text
stringlengths 211
22.9k
| id
stringlengths 47
47
| dump
stringclasses 1
value | url
stringlengths 14
371
| file_path
stringlengths 138
138
| language
stringclasses 1
value | language_score
float64 0.93
1
| token_count
int64 54
4.1k
| score
float64 1.5
1.84
| int_score
int64 2
2
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
South Coast & Southern Highlands NSW National Parks
There are several National Parks in and around Kangaroo Valley. These include:
Morton National Park and Kangaroo Valley Nature Reserve which features 24 walks from Kangaroo Valley. These walks include Fitzroy Falls which is also a platypus and lyrebird habitat.
Seven Mile Beach is a pristine beach area backed by low forest, home to numerous species of small mammals.
Jervis Bay National Park is great for dolphins and sea birds
Minnamurra Rainforest which is home to a substantial lyrebird population
Spectacular views can be had from several vantage points throughout the National Parks of the South Highlands and South Coast regions of NSW Australia. Cambewarra Lookout in the Morton National Park offers panoramic views across farmlands, the Shoalhaven River and out over the South Coast beaches.
Here is a summary of the Great Walks you can enjoy in Kangaroo Valley (visit our community website for more details on specific walks -link below) and the surrounding area:
Bushwalking, Waterfalls, National Parks & Picnics
Crystal Creek Meadows Country Accommodation in Kangaroo Valley is perfectly located for bushwalking, country ambles and village strolls being surrounded by 24 terrific walks, and offering some of the finest and most dramatic views in Australia.
You don't have to be an experienced bushwalker or hiker because there is a range of grades and distances, from 1 km to an 8 hour 20 km trek.
If you are an overseas visitor searching for a closer look at Australian wildlife, a city dweller keen to embrace the wild open spaces or a couple wishing to enjoy a romantic stroll then Crystal Creek Meadows offers the perfect country accommodation. [see luxury cottage accommodation information...]
Here are a few of our favourite walks, but you can explore any of the 24 during your stay and we will be delighted to provide advice. We can also arrange a picnic hamper so you can relax and enjoy the day.
Kangaroo Valley Village Walks
Spend an hour walking around the Village's key sites; the showgrounds (considered by many to be the most picturesque in NSW), walk through the Kangaroo Valley village and on to Riverside Park where there are gas BBQs
Tom's Pool is a 2-3 hour walk from the Pioneer Museum by Hampden Bridge where you cross a swing bridge and a little log bridge, see Moss Gardens and have views of Kangaroo River.
Morton National Park
Three Views Walk (pictured). There are three walks which interconnect. You can do just one of the walks or all three. As you are located on top of the escarpements the trails are flat and reward you with spectacular views of Lake Yarrunga.
Kangaroo Valley Nature Reserve
Red Rocks. Walk or ride the track from the junction of the Cambewarra Lookout Road and Moss Vale Road. You pass glens and shady forests and then are rewarded with an important archaeological site
Kangaroo Valley Beautiful Picnic Spots
Wooden Suspension Bridge. There are two in fact. One by Upper River Hall and the other near Gerringong Falls. At both you can walk across the river and later low-level crossings so might get your feet wet. Both offer really enchanting places to picnic and splash about in the cool mountain streams.
Glenmurray Road. At the end of the public access is a beautiful river bank where you can rest and enjoy the cool river to sooth your feet!
Easy 1 hour walk that gives you three vantage points where you have truly magnificent views across the valley, with distant mountains, volcanoes while all the while you can enjoy passing delicate wild flowers under the canopy of gum trees with varieties such as as Sydney Peppermint and all the while listening to the wonderful bird songs.
Wildflower walk around the east rim is a delight as you explore the rainforest area and then reach Warrawong Lookout.
Arahams Bosom 2-3 hours walk that includes lush forests, open coastal heath, rocky platforms and great cave and an Aboriginal archaeological site.
Telegraph Creek and Green Patch involves forest and beautiful sandy bays and rocky headland. | <urn:uuid:6abb215f-c018-40fc-883f-f81cdbc7f892> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.crystalcreekmeadows.com.au/kangaroo-valley-tourism/adventure-activities/bush-walks-kangaroo-valley?page=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933123 | 868 | 1.820313 | 2 |
An official says an explosion and fire has shut down a pipeline that carries oil from Iraq to the Mediterranean.
An Energy Ministry official said no one was injured in the explosion and fire that occurred late Friday. The explosion hit a section of the pipeline near the southern town of Midyat and was quickly put out.
The official said Saturday the blast was most likely caused by sabotage.
"We have cut the oil flow," the governor of Mardin province, Mardin Turhan Ayvaz said. "There are no deaths or injuries. Fire fighters are there on the spot." The 970-kilometre- (600-mile-) long pipeline has been the target of regular attacks blamed by Ankara on the Kurdistan Peoples' Party or PKK, listed as a terrorist organisation by Turkey and by much of the international community.
The group took up arms in Kurdish-majority southeastern Turkey in 1984, sparking a conflict that has claimed some 45,000 lives.
The pipeline to the Turkish port of Ceyhan was last attacked at the end of June. | <urn:uuid:2eacbbbe-d1e1-4eb0-83ea-4c883220532a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.turkishweekly.net/print.asp?type=1&id=138979 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979315 | 215 | 1.820313 | 2 |
A network of professional experts educating women to live financially healthy
Setting goals and planning for success is easy. It’s FUN to imagine what the world will look like when you reach your goals. Yet many of us—me included—tend to become short-sighted over what happens when your plan is NOT working. Instead of regrouping as part of the planning process, we tend to abandon it altogether.
My Non-Money Example
I’ve been losing weight this year. After about ten years of letting the excess weight “ride” for a variety of reasons, I finally found the energy and renewed motivation to start exercising regularly. I already ate pretty healthy, so that wasn’t a huge hurdle.
My weight loss went exactly as planned for about two months. In fact, everything went as planned. It was perfect! I imagined myself sailing through the next year (I’ve got a lot of weight to lose) without ever feeling challenged, denied or deprived. Pride goeth before the fall, right?
Of course, I hit a plateau. My weight loss completely stalled. I tried to exercise more—and I did, but it’s tricky with some of the energy issues I deal with. I didn’t want to eat too much less than I was, because I’ve been very aware of my hunger levels on a daily basis and knew the range I needed to stay in to feel satisfied. I felt stuck. I didn’t understand what I needed to do to lose more weight.
This is the point at which I usually become frustrated and abandon my plan—or in the past, I might have gotten so resentful and self righteous that I may not have even been aware that I abandoned my goal! Your unconscious, subconscious self starts to remind you it’s safer and easier to stay the same.
This isn’t me. My body never does what I want it to . . .
(or things my clients’ inner meanies tell them): “I’ve always had trouble with money . . . Something always happens to screw things up . . . I work so hard and never get what I want . . . “
It’s not like I was really listening to myself. My inner voice was (finally) revealed to me through someone else. I was commiserating with my friend Mary about hitting a plateau, when she said, “I know, I’m not losing weight either, it’s so frustrating!”
I paused. I had not realized Mary had been trying to lose weight. “So, you’ve been trying to lose weight?” I asked. | <urn:uuid:8e41552e-23f1-46b0-8edc-4514ec44c464> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneywisewomen/2012/08/14/not-making-progress-try-this/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97447 | 563 | 1.578125 | 2 |
"For the past few years, I've made a habit of giving advance directive forms to all of my new patients," says Dr. Karen R. Myers of Washington, D.C. "These are legal instructions everyone should take the time to complete.
"Myers, a doctor of Internal Medicine, knows firsthand the pain families suffer when terminal patients leave no care instructions. "I had a patient in his 40s who came into the hospital with pneumonia and meningitis," she says. "He turned out to have AIDS and just got sicker and sicker. Eventually, he slipped into a coma, and we pronounced him brain dead. But because he didn't have an advance directive, his family struggled with the decision of whether to let him go. Finally, after two months on life support, his poor body just couldn't take anymore. If the patient had made his wishes known in writing, his family could have been spared some of the heartache of losing him."
To keep this from being your own scenario, create a road map for your loved ones to follow. Put your desires in writing by completing three important documents: a living will, a health-care power of attorney, and a letter of instruction.
Why Create a Road Map?
Developing a road map keeps you in charge when it comes to decisions about medical treatment—even when you’re no longer capable of making those decisions. This kind of planning also shows compassion for family and friends. When loved ones are left guessing, too often the result is guilt, uncertainty, and arguments. By making your wishes known, you can help your loved ones feel more comfortable with your chosen course of care.
Parents' decisions about their own care usually, at some point, involve their children. When you complete your own advance directives, you have an opening to talk with your parents about whether they've made choices about their future medical care. Starting the conversation and learning what care they want can give the whole family peace of mind.
"I'm fortunate that my mother approaches me about her needs," says Carrie Dunson of Lee's Summit, Mo. "After my stepfather died in 1989, my mother and I sat down and talked about what she wanted as she grew older. We had our wills and advance directives drawn up at the same time and discovered that we want very different things. In the event of a coma, she wants doctors to do everything possible to revive her. But I don't want that for myself."
What Do You Need?
Each of the documents you need for your road map serves a different purpose. The first two—living will and health-care power of attorney—are legal instructions known as advance directives.
A living will tells medical professionals and your family which medical treatments you want to receive or refuse—and under what conditions. It only goes into effect if you meet specific medical criteria and are unable to make decisions.
A health-care power of attorney allows you to appoint someone to make health-care decisions for you any time you're unable to do so. Most people choose trusted family members or friends who are comfortable talking to doctors. The power of attorney can also be referred to as a health-care proxy, an appointment of a health-care agent, or a durable power of attorney for health care. It is different than a regular durable power of attorney, which only covers financial matters.
The third part of the road map—a letter of instruction—isn't a legal document, but it helps families find important information and saves them from having to dig through papers during a crisis. This document is a three-part personal letter that goes with the will. The first part includes the names of people to contact and instructions for planning a funeral. The second part covers financial affairs such as lists of accounts and phone numbers for your employer, insurance agent, or broker. In the final part, you can give away meaningful possessions and write special messages to family members. | <urn:uuid:dc0bbd29-94ec-477a-9493-048a5699e5bb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aarp.org/relationships/caregiving/info-03-2010/women_living_wills.1.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977255 | 806 | 1.546875 | 2 |
In these days of our pilgrimage, we are welcomed by our Holy Mother to her home - to the House of Nazareth transported from the Holy Land to this hill of Loreto.
These are days of silence for us, of prayer and meditation in the Holy House of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Within those ancient walls, we meditate on the Annunciation when Mary said yes to God. Here Mary accepted from God the role she was to play in the salvation of mankind. So humble and loving, Mary had no thought for herself, but wanted to serve God. For the holy Jewish people serving God is a sign of their love for him: a daughter of the Jewish people, the Daughter of Zion, Mary honours her people, and brings great glory to them as she offers herself completely to God. May we follow her. May we say yes to God, regardless of what he asks us to do. May that Holy Spirit which guided and assisted Mary in her life and decisions, assist us.
We follow her example, and so, spiritually coming into the Holy House, we make an Act of Consecration to Mary:
To you, Immaculate Heart of Mary, we consecrate ourselves – our hearts, minds, wills and lives and all those works we undertake so they may be for the glory of God, for the sake of the Gospel and the salvation of souls. Holy Mother, our Queen and our Joy, give to our hearts the dimensions of yours and form us in the image of your beloved Son.
Let us pray:
Eternal Father, you sent your Son among us to make of us one people dedicated to your will and restored through grace to sing forever of your glorious works. As he offered his life on the Cross for our sake, laying down his life for his friends, accept the gift we make of our prayer and sacrifices, offered in union with him, for those in the theatrical and cinematic arts. Grant us the grace to fulfil our obligations to you and our neighbour, building up the Body of Christ, the Church, and trusting in the intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen. | <urn:uuid:c649995d-af67-4515-8f2a-ab2d7723335e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://fatherdirector.blogspot.com/2012/04/monday-loreto-home-of-our-mother.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963421 | 441 | 1.609375 | 2 |
The recent LinkedIn breach made headlines, but I want to go deeper and provide practical advice for organizations on how they can anticipate any DLP consequences and tighten their network security.
As the world’s largest professional social network, LinkedIn is unique because it has legitimate uses for almost every employee.
LinkedIn’s password breach could result in three serious ramifications for businesses everywhere:
- Cybercriminals can take advantage of trust and social engineering attacks. If you are ‘linked’ to a trusted colleague you are more likely to click on a malicious link sent from them, which may open the door to targeted attacks and confidential data theft.
- Many LinkedIn accounts are tied to other social media services, such as Facebook or Twitter, so posts with malicious links can also be spread to a larger audience.
- Most of us are creatures of habit and have the same password for multiple accounts. The consequences of a breached password could reach across email, social media, banking accounts, and mobile phone data.
In my last post, I provided an email template for you to share with employees about changing their individual passwords, but it doesn’t stop there. The truth is many of your employees are going to ignore changing their passwords.
So what next? Well, to be honest, you are just getting started. First, we need to look at the three likely attack scenarios that might develop from this breach:
- Employees are tricked into clicking a malicious link from a trusted colleague through their compromised friends status feed (this could be a broad or targeted attack).
- A generic spam email is sent from compromised accounts to one of your employees, leading them to a malicious site.
- Sophisticated attackers collect data on their target (your CEO, CFO, etc.), find a suitable LinkedIn contact to compromise and send a tailored lure, which will likely lead to data-stealing code.
You need a strategy to protect against these and other attack scenarios. Here’s a seven-step check list for mitigating your risk.
- Educate, educate, educate your employees. An ounce of prevention can do wonders for your organization’s security. After you have educated, use tools like PhishMe.com to test whether employees are “getting it.”
- Double-check your core best practice procedures. Are all your security solutions up to date?
- Verify your social media controls and ensure all related policies are current.
- Review what solutions and settings you have in place to protect against targeted attacks. People post true and explicit details about their background on social media sites, which makes them ripe for socially engineered attacks. Can you prevent targeted attacks from email, the web, and mobile devices?
- Prepare to spend more time following up on suspicious events or activity. This means digging into logs with more urgency to ensure you have not been targeted or compromised.
- You need to be able to monitor data in motion. Your data loss prevention solution should block sensitive information from leaving the network via both email and web channels, not just discover that it’s lying around on the wrong server. Make sure you have this capability.
- In addition to DLP, investigate what other outbound security measures you have to identify and contain botnet or other malicious activity.
The potential implications for your business are serious. Talk with peers and find out what other steps they are taking. If you have any questions or thoughts, post comments here. | <urn:uuid:79b79218-6e0f-4525-b98b-db0cbbfb7ba6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://infosecisland.com/blogview/21573-LinkedIn-Breach-Part-II-What-You-Need-to-Prepare-for-Next.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944996 | 705 | 1.804688 | 2 |
This article was written by Alex Steffen in May 2007. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.
Last week, I flew over the coast of Greenland at 800 kph.
As the northern sun glinted off the aluminum of the wing, I watched the ice floes -- at first rare white specks on the Prussian blue sea -- grow gradually more numerous until they ran in great streaks of broken ice where the waves were pushing them together. Gradually they grew closer together still, and more studded with icebergs, until in the distance I could see enormous sheets of ice, glowing white and blending on the horizon into clouds and fog. And then, rising steeply up, the mountains of Greenland, masses of ice and snow and dark brown rock. It was like watching a documentary on global warming in reverse.
Except it wasn't. That footage won't run backwards. I have no idea if massive expanses of broken ice at that location are the norm or unusual at this time of year. But we do know that climate change is driving us towards an ice-free world, more quickly than we expected, and by flying home from Portugal, I was helping fuel that great planetary melting.
As symbols, it doesn't get much better than that: rocketing across the sky in an aluminum tube, nibbling on a "seasonal salad" and casually admiring the way the melting floes below resemble the drifts of apple blossoms covering the sidewalk near my house earlier this spring, while going over my notes from the two conferences I spoken at over the last week on climate change, the sustainability crisis, and how big business can respond.
We are all chained to a paradox: in order to change these things, we must to transform our economy into one capable of thriving within a one planet footprint; we have to continue to use more and more of the very tools which are eroding our planet's atmosphere, ocean and living systems in the first place. No one's hands are clean here.
To pretend otherwise is silly. We absolutely all should do what we can to shrink our own footprints. But much of the damage we do is done by others in our names, and is intricately connected to being able to work in an effective way. I've made clear my ambiguous feelings about flying before (feelings which grow less ambiguous the more I fly, regardless of how many offsets I buy), but the reality is that I am certain that my personal share of the CO2 left floating in the contrails behind me is a good investment when weighed against the opportunity to share worldchanging ideas with audiences capable of creating real change. It's not ideal, but we can't afford the self-deception of false purity.
I increasingly suspect that if we in fact make this great transition, the work is going to be messy, imperfect. There'll be winners and losers -- undeserving people who get filthy rich, good people who find themselves among the billion whose crops are ruined, whose homes are engulfed by rising waters, who lives are destroyed by crazy weather. We need to strive for justice (in part because, as I've said many times, poverty and oppression retard our efforts) but we can't afford to wait for perfection. We need practical, innovative and massive responses cobbled together across the whole world, and such efforts are always flawed. I'm partial to the saying that the perfect is the enemy of the good; now I am coming to believe that the perfect is the enemy of the future.
We cannot accept the tyranny of small steps -- the idea that little actions are enough, and that calling for the big systemic changes we need is somehow too radical. We see this thinking everywhere these days, as in this recent NRDC article on living in a less climate-catastrophic way, which goes so far as to say:
[P]ersonal emissions -- the ones from home energy use and driving that you're directly responsible for -- account for just 40 percent of your total. The larger part comes from everything else you buy and do. Your clothes, for instance. The songs on your iPod. The food you eat. For all of these things are made, grown, or transported with the help of fossil fuels. So is the bike with which you may idealistically pedal to work. So are the solar panels. But let's get real. If you're like most people, these indirect emissions are beside the point.
Unfortunately, if you're a member of the reality-based community, that other 60% of our climate impact is very much to the point.
So, too, are the indirect impacts of our lives, what's been termed our "public ecological footprint": the environmental and social impacts of all those things we almost never make direct personal decisions about, but which make possible our current ways of life, from the military, to the highway system, to the health care system. All of those deeply flawed systems are part of the backstories of our lives (though rarely counted in footprint calculations), and all need serious reengineering. Enormous damage is being caused by our attempts to prop up bad systems with minor incremental changes instead of working wholesale towards their improvement.
We don't have much time. With every new scientific report, our situation looks more dire, and the deadline for action closer. Just today, WWF released a major report finding that the window for serious action to stave off the worst effects of climate change was about five years, but that "Scientific warnings continue to mount, yet the debate continues and what passes for vision seems to have great difficulty seeing past the next filling station..."
In private, some of the best informed people I know -- who are by virtue of their positions some of the best informed people in the world on these issues, period -- confide, with increasing and disturbing regularity, that they believe we need to be planning 90% cuts in resource and energy use, alongside profoundly improved environmental performance in all manner of fields, by 2030, in part because we need to not only change our own behaviors, but do so in time for the innovations we pioneer to diffuse across the rest of the world. It is one of the great paradoxes of our day, it seems to me, that the more we learn about the large, slow-moving problems we face, the more manifestly urgent the need for action becomes.
This presents some challenges, not least of which is that people are disinclined to change dramatically until forced to do so by events, and climate change, environmental collapse and worsening poverty and conflict are unlikely to fully manifest the kind of events that get our attention in the daily lives of the people of the Global North until it's too late to do much about them. (And, indeed, our tolerance for disturbing news sometimes seems to be increasing much faster than our will to act -- two weeks ago, the first F5 tornado ever on the Enhanced Fujita Scale devastated Greensburg, Kansas, and provided what several experts said might be a taste of the future on the Great Plains; and already the story has all but disappeared from the American media.) We have, as I've heard it called, a profound perception-reality gap.
But bridging that gap, it seems to me, is something those of us who are passionate about and committed to building a bright green future have the capacity to do. We know more and more about the kinds of changes we need to make to bring our impacts within a sustainable range. We have better and better tools for imagining the future and helping people envision those futures and explore their possibilities (what we call future-making tools around here). And we certainly have no shortage of bold and innovative new ideas for how those futures might work better, as the constant stream of such ideas on this site should prove -- indeed, if anything, it seems to me that the frontier of innovation in sustainability is accelerating, moving away from the status quo at a faster and faster rate.
What we need, more than anything, it seemed to me as I shot across the Arctic sky last week, may be nothing less than a willingness to engage in a struggle for control over humanity's conception of its future.
We need, through a thousand efforts (interconnected, leapfrogging one another's best ideas), to help people see into the future we're still unfortunately creating, and help them understand that the ideas of the future we inherited from our parents are bankrupt. They won't work. We will never have them, and pursuing them will lead to disasters which are not only predictable, but predicted. If we continue chasing them, we will suffer a catastrophic collision with reality.
Then we need to do something even bolder: we need to show them futures that could work, explain the ideas and innovations that drive them, and show how life in those bright green futures is not only possible, but could quite likely be better for most of us than the lives we're living now. We need to excite the passions and commitments of millions more people, encourage their creative involvement, elicit their best ideas for what their futures could be. We need to transform ourselves from a movement which uses vague but dramatic threats to prod people into comparatively meaningless actions, into a movement that tells them the truth and invites them to exceed the expectations they have for themselves.
Encouraging that metamorphosis is, as the geeks say, a non-trivial task. Indeed, we're still just figuring out how to do it. But if we can pull it off, we won't need to hold out to people merely some simple steps or ecological absolution, because we'll have something better to offer: realistic hope, and a cause worth fighting for.
Creative Commons Photo Credit
Seeing the Future from High Above Greenland is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives. | <urn:uuid:44a36cf1-706e-4651-9147-d4543af69b14> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008641.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962903 | 2,043 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Behind the decline and downfall of each and every regime has been the role of sweet-talking professional sycophants. It is the single constant. The cluster of sycophants makes it all the more difficult to escape their clutches. It is a peculiar subcontinental malady, which Babar had identified in his memoirs 500 years ago, and about which Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya had warned, during his sermons seven centuries before.
Sycophancy is often confused with loyalty. But it is not. Sugary talk and buttering behaviour addicts the person in authority to what he wants to hear, rather than what he needs to hear. This breed resurfaces under different disguises: Sometimes under the umbrella of “supreme national interest”; sometimes under democracy; sometimes under reform. Theirs is not an overnight reawakening. It is a calculated bid to encircle the glitter of power and to protect their own perks and privileges. When the bubble bursts, they disappear.
The weapon of flattery is a good way to shield incompetence and fraud. False praise is also a tool of instigation against those who do not indulge in it. Rulers keep falling into the same ditch, because they end up doing the same thing over and over again. Meanwhile, the system remains rigged in favour of the rich.
These barracudas are nowhere to be seen when there is heavy lifting to do, but they are right there when there is ripe fruit to be plucked. Scavengers are not into doing good; they are into quick gain. Hence, they are visibly affiliated with whosoever is the flavour of the day.
Amidst sheep mentality, dissent often is portrayed as not playing with the team.
The larger question is: Does the existing culture have the guts and capacity to pay the price for revolutionary change? There is a huge gap between rhetoric and reality.
The pressures of electoral vote-getting have demonstrated that those at the upper tier are more sensitive to the demands of big donors (who happen to be rich) than to the aspirations of commoners. Inevitably, then, one makes false friends and genuine enemies.
Benjamin Franklin stated that a small leak can sink a big ship. Take, too, the example of America, where more than 50 percent of Congressmen are millionaires, and where the median income of Congressmen is $750,000 a year. It distorts democracy and makes the legislative body, in effect, hostage to moneyed interests, rather than a repository of common weal. It is by setting policy agendas that the wealthy 1 percent controls the 99 percent.
One way to vet opportunism is to ascertain how many have gone against the odds, spurned riches, taken an unpopular stand, and incurred losses while doing so.
The twin threat within comes from “mein” (me) and “munafqat” (hypocrisy).
It has been said that the essence of generalship is what a general does before the fighting begins. It has also been said that there are no bad soldiers, only bad generals. Over-promises are often under-delivered. It is a necessary safeguard, then, to question the assumptions.
Sycophants undermine audacity, which is the hallmark of leadership. Sycophancy, like corruption, can’t be eliminated. But it can be contained.
The writer is an attorney-at-law and policy analyst based in Washington DC. He is the first Pakistani American member admitted to the US Supreme Court Bar. | <urn:uuid:1be2c755-9358-4454-81a2-90ebda451bd2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/columns/05-Jan-2012/professional-sycophants | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967981 | 737 | 1.632813 | 2 |
How The World Wags
By Dave Kiffer
Unanswerable questions always have relatively easy answers. The hard part is answering them without letting on that the questioner is a complete moron.
My Mom taught me to always be polite - if possible. And besides we are all "tourists" somewhere. But it is just so hard to be polite when the questioner is obviously not the sharpest tool in the shed.
One of the first lessons I was taught in journalism is that there are no "stupid" questions, only "stupid" answers. Well, I have to admit that, yes indeed, there sometimes are stupid questions.
This year's "unanswerable" question had to do with dogs. Sled dogs. Husky dogs. A well dressed woman (she was wearing a clean garbage sack-raincoat) stopped on a rainy day a week ago and asked where the "dogs" were.
I offered my best perplexed look - sometimes they think I can't speak English and just walk away.
"Young man (I love it when those blue-haired vixens call me young man)," she repeated in a distinctly Georgian accent. "Where are the daaawwwwgs?"
"What dogs are you looking for Ma'am?"
"Why the sled dogs," she said. She turned to her friend. "What do they call them, Gladys?"
"Yes, that's it, those cute Iditarods."
"Oh you mean sled dogs?"
"Yes, sled daawwwggs."
I paused for a minute. I had two choices. I could've patiently talked about "The Last Great Race" and how it is held way up north and that we don't have sled dogs down here. But that would have taken time (I was late to an appointment as usual). And judging by their glazed expressions, they really didn't want to hear it.
"How did you hear about our "dawgs?" I asked, trying to buy a few seconds.
"The nice man on the cruise ship said they have sled dogs in Ketchikan," Gladys the friend replied.
It was getting wetter by the minute.
"Well, Ma'am, " I said finally. "When it's rainy like this, we like to keep the dogs inside. We don't want them to catch cold."
"Can we visit them?"
At that point, I could have directed them to the Pat Wise Animal Shelter, but it was time to be moving on.
"Sorry, Ma'am," I said. "The dog shelter is too far away. But you can get a nice video of the dogs in that store over there."
They thanked me and toddled off to do more shopping.
A few years ago, the unanswerable question involved ethnicity. But it didn't start out that way.
"Excuse me," asked a man who was wearing an identical jacket to that of his wife (both kind of a "puce" color!). "Do you know where Troglodyte Jewelers is?"
"But they are having a 10 percent off sale today," he continued. "They were highly recommended in the presentation before we got here."
I started to explain that just about every one of the 105 jewelry stores in town was selling similar merchandise at similar prices. But he was not able to process that information and his wife was certainly having none of it.
"Troglodyte Jewelers produces the finest jewelry in Alaska," she said firmly. "Are you from here?"
"Born and raised."
That caused them to pause.
"You speak English very well," she said after a minute.
I thanked her.
"I mean it must be hard to learn English after speaking Russian."
This time "my best perplexed look" was genuine.
"When we studied up for this trip, we learned that Alaska used to be owned by Russia," her husband continued. "You speak English without an accent at all."
I look more like the Lucky Charms Leprechaun than Leonid Breznev, but why argue?
"Where are you from?" I asked.
"New York," the wife said cheerfully.
"Funny you don't look Dutch," I wanted to reply but they already had on their "best perplexed" looks as they walked off in search of the 10 percent off sale.
Contact Dave at [email protected]
Dave Kiffer ©2005 | <urn:uuid:1ea455c5-6a01-4f4d-b440-d8ae8b0c7da8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sitnews.us/DaveKiffer/052605_kiffer.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.988241 | 943 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Everywhere Beth Linker turned, a criminal past haunted her.
It came up when she sought a better job and when she tried to volunteer, despite the fact that Linker served a brief prison sentence, completed parole early, and has remained drug- and crime-free for more than 10 years.
Linker tried to get that past swept clean through Utah’s expungement process only to be told she was not eligible given the number of her felony convictions for drug-related crimes and an initial failure to complete her first probation.
That’s when Linker turned to the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole, which pardoned her crimes in March. But even with that decision in hand, Linker has been unable to clear her record, stymied by a redundant, complicated and expensive process — one Utah lawmakers will look at refining in the 2013 legislative session.
Last session, lawmakers created a committee within the Utah Substance Abuse Advisory Council to study issues related to expungement of drug-related offenses. That group came up with recommendations embodied in HB33, sponsored by Rep. Eric K. Hutchings, R-Kearns.
It would allow a specified number of drug-possession felony and misdemeanor offenses to be eligible for expungement and also clarify that a pardon granted by the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole — which granted 17 pardons in 2012 — has the same legal effect and authority as a court ordered expungement.
“It is certainly a good first step in a direction towards giving opportunity where opportunity is deserved and not having to be so rigid … about who gets a break and who doesn’t,” said Scott Reid, an assistant attorney general who was co-chairman of the Drug-Related Offenses Expungement Committee.
“This doesn’t reduce anybody’s sentence,” said Santiago Cortez, a past chairman of the Utah Support Advocates for Recovery Awareness and committee co-chairman. “This is for people who do the right thing. … In many cases, we’ve made thousands of dollars of investments to make these people productive citizens and then when they get to the workforce they have barriers.”
A costly, complicated process • The Utah Bureau of Criminal Identification receives 700 to 800 applications each month from people seeking to expunge their criminal records. Given that volume, it takes the bureau 10 to 12 weeks to let applicants know if they are even eligible to proceed.
Some crimes can’t be expunged, such as capital murder, first-degree and violent felonies, and registerable sex offenses. Utah law also limits by type and number the convictions a person may have to be eligible for expungement and requires any sentence, probation, fine or restitution to have been met. In addition, the law requires a clean record following the last conviction and waiting periods of varying length, depending on the crime, before a person can seek an expungement: 10 years for any alcohol or drug-related offenses, seven years for eligible felonies, and three to five years depending on the classification of a misdemeanor offense.
The proposed bill would create a five-year waiting period for a felony drug offense.
Fees begin to pile up right from the start: There is a $50 application fee and then a charge of $56 per conviction for a certificate saying the crime is eligible to be expunged. A five-page checklist lays out the process applicants must follow; victims, prosecutors, Adult Probation and Parole and judges may all weigh in on whether or not to grant an expungement.
“It’s very expensive and it’s very difficult,” Cortez said.
If a person is denied an expungement, he or she can seek forgiveness from the Board of Pardons.
“It’s the last opportunity that is available for somebody who is trying to get their record cleansed,” said Jesse Gallegos, a board member who served on the Drug-Related Offenses Expungement Committee. In many cases, “They have remarkably turned their lives around and gone on to receive college degrees and are prohibited from employment in their requisite field because of their criminal records.”
The bill would recognize the board’s authority to forgive a criminal past, ending what is now a duplicative expungement process and reducing expenses for those who get a pardon.
“We are not changing anything about the process and not changing anything about the crimes we are willing to look at,” Gallegos said of the bill.
Pardon not enough • Although Linker, 48, received a full and unconditional pardon, she was nonetheless required to apply to the Bureau of Criminal Investigations and go through the entire expungement process, paying fees and charges at each step.
Linker said there is little uniformity between courts, and the number of forms to complete is overwhelming. Linker said she filled out one set of forms available online at the state-court website, only to be told by both a district court and a justice-court clerk that they had their own preferred forms that she would need to fill out.
Linker hit a financial wall at the courthouse, where she learned she would be charged $179 for each expungement. Linker, who works as a medical biller, applied for a fee waiver, but a judge turned her down.
“At that point I hung my head in defeat,” said Linker, who estimates her expenses from start to finish topped $1,500.
She still has not been able to complete the process because she can’t afford the court fees.
Aaron Bryant’s effort to clear his record was even more costly. Bryant, 30, racked up five criminal cases with multiple charges in each case, most associated with his substance abuse. After spending nearly eight months in jail in 2005, he turned his life around.
Bryant got a job and enrolled in college. He finished an associate’s degree, a bachelor’s degree in social work and is now working on a master’s degree in social work at the University of Utah, which he will complete in August. He also is working on a master’s degree in public policy at the U.
Bryant, who wrote a memoir about his life called A Synchronous Memoir of Addiction and Recovery, works full time for the Assessment and Referral Services in the U.’s Department of Psychiatry.
But like Linker, Bryant has found his criminal background hinders his ability to get certain jobs. He turned to the parole board after learning he could not get his record expunged.
“It was my understanding it was kind of a long shot, but I still submitted the application and they agreed to hear my case,” he said.
The board granted Bryant a pardon in January. It took him another eight months — and $3,500 — to finish the expungement process.
“It ends up being you are granted a pardon, but then it really doesn’t boil down to that,” Bryant said. “It is quite a bit more complicated than that. A lot of people weren’t even aware that when they gave a pardon there was still so much that had to happen. They kind of assumed that if you were pardoned, you wouldn’t have to have judges and prosecutors sign off on them.”
No expungement option
Utah law says expungement is prohibited for the following crimes or situations:
Capital felonies, first-degree felonies and violent felonies
Felony DUI alcohol/drugs
Registerable sex offenses
Crimes that are pending or being investigated
Statute of limitations has not been met
Waiting period not met
Fines, interest and restitution has not been paid
When there are two or more felony criminal episodes
Any combination of three or more convictions that include two class A misdemeanors
Any combination of four or more convictions that include three or more class B misdemeanors
Five or more misdemeanors or felony episodes | <urn:uuid:c90615fc-bae5-42dd-bd5f-37a82a0d7f27> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sltrib.com/csp/cms/sites/sltrib/pages/printerfriendly.csp?id=55593249 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966101 | 1,696 | 1.617188 | 2 |
enigma1 - 10:34 am on May 16, 2012 (gmt 0)
From what I read I don't see it as a new technology or something original. The idea behind is they establish a infiltration system that adds fake download sources to a network to reduce the chances of users finding the correct download in some way. And like every other mechanism can be used in many ways. I see no difference with malware attached to emails or downloaded over the net by tricking the user as something legitimate. It's the same concept.
If it becomes popular by having others releasing similar packages endorsed by corporations or governments, chances are to see more zombie nets. Besides, ideas how to damage competition is gaining vs being constructive lately. | <urn:uuid:67298dff-3e17-4cb5-aed1-dfb2cb8e7474> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.webmasterworld.com/printerfriendlyv5.cgi?forum=9&discussion=4453494&serial=4454095&user= | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962906 | 147 | 1.539063 | 2 |
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. AWARE and the Juneau Domestic Violence Task Force submitted this letter:
Sound off on the important issues at
I have a problem with the family next door. I hear yelling and crying, slamming doors and crashing ... and I'm not sure what to do.
I want to talk to my neighbor, and see if she's OK. But she looks so embarrassed passing me in the hall that I smile and ignore it. I'm not nosy. I see her kids playing outside sometimes while she's getting yelled at in the apartment, and I wonder what they think. Or worse, what happens to them when they aren't outside.
I think about calling the police. But wouldn't that make it worse? Wouldn't he be even madder when the cops showed up? I don't want to do anything that will make her life harder. And to be honest, I don't want that guy mad at me, either.
Even though I hear what she has to deal with, a small part of me thinks, why can't she pull it together enough to leave him? I think, if my husband treated me like that, I'd be out of there in a heartbeat.
Then I tell myself, wait a minute. It's never that easy. Having an abusive partner is something many women deal with, and there has to be something I can do to help. I will call the police if it seems bad. And next time I see her in the hall, I might say, "Hey, I've heard some scary noises coming out of your apartment. Are you OK?". Or I might say, "It sounds like you might be in a tough situation. Want to talk about it?". And if I wanted to tell her what I was really thinking, I might say "You don't deserve this."
I won't expect her to tell me everything, and I won't expect that my words will cause anything to change. But I can hope that she knows I'm here and that I don't think she's to blame. And if she wants to talk, we should have a cup of coffee some morning.
I will think about how everyone is frustrated with her, asking her why she won't leave. Then I will stop listening to what everyone says, open my heart, and think about the real question.
Why does he hurt her, and why do we let him get away with it?
Mandy O'Neal Cole, direct services manager, AWARE Inc.
Juneau Domestic Violence Task Force
Juneau Empire ©2013. All Rights Reserved. | <urn:uuid:2fcb686c-f5ef-4386-a799-2b9b41280f94> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://juneauempire.com/stories/101707/let_20071017002.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.986248 | 532 | 1.515625 | 2 |
U.S. school stops kicking out pregnant students
Published Thursday, August 9, 2012 9:21AM EDT
Last Updated Thursday, August 9, 2012 4:56PM EDT
NEW ORLEANS -- A U.S. school is changing a policy that kicked pregnant students out of class and required them to be taught at home, the school's board chairman said Wednesday.
No one at Delhi Charter School in rural Louisiana realized there was anything wrong with the policy until the American Civil Liberties Union's state chapter threatened to sue, said chairman Albert Christman.
The policy has gotten "everybody up in a roar," he said.
The school required students who were suspected of being pregnant to take a pregnancy test. If they refused, or tested positive, they had to be home-schooled. The ACLU said the policy violated Title IX of the 1972 federal education law, which requires equal opportunities for both sexes.
Too many schools do not realize pregnant students should receive equal treatment, the National Women's Law Center said in a June report.
"Despite enormous advances for women and girls in education since 1972, schools across the country continue to bar pregnant and parenting students from activities, kick them out of school, pressure them to attend alternative programs, and penalize them for pregnancy-related absences," the law centre said in the report.
Louisiana Department of Education spokesman Barry Landry said he did not know the state's policies for pregnant students or whether they apply to private and religious schools getting tuition vouchers
Fatima Goss Graves, vice-president for education and employment at the non-profit law centre, said it gets several calls a month from school and college students who are pregnant or have children and are having trouble with their schools. Many of those problems are corrected just by telling students their rights and explaining how to negotiate with administrators, she said.
Goss Graves said she had never seen a school policy "that said you must take a pregnancy test in order to attend school. Or one that pushes, so overtly, students out."
Christman, the Delhi school board chairman, said "just a handful" of students were affected by the policy, which dates to 2006. All of them "came back to school and finished their school," he said. | <urn:uuid:de46ee73-e6e3-4c03-91b9-dba22212ecc6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ctvnews.ca/world/u-s-school-stops-kicking-out-pregnant-students-1.908491 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980652 | 462 | 1.515625 | 2 |
WAG Executive Director Heads East to Debate Art
Dr. Stephen Borys, Executive Director of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, is one of four Canadian arts leaders participating in the 4th Annual Walrus Debate at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa on Wednesday, May 2. Moderated by Carol Off, CBC radio host for As it Happens, the topic of the debate is “ART In Daily Life: Essential or Irrelevant? Who decides? Who pays? Who cares?” For the debate, Dr. Borys will team up with the Globe and Mail’s Kate Taylor to square off against the National Gallery of Canada’s Director and CEO Marc Mayer and art critic Sarah Milroy.
“This is a wonderful opportunity to have some fun with a topic about which I am very passionate,” says Dr. Borys, who holds an Executive MBA, a PhD in Art History from McGill University, and an MA in Art and Architectural History from the University of Toronto. Dr. Borys, who serves on the Board of Directors of CAMDO (Canadian Art Museum Directors Organization), is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Winnipeg and a Scholar in Residence at the University of Manitoba. He adds, “It’s great for Winnipeg and Manitoba to be represented at this national debate, with the other distinguished participants all residing in the East.”
The proceeds from the event support writers and artists through the work of The Walrus Foundation. In appreciation of Dr. Borys’ participation in the debate, the Walrus will donate $10,000 worth of advertising to the WAG, which will be invaluable to the Gallery’s upcoming 100th anniversary celebrations launching this September. The Walrus was established in September of 2003, and has quickly become known for its witty commentary on Canada and its place in the world.
The debate also features the Walrus Soapbox, an interactive online platform that allows Canadians to engage in the debate and each other. This tool will help to inform the on-stage debate on May 2 at 7pm, which online viewers will be able to watch through a live webcast. To join The Walrus Soapbox, go to walrussoapbox.ca.
Celebrating its centenary from September 2012 to August 2013, the Winnipeg Art Gallery is Canada’s oldest civic art gallery and Manitoba’s leading visual arts institution. With a collection of over 25,000 objects spanning ten centuries—including the world’s largest collection of contemporary Inuit art—the WAG constantly moves between the historical and the contemporary, engaging a growing public with the power of art in our lives.
- 2013 (27)
- 2012 (72)
- 2011 (71)
- 2010 (51)
- 2009 (24) | <urn:uuid:3e490faf-b22a-467b-8abf-e673082b233b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wag.ca/about/press/media-releases/read,release/199/wag-executive-director-heads-east-to-debate-art | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934986 | 583 | 1.71875 | 2 |
IRVINE, Calif., Jan. 10, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Aviir Inc., a biotechnology company, dedicated to the prevention of cardiovascular disease through innovative laboratory tests, sponsored a GUARDaHEART Foundation community service event in South Central on Saturday, January 5. GUARDaHEART Foundation, a non-profit committed to heart disease prevention, joined forces with Red Eye Inc, a philanthropic organization, by providing much-needed fresh produce to families in need.
Tanaka Farms, in Irvine, CA, opened up their farm up to GUARDaHEART volunteers who then harvested by hand crates of fresh fruits and vegetables which volunteers later that day delivered to the residents of South Central Los Angeles. Red Eye Inc and GUARDaHEART Foundation volunteers were greeted by a multitude of grateful smiling faces on Saturday as they served up fresh produce and homemade soup, made from the freshly harvested crops to the disadvantaged families. The South Central Los Angeles residents were delighted to receive these locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables, often difficult to obtain, especially in lower income areas. One gentleman's eyes filled with tears as he accepted a large basket of carrots, commenting that he will use the vegetables to make soup, which will get him through the chilly winter.
Dr. Douglas Harrington, CEO of Aviir Diagnostics commented: "We are privileged to have this opportunity to bring food to those in need, especially since their access to fresh produce is so limited." Dr. Harrington went on to explain how this event was more than an act of charity: "We want to go one step further than donating food. We also want to empower the local residents on how to grow their own fruits and vegetables, even within a very small area. We also want to help them understand the important relationship of the foods we eat and heart disease, the nation's number one killer. It's been proven that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables can significantly lower an individuals' risk of heart disease. We hope this day brought more than nutritious food but offered these folks a new way to own their own heart health."
GUARDaHEART is a non-profit foundation dedicated to raising awareness of heart disease prevention by spreading the word to guard your heart and save your life. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. The good news is if individuals know their risk and take the necessary steps, most cardiovascular disease is preventable. Although heart disease is typically diagnosed in adulthood, its roots are often found in childhood. Compelling research has shown that plaque buildup in the arterial walls begins very early in life and progresses through increasing degrees of atherosclerosis. Intervention strategies and healthy lifestyle changes to reduce heart disease risk should begin in childhood when reversal of the process is easier, not later in life when the disease is more fully developed. GUARDaHEART Foundation also provides assistance for individuals who are unable to pay for cardiac risk assessments. Please visit www.guardaheart.org for more information.
About Red Eye Inc.
Red Eye Inc focuses on community, creativity, and serving humanity with young adults in Los Angeles and New York. It is a place where artists, musicians, actors, and many more can find authentic relationships while also using their platforms to serve others.
Aviir was founded in 2005 by cardiologists and scientists from the Stanford University School of Medicine to focus on discovery, development and commercialization of innovative diagnostic tests. The company specializes in developing proprietary diagnostic tests that assist in identifying patients who are most at risk of a cardiac event, but who may be unaware of their true risk status. Aviir's proprietary MIRISK and MIRISK VP assessment tests objectively identify, by a simple blood draw, individuals who are at a high risk of a cardiac event over the next five years. Aviir's CLIA-certified laboratory (Irvine, CA) complements these novel tests with a wide range of additional testing options for risk assessment and therapeutic monitoring of cardiovascular disease and related metabolic disorders including pharmacogenomic and genetic tests. The company has adopted a unique clinical laboratory service model to provide physicians better diagnostic tools that improve the cardiovascular health of their patients. The company is privately owned and funded by leading life science venture capital firms. Please visit www.aviir.com for more information.
For media inquiries, please contact:
Dina Scaglione, Corporate Media Manager
SOURCE Aviir, Inc. | <urn:uuid:8f493391-92ef-4b08-b4b8-146feacd2108> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.biospace.com/collaborative/News/aviir-inc-sponsors-guardaheart-foundations-farm-to/284582 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944571 | 906 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Opening to Spirit -Food for thought
The other day I was thinking about how life changes for people who have been injured or have disease. Not always, but most of the time it leads them to a spiritual awakening of one kind or another. For some it may be small but for others it is a significant turning point in their lives. As I was pondering this notion it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks. As people lose parts of their bodies (shell) it becomes more open to spirit. We begin to see that who we are has nothing to do with our shells, but rather our life force of energy. When pieces of our shells become sickened, diseased, amputated, etc . . . it allows for our spirit energy to spill out. For example, we can take a piece of wood and put a light inside of that wood then enclose the light within the wood by sealing it closed. If we were to look at the piece of wood we would not know what it held or that it contained light, but if part of that wood were broken away exposing some light we would see the light and know that it is there because it would spill out from the piece of wood. The more we break away pieces of the wood more light spills out. The more we break away pieces of "ourselves" the more our spirit is released from our bodies/shells. I believe that emotionally, we are all wounded in some form or another. Many of us choose to keep these wounds hidden within our shells, therefore our spirit is always contained because we are too afraid to open ourselves up to others and allow our vulnerabilities to show. If we keep these emotions and hurts tucked away eventually we implode. Now, if there is some sort of "higher power" that allows for us to grow and learn, which I believe is our soul purpose, it would be sensible to assume that he/she would want us to achieve a higher state of awareness of spirit and consciousness. If we can not, whether consciously or unconsciously, do it on our own, circumstances could very well allow for that to happen in other forms such as injury to the shell or body form. Is it possible that those who create havoc & chaos are unable to take a step up on the "spiritual ladder" therefore they can not bring themselves closer to spirit? These are the people that harm others whether by word or action. What about those that are extremely thoughtful, kind and loving people that pass into the next soul phase(death) very young, when they are seemingly healthy or from an unfortunate occurrence such as a car accident? It would make sense to assume that they have passed because their life lesson or karmic debt in this life has been fulfilled. Those people that create harm for other or themselves may not be ready to fulfill their lessons at this time and also return to the next soul phase, sometimes on their own or by creating circumstances that allow for this passing. This could include anything from suicide to putting oneself in harms way. Just something to think about. | <urn:uuid:8016ae72-4201-42b8-99da-bb28af58ee8e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://projectavalon.net/forum/showthread.php?mode=hybrid&t=20083 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977442 | 615 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Angel Raich describes herself as a ‘dead man walking’. The 41-year mother of two has been informed of possible prosecution// by the U.S federal government for breaching federal drug laws, by the possession and usage of drugs.
Suffering from scoliosis, brain tumor and other ailments, Raich has been taking ‘pot’ or marijuana, on her doctor’s prescription, every two hours to battle pain and anorexia; side effects of her condition. Now a federal court ruling says this is not possible.
Raich had sued the federal court as a pre-cautionary measure to avoid arrest for the possession of drugs. This latest legal battle follows the conflict between the federal government, which declares marijuana an illegal controlled substance with no medical value, and the 11 states allowing medical marijuana for patients with a doctor's recommendation.
Two years back, the Supreme Court ruled against Raich, saying medical marijuana users and their suppliers could be prosecuted for breaching federal drug laws even if they lived in a state such as California where medical pot is legal.
Because of that ruling, the issue before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was narrowed to the so-called ‘right to life’ theory: that the gravely ill have a right to marijuana to keep them alive when legal drugs fail.
Yet the appeals panel said that the United States has not yet reached the point where "the right to use medical marijuana is 'fundamental' and 'implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.”
As a sobbing Raich was comforted, leaders in the medical marijuana movement said they would continue fighting.
“This is literally a matter of life and death for Angel and thousands of other patients, and we will keep fighting on both the legal and political fronts until every patient is safe", said Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project.
The court has however left open the possibility that Raich, if she waPage: 1 2 Related medicine news :1
. Painkillers Do Not Shorten Dying Patients Lives
. Mammograms Reduce Risk of Dying3
. Individuals With Metabolic Syndrome At Risk of Dying From Heart Disease4
. A Call To Open Up The Channel Of Goodwill To Rescue The Dying Hearts5
. Study finds Unmarried Or Single Persons Stand The Risk Of Dying Early6
. Dying for Data7
. Unfolded Proteins May Protect Cells from Dying8
. Positively Charged Nurses, Best in Nursing Dying Children9
. Significant Rise in Proportion of Chronically Ill Children Dying in Intensive Care10
. Peaceful Slumber said to Restore Memories11
. Other Professionals Side With Medical Students In Delhi Peace March | <urn:uuid:68a48f99-04fd-4c71-868a-20ff0f7284fc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bio-medicine.org/medicine-news/No-Dying-in-Peace-for-Woman--Prescribed-Medical-Pot-09-19047-1/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933765 | 564 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Waukesha woman receives vehicle through “Recycled Rides” program
WAUKESHA — One woman’s Christmas present won’t fit under the tree. Maria Jose of Waukesha was chosen to receive a vehicle through the “Recycled Rides” program.
Through the “Recycled Rides” program, American Family partners with local auto body shops to donate vehicles that have been declared a total loss. This nationwide, non-profit project, organized by the National Auto Body Council, repairs and donates vehicles to families in need, chosen by local community organizations.
When a car is declared a total loss, American Family pays the customer for the actual cash value of the vehicle before the loss. American Family usually takes possession of the vehicle and can sell it through a salvage vendor. With this program, rather than take the salvage proceeds, American Family donates the vehicles and a local auto body shop donates its services to repair them. Other vendors also offer parts and services. Some even provide extras such as gas cards and certificates for oil changes and other services. The vehicles are repaired to industry standards and meet state safety requirements.
Recipients of vehicles through this program must meet a number of criteria, including financial need, a valid driver’s license, proof of income/employment, a safe driving record, no current working vehicle, and being able to insure and maintain the vehicle.
Maria was chosen to receive the vehicle by La Casa de Esperanza, a community-based organization committed to providing opportunities for individuals to reach their full social and economic participation in society, with an emphasis on the Hispanic population.
Maria and her husband moved to Waukesha from McAllen, Texas in May 2011 after their daughter was born. They had family members in the area and felt opportunities for employment were better here. Maria came to La Casa de Esperanza as a client looking for work, and was hired as their receptionist. She is now taking courses to be qualified to teach early childhood education.
Maria’s husband is disabled and unable to work so she is the family’s sole breadwinner. She has had to rely on public transportation to get to and from work and school, as well as take her daughter to daycare and medical appointments. She knows reliable transportation will be an incredible help for her family and is extremely grateful and excited to be the recipient of this donation.
CLICK HERE for additional information on the “Recycled Rides” program. | <urn:uuid:d876f985-b1ee-424a-875a-7e2e0439538a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://fox6now.com/2012/11/19/waukesha-woman-receives-vehicle-through-recycled-rides-program/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975266 | 523 | 1.671875 | 2 |
The mental_floss Summer Reading List
There is no shortage of summer reading lists, but none of those lists include the personal recommendations of Chris Higgins, Ethan Trex and your other _floss favorites. Here's what we think you should be reading this summer. We hope that you'll use the comments section to provide suggestions of your own.
Adrift by Steven Callahan
Subtitled 76 Days Lost at Sea, this is the true story of Callahan's shipwreck and subsequent survival ordeal in an inflatable life raft. Callahan is the only man known to have survived for more than a month in such circumstances, and his first-hand account of the experience is riveting.
While lost at sea, Callahan used the minimal resources available to him—a few items grabbed from his sinking ship, the raft itself, and a lot of ingenuity—to collect fresh water, spear and otherwise trap fish, gather barnacles, plot his position using a sextant made from pencils, and much more. As he drifted, Callahan spotted at least nine ocean liners, but none picked him up.
Callahan's story is gripping and immediate, full of fear and shocking reversals of fortune, but it's ultimately a tale of survival and hope—he does make it to the other side, and today he's a survival consultant and a leading designer of life rafts.
Recommended by Chris Higgins, a daily contributor to mentalfloss.com and a mental_floss magazine regular.
* * * * *
The Half-Mammals of Dixie by George Singleton
Short stories are perfect for the beach. Even if they've got some genuine literary merit, they're short enough that you can whip through one and then focus on more pressing issues, like how to throw a jellyfish at your friend while making it look like an accident.
Singleton's short stories in this collection, which are all set in the fictional small town of Forty-Five, South Carolina, often feature quirky characters in darkly comic contexts. While the stories are often laugh-out-loud funny, particularly "This Itches, Y'all," the tale of a young boy who acts in a head lice documentary and is subsequently ostracized from grade-school society, Singleton doesn't just play the characters for their comedic value. Instead, he uses his delightfully warped voice to present them affectionately and explore what it means to live in the rural South. The results are often thrilling, and even if you don't normally like short stories, the blend of humor and emotional depth will suck you in and keep you giggling.
* * * * *
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
I'd highly recommend Lionel Shriver's novel We Need to Talk About Kevin if you're looking for a thoughtful addition to your summer reading list. At times almost too painful to read, the novel is built around a series of letters from Eva Khatchadourian to her husband that tell the heartbreaking story of a teenager who commits acts of unspeakable horror.
In the hands of a lesser talent, this story might be just another "ripped from the headlines" tale of pointless violence, but with Ms. Shriver's sharp eye for detail and thoughtful observations, its characters will stay with you long after you turn the final page. There are no easy answers for the provocative questions that this former journalist and gifted novelist raises. The content might be too intense for some readers, but if you stick with this beautifully written novel, you'll be rewarded for your efforts.
Recommended by Toby Maloney, who heads up our business development efforts and serves as a handler for our newest mascot.
* * * * *
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
Everyone needs to finish a big book during the summer to help them feel productive. At an evenly-paced 614 pages, Tree of Smoke can serve as your "big summer read."
Johnson's novel covers two subjects that I find positively fascinating—the Vietnam War and CIA counterintelligence operations in psychological warfare. This sweeping story follows several compelling characters from before the escalation of violence in Vietnam through the termination of war, and beyond. Written in a unique style reflective of the chaotic atmosphere of the times, Tree of Smoke will keep you conning pages when you should be applying more sunscreen and shifting tanning positions. Johnson offers a stirring examination of why war exists at all...just the type of contemplative romp you'll need between cookouts and trips to the beach.
* * * * *
Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra &
The United States of Arugula by David Kamp
Sacred Games is like The Sopranos meet Bollywood: the story of a foul-mouthed gangster who gets tied up in something much bigger than himself, and the Sikh policeman trailing him. A phenomenal read, if difficult to get through sometimes with the dialect. I'm sure I missed some nuance in there because the language was challenging. But overall, a wonderful book with a lot of interesting characters.
The United States of Arugula is an interesting wander through American and French culinary history that starts with the immigrant experience and ends with the complete understanding of why "arugula guy" can be such an insult to modern politicians.
Recommended by our brilliant designer Terri Dann. Among (many, many) other things, Terri designs all those quiz banners.
* * * * *
How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes by Will Cuppy
If you are looking to do some light educational reading between dips in the pool this summer, consider Will Cuppy's How To Tell Your Friends from the Apes. Cuppy (1884-1945), a renown literary critic and satirist who was part of the original New Yorker crew, gives nuanced and annotated descriptions of the difference between humans and our simian counterparts, and indeed digresses wonderfully into mentions of other members of the animal kingdom (most notably in the section "Perfectly Damnable Birds," which follows the chapter "What I Hate About Spring").
Imagine Cuppy as a cross between Dave Barry and David Attenburough, with a hefty bit of Wodehouse thrown in for good measure. Take his advice on Tigers: "Tigers live in Asia in nullahs and sholahs. They seldom climb trees, but don't count on that. Young normal tigers do not eat people. If eaten by a tiger, you may rest assured that it is abnormal. Once in a while a normal tiger will eat somebody, but he doesn't mean anything by it."
And what more convincing do you need than the introduction, which is penned by none other than this master of perfectly pleasant pretentious pith, PG Wodehouse himself, who writes, "[Cuppy] says things boldly, regardless of how they may be conflicting with vested interests. 'What this country needs,' he says, nailing his colors to the mast, 'is a good medium-priced giraffe.' If I have thought that once, I have it thought it a hundred times." Haven't we all?
Recommended by Allison Keene, who writes two regular features for mental_floss: 'Dietribes' and 'The Weekend Links.'
* * * * *
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
I usually see summer as a time to expand my knowledge. Don't worry, though, Pessl's book isn't a textbook, and there are no equations to be memorized—it's an impressive novel that's somewhere between a murder mystery and the movie Mean Girls.
The story, concerning a year in the life of Blue van Meer—whose usually nomadic college professor father has temporarily settled in Stockton, North Carolina, while she finishes high school—starts off as any other teen novel. That quickly changes after a series of inexplicable events, concluding with Blue discovering her family's past while investigating the death of a teacher. The unexpected conclusion and amusing wordplay throughout makes Pessl's book a complex and interesting read. While it's a bit longer than most other summer reading choices (at just over 500 pages), the book is an enjoyable and page-turning read. So, if you're looking for something you can't finish in one sitting this summer, Special Topics in Calamity Physics won't disappoint.
Recommended by Ben Smith, one of our intern all-stars.
* * * * *
The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America by Thurston Clarke
If you love politics but need a break from the exhaustive coverage of the 2008 race, I highly recommend Thurston Clarke's meticulously researched book. The day-by-day recap makes you feel like you're following the story in real time, from the campaign's humble origins in March through its tragic ending at the Ambassador Hotel.
When I mentioned to a friend that I was reading this book, he said he could save me some time and tell me the ending. But Clarke doesn't close with Kennedy's death. The postscript imagines the next ten days of the campaign, June 7-June 17, based on an eleven-page schedule aides had prepared. Clarke calls this artifact "perhaps the most heartbreaking in the Kennedy Library, and there are numerous contenders for that title."
The postscript will have you asking the obvious 'What if...?' questions. But the book also leaves you with a better understanding of how the campaign unfolded, how the assassination affected those who worked for and covered RFK, the mark he left on the country, and why—forty years later—people are still devouring books about those 82 days.
Recommended by Jason English, who'd like to thank his co-workers for agreeing to participate. He encourages everyone to share their own summer reading suggestions in the comments.
* * * * * | <urn:uuid:043cd02f-6dae-4ef6-a537-f72a53409c68> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mentalfloss.com/article/18907/mentalfloss-summer-reading-list | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957683 | 2,032 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Jury selection, or de-selection, begins in the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin murder trial. The quote above comes from potential juror B37, regarding her consumption of newspapers. [Washington Post; my two cents a while back on jury selection]
A man who showed up at court in Springfield, Mass. to deal with a traffic ticket mistakenly wound up on a jury. The jury proceeded to hear the evidence and closing statements and convict the defendant; the judge declared a mistrial after it emerged that the man, who spoke limited English, had gotten on to the panel by accident. [MassLive]
In 2006, I wrote:
In May 2001, Cheryl Jane Hale was driving four children to a sleepover in her 1987 Ford Bronco. She didn’t bother to have the children wear their seat belts, so, when she took her eyes off the road to argue with the backseat passengers, and thus drove off the road and flipped the car, 12-year-old Jesse Branham was thrown from the car and suffered brain damage. A jury in Hampton County, South Carolina (the second jury to be impaneled—the first one was dismissed in a mistrial when it was discovered after two weeks of trial that five of the jurors were former clients of Branham’s lawyers) decided that this was only 45% Hale’s fault, held Ford 55% responsible, which puts Ford entirely on the hook for $31 million in damages.
On Monday, the South Carolina Supreme Court reversed because of prejudicial closing arguments that relied heavily on inadmissible evidence. More importantly for lawyers practicing in South Carolina, the Court adopted “the risk-utility test with its requirement of showing a feasible alternative design.”
How bad of a judicial hellhole is Hampton County? Though Hale was a co-defendant, she cooperated with the plaintiffs throughout the trial in their case against Ford, even sitting at the plaintiffs’ table; but because the judge classified Hale as a co-defendant, it meant that Hale got half of the peremptory challenges of the “defense.” More from Comer; no press coverage that I’ve seen yet. (cross-posted from Point of Law)
They’re felt more than ever in today’s economy, notes Amy Alkon.
I’m on record as saying I wouldn’t mind if they were abolished entirely, although the idea floated by Iowa lawprof in Nathan Koppel’s WSJ article yesterday, of limiting them to three per side, seems like a plausible compromise. (A further possible refinement: excusing more juror prospects if both sides agree in wanting them off the case).
Most of the lawyers who are blogging in response to the Koppel article, however, take a position sharply different from mine: Patrick and Ken at Popehat, Scott Greenfield, Mark Bennett (and further). (More: WSJ law blog.) Deadline pressure doesn’t permit me to join in, but anyone interested in the issue will want to follow the discussion. Earlier mentions on this website are here, including a discussion of England’s near-abolition of the practice in 1989.
I made a few favorable remarks about streamlining jury-selection (voir dire) procedure the other day, Houston criminal defense lawyer Mark Bennett expressed an emphatically contrary view that “Streamlining of the justice system will be the death of freedom,” and several others weighed in, including SSFC (Patrick). Many of the posts are memorialized at Nicole Black’s Legal Tweets. It was also agreed (in posts not included) that civil and criminal jury selection raised at least somewhat different issues.
After all, that’s the way to disqualify them: “If he speaks long enough, he might say something that lets you strike him for cause, too.” (Trial Theater, Oct. 24).
If you apply for a job handling million-dollar financial exposures or life-and-death safety risks, your prospective employer generally won’t be allowed to ask at the interview what prescription medications you may be taking. On the other hand, if you’re called as a potential juror on a case, the lawyers may enjoy carte blanche to probe and dig to their heart’s content, and you may be obliged to answer the questions proposed by their jury consultants. “A secondary reason for asking is strategic — to bounce jurors they don’t want and use medications as an excuse.” How about requiring the voir dire inquisitors to restrict themselves to the same formulas employers are supposed to use to avoid ADA liability, e.g., “Is there any reason why, with suitable accommodation, you would not be able to concentrate, sit for long periods of time, apply unclouded judgment, and do the other things expected of jurors?” (Julie Kay, National Law Journal, Aug. 26). | <urn:uuid:d37677f9-9b46-4473-adbd-dff432501cc5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://overlawyered.com/tag/jury-selection/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960003 | 1,036 | 1.648438 | 2 |
The front-end is in many retailers' cross-hairs as a target for immediate technology upgrades.
using open systems, using attractive displays, quiet thermal printers and an easy-to-use interface that speeds training of new cashiers. Retailers are also integrating payment systems and advanced loss prevention programs.
Self-checkout is seeing widespread acceptance this year, but the roundtable participants noted that labor savings isn't the only benefit. Customers come to see it as an additional convenience, speeding them on their way, especially with smaller orders. Handheld scanning systems are under consideration, but the first uses are likely to be with employees using them to shorten front-end lines, or for perimeter departments and sidewalk sales.
SN: What are the most important recent technology developments for the supermarket point-of-sale?
HERMAN: Open systems have finally become a reality for point-of-sale. Almost all the vendors offer point-of-sale solutions. That really allows you to protect your hardware investment with these PC-based solutions.
Right now, we are evaluating what we should be offering in terms of point-of-sale systems. We are in the process of going through a review. One of our requirements going in is to make sure that these were PC-based systems, and they were open. So that if you do get into a situation down the road, and there is another software solution, you don't have to completely throw out your hardware and your software solution if you want to change to something different.
PINK: In our opinion, most companies have gone a little backwards in terms of functionality at the point-of-sale. While systems have become more open, and that makes the data more accessible, it has also made the systems more vulnerable to normal system crashes as they run on more conventional operating systems.
The data is more accessible to us to create value with, but the systems are more fragile. So it is a technology development that I'm not sure is for the good.
In the past there were proprietary operating systems, and all they had to do is sit there and make sure that lane could scan groceries. Now we are seeing deployment on NT servers and with Microsoft-type operating systems in the lane, and you are picking up the same problems you have on your desktop. I'm not sure the lane is an appropriate place for them.
So for us, this kind of open environment has brought good and bad. It is easier for us to get to the data with standard types of tools, but it makes it not as reliable. Point-of-sale is something that you want to turn on and not have to think about. People just want to get out of the store. They are in the lane, and we don't want to see errors and have to reboot and all of that stuff.
BUTLER: The most recent development that has been very important for us has been the integration of payment systems. We are completely rolled out with new technology at our point-of-sale, and one of the benefits was the integration of those payment systems, so the checker doesn't have to enter the payment twice. It's all seamless and very nice for the customer. It is faster and more accurate.
In our previous point-of-sale systems, we had to enter sales on the cash register, and the customer entered the amount on the payment terminal, and it was always a reconciliation problem.
MILLER: The customer interactivity is a fantastic advance. For example, I've seen the ICL system, like the one Big Y is using. Even a non-POS manufacturer, Verifone, now has a magstripe reader for credit cards that has a built-in touchscreen. I think we are going to get real creative as an industry on how to empower the customer at the POS with these kinds of technologies.
The on-line database -- now that we are starting to see frequent shopper validations through a central database, rather than a local file at the store -- really enhances the frequent shopper offering and brings it a step closer to being able to deliver a true customer-specific marketing program.
SN: How are the more advanced front end technologies improving the environment for customers and cashiers?
PINK: Some of the new devices that we have used, like DynaKey from NCR, have given us the ability to cut down training time for cashiers. We have the same turnover problems that the rest of the retail world does, and the faster we can get a checker up to speed, the better off we are. But like everything else, there is a downside. The experienced checkers do not like the DynaKey-type of environment. They prefer the old one because they are fast. But we have more new checkers than experienced ones.
HERMAN: PC-based systems, with large customer displays and thermal printers, really help to make the systems more user-friendly for the cashiers and the customers. The cashier prompts make it easier for new cashiers to learn their jobs. The customer display allows customers to follow their orders as they are being scanned, and savings information is easy to see on the display, as well as on the customer receipts. The new printers support a clean receipt at the end of the order that can group purchased items in a logical sequence, with items and their frequent shopper discounts next to each other.
MILLER: Look at what the thermal printers have done. Number one, one of the most overlooked benefits of thermal printers is the reduction of noise at the front-end. That's something that is going to be harder to quantify as a return-on-investment, but anything you can do to make a more pleasant shopping experience for the customer is appreciated.
The speed of the scanners with the modern technologies -- whether it is a 360-degree scan, or a bi-optic scan, with the thermal printers -- is improving the speed of the front end. With the credit authorization now being on-line, you have the ability to swipe cards, and then have the customers enter the identifying information while the transaction is in progress. It contributes to a faster front-end checkout.
With the labor market being what it is, we have less of a luxury of having experienced cashiers. We sometimes have to settle for the less experienced cashier, and sometimes the more transient type of employees. Using a POS system with interactive displays and keyboards has had a profound impact on usability at the front end.
For the customer as well, the new generation of customer displays, whether it is the VGA monitors or the flat panels, gives them more information, which I think forms a confident bond between us and our customers. With the customer-specific approach to messaging, now you can start to drive some of your promotional efforts, some of your customer messages to individuals or to customer classes, rather than the mass. That is starting to be appreciated by customers.
SN: Self-scanning at the front end is being rolled out by many chains. What opportunities does this present?
HERMAN:I see an acceleration of customer self-scanning implementations. These solutions do save cashier labor and work especially well for the express checkout orders. Also, most customers like these systems and they believe that they spend less time in the checkout process.
The systems are pretty user-friendly, although when you launch them in a store, you do need to assign someone to hand-hold the customers through the process. But typically, once you have done it, it's pretty easy to do it again. And there is a cashier monitor available, so if there are questions or concerns, there is always someone at the ready.
It is still relatively new, and you are seeing more and more choices out there. People are trying to get focus not only on just the express orders, but the total order. And I think we need to see more of a depth of implementation than what we currently have before we will see anything radically different down the road.
BUTLER: We have had self-scanning in a couple of pilot stores for slightly over a year, and the experience has been good. We have another pilot getting ready to go with a newer version and we are real excited about that. The version that we are getting ready to test allows us to accept just about every type of payment except checks. We look forward to rolling it out in more stores toward the end of next year. We want to do some key stores and test it a little bit more in some of our other markets.
In our particular case, we have selected NCR self-scanning and we have NCR point-of-sale, so it has been a real seamless situation. From an accounting standpoint, it's just like another lane, so it's very good in that respect. It has been a convenience for our customers. It has helped us in some peak traffic times when we have customers that queue up. And we limit our self scanning only to express customers, although it would probably handle a higher number of items. This newer version is going to allow us to accept coins and electronic benefits.
I think we are going to see it at some point in the future in every single store that we operate. We thought early on that it would just be a niche for those stores that have high credit card use, but that turned out to not be true. We are seeing it being used for cash and credit. PINK: We almost put that in the store we are getting ready to open now, but decided not to. However, we are going to put self-scanning in the store that we will start construction on in March.
At first, we looked at it from a financial perspective -- how much labor could we save? But that's not what this is about. For us, it's about two things. One, it's about customer service. There are customers who like that feeling of being able to get out of the store faster by doing it themselves. So even if it seems somewhat contrary to customer service, there are customers who really want that ability to move through quicker, and if by doing it themselves they can do that, then that's great.
The other aspect is labor. As another supermarket executive said, "It is just getting harder to find cashiers." It has nothing to do with how much we are paying them. It has to do with putting enough bodies in the store to make it work. He said with self-scanning, "I can have one body and cover four lanes. Whether qualified or unqualified, the problem for us is just attracting enough people."
We have very low unemployment here in Utah, it's in the low 4% or high 3%. That's a real valid reason to look at it. There is a segment of people who like it, and it is hard for us to get enough to fill the positions we have open. Obviously, you have tremendous shrink upside potential on self-checkout, and how well that is going to work out, I'm not sure.
There is a cost consideration when you have three or four people being replaced by one, obviously you get a labor savings. But the real benefit is we get a different kind of customer service that certain people want.
MILLER: We are not yet using it, but we will. I think that the innovators have paid their dues and have proven the concept. There is a challenge with integration of the self-checkout subsystems to the retailers' legacy POS systems, and that does represent a technological hurdle.
The fact that different retailers have different POS applications, different hardware, different credit authorization, really limits the number of cookie cutter self-checkout systems out there. That has been an key inhibitor to the growth of the concept.
NCR came out with their solution, offering a convertible scanner environment that allows the customer or cashier to share scan duties based on the time of day. That really opens up some doors for retailers based on the type of POS system they have in place.
I don't think labor itself is going to be the key driver of success and payback on a front end. Customer empowerment, where the customers are in charge of their transactions, is actually going to be appreciated more by the customer, and drive the growth of the self-checkout. Labor will benefit as a result, but if we put a self-checkout system in just to save labor, we won't have a successful program.
SN:What potential do you see for portable handheld scanning for checkout?
HERMAN: This technology really hasn't taken off in the United States. The major concern is providing sufficient security protection without alienating the customer when orders are audited. Until you really find a good way to solve that problem, you are going to a limited roll out in this country.
BUTLER: Several chains have experimented with it, but at this point in time, we don't have any desire to test it. We are watching it to see if there is a good fit for us. But there is that fear of the shrink involved. In many cases, they do spot audits, but I don't know how effective that really is. You give the customer this service, then you pull them aside and say, "We're going to audit you." If a customer knows that is going to happen, they are probably not even going to use it.
MILLER: I love the wireless idea. The flexibility that we get for merchandising and selling at the customers' convenience is something that wireless brings to us. It has given us some enhanced customer service during holidays, for example, where we package meals for Thanksgiving and allow customers to buy a product without waiting for it in line. | <urn:uuid:52a03c7d-15f2-48e2-a963-429abfd1a290> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://supermarketnews.com/print/archive/front-line-action | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972804 | 2,818 | 1.609375 | 2 |
She also found lots of support from caring staff. Now she is just a few semesters from getting her high school diploma and contemplating a future filled with options.
"I want to do everything," Drummond said.
Soon, more young people will get their chance to dream.
College and county officials have decided to take the principles of Gateway, a national program funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that since 2004 has been replicated at 33 community colleges in 20 states, including Community College of Philadelphia, and start a program that will be open to applicants from all the county's municipalities.
The new program, Transition to College, will be based at the Camden County College Blackwood campus and funded not by Gateway but by a portion of the per capita state education aid allocated to the students' home districts.
The officials said they were inspired by the results the Camden Gateway program has had in its first year with students. The program, launched with a three-year, $325,000 grant from the national program, expects to be self-sufficient after this coming school year.
Of 85 students who joined the Camden Gateway program at varying academic levels, 66 were still with it by the end of the spring semester, according to program staff. Three have graduated and six more are expected to by the start of the fall semester.
Of the 19 who left the program, most did so because they were having a baby or for other family reasons, according to acting program director Irvin Sweeney.
That success may strike some as modest. Program proponents, however, say these young people come with often severe challenges.
"What you're talking about is a group of students who are pretty much lost," said Fred Cappello, dean of the college's Division of School and Community Academic Programs. "We're giving the toughest population of students a chance to graduate, to become dues-paying citizens."
County Freeholder Ian Leonard, a champion of the Transition program, said saving some students, even if the numbers are not huge, is worth the effort.
"If you have two people who have no hope and one finds their way, that's a success," Leonard said. "And you don't give up on the other one."
Academic deficits are just part of what the students in the Camden program have faced. Many have children of their own. Some have had to work to help support their families.
And there has been much more.
During the spring semester, one student lost two close friends to homicide in two hours. Another lost family members and friends to violent deaths, and yet another was pregnant, her baby's father was incarcerated, one of her sisters was murdered, and another sister committed suicide, said Sweeney, who also counsels and helps support the students' efforts.
That kind of intensive support is a key feature of Gateway. Sweeney said it is remarkable how many of the young people had found the strength to persevere.
"To us, it's a motivation and inspiring," he said.
Growing up in a hardscrabble community like Camden can mean struggle. Particularly in the city's general high schools, the dropout problem is severe. At Woodrow Wilson, the graduation rate is only 55 percent. At Camden High, it's a grim 45 percent.
But neither the national Gateway program nor Camden County's Transition to College is limited to low-income students.
"It's for everybody," said Paul Spaventa, a former Gloucester City school superintendent who has been volunteering with Transition to College and will become its director next month.
A student does not have to be low-income to fall behind in school, become pregnant, or get bogged down in family problems, bullying, or other high school drama, Spaventa said.
Transition to College will start small - about 20 to 25 students, Spaventa said. The program will look for students who have drive and meet certain academic standards; ideally they will be able to read at least at an eighth-grade level.
Program leaders are getting memorandums of agreement from school districts to work together to identify students. So far, Sterling, Winslow, and the Camden County Technical Schools have signed up, Spaventa said, expecting more.
Some students are seeking out the program on their own, even before their districts sign up.
Jireh Burnett, 17, of Lindenwold, has been hoping for a call back since she attended a Transition to College information session a little over a week ago.
When she was younger, she said, she went to a Christian school and found public school a hard transition. Then she got pregnant and went to a program for young mothers in North Jersey. It was a disappointment. She came back to her grandmother's home and went to Lindenwold High School shortly before her son was born in late 2011 and again a few months later after, but she was academically way behind.
She says Transition to College could mean a brighter future for her and for her baby boy.
"I'm really excited. I really went to get my high school diploma," Burnett said. "I really want to be successful in life and prove to my son everything is going to be OK."
Coming up to a year since he entered the Camden Gateway program, things are much brighter for James Ingalls, 18, a gentle giant of a young man from Camden.
His academic career included being held back more than once. By his second year as a high school freshman, he was older than most of the other students around him. He said he knows he could have worked harder. But still, "it made me feel bad."
When he got to Gateway, he liked that he was with students his age. He appreciated the support of Sweeney and Genevieve Griffith, a lead counselor.
He is planning to continue college. He is thinking about a degree in forensic science. To any students like him thinking about a way-back program, he would say:
"Just do it. Go with the program. It's a good program. Do the work."
An information session on Transition to College will be held at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Camden County College's Blackwood campus in the Connector Building at College Drive and Peter Cheeseman Road.
Contact Rita Giordano at 856-779-3841 or [email protected], or on Twitter @ritagiordano. | <urn:uuid:e0b4eacd-5d6d-4e21-a0c7-c785222ea4a1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.philly.com/2012-07-25/news/32828877_1_national-program-community-academic-programs-program-director | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982852 | 1,326 | 1.8125 | 2 |
U.S. Military Wages Battle Against Misconduct
Originally published on Tue April 24, 2012 5:18 am
There's some soul-searching going on in the military these days.
The latest scandal to hit U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan surfaced last week when The Los Angeles Times published photographs showing smiling American soldiers holding up body parts of a Taliban suicide bomber.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta addressed the latest incident during a trip to Brussels.
"That behavior that was depicted in those photos absolutely violates both our regulations and, more importantly, our core values," he said last week after a NATO meeting.
Senior military leaders say these high-profile incidents — including images of Marines urinating on the corpses of dead insurgents and other Marines posing with a Nazi SS flag — are isolated and not representative of the vast majority of those serving in Afghanistan.
Still, senior officers are asking, after 10 years of grinding war, whether leaders of small units are maintaining the proper standards of conduct.
Talking About Scandals -- And Preventing Them
This week, more than 100 Marine sergeants and officers are gathering in Quantico, Va., as part of a long-scheduled leadership workshop at Marine Corps University.
And instructors like Lt. Col. Brian Christmas expect the photos and videos of dead Taliban and smiling troops to be part of the discussion.
"What we try to instill in the Marines is, 'Look, your voice matters. If you see something that's wrong, you do something about it. You say something, you stop it,' " Christmas says.
What Marine instructors also want to get across to the Marines is how notorious episodes occurred, like the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, and the Abu Ghraib prisoner scandal in Iraq.
Paolo Tripodi, an ethics professor at Quantico, says the Marines will then break into small groups and ask themselves: "What do I develop as an individual to make sure this thing is not going to happen to me and my Marines?"
The instructors at Quantico are not the only ones raising the issue. The Pentagon's most senior officers are now weighing in.
Messages From The Generals
The top Marine officer, Gen. James Amos, recently sent a message to all Marines, reminding them of the Corps' ethical standards.
And Amos is visiting Marine commands around the country, driving home a theme of integrity in the wake of the video of Marines urinating on dead Taliban that surfaced in January. The video and recently published photos were all reportedly taken in 2010.
Soldiers are hearing a similar message. The Army's chief of staff, Gen. Ray Odierno, told a gathering of generals a few weeks ago that the Army must foster a climate where unacceptable behavior will not be tolerated.
Odierno made special reference to what's called General Order No. 1. It lists prohibited activities for soldiers, and includes photographing or filming detainees or human casualties.
Robert Scales, a retired Army major general, is a Vietnam combat veteran and historian. He says those messages are important, especially after a decade of war and repeated deployments.
"When soldiers get tired, and they've been in the field a very long time and the stress begins to build without very tight supervision from small unit leaders, soldiers — remember these are 18- and 19-year-old kids with a camera — go out and do stupid things," Scales says.
And Scales says the difficulty of fighting a counterinsurgency like Afghanistan only adds to that stress. Soldiers are trying to win over the populace, while trying to distinguish between friend and foe.
"And after a while, when operating within an alien culture, the soldiers get jaded, and when they get tired, when they're afraid, when they spend long times in the field away from the base camp, these things are likely to happen," he says.
But senior officers say these things are not supposed to happen. That's where leadership comes in. And that's why some junior leaders may be disciplined, not just those caught misbehaving in photos and on video. | <urn:uuid:4ec36015-9540-45b0-b0eb-920ad8093893> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wcbe.org/post/us-military-wages-battle-against-misconduct | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944866 | 845 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Under a pilot program that will expand to 299 schools across the city over the next two months, breakfast is served at the students’ desks at Public School 70 in Long Island City, Queens. The morning feasts, handed to students in bags as they stampede through the doors of the school, are meant to increase the number of children who eat what nutritionists consider the most important meal of the day.
Since 2003, the city has offered free breakfast to all students, rich and poor; about 1 in 5 eat it. Among students from low-income families who qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch, 21 percent participate in the program, a level some educators have attributed to the stigma associated with showing up early for breakfast in the cafeteria.
Studies have demonstrated that students who eat breakfast tend to perform better on exams, and similar programs in Newark and in cities in Maryland and upstate New York have shown improved attendance among students who take advantage of breakfast in class.
New York City began experimenting with the program last year at schools with high numbers of poor students. After the city received positive feedback from the pilot schools, it decided to expand the program, which is at 48 campuses this year.
Government and Politics
Gov. David A. Paterson failed to reach an agreement on budget cuts with the State Senate majority leader, Dean G. Skelos. The failure to reach a resolution throws into the doubt the chances that an agreement could be reached before Tuesday’s emergency legislative session. [NYT]
City Councilman Michael E. McMahon, newly elected to Congress from Staten Island, is seen as a practical centrist who is unconcerned with political philosophy. [NYT]
The head count in Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s office has swelled to the highest level of his seven-year tenure — prompting him to order a large cut over the next 19 months. Figures posted on the city’s Web site show that the mayor’s office had 492 employees as of September. [New York Post]
Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani says he’d consider a run for governor for 2010. “I don’t know if I’d be interested in it,” Mr. Giuliani said in response to a question at a business forum in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. “I’ll think about it when the right time comes along.” [Daily News]
These should be stable times for Mayor Bloomberg. Two months ago, he was a lame duck quacking for attention while his deputies counted down the remaining days; now he’s the presumptive favorite to rule the city for the next five years. So why does City Hall seem so unsettled? [Daily News]
Crime and Public Safety
A man suspected in the beating death of a financial worker in 2006 now faces charges of vehicular manslaughter and drunken driving in the deaths of two women in a Queens crash, the police said. [NYT]
A 17-year-old girl was killed on Sunday morning when she was shot and then trampled outside a house party in the Bronx. It was unclear whether the girl, Nadairee Walters, was an intended target or how many people were shooting. [NYT]
The sentencing of Nixzaliz Santiago in the death of Nixzmary Brown raises questions about the lawful obligations of being a good mother. [NYT]
A Trinidadian man charged with plotting to blow up Kennedy International Airport is close to death’s door after starving himself and refusing medical treatment — a situation that has left prison officials to force-feed him through a tube. Having lost 85 pounds — roughly half his body weight at the time of his arrest in June 2007 — the man, Kareem Ibrahim, 63, is being held at a prison hospital in Springfield, Ill. [New York Post]
Gregory Boyle, the retired police detective who took a bullet during a bizarre attempted robbery at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel on Saturday, is thanking his lucky stars he survived. [New York Post]
An attack on an African immigrant on Staten Island was part of an Election Day hate spree started by two teenagers upset over Barack Obama’s election victory, prosecutors said. Ralph Nicoletti and Bryan Garaventa, both 18, were arraigned and charged with second-degree assault as a hate crime and criminal possession of a weapon. [New York Post]
The family of an 11-year-old girl who prosecutors say was killed by her Brooklyn mother with a mop handle wants the girl’s 14-year-old sister sent back to Mexico rather than face an unpredictable life in the city’s foster-care system. The family, which has enlisted the help of the Mexican government, thinks the sister, Imelda Vazquez, should be returned to her beloved grandfather, who raised her until August 2007, when the mother paid $3,000 to sneak her into the country. [New York Post]
Inmates bunked at the Brooklyn House of Detention on Sunday night for the first time in five years — a sleepover critics worry is a risky first step in a much-debated jail expansion plan. About 50 sentenced inmates were expected to stay overnight in the out-of-use jail, a Department of Correction spokesman, Stephen Morello, said. [Daily News]
A Fort Greene building named for the late City Councilman James E. Davis was the scene of gunfire this month, officials said. Community and arts leaders were outraged that bullets were fired into the James E. Davis 80 Arts Building on Hanson Place on Nov. 9. [Daily News]
Housing and Economy
A corner of the north pool of the National September 11 Memorial Museum has become visible at ground zero. [NYT]
A massive natural-gas reserve that lies under the rural region around Tompkins, N.Y., is a potential cash cow for strapped farmers in the area — and a potential disaster for New York City’s drinking supply, opponents say. Dozens of landowners in the region 120 miles northwest of city and in the heart of the Catskills have already signed lease deals with energy companies that could open their land to drilling. [New York Post]
The Bloomberg administration is in serious negotiations to buy 10.5 acres of real estate in Coney Island that once appeared unobtainable — a move that would save both Astroland Park and the mayor’s plans to revive the slumping seaside amusement district. The developer Joseph Sitt is ready to give up his controversial plan to build a $1.5 billion Las Vegas-style entertainment complex, which the mayor wants no part of, and instead sell all of the beachfront land he has bought to the city. [New York Post]
The city’s premier biotech project has fallen victim to the credit crunch, according to an industry report. Construction is already under way on the 310,000-square-foot first phase of the East River Science Park, a 3.7-acre complex off the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive between East 28th and East 30th Streets that city officials had hoped would become a major lure for biotech firms because of its proximity to hospitals and universities. [New York Post]
The Buildings Department ignored warnings from a division chief that a problem-plagued crane should be grounded months before it collapsed, killing two workers at an East Side high-rise. Bethany Klein, then head of the department’s cranes and derricks unit, warned in an e-mail message nine months before the May 30 disaster the tower crane was at risk of “catastrophic failure.” [Daily News]
The movement to bring back the commuter tax already has the backing of Mayor Bloomberg. Now a new supporter has jumped on the bandwagon — Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, the Manhattan Democrat who led the charge to kill it in 1999. Proponents of the tax say it would raise $713 million this year alone and help stave off proposed tolls on the four East River bridges. [New York Post]
A lawyer involved in a battle for leadership of the Bronx Democratic Party used a firefighter placard to park illegally. The lawyer, Stanley K. Schlein, was spotted parked in a crosswalk outside the Bronx Supreme Courthouse twice this month, with a Uniformed Firefighters Association placard displayed on his dashboard, according to photos obtained by The Post.
Enrollment at the city’s Catholic schools is plummeting, continuing a trend that has shuttered dozens of diocesan schools in recent years, new data show. In the archdiocese of New York, enrollment at elementary and high schools dropped by nearly 6,000 students in one year, to 88,273, officials said. [New York Post]
The first organized opposition to continuing mayoral control of the schools came out swinging. The Campaign for Better Schools, a coalition of 25 community groups, said it will press for significant changes to the 2002 state law the Legislature will begin debating anew in January. [Daily News]
People and Neighborhoods
Susan Dominus’s Big City column: The tale of David Fishman, a 12-year-old Upper West Side restaurant critic, and his experience trying out Salumeria Rosi, a new restaurant. [NYT]
Metropolitan Diary: A subway rider finds something fishy at Union Square. [NYT]
Neediest Cases: After a Brooklyn woman came home to find her apartment emptied, her community chipped in to replace her family’s belongings. [NYT]
City parks officials are poised to unveil a sweeping new blueprint for Flushing Meadows-Corona Park on Tuesday.The plan envisions replacing swaths of concrete with green lawns, opening up the waterways and improving access from surrounding neighborhoods. [Daily News]
A critically ill Brooklyn boy at the center of a dispute between his Orthodox Jewish parents and the hospital that cared for him was buried. The boy, Motl Brody, 12, who had brain cancer and no longer had any measurable brain activity, had been pronounced dead on Nov. 4 by Children’s National Medical Center in Washington. [Daily News] | <urn:uuid:429fd5d8-28be-4545-8396-be25cbd14b08> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/breakfast-in-the-classroom-at-the-desk-in-fact/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961159 | 2,093 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Confidence Part 2
Dear friends, dear brothers and sisters, dear seekers, I wish to give a short talk on confidence. Here we are in Cambridge. Cambridge immediately awakens confidence in us. What we call confidence in the outer world is nothing short of assurance in the inner world. Therefore, I bow to the confidence and the assurance in Cambridge.
Confidence awakens our physical. Confidence energises our vital. Confidence illumines our mind. Confidence purifies our heart. A pure heart, an illumined mind, an energetic and dynamic vital and a wakeful body can and will manifest the divine realities here on earth.
Confidence is a divine revelation of our inner assurance. There is an unseen reality within us, a divine Pilot, an Inner Pilot who moulds and shapes our lives. When we hear the message of the Inner Pilot, in our outer life we feel confidence. Confidence is an outer gift from above, whereas assurance is an inner gift from above. Confidence is self awareness. We want to be aware of ourselves. We want to know what our source is, where we came from, what we are doing here on earth. We want to know our respective roles in this cosmic Game, this Lila. Our confidence brings to the fore the inner vision, the reality that we are aiming at, that we want to grow into.
Confidence is not a display of our egocentric life. Confidence is a divine force. Ego binds us, blinds us. Ego offers us the message of separativity and self enjoyment. Confidence, on the other hand, wants to express its universal oneness. It is for all; it is for the Infinite, the Vast. Confidence cannot be satisfied all by itself. It wants to grow into the Universal Light and Transcendental Height.
When we have confidence in ourselves, we realise the ultimate Truth and Light, the Absolute Supreme. When God has confidence in us, He makes us not only His Perfect instruments, but conscious representatives of His Divinity, His Reality, His Infinity, His Eternity and His Immortality on earth. With our confidence in God, we go up and reach His Transcendental Height. With God's Confidence in us, God comes down and makes us His Infinity, His Eternity, His Immortality. And this is not the end of His Game. Then He wants us to manifest what we have become.
Confidence is introduction. Confidence introduces our earthly reality to the divine Reality. And the divine Reality introduces its wealth-infinite Peace, Light and Bliss-to us when we are confident.
Life is either meaningful or meaningless. For those who do not seek, life is meaningless, a barren desert. For seekers, at every moment life is meaningful and fruitful; life has a purpose, a meaning, a reality and an ultimate Goal. What brings us the message of the ultimate Goal, what brings us the reality of the inner world, the more illumining, more fulfilling higher world? It is our confidence. With our confidence light, we dig deep within; and while digging within we cultivate the bumper crop of realisation, liberation and perfection.
An unaspiring person talks to himself and talks to the world. But he cannot talk to the Ultimate Reality. It is only a man of confidence, inner confidence, divine confidence, supreme confidence who can talk to the Highest Reality: the Transcendental Vision and the Universal Reality.
One portion of divinity comes down into the world and another remains above. The one that remains above is known as the Father Reality and the one that comes down is known as the Son Reality. Again, there comes a time when the two realities become inseparably one and tell the world of their oneness. Jesus Christ, the Saviour, announced, "I and my Father are one." His confidence light he brought down into the world; and it was his confidence light that uttered, "I and my Father are one." When divinity enters into humanity and illumines humanity, at that time humanity claims divinity as its very own.
Confidence is oneness with the Beyond, the oneness of earth life with Heaven life. Where God is, confidence is bound to be. God has given us the secret key to open up His Heart's Door and that secret key is confidence. We pray, we meditate, only to cultivate one divine quality and that one divine quality is confidence. Confidence shows us the way to go ahead, the way to dive deep within, the way to fly above. Confidence is the pioneer that constantly leads us, guides us, beckons us to the ultimate Source. Each individual has teeming questions: "Who am I? Where do I come from? What is my ultimate goal?" All the questions of our inner and outer life can be answered by one solitary thing: confidence. If we have confidence, then we can explore the inner world. If we have confidence, then we can explore the outer world.
Here we are all seekers. We want to know the reality that we eternally are and that we are going to offer to the world at large. And for that what we need is perfection, self perfection. It is only in self perfection that we can please the Inner Pilot, the Supreme Pilot, the world around us, the world within us. This perfection is our constant confidence in ourselves and in our Inner Pilot.
Again, this confidence has a Source. Its Source is God's Compassion Light and Compassion Delight. God grants us Light in boundless measure at our journey's start. And it is He, the Supreme, the Eternal Pilot, who grants us eternal, boundless Delight. Light energises us. Light leads us, guides us to our ultimate destination, where we see the transformation of Light into Delight. Delight fulfils us. Delight immortalises us.
We aspire to become good, to become loving, to become devoted, to become useful to the world at large. But this aspiration also needs something from us. It is confidence that aspiration expects from each seeker. If the seeker is wanting in confidence, then his aspiration can never be regular, it can never be spontaneous, it can never be continuous. But if inside his aspiration confidence looms large, then he walks along a sunlit road to his destined goal.
A child has confidence in his parents. He feels that his parents know everything, have everything and are everything for him. Similarly, a seeker has all confidence in his Inner Pilot, the Supreme, who is guiding his destiny, his life, his aspiration, his realisation, his reality to the ultimate Goal.
Each day we are granted by the Author of all good, out of His infinite Bounty, confidence both in our inner life and in our outer life. But if we use our physical mind-our earth bound, sophisticated, obscure, unlit, unaspiring, intellectual mind-to search, we may not feel God's Confidence-Light. For the earth bound mind feels that it is complete in itself; it does not need any reality other than its own existence. But the heart constantly feels that it can house something more, that it can see something more, that it can grow into something more, that it has something more to offer to the world at large. The heart has the eagerness to receive and to achieve from the world within and from the world without. The heart has a constant inner thirst to be universal, to be transcendental. Therefore, the heart always looks within and around to grasp and invoke the infinite Realities that abide in God's entire Creation. The heart comes to realise that there is only one way to achieve and grow into these infinite Realities and that is the way of self giving. And what is self giving today, tomorrow that very thing is God becoming. So, on the strength of self giving, our aspiring heart becomes both universal and transcendental. And this self giving heart has a source of its own and that source is confidence. Confidence also has its source. Its source is God's Compassion, God's infinite, unconditional, immortal Compassion in man, for man.
June 21st, 1976 | <urn:uuid:b98a373b-562a-46e1-9abc-47da7deedac4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.srichinmoy.org/resources/library/talks/human_experience/confidence_two/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948173 | 1,673 | 1.5 | 2 |
to control our civil rights in no; particularly that ecclesiastical power should only be used in the ; and then no further than fellowship was concerned— I think they injured their cause to day. There is another appointment for them on the morrow at 10, o,clock. Their friend they said, was sick, conseq uently could not attend to day— Mr. Linn said he thought it would be time enough to take it up in the Congress when they could not get justice in the State, and that he was confident, there was a disposition in the State of to do us justice should we apply: That the reason of their refusing to envestigate before, was, the trials of the prisoners were pending. And further said (when speaking of the trials before ) that he understood from Gentlemen that the prisoners commended the for his clemency and fair dealing towards them; and acknowledged they were guilty, in part, of the charges preferred against them. Mr. Linn said he presumed I was not present when sd. men were tried. I replied in the negative; that I was not there, neither any body else that could be a witness in their favor. The Lawyers advised them to keep away if they desired the salvation of their lives. I observed that I had read the procee dings of the Legislature but did not now recollect them; but since yesterday I have been reflecting on the sub ject and recollect a conversation, I had with Mr. who was the bearer of the petition to Jefferson City and he informed me, the reason why they refused an investigation was on account of the upper members being so violently opposed to it, that they used their utmost exertions and finally succeeded in getting a majority against it; and the reason of their taking this course was, in consequence of one of their members being in the Massacre at Haun’s Mill, Viz. Mr. Ashley & Gilbian— Gilbian was a leader of the first mob in , which the militia were called out to suppress.
Mr. Linn [said] if it must come our out in Congress, it [p. 101] | <urn:uuid:8841a305-fe8a-48c4-a570-e999005a32d7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://josephsmithpapers.org/paperSummary/letter-from-elias-higbee-21-february-1840?tm=expanded&dm=text-only&zm=zoom-right&p=2&s=&sm=none | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.991588 | 435 | 1.8125 | 2 |
A community of people who love to write
The easiest domain name (Note the .ORG) - Absolutely Free!
Home | Submit Articles | Login
Credit Crisis Impact on Indian Outsourcing jobs, software layoffs -My thoughtsBY: Bharat | Category: Technology and Computers | Post Date: 2008-09-29
Is the future of outsourcing in India is at risk: I think that time has come when we will start to see some changes in the Indian software industry in terms of reduced hiring of engineers and possibly some layoff's in many software companies (atleast in a short term). It's not just the United States, but Europe also bailed out 3 of its banks because of mounting losses due to credit crisis. Some believe that this is the time to sell dollars and buy Euro, but I personally share a neutral opinion about it because Europe has it's own set of issues. Gold has also climbed a lot recently.
What happens is yet to be seen, nothing can be said with certainty. There are both positives and negatives from this credit crisis. Most likely the impact will be limited, but media will likely underline every event in red letters, enough to scare public. There will likely be growth but at a slower pace.
1. Bankrupt US financial institutions:
Several banks like Lehman brothers and many big banks Indymac, New Century have closed down or filed for bankruptcy protection. Lehman brothers was one of the prominent companies which got it's works done in India via outsourcing clients. It is very likely that now there will be a huge cut in total software projects. How many Indian outsourcing companies will get effected, still need to be seen.
Big mergers like Citibank-Wachovia and Bank of America- Merrill Lynch, will also result in consolidated operations, which also results in lesser number of total software projects.
3. Falling Stock Markets:
If the global stocks continue to decline, it will result in loss of jobs or planned layoffs for bottom 1-10% of employees anyway.
4. An overall slow spending mode:
During a slowdown, even those industries which are not directly impacted seem to be conservative in spending money and doing new projects.
Other side of the coin - POSITIVES:
1. Less money to spend on could mean more projects for Indian outsourcers in a long run as America and European companies will look to get their work done at a cheaper rate even more.
2. Indian banks have a less impact of US credit crisis and it is possible that the recovery of Indian stock market is faster than the American stock market, which will be good for us.
3. Aging workforce in Europe and United States will likely open new opportunities in India looking for fresh blood, also medical software industry in India can flourish in a long run.
4. This will also be a good time for Indian companies to acquire some foreign software companies for cheap and get a better footing in their overseas operations.
Therefore if I were a Computer Science Student with just a year or so left to complete the engineering degree, I would rather be preparing for a Masters Degree than taking chances in the current turbulence of software industry. But if you are from one of the elite engineering colleges, then you probably are much safer.
29 September 2008: Software and services sector growth in the country could be slower than expected this year as the global financial crisis hits exports, - Nasscom.
Article Source: http://www.saching.com
About Author / Additional Info: I am not a researcher .. these are my personal views
* Ready made era: Surrounded by ready made products and services
* It's finger licking good... The world of Advertisements!
* The Purpose Of Marriage
* Informed consent: What every health professional and patient needs to know about.
* Who are the Maoists in India and what do they want?
Does this article violate or infringe on your copyright ?
It is a violation of our terms for authors to submit content which they did not write and claim it as their own. If this article infringes on your copyrights, then use our Contact us form with the detailed proof of infringement along with the offending article's title, URL and writer name. If you do not hear back from us then contact us again in another 10 days. Thank you.
Comments on this article: (0 comments so far)
* Additional comments are now closed for this article *
Article Views: 3471
Copyright © 2010 saching.com - Do not copy articles from this website.
Important Disclaimer: All articles on this website are for general information only and is not a professional or experts advice. We do not own any responsibility for correctness or authenticity of the information presented in this article, or any loss or injury resulting from it. We do not endorse these articles, we are neither affiliated with the authors of these articles nor responsible for their content. Please see our disclaimer section for complete terms. | <urn:uuid:d53c577a-a05c-4d8a-adfb-85ae67e7dd34> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.saching.com/Article/Credit-Crisis-Impact-on-Indian-Outsourcing-jobs--software-layoffs--My-thoughts/722 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945848 | 1,016 | 1.710938 | 2 |
: AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE
New York Times to launch Chinese news website
WASHINGTON: The New York Times said Wednesday it was launching a Chinese-language news website to deliver "high-quality coverage of world affairs, business and culture" to readers in China.
A statement from the prestigious US daily said it was "launching a beta version of a new online Chinese-language edition designed to bring New York Times journalism to China."
The site, http://cn.nytimes.com, was to launch in Beijing early Thursday, or late Wednesday New York time.
"The goal of the new site is to provide China's growing number of educated, affluent, global citizens with high-quality coverage of world affairs, business and culture," the statement said.
"The site will be edited specifically for readers in China, presenting translations of the best of The Times's award-winning journalism alongside original work by Chinese writers contributing to The Times."
Tensions have flared recently between authorities in Beijing and foreign media outlets operating in China.
Al-Jazeera said in May it had shut its English-language bureau in China after its correspondent became the first foreign journalist to be expelled from the country since 1998.
China operates a huge system of Internet control and censorship dubbed the Great Firewall of China, aimed at snuffing out information or comments that the government considers a threat to its authority.
Google has complained of interference from the Beijing government and reduced its presence in the Chinese market.
Chinese authorities regularly black out sections of broadcasts by foreign news channels such as CNN and BBC World that they deem objectionable.
Asked about any agreement with Chinese authorities about content, New York Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said there was "none."
"The content of the site will be determined by The New York Times," she said in response to an AFP query.
"Having said that, we know that occasionally Chinese readers cannot access certain articles on the Chinese-language sites of other foreign media organizations. That may be something we have to live with too, though we hope not."
The US daily's media blog said the site would feature around 30 articles a day on global news and editorials.
"The Times Company, which is well aware of the censorship issues that can come up in China, stressed that it would not become an official Chinese media company," the Times's Media Decoder blog said.
"The Times has set up its server outside China and the site will follow the paper's journalistic standards."
"We're not tailoring it to the demands of the Chinese government, so we're not operating like a Chinese media company," foreign editor Joseph Kahn was quoted as saying.
"China operates a very vigorous firewall. We have no control over that. We hope and expect that Chinese officials will welcome what we're doing."
<< previous||next >>
The blog said Chinese readers would not see a "paywall" that the newspaper uses in the United States. The site will have advertising, with sales to be run out of New York, aided by Cesanamedia for sales in China and Italy. | <urn:uuid:c4052d4d-5ff4-4729-b4d2-b31bf9788295> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.reviewnepal.com/detail_news.php?id=4108 | 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 | 0.963239 | 631 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Two weekends ago, the National Organization for Marriage boasted about the large protest in Paris against marriage equality, but this weekend saw a counter-response from tens of thousands of supporters. The march on Sunday included messages like “Equality of rights is not a threat” and “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity — No more, no less!”
Though Sunday’s march may not have been quite as large as the anti-gay protest, momentum certainly favors equality in France. A new poll released Saturday shows that 63 percent of French voters favor marriage equality and only 37 percent oppose it. Still, voters are a bit more divided on the question of same-sex adoption, which is one of the primary benefits marriage equality would provide. | <urn:uuid:13156ec5-81d4-433a-916d-3e4631f1f86c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2013/01/28/1502881/thousands-march-for-marriage-equality-in-france-as-support-surges/?mobile=nc | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973476 | 152 | 1.75 | 2 |
They were discussing how to boost the small shop’s revenue.
One woman was very enthusiastic about knocking off a version of the Starbuck’s Rewards Card, which is sort of like a pre-paid debit coffee card. Customers can load it with money and use it for their Starbucks purchases instead of cash or a credit/debit card. The card has certain perks—free additional syrup flavors, a free drink after 10 purchases, and other special one-time offers.
I certainly see the appeal in having customers pre-pay for their purchases. It is like a no-interest loan from your customers. They give you a chunk of money up front while you slow-drip the product to them. And then there are the customers who load the card and then never use the balance. Free money!
The pre-paid card works for Starbucks because they offer decent perks and you can’t walk a mile without tripping over a Starbucks. If you get a pre-paid card, you need to psychologically justify that you will use it. That $20 is no longer be in your bank account and available for a purchase from someplace else. You made a financial commitment to Starbucks. If it wasn’t on every corner, would you feel that commitment was worth it? If you can’t access the store easily from your office when you want a 3pm coffee boost, how will you feel paying cash for a cup of coffee when you have a $20 credit for coffee elsewhere?
But… As a small coffee shop with only one location, are there enough customers who would buy into it to pay for the additional costs for a new point-of-sale system so the card could work?
This one woman was really into her idea. And it took a good 20 minutes of explaining why it wasn’t a good idea for this little coffee shop to get her off the pre-paid card track. It was a waste of productive time. (Well, so are meetings, but that’s a post for another day.)
The point is, when it comes down to marketing ideas, sometimes stealing from the big guys works. But often it doesn’t. Just because it worked for Starbucks did not mean it would work for this little coffee shop. Yes, they both sell coffee. But that’s all they have in common. The little shop needs to find a way to play on its strengths and not play monkey-see with a massive chain. | <urn:uuid:6c520357-65c7-406f-9122-e8f596f5451e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.prforsmarties.com/2011/economies-of-scale/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970011 | 510 | 1.664063 | 2 |
A Jew is defined by Orthodox Judaism as a person born to a jewish mother only(according to other jews it includes the family too), and since his mother was jewish he is considered a jewish even according to the most strict religious sects of judaism.
Sam Harris is therefore defined by jewish religious law as “Apiqoros” (the religious term for “Atheist” or basically anyone who holds a philosophical viewpoint which contradicts the jewish religion specifically). An “Apiqoros” is a name taken from the name of Epicurus who first raied the question of the problem of evil, and in our days many jews have in fact raised that question after the holocaust.
And according to Maimonides an “Apiqoros” must be killed. and why orthodox rabbi’s arn’t ordering to kill all jewish atheists? (except for neturei karta and other very extreme fundamentalists)
the answer is quite obvious, they can’t, because reality will smite them. | <urn:uuid:69ecd214-096c-4a2a-b508-eac915221fee> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.samharris.org/forum/viewthread8979/viewthread/13443/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9667 | 227 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Interested in tutoring in NYC? Then you must totally agree that it would be awesome to have a celebrity best friend. Not only would you learn about how a niche industry works, but you’d get all the perks that come with the life of a famous face. What if celebrities were mentors, or even tutors? Receiving SAT tips from Oprah or Tom Cruise would be fascinating (though you might not do too well on the exam). HeyKiki brainstormed a few other celebrities who would make interesting tutors.
Louis C.K.: Sure, he’d make you laugh, but Louis C.K. would be an amazing tutor because he would tell you exactly like it is. If you’re being an arrogant, impatient teenager, the comedian will not hesitate to cut you apart mentally and emotionally. He’d make sure you learned the material without cutting corners.
Meryl Streep: As SNL aptly explains: Meryl is perfect. She will make sure you become the best at whatever she’s tutoring you in. SAT’s? Perfect Score. Football? You’ll be starting quarterback. Meryl for President.
Morgan Freeman: Freeman’s voice is so relaxing, so intense, so immortal that you would listen to every word he said during a tutor lesson. No information would slip by.
Beyonce: Though you might get distracted by her beauty, Beyonce would make a good tutor because of her elegance. We obviously do not know Miss Knowles personally, but she appears to be a patient, sweet, poised individual. Meryl for President, Beyonce for Vice President.
DMX: This rapper is pretty intimidating. Forget his muscles, it’s the voice (and thelyrics) that would make him an, uh, effective teacher. He’d scare you into learning. | <urn:uuid:268aa65c-4278-4513-a34e-c5aeaa053543> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.heykiki.com/blog/2012/07/05/tutoring-in-nyc-the-five-best-celebrity-tutors/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958661 | 384 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Have you ever wondered what the Merchant Adventurers were up to in Hamburg 400 years ago and why a British engineer was responsible for so many civil engineering projects here in the 19th century? This Friday, 11 May, there's a special chance to trace on foot a number British people who have left their mark in the development of Hamburg, from the foundation of the English Church in 1612, through architecture and engineering to media and music of the 20th century. Please register via the…Continue
Added by Jo Dawes on May 7, 2012 at 16:45 — No Comments
It's sometimes elegant, sometimes rough, sometimes courtly and sometimes fiery, and occasionally all of the above, at once! Canadian baroque flautist, Brian Berryman, gives us a view into the traditional music likely to have been heard by the early members of the congregation of the English church in Hamburg in the next concert in the 400th…Continue
Added by Jo Dawes on May 7, 2012 at 16:00 — No Comments
Have you also noticed that many successful Baroque composers who made their careers in England were actually foreigners? With its unique free-market concert landscape, 18th century London was the city of endless possibilities for musicians of continental Europe’s more restrictive courts.
The ‘English’ works by French, Italian and German composers in this Saturday's…
Added by Jo Dawes on April 11, 2012 at 14:00 — No Comments
Yotin Tiewtrakul, choir master at St Thomas Becket, welcomes experienced choral singers to join in a performance of John Stainer's oratorio, "The Crucifixion", at 5pm on 31 March - see events. If the excesses of Victorian romanticism make you swoon, then this date is a must for you. Rehearsals take place on 24 and 25 March and there will be a general rehearsal on the evening before the…Continue
Added by Jo Dawes on March 13, 2012 at 17:58 — No Comments
February 25 promises to be a real feast for the senses to brighten up the greyest winter day. The Michel, one of the finest Baroque churches in northern Germany, will be the venue for a performance of Handel's great oratorio, The Messiah, composed in 1741. Sung in the original English by the Monteverdi-Chor Hamburg, it's an event not to be missed. If you're planning to take part in the Scratch Messiah on 2 December as part of the…Continue
Added by Jo Dawes on January 28, 2012 at 16:37 — No Comments
This Saturday, 28 January, is the first concert in the series to celebrate 400 years of the Anglican Church in Hamburg. Given by Ensemble Schirokko, it promises to be a feast of Baroque music from around the time the Merchant Adventurers, who founded the church, were flourishing in Hamburg.
The young ensemble's CD, Schirokkos Seereisen, was selected ‘CD der Woche’ by NDR and captures the listener with its 'extraordinary sense of sound, imaginative playing and great precision'. This is…Continue
Added by Jo Dawes on January 26, 2012 at 18:30 — No Comments
Added by Jo Dawes on December 2, 2009 at 16:21 — No Comments
Added by Jo Dawes on September 14, 2009 at 16:00 — No Comments | <urn:uuid:28575f8a-6fd7-45bb-bf16-c6303c498675> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.britaininhamburg.de/profiles/blog/list?user=0d4d254t3uyy4 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960812 | 712 | 1.5625 | 2 |
QUOTE(gman060692 @ Sep 9 2009, 11:48 PM)
I'm still a teenager in high school so the $ value of my time is about $15 at most so I decided why not take an hour and build one myself and maybe learn some stuff along the way too.
Sorry, didn't mean to sound flip. Doing something yourself is the best way to learn.
I had a go at building a similar cable myself last year as I had a couple of standard cables lying around. I too followed that tutorial, but there is so much info. it can get a wee bit confusing. Mine did actually work, but I had to destroy the connector to build it and I didn't spend long making it properly, so it was always a bit unreliable.
I might suggest you just start again? Build the most simple (composite) version, prove that works. And then gradually add options, like svid or component and digital audio...? | <urn:uuid:fb759aa4-27af-4eb4-b34a-55addc360b4b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?s=2dd5968e5c2c4630d3694c8f6bc77b8f&showtopic=691505&st=0&p=4529387 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973072 | 198 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Monster Fish Keepers Facing Legal Battle with Monster Energy Over Similar LogoBy: Brandon Klaus
Copyright laws for the online world can get quite complicated, and with millions of people creating new intellectual property every day, people are bound to create things that appear very similar to the work of others, despite their intended use. When this happens, layers get involved and threatening letters start flying, often leading to a very public eruption of tempers that rarely ends well. The latest example of a pointless, yet potentially very damaging butting of the heads comes as a fight over a single letter used by both Monster Fish Keepers and Monster Energy in their respective logo designs.
Both companies use a very distinctly designed “M” logo, with the Monster Fish Keepers “M” sporting horns and a spade shape attached to the middle stern of the letter. Both of these traits are obviously meant to represent a devil. The Monster Energy logo, on the other hand, is merely a torn trail left by three claw marks. Both are effective at conveying the idea of a monster, and Monster Energy is accusing Monster Fish Keepers of using the logo in such a way that confuses their customers and potentially do financial damage.
Monster Energy originally sent their complaints in the form of a cease and desist letter. In the letter, Monster Energy demands that the Monster Fish Keepers logo be removed from the website and all clothing, accessories, and stickers. Additionally, the letter claims that consumers could potentially mistake the two brands. In response to the letter, Monster Fish Keepers responded by basically saying that they won’t give in to the drink company’s wishes, especially since they are an online community that is geared toward aquarium keepers and not drink marketing.
While this whole situation is quite annoying on the surface, there’s potentially a lot more on the line for Monster Fish Keepers. For one, Monster Energy has been around since 2002 and presumably have used their trademark “M” logo starting at that same time. The aquarium community has only been using their “M” inspired logo since early 2005, so the timing is on the side of the drink company. To make the situation more dire for Monster Fish Keepers, a concern over huge legal fees looms in the distance. In most of these situations, the loser pays the legal fees. On top of that, Monster Energy is a far larger company with relatively unlimited assets and they could simply drag the case out in court until Monster Fish Keepers went broke trying to defend themselves.
In lieu of the oncoming litigation, Monster Fish Keepers is asking for support from the aquarium community. They aren’t asking for any money, but are simply encouraging aquarium keepers to contact Monster Energy and let them know how ridiculous this entire situation is.
To show your support or simply found out more about the situation, please visit Monster Energy Company vs. MonsterFishKeepers.com.
For obvious reasons, we find this whole lawsuit to be one of the most absurd pieces of litigation since the Orbitec patent battle with PFO. Monster Energy is clearly going way out of their industry to pick a fight with a company that in no way competes for the same resources or customers. Hopefully Monster Fish Keepers pulls through this trying time unscathed. | <urn:uuid:efd8adcd-b3a3-40dc-95ce-83178235b2fd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.aquanerd.com/2012/07/monster-fish-keepers-vs-monster-energy.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948934 | 674 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Tying the Knot
A history of the nautical rope bracelet by Kiel James Patrick
As a young lad growing up seaside in New England, visiting the island of Nantucket was my summer tradition. I can vividly recall the ferry ride from Hyannis, circling the upper deck with untamed anticipation and a Roy Rogers gripped firmly in my hand.
Among my favorite and most treasured summer memories, acquiring a sailor’s knot bracelet from Nantucket remains today the most cherished. For centuries, the knot has been a symbol of function, tradition and survival for sailors and outdoor enthusiasts alike. Beginning first as a pastime, sailors fashioned bracelets from excess rope found on their ships. Soon, it became an opportunity for them to showcase their craftsmanship and eventually represented much more. If they weren’t wearing them at sea to wipe the sweat from their brow, they would braid them as good luck charms for their loved ones upon arriving home.
To this day, these rope bracelets continue to embody the true spirit of coastal living. I’ll never forget the experiences my friends and I have had over the years. Once you slip that twisted cotton cord over your wrist and submerge it in water, you know the season has officially begun. From hot days exploring sandy beaches, to the cool nights fireside with your sweetheart, the bracelet endures. And when eventually Labor Day rears it’s ugly head, we must say our bittersweet goodbyes to yet another summer and painfully cut off the now shrunken and perfectly faded bracelet. That is until now.
Contemporary designers (I may know one quite well) have taken their love for this historic beachside accessory and made it better. Today’s bracelets now fasten with anchor clasps or buttons (at least the well-crafted ones), allowing you to wear your bracelet when you want to—and take it off when you need to. No more must we cut away our memories of love and salt and lobster.
Kiel James Patrick crafts handmade accessories in his native Rhode Island.
With a strong commitment to local artisans and American manufacturing, Kiel has taken his cottage industry worldwide and, along the way, become a social media phenomenon.
No comments yet. | <urn:uuid:baf8f718-2275-42f1-be52-56728561cd08> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.brooksbrothers.com/the-man/tying-the-knot/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950534 | 465 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Los Angeles Times
December 30, 2004
BAGHDAD — Yasser Abbas Atiya swore he'd sooner sleep on the streets of his beloved hometown of Fallouja than spend another night in the squalid Baghdad shelter where his family had been squatting.
Thirty minutes after he returned home this week, however, Atiya had seen enough. He left in disgust and had no plans to go back.
"I couldn't stand it," the grocer said. "I was born in that town. I know every inch of it. But when I got there, I didn't recognize it."
Lakes of sewage in the streets. The smell of corpses inside charred buildings. No water or electricity. Long waits and thorough searches by U.S. troops at checkpoints. Warnings to watch out for land mines and booby traps. Occasional gunfire between troops and insurgents.
"I thought, 'This is not my town,' " Atiya said Tuesday after going back to the abandoned Baghdad clinic his family shares with nearly 100 other displaced Falloujans. "How can I take my family to live there?"
The initial clamor by an estimated 200,000 refugees to return to the homes they had fled last month is being replaced by a bitter resignation that the city remains largely uninhabitable and unsafe. Hopes of quickly restoring normality to the restive Sunni Muslim city are fading, raising questions about whether Fallouja will be ready to participate in the Jan. 30 national election.
"We have no intention of going back," said Yasser Mowfauk Abbas, 20, a university student who was among the first residents allowed in to inspect their homes. "No one is staying."
U.S. and Iraqi officials say that they tried to warn Falloujans that it was too soon to return, but that they let them go last week after a groundswell of protest. Officials also face pressure to reopen the city before the election. The U.S.-led invasion of the city last month was prompted, in part, by a desire to clear the way for the vote.
"We told them that until now there are areas where debris and wreckage are still not removed," said Kasim Daoud, Iraq's interim security minister. "We also told them that there are some streets that contain land mines. But our dear people insisted that they must return back."
Nearly 15,000 residents have reentered Fallouja during the last week, military figures show. The returnees have been given the option of staying permanently or leaving by the end of the day.
Military officials said they were not keeping track of how many were opting to stay.
U.S. Marines say they are working to make the city livable again but are grappling with decades of neglect and decay, as well as the results of last month's bombardment.
More than 700 workers have been hired for the rebuilding effort. Aid centers distribute bottled water, food and blankets. On Wednesday, a hospital reopened.
Military leaders are mindful that drawing Falloujans back into Iraqi society and into the election would send a powerful signal that the country was headed in a positive direction.
"We are attacking reconstruction efforts with the same grit, sweat and determination used to eliminate the malicious threat posed by the terrorists and insurgents," said Lt. Col. Dan Wilson, deputy operations officer of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in Fallouja. "We want to help the residents, so they will be able to live in peace and enjoy the privilege of voting in the upcoming elections."
But the effort to win the hearts and minds of the local population has fallen flat as soon as returning homeowners see the burned buildings, piles of rubble and heavy troop presence. The residents say voting is the last thing on their minds.
"What election?" Atiya, 35, asked. "I'm a refugee. How can a refugee take part in an election? Let me get back home and then I'll talk about elections."
After enduring three hours of military checkpoints and searches, Atiya and two brothers anxiously reentered the city Monday, uncertain what to expect.
U.S. troops handed them leaflets warning against a myriad of dangers and advising them that the U.S. military could not guarantee their safety. Don't drink the water, the leaflets warned, or eat food left behind.
Every resident is required to carry a small card outlining special new rules for the city. There's a 6 p.m. curfew. No weapons are allowed. Graffiti and public gatherings are illegal. Cars and visitors are banned.
Males between the ages of 15 and 55 must carry special identification cards. U.S. military officials have announced plans to use fingerprinting and retina scans to prevent insurgents from returning.
As Atiya and his brothers traveled through the city and saw the destruction, they braced for the worst. When he caught a glimpse of his roof, Atiya's first emotion was relief. The house was still there.
As they drew closer, however, Atiya and his brothers began to curse. A gaping hole in the two-story house appeared to have been caused by a tank, whose tracks were visible in the mud, he said. Most of the furniture was smashed. "Half my house was demolished," Atiya said.
In the kitchen, cabinets had been ripped from the walls, he said. Others were emptied of their contents, which lay in heaps on the floor.
"Every dish was broken, every cup, every plate, as if someone had just stood there breaking one dish after another," said Atiya's brother Raaid Abbas, 37. "Why?"
The brothers don't know who ransacked the house, but they blame American troops, who they say left muddy boot prints.
Military officials expressed sympathy with the plight of returning residents but said the blame should rest with militants who took control of the city and continued to hide among the population.
"Our forces never intentionally damage structures or homes," said Wilson, the deputy operations officer. "After all, we, in partnership with the [interim Iraqi government], will be at the forefront of assisting in the restoration and cleanup of Fallouja."
The brothers quickly determined that the house, where all three had been born, was uninhabitable. They had wanted to leave with some supplies, such as a kerosene heater, for use at the Baghdad shelter.
But in an effort to prevent theft and looting, U.S. troops prohibited residents from removing property from the city. The most the brothers could do was sneak out some extra clothing, which they wore as they left.
When the brothers returned to Baghdad and recounted their stories, other Falloujans shook their heads in amazement.
"After I heard what they said, I'm not willing to go back," said Latif Jasim, 45.
Atiya broke the bad news to his wife and four children. His youngest daughter, Noora, 4, had trouble understanding why she couldn't return home. "I want my dresses," she said, hiding shyly behind an older brother.
Atiya said the family had no choice but to stay in the makeshift shelter until conditions in Fallouja improved. "We are fed up with being here," he said. "We just want to go home." | <urn:uuid:6ec26eb2-fbb4-4720-aa79-87e0e19c0ddd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.christusrex.org/www1/news/lat-12-31-04a.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 | 0.983166 | 1,509 | 1.640625 | 2 |
The following information is made available in compliance with Public Law 101-542, the Student Right-to-Know and Campus Security Act. Copies of this information are available. Consult the UCA Student Handbook or contact University Police for more information.
A.C.A. § 5-73-119. Handguns - Possession by minor or possession on school property
Section (a)(3)(A): No person in this state shall possess a handgun upon the property of the publicly supported institutions of higher education in this state on or about his person, in a vehicle occupied by him, or otherwise readily available for use with a purpose to employ it as a weapon against a person.
Section (a)(3)(B): Violation of subdivision (a)(3)(A) shall be a Class D felony.
A.C.A. § 5-73-120. Carrying a Weapon
Section (a): A person commits the offense of carrying a weapon if he possesses a handgun, knife, or club on or about his person, in a vehicle occupied by him, or otherwise readily available for use with a purpose to employ it as a weapon against a person.
Section (d)(2): Carrying a weapon is a Class A misdemeanor.
Firearm Possession by Students
Any student possessing, storing, or using a firearm or weapon on University Controlled property or at any University sponsored or supervised functions, unless authorized by the University, will be suspended from UCA for a period of not less than three(3) years unless a waiver of the suspension is granted by the President upon the recommendation of the Vice President for Student Affairs. In order to be guilty of violating this policy, a student must have a culpable mental state of negligence or greater as defined in A.C.A. 5-2-202.
The statutory definitions are as follows:
Purposely - A person acts purposely with respect to his conduct or a result thereof when it is his conscious object to engage in conduct of that nature or to cause such a result:
Knowingly - A person acts knowingly with respect to his conduct or the attendant circumstances when he is aware that his conduct is of that nature or that such circumstances exist. A person acts knowingly with respect to a result of his conduct when he is aware that it is practically certain that his conduct will cause such a result.
Recklessly - A person acts recklessly with respect to attendant circumstances or a result of his conduct when he consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk that the circumstances exist or the result will occur. The risk must be of a nature and degree that disregard thereof constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would observe in the actor's situation.
Negligently - A person acts negligently with respect to attendant circumstances or a result of his conduct when he should be aware of a substantial and unjustifiable risk that the circumstances exist or the result will occur. The risk must be of such a nature and degree that the actor's failure to perceive it, considering the nature and purpose of his conduct and the circumstances known to him, involves a gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would observe in the actor's situation.
Firearms Possession by Faculty or Staff
Storage of Firearms
Secure storage of firearms is no longer available at the University Police Department, due to the location of the Department on campus and the fact that transport of such weapons would violate A.C.A. § 5-73-119, stated above.
The University Police Department is responsible for enforcing all firearms statutes of the State of Arkansas and policies of the University of Central Arkansas on properties owned or controlled by the University of Central Arkansas. Persons violating the provisions of the Arkansas state law or the regulations of the University of Central Arkansas are subject to arrest and prosecution in municipal or circuit court, and to campus disciplinary action. | <urn:uuid:5f526d8c-c8b2-4dad-9c41-1610f7238ecb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ucapd.net/index.php/policies-regulations/weapons | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942065 | 794 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Thread: Wound on angelfish
10-03-2012, 10:16 AM #1
Wound on angelfish
I've had my angelfish for about 2 years and a few months ago I put in a gourami with him. I saw the angelfish nudging him away a few times when he came too close and after a while the gourami had a tiny wound on him which I thought was due to this and I thought it would heal but it got bigger and the fish died. Now my angelfish has it!! Is it an infection? and can I stop it from killing him?
10-03-2012, 10:36 AM #2
I can't really say much i've never seen a wound like that on a fish... I mean I'm sure you could try antibiotics or someone will recommend a good medication.. I can however comment on your amazing Twitter background, Josh Hutcherson is GORGEOUS
10-03-2012, 01:54 PM #3
Wow, that is one deep wound :(
I wouldn't doubt the angel and gourami went at it and one killed the other. but odd to see this after the gourami was gone. unless the gourami did this/angel ran into something then it may be some infection.
either way, i would put him in QT, find some melafix, add a bit of salt, up the temp a bit to like 80-82, increase the O2, and keep the water super duper clean and keep the lights off.
what size is the tank? and any other tank mates with the angel currently?
10-03-2012, 03:34 PM #4
Some type of worm. Feed a deworming flake and follow the feeding recomendations.
Catch the fish, place it on a wet towel flat. Take a QT tip, place the Q tip into hydrogen peroxide. Swab the area of this wound with the HP. Only contact the area directly. Replace the fish into it's tank. You must move quickly, do a count in your head at a fair pace to get to 60, if you are not ready or delay, place the fish into a bucket of aerated water to catch it's breath for 5 minutes or so and do it again.
Observe the area carefully and repeat if the condition worsens. It may scab and slough some over growth, if this over growth funguses reapply the swabbing.
You must worm angels every 6 months to keep them healthy and ensure a long life. You basically need to use a fenbendazole based flake, angelsplus sells this.
10-03-2012, 06:07 PM #5
I'll put my money on an anchor worm.
If it is, the only thing that will cure it is anchor worm medication. Salt and a bunch of other stuff will not. Clout, Anchors Away or another anchor worm medication.
If you began to see a white string coming from it, then you'll know soon enough.
Last edited by Lady Hobbs; 10-04-2012 at 04:02 AM.
10-04-2012, 01:39 AM #6
Wow that is gnarly. I didn't know angels were prone to issues with worms. Thanks for the great info guys. Good luck with this guy. I hope he pulls through. He is gorgeous.
10-04-2012, 02:47 AM #7 | <urn:uuid:7888fc80-ecd1-4f3c-98ff-7d5f3c757676> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aquaticcommunity.com/aquariumforum/showthread.php?t=98312&mode=hybrid | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95776 | 733 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Environment roundup: EPA’s assault on coal plants, Stossel video, more
Over the last few days, there has been news on the energy and environment front that has been somewhat crowded out by Obamacare’s day(s) in court. Here’s an update:
WASHINGTON D.C. — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is preparing today to issue a proposed rule for greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants, a move that industry experts believe “effectively bans new coal plants” in the United States. Currently, coal-fired energy provides nearly 45 percent of America’s electricity needs, while solar and wind energy provide a combined 2.33 percent.
IER President Thomas Pyle released the following statement in advance of EPA’s proposed rule:
“President Obama promised to bankrupt coal-powered electricity in the United States, and this latest rule — when combined with the administration’s new rules for mercury emissions and cross-state pollution — makes good on that promise. Already, towns like Craig, Colo., whose economies rely on coal-fired electricity generation, are struggling under the burden of Obama regulations.
“Because the administration couldn’t shut down towns like Craig through cap-and-trade laws, the President has determined to impose his agenda through the EPA. This development is not surprising, given the president’s assurance that cap-and-trade was ‘just one way of skinning the cat.’
As Pyle says, this is exactly what Obama promised to do. How he expects to carry Ohio and Pennsylvania this time around, while waging an all-out war on coal, is a mystery. Perhaps he knows something about how those states will vote in November that the rest of us don’t. If I were a president presiding over the slowest jobs recovery since the Great Depression, I would be focused on creating an environment for job growth, not looking to kill as many jobs as possible.
Here is a video with John Stossel interviewing Dr. Roy Spencer, a climatologist and a leading voice in the pushback against global warming hysteria:
The foregoing statement from Speaker Boehner discusses the job losses associated with these new regulations:
Speaker Boehner Statement on New Job-Killing Energy Regulations
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) issued the following statement after the Obama administration announced new regulations on coal-fired power plants in America.
“Power plants across America have already begun to shutter because of this administration’s anti-energy policies. This new regulation only escalates the White House’s hostility toward the fossil fuels that power America’s economy. With gas prices already soaring, American families and small businesses now stand to face higher electricity bills, and they have this administration’s policies to thank. This rule is a dramatic overreach and a heavy blow to one of America’s richest natural resources – coal – that the President once heralded but now ignores. Once again, there is an enormous gap between the President’s rhetoric and his actions.
“An all-of-the-above energy strategy seeks to promote cleaner energy technology, but it does not extinguish the fuels of today in the process. This is yet another example of the administration siding with the President’s political base instead of American families. The House has already passed legislation to fight the President’s job-killing regulatory agenda, and we will keep fighting the administration’s continued assault on American energy.”
NOTE: On April 7, 2011, the House passed the Energy Tax Prevention Act (H.R. 910) to prevent the EPA from advancing its anti-business agenda through costly and burdensome regulations that would increase utility rates and cost jobs. On September 23, 2011, the House passed the Transparency in Regulatory Analysis of Impacts on the Nation Act (TRAIN Act; H.R. 2401) to require the administration to examine the cumulative impacts of these and other costly rules on jobs, energy prices, and the economy and to stop the administration from implementing two of the most damaging rules covering coal-fired power plants. The House passed both bills with bipartisan support but they have been blocked by the Democratic-controlled Senate. Both are part of the Republican Plan for America’s Job Creators. | <urn:uuid:f5bb92b4-7a30-4711-bc3f-3723c95308dd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.westernfreepress.com/2012/03/29/environment-roundup-epas-assault-on-coal-plants-stossel-video-more/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937405 | 893 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Quick! What is your most valuable business asset?
If you are like most business people, your mind might quickly fly over your balance sheet. Is it your equipment? Is it your location? Is it your accounts receivable?
For most businesses, the most valuable business asset isn't on the balance sheet.
It's their customer list. And those businesses for which this isn't the most valuable business asset should change their orientation to make it so.
The hardest, most expensive sale we ever make to a customer is the first one.
In that first, critical, transaction we earn or lose the trust of the customer. Once we have the trust of the customer, we open the door to many more sales and to referrals, which most of us agree are the very best new customers to get.
Many businesses frantically work at bringing in new businesses while they neglect developing the "acre of diamonds" at their doorstep represented by their customer list.
Why would you want to know the lifetime value of a customer?
The lifetime value of a customer is a measure of the value of the customer to your business. It is the potential contribution of the customer to your business over a period of time. When you know the lifetime value of a customer, you have a benchmark for how much you would or should be willing to invest to acquire a customer.
When you evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing, instead of focusing on the response ratio (how many responded compared to messages delivered), you should focus on the return received (number of customers times lifetime value) for the investment made (campaign cost). Suddenly you find you can justify a much greater promotion investment when you look at your returns in this way, and this provides the engine for significant business growth.
Chances are your competitors are too cheap to make the necessary investment, and this can give you a competitive advantage.
How can you quantify the "lifetime value of a customer"?
Estimate the profit for the transactions you expect to have with the customer over the period you expect to do business with him or her. If this is an unknown long term, use five years. You should collect statistics of the transactions done with customers and how long you keep customers. Also, factor in the benefit for referrals from your customers.
Here's an example:
At a computer software store, customers make average purchases each year of $500. The average gross profit is 30%. Most customers do business with the store for five years. One out of three customers refer a new customer.
Average purchases $ 500
Years X 5
Total purchases $2,500
Gross profit % X .30
Total gross profit $750
Add 1/3 gross profit for referrals $250
Total lifetime value $1,000
If this business invested $1,000 to get a new customer, it would "break even."
Obviously the business wants to make a profit, but now it has a benchmark to work on based on its own situation. Also, advertising and promotion now represent an investment on which a return can be measured, instead of just an expense "thrown against the wall."
Try applying this lifetime value approach in your business as a growth strategy. | <urn:uuid:c7d4f36a-5b1c-492f-8cdc-de612e27a350> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.warrioracs.com/rep-hiddenassets.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957601 | 650 | 1.53125 | 2 |
by Patrick Stewart.
If you ever visit Madonna House Combermere or any of houses around the world, you will likely see a small sign that says, "I Am Third." This means: God is first, my neighbor is second, and I am third. Do you want to be third? I don’t think most people do.
But what does this have to do with my vocation story (which is what this article is about) or even more importantly, with the culture of life? Everything!
Let me start at the beginning. I did not graduate from the "school" of early childhood with "high marks," and so I entered all the subsequent stages of life emotionally impaired.
My twin brother had a louder voice, my mother was stretched to near breaking point by the needs of five small children, and my father was emotionally distracted by many things, including alcohol.
In infancy and early childhood, we need love, care, and much attention. We need to be first. From age four to twelve, we need to learn to take care of ourselves and become aware of the needs of those around us. When we enter adulthood, we need to learn to take care of at least one other person besides ourselves.
Even though wonderful grandparents living close by showered me with love and attention giving me some core strength, I entered adulthood barely able to take care of myself, let alone anyone else. This is a not uncommon occurrence in our modern world.
During the summer between my junior and senior years of university, I spent several weeks driving and camping up the west coast of the United States, across Canada, and finally, south to Chapel Hill, North Carolina where I attended school.
Shortly after my return, I received a thick letter from my father. Well aware that he and my mother knew that I had made that camping trip with a somewhat older female friend, I headed off, letter in hand, to a nearby pub.
After draining a large pitcher of beer, I read the hard words I was expecting. Then I walked out of the bar into one of the worst thunderstorms I had ever seen, one that perfectly matched my mood.
I was drenched by rain, pummeled by hailstones, and saw violent lightening-bolts strike very near me. Finally, a tornado tore by, ripping trees from the ground less than a hundred feet away from me.
Terrified, I prayed at the top of my lungs—the only time I have ever done this. I promised God that if he saved me, I would become a priest.
This should have marked a turning point in my life, but it didn’t. When I got home and told my girlfriend what had happened and declared that God had saved my life, she laughed at me and talked me out of thinking that God would encounter me directly. With that, I was back at the "flesh pots."
A few weeks later, she came to me in tears to tell me that she thought she was pregnant. My response? Panic and self-protection. I suggested an abortion. I was not concerned about her or the baby; I was only concerned about myself.
I thank God that she was not, in fact, pregnant, so there was no abortion. But I had been ready to kill a life, the life of my own child.
It had not occurred to me to turn to my father, the priest on campus, or any other elder for advice, much less, in my fear and shame, to the Lord.
Several months later, I was sitting in the campus chapel. Graduation was just weeks away. I was torn apart within and praying to Jesus to give me a sign of his presence so that I could start living a righteous life. If he gave it to me, I missed it.
After graduation, I headed straight into the culture of death. Throughout my twenties, though I contemplated marriage twice, I remained single, choosing unhealthy and sinful relationships. I am thankful that God protected a woman and children from my immaturity and self-centeredness.
Meanwhile I was in the U.S. navy and during my eleven years there, I was assigned to four different combat ships. I began as a junior officer on an aircraft carrier and eventually worked my way up to weapons officer aboard a nuclear-powered cruiser.
For most of those years I was, from the commanding officer’s point of view, a very desirable officer.
Besides being highly capable, I was a workaholic. Part of my drive, I suspect, came from my lack of self-confidence, which in turn came from my moral short-comings. I may have appeared to be "third," but in reality I was "first" by a mile.
By the time my naval service was nearing completion, I was probably an alcoholic as well as a workaholic, and I was hooked on the drugs of codependency and seduction. I was also in a long-term, unmarried relationship.
My parents knew all this, and unbeknownst to me at the time, they and a priest friend made a pilgrimage to Fatima to pray for me.
to be continued
If you enjoy our articles, we ask you to please consider subscribing to the print edition of Restoration; it's only $10 a year, and will help us stay in print. Thanks, and God bless you! | <urn:uuid:c2ebb3e6-e0c2-49ac-ade7-fb2e357d6472> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.madonnahouse.org/restoration/2010/09/i_was_first_part_1.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987959 | 1,111 | 1.617188 | 2 |
UK trained secret Swiss forceRichard Norton-Taylor, Guardian, 20 September 1991, page 7
British secret services collaborated closely with an armed, undercover Swiss organisation which formed part of a west European network of "resistance" groups, it was officially disclosed yesterday.
Unknown to the Swiss government, British officials signed agreements with the organisation, called P26, to provide training in combat, communications, and sabotage. The latest agreement was signed in 1987.
The disclosures are made in a report by a magistrate ordered by the Swiss government to investigate the activities of P26 after a parliamentary outcry last year.
The existence of P26, which is in the process of being dismantled, came to light last year following the disclosure of a Europe-wide Gladio network of "stay behind" groups originally set up to organise resistance in the event of a conventional attack by the Warsaw Pact.
P26 was backed by P27, a Swiss secret intelligence agency which built up files on nearly 8,000 "subversives".
The report by the magistrate, Pierre Cornu, was released yesterday by the Swiss defence ministry. It says P26 was without "political or legal legitimacy".
It describes the group's collaboration with British secret services as "intense", with Britain providing valuable know-how.
P26 cadres participated regularly in training exercises in Britain, the report says. British advisers - possibly from the SAS - visited secret training establishments in Switzerland.
The activities of P26, its codes, and the name of the leader of the group, Efrem Cattelan, were known to British intelligence, but the Swiss government was kept in the dark, according to the report.
It says that documents giving details about the secret agreements between the British and P26 have never been found. | <urn:uuid:9f1b38b2-8dac-4255-84ff-f2247d7d4ee0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cambridgeclarion.org/press_cuttings/swiss.subversion_graun_20sep1991.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975386 | 363 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Over at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) blog is a report that a federal judge ruled in the government's favor on their right to keep leaked documents classified, even though they are already out in the world thanks to Wikileaks. In April 2011, the ACLU used a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to attempt to get copies and confirmation of 23 State Department cables that Wikileaks released in the fall of 2010. The government blocked 12 of the cables and redacted 11 of them in October. The ACLU responded by offering a side by side look at the two versions of the documents, so that citizens could get a look at what exactly was making the government so squirrelly. Turns out it mainly includes critiques of the U.S. government by other officials and diplomats, but there are also mentions of drone strikes in Pakistan. And yes, at the time that the cables were leaked that program didn't officially exist, but it does now, and it was obviously happening then. Why bother to pretend that this information isn't out there now? The ACLU is wondering, too.
According to their blog, the leaks:
reveal the diplomatic harms of widely criticized U.S. government policies, including torture, detention and rendition of detainees, detention at Guantanamo, and the use of drones to carry out targeted killings. The State Department claims that the withheld cables are classified, and thus so secret that they cannot be released—despite the fact that they are already accessible to anyone in the world with an internet connection and a passing interest in current events.
In order to avoid releasing its own copies of the cables, the government was required to prove to the court that doing so would cause harm to national security. It offered explanations of why releasing secret State Department cables might harm relations with foreign governments or disclose sensitive information, but failed to explain what harm would come from releasing cables that are already available to the public in full, and that the government has admitted have been leaked. The court accepted the government’s lackluster arguments, and did not even discuss the requirement that when information is already in the public domain, the government must explain what additionalharms would occur from re-release of that information by the government itself.
The court also rejected the ACLU’s argument that the government has officially acknowledged that the cables released by WikiLeaks are authentic government documents. This matters because under FOIA, if the government has officially acknowledged something in public, it cannot refuse to release the same information in court. The court took the incredible position that, because the ACLU’s FOIA request “made no mention of the WikiLeaks disclosure” and instead requested each of the 23 cables by date and title, the government’s admission that it possesses all 23 of the cables is not an admission that the cables released by WikiLeaks are authentic. The court was only able to reach this conclusion because it refused to compare the versions of the cables held by WikiLeaks and those held by the government side by side. Doing so easily confirms that the cables are identical, and thus that the cables identified by the government are the same ones already disclosed to the public.
Regardless of your feelings about Wikileaks or even the ACLU, it's bizarre that the government is bothering to conceal documents that are no longer concealable. It's hard to see how information can be a threat to national security if it is just a Google search away. | <urn:uuid:2d5cb2fa-d735-4476-ae65-c0bfef52c96a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://reason.com/blog/2012/07/24/us-government-says-that-already-leaked-w | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970658 | 683 | 1.84375 | 2 |
CHARLESTON, W.Va. - For 25 years, West Virginia had the same two Democratic U.S. senators, Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller, who put a glass ceiling on other politicians' rise to power.
Byrd died in 2010 and Rockefeller, 75, announced Friday he would not seek a sixth term in 2014.
Now, as they did when Byrd died, Democrats and Republicans across the state are eyeing the political ladder to Washington.
Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., announced in late November she would run for Senate with or without Rockefeller on the ballot.
With Rockefeller out, Democrats are floating their names, working the phones and figuring out what it will take to challenge the formidable Capito.
"Everybody I know thinks Shelley Capito is well positioned and well liked, and she is working hard and she has an infrastructure in place and she is clearly the frontrunner," said state Chamber of Commerce President Steve Roberts.
In the five most recent Senate races in West Virginia, the winner has spent an average of $5.1 million, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
(Though perhaps nothing matches the $10 million Rockefeller pulled from his own pocket to beat Republican John Raese in 1984 to win his first Senate term.)
Capito can raise money. On the day she announced she would run for Senate, her campaign raised more $100,000, The Washington Post reported. The leaders of the state Coal Association and Chamber attended her Senate run announcement, a sign of where they leaned.
There may also be considerable spending from outside groups. When Raese faced off against then-Gov. Joe Manchin to fill Byrd's unexpired term in 2010, outside groups spent nearly $11 million to try to swing the race, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
A major question now is, What Democrat can attract this kind of money against Capito?
No Democrats have declared their intentions firmly, but numerous names were mentioned and traditional Democratic Party factions were beginning their hunt for a contender.
There is also some effort to make sure the new senator is a reliable vote on traditional Democratic issues. Rockefeller's colleague, Manchin, D-W.Va., is perhaps not that reliable vote.
In 2009-2010, for instance, Rockefeller fought hard for the health care reform law, which many Democrats strongly supported. Manchin, then governor, danced around the issue and, during his Senate run, called for its partial repeal.
"I know it's not particularly popular in West Virginia, but, frankly that's OK," Rockefeller said during his announcement Friday at the state Culture Center in Charleston.
Elaine Harris, an international representative for the Communications Workers of America, was one of few in the West Virginia political world to get advanced notice Thursday night that Rockefeller would retire.
She said the senator did not waver on issues important to unions during his career.
"Without hesitation, he's been there fighting the tough fights and when he's up for the right thing, he will fight," Harris said.
Possible candidates to replace Rockefeller include current Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va. A spokesman said the congressman is considering a Senate run.
"Jay's decision has made it incumbent upon me to recalibrate all my decisions in terms of what is in the best interests of the people of West Virginia," Rahall said in a brief statement. | <urn:uuid:9fad8a6c-aba5-44e5-bed6-96d7caa49c46> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dailymail.com/News/201301130151 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976014 | 702 | 1.5 | 2 |
I just had to share this. I'm actually quite amazed Bill Gates had the balls to say this. It may initially make sense to some, but it's really just spin. If you think back, it was Microsoft who first offered a bounty for the head of a virus writer
, yet... they're good? I guess he feels he can pass anything off on the unwashed masses (and... I'm afraid he may be right.). Read on for the article.
Viruses and hackers make Windows more secure - Gates
By John Leyden
Virus writers and hackers are helping Microsoft to develop more secure products, Bill Gates claimed yesterday.
Speaking at at the Developing Software for the future Microsoft Platform in London yesterday, just hours before the MyDoom virus began spreading like wildfire across the Net, Gates reiterated that security remains key priority for the software giant.
He acknowledged that better security is vital if its .NET strategy is to succeed.
Microsoft would lose out, as would businesses, if customers resisted moves to put their businesses on the Net because of security concerns, he said.
He said Microsoft wanted to make sure viral epidemics cease to happen.
Gates did not say how this might happen beyond noting that the software giant had learned from hackers and recent viral outbreaks.
Microsoft has improved its inspection techniques, emphasised the value of fewer lines of code in software development and developed firewall technologies for PCs. Internet worms have also spurred improvements in auto-updating technology, according to Gates.
Bcause the smartest hackers targeted Windows Microsoft could improve the security of its platform more rapidly than OS rivals, he argued: hackers are "good for the maturation" of the platform"
"It would be wrong to say an operating system is more secure because nobody is attacking it," said Gates, in a clear dig at OS rivals such as Apple and Linux.
Getting customers to apply patches - vital in cutting down routes viral spread - is a thorny issue for Microsoft. Only one in five (20 per cent) customers are up to date with patches, Gates says.
Gates's perspective on hackers fits fairly closely to their own frequently-cited view that they are acting in an attempt to force Microsoft to improve the security of its products. Unlike his colleague Steve 'Sherriff' Ballmer, Gates isn't inclined to drawing analogies between hackers and bank robbers. | <urn:uuid:e8d19c8d-b127-4b89-9f9a-201ae5ff036f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://3cx.org/item/13/catid/3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963887 | 486 | 1.617188 | 2 |
|I'd say 60 of the 309 people in our class showed up.|
|I've known these |
|He literally hasn't changed NOT ONE BIT in twenty years.|
Every song from the late eighties was playing last night at our twenty year class reunion.
Let me tell you...they don't make music like that anymore.
A couple of the slow songs they played brought back memories of Friday Night Dedications.
Ever heard of those?
Every single Friday night, the local radio station let you dedicate songs.
Every teenager in the town gathered late on Friday nights and glued their ears to WCON.
There wasn't a soul that didn't want to be loved enough to have a song dedicated to them.
Do big cities have this kind of awesomeness?
We all grew up together...some of us knowing each other since Kindergarten.
We're from a small town...
the one high school, two junior high schools, everybody knows everybody kind of town.
I'd say most people never leave, or if they do, they find their way back home after a while.
You don't go grocery shopping or to Walmart without seeing ten people you know.
And, everybody goes out to the high school on Friday nights to see the local football game.
Friday Night Lights in all it's glory.
I wouldn't trade growing up in a small town for anything in the world.
I spent most every single weekend with these people.
Small town life on the weekends is a little bit hilarious now that I'm looking back on it.
The most exciting thing we really ever did was roll yards.
If we were really feeling wild, we'd spoon and fork the yard, too.
Where have the years gone?
In some ways, it's as if no time has passed and in MORE ways, it's as if a lifetime has gone by.w
You think you know each other because you spent half your life together.
But the truth is, most of us are completely out of touch with one another's present reality.
We're all the same people, except not really.
We re-told twenty year old stories together for as long as we could, while laughing hysterically.
Then, we asked about marriage, kids and work before calling it a night and bidding farewell.
I'm glad I went.
It's good to spend a little while remembering your roots.
All of it, by God's grace, makes you who you are today.
92. twenty year old stories.
93. memories of growing up in my small town.
94. laughing with old friends.
95. the home cooked meal at my parents house tonight.
96. neighbor kids from Orlando staying with us this weekend.
97. the family I came home to last night after my reunion. | <urn:uuid:557f5a92-e3bb-4b25-90e3-ad36a62b6af2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tarahlowry.blogspot.com/2011/10/twenty-years-later.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969745 | 592 | 1.585938 | 2 |
After being booed at the German Chamber of Commerce last week due to comments about Angela Merkel, Romania’s Prime Minister Victor Ponta made yet another borderline comment in relation to Germany. When talking to Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite about the austerity measures agreed by Germany and about the expected decision on these austerity measures at the EU council meeting in October, Ponta replied smiling: “Oktoberfest”, referring to the traditional German holiday synonymous with beer drinking that is held in October. The Lithuanian president explained that it was no beer party, and went on to say she was interested in avoiding applying populist measures in her country. Victor Ponta’s remark came after hearing the name of the month October.
Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court agreed on Wednesday (September 12 ) on Germany’s participation in the European Stability Mechanism, whereas the treaty to save the eurozone will go to the Parliament for approval, within certain conditions. The German state cannot exceed an exposure of EUR 190 billion, as a participation in the planned EUR 500 billion emergency fund for the eurozone countries.
Oktoberfest is one of the largest popular celebrations in the world. The German celebration starts mid September and ends in October, and is traditionally organized in Munich, but the tradition has been taken by Germans elsewhere in the world, where they also celebrate Oktoberfest.
(photo source: gov.ro) | <urn:uuid:be60ce8e-754d-442a-8451-24e33cf285a5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.romania-insider.com/romanian-pm-jokes-about-expected-eurozone-decision-in-october-oktoberfest/64884/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953311 | 292 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Date of Award
Master of Arts (MA)
Charlene E. Miall
Using an exploratory, qualitative approach, 30 in-depth interviews were conducted with adoptive mothers of Romanian children. interest focused on whether Mead's theory of the past was viable for exploring how these mothers create socially shared pasts for their children within the family. In addition, Kirk's adoptive kinship theory and Goffman's theory of social stigma were used to explore whether (a) an adoptive mother's acknowledgement or rejection of the difference between adoptive and biological parenthood; and (b) her perceptions of social stigma around Romanian adoption shaped the content of her construction of this past.
All four dimensions of Mead's theory of the past were evident in this study - the implied objective· past, the social structural past, he symbolically reconstructed past, and the mythical past. substantively, respondents made use of three types of strategies in constructing a socially shared past: (1) verbal personal adoption stories created for their children; (2) lifebooks to document their children's histories; and (3) affiliation with self-help support groups or with other adoptive parents.
In this study, KIrk's categories of acknowledgment and rejection of difference between adoptive and biological kinship were not mutually exclusive as respondents showed a pattern of high to low acknowledgment of difference only. This acknowledgment focused on the formation of the family rather than on its functioning. All respondents showed open disclosure patterns with their children and others, a trend in adoption as an institution.
Although respondents provided detailed descriptions of perceived stigmatizing beliefs about adoption in general and Romanian adoption in particular; they showed low levels of personal internalization of these beliefs. It was also demonstrated empirically that stigma can we responded to in positive ways. Specifically, self-help support groups offered positive social and emotional support, and provided individuals with a strong sense of belonging not experienced in "normal" interaction.
It is argued that the task of adoptive parents is not only to inform adopted children of their birth and cultural histories. parents must also try to understand how the children experience adoption. Allowing the children to take the lead in discovering and understanding their unique histories will aid their mothers in treating socially shared pasts for their families.
Chiappetta-Swanson, Catherine Ann, "The Creation of a Socially Shared Past: Romanian Adoption" (1995). Open Access Dissertations and Theses. Paper 5995.
McMaster University Library | <urn:uuid:ee5eaa6c-627d-47bf-afba-6e3556cd4ffd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/opendissertations/5995/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942871 | 498 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Marguerite Joseph, 104, entered her real age when signing up to the social networking site, but was presented with an error message.
After her granddaughter Gail Marlow helped her select her birth year as 1908, Facebook automatically changed it to 1928.
Joseph has stayed at 99 years old on the site for the last two years due to the bug.
Her granddaughter updates the Facebook page for her and replies to all the messages on her behalf. Her grandmother mostly uses the site to stay in contact with relatives across the US and Canada.
Marlow told WDIV-TV that she has sent messages to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg to help fix the issue, but has not received a reply.
A Facebook spokesman said: 'We've recently discovered an issue whereby some Facebook users may be unable to enter a birthday before 1910.
"We are working on a fix for this and we apologise for the inconvenience."
The granddaughter added: "I would love to see her real age on Facebook. I mean, in April she's going to be 105. It's special." | <urn:uuid:b10dfd5a-0848-48d0-a7ae-b167822a23c3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/odd/news/a460738/104-year-old-facebook-user-forced-to-lie-about-age-due-to-bug.html | 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 | 0.963798 | 219 | 1.59375 | 2 |
the Ohio mom who was jailed for having her children illegally registered in a school district in which they didn't live. The saga of Kelley Williams-Bolar made the rounds of the black blogosphere this week, before bubbling to the surface and reaching the mainstream media. It's a cause celebre that's risen to a level of interest not seen online since the case of The Jena Six.
Just in case you've been living under a rock all week, here are the basics of the story:
An Ohio woman who was jailed for tampering with records to get her children into a better school district has been released from jail a day early, according to a local newspaper. Kelley Williams-Bolar left the Summit County Jail on Wednesday, having served nine days of her 10-day sentence, the Akron Beacon Journal reported.
Williams-Bolar, a single mother living in subsidized housing in Akron, used her father's address to register her two daughters in the high-achieving suburban Copley-Fairlawn school district. Copley-Fairlawn said the improper registration cost it $30,000 in lost tuition and $6,000 in investigative costs.
The Akron City school district met only four of 26 standards on the latest Ohio Department of Education Report Card and had a 76% graduation rate. Copley-Fairlawn City Schools met 26 of 26 standards and had a 97.5% graduation rate.
Williams-Bolar told CNN affiliate WEWS-TV that she and her children considered her father's house one of their homes. "My primary residence was both places. I stayed at both places," she said in an interview at the Summit County Jail.
Williams-Bolar's father, Edward Williams, told CNN affiliate WJW-TV that the children did live with him, so he believed the family was within the law. He said his daughter's Akron neighborhood – where she lives in government-subsidized housing – isn't safe.
Williams-Bolar, a single mother, works as a teacher's aide at a high school in Akron and is just 12 credits away from earning a teaching degree at the University of Akron, according to the Beacon Journal. Her felony conviction will bar her from being licensed to teach in Ohio.
Summit County Common Pleas Judge Patricia Cosgrove sentenced Williams-Bolar last week to five years in prison, but suspended all but 10 days. Williams-Bolar also must serve 80 hours of community service and will be on probation for three years.
The case has drawn national media attention and outrage, much of it due to its racial undertones: Williams-Bolar is black, while the Copley-Fairlawn schools are predominantly white. Williams-Bolar told CNN affiliate WEWS-TV in Cleveland that she plans to appeal her conviction. The local chapter of the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network is trying to raise money to fund the appeal, the Beacon Journal reported.
I'm sure I'll catch a bunch of heat for this, but darnit, it needs to be said.
Could we as a community, please, please, please stop defending criminality?
Yes, Williams-Bolar's quest to provide her children with a better education than that of their home school district is laudable. Yes, Williams-Bolar's felony conviction and the subsequent loss of a possible career is tragic. Yes, it's unfair that Williams-Bolar's children can't get as good an education in their home district.
But guess what? When you strip all of that away, the issue remains that a law was broken. Period.
I've heard many people argue that had Kelley Williams-Bolar not been black, there's a good chance the school district (which is 75% white) would have never gone after her. While that may be the case (there's no proof to substantiate it), it still doesn't change the fact that she knowingly violated a law. As a person employed by a school system, if there's anyone who should know better, it would be her. Just because race is involved doesn't make this a racial story.
It's about simple economics. By illegally registering her children outside of their designated school district, she took $30,000 in funding from children whose parents worked equally hard to provide a good education for their kids. Yes, the intent is noble, but it's still illegal. If you broke into my house to steal food to feed your children, your best intentions don't change the fact that you took food out of my children's mouths.
Instead of getting all worked up over stories like this, and signing online petitions, I hope we'll learn a lesson from Jena and respond pro-actively, rather than reactively. Rather than bemoan the unfairness of the system that lead this mother to commit a crime, I hope everyone will channel that energy productively by signing up to be a tutor or mentor to kids in schools like the one Williams-Bolar sought to rescue her kids from. Call your congressman and raise a ruckus about the disparity in educational funding. Do something that will really change things for the entire black community, and other communities that are underserved.
Do something other than sign a lousy e-petition and groveling about a racial aspect to a story that may or may not even be there. We did that with the Jena Six. Based on the trials some of those kids endured once the thousands of marchers and hundreds of bloggers moved on, I'd say we missed the point of that whole expedition.
Yes, this story (which oddly hasn't showed up on the radar of school choice-advocating conservatives yet) illuminates the disparity in the quality of education those in the inner city receive versus their suburban counterparts. It also highlights that public school systems that are funded based on property taxation virtually insure that poor kids will always be a few steps behind. It is truly a shame that Kelley Williams-Bolar had to resort to such means to give her kids a better shot at life. I have great sympathy for her, and sincerely hope that her probation period is shortened.
But it doesn't excuse the fact that she still committed a crime. Sorry. And in the black community, sometimes we are too sympathetic towards "working the system," to the point that defrauding the welfare system, cheating on our taxes and even drug dealing is deemed justifiable because of the horrible inequalities that do exist. What would help more would be organized, consistent, pro-active action, instead of sympathizing with desperation. If the Kelley Williams-Bolar case can inspire us to do this, perhaps her crime will not have been in vain.
Jay Anderson is a freelance writer from Washington, DC, whose work has been featured in the Washington Post and on NPR. When he's not busy talking smack here, he runs the award-winning blog AverageBro.com. Follow him via Twitter @AverageBro. | <urn:uuid:4cd2e063-3bf7-4d8a-a52c-fa34c7d42d76> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bvonmoney.com/2011/01/28/an-alternate-view-on-kelley-williams-bolar-she-is-not-a-politic/5 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975082 | 1,431 | 1.5 | 2 |
Tongass National Forest (justification for mass destruction)
larryc at teleport.com
Sat Apr 26 13:38:10 EST 1997
In article <ifjed.4525.3355318A at nmsua.nmsu.edu>,
ifjed at nmsua.nmsu.edu (Jethro Bodine) wrote:
> >I've just returned from Ketchican where I was looking at used equipment
> >from the recently closed pulp mill. Why is this mill closed? Why was the
> >fibre resource withdrawn? What stable non-seasonal employment will be
> >available in the town? Does anyone other than Alaskans care about the
> >human consequences of alienating this forest land?
Louisiana-Pacific's contract with the feds expired. I don't know what the
current status of the mill is, but pulp prices worldwide are in the
dumpster right now, and paper stocks are sky high. That was the last
place in North America where old growth was being cut for pulp, and
the resource is just too rare to justify that sort of use any more.
In the absence of sustained yield management, timber will always be
a temporary job.
> Fortunately some people do care about the consequences, i.e, the real
> consequences. Unsustainable clearcut logging on a massive scale and
> destruction of the salmon runs is too high a price to pay (these are
> just a few of the prices to be paid). This isn't, by the way, one of those
> Japanese-owned mills to which the Forest Service is literally giving away
> our forest resources for a song, is it?
The only thing you said here that made any sense was "unsustainable."
Clearcutting is a management tool just like any other. Selective harvest
has its own drawbacks in disease propagation, mechanical damage, and
genetic selection for the weakest trees. Poorly done selective harvest
is referred to as "creaming," and is a dirty word among forest managers.
Federal timber cannot be exported before it is milled. Ownership of any
of the public timber corporations is independent of their location. Lots
of Louisiana Pacific stock is owned by Japanese, lots of Mitsubishi stock
is owned by Americans.
Resources have the value that someone will pay for them. Not so long ago,
people were chopping down old growth and burning it where it fell. No
one ever considered replanting a logged over tract. LP moved in and
provided a market for a resource nobody wanted.
I don't know about salmon runs in the area, but know that Alaskan salmon
runs are the only ones that are still healthy. The rivers in Alaska
haven't been dammed for hydro projects, so there is nothing keeping the
fish from reaching the headwaters. If you really want to help the salmon
runs, stop using electricity and eating vegetables. People don't want to
hear that, but it's really city streetlights that are killing off the
salmon, not loggers.
More information about the Ag-forst | <urn:uuid:b45d5363-3c9c-4a33-a802-29e035dfdb7b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bio.net/bionet/mm/ag-forst/1997-April/004636.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957023 | 662 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Contents | Executive summary | How to obtain this publication
| Additional information | Back to main page |
The following OECD assessment and recommendations summarise chapter 2 of the Economic Survey of the European Union published on 21 September 2009.
The measurement of innovation and the evaluation of innovation policies need to be strengthened
In 2000, the Lisbon agenda included a commitment to make Europe the most dynamic and competitive knowledge–based economy in the world. Enhancing investment in knowledge and innovation is now one of the four priority areas of the renewed Lisbon Strategy. The Commission set out a broad–based innovation strategy in 2006 and member states have committed to achieving an integrated European Research Area by 2020. Increasing attention is now being given to the concept of ‘creativity’, although this concept has not yet been clearly defined or measured.
Despite the wide range of policy initiatives, progress to date has been slow, with research and innovation still lagging behind the United States and Japan. The target of raising research and development (R&D) expenditure to 3% of GDP by 2010 will not be met in the EU as a whole and appears unlikely to be achieved anytime soon. While the target is an aggregate level benchmark that has encouraged policy action during the past decade, it is less clear that it should be retained as such, because it depends largely on private sector actions, and tends to emphasize innovation inputs rather than outputs and the use of innovations. EU member states have already set themselves their own specific targets within the framework of the National Reform programmes. The understanding of the innovation process is also changing, with non–technological innovations and open innovations (such as open–source software) becoming more important and research efforts more likely to involve co–operation across national borders. These all change the link between national R&D efforts and innovation outcomes. The Commission is taking steps to improve the statistical information available about innovative and creative activities in order to make greater use of output–based measures, allowing innovation policies to be developed from a more appropriate knowledge base. Support for R&D by the EU member states should be at least maintained during the current recession.
Improvement in measurement would also be an important step towards better evaluation of the effectiveness of the innovation policies pursued by the Commission. The Commission has been commendably prompt in introducing policy support for innovation. The policy initiatives are tied together by the vision of the future European Research Area (ERA) and a broad–based innovation strategy. But there is a need for priority setting amongst the initiatives and better quantification of the importance of each in accounting for differences in innovation across countries. The policies adopted reflect the perceived need for favourable framework conditions such as well–functioning product and financial markets and an adequate supply of human resources for science and technology. Without these, the effectiveness of specific innovation–related initiatives and attempts to foster demand for innovations may be constrained. Better measurement of innovation outcomes would aid the evaluation of Commission–funded research programmes. The Commission should also take further steps to improve the development and use of common evaluation methodologies and techniques for all innovation programmes.
Developing an integrated labour market for researchers and an integrated intellectual property system should be priorities
Improvements in the framework conditions for innovation and progress towards an integrated research area will underpin the free movement of knowledge across national borders (the so–called ‘fifth freedom’). Achieving a fully integrated labour market for researchers, a Community patent and a Unified Patent Litigation System will be important. The Commission is already taking actions to improve education and training policies to raise the long–term supply of human resources for science and technology. But such resources remain smaller in the EU than elsewhere and a significant share of university graduates, doctorate recipients and postdoctoral students graduating in Europe migrate to work elsewhere. The international orientation of European researchers should, in principle, enhance knowledge flows to the EU economy. However, steps need to be taken to enhance the circulation of EU and non–EU researchers. The Commission has launched the European Partnership for Researchers and should ensure that the priority actions are implemented on schedule by end–2010. Some of these are a matter for member states, but the Commission can ensure that publicly–funded research positions and research grants are open to qualified nationals of all member states and that researchers have the freedom to take research grants across national borders when changing jobs. Obstacles to short–term mobility in national pension and social security schemes should be removed. A Blue Card scheme is also to be introduced to encourage inflows of highly–skilled migrants by simplifying application procedures, provided that they have sufficient experience and a job offer with a salary above a certain threshold. The scheme is a welcome step forward, but the immediate benefits of it may not be large, especially since the Card will not grant rights to permanent residency and member states retain the right to set quotas that limit the numbers of cards issued. It will be important to monitor the impact of the scheme and explore possible extensions to the rights granted to Card holders to further promote mobility.
The European patent system, and hence the cross–border markets for technology and knowledge, is currently fragmented. Patent protection can be obtained in multiple European countries by receiving a “European patent” from the European Patent Office. But such patents require validation by national patent offices, which often requires translation into another language. Furthermore, the 'European patent' is subject to litigation in the national courts. The costs of validating and maintaining a patent in many European countries are thus much higher than in either the United States or Japan, with the burden being especially high for small and medium–sized enterprises. Therefore, to reduce such costs, a simplified system, with a single ‘Community patent’ that would be valid automatically in all member states and a centralised Patent Litigation Court for both European and Community patents should be implemented.
Funding for innovation should be enhanced and research co–operation should be encouraged
The market for high–risk capital, such as private equity and venture capital, plays an important role in the financing of innovation, especially for young, innovative companies, but is underdeveloped in Europe. The Commission and other Community–level bodies have thus taken steps in the European Economic Recovery Plan to ensure that financing of such companies is supported during the ongoing recession. Further ahead, the Commission will need to follow through on plans to tackle obstacles to cross–border venture capital provision. It should enhance the effectiveness of innovation policy design and delivery by tackling overlaps between the numerous Community–level programmes that offer funding for innovation, by looking for unexploited synergies and by reducing the presently high cost of research grant applications.
Innovation activities increasingly involve co–operation between different groups. Yet European innovation surveys indicate that public research organisations are a key information source for only a relatively small number of companies. This could mean that there are only a few commercial applications of the basic research undertaken in Europe, but is more likely to indicate that there are obstacles preventing firms from either being aware of the work undertaken in publicly–funded research organisations or from accessing it. The Commission produced guidelines for universities and research institutions to improve their links with European companies in 2007 and is to upgrade the status of the EU Forum for University–Business Dialogue. In 2008 it adopted a Recommendation on the management of intellectual property in knowledge transfer activities and a Code of practice for universities and other public research organisations. The rules for participation in Community–level R&D funding programmes should be extended to ensure that all applicants have to submit plans for dissemination of research findings as part of their research projects. Consideration should also be given to ways in which the European Union might further strengthen research and innovation links with other regions.
How to obtain this publication
The complete edition of the Economic Survey of the European Union is available from:
The Policy Brief (pdf format) can be downloaded in English. It contains the OECD assessment and recommendations.
For further information please contact the European Union Desk at the OECD Economics Department at [email protected].
The OECD Secretariat’s report was prepared by Nigel Pain and Jeremy Lawson under the supervision of Peter Hoeller. Research assistance was provided by Isabelle Duong. | <urn:uuid:4e8571ba-69bd-4619-83eb-1484ff7b7889> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.oecd.org/eu/economicsurveyoftheeuropeanunion2009strengtheningresearchandinnovation.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939281 | 1,649 | 1.6875 | 2 |
6Welcome to Stage V. This is where most stocks start to decline. While you might have some lagging sectors-such as mining and other resource-based equities-eking out small gains, the broader market starts to fall.Economic activity either slows down or contracts so that commodity prices enter a bear market, thereby signaling Stage VI. This usually happens just before or just after the recession has begun. After a while, we're ready to start the cycle again. Now in some instances there's no recession; just a slowdown in the growth path of the economy. The six stages still operate, but because the gyrations in the economy are less dramatic, volatility in the financial markets is also reduced.Insights: What stage are we in now? Martin: We're currently in Stage II.Insights: How do you determine the current stage? Martin: We use three models: one each for bonds, stocks and commodities. Their status, according to a metric we call "Pring Barometer" scores, determines the stage. For example, if they're all bullish, we're in Stage III. They're all bearish? Stage VI, and so forth. Insights: Can you describe your Pring Barometer scores in more detail? Martin: Each barometer comprises several components. Each has been fairly reliable in the past but certainly not perfect. When the majority of components are positive, so is the barometer. The actual formulas are proprietary. But I can tell you they include trend-following indicators as well as inter-asset relationships. Insights: What input data feed into calculating them? Martin: All of the data are market-driven. Some are published by the Fed. We also incorporate market benchmark data, such as commodity index performance.Insights: How do these scores factor into asset allocation?Martin: The barometer score for each asset class determines its target allocation. For example, commodities consistently lose in Stage II, but that's when stocks do best. Consequently, there's no allocation to commodities or commodity-driven stock sectors in that stage, but a big one for equities in general. At the inflationary back end of the cycle, Stages IV and V see greater allocations to commodities and resource-based stocks and so forth.The approach can only work if the baseline philosophy is properly allocating during each phase.Insights: How did the idea for creating an index based on your investment process come about? Martin: Steve Malinsky of Dow Jones Indexes read one of my books covering the business cycle and felt that the approach would make a great foundation for a dynamic index. I thought it was a great idea, and we began our collaboration.Insights: How did you test your theories to make sure they were usable in the index?Martin: When we devised the Dow Jones Pring U.S. Business Cycle Index, the first task was to develop three models-one each for stocks, bonds and commodities. These were then tested back to the 1950s to ensure they could meet the stresses of a deflationary, inflationary and financial crisis environment. Once we had decided on the stages, we researched which assets and equity market sectors performed the best in each stage. We then selected the best combination.Insights: How does risk come into play?Martin: Good question. The index uses our philosophy which is intended to minimize risk by avoiding or downplaying assets when the business cycle phase is hostile for them. So, for instance, it's going to downplay bonds when commodities and inflation are up. Insights: How have you found working with Dow Jones Indexes? Martin: My experience with working with Dow Jones Indexes was very enjoyable. They never overpromised and always delivered on their commitments.
7Customer SpotlightChuck Martin, Chief Investment Officer, FFCM, LLCChuck Martin and his partners at FFCM have always sought to employ disciplined, rules-based investment strategies based on well-researched approaches that would stand the test of time. When they saw a unique opportunity to provide investors with rules-based strategies designed to have improved transparency and enhanced liquidity, they jumped at the chance. The idea was to create ETFs constructed around the rules-based approaches on which they had always relied. The basis for the funds would be market- and sector-neutral indexes that tracked their strategies.In mid-2011, Chuck founded FFCM, LLC, along with Bill DeRoche and Kishore Karunakaran. In September of that year, FFCM licensed the seven indexes that Dow Jones Indexes had built to track its strategies to serve as the basis of ETFs. Collectively, the indexes were named the Dow Jones U.S. Thematic Market Neutral IndexesSM. "We worked with Dow Jones Indexes to have them develop the index series-with the end goal of FFCM offering ETFs that allow investors to access these familiar strategies through a rules-based approach in a more transparent, liquid and cost-effective manner," he explains. "My partners and I had used similar strategies and methods throughout our careers, in particular market-neutral investing. Because they are rules-based, there is no guesswork to these strategies. The opportunity to license indexes based on these successful strategies made a ton of sense."The indexes in this series are designed to reflect the performance of long/short strategies. They are intended to be both market and sector neutral in order to minimize the effects of the market and industries, revealing the essential themes on which the strategies are based-value, small size, quality, momentum and beta."Indexes like these appeal to us because they provide a means for us to measure these sophisticated strategies in a clear, transparent and easy-to-understand manner," Chuck said.Intelligent indexesChuck says that amid turbulent markets, his clients have one overriding concern: risk. They want buffers against "the twists and turns" that the market offers up with increasing frequency. "The beauty of these indexes is that they are designed to measure performance of strategies that are uncorrelated to the market," he continues. "An index such as the Dow Jones U.S. Thematic Market Neutral Value Index may reflect performance that is different from the greater market. You're attempting to sever the connection between the market and index performance."When asked about FFCM's relationship with Dow Jones Indexes, Chuck responds: "They're very collaborative. I think that might be a reason that we like working with Dow Jones Indexes so much. They're open to our ideas and their construction is really second to none. And their size and reputation were really key in our decision to work with them."Chuck thinks that investors are coming to appreciate that indexes such as those in this series provide an "intelligent" means of tracking sophisticated investment strategies. For more information on the Dow Jones U.S. Thematic Market Neutral IndexSM, visit: >> www.djindexes.com/thematicmarketneutralChuck MartinChief Investment Officer FFCM, LLC | <urn:uuid:cba5bc38-5e62-4b3c-b223-74606fa70d16> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://view.digipage.net/?id=april2012&page=6 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963935 | 1,426 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Home School Day at the Capitol
All Homeschoolers are encouraged to meet in Columbia on
Homeschool Day at the Capitol 2013 Schedule of Events
|9:00 AM||Registration -- Blatt Building Room 101 hallway |
Pick up your Home School Day at the Capitol Stickers (HDAC), schedule, tour tickets and Scavenger Hunt sheets. Drop off kidsí business cards* for drawing.
|9:30 AM - 2:00 PM||Scavenger Hunt on the Grounds -- Pick up scavenger sheets at registration. Please supervise your students at all times.|
|9:00 AM - 10:00 AM||Visit Your Legislators |
Baked goods from home are encouraged as gifts. Visit senators and representatives in their offices: Senators - Gressette Building, Representatives - Blatt Building. You can continue to visit offices throughout the day and drop off your baked goods with secretaries and aides.
|10:00 AM -10:45 AM||Workshop "How South Carolina State Government Works and How You Can Participate In It." led by Dr. Orin Smith, President of Palmetto Family Council**All times are subject to change due to legislative schedules and other unforeseen circumstances. (Specifically geared towards teens) Blatt Building Room 101|
|10:00 AM||Governorís Green/Mansion Tours Begin -- Reservations must be made by April 5. Contact Leslie Graham. If you want to sign up as a group for the tours, you need to sign by individual names.
|9:30 AM|| Capitol Tours Begin. Reservations must be made by April 5. Contact Leslie Graham. If you want to sign up as a group for the tours, you need to sign by individual names.
|11:00 AM - 11:45 AM||Workshop "How South Carolina State Government Works and How You Can Participate In It." led by Dr. Orin Smith, President of Palmetto Family Council Blatt Building Room 101.**All times are subject to change due to legislative schedules and other unforeseen circumstances.|
|11:00 AM||Confederate Relic Room Tours Begin Times: 11:00, 1:00, 3:00. Free admission and tours for HDAC participants, no pre-registration required.|
|12:00 PM - 1:30 PM|| Lunch on the Grounds
|2:00 PM||Scavenger Hunt Ends|
State Capitol Building Tours 9:30*, 10:00*, 10:30*, 11:00*, 11:30*, 1:30*, 2:00*, 2:30*, 3:00, 3:30 (50 people per tour, 45 minutes each, 3rd grade and upóno exceptions)
Governorís Mansion/Green Tours 10:00*, 10:30*, 11:00*, 2:00*, 2:30* (75 people per tour, 45 minutes each, meet in the Print Shop for the tours)
SC Confederate Relic Room and Museum 11:00, 1:00, 3:00 (free admission all day and to tours for HDAC participants, no pre-registration necessary)
USC Walking Tour brochures available at Registration
Riverbanks Zooódiscount coupons will be available at Registration that provide 1 free child's admission with each paid adult admission. Each coupon is good for up to 6 adults and children.† www.riverbanks.org
There are seven scheduled tours of the State House (Capitol Building). You can reserve a tour ahead of time by contacting Leslie Graham. Tours fill up fast, so if you want to make sure you get to take a tour, or get the time you want, please sign up soon! Tours are free. We can accommodate 50 people per tour. If you plan on attending HDAC as a group and want to go on the same tour, please sign up all at the same time. By Capitol Staff guidelines, only those who are 3rd grade or older may go on tours. Tours may overlap one another; each is 45 minutes long. The State House is located a short walk across the State House Grounds from the Blatt Building (where Registration is located and where workshops are held).
There are six scheduled tours of the Governorís Green (Mansion). The Mansion is located a short drive from the State House. There is a special designated parking area on the mansion side of Lincoln Street behind Calhoun and Laurel Streets for those who are touring the mansion. If these spaces are full, please park at the meters along the street. You need to go to the State House Grounds, to the Blatt Building, to Registration to pick up your tickets and get registered for HDAC prior to taking the tour of the Governorís Green. Please arrange time to find parking and walk to do this. The Governorís Mansion tour can accommodate 75 people per tour. Please reserve your space with others in your group if you want to ensure that you have the same tour time. Tickets are free.
The South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Museum is located a short drive from the State House Grounds. We have arranged three tour times. You need to show some proof that you are there as part of Homeschool Day at the Capitol in order to gain free admission (ex. HDAC flyer/schedule, HDAC sticker you will get at registration).
The State Art Museum is located a short drive from the Capitol. Highlights of the museum are located on the 1st floor and can be accessed for a reduced fee with proof of HDAC attendance (flyer, sticker). www.columbiamuseum.org.
The Riverbanks Zoo is located a couple miles from the Capitol, and is a fabulous way to end the day in Columbia. Zoo coupons for admission discounts are available at HDAC registration. The coupon is good for up to six adults in a party, and provide for one free child admission with each paid adult admission. Admission fees available on the zoo web site www.riverbanks.org .
This event is for all South Carolina Homeschoolers and their families -- not just SCHEA members. The event is FREE except parking - bring LOTS of quarters for the meters if you are parking around the Capitol. Plan your schedule carefully to allow time to get from one activity to another. Be sure your tour times are not overlapping.
All students are invited to create their own Business Card, to introduce yourself to your Legislator. There will be a drawing from all the cards for a special prize.
Capitol Tours are for THIRD GRADE and up ONLY. Tours are FREE, but you MUST pre-register. Tours for both the Governor's Mansion and the Confederate Museum are for any age, but you must preregister for the Governor's Mansion. The museum does not require preregistration, but you must be there for the scheduled times. Email Leslie Graham
Scavenger Hunt will allow you to learn much more about the capitol grounds, while having fun. Turn your completed list in to the registration desk for a small prize.
Bring a blanket and picnic lunch to enjoy on the statehouse grounds while you listen to the music of both the AAA Homeschool Band and the Midlands Home School Band.
We will hold "Homeschool Day at the Capitol" rain or shine (pray for shine), but the band will not play during lunch if it rains. All other events will be held as scheduled.
Come out for a fun-filled, hands-on Civics Day at the Statehouse in Columbia. You will get more out of the experience if you prepare a little ahead of time. The following ideas are given by way of suggestions for those of you for which this will be a first-ever experience to the Capitol. We're glad you're coming!
Workshops will be run strictly on schedule, in Room 101 of the Blatt Bldg. Doors will be closed at start time, and no one else will be allowed to enter while the workshop is going on, in order to demonstrate respect for our guest speakers. We ask that attendees remove children quickly who are unable to sit quietly. Otherwise, please do not leave during the session.
Most people at the Capitol dress in "business dress," that is suit and tie for the men, and dress, stockings, and heels, or a nice pantsuit, for the women. You don't have to dress this formal, but it is recommended highly that families come dressed very nicely to make an excellent impression on their representatives who are accustomed to this type of dress from their colleagues, and very different from how teens from most school groups appear (i.e. jeans, baggy pants). For older students who aspire to go into politics or business, the following book is highly recommended: The Etiquette Advantage by June Hines Moore published by The Life@Work Co.
Quiet, well-behaved deportment is the order of the day! This applies even in the hallways, elevators, and bathrooms. Good behavior and polite manners will stand out to representatives and make a great impression. Even during lunch outside on the grounds, children should stay with their parents and behave "decorously." This is a good word to look up for Vocabulary! Homeschoolers are often accused of not living in the real world; this is excellent training for our children to demonstrate that we know how to respect others by behaving well in public. This is a good opportunity for parents to teach children about self-restraint and self-discipline, hallmarks of child training and the one admonition specifically mentioned to young men in Titus 2:6. It would be a great family contest to see how well family members encourage one another in modeling self-discipline.
Check out the website www.knowitall.org/letsgo to get a layout of the Statehouse Grounds and the location of the various buildings. Have your children compare the Day at the Capitol schedule with the building plan.
Check out the website www.scstatehouse.gov/house.php to find out your representative's name and what he looks like. The Blatt Building houses the offices of the representatives. Most representatives share office space with three other representatives, their small personal offices arranged in a hub around a waiting area manned by a secretary at a desk which you see when you enter the room. You should introduce yourself to the secretary and ask to talk with your representative. Sometimes, more than one representative will come out of the little rooms into the waiting area, and it is very helpful to know which one is yours (!), so find out ahead of time what yours looks like. Remember this is a visit, not an overnight stay. Keep it short and pleasant. Your representative may not be favorable to homeschooling. Your goal is to introduce him to a fine homeschooling family, not necessarily make him change his diehard ways in one short visit. Politeness, respect for him and his views, and a listening attitude will go a long way toward his willingness to listen to you and your opinions.
Representatives go into session at noon, so if you visit after that (which is fine!), be prepared to leave a message with an aide or the secretary. If you write out your message, be sure to spell correctly! It is important that everything you do represents the excellence of homeschooling! For Christians, we are to do all things as unto the Lord. I Cor. 10:31
Across the paved, open area outside the south side of the Blatt Building is the Gressette Building. The Strom Thurmond Statue stands between the two buildings. This is the Lunch Spot, so plan on meeting back here at 12:00.
Senators are housed in the Gressette Building. Go to the web site www.scstatehouse.gov/senate.php to find your senator's name and what he looks like. Again, when you enter the waiting area outside of your senator's office, you will speak to his secretary, asking to speak to your senator. Be prepared to leave a message and your treat if he is not there at the time you visit. You can ask that he call or email you later about a particular issue, if you desire.
Please feel free to bring from home some homemade bread, cookies, brownies, or apple pie to take to your representatives. They will love it! A nice touch is to take a smaller plate of the same thing to the secretary - she is rarely remembered in this way and will treasure your gift. Make sure and leave your name and phone number. It is important that your representative know that he was visited by a real, live constituent from his district.
As you prepare to visit your legislators, think of something positive to say about homeschooling. How is it working for your family? You do not have to be an expert on homeschooling law. Most likely, you know more than your legislator does about how it actually works in the average home, so you are an "expert" on the actual workings of homeschooling. Most of them are very interested in how it works, how the children are doing academically "in school," and what other social activities they have. Prepare your children to greet these men politely, to make eye contact, to speak clearly, and to shake hands firmly. If invited into the office, children should sit or stand quietly while the adults talk. Often, legislators will turn to the kids to ask a question about how he or she likes homeschooling or what he likes about homeschooling. So, you can practice possible scenarios at home ahead of time, to let your children know what to expect. Kids can be our greatest ambassadors.
As you prepare in the days before your visit, work through the schedule, so that you can plan how you will spend your time during the day. Allow enough time to go from one activity to another so your tour times are not overlapping. You will want to make time to visit your legislators or do the scavenger hunt on the grounds with your children. If you have both older and younger children, you might want to split up as parents, one taking the older children to visit the legislators, and the other taking the younger ones on a more active walk around the statehouse grounds finding the landmarks on the activity sheets. Completed activity sheets can be shown at the Sign-In desk to receive a little prize. Children can keep their sheets to take home for their homeschooling work for the day.
Please plan on visiting with friends, and meeting with the SCHEA Board, on the statehouse grounds for lunchtime. We will all gather in the vicinity of the Strom Thurmond Statue. Look for the band setting up. The AAA Homeschool Band and the Midlands Home School Band will perform for one hour, starting about 12:15 PM. Bring a blanket and plenty of food and drinks for your family.
The afternoon is free for families to visit other sites around Columbia. Peruse through the list of sites that have offered family discounts in order to plan your afternoon. You will need to present your SCHEA card at these sites in order to receive the discount.
This is an excellent way to round out your educational day in Columbia!
For those who wish to do a follow-up to this study, here are some other ideas: Write a letter of thanks to your legislator whom you visited, thanking him for his time and for what he does in serving his constituents. Use the information in your workshop packet to find his address and how to write this letter. Write a short report or journal entry on your favorite part of your day at the Capitol, or something you learned that day you didn't know before. Feel free to send it to SCHEA, for possible entry into the next newsletter. Write a field trip summary about the special place you visited in Columbia, i.e. the Riverbanks Zoo, and the things that most impressed you about that place.
The Sign-In Desk is NOT the information desk manned by Capitol staff as soon as you enter the door. The Sign-In Desk is a table outside our meeting room, Room 101 of the Blatt Building. At this desk, you can sign in to register your presence on this Day, pick up a schedule, turn in kids' creative business cards, pick up scavenger hunt sheets, get stickers, and get free tickets for Capitol tours (must pre-register). | <urn:uuid:1a8bd1c1-8e10-4bc6-af89-7bd62e4ef85a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.schomeeducatorsassociation.org/hsdatc.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951376 | 3,354 | 1.554688 | 2 |
ACLU Welcomes Proposed State Secrets Fix, Applauds Senator Kennedy for Introduction of Legislation
Contact: 202-675-2312 or [email protected]
Washington, DC – The Bush Administration may soon have one less tool in its chest to stymie legitimate cases that might expose government misconduct. Today, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), introduced legislation aimed at narrowing the scope of the state secrets privilege – a huge step towards opening the courthouse doors to people who have suffered real and legitimate harm by the government. Several important suits, including one involving the extraordinary rendition of a German citizen, Khaled El-Masri, have been successfully blocked by this administration’s use of the state secrets privilege.
The following can be attributed to Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office:
"Senator Kennedy has done a great service by introducing this legislation. For too long, the government has hid behind an overly-broad interpretation of the state secrets privilege to protect itself from the glare of oversight. The Bush Administration has frequently used the privilege as an alternate form of immunity to block entire cases from going forward. We all agree that there need to be precautions when it comes to national security, but courts have been competently managing the balance between the security of classified information and the right to a fair trial in criminal cases for years. Senator Kennedy’s bill recognizes this fact.
"Abuse of the state secrets privilege is not an abstract concept. It has a real and human cost. Khaled El-Masri, Binyam Mohamed, Abou Elkassim Britel, Ahmed Agiza and others have all claimed to have been kidnapped and tortured by our government. El-Masri was denied his day in court as a result of the administration’s use of the state secrets privilege. This bill would ensure the other victims will be allowed their attempts at justice.
"Senator Kennedy’s bill allows the court to review government national security claims, thus lowering the wall of the current state secrets privilege to just a hurdle. The current form of the privilege has allowed the administration to successfully hold off investigations into its extraordinary rendition program and its warrantless wiretapping program. The cloak must be lifted and we urge Congress to waste no time in passing Senator Kennedy’s bill."
To read more about the ACLU’s work on NSA spying, go to:
To read more about the case of Khaled El-Masri and the ACLU's
work on rendition, go to: | <urn:uuid:737f45b1-ada4-4385-9c68-c3de3bcde48e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aclu.org/national-security/aclu-welcomes-proposed-state-secrets-fix-applauds-senator-kennedy-introduction-leg | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934771 | 515 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Silverstein Properties has released renderings of the airy, sunlight-filled lobby of the Richard Rogers-designed World Trade Center Tower 3. These are the first detailed designs of a World Trade Center structure to be unveiled since Silverstein presented exterior renderings of three skyscrapers (including Tower 3) in September 2006. The 71-story, 1.2 million-square-foot mixed-use building, which also links to an underground transit hub,will rise at175Greenwich Street between towers byNormanFosterandFumihiko Maki.
According to Mickey Kupperman, Silverstein’s director of design at the World Trade Center site, the lobby design is being released in advance of details on other parts of the building due to the space’s pivotal role as a threshold between several destinations. “The lobby is not just an entrance to an office building,” said Kupperman. “It’s also an entrance to the underground transit hub and to the retail functions. It’s an important part of the building and requires more than picking finishes and lighting.” Tower 3 will have five retail levels—one on the ground floor, two above, and two below grade— totaling 133,000 square feet.
The design locates access to the transit and retail areas in the southwest corner of the building, which will face onto Greenwich and Cortland streets. Visitors can also use this core to enter the more private office lobby, which will feature a waiting area, reception desk, and security turnstiles. As with the lobby of the already-complete 7 World Trade Center, the design seeks to combine heightened security measures with an open, inviting atmosphere, said Kupperman. The lobby’s primary partitions—those separating exterior and interior, and those separating the retail/ transit core from the office lobby—are all made of glass. The facade will also function as a “big picture window” onto the World Trade Center Memorial.
Work on the rest of Tower 3 continues apace. “Progress is consistent with everything you’d expect coming close to the end of design development, which should be finished by the first of July,” said Kupperman, who described his job as being more a director of designers than a director of design. “The core is very well developed and we’re almost done with the office floor layouts.” He added that right now a lot of attention is being focused on the curtain wall. When the exterior of the building was unveiled in September it drew a lot of comment for its uncanny resemblance to Foster’s pal Renzo Piano’s New York Times Building on 8th Avenue across from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, which is all but complete. Both designs feature slender towers set back from rectangular podiums, exposed perimeter steel columns and cross bracing, and column-less corners for unimpeded views.
At this time there has been no alteration to the schedule put forth in September, which set completion of Tower 3 for 2011, four years after Silverstein gets possession of the site, and completion of all three towers by 2012. | <urn:uuid:521328a0-b494-4c17-bdd6-76f374fa0a15> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=484 | 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 | 0.947583 | 646 | 1.539063 | 2 |
by Chuck Baldwin
October 1, 2008
According to the Army Times (dated Tuesday, September 30, 2008), "Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT [Brigade Combat Team] will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks."
The article continued by saying, "But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.
"After 1st BCT finishes its dwell-time mission, expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one."
The Times column also reported that the Army brigade "may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control . . ." It seems that the Army's new domestic duties also include "traffic control" as well as subduing "unruly or dangerous individuals."
The brigade will be known for the next year as a Consequence Management Response Force, or CCMRF (pronounced "sea-smurf").
I am assuming that the planners and promoters of this newfound function for the Army brigade envision the Army assisting local first responders in dealing with natural emergencies such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and the like. Good intentions notwithstanding, to assign domestic police duties to the U.S. military is extremely disturbing.
To understand my concern for this new "homeland Army brigade," it is important that we rehearse the principles of liberty as they relate to standing armies.
One of America's most sacred principles has always been that the U.S. military was never to be used for domestic law enforcement. The fear of standing armies ran very deep in the hearts and minds of America's founders. The tyranny and misery inflicted upon the colonies by British troops weighed heavily upon those who drafted our Constitution and Bill of Rights. In their minds, the American people would never again be subjected to the heavy weight of army boots. Furthermore, they insisted that America would have a civilian--not military--government.
And after the fiasco of the abuse of federal troops in the South following the War Between the States, the doctrine of Posse Comitatus was enacted into law. The Wikipedia online encyclopedia says this about Posse Comitatus:
"The Act prohibits most members of the federal uniformed services ... from exercising nominally state law enforcement police or peace officer powers that maintain 'law and order' on non-federal property. . . .
"The statute generally prohibits federal military personnel and units of the United States National Guard under federal authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within the United States, except where expressly authorized by the Constitution or Congress. . . .
"The Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act substantially limit the powers of the federal government to use the military for law enforcement."
The Posse Comitatus Act was passed in 1878 and was universally accepted as being a very just--and extremely important--law of the land.
But in 2006, President George W. Bush pushed a Republican-controlled Congress to pass the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007, which included a section titled "Use of the Armed Forces in major public emergencies." This section provided that "The President may employ the armed forces to restore public order in any State of the United States the President determines...." In effect, this bill obliterated Posse Comitatus.
When the Democrat-controlled Congress passed the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act, however, the restrictions of Posse Comitatus were restored. But when President Bush signed the Act into law, he attached a signing statement (Executive Order) indicating that the Executive Branch did not feel bound by the changes enacted by the repeal. Translated: President Bush wiped out Posse Comitatus by Executive Order.
Now, just a few months after expunging Posse Comitatus, President Bush has authorized an Army brigade to be assigned the new role of dealing exclusively with domestic law enforcement and related duties. This evokes serious questions.
Who will give the order to send U.S. troops against American civilians, and under what circumstances? What will the rules of engagement be? How will "unruly" and "dangerous" be defined? How will soldiers be asked to deal with "crowd" or "traffic" control? And perhaps the biggest question is, Once we begin to go down this road, where will it lead?
For several years, the federal government has been accumulating to itself more and more authority that was historically understood to reside within the states and local communities. More and more, our police departments have taken on the image and tactics of the armed forces. And to a greater and greater degree, the rights and liberties of the American people are being sacrificed on the altar of "national security." It seems to me that to now ascribe law enforcement duties to the U.S. Army only serves to augment the argument that America is fast approaching police state status.
If Hurricane Katrina is the template that our federal government is using as a model for future events, Heaven help us! Do readers remember how National Guard troops were used to confiscate the personal firearms of isolated and vulnerable civilians shortly after that hurricane devastated the New Orleans area? Do you remember how representatives of the federal government were calling upon pastors and ministers to act as spokesmen for gun confiscation? Is this what the new Army brigade is preparing for? And do President Bush and his military planners envision an even broader role for military troops on American soil?
Add to the above rumors of thousands of plastic caskets--along with thousands of portable prison cells--being shipped and stored across the country, and one is left to ask, Exactly what is it that our federal government is planning?
I think there is an even bigger question, What exactly will members of our armed forces do if and when they are commanded to seize Americans' firearms, arrest them at gun point, or even fire upon them? How many soldiers and Marines love liberty and constitutional government enough to resist such orders, should they be given? And how many officers would resist issuing such orders?
Remember, it is the job of the armed forces to kill people and blow up things, not to do police work. Then again, Presidential administrations from both major parties have been using the U.S. military as U.N. "peacekeepers" for decades now. So, was all of this preparation for what is yet to take place in the United States?
God forbid that any of the above should actually take place in our beloved land, but I believe it would be na´ve to not see that the actions and attitudes of the federal government over the past several years do nothing to assuage such fears.
*If you appreciate this column and want to help me distribute these editorial opinions to an ever-growing audience, donations may now be made by credit card, check, or Money Order. Use this link:
*Disclaimer: I am currently a candidate for President of the United States on the Constitution Party ticket. My official campaign web site is located at:
© Chuck Baldwin
This column is archived as http://www.chuckbaldwinlive.com/c2008/cbarchive_20081001.html | <urn:uuid:345707e2-5754-467c-acca-bc12d02c4cd7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.chuckbaldwinlive.com/c2008/cbarchive_20081001.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95469 | 1,536 | 1.65625 | 2 |
This week the F.B.I. released new information, shedding light on what crime looked like for the first half of 2012.
Oregon ranked relatively low, at number 37, on the national list of the highest number of homicides from a firearm.
"Oregon has a relatively low murder rate, which is good. Since you have low numbers you can't rely too much on what the statistic say because you are dealing with a small sample," said Medford Police Lieutenant Mike Budreau.
However, that's a different story for Illinois. who ranked at the top of the list.
In 2011 alone, 83% of their murders involved a firearm.
Back here at home, gun control activist Melissa Mitchell-Hooge says while the numbers in Oregon are improving, they are still too high.
"We are at a tipping point in this country that we have so many of these massacres occur just one after the other, that we have to take a stand and say no more," said Mitchell-Hooge.
That's exactly what's she's doing, taking a stand and organizing the southern Oregon chapter of One Million Moms for Gun Control.
The organization is less than a month old but already is sending a strong message to Washington.
Letting them know that firearms themselves aren't the issue.
"I do believe most people by and large who own guns are responsible gun owners. What we do have a problem with is these weapons so easy to purchase and background checks are not thorough enough," Mitchell-Hooge explained
Budreau didn't comment on background checks when NBC 5 spoke with him Thursday but says it's not just firearms that are an issue.
"Around here at least, I wouldn't say firearms are the most common method for murders, we find stabbings and other methods to commit murders."
In 2012, Medford only had one homicide that involved a firearm.
But for many, that number is still too high. | <urn:uuid:c27f7bfd-07a0-4e25-9f17-f8090c9a75ee> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kobi5.com/news/local-news/item/fbi-releases-new-statistics-regarding-homicides-involving-firearms.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976553 | 402 | 1.53125 | 2 |
There are educational and training benefits to veterans, dependents and survivors. Additional information can be found at www.gibill.va.gov or by calling 1-888-GI-BILL-1 (1-888-442-4551).
Post-9/11 GI Bill
Eligibility: The Post-9/11 GI Bill is a new education benefit program for service members and veterans who served on active duty on or after Sept. 11, 2001. Benefits are payable for training pursued on or after Aug. 1, 2009. No payments can be made under this program for training pursued before that date.
To be eligible, the service member or veteran must serve at least 90 aggregate days on active duty after Sept. 10, 2001, and remain on active duty or be honorably:
1. Discharged from active duty status;
2. Released from active duty and placed on the retired list or temporary disability retired list;
3. Released from active duty and transferred to the Fleet Reserve or Fleet Marine Corps Reserve;
4. Released from active duty for further service in a reserve component of the Armed Forces.
Veterans may also be eligible if they were honorably discharged from active duty for a service-connected disability after serving 30 continuous days after Sept. 10, 2001.
Generally, service members or veterans may receive up to 36 months of entitlement under the Post-9/11 GI Bill.
Eligibility for benefits expires 15 years from the last period of active duty of at least 90 consecutive days. If released for a service-connected disability after at least 30 days of continuous service, eligibility ends 15 years from when the member is released for the service-connected disability.
If, on Aug. 1, 2009, the service member or veteran is eligible for the Montgomery GI Bill, the Montgomery GI Bill - Selected Reserve, or the Reserve Educational Assistance Program, and qualifies for the Post-9/11 GI Bill, an irrevocable election must be made to receive benefits under the Post-9/11 GI Bill. In most instances, once the election to receive benefits under the Post-9/11 GI Bill is made, the individual will no longer be eligible to receive benefits under the relinquished program.
Based on the length of active duty service, eligible participants are entitled to receive a percentage of the following:
1. Cost of tuition and fees, not to exceed the most expensive in-state undergraduate tuition at a public institution of higher education (paid directly to the school);
2. Monthly housing allowance equal to the basic allowance for housing payable to a military E-5 with dependents, in the same zip code as the primary school (paid directly to the service member or veteran);
3. Yearly books and supplies stipend of up to $1000 per year (paid directly to the service member or veteran); and
4. A one-time payment of $500 paid to certain individuals relocating from highly rural areas.
* Effective Oct. 1, 2011, the housing allowance and books and supplies stipend are now payable to individuals on active duty. The housing allowance is now payable to those pursuing training at half time or less, or to individuals enrolled solely in distance learning programs.
Benefits may be used for any approved program offered by a school in the United States that is authorized to grant an associate (or higher) degree. Call 1-888-442-4551 or visit www.gibill.va.gov for information about attending school in a foreign country.
If entitlement to the Post-9/11 GI Bill was the result of transferring from the Montgomery GI Bill, the Montgomery GI Bill - Selected Reserve, or the Reserve Education Assistance Program, recipients may also receive Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits for flight training, apprenticeship or on-the-job training programs, and correspondence courses.
Individuals serving an aggregate period of active duty after Sept. 10, 2001 can receive the following percentages based on length of service:
|Active Duty Service||Maximum Benefit|
|At least 36 months||100%|
|At least 30 continuous days and discharged due to service-connected disability||100%|
|At least 30 months < 36 months||90%|
|At least 24 months < 30 months||80%|
|At least 18 months < 24 months||70%|
|At least 12 months < 18 months||60%|
|At least 6 months < 12 months||50%|
|At least 90 days < 6 months||40%|
Transfer of Entitlement (TOE): Department of Defense (DOD) may offer members of the Armed Forces on or after Aug. 1, 2009, the opportunity to transfer benefits to a spouse or dependent children. DOD and the military services must approve all requests for this benefit. Members of the Armed Forces approved for the TOE may only transfer any unused portion of their Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits while a member of the Armed Forces, subject to their period of eligibility.
Montgomery GI Bill
Eligibility: VA educational benefits may be used while the service member is on active duty or after the service member's separation from active duty with a fully honorable military discharge. Discharges "under honorable conditions" and "general" discharges do not establish eligibility.
Eligibility generally expires 10 years after the service member's discharge. However, there are exceptions for disability, re-entering active duty, and upgraded discharges.
All participants must have a high school diploma, equivalency certificate, or have completed 12 hours toward a college degree before applying for benefits.
Previously, service members had to meet the high school requirement before they completed their initial active duty obligation. Those who did not may now meet the requirement and reapply for benefits. If eligible, they must use their benefits either within 10 years from the date of last discharge from active duty or by Nov. 2, 2010, whichever is later.
Additionally, every veteran must establish eligibility under one of four categories.
Category 1: Service after June 30, 1985
For veterans who entered active duty for the first time after June 30, 1985, did not decline MGIB in writing, and had their military pay reduced by $100 a month for 12 months. Service members can apply after completing two continuous years of service. Veterans must have completed three continuous years of active duty, or two continuous years of active duty if they first signed up for less than three years or have an obligation to serve four years in the Selected Reserve (the 2x4 program) and enter the Selected Reserve within one year of discharge.
Service-members or veterans who received a commission as a result of graduation from a service academy or completion of an ROTC scholarship are not eligible under Category 1 unless they received their commission:
1. After becoming eligible for MGIB benefits (including completing the minimum service requirements for the initial period of active duty).
2. Or after Sept. 30, 1996, and received less than $3,400 during any one year under ROTC scholarship.
Service members or veterans who declined MGIB because they received repayment from the military for education loans are also ineligible under Category 1. If they did not decline MGIB and received loan repayments, the months served to repay the loans will be deducted from their entitlement.
Early Separation from Military Service: Service members who did not complete the required period of military service may be eligible under Category 1 if discharged for one of the following:
1. Convenience of the government- with 30 continuous months of service for an obligation of three or more years, or 20 continuous months of service for an obligation of less than three years.
2. Service-connected disability.
4. A medical condition diagnosed prior to joining the military.
5. A condition that interfered with performance of duty and did not result from misconduct.
6. A reduction in force (in most cases).
7. Sole Survivorship (if discharged after 9/11/01).
Category 2: Vietnam Era GI Bill Conversion
For veterans who had remaining entitlement under the Vietnam Era GI Bill on Dec. 31, 1989, and served on active duty for any number of days during the period Oct. 19, 1984, to June 30, 1985, for at least three continuous years beginning on July 1, 1985; or at least two continuous years of active duty beginning on July 1, 1985, followed by four years in the Selected Reserve beginning within one year of release from active duty.
Veterans not on active duty on Oct. 19, 1984, may be eligible under Category 2 if they served three continuous years on active duty beginning on or after July 1, 1985, or two continuous years of active duty at any time followed by four continuous years in the Selected Reserve beginning within one year of release from active duty.
Veterans are barred from eligibility under Category 2 if they received a commission after Dec. 31, 1976, as a result of graduation from a service academy or completion of an ROTC scholarship.
However, such a commission is not a disqualifier if they received the commission after becoming eligible for MGIB benefits, or received the commission after Sept. 30, 1996, and received less than $3,400 during any one year under ROTC scholarship.
Category 3: Involuntary Separation/Special Separation
For veterans who meet one of the following requirements:
1. Elected MGIB before being involuntarily separated.
2. Or were voluntarily separated under the Voluntary Separation Incentive or the Special Separation Benefit program, elected MGIB benefits before being separated, and had military pay reduced by $1,200 before discharge.
Category 4: Veterans Educational Assistance Program
For veterans who participated in the Veterans Educational Assistance Program (VEAP) and:
1. Served on active duty on Oct. 9, 1996.
2. Participated in VEAP and contributed money to an account.
3. Elected MGIB by Oct. 9, 1997, and paid $1,200.
Veterans who participated in VEAP on or before Oct. 9, 1996, may also be eligible even if they did not deposit money in a VEAP account if they served on active duty from Oct. 9, 1996, through April 1, 2000, elected MGIB by Oct. 31, 2001, and contributed $2,700 to MGIB.
Certain National Guard service members may also qualify under Category 4 if they:
1. Served for the first time on full-time active duty in the National Guard between June 30, 1985, and Nov. 29, 1989, and had no previous active duty service.
2. Elected MGIB during the nine-month window ending on July 9, 1997
3. And paid $1,200.
Payments: Effective Aug. 1, 2008, the rate for full-time training in college, technical or vocational school is $1,321 a month for those who served three years or more or two years plus four years in the Selected Reserve. For those who served less than three years, the monthly rate is $1,073. Benefits are reduced for part-time training. Payments for other types of training follow different rules. VA will pay an additional amount, called a "kicker" or "college fund," if directed by DOD. Visit www.gibill.va.gov for more information.
The maximum number of months veterans can receive payments is 36 months at the full-time rate or the part-time equivalent.
The following groups qualify for the maximum: veterans who served the required length of active duty, veterans with an obligation of three years or more who were separated early for the convenience of the government and served 30 continuous months, and veterans with an obligation of less than three years who were separated early for the convenience of the government and served 20 continuous months.
Types of Training Available:
1. Courses at colleges and universities leading to associate, bachelor or graduate degrees, including accredited independent study offered through distance education.
2. Courses leading to a certificate or diploma from business, technical or vocational schools.
3. Apprenticeship or on-the-job training for those not on active duty, including self-employment training begun on or after June 16, 2004, for ownership or operation of a franchise.
4. Correspondence courses, under certain conditions.
5. Flight training, if the veteran holds a private pilot's license upon beginning the training and meets the medical requirements.
6. State-approved teacher certification programs.
7. Preparatory courses necessary for admission to a college or graduate school.
8. License and certification tests approved for veterans.
9. Entrepreneurship training courses to create or expand small businesses.
10. Tuition assistance using MGIB as "Top-Up" (active duty service members).
Accelerated payments for certain high-cost programs are authorized.
Veterans who train at the three-quarter or full-time rate may be eligible for a work-study program in which they work for VA and receive hourly wages. Students under the work-study program must be supervised by a VA employee and all duties performed must relate to VA. The types of work allowed include:
1. VA paperwork processing at schools or other training facilities.
2. Assistance with patient care at VA hospitals or domiciliary care facilities.
3. Work at national or state veterans' cemeteries.
4. Various jobs within any VA regional office.
5. Other VA-approved activities.
Veterans' Educational Assistance Program
Eligibility: Active duty personnel could participate in the Veterans' Educational Assistance Program (VEAP) if they entered active duty for the first time after Dec. 31, 1976, and before July 1, 1985, and made a contribution prior to April 1, 1987. The maximum contribution is $2,700. Active duty participants may make a lump-sum contribution to their VEAP account. For more information, visit the website at www.gibill.va.gov.
Service members who participated in VEAP are eligible to receive benefits while on active duty if:
1. At least three months of contributions are available, except for high school or elementary, in which only one month is needed.
2. And they enlisted for the first time after Sept. 7, 1980, and completed 24 months of their first period of active duty.
Service members must receive a discharge under conditions other than dishonorable for the qualifying period of service. Service members who enlisted for the first time after Sept. 7, 1980, or entered active duty as an officer or enlistee after Oct. 16, 1981, must have completed 24 continuous months of active duty, unless they meet a qualifying exception.
Eligibility generally expires 10 years from release from active duty, but can be extended under special circumstances.
Payments: DOD will match contributions at the rate of $2 for every $1 put into the fund and may make additional contributions, or "kickers," as necessary. For training in college, vocational or technical schools, the payment amount depends on the type and hours of training pursued. The maximum amount is $300 a month for full-time training.
Training, Work-Study, Counseling: VEAP participants may receive the same training, work-study benefits and counseling as provided under the MGIB. | <urn:uuid:20f0bff4-9d6d-4589-984a-e253c0c75854> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://racc.edu/FinancialAid/veteran.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947803 | 3,168 | 1.789063 | 2 |
by Christina England
April 11, 2010
DNA India reports
“The programme is part of a two-year study to look into the utility of a vaccine in public health programmes and acceptability of Gardasil, the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine made by Merck. Gardasil, available in medical stores across the country, is marketed in India by MSD Pharmaceuticals Pvt Ltd.
The programme was marred by controversy after four deaths and complications among 120 girls were reported after vaccination. The girls complained of stomach disorders, epilepsy, headaches and early menarche. Women activists fear the vaccine may impact the mental health of girls who have shown no signs of distress so far.”
This news comes as no surprise to the many USA girls and their distraught parents who have been reporting these side effects for four years now. So far in the USA there have been 17781 adverse reactions and 66 deaths reported to VAERS and yet still this vaccine is being marketed.
One report brought my attention to the fact that the lesser figure of 52 deaths were attributed to unintended acceleration in Toyotas, which triggered a $2 billion recall and yet 66 deaths in the USA and a reported 17781 adverse reactions does not even make Merck or the USA Government feel a little uncomfortable. It just goes to show that Toyota have more scruples than the USA Government and Merck put ogether.
In fact many companies have more of a conscience when it comes down to the safety and protection of the public than the USA Government and Merck.
In November 2009 Maclaren recalled one million pushchairs due to a dozen children having their fingertips cut off. It was interesting to read that the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) advised parents in America to stop using them immediately
Sky News reported:-
“There have been 15 cases of children placing their finger in the hinges “resulting in 12 reports of fingertip amputations”, a joint statement from the firm and the CPSC said.
A Maclaren spokesman added: “Consistent with our unwavering commitment to child safety we are providing US consumers notice of a voluntary recall of all Maclaren umbrella strollers sold in the US.
In co-operation with the US CPSC, we are providing free of charge to all affected consumers and retailers a kit to cover the stroller’s hinge mechanism, which poses a fingertip amputation and laceration hazard to the child when the consumer is unfolding/opening the stroller.
The voluntary recall is to alert the operator when opening or closing the stroller of the possible risk of injury.
Safety is our first priority and through this voluntary effort we urge consumers to contact us immediately to obtain the kit which consists of hinge covers designed specifically to fit all Maclaren strollers.”
Another company concerned with children’s safety is Fisher Price. In 2007 Fisher Price recalled the Sesame Street, Dora the Explorer, and other children’s toys due to the fact that the surface paints on the toys ‘could’ contain excessive levels of lead.
In the case of Fisher Price, no children were injured. Again this recall was in league with the CPSC to ensure the safety of children.
So where is the CPSC in the sale of Gardasil? The safety of our children is being put at risk with this vaccine. So far we have reports of the following numbers of adverse reactions.
Australia figures from 2009 stated 1476
Germany the figure 1000 from a while ago
Spain more than 580
These are the figures without the countless number of deaths worldwide. So why is it then that India is the only Government brave enough to suspend the HPV vaccination programme?
Child Health Safety says
“India has suspended the cervical cancer vaccine programme after 4 girls died in India and amid allegations of exploitation of participants and violation of ethical guidelines during the earlier “clinical trials” of the HPV vaccine according to a front page story in India´s newspaper, The Hindu and widely reported in other media: Centre halts HPV vaccine project Aarti Dhar Thursday 8th April 2010.
The HPV vaccine has been associated with serious adverse effects with high levels of reported adverse reactions. Death and debilitating illness have been claimed but officials do not acknowledge an association:” | <urn:uuid:1a8cc531-01b7-497a-9a43-310dc4af77ba> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://holyhormones.com/sister_song/india-has-suspended-the-use-of-hpv-gardasil-vaccines-due-to-deaths/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95497 | 891 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Preservationists have long held the moniker "building hugger" close to their place-saving hearts, considering it a term of endearment for the important work they do in protecting the past and enriching the future. Now, we at the National Trust are making the term official with our new "Hugger-in-Chief," artist and place-lover Lindsay Rowinski.
Lindsay embraces places -- literally. She has created long red puppeteered arms capable of extending around buildings and structures with the help of a few volunteers and a lot of creative moxie. Her goal: inspire people to look anew at their surroundings and make what they see an integral part of their daily experience.... Read More → | <urn:uuid:8bd67e14-d726-499b-97ee-b00171b4ac03> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.preservationnation.org/category/interviews/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964507 | 145 | 1.65625 | 2 |
If you’re a avid (albeit amateur) gardener like me, this might be up your alley: G.E.E.E. (aka General Economy Exquisite Exchange 2011) is currently in operation at the Hyde Park Art Center (thru October 1st, 2011). Billed as “a post-retail museum shop and rooftop tomato garden where neighborly value has become the operative currency and creative bartering has become the dominant mode of exchange,” G.E.E.E. is in essence a trading post, where you can bring your own plants, seedlings, or gardening materials to exchange for the ones that are available there. What you exchange doesn’t necessarily have to take the form of physical goods — also welcome are what the folks behind G.E.E.E. (the Cream-Co. Collective) describe as “immaterial support (dialogue, advice, recipes)” — this could take the form of information exchange or even just a good story.
I stopped by G.E.E.E. several weeks ago, and was completely charmed by every aspect of its homespun display — the handmade, hand-lettered signs, the multi-colored array of seedlings, the little ceramic pig where you can leave money for things you want to purchase at cost. I traded a number of gardening books for a chocolate mint plant, which now sits in a pot in my back yard and which I compulsively sniff every time I go outside. All of the offerings are seasonal, so expect the plants, seedlings, and other good stuff to be changed up on a roughly weekly basis.
The thing about G.E.E.E. is that, if you garden, and if you’re even remotely friendly, you already get what G.E.E.E. is all about. I have plants growing in my garden that were given to me by at least three different neighbors on my block, and it’s common for us to swap stories and advice and the occasional embittered gripes about our gardens having too much shade. But what I find most valuable about G.E.E.E. is the way in which it highlights extant social relations, particularly those that occur neighbor-to-neighbor, whether you live next door or call across to each other from your balconies.
Despite the shitty, depressing, grey, cold, seemingly neverending, and did I say shitty? winters in Chicago, I think there is something so truly lovely, and deeply hopeful, about the act of gardening here. I’ve written about my love for the different kinds of gardens you see in this city before. For some reason it’s always the tiniest efforts that seem to make the biggest impact – you know damn well that if Spring and Fall are short-seasoned, you’re not going to get to enjoy the fruits of your labor for all that long, but still you pull the weeds and breathe in the dirt and try and make a happy home for the worms, and you do it because most of all it’s fun, but also because you’re bringing color and scent and texture and order and chaos to life, after so many months of grey, frozen dormancy.
Can you tell that winter hit me kind of hard this year?
At any rate, give G.E.E.E. a visit. I promise it will lift your spirits if you’re feeling low – it made me think of how grateful I am to have nice neighbors, and most of all a garden that’s more than willing to work with me.
This Friday, May 20th, from 3pm – 7pm at HPAC G.E.E.E. will host the grand planting of the Center’s rooftop garden – and you can pick up a trowel and pitch in. The planting also double’s as the exhibition’s official opening. On Friday, your efforts will be rewarded via barbecue, and on the next day, from 10 am – 2pm, there’ll be a garden party to celebrate. Bring stuff to swap or donate – if you have questions or plants to swap, contact [email protected]. For more info, check out the GEEE blog. | <urn:uuid:86354870-f020-4fd1-8285-86a37ca9ef32> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://badatsports.com/tags/g-e-e-e/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946544 | 899 | 1.523438 | 2 |
A message from beyond: Peace in Newtown
Newtown residents search for comfort after chaos
Grace McDonnell would write messages for her mother in the bathroom window.
On the first day without Grace, the bathroom fogged up and mom glanced at the window. And right there was a message from beyond the grave.
The little girl had drawn the peace sign, her favorite symbol. Above it was a heart with the words: "Grace, Mom."
"She was all about peace and gentleness and kindness," said Lynn McDonnell.
Amazing, Grace. A girl who lived by the family's mottos: "Live for the moment" and "Soak it in."
The McDonnells are now part of a community bound together by the tragedy of what transpired at a Connecticut elementary school, joined by a nation that has grieved with them.
Yet amid the memories of that awful day in Newtown, signs of hope have emerged.
Gene Rosen won't forget his connection. It's touched his soul and made him believe more in God and angels again.
Rosen went out back to feed two of his cats shortly after 9:15 a.m. on December 14. His home sits on an acre of land on Riverside Road, with his backyard on a hill overlooking Sandy Hook Elementary.
That day, he heard staccato gunfire -- Boom! Boom! Boom! -- coming from the vicinity of the school. The retired psychologist convinced himself it was fireworks.
Andrei Nikitchyuk was working in his home office that morning. He received a robocall from the school that it was in lockdown. He didn't think much of it -- the school recently had two lockdowns for false alarms: a suspicious car and bank robbery.
Inside the school, his son, Bear, walked down the hall with a friend toward the main office. Gunshots whizzed by.
Teacher Janet Vollmer huddled with her children away from doors and windows. Someone turned on the intercom system. The sound of gunfire and a woman crying was piped into every classroom.
Vollmer told her kids she loved them and began reading out loud.
A loss of innocence
It shattered a town and brought a president to tears. Twenty children -- all aged 6 and 7 -- were gunned down in the safest place they had ever known, their home away from home. Six educators died, too, hailed as heroes.
Never had an act of violence seemed so heinous, so horrifying in America. An attack on pure innocence at a school that symbolized peace and love.
Since then, residents of Newtown have been dealing with the arc of life in unimaginable ways -- of death and loss, of pain and suffering, of shock and horror, of beginning to heal.
Couples who settled here years ago had grown close to one another through their children and their schools. Teens in middle school had babysat the first-graders slain at Sandy Hook. Some teens had played on sports teams with siblings of the slain children; others attended dance class with sisters of girls killed at the school. College students, home for the holiday, saw the school they loved desecrated.
"I can't even tell you how hard it is for these kids," said Lillian Bittman, former chairwoman of the Newtown Board of Education. "A lot of these kids have been here their whole lives. That's why these connections are so strong.
"They've lost their childhood."
Newtown's Pastor Rocky Veach had been a preacher in Littleton, Colorado, when the Columbine shooting occurred. He said the biggest lesson he learned from the 1999 massacre was "that a lot of things are going to pan out over the next months here, even years, and you will see God's hand was in this, but you can't see it now."
Maybe it's too soon, too difficult to imagine another reality further in the future. Right now, residents can only think of the town they once knew and how everything changed that Friday.
For most, the pain is just too fresh, the attack too senseless to comprehend.
In the wake of the massacre, Americans have begun looking at gun control and mental health issues. It's also forced our society to take a deep introspective look: Have we become too polarized? What can we learn from those children?
Is there meaning to be drawn from Grace's message on that window?
Journey into hell
Gene Rosen had blocked out the sounds of whatever he heard coming from the school. How obnoxious, he thought, that somebody would shoot off fireworks so early in the day.
"I wanted to think that," he said, "because I know the school is over there."
He fed his two cats in a loft above his garage and walked back toward his home. He spotted something odd toward the end of his driveway.
There were six children -- four girls and two boys -- sitting on his lawn. A woman sat in the middle with them. A tall, skinny man stood over them and spoke in a loud voice: "IT'S GOING TO BE ALL RIGHT! IT'S GOING TO BE ALL RIGHT!"
Rosen thought they were practicing a school skit. When he got closer, he could see the children were out of breath and crying.
"There's been an incident at the school," said the woman, a Sandy Hook bus driver.
Rosen's not sure how the bus driver ended up with the children on his lawn. Nor does he know the identity of the man, who later walked off.
But Rosen knows this: It was the start of a "journey into hell."
He once had worked as a psychologist with the chronically mentally ill at a state psychiatric hospital. But nothing had prepared him for what would transpire next. Instead, at 69, his grandfatherly instincts kicked in.
He invited the children into his home. He ran upstairs and grabbed as many stuffed animals as possible. They calmed the children briefly.
One of the girls stared out his living room window. "I want my mommy," she said. "I want my mommy."
The two boys sat on the floor, crying uncontrollably and shouting, "We can't go back to school! We can't go back to school! We don't have a teacher!"
Then they said the name of their 27-year-old teacher, Victoria Soto.
"Mrs. Soto! Mrs. Soto! She's gone," they said in unison.
One of the girls said she watched the teacher fall to the ground.
Without prompting, one of the boys added, "He had a big gun and he had a little gun."
The other boy said, "Yeah, yeah, he had a big gun and a little gun."
Then they both began anew their chilling cry. "We can't go back to school. We can't go back to school ..."
Blowing Mom a kiss
Grace McDonnell, 7, enjoyed Sandy Hook Elementary School with its loving teachers and inviting learning environment. Earlier in the week she had a stomachache, and her mother suggested she stay home.
"No way," the girl said. "I have too much fun there, and I don't want to miss anything."
Eager to learn, Grace would pack her bag the night before school and skip to the bus stop when it was time to leave.
The night before the tragedy, Mom and Dad tucked their only daughter in bed. "See you in the morning," Chris McDonnell told her. "Don't let the bed bugs bite."
Mom often joked that her daughter was so full of life "she would talk from the minute she woke up until the minute she went to bed. We were always, 'It's time for bed, Grace. It's time for bed, Grace.'"
That Friday morning was like any other school day, a whirlwind of activity before heading out the door. She skipped down the road and boarded the school bus.
Grace blew her mother a kiss, as she always did. An endearing final image.
'Luckiest guy in the room'
Bear was one of two third-graders chosen by their teacher for the important job of class helper. The pair headed out of the room that morning to deliver an attendance report to the office.
As they neared the office, gunshots rang out. Bear said he could see bullets flying by. Smoke filled the air.
The two children froze, like deer in headlights. A second-grade teacher saw the children were in harm's way, raced toward them and grabbed them. She pulled them into a bathroom with other children and barricaded the door.
"If she didn't do that, I don't know," said Bear's father, Andrei Nikitchyuk.
Nikitchyuk and his wife were filled with anxiety when they realized the robocall was real. Rumors were rampant. Parents were panicked. Police were everywhere.
A Ukrainian native, Nikitchyuk came to the United States in 1992 shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He had always felt safe here and had been fortunate enough to live the American dream.
He settled in Newtown eight years ago. His two oldest children, ages 13 and 14, had attended Sandy Hook.
"It's just horrific," Nikitchyuk said. "I don't know how our little ones are going to be affected by all this, but our older ones, I think, matured in just a few days."
The father was spurred to action: "This horrific event woke me up." He traveled to the White House to speak up for gun control. He was the Sandy Hook representative for a Newtown United delegation that was joined by families who had lost loved ones to gun violence in the mass shootings in Aurora, Colorado, Columbine and Virginia Tech, as well as random shootings in Chicago.
"I was the luckiest guy in the room because my kid survived and theirs didn't."
The group met with Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to President Obama.
Nikitchyuk's message: "This is unacceptable in our society. We have to do better."
Emergency plans and instinct
Kindergarten teacher Janet Vollmer heard what she believed were gunshots. Then, the intercom system piped in the sounds of gunfire into her room. The teachers were well-schooled on drills; their principal made sure of that.
Vollmer immediately began putting her emergency planning to use. She knew the drill was to get kids outside and to the nearby firehouse. But it seemed too dangerous. She had 19 children she needed to protect.
"There was no announcement of what was going on," she said. "My instinct was it wasn't good."
The teacher of 18 years gathered her kindergartners in a cubby area away from the door. Teaching assistants closed the blinds.
"We read a story and we kept them calm," she said. "We do this as teachers. We are trained. We have drills. We talk to the kids and in case something were to happen, this is what we do."
After about 30 minutes, she said, police knocked on the door. The children were told to close their eyes and walk in a line outside. She told the kids to look straight at the walls and nothing else until they got outside. They headed to the Sandy Hook firehouse, the school's emergency gathering point.
It would be hours before she learned the awful magnitude. She had taught 10 of the slain children just last year.
'The gift of these children'
Gene Rosen's home sits right next to the firehouse. Inside his house, the kids continued to wail.
"We can't go back to school!"
At one point, one of the boys broke through his tears with a note of levity. He sat up, held his finger in the air and said, "Just saying, your house is very small."
"In that moment, he brought into the home peace and light," Rosen recalled. "I felt like an angel descended upon us and this boy, and we laughed."
"God sent a respite from hell -- just a moment of recess." He paused, then added: "They saw their teacher assassinated."
He and the school bus driver tried to call the children's parents, but they got answering machines. They notified the driver's supervisor who relayed the information to authorities. Some of the parents soon arrived. The parents, Rosen and the six kids walked to the neighboring firehouse.
The children and their teachers huddled in bay areas where firetrucks are typically kept so they could be counted.
Two hours later, after Rosen had returned home, a woman knocked on his door. She said she was the mother of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis.
"Her face looked frozen in fear. She said to me, 'I heard there were six kids here. Is he here?'"
Rosen knew the names of the six children who he helped. His heart sank. "No, he's not here," Rosen told her.
As he recalled that encounter, Rosen wept. "She was just looking for a miracle, and I wanted to deliver her son to her -- and I couldn't."
Initial reports had indicated two adults were dead, but by late Friday afternoon parents of the slain children were told of their loss at a private room in the firehouse.
Back at the firehouse, Rosen looked at a list posted later and wept again when he saw two of the names: Victoria Soto and Jesse Lewis.
Before the tragedy, Rosen often read children's books to an elementary school in a neighboring town.
He'd recently come across a kid's book about a girl whose dog died in a fire. For weeks afterward, the girl smelled soot in her dreams and couldn't sleep. Then, one night a one-eyed cat jumped into her bed, cuddled with her and purred. The cat's soothing purr helped her sleep for the first time.
"The book doesn't end with a rainbow," he said. "It ends with hope in the sense of the continuity of her healing."
He couldn't help but wonder: What will be Newtown's one-eyed cat?
"The one-eyed cat is here," he said. "I don't know what it is yet."
The son of Orthodox Jews from Ukraine, Rosen hasn't been to synagogue in more than 40 years. But he said God delivered six angels to him that day. "This experience has made me spiritual," he said. "I want to show those children that there is light.
"Let the goodness of the children, their essential innocence and goodness and energy -- let them provide us with a pathway," he said. "That's what I want the gift of these children to be."
'So many angels'
The McDonnells were overcome when they first saw Grace's white casket at the funeral home. "You felt like the floor was falling out beneath you and your breath was taken away," her mother said.
But then, they pulled out Sharpies of all colors and began drawing: peace signs, ice cream cones, lighthouses, sea gulls. The family said it looked like it was covered in graffiti by the time they were done.
"We had to take great joy in knowing that when we walked in there it was so white, and our breath was taken away," Lynn McDonnell said. "But when we walked out of there, it was like we had joy again. It had so much color."
The family also brought Grace's favorite pocketbook, seashells, hair bows and flip-flops, as well as her sunglasses and a frying pan. Her father placed his New York Yankees cap with her. Grace loved Taylor Swift and Kenny Chesney -- the family gave her music from both.
"When we left, we were like: She's fully stocked," her mom recalled.
Her father said that "thinking of her smile, her spark, her brightness" helped guide the family through this most difficult time. Telling Grace's 12-year-old brother Jack what had happened, he said, was the "toughest thing to do."
The McDonnells, like the other grieving families, met privately with President Obama when he visited Newtown last Sunday. Lynn McDonnell said his visit brought reassurance. "He's just a dad coming in to meet a dad and a mom and a son -- and we really felt that."
Grace was a budding artist. The family gave the president a painting of an owl she had drawn. He told the family he would treasure it.
The parents say they're comforted by the fact Grace died with her friends. "She was at a place that she loved," her mother said.
"We have so many angels and so many bright stars shining over all of us in this town right now," the father said. "They will teach us how to go on and how to live through them."
They have no hatred toward the shooter, a point they've emphasized to their surviving son.
"The thing that Grace taught us is that you've got to live for the future," her father said. "You've got to live for happiness, peace, and to not divert your energies to hate, anger. That wasn't her. It's not us."
That, they say, is their daughter's lasting legacy.
Copyright 2012 by CNN NewSource. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | <urn:uuid:5303c17a-cd4b-4684-8102-cf05ae14666e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.krcrtv.com/news/national/A-message-from-beyond-Peace-in-Newtown/-/14285942/17880876/-/view/print/-/efcdvr/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.990273 | 3,628 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Wednesday, August 08, 2007 at 10:32 AM
I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study. --Ezra Cornell, 1865
As a graduate student at Cornell University, I spent many hours in the library stacks. Cornell's collections are outstanding in breadth and depth; there, it seemed to me, any student could indeed "find instruction in any study." So I'm especially excited to share the news that Cornell has joined our Library Project as part of its educational mission. The collection housed at the extraordinary Mann Library will be digitized, making it possible for people everywhere to search and discover books on environmental science, public policy, natural resources, and much more.
"In its quest to be the world's land-grant university, Cornell strives to serve the scholarly and research needs of those beyond the campus," said Cornell President David J. Skorton. "This project advances Cornell's ability to provide global access to our library resources and to build human capacity across the globe."
This is tremendous news, and I hope people around the world will gain as much joy and enrichment from Cornell's libraries as I did. | <urn:uuid:835e8810-a02c-4fb7-8d57-0d3100b25255> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2007/08/cornell-university-becomes-newest.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959684 | 234 | 1.734375 | 2 |
The primary goal of these case studies was to understand how ICT relates to educational innovation.
Find out more information and a list of case studies for all schools and countries .
View results from the six United States schools that took part in the study, and a summary:
Future High School, Napa CA
Harland Elementary School, Crawford VA
Joshua Junior High, St. Louis MO
Mountain Middle School, Frontier CO
Pine City Middle School, San Diego, CA
Walnut Grove Elementary School, Seaside VA
National Case Studies on ICT in Schools - Home Page | <urn:uuid:5514ece7-9aef-4f3a-b378-bebd4b3e6838> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.oecd.org/edu/research/nationalcasestudiesoninformationcommunicationstechnologyictinschools-unitedstatesresults.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951502 | 121 | 1.78125 | 2 |
We hope you enjoy this first edition of the Kakadu newsletter. Let us know if you'd like to unsubscribe - and feel free to pass this on to your friends if you think they'd be interested.
Blue skies and speer grass at Gubara
There's a noticeable change in the air at Kakadu, as we move into Banggerreng or 'knock em down storm' season. Monsoonal conditions make way for clear skies during Banggerreng. Humidity levels are starting to ease and while the days are still warm, evenings bring a hint of cooler things to come.
At this time of year the vast expanses of floodwater start to recede and streams begin to run clear. Spear grass which has grown to over two metres tall during Gudjewg is knocked down by strong winds that come with the occasional ‘knock ‘em down storm'. Wildflowers begin to bloom, plants are fruiting and animals are caring for their young.
Grevillea in flower at Kakadu | Anja Toms
Now is a great time to join a guided tour of the park. Boat tours, scenic flights and guided day trips operate throughout the year. You can enjoy many Kakadu icons at their best. See water still flowing over Jim Jim and Twin Falls before the dry season, or take an exclusive boat tour on Magela Creek or Yellow Water wetlands.
Check our website for a list of the seasonal attractions, and look them up in the Kakadu National Park Visitor Guide for maps and further information.
Just remember - the heavy rains of the wet season have left damage to some roads. Before you depart, check our daily access report so you know which areas are open for business! For more detailed advice call our helpful staff at Bowali Visitor Centre on 08 8938 1120. Find out more about Banggerreng, including what to see and where to go, and learn more about Kakadu's six seasons.
Check out the size of that bite mark!
Crocodiles are part of life at Kakadu - just ask the two fishermen who nearly lost a chunk of their outboard motor last month!
3.5 metre croc attacked their boat in the early hours of Saturday morning, as they were moored at Mud Island, where the South Alligator River meets the sea. The guys felt the croc nudge their boat around midnight, then it came back around 2am and had a go at their outboard motor. Two boats were anchored next to each other when the croc attacked. The bloke in the other boat was snoring loudly at the time...but the noise clearly didn't scare the croc off. Rangers want to remind fishermen to keep perimeter lights on boats at night and avoid keeping anything smelly on board. Read other good tips on staying safe at Kakadu
As you're wandering through the woodlands or cruising one of Kakadu's stunning waterways, you're bound to see plenty of the local wildlife. It can be tempting to feed them - some like dingos and wallabies can be very persuasive - but it's really important not to!
Feeding native animals can interfere with their digestive and immune systems and can even end up killing them. It can reduce their natural fear of humans and they may become aggressive. They can also lose their wild instincts, become dependent on humans and stop teaching their young to hunt and forage. You can help by cleaning up all food scraps and rubbish before you leave a visitor area and please resist the temptation to feed the animals...no matter how charming they are!
Agile wallaby at Kakadu licks its arms to stay cool | Anne O'Dea
Friendly staff at Bowali Visitor Centre | Kakadu
Congratulations to Kakadu on another tourism win!
Kakadu took out bronze in Australia's top tourism awards this year, cementing its place as one of the country's top three major attractions. Ryan Baruwei was one of the Aboriginal traditional owners who proudly accepted the award.
“We say to everyone - come and visit us! Our country's moods and landscapes change over our six seasons. Immerse yourself, feel its spirit, hear our stories - you'll have an experience that will stay with you forever.”
Check our website for more ideas on what to see in Kakadu at the moment
The management plan for Kakadu is being updated at the moment, and we want your input on the things the new plan should consider. Your views are vital in shaping the future of this World Heritage national park!
What issues do you want considered as the new Kakadu plan is drafted? What types of recreational activities do you want more of? Are there further ways for traditional owners to participate meaningfully in tourism?
We'd love to hear from you by Friday 13 April 2012. Your input doesn't have to be long or complicated, just tell us what you think. | <urn:uuid:fa913e41-535c-472e-bfc1-644f83f512c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://environment.gov.au/parks/newsletters/kakadu/one/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96266 | 1,029 | 1.5625 | 2 |
A Quote by Richard Branson on global warming, sustainability, alternative energy, conscious business, and conscious capitalism
I used to be skeptical of global warming, but now I'm absolutely convinced that the world is spiraling out of control. CO2 is like a bushfire that gets bigger and bigger every year.
All of us who are in a position to do something about it must do something about it. Because Virgin is involved with planes and trains, we have even more responsibility. So we've put aside quite a lot of money to invest in alternative fuels. Over the next four years, we'll invest something like $1 billion in alternative fuels.
The money is going into a whole series of different things like building ethanol plants. We're looking into wind power. We're looking into solar. And we're also actually working on developing a new kind of fuel, which I can't say much about but which is quite exciting.
Source: Business 2.0: Branson's Next Big Bet: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/08/01/8382250/
Contributed by: ~C4Chaos | <urn:uuid:d3960f9d-6f46-408b-b38b-9c14ed0dbab2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/authors/richard-branson/56446 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960564 | 244 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Francis Collins stands at the very summit of the scientific community. He successfully led the massive effort to map the entire human genome, bringing the project to completion ahead of time and under budget. He now serves as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), having been nominated by President Barack Obama last summer. He oversees one of the largest research budgets in the world and, armed with a Ph.D., a medical degree, and a long list of accomplishments, is one of the most influential scientists of the last 100 years.
Thus, you might think that the scientific world would have celebrated the elevation of Dr. Collins to the NIH. Not so. Harvard’s Steven Pinker declared that Collins is “an advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs.” Other leading scientists said far worse. Why?
As The New Yorker reports this week, Dr. Collins is “a believing Christian.” As writer Peter J. Boyer explains, “The objection to Collins was his faith-or, at least, the ardency of it. Collins is a believing Christian, which places him in the minority among his peers in the National Academy of Science. (Of its members, according to a study, only seven percent believe in God.)”
Putting “believing” in front of “Christian” points directly to the problem. The voices of secular scientism would be much less threatened by an unbelieving Christian - a person who would associate with Christianity, but hold to no distinctive Christian beliefs. Even more striking in Boyer’s account is the linkage of “ardency” with “believing Christian.” It evidently doesn’t take much to be considered ardent these days.
Boyer points to the influence Collins has achieved through his books, speaking, and advocacy, and to his creation of the BioLogos website, designed “to advance his idea of the companionability of reason and faith.” Of course, the main preoccupation (or obsession) of the BioLogos site is advocacy for the theory of evolution among Christians.
Francis Collins is headed into a public controversy over the use of human embryos in medical research. As Boyer explains, Collins had crafted a policy that would reverse some limitations placed on such research by the Bush administration. The Bush policy, announced during President Bush’s first address to be televised from the Oval Office, limited federally funded research to a specified list of existing stem-cell lines taken from embryos and prevented any funding of research that would destroy further human embryos. Back in 1995, Congress had approved legislation [the Dickey-Wicker amendment] that banned federal involvement in any research that included the destruction of human embryos. Researchers demanded additional stem-cell lines, and some politicians promised that cures and treatments for devastating diseases would be right around the corner.
President Obama modified the Bush policy in 2009, with assistance from Francis Collins. Collins now appears to be a forceful advocate of an aggressive broadening of research using human embryos. “It’s time to accelerate human-embryonic-stem-cell research,” he said, “not throw on the brakes.”
Peter Boyer capably traces the issue and its controversies. Even James Thompson, the University of Wisconsin scientist who pioneered the use of human embryos in this research, saw this clearly. “If human-embryonic-stem-cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough,” he said.
Boyer reports that Francis Collins “was personally torn by the ethical questions posed by stem-cell research” before joining the Obama administration. Nevertheless, he is now pushing hard for the expansion of such research. As Boyer explains:
He has long opposed the creation of embryos for the purpose of research. He sees a human embryo as a potential life, though he thinks that it is not possible scientifically to settle precisely when life begins. But Collins also feels it is morally wasteful not to take advantage of the hundreds of thousands of embryos created for in-vitro fertilization that ultimately are disposed of anyway. These embryos are doomed, but they can help aid disease research.
This is a very troubling passage. Defining a human embryo as merely “potential life” is an evasion, especially when the same person says that is impossible “scientifically to settle precisely when life begins.” A closer look at that statement will reveal that, once it is denied that life begins at conception, there is no real scientific answer to the question of when life does begin. An affirmation of the sanctity and dignity of every human life requires unequivocal opposition to any harmful use of a human embryo.
Furthermore, the argument that existing human embryos should be destroyed in the name of scientific research because they are “doomed” anyway fails on multiple counts. Its horrifying pragmatism would allow the use of any “doomed” human being for medical research or destruction. The argument also fails to acknowledge the moral connection between the embryo and respect for human life, regardless of the reason it was brought into being.
All this takes on a powerful meaning in light of a judge’s recent decision that the Obama administration’s policy violates the Dickey-Wicker amendment, and thus the will of the Congress. The Obama administration has pledged to appeal the decision handed down by Judge Royce C. Lamberth on August 23. Regardless of how that process eventually ends, the Obama administration - and Dr. Francis Collins in particular - will be on the hot seat, crafting a new policy.
The main thrust of Boyer’s essay in The New Yorker is the difficulty of this task. But there is more to the story, for Boyer asserts that Collins’ policy - the one struck down by Judge Lamberth - had “resolved the stem-cell debate.” Clearly, this assumption was and is way off the mark.
The use of stem cells in medical research and treatment is not ethically suspect, unless the cells were derived unethically - as is always the case when a human embryo is destroyed in the process. The most promising avenues of stem-cell research are using cells derived from adult cells, not from embryos. The absolute determination of some researchers to destroy human embryos cannot be explained by scientific determination alone.
Francis Collins will indeed have his hands full as he attempts to resolve this issue and craft another workable policy for the nation. But so long as he remains committed to the use of human embryos in medical research - and to the argument that there are “doomed” embryos that should not be wasted - he will serve to undermine human dignity and the sanctity of human life.
One additional aspect of Boyer’s important essay is worthy of note. Even with all of Francis Collins’ achievements, qualifications, and experience, the bare fact that he is a “believing Christian” is enough to draw the active opposition of many in the scientific establishment. Just being a “believing Christian” is reason enough for suspicion, condescension, and opposition from many. Even when Francis Collins presses his case for evolution, he is dismissed by many scientists simply because he believes in God.
In other words, when we are told that we have to accept and embrace the theory of evolution in order to escape being considered intellectually backward, remember the opposition to Francis Collins. It just doesn’t work. When Collins’ elevation to the NIH post was announced, evolutionary scientist P. Z. Myers lamented, “I don’t want American science to be represented by a clown.”
This is the predicament of those who argue that evangelicals must accept some form of theistic evolution - the guardians of evolution still consider them clowns.
R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. For more articles and resources by Dr. Mohler, and for information on The Albert Mohler Program, a daily national radio program broadcast on the Salem Radio Network, go to www.albertmohler.com. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to www.sbts.edu. Send feedback to [email protected]. Original Source: www.albertmohler.com. | <urn:uuid:8d22ab88-e43b-479e-8409-1eb9e49ac74d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.christianpost.com/news/the-predicament-francis-collins-human-embryos-evolution-and-the-sanctity-of-human-life-46608/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952181 | 1,734 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Hitching rides became a way of life for Jack Kerouac’s Beat Generation. Decades later, Anton Krotov is leading a movement of Russia’s globetrotting “free travelers.”
With over 30 years of travel experience and 17 books under his belt, Anton Krotov doesn’t lack in tales from the road.
“One of my favorite stories comes from a journey on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, from Magadan back to Moscow,” said Anton Krotov, founder of the Moscow Academy of Free Travel. “My friend and I were detained by guards at a station for trying to negotiate with the train’s engineer. We went willingly, telling them about our trip, and they gave us food before handing us over to local police. We made friends with them, too, had dinner and a bath, and stayed at the chief policeman’s home before being given a special escort the next day.”
Krotov is Russia’s international guru of free travel. Regular congregations take place in his tiny Moscow apartment, which is filled with memorabilia from around the globe. This isn’t Europe on $20 per day: Krotov explores the limitless possibilities of our planet without paying. He describes foreign ministry blacklists as “the best countries to visit.” He gives lectures and sells his books all over Russia, teaching people how to discover freedom. Even in English, Krotov’s words project the authority of a seasoned public speaker. Animatedly narrating adventures from across Asia, Africa and the vastness of Russia, he frequently refers to his mountain of photo albums.
This man, some kind of wanderlust folk hero for post-Soviet Russia, really does come from another world. And this world is increasingly accessible. Whereas in Soviet times, internal passports were often needed to leave home cities, Russians now enjoy relative liberty to visit other countries and see more of their own.
Domestic and international travel has boomed. Visa bureaucracy remains a common barrier, but today’s situation is still a far cry from the pre-1991 regime.
The term free travel invites obvious conclusions about low-budget fiscal efficiency. But, according to Krotov, his concept represents a lot more than trying to get around on minimal expenditure. “Somebody travels and lives with people, but these people do not get work from it. We sit in villages and experience different types of life, but these people are not our guides. We look at the normal life of the world.”
Krotov’s inherently optimistic soul is clearly the guiding light. “We believe in friendship. All people are one family, living in one house; the world is one big house with different rooms. And people are friendly everywhere. When I travel, I don’t take a tent because I know everybody will invite me in. I lived four months in Indonesia and 100 different people invited me in on 100 different days. All the world is one. No enemies. No dangerous places. Nowhere.”
“I went to Afghanistan, where Russia made war 20 years ago. Now Russians are afraid to go there, as well as Americans and the British. They think it’s a dangerous country of narcotics and terrorism. I did not see this: People would give me lifts, in every village I found a place to sleep and eat. Some of them were veterans of war, but they had no problems with me. Nobody sold me drugs, showed me guns or tried to kill me. I’ve been there many times; it is a very friendly, happy, beautiful country.”
Krotov’s pocket handbook, “134 Questions – 134 Answers,” aims to address popular fears and myths. He goes into detail about how to prepare, emphasizing that free travel doesn’t always mean a zero budget. It’s vital to keep family and friends informed. As for the question of women on the road, he claims to know several who, “despising old prejudices, travel alone for thousands of kilometers,” with the only exception being in strongly Islamic countries.
Krotov’s mission is encouraging people to liberate themselves from old ways of thinking. Travel is a metaphor, a journey toward an independent life and an open heart. “I want to teach. Sometimes, after hearing my lectures... they will come to Moscow, to live here with me and learn more,” he explained.
“Of course, there are many who want to change but do nothing, especially in the former U.S.S.R. They think the government shows people everything — how to work, study, eat, sleep and that’s it. They are afraid of change. They do not understand that if you want to do something, you should do it. You are free, people, free!Published in Russia Now, December 2009, with The Washington Post (USA). | <urn:uuid:4c3e98ad-9f76-4553-80c8-f093279967d8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tigblog.org/group/ukyouthreps/archive/12_2009 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96928 | 1,042 | 1.773438 | 2 |
“Then followed that beautiful season… Summer… Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape Lay as if new created in all the freshness of childhood.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Reminiscing About A Summer in Japan: Photos & Places to Visit
Toshogu Shrine, Nikko
Tokyo Imperial Palace and here
Asakusa Kannon Temple, Tokyo and here
Lucky Charms at Temple in Kyoto and here
I love the changing seasons we enjoy here on the east coast yet summer always seems to breeze in quickly and fade away before we have time to properly bid it adieu. When I read Mamakat’s prompt, I was a bit hesitant to revisit summer but then I thought, why not? Why not share some pictures from our family trip to Japan a couple of years ago.
We write about autumn in fall and winter in December and on… Why not mix it up and revisit a season we love and reminisce about it a bit. So what if it is freezing outside? A little day dreaming can be a good thing for our soul. Plus, we can begin to mentally prepare for 2011 and our next fabulous summer. Right?
Nandaimon – Todai ji Hall trip in Nara
5th Station at Mount Fuji
Sōrin – Todai ji Hall trip in Nara
This Week’s Prompts:
1.) A Christmas gift that was not well received.
2.) Describe yourself in five words. Choose one, and write a poem.
3.) It happened at daycare.
4.) Let’s rewind to summer and warm up! Share some favorite photos from a vacation you took.
5.) A fist fight.
If there is one thing you like about summer, what would it be? What do you look forward to doing in the summer? If you could walk with me down memory lane, where will we visit? I love visiting new places and learning about other cultures so travel, even short trips, gives me a lot of pleasure. Yes, I know we are about to embark on a few long months of winter weather on the East coast, but we can revisit some wonderful memories and add cheer to our cooling temperature.
Even as some of us escape to sunnier climes, an island or two, most of us will stay behind and brave the dropping temperatures… or go skiing to enjoy some of the benefits that cold weather and snow provide. I’m all for apres ski as summer/warm weather is my first preference. Before we go traipsing into the glorious sunrise or sunset of a summer day, remember to bundle up; it’s still cold season!
“No bought potpourri is so pleasant as that made from one’s own garden, for the petals of the flowers one has gathered at home hold the sunshine and memories of summer, and of past summers only the sunny days should be remembered.” – Eleanor Sinclair-Rhode
Kusunoki Masashige at Imperial Palace Park, Tokyo
Kitanamaru Park, Tokyo
Robot Soldier at Ghibli Museum, Mitaka
Gammangafuchi Abyss, Nikko
Daitokuji Temple in Kita-ku, Kyoto
Definitely, I love winter wear but there are more things I love about the summer time… especially traveling. I love to travel and I bet you do too… Japan is a great destination point and I would love to visit there and a lot of other countries in Asia again. When Mamakat’s prompt asked for photos from a vacation, I had to share some of the places my kids and I visited because Japan was an incredibly beautiful visual experience for us. We packed in a lot of tours during our time there and yet there were places we didn’t get to see like Hiroshima – God willing, I plan to visit again.
The people welcomed us and even at the ever so busy Shinjuku station/mall, everyone made an enormous effort to answer questions, give us directions and tips on others things to do and see. The tea ceremony in Kyoto was surreal and even though we were encouraged to take pictures, my camera went kaput… another reason to go back. Plus, I would love to see the cherry blossoms when they are in full bloom. I heard they are magnificent.
Japan is stunning and we had an amazing time in a truly beautiful country. The Japanese were kind and helpful; the food was fresh, the tours exquisite and the landscape stunning. Kick back, relax and if you see a picture with a misplaced tag, do tell me as it’s been a while… Join me below for some more photographic reminders of good ole summer time… Think Travel..!
Ahh, those languid summer days… I’m so grateful to live in an area with changing seasons as there is always something new and different to look forward to again, right? Did you take a trip you’d like to share? What do you look forward to doing next summer? Do you miss the summer warmth or are you a winter bunny? On the other hand, perhaps you feel as Anton Chekhov said that “People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.”
Could fate be on your side for an exotic vacation? Head to JustLuxe [“Trips of a Lifetime"] to enter.
Positive Motivation Tip: Explore the world; in seeking to understand others, we ultimately learn to understand ourselves…
Elizabeth believes in positive kismet/fate and writes two bi-weekly blogs; Mirth and Motivation and Positive Kismet where she shares motivational, goodwill pieces and more. She is a mom to twins, a master trainer/educator, program developer & director, writer, healer, motivational speaker, real estate broker, and social media fan. She loves a good laugh, good food and an occasional jaunt to somewhere around the world.
Japan tour photographs from my personal collection
Mount Fuji via Wikipedia
Until Next Time…
Ask. Believe. Receive. © | <urn:uuid:e3b827ea-595e-416e-9b51-fa94942d0eab> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mirthandmotivation.com/tag/japan-trip/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936516 | 1,285 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Power. Magic. LIFE. Coursing through your mind, heart, and soul. Mages might wield mighty power, but that comes at a price, and it is not always easy. It takes great control, both of the mind and the will. In our world and the universe of Sarah Prineas'The Magic Thief, mages use aids to focus their concentration and power. That was one of the reasons our universes blended so well.
With that as an introduction, let's move on to magic lesson #4:
Focus stones, a primer:
Each mage in AQWorlds has a focus, usually made of stone*. These stones allow the mage to hook into the ley lines and nexuses of magic which transverse the planet, and can guide them to the lines and reservoirs of magic across the world.
One of 6 member-only Focus Stone Clusters
With practice and a stone for which they feel an affinity, a mage may also use the focus stone to enhance, to boost, their power. The crystalline structure of many stones allows it to hold the focused power mages channel through them.
As an example, think of a small tendril of a mage's power being funneled into a gemstone. That small jot of power bounces off the facets inside of the stone, gaining energy as it rebounds off the planes. That extra energy boosts power, increasing the strength of the magical working.
One of 5 AC Mana Surge Stones
With the proper focus and will, a mage may find their strength greatly enhanced, the power of their spells increased manyfold. Of course, that is for normal mages. With the... unique... magic found in Cysero and Warlic, who knows? These two rare mages have not allowed a proper study of themselves to be made.
The Emerald Mana Surge
* For example: Cysero with his stone hammer, Warlic with his gemmed staff, Alina with the stones she uses in her potions.
Magical Event Rare Rewards!
This Friday set your sites on a store full of mystical, magical, awesome armors, accessories, and weapons! From the enticing member-only Embero Spell armors as quest rewards to the powerful Aether Blade in the AC Rares shop, all the way to the Obsidian Athame free players will find dropping from Deorysa, there are rewards for everyone to collect and covet!
Mystical Blades in the AC Rares shop!
Member-only gilded athames
Mystic NightStalker, AC Rares shop
Dage the Evil's Death-day Shop Leaves Friday!
Dage returns to the Underworld tomorrow, taking his shop of rare birthday (birthweeks?) items with him! They will NEVER be available again, and that's one of the reasons the shop stayed so long. If you haven't battled your blade-edge off farming for the Paragon pet, get your armor in gear and get moving!
The Magic Thief event will be available for the foreseeable future, but the event rares will leave after a week, so get this massively-magical gear while the shop's still in-game! And be sure to check out The Magic Thief event page here! | <urn:uuid:2ab89532-b86e-4ae3-81f7-23930043c3df> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aq.com/gamedesignnotes/tag/focus-stones | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930447 | 658 | 1.554688 | 2 |
By Chris Woodyard, USA TODAY
DETROIT Diesel fuel costs an average 38 cents a gallon more than gasoline, isn't available at every filling station, and in the past, has been associated with engines that clatter and smoke.
But none of those negatives dissuaded automakers from rolling out a raft of new diesel car, truck and SUV models at the North American International Auto Show here last week.
DETROIT AUTO SHOW PHOTOS: See, rate carmakers' latest
It's not just German makers anymore. Among models unveiled last week were offerings of Japanese and South Korean brands that have eschewed diesel cars in the past.
They hope Americans will warm to a new wave of diesels as quiet, clean and smoke-free as their gasoline-fed siblings. Diesels also usually offer more torque, which helps in trailer pulling.
Mercedes (DAI) spokesman Robert Moran says today's diesels also have overcome past issues with cold-weather starting. Mercedes models, he says, need no more than an extra second to start on the coldest mornings and heat up faster than gas engines once running.
The biggest attraction: Diesels offer 20% to 40% more miles per gallon than comparable gasoline engines and are available off the shelf now.
"It's here-and-now technology," says Allen Schaeffer, executive director of the Diesel Technology Forum. "There's no looming questions about batteries" as with gas-electric hybrids.
The looming question is whether consumers will embrace diesels. They are hugely popular in Europe, where diesel fuel costs less. But that's not so in the USA. On Friday, diesel fuel averaged $3.41 a gallon nationally, 12% more than regular gas at $3.03, according to the daily survey in AAA's Fuel Gauge Report.
"Diesel isn't cheap and isn't going to get cheaper," says Brett Smith of the Center for Automotive Research.
Diesel vehicles also are likely to cost more to buy, though a smaller premium than hybrids.
Despite question marks, automakers unveiling new diesels included:
•BMW. Planned for sale next fall are two diesel vehicles with decidedly hard-to-remember names — the compact 335d sedan and the X5 3.0sd sport-utility vehicle.
The German automaker says the pair's 3-liter, 265-horsepower diesel will meet emissions rules in all states because of a new catalytic converter system and injection of the chemical urea into the exhaust. The injection system is called BluePerformance.
BMW is counting on diesel's torque during acceleration to make it popular.
•Mercedes-Benz. Mercedes, one of the biggest promoters of diesel through the years, is showing off two concept versions of its diesel-powered Vision GLK small SUV.
The two concepts, the Freeside and the Townside, are powered by a new-generation, four-cylinder, 2.2-liter diesel that neutralizes up to 80% of nitrogen-oxide emissions with a urea-injection system.
•Audi. To debunk the image that diesels are stodgy performers, Audi is showing off a 12-cylinder diesel concept version of its R8 sports car. The 500-horsepower engine powers the car from zero to 60 mph in 4.2 seconds and tops out at 186 mph. But don't expect to find one in showrooms anytime soon, if ever.
•Chrysler. A two-seat Jeep Renegade concept vehicle was designed as a plug-in hybrid with a twist: The rugged off-road vehicle is also a diesel.
Its small Bluetec diesel engine takes over when its lithium-ion batteries run out of juice. Renegade has a 40-mile range in electric-only mode. A 115-horsepower, 1.5-liter diesel takes it the rest of its journey.
•Toyota. The Japanese giant announced last week that clean-diesel V-8s will be available "in the near future" for its full-size Tundra pickups and Sequoia SUVs. But Toyota (TM) officials are not without reservations.
A surge in popularity of diesels could drive pump prices higher, warns Jim Lentz, president of Toyota's U.S. sales operation.
In introducing diesels, "we're hedging our bet, because diesel is the best current solution for a full-size pickup" when it comes to fuel economy and towing power, Lentz said in an interview.
•Honda. A clean-diesel engine will become available in one of Honda's (HMC) upscale Acura vehicles next year. Unlike the larger German diesels, it won't require urea injection to cut emissions, which should result in less maintenance, CEO Takeo Fukui announced last week.
•Kia. The South Korean automaker plans to put a diesel engine in the new seven-passenger Borrego SUV by 2010. The gasoline version goes on sale this summer with Kia's first V-8 engine.
So many new diesels were unveiled at the Detroit auto show's press preview that Consumer Reports auto testing director David Champion said he felt like calling it "the diesel show."
The price of the diesels is "a bit of a question mark," but he says he has no doubt about sales: "People are going to get them."
Conversation guidelines: USA TODAY welcomes your thoughts, stories and information related to this article. Please stay on topic and be respectful of others. Keep the conversation appropriate for interested readers across the map. | <urn:uuid:efd74e63-e97b-4c45-821c-4a64457e3aea> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/autos/2008-01-20-diesel_N.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944122 | 1,161 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Diplomacy is one thing; enabling is another. It seems Rwanda and the United States have been caught with their diplomatic pants down.
Congolese and international human rights organizations are calling on the United States to pressure the government of Rwanda to support the arrest of Bosco "The Terminator" Ntaganda and not provide him sanctuary. In a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the organizations call out the Obama administration and its ally, Rwanda, for inaction that has resulted in the brutalization and displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians in eastern Congo.
As you will know, Ntaganda is wanted on an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the war crime of conscripting and enlisting children under the age of 15 and using them to actively participate in hostilities in 2002-2003 in Ituri district, northeastern Congo. Despite the warrant, and the Congolese government's legal obligation to execute it as a state party to the ICC, Ntaganda was made a general in the Congolese army in 2009 and continues to be implicated in other grave violations of human rights, including unlawful killings, sexual violence, torture, and the recruitment of child soldiers.
The letter, while forceful, glosses over the fact that Rwanda, in a 2009 ugly blood pact with Congo, facilitated the illegal arrest and detention of CNDP rebel general General Laurent Nkunda. This resulted in a bloodless coup, allowing The Terminator Ntaganda to gain control of rebel forces. The result has been disastrous for civilians, who are the collateral damage in this ugly game of diplomacy.
The international press has so far refused to retract accusations leveled against Nkunda for atrocities committed by Ntaganda at Kiwanja and other sites.
Radio Okapi reports that in the last week, 20,000 people have been forced from their homes and villages after fighting erupted between the regular Congolese army (FARDC) and deserters from Ntaganda's faction. They are seeking shelter in Goma and surrounding areas.
The United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) released briefing notes for May 4, 2012 that paint a grim picture for civilians. Since January 300,000 people have fled renewed fighting in the Walikale and Masisi areas. A total of 2 million people are now on the run, including 1.4 million in North and South Kivu Provinces. Many of the spontaneous IDP camps are in areas controlled by rebel militias, which does not bode well for defenseless women and children who will certainly be raped and brutalized.
Margot Wallström, the Secretary-General's Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, expressed concern that there will be increased sexual violence against civilians by members of the rebel militias. "Once again, a new wave of violence is being perpetrated by actors such as the Mai Mai leader Sheka Ntabo Ntaberi and Gen. Bosco Ntaganda, both of whom have been sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council for various violations including sexual violence crimes," Wallström said.
UNHCR field staff say people are still coming to Goma and its environs from their homes in the Masisi and Walikale areas, but the flow has eased a bit. UNHCR staff have registered 10,300 people at a spontaneous site 25 kilometres from Goma and 9,000 in Mugunga III, one of 31 UNHCR-run settlements for internally displaced people in North Kivu. Hundreds are sleeping in a school and church at the spontaneous site, while about 1,000 people are heading to South Kivu
Walikale villagers displaced in January 2012 (Photo by Paluku Mbusa Omer)
38,000 displaced people remain in the areas of Masisi and Walikale. UNHCR is unable to access these people because of the insecurity. Walikale leaders sent out a cry for help early this year, which went unheeded.
Human rights organizations believe that the political commitment of the U.S. government would pressure the Rwandan government to intervene in a situation Rwanda created in early 2009 when they arrested CNDP General Laurent Nkunda.
The United States is complicitous and culpable in the bloodletting and mayhem. As usual, our government seems curiously disengaged. Or is it? One must consider the little reported fact that a United Nation's investigation implicated President Obama's trade advisor, Kase Lawal, in a gold smuggling scheme with the Terminator Ntaganda. Lawal is also a bundler for the Obama re-election campaign.
The elevation of Ntaganda has been a dirty, dirty deal for the Congolese people. Will a letter to Secretary Clinton have any effect? Rwanda won't sneeze without the approval of the United States. Does Obama care? The UN's Margot Wallström says, "the world is watching." We can only hope that it is.
Follow Georgianne Nienaber on Twitter: www.twitter.com/nienaber | <urn:uuid:57ddd31b-e727-4461-895e-72224d167e0a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.huffingtonpost.com/georgianne-nienaber/us-and-rwanda-caught-with_b_1484038.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951415 | 1,028 | 1.539063 | 2 |
July 31 , 2007
Volume V, No. 4
FDA Announces Program to Enhance States’ Food Safety Programs
Goal is to Strengthen Safety of Food Facilities Overseen by States
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today launched a national program to bring about the adoption of more uniform, equivalent, and high quality regulatory programs by state agencies responsible for regulating facilities that manufacture, process, pack, or hold food under FDA’s jurisdiction.
“This risk-based program represents a significant step in further integrating our food safety system,” said Margaret O’K. Glavin, FDA’s associate commissioner for regulatory affairs. “We realize it will be several years before it’s fully implemented, but we’re confident this program will bring great benefits to the public health.”
Currently, programmatic activities can vary from state to state and such variations can lead to inconsistencies in oversight of food safety. Adoption of voluntary standards for state regulatory programs will establish a uniform basis for measuring and improving the performance of state programs for regulating manufactured food and help the state and federal authorities reduce foodborne illness hazards in food facilities.
The Manufactured Food Regulatory Program Standards are the result of five years of intensive cooperative effort by federal and state regulators. The standards define best practices for the critical elements of state regulatory programs designed to protect the public from foodborne illness and injury, including:
Each standard has corresponding self-assessment worksheets. Several standards have supplemental worksheets and forms to assist state regulators in determining whether their state program addresses all of the elements in the standards.
The Manufactured Food Regulatory Program Standards have been approved by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and will be pilot-tested in New York, Oregon, and Missouri before September 30, 2007.
FDA regulates about 80 percent of the food supply, which includes food for humans and animals, except meat products, poultry products, and egg products, which are regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Limited Seats Available in ISVMA Convention Wet Labs
The ISVMA began offering wet labs and intensives at the 2005 Convention in Springfield. They were so successful that we expanded the number of wet lab and intensives in 2006 (and again in 2007) and have focused on offering programs that can increase practice productivity and profit.
The ISVMA Convention wet labs have limited capacity and will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis. Register early to assure you can attend these great sessions.
This year, ISVMA is offering three wet labs on November 2:
1) Puppy Aggression Prevention and Socialization by Dr. Rolan Tripp
2) 21st Century Ear Medicine by Dr. Louis Gotthelf
3) Equine Dentistry by Dr. Jack Easley
Intensive Programs Designed to Inform and Enhance Your Practice
ISVMA is offering two intensive programs on November 2:
1) Business Practice Intensive by Wendy Myers
2) Complementary & Alternative Medicine Intensive by Dr. Robert Silver
ISVMA Legislative Update
It has been a long and frustrating legislative year and lawmakers continue to delay their summer break as budget negotiations continue. Updates on some key issues follow:
Governor Rod Blagojevich is preparing to implement “contingency plans” for operating state government if neither a permanent nor a temporary budget is in place by midnight. However, Comptroller Dan Hynes said Monday that state government can continue to operate without disruption until at least August 8, which is a deadline for processing school-aid payments and a payroll for about 5,000 state employees.
Lawmakers were supposed to have passed a new state budget by July 1. Unable to agree on a permanent spending plan, they approved a one-month budget. Blagojevich wants lawmakers to pass another one-month budget to keep the state operating while negotiations continue. The four legislative leaders, though, aren’t inclined to support another one-month budget and instead are working on a permanent plan. The Governor and four legislative leaders continue to meet in Springfield in an effort to reach a budget agreement.
HOUSE BILL 3165
ISVMA proposed House Bill 3165 in the General Assembly earlier this year in order to clarify a section of the Illinois Child Labor Law that has recently been interpreted to prohibit children under the age of 16 from obtaining work permits to work in veterinary practices. The bill passed both the House and Senate and was sent to the Governor for his approval on June 15, 2007.
If the Governor does not approve the bill, he must veto it by returning it with his objections to the House of Representatives (chamber of origin). If it is not returned by the Governor within 60 calendar days after it is presented to him, it becomes law - even in the absence of his approval. The deadline for gubernatorial action on House Bill 3165 is August 14, 2007.
The nation's last horse processing plant in DeKalb has reopened while it challenges a state law that forced it to close twice in the last two months.
In late May, Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed into law a measure banning the slaughter of horses for human consumption, or the import, export, or possession of horse meat designated for human consumption.
Forced to close, the plant reopened for several weeks in June under a federal judge's order. It closed again when Judge Frederick J. Kapala decided against extending his order allowing the plant to operate while its appeal of the state law was pending.
Kapala later ruled Cavel's challenges to the state law on constitutional grounds were without merit, and the company appealed.
On July 18, 2007 the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago granted Cavel's request for an injunction prohibiting officials from enforcing the state law. In the brief ruling, the court said "irreparable harm" would come to Cavel if not allowed to resume operations while the appeal is pending.
ISVMA members that have not renewed their membership for the 2007-2008 Membership Year will be suspended at midnight tonight.
Suspended members will not receive the Epitome or E-SOURCE newsletters, enjoy member benefit programs, discount registrations or notifications of major regulatory or legal updates. They will also lose their continuous service status - which will delay their progress to Life Membership. Most importantly, they will lose out on the opportunity to support the veterinary profession by joining with colleagues to represent our interests before the Illinois General Assembly, Executive Branch and regulatory agencies.
Suspended members will be reinstated upon payment of dues. Their memberships will be terminated on June 30, 2008.
About the Photo in This Issue...
The most widespread and familiar of the American plovers, the Killdeer (Charadrius vociferus) is technically in the family of shorebirds. They are unusual shorebirds, however, in that they often nest and live far from water. It is a common bird in farmyards, fields, and parking lots and gravel roads. They also appreciate the water's edge, though, and can often be found on the shores of ponds and lakes.
Baby Killdeer (seen in the summer) always come out running. They hatch with their eyes open, and as soon as their downy feathers dry, they start scurrying about, following their parents and searching the ground for something to eat. Newly-hatched Killdeer can't fly, and they need their Killdeer parents for protection and guidance, but they are a lot closer to independence than most baby birds. Seeing fluffy Killdeer chicks is one of the pleasures of summer. Although they are lively right away, just-hatched Killdeer are like new fawns, a bit tottery and clumsy on their overly-long legs.
Baby birds that hatch with their running shoes on are called precocial. Precocial means "ripened beforehand." (The word comes from the same Latin source as "precocious.") Other precocial birds besides Killdeer are chickens, ducks, and quail. None of these precocial babies lies in the nest and gets waited on.
Birds that hatch blind, naked, and helpless are called altricial, which comes from a Greek word meaning "wet nurse." Robins are altricial, as are blue jays, cardinals and most other birds. The hatchlings lie helplessly in their nests, relying utterly on their parents to bring them food and push it down their throats. It's two weeks or more before they mature enough to leave the nest, and even after they leave it, their parents are still feeding them.
Precocial birds stay in the egg twice as long as altricial birds, so they have more time to develop. A one-day-old Killdeer chick is actually two weeks older than a one-day-old robin nestling. Although adult robins and Killdeer are the same size, a killdeer's egg is twice as big as a robin's. There's more nourishment built into the Killdeer egg, to sustain the embryo for its longer time in the shell.
Precocial birds (i.e. Killdeer, ducklings, chicks) are all cute. They are small, bright-eyed, fluffy replicas of their parents. In contrast, altricial bird babies, like robins and blue jays, are not cute. They are blind, bald, wrinkly-skinned little creatures that take two or more weeks to begin resembling anything that might be considered bird-like.
Although many species of birds pretend to have a broken wing to lure predators from their nest, the Killdeer is the one most commonly seen performing this distraction display. Perhaps you have seen an adult Killdeer that seemed to have a broken wing. It struggles in front of you, as if it can barely walk, let alone fly. One or both wings drag pitifully on the ground. If your instinct to rescue the killdeer overcomes you, and you try to catch the bird, it almost lets you reach out and pick it up. But somehow, while struggling to keep its balance, the Killdeer manages to stay one step ahead of you. As you pursue it, the Killdeer leads you farther and farther away from its four downy Killdeer babies crouching on the ground or half hidden under a tiny bush.
When the Killdeer feels that the young are safe from you, its broken wing heals suddenly, and the bird flies away, calling a loud "KILL-DEE" that sounds like a jeer. After you've been fooled a time or two by the broken wing display, you'll learn not to give the deceiving adult Killdeer a second glance. Instead, you should look around for the killdeer babies. You may see one disappearing into the grass or flattening itself on the ground and freezing.
I photographed this Killdeer at the top of this newsletter along the Rio Grande River in Salineno, Texas in January 2005. I took the photograph of the adult Killdeer in the broken-wing display at Montrose Harbor in Chicago, IL in July 1996.
Please feel free to forward this issue of the E-SOURCE to veterinarians that are not receiving ISVMA’s electronic newsletter. Any ISVMA member may subscribe to the E-SOURCE for free:
If you wish to add your name to the recipient list, send an e-mail to [email protected] and ask to receive the E-SOURCE newsletter.
ISVMA values your membership and does not want to send you any unwanted email. If you would like to be removed from this member service, please email [email protected].
State Veterinary Medical Association
Phone: (217) 523-8387
Copyright © 2003-2006 Illinois State Veterinary Medical Association
Web design by Rareheron Web Design, Portland, Oregon | <urn:uuid:8132e5a8-71c1-4c37-a01a-65319cd870e7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://isvma.org/isvma_library/e-source/volume05/esource_v_number04.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957687 | 2,478 | 1.742188 | 2 |
We were sad to hear that our June 3rd lecturer, Christian Cravo, had to cancel due to schedule conflicts. Fortunately the very pleasant Ian Shive agreed to step into the fray and lecture instead.
There's much to know about Ian Shive. Perhaps his passing resemblance to Christian Slater
- whom he probably encountered during his former years working in publicity at Columbia Pictures
- is not on the top ten list, but there are a number of other influential factors from his personal life that have shaped his perspective and allowed his work to stand apart from the masses of landscape photography.
On Thursday night, Ian shared his work at the Space and how and why he creates the images that leave our jaws wagging.
From Coachella Valley to Croatia, Ian Shive has travelled the world as a conservation photographer, achieving countless awards and national recognition along the way.
His current body of work examines how our world interacts with the planet's most valuable but increasingly threatened resource water.
Ian shared his most memorable accounts documenting ceremonial gatherings of water around the Ganges River to everyday communal get-togethers in Krka River in Croatia.
Ian has only been a professional full-time photographer for the last three years, but has been shooting since childhood.
His award-winning book The National Parks: Our American Landscape was released in 2009 and he shared numerous images from it.
It's clear that even without the accolades Ian would still be out in the field capturing these fantastic images and serving as an advocate for our environment.
His work is truly from the heart and you can see it in every image.
After the lecture, Ian answered a few questions from the enthusiastic crowd.
...and even though he didn't bring copies of his book to sign, some fans brought copies of their own
A gentleman and a scholar, that Ian Shive
...and so polite too.
Thank you Ian!
(All images © Unique for the Space) | <urn:uuid:34543590-b238-4243-9cd4-282af0ba9251> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://annenbergspaceforphotography.org/the-shot-blog/ian-shive-offers-water-sky-space?page=4 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978855 | 399 | 1.515625 | 2 |
On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency released a report on a peer review of the lifecycle analysis issues included in the RFS2 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that many found troubling. The Renewable Fuels Association asserted that the EPA stacked the deck against biofuels in its process to peer review the agency's indirect land use change analysis.
"EPA has asked the foxes to guard the hen house on this issue," said RFA President Bob Dinneen. "By adding lawyers and advocates to a scientific review panel, EPA bureaucrats have made a mockery of the Administration's commitment to sound science. These reviews absolutely cannot be viewed as objective or unbiased."
Dinneen says many of the reviewers have repeatedly and openly demonstrated unabashed and politically-motivated biases against biofuels in the past, which immediately casts a long shadow of doubt over the legitimacy of EPA’s peer review process.
"The EPA peer review panel reaffirmed many of the concerns I have about the EPA's proposed rule and rulemaking process for the Renewable Fuel Standard," said House Ag Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, D-Minn. "The panel expressed concern about using these incomplete and unreliable models to measure indirect land use changes and indicated that they didn't have enough time to review this convoluted and complicated proposal."
Peterson also said that he found it concerning that no one from USDA or any other agency with expertise in these issues were included in the peer review, stating that this was why the House voted to limit EPA's ability to implement international indirect land use.
Tom Buis, CEO of Growth Energy, said the study underscores Growth Energy's position that there is no universally-accepted scientific model for measuring indirect land use changes. He called on Congress to fix the flawed provision in the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act. Buis says EPA's peer review proves that too much uncertainty about the economic modeling, data and science exists to allow this to ever become regulation.
The president of the National Corn Growers Association, Bob Dickey, says NCGA is disappointed that there is no objectivity and a complete lack of unbiased opinions in the process. Dickey called upon the EPA to modify its approach to reflect the commitment of President Obama to adhere to policies based on sound science and a transparent process. | <urn:uuid:1c486a37-820f-4e3b-a1c0-1ff10e6382f9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://farmprogress.com/story-epa-report-clouds-lifecycle-analysis-issues-0-25444 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962287 | 465 | 1.5 | 2 |
Early voting up 18 percent in Marion County, officials say
Hours for early voting to expand
Last Updated: 240 days ago
INDIANAPOLIS - Hundreds of Hoosiers made their way to the Marion County Clerk's Office on Saturday for the first weekend of early voting.
County officials said interest is up substantially from the last presidential election.
For Ramona Powell, the decision to vote early was easy.
"One reason is because of the crowds for the voting, and secondly, I wanted to make sure I was able to vote, precluding any health issues or anything," Powell said. "I wanted to make sure I was able to get out and make my vote count."
Marian University student Erica Morris was one of several temporary workers helping eager voters through the process.
"It's been very busy. We've been setting records … about minimum 600 people a day since we started," Morris said.
Officials said the number of early voters is up 18 percent from the last presidential election in 2008.
"Indiana has the earliest closing polls time of any state in the country," said Marion County Clerk Beth White. "6 p.m. is very early, and if you are a single parent or a parent who has children in school or in day care ... this is a good option for you."
Voters in Marion County still have plenty of opportunity to vote early. The clerk's office downtown is the only voting center in the county.
Starting next week, early voting will run from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Any registered voter can participate by bringing a valid Indiana driver’s license or state-issued identification.
Early voting is also ongoing in other counties. More information is available at the Indiana Voters portal .
Copyright 2012 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. | <urn:uuid:93330362-a44a-41a9-98b4-4f574eab9576> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theindychannel.com/news/politics/early-voting-up-18-percent-in-marion-county-officials-say | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96807 | 389 | 1.609375 | 2 |
New call system for reporting abuse starts today
Today was the first day for a new call-in system for reporting abuse and neglect of children or adults.
Under this new statewide system, calls will go to a single phone number where the decision will be made immediately whether an investigation is needed. This replaces the system where calls would go to an individual Department of Human Services county office and were subject to the procedures of that particular office.
The toll free number will be staffed around-the-clock and provides a consistent standard in application of state law. The system is based in Kent County. The phone number for reporting abuse and neglect is 1-855-444-3911.
As a reminder, any school employee may report suspected cases of child abuse or neglect, but teachers, counselors, social workers, audiologists, psychologists, and school administrators are required to report. Click for more details. | <urn:uuid:8190a96b-021f-4137-9517-b5233b404225> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mea.org/new-call-system-reporting-abuse-starts-today | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952359 | 181 | 1.53125 | 2 |
The First Day of School is just around the corner for so many of us and with that it means, School Lunches.
Lunch Box Jokes and Love Notes are such a fun way to uplift your child in the middle of the day. I like to think that come lunchtime, I never know how his day may be going and a friendly note from home may be just the thing he needs to brighten his day, bring a smile to his face, and remind him that I care.
Instead of waiting to the last minute to scribble out a note as we run out the door, I pat myself on the bag in this area of preparation and got the notes done ahead of time this year! I made these Lunch Box Jokes and Love Notes and already have them printed, cut, and ready to slip into the lunch bag as needed.
Click here to download this free printable of Jokes and Notes. There are 5 pages of jokes and 2 pages of blank notes. Print them in color, cut them out, write a few personal notes, and stick them in a baggie next to your lunch-making-station at home. When the stash is low, come back and print them again.
And as a side note, keep your eyes out along the grocery check-out lines and dollar-aisles at superstores and craft stores. I picked up these little gems at Michaels lately and love them, too!
They're called LunchBox Love and are cards with positive and encouraging notes, jokes, and trivia to send off to school. You can get large sets off Amazon, or just keep your eyes out to buy them individually for a dollar or two each.
Making school lunches every day: To-Do
Making school lunches fun: Check. | <urn:uuid:ca8583f5-d1a4-4278-b4fa-cba9b68e3ae2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fiverealmoms.com/school-lunch-box-jokes-notes/2012/08/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973875 | 364 | 1.796875 | 2 |
A team of 250 Subway employees, along with "Famous Fan" and New York Giants defensive end Justin Tuck, set a Guinness World Record Wednesday for "most people making sandwiches simultaneously."
Subway's fastest sandwich maker Salvador Rodriguez was also part of the effort.
The effort involved more than 190 pounds of avocado, 440 pounds of roast beef, turkey and ham, 275 pounds of vegetables and more than 555 feet of Subway bread.
After the record was set, the sandwiches were donated to City Harvest in New York City.
Read more about branding and marketing. | <urn:uuid:f2f6a18c-532b-47ac-9d87-4011edfa8099> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.qsrweb.com/article/199093/Subway-sets-sandwich-making-Guinness-World-Record?rc_id=537 | 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 | 0.95463 | 115 | 1.53125 | 2 |
There is no doubt that early voting statistics are bringing a lot of good news for Democrats in North Carolina.
I would caution against getting too hyper about it. For instance blacks have so far made up almost 29% of the electorate. It's important to keep in mind that during the primary 40% of early Democratic primary voters were black, but they only ended up comprising 34% of the total electorate when you factored in the election day voters. These early figures reflect a definite enthusiasm gap. It's also a lot easier to vote early in larger counties where a ton of sites are open at a wide variety of hours- those sorts of places tend to be more Democratic. Both those things said, the news is very good.
On the North Carolina tracking poll this week we'll ask people whether they've voted yet or not, and we will dig deep into those numbers on Monday to try to get a picture of what sort of electorate we can expect going into election day as well as whatever lessons we can learn about the voting preferences of those who have already cast their ballots- down ballot fatigue, ticket splitting, etc.
We're also going to have new polls next week for NC-8 and Wake County, each of which should give us a more detailed view of what's happening in some key parts of the state. | <urn:uuid:5e5f4f44-deba-4a37-bf65-89f422a02baa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://publicpolicypolling.blogspot.com/2008/10/early-voting-in-north-carolina.html?showComment=1224825000000 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977652 | 266 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Thanks you two.
I am given to understand that the .775 case length is the .38 S&W.
And maybe that is a better way FOR ME to understand the differences.
I am going under this assumption:
Three case lengths:
.775 inches - .38 (I am given to understand that this is referred to as .38 S&W)
1.290 - .357 when referring to a smokeless round
1.155 - .38 special, also referred to as Long Colt
When I say, "when loaded with black powder" I mean, in the present day, loaded for CAS (even though I don't shoot CAS) and not what the cartridge was originally designed for. The question might be better posed; "What to CAS shooters call their rounds? If you have a revolver that is .38/.357, and you are loading black powder rounds, do you call it a .38 round, a .357 round, a .38 Special round, and if so, what is the difference?
Here is why I ask:
If I move into the .38/.357 caliber, I would probably stay away from .775 cases because of the limitation on the powder. I load only black powder, never smokeless.
So this means I can choose between (IIUC) two different case lengths. 1.155 and 1.290. In this case, the difference is minor and so I would likely go with the larger of the two sizes for flexability. It is important because if I am working with two different case lengths which are really only different by about an eighth of an inch, I have to reset my dies. So I wuld likely stick with one and only one case size.
My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government. Thomas Jefferson | <urn:uuid:a8c87042-9f34-4686-a7e7-8b3d2308dd64> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thefiringline.com/forums/showpost.php?p=5237330&postcount=5 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967421 | 376 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Dáil Éireann - Volume 424 - 21 October, 1992
Written Answers. - Employment and Training Levy.
Mr. Callely Mr. Callely
149. Mr. Callely asked the Minister for Labour if he will consider amending the youth and training levy of 2 per cent to its original format of youth employment levy; if he will utilise the levy solely for job creation for those people under 25 years; and if he will make a statement on the matter.
Minister for Labour (Mr. Cowen) Brian Cowen
Minister for Labour (Mr. Cowen): I take it that the Deputy is referring to the Employment and Training Levy for which the legislative basis is contained in the Youth Employment Agency Act, 1981 and the Labour Services Act, 1987. The rate of levy is one per cent of reckonable earnings, emoluments or income.
Up to 1988, all of the proceeds of the levy were allocated to youth programmes. Under the Labour Services Act, 1987, the scope of the levy was extended to employment and training generally and since then has been used towards the funding of activities of FÁS, CERT and certain programmes run by the Department of Education.
I have no plans at this time to utilise the levy solely for job creation for persons under 25 years.
Dáil Éireann 424 Written Answers. Employment and Training Levy. | <urn:uuid:d85b2066-99db-4938-9bc2-757ee32deee4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/D/0424/D.0424.199210210107.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935321 | 289 | 1.648438 | 2 |
I suspect consumers will be waiting a long time for the "trickle down". Proponents make some interesting arguments in favor of the HST, but in the end there seems a disconnect from theory to reality.
The fact the HST, in Ontario anyways, targets the basics, such as electricity, heating and fuel, tells me it's a fools hope to think an improved business climate will lead to lower prices. Fact is, everybody will pay it on the chin for the most elemental needs, and hope some other, mostly tertiary items, are cheaper as a result of lowered costs. You do the math, it's hard to see how it's revenue neutral, in fact it resembles a scenario wherein corporate taxes are lowered, while personal taxes are raised. Maybe the bottom line for the government might be revenue neutral (say proponents), but the BURDEN has changed once again.
I received my first "hush money" from the Ontario government, the fact it was sent part proof positive that it will impact me adversely. On top of this one year "transition" payoff, we hear that personal income taxes will be lowered in the future, if it turns out consumers have been negatively affected. Curious, to make these assertions, when you are trying to argue the opposite now, there will be no adverse affect.
I note that fiscal conservatives and business are the HST's biggest fans. Generally, these people hate any new tax, because that burden will leave less disposable income, acting as an ultimate drag on the economy. And yet, here we are, people arguing the classic trickle down economics nonsense that has already shown itself a failure. Taxing new homes, home renovations, what a terrific way to stimulate growth? The raw materials don't suddenly get cheaper, the cost of gas isn't lower, so where oh where will we find these terrific savings based on competitive capitalism? If history is our guide, about all we will see is more money divvied up amongst the executive class. Oh maybe a few crumbs will fall from their mouths, but human self interest tells us the fat cats will retain as well.
This HST isn't a wash for the consumer, it's a shaft. It's disguised corporate welfare that we all have to pay for. The argument that it will increase jobs is superficial, because if my disposable income is affected, I'm paying more for CORE costs, I'm buying less goods and services, which contradicts the supposed benefit. This is a case where theory never translates to the practical, and unfortunately we all pay for the error.
Anyways, between the higher electricity costs and higher internet fees, I best logoff right now, because this post is killing my bottom line! | <urn:uuid:c8040618-e8a1-4e2f-bc80-4c943bafff8f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://farnwide.blogspot.ca/2010/07/harmonized-shaft-tax.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954288 | 551 | 1.625 | 2 |
Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad’s exiled uncle, a former regime insider accused of carrying out a massacre in 1982, says he wants to oversee a peaceful transition of power in his homeland.
On Sunday, Rifaat al-Assad took charge of a new opposition movement in exile. Afterwards, in an interview with AFP and Le Monde, he urged Arab and world powers to negotiate his nephew’s safe departure from power.
But Rifaat’s former close ties to the regime and his current gilded life -- since quitting Syria in 1984 he has lived in luxury properties in London, Paris and Marbella -- may undermine his appeal to other opposition groups.
“The solution would be that the Arab states guarantee Bashar al-Assad’s security so he can resign and be replaced by someone with financial backing who can look after Bashar's people after his resignation,” he argued.
“It should be someone from the family ... me, or someone else,” he said.
Since March, Assad’s regime has been violently repressing a popular revolt against his rule, a campaign which the United Nations says has left at least 3,500 people dead and which has drawn international condemnation.
Opposition groups have been organizing to form a credible alternative government. Rifaat’s National Democratic Council is led by close allies from his own party and former members of the ruling Baath Party.
Rifaat al-Assad, aged 73 or 74, is the younger brother of Syria’s former dictator Hafez al-Assad and was a feared figure who commanded his internal security forces in the 1970s and early 1980s.
In 1982 these forces attacked the town of Hama to put down an Islamist revolt, in an attack which historians and rights groups such as Amnesty International estimate killed between 10,000 and 25,000 civilians.
Then, in 1983, with his brother receiving treatment for heart problems, he tried to seize power himself. The attempt failed, Hafez recovered, and the next year Rifaat left Syria for a long life in well-heeled exile.
Speaking to AFP on Sunday, Rifaat dismissed reports that he had a leading role in the Hama massacre as a “myth” and insisted he is now best placed to bring the latest crisis to an end.
“The regime is ready to go but needs guarantees not just of the personal safety of its members, but also that there will not be civil war after it is gone,” he said, warning of trouble between Syria's religious communities.
The Assad clan are members of Syria’s Alawite minority, which controls most senior posts in the security forces, while the bulk of the population are from the Sunni tradition.
“We need a kind of international or Arab alliance ... that could enter into talks with the government itself ... and be a real guarantor of the concessions that the regime would make,” he said.
Rifaat suggested that Britain, France, Russia or Iran play a role.
He was also dismissive of the other opposition groups, branding the main Syrian National Council of Paris-based Burhan Ghaliun “a band of Muslim Brothers hiding behind someone who is unknown in Syria.”
He said the internal opposition groups were ready for compromise, but added they would be unable to negotiate a truce without outside help. | <urn:uuid:9efefbec-0f94-44c4-9d45-ec124d535d84> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/11/14/177076.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976126 | 702 | 1.703125 | 2 |
|1.||Urban Dictionary Disorder|
A psychiatric disorder where every goddamn word has to mean something related to sex. As in, you ask someone with Urban Dictionary Disorder what a certain word is, and they're going to tell you it's some sexual move or position.
See: annoying as hell
Person 1: Which street do I turn on once I pass the stop sign?
Urban Dictionary Disorder Sufferer: Uhuhuhuuh that's what she said!
Person1: I'm just looking for directions to the cofee shop parlor.
UDD Sufferer: HAHAHAH that's what HE said!
Person1: Why is that sexual? Why is every damn thing have to mean something obscene these days? What the hell is it with people?
UDD Sufferer: HAHAHHAHAA that's what SHE said!! LULZ
|2.||your mom goes to college|
does everything have to mean SOMETHING? no, and this is a good example. that's why the phrase is funny; it doesn't mean anything. it's just kip's dry, meaningless humor.
why don't you just come down here and hit me and see what happens...
just as meaningless as your mom goes to college
A short phrase often use by one not in search of a return answer of ya I nah mean( just cause that is weird). people also often use this when they are in search of an answer as well to a really stupid question, and have nothing better to say. The process of saying this word is usually the squinting of one eye, the arching of the neck and the over powering left side of the mouth pulling up.
Jake: sooo im eatin tommorrow at lunch nah mean?
|4.||here to fuck|
its a term of expression to signify that you are here and you mean business. Granted it can also mean that you are there to fornicate to but in the intended sense its suppose to mean you have a agenda, your there to play ball, your very serious and mean business
guy 1: Man Don was really serious today, is he normally that serious?
guy 2: Naw man , Dons typically not that serious, but today he was sure there to fuck.
*while robbing someone*
Thief: Im here to fuck, give me your purse!
Victim: oh no! thats the sixth purse this week, gotta move outta detroit.
*In the most literal of senses*
Boyfriend: Im here to fuck!
Girlfriend: oh i love it when you take the initiative!
Mean-girling or to mean-girl someone is when a group of mean girls mercilessly attack a lone powerless girl like a pack of rabid dogs. The attack consists of tormenting, shaming and ridiculing their victim to utter and complete humiliation. The intent is to destroy the reputation of the lone, powerless girl.
The group of mean girls usually do this to feel powerful, as a form of sport or simply because they can. It is cowardly, bullying and sociopathic behavior since it is usually a GROUP of powerful girls against ONE powerless girl.
Rarely, one mean girl can attack another girl but in this case the mean girl is usually MUCH MORE POWERFUL than her victim and attacks her victim specifically because she knows the victim is powerless and unable to defend herself.
Originated from the movie "Mean Girls".
Mean girl 1: I feel like crap today. I've go so much work to do and my boyfriend just dumped me.
Mean girl 2: I know what will make you feel better. Let's go mean-girl that girl over there. She's all alone and she looks different from everyone else. She stands out and will make a perfect victim.
Mean girl 1: Okay! But let's get someone else to join us first so it will be 3 against 1. That way we will be sure to win and mean-girling some poor sob will make me feel GREAT about myself. Yay!!
|6.||talk to the hand|
An expression originally used by african american women to mean the coversation is over. Now used by all sorts of wannabe urban whites as well.
...for the last time i want my alimony payment now you deadbeat...no way honey, talk to the hand cause the face ain't listenin'
|7.||nothing to write home about|
Pretty good, or at least decent, but far from the best ever. Usually about a 6 out of 10, but can be used figuratively to mean much worse.
Rick: "Oh man this crack is alright, but it's far from the best I've ever smoked. Nothing to write home about."
Steve: "Shut up dogg what are you talking about? This is some quality shit. I'm definitely going to tell my mom what good crack I've been smoking in my next letter to her. She'd really be proud of me for smoking only the best crack."
Rick: "Word on the street"
Steve: "Shit man I was wasted last night. What the fuck happened?"
Rick: "You went off with some whore, dogg. Where did you wake up?"
Steve: "In the alley behind that strip club. How was she?"
Rick: "I don't know, man...nothing to write home about."
Steve: "Oh shit, you serious?"
Rick: "Yeah playa, that's rough."
Steve: "It itches. Not a good sign." | <urn:uuid:8ae2697f-a7e6-44ae-a865-c1802de1973a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=to%20mean | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957786 | 1,168 | 1.804688 | 2 |
As a number of usability studies have shown recently, the fold on a webpage doesn't have to be a barrier to users, and people are willing to scroll down to see more.
However, the area above the fold is the first thing visitors to your website will see, so what should be above the fold? Here are a few suggestions, with e-commerce sites in mind...
According to this insightful article from cxpartners, having watched more than 800 user testing sessions, the fold was only seen to be a barrier in three of them, which is a pretty convincing statistic.
Of the three cases where the fold was seen to be a barrier, a strong horizontal lines across the page, roughly around the fold area, was the culprit.
It's clear that the majority of web users are used to scrolling to see more content. For instance, most newspaper sites, especially the Daily Mail, require plenty of scrolling to see the entire contents of the homepage.
Why is the area above the fold still important?
This is what new visitors will see the first time they arrive at your website, and will have an influence on whether they decide to explore further or not.
Web users will often make a decision on whether to continue based on what they see above the fold, so this needs to let them know what the site is about, or if they have clicked through from a search ad, to find the product they have expressed an interest in.
Another thing to consider is screen resolution, as this will affect how much visitors see above the fold, as will the choice of browser, as add-ons, bookmarks and toolbars can all affect the visible portion of your webpage.
With this is mind, it is advisable to make sure crucial information, links etc, are well above the fold, so that the maximum number of users will see them. What is visible above the fold also serves the purpose of drawing customers into scrolling further down the page.
What should be above the fold on an e-commerce site?
- Navigational links and site search. Obvious, but users need to see this above the fold to move further into the site.
- Key information and customer updates. This could be updates on Christmas delivery times, or information on whether or not deliveries are affected by the Royal Mail strike.
- Merchandising. Depending on the kind of e-commerce site, you may want to display the latest clothing range, as on a site like ASOS, or have a rolling display of products like Comet. Either way, the most important products will be shown above the fold.
- Delivery offers. Free delivery offers are excellent sales drivers, so giving them prominence above the fold makes perfect sense.
- Basket / checkout links. Users will expect to see this link in a prominent place, which usually means at the top right of the page. This applies to all pages of the site.
Product description and price. And, for catalogue retailers, product codes.
- Review summary. While most sites will place the detail of reviews below the fold and shoppers can scroll down for this, a summary of the average review score deserves a prominent position.
- Product photos.
Call to action. The checkout or add to basket button
should be unmissable, which means placing it above the fold where
people are guaranteed to spot it. In the example below from John Lewis,
the call to action is below the fold, meaning that users have to scroll
down for it.
This is not the case with most products on the site, and I'm sure most people will be able to figure it out, but on other sites, as described in the Purdys example from this article, this could have customers doubting whether it is a transactional site.
A more prominent link, higher up the page, as on the Comet product page, should remove any such doubt:
- Stock availability. This is a key piece of information, and also a potential sales driver, as it can help to create a sense of urgency in the customer's mind.
- There are more than 30 things in total that we like to see on product pages.
A contact number or link to contact information. This provides reassurance for the customer, as well as a quick way to get any problems or questions dealt with.
- Security logos. Another way to reassure customers about transaction security.
- Progress summary. This shows customers how many steps they have completed, and how close they are to completing the purchase.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, so any suggestions for other above the fold essentials are welcome... | <urn:uuid:341bfd27-a02e-4646-9fdb-ece6523969db> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://econsultancy.com/ie/blog/4869-what-should-be-above-the-fold-on-an-e-commerce-site | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939021 | 946 | 1.726563 | 2 |
When large companies want to do business with small suppliers using electronic data interchange, sometimes they have to find a bridge to cross the communications gap.
[From Supply & Demand Chain Executive, April/May 2004] St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Home Shopping Network (HSN) is certainly large by most of the measures that count: close to $2 billion in sales for 2002, a customer base of 5 million and a customer relations staff that processes more than 70 million calls a year. In short, big business.
Like many large companies, HSN has a supply base that includes a variety of smaller enterprises. The challenge of integrating a new supplier is compounded when HSN elects to work with the vendor under a drop-ship model, whereby instead of stocking a manufacturer's products in its own warehouse facilities and handling fulfillment on its own, the shopping network takes customers' orders but has the manufacturer or distributor send out the product directly to consumers.
Tim Weber, director of e-business for the Home Shopping Network, says that HSN decided early on that, in the interests of efficiency, it would handle all transactions with its drop-ship supply base via electronic data interchange (EDI). Trouble was, linking electronically with each new supplier using EDI required a weeks-long process of establishing and testing electronic connections, far too long a lead time for a company that differentiates itself by being first to market with new-fangled merchandise. "When new products come along, we have to be able to bring them to market very quickly, sometimes with only a couple weeks notice," says Weber. "We found that with the speed with which we need to bring these products to market, if the vendor wasn't already EDI capable, it was just too long of a process to get them up and tested on EDI."
The Little Guy's Perspective
On the other side of the spectrum is David's Cookies, based in Fairfield, N.J. The company, which employs about 100 people, is a purveyor of cookies, brownies, crumb cake and ruggalach, among other gourmet specialties. David's is growing, to be sure, but it is still a relatively small enterprise. In fact, until about three years ago, the company operated solely through a "business-to-business" line, selling preformed frozen cookie dough to food services that resold the dough to restaurants and cafeterias. David's began venturing into retail only when it created its DavidsCookies.com Web site a few years back to sell ready-baked and packaged goods directly to consumers.
When the Home Shopping Network approached David's about two-and-a-half years ago to begin selling the cookiemaker's goods through HSN's online site and television programs, the smaller company still did not have EDI capability, and implementing a full-blown EDI connection with HSN would have been cost prohibitive for the baker, according to Oliver Tress, who heads up the retail sales operation at David's Cookies.
But that was only half the challenge for David's Cookies because, while the company had sufficient employees to handle order entry and processing for the couple dozen orders that would be coming in daily via the HSN.com Web site, the baker did not have the staff that would have been necessary to handle the thousands of orders that could be expected to roll in on days when HSN featured the cookies on one of its television shows.
Have Your Cookies and Eat Them, Too
By this time, however, HSN had found a way to have its cookies and eat them too, so to speak, by linking with its non-EDI-capable suppliers through third-party EDI service providers. The providers could receive EDI messages from the shopping network and provide the information therein to the suppliers in whatever format worked for the smaller companies, and vice versa, taking communications from the suppliers and translating them into EDI for transmission back to HSN. | <urn:uuid:afaffa24-6df6-49fb-8d03-f31d45215de1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sdcexec.com/article/10289974/keeping-the-cookies-coming | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96677 | 812 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Written By International Women's Health CoalitionMonday, 29 April 2013
Statement of a coalition of young advocates and activists related to young people with respect to this year’s theme of migration (Delivered on April 24, 2013).
Written By International Women's Health CoalitionFriday, 20 August 2010
Josina Machel delivered this speech at the 4th Africa Conference on Sexual Health and Rights in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in February 2010. Machel is a gender activist and a social entrepreneur and a member of the Board of Directors of the International Women's Health Coalition. The speech is available to download in Word and PDF.
Written By Lori AdelmanTuesday, 27 October 2009This speech was given by Priscilla Ikos Usiobaifo, Program Coordinator of BraveHeart Initiative, at the official ceremony of Nigeria's 49th Independence Day celebration held at Public Field, Igarra, Edo State.
Written By International Women's Health CoalitionMonday, 09 March 2009
>>Available in PDF
Summary: Statement by Ishita Chaudhry, Founder, the YP Foundation. Remarks for Congressional Briefing— Global Youth: A Strategic Investment. March 3, 2009
Written By International Women's Health CoalitionThursday, 05 March 2009
Summary: Statement by Beth Fredrick, Executive Vice President, the International Women’s Health Coalition. Remarks for Congressional Briefing— Global Youth: A Strategic Investment. March 3, 2009
My task today is to connect the remarks of my colleagues on the panel to specific actions that the U.S. government can take to ensure the health and wellbeing of the world's young people. As often is the case, I gained insight into the issue in the cab ride here. The driver asked what I was doing with Congress today and I told him that I was asked to speak on what we owe the world's young people. Without missing a beat, he said, "That's easy. A clean environment, a good education and freedom." It is that freedom that we are here to discuss with you today. The freedom for young people to make informed, supported choices about their own lives.
As you have heard from the other speakers there are more than 1.5 billion people between the ages of 10 and 24 living in the world today, the largest generation ever.
How do we make these young people our allies? How do we ensure their ability to contribute to global prosperity? What can we learn from their inspiration?
We are at a historic moment. Not only do we have the largest generation of youth, but young people's lives are increasingly shaped by a trend towards democracy and the rise of civil society, giving them increased opportunities to participate in local and national decision making. We have a new Congress and a new President committed to reenergizing U.S. leadership on human rights and restructuring foreign assistance to better serve those in need. ...
Written By International Women's Health CoalitionThursday, 26 April 2007
Written By International Women's Health CoalitionTuesday, 11 January 2005
Written By International Women's Health CoalitionSaturday, 14 February 2004
Written By International Women's Health CoalitionTuesday, 14 October 2003
Written By International Women's Health CoalitionTuesday, 04 February 2003
- About Us
- Our Work
- Get Involved | <urn:uuid:288e0c96-dacc-46b7-ab36-41c208ee6058> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.iwhc.org/index.php?option=com_advancedtags&view=tag&id=90&Itemid=1116 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955365 | 667 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Last modified: 2008-03-08 by antónio martins
Keywords: (no keywords) |
Links: FOTW homepage | search | disclaimer and copyright | write us | mirrors
Remarks: Complete new edition, to replace [pie90]. Regular updates are planned. Mechanical binding allowing insertion of amended pages. Fully bilingual, including the introduction section. Authorship, though known, is not specified. At the bottom of each page is written "Original". Information on line.
Commented on line by the author at the NAVA website: Research methodology used for the 2000 edition of Album des Pavillons.
Description (improvements from [former editions are shown underscored):
The book begins with a foreword (1 p.) by Y. Desnoës, Naval Hydrograph, an introduction to vexillology (7 p., with colour illustrations) by M. Lupant, president of the FIAV, a glossary of vexillological terms (1 p.).
Section A is for state flags and markings. Pages are numbered according to the two first letters of country names. (For instance, Albania is in page AL 1.1 and Algeria in page AL 2.1.) This numbering system shall facilitate inclusion of new pages or new countries.
Each page has the name of the country in French-English-local language, and the full name of the country in French. For each flag, the bilingual caption is immediatly below the image and no longer on the facing page. Construction data are shown in the image borders. For national flags and ensigns, the FIAV grid of use is shown near the image. Colour data (official or suggested) are also sytematically shown. Bilingual footnotes are present when required. The status of the flags is higlighted when necessary (not confirmed, not allowed for private use etc.)
Section B is for international flags (world-wide organizations, European organizations, other organizations, and fishery inspection). The book ends with an index of all names cited (4 p.)
My personal comments:
This new Album is a milestone in vexillology. Several new flags have been added, and the layout of the book has been dramatically improved. All texts are translated in English in full. The introduction by M. Lupant and the English texts shall enlarge the “target” of the book. The book is expensive, but I would love if scientific books in the same price range could have the same editorial excellency (no printing mistakes, no typos…)
I have to congratulate once again Armand du Payrat and the graphist who works with him first for having convinced the SHOM to publish a totally new edition of the book and then for having displayed in such an attractive manner one of the most comprehensive and accurate database on flags and ensigns curently available. A special thank should also be addressed to David Prothero, who supervized the English translation. Knowing the quality of David’s contribution to the FOTW-list, nobody shall be surprised by the excellence of the English text. I am personnally glad to have finally an accurate list of the English equivalents of all these naval ranks.
As usual, it is explicitely stated in the book foreword that all comments and corrections are welcome by the SHOM.
Ivan Sache, 10 Dec 2000
The foreword (p. A4) of the album says (signed Yves Desnoes, Hydrographer of the Navy, General Engineer of Armaments):
The objective of the Album des pavillons nationaux et marques distinctives, National Flags and Distinctive Markings is to show, with bilingual Franco-English captions, all the ensigns, flags and markings that a vessel might encounter at sea or in port. The various National Flags and Ensigns, Jacks, Masthead Pennants, distinguishing Flags of Heads of State, of Government and Naval authorities, Maritime Service’s Flags, military and state-owned aircraft Markings, and flags of autonomous States and Territories, are given for each country, listed alphabetically by its French name. The flags of major International Organizations that are likely to be seen at sea and Fishery Inspections Pennants are included at the end of the book.
The introduction (p. A11-A21), by Michel Lupant, says:
About 200 independent countries and about thirty overseas territories are covered. The book is intended mainly for seafarers, who need to identify the nationality of a ship; whether it is civilian or military, and whether there is on board a Head of State, or other high ranking official, entitled to a salute.
quoted by Ivan Sache, 07 Dec 2003
Other then the national flags, the second part of the album (which is considerably smaller then the part A with national flags) shows some international flags that are of importance for seamen (I guess):
The titles here given in “quotes” are my names given for sections without title in the Album. So these titles are somewhat imprecise and “for your convenience”, so do not draw any longreaching conclusions from them. In fact, I guess that they are not titled exactly because it is difficult to give exact title, while these flags (and those organizations) clearly form a kind of a logical group.
Among all these there are without clear naval connection, I believe, only Language Commmunites and Pancontinental Organizations. I would guess that they are all here for “general interest” and not for any use in naval (maritime, navigational, ceremonial) circumstances.
Željko Heimer, 07 Dec 2003
The call for information is probably one of the most striking features of the Album. Instead of saying «We are the French Navy and we know better», the first page of the Album encourages everybody to forward comments and corrections to the editors.
In spite of not being allowed to sign the Album, Armand Armand placed his “watermark” on the Album. The “sample page” shows the national flag of Noélie / Christmasia / Navedad, an imaginary country whose name is derived from Noël, Armand’s second name, and the flag of the Minister of Defence of Nolie, which is nothing but the banner of arms of the Payrat family. This is an extremely elegant “watermark”, already used for instance by Velázquez, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock. Armand is in good company…
Ivan Sache, 12 Jul 2003
I would like to share with you my pessimism on that matter. When Armand took over the Editor’s position, the Album had been more or less abandoned by his predecessor, mostly because of the total lack of interest expressed by the hierarchy of the Navy. Those of you who have had the pleasure to meet Armand know what kind of inflexible gentleman he his. He was able to trigger some new interest for the Album and obtained the funding required for the major revamping of the Album, with an increased size, more flags shown, bilingual captions and a bilingual, excellent introduction to vexillology written by Michel Lupant. The new Album was a best-seller, as it was confirmed to me by the two Navy official booksellers in Paris and Marseilles.
Armand knew he would have to retired and was very worried about the future of the Album. You might remember that he was always interested by all kind of new information allowing updating the Album and that he was never reluctant to admit that there were mistakes in the Album. Armand realized that his retirement would probably be a very good opportunity for the Navy to cut the funds for the Album. Since he was a loyal officer, he did not attempt to postpone his retirement but obtained a temporary successor for one year. I don’t know his record as a ship captain (he was too modest to speak about this) but some wise people in the Navy probably decided to reward his career by offerring a last run to the Album.
Olivier Corre, a teacher in history and geography from Brest, was appointed as the new Editor of the Album. He was not paid and worked on his free time one afternoon per week to the completion of the last updates of the Album. Change #4 [cor04], released in 2004, was probably the very last update. Olivier asked me to be his correspondent and to transmit the information from the list relevant for the Album, which I did with great pleasure. In summer 2004, Olivier informed me that his position would not be renewed and that no successor would be appointed.
The Album 2000 with changes 1 to 4 can therefore be considered as the last release of the Album des Pavillons, which ends a tradition which had begun in 1819. Armand’s idea when revamping the Album was to publish a book that would interest not only the seamen but everyone concerned with flags (therefore the increased size and graphic quality, the introduction…). He was not followed by the administration of the Navy.
Fortunately, all the work done is not lost for the general public since Željko Heimer has analyzed and redrawn the flags shown in Album for the FOTW website.
Ivan Sache, 11 Jul 2006
Remarks: At the bottom of each page is written "corr N° 2". Price: 19,65 €.
Includes: Afghanistan new National Flag South Africa Police
Coast Patrol Ensign & Rescue Vessels Australia Customs Ensign
Bahrain new National Flag and Royal Standard Bolivia Naval Ensign
Brasil Vice-Pres, Minister, Cder of the Navy Comoros new National
Flag South Korea Government Flag & Maritime Police India new Naval
Ensign and rank flags, Coastguard Ensign Israel Custom Vessels,
Police Ensign, Masthead Pennant Italy Chief of Staff Armed Forces
Libya Naval Ensign Myanmar Naval Ensign New Zealand Customs
Ensign, Police Ensign, Yacht Ensign, Chief of Defence Force Rwanda
new National Flag Saint Lucia new National Flag East Timor new
National Flag and of course many small corrections throughout.
Armand du Payrat, 19 Sep 2003
Željko Heimer, 07 Dec 2003
Anything below this line was not added by the editor of this page. | <urn:uuid:230ff90a-1dd3-4498-8a6e-450ed8eb6c4e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fahnen-fanshop.de/fotw/flags/bib-pay.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94068 | 2,154 | 1.53125 | 2 |
By Gary M. Stern, contributor
FORTUNE -- Turning a blind eye to the wrongdoing of colleagues has become the norm at many financial services firms. Despite the MF Global debacle, the rogue traders at UBS and Societe Generale, the subprime mortgage mess, and Goldman Sachs' tarnished reputation, most corporate employees continue to withhold information about misconduct by colleagues on issues they know are wrong, until it turns into a major financial imbroglio, according to a recent study.
In fact, employees do not report 50% of observed misconduct. And even when unethical behavior is reported, 60% of managers said they'd only divulge information to a senior executive if the impact of the case exceeded $1 million, according to a 2011 study of 500,000 employees at 150 companies (many, but not all, financial services firms) over four years, conducted by Corporate Executive Board, an Arlington, Va.-based consulting firm.
The improper conduct goes unreported because people "fear retaliatory action, including losing their job, failing to get promoted, failing to get a bonus," explains Thomas Monahan, chairman and CEO of Corporate Executive Board. Many employees expect that the misconduct will be buried under the table and no action will be taken. Indeed, companies have failed to create a healthy, ethical culture where people feel "they will not be retaliated against and the company will go and do something" about the wrongdoing, Monahan suggests.
When illegal practices go unreported at a financial services firm, the stakes are high. Firms face significant fines and legal costs, reputation damage, and tightened regulatory scrutiny. Fines of $100 million have been leveled against companies that have defied the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, says Monahan.
Why would it take a one million dollar loss to influence staff to blow the whistle on an illegal practice? Monahan says, "People need to be highly convinced that this is a potential catastrophe to take the risk." Otherwise, they'll stay mum and avoid the threat to their career stability.
The rogue UBS trader arrested last week raises questions about the bank's risk management practices. But the profession is so close to gambling that all traders walk a very fine line. By Shelley DuBoisSep 19, 2011 12:26 PM ET
Washington, February 20 -- The Federal Government today announced that for the first time in more than eight years, and possibly longer, it would begin to enforce finance and banking laws.
The announcement came on the heels of the Government's second requisition of information from UBS, a Swiss banking company that has allegedly been offering tax-free havens for savvy American investors for some years.
The move was viewed with consternation by many MOREBing - Feb 20, 2009 11:13 AM ET
|Men's Wearhouse fires the 'I guarantee it' guy|
|Men are disappearing from the workforce|
|I will graduate with $100,000 in loans|
|U.S. oil boom helps thwart OPEC|
|Stocks slide after Fed stands pat| | <urn:uuid:eb8918eb-8524-43bf-8471-ff50939c43eb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://management.fortune.cnn.com/tag/ubs/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951484 | 627 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Android is a mobile operating system, owned by Google.
Android Inc. was the startup company that developed the initial Android OS. Google acquired the company in July 2005, and many of the original Android Inc. founders work... More »
Facebook is one of the largest websites in the world, with more than 500 million monthly users. The site was started in 2004 by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg when he was an undergraduate student at Harvard.
Facebook became a... More »
Google Inc. is a multinational Internet search technologies corporation. Google hosts and develops numerous Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising. The company was founded by... More » | <urn:uuid:bc3942cc-5729-43c8-9dee-003172994367> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-android-app-employees-2012-8?pundits_only=0&get_all_comments=1&no_reply_filter=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960876 | 134 | 1.59375 | 2 |
It's long been known that there's a very close correlation between Solar Magnetic Activity (Sunspots) and climate. This is the best introduction to the subject that I've seen.
This is science that the Scientific Community is not interested in pursuing, perhaps because there are no financial grants to be had by saying that an increased Government control of the economy won't Save The Earth™. The film actually shows this is gory detail, as Scientists® confront Svensmark telling him that his experiment is "worthless" without giving a scientific reason why.
It also explains how Sagittarius killed the Dinosaurs. This is long time-scales science. And this is brutal:
OK, then. But if you actually want to, you know, understand the science (as opposed to The Science®), then this is must-see Borepatch TV. And read the links. The next time that some smarmy Prog Bastard sneers that "the Scienciness™ is settled", ask him about the Svenskmark Hypothesis and it's scientific strengths and weaknesses. And then stand back and enjoy him squirming.
And if you really want to twist the knife, let him run down and then turn to someone else and say "He doesn't know." | <urn:uuid:96531d29-636a-4d1b-ae0a-0eb1b178536d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://borepatch.blogspot.jp/2012/12/if-you-want-to-be-informed-about-global.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972241 | 260 | 1.6875 | 2 |
By vikram kumar
It is a fact that in todays fast moving world our body is not prepared for various kinds of unanticipated physiological disorders. For most of the diseases and disorders we our self are responsible. This is because to avail various kinds of expedient features we do not even hesitate to compromise with our health. People who normally use computers and mobile handsets even do not know how much lethal their radiation can be for a human body.
Yes, it is totally undeniable that most of the people are unaware from the fact that how much the radiation which is liberated from cell phones and other electronic gadget can be hazardous for the overall physiological condition of the body. They even do not go for various measures which are imperative for the cell phone radiation protection.
If you have understood the worth of cell phone radiation protection then it is the right time to act. You should look for one such company which is highly recognized for its quality based cell chips for mobile handsets and other devices.
When it is about the condition of your health then you cannot go for any sort of compromise. If you are ready to act then you are no doubt but at the right place. There is one company which can be highly productive for you to provide cell phone radiation protection. You can avail best results with the help of BioPro technology. To avail necessary results and services from this technology it is significant that you should visit first to Cellphone-Health.com online. It is owned, operated and controlled by Lotus Pond Marketing Inc. which is a sovereign consultant for BioPro technology and located in Hilo Hawaii.
When it is about optimum cell phone radiation protection then BioPro technology of Cellphone-Health is believed to be an undisputed leader of the market. Customer service and satisfaction is the ultimate objective of this company and a long list of happy customers is proficient enough to prove its worth in the market. With the help of revolutionary BioPro cell chip it will be simple for the user to neutralize the unsafe effects of electromagnetic radiations (EMR).
There are several reasons due to which you can select BioPro cell chip as a prominent choice. Here are few of them.
Wide application: BioPro cell chip from Cellphone-Health is versatile in function. Here the patented MRET-shield is applied in combination with energy resonance technology. It efficiently operates on Bluetooth, mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistant (a handheld computer).
Wide range of products: with Cellphone-Health there is availability of wide range of products which you can select according to your needs, choice and ease. Some of the major products include BioPro cell chip, BioPro universal chip, BioPro home harmonizer, Biolife pendant, BioPro smart card, P2R-12 capsule, i-H20 activator system, etc.
Reasonable prices: now you can avail best protection for yourself at the most reasonable prices existing in the market. You can select products after visiting the site online with the help of product code. You can select the quantity according to your own requirements. The prices of all the products are kept so reasonable that maximum number of gadget users can avail direct benefit out of it. You can also avail attractive discount packages as well.
It is a fact that all the species and movable and immovable things in the entire universe are familiar with the greediness of humans. To make the life easier and to experience a modern existence man has invented numerous sophisticated gadgets, devices and accessories both good and harmful within a small period of time. Technology has assisted man in every turn. But now it is understandable by everyone that man has generated numerous problems not only to different species of this earth but also for himself.
With the help of various inventions gifted by technology, we unknowingly take a small dose of health hazards every day. Yes, the boon of technology is now proving to be a curse for us and we normally prefer to overlook this aspect.
We cannot blame technology but must an improper application of it. We presently owe a large number of sophisticated accessories including mobile hand sets, personal digital assistant, Bluetooth, etc. But there are not many people who are familiar with the hazardous radiation that these gadgets and accessories release during the stages of their operation.
A large number of scientist and researchers have already warned about the adverse effects of these radiations and laid stress on the PDA and cell phone radiation protection.
Here, one can go for the better use of technology. Of course, eminent researches have already succeeded in creating shield for cell phone radiation protection. Here the leading and the most trustworthy name is Biopro technology.
Now with the help of internet it is quite easy for you to get in touch with this technology. You can search for outstanding Biopro cell chips with the help of a site Cellphone-Health online. Cellphone-Health is a site which is possessed and operated by Lotus Pond Marketing Inc., which is an autonomous consultant for BioPro Technology, located Hilo, Hawaii.
There are several advantages which you enjoy by visiting Cellphone-Health for Biopro cell chips and other decisive products.
Customer service, an ultimate objective: nothing is more important for this company than the satisfaction of its customers. BioPro Technology is tirelessly working for the welfare of its customers and offers guaranteed results in cell phone radiation protection.
Products available: there is a great collection of products which have proven to be the most efficient EMR/EMF safeguard solutions. A large number of unique products made up of BioPro Technology include BIOPRO Cell Chip, Hands Free Headset – NEW 2008, BIOPRO Home Harmonizer, BIOLife Pendant, BIOSports Pendant Soccer, BIOSports Pendant Racquetball, BIOPRO Smart Card, Nutrition Essentials Pack, Cell Phone Safety Team Button, i-H2O Spray Bottle, etc.
Privacy: if privacy is one major issue for you then you need not to worry about it. Cellphone-Health is a site which always upholds your privacy rights. Besides this, all the terms and conditions and the payment options regarding products offering cell phone radiation protection will be provided to you in advance.
Customer support: when it is about the support offered to the customer then also this company wins the race. For all the issues related with BioPro Technology you can avail email and telephonic support in an instant fashion. You will be immediately responded with all necessary solutions. | <urn:uuid:09ab7910-a293-4f28-8903-183e4fb20a69> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.green8gold.com/green-8-gold-mobile-cellular-3g-radiation-protection/1633 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944219 | 1,307 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Employee Stock Ownership Plans, or ESOPs, were designed as a way to put ownership into the hands of American workers. An ESOP is a type of employee benefit plan designed to invest primarily in employer stock. As such, it is a mechanism by which employees become beneficial owners of stock in their company. Created in 1974 with the passage of federal laws, ESOPs comprise an estimated 11,000 companies in the US, employing an estimated 11.5 million workers. The laws enacted to encourage employee ownership allow certain incentives for selling stockholders, the ESOP companies and the ESOP company's employee owners. The tax advantages of ESOP companies often allow them favorable corporate financing.
For more information on ESOPs, please visit the following websites:
When our ESOP began in 1998, we strongly believed that open communication and education with our employees was the key to a successful transition. During our early years as an ESOP company we were awarded three Annual Awards for Communication Excellence (AACE) by the National ESOP Association. The AACE awards are given to companies for outstanding communication and education about their ESOP to their employees, community, and company stakeholders.
2001 - Total Communications
2000 - External ESOP Advertising; Website Communications
1999 - The Young ESOP Total Communications
We were also honored with the Ohio ESOP Company of the Year in 2000 and the Ohio Chapter Employee-Owner of the Year in 1999.
The employee owners of Kraft Fluid Systems take pride in our community and support it with a variety of charitable events. | <urn:uuid:0d4f7f5b-351a-45b2-b463-ba96b20b4b46> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kraftfluid.com/about/employee.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966635 | 315 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Fewer Post Offices Targeted for Closure
Updated 1:10 p.m. ET
The Postal Service has cut more than 200 sites from its list of facilities for possible closure, including one site in Maryland, the next step in a process that began earlier this summer amid uncertainty over how many sites it would close.
Officials will now consider the fate of 413 retail stations and branches, down from a list of 677 facilities released in late July. The Derwood Post Office in Rockville was dropped from the list, but 12 other postal facilities in the District and suburban Maryland remain under consideration for closure or consolidation.
Derwood was spared because officials could not find adequate nearby space for its P.O. boxes, according to Postal Service regional spokeswoman Luvenia Hyson. Moving the boxes would have been too costly and would have inconvenienced customers because of the distance to the next closest postal facility, she said.
The Postal Service is required to provide the list to the Postal Regulatory Commission, which is reviewing closing and consolidation plans. Final decisions will be made after Oct. 2, and Postal officials have said privately they expect no more than 200 facilities to be on the final list.
Sites won't close or be consolidated until 60 days after they are approved for closure and thus are unlikely to be shuttered by the end of 2009, Postal spokesman Greg Frey said.
The Postal Service operates almost 37,000 facilities nationwide and sells stamps at 18,000 ATMs; another 56,000 supermarkets, pharmacies and other stores sell stamps or other postal services.
Mail volume will drop by as much as 20 billion pieces in 2009 versus last year, according to the Postal Service, which estimates it will deliver roughly 170 billion pieces of mail. It lost $2.4 billion during its third quarter and forecasts a $7 billion loss when its fiscal year ends Sept. 30.
The draft list of 677 possible sites was provided Congressional staffers in July, who then leaked it to reporters.
Its figures differed from a list provided to the Postal Regulatory Commission, which named up to 1,000 sites.
Postmaster General John Potter would not commit to an exact number of closures when asked by reporters, prompting Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to scold him during a Congressional hearing for refusing to provide a specific number.
The decision to consider closing postal facilities is one of several cost-cutting moves under consideration, including a plan to offer buyouts to up to 30,000 employees and a push to have Congress change the Postal Service's schedule of payments to fund retiree health benefits.
Review the full list of possible closures here.
Thoughts? Leave them in the comments section below.
Posted by: jckdoors | September 2, 2009 1:38 PM | Report abuse
Posted by: ggilby1 | September 2, 2009 1:58 PM | Report abuse
Posted by: gregory2481 | September 2, 2009 2:46 PM | Report abuse
Posted by: LoonyLeft | September 2, 2009 3:08 PM | Report abuse
Posted by: JedG | September 2, 2009 4:13 PM | Report abuse
Posted by: almelbe | September 2, 2009 6:58 PM | Report abuse
Posted by: thealaskan | September 2, 2009 8:56 PM | Report abuse
Posted by: fleuredeflorida | September 3, 2009 9:49 AM | Report abuse
The comments to this entry are closed. | <urn:uuid:ba28a00e-b6a1-40ea-ba98-5b8e2aa0b4a6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2009/09/postal_service_reduces_list_of.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960255 | 715 | 1.59375 | 2 |
A String Buyer's Bill of Rights (and Obligations)
By Steve Crandall
Vice President, Sales & Marketing
Ashaway Racket Strings
There may be a simple message underlying the longevity of this column (it's been running for over two years): racquet string is not a simple subject. Even though technical details of string and stringing can make a big difference in your game, I'll willingly acknowledge that the subject is not of earthshaking importance to a lot of players. Rather than taking the time to read these columns (or seek other sources of information on the subject), many players prefer to leave the decisions to their racquet stringers-and that's just fine, provided the stringer is both technically competent, and responsive to the player's needs.
Players who can't get excited about string, but who do take their game seriously, should therefore be willing to spend a few minutes periodically talking with their stringer. Players who do care about their equipment probably need no encouragement; they're more likely to want to discuss the subject at length, and they have a better understanding of the issues and the terminology involved. But regardless of whether you're a "string-focused" individual or not, your relationship with your stringer is important.
As with any relationship, there are expectations and obligations on both sides. In the interests of good service to players, and fairness to both parties, we've developed the following list of "rights and obligations" for buyers and sellers of racquet string and stringing services. (Ashaway is a String Supplier Member of the U.S. Racquet Stringers Association; this list is intended to supplement the USRSA's code of ethics, and not to contradict or replace it.)
The Rights of customers for string and stringing services:
Customers also have the following Obligations:
- The right to confer with a knowledgeable stringing technician.
If the kid at the superstore who takes your racquet can't answer your questions or give useful advice, ask to talk with the individual who does the stringing. If they're one and the same, go elsewhere.
- The right to obtain objective, unbiased advice about string and stringing options.
No stringer can be personally knowledgeable about every available string, or carry every brand in stock. But recommendations should be based on your needs as a player, not on profit margin.
- The right to a professional-quality stringing job, performed according to the racquet manufacturer's specifications, and/or by agreement between the stringer and the customer.
There's just no excuse for shoddy workmanship.
- The right to a choice of strings, enabling the customer to obtain the desired balance of properties (e.g., power, control, durability, price).
If you're not offered a choice of several racquetball strings, look out! You'll probably end up with leftover tennis string.
- The right to receive service promptly, by the date promised.
- The right to expect that every package of a particular string will be consistent in quality and performance.
This one is aimed mainly at the string manufacturer, who should practice modern quality control methods to ensure good product. Stringers, however, can also play a role. Although modern string materials do not have a "shelf life," string should be stored in a reasonably stable environment, away from direct sunlight and excessive heat and humidity.
This article previously appeared in Racquetball Magazine.
- Obligation to describe your own skills, needs and playing habits clearly and objectively when conferring with the stringing technician.
The stringer can't make a sound recommendation if he or she doesn't understand your needs.
- Obligation to pay for work performed.
'Nuff said, again?
- Obligation to pick up work promptly after completion.
You authorized the work and expected it to be done on time. Please don't subject the stringer to the unnecessary liability of storing your racquet for an extended period, or make him or her wait to get paid.
- Obligation to understand that the performance-enhancing ability of any equipment is limited.
You can expect a little extra power, durability, or control from the right string, but not a quantum leap in your performance as a player. Better play comes from practice and instruction.
- Obligation to understand that even the best stringing job has a limited lifespan.
Eventually, all strings wear out, break, or lose their bounce. Make it a policy to replace them before they impair your game. | <urn:uuid:f76ba268-00a5-40a8-bb5e-8bd471640148> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ashawayusa.com/RacquetballTip18.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943529 | 945 | 1.640625 | 2 |
UPDATE: Canadian Bear Cub Release, Two Collars Drop!
After two months of good and steady information, the satellite tracking info started showing that Jason suddenly separated from Drew. As there was some movement coming from Jason’s collar, we considered an actual separation but then lost contact for a couple days. When contact came back, the data coming in from Jason was in the same 30meter area with very slight movements: something was very wrong.
The movement could be contributed to different satellites picking up the data or to scavengers moving stuff around. Fearing the worst, Angelika and Peter from our partners at the Northern Lights Wildlife Society (NLWS) rushed to Bella Coola and hired a helicopter to fly over the signaling collar. With great relief, the team saw no signs of a dead bear! But retrieving the collar would be a challenge because it dropped off in the worst possible place. It looked like Jason got his collar off on the top of a mountain and it rolled into a very steep area – so steep that only a professional climber with ropes and climbing equipment would be needed to retrieve it.
On September 2nd, we received more “Oh, no!” news. It looked like Drew dropped his collar too. The only up-side was that this time it looked like his collar was in a much more accessible area.
There are several reasonable explanations for why the collars may have come off. A likely one is that when placing the collars, enough space was given to allow for bear growth and the fact that the bears might have now lost some weight with the increase of exercise sustained during long hours spent foraging for food, could have resulted in a collar loose enough to come off. Unfortunately, unless we get them back, we just won’t know.
Organizing an expedition to retrieve the lost collars has proven to be extremely difficult. A volunteer has offered his climbing and telemetry knowledge, but scheduling between his work, Angelika and Peter’s commitments, the helicopter schedule and the disintegrating weather is proving to be an ongoing challenge.
The good news is that Lori and Dean are sending strong and steady signals! Dean is at the river fishing and Lori is pretty much hanging out in one general area. We suspect that Lori is staying away from the rivers because that is where all the big males try to catch fish. It’s a prime feeding area and subdominant bears will avoid areas with lots of bears, particularly big males.Working with the British Columbia government, we’ll be getting information on food availability in the areas that the bears have frequented. I’ll keep everyone posted. | <urn:uuid:6c0820c2-5efc-41a3-949c-685b567f6c14> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ifaw.org/united-states/node/3059 | 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 | 0.970596 | 542 | 1.789063 | 2 |
The British Film Institute are set to turn to a cheese loving pair as part of a £500m boost for the UK film industry over the next five years, as they look to invest in movie making outside London.
The sum, which will be used to boost film production, has been revealed as part of a new five-year plan issued by the BFI.
Some of the money will also be spent on education and boosting audience choice.
The BBC stated that BFI chairman Greg Dyke said a "pioneering" partnership with Bristol-based studio Aardman would "build the animation talent of tomorrow".
Wallace and Gromit: at the forefront of British animation (Photo:WENN)
Aardman are of course most famous for their stop motion animation films, most prominently the Wallace and Gromit short and feature films, which won an Oscar. One only hopes that they don't spend the money on their favourite Wensleydale cheese.
Established in 1972, they also created children's character Morph, the Creature Comforts series and more recently Hollywood collaborations like 'Arthur Christmas' and 'The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists'.
The BFI's plan, called 'Film Forever', sets out a plan to help drive the growth of the film industry, particularly outside the capital.
Money will also be spent on giving audiences outside London a more diverse choice of film, to be achieved by putting cinema equipment into local community venues across the UK.
According to the BBC, BFI chief executive Amanda Nevill said: "We are investing where we think we can most make a difference, where we see potential for creative excellence and where we can be the supportive catalyst for change, innovation, business growth and jobs."
PHOTOS: The 2011 British Film Awards | <urn:uuid:6504960e-81f3-4430-8a4e-8d64161e155a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.entertainmentwise.com/news/89766/BFI-Turn-To-Wallace-And-Gromit-To-Boost-British-Film | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957213 | 365 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.