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mental health disorders are on the increase in the Gaza Strip, brought on by
loss of jobs and dignity, and lack of freedom under Israel's blockade
Wednesday 11 July 2012 09.26 EDT
as long as Farah can remember, her father has never worked. Nor, in recent
years, has she particularly wanted to spend time with him. She and her three
younger siblings love Abu Shawareb, insists their mother, Naima, but they have
grown wary of him, particularly of his mood swings and violent
"It was like a part of me had gone for ever," says Shawareb,
recalling the day five years ago when he suddenly lost his job. "I kept
thinking, how am I going to feed my family? How will we live?"
Israeli blockade of Gaza in June 2007, Shawareb has been unable to find another
job. "We've been left to die slowly here," he says. "I am just 40 but I feel as
if my working life is over."
He has been diagnosed with chronic
depression and is on medication. The treatment is helping, but Shawareb still
has days when he can barely pick himself up off the floor.
"Today is a
good day," he says, trying to smile. "I managed to go outside." The family's
housing situation compounds his anxieties, says Naima when her husband goes to
make tea. Recently their small, windowless house in Shati refugee camp – home to
87,000 refugees who fled from Lydd, Jaffa, Be'er Sheva and other areas of
Palestine – was infested with mice.
Stress-related and mental health
disorders are on the increase in the Gaza Strip, according to a recent report by
the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the near east (UNRWA).
A combination of internal and external influences – including forced
displacement, dispossession and occupation – have exacerbated the already high
rate of mental health problems.
Hasan Zeyada is a psychologist and
manager of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme. According to a study by
the GCMHP, depression has increased by nearly 18% among Gazans since the
blockade. Of those surveyed, 95% said they felt imprisoned. In 2010, another
study by Médecins sans Frontières said more than 50% of children under 12 in
Gaza needed mental health intervention.
"Feelings of powerlessness and
helplessness are the main causes for depression among Gazans," says Zeyada.
"Men, who in eastern culture are the powerful figures in the family, are
particularly affected. After having been able to care for their families,
overnight they become nothing. I come across many people looking for ways to
finish their lives."
Naima Shawareb says her husband is a shadow of the
man she married 10 years ago. "The children are scared of their father. If they
are playing around him when he happens to be really depressed, he can't control
himself and lashes out," she says. "When he cries, they sit in silence and cry
As if on cue, her husband begins to weep uncontrollably.
Farah, his eldest daughter, runs to the corner of the room to find him a tissue.
She says nothing as she pats his arm to comfort him, but then notices that her
mother has tears streaming down her face, too. The nine-year-old girl looks
stricken and creeps out of the room.
"Naima's family is one of thousands
who became poor overnight as a result of the blockade," says Karl Schembri,
Oxfam spokesman in Gaza. "It makes it next to impossible for such families to
recover their economic losses. Depression is rife. Oxfam offers temporary jobs
for people like Naima in sewing workshops, but the crisis of dignity gripping
her husband and so many other men we meet is hard to
Schembri believes the mental health crisis in Gaza will
remain acute until the blockade is lifted and internal divisions between
Palestinians are resolved.
"After the 2009 military operation against
Gaza, the number of children who were clearly traumatised was so visible," he
says. "Children are less attentive in school. Two-thirds fear more war and a
high percentage want revenge. How can you talk about post-traumatic stress
interventions in Gaza when people are still in a constant state of trauma?" | <urn:uuid:07e6f773-9001-416b-85e3-3ce298ec7470> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=26170 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977331 | 954 | 1.8125 | 2 |
horse-riding dance becoming your best-known cultural export, the phenomenal success of Psy's "Gangnam Style" undoubtedly raised the national profile.
Name-checked and imitated by everyone from US President Barack Obama, to Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei and pop icon Madonna, Psy bestrode his invisible horse and the music world like a colossus in 2012.
The hit video is already the most popular of all time on YouTube, having racked up more than 922 million views, and could well break through the one-billion mark before the end of the year.
A one-hit wonder maybe, but one with such staying power that the main sufferer of "Gangnam Style" fatigue was Psy himself.
"Sometimes, honestly, yes I get tired or I get sick of it," the rapper said in Singapore, during one of his endless overseas promotional stops.
In South Korea they gave him a medal in November for, as one foreign ministry official put it, "increasing the world's interest in Korea".
But the scrutinising spotlight of fame brought its problems, digging up a 2004 concert held to oppose the US-led invasion of Iraq when Psy rapped lyrics calling for American soldiers to be killed "slowly and painfully".
On Saturday the singer felt obliged to apologise, regretting any "pain" he might have caused.
Despite achieving extraordinary things in an extraordinarily short space of time, South Korea remains a frustrated understudy on the global stage compared to leading players like neighbours China and Japan.
The narrative of its rapid transformation from dictatorship to vibrant democracy and war-torn, impoverished backwater to Asia's fourth-largest economy is a source of immense national pride.
But outside views of the country are all too often dominated by glib stereotypes about dog restaurants or filtered from spurious sources like the long-running US television series M*A*S*H.
Even its obvious export success stories went unrecognised until recently, with many believing companies such as Samsung Electronics and LG to be Japanese or Taiwanese.
For Samsung, 2012 was a watershed year that saw it take a giant bite out of Apple Inc as it carved out a dominant position in the global mobile computing market.
Having ended Nokia's 14-year rule as the world's top cell phone manufacturer, Samsung saw its share of the lucrative smartphone market surge to 31.3 percent in the third quarter of 2012, up from just 3.3 percent in late 2009.
Apple smartphone sales in the July-September period were half those of Samsung's for a total market share of 15 percent.
The South Korean government has spent a substantial amount of time and money in recent years on raising the country's international profile -- notably through its support of the "Korean wave" of TV dramas and pop music that have become enormously popular in Asia and beyond.
For nation branding expert Simon Anholt, the success of someone like Psy is proof that state-sponsored or state-controlled cultural output is never as potent or attractive as individual self-expression.
"Countries are judged by what they do and what they make, not by what they say about themselves," Anholt told AFP.
"If a country wants to be admired, it has to be admirable, and in a way which catches people's imaginations: it's as simple as that," he said.
Samuel Koo, the new head of South Korea's Presidential Council on Nation Branding, is all too aware of the pitfalls of behaving like a "PR politburo" that simply trumpets the country's achievements.
"What is successful in, by and from Korea is already there and too big for us to do anything about. What can you possibly add to Psy?" Koo told AFP in an interview.
The presidential stamp gives the council genuine clout, which Koo is using to push for, among other things, greater recognition of overseas development assistance (ODA) and "green" policies as crucial tools for raising South Korea's standing in the international community.
But rather than throwing all its efforts behind a specific campaign, Koo sees the council's role as one of "joining dots" and presenting a mosaic that reflects Korea's diversity.
"Yes, it is the country of Samsung, but it's also a country of empathy, a country of ODA, the country of Psy, the country of Olympic medals.
"It cannot be too systematically orchestrated, but there are easy connections one can make," he said.
South Korea's film industry scored a major success in 2012 when director Kim Ki-Duk's anti-capitalist movie "Pieta" won the coveted Golden Lion prize at the Venice film festival.
South Korea has struggled to build a reputation for creativity and genuine innovation, with even Samsung's success tainted by accusations of copycat piracy and lawsuits with Apple over alleged patent infringements.
But Koo sees a generational change -- nurtured by economic growth -- that affords young Koreans the financial freedom to pursue creative avenues that were closed to their parents and grandparents.
"That's why we have the Psys. In my generation, if someone's son or daughter wanted to become a pop star, they would have been shot. Well, perhaps not shot, but at least had their arms twisted until they recanted.
"There's a paradigm shift there, and it's all to the good. Koreans would not be Koreans unless they were individualistic," Koo said. | <urn:uuid:ae1a1901-f9ce-4a63-965e-6fa573e89e6b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hindustantimes.com/technology/IndustryTrends/Psy-Samsung-push-brand-Korea-in-2012/SP-Article1-970795.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968785 | 1,115 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Traffic to any website consists of two types of traffic. One is called Organic Traffic and the other is known as Paid Traffic. Paid traffic again manifests in different forms, one of which being pay-per-click method.
Paid traffic gives you instant results but it can be very expensive. It would be ideal to get traffic to your site or blog organically as it will be an inexpensive proposition.
But, unlike paid traffic where we can control the results, we do not have any control over organic traffic generation. We can only follow certain unwritten rules for generation of organic traffic on search engines like Google and hope that the traffic will increase.
The most important rules for organic traffic generation are:
- On-Page search engine optimization
- Off-Page search engine optimization or Backlinks
We need to publish content that is optimized based on certain set of principles. The optimization to the content is basically required for the search engines to rank your content page higher for certain keywords or key phrases.
During the earlier days in the on-page optimization game, people were able to use short one to two word phrases and get high rankings for these phrases. But as time went by, most of the short words for different niches had already been used and ranked for.
So, the website content creators started using longer keyword phrases to rank a page in the search engines. Such longer keywords are also called Long Tail Keyword Phrases or just long tail keywords.
With thousands of websites & blogs emerging on a daily basis, even finding these long tail keywords have started becoming a challenge.
Several softwares have sprung up in helping a person to find relevant long tail keywords for specific niches.
I saw a long tail pro review, which I believe is very good in finding on-target long tail keywords. | <urn:uuid:bdf872f4-e277-47c9-959d-9b988fddd65e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theassociatereference.com/2013/02/why-is-it-important-to-consider-long-tail-keywords-for-ranking/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943088 | 370 | 1.507813 | 2 |
The US State Department called for the withdrawal of non-essential staff from its missions in Sudan and Tunisia on Sunday, directing them to leave the two countries with their families.
“Given the security situation in Tunis and Khartoum, the State Department has ordered the departure of all family members and non-emergency personnel from both posts, and issued parallel travel warnings to American citizens,” said State Department spokeswoman, Victora Nuland, on Saturday.
The US government also issued travel warnings to US citizens for both Tunisia and Sudan.
“While the Government of Sudan has taken some steps to limit the activities of terrorist groups, elements of these groups remain in Sudan and have threatened to attack Western interests,” read the warning issued concerning Sudan. The US government also announced it would require its personnel to travel in armoured vehicles for official business, and obtain permission to travel outside of Khartoum.
The German embassy in Khartoum, which was stormed in the wake of protests, announced on Sunday it would operate with a reduced staff as well.
The United States announced its intentions to deploy Fleet Antiterrorism Security Teams (FAST) to Sudan and Yemen. The elite Marine teams were deployed to provide additional security to the consulate in Benghazi. However, Sudan rejected the call for the FAST team deployment in Khartoum, as Sudanese Foreign Minister Ali Karti said that his government would be capable of “protecting its guests in diplomatic representations,” according to state-owned news agency, SUNA.
The Yemeni parliament similarly rejected a FAST team deployment in a statement, rejecting the presence of foreign troops, claiming it was the host government’s job to provide security for embassies and consulates. Although no deaths were reported in attacks in Yemen, concerns over the strength of Al-Qaeda in the country have risen in relation to the future security of diplomatic workers.
“Whoever comes across America’s ambassadors or emissaries should follow the example of Omar Al-Mukhtar’s descendants [Libyans], who killed the American ambassador,” said the Yemen-based Al-Qaeda organisation according to Reuters, “Let the step of kicking out the embassies be a step towards liberating Muslim countries from American hegemony.”
The US embassy in Yemen released a statement on Sunday announcing it would close all consular services until 29 September in anticipation of further protesting that would leave staff members vulnerable.
In Libya, FBI investigators who were scheduled to arrive to Benghazi on Saturday delayed the visit, pending the development of safer conditions on the ground. The investigators have already conducted interviews with evacuated eyewitnesses of the attack that killed 14, including the ambassador.
Libyan government officials have maintained the assault was planned by militants in an effort to strain Libya-US relations. Security officials have identified 50 individuals allegedly involved in the attack and have arrested four, but have not disclosed the identities of those detained. | <urn:uuid:383d850c-2e00-428f-b3fd-20a16a06a5d7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2012/09/16/us-withdraws-embassy-staff-from-sudan-and-tunisia/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969835 | 603 | 1.515625 | 2 |
With all of the attention Google+ and Facebook has been getting recently, many people have asked me if this means the end of Twitter. Certainly not. Twitter is still a valuable social networking tool and should be part of your entire social media strategy. In fact, the San Francisco-based organization has made some minor tweaks over the past several months to improve user experience.
Primer on Twitter
But first, let’s do a quick primer on Twitter. As we discussed previously, Twitter is a real-time information network connecting you to the latest information about what you find interesting. This could be sports, entertainment, world news, healthcare issues, etc. All you do is find the public streams you find most compelling and follow those conversations. @wpahospitalnews, for example, will report on the latest news and trends around the healthcare and hospital industries across the Western PA region as well as the world. Sometimes, we’ll post about local (non-health related) news that our followers may find interesting. | <urn:uuid:74bf69ff-6882-4fb5-a870-7d2585ed3d30> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kartcommunications.com/category/twitter/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937433 | 207 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Do We Really Reinvent Ourselves?
Are you feeling the need to reinvent yourself or your career? Personally, I don’t like using the word reinvention when it comes to your life. It’s semantics, I know, but I think what we do when we create a “new identity” for ourselves is more about evolution than reinvention. Several years ago I noticed I was very resistant to the idea of reinventing myself. It felt like I needed to learn new skills, market myself differently and see myself as someone new. I now realize that all the fragments of myself have been forming with each job I worked and each class and personality test I took. I’ve been evolving into who I want to become so there is no need to reinvent myself.
Reinvention means taking our lives and creating something new. Yet, what we really do when we start a new career or business is called evolution. It’s the natural progression towards fulfilling our life mission.
When we repackage all of our skills, talents, experience, and knowledge and present it to the world, it is the next step along our life’s evolutionary path. Here’s an example. A person who is a carpenter for a living fulfills his life long dream of being a writer. To the rest of us it may look like a career reinvention but what it really means is the carpenter is doing what he felt destined to do. What we don’t see is all the years he fantasized about becoming a writer, studied writing, wrote ideas in his journal and wrote short stories. His career evolved into something new behind closed doors.
If you’ve been feeling pressure to reinvent yourself, all you really need to do is reframe your life from a different perspective. There is no need to become someone new. Just allow yourself to evolve into the person you are destined to become.
How do you feel about reinventing yourself and moving into a new career or business? Can you see how you have consciously or subconsciously moving into a different direction? | <urn:uuid:e67db0b6-d306-4933-98c0-ba43862396f9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://entrepreneurialgoodlife.com/135/do-we-really-reinvent-ourselves-3/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974006 | 429 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Decline and fall of the Old Firm
What went wrong for the Bhoys and the Blues?
What went wrong for the Bhoys and the Blues?
Celtic: a Biography in Nine Lives
Faber & Faber, 288pp, £16.99
Probably nowhere in Europe is as football-mad as Glasgow. In a city of 600,000 people, two clubs - the historically Catholic Celtic and the historically Protestant Rangers - each draw average crowds of nearly 50,000. The national stadium, Hampden, can take another 52,000. "It is a piece of territory drenched in football, and there is an intensity at odds with the fact that the prizes at stake are minor in the eyes of the world at large," writes Kevin McCarra in this diligent yet disappointing book.
The "Old Firm" derby between Celtic and Rangers remains the most bitter event in British sport. It generates death threats, murders and chants for and against the IRA. This is peculiar, 14 years after the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, even longer after the death of God in Scotland and soon after both clubs have ditched their international ambitions. (Rangers are currently in administration, following a long debt binge.) The Old Firm rivalry lives on, even as the backdrop to it transforms. Football in Glasgow is a curious social phenomenon that reveals some uncomfortable truths about Scotland.
McCarra is a fine journalist and a knowledgeable Celtic fan but his book is frustrating. Eager not to produce another hate-filled Old Firm document, he rarely discusses Rangers and underplays the rivalry. A craftsman of daily newspaper articles, he seems overwhelmed by the task of structuring a book and this one at times seems to have no organisation at all. The banal moralising grates, too: "Players have the opportunity now to become vastly richer than those who watch them. The risk is that they live only in the opulent but enclosed society of football itself."
Still, he gets across Celtic's basic story. Like most of today's big European clubs - Manchester United, Barcelona and Bayern Munich, for instance - Celtic was created by poor, rootless, 19th-century migrants trying to build community institutions for themselves in an alien industrial city.
The club's founder, the Marist Brother Walfrid, intended Celtic to provide charity for the Irish Catholics who had fled the famine for Glasgow. The neighbourhood around Celtic's stadium was then spectacularly poor. It isn't much better now. Local male life expectancy in 2006 was 53.9 years, nearly 30 years lower than in the nearby town of Lenzie and over ten years lower than in Iraq.
Whereas Rangers for decades until 1989 refused to sign Catholic players, Celtic never discriminated against Protestants. Nonetheless, the club became a rallying point for Glaswegian Catholics and for the Scots-Irish diaspora around the world. This is partly because Scottish Catholics for a long time had it hard. As Michael Kelly, scion of one of the club's old ruling families, recalls of the 1960s:
We had just come through an era in which Catholics were quite severely discriminated against. [Some large engineering firms] wouldn't employ Catholics . . . The Conservative Party, or Unionist Party as it called itself in Scotland, was very anti-Catholic . . . A lot of accountancy and law firms simply wouldn't start Catholics as apprentices.
Even in the 1990s, a Protestant Glaswegian insurer told me that he thought Catholics should shroud their identities - for instance, by giving their children non-religious names - so as to avoid persistent job discrimination.
Some Celtic fans took their embrace of Irish Catholic identity to extremes. At an Old Firm game in 1993, I stood amid Celtic fans who chanted in praise of the IRA: "Ooh, aah, up the Ra, say ooh, aah, up the Ra!" That day, the IRA blew up two children in Warrington. McCarra says similar chants are still heard today, even though the IRA is now no more violent than the Liberal Democrats.
In the past 15 years, both clubs have tried to stamp out bigotry, largely for pragmatic reasons. The IRA guff puts off sponsors and when the market in foreign footballers opened up in the 1990s, the old prohibition on signing Catholics became irksome for Rangers. Many of the foreign players who have since come to Glasgow must have struggled to remember whether they were playing for the Protestant team or the Catholic one.
Moreover, the social background to the rivalry has transformed. Glasgow has ceased to be a particularly sectarian or Christian city. The bishop of Motherwell once mournfully told me that the Celtic fans shouting supposedly Catholic chants never showed up at mass. Not only do these fans have Protestant friends and colleagues; nowadays, many have Protestant wives or parents. I met one Celtic fan who, after his son was born, had raced to the town hall to name his son after the entire Celtic team (the subs wouldn't fit on the birth certificate). It sounds like a standard Glaswegian pub anecdote, except that this man's wife was a Protestant and a Rangers fan. (He said she had kicked the sitting room door off its hinges when she found out.) In other words, his feelings for Celtic's footballing past had outlived any sectarian sentiment.
What seems to have happened is that the sectarian chanting around the Old Firm has become mere decoration. It harks back to the two clubs' traditions and spices up today's rivalry. Even the death threats sent to Celtic's Northern Irish Catholic manager, Neil Lennon, are best understood as symbolic re-enactments of the sectarian past. The fans' songs for and against the IRA have become, above all, football songs. You see the same trend in stadiums across Europe: football chants are ceasing to be the echo of political or regional or religious passions. Rather, football clubs have become causes in themselves.
Empty as the sectarian rhetoric around the Old Firm has become, it must still irk Scottish nationalists. In 2014, Scotland will hold a referendum on independence. But two of the country's biggest social movements - Celtic fans with their Irish tricolours, Rangers with their Union Jacks - are mostly cold to the Scottish cause. A glance at the Old Firm helps explain why, according to the pollsters, Scots will vote against independence.
The faux-sectarian huffing and puffing in the stands presumably distracts fans from how Rangers and Celtic are now merely not very good Scottish teams. As McCarra explains, once television income became the key determinant of success for European clubs, the Old Firm teams, with their small local TV market, were doomed. Both clubs tried joining the English Premier League but were rebuffed. In the years before the recession they tried to compete through debt-spending and each reached a European final. However, as the flirtation of Rangers with bankruptcy illustrates, the strategy was unsustainable.
In football terms, the rivalry between the teams has become a parochial squabble - McCarra calls it "an ever more severe struggle that holds ever less interest for anyone outside the west of Scotland". He notes "a danger that the Old Firm rivalry may become the sole context in which each club exists". That makes the sectarian decoration all the more necessary.
Simon Kuper is a Financial Times columnist and author of "The Football Men" (Simon & Schuster, £16.99)
More from New Statesman
- Online writers:
- Steven Baxter
- Rowenna Davis
- David Allen Green
- Mehdi Hasan
- Nelson Jones
- Gavin Kelly
- Helen Lewis
- Laurie Penny
- The V Spot
- Alex Hern
- Martha Gill
- Alan White
- Samira Shackle
- Alex Andreou
- Nicky Woolf in America
- Bim Adewunmi
- Kate Mossman on pop
- Ryan Gilbey on Film
- Martin Robbins
- Rafael Behr
- Eleanor Margolis | <urn:uuid:5028190f-c44a-4ea5-aa39-c3ca9f2eb305> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2012/03/celtic-firm-rangers-football | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967834 | 1,633 | 1.59375 | 2 |
The Dance Centre
Established in 1986 as a resource centre for the dance profession and the public in British Columbia, The Dance Centre has evolved into a multifaceted organization offering a range of activities unparalleled in Canadian dance. Seeking to boost the profile of dance, and to develop a stronger infrastructure for the artform, The Dance Centre devises programs and presents performances; manages Scotiabank Dance Centre, Canada's flagship dance facility; promotes BC dance to the public and to presenters; and provides resources and services for its membership of dance professionals.
The Dance Centre runs programs and projects which support the professional development of dance creators and performers, and nurture new audiences. Key programs include Artist-in-Residence, where a choreographer undertakes creation, performance, teaching and outreach activities over an extended period of time; DanceLab, in which choreographers collaborate with professionals from other disciplines; Global Dance Connections, a contemporary dance performance series featuring artists from BC, Canada and overseas; and Discover Dance!, an informal noon performance series. Dance In Vancouver is a biennial event showcasing BC-based contemporary dance artists, both to the public and to presenters of dance from around the world.
Scotiabank Dance Centre
For over two decades The Dance Centre spearheaded the drive to create a home for BC's dance community. In 1995 it created The Dance Foundation, an independent not-for-profit society to fundraise for, construct and own the building. Today The Dance Centre manages this state-of-the-art facility, which opened in September 2001 in downtown Vancouver, on a site donated by its title sponsor. The building has become a hub for dance activity, housing The Dance Centre's programs, as well as rehearsals, classes, workshops, performances and events by dance artists and companies from Vancouver and beyond. Scotiabank Dance Centre generates an estimated 60,000 visits annually.
Promoting BC Dance
The Dance Centre is the primary source for information about dance in BC. The public can access information about hundreds of dance performances, classes, companies and organizations. In addition to events such as Dance In Vancouver, The Dance Centre promotes BC dance internationally, producing information for presenters and promoters around the world: the BC Dance Directory lists hundreds of BC dance organizations, and from Vancouver to the world gives information about local companies available to tour. In 2003 The Dance Centre facilitated a tour by nine Vancouver companies to the Dance Week Festival in Zagreb, Croatia.
A Resource for the Professional
The Dance Centre's members include professional dance companies and individual artists, teachers, choreographers, performers and dance enthusiasts. They benefit from resources and information about funding, jobs, auditions, training and other opportunities; Dance Central, a bimonthly publication, E-Central bulletins, and specialist dance publications and directories; information sessions and networking events. Video facilities include access to equipment and an editing suite, and an extensive dance video library - the largest one in Western Canada. Members receive free or discounted places on workshops and training initiatives; can apply to participate in Dance Centre programs; and receive consultations with experienced staff on topics such as grant writing, marketing and incorporation. | <urn:uuid:4294b354-dc36-4a54-9745-505693414c6f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thedancecentre.ca/about_us/the_dance_centre | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932146 | 639 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Cytoplasm and organelle transfer between mesenchymal multipotent stromal cells and renal tubular cells in co-culture.
ABSTRACT Cell-to-cell interactions of human mesenchymal multipotent stromal cells (MMSC) and rat renal tubular cells (RTC) were explored under conditions of co-cultivation. We observed formation of different types of intercellular contacts, including so called tunneling nanotubes. These contacts were shown to be able to provide transfer of cell's contents, including organelles. We documented intercellular exchange with fluorescent probes specific to cytosol, plasmalemma and mitochondria. Initial transport of cellular components was revealed after 3 h of co-culturing, and occurred in two directions--both direct and retrograde as referred to RTC. However, transport of probes toward MMSC was more efficient. One significant result of such transport was appearance of renal-specific Tamm-Horsfall protein in MMSC, indicating induction of their differentiation into kidney tubular cells. We conclude that transfer of cellular compartments between renal and stem cells could provide differentiation of MMSC when transplanted into kidney and result in therapeutic benefits in renal failure.
Article: Bi-directional exchange of membrane components occurs during co-culture of mesenchymal stem cells and nucleus pulposus cells.[show abstract] [hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: Mesenchymal stem cell (MSC)-based therapies have been proposed as novel treatments for intervertebral disc (IVD) degeneration. We have previously demonstrated that when MSCs are co-cultured with nucleus pulposus (NP) cells with direct cell-cell contact, they differentiate along the NP lineage and simultaneously stimulate the degenerate NP cell population to regain a normal (non-degenerate) phenotype, an effect which requires cell-cell communication. However, the mechanisms by which NP cells and MSCs interact in this system are currently unclear. Thus, in this study we investigated a range of potential mechanisms for exchange of cellular components or information that may direct these changes, including cell fusion, gap-junctional communication and exchange of membrane components by direct transfer or via microvesicle formation. Flow cytometry of fluorescently labeled MSCs and NP cells revealed evidence of some cell fusion and formation of gapjunctions, although at the three timepoints studied these phenomena were detectable only in a small proportion of cells. While these mechanisms may play a role in cell-cell communication, the data suggests they are not the predominant mechanism of interaction. However, flow cytometry of fluorescently dual-labeled cells showed that extensive bi-directional transfer of membrane components is operational during direct co-culture of MSCs and NP cells. Furthermore, there was also evidence for secretion and internalization of membrane-bound microvesicles by both cell types. Thus, this study highlights bi-directional intercellular transfer of membrane components as a possible mechanism of cellular communication between MSC and NP cells.PLoS ONE 01/2012; 7(3):e33739. · 4.09 Impact Factor
Article: Tunneling nanotubes provide a unique conduit for intercellular transfer of cellular contents in human malignant pleural mesothelioma.[show abstract] [hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: Tunneling nanotubes are long, non-adherent F-actin-based cytoplasmic extensions which connect proximal or distant cells and facilitate intercellular transfer. The identification of nanotubes has been limited to cell lines, and their role in cancer remains unclear. We detected tunneling nanotubes in mesothelioma cell lines and primary human mesothelioma cells. Using a low serum, hyperglycemic, acidic growth medium, we stimulated nanotube formation and bidirectional transfer of vesicles, proteins, and mitochondria between cells. Notably, nanotubes developed between malignant cells or between normal mesothelial cells, but not between malignant and normal cells. Immunofluorescent staining revealed their actin-based assembly and structure. Metformin and an mTor inhibitor, Everolimus, effectively suppressed nanotube formation. Confocal microscopy with 3-dimensional reconstructions of sectioned surgical specimens demonstrated for the first time the presence of nanotubes in human mesothelioma and lung adenocarcinoma tumor specimens. We provide the first evidence of tunneling nanotubes in human primary tumors and cancer cells and propose that these structures play an important role in cancer cell pathogenesis and invasion.PLoS ONE 01/2012; 7(3):e33093. · 4.09 Impact Factor | <urn:uuid:fcc26237-bf8e-4886-898d-dcb5d9e070ad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.researchgate.net/publication/45091076_Cytoplasm_and_organelle_transfer_between_mesenchymal_multipotent_stromal_cells_and_renal_tubular_cells_in_co-culture | 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 | 0.933845 | 977 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Leonard Cohen On The Heart Of “The Gypsy’s Wife”
This recently uploaded excerpt from the Harry Rasky documentary, The Song of Leonard Cohen,1 contains an especially explicit discussion by Cohen of the portion of his life that is captured in the song.
The Leonard Cohen and Suzanne Elrod History
Between 1968 and 1970 (accounts vary), Cohen and Suzanne Elrod,2 an artist, began a relationship that Rasky claims was a marriage while Cohen has said that “cowardice” and “fear” precluded marriage. Given that in this clip, Cohen terms the relationship a “marriage,” one can understand Rasky’s contention.
In any case, the union resulted in the birth of two children, Adam in 1972 and Lorca in 1974, both of whom are pictured in the video clip and in the screenshot below.
The relationship between Cohen and Elrod ended by 1979, when the documentary was filmed. That final disruption is the focus of “The Gypsy’s Wife.”
The Video Of Leonard Cohen’s “The Gypsy’s Wife”
In addition to the explication and a solid performance of the song, Cohen also reads his poem, “Slowly I Married Her.”
Leonard Cohen on The Gypsy’s Wife
Bonus: Suzanne Elrod At Home In Hydra
Suzanne Elrod has lived at the home Cohen originally purchased in Hydra for some time although rumors have surfaced that she may be leaving.
- For those interested in learning more about The Song of Leonard Cohen, I recommend the concise, well written Review by Dick Straub. [↩]
- As previously noted in The 2008 Leonard Cohen Field Guide, the song, “Suzanne,” does not refer to Suzanne Elrod. It was Suzanne Verdal, the wife (then) of Cohen’s friend, the Québécois sculptor Armand Vaillancourt, who fed the singer tea and oranges. [↩]
- Elrod is also pictured on the cover of “Death Of A Ladies’ Man
- I found the photos from Vogue at LeonardCohenFiles. [↩] | <urn:uuid:fcd4a068-175e-4084-a4ec-2814f9902c09> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://1heckofaguy.com/2009/03/19/leonard-cohen-unfolds-sings-my-gypsy-wife/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961581 | 473 | 1.835938 | 2 |
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Chapter 25: WHEREIN THIS HISTORY REVERTS TO MR. FAGIN AND COMPANY (continued)
'That's two doubles and the rub,' said Mr. Chitling, with a very long face, as he drew half-a-crown from his waistcoat-pocket. 'I never see such a feller as you, Jack; you win everything. Even when we've good cards, Charley and I can't make nothing of 'em.'
Either the master or the manner of this remark, which was made very ruefully, delighted Charley Bates so much, that his consequent shout of laughter roused the Jew from his reverie, and induced him to inquire what was the matter.
'Matter, Fagin!' cried Charley. 'I wish you had watched the play. Tommy Chitling hasn't won a point; and I went partners with him against the Artfull and dumb.'
'Ay, ay!' said the Jew, with a grin, which sufficiently demonstrated that he was at no loss to understand the reason. 'Try 'em again, Tom; try 'em again.'
'No more of it for me, thank 'ee, Fagin,' replied Mr. Chitling; 'I've had enough. That 'ere Dodger has such a run of luck that there's no standing again' him.'
'Ha! ha! my dear,' replied the Jew, 'you must get up very early in the morning, to win against the Dodger.'
'Morning!' said Charley Bates; 'you must put your boots on over-night, and have a telescope at each eye, and a opera-glass between your shoulders, if you want to come over him.'
Mr. Dawkins received these handsome compliments with much philosophy, and offered to cut any gentleman in company, for the first picture-card, at a shilling at a time. Nobody accepting the challenge, and his pipe being by this time smoked out, he proceeded to amuse himself by sketching a ground-plan of Newgate on the table with the piece of chalk which had served him in lieu of counters; whistling, meantime, with peculiar shrillness.
'How precious dull you are, Tommy!' said the Dodger, stopping short when there had been a long silence; and addressing Mr. Chitling. 'What do you think he's thinking of, Fagin?'
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OAS cost may tally $109B by 2030
Baby Boomers longevity hits Ottawa's coffers
John Greenwood, Edmonton Journal (Financial Post)
At a time of ballooning government debt, this is probably the last thing Ottawa wants to hear: According to a new report by Canada's chief actuary, payments to seniors by the Old Age Security program could rise to $109-billion by 2030, up from $36-billion in 2010.
That's a threefold increase, and unlike the Canada Pension Plan, which is funded from an actual investment fund, OAS comes directly from government revenue.
OAS is a key part of Canada's public welfare system that along with Canada Pension Plan ensures a minimum income for all seniors. It was instituted in the 1950s and continues to be regarded as an important part of this country's public policy. Problem is, like the rest of the welfare system, it's become quite expensive thanks to now-familiar demographic trends.
"Mortality rates between the ages of 80 and 90 have recently decreased at a pace of about three times faster than that observed over the previous two decades," said Jean-Claude Ménard, the chief actuary.
An important point to note is that the OAS cost estimates don't take into account recent changes boosting the age of eligibility to 67 from 65. Those changes - contained in legislation that was passed at the end of June - are expected to reduce OAS payments by about $10-billion a year by the time they're fully implemented in 2030.
One of the more interesting findings in the 96-page report was that between 2005 and 2009 mortality rates for all seniors actually rose compared to the government's expectations (5% more men died than expected, 3% more women). While this should be good news for taxpayers, it is likely a statistical blip that will have little or no impact on the long-term trend toward longer lifespans.
To read the full article: http://www.edmontonjournal.com/business/cost+tally+109B+2030/6920530/story.html | <urn:uuid:ce9132f4-d9c3-48a7-9b37-64545421ffe5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.palcanada.org/financial/527-oas-cost-may-tally-109b-by-2030.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963511 | 431 | 1.828125 | 2 |
If you haven't seen PetSugar's Pet of the Day group, you really should get in on that. Combined with National Photography Month, it's a great way to show off how adorable your pets are! However, if they aren't so photogenic (read: won't sit still for the camera), have no fear — there are a few ways to get great pics of your furry friends without chaining them to the ground. Here, I'll pass along a few basic, but tried-and-tested tricks to getting the shot, no matter if Fido and Sassy are hyperactive, or totally lazy.
- Create a distraction-free zone — Your pet's attention span can be short, especially if there's a lot of toys, objects, or items in his view. Clear out the area you'll be photographing in, so Fido's attention will be squarely on you.
- But, Keep his favorite toy or treats handy — Although you should clear the area of unwanted clutter, you'll want to keep your pet's favorite toy or treat handy for when it's time to snap the pic. A little coaxing goes a long way.
To see a few more tricks, just keep reading.
- Avoid using your camera's flash — One of the most distracting things about pet photos is the glare from the flash in his eyes. Open up a few windows for natural light, or take the photo shoot outside instead.
- Get down to their level — The best way to really capture your pet's features is by getting down on all fours and photographing them at their eye level. Hovering over from above may be your usual position, but it doesn't give us much to look at . . . except the tops of their heads!
- Choose the right setting — Fast-moving pets can make for blurry photos. Try changing your camera's setting to "sport" or "action" mode, which increases your camera's shutter speed and captures images faster, thereby reducing blur. | <urn:uuid:e7319af3-19eb-4bc8-ac04-7c6910d970eb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.geeksugar.com/National-Photography-Month-Photo-Tip-Day-2010-05-05-034750-8319722 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959495 | 410 | 1.601563 | 2 |
An individual with extensive knowledge in one or more aspects of business who helps a start-up company that lacks expertise in those areas.
QCED believes that companies like Phoenix small, post-start-up, high-growth tech firms are largely ignored by traditional academic research and business models. Success stories do exist, but entrepreneurs struggle to find ones that apply to their situations. And they rarely have time to waste.
That's where QCED hopes to come in. The firm has a network of 50-plus "knowledge angels" advisers from across Canada who lead high-growth firms. Companies can also sign up for services such as mentoring, interim management and venture capital coaching.
Andrew Wahl, "Thanks for the lift," Canadian Business, November 12, 2001
That helped cement a project for the Queen's centre to create a network of 'knowledge angels,' proven corporate players who could fly in and aid an early-stage company having difficulties or needing help in an unfamiliar area.
Daniel McHardie, "'Knowledge angels' aim to answer prayers," The Globe and Mail, October 3, 2000 | <urn:uuid:d8dd40f9-be0a-4bb5-beb9-aea05cfaa9d1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wordspy.com/words/knowledgeangel.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957097 | 225 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Thu May 24, 2012
New Revenue Deal Means Olympics Could Now Return To U.S.
The United States and International Olympic Committees have formally announced a revenue-sharing agreement that paves the way for the return of the Olympics to the U.S.
Details of the deal were not released but sources familiar with it say it guarantees the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) at least $110 million a year from international Olympic sponsorships and the American rights to televise the games.
The USOC share of new revenues will be cut sharply from the current formula and the USOC will initially contribute $15 million a year to help pay for staging the Olympics. That amount rises to $20 million in 2020. The agreement expires in 2040.
Other National Olympic Committees and some members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) resented the fact that the USOC had the biggest share of Olympic revenues. That was based, in part, on the fact that American corporations and television networks generated most of the income that flowed into the IOC.
The resentment is considered one factor in the IOC rejection of recent efforts by Chicago and New York to host the Olympics. The revenue-sharing dispute resulted in so much tension the USOC decided it would not submit any American bids for the Olympics until it could negotiate a resolution.
USOC officials even moved up by two years a negotiating schedule that wasn't supposed to begin until 2013.
"We hope this has removed a road block from a successful bid for the United States," said USOC Chairman Larry Probst, who added that the USOC will now discuss an American Olympic bid next month.
The next Olympics up for grabs is the 2022 Winter Games. Salt Lake City, Reno-Lake Tahoe and Denver already have Olympic committees studying the possibility of submitting host city bids for 2022. There's also interest from Olympic boosters in Bozeman, Montana.
The USOC decides which American city to nominate as the country's candidate. The IOC then chooses from among candidate cities from multiple countries.
The last summer Olympics in the U.S. was in 1996 in Atlanta. Salt Lake City hosted the 2002 Winter Games.
IOC officials sound pleased to have resolved the dispute with the world's biggest source of Olympic revenues.
"This is a very happy moment," said IOC President Jacques Rogge. "This agreement will definitely strengthen both sides." | <urn:uuid:fb3c5f9c-82e2-4fcb-b92d-fe50ce9de700> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.knau.org/post/new-revenue-deal-means-olympics-could-now-return-us | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962536 | 487 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Not according to William Deresiewicz:
If food were really a narrative medium, then all food would be narrative, just as the clumsiest and most simplistic story is. If food were really a narrative medium, it would also be able to speak about anything, to whatever degree of detail and specificity you want—not just, as with the curry, itself. Any made object can, in that sense, "tell a story," but only about its own making. A tall, green-eyed astronaut fell in love with a lawyer who recently lost her job: when you can cook me a dish that says that—and tell me how you’d change it if the astronaut were dark instead of fair—then we can talk about food as a narrative medium.
Food is ordered: but so are spreadsheets, or even regular sheets, when you make your bed in the morning. Food evokes emotions: but so do sunsets, or train sounds, or the cigarette smell of a bar. Food embodies ideas: but so does everything that’s made. To evoke is not to represent, and to embody is not to express. | <urn:uuid:6855e392-6e1e-4914-bca5-4c32f45c07ab> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2012/12/01/is-food-art/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980834 | 232 | 1.789063 | 2 |
By Kylie Bearse
Watch the video here: http://kifi.m0bl.net/r/1d36yn
Idaho - For most of us,
snowmobiling is a fun winter sport. But for some parts of Idaho, it's a way of life. Here's how deep
an impact it's having in one community, and how it's being threatened.
2013 is off to a roaring start for Island Park
“I think every business up here is thriving right now,” said
Tania Phillips of Mountain Mayhem.
“We've seen more people than we've seen in, more than I've
seen in 23 years of working here,” said Joe Williams of the Elk Creek Repair Shop.
Both own businesses along the main stretch, where
snowmobilers from near and far stop for rentals or to gas up before hitting the
They said these winter months are crucial.
“It's a good 50 percent of our business through the year,”
No doubt the terrain in Island
Park is perfect for snowmobiling, and
it's why Island Park is thriving. However, there are big
changes coming next year and it all has to do with a little sticker.
In 2014, snowmobilers will have to register online or at the
DMV, then wait for their registration in the mail.
“It flat-out will not work,” said Williams.
Residents say the policy is changing because one business
was keeping the money from registrations.
From a Parks & Recreation Department standpoint, they
faced an 80-percent cut in budget two years ago and an order from Governor
Otter to make agencies more efficient.
“We've always been able to provide those registration
stickers for locals and visitors,” said Phillips.
Law enforcement will also have to adjust.
“If they don't have stickers, they'll have to carry a
receipt,” said Fremont County Sheriff Len Humphries. “It'll be a bit of a
challenge” because finding that slip of paper isn't easy in snow gear.
The biggest problem will be for the weekenders--you can't
simply pick up the pass when you get there.
“We've got to actually plan ahead,” said Tamra Cikaitoga,
director of Fremont
She said it won't be easy to take a last-minute trip when
you see that killer snowstorm, “which, you know, is hard when we want to get
out on that snow.”
More restrictions could mean fewer registrations. That would
lead to less grooming on the trails and less money for the county.
“It will affect us tremendously,” said Williams.
“Bottom line, we think it's going to hurt us for a couple
years,” said Cikaitoga.
Harmful or not, the effects of the new registration rules
won't be known for quite some time.
posted Saturday, Jan 26 2013 03:59 PM
Not uncommon. Try to get the state to set up a state supplied computer station with a printer that has 24 hour access. Also maybe have the patrol officers take down the personal info from individuals that do not have registration or a receipt in possession, at that time write them a fix-it type citation. Then run their name when possible to see if they are registered. If not send them a citation. My thoughts.
Comments that contain personal attacks or excessive vulgarity are subject to removal at SnoWests' discretion.
Please keep it clean and worth reading. | <urn:uuid:b2215834-bdeb-4f4b-a9dc-3fdb5f104a95> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.snowest.com/snowmobile-news/display.cfm?ID=3661 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947477 | 770 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Welcome, Karen Pullano’s scavenger hunters! This is the article Karen read and commented on, and you can read her comments and my response starting at August 2, 1:39pm. As you can see, I directed her to this post, which is the next stop on your scavenger hunt! (To start from the beginning of the scavenger hunt, go here.)
When we perform an act of faith, hope, or love in God, we are in direct contact with Him, and this is especially true at Mass. God is no longer remote, He is as close to us as any two persons can be because Christ is not only present in the Eucharist, He dwells in us. In our earthly life we don’t see or touch God directly, but when we perform acts of faith, hope, and charity we are as near God as Jesus Christ the Son of God is near the Father and the Holy Spirit. Even in Heaven we will never be closer to God than when we make a sincere act of faith, hope and love.*
Living in fellowship with God is the climax of the Christian life, a life directed towards charity. The Catechism says “that the practice of all the virtues is animated and inspired by charity, which ‘binds everything together in perfect harmony’; it is the form of the virtues; it articulates and orders them among themselves; it is the source and the goal of their Christian practice. Charity upholds and purifies our human ability to love, and raises it to the supernatural perfection of divine love.” (CCC 1827)
For these reasons, my husband and I decided a long time ago that we wanted to make a habit of taking all our young children to Mass with us, an act of charity. We said to God, “We believe, we trust, we hope in you. God we love you above all things. We love our neighbor for your sake, and we will raise these children to do the same.” We figured that faith and hope would allow us to do whatever we needed to do to attend Mass as a family, and that it would be a blessed, climax of our lives each week symbolizing our blessed unity.
Oh you know the feeling, you envision it something like this.
So, each week we spent the three hours it took to get the kids all dressed, loaded into the truck, and driven to our parish. We filed in through the parking lot, and taught the children to quietly bless themselves, kneel and make the Sign of the Cross, locate the readings and hymns, and do all the things they can do to participate. However, even with all our fervent prayers invoking the aid of the saints and angels, even with all our determination and virtuous efforts in faith and hope and love, this is really more like how it looked each week.
Now, if you’re parents like us and can relate to the chasm between how you envision Mass with children to be and how it actually is, perhaps a simple image that keeps me focused on the bigger picture will help you too. Sometimes when I’m on the verge of tears, holding my head in shame at the misbehavior of my children – children we really and truly do try our hardest to teach and discipline in love – I ask God to just give me a glimpse, a little spark of light, to lighten my intense distress. I don’t want to let Satan win by focusing on my frustration and anger. I don’t want to be distant from God when I should be the closest, and I don’t want to distract anyone else. So, in an act of sincere faith, hope and charity, I say a little prayer that God will illuminate my vision beyond the immediate chaos in the pew, and that those around us are mercifully spared even noticing we are there (now that’s hope).
And this is what I see first.
I see myself alone at Mass, with everything that disturbs me fallen away. All I have to do is look around and see all the women sitting alone who have told me countless times that they remember when their children were little, when they also once brought them to Mass with their husbands and faced the same frustrations. I remember how so many times after Mass, they tell me, with distant smiles and tears in their eyes, how fond they are of those precious memories. Like everything in this life, it passes. Time passes, and passes, and passes, whether we want it to or not. If I live long enough, one day that may be me sitting alone with my memories in sacred silence before God, thanking Him for the journey of my life, sufferings, joys and all. And not just this life, this life is temporary, but for the life to come when I am hopefully, in faith and love, united with the entire family of God, in communion all together, forever into eternity. That is Mass, resting in unity with the Body of Christ, glimpsing Heaven.
So, this is what I see next.
That’s kind of how I picture the Beatific Vision, and it reminds of something else I read in the Catechism. “The practice of the moral life animated by charity gives to the Christian the spiritual freedom of the children of God…There is the goal; that is why we run: we run toward it, and once we reach it, in it we shall find rest.” (CCC 1828-1829)
The more I’ve learned to focus on the bigger picture, the more I’ve been graced to endure the daily minutia and allowed to understand that moral life on earth is an animated life, a journey towards perfection but never in any instance the culmination of perfection itself. That has made me strong enough to endure things and events I never imagined I could endure because attending Mass regularly has taught me what life is really all about – Christ’s love for me and for you.
*Source: Biblical Morality by Fr. Benedict Ashley, Lecture One: Difficulties in Constructing a Biblical Moral Theology
Sites That Link to this Post
- How We Found Our Son – A Mission of Love | Mission Adoption | September 25, 2012 | <urn:uuid:49c5a7e6-6f5c-4739-aae6-52b62a48b2d5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.acceptingabundance.com/moral-life-animated-with-stick-figures/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961891 | 1,302 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Microsoft has woven Internet Explorer and Bing through Windows 8. The marriage of the two has been done so nicely that Google has produced a website to help users "get their Google back." It seems as though Google might be slightly worried about Microsoft, Bing, and Internet Explorer. Take a look for yourself.
The video is pretty humorous. Whether or not it is effective at conveying the message that Google would like it to remains to be seen. Google has created a search app that will bring with it a user interface that most Googlers will be familiar with:
The Google Search app comes with a clean and recognizable user interface. Our new voice search lets you naturally speak questions. The image search and image previews are built for swiping. And, as usual, you get immediate results as you type with Google Instant. The doodles you enjoy on special occasions will be right there on the homepage and even show up on the Google tile on your start screen.
Chrome has also been updated for the touch interface and now features larger buttons with everything else about it largely unchanged. If you aren't sure how to "get your Google back," head on over to the website Google has put up to help guide you on your way to a search master. Check out GetYourGoogleBack.com
Further Reading: Read and find more Internet & Websites news at our Internet & Websites news index page. | <urn:uuid:18871437-dec9-4d82-921e-d04f057732cd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://australia.tweaktown.com/news/26429/google_wants_you_back_launches_new_site_get_you_google_back/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943588 | 284 | 1.65625 | 2 |
I recently figured out that modern x86 cores at >2 GHz get about 6 times as much work done as an older SPARC CPU at 900 MHz (for a particular workload) - this is an older model CPU, but representative of what's installed at many sites.
This means you could replace a 144 CPU SPARC server, which must have cost $500,000 at least, with a 24 core x86 server giving the same throughput - one server from HP (quad Xeon, 6 core processors) is priced at $20,000. In the current economic situation, this is amazingly attractive for any new deployments - you may even find the old hardware's annual maintenance is more than the cost of the new hardware, so it's worth the hassle of switching an existing server.
Of course, your mileage may vary, and this ignores disk I/O, reliability features, etc - but you can get resilience through clustering these days, by buying two or three of these servers.
The only real options on x86 are Linux and Windows, in terms of what major corporations will specify and major ISVs will support (I know Solaris x86 exists, but how many people really use this compared to Linux?). Many companies who have used Unix for decades are far more comfortable with Linux than Windows for mission critical software, and their applications will port easily to Linux.
This is probably why I'm seeing a huge upsurge this year of enterprises that are specifying Linux for formerly Unix only applications. Far more of an uptick in switching to Linux than in the post-dotcom downturn. | <urn:uuid:89b73376-4504-425d-9ac0-9c5edda11e76> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lwn.net/Articles/361871/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950553 | 321 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Cruising is usually seen as a bit of a soft-option when it comes to travelling…. entertaining and relaxing, yes, but a far cry from the swashbuckling adventurers that used to ply the high seas. Thankfully, some cruises offer more than a casino to set your heart a-flutter.
One of the wonderful things about cruise ships (when properly equipped) is that they can access areas cut off from travellers restricted to planes, trains and automobiles. And the main attraction when it comes to cruising off the beaten track is the ability to explore the ends of the earth; both north and south of the equator.
Cruises to Antarctica are top of any aquatic adventurer's to-do list, although cruises are restricted to the summer season from November to March. Many of the ships in use are converted Russian research ice-breakers, so don't be surprised if you find yourself boarding the Akademik Sergey Vavilov!
Most cruises to Antarctica depart from Ushuaia in Argentina, the southernmost town in the world and itself a great destination to spend a few days exploring. From Ushuaia you'll cross the dreaded Drake Passage (pack the seasick tablets!) as you head south towards the Antarctic Peninsula. Most ships offer Zodiac trips ashore so you can explore the Peninsula, while cruises including helicopter trips, kayaking, camping and even scuba diving are all on offer depending on your budget. Trips further afield to the preserved huts of famous Antarctic explorers, the Ross Ice Shelf as well as the islands of South Georgia and the Falklands are also popular.
At the other end of the globe are the treacherous waters of the Arctic Ocean, home to the fabled Northwest Passage which claimed hundreds of sailors searching for a sea route to Asia. Cruises range from sightseeing circuits around Greenland and Iceland to four-week adventures across the top of Russia and even a nuclear-powered journey to the North Pole!
While the Antarctic may lay claim to breathtaking vistas and giant icebergs the Arctic has more to offer in the way of wildlife; with narwhals, walruses, whales and polar bears to keep you company. Journeys to the far north are also popular for marvelling at the breathtaking Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights. These are best viewed in the Northern Hemisphere winter though, and the all-day darkness could put a dampener on your other sight-seeing.
If you decide to brave the darkness, the Hurtigruten Line offers one of the most interesting ways to enjoy the Aurora while exploring the dramatic coastline of Norway. With daily departures from Bergen en route to Kirkenes across the Arctic Circle, the ships call at 34 ports never visited by commercial cruise liners. Delivering freight, post and passengers to remote communities, some of which are home to just a few hundred people, this is a wonderful way to combine the comfort and adventure of cruising with a taste of the local culture.
The Alaska Marine Highway Ferry System offers a similar service for budget travellers on the United States' Pacific coastline, but there are also a host of commercial cruise ships offering a more comfortable ride past the glaciers, forests and waterfall of the wildest state in America.
After all that snow, ice and darkness you're probably about ready for some sun, sea and sand! Head then, to the eastern Mediterranean, where small ship cruising in the sun awaits.
Turkey is famous for its ragged coastline of rugged peninsulas and calm bays watched over by towns dating back thousands of years. The best way to experience this craggy coastline is on a Turkish gulet; a traditional wooden sailing ship usually sleeping 12 – 16 passengers in six to eight cabins. A major advantage of guletting is that you can either charter an entire boat (if you have a large group of friends or family), or simply rent a cabin on one of the scheduled cruises.
There are also a wide range of cruises on offer, from historical voyages exploring ancient civilisations of the Aegean to simply relaxing sails in the sun where snorkelling and swimming are all that's expected of you. Although most gulets aren't overly luxurious, the small crew do all the work on-board and will ensure you're well looked after.
If the romance of sail is what you're after, but you'd like a little luxury too, then the West Indies are the place for you. Windjammer Barefoot Cruises were the original cruise operator offering holidays under sail, and have four ships based in the exotic Caribbean.
As the name suggests, Windjammer Barefoot Cruises are relaxed affairs, and you're encouraged to feel the sun-weathered teak beneath your toes while your ship sails the warm waters of the West Indies. On-shore excursions range from the active to the cultural, so whether you're a type-A adrenalin junkie or just looking to soak up the Creole culture there'll be a cruise for you.
If you want the sail with a little more sass, Star Clippers offers five-star tall ship cruising. The ships may sail like the hard-working clippers of the 20th century, but on-board you are certainly not expected to haul in the main sheet. The fleet consists of three impressive clippers, but the imposing Royal Clipper is the pride and joy. The only five-masted sailing ship built in the last 100 years, the Royal Clipper is driven along by 42 sails but boasts state-of-the-art navigation systems and five-star luxury, complete with three swimming pools, glass atrium and health spa with underwater portholes. Adventurous guests can even climb the mast to the 'crow's nest' for a bird's-eye-view!
Page 3: Family holidays afloat | <urn:uuid:c029a221-1efb-47d9-b069-4ff607c64a63> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://travel.iafrica.com/destin/709775.html?p=2 | 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 | 0.945121 | 1,192 | 1.6875 | 2 |
The city of Aberdeen has awarded the Our Aberdeen group $3,800 to print art-related brochures and restore the centennial murals that have dotted the Harbor since 1986.
The allocation comes from tourism tax dollars the city collects from residents staying in local hotels and motels.
Denny Lawrence, who sits on the Our Aberdeen steering committee, says the group has its eye on two murals right now, one by the Aberdeen Transit Station and the other by the westside Swansons.
“We’ve been trying to get funding to get the murals redone,” Lawrence said Friday. “We want to spruce them up and make them presentable.”
Many of the murals have simply faded away over the past 25 years. A mural that hung on the old LaVogue’s Building in Hoquiam was torn down when the wall was replaced.
Lawrence said that Our Aberdeen is trying to contact the original mural artists, but if they can’t be reached, they may try to find someone else to help.
Hans Rehder, who did the new mural on the exterior of the Star Wars store in Aberdeen, had said he always wanted to do restoration work on the centennial murals.
“Give me money for paint and I’ll do it,” Rehder said in December. “If you look close, a lot of these murals just need a good power wash. Maybe there’s mold and mildew and the paint is peeling.” | <urn:uuid:3be3e631-3ce0-4eb7-9280-4e2707b4e85f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thedailyworld.com/sections/news/local/our-aberdeen-gets-money-city-mural-restoration.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960871 | 325 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Thursday, June 30, 2005
U.S. & India Sign Major Defense Pact
The US and India have signed a 10-year agreement to strengthen defence ties. The "New Framework for the US-India Defense Relationship" (NFDR) was signed this week by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and India's Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee. In an excellent analysis, Joe Katzman explains why this "is a big deal. A very big deal."
Under the NFDR, Washington has offered high-tech cooperation, expanded economic ties, and energy cooperation. It will also step up a strategic dialogue with India to boost missile defense and other security initiatives, launch a 'defense procurement and production group,' and work to cooperate on military 'research, development, testing and evaluation.'We are currently India's largest trading partner and Indians geneally have a favorable opinion of America. Our strategic interests are converging and ties between the two countries are blossoming on many different levels, as US Ambassador to India Robert D. Blackwill noted in 2003:
----------------Furthermore, the MFDR envisages joint and combined exercises and exchanges between both sides, naval pilot training... and increased cooperation in the areas of worldwide peacekeeping operations and expansion of interaction with other nations "in ways that promote regional and global peace and stability."
With respect to overlapping vital national interests, my big three for the next decade andbeyond are to promote peace and freedom in Asia; to combat international terrorism about which more later; and to slow the spread of weapons of mass destruction. It is difficult for me-- and this is a momentous strategic reality - to think of any nations other than India and the United States that will face to the same intense degree all three of these intense challenges simultaneously in the period ahead. Let me repeat them. Advancing Asian stability based on democratic values. Confronting daily the threat of international terror. Slowing the further spread of weapons of mass destruction. This daunting trio will be an encompassing foundation for US-India strategic cooperation for many years to come.India is all but certain to become our most important bilateral relationship in the not too distant future. President Bush deserves much of the credit for recognizing this and doing something about it that will have beneficial long-term concequences for America's world wide security interests.
Regarding people-to-people connections, allow me to give you just a few statistics. Since Iarrived in India, the US consular sections in Kolkata, New Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai have issued more than a half a million business and tourist visas. And, please listen carefully, the overall visa issuance rate for India is the same today as it was before 9/11, and there are no long visa lines at US diplomatic facilities in India.
In addition, India has become the second greatest source of legal immigration to the United States, second only to Mexico. This is not a one-way flow. In 2002, our consular sections registered more than 5,000 new Americans in India, and the total number of US citizens inIndia is more than 65,000. Last year, India became the single largest source of foreign students in the United States, over 66,000. This number of Indian students has grown by fifty per cent in the past 24 months. In 2002, India was second only to Germany as the country of choice for American senior scholars seeking Fulbright grants to study overseas. And we all know the extraordinary and growing contributions Indian Americans are making to US society. | <urn:uuid:2714d58a-40c8-41d2-b9f6-915895c52ef6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bdroppings.blogspot.com/2005/06/us-india-sign-major-defense-pact.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945034 | 716 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Energy-saving equipment can trim electricity bills up to nearly 50%.
Lowering monthly electricity bills is probably motivation enough for most pork producers to consider fluorescent lighting, high-efficiency ventilation systems and other energy-saving equipment. But getting a rebate from your power company to help pay for those devices is icing on the cake, says Iowa pork producer Rob Brenneman.
Several years ago, Brenneman converted from incandescent lighting in his finishing facilities, nurseries and farrowing barns to fluorescent lights. His utility company, Alliant Energy, based in Madison, WI, rebated him a portion of the associated costs, including $2 for each 30-watt, compact fluorescent bulb and $20 apiece for permanent Orion 32-watt fixtures.
Besides reducing out-of-pocket expenses for the new lights, the rebates encouraged Brenneman to search for other power drains on his farm.
“We found certain finishing sites were cheaper to run than others,” says Brenneman, who later enlisted Alliant to conduct energy audits at all of his production sites. “When we looked at where that electricity was going, we found that some fans were better than others, even though every (manufacturer) says it has a high-efficiency fan.”
Brenneman, who operates a farrow-to-finish operation with his wife Char, son Tim and son-in-law Tyler in Washington County, IA, replaced inefficient stir fans, controls and ventilation fans in several facilities and was awarded rebates by Alliant for many of those improvements.
Mark Kingland, an Alliant technical support project manager based in Mason City, IA, says Alliant customers can expect to earn over $3,300 in rebates on energy-efficient lights and fans for a new 2,400-head, tunnel-ventilated finishing facility. Some 45 different items appear on Alliant's rebate list with payments ranging from just a few dollars per item to $150 per 48-in., high-efficiency fan.
Rebate offers like the Alliant program are available at a number of other utility companies, so it can pay producers to talk to their electricity provider to determine if they qualify for payments.
Ongoing Energy Savings
Kingland, who is also a partner in a hog operation in northern Iowa, explains that by encouraging customers to save energy, utility companies ultimately benefit. In the past 30 years, per capita energy consumption has been on a steady increase, he explains.
“If we can save some energy, especially during peak demand, we don't have to build as many power plants for new generation,” Kingland says, adding that new plants are costly to build and tightly regulated.
In addition, the ongoing energy savings are a boost to the bottom line for utility customers like Brenneman. After he upgraded his facilities, his monthly electricity bills were cut in half in some cases. “The finishing sites were running in the $300-500/month range, and we got those down into the $200 range,” Brenneman says.
Kingland estimates that high-efficiency lights and fans installed in a 2,400-head, tunnel-ventilated finisher can save nearly $4,000 in annual energy costs.
“Helping the businesses that are spinning our meters be more efficient and stay in business is a good thing for us,” Kingland says. Last year, Alliant's agricultural rebate program equaled a 6.8 million kilowatt electricity savings for customers in Iowa and Minnesota.
Two years ago, Chuck Peters wanted to determine the impact of variable rate controllers vs. manual thermostats for supplemental heaters in farrowing crates. Peters is a co-owner of Wakefield Pork, a 40,000-head, farrow-to-finish operation based in Gaylord, MN.
Working with Herdstar and BENCO, Wakefield's electricity provider, Peters set up a one-year trial in a Wakefield farrowing room. BENCO supplied meters to monitor electricity use on each side of the room, with thermostats on one side and Herdstar's MicroZone controllers on the other. The controllers are designed to adjust the output from heat lamps or mats depending on the ambient temperature and the age of the pigs.
Peters was impressed with results from using the variable rate controllers. “We were creating a little better environment for the pig and saving energy,” he says. Based on the trial, BENCO offered to rebate Wakefield about a third of the equipment cost to install the Herdstar controllers in three farrowing units.
Peters says electricity consumption has been about 15% lower in the units where the Herdstar controllers are installed, and shares this example of energy use from a 3,300-head site:
“It would appear that we can pay for the equipment and installation in 4-5 years,” says Peters. “I think they were worth the investment.”
Alliant also offers customized rebates on equipment such as variable rate controllers and other equipment proven to save energy. But Kingland is quick to point out the rebates are not as significant to a producer's bottom line as ongoing energy efficiency. “What you really need to look at is the energy savings over the next 20 years,” says Kingland. | <urn:uuid:b5a4b996-b3d8-4939-92fb-eede3d5fb436> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nationalhogfarmer.com/facilities-equipment/0215-energy-savers-earn-rebates | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958029 | 1,107 | 1.695313 | 2 |
A few days ago, I had all the kids with me on a trip to Walmart. At the checkout line, I realized that I needed, and had forgotten to get, a tomato. Knowing the snail-like pace that is always the checkout line at Walmart, I sent the boys off to grab me one from the produce department.
They came tearing back, giant tomato in hand. Chase set it on the conveyor belt and announced, in his unmistakably loud voice, "Bad news, Mom. It's a Mexican."
I look up in horror, smile at the African American check-out girl, and try to say loudly, "That's okay, Chase. I'm sure MEXICAN TOMATOES are delicious."
To which he practically shouts, "But, Mom, we don't really like the Mexicans." [I know he was only thinking the tomatoes would taste different. The kid has love for all god's people. Honest.]
My ensuing lecture about how we really do like everyone was lost in the murmurs and shame that was our hurried walk out to the car.
For the record, we DO like the Mexicans.
And their giant tomatoes. | <urn:uuid:2701ceeb-7287-49dd-8095-7d8186f060d0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://stiesthoughts.blogspot.com/2009/03/tolerance-even-for-our-vegetable.html?showComment=1237670820000 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973943 | 242 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Shared responsibility – a new global compact for HIV
08 June 2011
A call for a new global deal of compacts to shift leadership of the AIDS response to countries was made in the first panel Shared responsibility–a new global compact for HIV on the opening day of the UN General Assembly High Level Meeting on AIDS.
Chaired by the Honourable Denzil Llewellyn Douglas, Prime Minister of the Federation of St Kitts & Nevis, the panel brought together the UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibé, Mr Søren Pind Minister for Refugees, Immigration and Integration and Minister of Development Cooperation of Denmark, and the General Secretary of the National Confederation of Municipal Workers in Brazil (Central Única dos Trabalhadores) and inter-American Regional co-President for Public Services International Ms Juneia Batista.
Shared responsibility needed
Against the backdrop of the global financial crisis, , the panel pprovided a unique opportunity to build consensus on a new global agreement for the AIDS response that could serve as a pathfinder to a new deal of shared but differentiated responsibility for health and development.
“Shared responsibility is not an option for small states. It is our reality. We have no choice in the Caribbean but to develop shared approaches in all sectors.”
Honourable Denzil Llewellyn Douglas, Prime Minister of the Federation of St Kitts & Nevis
“Small is beautiful. And different,” said Hon Douglas sharing his experiences from the island Federation of St Kitts & Nevis “Shared responsibility is not an option for small states. It is our reality. We have no choice in the Caribbean but to develop shared approaches in all sectors.”
Despite the increasing clout of emerging political powers and strong economic growth in many African countries, many national responses to HIV in low- and middle-income countries remain fragile, are largely externally-funded and driven by external development agendas. In 56 countries, international donors supply at least 70% of HIV resources.
Shared values for shared responsibility
Emphasizing the need for mutual respect and understanding in development cooperation Mr Pind encouraged participants to be truthful and work together. “But there are certain principles that you cannot ignore. Like discrimination against populations at higher risk. And this needs to be said,” he noted.
According to the panel, country ownership and sustainability will require increased and predictable long-term domestic and international funding. “Don’t get me wrong, I am all for innovative financing. But certain donors can not hide behind the need for innovative financing to shy away from meeting their commitments on official development assistance,” said Mr Pind.
At the same time, governments must be accountable for increasing domestic investment where possible and allocating resources where they are most needed and putting in place an enabling environment said the panel.
“10 years ago we would not have had this debate. The world has changed completely and we have to reflect on this. It is time to think about a new paradigm of partnership based on share responsibility,” said Mr Sidibé. “And we need share responsibility based on shared values for a social compact.”
Panellists and audience alike discussed priorities such as assuring continued leadership and shared responsibility for the AIDS response, including a new generation of leadership; strengthening broad national ownership and engaging communities in order to foster local and sustainable solutions; securing long-term financing; and increasing efficiency and ensuring mutual accountability for the future global response. Importantly, as noted by Ms Batista: “Shared responsibility and intelligent investment does not mean that countries should in any way adjust in reaching their commitments.”
10 years ago we would not have had this debate. The world has changed completely and we have to reflect on this. It is time to think about a new paradigm of partnership based on share responsibility
Michel Sidibé, UNAIDS Executive Director
Outlines of a new global compact
In this light, the new global compact discussed in the panel can be formulated around three key pillars. The country’s responsibility, the international community’s responsibility and the shared responsibility for innovation:
The Country responsibility
- ensuring voice and participation in democratic governance
- delivering smart responses—including enabling environments and human rights
- increased domestic investment on basis of ability
- responsible ‘donorship’—including long-term predictable and aligned financing
- increased support from emerging countries and new development partners
- more coherent international policy on trade, regulation, etc
Shared responsibility for innovation
- innovative financing mechanisms—including the private sector
- innovative partnerships including South-South cooperation and triangular cooperation
- enhanced mutual accountability for the reciprocal responsibility in the compacts including joint planning and reviews of the smart responses
According to the participants, universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support can be achieved by spending smartly and increasing annual investment to between US$ 22 and 24 billion by 2015. These resources can be mobilized by diversifying funding sources and balancing responsibilities.
UN General Assembly High Level Meeting on AIDS
Thirty years into the AIDS epidemic, and 10 years since the landmark UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS, the world has come together to review progress and chart the future course of the global AIDS response at the 2011 UN General Assembly High Level Meeting on AIDS from 8–10 June 2011 in New York. Member States are expected to adopt a new Declaration that will reaffirm current commitments and commit to actions to guide and sustain the global AIDS response. | <urn:uuid:ad0586c1-90a8-4c33-9b6a-466eb672aca2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/featurestories/2011/june/20110608apanel1/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943052 | 1,137 | 1.765625 | 2 |
UPDATE 6-Outages, floods hit two N.J. refineries; others restart
* Phillips 66's 238,000-bpd plant has flooding, power out
* Philadelphia's 330,000-bpd refinery restarting
* Hess 70,000-bpd NJ refinery, Imperial plant suffer outages
* Gulf Coast's Colonial Pipeline without power at NJ pump
* Gasoline futures pare losses as power glitches surface
By Janet McGurty
NEW YORK, Oct 30 (Reuters) - The second-largest refinery on the U.S. East Coast suffered some flooding and a power outage from Hurricane Sandy, and two smaller plants also lost power, as glitches threatened to slow the recovery in fuel supplies disrupted by the massive storm.
While the region's biggest plant, in Philadelphia, and several others were ramping up operations after escaping damage, other facilities, pipelines and terminals were struggling to restore the flow of supplies that had slowed to a trickle.
Phillips 66 said there was "some flooding in low-lying areas" of its 238,000 barrel-per-day Bayway, New Jersey, plant, which was shut on Monday as a precaution. The plant remains closed, the company said, and utility PSE&G said power was likely to be restored no sooner than in 24 to 48 hours.
News of trouble at Bayway, nicknamed the "gasoline machine" for its key role in supplying motor fuel to the New York City area, pared losses in gasoline futures which had fallen more than 2 percent as output recovered elsewhere and traders bet that fuel consumption would be hit.
RBOB futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), which was due to reopen its trading floor on Wednesday, closed down 1 percent, their first loss in three days. By late afternoon they had erased losses and turned higher.
Other power-related glitches also surfaced after the storm, which left more than 8 million customers without electricity, shut seven major regional airports and all but halted traffic on the nation's most heavily traveled roads.
As the storm moved north, a power outage shut Imperial Oil's 121,000-bpd Sarnia, Ontario, refinery, but the company said it expected to restart units later in the day.
Hess Corp's 70,000-bpd Port Reading, New Jersey, refinery, which had also shut ahead of Sandy, lost power and had no time frame for restarting.
The northern Line 3 segment of the Colonial Pipeline, a conduit that supplies as much as 15 percent of the East Coast's 5.2 million bpd of gasoline, diesel and fuel demand, was still idle, but the company said it had not suffered any operational damage. Portable generators were being brought in to restore power to the Linden tank farm and resume shipments.
The company asked customers to divert fuel shipments bound for the New Jersey area to southern markets.
The flooding at Bayway, which had been seen by experts as the refinery most vulnerable to Sandy's record 13-foot (4-meter) storm surge and subsequent power outages, is a potential second nightmare for Phillips 66, which had struggled to restore its Alliance, Louisiana, refinery after Hurricane Isaac in August. That storm pushed more than 2 feet of floodwater into the plant.
PHILLY PLANTS SEEN OK
Operations in the Philadelphia area appeared set to resume quickly. Philadelphia Energy Solutions' 330,000-bpd refinery, the biggest in the region, escaped damage and was restoring operations at the Point Breeze half of the plant that was shut, the company said, confirming a Reuters report.
Industry group Genscape said its infrared cameras detected the restart of key crude and vacuum distillation units.
Delta Air Lines subsidiary Monroe Energy's 185,000-bpd Trainer, Pennsylvania, plant operated through the storm, and was expected to reach full rates next week after a maintenance overhaul, a source with knowledge of operations said.
PBF Energy was ramping up its Delaware City refinery after minimal run-cuts, another such source said. A company spokesman confirmed reports that the plant had flared briefly, but said the incident had not affected operations.
Delaware City and PBF's 180,000-bpd Paulsboro plant in southern New Jersey, which had throttled back to reduced rates ahead of Sandy, "ran well through the storm", spokesman Michael Karlovich said.
He said personnel had completed a "thorough assessment" of the facilities, and that PBF would not provide further updates on logistics or operations.
The precautionary refinery closures were more widespread than during Hurricane Irene in August 2011, when only the Bayway plant shut completely.
John Auers, senior vice president and refining specialist at Turner, Mason & Co in Dallas, said East Coast plants, even those near the water, are better protected from potential flood damage than those that suffered weeks-long outages on the Gulf Coast following hurricanes Katrina and Rita seven years ago.
Still, even minor flooding can be a concern and plants without sufficient on-site generators may have to wait for utilities to restore outside power. The largest risk may simply lie in restarting vast, intense equipment.
"You're talking about heating up oil to fairly high temperatures, putting it through processing units at high pressure," Auers said. "Anytime you interrupt that steady-state there is always the potential for issues."
The vast network of terminals and smaller pipelines that serves the region - seen as a potentially greater danger than refinery outages - was also being assessed.
NuStar Energy said it could not access its Linden, New Jersey, terminal, while Magellan Midstream Partners said it would resume loading at two truck racks in Delaware and Connecticut later in the day. Motiva was reopening terminals apart from those in New Jersey and New York which were flooded and those in Connecticut which had lost power.
Major ports that supply the area with some 1 million bpd of imported fuel were starting to reopen. The Port of Boston opened without restrictions and was expected to unload a gasoline cargo later on Tuesday, an official said.
DEMAND IN FOCUS
Barring major damage, most experts expected the region's fuel supplies could bounce back quickly, while demand was likely to take a much deeper knock. Some 170,000 bpd of jet fuel demand alone was shut for a third day as all three major New York area airports remained shut, with no date for resuming flights.
Benchmark New York gasoline futures prices, which rallied more than 6 percent before the storm as traders feared a disruption in supplies, were still down 1 percent or 3 cents on Tuesday as the focus shifted to the likely cut in fuel consumption due to grounded flights and empty roads. U.S. crude oil futures rose slightly, reversing Monday's dip.
One trader offering to sell physical cargoes in the New York Harbor market found no buyers on Monday.
"For the moment you have a big black hole where there used to be oil demand," said Credit Suisse oil analyst Jan Stuart. He said 80 percent of demand in the New York metropolitan area had been affected somehow.
"In the end, the demand deficit outweighs the supply deficit."
Airlines had canceled more than 15,770 flights in the past four days, flight-tracking service FlightAware said.
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Cancer Queens Use “Edutainment” to Promote Screening and Awareness
Envision a group of women donning feather boas and rhinestone tiaras, dancing to the sound of “The Loco-motion” while singing the lyrics, “Every woman needs this lifesavin’ test now. Come on baby, go and get your Pap smear.” These 10 lovely ladies are a part of Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center’s Cancer Queens! A Cancer Prevention Musical Revue!
This traveling troupe of professional health educators volunteer to perform a 45-minute, live show featuring skits and song and dance routines set to popular music with new educational lyrics. The Cancer Queens have had little training other than singing in the shower and watching themselves dance in the mirror at home.
The “edutainment” group is on a mission to inspire women to treat themselves like queens and take care of their health. Mattie Bates, a breast cancer survivor and Cancer Queen, said that the group tries to empower women to take care of themselves against cancer.
Audience members have approached me after performances to discuss their diet and exercise routine as well as telling me they were definitely going to make appointments to get their mammogram and Pap test.
We have had many people write on their evaluations that they wish all women could see our show to hear our message.
With Prevent Cancer Foundation’s grant-funded support, Cancer Queens has been able to travel to rural communities across Middle Tennessee to encourage women to get their screenings as well as live healthier lives.
Cancer Queens is part of the Nashville, Tenn. based Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, which is a National Cancer Institute Comprehensive Cancer Center and is part of National Comprehensive Cancer Network. Learn more about Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center’s Cancer Queens. | <urn:uuid:d407420f-e072-41f8-af5c-18cda6c0c853> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.preventcancer.org/2011/cancer-queens-use-edutainment-to-promote-screening-and-awareness/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960495 | 380 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Bishop Scott Jones makes a point during his sermon at the Sending Forth Service.
Bishop Scott Jones, center, baptizes Emmalee Faith Cloud.
Kansas Area Bishop Scott Jones sent members of the Kansas East Conference home from the annual conference session, charged with following Jesus’ example of healing the whole person.
The Kansas East Conference met June 6-9 under the theme, “The Church United: Working for Wellness.”
“Jesus was interested in healing whole people,” Jones said. “When Jesus was healing physical illnesses, he was forgiving sins. He was curing the dis-eases people had.”
A passage from 2 Kings served as the basis for Jones’ sermon. In the passage, Elisha heals Naaman, a Syrian soldier. Jones said it is a powerful story of the basic things prophets did in the Old Testament in the name of God.
The act was wholistic. By healing Naaman’s leprosy, Elisha showed that God’s healing was not just for the chosen Israelites. If we want to save the world, we need to be an inclusive church, Jones said.
“I hope part of what you have gained from this annual conference is that your church should not be a club for benefit of its members,” Jones said. “I don’t care where you are from. There are unchurched people that you need to be loving. If Elisha can love Naaman the Syrian, there’s nobody in your town you can’t love. This is an inclusive God.”
At the same time, Jones said we’re an evangelistic church. By healing him, Elisha showed Naman the one true God. When Elisha healed him, Naaman response shows that he recognized God, although he was a beginning believer with a lot to learn.
“You need to be engaged in physical healing in your communities,” Jones said. “Whenever we engage in physical healing, we are also engaging in evangelism, and we need to get our heads around it.”
Finally, God healed Naaman, which demonstrates that we are in the healing business.
“Clergy feel inadequate because we don’t have the medical training; doctors feel inadequate about the spiritual stuff,” Jones said. “Jesus was engaged in preaching, teaching and healing. We don’t get a pass on the healing part.”
Jones said he believes the world needs a vital United Methodist church in every community here and around the world.
“We have a calling, and we have an opportunity, and we serve a God who is able,” Jones said. “God is able. Thanks be to God.”
During the service, Emmalee Faith Cloud, daughter of Leslie and Jacob Cloud, was baptized, and the bishop fixed the appointments to local churches and extension ministries. | <urn:uuid:7d1f8d55-22d3-416a-8e82-73fcaeec1abc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kansaseast.org/news/detail_ke/768 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967007 | 624 | 1.835938 | 2 |
From March 10 to 18, 2012, the Alternative World Water Forum (FAME or Forum Alternatif Mondial de l’Eau) will be held in Marseilles, France. This event is being, organized by associations and movements, trade unions, NGOs, citizens and elected representatives from all over the world.
A forum about activism and solidarity
The FAME will be a meeting place for all people who are fighting for water: against the appropriation of land and water, against the development of shale gas, which pollutes underground aquifers and rivers; against the privatization of water by multinationals, more or less all over the world…
This will be a chance to look towards Africa and the Mediterranean and meet up again with rural associations and women’s organizations who attended the World Social Forum in Dakar.
A forum about sharing experiences and alternatives
FAME will focus particularly on illustrating the mobilization of citizen movements and civil society associations around Lake Nokoué in Benin with the support of Emmaüs International, the remunicipalising of water in Paris, the ongoing expansion of public-public partnerships, the practical proposals for ensuring access to water and food security for rural populations. With numerous first-hand accounts from associations, experts in the field, and elected representatives from all over the world…
A forum about ideas and art
FAME will be an opportunity to discuss the power of water, which is often concentrated in very few hands, and its distribution; the future of water companies and also of the various forms of global citizenship for water management. But FAME will not be just debates; there will also be displays, shows, concerts, and a big party! | <urn:uuid:3d91e940-bbef-4aea-a272-359bd0e51337> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fame2012.org/en/about/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93931 | 344 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Weight-Loss Supplements: A Little Savvy Goes a Long Way
To help consumers make wise choices, the FDA recently released a Consumer Update
As more and more people struggle to lose extra weight, many of us have contemplated weight-loss dietary supplements. Consider that the global weight loss market reached a whopping $26 billion in 2009 and it becomes apparent just how many people are willing to try weight-loss products. Is this money well spent? With weight-loss supplements, a little savvy can go a long way toward making sure it is.
To help consumers make wise choices and avoid falling prey to dietary supplement fraud, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently released a Consumer Update to address the topic. Unlike some previous education efforts warning consumers away from all weight-loss supplements, the FDA is focused on practical measures for separating fact from fiction.
FDA warns of fraud
In recent years, supplements sold by unscrupulous retailers containing numerous powerful drugs have found their way into consumers' hands through Internet and in-store sales. Some "natural" diet products have been found to contain sibutramine (Meridia), a weight-loss medication removed from the market in 2010 because it increases risk of heart problems and strokes. Other FDA research has uncovered weight-loss supplements contaminated with seizure and blood pressure medications, and even prescription drugs that were never approved at all.
Become a confident consumer
The most important tip-off that a supplement may not be legitimate or pure are claims that are too good to be true. Products that promise quick action ("Lose 20 pounds in 10 days!"), that tout a revolutionary new scientific breakthrough, or that are marketed as having actions similar to FDA-approved weight-loss medications should raise a red flag. These products may contain unapproved or potentially harmful ingredients, including prescription medications.
More supplement savvy tips
In addition to paying attention to aggressive product claims, a few tips will help you make the most of any dietary supplement you decide to try.
(U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Beware of Fraudulent Weight-Loss 'Dietary Supplements.' Available at: www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm246742.htm; Accessed 23 March 2011.)
Suzanne Dixon, MPH, MS, RD, an author, speaker, and internationally recognized expert in chronic disease prevention, epidemiology, and nutrition, has taught medical, nursing, public health, and alternative medicine coursework. She has delivered over 150 invited lectures to health professionals and consumers and is the creator of a nutrition website acclaimed by the New York Times and Time magazine. Suzanne received her training in epidemiology and nutrition at the University of Michigan, School of Public Health at Ann Arbor. | <urn:uuid:7ddbb687-295a-42d6-a49d-10c2f1e7ff85> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.vitaminshoppe.com/content/en/healthguide/hncontent_printable.jsp?resource=/assets/feature/weight-loss-supplements-a-little-savvy-goes-a-long-way_14022_4/~default | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936425 | 567 | 1.648438 | 2 |
I’ve really got to get out of the habit of naming blog posts after songs from The Sound of Music. But fear not faithful readers. It all ties in.
Yesterday was the kind of day one has to write a blog about. Meeting Archbishop Emeritus and Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu calls for some kind of recognition.
We had been anticipating a service with Mr. Tutu for weeks. The plan was that we would get up early on a Friday morning, attend an Anglican service that he would preside over at St. George’s church and then go on to breakfast with him. The past few times we were to do this, however, the service was cancelled due to the archbishop having other scheduling commitments. So when we found out that we would actually get to attend the service this time, we knew how special it was.
Mr. Tutu, diminutive in stature but a historical giant for his role in bringing peace and reconciliation to South Africa after the fall of apartheid, entered a small section of the chapel and lead us through the service. Apart from the lack of music and a few word changes in some of the prayers, the service was not unlike the Catholic masses that much of our group is familiar with. When it came to the portion where a priest would typically give a homily, Mr. Tutu went around the small congregation of about 40 people and asked where everyone was from—Germany, Holland, the U.S. He warmly welcomed us and when the moment came for us to grant peace to those around us, he walked around the chapel, smiling and shaking our hands.
After the service, most of the congregation lined up to shake hands with Mr. Tutu and have him sign a book or postcard. I have been reading a copy of his book that I found in our house, so I brought along a piece of paper for Mr. Tutu to sign. As my turn came, however, I began to feel self-conscious about asking him for his autograph. At 77 years old, he was clearly becoming tired. I also felt a little presumptuous expecting someone I really don’t know to put his name on a piece of paper for me. Though we were all very glad to get his signature—because he is someone who we admire very much, through his work for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and in his strong stances against many injustices around the world—I felt almost as though I was treating him like a product or a historical statue rather than a man. Mr. Tutu did not seem to mind signing for us and is also probably quite used to signing autographs for people, but I found myself thinking about how important it is for me to value the people I meet in South Africa as humans rather than some caricatures I have in my mind.
This is a particularly important lesson at my work site. I feel like I may have come to South Africa with some preconceived notions about what it would mean for me to work with students in African schools. Like the plot of that generic Hallmark movie that seems to be remade every few years, I would arrive, struggle to connect with the students who so badly want to learn but have not had sufficient opportunities, reach some sort of a breakthrough, push them to success and then leave a better man all in time for the credits to roll to the tune of an inspirational Michael Bolton song. But like my naive initial impressions of Desmond Tutu, I realized that the students I’ll be working with are not flat characters in a movie. They’re kids: they like to run around during recess, sneak food into their mouths during class and talk while the teacher is.
At least that’s what I encountered when I began teaching reading lessons at St. Mary’s school in the township Nyanga last Monday. Though I had had initial meetings with employees of the Amy Biehl Foundation through which I’m working, as well as e-mail exchanges with Allison Schommer, the Marquette student who did a fantastic job at St. Mary’s last semester, I felt like a fish out of water as I prepared for my first lesson.
The roughly 10 students, all about 12 or 13 years old, trooped into a small room that also serves as a teacher’s lounge. They chattered in Xhosa as I prepared to address them. How do I organize class so they have fun yet improve their reading skills and learn? How do I maintain some sense of order and authority in the class while also being someone that they like and see as a friend? How do I, someone who has never taught before, even prepare a lesson? The students’ homeroom teacher had answered all of these questions with the same response: it was up to me. Empowering or terrifying?
We began the class with introductions—name, age, favorite school subject and favorite book. Apart from a girl named Cindy, I heard Xhosa names that are as foreign to me as the rules of rugby: Asihpe, Siyamptende, Thembisile. Learning the students names might be as challenging as learning how to teach.
Then we moved on to talk about what the class would entail. This was their course, I told them. What do they want to read? How can I help them? What would they like to learn about? I was surprised and impressed by some of their answers:
-“Long Walk To Freedom,” Nelson Mandela’s autobiography. This is an excellent book, but it is very large and dense. I’ve heard people my age regal it as “too long” and “never-ending.”
-Steve Biko. I attended an exhibit Friday about this young revolutionary who was murdered at the hands of South Africa’s repressive police force in 1977. Immortalized in the memories of those who believed in what he stood for (and by Peter Gabriel’s song Biko) I was thrilled that the students wanted to learn more about him, because I do, as well.
-Twilight. I’ll have to swallow my pride on that one, but it might provide a nice opportunity for the students to come to our Kimberley House to watch the movie based on the book. The students told me that my predecessor Allison had them over to watch The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and eat her homemade dinner. They expect nothing less from me. Thanks for setting that bar, Allison.
After I teach reading classes, I go on to another township school to teach guitar lessons in an after-school program. This, in a way, was even more daunting than giving reading lessons. I had already witnessed the excellent marimba class offered at the program, and though I consider myself a proficient guitarist, I have never taught the instrument and am poor at reading music. I decided to teach the 10 or so students to tune the guitars so they could get their hands on the instruments while learning a very necessary aspect of playing them.
Bad idea. Tuning guitars is as boring as Driving Miss Daisy, and I soon lost the students’ attention. I returned the second day determined and intent on teaching them some chords and a song, hopefully empowering them in their new knowledge of how to play something on the guitar. I had decided on Pete Seeger’s If I Had A Hammer when the students asked me to show them the Do-Re-Mi scale. Taking the opportunity, I showed them how to play the scale on the low E string and then explained how this scale could be used on the guitar’s five other strings. While an invisible orchestra didn’t kick in to back me the way one did for Julie Andrews when she taught those adorable little Germans the Do-Re-Mi scale, I still feel like I learned an important lesson in teaching: come with a plan but be flexible.
Flexibility is probably one of the biggest lessons I’ve taken from this experience so far (which is ironic because I learned last week that I’m double jointed). I have had many plans about what this trip will mean for me and what I will learn from classes, my work site and Cape Town’s culture. Sometimes my plans have panned out. Sometimes they haven’t. I certainly didn’t expect to walk away from Desmond Tutu’s service thinking about how I value people, and I certainly didn’t expect that I would be reading Twilight with a group of South African 12-year-olds. Sometimes all you can do is go along with what comes your way, using your plans when you can, changing course when necessary, and trusting that in all of the crazy things that happen, there is a lesson to be learned.
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|His Cup of Tea: Dominic Cooper on ĎThe Duchessí
by Dan Lybarger
Dominc Cooper and Keira Knightley from "The Duchess." Courtesy Paramount Vantage.
While Earl Grey tea is familiar across the globe, the man for whom the beverage is named is little understood, even in his native Great Britain.
Charles Grey, the Second Earl Grey (1764-1845), may become better known for his own life and achievements because heís a major character in the new fact-based drama, The Duchess, which focuses on the tangled romantic life of Georgiana Spencer Cavendish, the Duchess of Devonshire (played by Keira Knightley).
The Duchess and the Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes) may have been married until her death, but he had a lifelong affair with her best friend Lady Elizabeth Foster (Hayley Atwell), whom he later married.
The Duchess herself had turbulent relationship with the young Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper). As Prime Minister from 1830 to 1834, Grey would later be instrumental in spearheading the Reform Act of 1832, which widened the voter pool in the UK and enabled underrepresented urban districts more seats in the House of Commons. Slavery was also abolished in the United Kingdom during Greyís administration.
Despite what he achieved in the nineteenth century, his career almost ended because he and the Duchess had an illegitimate child.
Taking on this formidable supporting role is 30-year-old British actor Dominic Cooper, who is probably best known for playing the mischievous Stuart Dakin in Alan Bennettís play and film The History Boys and for wooing Amanda Seyfriend in Mama Mia!
Speaking by phone from Los Angeles, Cooper recalled learning about Earl Grey and the Duchess of Devonshire from Amanda Foremanís biography Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire and what it was like to bring their story to life.
Dan Lybarger: I just got done watching The History Boys for a refresher.
Dominic Cooper: Did you now? You had to watch that very long film.
Lybarger: I took a real interest in it because my parents are both former teachers, and my brother is a college professor. It really resonated with me more than some other people.
Cooper: I imagine so. You must be very proud of them because having done that film you realize how influential and important teachers and professors are to us and the incredible effect they have upon the rest of our lives.
Lybarger: The students in The History Boys are being trained to take a test instead of learning for learningís sake. This has been a big issue in the States. Has it been an issue in the UK as well?
Cooper: I think it has in terms of education: Learning for the love of learning and learning for the sake of the wealth of knowledge instead of learning to get to that next stage is a very interesting question to raise. What are we really learning for, to cheat and lie to get into our next level of college, which is what Hectorís character describes as learning for the soul and the heart?
I think itís definitely an issue with education everywhere. Education used to go around and round in circles in terms of how itís taught and the best way to teach children. I remember when I was in school the times were changing, it was much less academic and more about social behavior and interacting with other people, which I felt and have found very, very helpful in my later life. Obviously, it was much less academic because of it.
It raises all sorts of issues about education and how children should be taught and also about how very different children need different teachers and learning qualities.
Lybarger: Did you know much about Charles Grey before taking on the role?
Cooper: No, I didnít actually, embarrassingly. I knew very little about him, which made it fascinating to learn about him and realize what a profound effect he did have on English politics. Later on, when he became Prime Minister he passed the Reform Bill of 1832 and was very proactive in changing the way the voting system worked in England.
Lybarger: Part of the Whig party platform was to widen the voter pool.
Cooper: Exactly, which they did. And that happened, which later led on the suffragette movement and the fact that women gained the right to vote. It was a wonderful, incredible time of change in England and the rest of the world in terms of politics. It was only certain aristocratic people who were allowed to vote. Thatís what was wonderful about Charles Grey.
He didnít necessarily come from a very aristocratic background. He went to Eaton, but his peers would have been more aristocratic than himself. And he struggled in that world. And I think that from what Iíve read of him and learned about him, he was a wonderful orator, a very charming public speaker who wrote brilliant speeches.
It think thatís what put him in the right circles and moved him up the ladder of politics much more quickly than he would have, if that makes sense.
Lybarger: You just reminded me of my favorite scene of yours in the film. I loved the scene where heís just finished with his speech after Georgiana, and they have this long shot on your face, and youíre gauging what the audience thought.
Cooper: Yeah. Yeah. That scene unfortunately has been cut a lot. When I was working on that scene, it was the most fantastic speech. The original speech was much, much longer than the one you actually see, a very cleverly structured speech, which was loosely based around one heíd actually written.
And itís so rare to be given the opportunity to do something so theatrical for the screen. It gave me such a sense of power. Itís incredible how politicians have that technique of manipulating an audience and trying to encourage them and to get them to understand and believe in what theyíre saying.
And he absolutely believed in what he was saying, and very reflective of what Obama has been saying. I think actually Charles Gray says, ďChange is upon us. And we must not return to the old ways. We must be forward-thinking and progressive.Ē And to have these wonderful 200 extras standing in from of me and cheering me on while youíre giving the speech is a wonderful feeling.
Unfortunately, not all of it could stay in the film, obviously. Itís a very long speech, so you get only really the end of it. But you get the sense of it.
It was very, very exciting to do that, and it really gives you a sense of what he must have been like. And you also understand how vain politicians you know were. For the research I listened to Prime Ministersí question time in the houses of Parliament.
And they are really theatrical, you can really tell the politicians who really enjoy the theatricality of the big stage, some much more than others. Tony Blair was very much the showman. You could tell. He just oozed charisma and enjoyed the performance, which I felt that Charles Grey really did as well, and itís why she falls in love with him, I think.
Lybarger: Heís like the polar opposite of the Duke. Amanda Foreman recalled in an article that Ralph Fiennes had asked what the Duke of Devonshireís letters were like, and she told him there were almost none.
Cooper: Thatís right. Thereís an incredible amount of letters between the Duchess and Grey that were found. Their correspondence has been kept, but strangely altered by someone whoís gone through them, I think. Theyíd gone through the letters and scribbled things out and hidden parts of them.
Lybarger: Is it intimidating to play a real person for a change?
Cooper: Itís really exciting because thereís only so much you can do. Back to that thing, you kind of get a sense what it might be like to meet him, and itís really fundamental that you donít just portray a one-dimensional character.
And you really want to make him as believable, as real, as much as he was like as you could possibly be. The thing about learning about what he must have been like as a public speaker gave a sense of characterization for him. But really, you feel quite pressured to do it, but then youíve got this wonderful book to refer back to, which gave me a much firmer understanding of what he must have been like.
For him to have accomplished as much as he did, in terms of where he was politically and where he got to. He was very headstrong. I got the sense that he was very used to getting his own way in regards to everything. I think for a man to have put everything he had on the line and then to risk it all for someone he fell in love with, I found it amazing. Heís done all this for his career, and then he was absolutely prepared to throw it all away for the love of his life, which I was enthralled about.
I think heíd just reached a point where she couldnít be with him because of her children. And I think at that point if a man wonít listen or will continue to pursue a woman, expecting her to leave her children is either mad or desperately arrogant. While I think that Charles Grey was mildly arrogant, I donít think he could have continued to pursue it.
I think thatís the final answer. You canít continue to ask a woman to be with you if sheís risking her children.
Lybarger: It was amazing to me how close he came to wrecking what eventually became a substantial career.
Cooper: Absolutely. And he would have known that. And he would have been financially ruined, and he would have had nothing to do with politics every again. I love that about him, and I love the power of his feelings, the power of their feelings for one another.
Lybarger: Thereís a line from The History Boys that I think is applicable here. Irwin says that the recent past is sometimes harder to understand than the more distant past.
Cooper: Itís a wonderful line. I think so because you have some artistic license with something that happened a long time ago. We all in the audience and as actors have to use our imagination to get a sense of what a time and place was like. We can look at as many wonderful old paintings and things, but we canít ever really comprehend how these people really lived. We can represent it and get the essence of it.
But when youíre doing something thatís in the recent past, we know it and weíve seen it. To make that believable, to portray a character from those times is probably more difficult. Itís much closer to us, and we have a much closer sense of it. When you do something like The Duchess in the 18th century, it was certainly something that Saul (Dibb), the director wanted to do. When I first met him, he was desperate to make a very modern story, which it is. You could actually plunk that story of what happened now, and he really wanted it to relate to people now.
In a way, it feels very up-to-date and modern, but at the same time itís installed in the old world that we know very little about.
Lybarger: It really reminded me of some of the polygamous relationships you can find in some of the backwaters here in the States. In the Dukeís relationships with Bess and Georgiana, itís as if they were both his wives.
Cooper: I know. It absolutely was. And people go, why on earth did she let him in the house? She was just so desperately lonely it was kind of obvious that that was going to be the consequence. You have to understand what the social etiquette was: what could be seen and what could be talked about? There are some wonderful scenes. Thereís the scene where Grey storms in and demands that she return to him. That scene actually took place. There are references to that actually happening. And he burst into a room full of members of the Whig party, and he made an absolute fool of himself. But people still kept pretty quiet about it. I think thereís something so interesting about that because words didnít spread as quickly as they do now. There was this whole secret underground going on all the time. What did people say about Bess and Georgiana and their relationship? It must have been common knowledge, but maybe people just didnít talk about it.
Maybe people were too scared for their own reputations. You always get a sense that somebodyís listening in to conversations in these wonderful, big stately homes where they have plenty of servants running around. There was a cloak of mystery and secrecy to the way that people lived, which I found really quite fascinating.
You really get a sense of it when you work in the buildings themselves.
Lybarger: You really worked in some of the locations where these events took place.
Cooper: It really helped. It really breathed life into the world that youíre working in. Itís one of those things where you go into Parliament and you think, ďWhat have these walls witnessed?Ē You really get a feeling of it: centuries and centuries of monumental decisions being made about the world, and theyíve seen them, generations of families. I find that really, really exciting. You get a sense of how people worked physically and how they inhabited those spaces, so different from the spaces in which we inhabit now and very, very helpful to put you in that world.
Lybarger: Itís kind of sad that so much of London was destroyed in World War II.
Cooper: Absolutely, a lot of it was, but thereís still a fair amount of the old buildings. Unfortunately, the Devonshire house no longer exists. That was opposite Green Park I donít think that got blown up.
Lybarger: Right now youíre best known for Mama Mia! Did you grow up hearing ABBA tunes?
Cooper: I did, actually. I unfortunately found some terrifying evidence. A girlfriend of mine when I was thirteen years old filmed and recorded me dressed up in a fur coat singing ABBA songs and knowing all the lyrics. I have no way of hiding that.
I have no idea what I would have done. There was no way I would have let on to my friends because I was in a gothic band at the time. So had they known that I was singing and dancing to ABBA, I think I would have been fired immediately.
Lybarger: What instrument did you play?
Cooper: I was the lead singer. Weíre getting back together soon. Some improvements have been made.
Lybarger: Whatís the name of the band should anybody want to look out for it.
Cooper: Weíre called Dagmar.
link directly to this feature at http://www.efilmcritic.com/feature.php?feature=2581
originally posted: 10/04/08 15:25:25
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Cash boost for pothole repairs in Sussex
Potholed roads will be repaired and improved thanks to a multimillion pound funding boost.
Councils across Sussex will be handed an extra £6 million for the next two years to extend the life of the county’s weather-beaten highways.
Transport bosses have welcomed the news, which comes as budgets are squeezed by Whitehall.
Brighton and Hove City Council will receive nearly £1 million – £595,000 for 2013/14 and £325,000 in 2014/15.
West Sussex County Council will receive an additional £2.9 million in next two years while East Sussex County Council has been awarded £2.3 million.
Councillor Ian Davey, the city council’s transport committee chairman, said: “This is a very welcome announcement. The additional funds for highway maintenance will go towards repairing damage from winter frosts and one of the wettest summers on record.
“Well maintained highways are essential for providing a safe and efficient transport system, supporting mobility and economic activity in the city.”
The recent cold and wet weather has taken its toll on the county’s roads.
Earlier this month huge holes appeared in Reigate Road, Worthing, and Temple Street Brighton.
It is believed freezing temperatures weakened the road above a Victorian sewer or trench in Temple Street.
The new money is part of a £333 million scheme announced in the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement for essential maintenance to renew, repair and extend the life of roads in England.
It is in addition to the millions of pounds the Government is already providing for councils in Sussex between 2011 and 2015 for highways maintenance.
The funding could be used for improvements such as road resurfacing, maintenance of bridges or repairing damage to highway infrastructure caused by severe weather events, such as the recent flooding.
Transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin said: “This extra money will support economic growth and development by helping local authorities in the south east to get the best out of their road networks.
“This funding can be spent on measures to bring smoother, safer and more reliable journeys to the travelling public whether they are commuting to work or taking the children to school.”
A spokeswoman for the Department for Transport said a condition of the funding was for local authorities to publish a short statement on how it is spent.
This has to be done at the end of each of the two financial years. | <urn:uuid:38d56549-cc2b-42fe-bb64-17e440249cc8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/10134477.Cash_boost_for_pothole_repairs_in_Sussex/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945411 | 534 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Woe to any scientist with an interest in objectively researching and reporting on âLGBTâ-related issues. If your findings fail the leftâs socio-political âbutterflies-and-rainbowsâ litmus test, the âprogressiveâ establishment will try to destroy you â guaranteed. Thus, on these matters, honest scientific inquiry will require courage.
Kansas State University, July 2010: Family Studies professor Dr. Walter Schumm releases the most comprehensive study to date on the effects of homosexual âparenting.â Published in the Journal of Biosocial Science, the study determined, among other things:
Just before the research was released, AOL News reported, âSchumm says it shouldnât have taken until 2010 to do the meta-analysis. Too often his colleagues impose âliberal or progressive political interpretationsâ on their studies, which inhibit further inquiry. âItâs kind of sad,ââ he said.
Sad, yes, but itâs also by design. âI just want to know the truth about something,â he confessed. Unfortunately, there are many with an extreme socio-political agenda who depend entirely upon suppressing the truth.
âAs if expecting a political backlash himself,â reported AOL, âSchumm concludes his study with a quote from philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. âAll truth passes through three stages: First it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.ââ
Indeed, left-wing backlash was both swift and fierce. Schumm was instantly decried as a âquack,â a âconservative plantâ and a âfraud.â Over the past two years, both Schumm and his study have passed through all three of Schopenhauerâs fiery stages, only to emerge unsinged.
But the damage to honest inquiry was already done. The message to anyone else who might conduct such a study was clear: If you dare release research on homosexuality and we donât like your findings, weâre coming for you.
Not everyone got the message.
University of Texas-Austin, June 2012: Dr. Mark Regnerus leads a team of researchers on another peer-reviewed homosexual âparentingâ study labeled: âHow different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study.â
The study was published in the journal Social Science Research. Its website FAQ page summarizes the findings: â[T]he data show rather clearly that children raised by gay or lesbian parents on average are at a significant disadvantage when compared to children raised by the intact family of their married, biological mother and father.â
Focus on the Familyâs Citizenlink distills the research: âAccording to [Regnerus'] findings, children raised by homosexual parents are more likely than those raised by married heterosexual parents to suffer from poor impulse control, depression and suicidal thoughts, require mental health therapy; identify themselves as homosexual; choose cohabitation; be unfaithful to partners; contract sexually transmitted diseases; be sexually molested; have lower income levels; drink to get drunk; and smoke tobacco and marijuana.â
Again, you couldâve set your watch to the liberal response. They went ballistic.
Notorious homosexual activist Scott Rosensweig (aka, Scott Rose. Warning: link to Rosenweigâs extremist history is profane and offensive) filed a formal complaint, demanding that the University of Texas both investigate and, ultimately, fire Dr. Regnerus for his findings.
A gaggle of homosexualist academics and liberal activists pounced, bewailing the study as âhomophobicâ and âmethodologically flawed.â Darren E. Sherkat, a professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, conducted an âauditâ of the already peer-reviewed study and arrived at the unassailable, scholarly and poignantly worded conclusion: âItâs bullsât.â
Except that it wasnât.
On Wednesday, the University of Texas â no bastion of conservatism â released a highly anticipated report on its findings, summarily dismissing Rosensweig, Sherkat and the dozens of âprogressiveâ critics who couldnât stomach the studyâs game-changing implications. This painstaking inquiry was spearheaded by an independent consultant who formerly ran the Office of Research Integrity at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Noted UT-Austin: âAs with much university research, Regnerusâ New Family Structures Study touches on a controversial and highly personal issue that is currently being debated by society at large. The university expects the scholarly community will continue to evaluate and report on the findings of the Regnerus article and supports such discussion.â
Still, observed the report, the research was properly conducted and âno formal investigation is warranted into the allegations of scientific misconduct lodged against associate professor Mark Regnerus.â
Experience of the millennia, indeed child-like common sense, frequently informs reality. Children are best served â vastly so â when raised by a mother and father.
Although there are sometimes unavoidable circumstances that short-circuit the mom-dad gold standard (single parenthood, etc.), this undeniable truth, to borrow from Schopenhauer, has, heretofore, been âaccepted as being self-evident.â
So why on earth would we intentionally and selfishly sabotage it?
While we donât necessarily need studies to reaffirm that which is so obvious, it is helpful to find a fast-growing body of research available to refute the ânew-normal-modern-familyâ propaganda that sits tendentiously atop todayâs moral-relativist house of cards.
Still, those who seek to deconstruct legitimate marriage and the natural family will always endeavor to suppress honest inquiry. They must.
Even so, whether liberal or conservative, âgayâ or straight, the scientific community should be allowed to pursue truth in an environment that holds objective scientific inquiry sacrosanct. They should be free to follow the evidence wheresoever it may lead, even when such ends prove unfashionable.
But alas, the lie shall forevermore seek to imprison truth. So it was in a world once flat; and so it remains in a world with throwaway parents.
But take heart. In the end, truth does prevail. For it is the promise of Truth Himself: âIf you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.â (John 8:30-32)
Comments are closed. | <urn:uuid:725ffef5-4e8a-4fd1-a244-22901c1998a6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.freedomsjournal.net/2012/09/02/the-%E2%80%98gay%E2%80%99-activist-science-deniers/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940985 | 1,404 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Chickens Come Home to Roost in Upper Dublin
Upper Dublin Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to allow chickens for residential properties.
The Upper Dublin Township Board of Commissioners once again took up the Backyard Chicken ordinance.
Ira Tackel, Board President, said there are a fair number of residents in Upper Dublin that will to have chickens for eggs. Richard Barton, the Township's Code Enforcement Director added that there are some residents in the township that wish to keep chickens as pets, not just for the eggs.
According to the ordinance, which passed unanimously, a lot of one acre or greater can have chickens. On lots less than three acres, residents can have up to six chickens and on greater than three acres, residents can have no more than 12 chickens.
Residents whole live on a half acre or larger are also able to have chickens by special exception, but they have to meet three conditions and go in front of the zoning hearing board. The conditions are:
- The animal shelter must be at least 100 feet from the neighboring residential building
- They must follow the guidelines as set forth in the ordinance, and
- They must meet the general standards for special exception approval as contained in Section 255-174 of the Township Code.
The ordinance prohibits the keeping of roosters and the slaughtering of chickens on a residential property of any size in the township.
Commissioner Ronald Feldman said, "I don't think there's enough space on an acre of land [for chickens]."
"If a resident is opposed to this [ordinance], they can appear before the Zoning Hearing Board to oppose [it]," said Commissioner Chet Derr.
Paul Leonard, Township Manager, added that a majority of the properties in the township are between a half acre and one acre.
The vote on the Backyard Chicken Ordinance was unanimous in favor of approving the allowance of chickens. | <urn:uuid:88729e47-dc9b-49cb-820f-5d7e3a42ec78> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://upperdublin.patch.com/articles/chickens-come-home-to-roost-in-upper-dublin?logout=true | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9592 | 385 | 1.648438 | 2 |
TAMPON NATIVITY SCENE IS A HIT
“Have a holly, jolly, bloody good Christmas with these tampon crafts.” That’s the opening line on the homepage of tamponcrafts.com: the website offers instructions on how to construct nativity scenes out of tampons, including Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the Three Wise Men. Indeed, it advises the reader to “Gather ‘round the manger for the Christmas Miracle. These three kings come bearing gold, frankincense, and…fresh-scented feminine hygiene products.” To show how inclusive the web designer is, there are also guidelines on how to make a menorah out of tampons.
The tampon nativity scene, which has been around for several years, is the source of much humor this year. NPR likes it so much that one of its correspondents asked Martha Stewart about it. Some bloggers love it so much they can hardly contain themselves. It is so popular with social media addicts that over 21,000 Facebook users are already on board. Indeed, as a measure of how popular tamponcrafts.com is this Christmas season, it is currently posting a 92 percent Social Media Impact score.
In any event, American Atheists and the Freedom From Religion Foundation have not said whether they would sue a municipal government that displayed a tampon nativity scene on public property. My guess is they would fund it. | <urn:uuid:116d2fbf-cbef-49d8-b6bf-1fd07509ce42> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.catholicleague.org/tampon-nativity-scene-is-a-hit/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949844 | 300 | 1.765625 | 2 |
This scholarship is for residents of Oklahoma. To qualify for this scholarship, applicants must be enrolled in the eighth, ninth, or tenth grade; homeschool students must be age 13, 14, or 15. The income of the applicant's parent(s) from taxed and untaxed sources for the most recently completed federal tax year must not exceed $50,000. Scholarship recipients must promise to fulfill the high school requirements and the college requirements outlined in the application. If the student fulfills all the program requirements, the state of Oklahoma promises to help pay tuition at an Oklahoma public two- or four-year college or university; or a portion of tuition at an accredited Oklahoma private college or university; or a portion of tuition for courses at a public technology center approved for credit toward an Associate in Applied Science degree at a public college. See application for more details.
How easy is it to apply?
This scholarship's application process shouldn't take more than an hour or so.
How much competition is there?
This scholarship won't have as many applicants as most.
|Renewable:||This scholarship is renewable| | <urn:uuid:d84d7c25-4861-4338-b8f0-be597e763cf5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cappex.com/scholarship/listings/Oklahomas-Promise/-s-d-6592/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941918 | 228 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Ceremony honors Alzheimer's disease patients
November is national Alzheimer's Awareness Month, and it was marked with a special service in Allentown on Wednesday.
A ceremony was held at the Phoebe Allentown Health Care Center on West Turner Street.
Organizers said the event is meant to honor victims and raise awareness about the disease.
The Alzheimer's Association said more than five million Americans are living with Alzheimer's today.
Copyright 2012 WFMZ. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | <urn:uuid:08f32536-e8f4-47b8-8b31-a0b1bd8fabb4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wfmz.com/news/news-regional-lehighvalley/Ceremony-honors-Alzheimer-s-disease-patients/-/132502/17584330/-/view/print/-/jsobr9/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937471 | 113 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Valentine's Day. A holiday that most can take or leave. Some celebrate, and some do anything in their power to avoid it. To each their own.
But to experience Valentine's Day in all of it's commercial glory, there is really only one place that you need to go. Where might this place be you ask?
The cafeteria at any girls high school. Because I assure you, dear internet, that you have not experienced Valentine's Day to the max until you have seen the
And because I was a
good Catholic school girl, I did experience this lovely display first hand, all four years.
And also because I was a
good Catholic school girl, I graduated with not only the appropriate knowledge of how to do body shots, drink like a fish wear a plaid skirt, and a healthy dose of Catholic guilt, but also knowledge of patron saints. The first three things have proven to be useful life skills, but I was at a loss with what exactly the benefits of the fourth item might be.
Because what makes for better blog fodder other than
embarrassing stories pictures random facts about things. And fear not, while you may think that you know all about Valentine's Day - chocolate! flowers! love! - there is more. Oh yes, there is.
And so I give you five random facts I am quite sure that you
don't care about didn't know about Valentine's Day...
This is St. Valentine. He was beheaded. Because what says "I love you" more than the memory of someone having their head chopped off? I also wonder how he would feel about sharing his day with National Condom Day.
2. He is the patron saint of marraige, engaged couples, and love. That's boring. He's also the patron saint of fainting. Why, exactly IS there a patron saint of fainting, anyway?
3. St. Valentine is also the patron saint of beekeepers. Also of epilepsy. And the plague. I can understand a little more why these folks are in need of a patron saint.
4. Valentine's Day is part of National Jell-O Week. As in eating Jell-O, not Jell-O wrestling.
5. Valentine's Day is also part of Just Say No to Powerpoints Week. As one who has
suffered through experienced many a powerpoint presentation, there are certain individuals who I believe should embrace the "just say no to powerpoints" school of thought.
So go forth and celebrate the day of love. Just try not to behead anyone in honor of the occassion. | <urn:uuid:630f1373-2fe5-42a6-86bd-8dd1b3ee5959> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://andtheducksaid.blogspot.com/2008/02/valentines-day.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969865 | 542 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Well, darn it, this teaser doesn't say - but I think we all know the answer.
The eight years of the Bush administration have seen science disdained, neglected and even abused. In the first of our election special reports, we look at the enormous repair job that awaits the next US president and the positions that Barack Obama and John McCain are taking as they prepare for the November ballot..."
Dems, for all their faults, support science - republicans fear science in general, and especially fear it on religious grounds. They do like the weapons scientists can invent, which is better than nothing I suppose.
"ANNE SOLOMON knows exactly what kind of reality she wants to wake up to on 5 November, and it doesn't matter who's just been elected president of the United States. What counts, she says, is that he has a head for science.
Solomon works at the Center for the Study of the Presidency, a non-partisan organisation based in Washington DC that examines the successes and failures of past administrations. Last week it issued a report co-authored by Solomon that lists several of the most pressing issues facing America's next leader, including energy, healthcare, environment, national security and economic competitiveness. At the heart of every one of them are science and technology.
In this area, past performance gives considerable cause for concern, Solomon says: "We do not have in the White House and throughout the executive branch the kind of analytical capabilities and broad expertise that's needed to understand and develop (science and technology)..." | <urn:uuid:e0aef62c-e593-4ad7-b42b-1b4e347fa490> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://voicesweb.org/node/1788 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970112 | 314 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Rabbi Saperstein: "We are very grateful for the Kovler family's generosity and support in building bridges between Blacks and Jews - and are immensely pleased to support these programs."
WASHINGTON, D.C., May 12, 2011 -- The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism announced the recipients of the Kovler Black-Jewish Microgrant Program during the Consultation on Conscience, the Reform Movement's flagship public policy conference. Rabbi David Saperstein, Director of the Religious Action Center issued the following statement:
As part of the Religious Action Center's 50th Anniversary celebration, we were pleased to announce the first-ever recipients of the Kovler Black-Jewish Microgrant Program. This program is meant to promote quality programming and activities that enhance Black-Jewish relations.
The funding for these grants is made available by the Majorie Kovler Black-Jewish Institute, a project of the Religious Action Center. We are very grateful for the Kovler family's generosity and support in building bridges between Blacks and Jews - and are immensely pleased to support these programs. We congratulate the following recipients for developing activities and actions aimed at strengthening links and common ground between African Americans and Jews:
- Albany Civil Right's Institute (ACRI): Temple B'nai Israel of New Albany, Georgia will join ACRI in a Community Night. The topic for the evening is Jewish-African American Relations during the Civil Rights Movement and Prof. Hasia Diner will be the keynote speaker.
- Congregation Beth Israel of Carmel Valley: Congregation Beth Israel will partner with the Monterey Peninsula Gospel Community Choir to co-host a Jewish/Gospel Mash-Up.
- Boston Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC): Working with select youth from synagogues and NFTY Chapters and African American youth community organizations and churches, the Boston JCRC launched the Y MORE (Youth of Massachusetts Organizing for a Reform Economy), a leadership-training program for Black and Jewish teens who want to engage in community organizing.
- Loyola Marymount University: LMU's Jewish Social Services is developing a relationship with the Office of Black Student Services. They have cohosted and will continue to co-host joint programming, including a Black-Jewish seder, a film screening and roundtable discussions.
- Cultural Leadership: Supporting their ongoing work, Cultural Leadership is a nonprofit youth educational leadership development organization educating St. Louis area high-school students through the lens of the Jewish and African American experience to become social action activists. | <urn:uuid:25985009-d965-489d-b955-ee8ef1a6d0aa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://rac.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=22230&pge_prg_id=15254&pge_id=2436 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934549 | 511 | 1.53125 | 2 |
NBA Hall of Famer, humanitarian Twyman dies at age 78
ReutersHall of Famer Jack Twyman, a standout player in college and the National Basketball Association (NBA) and a champion for a paralyzed former teammate, died on Wednesday at the age of 78.
June 2, 2012, 12:08 am TWN
Twyman, who starred for the University of Cincinnati and with the NBA Rochester and Cincinnati Royals franchise (now the Sacramento Kings) in the 1950s and early '60s, died at a Cincinnati hospice of complications from blood cancer.
The sweet-shooting forward was a six-time NBA All-Star with the Royals and was also remembered for his relationship with teammate Maurice Stokes, a budding star player who became paralyzed after hitting his head on the floor in the final game of the Royals' 1957-58 season.
Twyman raised money for Stokes through charity basketball games and golf tournaments and became his legal guardian to assist with his care-taking and medical bills.
“The Basketball Hall of Fame and the game of basketball not only lost an incredible athlete but also an incredible man,” John L. Doleva, president of the Basketball Hall of Fame said in a statement. “Jack will always be remembered for his hard work and his huge heart.”
After the death of Stokes in 1970 at the age of 36, Twyman continued his fund-raising to help other needy former players.
On the basketball court, Twyman finished his college career as Cincinnati's all-time leading scorer and in 1960 he averaged a career high 31.2 points a game for the Royals, with whom he played his entire 11-year professional career.
A successful businessman, Twyman also worked as a TV analyst on NBA network broadcasts and was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1983. | <urn:uuid:3fc8621a-b9ff-42f9-84cd-af0d12ea10ec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.chinapost.com.tw/sports/basketball/2012/06/02/343030/NBA-Hall.htm | 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 | 0.982356 | 388 | 1.609375 | 2 |
I haven't done breaking in a long long time but i used to be really in to it, i guess it is sort of a young guy kudos thing. These days i see less and less value in doing very big breaking practice, by big i mean lining up board and trying to kick or punch thorugh as many as you can. i do see some benefit in it in some way though. kinda like:
breaking single boards quickly no line up
yeah maybe to practice genrating power quickly, but lacking combinations, maybe good for conditioning hands
breaking boards with line up and getting ready
um, i guess there could be an arguement for mental conditonaing, but there are better ways of doing this i guess
breaking large amounts of boards
looks good and is an indication of power generations, but you are hitting wood or stone, that don;t really bend very mcuh before they snap. very different from hitting person
so, does anyone practice breaking as a main part of their art, what are your thoguhts on it?
also does anyone know where the breaking aspect came from? was it part of traditional practice that like so many things got specialised into a competition, or is it a fairly recent addition? | <urn:uuid:af0a613d-9eb7-4dfe-926f-e25bfb52acd7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://iainabernethy.co.uk/content/breaking?mini=calendar%2F2013-04 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976179 | 256 | 1.640625 | 2 |
North Hollywood, CA, and CHICAGO, IL, June 7, 2007 - The International Myeloma Foundation (IMF)—supporting research and providing education, advocacy and support for myeloma patients, families, researchers and physicians—today said that data from a follow-up to a Phase 3 multi-national clinical trial shows the combination of DOXIL® with VELCADE® improves the probability of survival by 41%. The follow-up study also showed no increase in serious side effects such as neuropathy with the addition of DOXIL to the VELCADE. The findings were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) global cancer meeting in Chicago.
The VELCADE/DOXIL combination was approved by the FDA just last month as a new treatment option for myeloma patients who have relapsed or who have not responded to at least one other course of treatment. The drugs work in combination because there is evidence that VELCADE increases the effectiveness of DOXIL against cancer cells and DOXIL does the same for VELCADE.
"'Improved survival' are words that every cancer patient wants to hear, and we are encouraged to have this new option to offer patients with peer reviewed data behind it," said Susie Novis, president and co-founder of the IMF. "Until there is a cure, we are moving myeloma toward becoming a chronic disease with long term survival achieved by using drugs in combination and in sequence. The VELCADE/DOXIL combination fits perfectly into this paradigm and offers an important and powerful new opportunity to extend and improve patients' lives."
DOXIL is a specially (liposomal) formulated version of the chemotherapy agent doxorubicin, and is approved for use in other forms of cancer. VELCADE, bortezomib, is approved for myeloma patients who have relapsed or not responded to a previous course of treatment. The findings come from a 14 month follow-up to a multi-national trial involving nearly 650 patients.
Myeloma, also called multiple myeloma, is a cancer of the bone marrow that affects production of red cells, white cells and stem cells. It affects an estimated 750,000 people worldwide, and in industrialized countries it is being diagnosed in growing numbers and in increasingly younger people. | <urn:uuid:4af41ef8-2d43-4a70-b8ab-27055b2472a4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://myeloma.org/Main.action/ArticlePage.action?tabId=4&menuId=359&articleId=2076&aTab=0&gParentType=link&gParentId=2594&parentIndexPageId=139 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95352 | 488 | 1.757813 | 2 |
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: Scholastic Press September 14, 2008
In a post-apocalyptic world, sixteen year old Katniss Everdeen is the sole provider for her family after the untimely death of her father some years before. With a mentally ill mother and a preadolescent sister, Katniss has three mouths to feed in District 12, where food is strictly rationed by the Peacekeepers, a force that answers directly to the controlling capitol, Panem. The capitol controls all twelve Districts by means of food rationing, force, and a diabolical practice called The Hunger Games. Each year, one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen are randomly selected via name drawing to represent their district in a gladiator-like challenge between the other eleven districts and each other. Only one “tribute”, as they’re called, can win the games and return home alive. Viewing of the games by every citizen is mandatory. As a means of control, the capitol has landed on a very effective one.
Katniss eventually becomes the female tribute for her District, opposite a boy named Peeta Marak who has a special connection to her past. Now Katniss must fight for her life, and the lives of her mother and sister, while struggling with the strange mix of emotions she has for Peeta. The other 22 tributes aren’t anything to ignore, either. Luckily, Katniss has plenty of experience with surviving, thanks to several years’ worth of hunting and gathering food for her family when they couldn’t afford it any other way.
The plot for The Hunger Games is simplistic. You know the outcome after the first couple of chapters. But it’s the journey towards that ending that kept me reading. Katniss is not your typical sixteen year old YA heroine. She’s tough, untrusting, and capable. Her mind is like a steel trap, snatching up every bit of information available to her and never letting go, even though it might seem useless at the time. The skills she gained and added to from her father and her friend Gale serve her extremely well and you never get the impression that she’s waiting to be rescued by Peeta or anyone else. Although from a backwater District that is the lowest on the hierarchical scale of this civilization, she quickly grasps at least a basic understanding of the political landscape when she is thrust into the limelight at the capitol, indicating a high level of intelligence that goes beyond knowing outdoor survival skills.
When it comes to Peeta, she’s both calculating and confused, but she doesn’t let her confusion distract her from her goal of winning and returning home covered in enough riches to feed her family for the rest of their lives. In order to gain sponsorship from wealthy patrons on the outside who can send aid to her inside the arena, her story must be compelling, and if that means lying, acting, or killing, she’ll do it. Peeta himself is a fairly shallow character; we learn little about him other than that he carries strong feelings for Katniss and has since they were very young. He seems to have no other goals or dreams in life, which is disappointing. Katniss deserves a potential partner of equal complexity. Her friend and hunting partner from District 12, Gale, is much more interesting but has very little face time in this first book. Hopefully we’ll see more of him in Catching Fire, the second installment in the trilogy.
An interesting part of the story is the technological disparity between the capitol, Panem, and District 12. In District 12, Katniss hunts with a bow and arrows that she doesn’t even know how to successfully duplicate, the mining that is the District’s contribution to the capitol is still done by humans who eventually sicken and die from coal dust poisoning, and people are regularly seen starving in the streets. But in Panem, they have hovercraft, food replicators, and highly advanced medical technology, as well as the ability to control at least select areas of weather and climate. One shot is enough to cure a gangrenous infection, and they have rejuvenating drugs that can even erase scars and blemishes from your skin. It’s obvious that yet another form of control by Panem is the withholding of technology from the outer Districts, but not much is explained about why. We learn little about the government and why they’re in power in The Hunger Games, except a brief mention of a rebellion several generations ago, but I have a feeling more will be forthcoming in the next two books.
This passes the Bechdel Test, although it’s a close thing. Katniss has little contact with women after the games begin, and her main mentors and friends are generally men. There are some characters of color, but not prominent ones, and there are no LGBT characters or even mention of the possibility of being gay. Diversity overall is severely lacking, although the fact that as many girls as boys are entered into the games without favoritism is a point in the book’s favor. The book is frank about the deaths of the children during the games, but the descriptions are not overly graphic.
Class is also very important in the story, with Katniss’s low class upbringing being an asset to her at times, as she is able to withstand hunger, pain, and adverse weather conditions better than the tributes from wealthier families and Districts, who’ve always had enough to eat and shelter over their heads. Could this be considered glamorizing the poor? I don’t think so, as Katniss tells the story of almost starving to death after her father died, and it’s obvious that she’d much rather be wealthy and not hunt, then risk her life and her family’s lives every day out in a forbidden forest. The tributes from wealthier areas have advantages too, in that they have reached their full growth due to enough food, they’ve had training with multiple weapons, and their sponsors on the outside are wealthier and better able to help within the games. It’s also stated that lower class Districts like 12 rarely last long in the games, due mainly to their underfed and under trained state.
The Hunger Games is a good story, not overly original but with a compelling main character that I’ll definitely read more of. I’d like to see the politics develop more, and where the relationships between Katniss, Peeta, and Gale will go from this point. Some more diversity would also be very much appreciated, but considering this is a series that has already been finished, I’ll have to take what’s already been included. If you’re looking for a good easy read with an interesting female lead, this is a good book for that.
Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry. | <urn:uuid:5c4502e9-331c-4aa5-b126-76b5d380f7ca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://awthome.wordpress.com/tag/books/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97364 | 1,457 | 1.71875 | 2 |
If you’re infatuated with a craving for sweet, sugary substances, but not with the side effects and negative deductions on your health that sugar has, then help is here! Let it be known that we all have a sweet tooth, but not everyone chooses to fuel it with sugar. Here are some sources to help you kick the habit of eating sugar too:
Although it may be difficult to find a sugar-free cake that doesn’t taste like dogfood, there are plenty of delicious sugar substituting cakes out there if you know where to look. Happy baking, and best of luck finding a cake that’s perfect for you and your taste buds.
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And check out the "suggested by the author" links below to find even more good food articles. | <urn:uuid:6da294b7-e507-4b68-879d-28c814cfaad3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.examiner.com/article/sugar-free-cake-recipes-list?cid=rss | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950102 | 165 | 1.578125 | 2 |
In January, Facebook unveiled Graph Search, a more robust search tool that's being slowly rolled out to users. It uses the mountains of data the site collects to expand what a query on the site can find.
Planning a trip and want a list of college friends who have moved to London? No problem. Co-workers who also like "Game of Thrones?" Check. How about Facebook photos from National Parks? You got it. And, to take it to a somewhat different place, how about single friends of friends who live in the same city you do? Also doable.
Facebook is taking its time. Only a few hundred thousand of the site's hundreds of millions of users have gotten access so far, and the company is tweaking the test version of the feature as it goes.
Tom Stocky, product manager for search at Facebook, visited CNN headquarters recently and shared thoughts on the social-media giant's biggest product launch in some time. The following interview has been edited for style and brevity:
CNN: How's the rollout process been so far, and what early customer feedback have you received?
Stocky: We're still rolling out very slowly. It's still in beta. Even though hundreds of thousand of people have it now, and that sounds like a big number, Facebook overall features over a billion users so still a small percentage of the user base.
However, it's enough where we're starting to get feedback, and the reception so far has been pretty positive. People seem to find it most useful around people and photos queries. Places are the thing they are starting to like as well. And the things we continue hearing in terms of where we need to improve is, we have to do a much better job understanding everything that people type into the search box.
Users phrase queries in many different ways and than we initially anticipated and we have to invest in that. For example, the number of different of ways refer to friends. We had to build the product to recognize "buddies," "pals," "besties" and all of the other variations of the word "friend."
How is a Facebook Graph Search different from a Google Web search?
It's different in a lot of ways. One obvious way is users are only searching on related results in Facebook with Graph Search as opposed to a Web search where you're searching across all indexed documents on the Web. | <urn:uuid:a5761aa5-f78b-44ef-adbb-53a524391290> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wptz.com/news/technology/Facebook-Graph-Search-focus-Friends-photos/-/8869670/19416840/-/eub90k/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966542 | 488 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Major purchases that correspond with major life events are being delayed by 18- to 34-year-old credit union members, according to a new survey released Monday by TruStage, the consumer brand division of CUNA Mutual Group of Madison. Wis.
The survey asked 1,600 credit union members about major financial life events they face in 2013. The survey focused on the financial decisions members made regarding vehicle purchases, home buying, the birth of a child and planning for college and weddings.
The survey uncovered several revealing generational trends when it comes to making major life purchases and decisions, including:
• Generation Y (18–34 year-olds), typically the most connected and tech-savvy demographic, takes 18 days longer, on average, to shop for a car than those 45–54.
• People are dating much longer now before getting married, which delays
wedding-related purchases and big life events like buying a home or a car.
•18-44 year-olds have underestimated how long it will take to graduate from
college, despite rapidly increasing tuition costs and student loan debt.
• Retirements are taking longer to reach. For those planning retirement, the expected retirement age is nearly 64 years. For those already retired, the average retirement age was 59 years.
“When we took a deeper look at the survey results, we were surprised to see that it’s taking longer to make major financial decisions and purchases,” explained Alan Bergstorm, brand and creative services coordinator for TruStage. “Given the nature of our fast-paced culture, we anticipated those decisions to happen faster, but the results show many people are actually slowing down and taking more time to plan and decide.”
Bergstorm said the survey uncovered that 18- to 44-year-olds attending college at least one full semester longer than they had planned. Consequently, the big moments usually associated with post-graduation–the car buying, weddings and home buying–are delayed.
The survey also found 18–34 year-olds are planning to retire at a significantly older age than preceding generations. But 71% of this group is planning for retirement substantially earlier in life–starting on average at age 24.
“This presents an opportunity, as our survey indicated, (because) this generation considers credit unions to be one of several ‘trusted sources’ for help in planning retirement,” Bergstrom said.
Based on this survey, Bergstrom believes credit unions should be asking important questions such as what does this information mean for credit unions? How are economic, social or cultural factors affecting decisions and life event plans? What role does instant access to information and mobile technology play in the decision-making process?
“When we learn about members’ mindsets and behaviors and how they continue to change, we can apply that knowledge to member connections and relationships,” he said. | <urn:uuid:61d23703-e08a-4e2a-9a18-0ab832bd423e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cutimes.com/2013/02/26/survey-members-delay-major-purchases?t=credit-union-managementtonline-mobile-banking | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96532 | 595 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Continental Airlines Flight 3407 crashed into a house in Clarence Center, New York, late Thursday.
Continental Connection Flight 3407, a Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 74-seat turboprop, operated by Colgan Air, was en route from Newark, New Jersey, to Buffalo when it went down at around 10:20 p.m. ET. The crash occurred about seven miles from Buffalo Niagara International Airport.
Dave Bissonette, Clarence Center's natural disaster services coordinator, said it was "clearly a direct hit" on the house.
"The only recognizable piece of the plane left is the tail," Bissonette said.
The ferocity of the fire was such that officials don't expect the crash site to be safe for investigators until about noon Friday, nearly 14 hours after the crash. | <urn:uuid:28b6df7a-972c-41b7-af4e-13d1d2054cdd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bigcountryhomepage.com/fulltext?nxd_id=104131&nxd_237113_start=35 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941056 | 168 | 1.515625 | 2 |
|Release date||Not released in-game|
Chad was a Fremennik warrior that was amongst the first to engage the Penance race in combat after they emerged on the western fringe of the Fremennik Province. Chad was responsible for discovering a method by which the Penance Queen could be slain.
Chad is most well known for inventing the CHAD method, used during the Barbarian Assault activity to combat the Penance Queen. Coincidentally, the CHAD system is an acronym of its inventor's name, standing for "Collector, Healer, Attacker, Defender"; the order in which the omega egg is made.
Chad does not appear in-game, and as the Penance first emerged during the God Wars, Chad is presumably long-dead. He is mentioned by name only in the queen help book, obtained from Captain Cain in the Barbarian Assault longhall. | <urn:uuid:c9600c9c-6afd-4ab4-9be1-55ab8b41e766> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/Chad | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95674 | 184 | 1.5 | 2 |
Senior citizens should not be a pawn in the game of politics and health insurance. The Medicare section of the national health insurance plan should and must be removed. A health care plan cannot and must not be funded at the expense of senior citizens. Half the politicians are saying Medicare will not be weakened and the other half say it will be. Who are we to believe? Hopefully, all of congress is aware that 2010 is just around the corner and that means most are running for re-election. Let's not forget that senior citizens are one of the biggest voting blocks. Congress, do the right thing and protect the seniors' Medicare. | <urn:uuid:341b1e72-0684-49ee-82e6-8cc8bc607d24> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.mcall.com/2009-10-08/news/4454391_1_senior-citizens-health-insurance-medicare | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969128 | 126 | 1.539063 | 2 |
General Electric is reccalling about 2.5 million dishwashers due to a fire hazard, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced today. GE has received about 191 reports of overheated wiring, including 56 reports of property damage and 12 reports of fires that grew beyond the dishwashers.
It appears that liquid rinse-aid can leak from its dispenser onto the dishwasher's internal wiring, causing an electrical short and overheating.
The recall involves built-in washers sold from September 1997 through December 2001 under the brand names of Eterna, GE, GE Profile™, GE Monogram®, Hotpoint® and Sears-Kenmore. For more on the specific model and serial numbers of the recalled machines, check out the CPSC announcement. | <urn:uuid:1ffcf00b-662e-4807-a560-1bea31c017b5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2007/05/ge_recalls_25_million_dishwash.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944477 | 157 | 1.578125 | 2 |
PARIS — The French offensive in Mali will burden a defense budget that was expected to get relief from the withdrawal of French forces from Afghanistan, but the fighting might boost arms sales if the Rafale combat jet proves decisive in driving Islamist guerrillas out of the West African nation.
Asked how much the week-old operation would cost, French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian replied: “I cannot evaluate that yet. It will all be public knowledge of course.”
He has already warned that it will take a long time to dislodge Islamist fighters who are highly mobile in the desert regions of northern Mali and who are careful to disseminate themselves among civilians in populated southern areas. By comparison, the European Union has set a 15-month budget of 12.3 million euros ($16.5 million) for its share of the effort, which with 450 troops will be small compared with what France is likely to shoulder, and does not include salary or personnel costs.
The French defense ministry’s external operations budget for 2013 is 630 million euros, about 90 million less than last year owing to anticipated savings from the Afghan withdrawal. In 2011, France spent 1.2 billion euros to cover fighting in Libya, a different sort of operation based on an air campaign that lasted eight months and was closely coordinated with Britain.
On Jan. 14, France said its overall budget deficit came to 87.2 billion euros in 2012, and it is trying to cut that back over the next two years. The 2012 deficit was expected to come in at the government’s target of 4.5 percent of economic output.
Paris has pledged to the EU to push the deficit down to 3.0 percent of GDP this year, with 37 billion in tax hikes and spending cuts to meet the target.
In Mali, help has come from Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Germany, and the United States, mainly in the form of transport planes to ferry troops and material from France and African countries that have agreed to contribute soldiers.
French C-160 aircraft are nearing the end of their expected lifespan, and Harfang drones have been worn down by three years and 5,000 flight hours in Afghanistan.
“Military sources say the equipment being deployed will just about cover this kind of operation, but we are really pushing it,” said Axel Poniatowski, a French deputy who serves on the national assembly’s defense committee.
The operation is also a test for the Rafale combat jet made by Dassault Aviation, a French group that is in talks with India for up to 189 aircraft, according to sources close to the discussions. The possibility of an additional 63 jets being added to an expected order for 126 was raised during a visit by Indian Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid to Paris last week, they said.
Indian media have estimated the value of the deal for 126 Rafales at $12 billion (nine billion euros). The Rafale saw its first combat operations in Libya, but so far Dassault has not signed any binding foreign sales contracts. | <urn:uuid:c2659636-b40b-4c70-baae-519cba7560b0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.defensenews.com/article/20130118/DEFREG01/301180016/Mali-Operation-Another-Burden-French-Defense-Budget?odyssey=nav%7Chead | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968864 | 625 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Greynet Apps Are Worth Watching
Studies show a lot of employees use apps your IT department hasn't sanctioned, raising serious legal and security issues.
How many pirated movies are being downloaded over your corporate T3 while you read this? Employees are not usually allowed to use file sharing applications like BitTorrent at work, but policies laid down by managers or the IT department have a way of being ignored if they get in the way of how users want to use "their" office computers. The rules may have been put in place for legal, security or compliance purposes, but as far as many users are concerned, they are seen as inconvenient but easy to side step.
There is some evidence to back this up. A survey carried out for FaceTime, a CA-based supplier of solutions to combat this type of network abuse, found that work use of what the company refers to as greynet applications — instant messaging, peer to peer file sharing and other programs which the IT department is not aware of and has not officially sanctioned— rose from 78 percent in 2005 to 83 percent in 2006.
Peer to peer software is a real menace for many organizations because it can use up spectacularly large amounts of bandwidth, and, due to the way peer to peer systems work, employees who are downloading a film may also be unwittingly uploading it elsewhere. Not only are employees using corporate resources to infringe copyright, but by uploading it they are also making it available for others: a potentially much graver offense. Since all of this could conceivably be traced back to the corporate IP address block, this is very bad news indeed from a legal standpoint.
To the employee, downloading a Yahoo!, MSN or AIM IM client onto a PC is not such a big deal: most home PCs come with at least one pre-installed anyway, and if it helps improve productivity by making it easier to speak to colleagues, customers or clients, then surely so much the better.
Of course the reality is not quite so simple. IM clients are potential vectors for viruses and worms, and if they are part of the greynet and the IT department does not know they are in use, then incoming IMs are unlikely to be scanned for malware. Besides, in many industries all IMs need to be archived for compliance purposes – an employee talking to a client over AIM, for example, could completely escape all monitoring and breach compliance procedures and Sarbanes-Oxley measures.
To combat this an increasing number of (usually larger) organizations are installing enterprise based instant messaging systems such as Microsoft's Live Communications Sever, IBM's Lotus Sametime or an open source solution based on the Jabber protocol. These usually have a logging and archiving system built in, and can be set up to enable IMing with colleagues on the same corporate network only, or with a limited number of client or customer networks as wel.
The big question then, is this: does having an enterprise IM system and providing all employees with enterprise IM capabilities make your organization any more secure and less likely to breach compliance regulations? The answer, unfortunately, is a resounding "no."
That's because people are used to using their favorite public IM client, with their own buddy list, to talk with certain groups of people – perhaps friends or family – and the provision of an enterprise based IM system doesn't change that. In fact FaceTime's survey found that in organizations running their own enterprise IM system, the vast majority of users also used a public IM network such as AIM or MSN as well. "Having an enterprise IM system doesn't really change anything – you still need to block "rogue" IM clients," says Peter Firstbrook, a research director at Gartner. "Even if you only allow IM for internal use, you still need some sort of edge appliance."
Firstbrook is referring to IM security and hygiene appliances such as those supplied by FaceTime and CA-based security vendor Akonix, which detect and scan all incoming and outgoing IM messages, as well as detecting and preventing unauthorized peer to peer applications. He argues that for many businesses, the best strategy is to buy an IM appliance for security, archiving and so on, and then adopt a public IM network such as Yahoo! as the corporate IM service. This has the advantage of being a much cheaper solution because public IM network usage and clients are free and the only cost is the IM appliance, which you would need to buy if you implemented an expensive corporate IM solution anyway.
Public IM systems can even be used exclusively for internal corporate use: appliances like Akonix's can be set up so that they intercept IMs and block those bound for outside the corporate network. IMs sent to colleagues within the same enterprise are forwarded by the appliance to their destination so they never leave the corporate network.
What's the point of a corporate IM system at all then? It's a good question, and the answer is by itself, not a lot. It's more expensive than using the public IM networks, and, as we have seen, no more secure. Arguably it's more convenient to use in a corporate context as it can be integrated with internal directories, making it easy to look up the appropriate colleague to talk to, but that in itself hardly justifies the cost.
In fact enterprise IM systems only really come in to their own when they are implemented as part of a larger collaboration suite. Microsoft's Live Communication Server and Communicator client not only enables instant messaging, but integrates with Outlook and the corporate telephony system, so that what starts with an IM to a colleague can be escalated to a phone conversation, then a shared workspace, and even a conference call, all from the Communicator client.
So enterprise IM systems are all about functionality, but not about security. If you are serious about IM security – which you should be – then you need some sort of edge appliance to detect, control and cleanse IM usage, both authorized and unauthorized, and prevent other greynet applications. This remains true regardless of whether you have an enterprise IM system in place. If you want extra productivity features, look at a corporate system, but if you want a cheap way for your users to take advantage of IM without compromising security or compliance regulation, use one of the public networks.
But whatever you decide, don't forget that unless you take specific measures to guard against it, the chances are your users will be IMing their friends behind your back, and probably visiting the Pirate Bay to download the latest movie blockbuster as well. | <urn:uuid:1148fce4-535d-4617-96e8-41bd0273cd2b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netsecur/article.php/3681931/Greynet-Apps-Are-Worth-Watching.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955868 | 1,331 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Physical activity is not just for jocks. It's for everyone. Being active can help you stay healthy, control your weight, and get the most out of life. No matter what your age or condition, there is a type of exercise that's right for you.
To learn more, browse our Fitness and Exercise topics, or start with these:
To learn more visit Healthwise.org
© 1995-2013 Healthwise, Incorporated. Healthwise, Healthwise for every health decision, and the Healthwise logo are trademarks of Healthwise, Incorporated. | <urn:uuid:fbee0244-1aa1-4d0f-8a51-430c7f7ea6da> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.peacehealth.org/xhtml/content/conditioncenter/center1016.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93365 | 115 | 1.6875 | 2 |
You Can Have Lots of Fun Making These New Toys
HOW many toys are you going to make for Christmas this year? A lot of them, we hope, because no home workshop activity gives greater satisfaction and pleasure. There is something imaginative and colorful about toys that sets them apart from ordinary shop projects. Then, too, there is the added joy of being able to give each toy to some child and share in his happiness.
An Airplane Swing for Air-minded Youths
Swinging back and forth in this miniature plane, youngsters can duplicate in imagination all the feats of world famous aviators—all with absolute safety, of course. The swing is easy to build and will make a very fine addition to any playground.
Sand Castles Made in Fancy Molds
KIDDIES on the seashore may make ornate and highly decorated sand castles by the use of a newly devised mold made from stamped tin, and constructed in four hinged sections.
It is locked together, and one corner held tightly while damp sand is packed in firmly from the top. Then the catch is undone, the mold is removed, and there stands a castle that will be the envy of the beach.
Voting Machine for Young Citizens
YOU can teach your children to be good citizens with this voting machine scaled down to neighborhood size. Rotary, Kiwanis and Lions clubs, youth organizations or junior groups can run a mock election to prepare for adult citizenship—and the clubs can use the machine for real elections of their own officers and leaders.
After two thousand years modern design is applied to the old game of chess.
CHESS, going back into ancient history, got its present name from the Persian word, Shah, meaning King.
Its origin has been ascribed to the Greeks, Romans, Babylonians, Scythians, Egyptians, Persians, Chinese, Hindus, Arabians, Irish, Welsh and the Castilians, and it is mentioned in history as far back as 200 B.C.
OK Skinnay! Lookut Our Rolley Coaster
IT’S a far cry from the Bronx to Coney Island. Besides, Coney Island costs money. The children in the neighborhood of Crotona Park, New York City, therefore, have made a scenic railway all their own. It is better, they think, than all the Coney Island rides put together, and they have had the fun of making it as well as riding on it.
I wish I could have gone to the Gilbert Hall of Science when it was still there. The Eli Whitney Museum has a large collection of A.C. Gilbert material called The Gilbert Project if you’re interested.
The COLOSSAL ALL-ELECTRIC ERECTOR
They ‘Buzz’ with Action!
HELLO BOYS! Look at all the fun and action you get with my new Erectors
Glim was a brand of dish washing soap
make your own BUBBLE COMPOUND
WITH a startling new formula worked out particularly for MI readers, you can produce rainbow-colored bubbles that last longer and are more brilliant than the old-fashioned kind made with a soap base. In addition to the natural rainbow coloring, it is practical to add luminous powder to the new formula so that the bubbles will glow when produced in the dark..
Small Fry’s Play Stools
PLAY stools will keep children off drafty floors and are practical additions to any nursery. Here are two novel, colorful and sturdy units anyone can build.
The main parts must first be enlarged by laying out the contours on paper which has been ruled into 1 in. squares. The drawings are then transferred to wood 3/4 in. thick and the pieces cut out with a jigsaw.
Hook Intellivision to your color TV and its preprogrammed software lets you do everything from play games to learn a language. It has 60-by-92-line graphics in 16 colors. With keyboard, it’s $499. Maker: Mattel Electronics, 5150 Rosecrans Ave., Hawthorne, Calif. 90250. | <urn:uuid:34ba0d4d-f5ed-40b4-beb0-36ddb6580677> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.modernmechanix.com/category/entertainment/fun-and-games/page/2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95033 | 853 | 1.703125 | 2 |
By Saurabh Chaturvedi
NEW DELHI — Welspun Energy Ltd. said Monday it will invest about 10 billion rupees ($183 million) in a 100 megawatts solar power project in India’s central Chhattisgarh state.
The company, which is backed by Indian textiles-to-infrastructure conglomerate Welspun Group, said its fully owned unit–Welspun Renewables Energy Ltd.–recently entered into an initial pact with the state government to build and commission the project in the next three years.
Vineet Mittal, its co-founder and managing director, said the company will arrange for loans to partly fund the project. The Chhattisgarh government will facilitate the necessary approvals and acquire land for the plant, he added.
In total, Welspun plans to build 1,000 megawatts of wind power and 750 MW of solar power projects in India in the next few years. | <urn:uuid:e43ec889-024c-4636-bbf4-9d7e85d9b351> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.wsj.com/dealjournalindia/2012/11/05/welspun-energy-to-invest-183-million-in-solar-project/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934647 | 196 | 1.695313 | 2 |
PLATTSBURGH - The North Country has one of the most important resources for a thriving community, says Chris Duley, but it's one he considers greatly underutilized.
"I think that Lake Champlain, especially Cumberland Bay and the western shore of the lake, is probably the best-kept secrets going," said Duley, who serves as head of the Cumberland Bay Community Boating Center. "It is, by far, the best sailing and boating venue that there is in the Northeast."
Duley has been trying to promote an increased use of nonmotorized watercraft Lake Champlain for the past six years. Through coordination with the City of Plattsburgh Recreation Department, Duley has continued to offer the Learn to Sail program to do just that.
"Learn to Sail is a week-long program we offer twice in the summer for both kids 12 and up and for adults," explained Duley.
The concept behind the program is to get people of all skill levels acclimated to sailing under the direction of certified instructors teaching land- and water-based activities. Participants learn the basics of concepts such as "rigging, points of sail, sailing maneuvers, safety and recovery." However, that's just the beginning of what Duley said he'd like to see offered by the Cumberland Bay Community Boating Center, which currently has no official home.
"We are in the process of trying to offer a much larger program," said Duley. "We're trying to coordinate with the city to get a permanent place on the waterfront that would allow us to eventually host something longer than one-week sessions."
Extended sailing camps and incorporating canoeing and kayaking clinics are among some of the ideas, said Duley.
"The biggest thing for us before we proceed is to have a permanent, physical presence on the lake," said Duley, who noted the center is only visible when the program operates off Wilcox Dock. | <urn:uuid:b22f779d-5068-4604-b28b-a55a9064e119> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.denpubs.com/news/2010/jul/17/learn-to-sail-helping-more-enjoy-lake-champlain/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97681 | 402 | 1.507813 | 2 |
1. What happens during a Mediation?
Divorcing parties work with an impartial third party or Mediator to reach an agreement on the relevant issues regarding their divorce.
2. Are we good candidates for a Mediation?
If you and your spouse have reasonable expectations regarding important issues such as child custody, child support, alimony and asset division, you may be able to settle your divorce with the help of a mediator.
2. How many times will the Parties meet with the Mediator?
The Parties meet with the Mediator as often as needed to draft an agreement.
3. What are the Mediator’s responsibilities?
The Mediator educates the Parties on the law, informs the Parties about what other couples and the courts have done in similar circumstances, and assists them in drafting a Separation Agreement.
4. Is the agreement binding?
Agreements reached through Mediation are non-binding and cannot be enforced in court. However, after an agreement has been reached, the Parties may present the agreement to the Judge in Probate and Family Court, and it will be entered as a binding agreement.
5. Can I have my own attorney review the agreement?
Yes, both parties are given the opportunity to have the agreement reviewed by their own counsel.
6. What is the advantage of using a Mediator?
Mediation is less costly and time-consuming than litigation. In addition, couples who use a mediator are more likely to maintain a civil post-divorce relationship.
If you are considering Mediation, please call Patricia S. Fernandez & Associates. Our legal team is dedicated to helping you choose the strategy that is right for you.
Need Family Legal Advice?
Call (978) 681-5454 or request a FREE 30 Minute Consultation through our online contact form. Visit our website to learn more. _________________________________________________________________ | <urn:uuid:180574d7-01db-4075-bbde-f0548f730abd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://northandovermafamilylawattorney.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945013 | 387 | 1.523438 | 2 |
The Ultimate Cigar Aficionado
Ninety-eight-year-old George Burns shares memories of his life.
From the Print Edition:
George Burns, Winter 94/95
(continued from page 5)
Until he was 93, Burns didn't need Conrad to drive him to Forest Lawn. He did his own driving. But when he had four accidents in one month, he decided it was time to get out from behind the wheel--even though only three of those accidents were his fault.
Burns still hasn't been able to figure out why the Department of Motor Vehicles allowed him to drive until he was 93. As a matter of fact, he isn't sure why he was ever allowed to drive. "I was a lousy driver when I was 33," he asserts. "I not only went too fast, but my mind was always on shows and scripts. I was constantly making left turns while I was signaling right turns. But at least in those days I could see over the steering wheel. By 93, I had shrunk quite a lot. My car was known as the Phantom Cadillac. People would see it whizzing by and they would swear there was no driver.
"Look, who am I kidding? I kept driving because I wouldn't admit to myself that I'd become too old to do it. It's a thing called male pride. It's the same reason I can't give up working today. The only difference is I can't kill anybody if a joke misfires."
By the time Burns and Allen hit their stride in the late '20s, they were "killing" a lot of audiences in big-time vaudeville. But their big break came when they were given a chance to substitute for the ailing, sour-faced comedian Fred Allen in a one-reel comedy short for Columbia Pictures in 1929.
The short was called I Wanna Buy a Tie and it was based on one of their vaudeville sketches in which George walks up to the department-store counter and attempts to buy a tie from Gracie, a dumb saleswoman. Gracie tries to sell him everything else in the store except a tie.
The short was so successful that the two of them wound up starring in 13 additional one-reelers over the next couple of years. Film audiences liked their brand of comedy--with the result that Paramount signed them to move to the West Coast and appear in features. Mostly they were the kind of features that had an ensemble of stars, lots of music and comedy yet very little story. George and Gracie didn't star in them, but had cameo or supporting roles.
Their feature credits in the mid- to late-1930s were: The Big Broadcast of 1932; International House in 1933; Six of a Kind in 1934; The Big Broadcast of 1936; The Big Broadcast of 1937; A Damsel in Distress in 1937 and College Swing in 1938, in which Bob Hope made one of his early film appearances.
In a strange way, Burns and Allen were indirectly responsible for the Hope and Crosby "road" pictures. In 1938, William LeBaron, producer and managing director at Paramount, had a script prepared by Don Hartman and Frank Butler. It was to star Burns and Allen with a young crooner named Bing Crosby. But the story didn't seem to fit George and Gracie, so LeBaron ordered Hartman and Butler to rewrite their script to fit two male co-stars--Hope and Crosby. The script was titled Road to Singapore and it made motion-picture history.
George and Gracie's last film together was Honolulu in 1939. During their movie period they also continued to play vaudeville and nightclub dates. But by 1932, big-time vaudeville was on its last legs. Fortunately for Burns and Allen, Columbia Broadcasting System liked their one-reel movie shorts and offered to star them in a radio program, beginning in February 1932.
The Burns and Allen program remained on the air, usually with top 10 ratings, until 1950, when they abandoned radio to go into television for CBS.
You must be logged in to post a comment. | <urn:uuid:e2520aef-1055-4b3b-8dad-176632a63a48> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cigaraficionado.com/webfeatures/show/id/6004/p/6 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.990127 | 854 | 1.5 | 2 |
There are six important characteristics that can play a major role on the impact your website has on prospects. Outlined below is the importance of each characteristic and tips on how to maximize your potential. It is always important to tailor everything you do to what your customer is expecting, doing so will help keep you one step ahead of the competition.
Convenience – Allowing your customers to make decisions at their convenience is a very powerful element. Nobody wants to feel pressured or hurried into making a buying decision. When a customer can go to your website, browse your products and services, and make a purchase at their convenience, you are satisfying a crucial consumer obstacle — time. They don’t have to keep returning to your storefront every time they wish to evaluate your value. In fact, most customers do not buy something the first time they see it. Instead, they must see and consider it several times before they finally talk themselves into purchasing. A website allows customers to quickly review their reasons to purchase something, leading to a greater number of impulse buys.
Information – A website can allow you to communicate much more information about a product or service than an in-store display or advertisement. You can also control the way the information is presented. Supplying information in an orderly step-by-step process can greatly improve the chance of a purchase.
Evaluation – Many customers will not purchase something without searching for the best value. The internet allows your customers to obtain the information they need to feel like they are making an educated buying decision. Make sure you are using your website to take advantage of this opportunity. Inform your customer why your product or service is of the best value compared to their other options. Always acknowledge the competition instead of acting like your product or service is the only one out there.
Guidance – The pages of your website should guide the customer towards the specific solutions they are looking for. They should serve to help them quickly locate what they came to find. Think of it as a store map located at the entrance of a department store. The customer can use this directly upon entering the store to get to the department they are interested in, instead of wandering around looking for it. Get their relevant information in front of them quickly while they are still the mood to purchase. People buy on impulse. If they have to spend 15 minutes searching for what they are looking for, that impulse may very well fade away.
Contact – The internet also allows for another form of contact with your customer. Some people can be hesitant about talking to a representative in person or on the phone if they don’t feel very knowledgeable about the product or service. Email allows them to carefully collect their thoughts before sending them. They feel less awkward about their lack of knowledge. Again, use this opportunity to gain an edge over the competition. Go out of your way to educate them about the product or service.
Entertainment – Use the informal atmosphere of the internet to entertain your customer. The internet is used by more people as a means of entertainment than as a means of business. If used effectively, entertainment can significantly improve the business relationship. Provide clever facts, amusing presentations or even a witty character or mascot to assist them. However, be sure that the entertainment is used appropriately. Be sure that is does not obstruct the information or value you are trying to bestow upon them.
Always use your competition to your advantage. Research how your competition uses these characteristics to improve their customer relations. Your website does not have to be boring just because it is informative. Create an appeal that will set you above the competition. The internet can be an extremely powerful tool for your business, reaching a greater audience than ever before. A successful business uses a complete arsenal to reach its market. | <urn:uuid:8e3ccf3b-00c8-4c18-9436-fa959e9e1a75> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.websiteoptimizationindia.com/seoblog/tag/six-ways-to-improve-your-online-business | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960126 | 759 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Post of the Day
December 20, 1999
Posts selected for this feature rarely stand alone. They are usually a part of an ongoing thread, and are out of context when presented here. The material should be read in that light.
Time to Look at History
I think it is time we look at what has happened and try to determine where we are going.
Several Years back there were three companies making CPU's for Microsoft compatible Miro Computers, Intel (INTC), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Chips and Technology (C&T). C&T finally threw in the towel and ended up being bought out by INTC in 1998 for $321M. This left only two.
Shortly after the Federal Government indicted Microsoft on monopoly charges they did the same thing to INTC. Unlike Microsoft, Andy Grove (Chairman of INTC Board) quickly worked out a settlement that hardly amounted to more than a light slap on the wrist. INTC needs to keep a competitor in the CPU business in order to keep the Federal Government at bay.
Operating income for AMD and INTC for the last 5 reporting years:
On top of that INTC has done outside investments of $18,633M in the last three reporting years (1996 thru 1998). At the end of 1998 they had short term debt of $159M and long term debt of $702M. Hardly a drop in the bucket.
** All financial figures from 10-K reports filed with the SEC.**
Here are some questions you should ask yourself:
Historically how many times has AMD put out press releases and then:
a) could not meet delivery dates,
b) could not meet projected production, or
c) did not meet advanced specifications released?
How successful is a chip making company that has lost money the last three reporting years, and is expected to lose money again when they report in MAR 2000?
Why has Andy Grove, Craig Barrnett INTC CEO, and Andy Bryant INTC CFO, targeted the one niche that AMD has been successful (low end CPU's) and then did not come out with a major assault when AMD attacked the high end market?
Why has Andy Grove zeroed in on purchasing internet stocks and started talking about production of smart chips for cell phones and broadband?
Andy and company needs to keep AMD in the CPU business so that the government will not step in and break up INTC. The money in the CPU business is starting to flattening out in the developed countries. I realize that sales to developing countries will be huge business for years to come, but it is an unpredictable business. That was what INTC blamed the drop in operating profits on in 1998.
I believe that smart chips is the next major area of attack, since INTC needs to go somewhere to guarantee future high growth rates. We will never know how much of the 2+ billion dollar R&D budget has already been spent investigating smart chips.
AMD will be wanted to continue CPU production, but will be kept under control by big brother.
I will continue to enjoy the links provided by vikingfool for AMD news releases. But, don't expect me to buy into what they say, until they develop a history of consistently doing what they report.
I will agree with vikingfool, if AMD could develop a history of increasing profits and if they could start taking an increasing market share away from INTC there is a lot of money to be made there. However, I believe that any major move to take market share from INTC will be met with enough resistance that AMD's operating profits will again fall (the pain of falling stock prices).
Each of us has our dreams of rewards and our limits for pain. Personally the pain/reward ratio for AMD is far greater than I am willing to pay.
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Ten years ago atrocities in Somalia, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia made even the hardliners soft – at least softer. For the first time, they let this Council discuss and agree on key questions for sustainable peace:
What do women want?
What do women need?
How can women contribute?
Thus came Resolution 1325.
At least on paper, this resolution gives women a voice, and better protection.
Mr. President, I thank you and the Council for convening this open ministerial meeting – to remind us all what a long way we still have to go, to make the good intentions of Resolution 1325 a reality.
Ten years after the adoption of 1325 - at the NATO Ministerial Council meeting earlier this month - I called for including 1325 in NATO’s concept of operation. We obviously have a job to do, to make the military men take this seriously.
As Minister of Defence, I note that all of the UN force commanders are men. It is high time to rectify this. I call on the UN to start searching for women commanders while we continue to improve the gender ratio of our forces.
We must get better at explaining that 1325 is not about political correctness. Better protection and more equal participation of women in social, economic and political life – including in peace processes and security services – improves the quality of the process and the service, making the results more sustainable. We simply can’t afford to ignore half of society’s talent and capacity.
And, we must ensure greater accountability. I call on the Security Council to show leadership, by maintaining its focus on full implementation of all resolutions on women, peace and security; by endorsing today the indicators proposed by the Secretary General for this purpose; and by making prosecution of perpetrators a political priority! I commend the work of SRSG Wallström in this regard.
We must provide the UN system with resources, including finance, to follow up on the ground. I welcome the establishment of UN Women. I congratulate its first Executive Director, Under-Secretary-General Michelle Bachelet – and I trust that you will monitor and support Member States and the UN System, to ensure full implementation of all the resolutions on women, peace and security.
Beyond what we have already done, I hereby announce that we immediately take on the following commitments:
1. We continue to increase the number of female Norwegian soldiers and officers, both in our standing military forces and our contributions to international operations. The next two commanders of Norway’s national command in Afghanistan will be women.
2. Recognizing that we also have a way to go, I will now make sure our military operations rest on a gender analysis and adjust our operational demands accordingly. We will strengthen gender education of our armed forces and our police. And we will introduce a new system of reporting on gender and the role of women in field missions, starting in December with the Norwegian-led Provincial Reconstruction Team in Maymaneh in Afghanistan.
3. We will contribute experts on gender and gender-based violence to international peacekeeping operations. Last week we deployed such a team of experts from Norway’s national police to the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH.
4. Norway will further strengthen our support to the United Nations work to promote and protect gender equality and the empowerment of women. Our proposed allocation for 2011 is more than 30 million US dollars.
5. And finally, we also act urgently to boost the work of UN Women – and will support their new and welcome strategic partnership with the Department of Political Affairs – specifically the project to increase women’s participation in peace processes and improve the gender balance at all levels of mediation. The Norwegian government will immediately provide one million US dollars to this project.
Mr. President, Norway supports the women, peace and security agenda because we know it is the only way to sustainable peace and to free millions of women and children from the appalling suffering we see in too many current conflicts. The suffering and humiliation is a scar on humanity’s face. We cannot tolerate this. | <urn:uuid:04b07ce5-91e7-472e-a5d3-60b71621e4c8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.norway-un.org/Statements/Archived-Statements/Statements-2010/Security-Council/SC-Women-peace-and-security/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935924 | 836 | 1.703125 | 2 |
William Banks Caperton
Admiral, United States Navy
at Spring Hill, Tennessee, June 30, 1855, he was a descendent of John Caperton
who moved from Scotland about 1753.
He attended the Spring Hill Academy and graduated from the United States Naval Academy, 1875, the Naval War College, 1906. He was commissioned an Ensign, United States Navy, August 3, 1877, and advanced through the grades to Rear Admiral, February 14, 1913 and was advanced to Admiral on the retired list, June 30, 1919.
He served on various ships and stations, 1875-1896; with Naval Intelligence, Washington, 1896; USS Brooklyn, 1897; Executive Officer, USS Marietta, 1899; Inspector, Naval Gun Factory, 1901; Executive Officer, USS Prairie, 1904; at the Naval War College, 1904; Light House Inspector, 15th Naval District, 1907; comander, USS Denver, 1908; commander, USS Maine, 1909; Naval Secretary, Lighthouse Board, 1910; Naval War College, 1910; member of the Naval Examining and Retirement Board, 1912; Commandant, Naval Station, Newport, Rhode Island and 2nd Naval District, 1913; appointed commander in Atlantic Reserve Fleet, November 25, 1914;
Commander, Carrier Squadron, Atlantic Fleet, 1916; In command of the Naval Forces that intervened at Vera Cruz; 1915 and in Santo Domingo, 1916; designated Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, July 28, 1916 with the rank of Admiral. In charge of patrol of the east coast of South America during World War I; represented, with the rank of Ambassador, at the inaguration of President Avales of Brazil and the inaguration of Dr. Brum as President of Paraguay, 1919. He was relieved of command of the fleet on April 29, 1919.
He died on December 21, 1941 and was buried in Section 2 of Arlington National Cemetery.
His wife, Georgie Langhorne Blacklocke Caperton, is buried with him.
Photo By Michael Robert Patterson, 1999
Updated: 19 December 2001 Updated: 15 May 2004 Updated: 12 November 2007
Photo By M. R. Patteson, 23 April 2004 | <urn:uuid:efa50b6e-4dd9-45b9-84f6-bb2a7557e4fd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/caperton.htm | 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 | 0.9548 | 458 | 1.625 | 2 |
Investing In Asia - Buy the Technology, Not the TrendStock-Markets / Emerging Markets Nov 23, 2007 - 12:21 AM GMT
Yiannis G. Mostrous and GS Early write: There are two big concepts on growth investors' minds today: Asia and green tech. And for good reason; they both reinforce one another.
India and China is each turning out 600,000 engineers and scientists a year. In comparison, the US is graduating about 50,000.
The UK scientific community is also disturbed by the growing lack of interest current college students have for the sciences. And if you're trying to rationalize China 's and India 's numbers by noting their populations are much larger, well, they're not an order of magnitude larger. It doesn't wash.
What that means is in the next five years or so, much of the technical talent that has comfortably existed in the US and Europe will be moving to Asia : software, hardware, biotech, electronics, chip design and manufacturing, you name it.
What's more, large Asian nations are also using this technological boomlet and applying it to the challenges of supplying energy to billions of people as oil becomes scarcer, the planet warms and importing fuel to sustain a major country's productivity becomes economic suicide. These countries are going green not to save the planet but to build sustainable economies that won't swoon when oil or coal prices soar.
In the US and Europe , two of the world's largest consumers of energy, it's a green tech trend. In Asia , it's an economic model for capturing the brass ring of economic leadership in the 21st Century. But the semantics or even the intent isn't really the point.
The point is green tech is a global long-term trend, and one of the most important enabling technologies for green tech to succeed is nanotechnology. Although nanotech tends to be a pretty fuzzy concept for anyone not outfitted in a lab coat, it fundamentally boils down to allowing scientists and engineers to manipulate and construct properties at the molecular level with reliability and consistency.
Here's a tangible analogy: Think of an ear of corn. Imagine spreading butter on the ear versus buttering each separate kernel on the ear. The surface area you have to cover increases exponentially.
Up to now, most of our technology has been about dealing with properties as an ear of corn. Nanotech allows us to manipulate each kernel.
Increasing the surface area in such a way and manipulating individual “kernels” changes the interactions, efficiencies and performance of everything that is altered: nanotubes, nanoexplosives, nanolithography, nanomaterials, etc. Or, in more practical terms, new drug delivery systems and diagnostics; new ways to make computers smaller, faster and more energy efficient; better batteries; stronger fabrics; and more efficient fuels and materials.
Although this work is going on across the globe, Asia—Singapore, China, India and Japan, in particular—and Australia are quickly emerging as leaders in the new generation of work that will rupture the current status quo of the energy, electronics, pharmaceuticals and textiles industries for the next century. And it's happening now.
My colleague Yiannis Mostrous asked me to pen this issue of Growth Engines to give you the lowdown on how forward-thinking companies, from huge multinationals to development stage companies, are rewriting commerce for the coming decades. The following are a handful of companies I hold in my portfolios in my subscription service, The Real Nanotech Investor ( www.realnanotechinvestor.com ), that are incorporating nanotech into their existing product lines to enhance their market positions or are developing breakthrough products that may well be the ground floor opportunities about which all growth investors dream.
Three of the biggest players in Asia are actually German companies— Siemens , BASF and Bayer . German diplomacy has been instrumental in helping German companies develop very close business ties to markets in China and Singapore , in particular.
Singapore has been actively beefing up its research and development (R&D) efforts with the goal to be the brains behind the economic brawn in Asia . And this German trio has sunk significant resources in setting R&D facilities in Singapore . It also helps that the tax laws in Singapore are much more favorable than they are in Germany , so it makes good business sense for them to do so.
The companies get access to these markets and have an eager, educated group of scientists with state-of-the-art facilities (usually subsidized by the government). Singapore gets access to some of the top scientists and engineers in the world. That puts Singapore—or China or India or Australia—on the world stage years before that could organically “grow” a generation of world-class technicians.
Remember, scientists are interested in science, not geography. If they can work at the highest levels on important projects, they go; borders are immaterial.
In Australia , it's been more of an organic process of developing talent, but it also has two great advantages: It's an English-speaking nation with significant ties to the US and UK , and its neighbors are some of the fastest-growing economies in the world. And its scientists are relatively inexpensive, so start-ups are popping up like mushrooms after a spring rain.
Two development stage Aussie companies worth looking into are pSivida and Starpharma . Both are in the drug delivery business.
The former has significant backing from drug giant Pfizer and UK-based QinetiQ . It also has a proprietary drug delivery system in Phase III trials for pancreatic cancer. The company is now controlled by the inventor of its leading product line, so there's little risk that management is will to throw the company on the tracks to make a few bucks pitching a nanotech fantasy.
The latter has developed VivaGel , a salve that can be applied to women's genitals to prevent the transmission of Herpes and HIV. Its dendrimer-based technology also is being developed as safer and more effective spermicidal for use on condoms; it recently inked a development deal with Durex , the world's leading condom maker and is in negotiations with another major condom maker.
It also has deals with the leading cardio-pulmonary clinic in Australia and a Merck & Co subsidiary doing siRNA research for cancer-fighting applications. And its potential was echoed by its peers just last week when it was awarded for nanotech excellence in the product category for VivaGel at the National Nano Engineering Conference in Boston .
Suffice it to say, there are some big things happening Down Under.
Last, I would be remiss not to mention the forefathers of miniaturization, the Japanese. As Asia develops into a regional power and the enmity of the 1930s and '40s fades, inter-Asian trade deals are growing rapidly and Japan is a key beneficiary. In this space, Toshiba , Hitachi and NEC are the ones to watch.
If you're a “Buy American” kind of investor, check out ultracapacitor maker Maxwell Technologies , which has growing its business smartly in China and has significant business in Europe in the green power sector.
Also, Motorola is a mobile phone fixture in Asia and continues to have a wide and short pipeline from lab to market, which is crucial in this sector.
GS Early is editor of The Real Nanotech Investor and the free e-zine Nanotech Investor News , and executive editor of www.kciinvesting.com .
By Yiannis G. Mostrous
Editor: Silk Road Investor, Growth Engines
Yiannis G. Mostrous is an associate editor of Personal Finance . He's editor of The Silk Road Investor , a financial advisory devoted to explaining the most profitable facets of emerging global economies, and Growth Engines , a free e-zine that provides regular updates on global markets. He's also an author of The Silk Road To Riches: How You Can Profit By Investing In Asia's Newfound Prosperity .
© 2005-2013 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication. | <urn:uuid:48a4c13c-7482-4b7a-a8a5-2fed109df4b5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article2862.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94998 | 1,697 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Transforming the nursing profession in Georgia is like growing peaches in Alaska. It’s not exactly the most hospitable climate for nurse-led changes to health and health care.
But that hasn’t stopped an intrepid group of nurse and other leaders in Georgia from working to transform the nursing profession and, in so doing, improve health and health care in the state.
They’re tilling a rocky field. The state—with the backing of organized medicine—has placed tight limits on the ability of nurses to practice to the full extent of their training and abilities, nurse leaders say. In addition, there is no state center that provides reliable data on the nursing workforce. And building momentum for any kind of statewide campaign is tough in a state as large and diverse as Georgia.
Still, signs of success are beginning to sprout. The Georgia Nurses Association has been very focused on nursing legislation during this year’s legislative session. The group’s priorities include passing a bill that would remove a barrier preventing advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) from ordering radiological images and one that would provide funding to support nursing workforce data collection.
Georgia nurse leaders are also working with area nursing schools to create a common core of prerequisite courses so that associate-level nurses can move more easily into baccalaureate programs. And there’s more good news: The coalition may receive Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) funding to help advance nurse education in the state.
The effort “has been an extremely positive thing for nursing in Georgia,” said Lisa Eichelberger, DSN, RN, dean and professor of nursing at Clayton State University. “It has been so gratifying to see nurses really come together to bring about change.”
A Quick Start
The effort—now officially known as the Georgia Nursing Leadership Coalition—has its roots in a summit that followed the release of a groundbreaking report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) on the future of nursing. Called The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health, the report laid out a strategy to transform the nursing profession to ensure that all Americans have access to high-quality, patient-centered care in a health care system where nurses contribute as essential partners.
Back home in Georgia, hundreds of allies gathered together at venues across the state to watch the event remotely. Nursing leaders across the state quickly formed a coalition to begin implementing the recommendations in the report. Within just a few months, the group had organized its own summit on the future of nursing that was attended by some 400 supporters, including the state’s commissioner of labor.
“We did it very quickly and we raised quite a bit of money,” Eichelberger said.
In the year since, the coalition has solidified. In September, it was named an Action Coalition by the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action, a collaborative effort of AARP, the AARP Foundation and RWJF to implement solutions to the challenges facing the nursing profession and to build upon nurse-based approaches to improving quality and transforming the way Americans receive health care.
The Georgia Action Coalition is led by an executive committee and a leadership council. Eight workgroups, meanwhile, are tackling each of the report’s eight major recommendations. Key partners include AARP, the Georgia Hospital Association and Georgia Health Care Foundation.
The coalition’s top priorities—gleaned from a survey of summit attendees—include removing scope-of-practice barriers, increasing the number of nurses with baccalaureate and doctoral degrees and building a base of state-level nursing workforce data.
Despite the difficult terrain, Georgia’s nurse leaders are confident about the campaign’s prospects. One advantage: “Over the years we have had a number of exceptional nurse leaders from Georgia hold positions at the national level,” said Debbie Hatmaker, PhD, RN-BC, SANE-A,, chief programs officer of the Georgia Nurses Association and the immediate-past president of the American Nurses Credentialing Center. “They often bring their leadership skills and national perspectives back to our state efforts to improve nursing and health care.”
“That diversity helps us to learn from the other states,” added Karen Waters, MBA, MHA, senior vice president of the Georgia Hospital Association. “It helps challenge the status quo and makes us think of how we can do things better.”
Those ties, she said, will help the coalition reach its longer-term goals: defining its strategic goals, creating a business plan, raising money to sustain the campaign and engaging more community partners. “We really need to broaden our scope and involve groups that are not typically focused on nursing. That’s really going to be a major push in the next year.”
Learn how to improve care transitions and prevent avoidable hospital readmissions, and pick up nursing and medical education con-ed credits.
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The reconvened Commission to Build a Healthier America will provide new guidance in two key areas: early childhood and healthy communities.
"We often see the benefits of diversity as being for minorities," Angela Amar writes. "We seldom see that the majority benefits as well."
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Cure Violence, formerly known as CeaseFire, is a national public health strategy that reduces gun shootings and killings.
The strange pull of this series is its humanity, not its horrors.
While the need to address disparities in care is well known, few strategies for reducing disparities have been studied systematically. | <urn:uuid:af3f7992-d785-4cbf-97bd-0ce513d6f337> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://rwjf.org/en/about-rwjf/newsroom/newsroom-content/2012/03/georgia-action-coalition-sows-nursing-campaign-seeds-in-rocky-te.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954006 | 1,320 | 1.84375 | 2 |
In-depth Biography Travis Tritt was one of the leading new country singers of the early '90s, holding his own against Garth Brooks, Clint Black, and Alan Jackson. He was the only one not to wear a hat and the only one to dip into bluesy Southern rock. Consequently, he developed a gutsy, outlaw image that distinguished him from the pack. Throughout the early '90s, he had a string of platinum albums and Top Ten singles, including three number one hits.
Tritt fell in love with music as a child, teaching himself how to play guitar when he was eight and beginning to write songs when he was 14. Travis was determined to have a musical career, but his parents didn't encourage him to follow his instincts. His mother didn't mind that he wanted to perform, but she wanted him to sing gospel; his father was afraid there was no money in singing. When he was 18, he tried to settle down, work, and have a family but was unsuccessful -- he was married and divorced twice before he was 22. He continued to play music while working various jobs, including one at an air-conditioning company. The company's vice president was a guitarist who gave up hopes of a musical career and urged Tritt to follow his dreams. Tritt quit his job and began pursuing a career full-time.
In 1982, Tritt began his pursuit by recording a demo tape at a private studio which was owned by Danny Davenport, who happened to be an executive at Warner Brothers. Davenport heard the vocalist's songs and was impressed, deciding to take Tritt under his wing. For the next several years, the pair recorded demo tapes while Tritt played the honky tonk circuit. The singer was developing a distinctive sound, adding elements of country-rock and Southern rock to his honky tonk.
Partway through in 1989, Warner Brothers' Nashville division signed Tritt, and his debut album, Country Club, appeared in the stores in the spring 1990. It was preceded by the Top Ten hit, "Country Club." Upon the release of his debut album, Tritt entered the first ranks of new country singers. His next two singles, "Help Me Hold On" and "I'm Gonna Be Somebody," hit number one and two respectively. "Put Some Drive in Your Country," which had a clear rock & roll influence, stalled at number four, since radio programmers were reluctant to feature such blatantly rock-derived music.
Despite his success, the Nashville music industry was hesitant to embrace Tritt. His music and stage show owed too much to rock & roll, and his image didn't conform with the behatted legions of new male singers. Nevertheless, Tritt had a breakthrough success with his second album, 1991's It's All About to Change. Prior to its release, he had hired manager Ken Kragen, who also worked with Lionel Richie, Trisha Yearwood, Kenny Rogers, and We Are the World. Kragen helped market Tritt in a way that appealed to both country fans and a mass audience, sending It's All About to Change into multi-platinum territory.
T-r-o-u-b-l-e, Tritt's third album, was released in 1992. Although it didn't match the success of It's All About to Change, it had the number one single, "Can I Trust You With My Heart," and went gold. Tritt bounced back in 1994 with Ten Feet Tall & Bulletproof, which went platinum, spawned the number one single "Foolish Pride," and marked his highest position, number 20, on the pop charts. His 1995 compilation Greatest Hits: From the Beginning went platinum within six months of its November release. Restless Kind was released in 1996, followed two years later by No More Looking Over My Shoulder; Down the Road I Go was issued in fall 2000. Live in Concert appeared in 2007 from Big Bang while later that same year Category 5 released a new studio effort from Tritt called The Storm. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi | <urn:uuid:e6818c6c-eb65-4291-a5ba-3c309343ebad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ticketmaster.com/Travis-Tritt-tickets/artist/732965?tm_link=tm_edp_multiact_act1-name | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.989812 | 836 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Photo by Heather Middleton
By Maria-Jose Subiria
Terry Robinson, a flight attendant for Delta Air Lines, Inc., was
greeting fellow employees with a bright smile as they entered Delta's
Technical Operations Center, near Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta
Robinson said he has been with the company for 13 years, and has
enjoyed every minute while employed with the airline.
"Today is a celebration," said Robinson. "It's the beginning of a new
era for us."
More than 300 Delta employees recently filled the airline's Technical
Operations Center, in Atlanta, to celebrate the airline's 70th
anniversary at its Atlanta headquarters.
The festivities were celebrated on Jan. 21, and included the
christening of a Boeing 777-200LR aircraft, as the "Spirit of Atlanta."
A video projected onto the side of the aircraft showed Delta through
the years, with a final image of a large Coca-Cola bottle pouring
cola over the Spirit of Atlanta wording.
"The success of Delta and the City of Atlanta have been intertwined
for seven decades, and it's hard to argue with the results," said
Richard Anderson, CEO of Delta Air Lines. "Atlanta has grown into a
major international city while Delta built the world's largest hub at
the city's airport [Hartsfield-Jackson]. Central to this success has
been the historic partnership between Delta, the City of Atlanta, the
state of Georgia and our thousands of Atlanta-based employees and
Airline employees and a variety of officials, including Anderson,
Coca-Cola Company Chairman and CEO Muhtar Kent, Georgia Gov. Nathan
Deal, and U.S. Sens. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and Johnny Isakson (R-
Ga.) spoke during the 70th anniversary event.
Officials said Delta is among the largest airlines in the world, but
in 1941, during the time it moved its headquarters from Monroe, La.,
to Atlanta, it was a small air carrier with a focus on serving the
Southeast. Throughout the following decades, the airline built the
world's largest connecting hub in Atlanta, and for more than 20 years
it has remained Georgia's largest private employer and a major
economic force in the region, airline officials said.
"Delta is truly an economic force for Georgia," said Deal. "It is our
biggest employer and its presence here plays a key role in helping us
attract new investment and jobs. I look forward to partnering with
Delta as it sets out on the next 70 years."
Airline officials explained that Delta has 25,000 employees based in
Atlanta, and is estimated to pump more than $25 billion into the
local economy. The airline is also a large contributor to various key
community organizations in Atlanta, including the Grady Health
Foundation, the Woodruff Arts Center and AID Atlanta, Inc.
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed made an appearance on screen during the
celebration, because of a meeting with President Barack Obama in
"The strong relationships among companies such as Delta, state and
local elected officials and civic organizations are what make Atlanta
not only a global, dynamic city, but a great place to live and do
business," said Reed.
Chambliss said Delta has made tremendous progress since its
beginnings in Monroe. The airline has established itself as an
economic engine for Georgia and the Southeast, he explained.
"For seven decades, Delta has thrived, employing thousands of
Georgians and becoming an integral part of our communities," said
Isakson said since Delta has been in Atlanta, it has brought jobs,
businesses and abundant opportunities to Georgia, by linking it to
cities across the nation and the globe.
The event also honored three individuals, two of which are Delta
Lynda Lloyd, a flight attendant for Delta, was honored for her
longevity with the company.
According to Delta CEO Anderson, she has worked for the airline since
"As a longtime Atlanta resident it's been so exciting to be part of
this airline, which is such a positive force for the community," said
Lloyd. "It was the very best decision of my life, to come to Atlanta,
remain here and be a Delta flight attendant. I am still enjoying the
very best job in the world. It always makes me proud when I tell
people I work for Delta."
Cheryll Davis, who works in global sales and distribution for Delta,
was honored for being the company's most active community volunteer
Davis has dedicated thousands of hours to charities, throughout her
20-year career with the airline, explained officials.
"Delta has always encouraged its employees to become involved in our
communities, and service is a big part of being a member of the Delta
family," said Davis. "As an Atlanta resident, it's great that Delta
is so supportive of our community, and it's one of the benefits of
being Delta's hometown."
Ed Robinette was recognized as the airline's most frequent flier,
having flown nearly 7 million miles, using Delta, over the past 30
years, according to officials. He has been a member of the Delta
SkyMiles frequent flier program since 1981.
"Two years ago, I moved my business to Atlanta because of the great
flights and service offered by Delta, and I'm not the only one. We
have so many businesses based in Atlanta solely because of Delta,"
On the net:
Delta Air Lines: www.delta.com | <urn:uuid:887c06c2-d1a6-44f9-a61b-05f26373a2e1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.news-daily.com/news/2011/jan/30/celebrating-history/?opinion | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962196 | 1,169 | 1.789063 | 2 |
With the final debate between Obama and Romney in the 2012 US presidential election campaign behind us, we can expect another inevitable onslaught of debate analysis, opinion polls, extreme scrutiny and hilarious Twitter hashtags. So I'd feel remiss if I didn't add to this.
This wealth of data arguably is a good thing: it suggests that there is a demand for it, and this in turn suggests a large number of people are actively interested in the politics that directly affects their lives. Voter apathy is often a concern (in UK politics at least), so anything that gets people interested should be encouraged.
However, so much analysis, discussion, dissection, interpretation and opinion is produced over every debate or other high-profile (or not) political event, it risks becoming largely meaningless. I'm not in charge of a global superpower (yet) so I can't say for certain, but I'd have guessed that articulately defending your policies in front of an audience (albeit a very large one) is not the most important facet of the job.
And yet, the debates are portrayed as a crucial test of candidate suitability. The actions of animals in behavioural science labs don't come under this much scrutiny. When every sentence, gesture and stance (physical and ideological) can potentially result in a level of meticulous analysis that an electron microscope would consider "a bit invasive", what chance does any normal human have of getting an honest and accurate assessment of the useful facts in order to make a rational decision? I'd argue that it's "very little", bordering on "zero". They're likely to end up filtering the data in some way, and focussing on things that conform to their own views and principles, and if such a confirmation bias is used (by necessity) can a balanced decision based on the facts really be likely?
This is undoubtedly going to get worse as time and technology progress. It's bad enough now with 24-hour news channels and the internet with all its inlets and outlets. Most media, seemingly terrified of the audience's attention wavering, focus on sound bites and brief clips, which risk losing the context and nuance of a 3-hour debate. Twitter is hardly any better in this regard.
Who knows how bad it's going to get when more advanced technology becomes available? One can imagine the depth of analysis we'll have to deal with for the 2020 election debates.
"At the 2 hour mark, the perspiration detection laser sweep revealed the Democratic candidate has 1.54 times the number of beads of sweat on his forehead than his rival, implying that he is over 50% more nervous than the opposition candidate when discussing the economy. However, when the Republican candidate belched at 94 minutes, the olfactory detection scanner in the podium revealed that he had recently eaten bacon, which is likely to lose him support among undecided Jewish voters."
As facetious as this may sound, the reasons people actually vote for who they do can often be no more sophisticated and superficial. In a way, it's something of a contradiction to actively decide who will make decisions for you. Democracy is a relatively recent occurrence in terms of human cognitive evolution. If we're not adapted to make logical decisions based on the extensive socio-economic factors and variables we're presented with, how do we decide who we want in charge?
Because humans do seem to always want someone in charge. Humans (and other primates) are social creatures and instinctively form groups with a hierarchical structure. The need for hierarchies and social standing are potentially hard wired into our brains, and our position in the hierarchy can affect our health and well being. And with any hierarchy, there is inevitably someone at the top.
For more primitive societies, the leader is likely to be the one who can control most others by being the biggest or strongest, the one you don't want to cross. But as any society gets more widespread and complex, so must the mechanisms to control the society by its leader. Religion undoubtedly played a part in this, making it possible to invoke an invisible deity who will punish those who break the social rules when nobody is around, via some ineffable methods. And anyone who can claim to represent the deity must be obeyed, for they are supposedly capable of things beyond you.
In such tightly regulated hierarchies as religions and militaries, who ends up in charge is not a democratic decision; in these cases, membership of and acceptance by the organisation usually requires discipline and strict adherence to the rules, so who gets to lead is not a matter for debate.
The sort of free-thinking, intellectual types who read the Guardian science section may think themselves above such mindless adherence to authority figures, but that sadly may not be the case, even for more "enlightened" types. Milgram's infamous experiment, where everyday volunteers from normal backgrounds told to supply painful (but simulated, although they didn't know that) electric shocks to an unwilling victim, actually did so if commanded by a recognised authority figure (in this case, a scientist).
One theory as to why this happens is that the subjects enter an "agentic state", where they feel responsibility for their actions rests with the authority figure, not them, no matter how distressing. This is one theorised mechanism for why people obey commands that lead to genocide.
But it's not a straightforward process. Give someone a uniform and a position of authority and they don't instantly get respect and obedience, as any traffic warden will tell you.
Context appears to play a crucial role in the designation of someone as a 'good leader'. For example, authoritarian leaders tend to do better at times of crisis, which is why the more right wing establishments tend to try to convince people that crises are ongoing. During peaceful times, people tend to be more resentful at having their individual rights stripped from them when there's no imminent danger to justify this.
Even on the minor level , context matters. Ministers trading criticisms of each other's records is usually dismissed as childish name calling. But Julia Gillard's blistering attack on her opponent's sexism has done her no end of good, politically.
There is an extensive body of research on the social and psychological factors that determine who and what makes a good leader. There are many conflicting theories, but one major one mentions the importance of 'presence', that vague but essential quality that makes someone more likely to be obeyed and followed without objection. Exactly how you'd quantify this is anyone's guess.
Social psychologist Robert F Bales posited two classes of leaders: task leaders (who excel at initiating and directing behaviour to get a job done) and socio-emotive leaders (who lift spirits and provide psychological well-being to a group). Seeing as politicians need to be elected in order to start directing behaviour and completing the jobs of governing, they invariably fall into the latter category.
Whatever you think of George Osborne's fare dodging or Nick Griffin's alarming Twitter behaviour, the fact remains that a significant number of people felt comfortable enough with them to elect them into office. Feel free to find this alarming, I know I do.
It's worth pointing out that much of the leadership research cited in the literature is from a Western society perspective, and focuses on narrow areas such as business and small groups (both easily accessible to research). So any conclusions made may not be readily applicable to society in general, which is obviously far more complex and chaotic than any one group
With so many variables in play, perhaps it is naïve to expect any one politician to be able to effectively control and direct the extensive and ever-changing needs of a society of millions. Even religions recognise this, typically referring to an omnipotent deity who is running things. Monotheistic religions keep it vague with some omnipresent super being, but I prefer the Hindu approach, where they believe the world is run by thousands of gods, with about six arms each. Makes sense, India is a busy place after all.
But modern politics essentially asks voters to consider all the potential ramifications of one individual or group of individuals being in charge of a society and all the variables and complications this entails. The human mind is unlikely to be able to do this without years of study in the area, so will inevitably revert to what it knows; deciding according to group influence, personal ideology, even physical preference like height, facial expressions and gender .
You may argue that the latter isn't such a big deal, that you could probably fill binders with the number of powerful women you can think of, but the sad fact is that positions of authority in numerous fields are still male-dominated. Perhaps men have been in charge for so long that most people see it as the norm now, and assume there must be a logical reason for it? Damned if I know what it is, though.
So it's no wonder that, when confronted by a bombardment of facts and data that mean little or nothing about issues they can't really relate to, people will vote according to things they can grasp. Politicians know this, the media know this, which is maybe why so much time and effort is spent on seemingly irrelevant details like photo opportunities and correct phrasing; these are the things many people will relate to, and so could win an election. Ergo, they're not irrelevant after all.
If we ever are visited by aliens and they utter the classic request "Take me to your leader", I hope they are the patient sort, because that's going to take some working out.
Dean Burnett prefers to interact with his puny minions via the medium of Twitter @garwboy | <urn:uuid:a47735b7-607a-4b9d-9ca7-95419c9f2d90> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/brain-flapping/2012/oct/23/us-presidential-debate-voters-choice-leader | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966072 | 1,952 | 1.757813 | 2 |
November 9th, 2012
In the short time that has passed since the election, there have been numerous pronouncements that the struggle over the future of American health care is now more or less settled. And it is certainly true that, over the next four years, full-scale repeal and replacement of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is not in the cards. The president is determined to move ahead with full implementation, of course, and he will not readily sign onto major changes to his signature domestic initiative.
But the 2012 election did not produce a return to 2009. The Democrats do not have supermajority control of the House and Senate, as they did in the 111th Congress when the PPACA was passed. Indeed, in 2013 and 2014, Republicans will have a rather sizeable majority in the House, along with 45 votes in the Senate. In addition, there are now 30 Republican Governors in the states, who will have much to say about health care policy in the coming years, too. So, unlike the birth of the PPACA, its implementation will proceed at a time when Republicans are controlling many levers of power.
Moreover, the president and Congress will be forced by circumstances to address very significant budgetary questions in the coming months and years. In less than two months, the combination of tax and spending policies that constitute the “fiscal cliff” are scheduled to go into effect — against the wishes of leaders in both parties. And early next year, the federal government is again expected to bump up against the statutory limit on federal borrowing. Whether they like it or not, these events will force the president and congressional leaders to engage in a difficult and contentious discussion about how to narrow the massive gap between expected revenues and expected spending commitments in coming years.
Any conversation about the government’s medium and long-term fiscal situation will necessarily center heavily on health care matters. The rapid rise in health entitlement spending over the past three decades is a primary reason for the pronounced fiscal pressure we are experiencing today, and the problem is about to get much worse over the coming two decades.
Everything Must Truly Be On The Table
During his 2011 budget talks with House Speaker John Boehner, the president famously said that “everything was on the table” for discussion, but, in reality, he and his aides made it clear that the PPACA was not on the table. They wanted Republicans to accept the PPACA in its current form as a fait accompli and only negotiate on other elements of the budget. In other words, they wanted to construct a bipartisan budget agreement with Republican leaders, but on a foundation which had as a primary feature a health care plan written entirely by one party.
Republicans should not enter into budget talks with the president with those kinds of preconditions. If putting “everything on the table” for consideration is considered necessary to open up new possibilities for agreement, then everything — including all aspects of health care — must really be on the table too. And, if everything really is on the table, it is entirely possible — indeed probable — that significant amendments would be made to Medicare and Medicaid and even the PPACA.
There are also significant questions surrounding the implementation of the PPACA. Only a small subset of states have really moved ahead aggressively to construct the exchanges that are so central to reform. The administration says that it will move ahead with a back-up federal exchange in states that decline to participate, but it’s not hard to imagine this becoming a slow-motion administrative train-wreck that mars the program’s launch. The administration would clearly prefer to have the states take the lead in this process, but that is unlikely to occur in many parts of the country without real and significant concessions to Republican governors.
Implementation could be further complicated by adverse selection in the exchanges. The law was built around the assumption that the individual mandate would create the perception among citizens that they have an obligation to sign up with insurance, and thus millions of people would do so. But the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had no authority to impose such an obligation. Rather, citizens have a choice: they can buy insurance, or pay the tax. And both are perfectly legitimate choices.
This subtle difference could have profound implications on PPACA implementation if fewer young and healthy people sign up for insurance and instead choose to pay the tax. If that were to occur, premiums in the exchanges would be far higher than projections from the Congressional Budget Office would indicate.
A Deep Divide But The Potential For Bipartisan Agreement
No one should underestimate the difficulty of bridging the deep divide between the parties on health care, which is mainly a disagreement over how best to slow the pace of rising costs. One side favors empowering the federal government to impose more cost controls, while the other side wants to put consumers in functioning marketplaces in the driver’s seat. In deliberations over restraining projected federal budget deficits, these different visions are sure to collide.
This does not mean that bipartisan agreement is beyond reach. It isn’t. Indeed, if ever there were a moment for bipartisan accord, this is certainly it. There are big problems that must be confronted — problems that are difficult if not impossible for one party to ever fix by itself. The president, with re-election behind him, will have every reason to make 2013 a highly productive legislative year because his power will only diminish with time. And House Republicans want to demonstrate to voters that they are as interested in governing as in checking the excesses of the administration. So it would not at all be surprising to see both sides show more flexibility in the coming year than they have shown in the past.
The only thing that is certain, however, is that the issue of health care is not going away. The nation’s budgetary problems are too big and pressing to be avoided any longer, and it will prove impossible to fix those problems without significant revision to future health care spending commitments.Email This Post Print This Post | <urn:uuid:fbfdb20f-4890-4b52-aa6c-32a2cc037fd1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2012/11/09/health-policy-after-the-election/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968431 | 1,215 | 1.515625 | 2 |
OKLAHOMA CITY — Military officials are mistreating convicted Army deserter Camilo Mejia at the Fort Sill correctional facility where he’s being held, his attorney and family members said Thursday.
Mejia, a 28-year-old Iraqi war veteran, is not being allowed to speak to his family in Spanish, his native language, read his mail or give interviews to the media, his attorney, Louis Font of Brookline, Mass., said.
“What they’re trying to do is isolate Private Mejia and break his will,” Font said at a news conference. “He’s being singled out for harsher treatment than others.”
A spokesman at Fort Sill said security guidelines at the correctional facility restrict inmates from speaking to visitors in foreign languages and that Mejia is not being treated differently than any other prisoner.
“Private Mejia has been sent to Fort Sill, where he is being treated just as any other inmate,” said Marcello Bruni, a Fort Sill media relations officer. “There is no evidence of mistreatment.”
Bruni said mail addressed to all inmates is opened before being delivered and that requests for media interviews of prisoners are rarely granted.
“If there are requests for interviews that would benefit both the Army and the prisoner, then we would consider that,” Bruni said. “So far, we haven’t had any such requests that would fall into that category.”
Mejia was convicted of desertion in a military court in Fort Stewart, Ga., on May 21 after refusing to return to his Florida National Guard unit after a two-week leave in October.
He was sentenced to a year in a military prison, received a dishonorable discharge and was reduced in rank from staff sergeant to private.
On Wednesday, a closed hearing was held at Fort Sill on Mejia’s request for status as a conscientious objector. A military hearings officer from Fort Stewart presided over the hearing and heard testimony from Mejia and several character witnesses.
Mejia and his attorneys have argued that the horrors of war and his experiences during his 5˝ months in Iraq made him a conscientious objector.
Among those testifying Wednesday was Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst who leaked the 1971 Pentagon Papers, a top secret study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
A report from Wednesday’s hearing will be forwarded to the Department of the Army, which will make the final determination. If the military approves his request, his sentence and discharge status could be modified.
© 2004 Associated Press | <urn:uuid:0358740b-d979-4cfd-886b-dc14e058e422> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0625-08.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982392 | 556 | 1.507813 | 2 |
A recent post on Kairosnews asks, Should Academic Writing be Copyrightable? | Kairosnews Specifically it suggests that faculty at public-funded universities should not own the rights to the work they produce, but instead that work should be owned by the university/state/public.
If indeed SUNY or the state of New York wanted to own the copyright to my writing, I suppose they would have to pay for the privelege. Currently, they do not, except in the case where the university specifically asks me to write something. This is part of the union contract. As such, any royalties I might get are not “extra” money, they are part of the negotiated compensation I receive as an employee. I think it is misleading to charge me with trying to steal from the public simply because I do my job and get paid for it by the terms of my contract. A change in the contract would be required, at least in my state, and I would obviously expect some other form of compensation.
In any case, there would be multiple problems with this suggestion.
1. This would mean that SUNY and the state would own the copyright. This is not the same as saying it is in the public domain. The fact that tax money supports something is not a basis for the public to claim a right to it. I have to pay to go into a tax-supported state park or drive on my tax-supported highway. I’m not even allowed to sleep in the tax-supported Governor’s Mansion or ride in his car. And so on and so on.
Now the state might be inclined to just give that copyright away, but I kinda doubt it. For one thing, we have a fair number of publishers in our state who like to make money selling those copyrights as textbooks and journal subscriptions. Those folks would not be happy. No, I am entirely certain that the state would simply keep the copyrights and take the royalties into its coffers.
Besides, even if they did put the work into the public domain, that doesn’t mean that it will be free, it just means I won’t get paid. That is, if I write a textbook and it is put straight into the public domain, then any publisher can print and sell copies of the textbook without paying me. Meanwhile, the student at the college bookstore will still be paying just as much. Or is the assumption that the state will be printing and freely distributing my textbook or that everyone will read it online at a website freely maintained by the state?
2. This would put an end to academic freedom at public universities. If SUNY owns the copyright to my writing, then I do not have the right to publish my own work or even alter it. I would have to ask their permission before publishing anything. Could I even maintain my own blog without their approval? Obviously if I wrote something objectionable, in their minds, it would never see the light of day. Think about the situation with my SUNY colleague Steven Kurtz of the Critical Arts Ensemble.Do we really want to suggest that the legislators in Albany should be the ones to determine what academic work gets published by SUNY faculty?
Of course not. I agree with the principle that academic work be freely accessible to the public. However, saying that academics at public universities should transfer their copyrights to their institutions and/or the state is simply not the way to make that happen. | <urn:uuid:7d0cd6f6-b49d-462d-bc42-8ac49171eb85> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://alex-reid.net/2004/07/should_academic.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975299 | 704 | 1.5 | 2 |
After two decades and 126,000 miles, John and Susan Musinski's 1990 Ford Econoline has made its final run.
Belching black smoke and rusting from the wheels up, the once-rockin' van -- replete with curtains, a TV and even a CB radio -- made the 25-mile trek from Lake Villa to Gregory Hyundai in Highland Park, ready to take its place on the scrap heap in return for a new fuel-efficient car and a fat $4,500 government rebate.
Lured by the government's "Cash For Clunkers" program, which is set to launch officially on Friday, the couple are among the first to trade in an aging, gas-guzzling ride through the $1 billion initiative designed to jump-start sagging auto sales.
"It has been 20 years since we had a new car," said Susan Musinski, 57, a customer service manager at the Fox Lake Jewel-Osco. "I'm sorry to see it go, but it needed to be traded in."
Approved last month, the program known officially as the Car Allowance Rebate System offers rebates of $3,500 to owners who relinquish cars rated at less than 18 miles per gallon to purchase ones getting at least 22 m.p.g. If the new vehicle gets at least 10 m.p.g. more than the trade-in, the rebate is $4,500. For SUVs, minivans and pickups, a 2 m.p.g. improvement is required, while a 5 m.p.g. gain nets the full rebate.
The government rebate is taken off the price after manufacturer discounts and incentives are applied.
Reimbursement will be wired directly to the dealers, who must show proof that the clunkers have been taken off the road permanently by being "crushed or shredded," according to the legislation.
The program is expected to run four months, or until the $1 billion is depleted. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has until July 24 to issue the final regulations, putting most transactions on hold until Friday.
The staggered launch and stringent requirements have led to some confusion among dealers and consumers, but anticipation appears to be building, leading some to project a rush of clunkers to showrooms.
"There's a lot of interest, and there's a lot of junk out on the road," said Roger Rudin, general manager of Willowbrook Kia/Ford.
The dealership has fielded dozens of inquiries, and Rudin expects 20 to 30 pre-qualified buyers to drive off in new cars on Friday, especially the more fuel-efficient Kias.
"It's going to be kind of like when the zero percent [financing] first came out in October of '01," he said. "It was a madhouse."
Other dealers are somewhat less optimistic.
"We've already had a lot of people that have come in that were very disappointed that their cars didn't qualify," said Al Frisch, owner of Highland Park Ford Lincoln Mercury. "They might have had a car that pricewise was a clunker, but it has to get less than 18 miles to the gallon."
With incentives tilted toward some import lines that would yield the full $4,500 rebate, Frisch suggested his own incentive plan.
"It doesn't need to be this complicated," he said. "I think the industry would be better served with a flat rebate for anybody that buys a new car, or even better, anybody that buys an American car."
At Rockenbach Chevrolet in Grayslake, owner Gail Rockenbach Vitols is urging customers to "get in right away," figuring an estimated 250,000 sales nationwide will exhaust the rebate funds by Labor Day.
Although she is concerned that many customers may not qualify for the program, she is hopeful that once they hit the showroom, they will buy anyway. "If their old car is worth more than $4,500, they might be happy to trade in that vehicle and buy something new," she said.
Getting a jump on the competition, Hyundai instituted an interim dealer reimbursement program to generate interest before the actual launch. Gregory Hyundai made three advance sales but is planning to do the final paperwork on Friday to secure the government rebate directly.
Paul Hester of Barrington came to the dealer earlier this month to trade in his 1999 Oldsmobile Bravada, which was otherwise valued at about $1,500 and rated at 16 m.p.g. Hester bought a 2009 Hyundai Santa Fe, which gets 20 m.p.g. Listed at $24,000, he drove the new SUV home for $16,800 after discounts and a $3,500 rebate.
"The reason that I came in was the program, there's no question about that," said Hester, 69, a retired engineer. "Everybody was delirious that I was finally getting rid of it."
Rated at just 11 m.p.g., the Musinski's van not only qualified for the program, it could serve as a poster child. Keith Burgess, Gregory Hyundai sales manager, said the van was only worth about $300, "because it starts." Yet the government was willing to pay $4,500 to get it off the road.
"It's a gas guzzler and with the price of gas, it was just eating us alive," said Susan Musinski.
Maintained by her husband, a retired Ford mechanic, the blue and white van proved its mettle over the long haul, even as its metal began to weather away in huge chunks. | <urn:uuid:4537ed73-1038-4887-8f5f-ec133a0772a4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2009-07-24/news/0907230891_1_car-allowance-rebate-system-clunkers-government-rebate | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97657 | 1,162 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Christchurch's earthquake shook the city to its core, and did the same for Haiti quake survivor Emily Sanson-Rejouis.
It was an all-too-close reminder of her tragic loss eight months ago when her husband and two daughters perished beneath the rubble in Port-au-Prince.
Sanson-Rejouis - who yesterday competed in Nelson's gruelling Spring Challenge women's adventure race to raise money for Haiti - has returned to her hometown of Nelson with her surviving daughter, 2-year-old Alyahna.
When the Christchurch quake struck she was on her way back from France, where she'd been visiting her late husband Emmanuel's family.
"I transited through Christchurch to Nelson. I was in the airport on the Monday afternoon after the earthquake when there was an aftershock.
"A few things fell off the counter and I had a very strong emotional and physical reaction. It brought up memories of my experience in Haiti, which was very, very difficult."
Sanson-Rejouis can't bring herself to talk about the horror she endured that January day as she scrabbled desperately through her wrecked Port-au-Prince apartment searching for her family, and the heartbreaking loss of Emmanuel and their girls, Kofie-Jade, 5, and Zenzie, 3.
Little Alyahna was pulled out with a broken leg after 22 hours.
"One of the things I find extremely hard to come to terms with is the disparity between the level of destruction and the loss of life in Haiti versus New Zealand," she said.
Despite the two quakes being virtually the same magnitude, estimates of the number killed in Haiti's 7.0-magnitude jolt range from 230,000 to more than 300,000, while no one died in Christchurch's 7.1 quake.
The difference boiled down to New Zealand's high building standards and "exemplary" quake response.
For Alyahna's sake, the 37-year-old has pushed herself to keep moving forward.
Sanson-Rejouis has devoted herself to the Kenbe La Foundation, which she established in memory of her husband and daughters. "It's a vehicle for hope in the face of a tragedy that's literally incomprehensible."
Its name is Haitian Creole for "Never Give Up" and its first project is to rebuild the Source of Hope community school that was destroyed in the quake.
In the Leogane region where Emmanuel was born, near the epicentre, the school will cater to 120 students and will emphasise sports, music, leadership and entrepreneurship.
She's grateful for donations that have filled two shipping containers, ranging from stationery given by children to a prefabricated classroom provided by a Nelson businessman.
Sanson-Rejouis plans to take a team of people to Haiti early next year to assemble the classroom, create a water-supply system, medical clinic, playground and extra classrooms by converting the containers.
It will be her first time back.
"It's going to be very difficult emotionally, but it's really important for me to go back, and it's important for Alyahna to continue to have a connection to Haiti."
Sanson-Rejouis and her team finished the race in just under eight hours, about half an hour behind the winners.
* To help fund Kenbe La's work, visit www.kenbelafoundation.org or make a donation at the BNZ.By Kathryn Powley | <urn:uuid:82a27bf8-ff73-455b-b0e2-0e686458219e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nzherald.co.nz/christchurch-earthquake/news/article.cfm?c_id=1502981&objectid=10676134 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972023 | 730 | 1.523438 | 2 |
FREEHOLD, NJ - The Monmouth County Human Relations Commission (MCHRC) presented its third annual Earl Thomas Teasley Humanitarian Award on Monday, Feb.4, 2013 in Freehold.
Earl Teasley was the chairman of the MCHRC at the time of his death in April 2010. Teasley was a noted advocate for social justice, a beloved counselor and an assistant professor at Brookdale Community College.
Information about MCHRC and Teasley is at http://monmouthcountyhrc.org/Scrapbook.shtml .(click on Earl Thomas Teasley)
The 2013 Teasley award was given to Dale Daniels, Holmdel, Executive Director of the Center for Holocaust, Human Rights and Genocide Education (Chhange) at Brookdale Community College. As the director of what was formerly known as the Holocaust Center, she has made a real difference in bringing issues of bias crimes and discrimination to the forefront of the center’s activities.
The MCHRC presents the recipient a hurricane candle holder symbolic of those who do shine a light and allow others to shine also, even while the world around them may be stormy or unsettling.
Freeholder John Curley, of Middletown, and Assemblywoman Mary Pat Angelini, of Ocean Township, also provided recognition for Dale, who responded to the award with inspiring comments about her work. Earl's sister, Melissa Teasley, from Philadelphia PA shared poignant comments on Earl's personality. | <urn:uuid:79600284-d995-4ba2-b4d5-6178efef64ff> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://littlesilver.patch.com/blog_posts/mchrc-earl-t-teasley-humanitarian-award | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943876 | 304 | 1.765625 | 2 |
S.C. vets visit ‘their’ memorial for first time, with help from friends
And right behind him, pushing his wheelchair was Graceyn Moore, a junior at Belton-Honea Path High School, in Honea Path, S.C., who raised more than $10,000 for the trip so veterans like Leslie could be honored for their service.
“She’s been as nice to me as my children,” Leslie, 89 said. “She’s a special lady.”
He recalled how she had phoned him and asked him to come to her Sweet 16 birthday party, which was the main fundraiser for the event, have dinner with her family beforehand and accompany her through the sabers held by her Junior ROTC drill team. Graceyn is a Junior ROTC member.
Leslie was one of about 70 veterans from the Anderson, S.C., area who braved rain and tornado warnings to see the National World War II Memorial – their monument, they were reminded – through Honor Flight Network, which works to bring veterans to Washington.
Jeffery Miller, one of the co-founders, said he had been moved to start the group after discovering his father, a veteran, had donated toward the memorial but was never able to see it. Since 2006, 300 flights from around the country have brought veterans to the capital.
Many of the veterans were quick to describe the event as exciting, but underneath the rush were more sober sentiments.
“It’s unreal, really. It’s almost indescribable,”said Jay Byers, 84, of Lawrence, S.C., who served in the U.S. Air Force just after World War II. Asked what made the memorial so amazing, he looked away.
“It’s a little difficult,” he said.
Bob Frichette, 88, of Easley. S.C., and a former medic in the Coast Guard, was surprised to see how large the monument is.
But when he saw the South Carolina pillar, he said his mind went to the 14 friends who died in the war.
And there was anger as well.
“It makes me wonder why the hell Congress waited so long to build one,” he said.
Although the weather cut the trip short – the group viewed many monuments and memorials from their bus, and they missed the highly anticipated changing of the guard at Arlington National Cemetery – Miller said the main goal had been accomplished.
“They got to see the memorial,” he said. “That’s what we brought them up for.”
The veterans also saw other demonstrations of appreciation for what they had done. Bill R. Beckett, 50, of Easley, and an Air Force Veteran, helped the Defenders Motorcycle Club raise $6,000 and paid $300 for the chance to escort a veteran. Lauren Valainis, 23, a member of Republican South Carolina Rep. Jeff Duncan’s staff spent several days making 100 pins for the veterans and handed them out in the rain at the monument.
A group of volunteers from Burdette, Smith & Bish, an accounting firm in Fairfax, Va., took the day to help escort some of the veteran.
As the veterans waited for their return flight to the Greenville-Spartanburg airport, each veteran received several letters written by South Carolina school children thanking them for their service.
The best part of the day, Beckett said, is the homecoming. Family members were asked to be present when the plane landed to give the veterans greetings befitting returning soldiers.
“They give them hero’s welcome when they come back,” Beckett said. “If you have a human bone in your body, you’ll be crying,”
Reach reporter Emily Wilkins at [email protected] or 202-326-9867. SHFWire stories are free to any news organization that gives the reporter a byline and credits the SHFWire. | <urn:uuid:3db10350-a30c-4db6-8ac4-08f66b5edcdd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://shfwire.com/node/6871 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977196 | 862 | 1.546875 | 2 |
From: John M. Tait ([email protected])
Date: Wed Nov 25 1998 - 18:30:13 EST
Ward Powers wrote:
>I agree entirely. It is a VERY bad choice to translate SARX here by "body",
>just like that, and thus pre-empt possible interpretations.
>Another place where some translations do this (render SARX by "body") is in
>the next chapter of 1 Corinthians, in 6:16.
The TNT translates "the two shall become one." Again, this would be
understandable in a translation intended for ordinary reading, but as a
basis for further translation it seems inadequate.
Here the whole point of what
>Paul is saying turns on differentiating the two words he uses, SARX and
>SWMA. Paul writes, "Do you not know that he who unites himself with a
>prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, 'The two will become
>one flesh.'" (NIV; similarly most translations.) However, the TEV (Good
>News Bible) renders it, "Or perhaps you don't know that the man who joins
>his body to a prostitute becomes physically one with her? The scripture
>says quite plainly, 'The two will become one body.'": SARX (in the
>quotation) has been rendered "body", and the two words SARX and SWMA
>treated a synonyms.
>In Scripture SARX is used in reference to "all that a person is as a human
>being". Thus in the purposes of God, marriage, referred to several times as
>being or becoming "one flesh" is much more than just physical union, "one
>body": it is a commitment of two people to each other across all the levels
>of what it means to be human.
>This, ISTM, is the centre of the point which Paul is making. When you unite
>with a prostitute, what you get is a union of bodies: nothing more. Why is
>this wrong? In a compressed argument, Paul cuts straight to the reason it
>is to be condemned. "For he/it [God/Scripture] says, 'The two will become
>one flesh.'" (Genesis 2:24; also Matthew 19:5-6; Mark 10:8.) That is, a
>union which extends across all the levels of what husband and wife are as
>Taking SARX and SWMA as synonyms in 1 Corinthians 6:16 results in reading
>this verse as saying that a mere act of sexual intercourse with a person
>puts the two people involved into a "one flesh" relationship - which would
>have HUGE personal and pastoral implications, but this is in fact
>contradicted by the rest of biblical teaching about being one flesh and
>what constitutes a marriage.
>The word SARX in numerous places in Scripture refers to a person in all his
>humanity, including [sometimes, especially] in his human weakness. But SARX
>in itself never implies sin or sinfulness. (An earlier post to this thread
>said, I seem to remember, that SARX did imply sin - if I recall this
>correctly, I would invite a presentation of the evidence for such a meaning
>of the Greek word.) Jesus came in flesh (SARX, John 1:14) yet was without
>sin. God sent his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh (SARKOS hAMARTIAS,
>Romans 8:3: the word "sinful" has to be explicitly included because SARX on
>its own does not convey this implication of "sinful"). The NIV has done us
>a GREAT disservice by choosing frequently to translate SARX by "sinful
>nature" (23 times) or "sinful man" (thrice) - or "body" (20 times!!) - this
>is going to mislead a great many who are users of this translation.
>Thus the question of the differentiation of SARX and SWMA is basic to the
>understanding of 1 Corinthians 6:16. I suggest this differentiation may
>also throw light back on the question of the correct understanding of SARX
>in the preceding chapter of this Epistle.
While I agree with your treatment of the meaning of SARX in Paul, and agree
that TEV and NIV are begging questions by rendering it respectively as
"body" and "sinful" nature, I'm afraid I don't quite follow your reasoning
with regard to I Cor 6:16. Are you saying that Paul is here deliberately
drawing a contrast between SARX and SWMA in order to draw a contrast
between (a) the union of bodies which is involved in sex with a prostitute
("When you unite with a prostitute, what you get is a union of bodies:
nothing more"), and (b) the deeper union which is involved in marriage? In
other words, that Paul is saying that sleeping with a prostitute is _not_
the same as the union EIS SARKA MIAN which he quotes from Gen 2:24?
If this is the gist of your argument - and I admit that I may have
completely misunderstood - I would have thought that the opposite - or
something close to it - was the case. It seems to me that Paul is here
emphasising that union with a prostitute _is_ the same as the "one flesh"
relationship, in contrast to Gnostic approaches which regarded it as
irrelevant because of the perceived dichotomy between body and spirit.
(Insofar as I understand him, Grosheide seems to take this view).
Barrett regards SARX here as significant, considering that its use carries
Paul's argument forward in that it implies that the body, which is itself
innocent, in union with a harlot becomes flesh, which for Paul often has a
bad sense. However, this emphasis on a bad sense sees to be a strange
interpretation of the way in which Paul would have regarded his source in
It seems to me that not too much weight can be placed on the use of the
word SARX here, simply because Paul is quoting the LXX word for word. He
doesn't use SARX in the remainder of the argument, and to me this suggests
that he is here using the word simply because it is in his source, without
intending any particular semantic contrast with SWMA - unless it is to
emphasise that sexual union inevitably means more than the Gnostic
dichotomy between SWMA and PNEUMA would maintain. I would have thought the
main point which he is making is that sexual activity inevitably has the
original (ie, before the fall - cp. the similar appeal of Jesus to Genesis
1:27 with regard to the divorce question) God given significance however it
may have been corrupted by man, and that therefore it cannot be entered
into with impunity.
However, to return to the translation question, the very fact that this
passage is open to differences of interpretation would suggest that, in a
translation intended for further translation rather than reading, a more
literal rendering would have been appropriate. I would wonder what effect
the use of this translation might have on indigenous translations - and
even theologies - in the future.
John M. Tait.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:40:08 EDT | <urn:uuid:6b9ff246-960b-4cd1-913f-d872ca984098> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/test-archives/html4/1998-11/28609.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955375 | 1,705 | 1.625 | 2 |
NASA is building a next generation telescope to unlock the mysteries surrounding the origins of the universe. But the 9 billion dollar project is a decade behind schedule and billions over budget. Sally Kidd reports from Washington.
If you've been dreaming of strapping on your own "Iron Man" armor, you might have to wait a while longer. But revolutionary "bionic exoskeletons," like the metal suit worn by comic book hero Tony Stark, might be closer than you think -- just don't expect to fly away in one. | <urn:uuid:0303a526-b349-42c1-9fb1-b8b004b47585> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ketv.com/news/politics/NASA-Telescope-Billions-Over-Budget/-/9674400/19047320/-/6ucrko/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932887 | 107 | 1.554688 | 2 |
The International Chamber of Shipping, ITF, Indian National Shipowners’ Association, NUSI, MUI, IMEC, InterManager, Intertanko and BIMCO say they "deplore" the development.
The Asphalt Venture, a 1991 built asphalt/bitumen tanker was hijacked by Somali pirates on September 28 2010 and, following a ransom payment, the ship was released on April 15. Despite the owners’ concluding a dialogue with the pirates for the full release of 15 crew and vessel and payment of the ransom, the vessel was released but the master has reported that six officers and one rating were taken off the tanker and made to accompany the pirates ashore.
There is speculationthat pirates in Harardhere made the move in retaliation for the arrest of Somali pirates by the Indian Navy in recent weeks.
"This is a fundamental change to previous practice and moves the issue from being just between the shipowner and the pirates to being between the pirates and a government," say the maritime organizaions in a statement released today. "It is a major shift in the pirate-hostage equation which will need to be considered and addressed by the international community.
"Our thoughts are very much with these seafarers and their families as well as with all the other seafarers who are being held by the Somali pirates and with their families. As the state of lawlessness spirals downward in the Indian Ocean and the level of violence that pirates are prepared to use to coerce seafarers and to influence the hostage negotiation increases, this breach of the ransom agreement sets a precedent that is of the utmost concern.
"The international and national representative organizations are gravely concerned with this new development as international governments continue to fail to adequately respond to this 21st century example of organized and violent criminality that threatens the safe passage of world trade through the region, where 40 percent of the world’s oil is transported, and which may lead to increases in oil prices."
April 18, 2011 | <urn:uuid:cf74bb01-2a9f-41ec-a867-0b6fa3423924> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.marinelog.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=764:2011apr00183&catid=1:latest-news&Itemid=195 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969307 | 404 | 1.734375 | 2 |
January 19, 2011 |
NEW DELHI: The Jammu and Kashmir government is making constant efforts to bring back Kashmiri Pandits to the Valley as without them, Kashmir is incomplete, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah said on Wednesday. "It is our constant endeavour to bring back Kashmiri Pandits, who had left the Valley due to loss of sense of security. We want them to come back to a good atmosphere where they can feel secure. Without their return, Kashmir is incomplete," he told reporters here.
September 5, 2002 |
JAMMU: Panun Kashmir, an organisation of displaced Kashmiri pandits on Thursday asked members of the community to abstain from voting in assembly elections to protest their 'neglect' by the Center and state governments. The protest was also against government failure to probe the genesis of genocide, ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri pandits and ongoing human rights violations of the community, PK convenor Agnishekhar said. Unless genocide or the causes of exodus is addressed by the governments, we will not participate in any election, he said.
August 20, 2007 |
JAMMU: Kashmiri Pandits will organise an international summit in New Delhi next month to deliberate on the economic empowerment of the community. Seeking participation from over 150 leading members of the community, the summit would bring together Kashmiri Pandits from within and outside the country, using web casting and video conferencing, the organisers said. "The summit, which is the first-ever of its kind, would feature participation of successful entrepreneurs, industrialists, executives, bureaucrats, doctors, scientists, and scholars from the community", Surinder Ambardar, chief organiser said.
September 15, 2010 |
NEW DELHI: Amid demands for withdrawal of Armed Forces Special Powers Act from their state, Kashmiri Pandits on Wednesday opposed any such move and asked the Centre to take the views of all shades of opinion of the state before deciding on any major issue related to the state. A group of displaced Kashmiri Pandits met Defence Minister A K Antony to highlight their concerns over the worsening situation in the state and press their demands. "We have requested the Defence Minister that AFSPA should not been withdrawn as there are special circumstances in the Jammu and Kashmir.
October 9, 2010 |
JAMMU: Kashmiri Pandits today demanded removal of Omar Abdullah as Chief Minister accusing him of advocating separatist agenda through his recent statement in the state Assembly. "Omar's statement in the state assembly has helped promote the illegitimate agenda of separatists. He has become an advocate of separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani and has violated the oath of office as the Chief Minister, All State Kashmiri Pandit Conference (ASKPC) General Secretary H L Chata told reporters here.
July 18, 2002 |
NEW DELHI: The National Commission for Minorities, which until now has championed the cause of religious minorities, on Wednesday took up the case of Kashmiri Pandits, demanding their resettlement in Kashmir valley. The NCM chairman, Justice Mohammad Shameem, today met deputy prime minister L K Advani to convey the Commission's concern over the plight of Kashmiri Pandits displaced over the last one and a half decade of militancy. Suggesting that a beginning must be made towards resettlement of the minority community in the Valley, the NCM proposes to send a team to J&K soon to explore the possibility.
March 25, 2003 |
ON BOARD SPECIAL IAF PLANE: India on Tuesday blamed Pakistan for the massacre of 24 Kashmiri Pandits in a South Kashmir village and said violence in the state was continuing because of that country. Terming the massacre of the Pandits as a "cold-blooded murder," Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani, without naming Pakistan, told reporters that "this is an act of our neighbour and violence in the state is continuing only because of them. " He declined to reply whether the "healing touch" policy of Mufti Mohd Sayeed government hampered tackling militancy in the state and said "I will collect the report and brief the Cabinet Committee on Security once I go back (to Delhi)
April 20, 2003 |
JAMMU: Kashmiri Pandits on Saturday expressed disappointment over the PM "ignoring" Nadimarg massacre, which claimed the lives of 24 members of their clan a month ago. In his speech on Friday, All State Kashmiri Pandit Conference, General Secretary Hira Lal Chatta said, "a great tragedy had struck the Pandit community in the Nadimarg carnage by Pakistani militants, but not a single word of sympathy came from the prime minister in his speech....
August 21, 2005 |
SRINAGAR: At a time when J&K's coalition government is working overtime to complete three secured colonies for the migrant Kashmiri Pandits (KP) in Valley and around 1100 families are keen to return, a UGC funded study said only 40 percent of the migrants want central government to carve out "a separate homeland for them exclusively". The study carried out late last year suggested that only 15 percent of the migrants, mostly the underprivileged class from rural background, want to return and resume the pre-militancy living pattern and the remaining 45 percent would prefer to stay in secured colonies.
October 11, 2003 |
SRINAGAR: J&K government approved an ambitious and integrated Rs 33 crore project for construction of a cluster of 300 houses for Kashmiri Pandits migrants at Sheikhpora in the central Kashmir district of Budgam. The much talked about decision was taken at a high level meeting on Friday. Officials said the township will be set up over 92 kanals of land. It envisages construction of 300 two-bedroom tenements. Officials in the revenue ministry, which is handling the project, said that Mufti Sayeed had directed that priority should be given for allotment of dwelling units in the complex to those who are putting up in migrant camps at Jammu, Udhampur and Delhi and are willing to come back to the Valley. | <urn:uuid:0874c488-baa3-425d-a731-4f5594ea8f1b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/keyword/pandits/featured/4 | 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 | 0.950728 | 1,239 | 1.742188 | 2 |
ALEPPO, Syria (AP) — The injured arrive at the hospital in taxis or in the back of pickup trucks, to the blare of car horns and shouts of “Help!”
Sometimes, they are battle-hardened rebels with gaping wounds. Sometimes, they are children, peppered with shrapnel and screaming in pain.
Those who die are left on the sidewalk outside, to be claimed hours later by relatives.
An Associated Press team spent 24 hours at Dar al-Shifa hospital in Aleppo and witnessed the frantic work by overtaxed doctors and nurses to save those wounded in the battle for control of Syria’s largest city.
The AP first visited the hospital last month and returned this week to get a fuller impression of how its staff is coping amid Syria’s civil war. The routine is as simple as it is brutal: A barrage of shelling echoes over the city, and about 15 minutes later, the wounded flow in.
The medics work amid the wails of traumatized children, badly wounded men shouting Islam’s declaration of faith in their final minutes, and rebel fighters holding RPGs mourning dead comrades, with tears streaming down their gunpowder-blackened cheeks.
Blood is everywhere. Orderlies mop it up as more wounded arrive. Amid the din of groans and cries for help, a worker spots a severed limb on the floor and tries to break the tension with some black humor.
“Anyone missing a foot?” he asks.
Once a private clinic owned by a businessman loyal to President Bashar Assad, Dar al-Shifa hospital has been taken over by volunteer doctors, nurses and aides united by their opposition to the regime and the need to give medical care to civilians and rebels.
The seven-story hospital stands only 400-500 meters (yards) from the front line in a neighborhood that is heavily shelled. Nearly three months into the rebel offensive in Aleppo, the facility has taken at least six direct hits, mostly affecting the upper stories; its staff uses the bottom three floors.
Most of the surrounding apartment blocks are badly damaged and deserted, with the only evidence of life being the fluttering of clothes on laundry lines or an occasional resident stepping onto a balcony to get a better cellphone signal.
Dar al-Shifa has only seven doctors, two of whom are trained for emergency duties, and two nurses. The atmosphere is a bizarre and somewhat unnerving mixture of urgency, nonchalance, resolve and anger.
The staff smokes freely in the corridors, watching TV during breaks in treating the waves of wounded. Dr. Osman al-Haj Osman even has moved his wife and two small children into the facility in order to be close to them.
Hospital officials say they see about 100-120 cases a day, of which 10 or 15 are children. Eighty percent of the cases are of civilians; the rest are mostly rebel fighters. In the 24-hour period that the AP was there on Wednesday and Thursday, the hospital’s records showed nine dead and 107 wounded.
Because the hospital has no morgue, the dead are left on the sidewalk outside, where it is cooler. If the bodies are not identified and claimed within 12 hours, they are photographed and then buried. Residents who come to the hospital looking for missing relatives are shown the photos and – if they recognize a loved one – are given the choice of exhuming the remains for reburial elsewhere.
Osman, 30, spoke of the snap life-and-death decisions that he and others have to make when the hospital is flooded by casualties two or three times a day.
“I have to make a choice between a child with a 10 percent chance of survival and one with a 25 percent chance,” he said.
“Our cruelest moments are when we get a child whose foot or part of his leg is only held by skin and we have to amputate,” according to Osman, who said he was jailed and tortured by the Syrian regime twice since the start of the uprising in March 2011. “In the early days, we used to cry when we had a child with a severe injury, then recharge our psychological energy before we return to work.
“Now, there is just no time for that.”
When AP journalists first arrived Wednesday afternoon, there were only a handful of patients being treated. Dr. Abu Rayan, who studied medicine in Moscow, stood in one corner chatting with two members of the hospital’s pharmaceutical team. The doctor asked to be identified by his nickname for fear of retribution.
A man approached him, complaining of pain from shrapnel lodged in his right leg.
“Forget it, it will never come out,” the 35-year-old doctor told him with a smile.
Nearby, Zakariya Khojah lay on a gurney, a tube draining a wound in his side. He had a lifeless stare fixed on the ceiling. Standing at his side was his 13-year-old son, Bashar.
“Papa, is there anything hurting you beside your chest?” the boy asked. The father replied with a slow shake of his head.
“I was walking just ahead of him when a bomb fell close to us,” Bashar said. “He’s all I got. My mother died three years ago.”
The patient was later moved to a chair because the gurney was needed for someone else. Several hours later, he was brought outside to a pickup.
“I fear that my father may not get better,” Bashar said before climbing in beside him.
Around 3:10 p.m., shortly after artillery blasts were heard nearby, a wave of wounded arrived. Frantic men screamed, “Emergency! Emergency!” as they carried the casualties inside.
In minutes, the small, three-bed intensive care unit was filled, and the overflow of patients had to be treated on the floor of the lobby.
“Where are you guys? Hurry up, please, guys!” yelled one of the escorts. Others shouted, “God is great!”
Word quickly spread that the wounded, about 15 in all, had been standing in a bread line when a shell fell nearby.
A fighter carrying an RPG launcher on his shoulder walked over the wounded on the floor as he made his way to the narrow staircase leading to the X-ray room in the basement. A woman wearing the Muslim hijab and a blood-soaked black coat was on a gurney waiting for someone to attend to her. A man on the floor had a hole in his back the size of a tennis ball.
“May God curse Bashar Assad until he goes to his grave!” yelled a man in a loose gray robe. “He is a pig and son of a dog! May Allah curse his father, tanks and guns!”
The lobby was swiftly cleared of the wounded. Relatives took them away, either to their homes or to better-equipped hospitals in northern Aleppo province or in government-controlled areas of the city.
The respite did not last long. A series of blasts shortly after 4 p.m. brought a fresh wave of wounded, many of them children.
“Uncle, please take me to my mum at home,” said one of them, a 9-year-old named Fatimah, pleading to a journalist.
Fatimah only had shrapnel wounds to her arms and lower torso, but she clearly was in shock. She had been shopping with three aunts and several cousins when a shell fell on the street nearby. One of her aunts died in the hospital.
“It’s OK, sweetie. Just ask God to exact revenge on Bashar,” a fighter told the girl, who wore her long brown hair in two ponytails.
She grimaced every time she looked at the other patients nearby. A man lying on the floor with a back injury repeatedly shouted, “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.”
Addressing the medic treating him, he said in a heart-wrenching voice: “May Allah have mercy on the eyes of your parents.”
Next to him was a dying man who did not speak.
Next to Fatimah was a man whose right foot was hanging only by his skin. He held a cellphone in his right hand. As the staff walked past him to help others, he tugged at their coats.
“May Allah be with you,” he said, pleading for assistance. The man eventually lost his foot and the staff bandaged his leg to stop the bleeding.
Rawyah and Bedour, two girls about 9 or 10, were screaming in pain as a doctor and two assistants attended to them. Lying on their backs, they kicked their legs in the air every time bits of shrapnel were removed from their bodies.
Undeterred by all the gore, Osman’s two children, Omar and Rushd, wandered around the lobby the same way others their age would walk in a park.
“Don’t worry about them. They’ve become used to this,” he said. “As a family, we made a decision to live together. There is no such thing as a safe place. So, we live here and we die here. At least we will die while providing a service to our cause.”
Rushd played with three screwdrivers, which she used to try and make a hole in a wall. She seemed totally oblivious to the cries of pain.
“The psychological pressure on us is tremendous,” said Abu el-Baraa, a 23-year-old army medic who deserted his unit in July in rural Damascus and also asked to be identified by his nickname out of fear of retaliation. To avoid arrest, he walked for five days in the countryside and then obtained an ID card of an older brother that he used to get past army checkpoints on the road to Aleppo.
“This has been a miserable day par excellence,” he said of Wednesday.
Around 9 p.m., guerrilla commander Sheikh Hussein and a band of armed fighters in camouflage fatigues stormed into the hospital carrying a wounded man named Ali Al-Sheikh, who died minutes later.
“Ali has been martyred, you guys,” Hussein said, fighting back tears.
His men began weeping. One punched the metal door of an out-of-order elevator and another sat with his face buried in his hands.
Hussein, about 40, with an assault rifle slung across his shoulder, left the group and headed to one side of the hospital’s lobby to offer a brief prayer for Ali. He did not use a prayer mat on the bloodstained floor.
Afterward, he tapped his comrades on the shoulder with his blood-soaked hands.
“Don’t cry. Just say `thank you, God,’ because he is now a martyr,” he told them, his brown worry beads wrapped around the barrel of his rifle.
Al-Sheikh’s body, wrapped in a sky blue sheet, was taken from the ICU and carried outside by the fighters who shouted, “There is no God but Allah.”
Thursday morning was ushered in with an airstrike and intense shelling that sounded much closer than the previous day’s attack.
There were more injured: a sniper victim who prayed loudly until he succumbed to his chest wound; a child no more than 10 who stared at his severed left foot lying in front of him; a man who begged for help and was told firmly by a medic: “Act as a believer and wait for your turn.”
The overwhelmed staff asked those with superficial wounds to go home and come back later.
“My brother is dying!” cried a young man as he stood next to his wounded sibling. “For God’s sake, people, come and help him!”
Dr. Abu Rayan was preparing to meet his wife and two children across town in a government-controlled area of Aleppo, using a fake ID to get him through checkpoints. But he delayed his departure to help out.
Then the power went off, and an overworked generator kicked in as the sound of shelling got louder.
“I don’t know whether we will ever be able to lead normal lives again,” Osman said. “Will we have dreams and ambitions like regular people, or have we been scarred forever?” | <urn:uuid:113285b2-4f2a-42cf-9b04-ad338d59ffa5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://archive.longislandpress.com/2012/10/12/hospital-in-syrian-city-barely-copes-with-wounded/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981109 | 2,643 | 1.578125 | 2 |
There is a bizarre intellectual dance taking place around the topic of Barack Obama’s birthplace.
The world has been artificially divided into “Birthers” and “anti-Birthers” when in fact I suspect a large percentage or even majority of the population is neither and simply wants all the evidence released so that we can move beyond the issue. For most people, who have had to show their own birth certificates at various points in their lives, the notion that a presidential candidate should release his or her birth certificate to prove qualification for office reflects neither pro- nor anti-Obama sentiment, but a “what’s the big deal?” attitude.
It also seems that the supposed intellectual poles have been reversed.
People who supposedly are irrational and driven by hatred demand to see the evidence. People who supposedly are rational and driven by dispassionate intellect demand that the evidence not be seen.
Isn’t this the exact opposite of what should take place? Or have the labels been misapplied?
We can push and probe as to George W. Bush’s military record even though most of the claims made clearly were crank and politically motivated (and based on forged documents). We can lament that 35% of Democrats as of May 2007 still believed George W. Bush knew of the 9/11 attacks in advance, or that Truthers still claim 9/11 was an inside government job, even though we have had commissions and investigations which prove otherwise.
We can deal with accusations of John McCain’s alleged misconduct during imprisonment even though such suggestions were beyond the pale, and also questions as to whether McCain’s birth in the Panama Canal Zone disqualified him from the highest office in the land:
The Senate has unanimously declared John McCain a natural-born citizen, eligible to be president of the United States….
But Sarah H. Duggin, an associate law professor at Catholic University who has studied the “natural born” issue in detail, said the question is “not so simple.” While she said McCain would probably prevail in a determined legal challenge to his eligibility to be president, she added that the matter can be fully resolved only by a constitutional amendment or a Supreme Court decision.
“The Constitution is ambiguous,” Duggin said. “The McCain side has some really good arguments, but ultimately there has never been any real resolution of this issue. Congress cannot legislatively change the meaning of the Constitution.”
And when we confront crank and politically motivated theories, we do so with the best evidence we have available. And if we don’t have all the evidence, we go out and get it.
We regularly rebut and rebuke crank theories with evidence, and by pointing out the lack of evidence to support the theory. We don’t do what so many pundits are doing, and saying thing such as “oh, well even if we release the evidence, they won’t believe it.”
Yes, it’s true that die-hard conspiracy theorists never will be convinced, but that doesn’t mean we don’t try to convince the large segment of the population which will be convinced.
Why isn’t everyone who believes the “Birthers” to be driven by hatred and racism, and motivated by politics, doing what Obama’s family friend and the new Democratic Governor of Hawaii wants to do, rebut and rebuke with the best evidence?
I think a large part of this is the fear of being labeled a “Birther,” which is the functional equivalent of being called a “racist” by the mainstream media and by organizations such as Media Matters, Think Progress and their progeny. As I have pointed out before, you don’t need to doubt Obama’s birthplace or eligibility to be labeled a “Birther”; just ask Scott Brown.
We have reached the point that merely expressing normal political and legal inquisitiveness will result in a charge of Birtherism or racism because it now involves Barack Obama, even though similar questions as to John McCain’s eligibility for office were raised in the 2008 election cycle.
I repeat, whiter-than-white John McCain had his eligibility questioned because of his birthplace, so how is it necessarily racist that the same thing takes place as to Barack Obama? The racist charge is just a way of shutting down the conversation, a convenient excuse for epistemic closure.
As I’ve posted before, I think the circumstantial evidence supports the view that Obama was born in Hawaii, and there is no credible evidence otherwise. But to reach this conclusion, the one thing neither I nor anyone else can honestly say is that all the evidence has been reviewed.
And personally, I’d love for the records to be released and show that Obama was born in Hawaii, so as to put this politically losing issue behind us. I’d much rather focus politically on Obama’s destruction of the health care system and bankrupting of the country, than be drawn into the birthplace dance.
But I also have pointed out that Obama’s strategy of concealing the records and dismissing the “Birthers” as cranks is not working in the longer term. While the charge of Birtherism can be used by Democrats to shape the political landscape, polling shows that there is a substantial segment of the population which doubts Obama’s legitimacy.
Instead of evidence and inquiry, we have this bizarre intellectual dance, driven by fear of being labeled a Birther or racist, in which otherwise curious reporters, bloggers and pundits try to out-do each other in proclaiming that they do not want to know what the best evidence shows. In order to prove that one is not a “Birther,” is seems that pledging allegiance to the “anti-Birther” movement is required.
Thus, it is not surprising that even people — like me — who believe Obama was born in Hawaii are afraid to touch this subject. Trust me, every time I do a post on this topic I am extremely careful because I know there are people out there just waiting to twist my words and take things out of context.
There are enormous risks for anyone intellectually honest enough to wonder why merely asking questions or seeking the truth constitutes a punishable offense.
How is it that have we reached the point that the most vociferous opponents of Obama want the same evidence that Obama’s most vociferous defender, the Governor of Hawaii, wants?
And how is it that these opposites who are attracted to the same thing cannot seem to get what they want?
Update: Trending, Chris Matthews, David Corn and Clarence Page all say put the issue to rest and release the original birth certificate (h/t HotAir): | <urn:uuid:53a9035d-f8b2-4a90-91c4-1fe03106f979> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://legalinsurrection.com/2010/12/the-bizarre-birther-intellectual-dance/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970611 | 1,414 | 1.804688 | 2 |
An exciting plan is coming together to develop the Mexicantown and Mercado areas into a vibrant, multifaceted 20-block locale that would serve as a key destination spot in Detroit and which would enhance the ongoing revitalization of southwest Detroit.
The plan envisions innovative ways of linking the locale to Corktown and the West Riverfront and would turn neglected assets into unique opportunities for art, recreation, commercial development and green technologies.
The plan is called “Mexicantown: Vernor/Bagley Vista” or “Vista,” for short. Implementation of the plan would occur in phases, with much of it happening within the next five years, depending on community consensus, securing funding, and other factors.
The vision is truly community-based and includes input from more than 100 “stakeholders.” Southwest Housing Solutions is facilitating the Vista plan, working in tandem with the Detroit Collaborative Design Center (DCDC) at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture.
Dan Loacano, a program manager at Southwest Housing, helped initiate the Vista planning process six months ago. DCDC, led by Dan Pitera, has been compiling the input from stakeholders into a matrix of possibilities that will serve as the basis for the development plan.
“The conversations around this initiative have been amazing,” Dan Loacano says. “What’s being envisioned is a very imaginative use of space and resources, mixing many different uses and activities. The plan will support the triple-bottom line of economic, ecological and social success.”
The outlines of the Vista plan were introduced at a special community meeting earlier this month at Mexicantown Mercado. More than 100 people attended.
The evolving vision for the 20-block area integrates many elements:
The Vernor Viaduct refers to the spacious underpass on Vernor Highway, behind the abandoned Michigan Central Depot, and below the wide train trestle. The Viaduct is the primary corridor in and out of Mexicantown and is notoriously dark and uninviting.
A group of artists called “100 Points of Light” is proposing to light the Viaduct using replicas of historic chandeliers that once graced the Depot. The lights would be powered by solar panels that are expected to generate surplus energy which could be sold back to the grid. In coming months, “100 Points of Light” will be cleaning the Viaduct and preparing it for the ambitious project.
The Mercado Cultural Square development would transform the plaza between the Mercado and the Bagley Pedestrian Bridge into an energetic entertainment and gathering space, featuring restaurants, local vendors and artisans, live music and family-friendly activities. The Mercado itself would serve as the centerpiece of this development, filled with appealing retail, entertainment, office and social spaces.
Southwest Solutions is looking into acquiring the Mercado, but the deal is complicated by the significant debt that the Mercado has incurred and which Southwest Solutions cannot absorb.
The Welcoming Site would spur development along Vernor and Bagley near the I-75 ramps. The Site would be particularly appealing to international travelers, offering a variety of ethnic restaurants and interesting stores.
"We want both streets [Vernor and Bagley] to be active commercially and with pedestrians, with the space in between them becoming connectors," says Dan Patera, in an interview with Model D for a story about the Vista plan.
The 20-block Vista plan builds upon many factors that make the locale conducive to further development. These include considerable infrastructure investments already made in area and its vicinity. The International Welcome Center and Mercado, situated at the foot of the Ambassador Bridge, represent a $17 million investment in business and cultural development. The Bridge is the busiest international crossing point in North America, with more than 500,000 vehicles traversing the span each month. The new $230 million Gateway project connects 1-75, I- 96 and the Ambassador Bridge Plaza. Mexicantown already draws a million visitors yearly who come to its restaurants, shops and celebrations. The $5 million Bagley Pedestrian Bridge, which opened in May, provides easy access between the east and west sides of Mexicantown for the first time in 40 years.
West Vernor Avenue runs through the 20-block area and is regarded as “the city's most viable commercial street,” according to a Detroit Free Press report. Moreover, development of the 20-block area would synergize with exciting developments in Corktown and along the riverfront.
Numerous other factors figure into why the 20-block area is primed for this new vision, including close, vital neighborhoods, and the growing community of entrepreneurs, activists and artists. Indeed, beyond the significant infrastructure investments, it is the vibrant community itself that is the driving force for the development initiative.
To learn more about the Vista plan, contact Dan Loacano at 313.297.1347 or email him. | <urn:uuid:65dbdb2f-c47a-47cb-8c10-a55dab5813ae> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.swsol.org/pages/vista_plan/article_backup/article_1290093431.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949711 | 1,032 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Are you perpetually wounding your conference attendees with a one-way controlled experience that demands obedience over engagement?
Do you view your attendees as a threat that can disrupt the controlled conference experience that you have designed?
Enforcing Obedience Over Engagement
I was reading the March/April 2012 Harvard Education Letter on school culture by Meira Levinson. Her words stung deep and pricked my soul. The more I read, the more I felt her words were prophetic about conferences as well. I’ve paraphrased what she wrote and applied it to the conference institution.
Many conferences, especially those that are programmed and run by committees, leaders and staff that feel the need to control the experience, model civic disrespect. They demand that their attendees practice submissive obedience by sitting down, shutting up and keeping their eyes on the speaker at all times. Attendees are only allowed to ask questions at the end of the session in a very small time frame. Conference hosts and organizers require this submissive obedience over empowered engagement.
Conference hosts and their leaders enact a continuous series of civic microaggressions against their attendees as they demand this obedience. These regular but unacknowledged mini-invalidations of conference adults as civic persons worthy of respect are often barely noticeable to their victims–and usually totally invisible to their perpetrators.
Together, these infractions against engagement and for obedience can cumulatively erode the self-confidence and self-image of those that attend the event. Attendees experience an ongoing parade of microassults as they learn “their place” and “what’s expected of them from the conference host organization.”
The conference hosts model that attendees are seen as interchangeable, just one of a mass. They distrust multiple voices and diversity outside of their selected and approved speakers. Attendees therefore develop habits of self-preservation and practice disempowering relationships, norms and behaviors.
Conference hosts and organizers try to minimize transition time and frown upon speakers who request more collaborative room sets that allow attendees to interact and move about in the room. We line up attendees in theater room sets like cans on grocery store shelves. We supervise their actions and give them the mean look if they use mobile devices, move their chairs or disturb the order we create.
The Conference Civic Empowerment Gap
We have sent silent messages to our conference attendees that we distrust them by fostering one-way conference experiences to be consumed. In trying to control our attendees, we are telling them how much we doubt their ability to self-regulate and deny their potential to add to the experience.
As long as our conference organizers and hosts think that calling a person to serve as a speaker is how to plan education, the more we demand attendee obedience over engagement. As long as our conference leaders think education design is about securing several panelists to talk to at our attendees the more we do our attendees a disservice. This MUST stop! And if you think providing conference education is just about scheduling speakers, you are 100 percent wrong.
We have been caught in vicious cycle planning each conference the same way we did last year. We have exacerbated the beliefs that our attendees are not responsible civic persons able to engage with others effectively to discuss content and issues.
In short, we have fostered the civic empowerment gap. We have told our attendees that their views don’t matter and to accept as truth the view from the front of the stage.
It’s time for conference hosts and organizers to be more intentional, reflective and transparent. It’s time to flip this outdated conference model. We have to authentically realize that our attendees bring a tremendous amount experience, knowledge and wisdom to our events. And we must design experiences where they become participatory and have empowered engagement!
How can we help organizers and conference hosts realize that their need to control is actually an infraction on attendees’ civic engagement? What steps should we take to encourage attendee empowered engagement? | <urn:uuid:e0edbea5-1ac1-479f-b411-503439ae64c3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jeffhurtblog.com/2013/02/27/your-conference-wounding-its-attendees/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962553 | 814 | 1.570313 | 2 |
A Memphis, Tennessee, man faces a 45-count indictment after prosecutors say he took money from teachers who paid to have other people take their certification exams.
Clarence Mumford, 58, allegedly made tens of thousands of dollars from the scheme, which operated between 1995-2010 and involved teachers and aspiring teachers in Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi.
"Mumford's conduct has done harm to the systems in which unqualified teachers have been able to teach, to the individual schools, to qualified individuals who could have obtained jobs filled by unqualified teachers, and, ultimately, to a generation of our schoolchildren," said Edward L. Stanton III, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee.
It was not immediately clear whether Mumford has retained representation.
According to the indictment, dated Monday, Mumford charged teachers between $1,500-$3,000 per exam. As part of the scheme, he allegedly collected teachers' IDs and made fake driver's licenses.
The purported scam involved approximately 70 teachers, according to Kristin Helm, spokeswoman at the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations. None were mentioned by name in the indictment.
The tests, which are required to obtain licenses, were written and administered under the auspices of Educational Testing Services, or ETS.
The organization commented on the case in a statement Tuesday.
"ETS's Office of Testing Integrity brought this case to the attention of local authorities and has worked cooperatively with them to bring the alleged perpetrators to justice. Test security and score validity are paramount to ETS, its clients, and test takers. We are continuing to cooperate with authorities and remain committed to providing fair and valid assessments. Due to the ongoing nature of this case we cannot provide further details," it said. | <urn:uuid:5bdcbbe2-a88a-4414-9c70-7acd4f2a7335> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.channel3000.com/news/Tennessee-teachers-accused-in-test-fraud/-/1648/15471490/-/uxp15e/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974111 | 358 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl is one of the world’s leading authorities on Islamic law and Islam, and a prominent scholar in the field of human rights. He is the Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor in Islamic Law at the UCLA School of Law where he teaches International Human Rights, Islamic Jurisprudence, National Security Law, Law and Terrorism, Islam and Human Rights, Political Asylum and Political Crimes and Legal Systems. He also holds the chair in Islam and Citizenship at the University of Tilburg, the Netherlands.
Among his many honors and distinctions, Dr. Abou El Fadl was awarded the University of Oslo Human Rights Award, the Leo and Lisl Eitinger Prize in 2007, and named a Carnegie Scholar in Islamic Law in 2005. He was previously appointed by President George W. Bush to serve on the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom, and also served as a member of the board of directors of Human Rights Watch. He continues to serve on the advisory board of Middle East Watch (part of Human Rights Watch) and regularly works with human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights (Human Rights First) as an expert in a wide variety of cases involving human rights, terrorism, political asylum, and international and commercial law. In 2005, he was also listed as one of LawDragon’s Top 500 Lawyers in the Nation.
A prolific scholar and prominent public intellectual, Dr. Abou El Fadl is the author of 14 books (five forthcoming) and over 50 articles on various topics in Islam and Islamic law. He has lectured on and taught Islamic law throughout the United States and Europe in academic and non-academic environments for over twenty years. His work has been translated into numerous languages including Arabic, Persian, French, Norwegian, Dutch, Ethiopian, Russian, and Japanese, among others.
Dr. Abou El Fadl is most noted for his scholarly approach to Islam from a moral point of view. He writes extensively on universal themes of humanity, morality, human rights, justice, and mercy, and is well known for his writings on beauty as a core moral value of Islam. He is one of the foremost critics of puritan and Wahhabi Islam. Dr. Abou El Fadl has appeared on national and international television and radio, and has published widely in such publications as the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Boston Review and many others.
Professor Abou El Fadl is the founding advisory board member of the UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law (JINEL), and an editorial board member for Political Theology, the Journal of Religious Ethics, the Journal of Islamic Law and Society, the Journal of Islamic Law and Culture, and Hawa: Journal of Women of Middle East and the Islamic World, among others. He also serves as an advisory board member for the University of Adelaide Research Unit for the Study of Society, Law and Religion (RUSSLR) in Australia; the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Islam Initiative Publications Project; the Harvard Press Series on Islamic Law; and the Journal of Islamic Studies (Islamabad), among others.
His most recent works focus on authority, human rights, democracy and beauty in Islam and Islamic law. His book, The Great Theft, was the first work to delineate the key differences between moderate and extremist Muslims, and was named one of the Top 100 Books of the Year by Canada’s Globe and Mail (Canada’s leading national newspaper). His book, The Search for Beauty in Islam: A Conference of the Books, is a landmark work in modern Muslim literature.
Dr. Abou El Fadl holds a B.A. in Political Science from Yale University, a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Islamic law from Princeton University. Dr. Abou El Fadl is also an Islamic jurist and scholar, having received 13 years of systematic instruction in Islamic jurisprudence, grammar and eloquence in Egypt and Kuwait. After law school, he clerked for Arizona Supreme Court Justice James Moeller, and practiced immigration and investment law in the U.S. and the Middle East. He previously taught Islamic law at the University of Texas at Austin Law School, Yale Law School and Princeton University. | <urn:uuid:9e859021-3af5-43a7-91a7-9a6590dd7191> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.law.ucla.edu/faculty/all-faculty-profiles/professors/Pages/khaled-abou-el-fadl.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957393 | 907 | 1.65625 | 2 |
[By Koleen Singerline]
This weekend, I went the beach. I have a favorite spot up by the jetty – just perfect for watching the waves crash against the rocks and taking in the overwhelming power of the ocean. It’s also a great spot to watch the surfers. Now, I will probably never be a surfer (that train has already left the station), but watching them, both the experts and the novices, gives us some good rules to follow when learning to use social media to surf the net:
Rule#1: Don’t invest in all the equipment before you know what you’re doing. Start small and work your way up.
Rule#2: Don’t jump on your surf board in the roughest area to “give it a try.” You have to master it in stages. LinkedIN, Facebook, blogging, Twitter, RSS feeds, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious – there’s a ton of tools out there and it can be overwhelming if you jump into everything at once.
Rule#3: Take some time to watch how others do it. You can learn from both those that don’t seem to get it and from the experts. Some of this may be all new to you, but there are 2.0 experts out there that have tried it all and they have some good stuff to say. Two of my favorites: Brian Halleran and Chris Brogan.
Rule#4: Try different “beaches” so you can figure out where the surfing is the best. Facebook might not be the right tool for you, but LinkedIN might be perfect. Establish an online presence in several places and test which gives you the best connections.
Rule#5: There’s plenty of ways to learn: books, videos, blogs, etc. Use them all – you can never get enough information.
Now, unlike ocean surfing, using the new tools on the internet is within everyone’s ability. That’s one of the best things about it – we can all join in and use the internet to expand our reach; to get found and connect with the people we want to meet. It’s a great tool to help prospective customers learn about us and our services. So jump in (the water’s fine) because there are plenty of people at every stage of learning. Be one of them!
[By Tony Popowski and Jeff Androsko]
We decided to tag-team this one. When business professionals discuss Social Media, they typically talk about the three most popular sites: LinkedIN, Facebook and Twitter. While these networking platforms are definitely effective for nurturing leads and generating business, many people forget to talk about another valuable tool that gets your name out there on the web: social bookmarking. While there are numerous social bookmarking sites (Reddit, Delicious, Digg, Stumbleupon) and each one is slightly different, We’ll give you a brief overview on how bookmarking works.
When you sign up for these sites, you are given a profile where you can sign up as a person or a company. After you’ve completed your bio, you have the ability to upload articles, website pages and videos to your profile. Therefore, if your company publishes articles or has a notable page on its website, you can upload that link on the social bookmarking sites.
Once you’ve uploaded your article and link, you’re then given the responsibility of providing “tags” for your submission. These tags are very important – they serve as searchable keywords on the site. When another person on the site is looking for articles in their industry and searches by a specific keyword, your article has a chance of popping up if that keyword is “tagged.” The three main benefits of having your article read on bookmarking sites include:
- More exposure for your article / company – You’re introducing your submission to a whole new community of people. This increases your chances of something you’re publishing to go viral.
- Traffic for additional pages on your website – If your article or link interests the reader, there’s a good chance he or she will check out other pages on your website.
- SEO – Your article or link now has a better chance of climbing the ranks in search engine results.
There is one snag: you can’t shamelessly just load up your profile with your own website pages and articles. The other members of the social bookmarking community can “vote” on how much they like your submission. Therefore, if you submit links that are useless, boring and too “salesy”, readers will give a “thumbs down” vote and ignore you. The good news is that if people consistently give a “thumbs up”, your submission climbs the rank of articles for your submitted “tags” and industry. This makes your article more visible in online communities, enhancing the benefits of social bookmarking.
Load up on useful articles related to your industry that establishes your profile as a resource center, instead of a company name. This will establish credibility and bring users to you. Happy Bookmarking! | <urn:uuid:303250bc-e9c8-4d33-bb39-eab8400fff17> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.grmwebsite.com/blog/?month=7&year=2010 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936469 | 1,096 | 1.5 | 2 |
Four Journalists Named as Winners of 1991 Cabot PrizesAP , Associated Press
Oct. 30, 1991 5:51 PM ET
NEW YORK (AP) _ Four journalists have been awarded Columbia University's 1991 Maria Moors Cabot Prizes for furthering understanding between the Americas.
The winners, announced Wednesday, are: Eduardo Gallardo, The Associated Press Bureau Chief for Chile and Bolivia; Otavio Frias Filho, editor-in-chief of Folha de Sao Paulo in Sao Paulo, Brazil; Lucia Newman, Cable News Network's South American Bureau Chief and Alejandro Junco de la Vega, publisher of El Norte newspaper in Monterrey, Mexico.
Three staff members of Folha de Sao Paulo - Richard Arnt, Gilberto Dimenstein, and Carlos Lins da Silva - will receive citations.
Frias Filho, 34, worked as an editorial writer at Folha, Brazil's leading newspaper, between 1976 and 1982 before becoming editor-in-chief.
He was cited for hiring journalists with different viewpoints at a time when the Brazilian press operated under self-censorship and for starting a section on media criticism ''to restore public interest and confidence in newspapers.''
Gallardo, 48, has worked for The Associated Press in various positions - from head of the Latin American desk in New York to his current position - over his 24-year career with the AP. He was cited for a wide range of stories, including the stormy three-year presidency of Salvador Allende in Chile and the aftermath of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Colombia.
Newman, 39, joined CNN in 1986. She was cited for her eight-part series documenting the consequences of the civil war in Nicaragua, the drug war in the Andean region, unrest in Panama and violence in Haiti during that country's first free elections.
Junco, a fourth-generation newspaper publisher who began his career in the family-owned El Norte and El Sol newspapers, was cited for overseeing the conversion of the newspapers to offset printing in 1971 and beginning a training program for young reporters to improve journalistic standards.
The winners will receive a gold medal and a $1,000 honorarium at a Thursday night ceremony at the university's campus in Manhattan.
The Cabot prizes have been given annually for 53 years and are the oldest international award in journalism.
They are administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and were established by the late Godfrey Lowell Cabot of Boston. They are named in memory of his wife.
Since 1939, 191 medals and 142 citations have been given. | <urn:uuid:df64c85e-9d28-4444-a5cf-f0c14e3742ad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1991/Four-Journalists-Named-as-Winners-of-1991-Cabot-Prizes/id-e4c680adef243f07400482d6d0e6e452 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955082 | 530 | 1.640625 | 2 |
If you knew that you could live in luxury for the rest of your life but that by doing so it would absolutely destroy the future for your children, your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren would you do it? Well, that is exactly what we are doing as a nation. Over the past several decades, we have stolen 15 trillion dollars from future generations so that we could enjoy a dramatically inflated level of prosperity. Our 15 trillion dollar party has been a lot of fun, but what we have done to our children and our grandchildren has been beyond criminal. We ran up the greatest mountain of debt in the history of the planet and we are sticking them with the bill. Sadly, both political parties have been responsible for the big spending that has been going on. Both Democrats and Republicans have run up huge budget deficits when in power. But instead of learning the hard lessons of the past, both political parties continue to vote for even more debt. They would rather continue to steal trillions of dollars from future generations than have the party end and have to face the consequences.
And the consequences will be dramatic when the party ends. During fiscal year 2011, the U.S. government spent 3.7 trillion dollars but it only brought in 2.4 trillion dollars. That means that the U.S. government spent about 1.3 trillion dollars that it did not have. It is important to understand that even if the U.S. government spent that 1.3 trillion dollars on really stupid things, that money still got into the pockets of ordinary Americans who then spent it on things like food, gas, housing, etc. In turn, most of those that received money from providing those goods and services would spend it on other things.
So extra government spending can definitely stimulate the economy. The problem is that we have been doing it permanently. Since 1975, we have added more than 15 trillion dollars to the national debt. This has fueled a false prosperity that was way beyond what we could afford.
If the U.S. government tried to go to a balanced budget now, our standard of living would crash and there would be riots in the streets. The American people have been enjoying false prosperity for so long that they have lost any notion of what “normal” actually is.
Think of it this way. If your family makes $40,000 this year and you spend an extra $20,000 on your credit cards, your family would be enjoying a false sense of prosperity.
You could do that year after year as long as the credit card companies keep loaning you more money.
But debt always catches up with you in the end.
It is the same thing with the United States.
We have been running up our national credit card balance and the interest payments have become quite painful.
The U.S. government spent over 454 billion dollars just on interest on the national debt during fiscal 2011.
That is 454 billion dollars that the people of the United States do not receive anything in return for.
So in order to keep up with interest on the national debt and to enjoy a standard of living that is beyond our means we now have to run deficits that are in excess of a trillion dollars every single year.
And a trillion dollars is a staggering amount of money.
If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.
Since Barack Obama was elected, the U.S. government has added about 5 trillionmore dollars to the national debt.
That kind of debt is a recipe for national financial suicide.
How are we supposed to explain to our children that we are passing a debt of$15,579,852,946,457.64 down to them?
At this point, the United States government is responsible for more than a thirdof all the government debt in the entire world.
The 15 trillion dollar party that we have been enjoying has been amazing, but all of that debt is soon going to bring us a tremendous amount of pain.
And there is really no way out under our current financial system. As our population ages, government budget deficits are projected to spiral wildly out of control in future years.
Already, entitlement programs are starting to cause massive problems. For example, mandatory federal spending surpassed total federal revenue for the first time ever in fiscal 2011. That was not supposed to happen until 50 years from now.
If the federal government used GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) like all publicly-traded corporations are required to do, the situation would be much worse.
The truth is that the U.S. government never had a “balanced budget” during the end of the Clinton administration. The federal government was borrowing gigantic amounts of money from the Social Security trust fund to finance regular government operations. It was a big fraud. Under GAAP, there would have been huge budget deficits during those years.
And even under the non-GAAP numbers used by the U.S. Treasury Department, the U.S. national debt still increased every single year during the Clinton administration.
So let’s get real.
Our national financial situation has always been much worse than we have been told.
It has been estimated that our current budget deficits would be in the neighborhood of 4 to 5 trillion dollars under GAAP.
And looking down the road a bit, we are facing a tsunami of unfunded liabilities that is absolutely nightmarish.
In other words, we have committed ourselves to tens of trillions of dollars of expenses that we don’t have any money for.
According to Professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff, the U.S. is facing a “fiscal gap” of over 200 trillion dollars in the coming years. The following is a brief excerpt from a recent article that he did for CNN….
The government’s total indebtedness — its fiscal gap — now stands at $211 trillion, by my arithmetic. The fiscal gap is the difference, measured in present value, between all projected future spending obligations — including our huge defense expenditures and massive entitlement programs, as well as making interest and principal payments on the official debt — and all projected future taxes.
And it just keeps getting worse. Recently it was revealed that Obamacare will add 17 trillion dollars more to our long-term unfunded obligations.
Basically what we have done is we have committed future generations to a life of endless debt slavery to pay for our debts and for the financial promises that we have made.
How could we be so stupid?
Of course this entire fraudulent system is going to completely collapse before we get too much farther down the road anyway. Right now the whole thing is essentially being held together by chicken wire and duct tape.
Most Americans do not realize this, but the Federal Reserve bought approximately61 percent of all government debt issued by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2011.
Normally, the Federal Reserve is not supposed to be doing this.
But right now there are not nearly enough buyers of U.S. government debt at the super low interest rates that the U.S. government wants to pay. A recent Money News article explained that foreigners have been increasingly shying away from U.S. debt….
“In 2009, such foreign purchases of U.S. debt amounted to 6 percent of GDP and has since falled by over eighty percent to a paltry 0.9 percent.”
Instead of interest rates on U.S. Treasuries rising to attract additional investors, the U.S. Federal Reserve has been intervening to make up the difference.
This is essentially “monetizing the debt” and it is something that Ben Bernanke promised that he would never do.
But he is doing it.
If the Federal Reserve was not buying up all this debt, interest rates on U.S. debt would soar and so would U.S. government interest payments.
Yes, this is a giant Ponzi scheme and it cannot last for long.
Of course all of this could have been avoided if our politicians had not been running up such massive amounts of debt all these years.
Some have suggested that our problems could be solved by simply increasing taxes on the wealthy.
Well, the truth is that the top 5 percent of all income earners already pay nearly 50 percent of all federal taxes and soaking them even more will not even come close to solving the federal budget crisis.
For example, if Bill Gates gave every single penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.
And as Bill Whittle has shown, you could take every single penny that every American earns above $250,000 and it would only fund about 38 percent of the federal budget.
So taxing the wealthy will certainly not solve all of our problems.
In fact, when you tax the wealthy and the “somewhat wealthy” it slows economic growth in a number of different ways.
Number one, they have less money to spend into the economy.
Number two, they have less money to invest in business activities.
Number three, it gives wealthy individuals and corporations more of an incentive to move out of the United States. As I have written about previously, the global elite are already hiding about 18 trillion dollars in offshore banks. The U.S. government keeps trying to tap into all of that offshore wealth, but the elite always seem to be a few steps ahead of the game.
Yes, we should try to close loopholes in the tax system, but the truth is that the root cause of our problem is that the federal government is simply spending way, way too much money.
Right now, spending by the federal government accounts for about 24 percentof GDP. Back in 2001, it accounted for just 18 percent.
But our politicians always want to put off spending cuts for another day because they know that immediate spending cuts would really hurt the economy.
For example, just check out this recent quote from White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew….
“The time for austerity is not today,” Lew told NBC News “Meet the Press.” “If we were to put in austerity measures right now, it would take the economy in the wrong way.”
Yes, the Obama administration definitely does not want to hurt the economy with an election coming up in a few months.
So when will it be time to seriously cut government spending?
The day never seems to arrive.
But even though the federal government has been pumping more than a trillion extra dollars into the economy every year, the economy has not shown much improvement. The percentage of working age Americans that have jobs has barely budged for over two years.
Yes, the policies of the Obama administration have stabilized the U.S. economy for the moment, but if he was actually going to tell the truth he would say something like this….
“By mortgaging the future of our children and our grand-children I have stabilized our economic statistics for the short-term. Unfortunately, I am going to have to continue to financially abuse future generations to keep us from falling into another Great Depression. Meanwhile, I am making our long-term financial problems far, far worse. But the most important thing is that I win re-election so that I can continue to be president. Thank you for being so selfish and so willing to destroy the future of your children. Vote for me in 2012 and let the party continue!”
Unfortunately, the party is going to come crashing to an end at some point.
Right now, the global financial system is based on the U.S. dollar and on U.S. government debt.
There will come a time when the rest of the world is going to get sick and tired of watching this Ponzi scheme play out and they are going to completely lose faith in the U.S. dollar and in U.S. government debt. In fact, there are already signs that this is starting to happen.
When faith in our currency and our debt is completely gone, it will be nearly impossible to get back and the game will be over.
The false prosperity that we are experiencing right now is about as good as things are going to get.
Enjoy it while you still can, because when it is gone that will be the end of it.
Both the Democrats and the Republicans have failed us. They played fast and loose with our future and they never planned for the long-term.
Now we are facing a collapse of unprecedented magnitude that most Americans will never even see coming.
A horrifying economic collapse is coming.
You better get ready for it. | <urn:uuid:8138e493-b442-4b6d-9073-01194423df61> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://oolaah.com/?p=22297 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971125 | 2,620 | 1.617188 | 2 |
To say that Pluto is the final arbiter of all human life is mythically accurate, and though it might sound like a rather dramatic statement to make, it nevertheless has some considerable truth to it in mundane human life. We all understand that Pluto is dignified in Scorpio and detrimented in Taurus, and I have read various theories about exaltation; some say Aquarius, some say Virgo, some say no sign exalts Pluto.
This latter assertion appears flimsy, since we are interested in principles, not rules – except insofar as rules help us to sublimate principles. The astrologer who innately espouses principles will probably be good at his or her job; the one who only determines on the basis of rules will probably simply add to their clients’ many constrictions. In one sense however, I can agree with Pluto’s exaltation in Aquarius, simply through the appallingly destructive influence of Pluto in the sign of Leo; but again this is not entirely satisfactory, because it is hardly a sign in which Pluto struggles to express itself.
The jury is out on exaltation for the lord of the underworld, but one observation stands true; Pluto in Leo is just awful.
Wherever Pluto is found, in the unevolved (thus 99.9% of the human race) we find obsession; Pluto merely delineates the mode and preferred outlet for that obsession; and in Leo, it’s all about status. The generational effect of Pluto in Leo is quite easy to observe here in the United Kingdom, where all anybody seems to have a mind for these days is the car they drive and the value of their house. There are supplementary concerns of course; which school the children are attending, their exam grades, which handbag is in vogue this month, being seen at Ascot; but fundamentally, the Pluto in Leo generation have raised up the golden calf of status and created a raison d’étre out of it. They have also passed these dubious values on to their children, the Pluto in Virgo generation who seek to perfect their parents’ skewed vision, by appearing flawless, the epitome of health, vitality and with not a hair out of place: the ambience of the passing of the Plutonic baton then, has been to make an obsession out of the kind of status that is to be found in perfection. Inevitably, it’s a big ask, and as Uranus grinds over the radix Pluto placements of this generation right about now, there are going to be a fair few casualties.
Intriguingly though, with Pluto making its final foray in Sagittarius for the next quarter-millennium, it really is the end of the good times for Pluto in Leo and all his self-obsessed children. The quincunx that is created in Capricorn cuts this whole generation adrift, and with the lower-quincunx having a clear sixth-house influence, this entire swathe is in for a wake up call; there is a challenge in the pipeline, one that reverberates with themes of health, of occupational matters, of what we do in our day to day, in how we eat, wash and look after our appearance, and all of this because: they’re fast running out of sympathy.
This describes the quincunx exactly: Pluto in Leo simply has no common-ground with Pluto in Capricorn. If they were two people you’d imagine them being like Victoria Beckham and Ray Mears, but marooned together on a desert island. They just wouldn’t have anything to say to each other; Ray would consider Posh to be irrelevant, and for the singular purpose of living a subsistence lifestyle on a remote desert island, he’d probably be right. In fact, after he’d got bored of her pouting, he’d probably throw her off a cliff to improve his own resources and nobody would much care when years later he got rescued and his crime made the papers, because actually, Pluto in Leo is starting to seem a bit pointless now. A bit blown-up, selfish, greedy, pompous and irresponsible. They spent the children’s inheritance on cheap champagne and plastic baubles after all, and now it’s hard times for everyone.
The final crisis for Pluto in Leo will not truly manifest until Hades reaches Aquarius of course, and the last stragglers will expire with a final “oh dah-ling!” into the history books, the cement-head generation, who squandered an entire world’s resources just so they could look good.
This ought to be a wake-up call for the Virgo posse following on, let’s spread the word. | <urn:uuid:191b1c90-cf1d-4d9a-833e-6c1f35c57aab> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://chirotic.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/pluto-in-leo-nearly-irrelevant/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958469 | 999 | 1.703125 | 2 |
||Grundy Center Recreation|
Clint McMartin - Coach
Basketball sign-up January 6, 2002
Scheduled practices are January 6, 13, 20 and 27. 3rd and 4th grade will begin practice at 2:00 pm. 5th and 6th graders will start at 3:30 pm. Each session will last one hour. There is a small charge.
Sign-up and practice sessions will be held at the high school gym in Grundy Center.
The Recreation Youth Basketball Program's purpose is to teach FUNdamentals and sportsmanship to the youth. The Youth Basketball Program is for youth in grades 3 through 6. The program focuses on teaching fundatmentals to build a strong foundation for our youth. This program is designed for the kids to have fun and learn about the importance of teamwork. this program gives everyone an opportunity to participate and learn. The coaches and helpers are volunteers that truly enjoy giving back to the youth.
December 28, 2001 | <urn:uuid:44a5c782-0744-499a-9921-1da2e7a4e850> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gcmuni.net/text/cityweb/recreation/basketball.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952251 | 206 | 1.601563 | 2 |
I began this series last week with a question about a DNA sequence that was published and reported to be one the first beta-lactamases to be found in Streptococcus pneumoniae. Mike has a great post about one of problems with this paper.
I think the data themselves are awfully suspicious.
So, last week I suggested that you, dear readers, go and find out why. I gave you a link to the abstract and a place to get started.
Perhaps that was too hard.
Okay, here’s a little more help and another clue.
I highlighted the accession numbers. Post your guesses in the comments. | <urn:uuid:625025c7-bd78-42ad-8c04-8eba2f9d5dcf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://scienceblogs.com/digitalbio/2007/08/24/digital-biology-friday-a-helpf/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974379 | 134 | 1.570313 | 2 |
If you have enough wind, you can drop both the main and jib
, and the wind on the hull will provide enough drive to push the boat downwind into a slip. It doesn't require a lot of wind - just enough to push the boat fast enough so that she has steerageway.
If the wind is light, and you need some sail to help you move the boat, I would recommend that you use the mainsail, rather than the jib
. The reason is that sailboats don't have brakes, so you have to keep your speed under control as you enter a slip. If your jib
is hanked-on, then you can't furl the jib
to control your speed. If the wind gusts when you are close to the slip, the jib will fill and accelerate the boat too fast, and something bad is almost sure to happen. I prefer to use the mainsail when docking downwind under sail, because I can ease the main halliard, allowing all but the top part of the sail to fall to the deck. Only a small part of the mainsail will still be raised a few feet above the boom, and that will be enough to move the boat into the slip. If a gust of wind comes along, that small bit of mainsail probably won't accelerate the boat enough to present a problem, but, if it does, then I can just let the halliard go and let the rest of the mainsail fall to the deck.
If the jib is on a furler
, then you can furl the jib enough to limit the boat's speed as it approaches the slip. | <urn:uuid:180560d6-aa79-43eb-b9b6-6b51c07a93ca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sailnet.com/forums/194574-post14.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967703 | 346 | 1.609375 | 2 |
BASH as root shell (static linking)
quakenet1 at optusnet.com.au
Sun Oct 7 04:02:53 PDT 2007
On 07/10/2007, at 12:56 AM, andrew clarke wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 06, 2007 at 04:54:26AM +1000, Jerahmy Pocott wrote:
>> I'm wanting to use BASH as my root shell, so I compiled a
>> statically linked
>> version then tried to log in with only / mounted. But I was locked
>> because elf.ld.so could not be found..
>> I though elf was the native binary format these days? But it needs a
>> library to run them? Is it possible to statically link against
>> elf? Or do
>> standalone binary have to be in aout format? I'm a bit confused as
>> to why it
>> requires this dynamic library..
> I'm not sure if this helps at all, but you can build a static
> version of
> bash from the Ports tree:
> cd /usr/ports/shells/bash
> make WITH_STATIC_BASH=1
> You'll need to cp bash to /bin.
Thanks, that was the information I was looking for! I didn't know
option to the port..
The problem seemed to be with the dependancies, libintl is
to libiconv and some how that was causing it to build with a dynamic
More information about the freebsd-questions | <urn:uuid:07b2bac2-a0e3-4455-aeff-526eab6d7df7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2007-October/159773.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 | 0.935479 | 329 | 1.789063 | 2 |
- Isolate the device
Make sure the system is disconnected from the network. This is to protect UAB from any additional impact from the incident.
Determine the affected data.
Confirm whether or not sensitive data was housed on the compromised device. This includes employee, student, patient, or research data. Determine if any sensitive data was inappropriately accessed. If so, immediately escalate to both your local management and the UAB Data Security (https://silo.dso.uab.edu/incident or call 205-975-0842).
If sensitive data is at risk, do not perform additional activity until you have spoken with Data Security.
- Perform Root Cause Analysis
Establish the reason that the system was exploited. Ask yourself these questions:
- Did an end user install something harmful?
- Was it caused by a weak password?
- Was the system missing a patch?
- Remediate the issue
The best way to restore a compromised machine is frofm a trusted backup or to do a clean installation. Even what used to be routine virus infections have become so advanced that we cannot trust a system once it's been infected.
Perform password changes for end users and any administrators that may have used the system as well. This includes BlazerIDs and other accounts such as websites that were accessed from the compromised machines. Local Administrator passwords should also be changed.
- Reconnect to the network
Once the system has been properly remediated, UAB Data Security, in conjunction with the HIPAA Security Office, will reconnect the machine to the network. This process can take up to 24 hours after the initial request.
If you receive a notice saying the machine was compromised, the best way to get reconnected is to reply to that email.
Sunday, January 01, 2012 | <urn:uuid:b1512465-16fd-495b-bc51-c54d52214b4e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.uab.edu/it/home/about-uab-it/announcements/announcements/item/232 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940246 | 373 | 1.820313 | 2 |
The latest restructuring of J$860 billion of Jamaica's domestic debt was, from the start, a done deal. For as Richard Byles, the head of Sagicor Jamaica, observed, the alternative was too difficult to contemplate.
None of the financial institutions, or the other big holders of domestic bonds, wanted to be tagged as the one that caused the Government's negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to collapse.
More important for the financial sector, the J$119 billion in interest that savers and investors will give up because of lower interests and extended maturities is still 45 per cent, or J$96 billion, less than what would have been foregone, upfront, if they had endured a 25 per cent haircut on principal.
The deep haircut, apparently, was the IMF's preferred option. Their logic is understandable, given the need to bring under control Jamaica's debt of 140 per cent of GDP: absorb more pain now and lessen the likelihood of the Government, sometime in the near future, having to again approach its lenders for another dose of debt relief.
The countervailing concern, of course, was that the advocated haircut would be too great a shock for Jamaica's financial institutions, and that the economy would be made to spiral even further into recession.
In the aftermath of the National Debt Exchange (NDX), as this initiative has been dubbed, the fundamental question confronting our Government is how to avoid a replay, down the road, of the current scenario.
In this regard, there are two things that are critical for the Government to appreciate, which it claims to do.
Means to an end
One is that the restructuring of the domestic debt is not an end in itself, but a means thereto; it provides the Government with breathing space to begin to deal with its chronic addiction to debt. Second, it would be likely that another round of debt restructuring will not be as easy to accomplish.
It was only three years ago that the Jamaican Government, albeit another administration, was asking its domestic lenders for relief. With adjustment fatigue setting in, next time debtors may baulk.
The larger point here is that the Government delivers on its side of the bargain that it made with the IMF, financial institutions, and, more important, with Jamaica's savers and investors, when it made the case for the NDX. In other words, it must show a credible path towards sustainable debt reduction and sustained economic growth.
The Government must:
This last point is important. For, declared policies notwithstanding, the NDX and related efforts will come to naught if the bureaucracy is not invested in, or lacks the talent and skills to affect the transformation. Ensuring that this happens is in the remit of the administration and the leadership of the prime minister.
The opinions on this page, except for the above, do not necessarily reflect the views of The Gleaner. To respond to a Gleaner editorial, email us: [email protected] or fax: 922-6223. Responses should be no longer than 400 words. Not all responses will be published. | <urn:uuid:3dfe23c8-10f4-4e92-9fb6-adde46d7f3b2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20130224/cleisure/cleisure1.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94504 | 643 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Behind the Music Box Orchestra
You don’t know it, but you probably know Bill Weisbach. Bill is the “ears” behind our Baby Einstein Music Box Orchestra. In fact, he has been writing beautiful music for Baby Einstein ever since its inception. He does it all—from composing to playing to producing—and because of his vibrant vision, Baby Einstein music helps introduce little ears to Mozart (hyperlink), Beethoven (hyperlink), and traditional and original music (hyperlink) from all over the globe.
How long have you been composing music and sound design for Baby Einstein?
“I started composing music for Baby Einstein in 1997; the first video title, (then named) BabyEinstein featured images, movement and color, short poems, with verse and recitations in several languages, and simple focused melodies, rhythms, and natural sounds. For that title, I composed the original theme and music score, and also created the sound design.”
How did you get involved with Baby Einstein?
“When my son was very young, I wrote several lullabies and also created some sound collages for him – as a means of exposing him to music and sound, and also to provide a unique way for us to interact in quieter settings. When my friends Bill and Julie Clark invited me to discuss ideas for a video ‘board book’ for young children, I was very much in the midst of the sharing this new joy of music with my child. As new parents, the timing for all of us couldn’t have been better!”
Were you musical as a child?
“I grew up in a musical family; my mom played piano and my dad played string bass in a swing band. I was fortunate to have lots of encouragement and I was deeply curious about how instruments made their specific sounds. My first instruments, after pots and pans in the kitchen, were piano and guitar. When I was 11 or so, my grandmother treated me to season tickets at the symphony, and around that same time I heard Switched on Bach (Bach’s music realized on the Moog synthesizer). Right then, I had this new interest in color, and it wasn’t visual, but instead the color of music. Between hearing live acoustic symphony performances and these beautiful and strangely organic electronic timbres, I wanted to compose my own music.
So I got way interested in percussion instruments, and also exploring raw sound – making our family piano and other instruments sound unlike their natural selves: I used my dad’s bass bow on my cymbals and I dropped pennies and other things into the piano while scraping the strings (which I still love to do). Anything to explore timbre – not so great for the piano, but great fun for me!”
Describe the sound of the Baby Einstein Music Box Orchestra
“My aim with Baby Einstein is to create and present music that is fun and engaging for children, and also to expose them to music they may pursue more growing up. The Baby Einstein Music Box orchestrations are intended to provide a colorful, playful experience – created specially for little ears.
Take the idea of a music box with it’s intimate, resonant sound, capable of vibrant musical color. For the Baby Einstein classical music titles (starting with Baby Mozart) I experimented using different instrument sounds and blends, and liked how plucked sounds worked with softly struck sounds. Orchestrated with other instruments worked to create a musical feel which is not specifically, but suggestive of, the magical sound of a music box.”
How do you go about composing music for Baby Einstein, and what inspiration do you look to?
“I compose original themes, instrumental scores, and songs for Baby Einstein – and each kind of music requires a different approach, with it’s own starting point. I’m a big fan of creating music using what’s around, which is also an incredible experience to share with your child – spending time together to whistle a tune, clap out a beat, tap out a simple rhythm on a can or home-made shaker, move, and find the music around you.
Right now, I’m composing new original music for a Baby Einstein DVD, which is inspired by different cultures as well as aspects of different colors – some very cool stuff! But whatever the style of music I’m composing or arranging, my goal is to create a fun musical experience for the child.”
Baby Einstein also has music CD titles – how are they different from the DVDs?
“The Baby Einstein music CDs represent a really wonderful growing library of music that includes featured music appearing from the DVDs along with additional music, not on the DVDs. I’ve produced these CD titles so that each is designed and paced to provide an altogether different experience from the DVDs: since there is no visual, the focus is entirely on the music and the music can be enjoyed in different settings. A couple titles feature traditional songs with child vocalists accompanied by activities so that children can interact with parents and/or other children clapping, dancing, playing and singing. Focus is on interaction, appreciation of basic music forms and, of course, sharing the musical fun!” | <urn:uuid:857efa5e-39dc-4941-9f0e-99b4eb128d9e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.babyeinstein.com/baby-einstein-behind-the-music-box-orchestra/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955093 | 1,090 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Future popes will assess ability: Hart
- From: AAP
- February 12, 2013
MELBOURNE Archbishop Denis Hart says the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI will prompt successors to consider stepping down if they reach a point when they can longer perform their duties.
Melbourne's most senior Catholic responded to the news of Pope Benedict's resignation by saying it was a recognition of the pace of modern life.
"I think this does say to the person in office that he has to consider ... how well he can fulfil the office and if he cannot do so to be able freely, as Pope Benedict did, to step down," Archbishop Hart told reporters in Melbourne on Tuesday.
He said candidates to succeed Pope Benedict will be judged on their work not their age or nationality.
"It may well be that there may be someone younger. I don't think the consideration will only be one of age," Archbishop Hart said.
"It will be judged on a huge range of skills."
"Because I don't know who will be pope I can't really speculate on how much he'll be able to do," he said.
He had suggested earlier Pope Benedict's age may have been a barrier to doing more.
"You've got to think of what a man in his high-70s and 80s is able to do, particularly when he comes to the head of a big organisation," Archbishop Hart told ABC television.
Amid speculation a pope may be chosen from South America, Africa or Asia, Archbishop Hart said the candidate's country of origin would not be a factor in the decision of the cardinal college.
"The cardinals will take their role very very seriously and they won't look at particular consideration of what country the pope comes from but rather the person who is best to engage not only with the church but of the world of today."
He would not comment on Cardinal George Pell's chances of becoming pope. | <urn:uuid:ac81577b-cdfc-4ce2-9256-23289c56d467> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/breaking-news/frail-pope-right-to-quit-archbishop-hart/story-e6freono-1226576031218 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985025 | 392 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Governor Mike Pence signed an abortion drug regulation measure he says will protect women’s health. However, Planned Parenthood of Indiana says it will likely challenge the law in court.
The signed legislation would require Indiana abortion clinics that only dispense the abortion inducing drug known as RU-486 to adhere to the same physical standards as surgical abortion clinics. That includes bigger door and room sizes and surgical equipment requirements. Only one Indiana facility will be affected – a Planned Parenthood clinic in Lafayette.
House and Senate leaders say they’ve reached an agreement on the final two year budget. They say it includes significant increases for education and roads funding.
Though the budget isn’t expected to officially pass until late Friday, House and Senate fiscal leaders have hammered out a deal that includes more than $300 million in funding increases for K through 12 education. House Speaker Brian Bosma (R-Indianapolis) says the budget goes beyond the goal of restoring education funding to pre-recession levels.
House Speaker Brian Bosma (R-Indianapolis) says the legislature is largely finished dealing with implementation of the Affordable Care Act this session.
Both the House and Senate proposed legislation guiding the Pence administration on ways to proceed with implementation of the federal healthcare bill. But the House bill failed to pass and Ways and Means Chair Tim Brown (R-Crawfordsville) put a halt to the Senate bill, saying legislation passed in 2011 allowing the governor to negotiate for expansion through the Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP) was adequate. | <urn:uuid:dbf085dd-1227-4f87-87bc-d1b23f5b92f0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wbaa.org/term/mike-pence | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946287 | 308 | 1.5625 | 2 |
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