text
stringlengths 14
100k
| meta
dict |
|---|---|
Despite his loss in Pennsylvania and other campaign bumps, Barack Obama is heavily favored to win what will be the final and decisive contest for the Democratic presidential nomination -- the "invisible primary" for the convention votes of party leaders.
The reasons say a lot about these superdelegates' calculations for the November elections -- the presidential one, or their own.
The... | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Unity Editor Download Assistant
Component Installers Windows
Component Installers Mac
We are happy to announce Unity 5.6.5p1. The release notes and the corresponding issue tracker link for issues fixed in this release are as shown below.
As always, patch releases are recommended only for users affected by those bugs fixed in that patch.
Improvements
XR: Update Google VR NDK to v1.100
Fixes
(907324) - Animation: Fixed a crash when an animator reset was triggered during a StateMachineBehaviour awake.
(930814) - Animation: Fixed a crash when Animator instantiated from Script enters a Sub-State Machine with StateMachineBehaviour.
(972927) - AppleTV: Removed 2x App store icon slices that cause App Store validation to fail.
(None) - Build Pipeline: Improved build pipeline performance for large builds.
(922829) - Editor: Added an optional Async mode for Perforce Integration (see Editor Settings) to account for high latency with a remote server.
(929875) - GI: Fixed incorrect light modes being shown when multiple lights are selected.
(935149) - GI: Fixed Meta pass values when using terrain mesh with MaterialPropertyBlock and Realtime GI.u(930042) - GI: Fixed Unnecessary error message being displayed in console.
(941369) - Graphics: Fixed crash in SkinnedMeshRenderer::PrepareSkinCommon when SkinnedMeshRenderer has Animator and Cloth attached.
(971965) - Graphics: Fixed crash when opening project with BC6H texture.
(961692, 964998) - Graphics: Fixed asserts and potential memory leaks when Skinned Mesh Renderers with the "Update When Offscreen" property enabled are not visible.
(968591) - Graphics: Fixed crash during a visibility callback when a GameObject which was not visible is set inactive followed by setting a visible GameObject inactive.
(927145) - Graphics: Fixed crash in player when using non RGBA32 format 3D textures.
(907391) - Graphics: Fixed case when some of the cameras don't render anything because depth buffer contains garbage.
(956919) - Graphics: Fixed issue where DrawMeshInstanced calls will render with inverse normals if the previous draw call used negative scaling.
(841236) - Graphics: Fixed changing the projectors render queue in script not having an effect.
(957651) - Il2CPP: Prevented a crash on iOS which can occur when a device is awakened during a blocking socket call with a SIGPIPE signal.
(979007) - iOS: iPhone X, fixed problem with missing keyboard Done/Cancel buttons.
(954593) - iOS: Fixed videos started with Handheld.PlayFullScreenMovie not resuming after returning to the app in some circumstances.
(58811) - iOS: Metal: Fixed MSAA corner case causing warning messages and validation error Marton Ekler.
(952284) - iOS: [Metal] Fixed potential GPU crash.
(878407) - Physics: Fixed PhysX crash when calling Physics.OverlapBoxNonAlloc on Android devices.
(980640) - Resources: Improved Load performance in some circumstances.
(930358) - Scripting: Fixed crash when using GitHub for Unity.
(953068) - Scripting: Fixed Awake containing the wrong transform values when instantiated.
(911613) - UI: Fixed issue where an assigned fallback font would not be used.
(961763) - VR: Shaders meant to be used in VR platforms will no longer be included in builds where VR support is disabled.
(966173) - XR: Fixed Daydream applications hanging before quiting to Android home when calling Application.Quit.
Revision: b5fcd78dd1ab | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
A 35-year-old Safety Harbor man won $1 million prize on a $30 scratch-off.
The Florida Lottery said that Benjamin Singer played FLORIDA 100X THE CASH Scratch-Off game that he bought at the Radiant Food Store on West Waters Avenue
He chose to receive his winnings as a one-time lump-sum payment of $770,000
The store that sold the ticket will get a $2,000 bonus commission for selling the winning ticket.
The $30 game, FLORIDA 100X THE CASH, launched in February 2018 and features eight top prizes of $15 million – the largest Scratch-Off top prize ever offered by the Florida Lottery. The game also offers 20 prizes of $1 million. Overall odds of winning are one-in-2.59. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Image caption China's foreign policy decisions are being closely watched at home and abroad
Capping 38 years of diplomatic service, Yang Jiechi has finally ascended to China's top foreign policy position. After serving as foreign minister for six challenging years, Mr Yang has become a State Councillor in charge of managing foreign affairs.
Mr Yang's successor, Wang Yi, moved into his new role as foreign minister after scaling China's diplomatic ranks for three decades, working both as ambassador to Japan and the United States.
Most recently, Mr Wang was in charge of Beijing's complex relationship with Taiwan.
Those outside China will look to Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi to understand China's stance on a host of international issues. However, they might not receive clear answers.
Inside the country, China's foreign ministry is just one of the groups influencing its international agenda, including its ever-expanding military and large state-owned companies that have significant investments overseas.
Image caption Despite his title, Yang Jiechi holds less sway within the upper ranks of the party
Perhaps most importantly, those at the upper echelons of the Communist Party can overrule the desires of the foreign ministry.
Like his predecessor, Dai Bingguo, Yang Jiechi holds a relatively low rank in the Communist Party, despite his spot near the top of the state hierarchy.
"He is not a member of the Politburo - so he does not have high political status in the Communist Party - and it is unclear if this will impact his effectiveness," explains David Shambaugh, professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi must push to be heard when attending meetings of the powerful Central Foreign Affairs Leading Group, the elite committee in charge of China's international agenda.
Headed by Xi Jinping, the group includes political heavyweights such as Premier Li Keqiang and the Minister of Defence, People's Liberation Army General Chang Wanquan.
"The rank of the Chinese foreign ministry cannot compete with that of the United States [State Department]. Final decisions will be made by Chairman Xi Jinping," explains Zhou Yongsheng, professor of Japan Studies at the China University of Foreign Affairs in Beijing.
Weak or arrogant?
An astute politician, Mr Xi also heeds his own personal agenda when dealing with foreign policy.
Since taking over as the head of the Central Military Commission, some argue that Mr Xi is strategically boosting tensions in the South and East China Seas in order to rally the military around him while he solidifies his grip on power.
In recent months, Mr Xi has made several comments urging the People's Liberation Army to prepare to "win wars".
Image caption New Foreign Minister Wang Yi will need to balance international and domestic pressures
China's new leader is also eager to boost his base of popular support. Increasingly, Chinese citizens are eager to weigh in with their own ideas, particularly on the need for China to stand up to Washington and Tokyo.
"Chinese foreign policy has been criticised domestically because it looks like China has been very weak in dealing with hot issues," explains Su Hao, professor of foreign affairs studies at the China University of Foreign Affairs.
"But internationally, China has been accused of being arrogant. Terms like 'assertive' and 'aggressive' are used to describe China's foreign policy."
Perhaps that is the toughest task faced by Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi: they must present China's foreign policy on the international stage, even if, at times, they played a limited role in making those decisions. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
We like maps here at PCMag. We recently surveyed 2,033 US consumers across the country on a variety of tech topics, and we gathered additional demographic data, including the respondents' home states. First we told you which states prefer Android or iOS, then we mapped preferred gaming platforms. This week, we're looking at the most popular dating apps in each state.
The dating-app landscape is crowded with options: Tinder, Bumble, OKCupid, Match, Plenty of Fish, and Zoosk, as well as other lesser-known services, such as Coffee Meets Bagel and Hinge. Tinder was the top dating app in the US, at 17 percent. It was followed by Match, at 15 percent. Bumble and Plenty of Fish each garnered 8 percent, and OKCupid and Zoosk earned 5 percent apiece. Eight percent chose "Other." And 34 percent of respondents said they don't use dating apps.
On a state-by-state basis, Tinder won in 27 states, followed by Match with 17 states. Bumble won two states, Missouri and Oregon; and Plenty of Fish won Maine and Utah. The two remaining apps won one state each: OKCupid in West Virginia and Zoosk in New Mexico.
The results are also interesting when broken down across demographic lines: 32 percent of Tinder users were ages 18 to 24, and 38 percent of that age group prefers Tinder above the rest. This is the only age group where the percentage of respondents preferring any one dating app eclipses those who answered "none." Although dating apps have become part of our culture, plenty of people are already in relationships, and others simply prefer dating the old-fashioned way.
Plenty of Fish skewed a bit older, with 32 percent of users who prefer POF between the ages of 25 and 34. Looking at wider age ranges, respondents ages 18 to 44 generally prefer Tinder, and those ages 45 to 65-plus are more apt to look for love on Match.
Bumble is only app of the bunch that requires women to send the first message after a match. For whatever reason, 58 percent of respondents who preferred Bumble are men. Conversely, 58 percent of those who prefer the more data-driven and compatibility-focused OKCupid are women.
Further Reading
Mobile App Reviews | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Pfizer has clinched a blockbuster merger with a fellow drug maker, one worth more than $150 billion, that can best be described in superlatives.
When it is announced — most likely on Monday, people briefed on the matter said — the deal to buy Allergan, the maker of Botox, would be one of the biggest ever takeovers in the health care industry. And it would be the largest acquisition yet in a banner year for mergers.
Perhaps most important, it would be the biggest transaction aimed at helping an American company shed its United States corporate citizenship in an effort to lower its tax bill, in this case by billions of dollars. And it could become a flash point as the presidential race heats up.
A deal would come as the Obama administration is trying to crack down on these kinds of deals, known on Wall Street and in Washington as corporate inversions. Last week, the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service announced new rules meant to further clamp down on the benefits of such mergers. The government has already lost billions of dollars in corporate tax revenue from inversions, particularly over the last couple of years. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Cinema is a medium. Television is an appliance. Cinema is art. TV is product. Cinema is driven by directors. Television is driven by writers and producers. That’s why there’s nothing good on TV.
If you’re a cinephile, there’s a good chance I had you up until that last sentence, a cocktail-party cliché so outdated that it might as well be wearing an ascot. But the lead-up to it has proved surprisingly resilient among cinephiles. Even now, in the era of think pieces calling The Wire the Great American Novel and insisting that television is somehow “better than” movies, the notion persists that TV is not a director’s medium—that any creativity comes from the writer or producer, whose jobs fuse in the P.T. Barnum–esque title “showrunner.”
But here’s the thing: It isn’t true and maybe never was.
Consider a fleeting moment from season four of FX’s excellent Western-flavored crime thriller Justified: “Outlaws,” directed by John Dahl (film credits: The Last Seduction, Rounders). Backwoods gangster Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) sits at a table in his dive-bar headquarters, confronting local power brokers who think they own him (top).
“Now, I know people like you are used to taking from people like me,” Boyd drawls, the camera hanging back to show the configuration of his adversaries. “But there comes a point where people like me can’t take any more taking.” When Boyd stands up, asserting his power, the scene shifts into a close-up, showcasing his determined face.
“Now, all the things you’ve done, the way you’ve built your fortunes, it may make you criminals,” he says. “But it does not make you outlaws.” The scene snakes onward, ratcheting up tension by cutting between wide shots of the room and close-ups of Boyd and his would-be masters. The crowning shot shows Boyd from the back, center-frame, flanked by the old rich guys. His cocked pelvis and akimbo arms evoke the iconic pose of the gunfighter, but there are no holsters on Boyd’s hips. His confidence comes from his willingness to delegate (his cousin is behind him, covering the old guys with a revolver) and his theatrical mastery of word and gesture. The power brokers’ eye lines aren’t looking up at Boyd’s face, but farther south—a hilariously correct visual joke, considering that the scene is about cojones.
Boyd Crowder’s badass aria is a superb example of how to embed meaning in a moment without making a big deal of it—old-school classical direction, shot on the cheap with digital cameras. But it’s also an accidental metaphor for filmmaking in the early years of the 21st century. TV directors, the new outlaws, are weighed down by burdens that the old rich gangsters haven’t dealt with in ages, but they’re holding their own, and they’re full of surprises.
Thirty-two years after Hill Street Blues, 29 years after Miami Vice, 23 years after Twin Peaks, and fourteen years after The Sopranos, consensus persists that TV is not a director’s medium. There’s a certain truth to that charge, but it’s not as encompassing as you think. It’s true that TV is driven by long-form storytelling, and a related obsession with continuity and consistency. Showrunners drive and manage the medium, and if you’ve spent time on film sets, you understand why. Directors tend to think in terms of images and moments; those skill sets aren’t often compatible with the left-brain requirements of managing a sitcom or drama (though there are always exceptions; see veteran TV director Paris Barclay’s executive-producer credit on FX’s stylishly nasty biker drama, Sons of Anarchy). It’s also true that, for consistency’s sake, the showrunners get together with a pilot’s cinematographer, art director, costumer, and other collaborators to decide on the look and feel of a show before the pilot’s cameras roll, and any director who comes in afterward has to work within that preexisting vision.
But if TV is still a factory, it’s hardly stamping out interchangeable widgets. It offers an increasingly diverse array of storytelling modes: hypnotic minimalist nightmare (Top of the Lake, The Killing); stately, classical A-picture (Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire); gritty, run-and-gun B-picture (Sons of Anarchy, Justified, The Walking Dead); traditional three-camera sitcom (How I Met Your Mother, Anger Management); laugh-track-free pseudo-documentary (Parks and Recreation, Modern Family); glossy quasi-theatrical rom-com (The Mindy Project); trash-expressionist midnight movie (American Horror Story, Banshee); graphic novel (Archer, Bob’s Burgers); and droll-gritty indie (Girls, Louie). A director who jumped between three or four of these programs could serve the material, as they say, and still create one hell of a reel.
Plus there are always constraints on filmmakers, be they budgetary or stylistic. Prewar movie studios and low-budget impresarios like Roger Corman were equally likely to assign directors to projects whose casts and crews were locked and wish them well: Do the best you can, kid. You’ve got a million dollars and four weeks. Sometimes there was even a house style that directors had to honor. Cinephiles can tell an old MGM Studios picture from a Warner Bros. picture from twenty paces away with the sound off, or a Jerry Bruckheimer–produced action flick, for that matter. Networks have house styles, too. Visually oriented TV buffs can distinguish an HBO drama from an FX drama from an NBC drama after a minute or two, by studying the cutting, camerawork, and music. The constraints of TV production don’t stop great direction from happening, any more than they stopped it from happening on movie sets in the decades before the Cahiers du Cinéma gang decided that the director was the primary author of a film.
Martin Scorsese—the executive producer of Boardwalk Empire as well as the director of many a great movie—famously said that “cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.” TV direction? Same thing. We remember great TV moments because of the sum total of their creative choices, gathered under the descriptive umbrella of “direction.” Think of the closing montage in the third episode of The Americans, set to Roxy Music’s “Sunset,” climaxing with FBI agent Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) discovering an overdose that he knows is no overdose; that extraordinary episode was directed by Thomas Schlamme, whose roving camera enlivened Sports Night and The West Wing.
Heathers director Michael Lehmann helmed the American Horror Story episode “The Name Game,” which included the perverse spectacle of Jessica Lange’s hallucinating nun leading fellow inmates in a line dance to the title track; it played like a very special episode of Glee set in hell.
The horrifying massacre that ended season three of Boardwalk Empire, with disfigured sharpshooter Richard Harrow mowing down an army of gangsters, is the handiwork of Sopranos veteran Tim van Patten, the Sam Peckinpah of pay-cable mayhem.
The Breaking Bad episode “Madrigal,” which contained not a single dull shot and built to an agonizingly tense hostage scene in a house, was directed by Michelle MacLaren, whose sense of space, light, and pacing recalls Alan J. Pakula (Klute, All the President’s Men).
TV didn’t just wake up one day and let directors direct. There’s a long history of great filmmaking on the small screen, stretching from the fifties to the present. In The Moviegoer, Walker Percy wrote of recalling movie moments more vividly than moments from his own life, such as “the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.” You could build a Percy-style list of great television moments: the time Archie Bunker told Meathead that he knew his father loved him because he beat the hell out of him, the camera creeping closer to the bigot’s faraway eyes; the time Burgess Meredith’s librarian accidentally dropped his glasses in The Twilight Zone’s “Time Enough at Last” and we got a point-of-view shot of a world permanently out of focus; the time Miami Vice detective Sonny Crockett paused en route to a confrontation with a drug dealer to call his wife from a phone booth, the car and phone booth perfectly balanced in a wide shot with a neon sign buzzing in the background; the time ER nurse Jeanie Boulet sang Green Day’s “Good Riddance (The Time of Your Life)” at Scott Anspaugh’s funeral; the time Homeland’s Carrie Mathison walked slowly around the interrogation room, turning off all the cameras, then told her prisoner and ex-lover Nick Brody, “Alone at last”; the time Mad Men’s Peggy left the agency to start a new life while the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” blasted on the soundtrack like an anthem. These and other indelible moments didn’t just magically appear on our screens. They were directed.
Photo: Jordin Althaus
Why, then, does the public tend not to notice the names of TV directors—not even the ones who directed the scenes and episodes cited in the paragraph above? (They are, in order of mention, Paul Bogart, John Brahm, Michael Schultz, Charles Haid, Lesli Linka Glatter, and Phil Abraham.) If you watch TV with open eyes and ears, you can recognize that these people are artists, just as Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola were artists when they worked for Corman, and just as Victor Fleming was an artist when he directed chunks of Gone With the Wind for producer David O. Selznick, arguably the most hands-on producer in film history. Where’s their MoMA retrospective? Why is there no auteur theory of TV?
One explanation is that movies have a half-century head start on TV, so there’s been more time for critics to settle on terms and definitions. I like to tell people that TV, as both business and art, is at roughly the same place in its development as cinema was in the late fifties, around the time that the French floated the auteur theory. We’re still figuring out who the “author” is on TV shows. We’re still taking into account whether we’re talking about the show as a whole or a particular episode, and why. We rarely think of TV as being directed, unless the show’s main creative force has already been identified as a theatrical director (as David Lynch was before Twin Peaks) or doubles as the show’s star (like Louis C.K. or Lena Dunham). It’s not wrong to attribute a program’s personality to showrunners—the Matt Weiners (Mad Men) and Vince Gilligans (Breaking Bad) and Shonda Rhimeses (Scandal)—but it doesn’t tell the whole critical story. Showrunners aren’t on the set every single minute, and within the showrunner’s big picture are a series of smaller pictures: the scenes, the moments, the shots. It’s on these smaller canvases that episodic directors work their magic.
Television’s creative constraints have loosened in recent decades, but we should not forget that the medium produced art before David Simon was a glint in his mama’s eye. Even in the supposed pre-style era there was visionary filmmaking on television: the Kabuki-like sitcom minimalism of The Honeymooners; Ernie Kovacs’s experimental, highly visual slapstick; the atmospheric morality plays of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits; the Pop Art eye candy of The Prisoner and the original Star Trek; and the horror-comedy stylings of The X-Files, which once staged a whole episode (series creator Chris Carter’s “Triangle”) in a handful of elaborate Steadicam shots. John Frankenheimer’s direction of live theater for Playhouse 90 and other anthology shows boasted imaginative touches that would have earned a slow clap from Rushmore’s Max Fischer: realistic fake animals, miniature sci-fi panoramas and military vehicles, even a flood re-created in a water tank. Amazing direction happened on TV all the time before cable, but almost nobody recognized it as such because we were told that art was as anomalous in television as wildflowers in a toxic-waste dump, so there was no point keeping an eye out for it.
But our eyes, ears, and hearts told a different story. If television were truly disposable, our memories wouldn’t replay certain moments as if they happened to us: the wide shot of Tony Soprano, high on peyote, standing on a desert cliff and screaming, “I get it!”
The way the camera pushed in on the aged and dying faces of Six Feet Under’s main cast as the show’s final episode raced toward oblivion.
The slow pan across the faces of Springfield townspeople gathered in Ned Flanders’s fallout shelter, singing “Que sera sera.” Those episodes were directed by Alan Taylor, Alan Ball, and Bob Andersen. Like so many other great TV directors, they were authors of the moment.
*This article originally appeared in the May 20, 2013 issue of New York Magazine. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Souvenir-seeking tourists have done serious damage to the Berlin Wall, leaving Germany with no choice: A wall in front of the wall will be erected in summer 2018, to protect the landmark structure from further vandalism, reports the Art Newspaper.
This isn’t the first time the idea of a protective barrier in front of the Berlin Wall has been raised. In November 2015, authorities of Berlin’s Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district, home to the “East Side Gallery” section of the wall, which is covered in murals created in 1990, announced plans to erect a permanent protective fence.
The wall, a designated heritage site, was erected in 1961, dividing citizens of West Berlin from the rest of the city and the surrounding East Germany until November 9, 1989. The wall began coming down in June 1990, but parts of the structure were left intact as a monument.
That physical reminder of the Cold War, however, has become endangered by throngs of tourists—3.5 million of them reportedly visit the East Side Gallery a year, and some engage in graffiti, scrawling their own names and messages atop the historic artworks.
Others feel compelled to bring home a piece of the wall to call their own. But everyone that chisels off a tiny fragment of the wall is literally chipping away at world history, leading some authorities to worry that the wall will not survive without additional protection.
“We have had several people arrested and taken to court, and we want to avoid this,” Kani Alavi, an artist whose work is on the wall, and a leading advocate for its preservation as the president of the Artists’ Initiative East Side Gallery, told TAN. “We have tried to protect it using a construction hoarding but that means you can’t see the art.”
Alavi led a massive €2 million ($2.1 million) renovation of the East Side Gallery in 2009, gathering the original artists to have the artworks repainted. It was cleaned and repaired again in 2015.
The Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district is planning for a roughly three-foot-high railing, about 33 inches away from the wall. There will also be signs in multiple languages prohibiting vandalism.
Follow artnet News on Facebook: | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Spread the love
11
**Warning this post contains some rude language**
If you are a regular reader of my blog you will know that one of my favourite things to do is have a night in with friends!
I don’t like leaving Freddie at night (he is 8 and of course doesn’t care, but I prefer to be with him!) we tend to socialise a lot at home.
We are very lucky to have found some great friends who are Freddie’s friends parents and we often get together. With us generally in the kitchen and the kids wrecking the house!!
So here are my top tips for a great night in with friends:
Make sure if you are not planning on cooking to get plenty of nibbles in. We often get together after the kids have had rugby training on a Friday night, so we have normally eaten. Our favourites are olives, wasabi peas, nuts, maltesers, antipasti oh and some cheese (normally manchego – as we all love it!) Probably the most important, well for us anyway is to get in plenty of wine and gin, and of course not forgetting the tonic and at the minute our favourite to add to gin is grapefruit. You could serve a ready made cocktail so you are not playing barman all night! Another important thing for us as there are normally 3-5 kids (all over the age of 8 though) make sure the kids have got plenty of snacks and have plenty of games to play. Or in the summer make sure they play out on the trampoline. Play a game! Just so you know I am 40 and my husband is 50, so I don’t mean a kids game. I mean an adults game such as Shit Happens! On a side note, make sure the kids are in a different room while playing the game. As this is definitely one for the adults!
Shit Happens Game Review
As the name suggests this is a game all about, shit happens! We all face scenarios like this, and in the game you have to rank how shit the card is, compared to your other cards.
Each card has a misery index. These were ranked from a “serious” panel of professionals, from marriage counsellors, therapists, career counsellors and social workers, collectively representing over 150 years of clinical psychiatric experience.
Each player is handed 3 cards that are placed face up on the table, which you have to rank in order of misery, with 1 being the least shit.
The player then reads out the next card, but omits the misery number and you have to guess where in the shit rankings does this card fit. If you guess the correct place in your existing deck you win the card and add it to you “lane of pain”.
So what do some of the cards say?
Kicked in the nuts by a kangaroo! Well this is ranked 46 out of 100 so you can imagine what some of the shittiest cards say!!! For example a misery index 79 would be teenage daughter is pregnant, yeah I think we can all agree that would be a worse scenario!
What did we think of Shit Happens?
So what did we think on our night in with friends? Well there were only 4 of us playing with an average age of 45 and we certainly enjoyed it. We did feel however, that the rankings might have been aimed at younger adults, rather than us oldies. But we really did enjoy it as you can see from the photos!
Important to note. If you leave the game on the side in the kitchen over night, you might have some serious explaining to do by your child in the morning! Oops!
You can buy this from Amazon
** Please note we were gifted Shit Happens in return for an honest review. There may be affiliate links in this post **
Related
Summary Reviewer Freddies Mummy UK Review Date 2018-03-09 Reviewed Item Shit Happens Game - Cheatwell Games Author Rating 4 | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Editor's note: Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist and CNN political contributor, was a political consultant for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992 and was counselor to Clinton in the White House. Begala is not a paid political consultant for any politicians or candidates. Click here for a rival view
Paul Begala says McCain's VP choice, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, is completely unqualified to be president.
(CNN) -- John McCain needs what Kinky Friedman calls "a checkup from the neck up."
In choosing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate, he is not thinking "outside the box," as some have said. More like out of his mind.
Palin a first-term governor of a state with more reindeer than people, will have to put on a few pounds just to be a lightweight. Her personal story is impressive: former fisherman, mother of five. But that hardly qualifies her to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
For a man who is 72 years old and has had four bouts with cancer to have chosen someone so completely unqualified to become president is shockingly irresponsible. Suddenly, McCain's age and health become central issues in the campaign, as does his judgment.
In choosing this featherweight, McCain passed over Tom Ridge, a decorated combat hero, a Cabinet secretary and the former two-term governor of the large, complex state of Pennsylvania. iReport.com: 'McCain pick might be a gimmick'
He passed over Mitt Romney, who ran a big state, Massachusetts; a big company, Bain Capital; and a big event, the Olympics.
He passed over Kay Bailey Hutchison, the Texas senator who is knowledgeable about the military, good on television and -- obviously -- a woman.
He passed over Joe Lieberman, his best friend in the Senate and fellow Iraq Kool-Aid drinker.
He passed over former congressman, trade negotiator and budget director Rob Portman.
And he also passed over Mike Huckabee, the governor of Arkansas.
For months, the McCainiacs have said they will run on his judgment and experience. In his first presidential decision, John McCain has shown that he is willing to endanger his country, potentially leaving it in the hands of someone who simply has no business being a heartbeat away from the most powerful, complicated, difficult job in human history.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer.
All About Sarah Palin | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Thank you for choosing to take this survey!
I am an animation student and I am planning to create an animation that visually represents depression, for the greater public to understand what is going through the mind of those who suffer from depression.
I personally do not suffer from depression, but some of my loved ones around me do, and I would like to learn more about this topic - with your help. And don't worry, you will have 100% anonymity.
I would be really grateful if you could spare a couple minutes to fill in this survey. Thank you again!
OK | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Irodycites, the "sparkly" cells on the surface of clams, cause light to propagate very deeply into the clam tissue and spread out. When the light is distributed evenly among the thick layer of algae living inside the clam, the algae quickly converts the light into energy. Credit: University of Pennsylvania
Alison Sweeney of the University of Pennsylvania has been studying giant clams since she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara. These large mollusks, which anchor themselves to coral reefs in the tropical waters of the Indian and Pacific oceans, can grow to up to three-feet long and weigh hundreds of pounds. But their size isn't the only thing that makes them unique.
Anyone who has ever gone snorkeling in Australia or the western tropical Pacific Ocean, Sweeney says, may have noticed that the surfaces of giant clams are iridescent, appearing to sparkle before the naked eye. The lustrous cells on the surface of the clam scatter bright sunlight, which typically runs the risk of causing fatal damage to the cell, but the clams efficiently convert the sunlight into fuel. Using what they learn from these giant clams, the researchers hope to improve the process of producing biofuel.
Sweeney, an assistant professor of physics in the Penn School of Arts and Sciences, and her collaborator Shu Yang, a professor of materials science and engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, refer to the clams as "solar transformers" because they are capable of absorbing bright sunlight at a very high rate and scattering it over a large surface area. When the light is distributed evenly among the thick layer of algae living inside the clam, the algae quickly converts the light into energy.
"What those sparkly cells are doing," Sweeney says, "is causing light to propagate very deeply into the clam tissue and spread out."
After coming across Sweeney's work, Yang struck up a collaboration to see if they could mimic the system by abstracting the principles of the clam's process to create a material that works similarly. She and Ph.D. student Hye-Na Kim devised a method of synthesizing nanoparticles and adding them to an emulsion—a mixture of water, oil, and soapy molecules called surfactants—to form microbeads mimicking the iridocytes, the cells in giant clams responsible for solar transforming. Their paper has been accepted to Advanced Materials.
Sweeney compared the process to making a salad vinaigrette. The more a person shakes it, the smaller the oil droplets in the dressing. If one were to take nanoparticles, add them to the oil-water emulsion and shake it at the right speed, the droplet size can be controlled. After doing an optical characterization of the beads, the researchers found that they function very similarly to the clam cells.
"It's very efficient, and it's very difficult to achieve," Yang says. "People are trying to do this by designing nanoparticles, but you need to do a lot of synthesis and find ways to precisely control their size, shape and optical properties, which becomes complicated and expensive. Our method is both simple and inexpensive and at the same time achieves better results than all these other systems."
The researchers' next step is to try to mimic the organization of the algae within the clams by getting algae to grow in gel pillars. Once they figure out how to do so, they hope to then marry their artificial iridocytes and the algae and measure the system to see if it can produce fuel to the same high efficiencies as the giant clam.
If successful, the method can be used for photosynthesis to enhance the efficiency of biofuel production. It can also be used in solar panels for generating, storing or preventing heat to allow for better temperature control in buildings.
"It's exciting to see the clever, non-intuitive ways that life has come up with to solve problems," Sweeney says. "Typically, evolution is a lot more clever than human engineers, and the trick is to ask smart questions about what design problem is being solved in each evolutionary case. It's figuring out these really clever design strategies that you wouldn't get to from a top-down human approach."
Explore further Study shows how giant clams harness the sun
More information: Hye-Na Kim et al, Geometric Design of Scalable Forward Scatterers for Optimally Efficient Solar Transformers, Advanced Materials (2017). Journal information: Advanced Materials Hye-Na Kim et al, Geometric Design of Scalable Forward Scatterers for Optimally Efficient Solar Transformers,(2017). DOI: 10.1002/adma.201702922 | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Toronto police have made an arrest in the death of Rhoderie Estrada, a 41-year-old woman killed inside her East York home last month.
A 22-year-old man of no fixed address is facing a first-degree murder charge in connection to Estrada's death and will appear in court on Monday, Det. Sgt. Mike Carbone said Sunday evening.
Carbone said there was no relationship between Estrada and the man but that there is no concern for public safety. He would not comment on whether the killing may have been random or targeted.
Carbone added that police have an idea of the motive behind the death, but would not say what it was.
The man was known to police, he said.
Estrada was found lifeless and suffering from "obvious trauma," inside her Torrens Avenue home in the area of Pape Avenue and O'Connor Drive after 2 a.m. on May 26.
Emergency responders tried to perform life-saving measures on Estrada, but she was pronounced dead at the scene.
Investigators believe the suspect entered the home through a side window as early as 10:30 p.m. the night before Estrada's death. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Developer and Ty the Tasmanian creator Krome Studios revealed plans to give Ty the Tasmanian Tiger an HD overhaul and Steam early access release.
Originally released in 2002, Ty the Tasmanian was one of many mascot platformers that released for PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube. This PC release of the game isn't a total overhaul, but Krome says, "We're making a few 'special modifications' to make it nicer too," in the YouTube description of the video. The game will be available as an early access title next month.
We gave the original version of the game 7.75 when it released in 2002.
[Source: Krome on Facebook, @kromestudios]
Our Take
Is this a series that people have fond memories for? I never played it, but there were three games which means it must have had some fans. Please let us know in the comments if this is something you're excited to revisit.
| {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutras community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
Development in a big team is always an issue in Unity when we are talking about a scene file.
Multiple people working on the same scene may experience problems when the time for merging parallel work arrives.
Some solutions have been developed to account for that, but more often than not, bumps are present during production stage of the game.
The solution found here at Black River Studios was custom built from ground up and from day 0 to fit development of multiple people on the same scene causing as little interference as possible and the results were quite pleasing.
The solution
Two rules were defined at the beginning of production:
Game flow controlled by waypoint;
No direct references shall exist in a scene;
By having the team following this two rules, the only possible scene conflict would only fall on the scene composition work.
If two or more artists would add and edit what the scene actually looks like, that could cause a conflict.
Luckily that did not happen during the whole production phase of the game, and rarely there was more than one developer working on the scene composition at the same time.
Waypoint System
A waypoint system was created, where the philosophy was that all the game flow of a current waypoint is controlled by it, and every waypoint is self contained.
That means that anyone could set any of the waypoints as the starting waypoint, and the game would work perfectly from that point on.
That meant that each waypoint would guarantee that all the systems it needed to run would exist, all actors were set correctly, and from that point on, the game flow could start flawlessly.
This architecture sped up the development process considerably, since we could focus test each waypoint, and bugs found during the execution of a waypoint would be contained to that execution, making it extremely easy to pinpoint them in matter of minutes.
Playmaker was chosen as the tool that would handle the game flow so game designers would have more control and less dependency of engineers to create their own waypoints, but this system can be adapted to use any type of flow management the team decides to use.
The SceneManager sends an event to the FSM called "Initialize", and from that point on, the waypoint should do everything it needs to run correctly.
Spawning of enemies, start and end of battles, opening doors, setting traps, triggering big events should all be done by the waypoint, and actors only satisfies the condition of each node in the waypoint flow that triggers the next node to activate.
Ideally, a waypoint could start in any node and work correctly, but that level of encapsulation may hurt the flexibility of the system and is not required.
Scene References
The second part of this system is the indirect scene references.
Only one GameObject on the scene holds references to anything that is inside the scene that might be needed by any script or FSM.
It is a singleton, and the references are mapped via string path, with a custom editor controlling said references.
References in the scene are divided by categories and references, making it easy to map the variables to any script or FSM.
Additionally, an automated FSM variable addition was created to reduce the overhead work for dealing with references this way instead of directly linking a GameObject to a script variable.
This allows the waypoints to be prefabs, and manipulate the scene just by programming using the empty references instead of the actual objects.
At the start of the game, all scripts and FSMs have access to the SceneManager in order to fill the empty references with actual scene objects, allowing the code in them to affect actors and objects in the scene during run time.
Conclusion
By building an indirect reference and encapsulated flow from ground up , the scene conflicts during development were practically nullified and stability and control over what is happening made bug hunting the easiest the studio has seen so far.
This system is flexible enough that most projects can at least adapt a version of it, allowing to reap the benefits of disconnecting direct references from development and controlling game flow. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Samsung has reiterated that it will announce the revised release date for the Galaxy Fold in a few weeks, after it was left with no choice but to delay the handset earlier this month. This is the second time the firm has stressed that it will cast a new launch date into the wild in the near future — first in the statement it issued when it postponed the handset, and now in its latest earnings call.
To us, that sounds like Samsung is confident it has identified the source of the issue(s) that resulted in a number of reviewers running into a roadblock while using the Galaxy Fold. More often than not, that was because they toyed with the protective film affixed to the delicate 7.3-inch folding screen, thus rendering it unusable.
There’s a simple fix for that, however. All Samsung has to do is find a way to notify customers that the layer must be left in place. As it stands, there’s a small notice on the cellophane film covering the unit in the box, but that’s not enough. At the very minimum, there should be a pop-up notification the first time you power on the device.
What’s more concerning is the small number of reports from reviewers claiming that their Galaxy Fold broke after foreign matter managed to seep into the device itself, obliterating the screen from the inside. A teardown later confirmed that there are a number of openings around the hinge that could allow debris to enter.
As we noted in our teardown coverage, that could be another somewhat simple fix. Apple had a similar issue with the keyboard on the MacBook Pro and introduced a silicone layer to act as a buffer between the inside and outside — and that’s something Samsung could do with the Fold to stop debris from making its way inside.
Despite Samsung’s silence, US carrier AT&T has announced that Samsung will launch the Galaxy Fold in the region on June 13. We wouldn’t advise taking that as gospel, though; that could be the temporary date Samsung told the operator. But until Samsung speaks out itself, it’s unconfirmed. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
The global financial market is a market ripe for disruption due to the sheer number of inefficiencies and unfair practices in the industry.
For instance, customers often little to no knowledge at all of what goes on behind financial processes which leave them clueless as to whether they’re being served fairly or not.
To add to the lack of transparency, institutions often impose high transaction fees which makes no sense as the same institutions take days or even weeks to complete transactions—what’s the high charge for if transactions take so long to complete?
An industry where these challenges can be seen is in the derivatives market where several issues still exist that harm the integrity and efficiency of the industry. For instance, peer-to-peer trades are non-existent as everything has to go through brokers or counterparties which makes transactions longer and more expensive due to broker fees.
Customers may not even know if brokers are executing trades that will benefit them or not!
Even if trades go well for customers, liquidity problems in the market, as well as poor regulation of brokers, may cause the customer to not receive any money at all from their trades.
All of these problems are real, existing problems affecting customers in the derivatives market currently and it calls for an extensive solution to deliver and finally establish a market where all parties get what they want fairly and efficiently.
That is exactly what ThinkCoin, a revolutionary blockchain startup, is aiming for.
Introducing ThinkCoin
ThinkCoin is a blockchain startup that aims to disrupt the industry and remove brokers or any intermediaries in trades by using the TradeConnect network, the company’s proprietary platform to enable direct trading of financial instruments between two or more trade participants.
The TradeConnect network is a multi-asset trading platform and was specifically designed to allow individuals and institutions to directly trade with one another which dramatically reduces costs and improves the speed of transactions to be executed instantly.
As the network is powered by the blockchain, transparency will be at an all-time high as all data is recorded publicly and none of it can be removed or edited which removes the chances of fraud and shady practices from happening.
The network will allow the trading of numerous assets such as equities, forex, commodities, and even cryptocurrencies as well as implementing several cutting-edge features that will be the first of its kind in the industry.
TradeConnect will first focus on the retail trading sector and as the platform grows, the scope will be expanded to institutional and corporate sectors before finally allowing the trade of any financial product to happen between parties.
The network is led by co-founders Nauman Anees and Faizan Anees, who are also the company’s CEO and director respectively. Together, they will lead the TradeConnect team to deliver on its goals and establish itself as the world’s biggest multi-asset blockchain-based trading network.
How does TradeConnect work?
As mentioned earlier, TradeConnect is a platform and individuals and institutions to directly trade financial products between each other without the need for a broker or middleman.
The platform’s cryptocurrency which is known as the ThinkCoin (TCO) token is used to access the platform’s features and to trade between users.
Thanks to smart contracts, trades are automatically created and completed according to pre-defined terms which means that trades always stay true to what is agreed between the two parties hence eliminating fraud.
The two main participants in the work can be both individuals or institutions; instead of separating users by their statuses, TradeConnect divides its users into two categories: Makers and Takers.
Makers are responsible for creating the terms of a smart contract whenever they want to trade a financial product in the network. These contracts are then offered to the market to be taken up by Takers who can then accept these offers and thus complete the trade successfully.
Due to the team’s strong technical background, AI and deep-learning technologies are used to match offers to Takers which ensures that the right offers to go to the right people hence reducing inefficiencies in the market.
All of the terms of a trade will be stored in smart contracts called the TradeConnect Contract which also holds and locks the ThinkCoin tokens used in a trade.
Unlike other platforms, transaction fees are negligible and minimal in TradeConnect. Instead, traders pay a very small fee to the network with each trade for the platform’s Connect Fee.
The amount to be paid to the Connect Fee depends on the size of the trade. What makes the Connect Fee different is that a certain amount of the total amount collected by the network will be re-distributed back to Makers.
By doing so, Makers are rewarded for making offers on the market which encourages liquidity as well as allowing Makers to earn rebates and save even more fees on trades.
In terms of how the trading process is executed in TradeConnect, it couldn’t be more straightforward than what the network is doing right now which is best described via an example use case.
An example TradeConnect use case
Let’s say that John wants to buy stock in Google; in current systems, John would have to pay excessive transaction fees and wait for a frustrating amount of time for his trade to actually happen.
With TradeConnect, the process has been made extremely simple and efficient. All John has to do is to open an account with TradeConnect (a process that takes only a short amount of time to be completed.)
John can then use the network’s integrated crypto wallet to convert his fiat currency or cash into TCO which are then used to place trade orders for whatever financial product he’s interested in.
Going with the Google stock example, John wants to buy a certain amount of Google stock but he does not have enough money to buy full shares as he only has a small budget to work with.
John would be out of luck in traditional systems but he won’t have problems with TradeConnect as the network allows fractions of equity shares to be bought instead, which are known as Micro Shares.
John’s trade order is then automatically placed on the market and fulfilled by the network’s algorithms at the best available price. This trade works as sellers can also sell their shares in fractions instead of selling it as a whole.
Thanks to the blockchain, John’s trade is instantly executed and he receives his shares without having to pay excessive transaction fees. As his trade size is small, John’s Connect Fee is insignificant and much, much lower than what he’d pay on other platforms.
Of course, there are other efficient processes in place to serve multiple traders or institutions; all of these are presented clearly in the whitepaper should readers decide to learn more about how trades in TradeConnect work.
TradeConnect Personas
Traditional trade platforms have always suffered from the problem of not being able to offer retail investors the best price on the market.
Because of that, retail investors often overpay when making transactions and they also do not receive the best outcomes compared to large corporations or institutions for instance.
With TradeConnect, all of that will change thanks to the network’s AI technologies as well as the team’s experience in the industry in serving tens of thousands of customers for years.
The solution to this issue is achieved by using Digital Personas, which is essentially a model that gives each network subscriber a score that helps Makers and Takers to be matched with each other more accurately.
Personas are assigned from the network’s algorithm which learns and understands each user’s interaction on the network. This data is then used to connect the right offers to the right users at the best price possible.
Personas will develop and become more effective over time as the platform grows and more users register and trade on the network.
The ThinkCoin token sale
ThinkCoin will be holding a token sale for the ThinkCoin (TCO) token which will be used to power transactions in the TradeConnect network.
Here are the details of the upcoming ThinkCoin token sale:
Token name: TCO
Token base: Ethereum
Token supply: 500,000,000
Token sale duration: 15th May, 2018 – 25th May, 2018
Token sale target: $30,000,000 (hard cap)
Token exchange rate: TBA
ThinkCoin’s Website
ThinkCoin’s Whitepaper | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Acclaimed electronic music DJ Moby in a radio interview this week claimed current and former CIA agents confessed that they were “truly concerned” about President Donald Trump’s purported collusion with Russia.
“They were like, ‘This is ‘The Manchurian Candidate,’ like (Vladimir Putin) has a Russian agent as the president of the United States,” Moby told WFPK’s Kyle Meredith, citing “active and former CIA agents” who asked him to spread the word about President Trump.
“So they passed on some information to me and they said, like, ‘Look you have more of a social media following than any of us do, can you please post some of these things … sort of put it out there?'” said Moby, who has more than 1.35 million Twitter followers.
Last February, Moby claimed he was in possession of “100 percent real” intelligence that proves that “the Trump administration is in collusion with the Russian government.”
“The Trump administration is in collusion with the Russian government, and has been since day one,” the musician wrote in an Instagram post.
Now, nearly one year later, Moby says President Trump’s ties to Russia are too deep to remain hidden from public view.
“It’s really disturbing and it’s going to get quite a lot darker,” he said. “Like the depths of the Trump family in business and their involvement with organized crime, sponsored terrorism, Russian oligarchs, it’s really dark. I guess we should all, like, fasten our seat belts and hold on.”
When he’s not rattling off unsubstantiated conspiracies about the president, Moby is, however, trashing Trump through song.
In June, the 52-year-old released a music video in which President Trump was depicted as a Nazi robot who’s blown up by a band of rebellious citizens.
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
FILE - In this July 9, 2018 file photo, Mexico's President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador gives a press conference in Mexico City. Lopez Obrador said on Tuesday, July 31, 2018 that he plans to spend heavily in the public health system so Mexicans can enjoy European- quality free health care. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo, File)
FILE - In this July 9, 2018 file photo, Mexico's President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador gives a press conference in Mexico City. Lopez Obrador said on Tuesday, July 31, 2018 that he plans to spend heavily in the public health system so Mexicans can enjoy European- quality free health care. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo, File)
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s president-elect said Tuesday that he will end fracking, the oil and gas extraction method that has just begun to take root in areas of the country’s north.
Asked about the potential risks of fracking at a news conference, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said, “We will no longer use that method to extract petroleum.”
Mexico has a huge potential shale formation in the Burgos basin, similar to the Texas Eagle Ford fields.
But while a few wells have been drilled, the Mexican government has only recently scheduled bidding on opening some blocks for commercial development through fracking.
ADVERTISEMENT
Lopez Obrador also railed against private electricity generation contracts that displaced the government-owned Federal Electricity Commission, known as the CFE. He said that trend would be “corrected,” without saying whether he would seek to overturn existing contracts.
“The neoliberal governments deliberately closed the CFE plants in order to buy electricity from foreign companies at very high prices,” Lopez Obrador said. “All of that will be corrected.” | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
EU Commission: What is it and what does it do? Published duration 16 July 2019 Related Topics European elections 2019
image copyright Getty Images
Outgoing German defence minister Ursula von der Leyen has been confirmed as the next president of the European Commission, replacing Jean-Claude Juncker.
She will now form a new team of commissioners and they will start their new term on 1 November, a day after the UK is due to leave the EU.
But what is the European Commission, and why does it matter to the more than 500 million people living in the EU's 28 countries?
What does the European Commission do?
Its job is to develop laws for member states and enforce them.
Based in Brussels, it's the only EU body that can draft laws. It employs more than 32,000 staff in total and its running costs this year are €3.6bn.
Once its proposals have the approval of the European Parliament and a council of 28 ministers from the EU states, they can become law.
The laws it proposes cover many areas.
Clean air
The European Commission has referred a number of countries - including the UK - to court for breaching air pollution limits.
Fines amounting to millions of pounds could be enforced by the EU body, which says it "owed it to its citizens" to take legal action.
Rule of law
The European Commission has also taken action against some eastern member states over the rule of law.
It launched a series of legal actions against Poland over reforms to its judiciary.
And it warned Romania it would take legal action if it failed to scrap measures seen to threaten the independence of its courts.
Data protection
The EU made changes last year to data privacy regulations, tightening up rules about the way companies use our personal information.
Internet giants
Curbing the power of internet giants has also been a focus for the European Commission.
It has fined Google three times in the past two years. Most recently, it hit the firm with a €1.49bn (£1.28bn) fine for blocking rival online search advertisers
image copyright Getty Images image caption Commissioner Margrethe Vestager took on Google over competition issues
Competition cases have also been brought against Apple, Amazon, Ikea, Gazprom and chip giant Qualcomm.
Going overseas
The new rules meant consumers travelling within any EU country could text, call or go online on their mobiles for the same cost as they would pay at home.
On air safety, the commission maintains a list of airlines which are either banned from operating in Europe, or face restrictions on their operations.
Olive oil
Less popular was an attempt in 2013 to introduce rules for restaurants about refillable bottles and dipping bowls for olive oil.
The move was introduced to improve hygiene and protect consumers, said the commission. But it was ridiculed as unnecessary interference, and the EU backtracked on the idea shortly afterwards.
Why is there controversy about the top job?
Every five years, the 28 commissioners are replaced.
New commissioners - one from each country - and a president of the commission are put forward to be voted on by a newly-elected European Parliament.
These candidates all have to be approved by a clear majority of the parliament, which has 751 MEPs.
image copyright Getty Images image caption Ursula von der Leyen has to secure the backing of the European Parliament
The process of finding a candidate to fill the role of president this time caused controversy.
Mrs von der Leyen was put forward by political leaders in the EU as their preferred candidate in a last-minute deal.
The leaders rejected the candidacy process agreed with the European Parliament, under which political groupings put forward their own candidates during EU parliamentary elections.
Mrs von der Leyen is a close ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but she faces some opposition from green and left-wing political groups.
She is the first woman to lead the European Commission. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
I don't always have time to study for my WAPS test. but when I do, I don't.
1,271 shares | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
André Piazza entrevista Cynthia Antonaccio: empreendedora em saúde e nutrição, co-autora do best-seller “Nutrição Comportamental” e autora do livro “Mindful Eating”. CEO da Equilibrium Latam, agência precursora do ramo da saúde com atuação no Brasil e América Latina. Em 2018 apresentou ao mercado o Keywe Lab, escola online de Inovação em saúde. Empreendedora e Mestre em Nutrição especializada em Inovação para alimentos, Design Thinking e Marketing.
Ouça Este Episódio
Caso o episódio não esteja tocando, utilize uma das plataformas acima para escutá-lo.
Assine Grátis ao Podcast:
Ousadia para encarar as falhas e os medos
Cynthia, qual é sua maior competência? A coragem: o poder de agir, o poder de tomar ação.
Qual o seu pior momento como empreendedora? Tive dois momentos marcantes.
O primeiro foi quando eu era muito nova, tinha 24 anos e montei meu primeiro restaurante perto da Avenida Paulista para atender executivos de alto padrão. Uma responsabilidade gigantesca! A minha formação como nutricionista, a minha paixão e a coragem me mobilizavam muito de modificar a alimentação daquelas pessoas que trabalhavam, que passavam comigo no consultório e treinavam na academia. Queria cuidar da saúde delas. Naquela época, sem o conhecimento da gestão, comecei a acelerar, cheguei a ter 8 unidades. Meu pior momento foi ter que recuar e fechar algumas unidades. Foi muito importante para não perder o investimento e continuar com o meu negócio. Às vezes você realmente tem que dar um passo atrás para dar mais à frente, e essa é uma decisão que dói muito: a de assumir o fracasso.
O outro momento foi em outra empresa de consultoria que tem a 17 anos no mercado, tinha grandes empresas, porém poucas, e uma delas no mês disse que não precisava mais dos serviços porque tinha sido incorporada por outra, um serviço próprio. Um mês depois nós já sabiamos que outra empresa sairia do mercado. Tendo que recuar, com muita dor, conversei com a Samanta, minha sócia, vimos outras opções. Pegamos nossa equipe e caçamos no mercado, mil reuniões e hoje somos líderes no mercado.
Qual a grande lição desse momento?
'Ver o copo meio cheio ou o copo meio vazio, como você enxerga isso e como você quer enxergar' por Cynthia Antonaccio #Empreendedorismo #MulherEmpreendedora Twittar
Que recado você mandaria para a Cynthia do futuro? Aproveite mais a jornada, aproveite mais o caminho. Celebre mais, deguste cada conquista. Dê relevância para cada passo, porque o sucesso não é chegar lá: é caminhar até algum lugar que sempre te faça feliz.
'Tenha coragem e se jogue, mesmo que você erre, a ideia é continuar no jogo' por Cynthia Antonaccio #Empreendedorismo #MulherEmpreendedora Twittar
A Inspiração de quem inspira Nutricionistas no Brasil e na América Latina
Cynthia, o que lhe inspirou a empreender ? Minha vida e minha infância: nasci num ambiente de família sempre muito empreendedor. A vinda para São Paulo já foi um ato de empreendedorismo. Os relacionamentos que fiz em São Paulo.
Qual hábito pessoal e diário que mais contribui para o seu sucesso ? Ser generosa e ter coragem.
'Da queda, levantamos e dançamos' por Cynthia Antonaccio #Empreendedorismo #MulherEmpreendedora Twittar
Dica de nutrição para nossos ouvintes: Mudança de comportamento é chave para se alimentar melhor. Resgate e sabedoria interna para saber comer bem. Pensamento crítico para o comer e descobrir a forma de alimentação para você.
'Transforme sua inspiração em poder da ação em empreendedorismo' por Cynthia Antonaccio #Empreendedorismo #MulherEmpreendedora Twittar
Recursos Mencionados na Entrevista
Evento: “Building Healthier Brands” da Equilibrium Latam em São Paulo, 25 de Outubro de 2018
“Building Healthier Brands” da Equilibrium Latam em São Paulo, 25 de Outubro de 2018 Cynthia Antonaccio na Comunidade Octanage (crie o seu usuário e interaja conosco!)
Livros
Vídeos
Acesse a playlist de vídeos mencionados nos episódios na Playlist Octanage (em breve) “The Future of Food“, playlist de vídeos da Singularity University
Conecte com a Cynthia nas Redes Sociais
Cynthia Antonaccio (Equilibrium Latam, Keywe Lab): empreendedora em saúde e nutrição, co-autora do best-seller “Nutrição Comportamental” e autora do livro “Mindful Eating”. CEO da Equilibrium Latam e fundadora do Keywe Lab, escola online de Inovação em saúde. Converse e conecte diretamente com a Cynthia na Comunidade Octanage.
Cynthia Antonaccio : no LinkedIn , Instagram e na Comunidade Octanage
Equilibrium Latam : website , Instagram
: Keywe Lab : website , Instagram
A Cada Semana um Novo Episódio
de Sabedoria e Inspiração para Empreender
Assine grátis ao nosso newsletter. Juramos pela bandeira nacional: de nós você não receberá spam!
Assine Grátis ao Podcast
Receba e ouça novos episódios diretamente no seu dispositivo.
Patrocina Este Episódio
Rocket.chat é uma plataforma de chat open source servindo uma comunidade com mais de 10 milhões de usuários em empresas e organizações no Brasil e no exterior.
Este Episódio no Instagram | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
A few days ago, Mother Jones ran an article detailing the atrocious behavior of “gun bullies” who reportedly spat on a woman in a wheelchair after seeing her on TV speaking in favor of gun control. It was the perfect story to illustrate just how vile and despicable these evil gun owners were, that they would spit on a woman. In a wheel chair. And that no one would help her. It evokes strong emotions — anger, hatred, and a desire to help this poor woman. In other words, it’s the perfect anti-gun propaganda piece. There’s just one problem: it never happened . . .
From ProgressivesToday:
Hmm. So this incident reportedly occurred on April 25 at the Indianapolis airport after the concourse television aired a report on the Every Town for Gun Safety protest outside the NRA convention? That’s odd – the TV report never made it on the Everytown for Gun Safety website.
And, since the Indianapolis airport airs CNN on their TV screens you’d think you could find their report on the protest on their website, right?
Nope. It’s not there.
CNN has no record of the protest. TV Eyes also has no record of Jennifer Longdon on cable news on April 25. It looks like Mother Jones was just caught in a lie.
They really ought to do better research next time.
There was no recording of the speech played on the televisions. According to the Indianapolis police, there is no record of the incident ever happening. In fact, there’s no evidence whatsoever backing up any of the claims made by Moms Demand Action and Mother Jones.
Mother Jones is, as we all know, the epitome of activist journalism. They don’t really care about the truth, they just care about pushing their specific agenda and will accept at face value any story that the gun control advocates present them. Not one single fact about the story was true (other than Jennifer being at Indianapolis’ airport to fly home), and yet it still touted the news as if it were gospel.
This is the most crystal clear example of the difference between the two camps. Gun rights folks use facts, logic, statistics, and common sense to make their arguments and draw their conclusions. Control freaks like Shannon Watts and Mother Jones don’t even care about the facts so long as it feels right — they are running solely on emotion and nothing else. That’s what makes them so dangerous: they have no moral compunction about running a complete lie so long as it supports their cause. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
The Life-Changing Power of Drag
Growing up under the sexually repressive apartheid regime, Johann could never imagine how a bunch of drag queens would pave the way to the man he'd fall in love with.
Johann's coming-out to his parents was unusual in that it was interrupted by two warthogs, a herd of zebras, and a group of baboons. In hindsight, maybe he shouldn't have tried to come out to them during a vacation to the South African bush.
This was not the coming-out experience that he had come to expect from his limited exposure to gay entertainment: shows like Queer as Folk and movies like The Object of Ny Affection. I interviewed Johann this week for my podcast, The Sewers of Paris, a show about how entertainment has shaped the lives of gay men. (You can listen to his story and subscribe to the podcast here, or at the bottom of this article.)
Johann grew up closeted and lonely under a sexually repressive apartheid regime. He was deeply religious, and searched desperately for people who would accept him. Eventually, that search took to the other side of the world, where he finally found the community he was looking for -- culminating in his discovery of Drag Race, and Seattle drag queen Ben DeLaCreme.
Johann grew up with no access to any gay culture until he discovered E. M. Forster's classic novel Maurice. He recognized something of himself in the story of forbidden same-sex romance. He began easing himself out of the closet, traveling to Johannesburg, then to Europe and America in search of a place where he could be honest and open and out.
There were hookups here and there -- bookish and academic, he had a dazzling fling in Pennsylvania that began when he and another man flirted over favorite Greek philosophers. But it was community he craved, not just rendezvous.
It just didn't seem like being gay had anything to offer him. The life felt lonely, relationships fleeting.
It was maybe appropriate that the animal kingdom tried to disrupt his coming-out. At the time, he felt like the only one of his species, surrounded by strange creatures he didn't understand and who paid no attention to him.
But he finally found what he was looking for one year ago in Seattle's Century Ballroom. Local drag heroine Ben DeLaCreme was a featured contestant on that season of Drag Race, and every week fans would gather over drinks in the ballroom to watch Ben present the episode, offering a live performance of music and jokes and gossip during commercial breaks.
Suddenly, Johann's eyes were opened. Here it was at last -- that community he'd craved ever since he was a kid, trying to pray away the gay in an Evangelical church 10,000 miles away.
At those Drag Race screenings he found a community that gathered under a common cause: to root for their hometown hero. Like a gay Superbowl, they all cheered together, drinks in hand; and they booed together when Ben was eliminated. These were his people, and they were friendly and thoughtful and a little bit weird, just like he was.
It completely changed how he felt about being gay.
"That's how I saw my first gender queer expressions," he recalled. "There was a sense of community, and a sense of decency. You went there with a mission -- other than getting drunk and getting somebody to go home with."
Gradually, week after week, those communal screenings opened him up to what the gay community had to offer. And it opened his heart as well. For the past year, he'd been casually chatting with a fellow online, growing close but never committing to meet. It was time, Johann decided, to go on a date.
And so, one night last summer, the two met up for pizza and nachos, took a walk, and snuck down a dark side-street to make out.
Now they're engaged.
It was a long journey from the closet in South Africa to the marriage altar in Washington. Most of that trip Johann made by himself. But he finished it in the company of his chosen family.
Click here to listen to Johann's story, and to subscribe to the Sewers of Paris. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
LONDON – Bitcoin is surging on Thursday morning, shooting past $7,000 per coin on Thursday morning for the first time ever.
Bitcoin passed the milestone in early trade and, at 11.10 a.m. GMT (7.05 a.m. ET), the digital currency is up over 8% against the dollar to $7,300.11:
Markets Insider
Bitcoin has been on a tear over the last week, posting record highs on consecutive days. The digital currency had not been higher than $6,300 at the start of the week but has now gained $700 on that level in just a few days.
The recent run has been helped by news on Tuesday that CME Group, the world's largest exchange operator, plans to introduce bitcoin future contracts in response to client demand. This is seen as a stamp of legitimacy from the world of traditional finance for bitcoin.
Traders are also speculating that this week's bull run is partly helped by a coming "fork" in bitcoin's underlying software. The SegWit2x software update is scheduled for November 16 and could split bitcoin in two, creating a new currency.
This has happened in the past with bitcoin cash and bitcoin gold and, in those cases, bitcoin holders got those new coins free. As a result, investors may be piling into bitcoin in the hopes of a SegWit2x dividend. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
“Over time, a thriving economy must be the central ingredient in any UK Grand Strategy. This is why the eurozone crisis is of such huge importance not just to the City of London but rightly to the whole country and to military planners like me.” | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
"Jay Clayton is a highly talented expert on many aspects of financial and regulatory law, and he will ensure our financial institutions can thrive and create jobs while playing by the rules at the same time," Trump said in a statement. "We need to undo many regulations which have stifled investment in American businesses, and restore oversight of the financial industry in a way that does not harm American workers." | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Home Daily News Lesbian moms' rights not violated by birth-certificate…
Constitutional Law
Lesbian moms' rights not violated by birth-certificate law, Arkansas Supreme Court rules
Arkansas laws that require the mother and father to be listed on birth certificates don’t violate the constitutional rights of lesbian spouses, the Arkansas Supreme Court has ruled.
The court on Thursday ruled against three lesbian married couples who used anonymous sperm donors to conceive, report the Wall Street Journal Law Blog, the Huffington Post, Arkansas News and Arkansas Online. How Appealing links to additional coverage and the decision.
The couples had alleged the birth certificate laws violate their rights to equal protection and due process under Obergefell v. Hodges, the U.S. Supreme Court decision finding a right to gay marriage. Under Arkansas law, when a wife in a heterosexual marriage gives birth, the husband is automatically given assumed paternity, and can be named on the birth certificate regardless of whether he is the biological father. Lesbian mothers must obtain a court order for their female spouse to be added to a birth certificate. The plaintiffs sought the automatic right to have both spouses’ names on the birth certificate.
The Arkansas Supreme Court majority rejected the argument. “Obergefell did not address Arkansas’ statutory framework regarding birth certificates, either expressly or impliedly,” the court said.
“In the situation involving the female spouse of a biological mother, the female spouse does not have the same biological nexus to the child that the biological mother or the biological father has,” the court said. “It does not violate equal protection to acknowledge basic biological truths.”
The court said the laws served the important governmental objectives of tracing public health trends and helping individuals identify personal health issues and genetic conditions.
Four justices also admonished the circuit judge who struck down part of the law for “inappropriate remarks’ in his court order. The justices said Judge Tim Fox essentially said that staying his order would deprive persons of constitutional rights, and that the state supreme court had previously deprived people of their rights in a separate matter. The justices said the judicial conduct code requires judges to act in a way that promotes confidence in the judiciary.
“A remark made to gain the attention of the press and to create public clamor undermines ‘public confidence in the independence integrity and impartiality’ not only of this court, but also of the entire judiciary,” the justices said.
See also:
ABA Journal: “After Obergefell: How the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage has affected other areas of law” | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
I hope this great book stays open-access, but I urge everyone to download a free copy now:
It’s the best elementary introduction to the connection between prime numbers and zeros of the Riemann zeta function. Fun, fun, fun!
The preface gives an idea of what this book is like:
The Riemann Hypothesis is one of the great unsolved problems of mathematics, and the reward of $1,000,000 of Clay Mathematics Institute prize money awaits the person who solves it. But — with or without money — its resolution is crucial for our understanding of the nature of numbers. There are several full-length books recently published, written for a general audience, that have the Riemann Hypothesis as their main topic. A reader of these books will get a fairly rich picture of the personalities engaged in the pursuit, and of related mathematical and historical issues. This is not the mission of the book that you now hold in your hands. We aim – instead — to explain, in as direct a manner as possible and with the least mathematical background required, what this problem is all about and why it is so important. For even before anyone proves this hypothesis to be true (or false!), just getting familiar with it, and with some of the ideas behind it, is exciting. Moreover, this hypothesis is of crucial importance in a wide range of mathematical fields; for example, it is a confidence-booster for computational mathematics: even if the Riemann Hypothesis is never proved, assuming its truth (and that of closely related hypotheses) gives us an excellent sense of how long certain computer programs will take to run, which, in some cases, gives us the assurance we need to initiate a computation that might take weeks or even months to complete.
To inspire the reader — and I hope that means you! — Mazur and Stein give two interesting quotes. The first is by Peter Sarnak:
The Riemann hypothesis is the central problem and it implies many, many things. One thing that makes it rather unusual in mathematics today is that there must be over five hundred papers — somebody should go and count — which start ‘Assume the Riemann hypothesis,’ and the conclusion is fantastic. And those [conclusions] would then become theorems … With this one solution you would have proven five hundred theorems or more at once.
The second is by Don Zagier. I find this more moving, because of trying to wow us with hundreds of undescribed theorems, it really gets to the heart of the matter. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Check out our new site Makeup Addiction
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
Puts people in his close friends list on facebook 1st notification in years. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
President Barack Obama's secretary of Homeland Security criticized the presidential Democratic candidates who have come out in support of decriminalizing illegal border crossings.
Julián Castro, Obama's secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has called for the repeal of Section 1325 in Title 8 of the U.S. Code, which makes it a misdemeanor for migrants to enter the United States illegally.
In his recently released immigration plan, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker said he would "virtually eliminate" all immigrant detention centers.
"That is tantamount to declaring publicly that we have open borders," Jeh Johnson told the Washington Post. "That is unworkable, unwise and does not have the support of a majority of American people or the Congress, and if we had such a policy, instead of 100,000 apprehensions a month, it will be multiples of that."
Johnson has rebutted Democratic talking points when it comes to issues at the border. With renewed attention to the conditions and overcrowding at detention centers, he said those problems did not start when Donald Trump became president.
“Chain link barriers, partitions, fences, cages, whatever you want to call them, were not invented on January 20, 2017, okay?" Jeh Johnson said at the Aspen Ideas Festival last week.
"But during that 72-hour period, when you have something that is a multiple — like four times — of what you’re accustomed to in the existing infrastructure, you’ve got to find places quickly to put kids. You can't just dump 7-year-old kids on the streets of McAllen or El Paso," he continued. "And so these facilities were erected … they put those chain link partitions up so you could segregate young women from young men, kids from adults, until they were either released or transferred to HHS." | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
The content on this page is accurate as of the posting date; however, some of our partner offers may have expired. Please review our list of best credit cards , or use our CardMatch™ tool to find cards matched to your needs.
Whether you’re traveling to Pittsburgh for business or Prague for pleasure, you don’t want to run into financial troubles – especially when you’re on the road alone.
A little planning now – long before you head to the airport or hit the road – can keep you and your cards safe. A few calls ahead of your trip can reduce the chance that your credit card will be declined, cut the risk that your cards and cash will be swiped while you’re sleeping and keep you from paying hefty fees for foreign credit and debit card transactions.
It all starts with a check of the cards in your wallet. Are they the best cards for where you are going? If not, make changes now. This guide (and a handy checklist you can print out) will show you what to look for in your credit cards (no foreign transaction fees, for example), how to keep your finances safe whether you’re staying at hostels or high-end hotels and more.
Before you go
Notify your card issuers
If you’re traveling and charging purchases from places you don’t normally go, your credit card issuer may suspect fraud and block use of your card.
To prevent that, notify your credit card and debit card issuers before you hit the road or take to the skies. Some financial institutions will let you notify them of your dates and locations of travel online or through their mobile app. With others, you’ll need to call to let them know.
“If you’re out of your pattern, the artificial intelligence that scans the transaction will red flag it, and it can lead to unnecessary delays,” says Andy Abramson, founder of the communications agency Comunicano. Abramson, of Del Mar, California, was named Business Traveller magazine’s 2015 business traveler of the year because he has averaged about 200 days a year on the road for more than a decade.
Notify others of your travel plans
Let friends or family members know of your travel plans, and check in periodically so they know you’re safe.
If you’re traveling internationally, you can sign up for the free Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP), offered by the U.S. State Department. You’ll receive information from the closest U.S. embassy or consulate about the safety situation at your destination, and it will be easier for the embassy to get in touch with you if there’s a natural disaster, civil unrest or a family emergency.
Make copies of your financial documents
Make copies of your debit and credit card numbers and the phone numbers to call in case your cards are lost or stolen. Do the same for your bank account information and your passport if you’re traveling internationally. Leave one set of copies with a friend or family member, upload one set to a secure site, such as Dropbox, and carry one set with you, separate from your credit cards.
If your card is lost or stolen, you can use the information you’ve copied to immediately notify your credit or debit card company. “Time is of the essence,” says Johnny Jet, a travel expert who travels 150,000 miles a year.
Know your credit card benefits
Knowing the perks that come with your credit cards can save you cash ahead of your travels. For example, compare two cards, the Chase Freedom versus the Chase Sapphire Preferred. While the Sapphire Preferred is better for aspiring travelers, Freedom is better for everyday purchases.
Some card benefits of particular interest to solo travelers:
Travel insurance: Many credit cards, such as the Chase Sapphire Preferred and Chase Sapphire Reserve, will reimburse you for your prepaid expenses if your trip is canceled or delayed. The amount you’ll be reimbursed can vary greatly from card to card. You also may have coverage if your luggage is lost or delayed.
Free checked bags: Some airline credit cards, such as the Gold Delta SkyMiles from American Express and United Explorer cards, let you check your first bag for free. With the United MileagePlus Club card, your first two checked bags are free.
Rental car insurance: If your credit card includes rental car insurance, check to see if it’s primary or secondary coverage. Also, note whether there are any countries excluded from coverage. All Citi cards, including the Citi ThankYou Preferred, have no country restrictions for rental car coverage.
Emergency assistance: If you run into trouble on a business trip or epic adventure, you card may offer medical and legal referrals.
To determine your card benefits, you can check the terms and conditions online or you can sign up for Sift, which sifts through your credit card policies and shows you all your benefits for each card.
“There’s all that fine print. People aren’t aware or don’t know how to take advantage” of their card benefits, says Sift co-founder Abhinav Dubey.
Know your card fees
Whether you’re traveling domestically or internationally, keep credit and debit card fees in mind.
In the U.S.: If you use your debit card at an ATM that’s not in your network, you might be charged both by your bank and the bank ATM that you use. If you use a big bank, such as Chase or Citi, you can find branch locations around the country on their websites or mobile apps.
If you use a credit union that’s part of the CO-OP Financial Services network, you’ll have access to almost 30,000 ATMs around the country, and you won’t charged a fee.
Outside the U.S.: You also may be able to avoid ATM fees abroad, says Jason Gaughan, credit card executive for Bank of America. For example, Bank of America is part of the Global ATM Alliance, so if you’ve got a Bank of America debit card, you can make a withdrawal or transfer funds fee-free. Among the many banks in the alliance are Barclays in the United Kingdom and Deutsche Bank in Germany.
You also should look for credit cards that don’t charge foreign transaction fees on your purchases, such as the Bank of America Travel Rewards card, Gaughan says. A foreign transaction fee is a charge, usually 3 percent, that many credit card issuers and payment networks add for each transaction made abroad.
Know your card details
If you’re staying at a hotel or renting a car, you might have a “hold” placed on your credit card to cover possible extra charges. Make sure those holds don’t eat up your entire credit limit.
Also, check your credit card expiration date. You don’t want to be far from home when your card expires and have no way to get your hands on your new card.
Using cards when traveling
Should you use credit or debit?
It helps to bring both a credit card and a debit card on your travels. Use your debit card to withdraw cash at ATMs, rather than your credit card. If you use your credit card, it’s considered a cash advance, so you’ll be paying a high interest rate as soon as you get your cash.
That high interest rate is just for starters. As our 2017 Cash Advance Survey found, cash advances begin accruing interest as soon as the transactions post to a cardholder’s account. Also, 99 out of the 100 cards surveyed immediately charge a fee for each cash advance transaction, typically 5 percent of the transaction or $10, whichever is greater.
If you report your credit card as lost or stolen, your liability for fraudulent charges is capped at $50 – although many major card issuers have adopted zero liability policies.
With a debit card, your liability is limited to $50 if you report your card missing within two business days. Beyond that time, your liability could be $500. And you also run the risk of the thieves draining your bank account and wiping out your savings.
Do you need a chip card?
Most U.S. credit cards have chip-based EMV technology, which has long been the standard in Europe and other parts of the world. However, while most U.S. cards now require a chip and signature for authorization, in Europe and other places, cardholders typically use a chip and PIN to authorize payments.
How this difference can cause problems: While your chip-and-signature card will work many places abroad, there are exceptions. Jet recounts wanting to take a train from the airport in Copenhagen, Denmark, into the city, but the ticket kiosk only accepted chip-and-PIN cards. As a result, he had to wait in a long line to get a train ticket from the ticket counter.
A chip-and-PIN card “saves time and aggravation,” Jet says. What does he travel with? When traveling abroad, Jet carries a Barclaycard Arrival Plus World Elite Mastercard, which has a PIN. Other cards issued in the U.S. also offer chip-and-PIN.
Should you get a prepaid card?
With a prepaid card, you load a certain amount of money onto the card – say $200 or $300.
A big advantage of prepaid cards for travelers: If your prepaid card is lost or stolen, no one can run up thousands of dollars in charges to your card or drain your bank account. And some financial institutions will replace the money if your card disappears.
How many credit cards should you carry?
While you might be able to streamline the record of your expenses by using one credit card, you might find certain hotels or restaurants don’t accept your mainstay credit card – particularly if you’re traveling abroad.
For example, Visa and Mastercard are accepted more often worldwide than American Express and Discover, but check which cards are more commonly used in the countries you will be visiting.
To increase the chances you will have a card that is accepted nearly everywhere, “Have Cards, Will Travel” CreditCards.com columnist Stephanie Zito recommends traveling with a variety of cards from different networks.
Another reason to pack more than one card? In case your primary card is lost or stolen, you will have a backup, Gaughan, of Bank of America, notes.
Where should you carry your money and cards?
When traveling solo, it’s particularly important you keep a close eye on your cash and cards, because you don’t have another traveler to fall back on if you get into a bind.
If you have multiple cards, keep them in several places, Zito suggests. If your wallet is lost or stolen, you don’t want to have all your cards disappear.
Another tip: Jet wears a travel vest with hidden pockets.
When sleeping on a train or plane, safeguard your cash and cards. Jet has heard reports from friends about thieves going into the overhead bin during international flights and stealing other people’s possessions. If your cards and cash are in a purse or backpack, carry that with you – even to the bathroom.
How should you monitor your balance and transactions?
While traveling in the U.S., you can check your financial transactions and account balance for free on your financial institution’s website or mobile app. If you’re backpacking across the globe or on a business trip abroad, you may be charged data or roaming charges when checking your accounts.
Also, sign up for text or email alerts for all transactions, Jet says. These alerts are a great way to spot fraudulent charges. If you don’t recognize a purchase, you can contact your card issuer, or go online or use your issuer’s app to turn off your card if it has an on/off switch.
How can you safely use an ATM?
Always look for card skimmers when you’re using an ATM to prevent your credit or debit card information from being stolen. And always cover your PIN. “You never know if someone has a camera or binoculars,” Jet says.
Avoid ATMs in dark areas, obviously. Abrahamson recommends opting to use ATMs with long lines so there will be plenty of people around when you withdraw your money.
If you’re traveling abroad, check the State Department’s Country Information, which will alert you to crime, such as skimming, pickpockets or armed robberies, in countries you will be visiting.
Do you need RFID-blocking devices?
You may have seen ads warning you that thieves can steal your credit card data using radio frequency identification, or RFID. That’s led to an upsurge in RFID-blocking wallets and other accessories.
Since RFID-enabled contactless credit cards are just starting to arrive in the U.S., chances are you don’t need an RFID shield. Contactless cards are much more common in the U.K. and Canada.
What if your card is stolen or lost when you’re abroad?
There’s always the risk your credit or debit card may be lost or stolen when traveling the globe, so it’s imperative you keep a copy of your card information, as well as the customer service number, in another location. If your card vanishes, immediately notify your card issuer. That will help prevent fraudulent charges from being billed to your account.
You also can request an emergency card replacement.
What if you lose your card while traveling solo?
If you’re traveling on your own and your credit card disappears, you should still be able to get your hands on some cash or a new card if you have a Visa, Mastercard or American Express card.
Capital One, for example, will issue a temporary virtual number until your replacement card arrives. With Visa, a new card can be shipped globally in 24 to 72 hours and the card issuer also will work with your bank to have cash available within a few hours. American Express can wire you a small amount of cash through Western Union or MoneyGram, and can help you check out of your hotel if you can’t find your card.
Hostel safety
How should you select a hostel?
Hostels are a popular way to see a city and meet like-minded travelers trying to hold down costs. Guidebook author and TV travel host Rick Steves calls European hostels the cure for expensive, lonely travel.
How do you pick a hostel, though? You want a place that is cheap, safe and has a strong local vibe. And if free breakfast or beer is included in your hostel rate (yes, some hostels offer those things), that’s even better.
Steves notes there are “official” or “independent” hostels. Official hostels are part of a network called Hostelling International, which manages a federation of nonprofit hostel associations. In the United States, the association is called Hostelling International USA.
You can book hostels directly on their websites. TripAdvisor.com has hostel reviews, such as this one for Vietnam’s Central Backpackers Hostel, which has a free beer hour.
How do you keep your cards, money and valuables safe in a hostel?
Many hostels have lockers you can use. You should bring a padlock, although many have locks you can rent.
You also keep your cash and cards on you in a money belt or neck wallet while you sleep.
If you’re not staying in hostels but rather in luxury hotels, there usually are in-room safes to keep your valuables and any extra cash and backup cards. And with card rewards, luxury hotel stays (with a view of the ocean or a whirlpool to soak in after walking all over the city) may be free or within your budget, Zito notes.
Wi-Fi network safety
Protecting yourself on public Wi-Fi
Public Wi-Fi seems to be everywhere – at airports, hotel rooms and restaurants – but if you use it, your personal and financial information could be at risk.
Many public Wi-Fi systems currently lack strong security, so cyberthieves may be able to steal your passwords and other personal information. Sometimes hackers will put themselves between you and the internet connection and intercept the information you send.
It’s particularly important you don’t shop online or make other financial transactions on public Wi-Fi.
The good news: It soon may be safer to type passwords on public Wi-Fi. WPA3, a new security protocol, better encrypts hotel and coffeshop communication.
Protecting yourself on public computers
It’s risky using a public computer, particularly if you need to enter personal information or make a financial transaction. This goes for hostels, high-end hotels, campus computers and even libraries.
If the public computer doesn’t have good security, keystroke logging malware can record your keystrokes. You also put your information at risk if you walk away from the machine when it’s in use. Make sure the computer doesn’t save your login information, and delete your browsing activity when you’re finished. Oh, and don’t leave any invoices, receipts or other valuable information on the printer or in the trash can near the computer.
Do you need VPN?
Because you should avoid public Wi-Fi, you should consider other ways to send your information. One option is a virtual private network (VPN), which creates a private network from a public internet connection, giving you a secure, encrypted connection. Some VPN services are free, while others charge a fee.
What should you look for in a VPN, and how do you choose one? According to c/net, you should steer clear of the free VPN services. Most VPN services for a new business will cost roughly $10 a month, c/net notes. If you prepay for a year, you can usually shave a few dollars off your bill.
Or you can avoid VPN altogether and use your smartphone to create a personal mobile hotspot. This way your information is sent via your provider’s cellphone connection. Information sent via 4G is encrypted.
Final thoughts: Start planning your next trip
How are you, as a solo traveler, going to feel as if you’re prepared to tackle the world? Plan your next big adventure now.
Check your wallet or purse. Do you have the right cards for where you will be going? If not, sign up for one or more rewards cards. A big sign-up bonus might enable you to take a break from hostel living and chill in a swanky hotel while backpacking across the continent. That clothing and gear needed for your trip can help you meet the new card’s minimum spend, ensuring you get that big sign-up bonus.
You’ll find those tips and a lot more on our solo traveler’s checklist. Print it out and use it to help you get ready to hit the road, take to the air, sail the seas or hike across the country.
Safe travels!
See related: How to pick the right cards for around-the-world travel, 11 money and credit management tips for extended vacations | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Notícies Dijous 21.08.2014 10:04 Autor/s: ACN
Triomfa a l'Amèrica Llatina una aplicació catalana que vol revolucionar el món de la fotografia
L'eina incorpora instantànies amb so i ja han estat reproduïdes 5,5 milions de vegades
AudioSnaps és una aplicació per a mòbils i tauletes que pretén revolucionar el món de la fotografia. L'eina permet compartir fotografies a la xarxa incorporant so ambient del moment en què s'ha fet la instantània. L'aplicació es va llençar oficialment el gener (iTunes i Google Play) i en mig any han aconseguit 200.000 usuaris arreu del món i s'han reproduït les fotografies 5,5 milions de vegades. Els usuaris provenen principalment de Mèxic, Europa, Colòmbia i Argentina. En els últims mesos els responsables del producte han arribat a un acord amb un fabricant per a incorporar l'aplicació de sèrie als dispositius i han llençat una actualització que canvia la interfície de dalt a baix. Actualment l'eina no genera ingressos.
Combinar fotografia i so no és nou, en el passat s'havia intentat amb diferents sistemes però mai s'havia aconseguit un format internacional que es pogués reproduir en diferents dispositius. Un dels impulsors de la iniciativa, el molletà Marc Sallent, explica que el procés més difícil va ser crear un format internacional que permetés fer realitat la seva ambició. L'equip de programadors va desenvolupar una manera per incrustar el so en una fotografia en format jpg. Els professionals d'AudioSnaps van convertir-se així en els primers programadors del món en portar a terme la fita. Per això, els joves catalans van patentar el producte. 'No tenim res en contra dels vídeos, però aquests són l'eina perfecta per explicar una història i nosaltres treballem per capturar moments', apunta el SEO d'AudioSnaps, Marc Sallent.
Un èxit als mercats llatinoamericans
En mig any l'aplicació ha aconseguit superar els 200.000 usuaris arreu del món i que les fotografies hagin estat reproduïdes 5,5 milions de vegades. Per ordre de més impacte els principals usuaris provenen de: Mèxic, països d'arreu d'Europa, Colòmbia, Argentina i Brasil. En aquest darrer cas, segons indiquen, va influir molt el passat mundial de futbol. Un dels altres indrets on també arrela l'eina és als Estats Units d'Amèrica (EUA). Tot i que allà no s'ha fet inversió per a promocionar l'aplicació Sallent afirma que hi tenen força usuaris i que en un futur compten en poder invertir en aquest mercat.
Gran diversitat d'usuaris
AudioSnaps és gratuïta i està disponible pels sistemes operatius d'Apple i Android. Del gran nombre de fotografies que es publiquen diàriament, la majoria són de nadons i nens petits, concerts i esdeveniments esportius, vacances i paisatges. Des de AudioSnaps revelen que també han constatat diferents fenòmens i posen d'exemple que moltes famílies utilitzen l'aplicació per a donar a conèixer un nadó recent nascut. L'aplicació la fan servir usuaris molt diferents però el target se centra en adolescents i dones de 26 a 32 anys. 'Hem trobat gran diversitat de fotos i d'usuaris, des de gent que en penja en un quiròfan fins a persones que es fotografien en un cotxe patrulla', destaca Sallent.
Després del primer període, ara s'ha publicat una nova actualització de l'eina en la qual es potencia la interacció entre els usuaris, amb un canvi total d'interfície i molt més intuïtiva. Per ara descarten incorporar més funcionalitats més enllà de la fotografia amb so.
Sense ingressos 'de moment'
Actualment, AudioSnaps no genera ingressos. Segons han explicat, el model que han escollit no es començarà a rendibilitzar fins que 'la massa d'usuaris sigui molt més gran, al voltant de 3 o 4 milions'. Per aconseguir beneficis, en un futur, l'empresa compta en oferir publicitat o en llicenciar la tecnologia que tenen patentada. D'aquesta manera l'aplicació del jove vallesà podria ser decisiva en el futur de les càmeres dels smartphones, si aquests aconsegueixen acords amb els fabricants. Així, s'espera que a llarg termini, algun fabricant incorpori el sistema patentat per ells a la càmera del telèfon. El que sí que ja han aconseguit és un acord amb el gegant de les telecomunicacions, Sony Mobile Communications. De manera, que des de fa més d'un mes l'aplicació ve instal·lada de fàbrica a tots els terminals de la marca Sony. En un futur esperen que l'acord amb Sony es faci extensiu als altres fabricants i que això els suposi una entrada de capital.
La competència d'Instagram
Els joves catalans apunten que la seva iniciativa es diferencia d'Instagram perquè 'AudioSnaps pot capturar so i transmetre millor l'emotivitat d'un moment'. Davant de les constants actualitzacions i noves funcions d'Instagram, els del Vallès Oriental subratllen que 'estaria molt bé que en algun moment ens poguéssim integrar amb ells'. Això sí, destaquen que si el popular Instagram volgués incorporar les fotografies amb so s'hauria de posar d'acord amb ells 'perquè tenen patentat el format amb una llicència dels Estats Units'.
La dificultat d'emprendre
Els impulsors de l'aplicació asseguren que és difícil emprendre a casa nostra perquè 'hi ha determinats negocis que aquí costen molt perquè els inversors tenen poca confiança en els projectes derivats de les xarxes socials, a diferència de ciutats com París, Londres o Berlín'. 'Amb l'esforç que suposa aconseguir 150.000 euros a Barcelona a d'altres ciutats europees i americanes pots arribar a més d'1MEUR', comenta Sallent. El llançament d'AudioSnaps va ser possible perquè els joves van guanyar un concurs del Mobile World Congress, el Mobile DemoCamp, i posteriorment van tenir accés a la plataforma acceleradora de Telefonica, Wayra.
La idea va sorgir en un bar de Cardedeu
Els responsables de l'aplicació expliquen que la idea va sorgir mentre esperaven l'arribada d'uns amics en un bar de Cardedeu. Per fer-los enveja de les bones condicions climatològiques, l'estiu del 2011, van enviar-los fotografies. En aquest moment van adonar-se que les fotografies eren fredes i no transmetien 'l'emotivitat del moment'. Des d'aquell estiu i fins al cap de dos anys, Sallent i el seu soci van treballar per a fer realitat la seva idea per a poder transmetre 'fins i tot la brisa que feia en aquell bar de Cardedeu'. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
They've been doing it all over the world because it's all of our futures at stake.
Schools from Virginia to California have been installing and relying on clean energy methods like solar in increasing numbers. It is being used as a learning tool for students and is being driven by the dropping costs of solar power. That mixed with the penny-pinching that federal and state budgets force upon our schools systems has been one silver-lining. Inside Climate News reports that just around 5 percent of all K-12 schools in the United States are using solar power.
The nearly 5,500 schools using solar power today have a total of 910 megawatts of solar capacity, enough to power 190,000 homes, according to the study. The biggest reason for the surge is the economic benefits of solar energy. Drastic declines in price have made it financially viable for schools. Both public and private schools are reducing their electricity bills with solar, leaving them more money to spend on educational programs, according to the research. Many are also incorporating renewable energy into their science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) lessons.
The states that have the most solar-powered schools are the same as the states that have the most residential solar power, with California accounting for a little over a third of all US schools using solar.
According to the study, the average school solar system is about 300 kilowatts, which is 900 to 1,200 panels. Most are installed on rooftops, but there are many other models: solar farms are being built near campuses or on shaded carports in parking lots; urban schools with less space are participating in community solar projects; new buildings are being designed to be solar or net-zero-energy ready. The projects can save school districts into the millions of dollars over the projects' 25-year lifetime. Kern High School District in Bakersfield, California, for example, is estimated to save as much as $80 million in electricity costs over 25 years with its 22-megawatt project.
Inside Climate News says that while some communities have hemmed and hawed over investing in solar, the costs are too good, and the younger generations have been pushing for cleaner and forward thinking from the adults in their lives. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Passing the judgment completely in favour of art house afficandos and critics. Chaitanya Tamhane’s debut multilingual ‘Court’ is an outstanding piece of art. Chaitanya has created a realistic, arty and observed take on ‘Court’ and its people.. where the title plays the protagonist in an atmospheric metaphoric ground.. A truly deserved National award winner of the year as the best films.. ‘Court’ stands in the league of ‘Salam Bombay’, in its atmosphere, ‘Chakra’ in its realism ,and ‘Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho’ in its tease and niggle. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Rusza konkurs Popularyzator Nauki
Rusza kolejna, 14. edycja konkursu Popularyzator Nauki, w którym nagradzane są osoby, zespoły, media i instytucje popularyzujące naukę. Zgłoszenia przyjmowane są do połowy października.
W konkursie Popularyzator Nauki nagradzane są osoby, zespoły czy instytucje, które pomagają innym lepiej zrozumieć świat i potrafią zainteresować osiągnięciami naukowymi osoby niezwiązane z nauką.
"Popularyzowanie poznawczych celów i osiągniętych wyników prowadzonych badań to dzisiaj niezwykle ważna część misji uczonego" - podkreśla przewodniczący Kapituły konkursu, prof. Michał Kleiber.
Zgłoszenia można nadsyłać do połowy października (15.10). Zwycięzcy zostaną przedstawieni podczas finałowej gali w styczniu, kiedy otrzymają tytuł Popularyzatora Nauki oraz statuetkę.
Zgłoszenia oceni Kapituła, złożona z popularyzatorów nauki, przedstawicieli środowiska naukowego, Ministerstwa Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego oraz serwisu Nauka w Polsce.
Spośród wszystkich zgłoszeń kapituła wybierze laureata Nagrody Głównej. To najbardziej prestiżowe w konkursie wyróżnienie przyznane zostanie osobie, zespołowi albo instytucji, która promuje naukę wyjątkowo twórczo i skutecznie.
Przyznane też będą nagrody w kategoriach: Naukowiec, Animator, Zespół, Instytucja oraz Media.
W kategorii Naukowiec - która od lat cieszy się w konkursie największą popularnością - rywalizować mogą osoby co najmniej ze stopniem doktora, będące np. pracownikami naukowymi albo nauczycielami akademickimi. Jak zwykle w tej kategorii przyjmowane będą zgłoszenia naukowców, którzy popularyzują naukę wśród osób niezwiązanych z ich dziedziną.
Z kolei w kategorii Animator mogą się zgłaszać osoby nie mające stopnia doktora. Do rywalizacji w tej kategorii zaproszeni są więc m.in. studenci, doktoranci, pracownicy administracyjni uczelni czy osoby niezwiązane z instytucjami naukowymi.
W kategorii Zespół szansę na tytuł Popularyzatora Nauki zyskają grupy osób wspólnie popularyzujących naukę, które niekoniecznie identyfikują się z jedną, określoną placówką. Mogą to być np. osoby realizujące wspólnie projekty popularnonaukowe albo zespoły działające ponad granicami administracyjnymi instytucji naukowych. Mogą to być również koła naukowe albo grupy znajomych czy internautów, wspólnie promujących naukę.
Kategoria Instytucja powstała z myślą o instytucjach naukowych, pozanaukowych oraz przedsiębiorstwach. Dzięki niej osiągnięciami w promocji nauki będą mogły się pochwalić np. instytuty badawcze, jednostki uczelni, konsorcja, organizacje pozarządowe, centra nauki czy prywatne firmy.
O nagrodę w kategorii Media mogą z kolei zawalczyć dziennikarze, media czy redakcje. W tej grupie kandydować mogą też internauci tworzący przekazy popularnonaukowe - np. blogerzy, twórcy fanpejdżów i stron internetowych.
Konkurs Popularyzator Nauki ma długą tradycję. Od 2005 r. przyznano w nim ponad 70 nagród i ponad 40 wyróżnień.
"Nagrodziliśmy dotychczas wielu znakomitych popularyzatorów nauki - badaczy, dziennikarzy i całych instytucji badawczych, wybranych przez Kapitułę konkursu w toku bardzo skrupulatnych debat. Nowo wprowadzoną zmianą w regulaminie konkursu jest możliwość zgłaszania kandydatów, którzy byli już w przeszłości laureatami konkursu. Uznaliśmy bowiem, ze wielu z nich mogło wypracować nowy dorobek popularyzatorski, zasługujący na ponowne wyróżnienie" - mówi prof. Kleiber.
Laureaci konkursu, którzy zechcą w nim wziąć ponowny udział, muszą jednak spełnić warunek: zgłoszone działania popularyzatorskie nie mogą być związane z przyznaną już wcześniej nagrodą. Innymi słowy: należy opisać jedynie aktywność popularyzatorską, realizowaną już po uzyskaniu tytułu Popularyzatora Nauki.
Kandydaci do konkursu mogą się zgłaszać sami (lub mogą być zgłaszani przez osobę trzecią, za zgodą zgłaszanego), a w przypadku instytucji czy zespołów - za pośrednictwem przedstawicieli. Formularz zgłoszeniowy znajduje się na stronie serwisu PAP - Nauka w Polsce.
Jak co roku przy okazji konkursu redakcja PAP - Nauka w Polsce przyzna pozaregulaminowe Wyróżnienie im. red. Tomasza Trzcińskiego za wzorcową politykę informacyjną. W tej kategorii zgłoszenia nie są przyjmowane; laureata wskaże redakcja.
Organizowany od 2005 r. Popularyzator Nauki jest najstarszym i najbardziej prestiżowym w Polsce konkursem, w którym nagradzani są uczeni, ludzie mediów, instytucje oraz społecznicy, których pasją jest dzielenie się wiedzą i odsłanianie tajemnic współczesnej nauki w przystępny sposób. Wśród laureatów konkursu są m.in.: filozof przyrody ks. prof. Michał Heller, neurobiolog prof. Jerzy Vetulani, autor telewizyjnych programów Wiktor Niedzicki, dziennikarz Tomasz Rożek, popularyzator astronomii Karol Wójcicki, twórcy portalu "Nauka o klimacie", a także instytucje takie jak Centrum Nauki Kopernik, Polska Akademia Dzieci czy Instytut Biologii Doświadczalnej im. M. Nenckiego.
(Formularz można znaleźć na stronie http://www.naukawpolsce.pap.pl/popularyzator-nauki/, pliki niezbędne do zgłoszenia do konkursu znajdują się również pod tekstem w formie załączników. Ewentualne pytania związane z konkursem można kierować na adres: [email protected]).
PAP - Nauka w Polsce
zan/ lt/ ekr/ | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Tiago Queiroz/Estadão Conteúdo O ex-prefeito de São Paulo Fernando Haddad (PT)
O ex-prefeito de São Paulo Fernando Haddad foi condenado pela Justiça Eleitoral pelo crime de caixa dois. A sentença foi proferida no último dia 19 e divulgada nesta terça-feira (20).
O promotor eleitoral Luiz Henrique Dal Poz, afirmou, em acusação, que o petista “deixou de contabilizar valores, bem como se utilizou de notas inidôneas para justificar despesas”.
Os valores teriam sido repassados pela UTC Engenharia às gráficas de Francisco Carlos de Souza, ex-deputado estadual e líder sindical conhecido como “Chico Gordo”. Ele confessou que recebeu os pagamentos, mas disse que não eram destinados à campanha do ex-prefeito, mas a outros candidatos cujos nomes não revelou.
A denúncia narra que R$ 3 milhões teriam sido negociados com o empresário Ricardo Pessoa e depois repactuados para R$ 2,6 milhões. Além do empreiteiro, que é delator, o doleiro Alberto Youssef também citou as operações em depoimento.
O juiz Francisco Carlos Inouye Shintate determinou uma pena de “quatro anos e seis meses de reclusão e 18 dias-multa, cada um no valor de 1 salário-mínimo vigente na época do fato”. Cabe recurso da decisão.
Esfera criminal
Haddad também foi denunciado na esfera criminal por este mesmo caso, envolvendo corrupção e lavagem de dinheiro. A 12.ª Câmara do Tribunal de Justiça do Estado de São Paulo, no entanto, trancou a ação em fevereiro.
Segundo o voto do relator, desembargador Vico Mañas, a denúncia não esclarece qual a vantagem pretendida pelo empreiteiro, uma vez que os interesses da UTC foram contrariados pela gestão municipal, que chegou a cancelar um contrato já assinado com a empresa para a construção de um túnel na Avenida Roberto Marinho.
Defesa vai recorrer
Em nota, a defesa do petista afirmou que vai recorrer. Confira a íntegra:
A defesa de Fernando Haddad recorrerá da decisão do juiz Francisco Shintate, da primeira Vara Eleitoral. Em primeiro lugar porque a condenação sustenta que a campanha do então prefeito teria indicado em sua prestação de contas gastos com material gráfico inexistente. Testemunhas e documentos que comprovam os gastos declarados foram apresentados. Ademais, não havia qualquer razão para o uso de notas falsas e pagamentos sem serviços em uma campanha eleitoral disputada. Não ha razoabilidade ou provas que sustentem a decisão.
Em segundo lugar, a sentença é nula por carecer de lógica. O juiz absolveu Fernando Haddad de lavagem de dinheiro e corrupção, crimes dos quais ele não foi acusado. Condenou-o por centenas de falsidades quando a acusação mal conseguiu descrever uma. A lei estabelece que a sentença é nula quando condena o réu por crime do qual não foi acusado.
Em um Estado de Direito as decisões judiciais devem se pautar pela lei. O magistrado deve ser imparcial. Ao condenar alguém por algo de que nem o Ministério Público o acusa, o juiz perde sua neutralidade e sua sentença é nula.
*Com Estadão Conteúdo | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
I got a cool funny card from my Card Exchange Santa in the mail today with a nice note written in it.
Thanks Santa, hope you have a great Christmas and New Year! | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Or would it have run? A report from the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, an extensive look at Fox News from one of journalism’s most respected investigative reporters, gives reason to think that the network may have been reluctant to run it at all. After all, Mayer said, Diana Falzone, a reporter for the network, learned that Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen had arranged to pay off adult-film actress Stormy Daniels so she wouldn’t publicly discuss an alleged affair with Trump — but the story was never published.
“But Falzone’s story didn’t run—it kept being passed off from one editor to the next. After getting one noncommittal answer after another from her editors, Falzone at last heard from LaCorte, who was then the head of FoxNews.com. Falzone told colleagues that LaCorte said to her, ‘Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert [Murdoch] wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.’” New Yorker
Ken LaCorte denies having said that, Mayer writes, although Falzone’s colleagues confirmed having been told about it at the time.
When new revelations about the Daniels payment emerged in July, we looked at how coverage of her story had compared across the three major cable news networks. Here, for example, were mentions over two weeks on the networks’ prime-time shows.
That trend continued. Fox News consistently covered Daniels’s story much less frequently than its competitors did. (The data below look at the percentage of 15-second segments in a day during which the subject is mentioned.)
On average, from Jan. 1, 2018, to the beginning of this month, CNN mentioned “Stormy” in 0.61 percent of segments. MSNBC mentioned her in 0.54 percent. Fox News mentioned her in 0.17 percent — less than a third as often as its competitors.
The characterization of the payment to Daniels as “hush money” led to that term being used regularly in the first half of 2018 by Fox’s competitors but not by Fox. It was used more regularly by the network once Cohen admitted to federal crimes in August and, most recently, when Cohen testified on Capitol Hill last week.
Cohen, of course, admitted to several types of crime in August and December: fraud related to a bank loan he obtained, tax evasion, lying to Congress, and campaign finance violations related to the Daniels payment and another, similar agreement to silence Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model. Those campaign finance violations directly implicated Trump, as Cohen reinforced in his congressional testimony last week.
When talking about Cohen, Fox was less likely than its competitors to mention campaign finance.
It was more likely, after Cohen admitted guilt on eight federal felonies last year, to mention his involvement in fraud.
It covered his admission of lying to Congress as much as its competitors did last year — and last week, during his testimony, was just as likely to mention that crime.
In fact, it mentioned that particular admitted crime as often last week when Cohen was testifying as it had when the story first broke.
This isn’t specific to the Daniels story. Although none of the networks gave McDougal’s story as much coverage as Daniels’s, Fox still trailed in its coverage.
And, circling back to our original question, Fox News has also mentioned “Access Hollywood” less frequently than its competitors did.
From Oct. 1, 2016, through the end of the year, Fox News mentioned “Access Hollywood” in 0.07 percent of its daily 15-second segments. CNN and MSNBC each mentioned it more than twice as often.
I keep thinking of a statement made by John Dean in an interview with Rolling Stone last year. Dean was White House counsel under President Richard M. Nixon until he agreed to testify against his former boss, helping lead to Nixon’s resignation. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
VANCOUVER, BC - Major League Soccer announced today that Vancouver Whitecaps FC striker Major League Soccer announced today that Vancouver Whitecaps FC striker Camilo Sanvezzo has been named the league's Player of the Week for Week 17. The Brazilian earned the weekly award, as voted on by North American Soccer Reporters (NASR), following an impressive two goal, one assist performance in a 3-1 win over Chivas USA last Wednesday.
This is the second consecutive week that a Whitecaps FC player has received the award, with strike partner Kenny Miller being honoured last week.
Trailing 1-0 at home in first half stoppage time, Camilo played a key role in turning the match around. First, the in-form South American played a quick ball to teammate Russell Teibert before deflecting his cross in the box to set up defender Jordan Harvey for the equalizing goal. Then, with seconds remaining in the half, Teibert sprung Camilo for a breakaway, which he promptly finished to give the ‘Caps a surprise 2-1 lead at the break.
The second half ended with more of the same, as Camilo got on the end of a ball in the box and slotted home his second of the match in the 81st minute to seal a 3-1 win for Vancouver.
Camilo now has eight goals in MLS this season, leaving him only two behind league leaders Mike Magee, Marco Di Vaio and Jack McInerney with 10 apiece. The Brazilian has now scored 11 goals in all competitions, including seven goals in his past six matches, with three of those goals coming in two Amway Canadian Championship matches.
This is the third time that a Whitecaps FC player has won the honour, and the second such award for Camilo. The 5-foot-7 striker was previously named Player of the Week following his two goal, one assist performance against Sporting Kansas City at Empire Field during Week 3 in Vancouver's inaugural season in 2011.
Whitecaps FC are back in action this coming Saturday, June 29, when they travel to face Eastern Conference side D.C. United at RFK Stadium. Kickoff is scheduled for 4 p.m. PT and will be broadcast live on Sportsnet Pacific. Fans can also listen to Saturday’s match live on TEAM 1410 radio and teamradio.ca | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
INN Reporter Lars Wilson gets into trouble when screenshots of racist social media posts attached to his name appear online.
Join our Discord Community at https://discord.gg/wcBjWyx
Support us on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/PostalRoach
Rate us on Podchaser at http://podchaser.com/EmperorPigs
Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/emperorpigs
Poke us on Facebook at https://facebook.com/emperorpigs
Originally debuting during the Civil Rights Movement of the 2020s, "Lars Wilson and the Birth of Bigotry" was written and performed, in its entirety, by an angry multiracial transgender woman (Persephone Rose) who was fed up with the state of the world. We present it now, intact and unaltered, as it was originally podcasted, for purposes of historical accuracy and not as an endorsement of outdated moral and philosophical ideologies.
Production Copyright © 2020 by Postal Roach.
Visit us on the web at EmperorPigs.com | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
5 min read Rescued Baby Otter Could Not Be More Excited For Mealtime He loves bath time, too!
It's clear there's only one thing on this little otter's mind. Last week, Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand (WFFT), a Thai sanctuary and rescue group, received a call from a woman about an otter in need. The woman said she had found the baby animal near a weekend market in Bangkok, but WFFT believes she had purchased the infant as a pet and quickly realized she was in over her head, the group told The Dodo.
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand
"She asked us for help, as she wanted the otter to have a good home and proper care," WFFT wrote in a Facebook post. Rescuers with WFFT headed to the scene, where they found a 3-month-old Asian small-clawed otter, whom they named Oscar. He was far too young to be separated from his mother. "At this stage in his life he would still be very dependent on his mother for milk, and would be with her 24 hours a day," WFFT said. Knowing he needed all the help he could get, WFFT brought the little bundle back to the sanctuary, where they quickly realized what his favorite thing was. Food.
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand
Lots of food.
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand
He really, really loves his food.
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand
When he didn't have food, Oscar went around tasting things to see what else he could eat. Like shirts.
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand
And fingers.
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand
And his tail.
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand
WFFT also introduced Oscar to water, which he experienced for "probably the first time in his life," the rescue wrote.
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand
Oscar seemed to like the water very much ...
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand
... especially when he had food with him.
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand
Sadly, like many baby animals who end up in the exotic pet trade, Oscar was probably taken from his mother at a very young age after she was killed by poachers. Asian small-clawed otters, who are listed as vulnerable, are poached for their fur as well as for their babies, who can be sold as pets. Asian small-clawed otters are also losing territory due to human development, and their natural food sources are being depleted due to overfishing and pollution.
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand
"The threat posed by poaching, for the fur trade and pet trade, is still very significant in many parts of South Eat Asia and will certainly count as a major threat that needs to be constantly monitored," WFFT wrote. "Sadly an increase in keeping these animals as pets has been seen throughout Thailand." All of which make's little Oscar's survival that much more important. While it's unclear if he will be able to be released into the wild, WFFT is determined to give the young otter everything he needs to thrive - including, presumably, lots of food.
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand
"He will be in the WFFT Wildlife Hospital for round the clock care for the next few months until he is old enough to be socialized with the other otters here at WFFT," the group wrote. "Keep wildlife wild and not as pets." To help care for Oscar and the many other animals WFFT takes in, you can make a donation here. See below for more photos.
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand
Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
We’re happy to announce the first software update to the reMarkable paper tablet and its corresponding applications for iOS, Android, PC, and Mac. This update will be rolled out to existing users over the next 10 days.
Since we launched the reMarkable paper tablet, we’ve shipped out more than 35,000 units to our pre-order and direct-order customers. Thousands of people have given their feedback on improvement areas, and this input has been a valuable resource for us in our efforts to create an ever-better product experience.
The most important issues we’ve focused on for the reMarkable tablet update itself are power management, support for more types of Wi-Fi connections, and some functionalities which have caused frustration in the user experience, such as memory in the choice of pens and brushes. For the corresponding applications for iOS, Android, PC, and Mac, we’ve made it easier to import files, enhanced compatibility with a greater range of devices, and generally improved the reMarkable experience for a more seamless fit into your workflow.
This is just the beginning of an ever-evolving reMarkable experience to ensure the paper tablet finds its natural place in our customers’ lives. We’re currently working on hundreds of additional improvements and are looking forward to introducing more features in upcoming updates.
Read on below to learn more about the most recent software update and improvements we’ve made to the reMarkable, or, click here for the detailed release log.
Improving power management
For most of our customers, the reMarkable’s battery has lasted for days on a single charge. However, some customers have experienced a shorter battery life. This difference in power consumption is caused by a few power management bugs. For this release, we’ve worked on several improvements in terms of power management, resulting in a more consistent battery life across all reMarkable tablets. This process has led to the discovery of additional enhancements that will enable us to extend the battery life even further. We’ll continue working on this, and you can expect to see these rolled out in future software updates.
Introducing light sleep and new sleep mode
We know some of our users have been frustrated with how much time it took to start up the reMarkable after not using it for a while. Our new sleep modes solve this issue by allowing you to get back to your reading, writing or sketching quicker, while preserving the battery.
The tablet will now enter a new mode called “Light Sleep” after 20 minutes of inactivity. Your content will still appear on the display when this mode is enabled, but the tablet will not respond to input. You can instantly activate the tablet by pushing the power button or any of the buttons on the front. reMarkable will stay in “Light sleep” for 2 hours and 40 minutes.
After 2 hours and 40 minutes the reMarkable will enter “Sleep Mode”. The display will show “reMarkable is sleeping” and can instantly be turned on by pressing the power button. After 12 hours in “Sleep Mode”, the tablet will power off to preserve battery.
PS: When using the tablet, you can instantly put it in “Sleep Mode” by pressing the power button.
Remember the last used writing tool
Another thing we know many users have found frustrating is how the tablet forgets the previous choice of pen or brush. In this update, we’ve solved this by implementing memory in the selection of writing tools. This fix means that the writing tool you’re using, whether it’s a pen, brush, pencil or eraser, will remain selected, even in the minimal menu and across document sessions.
Wi-Fi connectivity
We know some customers have struggled with connecting to certain types of Wi-Fi connections. This is crucial to the reMarkable experience for hassle-free usability, so we’ve added support for a greater range of Wi-Fi connections, including some networks that require both a username and password. For an added layer of security, the password will now be hidden when connecting to a network.
Export and import of files
A vital part of the reMarkable experience is to make your documents available on all your devices. We’ve therefore improved the performance, stability, and removed bugs for exporting and importing files between the supported operating systems.
In addition to these enhancements, we’ve added a long range of improvements and updates across the different applications. Click here for the detailed release log.
How to get the latest updates
Starting from today, the updates on the reMarkable device, iOS, Android, PC, and Mac will roll out in controlled increments over the next 10 days to all of our users. Visit this page to learn how to update the reMarkable tablet software across your devices.
PS: The rollout of each of the updates for the different devices (PC, Mac, iOS, and Android) are not connected, so users might experience that they get one update before the others.
Please make sure to check our troubleshooting pages if you’re facing any issues. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
I wanted to do a quick post about active patterns in F#, specifically the usefulness of Single Total Active Patterns (STAPs?) for transforming and validating data.
One slightly annoying thing about the .NET BCL is the fact that there is no plain Date type. Oftentimes you only care about dealing with the date portion of a DateTime , and if there happens to be a stray time associated with it, any comparison might not work as expected.
In any case, I often want to work with the date and/or time portions separately, so I find myself doing things like this at the top of a method:
let date = dateTime.Date let time = dateTime.TimeOfDay
Of course, in F# we could condense this down to a single line with tuple destructuring:
let date, time = dateTime.Date, dateTime.TimeOfDay
Another approach is to define some active patterns to deal specifically with dates and times:
let (|Date|) (dateTime:DateTime) = dateTime.Date let (|Time|) (dateTime:DateTime) = dateTime.TimeOfDay
This allows us to rewrite the first snippet as follows:
let (Date date) = dateTime let (Time time) = dateTime
People coming from other languages might mistakenly think Date and Time are types in these declarations, but of course they are our active pattern names. The types of date and time are inferred. Again, we can condense this by using an AND Pattern ( & ) to combine the pattern matches.
let Date date & Time time = dateTime
Active patterns and pattern matching in general becomes more powerful when you realize that they're not just limited to match/try ... with constructs, but every let binding and parameter is also a pattern match. So one interesting thing we can do with active patterns is reshape our data directly in a parameter declaration. For example, suppose we have a function that takes a DateTime parameter:
let f (dateTime:DateTime) = ...
We could extract the date portion right in the parameter declaration:
let f (Date date) = ...
Or we could bind both the date and time to separate values:
let f (Date date & Time time) = ...
Note that from the caller's perspective this is still just one parameter. The only strange thing about this is that since our parameter is anonymous, we won't get intellisense for the name of the parameter, or the compiler will give it an auto-generated name like _arg1 if it is in a separate assembly. I don't know of any fix for this other than to use a signature file.
The usage of active patterns on arguments opens up other possibilities such as validation. For example, suppose we were to define the following patterns:
let (|NonEmptyString|) value = if String.IsNullOrEmpty value then failwith "String must be non-empty." else value let (|GreaterThanEqual|) comparand value = if value < comparand then failwithf "Value must be greater than or equal to %A." comparand else value
Now we can use these to define preconditions on our function parameters:
let sayHello (NonEmptyString name) = printfn "Hello, %s." name let rec factorial (GreaterThanEqual 0 n) = if n = 0 then 1 else n * factorial (n - 1)
If we violate a precondition, such as by passing a -1 to our factorial function, then it will throw an exception. The only downside is that it doesn't include the argument name. We could pass the argument name as an additional argument to the active pattern, but then that is getting kind of crufty.
I realize some of these examples are probably somewhat contrived, and I'm not sure I would do validation like this in a real application. Still, I hope it expands your view of the ways in which active patterns might be used to write more concise and expressive code. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Hearing the news that Susan Greenfield has lost her job at the Royal Institution threw me back 40 years to when she and I both went up to Oxford, to the same college and to read the same subject. This was the tail-end of the hippy era, an age of wearing wild clothes, smoking cannabis and taking LSD, listening to Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd.
We got on well but were not close friends: we were so very different. I was obsessed with investigating the paranormal and consciousness, and cared little for fame or career. She was ambitious from the start. In later years, we were often confused with each other (two Susans talking about brains on TV), although I worked at the fringes of respectable scientific topics – out-of-body experiences, memes, consciousness – without grants and usually without a job – while she went for the big time.
In some ways, she made the big time. She ended up as an Oxford professor, a baroness, a university chancellor, and director of the Royal Institution. Yet she neither did any significant scientific research nor gained the respect of most scientists. Indeed, in 2004, Greenfield was involved in another stir when several fellows of the Royal Society threatened to resign if she was elected a fellow, saying that "her work is too insubstantial and that she is too interested in self-promotion". "Self promotion" is a common accusation.
I feel sorry for my old friend and colleague, but I can only conclude that she is, in both her successes and her failures, the architect of her own fate. In her determination to get to the top, she may be an example of a woman having to fight even harder than a man to achieve such goals. So she has proved not only that you can be both a woman in chic suits and a scientist, but also that a female scientist can be just as competitive and ambitious as any man.
But what bothers me, and other scientists, is that she does not seem much to value science itself. The absolute heart of what it means to care about science is that you care about the evidence – that your opinions are based not on what you would like to be true but on what is found by research to be true.
Greenfield has, for instance, been vocal about the harms of drugs, the way they damage the brain and destroy lives. She campaigned against the reclassification of cannabis to Grade C, making meaningless comparisons with alcohol (such as that only 0.7 mg affects the brain whereas you need 2,000 mg of alcohol) – meaningless because you smoke tiny amounts of one and drink large glasses of the other. She scared people by claiming that cannabis changes who you are – but so does alcohol, so does falling in love, so does making scientific discoveries. She claimed that cannabis damages living human brain cells based on evidence from lab studies on isolated rat neurons. Worst of all, she ignored evidence on the actual harms of each drug, so painstakingly collected by Colin Blakemore, David Nutt and others.
These studies clearly showed cannabis to be less harmful than either tobacco or alcohol. We need this reliable evidence to give truthful drugs education and to create a less damaging drugs policy, but such progress is set back by Greenfield's evidence-free, high-profile pronouncements.
Then there are her dire warnings about the harms of playing computer games. This story would be funny if it were not so serious. I heard her speak last summer at the Cheltenham Science Festival, where the brochure described her "outspoken views. Praised and criticised in equal measure". There she claimed that our brains could be physically damaged by playing too many computer games. Ironically, she was simultaneously promoting her own commercial brand of brain-training device – "MindFit" – basically a simple computer game advertised as "based on scientific studies of the adaptability of the adult human brain" and "clinically proven to help you think faster, focus better and remember more". When I was recently asked to write about the evidence for brain-training games of this sort, I learned that there is no proper peer-reviewed evidence to suggest that any of them, including her own, actually improve brain function any more than playing Scrabble, chess or other computer games. And to cap it all, there is now evidence that playing fast-moving, first-person perspective computer games improves reaction times and some measures of intelligence. So she has been endorsing one unproven computer product while claiming that others do harm.
I applaud Susan for her dynamism and her many successes, but I wish she had behaved more like a real scientist. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Google CEO Sundar Pichai (Screenshot)
Asked how an image search for the word “idiot” produced pictures of President Donald Trump, Google CEO Sundar Pichai defended his company’s search results at a House hearing on Tuesday.
Democrat Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) told Pichai that she had just performed a Google image search for “idiot,” which produced a picture of Pres. Trump, and asked why that happened:
“Manipulation of search results. I think it’s important to talk about how search works. Right now, if you Google the word 'idiot,' under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. I just did that. How would that happen? How does search work so that that would occur?"
Pichai explained that Google’s analytical process “tried to rank and find the best results for that query,” which were then evaluated by the company’s “external rankers”:
“We provide search for any time you type in a keyword. We, as Google, we have crawled, we have gone out and crawled and stored copies of billions of pages in our index and we take the keyword and match it against the pages and grant them based on our 200 signals; things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it, and based on that, you know, at any given time, we tried to rank and find the best results for that query. “And, then, we evaluate them with external raters to make sure that, and they evaluate it through objective guidelines, and that’s how we make sure the process is working.”
Pichai, then, explained that fifteen percent of Google’s daily search requests have never been previously encountered: | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Do you remember last year when Kanye West said slavery sounded like a choice to him? Well, this got me thinking what would lead anyone, let alone a black man, to believe such a thing? It’s natural to have questions about a narrative that says a group of people were enslaved and didn’t fight against it. Slave uprisings are a part of the narrative that is often glossed over. While Kanye chose to question the people, I questioned the narrative. The truth is that African people were fighting against slavery from the beginning.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade
As a Brit, I used to always associate the slave trade with America. During the 400 years of transatlantic slavery, the average Brit didn’t come into contact with an enslaved person. Slavery in Britain took place on the Caribbean islands that were part of the British Empire. This is in stark contrast to the U.S., in which enslaved people and citizens came face to face every day. The geographical distance unfortunately led to a mental distance when it comes to how Brits think about the part they played in the transatlantic slave trade. When stories of the atrocities of slavery are told, it’s mainly from the perspective of America, despite the fact that the slave trade began in the 15th century, 300 years before America declared independence. Technically, America was another slavery outpost of Britain for those centuries.
The Abolition of Slavery
In fact, the only time I hear Britain admitting to any kind of participation in the slave trade is when it is bragged that Britain abolished slavery in 1833, 30 years before America followed suit. And it was all thanks to an enlightened politician by the name of William Wilberforce. At least that’s what the 2006 film Amazing Grace would have you believe.
While Wilberforce was instrumental in the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, the movie, and the way in which the abolition story is often taught, ignore those that fought against slavery long before Wilberforce was even a thought in his parent’s minds.
Book Deals Newsletter Sign up for our Book Deals newsletter and get up to 80% off books you actually want to read. Thank you for signing up! Keep an eye on your inbox. By signing up you agree to our terms of use
Similarly, Harriet Beecher Stowe, while influential in the abolitionist movement, did not single-handedly bring about the civil war by handing Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Abraham Lincoln. The way in which the enslaved people in her book are portrayed speaks volumes about about how the road to the abolition of slavery is perceived. Although Beecher Stowe’s characters, unlike Margaret Mitchell’s in Gone with the Wind, despise being slaves, they are too meek and mild to rise up and do anything about it. In a word, no.
The fear that slave owners had of slave uprisings was not unfounded. Americans especially knew the price a human being would be willing to pay for their freedom. The enslaved people throughout the course of the 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade were not just waiting around for their masters to become enlightened to the atrocities of slavery and end it. No, they fought against it every single step of the way, persevering through defeat after defeat until they finally won their freedom.
The Rebellions
In America alone there were at least 250 slave rebellions before abolition was passed in 1865. That is at least 250 instances in which slaves fought against and risked (and often lost) their lives for their freedom. The most well-known being the Nat Turner revolt. These rebellions also occurred a lot more frequently in the Caribbean and South America, where slaves often outnumbered their owners.
The largest slave rebellion occurred in San Domingue. This led to the creation of the independent state of Haiti in 1804. Haiti was the first nation to abolish slavery, 30 years before Great Britain. Haiti was no small loss to the French, either. It was the most profitable island in the Americas. The success of the Haitian rebellion led to an increase in rebellions across the Caribbean, including the Baptist War, or Christmas Day rebellion, in Jamaica in 1831, which involved 60,000 rebels. When the governor and slave owners of Jamaica saw how the slaves preferred death to a lifetime of slavery, it became clear that the clock was ticking on the legality of the slave trade.
For one of the world’s biggest, cruel, and economically profitable institutions to be dismantled, people in power and with influence had to get involved. But to think of these people dismantling slavery all by their lonesome is unjust.
While there are a plethora of books on the civil war, In my opinion there isn’t enough writing on the uprising that preempted it.
9 Books on Slave Uprisings
A chronicle of the work of the abolitionists, the slave uprising that put pressure on the government, and the work of the underground railroad.
An in-depth account of the Haitian revolution and how Haiti became the first independent country in the Caribbean following European rule.
The autobiographical account of Equiano’s time in enslavement and his journey to becoming an independent free man.
Nat Turner: Revolution by Kyle Baker
A two-volume graphic novel depicting the most famous slave uprising in America by acclaimed author and illustrator Kyle Baker. Trigger warning: it is very violent.
Night of the Silent Drums: A Narrative of Slave Rebellion on the Virgin Islands by Lonzo Anderson
A fictional telling of the slave uprising on the Caribbean island of Saint John under Danish rule. Based on true events.
The Long Song by Andrea Levy
Levy’s Man Booker short listed book of family and resistance set against the backdrop of the Baptist War and the violent end of slavery.
Facts and Documents Connected with the Late Insurrection in Jamaica: With a Narrative of Events Since the First of August, 1834 by James Williams
The historical textbook account of the Christmas Rebellion of 1831 in Jamaica.
Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion [Two Volumes] edited by Junius P. Rodriguez
A detailed account of all the known instances of slave resistance and rebellion throughout the slave trade.
Although not necessarily an account of slave uprisings, Akala’s comprehensive look at the legacy of the British Empire provides a detailed look at the legacy of slavery and the fight of African peoples against it from its beginning. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
As the Jets continue their search for a general manager, the team will move into Phase 3 of offseason workouts Tuesday at the Atlantic Health Training Center. Over the next four weeks, the Green & White are scheduled to have 10 voluntary OTAs (organized team activities) in addition to a mandatory three-day minicamp from June 4-6.
For the first time this spring, team drills (offense vs. defense) will be permitted but there will continue to be restrictions on live contact and one-on-one drills. There are many on-the-field storylines to follow before the team breaks in mid-June and they include:
1. Darnold Emblematic of a New Day
The Jets appear to have found their long-term and short-term answer at quarterback in Sam Darnold. The second-year passer, who will turn 22 during OTAs, thrived late last season. But he is learning his third offense in as many years, so all this spring work will be invaluable for the signal-caller who has already thoroughly impressed his head coach.
"I like the way he works and I love the way he studies. The way he throws the ball is very impressive," said Adam Gase of Darnold. "He just naturally, when he rolls out of bed, he could sling that thing, and it is fun to be around how intense he is every day trying to make sure he gets better. I think really, for us, it is going to be about how far can we take it. Can we keep all of our guys healthy that he is working with? Can we keep building chemistry? And if we do that, then that's going to give us a really good shot to have a good year."
2. Growing Into a Leadership Role
Despite operating a new offense under Gase and offensive coordinator/QB coach Dowell Loggains, you can expect Darnold to take more command on the field and in the locker room. He proved his mettle as a rookie, displaying blue-collar gritty qualities in the way he battled. Darnold is a gamer who knows the lay of the land after coming in fresh out of USC. Don't confuse the California cool with the passion that rages in the hyper-competitive SoCal native. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Sergio Perez says he has signed a deal for the 2019 Formula 1 season and expects an official announcement to come shortly.
The Mexican is expected to remain at the rebranded Racing Point Force India squad for a sixth campaign, possibly alongside Lance Stroll, after his father Lawrence Stroll led a consortium to save the team from administration.
Perez played a prominent role in instigating the administration process as he took legal action against the Silverstone-based outfit after revealing he was asked by team members to help save Force India following long-running financial difficulties.
“For me, I already know what I will be doing next year, but I cannot communicate it yet,” Perez told media during the Belgian Grand Prix weekend. “It’s signed, I cannot communicate it.”
When asked if he felt an announcement was likely to come ahead of this weekend’s Italian Grand Prix at Monza, Perez replied: “Who knows, probably. I don't think it'll be long from now. We are not in a hurry."
Perez headed teammate Esteban Ocon in fifth as the pair sealed a superb double points finish for Force India at Spa, after both drivers starred in a wet qualifying session to secure a second-row lock-out.
The result lifted the rebranded Force India squad up to ninth in the constructors’ championship after it forfeited its previous points tally and Perez hopes the newly-bought team will start to see the benefits of its fresh funds relate to on-track performance in the near-future.
He said an update that was previously expected should now arrive in time for the upcoming Singapore Grand Prix next month.
“Singapore is actually the one that was expected already,” he explained. “It was in the programme. We’re getting a good one for Singapore.
“I think we should be looking really for the new owners, the start of the next year should be the target to really kick out new things and try to be on a much higher level.” | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
The 2016 Blast The latest POLITICO scoops and coverage of the 2016 elections. Email Sign Up
Tweets from https://twitter.com/politico/lists/team-politico
Donald Trump and Jeb Bush speak at a break during the Fox Business Network Republican presidential debate on Jan. 14. | AP Photo Jeb Bush to meet with Trump rivals individually
Jeb Bush, weighing an endorsement in the Republican primary, will meet with each of Donald Trump's rivals in the final days leading up to the Florida primary.
The former Florida governor, who left the race last month, is planning to meet with Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich in the immediate days ahead.
That Bush isn’t meeting with Trump doesn’t come as a surprise. As a candidate, Bush routinely savaged the real estate mogul, portraying him as unfit for the job of commander-in-chief. Trump was just as bare-knuckled, casting the former governor as “low energy.”
Kristy Campbell, a Bush spokeswoman, didn't comment on the meetings other than to say Bush would be huddling with the three individually "over next couple days while candidates are in town for the debate" for Thursday evening’s GOP debate.
Many close to Rubio, who is betting big on a win in his home state ahead of its March 15 primary, hoped that the former governor would endorse him. Yet that hasn't happened. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Adopt
Search for a pet by first clicking any button below. Then you can select 'Show additional search options' to refine your search by age, breed and more.
At this time, we have closed the shelter to the public for walk through viewing.
Adoptions by appointment are available. To get started, please click the pet’s profile you are interested in, read the profile and then click the questionnaire at the bottom of the page to start your adoption process.
After you submit a questionnaire, our staff will get back to you to set up an appointment. You can expect to hear back from us within 24-72 hours of your questionnaire submission. Please be patient, as our staff is working hard to get back to you as quickly as possible.
Select an animal type All animal types Dogs and Puppies Cats and Kittens Small Animals Horses and Farm Animals Search More search options... Breed Any Breed Affenpinscher Afghan Airedale Akita Alaskan Malamute American Bulldog American Cocker American Eskimo American Eskimo Dog American Foxhound American Hairless Terrier American Pit Bull American Staffordshire Terrier American Staffy Anatolian Shepherd Appenzel Mountain Dog Australian Bulldog Australian Cattledog Australian Shepherd Australian Silky Terrier Australian Terrier Basenji Basset Hound Beagle Bearded Collie Bedlington Terrier Belgian Malinois Belgian Sheepdog Belgian Shepherd - Groendael Belgian Shepherd - Malinois Belgian Shepherd - Tervueren Belgian Shepherd Laekenois Belgian Shepherd Malinois Belgian Shepherd Tervueren Belgian Tervurer Bernese Mountain Dog Bichon Frise Black And Tan Coonhound Black Mouth Cur Black Russian Terrier Bloodhound Blue Healer Blue Heeler Bluetick Coonhound Border Collie Border Terrier Borzoi Boston Terrier Bouvier Des Flandres Boxer Briard British Bulldog Brittany Spaniel Brussels Griffon Bull Arab Bull Terrier Bull Terrier, Miniature Bulldog Bullmastiff Cairn Terrier Canaan Dog Catahoula Catahoula Leopard Dog Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Chesapeake Bay Retriever Chihuahua Chinese Crested Dog Chinese Crested Powderpuff Chow Chow Clumber Spaniel Cockapoo Cocker Spaniel Cocker Spaniel, English Collie Rough Collie Smooth Coonhound Coonhound, Redbone Coonhound, Walker Corgi Corgi, Cardigan Welsh Corgi, Pembroke Welsh Corgie Coton De Tulear Curly Coated Retriever Dachshund Dachshund, Long-haired Dachshund, Short-haired Dachshund, Wire-haired Dalmatian Dalmation Dandie Dinmont Terrier Deer Hound Doberman Dobermann Dogue De Bordeaux Dutch Shepherd English Bull Dog English Bulldog English Foxhound English Setter English Springer Spaniel English Toy Spaniel Entlebucher Eskimo Dog Eurasier Field Spaniel Finnish Spitz Flat Coated Retriever Fox Terrier Fox Terrier, Smooth Fox Terrier, Toy Foxhound French Bulldog German Coolie German Shepherd German Shorthaired Pointer German Wirehaired Pointer Giant Schnauzer Glen Of Imaal Terrier Golden Retriever Gordon Setter Great Dane Great Pyrenees Great Swiss Mountain Dog Greater Swiss Mountain Dog Greyhound Griffon Bruxellois Griffon, Wire-haired Pointing Harrier Havanese Heeler Hound Hungarian Puli Hungarian Vizsla Ibizan Hound Irish Setter Irish Terrier Irish Water Spaniel Irish Wolfhound Italian Greyhound Italian Spinone Jack Russell Terrier Japanese Chin Japanese Spitz Johnson Bulldog Karelian Bear Dog Keeshond Kelpie Kerry Blue Terrier Komondor Kuvasz Labradoodle Labrador Labrador Retriever Lakeland Terrier Large Cross Breed Large Terrier Cross Leonberger Lhasa Apso Long Hair Chihuahua Longhaired Dachshund Low Chen Maltese Manchester Terrier Manchester Terrier, Toy Maremma Sheepdog Mastiff Mcnab Medium Cross Breed Medium Terrier Cross Mini Australian Shepherd Mini Foxie Cross Mini Foxy Mini Pinscher Mix Mixed Neopolitan Mastiff Newfoundland Newfoundland - Landseer Norfolk Terrier Norwegion Buhund Norweigian Elkhound Norwich Terrier Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever Old English Sheepdog Otterhound Papillon Parsons Jack Russell Terrier Pekingese Petit Basset Griffon Ven Deen Pharaoh Hound Pinscher Pit Bull Plott Hound Pointer Pomeranian Poodle Miniature Poodle Standard Poodle Toy Portugese Water Dog Pug Puggle Pyrenean Mountain Dog Rat Terrier Redbone Coonhound Retriever Rhodesian Ridgeback Rottweiler Saint Bernard Saluki Samoyed Schipperke Schnauzer Schnauzer, Giant Schnauzer, Miniature Schnauzer, Standard Schnoodle Scottish Terrier Sealyhorn Terrier Setter Sharpei Sheltie Shepherd Shetland Sheep Dog Shiba Inu Shih Tzu Siberian Husky Sighthound Silky Terrier Skye Terrier Small Crossbreed Small Terrier Cross Smithfield Cattle Dog Spaniel Spaniel, American Water Spaniel, Water Spitz Springer Spaniel Staffordshire Bull Terrier Staghound Sussex Spaniel Swedish Spaniel Tenterfield Terrier Terrier Terrier, Rat Thai Ridgeback Tibetan Mastiff Tibetan Spaniel Tibetan Terrier Toy Fox Terrier Treeing Walker Coonhound Unknown Viszla Vizsla Weimaraner Welsh Springer Spaniel Welsh Terrier West Highland White Terrier Wheaten Terrier Whippet Wire-haired Pointing Griffon Wirehaired Dachshund Wirehaired Fox Terrier Wirehaired Jack Russell Yorkshire Terrier Sex Any Sex Female Male Age Any Age Puppy 6 mths. - 5 yrs. 5 - 10 yrs. 10 yrs. + Weight Any Weight Small (1-25 lbs) Medium (26-50 lbs) Large (51-100 lbs) X-Large (over 100 lbs) Color Any Color Albino Apricot Black Black Brindle Black Brown Blenheim Blonde Blue Blue Brindle Blue Merle Blue Roan Brindle Bronze Brown Brown Brindle Buff Cafe-Au-Lait Charcoal Chestnut Chinchilla Chocolate Chocolate Merle Cinnamon Cornaz Cream Dapple Fawn Fawn Brindle Ghost Grey Gold Grey Grizzle Lemon Liver Merle Orange Roan Red Red Brown Red Gold Red Merle Red Roan Roan Rust Sable Sable Agouti Sable Fawn/Sooty Salt and Pepper Sandy Silver Silver Fawn Slate Slate Merle Strawberry Roan Swiss Tri Color Tan Tan Points Tawny Ticked Tiger Brindle Tri Color Watermarked Brindle Wheaten White White Merle Wolf Grey Yellow Yellow Gold Select one or more additional criteria above, such as breed, age, or weight, to narrow your search. Search
Sort by: Name Date Available for Adoption A -> Z Z -> A | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Two weeks ago nineteen-year-old Mollie Olgin and her girlfriend, 18-year-old Kristene Chapa, were both shot in the head at Violet Andrews Park in Portland, near Corpus Christi. Mollie Olgin died at the scene, while Kristene Chapa remains hospitalized.
Today Portland, Texas Police have released a sketch (left) of the suspect in the shooting of a teenage lesbian couple.
The suspect is described as a white male in his 20s, 5 feet 8 inches tall, weighing 140 pounds, with a skinny build and brown hair.
Vigils for the girls have been held across the country, including last weekend in Dallas.
Police at this time ARE NOT investigating the shooting as a hate crime.
Anyone with information about the shooting should call Portland police at 361-777-4444. Reports may be made anonymously | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
The Swedish armed forces have been hit by a major equipment problem, according to reports. Flimsy military brassieres are unable to stand up to the strains imposed when female Swedish troops perform "rigorous exercises", routinely bursting open or even catching fire - so forcing busty young conscripts to hurriedly strip off in the field.
The revelations come courtesy of the Gothenburg Post and English-language Swedish journal The Local. The Post reported yesterday on concerns raised by the Swedish Conscription Council, an organisation concerned with the rights of conscript troops in the Swedish forces.
Council spokesperson Paulina Rehbinder told The Local that government-issue military brassieres supplied to young female soldiers have long been unfit for combat.
According to the paper:
The women complained that the bras’ fasteners have a tendency to come undone when the women performed rigorous exercise, forcing the female soldiers to take off all of their equipment in order to refasten the brassieres.
The Post apparently brought the related bosom-combustion issue to light, noting that bras can catch fire during combat and then "melt onto conscripts’ skin".
“Our opinion is that the Swedish Armed Forces should have ordered good, flame-proof underwear,” Rehbinder said.
“There should be suitable apparel for women.”
Rehbinder reportedly added that the problems have persisted for twenty years, with generations of young Swedish womens' tophamper routinely breaking free of confinement to oscillate wildly during army PT sessions and field exercises - presumably often followed by impromptu stripteases as the more jubtabulously fortunate female troops sought to re-fasten their flimsy government lingerie.
The problems would apparently be easy to sort out. Unaccountably, however, it appears that the male-dominated Swedish military hierarchy has failed to act.
Rehbinder reportedly - though perhaps mistakenly - believes that change is on the horizon. She told The Local that 2,000 new young female recruits are to enter the Swedish forces next year, and that top brass had been informed of this recently.
"That got them moving,” she said. ® | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Nova York
No rastro de revelações do fim de semana de que dados de até 50 milhões de usuários do Facebook foram usados para interferir nas eleições americanas de 2016, favorecendo a vitória do presidente Donald Trump, as ações da empresa despencaram na Bolsa de Nova York nesta segunda-feira (19).
Os papéis da rede social caíram 6,8% em reação às notícias, a pior retração dos últimos quatro anos, o que reduziu em US$ 36,7 bilhões (R$ 123 bilhões) o valor de mercado da empresa, que antes estava avaliada em cerca de US$ 538 bilhões.
O declínio contaminou outras ações de tecnologia. A Alphabet, dona do Google, teve queda de 3%, Amazon e Microsoft perderam 1,7%, e a Apple recuou 1,5%. O índice Dow Jones teve perdas de 1,35%.
O presidente-executivo da rede social, Mark Zuckerberg, que vinha despachando seus advogados para conter a ira de parlamentares americanos e europeus, enfrenta agora uma das maiores crises de imagem a chacoalhar o Vale do Silício.
E Washington, Londres e União Europeia querem ouvir da boca dele como a empresa britânica Cambridge Analytica teve acesso a dados de usuários num esquema para manipular resultados eleitorais.
Deputados e senadores americanos subiram o tom das ameaças ao Facebook, pedindo novas investigações sobre possível violação de acordo com o governo sobre proteção à privacidade de usuários por parte da empresa.
A senadora democrata Amy Klobuchar, por exemplo, exige uma explicação do dono do Facebook à Câmara, em Washington, onde, nas palavras dela, gostaria de ouvir tudo o que ele sabe sobre o mau uso de dados para “alvejar as propagandas políticas e manipular os eleitores”.
Em Londres, o chefe da investigação britânica sobre a interferência russa no referendo britânico para que o país deixasse a UE, Damian Collins, também disse que exigira uma manifestação de Zuckerberg sobre as acusações.
“É inaceitável que eles nos enviem testemunhas que evitam responder a perguntas difíceis dizendo que não sabem as repostas”, disse Collins. “Isso cria uma falsa impressão de que as políticas do Facebook são robustas e monitoradas de maneira eficaz.”
Um porta-voz da premiê britânica, Theresa May, também manifestou preocupação pelo uso de dados do Facebook pela Cambridge Analytica — a empresa operou o esquema a partir de Londres.
EXECUTIVO SAI
Noutro sinal de agravamento da situação, o responsável por assuntos de segurança da rede social, Alex Stamos, anunciou que deixará o cargo depois de desavenças com outras lideranças na empresa, entre elas Sheryl Sandberg, uma de suas diretoras.
De acordo com pessoas próximas às negociações, Stamos vinha brigando até o momento para que o Facebook investigasse e esclarecesse logo os episódios de atividade dos russos em sua plataforma, mas não foi ouvido.
Em dezembro, suas responsabilidades foram sendo repassadas a outros executivos, mas ele havia concordado em ficar até agosto, para não criar mais desgastes. Stamos é o primeiro executivo do alto escalão da firma a deixar o cargo desde o início do escândalo da campanha russa.
bloqueio
Na semana passada, sabendo que estavam para vazar detalhes de como o grupo britânico criou um aplicativo para compilar dados e montar perfis de preferências políticas de usuários, o Facebook bloqueou o acesso de executivos do grupo à rede.
Um deles é Christopher Wylie, que acabou se tornando um dos delatores das práticas do grupo britânico. “Sinto arrependimento todos os dias quando vejo para onde ajudaram a levar o nosso mundo”, disse.
“Preciso consertar isso e por isso é que estou dando o passo à frente.”
O time jurídico de Zuckerberg também acaba de anunciar que sua empresa contratou uma auditoria para entender como a Cambridge Analytica armou a operação.
Executivos do grupo deram detalhes ao canal britânico Channel 4 News sobre como plantaram notícias falsas e agiram com ex-espiões para manipular resultados eleitorais no mundo todo.
Estratégias envolviam criar escândalos falsos de pagamento de propina e até contratar prostitutas para seduzir políticos.
QUESTIONÁRIOS
Os dados de usuários do Facebook usados pelo grupo vieram de questionários sobre preferências pessoais permitidos pela rede social, que nega o vazamento dessas informações, alegando que sempre repassou esses dados a pesquisadores acadêmicos.
O problema é que a Cambridge Analytica é uma consultoria política que tinha entre os clientes a campanha de Trump, entre outros.
No Twitter, executivos do Facebook negaram que tenha havido qualquer vazamento. “Nenhum sistema foi infiltrado, nenhuma senha ou informação foi roubada ou hackeada”, publicou Andrew Bosworth, um executivo da empresa.
O mesmo executivo disse que foi a Cambridge Analytica que violou o acordo sobre como os dados podem ser usados, já que Aleksandr Kogan, um dos pesquisadores do grupo britânico, disse a usuários do Facebook que contatou que o seu trabalho era só um estudo acadêmico. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Sanders Votes Against Continuing Resolution
WASHINGTON, Dec. 21 – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) issued the following statement Thursday after voting against a temporary spending bill:
"I voted no on the continuing resolution because it is unconscionable for Congress to go home for the holidays while leaving major crises unresolved. There are 800,000 Dreamers in this country who are on the verge of losing their legal status and who could soon be subject to deportation if we do not act. For three months, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the community health center program have not been reauthorized or fully funded. Millions of children and families are wondering whether they will be able to continue to receive health care. Over 1.5 million older workers and retirees will soon see the pensions they were promised cut by up to 60 percent if Congress does not do its job.
"It would simply be wrong to pass another continuing resolution. These problems must be addressed, and they must be addressed now." | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Imagine opening a box of delectable chocolates that your friend had gifted you some days back, only to see them turning white! The reason for them to turn grayish to white boils down to the storage or the lack of it. There are two types of phenomena that attribute to the whitish color permeating through the surface of these chocolates: sugar bloom and fat bloom.
Sugar bloom is the result of moisture gathering on the outside of the chocolate. The sugar content in the brownie begins to soften due to wetness. When the moisture begins to evaporate, sugar crystals stick to the surface. If the process repeats, the surface can turn muggy and lose color. One can also relate sugar bloom to the ‘sweating of chocolate’ where it is stored in a relative cool surrounding and then moved into a much warmer temperature zone. When this happens, there is surface moisture on the chocolate, making it turn white.
Fat bloom is just like sugar bloom, but the only difference is that in this case, it is cocoa butter or fat that drifts away from the delicious chocolate and sit itself on the outside area of the body. Just like sugar bloom, the common reasons for fat bloom are rapid changes in the temperature and excessively warm storage medium.
Though you may not find the discolored ‘white’ chocolate as delectable as rich cocoa filled brown chocolate, it is still edible and fine for you to eat. The sugar bloom chocolate has a grainy texture on the outside but there should not be any major change in the taste. If you want to prevent your chocolate from turning white, make sure that you incorporate correct storage methods.
Make sure that chocolate is wrapped tight and stored away from any other type of food that emits pungent odors. This is because chocolate has the tendency to easily take in flavors from other food products stored nearby. The best temperature to store chocolate is between 64 and 69 degrees Fahrenheit. If you store it well, you can expect milk and traditionally white chocolates to stay fresh up to six months and other varieties to have an extended shelf life. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
A Facebook spokesperson told Engadget, "Trending includes a separate section of people's individual posts related to the news event; it's essentially a comments section. We built this as a way for you to easily see what others are saying around a topic. The type of stuff we were seeing yesterday is a bad experience and we're going to work to fix the product." It's great that Facebook recognizes there's an issue and will work to correct it. The problem, of course, is haven't they been doing that for the last couple of years?
The fact is this really should not be happening anymore. Sure, a few stories will fall through the cracks -- it's a big platform after all -- but Facebook should have a better handle on the problem by now. Trending news is not a comments section. Facebook comments are a comments section.
That's not to say solving the fake news problem is easy or simple. The fight is constant, and some have posited that it's a war that is, in fact, unwinnable. Google took steps earlier this week to clean fake news out of its search "snippets" and Facebook has revamped its News Feed to focus less on articles and more on friend and family updates (though this might actually exacerbate the problem). But if people keep themselves informed about world events through Facebook, and there is misinformation in the Trending News section, that's a huge problem. And it's not clear if Facebook is ever going to fix it. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
At a Tuesday rally, Donald Trump said something that could easily be interpreted as a call for violence against a future Clinton administration.
"Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment," Trump said. "By the way, and if she gets to pick — if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know."
As is common with Trump, it’s unclear exactly what he’s saying — whether it’s a call for assassination, armed insurrection, or something else entirely. But one thing that people have debated a lot after the comment is whether it was a "joke" or meant seriously.
But in a certain sense, it doesn’t really matter what Trump intended. This tweetstorm, from Dallas lawyer Jason P. Steed, explains why.
Before becoming a lawyer, Steed was an English professor. He wrote his PhD dissertation on "the social function of humor" and found something important: Jokes about socially unacceptable things aren’t just "jokes." They serve a function of normalizing that unacceptable thing, of telling the people who agree with you that, yes, this is an okay thing to talk about.
This, Steed explains, is why "it’s a joke" isn’t a good defense of racist jokes. By telling the joke, the person is signaling that they think racism is an appropriate thing to express. "Just joking" is just what someone says to the people who don’t appreciate hearing racist stuff — it shouldn’t matter any more than saying "no offense" after saying something offensive.
Likewise, Trump is signaling that assassinating Hillary Clinton and/or her Supreme Court nominees is an okay thing to talk about. He’s normalizing the unacceptable.
1. I wrote my PhD dissertation on the social function of humor (in literature & film) and here's the thing about "just joking." — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
2. You're never "just joking." Nobody is ever "just joking." Humor is a social act that performs a social function (always). — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
3. To say humor is social act is to say it is always in social context; we don't joke alone. Humor is a way we relate/interact with others. — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
4. Which is to say, humor is a way we construct identity - who we are in relation to others. We use humor to form groups... — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
5. ...and to find our individual place in or out of those groups. In short, joking/humor is one tool by which we assimilate or alienate. — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
6. IOW, we use humor to bring people into - or keep them out of - our social groups. This is what humor *does.* What it's for. — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
7. Consequently, how we use humor is tied up with ethics - who do we embrace, who do we shun, and how/why? — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
8. And the assimilating/alienating function of humor works not only only people but also on *ideas.* This is important. — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
9. This is why, e.g., racist "jokes" are bad. Not just because they serve to alienate certain people, but also because... — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
10. ...they serve to assimilate the idea of racism (the idea of alienating people based on their race). And so we come to Trump. — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
11. A racist joke sends a message to the in-group that racism is acceptable. (If you don't find it acceptable, you're in the out-group.) — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
12. The racist joke teller might say "just joking" - but this is a *defense* to the out-group. He doesn't have to say this to the in-group. — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
13. This is why we're never "just joking." To the in-group, no defense of the joke is needed; the idea conveyed is accepted/acceptable. — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
14. So, when Trump jokes about assassination or armed revolt, he's asking the in-group to assimilate/accept that idea. That's what jokes do. — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
15. And when he says "just joking," that's a defense offered to the out-group who was never meant to assimilate the idea in the first place. — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
16. Indeed, circling back to the start, the joke *itself* is a way to define in-group and out-group, through assimilation & alienation. — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
17. If you're willing to accept "just joking" as defense, you're willing to enter in-group where idea conveyed by the joke is acceptable. — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
18. IOW, if "just joking" excuses racist jokes, then in-group has accepted idea of racism as part of being in-group. — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
19. Same goes for "jokes" about armed revolt or assassinating Hillary Clinton. They cannot be accepted as "just joking." — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
20. Now, a big caveat: humor (like all language) is complicated and always a matter of interpretation. For example, we might have... — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
21. ...racist humor that is, in fact, designed to alienate (rather than assimilate) the idea of racism. (Think satire or parody.) — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
22. But I think it's pretty clear Trump was not engaging in some complex satirical form of humor. He was "just joking." In the worst sense. — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
23. Bottom line: don't accept "just joking" as excuse for what Trump said today. The in-group for that joke should be tiny. Like his hands. — Jason P. Steed (@5thCircAppeals) August 9, 2016
This is a broader problem with Trump’s candidacy. Even if he never makes it into the White House, it’s not clear how much damage his penchant for shattering norms against explicit racism and calls for violence is doing to American politics.
Other candidates have made comments similar to Trump’s — see 2010 Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle’s "Second Amendment remedies" line, among others. The difference here is that Trump is a major party standard-bearer, and so has a great deal more power to normalize the unacceptable. What he says matters a lot — even when he’s "joking."
Watch: This election is about normal vs. abnormal | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
WASHINGTON — Actor-turned-GOP congressional candidate Antonio Sabato Jr. called White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders being asked to leave a Virginia restaurant an “unfortunate” incident — but said he was personally used to that kind of treatment.
“She’s a lovely lady and it’s disgusting,” Sabato told The Post on Sunday as he attended a Virginia Women for Trump event at the Trump International Hotel in DC. “And I know more than anybody else because I’ve been through it and I’m still going through it.”
During his brief appearance onstage at the event — which was a high tea meant to celebrate the president’s June birthday — Sabato said he was “blacklisted,” just like Hollywood folk thought to be communists in the 1940s and ’50s.
“When I went to Cleveland and spoke for our president, as I came back, my agent, my managers were all gone. I had jobs lined up, they were all gone,” Sabato said.
Sabato and Scott Baio were the two Hollywood types who spoke in support of the now-president at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio.
Pointing to the incident Friday night, in which the owner of the Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia, asked the White House press secretary to leave, Sabato said, “I have the same treatment.”
“For me, from when I came back from Cleveland, that was it,” he told The Post. “That woke me up. It was communism all over again. You know, they’re not allowing us to speak our minds, to express how we love this country and it’s unfortunate.”
Sabato said there are “many people” in stereotypically liberal California who support Trump, but most keep their fandom quiet.
“I know them very well and they’re very scared and they care about their paycheck and they care about working in TV shows and movies and they don’t want to jeopardize that and I totally understand that,” he said.
Sabato decided to take a different route, running for a congressional seat in Ventura County, California. Earlier this month, Sabato advanced to the general election for the seat, coming in No. 2 in the primary, which moves the top two voter-getters regardless of party onto the ballot for the general election.
The Democrat, Julia Brownley, had more than double Sabato’s support.
Still, he remains hopeful.
“This seat in my county is a winnable seat, guys,” he told the crowd Sunday. “And we’re going to win it. We’re coming together.” | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Screenshot taken from Escape Evansville's website
SHARE
By Megan Erbacher of the Courier and Press
Searching for another family-friendly outing in the community, the Zeidlers first attempted an escape room game in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Sabrina Zeidler said having a son at the University of Evansville, as well as 16-year-old foreign exchange student from Japan, and an 8-year-old, it was something everyone in her family enjoyed.
"We are always trying to find something that is fun and entertaining for our broad spectrum of children," she said.
So, the Zeidlers decided to start something new in Evansville.
Starting March 7, the community can test their smarts at Escape Evansville, a real-life brain teaser. As many as eight people are locked in a room and then use clues to solve puzzles to "escape" in less than an hour. It's a concept that originated in Japan, according to Escape Evansville's website.
"It's a great way to bond," Zeidler said. "And we would get frustrated together on a puzzle. Somebody always thinks differently and could think of another way to solve the puzzle. We thought it was great."
Escape Evansville will open with four room escape scenarios. In Pirates on the Ohio, the group is taken prisoner on an enemy pirate ship and must escape the jail cell, find the treasure map and escape without getting caught. In Taken, the group finds themselves handcuffed and must use clues to call for help before the kidnapper returns. In Zombie Escape, the group is locked in a science lab with a live zombie and must find the cure before becoming lunch. And in The Enchanted Library, the group must find the enchanted book to unlock the door.
"Once it's had a run through for a couple of months, we'll change it up so there's always something fresh," Zeidler said.
Escape Evansville is located at 600 N. Weinbach Ave., Suite 940. Cost will be $25 per person. Hours will be 3-10 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday through Sunday.
The Zeidlers worked with Brian Bennett and Jen McKee, both of Social Life Marketing, to open Escape Evansville. It's not affiliated with a franchise, Zeidler said.
"Which is great so you can create your own ideas," she said. "There's no cookie-cutter process. ... It's completely our own thing."
There is no age limit to play an escape game, but children 14 years and younger must be accompanied by an adult. If a group has difficulty finding or solving clues, the "game masters" can help via an intercom. And the room is not actually locked, so members can leave at any time if necessary.
"We will be the first to open. ... Even if somebody else did do it, it would be their own thing," Zeidler said. "And create more opportunities for Evansville."
The Zeidlers also own and operate GattiTown with two business partners; John Zeidler owns Tri-State Aero; as well as Crawford Door and Dock with a business partner.
For more information, visit escapeevansville.com. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
No Fear: 2 Men Broke Off A Huge Iceberg.... Almost Got Crushed! | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
South of the border, Canada isn’t always acknowledged and appreciated in the world of sports as much as Canadians would like.
Whether it’s the Dwyane Wade shooting through the Canadian national anthem or fans in Texas chanting U-S-A during the Toronto Blue Jays–Texas Rangers brawl earlier this year, sporting events rarely bring those living on either side of the 49th parallel together.
On Wednesday, the Philadelphia Phillies are doing something to reverse that trend by holding a “Canadian Heritage Celebration.” According to the team’s website the first 500 fans will receive a Matt Stairs jersey shirt with Phillies-themed skates on the front:
Stairs, who is now the club’s TV colour analyst, will also throw out the pitch. The Fredericton, N.B., native played two seasons for the Phillies hitting .208/.351/.425, winning a World Series title with the team in 2008. The former slugger also spent two years with the Blue Jays hitting .270/.356/.476 with 32 home runs and 108 RBI. His 265 career MLB home runs rank second all-time among Canadians behind Larry Walker.
The Canadian theme apparently extends beyond the field of play to the press box where the dinner menu contains supposed northern favourites like caribou stew and “Toronto swordfish.”
Nothing like a little caribou stew on Canadian heritage night in Philly. Matt Stairs is throwing out the first pitch pic.twitter.com/kMcqwI54sO — Arden Zwelling (@ArdenZwelling) June 15, 2016
It may take more than a few shirts and a little caribou stew to repair sports relations between Canada and the United States, but it’s a start. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Article content continued
Now, everything is turned on its head. U.S. President Barack Obama’s “legacy” project has turned out to consist of substituting NATO influence in the Middle East with Khomeinist hegemony, in exchange for a dubiously crafted commitment from Iran’s ayatollahs that they will abandon their nuclear aspirations, which they insist they never harboured in the first place.
U.S. President Barack Obama’s “legacy” project has turned out to consist of substituting NATO influence in the Middle East with Khomeinist hegemony,
Thus, Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion can look straight into a television camera and deride the former Conservative government’s hard-line policy on the Iranian theocracy as “irrational and ideological.” The thing to do now is to cash in and pull out all the stops to help Bombardier Inc. beat whatever Boeing bids for the leavings from Iran’s recent $25 billion deal with Airbus. How times have changed.
As recently as December 2012, only three months after the Harper government severed diplomatic relations with Tehran, the Liberal line was that Canada’s Iran sanctions policy “wasn’t going far enough.” At the time, Dominic LeBlanc, the Liberal foreign affairs critic, had this to say: “Conservative sanctions against Iran are inadequate. Canada must strengthen its efforts to encourage regime change, including sanctioning the major human rights violators.”
Imagine that. Sanctioning Iran’s major human rights violators. “Regime change,” even. Who even talks like that anymore?
Debates about Canada’s foreign policy tend to fall along lines that are partisan, almost tribal, but there are honourable exceptions. Toronto lawyer Kaveh Shahrooz, a longtime Liberal and human rights activist, isn’t too shy to describe Canada’s new supine posture in unfavourable terms. “It’s the China model,” Shahrooz told me the other day. “We’re open to diplomatic relations, with no connection to internal issues.” | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop (Photo: adflegal.org)
What’s at stake and what to do about it
Two years to the day after the Supreme Court redefined marriage in Obergefell, the Court announced that it would hear a case about the extent to which private parties may be forced to embrace this new vision of marriage. The case involves Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker who declined to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex-wedding reception.
There was nothing remarkable about Phillips’s decision. With every cake he designs, Jack believes he is serving Christ. He had previously turned down requests to create Halloween-themed cakes, lewd bachelor-party cakes, and a cake celebrating a divorce. Yet Jack was never reprimanded over those decisions. He found himself in hot water only with the same-sex-wedding cake.
The immediate question before the Supreme Court is whether it’s constitutional for Colorado to penalize Jack under its “sexual orientation and gender identity” (SOGI) antidiscrimination statute. But the case has implications for millions of believers from every walk of life and, beyond that, for the health of our culture and our constitutional system of ordered liberty.
While there has always been disagreement about what religious liberty requires in particular cases, the idea of religious liberty as a fundamental human right has more or less been a consensus in America. It became controversial only in recent years as the government tried to force religious conservatives to violate their beliefs on sex and marriage, and as liberal advocacy groups decided that civil liberties aren’t for conscientious objectors to the sexual revolution.
That’s why we saw the American Civil Liberties Union oppose Catholic nuns’ attempt to get out of the Obamacare HHS preventive-care mandate, in which the Department of Health and Human Services required employers to provide insurance covering sterilization and birth control — including forms of birth control that prevent embryos from implanting in the uterus, thereby causing abortion.
The HHS mandate garnered the most headlines, but it’s far from the only flashpoint. In several jurisdictions, Catholic Charities and other faith-based adoption agencies have been forced to abandon their invaluable work simply because they want to place needy children only in homes with married moms and dads. The government calls that discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Agree or disagree with Catholic Charities, its belief that mothers and fathers are not interchangeable, that moms and dads are not replaceable, has nothing to do with sexual orientation. And respecting conscience here wouldn’t make a single concrete difference to same-sex couples, who would remain free and able to adopt from public agencies and other providers.
Yet lawmakers aren’t just coercing agencies such as Catholic Charities; they’re punishing states for declining to coerce those agencies. When Texas passed a law protecting the freedom of such agencies, California barred state employees from traveling to Texas on “non-essential” official business.
Religious schools adhering to the historic vision of marriage are also at risk. They stand to lose accreditation and nonprofit tax status as well as eligibility for student loans, vouchers, and education savings accounts. The Left regularly equates “homophobia” with racism, knowing full well that the latter can serve as grounds for ending tax-exempt status, as happened to Bob Jones University in the 1970s as a result of racist policies (lifted in 2000) regarding dating and marriage.
During Obergefell oral arguments, Justice Samuel Alito asked the solicitor general whether the state should yank tax exemptions for schools that uphold marriage as the union of man and woman. The solicitor general replied: “It’s certainly going to be an issue.” Right on cue, the Sunday after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell, the New York Times’ religion columnist wrote a piece for Time magazine titled “Now’s the Time to End Tax Exemptions for Religious Institutions.”
These vulnerabilities extend to Orthodox Jews, Roman Catholics, Evangelical Christians, confessional Lutherans, Latter-day Saints, Muslims, and anyone else who believes that we are created male and female, and that male and female are created for each other. Charities, schools, and professionals will find themselves on the wrong side of regulations: bans on what government deems “discrimination” in public accommodations and employment; mandates in health care and education; revocation of nonprofit status, accreditation, licensing, and funding. Rolling Stone just profiled the LGBT activist Tim Gill, who has pledged his $500 million fortune to passing SOGI laws that will, in his words, “punish the wicked.”
And it won’t just be government that does the punishing. As the law insists that social conservatives are like racists, big businesses and other institutions will bring their own pressure to bear on anyone who dissents. Professional associations, through licensing and accreditation procedures, will enforce the new orthodoxy. The American Bar Association has promulgated new model rules of professional conduct that make it unethical for lawyers to “discriminate” on the “basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status or socioeconomic status,” including in “social activities,” which, as former attorney general Ed Meese has explained, would include “church membership and worship activities.” Legally and culturally, believers should prepare for challenges.
Just how far is the Left willing to go? Consider the ACLU’s “Health Care Denied” project. Launched in May 2016, the project solicits complaints against Catholic hospitals to form the bases of lawsuits. These lawsuits claim that, in declining to perform abortions, Catholic hospitals “use their religious identity to discriminate against, and harm, women.” But this is absurd. The mother’s sex has nothing to do with a Catholic hospital’s refusal to kill the unborn and its commitment to saving lives instead.
The ACLU has also sued Catholic hospitals for declining to perform sex-reassignment surgeries. A headline for a California NBC affiliate read: “ACLU sues Carmichael faith-based hospital for denying transgender man hysterectomy.” The hospital was being accused of discrimination based on gender identity.
But Catholic hospitals refuse to remove a healthy and harmless uterus from anyone, whether the person identifies as cisgender or transgender. This doesn’t reflect discrimination based on gender identity, but rather an honest vision of the role of medicine and the proper treatment of gender dysphoria. But the Left is working hard to label all refusals to march with its sexual revolution as exercises of a “license to discriminate.”
It wasn’t always so. The American Civil Liberties Union used to defend civil liberties. Back in 1993, when Bill Clinton signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law, the ACLU was one of its biggest supporters. Nadine Strossen, president of the group’s national board of directors, testified before Congress in support of the law. It was needed, she argued, to “restore to religious liberty the same kind of protection that the Court has given and still does give to other fundamental freedoms.”
Strossen explained that “in order for government to infringe on a liberty, including religious liberty, it has to show some compelling interest, and it has to show that the measure is narrowly tailored so as to do as little damage as possible.” She embraced this legal standard, identifying it as “strict scrutiny” and saying it was “hardly a radical approach.” She even stated that RFRA was needed to protect “such familiar practices” as “permitting religiously sponsored hospitals to decline to provide abortion or contraception services” and ensuring “the inapplicability of highly intrusive educational rules to parochial schools.” She concluded that “these were decisions . . . that society had previously assumed that religious groups had the right to make for themselves and could not be compelled to change just because society thought otherwise.”
Let that sink in. In 1993, the ACLU endorsed RFRA, saying it would rightly restore for religious liberty the standard used to protect other freedoms — and specifically celebrated the very applications of RFRA that progressives now call abuses never imagined by its supporters. Today, the group sues Catholic hospitals over abortion and sex reassignment and supports a bill — the “Do No Harm Act” — that would amend RFRA so that it couldn’t be used to defend against progressive government mandates in employment and health care, amongst other areas, in response to the Hobby Lobby decision.
Rejecting religious liberty as a fundamental natural right means that the freedoms of a variety of faith traditions on any number of issues may become casualties of progressives’ zeal to quash conservative dissent on sex.
RFRA-style laws have been used to protect a variety of claimants: Apache Indians told they can’t wear the feathers of endangered eagles in their headdresses, Sikhs told they can’t carry a kirpan (a small ceremonial knife) if they work for the government, inner-city black churches zoned out of existence, Muslim prisoners forbidden to grow short beards, and Jewish inmates denied kosher meals. RFRAs became controversial only when the federal RFRA protected the Evangelical owners of Hobby Lobby and when people thought state RFRAs might protect bakers, florists, and photographers who object to same-sex marriage. Rejecting religious liberty as a fundamental natural right means that the freedoms of a variety of faith traditions on any number of issues may become casualties of progressives’ zeal to quash conservative dissent on sex.
Three historical developments have created our current predicament: a change in government, a change in sexual values, and a change in how religion is practiced and how it is viewed by our leaders. An adequate response to current and looming threats to religious liberty will need to address each of these three shifts.
What has changed regarding government? A presumption of liberty has been replaced with a presumption of regulation. Citizens used to think that liberty was primary and government had to justify its coercive regulation. Now people assume that government regulations are the neutral starting point and citizens must justify their liberty.
The progressive movement gave us the administrative state. Limited government and the rule of law were replaced by the nearly unlimited reach of technocrats in governmental agencies. As government assumed authority to regulate more areas of life, the likelihood of its infringing religious liberty increased.
If Thomas Jefferson and James Madison came back to America today and heard about the plight of the Little Sisters of the Poor, their first response would not be to cite the First Amendment; it would be to ask what the Department of Health and Human Services is and what authorizes it to issue a preventive-care mandate. This should be a lesson to religious believers — including many who supported the passage of Obamacare — in how policies that violate economic freedom and massively expand the role of government also can end up violating religious freedom. We must assist those in need without unduly infringing on liberty and while respecting their — and everyone else’s — consciences.
The best defense of religious liberty is a defense of liberty more broadly, a return to limited government and the rule of law. Nowhere is this more applicable than in the never-ending expansion of anti-discrimination statutes. What started out as well-justified efforts to combat racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism have morphed into laws protecting against the “dignitary harm” (i.e., harm to dignity) allegedly inflicted by anyone who disagrees with progressives about human sexuality.
Laws that exist to prevent discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and religion are now being expanded to ban discrimination on the basis of “sexual orientation and gender identity.” As a result, harmless actions and interactions, such as decisions not to perform sex-reassignment surgery or not to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, are being declared unlawful forms of discrimination. While no federal SOGI law exists, half of the U.S. population lives in a jurisdiction with a local or state SOGI. And these SOGIs frequently employ overly broad definitions of “public accommodation” so that almost every business is considered a place of “public accommodation.” It is essential to limit the damage these laws cause and to defeat them when they are proposed.
The comparison with racism is instructive, but not in the way SOGIs’ advocates think. In the 1960s, widespread and systemic racism radically limited African Americans’ freedom to flourish. Social and market forces were not sufficient to remedy the problem. Legal remedies were essential. Do Americans who identify as LGBT face similar challenges today?
Racist businesses refused to serve black people or to serve them in the same spaces and on the same terms as whites. If a business refused to participate in an interracial marriage, it was because that business thought whites were superior to blacks and therefore shouldn’t marry them — not that such a union wouldn’t be a marriage in the first place. By contrast, bakeries don’t refuse to serve people who identify as LGBT because they so identify. Rather, a small number of bakeries can’t in good conscience celebrate same-sex weddings because they think marriage can’t be same-sex.
What justifies the government in telling Jack Phillips that he must create cakes for same-sex weddings? Government has redefined marriage, but that didn’t create an entitlement for some citizens to demand that other citizens help celebrate their same-sex marriages. Activists are using SOGI laws to weaponize the redefinition of marriage. And so we see three important considerations for anti-discrimination policy: the underlying need and justification for government regulation, the scope and reach of that regulation, and the actions and interactions that count as discriminatory.
What about the change in sexual values? How America views the human body, sexuality, marriage, and the family has also changed profoundly since the 1960s. What started as a liberationist movement — asking for the freedom to live and love, be it with contraception or abortion, same-sex relations or transgender identities — now demands that other people support, facilitate, and endorse such choices: that Hobby Lobby’s insurance cover them, that Catholic hospitals perform them, and that various professionals celebrate them.
While the ACLU has largely failed in forcing pro-lifers to perform or pay for abortions, they’ve had more success in coercing traditionalists on LGBT issues. This highlights the reality that, for many people on the left, pro-life views are wrong but understandable, while traditional views on sex, marriage, and gender identity are not merely wrong but bigoted and deplorable. That’s why Catholic hospitals have prevailed against the ACLU in lower courts but Jack Phillips has to plead his case to the Supreme Court.
Any effective long-term response, therefore, cannot merely be about religious liberty or limited government. Ultimately, our goal should be to convince our neighbors that what we believe about sex is true. In the meantime we need to convince them that what we believe is at least reasonable and poses no harm to others, and thus that there’s no reason for the government to penalize it.
You can be in favor of gay marriage and be in favor of Jack’s not being forced to celebrate gay weddings. But if you think support for marriage as the union of husband and wife is akin to racism, you’re less likely to support Jack’s freedom to dissent. Conservatives need to explain why we believe what we believe in terms that our neighbors can understand. We may never convince the ideologues and activists, but most Americans aren’t driven by ideology or activism, and their opinions on these issues aren’t that deep or well informed. These people are persuadable if we make the effort.
In addition to changes in government and sex, religious practice and our understanding of religious liberty have also changed. The mainline Protestant churches became the old-line and now are on the sideline, in the memorable slogan of Father Richard John Neuhaus. This evolution sparked the growth of Evangelicalism, which is now challenged by the influence of mere cultural Christianity. On the Catholic side, the American implementation of the Second Vatican Council splintered the Catholic community into politically liberal, doctrinally heterodox “Spirit of Vatican II” Catholics and politically conservative, doctrinally orthodox “John Paul II” Catholics — with ex-Catholics composing one of the largest religious groups in America. These changes helped fuel the rise of the “nones” — those with no religious affiliation. As Americans become less religious, they care less about religious liberty, for people are most vigilant to protect the rights that they themselves want to exercise.
At the same time, a form of secularism has challenged the role of religion in public life, arguing that religion is appropriate inside the four walls of a house of worship but not on Main Street or Wall Street. The result has been an ever more naked public square, another memorable Neuhaus locution, where religion is viewed as a merely private affair with no public relevance.
These changes help explain why some liberals are trying to drastically narrow the natural right to the free exercise of religion by redefining it as the freedom of worship. If they succeed, the robust religious freedom that made American civil society a light to the world will be reduced to Sunday-morning piety confined to a chapel. The Little Sisters of the Poor will be free to worship how they want in their chapel, but will be forced to comply with the HHS mandate.
To adequately defend religious liberty, then, we must defend religion and work to spread it. In other words, we must evangelize. This takes many forms. Parents and pastors need to form their children and congregants in the truth. Spreading the faith to others — and helping them see the reasonableness of our beliefs — is likewise essential.
So is helping both believers and nonbelievers appreciate the importance of religious liberty. James Madison explained that religious liberty is a natural right “because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator.” Only if people can come to grasp the good of religion will they come to defend robust religious-liberty rights. Even people who aren’t personally religious can see that it is good for us to seek out and answer questions about ultimate origins, destiny, purpose, and meaning. They can see that it is good to live in accordance with religious truth as we each understand it. Religious liberty gives us the space to do precisely that.
And in doing so, it reminds the state that it is limited. As Sherif Girgis and I explain in our new point-counterpoint book with John Corvino, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination, religious liberty plays a crucial role in preserving civil society as something separate from government. It makes conceptual room for — and promotes in practice — private associations and self-determination. Respect for religious liberty sears into political culture an image of government as limited by higher laws: transcendent moral norms and timeless truths about humanity’s pre-political needs and duties.
Government has no natural general mandate to coerce us, with our rights coming merely from its gracious self-restraint. It’s the other way around: Civil society has moral claims on government. A government that can tell nuns that their health-care plan must cover contraception is a government that can do anything.
To meet the attacks on religious liberty, conservatives must avoid two pitfalls: opting out of politics and defending only “our” people.
Religious liberty has been defended almost exclusively by lawyers, pastors, academics, and other people at 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations. As Maggie Gallagher has noted numerous times, social conservatives have largely ignored actual politics. We talk about politics and we litigate to keep the courts from deciding issues against us, but we rarely engage in the actual electoral and political process.
Only one side has flexed political muscle. As Mike Pence will tell you, big business will make it painful for an elected official to do the right thing on these issues. We need 501(c)(4)s, PACs and super PACs, 527s, and other organizations to engage in direct political action, supporting bills and politicians that are good for religious liberty and opposing those that do it harm. What the Susan B. Anthony List has done for the pro-life cause we need done for religious liberty.
As for the second pitfall, conservatives must avoid following the Left’s lead in treating religious liberty as a partisan or tribal issue. In abandoning the religious liberty of conservative believers, the Left has betrayed a fundamental human right. Some on the right seem inclined to commit their own version of this mistake by denying the religious-liberty rights of Muslims, such as when towns refuse to let Muslims build mosques. But the same legal standard must apply to all faiths because the same human right is at stake.
Provided they don’t harm the common good, violate human rights, or otherwise offend justice, Muslims should be free to be authentically Muslim, just as Jews should be free to be authentically Jewish and Christians should be free to be authentically Christian. All of America is better off when these freedoms are protected, as they allow room for all of us to live according to our consciences — and to appeal to other people’s consciences in seeking to persuade them of what we regard as the truth in matters of faith.
Religious liberty is not an embrace of relativism. As we disagree about religious truth, we need to agree to leave legal room for that disagreement to play out in worthy and healthy ways — among people who are free to persuade and convert. People are free to try to convince Jack that he should bake the cake, but the government shouldn’t be allowed to force him to do so.
Religious-liberty protections help preserve the conditions that make peaceful coexistence possible. They acknowledge both man’s dignity and the reality of pluralism and diversity even as we work to know and live the truth.
READ MORE:
This Is a Fight for the First Amendment, Not against Gay Marriage
Legal Radicals Don’t Want the ‘Separation of Church of State’
The Supreme Court’s Religious Freedom Message: There Are No Second-Class Citizens
– Ryan T. Anderson is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a contributor to the American Project at the Pepperdine School of Public Policy. He is the author, with Sherif Girgis and John Corvino, of the new book Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination. This article appeared in the August 14 issue of National Review. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
As we inch closer to the start of NHL training camps next week, there are still a few difference-making RFAs who don’t have a contract. We looked at some of those players and their situations on Tuesday, but the most interesting case among them could be Sam Bennett of the Calgary Flames.
The fourth-overall selection of the 2014 draft, Bennett hasn’t developed in the NHL as expected so far. He saw a 10-point dip last season, falling to 26 points in 81 games, and hasn’t found a home on the top line with Johnny Gaudreau and Sean Monahan. Currently fitting on the third line as a centre, it’s hard to gauge what a player with this kind of production and pedigree is worth on the NHL’s market. Especially one without arbitration rights and, therefore, not a ton of leverage.
“The communication has been good, it’s been frequent, it’s finding a spot to land on where everybody’s comfortable with the deal,” Flames GM Brad Treliving said on Sportsnet 960 The Fan’s Boomer in the Morning. “We have a thought in our mind that we think makes sense, they have one in theirs and now it’s just trying to get to something that works for everybody. I’m not discouraged. Like any of these things you keep out the background noise and stay focused on getting a deal and I feel pretty comfortable we will.
Boomer in the Morning Treliving: Talks with Bennett still going September 06 2017 Your browser does not support the audio element.
Share Download
“There’s a sense on both sides — both sides want to get something done.”
As players around the league are beginning to return to their team’s cities for informal, optional skates, Bennett is not with his Flames teammates. This is not at all unusual for a player without a contract, but a reminder how close we are to training camp.
Treliving pointed out the importance of having a player attend training camp to get fully prepared for the start of the season, and the historical precedence for those who miss out on pre-season or the start of the regular season.
“History has shown that missing time, or people who don’t get there on time, usually it’s not a good thing,” Treliving said. “To get ready for an NHL season is difficult. You gotta get the reps, you gotta get playing at NHL pace, you gotta get doing it every day prior to the start of the season. So to get (a contract) done is one thing, we obviously want to get it done in time where Sam can join us.”
Just last season the Flames went through something similar with RFA Johnny Gaudreau, although he was a surefire top-line player coming off a 78-point season. In 2016, there were a number of big RFA deals signed including Mark Scheifele‘s eight-year, $49-million deal, Filip Forsberg‘s six-year, $36-million deal and Nathan MacKinnon‘s seven-year, $44.1-million deal.
Treliving pointed out that while the two situations are similar in that a couple of Flames RFAs are without a contract late in the summer, they’re very different beyond that. In Gaudreau’s case, the league market for those types of players was being defined by all the deals around him, and helped them get to the six-year deal worth $40.5 million that was signed just two days before the start of the regular season.
And not only that, but the fact Gaudreau missed training camp wasn’t as big of a deal as it would be for Bennett, considering the World Cup of Hockey brought him up to speed.
Bennett won’t have that luxury so if he misses camp he’ll start behind the eight-ball. Treliving thinks that will be a motivating factor for both sides as neither one wants Bennett to arrive late.
“Each day you try to bridge the gap and not only that, but you’re trying to support your position and with every day that goes by or with every contract the market becomes a little more solidified. Yeah, I think there are some days when you don’t make a lot of progress, but I think we’re closing in around that time. Lots of times the calendar dictates.
“At the end of the day, Sam’s a hockey player and you get to this time you’ve been training all summer,” Treliving continued. “I think if we don’t have everybody here already we’re pretty close, so you get itchy to get going and I know Sam’s the same way, but we all have to let the business side take care of itself.” | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Hampton Creek, a San Francisco-based startup developing plant-based replacements for eggs, has raised its biggest round of funding yet.
Today, the company announced that it is taking $23 million in a series B round led by Li Ka-Shing's Horizon Ventures. Li is Asia's richest man, with a net worth of $29.2 billion, according to Bloomberg's Billionaire Index.
Josh Tetrick, CEO of Hampton Creek, told us he's thrilled to have Li as an investor. There were plenty of suitors, but Tetrick was attracted to Li because of his connections in Asia.
"Money matters, but we'll have a platform to take what we’ve done and extend it out," says Tetrick. He notes that "38% of egg production is in China. It's a massive market, growing every day. Horizons has experience and connections into the Asian environment."
Hampton Creek makes egg-replacement products based on plants. It sells to consumers and enterprises.
Tetrick says Hampton Creek is working with two Fortune 500 companies to take eggs out of baked goods. It has deals with four other Fortune 500 companies to replace traditional mayonnaise with Hampton Creek's eggless mayo.
Hampton Creek's plant-based mayonnaise tastes pretty much the same, if not better than traditional mayo. (See our blind taste test video here.) Some Whole Foods are using it in chicken salad instead of mayo. And some fast food chains will start using Hampton Creek mayo on sandwiches.
"Our cost structure is our advantage," says Tetrick. "We're 48% more cost effective. The cost of eggs comes from feeding chickens. Unless egg makers are willing to lose money, they don’t have a structure to compete with us. Unless they come up with a way to not feed the chickens."
For consumers, Hampton Creek sells mayo directly in grocery stores. Right now it's only in a few stores, but Tetrick hinted that it would be in more stores in the near future. It also sells a plant-based version of cookie dough that's quite tasty. That will be in stores in a few months.
One of the biggest things Hampton Creek is working on is a plant-based replacement for scrambled eggs. Tetrick is optimistic those will be done by the end of the year.
While that would be a big breakthrough, the goal isn't necessarily to replace eggs you eat for breakfast. It's to cut back on the use of eggs that work their way into every other product.
Says Tetrick, "1.8 trillion eggs get into all these different spots" — Baked goods, fast food, chicken salad, and so on.
The chickens that make the 1.8 trillion eggs aren't treated so well. As Tetrick previously explained to us the, "eggs are coming from rusty cages with chickens sh**ing all over each other."
Tetrick says he will use the new funds for expansion. It's going to get a new testing facility, triple its sales staff, and expand the R&D team.
Tetrick says the hope is that in the next year, or year and half it won't "sound too delirious when we say the conventional egg isn’t going to be around anymore. "
WATCH THIS: We Tried Hampton Creek's Synthetic Eggs
&amp;lt;div&amp;gt;Please enable Javascript to watch this video&amp;lt;/div&amp;gt;
Here's the full release on the funding: | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
OmiseGo is a venture-backed payments company operating in Thailand, with rapid expansion plans to neighbouring countries across Asia-Pacific. In November 2016, Omise was featured on "Forbes as Fintech Rockstar".
The system is designed to provide decentralized banking infrastructure to people in South East Asia, allowing those who may want to switch banks to do so, and those without adequate banking to actually gain the ability to send and receive payments globally.
Despite what most people think, the service has been designed primarily as a way to facilitate payments between completely unrelated parties.
For example, if you are working in the UK and want to send money back to your parents in Thailand, you’d end up using something like Western Union (most don’t have Paypal). Not only is WU extremely expensive, but your parents may get stung for fees and income tax (for importing money into the country).
Also Read: What is Dogecoin (DOGE)? — 'Joke Gone Viral' — Beginner's Guide
The big promise of the crypto world is to get rid of this unnecessary issue – providing a completely decentralized infrastructure through which people are able to send, spend and receive money from around the world
The most important consideration with this system is the way in which it’s trying to build an infrastructure layer to help businesses accept international payments without the need for a central processor. By doing this, the system would give users the ability to actually increase their economic prowess by being able to sell their wares more effectively.
Backed by several venture funds, and having raised a successful round, the Omise company has received a significant amount of press from a large number of high profile finance/business publications (including TechCrunch and Forbes).
What is OmiseGo?
Built on top of Ethereum, OmiseGo was designed to provide financial infrastructure to a large number of people in SE Asia. Unfortunately, it’s original vision seems to have been somewhat diluted in an attempt to get the company to profitability – focusing instead on providing payment gateway infrastructure to businesses.
As mentioned, the system is designed to provide users with the ability to accept and send payments, as well as harnessing a backend infrastructure built on top of the Ethereum network to provide a large number of other services.
Quick Guide: What is Ripple (XRP)? — 'The Goliath that Never Was' — Beginner's Guide
The company has raised over $25m from a number of leading venture capital firms (many of which are based in the US), not only making it a valid proposition for investment but also showcases the requirement for the business to make a profit.
Who created it?
Like many Fintech crypto systems, this is backed by a for-profit operation designed to deliver a service for customers using the blockchain infrastructure – NOT to deliver the infrastructure itself.
Whilst many of these systems have been criticised for their lack of technical innovation, they remain somewhat steadfast in their ability to create long-term/sustainable progress through valid economic development. OmiseGo is no exception to this…
Jun Haegawa (CEO)
Originally from Japan, was involved in founding a series of tech companies mainly in the fields of e-commerce, lifelog and mobile payments. 16+ years of professional experience in web & product design and previously held several management.
Donnie Harinsut (COO)
Expert programmer with over 15 years’ experience in the field of computer science.
Why does it exist?
To quote the OmiseGo Whitepaper:
OmiseGO is building a decentralized exchange, liquidity provider mechanism, clearinghouse messaging network, and asset-backed blockchain gateway. OmiseGO is not owned by any single one party. Instead, it is an open distributed network of validators which enforce behavior of all participants. It uses the mechanism of a protocol token to create a proof-of-stake blockchain to enable enforcement of market activity amongst participants. This high-performance distributed network enforces exchange across asset classes, from fiat-backed issuers to fully decentralized blockchain tokens (ERC-20 style and native cryptocurrencies).
At its core, the system is basically designed to provide decentralized banking facilities for people who either want to get a better deal on their current banking setup or for those without access to financial infrastructure.
You might also be interested: Can Blockchain Change the World? — 3 Signs that it could be the Next Internet
Whilst this might sound great, the most important thing to consider (and this cannot be stressed enough) is that the entire system is unregulated. Banks exist for a reason – they have developed into an integral part of our society, and work closely with governments to provide a secure way to handle money.
Unfortunately, many of the crypto systems coming online are unable to provide this level of assurance. Consequently, you need to be very wary about using them – and trusting them with your finances.
Trajectory
The important consideration with OmiseGo is that it’s fully built on top of the ERC-20 token (IE is entirely reliant on the Ethereum network). This means that adoption should not be that big of a problem because ETH will be handling that for all of its client (DApps).
Typically, with a crypto system like this, what you’re looking for is the ability for the system to be integrated with either current systems, or users of the various systems.
Because OmiseGo has been built on top of Ethereum, the adoption level of the system should be already handled. What’s important is how the system is able to provide for those who may wish to use it — this is where contention arises.
Ultimately, the way that OmiseGo has been proposed is a difficult sell in the best of times – it essentially wants to be a "bank" without the ability to provide credit or debit facilities.
Also Read: What is Nem (XEM)? — 'Ripple in Disguise' — Beginner's Guide
The problem with a system like this is that it’s designed around the idea that their underlying currency is somehow worth something. In the case of this system, it isn’t. Nor is it worth anything through Ethereum, nor Bitcoin.
Each time you spend digital dollars, all you’re really doing is facilitating a payment with another party – probably using a central banking infrastructure to make it work.
The currencies themselves have little-to-no intrinsic value, which is why they have to be backed up by fiat currencies all the time. Thus, when you are actually looking to deal with financial instruments/metrics which imply maintaining the growth of these digital dollars, problems will arise.
You can’t store money in cryptocurrencies. You can trade money through them, but to say that the value of the digital currency is stored in each token is like saying your credit card is worth something on its own. Bitcoin and Ethereum are Visa and Mastercard of a new digital economy. This doesn’t mean they make or store value – they are just vehicles of transfer… facilitating transactions.
Therefore, when looking into a company such as OmiseGo, what you’re really looking at is a way to better manage transactions… rather than infrastructure to help encourage the growth of capital. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
The second instalment of Michael Wolff’s ‘train-wreck fascination’ with the US president speculates on how the fiasco will end
The Trump presidency began as reality TV, with a cast of loud-mouthed, dim-witted chancers embroiled in histrionic tiffs. Then, capitalising on Trump’s threats to Kim Jong-un, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury prospectively upgraded it to a war movie. But the nuclear fulminations were only bluff, and Trump soon began to exchange endearments with the chubby North Korean despot, having been told that he might qualify for the Nobel peace prize.
The world didn’t end after all, and the anticlimax has forced Wolff, in this new account of later developments, to think again about the Trump show’s genre. Siege reclassifies the hapless administration as a comic opera, calls the president a clown, and makes his rants and tantrums sound absurd not alarming.
To keep us quaking, Wolff gives his gossipy narrative a militarised title: we are asked to imagine Trump holed up in the White House as his enemies, armed with subpoenas, close in. Yet this is not the siege of Mafeking, let alone that of Leningrad. The war of attrition waged by Wolff and his fellow journalists has hardly worn Trump down; he retains the freedom of the air, tweeting out a daily barrage of lies and insults and jetting off to stoke up bigots in midwestern arenas or embarrass foreign heads of state who wince as they welcome him on to their soil.
Mostly Siege retells scandalous stories that are pretty familiar, with few fresh disclosures. Despite the indiscreet tattle dribbled into his ear by the disgruntled Steve Bannon, Wolff has no idea what arcane surgical procedure (or impasse in nuptial negotiations?) kept Melania in hospital for a week last summer, let alone how Putin managed to reduce Trump to the status of a brutalised cur during their confidential colloquy in Helsinki.
Insecurity assails this hollow man, who even resents the fact that his adolescent son is about to overtake him in height
The book does have some sharp insights about Trump’s mental deficiencies. Wolff diagnoses narcissism and megalomania, but adds that Trump, despite his keening self-pity, is too imperceptive about people and incurious about their motives to suffer from paranoia. Others rely on incredulous expletives, not clinical jargon, when characterising him. Sean Hannity, the Fox News demagogue who spends hours on the phone with Trump each day, calls him “totally fucking crazy”; Nick Ayers, after briefly rehearsing to replace John Kelly as his chief of staff, flees in horror from a man he allegorises as “Mr Fucking-totally-out-of-his-mind-crazy”.
We knew that Trump was illiterate, and now in a neat symmetry Wolff discloses that he is innumerate as well. “Dysfunctional and inept”, he “can’t walk down steps”, and “doesn’t know how to use a phone”. Insecurity assails this hollow man, who even resents the fact that his adolescent son Barron, elasticised by a sudden vertical spurt, is about to overtake him in height. “How do I stunt his growth?” he often asks as he recoils from the Oedipal beanpole.
Such malevolent blabbing reveals that Trump is all id, “unable to control his own running monologue”. Wolff also suggests that he has “no solely private thoughts”, which is why he is “almost never voluntarily alone, and absolutely never alone and awake without the television on”. His head, it seems, is a reverberantly empty boom box, a woofer surmounted by a teased orange tea cosy.
Trump’s compulsive mendacity is also astutely analysed here. No ordinary political fibber, he’s too intellectually clumsy to dissemble and prevaricate. Untruths, Wolff argues, are his metier and his business strategy, and they insulate him in an alternative reality. The Art of the Deal, in which even Trump’s name on the title page counts as a lie, might have been called The Art of Fiction if Henry James hadn’t got in first. This professional fraudulence makes Trump shameless and in a way blameless: it’s hardly his fault that his followers gobble up the whoppers he feeds them. “He really might,” says Wolff with a shudder, “be a genius.”
At this point the book’s genre switches to sci-fi. What if this “strange organism” with its “uncanny ability to survive every threat” is some kind of unkillable force, like the xenomorph in Alien? Wounded multiple times, Trump has never “bled out”. Even Bannon believes in his “magical properties”, while Trump keeps his guarded distance from the monster he has created by referring to himself in the third person. It’s a relief to learn that, once at least, his coiffed, confected, permatanned persona unravelled and exposed him as nothing more than a senescent baldie: the morning after the Fox pundits ganged up to attack him for reneging on his border wall, he arrived in the Oval Office in such a ferocious tizz that “for a moment, his hair came undone”.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Shameless and blameless’: President Trump at a White House reception. Photograph: Andrew Harrer-Pool/Getty Images
That’s all the comeuppance Wolff can provide. But he speculates impatiently about how the fiasco will end – with a faked heart attack, or a doleful ultimatum delivered by Ivanka? Perhaps with another bankruptcy, if some possibly dodgy money-laundering loans are uncovered? Bannon predicts that, whatever the scenario, Trump “won’t go out classy”.
Wolff, who admits to a “train-wreck fascination with Trump”, was hoping for a catastrophe to coincide with his book’s publication, and reserved his final chapter to deal with the indictments he expected Mueller to issue. Disaster-movie tropes accordingly menace the last pages: the runaway train is about to derail, the aeroplane’s wings are coming off. However, thanks to Mueller’s legalistic caution, Trump didn’t crash and burn, so a flustered Wolff has to apologise for one more anticlimax.
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff – review Read more
He concludes with the kind of teaser that entices television viewers to stay tuned, assuring us that Trump’s “escape, such as it was, would be brief”. There is no reason for the verb’s subjunctive mood, which implies that Wolff already knows what will happen next: his self-destructive subject has so far proved indestructible, which is clearly frustrating.
All the same, Wolff can afford to be cheerful. With retribution postponed, he now has an excuse to write a third money-spinning volume.
• Siege: Trump Under Fire by Michael Wolff is published by Little, Brown (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99 | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Check out our new site Makeup Addiction
Fuck Me, Right
add your own caption
Fuck Me, Right
add your own caption
Fuck Me, Right
add your own caption
Fuck Me, Right
add your own caption
Fuck Me, Right
add your own caption
Fuck Me, Right
add your own caption
Fuck Me, Right
add your own caption
Fuck Me, Right
add your own caption
Fuck Me, Right
add your own caption
Fuck Me, Right
add your own caption
add your own caption
Apparantly I swear a lot Fuck Me, Right? | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Yemen fuel shortage: health concerns rise as rubbish piles up
Sanaa is buried under mounds of rubbish as fuel supplies dry up, leading to fears of a cholera outbreak. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Earlier in December Red Bull asked me to make a quiz for them, I’ve never made a quiz before so after doing theirs thought I may as well make one for myself and here it is.
It’s a mix of just about everything, this season, all time, and of course a bit of silliness.
Related
[qzzr quiz=”144425″ width=”100%” height=”auto” redirect=”true” offset=”0″] | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
In this section you can find all our pages related to the history of communication. From the stone age, to the printing press, all the way up to invention of the computer. The History of communication: definitions, historical perspectives & much more. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
By AP
A woman accused of decapitating her 3-month-old daughter had been ordered by a court to stay away from the child, a prosecutor said Tuesday.
Deasia Watkins had been forbidden to have contact with the baby after she was hospitalised for psychiatric problems, authorities said.
The baby had been placed in an aunt's custody, and a five-year-old at the aunt's house with other children to catch a school bus on Monday found the baby's body on a kitchen counter, Hamilton County prosecutor Joe Deters said.
The aunt apparently was asleep, and the child ran outside for help from a male relative who had dropped them off, Deters said.
Police arriving in response to a 911 call found the baby decapitated and stabbed multiple times with a large chef's knife.
The aunt apparently had let the baby's mother move in with her and the baby about a week earlier, Deters said.
Police found the 20-year-old mother in bed covered with blood, he said, and she was arrested and charged with aggravated murder.
"This is one of the most disturbing cases I have ever seen in my life," Deters said.
The baby's injuries also included a fractured arm, county coroner Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco said. The knife used to kill the baby had been placed in the baby's hand, authorities said.
"These are images that will be indelibly marked in my memory," Sammarco said.
Deters said the mother hadn't spoken and remained under guard at a hospital, where she couldn't be reached for comment. The prosecutor said he doesn't anticipate seeking the death penalty in the case.
"It was pretty clear to the officers involved that she is suffering from some serious mental issues," Deters said.
In the 911 call, a woman who apparently was the aunt can be heard crying hysterically and asking for help while repeating, "Oh, my God!"
"My niece killed her baby," she said.
She told the dispatcher that she was asleep when her son, who had come to drop off the children, came in and woke her up, saying the baby was dead.
The son then told the dispatcher that he had seen the baby's body on the kitchen counter but did not know what happened.
"It's a very violent scene," he said.
Local media outlets reported that Watkins was diagnosed with postpartum psychosis after a January incident in which police responded to a report of a woman screaming and that a juvenile court judge this month ordered Hamilton County Job and Family Services to take custody of the baby.
Juvenile court offices were closed Tuesday evening.
Deters said: "It looks like JFS did their job exactly how they should, but you don't have the resources to be in the house 24/7."
He said the baby's father has not been located.
(Image via Shutterstock)
Follow Emirates 24|7 on Google News. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
A young Buffalo couple has opened up a market on the city’s Lower West Side/Historic West Village dedicated to foods that are pickled. Buffalo Barrel + Brine is located in a former corner store that was once considered the thorn in the side of the neighborhood. After neighbors fought to have the business closed, the space sat empty for quite a while. Recently RJ and Lindsey Marvin decided the it was the perfect location to open a pickling business. “We live right down the street,” said Lindsey. “Ever since I’ve known RJ, he’s wanted a corner type store such as this.”
If you’re still trying to wrap your head around the idea of a market that is dedicated to the art of pickling, then you probably haven’t been doing a lot of traveling to larger cities like NYC and Montreal. “Those types of cities have dozens of shops that are dedicated to particular types of foods,” RJ mentioned. “There are cheese shops, fish mongers, pickle shops, etc. Buffalo’s restaurant scene is finally starting to arrive, which means that there are going to be more people who appreciate specialty foods. Some people think that it’s weird, but there are a lot of people who love what we’re doing.”
During a recent visit to the shop, called Buffalo Barrel + Brine, three young kids from the neighborhood walked in with skateboards in hand expecting to find a store that sold candy, most likely. One of them shouted out, “What kind of a place is this? What do you sell?” “Pickles!” replied RJ. The three youngsters looked at each other, before one of them exclaimed loudly, “That’s weird – this place smells like pickles!” Upon, realizing they had walked into a pickle shop they abruptly walked out.
Fortunately, the rest of the people that walked into the pickle shop during my visit all arrived in search of pickles. One woman walked up to the front counter and sampled a number of slices, before proclaiming her favorite variety. A couple of young guys walked in looking for one of the bread and butter varietals, but they were already sold out. Sold out! Yes, there appear to be a lot of pickle fans out there who are extremely happy to have these picklers in the neighborhood. “It’s like going to a brewery and ordering a flight of beers,” RJ explained. “But instead of beers, it’s pickles.”
Before long, I found myself trying a number of the different house pickled cukes – some in vinegar and brine, and others in salt water. RJ’s favorite is the Buffalo Sour (a full sour), which is fully fermented in salt water, with garlic and a couple of spices. It’s raw, all natural, and took a month to make. After popping one into my mouth, RJ told me, “It’s yeasty and funky… it’s like being in NYC in an old Italian or Jewish deli – there’s nothing else like it.”
While the Buffalo Sour was not the number one on my list, I did find that the rest of the pickles that I sampled were pretty dynamite, especially the bread and butters. “Those are great,” said RJ. “The bread and butter dates back to times when people were too poor to eat anything but bread and butter. Occasionally, if they were lucky, they managed to come across this style of pickle, which they would put on top of the bread and butter, hence the name. Then we have the Million Dollar Pickle, which was resurrected from old Amish recipes, resurrecting old world recipes. If you like beer, then try the Southern Tier IPA Pickles, which are dry-hopped with fresh hops.” It’s true – the pickle has an IPA taste about it!
For those of you wondering how RJ and Lindsey got into all of this, it all started when RJ was working at Elm Street Bakery. “He worked in the restaurant business for 17 years,” said Lindsey. “Elm Street had a market, which is where he got a lot of experience in the business. He was doing a lot of pickling at the time, but he wasn’t able to do everything that he wanted. He wanted to experiment with pickling – he wanted to create flavors that no one else was doing. In order to achieve that goal, we needed to open this business.”
“It started when I was young,” RJ added. “It’s something that I always knew how to do. My grandparents preserved their tomatoes for the winter time, and my dad was always pickling. I was always helping when I was young. For years I was making kombucha (fermented tea) at home. I was also pickling and fermenting. Now I have taken all of these learning experiences and applied them to a business.”
Aside from pickles, Buffalo Barrel + Brine does carry a number of other products including house made kimchi and sauerkraut. The owners even serve up kimchi shots! When they make ferments, they create additional brine and add juices – it’s essentially a probiotic gutshot, according to RJ. There are also a number of products that are sourced from other supplier friends in the industry, such as BBQ sauce and rub. But most everything right now comes from the brain of RJ, who considers himself a Willy Wonka sort of character when it comes to pickles. “Next we want to do miso and vinegars… a steam punk cider vinegar… barrel aged,” RJ reflected. “The door is wide open for all sorts of ideas. In NYC there are people who come together as a ‘think tank’, dreaming up different ideas. I want to do that here in Buffalo. Maybe we might have one kick-ass sandwich that is what we become known for. We might do pop-up grilled cheese or tacos. Right now I’m looking for a rabbi – we want to be certified kosher [seriously]. I’m also thinking about putting out a Craig’s List ad, in search of a couple of old Italian guys who would sit outside and play dominoes all day [laughing].”
In the end, RJ dedicates much of the success of the market to his wife. “She helped to shred 300 pounds of cabbage a couple of days ago, and she plays a huge role in the day to day operation,” he told me. “She is 100% involved. I couldn’t do it without her. I wouldn’t do it without her. We both make the decisions, and we both roll up our sleeves.”
Was I expecting to see a pickle shop open at the foot of Johnson Park, in the shadow of The Avant? No. Am I anticipating heading back to score a jar of bread and butters as soon as they are available? Of course!
Buffalo Barrel + Brine is going to become a mainstay in the neighborhood, hopefully fueling others to follow their own culinary passions, no matter how weird they may seem. In the end, it’s these types of places that will enhance our city’s overall culinary prowess. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
“The kind of damage that you’re seeing coming out of the Panhandle of Florida would be similar to what we would see if we were to have a Category 4 hurricane that actually came in and made landfall,” said Bob Ballard, a science and operations officer at the National Weather Service-Honolulu. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
What's the most powerful weapon you can wield when playing Halo 3 online?
I know. You can control the entire map with a battle rifle and a couple of sticky grenades. But that teeny-bopper you just pwned has you beat with the tiny botnet he leased with his allowance money.
That's because Xbox Live gamers are increasingly turning to easy-to-use botnet software with names like "Bio Zombie Booter" to exact lingering revenge on their online foes, reports Christopher Boyd at SpyWareGuide.com.
Several programs available online, accompanied by YouTube tutorials, make it easy to sniff out your opponent's IP address, then aim a few dozen zombie machines at him in a distributed denial-of-service attack.
Steal my flag, will you? Enjoy being offline for the rest of the night, newb.
The cyberwar tactic has been an underground *Halo 3 *phenomenon for a while — complaints of DDoSing abound on gamemaker Bungie's community forum. But now the botnets are "quickly becoming mainstream," Boyd reports. The control software is free, but the entrepreneurial spoilsports behind it sometimes lease the bots for about $2 per zombie. Forty to 60 zombies are recommended to get a decent DDoS going against your enemy's Xbox 360.
Of course, the potential market for this malware is limited to those gamers who take Halo so seriously that they'll commit a felony over it — say, 500,000 or so. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
C'est pratiquement tous les jours les mêmes relevés depuis le début du mois de juillet. La température de la mer Méditerranée dépasse les 26°C. Un chiffre que l'on atteint habituellement au mois d'août. En raison de sa situation et de sa configuration - fermée et bordée de reliefs, à l'est d'un vaste océan et au nord d'un des plus grands déserts du monde -, elle est, d'après les spécialistes, la mer la plus sensible au réchauffement climatique.
Les premières victimes de ce "gros coup de chaud" ne sont autres que les poissons, les plantes et les planctons qui vivent dans ces eaux. "Comme pour les humains, des températures plus élevées demandent aux organismes marins des ajustements physiologiques pour continuer à fonctionner correctement, explique Émilie Villar, chercheuse en écologie marine à Marseille. Les organismes les plus adaptables résistent, parfois en subissant des lésions fragilisantes. Certains peuvent migrer soit vers des latitudes plus élevées ou dans des eaux plus profondes, mais les plus faibles risquent de périr", précise-t-elle.
700 espèces menacées de disparition
Pollution, surexploitation des ressources marines, dérangement de l’habitat, concurrence avec des espèces introduites... la spécialiste pointe du doigt d'autres facteurs qui causent leur progressive perte. En tout, 700 espèces marines sont menacées d'extinction en Méditerranée. "Jusqu’à certains seuils, les organismes peuvent s’acclimater en ajustant leur physiologie ou en fuyant la perturbation. Mais, si le stress dure trop longtemps et/ou que les espèces sont incapables de fuir la perturbation car ils sont fixés, ils peuvent dépérir. Cette niche écologique pourra alors être habitée par de nouvelles espèces plus adaptées aux fortes températures ou devenir des "déserts" si les conditions sont trop défavorables à la vie", continue Émilie Villar.
La Méditerranée compte entre 10 et 20 000 espèces marines - faune et flore confondues -, dont 25 % sont endémiques et la plupart ne peut pas s'adapter à un tel changement. C'est le cas notamment des posidonies (des plantes aquatiques, ndlr). "Le risque est grand car elle n’est pas capable de se replier dans une niche plus adaptée à ses conditions de vie, et cette flore risque d’être mise en concurrence avec d’autres espèces plus adaptées à des conditions plus chaudes", détaille la chercheuse.
L'arrivée d'espèces tropicales
Cette population, fragile, pourrait être à long terme remplacée par une autre, plus tropicale, et bouleverser de ce fait l'écosystème actuel. "Tout l’écosystème va être déséquilibré, et à cause de l’interaction forte entre océan et climat, cela aura des conséquences très importantes, même sur les populations humaines plus ou moins éloignées de la mer : orages très intenses, montées de eaux, etc." | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
"So, you were defeated again?" A voice said from no direction, yet all directions. "You really didn't fight all to much either... Maybe you shouldn't have covered a whole planet in darkness..."
I open my red black and white eye and look around. I'm back here again... The white space of death... I sigh, knowing that Kirby killed me... The voice was all over, but couldn't be seen anywhere. It was, like I've said, in all directions, yet no direction. Was I foating? I could never tell because there were no shadows.
I'm a white blob that went through reincarnation once before. I have my one eye, a halo, two disembodied shapes with three more disembodied gem-like shapes and six more disembodied gem shaped things on either side of me to make two disembodied wings. My name changes constantly. Zero... Zero 2 O2 Zero squared...
"Maybe I shouldn't take you back anymore... You don't show any signs of wanting to go back..." The voice said.
I think for a second. I don't want pain anymore... I don't want there to be nothing either...
"Wait... I want to go back, just once more..." I said.
"... There is a spot you could take in fate..."
"Fate?"
I was confused. The voice never said anything about fate before. I think the voice knew I was confused, because they started to explain things
"All the other times, your fate has been randomized... but this time your fate would be sealed..." The voice said. "Are you sure you want to go back? What would make you want to go back again?"
"I have an idea... One that would keep me from being killed again... I... also want to try to be happy" I said.
"I see... I think I know what your idea is, but this fate would have you battle... but you won't die, as long as you stick to your fate." the voice said.
"What would my fate be?"
"If you stick to your fate, you will find happiness... You would need to be good... Never do things like killing because others are happy."
"So, don't be the bad guy basically?"
"Yes."
I think for a moment, pondering on what I should do. Is being good, really worth living? I decide to try, because if I choose not to be good, I could say I tried.
"Okay, I can do that." I say.
"You will figure out the rest of your fate on your time back in Dreamland." the voice says.
"Wait, where Kirby lives!"
"Yes."
"Fine... take me to Dreamland."
"Goodbye."
After they say bye, the area turns black, and I become unconscious. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
The scandal engulfing two of our top military and intelligence officers could not be coming at a worse time: the Middle East has never been more unstable and closer to multiple, interconnected explosions. Virtually every American president since Dwight Eisenhower has had a Middle Eastern country that brought him grief. For Ike, it was Lebanon’s civil war and Israel’s Sinai invasion. For Lyndon Johnson, it was the 1967 Six-Day War. For Nixon, it was the 1973 war. For Carter, it was the Iranian Revolution. For Ronald Reagan, it was Lebanon. For George H.W. Bush, it was Iraq. For Bill Clinton, it was Al Qaeda and Afghanistan. For George W. Bush, it was Iraq and Afghanistan. For Barack Obama’s first term, it was Iran and Afghanistan, again. And for Obama’s second term, I fear that it could be the full nightmare — all of them at once. The whole Middle East erupts in one giant sound and light show of civil wars, states collapsing and refugee dislocations, as the keystone of the entire region — Syria — gets pulled asunder and the disorder spills across the neighborhood.
And you were worried about the “fiscal cliff.”
Ever since the start of the Syrian uprising/civil war, I’ve cautioned that while Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Tunisia implode, Syria would explode if a political resolution was not found quickly. That is exactly what’s happening.
The reason Syria explodes is because its borders are particularly artificial, and all its communities — Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Kurds, Druze and Christians — are linked to brethren in nearby countries and are trying to draw them in for help. Also, Sunni-led Saudi Arabia is fighting a proxy war against Shiite-led Iran in Syria and in Bahrain, which is the base of the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet. Bahrain witnessed a host of bombings last week as the Sunni-led Bahraini regime stripped 31 Bahraini Shiite political activists of their citizenship. Meanwhile, someone in Syria decided to start lobbing mortars at Israel. And, Tuesday night, violent anti-government protests broke out across Jordan over gas price increases.
Image Thomas L. Friedman Credit... Josh Haner/The New York Times
What to do? I continue to believe that the best way to understand the real options — and they are grim — is by studying Iraq, which, like Syria, is made up largely of Sunnis, Shiites, Christians and Kurds. Why didn’t Iraq explode outward like Syria after Saddam was removed? The answer: America. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Missouri transfer Blake Harris has committed to NC State, he told ESPN on Wednesday.
A North Carolina native, Harris visited the Wolfpack's campus earlier this week.
The 6-foot-3 guard originally committed to Washington in the summer before his senior year of high school but decommitted after coach Lorenzo Romar was fired. Once Michael Porter Sr. was hired as an assistant coach at Missouri and Michael Porter Jr. followed, Harris made the switch to Missouri as well.
Ranked No. 99 in the ESPN 100 for the Class of 2017, Harris averaged 3.8 points and 3.1 assists in 14 games at Missouri this season.
While NC State is adding Harris, it is losing junior forward Shaun Kirk. The 6-foot-8 reserve player is headed to UNC Pembroke where he can play with his brother, Tyrell Kirk, who is a guard for the Division II Braves.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Economic Works of Karl Marx 1861-1864
The Process of Production of Capital, Draft Chapter 6 of Capital
Results of the Direct Production Process
Written: Summer of 1864;
Source: Volume 34 of MECW;
Translated: by Ben Fowkes;
Scan & Mark-up: Andy Blunden.
Table of Contents
Introduction to document
Marx's Opening Remarks
1) Commodities as the Product of Capital
Transition from Section §2 and 3 of this chapter to 3
2) Capitalist Production as the Production of Surplus Value
6) The Direct Production Process
Formal Subsumption of Labour under Capital
The Real Subsumption of Labour under Capital or the Specifically Capitalist Mode of Production
[Supplementary Remarks on the Formal Subsumption of Labour under Capital]
The Real Subsumption of Labour under Capital
Productive and Unproductive Labour
Gross and Net Product
Mystification of Capital, etc.
3) The Product of Capitalist Production Is Not Only Surplus Value, It is Capital
Marx's Unplaced Footnotes in Manuscripts of 1863-1866
Editors' Footnotes
The Manuscript begins
[441] Chapter Six. Results of the Direct Production Process
Three points need to be considered in this chapter:
1) Commodities as the product of capital, of capitalist production;
2) Capitalist production is the production of surplus value;
3) Finally, it is the production and reproduction of the whole relation through which this direct production process is characterised as specifically capitalist.
Of these 3 headings, No. 1 should be placed last, not first, in the final revision before printing, since it forms the transition to the second book — the circulation process of capital. But for the sake of convenience we shall begin with it here. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Check out our new site Makeup Addiction
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
Put laundry away able to match all the socks | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Hillary Clinton’s aides were questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation about her use of a private and unsecured email server when she was still serving as the secretary of State, a sign that the investigation is nearing its end.
Among those interviewed by the FBI is Clinton’s longtime adviser, Huma Abedin. She was questioned by the FBI about Hillary Clinton’s decision to exchange sensitive information using a private email server while she was the secretary of State. The investigation is trying to determine whether Clinton has put the nation’s security at risk by sending and receiving classified information via her unsecured server.
#DropOutHillary Your private server was registered in the name of a JP Morgan employee No amount of lies can save U https://t.co/DlJCtfvhBZ — Free (R) women (@KristinP22) May 4, 2016
According to CNN, the probe is still ongoing, but the authorities have so far found no evidence to prove that Hillary Clinton “willfully violated the law.” Officials confirmed they are still looking into the matter aggressively and they are hoping to get a word from the former secretary of State so they can wrap up the investigation before the national elections.
A number of other Hillary Clinton aides have also been questioned by the FBI. The bureau has not yet scheduled an interview with Clinton, but they are expecting to meet with her in the coming weeks, officials said.
Abedin has recently provided information for the investigation, but her legal representatives remain quiet about the interview. The FBI officials assured that interviews of Clinton and her staff are a routine part of an investigation like this.
#clinton #hillaryclinton #hillaryclintonemail #email #unbelievable A photo posted by Andy Joseph Dupré (@_andy_dupre.13) on Oct 21, 2015 at 2:34pm PDT
The FBI investigation centers on the security of the private email server and whether Hillary Clinton mishandled classified information by using an unsecured server. FBI officials involved in the case and even the Justice Department are tight-lipped about the result of the inquiry. Clinton’s attorney has not yet commented on the recent development of the investigation.
Brian Pagliano, a former Clinton aide and the IT specialist who helped set up the server, reportedly provided relevant documents and other materials and interviews to the FBI just recently. Pagliano has been granted immunity by the Justice Department according to reports.
The FBI is expecting to finalize the investigation in the next few weeks and submit the findings to the Justice Department. The Justice Department will then decide whether to file charges against Hillary Clinton or any of the people involved.
The most crucial part of the probe will be the interview with Hillary Clinton, but her being active on the campaign trail poses serious logistical challenges for the FBI. She is regularly followed by campaign reporters, so the federal investigators plan to ask her lawyers to facilitate the interview to make sure that the meeting can be done privately, according to CNN.
Throughout the whole investigation, Hillary Clinton has firmly maintained that she never sent nor received classified information through her private email server during her tenure as the secretary of State. Lawyers of the presidential hopeful also said she is willing to cooperate with the FBI.
@thehill
3/9/16 Fact checking the Hillary Clinton email controversy https://t.co/zHAseIUKBI — jon ewall (@jeazman) April 27, 2016
“From the start, Hillary Clinton has offered to answer any questions that would help the Justice Department complete its review, and we hope and expect that anyone else who is asked would do the same. We are confident the review will conclude that nothing inappropriate took place,” Brian Fallon, Clinton campaign spokesman, said.
On Wednesday, Romanian hacker Guccifer, Marcel Lehel Lazar in real life, told Fox News he was able to hack Hillary Clinton’s home-based server. However, FBI officials have dismissed his claims. Reports say investigators found no sign that the hacker was able to breach Clinton’s server.
Officials believe that if the man had succeeded in hacking Hillary Clinton’s email, he would have released them just like he did to the accounts of some other high-profile people he victimized in the past.
[Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images] | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Did you ever wonder how Google tests screen lag on Android and Chrome OS devices? You may say manually but test results won’t be as accurate as the Chrome TouchBot. The latter is a special robot designed by the Chrome OS team and built by OptoFidelity, a Finnish tech company. The robot measures end-to-end latency of all Chrome OS and Android devices.
François Beaufort, the self-proclaimed Chrome Happiness Evangelist, shared a video that shows a high speed video recording of the Touchbot showing how “drawing a line on a screen is actually drawn in segments that fade in slowly”. Watch the video below and see for yourself:
There are more latency tests available like Tap, Click, FPS, Move, Scroll, and Flash. You can view the results on crostouchlatency.appspot.com. As for the Touchbot source code, the open-source is available at Chromium.googlesource.com.
On the video, you will see how the Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 7, and Nexus 9 have been tested for screen lag. Google doesn’t like lag on smartphones so this Chrome TouchBot is expected to spot delays by poking the screen many times, making several swipes in several web-based tests.
Such tests are aimed to identify hardware and coding problems or if there are any. Honestly, it’s just one of the many monitoring devices Google is using because it is said to be one of most important tools since a lot of Android actions involve touch.
SOURCE: François Beaufort, Google | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
If you want to turn a barren lot into a permaculture paradise, you’ve got to start from the ground up. Sheet mulching is an easy way to start. You start with a biodegradable weed barrier like cardboard, and from there build a thick, layered substrate for your garden with compost and mulch. As the materials break down, worms move in, softening the soil below, and creating a healthy, aerated planting bed where once there was compacted, dead clay.
The following is an excerpt from Perennial Vegetables by Eric Toensmeier. It has been adapted for the web.
Sheet mulching combines soil improvement, weed removal, and long-term mulching in one fell swoop. This technique, also known as lasagna gardening, can build remarkable soils in just a few years. There are several key components. First, a weed barrier like cardboard is laid down to smother weeds. In theory (and quite often in practice) the cardboard decomposes after the weeds have all died and turned into compost. The second ingredient is to add compost, or build a layered compost pile that will enrich your new garden bed. The third step is to add a thick layer of mulch on top, to keep new weeds from getting established.
I have had great results with sheet mulching, although sometimes the first year is a bit rough on delicate species, until the raw materials break down. You can use sheet mulching to turn lawns or weedy waste areas into gardens in just a few hours, or even to build soil from scratch inside built frames for raised beds. Sheet mulch can range from just a few inches thick to 2 feet or more, depending on how bad your soil is and how much raw material you have available (it will cook down and settle quite a bit).
Nine Simple Steps to Sheet Mulching
Mow or cut your lawn, weeds, or other vegetation right down to the ground. Plant any crops that will require a large planting hole (including woody plants, perennials in large pots, and large transplants). Add soil amendments (as determined by your soil test). Water the whole area thoroughly. You are going to be putting a layer of cardboard or newspaper over it, and rain and irrigation won’t soak through very well until that weed barrier breaks down. Water also helps the decomposition process get going. If you have compost materials that may contain weed seeds (like fresh manure, leaves, or hay), spread them in layers on the ground. Put a dry, carbonaceous layer of hay or shredded leaves below any manure layer. Avoid thick layers, and make sure to get a good carbon-to-nitrogen ratio just as if you were building a compost pile. Water this layer well. Lay down a weed barrier. I prefer to use large sheets of cardboard from appliance stores, because these last longer and are quicker to lie down. You can use layers of wet newspaper too. Make sure to have a 4- to 6-inch overlap where sheets meet so buried weeds can’t find a route to the surface. If you have already planted crops, or have other preexisting plants, don’t mulch over them. Cut holes in the cardboard to make some breathing space for each plant (or leave some room around each plant when laying newspaper). Now you can add your weed-free organic materials. I like to keep it simple, and just add a nice layer of compost. You can also do some sheet composting here, alternating layers of nitrogen-rich materials like fresh grass clippings with carbonaceous materials like weed-free straw. Now you add your final top mulch layer, at least 3 inches thick. Water the whole bed thoroughly once again. Your sheet mulch bed is complete. You can plant right into your bed if you like. To plant tubers or potted plants, just pull back the top layers until you get to the weed barrier. Cut an X in the cardboard or newspaper. If you are transplanting a large plant, peel back the corners of the X. Throw a double handful of compost in the planting hole and then put in the plant. Pull the layers and top mulch back around the plant, water well, and you’re all set. Planting seeds is easy too. Just pull back the top mulch to the compost layer and plant your seeds. You may want to cut through the weed barrier below first, depending on weed pressure below the barrier. If you are planting seeds, be sure to water regularly, as compost on top of cardboard can dry out quickly.
Sheet mulch can be as simple as three layers: cardboard, compost, and straw. But compost isn’t cheap, and it can be fun and thrifty to add layers of organic materials that will break down to make compost on their own. When doing so, you want to alternate layers of high-nitrogen material (greens) with high-carbon material (browns), just like the recipe you use to build an ordinary compost pile.
You want to have more carbon materials than nitrogen: the ideal ratio by weight is 30:1 carbon to nitrogen, which translates roughly to two to three times as much carbon bulk as nitrogen. Keep these layers thin (3 inches at most) and they will break down more quickly. Some items should be shredded first—leaves because they mat, and large items like cornstalks so they break down more quickly. Remember also that some materials must be kept below the root barrier because they may contain viable seeds.
Recommended Reads | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Lyijykromaatteja käytetään metalliväreissä, muovin värjäyksessä ja liikennemerkeissä.
Lyijykromaatit aiheuttavat syöpää, mutta EU on sallinut niiden myynnin alueellaan, kirjoittaa kolme ruotsalaisministeriä mielipidekirjoituksessa sanomalehti Svenska Dagbladetissa (siirryt toiseen palveluun) lauantaina. Siksi Ruotsin hallitus haastaa EU-komission EU-oikeuteen.
Ruotsalaisministerit vastustavat EU:n yhdelle yritykselle myöntämää lupaa myydä lyijykromaatteja väriaineena. Lyijykromaatteja käytetään metalliväreissä, muovin värjäyksessä ja liikennemerkeissä. Ministerien mukaan ne voi kuitenkin korvata turvallisilla vaihtoehdoilla.
Ann Linde, Karolina Skog ja Mikael Damberg kirjoittavat, että Ruotsin hallitus haastaa EU-komission EU-oikeuteen. Kuvakaappaus Svenska Dagbladetin verkkosivustolta.
Ministerien mielestä EU:n myöntämä lupa vaarantaa EU:n kemikaaliasetuksen Reachin ja vaikeuttaa vaarallisten aineiden myynnin pysäyttämisen jatkossa.
He huomauttavat, että lyijy on yksi vaarallisimmista ihmiskunnan tuntemista aineista. Se on erityisen haitallinen sikiöille ja pienille lapsille. Se voi aiheuttaa käyttäytymishäiriöitä ja oppimisvaikeuksia.
Ruotsin hallitus haastaa EU-komission EU-tuomioistuimeen. Asiasta kirjoittavat EU- ja kauppaministeri Ann Linde, ympäristöministeri Karolina Skog ja elinkeino- ja innovaatioministeri Mikael Damberg. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Check out our new site Makeup Addiction
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
add your own caption
Saw my probation officer didnt get drug tested | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Submitted on June 8, 2011
Much of the current education debate consists of a constant, ongoing argument about the role of poverty. One “side” is accused of using poverty as an excuse for not improving schools, and of saying that poverty is destiny in regard to educational outcomes. The other “side” is accused of completely ignoring the detrimental effects of poverty, and of arguing that market-based reforms can by themselves transform our public education system.
Both portrayals are inaccurate, and both “sides” know it, yet the accusations continue. Of course there is a core of truth in the characterizations, but the differences are far more nuanced than the opponents usually communicate. It’s really a matter of degree. In addition to differences in the specifics of what should be done, a lot boils down to variations in how much improvement we believe can be gained by teacher-focused education reform (or by education reform in general) by itself. In other words, some people have higher expectations than others.
I have previously argued that the reasonable expectation for teacher quality-based reforms is that, if everything goes perfectly (which is far from certain), they will generate very slow, gradual improvement over a period of years and decades. This means we should make these changes, but be very careful to design them sensibly, monitor their effects, and maintain realistic expectations (for the record, I think we are, in many respects, falling short on all three counts).
But the thing that I find a little frustrating about the whole poverty/education thing is that, while nobody should use poverty as an excuse in education policy, it’s not uncommon to hear education used as an excuse, of sorts, in discussions about anti-poverty policy.
These days, if you ask a politician or prominent public figure (of either party) about what they’re doing for the poor, they tend to talk mostly about education.
Obviously, to some degree, this makes perfect sense. A stronger education system is a key means by which poverty and inequality might be alleviated in the long term. Education belongs in that conversation, in a prominent role. Nevertheless, just as poverty shouldn’t be the only focus in discussions about improving education, education shouldn’t crowd out everything else in discussions about reducing poverty.
I’m not trying to erect another straw man - there are many substantive, meaningful discussions going on, and nobody thinks education is the only solution. Yet even as the recession decimates low-income families, the safety net continues to erode. And I sometimes feel like much of what passes for political rhetoric on strategies to fight this poverty – and justify these huge cuts in programs that do so - consists mostly of “we need to fix bad schools," with only passing reference to any other type of program (see here, here, here, here, here and here).
This is no better than saying we can’t fix schools until we "fix poverty." Anti-poverty policy, though costly, is very effective in the U.S., and education is only one among many factors that contribute to poverty and inequality (as is partially evident in the fact that much of the rise in inequality in the U.S. has occurred among similarly-educated people). In addition, while improving public education will help millions of people, the benefits will elude everyone who is beyond school age. These people need help now, and no amount of K-12 education reform will provide it.
Mitigating poverty will improve education outcomes, and vice-versa. So let’s not allow either to be an "excuse" for failing to comprehensively address the other.
- Matt Di Carlo | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
POLITICO Playbook: The case for Trump to shut down the government Presented by Amazon
A government shutdown could be President Donald Trump’s last chance to get a border wall. | Ethan Miller/Getty Images
DRIVING THE DAY
THE POLITICAL CASE FOR PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP TO SHUT DOWN THE GOVERNMENT … If you’re Trump, is there any cogent case to NOT shut down the government one week from today? Here is what a few of the president's allies are whispering to us.
-- IT WOULDN’T HURT TOO BADLY ... Congress has already passed a bunch of government spending bills, ensuring a shutdown would only be a partial stoppage of government funding. Trump has bills on his desk that fund critical parts of government. Much of the money Trump wants would come in Department of Homeland Security appropriations. So if he wanted to take a stand, it would be narrowly targeted to one department.
-- THIS IS WHAT HE PROMISED … If you are a Republican lawmaker who believes that the 2016 election was about Trump’s hard-line immigration policies -- as many conservatives tell us they do -- shouldn’t you take a stand on that while you can? Shouldn’t Republicans fear their base is going to stay home if an all-Republican Washington blows it on the wall?
-- WASHINGTON MIGHT NOT BE RED FOR LONG … This could be the president’s last chance to get a wall. The House is looking like it could be lost come January. No chance in hell that the leftward-drifting House will give him the wall if they get the majority in 2019. Zero. Zip. Zilch. If Ds win the House, there is no chance the president will get a wall in the lame duck, either.
-- WON’T HILL REPUBLICANS FIND A WAY TO FOLD? … Think of this: in this scenario, DHS will have no money 39 days before the election. Who is more likely to fold: Trump, who is still fuming he folded last time? Or House Republicans, who will be incentivized to put the episode behind them so they can get home to campaign? And Senate Republicans seem to be drifting ever closer to the president.
OF COURSE, Hill Republicans say they’re adamantly against a shutdown. And there would be other political and substantive pain that came along with a narrow government shutdown. But you can easily see Washington getting there. And Democrats are running on government dysfunction, so if Republicans get close, the minority have no incentive to help out.
46 DAYS until Election Day. (Phish has a song called “46 Days,” in case you are into that.)
Good Friday morning. JUST POSTED … WHAT TEAM PELOSI IS DEVOURING ... BLOOMBERG’S JOSH GREEN: “Internal GOP Poll: Pelosi Beats Trump in a Head-to-Head Matchup”: “President Trump likes to mock Nancy Pelosi, but a private survey conducted for the [RNC] finds that she’s actually more popular—and beats the president when the midterm election is framed as a contest between the two.
“The internal poll, conducted by Public Opinion Strategies and obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek, asks registered voters who they support ‘when the November election is framed by Trump and Pelosi.’ Overall, respondents prefer Pelosi-aligned candidates over Trump-aligned candidates by 5 points, 50 percent to 45 percent. Among independents only, Pelosi still prevails by a 4-point margin. The poll was completed on Sept. 2.” Bloomberg
-- BLOOMBERG’S SAHIL KAPUR and JOSH GREEN: “Internal GOP Poll: ‘We’ve Lost the Messaging Battle’ on Tax Cuts”
THE NRCC reported raising $5 million in September, compared to the DCCC’s $15 million.
THE LATEST ON BRETT KAVANAUGH …
BURGESS EVERETT and ELANA SCHOR: “Accuser’s camp floats Thursday testimony, other conditions in talks with Senate”: “Christine Blasey Ford’s attorneys held a high-stakes call with Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday night that ended with no decision on when or if Ford will testify about allegations that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
“One source described the call as ‘positive,’ though there is no ironclad agreement to have Ford appear and Ford’s attorneys made some requests that the committee won’t accommodate — such as subpoenaing Mark Judge, whom Ford alleged was in the room when Kavanaugh groped and forced himself on her while both were in high school. Senate Republicans had planned a Monday hearing and sought an agreement by Friday morning to appear, though those are no longer viewed as a hard deadline.
“Ford lawyers Debra Katz and Lisa Banks spoke to staff from Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) about possible scenarios for an appearance next week. And Ford seems amenable to a public hearing after being offered a private one, though with some stipulations.” POLITICO
A message from Amazon: Over the last 20 years, sales from our independent sellers have grown to account for more than half of everything sold in our store, and their sales are growing faster than our own retail sales. Learn how Amazon continues to accelerate our support for small businesses selling in our store.
WHAT EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT -- WaPo’s Seung Min Kim, Josh Dawsey and Emma Brown: “Ed Whelan, a former clerk to the late justice Antonin Scalia and president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, pointed to floor plans, online photographs and other information to suggest a location for the house party in suburban Maryland that Ford described.
“He also named and posted photographs of the classmate he suggested could be responsible. Ford dismissed Whelan’s theory in a statement late Thursday: ‘I knew them both, and socialized with’ the other classmate, Ford said, adding that she had once visited him in the hospital. ‘There is zero chance that I would confuse them.’
“Republicans on Capitol Hill and White House officials immediately sought to distance themselves from Whelan’s claims and said they were not aware of his plans to identify the former classmate, now a middle school teacher, who could not be reached for comment and did not answer the door at his house Thursday night. Whelan did not respond to requests for comment.
“He had told people around him that he had spent several days putting together the theory and thought it was more convincing than her story, according to two friends who had talked to him. Whelan has been involved in helping to advise Kavanaugh’s confirmation effort and is close friends with both Kavanaugh and Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society who has been helping to spearhead the nomination. Kavanaugh and Whelan also worked together in the Bush administration.” WaPo
-- @GarrettVentry, communications adviser for Senate Judiciary: “To reporters asking: The Senate Judiciary Committee had no knowledge or involvement.”
Playbook PM Sign up for our must-read newsletter on what's driving the afternoon in Washington. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
WHERE PRESIDENT TRUMP’S AT ... via Brent D. Griffiths: “President Donald Trump on Thursday night questioned why ‘somebody’ did not contact the FBI 36 years ago when Christine Blasey Ford alleges she was sexually assaulted by now-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
“‘You could say why didn’t someone call the FBI 36 years ago?’ Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity in a live interview before a rally in Las Vegas. ‘You can also say, when did this all happen? What is going on?’ Since Ford came forward on Sunday night, Trump has defended his Supreme Court pick, but had not explicitly criticized Ford. …
“Trump added that he still wants to hear [what] Ford has to say, but cautioned that the Senate Judiciary Committee has delayed its consideration of Kavanaugh long enough. ‘I don’t think you can delay it any longer. I think they have delayed it a week already,’ Trump said.” POLITICO
-- JEREMY PETERS and ELIZABETH DIAS on NYT A1: “Evangelical Leaders Are Frustrated at G.O.P. Caution on Kavanaugh Allegation”
YA CAN’T MAKE IT UP -- “SC GOP congressman jokes about Abraham Lincoln groping amid Kavanaugh Supreme Court drama,” by The Post and Courier’s Jamie Lovegrove: “South Carolina Republican congressman Ralph Norman made light Thursday of the ongoing drama surrounding Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, opening an election debate by joking that another judge has emerged with her own accusations of sexual assault. ‘Did y’all hear this latest late-breaking news from the Kavanaugh hearings?’ said Norman, R-Rock Hill, at a Kiwanis Club debate.
“‘Ruth Bader Ginsburg came out that she was groped by Abraham Lincoln.’ ... Norman’s line appeared to elicit some scattered laughter and applause from the Kiwanis Club of Rock Hill crowd but sparked immediate condemnation from South Carolina Democrats and many others on social media.” Post and Courier
-- L.A. TIMES’ JOE MOZINGO: “Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, in a tight race to retain his Orange County seat, ridiculed the decades-old allegation of sexual assault that has thrown the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh into turmoil, according to a recording acquired by Talking Points Memo.
“‘This guy who’s going to be our Supreme Court justice … and he better be our Supreme Court judge, he’s a perfect candidate. And what do they say? ‘Well, in high school you did this.’ High school? Give me a break.’” L.A. Times
REPUBLICANS WE SPEAK TO say if it appears Ford is willing to testify, the Judiciary Committee can’t say it’s Monday or bust. They need to be a smidge more accommodating than that.
FIRST IN PLAYBOOK -- HOW THE DEMS ARE GOING TO ATTACK -- ULTRAVIOLET is releasing a new TV ad in West Virginia, Nevada and Arizona and digital ads in Maine, Alaska and Texas targeting Republicans on the Kavanaugh appointment. Called “Senator, You’re Mistaken,” the ad says Republicans are “still blaming a survivor of sexual assault instead of believing her” and “Don’t put another sexual predator on the Supreme Court.” It is expected to run until the hearing. The West Virginia ad
MORE THREATS -- WSJ’s Kristina Peterson, Peter Nicholas and Natalie Andrews: “Judge Kavanaugh’s wife, Ashley Estes Kavanaugh, also has faced threats, which are being investigated by the U.S. Marshals Service, a senior administration official said Thursday. She has received two profane notes on her work email account in recent days, the official said. Both notes, which have been reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, were sent from the same email address.
“One of the notes to Mrs. Kavanaugh, a town manager in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., reads, ‘May you, your husband and your kids burn in hell.’ The other, whose subject line reads, ‘Hi, Ashley,’ says she should tell her husband to ‘put a bullet in his…skull.’ One person close to the confirmation process said that while Mrs. Kavanaugh is upset by the attacks on her husband, she doesn’t want him to withdraw.” WSJ
CALLING FOR BACKUP -- “Kavanaugh accuser leans on Democratic operative for advice,” by Annie Karni: “Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were both teenagers, is being advised by Democratic operative Ricki Seidman. Seidman, a senior principal at TSD Communications, in the past worked as an investigator for Sen. Ted Kennedy, and was involved with Anita Hill’s decision to testify against Supreme Court Nominee Clarence Thomas.” POLITICO
INSIDE THE MONEY RACE … DCCC got $100,000 from Eli Broad and $10,000 from Shonda Rhimes. … RNC got $33,900 from Stephen Schwarzman. … SENATE MAJORITY PAC (Senate Democrats) got $1.4 million from George Soros, $1 million from Seth Klarman, $500,000 from Ron Burkle, $200,000 from Steven Spielberg, $125,000 from Steven Rattner. …
… DNC got $333,900 from Seth Klarman. SENATE LEADERSHIP PAC (Senate Republicans) got $1 million from the Pilot Corporation and $500,000 from Koch Industries. HOUSE MAJORITY PAC got $3,053,000 from Reid Hoffman and $2 million from Seth Klarman.
2018 WATCH -- NYT’s KATIE ROGERS and MAGGIE HABERMAN, “Trump Sees a ‘Red Wave’ Where His Party Sees a Red Alert”: “During a discussion about his party’s legislative high points this year with a small group at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last week, Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, expressed a new concern about an old habit of President Trump’s. The many ‘distractions’ generated by the president, Mr. McConnell said during the dinner, were preventing Republicans from having a coherent message for the midterm elections focused on the booming economy, according to multiple people who were briefed on the remarks.
“Representative Paul D. Ryan, the House speaker, who also attended, expressed another concern — that the president’s talk with his supporters of a ‘red wave’ in November was unfounded. All agreed that he should instead be sounding the alarm about the possibility of big Democratic gains. The two congressional leaders were only echoing the worries of many Republican strategists and Mr. Trump’s own advisers.” NYT
-- “Democrats threaten GOP governors’ dominance in Midwest,” by Daniel Strauss: “Democrats are surging back in the Midwestern states where President Donald Trump cut deepest into their old coalition in 2016, led by a class of candidates for governor that have Republicans on their heels.
“The Republican Governors Association cut the size of its ad buys in Minnesota and then in Michigan, according to Advertising Analytics data reviewed by POLITICO. That’s given Democrats increasing confidence that Gretchen Whitmer, their nominee in a state Hillary Clinton lost in stunning fashion, will capture the governor’s mansion.
“In Wisconsin, Republican Gov. Scott Walker has not led a public survey in three months, and the most recent gold-standard poll from Marquette University showed him trailing Democrat Tony Evers by 5 points. And in Ohio, Democrat Richard Cordray has overcome early complaints about his campaign to pull even with Republican Mike DeWine in one of the most competitive races in the country.” POLITICO
COMING ATTRACTIONS -- “Post-election House Dems could quiz Trump Jr., Hicks and others on Russia,” by Darren Samuelsohn and Kyle Cheney: “Several lawmakers in line to take powerful committee posts have prepared lists of people to summon for what could be the House’s first public hearings on the subject. The House Intelligence Committee quizzed several associates of President Donald Trump about alleged collusion with the Kremlin, but only behind closed doors.
“Those likely to be hauled over to Capitol Hill include close Trump associates like the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., former White House communications director Hope Hicks and the current White House social media director, Dan Scavino. Trump Jr. and Hicks have appeared before the House intelligence panel but, Democrats complain, gave incomplete answers in their testimony.” POLITICO
A message from Amazon: Helping small businesses. Learn what Amazon is doing.
THE INVESTIGATIONS -- “Hackers Went After a Now-Disgraced G.O.P. Fund-Raiser. Now He Is After Them,” by NYT’s David D. Kirkpatrick: “Republican fund-raiser Elliott Broidy ... is not going quietly. His lawyers said this week that, after more than 80 subpoenas and months of forensic analysis, they had managed to identify as many as 1,200 other individuals targeted by the same cybercriminals.
“The list of names the lawyers compiled, they argue, will bolster Mr. Broidy’s case that the rulers of Qatar — the tiny Persian Gulf emirate that is a nemesis of the U.A.E.— had targeted him for his advocacy against them. Many of the other targets are well-known enemies of Qatar: senior officials of the U.A.E. and also of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Syria; American, British and Dutch commentators known for their criticism of Qatar; and two former employees of a Washington public affairs firm with U.A.E. ties.” NYT
-- “Michael Cohen spoke to Mueller team for hours; asked about Russia, possible collusion, pardon: Sources,” by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Eliana Larramendia and James Hill: “President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, has participated over the last month in multiple interview sessions lasting for hours with investigators from the office of special counsel, Robert Mueller, sources tell ABC News.
“The special counsel’s questioning of Cohen ... has focused primarily on all aspects of Trump's dealings with Russia -- including financial and business dealings and the investigation into alleged collusion with Russia by the Trump campaign and its surrogates to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.
“Investigators were also interested in knowing, the sources say, whether Trump or any of his associates discussed the possibility of a pardon with Cohen.” ABC
TRUMP’S FRIDAY -- The president will participate in a supporter roundtable in Las Vegas this morning before heading to the VA Southern Nevada Healthcare System, where he will deliver remarks and participate in a signing ceremony. In the afternoon, he will fly to Springfield, Mo., where he will participate in another supporter roundtable and headline a political rally Afterward, the president will fly to Newark, N.J., en route to Bedminster.
PLAYBOOK READS
PHOTO DU JOUR: President Donald Trump supporters cheer at a Las Vegas rally Thursday. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo
SUNDAY SO FAR …
CBS “Face the Nation”: Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) ... Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.). Political panel: Dan Balz, Reihan Salam, Seung Min Kim and Amy Walter
FOX “Fox News Sunday”: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ... Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) ... Panel: Jason Miller, Bob Woodward, Gillian Turner and Juan Williams. Power Player: D.C. United’s Wayne Rooney
CNN “State of the Union”: Nikki Haley ... Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii). Panel: Carrie Severino, Jennifer Granholm, Amanda Carpenter and Karine Jean-Pierre
ABC “This Week”: Matthew Dowd, Cokie Roberts, Chris Christie, Patrick Gaspard, Sheryl Gay Stolberg
NBC “Meet the Press”: Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) ... new NBC News/WSJ poll numbers
CNN “Inside Politics”: Mike Bender, Catherine Lucey, Manu Raju and Rachael Bade
SPORTS BLINK -- “LeBron James Is Already Winning Hollywood,” by The Hollywood Reporter’s Marisa Guthrie: “Asked if it bothers him that the president called him dumb, James just laughs. ‘No, because I’m not,’ he says. ‘That’s like somebody saying I can’t play ball. That doesn’t bother me at all. What bothers me is that he has time to even do that. He has the most powerful job in the world. Like, you really got this much time that you can comment on me?’” THR
BUSINESS BURST -- “Wells Fargo to Cut Jobs Over Next Three Years,” by WSJ’s Emily Glazer and Josh Beckerman: “Wells Fargo plans to cut as many as 26,500 jobs over the next three years as it adjusts to changing consumer behavior and works to recover from a series of scandals that have gripped the bank for the past two years.
“The bank on Thursday said it expects head count to fall by about 5% to 10%, including layoffs as well as typical attrition. Wells Fargo had about 265,000 employees at the end of the second quarter. The cuts are occurring as Wells Fargo contends with a number of federal and state investigations after a fake-account scandal in its consumer bank exposed problems throughout all of its major business units.” WSJ
A message from Amazon: Win-win partnerships. Find out how small businesses grow with Amazon.
VALLEY TALK -- “Google Workers Discussed Tweaking Search Function to Counter Travel Ban,” by WSJ’s John D. McKinnon and Douglas MacMillan: “Days after the Trump administration instituted a controversial travel ban in January 2017, Google employees discussed ways they might be able to tweak the company’s search-related functions to show users how to contribute to pro-immigration organizations and contact lawmakers and government agencies, according to internal company emails.
“The email traffic, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, shows that employees proposed ways to ‘leverage’ search functions and take steps to counter what they considered to be ‘islamophobic, algorithmically biased results from search terms ‘Islam’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Iran’, etc.” and “prejudiced, algorithmically biased search results from search terms ‘Mexico’, ‘Hispanic’, ‘Latino’, etc.’
“The email chain, while sprinkled with cautionary notes about engaging in political activity, suggests employees considered ways to harness the company’s vast influence on the internet in response to the travel ban. Google said none of the ideas discussed were implemented.” WSJ
POLITICO Playbook newsletter Sign up today to receive the #1-rated newsletter in politics Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
MEDIAWATCH -- Fin Gomez is joining CBS as a White House producer, and Katie Watson has been named White House reporter for the CBS website. Gomez spent 13 years at Fox News and most recently was the lead producer for Fox's chief White House correspondent, and Watson has been a politics reporter for CBSNews.com.
-- Fred Barbash will cover legal affairs for The Washington Post. He most recently has spent almost four years as the editor of WaPo’s Morning Mix.
PLAYBOOKERS
SPOTTED: Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) on the 5:40 p.m. Southwest direct to Austin, talking on his cellphone as he made his way to the A1 boarding position. “He was watching Bret Baier ... on his iPad with big silver headphones. (Topics: the ‘Kavanaugh Controversy’ and Trump declassifying Russian stuff),” according to our tipster ... Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) ordering Dunkin’ Donuts at DCA before boarding the 2:30 American Airlines flight to Boston -- pic ... Kellyanne Conway eating lunch on Thursday at the Oval Room on Connecticut Avenue.
TRANSITION -- FIRST IN PLAYBOOK: JONATHAN SMITH is joining Uber’s federal policy team in October. He was most recently chief of staff to Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-Wash.).
SPOTTED at Ben and Ashley Chang’s D.C. going-away party last night at the Gibson: Rebecca Cooper, Gloria Dittus, Natasha Bertrand, Craig Gordon, John Hudson, Lynn Sweet, Emily Horne, Steve Clemons, Evelyn Farkas, Mark Tavlarides, Izzy Klein, Kevin Griffis, Steve Rademaker, Betsy Woodruff, Josh Meyer, Richard Parker, Mike Dorning, Jay Newton-Small, Susan Toffler, Luis Miranda, Marcus Brauchli and Maggie Farley, Kevin Cirilli, Andrew Albertson, Brad Klapper, Brad Bosserman, Megan Devlin, Moira Whelan, Alice Lloyd and Scott Mulhauser.
BIRTHDAY OF THE DAY: Cass Sunstein, professor at Harvard and an Obama WH alum who is working on a new book about human error with Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony, is 64. A fun fact about Cass: “I am an avid squash player, and occasionally play in professional tournaments (the smallest ones, I hasten to add). I’m now ranked 462 in the world. Of course there are lots and lots of people who are much better than I am who haven’t joined the professional tour -- still, I love the game.” Playbook Plus Q&A
BIRTHDAYS: Brianna Keilar, CNN senior Washington correspondent and anchor ... Kiki Burger, account director in the LA office of Sunshine Sachs (hubby tip: Tim) ... Shealah Craighead, the White House photographer (hat tip: Peter Watkins) ... Mike Walsh, chief of staff for the Department of Commerce (h/t Becca Glover) … Maggie Dougherty, senior policy adviser for U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley … Dean Baquet is 62 ... former CIA Director James Woolsey is 77 … Melanie Steele, legislative counsel for Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho) ... former Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear is 74 ... former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is 61 ... Ashley Tate-Gilmore is 35 ... POLITICO’s Karey Van Hall and Jessica Andrews … Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) is 53 … Anna Greenberg, partner at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner (h/t Jon Haber) ... former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power, now a professor at Harvard Kennedy School (h/t Ben Chang) ...
… Brian Roehrkasse, VP of external comms at BAE Systems (h/t Blain Rethmeier) ... Massachusetts GOP’s Andrew Mahaleris is 24 (h/t Drew McCoy) ... NBC News PR’s Dominique Cuce ... Georgette Spanjich, VP of Plurus Strategies, is 3-0 (h/t Sarah Litke) … Charles Garrison ... Ian Russell, principal at Beacon Media ... Erin Graefe Dorton of Prime Policy Group … Zeke Turner ... Patricia Summers Edwards, head of comms at the British Consulate General in NYC ... Elizabeth Wiebe ... Laurel Ruza ... Monica Carmean ... Matt Thorn ... Justin Reilly ... CQ Roll Call’s Toula Vlahou ... Lydia Stuckey ... John Celock ... Jonathan Robinson ... Rachel Barth ... Lisa King ... Daniel Webber ... Sarah Sibley … John McKechnie … Chelsie Paulson … Kelly Lindner ... Dan Turrentine is 41 ... Mike Veselik ... Soren Dorius
A message from Amazon: Retail is a thriving, competitive, and highly-fragmented market where both buyers and small sellers have more choices than ever before. At Amazon, we welcome this competition. It sharpens our focus, feeds our creativity, and fuels our drive to innovate for customers. Learn more.
Follow us on Twitter Anna Palmer @apalmerdc
Jake Sherman @JakeSherman | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Former pro-life Congressman Sean Duffy and Fox News contributor Rachel Campos Duffy welcomed their ninth child into the world with great joy last week.
Valentina StellaMaris Duffy has Down syndrome, but her pro-life parents did not see her condition as any less of a reason to celebrate her life.
“Valentina was also born with an extra chromosome, which means she also has Downs Syndrome. That extra chromosome certainly made her EXTRA cute. Life is wonderful!!” her mother announced on Facebook.
Valentina was born on Oct. 1, a month early, and has two holes in her heart, the Wausau Daily Herald reports. The family said she still is in the neonatal intensive care unit, and she will need surgery to repair her heart within the next several months.
The Duffys thanked everyone who has been praying for Valentina since they learned that she would have special needs.
Click here to sign up for pro-life news alerts from LifeNews.com
“Thank you to everyone who prayed for Valentina all these months – your prayers were never felt more than in the crazy hours before her emergency birth,” her mother wrote.
Sean Duffy resigned from his Wisconsin congressional district in September because of Valentina. He said he made the decision because she would “need even more love, time, and attention due to complications, including a heart condition.”
The Duffys have been strong, proud advocates for life and family in America.
Announcing the pregnancy earlier this year, Sean Duffy wrote on Twitter: “God isn’t done with our family yet! Baby number nine coming to the crew this fall! @RCamposDuffy said it best – we aren’t crazy, we are just full of hope for America’s future!”
Then in September, Campos Duffy spoke more about their unborn daughter’s condition on The View.
“It’s pretty easy for us in the sense that we’re lifers. We believe in life, and whatever gifts God gives us, we accept them. And this is gonna be a great gift,” she said. “Yeah, it’s gonna be a little more stressful, but this little baby will have eight other siblings to wrap their loving arms around her, and we’re gonna do it as a family. We’ll figure out a different way to balance our lives.”
Valentina is their ninth child, and Campos Duffy said her older siblings could not be happier.
“When we visit with her at the hospital, the kids fight over who can hold her – I don’t blame them! She’s the sweetest, most perfect angel we have ever seen,” she said. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Bill Eadie is coming home one more time.
“It’s not everyone who starts their career in their hometown, and ends it there as well,” says Eadie, a Fayette County native best known as Ax from famed 1980s WWF tag team Demolition, from his current home outside Atlanta.
“My first match was in Pittsburgh [in 1972],” says Eadie, 69. “Gorilla Monsoon put me in a match at the Civic Arena when another guy didn’t show up.
“It’s apropos that I start here and finish here.”
Eadie will wrestle his last singles match on July 22 during the Keystone State Wrestling Alliance’s Brawl Under the Bridge III. The event will happen outdoors, under the Homestead Grays Bridge, in Homestead. Eadie will wrestle his final match, a final tag-team match, in Indiana in early August.
Eadie’s first match was under the name The Paramedic on Dec. 15, 1972, one of many aliases he would have during nearly 34 years in the ring. In that match, he defeated Ron Matteucci. The two men were friends from growing up in Brownsville, Pa., and both were school teachers. Early in his career, though, Eadie mainly wrestled as Bolo Mongol, who, along with Geeto Mongol, made up the infamous “Mongols” tag team. That lasted until September 1976, when he forged fame in the Mid-Atlantic states under the name The Masked Superstar.
He would headline under that name until 1987, when he stepped into his most famous role — Ax, who along with his partner, Smash (Barry Darsow), made up the tag team Demolition in what’s currently named the WWE. The team won the company’s tag-team titles three times and the two were among the company’s most iconic superstars of that decade.
As Demolition Ax, Eadie will battle KSWA mainstay Shawn Blanchard in the match under the bridge. Blanchard has been a frequent opponent of Eadie’s. The two have battled a number of times over the years, primarily at the former Lawrenceville Moose Lodge. Eadie’s first appearance in the KSWA was at KSWA FanFest in December 2008. Eadie and Kris Kash defeated Shawn Blanchard and Lou Martin, a tag team known collectively as the VIPs. A few months later, Eadie returned for the Joe Abby Memorial Tournament and was the third inductee into the KSWA Hall of Fame, joining Pittsburgh’s Studio Wrestling legends “Killer” Joe Abby and Frank “Slip Mahoney” Durso.
It’s only fitting that Eadie end his career in KSWA, since he has been a big part of that company since 2009.
On Oct. 10, 2009, Eadie, as Demolition Ax, brought his longtime tag-team partner Darsow, a.k.a. Demolition Smash, to challenge the VIPs for the vaunted KSWA tag-team championship. The former world tag-team champions beat Blanchard and Martin in front of a capacity crowd.
In September 2010, Eadie returned to Pittsburgh as part of the Officer Paul Sciullo Memorial Wrestling Event, in Lawrenceville. Sciullo, of Bloomfield, was one of three police officers who were ambushed and killed by a gunman in Stanton Heights in 2009. In that match, Eadie, with another wrestler, once again defeated Blanchard and Martin in tag-team competition. Just this past December — at the Teamster Temple — Eadie and Darsow once again defeated Blanchard and the VIPs at KSWA FanFest, this time in front of a crowd of more than 500.
Darsow was supposed to wrestle with Eadie in August for one last hurrah; the two decided together that they would call it quits in 2017. However, knee surgery in January has slowed Darsow down and forced him to retire just a bit earlier than he planned.
“We had been contemplating that for a year or so,” Eadie says. “I don’t like the travel, the airports.” But once Eadie gets to the show, all of his anxiety goes away.
Blanchard calls his upcoming showdown with Eadie the culmination of a “10-year feud.” (Away from the bluster of professional-wrestling promos, both men couldn’t speak more highly about their respect for one another … but you didn’t read that here.)
Looking past his retirement match, Eadie will focus on his final year as a special-education teacher for juvenile offenders in Georgia. The school’s principal announced her retirement and Eadie, her good friend, decided that it was time to end his 20-year teaching tenure at the school as well. Eadie’s wife, Sue, also plans to retire, and they plan to spend more time with their daughters, Julie and Heather, and four grandsons — Chris, Dylan, Dean and Chase. Eadie will also look for part-time work, noting, “I recently was recertified as a driving instructor.”
But just because he’s retiring from the ring doesn’t mean Eadie will disappear from the sport. Eadie says Demolition, together and individually, will continue to tour “about twice a month” for autograph sessions, comic conventions and the like.
“I really appreciate the fans,” Eadie says. “Without the fans, there is no wrestling business. There is no need for us to get into the ring.”
On July 22, they’ll get to show their appreciation one more time.
Thomas Leturgey is a wrestling journalist as well as ring announcer for the Keystone State Wrestling Alliance. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
A critical vulnerability affects hundreds of thousands of email servers. A fix has been released but this flaw affects more than half of the Internet's email servers, and patching the issue will take weeks if not months.
The bug is a vulnerability in Exim, a mail transfer agent (MTA) —software that runs on email servers and which relays emails from senders to recipients.
According to a survey conducted in March 2017, 56% of all of the Internet's email servers run Exim, with over 560,000 available online at the time. Another more recent report puts that number in the millions.
The bug allows for remote code execution
A Taiwanese security researcher named Meh Chang discovered the bug, which he reported to the Exim crew on February 2. The Exim team released Exim distribution 4.90.1 on February 10 that fixes the RCE issue.
The bug —tracked as CVE-2018-6789— is categorized as a "pre-auth remote code execution," meaning an attacker could trick the Exim email server into running malicious commands before the attacker would need to authenticate on the server.
The actual bug is a one-byte buffer overflow in the base64 decode function of Exim and affects all Exim versions ever released.
Chang described the bug in a blog post released earlier today, detailing basic steps for exploiting Exim's SMTP daemon.
No PoC or exploit code available
In a security advisory, the Exim team publicly acknowledged the issue. "Currently we're unsure about the severity, we *believe*, an exploit is difficult. A mitigation isn't known," the Exim team said.
Since Exim 4.90.1's release, updated Exim versions have trickled down to Linux distros used primarily in data centers, but the question remains about the number of unpatched systems that remain online. Taking into account that Exim is by far the most popular mail agent, CVE-2018-6789 opens a large attack surface, and Exim server owners should look into deploying the Exim 4.90.1 update as soon as possible.
At the time of writing, there is no public exploit code for taking advantage of vulnerable Exim servers, but this will likely change in the days following Chang's blog post.
Chang also discovered two other Exim bugs last year, which also led to remote code execution. Those bugs were patched in Exim 4.90. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Kama Sutra Gave Her Concepts
Kama Sutra gave my girlfriend several wicked concepts and baby instructed me baby desired to attempt one thing fresh in hump. Ok, I had this horny desire about her drilling any other fellow and me simply eyeing so shut I may paw her, and now it's a ideal opportunity to make it occur. I spotted her providing certainly one of my pals appears to be like and I do know baby wouldn't thoughts having hump with him, so right here we’re, me eyeing and her shamelessly drilling this guy and loving each and every second of it. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
My hair looks great today! Looks like I don't need to shower afterall
2,249 shares | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Last Updated on June 7, 2019 by haveclotheswilltravel
Meet Mica! She’s this month’s Featured Fashionista and the stylish founder of the blog “Away from the Blue.” Mica is from the Land Down Under, and her blog shows us how to “move away from the blue jeans style rut without blowing your budget!” I love that!
Mica is the mum to two adorable little boys, and her posts show us how to be practical yet stylish when getting dressed for the day. The vast majority of Mica’s looks are absolutely perfect for the office too! Mica even authored an ebook on how to be stylish during your pregnancy – with over 85 outfit ideas!
But don’t just take my word for it, check out how amazing Mica is in her Q&A, below. And be sure to check out “Away from the Blue” by clicking here.
Q&A With Mica of Away from the Blue
Tell me a little about yourself.
Mica: Hi! I’m Mica, an Australian mum of two cute boys and a sweet rescue Shih Tzu. I live in Queensland, Australia, and I work part-time while spending the rest of my week being a stay at home mum. Living in a house full of boys, it’s good to have my blog to escape into a world of fashion and frivolity while the boys sleep. It’s right back to trains and cars when they wake up!
How would you describe your blog, “Away from the Blue?”
Mica: Away from the blue is a personal style blog. I share easy, affordable outfits that are away from the blue jeans rut but are still practical as a mum to two preschool-aged boys.
What inspired you to create, Away from the Blue?
Mica: I was a big blog reader before I became a blogger! On a now deleted forum I participated in an ‘outfit of the day’ thread and would regularly post on that and reading blogs, I figured a blog was the next logical step.
What do you hope the future holds for Away From the Blue?
Mica: I hope I’m still able to blog and keep up with it! I’ll have been blogging for 7 years this year, with no plans to stop any time soon. I started a 30 ways to wear series recently and that’s been really fun, it would be great to continue that.
You also run a YouTube Channel! What can readers expect to find on your YouTube Channel?
Mica: Bags! They are the thing I love most about fashion! I’m trying to change things up a little and I’ll occasionally share a vlog of something fun we did, but it is really all about the bags!
If you had to pick, what would you say is your favorite post on Away from the Blue?
Mica: This was such a hard one to pick!
For my favourite video, I think it would be this one I did recently with 30 ways to wear a LV neverfull bag. I’m trying to improve the 30 wears series videos each time I make them, and I’m really proud of that one!
On the blog, there are again so many! I really liked this one that addressed the issue of comparing yourself on social media and also announced my last pregnancy. It’s so easy to hide things in photos, they never show the full story. I thought that illustrated it well!
How would you describe your personal style?
Mica: Casual, comfortable and a little bit boho.
What is your go-to clothing store?
Mica: Jeanswest! I think this is Australia only, sorry! I have so many clothes from them, though. I ask for and get gift cards for Jeanswest for Christmas all the time, as I know I’ll be shopping there often!
You have an amazing handbag collection! Seriously, I’m so jealous. What are some of your favorite bags you own and why?
Mica: I do love my bags! It’s so hard to pick favourites though, they work for different occasions. I think the most treasured piece is a vintage Chanel ‘Lady Di’ flap bag, but I also love the Rebecca Minkoff Love bag (ha!) I got for Christmas one year, as well as my Louis Vuitton Neverfull (another Christmas present!), and my little Rebecca Minkoff mini MAC bags for running errands. Oh, and my super rare by gorgeous Balenciaga magenta day bag from 2005! Really, I love them all too much!
You’re also the mum of two adorable, little boys! Could you tell us all little more about them?
Mica: My kids are the only topic I could talk for longer than handbags! They are 2 and 4, 20 months apart, so they are very close and they are so loving towards each other. It melts my heart to see, and I hope that never changes! (Although I’m sure they will eventually grow too old for me to make them hold hands when we are walking anywhere, and dress them identically!). They are the best thing to ever happen to me and I am so incredibly blessed to be able to work part-time and spend most of the week with them.
Has being a mom changed your personal style at all?
Mica: Definitely! I’m all about the practicality now! No more pretty but uncomfortable clothes and even my accessories have changed. I favour hands-free, crossbody style bags more, and I don’t wear as many statement necklaces or bracelet stacks as I used to. And forget about fun tassel earrings! The boys are very grabby sometimes!
I love that you also offer eBooks for how to shop and dress stylishly while pregnant! That’s a fantastic idea. Could you tell us a little more about what readers can expect to find in your eBooks and where they can find them?
Mica: Thank you! I wanted to have something fun to work on during my maternity leave in addition to my blog, and lots of people had asked about my pregnancy style and how I did it so it made sense to put it all into a little ebook. It takes you through identifying what maternity pieces you need for your wardrobe, things to keep in mind when buying them, and has a style guide and outfit ideas for each trimester. As an ebook, it’s instantly downloadable here.
If you had to pick, what is your number one piece of style advice you would give to a friend who is pregnant?
Mica: Buy maternity pieces that work in the future too! My pink maternity maxi dress was also a breastfeeding piece and remains one of my most-worn dresses, a great wardrobe addition.
And do you have any advice you would like to share for someone looking to start their own blog?
Mica: Create what you like to read – your blog is your own space. If you see things that annoy you on other blogs, leave that out! Things you love, incorporate that. If you create what you’d like you’ll find your own community who enjoy what you do.
Last but not least, where can my readers find you?
Mica:
*Read the blog here.
*Follow me on Bloglovin
*Follow me on Instagram
*Follow me on Twitter
*Subscribe on YouTube
Thanks so much for this opportunity Lindsey, it was fun!
I appreciate each & every share. Thank you!
47 shares Share
Tweet
Pin | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
I always lurk because I can't get any karma And I can't get any karma because I always lurk
277 shares | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
B.C.'s Information and Privacy Commissioner is raising concerns about the lack of record-keeping by Premier Christy Clark's office after surge in the number of Freedom of Information requests that found no documentation on key decisions.
Commissioner Elizabeth Denham says the complete lack of any kind of paper trail related to former chief of staff Ken Boessenkool's resignation is just one of several cases where no government records are found in response to requests for information.
Boessenkool was asked to step down by Clark last September for undisclosed "inappropriate behavior" involving a female government staff member at a golf tournament.
Denham also confirmed her investigators have spoken with the premier's former deputy chief of staff Kim Haakstaad.
According to the report, Haakstaad told Denham's investigators the general practice in the premier's office is to communicate verbally and that email is used for only "transitory" communication like requests to make telephone calls or meet in person.
Haakstaad was forced to resign just last week over a highly controversial leaked memo laying out the government's strategy to win over "ethnic" voters forwarded from her Gmail account, which continues to raise serious trouble for Clark in the lead up to the May provincial election.
In the report released on Monday, Denham called for changes to the province's freedom of information laws to ensure the government documents its key actions.
"A citizen's right to access government records is a fundamental element of our democracy. The right to know promotes transparency in the public policy process, and is an essential mechanism for holding government to account," said Denham.
"In the course of my investigation, we have seen evidence of the practice of oral government, where business is undertaken verbally and in a records-free way. There is currently no requirement to document these activities. However, without a duty to document, government can effectively avoid disclosure and public scrutiny as to the basis and reasons for its actions."
Denham launched the investigation in response to a complaint by the Freedom of Information and Privacy Association alleging significant growth in "no responsive records" replies by the government over the last 10 years.
She found the premier's office faile to find records for 45 per cent of FOI requeste, the highest level of any government department. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Closing in on the speed of light (Image: Volker Steger/ Science Photo Library)
The faster-than-light neutrino saga is officially over. Today, at the Neutrino 2012 conference in Kyoto, Japan, the OPERA collaboration announced that according to their latest measurements, neutrinos travel at almost exactly the speed of light.
“Although this result isn’t as exciting as some would have liked, it is what we all expected deep down,” said CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci in a statement.
With the dust settling, OPERA is getting back to its real job: finding tau neutrinos. This week the team also announced that they have found the second-ever instance of a muon neutrino morphing into a tau neutrino, strengthening the case that neutrinos have mass.
Close to light speed
OPERA shocked the world in September 2011 when it announced that neutrinos zipping from CERN in Switzerland to detectors beneath the Gran Sasso mountains in Italy were outpacing the speed of light, a feat that violated Einstein’s rules of relativity and opened the door to exotic physics. But over the next few months, two errors – a leaky fibre-optic cable and a malfunctioning clock – emerged, which slowed the neutrinos back down, dashing post-Einsteinian dreams and causing chaos within the OPERA collaboration.
The measurement wasn’t a waste of time, says OPERA team member Dario Autiero. The new, preliminary result shows that neutrinos arrived at OPERA 1.6 nanoseconds slower than light would have, with an error of 6.2 nanoseconds. That error should shrink with further analysis, says Giovanni De Lellis of the Italian National Nuclear Physics Institute (INFN) and co-spokesman for OPERA.
“This is the first time that velocity was measured with that level of accuracy,” Autiero says.
But all of that was a sidebar to the experiment’s real goal: catching shape-shifting neutrinos in the act. Neutrinos come in three flavours: electron, muon and tau. Several experiments had seen evidence for neutrinos spontaneously switching, or oscillating, from one type to another. Those oscillations proved, to many physicists’ surprise, that the supposed massless particles must have some infinitesimal mass, and offered a route to explaining why there is more matter than anti-matter in the universe.
Oscillate wildly
Before OPERA, all the evidence for neutrino oscillations came from disappearances: detectors would end up with less of a certain type of neutrino than they started with, suggesting some had morphed into other flavours. Then in 2010, OPERA found the first tau neutrino in a beam of billions of muon neutrinos streaming to the Gran Sasso detectors from CERN. The discovery was a big deal at the time, but the team said they needed more tau neutrinos to make it statistically significant.
Now, a second tau neutrino has shown up in the detectors, they report.
“This result shows that the collaboration is definitely and effectively back to its original goal of discovering neutrino oscillations in appearance mode,” De Lellis says.
OPERA will need at least six tau neutrinos to definitively claim they’re seeing the oscillation effect, so they’re not there yet. And when they do, they may find they’ve been scooped: in another experiment, the team behind the T2K detector in Japan announced this week that they have seen 10 muon neutrinos shifting into electron neutrinos.
This story has been updated to reflect more accurate figures for the neutrinos’ speed. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
I had to drink an entire bottle of white wine last night because my fridge was too full to put it back.
315 shares | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Crypto markets have hit a new 2019 high; Bitcoin dominating, ETH, BNB and XMR moving, LEO enters top twenty.
It has been another fruitful Friday in crypto land. Markets have hit a new high for the year and as usual it is Bitcoin driving them. A total market cap top of $300 billion was touched a few hours ago as BTC broke through resistance once again surging to a new 13 month high.
The move came a few hours ago during early Asian trading. This time it wasn’t a ‘Bart type spike’ but a gradual grind up through the resistance at $9,600 and on towards an intraday high of $9,800. Since then gains have mostly held as Bitcoin remained around $9,700 with plenty of talk about a further move to $10k today or over the weekend.
Ethereum also got a boost this time as a 4 percent climb lifted it to $280. In comparison however ETH is still way down, over 80 percent of ATH compared to BTC which is now close to 50 percent. There is no doubt that Ethereum will crack $300 and make bigger gains when altseason kicks in but at the moment the going is slow.
Altcoin Outlook
The crypto top ten has not reacted with the usual fervor and aside from Binance Coin adding 6 percent nothing else has really moved much. There is a little green with Bitcoin Cash and EOS adding 2 percent each but others such as BSV are falling back. There has been no movement on XRP, LTC and XLM.
The top twenty is equally lethargic aside from Monero which is still climbing with a further 6 percent today to reach $108. The Bitfinex transparency initiative UNUS SED LEO has arrived on the scene as CMC has just registered a market cap of $1.8 billion jumping it straight into 14th place above Dash. LEO tokens were trading at $1.84 at the time of writing. The rest of the altcoins are up a percent or flat at the moment.
FOMO: Egretia Climbing Higher
Today’s top performing crypto top one hundred altcoin is Egretia again as entertainments based token surges 24 percent. A listing in Singapore’s BiUP exchange may have driven some of the momentum for EGT as the team rejoices.
Breaking News: Egretia is currently ranked 77 as per CoinMarketCap!!! EGT has seen the highest gain, growing almost 30% over the past 24H! More info, welcome to join us on telegram : https://t.co/G8oBPqZT64 #egt #blockchain #cryptocurrency #coinmarketcap pic.twitter.com/N0FoeUHwvj — Egretia (@Egretia_io) June 21, 2019
Nash Exchange is getting a 12 percent boost today and Vestchain has made ten, these are the only three cryptos in double digits. Waltonchain and Grin are at the other end of the list dumping 10 percent each.
Total crypto market capitalization surged almost $15 billion to top out at a new 2019 high of $300 billion a few hours ago. A slight correction has dropped markets back to $297 billion at the moment but things are still bullish. Bitcoin is the only thing driving market gains at the moment as dominance increases to 58 percent in its push to five figures.
Market Wrap is a section that takes a daily look at the top cryptocurrencies during the current trading session and analyses the best-performing ones, looking for trends and possible fundamentals. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.