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Mario is often the first word that springs to mind when thinking about past Nintendo consoles, but the Wii U bucks this trend for the wrong reasons. The extent of the console's problems, and the continual emergence of them, marks it with the taint of failure.
It's the console that most third-party publishers have collectively abandoned, quietly and politely turning their attentions elsewhere, leaving a revered games company with a duty to singlehandedly carry its own system through an entire generation. This is unquestionably a nightmare scenario for any platform holder, and a burden of care that will drag on for years.
But is the Wii U a console that gamers should abandon too? That is a different question entirely. After all, Nintendo and its internal teams have been working tirelessly to create world-class games that, they hope, will demonstrate that the Wii U is a worthy purchase no matter what the rest of the industry is saying.
Below GameSpot has created a comprehensive review to mark the two-year anniversary since the system's release, guided by a simple yet important question for any gamer: Is it time to buy a Wii U?
On Saturday, November 15, GameSpot marked the one-year anniversary of the PS4's release with a similarly styled analysis. On Saturday November 22, we'll conclude with a breakdown of the Xbox One.
The Wii U is Burdened by Old Architecture
It is a challenge to measure the sheer extent of commercial damage Nintendo has inflicted on itself from manufacturing a console with a relatively poor hardware performance.
One of the worst outcomes, undoubtedly, is the inferiority of the hardware (combined with its uniqueness) has convinced many triple-A publishers to outright avoid porting their games onto Nintendo's console.
Granted, this is just one of several reasons why the Wii U's third-party game library is demonstrably barren. Other issues, such as customer demographics and Nintendo's business relationship with publishers, each make their own contribution to the problem.
The Wii U processor is a re-architected version of the Wii's CPU
But put it this way: Even if third-party publishers were financially convinced by the idea of shipping their games on Wii U, developers would still face the complex (and possibly hopeless) challenge of porting code designed for high-end systems.
The processor is a major culprit, clocking at 1.24 GHz, and famously described by a senior Metro Last Light coder as a "horrible, slow CPU". Weeks after the Wii U's release, it was revealed that the chip is a re-architected version of the original Wii's Broadway processor, which itself was an overclocked version of the GameCube's Gekko CPU.
The Wii U processor clocks at 1.24 GHz, and was famously described by a senior Metro Last Light coder as a "horrible, slow CPU"
Although skilled coders tend to be proficient at creating software that is scalable across many platforms, the Wii U's bottlenecks require the kind of man-hours and expertise that only blockbuster sales potential could justify.
Complicating matters further is the paltry 1GB of DDR3 memory reserved for games, which is dwarfed by the PlayStation 4's 4.5GB of DDR5 available to devs, and the Xbox One's similar make-up. Capacity is another major setback, with developers explaining problems with fitting their digital games on a hard-drive that can be as small as 8GB.
In terms of form-factor, the Wii U is slick, small and quiet. Much like with any Nintendo product, one shouldn't have concerns over its mechanical reliability and premium finish.
The GamePad Makes Matters Worse...
It is a natural law of electronic consumer goods is that the poorer the performance, and the cheaper the components, the more reasonable the price. Perhaps the most damaging flaw of the Wii U is that it does not adhere to this.
What creates this exception is the Wii U GamePad, a chubby and clumsy touch-screen controller that packs numerous technologies such as NFC, a slightly-better-than-SD display, along with its own sensor bar, a microphone, a gyrometer, an accelerometer, added with all the trappings of a regular controller.
Such a concoction doesn't come cheap. According to initial teardown evaluations (now old, but still a useful measure) the GamePad alone costs $80 in materials. That equates to more than half the price of the main console unit itself, which is roughly $148. Look no further than these figures when pondering why the Wii U is so disproportionately expensive, with the PS4 and Xbox One priced at just $50-$100 more despite their strikingly advanced hardware.
...And, Worse Still, the GamePad is Flawed
Concluding this nightmare scenario for Nintendo is the GamePad itself which, in addition to driving up the price of antiquated hardware, is unwieldy and often unpleasant.
Purely from a traditionalist's viewpoint, holding a controller with palms nearly a foot apart takes some time to acclimatise to. This distance is to accommodate the 6.2" touch-screen, which ultimately proves to be at the heart of the controller's problems.
Nintendo isn't afraid of thinking different, which is a key theme of so many of its previous success stories, but this time the corporation has overlooked a fundamental rule: game controllers are supposed to disappear in players' hands. The GamePad does anything but. Its screen flashes imagery you'll try to ignore, its layout is a distractingly bad fit that you're supposed to overlook, while the force feedback amounts to an eerie phantom rumble situated in the no-man's-land between your hands.
Pikmin 3 ofers an excellent example of how the GamePad is more a distraction in practice. The game plays impeccably with the Wii Remote and Nun-chuck (sold separately), meaning the GamePad itself could've been peacefully relegated to the coffee table, were it not for routine in-game prompts which demand players read text from the touch-screen rather than the TV itself.
This kind of shoehorning is something Nintendo has gradually learned to avoid, which is why even its flagship Wii U games, such as Super Mario 3D World, Super Smash Bros, and Mario Kart 8, do not employ touch-screen controls in a meaningful way. Nintendo's general neglect of the Wii U's unique control properties is somewhat surprising, but nevertheless a wise sacrifice.
Nintendo's neglect of the Wii U's unique control properties is somewhat surprising, but nevertheless a wise sacrifice.
There are numerous other isolated problems with the controller, such as the questionable button layout, and rock-bottom quality of the shoulder buttons, as well as the clumsiness of the single-touch-screen, along with the noticeably cheap materials. This is more GameGear than iPad. The battery life is also rather poor, while the charging connectors are proprietary, and there is no single genre of game one could say the controller is ideally suited for.
Furthermore, GamePads are not sold standalone, so if they break or malfunction, they'll need to be sent to Nintendo for repairs rather than replaced in-store.
Awesome Bonus: It’s Also a Wii
One dreadfully underappreciated aspect of the Wii U is its extensive backwards compatibility. Nintendo has opted for hardware emulation, meaning that all Wii discs and digital games (WiiWare and Virtual Console) can be played on the Wii U without any hassle.
The system itself comes packaged with a sensor bar, meaning it is compatible with all Wii Remotes (not just Wii Remote Pluses, as is sometimes misreported) as well as Pro Controllers and various peripheral attachments such as the steering wheel.
One should not underestimate the value presented here. There is no lost magic in games such as Wii Sports, or Mario Galaxy 1 and 2, or the Metroid Prime Trilogy (if you can still find it), or Zelda Twilight Princess. Nintendo has some of the most capable minds in the industry when it comes to creating content with long-term appeal.
Furthermore, players can still access the Wii Shop channel and buy all its digital games, offering access to a vast library of retro content. At the time of writing, the virtual catalogue offers:
79 NES games
61 SNES games
21 N64 games
74 Mega Drive/Genesis games
15 Master System Games
54 NeoGeo games
58 Turbografx games
20 Virtual Console Arcade games
Again, there is nothing backwards about playing Super Mario World in 2014. It’s as glorious and essential today as it was in 1992. That applies to Ocarina of Time too, and F-Zero X, and Mario 64 and Super Puyo Puyo and Harvest Moon and Super Metroid and dozens of other evergreen classics. At the very least, it’s worth taking a look at what’s on offer, especially considering that the Wii U’s digital library is hardly oceanic.
There is one caveat: The currency model remains a little consumer-hostile, because cash deposited is still converted into points, and it’s very likely that you’ll still have non-refundable points hanging over after making a purchase.
Elementally, it’s a system that ensures you deposit £10/$10 to buy a Master System game, as opposed to a reasonable price.
Off-TV Play is a Perk, But Not a System-Seller
Perhaps the most positive aspect of the Wii U GamePad is how it bypasses the necessity to play games through the TV, and the relative ease in which this can be done.
However, much like with the PlayStation 4's Remote Play function, Off-TV Play proves to be a luxury that requires a particular set of circumstances to be necessary. To wit; only if the television is otherwise occupied, and if there is enough charge in the Wii U GamePad, and if the player is sitting close enough to the Wii U console, does Off-TV Play enter into the equation.
This is clearly a superior service than Remote Play, by some margin, due to its low latency and how, unlike with PS Vita, it does not compromise the button layout. However, the GamePad needs to be within a ten-foot range from the console in order to function, and one must accept that they are condensing a full-screen experience onto a 6.2" 854x480 display.
Off-TV Play is supported by the majority of Wii U games already, which makes it a useful plan-b. It's also excellent, some say, for those who want to play games in bed. However, most people will not use it with any regularity, and only a few will swear by it.
The Wii U Pro Controller is an 80-Hour Miracle
Even if the Wii U GamePad is possibly Nintendo's worst controller since the Virtual Boy, one shouldn't forget the corporation's long-established reputation for designing fantastic controllers.
Certainly, Nintendo's signature expertise and craftsmanship can be found in the Wii U Pro Controller, a beautifully calibrated and meticulously programmed pad that apes the standard Xbox model.
There are no dramatic breakaways from tradition here--everything works how one would assume and, with the exception of the rickety shoulder buttons, it performs better than expected. The battery life, meanwhile, is remarkable. One full charge lasts a staggering 80 hours.
Those who are saving up to buy a Wii U should absolutely try to find some extra cash to buy a Pro Controller. It makes playing games on the system that much more enjoyable.
PC enthusiasts: This is the controller you need to mod.
Wii U's Operating System Has Improved Dramatically
Only those who bought the Wii U at launch day can fully appreciate the lengths Nintendo has taken to revamp the Wii U system software. Several key updates, released across 18 months, have transformed how fast and manageable the OS has become.
In fact, as hard as it is to believe, in some cases the Wii U has swung from being the slowest console to the fastest. Testing the time between power-on to game loading screen shows that the PS4 takes 35 seconds, compared to 24 seconds for Xbox One and 20 seconds on Wii U. By comparison, at launch the Wii U took about 25 seconds just to boot the system menu.
As hard as it is to believe, in some cases the Wii U has swung from being the slowest console to the fastest.
Key to the transformation is the Quick Start option, which displays ten recently used games and apps on the GamePad as the console begins to boot. Selecting one of these means the console will bypass the home menu and launch the game straight away. Sony and Microsoft would be wise to duplicate this.
While switching between game and home menu is still painfully long compared to the instantaneousness of the PS4 and Xbox One, it has nevertheless been reduced from 24 seconds down to just nine.
Meanwhile, the home screen layout is uncomplicated and familiar, opting for a grid of games and apps much like iOS and Android. Folders have also been implemented for us to indulge in our inner-OCD, as well as hide away system apps that you cannot uninstall.
Another touch, and an important one for those who want to use their console regularly, is the general pleasantness of the Wii U menus. The ambient music, the unfussy visuals, the adorable blabber sound of a Mii in the background, makes the Wii U a console with five-star hospitality.
Miiverse is Adorable, but Throwaway
Granted, when you power on the Wii U it probably won't be due to a pressing urge to read Miiverse posts. Nevertheless, it's hard not to chuckle at doodles and hand-written messages as they automatically pop up on the home screen.
Plus, the social network itself has a wonderfully friendly community that would make any Twitter denizen believe that world peace is possible. Just take a look here to see how much love is thrown around the place.
You'll also spot Miiverse posts in some games, with users offering throwaway comments and helpful tips, though you can switch these off if you wish.
This isn't a system-selling app, nor a serious alternative to Twitter or Facebook. It's not a place where you'll spot your friends either, and perhaps this is the most significant drawback. But it's free and puts a smile on your face, which surely classifies it as a win.
Wii U is a Meagre Media Player
If you want a console that offers an all-encompassing multimedia solution, the Wii U won't even come close to satisfying you. It contemptuously spits out Blu-ray discs, and even DVDs and CDs, as well as movie files via external hard drives. Also, its digital film and TV offering is limited to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video, and YouTube.
The Wii U contemptuously spits out Blu-ray discs, and even DVDs and CDs
Meanwhile, the TVii channel (which attempts to unify TV streams with digital services such as Netflix) is notoriously slow, which outright negates the convenience of turning to it in the first place. Elsewhere, the remote control app, which runs on the GamePad without needing to powering on the console, makes for a nice emergency replacement, but is far too basic to be a true alternative to the TV remote.
If by some reason you only watch shows and films through Netflix, you're in luck, as the GamePad makes it one of the best platforms to play it on. But if you want anything beyond that, you'll need to look elsewhere.
The eShop is Delightful
Motivated by the credo of putting smiles on faces, Nintendo often goes extra lengths to make its services accommodating and enjoyable. Few things typify this better than the Wii U eShop, which is presented with a hospitality that is both quirky and carefree.
First, and it needs to be said, the eShop plays the most adorably bad muzak you'll ever hear. Its saccharine chip-tunes will hang around in your head long after you've switched the console off. Also, the music changes every few months, and during certain times of the year such as Christmas. It's hard not to fall in love with this.
The eShop plays the most adorably bad muzak you'll ever hear.
In terms of layout, while the PS4 and Xbox One go for an automated grid system, Nintendo painstakingly builds the shop as though it were a magazine, resplendent with artwork spreads, spotlights and trailers. It's bold and colourful yet easy to read, and an ideal fit for TV or GamePad.
As well as custom layouts, the eShop is also rich on ideas, featuring staff picks and unique categories, such as "games to play together." Also, each game page is packed with useful data, such as trailers, screenshots, to data on download sizes.
Nintendo Has Made Strides, But More Must Follow
It's encouraging to witness major improvements and additions to the Wii U system software over the past two years, each contributing to a more reliable, faster and convenient system to operate. Modern services, such as pre-downloading and remote purchasing, are gradually being introduced. But the company is still far away from mission accomplished.
The lack of cloud saving options is quite shocking for a console that is supposed to be next-gen
The omission of cloud saving options, in particular, is quite shocking for a console that is supposed to be next-gen. Also, tying games to Nintendo Network IDs, as opposed to hardware, is an essential step Nintendo must take in order to modernise. There's also a surprising lack of personalisation, with no achievements, nor much other valuable data, attached to your profile.
Wii U Has, by Far, the Best Next-Gen Games Out There...
It's almost as though Nintendo's internal development teams are possessed by the desire to singlehandedly revive the Wii U's fortunes. From Super Mario 3D World to Bayonetta 2 to Wind Waker HD to Mario Kart 8 to Pikmin 3, right now the Wii U has more essential, can't-miss games than the PS4 and Xbox One combined. For a system that launched with Nintendo Land, it's a stupefying achievement.
Right now the Wii U has more essential, can't-miss games than the PS4 and Xbox One combined.
Cynics will view Nintendo's first-party line-up as little more than HD rehashes, but in truth these games are some of the best editions of the company's most legendary franchises.
Building games in high-definition for the first time has strained and stretched the Kyoto corporation's internal development teams, resulting in frequent delays, but the payoff has been worth it. As much as the Wii U hardware can be criticised (see all above), there are few games more visually impressive than Mario Kart 8 and Wind Waker HD. These are games so staggeringly beautiful that one begins to question the significance of raw hardware specs in the first place.
...But the Library is Desperately Thin
The Wii U is one of the only active games platforms that does not support Minecraft
The ultimate sacrifice Wii U owners make is that they are cut off from the vast majority of third-party games, both triple-A and indie, unless they buy an additional system.
To fully understand how desperate the situation is, look no further than the list of multi-platform games released in 2014 that haven't arrived on Wii U: Minecraft, The Evil Within, Sleeping Dogs Definitive, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, Dark Souls II, NBA 2K15, Alien: Isolation, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, Destiny, Metro Redux, Diablo 3, Ultra Street Fighter 4, GTA V, Trials Fusion, Call of Duty Advanced Warfare, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, South Park: The Stick of Truth, The Wolf Among Us, The Walking Dead Season 2, and Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition.
Oh, and all EA games. And all Assassin's Creed games this year, both last-gen and new. Wii U may have the best exclusive games in town, but it will still guarantee jealousy unless another console is bought along with it.
Nintendo No Longer Fears Generosity
For a company that once publicly warned developers about the apparent hazards of selling games for just a dollar, Nintendo has been surprisingly cavalier with its deals and prices in recent months.
Perhaps most strikingly big-hearted of all Nintendo's offers was the free game it bundled with Mario Kart 8 in the UK. Those who bought ahead of release could download one of eight major games, including Wind Waker HD and Pikmin 3, at no additional cost.
But there are also numerous discounts and offers spread across the eShop, offering savings between 10 and 50 percent. You'll find roughly the same number of discounts here as you would with PS Plus, though without needing to pay a subscription to take advantage of it.
For Now, Amiibo Are Missed Potential
Nintendo's Amiibo figurines, which are premium plastic toys that transmit data to the Wii U via NFC technology, are laced with promise but have yet to realise much of it.
At the time of writing, they are principally used to create AI characters in Super Smash Bros for Wii U. It's hardly the most compelling reason to buy a small plastic toy, especially one that fetches $13. Also, Nintendo recently revealed that Amiibo can only store data for one compatible game at a time. Not ideal.
GameSpot senior editor Justin Haywald, who has spent a fair amount of time with the Amiibo range, says they are "a me-too idea that's a good reflection of Nintendo's recent philosophy: Taking other people's ideas, in this case Skylanders, and not doing them quite as well".
He adds: "Amiibo have potential, especially since they can work across lots of games, but Nintendo hasn't come close to realising that yet."
VERDICT: Is It Time to Buy a Wii U?
Should Nintendo just abandon the Wii U and move on? It's an unpleasant question that has likely crossed the minds of most game devotees.
Certainly, the console's mortal clock is something that hangs in its owners' minds, much in the same way early Xbox 360 adopters battled subconscious anxieties over the emergence of three red rings.
The rest of the industry appears to have made up its mind, with hardly any major established publishers showing faith in the system. You cannot blame them for this. In an age where Nintendo needed to be more proactive than ever with third-party relations, the Wii U represents the company at its most stranded from the rest of the industry.
The Wii U offers some of the finest Nintendo games in years... Just enough, in fact, to make the console an essential purchase.
But Nintendo is fighting back, possessed by that longstanding and essential rule of business: keep your customers happy. And it does this so capably, creating some of the finest Nintendo games in years. In fact, not just the best versions of its garlanded franchises, not just an answer to critics, but outright some of the best games you'll play in years. Just enough, in fact, to make the console an essential purchase.
Let's be honest: The Wii U, when compared to the phenomenal success of the original Wii, is a disastrous console. But that won't be its legacy. When it finally goes gentle into that good night, people will look back on it the same way they speak about the Dreamcast; a strange few years filled with the best games of a generation. Does that really sound like something you should miss out on? | {
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In mid-2012, prominent Iraqi Shiite leader Moqtada Al Sadr visited Damascus where he was decorated with the Order of the Syrian Republic, in “gratitude” for his friendship. The Syrians never imagined that this cleric-turned politician — a long-time admirer of Hassan Nasrallah and protege of Iran — would turn against them, coming out with a surprising statement on April 8, calling on President Bashar Al Assad to step down, urged the Syrian president to “take a historic, heroic decision... before it is too late.”
Since emerging as a powerful heavyweight in the nationwide uprising against the United States after the 2003 invasion, Al Sadr has been a pivotal player in Iraqi politics. Starting off as a slow and very uncharismatic speaker whose only political credential was his family name, Moqtada Al Sadr evolved quickly on a personal and professional level, developing eloquent speaking skills, a powerful militia, a network of charity organisations that included hospitals and schools, and an influential bloc in the Iraqi parliament.
His Mahdi Army, which reigns in the ghettos of Baghdad, was modelled after Hezbollah. The mullahs of Iran always had high hopes in him, seeing that he would make a perfect proxy for the Islamic republic in the Arab world when and if Hezbollah parted the scene in Lebanon.
Tehran’s lingering fear
In Tehran, there is an ever-present fear that at one point in time, Hezbollah will no longer be able to carry out the duties for which it was originally formed back in 1982.
They include empowering Shiites in the Arab world and exporting revolutionary Khomeinism. This would happen if Hezbollah ever got dragged into a new civil war in Lebanon or if it were crushed in a war with Israel, or if it were ever abandoned by Syria, which remains the lifeline for Hezbollah arms coming from Iran.
When the Syrians and Israelis went into indirect peace talks, via Turkish mediation, back in 2008, Iran started investing heavily in the Mahdi Army, labelling it as a Plan B.
They were afraid that at one point, if Syria got what it wanted on the Golan, it would part ways with Hezbollah. As far as they are concerned, a Syrian regime that has signed peace with Israel was equal to a Syrian regime that had fallen — two things that they were determined, should never happen.
The conditions in which Hezbollah was founded in the early 1980s very much applied to Iraq after 2003. The state was completely absent, the army had broken down along sectarian lines, lawlessness prevailed, and arms were everywhere, waiting to be picked up by poverty-stricken Arab Shiites on Iran’s payroll.
Before his assassination in Damascus in February 2008, prominent Hezbollah chief Imad Mughnieh was reportedly working on a revamp of the Mahdi Army. Back then, the activities of Al Sadr’s militia were “frozen” while Iran handled the purging of it of rowdy elements and transforming it into a unified, well-trained, and properly indoctrinated fighting force. Al Sadr was transported to Qom to continue his religious training, earmarked for scholarly promotion from ‘seyed’ to ‘ayatollah’, which if obtained, would have given him theological authority to issue fatwas and lead Iraqi Shiites from above, rather than from below.
Al Sadr never continued his studies in Iran, returning home to help set up the Popular Mobilisation Units, some of which were sent to Syria to fight alongside Hezbollah after the outbreak of the present war in 2011. His army was then remobilised to fight Daesh, taking on the name ‘Saraya Al Salam’ in 2014.
Playing ‘good cop/bad cop’?
What then triggered Al Sadr’s sudden U-turn? Syria’s state-run media has refrained from criticising the firebrand cleric, who was often hailed as a “friend” and whose news often made it to the front page of Syrian dailies. Was it a ploy by the Iranians, playing “good cop/bad cop” in Shiite circles of Iraq? Or was it part of Al Sadr’s ongoing campaign to bring down the cabinet of Prime Minister Haider Al Abadi through massive protests in the streets of Baghdad accusing it of corruption and of selling out to the Americans. Within the powerful Iraqi Shiite community, many fear and distrust the 43-year old cleric, who emerged out of nowhere to challenge long-established political families like the Hakims and their political machine, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council. Often his militias roamed the streets of Iraq, striking at traditional Sunni enemies but also, taking gabs at the Hakim’s Badr Organisation, an Iran-funded militia that fought alongside the Iranian Army during its eight-year war with Saddam Hussain.
Is Al Sadr repositioning himself as an ‘independent Shiite’, distancing himself from the Iranians, expecting a confrontation between the Islamic republic and the Trump White House? Others have done it before, like Subhi Al Tufaili, the first secretary-general of Hezbollah, who now stands as a fiery critic both of Iran and Nasrallah.
Al Sadr cannot go that far — at least for now — fearing systematic character slaughter, isolation within the global Shiite community and perhaps political or even physical elimination at home. Instead he may have decided to send off signals, seeing how other players in the region would respond.
So far nobody has come knocking on his door, except for a delegation from Hezbollah, seeking an explanation for his deviance and wanting to know how he can be accommodated to keep the “Shiite family” united. He has played this game before, striking at former prime minister Nouri Al Maliki, an all-time Iran favourite, after having helped bring him to power in 2006.
When naming his price, Al Sadr outlined a long list of cabinet seats, pockets of influence, and quotas in the Iraqi parliament. Iran nodded back then, and he backed out, putting his full weight behind Al Maliki until the latter’s ouster in 2014. He might be hoping to do the same again in 2017 — using Syria this time, to attract the attention of Tehran — yet perhaps, with a whole new set of demands on Iraq’s domestic scene.
Sami Moubayed is a senior fellow at St Andrews University in Scotland and author of Under the Black Flag (IB Tauris, 2015). | {
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"The whole of Bharat is with you," a woman is seen telling the Alwar dairy farmer murder suspect.
Two videos had brought out the horror of the Alwar lynching: 55-year-old dairy owner Pehlu Khan yanked by his neck, thrown to the ground, kicked by cow vigilantes in Rajasthan early this month. A fortnight later, a third video has emerged. This shows one of the five men arrested for Khan's murder being applauded and eulogised by the leader of the cow vigilante group; all this and more while the 19-year-old was in the custody of the police.Bipin Yadav, who was seen in the earlier video beating Mr Khan with his belt, had been brought to his college by the police to let him write his annual examination. Kamal Didi, as she identifies herself, also showed up at the college."Don't worry Bipin, the whole of Bharat is with you," she is seen telling the suspect in the video. Then, she turns to others and continues: "These boys are like (Chandrasekhar) Azad and Bhagat Singh, they have done nothing wrong". The police guard escorting the teenager to college does not intervene.The saffron-robed woman is the president of Rasthriya Mahila Gau Rakshak Dal, the same group that led a mob of 100 people to a hotel in Jaipur, alleging that it was serving beef. They backed off only after the administration agreed to seal the hotel.In the video, she goes on: "Don't worry Bipin, this is just a matter of few days. After that something will happen which you won't even be able to imagine right now". She also advises Bipin Yadav to not sit idle in jail but "teach them" about cow protection.When NDTV contacted her, she confirmed meeting Bipin Yadav at the college. "I just went to assure him of our support," she says.Pehlu Khan's family has received no assurances of support, or justice. This week, they headed to the heart of the national capital, Jantar Mantar, over a 100 km from their village in Rajasthan Nuh district to seek justice.Mr Khan was killed by the mob of cow vigilantes attacked the dairy farmer in Alwar, who assumed he was smuggling the cows for slaughter. But apart from the five arrested after an outcry against the mob lynching which also echoed in parliament, the police haven't arrested six others named in the FIR.
"I want punishment for those who killed my son," says his 85-year-old mother Angoori Devi. Adds his eldest daughter Abida Khan, 26: "We have come up to Delhi to get heard".The Rajasthan police say they have formed three teams to identify the other accused seen in the video. But there are no clear answers why action hasn't been taken to catch the six named in the police complaint. Or why the police haven't analysed the phone records of the 6 missing accused to track them down. | {
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The debut of highly-anticipated Star Trek Picard is just around the corner on January 23rd (you can see the preliminary Mid-Season schedule at this link) and it looks like it will be a strong addition to the franchise (it has already been renewed for a second season). As we wait for its arrival, it seems like now would be a good time to look back at the past Trek TV entries and rate which are the best. Seven TV shows have been produced so far (not including the Short Treks mini-eps), starting with the original series in 1966 and going up through Star Trek Discovery which is heading into its third season. Below is a list of all seven shows in order of production and you can vote on the three that you consider the best in the franchise. So cast your vote and pass this along to others to participate as well. I will do a recap of the votes and look at how each of the shows were ranked shortly before the premiere of Star Trek Picard in January.
>ALSO READ: The Ten Biggest Sci Fi TV Cancellations of 2019: The OA, Swamp Thing, Counterpart, and More
Vote for the Three Best Star Trek TV Series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (29%, 489 Votes)
Star Trek: The Next Generation (29%, 480 Votes)
Star Trek: The Original Series (13%, 212 Votes)
Star Trek: Voyager (12%, 201 Votes)
Star Trek: Enterprise (7%, 117 Votes)
Star Trek: Discovery (6%, 95 Votes)
Star Trek: The Animated Series (5%, 80 Votes) Total Voters: 994
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More from CancelledSciFi.com
Keep up with the ratings developments and the status of all the currently airing sci fi and fantasy shows with our Weekly Roundup posts. And join the #CancelledSciFiArmy on Twitter to bolster our ranks and help us fight for the struggling and cancelled sci fi and fantasy shows.
Follow our Sci Fi TV Top 5 column for the top sci fi TV stories each week.
Check out our Sci Fi TV Schedule for debut and season finale dates and follow our Weekly Listings for a rundown of the shows airing in the current week.
Check back each Saturday for Sci Fi TV Retrospectives: A look back at cancelled, classic, forgotten, and more genre shows from the past. | {
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Magento 2 B2B solutions for rocketing sales and conversions
Are you a B2B Magento websites? And you are looking for a complete solutions for improving your business? This blog is absolutely for your sites and even other B2C owners. Here you can find the accurate definition of B2B and B2C businesses. Moreover, we are going to analyzing and introducing Mageplaza all-in-one B2B Solutions package for Magento webstores.
Table of Contents
What is B2B websites and B2B solutions?
When one business sells products or services to another company, it called B2B. B2B is different from B2C in which transactions occurred between business and individual customers. So, in other words, a B2B website serves other companies as their customers who often order a large quantity of products. You can consider them as the wholesalers.
So what are the best solutions for improving a B2B website performance? Understanding that their customers are mostly businesses and wholesales, Mageplaza build a B2B solution package exclusively for Magento 2 websites to optimize all criteria of their sites, including:
Better manage customers access/accounts/groups
Better manage orders
Improve products showcase on sites
Enhance product prices and promotions
Expand business and analytics
Why you need all-in-one B2B solutions?
Better manage customers account
B2B solutions provide Magento 2 stores with full control of their customer’s accounts and access. Whenever a new customer comes to your website, they can be required to log in or create a new account. Also, store owners are able to accept or reject any new account registration to filter their true buyers and prevent any tricky actions from bad guys.
Implement customer personalization
Personalization, in a simple way, is understanding and satisfying individual customers. With the B2B solutions package, your beloved customers can get special promotions and prices in individual ways. For more details, they can contact to stores and ask for a quote for their concerned items.
Moreover, customers can upload and leave any specific requirements on the checkout page regarding their orders. Extra information can be the customer’s expectations, certain notes, or feedback about their orders.
Enhance product showcases on stores
Besides the default product information that customers can view at product detail pages, B2B Solutions does allow them to view other specific documentations of products such as Product Specifications, Warranty Policy, User Guide, and so on. Additionally, customers can easily choose their bundle of options for products which is more beneficial and appealing in terms of pricing.
More powerful and necessary, with B2B solutions, Magento 2 stores can set up multiple price packages and offer to customers at the checkout page. By this, customers have a great chance to get the discount price if they buy at a large quantity. The function tier price does not only encourage buyers to shop more, but, as a consequence, push up the store’s sales and revenue significantly.
Make order process much easier
With the B2B package, your wholesalers and big customers can easily make an order of a large quantity using product SKUs. Moreover, they can also reorder quickly since the module support saving the information of their previous order and repeat for the next time.
Another useful tool for better order is that shoppers are allocated to appropriate shipping and payment methods. Hence, they can choose the preferred ones instantly and accurately, which also means that your sales are converted faster.
Track business sales and customer behaviors
Business analytics now is a must-have tactic for a successful company. With B2B solutions, Magento 2 websites will have the ability to track and handle significant figures and index of sales, customer insights. By this, it helps store make real-time improvements for their operation.
Manage customers’ access
Customer Approval and Required Login extension
In order to protect your sites from any suspicious account and internet fault, B2B package supports Customer Approval function, which allows admin to approve/reject newly registered accounts.
Sharing the similar purpose with Customer Approval, Required Login forces customers to use an account with a valid password to access store’s sites. The main purpose is remaining the true customers and only show the private and essential information for registered accounts now anyone visiting the sites.
Catalog permissions
Customers’ access can also be limited by the Catalog Permission module. Magento admin can restrict the connection of specific customer groups to certain web pages, certain categories, products, and CMS/static blocks.
This limitation feature is particularly necessary for wholesale merchants who work with diverse customer groups and would want to control their information visibility better with specific purposes and marketing strategies.
Auto switch customer groups
If you are finding for a supper method to manage your customer group effectively, this Milestone module is definitely your solution. By it, when a customer belonging to a specific group meet certain conditions, he/she will be moved to another group.
Those conditions are configured at the backend by admins, including:
Customers information
Orders attributes
Cart items conditions
Admin can then set up the specific policies and programs for typical groups. This way of management does not only help Magento admins save time and effort to control multiple groups, but it also encourages customers to be more active so that they can get better benefits of higher group levels.
Better handle Price and Promotions
Pricing is sensitive to all buyers. Allowing them to call the store for knowing product price individually is a great way to serve and listen to each customer flexibly. Magento 2 admins hide price and require actions such as:
Hide price and actions required: login, quote a price for each item via popup
Request for a quote: Customers can quote multiple items at the same time via a separate quote cart
Tier Price
Another way to offer customers a better price is by making the tier price with appealing discounts. Especially, this tool allows wholesalers to order with a large quantity and available discounted prices.
By this Tier Price module, admins store can improve their packages in the following ways:
Automated tier prices table for quick purchase
Multiple tier groups to apply instantly
Assign multiple tier prices to customers or customer groups
Special promotions
One more powerful tool for Magento 2 owners is the Special Promotions module which enables them to offer exclusive deals to customers, which Magento default hasn’t supported yet.
This module allows admins to create unlimited conditions based on:
Promotions based on conditions of order value
Promotions based on conditions of order status
Promotions based on conditions of order history
Promotions based on conditions of cart items
Different calculation rules
Thanks to the diversity of rules applied, Magento stores can attract more customers with their promotions and increase sales significantly.
Make order process much easier
For an order, customers now can leave unlimited sources of information at the checkout page. B2B solution package does support the order attributes function so that Magento stores can collect more useful information from their customers.
For example, customers can leave notes about how they want to pack their order. Or store can survey how shoppers can find their websites and decides to buy your items. This will definitely help Magento stores improve their products and services.
Quick Order
In order to reduce the time for adding products to cart and placing orders, B2B solutions is included with Quick Order function, which helps wholesalers to order with bulk in a few clicks. They can do instant search and add box, using SKU listing to fill in the order or upload the CSV file. All of these advanced tools assist buyers in completing hundreds of items at once.
With the purpose of supporting B2B websites to manage the shipment and payment process better. Also, in order to adjust the fees accordingly to shipping locations, order value, and so on, B2B Solutions enables adding conditions to shipment and payment methods. In case the customer’s order satisfy specific conditions (related to carts, items, etc.), it will be able to choose some certain shipment and payment methods.
Especially, in the B2B Solution Ultimate package, customers can choose the nearest physical stores and pick their items themselves so that they can save up an amount of shipping fee.
Enhance product equipment
Stores can attach preference documentation to their products on the Product Detail Page to enhance customers’ knowledge about the product and gain more customers’ trust. They can read more about product functions, material or origin, etc. Some useful documents B2B stores can assign to their items can be:
Assign User Guide to a product (especially technical products)
Attach Term and Policy of company (a big concern of wholesale buyers with bulk orders)
Attach Technical Documents (for software product or a product under development or use, eg.)
Actual video/ images
An order, even with bulk items now can be converted into a shared link. By this, customers can duplicate their carts or send it to other customers. Following some typical cases for using share carts:
Share any shopping carts, especially bulk order easily without making the same orders via usual steps
Make repeated orders easily. For example, an order is made on a frequent basis, daily, weekly, monthly
Use for blog or review article: If you would like to introduce a typical combination (for fashion, for technology, and many more), suggesting a complete cart with full items is a good idea.
B2B package allow Magento stores to build multiple sets of product attributes into different product options. Thanks to it, available product options provide customers more choices and saves their time to configure and select their loved products.
Below are the enhancements to product options made by B2B Solutions:
Create unlimited product custom options templates in all input types
Multiple ways to assign option templates to mass products: ID, SKU, Product Grid
Configure custom options with sub-options, pricing, tooltip and visual improvement
How can customers make purchases right on the categories page? It is totally possible with Table Category View extension for Magento B2B because it allows users to view details of all products under the category table. Hence, shoppers can compare, review, and add their favorite items to cart right in the table grid without moving to Product Detail sites.
Main functions of the module are:
View categories in table format with columns and rows
Popup to select options of configurable products
Extra product information is added
Add all selected items to cart at once
Advanced analytics and expand the market
Bringing your products to big markets is a great idea to utilize the large accessibility of those shopping channels. Understand the need for B2B businesses to expand their goods, we support Product Feed module which allows Magento stores to send data feed to those markets fast and accurately.
Famous and potential channels all supported such as:
Google Shopping
Bing
eBay
Amazon
Facebook
Others
There is no need to do complex coding in order to set up Google Adwords and Google Analytics since the automatic module is supported in this package.
Magento admins can track all store sales and customers’ behaviors with simple configurations. In details, they can have the following information:
Track & Capture all product views and clicks
Track events of updating cart and checkout process
Track & Capture events of customers’ purchase orders
Five advanced ecommerce reports
Read More B2B Solutions Package | {
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参院選の結果は、安倍首相と「日本会議」にとって「悲願の憲法改正」の絶好のチャンスであり、田久保氏の発言には注目が集まるかと思われたが、この日会場に集まった日本のメディアはほとんどがフリーランスかインターネットメディアばかり。テレビ局に至ってはNHK一社のみで、民放は皆無だった。
安倍政権を支える日本最大の右翼団体「日本会議」。改憲に執念を燃やす点で、安倍総理と「日本会議」の目的はぴったり一致する。最近では海外メディアもその存在と動向に注目し、報道するようになった。その会長である田久保忠衛氏を招いての記者会見が、2016年7月13日、日本外国特派員協会で開かれた。田久保氏は昨年、三好達氏（元最高裁判所長官）に代わり就任した第４代会長で、時事通信記者・論説委員を経て、現在は杏林大学名誉教授。
2016年7月10日投開票が行われた参議院選挙の結果、自民、公明、おおさか維新、日本のこころを大切にする党の改憲勢力が衆参両議院で憲法改正の発議に必要な3分の2議席を占めるに至った。
安倍は日本を極左から真ん中に持ってこようと努力した唯一の政治家
司会者から紹介された田久保氏は、「『日本が危険な、極めて好戦的な状態にあって、そこでナショナリストである安倍さんが登場した』という報道がありますけれども、私はそうは思わない。現実に安倍さんがナショナリスト的な政策をやったということは聞いていません」と、冒頭からとぼけた発言を口にし、「安倍の立脚点をみなさんに理解していただきたい。安倍は真ん中の普通の国から右にシフトしたナショナリストではない。エクストリーム・レフト（極左）から普通の国、真ん中に、日本の路線を持ってこようと努力した唯一の政治家であります」と主張した。
南シナ海での中国の膨張主義に対抗するためには、日本の防衛には欠陥がある
さらには「みなさんお気付きの通り、今回のテレビで（選挙戦で？）誰か、どこの政治家か、国際情勢を論じていた人がいますか、一人でも」と述べ、前日、ハーグの常設仲裁裁判所が、フィリピンの提訴に対して、中国が南シナ海における領有権を主張していることに対して「法的根拠がない」との判断を下したことに言及した。この問題を「まさに日本とアメリカが立脚している点」だと言い、「このことが一切選挙の争点にならなかったというのは、異様なことだと私の目にすら、見えた」と語った。
つまり、日本の領土とは無関係の南シナ海での、田久保氏の言う「中国の膨張主義」に対抗するため、「防衛に欠陥のある」日本は憲法を改正して自衛隊を国防軍にし、領土外に出て行って米軍とともに中国軍に対峙すべきなのに、選挙の争点として論じられなかったことが不満だ、と言いたいらしい。
だとすると、田久保氏の言う「普通の国」とは、右から見ても左から見てもかなり好戦的で危険な国としか思えない。領有権を争っている当事国は中国とフィリピンであって、日本は当事国ではないし、中比両国も裁判所を通じて争っているのである。中国は裁判所の判断を認めないと表明しているが、それを理由として第三国の軍隊が押しかけてゆくというのは尋常な話ではない。
そもそも改憲を争点から隠し、党首討論から逃げ回っていたのは、安倍総理本人である。そんな姑息な政治家を田久保氏は「日本を普通の国にしようとした唯一の政治家」とまで持ち上げるのはどうも不思議でならない。
田久保氏は最後に、「護憲派の言い分は中国の言っていることと極めて似ている」などと断言してプレゼンテーションを終えた。自民党の改憲草案が、彼の敵視する中国憲法に酷似している事実については言及しなかった。
「衆参両院で3分の2というのは戦後初めてで、絶好のチャンスを迎えた」
会見の後半、海外記者からは鋭い質問が続いた。 | {
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The discovery of files that police said were destroyed has cast fresh doubts on the suicide verdict at the heart of the Westminster VIP paedo scandal.
Campaigners are demanding a review of the coroner’s verdict into the death of Carole Kasir and a new inquest.
Mrs Kasir ran the notorious paedophile brothel Elm Guest House in South West London. She may have kept a dossier of the perverted visitors’ names and photos from the early 80s.
The newly found files reveal her GP’s surprise at her apparent suicide. They also say syringes and vials found next to her body had not been analysed.
One source believes a fresh probe may expose a cover-up and reveal that Mrs Kasir, 47, who was found dead in her bed in 1990, had been murdered.
(Image: Getty)
The Kasir files were released to campaigners under freedom of information rules after London’s Met Police said they had been destroyed.
Andrew Bridgen, Tory MP for North West Leicestershire, is among those calling for another inquest.
He said: “There is a case for a fresh investigation into the anomalies raised by these documents. One is that her GP questioned whether she had committed suicide but there are also other anomalies.”
Among the prominent people said to have visited the guest house and engaged in sex – some with consenting adults and some with children – were a government minister, a high-ranking policeman, a member of the Royal Household, an MI5 officer, traitor Anthony Blunt and Sir Peter Morrison, the Parliamentary Private Secretary to Margaret Thatcher.
A police investigation in 2015 failed to prove claims Mrs Kasir had kept a list and picture of the visitors.
A source close to the original investigation said: “If there’s a fresh look at Carole’s death and a full investigation into what exactly was going on at the time then there’s a good chance these things could turn up. If that happens it will blow the lid off any cover-up and it could reveal that she was murdered.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt this place is at the centre of things. The fact these files were found after the Met said they didn’t exist shows there is information out there that we could get.”
The papers show diabetic Mrs Kasir, convicted in 1983 for possessing obscene videos and keeping a disorderly house, tried to kill herself previously and she was found with an overdose of insulin.
(Image: PA)
(Image: Mirrorpix)
Pathologist Richard Shepherd said her death was “not due to natural causes” noting her profound low blood sugar consistent with excessive injected insulin. One abnormality raised in the files is a decision by the poison unit at New Cross Hospital in London not to analyse the syringes and vials found next to her body to see if they were connected to her death or to check her stomach contents. Experts say this should have been normal practice in a toxicology report.
Colin Peters, a Foreign Office barrister, was also named as an alleged Elm House regular. Notorious paedophile Sidney Cooke was linked to providing boys for VIP sex parties in London.
Elm House itself was said to be home to a sauna and a video suite where sick films could be made. A man who said he was taken there as a child claimed he was plied with drink and made to wear a fairy costume while abusers chased him.
The files even raise a question mark about Mrs Kasir’s home country. The official report says she was born in Germany as Carole Weitzman, based on evidence given to the inquest by her estranged husband Haroon Kasir.
(Image: Caters News Agency)
(Image: PA)
But a close family member says she was born in London and may have had the surname Jones. A campaigner said: “The fact that there are question marks over the basics makes you wonder what else went wrong. The whole thing needs re-examining.”
Deputy Labour leader Tom Watson was told by the Metropolitan Police that all the documents relating to the inquest had been destroyed.
Now it has emerged that information is untrue. Hammersmith coroner’s court, which held the inquest has released redacted accounts of the coroner’s notes, seen by the Sunday People. Evidence given by David Walker, who was a GP from the practice where Mrs Kasir had been a patient for 14 years, cast doubt on whether she had killed herself.
The evidence said she had attempted suicide in 1982, when the guest house was raided, been hospitalised after an overdose in 1984 and had a drinking problem in 1989 and was a heavy smoker.
But he said: “When there are marital difficulties you see the patient in a depressed light. Sometimes she was cheerful and friendly. I would not expect her to commit suicide.”
The postmortem report and the poisons unit report both show she had no alcohol in her body at the time of death.
Elm Guest House was used by paedos including late MP Cyril Smith
(Image: Mirrorpix)
Elm Guest House first came to public attention after MP Tom Watson raised questions in the House of Commons about a historic Westminster paedophile ring.
The house in Barnes, South West London, was said to have been used for child sexual abuse by VIP paedos in the 1980s. A 1982 leaflet published by the Conservative Group for Homosexual Equality said: “The facilities include a sauna, solarium and video studio.”
Just weeks later the guest house was raided by police. Carole and Haroon Kasir were convicted at the Old Bailey of running a brothel.
Visitors were said to have included the late Lib Dem MP and paedophile Cyril Smith.
Elm and the nearby former Grafton Close children’s home, run by Richmond Council, were subject to a police investigation, Operation Fernbridge, which led to the arrest and jailing of a Roman Catholic priest,Tony McSweeney, for three years in 2015.
John Stingmore, the former manager of the children’s home, was also arrested and charged and as the coroner’s papers show, was convicted as a paedophile after he left Richmond Council. Stingmore died just before he was due to face trial so one of the charges related to bringing a boy to Elm Guest House was never tested in court.
McSweeney’s offences did not involve the guest house.
In early 1983 Mrs Kasir was convicted with her husband Haroon Kasir of running a disorderly house.
Although the identities of many of the VIP visitors has been a source of speculation, police confirmed to a Channel 4 Dispatches programme that Smith – whose paedophile activities at Rochdale are currently being examined by the independent child sex abuse inquiry – did visit the guest house. The inquiry was also told that MI5 lied about knowledge they had he was a paedophile. | {
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For what it is worth, I saw nothing to support Toobin’s claim that Thomas is disengaged and “not paying attention” during oral arguments. During the course of the argument (which was on a relatively prosaic statutory interpretation case), I saw Thomas confer with liberal Justice Stephen Breyer some three or four times, and with Justice Scalia once. I believe I also saw him look up some points in what seemed to be the joint appendix filed by the parties (or perhaps one of their briefs). Obviously, I could not overhear what Breyer and Thomas were saying. Perhaps they were discussing the weather or making plans for lunch. But the timing of their interactions make it likely that they were talking about issues raised in questions asked or about to be asked by Breyer, or one of the other justices.
I only attended this one oral argument (which was the first one I have seen in recent years). However, the fact that Thomas often confers with Breyer during arguments is well-known to court watchers, and has been noted by such knowledgeable observers as Washington Post Supreme Court correspondent Robert Barnes. Thomas himself has confirmed that he sometimes suggests questions to Breyer, who then poses them.
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Obviously, there is plenty of room for reasonable disagreement about the quality of Thomas’ performance on the Court. Critics can legitimately claim that he should ask more questions at oral argument himself. But Thomas has a reasonable counterargument when he suggests that the justices would do better to listen to the arguments of counsel rather than take up much of time of with their own points. This is in fact how oral argument was conducted in the early nineteenth century, in the days of John Marshall and Joseph Story.
Be that as it may, Toobin is wrong when he claims that oral arguments are “the public’s only windows onto the Justices’ thought processes.” In reality, the justices’ written opinions are far more significant “windows…onto their thought processes” and explain their views in far greater detail and nuance than oral argument questions do. Obviously, many of the opinions are difficult for nonexperts to follow. But the same is true of many oral argument questions, whose significance can only be understood by observers with extensive knowledge about the case.
Thomas’ status as the Supreme Court’s most conservative justice and the nation’s most prominent black conservative inevitably makes him a controversial figure. Still, his reputation has gradually improved over the years, even among ideological opponents. Prominent liberal scholars such as Harvard’s Mark Tushnet (see also here) have come to recognize that he is a serious and sophisticated thinker on many constitutional law issues. Few any longer advance the old claim that Thomas just blindly follows Justice Scalia (the two have in fact differed on many important issues involving federalism, free speech, executive power, and other matters). On some key issues Thomas has influenced Scalia much more than the reverse.
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Image caption Fidel Castro had not been pictured in public since falling ill in 2006
New photographs have emerged showing Fidel Castro greeting workers in a rare public appearance.
The images of a grey-bearded Castro, 83, smiling and wearing a white tracksuit, offer a rare glimpse of the reclusive former Cuban leader.
Mr Castro appears slightly stooped but otherwise healthy in the four pictures, which were reportedly taken with a worker's mobile phone.
He had not been photographed in public since falling ill in July 2006.
The latest images, taken at a scientific think tank in Havana, were posted on the blog of two Cuban journalists on Saturday.
They were taken at the National Center for Scientific Investigation in the capital on Wednesday.
'Blowing kisses'
A worker at the centre reportedly sent the pictures to Rosa Baez, a journalist who works for official Cuban media, who posted them on her blog.
A comment from the unidentified Cuban worker accompanied the images.
"He is thin but he looks good, and according to our director, he is very good mentally," it read.
Mr Castro stopped, said hello and blew kisses to the employees, the worker added.
The pictures were also posted on the blog of Norelys Morales, a well-known Cuban television journalist.
Castro had not been photographed in public since being taken ill in July 2006. He was forced to hand over power - first temporarily, then permanently - to his younger brother Raul, 79.
The only updates on his health come from visiting dignitaries who have been able to meet him. Exactly what he suffers from, and where he is recuperating, remain state secrets.
Mr Castro himself said last year that he did not think he would see Barack Obama re-elected in 2012 - although it was not clear whether he was referring to his own life expectancy or the staying power of the US president. | {
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おまけ
先日、高校の同窓会行ってきました！
楽しい時間であっという間だった。
当時全然しゃべらなかった他クラスの友達とも、ふつーに喋れてなんか不思議でした
能登は基本、干物妹うまるちゃん並みな干物女なので、ワイワイ賑やかな空気に癒されました～
そして、移動中はこれ。
『自分は自分しかいない』という言葉が胸に刺さりました。涙無しでは読めません！
オススメです。。。
部屋片付けてたら古い履歴書出てきたw能登有沙です。 | {
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the kid in all of us
get promoted to director of operations, sending out first official team email
laugh to myself every time i type "duties" | {
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TIJUANA, BAJA CALIFORNIA.- Elementos de la Guardia Nacional y Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional (Sedena) detuvieron a un Teniente activo del Ejército Mexicano cuando transportaba 88 paquetes de cocaína y cristal a bordo de una camioneta con destino a la ciudad de Tijuana.
Los primeros reportes informaron que en un punto de revisión instalado sobre el kilómetro 40 la carretera Mexicali-Tecate sorprendieron al hombre conduciendo una camioneta Nissan X-Trail blanca con placas de Baja California. | {
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When we met the owner of Quick7, a busy convenience store in North Melbourne and told him about how TillBilly can help his business save money on payments and paper receipts, he quickly understood the value and signed up!
More success stories coming soon! | {
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On Thursday, Cisco formally joined the parade of major tech companies that have been calling for a comprehensive federal privacy law that would once and for all set a clear standard for tech companies nationwide.
Currently in the United States, there is a patchwork of laws governing how various types of data are handled—health, financial, etc.—but there isn’t a clear set of rules for Silicon Valley giants that traffic in vast amounts of information sharing. As a hardware networking giant, however, Cisco does not profit from user data in the same way that a company like Google or Facebook does.
In a blog post, Cisco’s top lawyer, Mark Chandler, called the current legal framework "not adequate." Cisco hasn’t put forward specific bill language just yet; it is speaking for now in generalities.
Particularly in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, along with the recent passage of the GDPR in the European Union and California’s own new privacy law, companies have been pushing Congress to regulate their industry like never before. Some lawmakers have taken notice and have introduced their own bills, but none have gotten far in the process just yet. Other states, like Washington and Massachusetts, are proposing their own privacy bills, too.
"What we don’t need is more fracturing," Michelle Dennedy, Cisco’s chief privacy officer, told Ars.
A former member of the Federal Trade Commission, Maureen Ohlhausen , told Ars that while the GDPR has "some good concepts," it may not be fully appropriate for the US, as elements of the law can clash with the First Amendment. The GDPR also relies on each member state’s data protection authority , a government agency that the United States lacks.
In the US, the FTC is the de facto privacy regulator, but the primary way the agency enforces privacy under Article 5 of its legal mandate is largely to make sure that companies are complying with the privacy laws that they themselves outline in their lengthy terms of service. The FTC can enforce those rules under consent decrees.
"I think that many companies will be interested in an approach that focuses on consumer expectations rather than excessive notification, targets harmful uses of data, is technologically neutral, avoids a patchwork of laws that may fragment our successful national market, and gives the FTC some additional resources," Ohlhausen said.
Still, Cisco and other companies’ sudden change of heart is somewhat odd, according to Ashkan Soltani, a former FTC technologist and current independent privacy researcher based in Oakland, California. Soltani helped author the new California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA), likely the strongest state-level regulation currently in place—it will take effect in January 2020.
"It’s ironic that for years, as long as I’ve been here, companies have said that we can self-regulate; we don’t need any federal regulation," Soltani told Ars. "But then as soon as there are state initiatives, the companies are, like, ‘It’s time for federal regulation!’"
Soltani added that numerous companies are trying to lobby state capitals to shape both California’s law and those of other states that are putting forward similar measures, while at the same time trying to direct the federal government toward something palatable. "The ultimate worry is that, because of a combination of laws like CCPA and just the actions of the big players ruining or tainting the ecosystem, they want to get ahead and [not] disadvantage their specific industry," he said.
That assertion tracks with what at least some privacy lawyers have observed.
"If you read between the lines, Cisco is calling for a law similar to GDPR," Susan Lyon-Hintze, a Seattle-based attorney, told Ars. "They want an enforceable law, but enforceable by governmental agencies and not by individuals and plaintiff lawyers. Tech companies all want to avoid costly litigation." | {
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We’ve the platinum-blonde hottie Sintia Stone in this sequence as descendant taunts and provides a blowage to his fellow. See as they commenced tearing up as Sintia is lovin that harsh fucky-fucky descendant is getting from her boy | {
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HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez urged Canadian counterpart Chrystia Freeland on Wednesday to help end U.S. sanctions on Venezuela in their third meeting since May on the South American country’s political and humanitarian crisis.
Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland shakes hands with her Cuban counterpart Bruno Rodriguez during a meeting in Havana, Cuba August 28, 2019. Ismael Francisco/Pool via REUTERS
Communist-run Cuba is a strong ally of leftist President Nicolas Maduro, whom most Western nations including Canada want to step down in favor of opposition leader Juan Guaido, arguing his election was fraudulent and there must be a new vote.
A hike in U.S. sanctions this year, aimed at intensifying pressure on Maduro, has hurt an economy already experiencing hyperinflation that has fueled malnutrition and disease while prompting millions to flee.
“I expressed that tightening of #US coercive measures vs #Venezuela damages its people and are contrary to International Law and the dialogue process,” Rodriguez tweeted in English after the meeting.
A Cuban Foreign Ministry statement added that the minister
“therefore proposed Canada contribute to their elimination.”
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has railed against socialism in Latin America, accuses Havana of propping up Maduro and tightened the decades-old U.S. trade embargo on the island this year.
The strategy, which is more aggressive than that of other Western countries, appears partly aimed at winning the votes of Latin American exile communities in the battleground state of Florida in next year’s presidential election, some analysts say.
Canada, a neighbor and NATO ally of the United States, also has long-standing good relations with Cuba, raising hopes it could serve as a mediator in the Venezuelan crisis.
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence called on Canada in June to do more to engage directly with Cuba over what he called its “malign influence” on Venezuela.
The Canadian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Rodriguez and Freeland agreed that senior officials would stay in contact and continue to exchange views over Venezuela. | {
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BALTIMORE (WJZ) — Baltimore Police are investigating after the home of Rep. Elijah Cummings was broken into early Saturday morning.
The burglary occurred around 3:40 a.m. at his Baltimore home in the 2000 block of Madison Avenue.
RELATED COVERAGE:
At this time, police don’t know if any property was taken.
This was several hours before President Donald Trump tweeted criticizing Cummings and his district including Baltimore.
Rep, Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA…… — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 27, 2019
Trump has continued to criticize over the last couple of days. Cummings has remained mostly silent as Trump continued to tweet and speak about Baltimore’s high crime rate and what he called a “rodent-infest mess.”
On Thursday, he visited Baltimore constituents in Waverly.
I visited a packed house at Stadium Place today to provide the seniors there with a legislative update & to talk about my work in Congress. We talked about what matters to them, & they encouraged me to keep doing my job & continue fighting for them in Washington. pic.twitter.com/UPKxoHGSA3 — Elijah E. Cummings (@RepCummings) August 1, 2019
A neighbor told WJZ that he has known Rep. Cummings for years and was shocked to hear about the break-in.
“Anything he can do to help this neighborhood he has been there for us,” the neighbor said.
Right now, there are no suspects in the burglary case.
One family who lives on the congressman’s street told WJZ they did capture some video footage on their doorbell camera.
Detectives from the Central District are investigating this incident. Anyone with information is asked to call 410-396-2221 or Metro Crime Stoppers at 1-866-7Lockup. | {
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Scanning electron micrograph of human T lymphocyte or T cell. Credit: NIAID/NIH
Immunotherapy can cure some cancers that until fairly recently were considered fatal. In addition to developing drugs that boost the immune system's cancer-fighting abilities, scientists are becoming expert at manipulating a patient's own immune cells, turning them into cancer-killing armies. But cancers have tricks to evade attack, so scientists are racing to outmaneuver cancer and boost the effectiveness of immune cell therapies. Today's scientists are skilled immune system engineers, but they're working off of an incomplete blueprint: while they know a great deal about how to reprogram immune cell pathways, they often can't determine precisely which circuits they should rewire in order to fabricate a more potent immune system.
Now, UC San Francisco researchers have devised a CRISPR-based system called SLICE, which will allow scientists to rapidly assess the function of each and every gene in "primary" immune cells—those drawn directly from patients. The new method, described in the Nov. 15 issue of Cell, provides researchers with a powerful tool that will guide their decision-making when determining how best to engineer immune cells to fight cancer and a host of other diseases.
"SLICE allows us to perform genome-wide screens in which we mutate every gene in the genome to see which genes have the biggest effect on the cellular behavior we're interested in," explained Alex Marson, MD,Ph.D., associate professor of microbiology and immunology at UCSF and co-senior author of the new study. "We change one gene at a time in each cell and see which change causes the cell to do what we want it to do. SLICE is the discovery engine that will point us towards pathways that we can reprogram to generate the most effective next-generation cell therapies."
SLICE Finds Genes That Ramp Up Cancer-Killing Immune Activity
As a proof of principle, the researchers tested whether they could use SLICE to identify genes that make T cells—a common type of immune cell—replicate more effectively. This is especially important for cancer immunotherapy, which employs artificially stimulated and engineered T cells to kill cancer. So far, these therapies have only been effective against certain malignancies, but scientists believe that identifying genes that promote T cell proliferation can make cancer immunotherapy available to a wider range of patients.
Using SLICE, the researchers were able to identify genes that promote T cell replication, and others that suppress it. Though some of these genes had been previously characterized using other discovery methods, many were entirely new, demonstrating that SLICE could reveal key regulators of proliferation that other methods failed to capture.
After identifying these genes, the researchers obtained primary T cells from multiple human donors and deleted the genes that had been found to inhibit replication. When these CRISPR-modified T cells were cultured in the presence of cancer, they exhibited a markedly improved cancer-killing capacity, demonstrating that scientists could edit genes identified by SLICE and turn ordinary T cells into a potent potential therapy.
Outsmarting Cancer's Defenses
But cancer has tricks of its own. Cancer immunotherapy often fails because tumors thrive in so-called microenvironments that are teeming with compounds that suppress immune activity and prevent T cells from realizing their full cancer-killing potential.
"T cells seem to become 'suppressed' in tumor microenvironments," said UCSF Health oncologist Julia Carnevale, MD, a Damon Runyon Cancer Foundation fellow and co-first author of the new study. "We wanted to know if SLICE could help us find a way to help T cells overcome this suppression."
The researchers showed that SLICE can indeed be employed to invigorate suppressed T cells. Utilizing SLICE, the researchers identified genes targeted by adenosine, an immunosuppressor found in tumor microenvironments, and found that deleting these genes allowed T cells to proliferate, even in the presence of adenosine.
"SLICE functions as a flexible platform that allows scientists to model the interaction between immune cells and the tumor microenvironment. We've shown that SLICE can help researchers identify genes that allow immune cells to escape the immunosuppressive forces they encounter in these microenvironments," said Alan Ashworth, Ph.D., the E. Dixon Heise Distinguished Professor in Oncology at UCSF, president of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, and co-senior author of the new study.
SLICE Is the Discovery Engine for Next-Generation Immune Cell Therapies
SLICE builds on a recent discovery from the Marson lab. In July 2018, researchers in Marson's lab reported in Nature that they could deliver CRISPR-based gene-editing constructs into immune cells using electroporation, a technique in which cells are literally shocked into absorbing molecules from outside the cell. SLICE takes a hybrid approach, incorporating the best aspects of the Marson lab's electroporation method alongside more conventional methods that employ viruses to deliver components of the CRISPR system. Once SLICE identifies genomic targets, the electroporation-based CRISPR method could be used to re-engineer those targets and reprogram immune cells, thus boosting their therapeutic capacity.
SLICE also represents a major advance over the current crop of tools that scientists use to study gene function. Though the existing methods—including RNA interference (RNAi) and a handful of CRISPR-based approaches—have yielded important insights, their use is limited to cell lines that often fail to capture the real-life biology that researchers are most interested in. Furthermore, SLICE could be used to interrogate regions of the genome that don't code for proteins—a major advance over RNAi, which was limited to coding regions of the genome.
But most importantly, the potential applications for SLICE are not limited to what's described in the new paper, said Marson, who serves as scientific director of biomedicine at the UC Berkeley-UCSF Innovative Genomics Institute, and is also affiliated with the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, which funded the new study.
"Given the flexibility of this approach," Marson said, "SLICE may one day help scientists to create personalized immune cells with novel disease-fighting properties."
Explore further Tumour immune cells could aid cancer therapies, study shows | {
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Photo : jacoblund ( iStock )
If you’ve ever tried to buy a shot for a bartender, only to have them politely turn it down, maybe this is why: A Portland, Oregon bartender was allegedly so drunk behind the bar that the liquor commission revoked the bar’s liquor license for three weeks. Now, to recoup lost profits, the bar in question is suing the offending bartender.
According to Oregon Live, the suit alleges bartender Gunnar Hokan Jorstad was drinking while behind the bar at Barrel Room on January 13, 2018. A spokesman for the liquor commission told Oregon Live that a police officer noticed Jorstand was “highly intoxicated” outside the bar around 10 p.m. that evening. Apparently Jorstad returned to work, where police were called five hours later, at 3 a.m., to remove him from the premises. His shift reportedly started at 8 p.m. According to the suit, Jorstad acknowledged to police that he had been drinking at work.
The liquor commission subsequently suspended Barrel Room’s liquor license for three weeks and suspended Jorstad’s individual server license for 18 days. But Barrel Room now wants Jorstad to pay for the estimated $5,500 per day the business lost when it was unable to serve alcohol.
“[The penalties] just shows how seriously we take this,” a liquor commission spokesman told Oregon Live.
Whether bartenders can drink at all while behind the bar varies from state to state; for example, Pennsylvania’s Liquor Control Board states it’s “unlawful for any licensee, his servants, agents or employees, to consume liquor or malt or brewed beverages while tending bar or otherwise serving alcohol.” In Oregon, a recently amended code allows for on-duty bartenders to consume one ounce of alcohol at a time, for a maximum of six total ounces (distilled spirits are excluded). Basically, the rule is in place to allow bartenders to make sure cocktails taste balanced or beers aren’t flawed, not so they can get sloshed while on duty. | {
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It's no secret that President-elect Donald Trump's sprawling business empire comes with an avalanche of potential conflicts of interests. The possibilities range across at least 20 countries, from regulators overseeing the banks that loaned money to his companies, to foreign officials that could be pressed into changing policies to help his real estate deals. When Trump assumes the presidency, he will enjoy a vertiginous array of chances to indulge in self-dealing.
The question now is: What will American institutions do about it? Will regulators, officials, agencies, activists, watchdogs, and reporters implicitly accept these conflicts of interests as a new normal? Or will they resist? The growing fracas around the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., will provide an important initial test.
The property is already on a collision course with Trump's future powers as president. Trump's company leased the Old Post Office building from the government — via the General Services Administration (GSA) — in order to transform it into the real estate mogul's newest prize.
Foreign diplomats are reportedly already feeling pressure to stay at Trump's hotel when they visit the nation's capital, lest they offend the new president. And the terms of the lease mean Trump's company has ongoing obligations the GSA must oversee — so the agency's boss will own the company they're meant to keep tabs on.
Yet it turns out there's an even deeper — and much more dramatic — problem.
An overview published Monday in Government Executive, by procurement experts Steven L. Schooner and Daniel I. Gordon, noted the lease for the Old Post Office building is actually somewhat unusual. It contains very specific language stating "No… elected official of the government of the United States… shall be admitted to any share or part of this lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom."
The language was put in specifically "to avoid the appearance of favoritism or preferential treatment by the government toward its employees." Yet Trump is about to become on elected official of the government, while owning and chairing the company that's leasing the Old Post Office building. Put simply, the moment Donald Trump becomes president on Jan. 20, 2017, he will be in legal breach of the contract.
Unfortunately, the lease is unusual in another way as well: Language that's normally in these sorts of contracts, allowing the government to unilaterally pull out of the deal, is not there in this case. The GSA is not allowed to use that escape hatch. That sets up a perverse catch-22: Trump will inevitably breach the contract when he becomes president, but the GSA can't preemptively pull out of the mess without also breaching the contract.
One way or another, someone is going to do something that will open them up to litigation.
Of course, the most likely solution Trump will propose is the same one he's put forward for all his business holdings: His children will take over the company, removing him from the picture. Schooner and Gordon are rightly skeptical of this. It's not as if Trump will suddenly forget that his name is on the building at 1100 Pennsylvania Ave NW. The staff at the GSA would just wind up negotiating with their boss' kids rather than their boss directly. In fact, this is the whole problem with Trump's argument: Unless all of the Trump Organization's real estate holdings are liquidated into cash, it can't actually function as a "blind trust" in any meaningful sense.
Schooner and Gordon conclude that the GSA must bite the bullet: Break the contract and pull out of the deal before Jan. 20, and face Trump's almost-certain litigious wrath knowing they'll have the better of the argument in court.
They're right. But the importance of the point doesn't just end with this case. This will likely be the first of many instances where Trump's self-dealing becomes a national issue. He's reportedly already used foreign diplomacy to try to get the British government to help out one of his golf courses. We actually have no idea how far Trump's business operations extend, so there's no telling how big the parade of horribles could get over the next four years. The Senate could be well within its rights to impeach Trump over any business gains from abroad that fall afoul of the emoluments clause. And sufficient political pressure could force Trump to give an independent monitor wide-ranging access to his company's operations. The monitor could report to the public on any possible conflict of interest. At the very least, it would keep voters, activists, politicians, watchdogs, and reporters informed.
But we need to give the officials and institutions involved in all those questions the courage, or the proper incentive, to make those choices. House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) once referred to a potential Clinton presidency as a "target rich environment." The looming Trump presidency clearly puts that environment to shame, but so far we haven't heard a peep from Chaffetz on whether he'll investigate. So clearly, some prodding is in order.
That requires setting the tone before Trump even takes office: Establish that Trump's indulgent, far-reaching risk of corruption is not normal, is not okay, and should be resisted by people of principle.
The GSA can do that by throwing down the gauntlet now, with everyone watching. | {
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Building Unity games has never been easier with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Tools for Unity! Visual Studio 2015 is the one-stop shop for getting you everything you need to start building Unity games in Visual Studio. In addition, Visual Studio Tools for Unity (VSTU), Microsoft's free Visual Studio add-on that enables editing and debugging Unity games in Visual Studio, is shipping 2.0 RTW with support for Unity 5 and advanced debugging capabilities. | {
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Flatspot X Omen – Highway Jam
2
A few weekends ago I was in Vancouver, BC and had the pleasure to attend the Flatspot Highway Jam featuring the guys from Omen Longboards and Free Wheel Co. I took a bunch of pictures to share for you now.
The bulk of the skaters met at Flatspot Longboards in east downtown/ Chinatown area. They took a big bus and drove from spot to spot along the Sea to Sky highway, getting out at each and leaving urethane at a rapid rate. The last spot they hit was a fire access road that was closed to traffic and perfect for this sort of event. No winners, no losers, just riding downhill, sliding, and hitting features. Midday, a bunch of pizza was provided to the riders and then they got back to riding. They rode almost till the sun went down.
Here it is, hope you enjoy!
2 | {
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Just last week we were talking about the role of contributor licensing agreements (CLA's) and why some organizations/projects preferred to have the copyright in contributed code assigned rather than licensed, i.e., so the organization/project would be in a better position to enforce the copyright. A prime example of this centralized copyright ownership has been in a number of projects owned or managed by Sun Microsystems, includin OpenOffice. Of course, Sun is no longer Sun, and we have all been waiting to see what Oracle's intent would be with the various open source projects they acquired. Well, we are now getting our first insight with the proposed donation of OpenOffice to the Apache Foundation. While the jury is still out on what exactly this assignment means for OpenOffice, I think it's safe to say that the Oracle announcement has elicited a range of reactions, a number of which have been less than enthusiastic. The biggest issue is the license change. The Apache Foundation requires all code donated to them to be under the Apache License. Since OpenOffice.org was not under that license, it means that the project changes from a true copyleft license to a more permissive license that allows companies to take the code proprietary. What kind of reaction will this draw from those who have been contributing freely to OpenOffice. Are they as likely to continue to contribute? Will Oracle be willing to continue to fund developers on the project? Will Attachmate, the new owner of Novell, allow their developers to continue to contribute to LibreOffice, the fork from OpenOffice? What realistic expectations should the Apache Foundation have?
Let's try to parse out the main strands of the discussion so far so you will be able to reach your own conclusions based on the facts, and then we'll look specifically at the legal issue. For historians, here's Oracle's Luke Kowalski on June 1 announcing to the Apache mailing list that "The following project is being sent in as an incubator candidate". The subject line is: "OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal" And here's the PDF attached. It couldn't be clearer what the purpose and goals are when you read the proposal. An excerpt: Proposal OpenOffice.org will be contributed to Apache Software Foundation by Oracle Corporation in compliance with ASF licensing and governance. This contribution will form the basis of the new OpenOffice project at Apache. Background OpenOffice.org was launched as an open source project by Sun Microsystems in June 2000. OpenOffice.org was originally developed by Star Division which was acquired by Sun in 1999. OpenOffice.org is the leading alternative to MS-Office available as an open source licensed offering. The source is written in C++ and delivers language-neutral and scriptable functionality. This source technology introduces the next-stage architecture, allowing use of the suite elements as separate applications or as embedded components in other applications. Numerous other features are also present including XML-based file formats based on the vendor-neutral OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard from OASIS and other resources. Rationale OpenOffice.org core development would continue at Apache following the contribution by Oracle, in accordance with Apache bylaws and its usual open development processes. Both Oracle and ASF agree that the OpenOffice.org development community, previously fragmented, would re-unite under ASF to ensure a stable and long term future for OpenOffice.org. ASF would enable corporate, non-profit, and volunteer stakeholders to contribute code in a collaborative fashion. Supporting tooling projects will accompany the OpenOffice.org contribution, providing APIs for extending and customizing OpenOffice.org. Both OpenOffice.org and the related tooling projects support the OASIS Open Document Format, and will attract an ecosystem of developers, ISVs and Systems Integrators. ODF ensures the users of OpenOffice.org and related solutions will own their document data, and be free to choose the application or solution that best meets their requirements. The OpenOffice.org implementation will serve as a reference implementation of the Open Document Format standard. Current Status This is a new project. Meritocracy The initial developers are very familiar with open source development, both at Apache and elsewhere. Apache was chosen specifically because Oracle as contributor, and IBM as Sponsor and the initial developers want to encourage this style of development for the project. A diverse developer community is regarded as necessary for a healthy, stable, long term OpenOffice.org project. Community OpenOffice.org. seeks to further encourage developer and user communities during incubation, beyond the existing developers currently working on the project. Core Developers The initial set of committers include people from the community of OpenOffice.org Technology projects. We have varying degrees of experience with Apache-style open source development, ranging from none to ASF Members. Alignment The developers of OpenOffice.org will want to work with the Apache Software Foundation specifically because Apache has proven to provide a strong foundation and set of practices for developing standards-based infrastructure and related components. Additionally, the project may evolve to support cloud and mobile platforms from its starting point of desktop operating systems . The initial group of developers will be employed by IBM, Linux distribution companies, and likely public sector agencies. Localization resources are expected to gravitate to the new project, as well. Ensuring the long term stability of OpenOffice.org is a major reason for establishing the project at Apache. The document speaks for itself. This obviously is not a community decision. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's automatically bad for the community in all respects. ODF is mentioned prominently. Wanting to protect ODF and make sure it survives is not anti-community. If you believe that Microsoft stranglehold on the desktop is not a good thing, you probably agree that competing effectively with Microsoft in the enterprise market matters. ODF matters. Some community members may decide to help out, on that basis alone. Then there's the sale of Novell assets to Attachmate. Can anyone demonstrate that Attachmate will assign the same level of employee support to LibreOffice or OpenOffice.org that Novell did? If not, then what happens? Here's IBM's press release, laying its cards out on the table: Continuing its long-standing commitment to open source, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it will take an active, supportive role in the new OpenOffice.org code base submitted to The Apache Software Foundation Incubator. As part of today's news, IBM will contribute staff resources to collaborate with the Apache community during the project's incubation period to further the Open Document Format standard. The move will help facilitate the long term viability and new innovation for OpenOffice.org development in collaboration with the Apache community. IBM plans to commit new project members and individual contributors from its global development team to strengthen the project and ensure its future success. "Open source and standards are key to making our planet smarter and improving the way we live and work," said Kevin Cavanaugh, vice president, IBM Collaboration Solutions. "As IBM celebrates its Centennial, we're actively investing in projects that will help our clients to collaborate in an open manner over the next 100 years." The Open Document Format is the standard for document interoperability across software from many vendors. Advances around ODF, combined with alternative forms of communication (email, IM, tweets, blogs), cloud delivery models for business applications, growth in smart, mobile devices, and economic pressures are all converging to apply pressure to the status quo of documents. As these industry factors converge, IBM is helping organizations move towards a model that offers low-cost acquisition of document tools, coupled with high value and high collaboration solutions around a document. This news strengthens IBM's ability to continue to offer our own distributions based on the OpenOffice code base and make our own contributions to reinforce the overall community. IBM's contribution to the incubating OpenOffice.org code base at Apache will further advance the adoption of office productivity suite alternatives. It is worth noting that IBM forked their own version of OpenOffice several years ago when they incorporated some of the OpenOffice codebase into the Lotus Symphony suite and provided their own enhancements. So it shouldn't be surprising that IBM would embrace this move. But IBM's support is also something that the community benefits from, from the standpoint of ODF. The community has its own goals and purposes, and sometimes they align with corporate interests and sometimes they don't. But if you are a corporate entity, a public company, then you have to think about the next quarter and shareholders and market share. The community for the most part could care less about all that, except to the extent that having large corporate interests involved in Open Source has provided community benefits or the individual developer's community participation is being directly underwritten by corporate support. If, for example, Attachmate isn't particularly interested in developing code in competition to Microsoft, then how would the community feel if IBM kept it going, so to speak, even if not under an ideal, from the community's standpoint, license? Bob Sutor, IBM sets forth his reasoning on why it matters to do it this way: An Apache implementation of a standard means that software, be it open source or proprietary, can start using the standard quickly and reliably. An Apache implementation of a standard immediately increases the value of the standard. OpenOffice happens to implement a standard called the Open Document Format (ODF), something Ive written about several hundred times in the last few years. While the incubator wont be starting from scratch, ODF will continue to evolve and need updated implementations. Over time, the code will be refactored and more uses will be found for it. Within a couple of years I think youll find greater use of ODF in other desktop applications, mobile apps, and even in the cloud. This wont all come from the existing code base but rather also from new contributions from others working in the ASF. ODF is not the only thing that OpenOffice supports: its got word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and other capabilities. Within Apache I think youll see advances in the user interface, functionality, performance, and reliability. This has to be done, in my opinion, in a way that makes subsets of the code easier to use in other software. That is, and again this is my opinion, OpenOffice will get better by being more modular with well designed interfaces. Im not dissing what is there, Im describing how I think it will get even better and enabled for much broader adoption of the code. I hope that OpenOffice in Apache will be viewed as a way to bring together some of the threads that have separated from the main project trunk over the last few years. Apache has a well deserved reputation for its process and high quality software. This is a place where people can get together under one virtual roof and turn OpenOffice into what people always thought it could be. With this move, well get a chance to see what empowered individuals with the right technical chops can do in a community to innovate on the current code base. Im very excited to see what they come up with. Like the old joke about the Lone Ranger, though, the community may be asking, Who's we, Kimosabe? Sutor, in a comment in response to criticism, added that he hopes over time the community will see it IBM's way: Bob Sutor says: It is not my intention in any way to disparage LibreOffice or the Document Foundation. Oracle had an asset and it was completely up to Oracle to decide what to do with it. Historically, we have had great success working with Apache and it is a fine organization. I think that over the next weeks and months people in the existing LO community plus people in other communities will figure out how to make this work since, to be honest, it is a done deal. There are multiple communities of people who are interested in this codebase, LO is not the only one. I think that once the excitement (for some) and shock (for others) wears off, well see a lot of creativity and collaboration on this. In the meanwhile, Im going to remain positive and constructive, and I can only hope others try to do the same. Apache President Jim Jagielski was interviewed by Joe Brockmeier for NetworkWorld, and he seems to think also that LibreOffice developers should now just come "home" to Apache and unite there, now that Oracle has done what they thought Oracle would never do, donate OpenOffice.org to a foundation: He says that makes Apache the perfect place to "help 'repair' the community" around OpenOffice.org. "I've already contacted the Document Foundation, which sponsors LibreOffice, with hopes that we can work together to benefit the existing community, as well as really grow the community at large: both developers and users." But here's the rub. Donating code to the Apache Foundation means changing the license on OpenOffice.org from copyleft to noncopyleft. If OpenOffice.org had always been under the Apache license, there would be a simpler question facing developers. Then donating it to this foundation wouldn't raise the same issue, which is that OpenOffice.org code they donate can be taken by IBM or any entity, even Microsoft, and used in a proprietary application. Why would IBM and Oracle or Apache, for that matter, imagine that this would appeal to developers, that they should donate their free labor so companies can benefit with proprietary offerings while under no obligation to give any code back? It's asking a lot from the community, nothing less than to forget about its principles. Some developers may decide it makes little difference. Others, perhaps many, will not. But what if there was no LibreOffice? Jagielski again: Licensing also enters into it Jagielski says that he thinks "having the OO.org codebase under the Apache License was also quite attractive." At least to Oracle and IBM. The LibreOffice fork is licensed under the Lesser GNU General Public License version 3 (LGPLv3) and Mozilla Public License (MPL), both of which are reciprocal thus requiring distributors to provide the code for derivative versions. As Greg Stein points out on the Apache list, this may not be something IBM was interested in doing with its Lotus Symphony suite. (Whether IBM is right for wanting to work on a non-copyleft project is left as an exercise to the reader.) You might see why IBM would want to go this way, of course, but what about the community? Ed Brill, also of IBM: This morning, Oracle announced that they are submitting the OpenOffice.org codebase to the Apache Software Foundation Incubator. At IBM, we see this as a strong validation of open source, open document formats, and market choice and flexibility in the office productivity arena. Since we launched Lotus Symphony in 2007, IBM has been an active participant in the OpenOffice.org community, and with the move to Apache, we plan to increase our efforts through human and code contribution. IBM is no stranger to work with Apache Foundation projects, or other open source initiatives such as Eclipse.org and, of course, Linux. The new project at Apache strengthens IBM's ability to continue to offer our own distributions of productivity tools based on the OpenOffice code base and make our own contributions to reinforce the overall community. Of course, the natural response is what "overall community?" Much of that community is already over at LibreOffice working. And if Attachmate finds a way to scuttle support for LibreOffice and The Document Foundation can't keep going, the community is still not faced with a single option. They might choose to just go forward without corporate backing at all, or with backing from those who truly grasp the value of a copyleft licensed project. Those options do exist even if they may be challenging. And thanks to the LGPLv3, the code can go on. What companies need or want in the short term may be one thing, but the goal of a totally free desktop is a marathon, not a sprint. So there is no particular pressure on developers to compromise. Both projects (OpenOffice and LibreOffice) can go forward, particularly since a project under LGPLv3 can simply take Apache-licensed code and incorporate it. The problem for an Apache licensed OpenOffice is that the reverse is not true. Let's take a look at some of the other reactions so far: Stefano Maffulli: Oracle has done what Sun should have done a long time ago: put OO.org code into the hand of an independent foundation. The good news is that now a wider participation from corporations and individuals is possible. Hell, even Microsoft can now participate into OO.org development. I hope that soon the fork can be reconciled, too . I personally welcome the change as I never believed that The Document Foundation had enough steam in its engine to radically improve the product. But I believe it can still maintain and improve LibreOffice until Apaches community will start rolling the next generation of desktop productivity tools. That seems like an odd conclusion, in that LibreOffice has been steaming along with OpenOffice stagnated for months, since the fork. But what if Attachmate altered that progression? What if LibreOffice didn't have a way to keep going? Corporate backing can indeed be helpful in terms of resources, so that may be the basis for his comments. But where is the community behind OpenOffice? Are any of the listed core developers known for previous work on OpenOffice? One of the real issues that LibreOffice faced in the beginning was that the OpenOffice code is a mound of spaghetti, so complicated that anyone but a developer with experience working on the codebase would find daunting. When pretty much all the OpenOffice coders, except for IBM, joined LibreOffice, that was an immediate boost for LibreOffice, but the lack of individuals familiar with the OpenOffice codebase will also likely be a challenge in the Apache version unless the LibreOffice contributors were to agree to reunite under the Apache umbrella. IBM's Rob Weir is a fan of the Apache Foundation, and he's also responsible for ODF, so he hopes those (LibreOffice) developers will help: Id point out in particular that the Apache 2.0 open source license was recently blessed by the Free Software Foundation: The Apache License 2.0 is the best non-copyleft license that does what a copyright license can to mitigate threats from software patents. Its a well-established, mature license that users, developers, and distributors alike are all comfortable with. You can tell its important by the way that other free software licenses work to cooperate with it: the drafting processes for GPLv3 and the Mozilla Public License 2.0 named compatibility with the Apache License 2.0 as a goal from day one. The Apache Software Foundation deserves a lot of credit for pushing to do more to tackle software patents in a license, and implementing an effective strategy in the Apache License. As you can tell, when it comes to Apache Im a fan. Ive experienced much of this first-hand. I was a committer in the Apache Xalan project many years ago (1999-2000). It was a great experience then, and when the opportunity came to add my name to the OpenOffice incubation proposal I did not hesitate. It was an honor. I look forward to coming back to Apache and participating in this continuation of OpenOffice. I am planning on getting directly involved with the engineering effort of this project . The Apache process is based on a strong meritocracy. Developers who regularly provide high quality patches get elected as Committers and they then help review submitted patches as well as write their own code. And those Committers who remain active and have earned the respect of their peers typically then get elected to the Project Management Committee (PMC) and steer the direction of the project. And those who are most valued on the PMC may become the PMC Chair for their project, which also ranks them as an Apache Foundation Vice President. And some then have the opportunity to serve on the Apache Board of Directors. With this cursus honorum, it is recommended that those with leadership ambitions get involved early. When the Apache OpenOffice project begins, there will be project decisions to make and leadership roles to fill, and this will happen fast once we get started. Obviously, you cant advance in the meritocracy if you are absent. Although, you can join anytime you want, there are clear advantages to getting in on the ground floor. In particular, we need to attract a wide variety of project specialists. This includes C++ programmers (on Linux, Mac and Windows), QA (also on all platforms), help/documentation, UI/UCD, translation/globalization, accessibility, install, etc. Please keep your eyes open for an announcement from Apache in the next week or two, saying that the OpenOffice incubator project has been set up and is ready to accept members. A vigorous discussion ensued. From the comments section, where he was criticized in the usual open-throated FOSS way: The Contrarian June 1, 2011 at 12:59 pm
I notice that you and your friends at Oracle do not mention the existing community at all instead you talk about outsiders of all shades who have never been involved in OpenOffice.org forming a new activity with our source code. There are lots of people in the community and in its two projects OpenOffice and LibreOffice who dont fit Apache at all, either because they are not involved in the core code or because they believe in copyleft and software freedom. Why have you and Oracle etc made no mention of them whatsoever? Is it your intention to isolate them and create division? Seems that way . Rob June 1, 2011 at 1:30 pm
@Contrarian, Of course, anyone is welcome to join the project. Unlike LibreOffice, Apache does not have a membership committee to review and approve or reject developers. Anyone is welcome to join. But you need to agree with the project license. This is true of any open source project. If you (or anyone) has a concrete proposal on how LibreOffice can or should related to Apache, Id love to hear it. I think the time is now favorable for having that kind of discussion, more so now than it was when OpenOffice was run by Sun/Oracle with their CLA. So he got an earful. Jeremy Allison: Jeremy Allison June 1, 2011 at 3:31 pm
Hi Rob, This is indeed good news, but I think long term rather than trying to run the project at the Apache Software Foundation the code would be much better merged into LibreOffice and let them take the lead on this. Given that there is already an existing community around this code, merging with it rather than trying to create another from scratch makes more sense IMHO. Jeremy. It's hard to argue with such a sensible and obvious solution. But the problem is, it's Oracle's code, not the community's. They handed over their copyrights. Rob's response: @Jeremy, Id be absolutely giddy with joy if LibreOffice developers would come over to Apache and run their project under the Apache 2.0 license under the Apache process. Id even be open to calling it LibreOffice. But this is much more an issue of organizational capabilities than it is the rather narrow gulf between the current OpenOffice and LibreOffice source codes. I want an organization that will last, not something that will fall over in the next storm. Jeremy responded: Jeremy Allison June 1, 2011 at 8:30 pm
Rob wrote : @Jeremy, Id be absolutely giddy with joy if LibreOffice developers would come over to Apache and run their project under the Apache 2.0 license under the Apache process Thats funny, Id be giddy with joy if it happened the other way around :-). This is about copyleft vs. non-copyleft licensing IMHO. I personally believe the the LGPLv3 copyleft license is a better choice for this codebase, rather than the Apache one. The reasons for this are too complex to go into in this short post, but based around my own experiences on Samba, where copyleft is one of the only ways to break into a monopoly-dominated market. The good news is that the Apache license is compatible with the LGPLv3 LibreOffice license, so they can take the OpenOffice code and merge any useful changes into their codebase. I dont think this can happen the other way around. The reason I would like Apache OO developers (including those from IBM) to throw in their lot with LibreOffice is that otherwise you end up re-running the same experiment of Linux vs. FreeBSD. Unless you consider Apple a FreeBSD success (not sure I do, at least from the FreeBSD point of view :-) then that experiment didnt go well for FreeBSD. But maybe you want to be Apple, in which case good luck (but remember in the best tradition of Highlander There can be only one :-). Jeremy. Rob commented on the license in a response to another critical comment: @Alex, See above on the membership question. I think what I said was accurate. To your second question, I agree that we need to figure out how OpenOffice and LibreOffice relate. But it is more than that. We also need to look at Symphony, RedOffice, BrOffice, EuroOffice, NeoOffice, etc., including other new customized distributions that will certainly now proliferate now that we are freed from the restrictions of the copyleft license. This conversation is already underway at Apache. I invite interested parties to join and help define the answer to that. "Freed" from the restrictions of the copyleft license? The only restriction, imposed on distribution, seeks to ensure that you pass along the same benefits you received, i.e., the freedom to adapt the work to your needs. Is that a bad thing? If you are a business, you may view it that way, because there's no lock-in and no way to differentiate your offering without others being able to follow right along. And at least one open source company has demonstrated it can thrive without such lock-in. But if you are a community member, the obligation to keep the code open and available is the opposite -- it's fair payment for the free code they happily contributed. But if there is no code *and no salary*, why are they supposed to donate? For the good of whom? Again, it depends on which side of the line you stand, what your goals are, and why you write FOSS code. It also may make a difference what you believe in terms of the current dominance of the desktop by a single company. Rob mentioned FSF recently "blessing" the Apache license, which drew a response from Bradley M. Kuhn: Bradley M. Kuhn June 2, 2011 at 10:04 am
@Jeremy, very well said. Thank you for saying it. I do agree that this is fundamentally about a dispute of copyleft vs. non-copyleft, and we shouldnt permit it be couched in any other terms. I updated my my blog post on this subject with a link to your comment here. And this PS from Kuhn: Bradley M. Kuhn June 2, 2011 at 10:59 am
Theres one additional point that Id like to make, which @Alexandre hints at but doesnt point out explicitly. Rob is quoting the FSF completely out of context in the main post here. Specifically, he leaves out this part of FSFs post on the Apache 2.0 license: When you contribute to an existing project, you should usually release your modified versions under the same license as the original work. Its good to cooperate with the projects maintainers, and using a different license for your modifications often makes that cooperation very difficult. You should only do that when there is a strong reason to justify it. The existing license of OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice is LGPLv3. Oracle, in coordination with IBM, unilaterally changed the license out from under the community, rather than cooperating with the existing licensing. Oracle of course had the legal right to do so as copyright holder, but this was an act in conflict with the existing community in a moral sense, even if, again, it was a permissible act under the OO.o community guidelines. We'll take a look at Kuhn's analysis of the licensing issue in a moment. But here are some resources, from Shane, a member of ASF, in an article titled Apache Office, anyone?, for those who wish to dig a bit deeper into what the process is like when code is donated to the Apache Foundation: Key reminder: Incubation is a process, with many checkpoints. Just because something is submitted to the Apache Incubator does not mean that the Incubator PMC will accept it as a podling. And once we do have a podling, the most important work comes, proving that there can be a healthy community around the project all before it can even be considered to graduate to a Top Level Project at Apache.
Newcomers to Apache may want to review the Apache Community Development project think of it as an outreach group within the ASF, starting work on explaining to newcomers what the Apache Way is about and where to find the right information on technology and community rules at Apache.
Reading Planet Apache is a great way to see what many of the committers at the many Apache projects are saying on their personal blogs.
I almost forgot! The best way to learn about how Apache works is to read our mailing lists. You can follow along the Apache Incubators discussion yourself, right on [email protected]! Personally, I think one of the most important differences between a potential Apache Office podling and the existing (and amazing) LibreOffice product is the license. Obviously, both codebases are fairly similar, and aim to provide a fully open source office suite. It will be interesting to see, after the first wild set of commentary flies, which project and which license that various developers and corporations alike choose to actively support with their contributions. I just hope that this license difference and the way that the OO.o code came to Apache, which was not something we controlled doesnt cause any unnecessary friction between the two communities. Some might view it as necessary friction. You might say it goes all the way back to the Open Source wing pulling away from Free Software's insistence on a free operating system. The Open Source wing believed, with some supporting evidence since, that business types couldn't handle the GPL, and that what mattered most was quick adoption. But then, look at Linux. When Google decided to put Android out under the Apache License but built on top of the GPL'd Linux kernel, it did lead to uptake, rapid adoption by many vendors. But Linux has been shoved into a back room. You can now find ads for Android phones that don't even mention Linux. And some of the restrictions on phones and tablets would be impossible if the GPL had been chosen instead. So it again comes down to the question: what is the goal? If it's rapid market share, you think one way. But if it's a free operating system with all the trimmings, then you feel very differently. Oracle's donation is on terms that it had to know would be objectionable to the community, so one can't help but wonder what the purpose is of choosing a license for a project where to date all of the code has been contributed under a different license. Not everything that is legal is also ethical. This is what can happen where a single entity controls the codebase, particularly where that entity is a commercial entity. On the other side of the coin, as Carlo Piana tweeted, it could have been much worse. Oracle could have retained everything and just let the project die. So it is certainly a good thing that it turned it over to a foundation. Michael Meeks, of LibreOffice, wrote the following on his blog: Interested to see that the widely trailed move of donating OO.o to the Apache Software Foundation actually happened today. TDF have a simple, friendly response, and I have a number of thoughts: Engaging with community members (IBM), and having a commitment to the developer and open-source communities (Oracle) are laudable goals. I can only applaud the sentiment. Unfortunately, starting that process only after finalizing a license incompatible with the communities existing work, and at a different home to the one the developers chose themselves seems an odd way to engage, and commit.
(IBM), and having a (Oracle) are laudable goals. I can only applaud the sentiment. Unfortunately, starting that process only after finalizing a license incompatible with the communities existing work, and at a different home to the one the developers chose themselves seems an odd way to engage, and commit. Unfortunately, there is a problem with Free Software developers, firstly - they often don't wear suits, and (get this) some have beards: which just shows you the kind of schmucks they are. But worse - they have odd, meritocratic, collaborative decision making processes, that don't come up with suitably corporate answers. One example is jurisdiction: the community (after all is said and done) wanted to found itself in Germany. Professional, serious, serial, corporate body founders prefer to go elsewhere (US, UK) - yet, is it really that bad to compromise on the issue ? Community decision making - but only if you like the outcome is a tad unfortunate.
Worse - Free Software hackers tend to be free-spirited, and they often believe in reciprocity: if I give you my work, surely you should give me yours ? ie. the spirit of the copy-left. Unfortunately, that is not the Apache way, which has some merits no doubt, but is alien to the existing developer community that commitment is made to. OpenOffice has traditionally included plenty of copy-left code, some of which I highlighted before. Coercing developers to do the bidding of big companies is not something they react well to (usually).
is made to. OpenOffice has traditionally included plenty of copy-left code, some of which I highlighted before. Coercing developers to do the bidding of big companies is not something they react well to (usually). This event highlights some of the great work that has been done as part of the GPLv3 process, and also the MPLv2 work (done by my friend: Luis Villa). These happy lawyers out there have laboured long and hard to make their new licenses compatible with Apache 2.0 - such that code under that license can be re-licensed under their terms. An example of doing this is here. Without their labours, it would not be possible to integrate the Oracle code, and the eight months of existing work by the community into a single beautiful whole. Clearly there is no rush to actually do that work, perhaps it can be done on schedule for LibreOffice 3.5. By a happy coincidence, we have a slightly longer cycle this time as we sync. up our six-monthly time-based release schedule with that of Linux distributions and desktop.
Apparently this is a somewhat divisive attempt by an exiting Oracle, along with IBM to sideline the existing developer community, their governance, their aspirations, membership, licensing choice (explicitly adapted to meet IBM's needs incidentally), bylaws, and so on. All of this despite a profound, frequently stated open-ness to including new (particularly large) corporate contributors inside TDF, and taking their advice seriously.
Thankfully, license compatibility lets us turn this from a closed, and finished chapter of long, sad story - into the beginning of a happy one - where everyone, regardless of size and Dilbert-ness can join together around TDF's code-base and contribute on their own merits. So, next time you meet a Free Software lawyer, please - shake their hand.
We also have Rob Weir enthusing about the joys of his preferred outcome. It all sounds wonderful, but sadly is not what the substantial, existing developer (and marketing, and QA and ...) community chose. Luckily of course, it is not a final choice as/when the code is released they are free to choose to join TDF and engage. Still, I look forward to reading Rob's code - it'd be great to hack with him.
Got around to reading Luke's mail and associated odf proposal That document itself has some great quoteable material: Both Oracle and ASF agree that the OpenOffice.org development community, previously fragmented, would re-unite under ASF to ensure a stable and long term future for OpenOffice.org. or how about The initial set of committers include people from the community of OpenOffice.org Technology projects .... The initial group of developers will be employed by IBM, Linux distribution companies, and likely public sector agencies. Localization resources are expected to gravitate to the new project, as well. Ensuring the long term stability of OpenOffice.org is a major reason for establishing the project at Apache. Amazing to see Andrew Rist and Rob Weir as the initial committers - I'm unaware that they have ever committed a single line of code to the codebase before: but ... there is always a first line; a whole new sense of initial committer perhaps. I was encouraged to read somewhere that: "The first step along the road leading to committership is to become a developer". Does he sound bitter? Well, you can hardly blame him. Here's a FAQ: What's the Future of OpenOffice.org? with some analysts interviewed by Chris Kanaracus, IDG News, for PCWorld: Q: Why did Oracle give OpenOffice.org to the Apache Foundation and not some other group, such as the Document Foundation, the group that oversees LibreOffice? "Only Oracle can answer this, but it is clear from past history that Oracle prefers to work with foundations that have both history and long-term experience working with enterprises," O'Grady said. He cited Oracle's recent decision to donate code for the Hudson continuous integration system to the Eclipse Foundation. Similar to OpenOffice.org, a group of Hudson developers split off from Oracle with an offshoot or "fork" of the codebase called Jenkins. "And just as in the case of Hudson, [Oracle] chose not to ultimately donate the code to the group that forked it," O'Grady added. "As for why Apache specifically, they have the requisite history of working with vendors, and IBM for one certainly has a preference for their more permissive licensing style."... The ASF's licensing model may also "free up the potential for even more [OpenOffice.org]-based offerings, particularly commercial and paid offerings, so that may bring some interesting participants and/or subcommunities to the table," 451 Group's Lyman said. The Register adds the news that the Document Foundation was considered: The Document Foundation tells us that Oracle approached the group for suggestions on OpenOffice, which it duly offered. Namely, the Foundation said that Oracle should put OpenOffice code under a Mozilla Public License/Lesser General Public License version 3 dual license and transfer the OpenOffice domain and trademark to the Foundation . Oracle owns the rights to about 6 million lines of code licensed under the LGPL. Oracle has the right to move this code to Apache, but it doesn't own the rights to the LibreOffice work, which is under LGPL and MPL. The rights to this code are owned by the individuals working on LibreOffice. What code are we talking precisely? The spell checker, all crypto support, and many file filters, among other features. Meanwhile, all those OpenOffice defectors who jumped to The Document Foundation must now decide whether they can stomach working with a license they philosophically disagree with. So, now what? Brian Proffitt at ITWorld: My second question doesn't have a definitive answer--yet. But it needs to be answered. It is simply this: how will OpenOffice.org remain relevant to end users? We know IBM's Lotus Symphony and its users will benefit directly, but beyond that, who beyond individual OpenOffice.org fans will be using the suite? Red Hat, SUSE (née Novell), Google, and Canonical all tossed in with LibreOffice and The Document Foundation. That doesn't preclude OpenOffice.org from showing up in one of their repositories in the future, of course, but it does put a damper on potential user numbers. It's not just a question of where OpenOffice.org will be distributed, but also how. Even IBM staffers are wondering how OpenOffice.org's extensive marketing machine will work within an Apache framework. "I know that OpenOffice.org prided itself on a strong marketing committee as well," writes IBM ODF Architect Rob Weir, "I think this is important, but it is not clear to me yet how that fits into an Apache project. Certainly this aspect is more critical to an end-user facing project like OpenOffice than it would be to a developer tool. Maybe someone out there in Apache-land will be able to offer some suggestions on how best to integrate this function into an Apache project?" With IBM marketing Symphony, it's doubtful they will be putting much marketing juice into the parent OpenOffice.org project. And don't look at Oracle--they just got the project off their hands. I think it is unlikely that this is correct, that Oracle is just tossing it over the cliff and walking off. It could have just kept it in the vault and killed it that way. Oracle took steps it was not required to take to keep the project at least on life support, allowing others to build on it. It's clear as well that IBM has a sustained interest in ODF, and that would include marketing it. But what about the licensing change? One participant said this is his understanding: Oracle is signing a SGA (Software Grant Agreement) giving the OpenOffice.org code to Apache Server Foundation (ASF) under the Apache 2.0 license. As you know, Oracle (via Sun) had ownership of the code via the CLA that they required from contributors. Oracle is also giving ASF the OpenOffice.org trademark, the logo with the birds, and the openoffice.org domain name. Some of this has happened already, some of it is in progress. Oracle appears to be retaining the copyright, not assigning it to Apache. The bottom line, then, if this is so, is that Oracle owns the code it is donating, thanks to a contribution agreement whereby contributors handed over copyright to Sun, now Oracle. And by retaining the copyright, it continues to own the code. Let this be an object lesson, that any time a project asks for all the copyrights, it can do what it pleases with your contributions. If you don't care, contribute as much as you wish. But do it knowing that it's like putting your baby up for adoption. You are not the parent any more afterward, so you don't get a say in anything. But here's the ironic part. Larry Ellison is famous for saying that he loved FOSS, that when a project gets big enough and mature enough, he can "just take it". But here, it's the reverse. Because he chose to donate it to a foundation that only accepts code under the Apache license, it's now the community that can "just take it" from OpenOffice.org, not the proprietary bits, of course, but that was always true. But whatever code is available under the Apache License is free for the taking. On the other hand, the reverse is not the case. Because Apache folks won't accept any code under a license that is not its own, whatever work the LibreOffice programmers come up with is not available to OpenOffice.org. There are many unknowns about the future of both projects, but one thing is for sure: the irony here is thick and heavy. On the other hand, Oracle and IBM are both smart companies. If they are doing this, they surely knew about the impact of the license change, and they went forward anyway. Bradley M. Kuhn's explanation of the license issue is worth repeating, and thanks to his use of a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License , we can republish it here, as part of this summary. You might want to follow the discussion about this article on identi.ca. And the mailing list archives for Apache are here for June. Here's the article in full: ********************** Ditching Copyleft to Compete with a Fork? Wednesday 1 June 2011 by Bradley M. Kuhn I was disturbed today to read that Oracle will seek to relicense all OpenOffice code under the Apache-2.0 license and move OpenOffice into the Apache Software Foundation. I've written recently about how among the permissive licenses, my favorite is clearly the Apache License 2.0. However, I think that one should switch from a copyleft license to a permissive one only in rare circumstances and with the greatest of care. Obviously, in this case, I oppose Oracle's relicense of OpenOffice.org under Apache-License-2.0. It is probably obvious why I feel that way, but I shall explain nonetheless, just in case. I'm going to mostly ignore the motives for doing so, which I think are obvious: Oracle (and IBM, who are quoted in support of this move) for their own reasons don't like The Document Foundation fork (LibreOffice) of OpenOffice.org. This is a last-ditch effort by IBM and Oracle to thwart the progress of that fork, which has been reported as quite successful and many distributions have begun to adopt LibreOffice. (Even non-software sites sites like Metafilter have users discussing changing to LibreOffice .) Anyway, as you might suspect, I'm generally against the idea of relicensing from a copyleft to a non-copyleft license in most situations. In fact, I generally take the stance that you should go with the strictest copyleft possible unless there's a strong reason not to. This is well-argued in RMS' essay on the LGPL itself, and I won't repeat those arguments here. Frankly, if I were picking a license for OpenOffice.org and/or LibreOffice from start, I'd pick AGPLv3-or-later, because of the concern that it could be turned into a Google Docs-like web service. But, what I'd do is obviously irrelevant. OpenOffice.org was put out under LGPLv3, and that was its license for some time. LGPL was presumably chosen to allow proprietary plugins to OpenOffice.org. That might be useful and perhaps a reasonable trade-off decision, since one of the goals of the project is to woo users away from Microsoft's tools which presumably permit proprietary plugins too. Thus, an argument can be made that the situation is vaguely analogous to the C Library situation that inspired LGPL's creation. But, what does a change from a weak copyleft like LGPLv3 to a fully permissive license do? Specifically, it allows not only proprietary plugins using the OpenOffice.org's defined plugin interfaces, but also for any sort of plugin that reaches into OpenOffice.org code in any way. Even worse, a permissive license allows for direct integration of OpenOffice.org into larger proprietary systems that might offer other desktop suite applications hitherto unimplemented in Free Software. It's my belief that this license change, if successful in its goals, may help foster a bit of a tragedy of the commons for the core codebase. The codebase is already well known for being somewhat unwieldy and time-consuming to learn. Those who take the time to learn it, but who aren't Free Software enthusiasts, may quickly decide that it's better for them to use that rare knowledge to proprietarize the codebase rather than contribute to the public Free Software versions. The LGPLv3 currently keeps such developers honest; the Apache-License-2.0 will not. Perhaps most importantly, the major consequence to consider is the the ultimate impact on the LibreOffice fork. To consider that impact, we have to look at the instigators of the relicense. IBM and Oracle both now will have a vested interest in maintaining a barely adequate public Apache-2.0-licensed codebase while keeping the best stuff in their proprietary versions. OpenOffice.org has actually always suffered from this very tragedy, but historically the regime was held up by mandatory copyright assignment to Oracle (and a semi-exclusive proprietary license from Oracle to IBM) rather than a permissive license. On the surface, then, this seems subtly like the kind of improvement I've written about before namely at least a public permissive license puts everyone on equal footing, whereas copyleft with a single for-profit proprietary relicensor gives special powers to the for-profit. And, frankly, but for the existence of LibreOffice, I think I probably would have concluded that an Apache-2.0 relicense of OpenOffice.org was the lesser of two evils. However, LibreOffice's very existence and momentum turns those two evils into a false dichotomy. Specifically, there's now a third alternative: LibreOffice is a vibrant, open, easy-to-contribute-to, non-copyright-assigned LGPLv3'd codebase now. In that community, the LGPLv3 is the shared and equal agreement; no one has special rights to the code outside of LibreOffice's license. Free Software communities, in fact, always rely on an equitable shared agreement to assure good governance and project health. Actually, relicensing part of the codebase out from under LibreOffice may actually be the most insidious attack Oracle and IBM could make on the project. Unilateral relicense is the single most destabilizing action you can take against a Free Software community, particularly if the relicense comes from wholly outside the community. Indeed, in my time at various copyright-holding Free Software organizations, I've seen situations where I was helping support a relicensing effort by the copyright holder. In every case, I've seen leaders who could have done a unilateral relicense chose to first consult the community before taking the action to ensure that there weren't any key community members who dissented. Just because you have the right to do something doesn't mean it's the correct action to take, and Free Software leaders know this well; that's why they very rarely act unilaterally on anything. Meanwhile, in this situation today, we have a copyright holder (Oracle) whose primary goal in relicensing is, in fact, to cause the outcome that Free Software leaders seek to avoid; Oracle is relicensing to undermine a successful Free Software project that relies on its copyrighted code. Nevertheless, I'm not too worried. I believe the LibreOffice community is strong and grows stronger every day. Since their license is LGPLv3, and they continue to add new code, the fact that most of the underlying code is suddenly available under Apache-2.0 license may matter a lot today, but it will matter less and less with each passing day of new commits under LGPLv3. In fact, I hope the LibreOffice folks will use this relicense to their advantage. Specifically, I suggest they take an Apache-2.0 license of Oracle's code, which is an LGPLv3-compatible license, and relicense the whole project to LGPLv3-or-later, so they have an easy way (years from now) to switch to LGPLv4, GPLv3, or AGPLv4 if they want to. (BTW, they already have an easy way to switch to GPLv3, since LGPLv3 permits this, and even to AGPLv3 thereafter (via GPLv3§13).) Note finally that there is one other benefit of this action: according to TDF, some OpenOffice.org code that had previously been proprietary is coming with the Apache-2.0-licensed code dump. This alone may make it all worthwhile, and given the points I make above, I think the ultimate outcome, long term, will be all positive for the LGPL'd LibreOffice codebase. (I'd like note finally that I'm not the only one to point out that Oracle's action would be different if LibreOffice didn't exist. Sean Michael Kerner said something similar.) | {
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Everyone is out at the bar... And I'm just sitting here masturbating
178 shares | {
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The NSW government has flagged important changes to noise standards for the wind energy industry, which could make it difficult for anti-wind campaigners to target the industry.
NSW Environment minister Rob Stokes has flagged rule changes that would mean noise standards would be incorporated into a new “Industrial Noise Policy” that would cover all sectors.
This is seen as important because it means wind energy will be treated as any other industry, rather than a “special case” that could be victim to policy whimsy and aggressive anti-wind campaigns.
“It’s long been my view that we need to move away from a segmented approach to energy policy, and that we treat all generators the same way,” Stokes said in a speech to the Clean Energy Week conference in Sydney.
“That’s why I’ve asked the NSW EPA to consider the inclusion of the draft noise standards for wind energy projects into the Industrial Noise Policy which is due to be finalised by December.”
Stokes said this will provide clarity and certainty for wind farm operators, and will facilitate appropriate and responsible siting of wind farms in regional and rural areas.
It will also mean that wind farm noise is treated the same way as noise from other energy and resource projects – creating a level playing field across industry.
There was no discussion at what the standards would be.
Stokes is keen for NSW to embrace renewable energy, with about $10 billion in projects currently awaiting development.
However, there are powerful conservative forces against wind energy in the state, both at state and federal level.
Treasurer Joe Hockey has said he doesn’t like wind turbines, Maurice Newman has campaigned against them, and a group of federal and state conservative MPs – including the NSW Minister for Planning – has voiced is opposition to the ACT government’s planned auction of 200MW of wind energy capacity. | {
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The 18″ Gerber Compact Clearpath is a compact machete that excels at cutting through vines and branches in a controlled fashion. The 11.5″ corrosion-resistant stainless steel blade features a sawback spine, which can be used for sawing through small branches and more.
The rubberized GatorGrip handle provides a comfortable grip with few hotspots, even after extended use. As an added bonus, the orange accents add visibility which is great for when you’re hip deep in the weeds.
Finally, this machete features a lanyard hole for attachments, and it comes with a nylon sheath. The Clearpath is the most affordable machete on this list, right at $20.
Gerber Compact Clearpath Details
Stainless Steel Blade, Corrosion Resistant Coating
11.5″ Blade Length
Rubberized GatorGrip Handle
18.7oz.
17.938″ Overall
Nylon Sheath
Cold Steel Kukri Machete
Cold Steel said it best with, “There are very few knives in the world that we can think of that can out-chop or out-cut a good Kukri.” That’s definitely true with the Cold Steel Kukri Machete. This inexpensive machete comes razor sharp straight out of the box. It’s rugged and absolutely built for tough work.
It features a 13″ 1055 carbon steel blade with a great anti-rust matte finish. The polypropylene handle has an awesome grip and is made for durability, and it comes with a Cor-Ex sheath. It swings like a sword and makes quick work of anything you can throw at it. For less than $30, you can’t go wrong with this one.
Cold Steel Kukri Machete Details
1055 Carbon Steel, Matte Finish
13″ Blade
Polypropylene Handle
16 oz.
18″ Overall
Cor-Ex Sheath
Made in South Africa
Condor Tool & Knife El Salvador Machete
Condor is known for making excellent knives and machetes. For less than $70, the El Salvador Machete features an 18″ 1075 high carbon steel blade with an epoxy black powder coating that helps it stand up to abuse and corrosion. This bad boy can handle a little ax work and works fine for batoning. The ergonomic walnut handle has triple rivets and a large lanyard hole. It includes a welted leather belt sheath.
Condor Tool & Knife El Salvador Machete Details
1075 High Carbon Steel, Black Powder Coating
18″ Blade
Walnut Handle
23″ Overall
Leather Sheath
A good quality machete doesn’t have to cost a ton, and these three are a good place to start. See more about these entry-level machetes or get one for yourself by clicking any link in the article or the button below.
All images courtesy of Smoky Mountain Knife Works – smkw.com. | {
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Lockheed Martin has begun work on a new factory for the production of the JASSM family of cruise missiles. This factory will enable the company to build the large ongoing and expected orders of JASSM, JASSM-ER, and LRASM. The factory will be located in Troy, Alabama, and should be completed and producing missiles by 2021.
The Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile family is currently made up of three types. The AGM-158A is the baseline model, with a reported 370 kilometers of range. The AGM-158B JASSM-ER increases this range by way of a larger fuel tank and more efficient engine, and has a reported range of 1,000 kilometer range. The final variant is the AGM-158C Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, which is not yet in service. All variants have advanced GPS/INS navigation, satellite and line-of-sight datalinks, and terminal homing Imaging Infrared Seekers. For many years the DoD’s air arms have lacked a universal air launched cruise missile. This is changing as JASSM entered service in 2009 and JASSM-ER in 2014. Both can be carried and fired from Navy’s Super Hornets as well as Air Force tactical and strategic platforms. LRASM will also be a tri-service weapon, being incorporated into the weapons software on the F-35, and being carried by Super Hornets and B-1Bs as well.
U.S. Air Force Major Jacob Rohrbach, a pilot assigned to the 40th Flight Test Squadron at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, releases the first Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile Extended Range, or JASSM-ER, from an F-16 over the Gulf of Mexico on September 19th, 2018. The test gathered data on safe separation and software integration of the JASSM-ER, and demonstrated the Eglin test range’s ability to monitor and control test items in flight over the Gulf of Mexico.
Establishing a new factory for the JASSM family is a large investment, and suggests that the DoD and foreign customers plan to buy the missiles in significant quantities. The long range will be necessary for any conflict in WESTPAC, and the ability of all the air arms to coordinate their fires with the same weapon will make mission planning significantly easier. There are also significant logistical benefits to a universal stand-off weapon. However, Lockheed is evidently expecting a long term production run for the weapon, which raises several questions.
The DoD stockpiles missiles, bombs, and other ordnance in the interests of having stores should a war break out. It is understood that unlike WWII, a great-power conflict today will be fought with what is in store, not with what can be produced. Therefore significant stocks of munitions must be available, of which small numbers will be consumed for training, testing and development, and the other minor uses of such weapons. For example, despite only having a single combat aircraft shoot-down since the turn of the millennium, the Navy has stockpiled somewhere over 10,000 AIM-9X short-range heat seeking missiles. The first big question therefore, is what is the baseline for the JASSM family? The second is how many international orders are expected? There are at present several international customers of the family, Australia, Poland, and Finland, though the size of their air forces are fractional compared to the US.
Lockheed Martin press photo, courtesy USAF.
Finally, it should be asked why now? It was nine years from the JASSM’s induction to service in 2009 to it’s first use in 2018 to strike a Syrian chemical weapons factory. In that time, dozens of Tomahawk ship and submarine launched cruise missiles have been fired into Syria and Iraq, and likely elsewhere as well. Is it the introduction of LRASM that has finally rendered the current factory incapable of keeping up with orders? Is it just the DoD being paranoid and stockpiling when they can get the funds? Or have the various instances of saber rattling instigated by this administration convinced the DoD that it needs to be ready for a conflict to break out very suddenly without the normal prelude and expected increase of tensions that normally precedes such things?
We may not know the reasoning, but publicly available numbers suggest a baseline stockpile of over 5,000 of the missiles of all types, which may well be worth the investment from Lockheed all on its own. | {
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With the new season of Game of Thrones about to hit television screens everywhere, we thought it would be nice to get a little glimpse into the life of the man that wrote all those wonderful (and less-than-wonderful) characters. Below you can get a look into the evolution of Mr. Martin as a writer, in his own words.
On when he started writing, as a kid:
“The first stories I remember finishing were written on pages torn from my school tablets. They were scary stories about a monster hunter, and I sold them to the other kids in my building for a penny a page.”
On the first time his words appeared in print:
“The first words of mine ever to appear in print were ‘Dear Stan and Jack’ They appeared in Fantastic Four #20, dated August 1963, in the letter column. My letter of comment was insightful, intelligent, analytical – the main thrust of it was that Shakespeare had better move over now that Stan Lee had arrived.”
Martin loves superheroes and monster and comics, and he tried his hand at writing them once
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“My first stories [written for comic fanzines] starred a superhero come to Earth from outer space, like Superman. Unlike Superman, however, my guy did not have a super physique. In fact, he had no physique at all, since he lacked a body. He was a brain in a goldfish bowl.”
On the inevitable rejection letter:
“The first rejection letter I ever received … was from Erik J. Friis, editor of the American-Scandinavian Review, who regretted “very much” having to return “The Fortress” to me. “It is a very good article” he wrote in a letter dated June 14th 1968, “but unfortunately too long for our purposes”. Seldom has a writer been so thrilled by a rejection. A real editor had seen one of my stories, and liked it well enough to send a letter instead of a rejection slip.”
On putting a part of yourself into your stories:
“[‘The Second Kind of Loneliness’] was the first story I ever wrote that truly left me feeling vulnerable, the first story that made me ask myself, ‘Do I really want to let people read this?’ “
The quotes above are all taken from Dreamsongs, which is a wonderful collection of his work, interspersed with chapters about his journey to becoming a writer. It also has interesting anecdotes on how he got to where he is now; his runaway success with what started out as a small story about a boy who went to see a man beheaded, and ended up as A Song of Ice and Fire, better known perhaps as A Game of Thrones.
Extra quote, as a reward for those who read all of the above.
George Martin worked for a while writing for the tv show Beauty and the Beast. And he then got started on another show called Doorways, for which a pilot was made but nothing came of it.
“Doorways will always be the great ‘what if’ of my career. … I might still be writing and producing the show today, or I might have been fired two months into the series. The only certainty is that I would be much, much richer than I am at present. On the other hand, I would never have finished A Game of Thrones, or written the other volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire. So maybe it all turned out for the best after all.”
The big kicker? Dreamsongs, and therefor the words above, came out in 2006. A Game of Thrones didn’t start filming until four years later. I wonder whether he thinks Doorways would have been more popular.
_________________________
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Eminem is reportedly set to release his ninth album later this year, after previously teasing that he was back in the studio.
The rap icon, who previously released The Marshall Mathers LP 2 in 2013, will release his latest album this autumn, according to industry insiders HITS Daily Double.
Last year, he claimed that he was working on an album as he dropped ‘Campaign Speech’, an anti-Trump freestyle released during the run-up to the U.S. election.
“Don’t worry, I’m working on an album”, he reassured fans.
Don't worry I'm working on an album! Here's something meanwhile. https://t.co/QX3cdpqFD2 — Marshall Mathers (@Eminem) October 19, 2016
Last month, an update on the record was provided by Allen Hughes, who directed Dr Dre documentary ‘The Defiant Ones’.
He said: “Dre records every day. Literally, he’s in there recording songs every day. He’s like Picasso in that way. He’s always painting. Right now he’s producing, in the 11th hour, a track for Eminem’s latest album. So Dre’s still real active in music.”
Another update came from 2 Chainz, who claimed that he had listened to some of Eminem’s new material.
““He let me hear this song and it was funny”, he said.
“I heard some things in there where his vernacular was 2 Chainz-y. It was crazy.”
Away from music, Eminem is also set to produce new comedy movie Bodied, which follows the story of a university student that writes a controversial thesis on the rap battle scene.
He will also headline Reading & Leeds Festivals at the end of August. | {
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O Conselho de Ministros aprovou esta quinta-feira quatro novos nomes propostos pelo ministro das Finanças para o Conselho Consultivo do Banco de Portugal, entre os quais o antigo coordenador do BE Francisco Louçã e o ex-ministro Murteira Nabo.
No final do Conselho de Ministros de hoje, a ministra da Presidência, Maria Manuel Leitão Marques, anunciou a designação de quatro novos membros para o conselho consultivo do Banco de Portugal, uma proposta do ministro das Finanças de nomes com reconhecida competência em matérias económico-financeiras e empresarias.
Francisco Louçã, economista, professor universitário e antigo coordenador do BE, Francisco Murteira Nabo, ex-ministro do XII Governo Constitucional e ex-presidente da Galp e da PT, João Talone, ex-presidente executivo da EDP, e Luis Nazaré, ex-presidente dos CTT e da Plataforma de Meios Privados, foram os nomes escolhidos para integrar este órgão. | {
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Matthew Soppa is transforming a 2016 Ford Fusion into a RWD drift machine in his garage in Phoenix, Arizona. The Formula Drift Pro-Am driver replaced the factory motor with a 5.0 L Coyote V8 which will eventually see a supercharger and upgraded camshaft. The drivetrain features a TR-6060 six-speed manual transmission with a Exedy lightweight flywheel and clutch kit and Mustang independent rear end. The sedan rides on a fully independent suspension consisting of a fifth generation Mustang (S197) front and sixth generation (S550) IRS with BC Racing adjustable coilovers on each corner. Matthew still has to work to do on the fuel and cooling system along with installing the driveshaft but you can watch his previous progress in the video playlist below.
Source: Matthew Soopa FB page and Matt Soppa | {
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Japanese giant Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (SMFG) has become the third Japanese firm in less than a fortnight to unveil plans to open a business in Germany that will act as its EU hub following Brexit.
The company, which has the headquarters for its European operations in London, announced that both its main banking business and its investment banking division would set up subsidiaries in Frankfurt.
SMFG said it was taking the step because it believed it “could face future restrictions in certain services it provides” after Brexit and that establishing subsidiaries in the German city would ensure that it “can continue offering banking services to clients with no disruption once the UK leaves the EU”.
It joins Nomura and Daiwa, two other large Japanese securities groups with big EU businesses based in London, in unveiling plans to open subsidiaries in Frankfurt, a process that will require them to apply for banking licences from the German regulator. Daiwa announced its move on June 22 and Nomura followed just days later. | {
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Vancouver: Stealthy drug-evading bacteria with heightened virulence and ability to infect humans have turned up in chickens in India, scientists said, indicating an “alarming" consequence of the nation’s fast-growing poultry industry and the misuse of antibiotics.
11% of chickens sampled at fresh produce markets around Hyderabad carried a multidrug-resistant form of a bacteria commonly found in birds and known to sicken people, a study found. The supergerms were detected in both intensively farmed broilers and free-range fowl, and were capable of thwarting routine antibiotics, scientists from the University of Hyderabad and the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin said.
The finding suggests contaminated meat may be spreading superbugs through the food chain and the environment, potentially causing hard-to-treat infections in people. Farms supplying India’s biggest poultry-meat companies routinely use antibiotics classified by the World Health Organization as “critically important" as a way of staving off disease, a months-long investigation by Bloomberg in the Hyderabad region this year showed.
“Our findings provide scientific support to what is known about the use of antibiotics in the food-animal sector amid a lack of a properly enacted antibiotics policy in this country," said Niyaz Ahmed, a senior author on the paper, which was published on 4 November in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, in an e-mail.
DNA damage
The Helicobacter pullorum bacteria found in the chickens was remarkable because, beside harbouring various genes for drug resistance, strains were also armed with the ability to produce toxins that potentially can damage the DNA of human cells, the researchers found. Their research was based on a study of the gastrointestinal tracts of 55 broiler and 45 free-range chickens bought at seven produce markets in Hyderabad.
More than 100 virulence genes were identified in the bacterial samples, including 40 related to motility, which could enhance the pathogen’s ability to take hold inside the intestinal tracts of both chickens and people, and 20 that enhanced the microbe’s ability to persist, including in warmer-bodied poultry, the authors said. Some genes also better equipped the bacteria to evade the immune system’s defences.
In humans, H. pullorum is thought to cause gastroenteritis and may be associated with cancer and cirrhosis of the liver.
‘Significant threat’
“If this organism uses antimicrobial resistance to augment its fitness, persistence and thereby its transmission, then it can emerge as a significant threat to human health," said Ahmed, who is now senior director of Bangladesh’s International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research.
The fact that free-range chickens, which aren’t routinely administered antibiotics, carried the superbugs was “truly unexpected," he said.
It could indicate that these fowl occasionally eat antibiotic-containing feed, or are exposed to the bugs via contaminated water and food, or of the feces of infected animals and people, Ahmed said. But it means the gene-altered bacteria from the intensive poultry industry have spread to “even the stocks that were so far considered as a safe choice," he said.
Growing meat-eaters
Agricultural systems in emerging economies such as China and India have changed radically in recent years, becoming increasingly intensive in order to meet growing domestic and global demands for animal protein, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations said in a report on Wednesday. This is likely to heighten the occurrence and spread of infectious diseases in these systems, leading to increased antibiotic usage and resistance.
Indians consume 14 times more chicken meat than they did in 1985, and the market is one of the fastest-growing in the world. A study last year predicted the use of antibiotics in livestock could more than quadruple by 2030 in some parts of India, primarily driven by “extreme" growth in chicken consumption.
The bulk of antibiotics are used to spur animal growth. Stopping that practice in India would result in an annual loss of meat production worth about $1.1 billion, an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report last year found.
Drug-resistant infections have the potential to cause a level of economic damage similar to — and likely worse than — that caused by the 2008 financial crisis, the World Bank said in September. Worldwide, it could add as much as $1 trillion a year to health-care costs by 2050.
India doesn’t have regulatory provisions for the use of antimicrobial drugs in cattle, chickens and pigs raised for domestic consumption, Ramanan Laxminarayan, a researcher with the Public Health Foundation of India, said in a study in March. A separate study published in April found 4% of chicken bought from shops in the eastern city of Kolkata harboured strains of salmonella, most of which were resistant to one or more antibiotics.
The latest study found that the H. pullorum bacteria were vulnerable to several older antibiotics, including the last-resort drug colistin, Ahmed said. Unless the use of the bacteria-fighting medicines are controlled on farms, it’s “only a matter of time" before the germs won’t be stopped by any drug, he said. Bloomberg
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Jaipur: The boom that followed India’s economic liberalisation in the 1990s led to an “exponential increase” in the accumulation of garbage while also changing athe very nature’ of litter generated. This “storm of waste” is a ticking time bomb and could have disastrous, fatal and horrifying consequences if not checked, say Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron, who have co-authored the monumental “Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India”.
Doron, an Associate Professor of Anthropology and South Asia Studies at the Australian National University, once went to Seelampur on the outskirts of Delhi and was “horrified” to see the manner in which old mobile phones — e-waste — were being treated.
He immediately and approached Jeffrey, a visiting research professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies in Singapore, saying: “This is huge, we need to study garbage in India,” thus beginning the research for the book.
“Since India’s boom in the 1990s and the aftermath of its economic liberalisation, the volume of waste has increased exponentially and the nature of waste has changed too. This boom has also produced construction and demolition waste, the hazardous waste and the plastic and the fast-moving consumer waste,” Doron told IANS on the sidelines of the Jaipur Literature Festival.
India, for example, had a culture of using biodegradable plates instead of plastic plates that you see all around today, he said.
“All of these together make an almost perfect storm of waste which is very difficult to tackle unless you do it at different levels of governance,” he added.
His co-author Jeffrey, on the other hand, said that there is some value in the waste and the people who work in the landfills extract that value.
“While you got to extract that value out of the garbage, it must must follow a certain procedure,” Jeffrey told IANS.
He said this complexity applies to all kinds of waste. “You have to find out who is throwing it, why is he throwing it, is there a need to throw it, who is the first person to handle it and then where can it go to have a new life.”
“The pharmaceutical industry is centred now in India because certain ventures are not profitable anymore in the West. These multinationals have outsourced their companies to India, particularly Hyderabad, which has emerged as the pharmaceutical capital of India. A lot of what they discharge into the waterbodies and in the soil are active ingredients. They are creating a bacteria-resistant environment, what is also known as superbugs.
“It’s disseminating and killing the fields, its harming the livelihood of the people who live in the periphery of these companies. It’s creating new bugs that even the most powerful antibiotics cannot tackle. So you have a situation where effluents produced as a result of bringing new industries in india, or creating special economic zones, is actually harming India in the long run. There has to be better planning and corrective measure need to be applied,” anthropologist Doron said.
Jeffrey said that life expectancy for those working and living around landfills in India is just 39 years as respiratory diseases and infections are common among them.
They suggested empowering of local urban bodies and municipalities to deal with the crisis.
“At the moment they have the responsibility but they do not have the wherewithal, not do they have enough trained staff,” said Jeffrey, while Doron added that local governments need to partner with civil society and the people who are already on the ground dealing with waste. They need to be made aware of the serious health implications, and “trained in extracting value from waste without hampering the environment or causing serious health implications” to themselves or those around them.
IANS | {
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In a circular released on March 28, 2017, the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) ordered the directors of all tiger reserves to refrain from recognising the rights of forest dwellers within critical tiger habitats.
Since its enactment in 2006, the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act or the Forest Rights Act (FRA) has been instrumental in recognising and vesting forest rights and the right to occupation in forest lands of forest-dwelling Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers who have been residing in such forests for generations but whose rights could not be recorded. The NTCA circular reasons that since there have been no guidelines laid down for the notification of critical wildlife habitats (CWH), rights should not be conferred in critical tiger habitats (CTHs).
Tribal groups have responded to the order with widespread criticism, and it is important to look back into the context and history of how CTHs came to be declared.
‘Tiger reserves’, initially an operational category of protected areas under Project Tiger, were made a legal category under section 38V of the Wildlife Protection Act (WLPA). The amendment allowed state governments to notify areas as ‘tiger reserves’ based on the recommendation of the NTCA. Typically, a tiger reserve has a core, or the CTH – which may previously have been a national park or a wildLife sanctuary – and a buffer or peripheral area. Many conservationists believe that the CTH should be ‘inviolate’, which they see as free of human presence. According to them, this is crucial for the breeding of tigers and the continuation of the species.
However, the NTCA’s recent circular is illegal on many fronts. First, it violates the WLPA itself, given that according to the Act, a CTH can only be declared when a detailed, scientific and objective study is carried out to ensure that the areas to be declared CTHs really need to be kept inviolate. This is to be done without affecting the rights of the STs and other communities that live in the forest. A clarification issued by the environment ministry in 2011 categorically stated that the concerned agencies of the state government need the consent of the STs and other forest dwellers in the area, as well as an ecological and social scientist familiar with the area, to establish that the activities of the STs and other forest dwellers or the impact of their presence upon wild animals is sufficient to cause irreversible damage to the existence of tigers and their habitat – and so there’s a need for an ‘inviolate’ zone to be formed.
Second, the process of declaring CTHs was rushed and completely arbitrary. Most states began to notify CTHs in late 2007, as the debates over the FRA bill has just started unfolding. Till 2012, out of the 41 tiger reserves notified, 31 had already been notified by the end of December 2007. Thus, this was arguably done to create such areas before the implementation of the FRA began, thereby completely sidestepping not only the responsibility of recognising the rights of forest-dwellers who occupy the reserves, but also alienating them from the democratic process of conservation that the FRA envisioned.
Third, the NTCA has issued no guidelines for the declaration of CTHs, despite repeated attempts by several civil society and wildlife conservation groups. To understand how such arbitrary policy decisions have affected many forest dwellers, and in turn, alienated them from the state’s conservation efforts, we reflect on our experiences visiting North Bengal’s Buxa Tiger Reserve and Jaldapara National Park and what we heard from the people there.
History of local and indigenous communities in Dooars of north Bengal
The Dooars in north Bengal can very well be regarded as one of the regions wedded to the history of ‘scientific forestry’ and later ‘conservation and protection’ policy experiments in India.
During the later part of the 19th century, around the time when the colonial government realised the forests’ potential for revenue generation, the region was sparsely populated by the forest-dwelling and hunter/gatherer communities like the Rabhas, Bodos or Mech and Garos. Their practice of jhum cultivation, particularly the use of fire, was perceived as a threat to the sal trees that were being heavily extracted from the forest at that time.
Throughout this period until the early part of the 20th century, the colonial state went about ‘reserving forests’ – which inevitably meant the denial of all rights of the tribal communities living in these forests and also the eviction of these communities from the reserved stands. However, the state also realised that forestry operations needed labour and, ironically, the imperial forest department then started ‘settling’ the same evicted forest dwellers in the so-called ‘forest villages’ – which were basically labour camps – for lumbering as well as the raising of plantations, large swathes of which consisted of sal and teak trees.
However, a new problem arose since there was a complete ban on fire and clear-felling whole forests for harvesting timber within the reserves. These measures led to the growth of a new semi-evergreen/moist deciduous forest since sal forests failed to regenerate naturally, thereby hurting the revenue from colonial forestry. Thus, taungya (derived from words meaning ‘hill’ and ‘cultivation’) villages also came to be established in the area, in which the jhum cultivators’ skills were put to use through clear-felling and then burning the area to be used for plantations.
It is important to note the significant and disturbing changes brought on by colonial forest policies in the lives and livelihoods of the local people.
Settlement in these villages was often a coerced affair. There was no wage labour; instead people were given small landholdings in exchange for unpaid and compulsory ‘begar’ labour. Sometimes these villages were made permanent (without tenural security, however), while others were shifted to new plantation sites every two to three years, once a forest patch had been entirely raised and felled. Over time, these settled villages were made to sign annual agreements with the forest department. In exchange for labour, they were given certain privileges and facilities including limited amounts of free timber for their living quarters, drinking water, limited medical assistance, free firewood and fodder, in addition to cultivable land of not more than five acres. Over time these plot sizes were reduced due to the increasing population. Today, there are more than 250 such forest villages spread across the Dooars and Darjeeling.
This exploitation of north Bengal’s forest people continued – and in fact intensified – post independence and no steps were taken to settle the rights of the people living in the forest villages. There was unrest and frustration among people and several people’s movements sprang up in the Dooars’ forest villages between the 1960s and 1970s, mainly against the infamous institution of begar or compulsory unpaid labour.
One consequence of this was direct confrontation with the forest department. Besides resisting begar, people started establishing new villages inside the reserved forests – some of which they were later evicted from forcefully. For example, the village of Bala came up within the reserved forests but its residents were evicted in 1975 with the village’s houses and fields destroyed by the department. Finally a petition was filed in the high court in 1976, after over a decade struggling to stop people being evicted from occupied forest lands. In 1977, when the Left came to power in West Bengal, the issue of eviction was finally settled and villagers were allowed to keep the plots they had occupied in previous years.
Protected areas in the Dooars
After the WLPA was passed, the Buxa Tiger Reserve was declared in 1982-83 and its CTH notification was issued on December 31, 2007. The reserve spans an area of more than 700 square km and is located in the confluence of three major bio-geographic zones of the lower Gangetic plains, central Himalayas and the Bramhaputra valley – and is therefore also witness to major floods and alterations in its geo-physical landscape.
Prior to it being declared a tiger reserve, the landscape used to be a site for dolomite mining, boulder and sand mining as well as clear-felling coupe operations. After the enactment of the FRA, there was no attempt by the administration to create awareness regarding the new Act, nor have there been any efforts to create viable livelihood opportunities in the co-management of the park. Most of the titles given under the FRA are over individual land under cultivation, and the titles are faulty and illegal, so that no government agency outside the tiger reserve recognises these as valid.
Most villagers seem to be completely unaware of the community forest rights provisions of the FRA and appear resigned to the fact that in the absence of livelihoods (due to restrictions placed by forest policies), increasing conflicts with elephants and the marginalisation of cultivable land due to floods, they would be better off receiving compensation and relocating. However, relocation does not seem to have changed the situation of these communities at all.
We visited the partially relocated Bhutia Basti forest village (relocated at Poro 11 forest compartment near Patkapara tea estate), shifted in two phases beginning in 1993. The agreement with the wildlife authorities was that the relocated families will get seven bighas of land and a house each, along with a school and community hall for the village. However, most families had to construct their own houses, the school is nearly 4 km away and the nearest hospital is 40 km away from the village. The biggest loss, however, the villagers told us, is the loss of forests, since even procuring firewood has become a problem for them now that they’re outside the tiger reserve. Most villagers are dependent on wage labour and migrate to cities in search of work. Meanwhile, institutional harassment continues within the tiger reserve. The Buxa tiger reserve has witnessed horrible atrocities and the killing of tribals at the hands of officials – all for access to resources.
Contiguous to the Buxa tiger reserve is the Jaldapara National Park which was first established as a WLS in 1941 and then a national park in 2012. It is situated on the banks of the river Torsha and is spread over 216.51 square km. It was declared a WLS for protecting the one-horned rhinoceros and a great variety of flora and fauna. In Jaldapara National Park and the nearby Chilapata forest (which forms the elephant corridor between Jaldapara and Buxa), the administration has never made an effort to create awareness about the FRA since it was enacted in 2006. The DFO of the Jaldapara Wildife Division Bhaskar J.V. and the project officer at the backward classes welfare department, Abhirup Bose have both acknowledged that the government has been slow in implementing the Act.
The residents of the forest villages in Jaldapara National Park and neighbouring forest ranges claim that they received no intimation when Jaldapara was declared a national park in 2012. They never received any notification regarding the same and till date the notification has not appeared in the government’s online archives. Some villages within the park, meanwhile, have filed for community forest resource (CFR) rights. However, despite this, they are subjected to gross violation of their various forest rights by forest officials, including obstruction from exercising their rights to enter their forests and graze their cattle, intercropping in the forests, collection of firewood and fishing.
There have been instances where gram sabhas have not been consulted before undertaking clear felling operations in forests, like in the case of North Khoirbari forest village in the Madarihat forest range. In other cases, consent has been coercied from gram sabha for clear felling operations by threatening to withdraw other benefits, like in the case of Mantharam forest village in the Kodalbasti forest range. Besides, there have been serious incidents of violence – like forest officials shooting at women collecting firewood in South Mendabari forest village. These are all violations of the FRA, since the rights of the local and indigenous communities have not been recognised. Additionally, the forest department and other governmental institutions have not treated these communities as stakeholders in important decisions, including deciding which areas are declared protected. A few villages from the national park and forests around it have now filed an RTI questioning the process that led to the extension of the national park network within Jaldapara.
People in the forest villages like North Khairbari and Holapara Titi in the Madarihat forest range within Jaldapara National Park also live in constant fear of eviction. According to the villagers, the forest department always threatens them with eviction and it does so with the help of some agents. These agents are other forest villagers whom the department has lured with money and facilities like houses. These agents act in the interest of the department. This has also created divisions within the villagers and affected the momentum of the community forest rights struggle in their villages.
Community efforts at conservation
Since 2008, 13 forest villages within Jaldapara National Park and Chilapata Forest have organised their gram sabhas and various committees, including a forest governance committee, forest management committee and joint wildlife conservation committee to ensure the protection, management and conservation of their forests. These villages are part of the Uttar Banga Ban Jan Shramojibi Manch, a coalition of several forest villages in north Bengal, which lobbied with national groups for the FRA to be enacted, and have since worked tirelessly in ensuring implementation of the FRA in the area. Since then in Uttar Mendabari, Bania and Kodalbasti forest villages, which lie in the Chilapata forest range and the latter in the Kodalbasti range, rhinoceros poaching was completely stopped as the villagers kept a careful watch. The villagers have also actively formed patrolling groups to patrol the forests and keep an eye on wildlife and illegal extraction of timber. Apart from this, the forest villagers possess vast knowledge on the biodiversity of the area. Conversation with them during a field visit in January 2017 revealed their observation and understanding of wildlife and their habitats, activities and behaviours as well as medicinal properties of plant species found in their forests.
Why the FRA can help
Both the colonial and post-independence forest administrations created policies, laws and governance systems which were top-down in their approach. The policy framework criminalised entire communities who continued to engage in traditional activities within the boundaries of protected areas and reserved forests, disrupted their cultural practices and beliefs, caused loss of traditional livelihoods and led to misery and deprivation in the Dooars of north Bengal, just as it did in the rest of India. Firstly, hunter/gatherer and forest dwelling communities were made to live as settlers and depend on sedentary cultivation and livestock rearing for their livelihood. Secondly, in the days post independence, landholdings were fragmented because the state did not recognise the second generation of forest settlers. They were also denied other entitlements like free firewood, grazing and intercropping. All of these affected their very basic methods of subsistence.
The livelihood crisis that has been developing because of such unfair practices, and the kind of stress that it has put on the ability of the present generations of these tribal communities to survive, makes the Forest Rights Act of 2006 a very welcome piece of legislation.
This historic Act tries to restore the traditional and customary rights of tribal and other forest dwelling communities, has enabled communities to take their own decisions and also unleashed a new wave of conservation practices whereby local and indigenous communities, and their gram sabhas, engage in forest management and biodiversity conservation to ensure cultural, livelihood and food security. These efforts, if supported by the administration and the forest department, could also be directed towards understanding and dealing with the changes in the geo-physical landscape of the river valleys in the Dooars. Therefore, it is of vital importance that the NTCA circular be withdrawn and a process of genuine recognition and the vesting of rights be carried out in all our tiger reserves and that processes of co-management are arrived at with the help of the communities living inside these reserves.
Meenal Tatpati and Sneha Gutgutia work at Kalpavriksh, Pune. The authors would like to thank Soumitra Ghosh of NESPON, Siliguri for his valuable comments and suggestions. | {
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President Trump flew to Texas to check on the devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey — and marveled at the size of the crowd as a few hundred people greeted him outside a Corpus Christi firehouse.
“What a crowd, what a turnout,” he said, emerging from the Annaville Fire House, where he had been meeting Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and other Texas officials.
Trump climbed up on a ladder and, using a microphone, praised the people gathered there.
“Thank you,” he said to applause. “We love you, you are special, we are here to take care of you. It’s going well.”
“It’s historic. It’s epic. But I tell you, it happened in Texas and Texas can handle anything.”
He then held up the Texas flag to loud cheers. | {
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There is gonna be a new season of Wolverine’s podcast. Bill Irwin who plays Cary Loudermilk on Legion is gonna play Mastermind and Bill Heck is gonna play Gambit. Richard Armitage is still playing Wolverine. It drops in Winter 2019 and you can check out the full press release below.
Press Release
NEW YORK CITY – November 5, 2018 – Marvel and top podcast listening service and content network Stitcher (“Heaven’s Gate,” “Katie Couric”) announced Marvel’s “Wolverine: The Lost Trail,” marking the second season for the critically-acclaimed scripted podcast series. The 10-episode second season will be available exclusively on Stitcher Premium starting in winter 2019. It will be released widely across all podcast platforms later in the year.
Following the incredible fan reception of Marvel’s “Wolverine: The Long Night,” Richard Armitage (“The Hobbit”) will reprise his role as Logan in Marvel’s “Wolverine: The Lost Trail.”
Marvel’s “Wolverine: The Lost Trail” is an epic quest that takes place in the Louisiana bayou. Following the events of Marvel’s “Wolverine: The Long Night,” Logan (Richard Armitage) returns to New Orleans in search of redemption, only to discover that his ex-lover, Maureen is nowhere to be found. And she’s not the only one. Dozens of humans and mutants have gone missing, including the mother of a teenage boy, Marcus Baptiste. With Weapon X in close pursuit, Logan and Marcus must team up and follow a trail of clues that leads them deep into the gothic heart of the bayou, where they encounter biker gangs, Cajun thieves and a world of wonders that defies explanation. It is here that they find Greenhaven — a backwater refuge run by a powerful mutant named Jason Wyngarde.
“After seeing the overwhelming support for Marvel’s ‘Wolverine: The Long Night,’ we are excited to introduce listeners to another unique audio storytelling experience,” said Dan Buckley, President of Marvel. “Marvel’s ‘Wolverine: The Lost Trail’ will continue expanding Logan’s story and introduce more elements of the Marvel Universe. We look forward to expanding our content for Marvel fans and the scripted podcast community.”
The show’s cast includes notable actors Bill Irwin (“Legion”) as Jason Wyngarde, Bill Heck (“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”) as Remy LeBeau, and Blair Brown (“Orange is the New Black”) as Bonnie Roach.
“Fans reacted so powerfully and positively to season one that we really had no choice–we had to keep the story and the characters alive (well, most of them) for another season,” said Chris Bannon, Chief Content Officer of Stitcher. “Fortunately, the outstanding creative team that made season one so memorable signed on right away! And I couldn’t hope for a better cast of great voices, including Richard Armitage as Logan. Together, they’re making a story Marvel fans will listen to over and over, I know.”
The process behind the making of Marvel’s “Wolverine: The Lost Trail” will continue to bring Marvel’s storytelling expertise into the podcasting world, breaking new ground for the medium and immersing listeners into the story through ambisonic — or fully surround-sound — environments and technology.
Award-winning comic book author Ben Percy (“The Dark Net,” “Red Moon”), director Brendan Baker (“Wolverine: The Long Night”) sound designer Chloe Prasinos (“Wolverine: The Long Night”) will return the series, produced by Daniel Fink and Chloe Wilson of Marvel andJenny Radelet of Stitcher.
The first nine episodes of Marvel’s “Wolverine: The Long Night” are now available on all major podcast platforms and devices. Listeners can tune in to the season one finale on Wednesday, November 7.
For more information on Marvel’s “Wolverine: The Lost Trail,” sign up for updates at www.wolverinepodcast.com . | {
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After two design advice sessions, Gerding Edlen Development is pushing ahead their Block 8L mixed-use development in Old Town in design review. Poised to become the new headquarters of Ankrom Moisan, the project’s architect, the building will have additional space for the University of Oregon’s graduate programs, 70 small residential units on the top two floors, and retail in the NW corner of the ground floor.
The newest proposal reduces the height of the overall form to the nearby Bickel Block’s roofline and massing by setting back the 6th floor and changing the proposed materiality to a more uniform palette. The window bays and entrances have also been modified to further match their older surroundings, and the previously proposed structural frame expression has been removed from the exterior. In an attempt to utilize some of the city’s stored cast iron pieces, a small “cast iron museum” of columns and pilasters will grace the unused ROW along Naito Parkway in the front of the building, with a few pieces also incorporated into the project’s alleyway.
The gated alleyway is proposed as a flexible outdoor space, with uniform planters and ample seating spaces. The previously proposed Asian motif has been gutted, and the new design is much more banal, for better or for worse. The stairs and entrances within the alley have been reduced in prominence, and the ground floor building line has been pushed out to the sidewalk to maintain the urban edge. The main entrances are now proposed to have larger wood canopies to differentiate from their lesser counterparts, but the darker facade material above the entrances remains in high contrast to the rest of the building’s lighter color.
Overall the project looks cleaner and more respectful to its immediate surroundings, something the design commission staff had been pressing the design team on. The staff tend to lean toward the ‘blend in’ approach to historic district preservation rather than the more European, and my own preferred, ‘stand out’ approach that is exactly the opposite. This project is rather bland to me, even compared to the nearby Mercy Corps headquarters built in 2009, and even that design falls too much into the historic mimicry dialogue for my tastes. Regardless, I welcome this development as a vast improvement to the existing conditions, and it will be another boost to Old Town and the waterfront, which have both been greatly neglected in the past decades. | {
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LONDON: Indian Navy ship ' INS Tarangini ' today set sail as a participant in the Tall Ships Races from the UK 's Sunderland port , where it had docked earlier this week.
The ship is on a Lokayan-18 voyage, which will take in 15 ports across 13 countries, and Sunderland marked the seventh, from where it set off for the annual races along with 13 other ships from the UK.
The ship is part of the first training squadron based at Kochi, under the Southern Naval Command of the Indian Navy.
The name 'Tarangini' is derived from the Hindi word 'Tarang', meaning waves, and Tarangini therefore means "the one that rides the waves".
"INS Tarangini is the first ship of the Indian Navy to have circumnavigated the globe in the year 2003-04 and has participated in tall ship races conducted around the world in 2005, 2007 and 2015," an official release said.
"This beautiful ship, in her 21st year of service, is once again ready to create history with Lokayan-18," the statement said.
The name Lokayan is a combination of two Sanskrit words: 'Lokya' meaning worldwide and 'Yana' meaning travel, with the voyage signifying the ship's global journey.
INS Tarangini commenced 'Lokayan-18' on April 10 from Kochi and is set to cover a distance of over 20,000 nautical miles, with a crew of nine officers, 30 officer sea trainees and 43 sailors. The voyage will take seven months.
INS Tarangini is a three-masted 'barque', commissioned in 1997 as a sail training ship for the Indian Navy. It was built in Goa, based on a design by British naval architect Colin Mudie.
"Anyone who aspires to become a seaman must begin by acquiring first-hand knowledge of the wind and waves," the official release said.
Sail Training International organises Tall Ships' Races and regattas, which promote international friendship and understanding between young sailors and the thousands of visitors.
Sunderland, by virtue of its location and rich sailing culture, plays host to the Tall Ship Races.
From the UK, the ship will arrive at Esbjerg, Denmark, next week and after a port halt it will cruise to Stavanger in Norway.
The second race is scheduled from Stavanger to Harlingen in Netherlands, concluding on August 6.
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By buying plenty of Google Ads and Adwords any scam operation can fill the first page of Google search results with whatever they like and even their own blog reviews. Since they are paying over $1,000 a month for those cherish first page views, you will only find the most favorable praise on page 1 of a google search result, until the paid spots dry up. This is an ideal but expensive way for someone with a bad reputation to conceal their history of complaints online. So is google helping scammers cheat people? Yes, but not by intent. Their sales reps are not vetting advertisers as they strive to meet sales goals.
Here is an experiment you can do yourself to see what we are talking about here... Using Google, search "Gi2c" and you will see not much stands out to raise any red flags. Now do the same search of "Gi2c" at DuckDuckGo.com. What a difference eh? Now add a second key word "Gi2c", "Scam" to both the Google and DuckDuckGo search. Based on the results we would think that we must be talking about two different companies!
Here's another example, using Google these links will not show up until page 8 of search results... but they are on page 2 of DuckDuckGo! How many people do you know read past page 2 of search results?
https://www.tefl.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=6777&p=18278&hilit=Gi2c...
https://www.scam.com/showthread.php?683734-Gi2c-China-Internship-Scam-No...!
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChinaScamCentral/comments/6n8vk2/china_snakes_l...
http://www.eslbase.com/forum/viewtopic/why-does-gi2c-refuse-to-answer-qu...
http://www.scamorg.com/gi2c-org-38
https://eslwatch.info/en/eslwatch-forum/china/117-fraud-warning-gi2c-and...
https://chinascampatrol.wordpress.com/2015/04/25/is-gi2c-china-internshi...
So unless you read all 10 pages of a Google search result, you may never get a clear, complete, nor accurate picture of things. Not so with DuckDuckGo.com.
We are now doing a similar analysis with other search engines Yahoo Vs. Google and MSN Vs. Google and also compared with DuckDuckGo.com and we will publish our results next week. But for now, we hope you realize that by using Google instead of DuckDuckGo.com, what you don't see may be far more important than what you do see online. Passive SEO censorship of scam artists make Google a powerful friend and unwitting ally to the cheaters of the world.
If you are looking to check out any company to see if they are legit, just search their company name at Reddit, scam.com, realscam.com, and scamorg.com. If you want to check out a company in China, visit http://reddit.com/r/chinascamcentral
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NOTE: The above comments and opinions are those only of the author and not the staff of OpnLttr.com | {
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Love git? Then say hello to the git bundle!
We're happy to announce a bundle of products especially for git fans. The git bundle includes playing cards, a tote bag, a mug with a coaster, a mouse pad and a sticker!
Best of all, it offers a 20% discounted price compared to purchasing the products individually. | {
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2018 marked big changes for transit in St. Louis. The first new MetroLink station in more than 10 years opened in the Cortex Innovation District, the region’s bridges and highways underwent major construction, and dockless bikes and scooters landed on city streets.
More changes are on the way for 2019, especially for frequent public transit riders. By fall, bus routes and schedules will start changing as part of Metro’s plan to overhaul bus service on the Missouri side of the St. Louis region. The agency also plans to make public transit rides easier by improving technology and safety across the Metro system.
Metro executive director Jessica Mefford-Miller said that many of the changes coming in 2019 focus on creating a “rider-centric revolution” that will change the transit experience, such as adding WiFi on buses and other features riders have requested.
Here’s what to expect in 2019:
WiFi to expand across MetroBus and MetroLink
Metro started testing wireless internet service on 20 buses in December. That pilot program will continue into the new year, then expand to the full bus system in 2019. MetroLink trains will also begin testing WiFi service in the first quarter of 2019.
Fare gates and other updates to safety and security
Metro started a safety and security assessment in 2018, and the final report will be released in January. Mefford-Miller said the agency plans to start implementing recommendations from the study this year.
Fare gates were added in 2018 at three MetroLink stations, controlling access to the platforms by channeling customers through smaller entrance points that have fare inspectors and security guards. In 2019 Metro will improve the design of those stations and add fare gates to stations in the Central West End and Delmar Loop.
Metro is also seeking a new contract for security services, and plans to have selected a company by the end of spring.
Redesigning original MetroLink stations
Early in 2019 Metro will revamp five of the original MetroLink stations: Arch-Laclede’s Landing, Convention Center, 8th and Pine, Forest Park and the Delmar Loop.
Mefford-Miller said Metro hopes to transform the stations into “vibrant spaces” with new lighting and art to “better connect our stations to the vibrancy that’s happening in the community surrounding us.” Design will start in spring after Metro determines a contractor. Construction timeline will depend on funding. The five 25-year-old stations will also receive needed maintenance.
The Central West End MetroLink station platform, which is being extended, will also reopen in 2019.
Electric bus program gets rolling
Metro won almost $3 million for establishing electric bus service from two Federal Transit Administration grants. Mefford-Miller said Metro will receive several 40-foot buses at the end of 2019, with plans to put them into service in 2020. Eventually the program will convert 60-foot buses on the most-used route, 70 Grand, to electric.
Metro is also partnering with Ameren UE to convert the Brentwood MetroBus facility to provide power supply and equipment that will support electric buses.
The last chance to give feedback on proposed bus route changes
Throughout 2018 Metro gathered public comments on Metro Reimagined, its plan to increase bus frequency without changing its budget. The plan involves scaling back the number of stops and routes, but increasing bus frequency. Metro released a revision in October that responded to rider concerns. The agency will make additional revisions before finalizing its plans, so the last chance to comment on the proposal ends is Jan. 11. See the Metro Reimagined website for information on how to submit public comments.
Riders will begin seeing pilot programs and route changes in 2019, but the majority of changes will not take effect until towards the end of the year.
‘Microtransit’ tests
Metro Reimagined will replace some fixed-route services with more flexible options. One of those, called “microtransit,” shuttles people to specific employers or shifts. Metro plans to start testing microtransit in spring.
The shuttles will focus on areas that are dense with people and employers, such as Downtown, the Central Corridor, the Hazelwood industrial area and health care employment centers in St. Louis County.
Fresh technologies to make trips easier
Metro’s Gateway Card, which allows riders to store and pay fare electronically, is in a pilot stage. Throughout the year, Metro will convert more passes from magnetic stripe paper to Gateway Cards.
Metro is working with a company to develop new software to plan trips in early 2019, and riders will also have mobile payment options.
Follow Kae on Twitter: @kmaepetrin | {
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A Victorian couple was stunned to find a furry intruder land on their bed after a kangaroo crashed through their window.
Bill and Norma McConnell were enjoying a quiet Sunday morning lie-in when a flying kangaroo bounced onto their bed.
The roo kept going, bounding off the bed, through the bedroom door and down a passageway.
Mrs McConnell said it took a while to register exactly what had happened.
“I heard the incredible crash and saw this big, brown mound in front of me,” she said.
Her husband gave chase, watching the marsupial bang into furniture as it tried to escape out closed windows.
Mr McConnell said he had just enough time to snap a photograph to prove the story.
“It’s not a very good photograph, but it does show it was in fact a kangaroo and we aren’t making this story up,” he said.
Mr McConnell said the roo then found the back door open and skipped off into the morning light, sailing over a large fence on its way. | {
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Image copyright PA
Rules on Sunday opening hours for shops in England and Wales are out of date and need to be relaxed, a group of 200 MPs and council leaders has said.
In a letter to the Sunday Telegraph, they wrote that increasing spending on Sundays would boost job prospects and help shops compete with online firms.
They backed government plans to devolve Sunday trading laws to local councils.
However, the shopworkers' union said the majority of its members opposed extended Sunday trading hours.
In the letter, the group - which includes the cross-party British Infrastructure Group (BIG) of MPs - said the world had changed "a great deal" since Sunday trading laws were last updated in 1994.
"Yet whilst times and attitudes have changed, Sunday Trading laws have stayed the same," they wrote.
"Our high streets and physical retailers have been left trying to compete with 24/7 online shopping, a task which is made harder by a shortened trading day at the weekend, just when many families might hope to go shopping together."
'Outdated retail law'
In England and Wales, shops over 280 sq m, or 3,000 sq ft, in size can open their doors for only six consecutive hours between 10:00 and 18:00. Retailers can be fined up to £50,000 if they break the rules.
There are no trading restrictions in Scotland, while in Northern Ireland shops can open for up to five hours between 13:00 and 18:00.
The letter supported a report by the BIG, which backs the modernisation of "outdated retail law".
The group includes more than 40 MPs and is led by former Conservative Party chairman Grant Shapps.
Its report argued the trend across Europe is for "liberalising" Sunday trading laws, saying that changes on the continent resulted in a 7‐9% net increase in employment.
'Special day'
The Sunday Telegraph letter added: "Ultimately, we believe that the best way to determine whether large shops are open for longer than six hours on a Sunday is to hand this decision to local communities.
"It is for this reason that we back the proposed change in England and Wales which would update our trading laws for the 21st Century."
Campaigners opposed to longer opening hours question if the move would really benefit the High Street, pointing out that under the existing law, smaller traders are allowed to open for longer.
Image copyright Getty Images
Last year, Chancellor George Osborne promised that councils and mayors would get the power to set Sunday trading laws in their areas.
Business Secretary Sajid Javid earlier this month said ministers plan to press ahead with the proposal, saying the move would allow local authorities to "help struggling high streets".
However, it faces strong opposition in the Commons.
And retail union, Usdaw, has said the current trading hours give "everyone a little bit of what they want".
"Retailers can trade, customers can shop, staff can work; whilst Sunday remains a special day, different to other days, and shop workers can spend some time with their family," general secretary John Hannett said. | {
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Your friend needs your help becoming a King of Chaos!
CHOOSE A RACE AND JOIN THE WAR NOW! Ready to become a King of Chaos? Choose your race below. Humans Dwarves Elves Orcs Undead Hobbits Signup Now! Username Password Password (again) Email Commander None Gather your troops to fight the coming horde! Come to the aid of your allies and destroy your enemies! Harness your strength and fight for your people! Use your might to spread evil throughout the land! Fulfill your oath, gather your fallen, and find final rest! Use the magic provided and stay hidden! More Money - Less Protection:
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-5% Defense Bonus Report Spam | Privacy Policy | Business Queries | Terms of Service Copyright © 2003-2019 Kings of Chaos, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kings of Chaos ® is a registered trademark of Kings of Chaos, LLC.
| {
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Yes, this site is still dead.
Today I’m going to talk at you about how the new (read: almost a year old) Project Diva deck works, what its weaknesses and strengths are, and how to play against it.
All because I don’t want too many people winning with it and getting its ass banned.
No, you don’t actually get whale cards for killing it, that was bait. (should I have titled the article Miku Slayer? would that have been a cute seasonal joke? idk shut up)
Although the cards have been out since December of 2017, this deck’s build and playstyle wasn’t solved until about June of 2018, going by various Twittter posts, which was a big reason as to why this deck went untouched in August, along with underrepresentation. Miku just isn’t popular anymore when you can hop on all these new Bushiroad music franchises instead.
Let’s cut to the chase. This article will go over some of the commonly played cards in this deck, rather than outright giving you a decklist right off the bat. However, there are a number of cards in this deck that must be played in a playset; these will be indicated as such.
Keep in mind the following while reading through these cards, as this may better your understanding of the deck: Project Diva is a primarily Green/Blue deck which plays an 8 bar climax lineup and 8 events that, after a certain point in the game, can get to refresh from a full deck and gain card advantage for little to no cast, and with zero interaction with the opponent. It wins by using optimal compression to get somewhat expected cancels for two to three turns to catch up in damage, then killing the opponent from 3/0 or above fairly consistently and at a low resource cost.
CARDS
Level 0:
Hatsune Miku “Layered Envy” is always played at a playset. There are several reasons why this card is played at 4:
It fixes blue. The deck usually plays 8 other blue cards, all 8 of which you want out of the level slot and floating around the deck or waiting room.
The next two points explain why one would play it as a main Level 0 attacker over, say, KAITO “Holiday”.
It’s a runner. This may be a deck with 16 misses (so almost it’ll miss run almost a third of the time on average), but the deck badly needs ways to dodge on reverse effects, as the rest of the deck is extremely poor in doing so.
It mills a card from your deck for no cost. This deck severely lacks ways to get to its first refresh before hitting level 2, so every card counts. This mill also lends its hand to a fairly common play where you cancel on a compressed deck, keep this card in the back, flush the rest of your deck out with 4 cards remaining, attack three times then mill the last card out for a refresh without giving your opponent empty damage to toss in your clock.
Hatsune Miku “Silent Voice” is another Level 0 the deck plays at 4 without question. It’s fairly obvious why and I won’t waste your time or insult your intelligence explaining it. It does remove 2 cards from the deck, which is worth nothing.
Hatsune Miku “Ultimate Miku” is the only other Level 0 the deck plays at a high count, though not necessarily at 4. This card is the main way the deck accesses the Waiting Room; almost all other filters go through the deck instead. “Endless Singing” Hatsune Miku is an excellent secondary Brainstorm effect that is extremely valuable along with the filter effect, as the deck has few ways to get Climaxes and Events into the hand during the Main Phase. Situations where you have way too many Characters in your hand but no Climaxes to play for Stock and Soul damage or no way to get Events out of your deck are not uncommon if the deck is running hot, and these are situations which can turn the tide of the game against Project Diva’s favour. It’s weird how a card that was once considered unusable tripe can now be a pivotal card in winning games.
MEIKO “Ivy Grimoire” is the deck’s only other way to pick cards out of the Waiting Room, and honestly isn’t as useful as it looks given that your other 2 Climax discard outs, which are your 1/0 attacker and simply playing Climaxes down for damage, are extremely good. However, although your brainstorm is extremely favoured to hit after one or two refresh cycles, it can get you out of situations where you *need* to salvage a critical card. It can also serve as a way to filter without moving your deck into your Clock, which can be important as your Clock is the deadest zone for your Climaxes to go to while playing this deck.
“Streaming Heart” Hatsune Miku is a card without a single unwatermarked and sizable scan on the internet, and fits a couple good corner case uses. The first effect removes cards from your deck for free (again, as mentioned before, every milled card counts in this deck) and the bomb effect is useful for dealing with troublesome Level 0s your opponent may need to trigger effects when they get Reversed.
Hatsune Miku “Engage”, Hatsune Miku “Lollipop”, and Hatsune Miku “Raspberryism” are all cards used at the player’s discretion to suit expected power thresholds and playstyles. None of these cards are must-plays.
Level 1
All Level 1 cards are fixed at a playset of 4 in the deck each. There is absolutely no leeway on this.
“Secret of X” Hatsune Miku is the main reason this deck can play 8 bars and get away with it. It gives two things the deck needs badly in a single Stage slot: a way to filter out Climaxes (and other cards if necessary) and a way to beat over opposing Characters for almost no commitment. The filter effect also has the upside of removing a card from your deck. Say it with me, kids: “Every card counts”. This effect has singlehandedly dug me out of situations where I had a single playable Character and into a board swinging for 11k, 8.5k, and 5.5k. The clockswap also accesses a zone which no other card in the deck can, leaving only the Stock inaccessible for selective pickings.
Hatsune Miku “Sea Lily” is the one of the reasons this deck can play the next card and not be crippled. Again, it fills two very strong roles: a card advantage engine and a way to get over the opponent’s board. Coupled with the above card and a Climax, it becomes very easy for this deck to just demolish its opponent’s board whenever it wants or needs to, making it difficult for the opposing player to just commit Characters attached to a resource cost and hope they don’t die. The cost on the salvage effect, again, removes a card from the deck, making it the 7th (!) and last unique card that manipulates/shrinks the deck in some way before Level 2. We’ll cry about the card it salvages later.
Sharing the World. When first shown on Card of the Day, I scoffed at the idea of losing cards just to get Stock you’re probably not gonna be able to use. Aside from that, it seems quite useful in a deck playing 8 bars, since every Climax you trigger will be a Stockboost that just flies into your hand, and also doesn’t screw up your damage swings on trigger like traditional Stockboost Climaxes do with their +2 Soul triggers. How would you offset the cost of taking an entire card in your hand and throwing it into the abyss though? It’s not like the clock cost salvage will recuperate your hand sufficientl
Level 2+
wait what hte Actual Fuck is THAT
A little history lesson. This card was first shown in the product press release released to distributors and stores (you can find it here) in plain text format, before any images of the cards in this product were shown. I didn’t believe for a second this card would be printed as-is. You could’ve bet any amount of money on this card being printed this way and I would have gleefully taken the bet. HoriP is a dumb dork who likes Miku, sure, but he doesn’t like Miku enough to print this thing.
haha
This card is what makes the deck work at all. It offers the following:
Free card advantage (albeit limited to Characters), letting you be extremely reckless with how you commit cards to the board. Before playing Sharing Your World in the deck, I often found myself with too many cards to deal with – something the hard minus from the green event actually solved.
High degree of control over your decksize. See those people playing 2 stock refresh costs? Laugh at them. Cancelled unoptimally on the first damage every swing the last turn? Just dump the rest of the deck into the bin.
Selective card advantage, which can sometimes translate into “pick pretty much any Character you want out of your deck”, given that your deck is small enough.
Don’t forget that you can just pick this card straight out of the Waiting Room, letting you use it multiple times without ever needing to draw into it.
The high degree of deck manipulation this card offers gives Miku players the ability to never be caught in a shitty position regarding their deck and compression ratio. They might have to take a few instances of clock damage here and there to do so, but if they’re playing an average game they should be cancelling 2 times or more every turn at this point, so it’s well worth it. The speed at which this card dumps the whole deck into the Waiting Room also makes the 1/1 event much more effective, as the stock you’re accumulating is immediately having an effect on your compression, while most decks would need to sit around for a turn or two waiting for their deck to run out.
don’t ban your baby HoriP
Hatsune Miku “High Fever” is played based on the player’s meta read. It’s used only when early plays that snowball and may lead to problems where the opponent is too compressed during the kill turn (Rem, Fuuka, and 合体 keyword marker cards like Gurren Lagann come to mind), or if an early play has an ability that will heavily impact the game (like this thing). If its just a fat heal that doesnt do anything though? Who cares lol just run your infinite respawning robots in
These are early plays I won’t even bother linking because decent players aren’t going to play these, for several reasons. The deck has no way to properly protect them, they offer nothing to very little to your main gameplan at the Level 2 stage of the game, and take up valuable boardspace where you could be playing your costless onplay abilities instead.
Hatsune Miku “Original” and Hatsune Miku “DE:MONSTAR” are the deck’s most usable costed power buffs. These help out mostly on the kill turn, and aren’t useful at any point before then, really. I’ll go into detail about why this deck cares about power later.
A few Level 2 Backups with additional effects you may want to be aware of. Most decks won’t be able to fit these in, but knowing that these effects may go off when you Front Attack doesn’t hurt.
“New World” Hatsune Miku and Hatsune Miku “Stubborn Factory Chief” are the deck’s topend cards. They’re pretty boring in the context of this deck and there’s really not that much to say about them that isn’t in the card text, though it should be noted that the extra Climax play during the Encore Step counts as a Climax play for the 1/1 Event (this usually doesn’t matter). There is also the possibility of the Miku player being a huge sack and triggering Hand in Hand during the attack phase without it already being in hand, and dropping it for the combo during Encore Step. When that happens, feel free to just smack their hand away when they go for the handshake tbh
The kill turn where the Miku player drops these Level 3 Characters and uses their combos makes them lose an incredible amount of steam. Each Level 3 they play down decompresses the next deck by 6 cards, and playing 2 bars in addition to the 3 Level 3s and dropping a card for each healer is also extremely taxing for the hand. If this turn fails it is very likely that the Miku player will just lose.
Climaxes
8 bars as mentioned. Since these Climaxes will never end up in the Stock unless placed there by the blindstock effect of another bar Climax, it is safe to assume that a Miku player’s big fat pile of Stock is always clean. Also, never miss a chance to call out a Miku player using the foil a art of Hand in Hand on their shit taste.
here’s a bunch of decks to look at, and here’s a degenerate 40 minute video of a miku mirror where both players misplay a few times and still cancel out the ass (seriously, what the fuck)
and thats the tea, sis
WEAKNESSES
The first one is the most basic. This deck gets completely fucked if it opens poorly in terms of card quality or Climax flooding. If you see a Miku player struggling to get rid of their deck early on, don’t be too shy to just commit to the board and swing in as much damage as possible, or you might not have the opportunity to deal big chunks of damage later. Taking too much damage before the deck is ready to do so leads to poor compression, since the Miku player has not had the time to properly accumulate clean stock or control how many cards are in their other compression areas. This also leaves the Miku player with less breathing room to punch themselves with to salvage the 2/0 event for card advantage, which can lead to a huge blowout. If a Miku player hits Level 3 long before you enter the kill range of Level 2 with high damage you will have an easy coast from then on, as the deck’s Level 3s are not meant to extend the game for very long.
This next point is something a few of you may have thought up of while reading this article (which is none of you, cardgamers don’t read). If your series has a stock bomb, especially a searchable one, you have a leg up without actually needing to do anything besides putting it in your deck. Since a Miku player’s Stock is almost always clean, there is really no point where this type of card wouldn’t be deadly. A Miku player’s only real counterplay to this is playing fewer 1/1 Events and 3-cost Encoring their Characters since the deck has hardly any Stock outlets, which is just shit for the deck’s gameplan.
Next is a type of card that’s a bit more obscure: cards that pick out Climaxes from their opponent’s deck, which Miku’s heavy compression further enables. These two are the most playable ones at the time of writing, though there are also some effective ones decks that aren’t quite as good.
Here’s another more common annoyance for Miku: -2 Soul effects at Level 2 often completely null swings from Miku, as the deck packs a very low count of Soul Triggers (usually around 8, some of which should be in the player’s hand). This fatty is extremely annoying, and I can’t think of another meta relevant -2 Soul Character right now whoops
Miku is goddamn awful at power on the defense and leaves a bunch of warm bodies on the board, so abuse your on-reverse abilities. Being able to get close to your opponent’s compression through abusing Level 1 Climax combos or getting good reverses off is an easy task. Even if the Miku player leaves a runner out to duck you, there is a good chance the runner will just whiff on the mill and be a vanilla.
The last point is something that was going to become obvious once the deck got a bit more exposure: Miku’s Level 3 gameplan is completely ruined by cards that remove “New World” Hatsune Miku from the board before the Encore Step, as the card must be on the Stage at that time to use its burn effect. Here’s an example. Why not have another one? In fact, take this, this, and this too. Miku players have recently started playing some dumbass TD level 3 that would be a complete shit card in any other deck to deal with this issue, which just goes to show how much of a problem this can be. In order to use this card effectively, however, they would need 8 Stock at the beginning of their turn, plus more Stock to stack additional Power where necessary. If you can force damage though fast enough, a Miku player will not have the Stock to deal with power differences when it’s relevant.
There’s also the usual tap counters and antidamage counters that you can use against any deck, antidamage counters being more effective given that it also nulls the extra burn 3.
i’m still looking for a copy of the TD level 3 in foil btw, hmu if you’re cool and want to donate one to me
CONCLUSION:
i dont know how to end this bye i’m gonna go back to rerolling re:live | {
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Made homeless by tribal enemies who kidnapped and gang-raped her last year, *Mary fled to a neighbouring village in Papua New Guinea's highlands to seek shelter.
"I was raped and severely beaten on my face," she said.
"My insides and my private parts were really broken up. More than 24 men raped me so I could hardly walk."
Now she's had to move again, this time because of the magnitude 7.5 earthquake on February 26.
The quake damaged the small "bush material" house she and fellow refugees from tribal fighting were staying in and now Mary and nine other people are sleeping in an outdoor kitchen until they can find more permanent shelter.
Mary is now homeless and has to rely on others to give her food. ( ABC News: Eric Tlozek )
Because she can't return to her own food gardens, Mary said she has to help farm other people's land and hope they give her something to eat.
"If people give me food, feel sorry for me, I eat," she said.
Rape and attacks on women and children — previously taboo — are now part of tribal conflicts.
Ongoing tribal fights are destroying families throughout the country. ( ABC News: Eric Tlozek )
But community leader Marilyn Tabagua said the earthquake has now put the victims of such attacks at a greater risk of exploitation, this time from those they are begging food and shelter from.
"This (earthquake) is like a double trauma for their lives," she said.
"So women who come into the villages and live here, I see that they have to work extra hard, because they have to live with the custodians of their land and they're prone to rapes, they're prone to abuses and forced labour."
*Name has been changed to protect the woman's identity.
Thousands already displaced by tribal fighting
Bessie Peyabe is still dressed in the black robes of a highlands widow.
Her husband was killed in tribal fighting just before the earthquake, leaving her and her five children without protection and support.
"When we were at the funeral, the earthquake happened," she said.
"It's really complicated being a woman alone, looking after five kids, and when the earthquake happened it got worse."
Ms Peyabe is one of 400 displaced women and children in Hoiebia struggling after the earthquake. ( ABC News: Eric Tlozek )
Highlands tribal fights are a modern, deadlier form of an ancient tradition where grievances were settled with violence, or rival tribes raided each other's villages.
The introduction of firearms and a breakdown of law and order in some highlands provinces has increased the intensity of the violence and the number of people being killed.
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre and the International Committee of the Red Cross both estimate thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes because of tribal fighting, many in areas now affected by the quake.
The PNG Government estimates the earthquake has displaced a further 35,000 people in the highlands.
Ms Peyabe is one of 400 women and children who have sought refuge from conflict in Hoiebia village, near the capital of Hela Province, Tari.
She said she and other tribal fighting victims are struggling to find housing, because the quake damaged the homes they were staying in.
"In one house, because of the earthquake, now we have 10 people," she said.
Many of the small houses in Hoiebia were unable to withstand the powerful earthquake. ( ABC News: Eric Tlozek )
The president of the Hoiebia United Church women's committee, Agnes Havalu, said the tribal fighting refugees did not have access to enough food in the aftermath of the quake.
"If things from the earthquake get worse and the fighting doesn't stop there will be a famine here," she said.
"A lot of men and women will die because already some children have died here."
Earthquake has not eased tribal fighting
Alena Potape has few relatives left, after most were killed in a long-running tribal fight.
"My father and two uncles were killed, two sisters were killed, plus my grandmother because she was worried and she died," she said.
"So I have lost all of my father's family, only I ran away with my three kids and I am sleeping out in a tent and having a hard time."
Alena Potape lost her small tent home in the earthquake. ( ABC News: Eric Tlozek )
The earthquake has made things even harder for the young mother, who said the tremor collapsed the rough tarpaulin shelter she was staying in.
"When the earthquake came, I was sleeping in a tent and the tent broke," she said.
"I was afraid and I held onto the grass and held onto my children and the tent was destroyed."
Local and international aid agencies are trying to set up temporary accommodation for women like Ms Potape, but village councillor Moreen Mokai said ongoing fighting made it risky to gather people in one place.
"We can't make a care centre, because men are still holding guns and finding all their enemies," she said.
More people have been killed in tribal fighting since the quake and the conflicts have also disrupted the distribution of aid supplies from Tari.
The Australian Government is funding the setup of "safe spaces" for women and children as part of earthquake relief.
They will provide basic counselling and healthcare services.
The PNG Government says 35,000 people have been displaced by the earthquake. ( ABC News: Eric Tlozek )
The PNG country director for UN Women, Susan Ferguson, said there needed to be long-term "peace building", led by local people, to stop the tribal fighting.
"It's really hard to untangle the earthquake from some of the existing challenges that women face," she said.
"I think the response to the earthquake is going to be really important in longer-term development because it's highlighting some of these issues that are very hard to uncover because it's such a remote place." | {
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The former president of the Manhattan Young Democrats and giant pedophile Jacob Schwartz is suing New York City for pack pay, claiming that he was unfairly compensated for overtime.
Schwartz, 31, recently pleaded guilty to possessing a large trove of child porn on his laptop, according to Fox News. The former Department of Design and Construction employee was arrested in 2017 after police found over 3,000 images of child pornography and 89 videos. Some of the victims were as young as 6 months old.
Schwartz is demanding $18,000 - claiming that for the two years he was working for the city at $66,000 per year he was usually paid "comp time" instead of time and a half when working over 40 hours in a week.
For a time, Schwartz was a rising star in Democrat circles - rubbing elbows with and promoting Hillary's campaign manager Robby Mook. From a now-deleted biography of Schwartz from the Manhattan Young Democrats.
Jacob was born and raised in the heart of Greenwich Village, and was involved in political organizing from a young age. Some of his oldest memories are handing out leaflets for his father, as he campaigned for District Leader. More recently, he helped start the New Democratic Alliance in New York City, and, in 2012, worked for the Obama campaig n as a Field Organizer in the Lehigh Valley.
Robby Mook (left), Jacob Schwartz
The lawsuit was filed in Manhattan Federal Court by his father, prominent attorney Arthur Schwartz - described by the New York Post as a "politically connected labor lawyer." The elder Schwartz served as council to Bernie Sanders during the 2016 election. He was also a delegate during Barack Obama's 2008 run for president. Schwartz has also represented SEIU, several unions, and served as general council to ACORN from March of 2009 to October 2010.
He referred to his son's arrest as a "personal tragedy," telling the New York Post
"They owed him money and he tried for two years to get paid," the elder Schwartz told the New York Post. | {
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– Jeg tror ikke den enkle mannen i gaten kjenner seg igjen i dette.
– Jeg føler meg presset til å stemme for noe jeg ikke liker.
– Jeg hadde forventet et annet forslag ut fra bestillingen.
Ordene tilhører henholdsvis Roald Stenseide (Frp), Tom Sverre Tomren (KrF) og Aud Karin Oen (SV).
De falt under dagens møte i fellesnemnda for sammenslåingen til Vestland fylke på hotellet Scandic Ørnen i Bergen sentrum.
BLÅTT OG SØLV: Slik kan det nye fylkesvåpenet se ut på fylkeshuset i Leikanger, ifølge Hordaland fylkeskommune sin illustrasjon. Foto: Hordaland fylkeskommune
Siterte Ivar Aasen
En lang prosess med å forene Hordaland og Sogn og Fjordane går mot slutten. De to fylkene blir Vestland i 2020.
Etter krangel om økonomien og varsler om store investeringskutt, var selve fylkesvåpenet blant de siste temaene som gjensto.
Tross heftig debatt, stemte til slutt et overveldende flertall for den mørkeblå versjonen av motivet som skal symbolisere fjord og fjell. Hordalands fylkesordfører Anne Gine Hestetun siterte Ivar Aasen.
– Til lags åt alle, kan ingen gjera. Jeg er helt trygg på at dette er et fylkesvåpen som vi kan være stolte over inn i framtiden.
FELLESNEMNDA: De ledende politikerne i Hordaland og Sogn og Fjordane. Foto: Eivind Fondenes / NRK
Fram og tilbake
Prosessen med våpenet har vært både lang og kronglete.
Opprinnelig fikk Innbyggerne i de to fylkene fikk sende inn sine forslag. Responsen var overveldende. Til sammen 667 ulike fylkesvåpen kom inn. Et våpen med fjordmotiv ble stemt frem som folkets favoritt.
Men motivet ble forkastet av byråkratene. Siden har det vært flere nye runder før man til slutt endte opp med vinnermotivet.
Flere av fylkenes ledende politikere var altså kritiske til prosessen og motivet, noe som også ble adressert under møtet.
– Til dem som klager på prosessen, vil jeg spørre: «Hva har du bidratt med i prosessen?», sa Pål Kårbø (KrF).
FORKASTEDE FORSLAG: Folkets favoritt i midten i nederste linje. Foto: Hordaland fylkeskommune
Blå foran grønn
Nå er altså valget gjort. Den blå versjonen av motivet slo den grønne i finalen, etter anbefaling fra en fagkomité.
Dette ble trukket frem som fordelene med vinnerforslaget:
Naturlig fargebruk i fremstilling av motivet. God sammenheng mellom motiv og farge.
Svært god kontrast.
Synlig på avstand, i lite og stort format.
Svarer til formelle krav.
Bare to av de 24 medlemmene i fellesnemnda stemte imot. Saken skal formelt til fylkestingene i Hordaland og Sogn og Fjordane.
Men med det overveldende flertallet i fellesnemnda, der de fremste politikerne fra begge fylker sitter, skal mye skje for at valget blir omgjort.
Fylkesordførerne Anne Gine Hestetun (Ap) og Jenny Følling (Sp) poserte sågar villig med det nye våpenet da vedtaket var banket gjennom. | {
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Dat betekent dat televisiekijkers die om middernacht naar NPO1 kijken, live de licht- vuurwerkshow op en boven het Binnenhof en de Hofvijver te zien krijgen, in plaats van de show bij het Scheepvaartmuseum in de hoofdstad. Dat heeft de gemeente Den Haag bekendgemaakt. De televisie-uitzending wordt gepresenteerd door Dionne Stax.
Vuurwerkshow
De Haagse burgemeester Pauline Krikke is verheugd dat Den Haag dit jaar het decor vormt. 'Het Binnenhof met de Hofvijver is niet alleen een icoon van Den Haag, het is ook het hart van onze nationale democratie. Hoeveel Nederlanders zouden er niet een foto hebben gemaakt op die bekende plek? Ik kijk er zeer naar uit om daar met de duizenden aanwezige Hagenaars en de miljoenen Nederlanders die via de televisie meekijken het oude jaar af te sluiten en het nieuwe jaar in te luiden. En natuurlijk om daarbij iedereen een heel gelukkig nieuwjaar te wensen', stelt zij in een verklaring
Den Haag organiseerde eerdere jaren ook al een vuurwerkshow op de Hofvijver. Het evenement op 31 december is van 21.00 uur tot 1.30 uur.
Den Haag hoopt dat het een 'plaatselijk, feestelijk en gezellig karakter' krijgt. Op de Plaats en het Buitenhof zijn dj's en er is horeca. Vanaf 28 december is er al een videoprojectie te zien op de gevel van de gebouwen van het Binnenhof. Het vuurwerk om middernacht wordt vanaf pontons in de Hofvijver afgestoken. Dit wordt ondersteund met een 'multimediashow vol muziek, licht en video', aldus de gemeente.
Omroep West
Bij Omroep West hebben we ook iets leuks tijdens oud en nieuw. Wij zenden de vreugdevuren op Scheveningen en Duindorp rechtstreeks uit op televisie.
LEES OOK: Burgemeester Krikke heeft begrip voor landelijk vuurwerkverbod | {
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CARACAS - Os recentes apagões que atingiram o sistema elétrico na Venezuela agravaram as condições do sistema de saúde do país. Segundo uma pesquisa feita pela Universidade Central da Venezuela e divulgada na quarta-feira, 11, apenas 26% dos hospitais do país têm serviço de água diariamente. Em média, os centros médicos venezuelanos contam com 6 horas e 48 minutos de energia elétrica por dia.
Nos últimos meses a entrada de equipamentos básicos de saúde no país, liberada após um acordo entre governo e oposição e intermediado pela Cruz Vermelha, melhorou as condições de atendimento em prontos-socorros e centros cirúrgicos da Venezuela. Apesar disso, o colapso do sistema de saúde local é iminente.
Leia Também OEA usa tratado da Guerra Fria para pressionar Nicolás Maduro
“Nenhuma ajuda humanitária substitui um sistema de saúde decente”, disse à agência Bloomberg o médico Julio Castro, autor do estudo.
Para Entender O tratado tirado do baú para pressionar Maduro na Venezuela Pacto que prevê a defesa mútua entre países signatários contra ataques armados foi assinado no Rio
De acordo com o relatório, a escassez de insumos para atendimento básico de saúde nos hospitais venezuelanos ficou em 43,3%. A de instrumentos cirúrgicos foi de 34,1%, numa melhora em relação aos números do último levantamento, em novembro de 2018.
O levantamento é feito junto aos 40 maiores hospitais da Venezuela em 23 Estados e avalia a escassez dos 20 principais itens de atenção básica e os 11 de instrumentação cirúrgica.
Ainda de acordo com o autor do estudo, a situação é mais crítica em Estados do Oeste do país, como Zulia e Trujillo, já que o governo concentra os recursos em Caracas.
“Nenhum hospital consegue prestar um bom serviço com os níveis de desabastecimento que possuem”, disse Castro. “A falta de luz e água não afeta apenas o funcionamento dos hospitais, mas também são necessários para pacientes que precisam de diálise e respiração mecânica.”
Para Entender Guerra da Venezuela contra a Colômbia seria um baita problema 'Alerta amarelo' decretado por Maduro na fronteira vai durar 18 dias
Maduro volta a acusar Duque
Em meio à crise humanitária no país, o presidente Nicolás Maduro voltou a acusar so presidente da Colômbia, Iván Duque, de tentar "assassiná-lo". O líder chavista prometeu apresentar uma denúncia formal à ONU ainda nesta quinta-feira, 12.
"Temos provas e vamos apresentá-las ao Conselho de Segurança (da ONU). Prova com vídeos, fotos, com todos os depoimentos das testemunhas, de como o governo da Colômbia está preparando terroristas para fazer ataques a alvos militares, civis, institucionais e para tentar assassinar o presidente Maduro", disse ele em discurso.
As provas, no entanto, ainda não foram apresentadas. A declaração acontece na mesma semana em que as trocas de acusação entre os dois países alcançou um nível crítico. Após Caracas ordenar um exercício militar próximo a fronteira colombiana, Bogotá reagiu entrando em alerta máximo. / BLOOMBERG | {
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Editor's note: The Android security team works to keep more than two billion users safe, and with the release of Android Oreo, they’ve rolled out some new security protections. We sat down with Adrian Ludwig, Director of Android Security to learn about his team, their approach to security, and what Oreo’s new protections mean for people who use and love Android.
Keyword: Talk to us a bit about what your team does.
Adrian: We build security features for Android that help keep the whole ecosystem safe. Our software engineers write code that encrypts user data, helps find security bugs faster, prevents bugs from becoming security exploits, and finds applications that are trying to harm users or their information.
How do you build these protections?
It starts with research. Because security is constantly evolving, our teams have to understand today’s issues, in Android and elsewhere, so we can provide better security now and in the future. Researchers in and out of Google are like detectives: they find new stuff, work to understand it deeply, and share it with the broader security community.
We then use those findings to make our protections stronger. We’re focused on tools like Google Play Protect and efforts like “platform hardening,” incremental protections to the Android platform itself. We’re also starting to apply machine learning to security threats, an early stage effort that we’re really excited about.
The final step is enabling all Android users to benefit from the protections. I’m really proud of the work our team has done with Google Play Protect, for example. Every day, it monitors more than 50 billion apps in Play, other app marketplaces, and across the web for potentially unsafe apps. If it finds any, we’ll prevent people from installing them and sometimes remove them from users’ phones directly. Users don’t need to do anything—this just works, automatically.
What are the challenges to protecting Android?
In security, we often talk about the trade-off between usability and protection. Sometimes, you can protect a device more effectively if there are certain things users can’t do on your device. And security is always much easier when things are predictable: for instance when all of the devices you are protecting are built the same way and can basically do the same thing.
But, Android security is different because the ecosystem is so diverse. The variety of use cases, form factors, and users forces us to be open-minded about how we should secure without limiting Android’s flexibility. We can’t possibly protect Android users with a single safeguard—our diversity of protections reflects the diversity in the Android ecosystem.
What are some of the new ways you’re protecting users in Android Oreo (not in robo- speak, please)?
Hang on, I gotta turn on Google Translate.
There are a … 0101100110 … sorry … a bunch! We’ve invested significantly in making it easier to update devices with security “patches,” fixes for potential safety problems, more commonly known as vulnerabilities. As a sidenote, you may have heard about “exploits.” If a vulnerability is a window, an exploit is a way to climb through it. The vast majority of the time, we’ll patch a vulnerability before anyone can exploit it. We have a project called Treble that makes it easier for us to work with partners and deliver updates to users. We want to close the window (and add some shutters) as quickly as possible.
We’ve also worked to improve verified boot, which confirms the device is in a known good state when it starts up, further hardened the Android kernel, which makes sure that hackers can’t change the way that code executes on a device, and evolved Seccomp which limits the amount of code that is visible to hackers. Basically, we’re moving all the windows higher so any open ones are harder to climb through.
You announced Google Play Protect earlier this year. Tell us a bit about that and why it’s important for Android users?
For several years, we’ve been building “security services” which periodically check devices for potential security issues, allow Google and/or the user to review the status, and then use that information to protect the device. These services interact with Google Play in real-time to help secure it, hence the name “Google Play Protect.”
Our goal with Google Play Protect is to make sure that every user and every device has constant access to the best protections that Google can provide. Those protections are easy to use (ironically, for many people, Google Play Protect is so easy to use that they didn’t even know it was turned on!) and they benefit from everything Google knows about the security of Android devices.
Google Play Protect isn’t available just for users with Oreo -- it guards any device with Google Play Services, running Android Gingerbread, or later.
Updates are a challenge with Android, especially in regard to security. Why is that so hard? What are you doing to improve it?
What makes Android so cool and unique—its flexibility and openness—also presents a really big security challenge. There is a broad and diverse range of devices running Android, operated by a complex collection of partners and device manufacturers around the world. It’s our responsibility to make it easy for the entire ecosystem to receive and deploy updates, but the ecosystem has to work together in order to make it happen. One approach to the problem is to make updates easier through technical changes, such as Project Treble. Another is to work with partners to better understand how updates are produced, tested, and delivered to users.
What’s the toughest part of your job?
Prioritization. Often we need to balance researching super cool, extremely rare issues with more incremental maintenance of our existing systems. It’s really important that we are laser-focused on both; it’s the only way we can protect the entire ecosystem now and longer-term.
What’s your favorite part?
I’m amazed and humbled by how many people use Android as their primary (or only) way to connect to the internet and to the broader world. We’ve still got a ton of work to do, but I’m incredibly proud of the role my team has played in making those connections safe and secure.
Ok, last question: How do you eat your Oreos?
In one bite. (But I can’t handle the Double Stufs). | {
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THURSDAY AM UPDATE/WRITETHRU: Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns is coming in around an estimated $4.8M for Wednesday after industry midday projections pushed the film significantly higher in the $7M-$8M vicinity. The sequel to the 1964 Oscar-winning musical led all titles yesterday. Disney will be reporting their official opening day figure later this morning.
Box Office analysts were seeing pre-sales around mid-day, which puffed up estimates, with evening business tapering off. The fall-off in projections for Mary Poppins Returns has nothing to do with the movie, rather the time of year. Moviegoers and families are still distracted by pre-holiday activities. There was only 6% of K-12 schools off yesterday, and remember musicals leg out: Fox’s The Greatest Showman made 92% of its $174.3M domestic B.O. last year after Christmas (and largely without Oscar buzz, it only received a nom for best song).
Related Story Chadwick Boseman Mural Unveiled At Anaheim's Downtown Disney
Those who showed up for Mary Poppins Returns last night enjoyed the Rob Marshall-directed musical with an A- CinemaScore and four stars on ComScore/Screen Engine’s PostTrak. Mary Poppins Returns was female heavy with 36% F25+ leading (they loved it the most at 91%), followed by F25- at 27%, M25+ at 24% and M25- at 14%. Family breakdown was 65% general audiences, 22% Kids, and 12% Parents. Other demos were 64% Caucasian, 19% Hispanic, 8% Asian and 4% African American. These demos will change as PostTrak polls throughout the weekend.
Mary Poppins Returns‘ opening day is under the $7.2M Wednesday pre-Christmas opening for Sony’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle last year as well as Disney’s Amy Adams 2007 musical Enchanted which opened the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to $7.96M, however, it’s 96% higher than the first day of The Greatest Showman a year ago ($2.45M). Greatest Showman‘s six-day opening was $19M.
Mary Poppins is currently booked at 4,090 theaters. Tuesday night there were special Dolby auditorium previews at 250 sites, which Disney didn’t separately report.
Sony’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse filed second on Wednesday with $2.8M, -35% from Tuesday with a running six-day total of $45.2M.
Warner Bros.’ The Mule was third with $1.8M, -37% for a six-day run of $23.9M.
Aquaman and Bumblebee start their previews at 5PM tonight | {
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Article content
It’s not easy being a tree in the big city.
Especially if that city is Montreal.
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tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Young, spindly and doomed: The hard life of Montreal's sidewalk trees Back to video
While all urban trees are subject to an undue amount of strife brought on by pollution, the weight of automobiles and people crushing their roots, and the indignities of human contact that include too much handling and bike locks damaging their bark, Montreal’s trees are also victim to two particularly noxious threats: snowplows, which break their skin, and salt, which poisons their circulatory systems.
Saplings are raised for about 10 years in a nursery before they’re considered ready to tackle the pressures of city life, at which point they’re typically shoehorned into a too-small plot of earth in the sidewalk wholly unsuited to a healthy upbringing. The result is the majority of trees downtown or on busy thoroughfares are young, spindly and doomed, more reminiscent of a Charlie Brown Christmas than the shade-bearing guardians that elevate the grand urban boulevards of cities like Paris, Barcelona, Washington and Chicago. | {
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Ultimately, it’s hard to be positive about a defeat, but there was cause for optimism after Fulham’s 2-0 loss at the Etihad on Thursday. On this podcast we reflect on what we learnt at Man City, and then our attentions turned to Monday’ night’s huge game at Huddersfield Town.
We got an opposition viewpoint from Huddersfield fan Lee Pearson, who expectedly confirmed how big this game is for Terriers fans as well as for FFC. Later in the show we replayed Liam Rosenior’s chat with Dom, Guy and George on Love Sport Radio where he talks about Fulham’s chances this season in the Premier League, and his own personal times at Craven Cottage. | {
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NEW YORK — Early scenes in Rachel Lears‘ documentary “Knock Down the House” take place far away from the halls of power. At a New York taco and tequila bar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is filling ice buckets in the basement.
It’s six months before the primary that turned Ocasio-Cortez into a liberal phenomenon. Then trailing far behind in the polls, few expected her to win the race for New York’s 14th district and unseat incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley, who had served for two decades and hadn’t faced a primary challenger in 14 years.
“If I were, like, a normal, rational person, I would have dropped out of this race a long time ago,” she says riding an elevator with sanitary gloves on her hands.
“Knock Down the House ,” which premieres on Netflix on Wednesday, is, in movie lingo, an origin story. But while it has come to be known as “the AOC documentary,” it captures a wider political movement. Shot over two years in the lead-up to the 2018 elections, it follows four progressive insurgent candidates, all women, running grassroots campaigns: the Bronx-born Ocasio-Cortez, Amy Vilela of Nevada, Cori Bush of Missouri and Paula Jean Swearengin of West Virginia.
One of them - you might have heard - won.
“They were all considered long shots. We were looking for people that would be very compelling to watch, no matter what happened,” Lears said in an interview. “We were very interested in races that would involve political machines and very entrenched power structures. We were interested in exploring the nature of power in the United States.”
The attention surrounding Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, has raised the profile of “Knock Down the House.” It won the audience award at the Sundance Film Festival, where Netflix acquired it for $10 million - the biggest documentary sale ever at the festival.
And given the intense partisan divisions around Ocasio-Cortez, “Knock Down the House” has also been used against the congresswoman by some. The filmmakers have had to combat falsehoods that Ocasio-Cortez profited from the Netflix sale (documentary subjects generally aren’t paid). Still, Ocasio-Cortez has said she’s been approached on the House floor about how much she made from the film.
On Monday, Kellyanne Conway criticized Ocasio-Cortez on Fox News’ “Hannity” for promoting “Knock Down the House” on Twitter the day after the Sri Lanka Easter bombings. (Ocasio-Cortez responded that Conway was “using this as an excuse to stoke suspicion around my Christianity.”)
“There is a lot of speculation about what the film is,” said Lears. “I look forward to it being out there and people can decide for themselves.”
Ocasio-Cortez, who declined to comment for this article, was unable to attend the film’s Sundance premiere in January, citing complications due to the government shutdown.
“Some might be assuming that this is her personal project, and that’s not true at all,” said Lears. “We had complete editorial independence.”
Those expecting a glossy political advertisement may be surprised to find something far more personal in “Knock Down the House.” The main thrust of the film is capturing the struggles of working-class women challenging the establishment, navigating the often painful process of stepping into public life and battling far larger, and far better bankrolled political machines.
The candidates are backed by the political action committees Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats, groups that were Lears‘ gateway to the four candidates. But the candidates are inexperienced political outsiders motivated to run by personal experience. Bush is a nurse and ordained pastor. Swearengin comes from a long line of coal miners, several of whom died from black lung disease.
Swearengin unsuccessfully ran against Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat and defender of the coal industry in West Virginia. In the documentary Swearengin summarizes her opposition: “If another country came in here, blew up our mountains and poisoned our water, we’d go to war. But industry can.”
Vilela, a Nevada businesswoman, entered politics after the death of her daughter, Shalynne. She died at age 22 of a massive pulmonary embolism weeks after being turned away from an ER for lacking insurance. Running on a platform of universal health care, Vilela lost to Democrat Steven Horsford.
“People right now don’t understand the basis of the film, or the basis of why we ran,” said Vilela. “This movie is about what is to go against the system and it’s not just a Democrat thing. It’s across party lines. It’s money in politics.”
One of the film’s most vivid moments comes when a devastated Vilela, faced with election day tallies that eliminate her long-odds bid, falls to her knees and bursts into tears. “I was like: And now more people will die,” said Vilela. “And I couldn’t save them like I couldn’t save my daughter.”
Vilela said she will run for office again. And she guarantees Republicans will watch “Knock Down the House.”
“People are going to secretly go and watch this movie. They’re ranting about it online. They’re not going to be able to resist,” she said. “I think it will humanize what we’re doing. Hopefully, we won’t be so scary to them, and they’ll understand where we’re coming from.”
Lears was there to document a happier election night for Ocasio-Cortez, and the documentary’s final moments track the Congresswoman’s giddy arrival in Washington D.C. But, to her, “Knock Down the House” isn’t about winning.
“It’s a testament to the value of trying to be part of the democratic process,” said Lears, “no matter what the outcome.”
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Image copyright AP Image caption North Korea runs dozens of restaurants in other countries as a valuable source of income
Authorities in Seoul have released a group of 13 North Korean restaurant workers who defected from China to South Korea earlier this year.
Officials said 12 women and one man had now begun the formal process of resettlement in South Korea.
The group defected in April from a North Korean state-run restaurant in the Chinese city of Ningbo.
At the time Seoul said the size of the defection was "unprecedented" and held them for further investigation.
Most North Korean defectors are first held at an interrogation facility to screen for potential spies and then put through a state resettlement programme for three months, the AFP news agency reports.
But in this case the National Intelligence Service (NIS) said it held the workers in "protective custody" because the case was very high profile. It added that the North was using the case for propaganda by claiming the female workers had been abducted by Seoul's spy agency.
The 13 defectors left a halfway house last Thursday, local media reports said. Seoul's Unification Ministry merely confirmed they had been released but did not give more details.
Read more:
The mystery of North Korea's virtuoso waitresses
BBC's Stephen Evans: My friend the North Korean defector
The release comes just one day after a diplomat at the North Korean embassy in London was reported to have defected and fled abroad with his family.
Thae Yong Ho had served as deputy to the ambassador and was responsible for promoting the image of his country to British audiences.
Image caption North Korea's London embassy is located on a residential street in Ealing, west London
The group of restaurant workers all left China by legal means on 6 April, a Chinese spokesman confirmed after the defection. Unlike many defectors, they all had valid travel documents.
The restaurant was reportedly in Ningbo, in China's north-eastern province of Zhejiang. North Korea runs some 130 restaurants in other countries which provide a much-needed source of income.
Their staff are thought to be hand picked from families loyal to the North Korean state. | {
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Ramallah, Occupied West Bank - Hundreds of people have gathered along a closed-off street on a Friday morning to watch a street racing event. Among the drivers are four women representing the "Speed Sisters", the first all-female racing team in the Middle East who have helped propel the nascent Palestinian racing scene into the international spotlight while breaking stereotypes.
Lined up at the start are the cars: Volkswagens, Peugeots, BMWs - everyday vehicles save the stripped down interiors, souped-up engines, and body work including window decals of Yasser Arafat and portraits of drivers superimposed in front of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.
Throngs of fans have gathered around the Speed Sisters, a group of women comprised of Betty Saadeh , Noor Dawood , Mona Ennab and Marah Zahalka . The team was formed in 2009 with the help of the British consulate in Jerusalem, and is seen as a success story in a region that has few.
"It's crazy, the love we get in Palestine," said Betty, posing next to her car with big blonde hair, make-up, painted nails, lip gloss, and a bright red racing suit. "It has been a blessing."
The crowd's attention turns to the track as they announce the next driver over the loudspeaker. A car with the words "white girls" scrawled across the side inches up to the start to begin the speed test - an individual timed race through a closed course. The driver speeds through it, weaving through cones, drifting around turns, then races back towards the starting line, leaving behind a cloud of smoke.
The government provides little financial support. Restrictions from the Israeli side as far as vehicles exiting into Jordan or Israel have become a major obstacle ... It is very hard to get vehicles out of Palestine. - Khaled Qaddoura, founder of Palestine Motor Sports Federation
This is the fourth of five street racing events that make up the Palestinian championship, with the final to be held in Jericho on November 15.
An enthusiastic crowd has gathered to watch the event. Khaled Qaddoura, a co-founder and long-time chairman of Palestine Motor Sports Federation, spoke to Al Jazeera about the evolution of the sport.
"It was challenging at the beginning. No one had done anything like this, but as the years went by we were able build something. The Speed Sisters have brought much attention to our small federation. It's been a great thing."
Yet economic and political pressure make racing in the West Bank a uniquely difficult endeavour.
"The tool is the car, and it's extremely expensive," Qaddoura said. "The government provides little financial support. Restrictions from the Israeli side as far as vehicles exiting into Jordan or Israel have become a major obstacle. In general, it is very hard to get the vehicles out of Palestine."
Identity politics
These types of restrictions inhibit drivers with West Bank IDs from racing in other parts of the world, including Israel. Israeli law forbids Palestinians with green plates to drive in Israeli territories, and even crossing into Jordan, the only other country in which West Bank racers can compete, is difficult.
Since the Second Intifada, Israel has systematically closed off the West Bank, culminating in the construction of the separation barrier that spans nearly 500km, mostly inside the 1967 armistice line - severely restricting Palestinian travel into Israel and Jerusalem. Israeli citizens are restricted from entering Area A, the 18 percent of the Palestinian territories that is under full Palestinian control.
Noor, the only Speed Sister with an Israeli ID, has faced challenges when racing in Israel.
"I was the only Palestinian racing against six Israeli girls. They didn't want a Palestinian to take it - they insulted me, tried to discourage me, did everything they could to make the situation difficult. Then coming back to Ramallah was the same. I got a lot of criticism from Palestinians for racing in Israel, even though I made it clear I was racing for Palestine.
"That's the problem: Everything you want to do involves politics here ... Let's just forget about that and play sports. But it's not easy. Being a racer in Palestine is political. Being a women … here that is political as well."
Sporting icons
Today the Speed Sisters are icons in the Palestinian sporting world. Yet gender politics have always been a part of their story: navigating conservative Palestinian society and competing in a sport that is traditionally dominated by men.
We would still hear things like you should be in the home cooking, negative things. But we let our racing do the talking. - Noor Dawood, member of the Speed Sisters
Mona, the first and only female racer for nearly three years, said she started racing illegally in 2004.
"Then I met the manager of the federation, he asked me to come and train with the boys. It was just me and the boys for almost four years. It was difficult for me - they didn't accept me for the first few years. Even later when the other girls arrived, we would still hear things like you should be in the home cooking, negative things. But we let our racing do the talking."
While all the women speak of their support from fans and families, societal pressure has affected the composition of the racing team over the years.
The group reached a high of eight members in 2010, but today only four remain. Some got married or stopped for other reasons. "In this society with marriage, commitment to the house, the culture itself can make it difficult to stay in the sport," said Qaddoura.
While the difficulties of being a female racer in the Occupied Territories are obvious, what is more clear is how much the Speed Sisters have become a beloved component of the Palestinian racing scene.
As Betty put it: "Our fans are incredible and always have been. It means a lot to have come this far, to break down barriers like this, to provide a different identity to Palestinian women than what gets portrayed in the media."
Racing can also be both a means of resistance and an outlet. "We [Palestinians] value our freedom and that's what driving is to me," said Mona.
"When I drive I feel free from pressure of life, from the political situation, from everything. That's what this is about for every one of us drivers." | {
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A controversial group of chemicals commonly found in lotions and other personal care products may be more dangerous at low doses than previously thought, according to a new study.
The chemicals, called parabens, are preservatives widely used in everything from shampoos and cosmetics to body lotions and sunscreens. The chemicals have generated increasing health concerns, however, because they mimic estrogens, which have been linked to an increased risk of breast cancer and reproductive problems.
“Although parabens are known to mimic the growth effects of estrogens on breast cancer cells, some consider their effect too weak to cause harm,” said lead investigator Dale Leitman, a gynecologist and molecular biologist at UC Berkeley and an adjunct associate professor of nutritional sciences and toxicology. “But this might not be true when parabens are combined with other agents that regulate cell growth.”
Existing chemical safety tests, which measure the effects of chemicals on human cells, look only at parabens in isolation, he said. They fail to take into account that parabens could interact with other types of signaling molecules in the cells to increase breast cancer risk.
To better reflect what goes on in real life, Leitman and his colleagues looked at breast cancer cells expressing two types of receptors: estrogen receptors and HER2. Approximately 25 percent of breast cancers produce an abundance of HER2, or human epidermal growth factor receptor 2. HER2-positive tumors tend to grow and spread more aggressively than other types of breast cancer.
The researchers activated the HER2 receptors in breast cancer cells with a growth factor called heregulin that is naturally made in breast cells, while exposing the cells to parabens. Not only did the parabens trigger the estrogen receptors by turning on genes that caused the cells to proliferate, the effect was significant. The parabens in the HER2-activated cells were able to stimulate breast cancer cell growth at concentrations 100 times lower than in cells that were deprived of heregulin.
The study demonstrates that parabens may be more potent at lower doses than previous studies have suggested, which may spur scientists and regulators to rethink the potential impacts of parabens on the development of breast cancer, particularly on HER2 and estrogen receptor positive breast cells.
The findings also raises questions about current safety testing methods that may not predict the true potency of parabens and their effects on human health.
“While this study focused on parabens, it’s also possible that the potency of other estrogen mimics have been underestimated by current testing approaches,” said co-author Chris Vulpe, a toxicologist formerly at UC Berkeley but now at the Center for Environmental and Human Toxicology at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine.
Leitman, Vulpe and their colleagues at the Silent Spring Institute published their findings online Oct. 27 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. The California Breast Cancer Research Program helped fund this research.
For more details about the study, link to the story on the Silent Spring website.
See also | {
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A man accused in a deadly DUI crash that killed one man and hurt several others has entered a guilty plea in the case.
John Whitaker was originally charged with eight counts in the July 2017 crash which killed Taylor Dillon, who served his country as a Marine. He would plead guilty to six of those charges in court Thursday.
Kentucky State Police said Whitaker was on drugs when a four-vehicle crash happened on U.S. 127 north of Liberty. He was indicted a year after the crash.
Whitaker pleaded guilty to manslaughter, assault and DUI as a part of an agreement. Prosecutors are recommending a 20-year sentence. His attorney said Whitaker will be eligible for parole after he serves four years. | {
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5
5 Shares
Mozilla has rolled-out the latest release of their Thunderbird email client with numerous security fixes. This month’s update carries the biggest number of security fixes amongst all previous Thunderbird releases in 2019. Allegedly, Thunderbird 60.7 brings patches for 16 different security flaws with severity levels.
High-Severity Patches With Thunderbird 60.7
This week, Mozilla released Thunderbird 60.7 version for the users. This version addresses 13 different high-severity flaws. Among these, a timing attack vulnerability (CVE-2019-9815) could affect Mac users in particular. To avail the patch for it, users must ensure upgrading to macOS 10.14.5. Another vulnerability (CVE-2019-11693) could specifically target Linux users as buffer overflow could affect bufferdata function in WebGL.
The latest Thunderbird also fixed 5 use-after-free flaws in various components, a type confusion vulnerability demonstrated with UnboxedObjects (CVE-2019-9816), and numerous others. It also patched a set of critical memory safety bugs (CVE-2019-9800) that also affected Firefox 66 and Firefox ESR 60.6 browsers. These vulnerabilities could allow arbitrary code execution when triggered.
Other Security Fixes
Apart from the high-severity bugs, Mozilla also patched some moderate severity flaws in Thunderbird. These include a memory leakage in Windows sandbox (CVE-2019-11694) affecting Windows users only, a flaw allowing theft of browsing history (CVE-2019-11698), and an out-of-bounds read vulnerability in Skia library (CVE-2019-5798).
As stated in their advisory, exploiting any of the flaws via email was not possible due to disabled scripting.
In general, these flaws cannot be exploited through email in the Thunderbird product because scripting is disabled when reading mail, but are potentially risks in browser or browser-like contexts.
Nonetheless, the users must ensure updating to the latest version to prevent potential attacks.
Alongside Thunderbird, Mozilla has also launched updated versions of its browsers, Firefox 67 and Firefox ESR 60.7. These versions also carry fixes for numerous security bugs, including critical memory leakage flaws.
Take your time to comment on this article. | {
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Watt Laboratory, an organization under Huawei’s Central Research Institute, has introduced a new graphene-assisted Li-ion battery which can withstand higher temperatures when compared with ordinary Li-ion batteries.
The new batteries are able to function at a temperature of 60°C (140℉), which is 10°C (18℉) above the current upper limit. They can be used in cellular base stations in high-temperature regions around the world and have a lifespan that is twice as long as ordinary Li-ion batteries.
In addition, the new batteries can extend the range of EVs in high temperatures and can also be used in drones, which tend to produce quite a bit of heat.
Dr. Yangxing Li, Chief Scientist at Watt Laboratory, has stated that there are three technologies that have assisted them in making a breakthrough in this battery technology. The first is a special additive in the electrolytes that can remove trace water and prevent the electrolytes from evaporating in high temperatures.
The second is modified large-crystal NMC materials that are used for the cathode and are able to improve the thermal stability of the cathode powder, while the third is graphene, which allows for more efficient cooling of the Li-ion battery.
Dr. Yangxing Li also said that charging and discharging tests in a high-temperature environment have shown that the graphene-assisted high-temperature Li-ion battery is 5°C (41℉) cooler than ordinary Li-ion batteries. And after being recharged 2,000 times at a temperature of 60°C (140℉), the graphene battery retains more than 70 percent of its capacity.
In other battery-related news, Huawei’s Watt Laboratory introduced a quick charging technology back in 2015, which is able to charge 48 percent of a 3,000 mAh battery in only 5 minutes. The company has now said that that technology will soon be available. Huawei plans on announcing a new smartphone in late December that will have the new quick battery charging tech onboard.
There is no other information regarding the device for now, so we’ll just have to wait for a month or so to see what Huawei will bring to the table. Stay tuned.
Editor’s note: the text above was edited to correct the Fahrenheit conversion of 10 degrees Celsius in the second paragraph. | {
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Фото: ТАСС
Летом 2016 года вышла книга «Записки из чемодана» — воспоминания первого председателя КГБ Ивана Серова (он возглавлял ведомство в 1954–1958 годах), обнаруженные четыре года назад в тайном архиве. Дневники Серова, подготовленные к публикации депутатом Госдумы Александром Хинштейном и Российским военно-историческим обществом (им руководит министр культуры Владимир Мединский), быстро стали бестселлером — однако изданы они были в таком виде, что вызвали сомнения в подлинности документа, положенного в основу книги. По просьбе «Медузы» историк Сергей Бондаренко разобрался в истории происхождения и публикации воспоминаний Серова.
Кто такой генерал Иван Серов?
Иван Александрович Серов — первый председатель КГБ, профессиональный военный — получил свой карьерный шанс, когда его перевели в НКВД в 1939 году: после массовых чисток в органы набирали новых людей, не задействованных в Большом терроре. В своей новой роли Серов стал исполнителем и непосредственным участником множества силовых операций 1940–50-х годов. Расстрелы польских офицеров, депортации поволжских немцев, чеченцев, ингушей и калмыков, чистки на Украине, окончание строительства Волго-Донского канала силами тысяч заключенных, подавление восстания в Венгрии в 1956-м — во всех этих событиях Серов участвовал.
Он поработал в Смерше и ГРУ и не потерял своего влияния и после смерти Иосифа Сталина, верно сориентировавшись и поддержав Никиту Хрущева в борьбе за власть. Серов участвовал в аресте Лаврентия Берии — и вскоре после этого, в 1954 году, возглавил Комитет государственной безопасности, выделенный из структуры МВД СССР. Еще через четыре года, в декабре 1958-го, Серова перевели на должность начальника ГРУ — там он проработал пять лет и был отправлен Хрущевым в отставку в 1963-м, незадолго до того, как генсека и самого отстранили от власти.
Что за тайные воспоминания?
Оказавшись не у дел в сравнительно молодом по советским номенклатурным меркам возрасте (генералу было 58 лет), Серов решил писать мемуары. Как и многим в 1960-е, ему было что рассказать. Во время оттепели опубликованным воспоминаниям придавалось особое значение — они в первом приближении рассказывали некую новую «правду» о сталинской эпохе. Илья Эренбург писал о культуре, маршал Жуков — о войне, Хрущев — о политике; Серов мог рассказать о спецслужбах и внешней разведке. В 1971 году руководитель КГБ (и будущий глава советского государства) Юрий Андропов докладывал в ЦК, что пенсионер Серов уже несколько лет что-то пишет и «использует свои записные книжки». То, что Серова не напечатали ни в «Политиздате», ни на Западе, вполне закономерно: специфика его работы была такова, что представить себе записки Серова опубликованными было невозможно.
В начале 2000-х годов небольшие фрагменты предполагаемых «дневников Серова» оказались в распоряжении американского историка Вадима Бирштейна. Впрочем, это был не серовский текст, а запись с его слов, сделанная третьим мужем дочери Серова, сценаристом и автором детективов Эдуардом Хруцким. Существовал ли где-то более полный вариант многолетних воспоминаний, никто в точности сказать не мог.
Что сделал с воспоминаниями Серова Александр Хинштейн?
В 2012 году при сносе стены в гараже на бывшей даче Серова нашлись два замурованных чемодана с генеральскими бумагами. Это и были мемуары, которые в 2016-м изданы отдельной книгой Российским военно-историческим обществом. Редактировал и комментировал текст депутат Госдумы, журналист «Московского комсомольца» Александр Хинштейн; на задней обложке имеется напутствие министра культуры России и председателя общества Владимира Мединского.
Сама книга представляет собой семисотстраничный том, разбитый на главы более-менее по хронологическому признаку, от 1939-го к 1963-му. Внутри редактор выделяет главками отдельные тематические фрагменты (от работы в Наркомате госбезопасности конца 1930-х до операций внешней разведки в начале 1960-х), привязывая к ним свой исторический комментарий. Вступление к каждой главе — краткий текст самого Хинштейна, объясняющий, как при Серове КГБ «начал превращаться в спецслужбу, где главное — не кулаки, а мозги» и почему первый председатель был «не совсем удобным человеком, еще старой, сталинской закалки». Завершается серовская часть книги (есть еще послесловие и «взгляд историка») написанной генералом поэмой, лирической хроникой трудовой жизни: «В дни торжества Победы над подлою ордой / Нас родина отметила Геройскою Звездой! / Потом опять десятки лет активного горения, / Все для того, чтобы потомству моему жилось, не видя огорчения».
«Объем найденных в тайнике бумаг огромен, — пишет Хинштейн в предисловии, — думаю, в общей сложности не менее ста печатных листов». Эта машинопись, надиктованная и переписанная в разные годы, составляет общий архив Серова, принадлежащий его внучке Вере Владимировне. Впрочем, из дальнейших комментариев становится ясно, что оригиналов Хинштейн в руках не держал — Вера Серова сняла со всех материалов копии, публикатор работал уже с систематизированными и отсканированными бумагами.
Почему подлинность воспоминаний вызвала вопросы?
Никакого доступа к оригиналам для остальных исследователей не предусмотрено. Архив закрыт для историков как минимум двумя степенями защиты: все права на него принадлежат семье Серова, которая имеет все возможности заработать на продаже документов, — а спецслужбы, очевидно, заинтересованы в том, чтобы сохранить некоторые материалы в тайне. Когда речь идет о советских репрессиях, ФСБ иногда отказывается выдавать даже рассекреченные документы.
Поскольку оценить содержание всего архива невозможно, а опубликованная книга по сути представляет собой «избранные места» со множеством пропусков, редакторских вставок и оговорок, некоторые историки и комментаторы высказали сомнения в подлинности дневников. Серов в версии Хинштейна путает даты, в его записях есть нестыковки и анахронизмы. Кроме того, у многих вызывает сомнения сам мелодраматический сюжет с чудесным обнаружением документов — дача, штукатурка, чемоданы. «Зачем Серову так прятать мемуары? Неужели он на каких-то диссидентов рассчитывал?» — спрашивает главный редактор журнала «Дилетант» Виталий Дымарский.
«Фальшивкой» книгу Серова — Хинштейна назвал и историк Борис Соколов. «Когда [в книге] речь идет о событиях, по которым есть обильные документальные публикации, сюжет излагается близко к ним, с подробностями и в основном верно. Когда речь идет о чем-то, что происходит вне этих публикаций, там все расплывчато, неконкретно и имеет явные литературные источники», — говорил Соколов в эфире «Эха Москвы». Он считает, что главная цель книги — представить Серова как положительного героя. Примерно треть редакторского текста в книге от Александра Хинштейна состоит из рассуждений о том, что «в истории не бывает только черного и белого», а есть «приказы, которые нужно выполнять». Его Серов — солдат и технократ, который не болтает попусту; герой на государственной службе.
Почему воспоминания — подлинные?
«То, что дневники плохо изданы, еще не делает их фальшивкой, — возражает историк спецслужб Никита Петров. — А то, что менее всего откомментированы новые, ранее неизвестные детали, является важным аргументом в пользу их подлинности». В 2005 году Петров выпустил свою книгу о Серове — и в процессе работы над ней он видел в архивах редкие и ранее не публиковавшиеся документы. Часть этих сюжетов повторяется в новой книге, уже в пересказе Серова. «Это вещи, о которых знали только Серов и Хрущев», — утверждает историк.
В частности, из записей Ивана Серова о разногласиях между Хрущевым и китайским лидером Мао Цзэдуном в середине 1950-х мы узнаем о планах провести в Китае гигантские политические чистки, новый Большой террор — по словам министра общественной безопасности Ло Жуйцина, которого цитирует Серов, в китайской компартии обсуждался арест «трех миллионов китайцев, плохо настроенных к мероприятиям на селе».
Другой неосуществленный проект — план осушения Каспийского моря, предложенный Сталиным как новая великая инженерная задача. «Распределив воды Волги в степях Казахстана», можно было бы «оголить Апшеронский перешеек», богатое нефтяное месторождение. «Правда, — замечает Серов, — [министр внешней торговли] товарищ Микоян выступил и сказал товарищу Сталину, что мы лишимся черной икры, которую экспортируем на весь мир за валюту». Уже составленные инженерные расчеты были в итоге отвергнуты.
Что еще стало известно из воспоминаний Серова?
Пишет Серов и об одном из героев Второй мировой войны, шведском дипломате Рауле Валленберге, спасшем в Венгрии несколько десятков тысяч местных евреев. После прихода в страну советских войск Валленберг пропал. По официальной версии — у которой, впрочем, нет документальных подтверждений, — он умер в тюремной больнице в Москве в 1947 году от сердечного приступа. Серов пишет другое: по его словам, Валленберг был убит министром госбезопасности Виктором Абакумовым по прямому указанию Сталина и министра иностранных дел Молотова, поскольку «возвращать его домой после Нюрнбергского процесса не имело смысла». Оказавшийся под следствием после смерти Сталина Абакумов мог рассказать об этом на допросе в 1954-м. Детали других допросов, на которые ссылается Серов, также указывают на то, что в 1946–1947 годах в тюрьмах «ликвидировались» многие «иностранные граждане». Если все эти рассказы верны, то в российских архивах могут оставаться протоколы допросов Абакумова — запрос на их получение отправила семья Валленберга, и это пока самое очевидное свидетельство значимости публикации дневников Серова.
Почему воспоминания Серова нуждаются в новом издании?
Историк спецслужб Никита Петров считает, что книга охватывает не более трети содержимого архива. «Редакторы пытались придать тексту какую-то законченность, поэтому компоновали и выбирали. Публикатор, который делает это по принципам научности, свой выбор как минимум оговаривает. Кроме того, если в тексте что-то опущено, из текстов сноски нам должно быть ясно, что именно, пусть даже это какой-то второстепенный сюжет», — говорит историк, отмечая, что в «Записках из чемодана» эти элементарные правила научной публикации не соблюдаются.
Так или иначе, первое издание абсолютно нового, важного и, видимо, подлинного источника по советской истории функционирует скорее как современный идеологический инструмент — это документ, который тщательно отцензурирован и снабжен патриотическим комментарием.
Сергей Бондаренко Москва | {
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(CNN) The Armenian parliament has elected opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan as the country's new prime minister, after an outpouring of populist anger against the ruling elite in the former Soviet republic.
Thousands of Pashinyan's supporters, who had gathered in a central square in the capital, Yerevan, to watch the vote on large screens, erupted into cheers when the result was announced.
Pashinyan's victory amounts to a peaceful revolution in Armenia, a small nation of around 3 million people squeezed between Iran, Turkey, Azerbaijan and Georgia. It marks a dramatic split from a corps of leaders who have run the country since the late 1990s, developing a reputation for corruption and cronyism.
The tipping point came two weeks ago when veteran leader Serzh Sargsyan, who had served the maximum two terms as president, was appointed prime minister -- complete with new powers conferred by a controversial referendum he had supported. Many Armenians regarded the job swap as a brazen attempt to maintain his grip on power.
Pashinyan, a former journalist and leader of the opposition Civil Contract party, put himself at the front of the protest movement as thousands of people took to the streets in Yerevan. With his black cap, camouflage T-shirt and bandaged hand -- reportedly injured on barbed wire -- he cut a rebellious figure, contrasting sharply with the suited Sargsyan.
Stung by the protests, Sargsyan stepped down . But his Republican party, which holds a majority in parliament, thwarted Pashinyan's first bid to replace him . In Tuesday's vote, some Republicans switched sides, and Pashinyan won the backing of 59 lawmakers, with 42 voting against him. On both occasions, Pashinyan was the only candidate.
"This is a remarkable shift in Armenian politics," said Laurence Broers, an associate fellow at the Chatham House think tank's Russia and Eurasia program, adding: "The desire for change is coming from within. It is coming from the Armenian streets, from the ordinary citizens."
'The people's candidate was elected'
Within an hour of the vote, Pashinyan traveled to Republic Square in central Yerevan to greet his supporters, who waved Armenian flags and balloons as a rock band performed live music.
Emma Khashmanyan, 27, was one of those celebrating. "We started the velvet revolution without weapons and blood," she told CNN. "And today the people's candidate was elected."
She said she hopes Pashinyan will "clean the system" and "protect the people's interests," adding: "There is no need to keep protesting; now we're just going to celebrate."
Posting a video on Instagram, she wrote, "One day I'll tell my grandchildren about this page of Armenian history, about democracy we've created."
"The ruling Republican Party still has the majority in the parliament but this was a great victory," said Mike Minasyants, another Pashinyan supporter.
He is now looking ahead to the plan the new prime minister will present to parliament, but also hopes the protesting will continue. "People want to protest now against the mayor of Yerevan," he said.
Unlike on previous appearances in the square, Pashinyan wore a suit and was flanked by bodyguards.
At a concert in the city Monday night, Pashinyan had appeared alongside System of a Down front man Serj Tankian, who gave his support to the former journalist and was also present in parliament for the vote on Tuesday.
People cheer in Republic Square, Yerevan, after Pashinyan was elected prime minister.
'Test case' for Russia
Under the constitutional reforms ushered in by the 2015 referendum, the position of president has become largely ceremonial. The prime minister is now the head of government, and controls the army, police, National Security Service and the Security Council.
The result of Tuesday's vote will be watched keenly in Russia. Although the two countries do not share a border, Russia wields considerable regional influence and Moscow is an important provider of military hardware to Armenia.
In a statement issued Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Pashinyan on his victory. "I expect that your work as the head of government will contribute to further strengthening the friendly, allied relations between our countries," he said.
Supporters of Pashinyan carry a cake showing his face at a gathering in central Yerevan Tuesday.
While the Kremlin tends to view democratic uprisings with suspicion, Pashinyan has focused his recent criticism on domestic issues. According to Reuters, the new prime minister said on Tuesday that Armenia would maintain strong ties with Moscow and that he hoped to meet Putin.
"This is a real test case for Russia's politics in the former Soviet Republics," said Chatham House's Broers. "There's likely to be a lot of caution from both sides on how to finesse this relationship."
How did Armenia get here?
Armenia's turmoil began on April 17 when Sargsyan, who had previously served two five-year terms as president, was appointed prime minister -- just eight days after his presidency ended.
Thousands took to the streets in protest, driving Sargsyan to step down 11 days later. His deputy, Karen Karapetyan, was named acting prime minister.
According to Broers, discontent with Serzh Sargsyan had been brewing for years. Armenians have seen their country, once the poster child for democratization following the collapse of the Soviet Union, stagnate in the hands of an entrenched oligarchy while many citizens choose to leave, he said.
Pashinyan's supporters celebrate his victory Tuesday.
In response to Sargsyan's appointment as prime minister, Pashinyan called for a campaign of peaceful, civil disobedience, harnessing a widespread desire for change among ordinary Armenians.
Following the failed vote last week, Pasinyan called for a nationwide day of protest . Demonstrators brought roads in Yerevan to a standstill, blocking roads to the main airport and to government buildings.
According to Broers, what matters now is whether Pashinyan can turn his hand to coalition-building skills, "because people have got to get off the street and into institutions." | {
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A final congressional stalemate in late December means the New Year’s expiration of a host of tax breaks, amounting to a $54.2 billion increase for green-energy businesses, teachers, homeowners, college students and others.
Businesses will take the biggest hit, with the disappearance Wednesday of a valuable research tax credit, subsidies for building wind turbines and incentives to make energy efficiency improvements to buildings.
Individuals will take hits, too. Those who pay college tuition will lose a tax credit, as will taxpayers who deduct state and local sales tax payments or who pay mortgage insurance. Teachers will lose a tax credit for buying classroom supplies. Some commuters no longer will get federal tax help for taking public transit to work.
That’s not to say the breaks are gone for good.
Analysts on all sides expect Congress to try to pass a bill extending some or all of the credits, and those decisions are likely to be retroactive to the first of the year.
Also expiring are some of the benefits available to those who have lost jobs because of an evermore global free trade regime. The Trade Adjustment Assistance program is a particular priority for Democrats, who say that while basic benefits remain, add-ons such as help for older workers expire.
“TAA is our commitment to workers competing in a globalized economy, and we must immediately extend the improvements that we made in 2009 when Congress returns,” Rep. Sander M. Levin, the ranking Democrat on the House’s tax-writing committee, said Tuesday.
But the tax credits and the trade benefits could become ensnared in a larger debate about overhauling the broad tax code, in which thousands of special breaks could come under scrutiny.
A few developments late in 2013 suggest things could be messy.
President Obama may have derailed efforts when he said he would nominate Sen. Max Baucus, Montana Democrat and chairman of the Finance Committee, to be ambassador to China.
Mr. Baucus was working with his House counterpart, Rep. Dave Camp, Michigan Republican, to set the stage for some tax reform.
If he is confirmed to the ambassadorship and departs, the Senate will have to restart the process.
Sen. Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat most likely to succeed Mr. Baucus as chairman of the Finance Committee, said in December he believes House Republicans are moving away from a broad overhaul.
“It looks more and more like the other body has in effect decided to, if not slow-walk tax reform, certainly take its time,” Mr. Wyden said.
He took that as a signal that Congress should proceed with extending the expiring tax cuts as a stand-alone bill and deal with the massive tax code overhaul later.
The Congressional Research Service identified seven tax credits for individuals that expired at the end of 2013, and another 49 aimed at businesses and investors.
Most of them had been set to expire earlier but were extended in last-minute deals.
Tax professionals say the year-to-year extensions are no way to provide certainty for taxpayers, but the Congressional Research Service said short-term extensions force policymakers to review tax credits regularly to make sure they are shaping behavior in economically beneficial ways.
Then there are concerns about another $50 billion in tax cuts, which will only deepen projected deficits.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning fiscal think tank, said that if Congress wants to extend the expiring tax breaks, it should find tax increases or other spending cuts to cover the hit to the budget.
Chuck Marr, the center’s director of federal tax policy, said that paying for the breaks would mean a significantly lower debt burden in the next 25 years.
“We’d still need to do more to address long-term deficits and moderate the debt ratio, but paying for the extenders would represent important progress,” Mr. Marr argued in a blog posting.
Democrats tried a last-minute power play in the Senate to push through 55 extensions, but Republicans objected, saying Democratic leaders were acting for show.
Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, the ranking Republican on the committee that has jurisdiction over taxes, called Democrats’ move an absurdity and demanded that the Finance Committee consider the bill first.
“I am appalled,” the Utah Republican said. “I have only been here 37 years, but I have never seen the rules violated as they have been — frankly, violated in a way that is destructive to the Senate, not helpful or constructive to the Senate. This is just another illustration.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, proposed a trade: Democrats would withdraw their slate of nominations they were trying to push, and the Senate could take up the tax package with amendments.
Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, refused, saying he wanted the nominations.
The credits apply for all of the 2013 tax year, which means filers can claim them on their returns due in April.
Despite the lack of year-end changes, the Internal Revenue Service says it won’t be ready for tax season on time.
The agency said the government shutdown set it back slightly, so the filing season won’t officially open until Jan. 31.
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Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Some 95% of US teens own or have access to a smartphone, according to the survey
US teenagers are ditching Facebook in favour of platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat, a study says.
Only 51% use Facebook, which is a 20 percentage point drop since 2015, when the US-based Pew Research Center last surveyed teens' social media habits.
Most of those aged 13 to 17 own or have access to a smartphone, with 45% online on a near-constant basis.
YouTube has stolen Facebook's former dominance over teens, with 85% of them preferring the video-sharing platform.
Second and third top social media services among teens are now Instagram at 72% and Snapchat at 69%.
The numbers of teens who use Twitter (32%) and Tumblr (14%) are largely unchanged compared to the results found in 2015.
While Facebook may have lost its reign among the teenage demographic to Google-owned YouTube, it has owned the rising favourite Instagram, a photo and video-sharing networking service, since 2012.
The Pew study, which surveyed nearly 750 teens in one month earlier this year, found that the increase in smartphone ownership played a huge part in teen life. Today's 95% is a 22-point increase from the 73% of teens three years ago.
It also found, consistent with previous studies, that while most teens used the same social media platforms as their peers, low-income teens were more likely to prefer Facebook than teens from a higher-income household.
The Pew survey could not find clear consensus among teens about the effects of social media on their lives.
Almost a third described the effect as mostly positive, and a quarter saying mostly negative. The largest bloc, 45%, said that the effect was neither positive nor negative. | {
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I will find you and I will order food from you
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The University of Bristol has hired its first Professor of the History of Slavery, in order to research its ties to the slave trade and whether the university should apologise for its past.
The newly created ‘History of Slavery’ position will be filled by Professor Olivette Otele, a Bath Spa University professor who specialises in the colonial history of Britain and France. Last year she became the United Kingdom’s first black woman history professor, a distinction which landed her on the BBC’s Top 100 Women of 2018.
Otele has been commissioned to begin a two-year research project, looking into historical ties that the university and the city of Bristol have with the transatlantic slave trade.
Bristol University was founded in 1909, nearly 80 years after the United Kingdom had abolished slavery.
Delingpole: Cambridge Appoints Grievance Archaeologists to Unearth Slavery Shame https://t.co/6PKzlMydtq — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) April 30, 2019
In a press release from Bristol University, Professor Otele said: “I want to produce a rigorous and an extensive piece of research that will be relevant to the University, to the city and that will be a landmark in the way Britain examines, acknowledges and teaches the history of enslavement.”
Students at Bristol campaigned earlier this year to rename the Wills Memorial Tower, because its namesake and Bristol’s founding chancellor, Henry Overton Wills III, had used the money he earned in the slave-connected tobacco trade in America to fund the university’s charter.
Professor Judith Squires, Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Bristol, said: “As an institution founded in 1909, we are not a direct beneficiary of the slave trade, but we fully acknowledge that we financially benefited indirectly via philanthropic support from families who had made money from businesses involved in the transatlantic slave trade.
“This new role provides us with a unique and important opportunity to interrogate our history, working with staff, students and local communities to explore the University’s historical links to slavery and to debate how we should best respond to our past in order to shape our future as an inclusive University community.”
Labour’s Corbyn: Teach Children Slavery and Britain’s ‘Grave Injustices’ https://t.co/24f9fHS2Wu — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) October 12, 2018
Bristol is just the latest university in the UK to look into its connections to slavery.
Last year, Glasgow University issued a public apology for receiving approximately £200 in donations from people tied to the slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries. The university announced that it would try to atone for their past by building a memorial to the victims of slavery and by establishing a centre to the study of slavery.
Cambridge University also commissioned a research project earlier this year to see what connections to slavery the university had, and how much it owed in reparations. | {
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Image caption Young Lee (l) was angered after a homeless man flashed a graphic tattoo at his car
Young Lee, co-founder of frozen yogurt chain Pinkberry, was found guilty by a California judge of beating a homeless man in Los Angeles in June of 2011.
According to documents, Mr Lee became angry after the man, Donald Bolding, flashed a graphic tattoo at the people in Mr Lee's car, including his fiancée.
He later returned with an accomplice and beat Mr Bolding with a tyre iron.
Mr Lee, 49, co-founded Pinkberry in 2005 but left the company in 2010.
He was arrested in January 2013 at Los Angeles International Airport on "outstanding charges."
Prosecutors said Mr Bolding was struck twice in the head and suffered a broken arm, before passerby stepped in to stop the attack.
Mr Lee faces up to seven years in California state prison.
A sentencing hearing is scheduled for 14 January. | {
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Of course, as oil prices rise, so do the costs of these fuel subsidies. Many of these countries are also trying to hold food prices steady as the prices of global food commodities soar.
Many countries - especially in the developing world -- are actually directly subsidizing fuel prices. In the name of helping their citizens cope, they are subsidizing energy waste, subsidizing an addiction to imports, and subsidizing the growth of greenhouse gas emissions.
As I said in my previous post, a gasoline tax holiday wouldn't make much, if any, difference in the price of gas at the pump. But if it did lower prices, the U.S. would be joining much of the rest of the world in helping keep demand artificially high. That's a recipe for fiscal disaster, and it distorts the market in disturbing ways.
This came up in a conversation I had this week with Rob J. Routs, executive director for oil products and chemicals at Royal Dutch Shell Group. "Half of the world is not seeing the real oil price," he said. He cited India, Indonesia and China, among others, who are subsidizing oil prices so that consumers don't pay the full amount. The subsidies, he said, create false economic signals. "In some countries," he said, "people have gone 12 months and they haven't seen an increase at the pump. That keeps demand up."
For more information I turned to the International Monetary Fund Web site where Amine Mati of the fiscal affairs department wrote a paper earlier this spring tactfully titled "Managing Surging Oil Prices in the Developing World." Actually, they're not being managed very well. "Less than half of a sample of 42 developing and emerging market countries fully passed through sharply higher world oil prices to retail customers in 2007," Mati writes.
The biggest culprits: Oil exporting countries. They can afford it, given high oil prices. But it's still bad energy and climate policy. Not surprisingly, the Middle East is the one area of the world whose increase in oil consumption rivals China's.
Some countries do tax fuel, but over the past couple of years they have used the McCain-Clinton approach to limiting the big increases in domestic prices. Lebanon, Mexico, and Peru have cut excise taxes and the Philippines and Ukraine have lowered import duties. In India, subsidies for widely-used kerosene are also important and the government floats special bonds to cover the losses oil companies have because of price controls. The Economist reported late last year that India's fuel subsidies might cost as much as $17.5 billion in 2007, according to Lombard Street Research, a British firm of economists. "That amounts to as much as 2% of the country's GDP," the magazine said. If that's right, then higher than expected oil prices this year will probably punch a $3 billion or $4 billion hole in the government's budget.
In all these cases, the dilemma for the governments is the same: Pain now or pain later. With rising oil prices, the pain deferred gets bigger all the time. | {
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S. Donald Stookey, shown here in 1950, prepares to expose an image to ultraviolet light. (Courtesy of Corning Inc.)
S. Donald Stookey, a chemist who created a synthetic ceramic glass that could withstand heat up to 1,300 degrees, a material initially used in guided missiles but that became a consumer sensation as the durable kitchen product CorningWare, died Nov. 4 in Pittsford, N.Y. He was 99.
The cause was complications from hip surgery, said a son, Donald B. Stookey.
Dr. Stookey was a lifer at Corning Glass Works in upstate New York. The prolific inventor helped make a photosensitive glass used in buildings such as the United Nations headquarters and photochromic glass to make eyeglasses that darken in response to light.
For all his industriousness, it was a botched experiment that brought him his greatest renown — revolutionizing cookware and creating a new industry exploring the possibilities of superstrong synthetic glass.
Dr. Stookey was director of fundamental chemical research at Corning when, in 1957, he drew national attention for developing Pyroceram, a product that could endure the intense heat generated by air resistance and encountered by missiles in flight.
Examples of CorningWare. (Courtesy of Corning Inc.)
After the product’s military uses had been explored — it was used on nose cones of guided missiles— Corning announced its workaday relevance for home cooks. Suddenly, instead of dirtying sinkloads of pans and serving dishes, they could bring casseroles and lasagnas from freezer to stove to dinner table in one attractive, shatter-proof dish.
For years, CorningWare was easily recognizable for the blue cornflower motif on its sides. More than five decades later, still a staple of wedding registries, it commonly comes in a sophisticated white.
Officials at Corning, a venerable glassworks founded in 1851, called Pyroceram the most important technological advance since the discovery of borosilicate glass in the late 19th century. Corning had marketed that innovation as Pyrex, which became a staple of laboratory glassware and kitchenware for decades.
Pyroceram was even more durable than Pyrex, a quality demonstrated when Corning officials heated it with an acetylene torch and then plunged it into ice water. This maneuver would cause most other products to shatter. The New York Times said Dr. Stookey, with Pyroceram, had managed to “crack the thermal barrier.”
He said his creation was serendipitous. He had left a plate of photosensitive glass in a furnace heated to 900 degrees Celsius (1,652 degrees Fahrenheit) — 300 degrees higher than he intended. He cursed when he realized his mistake. He thought he would open the oven to find a pool of molten glass, which would have ruined the furnace. He imaged himself filling out reams of paperwork accounting for the error.
But the plate — astonishingly — had not melted. Instead, it had turned opaque, with a milky-white appearance. Impatiently, he reached in with tongs to remove the glass. When the tongs slipped from his grip, the plate bounced on the floor, clanging like steel.
“It crystallized so completely that it could not flow,” he later wrote, referring to the molten quality he expected, “and was obviously much stronger than ordinary glass.”
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He began a series of experiments to fine-tune the heat-treatment process that could transform glass objects into fine-grained ceramics.
Pyroceram’s resistance to “thermal shock” was only one of its qualities. It was harder than carbon steel, lighter than aluminum and about nine times stronger than plate glass, the Times reported. CorningWare began mass production in 1958.
In addition to its oven and missile cap applicability, NASA has used ceramic glass nuts and bolts on the space shuttle. The product’s imperishability was so great, Dr. Stookey once said, that CorningWare often has been the only object to survive a home fire.
Stanley Donald Stookey was born in Hay Springs, Neb., on May 23, 1915. He grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he graduated in 1936 from Coe College with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and mathematics. Two years later, he received a master’s degree in chemistry from Lafayette College in Easton, Pa.
After earning a doctorate in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1940, he joined the Corning research lab.
“Glass chemistry research had barely started,” he once told the American Ceramic Society Bulletin. “My main objective was to be a pioneer, discover new things, produce things that had never been seen before.”
Amid a copper shortage during World War II, he joined a Corning effort to create pennies from photosensitive glass discs — with Lincoln’s image appearing within the glass. The project was scotched because it cost 25 cents to make a penny; zinc was used in lieu of copper.
In 1998, 11 years after Dr. Stookey retired, Corning sold its consumer products business, including CorningWare, to Illinois-based World Kitchen.
Dr. Stookey’s wife, Ruth Watterson, whom he married in 1940, died in 1994, and their daughter, Margaret Zak, died in 1988. Survivors include two children, Robert Stookey of Rochester, N.Y. and Donald B. Stookey of Utica, N.Y.; six grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.
Dr. Stookey was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2010 for having spurred “a new field of research in glass.” In 1986 he received the National Medal of Technology, which cited his developments at Corning for producing “$500 million in annual sales and over 10,000 jobs.”
“One of the things that makes me proud,” Dr. Stookey told the Associated Press in 1986, “is that fairly often someone I don’t know — one of the workers in the factory — will stop me on the street and actually thank me for his job.” | {
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Featuring Justin Timberlake. Let’s make it happen! The ultimate Christmas gift.
Winner of an 2007 Emmy for “Best Original Music and Lyrics”.
International people, please click the YouTube link below.
Directed by Akiva. | {
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The only U.S. manufacturer of sodium thiopental, a chemical used in executions, said today it will stop making the product.
Hospira, based in Lake Forest, Illinois, said it never intended for its chemical to be used to kill people. It intended to start making sodium thiopental at a plant in Italy, but Italian authorities required the company to guarantee the chemical would not be used in executions, Hospira said on its website.
Capital punishment is outlawed in Italy and throughout Europe.
"Given the issues surrounding the product, including the government's requirements and challenges bringing the drug back to market, Hospira has decided to exit the market," the statement said.
"We regret that issues outside of our control forced Hospira's decision to exit the market, and that our many hospital customers who use the drug for its well-established medical benefits will not be able to obtain the product from Hospira."
Apart from executions, sodium thiopental is used as an anesthetic for brief surgical procedures and some kinds of hypnosis, according to rxlist.com.
Hospira suspended production of the drug in 2009, and many state prison systems have run out, according to The Wall Street Journal.
As a result, some states have turned to pentobarbital, a drug used by veterinarians to euthanize animals. An inmate in Oklahoma was executed in December with pentobarbital. | {
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ED NOTE: As many of you guys know, I used to write for the SB Nation site Off Tackle Empire, which is a blog devoted primarily to Big Ten Football. The purveyor of that site, one Mr. Graham Filler--all around good guy, even if he is a Michigan fan--likes to break things down into relationship analogies. And those analogies made everything easy to understand, made life clearer, got down to the prime number, if you will. This is a blatant rip off of Graham's idea. So thanks Graham, for the great work you guys still do on OTE...and this great idea.
As a guy, you can look at almost any situation and make some kind of relationship analogy. Why? Because as guys, we've all been in enough relationships to know what works, what doesn't, and just who's off her rocker batshit insane. Relationship analogies crystallize things to the bare bones, the basics, and at times like this, it helps you understand your feelings with regards to your team, and the quarterbacks.
Unless you're a Jets fan. Then you just want to open a vein and wait for the sweet release that only death can bring.
Anyway, let's get to it.
Christian Ponder: Ponder is like the girl you wanted to love, but it just never happened. She came into your life when you really weren't wanting or expecting a relationship, and you liked her. You never loved her, though, even though you woke up every day trying to tell yourself that you could. Sometimes, you even wanted to. She'd do things that you didn't expect, and it gave you kind of a warm spot in your heart. And at times like that you would think 'yeah, maybe', and almost talk yourself into the long term commitment. But as soon as you would talk yourself into heading to the jewelry store to start looking for a ring, the batshit crazy would come out, and you wouldn't know what you were getting from one day to the next. Sometimes, the crazy could change from hour to hour. At some point it just got to be too much,
Matt Cassel: Unfortunately, too many marriages these days end in divorce. I've had this befall far too many friends of mine, and Cassel is like the woman all my buddies who are just coming out of a divorce would date. Look, they know this girl isn't going to be the one, and the girl more than likely knows it, because she's probably just coming out of a bad marriage and she's carrying just as much baggage into this relationship as you are. You both know this is kind of a 'port in the storm' kind of thing, and there aren't really any long term expectations. You're both just trying to get back on your feet and get back into the real world, and years from now you'll hopefully look back on this and think 'yeah, she was all right. I hope she's had a good life, wherever she is.' Because she ain't gonna be with you six months from now.
Teddy Bridgewater: You've been out on your own for awhile now, and for whatever reason, your relationships just don't work out, man. It's not you, at least you don't think it is. Well, it might be you, who knows anymore. You've gotten to the point in your life where you're just ready to quit wasting money on dates, and sites like Match dot com and just get on to a site like Hey Lets Do It And Then Leave Me Alone Forever Dot Com. You save money on flowers, dinner, and you don't have to worry about deleting your browser history in case someone inadvertently gets on your computer while you're in the shower. Then one day, a buddy of yours says to you 'hey man, me and the wife are having a party on Saturday. Why don't you come on over?'
You go home, check your Just Do Me Like A Cheap Tramp And Then Leave Dot Com account, don't have any smiley faces or pokes, and think to yourself 'eh, why the hell not?' You put on some nice clothes, walk in to the party, and then...
Damn. You lay eyes on the girl who just takes your breath away, and in that instant, you know you're going to marry her. Boom. Over, done. Get the ring, send out the invitations, because Jack, you just found your dream girl. She might not know it, and at some point what you call 'love at first sight' might be interpreted by the police, the district attorney, and the great state of Minnesota as 'stalking', but whatever. What does 'the law' really mean, anyway?
Tomato tomahto, AMIRITE?
'Hey, who's that girl?', you ask your buddy. He kind of smiles a shit eating grin kind of smile, because your buddy and his wife set you up only they didn't tell you, thinking you and her might hit it off. Remarkably there's an open chair next to where she's sitting (again, it's all part of the setup, as you find out later that your buddy said in no uncertain terms that no one else was to sit in that chair), so you grab a drink, sit down next to her, and start talking.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Brett Favre addendum: I had a few folks on Twitter ask me 'hey, what about Favre?' This was supposed to be about the QB's currently on the roster, but yeah, Favre was kind of a unique deal. So here you go:
Brett Favre: Your next door neighbor is a real boorish ass, but man, he's got kind of a hot wife. If circumstances in life were different, you wouldn't mind hooking up, to be honest. But they've got a solid marriage, and there's no way they'd ever break up.
But then one day, they did split, and it was bitter and public. She threw his shit out in the yard, he came home with a new girlfriend that he'd actually had on the side--it was bad, man. And you think to yourself 'hey, her and I might actually happen.' But before you could make a move, she bolts to New York, out of the blue, to try and find herself.
Whatever.
Then, one day out of the blue, there's a knock at your door...and it's her. You're pretty sure that she's knocking on your door to make her ex-husband jealous, but damn, you don't care. She moves in, and it's great for a year. Fantastic. You neighbor finds out and warns you about her and tells you 'dude, she'll break your heart, over and over. At some point, it's not worth it anymore.'
You tell yourself that your neighbor is just pissed off over their break up, but yeah...he was right. She does break your heart, and it sucks, man. It really sucks. She leaves, you want her to come back, she goes back and forth, and eventually, she does. But to get her back, you have to fly down to Biloxi and fish her out of a casino.
After that, it's just not the same, and you just kind of play out the string for awhile until she quietly leaves. | {
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A West Belfast football club has hit out at a dissident Republican group who questioned them playing against a PSNI team.
St James' Swifts ladies side played the PSNI’s ladies team at New Forge Lane on Wednesday night.
Dissident Republican group Saoradh said that a poster calling for support for the team revealed a ‘deeper issue at play which must be challenged by Republicans’.
They requested that the club 'reconsider its association with the RUC'.
Club player Joseph McCall described it as a "disgrace".
He added: “I have my own personal reasons and not once would I reject playing a league game against the PSNI."
Saoradh said on Facebook: "The British crown forces are directed by British military intelligence who are actively engaged in a campaign to destroy Nationalist and Republican communities and have been since the early 1970s.”
It went on: “Any group structured within our community that is truly dedicated to the development of the community by tackling youth alienation and despair through community association and positive activities is to be commended in its sterling work.
“We do not aim to criticise the committee of St James’s Swifts football club because, as political activists, we know how difficult it is to spend every day in the community in the hope of making a difference.
“St James’s club is making a positive difference in the lives of many young people in West Belfast through sport.
“We would though request that the club reconsider its association with the RUC and in doing so takes into consideration the history of collusion and its impact on our community.
“We ask those who genuinely strive to empower our communities to reconsider any liaison they may have with the British crown forces and to instead build an inclusive pathway for all in our community towards success - in the hope of delivering us all from the awful socio-economic effects of partition and the intelligence led political policing employed to enforce it.”
Player Joseph McCall, 23, told Belfast Live: “I think it is a disgrace.
“People are bringing their own political ideologies and agendas that suit themselves into sport.
“I have my own personal reasons and not once would I reject playing a league game against the PSNI.
“It’s business as usual in my eyes and in the eyes of the girls that play for our ladies team.
“Those statuses on Facebook put a lot of pressure on the girls, and on the club no one likes to be intimidated like that - especially not a girl who has just started playing football for the first time.
“We at St James have over 280 registered players and a lot more than that supporters who are behind the group.
“These people behind that Facebook need to keep our club, the sport of football, and the innocent people of St James’ out of their propaganda.
“This club plans to move forward with new pitches, new teams and to strive to the best we can - to represent West Belfast at the highest level and give kids a proper chance through sport.”
The tie finished one-all. | {
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The story is the same for many: “I started playing pickup games in college.”
“I played in college, at Ball State. It was just pickup behind the dorms,” Fort Wayne Ultimate Frisbee organizer Jeff Ratajczak said. “I played competitively in Orlando before we moved here. We moved back here 14 years ago, almost. I played pickup and leagues and all that ever since then.”
Ultimate Frisbee, or simply Ultimate, is a combination of soccer, a little bit of hockey and some football played with a disc.
The aim is to throw the disc to a teammate inside the defense's end zone. The player with possession of the disc cannot take any steps and must find a way to throw the disc to a teammate to advance.
If a pass is not successfully completed, whether due to an incomplete pass, block or interception, the disc switches possession.
Players are often drawn to the game because of the lack of intense competition that other sports have.
“I played a lot of rec sports (growing up), I played soccer in high school and I did a lot of intramurals in college,” said Peter Schweitzer, 30. “I really enjoy the people I play with, I enjoy that it's competitive but it's just a really good group of people. I guess that's the biggest thing. It's very competitive but, yet, it's great attitudes.”
For Bridget Bol, who played four years with mixed club teams at Purdue, the Fort Wayne league provided a perfect opportunity for her and husband, Ryan, to make friends.
“I have an older brother, Michael Wellman, and he played in college at Marquette and he would come home in the summer and we would throw around the Frisbee,” Bol said. “When I went to college, I sought it out right away. I know he had a lot of fun. I did track and cross country when I was in high school and I love the sport. I love Frisbee. I love how competitive it is as well as spirited. I think a lot of other sports, they get too much into the game.
“I played a summer in Fort Wayne since my parents live here. I played a summer here before I got married so we wanted to get involved again, not only just to make friends but to get in shape.”
Ultimate was brought to Fort Wayne by Mike Miller in the early 1980s after he played the game at Dayton University. He organized pickup games with co-workers at Magnavox and organized tournaments.
The Fort Wayne Ultimate Frisbee league started in the mid-1990s and has grown to be the largest Ultimate league in the state with 20 teams and almost 300 players the past two years, according to Ratajczak. There are also leagues in Decatur, Goshen and Indianapolis.
“When I first moved here (in 1999), we struggled to get 4-6 teams.” Andy Temple, 41, said. “When I first moved here, most people who played started in college but didn't necessarily pickup. Now, a lot of these guys started playing pickup in high school or just with their friends.
“It's physically active game. You're not necessarily limited because of age. As long as you understand how the game flows, you can still play and be competitive with younger people.”
Tournaments in Fort Wayne began in the 1980s, with memorable occurrences: crabgrass on the playing field, 98-degree heat with humidity and cooling off in nearby ponds.
Currently, the league hosts pickup games every Saturday at 2 p.m. at The Summit on West Rudisill Boulevard. With league spots filling quickly, pickup games are encouraged to get introduced to the game and the group.
“The pickup is where you can get a good introduction,” Temple said. “Pickup is a little less stressful. It's a good time to come out and see what the game's like without feeling too intimidated.”
More information can be found at Fort Wayne Ultimate Frisbee on Facebook.
[email protected] | {
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In normal times, you’d say everything went swimmingly. Sure, the American president seemed a tad unsure how to say the name of his guest – whom he greeted as Ter-raiser – slightly reinforcing the White House’s earlier failure, in a briefing note, to spell the British prime minister’s name correctly, dropping the “h” and thereby suggesting Donald Trump was about to receive Teresa May, who made her name as a porn star.
But other than that, the PM would have been delighted. In the press conference that followed their Oval Office meeting, there were no bombshells: Trump managed to get through it without insulting an entire ethnic group, trashing a democratic norm or declaring war, any of which might have diverted attention from May’s big moment. He was on best behaviour, diligently reading the script that had been written for him, attesting to the “deep bond” that connects Britain and the US. May received all the assurances she craved that her country’s relationship with the US remains “special”. Why, he even, briefly, took her hand.
Transatlantic tango: Trump and May take their turn at the special relationship Read more
However, these are not normal times. May and her team will be pleased with the optics and indeed some of the substance – artfully, May got Trump to confirm, on camera, that he is “100% behind Nato” – but the underlying truth is that this dash to Washington was mortifying.
First, there was the unseemly haste. May’s eagerness to be the first foreign leader to shake that short-fingered hand, the scramble to catch up with Nigel Farage and Michael Gove, gave off a strong whiff of desperation.
That is a scent Trump understands. What he lacks in book smarts, he makes up for in alpha male gamesmanship. His lifelong training was in real estate, an area in which there is rarely such thing as a win-win deal: the more you get, the more I pay.
He will have seen May as that most desperate of creatures: the housebuyer who rashly sold her old house before she had found a new one. Having tossed away Britain’s keys to the European single market, she will soon be homeless – and Trump knows it. For all the niceties – May’s shrewd deployment of a royal invitation for a state visit and her compliment to the president on his “stunning election victory”, flattery which saw Trump glow a brighter shade of orange – he will have seen May as a sucker who needs to make a deal. And he will look forward to naming his price.
What would such a deal look like? Tariffs between the US and the UK are already low, so it is the dropping of a different kind of barrier that Trump would be after. That could be a softening of the food standards that have kept out hormone-injected US beef. Or granting access to the NHS to overcharging US drug companies. Or a relaxation in environmental or labour rules that, set with our onetime EU partners, proved too onerous for US firms until now.
When Trump demands all that, May – needing a deal, any deal, to prove that Brexit is not a disaster – will struggle to say no. And what would be gained? One study, released on Friday, estimated that leaving the single market would bring a loss in UK trade of up to 30% – while a new deal with the US might boost it by a meagre 2%. It was a reminder that while the US might be a bigger market for British exports than any other single country, it is dwarfed by the European continent on our doorstep.
The losses will not just be economic. What can our other allies – Europeans, chiefly, but not only them – make of May’s rush to stand with Trump? Contrast Britain’s headlong dash to Washington with Angela Merkel’s wariness to cosy up to a man who says torture “absolutely” works and who regards climate change as a “hoax”. In our determination to be Trump’s new best chum, Britain risks being tarred with his brush, becoming a mini-me to a man already regarded as a global danger.
Underpinning May’s approach was a kind of optimistic naivety tinged with arrogance, the same sentiments that mistakenly informed so many Republicans in their dealings with Trump during the past year: the belief that they could tame him and that he would change.
Whitehall believes May can steer Trump towards sanity on the importance of the UN, Nato and a rules-based international system as well as the necessity of vigilance when it comes to Vladimir Putin. (“Engage, but beware,” as May put it.) As Jeremy Shapiro, a former state department official, told the New York Times, London tends to think “our expert tutelage will socialise him and it’ll be OK”.
Hubris apart, such thinking woefully misjudges Trump. He has not changed, and is not likely to, as the lies and lunacies of this past week have shown. What’s more, it assumes that Trump could ever be led to some kind of steady, consistent world view. He managed it for a few short minutes on Friday. But the evidence suggests Trump tends to agree with the last person he speaks to. Give it a few days or weeks, and he’ll happily say the exact opposite.
He is feeling warm about Britain and Ter-raiser now, but just wait till he gets in a room with the one person for whom his admiration has been constant: Putin. Then we’ll see which relationship Trump sees as really special. | {
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As Congress tries to tackle the many sides of immigration reform, one of Silicon Valley’s most contentious debates is getting renewed focus: Should high-tech companies be required to hire Americans before recruiting temporary workers from abroad?
The U.S. Senate’s compromise measure would require employers seeking foreign programmers, engineers and other skilled workers to post jobs on a government website and give preference to American job applicants who are “equally or better qualified.” That and other proposed regulations could make it more difficult and expensive for firms to sponsor workers through H-1B visas.
“They are imposing a recruitment requirement for the first time ever,” said Paul Herzog, a Los Angeles immigration lawyer. “That’s a big deal. … That should make anti-H-1B people happy.”
But it’s sending a chill through the Indian tech industry because the bill would ban companies from using temporary foreign workers for more than half their U.S. workforces. That provision mostly targets technology outsourcing firms based in India that for years have dominated H-1B recruitment.
There are indications Silicon Valley also has reservations even though the measure would increase the number of H-1B visas.
“Supporters of the Senate bill thought the business community would rally around it,” but they’re not, said Stuart Anderson, of the National Foundation for American Policy, which favors more H-1B visas.
Instead, Silicon Valley groups are lobbying to change provisions that would increase H-1B workers’ minimum pay, tighten rules against displacing U.S. workers and give the Department of Labor more power to investigate hiring.
But one Silicon Valley entrepreneur welcomes the new restrictions. Too many companies use the three-year H-1B visa to bring in cheaper labor, undermining the U.S. tech workforce, the CEO of Newark-based Systems in Motion warned Congress last week.
“The visas are primarily being used for lower costs,” Neeraj Gupta said in his Senate testimony. Each year, technology outsourcing companies such as Cognizant, Infosys, Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services bring thousands of mostly Indian tech workers to the United States on the temporary visas.
The 10 firms that hired the most H-1B workers, most of them India-based, grabbed about 20 percent of the visas in an annual rush that used up all 85,000 this spring.
Many of the workers do tech support for banks and other U.S. firms that contract with the outsourcers.
“Those are all jobs that Americans can easily do, or can easily be trained for,” said Gupta, who testified April 22 before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Gupta, himself a one-time H-1B worker, now runs what he calls a “domestic outsourcing” IT consulting company that competes for contracts with many of the companies he criticizes.
He sees both the world’s “best and brightest” innovators and future entrepreneurs coming into the United States alongside many more H-1B visa-holders whose main appeal to employers is their willingness to work for lower wages doing the tech world’s grunt work.
Others say the Indian firms are being unfairly vilified to deflect attention from broader problems with the H-1B program, which critics blame for suppressing pay and employment of older, experienced U.S. engineers.
H-1B program critics and supporters have long wielded competing studies to debate these workers’ value. An Economic Policy Institute report last week asserted that the glut of foreign workers has contributed to computer industry wage stagnation, and it rejected industry claims of a U.S. talent shortage in science and engineering.
At the same time, just 3.2 percent of computer and math workers were unemployed in March, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
And, at $78,200, the average annual earnings of an H-1B worker was about 10 percent higher than U.S. workers with at least a bachelor’s degree in any field, according to a 2011 study by the Public Policy Institute of California.
In IT occupations, new foreign workers earned about 7 percent less than U.S.-born IT workers, but those differences reversed as the foreign workers gained more job experience, the same study said.
“I don’t find any convincing evidence that H-1B workers are earning less than U.S. workers,” said study’s author, Magnus Lofstrom.
While acknowledging that some multinational firms have taken advantage of America’s immigration system to employ “underpaid, sometimes grossly underpaid workers,” Bay Area recruiter Vikki Pachera insists cutting-edge Silicon Valley firms are clamoring for global talent.
“In tech, there’s plenty of jobs,” Pachera said. “We’re certainly producing a lot of great, skilled workers, but there are just not enough of them.” Extraordinarily talented people often come in on visas, she said.
The Senate proposal is a compromise among tech firms, such as Facebook and Microsoft, that say they are desperate for hard-to-find talent, and longtime H-1B skeptics such as U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., one of the comprehensive bill’s sponsors. He said at last week’s hearing that Americans would be shocked to learn that so many H-1Bs go to outsourcing firms largely based in India “who are finding workers, engineers, who will work at low wages in the U.S. for three years.”
The companies that the new bill could hit hardest have been mostly silent since its introduction. | {
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US Senators launch fresh ‘genocide’ bill
WASHINGTON
Two senators including Republican US senator Mark Kirk launches a new effort for the passage in the Senate of an ‘Armenian genocide’ resolution.
Two pro-Armenian senators have formally launched a fresh effort for the passage in the U.S. Senate of an “Armenian genocide” resolution.“Next year will mark the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, during which 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turkey ... To honor the survivors and the memory of those lost, and to lead globally on human rights, the United States should finally join the European Union and 11 of our NATO allies in officially recognizing the Armenian Genocide,” Mark Kirk, a Republican from Illinois, said.Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their forebears were killed in 1915 and 1916 by the forces of Ottoman Empire.Turkey disputes the figure, arguing that only 500,000 died, and denies this was genocide, ascribing the toll to fighting and starvation during World War I.“This resolution reaffirms in the strongest terms that we will always remember this tragedy and honor the memory of innocent Armenian men, women and children who were killed and expelled from their homeland. The Armenian Genocide must be taught, recognized, and commemorated to prevent the re-occurrence of similar atrocities from ever happening again,” Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, said.The first step for the bill is the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. If the bill passes there, it will come to a 100-member floor vote. The U.S. President and the administration are against the passage of such a bill. | {
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TORONTO -- Health officials believe the second COVID-19-related death in Ontario was linked to “local transmission,” as the man in his 50s had no recent travel history outside of Canada and was not a close contact of any known cases of the virus.
The Milton, Ont. man, who had an underlying health condition, was initially admitted to a hospital in his hometown on March 11 before being transferred to an Oakville, Ont. hospital exactly one week later.
On March 18, the day he was transferred, he died at 10:15 a.m.
His diagnosis of COVID-19 was confirmed to be positive at 9 p.m. that same day.
“What we see now is that at the moment we know that he did not travel outside of Canada, nor does he have a link to a known COVID-19 case and thus the indication is that there is local transmission,” Halton Region’s Medical Officer of Health Dr. Hamidah Meghani said at a news conference held on Thursday afternoon.
She went on to say that everyone across the province “needs to act now” to help curb local spread of the virus.
“This is the tragic proof that we need to work together as a community to help stop the spread of COVID-19 by practicing social distancing and taking action to protect yourself and those around you. This is a larger community issue and I know that everyone joins me in extending their deepest condolences to his family at this time.”
#HaltonON Region Public Health confirms second death in Ontario related to #COVID19. https://t.co/rxN4qtRTTr — Halton Region (@RegionofHalton) March 19, 2020
44 cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Ontario
Provincial health officials confirmed 44 cases of the virus in Ontario on Thursday, including the deceased, bringing the provincial total to 258.
As the new patients were confirmed, officials stated that nearly 4,000 people are currently under investigation for the virus and more than 12,000 people in Ontario have tested negative thus far.
In the province, five people previously infected with the virus have since recovered, while two people have died.
The first COVID-19-related death in Ontario was confirmed on Tuesday. The patient was a 77-year-old Barrie man, who was receiving care at a hospital in Muskoka Region.
At the time, officials stated that it was unclear whether the novel coronavirus was in fact the man's cause of death. However, on Thursday evening Ontario's ministry of health confirmed that the patient died as a result of COVID-19.
The new cases announced on Thursday morning include eight people in Toronto, three in Peel Region, two in Hamilton, two in Halton Region, and one in Eastern Ontario, Durham Region, Waterloo and Haliburton Kawartha.
The 22 other patients’ locations are listed as “pending.”
Among the cases, 12 are travel-related, one is listed as being a close contact of another patient and the remaining 30 have their means of transmission listed as “pending.”
One of the patients, a man in his 80s in Durham Region, is the only person listed as being hospitalized due to the virus. The rest are in self-isolation or listed as “pending.”
Ontario's Chief Medical Officer Dr. David Williams reacted to the 44 new cases reported in the province on Thursday saying that the number was "surprisingly low."
"That still seems to me surprisingly low with the flow we've got coming, but I will be not surprised that goes up. I don't want it to go up huge. So we'll have to watch."
Symptoms of the virus, which can include fever, cough and shortness of breath, are similar to other respiratory infections.
There are no specific treatments for the virus and there is no vaccine that protects against it.
Health officials said “most people with common human coronavirus illnesses will recover one their own,” but added that “if you need immediate medical attention you should call 911 and mention your travel history and symptoms.”
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India's illegal entry into Chinese territory is a miscalculation that will lead to nothing but shame on itself: experts
Nearly two months have passed since a border standoff took place between China and India in the Donglang (Doklam) area, yet tensions continue to escalate, leading to public concerns over an imminent war. Though the possibility has been largely denounced by experts from both sides, the unprecedented conflict has cast a shadow upon the two nations’ already shattered mutual trust.
“Sino-Indian tension regarding border disputes happens from time to time, but the current standoff is different, as it is the first ever face-off in an uncontested border area. Indian troops have actually entered China’s territory,” said Guan Peifeng, an associate professor from the China Institute of Boundary and Ocean Studies at Wuhan University.
The unusual standoff has caused fierce finger-pointing between China and India. As of press time, China has laid out its position 67 times, with the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reiterating its firm stance on the issue for 54 times, while the Ministry of National Defense has issued 4 announcements regarding the incident.
Compared to China’s peaceful yet unyielding protests, India has showed an even more hawkish attitude, with some highly-ranked officials implying that the standoff should be settled through military means. India’s Defense Minister Arun Jaitley, for instance, reportedly said on Aug. 9 that “Indian armed forces are strong enough to meet any challenge to the country’s security.”
“Though military and economic powers are heavily stacked in China’s favor, the country will not easily give up the hope of finding a peaceful solution for the standoff. The standoff will continue, for now, but [China] should be prepared for the worst,” said Guan.
India’s wild ambition
“The current standoff shows India’s intention to counterbalance China’s influence and power in South Asia, as India has been holding a Cold War mentality, treating China as a potential competitor that may prevent India from becoming the region’s dominant power,” said Zhou Gang, a former Chinese ambassador to India.
According to Zhou, India’s interference aims to breed ill blood between China and Bhutan, disrupting the two nations’ negotiation on border issues, as well as offer India an opportunity to tighten its grip on the later.
As China has been reiterating, Doklam is part of Chinese territory and there is no dispute over it. Although the boundary is yet to be formally delimited, the two sides have had 24 rounds of talks, conducted joint surveys in their border area and have reached basic consensus on the actual state of the border area and the alignment of their boundary.
Currently, China and Bhutan have no diplomatic relations, while India has a friendship treaty with Bhutan, which stipulates that India will “protect Bhutan’s sovereignty.”
Echoing Zhou, Guan believes that India’s intention is to disrupt the current Sino-Bhutanese negotiations on border disputes, stopping China from establishing advantages along the Sino-India borders. He also noted that India may want to use the standoff to counterbalance China’s influence in South Asia, as China’s Belt and Road Initiative has affected India’s dominance in the region.
In addition to maintaining its leading role in South Asia, India may be hyping up the border dispute to distract public attention from serious domestic problems, as well as to gain support from Western countries, said experts.
Amid India’s tough stance on border issues, Reuters reported the country’s factory activity has slumped to its lowest levels in more than nine years in July, dragged down by disruptions to business activity following the launch of a new national sales tax.
“It’s possible that India wants to use the border conflict to gain support from the public, paving the road for launching the government’s reform measures,” said Guan.
“As India’s international status and influence have grown in recent years, its ambition of challenging China has expanded significantly. Its misjudgment of China’s power and the current situation will lead to nothing but shame on itself,” Zhou added.
India’s fallacies
Though the public and media outlets from both sides have gone ballistic with criticism and blame, India seems to be acting even more aggressive, branding China as a bully and spreading distorted information.
According to The Times of India in August, a Sanskrit book used in several schools in the state of Madhya Pradesh in central India teaches students that India won the 1962 war, though the truth is totally the opposite.
“Instead of reflecting on itself, the Indian government has been infusing wrongful and distorted information into the minds of their youth. Years of propaganda have led to unfriendly attitudes towards China among the Indian public,” said Zhou.
Unlike the majority of the Chinese public who prefer to seek a peaceful solution, many Indian netizens have shown different opinions, with some suggesting a war with China.
Under a hashtag “IndianIncursionToChina” on China’s Sina Weibo, which garnered almost 4 million views as of press time, many Chinese netizens have expressed their doubts on Indian public hostility against China, adding that they cannot understand some Indian netizens’ “thirst for war.”
According to experts, China has never maliciously embellished the 1962 war to its public, but India authorities and media outlets have been misleading its people, offering them distorted information.
“Even before the standoff, a search on the official website of India’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs can yield results containing wordings like ‘invasion’ or ‘infiltration.’ India has been depicting itself as a sorrowful victim, thus it’s understandable that Indians feel hatred toward China.” said Guan.
“Due to historical reasons, India has been vigilant of China’s moves, while the latter has yet paid enough attention to its neighbor in the south. The standoff indicates the weak mutual trust and insufficient nongovernmental exchanges between the two nations. If the Indian government and media outlets keep feeding its people distorted facts, relations between the two nations can’t be improved,” Guan added. | {
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Two words for Mrs. Braxton: F*ck off.
You know, the same country that made her rich and famous. | {
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HOUSTON -- Suspended Green Bay Packers defensive lineman Johnny Jolly was sentenced to six years in prison Thursday for violating the terms of his probation for a drug conviction.
State District Judge Denise Bradley imposed the sentence despite tearful pleas from Jolly and his mother, Phyllis Jolly, to allow the 6-foot-3, 325-pound lineman to be treated for his addiction to codeine instead of going to prison. Jolly's aunt, agent and drug counselor also testified on his behalf.
"I want to go to rehab to get help," Jolly told the judge as he wiped away tears with a tissue.
Jolly, 28, was charged with possession of a compound containing codeine, a controlled substance, after a traffic stop in Houston in October. He also was charged with tampering with evidence for attempting to conceal the substance from the investigating officers.
Jolly's truck was pulled over after he was seen throwing a bag out the window. The bag wasn't recovered, but Jolly was seen dumping a cup believed to contain codeine on the floor. Two bottles believed to contain codeine were recovered from the vehicle.
The arrest put Jolly in jeopardy of receiving prison time because in April he had pleaded guilty to a codeine possession charge in a deal that wiped out an earlier charge and spared him from prison unless he stumbled again.
After the hearing, Jolly's attorney, Letitia Quinones, told The Associated Press that the player spent eight weeks in court-ordered rehab after his second arrest, but has only recently faced up to his codeine addiction.
"I don't look at Johnny as a criminal," Quinones said. "I look at him as an addict."
Jolly, who grew up in Houston, was a sixth-round draft pick of the Packers in 2006 after playing at Texas A&M. He was a starter for the Packers in 2008 and 2009. However, he sat out the 2010 season after being suspended by the NFL indefinitely the previous July. | {
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Episode notes
When you’re in the deep end and hunting for the 8.5 pounder, make sure to load your tackle box full of Cuban Romeo y Julietas and Camachos. On today’s episode Adam, Ben, and John deal with one shit at a time while reviewing this WW2 drama!
This film is available on:
Amazon, Apple, Google Play, YouTube, FandangoNow, MaxGo, Vudu, and your local library
Next Film: The Key (1958)
Available on:
Amazon, Apple, YouTube, Google Play, Vudu, and your local library.
Produced by Rob Schulte.
Theme music, “WAR” by Edwin Starr, courtesy of Stone Agate Music.
Follow Adam, Ben, John, and Rob on twitter, and discuss the show using the hashtag #friendlyfire!
Facebook group | Subreddit
Art by Nick Ditmore. | {
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This article originally appeared in the August 1986 issue of SPIN.
It was one of those humid summer days in 1979 when the air on the Bowery was filled with the foul odor of week-old garbage. A horribly muggy day that promised to kill off everyone in New York City. The Ramones were happy to be getting out of town and found refuge in their air-conditioned van as they prepared for a two-and-a-half hour drive to Baltimore. They hadn’t even driven the several blocks through the Bowery into Chinatown before trouble started.
“John, you better take back what you said about my girlfriend!” Dee Dee Ramone stammered from the back of the van, where he was sitting next to a platinum blond. Johnny ignored him. Up front, Joey Ramone, in the passenger seat, rifled through a box of tapes looking for the right morning music. Way in the back, Marky Ramone slept off a hangover. A couple of girlfriends and a journalist filled the extra seats. Everyone acted as if Dee Dee wasn’t even there.
“JOHN, YOU’D BETTER TAKE BACK WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT MY GIRLFRIEND…,” Dee Dee continued screaming.
“What?” Johnny sneered. “That she’s a slut?”
“I’M GONNA KILL YOU! I’M GONNA KILL YOU!” Dee Dee was going hoarse from screaming and the veins on his neck looked like they were about to explode.
“No, you’re not,” Johnny laughed calmly. The rest of the Ramones ignored the outburst as their girlfriends busied themselves with their nails. Johnny refused to give an inch. Finally, Dee Dee couldn’t take it anymore. He jumped out of the van at a stoplight, and, like the grunt on the chopper in Apocalypse Now, screamed, “I’M NOT GOIN’!”
Monte Melnick, the Ramones’ driver and tour manager, took Dee Dee aside and after listening to him rant and rave for half an hour, calmly talked him into getting back in the van. A journalist along for the mini-tour decided to make a hasty retreat, on foot, back to the Bowery.
“What’s the matter,” Joey laughed. “Can’t you take the pressure?”
After 12 years without a hit record, without record company support, without radio or video airplay, and with only their records and live performances, their grinding chainsaw beat, and the kick-ass shows that remind one of an aircraft carrier while a squadron of jet fighters lift off for a bombing run, one blaring rocker after another—the band that reinvented rock ‘n’ roll has withstood the pressure.
What did you think of the Ramones’ show the other night?
Norman Mailer: “For me it was like I was an old car and I was being taken out for a ride at 100 miles an hour, and I kind of like it because I was really getting rid of a lot of rust. I don’t know if I’d like it night after night, and I’m not sure it isn’t absolutely killing. You’ve got to be super-human to pay that stuff night after night and not have your senses wiped out by it.”
“Nobody’s gonna like you guys, but I’ll have you back.”
—Hilly Kristal, owner of CBGB’s, to the Ramones after their first audition.
CREDIT: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
“Hey, hey, what’s going on?” Joey greets you at the door. You know he’s been on the phone for an hour. “Could you, like, hang on for a minute?” he asks sheepishly. He’s always embarrassed that he can’t give you his full attention, but his life’s one constant interruption after another.
The phone doesn’t even ring, the receiver just keeps clicking with Joey saying, “Can you hold on for a second?” while he jockeys calls. On the floor is a tangle of extension cords, strips of outlets, tape recorders, portable keyboards, video cassettes, tape cassettes, and clothes from his last tour. On the kitchen table where Joey sits talking on the phone are piles of fan mail and empty take-out cartons. On the walls hang original Hard Day’s Night and some obscure Mick Jagger Western film posters, and on the couch lie boxes of the new album, Animal Boy, and the English EP, “Something to Believe In.”
Joey hasn’t had time to listen to the new LP more than a couple of times, but everyone in the room is going crazy over it, though they don’t want to seem overenthusiastic. “It’s good, isn’t it?” Joey laughs, finally getting off the phone. Everyone smiles and shakes their heads. The Ramones have done it again. The pressure’s off now.
It all started in a back room of a paint store, with Joey on drums, Johnny on lead, Dee Dee on bass and lead vocals, and another guy, who got kicked out after the first few rehearsals. Tommy Erdelyi, later Tommy Ramone, the first drummer and ad hoc adviser/manager, thought they would be an instant smash on the downtown artsy-fartsy music scene. The New York rock scene was in its death throes, but Lou Reed’s Berlin, Wayne County’s glitter-camp, and the New York Dolls’ vulgar charm kept the underground alive and the critics wanting more.
The band was inspired by the bubblegum groups of the ’60s (such as the 1910 Fruitgum Company and the Ohio Express), early Beatles and Stones hits, later Gary Glitter, T. Rex, Slade, and the Stooges. The Ramones were basically a bubblegum group with a buzzsaw sound and sicko lyrics.
“I don’t wanna see your face
I don’t wanna see it please
You come knockin’ on my door
Gonna knock you on the floor”
Early gigs lasted only 15 minutes. Critics called it minimalism. Actually, the Ramones didn’t know enough songs to do 30-minute sets. They kept churning out songs, but it didn’t help because the songs only lasted a minute or two. Their first songs were inspired by a deep hatred of the mundane suburban existence it looked like they were doomed to.
Dee Dee was a crazed drug addict from Berlin who worshiped pop imagery while living the life of a criminal. Johnny was a juvenile delinquent who was disciplined at a military academy and liked to maintain an image of politeness, decorum, and structure while planning how to take over the world. Johnny and Dee Dee would hang out on the rooftops of Forest Hills, Queens, snorting Carbona and wondering where the fuck they fit into the picture. Before long the Carbona was replaced by jugs of wine, except for Dee Dee, who became a junkie.
What Johnny, Joey, and Dee Dee found in each other was the same sick sense of humor. That and the fact that rock ‘n’ roll seemed to be dying in front of their eyes. Together they wished for great rock ‘n’ roll to show them the way. Instead, they found that their twisted, humble beginnings, warped sense of humor, and dedication to mastering their musical instruments was their only way out.
“Glad to See You Go” typified the atmosphere of the times. The song was about Dee Dee’s then-girlfriend, Connie Ramone, as she was known. To put it bluntly, Connie, God rest her soul, was, uh, difficult. Until her death a few years ago from drug overdoes, she was a notorious celeb on the punk circuit. While she was going out with New York Doll Arthur Kane, she cut off his little finger with a knife. While she went with Dee Dee, she once sliced up his buttocks with a beer bottle (he couldn’t sit down until the stitches were removed).
Dee Dee and Connie reigned as the king and queen of the scene. They could often be seen at CBGB’s, Dee Dee usually out of it, threatening to kill people with a large club he carried. “What makes Dee Dee so distinctive?” then-manager Danny Fields was asked in a 1980 Esquire article. His IQ…His abiding sense of decency, justice, honor, integrity, morality…He’ll also sleep with anything, which makes him very hot.'”
Everyone in and around the Ramones hated Connie. Dee Dee freely admits that if he hadn’t broken up with Connie he’d be dead today.
“Dee and I came up with the song ‘Glad to See You Go,’ about Connie’s leaving,” Joey recalled.
“Gonna take a chance on her
One bullet in the cylinder
And in a moment of passion
Get the glory like Charles Manson
Ya gotta go go go goodbye
Glad to see you go go go go goodbye”
The curse of Connie would come back to haunt the Ramones years later, when the song was released on their second album, Leave Home. The program director at a rock station in NYC heard the reference to Charles Manson, thought the Ramones were glorifying mass murder, and refused to touch the LP with a 10-foot stylus.
The Ramones couldn’t understand why anyone would be offended by songs like “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Beat on the Brat,” and “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World.” They became irritated when asked about their Nazi imagery. “We’re right-wingers, but we have nothing to do with the German ideology at all,” Tommy said in 1976, “other than romanticism of the military.”
In retrospect, it’s easy to understand why the Ramones used military references and metaphors in their songs. They were at war with the world. Disco music was the rage and the band had committed themselves to making rock ‘n’ roll kick ass again.
Getting signed was a miracle in itself. No record company in its right mind would sign a New York rock ‘n’ roll band. The New York Dolls’ spectacular commercial failure left a black cloud over New York groups. No one thought the Ramones would make it. When Blue Sky records auditioned them as the opening act of a Johnny Winter concert in Connecticut, they were pelted with bottles and booed off the stage.
“They’re great,” Clive Davis was heard to say, “but you’ll never get them on wax.” Even Seymour Stein, who took the plunge with them and other punk groups on his Sire label, said to independent producer and Red Star owner Mary That that the didn’t think the Ramones could be recorded.
CREDIT: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Joey’s long, gangly body stands hunched over the jukebox in Paul’s Lounge in New York’s East Village. He’s reading the selections like a Wall Street analyst studies the Dow Jones. His table is filled with friends. “So what do you want to do tonight?” someone asks over the plates of half-eaten cheeseburgers, shrimp scampi, raw oysters, and crabmeat in avocado. “Pig Vomit’s playing the Ritz,” someone answers. “King Flux is playing the Cat Club.” Both are within walking distance and provide better rock ‘n’ roll than the trendier clubs. Joey prefers listening to good music to hanging out being trendy.
The conversation at the table turns to reminiscences of fucking to Ramones music as “Danny Says” builds on the jukebox and the beer flows freely. Everyone offers a story, and finally Joey is persuaded to tell one. “Yeah, I went home with this real nut once. She was nice, ya know, but she was still a nut, and she wanted to listen to us while we were in bed.”
“What did she want you to play?” the whole table choruses.
Joey explodes with laughter just thinking about it: “‘I Wanna Be Sedated’.”
Maybe everything just clicked (or as Joey put it when asked how they came up with their own sound: “It’s just the chemistry of the four of us—a chemical imbalance”), but when the Ramones walked into Plaza Sound recording studios in the bowels of Radio City Music Hall to record their first album and walked out a week later, history had been made. The album cost $6,400. The record companies sat up and took notice. What they noticed scared the hell out of them. The music was faster, louder, and scarier than anything before—just when rock ‘n’ roll was getting safe.
By the time the second album rolled around, the Ramones were beginning to realize the long road ahead of them. “‘Swallow My Pride’ was about signing with Sire,” says Joey. “It was about how the first album didn’t skyrocket. There were a lot of things that were fucked up in those days. Sire was then distributed by ABC. They really sucked. We’d fly to some city where we were gonna play and there’d be no one there to meet us at the airport. So you swallow your pride.”
America wasn’t ready for a band with songs like “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “All That Girl,” but in England they caused a musical revolution. “But we were always concerned about good taste,” Johnny claims. “There were certain songs that we’d say, ‘That’s not in good taste, let’s not do that.’ Dee Dee once had a song called ‘Cripple.’ We said, ‘Let’s leave that one for the future, if we put out a totally offensive album.’ But you can write about pinheads. They’re not gonna get together and organize any kind of picket line…”
Even though there were problems with the second album, Leave Home, the punk scene was exploding. Famous rock stars started dropping by CGBG’s to see what all the noise was about. “I remember Lou Reed telling Johnny that he wasn’t playing the right guitar,” Joey said “and that he should play a different type of guitar. That didn’t go over too well with John. When John found his guitar, he didn’t have much money. He bought his guitar for like 50 bucks ’cause that’s all he had. And he like the idea of using a Mosrite because no one else had one and he thought it would, like, become his trademark. So John thought Lou Reed was a real jerk.”
The Ramones’ luck began to change when they recorded Rocket to Russia, their third LP. On January 7, 1978, they played a sold-out show at New York’s Palladium, kicking off a national tour. They had finally outgrown the Bowery. The New York Times reviewed them under the headline: “Ramones in the Big Time.” It looked like they had finally made it.
“It was sorta like the beginning of something supposedly great. We got some heavy promotion—the stand-up cardboard cutouts—and we got buttons and stuff. We were the first band to have baseball bats for ‘Beat on the Brat,’ and switchblades for Leave Home,” says Joey with pride.
“I remember,” says Joey, “writers being afraid to interview us because they were afraid that we’d kick the shit out of them. A lot of radio stations thought that, too, which didn’t make any sense.”
But promotional problems were the least of their worries. Just as the Ramones were kicking off their Rocket to Russia tour, the Sex Pistols flew into Atlanta and turned their first and last American tour into a media circus that overshadowed the Ramones.
Punk’s time had come in America. The Ramones were selling out 2,500-seat auditoriums. But one night at the Capitol Theater in New Jersey, Joey, forever plagued with sinus problems, was inhaling a vaporizer from a tea kettle, to clear up his nose and throat before going onstage, when the kettle exploded in his face. It was the beginning of a series of accidents that would continually plague him.
With each injury, Johnny would go into a frustrated frenzy and accuse Joey of goldbricking. But it wasn’t until after the filming of their movie, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, the Phil Spector sessions in hell for the End of the Century album that Johnny and Joey really started to hate one another.
CREDIT: Chris Walter/WireImage
“He always carried three guns around with him,” says Johnny of Phil Spector. “He was going shoot us. He started a fight, you know, for publicity, a publicity stunt. He drove me to beating him up. He wanted to be punished, you know? I didn’t want to. We were prisoners in his house for about six hours, and we thought we were gonna get shot. I said, ‘Let’s go,’ and he pulled out a gun and said, ‘Do you wanna leave?’ I said, ‘No, that’s OK, we’ll stay for awhile.'”
Joey’s side of the story about working with Spector is equally bizarre. “Phil would make us run through the song a thousand times before he’d even do one take. And then he’d get drunk. The son of the guy who owned Gold Star recording studios [the home of Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’ in L.A.] would bring Phil these tiny little Dixie cups of Manischevitz wine and before long Phil would be drunk out of his mind.”
“He’d be stompin’ on the floor, cursin’. ‘Piss, Shit, Fuck! Piss, Shit, Fuck! Fuck this shit!’ and that would be the end of the session. Really, nothin’ much would get done, and then Johnny and Dee Dee didn’t want to work with him no more. I really wanted to. We called a meeting and told him if he didn’t stop drinking we wouldn’t be able to work with him. After that he was better, but he was still…the guy’s a perfectionist. He just couldn’t finish things.”
Seymour Stein, president of Sire, who had just sold his label to Warner Brothers for big bucks and a seat on the board of directors, was forced to sue Spector to get back the Ramones’ master tapes to have something to release.
“But I think Spector did a great job,” says Joey. “But the guy is definitely nuts. I remember he’d have some hooker hanging out in the studio and he’d just insult her. She was paid for his abuse—it was crazy!”
The LP and movie finished, the band returned home to New York, Joey to a co-op on the Lower East Side, Dee Dee to his house in Queens, Johnny to his apartment on Fourth Avenue, and Marky to Brooklyn. For the first time in the Ramones’ careers, they were financially independent.
The Ramones have never, even from day one, ever operated in the red. When it comes to the 3 R’s, they may be “D-U-M-B, everyone’s accusing me,” as Joey sings, but they’re not stupid. Their only concern has been writing songs, reading the trades, and adding up concert receipts.
“They wanted to succeed,” says Linda Stein, Seymour’s ex-wife, who once managed the band. “They wanted to sell records and tickets and make money. So they became very demanding. You can’t ever be five minutes late, you can’t ever not come to rehearsal, you can’t ever make a mistake. I don’t care if the audience is howling for encores, if you made a mistake, when you get off that stage you’re being screamed at by the other Ramones. As long as your’e a Ramone, there’s no room to misbehave or get yourself screwed up. I mean, it’s like a Nazi army!”
It was Tommy who first set up the rules. He was more than just a drummer who happened to be spokesman for the group, he was the Boss. What Tommy said, everyone did. Interviews were tortuous affairs, during which Tommy would refuse to answer specific questions, trying to promote the Ramones Myth. All members of the band had to be present. No solo interviews were permitted. Johnny would join in, but Tommy ran the show: “No, none of the other Ramones had been in rock groups before. Yes, the Ramones are like brothers, everyone sitting around writing songs together. No, no one writes a song by themselves.”
It was a peculiar form of utopian communism that Tommy liked to project, especially from a self-professed right-wing group. One can only wonder if Dee Dee had been allowed to talk about chicken-hawking on 53rd and Third or packing a 9-mm. Walther P-38 automatic and Johnny throwing TV sets off rooftops, would the world have been confused about who really started punk—the English or the Americans.
When Tommy left the Ramones after Rocket to Russia’s release (to be replaced by heavy metal drummer Marc Bell), the band lost its authority figure. Slowly all the rules began to change. Joey, Dee Dee, and Johnny chafed under the Ramones Myth and eventually began taking individual songwriting credits. They fired Danny Fields, their original manager, and Linda Stein, and then signed with Gary Kurfirst, who was managing Talking Heads. By the time the Spector album, End of the Century, was finally released in March 1980, Johnny and Joey had stopped speaking.
“There have been times when no one in the band has been speaking to each other,” says Danny Fields, “but they go out and play, and as a member of the audience you won’t know that and that is my definition of professionalism.”
CREDIT: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
The Ramones were smart enough to realize that if they didn’t leave the personal shit behind they’d never make it. After 13 years of heroin addiction, even Dee Dee realized that if was time to clean up. “I used to think I had to live the life of a punk rocker to be authentic, but I learned from watching Sid Vicious die. Drugs are dangerous.” In addition to his constant struggle to stay drug-free, Dee Dee acted as mediator between Johnny and Joey, and always found himself being asked to choose sides.
Johnny decided to take control of the band. He threatened to break up the group unless things were done his way. He hated the reaction to their album, Pleasant Dreams, and he despised the direction the band was moving in. “I mean,” he said, “there were albums where I became totally disinterested and didn’t write anything on it, like Pleasant Dreams. The Ramones were losing the respect we’d earned throughout the years. So then, I started to fight for things, demanding, ‘I’m not continuing anymore unless we do this or that.'”
One of the things he demanded was that Marc Bell (né Ramone) be replaced. Marc had a serious drug and alcohol problem, and his condition added to the tensions in a band in which no one was speaking to each other. Soon, Marky was thrown out.
Another thing Johnny demanded was a new approach to the Ramones’ music. That is, an OLD approach to the Ramones’ music.
One of the sore spots between Joey and Johnny is that Joey wants a hit, and Johnny doesn’t care. “All I wanna do,” Johnny said after the release of Subterranean Jungle, “is play the songs the kids wanna hear. Sometimes I don’t wanna be in the band anymore. Being with the same people and hearing the same conversations over and over—’Oh, this record’s gonna sell, we’re gonna have a hit and all that.’ I can’t listen to that stuff. I know what we should be doing. I don’t care whether it sells or not.”
That, says Johnny, was why the band took a new direction, starting with “Psychotherapy” from Subterranean Jungle, which he wrote with Dee Dee. “I wanted to do a hardcore song to show the hardcore people that we can play as fast or faster than they can. Nobody plays faster than us.”
Joey is as apathetic about hardcore as he is enthusiastic about the prospects of having a hit. “For the most part,” he says, “I just hear it [hardcore] all sounding the same. I really don’t hear anything that’s earth-shattering or that knocks me out.”
As much as hardcore has helped their career, it has also hurt it. As wonderful, amazing, and horrifying as slam-dancing is to watch, it takes a toll on people who practice it, and the groups who play the music for it. Monty, the Ramones’ road manager who always deals with whatever mess the group creates, says that the slam-dancing that goes on at Ramones concerts has made it difficult for them to get booked into clubs.
“I’ve had club owners just freak out. The security just goes crazy. They go right into the audience, grab these people and throw them out.”
“How do you explain what’s gonna be goin’ on? ‘Well, we’re gonna have a bunch of kids who will jump off the stage and land on their backs, and they’re also gonna be in the middle, slammin’ into each other…Some of these people are girls! They get hurt and they wanna stop the show. People get hurt! I don’t understand why they wanna do this. They wanna be part of the show, but why do it, so you can hurt people? And we get blamed for everything. It’s sick. You figure it out. I can’t. It’s getting worse, I’ll tell you.”
In 1985, just when things looked their bleakest, the Ramones’ luck began to change. They signed a new contract with Sire/Warner Bros. and with Tommy Erdelyi and Ed Stadium producing released Too Tough to Die, which revealed for the first time their political awareness.
“We had watched Reagan going to visit the SS cemetery on TV and were disgusted,” says Joey. “We’re all good Americans, but Reagan’s thing was like forgive and forget. How can you forget six million people being gassed and roasted?” he spits out, still indignant over Reagan’s betrayal.
The resulting single, “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg,” was a huge success with the critics and elevated the band that had once romanticized the military with songs like “Commando” to politically correct status.
“Joey is one of the first guys I called when I was putting together ‘Sun City’,” remembers Seven Van Zandt. “I thought ‘Bonzo’ was a great record. I’ve been a Ramones fan from the first album. I hate the idea of things being disposable like the English punk scene. The thing that is endearing about the Ramones is that they last.”
Finally getting respect and kudos from their peers, the band toured England in 1985 and played festivals throughout Europe, and suddenly Joey and Johnny started having fun together again. “Things are great when it’s just the band,” laughs Joey. “It’s the girls who cause all the shit. Girls are troublemakers.”
If the Ramones’ English tour in ’85 was a smash, their 1986 romp across the UK caused pandemonium. While Too Tough to Die was a return to good old punk rock with a few hardcore songs thrown in, the new album, Animal Boy, is a perfect blend of Johnny’s raw power, Dee Dee’s lunacy, and Joey’s pop sensibilities. It entered the English charts at 31.
It only takes 12 years of constant bullshit before you become an overnight sensation: 12 hard years of one-night stands and cranking out great albums that asshole DJs refuse to play because they’re not hip enough to get the joke; 12 years of traveling with your delinquent pals from Forest Hills to show the world how real rock ‘n’ roll is played; 12 years of playing music fast enough to rip through the sound barrier and not have your senses completely wiped out. When you’re a Ramone it takes the rest of the world 12 years to catch up with you.
“You know, people always talk about how good those CBGB’s days were,” says Joey. “Well, those days sucked. I’m a lot happier now. I mean, I like things now.” He starts to laugh when he thinks of the piles of dog shit that used to litter the floor of CBGB’s. “I mean, anything is better than that.”
“Sitting here in Queens
Eating refried beans
Reading all the magazines
Gulping down Thorazines
We ain’t got no friends
No Christmas cards to send
Our troubles never end
Daddy likes men
We’re a happy family
We’re a happy family
We’re a happy family
Me, mom, and daddy”
—”We’re a Happy Family” | {
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Egypt to Establish ‘Supreme Council for Combating Terrorism and Extremism’
Egypt’s parliament preliminary approved a new bill on Monday to establish a supreme council for combatting terrorism and extremism (SCCTE).
All the 20 articles of the new bill were approved; however, parliamentary speaker Ali Abdul All announced that the final vote on the bill will be postponed because the constitution stipulates that at least two third of the members should be present at the time of voting, according to Ahram Online.
The new council will replace the national council for combatting terrorism that was established last June at the decree of Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi after a series of terrorist attacks.
The council will be headed by the president and the key members will include the prime minister, religious and military figures and ministers, among other members. The key role of SCCTE is to combat terrorism and demolish extremism both internally and externally and it will coordinate with other bodies to implement inclusive plans to defeat terrorism.
The new council is appointed to implement a comprehensive strategy to be renewed every five years to eliminate terrorism and is set to cooperate with media and religious institutions to defeat extremist beliefs. SCCTE will convene every two months in Cairo governorate.
Egypt witnessed multiple terrorist attacks in recent years, primarily targeting security forces and churches. While initially the terrorist attacks were limited to North Sinai, it spread across several other governorates, including Cairo the capital. In February, Egypt’s army launched a major operation to fight terrorism in North and Central Sinai.
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Tomas Samuel’s analysis holds true not just for the call to prayer in Sweden, but all over the West.
“Ex-Imam about Muslim prayer call: ‘Shows power and control over the country,'” translated from “Ex-imam om muslimska böneutrop: ‘Visar på makt och kontroll över landet,'” by Anna Ernius, Samtiden, February 23, 2018:
ISLAM. A mosque in Växsjö has applied for a prayer call. This has aroused debate, not least since Bishop Fredrik Modeus said he welcomed the Muslim proclamation…
This motivated former Imam Tomas Samuel to explain what the prayer call stands for.
The imam of the mosque in Växsjö also compared the Muslim call to prayer with church bells as an argument for getting the prayer call approved.
Bishop Fredrik Modeus has received harsh words after his statement that he welcomes the application for the Muslim prayer call, and hoped to hear both church bells and prayer calls in Växjö.
“I think that many of those who have spoken this way have a real fear of what’s unfamiliar.
“That fear I respect, but I do not think that the way forward is to prevent others from exercising their religion,” said the bishop to the newspaper Dagen.
Tomas Samuel, a Christian apologist and former Imam, therefore, wants to provide knowledge of what the prayer call stands for.
“By going to the Islamic sources, we can get a foundation that can help decision makers make the right decision,” he says.
“What we discover is that the prayer call states that everyone should submit to Islam, and proclaims power over the area of the prayer.
Tomas Samuel writes that at first glance it may seem that church bells and prayer calls are the same, but that this is a logical error.
“Church bells are not a confession, it’s just a musical sound. They are not trying to assert power and control over the country. In addition, most churches do not use the bells, several do not even have any.”
“The difference is obvious,” writes Tomas Samuel.
The prayer call is called “Adhan” in Arabic and means “information, enlightenment.”
“The prayer call comes for essentially two reasons: it will remind people of when it is time to pray, and the prayer call will proclaim Islam over a city,” according to Tomas Samuel.
“At that time there were no alarm clocks. As the Muslim population increased in number, there was a real need to remind people of the different prayer times.”
“But that need hardly exists today, because we have wristwatches and clocks on the walls and in our mobile phones.
He quotes “Omdat Al-Ahkam”, one of the most important books for Islamic law:
“Adhan is a very important ritual in the religious practice of Islam, one can liken it to the Muslim flag. Its proclamation shows that the people of the city are Muslims.”
“It is also important for the proclamation of the word of Allah, thus manifesting the religion of Allah (Islam).”
“The prayer call begins with giving thanks by proclaiming ‘Allahu akbar,’ to show that Allah is the greatest and that everything and everyone should bow to Allah and Islam. The Islamic profession of faith is the second part of the prayer call (‘There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.'”
“This confirms Islam and proclaims it (Islam) across the country.”
“The prayer call should be done by a man who has a beautiful voice.”
“Women are not allowed to raise their voices, because a woman’s voice could mean a temptation for men,” continues Tomas Samuel.
“The prayer call should be done with a loud voice. There is promise of a reward from Allah for a loud voice that reaches as far as possible.”
“The prayer call will take place at the exact time of the five prayers.”
Tomas Samuel believes that the Växsjö mosque’s application for a prayer call is only the beginning.
“Many other mosques will make the same request, not only to have the prayer call twice a week, but five times a day.”
He emphasizes that everybody is free to believe how he wants.
“But your freedom ends when my starts. One of the simplest rights is that no one should be forced to listen to a creed he does not believe in,” he writes. | {
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Amputee swimmer Philippe Croizon has wheelchair stolen Published duration 12 August 2013
image caption Philippe Croizon braved icy waters to complete a swim linking five continents
A French athlete, who became the first quadruple amputee to swim across the English Channel, has made a public appeal after thieves stole his custom-made wheelchair.
Philippe Croizon, 45, was on holiday with friends near Dieppe in northern France when the device was taken.
"They haven't just stolen my wheelchair, they've stolen my independence," he told French media.
Mr Croizon lost his limbs in an electrical accident in 1994.
He was struck by a charge of 20,000 volts while adjusting a TV aerial on a roof.
Since then he has completed a number of high profile swimming challenges using tailor-made flippers - including swimming the Channel in 2010 and completing a swim linking five continents in August 2012.
He said he was "sad and angry" at the theft of the all-terrain, specially designed wheelchair, which was taken along with the trailer it was being stored in overnight on Thursday.
"I don't know if these people realise what they did," he said. "Without it, I am nothing."
He said the wheelchair had been part-financed by friends and would be very expensive to replace, although it is not clear exactly how much the chair was worth.
He urged the thieves to return it.
"Give me back my wheelchair, give me back my independence," he said. | {
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Dr Brian Moench writes: "So far one million people from around the world have already died from Chernobyl radiation, including over 110,000 of the original 830,000 clean up workers". How fatal will Fukushima be?
Chernobyl's poisonous legacy lives on
Several days prior to Japan's nuclear disaster, in a stroke of prophetic timing, former Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev published his lessons learned from Chernobyl. He calls the Chernobyl accident “a shocking reminder of the reality of the nuclear threat”. The nuclear power industry survives through secrecy and deceit, he wrote, having kept private “some 150 significant radiation leaks at nuclear power stations over the world”.
The Fukushima catastrophe has now officially been designated the same level of threat as the signature nuclear catastrophe of Chernobyl in 1986. For anyone who has bought into the "deceit" as Gorbachev called it and believed the official line that only dozens of people were killed at Chernobyl and a few thousand easily treated cases of thyroid cancer were the only health consequences, another recently published book should be required reading right after Gorbachev's work.
Written by Russian and Belarus experts, edited and published by the New York Academy of Sciences, the book, "Chernobyl : Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment" is by far the most well researched book on the issue. Drawing from over 5,000 published articles and studies, the authors arrive at startling conclusions. Among them:
So far, one million people from around the world have already died from Chernobyl radiation, including over 110,000 of the original 830,000 clean up workers. High doses of radioactive fallout reached much of Europe and the UK. 750 million people in the Northern Hemisphere received significant contamination. The release was 200 times more radiation than previously thought, hundreds of times more than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The authors stated:
"There is a danger greater than nuclear weapons concealed within nuclear power. No citizen of any country can be assured that he or she can be protected from radioactive contamination. One nuclear reactor can pollute half the globe. Chernobyl fallout covers the entire Northern Hemisphere."
The percentage of healthy children born in Belarus, the Ukraine and European Russia fell from 80% to less than 20% after the 1986 accident. The health consequences include increased fetal and infant deaths, birth defects, diseases of every organ system, cancers and non-cancerous tumors. Photographs of the tumors and birth defects are frightening.
Bird populations in California plummeted a month after Chernobyl and there is no other plausible explanation. Other species still show marked contamination: livestock, birds, fish, plants and trees. Grazing sheep in the UK, 2000 miles away, still have high levels of radioactive Cesium 137. Over 1,000 square miles in the Ukraine still contain enough radioactivity to prohibit human habitation for hundreds of years.
Last year, Ukraine’s president warned that the reactor ruins remain a serious threat. Most of Chernobyl’s radioactivity is still in those ruins which are encased in a rapidly deteriorating concrete shell vulnerable to collapse. Urgent work to construct a giant steel coffin over it is far behind schedule and the Ukraine is asking--begging really--for financial help to complete the project.
It is common rhetoric that new reactors are much better designed--a half truth at best. In 1986 Chernobyl 4 was state of the art and its lid was stronger than domes covering some plants in the US. Soviet engineers pronounced it melt down proof, and that even if the worst happened, the lid would hold. Because of their older design, a melt down in many US reactors would release far more radiation than Chernobyl. Numerous close calls have occurred among the aging US reactors in addition to our own Three Mile Island accident. High cancer and infant mortality rates in Pennsylvania, especially Dauphin County, defy the common belief that no one died at Three Mile Island.
At least new nukes are safe, right? The Nuclear Regulatory Commission ruled the flagship of new designs, the Toshiba-Westinghouse AP-1000, unable to withstand earthquakes, hurricanes or tornadoes, and has a critical flaw that could cause it to explode. We should have learned by now that extreme scientific endeavors are high risk. Several deep water oil drilling catastrophes, two space shuttle explosions, three nuclear melt downs and multiple nuclear near misses certainly illustrate the point.
Even without accidents and earth quakes nuclear power is a public health hazard. Every phase of the nuclear fuel cycle--the mining, milling, processing, routine power plant operations, waste transportation and storage--releases a steady stream of radioactivity into our environment.
New clean, safe, nuclear power?
There is no such thing as a "safe" amount of radiation exposure. Even small increases in radiation exposure increases everyone's risk slightly. When hundreds of millions of people have their health risks increased slightly, even in a best case scenario there will be thousands of victims, which by definition is a public health disaster. But Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima and Daiichi teaches us that the nuclear industry's history, like the oil industry's, was never close to best case scenario and there certainly is no reason to believe their future will be either.
Albert Einstein said, “The splitting of the atom changed everything, save man’s mode of thinking; thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe.” I wonder if Einstein qualifies as a sufficiently authoritative voice to silence the undaunted nuclear cheerleaders.
(This story was originally published in Truth Out on April 5, 2011 under the title 'Bury the Nuclear Renaissance Once and for All' and has been republished with permission. This version has been newly updated by the author for Independent Australia to better reflect the current situation at Fukushima.)
See Brian Moench speak about air pollution: | {
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As is customary for this time of year, it’s all about the wearables – and the last two weeks haven’t disappointed in that realm. Today we add to the pile with the new Garmin Vivosmart 4, which is, as the name implies, the fourth edition of the Vivosmart series. And approximately the 86th Vivo-branded device.
As with new Fitbit’s Charge 3 last week, there aren’t massive changes here from the previous generations. But in many ways, both companies are on a very similar track – especially when it comes to the addition of SpO2 tracking, which Garmin has added into the Vivosmart 4. Previously that was only seen on their highest end and most expensive watch, the Fenix 5X Plus which came out back in June.
Still, that’s not the only new feature – so skip down below for the quick run-through of what’s new on this $129 wearable.
Oh, and before we do that, note that this isn’t a full in-depth review. It’s a quick hands-on based on a handful (well, wrist-full) of days of use on a media loaner device. Down the road, I’ll likely do an in-depth review, mostly because some of the new features here are actually unique on this device and worth investigating deeper. Since it’s not a full in-depth review, I could find over time that things get either better or worse than my quick poke at it. Got it? Good. Let’s go. Onwards!
Update: In September 2019, Garmin added Connected GPS to this device via a firmware update, which means you’ll now get a GPS track of your workout as well, as long as your phone is with you. More details in my post about that here.
What’s new:
As with most Garmin device iterations you generally see features introduced on other devices filter down into lower-cost devices. And while that’s certainly the case with some new features on the Vivosmart 4, there’s actually two cases where these features are found on no other Garmin devices. Specifically, the newly added features of:
– Body Battery: Gives you a constantly updated ‘energy’ score throughout day
– Sleep Pulse Ox readings: Tracks SpO2 readings during sleep and shows on mobile app
Neither of those two new features are found on any other Garmin device (yet), no matter the cost.
Atop that, there are some differences between the Vivosmart 3 and the new Vivosmart 4 that extend beyond that. Some of these are hardware, and some of them are software updates previously seen added elsewhere in the Garmin realm. Here’s my typical bulleted style list:
– It’s smaller: The unit is now thinner (width) than before
– Battery life increased: Now 7 days versus 5 days
– Far clearer screen: It’s actually quite an improvement over the Vivosmart 3
– And that’s it: Best I can tell.
Now, some other things may appear new, that came in via later updates since last year’s Vivosmart 3 launch. For example, the Vivosmart 3 got Abnormal Heart Rate Alerts this past summer, and the Vivosmart 4 carries those too.
There’s a huge list of firmware updates since then on the firmware updates page. But this list doesn’t do a great job of capturing software-based updates on the mobile app – for example with the advanced sleep tracking that they rolled out this past spring or so. That’s covered on the Vivosmart 3 and Vivosmart 4.
If you want the hands-on summary of everything in the new Vivosmart 4, I put together this quick video that covers both the app and the unit hands-on:
When it comes to the display, the new touchscreen is definitely easier to see than the Vivosmart 3, there’s no question about that. The Vivosmart 3 always felt a bit fuzzy because of the layer of silicon over the screen. It worked well enough, but it just wasn’t super crispy. This is super crispy.
On the flip-side, I still find the touch responsiveness a bit cumbersome. Specifically with waking it back up again. It’s not an always-on display like some watches, so you have to either raise your wrist or tap it. And I find that sometimes swiping through the menu (especially down), it doesn’t seem to always register my touch. Note that you can customize the way the main dashboard page looks:
Of course, there’s two main new features here. First being Pulse Ox, and the second being Body Battery. I cover Pulse Ox in the next section, leaving us this moment for Body Battery.
This feature is only seen on the Vivosmart 4. And yes, I asked if it’s coming to other watches and merely got back “it’s exclusively launching on the Vivosmart 4”. Essentially it’s like the days of the Street Fighter video-game where you had your energy level. This level tracks throughout the day based on resting HR (from the optical HR sensor), stress tracking (also from the optical HR sensor), workouts/activities, and sleep quality. The more you do, the lower your score goes. Get some rest, and your score goes up. The easiest way to look at it is my day yesterday:
A couple of things above to decipher:
A) You can see I slept from roughly midnight till 8AM, my battery says I was fully ‘re-charged’ by 4AM
B) The grey icons indicated automatically tracked activities, mainly two commutes by bike
C) The green icons indicate my two actual ‘workouts’ (tracked on the Edge 1030 in fact, not this device), these were relatively short 25-minute test rides
D) The orange is the stress level measured throughout the day when not sleeping
E) The blue line is my body battery level over the course of the day
The app also outlines this in a more wordy form:
Now the question is what do I think of it? Well…I guess it’s correct in spirit.
But I’ve got a couple of concerns here. To begin:
A) If my body battery was re-charged by 4AM, that’s…full of crap.
B) I know this because I woke up at 6AM to screaming children, and was exhausted…and went back to sleep. 4AM would have been far worse.
C) Why did my rides have virtually no effect? Was it because I did them on another device?
D) Typing this post (from 11PM on this chart) had a seemingly bigger impact than my first ride outdoors
Now, perhaps writing this post is more brain-impacting than my ride, I’m not sure. But I’m not convinced.
Now don’t misunderstand me. I do think that the overall concept of a body energy type metric is exactly what’s needed. I’ve long talked about the lack of an overarching metric that takes into account things like resting heart rate trends, and sleep, and activity and gives you truly actionable instructions. As Garmin notes in the app – the number here is very explicit in what you should be doing in terms of going out for that workout or not. I’m just not sure I agree with how that number trended yesterday. Or the fact that the day before when I went and did a 45-minute strength circuit workout that it basically had no meaningful impact on my body battery number (it says 57 below because I forgot to pause it after). Again, I need a bit more time here with this feature…but my initial impression is that Garmin might need some more time with it too.
And before I forgot, the Body Battery score is also shown on the watch itself like other widgets, just by swiping up/down. You can further configure it onto the main dashboard display if you want.
I do want to note that Body Battery is a FirstBeat feature and also found under a different name in the Suunto 3 Fitness watch. However, the implementation is quite a bit different. First, Suunto doesn’t show you any historical information on their mobile app – so that’s a biggie. Second, Suunto’s underlying data is different because they don’t have a 1-second always-on capable optical HR sensor. Instead, the Suunto sensor samples less frequently. It might not make a huge difference, but it’s worth noting.
Finally, for lack of anywhere else to stash it – here’s the stock image of all the colors. Obviously I’ve got the black one, but they’ve got a handful of other color choices. Unlike the Fitbit Charge 3, there’s no swappable bands here.
With that colorful bit out of the way, let’s dive more deeply into the new Pulse Ox bits.
Pulse Ox Redux:
Pulse Ox was first introduced on the Fenix 5X Plus back in June as part of the larger Fenix 5 Plus series. At the time, only the highest end Fenix 5X Plus variant got the feature, which required additional hardware sensors. Garmin said they saw that feature as somewhat unique and also a bit of a bleeding-edge type experiment of sorts.
The main (marketing or engineering, depending on one’s view) thinking behind Pulse Ox on the Fenix 5X+ was really more focused on climbers and those at high altitudes. The idea being one could watch blood oxygen levels there and do a better job tracking over time than typical finger sensors would do (since that process was more cumbersome to do frequently). Garmin hasn’t yet gone through any sort of FDA certification for Pulse Ox readings, though, it’s something they’ve said they’re seriously considering (I talk about that at length in my in-depth review in the Pulse Ox section, including the entire new FDA Software as a Medical Device realm).
But that story shifts a bit with the Vivosmart 4. Here, the goal is more about using the data during sleep tracking than it is about high altitude adventures. This thinking is virtually perfectly aligned to all of Fitbit’s efforts. The main difference though is that Garmin is exposing far more of the actual data, rather than Fitbit’s plan to give you general trends.
Here, let me explain how it works. First, you’ve got to enable it. And actually, you seem to have to enable it in two places and in two ways. First is enabling Pulse Ox as a feature, but then enabling it for the sleep portion. For example, you can take a Pulse Ox (SpO2) reading at any time from the menu on the device. You’ll go into the heart rate sub-menu (where you can get things like VO2Max as well), and then select the PulseOx icon:
When doing so it’s recommended to sit/stand/whatever still. Don’t move. Same basic advice from the Fenix 5X+. The reading tends to take 10-20 seconds to complete. You can see the red light illuminating my skin as well:
Taking a direct head-on picture of the red light is tricky business, but here’s a slightly different angle:
In any case, once that’s done you’ll get your reading:
I have noticed though that when it fails to get a reading it seems to go one of two ways:
A) It outright tells you it failed and to adjust fit and try again
B) It just says 94%. For example, you’ll see a few pictures in this post with 94%, that’s when it measured the nothingness of space
But that reading is kinda like a one-off. At this time it doesn’t appear to go anywhere in the mobile app as saved data for later. Fart in the wind and all that.
Instead, in order to get Pulse Ox readings to track you need to enable the sleep Pulse Ox section within the mobile app for sleep data. I made the mistake of only enabling within the first portion for my first night, and I got no Pulse Ox data. So definitely remember to enable both parts. It gives you an explainer of the magic you’re about to invoke:
Then, fast forward to the second night with it on and I’ve got this pile of data afterwards:
Which, is not much data.
You’ll notice it doesn’t actually measure my SpO2 values all night long. Instead, it just picks some period in the middle of the night to do its thing (this is just barely shown above in the middle screen at the very bottom by that elongated blip around the 2AM marker). It remains to be seen how exactly Fitbit does this on the Charge 3/Ionic/Versa units. That won’t happen till later this year sometime as part of their Sleep Scorecard beta program.
In the case of last night for me, it apparently thought I was sleeping while I was still working away, and in fact as I stood up to go get a glass of water from the fridge, it chose that exact moment to try and get its Sp02 reading. I could tell from the red light glowing into my skin. It doesn’t appear to have tried again that night. I did get a video the day before showing how to access the setting, recorded from someone else’s screen – and that definitely shows a bit more data during the night:
Nonetheless, initial troubles aside (keep in mind, it starts shipping today), the idea behind monitoring this though is that the data could be used to assist people in figuring out sleep-related issues. While this data point by itself may not be valid in a medical/clinical scenario, integrating multiple data points including movement and heart rate can start to paint a much more cohesive picture than most people could ever get – short of spending lots of time and money on medical-grade sleep devices.
Ultimately of course, it’s clear that all of the fitness tech giants (Garmin, Apple, Fitbit, and likely Samsung) are working towards these same goals with likely the same metrics. All companies have at one point or another talked about ways to address the huge numbers of people impacted by sleep disturbances (sleep apnea, atrial fibrillation, allergies, asthma, etc…).
Of course, Garmin does have a slew of disclaimers on their site nonetheless about (not) using it as a medical device (with a section on Pulse Ox as well):
In the meantime, I’m interested in seeing what this data looks like longer term – and of course, where Garmin plans to expand it beyond the Vivosmart 4. Obviously, it takes additional new hardware. So it’s not something they can just turn a software switch on and enable on older units. But given they’ve just added the feature to their least expensive optical HR device – after adding it to their most expensive device introduced this year…it stands to reason it’s going to quickly fill in on every other unit between those two points.
Wrap-Up:
Overall, I like the direction Garmin is going here with both Body Battery and Pulse Ox. I’m just not convinced either is ready for prime time yet. While it’s still early days (I’ve only had a few days worth of data), the data doesn’t always trend in the ways I’d expect it to (primarily with respect to Body Battery). But the value of what Garmin (and I presume FirstBeat behind the scenes) is trying to convey is exactly what I’ve been asking for, for years. The idea to take in all these metrics (sleep, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, workouts, activity, stress), and give you a simple 0 to 100 number: That’s brilliant. At least in theory.
When it comes to SpO2, obviously, that’s the new industry trend. I’m actually less concerned about inaccurate SpO2 readings at this point (it seems to be accurate when it does correctly get a reading), as just the lack of readings and logic that goes into the nighttime pieces. For example, the fact that last night it didn’t retry again when I was actually sleeping is a bit peculiar to me. As is the fact that it doesn’t seem to save one-off Pulse Ox readings I take during the day. I will say that I’d certainly hope that any further wearables Garmin develops would have Pulse Ox within them, given they established the price floor (this device, the least expensive optical HR unit they make), along with the price ceiling (the Fenix 5X+ – the most expensive watch this year). Thus, not doing it on every other future device (like Fitbit is doing) would be a solid face-palm.
And while some may think I’m being slightly harsh, I’m told you should be able to pick up the Vivosmart 4 today at major retailers around the US. So as such, it’s kinda a device that’s ready to roll with current firmware/hardware. Said differently: It’s not beta, it’s fair game.
Still, I’m looking forward to trying it out more over the next month and putting together a more complete review after they’ve perhaps addressed some bugs and more importantly that I’ve got a number of weeks of data to start looking at trending on. Perhaps there’s a learning aspect to some of the Body Battery bits, just like there is for other metrics like VO2Max and Training Status.
With that – thanks for reading!
—
Pre-orders: You can order the Vivosmart 4 from Clever Training, which helps support the site here (and DCR/VT VIP members get 10% back in points). Plus, free shipping to boot! | {
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The idea for this mission was submitted by a stranger via email. Agent Slavinsky wrote in to suggest I get either a large group of people in blue polo shirts and khakis to enter a Best Buy or a group in red polo shirts and khakis to enter a Target. Wearing clothing almost identical to the store’s uniform, the agents would not claim to work at the store but would be friendly and helpful if anyone had a question. There aren’t any Targets in Manhattan, so I decided to go with the two-story Best Buy on 23rd Street.
I staked out the Best Buy a few times leading up to the mission. I wanted to figure out the exact shade of blue they used for their uniforms. One detail I noticed is that all employees wore belts and black shoes. I figured it would be against policy to film in the store, so any cameras we used would have to be somewhat hidden. In addition cameras could also be “hidden” in plain sight by using Best Buy’s demo cameras to document the mission. All we would have to do is bring in blank tapes and memory cards to insert in their own video and still cameras.
I sent out an email to my mailing list to recruit agents. I didn’t want to give away the exact nature of the prank for fear of word spreading to Best Buy employees ahead of time. I had to be as vague as possible and still make sure everyone wore the correct clothing:
In order to participate you must arrive adhering to a very specific dress code:
1) Blue Polo Shirt. Short sleeved. Any brand. Preferably with no logo. As Close to Royal Blue as possible.
2) Khaki Pants. Any shade of khaki is fine. No shorts.
3) Belt. Any belt is fine.
Other Instructions:
-If possible, please wear black shoes. This is not required, but please wear them if you have them.
-You must also bring a NEWSPAPER (Any newspaper is fine–just grab a free one on the street.)
-If possible, do not bring a backpack or any type of bag. This is not a huge deal, but it will work better without bags.
-Do not bring any type of camera. This mission is, as all IE Missions should be, participatory. We are covering it with our own small staff of camera people and do not need any more cameras or journalists. Only show up if you are wearing the proper dress and ready to participate and have fun!
We met at Union Square North at 3:30 PM. Around 80 agents showed up, most them looking like wonderful Best Buy employees. More than a few came dressed in navy or teal, but with the belt and the khakis they still looked employee-like. After everyone arrived I explained the mission. The first step was for everyone to throw their newspapers away. The instruction to bring a newspaper was a red herring meant to throw people off the scent of the mission’s true nature. I then revealed the plan, “We’re heading up to the Best Buy on 23rd Street. We’ll enter the store one by one. Once inside, spread out and stand near the end of an aisle, facing away from the merchandise. Don’t shop, but don’t work either. If a customer comes up to you and asks you a question, be polite and help them if you know the answer. If anyone asks you if you work there, say no. If an employee asks you what you’re doing, respond ‘I’m waiting for my girlfriend/boyfriend who is shopping elsewhere in the store.’ If they question you about your clothing, just explain that it’s what you put on when you woke up this morning and you don’t know any of the other people dressed like you.”
Agents listening to the instructions
It had been a rainy morning, and I was worried that most agents would show up with rain jackets and umbrellas, something Best Buy employees surely would not have on their person while working. Fortunately the rain stopped about an hour before our meet up time and most folks came empty handed. One Agent had a car parked nearby and let folks store their backpacks in his trunk for the duration of the mission. Agent Simmons was particularly resourceful, opting to check his bag at the Strand Bookstore on his way to the meeting point.
After everyone was briefed on the mission, we took a few group photos. We must have looked like some type of church retreat group to anyone passing us in the park. The group slowly started heading up towards the store. I positioned myself on 22nd street, just one block south of the store and around the corner. As agents started arriving, I had them wait out of view and sent people over individually in fifteen-second intervals.
An agent waits his turn
Our camera crew entered the store first with their hidden devices.
Agents EMartin and Reeves
Agents Shafer and Reeves stored their cameras in duffle bags.
Agent Shafer’s camera
Agent EMartin hid his camera inside an Xbox 360 box, cutting a hole in the side for his lens. The plan was for him to claim he was attempting to return his Xbox and get the security guard to tag it with a pink slip. Once inside he could walk around freely with what looked liked store merchandise.
Agent Carlson entered the store with only a Mini-DV tape. He went directly to the video camera section of the store, locating on the ground level right next to the front door, conveniently. He found their best 3-CCD camera, inserted his tape, and positioned it to film everyone entering the front door.
Agent Carlson inserting his tape
IE’s favorite photographer Agent Nicholson was on board per usual to snap photos. He brought a couple of cameras of his own, but he also brought a variety of memory cards to insert into Best Buy’s own demo cameras.
Agent Nicholson with his memory cards
Using a demo camera he snapped a few photos on the upper level discreetly.
Agent Simmons and Rodgers are among the first to enter
Agent Carlson loading the a demo video camera while Agent Kinney “works” in the background
After about fifteen minutes of staggered entrances, all 80 agents were in the store. Not noticing the lack of Best Buy logo and nametag, customers immediately started asking our agents for help.
Agent Kinney helps a customer near the front door
Agent Rodgers helps someone find a router
Two agents cross each other on the escalators
Pretty soon there was an agent stationed at every aisle in every section of the store.
We had a pretty diverse crowd, men and women, young and old. One agent brought his 9 and 11 year-old daughters with him. “Take your daughter to work day,” he explained to me. Their shirts weren’t quite the right color, but they made great employees nevertheless.
Some agents looked pretty close to a typical Best Buy employee.
Others, not so much.
Sound of Music
I spent much of my time wandering the store checking out other agents and making sure everything was going to plan. Every now and then I would stay put for a bit on the end of an aisle. I helped a few customers. One woman wanted to know where she could find “on DVD.” I happily walked her over to the DVD section.
One employee passed me with a smile on his face and exclaimed, “All you guys have GOT to get together for a photo, because no one is ever going to believe this!” Another came up to me and said, “Let me guess, you’re waiting on your friend? Good answer.” I guess at that point he had heard that answer more than a few times.
The reaction from the employees was pretty typical as far as our missions go. The lower level employees laughed and got a kick out of it while the managers and security guards freaked out. Some employees speculated that we were a cult, or maybe protesters. One employee tried to get a date out of the incident, informing one agent, “Tell that girl in the computer section that ‘Mike says hi.'” Another employee after being told to go get some merchandise from the back, declared, “You should ask one of these other 50 people to do it!”
A real employee with three fake employees in the background
Security guards and managers started talking to each other frantically on their walkie-talkies and headsets. “Thomas Crown Affair! Thomas Crown Affair!,” one employee shouted. They were worried that were using our fake uniforms to stage some type of elaborate heist. “I want every available employee out on the floor RIGHT NOW!”
Two managers confer (right) while a security guard looks on (left)
Another manager meeting
Employees began asking our agents to leave the store if they weren’t shopping. Most stuck to their “I’m waiting for my girlfriend” story and refused to leave. Others pretended to shop whenever employees were near by. A few were escorted out by employees.
Agent EMartin’s Xbox video camera rig was discovered when an employee approached him to offer advice on how to return his Xbox. He was asked to leave, and then detained by security at the front door. There a manager claimed it was “illegal” to film in Best Buy and instructed someone to call 911. She informed him that he had violated her “civil rights” by filming in her store. Agent Nicholson, who had been taking photos at the hip to avoid detection was caught as well, but he was able to leave the store freely.
With our main photographer busted, I took out my camera and started taking covert snapshots. One employee caught me in the act and rushed over. As soon as he got to me, I caught him off guard with a question, “Hey, do you know where I can find the right memory cards for my camera?” He stammered for a second and then said, “Sure. They’re right over there.” I thanked him and was on my way. Another employee caught me moments later in the DVD section, but I disarmed him with a question as well, “Do you know how much the Star Trek DS9 DVDs are? There is no price tag.” We chatted for a second about how expensive the set was, and by the time I walked away he forgot all about the camera.
The cops arrived and began questioning Agent EMartin about why he was filming. He claimed he didn’t know us, but thought it was funny and started filming (inexplicably out of his Xbox). While filming this altercation, Agent Shafer’s camera was also discovered and the cops began questioning him as well. Already out of the store, Agent Nicholson was able to take photos through the window.
While the cops were questioning Agents Shafer and EMartin, we had two other cameramen filming the interaction. Agent Carlson remained undetected filming from a Best Buy demo camera, and despite the fact that her camera was the least hidden, Agent Reeves was never discovered. Perhaps being tall, blonde, and female had something to do with her camera not being noticed. Agent Shafer confidently informed the cops that it was not, in fact, “illegal” to film in Best Buy and that they couldn’t accuse him of trespassing until he had been asked to leave the store. He pointed out that he was perfectly willing to leave. A manger told Agent Shafer, “I don’t come to your house and film you,” to which he replied, “Who lives here?” The cops argued for a bit, but finally realized there was nothing they could do. They let the cameramen go and informed the manager, “The worst you can do is ask them to leave.”
We had been in the store for around 40 minutes, so I decided it was time to start leaving. I also figured our departure would ease the heat off of the cameramen. I walked around and gave agents the signal to leave. Before heading out, I snapped a few more photos and was busted a third time by an employee. He asked me to leave, and I informed him I was on my way out. I soon found myself in the middle of about six other agents heading towards the escalators. The guy who busted me decided he wanted to talk to me more about my camera, but couldn’t remember which one I was. As he walked with the six of us in our blue shirts, he started demanding, “Which one of you had the camera?” None of us answered. Riding the escalator up I took one last glance backwards. The employee saw my face and shouted, “That’s him!” I worried that he would make it to a security guard to radio in my description to the front door guys so they could intercept me. I picked up the pace and hurried out the front door, undetected, camera safely in pocket.
A security guard checks out an agent on his way out
Once on the street, we headed to a meet up point about five minutes away from the store. One manager followed us outside with her walkie-talkie shouting, “They’re heading down 6th Avenue!,” as if she was going to get someone to trail us.
Manager on the street
Another employee chased after us with a camera, hoping to get some group photos.
Agent EMartin, Hidden Camera
I created a hidden camera setup for this mission by making a smallish hole in an Xbox 360 box and crudely securing the camera inside. I thought I was going to be pretty clever walking around the store with a camera in a large bright-ass green box. I lasted about 5 minutes. One employee started chatting me up about return options and another employee wearing a tie came from behind me and spotted the lens-hole. They asked me if I was recording, I said yes, and he told me I had to leave the store.
I was escorted up the escalator, thinking that I was going to be kicked out. Near the front door a manager stopped the employee with a tie and started asking me questions about “what was going on.” I said I had no idea. She then lectured me about how I violated her civil rights and how I had endangered people in the store by distracting the employees. Her exaggerated arguments didn’t make much sense, but she was set on doing this “by the book” and calling the police. Two security guards made sure I didn’t leave. It took the manager a while to find the correct precinct phone number in their manual, and eventually they just dialed 911.
While I was waiting for the cops (it took 15-20 minutes for them to show up) I overheard some interesting exchanges. Only a couple of employees interacted with me directly, but aside from the one manager accusing me of endangering the masses, everyone was very polite. Both security guards loudly advanced their own theories about what was going on. One security guard didn’t know who the group was, but suspected that it was some cult, because, “They all have that zombie look in their eyes. They just stand there staring at nothing.” They also argued about if the prank was funny or not. One did not think it was funny at all and the other said he thought it was “kinda funny,” and tried to explain the humor, “What if you went into Home Depot and there were all these people wearing orange aprons all over the store?” “That’s completely different.” A few employees tried to get me to spill the secret on what the group was, and another employee came over twice and asked me in a hushed voice, “Are YOU a police officer?”
Once the cops showed up everyone including me got a bit more tense. They were obviously not happy about having to deal with the situation. They did not think the prank was funny and they repeatedly asked me for everyone’s names. I didn’t say anything, but agreed to show them the tape. One cop watched it while another spoke with store employees. Every time it would show an agent on the tape he would ask me what his name was. I would say I didn’t know (which was the honest truth), but he kept saying, “Bullshit, I don’t believe you. Why are you taping them if you don’t know them.” “Because, I think it’s funny.” “I don’t think it’s funny.” This whole time, agents were recording the event with Best Buy’s own demo video cameras. No employees noticed, even though they seemed to be pretty blatant.
Eventually, the cop angrily insisted that I was to go around and personally get all of the non-employees in blue shirts to leave the store. I complied and went around the store relaying the message to any of the agents left in the store. My favorite part of this was when an agent and his daughter refused to acknowledge me and didn’t break character, even though I was speaking directly to them.
Apparently, while I was walking around the store Agent Shafer was also discovered with a video camera. They kept asking us for the names of everyone else involved, which we didn’t disclose. They grew frustrated and at one point said that they would be writing both Agent Shafer and I summons for trespassing. Fortunately, Agent Shafer knew the law and kept turning the officer’s statements back on themselves:
“I’m not trespassing until you ask me to leave. No one has asked me to leave yet.”
“Are you disobeying a lawful order?”
“Are you asking me to leave?”
With most the agents now gone from the store, the cops gave up and we left the store.
Agent Shafer, Hidden Camera
Agent Reeves, Hidden Camera
I was excited to see so many people show up at Union Square in Blue polo’s and Khaki pants. When I got to Best Buy my job was to first stand outside and videotape the agents going in. After the first five minutes, four employees came out and stood next to me as they smoked. They knew something was up, one guy thought he was tripping on Acid, another said it was just like the Thomas Crown Affair. Whenever a new agent walked by, the guys would say, “Hey, Best Buy is right here, you might want to go in, your friends are in there.” Then they noticed agents were coming from every direction and this made them confused.
Audio clips of these employees:
Out of all the camera people, I was the most obvious. The lens was sticking out of my bag but nobody ever said anything. I caught up with Agent Kula as he helped some shoppers who were looking for a new TV. I saw some other Agents talking with customers about which video game or cell phone to buy. As everyone was leaving I stood downstairs in front of the escalators and spoke with two Black shirts about why they had so many employees working that day. The guy said about 50 people just came in randomly dressed as Best Buy employees and they absolutely did not work there. When I was leaving, I saw a police confrontation another cameraman, Agent Shafer. I stood next to them and videotaped the whole thing. That must have been the highlight for me. I made it in and out with a camera videotaping the whole time and nobody asked me about it. It’s just too bad we didn’t walk down to Blockbuster afterwards.
Agent Kula
Agent Natty
Agent Barnes
Agent Scott
This was my third mission, and the first time I had the opportunity to bring my daughters (Agents Co and Bo). For us, it was a HUGE success. At one point on the way over to Best Buy, Agent Co said to me: “My cheeks hurt I’m smiling so much!”
We actually had other plans for Sunday–fortunately canceled by the rain–so we woke up uniform-less that morning. A stop at Old Navy got Bo and Co as close as we could get, and Agent Todd hooked me up with the perfect royal blue shirt. I must say that the anticipation, and the speculation about what we might be doing, was at least half the fun for the kids. And spotting other people in their “prank uniforms” on the way to the meeting place provoked total giggles in all three of us!
I was actually surprised that my kids didn’t feel a little disappointed by the prank itself, because there was no, like, “big moment.” Keeping on a game face and seeing their dad do something so… I don’t know… ridiculous and silly and “daring” was obviously entertaining enough.
Some highlights of our time inside the store: the customers who would stop mid-question upon seeing no logo on my shirt and apologize, sometimes pretty profusely, that they thought I worked there (wonder what gave them THAT idea!?); watching my kids massage their cheeks in that classic “don’tsmiledon’tsmiledon’tsmile” maneuver; the dude who seemed genuinely angry at me for wearing the shirt (“What are you guys doing?!! Why are you wearing these clothes!!??); and at one point about 45 minutes in, wandering from the video games all the way back to the TVs and seeing the scope of our “invasion.”
You know, though, having recently seen V for Vendetta and The Inside Man (both of which feature robberies and/or escapes using lots of people in identical outfits, I could definitely identify with the growing anxiety of Best Buy’s security and managerial staff. All in all, though, we had a great, truly memorable day, which always seems to happen when I hang with the Improv Everywhere crew!
Agent Ace$Thugg
When I entered the store, right off the bat, the employees pointed at my blue shirt and said, “Look, here comes another one! What’s going on?” So it didn’t take them long to be on to me. I then walked to the most vacant open space I could find, which happened to be the speaker section. It was there that I became the focal point of the manager Al (yellow shirt), and his manager Rick (white shirt.) As I stood with my back to the display case and arms behind me, Al first approached me within 30 seconds and asked if I needed any help. I asked him where the bathrooms were (I was actually needing to go), but he told me they were out of order. I said, “Alright, I’ll just wait for my girlfriend then. She’s looking for the bathroom. I guess I might be here awhile.” Five minutes later Rick came by and asked me pointedly, “What’s going on? What are you and your buddies doing?” I, flabbergasted, told him kindly I was waiting for the bathrooms to be fixed. And he, not believing me, asked me to leave and said he’s calling the police and then stormed off. I said ok and just went to another section.
In this section, Al approached me twice asking me if I needed help. I assured him, if I did indeed need help, I knew to come find him. And then he asked me if I had a child at home, and if I knew any children. Curious about his line of questioning, I asked him what he was getting at. He said he noticed that I was in the children’s section for a long time and it was making him uncomfortable. Not wanting to make him or any children uncomfortable, I went back to the speaker section. Rick then came by again said, “I can’t believe you guys are this bored; you better not talk to any of my customers.” I just stared at him with a puzzled look on my face claiming I knew of no others here but my lost girlfriend who I was becoming concerned about. He just walked away in a huff.
A customer did approach me soon after though and asked where the calculators were. I, trying to be helpful, pointed and said I think they are on the other side of the store. As soon as I finished my sentence, the couple says, “Here they are!” That was when I learned I was in the speaker and calculator section of Best Buy. I would not have made a good employee.
About 10 minutes later, I saw Al walking towards me from across the store. Trying to avoid him, I picked up a Best Buy brochure that was at the end of the aisle. I picked it up thinking it was an employment application, and Al asked if I needed any assistance once again. I asked him if they were hiring, nodding towards the brochures. And then we got into an awkward discussion about how it was actually a Best Buy credit card application and I said “it would be good for me if I actually did any shopping here.” He then said, “It looks like a lot of people like you like to shop at this store” as he pointed to all the other blue shirts. All I could muster was, “Yeah… that’s weird.”
Al and Rick finally approached me together towards the end of the mission. Al asked me my name, and I told them it was Al too, and of course they didn’t believe me. Al explained that he was still very uncomfortable with my presence in the store (even in the speaker and calculator section) and wanted to know what I was shopping for. I said, “I’m not shopping for anything. I’m browsing.” And the two looked at me like I was the first person to ever browse a Best Buy aisle with my back to the display cases the whole time. Rick, feeling defeated, said to Al. “You know what Al, just let them have their fun. We can’t do anything.” And as he said that, I got the cue from Agent Todd to exit, and then we all left in a timely manner.
Agent Shelktone
I was lucky to score one of the regulation shirts from Agent Todd. As such, I was one of the first of the blue shirts to enter the store. I didn’t get five steps in before a dude asked me on the elevator, “Where are your land line phones? Are they downstairs?” I said, “Yeah, I think so.” He then asked, “Oh and where are the bathrooms?” I said sheepishly, “Oh I don’t actually work here.” He pointed, “The blue shirt.” I shrugged and said, “Oh right.”
Then downstairs very quickly the real boys in blue started to notice the mass influx of recreational blue shirters. They responded at first by very deliberately greeting me. “Hello!” “How are you?” Then, they grew more suspicious trying to suss out my level of craziness. “Can I help you with something?” Then to, “Hey, why are you wearing a blue shirt? It’s confusing.” To finally flat out accusation from a yellow shirted higher up, “Hey man, what’s going on? What are you guys going to do?” I explained I was just browsing and had felt like wearing blue today. He didn’t buy it. Two minutes later, I heard one of the dudes say, “I can’t deal with this, I’m calling the police.” To be fair, I think I might have been a little freaked out too. Still, if you were a manager you had to love what appeared to be wall-to-wall employee coverage of the store for every five feet. Now, that’s service!
Agent Montague
I arrive at Best Buy and immediately have the chance to hold the door for a few customers. I step inside, cruise down the escalator, and quickly encounter an annoyed security guard. “May I help you sir?” he asks. “No thanks.” “What’s going on here?” “What do you mean?” I respond. “Is this some sort of event?” “I don’t understand.” “Why are you wearing that?” he presses. “Oh,” I smile, “These are just my clothes.” He shakes his head, and I wander off.
I tour the store and feel pretty good about landing a spot next to the vacuum cleaners. There are no employees in sight. I hover. A 50-something bearded Jewish man makes eye contact, walks toward me, my first customer. “Do you work here?” he asks. “No, I don’t.” He starts looking at vacuum cleaners, not knowing where to start. “What are you looking for?” I ask. “I need a vacuum cleaner,” he says. “I have a Dirt Devil. It works really well, very powerful machine,” I say. “A Dirt Devil. Dirt Devil, OK.” A real employee approaches. “May I help you sir? the employee asks. “Yes, I’d like to buy a Dirt Devil,” the man responds.” I sold my first vacuum cleaner. Damn, it feels good.
Shortly after that, I was asked to leave for not shopping. Instead, I decide to stay. I stroll around the store for awhile, until I overhear an employee say the cops had been called. I casually make a daring escape up the escalator and out the front door. Have a nice day, a large, bald bouncer says in a tough voice as I left.
Agent Jester
I searched frantically the day before the event for a shirt that was perfect color, that “Best Buy Blue.” I found a decent approximation, but I was concerned it was off enough that I wouldn’t fit in well. Nevertheless, I got into my role the second I walked into the store, I went to the video game section, (the section I personally spend the most time in whenever I’m actually shopping at a Best Buy). I leaned against the “discount games” table, crossed my arms and patiently waited for any customers in need. Within 5 minutes an older gentleman approached me, began asking me a question, then paused and looked carefully at my shirt. “Oh, I’m sorry, you don’t work here…” Damn! I was sure now that I wasn’t fooling anyone. I was just a guy who kinda sorta looked like a Best Buy employee. But then, a person playing on the Xbox 360 on display looked over at me and asked me to change games on the system. “Sorry,” I said, with an unusually large smile, “I don’t work here, but maybe I can find someone that can help you. Also, may I recommend `Burnout: Revenge’?” The look on his face showed genuine surprise. “Damn! You really don’t work here?!? Shit, that’s just…confusing.” That’s all I wanted to hear. After that I got asked three times by different people where to go to check out. “Oh, right over there,” I told them, adding: “they should really make that clearer for us, right?”
The rest of my tenure was spent watching other Best Buy employees freak out. They walked past me, usually staring at me, occasionally asking if I needed any assistance. But one guy, “Mike” was his name, made it a point to let us all know he A) knew what was going on, and B) was A.O.K. with it. He walked over to at least five IE Agents and asked them their name, and how it was going, and if they were having a good time. He would then turn to one of the other real Best Buy employees and give a grin, a laugh or a thumbs up to indicate that he had engaged with us, and recognized us as a non-threat. I also saw another employee snapping photos of us with her camera phone.
Agent Wimpy
I was one of the last to enter the store. As I approached I saw two employees smoking at the curb. I glanced at the store door and heard from behind me, “…another one!”
As I entered the upper level at least half the employees in the open display area there turned to look at me. I was thinking, “Wow, a Cheers moment!” I stepped forward intending to go down the escalator and found myself in the roped off area at the top of the up escalator and had to backtrack to get around to the down escalator. I heard several people giggle.
As I came off the down escalator I heard an employee say, “I don’t know but they are stationed around and helping customers.”
After about 15 minutes downstairs I went back up to see how things were on the street level section. As I stood near the digital video cameras a young male employee walked round the display table touching and counting aloud the cameras and an older female employee walked around touching each of the associates on the upper arm and saying, “Keep your cool, just keep your cool.”
I went back downstairs and walked toward the CD section. A short 40ish black woman with dreadlocks pulled back and tied behind her head started following me. We walked the length of the classic music aisle and turned the corner starting back past the country western CDs. She is walking about five feet behind me. I stop and just look across the top of the display toward the escalators. She stands there looking toward me for a few seconds then backtracks and walks up the next aisle directly through my field of vision. She is walking very stiffly with eyes pointed forward avoiding eye contact. At the end of the row she turns the corner back into my aisle again and starts toward me. She takes about two steps directly toward me. When I glance over in her direction I see that she has both her hands together at waist level. From between her hands there is a camera flash. She immediately turned and headed back toward customer service.
Agent Simmons
I was lingering near the audio equipment at one point when a middle-aged couple asked me if I knew the price of some speakers. I looked for a price tag and then read $99.99 labeled on the shelf by the product. I said “$99.99?” Unsure. And they pointed out, “No. That is the price of the wireless speakers”. “Oh”, I said “Maybe it’s been labeled wrong.” The man said, “Well, do you work here?” I said, “No,” but I thought they looked like good speakers. They looked puzzled.
Just then an actual Best Buy floor clerk approached me:
Employee: “You can’t talk to my customers”.
Simmons: “I’m just having a friendly conversation with these people”
Employee: “But you don’t work here.”
Simmons: “It’s a free country I feel I can speak with anybody I choose.”
Employee: “You’re playing some games.”
Simmons: “I’m just here to shop with my wife.”
Employee: “Yeah, you and your 50 friends?”
Simmons: “I don’t know anybody else here.”
Employee: “Yeah, you’re instigating (sic) our shirts.”
Yes, he said INSTIGATING.
I told him, “I’m only wearing what I wore this morning,” and walked away.
A little while later, an older woman with a handful of products walked past me at one point muttering to herself, “Everyone in this goddamned store is wearing a blue shirt and nobody knows a thing!”
Agent Chadwick
Saturday: I entered Conway discount store and spotted a fellow agent surveying the royal blue polo shirts. A funny side effect of this mission, I realized, would be a baffling increase in sales of royal blue polo shirts.
Sunday: Once we got the logistics and the group photos out of the way, Agent Todd situated himself around the corner from the store and waved us in individually to avoid a conspicuous glut of agents entering the store. As soon as I got inside, I overheard two blue-shirted Best Buy employees remark that this was something like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. I meandered slowly through the downstairs, putting on a blank stare so as to avoid eye contact with anyone. BB blue-shirts kept coming up to help me–apparently “can I help you?” is the only icebreaker they know, and they just walk away dejectedly if you say no.
A customer in the big-screen TV section asked, redundantly, if he could ask me a question. I admitted I didn’t work there, but offered to help anyway. He wanted to buy a large, flat-screen TV, but didn’t know whether to look at plasma models or LCDs. I told him that plasmas tend to be a lot more expensive and tend to have a limited lifespan (both true, I think?). He thanked me and wandered off with his girlfriend.
A little later, when I was loitering near the computers, a female customer got kind of snappy with me when I couldn’t tell her where the scanners were. I politely let her know that I didn’t work there and she got totally apologetic, like she’d insulted me by assuming I worked at Best Buy. Then an employee approached and asked (of course) if I needed any help. I said no, I was just waiting for my friend. “You mean all of your other friends you’re here with?” No, I said, just my one friend–I think she’s over looking at CDs. “Well, it’s hard to tell with everyone wearing these shirts.” Yeah, I told her, what a weird coincidence! She asked that I refrain from helping any customers and rushed off to ask other IE agents if they needed any help.
As time wore on, I could sense the growing confusion of the BB people–the yellow-shirts were out in force, the black-shirts were on their walkie-talkies. I imagine some off-duty regional manager was receiving a very confused call from BB personnel at this point.
Around 4:45 or so, Agent Todd signaled that it was time to go. On the way out, I saw Agent Shafer getting a talking-to by a cop. He was saying something about “trespassing” which I’m sure was a load of crap, but I figured it was better to leave than test whether that would hold up in court.
Agent Kendall
I got mixed up when buying my polo shirt and bought a Navy Blue one, so I wasn’t an exact match for an employee and was a little dejected when I showed up and was informed of the mission. As I approached the store a passer-by said how he was freaking out about the number of people with blue shirts. When I was cleared by Agent Todd to stagger in, I overheard employees outside smoking that they didn’t know what was going on but it was weird.
It seemed pretty immediate once I entered the store and took the escalator down that the management was freaking out. I overheard a woman first asking an agent what was going on and then discussing it with an employee about how weird it was. People were on their walkie-talkies asking what was going on, saying they were calling the cops, not to let them talk to the customers, etc. After awhile I was glad that I wasn’t a Royal Blue shirt, because although I’m pretty sure the employees knew I was with the group, since I wasn’t wearing the correct color, they couldn’t be 100% sure and I was able to blend in more to observe and listen.
At different times I tried to find a spot that wasn’t around any other agents, but this was impossible. So I mingled. A couple of times it got a little busy around me with employees so I started shopping, picking up a DVD or CD and looking at it. The most anyone said to me was to ask if I needed help, which I didn’t. Later I tried to hang out more near other agents to hear what was going on. Then it seems like every idling agent was being asked to leave so I again started shopping. I then got the cue from Agent Todd to leave the store and meet up a block away to hear the other stories. Now, I think it might be good to buy the right color shirt and go back on my own and shop to see if they think it’s happening again.
Agent Goldman
Some of my favorite quotes when I was in Best Buy:
Lady on a headset: “They’re coming in droves–what do I do?”
A dude walked up to me and said: “Are you guys demonstrating or protesting or something?” I said: “Oh, I’m just waiting for my girlfriend, she’s somewhere around here.” And he says: “So the shirts….?” And I said: “Shirts?” A security guard walked by and said to the dude, “Sir, this man does not even work here, do not ask him questions.”
And finally when I was “escorted” out by a large female manager:
Manager: “What are you doing can I help you?” [very sassy tone]
Me: I’m just waiting for a friend.
Manager: “Oh yeah? Where is your friend? Let’s go find your friend, I want to see him.”
Me: I’m not sure; I think he’s looking at flat-screen TV’s.
Manager: Okay. Either you’re shopping or you’re leaving.
Me: I suppose I’ll leave
Manager: That’s right. And I’m going to escort you out.
Agent Ciletti
I stopped in two stores to kill some time before heading to Best Buy. In West Elm, a chic home furnishings store, a woman flagged me down.
“Excuse miss, do you work here?” she said.
“No, but did you need help with something?” I said.
She started laughing then said, “Well, no, not if you don’t work here.”
I think she thought that I was crazy. After that I went to Staples. A young woman approached me.
“Do you know where I can find those things that hold business cards?” she said. I paused. She waited.
“I don’t work here,” I said.
“Oh, I thought you did,” she said, gesturing wildly to my outfit. “I’m sorry.”
I was about to leave when an old man and a young child approached me. The man was carrying a newspaper. He pointed to it and asked me if I could unlock the cabinet holding the item he needed. We walked over to the cabinet. I told him twice that I didn’t work there, but he just kept saying, “We’ll have to get the key.”
Finally I just walked off and left the store. I headed to Best Buy and once inside I took the escalator downstairs. Several people asked me for help. One man wanted to know about some software and started laughing when I said I didn’t work there. After about 15 minutes I went upstairs and stood by the front door. At this point the managers and security knew something was going on. A girl walked in and approached me.
“Do you know where I can find a USB port?” she said.
“What is that?” I said.
“It’s a computer thing,” she said.
“What does USB stand for?” I asked. She gave me a strange look.
“I don’t know,” she said. “You just plug it in…”
At that point a Best Buy employee wearing a black shirt came running over shouting “She doesn’t work here!” but the girl was already heading down the escalator.
He turned to me and said, “You can’t help her!”
“Oh, believe me,” I said. “I wasn’t helping her.”
“Who are you guys with?” he asked.
Shortly thereafter, I left the store.
Agent DLee
My favorite moment of the day happened within five minutes of entering the store. When I took a very visible (and helpful, I thought!) position near the base of the escalator, I was told by some yellow-shirted security tool with a corporate lackey by his side that I needed to leave the premises. I said sure, and was on my way out, when I was stopped by a guest who needed help finding some PS2 game. And with that, I was back on the job. I walked the guest over to the game section, bullshitted my way through assisting her (“No, that game’s got great graphics. Me? I play it all the time. Oh yeah. Sure. Why not?”), and then took up my new position there…where I remained, until the mass exodus of IE Agents. Next time: We need yellow shirts.
Agent Hamilton
My friend and I took a longer walking route to the Best Buy (at 23rd and 7th) so we could observe fellow agents entering the store. From across the street, it was very funny to watch because anyone would have assumed that the gaggles we kept seeing were actual Best Buy employees and they were on break together or something. We crossed the street and were instructed by Agent Todd when to enter the store. Once we were downstairs on the sales floor, I started seeing more and more blue-shirted people coming down the escalator, to the point where there was an IE agent at the end of every aisle. I decided I needed to walk around the store to get the full effect. I passed a couple of real employees, one of whom was saying “they must have NOTHING BETTER TO DO” and another of whom was saying “I’ma smack them all upside the head, that’ll make `em leave,” which was my first indication that we were in trouble. I started looking around for my friend, who I’d gotten separated from, but couldn’t find him, so finally I perched myself at the end of an aisle and waited. A customer came up to me and asked me where the DVD’s were. I said I didn’t know, because I didn’t work here, and he looked at me weirdly and moved on. I then realized that I was standing in the middle of the DVD section, so I have to think that my “customer” was another undercover IE Agent. Then I started getting approached by managerial types. One manager came up to me and said, “I don’t know what you and all your friends are doing here, but you need to leave.” I said, “What? I’m just waiting for someone, I don’t know…” and the guy goes, “Yeah, yeah, all of you are just ‘waiting for someone.'” Then I was ambushed by two more managers who started barking “Are you purchasing anything ma’am? Are you purchasing anything ma’am?” at me, and escorted me to the escalator, and amid my protests were telling me that I was causing a distraction by being dressed too much like them. This was the rule that they determined I was breaking: causing a distraction by being dressed too much like them. Hilarious.
Outside, I conferred with some other agents who’d been kicked out, one of whom reported that she’d overheard a manager saying, “The police are on their way.” Two minutes later, the police car pulled up. I feel guilty for wasting the time of New York’s Finest with our silly prank where absolutely nothing untoward was going to happen, but I didn’t feel quite as guilty when one of the policemen came up and started being, predictably, a total dick: “This is absolute nonsense. If you go back in there, you’re getting a summons and you’ll be going to jail.” He walked away and an agent said “Okay, so now we’ve established where the line is. You can go in once, but you can’t go in again.” I said, “Are we banned from Best Buy for life?” Everyone shivered. Then, someone else: “Where’s the nearest Blockbuster?”
I had to hang around for quite awhile waiting for my friend (who did a better job of hiding than I did – he was hanging out by the calculators waiting to tell unsuspecting customers who asked him a question, any question: “I’m sorry, I’m the calculator guy, and calculators are all I know about.”), so I got to hear lots of other stories, including one who said a customer was carping about us to a manager because “they won’t do anything and they won’t tell us what they’re protesting!” I also saw one guy who thought the gag was pretty funny, and on his way out of the store he said “Well done, guys.” So all in all, I think a success!
Agent Gregor
An old man asked me to help him get down a big box from a top shelf for him. I began to try to get the box, when I realized I was way too short to actually get it, and at best I’d knock it off the shelf. I then told him, “You know I don’t work here, sir?”
He was so confused, and just pointed at my shirt, began to laugh, and apologized. He went to another nearby ACTUAL-Best Buy employee, and said, “Looks like your twin!” The Best Buy employee did not share a laugh with him.
Agent Sara
I really enjoyed selling a phone to a customer, recommending different products, talking a couple out of buying a particular washing machine, and referring a customer to a Best Buy employee when I couldn’t quite help him with his question about a cord extension for his speakers. It was also really fun talking to the other employees and calling them by name as if they knew me- “Hey Randy this woman needs more help with…”
Agent Steinberg
Here are some bullet points from my observations:
1. I waited to enter the store so I’d be toward the tail end of the group. The first thing I heard was the manager walking rapidly through the store with her walkie. She was saying, “I want every available person on the floor right now…!”
2. Shortly thereafter, several of the more official-looking employees were walking rapidly around the store saying, apparently for the benefit of the ears of all blue shirts they did not recognize, “…the cops have been called…” They said this as they walked by me, as if in the middle of a conversation, and I understand they repeated this again for others to hear. A clever strategy on their part, I thought.
Soon afterward some of our agents walked around passing this information along to their fellows in an under-the breath way. (It was suggested afterward that one thing we could have done is informed the regular customers of this fact, as well: “Just wanted you to know the cops have been called, so don’t panic.”)
3. An employee, who seemed to dog me through the store, walked up beside me near the refrigerators. “So, you guys get bored or something?” he asked in an offhand, amiable way. I looked blank: “Huh?” He repeated it. “You guys all got bored and so you got blue shirts and came in here…?”
I said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand what you mean. If you mean, am I bored, it’s true I’m kind of bored because I’m waiting for someone.” He then changed tactics. “It’s really cold today, right, and raining like [some off-color phrase], isn’t it? Isn’t it a bit cold for the shirts? I mean, short sleeves and all?” I assured him it was now sunny and warm and he should check it for himself. As I was no help, he excused himself and went elsewhere.
4. I was asked “Can I help you” by several people over time. I found the best answer, besides my story that I was waiting for my wife shopping for baby supplies across the street at Burlington Coat Factory, was to actually ask some question about something in the store. “Is that a rear projection screen or is there a projector somewhere?” “Is that screen more or less effective in terms of glare if there’s bright sunlight?” That sort of thing. They would answer me and I’d say “thanks” and look off into the distance; they must have felt that somehow I had just proven my right to be in the store, because in each case they then left me alone.
5. For a bit I stationed myself at the foot of the escalator so the maximum number of store patrons would ask me for directions. This worked not so very well. Then I decided to freak out the fellow(s) watching me a bit and for some time I would check my watch, then go up the escalator and hang out at the top. After a few minutes, I checked the time again and went back down, as if there were some reason to be one place or the other. (Later other agents and I thought it would have been more fun if I’d touched my ear and looked like I was receiving instructions through an implant, nodded and proceeded to change position, rather than merely checking the watch.)
6. As I hung out on the top floor, hoping to overhear something being said by the employees talking with the cops, a guy in a black jacket walked up and warned me, “You’re going to have to leave. The police are going to start arresting people if you don’t leave.” I had been talking with an employee at that moment, and as the man moved away I looked at the employee with a confused expression and asked “Do we know him?” The employee said nothing. I asked, “Does he work here?” but the employee moved away. I still don’t know if the man worked for the store. He might have been an undercover agent of the store.
7. Another employee — or the same one; they all dress alike, I noticed — asked “You guys all together? You come as a group?” I gave him my patented blank look. “What do you mean? I’m just here by myself.” Like the other very confused employees, he wasn’t sure how to follow up on this line of questioning and went away.
8. Being as I was near the very front door of the store at 4:45, I was perhaps the first person told by the police to vacate. “Are you shopping?” said the policeman. “No, I’m just waiting.” “All the people wearing blue shirts who are not employees of Best Buy have to leave right now. You have to leave right now.” I obliged, looking inconvenienced.
Agent Firth
I was one of the earlier entries into the store and as I walked around trying to get a feel for the layout I overheard some employees already on alert. One of them was giving orders to the others, “Eyes open. Eyes open. Anyone wearing a blue shirt. Eyes open.’
I found a comfortable spot by a pillar in front of a TV. I hoped I could look like a bored employee to random customers and like a bored customer to random employees. Almost immediately somebody asked me for help finding a certain Bose speaker system. I told the customer I wasn’t sure but I’d get one of the women who work in this section to help him. I found two female employees chatting and said, “There’s a customer who wants help finding Bose speakers. Can you help him?” They seemed reluctant to, maybe they thought I was trying to give them orders or something, but one of them came and I introduced her to the customer then went back to my post.
One of the male employees was particularly take charge. He questioned me early on about what was going on. The typical “What are you up to?/I have no idea what you’re talking about” conversation. I did let him know that a customer had asked me about speakers and that I had found an employee to help and he said “Thank you” and stopped questioning me.
Another customer got my attention in a more rude way by snapping his fingers and saying hello then going into the aisle a few rows down before waiting for a response. So I followed him to where he was with his wife looking at cordless phones. He seemed to be ignoring me so I asked, “Were you talking to me?” and he replied “Yes” very annoyed and asked me something about the frequencies. So once again I hooked them up with an employee. I continued to do that for the rest of the questions I received.
One customer got particularly annoyed. She came up demanding, “Do you work here?” When I said I didn’t she said, “Then why are you wearing a blue shirt? You shouldn’t come here in that shirt.” She too got taken care of by a real employee. After some time the employee who had questioned and thanked me earlier came back really pissed. We had a conversation that went something like:
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“You’re kicking me out?”
“No, I’m not saying that.”
“Ok, then I can stay?”
“You’re not buying anything.”
“I’m waiting for my friend, just watching TV while I wait.”
“I’m asking you to leave.”
“Are you kicking me out?”
“No.”
This repeated in various versions until eventually he conceded with, “Fine, just do what you have to do.” Agent Todd also overheard him add, “Have fun,” as he walked away. A little while later a more managerial guy came by simply saying, “You can stay there, but just don’t help our customers.” Before I could respond he was already moving on to give the warning to the next blue shirt in sight. I grew tired of my spot and walked around. I went to a bathroom that I had seen on my initial scout of the store but when I got to it I noticed it had an Employees Only sign. I considered it for a moment, but I didn’t want to push my trespassing luck so I moved on.
The last and best-overheard moment was two employees who were actually getting a kick out of the whole thing saying, “These guys rock!” They started discussing some part they needed. “You’ve got to go to the warehouse and get it yourself… or send one of these guys to do it.” The other guy agreed he should send me.
Mission Accomplished.
OTHER RESOURCES:
Agent Nicholson’s Flickr photoset (highlights)
Agent Nicholson’s Flickr photoset (128 photos)
Look for more agent reports in the comments section, below. | {
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The gains to London property investors from leaving homes empty has far outstripped the penalties they face doing so, a Guardian investigation has learned.
Owners of homes with a combined value of over £500m in the ultra-rich borough of Kensington and Chelsea were fined a total of just £85,000 for leaving them empty last year, a survey of vacant properties suggests.
The figures can be reported due to the accidental release earlier this year of a confidential database, which for the first time identified hundreds of properties left empty for at least two years, as well as their owners.
The single largest penalty imposed on any of the 89 properties examined for the survey was just £1,426, even though the property – a £9m, six-storey mansion in the Notting Hill area – has increased in value by approximately £1.1m since it was acquired three years ago.
Polly Neate, the chief executive officer of the housing charity Shelter, said the data revealed how the empty homes premium – a penalty measure of an additional 50% council tax for long-term empty properties – was effectively “meaningless”.
“It’s much easier for [owners] to just incur the penalty,” Neate said. “That’s actually the easiest option for them; it should be the hardest option. It should be harder for them to keep the home empty than to do something with it.”
'It should be harder for them to keep the home empty than to do something with it' Polly Neate, Shelter
The problem of buy to leave, whereby investors acquire property and deliberately leave it empty so as not to incur any of the costs of renting, is not limited to Kensington and Chelsea. A buyer for the property company Savills described buy to leave as “endemic” in the capital’s most desirable areas. During the leadup to London’s mayoral election last year, both candidates pledged to clamp down on the problem.
No official figures on the practice is compiled. However, it is in the city’s most expensive boroughs that house prices have risen most sharply. While UK house prices rose by an average of 20% over the last decade, according to the Office for National Statistics, prices in Kensington and Chelsea rose by 65% over the same period.
Earlier this month it was reported that only ten of the households left homeless by the Grenfell Tower disaster had been permanently rehoused.
Investors examine a scale model of London at Mipim, the real estate trade show in Cannes on 14 March 2017. Photograph: Yann Coatsaliou/AFP/Getty
To assess the scale of the potential profits earned by owning empty homes, the Guardian compared the purchase price of the list of empty properties accidentally released by Kensington and Chelsea council with Zoopla estimates for what those properties are currently worth. The estimates are based on recent sales from other properties in the local area. Both data points were available for 89 of the properties on the list.
The data also reveals how much the owners of the properties were charged in empty homes premium as a penalty for leaving them empty for longer than two years.
The properties, which were bought for a combined total of £395m at different times, are currently worth £504m. The average increase in value was £1.2m; those who owned larger properties, or held them for longer periods, enjoyed even more lucrative returns.
One flat, worth £99,000 in 2001, is now worth an estimated £1.5m. Yet the owner of the property, an apartment in the attractive ward of Courtfield, was charged just £1,077 last year for leaving it empty.
In another case, a four-storey property in the Campden ward worth £1.8m in 2001 is now estimated to be worth over £6m. Neighbours said the house, a few hundred metres from Kensington High Street, had been empty “for years”. The owner was fined £1,062 last year for leaving it empty.
In total, the owners of the 89 properties now worth an estimated half a billion pounds were charged just £85,373 in empty homes premium last year, or 0.02% of the properties’ current combined estimated value.
Kensington’s recently elected Labour MP, Emma Dent Coad, accused prime property buyers and developers of profiteering from the country’s housing crisis. “This is a deliberate thing, to inflate prices ever further while shoving people on low incomes out on to the edges, next to railways lines, next to busy roads and at the end of industrial estates,” she said. “That’s not right for anybody.”
Calls for tougher sanctions have been made for some time from both Conservative and Labour politicians. In 2014, then mayor Boris Johnson said he thought 1,000% tax rates should be imposed. A report for the Greater London Authority earlier this year also called for central government to permit larger fines.
Such calls have thus far been unsuccessful. The government’s position is yet to change from the one expressed in a 2013 letter from then housing minister Brandon Lewis to Camden councillor Theo Blackwell, implying that tougher sanctions would be too severe a penalty for owners of empty properties. “The government believes the current empty home premium is appropriate and has no plans to make the changes you suggested,” he wrote, before going on to criticise “the last government’s punitive approach to empty homes” as “counterproductive”.
Additional reporting by Niamh McIntyre
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After months of hard work, there's a new stable Tor release series available! If you build Tor from source, you can now download the source code for Tor 0.3.2.9 from the usual place on the website. Packages should become available over the coming days, including (we hope) a Tor Browser release before the end of the month.
Tor 0.3.2.9 is the first stable release in the 0.3.2 series.
The 0.3.2 series includes our long-anticipated new onion service design, with numerous security features. (For more information, see our blog post at https://blog.torproject.org/fall-harvest.) We also have a new circuit scheduler algorithm for improved performance on relays everywhere (see https://blog.torproject.org/kist-and-tell), along with many smaller features and bugfixes.
Per our stable release policy, we plan to support each stable release series for at least the next nine months, or for three months after the first stable release of the next series: whichever is longer. If you need a release with long-term support, we recommend that you stay with the 0.2.9 series.
Below is a list of the changes since 0.3.1.7. For a list of all changes since 0.3.2.8-rc, see the ChangeLog file.
Changes in version 0.3.2.9 - 2018-01-09
Directory authority changes: Add "Bastet" as a ninth directory authority to the default list. Closes ticket 23910. The directory authority "Longclaw" has changed its IP address. Closes ticket 23592. Remove longclaw's IPv6 address, as it will soon change. Authority IPv6 addresses were originally added in 0.2.8.1-alpha. This leaves 3/8 directory authorities with IPv6 addresses, but there are also 52 fallback directory mirrors with IPv6 addresses. Resolves 19760. Add an IPv6 address for the "bastet" directory authority. Closes ticket 24394.
Major features (next-generation onion services): Tor now supports the next-generation onion services protocol for clients and services! As part of this release, the core of proposal 224 has been implemented and is available for experimentation and testing by our users. This newer version of onion services ("v3") features many improvements over the legacy system, including: a) Better crypto (replaced SHA1/DH/RSA1024 with SHA3/ed25519/curve25519) b) Improved directory protocol, leaking much less information to directory servers. c) Improved directory protocol, with smaller surface for targeted attacks. d) Better onion address security against impersonation. e) More extensible introduction/rendezvous protocol. f) A cleaner and more modular codebase. You can identify a next-generation onion address by its length: they are 56 characters long, as in "4acth47i6kxnvkewtm6q7ib2s3ufpo5sqbsnzjpbi7utijcltosqemad.onion". In the future, we will release more options and features for v3 onion services, but we first need a testing period, so that the current codebase matures and becomes more robust. Planned features include: offline keys, advanced client authorization, improved guard algorithms, and statistics. For full details, see proposal 224. Legacy ("v2") onion services will still work for the foreseeable future, and will remain the default until this new codebase gets tested and hardened. Service operators who want to experiment with the new system can use the 'HiddenServiceVersion 3' torrc directive along with the regular onion service configuration options. For more information, see our blog post at "https://blog.torproject.org/fall-harvest". Enjoy!
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At the Democratic National Convention, Khizr Khan, the father of a deceased Muslim U.S. soldier, asked Donald Trump if had ever read the Constitution and offered to loan Trump his. | {
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Last week ten international figures signed a manifesto titled "Let Catalans Vote" in support of the demand for a referendum on Catalan independence. Now a further 15 have joined them.
Nobel Prize laureates Desmond Tutu and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel top the list that was published last Saturday on the website Let Catalans Vote where the statement is available in Catalan, Spanish, English and French.
Some of the new names include people renowned for their commitment to the defence of human rights and free speech in China, Pakistan and South Africa, as well as western personalities from culture, such as Italian Nobel Prize winner Dario Fo and linguist Noam Chomsky.
The manifesto's main idea is that "the best way to solve legitimate internal disputes is to employ the tools of democracy". That's why the signatories point out that, only two days before the 9N vote and amid repeated attempts to block the participatory process, "to prevent the Catalans from voting seems to contradict the principles that inspire democratic societies".
The 15 new names who support the manifesto are: Italian playwright and Nobel Prize in Literature Dario Fo; American MIT linguist Noam Chomsky; Holland's Johan Cruyff, chosen best European footballer ever by FIFA; Chinese dissident Wu'erkaixi, who led the Tiananmen protests; South African writer Ronald Kasrils, former minister and anti-apartheid activist; Pakistani writer Tariq Alí, human rights activist; blogger and Chinese dissident Hu Jia, who received the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought; Italian writer and theatre director Andrea Camilleri; Irish writer Colm Tóibín; Czech architect Bořek Šípek, who rebuilt the Prague Castle; Latvian composer Mārtiņš Brauns, who wrote the anthem of the Baltic Way; "New Age" composer Pēteris Vasks, also from Latvia; Peter Sís, American writer; Saúl Hernández, Mexican rock musician; and Ignacio Ramonet, former director of 'Le Monde Diplomatique'.
The signatories call on "the Spanish government and institutions and their Catalan counterparts to work together to allow the citizens of Catalonia to vote on their political future and then negotiate in good faith based on the result".
These further 15 international personalities join the initial ten names who showed their support last Saturday: Nober Prize laureates Desmond Tutu and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel; movie director Ken Loach; sociologist Saskia Sassen; thinker Richard Sennett; writer António Lobo Antunes; literary critic Harold Bloom; Bill Shipsey, the founder of Art for Amnesty International; Hispanist scholar Paul Preston, and American diplomat Ambler Moss. | {
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Or your toothbrush for that matter. It might be a funny question to ask and frankly I would not have thought to ask it if I had not stumbled onto the solution by accident (ask in the comments if you want to know). It all comes down to resonance and harmonics. Resonance, harmonics, waves and frequencies are very pervasive concepts in physics and have to do with a lot more than sound but finding the note of a vibrating source is a great way to get a handle on the concepts. Plus it can be used to measure the frequency of many different objects, like hex bugs or even a cell phone ^_^.
As you can see in the video this is what you’ll need: an electric toothbrush (or anything that vibrates), 1 meter of string, digital scale (accurate to .1 gram or better), marker, metric ruler.
Experimental steps:
Turn on the toothbrush and let it hang from the string. Give a good 40cm to 50cm where possible. Tie the string to the head of the toothbrush. If you aren’t using a toothbrush be sure the string directly contacts the vibrating object (don’t put in in a cup or something too much loss). If you haven’t already cut your string to an easy to weigh length do so. For me it was 1 meter, but this could be longer or shorter as needed. Also depending on how heavy the toothbrush is you might want to use thread. Or if you’re measuring something like a Hex Bug it may not have enough power to get a larger string moving visibly (the tension may be too low). Weigh your toothbrush (or object) and record the value. Also weigh your string and write down its weight divided by the length. Mark the string where the knot touches the toothbrush. Since a little string was used to make the knot it’s important to make a mark so you don’t get the length wrong. While hanging the toothbrush from the string pinch the string with your other hand at the top and slowly move your fingers downward until the string suddenly spreads out into well defined lumps. Congratulations you found a resonance!While holding the string firmly take a marker and make marks at your fingers, the knot around the toothbrush and at any node points (to help count). Use different colors for different settings or numbers of nodes to keep from getting confused.
*Note the harmonic number is the number of lumps. You can also find the harmonic number by counting the nodes (including the endpoints) and subtracting. After you’re done untie the string and make a measurement of the length between where the knot was and where your fingers were, keeping track of the number of nodes involved. It’s also important to stretch the string a little to make sure the length is accurate for while it was under tension. Alternately if you have an assistant have one person continue to hang the toothbrush while the other takes a measurement. Once all your measurements are taken take a moment to convert them all to SI units before plugging them into the formulas below.
Data:
Setting T – Tension (weight of toothbrush) μ – Mass per unit length of string L – Length of the string n – harmonic number (number of lumps) f – frequency in Hz. regular 164.3 ±0.1g 1.3 ±0.1g 15.1 ±0.2cm 2 74.90 ±3.65Hz low 164.3 ±0.1g 1.3 ±0.1g 15.5 ±0.2cm 2 72.71 ±3.29Hz average 164.3 ±0.1g 1.3 ±0.1g 15.3 ±0.2cm 2 73.66 ±3.34Hz
Math:
So first things first we need to convert the values of grams into kilograms and centimeters to meters. The math for this is pretty straight forward, since there 1000g to a kilogram all one has to do is divide the number of grams by 1000 to get how many kilograms that is. Alternately you can just bump over the decimal point over to the left three spaces (since 1000 has three zeros) and you get the same thing. Similarly there 100 centimeters in a meter so simply divide the value of centimeters by 100 to get the equivalent amount in meters. Or again do the decimal trick but with two spaces this time. Or if all else fails just tell Google or Wolfram Alpha you want to convert grams to kilograms and centimeters to meters.
Now for the real math, here is the equation again:
This equation is the result of Mersenne’s Laws about the frequency produced by a stretched string, which is of course what the experiment does. There’s also another breakdown of the math on the wiki page for Vibrating String. However, other than that it’s pretty straight forward…well that is if you have a calculator handy, or if you would rather use Wolfram Alpha here’s a link for the basic way to type in the equation for Wolfram Alpha to read, and you can just replace the letters with the appropriate value.
Also here are links where I plug in my actual numbers. It might sort of look like I did the math twice and I sort of did, but this was part of keeping track of the measurement error (see the Error Analysis section of this post for more on that).
regular regular-error
lower lower-error
Average average-error
Error analysis:
As I mentioned “always keep track of your measurement error kids.” So here’s the game with measurement errors, we know that a given measurement is only accurate to plus or minus some amount and we are plugging this value into a rather complex equation, the goal is to arrange things by adding or subtracting the error amount to find the largest possible value and the smallest. Next sum the values and divide by two to get the average value. Finally take the difference of the two values and divide by two to get the size of the error. However, you should note that I estimated the measurement error in this project, I did not weigh and measure everything multiple times and derive a span of values to determine the mean and a standard deviation. I just guessed on what I thought I could trust myself on. This set up could be repeated many more times and compared to get a much better accuracy if one chose to.
Errors sources and mistakes:
In addition to simply repeating the measurements the accuracy of this test can be increased in a wide variety of ways. For instance where the string gets tied on can have an effect on the way the string vibrates do to internal oscillations. Also the stretchiness and thickness of the string also affect the speed of the wave in the string and thus the frequency. In a follow up experiment it would make sense to do this with a variety of different set-ups and compare them.
Results and Interpretation:
In the video I said my toothbrush was a D flat but after going through this in detail I would now say it’s solidly in the low D range. I think that I was looking at just the lower setting of the toothbrush when I recorded that part of the video. According to this piano key frequency chart on wikipedia the regular speed is a slightly sharp D2 and the lower speed is a slightly flat D2 and the average at 73.66 ±3.34Hz is pretty evenly a D2. On the other hand the accuracy of the setup means that I cannot really assess if the toothbrush is sharp or flat, I can just get a general note range.
Also like I mentioned in the video the sound you hear is more than just this driving frequency. There’s the low buzz that moves the toothbrush head but a whole set of higher harmonics (½ wave, ¼ wave, ⅛ wave etc.) that occur in the body of the toothbrush contributing to the overall sound. It’s these harmonics that are changing when the pitch of your toothbrush shifts around as you brush, because the driving frequency is resonating in your head.
Linkography:
http://www.usa.philips.com/c-p/HX9172_11/sonicare-flexcare-platinum-rechargeable-sonic-toothbrush/specifications
http://www.oralb.com/products/professional-care-3000-toothbrush/#features-0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_key_frequencies
http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/waves/Lesson-4/Mathematics-of-Standing-Waves
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/waves/string.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rmip26SnIlA | {
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Three men carrying "creepy clown" masks and a gun fled from the Westfield San Francisco Centre on Sunday afternoon, after being discovered by security guards during a routine grounds check.
The guards were reportedly walking through the emergency stairwells in the mall when they found the men, according to the San Francisco Examiner. San Francisco police spokesman Officer Carlos Manfredi told the Examiner SFPD was informed about the incident at about 3:15 p.m. and confirmed that the masks were of the "creepy clown" variety.
"They saw three suspects, two clown masks that they were holding, and one of the three brandished a gun," Manfredi told the Examiner.
The suspects were gone by the time SFPD arrived on the scene. Police said that the gun was not pointed towards the security and they they believed the suspects were possibly getting ready for a robbery inside the mall, KRON4 reported.
Initial reports said the men were wearing the masks outside the mall, but were later corrected by Manfredi via Twitter to say that the men were merely carrying the masks with them.
No arrests were reported.
On Aug. 10, the body of a 28-year-old man was found in the emergency-exit stairwell at that same mall, and while initially investigated as a homicide, has since been reclassified as a suspicious death. In addition, that part of Market Street between Fourth and Fifth streets was found to generate the most crime reports than any other block in the city.
This story also comes on the heels of a wave of "creepy clown" stories that have been happening around the country. The Bay Area has had its share of scary clown reports, from a supposed attempted kidnapping by a clown in Concord, to menacing social media threats made to Oakland, Fairfield and Sacramento schools.
SFGATE has reached out to the San Francisco Police Department and will update this article when they have more information. | {
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Zunächst die gute Nachricht, die der stellvertretende Direktor im Hauptverband der Sozialversicherungsträger dem KURIER vorab zukommen ließ: „Es wurde lange behauptet, dass in Österreich 100.000 Menschen ohne Krankenversicherung leben. Wir können nun belegen, dass diese Zahl doch deutlich niedriger ist.“
Alexander Hagenauer beruft sich auf eine Studie, die der Hauptverband beim Eu- ropäischen Zentrum für Wohlfahrtspolitik in Auftrag gegeben hat. Diese wartet bereits seit Monaten auf ihre Veröffentlichung. Womit die gute Nachricht einen ersten zarten Schönheitsfehler erleidet.
Der nächste folgt sofort: Unbestritten ist für viele Experten, dass dank der Einführung der bedarfsorientierten Mindestsicherung viele zuvor Nicht-Versicherte Anspruch auf eine medizinische Versorgung erhalten haben. Doch dann sagt Hagenauer: „Die Versorgung ist heute in Österreich lückenlos geschlossen.“ Und pickt eine Zahl aus der neuen Studie heraus: Demnach wären im Jahresschnitt nur 4000 Menschen ohne Krankenversicherung auszumachen. | {
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Tate Martell only lasted at Ohio State for two seasons, but the former five-star recruit appears to be finding his way at Miami.
The former Buckeyes quarterback, who transferred out following the 2018 season, has landed with the Hurricanes and is eligible to play right away.
Martell, who’s competing for the starting job at Miami, is certainly doing well off of the field.
The quarterback confirmed this weekend that he’s dating Instagram model Kiki Passo.
good thing you slid in my DM’s pic.twitter.com/VyehGO1z7A — TATE MARTELL (@TheTateMartell) July 7, 2019
Passo, a Miami native, has more than 800,000 followers on Instagram.
Miami is set to open its season on Saturday, Aug. 24.
The Hurricanes are opening their season against Florida. | {
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