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In Barkan, Israelis and Palestinians work together in peace; owner says Palestinian workers will suffer the most from anti-Israel boycotts.
The European Union is set to decide whether to label goods produced by Jewish-owned business in Judea and Samaria, in a bid to allow consumers to single out such products for a "limited boycott" of Israel.
European officials hope the move will place pressure on Israel to expel Jews living in those areas, as a prelude to establishing a Palestinian Arab state.
But Amir Dibon, owner of Shamir Salads in Barkan, Samaria, says those talking about boycotting "settlement goods" don't actually understand the realities on the ground.
140 of his 150 employees are Palestinian, he said, and noted that a boycott of a company such as his would hurt them - and other Palestinians working in Israeli businesses - first and foremost.
The Palestinian Authority has few labor laws, which means employees are often mistreated and paid paltry salaries. As a result many Palestinian Arabs struggle to make a living under its corrupt rule - preferring to work at neighboring Israeli-owned businesses.
"They support their families with the salaries they get here. They get paid here four times more than they'd get paid in Ramllah or Shechem. It's the only way they can support their families."
Many of his employees have worked their entire professional lives at his company, with several now serving in management positions.
Those advocating for a boycott "know nothing of what's going on here," he emphasized, noting the cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians that is often unreported.
"We've worked together for a long time... for more than 20 years... we work together." | {
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wallets, pouches, totes, and more
made from repurposed textiles
For the sassy yet classy lady! | {
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Waistcoated and understated, tournament’s paragon of civility is having his moment
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This article is more than 2 years old
Tights, capes and masks are so last season. Heroes in 2018 wear Marks & Spencer waistcoats.
Gareth Southgate, now inseparable from his signature navy waistcoat, light-blue shirt and striped tie combination, has emerged as an understated paragon of civility at the 2018 World Cup.
From social media devotion to thinkpieces about positive masculinity, the England manager is enjoying a swell of support and adoration as he leads his squad closer to the trophy. Geoff Hurst, whose hat-trick against West Germany helped England win the 1966 World Cup, has likened Southgate to Sir Alf Ramsey, saying his leadership has “engendered a good team spirit”.
Gareth Southgate’s science rockets England towards the moon | Barney Ronay Read more
As England’s campaign in Russia got underway, Southgate showed himself to be a reflective soul in an interview with ITV that encapsulated his world view.
Asked about whether supporters were “connecting” with the team, rather than offering platitudes, the manager started musing on modern English identity.
“We’re a team with our diversity and youth that represents modern England and in England we’ve spent a bit of time being lost as to what our modern identity is, and I think as a team we represent that modern identity and hopefully people can connect with us.”
He added: “We have a chance to affect something bigger than ourselves.”
ITV Football (@itvfootball) Gareth Southgate: "We're a team with our diversity and our youth that represent modern England"#England #ThreeLions pic.twitter.com/loLjJrgdFC
The tournament has served as a platform for reminding football fans and non-fans of the kindness and generosity Southgate has shown.
Social media is awash with memes, tweets and posts praising the 47-year-old, including a hashtag #GarethSouthgateWould.
Examples included Southgate writing personally to fans and devoting his time to young players.
Tom Duggan (@TomDuggan29) #GarethSouthgateWould write back to the the 14yr old me after Euro96, and then when I am introduced to him 21 years later at a conference, thanks me for my support again! pic.twitter.com/08Tfc0OrtM
Hackney Laces (@hackneylaces) #GarethSouthgateWould come and spend 3 full hours with a teenage girls football club in Hackney when he was only meant to stay for 30 mins. pic.twitter.com/Fw9msdgiLi
Others suggested the support for Southgate reflected a desire for genuine role models.
Nick Metcalfe (@Nick_Metcalfe) All this Gareth Southgate love - well deserved for a great bloke - only says to me how much we’re crying out for basic decency in our leading public figures. We’re tired of braggarts and buffoons and Gareth is helping to fill the void.
Of course Southgate’s backstory gives his refreshed celebrity an edge. His saved penalty in the Euro 96 semi-final against Germany became one of English football’s most infamous moments.
After last week’s game against Colombia, Southgate offered a hug to Mateus Uribe, who missed his spot-kick against England.
The tributes continued to come on Sunday, with Andrew Marr presenting his eponymous current affairs programme on BBC One in a Southgate waistcoat and tie.
The Andrew Marr Show (@MarrShow) Coming up... @AndrewMarr9 with his own tribute to England manager Gareth Southgate's dress style after Saturday's win #ThreeLions #WorldCup18 pic.twitter.com/qjQCWZHSYj
Other fans are following suit.
Hugh Griffin (@Whooooweeee) Arise Sir Southgate.... I think the next England kit should have a waistcoat!!! pic.twitter.com/5Z4mR1WKfM
Neil Rowe, from Surrey, England, is enjoying a boom in popularity off the back of the England manager’s run of glory. Rowe’s a Southgate lookalike.
Rowe, who is in Russia, told the BBC: “Some fans here in Russia believe I am the real one. Some Colombians were having a go at me yesterday, saying well done to your team for beating us.” | {
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河南省の三自教会の教会堂が、またしても当局の取り壊しに遭った。教会が国旗の掲揚と国歌の斉唱を拒んだことが原因だ。
この三自教会の信徒は、自分たちの礼拝堂でクリスマス祝賀会をたった1回しか開けなくなるとは思いもしていなかった。このクリスマス祝賀会の後、教会堂は政府により取り壊された。河南省偃師市大口鎮にある、この董村教会堂は、現地政府の認可を受けた後、2017年12月に建てられた。
現地の宗教局は教会堂に対して、国旗を掲揚し、国歌を斉唱するよう、繰り返し強要したが、教会はそのたびに拒絶した。今年4月、政府はこの教会堂の強制撤去を命じ、信徒は激しく抵抗した。ある高齢の信徒はブルドーザーの前で横になって、死んで抗議しようとした。政府は何度も教会堂を強制的に取り壊そうとし、最終的に目的を果たした。
9月13日早朝、偃師市宗教局、公安局は現地政府と連携して、車両50台あまりと、警官約800人を出動させた。そして教会に通じる各交通要所や交差点を封鎖し、誰も出入りできないようにした。
動画: 偃師市大口鎮の董村三自教会堂が破壊される
信徒が強制撤去に抵抗しないよう、公安局長は他のグループの者に教会責任者を逮捕し、現地の派出所に収監するよう指示した。教会堂を守りに来た20人以上の信徒は、こう聞かされて、教会堂の玄関口に跪き、泣き叫んで祈った。すると、迷彩服を着た警察が信徒たちを無理やり近くの工場に連行し、そこに閉じ込めた。
その後、ショベルカー2台と、大型ブルドーザー1台が教会堂に入ってきた。ショベルカーが教会に突っ込むと、ガラスが割れる音とドリルの音とともに、教会堂が徐々に崩れ落ちた。この取り壊しは17時間近くにも及んだ。そして、180万元以上（2,900万円）以上かけて新しく建てた教会は平地と化してしまった。
信徒たちは17時間拘留された後に釈放された。その時、目の前には、かつての美しい教会堂ではなく、破壊された後の瓦礫しかなかった。信徒たちは泣き崩れた。多くの時間と金銭をこの教会堂に費やしていたのだ。信徒たちは教会堂が破壊されることを知ったときも、郷政府（村役場）に連名で文書を送り、老人ホームに改造してもよいので教会堂の建物は残してほしいと切実に訴えたが、残念なことに、すべては無駄であった。
江涛による報告 | {
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Charred remains of a flatbread baked about 14,500 years ago in a stone fireplace at a site in northeastern Jordan have given researchers a delectable surprise: people began making bread, a vital staple food, millennia before they developed agriculture.
Slideshow ( 2 images )
No matter how you slice it, the discovery detailed on Monday shows that hunter-gatherers in the Eastern Mediterranean achieved the cultural milestone of bread-making far earlier than previously known, more than 4,000 years before plant cultivation took root.
The flatbread, likely unleavened and somewhat resembling pita bread, was fashioned from wild cereals such as barley, einkorn or oats, as well as tubers from an aquatic papyrus relative, that had been ground into flour.
It was made by a culture called the Natufians, who had begun to embrace a sedentary rather than nomadic lifestyle, and was found at a Black Desert archeological site.
“The presence of bread at a site of this age is exceptional,” said Amaia Arranz-Otaegui, a University of Copenhagen postdoctoral researcher in archaeobotany and lead author of the research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Arranz-Otaegui said until now the origins of bread had been associated with early farming societies that cultivated cereals and legumes. The previous oldest evidence of bread came from a 9,100-year-old site in Turkey.
“We now have to assess whether there was a relationship between bread production and the origins of agriculture,” Arranz-Otaegui said. “It is possible that bread may have provided an incentive for people to take up plant cultivation and farming, if it became a desirable or much-sought-after food.”
University of Copenhagen archeologist and study co-author Tobias Richter pointed to the nutritional implications of adding bread to the diet. “Bread provides us with an important source of carbohydrates and nutrients, including B vitamins, iron and magnesium, as well as fiber,” Richter said.
Abundant evidence from the site indicated the Natufians had a meat- and plant-based diet. The round floor fireplaces, made from flat basalt stones and measuring about a yard (meter) in diameter, were located in the middle of huts.
Arranz-Otaegui said the researchers have begun the process of trying to reproduce the bread, and succeeded in making flour from the type of tubers used in the prehistoric recipe. But it might have been an acquired taste.
“The taste of the tubers,” Arranz-Otaegui said, “is quite gritty and salty. But it is a bit sweet as well.” | {
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Looks like a cat belong to one of those brooding single women who want children so bad, they dress up their cats, resulting in a rather perturbed feline. | {
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On the 20th June, barely six weeks after the surprise Conservative victory in the general election, I pushed my wife in her wheelchair with 250,000 others as we marched from the Bank of England to the Houses of Parliament in protest against the new government’s austerity measures. Four days later a group of disabled people interrupted Prime Minister’s Questions, and occupied the central lobby of the Palace of Westminster before delivering a letter to the Speaker of the House of Commons [ii]. They were protesting against government plans to end the Independent Living Fund on 30th June.
This has provided essential support to enable the disabled to live with dignity in the community. Two days later another group of protestors occupied Streatham Job Centre in South London, in protest against a scheme that frames unemployment as a psychological disorder [iii] [iv]. This pilot, which the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) intends to roll out across the country, involves ‘psychological’ assessments, online cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and other forms of ‘therapy’ to force unemployed people with common mental health problems back to work. A team of mental health professionals responsible for IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies) have been relocated to the job centre to help staff ‘assess’ and ‘treat’ claimants.
Many of us in the U.K. are mad – mad with anger at the injustice and cynicism of a political system that is turning the gap between rich and poor into an unbridgeable chasm. Mad with anger because the most vulnerable in society are now paying the price for a political ideology – neoliberalism – with their lives. We are mad and angry because they are blamed for failings that are not of their making, but which originate in the system under which we live.
The campaigning group Black Triangle publish a list of deaths related to UK welfare reforms. Up to October 2014 69 such deaths were recorded; most were suicides[v]. Another group, Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) published a list of 22 suicides or attempted suicides by disabled people related to the detested Work Capability Assessment (WCA). Introduced in 2011 the WCA moved hundreds of thousands of people (most with mental health problems) off incapacity benefit onto Job Seeker’s Allowance or training programmes.
The DWP undertook a secret internal investigation into deaths and suicides of people on benefits, but has so far refused to make this public [vi]. A freedom of information request to DWP by independent journalist and blogger Natalie Leal has revealed that nearly half of 49 of these deaths were people on Employment and Support Allowance. This means they had illness or disabilities [vii].
Suicides and other deaths are the tragic tip of an iceberg of misery and suffering experienced by people forced to rely on benefits either because there are no suitable jobs available, or because they are unfit for work. The government is exercising an increasingly punitive and authoritarian regime against people on benefits. Vulnerable people with disabilities, physical and mental health problems are left destitute by sanctions that suspend or end their benefits if they fail to comply with orders to attend ‘training courses’ or keep a job seeker’s diary.
The Manchester Citizens’ Advice Bureau’s report on benefit sanctions involved 376 respondents from all over the UK [viii]. Claimants were forced to cut down on food and heating, borrow money from family and friends, use food banks, or scrounge for food from skips. Others were forced to beg. Sanctioning severely affected the mental and physical well being of respondents. Some had attempted suicide or contemplated it after their benefits were withheld. The report paints a picture of lives already permeated by hopelessness plunged into destitution and despair by sanctions
The recently elected Conservative government’s response has been to reinvigorate its pursuit of austerity by a further £12bn benefit cuts [ix], a 2-year freeze on benefits, and a household benefit cap of £23,000 (down from £26,000)[x]. Benefit cuts antedate the austerity measures that followed the global banking crisis of 2008, and have been enthusiastically taken up by a succession of governments extending back to Margaret Thatcher. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (a non-political organisation) found that whilst the total amount spent on disability benefits has fallen, the proportion of claimants with mental health problems has increased from around 50% to 60% from 1999 to 2014, posing ‘… an increasingly central issue for future disability policy reform.’ (p. 175).[xi] It’s not only as bad as you think it is, but it’s going to get a damn sight worse.
The Coalition Government’s austerity programme had a disproportionate impact on the most vulnerable people in society. The Centre for Welfare Reform[xii] found that the impact of austerity, including benefit cuts and sanctions, cuts to housing benefit, and cuts to local government fell disproportionately heavily on disabled people. The government refused to carry out a cumulative impact assessment on the effect of these changes on the lives of the disabled. A report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission[xiii] found that tax and welfare reforms had had a more negative impact on families with at least one disabled person, particularly a disabled child, and especially in low-income families.
Here, I want to examine the ideology of neoliberalism which, I will argue, is largely responsible for the terrible plight of our most vulnerable citizens. Through it, inequality and injustice have become ineradicably woven into the fabric of society. I also want to describe how CBT and other forms of therapy are being recruited into job centres in an attempt to coerce even more people back to work, as part of this rampant political ideology.
What is Neoliberalism?
Most people probably believe neoliberalism has little relevance to their lives. I disagree. It has become the dominant ideology affecting every one of us through its economic impact, and through this the choices that its opens up or, more usually, closes down for us. Over the last thirty years this ideology has forced us to think and act in ways that suit its interests rather than the democratic interests and concerns of ordinary citizens.
The Anglo-US academic David Harvey defines neoliberalism as ‘…the theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.’[xiv] (pp 1-2)
This means the power of the state is cut right back and its role limited to the creation of those institutional frameworks necessary to support free markets. This includes guaranteeing market functioning, and having the necessary legal structures to secure private property rights. If appropriate markets do not exist, the state may have a role in creating them through privatisation of public utilities. In addition, neoliberal economic policy requires the deregulation of financial markets to encourage competition. The state cuts back on or withdraws altogether from welfare and social provision.
This ideology has become so pervasive, so deeply embedded in our culture, that it is now widely seen as the ‘common-sense’ way of understanding our lives and the world in which we exist. It is taken to be so self-evident that it is extremely difficult to challenge. To question it is to attract ridicule, and those who dissent from it risk marginalisation. To question the meaning of ‘reform’ or ‘progress’ is, as Owen Jones points out[xv], to risk being portrayed as being in the pay of reactionary vested interests, such as the unions or other left-wing organisations. This is indeed ironic given the vested interests served by neoliberal ideology that are never questioned or called to account.
Harvey describes the origins and modus operandi of neoliberalism, and here I will summarise those elements that are useful in understanding why so many of us are angry. These elements concern individual freedom versus collective responsibility, social justice and democracy, and the role of technology.
Individual freedom versus collective responsibility
The notion of individual freedom (hence ‘liberal’) lies at the heart of neoliberal ideology. The policies pursued by Margaret Thatcher in UK in the 1980s exemplify neoliberalism’s prioritisation of individual freedom over collective responsibility. To confront the economic problems of the 1970s (stagflation) Thatcher slashed spending on welfare, and privatised public utilities. She also privatised social housing by allowing council (local authority) tenants to purchase their council homes. Through the bitter and divisive Miners’ Strike of 1984, she engineered a confrontation between Britain’s most powerful union (the National Union of Mineworkers) and in victory effectively dismantled union power. She also reigned in the power of local government and professional groups and their associations. These changes were epitomised by her view that ‘There is no such thing as Society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.’[xvi] Harvey writes thus of neoliberalism: ‘All forms of social solidarity were to be dissolved in favour of individualism, private property, personal responsibility, and family values.’ (p 23). One consequence of this is the view that individual human beings stand or fall by their personal responsibility for their own decisions, actions, and choices.
If the origins of personal success or failure are to be understood solely as a property of an individual who is free to choose and act, then it follows that the consequences of his or her decisions and actions have nothing to do with the wider social and systemic contexts in which that individual is located. Those who are seen to be industrious, hard-working, or who invest financial resources in their betterment through education and qualifications, or who profit from successful investments, or who have won the national lottery, are held out as aspirational models for the rest of us. They are seen to be virtuous and deserve their success. This is how we should see ourselves. This is reflected in the popularity in Britain of the TV series Dragon’s Den, in which young entrepreneurs have an opportunity to present their business plans to a group of wealthy potential investors.
In contrast, personal failure is just that – a property of the individual. It has nothing to do with an increasingly unfair society in which the net direct effect of the Coalition government’s tax and benefit policies from 2010 to 2014 increased both absolute and relative poverty [xvii]. Instead poverty is believed to arise because the individual has the wrong attitude, a faulty set of beliefs, or a lack of ‘positive affect’. It has nothing to do with the socio-economic circumstances in which the person exists. Neither for that matter is it related to personal stories grounded in oppression, racism and abuse. This idea, that personal failings are the primary determinants of poverty, is central to neoliberal ideology. It is being used to justify the U.K. government’s recruitment of psychological therapies in its mission to force ever more people off benefits.
Social justice and democracy
Harvey argues that there is a fundamental incompatibility between individual freedom and social justice in neoliberalism. He puts it this way: ‘Pursuit of social justice presupposes social solidarities and the willingness to submerge individual wants, needs, and desires in the cause of some more general struggle for, say, social equality or environmental justice.” (p 40) As an example he cites the New York fiscal crisis of 1975 as a key moment that established the principle that the integrity of financial institutions trumped the well-being of citizens. It meant that the role of government was to maintain an orderly society in which markets could flourish, even though this was not in the best interests of the citizens.
There is also an uneasy relationship between neoliberalism and democracy. The most persuasive argument here has can be found in Noam Chomsky’s Profit over People [xviii]. Although politicians readily resort to favourite sound-bites on the value of freedom and democracy when for some reason these appear to be under attack, the will of the majority can and does conflict with individual freedom. In Capitalism and Freedom Milton Friedman[xix], the high priest of neoliberalism (and one of Margaret Thatcher’s heroes), argued that making a profit is the essence of democracy. If you agree with this then it follows that a government that implements anti-market policies is antidemocratic. This is why neoliberal governments are intent on restricting their activities to the protection private property and the enforcement of contracts. True political debate is stifled, and limited to matters of no real consequence. This creates an apathetic and cynical electorate, which is exactly what we have in U.K. at present. Democracy becomes as an optional extra, a luxury that can be afforded as long as markets are functioning and creating affluence. Harvey describes how this gives rise to a preference for governance by experts and elites, rather than through parliament and the ballot box. Ultimately neoliberalism has to resort to authoritarianism to impose the will of the elite few over the many: ‘Faced with social movements that seek collective interventions, therefore, the neoliberal state is itself forced to intervene, sometimes repressively, thus denying the very freedoms it is supposed to uphold.’ (Harvey: p69)
Science and technology in neoliberalism:
Science and technology play an important role in neoliberalism. Information and communication technology are essential for the efficient running of markets. However they both represent the means of production of new knowledge, processes and products, which through the compulsion of the market become fetishised. We are constantly pressurised to buy the latest gadget containing the latest technology (did I really need to upgrade my iPhone 4 to a 5?). Technological products and scientific knowledge are subject to patents and intellectual property rights in order to maximise profit. At the same time the idea that there is a scientific or technological fix for all human and social problems has become enormously popular. We no longer expect governments to fix unfair societies. Instead we expect experts to rectify malfunctioning individuals. Even here there are destabilising influences. Technological advances take place so rapidly that they outstrip the ability of markets to keep up with them. Pharma constantly reinvents old drugs for new, made up, illnesses [xx]. The grotesque debasement of scientific medicine described so powerfully in Robert Whitaker and Lisa Cosgrove’s recent book [xxi] could only have arisen in societies that value markets and profit over scientific rigour, accountability, transparency and honesty.
Neoliberalism and Authoritarianism
In the U.K. the new government’s benefits reductions are taking an authoritarian turn. We have already seen that despite superficially embracing democracy, neoliberal governments rapidly become authoritarian when they sense resistance, especially if this interferes with markets, or involves spending more money on welfare. We have seen too that one consequence of authoritarianism is benefit sanctions, but this is now assuming a more disturbing form.
Lynne Friedli and Robert Stearn[xxii] have examined in detail how psychology, clinical psychology and therapy have become incorporated into government action directed against disabled people on benefits. A range of psychological ‘assessments’ and ‘interventions’ threaten to control the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens with disabilities and health problems. This occurs through conditionality (i.e. sanctions)and workfare, i.e. being forced to work ‘voluntarily’ for private sector firms or social enterprises in order to be eligible to receive benefits. But worst of all is the use of political psychocompulsion and positive affect.
Friedli and Stearn use the term psychocompulsion, but as this is primarily a political act, the use of the qualifying adjective ‘political’ is justifiable. It takes the form of the imposition of psychological explanations for an individual’s unemployment. The assessments and interventions that are being piloted in Streatham Job Centre are predicated upon the assumption that unemployment originates in ‘faulty beliefs’ about the reasons the person is unemployed, and that these beliefs result in faulty attitudes and behaviours, especially so-called benefit dependency. This fits with the value attached to personal choice and agency in neoliberal ideology. Consequently unemployed people end up on benefits long-term, and resist seeking paid employment. This ‘theory’ gives rise to a variety of assessments aimed at identifying the faulty beliefs and practices in order to ‘rectify’ them through ‘therapy’ aimed at modifying these beliefs as well as the person’s attitude and personality. Psychologists and therapists are recruited into ‘…monitoring, modifying and punishing people who claim social security benefits or research into the impact of mandatory positive affect on an expanding range of ‘unproductive’ or failing citizens: those who are out of work, not working enough, not earning enough and/or failing to seek work with sufficient application’. [Friedli and Stearn, 42]
Political psychocompulsion and workfare draw heavily on the strengths-based literature of positive psychology, especially notions of confidence, optimism and self-efficacy. The ‘science’ of positive psychology has unconscionably baleful origins. It can be traced back to the 1960s work of the American psychologist Seligman on learned helplessness. He gave repeated electric shocks to caged dogs in one of two experimental conditions. In the first there was a lever in the cage which if pressed by the dog prevented the shock. The dogs very quickly learnt to press the lever and avoid the shock. In the second there was no lever and there was nothing the animals could do to avoid the shock. Very quickly these animals became stressed out, anxious and withdrawn. In other words they appeared chronically depressed.
Positive affect has in recent years become a key element in government action to manage people with complex problems. One way of understanding these developments is that they represent attempts by the state to govern and manage disabled subjectivities, so that ‘… liberal subjects’ capabilities, inclinations and desires are in accord with values and expectations that are identified as already given by a civil society centred on the labour market.’ (Friedli & Stearn: 42)
In reality the implementation of these approaches is trite and shallow in the extreme, and would be risible were they not so humiliating and degrading for those forced to endure them. Izzy Koksal, an activist and blogger, has written about her experiences of courses based on positive affect[xxiii], which were ‘…simply one long motivational talk with very little actual real content…[we were told that] if we believed we could get a job then it would happen. It was simply our mindset that was the barrier…’ She goes on to describe how claimants were told repeatedly the reason they were unemployed was because of self-created barriers.
Conclusions
Positive affect and cognitive therapy focus on ‘deficits’ that are supposed to be a property of the individual; they thus deny the reality of experiences of distress whose origins are to be found in the deeply inequitable and oppressive conditions found society. This is utterly deceitful and beggars belief. We know that there are very close links between income inequality and a wide range of complex problems – reduced life expectancy, poor mental and physical health, suicide rates, and family dysfunction [xxiv] [xxv]. This raises important ethical and moral questions. There can be no moral justification for trying to force people to believe that things aren’t really as bad as they believe them to be, and that things really can be better for them, if only they change their ‘mind-set’. Even more so when the real agenda is to reduce spending on benefits as part of the ideology of neoliberalism. The reality is that people’s lives are tragic, blighted by misery, suffering and oppression. The Streatham pilot scheme, and the plans that follow on from this are an abuse of therapy that lets government off the hook in two ways. First it can claim that it is taking positive action to help get people off benefits and back to work (probably on zero-hours contracts). Second the action it takes blames the unemployed and disabled, not the conditions created by neoliberalism.
This is a direct consequence of the government’s will to impose this ideology on us all. The disabled, people with physical and mental health problems are in a war of attrition. They are slowly being ground down by austerity. People struggle to make ends meet; they try their best to live, not extravagantly but with self-respect and decency, but instead they are demeaned, blamed, pathologised, and driven into the arms of mental health professionals in job centres. It is important to remember that this agenda is driven by government, not psychiatrists or psychologists.
As a result lives are being lived in fear of the rattle of the letterbox and the fluttering buff envelope that crashes as a hammer blow on the floor. Voices shriek abuse at voice hearers: ‘Dole scum!’, ‘Life unworthy of life!’, ‘Parasite!’ repeating the stigmatising and abusive rhetoric that fills the popular press, and media poverty porn like Benefit Street [xxvi]. What prospects can there be for recovery (whatever that is) when the world despises and humiliates you? Yes indeed, they really are out to get you, and it is as bad as you think.
Acknowledgement
Whilst I alone am responsible for the views expressed in this blog, I am grateful to a number of colleagues whose lives and experiences have shaped my thinking in recent times. I am especially grateful to have had the opportunity to participate in discussions on the Recovery in the Bin Face Book group, and to my K9 colleague.
References:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/jun/20/anti-austerity-demonstrations-live accessed on 28th June 2015
[ii] http://dpac.uk.net/2015/06/the-letter-disabled-people-stormed-parliament-to-deliver/ accessed on 28th June 2015
[iii] http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jun/26/mental-health-protest-clinic-jobcentre-streatham accessed on 28th June 2015
[iv] https://www.madinamerica.com/2015/06/protesters-march-on-job-center-over-forced-mental-health-therapy/ accessed 29th June 2015
[v] http://blacktrianglecampaign.org/2014/10/21/uk-welfare-reform-deaths-updated-list-october-21st-2014/ accessed on 22nd June 2015
[vi] http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/dec/14/dwp-inquiries-benefit-claimant-suicides accessed on 28th June 2015
[vii] http://natalieleal.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/dwp-secret-reviews-into-benefit-deaths.html accessed on 28th June 2015
[viii] Manchester CAB (2013)
Punishing Poverty?
A review of benefits sanctions and their impacts
on clients and claimants. Accessed at http://www.manchestercab.org/news_more.asp?news_id=19 23rd June 2015
[ix] http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/7762 Accessed on 22nd June 2015.
[x] Peter Beresford (2015) For service users who rely on benefits, the Queen’s speech brought no relief. The Guardian 28th May 2015. Accessed at http://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2015/may/28/service-users-rely-benefits-queens-speech-no-relief-social-care-nhs on 23 June.
[xi] Banks, J., Blundell , R. and Emmerson, C. (2015) Disability Benefit Receipt and Reform: Reconciling Trends in the United Kingdom. Journnal of Economic Perspectives, 29, 2, 173–190. Accessed at http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.29.2.173 on 22nd June 2015.
[xii]http://www.centreforwelfarereform.org/uploads/attachment/403/counting-the-cuts.pdf accessed 23 June 2015
[xiii]http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/publication_pdf/Cumulative%20Impact%20Assessment%20full%20report%2030-07-14.pdf accessed 23 June 2015
[xiv] Harvey, D (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford, Oxford University Press
[xv] Jones, O. (2014) The Establishment: And how they get away with it. Allen Lane, London.
[xvi] (Margaret Thatcher, Women’s Own, 31st October 1987)
[xvii] http://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/publications/comms/r96.pdf accessed on 28th June 2015
[xviii] Chomsky, N. (1999) Profit over People: Neoliberalism and the Global Order. New York, Seven Stories Press.
[xix] Friedman, M. (1962) Capitalism and Freedom Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
[xx] Moncreiff, J. (2006) Psychiatric drug promotion and the politics of neoliberalism British Journal of Psychiatry 188 (4) 301-302; DOI: 10.1192/bjp.188.4.301
[xxi] Whitaker, R. and Cosgrove, L. (2015) Psychiatry Under the Influence: Institutional Corruption, Social Injury, and Prescriptions for Reform Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan
[xxii] Friedli, L. & Stearn, R. (2015) Positive affect as coercive strategy: conditionality, activation and the role of psychology in UK government workfare programmes Medical Humanities 41:40–47. doi:10.1136/medhum-2014-010622 Accessed at http://mh.bmj.com/content/41/1/40.full.pdf+html on 22nd June 2015.
[xxiii] https://izzykoksal.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/adventures-at-a4e/ accessed on 26th June 2015
[xxiv] Wilkinson, R. & Pickett, K. (2009) The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone. London, Penguin Books.
[xxv] https://www.madinamerica.com/2012/05/on-the-importance-of-moral-imagination/ accessed 29th June 2015
[xxvi] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefits_Street accessed 29th June 2015 | {
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A flip of a coin determined the St. Francis aldermanic race in favor of Steve Wattawa Thursday morning.
The coin flip was needed after the incumbent, Wattawa, and challenger Laura Martin received 253 votes apiece for the District 1 aldermanic seat.
Wattawa pulled tails and Martin pulled heads in the coin flip.
Both candidates pulled 253 votes apiece in the race.
Wisconsin state law mandates a coin flip as the proper way to solve a tie.
The loser of the coin flip can call for a recount. | {
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Masahiro Tanaka through the years
The Yankees have the best odds to sign Masahiro Tanaka, according to Bovada. (Mark J. Rebilas/USA TODAY Sports)
Who's got the best odds to sign Masahiro Tanaka?
The Yankees, according to Bovada.
The Yankees are a 3-2 favorite to land the 25-year-old Japanese pitcher, the gambling website says.
The Dodgers are right behind at 11-4, it says.
The rest of the odds: Seattle (5-1), Cubs (7-1), Red Sox (10-1), Diamondbacks (12-1), Angels (15-1), Rangers (15-1), White Sox (18-1), Blue Jays (18-1).
Tanaka went 24-0 with a 1.27 ERA for the Rakuten Golden Eagles last season. He's expected to fetch a deal worth around $100 million for six years, and the team that signs him must give his former team a $20-million posting fee.
The Yankees are expected to aggressively pursue Tanaka. The righty could help bring stability to a rotation surrounded by question marks and comprised by CC Sabathia, Ivan Nova and Tanaka's countryman Hiroki Kuroda.
The Dodgers just agreed to a historic seven-year, $215-million contract with lefty Clayton Kershaw, but could still be in the market for another big-named pitcher.
How much money would you bet the Yankees sign Tanaka?
| {
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When you find out that a stoma is going to be in your life forever many things run through your head. It certainly is a scary feeling knowing your life is about to change. Most people are not a big fan of change especially when it comes to your body. So during the first stages and months of having surgery and getting a stoma lots of fears creep into your life. One of the fears that strike many people the hardest is the idea of intimacy. I have to admit it was one of the areas that worried me the most. The thought of not being able to be intimate again and feel that confidence was a really hard thing for me to get over. But I want to let you know that for the most part that intimacy with your partner is possible and there are lots of tips and guides to get you through the process with a stoma.
The first thing to myself was the look. I was most afraid I would look ridiculous and simply not feel sexy. Luckily I was under the impression that I would be wearing a full-sized bag during the whole process and that was just silly. Hey, we all have fears and they all manifest a little differently. When it comes to fears there certainly are a few more fears than just looks too. I was terrified of smells and simply just feeling gross during the whole ordeal. Well, there are so many products that are meant to do the dead so to speak and I have to admit I was impressed with the ostomy gear available. Yes, it does feel like you are the only one who has struggled with this thought when you first get a stoma. Trust me, you are not alone and this topic has been well taken care of by the manufactures out there.
The first thing to know is that there are lots of mini bags and even stoma caps that are out there for this type of thing. It is similar to heading to the beach in a way and looking good is not really an issue. There are many manufactures and they are all willing to help you find the right product that fits you and your lifestyle well. I do first suggest talking it all over with your healthcare provider and making sure you are ready for this kind of activity. It may be painful or simply complicated after surgery because you are still healing. Also, all the medication that may be going on can have effects on you in so many different ways. So don't put the pressure on yourself too much to start with.
Now the other area we touched upon was the smell. That was something I was really worried about and there are lots of great tips and articles on this. Lots of gear is anti-microbial and rather scent proof. There are also drops you can use in your mini bag to make sure odor is eliminated. But if you are just starting out, light a candle for your own psychological mindset. That was one area I was a bit worried about and just simply having a lit candle helped. So don't get too worked up and fearful. There is no issue with intimacy and having a stoma. Just plan ahead and get the right gear that works best for you. | {
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BERLIN (Reuters) - Audi's NSUG.DE emissions scandal flared up again on Thursday after the German government accused the carmaker of cheating emissions tests with its top-end models, the first time Audi has been accused of such wrongdoing in its home country.
Audi A8 models are seen at their plant in Neckarsulm near Heilbronn May 21, 2015. Audi will hold their annual shareholders meeting on May 22, 2015. REUTERS/Michael Dalder
The German Transport Ministry said it has asked Volkswagen's VOWG_p.DE luxury division to recall around 24,000 A7 and A8 models built between 2009 and 2013, about half of which were sold in Germany.
VW Chief Executive Matthias Mueller was summoned to the Berlin-based ministry on Thursday, a ministry spokesman said, without elaborating. VW didn’t return calls seeking comment.
The affected Audi models with so-called Euro-5 emission standards emit about twice the legal limit of nitrogen oxides when the steering wheel is turned more than 15 degrees, the ministry said.
It is also the first time that Audi’s top-of-the-line A8 saloon has been implicated in emissions cheating. VW has said to date that the emissions-control software found in its rigged EA 189 diesel engine does not violate European law.
The 80,000 3.0-liter vehicles affected by VW’s emissions cheating scandal in the United States included Audi A6, A7 and Q7 models as well as Porsche and VW brand cars.
The ministry said it has issued a June 12 deadline for Audi to come up with a comprehensive plan to refit the cars.
Ingolstadt-based Audi issued a recall for the 24,000 affected models late on Thursday, some 14,000 of which are registered in Germany, and said software updates will start in July. It will continue to cooperate with Germany’s KBA motor vehicle authority, Audi said.
When Audi’s headquarters were raided by prosecutors on March 15 in connection with the emissions fraud, Chief Executive Rupert Stadler said investigations into the scandal were far from over, promising to keep at it until the work was done.
A source close to Audi said problems in the interaction between transmission and engine control units are to blame for the emissions overshoot. A proposal for a fix has already been submitted to the KBA, the source said, declining to elaborate. | {
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This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated.
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DENVER -- A man has killed from an apparent gunshot wound in the 1100 block of South Pecos Street on Sunday, the Denver Police Department said.
A woman was transported to an area hospital in critical condition with an apparent gunshot wound, police said.
The circumstances of the incident remain under investigation and no further information was released by police.
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‘Er is in België en in Europa een vluchtelingeneconomie ontstaan’. Dat zei de burgemeester van Antwerpen en N-VA-voorzitter Bart De Wever dinsdag tijdens het openingscollege Politicologie aan de Universiteit Gent. Hij riep de studenten op om met een minimum aan realiteitszin naar de vluchtelingencrisis te kijken.
‘We moeten niet naïef zijn. Als hier 80 procent alleenstaande mannen arriveren, dan moeten we weten dat het niet zo zal blijven. We zijn een ‘open chantier’ voor volgmigratie’, zei N-VA-voorzitter De Wever tijdens het openingscollege politicologie aan de Universiteit Gent.
‘In de media wordt constant over Syriërs gesproken, maar minder dan een vijfde van de vluchtelingen in België is van Syrische afkomst. Meer dan de helft van de aanvragen is van Irakezen. En dat land is niet in oorlog. De Bagdad-Brusselexpres bestaat echt en kost 3200 dollar. Het is een echte vluchtelingeneconomie’, zei De Wever. 'Dat de vluchtelingen dus enkel in gammele bootjes stappen op zoek naar veiligheid is een leugen.'
'Mutti Merkel maakte epic fail'
'Vandaag zitten we dus niet met een vluchtelingencrisis maar met een ware exodus. De oorlogsvluchtelingen krijgen stabiliteit zodra ze de landsgrens over zijn. Maar daar blijven ze niet, ze wandelen met een economisch kompas. En daarbij volgen ze de weg van de minste weerstand. Niet alleen Griekenland maar ook Mutti Merkel maakte volgens mij een epic fail. Met haar spreuk 'Herzlich Wilkommen' nodigt ze de hele wereld uit. Zowel in Duitsland als bij ons.'
’Schengen is klinisch dood’
De Wever had ook aandacht voor een mogelijke oplossing van de vluchtelingenstroom. ‘We moeten een andere oplossing verzinnen. Ik geloof niet in de spreiding van vluchtelingen door Europa. We moeten de instroom onder controle krijgen.’
De Wever was zeer duidelijk over de manier waarop dat kan gebeuren: ‘De buitengrenzen van Schengen moet dicht. Schengen is klinisch dood. Vervolgens moeten er hotspots worden opgericht en moet België een pushbackbeleid opzetten.’
Griekenland is verantwoordelijk
‘Daarnaast moeten we ook het akkoord van Dublin toepassen. Dat zegt dat vluchtelingen zich in het eerste land van de Schengenzone moet laten registreren. Dat gebeurt momenteel niet. Griekenland vermoordt niet alleen de Schengenzone, maar ook het Dublin-akkoord.’
‘Tenslotte moeten we het aanzuigeffect verminderen. En dat kunnen we onder meer doen door bijvoorbeeld het voorstel van de kinderbijslag. Een sociaal statuut moet opgebouwd worden.’
Conventie van Genève wijzigen 'moet bespreekbaar zijn'
De Wever verwees tijdens zijn college ook verschillende keren naar de conventie van Genève. 'Die is een onderdeel van het probleem als we naar de Europese vluchtelingencrisis kijken. We moeten dat kritisch tegen het licht durven houden. De internationale wetgeving zit in de weg. U hoort mij niet zeggen dat België uit de Schengenzone moet stappen, maar een wijziging van de conventie van Genève moet bespreekbaar zijn.' | {
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Nos Iau, 11 Ebrill 2019, cafodd seremoni Gwobrau Gwerin Cymru ei chynnal, a hynny am y tro cyntaf.
Roedd Neuadd Hoddinott ym Mae Caerdydd yn fwrlwm o gerddoriaeth a hwyl wrth i'r noson ddathlu'r artistiaid gorau o'r sîn werin Gymreig.
Rhestr enillwyr Gwobrau Gwerin Cymru 2019
Here Come The Young - Martyn Joseph | {
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FBI Director James Comey on Wednesday wrote a memo to his employees defending the decision not to bring charges against Hillary Clinton and how the Bureau has handled the investigation.
First, the FBI Director detailed what he called the “unusual step of sending relevant 302s, our case summary Letter Head Memorandum, and the classified emails we recovered during the investigation” to Congress in an effort to enable them to exercise their oversight duties. He also said he will be back up on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee for the annual oversight hearing at the end of September where he expects to answer more questions.
The second part of the memo is more clearly in response to recent criticism about the timing of the decision to release documents in the case publicly on Friday right before Labor Day weekend. On this point, Director Comey said they just happened to completed to necessary FOIA sign-off procedures to release Clinton’s 302 Interview Form and summary of the investigation on Friday morning. Comey wrote:
I almost ordered the material held until Tuesday because I knew we would take all kinds of grief for releasing it before a holiday weekend, but my judgment was that we had promised transparency and it would be game-playing to withhold it from the public just to avoid folks saying stuff about us. We don’t play games. So we released it Friday.
Comey concluded the memo by saying employees may be “sick of this” but he felt it was necessary to reiterate some points he had been making privately about the investigation.
“At the end of the day, the case itself was not a cliff-hanger; despite all the chest-beating by people no longer in government, there really wasn’t a prosecutable case…but I have no patience for suggestions that we conducted ourselves as anything but what we are – honest, competent, and independent. Those suggesting that we are “political” or part of some ‘fix’ either don’t know us, or they are full of baloney (and maybe some of both),” Comey wrote.
READ the MEMO:
Comey Memo to FBI Employees
Have a tip we should know? [email protected] | {
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London (CNN) British police released dramatic video footage Tuesday appearing to show a jogger pushing a woman into the path of an oncoming London bus.
The footage of the incident, which took place on the morning of Friday May 5, shows the 33-year-old victim walking across Putney Bridge in southwest London when a male jogger appears to knock her into the road, forcing a bus to swerve to avoid her.
Police said the victim received minor injuries and that passengers on the bus came to her aid.
The jogger returned 15 minutes later as he made his way back across the bridge but did not acknowledge the victim when she attempted to speak with him, according to police.
"The victim was put in extreme danger when she was knocked into the road. It was only due to the superb quick reactions of the bus driver that she was not hit by the vehicle," Sergeant Mat Knowles, the investigating officer from Putney Safer Neighbourhood Team, said
Read More | {
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Case Western Reserve University has named PNC Bank as its student banking service. Through this new relationship, students, faculty and staff now have access to five PNC Bank ATMs on campus and the ability to link their CaseOneCards to a PNC Bank account, among other benefits.
“We are excited to welcome PNC Bank to Case Western Reserve as our new student banking service,” said Dick Jamieson, vice president of campus services. “As a banking leader in the region, we feel their presence on campus will help meet the banking needs of our community.”
Three new ATMs have been added to Leutner Commons, Biomedical Research Building and Nord Hall, in addition to the two already present in Crawford Hall and Thwing Center. The new ATM in Nord Hall is an advanced function ATM, capable of accepting deposits, cashing checks or withdrawing cash.
The PNC Bank team will be on campus Oct. 6-7 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. in Nord Hall to discuss the new banking options. Prizes will be awarded to faculty, staff and students, including a grand prize of $1,000 CaseCash for students and $500 for faculty and staff.
In addition to easy banking access on campus (and at the nearby PNC Bank branch at 2025 Stokes Blvd.), anyone with a CaseOneCard can link his/her card to a PNC Bank account and use the CaseOneCard as a debit card. Individuals wishing to do this must get a new CaseOneCard—free of charge—from Access Services at any time. Card linking can be done online, in person at a PNC Bank branch or by phone.
Other benefits of the alliance include a CWRU-branded Visa check card, which will be available in December, a dedicated student banking website and Banking Days, beginning in October.
The student banking website, available at www.pnc.com/CWRU or www.pnc.com/studentbanking, includes the Virtual Wallet feature. Virtual Wallet features a calendar of major university events, so students can plan ahead for events for which they need to budget, as well as alerts to let parents know when an account is getting low and reimbursements, so parents—or other willing individuals—can be notified to pay you back for certain items, such as books.
Finally, PNC Bank will offer Banking Days, in which staff members from the local PNC branch will arrive on campus twice a month to answer any questions and assist customers with their banking needs. Banking Days will be held the third Tuesday and Wednesday of each month, with locations rotating around campus.
Case Western Reserve is PNC Bank’s 36th university relationship, and their banking services are available at more than 200 other universities. | {
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MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia said on Monday it may deport foreigners who test positive for coronavirus as Russian military planes flew in to evacuate its citizens from the Chinese province at the epicenter of the outbreak which has killed 361 people.
Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin attends a meeting with his deputies in Moscow, Russia February 3, 2020. Sputnik/Dmitry Astakhov/Pool via REUTERS
Russia, which has a 4,300km (2,670-mile) land border with China, reported its first two cases of the virus last week in the Siberian regions of Tyumen and Zabaykalsk. Both involved Chinese nationals.
Russia halted passenger trains to China as of Sunday night and the last train from Beijing rolled into Russia empty after 136 passengers - all Chinese nationals - were taken off at the border, the RIA news agency reported.
Moscow has already restricted direct flights to China, its largest trade partner, and the remaining flights are being routed through a separate terminal at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport.
“We’re not scared yet but if doctors diagnose (coronavirus) cases in Moscow then of course (we will be),” a security official wearing a mask at a check point at the terminal for China flights, told Reuters.
Starting from Tuesday, Sheremetyevo will be the only place where foreign citizens coming from China by air can enter Russia, and Moscow hopes to stop special chartered flights for Russian tourists returning from China by Feb. 14.
MASKS, PRECAUTIONS
Border guards and customs officials at Moscow airports are wearing gloves and medical masks. In the capital, people have been rushing to stock up on masks and some pharmacies have sold out, the Vedomosti newspaper reported.
Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin told senior government officials that Moscow has formally labeled coronavirus a “very dangerous disease”, granting authorities enhanced powers to combat it.
“This will allow us to deport foreign citizens if they are found to have such a disease, and to introduce special restrictive measures, including isolation or quarantine,” he said.
Mishushin also proposed postponing Russia’s annual economic forum in the Black Sea resort of Sochi which was initially set for Feb. 12-14.
Postponing the forum would free up the schedule of energy minister Alexander Novak who is facing calls from Russia’s OPEC partners to take joint action to stabilize oil prices, as coronavirus spurred fears of weakening oil demand from China.
Military planes are due to fly back 130 Russian nationals from China’s Hubei province on Monday, officials said. Separately, 58 other citizens had been repatriated via Russia’s far eastern border as of Saturday, local authorities said.
The Far East Primorsk region has also opened special quarantine zones for Chinese people arriving in Russia and they will be held there for 14 days regardless of whether they have tested positive for the virus or not, officials said.
Russia’s second-largest food retailer Magnit said on Monday it was suspending fruit and vegetable imports from China due to the spread of the coronavirus and logistical complications.
In the Far East, some vegetables doubled in price and even disappeared altogether when authorities restricted trucks passing into Russia from China, but that measure was lifted on Monday, local officials said.
Ukraine has not yet reported any coronavirus cases on its territory but plans to evacuate its citizens from Сhina by the end of the week, Interfax reported. | {
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Our new issue, “After Bernie,” is out now. Our questions are simple: what did Bernie accomplish, why did he fail, what is his legacy, and how should we continue the struggle for democratic socialism? Get a discounted print subscription today !
Way back in the early months of the 2008 Democratic nomination battle, the online hive of liberal wonkery was abuzz with controversy. The health care plans announced by the Clinton and (especially) Obama campaigns had come under fire for being short on specifics and vague about key issues. The controversy was dominating the campaign news cycle, and now liberal pundits were split. One side (including Paul Krugman and the New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn) saw the sparse details and general vagueness of Obama’s proposals (and, to a lesser extent, Clinton’s) as a serious problem that reflected poorly on the candidates. But one prominent wonk demurred — Matt Yglesias: Implicit in the pro-details side of things seems to be a kind of mandate literalism about the American legislative process. The idea is that if a candidate has a proposal on the table, runs on the proposal, gets attacked on the proposal, and then wins the election anyway that this makes it much more likely that congress will actually pass the proposal. That makes a ton of logical sense. But is it historically accurate? Yglesias was dubious, and his skepticism of the whole “pro-details” position on health care soon became something of a leitmotif for him. “In terms of specific details,” he wrote in another post, “neither campaign has released much in the way of specific details. And what’s more, everyone acknowledges that any specific details the campaigns might release will likely be changed during the legislative process anyway. So what’s the deal?” For Yglesias, the really important thing about a candidate’s health care plan was the broad principles that underpinned it, not its accumulation of details. That was the lesson he took away when a DC policy magazine asked a panel of experts to issue detailed scorecards for the various health care plans of all the Democratic and Republican candidates. Reviewing the scorecards, Yglesias concluded: That the [two parties’] plans differ in these systematic ways probably gives you a better idea of who to vote for than would any amount of peering into the details of the plans. All of these proposals are vague in some key respects, and nothing that’s proposed on the campaign trail is going to be enacted as is by congress. But these plans show something about the values and priorities of the different parties. Republicans, basically, are looking to make sure that the federal budget contains as much headroom as possible for tax cuts for high-income and high-wealth individuals while minimizing financial burdens on large employers. Democrats, by contrast, are looking to improve the quality and accessibility of American health care. The lesson for Yglesias that day (as on many other days) was that when it came to principles, the Democrats had the better of the argument. As for details, they weren’t so important.
The Acupuncture Crisis It seems Yglesias has changed his mind. Now that it’s Bernie Sanders who’s offering a major health care reform plan, Yglesias wants to hear specifics. In fact, the sheer exhaustiveness of the specifics he wants to hear is pretty extraordinary. “Is abortion covered? Is acupuncture? What if there are shortages of medical equipment? What if a doctor wants to prescribe a course of treatment that’s not supported by science? Sanders has nothing to say about any of this.” And it’s not just his mind that’s changed, it’s his tone. Gone is the usual air of amused detachment; instead, he works himself up to an exasperated pitch, like the policy writer’s version of a man yelling at his TV. “His big, bold ideas — though a valuable contribution to the debate — just don’t look very much like a governing agenda or even a basis for grinding general election campaign.” Warming to his theme, Yglesias spends a paragraph dilating on the complexities of administering Britain’s National Health Service (a different system than the one Sanders is proposing), and then after reviewing those intricate issues, complains that “Sanders’s ‘plan’ doesn’t cover any of this ground.” Worse, he says, Sanders’s “worldview” is unable even to “accommodate the questions”; for the Senator, “the only relevant issue is ‘whether we have the guts to stand up to the private insurance companies and all of their money.’” As Yglesias moves on to Sanders’s free college tuition plan, the hunger for details becomes insatiable. There are big questions here: What if states make this work by pushing more costs into the room and board column? What if public university systems are swamped with applicants now that they’re free? What if eliminating tuition means students start taking longer to complete their degrees? What if the underlying cost of providing a college education grows faster than the volume of Wall Street trades? What about the quality of college education? By the time Yglesias gets to Sanders’s Wall Street reform plan, the list of missing details is too long even to itemize. He quotes the candidate: “It is clear what you have to do. Bring back the 21st Century Glass-Steagall legislation and break up these huge financial institutions.” To Yglesias, this might as well be gibberish: What does that mean? Well, Sanders has a bill called the Too Big To Fail Too Big to Exist Act, which is a nice slogan. . . . The bill is only four pages long, and what it does is direct the Financial Stability Oversight Committee to compile a list of banks that are deemed “too big to fail” and then break them up. This just isn’t the way bank regulators think or work. There’s no such thing as a bank that’s “too big” to fail. There are specific situations in which the failures of certain financial institutions could be gravely threatening to the stability of other financial institutions and set off a chain reaction of bank failures that devastates the economy. Sanders’s legislation offers regulators no guidance as to what criteria are supposed to be used to identify institutions that are to be broken up, and says nothing much about how the breakups are supposed to look or work. It’s possible Yglesias hasn’t had an opportunity to read Sanders’s four-page bill, though it is online. If he gets around to it, he’ll find a paragraph that defines “too big to fail” as “any entity whose failure, due to its size, exposure to counterparties, liquidity position, interdependencies, role in critical markets, or other characteristics or factors, would have a catastrophic effect on the stability of either the financial system or the United States economy without substantial Government assistance.” He’ll find another part stating that Too Big To Fail “shall include, but is not limited to, any United States bank holding companies that have been identified as systemically important banks by the Financial Stability Board.” And if he really digs, he might stumble across the fact that the Federal Reserve, the largest US bank regulator, has already promulgated a rule “establishing the criteria for identifying a GSIB” (global systemically important bank), and already compiled a list of such institutions: eight giant banks, all household names. (Though obviously there’s no talk of actually breaking them up.) Now, is the idea of breaking up big banks — as a general principle — a good idea in the first place? That might be something worth debating. Certainly Sanders isn’t the only one who thinks so. “If some banks are thought to be too big to fail,” Bank of England governor Mervyn King said in a 2009 speech, “then, in the words of a distinguished American economist, they are too big. It is not sensible to allow large banks to combine high street retail banking with risky investment banking or funding strategies, and then provide an implicit state guarantee against failure.” Of course, the devil is in the details, as always. But this is an election campaign, where the underlying “values and priorities” of a campaign plan “[give] you a better idea of who to vote for than would any amount of peering into the details of the plans.” At least, according to Matt Yglesias.
A Switch in Time But apparently one Sanders takedown in Vox wasn’t enough. Ezra Klein, the website’s founder and a longtime health policy hand, felt the need to pitch in too, posting a slashing evisceration of Sanders’s single-payer health care proposal. The flavor of Klein’s piece can be gleaned from its early paragraphs. It was pretty brutal. [T]his is a document that lets Sanders say he has a plan, but doesn’t answer the most important questions about how his plan would work, or what it would mean for most Americans. Sanders is detailed and specific in response to the three main attacks Clinton has launched, but is vague or unrealistic on virtually every other issue. The result is that he answers Clinton’s criticisms while raising much more profound questions about his own ideas. Sanders promises his health-care system will cover pretty much everything while costing the average American almost nothing, and he relies mainly on vague “administrative” savings and massive taxes on the rich to make up the difference. It’s everything critics fear a single-payer plan would be, and it lacks the kind of engagement with the problems of single-payer health systems necessary to win over skeptics. Klein gives no quarter. Sanders’s plan is a “puppies-and-rainbows approach,” a “huge, disruptive reform.” “This is what Republicans fear liberals truly believe: that they can deliver expansive, unlimited benefits to the vast majority of Americans by stacking increasingly implausible, and economically harmful, taxes on the rich. Sanders is proving them right.” As the paragraphs pile up, the conclusion becomes inescapable: health reform is serious business — full of hard choices and tough calls. And Sanders talks as if they just don’t exist. This, obviously, is the age-old litany of the Important Beltway Pundit, a rarified station that Klein has attained at a precocious stage of his career. Yet before he became a Sunday morning-level pundit, Klein was actually known as a bright young health reform expert, writing detailed analyses and explainers on the finer points of policy. In 2007, he published a broad-ranging and widely praised survey of the world’s health care systems in the American Prospect (Paul Krugman even put it on his class syllabus at Princeton) that did much to establish his early reputation as a policy analyst. And back then, health reform didn’t seem quite so hard or so tough to Klein. Instead, that piece offered a far sunnier perspective. To see just how sunny, it’s worth quoting it at length: Medicine may be hard, but health insurance is simple. The rest of the world’s industrialized nations have already figured it out, and done so without leaving 45 million of their countrymen uninsured and 16 million or so underinsured, and without letting costs spiral into the stratosphere and severely threaten their national economies. Even better, these successes are not secret, and the mechanisms not unknown. Ask health researchers what should be done, and they will sigh and suggest something akin to what France or Germany does. Ask them what they think can be done, and their desperation to evade the opposition of the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry and conservatives and manufacturers and all the rest will leave them stammering out buzzwords. . . . So let us, in these pages, shut out the political world for a moment . . . and ask, simply: What should be done? To help answer that question, we will examine the best health-care systems in the world: those of Canada, France, Great Britain, Germany, and the U.S. Veterans Health Administration (VHA). How could Klein have felt such warmth back then for the single-payer systems of Canada or France (let alone Britain, with its socialized NHS!), while being so hostile to Bernie Sanders’s plan now, when the latter claims to draw its inspiration specifically from the former? Based on the Vox piece, it’s a mystery. Klein’s tone of confident authority barely conceals a confused, self-contradictory, at times laughably inaccurate jumble of charges that make little sense even on its own terms.
Losing the Paperwork Sanders’s cost-cutting plan is based on two premises about single-payer systems: that they allow for a massive reduction in administrative costs, and that they let the government bargain down the price of care. Klein breezily dismisses the first source of cost reduction. He seemingly doubts such a thing is even possible (the plan “relies mainly on vague ‘administrative’ savings”) and insists that, in any case, “the real way single-payer systems save money isn’t through cutting administrative costs.” Yet he seems to have been working from a different set of facts when he wrote his 2007 tour of the world’s health systems. Single-payer systems are also better at holding down administrative costs. A 2003 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the United States spends 345 percent more per capita on health administration than our neighbors up north. This is largely because the Canadian system doesn’t have to employ insurance salespeople, or billing specialists in every doctor’s office, or underwriters. Physicians don’t have to negotiate different prices with dozens of insurance plans or fight with insurers for payment. Instead, they simply bill the government and are reimbursed. When 2007-era Ezra Klein wrote this, he was not getting carried away by youthful idealism; he was just reporting the consensus among experts. For example, a frequent expert source for Klein over the years, Harvard health economist David Cutler, who served as Barack Obama’s top health policy advisor in the 2008 campaign, published new research in 2011 comparing administrative costs in the US and Canada, and found that while the American system employs 2.2 administrative workers per physician, Canada has only 1.1. Cutler’s conclusion: “Perhaps the most troubling difference between the U.S. and Canadian healthcare systems is the differential amount spent on administration . . . There are few other areas of the U.S. economy where waste is so apparent and the possibility of savings is so tangible.” After inexplicably dismissing the possibility of administrative savings, Klein moves on to Sanders’s other cost-cutting plank: government bargaining. The core of Klein’s argument is laid out here: The real way single-payer systems save money isn’t through cutting administrative costs. It’s through cutting reimbursements to doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and device companies. And Sanders gestures towards this truth in his plan, saying that “the government will finally have the ability to stand up to drug companies and negotiate fair prices for the American people collectively.” But to get those savings, the government needs to be willing to say no when doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and device companies refuse to meet their prices, and that means the government needs to be willing to say no to people who want those treatments. If the government can’t do that — if Sanders is going to stick to the spirit of “no more fighting with insurance companies when they fail to pay for charges” — then it won’t be able to control costs. Klein’s whole argument is rooted in this rhetorical device — the concept of “Saying No.” And that sounds like a very serious, very responsible thing to say. Yet, from top to bottom, the argument amounts to a spurious conflation of two very distinct kinds of “Saying No” — joined to a series of factually wrong claims about existing single-payer systems, and some baffling logic thrown in for measure. Parts of it are not much more than double-talk. Though dressed up to look like a policy critique of Sanders’s health care plan, Klein’s piece, when stripped of its tangle of confusions, is just another partisan polemic against the Sanders campaign itself.
How Single-Payer Really Saves Money The single most important fact to know about health care costs is this: by definition, they equal the price of health care times the number of health care services delivered. So they can only be reduced if there’s either a reduction in the average price of a service, or a drop in the number of health care services provided (or some combination of the two). Single-payer health systems vary greatly among one another. But their lower costs relative to the US are, in pretty much all cases, overwhelmingly due to lower prices per service — not fewer services per person. That was the point of Princeton health economist Uwe Reinhardt’s now-classic 2003 coauthored article in the specialist journal Health Affairs. The title says it all: “It’s the Prices, Stupid: Why The United States Is So Different From Other Countries.” Reinhardt and his coauthors analyzed a range of data from thirty OECD countries — not just national health spending, but the actual numbers of physicians, nurses, hospital beds, length of hospital stays, high-tech machines, and cutting-edge procedures in each country, per capita. Their conclusion, from the abstract: The data show that the United States spends more on health care than any other country. However, on most measures of health services use, the United States is below the OECD median. These facts suggest that the difference in spending is caused mostly by higher prices for health care goods and services in the United States. And although the authors themselves only analyzed aggregate statistics, they also made use of an earlier study by the McKinsey Institute (carried out under the direction of Kenneth Arrow and Martin Bailey) that gathered particularly revealing micro-level data from individual hospitals in the US, UK, and Germany. Using those data, Arrow, Bailey, and their German partners were able to break down the cost of individual hospital disease treatments (diabetes, breast cancer, lung cancer, etc.) into separate input cost components (physicians, pharmaceuticals, administration, etc.), and then divide each input cost into its price component and quantity component. The results are summarized in the charts below: There’s a lot going on in these charts, but what they show can be summarized in a few sentences. US hospitals spent 66 percent more than those in Germany when treating the same diseases. Yet those hospitals employed fewer physicians, dispensed fewer prescriptions, and treated fewer acute cases per patient than the German hospitals. Rather than the result of Germany saying “no” to health consumers (i.e. patients), its lower costs were entirely attributable to saying “no” to producers, by paying them lower prices. The US-Germany cost difference broke down as follows: lower physician wages (20 percent of the difference), lower drug prices (5 percent), lower administrative expenses (37 percent), and lower prices for acute care treatments (40 percent). (The remainder, 27 percent, is an unexplained residual.) (Do not be misled by the seemingly small percentage accounted for by drug prices — the study looked only at hospital spending. More than 70 percent of drug purchases take place outside of hospitals, so national drug costs loom much larger as a share of total national health spending — and thus of single-payer savings — than their share of hospital costs alone would suggest.) The facts were a bit different for the UK, but qualitatively the same. Unlike Germany, it did use slightly fewer doctors and acute services than the US. But its total spending was even lower than Germany’s (46 percent of the US level, rather than 60 percent for Germany), and 87 percent of the UK-US difference was still due to lower prices and overhead, rather than input use. So why are prices so much higher in the United States? Let’s let 2007-era Ezra Klein explain it: Canada’s is a single-payer, rather than a socialized, system. That means the government is the primary purchaser of services, but the providers themselves are private. (In a socialized system, the physicians, nurses, and so forth are employed by the government.) The virtue of both the single-payer and the socialized systems, as compared with a largely private system, is that the government can wield its market share to bargain down prices — which, in all of our model systems, including the [Veterans Health Administration], it does. A particularly high-profile example of how this works is Canadian drug reimportation. The drugs being bought in Canada and smuggled over the border by hordes of lawbreaking American seniors are the very same pharmaceuticals, made in the very same factories, that we buy domestically. The Canadian provinces, however, bargain down the prices (Medicare is barred from doing the same) until we pay 60 percent more than they do. And how does that square with what Klein is saying today? Well, let’s recall his new argument, quoted above: But to get those savings, the government needs to be willing to say no when doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and device companies refuse to meet their prices, and that means the government needs to be willing to say no to people who want those treatments. If the government can’t do that — if Sanders is going to stick to the spirit of “no more fighting with insurance companies when they fail to pay for charges” — then it won’t be able to control costs. This is the crucial point where Klein subtly conflates two very different kinds of “saying no”: the use of government bargaining power to say “no” to producers, by insisting on lower prices than the market would otherwise bear; and the government’s saying “no” to patients, by declining to pay (or fully pay) for services. Let’s walk through how these two kinds of “saying no” play out in a particular medical example. I’ll use France — “the world’s best health care system,” according to Klein in his 2007 survey — as the comparison case. The bestselling blockbuster drug on the US market is Humira, an anti-inflammatory biologic manufactured by Abbott Laboratories and approved by the FDA in 2008. Humira is classified as a “fourth-tier drug” (a cutting-edge specialty drug); it’s used for inflammatory conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease. It goes without saying that these can be awful and stressful illnesses to live with. Currently the US retail price of Humira (2 syringes of 40mg/0.8ml) is around $3,500. That’s how much you’ll have to pay for the drug if you don’t have insurance. Good luck. [All employer health plan data in this section is from the Kaiser Foundation’s 2015 Employer Health Benefits Survey.] But what if you do have insurance? (And remember, 27 million will still be left uninsured when Obamacare is fully implemented.) Well, you might be among the 15 percent of workers with employer-provided insurance whose plans nevertheless don’t cover specialty drugs at all. If so, again, you’re out of luck. Or you might be one of the 34 percent of employer-covered workers who face “co-insurance” for fourth-tier drugs, which means you’ll have to pay a certain percentage of the drug’s cost. The average co-insurance rate for these workers is 32 percent. So, absent any overriding plan provisions, the Humira would cost you $1,120. Then there are the 40 percent of covered workers whose plans charge co-payments for fourth-tier drugs, rather than co-insurance — a fixed dollar amount, rather than a percentage of the cost. The good news here is that the average copayment is $93. (Though, of course, some plans have much higher copayments.) That doesn’t sound so bad, right? Don’t get too excited, though. After all, you might be one of the 12 percent with a separate prescription drug deductible, which means you have to foot the entire bill until you reach a certain threshold. The average drug deductible is $231 per year — but, again, your mileage may vary considerably. And although your insurance will kick in once you’ve paid that much, in almost all cases you’ll still have to cough up co-payments or co-insurance. And don’t forget, you’re also paying premiums every month — $521 for single coverage on average. That’s more than 20 percent of the average wage for single, childless workers with employer insurance. And that’s not all. Almost half of employer plans that cover specialty drugs employ a variety of additional special strategies for “saying no” when it comes to fourth-tier medicines. Some have an additional cost-sharing tier for these drugs. Others impose “tight limits on the number of units administered at a single time,” or mandate “step therapies,” where they make you take cheaper treatments before they’ll pay for the expensive drug — even if your doctor is sure it’s the best one for you. Then there’s the infinite variety of “utilization management programs” that appear the instant you request such drugs: special surveillance regimes that find creative and innovative ways of making sure you don’t splurge too much on your life-saving medicine. Often these make people’s lives a living hell. That, in a nutshell, is how we in America say “no.”
The Big “No” Now let me walk through the same scenario as it would play out in France. When the French government says “no,” it says so first and foremost to Abbott Laboratories. The French equivalent of the “retail” drug price is called the prix public, or public price — the sum that Abbott is actually paid for the drug, plus sales tax. The public price of Humira in France (same dose, same strength) is not $3,500 (as it is here) but €940.90 ($1,028). Why the difference? Here’s an explainer from the website of a French online pharmacy directory: The price of medications covered by national insurance is not a free-market price, it is set partly by the Economic Committee for Medical Products (ECMP), after negotiations with the manufacturing pharmaceutical laboratory. In case of disagreement, the ECMP, which is a government body, has the final say. In reality, though, no one in France pays even $1,028. National insurance covers, at minimum, 65 percent of the public price. Thus, the most a French patient would pay for Humira is $360. Now, that’s still a lot of money for a person of modest means. But we’re not done yet. Patients who need drugs to treat serious, chronic illnesses like diabetes, hypertension, or cancer don’t have to pay a thing. A full 6.8 percent of the French population fall into this category, and another 1.7 percent are exempted for other reasons (newborns, pregnant women, the disabled, nursing home residents, etc.). And, as it happens, rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease, two of the main chronic conditions Humira is used to treat, appear on the list of diseases that qualify for an exemption. So let’s apply Klein’s “saying no” formula to this example. Suppose you are French, and you take Humira. But you’re not one of the people who qualify for any exemptions. (Though I suspect there are not, in fact, many such patients when it comes to this particular drug.) In other words, you’re one of the people the French government is saying “no” to. Yours is the “no” that Klein is keen to stress. But the other “no” — the much more significant “no” — is the ultimatum the French government already issued to Abbott Laboratories long before you, the patient, were ever prescribed the drug. How much bigger is this “no”? The “no” imposed on Abbott saved French taxpayers about $2,500 per Humira prescription – the difference between the “market price” (i.e. the US retail price) and the price fixed by the French Health Ministry. By comparison, the “no” handed down to you, the patient, requiring you pay 35 percent, saved taxpayers only an additional $360. By this (admittedly partial) reckoning, more than 87 percent of the taxpayer savings generated by France’s “Saying No Apparatus” (as it were) came out of the pockets of Abbott’s shareholders. Only 13 percent came out of the patient’s. Yet Klein’s article systematically obscures the distinction between the two, while making it seem that Sanders’s plan, out of some kind of populist irresponsibility, chose to forego the main sources of real-world single-payer cost containment. In fact, the reverse is true: it was Klein who was doing that. And this logic is by no means limited to the example of pharmaceuticals. Every US health-provider industry is riddled with such rents, which get squeezed out in single-payer systems. Consider that the median annual wage for a US dentist is $150,000, even though the median electrical engineer makes less than $90,000. Why in the world should that be? In Britain, a dentist at the midpoint of the NHS pay scale makes $92,000. But I haven’t even gotten to the weakest parts of Klein’s piece. Let me briefly note a few. He claims that “Sanders’s effort to fund a universal health care system so heavily on the backs of the wealthy would be unprecedented,” and contrasts the candidate’s approach with that of European countries, which “tend to pay for their health care systems through more broad-based, economically efficient taxes like VATs.” But he offers no evidence for this. In fact, 87 percent of the funding for Sanders’s plan comes from broad-based income and payroll taxes, only 13 percent from taxes targeting the wealthy. Most European countries fund their systems through general tax revenues, which, likewise, mix broad taxes like the VAT with progressive income and wealth taxes. Klein clearly made no effort to check if his claim was true. At one point, Klein tries to see how far he can get by simply redefining the term “single-payer”: Technically, a single-payer system is a system with, well, a single payer. Private insurers are outlawed — otherwise, it would be a multi-payer system. But the term is often used more loosely than that, and many systems that get mentioned during discussions of single-payer, like the French system, include various kinds of supplementary, private insurance that people generally purchase. That line could have used a fact-checker. In fact, there are no national single-payer systems that outlaw private insurance, for better or worse. (Or at least none among the usual “model” systems — or any of the countries profiled in last year’s Commonwealth Fund survey.) In Canada, around 70 percent have private insurance. In Denmark’s socialized system, 40 percent do. In fact, no health care system in the world, or at least the rich world, is actually “single-payer” on Klein’s definition — they’re all “multi-payer systems.” In Canada, 29 percent of health spending comes from private sources. In Sweden, the number is 16 percent. Ironically, the system with the lowest share of privately sourced spending — that of the Netherlands (12 percent) — mainly channels funds through private insurers. Nobody has ever thought of it as a single-payer system. But perhaps the biggest elephant in the room for Klein’s argument has Hillary Clinton’s name on it. After all, a centerpiece of the health care plan she’s now touting is a promise to repeal the law that forbids Medicare from negotiating drug prices with manufacturers. She claims that under her plan, Medicare will “use its leverage with more than 40 million enrollees to negotiate and drive down drug and biologic prices for seniors and others in the program.” But wait — according to Klein, isn’t such bargaining only supposed to work if the government is willing to “say no”? To drop coverage for drugs whose manufacturers refuse to meet the government’s price? Which drugs will Hillary drop from Medicare? Which seniors will lose coverage? Which diseases will go untreated? What about acupuncture? What about death panels? Surely this can’t be a serious plan either, on Klein’s analysis.
Lessons From Bevan There is, of course, room for reasonable debate about Bernie Sanders’s health care plan. It’s only eight pages long — just like the document Obama released in 2007. It explains how it’s paid for, but offers no detailed accounting of how it arrived at its numbers. And it had to make specific projections about cost containment without much hard data to go on. It also doesn’t spell out which categories of spending, if any, would still be privately financed, though even the most socialized systems, for better or worse, fund their budgets with a small but significant fraction of private spending. It can fairly be said that the plan glosses over the most controversial issues that inevitably arise in any single-payer system. In other words, Bernie Sanders released a campaign document, not a blue-ribbon report from a panel of experts. We might recall the experience of Aneurin Bevan, the father of Britain’s NHS and hero of the Labour left. Despite Britain’s bankruptcy after the war, he managed to push through his dearly held vision of free care at the point of service — though doing so required an arduous standoff with the nation’s doctors groups, of whom he famously said he had “stuffed their mouths with gold.” In 1951, he resigned from the Labour government in protest: he couldn’t abide new prescription fees for dentistry and eyeglasses. That would be only the first of many compromises of the NHS over the years. Nevertheless, seven decades later, the NHS is still there and still beloved. | {
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Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich is resigning after the company learned of a consensual relationship that he had with an employee.
The company, one of the world’s largest makers of semiconductor chips, said that the relationship was in violation of the company’s non-fraternization policy.
“Intel was recently informed that Mr Krzanich had a past consensual relationship with an Intel employee,” the company said in a statement.
“An ongoing investigation by internal and external counsel has confirmed a violation of Intel’s non-fraternisation policy, which applies to all managers. Given the expectation that all employees will respect Intel’s values and adhere to the company’s code of conduct, the board has accepted Mr Krzanich’s resignation.”
Details of the relationship remain unclear. The relationship took place “some time back,” people familiar with the situation told CNBC.
Krzanich’s resignation conforms to a new spirit in corporate America that influenced by #MeToo era, is now under intense pressure to enforce workplace policies on gender equality and sexual harassment.
While many employers do not allow managers to have relationships with co-workers, irrespective of whether they have direct management responsibility over their partner, others take no position on consensual relationships within the company.
But like many tech firms, Intel’s employment profile is heavily weighted toward men. In its 2017 diversity report, the company said 73.5% of its total workforce was male. Intel has said it is working to increase gender and racial diversity.
Krzanich, 58, joined Intel in 1982, and rose through a series of technical and leadership roles to become chief executive in 2013. He lately emerged as a leading advocate for the commercial drone industry and is successfully transitioning from being a chip maker to a data services firm.
In abruptly exiting the company, he adds his name to a growing list of CEOs who have left leading public companies after details of intra-employee relationships were revealed.
They include Harry Stonecipher, who left as CEO of Boeing in 2005; Steven Heyer, who left Starwood Hotels in 2007; and Christopher Kubasik, who was the CEO-in-waiting when he left Lockheed Martin in 2012.
The board said chief financial officer Robert Swan would become interim CEO effective immediately. Swan joined Intel in 2016 from eBay.
The company also said it had started a search for a permanent leader and is considering internal and external candidates. | {
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As China braces for the full impact of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war, it’s seeking to learn from Japan’s economic battles with Washington during the Reagan years.
Chinese officials, businesspeople and academics have been pressing their Japanese counterparts to share experiences from the 1980s, when Tokyo found itself in Washington’s crosshairs as its huge trade surplus and increasing industrial might sparked alarm in America.
While there are differences between Japan’s ascent as a commercial power a generation ago and China’s emergence today as a potential superpower, Japan also has lessons for its neighbor in dealing with rising debt, asset-price bubbles and an aging population.
Chinese visitors at the Bank of Japan have repeatedly asked senior BOJ officials about the country’s experience in managing trade friction, according to a person familiar with the matter. Their advice has been to avoid one-on-one talks with the U.S. and keep away from numerical trade targets.
While the Trump administration has already got its way with one-on-one talks, China looks intent on not repeating Japan’s 1985 compromise on the yen. In a speech in Washington in August, Ambassador Cui Tiankai said China would not accept “another Plaza Accord,” the agreement the U.S. struck with Japan, West Germany, the U.K. and France to depreciate the dollar.
The deal, which was seen as a win for President Ronald Reagan’s administration, saw the yen surge, forcing the BOJ to funnel liquidity into the economy to offset the hit to exporters. One view has it that this burst of easy money contributed to the bubble in the property market that later wrought havoc on the economy.
Researchers from a government-affiliated think tank also visited Tokyo earlier this year, meeting Shigehiro Tanaka, the director-general for trade policy at the trade ministry, and talking with former officials, central bankers and academics on the trade war and the lessons of the past.
China has also been looking to Japan for guidance about what to do in a financial crisis. Former BOJ Deputy Gov. Hiroshi Nakaso told the Financial Times earlier this year that the Chinese were looking at how Japan handled the meltdown that followed the bursting of its stock and real estate bubble in the early 1990s.
They may get another opportunity to glean insights from their Tokyo counterparts this week, when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe heads to the Chinese capital to meet President Xi Jinping. Among his entourage will be trade chief Hiroshige Seko, Foreign Minister Taro Kono and business leaders including the chairman of business lobby Keidanren.
The echoes of the Reagan era even include one key official: Robert Lighthizer. Now Trump’s top trade negotiator, Lighthizer led talks aimed at reducing the trade deficit with Japan under Reagan as deputy U.S. trade representative.
He shares Trump’s belief that the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods, which has grown steadily since 1975, is a symptom of things having gone very wrong.
With so many changes over the last few decades, China will only be able to take lessons from Japan’s experience, rather than copying its playbook, noted Matthew Goodman, senior adviser for Asian economics at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington.
But with the U.S. showing little sign of backing down on its demands to rebalance trade with China, every little bit of insight Beijing officials can get from their neighbor may help. | {
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Τους λόγους για τους οποίους επέλεξε να μην παραστεί στο συλλαλητήριο που αναμένεται να διεξαχθεί σήμερα στη Θεσσαλονική απαριθμεί ο επικεφαλής του Ποταμιού, Σταύρος Θεοδωράκης, με ανάρτησή του στο Facebook την οποία συνοδεύει με μια φωτογραφία του 1860 που απεικονίζει την Θεσσαλονίκη με τείχη, όπως σημειώνει ο ίδιος.
Αναλυτικά στο σχόλιο του στο γνωστό μέσο κοινωνικής δικτύωσης, αναφέρει:
«Γιατί δεν είμαι στο συλλαλητήριο στη Θεσσαλονίκη
– Γιατί 25 χρόνια τώρα χάνουμε, διατηρώντας πολεμική ατμόσφαιρα με μια μικρή χώρα που θα μπορούσε να είναι πιστός μας σύμμαχος
– Γιατί απεχθάνομαι όλους αυτούς που χτίζουν καριέρες με λαϊκίστικες συμπεριφορές και εθνικιστικές κορώνες
– Γιατί δεν βλέπω και πολλές διαφορές ανάμεσα στο "πρώην Γιουγκοσλαβική Δημοκρατία της Μακεδονίας" – που το έχουμε δεχτεί όλοι – και το Νέα ή Βόρεια ή Άνω Μακεδονία
– Γιατί στο "Μακεδονικό" – όπως άλλωστε και στο "Κυπριακό" – η απραξία και οι αναβολές είναι εις βάρος των συμφερόντων της Ελλάδας και του Ελληνισμού
– Γιατί δεν με συνδέει τίποτα ούτε πολιτικά, ούτε αισθητικά με αυτούς που λένε ότι είμαστε υπό κατοχή και μιλούν για προδότες, ανθέλληνες, κρεμάλες και φέρετρα
– Γιατί τέτοιου είδους απολίτικες κινητοποιήσεις οδηγούν σε πολιτικές τερατογενέσεις – βλέπε και ΣΥΡΙΖΑΝΕΛ μετά τους Αγανακτισμένους
– Γιατί κάθε φορά που ένα κράτος μέλος των Ηνωμένων Εθνών αναγνωρίζει την "Δημοκρατία της Μακεδονίας", η ελληνική διπλωματία ηττάται και αποδυναμώνεται
– Γιατί δεν θέλω να διαλυθεί η γειτονική χώρα – θέλω να αποτρέψω "το μουσουλμανικό τόξο της μητέρας Τουρκίας" και την "μεγάλη Αλβανία"
– Γιατί εχθρός μας είναι ο αλυτρωτισμός και θέλω οι γείτονες μας να αλλάξουν το Σύνταγμα τους και τα σχολικά τους βιβλία. Να μην μεγαλώνουν τα παιδιά τους με μίσος για την Ελλάδα
– Γιατί μου προκαλούν γέλια οι συστάσεις "μην βιάζεστε να λύσετε το όνομα" από χώρες που από το ‘92 αναγνώρισαν την "Δημοκρατία της Μακεδονίας"
– Γιατί η Καστοριά, η Φλώρινα, η Πέλλα, το Κιλκίς, οι Σέρρες, η Δράμα θέλουν δουλειές και ανάπτυξη και όχι σκοτεινές business σε νέες "ζώνες αποκλεισμού"
– Γιατί η Θεσσαλονίκη είναι πρωτεύουσα των Βαλκανίων και όχι μια φοβική επαρχία της Αθήνας
Και γιατί τα λέω όλα αυτά σήμερα;
Γιατί δεν έχω μάθει να κρύβομαι.
Και ελπίζω τις επόμενες κρίσιμες ώρες και μέρες, να βγουν και άλλοι προοδευτικοί πολιτικοί και να πουν αυτά που σκέπτονται χωρίς να φοβούνται.
Πρέπει να μάθουμε να κάνουμε το χρέος μας. Το "μην τολμάς" δε μπορεί να είναι το έμβλημα του καιρού μας». | {
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(CNN) Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg used a Fox News town hall in New Hampshire on Sunday to slam two of the network's primetime opinion hosts, knocking both Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham by name on the network where they each host an hour.
The moment came when the South Bend, Indiana, mayor was trying to explain why he agreed to do a town hall with Fox News, something that other Democrats -- namely Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren -- have said they would not do because of the network's near constant attacks against the party, and, as Warren said, because the network has mixed "bigotry, racism, and outright lies with enough legit journalism to make the claim to advertisers that it's a reputable news outlet."
"There is a reason why anyone has to swallow hard and think twice about participating in this media ecosystem," Buttigieg said after hitting Carlson for saying immigrants make the country dirty and Ingraham comparing detention centers with children to summer camps.
"Even though some of those hosts are not there in good faith, I think a lot of people tune into this network who do it in good faith," he said, adding that Democrats "can't blame" Fox viewers if "they are ignoring our message because they will never hear it if we don't go on and talk about it."
A spokeswoman for Fox News did not respond to CNN's request for comment.
Read More | {
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Look, you want to know why people are fed up with politicians, is because of shit like this. And yes, it includes Democrats who continues to not stand up for what is right. The Obama Healthcare Plan has been dogged by the Republicans from conception. It was not the best piece of legislation, but damn can't the Obama White House at least stand up for what was in the legislation?
Known as the Community Living Assistance Services (CLASS) Act, the program was intended to be purely voluntary and open to all working Americans. It would have provided a basic lifetime benefit of a least $50 a day in the event of illness or disability, to be used to pay for even nonmedical needs, such as making a house wheelchair-accessible or hiring a home caregiver to assist with basic tasks. The program was to be entirely self-financed with the premiums participants paid. Obama officials said that presented them with a problem: If they designed a benefits package generous enough to meet the law’s requirements, they would have had to set premiums so high that few healthy people would enroll. And without a large share of healthy people in the pool, the CLASS plan would have become even more expensive, forcing the government to raise premiums even higher, to the point of the program’s collapse.
Rep. Phil Gingrey said the finding was long overdue. The Georgia Republican, who sponsored a bill to repeal the legislation, observed that more than a year ago the chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services determined that the program was at significant risk of failure. “I feel justified and vindicated,” Gingrey said. Like other Republicans, he predicted that this would be the first thread in the health-care law to unravel. “The bottom line is: As people start to understand this bill, you are going to see more and more of a domino effect,” he said.
Again, the Republicans are with glee, while the White House sound like crickets:When you have folks who are willing to negotiate everything away, well, yeah the historic piece of legislation will unravel, and it will be at our peril.
Folks, this is just the beginning. | {
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Panaji: Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on Saturday said there was still a sense of sympathy for anti-nationals in India and also claimed that he was complimented by everyone for his recent comments, targeting actor Aamir Khan.
"There is a certain sympathy for people who are anti-national. Therefore, what I said in Pune I would not like to repeat it here. Those who want to see it can see it on YouTube. No one has told me that you have said the wrong thing, everyone said you have said the right thing," Parrikar told a meeting of the Bharatiya Janata Party Scheduled Caste morcha.
Parrikar, during a book release function in Pune recently, had in comments apparently targeting actor Aamir Khan, said: "One actor said my wife wants to go out of India... it was an arrogant statement. However poor my family is, however small my house is, I have to love my house and always aim to make a big bungalow out of it through right procedure.... You can`t feel ashamed of your set up"
The remarks triggered controversy, with media reports stating that the former Goa Chief Minister`s comments had unfairly targeted Aamir Khan. Later in his speech, Parrikar had also justified the targeting of Aamir Khan and Snapdeal, the e-commerce portal he was associated with.
Parrikar on Saturday also said that there were efforts being made to "defame the BJP".
"A lot of people are making efforts to create a misunderstanding about the BJP, which believes in taking all sections of society along together," Parrikar said.
The Defence Minister also said that the political opposition was hassled by the achievements of the BJP-led government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, both in India and abroad.
"If the BJP government led by Mr Modi, which has taken the fancy of the world, keeps going on in the way it does, then the parties which are opposing us, they will not last. The obvious message will be a BJP-led India. Those who worry about this, they raise these issues," Parrikar said. | {
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Orville Redenbacher was born on July 16, 1907, in Brazil, Indiana and studied agronomy at Purdue University. After graduation, he ran a profitable fertilizer company and in his free time focused on creating the perfect popcorn. He sold the kernels from the back of his car and eventually appeared on television selling what is now known as Orville Redenbacher Popcorn. He died on September 19, 1995, in Coronado, California.
Entrepreneur Orville Redenbacher was born on July 16, 1907, in Brazil, Indiana, and grew up on a small corn farm. As a child, he was active in the local 4-H chapter. After graduating in the top 5 percent of his high school class, Redenbacher went on to Purdue University, where he joined Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity and studied agronomy.
Redenbacher worked as a Vigo County Farm Bureau Extension agent in Terre Haute, Indiana and at Princeton Farms in Princeton, Indiana. He also ran a very successful fertilizer company and became quite wealthy. Since childhood, Redenbacher had had a single obsession: creating the perfect popping corn. As an adult, he dedicated all his free time to developing a new strain of popping corn. He eventually settled on a type and went into business with Charlie Bowman.
Redenbacher Popcorn
The two named their new hybrid corn RedBow, but were persuaded to change the name by an advertising agency. The result, Orville Redenbacher Popcorn, struck gold. At first, Redenbacher sold the kernels from the back of his car. Around 1972, however, Redenbacher began appearing in television commercials, as himself, hawking his new popcorn. He even appeared on the television show To Tell the Truth where he stumped panelists such as Kitty Carlisle Hart, Peggy Cass and Joe Garagiola.
Initially bought by Hunt-Wesson Foods in 1976, Orville Redenbacher's popcorn, through a series of business buy-outs, settled under the umbrella of giant ConAgra. Redenbacher continued to appear in television commercials, sometimes with his grandson, Gary. Immediately recognizable by his white hair, bow tie and glasses, Redenbacher became a beloved pitchman. Consumers were confused as to whether or not he was an actor, so Redenbacher appeared on television talk shows to clear up the confusion. | {
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DEXON was publicly announced on May 2018 when Popo Chen, co-founder of the DEXON foundation spoke in front of hundreds of audience, and thousands more watching the livestream back home, at Blockshow Berlin.
DEXON X BLOCKSHOW EUROPE 2018–Infinitely Scalable, Low Latency Blocklattice
Fast forward from that faithful day to today, DEXON is undergoing unprecedented progress from every facet of the platfrom—from PR and community, to building what’s under the hood—here is the first ever DEXON development update that you must follow along with.
Media
4 roadshows
8 top media mentions
2 interviews
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYdfzi5zD2g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZoyI7TGhOg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYdfzi5zD2g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZoyI7TGhOg 1 consensus introduction
Overview on DEXON Consensus by Co-founder Popo Chen
Roadshows
Blockchain Future: Blockchain Economics Forum, Singapore
Blockchain Economics Forum, Singapore Pain points on current blockchain technology: Crypto Investor Show, London
Crypto Investor Show, London Next generation blockchain — DEXON: Startup Thailand
Startup Thailand NEXT GENERATION BLOCKCHAIN: EMPOWERING DECENTRALIZED FUTURE: Blockshow, Berlin
Blockshow, Berlin Next generation blockchain — DEXON: iCoin Summit, Cyprus
iCoin Summit, Cyprus NEXT GENERATION BLOCKCHAIN: EMPOWERING DECENTRALIZED FUTURE: Tech Open Air, Berlin
Tech Open Air, Berlin Next generation blockchain — DEXON: Global Blockchain Forum, Seoul
Global Blockchain Forum, Seoul Next generation blockchain technology — infinitely scalability and energy efficiency: Webit.Festival Europe, Bulgaria
Webit.Festival Europe, Bulgaria Blockchain — Asia In the Move: APEC Digital Innovation Forum, Taipei
APEC Digital Innovation Forum, Taipei Next generation blockchain — DEXON: Blockchain Conference DC, Washington DC
DEXON Publications
“Tech whitepaper”
At the end of May, we published our consensus design: DEXON consensus algorithm. Since then it has been updated several time to include latest data. You can read paper about the consensus algorithm, here.
“Economic whitepaper”
Moreover, the DEXON economic whitepaper was published at the beginning of July, which you can read the English version, here, with both traditional and simplified Chinese version also available from the website.
New Website — dexon.org
DEXON’s Official Website is: https://dexon.org
If you have visited the DEXON website few months ago, it now features an all-new look, which include the following updates:
FAQ
Contact us — survey paper
Media page
Mail subscription
Roadmap
DEXON aims to go beyond blockchain as we know of today by launching a novel blocklattice technology to become the ultimate decentralized solution for real-world apps.
DEXON can reach 1M+ TPS with all transactions finalized with under 1 second of latency with provably secure Byzantine fault tolerance. The DEXON consensus SDK is targeted to be open sourced in August.
DEXON ROADMAP (estimated timeline)
• 2018/Q3: DEXON consensus algorithm, simulation results, DEXON consensus engine SDK and PoC. ↓ • 2018/Q4: Launches testnet, explorer, and wallet. ↓ • 2019/Q1: DEXON mainnet goes live.
What’s Next?
You can register for the newsletter for the latest updates, or join us in our various community discussions in different platforms.
✅ Telegram discussions: https://t.me/dexon_foundation
✅ Announcements: https://t.me/dexon_news
✅ Scam alerts: https://t.me/dexon_scam_alerts
👩💻 Gitter (DEXON’s official dev chat): https://gitter.im/dexon-foundation/Lobby
👩💻 Github: https://github.com/dexon-foundation
👩💻 Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DEXONFoundation/
👉 Twitter: https://twitter.com/dexonfoundation
👉 Faceboook: https://www.facebook.com/DEXON.Foundation/
👉 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbg6l4M8QmSrJphxQvKof5g
👉 Medium: https://medium.com/dexon | {
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Colorado authorities have closed a seven-month search for two girls who were abducted in December by their mother, Brittany Nunn, and her husband, Peter Barr, in the midst of a custody dispute. The case was ultimately cracked by local sheriff’s investigator Drew Weber, who executed a search warrant and pulled records from Nunn’s Spotify account, The Coloradoan newspaper reported.
Weber was able to track the Spotify IP address associated with Nunn’s account to Mexico. He then pulled search accounts from other accounts, including Nunn’s Netflix account, and was eventually able to track the fugitives to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. With help from a private investigator, the FBI, and the US State Department, they developed a plan over several months to bring the abducted children home.
Nunn was on the verge of losing primary custody of the two girls—ages 4 and 6—to their fathers, according to the Coloradan. Mexican immigration authorities arrested Nunn and Barr and deported them to the United States, where they are now facing felony custody violation charges. The girls have been returned to their fathers.
Neither Spotify nor Netflix has commented on the investigation, but Techdirt notes that the use of a search warrant means that the companies would have been required to supply any requested information to investigators. | {
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I want to clarify and expand on something I noted yesterday. The President stands accused, now with a mounting array of evidence, of conspiring with a hostile foreign power to win the Presidency. He has now made clear that he will not permit any investigation of those accusations.
That may sound on first blush like an extreme formulation. But I think it is incontrovertible. This is not some investigation that has dragged on for years and, either by a strong or a weak argument, is claimed to have crossed some basic lines of fairness or equity. It has actually only just begun. It is just getting started, only just out of the gate. It is led by a man who is at least within the American political class universally well-regarded for his probity and professionalism. He is also a man who is, to the extent these things are relevant, a Republican. The only basis for threatening to shut down such an investigation is the contention that no actual investigation can be permitted. I defy anyone to find a path out of that logic.
I posted this earlier this morning. The text I reference is from Mike Allen’s morning newsletter in Axios.
The mix of nonsense from the perps and numskull play by play by the announcers means this will get bad fast pic.twitter.com/4Zn76nXyHH — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 22, 2017
As is so often the case, the reporting is both a symptom of the broader crisis and also a genuine service. We learn critical new facts, by dint of reporting skills and access. But they are presented in the nonsensical play-by-play speak of the access class. Note the reference to “Bob Mueller signaling that he plans an expansive, exhaustive investigation aimed at Trump, his relatives, and current and former political lieutenants.” This is presented as an escalation when in fact it is simply a statement of the nature of the investigation itself.
Mueller is investigating Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign colluded or conspired or assisted in that effort. That is the charge and that inevitably requires looking at everyone involved in the Trump campaign (candidate, family, political lieutenants) and their finances, since finances would be the seedbed and playing field on which collusive bargains and deals would take place. This is elementary. The reporting itself is playing into the Trump legal team’s claim that the investigation is already exceeding its mandate and scope.
Now, if three years from now, Robert Mueller indicts Trump and members of his family for defrauding American investors in a real estate deal on a golf course in California we may be in a different circumstance. This is simply how big investigations operate. The specific charge in this instance instructs Mueller to investigate the question at hand and pursue any crimes he finds along the way. So as a legal matter, there would be nothing wrong with that hypothetical. As a substantive or political matter, Trump supporters might have some argument that what began as a probe of the collusion question has become an open-ended scrutiny of every business transaction Trump has ever engaged in. But needless to say, none of this has happened. So unless and until it does, it’s all quite irrelevant. The President is saying himself and through his cronies that he will not allow any investigation.
The reference to building a ‘wartime cabinet’ captures every fiber of the grandiosity, nonsense and criminality of the Trump world. Pathological narcissism, slavering toadies and Godfather references – they’re all there. As I say in the tweet, Trump seems to envision himself as the Churchill of obstruction. But there’s no war. This is just organizing the White House around defying the rule of law as opposed to running the country. Play-by-playing that fact is no service.
This is a crisis. It will escalate dramatically when Trump fires Robert Mueller. Then the Congress will become the only failsafe in the way to extra-constitutional rule. | {
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Reserve Bank of India (Source: File) Reserve Bank of India (Source: File)
A spending push in key infrastructure sectors, such as roads and railways, may be at the heart of the Centre’s efforts to rekindle the economy but attempts to prod the private sector to invest in core sectors seem to be floundering — if lending by banks is anything to go by.
Bank credit to the infrastructure sector, which had been steadily sliding over the first eight months of the current financial year, has recorded its sharpest contraction of 6.7 per cent in November.
The latest data released by RBI Tuesday shows that credit outstanding to the infrastructure sector has slipped from Rs 9,64,800 crore in March 2016 to Rs 9,00,700 crore in November 2016.
The power sector, which accounted for almost 55 per cent of the infra credit demand, saw a contraction of 10.4 per cent in November — down from a decline of 4.8 per cent in April 2016.
And, the road sector, which has seen significant government push, has witnessed a sharp decline in credit offtake over the last few months.
In October and November, bank credit slipped to a low of 2.9 and 1.3 per cent, respectively, suggesting a decline in private sector demand for credit and a corresponding aversion by banks in lending to the sector.
The decline in infrastructure credit growth has also pulled down the overall bank credit to the industry as it contracted by 3.4 per cent in November, which is the worst in at least a decade. Even the gross bank credit expanded by only 4 per cent in November, down from 9 per cent growth in March 2016.
Recent data on highway construction show that the pace of construction has not picked up.
In December, Minister of State in the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, Mansukh L Mandaviya, informed Rajya Sabha that in the first seven months of FY’17, the length of highway construction stood at 3,591 km against the target of 15,000 km. In 2015-16, the length of highway construction stood at 6,029 km.
Among several reasons cited by Mandaviya for the slow pace were land acquisition, utility shifting, non-availability of soil/aggregates, poor performance of contractors, etc.
In his budget speech 2016-17, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had announced a total outlay of Rs 97,000 crore for the road sector.
However, private sector involvement seems to be very low. In the first eight months of the FY’17, the banks credit outstanding for the road sector rose by only Rs 2,700 crore from Rs 1,77,500 crore in March 2016 to touch Rs 1,80,200 crore in November 2016.
Economists say the environment for private sector investment is “very weak” as of now and may remain out of the system for some time.
“While government investment is one factor to crowd in private sector investment, there are other factors also required and they are not favourable as of now. There is too much debt in the books of infrastructure companies and also, a lot of companies are saddled with overcapacity. Even the banks are not very keen on lending to the sector as they have a lot of bad loans in the sector,” said DK Joshi, chief economist, Crisil.
📣 The Indian Express is now on Telegram. Click here to join our channel (@indianexpress) and stay updated with the latest headlines
For all the latest Business News, download Indian Express App. | {
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In a pivotal moment for private spaceflight, a towering white rocket lifted a cone-shaped capsule into space early Tuesday on a mission to the International Space Station.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket carried the unmanned Dragon capsule into space after a 3:44 a.m. EDT launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., marking the first time a private company has sent a spacecraft to the space station.
The mission is considered the first test of NASA’s plan to outsource space missions to privately funded companies now that its fleet of space shuttles is retired. SpaceX aims to prove to NASA that its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule are ready to take on the task of hauling cargo -- and eventually astronauts -- for the space agency.
INTERACTIVE: SpaceX’s demonstration mission
“Today marks the beginning of a new era in exploration; a private company has launched a spacecraft to the International Space Station that will attempt to dock there for the first time,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden in a speech at the cape. “And while there is a lot of work ahead to successfully complete this mission, we are certainly off to good start.”
In a separate news conference, Elon Musk, SpaceX’s 40-year-old billionaire founder and chief executive, spoke at company headquarters in Hawthorne. It was there that SpaceX employees had gathered, watched and cheered as the Falcon 9 climbed toward the heavens.
“There’s so much hope riding on that rocket,” he said. “When it worked ... and they saw their handiwork in space and operating as it should, there was tremendous elation. For us, it’s like winning the Super Bowl.”
But the launch is just the beginning, and the toughest tasks in the mission lie ahead.
The Dragon capsule will rendezvous with the space station as it circles the Earth at about 17,000 mph. Once the Dragon catches up to the station, it must complete a series of complicated tests to determine if it is ready to dock.
If all goes well, the crew aboard the station will snag the spacecraft with a robotic arm and lead it in. SpaceX hopes to dock the Dragon, which is designed to carry up to seven astronauts, as early as Friday.
After years of testing, NASA is hoping to turn the job of carrying cargo and crews over to private industry at a lower cost. Meanwhile, the agency will focus on deep-space missions to land probes on asteroids and Mars.
The agency has poured nearly $400 million in seed money into SpaceX in hopes that the company can one day complete routine missions to the space station. NASA is doling out $63 million to the Russians each time it wants to send an astronaut to the station.
SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., is one of the leading contenders to carry astronauts for NASA one day. Company officials say cargo missions will yield valuable flight experience toward accomplishing this goal by 2015.
Still, the company has experienced repeated delays over the years. For instance, SpaceX planned to launch the current mission Saturday. The countdown was flawless until the last second, when the rocket engines briefly lit up and then went dark.
SpaceX said a flight computer detected an anomaly in one of the rocket’s nine engines and automatically shut down the launch sequence. Later that day, company engineers traced the problem to a faulty valve, and technicians fixed it within hours.
That made Tuesday’s launch all that more exciting for Musk, who said that when he saw the Falcon 9 finally lift off, “every bit of adrenaline in my body released at that point.”
Founded in 2002, SpaceX makes the Dragon and Falcon 9 at a sprawling facility in Hawthorne that once was used to assemble fuselage sections for Boeing 747s. The hardware is put on a big rig and trucked to Cape Canaveral for launches.
The company, with about 1,800 employees, has a $1.6-billion contract to haul cargo in 12 flights to the space station for NASA. If the current mission is successful, SpaceX will begin fulfilling the contract later this year.
SpaceX has now had three successful launches of the Falcon 9.
With Tuesday’s successful launch, the reusable Dragon became the first U.S.-made spacecraft to head to the space station since the space shuttle started flying more than 30 years ago.
“We’re at the dawn of a new era in space exploration,” Musk said. “There are no precedents for what we’re doing here.”
RELATED:
SpaceX: A new frontier for space travel
Aerospace manufacturer Rocketdyne is for sale
The space shuttle’s birthplace: A Southland legacy
Twitter.com/@wjhenn
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You can see other cool NuGet Packages I've mentioned on the blog here. Today's NuGet package is CacheCow, which has possibly the coolest Open Source Library name since Lawnchair.js.
"CacheCow is a library for implementing HTTP caching on both client and server in ASP.NET Web API. It uses message handlers on both client and server to intercept request and response and apply caching logic and rules."
CacheCow was started by Ali Kheyrollahi with help from Tugberk Ugurlu and the community, and is a fantastically useful piece of work. I wouldn't be surprised to see this library start showing in more places one day.
As an aside, Ali, this would be a great candidate for setting up a free AppVeyor Continuous Integration build along with a badge showing that the project is building and healthy!
CacheCow on the server can manage the cache in a number of ways. You can store it in SQL Server with the EntityTagStore, or implement your own storage handler. You can keep the cache in memcached, Redis, etc.
Consider using a library like CacheCow if you're putting together a Web API and haven't given sufficient thought to caching yet, or if you're already sprinkling cache code throughout your business logic. You might already suspect that is going to litter your code but perhaps haven't gotten around to tidying up. Now is a good time to unify your caching.
As a very simple example, here's the HTTP Headers from an HTTP GET to a Web API:
Cache-Control: no-cache
Content-Length: 19
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 23:22:10 GMT
Expires: -1
Pragma: no-cache
Here's the same thing after adding the most basic caching to my ASP.NET applications config:
The HTTP Headers with the same GET with CacheCow enabled:
Cache-Control: no-transform, must-revalidate, max-age=0, private
Content-Length: 19
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 23:24:16 GMT
ETag: W/"e1c5ab4f818f4cde9426c6b0824afe5b"
Last-Modified: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 23:24:16 GMT
Notice the Cache-Control header, the Last-Modified, and the ETag. The ETag is weak as indicted by "W/" which means that this response is semantically equivalent to the last response. If I was caching persistently, I could get a strong ETag indicating that the cached response was byte-for-byte identical. Also, if the client was smart about caching and added If-Modified-Since or If-None-Match for ETags, the response might be a 304 Not Modified, rather than a 200 OK. If you're going to add caching to your Web API server, you'll want to make sure your clients respect those headers fully!
From ALI's blog, you can still use HttpClient in your clients, but you use WebRequestHandler as the message handler:
Really don't want a resource cached? Remember, this is HTTP so, Cache-Control: no-cache from the client!
Of course, one of the most important aspects of caching anything is "when do I invalidate the cache?" CacheCow gives you a lot control over this, but you really need to be aware of what your actual goal is or you'll find things cache you don't want, or things not cached that you do.
Are you looking for time-based caching? Cache for 5 min after a DB access?
Are you looking for smart caching that invalidates when it sees what could be a modification? Invalidate a collection after a POST/PUT/DELETE?
Given that you're likely using REST, you'll want to make sure that the semantics of these caching headers and their intent is reflected in your behavior. Last-Modified should reflect realty when possible.
From the CacheCow Wiki, there's great features for both the Server-side and Client-side. Here's CacheCow.Server features
Managing ETag, Last Modified, Expires and other cache related headers
Implementing returning Not-Modified 304 and precondition failed 412 responses for conditional calls
Invalidating cache in case of PUT, POST, PATCH and DELETE
Flexible resource organization. Rules can be defined so invalidation of a resource can invalidate linked resources
and the CacheCow.Client features
Caching GET responses according to their caching headers
Verifying cached items for their staleness
Validating cached items if must-revalidate parameter of Cache-Control header is set to true. It will use ETag or Expires whichever exists
Making conditional PUT for resources that are cached based on their ETag or expires header, whichever exists
Another good ASP.NET caching library to explore is ASP.NET Web API "CacheOutput" by Filip Wojcieszyn. While it doesn't have an fun to say name ;) it's got some great features and is super easy to get started with. You can find CacheOutput with NuGet at
Install-Package Strathweb.CacheOutput.WebApi2
And you'll configure your caching options using the intuitive CacheOutput attributes like those you may have seen in ASP.NET MVC:
ASP.NET Web API CacheOutput has great getting started docs and clear easy to ready code.
So, you've got options. Go explore!
You can also pickup the Pro ASP.NET Web API book at Amazon. Go explore CacheCow or CacheOutput and support open source! If you find issues or feel there's work to be done in the documentation, why not do it and submit a pull request? I'm sure any project would appreciate some help with updated samples, quickstarts, or better docs.
Sponsor: Many thanks to our friends at Octopus Deploy for sponsoring the feed this week. Did you know that NuGet.org deploys with Octopus? Using NuGet and powerful conventions, Octopus Deploy makes it easy to automate releases of ASP.NET applications and Windows Services. Say goodbye to remote desktop and start automating today! | {
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Please join me in signing this urgent petition. Without a kidney transplant, an Oakland father named Jesus Navarro will die.
I was once in need of a transplant, but thankfully I was able to receive a kidney from a Nicaraguan friend of mine. UCSF never asked me if I was a legal resident.
Now, Jesus Navarro, a dedicated, hard-working family man who has health insurance needs this life-saving procedure. He even waited for 6 years to come to the top of the list for recepients. His wife wishes to donate her kidney to him.
UCSF hospital has told Jesus that the only reason he would not be able to get a transplant is becuase of his immigration status. As I see it, this is a matter of life and death.
Jesus has received hundreds of messages of support stating that he should be allowed to receive a transplant. Immigration status should not determine someone's fate.
Sign the petition to convince the UCSF Kidney Transplant Clinic to do the right thing and let Jesus receive this life-saving transplant. Thank you.
P.S. You can read more on Jesus' story:
Jesus Navarro has a donor match in his wife and private insurance to pay for a kidney transplant. But UC San Francisco Medical Center refuses to perform the operation because administrators cannot be sure he will be able to afford follow-up care given his status as an illegal immigrant.
This man does not deserve to die. | {
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El proceso extraordinario de regularización migratoria del gobierno de Sebastián Piñera partió con su etapa de registro el 23 de abril y culminó el 22 de julio.
Hoy, los extranjeros que no se inscribieron en aquella parte del trámite arriesgan ser expulsados del país.
La postura del Ejecutivo ya era conocida, pero el subsecretario del Interior, Rodrigo Ubilla, reiteró la posición de la administración Piñera en conversación con El Mercurio.
“Yo supongo que no se inscribieron los que tienen antecedentes penales, pasa a ser atractivo saber quiénes son. Pueden haber cometido delitos en su país de origen o estar cometiéndolos acá”, disparó.
¿Cómo lo harán? En los próximos días y en conjunto con la Policía de Investigaciones (PDI), institución que reforzará sus controles migratorios con el objetivo de encontrar a quienes decidieron no someterse al proceso.
Tras el fin de la primera instancia comenzó la de procesamiento, con la cual se otorgará un visado temporario a quienes tengan sus papeles en regla, previa presentación del correspondiente certificado de antecedentes.
Expulsiones
Hasta septiembre de este año, el Gobierno ha ordenado la expulsión de 2.850 personas, de las cuales sólo se han concretado 1.387, en su mayoría bolivianos por vínculos al tráfico de drogas.
Pero desde 2014 se han acumulado 13.968 de estos procedimientos, de los cuales sólo se han llevado a cabo 6.398.
“No se explica que tengamos una diferencia tan grande. Por una lógica de cumplimiento del deber, queremos mejorar estos porcentajes”, dijo Ubilla.
No obstante, negó que busquen deshacerse de una gran cantidad de migrantes. “Es bastante razonable 14.000 (expulsiones) de un millón (de extranjeros en el país); es un porcentaje pequeño”, dijo al medio.
Según cifras entregadas por Piñera en julio, fueron poco más de 155 mil los extranjeros que se inscribieron para este proceso, en su mayoría ciudadanos haitianos y venezolanos. | {
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Next weekend, there will be no place left to rent a movie to watch on Saturday night in Brick – or anywhere else in the Garden State, for that matter.
After 27 years in business, Bob’s Video Time, the final holdout of what was once a multi-billion dollar industry, is closing its doors in the Briarmill shopping center off Lanes Mill Road.
The shelves are still stocked with Blu-Ray discs, DVDs and video games, but a closeout sale is beginning to take a bite out of the inventory. Business is slow – an occasional regular strolls in to find something to watch for the night – but the hustle and bustle that was once found in this place has gone away for good.
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Bob Karpodinis, now 62, began the business when he was 35-years-old. He took a chance on opening a business in his hometown with the hopes of gaining a foothold in a growing industry that was thriving with the popularization of VCRs a few years earlier.
“I lived in Brick, and back then it was a glamorous business to be in, in its own way,” said Karpodinis. “It was like your own piece of Hollywood, and it was a very profitable business.”
Over the years, Karpodinis and his wife manned the counter daily, made sure the latest movies and video games were in stock, and meticulously kept up with rental records and receipts. The business was, in and of itself, a sign of the times. A 1997 episode of Seinfeld even centered around video store culture, with Elaine, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, falling madly in love (so she thought) with a store clerk who made weekly picks for customers.
As the industry grew, so did the competition, but Video Time had carved a local niche that kept its customers returning, again and again, for the personal service that may not have always been present in a massive Blockbuster or Hollywood Video location.
“There were eight video stores in a two mile radius, and they eventually all went out of business,” said Karpodinis. “At least for the last five years, we were the only ones left. People like mom-and-pop stores. They know you from town and they know your name.”
Karpodinis said his store is the last video rental store in the entire state of New Jersey, save for one or two ethnic specialty stores in the state’s Indian community.
The factors behind the industry’s decline is no secret. First, Netflix began offering rentals through the mail for discount prices, eventually leading to broadband video on demand services that represented the final nail in the industry’s coffin. Hundreds of thousands of movies at a viewer’s fingertips, with no need to return discs or face late fees, was too tempting.
Still, some customers remained, including a local couple who came in to find one last movie to rent while a reporter was present.
“I’m going to miss the family atmosphere here,” said Faith Yourth, who has been coming to the store for decades. “I just love Bob, his wife, everything. We got to know them over the years.”
Her husband, Roger, said his wife is a movie buff, and Video Time always had the latest titles even when other stores would run out.
“He always had everything, and he had things ahead of time,” said Roger Yourth. “If you haven’t seen a particular movie, you could always find it here.”
The couple, in their 60s, have broadband Internet access at home, but still prefer choosing which movies to watch as they have for years.
“Netflix is just too limited,” said Roger Yourth.
Karpodinis will close his doors for good next Saturday, Feb. 11. He said since he put up signs announcing the closing, customers have been stopping by to share memories and even shed a few tears. It is those relationships – with his customers and the many staff members he’s employed for years, that he’ll miss the most, he said.
“I would say the best memories were our employees, the young kids who worked here,” said Karpodinis. “They started here and then learned how it is in the working world. I was happy that I could help them along.”
Karpodinis said his next step in life is to maintain and online video sales business he founded several years ago. But nothing will be like running the store.
“We made a lot of friends because we had people coming in constantly,” he said. “We had kids who grew up coming here bringing their kids in here. The people of Brick have been very good to us, supporting us. We made a good living here.” | {
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It’s no secret that the CIA isn’t always up front with the public about its operations. You may even be kept in the dark if you’re an elected official. But did you know the agency even lies to its own employees?
That’s the subject of a recent Washington Post report on a heretofore unknown practice at the CIA called “eyewashing.”
Before moving to the substance of the article, however, I owe my readers an explanation: The Central Intelligence Agency must approve of everything I write about intelligence, the CIA, foreign policy, diplomacy, the military, and national security — for the rest of my life.
They didn’t like this column, even though the source material is freely available to anybody who reads the Post. The CIA consented to let me run it, but only if I redacted a few important sections.
I’ve decided to show you the CIA’s cuts, rather than engage in a protracted negotiation.
Now, back to eyewashing. Eyewashing, simply put, is a way that the CIA deceives its own employees.
According to the Post, CIA veterans described eyewashing as an “important security measure” and a “means of protecting vital secrets by inserting fake communications into routine cable traffic.” But these lies eventually are passed to Congress, too.
And when documents are finally declassified, the lies make their way to historians and to the American people. Here’s how eyewashing works.
Let’s say a CIA officer is working on a sensitive operation in the field. He’s reporting his progress to headquarters, and the operation becomes even more sensitive.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.
Investigators from the Senate Intelligence Committee found at least two instances where the CIA turned over eyewashed cables for the committee’s report on torture. Both related to Abu Zubaydah, an alleged al-Qaeda operative the CIA believed — incorrectly — XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.
This practice is ripe for abuse.
What happens when an officer decides to issue a deceptive “eyewash” cable to his coworkers because the source — or the officer — is doing something illegal or unethical? With the eyewash cable in place, congressional oversight committees would have no idea.
Interestingly, the Post article said that most former senior CIA officers interviewed, including attorneys, had never heard of the practice.
That means it wasn’t passed through the chain of command. No legal opinions were issued. The inspector general didn’t know it was happening. While those who did know about the practice claimed it didn’t get out of hand, you’ll just have to take their word for it. Plainly, there’s no adult supervision in the CIA.
Imagine what can happen if we accept that our public servants can simply lie. Why not eyewash a torture program? Why not eyewash a secret prison system? Where does it end? And more importantly, how can it end at all if nobody except the perpetrators knows it’s happening in the first place?
The CIA may tell you that eyewash cables are important to protecting sources and operations. What I would tell you is that it’s forbidden by federal law.
Indeed, it’s a criminal offense to “conceal, cover up, falsify, or make a false entry” into an official record. It’s called “making a false statement,” and it’s punishable by five years imprisonment. There’s no legal exemption for the CIA.
It’s in the CIA’s nature to lie, even to its congressional overseers. But that doesn’t mean the American people should stand for it. | {
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White House press secretary Sean Spicer, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney arrive to discuss the CBO reporter outside the West Wing of the White House on March 13. | AP Photo White House calls CBO health care report bogus Trump's administration says the report showing 24 million fewer insured under GOP bill is 'just not believable.'
Unbelievable, wrong and “virtually impossible.”
That was how President Donald Trump’s administration responded Monday to the Congressional Budget Office’s politically damaging score of House Republicans’ plan to repeal and replace Obamacare.
The nonpartisan CBO projected that the bill, the American Health Care Act, would insure 24 million fewer Americans than Obamacare by 2026 but reduce the federal deficit by $337 billion in the same span.
“We disagree strenuously with the report that was put out,” Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price told reporters after leaving a Cabinet meeting with Trump at the White House. “It's just not believable is what we would suggest.”
Bracing for what was expected to be a dismal projection, the White House had begun setting expectations earlier Monday by blasting the alternative: Obamacare.
Warning Republicans that they’re “putting themselves in a very bad position” by repealing and replacing Obamacare, Trump himself said letting it “implode” is still an option — seemingly issuing a threat to Republicans who have so far been unwilling to support the bill.
Even as he’s endorsed House leadership’s Obamacare replacement plan, Trump has argued that Republicans should let the health care law collapse so Americans can see Obamacare for what it really is: in his eyes, at least, a failure.
“Obamacare all of a sudden the last couple of weeks is getting a false rep that maybe it’s OK. It’s not OK,” Trump said Monday afternoon during the meeting with Cabinet officials. “It’s a disaster, and people understand that. It’s failed, and it’s imploding. And if we let it go for another year, it’ll totally implode. In fact, I’ve told the Republicans, ‘Why don’t you just let it go for another year?’ That way everybody will really understand how bad it is.”
Trump’s bleak outlook for Obamacare appears to be a subtle nudge to resolute Republicans who have stated their opposition to the Republican replacement plan. Leaders have presented the replacement as a binary choice between the bill making its way through the House and the status quo of Obamacare, which Republicans have promised to repeal and replace for years.
Price, who helped handpick the current CBO director two years ago, faulted the nonpartisan office for reviewing only part of the replacement plan — Republicans have painted their health care overhaul as a three-part process that begins with the bill currently advancing through the House. However, its job is to analyze the legislation that was introduced, and not include rhetoric from the White House and GOP leaders about additional phases that may or may not happen.
“We believe that the plan that we’re putting in place is gonna insure more individuals than currently are insured. So we think that CBO simply has it wrong,” said Price, who argued that Americans under Obamacare “have health coverage but no health care.”
He added it’s “virtually impossible” for the CBO to come up with the number of Americans it estimated would lose coverage and that he believes the GOP plan will cover more people at lower costs with more coverage options.
But the bill appeared to be stumbling shortly after it was introduced last week, as it was greeted with opposition from a mix of fellow Republicans and powerful outside conservative groups. And despite the progress it’s made in the House, where it’s advanced its way through markups and out of key committees, Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Rand Paul of Kentucky have cautioned that it will die in the Senate unless it’s vastly improved before the House votes, with Cotton warning that a yea vote could cost Republicans their House majority.
And that was before CBO projected 14 million fewer people would be insured by 2018 alone.
Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to the president, told “Good Morning America” she isn’t concerned about political calculations or the next election, although Trump himself reportedly warned Republicans last week that there would be a bloodbath in 2018 if they failed to repeal and replace Obamacare.
“I’m not looking at a political calculation whatsoever now. I’m not thinking about the next election,” she said. “I’m thinking about the millions of Americans who don’t have care and don’t have coverage and who want it and need it and who were expecting it through Obamacare.”
White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that “the president’s fully committed to the plan.” But Trump himself was less assuring.
“We’re negotiating with everybody,” the president said. “It’s a big, fat, beautiful negotiation. And hopefully we’ll come up with something that’s gonna be really terrific.”
Trump hammered Obamacare via Twitter and during multiple public appearances Monday, at one point referencing it as “the very, very failed and failing Obamacare law.” He slammed its premium hikes and limited insurers.
“It’s really not having insurance at all,” he added during a listening session with so-called “victims” of Obamacare. “A lot of Obamacare, you don’t really have insurance because the deductibles are so high that you really don’t have insurance, if you think about it.”
“The Republicans, frankly, are putting themselves in a very bad position — I tell this to Tom Price all the time — by repealing Obamacare,” Trump said. “Because people aren’t gonna see the truly devastating effects of Obamacare. They’re not gonna see the devastation. In ’17 and ’18 and ’19, it’ll be gone by then. Whether we do it or not, it’ll be imploded off the map.”
He argued that more people were better off before Obamacare than after it was implemented. People who were so happy pre-Obamacare are miserable now, Trump asserted, and it’s putting Americans “out of business” and “in the poorhouse.”
“I’ve been telling you why don’t we wait, just let it implode and let’s not take the blame,” Trump told Price, who along with Vice President Mike Pence attended the listening session and made brief remarks. “I’ve been telling you that as an option. It’s not an option I like, frankly, but it’s certainly an option.”
Trump accused the media of undermining the GOP's repeal effort by misrepresenting the health care law. In his words: “The press is making Obamacare look so good all of a sudden.”
“They’re showing these reports about this one gets so much and this one gets so much. First of all, it covers very few people, and it’s imploding,” he claimed. “And ’17 will be the worst year. And I said it once; I’ll say it again: because Obama’s gone.”
Contrary to Trump’s comment that Obamacare covers few people, 20 million Americans gained coverage under it — the same number of people Price said would be without coverage if Republicans don’t pass their bill.
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Defending the president’s criticism, Spicer, the press secretary, told reporters that Obamacare is failing on its own. But media coverage, he argued, “makes it seem like it’s all rainbows and puppies.”
Likening favorable coverage of Obamacare, which surveys show has become increasingly popular, to Obama himself, Trump blamed the media for “making it look so wonderful.” He alleged that the media narrative is favoring Obamacare so that if Republicans repeal it, people will remember how “great” and “wonderful” Obamacare used to be.
“It’s a little bit like President Obama. When he left, people liked him,” Trump said. “When he was here, people didn’t like him so much. That’s the way life goes. That’s human nature. The fact is Obamacare is a disaster, and by — and I say this to the Republicans all the time — by repealing it, by getting rid of it, by ending it, everyone’s gonna say, ‘Oh, it used to be so great.’ But it wasn’t great.”
“And I tell Tom Price and I tell Paul Ryan, I tell every one of them, the best thing you can do politically is wait a year because it’s gonna blow itself off the map, but that’s the wrong thing to do for the country,” he continued. “It’s the wrong thing to for our citizens.”
Trump promised that the House bill would “provide you and your fellow citizens with more choices — far more choices — at lower costs,” including the choice of their plan and doctor.
Rates, he said, will “go down, down, down,” while plans will “go up, up, up.”
“You’ll have a lot of choices. You’ll have plans that nobody’s even thinking of today,” he said. “They will have plans that today nobody has even thought about because the market’s going to import that with millions and millions of people wanting health care.”
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Last month I convened an emergency meeting of my cabinet and top homeland security, intelligence and defense officials. Across the country trains had derailed, including one carrying industrial chemicals that exploded into a toxic cloud. Water treatment plants in several states had shut down, contaminating drinking water and causing Americans to fall ill.
Our nation, it appeared, was under cyber attack. Unknown hackers, perhaps a world away, had inserted malicious software into the computer networks of private-sector companies... | {
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Former Major League pitchers Eric Gagne and Ryan Dempster are planning to play for Team Canada in the 2017 World Baseball Classic, according a report Saturday from Sportsnet.
Gagne and Dempster will each make his first appearance as a player in the World Baseball Classic, joining a pitching staff that includes John Axford, Adam Loewen and Nick Pivetta.
• Get your tickets for the 2017 Classic
Gagne, 41, won the National League Cy Young Award in 2003 with the Dodgers, when he recorded 55 saves and 137 strikeouts in 82 1/3 innings. His 161 saves for the Dodgers places him second to Kenley Jansen in franchise history. A three-time All-Star with the Dodgers, Gagne also pitched for the Rangers, Red Sox and Brewers. He last appeared in the Majors in '08 with Milwaukee.
:: 2017 World Baseball Classic ::
Dempster, 39, last pitched in the big leagues in 2013 with the Red Sox. He was an All-Star with the Cubs in '08. Over a 16-year career as a starter, Dempster also pitched for the Marlins, Reds and Rangers.
Gagne was born in Montreal and Dempster was born in Sechelt, British Columbia.
Team Canada opens play in Pool C against defending champion Dominican Republic at 6 p.m. ET on Thursday, March 10, at Marlins Park in Miami.
**Austin Laymance** is a reporter for MLB.com. | {
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António Guterres prestou esta tarde juramento sobre a Carta das Nações Unidas como novo secretário-geral da ONU. Uma cerimónia em que Portugal esteve representado pelo Presidente Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa e o primeiro-ministro, António Costa.
Mais atualizações
17h49 - Guterres respondeu às questões dos jornalistas no final da cerimónia
Guterres says reform is 3rd priority - applause. Simplification, decentralization, flexibility.Budget rules prevent, don't enable, mandates — Peter Wilson (@PeterWilson) December 12, 2016
At 10a Antonio Guterres will b sworn-in as 9th #UN Secretary-General. 8th #UNSG will also deliver last remarks to GA:https://t.co/24sWcEj0Vw pic.twitter.com/6MMcyUw9CV — UN Spokesperson (@UN_Spokesperson) December 12, 2016
promoção da paz, desarmamento e segurança;
combate às alterações climáticas;
defesa dos Direitos Humanos e desenvolvimento sustentável;
luta contra o terrorismo e extremismos;
resolução de emergências humanitárias e de saúde;
e o aumento da igualdade de género.
António Guterres identificou as três prioridades estratégicas do seu mandato: trabalho pela paz, apoio ao desenvolvimento sustentável e gestão interna da ONU.É a primeira sessão que António Guterres enfrenta de questões dos jornalistas depois de ter prestado juramento como próximo secretário-geral das Nações unidas.Na resposta a crises graves como na Síria, Iémen e Sudão do Sul ou disputas longas, como o conflito israelo-palestiniano, são necessárias "mediação, arbitragem e diplomacia criativa"."A prevenção é o que os fundadores das Nações Unidas nos pediram para fazer. É a melhor forma de salvar vidas e de reduzir o sofrimento humano. Onde a prevenção falha, devemos fazer mais para resolver conflitos", sublinhou António Guterres perante o plenário da ONU.Guterres diz-se preparado para se envolver pessoalmente na resolução de conflitos, destacando a necessidade de "fazer mais"."Estou preparado para me envolver pessoalmente na resolução de conflitos onde isso trouxer um valor acrescentado, reconhecendo o papel de liderança dos Estados-membros".António Guterres inicia mandato como 9.º secretário-geral das Nações Unidas a 1 de janeiro de 2017.A assembleia-geral das Nações Unidas aplaude o novo secretário-geral.António Guterres declarou-se "determinado em ser guiado pelos propósitos e princípios" da Carta das Nações Unidas. "Estou muito honrado pela confiança que os Estados-membros depositaram em mim".António Guterres discursa agora no coração das Nações Unidas, em Nova Iorque.Está cumprida a primeira parte da cerimónia de investidura de António Guterres como novo secretário-geral das Nações Unidas.António Guterres prepara-se para prestar juramente e dirige-se ao pódio.O Presidente Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa e o primeiro-ministro, António Costa, são chamados na sala da assembleia-geral da ONU a ocuparem um lugar de honra.O presidente da assembleia-geral, Peter Thomson, declara a Ban Ki-moon "profundo agradecimento", destacando o seu legado duradouro e "compromisso com a paz, direitos humanos, justiça e igualdade".Peter Thomson destacou como os três principais legados de Ban Ki-moon o seu contributo "incansável para chamar a atenção para as consequências catastróficas do aquecimento global", o seu papel na definição da Agenda 2030 para o Desenvolvimento Sustentável e a sua luta a favor da igualdade de género e defesa dos direitos das mulheres.Ban Ki-moon afirmou perante a assembleia-geral das Nações Unidas que "foi uma grande honra trabalhar com todos".Como estava previsto, antes do juramento de António Guterres, Ban Ki-moon faz agora o seu último discurso perante o plenário das Nações Unidas enquanto líder da organização.O secretário-geral cessante das Nações Unidas assegurou que a ONU tudo está a fazer para que as próximas gerações vivam em paz.Ban Ki-moon desejou a António Guterres e a todos os membros da ONU "paz, prosperidade e sucesso".Amina Mohammed, ministra nigeriana do Ambiente, é vista como a escolha mais do que provável para vice-secretário-geral da ONU.A sessão na sala da Assembleia-Geral da ONU terá intervenções de diferentes embaixadores, antes de o secretário-geral cessante, Ban Ki-moon, tomar a palavra. O discurso de António Guterres fechará a cerimónia.À chegada à sede das Nações Unidas, em Nova Iorque, o Presidente da República não escondeu o orgulho por ver António Guterres a prestar juramento como secretário-geral da organização.- Já em Nova Iorque, o primeiro-ministro, António Costa, falou de um dia muito especial.António Costa antevê grandes desafios para António Guterres, sublinhando porém que "maiores os desafios, maiores se revelam os homens".A investidura de Guterres como novo líder da ONU decorre na sede das Nações Unidas, em Nova Iorque, a partir das 15h00, perante representantes dos 193 Estados-membros.António Guterres, 67 anos, com um passado de liderança do PS, ex-primeiro-ministro em Portugal e anterior alto comissário da ONU para os Refugiados, tem pela frente um mandato de cinco anos, que arranca formalmente em a 1 de Janeiro.Nas vésperas de apresentação do seu programa, os analistas apontavam para a mais do que certa preocupação de António Guterres com aA cerimónia desta segunda-feira é antecedida por uma homenagem ao secretário-geral cessante, Ban Ki-moon, que faz o seu último discurso perante o plenário enquanto líder da organização. | {
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Bill Maher spilled the beans about a concept for a movie called The Kings of Atheism that Maher says he is creating with Michael Moore. As seen in the below video from the Friday, May 13, episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Bill talks about The Kings of Atheism film. Much to the surprise of Moore, Bill tells his viewers that The Kings of Atheism will be similar to the concert film titled The Original Kings of Comedy. Whereas the The Original Kings of Comedy featured comedians on the road, filmed by Spike Lee — The Kings of Atheism movie will feature Maher and other famous atheists on a tour throughout the Bible belt.
Moore admitted that he’s not an atheist, but he quipped that The Kings of Atheism challenge would give Maher and others on the atheism tour 10 days to try and convert Michael over to their way of thinking. Moore didn’t mention what would happen if Bill and those who Maher foresees coming on The Kings of Atheism tour with him if Bill and his unbelieving crew got converted to Christianity instead.
As for Maher’s dream of atheist stars who would join Bill on The Kings of Atheism tour, those include noted atheists Seth MacFarlane, Ricky Gervais, and Sarah Silverman, to name a few. Since Maher included Sarah in that tour list, The Kings of Atheism title might have to be changed to The Kings of Atheism — Plus One Queen of Atheism.
The Kings of Atheism wouldn’t be the first time that Maher has tackled religion in a movie. Maher made Religulous, wherein he spoke of being raised in Catholicism. When Moore and Maher discussed their thoughts for The Kings of Atheism, apparently it was the first time the duo spoke of the movie publicly.
MAHER: “We want to do a movie called The Kings of Atheism.” MOORE: “Okay, there, it’s out.” MAHER: “There, it’s out. Oh, what’s the worst that could happen? That we get it made? As opposed to now, when we’re not?” MOORE: “No, but you just told the Almighty that we’re gonna do this, and now…” MAHER: “— We’re not gonna do this —” MOORE: “… you and I have to survive the next six months.” MAHER: … Remember The Kings of Comedy?… The Kings of Atheism!” MOORE: “The Kings of Atheism.” MAHER: “And we can’t get anybody we want to sign up for the movie.” MOORE: “We are going to have four of America’s top comedians, I’m going to film it, and we’re gonna travel through the Bible Belt, putting on these shows.” MAHER: “It would be so awesome!… The first person I wanted to do it was my fellow atheist and boyfriend Seth MacFarlane. I can’t get him to commit! [To crowd] Maybe you people could… If we got Ricky Gervais, me, Sarah Silverman, Seth MacFarlane, that would be an amazing…”
What’s most interesting about the concept of The Kings of Atheism is that the movie would once again feature Maher traveling beyond California — and well into realms of Bible-believing regions. Instead of being met with salt of the earth folks who come against Bill’s brand of atheism — which often calls the Old and New Testaments fairy tales — Maher could be met with those who have graced his stage who share his beliefs. Brad Pitt famously quipped on Bill’s show that Pitt was acting like Christians watched his show, to which Bill said Brad would be surprised who is watching from the closet.
Or Bill could be met with Bible-believers who aren’t preachy, but interesting enough to get him to give up atheism altogether in the name of Christ — and make Maher rethink calling Jesus’ resurrection a “suicide mission” from God.
As seen in the top photo above, Bill still takes to the road to perform his stand-up comedy. Maher appeared in Hollywood, Florida, at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casinos’ Hard Rock Live.
Bill Maher and Michael Moore are joining forces to take down Donald Trump ⏩ @lee_moran https://t.co/5gF3rXZksk pic.twitter.com/UoVJ3z7RtI — Huffington Post (@HuffingtonPost) May 14, 2016
[Photo by Jeff Daly/Invision/AP] | {
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ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A Pakistani court issued an arrest warrant for ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif after he failed to appear before the court over anti-corruption allegations, local media said on Thursday, but he can avoid arrest by paying bail.
FILE PHOTO: Pakistan's former prime minister Nawaz Sharif speaks during a news conference in Islamabad, Pakistan September 26, 2017. REUTERS/Faisal Mahmood/File Photo
In Pakistan, “bailable arrest warrants” often act as a warning to deter absences from court, but a judge can later issue non-bailable warrants that are more serious and could see Sharif arrested when he returns to Pakistan.
Sharif missed the hearing as he is undertaking a religious pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, Dawn and other English-language newspapers reported. Sharif had spent previous weeks tending to his wife in London, where she is receiving cancer treatment.
Sharif faces three separate corruption charges from the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), an anti-corruption body which has its own courts. Sharif’s two sons and his daughter Maryam, who is viewed as Sharif’s heir-apparent, are also facing NAB trials.
Sharif, 67, resigned in July after the Supreme Court disqualified him from holding office over an undeclared source of income, but the veteran leader maintains his grip on the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party.
The Sharifs have called the corruption proceedings against them a conspiracy, hinting at intervention by the powerful military, but opponents have hailed it as a rare example of the rich and powerful being held accountable. The army denies playing a role.
“We are going through a time in Pakistan where speaking up against injustice is called contempt of court and speaking up for the nation is called treason, but I still believe that we will be victorious,” Maryam said outside the court, according to Dawn newspaper.
Sharif had a representative in court.
Sharif’s disqualification stemmed from the Panama Papers leaks in 2016 that appeared to show that his daughter and two sons owned offshore holding companies registered in the British Virgin Islands and used them to buy flats in London.
The NAB court charges against Sharif relate to the ownership of London apartments, as well as establishment of two large-scale factory businesses in Saudi Arabia. Sharifs deny any wrongdoing on all charges. | {
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Nashville, Tenn. (September 28, 2016) - Nashville Predators President of Hockey Operations/General Manager David Poile announced Wednesday that the team has signed defenseman Samuel Girard to a three-year entry-level contract.
Girard, 18 (5/12/98), has played the last two seasons with the Shawinigan Cataractes (QMJHL). In 2015-16, he played 67 games, amassing 74 points (10g-64a). He posted a plus-24 rating and scored seven power-play goals. Girard played 64 games for the Cataractes in 2014-15, recording 43 points (5g-38a) and a plus-15 rating.
Nashville's second choice, 47th overall (second round), in the 2016 Entry Draft and a native of Roberval, Quebec, Girard is currently attending 2016 Predators Training Camp. He skated 20:49 on Tuesday in the Preds' second preseason game against the Florida Panthers. | {
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thesovietbroadcast answered:
A lot of it really amounts to the government of China actively redefining what it means by poverty line and relying on the same number-setting used by the World Bank to falsely portray global poverty as rapidly shrinking (claiming an 80% reduction globally since 1980 thanks to capitalism) despite it being larger today when utilising reasonable metrics. In China measures poverty with a standard equivalent to $1 a day, which is actually lower than the already absurdly low World Bank standard, and going by Chinese prices is not even enough to provide a 1500 calorie per day diet even if 100% of income goes towards food.
What poverty reduction has occurred is only temporary and there is an ever increasing wealth gap between urban and rural areas, minimum wages range from $1.40 to $2.70 per hour depending on the province making it extraordinarily difficult for workers to live in urban centres (particularly more affluent ones where prices are very much similar to prices in western countries), not to mention that most of western China is impoverished and largely ignored by state authorities. The share of the “growth in wealth” in China since 1978 seen by the proletariat has continued to shrink further and further with time.
It also must be kept in mind that by far the greatest reduction in poverty predates the 1978 reforms, seeing as the so-called “Mao period” saw widespread electrification, infrastructure development, housing development, urbanization, etc. that is unrivaled in history since. The price reduction in agricultural goods brought about through collectivization have also been reversed with and since the 1978 reforms, increasing the percentage of income spent on food considerably compared to the Mao period. Besides the benefits which cannot be accurately measured through the typical capitalist means of measuring poverty, the Mao period was stronger in terms of economic growth by those systems of measurement China relies on today as well. “Mao era” China saw stronger GDP growth than post-reform China, even despite the losses after the Great Leap Forward, while growth in agricultural and industrial output has been unrivaled since that time. This is despite the claims from the “China is socialist” crowd that the economy was stagnant and on the verge of collapse.
When you factor in all these elements it’s very hard to believe China has a “socialist economy” when its current leadership actively calls for the enhancement of the private sector, defends the allocation of resources based on market capitalism, and engages in extractivist missions in third world countries. The “growth of wealth” in China was not brought about by the 1978 reforms and those which followed, they only changed which classes benefit the most from that growth.
Only very delusional people who don’t understand important Marxist principles such as ownership of the means of production, relations of production, and dictatorship of the proletariat can claim that China’s socio-economic system is “socialism.”
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Two-year-old Robyn Rivers is in critical condition after being struck in the head by a brick that was thrown through the rear passenger window of her family's car.
According to police, it happened around 10:10 p.m. Wednesday night on the I-75 service drive and east Warren.
The child's mother and grandmother were in the car with the child. Police say an unknown black male ran out in front of the vehicle, then ran to the side.
That's when the rear window was shattered and they discovered the child had been struck by a brick.
Little Robyn was taken into surgery Thursday.
The suspect is described as a 17 to 21-year-old male with a thin build, wearing a red-hooded shirt and white pants.
Police are also investigating reports of young kids throwing rocks may be related to this case. | {
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Roy Moore refusing to concede Alabama Senate race, says 'battle rages on' The Republican candidate released a video statement on Wednesday night.
-- Twenty-four hours after Democrat Doug Jones claimed an upset victory in Alabama's senatorial election, controversial candidate Roy Moore is refusing to concede the race.
Moore released a video on Wednesday night, saying "the battle rages on," and vowing every ballot should be counted.
"In this race, we have not received the final count to include military and provisional ballots," Moore said in the video. "This has been a very close race -- and we are awaiting certification by the secretary of state."
Alabama's Secretary of State John Merrill stood by comments he made election night in an interview with ABC News' Tom Llamas on Wednesday, saying an automatic recount is "highly unlikely." Merrill believes Jones' margin of victory will not dip below 0.5 percent, which would trigger an automatic recount. A spokesperson for Merrill said the state had a "free, fair and safe elections process," even calling it "perfect and seamless."
Jones spoke to reporters in Birmingham on Wednesday afternoon and said he'd leave it up to Moore to choose to concede.
"I'm going to leave that to him," Jones said. "I think that as most people, including the president, believe that the people of Alabama spoke, and after elections it's a time for healing, it's a time for reaching out."
Jones also told Moore to "do the right thing" in regard to conceding later in the press conference.
The Moore statement, filmed in front of an American flag and Christmas tree, runs just under five minutes long. It touches on many of the topics Moore made a hallmark of his conservative campaign -- religion, abortion, immigration, the Constitution and the definition of marriage.
Moore also briefly alludes to the allegations of sexual misconduct against him made by multiple women, though not explicitly, saying the claims against him have been a sign of "immorality."
"Immorality sweeps over our land -- even our political process has been affected with baseless and false allegations which have become more relevant than the true issues which affect our country," Moore says. "This election was tainted by over $50 million from outside groups who want to retain power and their own corrupt ideology."
Moore faces allegations from eight women who have accused him of sexual misconduct when he was in his 30s and, in some cases, the women were in their teens. He has denied the allegations throughout the race.
Absentee ballots are still being counted, as Moore notes, but with 100 percent of precincts reporting, Jones led Moore by nearly 21,000 votes, according to the Alabama secretary of state's office.
While Moore vows to fight on, it doesn't appear as though the rest of the political establishment is in agreement.
The Republican National Committee, Alabama's Republican Party and even President Donald Trump, who endorsed Moore, have all made statements indicating they are moving on. Trump tweeted three times about Moore losing in the 24 hours since Jones declared victory.
Jones said he also received a congratulatory call from Trump, referring to it as "gracious" and "very much appreciated." Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and sitting Alabama Republican Sens. Richard Shelby and Luther Strange also called him.
ABC News' Tom Llamas and John Verhovek contributed to this report. | {
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Though our past few articles focused on the Nilfgaardian siege camp, it wasn’t the only location used for May’s third week of filming. The week’s second location was a lakeside forest by Gyarmatpuszta Hunting Lodge at Kumarom-Esztergom, Hungary. While a siege was waged at Paty, Pest, the filming at Gyarmatpuszta involved a more intimate shoot and a completely different cast. Lead actor Henry Cavill, our Geralt, was among them.
UPDATE: A source has now provided us a video taken on location, confirming that Freya Allan (who plays Princess Ciri) was indeed filming by the lake as first speculated here. To respect the young young actress’ privacy, we have chosen not to share this video here as it was originally shared on a private account. We will describe it instead.
The video shows Freya near the lake the morning after a night shoot. In the video, she is seen with Ciri’s iconic ashen hair (and a lot of dirt). Freya writes that she was filming night shoots all week long, which means she could have been filming scenes with Cavill (or perhaps filming in the Nilfgaardian camp after being snatched by a certain knight with wings on his helmet). Read the original article below for pictures of the crew on location and other cast members spotted by the lake.
A new crew picture, described as “swamp filming”
The crew first arrived at Gyarmatpuszta on Monday, May 13, while continuing to film the siege camp sequence. Upon arrival, the crew quickly ran into the local wildlife (including boars and deer). The boars especially were a highlight, as they visited the set many times and are all over the crewmembers’ social media. Click here for a short video of the boars’ set visit, and scroll down for more pics and info.
Boars on a set visit
Deer, spotted nearby the show’s location
A truck on its way to the crew’s base camp
The road leading to a Witcher location
The Witcher crew clearly love mud
Filming equipment used for long panning shots
The crew filming on the lakebed using a crane
As mentioned, Henry Cavill (who spent the weekend back home in Jersey for the Durrell Challenge) returned to Budapest and was almost certainly filming scenes at Gyarmatpuszta. Henry’s hair stylist, Jacqui Rathore, was on location; that means Henry must have been close by. Who else was on location with Henry? Several key cast members and one new one. Since they filmed there for six days straight, it’s quite possible that the forest will be used for multiple scenes and multiple locations in-universe, and potentially even in different episodes. The first cast member we will discuss is the newcomer.
New cast member Jack Wolfe, whose role is unknown
Actor Jack Wolfe was on location on May 13 and was still in Budapest during the weekend. Though his CV has yet to mention The Witcher, we can’t imagine what else he’d be doing there. More interestingly, Kata Balogh, stunt actress and circus performer, was also on location. Kata has likely stunted for Therica Wilson-Read (who plays sorceress Sabrina) in the past as she was present at Egri Var’s mage filming several times. However, now that Therica has wrapped, it appears Kata is stunting for another role. With Freya Allan still in Budapest and since she matches Kata’s height and hairstyle, it’s quite possible these scenes will feature Ciri as well.
Which scenes could feature Geralt and Ciri together in the wilderness? Readers of the book will remember that Geralt and Ciri spent several days together as they traveled to the heart of Brokilon forest. It is important to note, however, that this is just speculation on our part (we were not able to confirm that Freya was here, so her filming may have been for the Nilfgaardian scenes).
A fan illustration of Geralt, Ciri and dryad Braenn, found on tumblr
Additionally, Jack Wolfe is now following season finale director Marc Jobst on twitter, which implies Marc was also on location (and that the Nilfgaardian siege was directed by another, likely Alik Sakharov). If all these scenes are indeed from the season one finale, Brokilon seems less likely, as it happens chronologically before the siege of Cintra. Keep in mind that these scenes might not all be part of the same sequence or even the same episode. However, if all of this shooting is for one sequence, these next two actors should come as a surprise.
On Saturday, May 18, Mate Haumann (whose role in the show is yet unknown) posted a video from what appears to be the exact same spot. A likely candidate for Mate’s character was Yurga, the farmer who saves Geralt in the books’ final short story (which will presumably be adapted for the season finale). However, the arrival of another cast member — also on Saturday — puts that theory to question. Mahesh Jadu, aka Vilgefortz, shared pictures from an area 10 minutes away from Gyarmatpuszta and later shared pictures of a filming location which is most likely near where the rest of the action took place. With Mahesh and Mate on location at the same time, it seems likely they will be sharing a scene, perhaps with other actors as well.
Heading into the weekend and long after the crew wrapped filming for the Nilfgaardian siege camp, the show continued filming scenes in this lakeside forest. The focus appears to have shifted towards night shoots, as several crew members and even showrunner Lauren S. Hissrich herself were present from dusk till dawn. “We’ve been doing exterior nightshoots for two weeks with a lot of rain and temperatures in the low-mid 40s,” says a crew member on social media. “We’ve been bundled up each evening in many layers of clothing and boots. Summertime in Hungary!”
The crew gathered in the forest by Gyarmatpuszta during a night shoot
The light of a fake moon, perhaps. “No filter”.
The crew prepping for a shoot. Is that Mahesh in the center?
More filming by the lake, this time at night
A Nilfgaardian tent, and our best look yet at Nilfgaardian soldiers. Uploaded May 18, likely from the same location.
Mud isn’t the only thing common on a Witcher set, smoke is as well
The day breaks at Gyarmatpuszta as the nightshoot comes to an end
A picture taken on location by the crew
Are all of these scenes part of the season finale, or do they belong to various episodes? Do they stand for the same location, or multiple places in the show’s story? Or, perhaps, will they all stand in for Sodden, as we see various groups of characters journeying through it in the season finale? As of now, your guess is as good as ours. Hopefully all will be revealed soon as filming of The Witcher reaches its final lap.
Stay tuned with Redanian Intelligence as we have a number of posts coming up (some soon, others later on) which are sure to ease the troubling silence of the coming news drought.
Sunrise at Gyarmatpuszta, the morning after an extensive nightshoot
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更新
ダウン症の子を妊娠したマウスに投与すると、生まれた子の脳の構造が変化して学習能力が向上する化合物を発見したと、京都大の萩原正敏教授（化学生物学）らのグループが、５日付の米科学アカデミー紀要電子版に発表した。化合物の作用で神経細胞の増殖が促され、ダウン症の症状が改善されるという。
将来、出生前診断をした人の胎児を対象とした薬剤の開発につながる可能性がある。ただ、人の胎児で臨床研究を行うことの是非など、早期の実現には倫理面で課題がある。
ダウン症は２１番染色体が１本多い３本になることで起き、発達の遅れや、心臓疾患などの合併症を伴うこともある。グループは、神経の元になる細胞（神経前駆細胞）が増えないことがダウン症の原因の一つと考え、７１７種類の化合物をふるい分けし、神経幹細胞が前駆細胞を増殖するのを促進する化合物を発見。「アルジャーノン」と名付けた。
ダウン症の子を妊娠したマウスに１日１回、経口投与すると、胎児の前駆細胞が増えるなど、投与しなかったダウン症の子とは脳の構造が異なった。迷路を使った実験で学習能力を比較した結果、投与したマウスの方が好成績で、正常なマウスとも変わらなかった。
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UK Members of Parliament have voted on Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit proposition. May’s Brexit deal has been rejected.
The rejection of the deal could now result in a “hard Brexit,” an exit from the EU with no formal agreement on debt, trade, and what will happen to UK citizens living in Europe. There are other likely outcomes and the UK government has just three days to decide what comes next.
The Outcome is…Well…Complicated
The 585-page withdrawal agreement and 26-page declaration on proposed future relations between the UK and EU could now be renegotiated.
Or, the government could propose a general election.
Or, May’s opposing Labour government could call for a vote of no confidence in May.
A general election could lead to an extension of “Article 50” the bill dictating the leave date for the UK, thus extending the UK’s time in the EU while the UK government is redecided and negotiations occur.
A vote of no confidence could lead to a new Prime Minister, a general election, or May could win and everything is back on the table, but still with no clear outcome.
There could also be a new referendum, but as Article 50 is in play, the UK cannot end Brexit unless the other EU member 27-member states agree. There is no time for a referendum before the UK’s exit of the EU, on March 29, 2019. So, to hold a referendum Article 50 would need to be extended.
This diagram from the UK’s BBC News illustrates the pre-vote scenario.
Now that May’s Brexit deal has been rejected, the choices of renegotiation, general election, referendum, and vote of no confidence could, in a nutshell, send the UK and the EU around in circles.
The next three days and whether a vote of no confidence is called will provide some clarity, maybe.
As anything other than a hard Brexit will be lengthy and complicated, the immediate outcome may be either exactly the “hard” exit with no agreement – or, some kind of extension to article 50 while the UK deals with the further turmoil. Even if May has a chance to renegotiate a withdrawal agreement, that process might not be concluded by the critical date of March 29.
The Impact on Economies and Markets
A hard Brexit is going to be exactly that for the UK economy. The UK will have to renegotiate trade deals, debt arrangements, and so forth. It will be long and complicated and full of uncertainty.
This is likely to transpose into both economic performance and the UK’s stock markets as companies hold back plans while they wait for a clear outcome. An extension to Article 50 and the UK’s Brexit leaving date will have the same effect until a firm outcome emerges. UK is in a limbo.
Though Europe will feel the pinch it is not as reliant on the UK. European businesses have likely been operating on the basis that the UK is leaving. Again, deals may need to be made but the EU’s economy as a whole should resist some effects. Short term the stock markets may see some volatility but will recover quickly.
A recent EY survey discovered that companies in the UK financial services industry have moved $1 trillion in assets out of the UK in preparation for Brexit.
A small amount of uncertainty, potential economic slowdown, and stock market unrest, could pass on to the US markets.
Long-term Brexit may aggravate a European economic slowdown. Short-term the US markets have enough to focus on nearer to home. The government shutdown persists, trade resolutions need to be agreed. And, US President Donald Trump adds his own volatility to the US stock markets.
Featured image from Reuters. | {
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MTV has greenlit the anti-Jersey Shore.
The network has ordered 12 episodes of a new docu-soap series following a group of virgins.
This as-yet-untitled show follows the lives of several abstinent young people (ages 18 to 25) trying to handle their love lives, parental sex talks, sexually active friends, and the pressure to give in to their temptations. Throughout each episode, MTV chronicles v-card-carrying cast members from across the country, all “plagued with the overwhelming question of keeping their virginity… or losing it.”
The show will include messaging from MTV’s Peabody-winning “It’s Your (Sex) Life” campaign, which aims to empower young people to make better decisions about their sexual health.
Endemol USA will produce the weekly, hour-long reality show, which is sure to generate plenty of discussion for the network. The channel has a history of reality hits starring sexually active party-going young people — from The Real World, to The Hills, to Jersey Shore, to Buckwild. While it’s common for such reality ensembles to have one character who is still a virgin, this may be the first time a grown-up docu-soap reality series will have an all-virgin cast. Previously, TLC aired a one-time special titled The Virgin Diaries, which followed virgins in their 20s and 30s. | {
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Howdy everyone!
My name is Chris, or as you may know me, Lateralus19. I have been playing TES: Legends since the end of July and have been able to achieve Legend rank each season. My card game experience did not start there though. I have been playing Magic the Gathering on and off since my childhood at a competitive level. I played Hearthstone from Goblins vs. Gnomes until One Night in Karazhan (about when I started playing TES: Legends). I’ve dabbled in a few other card games such as Infinity Wars, Pokémon, Duelyst, and Eternal, but nothing on the competitive level there yet. I’m excited to be writing my first TES: Legends article today about my current favorite aggressive deck – Goblins!
Why Play Archer Goblins?
Well, in order to win a game in TES: Legends, we have to get our opponent to zero health, right? Goblins can do that extremely fast. Grinding ladder can be tedious for some. For experienced players, you realize that the deck you have the highest win rate with is not necessarily the best deck to climb ladder with quickly. A deck with a win rate above 50%, usually in the 55-65% range, with a low average turns/win, tend to be the fastest decks to climb. Goblins tend to win fast or lose fast. The average game tends to be 7-8 turns, although the deck has been able to close out games in the later turns better than expected.
The second reason to try the deck out is its cost. Looking for a “budget” deck to climb to legend with? Archer Goblins fills that role. With only two unique legends, the deck costs only 8,850 soul gems! Many tier one decks cost roughly double that.
Lastly, it is consistent! With a relative low curve, it is not often that you get truly bad hands that would cost you the game before it gets started. With all cards aligned to help push damage to the face, you do not always need a specific hard on a specific turn in order to achieve your goal.
The Cards
Goblins
Well, how about we start with all of the goblins? Seems obvious enough. I want to just talk about a few of them.
First, Goblin Skulk. This is one of the best two drops in the game, so naturally it would be one of the best goblins. You want to get this card online as quick as possible and should always choose to play this turn 1-2 over your other options. We are running six 0-cost cards and want them out of our deck as quickly as possible. One way to lose is to naturally draw multiples of these cards.
Second, Murkwater Savage. Everyone from early beta remembers this guy right? Well, he is back. While he may not be dominating the meta like he used to at 2-cost, he is still scary here. Following him up with the next card on our list, Murkwater Skirmisher, allows him to swing as a 5/5 on turn 4-5. He might even be bigger if you held or pulled a Murkwater Goblin!
The last goblin I want to mention here is the aforementioned Murkwater Skirmisher. This is the card that will let you dominate a board state and seal a game. He will often immediately add six power and toughness to the board. This allows you to burst down your opponent to where you threaten lethal the following turn or clear a pesky guard.
Some of the Other Guys
The reach: every aggressive deck needs it. In this deck it comes in several forms. We have Skirmisher, Cliff Racer, House Kinsman, Crushing Blow and Tazkad the Packmaster himself to add to our damage output.
As for card draw, we are very limited in options here and ultimately this is the reason we are Archer! Triumphant Jarl is a must and will keep the gas tank full and help us grind out games if we have not closed in the early game.
Ungolim the Listener is here because of his summon ability and his cost. He and his lovely assassins have good synergy with Murkwater Savage, being only 1-cost. Daring Cutpurse is an aggressive staple in agility. Fighters Guild Recruit may seem odd and sometimes I think he should be a Mournhold Traitor. What I like about him is that he can help our snowball cards, well, snowball. Dropping him to protect our early threats is helpful and he is our only defensive prophecy. Nimble Ally just makes sense when 88% of your deck triggers his summon ability.
What You Can Change
You can change whatever you what, duh! No, but in all seriousness, you could get away with making this budget deck even more cheap. While Ungolim and Tazkad are nice to have, you can get away with substituting them. I wouldn’t be mad at you if you substituted Fighters Guild Recruit either. As for what cards would fit in the deck as replacements, you have a few solid options.
My first recommendation would be Dune Smuggler. It has synergy with the three Shadow Shifts we run and can help snowball a Cutpurse or Skulk or maybe even keep an important Shaman alive to start generating value.
I’ve already mentioned Mournhold Traitor. He is very aggressive and if you know how to play around his last gasp, he can do wonders for you. Just be careful that you only have curses to efficiently remove the 2/1s he summons for the opponent without trading, since we are not running Skaven Pyromancers.
Earthbone Spinner is one of the best red cards in the game. We have no silences, so if you are seeing a ton of guards, feel free to tech him in. He won’t hurt your Nimble Ally procs too often (unless your name is YakinikuParty).
Lastly, I would recommend Belligerent Giant to top off with, especially if you are not running Tazkad. He is a great way to help close a game with his versatile summon and big body. (Again, if you’re not YakinikuParty, he won’t hurt your Nimble Ally procs often… Then again, if your name is YakinikuParty, you won’t be hitting on your Nimble Allies anyway, so maybe you want to substitute those.)
Goblins Will Kill…
Here, I will give a quick overview of the decks I played against the most and leave it open for questions or comments if more details are desired.
Item Sorcerer – Favored (75/25)
This deck was a large portion of the ladder meta, which is a main reason I began playing Goblins. Item Sorcerer tends to struggle versus decks that were just too fast to get set up against. Murkwater Shaman and Curse tend to shine in this matchup. I won about 80% of my games versus this deck, although I think that was just a tad high.
Control Mage – Favored (65/35 – 55/45)
The reason I give two percentages here is because there is two types of Mage Control running around. Versus traditional control goblins tend to be too much too fast. If you also hit a Skirmisher before they can cast Ice Storm, they have no way of stabilizing unless they get (and run) a good Immolating Blast. Of course, they can always open up with multiples of Execute, Firebolt and Hive Defender to make your world hell.
Prophecy Mage tends to be tougher. If they hit two or three timely prophecies, this could be hard to win before we get into the late game where they shine. That said, if prophecies are not hit, or are played around well, this tends to be fairly easy.
Ramp Scout – Favored (60/40)
Goblins usually comes out on top here. The way that we don’t is when they ramp while they ramp so they can have some ramp on their ramp into all the shackles and life gain. Other than that, Goblins are too fast for Ramp Scout to get to their late game.
Goblins May Die To…
Midrange Sorcerer – Even (50/50)
This deck tends to be faster than Item Sorcerer and doesn’t need time to setup combos. It usually runs Royal Sages though, and they would be fortunate to proc its ability any time against Goblins due to our damage output. However, when this deck vomits all of its Firebolts and Shrieking Harpies and efficient ward creates that can trade well in the first few turns it can feel impossible to win.
Merric Battlemage – Even (50/50)
This was always a tough match. I thought that it would not be any more difficult than a Control Mage, but with Merric’s ability to close a game quickly along with a nice removal suite, there is no room for error and you need to be able to get off to a quick start.
Prophecy Battlemage – Unfavored (40/60)
This is difficult. They are about the same speed in terms of aggression, but they have about 4-5x the amount of prophecies, making it extremely hard to race. We neither have the tools to control nor any life gain. You have to race and hope you come out on top.
The Verdict
Goblins are great to climb the ladder in a timely matter. I remember I climbed from the bottom of rank 1 to legend in 40 minutes, which is pretty quick. This is a deck that you can use to get to legend and maintain a decent win rate in. However, I do not recommend the deck for high legend play because you can pilot something that can achieve a higher win rate and every win counts at the top. Goblins are also extremely budget friendly and every rare+ card in the list is used in some other high tier deck besides maybe Murkwater Skirmisher.
Well folks, it has been my pleasure to shed some light on Archer Goblins for you all. I hope everyone enjoyed the read. I look forward to bringing you more content in the future! | {
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The Utah State Aggies will play at the Michigan State Spartans in 2018 and at the Washington Huskies in 2020, FBSchedules.com has learned.
Copies of contracts for both games were obtained from Utah State University by FBSchedules.com via a public records request.
Utah State will travel to take on Michigan State at Spartan Stadium in East Lansing on Sept. 1, 2018. The Aggies will receive a $1.4 million guarantee for the game, according to the contract.
The 2018 contest between Utah State and Michigan State will be each teams season-opener and also their first-ever meeting on the gridiron.
Utah State will take on the Washington Huskies on Sept. 19, 2020 at Husky Stadium in Seattle. Per the contract, the Aggies will receive a $1.5 million guarantee for the game.
Utah State and Washington have met three times in football. In their most recent meeting in 2015, the Huskies defeated the Aggies 31-17 to extend their lead in the overall series to 3-0.
Football Schedules | {
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The disease of Ascariasis has been around for many years. First studied by Edward Tyson in the late 17th century, Ascariasis comes in two forms. Ascaris lumbricoides, the human form, and Ascaris suum, the pig form, are very similar in structure and many believe the two evolved from a common origin. A. lumbricoides is a helminthes, or worm, grouped with specifically the nematodes, or round worms in terms of classification. With modern technology Ascaris eggs have been found in human coprolites from Peru dating back to 2277BC. Due to the nature of the worm being so large, there has been a long history of written record of the disease back to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics which detail the worm evacuating the body through the anus, much like the picture on the left.
The life cycle of the disease was finally discovered in Japan in 1922 when Shimesu Koino, a researcher, infected both a volunteer and himself, and then traced the progress of the disease. | {
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Hello and welcome to the 37th Hearts of Iron IV Development Diary. We’re crunching like mad, to make a new beta-submission on monday. Today I want to show a little bit about carrier warfare in our game.The Aircraft carrier is a floating airbase. So each carrier functions as a small airbase and can base naval versions of small aircraft (no strategic bombers, sorry Doolittle). You can have fighters, naval bombers and close air support aircraft. Close air support aircraft fulfil a dual role as both a Naval dive bomber and a land based dive bomber so you can use your carrier fleets to hit the enemy and on a ground support role for troops close to land.When you construct your carriers, you can easily set up its airwings composition, and you can also assign larger airwings to a carrier than it can take, reducing its effectivity.You can spend navy xp, to make special variants, as we have mentioned earlier. Where carriers have the possibility to increase reliability, armor, engine and decksize.As with land based airbases you can choose the blend of aircraft you want to put on your carriers. This in part depends on what aircraft you happen to have on hand but also what role you carriers are filling and your strategic situation. The air war is going well, maybe you can reduce the number of fighters and increase the amount of bombers (or vice versa). Maybe you have control of the seas and are looking to some naval landing, then less naval bombers and a few more CAS are the answer.Have fun! | {
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1. Pennsylvania Senate Bill 367 and Chancellor Cavanaugh’s Plan to Industrialize Higher Education
Dory Hippauf’s “ ” offers an excellent profile of the : “an act providing for indigenous mineral resource development; and imposing powers and duties on the Department of General Services and the State System of Higher Education.” The bill makes Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) campuses available to Big Energy for the development of any form of extraction—including slickwater horizontal hydraulic fracturing—fracking. It’s sponsor and gas industry beneficiary, (R-41) – who received $94,150 from the industry, :
“This legislation provides an opportunity currently available only to state game lands, state parks and state forests to generate revenue,” Senator White said. “This bill does not require the state to lease or sell any property rights. SB 367 simply opens up that option, which can provide revenue while boosting our state economy through the creation of new jobs. Equally important, much of the revenue generated from these leases will be used to boost Pennsylvania’s environmental protection efforts”… “This fits well with the proposals made by the Governor when he urged state universities to consider drilling for natural gas below campus to help solve their financial problems,” Senator White said. “This legislation would give SSHE [PASSHE] schools that option and allow the system to benefit from the royalties.””
As Sean Kitchen points out, among the most astonishing elements of this bill (sec. 4 (a) (1)) is that it invests university presidents with the exclusive authority to decide whether a fracking—or coal, or oil—mining operationv can proceed on your kid’s campus. As Kitchen reports, this provision raises serious concerns for the few Pennsylvania state representatives who had the courage to vote against it, for example, Greg Vitali:
“[Vitali] is worried that the presidents will become puppets for Chancellor Cavanaugh and the Board of Governors. Another real concern this bill creates is the vetting process when new university professors or presidents are hired. What will happen to university presidential candidates if they openly express any thought that mining for natural resources on a college campus is not conducive for proper learning conditions? Or if that professor’s research notes DEP data that 7% of all natural gas wells will have cement casings fail on the very first time the wells are fracked?”
My only quibble with Vitali’s assessment is that the situation is actually far worse than this. Chancellor Cavanaugh’s vision for PASSHE—and hence what he will no doubt expect from his university presidents—accords not only with SB367, but with the wholesale corporatization and industrialization of the state university system.
Extraction is merely one piece of the transmogrification of PASSHE schools, converting what is an essential public good in the creation of thinking citizens into effectively privatized for-profits whose aims are not education, but the next generation of workers laboring under the tutelage of those who can afford to send their children to far more expensive private institutions. and the firing of tenured professors for the sake of “cost-savings” and “efficiencies,” that his “wish list” in the on-going negotiations with the PASSHE faculty union, APSCUF (The Association of Pennsylvania College and University Faculties) is a recipe for union-busting—including the creation of a poorly paid underclass of non-tenure “lecturers,” the reclassification of department chairs as “managers,” and the conversion of “brick and mortar” classroom education into “executive model” on-line courses — , but the manufacture of workers most attractive to the industries he welcomes to your kid’s campus via his presidents, or rather, your kid’s campus-factory where he or she can expect to see the liberal arts demoted to “service curricula” and programs which serve .
SB367 is simply one of the cogs in this machine—but one of the most lethal—both figuratively and literally. What the introduction of the extraction profiteers herald for PASSHE isn’t “merely” the corporatization of public higher education, but rather the industrialization of the public college campus, its conversion from a community whose mission is the creation of knowledge, ideas, art, music—citizenship—to a site of manufacture whose mission is the generation of profits. The notion that a campus with active drill rigs competing for space with libraries, quads, and classrooms is conducive to learning, that a frack-operation is consistent with the atmosphere necessary to the free exchange of ideas, is absurd on its face. Indeed, regardless the locus of industry influence—whether drill rigs on the quad or industry-cheerleader “Frackademics” like Penn State’s discredited Terry Engelder in the classroom—the claim that “industry partnerships” heavily leveraged by Big Energy are consistent with objective research has turned out to be patently laughable. , for example, have all come under fire in recent months for “research” demonstrably biased to industry interests, for ignoring environmental and health concerns, and for failing to disclose their financing.
The criticism has motivated some academics—like Penn State’s Michael Arthur—to distance themselves from industry promotional groups like Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale Coalition. But Chancellor Cavanaugh remains apparently impervious to the possibility that PASSHE could be confronted with similar criticism, much less, say, a lawsuit like the one filed by against Penn State for “ ” concerning the publication of two 2009/10 “studies” conducted under the university’s name neither of which were subjected to review and both of which have since been significantly discredited for unsubstantiated claims in favor of the industry. Of course, PASSHE programs are unlikely to be able to solicit quite the same level of investment that the bigger name school programs are—so perhaps Chancellor Cavanaugh sees the prospect of fracking-on-campus as the next best thing. Penn State may have to suffer the discredit and notoriety for its support of shoddy research and industry cheerleaders pretending to be academics. But it’s still the members of PASSHE campus communities who’ll be subjected to the environmental and health risks associated with the long and hoary history of extraction. Apparently Chancellor Cavanaugh is OK with that.
2. DEP: Owned by “The Gas”
It is richly ironic that SB 367’s sponsor, Senator White, attempts to paper over the well-established hazards associated with fracking, transmission lines, compressor stations, rigs, trucks, pits, etc., by promoting “Pennsylvania’s environmental protection efforts in that, for all practical purposes, there currently are no such efforts. The Department of Environmental Protection (or Deny, Evade, Procrastinate – a name coined by environmental activists) is a wholly owned and operated, taxpayer funded, subsidiary of the natural gas industry. :
“Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Michael Krancer took the microphone multiple times at a press conference this week aimed at promoting the conversion of the idled Sunoco refinery into a natural gas processing facility. Krancer wanted to assure any prospective investors that they would experience a friendly and expedited permit process. “We as a Department of Environmental Protection will work hand in glove, very closely, cooperatively and spiritedly with anyone who would want to participate in activities at this facility,” said Krancer… Krancer said DEP employees will “work night and day” to get industry the necessary permits…“They’ll find a DEP that is creative and wants to get to the right result for environmental protection and economic development because the two are not mutually exclusive,” he said.”
“A friendly and expedited permit process” facilitated by a “creative” and “spirited” DEP headed by Michael Krancer, former executive at Exelon, an energy corporation most well-known for the sweetheart deal it enjoys with—you guessed it—DEP and the Delaware River Basin Commission. Consider this :
“The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the Delaware River Basin Commission went to extraordinary lengths to accommodate Exelon’s profits, while abandoning public interests. Exemptions and giveaways in Limerick Nuclear Plant’s five-year draft permits are unethical schemes that enable Exelon to circumvent limits and laws and irresponsibly facilitate relicensing. Limerick Nuclear Plant is being exempted from Clean Water Act limits for pollution that carries Limerick’s radioactive discharges into the river…This is about Limerick’s unprecedented use and poisoning of public drinking water for corporate profit. Permit decisions now could impact you and your family for generations. The Schuylkill River is a vital drinking water source for almost two million people from Pottstown to Philadelphia…Gov. Tom Corbett and DEP Secretary Michael Krancer are turning a blind eye for Exelon’s profits… Krancer, a former Exelon attorney, was appointed by Gov. Corbett, the polluters’ puppet…It’s regulatory malpractice to allow Exelon to circumvent Safe Drinking Water standards because Limerick can’t meet them. Permit exemptions don’t remove risks from Limerick’s radiation and cooling tower toxics. Allowing Limerick’s dangerous Total Dissolved Solids discharges to poison Schuylkill River water, without limits or meaningful oversight, is morally reprehensible. Exelon can and must filter Limerick’s TDS discharges into the river.”
To be clear, this is an Op-Ed and not a news report, but the facts are not in dispute: Limerick is exempted from the Clean Water Act (much like fracking), the Schuylkill is a vital source of drinking water, Krancer is a former attorney for the corporation that stands to make millions (or billions) from this nuclear gambit, Limerick’s discharge into the river does seriously endanger the public health, and Governor Corbett did appoint Krancer to DEP. This is your department of environmental protection at work. And this is the level of commitment and protection your kid can expect from fracking on PASSHE campuses—a mining operation exempted from the Clean Water Act.
Then again, why should PASSHE campuses enjoy any more protection than state parks? As environmentalist Jan Jarrett speculates on her blog about “resignation” may be polite code for fired by a Corbett administration hell-bent on opening the parks to drillers. While Corbett administration spokesperson Christine Cronkright denies there is any connection to drilling, and insists that the current moratorium on fracking in state parks is in place, the resignation of Professor Paulette Viola from Slippery Rock—a PASSHE university—tells a very different story about the esteem with which the Corbett administration holds its faithful servants from the . It’s no wonder that Norbeck would resign in frustration at the prospect that concluding that the state can’t lease out any more land without seriously compromising state park ecologies is likely to be entirely ignored. His, however, is just one voice effectively silenced by an industry whose power is now postured to control the state’s most effective stronghold of independent expression—the faculty of the public university:
“Norbeck is not the only talent heading out the door at DCNR. , an ecology professor at Slippery Rock University who served as a volunteer member of the for 18 years, recently left in frustration. Viola tells StateImpact Pennsylvania that public input and advice from council members are no longer valued ‘We’re ineffective and inefficient at this point,’ said Viola. ‘We’ve tried to work with the Secretary for the last six months, and it’s not happening.'”
Will PASSHE university presidents be taken more seriously than the director of state parks for DCNR? More seriously than a professor of ecology with eighteen years of relevant experience at a PASSHE institution? No. In fact, Professor Viola represents precisely the independent professoriate Chancellor Cavanaugh’s “wish list” would do away with, and replace with lecturers whose freedom to speak out against genocidal profiteering is only as secure as their one year contracts. : “after consulting with petroleum companies and related industries late last year, the university founded the Marcellus Institute, which will help develop academic programs in fields related to the gas industry, get students connected to companies for internships, and offer programs in community education.”
The irony here is that professors who sell out their academic integrity on the Terry Engelder Penn State model stand to make bank on their gas industry connections—all the while academics who refuse to compromise their integrity—hoping that the tenure system will protect them either from being outsourced or from simply being fired like their Antioch colleagues—are rapidly becoming an endangered species in a university system whose premium on “efficiencies” can make no room for “old fashioned” enterprises like the liberal arts or, god-forbid, the humanities.
3. SB 367 and the 15 Percent Fake-Scholarship Bribe
Proponents of SB 367 claim that some of the revenue generated will go to environmental restoration. This, however, is absurd. In fact, the state is willing to sacrifice your kid’s health during his/her tenure at a PASSHE school in exchange for what amounts to a flat lie. “Restoration” is a ridiculous notion in the face of century old trees reduced to dead stumps, rivers drained into frack-drill-holes, produced water tankers, and deep injection wells, air polluted with invisible and deadly carcinogens. This is rather like the nefarious physician who says to your kid as he/she strolls onto campus: “Well, I am going to inject you with a poison that will kill you, but then I’ll ‘restore’ you with some embalming fluids and nifty cosmetics that will make you look all rosy and alive—in your casket.” What makes the “frack-money-for –the environment” clause of SB 367 even more offensive, however, is that it authorizes that “15 percent of proceeds [from the lease of PASSHE campus property] will be allocated for tuition scholarships for all 14 state universities.” Sounds good—good enough even for while they vote in favor of the frackers.
The 15% scholarship money clause is nothing but a bribe. At Mansfield University, in fact, it’s easy to imagine this 15% going right back to the pockets of the frackers—with bonus money—in the form of training programs for middle management frack workers disguised as university graduates: “ is also now offering two new degree programs – the Associate of Applied Science in Natural Gas Production and Services and the Bachelor of Science in Safety Management – that will also support jobs in the natural gas industry.” So what “scholarship” really means is “investment” in future-frackers whose labor will generate more profits for the natural gas industry, while simultaneously offering precisely no critical evaluation—much less opportunity for criticism—of the industry itself. As we see more and more of at PASSHE institutions—the state schools good enough for your kid, but not Chesapeake’s Aubrey McClendon’s—what passes for education is no longer directed at making of us better citizens (god forbid “persons”), but at providing workers to the corporations who offer to take up the slack left by gutted state appropriations by leasing university campus land for fracking. “Taking up the slack! Drilling down for the frack!” could be the PASSHE, INC. motto, making into toxic reality Governor Corbett’s ideological mission to privatize and corporatize the state university system—and making it all look like the gift of a “scholarship.” Has a nice ring—“scholarship.” Too bad it doesn’t mean a goddamn thing other than that .
4. The Exchange of Critically Thinking Citizens for Replaceable Cogs in the Extraction-Machine
Consistent with Governor Corbett’s ideologically driven agenda to industrialize PASSHE universities, “student” is successfully converted into “education consumer”—a pale substitute for the citizen who can think for themselves—on the way to becoming a “worker” for an industry that donated millions to the governor’s run for office, and that ultimately pads the pockets of his frack-friends. it seems no mere speculation that Corbett’s tenure as governor is really just a rehearsal for his dream job with “the gas.” What does your kid get out of this? The opportunity to become an “oil field worker” in the new industrialized PA, Inc—at least until the fracking boom goes bust. He could even get the chance to become a statistic in a field exempted from highway safety rules, a field whose “fatality rates…are seven times the national average across all industries.”
“After working 17 hours straight at a natural gas well in Ohio, Timothy Roth and three other crew members climbed into their company truck around 10 o’clock one night last July and began their four-hour drive back to their drilling service company’s shop in West Virginia…When they were just 10 minutes from home, the driver fell asleep at the wheel. The truck veered off the highway and slammed into a sign that sheared off part of the vehicle’s side, killing Mr. Roth…About two months before the fatal crash, Mr. Roth nearly died in a similar accident when another co-worker with the same company fell asleep at the wheel after a long shift and ran the company’s truck into a pole. They had to call afterwards to geta claim set up. In 2009, Mr. Roth’s employer in New York, Pennsylvania and Utah for violations like “requiring or permitting” its oil field truckers to drive after working for 14 hours, the legal limit…Over the past decade, more than 300 oil and gas workers like Mr. Roth were killed in highway crashes, the largest cause of fatalities in the industry. Many of these deaths were due in part to oil field exemptions from highway safety rules that allow truckers to work longer hours than drivers in most other industries, according to safety and health experts…Many oil field truckers say that while these exemptions help them earn more money, they are routinely used to pressure workers into driving after shifts that are 20 hours or longer.”
Or you can be who lost her only son – Charles Bevins – at 23. Charles Bevins was crushed and pinned between a forklift and a building. The company he worked for – Bradden Energy – repeatedly denied requests to get the proper ground mats to stabilize the surface because they were “too expensive.” Their story can be seen below.
Now, perhaps your kid’s degree from Mansfield, or from Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering, or pre-engineering program won’t relegate him (or—very unlikely—her) to nonunionized and unregulated truck driver status. Perhaps he’ll get to be the guy who assigns the working hours to fellows like Timothy Roth. I’m sure that makes us all feel much better.
Or maybe your kid could be the DEP agent responsible for “pulling” the next “switcheroo” “by approving a permit that allows the spreading of chemical salts from Marcellus Shale hydraulic fracturing wastewater on roadways and fields” by one of the fracking-suckubi enterprises– . Instead of the treated wastewater permit DEP should have issued–the one that demanded public comment (and the potential denial of the permit), the agency issued a “general permit” “that says nothing about wastewater treatment.” Even worse, “the issued permit changes the definition of two chemical compounds produced by the company’s treatment process from “waste” to “beneficial use” and authorizes the spreading and use of the chemical salts for road and sidewalk de-icer…” ( ). Is this the DEP that any of us would want our kid to be associated with? No–but the better question is this: Is this the DEP that, say, your kid’s Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s (IUP) prepares him or her for? Yes. because this is Michael Krancer’s DEP–the Department of Environmental Piracy–where drillers can expect to receive little more than a ceremonial slap on the wrist for “allowing a leak of a clay substance [bentonite] at a well site near Beaver Run Reservoir in Bell Township,” the reservoir “monitored by a team of IUP students from the department of geography and regional planing.”
The leak was detected “just three days after the Municipal Authority of Westmoreland County said the IUP testing showed that drilling had had no environmental impact on the reservoir, which provides drinking water to 150,000 people in 31 municipalities” ( ). This is the same IUP testing lauded by the gas-cheerleader Marcellus Drilling News–the folks your kid really works for however much this fact is disguised by a degree from IUP (or Lock Haven or Mansfield, or potentially any PASSHE school). This is the same testing that paved the way for fourteen more wells drilled near Beaver Run, conducted by an IUP professor, Brian Okey, Associate Professor for Geography and Regional Planning, who admitted that some metals and “signs of industrial activity” were identified in the water samples taken by IUP students, but insisted that none threatened public health or safety ( ). Maybe. This is also the drinking water that your kid may be slurping down every time he or she brushes their teeth, and DEP required no independent monitoring of the leaking drill site ( ). DEP, in other words, simply took Consol Energy–the offending drilling company’s–word for what happened at Beaver Run reservoir, citing the corporation for “discharge of pollutional material into the Commonwealth” ( ). Note, I’m not suggesting that the IUP students involved in the testing are engaged in any dishonest enterprise. Perhaps the water was clean three days before the spill. But who knows when the fox is guarding the hen house? What I am arguing is that the alliance between Big Gas, a corrupt state agency–DEP–and a corrupt PASSHE leadership under Chancellor Cavanaugh taints every enterprise connected to natural gas drilling, and that this fact is not consistent with your kid’s aspirations to become educated. Not unless “educated” means “uncritical drone for the gas.” And if that’s all it means, we should drop the pretense that PASSHE is a university system. it’s not. It’s a network of training depots for Big Extraction–and thanks to SB 367, soon to have the industrialized toxic landscape fitting to its purpose.
This is the of kind frack-tastrophe we can expect given the perverse logic of a governor who slashes and burns PASSHE school budgets, forcing a 16% rise in tuition in 2012, and then gives the “saved” money away to the gas industry in the form of tax breaks and subsidies. Indeed Governor Corbett appears to want to emulate the federal taxpayer funded give-away program. : “Over three decades, from the shale fields of Texas and Wyoming to the Marcellus in the Northeast, the federal government contributed more than $100 million in research to develop fracking, and billions more in tax breaks.”
The good governor’s own cash-for-frack subsidies offers 1.65 billion dollars to “woo” Shell Chemical away from competing states like Ohio for the building of an .
That’s 1.65 billion dollars that could go to higher education, social services for indigent and elderly folks, K-12 public schools, or environmental protection. He then decries the recession’s stranglehold on the Commonwealth. “We’re broke!” says the governor. But behold! The way out of our “financial difficulties” is to “allow” PASSHE schools to “drill for dollars” right on campus! (Republican, Bradford/Tioga)—unwittingly—may say it best:
“Our universities are more financially strapped than ever with decreasing state funds and mounting educational costs,” said Baker. “This legislation will provide a way for the universities to benefit from the lands on which they are located. Several of the schools are positioned well for the extraction of coal or natural gas in particular, and the universities are in favor of the proposal.”
”More financially strapped than ever”: “Making a ton of money for a few already really wealthy extraction corporations and their proliferating succubae is far more important than keeping our commitment to educate the citizens of the Commonwealth.”
“A way for the universities to benefit from the lands on which they are located”: “Wow! Look at all that really cheap frackable land! Let’s sucker PASSHE students by offering “scholarship” money to get’em to work for us.”
“[T]he universities are in favor of the proposal”: gut the PASSHE funding enough, and they’ll be happy to call this shit-cake a tasty-treat.
There’s really no way around it. SB 367 is obscene.
5. Fracking, SB 367, and your dead kid
Imagine: drill rigs, sand trucks, wastewater trucks, freshwater trucks, evaporating wastewater pits, compressors, the noise from drilling, flaring, trucking—on the campus where your kid, your friends, your neighbor’s children go to school.
How about Bloomsburg University (where I have taught for 20 years): your kid competing with speeding sand haulers on two-lane Rt. 487 either coming or going from the I-80 exchange along with BU campus buses, other vehicles, waste-haulers, white chemical-conveyer pick-up trucks (say, Halliburton), and students walking to class (that is, competing with the frack-traffic that’s already there). Envision that accident—maybe right across the street from the president’s house, Buckalew Place. Imagine the ambulance trying to get to the head-on collision involving a truck like, say, this 4, 600 gallon beauty from Luzerne County and your kid’s beater-car. Or your kid’s bicycle, or your kid’s body:
The Minuteman Environmental Services driver somehow crashed into a rock wall in Watson Township on his way to a gas well site, according to state police. Fire officials said the truck was hauling a full load in excess of 4,600 gallons of the treated wastewater that contains high salt levels and some chemicals used in the fracking process. Firefighters placed booms in Pine Creek to catch any contamination. .
Imagine the ambulance competing with the Minuteman clean-up crew trying to get to the .
Or how about this: football game traffic backed up for miles at BU’s Redman Stadium speckled with rig trucks, tractor trailers hauling pipes, etc., making their way through the residential neighborhoods that dominate every square foot of ground between the BU campus, Rt 487, Rt. 11, and I-80. What would that collision look like? What would that clean-up cost? What would be the human cost of that disaster?
Or how about this: your kid taking her/his crucial final exams to the roaring noise of a frack operation, say, 300 ft. from their building’s classroom—or the food service, or the open quad. Is this the atmosphere for scholarly growth—even just gettin’a degree—you had in mind for your kid?
Or how about the cancer your kid may develop 20 years from now due to exposure to highly toxic frack fluids, the composition of which won’t—under Act 13—be revealed to him/her because, according to Governor Corbett, it’s far more important to protect the trade secrets of the natural gas industry than it is to insure your kid can offer informed consent to treatment. In PA, Inc, the Hippocratic Oath takes the big back seat to money-making proprietary rights laws.
Don’t think this can happen? Ask Mom on a Mission, , thyroid cancer survivor:
In 2011, I became aware that the Encana Corporation planned to drill eight natural gas wells less than 600 yards from a childcare center, a middle school and two local elementary schools—one of which my then seven-year-old son attended…I quickly learned that hydraulic fracturing, also known as “fracking,” is a drilling practice that employs the use of known carcinogens such as benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene and xylene, to extract natural gas from the ground…Exposure to these chemicals can lead to neurological problems, birth defects, and cancer, as well as bloody noses, asthma, gastrointestinal distress, diarrhea, dizziness, migraines, nerve pain and skin rashes. These health risks are especially dangerous to children. And, given my family’s story, I just cannot allow one more threat to harm my child.
Anecdotal evidence? Ask :
When it comes to exposure to hazardous chemicals, children are not just little adults. “Children are more vulnerable to environmental hazards,” states the Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit, a subcommittee of the American Pediatric Society. “They eat, drink and breathe more than adults on a pound for pound basis.” This means children are proportionally more exposed to toxins in air, water and food…In areas of unconventional gas development, children are exposed to multiple industrial toxins, through air, and potentially through water and soil. Yet children’s health remains one of the many unexamined issues of this contentious industry…Shale gas development creates a widespread network of open-air industrial sites. Well pads can be located close to rural and urban communities. In Pennsylvania, more than 3,000 gas fracking wells and permitted well sites were identified within two miles of 320 day care centers, 67 schools and nine hospitals and the industry was still growing…Not only are children proportionally more exposed to toxins, children’s immature bodies are less able to metabolize some toxic substances. This means children are more vulnerable when they are exposed. Young children and babies in the womb are especially vulnerable. In these early stages, children go through critical periods of development when even small exposures to toxins can result in serious, lifelong harm.
The danger of exposure to fracking chemicals knows no age, economic status, ethnicity, or gender. That Governor Corbett would convert PASSHE campuses into industrialized sacrifice zones for an industry he favors in virtue of the company he keeps and the dollars that made his own campaign possible speaks not merely to corruption—but to genocidal profiteering.
6. SB 367, The APSCUF Contract, and the Industrialization of Public University Faculty
What Governor Corbett knows and what Chancellor Cavanaugh knows is that the only effective obstacle to the corporatization and industrialization of PASSHE is a faculty who takes the mission of a university seriously. Such a faculty unionizes for the sake of collectively bargaining contracts that preserve and advance the mission of the university, the integrity of its faculty, the welfare of its students, and the spaces where intellectual exchange, artistic expression, and the fostering of the humanities can transpire. Such a union is APSCUF—or at least could be—if its leadership can be made to see the connections between legislation like SB 367, the vision of the chancellor, and how SB 367 advances this vision. Kevin Mahoney lays out this vision succinctly in his piece “Smashing Apples” when he profiles the current state of APSCUF contract negotiations via APSCUF negotiations attorney Stuart Davidson:
“Davidson said that from his perspective, has sought to “virtually gut our collective bargaining agreement” from the beginning of negotiations. He is seeking to “eliminate faculty’s role in governance,” “shift $8 million in health care costs onto faculty,” and to go after the structure of the State System itself. While PASSHE has about half a billion dollars in reserves, the Chancellor continues to insist that PASSHE is broke and he refuses to allow a contract similar to the contract offered to other PASSHE unions. Davidson suggested that he is left with the conclusion that the Chancellor sees this negotiation as an opportunity to “break the union and gain the national spotlight for himself.” At one point, Davidson said, “We cannot allow ourselves to be led quietly to the slaughter at let him get himself on the national stage.” Both Davidson and APSCUF state leadership have come to view our contract negotiations in the same category as the recent Chicago teachers’ strike and Wisconsin Gov. Walker’s attempt to strip public unions of their collective bargaining rights.”
If we, PASSHE faculty, cannot allow the chancellor to lead us quietly to slaughter with respect to the fair contracts consistent with our university missions, we cannot allow him to get away with bribing us via a bill—SB 367—that promises us a return to fiscal security in exchange for the transformation of our schools into industrialized toxic wastelands. By investing presidents with the sole power to decide contracts with fracking industry representatives, Chancellor Cavanaugh has reserved for himself the power to dictate the terms of that industrialization. He is the nefarious physician who allows his patient to become infected with a terrible illness that he has the capacity to cure—except for that the medicine will convert the patient from being a healthy thinking human being into a monstrous zombie. Governor Corbett’s obscene budget cuts are, of course, that illness. But allowing fracking on PASSHE campuses is no cure. Quite to the contrary: at every level from academic integrity to the quality of campus life to the integrity of PASSHE educations to the very health of the campus community, fracking is poisonous—and I implore my own union leadership to see this.
____________________
Wendy Lynne Lee | Professor of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University
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School's lambs skinned and slaughtered Published duration 4 March 2019
image copyright Hall Farm image caption Four-week-old Ethel, Chunks and Ugs were triplets
Three lambs bought for a primary school to be pets have been found "skinned and slaughtered" near a farm.
Remains of the four-week-old lambs, and a rare Lincoln Longwool sheep, were found on land near Hall Farm in Messingham, near Scunthorpe, on Saturday.
Farmer Jamie Quinn said: "How do we tell the children at the school?"
Humberside Police said it was investigating a burglary at the farm on Holme Lane.
The lambs, named Ethel, Chunk and Ugs, were triplets and had to be bottle-fed with formula milk four times a day because their mother could not feed them all.
image copyright Hall Farm image caption Mr Quinn said he was "in bits" over the deaths
Mr Quinn said the animals were "slaughtered in the field opposite - skins left for us to find".
"I am currently in bits," he said.
"They were bought specifically for a school project to fit in with other parts of the curriculum six weeks ago. The plan was to keep them at the school as pets for the kids."
Police said a barn on the farm was broken into between 18:00 GMT on Friday and 07:00 on Saturday.
"This is clearly a very upsetting incident and the theft of livestock from farms is a serious matter," officers said.
"The animal's skins and carcasses were found nearby. Damage was caused to the farm and its fencing during the burglary."
image copyright Hall Farm image caption Humberside Police said it had "increased patrols in the area"
Mr Quinn said the lambs' deaths came after three adult sheep, including another Lincoln Longwool, went missing four weeks ago in a suspected rustling.
"All we found was wool hanging over the barbed wire fence where they'd been dragged across," Mr Quinn added. | {
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Former Duke star Carlos Boozer said that he received money and vehicle offers from multiple schools as a recruit, but turned them down to go to Duke.
Talking on Sports Illustrated’s HOLDAT Nation podcast, Boozer said that the offers “turned him off,” while Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski’s promise of competition made him excited to attend school in Durham.
"I’m going to be honest, I was a kid that turned it down. I was raised by my mom and dad—shout out Renee and Carlos Sr.—when I was getting recruited, and you probably went through this too Nate. I was one of the top players in my class and had a lot of schools coming after me. Obviously I’m not going to out anybody on this show, but I had a lot of schools coming out for me. I had schools telling me that if you come to my school you’ll start right away, we’ll give you a Jeep Cherokee, which at that time was one of the hottest whips out, we’ll give you $1,000 a month, you don’t have to go to class, you just gotta come play ball for us.
"And that turned me off because I wasn’t used to getting handouts. I was used to working for everything I ever got. That’s how my mom and dad worked; my mom and dad had two jobs each. They were busting their chops making sure they could feed all five mouths they had, they had five kids so they were trying to make sure that we could all eat. And so I’m used to seeing my parents as an example—don’t take no handouts, you gotta work for everything you get. So I told these universities no and I ended up going to Duke. They didn’t offer me nothing. Coach K sat in my living room in Alaska and was like, ‘You’re the top player in your class, but I can’t even promise you you’re going to start at this school. You’re going to have to earn it. We’ve got seven All-Americans coming in, you’re one of them if you decide to come here.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, you’re challenging me. I like that. I need a challenge.'
"So for me, that turned me on. That made me excited to have to go work for what I wanted, where I had other schools—again, they’ll remain nameless—telling me you don’t have to worry about class, you can be a dumb jock, we’ll pay you to come to our school $1,000 a month, which to me is a lot of bread. I wasn’t used to getting no money a month. So that was a big deal for me. But I didn’t want to owe nobody nothing, I wanted to be able to work for everything I got and be able to look back and be like, ‘I did it the right way and I don’t owe nobody nothing but my mom and my dad and the people that supported me—my sisters, my brothers’. I’ve been blessed with great siblings to be my support system. I didn’t want to owe nobody nothing so I turned that stuff down, went to Duke and worked my butt off and became a starter as a freshman. That was challenge enough for me."
Boozer went on to a strong Duke career, averaging double-digit points and at least 6.3 rebounds per game in each of his three seasons. He then spent 13 years in the NBA, including two years as an All-Star. | {
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"Protector of the Throne" 5W Creature - Giant When Guardian of the Throne enters the battlefield, you become the monarch.
If damage would be dealt to you, you may instead have that damage be dealt to Protector of the Throne. Illus. Johannes Voss 2/5 | {
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A leading alternative news site in Greece, Athens Indymedia announced it was being suppressed by Greek judicial authorities, along with two radio stations, and provided a Tor link [el] for alternate access. Potmos asserted on the significance of the site for independent news in Greece:
@potmos: Fast and accurate info posted on Athens # Indymedia led to life sentence for cop who murdered 15yo Alex. Grigoropoulos in 2008.
The site had been hosted on Athens Polytechnic servers, and had become a frequent point of contention in the past, as right-wing politicians campaigned to close it down, accusing it of anti-state incitement. Conservative MP Adonis Georgiadis, who has led the latest calls to shut the site down even congratulated [el] the Public Order Minister Dendias in a tweet. Athens Indymedia was also blocked in September 2012 [el], and its administrators were arrested. | {
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To the uninitiated, becoming an overnight internet sensation can be intimidating indeed. Suddenly one is thrust into the Twitter spotlight for his or her requisite fifteen minutes, polarizing the entire news feed and maybe, just maybe, receiving a sound bite of praise or condemnation from some public figure in Hollywood or the District of Columbia. All this over a seemingly inconsequential post of a type seemingly no different than hundreds that have gone before. Exhilarating, wot?
Well…maybe it is if you were handed a device to connect to teh Intrawebz right out of the birth canal. To anyone Gen-X or older, though, such a frenzy would be more akin to inadvertently making head-on contact with a hornet’s nest while on a ride-on lawnmower. And that is precisely what befell the blogger known as The Transformed Wife on July 16th.
On that fateful day, TTW posted a simple blog entry stating what used to pass for the obvious – that men of good character have a preference for women who have not amassed obscene amounts of credit card and student loan debt, who are virgins in their late teens-early 20s, and who aren’t covered in tattoos. That she expected this entry to be non-controversial is obvious: it mostly concerns itself with testimonial quotes from women expressing misgivings of attending college (where these three moral lapses are most likely to take place), with TTW’s affirmations on each point made – in which the dominant descriptive adverb she uses is ‘sadly’. I’ve seen incendiary posts before, and they looked nothing like this. This is the kind of piece that is quickly dashed off within five minutes – consisting as it does mainly of copied-and-pasted passages, and opening and closing statements – right before it’s time to feed the kids or the washing machine’s about to shut off. No big deal.
Except that’s not how the feminist anthill saw things.
When TTW re-posted her article to her Facebook page, suddenly every entitled little princess with an opinion and access to Daddy’s iPhone was right there to squawk in extremely reasonable fashion about how they are fantastic people in spite of their debt, ink, and harlotry….or splitting hairs by expounding on how they have the credit rating of Namibia and more ink than a giant squid, but they ARE virgins (yeah, sure!) and doesn’t that just topple your entire hateful hypothesis, Ms. Smarty-Pants?…or how they personally are debt-free virgins without tattoos yet their totally BFF who works at the animal shelter is none of the above, but she’s totally awesome, and thus TTW is a Cro-Magnon who doesn’t realize it’s the current year….getting the gist of things yet? If not, perhaps some representative screenshots might help:
This meeting of the mindless continues on for sixty thousand responses…and was active for weeks! Just getting the thread to open is a challenge anymore, even on the newest and cleanest electronic devices. It certainly is not limited merely to female feminists, either. Many a male meathead saw fit to chime in with his two cents’ worth as to the sheer ludicrousness of the notion that feminine modesty is desirable – especially, as you might have suspected, over the ‘virginity’ part. Well, if these Lotharios want to go through their youth with itchy and pestilent unmentionables, I suppose that’s their prerogative. I guess they revel in their liberty to feel like they’re passing a branding iron whenever they have to relieve themselves. And that’s if they’re lucky.
This, of course, is the stuff hot trending memes are made of, and the whole seedy spectacle has become exactly that, as the introductory picture for this article makes clear. Alas, a few supportive cells of resistance to the contrary, the predominant theme of this meme is one of derision. We ought not to be surprised at this, but we ought still to mourn.
So a bunch of harridans spazzed out. So what? Isn’t that just what comes naturally to them? Or is this symptomatic of something profoundly more wretched?
One of the more striking features of this whole imbroglio is TTW’s subsequent reaction to it all, in which she expresses honest bafflement over how such a harmless post could trigger the equivalent of the explosion of Krakatoa. Here we behold a generational gap more profound than the vaunted chasm that defined the 1960s. TTW is not a Millennial, so it is understandable that she might not grasp just how thoroughly she violated the only commandment that matters to this age group: ‘thou shalt respect my personal choice’. Or, to put it even more broadly: ‘thou shalt not place any limitations on the panorama of personal choices open to me’. Having rejected Eternal Truth as a basis for life, Millennials, especially in their female variant, seem perfectly content to settle for Eternal Options instead. After all, this is the demographic that has made the depressingly puerile country singer Kacey Musgraves a millionaire, responding so favorably to her licentious anthems Follow Your Arrow and Mind Your Own Biscuits that they clog her Twitter feed with encomiums about how she is the Yin to their Yang and other such important theological musings. Who cares if the vast majority of SJW women will never be able to embark upon a Thelma and Louise spree of mass murder and self-empowerment because it turns out student loans and pictographs of unicorns on the epidermis kinda put a kink in that ultimate symbol of patriarchy, the budget? Why are you so hell-bent on trying to ensnare a shooting star, misogynist???
And you’ll never in a million years guess who some of the most avid defenders of this hedonistic nihilism are. That’s right….antinomian Churchtards who love the sinner and sorta kinda have reservations about the sin! How tiring it is to be unequally yoked to these sycophants with their idiotic presumptions about the inherent goodness of man. They come in both ‘nice’ feminist varieties:
As well as in soy-boy flavor – which is even more repulsive as one strongly suspects they are more concerned with presenting themselves as potential non-threatening boyfriends to the multitude of hot chicks present than to giving God His due glory:
‘A huge disservice to the name of the church and the kingdom in general’??? So I guess God wasn’t very clear when He bluntly prohibited all strange cuttings and marks in the flesh and will wink at such provided they give voice to an otherwise repressed woman? That must have been a footnote to Leviticus 19:28 that got waylaid in translation along about the time of the Septuagint. And Jesus chases after women with a jaded past? What is He – Harry Paget Flashman? Not to mention such universalism makes an utter mockery of Paul’s conjecture of grace in Romans 6:1-2 – ‘What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?’ In trying to be all things to all people, these opportunists have succeeded in being nothing to nobody. Which is only fitting. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…
As with so many other clarion calls for cultural death masquerading as vibrant affirmations of liberty, the foundation from which this shofar was blown is inherently Jewish. For there is nothing said here that would not be entirely congenital to the cult of Lilith – that Kabbalist order of devotion to vulvae and demons that has formed the basis of so much of the feminist movement for the past half century. What better source to extol this healthy expression of vestal diabolism than the Huffington Post? And sho nuff, they saw fit to publish just such a panegyric, as penned by a vile woman who, one prays, has access to neither butcher knives nor matches and gasoline:
Each of us has a bit of Lilith in us. A bit of a voice, when silence is expected of us. A bit of a desire for freedom from the conventional fences others erect around us. A bit of a need for equality, when we’ve been taught, as early as when we were children or young girls, that we are not quite equal. Yes, we all possess a bit of Lilith’s unacceptable rebelliousness in us, which believe me, requires more than a bit of courage. My Lilith revealed herself when I immigrated to America and decided to go back to school as a married woman and a mother of young kids, when I became a writer and began creating strong willed female characters with big dreams and the courage to realize these dreams, despite the many obstacles they encountered on their way. In order to succeed, each and every one of us must have a bit of Lilith in us. Sometimes a bit and sometimes more than just a bit. …it is a different day and time now. Why not give Lilith her rightful place in history as the first feminist, who claimed herself equal to Adam and refused to become subservient, who saw Adam’s relationship with Eve as an unacceptable betrayal. In short, she demanded to lie next to him and not under him, be his partner, rather than simply his helper. She demanded to be considered a woman in her own right.
Ironic indeed that in this piece author Dora (((Levy Mossanen))) cheers the wise mystical men who concocted this sacrilegious fantasy as a crutch for her to engage in her symphony of whoredoms centuries later. But then, what feminists lack in brains or morality they amply make up for in biting the hand that feeds them. The witches’ coven who saw fit to descend en masse against TTW and engage in the online equivalent of flashing their cleavage in the face of a woman who is far wiser and better than they will ever be proves this adage conclusively.
As the meme war thus generated shows no signs of abating any time soon, I can’t think of a more apt conclusion than to share one such meme a friend of mine created to express his disgust over the whole affair – brilliantly, I might add: | {
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Kellogg's launched the All Together cereal
If you’re a fan of breakfast and being gay, we have grrrrreat news for you – Kellogg’s is launching an LGBT-themed cereal.
The company’s special edition All Together Cereal is enough to make you snap, crackle and pop with Pride, bringing together many of the brand’s most popular cereals.
The company announced a $50,000 donation to LGBT+ advocacy charity GLAAD as it launched the cereal for Spirit Day on October 17.
The $19.99 special edition box, available while supplies last, contain six mini cereal boxes packaged inside one larger exclusive All Together box “to celebrate the belief that we all belong together”.
The company explained: “The box brings together six of the famous Kellogg mascots and cereals inside the same carton as a symbol of acceptance no matter how you look, where you’re from or who you love.”
The box includes Corn Flakes, Frosties, Froot Loops, Rice Krispies, Raisin Bran and Frosted Mini-Wheats.
Kellogg’s ‘firmly committed’ to equality.
Chief diversity officer Priscilla Koranteng said: “At Kellogg, we are firmly committed to equality and inclusion in the workplace, marketplace and in the communities where we work and live.
“We have long been allies and supporters of LGBTQ employees, their families and the community. For more than 100 years, Kellogg has nourished families so they can flourish and thrive, and the company continues to welcome everyone to the table.”
John McCourt of GLAAD: “We are proud to partner with Kellogg’s again this year to help extend the important message of Spirit Day to households across the country.
“The All Together cereal encompasses the values of diversity, equality, and solidarity that Spirit Day is all about, and we hope that LGBTQ youth everywhere receive the messages loud and clear.”
Andi Mack star to launch LGBT-themed cereal All Together.
The cereal is being launched by Andi Mack star Joshua Rush at a Spirit Day event at the Kellogg’s café in New York City, where guests will have a “chance to mix your own one-of-a-kind cereal” and learn about the work of GLAAD.
Kellogg’s previously put its cereal mascots to work campaigning against homophobic bullying.
A 2017 Spirit Day video featured mascots including Tony the Tiger, Snap, Crackle and Pop, Toucan Sam, and the Corn Flakes mascot (apparently called Cornelius) telling kids that “bullying is no laughing matter”.
The company won a PinkNews Award in 2018 for an ad campaign featured drag queens Vivienne Lynsey and Miss Blair talking about how they take their cereal. | {
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Here’s a look at a set that was sent over from a new company to me called Vaperific. The company is owned by a man named Zee and as far as I can tell Vaperific are an online shop that sells a modest selection of liquids and pre-made coils. So far it looks like they just carry their own three flavours but one thing to note is the liquids are all produced by Dvine labs so there’s absolutely no concerns about quality. Here are my honest thoughts on Vaperific liquids from Vaperific.
Bottles: The juices come in clear 60ml chubby gorilla style bottles with colourful labels that have a sort of matte finish to them. The colour of each label lines up with the flavour it represents so even at a glance it’s pretty easy to tell which is which. The labels themselves are modest with just the name of the company and logo along with the flavour name dead center and just the usual regulatory markings surrounding it. They might seem a bit simple but they look clean and do the job so no complaints here. I didn’t see the ratio listed anywhere but if I had to guess I’d say they are a 70 or 75vg blend and the set I got was in 3mg. Here’s a shot of the colourful bottles I received:
Setup: Testing was done mostly in a DAYWON from MissionXV with a little spaced fused clapton(2×30/40ni80), 6 wraps on a 2.5mm coming out to 0.97 ohms and running between 15-20w. Using Puff cotton, rda rinsed and rewicked in between. Here’s a shot of a fresh build:
Remember taste is subjective and results will vary! Click the titles for links to the products!!
Blue Bar
Site description: Blue Bar is a Blueberry Granola Bar drizzled with Greek Yogurt. Tangy and Sweet with a hint of Blueberry. Have your breakfast bar any time of day!
My thoughts: As soon as I cracked the bottle all I could smell was a rich thick blueberry jam. It has a fresh smell like real blueberries without that often overwhelming floral quality that so many blueberry flavours I’ve tried tend to have. No perfume or off taste from this one just a natural and thick tasting blueberry jam or fresh compote sort of thing. The jam is nestled in a thick creamy blanket which I’d assume is from the Greek yogurt. It sort of overpowers the granola bar aspect of it making it almost more of a creamy blueberry yogurt than a snack bar. The Greek yogurt adds some thickness to the flavour giving it a real thick creamy aspect that I found quite enjoyable.
To me the breakfast bar aspect almost comes off more like a blueberry muffin with it’s somewhat subdued granola flavour barely poking through. You know the muffins from Tims that don’t have a very strong baked goods taste that let the flavour of blueberry actually come through, it’s sort of like that but creamy. Despite blueberries being one of my all time favorite berries I tend to be a bit picky when it comes to blueberry flavours. Mostly on account of that floral quality they tend to have but with Blue Bar I don’t find that at all, it’s just a nice creamy blueberry flavour and that’s about it. Fans of blueberry flavours will definitely appreciate this one!!
Lemon Pounder
Site description: Lemon Pounder is a delectable fluffy pound cake smothered with lemon curds topped off with a hint of dusted sugar. You won’t believe something this good has no calories 💯
My thoughts: For the past couple of years I’ve been a bit of a push over for a good lemon flavour, particularly a good lemon pound cake. With Lemon Pounder I get that classic Lemon Pound cake flavour that I’ve tasted in other flavours before. It’s bright and lemony with a fairly light pound cake flavour underneath. For me the lemon comes on quite a bit stronger than the cake but it’s pretty common for this type of flavour. However with such a lean towards lemon I find it can get a tiny bit biting after vaping on it for a while. It’s not unbearable by any means and fans of lemon flavours might not even notice it but for a guy like me I almost find it needs a little something to help make it more manageable like a shot of cream or meringue to take the lemony edge off.
As far as lemon pound cake flavours go this one is pretty standard and like I said it could probably benefit from a dollop of cream or something but as it stands I think most people will still enjoy it for what it is. A plain and simple lemon pound cake that tastes comforting and familiar.
Sugar D’oh
Site description: Sugar D’Oh is a deeply delicious sugar coated donut. So good you can smell the freshness. You’ll be as happy as a kid in a donut shoppe!
My thoughts: This is a pretty different take on another classic flavour. I was half expecting a typical cinnamon sugar donut sort of flavour from vaperific but with Sugar D’oh I get more of a honey glazed donut with the honey glaze sort of stealing the show. I do pick up a slight floral note that I normally associate with honey flavours but it’s not overbearing or perfumey in anyway, just pleasant. It’s a little on the sweet side with it’s thick sugary glaze but somehow doesn’t cross the line in to cloying.
The actual donut flavour is fairly mild but has that familiar fried dough taste to it with just a dusting of spice to it to let you know it is a donut. I suppose it could also pass as a beaver tail or elephant ear sort of thing being a simple mix of sugar and fried dough it’s definitely a familiar taste. I’ve had similar flavours but they usually include a fruit like blueberry or strawberry and call it a fritter but this is just a plain and simple glazed donut. It might come off a bit syrupy or artificial for some but I think fans of sweet fried dough flavours will appreciate what this one brings.
Overall:
I’d say all three flavours are quite well done with Blue Bar possibly being the most complex of the three. Like I said they’re produced by Dvine so the quality is excellent and for only having three flavours it’s a pretty solid starting lineup. The prices are pretty reasonable and I’m all about supporting up and coming businesses so if any of these flavours sound appealing to you I wouldn’t have any trouble recommending you check Vaperific out. | {
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Some time back there was a great controversy over the brand ambassadorship to tennis player Sania Mirza by the Telangana government. It is a case book study of how the electronic media behaves on most issues.
You may remember that there has been a great amount of animosity between various factions in Andhra Pradesh over the Telangana issue for decades.
But when the new state was born, it was a major victory for the people of Telangana and it was a time to bury old grouses and begin on a fresh note.
However TRS chief K Chandrashekar Rao refused to invite any of the Central leaders. Is it right for any State to do that? Can a Congress Chief Minister refuse to invite a BJP Prime Minister for his swearing in ceremony and vice versa?
So in the end KCR did not attend even Chandrababu Naidu’s swearing in ceremony. Both Naidu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not attend KCR’s swearing-in ceremony. KCR also began his term on a false note.
Not only did he call a bandh protesting the Polavaram issue, but KCR’s son, daughter and nephew have all been accommodated into the ministry. As political dynasties are crumbling all over India, KCR is trying to build a new one.
( Continued... )
Telangana chief minister K.Chandrashekhar Rao presenting a cheque Rs.1 crore to Sania Mirza.
Image: PTI | {
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Heather Brunskell-Evans had been asked to give a talk this week on the subject of pornography and the sexualisation of young women
An academic who was no-platformed by university students after she discussed transgender issues on a radio show has attacked the “reprehensible cowardliness” of public institutions.
Heather Brunskell-Evans, a research fellow at King’s College London, who is also a spokeswoman for the Women’s Equality Party, told The Times that she believed such institutions were running scared from public debate, out of fear of offending the transgender lobby.
She had been asked by medical students from the Reproductive and Sexual Health Society at King’s to give a talk this week on the subject of pornography and the sexualisation of young women, at the college’s Guy’s Campus in south London.
But days after appearing on the Moral Maze, the Radio 4 series hosted by Michael Buerk, she | {
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A suspect is behind bars, accused of firing on Jefferson County sheriff’s deputies four days ago.
Larence Ladel Quinn, 30 was taken into custody Wednesday night. He is now charged with four counts of attempted murder.
The shooting happened at 2:45 p.m. Sunday while deputies were at Valley Brook apartment on Gallant Drive in eastern Jefferson County. Deputy Chief David Agee deputies were investigating a theft from a local merchant and had several suspects detained in sheriff’s vehicles.
While conducting the investigation, shots were fired at deputies from a distance. Bullets struck one of the patrol vehicles and shattered the rear window, but no one was injured. The shooter fled the scene and has been on the run since the incident, Agee said.
Sheriff’s investigators with the assistance of ATF agents and the Metro Area Crime Center were able to identify and track the shooter. Quinn was taken into custody without incident around 4:15 p.m. Wednesday. He was booked into the Jefferson County Jail about 8 p.m. and is held on bonds totaling more than $1 million. | {
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Enac: "Risultato oltre le attese" - "È un risultato oltre le aspettative", ha commentato il presidente dell'Enac, Vito Riggio, aggiungendo: "Magari ci fosse una grande compagnia europea che riuscisse a prendere Alitalia, ma europea o no occorre un rilancio forte". Tra le manifestazioni di interesse figura anche quella presentata da Ryanair.
"Crisi infinita non ha consentito competitor italiani" - "La crisi infinita di Alitalia ha assorbito molte risorse e non ha consentito l'emergere di un competitor italiano, favorendo invece i concorrenti stranieri", ha sottolineato Riggio. "L'intuizione di queste compagnie low cost è stata quella di ridurre i costi e aumentare i voli: ciò ha consentito loro di entrare nel mercato italiano come il burro".
"A noi interessa avere una compagnia nazionale forte - ha proseguito il numero uno dell'Enac - ma non a tutti i costi, perché una compagnia nazionale forte deve camminare sulle sue gambe. Sull'Italia grava anche un peso fiscale molto più forte che altrove".
Giovedì l'Ue rivede norme su proprietà e controllo - La Commissione Ue presenterà giovedì un pacchetto di misure attuative sull'aviazione, denominato "Open and connected aviation", che conterrà anche nuove linee guida su proprietà e controllo dei vettori. Pur non toccando il tetto del 49% per le compagnie non europee, le linee guida daranno un'interpretazione della regola che potrebbe aprire la strada ad un ammorbidimento di fatto di quella soglia.
Arriva Lufthansa? - L'agenzia Bloomberg ha riportato le parole di Carsten Spohr, amministratore delegato di Lufthansa ieri a Cancun, che ha dichiarato: "Non abbiamo intenzione di acquistare Alitalia". Ma ha anche aggiunto: "L'Italia è un mercato molto importante per noi", quindi "guardiamo con molta attenzione alle opportunità che emergeranno".
Ryanair presenta offerta feedaraggio - Ryanair ha presentato "un'offerta di feedaraggio per i voli a lungo raggio di Alitalia". Lo ha affermato John Alborante, portavoce della compagnia irlandese, spiegando che "i dettagli dell'offerta saranno resi noti dai commissari" e che "Ryanair non è interessata all'acquisto dell'intera compagnia". "Abbiamo parlato anche con il governo - ha aggiunto il portavoce - e abbiamo detto che siamo pronti a mettere 20 aeromobili se Alitalia dovesse tagliare le rotte". | {
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The Psychology Of The To-Do List
Ten years after David Allen’s bestselling productivity book Getting Things Done, scientific research caught up.
We now know why the popular system is so effective.
The key behind GTD is writing everything down and sorting it effectively. This act of planning reduces the burden on the brain, which is struggling to hold the mental list of all the things we have to do. Releasing the burden of unfinished tasks on the mind frees it up to become more effective.
This act of planning reduces the burden on the brain, which is struggling to hold the mental list of all the things we have to do. Releasing the burden of unfinished tasks on the mind frees it up to become more effective.
Tom Stafford explores this further in his BBC Future column.
“Filing effectively”, in Allen’s sense, means a system with three parts: an archive, where you store stuff you might need one day (and can forget until then), a current task list in which everything is stored as an action, and a “tickler file” of 43 folders in which you organise reminders of things to do (43 folders because that’s one for the next thirty-one days plus the next 12 months). The current task list is a special kind of to-do list because all the tasks are defined by the next action you need to take to progress them. This simple idea is remarkably effective in helping resolving the kind of inertia that stops us resolving items on our lists. …
Breaking everything down into its individual actions allows the system to take hold, freeing you to either do something or forget about it, knowing the knowledge has been captured in the system. The system does the remembering and monitoring for you.
So what’s the psychology that backs this up?
Roy Baumeister and EJ Masicampo at Florida State University were interested in an old phenomenon called the Zeigarnik Effect, which is what psychologists call our mind’s tendency to get fixated on unfinished tasks and forget those we’ve completed. You can see the effect in action in a restaurant or bar – you can easily remember a drinks order, but then instantly forget it as soon as you’ve put the drinks down. … A typical way to test for the Zeigarnik Effect is to measure if an unfulfilled goal interferes with the ability to carry out a subsequent task. Baumeister and Masicampo discovered that people did worse on a brainstorming task when they were prevented from finishing a simple warm-up task – because the warm-up task was stuck in their active memory. What Baumeister and Masicampo did next is the interesting thing; they allowed some people to make plans to finish the warm-up task. They weren’t allowed to finish it, just to make plans on how they’d finish it. Sure enough, those people allowed to make plans were freed from the distracting effect of leaving the warm-up task unfinished.
Our attention has a limited capacity. The GTD system frees up the attention used to keep track of our mental to-do list and acts as a plan for how we will do things, freeing our mind for more effective uses. You don’t actually need to do the things on your list; you only need a plan for when and how to do them.
There is some tension here though. While to-do lists might reduce the burden on your brain, the most productive people rarely use them. | {
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Ha decidido el PP que su problema es que no comunica bien. Después de sus reconocidas carencias de epidermis, tan creíblemente relatadas por Floriano, la patología parece residir ahora en la boca, en lo que sale de ella.
Es una disculpa no sólo recurrente, también socorrida cuando no se quiere reconocer una evidente, para la mayoría, deriva hacia el batacazo municipal y autonómico, recién venido como está el PP del batacazo andaluz. Hacemos las cosas bien, pero no sabemos contarlas, se dicen a si mismos, como para darse ánimos, como para negar la evidencia de 17 escaños y más de medio millón de votos perdidos, para despejar con un patadón a la grada los miedos a perder ayuntamientos y comunidades el próximo 24 de Mayo.
La disculpa para no reconocer lo evidente es vieja. Es como cuando en el cole, de pequeños, el alumno decía: "seño, lo sé, pero no lo sé decir". La frase era una sincera evasiva para ocultar la verdad: la criatura no tenía ni la más remota idea de aquello que se le preguntaba, pero trataba de captar la benevolencia de la profe. El PP cree que con el reconocimiento confesional de comunicar mal lo que cree que hace bien, ganará el favor de los votantes que se han ido, por ejemplo, a Ciudadanos, y que estos verán, después del aparente acto de contrición, las virtudes de su expartido y volverán al redil electoral.
¿Qué es lo que no sabe comunicar el PP? ¿que durante 18 años se financió ilegalmente?, ¿que Bárcenas, y otros que le precedieron en el puesto, no responden a una pertinaz conjura de los tesoreros? ¿que los políticos que Mariano Rajoy puso como "ciudadano y político ejemplar", Fabra, o cómo modelo de Gobierno que había que seguir para toda España, Matas, están los dos en la cárcel por corruptos, por robar?
Lo cierto es que en el PP, durante mucho tiempo, comunicaron divinamente los cien mil casos de corrupción de su partido. Dijeron, por ejemplo, que los papeles de Bárcenas eran falsos, salvo alguna cosa. Que nadie podrá probar -Mariano enarca la ceja- que Bárcenas no es inocente. Que Luís, sé fuerte, hacemos lo que podemos. Que su indemnización fue en diferido, que la Gürtel era cuestión de cuatro trajes y, la mejor, que todo era una "causa general contra el PP", como dijo Rajoy, rodeado de todas las cúpulas del PP, antes de que se estallara el actual quilombo.
Dijeron que la trama corrupta Gurtel no iba con ellos (Rajoy), o bien que la habían descubierto (Aguirre), que los policías que investigaban su corrupción no eran fiables, que los jueces que les encausaban les tenían manía, incluso si eran de derechas, que los medios se inventaban papeles manuscritos.
Desde luego que han comunicado a la perfección la subida hasta un 21% del IVA a la Cultura, entendida por todo el mundo a la primera; la precarización de las condiciones laborales, que permiten desde ahora tener trabajo y estar en la miseria; la subida de tasas judiciales para impedir que el que no tenga una pértiga llena de euros no pueda saltar el muro y ejercer sus derechos ciudadanos…
La lista es interminable y se agrava con la expulsión de los inmigrantes de la sanidad, que se entendió perfectamente y que ahora, con su parcial rectificación --tendrán asistencia, pero no tarjeta--, se entiende su intención con claridad, dadas las futuras convocatorias electorales.
De manera que al PP, a sus portavoces de todos los niveles, se les entiende a la perfección, porque incluso los balbuceos dados tras Bárcenas aportan muchísima información.
Puestos a comunicar bien, quizás sería más honrado plantearse que lo fundamental para contar algo es tener algo, a ser posible bueno, que contar. Y, si no es mucho pedir, que ese algo bueno se aproxime a la verdad. No se puede comunicar bien lo que esta mal hecho.
Anda ahora el PP enfrascado en comunicar bien sobre Ciudadanos. Primero, siempre Floriano, les llamaron de cuatro formas distintas, todas ellas malintencionadamente incorrectas.
Dicen de ellos que es un partido catalán y por tanto, según la lógica nacionalista catalana que tanto critican los nacionalistas del PP, incapacitado para hacer política, por ejemplo, en Andalucía, parte de España. Dicen que no quieren que un Albert, y/o un catalán gobierne Andalucía. Cachean mediáticamente a Rivera para ver si tienen algo con lo que empaquetarle un dossier. Los resultados de tamaña estrategia de comunicación están a la vista: Ciudadanos se ha zampado ya al PP en Cataluña; les ha pegado un gran mordisco en Andalucía (9 escaños, a pesar de su casi nula infraestructura) y va camino de llevarse una enorme porción de votos del PP en las generales.
De manera que, por todo lo expuesto, el PP comunica con una gran eficacia hacia la debacle, se le entiende todo, el problema es que la mayoría de las cosas que tiene que contar resultan lesivas o insultantes para los ciudadanos. | {
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Mourinho and Guardiola are set to renew their rivalry from their time in La Liga with the English official chosen to keep a lid on proceedings in this weekend's clash
Mark Clattenburg has been announced as the referee for this weekend's titanic Manchester derby between United and City.
Pep Guardiola will take his City side to face Jose Mourinho's men at Old Trafford as one of the Manchester giants stand to lose their 100 per cent start to the 2016-17 Premier League season.
Both sides have won their opening three fixtures of the campaign, though United are favourites going into the clash due to Sergio Aguero's suspension, the Argentine charged with elbowing West Ham's Winston Reid.
Mike Dean has been named fourth official for the tie, while Jake Collins and Steve Bennett will act as Clattenburg's assistants.
Clattenburg manned both the 2015-16 Champions League and the Euro 2016 finals and will take charge of arguably the most important game of the season so far. | {
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Image copyright AFP/Getty Images Image caption One Direction's managers are among the campaigners calling for action to combat ticket touts
Senior figures from the world of sport and entertainment have issued a call for new controls on websites selling event tickets.
They want resale websites to be required to publish the names of ticket sellers and the tickets' face value.
The call comes in a letter to the Independent on Sunday signed by heads of sporting and cultural bodies and entertainers' management companies.
MPs will debate the rules on Monday; ministers prefer a voluntary approach.
The Department of Culture, Media and Sport has previously said a change in the law would be unnecessary.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Ticketing specialist Reg Walker says the ''extremely sophisticated'' software used by touts enables them to harvest tickets in bulk
Secondary ticketing sites act as marketplaces that allow sellers to charge what they like for concerts, plays and sports events, and often earn a commission from selling on the tickets.
When tickets for a popular event go on sale, they may be snapped up in bulk either manually or using automated software in order to sell them on at a profit.
'Put fans first'
The letter warns that the way the secondary ticketing market currently operates can seriously undermine efforts to ensure fair prices for event-goers.
"It's high time the government stopped sticking up for secondary platforms, and decided to put fans first," the letter continues.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Some fans are concerned about access to fairly priced tickets for the 2015 Rugby World Cup
Individuals and organisations behind the letter include the England & Wales Cricket Board, Lawn Tennis Association and Rugby Football Union; the UK Theatre organisation; and managers of the bands Iron Maiden, Arctic Monkeys, Radiohead and One Direction.
They want ministers to give their backing to a set of measures requiring secondary ticketing platforms to publish:
the name of the seller and whether they are affiliated to a larger organisation
the face value of the ticket
the seat number of the ticket
whether the resale contravenes terms and conditions agreed to by the original buyer.
The proposals have been suggested as a change to the Consumer Rights Bill, which is currently going through Parliament.
How do ticket resale websites work?
Ticketing specialist Reg Walker explains: "This is organised and on an industrial scale. I think everyone at one time or another has tried to purchase tickets online, [and] simply not been able to get through because they are blocked out from the system by touts harvesting tickets in bulk using extremely sophisticated software.
"The software hits the primary ticket agent's system with a high-speed connection with multiple identities - different names, different credit cards, different addresses, different email address. It just simply pounds the system far faster than you or I can actually fill out our details.
"Unfortunately, what happens is as soon as tickets are harvested, they are flipped straight over onto a small number of so-called ticket marketplaces. The public are forced then to buy at inflated prices. We've seen £75 tickets go for upwards of £1,200. So some of the mark-ups on these tickets are enormous."
Rod Smallwood, Iron Maiden's manager, added: "At the end of the day we care about the fans, we care about the future of this business and we try not to overload them."
A spokesman for Viagogo, a ticket sales website, said: "We are in favour of making information clearer on our website and have made a number of commitments in our recent discussions with the government.
"However, publishing the original seller's identity is unnecessary because all tickets come with the Viagogo guarantee, while publishing specific seat numbers allows rights owners to cancel tickets which are being legitimately resold. Anyone can see that is not in the consumer's best interests."
'Market abuse'
Arguing on behalf of the proposed regulations in the House of Lords last November, the Conservative peer and former Olympic rower Lord Moynihan said the government had "an opportunity for action on behalf of consumers, the many people who daily find themselves to be the victims of market abuse".
But the government's culture spokesman, Viscount Younger of Leckie, responded: "I believe that a voluntary approach with improved guidance and with better point-of-sale electronic means to control ticketing is the way forward."
Peers defeated the government and voted in favour of adding the measures to the Consumer Rights Bill.
On Monday, MPs will need to decide whether to overturn that decision. | {
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LAUREN COHAN is on The Walking Dead…a popular show I’ve never watched cuz I’m too lame to hang with the cool kids…and I’m not allowed to like what the mainstream like….cuz the mainstream doesn’t ever invite me to its birthday party…..but more importantly….cuz I just assume a Zombie show created because of Zombie hype..based on a comic book…is garbage and I won’t give it a chance….at least I can pretend I’m just too cool and above it all…sitting on my throne of dog shit in a basment apartment that is around 0 degrees thanks to quality craftmanship when this low cost housing dump was built….
I guess with being on a popular show…comes getting exposure…and getting exposure that sell magazines when magazines are kinda dead and should be free anyway….require semi hot pics….leading to these shots of this girl in her one-piece that all you nerd and AMC show loving freaks will probably really like lookin at…
Lauren Cohan in Esquire of the Day
Posted in:Lauren Cohan | {
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Disney Infinity attempts something really ambitious: translating the principles of the childlike way in which we play with toys into a video game. And so it lets you build whole new worlds where logic is an infrequent guest, and then gives you the power to knock them down and start again. It wants you to go on new adventures with the toys you own, but it also wants you to reenact the scenes that made you fall in love with them in the first place. It’s crammed with creativity and variety, and I think, above all, it just wants to make you smile. And it succeeds, time and time again.
Infinity is neatly divided into two complementary parts: the Play Sets and the Toy Box. Again, it’s all structured around how we think of toys as kids, or at least how I did. The Play Sets are mission-based adventures – the closest Infinity has to a straightforward campaign – and each take place exclusively within a single Disney movie setting. When inside a Monster’s University Play Set, don’t expect to see Jack Sparrow sauntering across the manicured campus lawns. Those kinds of lawless mash-ups are reserved for the Toy Box, a level-editor where you’re free to create your own adventures. Loading
And that’s the key to really appreciating the magic of Disney Infinity: you don’t play as Jack Sparrow; you play as the toy version of Jack Sparrow that comes in the box (he still has the boozy pirate’s wayward swagger, of course). And that toy comes to life and is transported into the game the moment you place it down on the Infinity Base, a peripheral that plugs directly into your console.
The toys themselves are well-made statues; they’re not poseable, but each one really captures the personality of that character with a charismatic stance. The toys have their own unique style that sparked desire in my inner Disney fan. It’s a good thing, too, because Disney Infinity is really all about celebrating the wonder of toys, and that concept is really sold through some lovely deft touches. For instance, Jack’s just a tad too short to see clearly over the helm of the Black Pearl; the robots you fight as Mr. Incredible have visible battery slots; and or when you “die” you break apart like a neglected plaything. These really are toys that have come to life.
The Starter Pack comes with three Play Sets, one for each of the three characters included: Jack Sparrow, Sully, and Mr. Incredible. Sadly, there’s no place for classics like Donald Duck, Snow White, or Peter Pan as a fully playable character. Classics still appear – Mickey welcomes you at the beginning (and has now been confirmed as an additional character) – but Infinity is definitely pitched more at a contemporary audience.
My biggest fear going into Infinity was that each of the Play Sets would be very similar, differing in largely superficial ways. I was very wrong. Each Play Set really embraces its unique setting in a way that shows not only an abundance of imagination but also a canny respect for its source material. Loading
Pirates of the Caribbean is a swashbuckling adventure, with hack-and-slash combat, some nifty Uncharted-inspired platforming and puzzle solving, and naval warfare on the high seas (which is every bit as good as Assassin’s Creed III’s for my money). And if that wasn’t enough, it has a Kraken and equips you with canons powered by voodoo. The Incredibles, meanwhile, is a complete change of pace: an open-world superhero game, in which you help the helpless, drive cars, and learn how to powerslide, traverse roofs, glide through the air using a wing-suit, and drop-kick a Panda back into a zoo. But there’s more: have to build your own superhero base, select what building to buy, figure out where to place them, and how to customise them. Although still varied, it’s probably the least captivating of the three sets – Metroville just isn’t that interesting. What’s the point of an open-world if you don’t want to explore it?
Monsters University is the real standout, though. In many ways it’s an ideal adaptation of that film, succeeding where a more straightforward movie tie-in would fail. Under no obligation to recount the film’s plot beat-by-beat (in fact, none of the Play Sets are) it has the freedom to do something much smarter; it captures the spirit of the source material by translating it into a gameplay experience that makes sense. Monsters University is a stealth-action game, which sees Sully infiltrating the campus of rival institution Fear Tech, stealing mascots and defacing statues. You’ll “take down” Fear Tech jocks by sneaking up behind them and scaring them senseless. Playing on the Fear Tech campus is a treat – you don’t really get to see it in the movie – but it’s been realised with great thought. It has all the architectural inferiority of a new-build compared to the august institution of MU, and that attention to detail that runs throughout the game.
Everything you unlock goes straight into the wonderful Toy Box mode. Part Minecraft, part LittleBigPlanet, Toy Box lets you not only build worlds, but design your own games. I spent most of my time creating a huge pinball table out of the Monster’s University campus, a third-person shooter set in a Pirates of the Caribbean port, and a race track that weaves in and out of Cinderella’s castle. Right from the start you have a healthy range of building items, which quickly expands once you gather new ones from the Play Sets. Materials range from a simple blocks and shapes to huge pre-built items (like Cinderella’s castle). Building isn’t always the easiest, though: it’s sometimes fiddly to line-up pieces – they don’t always snap into place – and when building on a large-scale this can quickly become frustrating and time-consuming to rectify. (The Wii U's GamePad makes rummaging through your items slightly easier, but doesn't really improve the overall experience.) Additionally, pieces of terrain can’t be overlapped, so if you don’t have a clear idea of what you want to build in advance, you’ll soon encounter situations where blocks conflict and can’t be placed down. It’s also really annoying there’s no undo button, especially considering how easy it is to delete something. Connecting switches and dynamic items like doors and fireworks is really intuitive, all done with the assistance of a magic wand, and that’s down to a clear interface and tutorials that do a great job of laying down the basics. Loading
The elephant in this particular room is that this is a review of the Disney Infinity Starter Pack, which rightfully implies there’s a great deal more to this that’s not included in the purchasing price. Understandably, it’s been scrutinised for the amount of content that’s available before additional purchases rear their ugly heads, but on the whole I found the Starter Pack to be an incredibly generous experience on its own. Each Play Set’s campaign lasts around four hours – add another hour or so if you want to complete every side mission and challenge – but there’s plenty more to do. Just when I thought I knew what the Monsters University set was all about, I got a bike and discovered an entire BMX course waiting around the corner. Then there’s a little hut on the MU quad which let’s you combine gruesome items – bat wings, tentacles, claws, and so on – to create your own monster. It exists for no other reason than because it’s fun, and Disney Infinity understands that pure fun doesn’t need an objective.
However, one of the most prominent aspects of Infinity is the character you get control, and after a while I did end up longing to play as someone else – especially when everything from the box art to the cutscenes teases you with tantalising cameos, like Mike turning up in nearly every Monsters University cutscene only to disappear when the game resumed. It’s also a genuine shame you can’t play co-operatively in a Play Sets locally without buying an additional toy from that world – that’s the only thing you have to pay extra for that I really feel should’ve been included.
That frustration aside, the lack of additional characters or items never really compromised my single-player experience – sometimes you’ll come across gated areas accessible only with characters that you have to buy (video advertisements pop up, which comes across as a little on-the-nose) but usually it’s just extra points or an additional character-based challenge that you’re missing out on. I know some will have a problem with extra content being present on the disc that is inaccessible without further investment, but I feel the Starter Pack presents more than enough to justify its price. | {
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Visitors to Pornhub, the largest porn site on the internet, watched about 92 billion sexytime videos last year. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I have two young sons; I don’t want them to end up incapable of being aroused by an in-the-flesh human because their first encounter with sex was a clip of a porpoise-pudenda’d MILF getting jackhammered. So I called Peggy Orenstein. The author of Girls & Sex and Cinderella Ate My Daughter is currently working on a book about boys, masculinity, sex, love—and yes, porn. As part of her research, she’s interviewing high school– and college-age males across the country. I needed her counsel.
WIRED: Are all the kids watching it?
The first thing I recognized when I started working on the new book was that the question to ask boys is not whether or if they watch porn. The question is, when was the first time they saw it? The most typical answer I get is 11, sometimes 13, sometimes younger.
How do they come across it?
Sometimes they felt they needed to know what people were talking about, or an older boy had said, “Hey, look at this.” Boys will say things to me like “When I was 11, I looked up ‘big boobies.’” With just a couple of clicks, that search can lead them to images or videos they’re not prepared to understand or process. What I always say to parents is, if you’ve never gone on Pornhub to see what is there for free—on the opening page—then you have no idea what we’re talking about.
What’s the effect on those boys?
Research suggests a positive correlation between heterosexual guys who look at porn regularly and those who support same-sex marriage.
Great!
Ah, but they’re also less likely to support affirmative action for women. And among young men, exposure to porn has been correlated with seeing sex as purely physical, regarding girls as playthings, and measuring their masculinity and their self-worth by their ability to score with hot women.
And one study suggests that female porn viewers are less likely than other women to intervene if they see another woman being threatened or assaulted.
See, this is why I want to craft a porn ecosystem that allows nothing but positive, friendly porn between realistic-looking people. Nothing with dogs or sex machines. All consensual and preferably partially clothed. And make it so my kids’ phones and computers can go there and no other porn sites.
There’s something weird about curating your sons’ porn.
Fair enough. | {
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The same back-and-forth-in-time thing is happening with Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood)—only, from an audience perspective, it’s harder to track because her multiple loops (or memories) are nearly identical. If you’ve known what to look for all season, you may have seen Dolores glitching in and out of time. But in this episode we see it most plainly when she’s by the riverbank with William.
Dolores walks down the riverside, canteen in hand, and William on the shore behind her. She sees a dead version of herself in the water, looks around, and William is gone. Eventually, he returns. Here, Dolores—who, in the present time line, is all alone retracing the route she took 30 years ago with William—flashes to different moments in her own life. But since Dolores is wearing the same clothing and is in the exact same place she was 30 years in the past, it’s not as obvious as when Maeve does it. It just looks like she’s having a mental breakdown. “It’s like I’m trapped in a dream,” Dolores says to William. “Or a memory from a life long ago.”
Angela Is a Time-Period Anchor
What’s happening with Dolores is confusing, and not just for her. But there’s another female host who can help firm up the time line for us: Talulah Riley’s Angela. Thirty-five years ago, when the park first opened, Angela was a resident of the Town with the White Church, which seems to have served as the Westworld home base. We see her both in Ford’s initial Episode 3 flashback about the park’s creation and, again, in this week’s episode when Dolores flashed back to her time there. Maeve, Armistice (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal), Lawrence’s daughter (Izabella Alvarez), and Angela all lived in this town with Dolores as they all took their first shaky steps towards becoming hosts. By the time William entered the park five years later, Angela had been promoted to Hospitality. Thirty years after that, in the present, the Man in Black mentions that he thought Ford would have retired her by now. He recognizes her from her old gig in Hospitality. So, to recap, Angela has had at least three roles: townsperson, Hospitality (and Westworld spokesperson), and, now, a spy for Wyatt . And those, then, are your three time periods. When she walked into the Town with the White Church in this episode, Dolores glitched through all three. | {
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Canada's transport minister is sending a special ministerial observer to the scene of the CP Rail derailment and hazardous goods spill northeast of Edmonton amid concerns surrounding the company's use of "remote control" technology to move trains.
The move came after CBC News reported earlier today that the Transportation Safety Board is investigating whether a remote control unit used to move a CP train contributed to the derailment and hazardous liquid spill last week near Edmonton.
In a statement issued this afternoon, Transport Minister Marc Garneau said he was "aware of the questions raised by the use of remote controlled train technology, also known as beltpacks."
"I have deployed a Minister's Observer who will keep me informed while the Transportation Safety Board investigates a December 8, 2015 derailment at Scotford Yard near Edmonton. Should the Transportation Safety Board's investigation uncover any concerns, I will not hesitate to take action in order to uphold safety."
The accident happened as CP Rail is pushing ahead with plans to expand its use of "remote control locomotive systems" across Canada, CBC News has learned. The TSB has been looking into the incident from the outset and confirmed to CBC that it wants to determine how big a role the remote technology played in the crash.
CP Rail crews at Scotford Yard, northeast of the city, were standing on the ground using a "belt pack" to remotely operate the train a week ago Tuesday. Four cars derailed, tipping one and spilling 98,860 litres of styrene, a chemical used in plastics.
Remote control technology — along with crews using the belt packs to operate locomotives while on the ground or while riding — has been approved for use in Canada since the late 1980s. Railways, including CP and CN, use it widely, though almost exclusively inside rail yards to quickly shift cars back and forth as yard crews assemble trains.
However, CBC News has learned that this past year CP told its main union that it will be expanding use of this technology on main tracks in seven areas: Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Welland, Ont., Lethbridge, Alta., Regina and Bredenbury in central Saskatchewan.
The move is part of a cost-cutting effort to replace locomotive engineers with "road service" employees, union officials at the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference were told.
The company initially proposed either single operator crews, or pairing its more junior employees to work alongside a conductor to use remote control along the main tracks in industrial areas and at sidings where the railway drops off and picks up customer rail cars. It is no longer considering single operators, it told CBC News in an email.
The Teamsters union is fighting the move, arguing that Canada has absolutely no safety rules to govern use of remote control trains outside the yards. The union is also expressing concern about how far afield this technology will be deployed given "road service employees," in their contracts, can be assigned to work anywhere within 48 kilometres of a rail yard.
Don Ashley, the TCRC's Ottawa-based national legislative representative, says locomotive engineers have years of experience dealing with heavy loads and complex braking systems, whereas "road switchers" are more junior.
A remote control device for trains, known as a Beltpack. (Transportation Safety Board)
He also said the one involved in last week's Edmonton derailment had only been on the job for month or two.
"Yards are basically controlled environments where the grade is set. When you get outside of yards onto the main line you know there's grades, there's curves, there's crossings," Ashley told CBC News.
"There's a lot more interaction with the public. I don't think all those things are being properly looked at and considered."
More accidents: U.S. regulator
Ashley also said that the U.S. Federal Railway Administration is studying the issue closely, and in 2006 concluded RCLS can lead to more accidents.
"The FRA study showed there is a 25 per cent increase in incidents with the use of RCLS over conventional crewing operations. That's pretty significant," Ashley said. "It could be minor, yard incidents, but it's still 25 per cent higher risk or potential risk for something catastrophic."
CP Rail and the union are now in an arbitration fight over the use of remote controlled technology, CP having told the union in a letter last year "there are no operating or regulatory barriers that prevent the use of RCLS in yards or on main track."
In an emailed statement to CBC News, assistant VP of public affairs Martin Cej wrote that CP has simply "reintroduced RCLS technology into its operations.
"CP has a robust training program for RCLS and for 12 of the last 14 years has been the safest Class 1 railway in North America (according to train accident frequency)," Cej wrote.
CN Rail also calls it a 'safe, proven technology." In its statement to CBC News CN said it has "extensive experience'" using remote control in yards, and using two-person crews at speeds limited to 24 km/hr.
Still, since September, CN rail has reported 12 minor derailments or collisions involving RCLS to safety authorities while CP Rail has reported five.
Past collisions
The Transportation Safety board has investigated other more serious accidents in the past, including a 2007 incident in Winnipeg where a CN employee was operating a train by remote control while seated in the passenger side of a moving company vehicle.
The employees were monitoring the train through rear-view mirrors when it veered away from them and collided with another outbound train.
In August 2007, in Prince George, B.C., two CN Rail managers were operating a belt pack to pull a train of 53 loaded cars inside a yard. The load got away from them and collided with another train carrying gasoline, causing an explosion and spill involving 172,000 litres of fuel.
The Transportation Safety board concluded the load was too heavy and the managers lacked adequate training to safely use the remote control system.
The FRA study in the U.S. also recommended far greater training and called for 15 mph (24 km/hr) speed limits and caps of 1,000 feet or about 20 cars on the lengths of any train being operated by remote control.
Transport Canada confirmed to CBC that there currently are no such explicit rules or regulations. Railways are left to decide on their own what is a safe practice using belt packs.
The Canadian Rail Operating Rules, Transport Canada said, state that: "Remote control locomotives in transfer service may only operate on the main track when a qualified operator is equipped with an operative operator controlled unit. Each qualified operator, to a maximum of two, must have an operative OCU.
"There are no additional rules, regulations, or directives specific to the use of remote control locomotives on main track."
The Teamsters' Ashley said he has written Canada's rail safety division demanding a study and new regulations fearing someone could be seriously injured or killed.
"You know in the railway industry there's a lot of rules and regulations that unfortunately have evolved over the years and been written in blood. Basically they are created when there's an incident or accident. I view this as an opportunity for the regulator to get ahead of the curve here and develop some regulations ... before we have more incidents." | {
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Developers working together to build shared infrastructure: it’s the fundamental tenet of open-source software. Any motivated programmer with an idea and the ability to implement it can solve a common problem, share the solution with the world, and reap the rewards of future improvements by peer review.
Advancing that shared infrastructure often requires crazy ideas. I should know. In 2005, I created Prototype, the first of a generation of JavaScript libraries designed for building modern web applications. Prototype was based on a far-out idea in a time of stagnant browser innovation: what if we fixed the deficiencies of JavaScript by augmenting its built-in types with new behavior?
The idea quickly took hold. Ruby on Rails adopted Prototype as the JavaScript framework of choice, and before long you could find it powering the web sites of high-profile companies like Apple and the New York Times.
After some time, though, it became clear that Prototype’s core idea was at odds with the world. Browser vendors responded to the JavaScript renaissance by adding new APIs, many of which conflicted with Prototype’s implementation. And developers began to show a preference for small, self-contained, modular libraries over more monolithic frameworks.
In just a few short years Prototype went from best practice to anti-pattern—and depending on who you listened to, you might even be convinced that it was one of the worst things to happen to the web. The reality is that Prototype helped lots of people despite its flawed foundation. But its time had come and gone, and I eventually realized it was time to move on.
It was hard not to take Prototype’s failure personally. Critical blog posts felt like a full assault on my values. And seeing friends use other libraries made me feel like my work was a waste.
But this process is how we move the shared infrastructure forward. In order to advance the state of the art, we have to be willing not only to try new ideas, but to retreat when those ideas prove untenable or when something better comes along. And we have to be able to speak candidly about problematic code without fear of offending the egos behind it.
I have learned that in the open-source world, you are not your code. A critique of your project is not tantamount to a personal attack. An alternative take on the problem your software solves is not hostile or divisive. It is simply the result of a regenerative process, driven by an unending desire to improve the status quo. | {
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This adapts the famous Thai noodle dish with oats and common western ingredients. Total cooktime is about five minutes.
cost calories net carbs fat fiber protein sugar ~$0.72 489 32 34 7 14 5
Ingredients
microwave-safe bowl
1/2 cup rolled oats
1 tsp garlic
1/4 tsp ground red pepper (adjust to your heat preference)
2 tsp erythritol (or your preferred sweetener)
2 tsp chicken or vegetable broth base (low sodium, ideally, since fish sauce is salty)
1 tbsp peanut oil
1 tsp fish sauce
1 tsp lime juice
3/4 cup water
2 tbsp crunchy peanut butter
1 tsp dried shallots/scallions/chives
1 tsp sriracha
Directions
combine all ingredients except peanut butter, chives, and sriracha in bowl
cook on high until oats are nearly done, about 2 minutes
stir in peanut butter and cook until oats are tender, about another 2 minutes
top with shallots and sriracha
Notes
Frozen vegetables like peas+carrots, peppers, and onions are good additions. To reduce carbs, use them in place of half the oats.
Replacing the water with coconut milk adds a lot of flavor. I don’t find it worthwhile to keep on hand, though. The same goes for replacing the lime juice with tamarind paste.
Consider topping with an egg for a more conventional flavor and added protein. I crack it onto the oats after stirring in the peanut butter.
Similar recipes
Garlic Oatmeal is another savory oatmeal. It’s a bit quicker to prep since it has fewer ingredients. | {
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Versailles (France) (AFP) - Photos of a dog buried alive up to its head in France sparked an outpouring of anger on social media Wednesday, and police said the owner was taken into custody.
The French mastiff was discovered and then rescued on Saturday by a man walking his own dog on waste ground in Carrieres-sur-Seine, west of Paris.
The man posted pictures on Facebook saying: "Only her head was visible and it was difficult to see given the amount of earth covering her."
A police source told AFP that the dog was surrounded by stones and her lead was attached to a sack of gravel to prevent her breaking free from the earth.
The man called the emergency services and began to free the animal. The dog, "shocked and dehydrated" according to the police source, was taken to a veterinary clinic nearby.
Police quickly traced the animal to its 21-year-old owner who was taken into custody. He denied burying the dog, saying that the animal had run away.
However, investigators said this was "not very plausible".
"The dog is more than 10 years old and suffers from arthritis. It's difficult to imagine her running away," said a source close to the investigation.
The owner will be put on trial for animal cruelty and could be sent to prison for two years and be forced to pay a fine of up to 30,000 euros ($32,600).
An online petition calling for the "maximum sentence for the owner" had received 135,000 signatures by Wednesday. | {
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No period of progress in America has ever come without devastating push-back from the forces of conservatism
The most popular person in American politics was out campaigning for Hillary Clinton this week – and so was her husband.
“Elections aren’t just about who votes,” First Lady Michelle Obama told a crowd at La Salle University’s Tom Gola Arena in Philadelphia. “It’s also about who doesn’t vote.”
This echoes a message her husband offered on the Steve Harvey Show.
“If you don’t vote, that’s a vote for Trump,” Obama told the radio host. “If you vote for a third-party candidate who’s got no chance to win, that’s a vote for Trump.”
The Obama’s attempt to sharpen the choice of the election seems seems to have the same goal as Clinton’s honing in on a the more populist elements of economic message during the first debate — namely, energizing Democrats.
Yes, Democrats are less eager to vote this year than Republicans. This was also true in 2012 and we know how that worked out. But the stakes are infinitely higher this time.
“This was not a bad performance,” The New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik wrote about Trump’s performance in Monday night’s debate. “This is a bad man.”
That should have been obvious before Trump bragged about about not paying taxes, congratulated himself for not discriminating against black people anymore and defended calling a 20-year old woman “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping” — a slur that revealed his true contempt for the working class, as Harold Pollack explains.
But there is a frisson in this election that make a Trump much more possible than many of us would like to admit. A slight Trump win or a vast Clinton electoral college landslide seem the most likely outcomes, given the closeness of this race and the way the presidential map favors Democrats.
Obviously, the Obamas share my fear that Trump can win — and given the “old fashioned racism” they’ve faced in office, it’s not hard to see why.
America has a fetish for “outsiders” almost equal to the adulation conservatives have nurtured for the rich and the unabashedly “old-fashioned.” And the right also has the physics of progress on its side.
No period of advancement of human rights in America has ever come without a devastating push-back from the forces of conservatism.
The jubilation of abolishing slavery was followed by the maiming of Reconstruction and the terror that followed. The rise of women’s suffrage just happened to occur as Birth of a Nation prompted a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. And the civil rights victories of the 1960s were followed by a conservative reaction of intentional “positive polarization” that used “dog whistles” to divide the nation, creating a new majority through savvy redistricting and gerrymandering.
In the last seven years, we’ve seen revolutions in LGBTQ rights, clean energy and the radical expansion of health coverage. All of this is prologue to us seeking to elect the first woman president the face of the greatest demographic transformation the United States has ever seen.
Those who were born into privileges guaranteed by race and gender sense a threat greater than any economic anxiety — the fear of something lost that cannot ever be regained.
All the has been accomplished with the Obamas in the White House is at stake in 2016 — along with our reproductive rights and everything the government does to fight inequality, possibly even including federal child labor laws, Social Security and Medicare.
That’s why the president and the First Lady are taking no chances and are intent on clarifying the choice we are making in November. So register, give and volunteer if you can.
[Image of President Obama and the First Lady at the 50th anniversary of the March on Selma via the White House | Flickr] | {
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By Vickey Chauhan
Little Rann of Kutch (LRK), Gujarat, India.
Short Eared Owl Asio flammeus is wide spread winter migrant owl here in India. Little Rann of Kutch is a salt marsh Located in Gujarat State. It is world's last refuge of the Indian Wild Ass Equus hemionus khur. LRK is a major part of the Indian Wild Ass Sanctuary, spread over 4954 Km2. LRK is famous for Migratory Raptors in winters.
Because of the high pH in the stomach of owls, they have a reduced ability to digest bone and other hard parts; they eject/Regurgitate pellets containing the remains of their prey. I was lucky enough to capture whole process of regurgitating pellets process of a Short Eared Owl. Here are images in sequence and also a close-up of the pellet. | {
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This is the rack onboard the ISS where the Super Critical Water Mixture experiment takes place.
When firefighters want to extinguish a blaze, they often douse it with water. Astronauts on board the ISS, however, are experimenting with a form of water that does the opposite. Instead of stopping fire, this water helps start it.
"We call it 'supercritical water,'" says Mike Hicks of the Glenn Research Center in Ohio. "And it has some interesting properties."
Water becomes supercritical when it compressed to a pressure of 217 atmospheres and heated above 373o C. Above that so-called critical point, ordinary H2O transforms into something that is neither solid, liquid, nor gas. It's more of a "liquid-like gas."
"When supercritical water is mixed with organic material, a chemical reaction takes place—oxidation." Says Hicks. "It's a form of burning without flames."
This really comes in handy when you want to get rid of certain unpleasant materials—like sewage. Cities, corporate farms, ships at sea and manned spacecraft accumulate waste materials that could benefit from this kind of treatment.
"When we push a wet waste stream above the critical point, supercritical water breaks the bonds of the hydrocarbons. Then, they can react with oxygen." In other words, the slurry ignites. Sometimes, hotspots in the slurry produce visible flame, but usually not. "This is a relatively clean form of burning that produces pure water and carbon dioxide, but none of the toxic products of ordinary fire."
What does all of this have to do with the ISS? "The International Space Station provides a unique microgravity lab for studying the properties of supercritical water," explains Hicks.
One of the problems with supercritical water has to do with salt. Above the critical point, any salts dissolved in water quickly precipitate out. If this happens in a reactor vessel, the metallic components of the vessel become coated with salt and they begin to corrode.
"In any realistic waste stream, we have to learn how to deal with salt. It's a major technological hurdle."
Dealing with salt is the ultimate goal of the Super Critical Water Mixture experiment on the ISS, a joint effort between NASA and CNES, the French space agency.
"By studying supercritical water without the complicating effects of gravity, we can learn how precipitating salts behave on a very fundamental level," says Hicks, who is the principal investigator of the experiment. "We might even be able to figure out how to draw salt away from corrosion-sensitive components."
The experiment, which uses French-built hardware (DECLIC) located in the station's Japanese Experiment Module (JEM), began during the first week of July 2013. It will continue for a full year in a series of six test runs, each lasting approximately 15 days.
The results could have down-to-Earth applications. The US Navy has already started using supercritical water technologies to purify waste streams onboard some of their ships, while the City of Orlando has started a supercritical treatment plant for processing municipal sludge.
Explore further Space station research exposing the salty truth of supercritical water transitions | {
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When I was young there were a few things I could not understand – probably more than a few, but these stood out: why would anyone drink coffee or beer, since they both tasted awful; and why anyone willingly would listen to opera? My mother had a great voice and sang in a chorus, but I don’t remember my parents listening to opera at home. They took me to the opera when I was seven, but I remember barely sitting through it.
When we came to the US in 1991, my aunt gave us a present: a CD player and one CD – I still have it – Pavarotti singing Rossini’s “Stabat Mater”. Since this was the only CD we had and we did not have money for others, I think that after listening to it a dozen times I started to like it.
The first time I went to the opera willingly I was an adult, it was in the US, and I wanted to impress a girl. The opera was “Madame Butterfly,” and I remember vividly liking the girl but not the opera. Normally you’d stop there, but I wanted to impress another girl, so I went a second time. Neither girl worked out, but a love for opera was born.
I never thought I’d be comparing opera to coffee or beer, but just as most people don’t like the taste of coffee or beer when they first try them, so it is with opera (and the same probably applies to most classical music). Just think about it: most opera sung today were written a hundred and fifty years ago, the performers usually wear costumes of that time period, and on average they don’t come up to Hollywood-defined standards of attractiveness (a lot of them are overweight).
I am grossly generalizing here and it’s an extremely shallow observation, but there’s some truth to it nonetheless. Operas are sung in languages we don’t understand. In fact, you have to read the program (or subtitles) to follow them. Add all this up, and in our society the odds are definitely stacked against opera. But somehow this seemingly archaic genre of music/theater keeps marching right along.
Why? I can only speak for myself. I find that opera has a deeper emotional impact on me than a symphony or a piano concerto. Opera is really symphony orchestra plus voices (a voice symphony within a traditional symphony). Not being able to understand the words is maybe even a feature, since it stimulates the imagination. When I write and get stuck, which happens often, I turn on an opera, because I found that it has a magical ability to clear my writer’s block.
At the end of this month my son, my father, and I are going on a road trip. We will drive to Santa Fe, which is about six hours from Denver. We’ll go to art galleries, and my father will teach his son and grandson about art. We’ll visit Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was born. And we’ll go see “La Traviata.” If I told you my twelve-year-old son is looking forward to seeing it, I’d be lying. But over the past twelve months I have taken him to see “Rigoletto,” “Carmen,” and “La Traviata,” and he didn’t hate them.
Today I want to share with you the opera “Samson et Dalila,” by one of my favorite French composers, Camille Saint Saens. I wanted to focus on your attention on this piece. It is sung by Elina Garanca, Latvian soprano. She has an incredible voice, she is a very talented actress (I saw her last year singing “Carmen” at the Metropolitan Opera), and her looks contradict what I told you above – her looks would make Hollywood proud. | {
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The BYD Qin Pro EV has now landed in the Chinese market.
After an all-time record in December when sales were rushed to benefit from government subsidies, the New Energy market in China logically recedes volume-wise but remains extremely dynamic. CAAM wholesales figures show a whopping 138% year-on-year uptick to 96.000 units including 75.000 EVs (+179.7%) and 21.000 PHEVs (+54.6%). Our selection of New Energy vehicles is slightly different as it also includes non-rechargeable hybrids but is restricted to passenger cars and retail sales, not wholesales as these offer a broader list of models. Our set of models add up to 96.178 over January, displaying an explosive +124.6% year-on-year gain to be compared with the 250.247 (+27%) of December alone.
The BYD e5 is the best-selling New Energy vehicle in China in January.
Both brands and models rankings are significantly reshuffled this month. BYD (+369%) reclaims the top spot it held over the Full Year 2018 with a mammoth 33.6% market share, way above Toyota (+4.8%) whose lineup of non-rechargeable hybrids is starting to pant, Honda (+69.2%), BAIC BJEV (+39.4%) and JAC (+78.5%), with Dongfeng (+2162.8%), Geely (+411.1%) and JMC (+170.8%) also impressive in the Top 10 but Lexus (-10.9%) in difficulty. Model-wise, the BYD e5 surprises and easily takes the lead with over 12.000 sales, distancing the BYD Yuan EV at 9.000 and the Toyota Corolla hybrid just under 6.000. The BYD Tang PHEV (+326.2%), JMC E200L (+145.2%) and BAIC EU-Series (+7781.4%) follow. The BYD Qin Pro EV makes its first appearance in the charts directly at #13 with almost 2.500 sales, while the Nio ES8 is up 5 spots on December to #15 and the Weltmeister EX5 is up 9 to #16.
Previous post: China Full Year 2018 New Energy: BYD and BAIC EC-Series best-sellers, market eclipses 1 million sales for the first time
Full January 2019 Top 59 All-brands and Top 112 All-models below. | {
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Story highlights Elizabeth Aranda: Research showed DACA significantly improved mental well-being
If Trump rescinds it, he will be cruelly snatching away hope for the future
Elizabeth Aranda is a professor of sociology at the University of South Florida who researches immigrants' lives. She is the co-author of "Making a Life in Multiethnic Miami: Immigration and the Rise of a Global City." The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
(CNN) Students at the University of South Florida, where I teach, are buzzing with excitement as they tackle a new fall semester. As someone who teaches, advises, and mentors students, I enjoy watching them explore and figure out what the term might hold for them. I'm also a sociologist who studies the lives of immigrants. For some of my students, I see that this semester is different. I've been in touch with one student, for example, who is feeling dread and not excitement as she begins her senior year.
Elizabeth Aranda
My student, who probably would prefer I not use her name, is a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) -- the two-year reprieve from deportation that, among other things, grants undocumented youth brought to the US as children the right to get identity papers and apply to work legally.
Having heard news that President Donald Trump may rescind DACA in coming days , my student seemed incapable of looking forward to the new school year or having any hope about what education might have in store for her.
The stakes are high if President Trump rescinds DACA. Surely such a decision would not be about hewing to the rule of law, as he recently showed that he has no qualms about actual lawbreakers: after all, he quickly pardoned former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt only a month ago.
The truth is, that though Donald Trump may be approaching a DACA decision as yet another chess move in the political game of winning over his base, for many -- likely most -- DACA recipients, the idea that they must once again retreat into the shadows in the only country they've known and from which they may in fact be expelled, fills them with unbearable anxiety. | {
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Mobile is today as important, if not more important, than desktops when it comes to the internet and apps. A clear reminder of that comes with news of a report claiming that Google’s Android has overtaken Windows as the internet’s most used operating system.
Research from web analytics company StatCounter found Android now accounts for a larger share of internet usage than Windows for the first time. During March 2017, Android users represented 37.93 percent of activity on StatCounter’s network versus 37.91 percent for the Microsoft operating system. It’s a small gap for sure — and it refers to usage not necessarily users — but it marks a notable tipping point that has been inevitable for the past couple of years.
StatCounter — which bases its findings on 2.5 million websites that it claims generate more than 15 billion monthly page views — tracked the gradual convergence of usage for the two operating systems over time. The chart highlights Microsoft’s failure to challenge with its ill-fated Windows Phone platform.
StatCounter: Internet usage based on operating systems Match 2012-March 2017
Interestingly, for Apple, the switch happened some time ago. During March 2017, Apple’s mobile users (iOS) were close to three times more active on the internet than users of its desktop machines (OSX).
StatCounter: Internet usage based on operating systems during March 2017
The wider Android-Windows trend has been evident for some time. Windows dominated, and continues to dominate, the desktop landscape, but worldwide PC sales have declined for the past five years to reach the same levels as 2008. In contrast, sales of smartphones continue to grow, and Android is the operating system for the lion’s share of internet users worldwide. Growth is highest in emerging markets like India. There, Apple has increased its sales but remains a niche player, with Android accounting for upwards of 90 percent of smartphones.
While the balance between iOS and Android is more level in Western markets like the U.S., the influx of new internet users from regions like Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America has tipped the scales in favor of Android. Indeed, a StatCounter report issued last week showed that mobile accounts for the vast majority of internet usage in countries like India (79 percent), Indonesia (72 percent) and China (57 percent), while desktop remains king in markets such as the U.S. (37 percent), U.K. (35 percent) and Germany (30 percent).
Those numbers have seen some shift in global revenue for developers, with China overtaking the U.S. as the most lucrative market for iOS apps worldwide, but Android continues to lag despite a larger base of users.
A recent App Annie report found that iOS accounted for just over 25 billion of the 90 billion app downloads made in 2016, with Android taking the remainder. Yet iOS apps pulled in the majority of the $35 billion paid out to publishers across the iOS and Android app stores.
That might change soon, though. Thanks again to its vast dominance in the emerging world, App Annie is predicting that 2017 could be the year that Android app earnings overtake iOS for the first time. That would be another important milestone. | {
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Sen. Jeanne Shaheen Cynthia (Jeanne) Jeanne ShaheenSenate Democrats introduce bill to sanction Russians over Taliban bounties Trump-backed candidate wins NH GOP Senate primary to take on Shaheen Democratic senator urges Trump to respond to Russian aggression MORE (D-N.H.) is advising the GOP to listen to fellow Republican, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, on how to move forward on healthcare.
“Let’s listen to Republican governor John Kasich of Ohio, whose state is also struggling with the opioid crisis,” Shaheen said in the Democrats' weekly address Saturday.
“He rejects the way Trumpcare would end treatment for people in recovery. I agree with the governor’s call to put politics aside, use common sense, and find common ground. Many of my Republican colleagues in the Senate are also saying: Let’s slow down and work across the aisle.”
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Kasich has criticized the House GOP's ObamaCare replacement plan and said lawmakers from both parties should work together on a healthcare plan.
"What's at risk here to Democrats is you can't turn your back on these people. And to Republicans, you need to invite Democrats in because we're talking about lives,” Kasich told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“All this consumption with who gains politically, you know, life is short. And if all you focus on in life is what's in it for me, you're a loser. You are a big time loser. And this country better be careful we're not losing the soul of our country because we play politics and we forget people who are in need,” he said.
The GOP has faced major pushback for its healthcare plan, from conservatives as well as moderate Republicans, as well as Democrats.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Monday predicted that the number of people who would lose health insurance under the new plan would increase by 14 million in 2018.
Shaheen in the address said the GOP plan takes the country “in the wrong direction” arguing it will have “tragic consequences” in her home state, which is currently fighting an opioid epidemic.
“In poll after poll, they’re telling us not to end Obamacare but to mend it ... keep the most successful parts, and fix what is not working,” she said.
“We need to get this right. And that means Republicans and Democrats working together, keeping our promises, putting people first,” Shaheen added. | {
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Industries We Serve
Activated Calcium Carbonate, Coated Calcite, Activated calcium Carbonate, Ground Calcium Carbonate, Micronized Dolomite Powder, Talc Soapstone Powder Manufacturer Suppliers in India
Activated Calcium Carbonate, Coated Calcite, Activated calcium Carbonate, Ground Calcium Carbonate, Micronized Dolomite Powder, Talc Soapstone Powder Manufacturer Suppliers in India
Activated Calcium Carbonate, Coated Calcite, Activated calcium Carbonate, Ground Calcium Carbonate, Micronized Dolomite Powder, Talc Soapstone Powder Manufacturer Suppliers in India
Activated Calcium Carbonate, Coated Calcite, Activated calcium Carbonate, Ground Calcium Carbonate, Micronized Dolomite Powder, Talc Soapstone Powder Manufacturer Suppliers in India
Activated Calcium Carbonate, Coated Calcite, Activated calcium Carbonate, Ground Calcium Carbonate, Micronized Dolomite Powder, Talc Soapstone Powder Manufacturer Suppliers in India
Activated Calcium Carbonate, Coated Calcite, Activated calcium Carbonate, Ground Calcium Carbonate, Micronized Dolomite Powder, Talc Soapstone Powder Manufacturer Suppliers in India
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The first thing Porter Fischer spotted was the trunk of his silver Corolla. It was wide open. Then he noted a bashed-in passenger window and shattered glass littering the parking lot outside the Boca Tanning Club on North Federal Highway. Patrons in a nearby Starbucks peered out curiously as he sprinted to the car.
"No!" he screamed. The boxes were gone.
Fischer dashed back into the salon and yelled to the receptionist: "Call the police! Now!" Then he ran to the back, where a salon employee was tanning in a booth. It was the same place Fischer had spent the last ten minutes getting a sprayed-on sheen. He banged on the door. "They broke in!" he yelled. "They got everything!"
In the weeks that followed, Fischer would torture himself about leaving priceless cargo unattended. But the truth was, he didn't think anyone would have followed him 300 miles from Miami to a storage unit in Ocala and then to Boca Raton. He certainly never imagined a thief would be bold enough to snatch the boxes from his car in such a busy lot.
He was wrong.
See also: "Tony Bosch and Biogenesis: MLB Steroid Scandal"
The March 24 daylight burglary was just one of many gut punches Fischer has taken since removing boxes of documents from Biogenesis, the Coral Gables anti-aging clinic where he'd worked. He later shared the medical records, patient spreadsheets, and handwritten composition books with Miami New Times for an explosive story that sparked the biggest drug-related scandal in professional sports since Lance Armstrong lost his seven Tour de France medals in 2012. Earlier this month, ESPN reported that Major League Baseball is considering suspending as many as 20 players for up to 100 games.
Fischer's motives were simple. He believed he'd been cheated by the clinic's owner, Tony Bosch, who the records indicated had sold performance-enhancing drugs to players including New York Yankees superstar Alex Rodriguez and the Toronto Blue Jays' All-Star MVP Melky Cabrera.
Fischer could never have predicted the insanity that followed the story's publication: a high-speed car chase on U.S. 1, midnight knocks on his door, death threats, and unmarked envelopes stuffed full of cash — not to mention the Boca Raton smash-and-grab.
Even worse, Fischer says, has been the jaw-dropping incompetence of the authorities he trusted. Major League Baseball spent months alternately trying to cajole and offer money to Fischer before apparently losing interest just after the break-in. And the Florida Department of Health, despite his full cooperation and reams of evidence, abruptly closed the case by giving Bosch just a citation and fine.
"Mr. Fischer approached us, and it was clear from the beginning he was seeking compensation for documents or verification," says Pat Courtney, a spokesman for MLB. "We had discussion with him on a number of occasions but never reached any agreement." (Fischer says Major League Baseball approached him and offered money.) Courtney adds that baseball has aggressively investigated Bosch's company. "Since we became aware of the Biogenesis allegations, we have pursued every legal avenue to enforce our drug program," Courtney says.
Attorneys for Tony Bosch and Alex Rodriguez did not respond to a phone message as well as an email from New Times seeking comment.
The goateed, muscular 48-year-old from Pinecrest provided the records to New Times on the basis of anonymity this past January but decided to reveal his identity now in the hope the real miscreants will be punished. He is the most important whistleblower in baseball history, a man who helped show that the steroid era is far from over and may well have ended A-Rod's career before a $275 million contract is even finished. Now he has no job and plenty of reasons to fear for his life.
"The people running Major League Baseball are the biggest scumbags on Earth as far as I'm concerned," Fischer says. "At this point, every bad guy out there knows exactly who I am. Why shouldn't everyone else know the story too?"
One of the most significant scandals in modern baseball history began with an argument over $4,000. That unpaid debt, combined with Porter Fischer's short fuse, ignited a firestorm that likely won't be finished for years.
Fischer was born in 1964 and grew up in a small Coral Gables house with his mom, Ann Marie Porter, a member of a storied South Florida family. Her great-grandfather, Dr. Joseph Yates Porter, is among Florida's most famous medical professionals. Yates' research around the turn of the 20th Century helped prove yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes, and eradication efforts that followed the discovery saved thousands of people from the scourge. His former home, a three-story mansion with Southern porches on Caroline Street in Key West, is now a historical site.
Ann Marie, the daughter of Joseph Yates Porter III and his first wife, Edna, was raised in Boston. She later moved south to attend the University of Miami, where she met a strapping ROTC officer and helicopter pilot named Gary Fischer.
The couple married in the early '60s and had two children -- Porter and his sister, Suzanne. Fischer traces his temper and boundless appetite for revenge to his childhood. "My mom was an authoritarian," he says. "She'd find one thing out of place and ground you for two months. If you didn't clean something up, you'd come home and your dresser would be knocked over and everything was on the floor."
Fischer says he was often unjustly punished.
"If you want to know the source of my attitude of 'Don't fuck with me or else,' that's exactly where it comes from," Fischer says. "Now that I'm big and strong enough, I don't like to be pushed around."
His parents filed for divorce soon after his senior year at Christopher Columbus High School. Days after graduating, Fischer packed his bags and moved to Tallahassee, where he enrolled at Florida State University. He barely spoke to his family for the next seven years while working as a manager at Ruby Tuesday and paying his own way to an art degree. "I was always a decent artist," he recalls, "but I realized I was kind of a Coconut Grove Arts Festival-level talent."
So Fischer continued working at Ruby Tuesday after graduation and then briefly traveled to San Diego before returning east to manage Orlando's science-themed attraction, WonderWorks. Soon he quit that job and began freelance marketing. "I was always on planes, going to trainings and meetings," he says. "You're not exercising; you're coming home at 3 a.m., drinking beer, eating out. I got up to 228 pounds."
He started worrying about his health. One day in early 2010, he stopped by a Boca Tanning Club location at Sunset Drive and Red Road in South Miami. Fischer had made friends with the staff.
"I wanted to be the manager there," he recalls. "I was thinking, How do I get the edge back? How do I get my looks back, my income back?"
That's when a new section opened in the salon: Boca Body. "They told me they were doing HCG," Fischer says. "I asked, 'What's that?' and they said, 'Oh, it helps you lose weight.'" (HCG, in fact, is a hormone, which the FDA has prohibited from over-the-counter sales.)
An employee took Fischer's body fat measurements and told him to come back in a few days. When he returned, the staff ushered him in to see a man they called "the doctor." "That's when I first met Tony Bosch," Fischer says.
Fischer didn't know it, but Bosch wasn't a licensed doctor. He had earned a degree at the Belize-based Central America Health Sciences University, which isn't recognized in the United States. And he had led a troubled business career marred by a bitter dispute with his former partner in a medical supply business.
Along with his father, Dr. Pedro Bosch, Tony Bosch had reportedly been investigated in 2009 during a probe of then-Los Angeles Dodgers slugger Manny Ramirez, who was eventually suspended for failing a drug test. Neither father nor son was ever charged, and both proclaimed their innocence.
When Fischer met Tony Bosch, he "was wearing a lab coat," Fischer recalls. "He says, 'OK, I think we can make this work. Where do you want to be?'"
Fischer thought for a minute and answered truthfully. "Well, in a perfect world, I'd like a Stallone body."
Bosch grinned, Fischer remembers, and said, "We can get you there."
As the two men talked, they realized a connection: Both had attended Columbus High School, and Bosch had been in grade school with Fischer's sister, Suzanne.
Soon the HCG started working, and Fischer's excess weight began sliding off. During the next visit, Bosch gave him another shot and suggested weightlifting. "I worked out like a fucking animal," Fischer recalls. He claims he never bothered to ask about the injections' ingredients.
In 2010, Bosch opened a new clinic called Biokem, tucked into a building just across South Dixie Highway from the University of Miami campus. He agreed to keep Fischer on the drug regimen for about $300 per month.
Then, on March 2, 2011, Fischer was biking on SW 128th Street when a 2011 Jaguar turned and slammed into him. After knee surgery, Fischer says, he received $35,000 in insurance money. (A police report confirms the driver was cited for careless driving.)
Fischer had begun hanging around the clinic — which changed its name to Biogenesis in March 2012 — after receiving his latest prescriptions, which by then included testosterone creams and anabolic steroids Winstrol and MIC. (Fischer shared his own patient records, which showed the prescriptions.)
"I was starting to get seriously jacked up," Fischer says. Soon he proposed the idea of marketing Biogenesis. After all, the place didn't even have a sign out front. About a year after the accident, he pitched the idea hard: "I said, 'Look, I'll even pay for some of the advertising myself. I've come into some money,'" Fischer remembers, referring to his accident payout.
That night, Bosch called with a proposal: Invest $4,000 and be repaid plus 20 percent interest via weekly installments. He'd also make Fischer a partner and marketing director.
Fischer agreed. This past October, he began working at Biogenesis every day, organizing records and assembling a marketing plan. "I was doing everything for free," he says.
Then, after almost two years on the drug regimen, Fischer finally began seriously researching what he'd been taking. He wasn't too worried. After all, Bosch was a doctor, right?
One day a co-worker approached Fischer. He claimed Bosch's main drug source wasn't a licensed doctor but rather "just a goddamn glorified steroid dealer."
"That's the first moment I thought, Oh, shit. I'm in the drug trade," Fischer says.
It's also the moment he began planning his exit strategy. The problem was, Bosch quickly abandoned his weekly payment plan. Pressed about the matter, Bosch claimed the clinic's income had fallen recently by $30,000 per month "because of Cabrera." (Bosch did eventually make two $600 payments to Fischer.)
Fischer went home and researched the name. Then-Giants outfielder Melky Cabrera had been suspended 50 games beginning in August for failing a drug test. It was then that Fischer learned of Bosch's alleged links to slugger Manny Ramirez's case.
"That's when I started documenting shit," Fischer says. "I [thought], Look, if this motherfucker doesn't pay me, there's going to be collateral damage."
Fischer began discreetly taking Biogenesis records home. (He claims the clinic's manager, Ricky Martinez, had actually requested that he store them somewhere.) Bosch wasn't around much, perhaps because he was distracted by money woes — including thousands in unpaid child support to two ex-wives.
One day, Fischer grabbed four composition notebooks from Bosch's desk. The Biogenesis owner's name was written on the front, and they were packed with hand-scrawled notes about clients, drug formulas, and payments.
Finally, he confronted Bosch, who had returned from a trip to Detroit. (According to Fischer, the trip took place during last year's Yankees-Tigers playoff series, when A-Rod was benched for his ineffectual hitting. Bosch had been called to the slugger's side, Fischer claims, to help him right his swing.)
"I said, 'Hey, how was the trip? Where's my money?'" Fischer recalls. "Bosch looked me straight in the face and said, 'I don't have it. You're not going to get it. I'm Tony Bosch. What the hell are you going to do about it?'"
Fischer suddenly was a small boy again, being pushed around for no good reason. "That's when the switch went off," he says.
The way Fischer tells it, the frantic phone call came January 26, the Saturday before New Times' story about Biogenesis was scheduled to land. Fischer had told only a few people he'd been speaking to a reporter, including a friend whom Fischer requested New Times not identify. Rumors were running wild. After New Times had called every player named in the records for comment that Friday, someone leaked details of the coming bombshell to the New York Daily News and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
The friend sounded panicked.
Here's how Fischer remembers the call: "Porter!" he hollered. "I need to come over to your place now!"
Fischer was rattled. He checked his .32 Beretta and armed the alarm on his front door. Then he gave his friend his home address. That would be the first of several mistakes he made in the manic months that followed New Times' story on Biogenesis. Fischer would soon find himself burned by his friends, by Major League Baseball, and finally by state investigators.
The first betrayal came from that friend, who showed up around midnight, panting nervously with a simple message: "[One of Bosch's associates] will kill both of us..." he claimed, unless the story was softened.
Fischer began to panic. "What can I do?" he asked. "I just want this to blow over now."
"Let me see the notebooks," the friend allegedly said.
Fischer thought for a minute. Then he went to the closet, grabbed the four handwritten notebooks in which Tony Bosch had kept daily records of his patients, and handed them over. His friend quickly announced he could get them back to Bosch, Fischer says, no questions asked.
As far as Fischer was concerned, that was fine — he had copies of everything and knew New Times' story would come out soon. "The whole situation was crazy, and I was panicking," Fischer says. "I figured, I already did the damage. What did I need the originals for anymore?"
On Sunday, two days before the story went online, Fischer visited his friend at his business. The friend handed over an envelope with $4,000 in hundreds, Fischer says. "See, I got you your money back from Tony," he said, smiling.
"So you gave him the notebooks back, huh?" Fischer said.
"Oh, no, I told him they were destroyed," the friend said.
Fischer's stomach dropped. "So what did you actually do with them?"
"I gave 'em to A-Rod's people," his friend said, chuckling.
On April 12, the New York Times reported that MLB officials believed Rodriguez had "arranged an intermediary" to buy documents from the clinic. An A-Rod spokesman denied that report.
On Tuesday, New Times' story went viral, and Fischer says the friend who'd taken the notebooks called him in a panic. "This is the worst it could possibly be!" he yelled. "[New Times] has everything! I'm leaving town — now."
Fischer also packed a bag and went to a relative's house near Orlando. The story soon landed on the front page of the New York Times and led every newscast from ESPN to CNN. Fischer's records had threatened the careers of some of the biggest, wealthiest names in the sport.
"I started to feel my safety was in serious jeopardy," Fischer says. "If you've been playing ball for 15 years and suddenly you don't get in the Hall of Fame, you might just want to blame that on whoever was responsible. Or maybe Jose, his third cousin removed who lives in Hialeah and doesn't get a check in the mail anymore, is a little bent out of shape about the whole thing."
MLB soon dispatched a team of investigators to South Florida. They were led by Dan Mullin, a tough former New York Police Department deputy chief who'd been appointed to head baseball's new Department of Investigations.
Two senior vice presidents — Pat Courtney and Rob Manfred — meanwhile, visited the New Times office. Their request was simple: Share the documents. (New Times eventually declined.)
By February, Fischer had returned to Miami and moved into his mother's Pinecrest home. It was surrounded by fences and tall hedges, so he could spot anyone coming.Reporters had been driving by for weeks. An MLB investigator one day left a business card that later found its way into an ESPN report: "We know time is $," he had scrawled on the back. "Please call."
Fischer didn't respond. A surreal incident on February 19 convinced him that keeping a low profile was a wise move. He was driving home from the gym when he noticed a beige Honda turn onto his block. Warily, he drove past his house and parked at nearby Pinecrest Gardens. After waiting a few minutes, he pulled out — but the Honda was parked outside the lot.
Fischer sped out onto South Dixie Highway with the Honda in pursuit. Sweating, he called a friend named Pete Carbone. "What the hell do I do?" he yelled.
Carbone convinced Fischer to meet him at a nearby Winn-Dixie. They quickly traded cars. The Honda tailed Carbone in Fischer's car. A few minutes later, Carbone was boxed in between two other cars. He called the cops.
A report filed by Pinecrest police sheds little light on why the men were chasing Fischer. The three other drivers — Lewis Perry, Ernesto Sam, and Julio Moreiras — all worked for Precise Protective Research, a private eye firm based nearby on South Dixie Highway. They told police they were "working an investigation" when Carbone began threatening them. (Carbone claimed one man flashed a gun at him, according to the police report.) No charges were filed, and Carbone declined to talk to New Times.
"They were either working for Major League Baseball or A-Rod or another ballplayer involved," Fischer claims today, though he has no proof.
On February 25, Fischer finally decided to meet with two MLB investigators, both ex-NYPD cops.
They started with the carrots: They'd pay Fischer just to talk. If things worked out, maybe they could even move him to a gated community. And there would be justice for the cheaters.
Fischer replied, "I don't give a shit about you or your ballplayers. This is about self-preservation to me."
So the ex-cops switched tactics: If someone were to sue you, they warned, it could be expensive. MLB could indemnify him from damages. "I'm not worried about court," Fischer countered. "I'm worried about a bullet in my head."
A deal was hatched: If ten days went by and no newspaper or TV station reported Fischer's name, he'd meet them again. The MLB representatives agreed, on the condition that Fischer would send them a few pages of Bosch's files.
When there was no word in the media, they agreed to meet in a Coconut Creek parking lot. Fischer arrived to find the pair in a Chevy Tahoe with tinted windows. They rolled down the window and hailed him into the back seat. He slid in next to one investigator, while the other turned around with a grin and wordlessly handed Fischer an envelope. Inside was $5,000 cash.
"I'm thinking, Holy shit, this is exactly like the movies," Fischer says. "I considered not taking the money, but then I thought, Wait, I didn't do anything wrong here. Everyone else is getting paid — why shouldn't I?"
One investigator made a proposal: They'd give him another $10,000 to come in with all of his documents. Fischer laughed, "My safety is worth $15,000?"
The next meeting came March 11 at a small park wedged next to SW 72nd Avenue just south of the Deering Estate at Cutler.
This time, MLB top cop Dan Mullin himself showed up. He suggested a deal: Fischer would share everything in exchange for a $1,000-per-week salary for a year as a "consultant." He'd be on the hook to answer any questions about the records.
"I told him: 'No way. That's not enough to protect myself.' And he said, 'Porter, this stuff isn't worth a million bucks,'" Fischer says. "But I never said it was. I just wanted to know how I could feel safe cooperating with these guys."
Baseball was done with the carrots. On March 19, MLB attorney Steven Gonzalez texted Fischer. It was three days before baseball would file a lawsuit against Tony Bosch and other Biogenesis associates. Gonzalez, in text messages shared with New Times, warned Fischer about the suit and added, "I hope you take it as a sign of good faith that your name was not included. This does not preclude us from making a deal, but if you ignore a forthcoming subpoena, it will force us to compel the courts to produce the four notebooks from Miami New Times."
Then Gonzalez made an offer: "We can compensate you in the amount of $125,000 for all the records and your signature on an affidavit."
Fischer took the text as "a fucking... lawyer-speak threat."
"No, thank you," he quickly texted Gonzalez back. "Not worth it."
MLB never seemed to grasp one key fact about Fischer: He didn't give a damn about their sport. In fact, other than A-Rod and Melky Cabrera, Fischer didn't even recognize a single ballplayer's name in Bosch's records until a New Times reporter began poring through them.
He had only one motivation: taking down Tony Bosch, the guy he says took his money and laughed in his face. That's why Fischer was so much more receptive when the Florida Department of Health (DOH) came calling.
The health department was a strange choice to investigate Bosch. Drug Enforcement Administration agents or local cops would have been more logical, but a well-placed source told New Times the feds initially refused to take the case.
Florida's DOH, by contrast, had a very narrow issue: If Bosch was practicing medicine or compounding drugs without a license, the department could charge him. In early April, Fischer met with a DOH agent named Jerome Hill.
Fischer immediately trusted Hill. The investigator wanted only to go after Bosch. "I agreed to cooperate completely," Fischer says.
The two began meeting regularly, and Hill — who repeatedly declined to talk to New Times about his investigation — began building a case against Bosch.
Fischer provided documents, including copies of medical reports that indicated Bosch had prescribed testosterone, human growth hormone (HGH), and anabolic steroids such as Anavar, Winstrol, and MIC. Fischer had even taken Bosch's lab coat from the office, a full-length white coat with "Dr. Tony Bosch" stitched over the pocket.
But the seemingly slam-dunk case soon hit roadblocks. The first came March 24, when Fischer, at Hill's request, traveled to the Ocala storage unit where he'd kept many of the boxes of medical files. When he stopped at the Boca Tanning Club in Boca Raton at 11:30 a.m., someone broke into his car and took the files, his laptop, and his .32 Beretta, according to a Boca police report.
"I told the police right away: This is important state's evidence that was taken," Fischer says. "They thought I was crazy."
A close-out memo from the Boca PD shows a detective talked to Hill about the case and noted the New York Times reported that both A-Rod and MLB officials were allegedly buying documents from clinic employees. Hill "did not think Fischer sold files to any players," the officer wrote. On March 20, they closed the case "pending DNA or new information."
Who took the boxes? It's still a mystery to Fischer.
"Whoever did this was a professional," he says. "They followed me for hours, waited for their one opportunity, and then struck."
Worse was yet to come. About a month later, the DOH abruptly closed its case and announced Bosch would receive a citation and a $5,000 fine but no criminal charges. "[We have] referred this matter to law enforcement," Ashley Carr, a department spokeswoman, said in a statement.
Why would the health department pass on a chance at such a high-profile criminal case? Bosch couched his business as an anti-aging clinic — which makes it part of a major industry in Florida. If regulators went after Bosch for improperly distributing HGH, how many others would they have to chase down?
Whatever the reason, Fischer is still baffled at prosecutors' lack of enthusiasm. "[They] completely blew this investigation, and I gave them everything on a silver platter," he says. "I blame the fucking bureaucrats."
When the story broke late on June 4, Fischer was livid: Citing two anonymous sources, ESPN reported Tony Bosch had reached an agreement with MLB to cooperate in its investigation. In return, baseball would drop its ongoing lawsuit against the bogus doctor, indemnify him against future damages, and provide personal security.
Many questions remain. If MLB has copies of Bosch's personal notebooks and business records, it's unclear how the league obtained them. Experts also question whether Bosch's testimony combined with those records would be enough evidence to suspend players. In the past, only positive drug tests have led to suspensions.
(However, that precedent has already changed. Cesar Carrillo, a minor-leaguer in the Tigers system, was suspended 100 games in March, reportedly over his ties to Biogenesis.)
It's worth noting that a New Times reporter spent three months with Fischer's records from Biogenesis and — with no "cooperation" from Bosch or any ballplayers — verified that the records were legitimate by interviewing six former clients, all of whom confirmed the details written about them in the notebooks were accurate. MLB's investigation division — which boasts 13 full-time staffers — could do the same.
In the weeks to come, baseball will reportedly interview Bosch, review its evidence, and present its case to an arbitration panel. Most of the players named in ESPN's latest story have declined to comment: Ryan Braun told reporters that "the truth has not changed" but refused to speak further. Alex Rodriguez released a statement that he would "monitor the situation and comment when appropriate."
Where all of that leaves Porter Fischer is much less clear. He still has hundreds of pages of Biogenesis records. He's willing to help any authority that wants to pursue Tony Bosch. And if MLB would offer him the same assurances it had evidently given Bosch, he'd even be willing to cooperate.
For now, though, he's alone in Pinecrest, wondering how Tony Bosch ended up in the catbird seat.
On a recent weekday afternoon, Fischer paces his neat, dimly lit room. He passes by the Xbox, the free weights, and the two-foot-tall red statue of the Incredible Hulk with exploding pecs and bulging veins. As he rails against Major League Baseball and the Department of Health, he swigs vodka and cranberry juice from a plastic mug.
"Everything is backwards in this story now. The good guy has been molded into the bad guy and vice versa," he says, his voice rising with indignation. "What did I do wrong? I stood up for myself. I exposed a bad guy breaking the law and ruining a sport."
Shaking his head, he pauses to refill his mug. He knows he never should have given his friend the notebooks or left the documents in his car in Boca. He never should have trusted MLB or the DOH.
But he doesn't regret any of it — exposing Tony Bosch or throwing a monumental wrench into America's pastime. He just wonders when he'll see justice. "Why am I still paying for everyone else's sins?" he asks. | {
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Update 8 January, 10pm GMT: FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has just appeared at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, confirming earlier reports that he will back strict net neutrality rules.
Wheeler said: "We're going to propose rules that say that no blocking (is allowed), no throttling, no paid prioritization."
Net neutrality will be protected by regulations enforced by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) despite objections from telecoms firms, according to new reports.
Anonymous sources involved in discussions with the agency have been cited by Bloomberg as saying the FCC is signalling its intent to keep the internet free and open.
Net neutrality, the concept that all web traffic should be treated equally, has been discussed by the commission in relation to new rules proposed by internet service providers (ISPs) to create "fast lanes" for companies willing to pay for fast data speeds.
More than four million comments concerning the controversial proposals for a "two-speed internet" were submitted to the FCC last year after the issue was opened up for public feedback.
Advocacy groups and major technology firms such as Facebook and Google have been among those vocalising their concern about the implications of not having sufficient rules to protect net neutrality.
The internet as a "vital service"
In November, US President Barack Obama called on the FCC to protect a free and open internet, claiming "no blocking", "no throttling", "increased transparency" and "no paid prioritisation" where necessary to enforce net neutrality.
"An open internet is essential to the American economy, and increasingly to our very way of life," Obama said in a statement. "By lowering the cost of launching a new idea, igniting new political movements, and bringing communities closer together, it has been one of the most significant democratising influences the world has ever seen.
I'm urging the @FCC to keep the internet open and free. Here's my plan to protect #NetNeutrality for everyone: http://t.co/3y3YLQD6MB –bo — The White House (@WhiteHouse) November 10, 2014
"We cannot allow internet service providers to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas.
"The time has come for the FCC to recognise that broadband service is of the same importance and must carry the same obligations as so many other vital services do."
The FCC's decision is yet to be officially made and follows almost a year of debate on the subject after a US court rejected rules to guarantee net neutrality.
A vote on the matter is set for 26 February and will be decided by the five FCC commissioners led by chairman Tom Wheeler. | {
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Home | Databases | WorldLII | Search | Feedback Supreme Court of New South Wales - Court of Appeal
Lemongrove Services Pty Ltd trading as Reimer Winter Williamson Lawyers and Anor v Rilroll Pty Ltd and Ors [2019] NSWCA 174 (17 July 2019)
Last Updated: 17 July 2019
Court of Appeal
Supreme Court New South Wales
[Note: The Uniform Civil Procedure Rules 2005 provide (Rule 36.11) that unless the Court otherwise orders, a judgment or order is taken to be entered when it is recorded in the Court's computerised court record system. Setting aside and variation of judgments or orders is dealt with by Rules 36.15, 36.16, 36.17 and 36.18. Parties should in particular note the time limit of fourteen days in Rule 36.16.]
HEADNOTE
[This headnote is not to be read as part of the judgment]
In late 2014, the appellants, Lemongrove Services Pty Ltd trading as Reimer Winter Williamson Lawyers and a director of that firm Anthony Brischetto, provided legal services to the second and third respondents, Mr and Mrs Hanshaw and the first respondent, being the trustee of the Hanshaws’ self-managed superannuation fund, Rilroll Pty Ltd. Those legal services related to the aborted purchase of land at Huntleys Cove and a café business conducted on that land.
The respondents alleged that, at a conference on 27 November 2014, Mr Brischetto did not tell the Hanshaws that a “subject to finance” clause that they had sought to have included in the contracts for sale of the land and business had been rejected by the vendors’ solicitors. The Hanshaws were ultimately unable to complete the purchase. They were sued by the vendors and by settlement agreed to pay damages. The Hanshaws cross-claimed against the appellants for breach of retainer and breach of duty. It was agreed before the primary judge that, upon proof of liability, the damages payable by the appellants to the respondents were $272,559.65.
The primary judge found that Mr Brischetto had not told the Hanshaws that the “subject to finance” clause had been rejected by the vendors’ solicitors, and that had the Hanshaws known that the “subject to finance” clause had been refused, they would not have entered into the contracts.
Lemongrove and Mr Brischetto appealed. The issues in the appeal were:
(1) Whether the primary judge erred in finding that Mr Brischetto had not told the Hanshaws that the “subject to finance” clause had been rejected by the vendors’ solicitors.
(2) Whether the primary judge erred in finding that had the Hanshaws known that the “subject to finance” clause had been refused, they would not have entered into the contracts.
Issue 1:
The Court (Payne JA, Bell P and Simpson AJA agreeing) held, dismissing the appeal:
The appellants were required to demonstrate that the primary judge’s finding about the critical issue was “glaringly improbable” or “contrary to compelling inferences”. The appellants’ case was essentially based upon what were asserted to be differences in accounts and differences in recollection about the matters discussed at the 27 November meeting. This was an inadequate foundation for a successful attack upon a finding of principal fact: [31]-[33].
Fox v Percy (2003) 214 CLR 118; [2003] HCA 22 applied.
It is not sufficient merely to point to some evidence which was relevant and not recorded in the judgment. It was necessary for the appellant to point to evidence having a quality which seriously calls into question the integrity of the primary judge’s critical finding of fact: [32]-[33].
Baira v RHG Mortgage Corporation Limited [2012] NSWCA 387 at [173]- [175] applied
Faced with conflicting but equally clear evidence from the Hanshaws and Mr Brischetto, the primary judge approached the fact finding task in the conventional way by examining the contemporaneous documents and evidence from the parties and others about events both before and after the critical meeting: [36].
Watson v Foxman (1995) 49 NSWLR 315 applied.
Issue 2:
The Court (Payne JA, Bell P and Simpson AJA agreeing) held, dismissing the appeal:
This was another factual finding made by his Honour after seeing the relevant witnesses cross-examined and considering the relevant documentary record. The primary judge did not fail to deal in a satisfactory way with a substantial amount of evidence. His Honour’s finding of fact, that the Hanshaws would not have exchanged if they had been told that the vendors had rejected the “subject to finance” clause, was not glaringly improbable or contrary to compelling inferences: [51].
JUDGMENT
BELL P: I have had the benefit of reviewing the judgment of Payne JA in draft. I agree with his Honour’s reasons and proposed orders. I, too, would dismiss the appeal with costs. PAYNE JA: In late 2014, the appellants, Lemongrove Services Pty Ltd trading as Reimer Winter Williamson Lawyers and a director of that firm Anthony Brischetto, provided legal services to the second and third respondents, Mr and Mrs Hanshaw and the first respondent, being the trustee of the Hanshaws’ self-managed superannuation fund, Rilroll Pty Ltd. Those legal services related to the aborted purchase of land at Huntleys Cove and a café business conducted on that land. At its heart, this appeal is focused on a challenge to a single factual finding, namely that at a conference on 27 November 2014 Mr Brischetto did not tell the Hanshaws that a “subject to finance clause” they had sought to have included in the contracts for sale of the land and business had been rejected by the vendors. The Hanshaws alleged that if they had been told that the contracts for sale did not contain a “subject to finance” clause, they would not have exchanged those contracts. On 19 November 2014, Mr Brischetto wrote to the vendors in these terms:
“Dear Sirs
RE: HANSHAW PURCHASE FROM GRAHAM AND BARTEL PROPERTY: XXX, HUNTLEYS COVE
We refer to our earlier correspondence.
Our client also requests that the purchase of the land and business be made subject to finance approval. In this respect, we request the following special condition to be inserted in both contracts:
Subject to Finance
a. Notwithstanding any other provision of this Contract, this Contract is subject to and conditional upon the Purchaser obtaining finance to enable the purchase of the property/business on terms which are reasonably satisfactory. (“Finance”).
b. In the event that the Purchaser has been unable to obtain Finance by the Completion Date (and provided that the Purchaser has otherwise complied with this clause), the Purchaser may rescind this Contract, following which the provisions of Clause 19 shall apply.
c. The Purchaser must make an application for Finance within twenty-one (21) days after the date of this Contract and must' diligently and expeditiously prosecute its application.
d. The Purchaser must notify the Vendor within two (2) business days of receiving notification that the Finance has been approved or refused:
e. For the purposes of this clause a., “terms which are reasonably satisfactory” means terms which are usual and commercial for a transaction of this type and having regard to the commercial and market conditions at the time.
We look forward to receiving your response.
Yours faithfully
REIMER WINTER WILLIAMSON
Anthony Brischetto
Solicitor – Director”
On 20 November 2014, solicitors for the vendors replied by email, relevantly:
“Dear Anthony,
I refer to your recent correspondence and we have been instructed to reply as follows:-
A. Our client will not agree to make the Contracts subject to finance, and accordingly no special condition will be inserted in this regard.
...
Please advise when you are ready to exchange.
Yours faithfully,
RANKIN ELLISON LAWYERS
Phillip Penman
Consultant”
It was common ground that, despite letters being sent on Mr Brischetto’s behalf to the Hanshaws following receipt of that email, and Mrs Hanshaw speaking to Mr Brischetto’s Executive Assistant Ms Catalano about the “subject to finance” clauses on 20 November 2014, prior to 27 November 2014 the Hanshaws were not informed that the vendors had rejected the “subject to finance” clauses which had been proposed. It was Mr Brischetto’s case, denied by the Hanshaws, that he told them of that matter at a meeting on 27 November 2014. The only participants at the critical meeting on 27 November 2014, Mr Brischetto, Mr Hanshaw and Mrs Hanshaw, each gave evidence before the primary judge and was cross-examined. The principal findings of the primary judge, Curtis ADCJ, were that: (1) the Hanshaws had asked for a detailed “subject to finance” clause to be sought from the vendors;
(2) the appellants asked the solicitors for the vendors to include such a clause in the contracts but the solicitors for the vendors had refused to include such a clause;
(3) the appellants were told that the vendors refused to include a “subject to finance” clause in the contracts but failed to inform the Hanshaws of that matter; and
(4) the Hanshaws would not have exchanged contracts had they been told that the vendors refused to include a “subject to finance” clause in the contracts. The contacts were exchanged without any “subject to finance” clause. Two valuations by the bank chosen by the Hanshaws to finance the purchase were obtained. Unhappily, each valuation was in an amount considerably less than expected by the Hanshaws. The Hanshaws were unable to complete the purchase. The Hanshaws were sued by the vendors and, by settlement agreed to pay damages. No complaint was made about the reasonableness of that settlement. The Hanshaws cross-claimed against the appellants for breach of retainer and breach of duty. It was agreed before the primary judge that upon proof of liability, the damages payable by the appellants to the respondents were $272,559.65. Helpfully, Mr Griscti, who appeared for the appellants accepted that:
“The judgment does not include any precise finding that there was a breach of contract and/or breach of duty of care. It is not disputed by the Appellants that if there is a finding that the Second Appellant failed to inform the Respondents of the rejection of the “subject to finance” clause by the Plaintiffs, this constituted:
a. a breach of the implied term of the retainer to exercise due care and skill in the performance of the retainer, and
b. a breach of the duty of care owed to the respondents by the Appellants in accordance with section 5B of the Civil Liability Act 2002 (NSW).”
The only two issues litigated on this appeal were: (1) whether the primary judge erred in concluding that Mr Brischetto did not tell the Hanshaws at the meeting on 27 November 2014 that the vendors had refused to include a “subject to finance” clause in the sale contracts; and
(2) whether the primary judge erred in concluding that the Hanshaws would not have exchanged contracts had they been told that the vendors had refused to include a “subject to finance” clause in the sale contracts. On the first issue (comprising grounds 1-4 of the notice of appeal), the appellants submitted that the relevant breach in respect of each of these causes of action was that the appellants failed to inform the respondents prior to exchange of contracts that the vendors refused to agree to a “subject to finance” clause. Curtis ADCJ, in his analysis, identified four possibilities, namely: (a) Mr Brischetto consciously lied about what was said at the 27 November 2014 meeting;
(b) the Hanshaws consciously lied about what was said at that meeting;
(c) Mr Brischetto was telling the truth and the Hanshaws had honestly, but mistakenly, wrongly recalled what they were told in the meeting; and
(d) the Hanshaws were telling the truth and Mr Brischetto honestly but mistakenly recalled what was said in the meeting. His Honour was not persuaded on the evidence that any of the parties had lied and concluded that “the contemporaneous documents are more consistent with acceptance of the [respondents’] case.” The appellants’ principal complaint on the appeal was that the primary judge had overlooked or not dealt with the evidence about what was said at the 27 November meeting. It was submitted that Mr and Mrs Hanshaw each gave evidence that the key meeting on 27 November 2014 was a brief one in which they were rushed into signing the contractual documents. The appellants emphasised that in cross-examination Mr and Mrs Hanshaw denied that Mr Brischetto discussed the contracts with them in detail and denied or did not recall Mr Brischetto addressing a number of matters with them such as the absence of a development application, a community associations search and discussions regarding a managing agent. The primary judge’s principal findings concerning the Hanshaws’ evidence about the 27 November meeting were as follows:
“[31] I do have some concern with the credibility of Mr and Mrs Hanshaw.
[32] Mr Hanshaw said that if they sold all the shares in their SMF they would have no money to live on. That evidence was patently untrue. It was later conceded that annual income from their other investments was between $90,000 and $117,000. This evidence reflected poorly upon his credit. Mr Hanshaw also said that the meeting of 27 November 2014 lasted only minutes. That is inconsistent with the contemporaneous notes of Mr Brischetto.
[33] Mrs Hanshaw said that she had no idea as to the amount of their additional income. That evidence is inconsistent with her other evidence that she managed the funds and I believe she was consciously dissembling.
[34] It is also perhaps strange that the Hanshaws did not raise the important topic of the subject to finance clause in the meeting of 27 November. That fact is perhaps explained by the fact that they had been told by the vendor that such a term was to be included, Mr Brischetto had forwarded his draft to them one week earlier and had not in the interim advised that the term had been rejected.
[35] Nevertheless their evidence in relation to these peripheral matters is not central to the question at hand, which is: Would the plaintiffs have entered into the contract in the absence of a subject to finance clause?”
The appellants submitted that Mr Brischetto’s evidence about what was said at the conference on 27 November 2014 was corroborated by his detailed handwritten notes. It was submitted that those notes supported his evidence that he went through the contracts in detail on 27 November. It was submitted to be significant that Mr Brischetto gave evidence that he had an independent recollection of the conference, whereas the respondents essentially did not. The primary judge made detailed findings about that matter:
“[40] The defendants tender diary notes of Mr Brischetto made on 27 November 2014, the first two pages record notes taken before the conference with the plaintiffs in which he listed the subjects that he intended to address in the conference. Under the heading "Finance" he wrote:
Valuation/Approval
-NAB-
[41] Notes taken after the conference record:
Loan with NAB-Val wouldn't be done until after exchange-will lend 70% of val-John is okay with this-can put in more if val is short
[42] Mr Brischetto says that these notes confirm that he discussed the absence of the subject to finance clause with the plaintiffs before they signed the contract. Because the notes make no specific reference to the subject to finance clause I rather think that the probability is they confirm the account of the plaintiffs.
[43] Before the conference Mr Brischetto must have known that the plaintiff regarded the subject to finance clause as important. They had told him that they had asked for such a clause, that the vendors had instructed their solicitors to include a clause, and he had not before the conference contradicted this belief. In this circumstance it is improbable that a reasonable person in the position of Mr Brischetto, if he had re-read the letter from Rankin Ellison in preparation for the conference, would not have included Subject to Finance Clause as an important topic of conversation. He did not.
[44] The statement that ‘John is okay with that-can put in more if Val is short’ is again consistent the words being to the effect that if the valuation came up short they may nevertheless elect to proceed contributing a modest amount of their own funds.
[45] Although the Cross defendants argue Mr Hanshaw should not be believed in part because it is improbable that the vendors would have initially consented to include the subject to finance clause. That assertion by Mr Hanshaw was refutable, nevertheless the vendor who is said to have spoken those words is not called by the defendant. His absence is unexplained and I infer that he would not have supported the defendant's assertion that I should not believe Mr Hanshaw.”
The appellants accepted that Mr Brischetto’s file note does not record a reference to the “subject to finance” clause. It was submitted, however, that the note did refer to the loan to valuation ratio being applied by the lender of 70 per cent referred to by the primary judge at [41], which is quoted above. It was submitted that the recorded discussion to the effect that if the valuation was less than expected the Hanshaws were able to make up the shortfall showed that it was implicit that the Hanshaws knew that the contracts were not “subject to finance”. It was submitted that his Honour effectively rejected the evidence of the Hanshaws about the 27 November meeting. In the context of expressing concerns with the credibility of the second and third respondents his Honour stated, “Mr Hanshaw also said that the meeting of 27 November 2014 lasted only minutes. That is inconsistent with the contemporaneous notes of Mr Brischetto”. It was submitted that his Honour gave little or no consideration to the respondents’ unreliable evidence in respect of the meeting. It was submitted in writing that having made findings on credibility which were “tantamount to dishonesty”, his Honour marginalised this evidence as relating to “peripheral matters”. The appellants submitted that the primary judge erred in stating that such evidence was not central to what he described as the issue at hand and in expressing the central question as being whether the respondents would have entered into the contracts in the absence of a “subject to finance” clause. It was submitted that his Honour erred in reasoning from the absence of a specific reference to the “subject to finance” clause in the notes of the conference to a conclusion that, “[b]ecause the notes make no specific reference to the subject to finance clause I rather think that the probability is they confirm the account of the [respondents]”. It was submitted that this involved a failure to take into account the other part of the notes earlier referred to. It was submitted that his Honour failed to take into account or accord any weight to the evidence that Mr Brischetto was a careful and prudent solicitor. In his affidavit as well as in cross examination Mr Brischetto stated that he went through the contents of the contracts with Mr and Mrs Hanshaw. He gave evidence that he recalled specifically advising in respect of the “subject to finance” clause:
“We were talking about the finance, about their finance approval. We talked about the request that had been for the contract to be made subject to finance and the fact that they hadn't agreed. We then talked about their loan approval the valuation associated with that. I was pressing for them that they should speak to the bank about obtaining it before exchange and John became agitated, I would say, telling me that it's, it's okay. They want to exchange immediately.”
It is to be noted, however, that the following finding was not challenged on appeal:
“[20] It appears that nowhere in Mr Brischetto's file is there an unequivocal statement advising Mr and Mrs Hanshaw that the subject to finance clause was not included in the contract.”
It was submitted that his Honour erred in failing to find that Mr Brischetto’s evidence was corroborated by that of his secretary, Lidia Catalano. The evidence included a diary note of a conversation between Ms Catalano and Mrs Hanshaw in the following terms:
“She said she met with her bank manager and he said that the evaluation is done after exchange of contracts-I told her this was wrong. That from my experience the valuation is done prior to exchange so that the bank can provide unconditional loan approval before exchange. She said she said this to the bank manager but that he said this is how they do it for commercial properties. They are getting finance with NAB. She said she believes it will be okay and if it is not, they can always refinance and get money from other places. She mentioned they have shares they can cash in.”
The primary judge found about this evidence:
“[38] I do not regard this conversation as being, more probably than not, consistent with Mrs Hanshaw being content to exchange without the benefit of a subject to finance clause. Before the conversation the Hanshaws had cause to believe that such a clause would be included in the contract and neither Ms Catalano nor Mr Brischetto had disabused them of this belief.”
Finally, concerning the reactions of the parties to the initial bank valuation, his Honour found:
“[17] On 8 January 2015 after receiving the valuation of $1.2 million Mr Hanshaw wrote to Mr Brischetto stating that they were: ‘Not in a position to complete and may have to possibly withdraw from this purchase’ and that although the bank would seek another valuation, We did have a clause included in the contract that the sale was "subject to finance". Mr Brischetto was then on vacation and did not reply.
[18] On 19 January 2015, the date fixed for completion, Mrs Hanshaw again wrote to Mr Brischetto:
As today was due to be settlement, we are not in a position to complete and wish you to advise the Vendors Lawyers as the contract was "subject to finance" clause. The bank have organised another valuation which will not be available until 30 January 2015.
[19] Mr Brischetto having returned from his vacation replied:
I note your comment that the contract was "subject to finance". This is not correct. Whilst a request was originally made of the vendors to make the contract subject to finance, this was not agreed
I note that we spoke about this during our conference on 27 November 2014 where you signed the contract. You indicated that you were okay to exchange without valuation and loan approval and that you could put in more funds if the valuation was short.
There is also a note on my file where my secretary Lidia spoke with Anita on 21 November and discussed the finance approval. Again this note says that Anita said that if there was a problem with the loan approval you could refinance or you could cash in shares. It was on the basis of the above instructions that we exchanged contracts.
....
[22] On 22 January 2015, the plaintiffs met with Mr Brischetto. Both Mr Brischetto and Mrs Hanshaw took notes of the conversation.
[23] Mr Brischetto's notes include the following:
John and Anita believe that contract for sale was subject to finance
...
I discussed what would happen if they didn't complete- vendors could terminate and claim balance of 5%-sue for full loss on resale.
...
I spoke to them about speaking to another solicitor if they believed that my advice to them had been negligent or deficient.
[24] Mrs Hanshaw's notes include the following:
Anthony!
Advised days later via email subject to finance clause was not allowed
Advised us day of signing contract [those two words struck through] settlement
John
Why were we not contacted
5% needs paying now. Suggest we pay no more- not stamp duty or extra 5%
Apologised for problem and lack of communication - perhaps talk [These words highlighted and underlined]
to someone else [these words underlined]
Grace time to be applied for
Concern
interest
terminate contract
...
To continue we need no interest and extend time for loan preparation
[25] Although I had expressed some concern as to whether, because of form, the words highlighted were not spoken, but included in the notes at a later time, on reflection this concern was groundless. It is not improbable, in the composition of a rough note, that the words to someone else may not appear as a new line underneath the commencement of a previous line.
...
[27] Mr Brischetto's note that Mr and Mrs Hanshaw "Believe" the contract was subject to finance is more consistent with their case rather than that of the defendants. If Mr Brischetto was confident that he had disabused them of this notion at the conference of 27 November it is more probable than not that he would have written words to the effect that they "Assert" that the contract was subject to finance.
[28] Mr Brischetto's note that: I spoke to them about speaking to another solicitor if they believed that my advice to them had been negligent deficient is consistent with Mrs Hanshaw's note that Mr Brischetto: Apologised for problem and lack of communication- perhaps talk to someone else.
[29] It is apparent that each of Mr and Mrs Hanshaw and Mr Brischetto hoped that the need to further discuss the absence of the subject to finance clause would be obviated by a second more favourable valuation by NAB.
[30] On 30 January 2015 NAB provided the second valuation of $1,575,
70% of which was $1,102,500. The plaintiffs elected to abandon the purchase. Given that they now budgeted for six months of mortgage repayments before the premises were capable of being leased, and a further contingency that a tenant may demand six months rent free, this election was not unreasonable, even if a stronger reason was their belated recognition that they had agreed to pay far too much for the property.”
As to the second issue, causation, it was submitted that the proper determination of factual causation required his Honour to consider all of the relevant evidence, rather than rely on the general circumstances and “common prudence”. The appellants submitted that his Honour’s reasons do not disclose any consideration of the Hanshaws’ professed confidence in their assessment of property values in the Hunters Hill area. It was submitted that there was no apparent consideration of the Hanshaws’ apparent impulsiveness and lack of caution in negotiating with the vendors. It was submitted that if the totality of the evidence had been considered the likely conclusion was that the respondents had not established, on the balance of probabilities that they would not have proceeded with exchange of contracts in the absence of a “subject to finance” clause. It was submitted to be a plausible conclusion that the Hanshaws would have wished to proceed with the transaction on the basis that they expected a favourable valuation (and were prepared to take the risk) or that the Hanshaws considered they had the means to effect the purchase even if the valuation was less than expected.
Consideration
The relevant principles binding on this Court in cases of this kind are set out in Fox v Percy (2003) 214 CLR 118; [2003] HCA 22. Both parties drew attention to and relied upon Baira v RHG Mortgage Corporation Limited [2012] NSWCA 387 at [173]- [175] where Bathurst CJ explained those principles as follows:
“[173] In these circumstances, in considering the appeal it is critical to bear in mind the restraints on an appellate court in reviewing findings of a trial judge based on credit; restraints which have been repeatedly emphasised by the High Court in recent years. Such findings can only be overturned if the appellate court is satisfied that the findings are glaringly improbable or contrary to compelling inferences: Fox v Percy [2003] HCA 22; (2003) 214 CLR 118 at [28]- [29], or if it can be shown that the judge has palpably misused his advantage or acted on facts which were inconsistent with the evidence or glaringly improbable: Devries v Australian National Railways Commission [1993] HCA 78; (1993) 177 CLR 472 at 479; Abalos v Australian Postal Commission [1990] HCA 47; (1990) 171 CLR 167 at 178-179. Further, as was pointed out in Abalos supra, where a trial judge has made a finding of fact contrary to the evidence of a witness but has made no reference to that evidence, an appellate court cannot act on the evidence to reverse the finding unless satisfied that any advantage enjoyed by the trial judge by reason of his having seen and heard the witnesses could not be sufficient to explain or justify the trial judge's conclusions: Abalos supra at 178; Fox v Percy supra at [65].
[174] Further, quite apart from a limitation on the review of findings based on credit there are a number of matters which lend objective support to the conclusion reached by the trial judge. First, there is no issue that the Iannis agreed to provide a guarantee secured over the Drummoyne property in 2000. The issue was whether the guarantee was limited to $100,000. Second, in relation to that transaction there was evidence from Mr Egisto and Mr Previte that they explained the documentation to Mr and Mrs Ianni respectively. Third, Mr Ianni acknowledged that he agreed to guarantee the RHG loan, albeit up to a limit of $100,000. Fourth, there is the evidence of Mr Wennerbom that he explained the documentation to the Iannis. Fifth, there is the declaration they signed acknowledging that they had borrowed $910,000 and could repay without hardship.
[175] However, if it can be shown that in reaching his conclusion the primary judge failed to deal in a satisfactory way with the substantial amount of evidence necessary to be dealt with before the relevant finding against the Iannis could be made, an appellate court on a rehearing is entitled to order a retrial: Fox v Percy supra [104]; State Rail Authority NSW v Earthline Constructions Pty Limited supra at [60], [90], [94]. This is because in such a situation there has not been a determination of the case upon a consideration of the real strength of the body of evidence presented.”
The appellants in the present case were required to demonstrate that the primary judge’s finding about the critical issue was “glaringly improbable” or “contrary to compelling inferences”. In Baira, the Chief Justice was not saying that where it was shown that a primary judge failed to deal with some evidence, he or she has thereby failed to deal in a satisfactory way with the substantial amount of evidence necessary to be dealt with before the relevant finding could be made. As Mr Griscti accepted in his submissions in reply, the evidence identified by the Chief Justice in Baira has to have a particular quality. His Honour was not referring simply to evidence which was relevant, but, rather to evidence having a quality which seriously calls into question the integrity of a finding of fact. The appellants’ case in this Court was essentially based upon what were asserted to be differences in accounts and differences in recollection about the matters discussed at the 27 November meeting. This was an inadequate foundation for a successful attack upon a finding of principal fact. It was not sufficient merely to point to some evidence which was relevant and not recorded in the judgment. It was necessary to point to evidence having a quality which seriously calls into question the integrity of the primary judge’s critical finding of fact. Successfully to attack the critical finding of fact here, the appellants needed to demonstrate the existence of evidence from which a compelling inference contrary to that finding of fact could be drawn. In relation to whether, at the meeting on 27 November, Mr Brischetto told the Hanshaws that the vendors had refused to agree to include a “subject to finance” clause in the contracts, the primary judge based his conclusions upon the contemporaneous documentary record, the reactions of the parties to subsequent bank valuations which were lower than expected and upon his Honour’s observations of the oral evidence of the principal witnesses. The primary judge did not fail to deal in a satisfactory way with a substantial amount of evidence. On the one hand, Mr Brischetto gave evidence and was cross-examined. He maintained that he told the Hanshaws at the meeting that the vendors had not agreed to include a “subject to finance” clause in the contracts for sale. The Hanshaws each gave equally clear evidence that they had not been told of that matter until some days later and after they had signed the contracts for sale. Given that conflict, the primary judge approached the fact finding task in the conventional way and examined the contemporaneous documents and evidence from the parties and others about events both before and after the critical meeting to determine whether it was likely, on the balance of probabilities, that the Hanshaws had not been told at the meeting that the vendors had rejected the “subject to finance” clause in the contracts for sale. Having examined the contemporaneous documents, the primary judge held that they were more consistent with the respondents’ case. Such an approach is consistent with the approach to fact finding outlined by McLelland CJ in Eq in the oft-cited Watson v Foxman (1995) 49 NSWLR 315. The primary judge was entitled to proceed on the assumption that the “subject to finance” clause sought in the letter of 19 November was a matter which was important to the Hanshaws. The clause sought was detailed and not merely a request for a general “subject to finance” clause. The only subject matter of the letter Mr Brischetto sent to the solicitors for the vendors was the request for a detailed “subject to finance” clause (see [4] above). The solicitors for the vendors responded the following day (see [5] above). The primary judge was entitled to conclude that a competent solicitor would formally communicate such a rejection promptly to his or her clients. Sometimes powerful proof or evidentiary support for a proposition is provided by the absence of something that would reasonably be expected to be present. The absence of a letter or email communicating the rejection of the clause by the vendors is consistent with it having been overlooked by Mr Brischetto. A solicitor, in circumstances where there had been an explicit request for the inclusion of a detailed clause, which had been immediately rejected the following day, would be expected to communicate that rejection to his or her clients in writing. Were the rejection to be communicated orally, a careful file note of that conversation would be expected to be made. There was neither here. It is significant that no document records that Mr Brischetto ever told the Hanshaws, either before or after they signed the contracts for sale, that the vendors had rejected inclusion of a “subject to finance” clause in those contracts. The primary judge was correct so to conclude at [20] of his judgment, quoted at [24] above. Mr Griscti accepted that his Honour’s statement at [20] was accurate. Mr Brischetto’s evidence that he had told the Hanshaws in the meeting on 27 November that the vendors had rejected a “subject to finance” clause must also be evaluated against the background of the following matters: (1) on any view, Mr Brischetto did not tell the Hanshaws at any time between 20 November (when he was told that the vendors had rejected a “subject to finance” clause in the contracts for sale) and 27 November about that matter. There was no satisfactory explanation for that failure, and Mr Brischetto accepted in cross-examination that it would have been appropriate to have told the Hanshaws about that matter on 21 November (when Ms Catalano said he would report to the Hanshaws) and on 22 November (when he reviewed the relevant correspondence);
(2) the omission by Mr Brischetto to tell the Hanshaws between 20 and 27 November supports a conclusion that he did not tell them on 27 November. The primary judge was entitled to conclude that it was something that Mr Brischetto overlooked, both originally (that is to say, on 22 November when he reviewed the file and correspondence) and at the 27 November meeting;
(3) on any view, the topic of a “subject to finance” clause was not contained in Mr Brischetto’s list of matters to be discussed at the meeting on 27 November;
(4) on any view, Mr Brischetto did not make a note of any discussion specifically about the “subject to finance” clause in the notes that he made immediately following the meeting on 27 November, even though he knew the importance of keeping accurate and complete file notes. It was reasonable and appropriate for the primary judge to conclude that there would be a written record of that information, given it was a clause which his clients had specifically requested and had been expressly refused by the solicitors on the other side;
(5) Mr Brischetto’s affidavit does not, at least in terms, support his assertion that he told the respondents that the vendors had refused to agree to the “subject to finance” clause. Rather, his recounting of that conversation rather assumes that the Hanshaws already knew that the “subject to finance” clause had been rejected by the vendors. In any event, Mr Brischetto’s account of that conversation appears to be based on his file note rather than any independent recollection. That file note is consistent with Mr Brischetto assuming that the purchasers would obtain finance. This may provide a further reason why Mr Brischetto did not tell the Hanshaws that the “subject to finance” clause had been rejected by the vendors;
(6) the correct factual finding about what was said at the meeting on 27 November is also informed by the Hanshaws’ reactions to valuations received after exchange and before settlement. Upon being informed on early January 2015 of the valuation of $1.2 million, the Hanshaws immediately suggested that they might need to withdraw from the contracts relying upon the “subject to finance” clause. On 9 January 2015, Ms Catalano recorded the following conversation with Mr Hanshaw:
“John went on to say that if the second valuation did not come in at $1.8 million the bank would not approve finance and they would then be forced to pull out of the deal ‘under that subject to finance clause’. I did not comment on this and I told John that I would speak to Anthony about this when he returned from leave on 16 January and that he would call him on that or possibly on Monday 19 January to discuss this matter.”
(7) after being told that the clause had not been included in the contracts for sale, the Hanshaws immediately complained that they had not been told. Mr Brischetto’s note of the conference on 22 January 2015 states that “John and Anita [Hanshaw] believe[1] that [contracts] were subject to finance”. Those reactions are consistent with their not having been told on 27 November that the vendors had rejected a “subject to finance” clause.
The appellants’ complaint about the way the primary judge addressed the evidence of the Hanshaws about the content of the meeting on 27 November is without merit. The Hanshaws’ evidence about the length of the meeting was rejected by the primary judge. The primary judge proceeded on the basis that the Hanshaws were wrong about that matter. His Honour accepted that Mr Brischetto had a number of important matters to address at the 27 November meeting. It does not follow that the rejection of one part of a witness’ evidence necessarily leads to the rejection of it all, as the primary judge correctly concluded. As Basten JA explained in Sangha v Baxter [2009] NSWCA 78 at [155], because a witness has not told the truth with respect to a particular matter does not mean that other parts of his or her evidence are untruthful. Where possible, an assessment should be made of the reasons for the untruthfulness in order to see if other aspects of the evidence are likely to be infected by the same concern. See also Hutchison Construction Services Pty Ltd v Fogg; Fogg v Les Quatre Musketeers Pty Ltd (t/as Plastamasta South Coast) [2016] NSWCA 135 per Leeming JA at [68]. In the present case, the difficulties with parts of the evidence given by the Hanshaws were squarely faced by the primary judge. His Honour took them into account in reaching his ultimate conclusion. In relation to the meeting on 22 January 2015: (1) Mr Brischetto’s notes recorded that the Hanshaws “believe” that the contracts for sale were subject to finance, without comment and without recording the assertion that Mr Brischetto had in fact told them that they were not. As the primary judge accepted, this was more consistent with the Hanshaws’ account;
(2) Mr Brischetto’s notes also recorded him telling the Hanshaws that they should seek advice from another lawyer if they believed that he had acted negligently. The primary judge was entitled to conclude that this was a relevant matter to take into account; and
(3) Mrs Hanshaw’s notes recorded an account, which the primary judge accepted, that Mr Brischetto had apologised for the problem and for the lack of communication. The objective evidence, which was reviewed and set out by the primary judge, was supportive of the Hanshaws’ account rather than that of Mr Brischetto. The submission that his Honour erred in failing to find that Mr Brischetto’s evidence was corroborated by that of his secretary, Ms Catalano, should also be rejected. Ms Catalano was not present at the meeting on 27 November 2014 and her evidence, if anything, assisted the Hanshaws. She understood when she spoke to Mrs Hanshaw on 21 November that Mrs Hanshaw did not know that the vendors had rejected the “subject to finance” clause. She said nothing about that matter but promised a written report the next day, which was never sent. It is clear that when Ms Catalano spoke to Mr Hanshaw shortly after the meeting on 27 November the Hanshaws were labouring under a misapprehension that the contracts were each “subject to finance”. Again, she did not correct this view. Returning then to the critical question, the primary judge gave close consideration to the conflicting accounts and saw all three participants at the meeting cross-examined. His Honour had the advantage of seeing each witness respond to cross-examination about the critical conversation here in issue. His Honour took into account the contemporaneous documents. This is not a case where the conclusion of the primary judge is shown by uncontroversial facts or uncontested testimony to be erroneous. The contemporaneous and apparently reliable documentary evidence supports the Hanshaws’ account. The primary judge did not fail to deal in a satisfactory way with a substantial amount of evidence. I would reject the challenge to his Honour’s finding that at the 27 November meeting the Hanshaws were not told of that the vendors had rejected a “subject to finance” clause. It follows that ground 1-4 of the notice of appeal must be dismissed. As to causation, the matter was to be determined subjectively in the light of all the relevant circumstances. The primary judge had to determine whether the case as presented by the Hanshaws was to be accepted, which required an assessment of them as witnesses generally and by reference to the surrounding circumstances. The “subject to finance” clause was obviously important to the Hanshaws. It is perverse to suggest that it was not. It was the subject of an explicit and detailed written request for its inclusion in the contracts. The primary judge noted that although the Hanshaws told Mr Brischetto that they could make up a modest shortfall in the purchase price if the valuation was in an amount less than 70 per cent of what they had agreed to pay, they could not fund a substantial part of the purchase price from their own assets. That finding was not challenged in this Court. The fact that the Hanshaws agreed to a price without a valuation, even if it suggests a confidence in property values, does not lead to a conclusion that they would have proceeded to exchange contracts if they had known that there was no “subject to finance” clause. Indeed, it rather tends to the opposite conclusion. The appellants’ submission that the Hanshaws were unconcerned about the value of the property which would be used by their lender in making its lending decision is inconsistent with their having raised the issue of a “subject to finance” clause in the first place and to their reaction when they were told in January 2015 that the valuation was for a much smaller amount than hoped. This is another factual finding made by his Honour after seeing the relevant witnesses cross-examined and considering the relevant documentary record. The contemporaneous documents were more consistent with the Hanshaws’ case that they would not have exchanged contracts had they known that those contracts were not “subject to finance”. The primary judge did not fail to deal in a satisfactory way with a substantial amount of evidence. His Honour’s finding of fact, that the Hanshaws would not have exchanged if they had been told that the vendors had rejected the “subject to finance” clause, was not glaringly improbable or contrary to compelling inferences. Ground 5 of the notice of appeal should be rejected. Finally, it is to be noted that two separate Blue Books were produced for the purposes of the appeal. With few exceptions, the only documents to which the Court was referred were contained in what was styled the “Supplementary Blue Book”. Whilst no special costs order was sought by either party about the preparation of the Blue Books, what occurred in this case is to be deprecated. The Court expects the legal representatives of parties to an appeal to cooperate to produce appeal books that contain only those documents necessary for determination of the appeal. Given the events in this case, it perhaps should be re-iterated that the legal representatives of a party responsible for wasteful reproduction of unnecessary appeal books should expect that the Court may consider making a special costs order against them personally.
Conclusion and proposed order
For the foregoing reasons, I propose the following orders: (1) Appeal dismissed;
(2) Appellants to pay the respondents’ costs. SIMPSON AJA: I agree with Payne JA.
**********
[1] The handwritten note may possibly say “believed”.
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Classroom of the Elite Volume 6
Translation by Graze
Chapter 1: "The Changing Class D"
(Introduction)
The sports festival ended in mid-October, around the time of year when it started getting chilly.
The school held a general election to decide who would be in charge of the next student council. Immediately after the election concluded, the school ushered in the handover ceremony of the student council. It was a large-scale event that gathered students from the entire school to the gymnasium. However, for most of the first year students, it was a very uneventful experience. They were drowsy, but they were attempting to keep quiet and slow their breathing so the teachers and upperclassmen wouldn’t notice them.
"Now, here are some final remarks from president Horikita of the student council."
Following the moderator's speech, Horikita Manabu slowly approached the microphone on the stage.
If it was the Horikita from before, the younger one I mean, just seeing her brother on stage would probably make her cower.
But now, as she watched over her brother’s resignation, she was staring at him with a firm look.
"I am proud and grateful to have been able to lead the student council for almost two years. Thank you very much."
After his brief statement, Horikita's brother quietly retreated and returned to his original position.
There were no moving words in his speech. It could be said that it was a solemn and dutiful statement.
However, it does not look like the retirement ceremony will end with just this.
The student council officers on the stage with him stood firm, not breaking their solid posture.
"Student president Horikita has worked so hard for you all. Now, please welcome the new student council president, second-year student of Class A, Miyabi Nagumo.”
Miyabi Nagumo, the new student president, walked forward and stood in front of the microphone.
Among the student council members warmly watching over him on the stage, the figure of Ichinose could be seen.
"I am Miyabi Nagumo of the second year’s Class A. President Horikita, I really appreciate your strict and kind guidance so far. I am honored and would like to pay tribute to you. I am thankful for being able to accompany the legendary president who has played one of the greatest leadership roles in the history of this school."
With that, he bowed deeply in the direction of Horikita's brother, and then re-faced the students.
"Let me introduce myself again. My name is Miyabi Nagumo. I will be the next student president of Advanced Nurturing High School. Please take care of me."
It was quite different from the attitude I had glimpsed at the sports festival. Nagumo was very polite and gentle. His expression and attitude that he held during the final leg of the relay race had entirely disappeared. But I felt we were only being shown the surface.
Nagumo smiled thin and small so as to change the calm atmosphere.
"I'll get straight to the point. First of all, I promise to change the terms and appointment method of the student council as well as the practice of the general election. This will mean changing the date of the general election of the student council from December to October. This shift will be an attempt to move to a new generation for the student council and I judge that that then will be when the new student council will move towards a new era. I will change the tenure of the president and officers from terms to indefinite so they can serve until graduation. At the same time, I will abolish the current restrictions on the number of student council officers. In other words, as long as it is an excellent and necessary person, they can become a member of the student council at any time regardless of the number of slots that are open. In the event that someone is judged unfit for office, I will establish a system of majority vote at the meetings for expelling them from their positions. As a starting point, let me make a declaration to the students, teachers, and leaders of the former student council who are assembled here. The school system of the future... I will destroy all that has been preserved by the previous student councils for the sake of the appearance of the school."
He spoke so forcefully that it seemed to negate all the merits of the former student president who stood behind him.
"I originally wanted to implement this new system immediately, but unfortunately, I cannot do that. This is because the new student president will be bound by various kinds of constraints upon first taking office."
Nagumo glanced at Horikita, the former student council president, and then turned back to the students.
"I promise that there will be a great revolution in the near future. Students with strength will climb up to the top and those without strength will fall to the bottom. I will turn this school into a real meritocracy, so please show me what you all can do."
The gymnasium was immediately silenced by his declaration, but almost all the sophomores soon started screaming with joy and became rowdy. Maybe there was a battle between the second years and the third years that we didn't know about. It was an event that made me feel that way.
(Intro End)
(Part 1)
One such event ended, and after school on a certain day, it was now the middle of the second semester.
My surroundings began to change little by little. Class D passed the uninhabited islands and sports festivals at a slow pace, but we began to have unity as a class. Everyone's small circle of friends gradually expanded, and the people who thought they couldn't get along were getting better at handling one another.
Everyone’s attitude towards classes has also significantly improved. In the past, Class D had a problem with students arriving late, sleeping in class, talking during lessons, and perpetrating all kinds of unrest. In this regard, Sudō especially showed changes.
After the sports festival, although the number of days since then is still relatively small, it’s clear that his general attitude towards school has improved. Occasionally he can be seen a bit drowsy in class, but that is probably due to the impact of his intense practice in the basketball club. Even if he is behind on sleep, he always takes the time to write notes. This was because it's necessary for him to get his studies in order for the sake of Horikita and the future of the class. Perhaps her surveillance during class has had a part in things as well.
His violent attitude that he had with his friends Ike and Yamauchi had become more gentle.
He didn’t want his beloved Horikita’s opinion of him to worsen by letting her witness him shamefully rampaging about. I’m guessing it was mostly this that motivated him to change.
In short, Sudō is growing steadily and he has begun to gain a better reputation amongst his classmates.
At the same time, there were changes not only in Sudō’s reputation, but also with my own.
Whether that’s a good or bad thing, however, is hard to say.
"Are you alone?"
As I was sorting out the situation, I was called out to from the seat beside me.
"Is it bad to be alone?"
My next-door neighbor, Horikita, seemed to chuckle. I stared at her blankly.
"Your dearest friends, Ike-kun and Yamauchi-kun. They’ve been inviting you along much less often."
“Is that so?”
The fact that she always tends to go to the extremes reveals the bad parts of her personality.
"Ara, my mistake. At lunch you seem to be alone these days. After school as well as you can see."
We watched as Ike and Yamauchi left the classroom with The Professor. Are they heading to Keyaki Mall together?
(Note: The Professor is Hideo Sotomura's nickname.)
I had thought I appeared to be as calm as the Buddha, but Horikita seemed to see through everything.
Right. This would be part of the changes with my own reputation. After the sports festival, It’s been uncommon for me to be invited out by the two people who I had gotten closest to. No, it is more like they have completely ignored me.
"No way. They thought you were all birds of a feather, a bunch of useless students, so you stuck together. But you were actually hiding a lot of physical strength from them."
“What is high physical strength? It's only that my feet are a bit faster, at best.”
"But your footwork is fast, especially for a student. It's very fast. Besides, they've also probably started noticing other odd occurrences. They probably noticed that your measurement for grip strength was higher than average. You should know right? People have a basic tendency to hate others for being excellent, and your situation is that you’ve been hiding your excellence."
I know such a thing goes without saying. However, I also have to admit that I don't have a clear understanding of what counts as average. That I had believed that I was "just running a bit fast" was the truth.
"Enjoy your solitary life."
Horikita gave a sarcastic look before leaving the classroom, her long hair flowing.
Despite being solitary herself, her commanding manner was at least a little respectable.
As I saw her off, Karuizawa, who was still in the classroom, threw an indescribable glance in my direction. But as soon as our eyes met, she looked away naturally as if she never had any intention of looking my way in the first place. There was obviously some kind of meaning behind this look, but she followed Horikita out of the classroom without revealing anything in particular. The short length of her gently fluttering skirt was on my mind as it was a bit shorter than the rest of the girls. Though a simple one or two centimeters are easily within the margin of error, they are in fact a whole world apart.
"How's she... well, it’s okay."
"Hey, hey, Ayanokōji-kun."
As I was thinking about what to do, an unexpected visitor appeared beside me.
She was the same type of hot girl as Karuizawa. Satō... I don't remember what her first name was. She is a very nice girl who had been friendly with Ike and Yamauchi in their group chat in the past. I also participated in their group chats, but we had almost no mutual interests.
Although she was a classmate, she was one I barely spoke to.
She’s a girl who wanted to be close to boys and feels as popular as Kushida is with girls, but she wasn’t as popular with the opposite sex.
Ike had said that she looks very bitchy and must be accustomed to men, so he had rejected her. What a complicated man's heart.
As far as the timing of the visit was concerned, she might have been waiting for me to be alone.
Satō looked around the room nervously.
"What’s the matter?"
In the face of strange circumstances, I can only ask such questions.
"Yes, well. It’s a bit."
She wasn’t making herself quite clear. Unfortunately, I couldn't speculate on the content.
I was too lacking in information about the student Satō.
"Well, how can I put it? Can I borrow some time? I have something to say."
This was rather strange. I tightened my guard a little, but I’m not brave enough to refuse an offer. It is easier to gather enough courage to accept than to gather the courage to refuse.
"It's a little inconvenient here, is it alright if we go somewhere else?"
Before I answered, Satō seemed to predict that I would not refuse, and offered to change places. I obeyed her and followed behind her.
"Ah..."
As I was about to leave the classroom, Sakura made a sound as if trying to say something, but nothing came out and she ended up turning away.
We went out of the hallway to the liaison corridor connection to the gymnasium. For the rest of the day after lunch, it would be crowded because the students who played and practiced in the gymnasium would use this communication corridor to move about. But now everyone is probably eating lunch, so this is one of the least populated areas. It might be the ideal place to talk about things.
It appears Satō did not particularly want to meet other people. She stopped and then turned around.
"I’m going to ask you something a little strange... Ayanokōji-kun, is there someone you're currently dating?"
"Er, what does that mean?"
"Well... literally speaking, it means having a girlfriend... how about that?”
If I had been asked if to choose between a “yes” option, and a “no” option, I would not have had the capacity to answer anything other than "no."
Saying that was like stressing how unpopular I was, and although I felt reluctant to do so, there was no use lying, so I answered her honestly.
"No..."
"Hmm, I see… Can I take that as though you’re looking for a girlfriend?"
She did not look down on me, nor pity me, but instead showed a happy little smile.
At this point, I began to understand how things were going.
Was this a trap with the goal of framing me? I was on guard, but there were no signs of someone hiding nearby. Of course, we haven't been followed since the classroom either.
So, Either Satō herself, or a friend of hers, seem to think that I’m decent boyfriend material. Why all of a sudden at this point in time?
Does this have to do with how Horikita was able to conclude that I have high physical ability?
"If you’d like to start with just being friends -- well... would you exchange phone numbers with me?"
It seems that it’s not a friend of hers she’s asking for, Satō herself seems to be the one that’s interested.
It never occurred to me that the day of a girl’s request would actually come.
This was like the act before the confession.
"Anyway, I get it."
I can't find any reason to refuse her request to exchange our phone numbers.
ILLUSTRATION: https://imgur.com/a/OeMVaNt
Getting into a relationship would be a matter of leaps and bounds into the future. As of now, I’m only being asked to exchange phone numbers.
"Well, that's that."
The mobile phone shows the completed contact registration page. To increase my number of girls' contacts is a happy thing.
After this brief interaction with Satō, there was a strange tranquility in the atmosphere.
"I'm asking a question that's a bit awkward. Why are you suddenly asking me for my contact information?"
Satō blushed a little and didn't open her eyes.
"Ask me why... During the relay of the sports festival... Should I say you were very cool? Or should I say you've been so close-by, and I haven't noticed you at all? I had thought the best guy in the class was Hirata-kun, but he is Karuizawa-san’s boyfriend, so he’s out of the question.”
As she finished saying this, she opened her eyes and looked up at me, and awkwardly adjusted what she had said.
"Ah... should I say that I don't think you are worse than Hirata-kun? To be honest, after I got a closer look, you seem to be more handsome than Hirata-kun. You also look really reliable and gentle... That’s all!"
Perhaps the feeling of shame had swelled up in her, as the I couldn’t hear the last part very well, and Satō inevitably left like the wind. My thoughts couldn't keep up with what had happened with her, so I stood still.
I was in an unexpected situation at an unexpected place with an unexpected person. Although nobody knows what the future holds, no way did I expect this to actually happen. What am I supposed to do about this? I feel neither negative or positive about Satō, only considering her as an ordinary classmate. Does this mean that the right thing to do is to refuse her confession?
No, she didn't say she wanted to be with me or that she liked me. I was just asked about my relationship status and was asked for contact information. Even if I assume her intentions a bit, I was only asked to become friends with her and to exchange contacts. If I refuse her confession, perhaps she will spit at me, saying I misunderstood something. That would be very embarrassing.
Being a bystander to a confession or being confessed to is totally fine, but when you yourself become the target of either of them, it just becomes troublesome. Now I understand how Sakura was feeling before being confessed to by Yamauchi.
While I was returning to the classroom, pondering about the complicated situation, I ran into Katsuragi and Yahiko of Class A.
I thought that there was no need to talk, but Katsuragi stopped and said to Yahiko:
"I'm sorry, go on ahead. I have something to say to Ayanokōji-kun."
Yahiko took up his guard, but because it was the instructions of Katsuragi, he immediately nodded his head and left.
"Horikita doesn't seem to be with you."
"We don't always stay together."
What should I say? Compared to speaking with girls, talking with boys is really easy.
Considering this, I feel like an idiot for struggling to make friends.
"That's true. To be honest, I was surprised by the relay race at the sports festival. It’s probably something no one else in the school would have expected."
The topic of the conversation would, of course, be this. I was not surprised at all, and said indifferently:
"Class D won’t always continue to be the losers.”
"That's fine, but most of the students in Class D looked surprised as well. As long as their reactions weren’t an act, then there seems to be a limit to the number of people who knew how fast you can run.”
Katsuragi is skilled... He's sharp to have observed his surroundings so well in that turmoil.
Most people would have only paid attention to myself and the student council president. He not only paid attention to his own class but carefully observed the other classes as well.
“You are free to imagine what you will, but I'm not going to say anything."
"It doesn’t matter. I'm not trying to get anything out of you."
"If it's a hostile class, don’t you want as much information as you can get? Or, from the point of view of Class A, do you not see Class D as an adversary?"
Katsuragi gave a slightly vexed expression and took a few steps forward, stopping at the window. His gaze shifted towards the outside.
"I'm being overworked with all sorts of tricky problems at this time. I simply don't have the luxury to pay attention to other classes."
"You told Horikita to pay attention to Ryūen."
I only spoke information that I knew to Katsuragi.
"That guy always moves while disregarding his image for the sake of winning. He does whatever it takes to come out on top, even if he has to utilize things like intimidation and violence."
However, Katsuragi should not just be wary of Ryūen. It would be better to say that he should be wary of Sakayanagi who was lurking in Class A. Despite that, I deliberately did not bring that up.
Sakayanagi is a student who knows my past and is full of mysteries. If I don't handle the situation carefully, I’ll only get bitten by the snake.
"Intimidation and violence? It would be dangerous if the school found out about it.”
"He is the type of person who will do that kind of thing skillfully and covertly. Please continue to urge Horikita to not look down on him. Although this all might seem as though I’m helping an enemy and make you wary, Ryūen is a common enemy of Class A, Class B, and Class D."
It is true that Class C is actively fighting against all the other classes. However, there is evidence that Katsuragi and Ryūen had previously joined forces with one another. I’m not sure if I can believe him unconditionally.
As I think of this, Katsuragi seems to feel my distrust.
"You don't believe me?"
Due to his concern, I decided to dig a little deeper into what he knows.
"To be honest, I can’t believe you entirely. It's hard for me to decide if I want to tell Horikita what you said. I can't tell you the source, but there are rumors that you were in partnership with Ryūen. Are these just rumors?"
"...Where did you hear that? No... There is no need to delve into that."
Katsuragi seemed to come to an answer right away. He did not lose his composure and continued:
"I regret it now. Although it was a momentary feeling and there was no leeway, I really shouldn't have taken the risk and involved myself with him. That's why I want you to take this advice. If you become involved with that guy, you'll be damned."
I don't know what the pros and cons were, but Katsuragi should have experienced it himself. The credibility of his words isn't guaranteed, but his request is still inexplicably persuasive.
"I knew right from the start that there was a risk in joining forces with that guy."
"Then what’s the value in accepting your proposal to join forces against him?"
Katsuragi laughed to himself.
I thought it was unnecessary, but there was no calmness in Katsuragi’s face. He shouldn't have been anxious or upset by my question, so I decided to dig even further.
"I know you are working to stop Ryūen, but that problem should belong to Class A and Class B. I saw the public class points that were displayed at the start of October.”
Katsuragi shut his mouth, it seems that he is indifferent on the matter.
After the end of the uninhabited island test, Class A had their class points increase to 1,124. It was a positive situation for them at first, but there was a significant loss of points during the second special examination and the sports festival, taking Class A down to 874. In contrast, Class B wasn’t that far behind, sitting at 753. Apart from having started at the same level, this was the closest gap between any of the classes at present time.
To supplement this, Class C was currently at 542, while Class D has 262.
"I really can only admit that this is not a very good state for Class A to be in. I was fooled by the school structure. My inability to perfectly understand the system of class points is also a factor."
He did not mention the subject of Sakayanagi carelessly.
Sakayanagi aside, as Katsuragi had said, it is also true that the school has a misleading point system.
The system seems simple, but unexpectedly there are many difficult to understand and unclear points being rewarded and removed.
In retrospect, it should have been easy to spot. Immediately after admission, the school conducted a rigorous review of lateness, absenteeism, and class attitude. In fact, our Class D was so affected that we lost all the class points we started out with at once, an experience that remains fresh in my memory.
Now, however, class attitude and so on do not reflect the increase or decrease with points as much.
Of course, students across all of the class had begun to take classes seriously, but I'm not certain that the penalty deductions have completely disappeared.
Now that I think about it, that might have been the original "Special Exam".
"I was born in the countryside and went to a local middle school. This place is very different from the high school life I always imagined."
After Katsuragi had said so, he clammed up a bit out of frustration.
"Although we all know this, this school is an incomprehensible and incredibly structured place. I have recently felt it again. Students of the same grade should be friendly to each other and should never be hostile to one another."
There is no doubt that this is different from a normal school life. The school had created a fine-tuned system that discourages students from getting along with students from other classes. It can also be said that the school is constructed based on competition. Depending on the situation, there will be cases where mutual hatred eventually leads to conflict. This is just the kind of school we go to.
In the same way, a system like this causes unity in one's own class to increase significantly.
Well, whether this class unity exists for any other class other than Class B is doubtful.
Class D has had a number of individual actions happen that go against the concept of unity, Class C is effectively run as if it was a dictatorship, and Class A is divided between two competing factions in an all-out power struggle. Overall, the topic of unity is a difficult situation for most of the first year students.
"Are you not wavering, Ayanokōji-kun?"
"Honestly, not at all. It doesn't affect my judgment of how good or bad this school is. If the goal of reaching or maintaining Class A is put aside, this is definitely a charming and moving school. With only a certain amount of hard work, students don't have to worry about things like food and clothing. We even get money to spend on entertainment because of the points the school pays. Everything in the school is impeccably well prepared and thought out."
This is an idea shared by all of the students living in this school. As long as we don’t desire to live like gods, no one would not welcome the current environment. Katsuragi is unable to refute this as well.
"I agree. If there is something to be disgruntled about, it is that the environment is too perfect. I don't think this is the way a high school student's life should be experienced. Students at this school didn’t pass a particularly difficult test or anything... It’s all just nonsense. Regardless, please tell Horikita about the threat that Ryūen poses.”
I was advised by the reticent man and promised that I would communicate this to Horikita.
In fact, Ryūen was already launching a solid attack on Class D in an attempt to defeat us.
“You also just want to live peacefully too? The worries never seem to end... for both of us.”
I couldn't help but murmur.
(Part 1 End)
(Part 2)
That night, while I was relaxing in my room, Karuizawa called. We had exchanged contact information before, but I was still a little surprised to hear from her for the first time.
"I have something to ask you."
After answering the phone and putting it by my ear, Karuizawa said immediately:
"If I can answer. That should be fine."
"You've been confessed to by Satō, haven't you?"
I became tongue-tied at the unexpected question. How could she know that?
"Let me begin by saying that there are many girls in the class who already know.”
"How quickly does your news network spread information? It's faster than the Internet. Who's the source of this information?"
"What do you mean who? The source is Satō herself. I was told in advance that she was planning to confess today."
Is it like insider trading or something? No, that doesn't seem right...
"Is that why you were looking at me earlier today?"
"...Did you really notice?"
"Who confesses to who is nobody else's concern, why do you report that kind of thing to one another?"
"Because girls are like that. It's troublesome to get in touch with one another after it happens.”
Is that what it's like to want to write your name on your possessions?
Boys have a similar phenomenon, so maybe it’s not inconceivable...
Even so, there's something I don't understand.
"If there's that much competition for the same person... Wouldn't it be better if you don't make a declaration to other girls since the outcome will be the same?"
"It's totally different. It's annoying if you suddenly declare that you're in a relationship. Letting others know ahead of time shows that everything is fine. Regardless, I'd like to ask what answer you gave her."
No, it’s nerve-racking to be asked that kind of thing.
"No matter what my answer was, it has nothing to do with you.”
"Well, it doesn’t matter…… but you can’t say it’s irrelevant. You threatened me and made me do a lot of things for you, so I might end up getting caught. The girl’s information network is very wide. If rumors were to spread, it will be very nerve-racking for me. I’ll be at an increased risk of getting involved in trouble. Do you understand?”
In other words, when Satō and I talk, there is a chance that information on Karuizawa will come to light and put her at risk. Alternatively, I could only care about Satō, and neglect to protect Karuizawa. Through some strange system of logic, she had managed to think of this kind of thing. No matter how I look at it, it is obvious that she’s thinking about this way too much.
It seemed to make sense, but it really didn’t pass for sound logic. Karuizawa’s appearance, words, and actions were inconsistent with the theoretical thinking she would discreetly take part in, but this time she was kinda forcing it a bit too much.
"You don't have to worry about it anyway."
"Does that mean you're planning to accept the confession?”
"I didn't say that, did I?"
"You are saying it alright. Since you don't outright deny it you know. Ah-ah, I somehow think I can see through you right? Making use of that confession, you're probably just thinking of some perverted thoughts anyway right? Men are just that kind of creature after all."
Her ideas jumped in an exaggerated way. This is like a parent feeling so proud of their child winning for first place in a sporting event, that they proclaim to other parents that their child is ensured to become an Olympic athlete in the future.
"Even if men are that kind of creature, at least for now I don't have those type of feelings."
"Prove it. Explain to me the reason for your refusal."
"Prove? It wasn’t even a confession. She just said she wanted to be friends and we exchanged contact information."
“…I see. It turned out to be that kind of feeling.”
Why do I have to say such things to Karuizawa? It’s so embarrassing.
"It's not a question of accepting a confession at all. It's simply ended with an exchange of phone numbers."
"Hmm…… Well, that’s where we’ll leave things for today."
Karuizawa’s attitude was very lofty.
Since I've got her on the phone, I'm going to get this thing settled.
"I want to ask you something now. You haven't had any interaction with those girls from Class C since the cruise, correct?"
"…Well, yeah, it hasn't been an issue. At least for now."
Her tone dropped a notch or two. For Karuizawa, this was an event she didn't want to bring up.
"I think I have taken the appropriate countermeasures, but if anything happens, you must let me know immediately. Even if you've been violently threatened to stay quiet, as long as you tell me, I'll fix the problem right away.”
Karuizawa clearly held her breath over the phone. Were my words a bit too strong?
"......I know. What else should I say? If I’m not useful to you, it will become very troublesome for me..."
In order to survive in this school, Karuizawa must hold on to her current status no matter what.
To do this, she must first completely seal off the characters who know the truth about her.
However, it is impossible for the girls from Class C to understand the entire situation in the first place. The problem lies with Ryūen who works behind them. Depending on the situation, I may end up having to attack him instead.
No, I'm afraid that moment is almost certainly approaching.
"So, back on the topic of Satō, what do you intend to do? Because you exchanged contact information, there's a possibility things will move to the next level, right?”
"I'm taking a reserved attitude with it. At least, I don't know anything about Satō... I may never even be contacted by her."
"So, if Satō does stick around more than this, will you dump her?"
"What do you mean by dump her? We just exchanged contacts. Personally, I don't think I'm going to initiate contact."
I didn't have the guts to ask her out on a date, and I was not confident that I would be able to move the situation forward to a confession anyway.
"Yes, I see. So be it."
Looking somewhat satisfied, Karuizawa prepared to cut the call.
“Karuizawa."
"What?"
I thought maybe I wouldn’t make it in time, but after calling out to her, the phone didn't hang up.
"Make sure to erase the records of our phone call from your cell phone.”
"I’ve done that a long time ago. I even erase the emails."
“As expected. All right.”
Even without instructions, Karuizawa seems to be doing a good job.
"If it's just these things, I'm going to hang up."
“Yeah.”
I added in this statement to end the conversation and hung up the call.
To be honest, I was worried about whether I should say one more thing or not, but I gave it up.
I judged that if we were to discuss our assumptions at this stage, it would only become a burden for Karuizawa.
Even if the time comes, if it is Karuizawa, she should be able to deal with it at the very least.
It looks like I will inevitably have to take action soon.
ENGLISH ILLUSTRATION: https://imgur.com/a/SNKnlXV | {
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In the early 1980s, images of starving children in drought-stricken landscapes were beamed into lounge rooms around the world as aid organisations made appeals to help the millions of Ethiopians impacted by famine. So powerful were the pictures that many people would still find it hard to believe the country is home to what is widely touted in the Western world as the next superfood.
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A gluten-free cereal that is high in protein, iron and fibre, teff has been cultivated in Ethiopia and neighbouring Eritrea for at least 2,000 years. In mud huts in the highlands and fine-dining restaurants in the capital Addis Ababa, it is ground into flour and used to make the country’s staple dish, injera. The pancake-like fermented bread is perfect for scooping up meat and vegetable stews and their juices, and most Ethiopians eat it at least once a day.
Like most travellers, I quickly fell in love with its slightly spongy texture and tangy flavour, and found myself ordering it time and time again as we made our way around the country. It is served on a large, round plate with a smattering of colourful concoctions, including lentils, collard greens, yellow beans, lamb, beef and chicken. Breaking it apart and eating it with your hands makes the experience that much more enjoyable.
It is hard to believe, but despite injera’s popularity throughout the country, the patent for the processing of teff flour and related teff products ended up in the hands of a company in the Netherlands.
It all began in 2003, when a dozen varieties of teff seeds were sent to Dutch agronomist Jans Roosjen through a partnership with the Ethiopian Institute of Biodiversity Conservation for research and development. Four years later, the European Patent Office granted a patent to his company Health and Performance Food International (HPFI). While Roosjen overestimated the potential for the seed at the time and his company went bankrupt, he continued to market and sell teff products.
The dispute over who owns teff made international headlines earlier this year after Roosjen tried to sue another Dutch company that was marketing teff baked goods for patent infringement, and his patent was declared void in the Netherlands. When the deadline for an appeal expired in February 2019, many Ethiopians hailed it as a victory on social media.
I hope we can learn from this that our national assets must be protected
Ethiopian diplomat Fitsum Arega tweeted that it was great news. “I hope we can learn from this that our national assets must be protected by Ethiopians & friends of #Ethiopia,” he wrote.
But with Roosjen's patent still in place in other parts of Europe, the war continues. In February, Ethiopia’s attorney general Berhanu Tsegaye tweeted that the government was determined to defend Ethiopia’s legal rights related to teff. “Ethiopia has already deployed a law firm to fight the teff case internationally,” he wrote.
It is not the first time Ethiopia has had to protect one of its biggest products, with the country previously going into battle against Starbucks over the use of three premium coffee names. After intense talks, the world’s largest coffee chain and the Ethiopian government reached a licencing agreement allowing Starbucks to sell and market Harrar, Sidamo and Yirgacheffe coffee in 2007. According to a report by the World Intellectual Property Organization, the high-profile dispute greatly increased the value of Ethiopian coffee.
Dr Bula Wayessa, who is an expert in indigenous crops, believes the Dutch teff patent stripped millions of Ethiopian farmers of their rights. “It represents a manifestation of global power relations in which multi-million-dollar corporations based in the global north excise cultural appropriation in Third World countries,” he said. “The flaws in the international legal system that give private companies patent ownership without thorough investigation are disproportionally affecting developing countries such as Ethiopia.”
Dr Wayessa, visiting assistant professor at the State University of New York, New Paltz, was born into a teff-farming family in the Oromia Regional State, which is one of Ethiopia’s nine ethnically based regions. He grew up eating injera twice a day and helped cultivate, tend to and harvest the crop after school and in the summer holidays. “If I had other foods than injera for lunch and dinner, I used to still feel hungry,” he said.
Since leaving his homeland in 2009 to study overseas, Dr Wayessa has returned several times to conduct research. He said teff is not just a crop; it is part of Ethiopia’s cultural heritage. “Teff injera is a major common identity marker across more than 80 ethnic groups living in the country,” he said. “It frames Ethiopians’ indigenous food technology and informs their social and national identities by helping to chart social relationships through gathering around the plate and sharing.”
But while the dispute over teff’s ownership was big news around the globe, Sofonias Melese, head of operations at New Ethiopia Tours, said he only knew about it because he works in the tourism industry, and most of his countrymen weren’t aware of the controversy.
Teff is the backbone of our kitchen
“The patent issue is really sad for me,” he said. “Teff is the backbone of our kitchen. We eat it every day – sometimes three times a day – in almost all regions and tribes.”
Melese said he loves introducing people to injera during his tours. “Most of our tourists first try injera alone, then I can see the sourness in their faces,” he said. “Then I tell them to try it with our spicy wat, which is like a stew, and then they love it. When I tell them it’s gluten-free, high in protein and iron, they get fascinated.”
While its exact age is unclear, archaeologists believe that teff originated and was domesticated in highland Ethiopia about 2,000 years ago, although griddles for baking injera may date back 2,500 years.
Dr Diane Lyons PhD, co-author of Griddles, Ovens, and Agricultural Origins: An Ethnoarchaeological Study of Bread Baking in Highland Ethiopia, has conducted extensive research in northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region, where injera is baked on a clay griddle and served with meat, vegetable and legume stews. She said there are two colours of teff grains – white and red. The former has traditionally been considered more valuable and symbolises wealth, and is always served to important guests. Red injera is cheaper and is more commonly used in daily food.
Both Dr Lyons and Dr Wayessa said that teff is now expensive for poorer urban people thanks to global demand. Most farmers in northern and southern Tigray now sell their teff for larger quantities of cheaper grains in the market, such as barley, wheat and sorghum, to make their injera, causing “a loss in culture and a loss in nutrition,” according to Dr Lyons. “[Teff] is usually the cereal used in making injera in restaurants – and always in the finer restaurants in Ethiopia,” she added.
As an outsider, Dr Lyons said it seemed unethical to appropriate Ethiopia’s rights over teff. “This is a very poor country and their ancestors developed this crop,” she said. “They should have the rights to benefit from its marketing. Ethiopians are very proud of their cuisine, and rightly so. Their food is delicious, and teff-based injera is viewed as the best injera by Ethiopians. I sincerely hope they regain ‘full ownership’ over teff.”
I spent two weeks travelling throughout Ethiopia, from Addis Ababa to the Simien Mountains, dining on teff at restaurants daily. Children, raised on the grain, waved and chased our car as we passed them by. We were welcomed into the home of a rural family who showed us the small kitchen where they make injera. For the sake and future of these warm and hospitable people, I can’t help but share the same wish.
Food Wars is a series from BBC Travel that invites you to feel the heat when passions flare around beloved dishes that shape a culture’s identity.
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Tall, gaunt, and particularly effective in horror and drama films--British actor Julian Sands was born in Otley, West Riding of Yorkshire, to Brenda and William Sands. He came to the attention of NBC when the network cast him in the made-for-TV The Sun Also Rises (1984) and then with Anthony Hopkins in the television film A Married Man (1983). ... | {
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The Best & Worst Films of Every Year, Decade, Genre, and Language… 1930-2020.
Lists Galore… Film Essays… Movie Reviews… Outrageous Snobbery…
Movie Posters… Film Stills… Celebrity Interviews… Opinionated Columns… | {
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If you didn't want guys staring at your ass you shouldn't have worn tight pants with words on them
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Companies hiring for what would traditionally be classified as middle-skill positions (those that economists define as requiring a high-school diploma but not a bachelor’s degree, such as bookkeeping or a secretary) today often say they require candidates to have a bachelor’s degree. They see such degrees as an indication of whether an applicant has a range of skills they’re looking for, like the ability to communicate effectively or program computers. In 2015, almost 70 percent of job postings for production supervisors (people who oversee the production operations in manufacturing or other industrial environments), for example, asked for a bachelor’s degree even though only 16 percent of the workers already employed in that occupation had one, according to a report by the Harvard Business School. The report estimates that more than 6 million jobs——interestingly, the same number as those that are vacant— are at risk of degree inflation.
This phenomenon isn’t limited to a small sphere of the American workforce: The 15 occupations experiencing the greatest degree inflation, according to the report, span virtually every major industry.
But adults who participated in apprenticeship programs instead of college, for instance, can do certain jobs, such as billing and customer service, just as effectively as graduates with bachelor’s degrees, according to a separate 2017 report by the Harvard Business School, this one co-authored with the labor-market analytics firm Burning Glass Technologies. Sometimes apprentices can do those jobs even more effectively than college graduates. Only 42 percent of employers feel that graduates are adequately prepared for the job market, according to a 2013 report by the McKinsey Center for Government.
This suggests that, in focusing their hiring efforts only on college graduates, many employers are overlooking pools of qualified applicants—a habit that’s mutually detrimental in that it can both undermine the company’s economic health and deprive promising Americans of opportunities in which they’d otherwise thrive. After all, the vast majority of high-achieving, low-income students don’t apply to any selective college or university, according to analyses by Stanford University researchers. And just 14 percent of low-income students receive a bachelor’s degree within eight years of completing high school, which is roughly half the rate of their middle-income peers.
These discrepancies aren’t the result of an imbalance in ability but rather an imbalance in access. And that ought to call into question companies’ ever-growing reliance on a bachelor’s degree as a barometer of one’s eligibility for a given job. Instead of considering whether a candidate has a four-year degree, the employer should be asking, “who can do this job today and continue learning to become a productive member of the team?” said Beth Cobert, the CEO of Skillful. Skillful, a recently launched Colorado-based organization, aims to change the way companies hire by working with employers, job seekers, educators, coaches, and the government, among others, to shift their focus during the job-screening process from degrees to skills. The goal is to have employers look at applicants’ competencies—say, their ability to communicate effectively with customers and compile an Excel spreadsheet—rather than just their degrees when screening candidates. | {
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Had an amazing time. Challenges were Great fun. The route was one of the best we have been on, some amazing places we will never forget. | {
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DAVAO CITY — A motorcycle-riding gunman shot and killed an elderly woman in this city before dawn on Sunday, the police said.
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PO1 Sanfred Catayas said Andrea Villarino Baguio, 68, a widow, was walking alone to an Iglesia Ni Cristo chapel to attend Sunday service when she was repeatedly shot in Sitio Crossing in Barangay Malabog, Paquibato District, at about 4:45 a.m.
Baguio died on the spot from multiple bullet wounds from a .45-caliber pistol. The suspect fled immediately.
Police learned of the incident when a concerned citizen called them through the PS7 Hotline.
The motive of the killing has yet to be determined, Catayas said. /cbb
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Fabrizio Frizzi è morto stanotte a 60 anni e lo si ricorda con riconoscenza. Nell’immaginario collettivo italiano ha incarnato la persona buona e brava che entrava nelle nostre case con gentilezza. I fan Disney lo ricordano con affetto anche per aver doppiato Woody in Toy Story. Un amico.
E… abbi pazienza, tu che sei uno dei miei 4 lettori, ma non posso fare a meno di provare una gran malinconica mancanza e quell’inutile quanto inevitabile senso di profonda ingiustizia che mi assale quando un uomo buono muore dannatamente troppo presto…
Fabrizio Frizzi su Topolino: https://inducks.org/story.php?c=I+TL+2778-1&search=I%20bassotti%20e%20gli%20insoliti%20ignoti
Qui venne ristampata la storia con Frizzi:
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