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A Canadian woman travelling to Australia with her young son was caught at the airport with a large load of cocaine in her luggage, according to Australian police.
While the 42-year-old woman was held in custody with her first court appearance scheduled for Canada Day, Australian child welfare authorities and Canadian consular officials were discussing the care of her child until he can return to his family in Canada, the Australian Border Force (ABF) said.
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tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Canadian woman arrived in Australia with her young child and a large load of cocaine: police Back to video
The woman, who was identified only as L. Roberts, arrived at Sydney International Airport on a flight from Canada with three large suitcases and her young son on June 30. Australian border agents targeted her for an examination and her luggage was X-rayed.
The X-ray images revealed several anomalies, the agency said.
“ABF officers discovered a white powdery substance concealed within the lining of the suitcases. Initial testing returned a presumptive positive result for cocaine, with a total weight of approximately 12 kilograms,” officials said. | {
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The end of the ESPN-Barstool Sports partnership came down to one person: ESPN president John Skipper.
At a certain point over the last week, Skipper became more aware of the historical content of Barstool Sports away from the popular Pardon My Take podcast, and specifically, the ugly comments made by Barstool founder and president Dave Portnoy in 2014 about ESPN Sunday NFL Countdown host Sam Ponder.
The ESPN president also received a number of emails last week (his emails are open to staffers) from employees who were upset at the partnership. Those familiar with his thinking said it had a heavy impact on him. That was in addition to those who expressed the same sentiment publicly—led by Ponder—how much they did not like the partnership between the two entities.
ESPN management had been trying to thread the line that they were in business with the talent from the popular PMT podcast (Dan Katz, PFT Commenter and Hank Lockwood) while Barstool was its own separate ecosystem. For instance, here is what ESPN executive vice president of programming and scheduling Burke Magnus said prior to the debut of Barstool Van Talk last Tuesday on ESPN2.
“The comments about Sam Ponder were offensive and inappropriate, and we understand her reaction,” Magnus said. “She is a valued colleague and doing a great job for us. As stated previously, we do not control the content of Barstool Sports. We are doing a show with Big Cat and PFT, and we do have final say on the content of that show.”
On Monday afternoon at 3:20 p.m. ET, Magnus called Barstool CEO Erika Nardini to deliver the news, telling her the partnership was over.
“Effective immediately I am cancelling Barstool Van Talk,” said Skipper in a statement released 20 minutes after Magnus called Nardini. “While we had approval on the content of the show, I erred in assuming we could distance our efforts from the Barstool site and its content. Apart from the decision, we appreciate the efforts of Big Cat and PFT Commenter. They delivered the show they promised.”
A request from Sports Illustrated for Skipper, Magnus or ESPN executive vice president Connor Schell was declined.
“We respectfully decline and are letting Skipper’s statement be the comment,” said an ESPN spokesperson.
I’ve seen a lot of ESPN statements over the years and the use of the “I” here by Skipper is significant. An ESPN employee familiar with Skipper’s thinking said a lot of internal opposition to the Barstool partnership was directed specifically at him. “There is quiet satisfaction that there are some values that transcend business operations,” said one longtime ESPN staffer. “Though let's face it, this was a rogue half hour of television at 1:00 a.m. once a week.”
Nardini said on Monday afternoon that there was a clear and growing sense coming from inside ESPN during the week that the partnership could be ending.
“From looking how it played out in the media their concerns were fairly obvious,” Nardini said. “I would say a small but significant portion of ESPN’s talent base was uncomfortable with Barstool at large. Second, there were specific ESPN employees who had personal issues with Barstool in the past. Third, ESPN was doing something that was fairly uncharacteristic of ESPN which is to work with a third party brand to greenlight a show that wasn’t originated from within the network. There were obstacles to be expected in that process. But the blowback and frankly the events of last week exacerbated what was a unique situation to begin with for both of us. In this case it is ESPN’s decision what goes on its air and I completely respect that. I respect their decision but we will move on.”
"John Skipper is saying he thought he could distance himself from Barstool,” Portnoy said on his Facebook and Periscope channels on Monday afternoon. “Don't know what that means. You hired Barstool. The deal was with Barstool. The reason you needed us is because we're Barstool. That's why this audience exists and it's not going anywhere."
Nardini said she spent eight months on the ESPN deal and was personally disappointed. She said she will consider shopping Barstool Van Talk to another media outlet. “It is disappointing because I think we created a show unlike anything on television and certainly unlike anything on ESPN,” she said. “The numbers last week showed that we could bring a lot of 18 to 34 year olds to watch it which is what they wanted.”
Nardini said she could not be 100 percent sure that Skipper made the final decision but said, “I would say the decision was absolutely at the highest levels with regard to who exactly made it. I am assuming that because the statement came from John Skipper, I would say it came from him. We are disappointed. This was a big deal for us and we hoped to see it through.”
ESPN and Barstool Sports were an odd fit if you based it on the history of each entity. Once upon a time ESPN’s lawyers sent Barstool a cease-and-desist letter over Pardon My Take, claiming its logo and name were too close to Pardon the Interruption and First Take shows. ESPN staffers have also long been the target of Barstool’s ire especially when it comes to the network’s NFL reporters who cover the Patriots such as Chris Mortensen and Sal Paolantonio.
But the deal was not much of a surprise if you’ve been following the landscape over the past year as Barstool and ESPN have become promotional partners for each other. If you look at the 2017 guest list on Pardon My Take, it is littered with ESPN talent as guests including multiple appearances by Rachel Nichols and Scott Van Pelt, as well as ESPNers Adam Schefter, Kate Fagan, Matthew Berry, Greg McElroy, David Ross, Mark Teixeira, Randy Moss, Nate Silver, Jay Bilas, Jay Williams, Trey Wingo, Mike Golic, Jemele Hill, Michael Smith and Paul Finebaum. ESPN management and talent know full well that the PMT podcast drew high six figure audiences for each podcast and the demos they wanted. There are also plenty of Barstool fans inside ESPN.
One person familiar with Skipper’s thinking said don’t discount the impact of ESPN finding itself in the news—often negatively—over the past three months on wanting to get out of a controversial deal.
“He’s well aware of what the initial reaction will be in that part of the digital world that followed this show or has a gripe with the network,” said an ESPN senior employee.
As Variety noted earlier this month, the ESPN deal was biggest media deal to date. The show was produced by Embassy Row, which produces NFL Network’s Good Morning Football, NBC’s Men In Blazers and previously produced FS1’s Garbage Time With Katie Nolan. (Thus, for a short time, the Roger Goodell-loving Barstool and the league-owned morning show were part of the same content family)
Nardini said she had empathy for the ESPN executives who canceled the deal.
“What their talent wants is in some cases different than what their audience wants, and that is a very difficult place to be,” she said. “One of the interesting things about this partnership is everybody took a lot of shrapnel in it. ESPN took a lot of internal shrapnel and general media noise and we took a lot of shrapnel from Stoolies regarding selling out and questioning how we could work with ESPN.”
Barstool Van Talk premiered on Oct. 17 at 1 a.m. ET on ESPN2 and averaged 88,000 viewers. Going inside the numbers: 53,000 of the 88,000 were Men 18-49; 13,000 of the 88,000 were Women 18-49. The lead-in the show drew 61,000 viewers. Lead out was 39,000 viewers. Given the ratings were tweeted out by ESPN senior management and the show was designed to bring in 18-34 demo, you can presume ESPN was initially happy with the numbers.
“God bless Sam Ponder,” said another ESPN employee. “Masterful timing, and a perfect use of the medium that has done nothing but plague this company. The irony is delicious." | {
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Ryan Hunter-Reay’s script for the afternoon at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca went out the window the moment his car stalled in pitlane during the first round of stops, dropping him from eighth to last.
Popular wisdom pre-race was that the track offered virtually no realistic overtaking opportunities, and on that basis, the No. 28 Andretti car appeared destined for a long afternoon. Instead, Hunter-Reay carved his way back up from 24th to 10th.
“We had a good start, moved up a position and then at the first stop… I don’t even know what it was yet,” Hunter-Reay told RACER. “But I had the throttle floored and for some reason the car stalled, so we’re not sure if it was a boost issue, a timing issue, or what.
“From there we went to last, and then had to come back through the field. I had a lot of fun today knifing my way though the field from last to 10th and salvaging a top 10. But I hope the fans saw it, because there were some very creative passes! I passed in [Turns] 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. It was good fun.”
On a day that offered little opportunity to stray too far from the conventional strategy, Hunter-Reay and his crew looked elsewhere to help make up the lost ground.
“We didn’t really change strategy,” he said. “We just kind of stuck with what it was, and tried to be really fast on the in and out laps. I had some creative setups for the passes, and those ended up working for me.” | {
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Last week Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, issued an invitation to all of the Primates of the Anglican Communion (plus Foley Beach, head of the ACNA) to meet next year in Canterbury to discuss new ways of being the in relationship with another and with Canterbury. That he proposed a significant re-ordering of how member churches relate to one another as well as inviting the head of the schismatic Anglican Church in North America was largely met with a collective “meh.”
Tom Ferguson, in the guise of his blogging alter-ego Crusty Old Dean, responded with a post titled “It’s The End of the Anglican Communion As we Know It – And I feel Fine” where he writes;
Yet also in the title, and in the manic exuberance of the song, there’s also a sense of resignation, or outright relief, or even rejoicing, that world as we know it is ending — because we feel fine. This is what Crusty thought when he read the Archbishop of Canterbury’s call for a meeting of the Primates of the Anglican Communion in Janury of 2016, which can be found here: It’s the end of the Anglican Communion as we know it, and I feel fine. In his call the Archbishop noted the need to “consider recent developments but also look afresh at our ways of working as a Communion.” He also wrote of the “way in which proclamation [of the gospel] happens and the pressures on us vary greatly between Provinces. We each live in a different context.”
Giles Fraser posits that it was the world-wide-web that did in the Communion. Once we had the ability to really get to know what other member churches believed and did, we discovered our vast differences but without appreciation of our various contexts.
But it was the world wide web that finally did for global ecclesiastical solidarity. Through the web, different churches could finally experience each other’s theology first hand. We could read their sermons and church pronouncements. And they could read ours. And we didn’t like what we saw. Western liberals saw anti-gay bigotry. African conservatives saw an abandonment of the traditional gospel. We had become strangers to each other. No, worse than that: we realised we were fighting on very different sides. And, however hard they tried (and Rowan Williams really did) the men in mitres could not put Humpty together again.
Laura Sykes writing at Lay Anglicana sees the potential for good news, or at least not bad news, says;
In brief, Archbishop Justin is suggesting that we cease to fall over backwards to hold on to the Anglican Communion as a force seeking to hold everything revolving around the centre (which, had the Anglican Covenant been passed, would have acted as the reference point). Instead, we could aim to be a force seeking to spread out into the world, according to broadly agreed principles (based on the understanding of the Bible by each Church in the Communion). {The Archbishop does not describe it thus, this is my interpretation}.
Further noting;
The loose federation envisaged by Archbishop Justin is not a new idea – so far as I can see it represents a return to the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral of 1886/8 which includes”The Historic Episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into the unity of His Church.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, those who have worked hardest to undo the fabric of Communion, are not expressing much enthusiasm for the Communion or Welby’s plan either.
The GAFCON Primates said in their response;
They (the Primates) recognize that the crisis in the Communion is not primarily a problem of relationships and cultural context, but of false teaching which continues without repentance or discipline. Consistent with this position, they have previously advised the Archbishop of Canterbury that they would not attend any meeting at which The Episcopal Church of the United States or the Anglican Church of Canada were represented, nor would they attend any meeting from which the Anglican Church in North America was excluded.
And David Virtue, long standing critic of the Episcopal Church, has urged the the GAFCON Primates not attend and rejects any notion of an Anglicanism that includes TEC;
(Virtue) believes they should not waste the airfare. There is nothing to be gained by their attendance. Nothing. First of all, if there is no “common doctrine,” Anglicanism itself is meaningless. What does it mean to be Anglican if two different versions of the same faith are tolerated! To be an Anglican means a specific identity, a specific theological outlook. The Scriptures and the Gospels, the Apostolic Church, and the early Church Fathers are the foundation of Anglican faith and worship that make up the Anglican Communion. …So the question must be asked again, can the two groups, orthodox and heterodox, live under the same roof and still call themselves Anglican? I think not. It is impossible. Secondly, it presupposes that the Global South Primates are willing to agree to such an arrangement and admit that heterodoxy and orthodoxy can live as “two integrities” side by side when, in fact, they cannot. For nearly two decades, the Global South primates and the GAFCON bishops have argued, pleaded, and fought with TEC to repent of its heresies. They have steadfastly refused to do so. TEC’s response has been to promote endless “reconciliation” talks and Indaba.
Nick Knisely, Bishop of Rhode Island and an Episcopal Café pioneer kept his response below 144 characters.
It seems to me that the Archbishop of Canterbury's plan for the Communion is a return to our older Anglican understanding of how we relate. — Nick Knisely ن (@wnknisely) September 17, 2015
So, whither the communion now? What does it mean to be “Anglican” and does it affect our understanding of ourselves as Episcopalians or not?
You can read more thoughts on the Archbishop’s statement from the links here at Thinking Anglicans.
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During the Olympics, we'll be analyzing NBC's primetime coverage sort of the way we analyze SportsCenter in Bristolmetrics. We'll break down what countries the Peacock is talking about, and which athletes are getting the most attention.
Data for Friday, August 3 to Sunday, August 5
Twenty most-mentioned athletes:
Michael Phelps (USA, swimming): 133
Misty May-Treanor (USA, beach volleyball): 126
Usain Bolt (Jamaica, track): 101
Kerri Walsh Jennings (USA, beach volleyball): 82
Missy Franklin (USA, swimming): 53
Yohan Blake (Jamaica, track): 44
Carmelita Jeter (USA, track): 42
Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce (Jamaica, track): 41
Marta Menegatti (Italy, beach volleyball): 40
Justin Gatlin (USA, track): 39
Oscar Pistorius (South Africa, track): 35
Veronica Campbell-Brown (USA, track): 31
Matthew Centrowitz (USA, track): 31
Cassidy Krug (USA, diving): 31
Tyson Gay (USA, track): 30
McKayla Maroney (USA, gymnastics): 30
Sanya Richards-Ross (USA, track): 27
Wu Minxia (China, diving): 26
Allyson Felix (USA, track): 25
Laura Sanchez (Mexico, diving): 24
Countries, by number of mentions:
USA: 412
China: 66
Jamaica: 53
Great Britain: 52
Netherlands: 31
Australia: 31
Italy: 19
Russia: 18
Kenya: 14
Japan: 12
Germany: 11
South Korea: 10
Brazil: 10
South Africa: 9
Trinidad & Tobago: 7
Canada: 7
Austria: 6
Dominican Repuplic: 5
France: 5
Nigeria: 5
Hungary: 5
Romania: 5
Belgium: 4
Botswana: 4
Turkey: 3
Mexico: 3
Morocco: 3
Czech Republic: 3
Grenada: 3
Serbia: 3
Argentina: 2
Bulgaria: 2
Lithuania: 2
Ukraine: 2
Uzbekistan: 2
Switzerland: 2
Algeria: 1
Saudi Arabia: 1
Bahrain: 1
Cuba: 1
Denmark: 1
Ecuador: 1
Finland: 1
Poland: 1
Sweden: 1
Tanzania: 1
Tunisia: 1
Cumulative prime-time mentions and number of Olympic medals won, through August 5
USA: 972 mentions, 63 medals
China: 215 mentions, 64 medals
Great Britain: 133 mentions, 40 medals
Russia: 113 mentions, 42 medals
Australia: 103 mentions, 22 medals
France: 63 mentions, 26 medals
Brazil: 61 mentions, 8 medals
Japan: 58 mentions, 28 medals
Jamaica: 57 mentions, 4 medals
Canada: 48 mentions, 10 medals
Netherlands: 44 mentions, 10 medals
Ukraine: 30 mentions, 9 medals
Austria: 26 mentions, 0 medals
Mexico: 24 mentions, 5 medals
Germany: 23 mentions, 22 medals
Romania: 22 mentions, 8 medals
Italy: 22 mentions, 17 medals
South Africa: 17 mentions, 4 medals
Hungary: 12 mentions, 8 medals
Serbia: 10 mention, 2 medal
South Korea: 10 mentions, 22 medals [Note: NBC has still made no mention of the 22 medals; of the 10 times the network mentioned the country, six were in reference to the 2011 track and field world championships held there, and four were passing references to the women's volleyball team.]
Denmark: 7 mentions, 8 medals
Belgium: 7 mentions, 3 medals
Trinidad & Tobago: 7 mentions, 1 medal
Lithuania: 6 mentions, 2 medals
Cuba: 5 mentions, 7 medals
Dominican Republic: 5 mentions, 0 medals
Poland: 5 mentions, 6 medals
Tunisia: 4 mentions, 2 medals
Botswana: 4 mentions, 0 medals
Bulgaria: 3 mentions, 0 medals
Czech Republic: 3 mentions, 5 medals
Turkey: 3 mentions, 1 medal
Malaysia: 2 mentions, 1 medal
Belarus: 2 mentions, 8 medals
Argentina: 2 mentions, 1 medal
Uzbekistan: 2 medals, 1 mention
Switzerland: 2 mentions, 2 medals
Colombia: 1 mention, 4 medals
Spain: 1 mention, 3 medals
Morocco: 1 mention, 0 medals
Greece: 1 mention, 2 medals
Algeria: 1 mention, 0 medals
Saudi Arabia: 1 mention, 1 medal
Bahrain: 1 mention, 0 medals
Denmark: 1 mention, 8 medals
Ecuador: 1 mention, 0 medals
Finland: 1 mention, 0 medals
Sweden: 1 mention, 6 medals
Tanzania: 1 mention, 0 medals | {
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AOL shares are getting smoked today—they’re down 21% after the company reported weaker-than-expected earnings.
The company is trying to rebrand itself as a content business, but the owner of the Huffington Post, TechCrunch and several other websites still generates pretty much all its profits from its dial-up internet business, as well as other internet-based “products and services.”
Dialup is a business in inevitable decline. But AOL is not declining as fast as it could be. Amazingly, the company still has has 2.42 million internet customers, who pay for dialup internet access and other services like email. Apparently many don’t even realize they are still customers. AOL’s average monthly revenue per user was $19.41, higher than a year ago, and the rate of subscriber decline actually slowed (to a decline of 9%, from a decline of 14% a year ago).
This business generated $138 million in operating income (down 6% from a year ago) which AOL can use to underwrite growth initiatives. One of those, “AOL Platforms,” a programmatic ad-buying platform, grew revenues by 43% (it now makes more in revenue than membership does) but it still lost money.
Basically, none of AOL’s content businesses look like they are anywhere near ready to pick up the slack from the impending demise of dialup yet. | {
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In the early 1990s, the New York Post reported that Bruni and Trump were romantically linked.
Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images
On the morning of June 26, 1991, Donald Trump's picture was splashed across the front page of the New York Post. Next to the photo, which featured his then-girlfriend Marla Maples, was the headline "IT'S OVER." Trump, according to the Post, was leaving Maples for Italian model (and future first lady of France) Carla Bruni. That morning, NBC's Today ran with the report. "And Donald Trump is reportedly breaking up with Marla Maples, the woman said to have come between him and his wife Ivana," anchor Doreen Gentzler announced. "The New York Post is reporting that she's been ordered out of Trump's luxury high-rise apartment, and that Trump has begun dating an Italian model named Carla Bruni." Trump confirmed to the Post the next day that Bruni was the "new one" in his life. Bruni, however, vehemently denied she was dating Trump, and according to one biography, Trump himself planted the story for publicity. The episode illustrates just how personally involved Trump is in managing his own image through the press, a tactic he used to great effect as he rose to prominence in New York and one he continues to use as he runs for president. "Trump is obviously a lunatic," Bruni said of the story in an interview with the Daily Mail later that year. "It's so untrue and I'm deeply embarrassed by it all. I've only ever met him once, about a year ago, at a big charity party in New York. And I haven't seen him since, of that I'm sure."
New York Post
"It's all nonsense," she said of any linking to Trump, saying perhaps it was mistaken identity. "No doubt there are hundreds of models called Carla," she told the Mail. "Just because I'm well known they may have jumped to conclusions and put the wrong face to the name." Even Trump agreed when caught by the Mail, saying there was no romance. "These stories are sheer nonsense," he said, but added: "She is a friend." However, Bruni, according to Harry Hurt III's Trump biography Lost Tycoon, was no friend to Trump. "Carla does not, however, consider Donald J. Trump one of the world's 'great men,'" writes Hurt. "After her arrival in New York he tracked her down at the Mayfair Regent hotel and tried to ingratiate himself. Carla mischievously informed Donald that her 'sister' was coming to town. He immediately offered to provide a room at the Plaza Hotel. The visitor was actually one of Carla's longtime female friends, who showed up at the Plaza with a boyfriend in tow. Carla and her friends spent the next few days ordering room service and gloating over the way they fooled the 'King of Tacky.'" Hurt writes that, after confirming that Bruni was not dating anybody else, he began a rumor that he and Bruni were in a relationship, leading her to confront Trump directly for spreading the rumors. "'How dare you do this!' she screams at him. 'It's not true!'" Hurt writes. Evidence of Trump's direct involvement emerged in People, which ran an article suggesting Trump posed as his own PR man in a phone interview with the magazine. "On June 26, the tabloid New York Post ran a front-page headline announcing that Trump, 45, had dumped his longtime sweetheart, Marla Maples, 27, and taken up with an Italian model named Carla. A curious PEOPLE reporter called Trump's office to ask if the story were true. Five minutes later, a man identifying himself as John Miller called back, said he was handling publicity for Trump and confirmed everything, in detail. Yes, said Miller, it was over with Marla. 'It doesn't matter to [Donald] if Marla talks; he truly doesn't care.' As for that diamond ring Trump bought Marla several weeks ago, 'It was never an engagement ring,' said Miller, who went on to brag about the army of women he said were rabidly chasing The Donald: Madonna was one, he said, Kim Basinger another. 'Important, beautiful women call him all the time,' said Miller. It was a fascinating interview, made all the more fascinating when the reporter realized that the man she was talking to seemed to be...no, it couldn't be...yep, it apparently was: Donald Trump, posing as a fictitious PR man." The magazine then played the tape for Maples, who identified the voice on the phone as Trump's.
New York Post | {
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From the tiniest veins, arteries and nerves to serial cross-sections of the spinal cord, these incredibly detailed dissections show and label most every part of the human body.
The collection is the product of a 17-year collaboration between David L. Bassett, a School of Medicine alumnus and faculty member known for his elegant dissections and love for the human body, and William Gruber, the photographer who invented the View-Master stereoscopic viewing device.
The partnership between the two resulted in the production of the Stereoscopic Atlas of Human Anatomy, which began in 1948, but was not not completed until 1962. It consisted of 221 View-Master reels with 1,554 color stereo views of dissections of every body region. Each stereo view was accompanied by a black-and-white, labeled drawing and explanatory text.
A courtesy the Lane Medical Archives (thanks Drew!),today we present you some of the most impressive pictures of The Basset Collection. Meet the Human Body.
After the removal of an outer layer of bones around the jaw, the dissection shows blood vessels and sensory nerves to the lower teeth and chin.
The onion-like structure is an eye, seen from above with the bony roof of the eye socket removed. The profusion of blood vessels and the muscles that rotate the eye are visible.
A pelvis from a woman, right, is lighter and wider than that of a man, left. The wider angle of a woman’s pubic bones at the base of the pelvis allows birthing of a baby.
Removal of the skin and the layer of tough tissue beneath it, the palmar fascia, reveals a complex arrangement of blood vessels and nerves in the hand and wrist.
This dissection of the kidneys was done after red latex was injected into the arteries and blue latex into the veins.
With all layers of the skin removed on the left side of the head and neck, the dissection displays the blood vessels and nerves of the scalp, almost all of which come from the periphery, not through the skull. Colored latex was injected into the blood vessels: red for arteries, blue for veins. The structures in the neck remain covered by a tough layer of tissue known as the cervical fascia.
Inside the vertebral column, cut in half vertically, is a channel for the spinal nerves. The brown material is the bones; the white material is the intervertral disks that sometimes “rupture,” causing back pain. A horizontal split has been made on the left to show the connection of the sacrum, a triangular bone at the base of the spine, to the pelvis.
This view of the wrist joint features the two rows of four carpal bones each and shows how they are connected to the bones of the forearm and the fingers.
A dissection of the leg and the foot displays the long tendons connected to the toes, and the blood vessels and nerves to the top of the foot.
This dissection of the backbone was performed by Donald Stilwell, another Stanford professor, for the Bassett atlas. Note the profusion of arterial blood vessels nourishing the vertebral area of the neck and chest area. Also, at the top, the ends of the vertebral arteries, which pass into the skull to nourish the brain.
The mediastinum, a central chest compartment located between the lungs, houses the heart. Immediately to the right of the heart is the aorta, the largest artery of the body. To the right of the aorta are groups of blood vessels (one artery and two companion veins) that run between the ribs to distribute blood through the body. The phrenic nerve, which sends messages to the diaphragm to breath, is visible as it crosses the heart vertically.
Dissection of the meninges and brain in situ. On the right the calvaria and layers of the scalp are shown in relation to the dura. On the left the dura has been cut away to reveal the cerebral hemisphere and cerebellum covered with the arachnoid membrane. The confluence of the sinuses is shown.
The sclera and cornea have been cut away on the medial side of a right eye to display the anterior chamber, iris, ciliary body and outer surface of the choroid. Although none of the vessels has been injected, the branches of the superior and inferior medial vorticose veins are clearly visible. The long posterior ciliary artery was cut across in the resection of the sclera but its course can be traced nearly to the ciliary body.
On this dissection of the heart, the epicardium has been removed from all parts of the atria with the exception of the left auricle.
Dissection of lungs in situ. The lungs have been dissected from their medial surfaces and are reflected laterally for this image. Fragmentary portions of all of the chambers of the heart have been preserved. The great vessels have been kept intact, although the aorta and pulmonary trunk have been elevated to expose more posterior parts of the heart.
The cervical spinal cord. By removing the rear arches of the neck (cervical) vertebra and the fibrous covering (dura) over the spinal cord one sees the cervical spinal cord and its nerves. The blood vessels nourishing the cord and vertebral column and the origin of the cord from the brain are clearly shown.
Dissection of thorax from a posterior approach. Ribs and vertebral bodies have been resected bilaterally between the second and the ninth thoracic segments. The periosteum which covered the inner surfaces of the ribs have been preserved in most areas. The anterior longitudinal ligament, with remnants of the intervertebral discs attached, has also been retained in part. The lungs have been inflated and are visible through the intact costal pleura. The proximal parts of the III-VII spinal nerves have been positioned on the pleura in such a way that their dorsal and ventral roots, dorsal rami and communications with the sympathetic trunks are visible. These components are labeled for the left seventh thoracic nerve. The intercostal arteries and veins have been cut off in various ways.
The knee joint opened from the front shows the inner surface of the knee cap or patella within its large ligament which is folded downward and forward. The ear shaped cartilages lie on the surface of the joint floor formed by the tibia. Between the cartilages one sees the cut ends of the cruciate ligaments so often injured in athletics and frequently reconstructed surgically.
The Jawbone. The masseter muscle of mastication reflected back to expose the jawbone (mandible) and the related vessels, nerves and muscles. | {
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Less than 36 hours passed after President Trump signed his executive order on Friday restricting immigration on several fronts before four federal judges had issued rulings in quick succession blunting the effect of the order and calling its constitutionality into question.
The executive order — "Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States" — temporarily halted the US refugee program for 120 days; indefinitely suspended the intake of refugees from Syria; and blocked all people from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, and Yemen from entering the US for 90 days.
The moves against the order started when a federal judge in Brooklyn on Saturday evening granted a nationwide stay of removal — preventing deportation — for those people affected by the order.
"Nobody is to be removed," US District Judge Ann Donnelly told the government lawyers, issuing the stay after holding the first hearing on a challenge to the order.
In the order that followed, Donnelly barred federal officials from removing those with approved refugee applications, valid immigrant and non-immigrant visas, and individuals from the seven countries where all immigration was halted who are otherwise legally authorized to enter the US. Those seven countries are Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen.
Several hours later, after a late-night hearing in a federal courthouse in Massachusetts, US District Judge Allison Burroughs and Magistrate Judge Judith Dein issued an order early Sunday morning that — as the petitioners' lawyers had requested — went further, barring federal officials from detaining, in addition to removing, the same group covered by Donnelly's order and adding those same protections, explicitly, to lawful permanent residents.
Additionally, Burroughs and Dein's order limits secondary screening to pre-Trump order status and order US Customs and Border Protection to "notify airlines that have flights arriving at Logan [International] Airport of this order and the fact that individuals on these flights will not be detained or returned solely on the basis of the Executive Order."
Overnight, there remained questions about the scope of the orders — lawyers in the New York case already are seeking clarification from the court there and the Massachusetts case only named two petitioners. The Department of Homeland Security put out a statement overnight — but prior to the decision in Massachusetts — declaring, "President Trump’s Executive Orders remain in place — prohibited travel will remain prohibited, and the U.S. government retains its right to revoke visas at any time if required for national security or public safety." At the same time, however, the agency acknowledged that it "will comply with judicial orders."
Nonetheless, the explicit terms of the two court orders — which combine to limit federal officials from detaining or removing those affected by Trump's executive order — contain no explicit limitation to the respective districts or states in which they were granted.
In addition to those two rulings, two more localized rulings came from federal courts in Virginia and Washington. In the case filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, US District Judge Leonie Brinkema ordered federal officials to provide lawyers access to "all legal permanent residents being detained at Dulles International Airport" and barred officials from deporting any such people for the next seven days. In the case out of Washington state, US District Judge Thomas Zilly barred the federal government from deporting two unnamed individuals from the US. Zilly set a hearing for Feb. 3 "to determine whether to lift the stay."
On Sunday afternoon in California, US District Judge Dolly Gee issued a potentially ground-shifting order — requiring the federal government to return Ali Khoshbakhti Vayeghan, who had been deported and slated to be returned to Iran under Trump's order, back to the US.
The New York-based lawsuit that started things rolling had been brought early Saturday on behalf of Hameed Khalid Darweesh and Haider Sameer Abdulkhaleq Alshawi, two men detained at John F. Kennedy International Airport for several hours after their arrival at the airport in the wake of Trump's signing of the ban.
In addition to the two men, however, the group of lawyers backing the men also filed a motion to turn the lawsuit into a class action, which would result in protection for all of those who would be covered by the class.
Later, they sought immediate action, filing a request that the court issue a stay of removal — an order preventing deportation — not only for the two men, but for the entire proposed class.
At the hearing in the first case, Donnelly focused in on whether the people affected by Trump's order would face irreparable harm if deported.
Gisela Ann Westwater, a lawyer from the Justice Department's Office of Immigration Litigation, presented the bulk of the government's defense over the phone, with support from Susan Riley, who was in person at the hearing.
While discussing whether irreparable harm would be brought onto people who were detained and would be sent back to the countries they came from, the judge referenced an unnamed person who the ACLU's Lee Gelernt, who argued for the challengers, said was being sent back to Syria.
Donnelly turned to the government's lawyers, asking, "What do you think about that?" Westwater began to make the case, briefly, about concerns based on those trying to come to the US on tourist visas.
The judge, however, interrupted her and delivered her order, questioning whether "the government had a full chance to think about this.”
At another point in the hearing, Gelernt told Donnelly that the petitioner's lawyers estimate 100 to 200 people are being detained across the country as a result of Trump's order.
When Gelernt pressed for the government to turn over names of those detained and the government responded that it did not know who all of those people being detained are, Donnelly said the government should compile a list.
In a follow-up order to the stay, Donnelly ordered the government "to provide a list of individuals detained, pursuant to the January 27, 2017 Executive Order, to the petitioner's counsel."
Further proceedings in the case, ultimately challenging the constitutionality of Trump's order, are set for February. The government's brief responding to the petition is due Feb. 10.
The lawyers who brought the case come from International Refugee Assistance Project, National Immigration Law Center, American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, and the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization at Yale Law School.
The Massachusetts court's order, meanwhile, will remain in effect for 7 days, with the court to schedule a further hearing before that time. | {
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AMDが新GPUを正式発表 AMDの夏の大攻勢がはじまった。AMDは8月に、新GPU「Radeon RX Vega64(Vega10:ベガ10)」と16コアCPU「Ryzen Threadripper」を投入する。今年(2017年)のAMDの新製品が重要なのは、いずれもアーキテクチャの大きな変化となるからだ。ZenアーキテクチャでCPUはマイクロアーキテクチャを一新したが、今回のVegaでGPUもマイクロアーキテクチャが一新される。AMDにとって、5年振りの大きなGPUマイクロアーキテクチャ変革となる。 GPU製品としてみると、Radeon RX Vega64は、AMDにとって2年振りのフラグシップモデルだ。AMDは、昨年(2016年)はハイエンドGPUを発表しなかったため、ハイエンドのGPUはPolaris(ポラリス)世代をスキップしてVegaとなる。Vegaはファミリで登場する見込みで、今回発売されるのは、最上位のVega10だ。 Vega10アーキテクチャの最大のポイントは、NVIDIAのように巨大ダイ(半導体本体)への道を歩まずに、この世代ではGPUのダイサイズを抑えてきたこと。ダイサイズは486平方mmで、NVIDIAのVolta(ボルタ)世代の「GV100」の815平方mmの60%程度しかない。AMD自身の2015年のフラグシップGPU「Radeon R9 Fury X(Fiji:フィージー)」の596平方mmの82%程度。トランジスタ数は12.5B(Billion:125億)だが、これもNVIDIAと比べると少ない。スタックドメモリHBM2も2スタックと、NVIDIAの4スタックより少ない。 マイクロアーキテクチャでは、NVIDIAは今世代で深層学習(ディープラーニング)に向けて大きく振った。深層学習向けとグラフィックス向けに完全に分化する道を選んだと見られる。それに対してAMDは深層学習向け機能を加えながらも、そこに使うトランジスタを抑えた。結果として、Vega10は、高いグラフィックスパフォーマンスの割りには製造コストが低い＝価格を下げられる、バランスのよいGPUとなっている。
コア数は同一だが性能は47%アップ Vega 10のCU(Compute Unit)数は64個で、単精度FP32積和算ユニット(AMD用語ではStream Processor)数は4,096個。これは、2015年の「Radeon R9 Fury X(Fiji:フィージー)」と同じ数だ。しかし、FP32の性能は、Radeon R9 Fury Xの8.6TFLOPSに対して、Radeon RX Vega64では12.66TFLOPSと、47%も性能が上がっている。 大幅な性能向上は、チップの動作周波数の向上によってなされている。Fury Xでは動作周波数は1,050MHzだったが、Radeon RX Vega64では、ベースクロック1,247MHz、ブーストクロック1,546MHzとなっている。動作周波数の向上分が、そのまま性能向上となっている。 Vegaアーキテクチャでは、従来のGCNと比べて基本のパイプライン段数に変更はない。ベクタユニットの積和算パイプは4サイクルレイテンシのままだ。しかし、クリティカルパスについては徹底したチューニングが行なわれたという。 ロジック回路はパスによってディレイが異なり、ディレイがとくに長いパス群がクリティカルパスと呼ばれる。同期型プロセッサの動作周波数は、もっともディレイが長いパスに制約される。そのため、クリティカルパスをチューニングしてディレイを短縮すれば、動作周波数の向上が可能となる。Vega10ではクリティカルパスチューニングと、14nm LPPプロセスによって、1.7GHz以上の動作周波数が可能になったという。 パイプライン自体を変更しなかったのは、パイプラインを深くして積和算のレイテンシを長くすると、パイプラインを満たすのにより多くのスレッドが必要となってしまうからだと推測される。スレッド並列性を維持するためには、レジスタなどより多くのリソースが必要となってしまう。それに対してクリティカルパスチューニングでは、原理的にはアーキテクチャ上の変更が必要ない。
GPUコアのマイクロアーキテクチャを刷新 Vega世代では、CU(Compute Unit)のマイクロアーキテクチャが大きく刷新された。新設計の次世代CU「NCU(Next-Generation Compute Unit)」となった。NCUの最大の特徴は、「Rapid Packed Math (RPM)」と呼ぶパックド(SIMD)フォーマットのFP16半精度浮動小数点演算のサポートだ。 AMD GPUは単精度FP32(32-bit浮動小数点)演算に最適化したパイプラインを備えている。しかし、Vegaでは、32-bitパイプで16-bitの浮動小数点演算を2並列のSIMD(Single Instruction, Multiple Data)フォーマットで行なうことで、FP16時にFP32の2倍の性能を出すことができる。 FP16はモバイルグラフィックスなどで使われている他、マシンラーニングでも急速に浸透している。マシンラーニングのトレーニングフェイズにおいて、データ精度を下げたFP16の利用が進んでいるためだ。VegaでのFP16は、積和算など通常の演算はすべてサポートしている。 Vegaアーキテクチャでは、パックドの8-bit整数演算もサポートされた。しかし、8-bit整数演算は、SAD(Sum of Absolute Difference:差の絶対値和)演算のみサポートとなっている。動画などイメージ処理向けであり、マシンラーニング向けの実装ではない。この他にもVegaアーキテクチャには、ジオメトリパイプラインの刷新や新しいキャッシュ回路設計、FreeSyncの拡張など多数のアーキテクチャ拡張が加わっている。後の記事でレポートしたい。 【表】AMD GPUのスペック比較 名称 Radeon Pro SSG Radeon Pro WX9100 Radeon RX Vega64 Liquid Cooled Edition Radeon RX Vega64 コードネーム Vega10 Vega10 Vega10 Vega10 ベースクロック 1,406MHz 1,247MHz コアクロック(最高) 1,500MHz? 1,500MHz? 1,677MHz 1,546MHz アーキテクチャ GCN 5.0 GCN 5.0 GCN 5.0 GCN 5.0 プロセッサ数 FP32 4,096 4,096 4,096 4,096 CU数 64 64 64 64 FP32 MAD/CU 64 64 64 64 プロセッサ数 FP16 8,192 8,192 8,192 8,192 プロセッサ数 INT8 16,384 16,384 16,384 16,384 FP32 GFLOPS 10,215 10,215 11,518 10,215 FP32 GFLOPS (boost clock) 12,288 12,288 13,738 12,665 FP16 GFLOPS 20,431 20,431 23,036 20,431 FP16 GFLOPS (boost) 24,576 24,576 27,476 25,330 Texture Units 256 256 256 256 Texture Fill Rate 319.2GT/s 319.2GT/s 359.9GT/s 319.2GT/s ROP Units 64 64 64 64 Pixel Fillrate 79.81Gpixels/s 79.81Gpixels/s 89.98Gpixels/s 79.81Gpixels/s L2 cache 4,096KB 4,096KB 4,096KB 4,096KB メモリ種類 HBM2 HBM2 HBM2 HBM2 メモリ転送レート 1,892Mtps? 1,892Mtps? 1,892Mtps? 1,892Mtps? ビデオメモリインターフェイス幅 2,048bit 2,048bit 2,048bit 2,048bit メモリ帯域(GB/Sec) 484GB/s 484GB/s 484GB/s 484GB/s 標準搭載メモリ 16GB 16GB 8GB 8GB DRAM容量/ダイ 8Gb 8Gb 8Gb 8Gb DRAM個数 16 個 16 個 8 個 8 個 SSG(NAND Storage) 2TB 製造プロセス技術 14nm 14nm 14nm 14nm 製造プロセス技術の特徴 14LPP 14LPP 14LPP 14LPP トランジスタ数 12,500M 12,500M 12,500M 12,500M ダイサイズ(最初のダイ) 486平方mm 486平方mm 486平方mm 486平方mm TDP Max 300W 250W 345W 295W 名称 Radeon RX Vega56 Radeon RX 480 Radeon R9 Fury X コードネーム Vega10 Polaris 10 (Ellesmere) Fiji ベースクロック 1,156MHz 1,100MHz 1,050MHz コアクロック(最高) 1,471MHz 1,266MHz 1,050MHz アーキテクチャ GCN 5.0 GCN 4.0 GCN3 プロセッサ数 FP32 3584 2304 4,096 CU数 56 36 64 FP32 MAD/CU 64 64 64 プロセッサ数 FP16 7,168 2,304 4,096 プロセッサ数 INT8 14,336 FP32 GFLOPS 8,286 5,069 8,602 FP32 (boost clock) GFLOPS 10,544 5,834 8,602 FP16 GFLOPS 16,572 5,069 8,602 FP16 GFLOPS (boost) 21,088 5,834 8,602 Texture Units 224 144 256 Texture Fill Rate 258.9GT/s 158.4GT/s 268.8GT/s ROP Units 64 32 64 Pixel Fillrate 73.98Gpixels/s 35.20Gpixels/s 67.20Gpixels/s L2 cache 4,096KB 2,048KB 2,048KB メモリ種類 HBM2 GDDR5 HBM1 メモリ転送レート 1,700Mtps 7,000Mtps 1,000Mtps ビデオメモリインターフェイス幅 2,048bit 256bit 4,096bit メモリ帯域(GB/Sec) 435GB/s 224GB/s 512GB/s 標準搭載メモリ 8GB 8GB 4GB DRAM容量/ダイ 8Gb 4Gb 2Gb DRAM個数 8 個 16 個 16 個 SSG(NAND Storage) 製造プロセス技術 14nm 14nm 28nm 製造プロセス技術の特徴 14LPP トランジスタ数 12,500M 5,700M 8,900M ダイサイズ(最初のダイ) 486平方mm 232平方mm 596平方mm TDP Max 210W 150W 275W
膨大なメモリ空間をGPUが使えるようにするHBCC Vega10は、スタックドDRAMの「HBM2」をサポートする。AMDはRadeon R9 Fury(Fiji)でHBM1をサポートした。今回は、規格上のデータ転送レイトが2倍になったHBM2を搭載している。Fijiでは、データ転送レートが1GtpsのHBMを、4スタック搭載していた。メモリインターフェイスは4,096bitで、メモリ帯域は512GB/sだった。 今回、AMDはVega10に、2,048-bitのHBM2インターフェイスを実装した。HBM2メモリスタックは2個と、Fijiの半分になった。しかし、HBM2自体のデータ転送レートが上がったことで、メモリ帯域は484GB/sを達成している。また、HBM1では、DRAMダイの容量が2G-bitだったが、HBM2では8G-bitとなったため、2スタックでも8GBの容量となっている。 さらに、Vegaでは、「HBCC(High-Bandwidth Cache Controller)」と呼ぶ新ユニットを搭載した。HBCCは、GPUのメモリだけでなく、CPU側のシステムメモリやストレージ、GPUに搭載したフラッシュストレージなどをシームレスにGPUメモリとして扱うことができるようにする仮想メモリシステムだ。Vegaアーキテクチャでは、CPUシステムメモリの一部やストレージをHBCCのメモリ空間として扱うことができる。 そして、オンパッケージのHBM2をあたかもキャッシュメモリのように扱う。インクルーシブキャッシュモデルを取る場合は、HBM2が新しいキャッシュ階層のように振る舞う。エクスクルーシブキャッシュモデルの場合は、HBM2とGPU外のメモリが地続きのメモリとしてマップされる。基本的なアイデアは、アクセス頻度が低いデータは遠いメモリに、頻度が高いデータは近いHBM2に持つことで、無理なく大規模なワークセットを扱えるようにする点にある。 キャッシュといってもHBCCの制御の粒度はページベースだ。Vegaでは、異なる複数のページサイズを同時に扱うことができるようにした。グラフィックスで多用されるシーケンシャルなアクセスが生じるようなデータタイプはラージページに格納。分散したアクセスが発生するデータはスモールページに格納する。Vega10では512TBまでのバーチャルアドレススペースをサポートする。
Radeon RX Vega64製品ラインナップ 製品としてのRadeon RX Vegaには複数のSKU(Stock Keeping Unit=アイテム)とパックがある。グラフィックスカードでは、フルスペックの「Radeon RX Vega64」が499ドルで発売される。Radeon RX Vega64では、64個のNCUが有効になっており、それが製品グレードナンバ「64」の由来となっていると見られる。 Radeon RX Vega64では、64個のNCUで、FP32積和算ユニットは合計4,096個となる。動作クロックはブースト1,546MHzで、ピーク性能はFP32で12.66TFLOPS、FP16で25.3TFLOPS。Radeon RX Vega64には、カードデザインが異なるリミテッドエディションがあるが、これは後述するパックでしか入手できない。 Radeon RX Vega64には液冷の「Radeon RX Vega64 Liquid Cooled Edition」がある。冷却能力を高めることで、動作周波数をブーストさせたバージョンだ。ベース1,406MHz、ブースト1,677MHzで、ピーク性能はFP32で13.7 TFLOPSとなる。FP16なら27.5 TFLOPSに達する。 Radeon RX Vegaファミリでは、さらに廉価なRadeon RX Vega56も399ドルで発売される。こちらは56 NCUで3,584FP32ユニット、ピーク性能は10.5TFLOPS。動作周波数はRadeon RX Vega64よりやや抑えられベース1,156MHz/ブースト1,471MHzとなっている。TDP(Thermal Design Power:熱設計消費電力)で比較すると、Radeon RX Vega56が210W、Radeon RX Vega64が295W、Radeon RX Vega64 Liquid Cooledが345Wだ。
お買い得なRadeon Pack AMDはRadeon RX Vega64発売にさいして、グラフィックスカード以外のディスカウントを加えたパック製品「Radeon Pack」も用意した。これは、Radeon RX Vegaカードに加えて、ディスプレイやCPU、マザーボードのディスカウントとゲームパッケージをセットにしたパッケージだ。 パックには、湾曲34型の「Samsung CF791」FreeSyncディスプレイの200ドル割引、Ryzen 7とX370マザーボードの100ドル割引、それに120ドル相当のゲームパッケージ(リージョンによって異なる)が含まれる。Radeon RX Vegaに加えて、Ryzen 7プラットフォームとFreeSyncモニタも揃えてしまおうというユーザーにとっては、いい組み合わせとなっている。Radeon Packも8月に発売される。 パックは3系統が用意される。最上位の「Radeon Aqua Pack」は、液冷却のRadeon RX Vega64のパックで699ドル。通常の空冷のRadeon RX Vega64ベースのパックは「Radeon Blask Pack」で599ドルから。Blask PackのRadeon RX Vega64には、リミテッドエディションのバージョンが含まれる。 このほか、Radeon RX Vega56ベースの「Radeon Red Pack」も499ドルで発売される。言い換えれば、パックではカード製品と100ドルの差額で、300ドル分のハードウェア割引と、120ドル分のゲームが手に入る。 | {
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A former Ohio state trooper was sentenced to 60 months in federal prison for sexual misconduct with women he pulled over for traffic violations. Officer Bryan D. Lee, 31, was accused of groping and rubbing his genitals against victims while they were handcuffed, stalking some victims on Facebook, and demanding sex and nude photos in exchange for leniency.
Lee's first victim filed a complaint against him back in 2011, but local police didn't believe her. A county prosecutor even offered to charge the woman with making a false statement if Lee wanted; he graciously declined.
Last October, Lee pled guilty to charges of cyberstalking and "violating the civil rights" of four women. He was sentenced in U.S. District Court on Thursday.
Here's a timeline of his abuses, from the Dayton Daily News:
Nov. 19, 2010: Lee responded to a car wreck involving victim "NS," who failed field sobriety tests. Lee turned off his body microphone, groped NS's breasts while she was handcuffed and rubbed his genitals against her. He drove her home and released her to her mother. Nov. 21, 2010: Lee stopped "KD" for speeding and found she was driving without a valid license and had a warrant for her arrest. He told the male passenger to walk to the nearest rest stop. Lee groped KD's breasts and cited her for traffic offenses but did not charge her for pills and drug paraphernalia found during the stop. Lee later stalked KD on Facebook, demanding naked pictures of her. March 22, 2012: Lee cited "JE" for speeding and then pulled her over a second time because she was upset and crying. JE sat in Lee's patrol car and allowed him to take a cell phone photo of her topless. Lee convinced her to drive to an abandoned gas station where they had sex. Lee then tore up the speeding ticket. JE and Lee later had a consensual relationship until she discovered on Facebook that Lee was married. Sept. 8, 2013: Lee flirted with two women on a traffic stop. He turned off his mic, allowed the driver to drive despite showing signs of impairment, and put the passenger, "TF," in his patrol car. He took a photo of him touching TF's breasts and later stalked her on Facebook. A month later, TF was again a passenger during a drunken driving stop by Lee. Lee ticketed the driver for misdemeanor violations and didn't make a drunken driving arrest. TF walked home.
The News also reports that Lee comes from a family of police officers, including two brothers who are also state troopers. Family members wrote the court to insist that Lee "is a good person who lacked the self-esteem, self-discipline and self-awareness necessary to abstain from acting on his sexual compulsions with women that he met in the course and scope of his employment with the Ohio State Highway Patrol." | {
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A San Francisco-based federal appeals court will hear arguments on President Trump’s latest travel and refugee resettlement restrictions in May.
A three-judge motions panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals granted the Trump administration’s unopposed request for expedited review Monday and set a schedule for written arguments.
A brief order from the court said a hearing would be held some time in May. The court will be examining a Hawaii judge’s ruling that blocked the executive order on the grounds that by targeting countries that are predominantly Muslim it discriminated on the basis of religion.
The order — which would stop all refugee resettlement for 120 days and block citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen from entering the U.S. for 90 days — is a revised version of Trump’s original travel ban.
In February, the 9th Circuit upheld a nationwide injunction on the original order, ruling that it violated due process rights because it was enacted without notice and without giving people the right to challenge it.
The revised order removed restrictions on holders of visas and green cards but still targeted predominantly Muslim nations.
Another ruling blocking part of the revised ban is pending in the Virginia-based 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. A hearing on that appeal is also set for May. | {
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It’s Alive! It’s Aliiiiive! (insert maniacal laughter here). Now in it’s sixth year, Suwannee Hulaween is a monster of a festival. Inside, Creatures of the Galaxy run rampant at five stages, especially in Spirit Lake. Silver Wrapper & Purple Hat Productions are the guilty parties responsible creating this Beast of the Southeast and setting it loose to roam free under the Spanish moss of the Spirit of Suwannee Music Park in Live Oak, FL. Hulaween features live music from incredible acts such as Odesza, Jamiroquai, Janelle Monae, Tipper, Vulfpeck, Turkuaz, and of course The String Cheese Incident.
Hulaween is much more than the music. Spirit Lake is larger than ever, and the art inside is out of this world. Escape the “real world” with me for four days of music, costumes, and adventure. Let’s go!
TUESDAY (yes, Tuesday), I arrive to camp during a mid-afternoon thunderstorm. My friends are already there, holding down a spot and even offer me a hot dog upon arrival. I love this place; it’s Utopian society. Caring and sharing with their brothers and sisters and strangers alike, people go from complete strangers to best friends in a matter of hours. I set up my tent and easy-up porch. Complete with a swanky shelving unit, my spot is ready for the weather of the weekend.
WEDNESDAY, we battle boredom by setting up our friends tents. I purposefully get my friends to bring me their tents in the week prior to the festival so that I can set them all up and essentially grab land. This helps in holding a spot, but also helps in city planning — we now have a main sitting area, as well as a parking lot, and residential section. Honestly, this is the best camp we have ever made. It’s a total group effort, with everyone contributing one way or another. The place is buzzing with excitement as Spirit Lake begins to come alive and vendors open their doors. There is a problem though — our neighbors. They have set up a surround sound system up in the trees, and are heavily drinking while playing their music, simply too loud. We ask them several times to turn it down and their response is to actually play it louder! Before I have a chance to react, my friend has his huge flashlight out and begins to strobe their camp from our fire. The war is on. Luckily, they immediately come over to concede as they can see that we mean business. I am happy to report that the two camps get along really well after that. 😎
THURSDAY, I wake up early to get a good breakfast and make sure I’m ready for the day. Today is a whole lot of good music. Some would argue it is the best all weekend. Funk You is the first band for me this Hulaween. Their dance driven grooves and sparkling vocals make them a must see set. This six piece from Augusta, GA has this costumed crowd moving and shaking at full tilt, just ten minutes in. Will Foster (keys) is especially impressive as I get down between Gumby and a bunch of pirates. They cover Prince’s “1999” and I couldn’t be any happier right now. I’m up on cloud 9 and I’m not getting off until Monday!
I’m up on cloud 9 and I’m not getting off until Monday!”
Ghost Light is up next in the amphitheater. This four piece features the guitarist from Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, Tom Hamilton. He is constantly in the spotlight with lengthy solos, one after another. He is so aggressive at every turn, forcing his band to adapt as he launches them through the changes. Hamilton revs up the band with shorter and shorter riffs. They rocket upwards through the clouds and just when we’re ready for the drop back to earth, we break through into outer space. The band quiets down and Holly Bowling’s twinkling piano notes dot the stars around us.
Slowly, we float back down to earth and land at the Marco Benevento set. He plays a few tracks from his newest album, Invisible Baby. The heavy tri-tones and trance like vibe has the crowd swaying back and forth. During the musical journey we touch on the jazz standard, “The Girl from Ipanema,” as well as covering the song “Pepper,” by the Butthole Surfers. After some camp time, I make my way back up to Spirit Lake for Corey Wong, the lead guitarist for Vulfpeck. He and his band are fast and funky. He spends a bunch of time on the mic explaining what they just did musically. He goes way to fast and it feels like he’s trolling the crowd to a degree. He talks over the band, presses Benny Bloom, the talented trumpeter for Lettuce to come up on stage only a moment before playing. Despite the tongue-in-cheek obnoxiousness, the music is excellent. Then, he encourages the crowd to go out this weekend and “Tang the Hump.” Suddenly a nice guy, he is empowering us to take on our problems. Wong goes from annoying to inspirational in just a few moments. He has Bloom and Vulfpeck vocalist Antwan Stanley sit-in again before ending a great set.
In 2018, The Infamous Stringdusters have already won a Grammy for their album, Laws of Gravity. This band is super impressive, even after my bluegrass standards were raised by the killer performances from last weekend’s Suwannee Roots Revival (REVIEW HERE). They work their way through a magical setlist with “Dancing in the Streets” into “Waste” by Phish. Jeremy Garrett (fiddle) takes things up a notch and the crowd can’t help but to be clicking their heels and swinging about from each other’s elbows. They stick to the theme of the weekend with a cover of “2001” but it’s so twangy you can hardly make it out. Andy Hall is super impressive on the dobro as the clouds from the oncoming storm draw closer and closer.
From here I am convinced to go and see Sound Tribe Sector Nine. It’s their second set of the day and they open with “Click Lang Echo.” Party people and rage sticks are everywhere. It’s sensory overload with hoops and lights in every direction. They land in “Rent” where they feature their amazing bassist, Alana Rocklin. She shines bright, plucking and slapping, in what is easy the most colorful set of the day so far. The rain from the storm starts to slowly fall and we go from Creatures of the Galaxy to monsters of the mist. “World Go ‘Round” is the closer for the set and we head to the amphitheater for tonight’s headliner: Joe Russo’s Almost Dead.
My friends show their excitement as we get an “Estimated Prophet” right off the bat. In addition, they cover the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.” “Tennessee Jed” is just too long and I have to escape as they head back into the chorus for a third go around. I break free from the crowd and walk in the rain to the Patch Stage to get my glitch funk on with The Floozies. They have a huge crowd and it’s difficult to even get a spot with a view. I get my fill of this funk quickly as it is very difficult to find a spot worth standing in.
Back at JRAD, Hamilton (guitar) and Benevento (keys) are out of control. Trying their best to be more outlandish than the other, they stretch the Grateful Dead tunes to their breaking points. Later that evening, we enjoy a crunchy set of Lettuce at the Amp. Their funk is enough to keep me from my bed which has been calling my all the way from camp. I’m definitely not too tired to “Move On Up” with Nigel Hall on vocals. My friends and I snack on the sweet tunes and starbursts I brought to the set. Adam “Shmeeans” Smirnoff is impressive with his guitar work and the band creeps into the Halloween movie theme song, but with way more bass. Long gone are the days that I miss Krasno when I see this band, Smirnoff is a beast. What a set! I want to go and rest, but Ajeva, who I missed earlier in the day is playing at my friends campsite and I steal over there for a few great songs. We stand around and swap stories, then it’s off to bed!
THURSDAY
Sets seen: 11
Miles walked: 7.1 miles
FRIDAY we begin with group meals and a bunch of great music! First up are The Wood Brothers in the Meadow. Their sound lands somewhere between folk and Americana. They play for a crowd brave enough to stand in the sun in this post-monsoon Hula. The humidity is high and that makes things especially hot and heavy for Too Many Zoos. This brass house trio from NYC has the crowd all the way up! Man, this party poppin’! Leo Pellegrino (baritone saxophone) holds down the baselines and Matt “Doe” Muirhead (trumpet, sax) dances like a crazy person. I can still feel the bass in my chest as we hoof it back to eat.
I’m so tired, but with a huge smile on my face. This is what its all about! After a short break at camp, we are on our way back out to the Meadow for Medeski, Martin, and Wood. This normally weird three piece is today, distinctly dancy. John Medeski (keys) is the leader of the pack, takes the crowd for a spin on the dance floors with his uptempo, funky songs. These guys are the perfect vibe for this breezy afternoon.
We transition from jazz funk in the meadow to Break Science Live Band in the Amp. Essentially, this is Lettuce but instead of Nigel Hall on keys, we have producer and keyboardist Borahm Lee. He provides “a funky, funky style and a funky swag” for the band to groove on. They take it down to a slow, reggae sound while the rain drizzles upon us. Scott Flynn (trumpet) from Odesza joins the mix on stage. He and Adam Deitch (drums) go back and forth, having what seems like a musical conversation. These guys know how to get down. I can’t wait for tomorrow afternoon’s Lettuce set.
The Malah are up next and they are awesome. We make our way to the coolest stage, The Campground Stage. Its a smaller trailer stage, but they have positioned it just on the waters edge inside of Spirit Lake. It’s decorated with art that both moves and lights up. On stage, the guys dress up like Coneheads for their special set. Celebrating 15 years with this band on these hallowed grounds is a dream come true as they play their only appearance of the year. They have a saxophonist join them on stage for sultry sounds on top of their jazzy groove. Next, we catch a few songs of Trampled by Turtles before heading over to the band of the weekend: The String Cheese Incident. They are such a delight and you can feel the love in the air. The sun is setting and the people are out to play.
Dancing barefoot in the grass music fans of all ages gather for the first of seven SCI sets this weekend. The open with “Texas” and follow it with Jason Hann’s (percussion) new tune “Manga.” They are joined next on stage by alternative country music artist Rayland Baxter for “Gone Crooked,” and “Hey Larocco.” We finish the set with “Let’s go Outside” and dance our way to the Patch Stage for Bustle In Your Hedgerow: Joe Russo’s (drums) take on Led Zeppelin. They are great, and I love how close I can get to the stage for such a big sound. Scott Metzger is a beast on guitar and does Page justice.
On our way back to camp for a pit stop, we pass a giant light up lotus flower in Spirit Lake. It’s gorgeous and huge, but most of all its a musical instrument. They are playing a giant light up Tesla flower. I don’t even know how to think anymore.
I don’t even know how to think anymore.
The String Cheese Incident reconvene to play a few of their huge songs: “Joyful Sound,” and “Rivertrance” in the next set. Bill Nershi (guitar, vocals) gets the crowd to holler at the rising moon and in the next song he sits down with his legs crossed. The music is slow and trance-like allowing us to all center our Cheese. We pass by STS9 and can see their gorgeous lights from afar. Heavy and fast baselines combined with fluffy keys make for an uplifting but driving sound. We end up at Rezz where an LED goggle-wearing woman rages the Amphitheater. Her rude bass and distorted glitch noises are pretty damn cool. She wins me over later in the set with a “Killing in the Name” cover by Rage Against the Machine. From there I try my best to stay upright at Odesza but I just can’t do it. Luckily I can hear most of the show from my air mattress where I am happy spend the rest of the night.
FRIDAY
Sets seen: 12
Miles walked: 11 miles.
SATURDAY. Rise and shine! Saturday is here! I know its going to be a good day because I wake up to breakfast in bed. Yum! French toast, eggs, and bacon is the perfect start to this gorgeous day! I’m ready and get out of camp as quick as possible to catch Orlando’s Leisure Chief. Theses guys dominate funk/jazz scene and are where its at for all you high class ragers. They play Derek Engstrom’s (drums) “Seven O’clock” as I walk towards The Patch Stage and KNOWER.
HOLY SHIT! KNOWER knows how to rage! Indie-punk jazz with killer vocals on top. This band is fast paced, intricate and ruuuude. Normally a duo, today they have 2 sets of keys, a seated bassist (Sam Wilts), and OG’s Louis Cole (drums), and Genevieve Artadi (vocals). Cole stops in the middle of one of their songs to stand and chuck his drum stick at a crash symbol set up 20 feet behind him on stage (see above in the back right corner). He misses with the first attempt, but hits home with the second try. These guys are great! My friends were all in my ear yesterday about the Lizzo set that “changed their lives.” And now I know how they feel, standing here covered in goosebumps as I discover a new artist at this endless adventure of a festival.
Lettuce in the Meadow is great! I’m surrounded by dozens of my smiling friends. The boys of Boston are cooking up some great daytime funk and Adam Smirnoff is again slicing and dicing on guitar. It’s his birthday too! (HBD!) Now, the band slows down for some dirty funk trap that builds and builds until finally we are throwing our towels up to the beginnings of “Madison Square.” I don’t know everything they played after that, but it was a hell of a set. Better than last night if you ask me. How can you not love this band?!
A camp sandwich later and I’m back at the Amphitheater to catch the end of a chill Stephen Marley set. He and his band stay seated the whole time as they navigate old Bob tunes and sprinkle in some of Stephen’s bigger hits. I need something laid back before we bounce for the third SCI set of the weekend. On my way across the field, I walk past a giant multicolored parachute with 50 people inside. Who knows what kind of shenanigans are going on inside of that exclusive Hulaween club. Just then, a member of Trump’s Space Force dances by me, I’m dead. This band is always a great time. They are just so light and fluffy: rainbows, bubbles and butterflies seem to be present at all of their sets. They hand off the solo better than any band I know, and they just always seem to have just enough edge to keep everyone interested.
We sneak off to Roosevelt Collier Band where he’s holding the note hard on the slide guitar. Driving bass and his constantly wiggling note has a throng of trick-or-treaters dancing with delight. An hour goes quickly and we are right back in the Meadow for SCI’s big theme set of the weekend: Women of the Galaxy. Each song will feature a guest female vocalist. They start simmering with The Rolling Stone’s “Gimme Shelter,” featuring Lisa Fischer. Dancers wearing fire emerge on the stage as well as ribbon dancers who are soon taken high above the stage only to come tumbling down. Next Jennifer Hartswick tributes Aretha Franklin with both her voice and trumpet for “Rock Steady” as inflatable Ouija board picks bubble over the crowd. Later, Fischer slays again with her rendition of “Killing Me Softly With His Song.”
With hearts for pupils I gaze lovingly towards the stage. This band and this set are ah MAZE ing. Just when I think it can’t get any better, Ann Wilson of Heart comes on stage to help the band out with a Cream tune, “Politician.” They rev things up with “Barracuda” and finish strong with “Get Up, Stand Up” with all the vocalists on stage. The Women of the Galaxy exit and the band takes things up to warp speed in the Space Jam encore. They start with “Rollover” but are soon in a Close Encounters jam. They weave their way through an epic space medley of Star Wars and Star Trek a while 6 foot tall aliens probe the crowd. A giant space ship is now hovering to the left of the stage and all hell has broken lose. Go ahead and watch it again, and again, and again…
Set Three
Gimme Shelter2, Rock Steady3, Proud Mary4, Killing Me Softly With His Song5, Respect6, Valerie7, Heartbreaker8, Politician9, Baracuda10, Get Up Stand Up11
Encore
Rollover> Close Encounters Jam > Star Wars Title Jam > Cantina Jam > Imperial March > Star Trek Next Generation Jam > Original Star Trek Jam > 2001 > Rollover
Notes
1 w/ Rhonda & Tony on vocals, 2 Rolling Stones cover, Lisa Fischer on vocals, 3 Aretha Franklin cover, Jen Hartswick on vocals and trumpet, 4 Tina Turner cover, Rhonda Thomas on vocals, 5 Roberta Flack cover, Lisa Fischer on vocals, 6 Aretha Franklin cover, Rhonda Thomas on vocals, 7 Amy Winehouse cover, Rhonda Thomas on vocals, 8 Pat Benatar cover, Jen Hartswick on vocals and trumpet, 9 Cream cover, Ann Wilson on vocals, 10 Heart cover, Ann Wilson on vocals, 11 Bob Marley, cover featuring everyone
We aren’t finished yet! The crowd splits with half going with me to Vulfpeck at the Patch and the majority to the Amphitheater for Dave Tipper. Vulfpeck is great, playing fan favorites, “Funky Duck” and “1612” with singer Antwan Stanley. I steal away from the funk to go and try to check out Tipper, but I can’t even get close. The place is packed to the gills with folks looking to get their freak on. This guy has a different approach to music that really defies explanation. It’s weird and its good. Go see it.
We are forced to wait a bit for the biggest act of the weekend. They are more that worth the wait as Jamiroquai dominates the stage. His vibrant coat and wicked cool light up headdress keep him warm on this more than brisk evening. His set has huge hits including “Little L,” “Cosmic Girl,” and “Space Cowboy.” The guys will play just 5 US dates this year and we’re here!
Words cannot explain the happiness I feel as all the Napoleon Dynamites in the crowd have their time to shine when “Canned Heat” comes on. Pure. Bliss. This is why we are here!! Nothing can touch this party. Two hours blaze by and the show comes to an end with Jay Kay (vocals) thanking the crowd for a wonderful night. “Thank you psychedelic Statue of Liberty” someone calls out from behind me.
My life is complete.
SATURDAY
Sets caught: 12
Miles walked: 11.4
SUNDAY is for the strong. We pass almost no one on our way to the first music of the day. It’s plain to see that the whole festival stayed up late last night. The place is a ghost town (pardon my pun). We pass Rebirth Brass Band just in time for them to cover “Waterfalls” by TLC. It’s so fitting because three of my best friends were “Crazy, Sexy, & Cool” last night for Halloween! I’d like to stay for another song but I’m really on my way out to see Yonder Mountain String Band in the Meadow. I have been invited to sit under the trees with a couple of cute girls and we take this time to enjoy the shade and professional pickin’. YMSB weaves through a bunch of old songs including “No Rain,” by Blind Melon and Pure Prairie League’s “Amie.” Their biggest cover of the set was a sick version of Edgar Winter Band’s “Frankenstein.” These guys can really cause you fall in love with bluegrass.
“You guys are still here?” Nershi (guitar, vocals) calls from the main stage as SCI assembles for the 6th time this weekend. Hats, sunglasses, and parasols are the fashion of the afternoon as the band battles the beautiful sunshiny day. It’s the softer side of Cheese with Kyle Hollingsworth (keys) serenading us with an accordion. I have a great time rubbing elbows with friends and eating great vendor food. It’s so surreal to be in this place with all these awesome people. I love having fun myself, but to see others ring their own bell is the true definition of joy. I know some people need this little bit of freedom more than others and it just fills my heart to see so many happy people, all in one place.
During Cheese set break I have a little fun with Galactic and their big hit “Heart of Steel.” I can’t stay long because the seventh Cheese set is on soon. Last year, it was easily my favorite of the weekend. This year they don’t disappoint with covers of “Superstition,” with Nick Cassarino of Nth Power as well as a predictable “Naive Melody” by the Talking Heads. I am so satisfied with the Cheese sets this year. The Revivalists are next and I need something slow. These guys have the feelings turned all the way up and the crowd sways and sings along. They are looking sharp: all in matching 80’s track suits all in different colors. David Shaw (vocals) is super smooth as he leads the crowd in a call back or two. They send the crowd out happy with a cover of Beastie Boys, “Sabotage.”
Turkuaz is up next. The power-funk nine piece from Brooklyn, NY that takes no prisoners. Balancing male-female harmonies, strutting guitars, wild horn arrangements, and interminable grooves, this spirit takes shape in the color donned by each respective member on stage nightly via larger-than-life performances. THESE GUYS BRING THE FUNK! They do their best to keep things spooky with their song selection, mostly coming from their newest album: Life in the City. They normally each dress up in one solid color for the evening, but something is off here tonight. They are all just a single color still, but have all switched and it’s amazing. With the color switch comes new attitude from the way their are dressed. Sammi, who is usually pink, is now all black with short straight black hair. You can tell they’re having fun on stage and it radiates outward to us!
I’m surrounded by friends and smiling faces as we tear up the rug for the last set of the weekend. The guy next to me insists that I have my hands above my head at all times, and he’s right. Kuaz finishes out strong with a cover of Hot Chocolates‘ “Everyone’s a Winner.” This song will be stuck in my head for a week as I pull out all the stops and use up every last one of my dance moves. The music ends and I’m exhausted. Luckily for me I have cool friends who cook me spaghetti back at camp. This gives me the fuel I need to go out into the darkness one last time looking for live music. I succeed in finding Guavatron hiding in the mist. This is one of my favorite local Jamtronica bands and I’m glad I stumbled upon them, even if its late night and at a small campsite. I highly recommend checking them out when you get the chance. Finally I go to bed, just as the sun begins to rise.
SUNDAY
Sets caught: 9
Miles walked: 11.6
We did it! We made it through 4 days 6 days of camping and live music! I’m tired, and my feet hurt. I’m sunburnt, and trending towards the wook flu. BUT I wouldn’t trade this feeling for anything in the world!
THE 2018 HULA MONSTER HAS BEEN CAUGHT!
HULAWEEN 2018
Total Sets: 44
Total Miles Walked: 41
Suwannee Hulaween 2018 Live Review by Spencer Storch.
Suwannee Hulaween 2018 Photos by Chad Pearce, Carmelo Conte, and Spencer Storch.
HULAWEEN 2018 PHOTOS
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A right-wing "European identity" group called Generation Identity crowdfunded enough to hire a ship in order to intercept refugees from North Africa trying to reach Europe. But as the effort cast off in July, Patreon cancelled an account being used to fund the efforts. And today, the group's ship lost propulsion off the coast of Libya. The ship that arrived to provide assistance was one operated by Sea-Eye, a nongovernmental organization coincidentally working to rescue refugees in distress on the Mediterranean.
The C-Star is a 42-year-old research and survey ship operated by Marine Global Services Ltd. and registered in the land-locked nation of Mongolia. The vessel was hired in July by the anti-refugee organization using funds from a Patreon campaign called "Defend Europe" that started in May. Through sites such as Patreon and WeSearchr, the group collected funds for its "rescue mission":
It’s a mission to save Europe, stop illegal immigration and save lives on the sea. We want to expose doings of the NGOs, disrupt the human traffickers and support the Libyan Coastguard with informations [sic]. To do that we need your help to get our ship in the Mediterranean Sea.
The group promoted their cause and fundraising campaign with the assistance of Canadian right-wing YouTube personality Lauren Southern. Southern had accompanied Generation Identity on a prior mission at-seas, when the group used a small boat to intercept a rescue ship operated by Doctors Without Borders and the French refugee rescue charity SOS Mediterranee (Generation Identity fired flares at it). Southern said that the group's goal was to get more boats and to use nets and other tools to foul the propellers of "migrant boats."
That attention helped the group raise more than $100,000 by July. The group's WeSearchr page has now reached $213,000 in donations from more than 2,800 contributors. But getting it to the Mediterranean (and getting Generation Identity members aboard) turned out to be a bit more difficult than anticipated. The ship, previously known as the Suunta, was held up by authorities at the Suez Canal when it was en route from Djibouti. The ship did not having proper documentation for crew, according to a report from the activist group Hope Not Hate. Then on July 20, the Patreon accounts of Southern and Austrian "identitarian" Martin Sellner, were closed. Those accounts were being used to fund the ship's operations.
In a message to Southern, Patreon executives said:
It appears that you are currently raising funds in order to take part in activities that are likely to cause loss of life. We have therefore decided to remove your page from Patreon, and paid out your final balance of $95.00 to you.
(Southern disputes this characterization. While she has openly promoted the Generation Identity campaign, in a new video she claims that her Patreon was funding her work as a "YouTube journalist," not the Generation Identity ship.)
After the cancellations, the C-Star next had trouble getting to Italy to pick up the Generation Identity members, who were waiting for the ship in Catania, Italy. Facing protests and unwanted attention from local officials, the "identitarians" flew to Crete in late July to meet the ship, where the ship's crew again ran into trouble with authorities over documentation for Sri Lankan crew members. The ship's captain and owner were placed under arrest by Turkish authorities there.
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But on July 31, the ship finally got underway despite all its setbacks. After refueling in Tunisia, the C-Star headed to a position off the coast of Libya—where the ship broke down and set adrift.
In a post to Facebook this morning, a Sea-Eye representative wrote:
A spokesman for [European Naval Forces Mediterranean] Operation Sophia informed... the chairman of Sea-Eye Michael Busch Heuer on Friday morning that the Nazi ship was disabled [due to mechanical failure] and needed help. Since Our Cutter Sea-eye is closest to the c-Star, we have been instructed by the [Maritime Rescue Coordination Center Rome], the emergency service for the Western Mediterranean to get the ship to help. The Sea-eye is currently with the c-Star. Michael Busch Heuer [said], "To help in distress is the duty of anyone who is at sea, without distinction to their origin, color, religion or beliefs."
Generation Identity acknowledged the problems in a post to Twitter but said that the ship was not in distress:
According to data from Marine Traffic, as of noon Eastern Time today (1600 UTC), the C-Star was underway again and limping north at a speed of 3 knots. | {
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Barcelona will play for yet another trophy on Saturday night. If the Catalans can beat Valencia in Seville , they will win a second successive domestic double and claim a record fifth successive Copa del Rey.
Yet not everyone is happy.
For the showpiece at Betis’ Benito Villamarin stadium, the fans have prepared a tifo which reads: “Tots units: som-hi”. All together, let’s go.
The first bit is also a line from the Barca hymn. “Tots units fem força”. All together, we are strong.
After the pain of defeat to Liverpool in the Champions League earlier this month, the message of unity is an important one.
But on social media, there is no such togetherness. Underneath every post from Barcelona’s official account, there is ire and rage, mostly directed at Valverde and Ivan Rakitic.
It has quickly been forgotten how Valverde steered a Barcelona side seemingly in decline and in chaos following the departure of Neymar, supposedly about to be overtaken by Real Madrid, to La Liga and the Copa del Rey in his debut season.
The collapse against Roma is remembered, though. In fact, he has never been allowed to forget it. And now, there is a debacle to supersede that failure: Anfield.
In the aftermath of the 4-0 loss at Liverpool in the Champions League semi-finals earlier this month, it seemed likely that Valverde could and would not keep his job. But the Barca boss has since been backed by president Josep Maria Bartomeu. With no obvious replacement out there, he seems set to stay.
When Barcelona beat Getafe 2-0 at Camp Nou five days after Anfield, there were a few timid whistles against the team, but no chants against Valverde. Nor Rakitic.
How the Spanish press reacted to Liverpool’s win over Barcelona 9 show all How the Spanish press reacted to Liverpool’s win over Barcelona 1/9 How the Spanish press reacted to Liverpool’s stunning Champions League comeback against Barcelona… 2/9 SPORT 'the Champions League is too big for Valverde' 3/9 ARA 'Four stabs in the heart for Barcelona fans' 4/9 L’Esportiu 'ridiculous repeat' 5/9 El Mundo Deportivo 'Another European debacle' 6/9 La Vanguardia 'Anfield dynamites Barcelona' 7/9 MARCA “hecatomb” and then a “historic failure” in their Wednesday edition 8/9 AS 'Valverde is the crossfire' 9/9 El Pais “Barca burn on the bonfire at Anfield” 1/9 How the Spanish press reacted to Liverpool’s stunning Champions League comeback against Barcelona… 2/9 SPORT 'the Champions League is too big for Valverde' 3/9 ARA 'Four stabs in the heart for Barcelona fans' 4/9 L’Esportiu 'ridiculous repeat' 5/9 El Mundo Deportivo 'Another European debacle' 6/9 La Vanguardia 'Anfield dynamites Barcelona' 7/9 MARCA “hecatomb” and then a “historic failure” in their Wednesday edition 8/9 AS 'Valverde is the crossfire' 9/9 El Pais “Barca burn on the bonfire at Anfield”
But on Twitter, there was a special campaign to get #ValverdeOUT trending during the match and sure enough, it did. And it has continued ever since.
Valverde is now on the verge of another domestic double and he has lost just 11 games since taking over from Luis Enrique in the summer of 2017.
Two of those came with La Liga already won. Three more were cup losses turned around in the second leg. Another two arrived in the Supercopa, his first fixtures in charge, with Barca broken by Neymar’s exit and well beaten by Real Madrid. And even though the defeats in Rome and Liverpool were desperately disappointing, they are the only ones in Europe during his time as coach.
To put the record into perspective, Real Madrid lost 12 games in 2018-19 in La Liga alone. And since losing out to Los Blancos in that Supercopa series, Valverde is unbeaten against the club’s biggest rivals, with four wins and two draws: 15-4 on aggregate.
Furthermore: the night after Barca’s 3-0 loss in Rome, Zinedine Zidane’s side found themselves 3-0 down at home to Juventus and almost suffered a similar fiasco, before a highly contentious late penalty saw Madrid escape with a 4-3 aggregate success, en route to a third straight title.
It is perhaps that Real run which has done the most damage in the eyes of many. Madrid’s success in Europe in recent seasons has hurt Barca, despite their domestic dominance. And for a lot of fans, it is too much to take.
This was supposed to be the year. Messi had said so in August. Yet there is no guarantee for any club in the Champions League. Juventus, PSG and Atletico Madrid were all obsessed with winning it this term, but the final will be played between Liverpool and Tottenham. That is knockout football.
The collapse at Anfield has sparked a fresh debate about style and it is a genuine question. With greater control in midfield, Barcelona may have survived against Liverpool.
But there are many layers here. Valverde’s tactics can certainly be scrutinised. In order to play the type of football so many demand, though, the right players are needed. Xavi is gone, Andres Iniesta too, while Sergio Busquets is past his peak.
In Pictures | Lionel Messi 40 show all In Pictures | Lionel Messi 1/40 Getty Images 2/40 Lionel Messi of Argentina celebrates after scoring his team's second goal during the 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil Group F match between Argentina and Bosnia-Herzegovina at Maracana on June 15, 2014 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Getty Images 3/40 FIFA World player of the year winner Ronaldinho, the Gillette Best Young Player Award Leo Messi, and third place FIFA World player of the year Samuel Etoo pose with their trophies before La Liga match between FC Barcelona and Celta, at the Camp Nou stadium December 20, 2005 Getty Images 4/40 Barcelona's Argentinian forward Lionel Messi (C) vies with Real Madrid's Welsh forward Gareth Bale (L) and Real Madrid's Croatian midfielder Luka Modric during the Spanish league football match between Real Madrid CF and FC Barcelona at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium in Madrid on March 2, 2019 AFP/Getty Images 5/40 Lionel Messi of FC Barcelona looks on as Catalan Pro-Independence flags are seen on the background during the La Liga match between Barcelona and SD Eibar at Camp Nou on September 19, 2017 in Barcelona, Spain Getty Images 6/40 Messi for Argentina Under 20s in 2005 vs PERU AFP/Getty Images 7/40 Lionel Messi from Argentina celebrates with the cup after winning the FIFA World Youth Championships 2005 Final between Argentina and Nigeria on July 2, 2005 in Utrecht, Netherlands Getty Images 8/40 FC Barcelona's Argentinian Messi scores the second goal against Albacete during their Spanish League football match at the Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona, 01 May 2005. FC Barcelona won 2-0 AFP/Getty Images 9/40 Argentine Lionel Messi (R) is fouled by Peruvian goalkeeper Leao Butron 09 October, 2005 at the Monumental stadium in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during their FIFA World Cup Germany 2006 South American qualifying round match. Argentina won 2-0 AFP/Getty Images 10/40 Argentina's footballer Lionel Messi (R) is marked by Brazil's Mineiro during their Copa America Venezuela-2007 final match at the Panchencho Romero Stadium July 15, 2007 in Maracaibo, Venezuela AFP/Getty Images 11/40 Argentinian forward Lionel Messi leaves the pitch with his gold medal after attending the men's Olympic football tournament medal ceremony at the national stadium in Beijing during the 2008 Beijing Olympic games on August 23, 2008. Argentina won gold ahead of Nigeria and Brazil AFP/Getty Images 12/40 Lionel Messi of Barcelona and Argentina sits on top of the world in 2009 Getty Images 13/40 Barcelona´s Argentinian forward Lionel Messi (C) and Barcelona'´s midfielder Andres Iniesta (R) celebrate with the Champions League Cup afte the trophy ceremony on May 27, 2009 at the Olympic Stadium in Rome. Barcelona defeated Manchester United 2-0 in the final of the UEFA football Champions League AFP/Getty Images 14/40 Lionel Messi (2R) of Barcelona tests the defence of Manchester City (FLTR) Richard Dunne, Pablo Zabaleta, Gareth Barry and Stephen Ireland during the Joan Gamper Trophy match between Barcelona and Manchester City at the Camp Nou Stadium on August 19, 2009 in Barcelona, Spain. Manchester City won the match 1-0 Getty Images 15/40 Diego Maradona head coach of Argentina talks with Lionel Messi of Argentina as they celebrate victory after the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa Group B match between Argentina and South Korea at Soccer City Stadium on June 17, 2010 in Johannesburg, South Africa Getty Images 16/40 Lionel Messi of FC Barcelona poses with the trophy after victory in the UEFA Champions League final between FC Barcelona and Manchester United FC at Wembley Stadium on May 28, 2011 in London Getty Images 17/40 Lionel Messi of Argentina receives the FIFA Ballon d'Or 2012 trophy on January 7, 2013 in Zurich, Switzerland. Getty Images 18/40 David Beckham (R) of PSG shakes hands with Lionel Messi of Barcelona ahead of the UEFA Champions League Quarter Final match between Paris Saint-Germain and Barcelona FCB at Parc des Princes on April 2, 2013 in Paris, France Getty Images 19/40 Lionel Messi of Barcelona celebrates scoring his team's third goal as Cristiano Ronaldo of Real Madrid looks dejected during the La Liga match between Real Madrid CF and FC Barcelona at the Bernabeu on March 23, 2014 in Madrid, Spain Getty Images 20/40 Lionel Messi of FC Barcelona with his son Thiago walk out the pitch prior to the La Liga match between FC Barcelona and Real Sociedad de Futbol at Camp Nou on September 24, 2013 in Barcelona, Spain Getty Images 21/40 Sergio Aguero (L) and Lionel Messi of Argentina react while walking off the field after defeating Iran 1-0 during the 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil Group F match between Argentina and Iran at Estadio Mineirao on June 21, 2014 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil Getty Images 22/40 Bastian Schweinsteiger of Germany hugs Lionel Messi of Argentina after Germany's 1-0 victory in extra time during the 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil Final match between Germany and Argentina at Maracana on July 13, 2014 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Getty Images 23/40 Lionel Messi of FC Barcelona with the match ball after scoring three goals during the La Liga match between FC Barcelona and RCD Espanyol at Camp Nou on December 7, 2014 in Barcelona, Spain Getty Images 24/40 Lionel Messi of FC Barcelona performs an overhead kick under a challenge by Nicolas Otamendi of Valencia CF during the La Liga match between FC Barcelona and Valencia CF at Camp Nou on April 18, 2015 in Barcelona, Spain Getty Images 25/40 FIFA Ballon d'Or nominees Lionel Messi of Argentina and FC Barcelona (L) and Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal and Real Madrid smile during the FIFA Ballon d'Or Gala 2014 at the Kongresshaus on January 12, 2015 in Zurich, Switzerland. Getty Images 26/40 Lionel Messi of Barcelona celebrates with the trophy after the UEFA Champions League Final between Juventus and FC Barcelona at Olympiastadion on June 6, 2015 in Berlin, Germany Getty Images 27/40 Barcelona players including Javier Mascherano, Lionel Messi, Neymar and Luis Suarez celebrate victory with the trophy after the UEFA Champions League Final between Juventus and FC Barcelona at Olympiastadion on June 6, 2015 in Berlin, Germany Getty Images 28/40 Lionel Messi of Barcelona celebrates with his winners medal after victory in the UEFA Super Cup between Barcelona and Sevilla FC at Dinamo Arena on August 11, 2015 in Tbilisi, Georgia Getty Images 29/40 Lionel Messi of Argentina and FC Barcelona and his partner Antonella Roccuzzo attend the FIFA Ballon d'Or Gala 2015 at the Kongresshaus on January 11, 2016 in Zurich, Switzerland Getty Images 30/40 Lionel Messi of Argentina and FC Barcelona receives the Ballon d'or during the FIFA Ballon d'Or Gala 2015 at the Kongresshaus on January 11, 2016 in Zurich, Switzerland Getty Images 31/40 Lionel Messi of FC Barcelona holds up the FIFA Ballon d'Or trophy prior to the La Liga match between FC Barcelona and Athletic Club de Bilbao at Camp Nou on January 17, 2016 in Barcelona, Spain Getty Images 32/40 Lionel Messi #10 of Argentina interacts with a fan who ran onto the field prior to the start of the second half during a 2016 Copa America Centenario Semifinal match between Argentina and the United States at NRG Stadium on June 21, 2016 in Houston, Texas Getty Images 33/40 Argentina's Lionel Messi (C) is marked by Chile's Arturo Vidal (L) eyed by Argentina's Ever Banega during the Copa America Centenario final in East Rutherford, New Jersey, United States, on June 26, 2016 AFP/Getty Images 34/40 Lionel Messi (L) and Andres Iniesta (R) of FC Barcelona lift up the Spanish La Liga 2015-2016 season trophy before the La Liga match between FC Barcelona and Real Betis Balompie at Camp Nou on August 20, 2016 in Barcelona, Spain Getty Images 35/40 Neymar (R) of Brazil greets Lionel Messi of Argentina during a match between Brazil and Argentina as part of 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia Qualifier at Mineirao stadium on November 10, 2016 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil Getty Images 36/40 Gianluigi Buffon, Dani Alves, Leonardo Bonucci, Sergio Ramos, Marcelo; Luka Modric, Toni Kroos, Andres Iniesta; Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar pose for a selfie as they are named The Fifa FifPro World XI during The Best FIFA Football Awards Show on October 23, 2017 in London Getty Images 37/40 Barcelona's Argentinian forward Lionel Messi poses with his four Golden Shoe awards after receiving the 2017 European Golden Shoe honoring the year's leading goalscorer during a ceremony at the Antigua Fabrica Estrella Damm in Barcelona on November 24, 2017 AFP/Getty Images 38/40 Lionel Messi of FC Barcelona in action during the La Liga match between Real Betis Balompie and FC Barcelona at Estadio Benito Villamarin on March 17, 2019 in Seville, Spain Getty Images 39/40 AFP via Getty Images 40/40 Lionel Messi after Barcelona were thrashed 8-2 by Bayern Munich. POOL/AFP via Getty Images 1/40 Getty Images 2/40 Lionel Messi of Argentina celebrates after scoring his team's second goal during the 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil Group F match between Argentina and Bosnia-Herzegovina at Maracana on June 15, 2014 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Getty Images 3/40 FIFA World player of the year winner Ronaldinho, the Gillette Best Young Player Award Leo Messi, and third place FIFA World player of the year Samuel Etoo pose with their trophies before La Liga match between FC Barcelona and Celta, at the Camp Nou stadium December 20, 2005 Getty Images 4/40 Barcelona's Argentinian forward Lionel Messi (C) vies with Real Madrid's Welsh forward Gareth Bale (L) and Real Madrid's Croatian midfielder Luka Modric during the Spanish league football match between Real Madrid CF and FC Barcelona at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium in Madrid on March 2, 2019 AFP/Getty Images 5/40 Lionel Messi of FC Barcelona looks on as Catalan Pro-Independence flags are seen on the background during the La Liga match between Barcelona and SD Eibar at Camp Nou on September 19, 2017 in Barcelona, Spain Getty Images 6/40 Messi for Argentina Under 20s in 2005 vs PERU AFP/Getty Images 7/40 Lionel Messi from Argentina celebrates with the cup after winning the FIFA World Youth Championships 2005 Final between Argentina and Nigeria on July 2, 2005 in Utrecht, Netherlands Getty Images 8/40 FC Barcelona's Argentinian Messi scores the second goal against Albacete during their Spanish League football match at the Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona, 01 May 2005. FC Barcelona won 2-0 AFP/Getty Images 9/40 Argentine Lionel Messi (R) is fouled by Peruvian goalkeeper Leao Butron 09 October, 2005 at the Monumental stadium in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during their FIFA World Cup Germany 2006 South American qualifying round match. Argentina won 2-0 AFP/Getty Images 10/40 Argentina's footballer Lionel Messi (R) is marked by Brazil's Mineiro during their Copa America Venezuela-2007 final match at the Panchencho Romero Stadium July 15, 2007 in Maracaibo, Venezuela AFP/Getty Images 11/40 Argentinian forward Lionel Messi leaves the pitch with his gold medal after attending the men's Olympic football tournament medal ceremony at the national stadium in Beijing during the 2008 Beijing Olympic games on August 23, 2008. Argentina won gold ahead of Nigeria and Brazil AFP/Getty Images 12/40 Lionel Messi of Barcelona and Argentina sits on top of the world in 2009 Getty Images 13/40 Barcelona´s Argentinian forward Lionel Messi (C) and Barcelona'´s midfielder Andres Iniesta (R) celebrate with the Champions League Cup afte the trophy ceremony on May 27, 2009 at the Olympic Stadium in Rome. Barcelona defeated Manchester United 2-0 in the final of the UEFA football Champions League AFP/Getty Images 14/40 Lionel Messi (2R) of Barcelona tests the defence of Manchester City (FLTR) Richard Dunne, Pablo Zabaleta, Gareth Barry and Stephen Ireland during the Joan Gamper Trophy match between Barcelona and Manchester City at the Camp Nou Stadium on August 19, 2009 in Barcelona, Spain. Manchester City won the match 1-0 Getty Images 15/40 Diego Maradona head coach of Argentina talks with Lionel Messi of Argentina as they celebrate victory after the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa Group B match between Argentina and South Korea at Soccer City Stadium on June 17, 2010 in Johannesburg, South Africa Getty Images 16/40 Lionel Messi of FC Barcelona poses with the trophy after victory in the UEFA Champions League final between FC Barcelona and Manchester United FC at Wembley Stadium on May 28, 2011 in London Getty Images 17/40 Lionel Messi of Argentina receives the FIFA Ballon d'Or 2012 trophy on January 7, 2013 in Zurich, Switzerland. Getty Images 18/40 David Beckham (R) of PSG shakes hands with Lionel Messi of Barcelona ahead of the UEFA Champions League Quarter Final match between Paris Saint-Germain and Barcelona FCB at Parc des Princes on April 2, 2013 in Paris, France Getty Images 19/40 Lionel Messi of Barcelona celebrates scoring his team's third goal as Cristiano Ronaldo of Real Madrid looks dejected during the La Liga match between Real Madrid CF and FC Barcelona at the Bernabeu on March 23, 2014 in Madrid, Spain Getty Images 20/40 Lionel Messi of FC Barcelona with his son Thiago walk out the pitch prior to the La Liga match between FC Barcelona and Real Sociedad de Futbol at Camp Nou on September 24, 2013 in Barcelona, Spain Getty Images 21/40 Sergio Aguero (L) and Lionel Messi of Argentina react while walking off the field after defeating Iran 1-0 during the 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil Group F match between Argentina and Iran at Estadio Mineirao on June 21, 2014 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil Getty Images 22/40 Bastian Schweinsteiger of Germany hugs Lionel Messi of Argentina after Germany's 1-0 victory in extra time during the 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil Final match between Germany and Argentina at Maracana on July 13, 2014 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Getty Images 23/40 Lionel Messi of FC Barcelona with the match ball after scoring three goals during the La Liga match between FC Barcelona and RCD Espanyol at Camp Nou on December 7, 2014 in Barcelona, Spain Getty Images 24/40 Lionel Messi of FC Barcelona performs an overhead kick under a challenge by Nicolas Otamendi of Valencia CF during the La Liga match between FC Barcelona and Valencia CF at Camp Nou on April 18, 2015 in Barcelona, Spain Getty Images 25/40 FIFA Ballon d'Or nominees Lionel Messi of Argentina and FC Barcelona (L) and Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal and Real Madrid smile during the FIFA Ballon d'Or Gala 2014 at the Kongresshaus on January 12, 2015 in Zurich, Switzerland. Getty Images 26/40 Lionel Messi of Barcelona celebrates with the trophy after the UEFA Champions League Final between Juventus and FC Barcelona at Olympiastadion on June 6, 2015 in Berlin, Germany Getty Images 27/40 Barcelona players including Javier Mascherano, Lionel Messi, Neymar and Luis Suarez celebrate victory with the trophy after the UEFA Champions League Final between Juventus and FC Barcelona at Olympiastadion on June 6, 2015 in Berlin, Germany Getty Images 28/40 Lionel Messi of Barcelona celebrates with his winners medal after victory in the UEFA Super Cup between Barcelona and Sevilla FC at Dinamo Arena on August 11, 2015 in Tbilisi, Georgia Getty Images 29/40 Lionel Messi of Argentina and FC Barcelona and his partner Antonella Roccuzzo attend the FIFA Ballon d'Or Gala 2015 at the Kongresshaus on January 11, 2016 in Zurich, Switzerland Getty Images 30/40 Lionel Messi of Argentina and FC Barcelona receives the Ballon d'or during the FIFA Ballon d'Or Gala 2015 at the Kongresshaus on January 11, 2016 in Zurich, Switzerland Getty Images 31/40 Lionel Messi of FC Barcelona holds up the FIFA Ballon d'Or trophy prior to the La Liga match between FC Barcelona and Athletic Club de Bilbao at Camp Nou on January 17, 2016 in Barcelona, Spain Getty Images 32/40 Lionel Messi #10 of Argentina interacts with a fan who ran onto the field prior to the start of the second half during a 2016 Copa America Centenario Semifinal match between Argentina and the United States at NRG Stadium on June 21, 2016 in Houston, Texas Getty Images 33/40 Argentina's Lionel Messi (C) is marked by Chile's Arturo Vidal (L) eyed by Argentina's Ever Banega during the Copa America Centenario final in East Rutherford, New Jersey, United States, on June 26, 2016 AFP/Getty Images 34/40 Lionel Messi (L) and Andres Iniesta (R) of FC Barcelona lift up the Spanish La Liga 2015-2016 season trophy before the La Liga match between FC Barcelona and Real Betis Balompie at Camp Nou on August 20, 2016 in Barcelona, Spain Getty Images 35/40 Neymar (R) of Brazil greets Lionel Messi of Argentina during a match between Brazil and Argentina as part of 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia Qualifier at Mineirao stadium on November 10, 2016 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil Getty Images 36/40 Gianluigi Buffon, Dani Alves, Leonardo Bonucci, Sergio Ramos, Marcelo; Luka Modric, Toni Kroos, Andres Iniesta; Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar pose for a selfie as they are named The Fifa FifPro World XI during The Best FIFA Football Awards Show on October 23, 2017 in London Getty Images 37/40 Barcelona's Argentinian forward Lionel Messi poses with his four Golden Shoe awards after receiving the 2017 European Golden Shoe honoring the year's leading goalscorer during a ceremony at the Antigua Fabrica Estrella Damm in Barcelona on November 24, 2017 AFP/Getty Images 38/40 Lionel Messi of FC Barcelona in action during the La Liga match between Real Betis Balompie and FC Barcelona at Estadio Benito Villamarin on March 17, 2019 in Seville, Spain Getty Images 39/40 AFP via Getty Images 40/40 Lionel Messi after Barcelona were thrashed 8-2 by Bayern Munich. POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Prior to Valverde’s arrival, Barca lost 4-0 away to PSG in the Champions League and also 3-0 to Juventus…
Clearly, the issues run deeper than the coach.
Carles Alena and Riqui Puig represent the future of La Masia, while Frenkie De Jong’s arrival should see Barca’s midfield improve. But all of that will take time.
Some of the abuse aimed at Valverde is extremely distasteful. The 55-year-old has done an excellent job overall, is popular with the players and is quite clearly a good person. If he wins on Saturday, he will have five trophies as Barca boss. Yet he is treated as if he has led the club to rack and ruin.
Maybe it is because they are just very angry people with extremely difficult lives. Whatever it is, if they cannot appreciate this Barcelona team, they should probably not bother."
And here is the thing: it is fine to think that Valverde’s brand of football is not ideal for Barcelona in the long run, but it is not at all helpful or acceptable to insult and abuse a decent man who has brought much more success than failure to the club.
In addition, the grass is not always greener. Ajax’s Erik ten Hag has ruled himself out of the job already, while former Juve coach Massimiliano Allegri would hardly represent an upgrade in style terms. And he, like Valverde, is a coach who has won leagues and cups, but failed in the Champions League.
Meanwhile, there has been a huge clamour on social media for Quique Setien after he left Betis. The 60-year-old’s ideas are based on those of Johan Cruyff, but he is notoriously stubborn in his approach, finds it tough to work with egos in the dressing room and his admiration for Lionel Messi might make it difficult for him to coach objectively. He would be great for Real Sociedad or Villarreal, but does not appear right, nor ready, for Barca.
The Barca board have considered Ronald Koeman, a club legend from his time in Cruyff’s Dream Team and his winner in the 1992 European Cup success. But the current Netherlands coach almost took Valencia down in his troubled time at Mestalla, winning the Copa del Rey as the players went against his tactical instructions, and was more recently sacked by Everton.
A big Barca fan account was recently “reeling” at news Valverde might stay, yet excited by the possible arrival of Koeman as coach. Be careful what you wish for.
The vilification of Rakitic is another unsavoury sight on Twitter. The Croatian’s arrival helped Barca toughen up in 2014-15 and he was key in their treble that season, scoring the opener in the final as the Blaugrana beat Juventus.
But now, since the Liverpool loss in particular, it is in vogue to make him the scapegoat – even though Busquets has arguably been much worse this term. The latter, of course, is from La Masia, and was not pictured smiling (how dare he?!) at a fayre in Seville the day after Anfield.
Ironically, many Barca fans who once arrogantly proclaimed to others that “you don’t understand what Busquets does”, now do not seem to understand why Rakitic is so important.
The 31-year-old’s work off the ball and tactical discipline are invaluable to this team and that is why he has been so highly rated by both Luis Enrique and Valverde. “Not Barca DNA,” some say. As if that should matter. In 2006, Mark van Bommel, Deco and Edmilson started in midfield for Barca in the Champions League Final against Arsenal. Back then, the fans just wanted to win. Happier, simpler times.
Pep Guardiola, for all his brilliance, is not succeeding in the Champions League either. The purists will hope he returns to Camp Nou one day and that would indeed be an exciting prospect, but the Catalan coach also ended his reign on bad terms with a number of players – including Gerard Pique and Messi.
Guardiola had Xavi and Iniesta in their prime. He had a young team and a style of play in its infancy at that time. But football has changed, hence his inability to win the Champions League since. Others teams have learned and evolved.
So while it is true that Barca would do well to return to a style that made them great under the current Manchester City manager, the right players are needed for that. Younger ones, too. And that comes down to squad planning, not just the coach.
Valverde is being battered online for his philosophy. But it is not as if the Catalan club has played Pep-style football since 1899. Far from it. That was the peak and it should be the ultimate objective. Demanding it, plus a treble every year, is as unreasonable as it is unrealistic.
Football should be about enjoyment. And even if Valverde’s style is not as pleasing to the eye as Pep’s or other sides, some of Barcelona’s play is still sublime. And there’s Messi at his breath-taking best. Fans should be grateful for that.
So why are they so irate? Online fans miss out on the entire match day experience. Perhaps if they attended games at Camp Nou and experienced the atmosphere, the sense of community and the joy inside the stadium, their anger would dissipate.
Maybe it is because they are just very angry people with extremely difficult lives. Whatever it is, if they cannot appreciate this Barcelona team, they should probably not bother. Football is supposed to be fun and Barca still offer plenty of that. In addition, supporters are meant to actually support the team.
All of those so-called supporters – and there are many – hoping Barcelona will be beaten by Valencia just so Valverde will lose his job are not real supporters at all. And those spamming Barca’s official account with hashtags on Twitter are just making themselves look ridiculous, like spoilt children.
Their chief complaint is that Valverde is wasting Messi’s final years. Or that Barca are.
The irony is that it is they, instead of enjoying possibly the finest footballer to grace the game and the team’s best ever era, who are wasting Messi’s final years with their persistent protests and bitter bleating online. And when he is gone, they will probably regret it. | {
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Federal authorities were forced to close traffic at an international port of entry in Brownsville, Texas, after a group of approximately 300 migrants gathered in protest after not being allowed to pass.
The incident began on Thursday shortly after 1 a.m. when a group of close to 300 migrants collected at the mid-point of the pedestrian bridge, prompting a temporary shutdown, U.S. Customs and Border Protection revealed.
Brownsville is immediately north of the Mexican border city of Matamoros, where hundreds of migrants are gathered as they wait for their turn to request entry or asylum. Since only a certain number are allowed daily, the rest make camp around the international bridge.
Traffic resumed briefly at 3:45 a.m., but by 8.a.m. authorities were forced to close all lanes again due to renewed protest actions. Mexican authorities have asked them to disperse since they were disrupting regular traffic between the border cities.
Ildefonso Ortiz is an award-winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He co-founded Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and senior Breitbart management. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. He can be contacted at [email protected].
Brandon Darby is the managing director and editor-in-chief of Breitbart Texas. He co-founded Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project with Ildefonso Ortiz and senior Breitbart management. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. He can be contacted at [email protected].
“J.A. Espinoza” and Tony Aranda from Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project contributed to this report. | {
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Kristine Guerra
[email protected]
A diamond-studded NBA All-Star ring, worth about $15,000, was among the items stolen from Indiana Pacers player Paul George during a burglary Monday night.
Police were called shortly before midnight to the Diamond Pointe Drive home north of East 86th Street on the Geist Reservoir. Aside from the ring, a $700 Flux watch, a pair of red Jordan 4 Toro tennis shoes and $20 also were missing, according to an Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department report.
The house is not listed under George's name, but IMPD Lt. Chris Bailey confirmed that he is one of the victims.
There were no signs of forced entry at the house, the report said.
Earlier in the evening the Pacers lost Game 5 of their first-round playoff matchup against the Atlanta Hawks at Bankers Life Fieldhouse. Atlanta's 107-97 win gives the Hawks a 3-2 lead in the seven-game series, with Game 6 Thursday in Atlanta.
Contact Star reporter Kristine Guerra at (317) 444-6209. Follow her on Twitter: @kristine_guerra | {
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In a preliminary ruling, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California ruled that Qualcomm owed Apple nearly $1 billion in rebate payments that were part of the business cooperation agreement of the two companies. Today's ruling is unrelated to the patent fight that both companies are embroiled in, but pertains to the matter of patent royalty rebates.
As noted by Reuters, both companies had a patent licensing agreement that worked in the following manner:
In general, the contract factories that built Apple's iPhones would pay Qualcomm billions of dollars per year for the use of Qualcomm's patented technology in iPhones, a cost that Apple would reimburse the contract factories for. Separately, Qualcomm and Apple had a cooperation agreement under which Qualcomm would pay Apple a rebate on the iPhone patent payments if Apple agreed not to attack in court or with regulators.
While the agreement worked for several years, Qualcomm decided to stop paying Apple when it found that the company was making "false and misleading" statements to the Korean Fair Trade Commission, which was investigating Qualcomm at the time over antitrust violations. Qualcomm viewed this as a breach of its agreement, but Apple countered by saying that it was making lawful responses in an ongoing investigation.
Apple then filed the lawsuit stating Qualcomm had missed rebate payments, which amounted to nearly $1 billion. The judge sided with Apple in this issue, ordering Qualcomm to pay the $1 billion it owed. Qualcomm's general counsel Don Rosenberg commented on the ruling:
Although the Court today did not view Apple's conduct as a breach of Apple's promises to Qualcomm in the 2013 Business Cooperation and Patent Agreement, the exposure of Apple's role in these events is a welcome development.
It's unlikely a payment will be forthcoming as Reuters notes that Apple's contract factories have already withheld the $1 billion in payments to Qualcomm. A decision will be finalized when both companies meet in court next month. | {
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Hundreds of thousands of people are without power in Nova Scotia as Dorian made landfall on Saturday.
Many communities within the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) are currently affected by the outages, with Nova Scotia Power attributing the cause to high winds, rain and damaged power lines.
LIVE: Hurricane Dorian slams Atlantic Canada
Around 400,000 Nova Scotia Power customers were off the grid as of Saturday night, and in New Brunswick, more than 64,000 households and businesses lost power, most in the southern reaches of the province.
Peter Andrews, deputy chief of operations for Halifax Regional Fire and Emergency, said at a news conference Saturday evening that there have been no reports of significant injuries or deaths so far.
The winds have caused damage, though — including uprooting trees, blowing off part of a roof and causing a construction crane to collapse.
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WATCH: Video captures moment crane collapses in downtown Halifax during storm
0:40 Hurricane Dorian: Video captures moment crane collapses in downtown Halifax during storm Hurricane Dorian: Video captures moment crane collapses in downtown Halifax during storm
Here’s the section of roof that flew 70 yards or so onto Queen Street pic.twitter.com/ZxvBNLbfX9 — Jesse Thomas (@jessethomas21) September 7, 2019
Though Dorian was a Category 2 hurricane as it approached Atlantic Canada, the storm made landfall as a post-tropical cyclone at 7:15 p.m. ADT, according to Environment Canada.
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Bob Robichaud, warning preparedness meteorologist with the Canadian Hurricane Centre, said though the storm has changed structure, the cyclone designation says “nothing about” its intensity.
“We’re still talking about a very dangerous storm that is transiting through the Maritimes,” he said.
WATCH: Halifax officials provide an update on Dorian
Dorian, which made landfall southwest of Halifax on the Chebucto Peninsula between Terence Bay and Sambro, has brought sustained winds of nearly 150 km/h.
Paul Mason of Nova Scotia’s Emergency Management Office said the province will continue to face the storm into Sunday morning.
“This weather system is ongoing,” he said. “…We’d really encourage everyone to exercise caution with regards to staying away from water areas such as the coast.”
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Officials said earlier that the high-risk zones include the Sambro area, Peggy’s Cove and along the province’s Eastern Shore, which extends east of Halifax.
READ MORE: Dorian on pace to hit Atlantic Canada: Here’s what you need to know
WATCH: Storm blows through Nova Scotia downing trees and flooding roads
1:48 Hurricane Dorian: Storm blows through Nova Scotia downing trees and flooding roads Hurricane Dorian: Storm blows through Nova Scotia downing trees and flooding roads
“We are looking at closing the roads to Peggy’s Cove and Lawrencetown,” said Erica Fleck, assistant chief with Halifax Regional Fire and Emergency.
As of 8:42 p.m. ADT, hurricane warnings are in effect for central and eastern Nova’s Scotia as well as the south shore, plus western Newfoundland. Watches are in place for eastern P.E.I. and the Magdalen Islands.
12 metre or 39ft waves at that yellow dot along Hurricane Dorians path. pic.twitter.com/hmVkxzjV0B — Anthony Farnell (@AnthonyFarnell) September 7, 2019
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Southeastern New Brunswick, P.E.I., western and northern Nova Scotia, parts of northern and southwestern Newfoundland, the Magdalen Islands and parts of Quebec’s Lower North Shore are under tropical storm warnings.
The storm’s centre is expected to track northeast Saturday night, first toward P.E.I. around midnight, then across the Gulf to Newfoundland’s west coast by morning, Environment Canada said.
Surge report = Stoney Beach waves are rolling in one after the other with extreme wind speeds picking up. pic.twitter.com/ck8z2t9zGQ — Alexa MacLean (@AlexaMacLean902) September 7, 2019
The latest forecasts predict high winds, considerable rainfall, and significant storm surges. Waves are expected to reach heights of 15 metres, which could create dangerous conditions for residents living near the water.
As a result, HRM urged residents living along the shoreline of the municipality to consider other accommodations until Hurricane Dorian exits the region.
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HRM said in a media release earlier on Saturday that those responsible for construction sites and other outdoor work spaces where significant debris may be present are urged to ensure their sites are clear of loose debris that could create a public safety concern.
IN PHOTOS: Hurricane Dorian arrives in Atlantic Canada
In addition, the largest threat to homes and property is flying debris. HRM is asking residents to move umbrellas and patio furniture inside and remove anything that high winds could pick up, such as garbage containers/bags, flower pots, and toys.
Fleck said it is critical for citizens to call 311 to report on falling trees or flying debris.
WATCH: Global News coverage as Hurricane Dorian bears down on Atlantic Canada
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“We still have crews on the road to clear trees as soon as possible and we want to get those out of the way for the safety of our citizens and the safety of our crews that are on the road,” she said.
“We’re very concerned about the safety of our citizens about debris flying which it will, with [winds expected to hit] between 140 and 150 km/hr. And again we want people to stay inside.”
WATCH: Survivors in Bahamas search rubble for what’s left
3:57 Hurricane Dorian: Survivors in Bahamas search rubble for what’s left Hurricane Dorian: Survivors in Bahamas search rubble for what’s left
Employers were urged to close early before 5 p.m. to allow employees enough time to return home before weather conditions worsened.
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In preparation for Dorian’s arrival, several services were cancelled, including Halifax Transit.
The Red Cross opened three evacuation shelters to accommodate residents who are unable to find other accommodations, especially those in high-risk zones.
WATCH: Nova Scotia officials say they expect weather to deteriorate as Hurricane Dorian approaches
0:56 Nova Scotia officials say they expect weather to deteriorate as Hurricane Dorian approaches Nova Scotia officials say they expect weather to deteriorate as Hurricane Dorian approaches
The shelters are located at the Dartmouth East Community Centre, Canada Games Centre and St. Margaret’s Centre.
“We are prepared for 60 people in each location,” said Ancel Langille, senior manager of emergency management programs at Atlantic Region Canadian Red Cross.
Residents were warned to prepare for extended power outages and flooding – which means stocking up on food, water and gasoline.
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Long lineups were reported Friday at Halifax-area gas stations and grocery stores.
WATCH: Residents stocking on water, food and other necessities in preparation for Dorian
1:47 Residents stocking on water, food and other necessities in preparation for Dorian Residents stocking on water, food and other necessities in preparation for Dorian
Several flights have been either delayed or cancelled as a result of the storm. The Halifax Stanfield International Airport is urging travellers to check their flights before departing.
The MacKay and Macdonald bridges are closed.
Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, Ralph Goodale, said in a tweet that Nova Scotia has requested help from the feds with hurricane Dorian, and now the Canadian Armed Forces are mobilizing to deploy to assist with recovery.
-With files from The Canadian Press | {
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Voters waiting to cast their ballots at a polling station in the barrio of Petare in 2007 in Caracas, Venezuela. Getty Images Venezuela is on the brink of economic collapse.
According to The Washington Post, its currency has lost 93% of its black-market value in two years, and the nation is running out of beer and toilet paper.
The country is dependent on its inefficient oil-producing infrastructure for money, and its budget has been wiped out by low oil prices.
That's bad news for a centrally planned economy like Venezuela's.
Oil started to fall like a stone in 2014, from triple figures to about $30 this year, after OPEC refused to cut production as demand fell, causing a supply glut.
But even if oil returned to about $100 a barrel, as it was midway through 2014, the country wouldn't be able to escape its economic hole. It needs double that.
Analysts at Deutsche Bank have taken a look at the countries worst hit by falling oil prices. Here's a quote from the note:
Of the top five most vulnerable countries, four are either net energy exporters, or heavily reliant on energy: Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil (Ukraine is the exception). Realistically, these countries would remain vulnerable regardless of a moderately higher oil price.
To balance Venezuela's budget, for example, requires oil closer to $200 than $100.
Venezuela this week signed up to an agreement with Saudi Arabia and Russia to freeze oil production at January levels. That output level is still too high to move prices up. What it really needs is a cut, and a big one at that.
According to Deutsche Bank, supply from the US will tighten, though it will take time and will probably not drop enough to help Venezuela.
Here's the chart: | {
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For years, for me, New Westminster was a place where industry and west coast beauty met, on my early morning drives through this port city, en route to one of the many film sets I have worked on over the years. I always looked forward to that part of my drive, as I loved how the morning mist accented this part of the Fraser River, where industry and a sleeping bedroom community joined as one – the trains, the tugs, bridges, old warehouses – all shrouded in the morning mist, giving it a feeling of mystery and intrigue, leaving me wanting more. On my evening drive home, it was my port for a late night snack with my good buddy, Rob Jones, to decompress, hash out our days, and ultimately solve the problems of present day society.
In those early days, while I looked forward to those late night port of calls in New Westminster – it was for the company – rather than the food. The food was decent, but simply your standard pub fare. In the last few years, that has begun to change. With more people my age moving to New Westminster and beyond to live, New Westminster has become a favourite port of mine to meet up for a date – a bite to eat, a wander through the market, a coffee and a walk along the quay. In spending more daylight hours there in recent years, I’ve been pleased to discover a burgeoning foodie scene, and have been most impressed by the tastes and experiences that I have enjoyed thus far.
It is for all the reasons that I listed above that my eyes nearly popped out of my head with desire and I started to salivate when I stumbled upon the inaugural year of Feast on the Fraser, a foodie event that began Friday night in New Westminster, and continues until October 4th, with different nightly mouth watering experiences. Each of these events presents THE PERFECT DATE NIGHT – either with a lover (or potential lover) or with a best bud. And if going with a best bud, then with the wildly different experiences, this just might present the perfect venues for meeting Mr or Ms Right (or Right Now). Green with jealousy that I can’t attend each and everyone of these, as again as this occurs, I am working on a film set, which will likely limit my culinary sampling to only one of these tasty events, when ultimately I’d like to take them all in. Just wish I’d caught Saturday night’s Longtail Kitchen Seafood Boil & Fry. I did, however, dream about it, which somewhat made up for the exhaustion that had me cemented to the sofa all evening.
So what can the rest of you enjoy (and brag about with #FOTF2015), while I am a poor working stiff this week:
Sunday September 27th – Raw Nights at Rain City Juicery
This fun foodie experience has diners exploring raw and vegan friendly cuisine, including build your own Nut Pate Sushi, which admittedly has me intrigued.
Monday September 28th – Monday Night Football at Match Eatery
Thinking this 3-course, drool worthy menu at a sporting event hot spot is the perfect date night, ladies, if your with a sports fan; or it just may be the perfect culinary experience for the single gals, hoping to meet a sporty Mr. Right (or Mr Right Now). PS. You have to click on the link just to check out the desserts.
Tuesday September 29th – Rock Band Party at the Columbia Theatre
This looks like a hilariously fun night and just the night out for the Game Boys and Game Girls out there, with a night of drinking and the Harmonix game Rock Band. You can expect live entertainment with audience participation, other games to enjoy, and a selection of pub food and drinks to keep the party going.
Wednesday September 30th – Palates & Paint Night Fundraiser
Torn as to whether I’d be taking a date to this (if I had a life this week) or if I’d go with a girlfriend – either way, with a night of Art, Food & Wine, in which I’d get to enjoy the artwork of the 100 Braid St Studios artists in residence, learn from a professional artist, and create some artwork of my own – this is not an event I’d be missing.
Wednesday September 30th – The Heritage Grill Dine and Dance
Now here is a night that I have experienced before, when one of my good buddies, Ross Neilsen, was in town playing at The Heritage Grill, and dance, I did! A great night out, and one I highly recommend, although with a different band this time – Ranj Singh. There is no bad seat in the house, at The Heritage Grill.
Thursday October 1st – A Tribute to King Neptune at Wild Rice
I have long been a fan of Wild Rice’s Chinese cusine with a modern flare, but what really has me nerding out to this tastebud tantalizing night, is that it is a fusion of history and culinary delights. The history buff in me is screaming out with desire, as this night takes diners back in time through the storied history of the working waterfront of New Westmister during the three decades King Neptune reigned on the Fraser River.
Friday October 2nd – Wine & Dine Paddlewheeler Cruise
How many of you have looked upon the M.V. Native, the authentic paddlewheel riverboat that docks along the New Westminster Quay, and have pondered what a journey out on to the Fraser in it would be like? I certainly have. And what better way to enjoy that experience than with this night of wine tasting perfectly paired with a delicious meal.
Friday October 2nd – Belly Dancing Divas at Taverna Greka
Greek food and belly dancing – all the makings for a fabulously fun evening! In some ways, it is probably a good thing that I will be putting in a late night on set, Friday night, as history would suggest that it would not be long into the evening before I was belly dancing on a table.
My personal goal this week is to hold back enough energy, so that I can sink my teeth with the rest of you into Feast on the Fraser, come next weekend, and into their final two mouthwatering New Westminster experiences.
Kisses,
Emme xoxo
PS. If you are quick about it, there is still time to enter to win tickets for 2 to one of the Feast on the Fraser events on Savoir There. | {
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He questioned which political parties would be able to work with the PCs if they won a small majority. A minority government would be “uncharted territory” in Alberta and a whole new governing party would be “chaos,” he said.
Smith disagreed.
“I don’t think that we need to be panicked into thinking we can’t ever change government because, I have to tell you, there has been more chaos in the last three years — every single ministry has had four different cabinet ministers, at least,” she said.
“I don’t think we would have more instability than that by changing government.”
Still, Smith presented a gloomy outlook for the next four years regardless of the outcome.
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“It does not matter who is in government for the next four years,” she said. “It’s going to be terrible. I really think we lost our window of opportunity. Now we’re in a position where all of the parties in some way are relying on oil prices to recover. They’re all using the projections that get us to oil at $83 by Year 3 … I’m skeptical.”
“We’re in for some really tough times,” she said.
Smith said she expects the PC party will emerge from next month’s election with a small majority government. She acknowledged the attitudes of Albertans have become much more progressive on a number of issues, and those changes are starting to affect the province’s politics — a position echoed by the other two panellists, Bratt and data scientist Brian Singh.
With the NDP surging in Edmonton, and rural ridings appearing to maintain their support for Wildrose, Smith said the election will be decided in Calgary.
“I think it would be a miracle for the PCs to turn things around in Edmonton,” she said. “The coalition that Ms. Redford put together there relied on having union support. It does not matter what they throw at Rachel Notley this week, that union support is not going to be changed back to the PCs this time.” | {
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MANILA, Philippines - The government will require Internet service providers (ISPs) and telecommunication companies to install software to monitor and filter out cyber-pornography sites and content.
Speaking at a “Child Abuse and Exploitation in CyberSpace†forum, Samuel Sabile, National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) networks and facilities division officer-in-charge, said the memorandum circular issued last Jan. 30 will be enforced within the month after fulfilling the publication requirements.
In the forum organized by the Council on the Welfare of Children last week, NTC and other government agencies like the Department of Justice (DOJ), National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), Philippine National Police (PNP), and the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) gave updates on measures being taken to fight cyber-pornography, especially the emerging webcam child sex tourism (WCST).
Terre des Hommes, a European anti-child abuse and exploitation group, said the Philippines was emerging as the main, if not the only, supplier of children offering sex to pedophiles on the web.
Hans Guijt, Terre des Hommes Netherlands head of special projects and campaign, said their study of current global WCST situation indicated that the Philippines had a monopoly on the supply side of the emerging illicit “business.â€
Guijt headed Terre des Hommes’ “Sweetie†project last year to make contact with online pedophiles all worldwide.
The Sweetie project involved the creation of a computer-generated Filipino girl named Sweetie, who offered sex services to online predators.
The Philippines has a major role in fighting the relatively new but fast growing phenomenon, he added.
The Philippines is emerging as a supplier of children for web cam (camera) sex due to the English language skills of Filipinos, as well as the high accessibility of Internet connectivity nationwide, Guijt said.
Sabile said since the Philippines currently has no capability to effectively identify cyber-pornography content and sites, the NTC circular requiring the installation of carrier-grade monitoring programs to identify and filter out cyber-pornography content is needed.
The NTC is moving towards migration from the current IPV (Internet protocol version) 4 to IPV6 to enable authorities to monitor Internet activity in smaller and specific locations like houses, he added.
It was learned that IP address monitoring can only be done on a barangay, municipality or city.
If a user in a barangay or city enters a cyber-pornography site, the barangay or city’s IP address will register. | {
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Jeff Bezos gives an update on the development of New Shepard at an April 5 briefing during the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado. (credit: J. Foust) Blue Origin’s status update
At the Space Foundation’s Space Symposium, the annual space industry confab held last week in Colorado Springs, Colorado, as much attention goes into the exhibit hall as the main conference sessions themselves, as companies and organizations go to great lengths to attract attention. At Boeing’s booth, for example, you could fly a simulator of the company’s CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle, docking it to the space station. AGI, the software company, offered visitors free ice cream, while others, as each day wound to a close, offered something a little stronger, from beer to sake. “I always remind the team that we’re not racing, that this vehicle is going to carry humans. We’re going to make it as safe as we can make it… We’re not going to take any shortcuts,” Bezos said. The exhibit that got the most attention, though, was not in the main hall, in large part because it couldn’t fit. Standing on the sidewalk outside the Broadmoor’s conference center was the propulsion module of Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle, one that flew five suborbital spaceflights in less than a year, culminating with an October 2016 flight where the module landed safely, despite being blasted by the crew capsule’s abort motor in a planned test. That vehicle, along with a full-sized model of the crew capsule, was the center of attention throughout the four-day conference. People took photos of it or posed for pictures with it during the day and at night, when it was lit from above and below in blue and red lights, respectively. It weathered a snowstorm that dumped several inches of snow that melted the next day. And symposium attendees, their schedules normally busy with conference sessions and meetings, waited in line for the opportunity to go inside the cabin to see what it would be like to fly on New Shepard. And there was a special guest as well. While he wasn’t on the program, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos made a cameo appearance at the conference April 5 to provide an update on the development of New Shepard as the company plows ahead on both that vehicle and a much larger orbital launch vehicle, New Glenn. Bezos was clearly enjoying himself, starting the event by boarding the capsule and talking about the spaceflight experience. “Can you imagine how Alan Shepard must have felt, all those years ago? It must have been pretty cool,” he said, looking out of one of the large windows—the largest of any spacecraft, the company frequently notes. “I’m going to come out now, even though I don’t want to,” he said a short time later, exiting the capsule for a more conventional talk, and question-and-answer session, on a stage in front of the capsule and booster. The event was unusual in the sense that Bezos and Blue Origin were not making a major announcement about the company’s plans: no news about when New Shepard would begin commercial flights or when ticket sales would start, or even how much those tickets would cost. Last year, Bezos suggested that test flights with crews on board—“test passengers” since the vehicle is autonomously flown without pilots on board—could begin this year. But at Space Symposium, he backed away a bit from that schedule. “I don’t think it’s going to be 2017 at this point,” he said when asked about that earlier timeline for crewed test flights. “It could be.” “I always remind the team that we’re not racing, that this vehicle is going to carry humans. We’re going to make it as safe as we can make it. We’re going to test it. We’re not going to take any shortcuts,” he said when asked about the company’s schedule. “So we’ll put humans on this vehicle when we’re ready and not a second sooner.” I’m hopeful, by the way, that could still be 2018,” he said later of the beginning of commercial flights. “We’ll see. It’s really going to be when we’re ready.” “I’ve thrown parties before that nobody came to,” Bezos said. That apparent delay, he said, wasn’t linked to the company’s other major project, development of the BE-4 engine that will power the company’s New Glenn orbital vehicle as well as, potentially, the Vulcan rocket under development by United Launch Alliance. Blue Origin recently shipped the first BE-4 to the company’s Texas test site for static-fire tests expected to start in the next several weeks. “We’re really not constrained by our BE-4 activities. Both things are fully staffed,” he said. “We’re making great progress on BE-4 and we’re making great progress on New Shepard.” As uncertain as the test flight schedule is the marketing schedule for selling rides on the vehicle. The company is taking email addresses to receive information, but nothing else: a far cry from Virgin Galactic, which started selling tickets more than a decade ago but has yet to fly its first customer. “We’ll probably start taking down payments and selling tickets when we’re closer to commercial operations,” he said. “We have a whole test program ahead of us.” He added the company hasn’t even set a ticket price yet. “We’re working on that. We’ll figure something out,” he said. “We still have time. It’s not an urgent thing to figure out because we’re not ready to sell tickets anyway.” The company has given some thought to a “very minimal” training program for its customers, though. “It shouldn’t be more than a day of training,” Bezos said. “The system has been designed, from the very beginning, so that the training can be minimal.” Ariane Cornell, head of astronaut strategy and sales at Blue Origin, discusses the features of the New Shepard crew capsule with reporters inside a full-sized model of the capsule. (credit: J. Foust) A visit inside the capsule mockup makes it clear why. Entering the capsule, you sit down in one of the surprisingly comfortable seats, arranged horizontally along the cabin wall, each with access to its own window. There’s not much to train for: the automated vehicle means there’s little for spaceflight participants to do other than strap themselves in (seat belts were not included in the model, but will be in the actual spacecraft) and enjoy the ride. Customers will be able to float around the cabin in the approximately four minutes of microgravity as New Shepard reaches apogee, above the 100-kilometers Kármán line. Handholds are built into various surfaces, including around the windows and the cylinder in the center that covers the abort motor. People will get warnings that weightlessness is about to end and it’s time to strap themselves in, but there will be no crew on board to help people do so. Bezos, intriguingly, suggested there might be other applications for the New Shepard booster besides lofting the crew capsule (which, besides carrying people, could also carry research payloads.) Blue Origin, he said, could get into the smallsat launch business. “I’m thinking that it might be interesting to build a small second stage for this New Shepard booster so we could use it to put smallsats into orbit. It would be perfectly capable of being a first stage for a small orbital vehicle,” he said. He said later that smallsat launchers in general, including any use of New Shepard for launching small satellites, were not necessarily a good deal on a cost-per-kilogram basis. “But they do have certain advantages if you’re doing, say, replacement of LEO constellation satellites,” he said. “I think for most launches, New Glenn would be a much better vehicle. But it would be interesting to put a small second stage on this and use it as a small satellite launcher. It’s perfectly suited for that task.” New Shepard’s biggest role, though, may be as a reusability test bed for the company’s New Glenn orbital launch vehicle, scheduled to begin flights around 2020, and future, even larger vehicles. “The learnings are often in the detail level,” he said, describing lessons learned about maintenance and operation of the engines as one example. “We have learned so much, and most of it has been in the details.” “I am determined to lower the cost of access to space. And we, at Blue Origin, only need three things to make that happen: talented people, money, and patience,” he said. “And we have all three.” Bezos trumpeted space tourism as a market that could drive the high flight rates that provide the experience needed to achieve those “learnings” for reusability. But he also at times seemed willing to concede he wasn’t sure of the market for tourism. “At Amazon we’ve had a lot of inventions that we were very excited about, and customers didn’t care at all,” he said. “The only thing that is disruptive is customer adoption.” Or, as he put it later, “I’ve thrown parties before that nobody came to.” Bezos, though, has the confidence of someone with the time and money to wait until New Shepard, and all of the company’s other projects, are ready to fly. The company currently takes in virtually no revenue, given that it’s not selling tickets on New Shepard and only in the last month announced its first launch contracts for New Glenn. Of course, it has an ample source of funds in Bezos himself. “My business model right now for Blue Origin is that I sell about a billion dollars a year of Amazon stock and I use it to invest in Blue Origin,” he said. “So the business model for Blue Origin is very robust.” That said, he added he wants Blue Origin to one day be a profitable company that stands on its own, but he’s willing to take time to make that happen. “I am determined to lower the cost of access to space. And we, at Blue Origin, only need three things to make that happen: talented people, money, and patience,” he said. “And we have all three.” There was faint cheering in the background, from either some of those talented employees or their fans. Until test flights of new New Shepard vehicles resume, likely by the middle of this year, that earlier propulsion module will continue to be a magnet of attention for the company, as it gradually sheds the secretive ways of most of its history. And while that propulsion module won't fly again, its work for Blue Origin isn’t done just yet. “It’s a little scarred. We have tortured this vehicle,” Bezos said of the roughed-up propulsion module. “We’re glad we got it back, because we get to show it off, bring it to events like this. We’re going to send it on a short roadshow to various venues, and then we’re going to retire it to a museum somewhere.” Home
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On a rainy, muddy afternoon in Terre Haute, Indiana, the BYU men’s cross-country pulled an upset and claimed its first national championship in program history.
Saturday at the LaVern Gibson Championship Cross Country Course, the No. 3 seed Cougar men outperformed top-ranked Northern Arizona, 109-163, while on the women’s side, BYU finished in second place behind Arkansas.
“It’s the men’s first national championship in cross country. They represent groups of guys that I’ve worked with over the last 20 years. It’s fun to get to the top.” — BYU men’s cross country coach Ed Eyestone
“It’s a testament to all the hard work, the staff and the administration and the trainers, the coaches and obviously, first and foremost the student athletes,” men’s coach Ed Eyestone said of the title. “It’s been a long time coming. I’ve been doing this for 20 years now. To have it finally come together was very rewarding. I’m super proud of the way the men responded. And I’m super proud of the women as well.”
Eyestone also became the first person in NCAA men’s cross-country history to win an individual national championship as a runner, which he did in 1984, and also to lead a team to a national championship.
“It’s the men’s first national championship in cross-country,” Eyestone said. “They represent groups of guys that I’ve worked with over the last 20 years. It’s fun to get to the top.”
Grid View BYU men’s cross country coach Ed Eyestone celebrates with his team after the Cougar men won the national championship at the 2019 NCAA Division I Cross-Country Championship, Saturday, Nov. 23, 2019, in Terre Haute, Ind. Nate Edwards/BYU
BYU’s Conner Mantz races in the 2019 NCAA Division I Cross-Country Championship, Saturday, Nov. 23, 2019, in Terre Haute, Ind. Nate Edwards/BYU
BYU women’s cross country coach Diljeet Taylor celebrates with the runners-up trophy after the Cougar women finished second at the 2019 NCAA Division I Cross-Country Championship, Saturday, Nov. 23, 2019, in Terre Haute, Ind. Nate Edwards/BYU
BYU’s Erica Birk-Jarvis, left, and Courtney Wayment race in the 2019 NCAA Division I Cross-Country Championship, Saturday, Nov. 23, 2019, in Terre Haute, Ind. Nate Edwards/BYU
BYU’s Conner Mantz sprints to a third-place individual finish in the 2019 NCAA Division I Cross-Country Championship, Saturday, Nov. 23, 2019, in Terre Haute, Ind. Nate Edwards/BYU
The BYU men’s cross country poses with the championship trophy after the Cougar men won the national championship at the 2019 NCAA Division I Cross-Country Championship, Saturday, Nov. 23, 2019, in Terre Haute, Ind. Nate Edwards/BYU
The BYU women’s cross country team poses with the runners-up trophy after the Cougar women finished second at the 2019 NCAA Division I Cross-Country Championship, Saturday, Nov. 23, 2019, in Terre Haute, Ind. Nate Edwards/BYU
BYU men’s cross country coach Ed Eyestone shouts instructions at the 2019 NCAA Division I Cross-Country Championship, Saturday, Nov. 23, 2019, in Terre Haute, Ind. Nate Edwards/BYU
BYU men’s cross country coach Ed Eyestone and women’s cross country coach Diljeet Taylor celebrate after the Cougar men won the national championship and the BYU women were runners-up at the 2019 NCAA Division I Cross-Country Championship, Saturday, Nov. 23, 2019, in Terre Haute, Ind. Nate Edwards/BYU
BYU men’s racers begin the race at the 2019 NCAA Division I Cross-Country Championship, Saturday, Nov. 23, 2019, in Terre Haute, Ind. Nate Edwrads/BYU
BYU’s Courtney Wayment celebrates at the 2019 NCAA Division I Cross-Country Championship, Saturday, Nov. 23, 2019, in Terre Haute, Ind. Nate Edwards/BYU
BYU’s Courtney Wayment, left, Erica Birk-Jarvis, center, and Whittni Orton race in the 2019 NCAA Division I Cross-Country Championship, Saturday, Nov. 23, 2019, in Terre Haute, Ind. Nate Edwards/BYU
This marks the first national championship captured by a BYU team since the men’s volleyball squad won the NCAA Tournament in 2004.
The BYU men’s cross-country team was led by sophomore Conner Mantz, who finished third overall with a time of 30:40 and he received All-American honors for the second consecutive season.
“Conner is in that position where he’s one of the top guys in the country and we kind of take for granted that he’s going to be the guy up there,” Eyestone said. “It’s inspiring to the other four guys. They knew they just had to put together a good race. We knew that if we all ran our best races, we could do very well as a team.”
For BYU, Danny Carney (31:05.7) placed 17th while Jacob Heslington (31:10.5) finished 21st.
With NAU having won three straight national championships, many observers expected the Lumberjacks to win again. But Eyestone knew his team could do something special.
“I can’t say I was brimming with confidence. I was confident that our men could put together a good race. NAU was heavily favored and going for a four-peat,” he said. “People had them as a rock-solid favorite, then maybe Colorado, which was ranked No. 2, and us. We were ranked third coming in. But I felt like we had a pretty good shot. As it turned out, due to the heart and the grit of our guys, it was a bit of a blowout, which is pretty exciting.”
That feeling when you win your first #ncaaXC National Championship! pic.twitter.com/1xwK4TUM6d — NCAA Track & Field (@NCAATrackField) November 23, 2019
The BYU women finished as the national runners-up to Arkansas, which scored 96 points compared to the Cougars’ 102. BYU was led by three top-10 finishers — Courtney Wayment, Erica Birk-Jarvis and Whittni Orton.
After the men’s championship, Eyestone’s phone filled up with 72 messages. He and the team left Terre Haute for Indianapolis, where they were scheduled to put on a fireside at a stake center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and eat a celebratory meal at a Ruth’s Chris Steak House.
“It will be a fun fireside when you’ve had a good day,” Eyestone said. “It’s a nice feeling to close the season on a really positive note, especially when the guys have worked so hard and so long as a team to do this.”
For Eyestone, it’s a gratifying accomplishment to clinch a team championship to go along with his personal championship earned 35 years ago.
“To add the team aspect is a great feeling. I recognize that when I was running for BYU in the 1980s, BYU had a great tradition of distance runners,” he said. “It was kind of a legacy that I had become a part of. It gives me great joy to continue on and get us to the top of the mountain as a team. Hopefully, it doesn’t take us another 20 years to get our next one.” | {
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The world’s largest seasonal migration of people -- otherwise known as China’s annual Spring Festival holiday -- is increasingly slogging its way through airports and spilling outside China’s borders. With the initial wave of passengers already out the door, China’s travel authorities want to make sure everyone behaves.
Mainland Chinese tourists going abroad on packaged tours during the Spring Festival period are expected to hit close to six million, up nearly 50% from four million in 2013, according to an estimate from Ctrip.com,... | {
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Unexpectedly, the show became the most-watched summer comedy on network TV in eight years, and actually pulled in more viewers in the second episode than the first. The only other show that accomplished that jump this year was Fox’s Empire, which also features a majority African American cast. In other words, 2015’s TV ratings continue to demonstrate that there’s a major appetite for more diverse TV programming, whether on networks or premium cable.
The Carmichael Show’s success was mostly thanks to how it offered a fresh perspective on age-old issues. Flavorwire’s Pilot Viruet has written about how the show brilliantly deployed “gallows humor” to deal with current events, like police shootings of unarmed African Americans and the question of how to respond in protest. Other stories the sitcom tackled during its short run featured a teenage basketball player who confides to Jerrod that he’s transgender, and Jerrod’s real fear that his father’s poor diet of fried foods is going to lead him to an early grave.
It’s hard to know whether NBC predicted The Carmichael Show would be a success. Running a sitcom in the summer is traditionally seen as a death sentence, referred to as “burning off,” because there’s very little chance for it to find an audience in August’s ratings doldrums. But the rom-com Undateable achieved a similar feat in 2014 for the same network, and has now moved from a summer schedule to primetime. Based on the creative promise shown in its first six episodes, The Carmichael Show should be on the same trajectory.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected]. | {
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"Eu sou de direita e votei em vocês. Infelizmente não há partidos à direita que tenham qualquer tipo de respeito pelos animais ou reconheça os direitos dos mesmos. E tal como eu há muita gente a votar em vocês como alternativa. Força!!"
Catarina Araújo manifesta assim a sua alegria com o resultado do PAN na respetiva página no Facebook. É logo questionada, porém: "Quem disse que o PAN é de esquerda?" E cria-se um debate nos comentários. Há quem assevere que é "centro-esquerda" porque é "o que diz na Wikipédia", quem comente "que eu saiba o PAN viabilizou um governo de extrema esquerda", e quem conclua: "Não é de esquerda, é de extrema esquerda!" E quem certifique: "Nem esquerda, nem direita, nem centro. PAN é um partido de CAUSAS! Esta é a grande diferença em relação ao status político atual."
"Toda a minha ideologia política é de direita, só não me defino como de extrema-direita porque abomino racismo. Foi principalmente por causa das touradas que passei a votar PAN."
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10 anos após ser lançado, a 22 de maio de 2009, como Partido pelos Animais (PPA) e oito depois de nas legislativas, já com o novo acrónimo - Partido pelos Animais e pela Natureza - e recém-autorizado pelo Tribunal Constitucional, se ter apresentado com um programa no qual se definia como defendendo "uma sociedade onde todos os seres sencientes, humanos e não humanos, possam viver numa harmonia tão ampla quanto possível, com bem-estar e felicidade", com "os interesses humanos e animais" a deverem "ser igualmente considerados e, quando pareçam estar em conflito, deve procurar-se a solução eticamente mais justa, tendo em conta as suas especificidades", obtendo na sua estreia eleitoral mais de 50 mil votos e assim o direito a uma subvenção estatal, o PAN continua a não se definir como "esquerda ou direita", reputando essas classificações de "do século passado".
André Silva é o líder do PAN e deputado na Assembleia da República © ANTONIO COTRIM/LUSA
E, apesar de uma boa parte das suas propostas, quando não passam pela defesa dos direitos dos animais (nesta legislatura, conseguiu o fim de abate dos animais nos canis e gatis e a proibição de uso de animais em circos, e falhou a ilegalização das touradas), coincidirem com as da ala esquerda do parlamento, mais concretamente com o BE - da eutanásia à legalização da canábis medicinal e recreativa, passando pela legalização da adoção por casais do mesmo sexo -, e as suas votações nesta legislatura alinharem muitas vezes com o PS, a verdade é que consegue atrair eleitores de outros quadrantes.
Eleitores de direita, de esquerda e da abstenção
Por vezes no extremo oposto, como é o Catarina Araújo. Esta profissional de marketing de 34 anos afirma até ter sido militante do CDS e sentir "simpatia por algumas posições do PNR", nomeadamente "políticas anti-imigração, antirrefugiados": "Toda a minha ideologia política é de direita, só não me defino como de extrema-direita porque abomino racismo." Porém, votou PAN, e sem ligar, aparentemente, à posição do mesmo sobre refugiados, tão diferente da sua. "Porque acima de tudo preocupo-me com o meio ambiente e com os animais", justifica. "Foi principalmente por causa das touradas que passei a votar PAN." Desde quando não sabe precisar: "Acho que desde que o PAN existe."
Pelo contrário, Rodrigo, 38 anos, web designer a residir no Algarve, votou sempre à esquerda ("alternava entre BE e PS") e estas eleições foram as primeiras em que escolheu o PAN. "Porque sou vegan [não usar qualquer produto de origem animal na alimentação ou vestuário] há quase dois anos e é único partido que defende tudo aquilo em que acredito." E aquilo em que crê é que "a máxima prioridade de qualquer sociedade hoje em dia seja garantir que as próximas gerações tenham um futuro digno, e não vejo mais nenhum partido em que isso seja sequer considerado seriamente. Ao ver as coisas por esta perspetiva, todas as outras forças políticas me parecem extremamente antiquadas e até irresponsáveis. Considero que o PAN é um dos raros partidos políticos em que as suas ações estão alinhadas com as suas palavras."
"Considero que o PAN é um dos raros partidos políticos em que as suas ações estão alinhadas com as suas palavras."
Tão raro que conseguiu, segundo Tânia Carvalho, de 43 anos, bióloga e gestora de projetos clínicos, convencê-la a ela e aos pais a voltar a votar, depois de terem integrado as fileiras dos abstencionistas. "Imediatamente antes de votar PAN votava em branco, por não me sentir representada. Revejo-me no seu modo de fazer política -- discutir soluções e problemas e não passar a vida a caluniar o "governo este" ou "o governo aquele", fulano ou sicrano. Isso não ajuda em nada, empurrar culpas uns para os outros."
Certificando que não é vegetariana - "Não como só alfaces" - elege "as questões do clima" como uma das motivações do seu voto. "Não vejo mais nenhum partido a dar grande importância ao assunto." Quanto aos pais - uma técnica de análises clínicas e um advogado, de 73 e 72 anos, ambos reformados, só pode dizer que não tinham votado antes no PAN. "O meu pai disse-me: "Agora é o meu partido do futuro." Fiquei super feliz porque nem fui eu que os influenciei, não costumamos falar de política."
"A maior inversão de valores jamais vista"
O partido do futuro do pai de Tânia tem um passado, porém. E o seu primeiro presidente e também fundador, Paulo Borges, conhecido como seguidor do budismo, não se quer fazer esquecer. O resultado das europeias inspiraram-lhe dois posts públicos no Facebook. Um em que se lê "Ganhar é mau. Ilude. Perder é bom. Desilude - Livro da Moral da História" e outro no qual interroga: "Como é que há partidos a cantar vitória quando a abstenção aumentou para quase 70%, o que significa que foram eleitos pela pequena minoria dos que votaram?"
Borges, que num discurso em 2011 afirmava que em Portugal se vivia um ambiente semelhante ao do pré 25 de Abril e sob cuja liderança o PAN defendia a redução do número de deputados, o "saneamento" das contas públicas e a diminuição da despesa do Estado enquanto lamentava "as nossas pensões e salários diminuídos e muitos de nós privados dos nossos subsídios", demitiu-se da presidência em 2014 com uma série de acusações. Falou de "manobras maquiavélicas, falta de ética, difamação e lutas pelo poder" e acusou André Silva (o deputado do PAN no parlamento e atual porta-voz, designação que o partido usa para aquele que na prática é o líder), de "carreirismo", "arrivismo" e de "golpe".
"O PAN atingiu hoje um estado preocupante: o mero título Animais e Natureza traz votos (mesmo sem se ser verdadeiramente pelos Animais ou pela Natureza). O PAN atual nada mais é do que um manto de retalhos constituído nos seus órgãos de direção por elementos renegados de outros partidos."
"Claro que tudo isto é legítimo e próprio do que habitualmente chamamos "política" em termos depreciativos, mas não era isto que intencionava e estava à espera quando ajudei a criar o PAN. Isto no fundo não é política, mas sim politiquice maquiavélica igual à ou pior do que aquela que tanto condenamos nos partidos do sistema", escreveu Borges num post no qual punha mesmo a hipótese de se desvincular do partido, o que veio a suceder.
O mesmo ocorreu com Célia Feijão, filiada de primeira hora (tinha o número 12) que disputou a liderança com André Silva e se desvinculou de seguida, em 2015, depois de perder - numa eleição na qual, assevera, votaram apenas 173 dos 940 filiados --, falando da "maior inversão de valores jamais vista na classe política" e de "irregularidades internas, atropelos estatutários, perseguições e tentativa de expulsão a filiados". Comentando que "o PAN atingiu hoje um estado preocupante: o mero título Animais e Natureza traz votos (mesmo sem se ser verdadeiramente pelos Animais ou pela Natureza)", concluía: "O PAN atual nada mais é do que um manto de retalhos constituído nos seus órgãos de direção por elementos renegados de outros partidos, ou que nunca tiveram oportunidade de integrar um, e encontram aqui a sua tábua de salvação que lhes confere as oportunidades que não conseguem encontrar fora dele."
Acusações violentas que André Silva, pelo menos publicamente, parece ter decidido não valorizar. Quando o Expresso recentemente o confrontou com elas, respondeu de modo não pessoalizado: "Havia um desconforto geral das pessoas na comissão política sobre o rumo do partido, a inação, a falta de iniciativa e de abertura." E sobre o discurso do PAN, ao qual a sua direção acrescentou, no final de 2014, a palavra "Pessoas" - passando assim a assumir o atual nome de Pessoas, Animais, Natureza - reconhece: "Tivemos de ter cuidado com a linguagem, era mais crua, perentória. Éramos mal interpretados e tem sido uma aprendizagem."
"Argumentos radicais podem prejudicar ativismo"
A imagem de André Silva, engenheiro civil nascido a 2 de abril de 1976, é aliás de serenidade, contenção, de bom comportamento. Nunca o vimos na Assembleia da República aos berros a invetivar adversários, nem a dar entrevistas incendiárias. Tudo o que diz parece ponderado e centrado em questões e não pessoas, e chega mesmo a admitir que às vezes se abstém em algumas votações por não ter informação suficiente.
Se foi, como conta numa entrevista ao Observador, apenas em 2012 que "mudou a agulha" para o ambientalismo e vegetarianismo, deixando de comer carne e peixe, e nos primeiros tempos se radicalizou, terá chegado à liderança do partido, numa muito rápida ascensão, apenas dois anos depois. Diz ele que mais moderado. Ou, pelo menos, com a consciência de que não se apanham moscas com vinagre: "Hoje em dia sou muito menos radical do que era nas minhas posições. E até acho que muitas vezes os argumentos mais radicais podem chegar a prejudicar a defesa ou o ativismo em torno de uma causa."
Se nada se sabe, além das acusações de dissidentes, do que se passa no interior do partido - o último congresso, segundo foi reportado, decorreu à porta fechada, só sendo possível aos jornalistas assistir ao encerramento -- na assembleia os outros deputados também não parecem ter o único deputado do PAN como um radical. Parecem até encarar André Silva com alguma bonomia; não o vimos até agora ser alvo do tipo de ataques verrinosos tão comuns no parlamento. Como se não soubessem bem o que pensar dele ou o desvalorizassem como oponente -- pelo menos até agora, quando a dada altura da noite eleitoral o PAN esteve empatado com o CDS.
Francisco Guerreiro é o primeiro eurodeputado a ser eleito pelo PAN © EPA/RODRIGO ANTUNES
Diz Jorge Costa, do BE, ao Observador: "Às vezes o André [Silva] é tratado com alguma condescendência e com algum paternalismo sobretudo por alguns setores dos partidos de direita, e essa postura é até pouco comum naquilo que é prática parlamentar. É certo que tem uma agenda suscetível a alguma caricatura mas nós, no Bloco, por exemplo, sempre optámos pela não ostracização do PAN."
Com o crescimento, a manter-se, virá decerto o fim do defeso. O PAN, de resto, já lançou, pela voz de Francisco Ferreira, o eurodeputado eleito este domingo, alfinetadas aos Verdes, o parceiro de coligação do PCP: "Não podemos dizer que existia um partido ecologista antes de o PAN estar no Parlamento, porque para se perceber como é que se defende um programa tem de se ir a eleições. O Partido Ecologista "Os Verdes" nunca foi a eleições. As pessoas precisam de saber se um determinado partido, seja ele qual for, vale dez votos, vale cem, vale mil, vale dez mil, vale cem mil... Isso nunca aconteceu!"
E de contar votos pode o PAN gabar-se: o partido que diz ter dois mil militantes mereceu as cruzinhas de mais de 165 mil pessoas, triplicando a sua votação nas europeias de 2014 (56 mil, um pouco acima da das legislativas de 2011) e duplicando a do escrutínio de 2015, quando, com 75 mil, elegeu André Silva.
Aquele que foi o único partido a abster-se no episódio da contagem do tempo dos professores pode até agora pôr a hipótese, caso aumente o grupo parlamentar, de ser o parceiro do PS no apoio de um futuro governo, em troca de viabilização de algumas das suas propostas.
Entre acabar com as touradas e caça desportiva e com os subsídios à pecuária, promover o apoio à agricultura biológica e a distribuição de copos menstruais nos centros de saúde, passando pela extensão da licença de parentalidade para um ano, redução das horas de trabalho semanais para 30, a aplicação de uma fiscalidade verde, que penalize a pecuária intensiva e faça depender o valor do IVA da "pegada ecológica" dos bens (incentivando o consumo de produtos locais) e a criação de um Rendimento Básico Incondicional, ou seja, um valor mínimo atribuído a todos, independentemente dos seus proventos, o PAN não tem falta de ideias. Se tem um projeto para o país e a Europa é outra coisa. Mas tal dúvida não se aplica só a ele. | {
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Amit Shah
Jay Shah, BCCI secretary's father
My son has contributed a lot to cricket. And that is why he is BCCI secretary on his own merit. There is nothing Dynastic about it. | {
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Paramount Pictures is giving another change of coming into fruition to the live action movie of ‘Sonic the Hedgehog.’ The project was first taken four years ago by Sony, but it never really came through.
According to reports, the production team will remain, meaning that ‘Deadpool’ director, Tim Miller, will take on the production of the movie while he won’t direct it.
Getting a second wind with Paramount
After starting the movie adaptation of ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ four years ago, Sony Entertainment has decided to drop the project. Luckily, Paramount Pictures picked up the rights for the movie, giving the Blue Blur’s first big screen appearance another chance for fruition.
The studio will retain former ‘Deadpool’ director Tim Miller to help put the film together.
Miller, however, won’t be helming the ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ live-action flick. He will instead serve as executive producer while Jeff Fowler will make his directorial debut.
Supporting Miller and Fowler in this project is Neal H. Moritz, who is also executive producer. Toby Ascher, Dmitri Johnson, and Dan Jevons are attached to the film production as well.
The movie won’t be purely live-action as some elements will have CGI animation. It will be the first live-action treatment for the popular video game.
“Jeff is an incredible director with strong story instincts,” Miller said when the project first came to light.
“The world of Sonic presents the perfect opportunity for Jeff to leverage his experience in animation. To bring a new dimension to this iconic character.”
Sony The Hedgehog
Sega launched the character of Sonic the Hedgehog in 1991. In its early versions as a 16-bit video game, Sonic ran around to collect rings and evade the villain, Dr. Edman, as with any typical arcade game.
The franchise, however, developed more games that offered backstories to the characters, thus creating a mythology to Sonic the Hedgehog.
Sega then tied up with Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2014 for the film development in its bid to expand its entertainment brand.
Sony passed the rights to Paramount three years later. The latter retained most of the people involved in the making of the movie.
Miller and company haven’t divulged any clue to the storyline but more details, including cast announcements, are expected to follow.
‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ live-action film has a 2019 theater release date.
A rough start, but finally happening
Last October it was announced that ‘Deadpool’ director Tim Miller was developing a live-action movie based on the iconic SEGA video game character Sonic the Hedgehog.
The news broke just over a week after stepping away from ‘Deadpool‘ due to creative differences.
At the time it was announced that Miller and his longtime Blur Studio collaborator Jeff Fowler have been tapped to work on the project, on which Fowler would make his feature directorial debut.
Miller and Fowler were nominated for a best animated short Oscar in 2005 for their farm animal-centric ‘Gopher Broke’. It was written and directed by Fowler and that saw Miller as executive producer. The two also have been developing, with David Fincher, an animated adaptation of cult comic ‘The Goon’.
If you’re not convinced yet of the possibilities of this creative team then remember that Miller had garnered praise for eclipsing ‘Deadpool’s infamous cinematic debut in ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ with a faithful adaptation that stuck to the character’s trademark comic book tropes.
As Sonic has revived his reputation by doing the same in Sonic Mania, Miller will certainly be looking to build on this common logic, reminding fans why they fell in love with the character in the first place.
Additionally, as Fowler has already showcased his ability to mix action with comedy in two hilarious shorts, there’s no doubt that he’ll be taking a similar approach to retain Sonic’s characteristic charm while also providing fans with a fast-paced adventure.
And more video games coming
Meanwhile, on the video game side of things, Sega is teaming up with Hooters Restaurants to promote Sonic the Hedgehog and the upcoming game ‘Sonic Forces’. Comic Book reported that the announcement was made during this year’s Tokyo Game Show, though details about the actual promotion have yet to be revealed. Coverage was also unclear, whether the promotion will be Japan-only, or will US-based Hooters participate as well.
Created and produced by Sega, Sonic the Hedgehog was made to compete with rival Nintendo’s mascot, Mario. Focusing on speed-based platforming, the game centers on the titular blue-colored hedgehog as he foils the plans of Dr. Eggman for world domination. The Chaos Emeralds were later on introduced in the series, colored gems that provide Sonic and other characters a power-up once collected.
After its release, Sonic the Hedgehog has become one of the best titles of Sega. Selling over 300 million different game copies, including mobile games. Sonic the Hedgehog has branched out into different mediums, including animated television shows and comic books.
The Sonic the Hedgehog comics has earned a Guinness World Record for the longest-running series based on a video game.
Source: Movie Pilot | {
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How often do you find yourself reading the next productivity article or the next productivity book.
Do you ever see that all the time you spend reading such productivity tips is actually the time you are not being productive at all. Doesn’t this sound counterintuitive to you?
I, too, have spend my fair share of time in search for the next secret tip that would make me super productive and make me finish my work in half the time.
The truth is, such secrets don’t exist. The only way to get more done in your life, is to actually do your work for more time.
Sure, if you work hard all day, then there are ways to optimize your time and the way you work. But if you don’t do any work at all then no matter how many productivity tips you know of, they won’t be of any use to you.
First, you have to learn to do the work. Get better at it. And then, and only then, should you search for any productivity tips. And that too only if being productive will actually improve the quality of your work and your life.
As for me, the best productivity tip that I know of, is to make your life simple in as many ways as you can, so that you can focus on the most important things in your life.
Make your life at home simple. Make your life at work simple. Those are the only things you need to do to become productive.
And don’t get into the race of doing a hundred different things in one day. You can only do a certain amount of quality work each day.
Respect your body and mind, and respect their capability, and do only what they are capable of doing in a single day. Don’t overload them every day, and you’ll see that they remain faithful to you in the long-term.
You can’t afford to work 14 hours a day for the rest of your life. There is no way your body can tolerate so much work.
Instead, break down your work into small goals, and try to finish few goals every day.
Instead of chasing the next productivity tip, try this for a change : For the next few days, try to simplify your life in as many ways as possible.
For example, if you read 100 blogs a week, cut that down to 10. If you watch 2 hours tv every day, cut down to 30 minutes. If you follow a hundred people on twitter or facebook, cut down to a dozen. If you check you social media or email updates ten times a day, cut down to two.
All these are simple changes that you can apply in your life today. And I guarantee you that you will start to see positive changes in your life within a week.
You will find that you have now more time to do your work, you have more time to spend with your family, you have more time to meditate and read books. And, above all, you have more time to know more about yourself each day.
So, the next time you come across any article that says 21 ways to become productive or a 100 ways to optimize your work, you can read it and get overwhelmed with so many tips, OR you can ignore it and continue with your work, and see for yourself that doing the work itself is the best productive way to use your time.
Life is already simple. We ourselves are to blame if we complicate it. And when you keep searching for the next productivity tip, you yourself are responsible for wasting your time which you could have used to actually do something.
Think about this today. If it makes sense to you, then try to make your life simple for a week, and see if that’s not the only productivity tip you need to know.
When your life becomes simple, you automatically become productive.
Thank you for reading this article. Wish you a simple and productive day.
Get Started With a Life of Peace, Happiness, Meaning & Purpose Signup for my free newsletter below, and I'll show you how to find all that and more by using the path of mindfulness and meditation 100% Privacy. I won't rent, share or sell your email. Unsubscribe anytime. | {
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I wrote last week that Bernie Sanders's campaign had changed my mind and convinced me that he is right to set tuition-free college at public universities as the goal for higher education policy.
But I also noted that I wasn't sold on the implementation details of his plan, and that in my experience Sanders enthusiasts were not especially aware of the content of his plan.
Big-picture principles are important, but implementation is important too. It's worth reading Sanders's actual plan, since not only is there a lot of nitpicking one could do but there's also an enormous glaring flaw. It pretty clearly wouldn't achieve its goal of making the United States a country where students pay zero tuition to attend public colleges.
This matters because it's not so much a design flaw as a concession to some practical realities that Sanders doesn't admit to on the campaign trail — realities that his supporters would be well-advised to pay more attention to.
So even if the idea of free college is exciting, there are a lot of reasons to doubt it would ever happen.
Bernie's plan: matching funds for states that want to eliminate tuition
Sanders's own summary of his College for All Act makes it pretty clear that the act would not, in practice, eliminate college tuition. What it would do instead is offer federal matching funds on a 2-to-1 basis to states that want to increase higher education spending in order to eliminate tuition:
This legislation would provide $47 billion per year to states to eliminate undergraduate tuition and fees at public colleges and universities. Today, total tuition at public colleges and universities amounts to about $70 billion per year. Under the College for All Act, the federal government would cover 67% of this cost, while the states would be responsible for the remaining 33% of the cost. To qualify for federal funding, states must meet a number of requirements designed to protect students, ensure quality, and reduce ballooning costs. States will need to maintain spending on their higher education systems, on academic instruction, and on need-based financial aid. In addition, colleges and universities must reduce their reliance on low-paid adjunct faculty.
There are two relevant things to note here.
One is that the 2-1 match for eliminating tuition is much less generous than the 9-1 match offered by the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion, yet many states have chosen not to expand Medicaid.
The other is that because the College for All Act requires qualifying universities to reduce reliance on low-paid adjunct faculty in addition to eliminating tuition, in practice the federal match is worth even less than 2 to 1.
Between the years 2008 and 2015, 47 out of 50 states chose to cut higher education spending.
Several states have moved to partially reverse those cuts over the past year or two. And with federal matching funds on the table, several solidly blue ones would likely try to take advantage of Sanders's offer. But this simply isn't many states. After the electoral disasters of 2010 and 2014, Democrats don't even have solid control over states as blue as New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland — to say nothing of places like Michigan, Ohio, or Florida that are under complete Republican control.
Put it all together, and what Sanders has is a plan for tuition-free college in Vermont and, if he's lucky, California, but not for the United States of America.
Sanders's plan acknowledges path dependency
One possible reaction to this would be to slam the plan as inadequate and call for a more ambitious scheme to federalize public higher education financing in the United States. That, after all, would be the only way to guarantee the high-level result that Sanders is promising. It also seems like a reasonable idea in principle. There's no particular reason a poor kid growing up in Alabama should have his access to higher education constrained by the limited financial resources and stingy right-wing politics of his home state.
But Sanders has good reason for not proposing that.
US higher education policy in 2016 is not a blue-sky landscape. We can't turn back the clock to the 1860s and launch federal higher education. The country is full of established public colleges and universities that operate primarily under state auspices. In other words, college in America is an example of path dependency.
A proposal that massively disrupts the governance and financing at all of the public higher education institutions in America would be a recipe for massive backlash. Even though there's nothing wrong in principle with federally managed higher education, and even though there are plenty of countries around the world where it works fine, these institutions are resistant to such massive change.
Sanders should acknowledge path dependency elsewhere
This leaves us with two problems.
One is unrealistic expectations. People who are voting for Sanders because they are enthusiastic about the idea of free college should know that even if his political revolution fully sweeps Washington, college tuition still isn't going to be eliminated unless governors and state senators can be convinced to raise higher education spending.
The other is selectivity. Sanders's plan does not truly deliver tuition-free college for the exact same reason that the Affordable Care Act does not truly deliver universal health care: path dependency and reliance on state government cooperation. If all 50 states had governments in place that wanted to achieve universal insurance coverage, then the Affordable Care Act creates a framework in which they could easily and affordably do so. Indeed, it provides much more of the necessary financial resources than does Sanders's College for All Act.
Great ideas need down-ballot wins
Sanders's campaign was initially interpreted by most people, myself included, as a protest candidacy whose purpose was to raise issues and talk about ideas.
And on that level, it's been very effective — reminding Democrats of the shortcomings of Obamacare, introducing the free college concept to a national audience, and elevating concerns about bank regulation and globalization that would have gotten short shrift in a Hillary Clinton coronation.
But examining the details of Sanders's higher education plan is a reminder that there's relatively little reason to think that replacing Barack Obama with a more left-wing president would be the major difference maker on the issues that Sanders and his supporters care about. On most issues — including both extension of insurance coverage and funding of public higher education — the proximate barrier to more progressive policy is in the statehouse or the House of Representatives, not the White House. | {
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When Lily Eskelsen García, president of the 3.2-million member National Education Association, attended the State of the Union address earlier this year as a guest of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, she had an unexpected encounter at a reception after the speech.
A waitress for the company catering the reception approached the head of the powerful teachers union, who was looking to put down an empty glass.
"Lily," the waitress said. "I'm so happy to meet you."
They struck up a conversation, and Eskelsen García soon learned that the waitress' name was Evelyn Fabito. She was a media specialist at Dodge Park Elementary School in Maryland's Prince George's County. Fabito had been an educator for more than 20 years and was a long-time and active member of Eskelsen Garcia's union.
"So, this is your second job?" Eskelsen García asked.
"No," Fabito said. "This is my third. I have another on weekends."
The plight of the teaching profession is a narrative that's made headlines over the last two years, as educators have become more vocal about the state of their profession, including how their low pay stands in stark contrast to the high expectations placed on them. They've walked out of classrooms in protest, rallied at state capitols and gone on strike in nearly a dozen jurisdictions to demand higher pay, smaller class sizes and increased state investment in their K-12 systems.
Though average teacher salary has increased by 11.5% over the last decade, when taking inflation into account, average teacher salary has actually decreased by 4.5%, according to new data from the NEA.
"When you see the pay gap, you can see the gender gap, you can see the respect gap," Eskelsen García said on a call with reporters last week, during which she detailed her chance meeting with Fabito. "The numbers speak for themselves. You can see that our teacher pay over the last decade has continued to erode."
Editorial Cartoons on Education View All 76 Images
The average public school teacher salary in the U.S. for the 2017-18 school year was $60,477, according to the NEA's annual report, but state averages varied greatly – from more than $80,000 in states like New York, California and Massachusetts to less than $47,000 in Mississippi, West Virginia and Oklahoma.
The report also includes data on teacher starting salaries and shows that in many states average starting salaries are below pre-recession levels. The average starting salary for the 2017-18 school year was $39,249, a 3% percent decrease over the last decade, after adjusting for inflation.
Moreover, 63% of public school districts still offer a starting salary below $40,000, according to the report, and nearly 300 school districts pay first-year teachers less than $30,000 a year.
"When we go into colleges of education and ask them why they've seen a drop in the number of people applying to teacher colleges, they keep saying that these are prospective teachers who have to look at the pay they are going to receive as new teachers. And they are saying, 'We won't be able to pay off our student loans for that,'" Eskelsen García said. "People who want to be teachers are going into other professions because of the pay gap."
According to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning policy organization, teachers are paid 21 percent less than similarly educated and experienced professionals. The so-called "teacher pay gap" reached an all-time high in 2018, the institute's experts have said, exacerbated by the gender gap in wages. Women earn about 80 percent of men's salaries across the spectrum of full-time jobs, and historically, teaching has been a profession made up mostly of women. Today, 77 percent of educators are women.
"I am working hard so I can have money to pay for mortgage, insurance and all other expenses," Fabito says during a brief break on her way from one job to the next. In addition to her jobs at the elementary school and for the catering company, Fabito is a caregiver in a private home.
There are some promising signs it's making an impact on the profession.
The average classroom teacher salary for 2018-19 school year is projected to increase by 2.1 percent over the 2017-18 school year, from $60,477 to $61,730, according to the NEA report, in part because of the salary bumps negotiated in states and cities where educators spoke up. | {
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The Visegrad group is made up of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. It was founded 25 years ago to promote the European integration of these four former Communist states. They joined the European Union in 2004. Now, though, they seem more set on promoting European division.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel's idea of distributing refugees around the EU is anathema to them. They also reject the plan for Turkey to prevent refugees from traveling on to Europe, with the EU taking quotas of refugees from Turkey in return. The Slovakian foreign minister, Miroslav Lajcak, told the news magazine Der Spiegel that "quotas only offer greater incentives for migration."
The Visegrad governments regard Chancellor Merkel as principally responsible for the influx of refugees. "It's a simple idea," the Slovakian prime minister, Robert Fico, remarked sarcastically not long ago. "I'll invite some guests, and when I realize I can't cope with all of them I'll knock on the neighbor's door and say to him: Look after my guests." The Visegrad countries don't want to be that neighbor.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban with Chancellor Angela Merkel
No choice?
They now want to solve the problem by themselves. To do this, they want to seal off the Balkan route. Hundreds of refugees are still reaching Greece from Turkey every day, and from there they travel north via Macedonia. As the EU country they arrive in, Greece should be responsible for processing their asylum applications. But Athens feels overwhelmed, and is just letting most of the refugees travel on.
Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban says they have no choice. "If it had been up to us, the region would have been sealed off long ago," he said recently. Lajcak, the Slovakian foreign minister, told Der Spiegel that "as long as there is no joint European strategy, it's legitimate for the states along the Balkan route to protect their borders. We're helping them do that." Orban believes that in doing this he is not just serving particular interests but fulfilling a greater European mission. "We must safeguard the security of the continent," he has said. The Visegrad leaders don't seen their demand as putting pressure on Macedonia and other states along the Balkan route, but as supporting them. The Czech prime minister Bohuslav Sobotka speaks of it as "solidarity" with the countries of the western Balkans.
The central European EU countries attracted a great deal of criticism in the western European Union as early as last autumn, when they refused to take in any appreciable number of refugees. There was even talk of punishing them by cutting the aid they receive from the EU. Now, though, they have more and more supporters. Last weekend, even the French prime minister Manuel Valls rejected fixed quotas – a stab in the back for Angela Merkel. Austria too is increasingly leaning towards isolation.
Schengen under pressure
If Macedonia and Bulgaria really do close their borders with Greece, this would effectively exclude Greece from the border-control-free Schengen zone. Even in Merkel's own CDU party, Schengen in its current form is no longer sacrosanct. Wolfgang Steiger, the general secretary of the CDU's economic council, told Die Welt newspaper that if a country fails to meet its responsibilities for securing the EU's external borders, "then Schengen must shift towards central Europe."
For Greece, the sealing of its northern border would mean it ends up stuck with the refugees. The Greek government is already trying to brace the country for this possibility. "We have to prepare ourselves for a (large) number of people who will stay in Greece," said the deputy minister responsible for migration, Ioannis Mouzalas, in an interview with the Avgi newspaper.
Italy, another country where many refugees set foot in the EU for the first time, is warning that exclusion will set a precedent. Like Greece, Italy has often simply waved the refugees through. On a visit to Greece, Laura Boldrini, the president of the Italian house of representatives, was quoted by Greek media as saying that "the idea of exclusion - Greece today and Italy tomorrow - is a renunciation of the principles and values of Europe."
Germany's Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, believes the plans to seal the borders are very dangerous. He and his fellow party member, Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, have written a letter to all the EU's social democrat heads of government, saying that "Europe's external borders cannot simply be redefined - over the heads, furthermore, of the affected member states." The two politicians fear that, in a Greece already economically on its knees, this will cause total chaos to break out.
There's little time left for a European solution. The EU heads of state and government will make another attempt, starting this Thursday. | {
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VATICAN CITY -- As Christians around the world celebrated the birth of Jesus, Pope Francis used his traditional Christmas message and blessing Monday to call for a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
That comes in the wake of President Trump's recent recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, which inflamed tensions in the region.
"On this festive day, let us ask the Lord for peace for Jerusalem and for all the Holy Land," the pontiff said. "Let us pray that the will to resume dialogue may prevail between the parties and that a negotiated solution can finally be reached, one that would allow the peaceful coexistence of two States within mutually agreed and internationally recognized borders. May the Lord also sustain the efforts of all those in the international community inspired by goodwill to help that afflicted land to find, despite grave obstacles, the harmony, justice and security that it has long awaited."
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The Reuters news agency notes it was the second time Francis has spoken out publicly about Mr. Trump's decision, which was announced Dec. 6. On that day, the pope called for the city's "'status quo' to be respected" to ward off new tensions, Reuters reported.
Nun looks at Nativity scene in St. Peter's Square before Pope Francis led the "Urbi et Orbi" (to the city and the world) message in Vatican on December 25, 2017 ALESSANDRO BIANCHI / REUTERS
On Thursday, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to approve a resolution condemning Mr. Trump's new policy on Jerusalem, despite his warning that he'd be watching very closely at which members of the General Assembly vote for the resolution and which vote against it.
The Holy Father, leader of the world's 2 billion Catholics, also depicted suffering reflected "in the faces of little children" in his Monday message, citing war and other tensions in places including the Middle East, Africa and the Korean Peninsula.
He told the faithful that "the winds of war are blowing in our world and an outdated model of development continues to produce human, societal and environmental decline."
The pontiff said children in the Middle East "continue to suffer because of growing tension between Israelis and Palestinians," while Syria remains "marked by war" and ongoing conflict in Yemen "has been largely forgotten."
He offered a prayer that "confrontation may be overcome on the Korean Peninsula." | {
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Very close encounters of the 'super moon' kind: Amazing pictures of our lunar neighbour... the nearest it's been in 20 years
It looks like an intergalactic pilot is trying to cut the moon in half. In fact, this memorable image was created by a very Earthly vapour trail from a plane.
The shot is one of many extraordinary pictures of our nearest neighbour taken across the world this weekend, including a magical one below at Glastonbury Tor, Somerset.
As well as being full, the moon is currently relatively close to the Earth.
On Saturday it was 220,625 miles away, making it seem brighter and yellower and creating the eye-catching 'super moon' effect.
It was the first time since January 19, 1992, that the moon has been so close to the Earth. At its furthest, it can be 250,000 miles away.
An aircraft flies past the moon over Somerset on Saturday night as it is at its closest point to the earth for almost two decades
Revellers stand beside St Michael's Tower on Glastonbury Tor, Somerset, watching the moon as it is at its closest point to Earth for two decades
The full moon is seen as it rises near the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington DC Moonhattan: The oversized moon adds to the lights of New York City as it rises over the city skyline Something for everyone: Tourists, star-gazers and simple star-crossed lovers gathered to watch the moon rise over New York's East River
The moon is seen behind the top of the radio and television tower 'Funkturm' in Berlin
The moon as seen from the end of Worthing Pier in Sussex, looking east towards Beachy Head
A view of the full perigee moon (which means it is at its closest point to Earth) in the backdrop of a minaret of a mosque, over Karachi city, Pakistan (left); A seagull flies in front of a full perigee moon in Yangon, Myanmar
A rugby match in Headingley, Leeds is bathed in an orange glow
View of a full perigee moon over Manila, Philippines | {
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Two Congressmen are furious with the Attorney General’s decision not to appoint a second special counsel to investigate corruption in the justice department. “I think he’s being poorly served,” one notes. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) has spoken recently with both Sessions and the Deputy Attorney General. “It’s almost like they have a set of talking points that they go to,” he says, “but the facts don’t support those talking points.”
“It’s supposed to be the truth, the whole truth,” Congressmen Mark Meadows insists, “not part of it, not redactions.” Especially when the things that are being struck out are the ones that show the FBI was committing crimes themselves.
What can be more extraordinary than the nation’s highest law enforcement officials illegally hiding material facts with a magic marker, to cover up evidence of even worse crimes?
The only reason Rep. Meadows can think of for A.G. Sessions to be so reluctant is that he is being convinced to pull back by his underlings.
Rep. Meadows appeared on The Ingraham Angle, Thursday. He was joined by Jim Jordan (R-OH) to weigh in on Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ announcement not to appoint a second special counsel. It should only be done, Sessions insists, under extraordinary circumstances.
Rep. Jordan was shocked. The Director of the FBI, James Comey, had been fired. His second in command, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, has been fired. How much more does Sessions need?
Jim Baker, the former chief counsel at the FBI has been demoted and reassigned. Peter Strzok, who was once deputy head of counter-intelligence, has been demoted and reassigned along with his adulterous lover, Lisa Page, former FBI counsel. The two cooked up a scheme of what to do if President Trump happened to win the election.
The plot was hatched in FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe’s office. Everyone is convinced the Robert Mueller witch hunt is the insurance policy they came up with.
“If those aren’t extraordinary circumstances warranting a second special counsel I don’t know what the heck is.”
Rep. Meadows would like to know “When you go to a court… you have to give them the whole truth.” They didn’t do that at the FISA court. “Two of them have been fired, three of them have been demoted and we don’t think that’s extraordinary circumstances warranting a second special counsel… I mean, tell me some fact pattern that would then, Mr. Sessions.”
As congressional watchdog committees try to put the puzzle together, the DOJ is “keeping some of the pieces.” They are about to be found in contempt of congress.
“I went through and reviewed some redacted things that were given to our committee and on 7 pages there were 12 material facts… Material facts, not just names… material facts that were omitted by the Department of Justice.” Meadows wants some justice from the Justice department.
“It’s time that they come clean, and give Congress what we need.”
Specifically, Justice Department officials ran a sharpie over everything that had to do with a White House meeting between FBI Director James Comey and Obama’s chief of staff, Dennis McDonough. “That was redacted.” It wasn’t the only key point that was either.
One isolated example would not be alarming but Meadows notes, but the multiple redactions show a pattern of abuse. The department of justice “is not complying with the subpoena, and with the oversight responsibility that we have in Congress.”
Rep. Jordan agrees that marking out information about things like “a reference to a friendship” between Peter Strzok and FISA judge Contreras doesn’t make them look good.
“That’s right. They’ve been trying to hide information from us.” It’s bad enough, he says, that they have to physically walk over to the Justice Department, where a special viewing room lets staff look at the information. “It’s ridiculous.”
Rep. Jordan demands to know how the investigator appointed by Sessions can investigate his own boss.
“How can Mr. Huber… He’s probably a great lawyer, I don’t know much about Mr. Huber from Utah but how can he investigate his boss?” Huber reports directly to Rod Rosenstein. “Mr. Rosenstein is involved in all this FISA abuse that we think took place.”
Rosenstein signed the application for Trump wiretaps used to defraud the FISA court into approving surveillance on Carter Page. “He signed the FISA application. That’s the problem.”
The facts speak for themselves, Meadows adds. “Is it a material fact that Peter Strzok had a relationship with a FISA judge and they concealed it. The answer is yes.”
A select group of five people at the top echelons of the FBI, put the file together, “dressed it all up like it was legitimate intelligence,” and took it to the FISA court.
The Hillary Clinton fan club didn’t tell the court the whole truth. They kept silent on who paid for the dossier. The hid the fact that the FBI dumped Christopher Steele as informant when they found out the dossier’s author was peddling the same things he was telling them to the press.
Material facts aren’t only being held from Congress, they were withheld from the FISA judge too. “They didn’t disclose that to the court so… Those are all key facts.”
The investigation of alleged Donald Trump collusion started in late July. A week later there was a meeting with the Department of Justice “where they said the White House is leading this.”
Another week after that, Director Comey paid a visit to the White House. “We can’t draw a conclusion but we can certainly look at the facts and the facts do speak to further investigation.”
They will certainly bring Mr. McDonough in for questioning now that they know what was under the redaction blocks but the lawmakers point out the example only highlights that they can’t interview people when the underlying facts were conveniently hidden, to begin with.
“Some of the redactions that the Department of Justice have, they keep the names so we don’t even know who to bring in.” | {
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Senior Tories are urging MPs to back away from provoking an early leadership contest this summer, after claims that some want to see David Davis take charge.
Some MPs are keen to see Davis replace Theresa May, claiming that the prime minister is so wounded that she cannot continue in office for long and that the party should act after its disastrous election result.
However, senior figures in the party are now saying it would be a mistake to remove May too soon. Calmer heads are urging restraint, warning that it would be hard to engineer the coronation of Davis – and that unleashing a messy leadership contest could be disastrous for the party.
One senior Tory said there was frustration among a small group of MPs and junior ministers that needed to be reined in. “I’m encouraging everyone to go on holiday,” they said. “It cannot be now – there are some who want it to happen before the end of July, but it is not in the interests of the party. We need to go away, have a holiday and address it in the autumn. There are a lot of conversations going on about when she should go, not if she should go.”
Davis has been cited by some MPs as the best caretaker candidate, but several allies of the Brexit secretary said that he was not involved in any planning about the leadership. “The fact is David is just getting on with his job,” said one. “He’s got the most important ministerial job that anyone has had since the second world war.
“Obviously a lot of MPs are coalescing around him because the task of the Tory party is to deliver Brexit and take on Corbyn and he is superbly qualified to do both, but he is not plotting. There are a bunch of junior ministers who are plotting.”
Becoming leader would be a remarkable achievement for Davis, who was frontrunner to seize the Tory crown in 2005 before David Cameron ultimately emerged as the winner. A poorly received speech at that year’s Conservative party conference was seen as the reason his campaign lost momentum.
Overall, however, there is little appetite now among Tory MPs for a quick leadership contest and even less enthusiasm for an election, which most believe the party would lose. Tory whips have been on the alert for any leadership plotting, but are said to have found no evidence of a groundswell of support for the idea of an early contest.
One minister said: “The ball is in [May’s] court. If over the summer she says, ‘I can’t do this, I’m going to go’, then OK, we have a leadership contest. But unless she does that then she stays and her punishment is to see through Brexit. She has to get on with it and show a bit of resolve.”
Allies of the prime minister pointed to her public comments suggesting she had no intention of stepping aside.
She told a Conservative summer party that the Tories must not lick their wounds after the election. She said this week that the party must be “bold, not timid” – taken as a sign that she wanted to stay in power for some time.
There is also a significant group of newer MPs who believe that their generation should be given time to emerge as possible leadership material. “There is a new generation who are coming up with new ideas,” said one. “We may not want the candidates currently on offer.”
Other young MPs in the party are said to be frustrated by May’s inability to free up slots in the cabinet because of her weakened position after the election.
“Junior ministers think that the cabinet has some good people in there and some rubbish – and that the rubbish should be cleared out,” said a senior party figure. “They know she is too weak to sack anyone.” | {
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A nice, short history lesson from Sen. Sherrod Brown:
or more than a century — in churches and temples, in union halls and neighborhood centers, in the streets and at the ballot box — progressives have moved the country forward. Progressives brought us minimum wage and Social Security in the 1930s, civil rights and Medicare in the 1960s, and health care and Wall Street reform in 2010.
Opponents of these accomplishments — some of society's most privileged and well-entrenched interest groups — have not changed much. The John Birch Society of 1965 has bequeathed its fervor and extremism to the Tea Party of 2010.
History tells us that rage on the right should not be confused with populism. The far right attacks government regulation as it feeds Wall Street and the insurance companies. It rails against government spending for the least privileged as it lavishes tax cuts favoring the most privileged.....
The Tea Party vision of 21st century America would gut Medicare and Social Security, ignore the minimum wage, and scale back consumer protections and regulations that keep Wall Street honest and our food supply safe. It seems to me that Tea Party activists, increasingly influential in the Republican Party, do not seem to much like America the way we are.
Tea Party populism is driven by anger at our government and at our country. Real populism fights for all Americans, while Tea Party populism divides us.
Republicans have always been good at coming up with catch phrases and slogans that traffic in fear and misinformation.
But impatient progressives, like generations before us, have the truth on our side. And this time we have the perfect bumper sticker.
"Bring back pre-existing conditions. Vote Republican." | {
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 6/5/2017 (1230 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
His case sparked an uproar after he damaged a cell at the Emerson port of entry, uttered threats and allegedly assaulted an officer.
The case prompted the national union for border guards to declare half of all asylum seekers crossing into Canada to be serious criminals and the Canada Border Services Agency to refute that, saying about two per cent pose a threat and are held in detention.
After spending more than two weeks in the Winnipeg Remand Centre, Ahmed Aden Ali, 37, is out on bail and desperate to stay in Canada.
In an interview with the Free Press, he talked about what happened the night he arrived in April and the series of bad choices and bad luck that got him to where he is today: a man weighed down with troubling baggage who has become Canada’s problem.
Authorities here can’t send him — or any other asylum seeker who’s slipped over the border — back to the United States, because the U.S. won’t take them, said Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees.
Canadian authorities can’t keep him locked up unless he’s a danger, because it’s a human rights violation and is too costly.
Dench called Ali’s case "very uncommon."
"The federal government is trying to identify better solutions for people who don’t need to be in detention, so we’re not wasting taxpayers’ money keeping people locked up," she said.
If his removal order is issued, he can’t just be sent back to Somalia. He has no travel documents and there are no commercial flights from North America to the African country.
Ali was 11 years old when civil war broke out and Somalia degenerated into chaos. By the time he was 14, he and other boys his age were walking around with AK-47 assault rifles.
"You find a gun when you see dead people on the street. Everybody gets it — it’s for protection," he said in an interview Thursday at his lawyer’s office.
When he was 17, his parents and six siblings moved to Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya. There, Ali learned to speak English.
At 19, an older sister living in the U.S. sponsored his family, who moved to Minneapolis in 1999.
"Everybody was excited," said Ali, who was keen to continue his education. "I was good at math and English."
He went to live with an aunt in Madison, Wis., got his GED and started attending classes at a liberal arts college. Just when it seemed like he had it all together, everything began to unravel.
"I was having flashbacks," he said.The memory he tried hardest to forget kept resurfacing.
In it, Ali is 14 years old and in Somalia, with no school and at loose ends with a "buddy," each carrying an AK-47 and watching the world go by.
"We see a lady walking down the street. He said, ‘I’m going to shoot the lady.’ And he did it — he shot her! I jumped up and went to see her."
She was dead. Her face was covered by her niqab, so he pulled it back to see who she was. He recognized the woman as someone who had been kind to him.
"I felt it was like my own mom." He said he shot the boy who had killed her, and injured him.
That episode replays over and over in his head — even 23 years later and half a world away.
"I should’ve grabbed his gun," said Ali, who wishes he’d asked for help sooner as an adult in the U.S.
Ali said he wouldn’t talk to anyone about what he was going through because of the stigma of mental illness in the Somali community.
"They call you crazy," he explained.
He moved back to Minneapolis to be close to his mother. There, he was charged with grand theft auto after taking his uncle’s vehicle without permission. Ali said his uncle didn’t know who took it and reported it stolen. Ali said he was arrested for being drunk and disorderly.
In 2013, he suffered a brain aneurysm, spent more than a month in a coma and underwent surgery, leaving long, wide scars across his scalp. He underwent physical therapy, then went into treatment for chemical dependency and mental health issues.
Then he spent more than three years in immigration detention.
Finally, he was released.
"When Donald Trump became president, I felt fear," he said.
Ali had heard about people being deported to Somalia. A friend working in Edmonton encouraged him to head north to Canada. So did his mom.
He paid a smuggler US$200 for a ride to the border near Emerson. Late on a Friday night, he and five other people were dropped off further away from Canada than they were told and they had a two-hour walk to the border. A van picked the migrants up when they crossed into Canada and took them to the Canada Border Services Agency at Emerson.
"I had my first interview and it was really good," said Ali. He had a second interview and then noticed the group he crossed into Canada with had finished their interviews and were being driven away towards Winnipeg. He started to worry.
For the third interview, another officer — a woman — told him to wait and came back with two other officers.
"They put me in a little room and locked the door," Ali said. "She said, ‘You’re going to get deported.’"
Ali said he panicked and started banging on the door and yelling. One of the officers told him to settle down. Ali pulled out a lighter he had in his pocket and held the flame next to the sprinkler in the ceiling until it started spraying water in the cell. The officers returned, cuffed him and sent him to the Winnipeg Remand Centre.
He was charged with uttering threats, mischief over $5,000 and assaulting a peace officer. Ali said he didn’t assault anyone and his lawyer, David Davis, said there are questions about the strength of those charges. He’s back in court May 23 to answer to them.
The Customs and Immigration Union did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
For now, Ali has to abide by release conditions, including a curfew and staying away from alcohol and trouble. He’s waiting to get a work permit so he can support himself as his immigration case moves through the system. Meanwhile, he’s volunteering at the inner-city shelter he’s staying in, interpreting for other asylum seekers and helping them find their way around.
"I have to stay busy," he said.
He said he poses no threat to anyone. "If they give me a chance, then I’m going to show them. I’m trying to do good in my life."
[email protected] | {
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Image copyright Asher Svidensky
The Eagle Huntress, a documentary about a Kazakh nomad girl in Mongolia learning to hunt with a golden eagle, divides opinion. It is up for a Bafta award on Sunday night but missed out on an Oscar nomination, possibly because to some viewers it feels staged. Director Otto Bell, however, denies all accusations that the film was scripted, acted or re-enacted.
The story of the Eagle Huntress is simple and heartwarming. Aisholpan Nurgaiv, the rosy-cheeked 13-year-old heroine, is trained by her father to hunt on horseback with a golden eagle - traditionally a male pursuit - and shocks everyone by winning the prestigious eagle-hunters' competition held annually in the town of Ulgii, in north-western Mongolia.
It has a stirring musical soundtrack, ends with an anthem "You can do anything" sung by pop superstar Sia, and is narrated by another teenage role model, Star Wars actress Daisy Ridley.
One reviewer has described it as a "fairytale documentary" - two words that don't usually go together - that feels at times "more like fiction than fact".
Another calls it a "repetitious, half-baked, contrived and crudely staged homily on female empowerment [that] tells us less about Kazakh nomads than Pocahontas does about the Algonquins in 17th Century Virginia". The film took another culture's traditions, he goes on, and translated them "into the tired platitudes of a second-rate Disney animation".
Early publicity for the film did little to inspire confidence, by stating that Aisholpan had fought "an ingrained culture of misogyny to become the first female eagle hunter in 2,000 years of male-dominated history" - a claim that US historian Adrienne Mayor has shown is untrue.
This line was recast to say that Aisholpan is "the first female in 12 generations of her Kazakh family" to be an eagle huntress. But Mayor and others still argue that the film creates a false impression, by failing to mention other Kazakh eagle huntresses, and exaggerating the patriarchal pressures that Aisholpan had to overcome.
"I think eagle hunting would be open to any young woman who would want to pursue it," Mayor says.
Image caption Adrienne Mayor's paper, The Eagle Huntress - Ancient Traditions and New Generations, mentions a number of Kazakh women who have trained or are training to hunt with eagles
The spark for the film came when director Otto Bell came across photographs of Aisholpan taken by Israeli photographer Asher Svidensky on the BBC News website, in April 2014.
He tracked Aisholpan's family down (being nomads, they move around) and on the very first day, he says, filmed one of the early scenes in the film, where the girl and her father seize a baby eaglet from its nest. It's a dramatic moment with Aisholpan climbing down a cliff, her father holding a rope attached to her waist. And it's one of a number of scenes that some critics have assumed was staged.
Otto Bell rejects this.
"The scene where she takes the baby eagle out of the nest - people are always surprised to know that's one single take. I filmed it like I would film a live sports event," he says.
"I did it drawing on my experience in commercials. As far as reconstructing stuff and staging stuff, what you see on the screen is what we got."
Another scene that sceptics find questionable comes when Aisholpan's father, Agalai, gets his own father to give his blessing to Aisholpan's eagle-hunting ambitions. The shot is framed and the camera is rolling when the conversation between the two men takes place outside the tent, and the girl is summoned to receive the old man's good wishes.
Was it staged? No, says Bell.
"The blessing scene - he said he was going to do this, I just asked him to do it outside. He told me: 'We need to think about what my father thinks of this.' The father likes to sit outside anyway, he likes to watch the goats. That was as close [to staging] as we got."
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Otto Bell (centre) with Aisholpan's parents at the Ajyal film festival in Doha in December
There are other moments that critics grumble about. Tim Robey in the Telegraph describes as "woefully unspontaneous" a scene where a newsreader on the radio in the family's tent is heard talking about the forthcoming eagle festival, and Aisholpan pipes up to plead with her parents for permission to enter.
It's "engineered storytelling" he says. "You feel sorry for her enacting some of these charades."
Will Dunn in the New Statesman is also bothered by the film's "re-enactment and editorialising", though he notes that without the imposed girl-power narrative it's "a film about the fox-hunting techniques of Mongolian Kazakhs, a subject that is not exactly a banker at the box office". He also accepts it would have been a shame if Aisholpan's world had not been revealed to a wider audience.
Nigel Andrews in his review in the Financial Times last December wrote that the action and dialogue seemed "a little set up". He was particularly suspicious of a montage of grumpy elderly men filmed tut-tutting over the idea of a woman taking up eagle hunting. But while the academic Adrienne Mayor suggests Bell went searching for these naysayers in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, in Andrews' latest article about the film Bell says he just went round knocking on elders' doors, and all openly voiced disapproval. So he put them in the film.
Meghan Fitz-James, a Canadian traveller who spent time with Aisholpan's family, also says that one scene showing Aisholpan training for the eagle festival was in fact shot three days later, in a four-hour shoot with coaching and retakes.
Image copyright Asher Svidensky Image caption Aisholpan training with her father
But the fundamentals of the film are confirmed by Aisholpan herself.
"I started to train when I was 10 years old, going into the mountains with my dad," she told the BBC, while passing through Ulan Bator recently. "I told my dad that I wanted to become an eagle huntress."
That was in 2011 - two or three years before Svidensky arrived on the scene - and she wasn't just training with the eagle, she was already hunting too, she says.
Aisholpan also confirms that she was aware some men thought a girl was not strong enough to hold an eagle, that she should stay at home, and would not be able to stand the cold hunting for hours in winter in the Altai mountains.
"The pressure gave me more will and power. It gave me the inspiration to win," she says.
But the curmudgeonly views of these mostly elderly men were not expressed at the eagle festival, where officials and competitors were supportive, she says. After her win in 2014 (captured on film) she was greeted by loud cheers when she competed again in 2015 and 2016.
Watching the film, a cynical viewer may fear that Aisholpan has been coached when she says: "Girls can do anything if they try." But she says the same thing off-screen too: "I am happy that I have won a man's competition. It shows how strong women are."
Image copyright Getty Images
Who would not be proud, in her position, to have beaten grown men with years of eagle-hunting experience? Any telling of her story would carry a female empowerment message, even if this film does milk it for all its worth.
Despite her criticisms of the film, the historian Adrienne Mayor agrees that Aisholpan is a worthy heroine.
"Her bravery and her feats in that eagle hunting contest are really amazing and inspiring," she says. "That would have been enough in the film."
Additional reporting by Grace Brown in Ulan Bator, and Mike Wendling in London
Join the conversation - find us on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter. | {
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The 2012 Huntington’s Disease Therapeutics Conference brought a hefty dose of news, excitement and optimism for people desperately waiting for effective treatments for HD. HDBuzz interviewed some of the leading scientific minds behind the Conference’s organizer, CHDI Foundation, Inc.
What is CHDI?
It’s a continuous source of surprise to us that many people from HD-affected families haven’t heard of CHDI, considering they are, by a long way, the largest funder of Huntington’s disease research around the world.
Robert Pacifici, CHDI’s Chief Scientific Officer Image credit: Blumenstein/CHDI
CHDI’s structure and mission are highly unusual - not just within Huntington’s disease, but in any area of research. In many ways, CHDI resembles a commercial drug company - it has a management structure, has a pipeline of ‘targets’ and employs drug-hunting scientists, many with experience in the pharmaceutical industry. Yet CHDI is a non-profit organization, funded entirely from donations, with no need to deliver a financial return to shareholders. CHDI’s main motivation is time, not money. Uniquely, CHDI is committed entirely to developing treatments for one disease - Huntington’s - and, equally unusually, has no physical laboratories of its own, instead driving HD research through collaborations with academic and commercial researchers.
Our interview at the 2011 Conference covered CHDI’s unusual setup in detail. This year, we wanted to concentrate on what’s new and the palpable sense of excitement at the 2012 Conference around forthcoming trials of new drugs for HD.
An exciting time for drugs
As our tweets and reports from the Conference show, there’s a real feeling that 2012 will mark the beginning of a new era in Huntington’s disease drug development. Several long-awaited human trials of gene silencing are being planned, and CHDI’s parallel efforts to produce new drugs specifically targeting different problems in HD have advanced dramatically.
We started by asking Robert Pacifici, CHDI’s Chief Scientific Officer, what was different about these upcoming trials from what we’ve seen before. Three things make him optimistic, he replied. “The first is the number of shots on goal. We have a lot of things in the hopper that are at a very advanced stage. The second thing is diversity. If we were only focusing on one approach, I’d be really nervous, but we’re not - there’s diversity there.”
Pacifici and his chemistry and biology leads, Celia Dominguez and Ignacio Muñoz-Sanjuan, are rightly proud of the drugs they’ve painstakingly designed and tested. One thing that distinguishes the next generation of experimental drugs is that they were designed specifically for Huntington’s disease rather than re-tooled from other diseases - or as Dominguez puts it, “these molecules were hand-crafted for HD from the get-go. ”
“ There’s every chance of success - but if the trials fail, they’re still informative. Everything is going to give a definitive result ”
The third change CHDI is aiming for goes to the very heart of what motivates researchers to run a clinical trial. “We’ve got things designed in a way that there’s every chance of success - but if they fail”, says Pacifici, “they’re still informative. Everything is going to give a definitive result.”
That requires two fundamental adjustments to the way trials are run. First, there has to be exhaustive testing of the drug before it reaches a human trial, to make sure it does what it’s supposed to. Second, the trial has to be designed in a way that allows the results to make sense, whether positive or negative.
Given the financial and time cost of trials, says Pacifici, it’s not enough to get a negative result and not know why. CHDI’s trial designs use three layers of ‘biomarkers’ to track the effects of a drug from hitting its target to having a “meaningful biological effect” on the disease. “It’s still possible, even with those three things, that the drug doesn’t fix Huntington’s, but if I know I’ve hit the target, and it doesn’t fix HD, I know that target is one to walk away from.”
As an example of CHDI’s approach, Pacifici cites caspase-6, an enzyme thought to be important for snipping the mutant huntingtin protein into poisonous fragments. CHDI worked intensively to study the enzyme, and to develop drugs to reduce its activity. But the more they discovered, the less promising it seemed as a treatment approach, and the hard decision was taken to discontinue the program. But CHDI didn’t just walk away from caspase-6, Pacifici points out. “We made sure we closed out the project properly and we’re publishing our findings, so that anyone else who was interested could pick it up. We’re happy to be proved wrong.”
A new approach
With gene silencing and exciting drugs like phosphodiesterase (PDE) inhibitors and KMO inhibitors rapidly moving towards clinical trials, if CHDI were a regular pharmaceutical company this might be the time to pause its efforts to discover new targets and develop new molecules. Instead, the Foundation has just unveiled a new approach to the problem of studying and developing treatments for HD - using systems biology.
Keith Elliston, CHDI’s new Vice President for Systems Biology. Image credit: Blumenstein/CHDI
Keith Elliston is CHDI’s newly appointed Vice President for Systems Biology. “Biological systems,” explains Elliston, “have a particular nature to themselves that you cannot understand by looking at single parts one at a time. We have to look at the collection of parts as a whole, rather than individual components.”
It sounds so sensible, we wonder briefly why anyone would do anything differently. Elliston switches to history mode. “The molecular biology revolution fundamentally changed the way we think about biology. It took us from a state where we looked at whole systems as they function, to where we could tear them down to their atomic components. But it’s very clear that biological systems are much more complex than that.”
Fair enough, but isn’t Huntington’s disease basically a simple problem - a single genetic stutter, that causes the death of brain cells? Not quite, says Elliston. A cell with the HD mutation has “changed its nature - it’s not dead, it’s still alive, but it’s fundamentally altered. The challenge is to find out how it’s been altered, then how can we nudge the system back to a more favorable state”.
Elliston believes that systems biology presents a new way of approaching drug development. “Conventional wisdom says that if we make a drug that alters a single point in the system, we can change the way the system works. But drugs have many different effects, and it may be the collection of effects that nudge the system one way or another.”
In a sense, then, it seems like systems biology is about realizing that we’ve always been dealing with systems, perhaps without realizing it. Elliston has a neat analogy. “If I take a pin and push it against a balloon, I pop it. If I take a hand and push it at many points, it changes shape. It’s the same thing with biology. The more gently I push it, the more likely I am to move it from one state to another.”
Openness and sharing are important aspects of CHDI’s move towards systems biology. The Foundation has many academic and industry partners, and aims to bridge gaps where those traditional ways of working don’t always do well. “The key thing that CHDI can do is build the database - what are the right models we need, what are the mechanisms of disease - when we put these things together and package them up, we can basically kick off HD programs across the pharmaceutical industry, because we’ve done the biology.”
“ Our strategy has been to make sure that nothing that’s on the critical path is beyond our control ”
“Big pharma”
It’s been a mixed year for the pharmaceutical industry and Huntington’s disease. HD families were understandably disappointed when Novartis announced they were pulling the plug on their neurodegenerative disease program, including their HD work.
Meanwhile another drug giant, Pfizer, announced great preliminary results from its collaboration with CHDI, to develop PDE drugs to improve the functioning of the synaptic connections between neurons. Pfizer is now planning a drug trial which could begin as early as 2013.
Pacifici remains positive about the sometimes unpredictable involvement of commercial drug companies in HD research. “Because CHDI has the luxury of the long term and the financial resources,” he says, “we can rise above it. It’s disappointing when a company de-prioritizes things, but our strategy has been to make sure that nothing that’s on the critical path is beyond our control.”
From small seeds
CHDI has reinvented itself this year with a new logo - a tree made from connected structures - representing the chemistry of drug molecules, or possibly Elliston’s biological systems. It’s an apt image, since the seedlings that CHDI has been planting and nurturing these past seven years have oftentimes proved fragile and difficult to cultivate. But there’s a real sense, both within the Foundation and in the global community of HD researchers, that their efforts will be rewarded and every reason to believe that the forthcoming trials of drugs “designed specifically with HD in mind” will bear fruit. Or, at the very least, provide some shelter from the storm.
Dr Wild and Dr Carroll's registration fee for the Therapeutics Conference was waived by CHDI Foundation, Inc., but their attendance was supported by HDBuzz and the European HD Network, from funds independent of CHDI. CHDI had no input into the selection of subjects or the content of coverage on HDBuzz. For more information about our disclosure policy see our FAQ... | {
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Hughes Insurance, Northern Ireland's largest independent insurance broker, has been bought by US firm Liberty Mutual.
Liberty Mutual already owns the former Quinn Direct insurance business baseed mainly in the Republic of Ireland.
Newtownards-based Hughes was established by Leslie Hughes in 1977 and employs over 300 people.
All Hughes policies remain valid and at renewal customers will be offered terms for cover underwritten by Liberty.
Hughes Insurance will operate as a stand-alone business under its existing brand.
Employment levels at its call centre in Newtownards and at its 11 other branches around Northern Ireland are unaffected by the announcement.
Employment at Liberty's operations in Enniskillen, Dublin and Cavan are also unaffected.
'Exciting opportunities'
The purchase price for the business, which had turnover of about £60m last year, has not been revealed.
CEO of Liberty Insurance, Patrick O'Brien, said: "I believe Liberty's acquisition of Hughes and our appointment as lead underwriter will enable us to build a leading presence in the Northern Ireland market.
"Liberty Mutual has a long history in Northern Ireland, having first invested in Northern Ireland in 1997 with the establishment of Liberty Information Technology, which now employs over 400 IT professionals."
CEO of Hughes Insurance, Gareth Brady, said: "This is a great development for both our customers and our employees, enabling us to grow our business further with the backing of one of the world's leading insurers while maintaining our Northern Ireland identity.
"It also opens up a range of exciting opportunities for our talented workforce across Northern Ireland." | {
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In an attempt to gain some insight into possible approaches to reducing age-related memory disturbances, aged Fischer 344 rats were administered either vehicle, choline, piracetam or a combination of choline or piracetam. Animals in each group were tested behaviorally for retention of a one trial passive avoidance task, and biochemically to determine changes in choline and acetylcholine levels in hippocampus, cortex and striatum. Previous research has shown that rats of this strain suffer severe age-related deficits on this passive avoidance task and that memory disturbances are at least partially responsible. Those subjects given only choline (100 mg/kg) did not differ on the behavioral task from control animals administered vehicle. Rats given piracetam (100 mg/kg) performed slightly better than control rats (p<0.05), but rats given the piracetam/choline combination (100 mg/kg of each) exhibited retention scores several times better than those given piracetam alone. In a second study, it was shown that twice the dose of piracetam (200 mg/kg) or choline (200 mg/kg) alone, still did not enhance retention nearly as well as when piracetam and choline (100 mg/kg of each) were administered together. Further, repeated administration (1 week) of the piracetam/choline combination was superior to acute injections. Regional determinations of choline and acetylcholine revealed interesting differences between treatments and brain area. Although choline administration raised choline content about 50% in striatum and cortex, changes in acetylcholine levels were much more subtle (only 6–10%). No significant changes following choline administration were observed in the hippocampus. However, piracetam alone markedly increased choline content in hippocampus (88%) and tended to decrease acetylcholine levels (19%). No measurable changes in striatum or cortex were observed following piracetam administration. The combination of choline and piracetam did not potentiate the effects seen with either drug alone, and in certain cases the effects were much less pronounced under the drug combination. These data were discussed as they relate to possible effects of choline and piracetam on cholinergic transmission and other neuronal function, and how these effects may reduce specific memory disturbances in aged subjects. The results of these studies demonstrate that the effects of combining choline and piracetam are quite different than those obtained with either drug alone and support the notion that in order to achieve substantial efficacy in aged subjects it may be necessary to reduce multiple, interactive neurochemical dysfunctions in the brain, or affect activity in more than one parameter of a deficient metabolic pathway. | {
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Today we are introducing AndroidStarters, boilerplate for your next Android project, made simple. Handcrafted starter projects from the community, optimised for simplicity and ease of use.
Why was this developed?
I used to be a freelance Android Developer where I worked on new projects every two months. I followed the same architecture for all my projects. Every time I started on a new one, it would easily take 2–4 weeks for configuring various libraries, developing, debugging and hacking.
With every project, I had to go through the same steps of setting up everything again and again. There was a lot of rework and I felt the need to eliminate it.
Boilerplate destruction
To eliminate all this re-work I created a Yeoman generator: generator-android-mvp-starter, which would get my project up and running within minutes. I had everything configured to my taste, the architecture, libraries, tools, testing suite, etc. This not only solved my problems, it saved me a lot of time and increased my productivity.
But I wanted more. I wanted the Android community to benefit from this. After talking to a lot of Android developers, I realised that most people didn’t want to go through the hassle of installing additional tools like node.js, yeoman, etc. All they wanted was a project that could be imported straight into Android Studio.
AndroidStarters to the rescue
A nifty web app that abstracts all the complexity behind a simple 3-step process:
Provide app name and package Choose your architecture Hit Build!
Just another bootstrap/boilerplate project?
No. This isn’t another bootstrap project. There are loads of good boilerplate examples available on Github.
Most of the boilerplate/bootstrap projects, don’t have way to create a new project. You have to manually rename packages, resources, etc. which is highly error prone.
AndroidStarters allows you to use any of those bootstrap projects and create a new one all setup and ready for use. The app generation process goes through the selected architecture’s source code and replaces app name, package names, imports and what not in future. It also generates the project structure with the package name specified.
We’ve included a few architecture samples from the Android community which you can choose to generate a new project with your app name and package. If you have any other architecture in mind, please open an issue on androidstarters.com to get it added. Also, do check out our Architectures Roadmap.
Behind the magic
The idea originated from androidbootstrap.com by my guru Donn. I used a lot of code from it, as it’s open source. You can check it out on GitHub.
I learnt Android app developing through Donn’s TekPub course, way back in the day. Thanks to Donn for inspiring lots of developers around the world.
Roadmap
Add more architecture samples
Sample for Google’s New Android Architecture Components
Provide an option for developer to COMPOSE the project as per his needs. e.g: Enter AppName->Enter PackageName-> Provide options to select and configure all the libraries.
the project as per his needs. e.g: Enter AppName->Enter PackageName-> Provide options to select and configure all the libraries. Create Android Studio templates for AndroidStarters.
Create real world starters, E-commerce Starter, Chat Starter etc.
Thanks to all Android Architecture Evangelists
Wait..
We also have the new architecture components from Google lead, Yigit Boyar ;)
Open source
Entire source code androidstarters.com is open-source. Please feel free to contribute.
If you liked this post, hit the 👏 . Stay tuned for the next one!
Also share AndroidStarters and give us some feedback in the comments below. | {
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HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuban evangelical churches are collecting signatures to petition against a proposed constitutional amendment that would open the door to gay marriage, as part of an unusually strong non-governmental political campaign for the Communist-run island.
Worshippers wave paper flags that read in Spanish "I am in favour of the original design. The family as God created it. Wedding between man and woman", during a service at a Methodist Church in Havana, Cuba, October 4, 2018. REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini
Cubans have been discussing the broader revamp of their Soviet-era constitution, as proposed by the Communist Party, at official block-level meetings nationwide since August.
Article 68, which redefines matrimony as gender neutral, has sparked a particular uproar, revealing how macho Cuban society remains despite making headway on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights in recent years.
Cuba’s churches, which enjoy more autonomy and influence than any other organization not affiliated with the Communist Party after the country expanded religious freedoms in the 1990s, have been stoking the controversy.
“We do not in any way approve Article 68 ... because the Bible condemns it,” Pastor Lester Fernandez, 39, said to euphoric applause from around 500 people gathered at a Methodist Church in Havana one weekday morning earlier this month.
The Methodist Church is one of 21 evangelical denominations that this month started gathering signatures for a petition against the amendment.
They have also been plastering posters celebrating the “original family design, just as God created it” on their doors and windows, surprising many Cubans in a one-party country with tight control of public spaces.
Some analysts say the focus on gay marriage is crowding out discussion of other, more sensitive issues raised by the constitutional revamp, which maintains Cuba’s one-party socialist system as “irrevocable” while reflecting changes of recent years in its 224 articles.
“(Gay marriage) has functioned as a smokescreen to hide other realities,” said Isbel Diaz Torres, an activist for many issues, including LGBT rights.
Slideshow ( 15 images )
Diaz Torres said he would be happy to finally be able to marry his boyfriend of 14 years if the constitution were approved and the necessary legal changes made.
But he wished Cubans would use the public consultation to address other issues like human rights.
The consultation has provoked an unusually open debate for Cuba, with some citizens, for example, calling for direct elections for president. Yet some topics, like the possibility of another political or economic system, appear to remain off-limits.
HALF A MILLION SIGNATURES?
Cuba persecuted gays in the early decades of Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, as it did religious people, rounding them up as counter-revolutionaries and placing them in labor camps.
Castro apologized in 2010 for this, and the country has made strides in LGBT rights in recent years, thanks partly to the advocacy of his niece, Mariela Castro, director of the National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX). Fidel Castro died in 2016.
If the constitution were approved with Article 68 in place, Cuba would be on track to joining Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Uruguay in allowing same-sex couples to marry.
Given that it already guarantees other LGBT rights like free sex-change operations, this would make it an unlikely regional leader in LGBT rights, particularly in the Caribbean where homophobia is rife and some countries still have anti-sodomy laws.
However, the government has promised to take into account public suggestions for a final version to be put to a referendum early next year.
Cuban Evangelical League Church President Alida Leon Baez said she expected more than 500,000 Cubans to sign the churches’ petition.
Meanwhile, more than 60 percent of Cuba’s 11.2 million citizens are baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, which has not weighed in on Article 68, but traditionally opposes same-sex marriage.
“If the topic of matrimony is not modified in the constitutional project, we will all vote against it,” said Leon Baez. “If this is approved, our nation is going to total destruction.”
This could put the government in a bind if it wants to prove the public consultation is a real example of participatory democracy, and not, as some opponents say, a fraud.
Cuban LGBT activists have run a countercampaign mainly on social media. But they complain the government does not officially recognize most independent activists and occasionally harasses them.
That means they, unlike Cuba’s churches, cannot do big campaigns.
“CENESEX is doing many actions,” said LGBT activist Ulises Padron. “But we can’t forget at the end of the day it’s an academic, scientific, teaching institution.” | {
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WHY?
In 2012 Kevin, a game developer at Blizzard was diagnosed with stage four Alveolar Soft Part Sarcoma, an incredibly rare cancer with no cure and no clear treatment path.
This project came to be when we decided we had to do something for our friend and fellow game developer, Kevin Kenai Griffith (KKG).
Unfortunately, in Oct. 2014 KKG passed away, as the content for the book was completed.
HOW DID WE MOVE FORWARD?
After he passed we spent a great deal of time deciding how the project should move forward, if at all. We decided Kevin would have wanted us to see this through, so we continued production on the book as a tribute to him and as an opportunity to show off the great positivity that can come from Gamers in action. His legacy will continue on in the form of this book made by his friends and fellow game artists.
In order to try and stay as close to the original intent of the project we split the proceeds of the campaign between 2 charity organizations in KKG’s memory:
Game Changer is an organization that donates games and funds for medical treatment to kids with cancer and their families.
CureASPS is the main group leading research on the type of cancer Kevin had. | {
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Tiera Skovbye is everywhere these days – in Midnight Sun, The Miracle Season, and a little show you may have heard of called Riverdale, in which she plays Polly Cooper who is set to return this season in a huge storyline. The actress, who goes back and forth between Vancouver and Los Angeles, has a prominent part in the Gunpowder & Sky RKSS Films production Summer of 84, playing the girl next door with a twist.
We caught up with the captivating actress on the phone recently and the following is a condensed and edited version of our conversation.
Brief Take: Congratulations on the movie and its successful screening at Sundance! What was that experience like for you?
Tiera Skovbye: Oh it was incredible! It was just like crazy madness the entire time. I’d never been, so I had no idea what to expect. I also didn’t realize that Park City was so small! It was crazy, walking down the street, you just see actors everywhere, and producers and directors. It was a really cool and inspiring experience because you are surrounded by so much creativity in such a small place, and it is so much fun!
I think that what was so cool for me about the Sundance screening was, you know, I had seen the film before, I got to be in the editing room for a little bit and watch it being made, which was really cool. What was cool for me was to be in an audience full of people, and especially in a midnight screening, those are fans and people who really want to be there. They’re up late and they want to see the movie, and it was so cool to see people reacting and cheering, or booing, and being shocked and scared by things. You’re there and you’re like “Oh, okay! It is scary!” and “people do like it!” [giggles] And that for me was really cool. It was really fun that what we made, people were enjoying.
BT: When you were filming the movie, how did it feel to wear the clothes of the ’80s and feel fully present in that time period?
TS: Oh, it was so much fun! I really enjoy doing period pieces of any time, especially the ’80s, with all the colours and the hairstyles. I feel like for me, that was something that really helped me to get into the character, her clothes and her hairstyles and all that kind of stuff. It was great!
BT: You just returned from Hawaii where you were filming your next film, 2 Hearts. What was that experience like?
TS: It was incredible. We didn’t do a ton of work in Hawaii, but we were there for ten days, so we got so much time to explore, which was incredible. I’d never been to Hawaii before either, so it was really a lot of fun.
BT: You were also named one of Canada’s Most Beautiful in Hello! Magazine.
TS: Yeah, I love that magazine and this was the second year in a row that they featured me, in that issue of theirs. I thought that it was really special and really cool. I’m honoured.
BT: What do you have coming up?
TS: I’m currently shooting Season 3 of Riverdale right now, and it’s really cool and very fun.
BT: What’s coming up for the Cooper family?
TS: There’s a lot that is coming into play this season. A big thing that gets to happen this season is that we get to see this mysterious farm that Polly has been disappearing to and we get to explore that, which I’m really excited about because last season there was so much talk, and alluding to this mysterious farm. So now we get to explore it, and it’s very exciting!
BT: Do fans of the show still think that you’re the Black Hood now that Hal has confessed to the murders?
TS: [laughs] They’re less on that right now, but it was a fun theory.
BT: Your fiancé produced Summer of ’84 as well as Prodigals. What’s the best part about getting to work together?
TS: What’s so interesting in this industry is that films and projects can just consume so much of your time. So for us to be able to make things about which we are both passionate together is a really great way for us to connect, and a really great way for us to spend time together. Work becomes such a big part of your life so if you can do it together and enjoy it together, it just makes it that much more special.
BT: Everyone seemed to have a clear vision of what this film would be.
TS: Yeah, Gunpowder & Sky, and RKSS Films and our writers, Matt Leslie and Stephen J. Smith, they were all able to find a very good common ground. They were all able to find ways to work together to enjoy and have the same ideas and collaborate really well together, because there are sometimes so many working pieces, you know?
BT: What did you like most about playing Nikki?
TS: What I was so drawn to with Nikki is that she was so confident and charismatic, then in her more intimate moments with Davey you really see her cracks and a depth and a vulnerability to her, that maybe you don’t see in the cute girls next door that boys idolize, and I think to me that was really important. There was more to her than meets the eye.
BT: What do you want to tell your fans about Summer of ’84?
TS: I think that they should come prepared to be scared, but also prepared to go on a really fun ride with a lot of loveable characters.
Summer of ’84 is now playing in select U.S. theatres and is available on VOD and iTunes in the United States and Canada! | {
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A construction project beginning Monday will shut down a section of Interstate 480 in Omaha for about 3½ months and reroute traffic into Council Bluffs.
The work on the southbound I-480 ramps to eastbound I-80 and southbound U.S. Highway 75 will start Monday at 10 p.m., the Nebraska Department of Roads said.
Also, the southbound lanes of I-480 will be resurfaced from about Dewey Avenue south to the I-80 interchange. That work will be done each night from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. The lanes will be open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.
The ramps are scheduled to reopen and the resurfacing work is to be completed before the College World Series’ first pitch in mid-June, officials said.
Beginning July 5, the northbound lanes of I-480 will be resurfaced during the overnight hours, officials said, with that work also lasting about 3½ months.
Roads officials said southbound traffic on Highway 75 will be detoured east on I-480 just north of Dodge Street into the Bluffs and onto southbound I-29. Motorists will follow southbound I-29 to westbound I-80 back into Omaha and then take Kennedy Freeway/Highway 75 south. | {
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Bolivia has the largest cache of one of the world's most important metals.
An estimated 9 million tons of lithium sits untapped in the South American country.
Tech companies need it for their devices, and chances are you're reading this story on a laptop or smartphone that's powered by a lithium-ion battery.
So why is Chile, not Bolivia, dominating the South American lithium market?
"Chile is the gold standard for the lithium operation," said Brian Jaskula, a mineral specialist for the US Geological Survey.
Last year Chile, which has about 8.4 million tons of lithium reserves, processed 14,100 tons of the white metal along salt flats at the foot of the Andes mountains. Bolivia processed less than 1% of that.
The disparity in processing is partly because of Chile's natural advantages. But it also has a lot to do with Bolivia's politics.
Extraction
Lithium is found in brine, or pools of salty water. After the brine is removed from the ground, lithium must be extracted using a lengthy evaporation method, during which impurities are removed.
Chile's climate is optimal for evaporation.
Sunlight there is intense, and the altitude is perfect, said Jaskula. A nearly constant hot wind blows across evaporation ponds.
And Chile's coastal location and existing infrastructure means transporting the lithium -- and batteries made from it -- is a relatively uncomplicated task.
Bolivia is not blessed with the same conditions. Its extensive rainy season prolongs evaporation. Its brine has more impurities -- mainly in the form of hard-to-shake magnesium, and that extends the process beyond the approximately two years needed in Chile. It also makes it more expensive.
The country is also landlocked and with poorer infrastructure. Its products must go through Chile or Argentina to reach a port.
Politics
But the more significant holdback for Bolivia's lithium industry is the political climate.
President Evo Morales is eager to tap into the country's natural resources, but with an important caveat: Bolivia must get the lion's share of economic benefit. .
The country is haunted by its past of being exploited by foreign investors and not gaining from it, said Dr. Anna Revette, a sociologist and author of a study on lithium extraction and cultural politics in Bolivia.
Mineral extraction has long been the essence of the Bolivian economy. The psychological scar of exploitation dates well back to the 17th century, when Spanish settlers profited from silver mined by natives and African slaves in the once resource rich city of Potosí.
"No longer do they want foreign exploitations to dominate their natural resources," she said. "There's a drive to have ownership -- to prove that Bolivia has the ability."
Bolivia wants to make batteries from soup to nuts. Its even expressed a desire to make electric cars.
"It wants to put together an entire production chain, in which Bolivia has a stake," said Robert Albro, a research associate professor at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University.
The prospect of Bolivia competing in battery production may be far-fetched, according to both Albro and Revette. It lacks the technical expertise to make them, and its been hesitant to ask for too much help.
It appears the country is willing to work with certain nations, but is picky.
"Morales is trying to work with the global south, to show they're sticking together," said Revette. In July, Bolivia signed a preferential trade agreement with India for use of its resources. Last year it exported its first shipment of lithium carbonate to China.
This year, Bolivia surprised some analysts when it entered into a $1.3 billion deal with German company ACI for extraction and the manufacturing and marketing of batteries.
ACI said it will give Bolivia a 51% share of revenue, and build a manufacturing plant in in the country. The conditions seem to suit Bolivia's desire to remain at the heart of its economic gains.
But Revette is skeptical.
"I'd be surprised if this went forward, but it's not impossible," she said citing previous agreements between Bolivia and Japan, Bolivia and South Korea, and Bolivia and France that never materialized. "It seems history may just repeat itself."
Meanwhile, Chile's political predictability and economic stability makes it a more attractive option for foreign companies, said Rebecca Keller, senior science and technology analyst at geopolitical intelligence platform, Stratfor.
"Chile is in the best position for the next five years," Keller said. | {
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Gathers some data from your PC to our servers. You have nothing to worry about!.
Anti-Consumer
We are proud of our "copy protection technology" (hahaha, couldn't hold myself, sorry). Yes, it's a little anti-consumer, it can lock you out of game for few days, especially if you are out in the open somewhere or you're travelling, then tough luck, mate. Constant internet connection is required because you never know when your license will expire.
We are also very proud of "our" VMs (hahahahaha, sorry!11, sorry!!) tanking your game performance. We care only about making some profit out of your game, we don't care about your framerates or your micro-shuttering. Human eye can't see more than 24 fps anyways.
*Last sentence is sponsored by Ubisoft. | {
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DIGHTON – It likely will never be known why five loose dogs attacked and killed a Rehoboth teenager on a Dighton property last month, according to a statement released Friday by the office of the Bristol County District Attorney.
Ryan Hazel was 14 when authorities say five dogs being kept at 2477 Maple Swamp Road attacked and mauled him to death.
An investigation indicated no evidence of foul play and no evidence that any other animals — including other dogs being housed at the property or wild animals in surrounding woods — were responsible for his death, the release says.
All five dogs were euthanized two weeks after the incident — which took place on a large, sprawling, rural site that includes horse stables, a trailer unit, a fire-damaged house and pieces of construction equipment.
The DA’s statement reiterates a press conference held the morning after the attack at Dighton police headquarters — where District Attorney Thomas Quinn stated that Hazel had been dropped off by his grandmother around 6:30 p.m. to check up on and care for the dogs and other animals living there, as per a year-long agreement with the property owner.
When the former Bristol-Plymouth Regional Technical School student failed to return after more than half an hour, police say his grandmother called the boy’s mother, who was out of state.
Police say Hazel’s mother in turn called a neighbor living nearby. It was that male neighbor, they said, who found the boy’s body at the rear of the property.
Ryan was declared dead despite the efforts of the neighbor and first responders to save his life by providing CPR and other life-saving measures, the DA’s release says.
The property owner, identified as Scott Dunmore, was in Boston at the time, authorities said.
Dunmore, 49, according to authorities was cooperative during the investigation and will not be criminally charged with an offense.
Other dogs being kept at the site were not involved and were not loose at the time of the attack, authorities said.
The investigation revealed that Dunmore owned some of the dogs and boarded others for other owners.
The five dogs that investigators said killed Ryan Hazel were four Belgian Malinois, three of which were eight months old and one of which was four years old.
The fifth canine was a 2-year-old Dutch Shepherd, authorities said.
The investigation concluded that Ryan “was experienced in caring for dogs” and “in particular … these five dogs.”
“Ryan was devoted to caring for dogs in a kind and humane manner (and) no evidence points to Ryan’s actions or conduct contributing at all to cause his death,” the release states.
Dunmore, authorities said, “did not follow the appropriate licensing requirements for these dogs.”
But the five dogs had been vaccinated, the press release states.
Investigators included local and state police and laboratory investigators from the Massachusetts State Police. | {
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US Navy Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson, President Donald Trump's nominee for Veterans Affairs secretary, had his confirmation hearing postponed.
The postponement comes amid allegations against Jackson that include claims of a hostile work environment, excessive drinking at work, and improperly dispensing medication, several news outlets reported.
Jon Tester of Montana, the top Democrat on the Senate Committee for Veterans Affairs, said his office is reviewing the allegations, which reportedly come from "current or former White House medical staff," CBS News reported.
Jackson has already been under fire from the growing number of lawmakers who doubt his ability to lead the federal government's second-largest agency.
President Donald Trump's nominee for Veterans Affairs secretary, US Navy Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson, hit a roadblock after Senate lawmakers postponed his confirmation hearing amid multiple allegations stemming from his time as the White House physician.
Some of those allegations include claims of excessive drinking at work, creating a hostile work environment, and improperly dispensing medication. The claims come from "current or former White House medical staff," according to a CBS News report published Monday night.
Business Insider has not independently verified the claims. Neither the White House nor the Veterans Affairs department immediately responded to requests for comment.
"I can tell you we're vetting out Jackson," Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana told The Washington Post. "I can't get into specifics, but we're doing our job to make sure he's fit for the job."
But two unnamed sources reportedly confirmed to CBS News correspondents that committee members were reviewing allegations against Jackson.
Jackson, who was originally scheduled for a Wednesday hearing in front of the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, has already been under fire from some lawmakers who expressed doubt over the White House physician's ability to lead the nation's second-largest agency.
Jackson, who served as the White House physician under George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and now Trump, was thrust into the spotlight after performing Trump's first physical as president, and later delivering an effusive report on Trump's health.
But despite being well-perceived in the White House, questions over his lack of sufficient management experience have clouded Jackson's nomination, which came shortly after the the controversy surrounding the ouster of former VA secretary David Shulkin.
Shulkin was removed from his post in March after a series of scandals and rumors of infighting at the VA. He was the only Cabinet member unanimously confirmed by Congress.
It remains unclear whether Jackson's confirmation hearing will be rescheduled or scuttled completely, according to The Post.
"There's a need for very exacting and close scrutiny and vetting," Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said to The Post. "And some questions that need to be answered. I'm not going to comment on any of the specifics, except to say we're going to be doing very close and careful scrutiny." | {
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Orion and director Lars Klevberg scored big time when they landed Mark Hamill as the voice of Chucky in their Child’s Play, which will be the first official project that doesn’t feature Brad Dourif as the voice of the iconic killer doll. Hamill has big shoes to fill, that goes without saying, but he’s also a guy who knows a thing or two about voicing iconic villains.
At a press conference this week, Hamill explained why he wanted to try his hand at Chucky.
“I got a letter from Lars. He already laid out his vision for the film, before I read it. And then they sent me this script and I thought the crucial element that was different from the original, which I love — I’m a huge fan of Brad’s interpretation — Chucky has a different origin. So it’s not the soul of a serial killer, but someone deliberately goes in and alters his operating system and takes off the safety measures,” Hamill explained at the event, transcribed by Den of Geek.
Hamill continued, “When I agreed to it, and it sunk in that they wanted me to do this, I felt intimidation like I hadn’t felt since I did the Joker. I thought, when I auditioned for the Joker, there’s no way they’re going to cast this icon of virtue, Luke Skywalker, as the Joker. Forget about it. So I had no performance anxiety because I knew they couldn’t hire me. It’s only when they hired me that I really thought, ‘Oh no, I can’t do this because so many people have expectations of what he’s supposed to sound like.’ I didn’t feel that kind of intimidation until it sunk in that I was doing this. I love Brad. It’s a great responsibility, so I’m anxious to see how people react because it’s not the Chucky that we all know from before.”
Child’s Play slashes its way to theaters on June 21, 2019. | {
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Most people can agree that JavaScript was the most important language of 2016 and will continue to be a staple of the Hacker community for years to come. However, more and more people are talking about Rust. Its C-like semantics combined with guaranteed type-safety give it a unique and important place in programming languages today. And so, I am creating a JavaScript to Rust transpiler in Haskell, a great language for compilers and a great keyword for any Hacker News post. In writing this transpiler, I hope to change the way we think about JavaScript and Rust, and also put an end to the godforsaken monotony of reading about programming languages day after fucking day.
One obvious initial challenge in solving this problem is resolving some of the fundamental incompatibilities of the two languages. Since JavaScript is weakly-typed and has a penchant for undefined behavior, this raises a question of how we should handle behavior in JavaScript that is antithetical to the same patterns that make Rust such a desirable language. If I implement a safe subset of JavaScript, will that free me from my curse of exerting large amounts of energy arguing over React anti-patterns on the internet? If I make use of the unsafe features of Rust to allow for a full ES6/ES2015 implementation, will I be able to have conversations with normal human beings again? Will I be able to feel? If you cut me, will I bleed?
Every morning, I wake up, drink a glass of Soylent and recite the following: “Today, I will solve challenging problems. Tomorrow, I will also solve challenging problems. Every day, I will solve challenging problems, and then the robots will take over, and I will die a fulfilled man, and someone will post my obituary on Hacker News.” Then I log into my machine using a custom startup script.
> Welcome, Julian. Would you like to make the world a better place today? y/n
y
> Very good. You may now enjoy root access to your system.
Haskell offers a number of features that make it an excellent choice for writing a compiler. Although a compiler is typically written in either the source or target language, neither JavaScript nor Rust offers the full richness of Haskell’s recursive algebraic data types. It also makes sense to use a purely functional language to write a compiler, since a compiler is at its core a series of transformations that can and should be done in an elegant, stateless way.
I see clouds in the sky, and green grass. It has been fifty years and I am sitting in the park with my dog, feeding ducks and watching the local children at play. I haven’t uttered the phrase “type-safety” in years. All the startups are gone. I am free.
In conclusion, this is an ambitious project, but I am grateful for all the enthusiasm I’ve received from the JavaScript, Rust, and Haskell communities, as well as the greater compilers community. Be on the lookout for a stable release soon.
Please save me. | {
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This week, we have analyzed the advanced energy storage industry as well as the oil and gas market. We also evaluated the Waste-to-Energy technologies and market forecasts.
Check out the key upcoming developments selected by our top analysts.
The global market for Advanced Energy Storage is forecast to reach 103.8 thousand megawatts by 2024, driven by the speeding up of the decarbonization agenda in countries worldwide. Integrating renewable energy into grid operations is the first step towards reducing the energy industry’s carbon footprint.
The need of the hour for meeting renewable integration goals is the ability to store variable renewable energy for future use for meeting peak load demands. The growth in the market is therefore largely dependent on the provision of government funding and financing support for grid-level energy storage projects.
Future growth in the market will also be governed by cost competitiveness of energy storage technologies; validated reliability and safety of these technologies; and development of an equitable regulatory environment.
The United States represents the largest market worldwide. Rest of World, comprising Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, ranks as the fastest growing market with a CAGR of 64.9% over the analysis period.
The growth in the market is led by factors such as robustly growing regional economies; strong investments in new energy infrastructure build-outs; growing international pressure on emerging countries to reduce their per capita carbon dioxide emissions; and rich abundance of natural renewable energy sources such as sunlight, wind and water.
For more details, visit: Global Advanced Energy Storage Industry
The global oil and gas market had total revenues of $1,977,380.6m in 2017, representing a compound annual rate of change (CARC) of -13.2% between 2013 and 2017. The crude oil segment was the market’s most lucrative in 2017, with total revenues of $1,627,754.2m, equivalent to 82.3% of the market’s overall value.
The popularity of natural gas is growing in a number of countries across the globe and especially in the Asia-Pacific region.
India, Pakistan, South Korea and Malaysia being are some of the countries that have announced the establishment of new liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals in their countries in the coming years.
Meanwhile Russia and Germany are on the verge of being connected by another natural gas pipeline namely the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. This too will boost growth in the natural gas segment of the global oil and gas market.
For more details, visit: Oil and Gas Industry Guide
It is estimated that the global waste to energy market will be progressing at a growth rate of 6.22% CAGR by the end of 2027. The increasing industrialization, urbanization and the variety in lifestyle that accompany the process of economic growth, also gives rise to the generation of enormous quantities of wastes leading to increased threats to the environment.
Therefore, waste-to-energy technologies are considered to be one of the most robust and effective alternative energy options to reduce CO2 emissions, replace fossil fuels, and further reduce the generated wastes in the current times.
Approximately 2/3 of household waste is categorized as biomass. So, the biological waste-to-energy technologies are expected to penetrate the market more vigorously than other WTE technologies. The strong shift in the trend toward energy security around the world, the depletion of conventional energy resources and increasing municipal waste generation are some of the circumstances that are driving the market growth throughout the world.
The global waste to energy market is geographically segmented into North America, Asia Pacific, Europe and the remaining countries forming the Rest of World segment. The Asia-Pacific market has emerged as a major hub for WTE development that is expected to provide numerous growth opportunities to market players over the forecast period.
The emerging economies of China and India have been developing their renewable resources to minimize their carbon footprints.
To get more insights, please refer to: Global Waste-to-Energy Market Forecast | {
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Thirty years ago this week, a Hollywood star was decapitated while shooting a scene for a movie. The actor was Vic Morrow, the veteran star of the TV series Combat. He was killed, along with child actors Renee Chen and Myca Dinh Le, by a falling helicopter during filming of The Twilight Zone, a feature-length adaptation of Rod Serling’s television series.
Morrow played a bigot who skipped through time getting a taste of his own medicine. In the scene that would prove fatal, he was earning some Serling-style redemption by trying to rescue a pair of Vietnamese children from an American air raid. Mainly, the setup was an excuse for director John Landis to capture immense explosions on film.
At the controls of the helicopter that was “bombing” the village was Dorcey Wingo, an actual Vietnam veteran. Wingo was new to the movie business, so even when the rehearsal explosions that buffeted his chopper scared him witless, he swallowed his concerns, especially as Landis, who had a reputation for being dictatorial on set, screamed expletives into the California night. (The shooting was taking place at a disused motorcycle track at Indian Dunes Park, a few miles north of Los Angeles.)
When the cameras rolled, pyrotechnic fireballs engulfed Wingo’s helicopter, forcing him down into a river where the actors waded. As a hundred or so people looked on, the right skid of the aircraft crushed 6-year-old Renee, who was a few feet from Morrow (the aging star had dropped her). The helicopter then toppled over, and its main blade sliced through Morrow and 7-year-old Myca. According to Stephen Farber and Marc Green’s exhaustive book on the incident, Outrageous Conduct, there was shocked silence until Renee’s mother started shrieking as she kneeled over her daughter’s lifeless body. Morrow never got to deliver his scripted line: “I’ll keep you safe, kids. I promise. Nothing will hurt you, I swear to God.”
Civil suits against the studio and Landis were settled, but Warner Bros., Landis, Wingo, and three others couldn’t avoid criminal charges of involuntary manslaughter stemming from the tragedy. The defendants freely admitted that the production broke child labor laws, but they maintained that the crash was an unavoidable accident. After three years of legal wrangling, the suit finally went to trial in L.A. in 1985. Despite an emotional bit of prosecution by Deputy District Attorney Lee D’Agostino—she theatrically offered Landis tissues after he teared up during his testimony, hissed “murderer” at him in full view of reporters when he happened to walk past outside the courtroom, and summed up her case by booming, “It isn’t that John Landis decided to violate the law, it’s that he thinks he’s above it!”—she failed to win a conviction. Landis and his co-defendants were acquitted of serious charges, and the director went on to make Coming to America, a hit that put the tragedy in his rearview mirror.
Terrible as the Twilight Zone accident was, some good did come of it. At Warner Bros., a behind-the-scenes revolution was set in motion, as a vice president named John Silvia was determined to tighten up the industry’s approach to safety. Silvia convened a committee that created standards for every aspect of filmmaking, from gunfire to fixed-wing aircraft to smoke and pyrotechnics. All the unions and guilds in the business were represented. “It was like lawmaking,” says Chris Palmer, a risk-management consultant who was part of the committee. “The committee had to parse words like ‘would, shall, and must’ because of the possibility of negligence lawsuits overtaking Hollywood if they were too strict in the wording.” The committee’s codicils were collected into a group of standards called Safety Bulletins. The studios then issued a manual to their employees based on the bulletins, known as the Injury and Illness Prevention Program. (The guidelines have been updated over the years and are now digitized—the current versions can be found here.)
It wasn’t an overnight process, and the standards needed continual updates—despite increased efforts to improve safely, accidents kept happening. Veteran pilot Art Scholl was killed when his camera plane crashed during the filming of Top Gun; stuntman Reid Rendell was killed in a helicopter crash on the set of Airwolf; actors Brandon Lee (Bruce’s son) and Jon-Erik Hexum (star of the NBC series Voyagers!) were killed by guns loaded with blanks.
New Safety Bulletins were issued after each mishap. When legendary stuntman Dar Robinson died in a remote area after rupturing his spleen in a stunt during the shooting of Million Dollar Mystery, on-set ambulances became mandatory. The process continues today. “With every accident comes more regulations,” says Pam Elliott, production manager at Special Effects Unlimited, a longtime provider of explosives and other effects for Hollywood. “Every time someone gets hurt, we learn, and rules are put in place to try to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
The insurance industry made sure that safety provisions stuck. Before The Twilight Zone, insurance companies didn’t view the movie business as a source of profit: Given how unsafe film sets were, the likelihood of a payout was just too high. Afterward, the industry’s commitment to improving safety, along with increasing budgets, made Hollywood a better risk. Soon, getting affordable rates to underwrite shoots became a basic part of the movie-making business. And that meant dancing to the insurance industry’s tune. “The insurance companies want to know everything,” Elliott says. “They want your resume, the resumes of everyone participating. They want to see your licensing, a list of materials, the number of people working on each shot, the distance they will each be from the explosive, the number of fire extinguishers available on set. Then the fire department comes out to look at what you’re doing, and they have a long list of safety criteria to meet, too. It’s a pain in the butt, sure, but that’s the way it is.”
Perhaps the biggest evolution took place in the field of risk management. “The Twilight Zone accident created my job,” says Palmer, who has assessed the risk involved on shoots ranging from Titanic to X-Men to Speed 2. “It was a sea change in the movie industry. No one in risk management was ever on set before then.” As opposed to insurance, which finances risk, risk consultants attempt to avoid it, or at least control it. Risk managers like Palmer become involved in a film long before principal photography begins, scanning scripts for issues, starting with the location. “If you want to shoot in the Caribbean during hurricane season,” Palmer says, “you’ve got a problem, unless you have a specific plan in place to protect the production.”
On set, Palmer’s job is to step in when crew members want to play it safe but feel their careers would be in jeopardy if they spoke up. “I can’t be terminated by the director or producer. … That takes the pressure off the crew because it can be intimidating to be the one to stand up and say ‘hold on.’ ” Had Palmer or one of his colleagues been on the set of The Twilight Zone, Dorcey Wingo’s concerns might have stopped filming. “Wingo was a remarkably talented pilot—but he wasn’t a movie pilot,” Palmer says. “Senior movie pilots would have taken their helicopter and gone home.” But the potential consequences weighed heavily on a guy who wanted to have a showbiz career.
(And Landis had bullied his way through The Twilight Zone: According to Outrageous Conduct, the director grew frustrated as lighting the fatal scene grew difficult. The job required grips to climb scaffolding thirty feet in the air while being buffeted by rotor wash from the helicopter. When some techs hesitated, Landis demanded, “Is there somebody on this electrical crew who’s not too chickenshit to do the job?”)
The rise of computer-generated imagery has taken a lot of the danger out of stunts, especially stunts involving explosions. But movie sets can still be dangerous places. While filming the recent superhero flop Green Lantern in Louisiana in July 2010, pyrotechnical effects worker John Franco was injured by a van that was sent hurtling through the air as part of a shot. According to Franco’s negligence lawsuit against (ironically enough) Warner Bros., director Martin Campbell added the stunt during shooting, meaning it wasn’t in the script. Franco alleges that the van was damaged in rehearsals but was used within the hour in the name of expediency. Sure enough, it broke apart, causing Franco “lifelong-affecting (sic) injuries.”
Hopefully the safety regimens put in place after the deaths of Morrow, Renee, and Myca 30 years ago will keep any accidents from befalling the cast and crew of another Warner Bros. production that the studio hopes to mount as soon as it has a viable script: a remake of The Twilight Zone. | {
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An explosive device flown into Israel from the Gaza Strip detonated outside a home in the Eshkol region, causing damage but no injuries on Wednesday night, officials said.
The small bomb had been attached to a cluster of balloons and launched toward Israel from the coastal enclave on Wednesday as part of nightly riots along the Gaza border.
“A string of balloons carrying an explosive object was spotted traveling from the southern Gaza Strip into Israeli territory. The object apparently exploded in midair and caused damage to a house in a nearby community,” the army said.
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The explosive shattered one window and damaged the shutters on another, according to the Eshkol Regional Council.
The military sent troops to the scene to inspect the damage and investigate the incident. Police sappers were also called in to ensure there were no other threats and remove any remaining explosive material.
The incident appeared to be the first time damage was caused to a home or building from an incendiary or explosive device attached to balloons or kites this year.
Since March 2018, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have launched thousands of balloons carrying incendiary and explosive devices into Israel, causing wildfires in nearby agricultural fields, forests and nature reserves.
These arson and bombing attacks largely stopped at the end of last year, in light of a de facto ceasefire between Israel and the Gaza-ruling Hamas terror group, but they returned earlier this month as this understanding began to fray.
“These explosive and incendiary balloons are terror in every way and this evening, we are dealing with an intensification of this terror,” Eshkol Mayor Gadi Yarkoni said in a statement.
“Residents of Eshkol have shown exemplary spirit and allowed policymakers and the military to find the ways to root out this terrorism from our communities. We will not accept this reality and we expect an immediate solution that will ensure long-term calm,” Yarkoni said.
Last Tuesday saw the first brush fire in southern Israel sparked by incendiary balloons from the Gaza Strip in months. The blaze burned grasslands in a wooded area outside the community of Kibbutz Kissufim in the Eshkol region. In addition, a helium-filled condom with a suspected explosive device attached to it was found outside another community in the Eshkol region.
Wednesday night’s balloon attacks came as hundreds of Palestinians took part in riots along the border of the Gaza Strip near the city of Beit Hanoun.
Demonstrators burned tires, threw rocks and explosives at soldiers and attacked the security fence.
The IDF believes Hamas or the Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the second-largest terror group in Gaza, could attempt to draw Israel into a war by conducting an attack along the border — an anti-tank missile strike, an ambush from an undiscovered tunnel, or a similar psychologically significant attack.
IDF chief Lt. Gen. Aviv Kohavi, whose tenure began last month, ordered the military to update operational plans for fighting in the Gaza Strip.
On Tuesday, troops wrapped up a surprise drill simulating war with the Strip. | {
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After virtually tying with Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Iowa Democratic caucus, Sen. Bernie Sanders raised $3 million in a 24-hour period, a record for the insurgent presidential candidate.
Sanders, I-Vt., who has abjured raising money from major givers, scored the amount from small donations online in the 24 hours after Monday’s vote, The Associated Press reported Wednesday. Clinton, long the presumed front-runner, claimed victory in Iowa, the first state to hold a vote, with a razor-thin margin.
Sanders and Clinton also agreed to add debates to what has been criticized as a sparse schedule of six for the Democratic candidates. A a newly scheduled debate will be held Thursday in New Hampshire.
With the advantage of being from neighboring Vermont, Sanders is heading into the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday with a substantial lead in the polls over Clinton. Combined with the strong showing in Iowa, a victory there could build on his momentum.
On the debates, the Sanders’ campaign, along with that of former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who dropped out after Iowa, had complained that the Democratic National Committee had scheduled only six, including some on Saturday night, when viewership is low, because its chairwoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., is aligned with Clinton.
Heading into the campaign, Clinton had a reputation of being uneasy on stage stemming in part from her failed 2008 bid, when Barack Obama prevailed in the debates. She has fared well, however, in this campaign’s debates, and her advisers have urged her to more forcefully confront Sanders as his bid gains traction. | {
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Newly released surveillance video shows a store owner using an AK-47 to shoot a man. His attorney says it was in self-defense. | {
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[ AD HAS BEEN REMOVED FROM THIS STORY ]
Two major highways on Oahu will soon be getting some long-overdue renovation — and the headache-inducing lane closures that come with daytime roadwork.
Drivers who use Kalanianaole Highway in East Oahu and Kamehameha Highway in the Mililani area will start to see crews working next week on overdue repair projects that are not expected to end until 2016, state transportation officials said Wednesday.
The Kalanianaole Highway project will take place from West Hind Drive to Hawaii Kai Drive from 9 a.m to 3 p.m. and Hawaii Kai to Hanauma Bay Road from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays, according to the state Department of Transportation.
The work is taking place during the day because DOT officials felt the overnight work would be a “nightmare” to the homes fronting the highway, DOT Highways Administrator Alvin Takeshita said. However, he added that the schedule means the comprehensive road repairs, already about 15 years overdue, won’t be done until February 2016.
The Kamehameha Highway repair project will run from Ka Uka Boulevard to Waihau Street, with work running from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays. Officials expect it to be completed by summer 2016. | {
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A jury found decorated Navy SEAL Edward "Eddie" Gallagher not guilty Tuesday on almost all charges he was facing, including murder and attempted murder, in the killing of a teenage Islamic State member in Iraq.
Gallagher was accused of stabbing to death a 15-year-old ISIS fighter in 2017 and posing with the corpse for photos.
As he awaited the charges to be read, Gallagher, 40, bounced lightly on his feet, appearing nervous, but dissolved into joyful tears once the verdict came through, tightly embracing his wife, Andrea, who has publicly championed him throughout the case as they both cried. Also seated in the gallery were Gallagher's attorneys, brother and parents, all of whom he hugged.
TUNE IN: EDDIE GALLAGHER, WIFE AND ATTORNEY EXCLUSIVELY ON 'FOX & FRIENDS,' WEDNESDAY AT 6 AM ET
"I'm happy and I'm thankful," Gallagher told reporters after the verdict as he joked with his legal team that "it's Independence Day," his freedom coming days before the July 4th holiday.
"Suffice to say, huge victory, huge weight off the Gallaghers, huge victory for justice," Gallagher's attorney Marc Mukasey said adding that his client cried "tears of joy, emotion, freedom, absolute euphoria and proud of the process."
“I was feeling like we’re finally vindicated after being terrorized by the government that my husband fought for for 20 years,” Andrea Gallagher said. She also said she intends to "continue to fight for the war heroes of this country" and hopes to see Naval Special Warfare Group 1 Commodore Capt. Matthew D. Rosenbloom resign, among other things.
He faced seven criminal charges in all. Six of the most serious charges included premeditated murder, willfully discharging a firearm to endanger human life, retaliation against members of his platoon for reporting his alleged actions, obstruction of justice and the attempted murders of two noncombatants. On all of those charges, the jury in San Diego found him not guilty.
Jurors did find him guilty of the seventh charge, posing for a photo with a casualty, considered the least egregious of the crimes, which carries a maximum prison sentence of four months.
"We have a sentencing to do, but the maximum sentence of what they’re about to sentence him on is much less than the time that they’ve already had him in the brig," defense attorney Tim Parlatore said. "So he is going home."
NAVY SEAL ACCUSED OF KILLING ISIS DETAINEE WAS VICTIM OF 'TARGET FIXATION,' ATTORNEY SAYS IN CLOSING ARGUMENTS
Gallagher served nine months in prison awaiting trial but was released ahead of trial proceedings at the end of May as the judge attempted to rectify alleged prosecutorial misconduct which included the unauthorized tracking of the defense's emails.
Nearly a dozen members of Gallagher's platoon testified against him, revealing that nearly all the platoon members posed for photos with the dead prisoner and witnessed Gallagher read his reenlistment oath near the body, actions prosecutors said proved that Gallagher was "proud" of his actions.
Perhaps the biggest bombshell in the case occurred on June 20 when Gallagher's colleague, Special Operator 1st Class Corey Scott, admitted to asphyxiating the ISIS fighter back in 2017, contrary to the testimony of at least seven other SEALs who said Gallagher stabbed the ISIS fighter after medics administered treatment to him, ultimately resulting in the teenager's death.
CLICK HERE FOR THE FOX NEWS APP
Gallagher, who served 19 years in the Navy and earned a Bronze Star with V for Valor twice, a Meritorious Unit Commendation and a trio of Navy and Marine Corps Achievement medals, has been publicly championed by his wife and even President Trump, who previously got Gallagher removed from the brig and transferred to better custody conditions at a Navy hospital before trial.
Fox News' Dan Gallo in San Diego and Samuel Chamberlin contributed to this report. | {
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Canopy Growth, one of the world's largest marijuana producers by market value, has applied to list on the New York Stock Exchange and plans to begin trading shares by the end of May 2018.
It's the first Canadian pot company to list on the NYSE, though not the first marijuana company to trade on a major US stock exchange, CBC reports. (Marijuana manufacturing rival Cronos Group listed on the Nasdaq in February 2018). Canopy Growth announced on Monday that it will file with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and plans to trade under the ticker symbol CGC.
Founded in 2014, Canopy Growth likens itself to the Procter & Gamble of pot. Several marijuana brands fall under its umbrella and cater to different user preferences. The company supplies the drug to about a third of the roughly 270,000 registered medical marijuana customers in Canada.
Canopy Growth grows, trims, processes, packages, and ships marijuana products out of several properties across the Great White North. Take a look inside the company's headquarters. | {
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Raul Jimenez left Vicarage Road with a very clear message for Watford and their captain Troy Deeney: “I have my revenge.”
The 17th goal of Jimenez’s remarkable first season in England opened the scoring in Hertfordshire before Diogo Jota sealed Wolves’ 2-1 win with a well-placed volley late on.
Despite Jota’s brilliance, this game was always going to centre around Jimenez with hundreds of Wolves fans donning wrestling masks in support of their No.9 after Deeney’s outburst at Wembley earlier this month.
Deeney, who was suspended for the latest meeting, said: "I’m glad he put that mask on – he could wear it out now as well, now he’s a loser. So, enjoy the mask – we got the victory.”
He also dedicated 277 words of his pre-match programme notes to Wolves and the Mexican No.9 - but it was Jimenez who had the last laugh.
“I was in the right place to score that goal,” said Jimenez. “I had one chance but I have my revenge and I score.
Player ratings as Jimenez and Jota shut Watford up - READ
“Did I read his programme notes? Yes, I also read that they put that I’m 32-years-old - and I’m not! I like to read them before the matches and it’s OK.
“I heard all the interviews that he did. I hear everything that he said and it’s fair, I have no problem with it. This is football, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose and you have to be happy with that.”
Jimenez celebrated his latest strike against Watford by pointing to the name on the back of his shirt, but that wasn’t the celebration he’d planned.
The 27-year-old intended to whip out his mask at Vicarage Road and revealed after the game that Wolves’ bench forgot to hand it to him.
Hilarious scenes as Watford fans chucked out minutes into Wolves match - WATCH
Jimenez added: “When you score you can do whatever you want. I don’t know if I’m going to win or I’m going to lose, I just did it. It’s something from Mexico and I’m happy with it.
“I brought it but I don’t know why the people on the bench didn’t give it to me. They didn’t remember!
“I haven’t scored since the last time we played against Watford, that’s why I didn’t do it before.”
Will we see it again? “Yes, why not?”
Jimenez’s latest star turn helped Wolves move four points clear of Watford and Everton in the race for seventh place. A victory over already relegated Fulham next weekend would guarantee Wolves finish as the ‘best of the rest’ outside the Big Six, provided Leicester City, who beat Arsenal 3-0 on Sunday, don’t win both of their remaining Premier League fixtures.
That will mean Europa League football IF Watford are defeated by Manchester City in the FA Cup final next month.
“It would be a great achievement,” said Jimenez, who could hardly stop smiling in Vicarage Road's mixed zone. “At the beginning of the season all the other people thought we were going to be fighting to stay in the Premier League. Now we are achieving good things and we’re one game away from finishing seventh.
“It’s going to be amazing if we can go to the Europa League. The final of the FA Cup still has to be played though.
“Since about eight matches in, that was the moment we knew we’d be fighting for the top places. This is a very good season for us and we’re very happy.”
For all your latest Wolves news, opinion, analysis and transfer gossip, click here | {
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It is important for OPS to ensure Madhusudanan's victory in the RK Nagar constituency that goes to polls on Thursday
In February, an inner voice reportedly spoke to O Panneerselvam at the J Jayalalithaa samadhi by the Marina in Chennai, resulting in a revolt and political upheaval in Tamil Nadu. On 21 December, when the inner voice of the voters of Jayalalithaa's constituency will speak to the OPS-led AIADMK through the EVMs, it could once again result in a political crisis.
In the past two weeks, OPS has done precious little apart from campaign for his party candidate E Madhusudanan. It is important for OPS to ensure Madhusudanan's victory in the RK Nagar constituency that goes to polls on Thursday. For this patch in north Chennai is not just any other constituency. It was represented by Jayalalithaa twice — in 2015 and in 2016 — and what the subtext of the victory, should it happen, will mean for the AIADMK is not lost on OPS. It will elevate the stature of the deputy chief minister and an orchestrated chorus celebrating him as the inheritor of Jayalalithaa's political legacy can be expected.
The past four months since the merger of the OPS faction with the Edappadi Palaniswamy camp, have been anything but smooth. There has been much discomfort within the erstwhile OPS group over denial of political goodies. Many senior leaders feel shortchanged by the coming-together as barring OPS, who got the party coordinator and deputy chief minister's post, no one else was politically elevated. They were made to sweat even to get the RK Nagar ticket for fellow camper Madhusudanan, who was Panneerselvam's candidate when the bypoll was to be conducted in April. A victory is sure to give the OPS camp muscle and lung power to throw its weight around within the AIADMK. And an assertive rival group within the ruling party won't please EPS too much.
But the chief minister knows a defeat would mean even more bad news. Should the AIADMK be unable to retain the seat and worse, lose to Sasikala's nephew TTV Dhinakaran or if the margin of votes between the two is insignificant, it will mean the two leaves symbol achieved zilch for the party. That could set the cat among the pigeons with many wondering if staying invested with EPS will fetch handsome returns in 2019 and 2021.
Then, there is the caste angle to the tug of war within the AIADMK as well. Ever since the ascension of EPS to the top job, the Gounder community has come to dominate the politics of Tamil Nadu. That is not music to the ears of the Thevar community that has held sway since the time Sasikala came into Jayalalithaa's life. Both Sasikala and OPS are Thevars, because of which the AIADMK was spoken of as a Thevar party.
Should Madhusudanan not put up a credible performance, Dhinakaran could act as the rival Thevar magnet for the fence-sitters from his community. The community realises that it needs a strong leader at the moment to take on EPS and his Gounder support system and the jury is out on whether OPS has the calibre to be that person.
The DMK's role in the RK Nagar election is a curious one. It has not run the kind of spirited campaign it was expected to, choosing local Maruthu Ganesh once again to contest the polls. Arithmetically speaking, it would be expected to win the contest, gaining both from the split in the traditional AIADMK vote between Madhusudanan and Dhinakaran, and retaining its core vote base. With 45,000 bogus voters removed from the electoral rolls, the DMK will fancy its chances.
But politically, MK Stalin will also be able to ring the death knell for the AIADMK with Plan B: Helping Dhinakaran win the contest and watching the fun unfold. A victory for Dhinakaran, despite being chargesheeted in the bribery case, with no party apparatus backing him and contesting on a new symbol, will enhance his stature. Unlike April, he is also campaigning using Sasikala's name and photograph — a sign of confidence that a lot has changed since the summer.
The BJP is not seen as a serious player in the contest, but is the punching bag for both DMK and Dhinakaran.
Both point out that a vote for Madhusudanan is a vote for the BJP that is hoping to cash in on the resentment against the national party for meddling in the internal affairs of the AIADMK. But given the demographic profile of RK Nagar and the emphasis on cash-for-votes, it is anyone's guess as to how much this will be a factor for the voters.
The by-election is the first electoral test after the demise of former chief minister Jayalalithaa and in a situation where elections to local bodies have been postponed more than once, the result on Christmas Eve although tainted by money power, will be seen as a barometer of the popular mood in Tamil Nadu.
Follow LIVE updates on RK Nagar bypoll here | {
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Probably the most efficient way to convert solar energy into electricity is the old fashioned way, heating water into steam and turning a turbine. This remains a messy affair though and you don’t really want a steam boiler on your roof, so solar cells are popular. However, there’s some new research showing how a molecule can absorb solar energy, store it, and then release the heat on demand years later. This could offer new ways to collect and even transport solar power. This new molecule, derived from azobenzene, holds immense promise to change the way we work with solar power.
The idea behind the system is that a parent molecule is isomerized by solar irradiation. The resulting photoisomer is stable for a long period. Adding a catalyst or heat will cause the photoisomer to revert back to the parent molecule, releasing energy in the process.
We will admit, we aren’t chemists so some of the paper was a bit over our heads. But the basic idea is appealing, and this sounds like a field where a garage chemist might be able to contribute. Perhaps one day the desert will be producing photoisomers in the same way it currently produces petroleum.
We always thought the future of fuel might be biofuels, but maybe it will be solar, instead. Maybe the future solar car won’t look like this, after all. | {
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A California college professor on Wednesday trashed the late Barbara Bush as an “amazing racist,” added that she was “happy the witch is dead” — and then crowed that because she had tenure, she’d never be penalized for her ugly comments.
“Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal. F*** outta here with your nice words,” Randa Jarrar, a professor in the English department at California State University, Fresno, wrote on Twitter only an hour after the former first lady passed away Tuesday at the age of 92.
The cowardly Jarrar later made her Twitter account private and wrote that she was “currently on leave from Fresno State.”
But the would-be egghead’s hateful tweets took the internet by storm and were widely circulated before she locked her account.
“PSA: either you are against these pieces of s— and their genocidal ways or you’re part of the problem. That’s actually how simple this is. I’m happy the witch is dead. Can’t wait for the rest of her family to fall to their demise the way 1.5 million Iraqis have,” Jarrar wrote, cruelly adding that she was happy “George W. Bush is probably really sad right now.”
The looney leftist remained defiant, gloating that she was untouchable because she had tenure, which in most cases provides college professors with lifetime job security regardless of their idiotic behavior.
“I work as a tenured professor. I make 100K a year doing that. I will never be fired. I will always have people wanting to hear what I have to say,” she wrote on Twitter.
The nutty professor’s tweets generated more than 2,000 critical replies, the Fresno Bee reported.
“@FresnoStateAlum wow. Not making me feel proud of being an alum right now. I think more than a ‘statement’ is needed from you on this @JosephICastro,” tweeted Lauren Milam, an alumna who tagged Fresno State president Joseph Castro in her tweet.
“Don’t be too hasty to blame Arabs, Palestinians or Muslims for @randajarrar. There’s a good reason why she’s teaching at some third-rate school in Cali instead of being in the mainstream of Arab/Muslim intellectual life,” added Charles Hoskinson on Twitter.
“I have always had great respect for Fresno State, but if @randajarrar and the institution value hate speech through the mockery and celebration of Americans dying, I refuse to associate. Not another penny from me. @JosephICastro and @Fresno_State ought to be ashamed,” added a user who posted as bassam.
The blowback left Jarrar whining about her self-inflicted plight.
“If you’d like to know what it’s like to be an Arab American Muslim American woman with some clout online expressing an opinion, look at the racists going crazy in my mentions right now,” she wrote.
Jarrar also at one point posted a phone number that many viewed as her own and called — swamping the phones of a crisis and suicide prevention center, prompting further outrage.
“Replying to @randajarrar. Your freedom of speech does not entitle you to have all these people spam an actual mental health crisis line. Please stop,” tweeted Eugene Gu, MD, a pediatric surgeon.
The controversy forced Fresno State to issue a statement distancing itself from her comments, which school officials said raised “deep concerns.”
“On behalf of Fresno State, I extend my deepest condolences to the Bush family on the loss of our former First Lady, Barbara Bush,” Castro said in the statement.
“We share the deep concerns expressed by others over the personal comments made today by professor Randa Jarrar, a professor in the English Department at Fresno State.”
Castro said Jarrar’s comments were “as a private citizen” and don’t represent the university.
“Professor Jarrar’s expressed personal views and commentary are obviously contrary to the core values of our University, which include respect and empathy for individuals with divergent points of view, and a sincere commitment to mutual understanding and progress,” he added.
But his reaction was mocked by many as too wimpy.
“The Fresno State president basically defended her saying she had a right to freedom of speech as a private citizen which to me is his way of absolving himself and Fresno State of any accountability for their employees. I believe public opinion is going to prove him wrong,” tweeted jennebehre. | {
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Word has it that the President will be emphasizing “improving American competitiveness” in his State of the Union Address Tuesday night. As I’ve noted, the term is meaningless — but it’s politically useful. CEOs and many conservatives think it means improving the profitability of American companies. Liberals and labor unions think it means increasing export jobs.
Neither touches at the heart of the matter. Hopefully, the President will. Over the long term, the only way to improve the living standards of most Americans is to invest in our people – especially their educations, skills, and the communications and transportation systems linking them together and with the rest of the world (infrastructure).
In the global economy, the only “asset” that’s unique to any nation – and that determines its living standard — is the people who comprise it. Almost everything else moves across global boundaries at the speed of an electronic impulse. (Money is available to any major business from anywhere around the world. Any entrepreneur can rent or purchase additional office or factory capacity, and the most up-to-date machinery, instantly from anywhere. Commodities, supplies, and components can be summoned almost as quickly from anywhere.)
That’s why spending on education, infrastructure, and basic R&D (which educates our people in the technologies and processes of the future) is fundamentally different from other categories of government spending. These outlays are really investments in the future productivity of our people.
Here’s where the debate over the deficit comes in. If the federal budget were organized sanely, it would be divided into three parts:
Past obligations,
Current needs,
Future investments.
Past obligations reflect payments Americans have made over the course of their lives in the expectation of receiving social insurance (mostly Social Security and Medicare) when they retire. These past obligations need to be honored because they’re based on implicit contracts between the public and the government. If such contracts are to be altered, they should be altered only for future generations who haven’t yet entered into them.
Current needs reflect everything we want today in order to remain safe and healthy (from national defense through Medicaid). The current needs budget should be balanced each year. It’s appropriate that we pay for all our current needs through our current taxes.
But future investments are qualitatively different. There’s no problem with borrowing in order to finance such investments. While it might be irresponsible for a family to go into debt in order to finance a worldwide cruise, it could be equally irresponsible for the same family not to borrow money in order to help finance their kids’ college.
In fact, borrowing in order to increase future productivity is sensible – up to the point where the return on the investment is no longer higher than the cost (principal plus interest) of the loan.
Ideally, the federal budget would be divided along these lines – past, present, and future. And the future, or “capital,” budget (containing spending on education, infrastructure, and basic R&D) would be separated from the rest, with its own system for “scoring” – that is, evaluating – whether the likely return is worth the cost. It won’t be an easy call in every case, of course, but the Congressional Budget Office and the OMB take on much harder ones.
Who knows? The President may even propose something like this tomorrow night.
Robert Reich
Robert Reich’s Blog | {
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Le club lillois a réaffirmé il y a quelques jours que son mercato n'était pas terminé et que des départs étaient encore à venir. Mais Gérard Lopez annonce ce dimanche une nouvelle arrivée.
À ce sujet, la rédaction vous recommande LOSC : quel avenir pour Nicolas Pépé ?
"Il y aura sans doute des sorties", a réaffirmé dimanche sur BeIN Sports le président de Lille Gérard Lopez, selon qui son club attend aussi "une arrivée au milieu de terrain avec". Il y aura éventuellement des sorties parce qu'on ne le dit pas assez mais on a 5 défenseurs centraux, 8 ou 9 joueurs d'attaque et 8 ou 9 milieux", a-t-il expliqué en marge du match de la 3e journée contre Guingamp. "J'ai demandé à ce qu'on équilibre les comptes du club et qu'on arrive pas loin de ce chiffre deLe LOSC, 9e de Ligue 1 avant le coup d'envoi du match, a déjà cédé Kevin Malcuit, Ibrahim Amadou, Yves Bissouma ou Hamza Mendyl lors de ce mercato d'été et | {
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The Ebola epidemic could claim hundreds of thousands of lives and infect more than 1.4 million people by the end of January, according to a statistical forecast released this week by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC forecast supports the drastically higher projections released earlier by a group of scientists, including epidemiologists with the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, who modeled the Ebola spread as part of a National Institutes of Health-sponsored project called Midas, short for Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study.
The effort is also supported by the federal Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
Before the scientists released results, the outbreak in West Africa was expected to be under control in nine months with only about 20,000 total cases. But modeling showed 20,000 people could be infected in just a single month.
The predictions could change dramatically if public health efforts become effective, but based on the virus’s current uncontrolled spread, numbers of people infected could skyrocket.
“If the disease keeps spreading as it has been we estimate there could be hundreds of thousands of cases by the end of the year in Liberia alone,” said Bryan Lewis, a computational epidemiologist with the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute.
Lewis and his fellow researchers use a combination of models to predict outcomes of the epidemic.
The agent-based models are adaptive, evolving as more information is fed into them to provide an accurate forecast.
Pharmaceutical intervention, which is still on the horizon, is proving less effective in the models than supportive care and personal protection equipment for health care workers.
“The work with Ebola is not an isolated event,” said Christopher Barrett, the executive director of the institute. “This research is part of a decades-long effort largely funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to build a global synthetic population that will allow us to ask questions about our world and ourselves that we have never been able to ask before, and to use those answers to prevent or quickly intervene during a crisis.”
Barrett and other institute leaders updated U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine and Virginia Tech President Timothy Sands about the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Lab’s role in analyzing the Ebola outbreak at the Virginia Tech Research Center in Arlington on Tuesday morning. That afternoon in Blacksburg they briefed staff members from U.S. Sen. Mark Warner's office. | {
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Der Elch kam in der Nacht auf Montag auf der A3 bei Iggensbach ums Leben. Das Tier war mit einem Auto zusammengeprallt. Jetzt liegt es im Kühlhaus des hiesigen Jagdpächters. − Foto: Polizei
Martin Spannmacher hat das Prachtexemplar, das seit Montag in seinem Kühlhaus liegt, noch gar nicht gesehen. Der Jagdpächter arbeitet derzeit auf einer Baustelle in München und kommt erst morgen heim nach Aicha vorm Wald (Landkreis Passau) – dann kann er den Elch persönlich in Augenschein nehmen.
"Ich glaube, dass ich in Deutschland der Einzige bin, der einen Elch im Kühlhaus hat", sagte Spannmacher am Dienstag der PNP. Das Tier war in der Nacht auf Montag auf der A3 bei Iggensbach (Landkreis Deggendorf) vor ein Auto gelaufen. Der Fahrer aus Baden-Württemberg konnte nicht mehr ausweichen und erfasste mit seinem Skoda Octavia den Elch, der den Zusammenprall nicht überlebte. Die vier Insassen des Skoda kamen mit dem Schrecken davon.
Nachdem die Autobahnmeisterei den Tierkadaver mit einem Kranwagen von der Autobahn geschafft hatte, wurde Spannmacher alarmiert. Er ist seit sechs Jahren Jagdpächter in Iggensbach, der überfahrene Elch stehe ihm somit zu, sagte Spannmacher. Da das Tier hauptsächlich am Kopf und nicht am Körper verletzt worden war, könne er das zarte Fleisch zu Steak und Wurst verarbeiten. Das mache er alles selbst, betonte Spannmacher: "Ich bin gelernter Metzger." Verkaufen darf er das Elchfleisch aber nicht. "Das werd ich selber essen", kündigte Spannmacher an. | {
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A property that was once the headquarters for the Australian Nazi Party has gone on the market for $7.5million.
The Lyndhurst estate, located at 57-65 Darghan St in Glebe was bought for $3.3 million in 2005 by stockbroker Tim Eustace and his partner Salavatore Panui.
The couple spent four years restoring the six-bedroom property with the help of heritage architect Clive Lucas.
The property has a rather infamous history, being the former headquarters of the Australian Nazi Party, active in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Lyndhurst estate, located in Glebe was the former headquarters of the Australian Nazi Party, active in the 1960s and 1970s
Tim Eustace and his partner Salavatore Panui spent four years restoring the property after buying it in 2005 for $3.3million
Pictured circa 1880, the Glebe mansion was built in 1833 was designed as a marine villa by English architect John Verge for surgeon and pastoralist Dr James Bowman
Arthur Smith was the leader of the National Socialist Party of Australia when it was active during the 1960s until the 1970's
In 1847 James and William Macarthur were forced to sell the property to the Bank of Australasia due to financial difficulties
Over the years the property became Australia’s first theological seminary, a maternity hospital, a pickle factory, a broom factory and notably the Australian Nazi Party headquarters
The Glebe mansion was built in 1833 was designed as a marine villa by English architect John Verge for surgeon and pastoralist Dr James Bowman. It was originally on 36 acres that overlooked Blackwattle Bay and was considered to be a rural property.
Fourteen years after it was built Dr Bowman's brothers-in-law, James and William Macarthur were forced to sell the property to the Bank of Australasia due to financial difficulties.
Over the years the property was subdivided and became Australia’s first theological seminary, a maternity hospital, a pickle factory, a broom factory and notably the Australian Nazi Party headquarters.
Also known as the National Socialist Party of Australia, the Australian Nazi Party was a minor far-right party active in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Australian Nazi Party was a minor far-right party active in the 1960s and 1970s, their headquarters were raided by police in 1964
In 1972, plans for an expressway through Glebe meant the property was at risk to be demolished, but the plans were abandoned and Lyndhurst was protected for restoration by the Save Lyndhurst Committee
Since 1984, it was the the headquarters of the Historic Houses Trust of NSW before it was sold in 2005 to Tim Eustace and his partner
Tim Eustace says the house is very comfortable to live in. He hopes that whoever buys it will appreciate the architecture and use the space
While the property was subdivided and only occupies a fragment of its original estate, Mr Eustace says there is still a sense of the style of the period and an insight into how they lived nearly 200 years ago
The property is located at 57-65 Darghan St in Glebe. It was recently restored with the help of heritage architect Clive Lucas
Lyndhurst was originally on 36 acres that overlooked Blackwattle Bay and was considered to be a rural property. The Glebe property is now right by Sydney's CBD
Listed through from Sothebys International, the 1507sq m property will go to auction on Saturday. It's valued at $7.5million
In 1972, plans for an expressway through Glebe meant the property was at risk to be demolished, but the plans were abandoned and Lyndhurst was protected for restoration by the Save Lyndhurst Committee.
Since 1984, it was the the headquarters of the Historic Houses Trust of NSW before it was sold in 2005 to Mr Eustace.
'Even though it occupies a fragment of its original estate, you still get a sense of the style of the period and an insight into how they lived nearly 200 years ago from a privileged perspective,' Mr Eustace told the Daily Telegraph.
'There's a lot of feedback that it looks like a museum. In fact it's a very comfortable house to live in. It would be nice to think that whoever buys it will appreciate the architecture and use the space.' | {
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WASHINGTON The United States spends more than other developed nations on its students' education each year, with parents and private foundations picking up more of the costs, an international survey released Tuesday found.
Despite the spending, U.S. students still trail their rivals on international tests.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development which groups the world's most developed countries writes in its annual report that brand-new and experienced teachers alike in the United States out-earn most of their counterparts around the globe. But U.S. salaries have not risen at the same pace as other nations.
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The findings, part of a 440-page tome of statistics, put the United States' spending on its young people in context.
The United States spent more than $11,000 per elementary student in 2010 and more than $12,000 per high school student. When researchers factored in the cost for programs after high school education such as college or vocational training, the United States spent $15,171 on each young person in the system more than any other nation covered in the report.
That sum inched past some developed countries and far surpassed others. Switzerland's total spending per student was $14,922 while Mexico averaged $2,993 in 2010. The average OECD nation spent $9,313 per young person.
As a share of its economy, the United States spent more than the average country in the survey. In 2010, the United States spent 7.3 percent of its gross domestic product on education, compared with the 6.3 percent average of other OECD countries. Denmark topped the list on that measure with 8 percent of its gross domestic product going toward education.
Spending, of course, only tells part of the story and does not guarantee students' success. The United States routinely trails its rival countries in performances on international exams despite being among the heaviest spenders on education.
U.S. fourth-graders are 11th in the world in math in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, a separate measure of nations against each other. U.S. eighth-graders ranked ninth in math, according to those 2011 results.
The Program for International Student Assessment measurement found the United States ranked 31st in math literacy among 15-year-old students and below the international average. The same 2009 tests found the United States ranked 23rd in science among the same students, but posting an average score.
And it's not as though all spending on education is public, the OECD report found. Public spending accounts for just 70 cents of every education dollar in the United States. Parents picked up another 25 cents and private sources paid for the remainder in 2010.
A decade earlier, the public's share of education spending was 72 cents on every dollar.
The average OECD nation spent 84 cents of every education dollar, down from 88 cents a decade earlier.
For post-high school programs, the United States is far outspent in public dollars. U.S. taxpayers picked up 36 cents of every dollar spent on college and vocational training programs. Families and private sources picked up the balance.
In other OECD nations, it was roughly reversed: The public picked up 68 cents of every dollar in advanced training and private sources picked up the other 32 cents.
"When people talk about other countries out-educating the United States, it needs to be remembered that those other nations are out-investing us in education as well," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, a labor union.
Still, teachers in the United States fare fine.
The average first-year high school teacher in the United States earns about $38,000. OECD nations pay their comparable educators just more than $31,000.
That trails Luxembourg, which pays its first year teachers more than $72,000 a year, but far exceeds the $10,000 paid to first-year high school teachers in Slovakia. Among all educators, U.S. payrolls are competitive. The average high school teacher in the United States earns about $53,000, well above the average of $45,500 among all OECD nations.
Even so, other nations have increased teachers' salaries more quickly than the United States, which has been confronting tighter budgets as a result of the economic recession.
"Teachers' salaries represent the largest single cost in formal education and have a direct impact on the attractiveness of the teaching profession," the report states. "Since compensation and working conditions are important for attracting, developing and retaining skilled and high-quality teachers, policy makers should carefully consider teachers' salaries as they try to ensure both quality teaching and sustainable education budgets." | {
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Tulum Beach, a place of pristine natural beauty: this idyllic, turtle-laying sanctuary sits before the Sian Ka’an Biosphere. Once a haven for those who wanted to get off grid, reconnect with the self, and live simply. With no access to the full amenities of its touristic counterparts on the Mayan Riviera, Tulum was a gem. Fast forward to January 2019… it might be hell. Drugs, music, and Instagram. Now Tulum is a mecca for the techno-seeking, pseudo hippie, private equity type — desperate to be at the right party; armed with a bevy of social media influencers and models alike. I think this is vaguely the same group you will find chasing the Robot Heart bus at Burning Man, holding up signs saying “finally, normal people” (don’t worry I was one of them) or at Scorpios in Mykonos, perhaps even at an Ayahuasca retreat in Peru.
You can’t miss it when you come here. The men are clad with their harem pants, kimonos, crystal necklaces (maybe even a healing crystal that also doubles as a cocaine/ketamine shovel), and a top that I can only say resembles some sort of wearable old dishtowel, nay, a rug. It’s a uniform really, along with the optional man bun and/or turban. Don’t forget the doc martins. I assume most of the year these guys are wearing monogrammed shirts and double monk strap shoes.
The ladies are undeniably beautiful. It’s equally hard to miss. You’ll find them doing an impromptu yet professional photoshoot on the beach — do they always travel with photographers? Often they are topless or wearing some sort of Star Wars bikini ensemble with heavy boots (totally beach appropriate). With an array of face art and even the odd Bindi — it says “I do Kundalini yoga and I am always on the guest list.” Sparkle Ponies with henna.
There isn’t anything wrong with dressing up for parties. There definitely isn’t any harm in taking on a persona at a festival — in fact, it’s great. I guess why it’s so horrible in Tulum is the hypocrisy of the entire thing. It’s a charade, a money-making exercise at the expense of the place and people who live and work here.
There are stunning eco-hotels, impeccably designed and aesthetically place-appropriate. With stunning furniture, art, textiles — these hotels supposedly have the same ethos as the nature retreat they inhabit. Once perhaps they were enforcers, now they are enablers. You can hear the ‘deep beats’ of shamanic house (that surely plays on loop) blasting from their beach front with ropes up all around. I think these parties are fire ceremonies paying respect to the Moon or Pluto? Nothing says we are an eco-retreat with spiritual values like a mean door girl armed with a clip board (adorned in coral) and a rave on the beach, (£600 entry — friends & family price). I dread to know the impact of these all-night raves on the animals that live in and around the ocean and jungle.
When you walk through the town there are plenty of stores selling the ‘Tuluminati’* uniform (if you need more kimonos and rugs to wear), there is even a store called Tuluminati. Fuck me. There is a drip bar, to help you recuperate after a heavy night of mezcal, cocaine and vibes (served with a side of Peruvian flute house).
After spending almost 2 hours driving down a 2-kilometre stretch (suburbans bumper to bumper) my enthusiasm for life began to wane. We arrive for dinner at a tree house complex designed by Peggy Guggenheim’s grandson/nephew/relative/person. The place is amazing. If not pretentious. Dinner was served in a thick fog of copal incense with music so loud I literally thought the place was going to collapse (I’m not kidding, it was shaking, must be all those vibes). When I asked for the music to be turned down, I was immediately filled with self-doubt about how one should enjoy dinner. I got lost twice looking for the exit. Note, this place is not accessible for those in a wheelchair, with vertigo, heels, or any sight impairment. I am not sure how high people navigate this behemoth safely. Apparently, they do. At £12,000 a night you too can live on the edge.
Desperate times approached when the private villa next to our hotel decided to throw a party (in front of this house is a sign from the authorities reminding people that Tulum is a sanctuary for turtles laying eggs and loud noises and lights are strictly forbidden on the beach). From our sweet beach bungalow, you could hear every cackle, crack and pop through the night. The whitewalkers, sorry, the Tuluminati were in full form. Not even a pair of earplugs and noise cancelling headphones could protect us. We desperately asked the security to call the police, he tried, he too was hopeless as the police wouldn’t come — they had been paid off. We proceeded to break into another hotel room in a state of sleepless despair. The general manager wasn’t even mad, he was sympathetic. These payouts are getting too big for anyone to say no to. The morning after I walked by the house to find the party still going, albeit quieter and smaller, there was just one guy playing a horizontal harp, his Bindi slightly off kilter.
BPM was cancelled, and now the party-throwers and goers have descended on Tulum and it’s a tragedy.
Anyway, come to Tulum, its heaving, about to implode on itself. The septic tanks here can’t possibly hold the amount of shit people are full of. But don’t worry someone is playing somewhere tonight and all will be right.
The big plus is the people who live and work here are amazing, hospitable, patient and kind — although if you ask anyone here, they are truly sad about what has happened to this once sweet paradise. Pro tip, Tulum is still amazing, come anytime just not from Dec 28th to Jan 18th; there are also great yoga/meditation activities going on year round.
P.s. Restaurants here accept cash and crypto only, bribes can be paid in cash
*An ironic, self-imposed title — #tuluminati… also dont forget: #grateful #blessed #gratitude #industwetrust #savetheturtles #butnostrawsokay | {
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A test opening of St Petersburg’s Zenit Arena in February treated 10,000 spectators to car racing, motorcycle tricks, dancers and a performing bear introduced as “Russia’s greatest hero”. But the patriotic ceremony failed to note that the stadium, in which Russia kick off the Confederations Cup in a fortnight in preparation for next year’s World Cup, was built mostly by immigrant workers from Asia, including from one of the world’s most repressive countries, North Korea.
A subcontractor who asked to remain anonymous said at least 190 “downtrodden” North Koreans had worked long hours with no days off between August and November last year and that one, a 47-year-old, had died on site. “These guys are afraid to speak to people. They don’t look at anyone. They’re like prisoners of war,” the subcontractor said.
An employee of a North Korean state company that brings workers to Russia told the Observer at a St Petersburg construction site that the men often worked long hours and had to give part of their pay to the regime in Pyongyang to “facilitate the country’s defence”, which includes its nuclear weapons programme.
Tens of thousands of North Korean labourers in Russia work in often “slave-like conditions”, according to Marzuki Darusman, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The companies that hire them “become complicit in an unacceptable system of forced labour”, he said.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Zenit Arena under construction in July 2015. Photograph: Grigory Dukor / Reuters/Reuters
Although a law passed in Russia in 2013 exempts employers connected with the World Cup from much of the country’s labour regulations, the North Koreans’ work at the stadium calls into question Fifa’s and Moscow’s commitment to human rights in the preparations for the tournament. In a blanket statement in response to questions about the use of North Korean labour, Fifa told the Observer it monitored conditions for migrant workers and would “continue to follow up any allegations made with regards to human rights violations”.
The St Petersburg construction committee said the authorities had conducted regular inspections to make sure conditions at the Zenit Arena site met Russian labour laws. But according to the subcontractor, North Koreans at the site worked at least 11 hours a day for $10-$15, seven days a week. They not only earned less than other migrant workers but lived in more cramped conditions, six to eight workers sharing one construction caravan.
The North Korean had died from a heart attack, the subcontractor said. He added that fatigue was a danger. “When you lose your reaction time due to fatigue, you can get hurt out of the blue, just like that.”
While Russia’s World Cup preparations have not had the same number of fatalities as those for the 2022 competition in Qatar, where hundreds of migrant workers have been killed during a huge construction boom, the Observer found in 2015 that at least five workers had died in accidents at the Zenit Arena. The subcontractor said another five had died between August and December 2016, including the North Korean.
Allegations of exploitation of North Korean workers are only the latest chapter in the spotted history of the Zenit Arena. When St Petersburg started planning a new stadium in 2006 for Zenit, the project was scheduled to finish by the end of 2008 and cost 6.7bn roubles (£92m at today’s exchange rate). As construction finally neared its end almost a decade later, the city’s vice-governor, Igor Albin, said the cost of the 68,000-seat venue had risen more than sixfold to 43bn roubles.
The actual cost is very likely to be much higher – owing to corruption, mismanagement and fluctuations in the exchange rate – making it one of the most expensive stadiums per seat in the world, according to Dmitry Sukharev, a former construction worker who heads the St Petersburg branch of the global anti-corruption NGO Transparency International. The St Petersburg construction committee did not respond to a request for comment about costs.
Despite the huge spending, Fifa reportedly found last year that the Zenit Arena’s removable pitch did not meet its shock absorption standards. Vladimir Putin is said to have told Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, that the stadium’s scandal-ridden construction was a “very sad story” and promised that all defects would be fixed. After the city fired the general contractor last July over delays and cost overruns, the vice-governor Albin managed to gather more than 4,000 workers at the site for a final push to finish it. That is when three companies brought in North Korean workers, the subcontractor said.
Play Video 1:49 Delays, corruption and cheap labour: the budget-smashing World Cup stadium - video
Pyongyang has been exporting manpower to Russia since Soviet times, including to logging camps in Russia’s far east. In testimony provided to the Observer, Choi Myong-bok, a refugee who escaped a logging camp in the Amur region in 2002, said the camp was “a living hell, it was an open-air prison, wardens watched us around the clock”. He said he lived in inhumane conditions in crowded construction caravans infested by lice and bedbugs and subsisted on melted snow, rice, salt and whatever mushrooms and berries he could gather.
Pyongyang earns up to $2.3bn (£1.8bn) a year sending workers such as Choi abroad, mostly to China and Russia. This is despite UN sanctions meant to deprive it of foreign currency for developing nuclear weapons. Moscow has recently signed agreements with Pyongyang to increase trade and employment of North Korean workers at agricultural and timber operations. According to the federal migration service, 30,000 North Koreans were estimated to be in Russia as of 2015.
Last year the two governments signed a treaty to extradite citizens who illegally enter either country, an agreement condemned by the UN as a mechanism to send North Korean workers who seek asylum back to face torture or death. But only a handful have sought asylum. “They all have families and if one runs away then it wouldn’t be good for his family, because it’s a communist order there, like we had under Stalin,” said Maria Trush, the administrator of a branch of Apart Hostel, a five-storey dormitory in an industrial zone outside St Petersburg close to where a North Korean subcontractor has an office.
Trush has been housing construction workers on and off for the past five years. She said the North Koreans typically worked “like ants”, starting at 8am and ending at 11pm. In the little free time they had, they watched North Korean state television or dubbed Soviet films.
Malsar Khuseinov, the director of Soyuz-Stroi, a construction company that employs 200 North Koreans, said workers were allowed to “extend the work day as much as they need” to meet a deadline. Pyongyang “commands and controls them” through “captains” on the ground, he said. “They have the right kind of discipline,” he said, adding that it was “out of the question” that any of them would run away.
Another construction firm, Dalpiterstroi, employed 60 North Koreans at the Zenit Arena, the company’s PR and advertising director, Anna Bochenkova, said. But they worked eight, not 11, hours a day, and she denied allegations of low pay and overcrowded construction caravans. “They work in good conditions with standard pay, like all workers on St Petersburg construction sites, at market price, and have good living conditions,” she said.
Bochenkova said she could not comment on the North Korean worker who died but denied it could have been caused by overwork. “A person can die from a heart attack just walking down the street anywhere in the world,” she said.
On a recent night in the suburb of Shushary, this reporter found a two-storey, metal-sided dormitory where North Korean workers live in a large cluster of similar housing. A man preparing food in the small, low kitchen immediately made a call on his cellphone and within minutes a well-dressed man who gave his name only as Choi arrived. He said he was a translator for the North Korean state company that brings workers to Russia.
Thirty-two men lived in the Shushary dormitory, he said, and another 100 were working in the suburb of Pargolovo. A North Korean fell to his death from a nine-storey building there in June, Choi confirmed. The men are sent to Russia for five years, work 12 hours a day with two hours for lunch, rest on weekends, and make 50,000-60,000 roubles a month (£685-£825), of which they give 5%-10% to the Pyongyang government, he said.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest This aerial view shows the construction site of the new Zenit Arena. Photograph: Dmitry Lovetsky/AP
Nearby, a group of North Korean workers were still pouring concrete on the 22nd storey of a residential tower at 10.30pm. When asked, one of them at the base of the tower said he made 50,000 to 60,000 roubles a month. A security guard quickly ended the conversation.
The Observer also ran into Choi and another worker on a muddy track between the dormitories and the building sites. The worker said he started each day around 8.30am or 9am and carried on until 7pm or 8pm, with two hours for lunch. That day, a delayed batch of concrete had pushed work later, he said. “I came to see this city, which is beautiful and famous around the world,” he said, adding that he had worked in Russia since 2014.
Asked how much he made, he also said 50,000 to 60,000 roubles a month. The conversation was cut short by security guards who briefly detained this reporter in a construction trailer.
World Cup 2018: Fifa admits workers have suffered human rights abuses Read more
The Norwegian football magazine Josimar recently found another group of about 100 North Koreans who were living in construction caravans and working long hours at another Dalpiterstroi site, surrounded by barbed wire and guards with dogs.
In reality, the workers are likely to make far less than the figures they cite as the Pyongyang regime takes 30%-50% of their income, according to Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert. Nevertheless, working abroad was one of the few ways for North Koreans to improve their financial situation, he added.
While there are many exceptions to the standard 40-hour week stipulated in Russia’s labour code, working at least 10 hours a day for most of five years, like the North Koreans said they do, would violate the law, two lawyers told this newspaper.
Last week it emerged that Infantino had admitted that Fifa was aware of the issues. In a letter dated 22 May to Nordic FA presidents who had raised the issue, he said: “Fifa is aware of and firmly condemns the often appalling labour conditions under which North Korean workers are employed in various countries around the world.” He acknowledged that an inspection team for Fifa’s decent work monitoring system, set up to address concerns about human rights abuses, did find “strong evidence for the presence of North Korean workers on the construction site in St Petersburg” on a visit in November. “The issues found were subsequently raised with the respective company and with the general contractor,” Infantino wrote. Fifa said a further inspection in March found no more North Koreans working at the site.
According to Svetlana Gannushkina, a veteran migrant rights activist who helps North Korean refugees, the authorities rarely raise any questions about these workers. “The rights of people working on our territory should be respected, no matter who their overlords are, but this isn’t done,” she said. “It’s an area of complete lawlessness.” | {
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Since their inception back in 2008, Google’s Nexus reference devices have given developers and consumers alike a fantastic feature: the ability to run Android as envisioned by the very team that creates, maintains, and develops it. Unlike so many OEMs that rely on enhancing the user experiences with gimmicks or modified skins, the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) builds that exist on these hallowed “pure” devices are assisted by the hardware, not driven by it.
The problem, especially as of late, is that while the Nexus line has seemingly become more and more popular with each passing year, Google has consistently failed to meet demand. The problem truly began when the Nexus 4 released and undercut so many competitors with its pricing, however it continued even as recent as last year’s Nexus 6 which rang in at a premium price tag. In this piece, we will take a look at the pricing history of the Nexus smartphones, discuss the paradoxical sales situation that exists within the pricing, and then offer some thoughts on how this year’s new Nexi’s supply story might fare.
The “slow start” of the traditional trio
The Nexus One, also known by the codename “(HTC) Passion” launched on January 5, 2010 and rang in at $529 sans contract. It was commissioned and created to guide OEMs and provide developers a standardized work environment with which they could test and create Android software. The Nexus One was openly branded as a failure, as exemplified in this piece by PC World, and discontinued by that summer.
The Nexus S, also known by the code name “Crespo” was made by Samsung and formally announced on December 6, 2010. The asking price was even greater than the One, at $699.99 off contract. While the device was generally regarded as cutting-edge and worthwhile, the high cost arguably worked against it, as did the perceived superiority of Samsung’s own Galaxy offering, which the Nexus S was created from.
The Galaxy Nexus, also known by the code name “Maguro” was formally unveiled on October 19, 2011. The full retail price was an impressive $399 which garnished much praise on Google, including this piece by GigaOM, who called the Galaxy Nexus a “big deal”. The Galaxy Nexus saw a much larger push from Google, though the carrier-branded versions were not without setbacks and update problems.
The second trio…
AndroidPIT
The Nexus 4, also known as Mako, was manufactured by LG Electronics and released on November 13, 2012. It was sold in two variants, an 8GB model originally retailing for $299 off-contract, and a 16GB model originally retailing for $349 off-contract. The device was widely praised for its extremely affordable price tag. Based on the LG Optimus G, the price tag was so low as to be deemed sold “at cost” and was immensely popular.
So popular was the product that it literally sold out within minutes upon release. The availability problems continued, and became so widespread that Google itself issued a public apology, blaming LG for “scarce and erratic” supply but also pointed the finger internally as well, citing poor communication. Interestingly enough, despite the unrelenting stock shortage, one report claimed Google had sold just 3 million units by Q2 2013. Unfortunately the problem would continue.
The Nexus 5, also known as the Hammerhead, was released on October 31, 2013. Developed again by LG Electronics and based on the Korean OEM’s own G2 hardware, the price was once more, an unbeatable proposition: the 16GB variant cost $349 off-contract, and the 32GB variant $399 off-contract. At this point in time, similar hardware (including the G2 itself) was retailing for unsubsidized prices in upwards of the $600 mark. History, unfortunately, would be doomed to repeat itself, as the phone again sold out in minutes and faced shortages that lasted for months on end.
The Nexus 6, also known as Shamu marked a major change for the Nexus program when it was unveiled on October 15, 2014: this time around Google went with Motorola for the manufacturing and produced a 6-inch phablet. The device was immediately deemed as polarizing to the point where Google itself went on the defensive, suggesting that after users try it out, the will begin to love it. Perhaps the biggest surprise was the price itself however, which market a return to the highs of 2010: the 32GB variant cost $649 and the 64GB variant cost $699. Despite the high point of entry, the phones immediately sold out. And continued to sell out. In fact, they remained difficult to get for some until around mid-January 2015; at one point Google itself had to promise more supplies were coming.
..and its paradoxical pricing problems
Without a doubt, Google’s decision to price both the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 at such a low price point made the devices instantly affordable to all, and therefore undeniably desirable. Those who tried to purchase even the 8GB Nexus 4, for example, may recall taking to eBay only to have found sellers offering the device for almost triple the $299 MSRP, and it was still selling. The supply issues were clearly the result of either Google, LG – or both – failing to anticipate the demand.
And yet. Considering the aforementioned report that the Nexus 4 had only sold 3 million units by Q2 2013, one has to stop for a second and consider what was truly going on. LG is an absolutely gigantic company, and the hardware in question was basically a modified G2 of which LG had released months earlier. How is it logically possible that a company with the resources of LG was unable to manufacture enough of the phones to meet demand for months on end? Perhaps the better question therefore, is in considering just how few units Google would have asked LG to manufacture in the first place. And yet: at that price? Still, hindsight is always a different story, and especially in light of concrete figures (as Google doesn’t talk numbers unfortunately) the Nexus 4 blunder was just that: a blunder.
That the same problems repeated again the next year with the Nexus 5 however, would serve to suggest something more critically flawed is going on in the supply-chain-management process. Unfortunately we will never known the full story from those in the position to tell it, but there are a myriad number of angry, infuriated personal narratives of customers who had to wait weeks or months for even the chance to order their desired product let alone receive it. Truth be told, it matters not what caused the problem in the end, only that there was a shortage.
Ironically the Nexus 6’s pricing arguably had little to do with its extended supply issues. Rumors had circulated that key components such as the AMOLED display panel, were not being supplied in quantities great enough to meet demand, and so too did Google arguably underestimate just how many people would want the super-sized smartphone. Add in the fact that Motorola itself was literally being moved to China and all that entails from such a major change of ownership, and the problem would only be magnified.
The Nexus 5X and the Nexus 6P: when will these phones actually get to me?
Putting the past aside, let’s look to the present: Google has just announced not one, but two new Nexus phones. These darling devices cater to very different markets as evidenced by their display size, spec sheet, and pricing points. Assuming that the pair of products will be as widely available around the world as the Nexus 5 and Nexus 6, if not more so, the most immediate question is the one on everyone’s mind. How long will I have to wait before I can get one?
The most obvious answer is – at the moment – not for almost a month. Seemingly simultaneously as the new products became available for pre-order on the Google Store, all models were listed with a 3-4 week shipping time. Here in Japan the 64GB Nexus 6P is listed as a 4-5 week shipping delay.
Given the time that had passed from the site update and the announcement, it is possible Google was listing the delay as a placeholder, especially since there didn’t seem to be a specific day indicated for the actual shipments, just that the devices would release “in October”.
It is also possible that the devices will be more readily available in other countries given the higher price points they are being sold at, though one can only imagine what issues the Japan-exclusive Gold colored Nexus 6P will face.
Why no carriers?
Shutterstock
One thing curiously missing from Google’s press event was the mention of retail stores or carriers that will be selling either of the new Nexus devices. In fact, according to a leak obtained by Android Central just a day before the event, it seemed clear that Google will only be offering the devices online, at least within the United States. This could mean one of two outcomes: either (1) there will be sufficient supplies to go around as physical retailers will not receive allocations, or (2) the devices will be harder to purchase than ever due to everyone being forced to buy online.
While this move may indeed seem like a strategic one designed to ensure customers receive their orders as quickly as possible (i.e. option 1), the more likely explanation is inevitable that…
Project Fi functionality is included
That Google spent time in the unveiling to call out Project Fi compatibility should give readers a good indication of the company’s overall product picture. That Google is allowing users to pay for the device with a Project Fi plan should cement it even more securely. Mountain View has its own MVNO service (a very good one at that) and its interests are therefore best served by avoiding the traditional ones entirely.
If the phone is sold at a local Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T or Sprint store, users are inevitably going to sign a contract, and thus not use Project Fi. Moreover, if customers are given a monthly installment plan by those carriers, they are definitely not going to be interested in using Project Fi to pay it off. This is a very calculated move to be sure, though – in consideration of this piece’s topic – it will only serve to contribute to the whole idea of a supply shortage.
An Optimistic Opportunity
There is currently a thread on reddit devoted to what the community has deemed a “successful” launch for the two new Nexi. Mentioned are things such as the Google Store website not crashing and “having stock” of the item although the question remains how a 3-5 week ship date is considered “in stock”. Some users have reported an estimated delivery date of late October, while others are looking at the beginning of November.
The general consensus seems to be that a late October ship date is actually normal for the device, and the overall tone is quite positive. Indeed this may be an indication that Google has finally straightened things out, though in avoiding carriers and their supply demands as well as releasing two devices with multiple colors and storage configurations has arguably helped dilute the interest from concentrating on one specific variant.
We, like all Google fans, remain optimistic that this year will be different. The new Nexus devices are pure Google gold and everyone wants to treasure our treasure as soon as possible.
Wrap Up
Last week’s new product announcements, while hardly shocking to those that follow tech, are the culmination of months – if not years – of planning. They also represent the fruition of the endless stream of rumors that have been freely flowing around the internet. While the fever pitch may be bigger than ever at the prospect of two divergent, different Nexi, it is truly just a matter of time before customers can get their hands on one, or both.
We are quite interested to hear your thoughts on this topic. Have you purchased a Nexus device before? Did you experience delays or supply issues? What kind of reaction do you think the new Nexi will have in the market, and how long will it take before they are readily available? Please feel free to answer the survey questions below, and leave us your comments and opinions! | {
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Japan is poised to begin informal trade talks with the UK to secure a swift trade deal after Brexit.
Shinzo Abe’s government has signalled an intention to open a dialogue with the UK while it remains in the EU, even though formal bilateral negotiations cannot begin until it has left the bloc, according to the Japanese newspaper Nikkei.
More than 1,000 Japanese companies currently operate in Britain employing some 140,000 people in the country, while Japan’s direct investment in the UK has topped 10 trillion yen (£71bn).
Japan is currently locked in long-running negotiations with the EU to secure a trade deal.
Japan and the EU began a new era of cooperation in the early Nineties and launched free trade talks in 2013. However, the sides are still negotiating tariffs on food, drink and cars after 18 rounds of talks.
Mr Abe said over the weekend that he would aim to reach a Japan-EU free trade deal during a visit to Germany to attend a G20 summit next month.
The Nikkei claimed “the Japanese and British governments will prepare [informal] talks behind the scenes” in the coming months. | {
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India’s demand for consular access to Kulbhushan Jadhav not appropriate as case is in ICJ: Pakistan
india
Updated: Apr 06, 2019 09:10 IST
Pakistan on Friday said that India’s demand for consular access to Kulbhushan Jadhav is not appropriate at this point as the case is pending in the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Foreign Office spokesman Mohammad Faisal, addressing media in Islamabad said India has so far not given response to Pakistan’s questions about the passport of Jadhav who was sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of “espionage and terrorism” after a closed trial in April 2017.
Pakistan claims that its security forces arrested Jadhav from restive Balochistan province on March 3, 2016 after he reportedly entered from Iran. However, India maintains that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he had business interests after retiring from the Navy.
During a media briefing, Pakistan Foreign Office spokesman said the case is in ICJ and the question of consular access was “not appropriate at this point”.
On the issue of abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution that provides special status to Kashmir, Pakistan said it will be in violation of the UN resolutions.
“The abrogation of Article 370 of Indian constitution is violation of UN resolutions. We will not accept it under any circumstances and the Kashmiris will also not accept it,” he said.
Faisal also said that Pakistan is committed to operationalise the Kartarpur corridor by the 550th birth anniversary of founder of Sikhism Baba Guru Nanak Dev in November 2019.
Faisal said that if the corridor failed to open, India would be responsible.
“But it is important to have the meetings so that all issues about Kartarpur are settled. In principle we are ready to open it as Prime Minister Imran Khan announced but it will be only possible if India agreed to it,” he said.
India on Thursday said Pakistan is yet to respond to its concerns over reports that controversial elements have been appointed by Islamabad to a committee which is to be associated with the Kartarpur corridor.
Sources had last week said India had summoned Pakistan’s deputy high commissioner in New Delhi and conveyed its concerns over the presence of a leading Khalistani separatist in the committee appointed Pakistan on the Kartarpur corridor project.
India had also sought clarifications on several issues related to the Kartarpur corridor from Pakistan.
Commenting on the sale of anti-submarine weaponry to India by the US, Faisal said that such decisions will lead to an escalation in the arms race within the region.
“We are prepared and want peace but we are not negligent to our defence,” he said.
The spokesperson said that all steps were being taken for the implementation of the National Action Plan which included actions against proscribed groups. “We are taking these steps in our own interests,” he said.
He said Pakistan would continue to brief the diplomatic corps on actions against militancy. | {
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SPANISH green party Equo is demanding an ‘immediate ban’ on the herbicide Glyphosate which has been linked to terminal cancer.
The call comes after American courts ordered the manufacturer to compensate a victim who fell prey to the disease after exposure to the product.
Developed in the 1970s by Monsanto, now owned by pharmaceutical giant Bayer, Glyphosate has been denounced on multiple occasions due to its negative effects on the environment and human health.
Based on official government data, ecologists claim that at least one of Spain’s three major rivers is contaminated with the substance.
Equo pointed to Bayer’s difficulty in getting its manufacturing license renewed in Europe. “It’s no coincidence that the European Parliament blocked Monsanto which has been accused of interfering with scientific reports about Glyphosate”.
However the European Commission maintains that use of the herbicide in the EU is based on ‘scientific evidence’, adding that every country is free to use it or ban it as they choose.
Carlos Vicent, Bayer’s Spain and Portugal spokesman, commented: “The court’s decision doesn’t change the fact that more than 800 scientific research reports state that Glyphosate doesn’t cause cancer”. | {
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School districts across the St. Louis region sought more money from taxpayers in Tuesday’s election. Also, there were three seats up for grabs for the St. Louis Public Schools’ elected school board., though the state still has oversight.
Here’s the breakdown of what passed and what didn’t:
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Metro East voters reject 1 percent sales tax for schools
Metro East schools will not see millions more after voters turned down a 1 percent sales tax.
The ballot measures failed by .6 percent in Madison County and about 13 percent in St. Clair County. The money — an estimated $23 million a year in Madison County and $20 million a year in St. Clair County — would have gone to facilities, not salaries.
Alton’s superintendent had called it a “fair-share tax,” because it doesn’t affect just homeowners. But opponents had argued there’s no promise that officials won’t try a bonding issue next.
Monroe loses seat on St. Louis school board
Bill Monroe failed to win re-election to the St. Louis Public Schools board, which is notable because some officials said if he had remained on the board he could have prevented the district from regaining control from the state.
Among the seven candidates in the running, St. Louis voters chose Susan Jones, Dorothy Collins and Natalie Vowell.
The vice president of the Missouri Board of Education, Vic Lenz, had said talks between state officials and SLPS board members were put on hold until after the election because Monroe had become disruptive during two meetings that originally were not open to the public.
Monroe has said that meetings should be done in public and talks to regain local control should resume “immediately.”
Kirkwood voters approve smaller property tax increase for schools
About a year after a school funding measure failed, Kirkwood voters gave the go-ahead to a property tax increase.
The difference between this year’s request for a 46-cent levy and the one in 2015 was 32 cents per $100 of a home’s value. The measure passed 57.96 percent to 42.04 percent.
Since the 2015 vote, Kirkwood cut more than $5 million from its budget, including laying off 52 staffers and instituting a pay freeze. Officials say the property tax increase will go toward restoring those reductions.
Opponents of the measure said the district should sell off a tract of land and make teachers pay more for their health care.
Normandy OKs $23M bond issue
The unaccredited Normandy School District received permission from voters to take out a $23 million bond for a new middle school and science and technology labs.
The measure, which passed 3,359-1,527, was critical for the north St. Louis County district to remain competitive, Superintendent Charles Pearson said, because parents can choose to send students elsewhere on Normandy’s dime. | {
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(CNN) -- Six of the suspected gunmen responsible for the killings of 72 migrants in Mexico have been identified, Mexican authorities said Monday, the state-run Notimex news agency reported.
However, all of the suspects are dead, said Alejandro Poire, the spokesman for Mexico's president on security issues.
Three were killed in a confrontation with the Mexican navy after the bodies were discovered, and three others were found dead inside a vehicle on the side of a highway, Poire said
The dead suspects were identified by the survivors of last month's massacre at a ranch near the town of San Fernando in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas.
Three people are believed to have survived the mass killings, although only one -- an Ecuadorean man -- has spoken publicly. Mexican authorities have withheld details about survivors, citing safety concerns.
A seventh suspect was arrested and is being held by authorities while they investigate possible charges against him, Poire said.
Of the 72 migrants who were killed, 27 had been identified and their bodies returned to their home countries in Honduras and El Salvador, he said.
The official said the preliminary investigation shows that the Zetas drug cartel was responsible for the killings. | {
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In 1946, Stanley Kubrick, then aged only 18, took these photographs of the New York Subway and had them published by LOOK magazine. He photographed for the magazine from 1945 to 1950.
According to Helen O'Brian, head of LOOK's photographic department, Kubrick generated the highest number of published articles of any photographer she had worked with. At the time, Kubrick was the youngest photographer LOOK had had on its books.
| {
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CHICAGO (WLS) -- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Chancellor Phyllis Wise announced she will resign just two weeks before classes are set to resume for the fall semester.The I-Team has learned that U of I will give Wise a $400,000 bonus as she leaves, even though it was her decision.When Wise left Washington University for U of I in 2011, she was heralded as the education administrator of the future at the flagship campus in Champaign.Wise said she is resigning due to a range of "external issues" that she says have become a distraction for the school. Those issues include several lawsuits challenging her decision making and some of those under her.Wise leaves on the cusp of her final contract year that would pay her $549,068 - making her one of the highest paid public employees in Illinois. She is said to be moving into a faculty job at more than $250,000 annual salary.According to her original contract , a $500,000 bonus was to be payable after completing five years of service - which she wouldn't hit until 2016 - or if she was terminated by the U of I Board, the money would be prorated.However, a university spokesman told the I-Team "she will receive a prorated $400,000 of the retention compensation in a negotiated agreement."Wise's actual faculty salary will be up to the U of I Board of Trustees. But her current deal states that if she returns to a faculty position, she is entitled to a nine-month sabbatical, so she may be paid an additional $250,000 or so for not actually teaching the next year. | {
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Un total de 200 casos han resultado positivo por coronavirus en Panamá, confirmó la ministra de Salud, Rosario Turner.
Esto significa que de ayer, jueves 19 a este viernes, 20 de marzo, se expandió a 63 nuevos casos, el contagio de virus en el país.
Del total de casos, 171 se encuentran en aislamiento domiciliario (con síntomas y 28 están hospitalizados (11 cuidados intensivos y en sala 17 casos).
" De los 200 casos, 171 se encuentran en aislamiento domiciliario, esto representa un 85.5% de los casos. Los hospitalizados son un 8.5% y los casos críticos son un 5.5%",detalló Lourdes Moreno, directora de Epidemiología del Ministerio de Salud (Minsa).
Así las cosas, el 81% de las personas afectadas corresponden a las edades de 21 a 59 años, que son las edades productivas.
Se han realizado 2,170 pruebas de las cuales el 91% han resultado negativas.
" Panamá tiene una situación, nos encontramos en una etapa 3, la población debe tomar conciencia, si no lo hacen... podemos tomar medidas más fuertes como limitar la movilización diaria", aseveró Turner.
Panamá, provincia más golpeada por el COVID-19
Panamá Metro, Panamá Este, Panamá Norte, Panamá Oeste y San Miguelito continúan siendo los puntos de mayor infección por el virus.
Las áreas más afectadas de Panamá Centro son San Francisco, Juan Diaz, Bella Vista y Betania. " Lo más importante es quedarse en casa", remarcó Moreno.
Panamá Oeste, se han registrado cosos en Vista Alegre, Juan Demóstenes Arosemena y Paya Leona.
Panamá Este se han confirmado casos en Chepo y Tortí.
Panamá Norte hay casos en Las Cumbres, Chilibre, Alcalde Díaz.
San Miguelito se constaron casos en Omar Torrijos, Ernesto Córdoba, Rufina Alfaro, José Domingo Espinar, Amelia Denis de Icaza y Belisario Porras.
Provincias Centrales
Se han comprobado 2 casos en Coclé, 2 Colón en y 2 Panamá Este.
Además, este viernes 20 de marzo, Chiriquí se convirtió en la sexta provincia de Panamá con un caso confirmado por COVID-19.
Veraguas: Se confirmaron casos Soná, Santiago, San Antonio, San José y Ponuga.
Coclé: Cañaveral, y Pocrí, regiones con casos comprobados.
Colón: Barrio Norte y Cristóbal tienen casos confirmados.
Chiriquí: En el distrito de Bugaba un caso confirmado
En el número de consulta 169 se han recibido 1,870 llamadas, de las cuales se han contestado 1,767. "Por favor tomemos conciencia otra vez hemos vuelto aumentar el número de llamadas falsas, hay 108 de esta índole", aseveró Moreno.
Anillos de seguridad
Turner hizo el desglose de los 6 anillos de seguridad que deben acatar los panameños para prevenir ser un número más en la fila de contagiados por el coronavirus.
Anillo 1: Mantenerse en casa y tomar las medidas sanitarias requeridas.
Anillo 2: De llegar a presentar síntomas, deben comunicarse con el consultorio virtual Rosa, la asistente virtual del Minsa o llamar al 169.
La titular de salud recordó que Rosa ofrece dos caminos a los pacientes: si la persona no reporta datos ni síntomas ni factores de riesgo se le solicitará que se quede en casa. En cambio, si la respuesta es positiva se le pedirá que se acerque a un módulo de atención.
Anillo 3: Recurrir a módulos de atención, que son contenedores o carpas que están afuera de los centros de salud para atender casos sospechosos. (Los hospitales son exclusivos para manejar casos graves).
Anillo 4: Mientras esperas la respuesta de la prueba por parte del Minsa y se procese el examen de laboratorio, el paciente debe quedarse en casa.
Nico (Notificación Individual de Caso negativo Obtenido): será el encargado de anunciar que la prueba es negativa. De ser positivo, el Minsa se comunicará con el paciente.
Anillo 5: Se deberá acudir, una vez este listo, al nuevo hospital modular, que tendrá capacidad para 100 camas, así como cuidados intensivos.
Anillo 6: Conlleva el periodo de observación por la recuperación del paciente, Para esta fase los hoteles han puesto a disposición más de 2 mil camas para completar este periodo, en caso de ser necesario el monitoreo clínico.
Toque de queda | {
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Cross-Data Photographer Mark A Harris Airline Delta Air Lines Version Airbus A350-941 Generic Type Airbus A350 Basic Type Airbus A350 Manufacturer Airbus MSN 175 Reg. N506DN Code 3506 Location Los Angeles - International Region California Country USA Date Photographed January 20, 2019 Cancel Search
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UCLA professor Kelly Lytle Hernández, an award-winning author and scholar of race, mass incarceration and immigration, was announced today as a recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Lytle Hernández, who is a professor of history and African American studies, is the director of UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, which under her leadership has focused on supporting research into two critical themes in the modern black world — work and justice. The Bunche Center is home to Million Dollar Hoods, which maps the fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. Lytle Hernández is the director and principal investigator on the project.
“Lytle Hernández’s investigation of the intersecting histories of race, mass incarceration, immigration, and cross-border politics is deepening our understanding of how imprisonment has been used as a mechanism for social control in the United States,” the foundation said.
The MacArthur Fellowship is a $625,000, no-strings-attached award to people the foundation deems “extraordinarily talented and creative individuals.” Fellows are chosen based on three criteria: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of accomplishments, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. Lytle Hernández is one of 26 individuals the foundation selected for fellowships in 2019.
“As a scholar, I both work deeply alone and deeply in community, but until very recently the scholarly communities I’ve worked in — immigration and the carceral state — have been fairly separate,” said Lytle Hernández, who holds the Thomas E. Lifka Chair in History at UCLA. “I hope my work has helped people understand immigration as another aspect of mass incarceration in the United States and that my award further helps people understand that these two regimes are intertwined. This award will help us continue this work across communities and shine a light on this kind of thinking that unites these two crises that others often see as distinct.”
Lytle Hernández, 45, received her bachelor’s degree from UC San Diego in 1996 and earned her doctorate in 2002 from UCLA.
For her first book, “MIGRA! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol,” Lytle Hernández pored over historical records to illuminate the border patrol’s nearly exclusive focus on policing unauthorized immigration from Mexico.
In “City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles,” she began zeroing in on another dimension of race and law enforcement, specifically what forces shaped Los Angeles so that it came to operate the largest jail system in the United States.
“What I found in the archives is that since the very first days of U.S. rule in Los Angeles — the Tongva Basin — incarceration has persistently operated as a means of purging, removing, caging, containing, erasing, disappearing and otherwise eliminating indigenous communities and racially targeted populations,” Lytle Hernández said in an interview about the book.
The MacArthur Fellowship, which is commonly referred to as the “genius grant,” is according to the foundation, intended to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual and professional inclinations. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations.
Lytle Hernández joins 13 other UCLA faculty as MacArthur fellows, including mathematician Terence Tao, choreographer Kyle Abraham, director Peter Sellars, astrophysicist Andrea Ghez and historian of religion Gregory Schopen.
While unsure of her specific plans for the award, Lytle Hernández said that she will continue to expand the scope and scale of her social justice scholarship, including with partners outside of UCLA.
“I’d like to create a space for myself and others — especially community organizers and movement-driven scholars — to write,” she said, noting that these people’s calendars tend to be jammed by the “urgency of their work.” “I’d like to create space that allows myself and others to process the work that we’re doing and to share it.” | {
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White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is set to take questions from reporters on Tuesday afternoon.
The press briefing is the first held by the White House since late November.
The briefing is scheduled to begin at 1:45 p.m.
Watch live in the video above. | {
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Bitcoin crosses $10,000 milestone Published duration 29 November 2017
image copyright Getty Images image caption Bitcoin's value has fluctuated widely during its nine-year existence
The value of one bitcoin has gone past $10,000 (£7,493).
The virtual currency reached the benchmark for the first time, just days after it passed $9,000.
It caps a remarkable rise in value for the crypto-currency, which was trading below $1,000 at the start of the year.
Some experts believe the asset still has far to soar , but others say it represents a speculative bubble with nothing tangible at its core that could burst any time.
The total value of all the bitcoins in existence has now surpassed $167bn.
Bitcoin first reached $1,000 in late-2013 and then dipped significantly before starting a volatile climb to its current value.
It is not entirely clear what has driven the sudden rise in value, especially because the past few weeks have been marked by action by some financial regulators to limit its use.
New heights
One factor that may have helped was the US-based derivatives marketplace operator CME Group's announcement at the start of the month that it planned to launch a Bitcoin futures product before the end of 2017, which bolstered confidence in its prospects.
Another was a decision to drop a controversial plan known as Segwit2x.
This would have altered the way Bitcoin's underlying technology, the blockchain, worked, to help it handle more transactions.
But the move risked splitting the community.
Many industry watchers believe the rapid rise in value will not be sustained and expect its value to suddenly fall sharply.
Bitcoins were first produced in 2009 and took a long time to become an accepted holder of monetary value that could be swapped for real-world cash.
One early transaction involved using 10,000 bitcoins to buy two pizzas.
The boom has led to a general rise in many other virtual currencies.
One, known as Ethereum, is now worth about $480, but at the start of 2017 each one was worth only about $10.
Many others are also trying to profit from the growing interest in crypto-currencies.
image caption Con artists are sending Bitcoin-based scams to phone users, pretending to be from the news site CoinDesk
Many malware writers are now seeking to install software on vulnerable websites that create or "mine" the coins.
In addition, scammers have sent fake text messages to people's phones, claiming they own some of the digital currency, in an effort to tempt them into opening a dangerous link. | {
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After the pictures we brought you last mont of the barrier work at Tertre Rouge here are a couple of further images from David Legangneux that show further work underway which we believe will lead to a full resurfacing of the track at this point (beginning on 20 May) and an extension of the track by around 1.5 metres towards the inside of the corner.
The shots below, from some weeks back, show too that the pit lane has already been entirely resurfaced. | {
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Un millonario y silencioso flujo de dinero transita desde empresas mineras a municipios donde tienen instaladas sus faenas. Muchas de esas donaciones coinciden con episodios de contaminación o periodos en que esos mismos municipios deben pronunciarse ante la autoridad ambiental sobre proyectos clave de las mineras. Ante el evidente conflicto de interés, la Contraloría dictaminó en 2010 que las municipalidades deben abstenerse de recibir donaciones de privados que comprometan su imparcialidad. Letra muerta: CIPER detectó más de $44 mil millones donados por mineras cuyo uso no siempre es transparente.
Vea también: Municipios mineros I: Los millones de los Pelambres que se esfumaron en Salamanca
Letra muerta. En eso se han convertido los sucesivos dictámenes de la Contraloría General de la República que desde al menos 2005 prohíben a las municipalidades aceptar donaciones de privados que comprometan su imparcialidad a la hora de resolver asuntos en los que esté involucrado el benefactor.
En marzo de 2010, el ente contralor dictaminó que las municipalidades debían abstenerse de recibir aportes o firmar convenios de colaboración con empresas o personas naturales “que tengan o puedan tener interés en asuntos que deban ser analizados, conocidos o resueltos por las entidades edilicias” (ver dictamen).
Si para usted resulta obvio que vulnerar esa normativa genera un conflicto de interés, la evidencia indica que para varios alcaldes no es así.
CIPER solicitó vía Ley de Transparencia a 41 municipios del norte, centro y sur del país un listado con todas las donaciones recibidas entre 2010 y 2016 de compañías mineras que operan en sus jurisdicciones territoriales. De esas 41 municipalidades, 22 reportaron donaciones, 15 señalaron no haber recibido aportes y cuatro –Freirina, Salamanca, Arica y La Higuera (donde se ubica el polémico proyecto minero Dominga, de Andes Iron)– desatendieron su obligación legal y no respondieron a la solicitud cumplido el plazo (vea el listado aquí).
CIPER cruzó la información de esos aportes con los oficios que los propios municipios han remitido al Servicio de Evaluación Ambiental (SEA) pronunciándose sobre proyectos mineros en trámite en el mismo periodo de tiempo (2010-2016). En ese proceso, las municipalidades juegan un rol clave en determinar si los proyectos se ajustan a los planes de desarrollo comunal y si, entre otras cosas, presentan riesgos para la salud de la población o los recursos naturales, como el agua o el aire.
Producto de los cuestionamientos que arrastra el sistema de evaluación ambiental –y que escalaron recientemente tras el rechazo del Comité de Ministros al proyecto Dominga–, el gobierno se encuentra ad portas de introducirle modificaciones en base a una veintena de propuestas presentadas por los especialistas que conformaron la comisión asesora creada en 2015 para esos fines.
La indagación de CIPER detectó una zona gris que el Ejecutivo deberá mirar con lupa cuando implemente los cambios: una larga lista de municipios no se ha abstenido de recibir cuantiosas donaciones de compañías mineras con proyectos en pleno trámite ambiental ante el SEA.Varios de los pronunciamientos de las municipalidades –en su mayoría expresando “conformidad” sobre costosas iniciativas de instalación, mejora o ampliación de faenas– fueron presentados a la autoridad ambiental a solo días o meses de que esas mismas administraciones comunales aceptaran los dineros.
La lista de municipalidades que más concentran donaciones de mineras la encabeza Tierra Amarilla (Región de Atacama) con $15.767 millones; le sigue Calama (Región de Antofagasta) con $8.104 millones; Salamanca (Región de Coquimbo) con $7.200 millones; Lo Barnechea (Región Metropolitana) con $2.960 millones; Sierra Gorda (Región de Antofagasta) con $2.669 millones; Illapel (Región de Coquimbo) con $2.253 millones; Chañaral (Región de Atacama) con $1.363 millones y Andacollo (Región de Coquimbo) con $1.010 millones (ver todas las donaciones reportadas).
El monto total de los dineros traspasados por mineras a municipios que CIPER pudo rastrear a nivel nacional supera los $44 mil millones. Con esos mismos fondos los jefes comunales dicen financiar becas de estudio u obras de infraestructura, cortan cintas en actos públicos, pagan remuneraciones y deudas municipales, organizan carnavales y ofrecen celebraciones de aniversario, Año Nuevo o Navidad para los vecinos. Los fines son diversos y, en ocasiones, el interés del donante es explícito. En Machalí, por ejemplo, Codelco le traspasó al municipio de esa comuna $70 millones en 2014 para que se tramitara el cambio de uso de suelo donde opera la División El Teniente, propiedad de la estatal.
Los alcaldes, a su vez, pueden jugar un rol clave como mediadores entre las mineras y las comunidades, utilizando su capital político para desactivar conflictos sociales derivados de las crisis ambientales que las propias compañías benefactoras generan en los lugares donde operan.
Tal es la magnitud de la danza de millones, que municipios con presupuestos exiguos o deudas de arrastre terminan dependiendo de esos dineros para funcionar. Así sucedió en la Municipalidad de Salamanca, donde bajo la gestión del ex alcalde Gerardo Rojas (PPD) se utilizaron buena parte de los millonarios recursos que le entregaba Minera Los Pelambres para pagar remuneraciones y cuentas básicas.
Pese a que ese municipio no entregó en el plazo legal la información solicitada por Ley de Transparencia sobre donaciones, CIPER pudo reconstruir los montos de los aportes y detectar que existen más de $2 mil millones de la minera del Grupo Luksic con los que se solventaron gastos municipales (ver reportaje de CIPER).
La revisión de la información da cuenta que los aportes de las mineras se dan bajo tres modalidades: donación con un fin específico; convenios marco para la ejecución de una línea de proyectos y fondos de libre disposición, una suerte de “cheque en blanco” para ser gastado en lo que el alcalde estime conveniente.
Sea cual sea la modalidad, en varios de esos acuerdos se estipula que las mineras buscarán obtener beneficios tributarios con las donaciones que realizan. Así ocurre con un convenio firmado por la Municipalidad de Tierra Amarilla y una minera, donde se establece que se buscará que los aportes “puedan rebajarse legítimamente como gastos tributarios y/o puedan imputarse como crédito en contra del impuesto de primera categoría”.
Tierra Amarilla ha sido precisamente una de las municipalidades beneficiadas con el formato de donación de libre disposición. En noviembre de 2015, Minera Candelaria (de Lundin Mining y Sumitomo) le transfirió más de $2 mil millones para ser utilizados bajo ese concepto. Para dimensionar hasta qué punto ese volumen de dineros impactó en las finanzas municipales, basta citar un dato: el presupuesto de salud aprobado por esa administración comunal para ese mismo año fue de $1.478 millones, $500 millones menos de lo que transfirió a la cuenta corriente municipal la minera controlada por capitales canadienses. Según informaron a CIPER desde la municipalidad, las autoridades de Tierra Amarilla utilizaron parte de los fondos de libre disposición de Candelaria para pagar deudas en dos áreas estratégicas de gestión: educación ($505 millones) y salud ($200 millones).
TRONADURAS EN ANDACOLLO
El 6 de agosto de 2013, una nube de polvo envolvió a varias localidades de la comuna de Andacollo (Región de Coquimbo). Pasadas las 10 de la mañana, el aire adquirió un tono amarillento y se hizo irrespirable. Ese día, la minera Teck Carmen de Andacollo realizó una tronadura en su faena. El viento esparció por varios kilómetros el polvillo tóxico que produjo la detonación. No era el primer episodio de ese tipo protagonizado por la cuprífera canadiense.
Entre 2010 y 2016 la Municipalidad de Andacollo –que desde 2008 es liderada por Juan Carlos Alfaro (PS)- ha recibido $1.010 millones en donaciones mineras (parte de esos dineros no pasaron por las arcas municipales y fueron directamente a organizaciones comunales). Más del 95% de ese monto fue desembolsado por Teck y el saldo restante por Dayton, compañía de capitales australianos que extrae oro desde una mina a rajo abierto.
En 2009, un Decreto Supremo declaró a Andacollo zona saturada por Material Particulado Respirable. Pese a ello, las tronaduras no autorizadas de ambas mineras siguieron causando estragos. Por esos hechos, en diciembre de 2014 y junio de 2015, Dayton y Teck respectivamente, fueron sancionadas por la Superintendencia de Medio Ambiente (SMA). Respecto de Teck, la SMA identificó cerca de 70 tronaduras ejecutadas en circunstancias desfavorables, “con condiciones de viento que evidencian un compromiso de afectación con polvo a sectores de la comunidad aledaña a la faena minera” (ver documento).
El informe sancionatorio de la SMA indica que las detonaciones se llevaron a cabo entre enero de 2013 y diciembre de 2014. En el transcurso de esos mismos 24 meses, la minera canadiense hizo donaciones al municipio por más de $117 millones, monto que esa municipalidad dice haber invertido en infraestructura e insumos educativos para liceos y escuelas de la comuna. Los fondos de Teck también han permitido financiar una de las actividades más emblemáticas de Andacollo: el festival “La Voz de la Montaña”, organizado cada año por el área cultural del municipio y que en su última versión contó con la participación de Luis Dimas, Manuel García y el trío Natalino. Todos fueron pagados con los $30 millones que la minera aportó para esos fines.
En octubre de 2014, la Contraloría cuestionó en duros términos el manejo que hizo el municipio de los dineros que le transfirió la minera Teck. “No fue posible obtener los convenios de colaboración u otros antecedentes que dieran cuenta de la naturaleza de los acuerdos entre la municipalidad y la empresa minera (…) razones por las que se desconocen, entre otros, los procedimientos establecidos para la selección de los proyectos, contratación, ejecución y pagos, además de no contar con la documentación fuente que permita efectuar el análisis de su pertinencia y legalidad” (ver documento).
La Municipalidad de Andacollo solo registra un pronunciamiento sobre estudios o declaraciones de impacto ambiental ingresados por Teck al SEA entre 2010 y 2016. Tras introducir algunas observaciones iniciales al proyecto de la minera para recuperar suelos contaminados, el 17 de julio de 2012 la administración edilicia se pronunció conforme. El municipio recibió dos donaciones de la minera en fechas cercanas: una el 14 de julio y la otra el 30 del mismo mes, por un total de $12 millones.
El capítulo más delicado de la relación entre la minera y la Municipalidad de Andacollo se da en otra instancia. En 2010 el SEA dio luz verde al proyecto de Teck que le permitió modificar y optimizar sus procesos productivos. En la Resolución de Calificación Ambiental (RCA) que lo autorizó, quedó establecido que el municipio debía ejercer un rol fiscalizador respecto de la minera: “(Teck) realizará reuniones trimestrales con la comunidad (Municipalidad y Unión Comunal de Juntas de Vecinos) donde se presentarán los resultados del monitoreo y el avance en la implementación de los compromisos ambientales del proyecto”.
ZONA ROJA: ATACAMA
En septiembre de 2016 se inauguró en Caldera la “Feria Entre Rieles”, un proyecto en el que se construyeron 28 módulos para que mujeres emprendedoras de la comuna comercializaran sus productos. “Estos son los compromisos que como alcaldesa entrego a mi comunidad, porque siempre estamos y estaremos al servicio de nuestra comunidad”, dijo en el acto de corte de cinta la entonces alcaldesa Patricia González (independiente, pacto Alianza).
La obra tuvo un costo de $152 millones, los que fueron aportados íntegramente por Minera Candelaria.Los dineros habían sido traspasados por la empresa al municipio en diciembre de 2015. Cinco meses antes, la administración edilicia se había pronunciado sobre un proyecto ingresado por Candelaria al Servicio de Evaluación Ambiental para extender su operación hasta 2030, con una inversión de US$400 millones. “Se revisó el informe consolidado de evaluación del proyecto (…) Este órgano de la administración del Estado no tiene observaciones que realizar”, se lee en el oficio municipal enviado al SEA.
A demás de ese aporte, Candelaria registra otras siete donaciones a ese municipio por un total de $150 millones. No es la única minera que le ha transferido dineros. También lo han hecho la Compañía Minera del Pacífico (de CAP y MC Inversiones), Minera Casale (de Barrick Gold y Kinross Gold), Águila del Sur (vinculada a Gonzalo Vial Concha), Lumina Copper (de Pan Pacific Copper y Mitsui & Co) y Minera Santa Fe, ligada al empresario Leonardo Farkas. En total el municipio ha recibido más de $624 millones de empresas mineras entre 2010 y 2016.
En julio de 2011, ese municipio debió revisar un proyecto ingresado al SEA por la Compañía Minera del Pacífico para aumentar la capacidad de acopio y embarque de hierro y cobre en el Puerto Punta Totoralillo. La administración de la alcaldesa Brunilda González (PPD, estuvo en ese cargo entre 2002 y 2012 y fue nuevamente electa en 2016), se pronunció conforme. Tres meses antes, en abril de 2011, Caldera había recibido $50 millones de la minera para financiar su gestión en salud y educación. La donación se materializó luego de que en enero de ese año el municipio manifestara no tener observaciones sobre otro proyecto de la minera ingresado al SEA (“Uso temporal cancha acopio en Puerto Punta Totoralillo”).
La Municipalidad de Copiapó ha recibido más de $320 millones en donaciones de compañías mineras con intereses en esa comuna: Candelaria, Carola y Ojos del Salado (las tres de Lundin Mining y Sumitomo), Hierro Atacama (CAP), Barrick (Barrick Gold), Atacama Kozan (Nittetsu Mining), Punta del Cobre (Pacífico Quinta Región) y Kinross (Kinross Gold Corp.).
Una tajada importante de esa torta de recursos ha ido a financiar el “Gran Rodeo de la Minería”, evento que anualmente reúne a 300 colleras de distintas partes del país y que en 2014 fue catalogado como “Evento de Interés Turístico” por el Sernatur.
El 28 de febrero de 2012, la Municipalidad de Copiapó envió un oficio al Servicio de Evaluación Ambiental manifestando su conformidad con el proyecto “Prospecciones geológicas Mantos de Oro”, de la minera Kinross. La aprobación quedó condicionada, eso sí, a que la minera diera “cumplimiento a los compromisos establecidos” y a que generara “una instancia de participación e información a la ciudadanía respecto de los avances del proyecto y las medidas de mitigación”.
La información recabada por CIPER, indica que Kinross le donó $10 millones al municipio solo dos meses antes de ese pronunciamiento, los que fueron destinados al financiamiento de “actividades recreativas y culturales de Navidad y Año Nuevo”. La misma minera registra aportes al municipio en agosto de 2011 y agosto de 2012.
En marzo de 2016, la Superintendencia de Medio Ambiente formuló siete cargos contra la minera Mantos de Oro de Kinross, dos de ellos catalogados como graves y relacionados a contaminación de pozos de extracción de agua.
Los municipios de Chañaral y Mejillones también se han beneficiado con donaciones mineras. El último registra más de $320 millones provenientes de las mineras Michilla y Esperanza (operadas al momento de los aportes por Antofagasta Minerals), y Minera Escondida (BHP Billiton).
Chañaral, en tanto, ha recibido más de $1.363 millones en donaciones y ha firmado una serie de convenios con mineras en los que no se detallan montos. En junio de 2017, por ejemplo, la Municipalidad de Chañaral firmó un convenio con la minera Manto Verde (Mantos Copper) en el que la cuprífera se comprometió a “aportar fondos que permitan financiar proyectos en beneficio de zonas cercanas a la operación”. Cuatro meses antes, la compañía había ingresado al SEA el Estudio de Impacto Ambiental (EIA) “Proyecto Desarrollo Mantoverde”, con una inversión de más de US$830 millones.
En marzo pasado, el municipio se pronunció conforme con ese proyecto –que incluye la construcción de un tranque de relaves–, aunque pidió algunas aclaraciones. A fines de ese mismo mes, ratificó su aceptación, solicitando que la minera “realizara una invitación formal al evaluador del proyecto a una instancia de participación ciudadana a realizarse en el balneario de Flamenco”.
En reiteradas oportunidades los vecinos de Flamenco –localidad ubicada a unos 30 kilómetros de donde se planea construir el tranque de relaves–, se han manifestado en contra de la iniciativa de la minera. El proyecto aún está en trámite de evaluación ambiental en el SEA.
De todos los municipios de los que CIPER recibió respuesta a su solicitud de información, Tierra Amarilla (Región de Atacama) es el que concentra a nivel nacional el pozo mayor en donaciones mineras: $15.767 millones. Casi la totalidad de esos fondos tiene el mismo origen: Minera Candelaria (también han hecho aportes Minera Carola, Lumina Copper y Punta del Cobre).
En septiembre de 2013, Candelaria ingresó al Servicio de Evaluación Ambiental un proyecto de US$460 millones para extender la vida útil de sus operaciones hasta 2030 (inicialmente su cierre era 2018). Desde el primer momento, la administración del alcalde Osvaldo Delgado (PRO) se manifestó en contra del proyecto. Tenía razones de sobra: suelos contaminados con cromo, cobre y mercurio; la abrupta disminución del caudal del río Copiapó y la gigantesca montaña de estériles de la mina, ubicada a unos 30 metros del cementerio municipal, ya eran parte habitual del paisaje comunal (ver reportaje de CIPER).
Cinco veces el municipio rechazó ante el SEA ese proyecto. “El proyecto minero Candelaria ha afectado negativamente la calidad de vida de los habitantes”, se dice en uno de los oficios de respuesta del municipio al requerimiento de la autoridad ambiental.
El 23 de julio de 2015, el proyecto de Candelaria obtuvo su Resolución de Calificación Ambiental. Un mes y medio más tarde, el alcalde Delgado firmó con la minera un convenio formalizando una donación de $11.386 millones. El 19 de noviembre, recibiría otros $2.070 millones como aporte de “libre disposición”.
Justo un año después, la Superintendencia de Medio Ambiente sancionó a Candelaria con una multa de $2.800 millones por graves infracciones ambientales: no rebajar el consumo de agua fresca tal como estaba comprometido en la RCA, situación que se mantuvo por 15 años; descenso en el nivel de agua de algunos pozos; utilizar para la faena una superficie de territorio mayor a la autorizada y disponer residuos líquidos en zona de playa (ver documento).
ANTOFAGASTA: EL FESTÍN DE SIERRA GORDA
De los $2.669 millones que ha recibido en donaciones mineras la Municipalidad de Sierra Gorda (Región de Antofagasta), $432 millones se han ocupado para celebrar fiestas diversas: comidas para el día de la madre, regalos para el de la mujer, colaciones para el del niño; fiestas para el aniversario de la comuna, pinos para Navidad, campeonatos de cueca, alojamientos y traslados para adultos mayores, obras de teatro y la semana de la minería, entre otras.
El caudal de fondos que ha recibido ese municipio ha sido alimentado por Antofagasta Minerals (AMSA) y filiales; Sierra Gorda SCM (de la estatal polaca KGHM y los japoneses de Sumitomo); Minera Spence (BHP Billiton); y Lomas Bayas (de la suiza Glencore).
No todo ha sido fiesta en Sierra Gorda. Los dineros de las mineras también han ido a mejorar el sistema de luminaria pública de la comuna, arreglar plazas y comprar vacunas antigripales.
Ese municipio ha debido pronunciarse en varias ocasiones ante el Servicio de Evaluación Ambiental por proyectos en los que están involucrados los intereses de sus benefactoras. Debido a que la información entregada a CIPER por Sierra Gorda solo consigna el año de la donación –que coincide con los años de los pronunciamientos del municipio ante el SEA–, no se pudo establecer con qué distancia de los aportes fueron emitidos.
San Pedro de Atacama es otra de las comunas de la Región de Antofagasta que registra montos importantes en donaciones de mineras. Entre 2010 y 2016, Minera Escondida (BHP Billiton); Minera Gaby (Codelco); Soquimich y Rockwood Lithium (Albemarle) le han allegado recursos por más de $733 millones.
El Servicio de Evaluación Ambiental registra pronunciamientos del municipio de San Pedro en cinco proyectos ingresados por Soquimich para su evaluación.
En marzo de 2010 la minera controlada por Julio Ponce Lerou traspasó $5 millones a San Pedro de Atacama bajo el concepto “Fondos concursables 2009”. En esos momentos la autoridad ambiental evaluaba la implementación de una nueva planta de cloruro de potasio de SQM. Luego de una resolución con observaciones, el 3 de septiembre de 2010 ese municipio manifestó su conformidad ante el SEA.
En noviembre de ese mismo año, la Municipalidad de San Pedro de Atacama volvió a pronunciarse ante el SEA por un proyecto de SQM Salar: “Aumento de capacidad de procesamiento de carnalita de Potasio”. Y solicitó que la minera aclarara tres puntos de su Declaración de Impacto Ambiental, entre ellos, si afectaba el valor de la zona como centro astronómico producto de una posible “interrupción lumínica”.
A pesar de ello, poco después, el 14 de diciembre el municipio declaró ante el SEA su aprobación. Nueve días más tarde, la minera le transfirió a la municipalidad $11,3 millones, que fueron consignados como “Fondos concursables SQM”.
En la Región de Antofagasta, la Municipalidad de Calama es la que concentra el monto mayor en donaciones de mineras entre 2010 y 2016: $8.104 millones. Casi la totalidad de esos dineros proviene de las operaciones que la estatal Codelco tiene en la zona: Ministro Hales, Gaby y Radomiro Tomic.
Los fondos han sido utilizados por la administración comunal para diversos fines: atención odontológica, recuperación de plazas, pavimentación de calles y espectáculos pirotécnicos, entre otros.
El cruce de las fechas de las donaciones con las ocasiones en las que el municipio se ha pronunciado ante el SEA evaluando proyectos de esas tres divisiones de Codelco, también da cuenta de la existencia de conflicto de interés.
El 15 de diciembre de 2011 el municipio recibió más de $300 millones de la División Radomiro Tomic para la construcción de una micro central hidroeléctrica. En esos momentos, la minera tramitaba ante el Servicio de Evaluación Ambiental un proyecto para ampliar el proceso de lixiviación de ripios. El municipio se pronunció en dos ocasiones ante el SEA, manifestando su aprobación definitiva en enero de 2012, casi un mes después de la donación.
Tres días antes de ese pronunciamiento, el 6 de enero, la División Radomiro Tomic había depositado otros $239 millones en la cuenta municipal para ejecutar una “cartera de proyectos” (diseño de parque, memorial e inspección de pavimentación).
En 2011, la División Ministro Hales ingresó al SEA un proyecto para optimizar el procesamiento de concentrado de cobre. El municipio se pronunció en dos oportunidades frente a esta iniciativa ante la autoridad ambiental: el 23 de diciembre de 2011 (con observaciones) y el 7 de agosto de 2012 (conforme). El 10 de abril de 2012, en medio de ambos pronunciamientos, la Municipalidad de Calama recibió de la División Ministro Hales $100 millones bajo el concepto “Fondos de inversión social”.
EL CENTRO-SUR MINERO
Cerca de Machalí (Región de O’Higgins), está el yacimiento de cobre subterráneo más grande del mundo: El Teniente (Codelco). Entre 2012 y 2014 el municipio de esa comuna ha recibido $314,5 millones de la empresa estatal. En ese lapso, la administración municipal se ha pronunciado tres veces ante el Servicio de Evaluación Ambiental sobre proyectos de la cuprífera.
El 8 de agosto de 2012 el alcalde de la comuna, José Miguel Urrutia (UDI), firmó un convenio para la “implementación de especialidad técnico profesional de explotación minera” con Codelco, el que no informa los recursos involucrados. Doce días después el municipio hizo observaciones al proyecto “Explotación Pacífico Superior” de la misma minera. El 26 de octubre volvió a pronunciarse a favor. Seis meses después el municipio recibió otras dos donaciones: $243 millones para la “adquisición e instalación de módulos liceo Machalí” y $1,5 millón para la celebración de actividades comunales.
Entre los traspasos de dinero de El Teniente a la administración del alcalde José Miguel Urrutia, figura uno por $70 millones realizado el 1 de diciembre de 2014. En rigor, no se trató de una donación, sino de un aporte con elástico. Lo que buscaba Codelco era que con esos dineros el municipio contratara una consultora para acelerar los trámites de cambio de uso de suelo (de rural a industrial) en la zona de Alto Coya, donde precisamente El Teniente tiene sus operaciones.
“División El Teniente ha buscado regularizar esta situación, de manera que se reconozca el carácter industrial del área en la que funciona”, informaron a CIPER desde la minera estatal. Agregaron que la transferencia se materializó luego de que el municipio les hiciera ver que esa gestión no estaba entre sus prioridades y que no contaba con recursos para llevarla a cabo (ver respuesta de Codelco).
Lo Barnechea (Región Metropolitana) es otro de los municipios que registra ingentes donaciones de mineras en el centro del país. Entre 2010 y 2016 ha recibido más de $2.960 millones de Anglo American, dueña de la faena minera Los Bronces, la que ha sido reiteradamente cuestionada por la destrucción de glaciares en Los Andes centrales. La empresa ha sido sancionada dos veces (ambas en mayo de 2015) por la SMA por diversas infracciones ambientales.
En distintas oportunidades el alcalde Felipe Guevara (RN) ha manifestado reparos a los proyectos presentados ante el SEA por la minera, aunque no se ha inhibido a la hora de recibir aportes de esa compañía en momentos cruciales. Un ejemplo: en pleno proceso de evaluación del proyecto “Fase 7 Los Bronces”, que involucra una inversión de US$112 millones para sostener sus niveles de producción, el municipio recibió aportes por casi $260 millones de Anglo American.
La nómina de municipalidades con aportes de mineras se extiende hasta el extremo sur del país. El 29 de mayo de 2010, el equipo de paramédicos de la posta de Río Verde (Región de Magallanes), recibió de regalo una camioneta 4×4 habilitada como ambulancia.
El vehículo costó $13 millones, los que fueron transferidos a la Municipalidad de Río Verde por la Sociedad Minera Isla Riesco –de los grupos Angelini y Von Appen– titular del proyecto de explotación carbonífera Mina Invierno.
Cuando se materializó la donación, en mayo de 2010, el proyecto carbonífero de casi US$180 millones en inversión, buscaba su aprobación ante el Servicio de Evaluación Ambiental.
En febrero de 2011, la alcaldesa de Río Verde, Tatiana Vásquez Barrientos (UDI, en el cargo desde 1992), manifestó su conformidad con el proyecto ante la autoridad ambiental. Al mes siguiente, el SEA le otorgó a Mina Invierno la autorización para operar.
No fue el único pronunciamiento de la alcaldesa Vásquez. En marzo de 2015, Mina Invierno volvió a iniciar trámites ante el SEA para la aprobación de un proyecto para incorporar tronaduras como método de extracción de material estéril de la mina.
El proyecto, cuestionado por varios vecinos y agrupaciones sociales, fue aprobado por la Comisión de Evaluación del SEA, luego de que en abril de 2015 el municipio diera su visto bueno. Pero en marzo de 2017 la Corte Suprema obligó a abrir un proceso de participación ciudadana, el que había sido obviado en etapas de evaluación anteriores.
Entre la presentación ante el SEA del Estudio de Impacto Ambiental que autorizó la operación de Mina Invierno (2010) y el ingreso a evaluación del polémico proyecto de tronaduras (2015), la Municipalidad de Río Verde recibió otras tres donaciones por un total de $30,6 millones, monto que fue destinado a equipar la posta rural.
(Imagen de portada: chilesustentable.net) | {
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In January, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte issued an executive order calling for the full implementation of the so-called Reproductive Health Law that would give an estimated 6 million women in need access to birth control. According to government data, an estimated 2 million of those women are poor and require government assistance to access contraceptives.
But unless the Supreme Court lifts its temporary restraining order (TRO) on the registration of contraceptives, the Philippines may run out by 2020.
"Of course, we welcome the president's support, but it is not enough," Romeo Dongeto, head of advocacy group Philippine Legislators' Committee on Population and Development (PLCPD), told DW.
In 2015, the Philippine Supreme Court issued the TRO preventing the Department of Health (DOH) from procuring, selling and distributing the contraceptive implant, Implanon. The order was issued in response to a petition filed by anti-abortion groups that claimed it caused abortions.
When the DOH appealed for the lifting of the order, the Supreme Court rejected the motion and in August 2016 effectively expanded its effect when it put the renewal of licenses on hold for other contraceptives.
"To date, the most serious challenge to the implementation of the Reproductive Health Law is the Supreme Court's temporary restraining order, which would result in contraceptive stock-out in the country if it remains unsolved, affecting more than 13 million Filipino women," said Dongeto.
A presidential executive order cannot overturn the Supreme Court order as the executive and judicial are equal branches of government.
Public health emergency
The Philippines has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Asia
The imposition of the TRO for more than 18 months has had a drastic effect on reproductive health and government health officials warned that if it remains in force, the increasing number of unplanned pregnancies and maternal deaths could reach the scale of a public health emergency.
"Since 2015, when the TRO was first imposed, we estimate that half a million unintended pregnancies have occured," Juan Antonio Perez, executive director of the Commission on Population (POPCOM), said at a press conference.
Based on the Philippines' current maternal mortality ratios, POPCOM projects that these pregnancies will result in 1,000 maternal deaths every year.
"That is the equivalent of three jumbo jets of pregnant women dying every year," said Perez."It would be equivalent to a public health emergency if the Supreme Court does not lift its TRO."
According to a United Nations report, the Philippines topped the regional list of Asian countries with high numbers of teen pregnancies. Globally, teen pregnancy rates have declined over the past two decades, except in the Philippines.
Gradual decrease in supply
Listen to audio 08:11 Share Contraceptives Philippines Send Facebook google+ Whatsapp Tumblr linkedin stumble Digg reddit Newsvine Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/1Dh7r Free contraceptives for the poor in the Philippines
Another concern is the gradual elimination of contraceptives from the market. Under the TRO, product registrations expire that would allow for the sale and distribution of contraceptives. The total effect is the gradual phasing out of contraceptives from government clinics and pharmacy shelves.
According to data provided by POPCOM, about 31 percent or about 15 brands of contraceptive certifications, expired as of December 2016. Currently there are 48 contraceptive brands in the Philippines. To date, there are a total of 20 contraceptive brands whose product registrations have already expired.
"What we are seeing now in the market, are just existing stocks that will eventually run out. By 2018, there will hardly be any more brands left and by 2020, there will be no more contraceptive brands available unless the Supreme Court lifts its TRO," added Perez.
The TRO affects oral contraceptive pills, injectables and intra-uterine devices. While condoms are not affected by the TRO, the Department of Health said offering only condoms would not address the need to have choices.
After more than a decade of fierce lobbying, the Reproductive Health Law was passed in December 2012. But in the years since then, the controversial law, which promises access to family planning commodities and information, has continued to divide the deeply Catholic country of more than 100 million.
Immediately after it was passed, pro-life groups contested its constitutionality causing the Supreme Court to temporarily halt its implementation. In 2014, the High Court upheld the constitutionality of the law. In 2016, the health department's $21 million contraceptive budget was cut.
But this confrontation with the Supreme Court will be its toughest battle yet. Considering that the Supreme Court is the court of last resort, if it decides to uphold the TRO, access to contraception could become a major public health issue in the Philippines.
"I don't want to even imagine that," DOH Undersecretary Gerardo Bayugo, told DW. "I want to believe that we will continue to be allowed to provide the family planning products requested by our people." | {
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ABC
ABC News’ Shushannah Walshe ( @shushwalshe) and Sarah Kunin ( @sarah_kunin) Report:
In an interview with ABC’s “The View,” presidential candidate Jon Huntsman rebuked former Gov. Sarah Palin for “stringing people along” as she decided whether to run for president.
“There’s too much drama and theater in politics,” Huntsman told the co-hosts in an appearance that was pre-empted for President Obama’s jobs plan speech. “I mean come on. You string people along. Everybody who has anything to do with politics knew she wasn’t going to get in the race. She has a profit proposition, she’s got a business. She makes money doing what she’s doing. Who on earth is going to leave that for the uncertainty of presidential politics?”
When asked if he believed her decision was made because she wanted to spend more time with her family, Huntsman answered, “Hey, my family is here. I get to spend time with my family.”
Huntsman articulated a very different sentiment at the 2008 Republican National Convention, chanting her name on stage. “Hockey moms of the world unite! History will be made tonight and her name is Sarah Palin,” Huntsman shouted. “We are looking for an American who represents every one of us, who can relate to the needs of our families and the struggles of our country. We are looking for Sarah!”
Huntsman was joined on the show with his wife, Mary Kaye. Three of his daughters were also in the audience.
Now that Palin and Gov. Chris Christie are officially out, Huntsman believes the field is still open for a new front-runner to spring forward. In an interview after the show, Huntsman told ABC News that Herman Cain’s surge in the polls shows “that there is a large segment of the voting population out there that is still very unsettled and very undecided about this race and that leads to real opportunities for all of us.”
Huntsman is spending the next two days fundraising in New York City, where he will try to bolster funds for the next quarter. On the upcoming release of his campaign finances, Huntsman told ABC News, “It is line with what we thought we would be at this point. A lot of people are still sitting on the fence. A lot of people are still waiting for the race to continue to play out.”
He said that since Gov. Christie’s decision not to enter the race , his campaign “has been in contact” with some of the donors who were waiting for the New Jersey governor to get into the race.
“I believe they will watch the field play out and evolve and probably make a decision in the weeks ahead would be my guess and we hope to be in the middle of that,” Huntsman said.
Huntsman also took the opportunity to reflect on the Wall Street protests in downtown Manhattan. “In this country, people have a right to protest, it’s an expression of who we are and it’s something that was put forward in our founding documents we can petition government and we can live freely,” Huntsman said. “That’s something, having lived 10,000 miles away in China where that isn’t allowed, it’s something I have great respect for.”
Huntsman said the protests are “driven by high joblessness” and “loss of opportunity,” blaming the Obama administration for the demonstrations.
“Right now, the administration obviously because for two and a half years they’ve failed to revive this economy and to create an environment that allows us to create jobs and so people are rightly upset. I don’t buy tactics where people break the law, but if they want to protest and they want to gather and they want to speak out, that’s completely their right,” Huntsman said.
While in Manhattan, Huntsman is keeping the focus on his new New Hampshire headquarters where, he said, he is seeing a “groundswell” of support, offering a preview of his upcoming foreign policy speech , which he will deliver at Southern New Hampshire University Monday. The former ambassador to China said the country needs to realign “our foreign policy interests and deployments abroad in a way that is consistent with 21st century reality.”
“We need to remember that fixing our core here at home, strengthening our economy should guide everything we do on the foreign policy realm: free trade agreements and international economic engagement.” he said. “Without a strong core, we don’t have a foreign policy.”
ABC News’ Josh Haskell contributed to this report. | {
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It's been more than two months since President Donald Trump announced that he would ban kid-friendly flavored e-cigarettes, and public health groups are losing patience.
But the administration has taken no action yet, fueling speculation that Trump is backing away from a ban because doing so may cost him votes next November.
"We are deeply troubled by reports that politics may be interfering with policy that would prevent children from the dangers of e-cigarettes," Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association, said in a statement.
"We remain hopeful the Trump administration will listen to the concerns expressed by the first lady and millions of parents and move forward with plans to remove all flavored e-cigarettes, including mint and menthol, from the market," the statement went on.
Other anti-tobacco advocates agreed, warning that inaction would have long-standing consequences.
"If the Trump administration backs off for political reasons, it will create a public health crisis that we will live with for decades," Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said.
"The rise in the use of e-cigarettes among kids is a crisis of proportions that we haven’t seen in decades," he told NBC News, adding it's the fruity and minty flavors that attract kids to vaping in the first place.
"Eliminating those flavors will eliminate the on-ramp" for kids, Myers said.
A study published earlier this month found mint is the No. 1 choice for teens who vape nicotine. Mango was also popular.
"If removing flavors is a dead issue until all the votes are counted next November, it will be a real tragedy for our nation's youth and public health. The worsening youth e-cigarette epidemic will not miraculously get better on its own," said Robin Koval, president of the Truth Initiative, a nonprofit anti-tobacco organization.
The White House has not said publicly that it's reversing course on the proposed ban.
"President Trump and this administration are committed to responsibly protecting the health of children. At this time, we are in an ongoing rule-making process, and I will not speculate on the final outcome," Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said Monday.
The number of kids vaping nicotine has doubled in the past two years, according to research published in September. More than 25 percent of high school seniors and more than 20 percent of high school sophomores said they'd vaped within the past month. One in 11 kids in the eighth grade admitted to vaping as well.
Meanwhile, cases of severe lung illnesses linked to vaping continue to grow. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 2,172 cases last Thursday. And Monday, health officials in Louisiana reported the first such death in that state, bringing the national total to 44.
Juul under fire
In a related development, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey announced Monday they are filing a lawsuit against Juul Labs Inc. for allegedly targeting teenagers with advertisements for its e-cigarettes and downplaying the dangers of vaping.
"We’ve worked too hard, committed our hard-earned money for too long combating harmful tobacco use to stand idly by as we now lose Californians to vaping and nicotine addiction," Becerra said in a statement. "Juul adopted the tobacco industry’s infamous playbook, employing advertisements that had no regard for public health and searching out vulnerable targets."
Lacey said Juul and other nicotine product makers "must be held accountable."
"This lawsuit takes that fight to a new front, against a new threat," Lacey said.
One in 10 high schools students in and around Los Angeles reported using e-cigarettes. "That is not by chance," Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn said.
In response to an email, Juul spokesman Austin Finan said the company has not yet reviewed the complaint but insisted they are working with lawmakers and others "to combat underage use and convert adult smokers from combustible cigarettes."
Juul has pulled many of its most popular flavored pods from store shelves, including mint, fruit, mango and creme. The company still sells menthol and tobacco-flavored pods.
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Does Fernanda Know? ’90 Day Fiancé’ Star Jonathan Hit With $26K Tax Lien Rivera has been living a luxurious lifestyle with Flores while in debt!
Fernanda Flores moved from Mexico to North Carolina to marry her fiancé Jonathan Rivera – but did she know about his over $26,000 debt when she left her life behind for America? RadarOnline.com can exclusively reveal the real estate agent was recently hit with a tax lien.
The clerk of court for Robeson County in North Carolina exclusively confirmed to Radar that Rivera was slapped with a federal tax lien in the amount of $26,196.30 on September 6, 2018.
The clerk confirmed the lien remains active.
Rivera, 32, and Flores, 19 have been living a luxurious lifestyle ever since she moved to the United States.
The two have traveled to New York, Chicago, California, Texas, and Guerrero, Mexico in recent months.
The couple came under fire earlier this week. Flores accidentally posted an explicit video of Rivera.
“I’m so sorry from the bottom of my heart that you had to see that,” she wrote on Instagram. “It was a huge mistake.”
Rivera added, “As for the video, that without question was a mistake. We are so sorry you had to see that.”
Rivera proposed to his fiancée after only three months of dating after meeting at a club in Mexico.
The couple fought during her first night in America, as she found another woman’s underwear in his bedroom. They fought on a later episode when she caught him grinding with another woman at a club.
Do you think she knows about the lien? Sound off in the comments.
We pay for juicy info! Do you have a story for RadarOnline.com? Email us at [email protected], or call us at (866) ON-RADAR (667-2327) any time, day or night.
For the biggest celebrity news stories of the day, controversies, crime, and other hot topics listen to our new podcast ‘All Rise’ below!
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Obama is always right and Romney is a douche canoe Give me karma
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With only a handful of episodes left for the season, things are definitely heating up and the level of danger is escalating on Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger, airing on Thursday nights on Freeform. With the premonition that one of them will die looming, Tandy (Olivia Holt) and Tyrone (Aubrey Joseph) will test their combined powers to learn more about what they can accomplish together, as they try to navigate their own issues while dealing with the bigger threats that are out there.
During this 1-on-1 phone interview with Collider, showrunner Joe Pokaski talked about how proud he is of what the Cloak & Dagger writers’ room has done this season, how much the actors – Olivia Holt and Aubrey Joseph – have brought to their characters, whether Cloak and Dagger will embrace their partnership, by the end of the season, how Episode 8 might break a lot of hearts, the desire to get to 100 episodes, the biggest challenges in being the showrunner of this series, and what he likes most about who Tandy and Tyrone are, at this point in their story. Be aware that there are some spoilers discussed.
Collider: Looking back on the first season, overall, what are you most proud of actually being able to pull off and get accomplished with it?
JOE POKASKI: Honestly, I’m most proud of my writers’ room. There’s been a lot of talk about putting together a diverse writer’s room, and I’m very happy that I dug in and found these brilliant writers that represent things that I don’t understand. We’re able to have a writers’ room with a majority of black writers who can really talk about issues, and a lot of women who can really keep me honest as to how to push the envelope and tell the story of a young woman who’s a superhero. [With Episode 6], we were able to tell the story of two young men, driving through New Orleans and talking about their reality and how justice is for other people, which literally brings tears to my eyes, every time I see it, and of two women talking about science and about how they need to save the world. I certainly can’t do that, on my own. Jenny Klein and J. Holtham both wrote that episode and they’re able to understand what we’re trying to do while putting their personal experiences into it. That’s probably what makes me most proud.
On top of all of that, Tandy and Tyrone feel like real and authentic teenagers, which isn’t easy to do.
POKASKI: A lot of the credit not only goes to our writers’ room, where many of them are much younger and more handsome than I am, but to our actors. Aubrey [Joseph] and Olivia [Holt] take every script they read and they come at me with anything that doesn’t feel like something that they’d say. They’re such great partners, in the sense that you can write something that even sounds natural, and they’ll make sure they add their angle to it. If you look at Aubrey crying, in the last scene [of Episode 6], you’re just like, “I don’t know what you’re drawing from, but I just wanna hug you, and I can’t hug you ‘cause the whole idea is that nobody can hug you right now.” They commit to the point that I wanna call them psychological help when I’m in the middle of every scene. And then, we yell, “Cut!,” and they’re back on their phones, acting like normal human beings. They’re not damaged. They’re just geniuses.
The first season of a series, you have to establish the world, introduce the characters and set up all of the relationship dynamics. When do you feel like all of that really started to come together?
POKASKI: My intention has always been to make sure we take our time with that. There’s been a little criticism of the slow boil, that seems to be going away now, which is nice. It’s always been my intent to make 100 episodes of this show. I think Episode 4 was the end of the “we need to understand Tandy and Tyrone before we understand Tandy and Tyrone.” Episode 4 was the important turning point for, “All right, we’re not gonna jerk around the audience. They’re gonna talk about everything possible, right now,” which a lot of TV shows either avoid or make happen in Episode 1. That was another episode that was really drawn out by the experiences of my writers’ room and was directed brilliantly by Ami Mann. I feel like that was the end of our first act of really making sure that we understood them, individually. In loose terms, Episodes 5, 6 and 7 are about them coming together comprehensively, not only as a team, but as best friends. Then, Episodes 8, 9 and 10, just forget about it.
Tandy and Tyrone didn’t ask for their powers, and they didn’t specifically choose or ask to have each other to share that with, but as we’ll see coming up, they’re learning that they might actually be stronger together. By the end of this season, how would you say they’ll feel about each other?
POKASKI: I can’t give that away! By the end of the season, they’ll embrace what Cloak and Dagger embraced, in their first comic. It’s about, “The universe has thrown us together and we need to understand the reason.”
It’s definitely ominous when you have a prediction that one of them will die.
POKASKI: Yeah, and it’s intended to be. They saved each other when they were eight years old. Now, if you pose the question to both of them and you ask, “Will you sacrifice yourself to someone who was a stranger, nine episodes ago?,” I think you’d be amazed at what the answer is.
Would you say that prediction will be in the forefront, for the rest of the season, or at least until we see how that plays out?
POKASKI: Yeah. What we’ve been trying to do – and hopefully once you watch the finale, you’ll understand it better – is to lay out what these two are heading up against, on a global level, as well as those dolls on the mantle. They are not there by accident. Evita (Noëlle Renée Bercy) told the story of this duel in Episode 3, so by the time we get to the end, anyone who’s been paying attention and not been doing laundry during the show – which I am guilty of with some – will actually feel like they’ve had all of the information that’s leading up to what we’re building toward.
It seems like this show is just going to get more and more emotionally intense. How would you say that fans of the show will be left feeling, by the end of the season finale?
POKASKI: Hopefully, if I do my job right, they’ll be wanting to watch Season 2. I think Episode 8 might break a lot of hearts. I don’t want to get into too much of the detail, but it’s part of the hero’s journey. As you start learning and understanding what destiny has in mind for you, that destiny knocks you on your ass. I think the audience should probably prepare to be knocked on their butts a little, in Episode 8.
By the end of the season, would you say that we’ll have a good sense of where you would take Season 2?
POKASKI: Yes and no. I think there will be places where we’re leaving some stuff open, intentionally, but there’s also something tremendously definitive, in our post-credits sequence, that will help define some of the drive.
You talked about wanting to do 100 episodes of this show, but when you set this series in motion, did you have a five-season plan, or were you just thinking ahead, in more loose terms than that?
POKASKI: I happen to be someone who can’t turn off my brain, at times. I wrote an 80-page bible for Season 1, and every season has a similar type of structure. So, there is a definitive plan for five seasons, and then leaving ourselves open for more opportunities and for Disney to buy more corporations that free up more characters.
Do you feel like you stick pretty close to that bible, or would people be surprised by what that looked like if they looked at it?
POKASKI: I think it’s half and half. My philosophy is to have a really good plan, so you know where you’re going. Then, if you really know where you’re going, it allows you to deviate to the better story.
What would you say the biggest challenges are, in being the showrunner of a Marvel superhero series, but specifically this series?
POKASKI: God, I don’t know. To be honest, I expected a lot of bureaucracy, on the Marvel side, and there is some, every once in awhile, but they’ve been tremendously freeing. They make such good television, with shows that are different. The biggest challenge comes from the weather in New Orleans, where there seems to be four hurricanes, no matter when I want to shoot. Honestly, just the timing of making sure that we can find the best directors and find the best writers and really lock everything down is a challenge. And there’s the challenge of, how can we tell something different? How can we put a mirror up to society, in a way that someone can watch it and, hopefully, make some better choices, to make the world a better place?” I think that’s a challenge that artist would have. But Marvel has been my hero and has been behind what we want to do on this show, from day one.
Because you don’t have a movie budget, but people have certain expectations of TV shows looking a certain way now, was there anything that you couldn’t do in Season 1, due to time or budget restraints, that you’re hoping you could still do, at some point?
POKASKI: Yes, but I don’t want to get into specifics. I think there are probably more success stories. We have such an amazing crew. Part of the reason that I picked our particular look and feel is that I didn’t want to wait for a dolly track to be laid, so I put the camera on shoulders. We were able to do a lot. There’s some stuff, in the finale, where we could have been bigger, if we had 30 million more dollars, but we make sure it’s all about our characters. I always wish I had more money, but at the end of the day, I always have to be reminded that the scenes people talk about are of the two kids talking. I go through all of my favorite movies and TV shows, and I don’t really think about the spectacle, as much as the really tight emotional moments. Breaking Bad is one of my favorite television shows, and they blew stuff up, but it was always the mind games and the emotional metaphors that really got me.
Because Marvel is so secretive, how did you decide what you would tell the actors, as they were auditioning? How do you tell them anything about what they’re auditioning for, to see what they can deliver, without actually telling them what they’re auditioning for?
POKASKI: It’s so hard! For Aubrey and Olivia, part of it was having a great partner in our pilot director, Gina Prince-Bythewood. Because we were reinventing the story a little, it allowed us to talk about two people who weren’t necessarily the Tandy and Tyrone you’d seen. But for other characters, it’s tough. When we do auditions, we have to change the names, so I a little trick where, if you’re casting Brigid O’Reilly, you name the character Bailey Callahan and you hope the actor knows enough to Google and figure out who it is. Marvel still allows you to talk about the emotional core of the character, so if you can do that, then you can fill them in on the mythology later. You just need to find someone who can do the hard part of the job. It forces you to find that analogy and break it down. The Bridget scene, for auditions, we actually wrote a version where she walks into the dry cleaners that Tandy and Tyrone go into, in Episode 2. It allows you to break the character down into her basic emotional essence. Part of the reason Emma Lahana is on the screen right now is ‘cause she read that scene between the lines, and she really crushed it. Jaime [Zevallos], who plays Delgado, did a self-tape, so he didn’t even audition in front of us. He was this man who just looked strong and you saw his tattoos. He decided to not dress like a priest. When you get the right actors, it makes your job easier ‘cause they bring a little of themselves to it.
What do you most like about who Tandy and Tyrone are, at this point in their lives and story?
POKASKI: I like that it feels like a coming-of-age story. It was many years ago for me, but I still feel like we all carry around the baggage of youth. I think Facebook, and things like that, help it not go away. I remember being so scared. I remember, my first day of college, almost wanting to cry, as I forced myself to meet friends. What Aubrey and Olivia do is they bring this uncertainty. Olivia brings to Tandy this decided cynicism. She’s decided that the world has taken from her and she can’t trust it, so she’s gotten harder. And Aubrey brings this fear to Tyrone. He’s decided the world is unsafe and he’s gonna hide, so he’s become softer. Both of those actors bring very similar things to very different conditions, and I can’t applaud enough how they, without saying a word, get that across. If you look at Aubrey, in particular, who was not necessarily as much a screen actor – he came up in the theater as young Simba (in The Lion King) – watching him grow up, as a character and as an actor, over these 10 episodes, has been one of the biggest pleasures of my career. They just get it. It’s about this generation, too. They know everyone screwed them over and it’s on them to save the world, and at least Aubrey and Olivia are up for the challenge.
Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger airs on Thursday nights on Freeform. | {
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[playwirevid id=’4217923′]
A video surfaced online Monday afternoon of an incident inside of a classroom between a Spring Valley High School student and a school resource officer.
In the video, a female student is approached by a police officer while sitting at her desk in a classroom where several other students are present. An officer can be seen grabbing the student’s arm and placing his own arm around the student’s neck before yanking her from her seat. Once the student is on the ground, the officer drags the student across the floor and out of the view of the camera.
According to Sheriff Leon Lott, the school resource officer was acting in response to a student who was being disruptive in class and resisting arrest.
“The student was told she was under arrest for disturbing school and given instructions which she again refused,” Lott said. “The video then shows the student resisting and being arrested by the SRO.”
Students present in the classroom posted on twitter disputing the account.
The girl in the video was new to our class, and she was quiet like she never talked to anyone — Aaron Johnson (@Aaron___J) October 26, 2015
@Ace_doe I WAS HERE AND NOBODY EVEN KNEW WHAT SHE DID WHEN HE GRABBED HER THATS HOW FUCKE UP IT WAS — Aaron Johnson (@Aaron___J) October 26, 2015
@DianaChhun @Ace_doe i think we were all in shock and afraid they would say something to us, he put another girl in handcuffs for standingup — Aaron Johnson (@Aaron___J) October 26, 2015
Richland School District Two. Superintendent Dr. Libby Roof released the following statement:
“Our District is deeply concerned about an incident that occurred at Spring Valley High School today. The incident took place between a school resource officer employed by the Richland County Sheriff’s Department and a student. Video of the incident is circulating on social media. “Student safety is and always will be the District’s top priority. The District will not tolerate any actions that jeopardize the safety of our students. “Upon learning of the incident, school and district administrators began an investigation. We are working closely and in full cooperation with the Richland County Sheriff’s Department to conduct a thorough and complete investigation. “Pending the outcome of the investigation, the District has directed that the school resource officer not return to any school in the District.”
And this poor baby. She is not making a sound. I can not imagine what her thoughts were before, during or after this officer brutalized her. — Johnetta Elzie (@Nettaaaaaaaa) October 26, 2015
About 70 percent of students involved in in-school arrests or referred to law enforcement are Black or Hispanic, according to SuspensionStories.com. Many on twitter provided evidence of how often similar incidents occurred at Spring Valley High and nation wide.
All jokes aside … but Fields ain’t getting fired , he done this shit numerous times ! — Ziyonna Windsor (@ziyonna_windsor) October 26, 2015 | {
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Comparing Golang, Scala, Elixir, Ruby, and now Python3 for ETL: Part 2
A year ago, I wrote the same program in four languages to compare their productivity when performing ETL (extract-transform-load). Read about part 1 here and feel free to check out the source code.
The code has changed, the languages have evolved, and the hardware now includes a SSD drive. So, where are they now?
Update: There is now also a part 3
Results
Ruby w/ Celluloid (Global Interpreter Lock Bound, single core) 43.7s JRuby w/ Celluloid 15.8s Ruby w/ grosser/parallel (not GNU Parallel) 10.9s Python w/ Pool 12.7s Scala 8.8s Scala w/ Substring (Skipped regex for performance analysis) 8.3s Golang 32.8s Golang w/ Substring (Skipped regex for performance analysis) 7.8s Elixir 21.8s
Recap
The original goal was not to see how fast each language could go. Rather, it was was to measure the length of time needed to write a solution and subjectively measure the maintainability of said solution, all while learning each language’s gotchas on the way. But, in the end, everyone wants benchmarks.
It was assumed that runtimes would all be approximately the same, since this should have been an IO-bound problem. So why care about the speed of the language? Well, on my old MacBook Pro with a 5200 RPM HDD, this was not true and, surprisingly, it still isn’t on my SSD.
The Hardware
MacBook Pro 2.3GHz i7 (quad core) with 16GB RAM and SSD
The Problem
We have ~40M tweets spanning multiple files, with each tweet tagged with their New York City neighborhood. We want to discover which neighborhoods care the most about the New York Knicks by searching for the term knicks .
Questions and Concerns from Part 1
Why was I writing to an intermediary file? Why didn’t I do it all in memory? Well, now I do. This comparison was derived from a larger ETL process that spanned multiple computers and therefore used intermediary files to pass along the information. This cookie-cutter experiment has no need for this, so it has been removed. Why am I using regex and not a simple string search (GoLang’s regex sucks in 1.x.x)? The implementations should be consistent across all languages for a fair comparison. Even though the problem is simply searching for knicks , I wanted the implementations to have the flexibility to perform more powerful searches. That being said, Golang’s Regexp package performs dramatically worse than other languages so I included results using strings.Contains . In Scala, why did I use Akka instead of the lighter Parallel Collections? Because I love Akka.
Implementation Changes
Ruby
Ruby version is now 2.2.2.
No longer uses GNU Parallel, but instead uses grosser/parallel to span multiple cores.
Implementation no longer writes to intermediary file.
Scala
Upgraded to Scala 2.11.5 and Akka 2.3.10.
Reduction no longer writes to intermediary file.
Still uses Akka. If you think the Parallel Collections library would be a better fit, which it very well might be, please feel free to contribute a pull request.
Python
Version python3-3.4.3
A new Python implementation has been added for comparison’s sake.
The Pool object allows one to run the program on multiple processes and sidestep the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL). A pretty great alternative to my use of GNU parallel with Ruby in part 1.
Elixir
Updated to Elixir version 1.0.4
Reduction no longer writes to intermediary file.
Actor model is beautiful in Elixir.
No significant performance improvement when using String.contains instead of regex.
Profiled with exprof but didn’t see any low hanging fruit (I’m welcome to any feedback here).
Changing
Map . merge ( ... )
to this
HashDict . merge ( ... )
made a dramatic difference. It speaks to the youth of the Elixir.
From the website:
Note: Maps were recently introduced into the Erlang VM with EEP 43. Erlang 17 provides a partial implementation of the EEP, where only “small maps” are supported. This means maps have good performance characteristics only when storing at maximum a couple of dozens keys. To fill in this gap, Elixir also provides the HashDict module which uses a hashing algorithm to provide a dictionary that supports hundreds of thousands keys with good performance.
Golang
Updated Golang to 1.4.2.
Initial performance was a disappointing 30s+, so I dug in and used pprof to profile the code.
Go’s Regular Expression engine really is as slow as a previous commenter mentioned. Switching to strings.Contains took it to ~7s.
took it to ~7s. They’ve been hyped before, and I’m going to hype them again: GoLang’s Channels are fantastic.
A modification to the GoLang implementation liberally uses channels as a FIFO queue to great effect:
// Spawns N routines, after each completes runs all whendone functions func Spawn ( N int , fn func (), whendone ... func ()) { waiting := int32 ( N ) for k := 0 ; k < N ; k += 1 { go func () { fn () if atomic . AddInt32 ( & waiting , - 1 ) == 0 { for _ , fn := range whendone { fn () } } }() } }
#####Usage
Note the channel filenames acting as a thread-safe queue.
filenames := make ( chan string , * procs ) Spawn ( * procs , func () { for filename := range filenames { file , err := os . Open ( filename ) ... }, func () { fmt . Println ( "Done" ) })
Conclusion
It’s always a challenge (or a lot of fun) attempting to write the same thing in two languages, let alone five. Each language’s idioms sway an implementation in a particular direction. Long story short, there are still a lot of discrepancies between the implementations.
Elixir and Golang have matured dramatically in a year’s time.
It is damn difficult to parse Scala code when you’ve been away for a while. It’s just… dense .
. My previous conclusion still holds up, check it out (it’s at the bottom of the link).
This whole experiment has lived far longer than I thought.
Think you can do better? Want to see another language? Contribute.
Submit a pull request with your code changes and I’ll update the doc.
Thanks
Thanks to all those who contributed to the repo: | {
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The first week of the launch of the new title from Riot Games, first-person shooter Valorant, has been something of a mixed one for the developer. The almost unprecedented hype around the game saw the closed beta launch reach a peak of 1.7 million viewers on Twitch as people vied for a drop so they could too participate.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and are not necessarily shared by Dexerto.
Initial impressions of the game were met with praise from veteran gamers on social media. Then came the revelations that maybe the game’s anti-cheat, which was a big part of the marketing push to attract players of other games, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be with working private cheats being sold in the first few days of the closed beta’s release.
If Riot had egg on their face after that the coming days would bring worse PR their way. On April 12th a post on popular subreddit r/pcgaming would claim that the Vanguard anti-cheat system, which has kernel-level access on the computers that install it, would be launched on booting up your PC regardless of whether or not you were playing Valorant.
The post, made by Reddit user u/voidox, read:
“The kernel anticheat driver (vgk.sys) starts when you turn your computer on. To turn it off, you either need to change the name of the driver file so it wouldn't load on a restart, or you can uninstall the driver (it will be installed back again when you open the game).
so ya, the big issue here is it running even when players don't have the game open, from startup no less. EDIT - It runs at Ring 0 of the Windows Kernel which means it always has the same rights as administrator from the moment you boot.
For comparison, BattlEye and EasyAntiCheat both load when you're opening the game, and unload when you've closed it. If you'd like to see for yourself, open cmd and type "sc query vgk.”
The thread quickly filled up with people confirming this to be accurate and expressing their concerns. The finding spread across social media like wildfire and made its way to the official Valorant subreddit. Eventually, Paul “arkem” Chamberlain, the anti-cheat lead, commented on Reddit confirming the claims made by the now many users who had tested out the method detailed in the Reddit post.
“TL;DR Yes we run a driver at system startup, it doesn't scan anything (unless the game is running), it's designed to take up as few system resources as possible and it doesn't communicate to our servers. You can remove it at anytime.
Vanguard contains a driver component called vgk.sys (similar to other anti-cheat systems), it's the reason why a reboot is required after installing. Vanguard doesn't consider the computer trusted unless the Vanguard driver is loaded at system startup (this part is less common for anti-cheat systems).
This is good for stopping cheaters because a common way to bypass anti-cheat systems is to load cheats before the anti-cheat system starts and either modify system components to contain the cheat or to have the cheat tamper with the anti-cheat system as it loads. Running the driver at system startup time makes this significantly more difficult.
We've tried to be very careful with the security of the driver. We've had multiple external security research teams review it for flaws (we don't want to accidentally decrease the security of the computer like other anti-cheat drivers have done in the past). We're also following a least-privilege approach to the driver where the driver component does as little as possible preferring to let the non-driver component do the majority of work (also the non-driver component doesn't run unless the game is running)."
The Vanguard driver does not collect or send any information about your computer back to us. Any cheat detection scans will be run by the non-driver component only when the game is running.
The Vanguard driver can be uninstalled at any time (it'll be "Riot Vanguard" in Add/Remove programs) and the driver component does not collect any information from your computer or communicate over the network at all.
We think this is an important tool in our fight against cheaters but the important part is that we're here so that players can have a good experience with Valorant and if our security tools do more harm than good we will remove them (and try something else). For now we think a run-at-boot time driver is the right choice.”
While I was working on this they also put out another clarifying statement, one that assured their players that their anti-cheat absolutely has to run the way it does and no changes to it are likely. If you want a TL;DR for the whole post it basically states “trust us, we’d never do anything bad to our fellow gamers.”
Right out the gate let’s establish something. Anyone acting surprised about the level of access that Vanguard has is either uninformed or disingenuous. Two months prior to the release of the closed beta the development team posted a blog detailing exactly how the anti-cheat would operate. As the original Reddit poster acknowledges kernel access anti-cheat isn’t anything new and has been utilised by multiple companies in the past. Indeed, it is the only thing that can give an anti-cheat system a fighting chance because most high-level cheats have that same level of access.
What must be said is that someone who is adept in reassuring people should have given this a thorough proofread. While the sentence “this isn’t giving us any surveillance capability we didn’t already have” might seem benign if you take it to mean the capability is zero, given Riot’s history and the company that funds them, it’s a statement that is incredibly difficult to be relaxed about. It also seems to inadvertently contradict what Chamberlain said in his Reddit post because it implies there is some surveillance capability there. If the intent was to communicate that there is no capacity to spy on you once the software is installed then this was a ludicrously ominous way of expressing that. This conclusion seems an impossibility when the following sentence states “if we cared about grandma’s secret recipe for the perfect Christmas casserole, we’d find no issue in obtaining it strictly from user-mode and then selling it to The Food Network.”
We can all appreciate when a game's developer has a sense of humour, both about themselves and their projects. It can lead to great things. Think Devolver Digital. One area you probably don’t want to joke about though is having the potential to spy on your customers. The sinister overtone of “we’d find no issue” as a phraseology can’t be overlooked either. Do they mean technically, morally or both?
Still, most people let it slide because there is a growing sentiment among online gamers that they’re willing to take the risk of a big company violating trust with their data to ensure a cheat-free environment. It’s certainly not a sacrifice I would be willing to make and I think anyone willing to do so should probably assess their life priorities, but provided people are informed I believe it is a choice that should be up to the individual. It comes down to a matter of trust. So the only question that matters is how comfortable are you in allowing Riot Games that level of access to your computer?
Some things to consider then. Riot’s history when it comes to data breaches is less than stellar. In 2014 I detailed how they had kept a major hack, one that compromised millions of accounts, secret and then downplayed the details when it became public. The hacker behind that incident was able to continue to gain access after it was brought to the public attention after a warning for players to change passwords wasn’t heeded by a senior Riot employee. Even the President of the company, Marc Merrill, had his Twitter account compromised during this time. It was a hugely embarrassing and costly lapse in security.
Given that this took place between 2011 – 2013 you might be inclined to give them a pass and say it was early in the company’s history. It is worth remembering then that in July 2018 when Riot Games were legally obliged to comply with requests to share data with their customers under the newly adopted General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, they also had a security lapse. Some players were sent other people’s data, which included name, phone number, email and date of birth. While Riot were quick to respond and said it was only a “few” who were affected, the scope of the problem will never be known.
It also doesn’t help alleviate fears when you consider the fact that invasive anti-cheats have been abused in this space before. The Counter-Strike pick-up game system ESEA decided to secretly turn their kernel access anti-cheat into a bitcoin miner, violating their consumer’s trust and damaging user’s machines in the process. They would receive a $1 million fine for this malicious activity, two thirds of which would be scrubbed if they avoided any other violations for a ten year period. In court, the company would blame a “rogue employee” for doing it despite evidence of the owner of the company having made public comments about how they could turn their anti-cheat into a bitcoin miner without customer’s knowledge prior to the incident. Some of the staff that worked on the ESEA anti-cheat are now working on Vanguard.
Then there’s the elephant in the room… China. Riot Games is now wholly owned by Chinese mega-corporation Tencent. It is career suicide in the gaming industry to talk about how Chinese money and influence directs many of its biggest companies. Whether it’s Activision Blizzard punishing a player for expressing solidarity with the Hong Kong protestors, Mesut Ozil disappearing from PES and FIFA Online in China due to his comments about the persecution of Uyghur Muslims or game stores adhering to Chinese government censorship in order to sell their products in that country, China gets what it wants and games developers let it.
Tencent has become ubiquitous across all of gaming and tech. They own a piece of practically everything it seems. Where their money goes sympathies towards the authoritarian Chinese government seem to build. Indeed, Tencent enjoys a close relationship with Chinese government officials and has been exposed as having used their software for gathering information on their behalf. In March last year, a Dutch hacker revealed that 300 million private messages had been gathered through Tencent applications and stored on a database that could be accessed by police stations in cities and provinces across China.
Now, doubtlessly you’ll say “but that’s in China and there’s no way an American company would ever sign off on people’s data being used that way.” I’d hope you are right but it is hard not to believe that Chinese government influence isn’t present already. For example, last October, League of Legends players found that the game was censoring iterations of the word “Uyghur” and “freedom”. Riot staff took to social media to explain this away as a censoring error and that explained that sometimes the system just bans words by mistake. Interesting then that one of those words would happen to be the name of a minority group persecuted by the Chinese government who wants the atrocities committed against them to be hidden from the eyes of the world. What a crazy coincidence.
Put all this together and at best you should be healthily sceptical about deciding to give across such access to your computer. I’ve seen the arguments made that anything you sign up to can be subject to a hack. Of course, this is right but not everything you sign up to can be used as a surveillance tool without your knowledge and you should absolutely weigh up whether or not you want to opt into this simply to play an online game.
A final consideration… Maybe you are the type of person who is so frustrated with cheaters that you’d be willing to roll the dice on your personal data being used for something nefarious or a malicious entity gaining access to your computer files. So far the anti-cheat has fallen well short of the expectations it was generating before the closed beta launch. We had working private cheats being sold two days into the closed beta and the embarrassments keep coming.
Spanish CS:GO pro Oscar "mixwell" Cañellas was locked out of playing while streaming for charging his mobile phone via his USB port. He wasn’t the only player this happened to (Riot has since addressed the issue, and stated that Mixwell was in fact not banned, but instead hit by a bug that affected digital bootcamp participants who were accidentally still using the alpha build to play the closed beta).
Indeed, some cheats in the past have operated via injection from an external device. This false-positive suggests that at best, the anti-cheat is being overcautious and needs some fine-tuning. Meanwhile, T1 player Braxton "brax" Pierce had two cheaters in one of his games while streaming. Currently, it seems we are relying on manual bans to keep cheaters out of the closed beta, which makes a mockery of the whole idea of having this “revolutionary” anti-cheat in the first place.
So, to conclude, you guys can make your own choices. I personally think Riot Games should yield ground on the idea that Vanguard needs to be working on start-up as this would bring it in line with other kernel access anti-cheats we already have. The argument that it “helps” their fight against cheaters is lame when you consider the potential cost and the fact that so far the anti-cheat software looks like a false bill of goods. Failure to compromise or do more to reassure their players could be a not insignificant factor in the game’s potential success when it leaves this beta phase. | {
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Buckeye Beer Engine
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Reopening Update
The post you’ve been waiting for…..
BEER ENGINE IS OPENING MAY 18th!!
We will be offering carry-out service (including beer and cocktails!) and seating on our patio.
We’ve missed all of you and are excited to see your faces! We have the greatest customers, and because we care about your well-being and safety, you will see some changes when you visit. Thanks in advance for your PATIENCE AND FLEXIBILITY as we work through some new practices and procedures.
We don’t take your health or the health of our staff lightly. The hours we’ve spent figuring out how to make this work is worth it for you to know we are doing our best.
That said, here are just a few things you will see:
– Masks for all staff.
– Staff member’s temperature taken and a health assessment performed upon entering building.
– Compartmentalized duties and designated staff for “clean” duties (food handling) and “dirty duties” (touching a dirty plate) to avoid cross contamination.
– New layout to comply with 6′ distancing.
– Empty tables – condiments upon request.
– Menus sanitized after every touch.
– Hourly alarms which will signify a restaurant sanitation to all high-touch surfaces.
– Replacement of all filters in heating and cooling system.
– A new dedicated phone line to text customers when their carryout orders and/or tables are ready to prevent crowding.
– Curbside service available upon request.
– And coming soon…on-line ordering and touch-free payments.
OUR HOURS WILL BE:
Sunday – Thursday, 12:00 pm – 11:00 pm
Friday – Saturday, 10:00 am – 11:00 pm
Again, we appreciate your understanding if it takes an extra moment or two to serve you. We know it is cliche’ at this point to say “We are in this together” but truly; you have stood by us, been loyal and supportive and we could not be more grateful.
See you soon!!
Cheers!
ENGINE NEWS – Periodic Email updates
Sign up for old school email updates. We’ll send up to three per month. Perhaps more during special events such as 420 HopFest. LINK
‘ENGINE FUEL’ GIFT CARDS MAKE A GREAT GIFT!
You choose the amount; give the beer or burger lover in your life an ENGINE FUEL gift card. | {
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} |
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