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PSYCHOTRONIC NETFLIX VOL. 41
Welcome to another edition of PSYCHOTRONIC NETFLIX! This week we’ve got ten flicks featuring various members of the Carradine clan, the multi-generational family that serves as the Redgraves of crap. Will Ever Carradine live up to her family potential? Only time will tell!
(For the record, no I didn’t forget about DEATH RACE 2000. I mentioned it in this same column six weeks ago, and try to avoid duplication whenever necessary. So there!)
10. Return of the Ape Man (1944)
Family patriarch John Carradine stars with Bela Lugosi as a pair of scientists who discover a frozen caveman during an Arctic expedition, and then try to give him a new brain. Short and standard, but with a solid performance by Lugosi and footage from a 1926 Alaskan travelogue.
9. Adventures in Plymptoons (2011)
Non-Carradine animator Bill Plympton is profiled in this entertaining doc, with Martha Plimpton (the daughter of Keith Carradine) among the huge roster of folks interviewed, including Matthew Modine, PES, Ralph Bakshi, Terry Gilliam, Tom Kenny, Lloyd Kaufman, Jerry Beck, Weird Al Yankovic and more.
8. Kill Zone (1993)
The prolific Cirio Santiago helmed this Vietnam war flick (shot in the Philippines) starring David Carradine as an American colonel fighting for his life. It cheap and crap, but features Carradine chomping cigars, which is always entertaining.
7. The Black Sleep (1956)
Reginald (HOUSE OF WAX) Le Borg directed this mad scientist flick starring Basil Rathbone as a loopy doc who kidnaps folks and examines their brains to cure his wife’s brain tumor, with John Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr., Tor Johnson and Bela Lugosi among those at his mercy. (Don’t get too excited, as it’s all Rathbone’s show — thankfully, he plays it to the hilt.)
6. Number One with a Bullet (1987)
Robert Carradine is white! Billy Dee Williams is black! They’re cops! It’s a typical ’80s buddy cop film that’s a touch grimier than average, with Valerie Bertinelli, Peter Graves, Doris Roberts, Mykelti Williamson and Jon Gries, from Jack Smight, the director of DAMNATION ALLEY.
5. Face of Marble (1946)
William “One Shot” Beaudine is the man behind this mad doc pic, featuring John Carradine as a scientist trying to being the dead back to life. Noteworthy for being one of the elder Carradine’s few starring roles, and with Willie Best.
4. Grey Lady Down (1978)
A solid submarine thriller starring Charlton Heston, David Carradine, Stacy Keach and Ned Beatty, GREY LADY DOWN fits nicely into the realm of ’70s disaster flicks, but it’s also more serious than the likes of POSEIDON ADVENTURE and deserves a better reputation than it has.
3. Lone Wolf McQuade (1983)
David Carradine faces off against SIDEKICKS star Charles Norris is Steve Carver’s great action flick, as Carradine plays a drug kingpin up against a Texas Ranger. With Barbara Carrera, Leon Isaac Kennedy, Robert Beltran, L.Q. Jones, R.G. Armstrong, William Sanderson and Dana Kimmell.
2. Thieves Like Us (1974)
One of Robert Altman’s best films (and that’s no small feat) is his 1936-set story about the lives and loves of a trio of bank robbers, featuring Keith Carradine, John Schuck, Bert Remsen, Shelley Duvall and Louise Fletcher. Highly recommended.
1. Boxcar Bertha (1972)
…and you can even pair it with another ’30s crime pic with a Carradine, this time the early Martin Scorsese flick about a couple (David Carradine and Barbara Hershey) who turn to crime to go against the management of a railroad. With Barry Primus, Bernie Casey, John Carradine and Victor Argo.
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Summary:
Samsung has started to mass produce the industry’s first 8 gigabit (Gb) low power double data rate 4 (LPDDR4) mobile DRAM based on its leading-edge 20-nanometer (nm) process technology.
Samsung Electronics Starts Mass Production of Industry’s First 8-Gigabit LPDDR4 Mobile DRAM
Samsung pioneers the next generation of ultra-fast, high density mobile memory technology, opening the door to the era of 4GB mobile DRAM for a new level of mobile responsiveness
Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, announced that it has started mass producing the industry’s first 8 gigabit (Gb) low power double data rate 4 (LPDDR4) mobile DRAM based on the company’s leading-edge 20-nanometer (nm) process technology. LPDDR memories are the most widely used “working memory” for mobile devices worldwide.
“By initiating production of the 20nm 8Gb LPDDR4, which is even faster than the DRAM for PCs and servers and consumes much less energy, we are contributing to the timely launch of UHD, large-screen flagship mobile devices,” said Joo Sun Choi, Executive Vice President of Memory Sales and Marketing at Samsung Electronics. “As this major advancement in mobile memory demonstrates, we will continue to closely collaborate with global mobile device manufacturers to optimize DRAM solutions, making them suitable for next-generation mobile OS environments.”
The new 20nm 8Gb LPDDR4 offers twice the performance and density compared to 4Gb LPDDR3 which was based on 20nm-class* process technology. The new 8Gb LPDDR4 chip allows a 4 gigabyte (GB) LPDDR4 package to be created.
Samsung’s 4GB LPDDR4 package was chosen as an Honoree of the 2015 CES Innovation Awards in the Embedded Technologies category. In winning this award, Samsung became the only company that has won the CES Innovation Awards for three consecutive years with its mobile DRAM solutions, as the company’s 2GB LPDDR3 and 3GB LPDDR3 were honored in 2013 and 2014, respectively.
Due to an I/O data rate of up to 3,200 megabits per second (Mbps), which is two times faster than a typical DDR3 DRAM used in PCs, the new 8Gb LPDDR4 can support UHD video recording and playback and continuous shooting of high-resolution images with over 20 megapixels.
The LPDDR4 mobile memory chip’s operating voltage was reduced to 1.1V from that of LPDDR3 memory chips, which makes the new Samsung chip the lowest power memory solution available for large-screen smartphones and tablets, and high-performance network systems. For example, in case of a 2GB package, an 8Gb LPDDR4-based 2GB package can save up to 40 percent of power compared to a 4Gb LPDDR3-based 2GB package, due to low operating voltages and faster processing.
By adopting new proprietary low-voltage swing-terminated logic (LVSTL) for its I/O signaling, Samsung has also further reduced the new LPDDR4 chip’s power consumption while enabling high-frequency operations at low voltages for optimal power efficiency.
Samsung started providing 2GB LPDDR4 and 3GB LPDDR4 DRAM packages this month based on 8Gb and 6Gb LPDDR4 dies, respectively, in support of global application processor vendors and mobile device manufacturers, and will provide 4GB LPDDR4 packages in early 2015.
Samsung expects to rapidly increase the production volume of its 20nm DRAM line-ups, including the new 8Gb LPDDR4 mobile DRAM and the recently introduced 8Gb DDR4 DRAM for servers, in order to better meet customer needs, while accelerating the growth rate of the high density DRAM market. | {
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The EU said it would cut the financial assistance after Bosnian politicians last week failed to agree a deal to implement a 2009 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that the country must change its electoral legislation.
Andy McGuffie, head of communications with the EU delegation to Bosnia, told Balkan Insight that Bosnia would not now be getting around half of the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA) funds that it had previously expected.
“The procedure has been started to redirect about 47 million euro of financial assistance that was heading to Bosnia and Herzegovina in the IPA 2013 programme,” McGuffie said.
He explained that it would be difficult to justify approving financial assistance to a country which has made no progress on its EU membership path.
“Bosnia and Herzegovina is sanctioning itself by not taking the steps. It is delaying the possibility of a better life to its citizens,” he said.
Bosnian politicians met EU enlargement commissioner Stefan Fule in Brussels last week in an attempt to work out an agreement to comply with the European rights court ruling.
The ‘Sejdic and Finci’ ruling came after a Bosnian Roma and a Bosnian Jew successfully challenged legislation that only allows candidates from the three largest ethnic groups, Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats, to run for parliament.
Alida Vracic of the Sarajevo-based think tank Populari said that Bosnia’s politicians should sort out the situation at home before returning to Brussels.
“Until we see solutions within the country, I don’t see any reason to have high-level meetings. Here we have problems with electricity, gas, water; meanwhile they are having high-level dialogues,” Vracic said.
She added that she expects to see a period when not much will happen in terms of Bosnia’s progress towards the EU path because even the removal of financial assistance hadn’t forced politicians to come to an agreement.
“It would be best to wrap up things here and then speak of some EU integration process,” she said.
The failure to achieve progress is likely to be reflected in the upcoming EU progress report on Bosnia, although the EU has expressed hope that a breakthrough can still be achieved. | {
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Crazy Good Coconut Oil "Chocolate" Bark
Do you have any kitchen quirks? What about your partner or roommates?
Maybe you are wondering what I mean by a kitchen quirk. Basically it’s anything that drives your significant other batshit crazy.
I’ll offer some examples:
– Always sticking produce stickers on the counter despite your husband’s pleas not to (my long-time readers will get this, if you don’t, see Part 1 and Part 2) – Loading the dishwasher in a very specific way (spoiler alert) – Only wanting the cutlery drawer to be perfectly stacked with everything facing the same direction – Organizing the fridge or pantry in a certain way and insisting that it’s kept in this precise order – Debating with your partner/roommate about whether certain foods should be refrigerated or not – Turning cans so that the label always faces the same way, are arranged by alphabet/colour/etc
I like to think of myself as a recipe creating tornado and I frequently drive Eric nuts because he is so much more organized than I am. When you are with someone for almost 15 years you learn every one of their little (and big) quirks. Day by day….by day.
Want to know what Eric’s biggest kitchen quirk is?
Aside from me, it’s the dishwasher.
The guy has a thing for dishwasher organization. It’s his pride and joy. And it’s actually impressive, the dedication that he puts into carefully loading and stacking the dishwasher every day. He has refined his technique over the years too, always improving. Impressive. At first glance, you might think that he’s just a normal guy unloading or loading the dishwasher, but you’d be wrong, very wrong. He is not normal. Eric has been trying to enlighten me with his genius dishwasher short-cuts ever since we got together. I stubbornly refused for years until I recently discovered how amusing it is to see him so proud when I use his “tricks”. He beams with pride.
My sister was over yesterday and after dinner we got talking about how her husband/my brother-in-law insists that the dishwasher is loaded in a certain way. Hmm sounds familiar. So began a hilarious conversation with us and the guys talking about how a dishwasher should be loaded. She said, “Steve will actually UNLOAD the dishes that I have loaded and then reload the machine!” Well, that rings a bell. I hear Eric tinkering away with unloading and reloading my dishes every night. He also has a system of loading my measuring spoons (because I typically use about 20+ on any given day of recipe testing). We have a dishwasher with a narrow top tray for cutlery and he has created this whole system of how to load the measuring spoons and other utensils so that they don’t collect/pool any water…right down to which direction they face for optimum drying. Like I said, not normal…but impressive.
I should also mention that we had a 10+ year ongoing debate about whether ketchup should be refrigerated or not. I said that, yes, ketchup should be refrigerated and he always said it shouldn’t (just a personal preference on his part). One day I pointed out the label which reads “Keep refrigerated” and it’s been in the fridge ever since! Case closed. Mystery solved. He finally gave in (even if it’s perfectly fine at room temperature).
Of course, this story wouldn’t be complete without Eric weighing in on my biggest kitchen quirk.
Without even blinking an eye he said, “chaos.”
Nailed it. Martha would so not approve of my kitchen ways.
Ok, it’s your turn to spill the beans. What are your kitchen quirks? What about your partner or roommates’ quirks?
4.5 from 38 reviews fromreviews Crazy Good Coconut Oil "Chocolate" Bark Vegan, gluten-free, grain-free, no bake/raw, refined sugar-free, soy-free By Angela Liddon This homemade chocolate is made with just a few essential ingredients - virgin coconut oil, cocoa or cacao powder, and pure maple syrup. (Feel free to use whichever liquid sweetener you prefer). The virgin coconut oil replaces the cocoa butter found in traditional chocolate so while it needs to be kept in the freezer, it’s a great way to sneak some coconut oil into your day. You can also use any toppings you'd like - dried fruit, nuts, + seeds all work lovely. It melts much faster than regular chocolate, so be sure to keep it chilled until ready to enjoy. I prefer it straight from the freezer. Yield
20 pieces Prep time
15 Minutes Cook time
0 Minutes Chill time
15 minutes Total time
15 Minutes Ingredients: 1/4 cup raw hazelnuts
1/4 cup raw almonds
1/3 cup large flake dried coconut
1/2 cup virgin coconut oil
1/2 cup cocoa or cacao powder, sifted if necessary
1/4 cup pure maple syrup
1 tablespoon smooth almond butter, optional
pinch fine sea salt Directions: Preheat oven to 300F. Line a 9" square pan or a small baking sheet with two pieces of parchment paper, one going each way. Set aside. Add hazelnuts and almonds on a baking sheet and roast in the oven for 10 minutes. Remove baking sheet and add the coconut flakes and spread out. Continue roasting the nuts and coconut flakes for another 3-4 minutes, or until the coconut is lightly golden. Watch closely to avoid burning - coconut burns fast! Place hazelnuts on several sheets of damp paper towel. Wrap the hazelnuts and rub them vigorously with the paper towel until the skins fall off. It’s ok if some skins don’t come off. Discard the skins and roughly chop the hazelnuts and almonds. In a medium saucepan, melt the coconut oil over low heat. Remove from heat and whisk in the cocoa (or cacao) powder, maple syrup, and almond butter (if using) until smooth. Add a pinch of sea salt to taste. Stir in half of the almonds and hazelnuts. With a spatula, spoon the chocolate mixture onto the prepared parchment-lined pan or sheet and smooth out until it's about 1/4-1/2 inch thick. Sprinkle on the remaining nuts and all of the coconut flakes. Place into freezer on a flat surface for about 15 minutes, until frozen solid. Once frozen, break apart into bark. Store in the freezer until ready to eat. I don't recommend keeping it out on the counter long because it melts fast.
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Enjoy!
Let's get social! Follow Angela on Instagram @ohsheglows, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest
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Highlights
EpiGenie uses more Canadian talent than the NHL, so naturally we sent one of our staff writers, Ben Laufer, to hit up this nice little meeting. He got to enjoy the home court advantage at Canada’s second national conference on Epigenetics at Western University in London, Ontario. Check out Ben’s report below:
Meeting Summary
Tucked away in one of the University’s lecture halls, the 2nd Canadian Epigenetics Conference had a strong focus on biochemistry and clinical application. The term epigenetics was taken somewhat loosely and rather than a pure focus on inheritance and genetics, there was a bit of a slant towards biochemical machinery and protein names. However, through all the cutting edge data presented, plenty of interesting themes arose, including a noticeable impact of Bing Ren’s work, a new appreciation for the complex transcriptional control of nuclear pore complexes, and an engulfing interest into the emerging massive regulatory roles of lncRNAs.
Histone modification and exchange during sense and antisense transcription
Jerry Workman, Stowers Institute for Medical Research
Dr. Jerry Workman talked about his research on chromatin mechanisms. In a yeast model his group looks at how chromatin signatures are reset during transcription. In their research they have found that these chromatin signatures can control strand specific expression and they are established by the Set2/Isw1b/Rpd3S pathway.
Workman’s group has taken an interest in how cryptic transcripts occur due perturbations in this pathway, ultimately resulting in improper chromatin spacing. The chromatin spacing by this pathway influences what DNA sequences are amenable for RNA Polymerase II to bind at regions that resemble promoters. By looking for cryptic transcripts, in Set2 loss of function mutants, they found hundreds of Set2 Repressed Antisense Transcripts (SRAT). Interestingly, 82% of the yeast genome is transcribed as bonafide genes in wild-types and 30% show up in their Set2 mutant as SRATs.
Next, they found that H3K36 methylation mediated by Set2 suppress cryptic transcripts by preventing their initiation and that the antisense transcripts produced upon loss is Set2 mediated methylation are usually intergenic and contained within the gene body. However, he notes that the levels of antisense transcripts are significantly lower than those of protein coding transcripts in his mutants. In another set of experiments they found that Set2-mediated suppression of antisense transcripts does not require the Rpd3s deacetylation pathway, but the Isw1b and Chd1 chromatin remodellers are involved in suppressing the antisense transcripts. Finally, they found that transcription of the antisense RNA overlapping the sense promoter is required to repress transcription in cis.
This leads him to the conclusion that “real genes with real promoters” use this pathway to silence cryptic transcription, with a take home message that the process of antisense transcription over a promoter represses transcription through Set2 and H3K36 methylation. Ultimately, his research suggests that “transcription can regulate transcription.”
Dynamic DNA methylation and gene expression in spermatogonial stem cell differentiation
Hiroyuki Sasaki, Kyushu University
Dr. Sasaki (Fukuoka, Japan) started off his plenary talk with his early research years and the difficulties he had in mouse models of disease due to genomic imprinting leaving a big mark on his transgene of interest. Ultimately, this started him on a life long journey where ‘imprinting left its imprint on him’. These findings left him with the burning question, how does the same machinery (Dnmt3a+Dnmt3L) react differently to establish imprinting in the sexes? His group then went on to show how piwi RNAs (piRNAs), which are male germline specific, can guide the genomic imprinting machinery in the male germline and influence imprinting control regions (using the example of Rasgrf1) and are distinct from siRNA/miRNA. They also showed how endo-siRNAs in the ooctye arise from naturally occurring dsRNA and can go onto regulate transposons and genes.
Next, Sasaki focused on his current research into stem cell epigenomics, specifically how sperm cells are reprogrammed throughout development. Utilizing post-bisuflite adaptor tagging (PBAT), they examined the methylomics of differentiating postnatal sperm stem cells. They found large partially methylated domains (PMDs) that also appear in cancerous and placental cells, but not somatic cells. They also found that a certain stage of differentiation (neonatal prospermatogonia) shows very high levels of non-CpG methylation and that there were a number of stage specific DMRs that were important to the regulation of stem cell properties and differentiation, with there appearing to be distinct classes of DMRs that are enriched for Sox transcription factor binding sites.
XIST: Long non-coding RNA as CIS-acting silencer
Carolyn Brown, University of British Columbia
Dr. Carolyn Brown (Vancouver), a pioneer in X chromosome inactivation, discussed her groups work on imprinting and dosage compensation. Starting off with the classical example of calico cats, her initial interest lies is in the classic example of how dosage compensation results in the inactive X taking on the state of facultative heterochromatin that results in the mosaic expression patterns that produce the recognizable fur patterns. Getting into the specifics, the long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) Xist is her molecule of interest. She views lncRNAs as modular adaptors, bringing proteins to sites of action, in the case of X it recruits epigenetic modifications that silence the 160 MB of DNA on the X chromosome.
In Brown’s earlier research, using a Dox system and transgenes, her team found that nuclear contact and H3K27me3 are key features of X inactivation. Overall, there is a recruitment of repressive marks by Xist, with the exception of H3K9me3, but the cascade of events leading to this remains unknown. So rather than focus on the chain of events, they shifted to understanding what regions of DNA are responsible for certain events, by carrying out systematic deletions.
Brown’s group found that silencing correlates with the number of repeats since it requires stems and loops to form. They are now focused on DNA methylation marks, as their earlier model wasn’t able to recruit them properly. But overall, she thinks that initial expression of Xist induces silencing in cis, which has a different control mechanism in humans and mice, and regardless of the mechanism it recruits the chromosome to a unique cellular region where the repeats are then silenced so their RNA products cannot compete with Xist and thus this allows it to bind and silence the chromosome.
Chromatin folding in post-mitotic neurons
Ana Pombo, Humboldt University
Dr. Ana Pombo (Berlin, Germany) discussed her research on nuclear architecture and offered up a refreshing perspective on genome structure and how it contributes to the regulation of gene expression. Her interest lies in the chromatin organization that is responsible for long-range interactions at the DNA level and at the preference of chromosome positions at the cellular level. Her group’s research utilizes chromatin confirmation capture (3C) based technologies (Hi-C) to identify stem cell differentiation systems that lead to distinct populations of neurons, specifically ESCs, Neural Progenitor Cells, and post-mitotic neurons. They observed that chromatin folding greatly changes through out neural differentiation by analyzing distinct topological domains. By examining the interactions of distinct topological domains they noticed unique and consistent profiles throughout differentiation from ESC into post-mitotic neuron. The observed structure of domains-within-domains that span regions of the genome ranged up to 10 Mb.
Overall, the general organization is conserved in the different cell stages looked at but the functional changes are reflected in the more local details. Intriguingly, these meta structures (known as ultrametric trees) correlated with epigenetic features in their regions. They then went on to model the theory behind it in silico. Ultimately, by viewing chromatin as a dynamic polymer with meta domains that interact in a 3D fashion a lot can be learned about differentiation.
Histone methylation mediated silencing of endogenous retroviruses
Matthew Lorincz, University of British Columbia
Dr. Matthew Lorincz (Vancouver) continued on the theme of transcriptional regulation of transposons and talked about his research into epigenetic processes of development. Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) are repeated elements that have repeatedly integrated into the mouse genome and represent a genome integrity burden as some ERVs may still be active and represent a large potential for mutation. DNA methylation has long been known to play a role in silencing ERVs and its dynamics through out development are extremely important for proper development, a common theme of this meeting.
However, it appears that DNA methylation wasn’t able to explain all of the ERV repression, and many (Class 1 and 2) are marked with H3K9 by the methyltransferase Setdb1, which was previously thought to be unique to somatic cells. Interestingly, when Setdb1 was knocked out conditionally in the germ cells, it was the only gene able to stop the repression of ERVs at H3K9 sites. These sites showed a difference not only in H3K9 methylation but also DNA methylation in their low input (1000 cell) ChIP-Seq method.
Furthermore, while not too many new transcripts were seen, the ones expressed appeared to be coming from cryptic promoters in the repeats of ERVs and there was some sex specificity in the activation. Deficiency of Setdb1 causes cell viability defects and suggests that it is an essential guardian against the retroviral driven expression and maintains ERV repression in the wake of de novo methylation that occurs in the mammalian genome during development, as marked ERVs show relatively low levels of active and passive demethylation by Tet.
Genetic and environmental factors controlling RNA-DNA hybrids
Karim Mekhail, University of Toronto
Dr. Karim Mekhail (Toronto) talked about his research on how ncRNAs regulate chromosome stability and cellular lifespan in the brain. He started off in budding yeast and has now moved to humans. His research has had a strong focus on ribosomal repeats and their transcriptional complexity, due to their exposed repetitive nature they require special considerations in the cell, such as localization in order to protect it from recombination and ncRNA on a destructive mission. So they carried out some RNA-DNA hybrid ChIP, and while examining the deletion of the gene Pbp1 his group observed that it was preventing ncRNA and DNA hybrids within the intergneic spacers of rDNA repeats.
Interestingly, it didn’t interact with RNases but rather a protein called Stm1. When Stm1 was deleted it recovered the defects associated with Pbp1 deletion. Furthermore, caloric restriction was able suppresses hybrids in cells with Pbp1 deleted via RNAseH and Pif1 and recover repeat integrity. Taken their results to the genome wide level the observed a global role for Pbp1 in RNA-DNA hybrid suppression in repetitive elements in the genome and appears to have a role in neurological disease.
Gene regulation via gene looping & noncoding RNA
Musa Mhlanga, CSIR Synthetic Biology
Dr. Musa Mhlanga (Pretoria, South Africa) talked about his group’s research into epigenetic technology and chromatin architecture by presenting a molecular approach into manipulating chromosome loops. His teams interest lies in that gene loops are not a consequence of transcription, but rather a causative factor behind it. He interrogates whether inter and/or intra chromosomal interactions and domains are needed for transcription to occur. There are 3 main types of gene loops: Enhancer promoter interactions, Gene loop regulatory elements (like CTCF sites), and multi gene complex interactions. The latter represents topological domains that share a focus of RNA polymerases and are co-regulated. His research examines how the dynamic movement of chromosomes makes it possible for such gene loops to form.
Interestingly, the higher order regulation in the nucleus is related to the position of DNA in the nucleus and determines gene expression in “jackpot” cells. By using TALEN genome editing (and later confirmed via CRISPR), they disrupted a single gene loop in a well characterized multi gene complex that is co-transcribed. Upon doing this his group observed that the disruption of a single loop was enough to interfere with the whole complex and causes a transcriptional response of the co-regulated genes. Interestingly, they found that chromosomal breaks uni-directionally affect transcriptional ‘kisses’ ranging from Mb to entire chromosomes. Finally, he demonstrated some of the roles of lncRNAs in influencing looping and transcription.
**EpiGenie would like to thank Ben Laufer, who is a PhD student in the Singh Lab at Western University for contributing coverage of this conference** | {
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India's Jemimah Rodrigues has been signed up by Yorkshire Diamonds for the fourth edition of the Kia Super League.
Rodrigues, the up-and-coming 18-year-old batting allrounder, is a fearless stroke-player and has been consistent both at home and away in her short career so far. Having made her international debut only in February 2018, in South Africa, she averages 30.40 and has a strike rate of 123.57 in her 25-T20I career. In her most recent outing on foreign soil, Rodrigues impressed against the moving ball in testing New Zealand conditions in an ODI series, notching up a career-best 81 not out in Napier to help set up India's 2-1 series win.
Super stoked to be signed by @YorksDiamonds this season of the Kia Super League! Looking forward to playing some good cricket with you guys! #ShineBright #KSL pic.twitter.com/WcrEqUD0K8 — Jemimah Rodrigues (@JemiRodrigues) June 12, 2019
Her ability against some of the world's most established bowlers was on show more recently at the Women's T20 Challenge in Jaipur, where she was named the Player of the Tournament after scoring 123 runs in three games at an average of 61.50.
ALSO READ: Jemimah Rodrigues - ready for lift-off
ESPNcricinfo understands that Rodrigues will leave for the UK towards the end of July and will be available for the whole tournament.
Although Loughborough Lightning, too, had expressed an interest in signing Rodrigues up, Diamonds got in touch with the player's management team in early May and inked the deal.
"More than anything, it's the experience of playing in an overseas league that will count for a teenager like Jemimah," her mother Lavita Rodrigues said. "Her progress since her India debut last year has been steady, with god's grace, and we want this experience to help her be an even better player."
BREAKING: The Diamonds have announced their squad for the fourth and final edition of the KSL, which will be replaced by the Hundred from 2020. This summer's competition kicks off in early August.#ShineBright pic.twitter.com/zWqzrIjkQ9 — Yorkshire Diamonds (@YorksDiamonds) June 11, 2019
India opener Smriti Mandhana had set the tournament alight last year with a chart-topping 421 runs in her debut season, playing for Western Storm while Harmanpreet Kaur, the Indian T20I captain, who debuted along with Mandhana last year, had an up-and-down run with Lancashire Thunder. Official news on their future in the league is awaited.
The upcoming edition of the six-team KSL begins on August 6. Defending champions Surrey Stars will take on Diamonds, while Storm, finalists last season, and Thunder will host Loughborough Lightning and Southern Vipers respectively.
Bangladesh, meanwhile, will be represented by allrounder Jahanara Alam and top-order batsman Fargana Hoque in the Women's Global Development Squad (WGDS), an ICC-ECB initiative now in its second year. Alam, who stood out with her incisive swing bowling and fielding at the Women's T20 Challenge, was also part of the inaugural WGDS that lost to Loughborough Lighting in last year's double-header.
Additional reporting by Mohammad Isam | {
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Waiting for your games to load is one of the biggest banes of playing video games. Sure, the constant patches and reminders to buy premium content are annoying, but it’s having to watch a progress bar that never actually bears any resemblance to the actual loading progress that’s the most offensive.
So what if we told you you could reduce these waiting periods? And not just by a little, but up to 48%? Well, you can, if you own a new Sony PlayStation 4 Pro and buy a solid state drive to go with it.
You see, the original PlayStation 4 boasted the ability to swap out the internal hard drive and replace it with a faster SSD drive, but the true potential of that drive was throttled by the SATA 2 controller in the console. On PS4 Pro, that’s been upgraded to SATA 3, which doubles the transfer speed from up to 300MB/s to up to 600MB/s.
OK, so we got a bit technical there, but you get the idea - it’s fast. However, there’s only really one area where you’ll feel the difference, and that’s loading games from the hard drive. This isn’t going to speed up your downloads, because the throttle there is on your broadband speed, and it’s not going to speed up installations from Blu-Ray discs, because there the throttle is the disc drive. | {
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"They can sit for days on end on the other side of the river and watch you go fishing off the same log or rock – that's how they hunt. | {
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A long time ago in a town far, far away...
Tony SkyParker has returned to his home planet of San Antooine in an attempt to rescue his friend Manu Solo, who was frozen in carbonite at the end of Round 2, from the clutches of the vile gangster, JabBo the Hutt. Little does Tony know that the GALACTIC EMPIRE has secretly begun construction on a new armored space station even more powerful than the dreaded Lake Star, which had been destroyed in Round 1. When completed, this ultimate weapon will spell certain doom for the small band of Spurs struggling to restore freedom to the league...
Tony SkyParker sends C3-Kleo and D2-B2 with a holographic message to JabBo the Hutt, requesting the release of Manu Solo. The grizzled criminal refuses, instead taking the droids captive and making them slaves on his floating FedEx Forum. That evening while entertaining, JabBo is captivated with the graceful ball playing of the slave point guard, Coola. However, when Coola refuses to share the ball with JabBo, he orders her to be thrown into the pit to be devoured by the Marcor beast.
Suddenly, Princess Tia (disguised as a bounty hunter) arrives with "prisoner" Diawbacca to collect the long-standing bounty from when JabBo had originally put a price on Solo's head. JabBo sends Diawbacca below to the prisons.
That night, still disguised, the bounty hunter releases Manu Solo from his carbonite coffin and then reveals himself to be Princess Tia. As Manu and Tia prepare to escape, they are caught by JabBo and his annoying minions.
Both Manu Solo and Princess Tia are captured. Solo is sent to the prison cells where Diawbacca waits, while JabBo takes Leia to replace the recently devoured Coola. Tia is chained to the paint, forced to serve the hulking behemoth in a humiliating slave girl outfit.
At dawn, Tony SkyParker arrives and uses a Spurs Knight mind trick to convince Bib Tayshauna to let him enter the Palace, which only serves to enrage his master, who spits out his mouthguard in consternation.
Tony makes a single plea to JabBo for Solo's release, but JabBo rejects the offer. Tony uses the Zone to pull a nearby blaster into his hand, and tries to shoot the big man with a floater. During the skirmish, SkyParker falls into the Marcor pit as Salacious T Allen hurls insults down on him, and all those in attendance gather to watch the beast devour the enemy.
SkyParker must face the Marcor alone, and even though he's initially caught in its humongous claw, he is able to avoid its massive maw, squirm out of the irresistible grasp and maneuver for an attack. Tony lures the Marcor under the entrance gate to the pit, which he triggers by heaving a one-hander, and crushes the creature. Yet SkyParker is unable to escape from the FedEx Palace.
JabBo, furious with the destruction of the Most Fearsome Beast Of The Year, commands that Tony and the others be destroyed by the man-eating Sarlacc. Only Tia is not sentenced to death, for JabBo is entranced with her Sparkling personality.
But before the rebels are thrown into the Pit of Mempkoon, D2-B2 launches something that arcs high, higher, ever higher into the air.
It's SkyParker's lightsaber! Tony retrieves his signature weapon and begins the liberation of his motley band.
During the ensuing battle, Manu Solo, still blinded from the effects of carbonization, can't seem to shoot straight, yet finds a way to send Boba Steph careening down the pit to his apparent doom. Princess Tia, really upset about the bikini, strangles JabBo with the chain meant to enslave her. C3-Kleo and D2-B2 free themselves, jump off the ship and land in the San Antooine sand.
SkyParker and McGradian mop up the remainder of JabBo's forces. Tony rescues Tia, aims a shot at the heart of JabBo's ship, and escapes before it explodes. The majority of the team departs San Antooine for the rendezvous point where the rest of the rebels are assembling. Tony and D2-B2 head back to SanAnbah to fulfill his earlier promise to YodaPop.
SkyParker and D2=B2 arrive to find the aged YodaPop at death's door. Tony has returned to complete his Spur training, but YodaPop declares no further training is required. All that remains is for Tony to confront the Dark Lord. With his last breath, the old coach reminds the poing guard that his power comes from the fundamentals of The Zone. As SkyParker leaves, the spirit of Obi-Tim appears to Tony and warns the Spur Knight to bury his feelings, for they could in time "serve the Emperor".
Emperor Palpastern really, really hates the Small Market battle.
Story continues in Episode IV
Credits:
Story - CapHill and JRW (with no apologies to George Lucas)
Concepts - DrumsInTheDeep and JRW
Photoshop Images - Drums and Aaron Preine
Special thanks to Wiki and Wookieepedia
Disclaimer for the legal eagles: "Star Wars," the Star Wars logo, its characters and creations are the property of Lucasfilm and the Walt Disney Company. Purchase the original trilogy on Blu Ray! | {
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A controversial New York City photographer, who documents parties around the world, has been barred from a scheduled appearance at a restaurant in downtown Halifax after a series of his tweets was deemed offensive by the restaurant's owner.
Photographer Kirill Bichutsky, who goes by the name Kirill Was Here, was to appear at The Argyle Grill and Bar on Saturday as part of a party organized by the This is After Dark entertainment company.
Bichutsky travels to nightclubs around the world taking photos of party-goers. His website, blog and Twitter account feature pictures of naked, inebriated women.
Many took to social media this weekend to express their anger with Bichutsky's scheduled visit. They were upset with the content of his Twitter account, which includes misogynistic tweets.
Ally Lord, a first-year student at the University of King's College in Halifax, posted a picture of the event's poster on Facebook and shared a message encouraging others to tear the posters down. She and her friends took down posters around Dalhousie University this weekend.
Lord said a friend told her about Bichutsky's tweets.
"I was really surprised because I remember seeing all of the posters all over Halifax," she said.
"I decided to post [on Facebook] because I was infuriated."
'He's just bad news'
Chris Tzaneteas, the owner of The Argyle Grill and Bar, said he's been getting emails and calls about Bichutsky since Friday. Tzaneteas said he didn't know who Bichutsky was until he started getting the calls.
He described people as being outraged and disgusted.
"Some folks that called said, 'Just go on his Twitter account and kind of see who he is all about.' Which I did, and I found some alarming and offensive tweets," Tzaneteas told CBC News on Monday.
New York-photographer Kirill Bichutsky features pictures of naked, inebriated women on his website, blog and Twitter account. (CBC)
"I said, 'Whoa, OK, I've got a daughter, I've got a young son.' I definitely don't want their dad ever promoting anybody who has these kinds of values."
Tzaneteas called the promoter, Lee Fraser, on Saturday morning and told him that the party could go on, but Bichutsky wouldn't be allowed at the bar.
"We're against anything this guy is for," said Tzaneteas.
"He's just bad news."
Bichutsky, who describes himself as a "Slut Whisperer" on Twitter, did not respond to calls and an email from CBC News.
'I party for a living'
A post on his Twitter feed Sunday said, "I party for a living. If you actually care what I have to say, then you're the problem, not me. Listening to a moron like me..."
An earlier post reads, "So many fat girls from Nova Scotia are mad that I'm coming to party. You're not gonna get into the party anyways. Cats can't be your +1."
Arjun Varma runs Rise Hali, which is selling tickets and promoting Saturday's event. The contact information for his company was included on many of the social media posts from people who were upset.
Varma said he's not the one putting the event on and he doesn't agree with the content of Bichutsky's tweets. People have been sending him emails about the event all weekend, he said.
"Everyone's been talking about my company and it's taking me so long to build my reputation and I will most likely lose business because of this," said Varma.
"People have called me a rapist. People are calling me a misogynist."
The event will still run this Saturday, but without Bichutsky. This is After Dark, the event promoter, confirmed in a Facebook post on Monday afternoon that Bichutsky would not be attending the event "due to things beyond our control." | {
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President Barroso’s intervention in the debate about the future of an independent Scotland in the European Union has made the point, forcefully, that nothing is certain other than that the situation is wholly without precedent and mightily complex. Mr Barroso is right to point out that Spain will be a reluctant party to any Scottish separatist negotiation because of Catalonia. The same applies to Cyprus and Greece because of the threat of recognition of the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus. Belgium, with its tetchy Flemish nationalists, is unlikely to be overjoyed.
The Scottish government leads us to believe that a liberated Scotland would not have to apply to join the EU under the provisions of Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union as if it were a third-country candidate. Alex Salmond, Scotland’s First Minister, hopes that an ordinary revision of the EU treaties under Article 48 would suffice. The controversy over treaty base is both interesting and important, although it is crystal clear that no matter which legal route is eventually agreed, the practical result will be the same: unanimous agreement by all 28 member states followed by ratification of that agreement by the 28 plus 1. In any case, what is largely overlooked is that the first, preliminary phase of the renegotiation will be subject neither to Article 48 (full-blown treaty revision) nor 49 (accession de novo) but will be governed, rather, by the spirit of Article 50, the Union’s new secession clause, usefully inserted by the Treaty of Lisbon in order to provide a departing state with the framework for its future relationship with the Union.
In the event of a Yes vote in the referendum on 18 September, the process of the internal demolition of the United Kingdom will start. In accordance with the procedures suggested in Article 50 TEU, the British government will have to inform the European Council of the dramatic news. The European Council at its October meeting will no doubt then invite the European Commission to come up with an Opinion about what should happen next. The Commission’s Opinion will make a recommendation as to the most appropriate legal base(s) for the conduct of the negotiations on the new arrangements, both transitional and final. The Council will then adopt a decision authorising the opening of negotiations and mandating the Commission to conduct them. The European Parliament will exercise its right to be consulted. And at some stage an application to the European Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling on whether the chosen procedures are compatible with the Treaties cannot be excluded (and may even be welcome).
If the rupture takes place in hostile circumstances the EU negotiations will surely be lengthy, and London can be expected to have the support of several revanchist allies. Nevertheless, even if fraught and protracted, the negotiations will conclude at some stage with Scotland emerging as the 29th member state of the Union. The legacy of having been within the EU for over forty years matters. European integration is not simply a matter of inter-state relations: the Scottish people are EU citizens and will remain so, and it is in everyone’s interest that the acquis communautaire, that corpus of EU law which applies now to Scotland because of its membership of the United Kingdom, will continue to apply throughout as well as after the hiatus. Happily, the EU treaties and the Charter of Fundamental Rights oblige its member states and its institutions to cooperate sincerely in the spirit of solidarity, not to discriminate on grounds of nationality and to respect domestic constitutional structures.
Beyond these steps, the situation will not be clarified unless and until both the UK and Scottish governments spell out in detail their negotiating positions. The critical decision for Scotland is the currency. Will Scotland seek to inherit the British derogation from the single currency (Protocol 15)? If it does so, will the rest of the EU agree? Strictly speaking (and why not?) as a member state of the Union Scotland will be expected to adopt the euro as and when it fulfils the Maastricht convergence criteria, according to the ordained timetable. We can only gauge Scotland’s progress in this regard once we know the extent of its legacy debt, courtesy of the UK. But why Mr Salmond would prefer to stick with the pound sterling instead of pitching into the euro as soon as possible, I cannot say. One may doubt, as Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, has done that Scotland could truly claim to be independent if its monetary policy and fiscal disciplines were to continue to be set in London.
The deeper truth, of course, is that Scotland in the EU will be no more or less ‘independent’ than any other member state. In the EU, interdependence is the name of the game. ‘Scottish independence’ is a powerful slogan: the reality will be somewhat different whether it tried to stick with sterling or agreed to embrace the euro. As Ireland has found, although liberated from Whitehall, its autonomy under the terms and conditions of EU economic and monetary union is strictly conditional on decisions taken in Frankfurt and Brussels.
Beyond the question of the single currency are the UK’s plethora of other opt outs and exceptions which are governed by Protocol 20 on Schengen, Protocol 21 on justice and home affairs, and Protocol 30 on the Charter of Fundamental Rights. One can see that the common travel area of the British Isles should stay. But why the Scottish parliament and courts would wish to marginalise themselves like the English from the development of mainstream EU common policies in terms of immigration and asylum, the administration of justice, cooperation of police forces and the like is not self-evident.
After the question is settled of how ‘British’ Scotland wishes to be, there will still be real and somewhat tough negotiations between London, Edinburgh and Brussels about the number of MEPs each state will elect and about both the actual and relative size of their budgetary contributions.
Finally, one should note that the Scotland question will not be taken in isolation, and that the new EU arrangements for a non-UK Scotland will not be based on things as they are now. The European Union is changing fast. Over the next five years the eurozone is bound to construct a fully-fledged banking union and deepen its fiscal integration. These reforms will require in any case a constitutional Convention whose likely timetable will start after the British general election in May 2015 and finish after the French presidential elections two years later. At the same time, the UK Conservative Party seems strangely determined to loosen the ties that bind the UK to the EU in time for a British referendum in 2017. To be fair to the referendum voters, not only Alex Salmond and the Scottish nationalists but also David Cameron and the English nationalists must spell out clearly the catalogue of demands that they each intend separately to perpetrate on the rest of the European Union.
Andrew Duff is the spokesman on constitutional affairs for the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE). @Andrew_Duff_MEP
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Author : Andrew Duff | {
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Facebook Oversharing Has Been Taken To A New, Disgusting Level [NSFW]
Just because you marry a virgin, doesn't mean you need to tell the world in the grossest way imaginable. In fact, you really don't need to tell anyone at all. Why would you? | {
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Best resources for learning Java, JDeveloper and SQL 6 points by celticninja on Apr 11, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments I have just wangled a job as a trainee developer. It is a total career change for me in my mid-30s. I have some basic understanding of programming however the role requires zero previous experience and they are happy to train me, however i also want to be responsible for my own development. I start the role in about a month so what can I do or where should I start to prepare myself. thanks
| {
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O Campeonato Brasileiro Série B está entrando na reta final e é nesse momento que a tabela começa a ser definida. Quem será que sobe, quem consegue permanecer na competição e quem cai?
Hoje, pegando como base as estatísticas feitas pela Universidade Federal de Goiás (UFMG) vamos analisar quais são os possíveis clubes que vão estar entre os 20 melhores do país em 2020. Para que um time se garanta 100% na Série A ele precisa chegar à marca de 66 pontos. Mas 62 e até 61 na pontuação pode fazer a equipe subir para a elite.
+ Leia Mais: Qual é a pontuação mínima para conseguir o acesso à Série A?
E quais são os clubes que estão mais próximos de alcançar este objetivo? De acordo com a UFMG, Bragantino, Sport, Atlético-GO, Coritiba, América-MG e Paraná tem mais chances de subir para a Série A. Veja os números!
Probabilidade de acesso à Série A
Bragantino
99,9% na série A, mas aquele 1%.... O Bragantino está incontestável na segundona e com os dois pés praticamente na primeira. O possível campeão do torneio, ocupa a liderança desde o início do campeonato, venceu o primeiro turno e segue líder no returno. Em 28 jogos, o Bragantino ganhou 17 vezes, empatou 6 e foi derrotado em apenas 5 ocasiões.
Sport
Também com uma ótima campanha, o clube pernambucano tem tudo para voltar à elite. Segundo a UFMG, as chances de o Sport subir é de 87,9%. Atualmente, a equipe está na vice liderança da Série B. O título já não é tão almejado, já que o Bragantino abriu 8 pontos de vantagem.
Atlético-GO
Muito estável no primeiro turno, o Atlético-GO possui 72,1% de estar na Série A em 2020. O clube goiano caiu um pouco de rendimento no returno, o que o fez perder a vice-liderança, mas ainda assim é o terceiro colocado na tabela. O time passa por um momento conturbado quanto a parte extra campo. Após três jogos sem vencer, o treinador Wagner Lopes foi demitido e o cargo está em aberto.
Coritiba
Depois de dois anos como coadjuvante na Série B, o Coritiba está voltando a ter chance de jogar entre os grandes. O Coxa é o atual quarto colocado, com 48,8% de chance de retornar à elite. O desafio do time será conseguir se manter na posição, já que está a apenas dois pontos do quinto colocado, o América.
América-MG
E falando no Coelho, quem achou que o time não ia brigar para subir se enganou muito. A equipe mineira começou muito mal o campeonato, mas deu uma arrancada nesta reta final. O time está a apenas dois pontos do G-4 e com 27,3% de chance de subir.
Paraná
A briga pelo G-4 está boa e o Paraná quer garantir sua vaga. O time também está a apenas dois pontinhos da zona que dá acesso à elite, perdendo posição para o América por conta do número de vitórias. A probabilidade de que o clube suba é de 18,9%.
+ Veja a Tabela da Série B!
Faltam apenas 10 rodadas para o fim do Brasileirão Série B, e as chances de acesso vão ficando cada vez maiores para umas equipes e menores para outras. E para você, quem são o quatro que vão reinar na Série A ano que vem?
Em 14/10/2019 por Daniela Versiane | {
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A Chinese government spokesman said Thursday that "it might be U.S. Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan," pushing one of several popular coronavirus conspiracy theories in China.
Zhao Lijian, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman, called attention to the admission Wednesday by Robert Redfield, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that some Americans who were said to have died from influenza may have actually died from the coronavirus (COVID-19).
"When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected?" he asked. "What are the names of the hospitals? It might be U.S. Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! U.S. owe us an explanation!"
In a short thread on Twitter, a social media platform inaccessible in China, Zhao demanded to know how many of the 34 million influenza infections and 20,000 associated deaths during this latest flu season were related to COVID-19.
The coronavirus, now a pandemic, first appeared in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, capital of hard-hit Hubei province and the epicenter of a serious outbreak that has claimed the lives of thousands, the majority in China.
As China has faced criticism, Chinese authorities have been pushing back, suggesting that the virus may have originated somewhere other than China. Dr. Zhong Nanshan, a leading Chinese epidemiologist, said in late February that "though the COVID-19 was first discovered in China, it does not mean that it originated from China."
Zhao, in his role as a government spokesman, stressed the same point in a recent press briefing.
"No conclusion has been reached yet on the origin of the virus," he told reporters, adding that "what we are experiencing now is a global phenomenon with its source still undetermined."
One popular conspiracy theory that has emerged about the coronavirus is that American athletes participating in the Military World Games, an event held in Wuhan last year, may have brought the virus, either intentionally or accidentally, into China. There is, however, no evidence to support this accusation.
The Trump administration has laid the blame firmly at China's feet though. "Unfortunately, rather than using best practices, this outbreak in Wuhan was covered up," White House national security adviser Robert O'Brien told reporters Wednesday.
"It probably cost the world community two months to respond," he added.
Another Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, Geng Shuang, called O'Brien's efforts to denigrate China's efforts to fight the virus "immoral and irresponsible."
More From Business Insider: | {
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Election of Republican who focused much of his campaign vilifying minority communities has made some Americans nervous.
It’s been about 48 hours since Donald Trump’s surprise win in the US presidential election, but Alicia Scotland-Smalls still cannot shake off a feeling of shock and fear.
“Given that racism was part of Trump’s campaign, I am afraid that racists might feel emboldened to commit acts of violence and discrimination against our community,” Scotland-Smalls, a 29-year-old African American from Greenville, South Carolina, told Al Jazeera.
“While at work, I am always on guard because you never know who will come through the door,” the shipping clerk said.
She is not alone in being worried. For many members of the African-American community, Trump’s presidency represents genuine concerns of a resurgence of racism and institutionalised violence against them.
Before the election, Trump’s campaign had focused heavily on minorities and foreigners, with rights groups raising concerns that the election of Trump might legitimise outward racism and physical violence. Just days before the election, a black church in Mississippi was burned and spray-painted with “Vote Trump” on one of its outside walls.
A former reality TV star who was endorsed by far-right groups and politicians, Trump received widespread criticism for a series of misogynistic, racist and xenophobic remarks, including a call for a ban on Muslims entering the US and a pledge to build a wall to block Mexicans from entering the country.
And over the past few days, many Americans have used social media to recount racist attacks that took place following the 70-year-old’s election win.
“The 2016 campaign has regularised racism, standardised anti-Semitism, and mainstreamed misogyny,” Cornell William Brooks, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said in a statement after Trump’s win.
While the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil rights group, congratulated the president-elect, it also urged him to be more inclusive and stay away from his brash, unapologetic, racist politics.
“We are now calling on the next president to speak and act with the moral clarity necessary to silence [his campaign’s] racial politics,” Brooks said.
‘Racist attacks might increase’
Trump won the election partly because of the low voting turnout among the black community, which was significantly less than during Obama campaign, according to Bob Starks, professor emeritus of inner city studies at North Eastern Illinois University in Chicago.
Early exit polls reported by various US media showed that African Americans, as well as Latinos, did not support Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton, in the same way as when President Barack Obama was running for re-election four years ago.
The vast majority of African Americans, who comprise about 14 percent of the US population, have historically and consistently voted for the Democratic Party since the 1930s.
On Tuesday’s election, about 88 percent of African-American voters backed Clinton, less than the 91 percent Obama – the first black president – got in 2012.
“All things considered, we as African-Americans must reassess our stance vis-a-vis both the Democratic and the Republican parties and demand better representation in both parties, especially at this historic juncture,” Starks told Al Jazeera.
With Trump in power, Starks claimed, the African-American community might witness more police shootings, more incidents of racist attacks against them and an increase in mass incarceration.
According to an NAACP criminal justice report, African-Americans constitute nearly one million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population in the US.
“One in six black men had been incarcerated as of 2001. If current trends continue, one in three black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime,” the report said.
‘Stoking fears’
Ahead of the vote, both pollsters and major media outlets consistently predicted a landslide victory for Clinton.
But since then, many have argued that such false predictions ultimately helped suppress the black and Latino vote, as they led both communities to think a win for the Democratic candidate was a forgone conclusion.
Early exit polls reported by various US media showed that African Americans as well as Latinos did not support Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton, in the same way as when President Barack Obama was running for president.
For Salim Muwakkil, a well-known Chicago radio host, Trump’s victory was not a total surprise.
He argues that Trump’s presidency is part of a global trend of rising extreme nationalism and racism in response to massive immigration to Europe from poorer countries and violent attacks over the past few years.
“Trump’s election indicates that the US is reacting to the same factors that have occurred in Europe in recent years,” he told Al Jazeera.
The president-elect was able to rally the white poor and working-class votes by using anti-refugee “xenophobia” or “racism” to stoke fears and uncertainty among a segment of the electorate against an alleged “growing power of blacks or other minorities”, according to Muwakkil.
But even without these issues, Muwakkil argues that it is hard for any political party to keep control of the White House for more than two terms.
“The irony of it all is that the poor white working-class Americans have elected a billionaire who epitomises an economic policy that was directly responsible for their poverty,” he said.
Follow Ali Younes on Twitter: @Ali_reports | {
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A day after Alabama beat South Carolina 47-23, we got a second look at the action in Columbia.
Our weekly Sunday DVR review of the Crimson Tide includes some extra insight from postgame interviews and the stat sheet.
Before moving on to Southern Miss, here are a few thoughts from Round 2 with Alabama-South Carolina:
-- The WR in motion, bending behind the shotgun snap instead of through the lane is something new added this season, Jerry Jeudy confirmed last week. You saw it several times Saturday as Steve Sarkisian expanded the variety of plays used from that look. It keeps defenses off-balance and creates matchup issues. “It just helps us get the ball in our hands faster to make plays,” Jeudy said. You saw it on the first snap with three defenders following Jeudy to the right while DeVonta Smith found a seem to the left. Nine yards to start Smith’s career day.
-- The running game was another talking point with a lack of yardage and attempts. Saban attributed it to South Carolina stacking the box. The Gamecocks had six in there on the second play and Najee Harris ran for 12.
-- With DeVonta Smith, his injury last year somewhat pushed him down the rankings of the four star Alabama receivers. The last two games showed why he took momentum out of his freshman year with arguably the strongest two hands catching the ball.
-- Not real sure what South Carolina was doing on kickoffs. Four times Shi Smith attempted returns when the fair catch was an option. He averaged 15.5 yards with a long of 18 and each time the Gamecocks had a longer field than necessary. Saban had been worried about complacency on the coverage unit with Will Reichard kicking so many touchbacks but that wasn’t an issue at all Saturday.
-- You could see the young middle linebackers looking unsure of the call when the ball was snapped a few times. It was clear South Carolina wanted to exploit that and it was the first of Alabama’s three opponents with the players and scheme to do that.
-- South Carolina had four first downs via Alabama penalties. That included negating the first-drive interception because of an illegal substitution. For the season, seven of Alabama opponents’ 56 first downs resulted from penalties compared to two of the Tide’s 78.
-- The 11 Alabama flags for 92 yards didn’t sit well with Saban postgame.
-- Tagovailoa was sacked twice on the second Tide drive. The first time, center Chris Owens got bowled over but Saban pointed out in the postgame that the second one was on the RBs. Watching back, Najee Harris got beat on the blitz pickup for the third-down takedown.
-- Of the 21 combined possessions for Alabama and South Carolina, only one ended in a punt. It wasn’t a good one. Skyler DeLong’s kick from deep in Alabama territory traveled just 18 yards.
-- D.J. Dale did his best Quinnen Williams impression on his sack. Just manned up the blocker and tossed him aside for the open lane to Hilinski. It helped force the fake field goal attempt that almost worked for the Gamecocks. As noted in the instant analysis, Will Muschamp wasn’t there to keep it close with the gambling play calls.
-- From the press box view, Henry Ruggs III’s 81-yard touchdown on the slant was clearly a score the second he caught it. The lane he had was just enough to spring the track star into the wide-open pasture that made it look easy. On the clock, Ruggs needed 8.65 seconds to run the 63 yards after the catch with some time to ease up at the end. Jeudy had the only block necessary after he said he missed one on Ruggs’ first-play TD last week.
-- Alabama’s defense allowed 459 yards without giving up a true home run. The longest Gamecock play was a 33-yard run by Rico Dowdle.
-- It looked like South Carolina wanted to get the ball on the edge of the formation to force Alabama defenders to make open-field tackles. Alabama had several WR screens too with varying results. One thrown to Jeudy had three DBs to that side and one blocker. He still squeezed through for a decent gain.
-- On the carries before Najee Harris’ insane 42-yard touchdown catch, South Carolina had eight or nine guys dedicated to stopping the running game. Safeties were coming down in support and there just wasn’t anywhere to run.
-- Raekwon Davis had a few impressively athletic plays with four tackles and one QB hurry.
Somebody tell my momma I’m having fun again 💯 https://t.co/acFtCTxKBs — Raekwon Davis (@Raekwondavis_99) September 15, 2019
-- Linebacker Ale Kaho got his first real shot at serious playing time on defense when Saban said they wanted to settle down freshman Christian Harris. Kaho, a former top-recruit who transferred from Washington last August, made four tackles including one for a loss.
-- From the beginning, this felt like a game that could be tight early with the question being South Carolina’s ability to keep pace. The host’s inability to finish drives put them too far behind the pace of an Alabama offense that was just steamrolling with the passing game.
-- South Carolina had the ball for nearly seven minutes over two drives ending the first half and opening the second. It netted 3 points. Alabama needed just 1:34 to score 7 on the next drive (DeVonta Smith’s 42-yard TD) in a demoralizing sequence. The air started to leak from the balloon in the stadium from there.
-- The three sacks of Hilinski were big for Alabama. The other pressures on the young passer made a difference too as the Tide were credited with five QB hurries. Terrell Lewis had two. For the season, Alabama has 13 hurries with Lewis’ four leading the way. After two years of injury, the Washington DC product has an extra burst off the snap. Jennings’ forced fumble midway through the third quarter snuck up on Hilinski with Christopher Allen creeping from the other edge.
-- Slade Bolden, a popular player in the Alabama locker room, had two big plays. First, he had the tackle on the fake punt. Then the former high school QB took his first college shotgun snap as the Wildcat quarterback on 3rd-and-2 late in the third quarter. He got the first down up the gut. “Actually,” Ruggs said in August, “we call Slade Julian Edelman every day.” The Patriots’ WR played quarterback at Kent State.
-- Tight end Major Tennison apparently feels like he didn’t step out before scoring in the third quarter.
-- Hello, upright. Will Reichard’s extra point off the left goal post looked all too familiar. Tagovailoa gave the young kicker a pat on the helmet on the long walk back to the bench after drilling the equipment for a third time this year.
-- Safety Xavier McKinney quieted his teammates joking about missing an interception against Duke. He picked off Hilinski in the end zone in the fourth quarter deep in the end zone. Instead of running it back, the junior took his knee. Asked him about the decision to kneel down afterward. “I thought about it for a little minute when I caught it,” a smiling McKinney said, “but I felt like the better play for me was to take a knee and play it safe. We were up in the game and didn’t need to take it out.”
-- Impressive 1-yard TD run for Mac Jones.
Michael Casagrande is an Alabama beat writer for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook. | {
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Whenever Pixar releases a new film, it’s an event. The gold standard of computer generated animation for twenty years, Pixar had become synonymous with quality for such a long time that each new release was destined for critical acclaim, Academy Award recognition and box office success. Pixar’s greatest asset was its creativity, each new project a fresh story and setting. The juggernaut of a studio has gotten away from that aspect of things a bit as of late, returning to the well for two (excellent) additional Toy Story films, as well as not nearly as victorious second installments of the Cars and Monsters Inc. franchises. Those films were part of a run of disappointment from the studio, culminating in the shockingly poor The Good Dinosaur last Thanksgiving (of course, Inside Out was released during that run, so it couldn’t be all bad). Despite the recent stumbles that have come with revisiting old intellectual property, Pixar’s 2016 release sees the venerated company head back to the ocean thirteen years after one of its greatest triumphs, Finding Nemo.
This time around it is Dory, the genial, excitable and profoundly forgetful fish played by Ellen Degeneres, whose turn it is to go missing. After a series of events jars loose some long forgotten old memories of her parents (played in flashback by Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy), Dory takes off for the shores of California, her clown fish companions Marlon (the ever exasperated Albert Brooks) and Nemo (Hayden Rolence) in tow. Dory’s journey to be reunited with her parents takes her to an aquarium/research facility/resort park (SeaWorld without the Blackfish baggage, essentially) that might hold the answers she seeks. Aided by a strikingly nearsighted whale shark (Kaitlin Olson), a Beluga who can’t quite get the hang of his echolocation (Ty Burrell) and an octopus doing everything he can to avoid being evicted from the friendly confines of the park’s controlled environment (Ed O’Neill), Dory must search her murky memory to find the clues that might see her find her family after so many years away.
Finding Dory could easily be seen as a cash grab along the lines of Cars 2 (Cars and Finding Nemo are the most kid-friendly of Pixar’s originals after all); its first installment did not exactly scream for a sequel, and thirteen years between films is not exactly a case of striking while the iron is hot. Andrew Stanton is back in the director’s chair as he was the first time around (making a triumphant return to Pixar after his disastrous live action debut John Carter), and a decade and a half of technological improvements are poised to make the ocean look more breathtaking than it ever has before. This is all well and good, but that sense of familiarity hasn’t always worked in the studio’s favor. The hope is that Pixar took this long to make a second Nemo film because they didn’t have a story worth a full length film until now. In practice, it could be tough to justify that belief. The structure of the screenplay is exceedingly similar to that of Finding Nemo, another journey across the sea, small, vulnerable fish in a giant pond with danger lurking everywhere. The tenor of the proceedings is certainly different with Dory at the helm of the search compared to the far more cautious Marlon, but as a general rule, Finding Dory doesn’t bring all that much new to the table. The new supporting cast provides quite a bit of comic relief, but it would not be an untoward criticism to claim that does not do quite enough to differentiate itself from its predecessor. And when its predecessor is one of the most beloved animated films of the 21st century, second best can still be a precipitous drop.
There is one aspect of Finding Dory that gives Finding Nemo a run for its money. As Dory’s back story is fleshed out, featuring an impossibly tiny and impossibly cute little fish voiced by Sloane Murray who is more eyes than fish at times, she generates an endless pool of overwhelming sympathy. Young Dory is, for all intents, a far more pitiable version of Nemo, far more susceptible to danger due to her short term memory loss and far more tragic as she knows she’s lost and lost something, but cannot remember what it is. The Dory of Finding Nemo was surely an empathetic character, but her development here makes her a worthy protagonist. Interestingly enough, when Marlon is relegated to the side, his character comes across much worse for wear than the spotlight; his hectoring provincialism loses its charm and quickly wears out its welcome. Luckily, Marlon and Nemo are a much smaller part of the narrative, with new cast members like Hank the octopus and Destiny the whale shark proving far more capable support.
With technology advancing by leaps and bounds in past decade and a half, Finding Dory’s aesthetic has improved quite a bit. Though there are not nearly as many sequences set in the open ocean, the film is a vibrant, visual feast chock full of minute detail and teeming with life inhabiting every corner of the screen. However, the visual bona fides and efficacy of the flashbacks are little more than wallpaper over a familiarly painted room. Finding Dory is an easy watch, breezy and fun with dollops of laughter and quite a bit of heart. It justifies its existence more than Monsters University or Cars 2, but not nearly to the level of Toy Storys 2 and 3. Those films set Pixar’s sequel bar at a perhaps unreasonable height, one that Finding Dory cannot hope to meet. It is a decent film, but for a studio like Pixar with the pedigree it has earned over the last two decades, decent doesn’t quite cut it. | {
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This picture taken on September 12, 2018 shows a flock of birds flying over a paddy field in Kete Kesu on eastern Indonesia's Sulawesi island.
At least 30 people were killed when a strong earthquake and tsunami hit the city of Palu on Indonesia's Sulawesi island on Friday, a hospital official told Metro TV in a report broadcast on Saturday.
A tsunami up to two metres (six feet) high swept through Palu at dusk after the sleepy but growing tourist resort was rocked by a 7.5 magnitude earthquake.
Amateur footage shown by local TV stations, which could not immediately be authenticated by Reuters, showed waters crashing into houses along Palu's shoreline, scattering shipping containers and flooding into a mosque in the city.
"Bodies of victims were found in several places, because they were hit by the rubble of collapsing buildings or swept by tsunami ... but we are still collecting data," Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, National Disaster Mitigation Agency spokesman said on Saturday.
Doctor Komang Adi Sujendra told Metro TV that 30 people were killed and their bodies taken to his hospital, adding another 12 injured needed orthopaedic surgery.
@Chikadachina
National Disaster Mitigation Agency spokesman Nugroho declined to give an official death toll.
The Palu area was hit by a lighter quake earlier on Friday, which destroyed some houses, killed one person and injured at least 10 in the fishing town of Donggala, closest to the epicentre, authorities said.
The U.S. Geological Survey put the magnitude of the second quake at a strong 7.5, after first saying it was 7.7.
The quake and tsunami caused a power outage that cut communications around Palu. On Saturday, authorities were still having difficulties coordinating rescue efforts without power and communications as the area was rocked by aftershocks.
Metro TV played an amateur footage which showed water remaining from the tsunami, a collapsed bridge, large cracks in roads and buildings badly damaged.
Tezar Kodongan, a resident of Palu who took one of the videos, told the TV station some of the city landmarks were broken. "There is no evacuation yet in the disaster area," Kodongan added.
More than 600,000 people live in Donggala and Palu. | {
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Vamos registar as suas reclamações e ajudá-lo a obter uma resposta mais célere na resolução de conflitos com operadores de transporte que não cumpram as suas obrigações. | {
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Japanese authorities are investigating eight men found on Japan's northern coast who say they are from North Korea and washed ashore after their boat broke down.
Media reports say investigators believe the men are not defectors and wish to return home.
Akita prefectural police said Friday they found the men late Thursday after receiving a call about suspicious men standing around at the seaside in Yurihonjo town. Police also found a wooden boat reportedly carrying squid at a nearby marina.
Police said the Korean-speaking men were in good health and identified themselves as North Koreans who were fishing before the boat broke down and washed ashore.
Wreckage believed to be North Korean boats regularly washes ashore in northern Japan during winter due to seasonal winds. | {
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I just received my eagerly-anticipated copy of the 2012 WRTH directly from the publisher and, as ever, jumped right into their articles and reviews.
Like many radio listeners, I always look forward to the newest edition of the WRTH. It takes its rightful place at arm’s length next to my main receiver. Even though I use online frequency guides, I find they generally lack the detail and foresight that WRTH delivers. And much more than just a listing of frequencies, WRTH’s radio reviews, feature articles, and HF report make for excellent reading.
On that note–this year, WRTH reviews several noteworthy shortwave receivers: the Alinco DX-R8E (the European version of the DX-R8T which we reviewed), the Reuter Elektronic RDR54C, WinRadio Excalibur Pro, Sangean ATS-909X and the Tecsun PL-660. They also take a look at the very affordable Pappradio DRM SDR receiver. The WRTH review mix always covers the receiver spectrum, from portables to professional, tabletops to SDRs.
The 2012 WRTH edition also gives a simple primer on the terminology and techniques used for evaluating receiver performance–e.g., sensitivity, selectivity, dynamic range, etc.–a worthy reference for anyone who routinely reads radio reviews.
I always enjoy their human-interest articles as well. In this edition they take us to the remote–I should say, most remote–Atlantic island, Tristan da Cunha; report on radio’s involvement (or lack of it) in the “Arab Spring;” and visit our good friends at Radio Bulgaria.
But, of course, the reason we all buy WRTH is for their in-depth comprehensive radio schedules for the upcoming year. How comprehensive are they? Check out the results from the annual comparative analysis of WRTH vs competitor guide Klingenfuss at the end of this post. Personally I can’t do without my WRTH–as I’ve often said, this indispensable go-to reference guide is the source for my shortwave listening fare.
Purchase your copy of WRTH directly from WRTH’s publishers, or from a distributor like Universal Radio (US) or Radio HF (Canada).
If you’re new to WRTH, note that they regularly update changes to their schedules throughout the year: go to their website to download these updates.
If you would like to know more about using WRTH’s schedules, please see one of our previous posts.
How does WRTH compare with other frequency listings? Sean Gilbert posted the following on WRTH’s Facebook page:
The annual comparative analysis of WRTH vs Klingenfuss has just been published. I am pleased to announce that, once again, WRTH has proved more accurate and comprehensive than the Super Frequency List as regards Shortwave broadcasting (which is the area this study concentrates on). Overall we scored 98.4%, compared to the SFL which scored 97.6%. Breaking this down out of a possible 125 points for international broadcasting, we scored 124, whereas SFL scored 120. For domestic broadcasting, WRTH scored 122/125 and SFL scored 124/125, so the SFL just has the edge. This is caused by WRTH not including the full schedule for some of the tropical band stations in SAm. Here is a comment extracted from the report:
——-
“I still consider it useful, if the Handbooks also can provide the DX-er with additional information about Geographical Coordi-nates for his propagation calculations and Google Earth search, and ID in the language heard. Furthermore it is necessary to know current addresses (postal, e-mail and web) and QSL-policy for his reception report writing. For listeners with Broadband internet (ATDL) is it also useful to know, if the station broadcasts live audio on the web. Most of these useful details can be found in the WRTH, but they are still missing completely in the SWFG ! The Handbooks are very useful for the DX-er and ordinary shortwave listener and are at a very high accuracy level and can hardly be much better!”
———
This fantastic result is down to the extremely hard work and dedication of all our country editors, contributors, monitors and, of course, the 3 main international sub editors who gather the majority of the information for the section. Without their enormous knowledge and skill, the section would not be what it is today. Finally we must not forget the publisher who has, amongst many other things, the unenviable job of doing the final setting and making it all fit into the available space – more difficult than it sounds, believe me!! […]Best wishes and regards, Sean Gilbert – International Editor.
Related | {
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Our school has recently changed up our recess schedule, so I asked for some items to make it more enjoyable for the children. My Santa went above and beyond and provided me many items to teach the kids how to use. Next week we will begin using the items at recess, so unfortunately I will not be able to post pictures of the kids having fun yet.
I also asked for some miscellaneous items I would have loved to have in my classroom. My Santa sent me some educational puzzles along with headphones and a CD player to provide me with a listening center.
I am very happy with all of the items are received. My class is beyond excited. I am so thankful for the generosity of a stranger. It really means a lot to receive this help from someone who does not know me or my school. Thank you thank you thank you! | {
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CASH buyers are ALWAYS at our shows | {
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Today, the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued a Carrier Letter to their health plans banning blanket exclusions for transition-related care. The news is the culmination of advocacy by the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) and others since 2009 pressing OPM to recognize that Federal Health Benefits Plans that maintain blanket exclusions of transition-related care is a form of employment discrimination and must be eliminated.
In response to this development, NCTE Executive Director Mara Keisling said:
"The Office of Personnel Management's action eliminating blanket trans exclusions represents a huge step toward ending one of the last remaining ways the federal government itself discriminates against transgender people. Until now, the federal government has been providing discriminatory healthcare plans to its trans employees. Transgender workers have been required to pay out of pocket to cover care deemed necessary by their doctor--often for services that are covered for non-transgender people. This is completely out of step with the medical consensus on this issue and it is discrimination, plain and simple. With today's announcement, transgender federal employees can now access health care that is so fundamental to their well-being and, in the long-term, will make transgender employees happier and more productive workers. We know that plans will still try to exclude some necessary services, and we will keep pushing to eliminate all insurance discrimination against trans people."
Rachel See is an openly transgender federal worker and in May 2015, was denied claim for coverage of transition related care. In light of the news, See said:
"As someone who was recently forced to pay outrageous out-of-pocket costs for transition related care, I am thrilled to hear that OPM has finally taken this long-overdue step. My health care claim is as medically necessary as treatment for a broken arm or a heart condition, and federal health plans should treat all of these claims equally. For too long, transgender federal employees who sought to obtain medically necessary transition-related health care did not receive the government’s full support. I hope OPM will take action to help those who have already faced financial hardships because of discriminatory exclusions."
The National Center for Transgender Equality applauds OPM Director Katherine Archuleta and the Obama Administration for taking action against health care discrimination.
We expect new FEHB plans without blanket exclusions to begin January 1, 2016. However, NCTE urges all workers currently being denied health insurance coverage for transition-related care to refer to NCTE's Know Your Rights resources for information about how to file a complaint. | {
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ZOTAC's insanely powerful GeForce GTX 1080 PGF edition graphics card has been teased. Being one of the many custom models which will be available after launch later this month, the GeForce GTX 1080 PGF edition graphics card will come with a serious cooling design built to handle the beefy PCB under its hood. This card will be clock in at higher frequencies compared to the reference variants which will be available at $699 US.
The ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 PGF is a custom build graphics card with a beefy design!
ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 PGF Custom Graphics Card Teased - Non-Reference PCB, Beefy Cooler
While the GeForce GTX 1080 reference edition graphics card (now known as the Founders Edition) will hit store shelves on May 27th, NVIDIA partners will also have some custom models available. GALAX, Gigabyte and many others have already teased their upcoming custom models so Computex is definitely going to be interesting. All cards will feature new cooling designs and custom-built PCBs to ensure best products for enthusiasts.
The latest card to do the rounds today is from ZOTAC. The ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 will be part of the new PGF series where PGF stands for Prime Gamer Force. It sounds like a new series since we haven't seen ZOTAC use such naming schemes on their cards before. The GeForce GTX 1080 PGF looks like a beefy card and comes with some insane features. The internals of the reference GeForce GTX 1080 were covered in detail yesterday.
ZOTAC's latest PGF brand is geared at the GeForce 10 series cards such as the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070.
First of all, the specifications. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 features the GP104 GPU (GP104-400-A1) core which comprises of 2560 CUDA cores. NVIDIA’s FinFET architecture allows significant increase in clock frequency increase. We don't know the exact clock speeds for ZOTAC's model but they are said to be much higher than the reference variants which run at 1607 MHz base and 1733 MHz boost clocks. The card features 8 GB of GDDR5X (next-gen) memory featured across a 256-bit bus. The memory is slightly overclocked so we will see total band width exceeding that of a GTX 980 Ti (336 GB/s).
The cooler on this card looks to be the a slightly modified version of the current AMP! Extreme edition that is offered by ZOTAC. There's a large aluminum heatsink which incorporates five massive heatpipes. The backplate on this card is an attraction which is fully LED lit on its borders. ZOTAC's Firestorm utility will allow you to adjust colors to your preferences. You can learn more about the Firestorm utility and its features at Videocardz.
ZOTAC's Firestorm utility will allow you to change colors on the GeForce PGF series cards (Via Videocardz)
We can see that the PCB uses high quality components such as the Power Boost 2.0 capacitors which allow stable supply to the core when running under overclocked conditions. There are also a few overclocking friendly features such as a USB connector that allows you to control some functions of GPU.
The card uses a dual slot design and will be powered by dual 8-Pin connectors which means that overclockers will get full freedom in utilizing the maximum power of this board. The card sticks to the reference display out put scheme. Overall, the card looks great but we can't wait to see more of it. The ZOTAC GTX 1080 PGF being a custom design will hit retail at a price close to the $699 price point due to its non-reference build. | {
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Harju County Court on Tuesday decided to close the case of former longtime Centre Party chairman and Tallinn ex-mayor Edgar Savisaar at the request of defence lawyer Oliver Nääs in connection with the defendant's severe illness.
The court found that Savisaar suffers from severe and chronic illnesses, and as there is no hope of his recovering, he is not capable of attending hearings or serving a sentence if found guilty.
The court based its decision primarily on the expert opinion of endocrinologist Vallo Volke, according to which it could be life-threatening for Savisaar to attend hearings in his case.
Harju County Court said that although most experts have determined that Savisaar is capable of attending hearings, reality has proven otherwise, and on several occasions Savisaar's condition worsened enough during a hearing that h had to be transported to the hospital for treatment, adding that there was no reason to call into question the competence of the paramedics.
The court did not agree with the prosecution's claims that Savisaar only goes to the hospital ahead of hearings, as the latter has been hospitalised at other times as well. The court also said that Savisaar's memory is also not that which it used to be, and that his illness is irreversible, and so the case has to be closed.
Nääs told the court that the next step for Savisaar will be seeking compensation for defence costs as well as the return of money confiscated from him during the pretrial investigation.
During a search conducted on 22 September, 2015, 300,000 Estonian kroons (or approximately €19,200) as well as €186,000 were found and confiscated from Savisaar.
Nääs sought closure of case
Harju County Court on Tuesday began discussing the most recent medical assessment of former longtime Centre Party chairman and Tallinn ex-mayor Edgar Savisaar, who is on trial for corruption-related charges, and how the trial would continue. Savisaar himself was absent from court, as he is in the hospital in Jõgeva.
Defence lawyer Oliver Nääs sought the termination of the proceeding in connection to Savisaar for health-related reasons, noting that the stress caused by the trial could cause his client's death.
Nääs cited the expert opinion of endocrinologist Vallo Volke, who had participated in the medical assessment, noting that Volke was the only committee member to assess Savisaar's health from an endocrinological standpoint.
Chief State Prosecutor Steven-Hristo Evestus noted that six experts found that Savisaar was fit to stand trial. He believed that as Savisaar is currently hospitalised, the hearings should be rescheduled.
Committee member disagrees with consensus
A medical assessment recently conducted by the medical committee of the Estonian Forensic Science Institute (EKEI) declared Savisaar, 68, medically fit to stand trial, with certain concessions.
At the same tie, the assessment, which Savisaar granted ERR's online news portal permission to publish in full, revealed that committee member and endocrinologist Vallo Volke believed that the ex-mayor's participation in the trial could be life-threatening.
"Edgar Savisaar is not capable of standing trial, as this is a patient whose risk of a new cardiovascular attack or death is incredibly high," Volke stated.
This February, Harju County Court ordered a new medical assessment for Savisaar which was to determine whether Savisaar was medically fit to stand trial.
The defendant's health became an issue after multiple instances of having to be taken to the hospital in the middle of a hearing and the resulting delays to the trial.
Peep Põdder, Savisaar's personal doctor, has previously noted that his patient's ability to participate in his trial was questionable due to the state of his health.
In the medical assessment conducted last year, the doctors serving on the committee recommended that Savisaar can be questioned for a period of up to 45-60 minutes at a time, which should be followed by a half-hour break.
Trial began last June
The trial of Savisaar and a number of businessmen began in Harju County Court on June 12, 2017, when the defendents confirmed that they understood the charges against them but did not plead guilty. Only Villu Reiljan pleaded guilty, and the court decided to separate materials concerning him from the larger case for the purposes of a plea deal.
Witnesses who had testified in the trial thus far included businessmen Paavo Pettai and Tarvo Teder, MP Siret Kotka-Repinski, acting mayor of Tallinn Taavi Aas, former Minister of the Interior Ain Seppik, Tallinn city secretary Toomas Sepp and Center Party Secretary General Mihhail Korb. The court has likewise heard testimony from a number of other witnesses, including several subordinates of businessman Alexander Kofkin, employees of Hillar Teder's companies as well as city officials.
Of the defendants, Reiljan and former Tallinn official Priit Kutser had also testified. Kutser hoped that his case would be closed for reasons of expediency, but the Office of the Prosecutor General did not agree. Reiljan has since been found guilty of arranging a bribe and sentenced to a pecuniary punishment.
The court has also been able to listen to records of audio surveillance carried out on the defendants as well as review written evidence.
The county court likewise said it did not agree to the applications of some of the defense attorneys to close the defendants' cases for reasons of expediency.
"Ending proceedings under this motive would only be in question as a last resort and the court believes that there is currently no reason to employ such a last resort, first and foremost because the court currently lacks a comprehensive overview of the volume of the case," Harju County Court had said. "Currently, the decision to end proceedings for reasons of expediency is premature."
The court has also investigated written evidence regarding Savisaar's financial affairs, disclosing that Savisaar was interested in owning cash and allowed others to pay for his everyday domestic expenses.
Trial delayed by repeated hospitalizations
The condition of Savisaar's health had worsened on several occasions during the course of the trial, including on two occasions over last summer, in June and again in August, when hearings were cut short after Savisaar was taken to the hospital.
After the second such instance, Põdder had told BNS that Savisaar's general health condition concerned him significantly as a doctor. "This will not end well," he commented.
The trial was delayed once more in December and again in January after Savisaar's health warranted his return to the hospital. After the most recent postponement, Evestus said that the prosecution wanted Põdder to appear before the court.
Thus far, all medical assessments concerning Savisaar's appearances in court have been carried out by Põdder, BNS noted last week.
The fact that Savisaar must stand trial was established at the beginning of June last year, when a four-member expert committee at the Estonian Forensic Science Institute determined that the suspended mayor is able to attend the hearings of the graft case and bear liability in spite of his medical condition.
Charges
The Office of the Prosecutor General has brought charges against Savisaar for accepting bribes, money laundering, embezzlement, and accepting prohibited donations for the Center Party. The same charges have been lodged against Alexander Kofkin, Vello Kunman, Villu Reiljan, Hillar Teder, Kalev Kallo, Aivar Tuulberg, Priit Kutser as well as the Center Party itself. | {
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Nashville's Google Fiber rollout has hit a pair of snags: rival carriers are, and this may surprise you, stalling the installation of lines needed for Google's new broadband network.
AT&T in particular is battling Google's efforts to run cables from telephone poles around Music City, in Tennessee, US.
The issue centers around access to the poles and the effect the installation of new cable has on existing lines. Under Nashville city laws, carriers that wish to string new cables have to notify all other companies using that pole and give them time to move their lines to make room.
Arguing that this process has slowed the Fiber rollout to a crawl, Google wants a new ordinance that would allow it to move the other cables itself. AT&T, meanwhile, is lining up against the effort on the grounds that Google would be taking work away from its union network technicians by letting its own non-union contractors move AT&T lines.
Fun fact: the huge limestone bed beneath Nashville means operators have no choice but to string above-ground cable in most of the city.
"Just because you spell your name with eight different colors doesn't mean you can't play by the rules that everybody else has to fucking play by," one wag observing the spat told the Nashville Scene.
Google, meanwhile, is doing its best to show that it doesn't need anyone else's help with fumbling the Nashville rollout. On Saturday, streets were closed for several hours after a crew tasked with laying the below-ground cable portion of the Fiber network accidentally severed a gas line.
The ruptured line forced police to close an intersection and call in the gas company to shut off and repair the broken pipes. This is, to our knowledge, the fifth time Fiber contractors have broken a gas, water or power line since the project began in 2015. ® | {
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Source: Xinhua| 2019-04-09 10:47:54|Editor: Liangyu
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WASHINGTON, April 8 (Xinhua) -- China is catching up with the United States in innovation, according to the indicators shown in an American think tank report released Monday.
China during the past decade has been closing gaps with the United States rapidly and now even leads the latter in some indicators, says the report published by Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF).
In 2017, China's investment in R&D was 33 percent less than that invested in the United States. But by 2017, China had significantly closed the gap by reaching 76 percent of U.S. levels and surpassing the EU, according to the report.
Chinese government institutions spent more on R&D as a share of GDP than the United States, going from 84 percent of the U.S. levels in 2007 to 119 percent in 2017.
Chinese venture capital markets were extremely small in 2006, at 3.7 percent of U.S. venture capital funding. But in 2016, venture capital firms in China provided half as much funding as the firms did in the United States.
China's research universities scored just 9.5 percent of that of the United States in 2009, but closed the gap to 28 percent by 2018, based on the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities.
In 2004, Chinese articles were cited only 62 percent as frequently as the average article was cited globally in the three years following publication, compared with 141 percent for U.S. articles. By 2014, however, Chinese articles had nearly reached the global average, at 96 percent of the expected citations.
In 2006, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted 1,066 Chinese patents, 1.2 percent of which went to U.S. inventors while in 2016, the number had risen to more than 11,000, the equivalent of 8 percent of U.S. patents.
Also, China's high-tech manufacturing value-added grew from 30 percent in 2006 to 77 percent in 2016. If this growth rate were to continue, China would exceed the United States in high-tech manufacturing value-added by 2020.
The report concludes that considering China a copier is misconception and China can and does innovate. The report's co-author Robert Atkinson, ITIF president, calls for an American national innovation and competitiveness strategy to maintain the country's leadership. | {
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We live in a culture surrounded by misinformation and doubt when it comes to breastfeeding. We are just now raising awareness that 'breast is best' in a culture that has been led to believe for years, by the formula industry, that mothers in some way or another are incapable of providing proper nutrition for their babies, or that for some reason breast feeding is indecent or offensive.One of the biggest problems still out there is the doubt of a new mother being able to supply enough milk for her children. I was shocked to find out that Target sells a “Breastfeeding Assessment Test” that claims to tell mom’s if they are producing enough milk. This "test" relies on the mother pumping milk to see if she is producing "enough". A pump is not a baby. The fact is that most women can not pump the same quantity of breast milk that they produce by nursing directly.
This product preys on and profits from the doubt and insecurities of a new mother and will only cast doubt on her ability to successfully breastfeed.
If a mother is concerned about her production she should spend her money on a lactation consultant or someone qualified to teach her how to know if her baby is getting enough to eat not waste it on a scam which will only urge her to turn to formula.
Please sign my petition to tell Target they should show their support for breastfeeding mothers by removing this product and stop supporting a company who is only trying to profit from and mislead a new mother.
Those interested in keeping up to date with this can "like" our page on Facebook. "Mothers Against Milkscreen Breastfeeding Assessment Test". Get in touch with us at [email protected]. | {
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LAS VEGAS — The NFL has levied hefty fines against the New Orleans Saints and coach Sean Payton after they determined that Payton failed to properly wear his face covering on Monday night, the NFL Network's Tom Pelissero reported Tuesday afternoon. Read the full story | {
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SAN DIEGO, CA - JULY 12: Kristian Nairn attends WIRED Cafe at Comic-Con held at Palm Terrace at the Omni Hotel on July 12, 2012 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Jerod Harris/Getty Images for WIRED)
It seems that there is more to gentle giant Hodor from Game of Thrones than many would expect.
Kristian Nairn, the Northern Irish actor who plays him, is in fact a house music aficionado and a regular on the Belfast DJ circuit.
Now, in a nod to the hit fantasy TV series he stars in, Nairn is embarking on an Australian tour entitled Rave of Thrones and promising to play “the deepest house in all the seven kingdoms”.
Club promoters have hinted at “a range of surprise guests and garnishings” and fans are expected to rock up in Game of Thrones fancy dress.
Expand Close Promotional poster for Kristian Nairn's 'Rave of Thrones' DJ tour / Facebook
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Anyone who ignores the compulsory theme faces the wrath of “the Hand of the King” so, be warned, partygoers.
“For one night only, in every capital across this land, venues will be transformed into the finest halls of Westeros,” organisers announced.
Nairn told Red Dot Diva in 2012 that he sees acting and DJing as similar processes with “slightly different components”.
“When DJing I am definitely trying to keep my mind very much switched on and for Hodor it’s really the opposite,” he said.
“I still want to be present in the scene and to react well to what is happening because I believe Hodor is a great reactor. I don’t think too much is planned in his head!”
Nobody has a clue what to expect from this bizarre event, but a house remix of Sigur Ros’ “The Rains of Castamere” from King Joffrey’s wedding could be on the cards, along with some “chunky, deep, dark” tunes, “always with attitude”.
In March, Game of Thrones producers released a hip-hop mix tape inspired by the characters, with Outkast's Big Boi and rapper Common among the contributors.
Coldplay, The National and Snow Patrol have all joined Sigur Ros as guest stars for past episodes, while Lily Allen and Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks have voiced their enthusiasm to write for the soundtrack.
Independent.co.uk
Online Editors | {
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The Da Bird Super Pack (Includes 1 Da Bird Original 36" Single Pole Cat Toy, Feather Refill, Sparkly Attachment, Kitty Puff Attachment & Peacock Feather) Single piece 36" pole w/Guinea Feather refill attached 3 EXTRA attachments: Kitty Puff, Sparkly & Natural Guinea Feather Refill Cats love peacock feathers! Da Bird Mimics the Look & Sound of a Real Bird in Flight Cats are so crazy about this toy that you have to hide it when not in use | {
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"Some might call it prostitution. I call it a 'mutually beneficial arrangement' that pays for my killer wardrobe." We just call it bizarre: a college student justifies her life as a professional mistress on The Daily Beast. Her verdict? Beats waitressing!
"Melissa Beech" is a college student from a privileged background. "I was blessed to have been raised with class, sent to the best schools, and taught to be well read, well spoken and well traveled." Yet the world of higher learning proves a rude awakening!
But when I got to college, I spent the first two years straining for financial independence. I tried working, but in retail, surrounded by temptation all day, I spent more than I made. Waiting tables was exhausting. I went on several job interviews, but all of the internships were unpaid. As my years in college wore on it was evident that the job market was sliding into decline. When the economic climate grew worse, my friends panicked that their resumes and high GPAs wouldn't be enough to give them a leg up on the competition, and my goal became getting my foot in the door before everyone else.
What's a girl to do? She goes on an interview and the guy - "in his early thirties, single and successful" -offers her a job as his mistress instead. Turns out the dude's in this businesslike world of mistresses and sugar-daddies where, as in 18th century London, these arrangements are understood.
There's even a social networking website that connects sugar daddies and their beneficiaries. This man told me about it: SeekingArrangement.com. He had been referred to it by a close friend who was a hedge fund manager. At his urging, I logged onto the site and looked at his profile. It didn't have a picture, for privacy reasons. But it did contain information: his marital status (single), the industry he worked in (media and communications), and-a key element-his salary (seven figures). I was encouraged by the fact that the website vets its clients and offers only Certified Sugar Daddies, whose tax returns have been carefully examined so you know that you're getting. I also learned that he was attracted to bright, smart women-he wasn't in the market for the dumb bombshell. His profile said he wanted more of "a Jackie Kennedy than a Marilyn Monroe." I fit the type.
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Basically, she'll be his girlfriend, and he'll support her. She asks that they wait to get to know each other before sleeping together; he accedes.
As for the allowance, he doesn't just cut me a check. He simply ensures that I need never worry about expenses. I rent a $1,600 apartment in the city, for which he pays the rent in full. I carry an AmEx Black card in both our names, and use it for things like shopping, spa trips, manicures, and tanning; the bill goes to him. And the company car I drive costs him around $700 a month for the lease and the insurance. I've even managed to build up a little nest egg over the past year – at his insistence – putting away around $12,000. All in all, he probably spends in the ballpark of $5,000 a month on my lifestyle.
It seems hard to believe that this scenario could actually inspire moral outrage, even from those who consider it to be prostitution: neither party is married, and the arrangement is, as she says, mutually beneficial. (And if she and her benefactor are suffering from the now-official recession - as many mistresses apparently are - she gives no indication.) More than anything, it seems odd and unsatisfying - a bloodless compromise between a relationship and a business transaction. But whatever one thinks about her choices, her justifications ring false to any young woman who's been strapped for cash in college - which is to say, most of us. Retail tempted her? Waitressing exhausted her? Please. These easy rationales lose her a lot of sympathy pretty quickly. And her defensive claims that although "he didn't hire me for the internship position, but because of him I have had several internships at well-known PR companies, and have plenty of networking opportunities, shoring up my future prospects for when I graduate this spring" don't win much sympathy, either. If this was all some plan to bolster her resume, it seems like there are more direct ways - and this can't bring much comfort to the qualified young women who failed to obtain the same jobs because, while they may have been restrained enough to work a retail job, they didn't have the prescience to nab a sugar daddy. If she wants to be some emotionally disconnected rich guy's mistress, it's her prerogative - it's not like couples haven't been doing this for centuries - but attempting to justify it on professional grounds is an insult to the rest of us.
Girly Golddiggers Are Reeling From The Recession "Everyone is looking for handsome, rich and charming men but there are less and less of them to go… Read more
My Sugar Daddy [Daily Beast]
Earlier: Girly Golddiggers Are Reeling From The Recession | {
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Italy's Berlusconi faces key vote amid economy fears Published duration 8 November 2011
image caption Mr Berlusconi faces mounting pressure to resign
Italy's PM Silvio Berlusconi is facing a crucial vote on the budget, amid fears that Italy could be the next victim of the eurozone debt crisis.
Italian media say his main coalition partner, Northern League leader Umberto Bossi, has called on him to resign.
Mr Berlusconi, who has survived dozens of confidence votes during his tenure, has insisted he will not resign.
Italian government borrowing costs spiked at a new record of 6.74% on Tuesday because of the crisis.
European Union finance ministers are meeting in Brussels for talks.
Concerns over Italy are overshadowing developments in Greece, where political leaders are wrangling over the formation of a new unity government to impose austerity measures in return for international loans.
Defections
Italian lawmakers were expected to gather at about 1500 GMT on approving the Italian state financing bill, usually a procedural vote but one which has come sharply into focus amid the current debt crisis.
Last month, the vote of the same measure failed by one vote. Italy's Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti has already left the talks in Brussels to return to Rome to take part.
Several MPs from Mr Berlusconi's party have defected over recent days. Several more are reported to be considering defecting or voting against him, Italian media reports.
Mr Berlusconi has remained defiant, insisting that his government has all the support it needs but he held three hours of crisis talks with his main coalition partner, the Northern League and representatives from his own party late into the night on Monday.
Further talks are expected after the results of Tuesday's vote become clear.
Mr Berlusconi is reported to be short of the 316 votes needed to prove that he still has a majority.
According to La Repubblica, he has invited six of his own MPs who published a letter urging him to resign to a meeting ahead of the vote, to try and convince them to re-enter the fold.
But analysts say Mr Berlusconi may still win the vote as the centre-left may abstain, allowing the essential measure to pass.
Were he to lose, he could either resign immediately or be ordered by President Giorgio Napolitano to call a confidence vote.
His main coalition partner, the Northern League, said the party would not accept a temporary, technocrat government and would push for immediate fresh elections.
"We think elections are the only way, the only solution for the country," spokeswoman Nicoletta Maggi told the BBC. "The people must decide who is going to rule them, nobody else, through the vote."
'Baseless rumours'
On Monday, a defiant Mr Berlusconi dismissed talk of his possible resignation as "baseless".
"I don't understand how rumours of my resignation are circulating," Mr Berlusconi was quoted as saying by Libero newspaper.
If Mr Berlusconi were to lose the budget vote then it is hard to see how he could continue in power for long, says the BBC's Alan Johnston in Rome.
Our correspondent says it is certainly worth remembering that Mr Berlusconi is a master deal-maker and political infighter, having survived more than 50 confidence motions in the past.
But this crisis is different as it goes beyond Italian politics - it is instead linked to the international money markets, which have lost faith in Mr Berlusconi's ability to fix Italy's economy, our correspondent says.
The markets are now forcing this country to pay interest rates that could eventually ruin it, which means the pressure on Mr Berlusconi is extraordinary, he adds.
While Italy's deficit is relatively low, investors are concerned that the combination of Italy's low growth rate and 1.9tn euro ($2.6tn) debt could make it the next to fall in the eurozone debt crisis.
Shortly after markets opened on Tuesday, Italian 10-year bond yields spiked at 6.74%, before slipping back to 6.6%.
This is its highest level since the euro was established in 1999 and close to the 7% threshold which many analysts believe could lead to a so-called "buyers' strike" where investors take fright and refuse to buy. This was interest rate level at which Ireland and Portugal were forced to accept bailouts.
Approval rating drops
Mr Berlusconi has been the dominant figure in Italian politics for the best part of two decades, but lately his approval rating has hit a record low of 22%.
Notwithstanding the effects of the debt crisis, the multi-billionaire leader is currently a defendant in three trials for bribery, tax fraud, abuse of power and paying for sex with a 17-year-old girl.
On Monday, finance ministers from the eurozone met in Brussels to push ahead with a deal put together late last month.
After their meeting they called on the new government of Greece to approve in writing the terms of the international bailout in exchange for the release of the next tranche of funds.
Crisis jargon buster Use the dropdown for easy-to-understand explanations of key financial terms: AAA-rating AAA-rating The best credit rating that can be given to a borrower's debts, indicating that the risk of borrowing defaulting is minuscule.
They also said they welcomed the monitoring of Italy to reassure the markets, and said they were seeking further clarification of when it would pass the economic reforms it has promised.
The European Union's Economic Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn said he wanted answers from Italy by the end of the week. | {
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On Friday, the House of Representatives voted to block Planned Parenthood’s federal funding for a year. The vote was 241-187, but the Senate Democrats have the votes to block the bill that was just placed, and the White House is backing the Democrats with a promise to veto.
President Obama is strongly against the vote to de-fund Planned Parenthood and issues a statement that said he would veto the House bill that not only strips the federal funding for Planned Parenthood but also puts new restrictions on abortions, according to the Huffington Post.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that if the bill was passed, then 630,000 people would lose access to health care services, many of those people being women.
In a statement The White House said, “Planned Parenthood uses both Federal and non-Federal funds to prove a range of important preventive care and health services, including health screenings, vaccinations, and check-ups to millions of men and women who visit their health centers annually. Longstanding Federal policy already prohibits the use of Federal funds for abortions, except in cases of rape or incest or when the life of a woman would be endangered. By eliminating Federal funding for a major provider of health care, H.R. 3134 would limit access to health care for men, women, and families across the Nation, and would disproportionately impact low-income individuals.”
Many U.S. Representatives took to their Facebooks today to express why they voted in favor of the bill, and the internet blew up with the announcement that the bill had passed. The hashtag #IstandwithPP began to trend while people fought against the House’s decision to defund Planned Parenthood.
The House voted to defund Planned Parenthood. If you stand for choice, affordable healthcare & children who are loved, act now #IStandWithPP — Livia Scott (@LiviaLove) September 18, 2015
People that want to de-fund Planned Parenthood are obtuse and don't like facts that go against their worldview. — Kyle Croft (@mrcroft92) September 18, 2015
. @PPFA #IStandWithPP because you were my only resource for healthcare & real facts in my teens & 20s. Planned Parenthood saved my life. — fifi fleshwound (@stupid_america) September 18, 2015
#standwithpp MT @annfriedman: This is not just about abortion and it's not just about low-income women's health care. http://t.co/yxGgacXLe3 — Katelyn Burkhart (@katelynburkhart) September 18, 2015
Planned Parenthood encouraged their supporters to fight back against the bill and take a stand against the “attacks on reproductive health” and also encouraged the hashtag #istandwithPP to be used when discussing the new bill being passed.
The White House has not made a statement yet on the Planned Parenthood bill being passed.
[Image by Andrew Burton/Getty Images] | {
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A young man who was raised in Jordan and attended university in Syria and then Canada discovered recently that he is Jewish because he has a Jewish grandmother. This new knowledge turned him from hating Jews to serving as an anti- United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) activist.
#Muslim #Palestinian was raised to hate #Jews . At age 26 he finds out that he himself is Jewish. In his interview he reveals what he was taught about Jews & sheds some light on the connection between @UNRWA 's funding to financing terrorism & the Palestinian leadership's wealth. pic.twitter.com/ttIkvJMn0T February 19, 2019 Mordechai Yosef’s father was born in 1945 in Beit She'an, a city in the Northern District of Israel. In 1948, during the War of Independence, his father’s family fled Israel for Jordan.
In an interview with Israel's Channel 20, the young man, who now goes by the Hebrew name Mordechai Yosef, tells his story.Mordechai Yosef’s father was born in 1945 in Beit She'an, a city in the Northern District of Israel. In 1948, during the War of Independence, his father’s family fled Israel for Jordan.
“The Arab armies told us to leave so they could go and kill the Jews and kick their a**, and then you could go back and take all the property of the Jewish people,” he recounts. “You know, the rest is history. We were stuck in Jordan, put in a refugee camp. My dad suffered from this. He never forgot. He was three-and-a-half years old.”
Mordechai Yosef said that growing up he was taught that Jews were pigs and monkey and that they wanted only to kill Palestinians.
“In math class, in Kuwait, a teacher would walk in and ask: ‘What if one bomb could kill five Jews? How many Jews could you kill with seven bombs?” he described.
But recently, while studying at a Canadian university, Mordechai Yosef bumped into a man wearing a kippah, who turned out to be Chabad. They sat down for a minute and the Chabad emissary explained to him that by Jewish law, if he has a Jewish grandmother this would mean he is Jewish.
“I thought this guy was crazy or a liar. I lived all my life hating Jews,” Mordechai Yosef said. “I was looking at myself right now as an enemy.”
The discovery led the young man to do more research into the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He discovered that $1.2 billion dollars is given annually to UNRWA and he told the interviewer in the video that this money is being misused.
“We don’t get the money directly, the money goes to the PA [Palestinian Authority] – goes to yimach shemo Arafat, goes to [Palestinian Authority President] Abu Mazen,” he said. “How do you think Abu Mazen builds all these hours and buys a private plane? There is a system.
“How do you think $400 million goes to pay the terrorists that stab people in the street and blow up and kill Jews?” he continues. “You kill Jews, you get money. You work hard, you don’t find anything.”
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A young woman in Saudi Arabia was arrested on Monday for wearing “suggestive clothing” after a Snapchat video emerged of her wearing a miniskirt, state media confirmed.
The video, in which the young woman can be seen strolling through an ancient fort in Ushayqir, Hadj province wearing a miniskirt and a crop top, quickly went viral after being posted to Snapchat by a popular user named Khulood.
يجب ان لاتطلع في بلد محافظ بهذا الشكل ، عليها احترام القوانين ، ولاا سوف يكون مصيرها معروف#مطلوب_محاكمة_مودل_خلود
https://t.co/1ygF1UCD53 — Fawaz X (@fa_waily) July 16, 2017
The video split opinion across Saudi Arabia, which has strict Islamic laws concerning women’s clothing. Typically, women are expected to wear a niqab as well as full-length robes, despite an average daily temperature of 97 degrees F.
On Sunday, a spokesperson for the Presidency of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, which serves as the country’s religious police, confirmed they were investigating the issue and taking the “necessary steps” to address a video depicting a “girl in offensive clothing.”
“Just like we call on people to respect the laws of countries they travel to, people must also respect the laws of this country,” Saudi journalist Ibrahim al-Munayif wrote on Twitter.
Meanwhile on Twitter, angered Saudis called for the woman’s arrest, even initiating the hashtag “Demand_the_trial_of_Model_Khulood.”
However, female academic Amal al-Hazzani warned that the country must adapt if it wants to attract foreigners. “Let’s suppose this is an Italian tourist who wanted to know about our great past as part of our 2030 vision of not relying only on oil. Get used to that,” he wrote.
“If she was a foreigner, they would sing about the beauty of her waist and the enchantment of her eyes… But because she is Saudi they are calling for her arrest,” another tweet read.
Some have speculated that the video might be a deliberate protest against the country’s ingrained misogyny, given that it was filmed in Hadj province, known for its ultra-conservative traditions and array of Wahhabi Islamic leaders.
The woman reportedly told police that she was accompanied by a male throughout her visit, thus abiding the country’s male guardianship system, while claiming that she did not upload the video herself.
Her fate, for the meantime, remains unclear.
Saudi Arabia is notorious for its regressive treatment of women, where Sharia Law dictates that women cannot freely interact with men, drive a car, practice sports or go for a swim. All women must also wear a hijab, while many are forced to wear burqas, where only their eyes are visible.
During President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia in May, First Lady Melania Trump and first daughter Ivanka Trump attracted headlines after they chose not to wear headscarves throughout their visit, instead choosing modest dresses.
The needs of a 21st-century economy appear to be pressuring Saudi Arabia to modernize its attitudes. In April, the Saudi leadership officially approved the ‘Vision 2030’ program, which alongside increasing economic growth seeks to loosen some of the rules around women’s rights.
You can follow Ben Kew on Facebook, on Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at [email protected] | {
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Senate Democrats can ask Gorsuch to expand on his views of what standard has to be met for a news organization to be sued for libeling a public official, since Trump has hinted at crackdowns on news media that displease him. They can ask questions designed to gauge how he might view constitutional challenges towards national security measures undertaken by the president that appear to be intended to discriminate toward Muslims (including but not limited to the executive order, since more policies like this one might be in the offing, particularly if there is a terrorist attack). And Democrats can ask Gorsuch for a general statement of principle as to how he views the role of the judiciary in the face of naked authoritarian behavior by the executive branch.
That last bit, that overreach by the executive branch, is particularly important here. Back in the day, Gorsuch was in the "it's not illegal if the president does it" crowd. He was just a college student when he wrote that, yes, but there's been little to suggest in his writings since that he's evolved away from a Scalia-like devotion to far-right causes. It’s the kind of ideology that allows a smart justice to twist and turn the law to his own political devices. That's what Senate Democrats need to deeply probe with Gorsuch.
Because he's unlikely to pass up this golden ticket to the Supreme Court, even though he must realize he'd serve his entire term with an asterisk by his name. Being picked by what is easily the most authoritarian, corrupt, ignorant and just downright dangerous executive we've ever had is not much of a way to cement a legacy. | {
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To join Mama Dragons you will go through a vetting process to ensure you will benefit from this group and our mission. The buttons below will take you to our main closed Facebook group or our spanish-speaking closed Facebook group. Answer the questions and look for a Facebook Messenger message from our team. | {
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Jack Goldsmith’s defense of Attorney General Barr’s handling of the Mueller report is typically thoughtful but ultimately unpersuasive. While certain aspects of Barr’s behavior could be defensible if they stood alone, taken as a whole his course of conduct—what he said, how he said it and what he didn’t say—shows that Barr is not merely “defen[ding] the presidency” institutionally, as Goldsmith argues, but defending this particular president politically. I want to highlight a few points that undercut the argument that Barr has been acting in good faith.
Let’s start with what Goldsmith’s article largely fails to discuss: Barr’s April 18 press conference. In this press conference, Barr discussed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings selectively and sometimes misleadingly—but always in a way that aligned with President Trump’s position. To give a few examples:
Barr announced that Mueller found “substantial evidence to show that the President was frustrated and angered” by an investigation that was “undermining his presidency,” suggesting that “this evidence of non-corrupt motives weighs heavily against any allegation that the President had a corrupt intent to obstruct the investigation.” In fact, Mueller actually said that while “[s]ome evidence indicates that the President believed that the erroneous perception he was under investigation harmed his ability to manage domestic and foreign affairs ... [o]ther evidence ... indicates that the President wanted to protect himself from an investigation into his campaign.” In other words, Barr gave only half the picture.
Barr said that “the President took no act that in fact deprived the Special Counsel of the documents and witnesses necessary to complete his investigation.” As Goldsmith concedes, Barr ignored the president’s refusal to be interviewed as well as Mueller’s conclusion that Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort lied to the government after statements by the president that “had the potential to influence Manafort’s decision whether to cooperate with the government.”
When asked whether the Justice Department’s policy against indicting a sitting president “had anything to do with” Mueller’s refusal to reach a decision on obstruction of justice, Barr responded that Mueller “made it very clear that ... [h]e was not saying that but for the [Office of Legal Counsel] OLC opinion, he would have found a crime.” Barr’s statement may be literally true, but given that Mueller’s actions derived entirely from his view that the OLC opinion precluded prosecution, it was misleading.
Finally, Barr emphasized both in his letter and at his press conference that Mueller did not find a basis to charge Americans with conspiring with the Russians to affect our election. But he passed over Mueller’s cautions that “[a] statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts,” and that because of lack of access to certain witnesses and documents, Mueller “cannot rule out the possibility that the unavailable information would shed additional light on (or cast in a new light) the events described in the report.” Instead, Barr overstated Mueller’s findings, saying that “there was in fact no collusion” and that “we now know that the Russian operatives who perpetrated these schemes did not have the cooperation of President Trump or the Trump campaign.”
But even apart from Barr’s distortions of Mueller’s findings, the critical question is why Barr felt it was necessary to have a press conference to summarize Mueller’s report at all. In his March 24 letter, Barr said that it would not be “in the public’s interest” for him to “summarize the full report” because “[e]veryone will soon be able to read it on their own.” If it was not in the public interest to summarize the report three and a half weeks before its release, what—other than a desire to “spin” the contents of the damaging report in the president’s favor—made it in the public interest to do so 90 minutes before its release? Yes, the report itself was to be released shortly, but Barr surely knew that his statements would both shape initial perceptions of the report and be seized upon by the president in his defense—as they were.
Second, Goldsmith seems to agree with Barr’s criticism of Mueller for failing to make a determination as to whether or not the president obstructed justice. According to Goldsmith, a prosecutor’s job is to decide “whether or not there is a crime.”
Yet a prosecutor’s job is not to decide in the abstract whether or not a crime was committed, but to decide whether or not to bring criminal charges. That includes not just a determination of whether a crime was committed but also an assessment of whether prosecution would be in the public interest and consistent with Department of Justice policy.
As many others have noted, it is a fair reading of Mueller’s report that he felt that the evidence warranted indicting the president for obstruction of justice. Justice Department policy prevented Mueller from doing so. However, that policy applies only when the president holds office. At a minimum, President Trump would become subject to indictment if he is defeated in 2020—but that indictment would come from someone other than Mueller.
It is not clear what Barr and Goldsmith believe Mueller should have done given these circumstances. Mueller would undoubtedly have been criticized if he reported that he thought the president had committed a crime but did not indict him. Nor, given his apparent view of the facts, could Mueller exonerate the president. In testimony before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Barr suggested that Mueller should have shut down his investigation if he felt he could not indict the president. But if this rule were applied consistently, it would have precluded Mueller from finding that the evidence did not support charges of conspiracy—unless Barr believes that investigations should be shut down only if they tend to establish the president’s guilt.
The approach Mueller chose was a responsible one. He memorialized the results of his extensive investigation in what Barr repeatedly emphasizes was a confidential memorandum to him, so that a prosecution decision could be made when it became possible to do so. Indeed, that is exactly how Mueller characterized what he did: “[W]e conducted a thorough factual investigation in order to preserve the evidence when memories were fresh and documentary materials were available.” Media reports, not Mueller himself, have made the claim that Mueller’s office was, in Goldsmith’s words, “making an impeachment referral.”
Third, Goldsmith is too charitable in his assessment of Barr’s statement that the attorney general believes there was “spying” on the Trump campaign. To begin with, Barr’s suggestion that this was just an “offhand” remark is belied by the video of his testimony, which shows that he paused and thought before answering the question.
But more importantly, the effort to equate the term “spying” with “court-authorized surveillance” ignores both the current political context and the connotation of the term “spying.” The average citizen surely understands the phrase “spying on political campaigns” to mean Watergate-style dirty tricks: a surreptitious effort to learn what an opponent’s strategy is. And no one—not even the president’s most dedicated defenders—has found any evidence that that occurred here. Rather than being an effort to pry into political activities, the FBI’s activities were a counterintelligence investigation directed at identifying the scope of Russian activities and whether any Americans were working with them to undermine our election process. As with Barr’s use of the term “collusion,” his language seems calculated to lend political support to the president.
A final problem with Barr’s approach to the Mueller report is the things he hasn’t said. He could have taken the opportunity presented by Mueller’s devastating findings about Russian interference with our election to defend his own agency and its personnel—to note the indisputable fact that the FBI would have been derelict in its duty if it failed to investigate that interference and the credible information suggesting that Americans might be working with the Russian government or its agents. He did not. He could have disassociated himself from the president’s stated view that an attorney general’s job is to protect the president and reiterated that the Department of Justice’s independence from political pressure is critical to its acceptance by the public. He did not. His consistent choice instead to provide political cover to the president is disappointing. | {
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There's nothing like the taste of a freshly picked tomato.
Growing your own tomatoes is simple and just a couple of plants will reward you with plenty of delicious tomatoes in the summer.
In order to grow a really, great tomato plant without deficiencies or diseases, it’s important to plant it correctly.
About 7-10 days before planting your tomatoes seedlings outdoors,help acclimate them to temperatures, sunlight, and wind.
This is the process of hardening off, or gradually acclimating you tomato seedlings to outdoor conditions. These plants have spent their short lives in a warm, sunny, protected place and won't fare well if you don't expose them slowly to the elements.
Before you intend to plant, put your transplants outdoors in an area where they'll be protected from the direct sunlight and wind. Leave them out for a few hours and bring them back inside. Repeat this each day, gradually increasing the amount of time they're outside and the degree of exposure to sun and wind.
Gradual exposure helps your plants toughen up and reduces the possibility of injury. With proper hardening off, they’ll have an easier transition to the garden and begin producing fruit sooner.
After a week, leave the transplants out overnight.
Planting Tomato Plants
Soil is a main factor in planting nearly all types of tomatoes. Here are some tips for preparing soil and produce healthy organic tomatoes.
1:
Test the soil's acidity.
You should check the pH level in your garden every three to five years. You can test it with an inexpensive kit from a garden center.
Tomatoes like their soil pH around 6.0 to 6.8.
If your soil pH is too low (too acid), you'll need to add lime to the soil to bring the pH back into the proper range
2:
When you’re growing tomatoes, the deeper their root systems. The more nutrients they can pull from the soil, larger, more vigorous and more resilient your tomato plants will be.
Before transplanting tomatoes, it's a good idea to work the soil until it's loose to a depth of six to eight inches. You can do the work with a garden fork. The tomato roots will be able to expand quickly in the loose earth and you'll also uproot and kill many weeds.
3:
Tomatoes grow well in moderately fertile soil with lots of organic matter. You can incorporate compost when you prepare the soil. No matter what kind of soil you have in your garden, you can shape it into a great home for your tomatoes. Both light, sandy soils that drain too rapidly and heavy, clay soils that take forever to drain and warm up in spring can be improved with the addition of organic matter such leaves or compost.
4:
Assuming you have provided rich well-drained soil, pick a sunny spot and don’t plant your tomatoes too close together. Tomato plants thrive in full sun and are healthier when provided good air circulation.
Pick a location that gets at least 6 hours of sunlight each day to plant your plants. Till the soil with a hand shovel and mix in some manure, fertilizer, or compost. Dig holes deep enough to accommodate your transplants.
Carefully remove the plant by holding it at the base, turning it upside down, and sliding off the pot.
5: Set the plant in the hole deeply enough so that two-thirds of it is buried. Roots will sprout all along the buried stem to make a stronger plant. You can pinch off the lower leaves if you prefer, but it is not necessary.
Tomatoes have the ability to grow roots along their stems, so when planting tomato plants, plant deep; right up to the first set of leaves. This takes care of those leggy tomato seedlings. If the plant is too long and wobbly, dig a small trench and lay the plant on its side, gently bending it into a right angle. Bury the stem in this position leaving those first two leaves exposed. Some gardeners believe those leggy starters will form a healthier plant than those with a more compact form.
After transplanting your seedlings into the garden, water well aroud your new plants. For the first 2 weeks after planting, water a little bit every day or every other day if it doesn’t rain, to get the plants established.
6: Stake or cage all tomatoes with the exception of small bush or patio varieties, which can often support themselves. Waiting a few weeks after planting to install stakes or cages can injure the plant's roots. Cages and stakes keep tomatoes off the ground, helping to encourage successful tomato growing and prevent fruit rot and numerous diseases. I use bamboo stakes as they keep the plants stand tall and help tomatoes successfully grow. They need to be at least 8 feet high and 1 inch wide. Pound the stake at least 12 inches into the ground and 4 inches from the plant. Attach the stem to the stake with garden twine.
7: After the tomatoes have been in the ground for 3 weeks, when the vines are thickening up and beginning to grow aggressively, stop watering. Let them dry out for a few days. At this stage, you want to make your tomatoes work to sink their roots deeper to find water. If it’s hot and they are wilting, give them some water. The point is to make them stretch, not stress them excessively. After a few days, give them a good, deep soaking. Saturate the soil, then let it dry out again for a few days, to make your tomatoes stretch their roots even deeper into the soil. The deeper their root systems, the more nutrients they can pull from the soil and you will have robust tomatoes plants put off garden pests, that resist diseases and healthy. Once your tomatoes start flowering and setting fruit, shift to regular watering, a little bit every day or every other day, for 1-1 ½” (2-4cm) of water per week. Flowering plants require a higher ratio of potassium . To ensure proper tomato plant nutrition, you will need to add nutrients at differing amounts at various stages of growth.
8: Plant companion plants next to your tomato plants that will naturally deter bugs from residing on or near your beloved fruit. Plant , basil, beans, , borage, chives, garlic, mint, marigolds, anise, nasturtium, onion, parsley, peppers or petunias near your tomatoes to ward off unwanted visitors.
Care For Tomato Plants
After the soil has warmed, mulch plants with a layer of organic mulch, such as straw or finely shredded wood chips, to prevent weeds and to maintain soil moisture. Mulch is also necessary to help successfully grow tomatoes as it prevents soil and soilborne diseases from splashing onto leaves when it rains.
Water about once a week in the morning and do not water at night, as this creates dangerous conditions for your plants as insects love wet dark environments and rot and other diseases such as mold, verticillium rot, they are easily avoided by watering during the morning. Tomatoes grow most successfully when they have consistent moisture. If it rains less than 1 inch per week, supplement by watering. To prevent diseases, avoid wetting the foliage. Use a watering can or deliver water directly to the root zones by using a drip irrigation system. Remember that Your tomato plants can withstand both insects and fungal or bacterial disease better if they're watered regularly.
Tomato Pests
Hornworms : They are so big (three inches long or more ) it's easy to control them just by picking them off. The problem is that their pale green color provides excellent camouflage, and the nymph and larval stages are far smaller and less obvious. If there are only a few, picking them off works well . To keep hornworms away from your plants, plant borage among your tomato plants.
Whiteflies: These tiny flying insects feed on plant juices, leaving behind a sticky residue which can become a host for sooty mold. To deal with release natural predators such as ladybugs, lacewings, but if the situation is out of control, use insecticidal soaps or botanical insecticides.
Tomato Diseases
Early blight develops in early summer and causes leaves near the ground to develop dry, brown patches surrounded by concentric black rings. The best intervention is to prune off all affected leaves as soon as the problem is noticed. Pruning leaves to 18 inches from the ground will also reduce outbreaks.
Late blight may strike following a prolonged period of heavy cool rain. Affected leaves develop light brown, water-soaked patches, and entire plants can wilt within a few days. To reduce the risk of late blight, provide excellent light penetration and air circulation to keep plants dry.
How To Protect Your Tomatoes:
Healthy plants are much more likely to resist diseases and other problems so give your plants good soil, fertilizer, regular watering, a void watering the foliage of your plants, especially in humid climates, as many diseases are encouraged by damp conditions and rotate crops so that soil-borne pathogens never have more than a season to get established.
Successfully Harvest Tomatoes
Harvesting tomatoes at the right time means you get fantastic flavor. Fully-ripened fruit tastes much better than fruit picked early.
You’ll start picking your tomatoes about 60-85 days after planting seedlings in the garden.
Determinate tomatoes set and ripen their fruit all at one time
Indeterminate tomatoes ripen all season long. You can help them to set fruit earlier by pinching off the tips of the main stems in early summer.
Grasp the fruit firmly, but gently, and pull from the plant by holding the stem with one hand and the fruit with the other, breaking the stalk just above the calyx that has formed to protect the bud.
Once tomatoes start ripening, check plants each day and pick those that are ready. Overripe tomatoes will fall or be knocked off stems. They rot quickly. You can easily lose a big portion of your crop if you don’t monitor your patch and keep harvesting tomatoes. | {
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This is the kind of thing the typical non-right-wing news consumer these days tends to roll their eyes at and then forget about, but let’s hold up and groove on it for a second:
Fox News contributor Bill Bennett compares coronavirus to the flu, claiming that "this was not and is not a pandemic." pic.twitter.com/Q4oBcXKISV — Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) April 13, 2020
Bill Bennett is a conservative pundit with a liberal arts background who has in the past served in government roles related to education and drug policy. He is most well known for writing books about moral virtue. He doesn’t have experience in medicine or public health, nor is there evidence that he has been reading up on those subjects in order to make a substantive critique of the experts. When it comes to the coronavirus, asking him for his opinion is no different than asking a random person at the gas station. Why does anyone care what the author of The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American Family thinks about the relative epidemiological threat of two viruses?
And beyond that, in what sense is it “news”? Why is it on a “cable news” channel? What would someone from, let’s say, 1965 think if you told them you were showing them a news program about a previously unknown disease that has killed 20,000 United States residents in the past month despite a national lockdown—then played them a clip of someone who hasn’t ever held a job germane to the subject matter making the reading-comprehension error of arguing that a model that was explicitly revised, per the press release with which it was unveiled, in order to account for the effects of the lockdown proves a point about what conditions were like before the lockdown took place?
Maybe this time-traveling American would eventually understand the perverse profit incentives acting on the media in an era during which content is more successful the more that it is republished (or “shared”) by regular people, regardless of whether they are sharing it because it infuriates them or because it manipulates their biases. They might be able to recognize intuitively that Brian Kilmeade and his fellow Fox hosts are what would happen if Barry Goldwater suffered a profound brain injury. They would likely not ever be able to comprehend the possibility that in Future America these two phenomena would combine to create a near-critical mass of public sentiment that insists that the U.S. should choose, on purpose, to waste its still-abundant technical know-how and financial resources during a crisis in order to express its ideological disdain for public services, its fanatical deference to the profit motive of corporations, and its feelings of resentment toward know-it-all eggheads. | {
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WASHINGTON—Following revelations last week that priests in Wisconsin and Italy were responsible for molesting more than 250 young deaf boys, millions around the country expressed shock and outrage over the very thing they had been endlessly milking as a source of humor for the past 10 years. "I am stunned and disgusted that this incredibly abhorrent thing that I was just joking with a coworker about the other day has actually occurred," Seattle resident Jess Voigt said. "Even though I have been humorously referring to this particular subject almost nonstop for the past decade, I am absolutely blindsided by this unexpected and disturbing news." Members of the American populace vowed to shake their heads and drop the subject from their ribald office banter for at least two weeks before drawing on these unfortunate events to make approximately 13 million more jokes about choirboys.
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CHICAGO (WLS) -- The party is over for 17 party bus companies, the Chicago Police Department and Chicago's Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection announced Monday.The city and the CPD said those companies are in violation of an ordinance that cracks down on illegal party buses. This comes after a three-day field investigation of party-bus and charter-bus operators."We found everything from operating - obviously, the cease and desist was because of operating without a license - but we have found individuals not to have proper proof of insurance. I know that for those that were potentially conducting party bus activity that they have had no security, no cameras," said Commissioner Rosa Escareno, Chicago Department of Business Affairs.In the joint operation, investigators issued 17 cease and desist orders to bus companies they found to be out of compliance with the ordinance, which was toughened in April.Companies are now required to display their licenses clearly and have cameras on board. A security guard must be on board for trips involving 15 or more passengers, trips where alcohol is served and trips that include stops where alcohol is consumed. Bus drivers must also ensure no passengers are carrying illegal firearms or drugs.The cease and desist orders apply to the company's entire fleet - not just the cited vehicle.Party buses operating illegally will be subject to the maximum fines and the vehicle will be impounded, police said. Minimum fines are $1,000 for a first-time violation and increase to $5,000 for subsequent violations. Ignoring a Cease and Desist order also carries a minimum $5,000 fine, police said.Chicago police and the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection released Monday a list of the 17 companies that were issued cease and desist orders:-AAA Exquisite Limousine, LTD-Almost Famous-Chicago Classic Coach-Chicago Cloud 9 Limo-Chicago Party Bus 1-Chicago Party Bus Rent-Chi Town Limo Bus-Chi Town Party Bus-Crystal Limousine Group, Inc.-Elite Chicago Limo-Exquisite Limo & Party Bus Chicago-Limos Alive Party Bus Rental-Manuel D. Tavarez-Professional Limousine Service, Inc-The Trolley Car & Bus Company-Viking Limousine-VIP Limousine, Inc and Chicago Party Bus Rental"This isn't just a downtown problem. These operators run their buses throughout the city and that's why it's important to the overall crime picture of Chicago," CPD Chief Anthony Riccio said.The city called for the crackdown after seeing a string of violent incidents involving party buses.In March, two men were shot and killed in Chicago's Edgewater neighborhood as they exited a party bus. A verbal altercation between passengers and a person in an SUV sparked the shooting.Last September, a man was shot in Grant Park near Buckingham Fountain. He was standing with a group of people when police said that group got into an argument with several men who just exited a party bus.The city also warned consumers to beware. Hiring a company that isn't licensed and isn't in compliance with the law will cause a trip to be shut down.Some bus operators applauded the effort to crack down on unlicensed operators for the safety and reputation of the industry, but said the ordinance goes too far.Muhammad Bhatti of LCW Coach said the new requirement to have a camera recording customers is causing him to lose business. George Jacobs of Windy City Limo said requiring security could mean a security guard is standing if the party is at capacity, which could be dangerous. | {
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A team of researchers from the Medical University of Warsaw in Poland has proposed a novel, non-invasive test for screening and monitoring gut diseases such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. The technique uses a tiny blood and stool sample to determine gut permeability, a key marker of these diseases.
The importance of our gut health is a subject that has received a lot of attention over the last few years, from the gut-brain axis to the composition and health of our gut flora (also known as our gut microbiota). Intestinal permeability – often referred to as leaky gut – is another indicator of our intestinal health and has been associated with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), an umbrella term for Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, as well as celiac disease and food sensitivities.
According to The Lancet, IBD is a global problem, with a prevalence of over 0.3 percent in Western populations (three million plus in the US according to the CDC) and a growing problem in newly industrialized countries as they become more Westernized. This highlights the need for innovative detection, management and prevention of IBD and associated issues, and studies such as this play an essential role towards that goal.
The study offers hope for the early detection of IBD, which is incurable, but controllable. At present, IBD and similar diseases are difficult to diagnose, with a combination of clinical symptoms and colonoscopy the current methodology. But this comes with its own problems. It's invasive, often requires general anesthetic, isn't cheap and can be a little frightening. All of which can be enough to prevent people from proceeding with tests and therefore hindering effective diagnosis and treatment.
The proposed method from the research team, led by Dr. Marcin Ufnal, presents far fewer obstacles to diagnosis. Using a small sample of around 1 milliliter of blood and stool, the technique measures the ratio of short–chain fatty acids created by bacteria in each sample. This ratio is important, as it shows how well the gut-blood barrier is functioning. When this layer of the gut-wall is compromised, unwanted products – including gut bacteria and bacterial products – are able to cross into the bloodstream and cause problems. More gut bacterial byproducts in the blood versus the stool indicates a more damaged – and therefore more permeable – gut-blood barrier.
"This may be a very important tool for diagnosis and treatment of gut and other diseases," says lead author, Marcin Ufnal. "Using the leaky gut as a marker for disease, as well as a potential target for treatment."
Early diagnosis of IBD and similar issues makes it possible for sufferers to take steps to make informed choices, control symptoms and improve their quality of life outlook. The team also hopes this technique might be able to flag other diseases that create gut permeability, such as liver problems and heart failure.
A short video explaining the research can be seen below.
The paper is available via the journal Experimental Physiology.
Source: The Physiological Society | {
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Legends of Tomorrow boss on that steamy hookup
DC's Legends of Tomorrow type TV Show network The CW genre Superhero
Warning: This story contains major spoilers from Monday’s episode of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. Read at your own risk!
Sara Lance and John Constantine reunited in a big way when DC’s Legends of Tomorrow returned on Monday — wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
The two anti-heroes hadn’t seen each other since the fourth season of Arrow, in which John Constantine (Matt Ryan) restored Sara’s (Caity Lotz) soul. During the winter premiere, Constantine had tracked the Legends down after a young Nora Darhk was possessed by Mallus, who aimed to drag Sara into the spirit world.
When Constantine and Sara — along with Leo Snart, who exited the team by hour’s end — got trapped in 1969 without the Waverider, the duo decided to act on the sexual tension between them and, well, enjoy a timey-wimey hookup.
“It was simply something that had to be done,” executive producer Marc Guggenheim tells EW of the temporary couple, who both happen to be bisexual. “I mean, literally I said in the room, ‘If we’re having Constantine on the show, he and Sara have to sleep together.’ I very rarely lay down directives, but for me that was non-negotiable.”
The moment was fleeting, however, as Constantine won’t be sticking around. But it’s clear that Sara is finally going to act on her feelings for Time Bureau Agent Ava Sharpe (Jes Macallan). Any potential relationship is less a reaction to her hookup with Constantine and more about everyone pointing out the obvious, as Snart did during Monday’s episode.
“I don’t think that it’s related to Constantine, but it is definitely, I think, related to the thing that Sara learns in episodes 10 and 11,” Guggenheim says. “There’s a one-two punch really in terms of people telling Sara to get her head out of her a— as far as Ava’s concerned. And I’d just say that [episodes 10 and 11] kind of turn her.”
DC’s Legends of Tomorrow airs Mondays at 8 p.m. ET on The CW. | {
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Last Updated on March 5, 2018
Creativity is in the air and you’re about to catch it. As you might know inspiration sometimes comes from almost anything. We have a great roundup of hand-picked creative photographs that are bound to inspire you. Some of the photos are obviously photoshopped, but they still look real. We would love to know what you think, so please comment below. Enjoy! | {
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Real Madrid El Madrid les pone el cartel de transferibles
El Madrid, decepcionado, les pone en el mercado, aunque confía en que reviertan su situación
James Rodríguez e Isco Alarcón pueden tener sus días contados en el Real Madrid. Ahora mismo son dos de los futbolistas más cuestionados desde las altas esferas del club por bajo rendimiento. No se duda de su calidad técnica, que la tienen y mucha, sino de su compromiso.
Ambos jugadores, considerados de forma unánime como dos de los más capacitados a nivel técnico de la plantilla junto a Marcelo, van a pasar un examen durante los 13 partidos (podrían ser hasta 18) que le restan al conjunto blanco. En esos tres meses que quedan hasta que la temporada finalice el 28 de mayo con la disputa de la final de la Champions en Milán se va a decidir el futuro de James e Isco. Pero a raíz de la crisis abierta tras el derbi y la pérdida definitiva de toda opción en la Liga, hoy ambos tienen la consideración de transferibles. En su mano está revertir la situación, aseguran desde el club, donde no esconden que se sienten defraudados con su actitud.
80 millones pagó el Madrid por James y ese es aún su valor de mercado actual
En el análisis interno que se hace de la mala situación del equipo y la dinámica negativa que envuelve a la institución, los jugadores aparecen como los grandes señalados. Se han acomodado y no responden ni con un entrenador de método rígido y perfil autoritario (Benítez) ni con uno más permisivo y dialogante (Zidane). Dentro de ese reparto de culpas, los nombres del colombiano y el malagueño están subrayados en la lista de posibles salidas para el próximo verano. Se cuestiona su rendimiento deportivo, su mentalidad y su dedicación, tanto dentro del terreno de juego como fuera.
Retratados en el Derbi
El problema viene de lejos, pero en el derbi James e Isco fueron dos de los jugadores que quedaron más retratados. Su actitud al desentenderse de las tareas defensivas que les encomienda Zidane fue especialmente evidente en el gol atlético. El técnico, muy desencantado con su rendimiento (aunque de puertas para fuera se atenga a los códigos y muestre su cara más amable), no dudó en sustituirles: a James en el 57' y a Isco en el 70'. Y por primera vez se escucharon silbidos cuando abandonaron el campo. Sintomático, al tratarse de dos de los futbolistas por los que el Bernabéu ha mostrado predilección en las dos últimas temporadas.
En el club consideran que los dos mediapuntas encarnan uno de los principales males del equipo blanco, que hacen extensible a otros jugadores: la falta de carácter competitivo, de mentalidad ganadora, de verdadero espíritu de sacrificio. Un déficit que en ocasiones enmascaran con chispazos de su indudable talento ante rivales menores. Pero cuando aumenta la talla del rival y la exigencia, se hace evidente que sólo con la calidad no les alcanza.
Tienen mercado
En caso de que las cosas siguieran por los mismos derroteros y el Madrid decidiera desprenderse de ellos, ambos futbolistas tienen mercado y equipos dispuestos a realizar un fuerte desembolso. A sus 24 años, a James, con contrato hasta 2020 y una cláusula de 500 millones, la web especializada TransferMarket le otorga un valor orientativo de mercado de 80 millones, curiosamente los mismos que pagó por su traspaso el Madrid en el verano de 2014 después de que se coronase como la gran sensación y el mejor goleador del Mundial de Brasil. En Inglaterra se especula hace tiempo con el interés del Manchester United y, si finalmente abandona el Real Madrid, es un futbolista que a buen seguro protagonizará uno de los grandes traspasos del verano.
27 millones le costó Isco al Madrid, y el club confía en venderlo en 40-45
Por su parte, Isco sigue siendo objeto de deseo del Manchester City, al que el Madrid se lo arrebató en el verano de 2013 pagando 27 millones (24+3) al Málaga. Todavía no ha cumplido 23 años y acaba contrato en 2019. En los últimos meses el nuevo equipo de Guardiola le ha hecho llegar al Madrid por vía directa su interés por el malagueño, que no vería mal un cambio de aires para jugar en su posición natural, más cerca del área, y para intentar mejorar su exigua ficha (poco más de dos millones netos, en la parte baja de la escala salarial madridista). Pero además del City hay otros equipos de la Premier que estarían encantados de poder contar con su fútbol preciosista, como el Arsenal. Su precio de mercado ronda los 40-45 millones.
Mientras, en el Madrid van dando pasos de cara a definir sus posibles sustitutos. Zidane ha recomendado la contratación de Eden Hazard para la mediapunta y de Paul Pogba para el centro del campo. Sin olvidarse de Marco Asensio, la perla en la que el club tiene depositadas muchas esperanzas. | {
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I’ve mentioned this a few times, but it’s worth going over in detail. The full title is Clusters Of Individual Experiences Form A Continuum Of Persistent Non-Symbolic Experiences In Adults by Jeffery Martin, with “persistent non-symbolic experience” (PNSE) as a scientific-sounding culturally-neutral code word for “enlightenment”. Martin is a Reiki practitioner associated with the “Center for the Study of Non-Symbolic Consciousness”, so we’re not getting this from the most sober of skeptics, but I still find the project interesting enough to deserve a look.
Martin searched various religious and spiritual groups for people who both self-reported enlightenment and were affiliated with “a community that provided validity to their claims”. He says he eventually found 1200 such people who were willing to participate in the study, but that “the data reported here comes primarily from the first 50 participants who sat for in-depth interviews…based on the overall research effort these 50 were felt to be a sufficient sample to represent what has been learned from the larger population”. Although Martin says he tried to get as much diversity as possible, the group was mostly white male Americans.
Martin’s research was mostly qualitative, based on in-depth interviews, so we’re mostly going with his impressions. But his impression was that most people who self-described as enlightened had similar experiences, which could be be plotted on:
…a continuum that seemed to progress from ‘normal’ waking consciousness toward a distant location where participants reported no individualized sense of self, no self-related thoughts, no emotion, and no apparent sense of agency or ability to make a choice. Locations prior to this seemed to involve consistent changes toward this direction.
He describes this distant form of consciousness as involving changes in sense-of-self, cognition, emotion, memory, and perception.
Starting with sense-of-self, he says:
Perhaps the most universal change in what PNSE participants reported related to their sense of self. They experienced a fundamental change from a highly individualized sense of self, which is common among the ‘normal’ population, to something else. How that ‘something else’ was reported often related to their religious or spiritual tradition(s), or lack thereof. For example, Buddhists often referred to a sense of spaciousness while Christians frequently spoke of experiencing a union with God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit depending on their sect. However, each experienced a transformation into a sense of self that seemed ‘larger’ and less individuated than the one that was experienced previously. Often participants talked about feeling that they extended beyond their body, sometimes very far beyond it… This change was dramatic and most participants noticed it immediately, even if initially they could not pinpoint exactly what had occurred. Sense of self changed immediately in approximately 70% of participants. In the other 30% it unfolded gradually, with the unfolding period reported as varying from a few days to four months. Those who were not involved in a religious or spiritual tradition that contextualized the experience often felt that they might have acquired a mental disorder. This analysis was not based on emotional or mental distress. It was typically arrived at rationally because the way they were experiencing reality was suddenly remarkably different than they had previously, and as far as they could tell different from everyone they knew. Many of these participants sought professional mental health care, which no participant viewed as having been beneficial. Clinicians often told them their descriptions showed similarities to depersonalization and derealization, except for the positive nature of the experience. There were nuances within how sense of self was experienced at different locations along the continuum. In the earliest locations, the sense of self felt expanded, and often seemed more connected to everything. In the farthest locations on the continuum, an even more pronounced change occurred in sense of self; a ll aspects of having an individualized sense of self had vanished for these participants. Prior to this location some aspects of an individualized sense of self remained, and participants could occasionally be drawn into them.
On cognition:
Another consistent report is a shift in the nature and quantity of thoughts. Virtually all of the participants discussed this as one of the first things they noticed upon entering PNSE. The nature and degree of the change related to a participant’s location on the continuum. On the early part of the continuum, nearly all participants reported a significant reduction in, or even complete absence of, thoughts. Around 5% reported that their thoughts actually increased. Those who reported thoughts, including increased thoughts, stated that they were far less influenced by them. Participants reported that for the most part thoughts just came and went, and were generally either devoid of or contained greatly reduced emotional content. Almost immediately it became clear that participants were not referring to the disappearance of all thoughts. They remained fully able to use thought for problem solving and living what appeared outwardly to be a ‘normal’ life. The reduction seemed limited to self-related thoughts. Nevertheless, participants were experiencing a reduction in quantity of thoughts that was so significant that when they were asked to quantify the reduction, t hose who could answered within the 80-95% range. This high percentage may suggest why someone would say all thought had fallen away. There do not appear to be negative cognitive consequences to this reduction in thought. When asked, none said they wanted their self-referential thoughts to return to previous levels or to have the emotional charge returned to them. Participants generally reported that their problem solving abilities, mental capacity, and mental capability in general had increased because it was not being crowded out or influenced by the missing thoughts. They would often express the notion that thinking was now a much more finely tuned tool that had taken its appropriate place within their psychological architecture.
On perception:
Participants in the later part of the middle range of the PNSE continuum often reported seeing the unfolding layers of these perceptual processes in detail. They reported being able to begin to detect the difference between the orientation response and the physical, cognitive, and emotional processes that arose after it. They reported reaching a point where some events were reacted to by one or more of these layers while others were not. This was in contrast to participants on the early end of the continuum who perceived all of these layers as one during an event, or at least as a greatly reduced number of discrete processes.
You can read more, plus the sections on emotion and memory, yourself; they mostly fit with the stereotypes you would expect of enlightened people; a lot of tranquility, joy, and focus on the present moment.
What I like about this paper is the parts where it departs from these stereotypes. It makes clear that most of these people’s external characteristics didn’t change at all. In many cases, their friends and family didn’t even notice anything was different, and could not be convinced that anything about them was different:
Despite an overwhelming change in how it felt to experience both themselves and the world after the onset of PNSE, the outward appearance of the participants changed very little. Generally speaking they retained their previous mannerisms, hobbies, political ideology, food and clothing preferences, and so forth. If someone were an environmentalist prior to PNSE, typically they remained so after it. If they weren’t, they still are not. Many participants discussed the thought, just after their transition to PNSE, that they would have to go to work and explain the difference in themselves to co-workers. They went on to describe a puzzled drive home after a full day of work when no one seemed to notice anything different about them. Quite a few chose to never discuss the change that had occurred in them with their families and friends and stated that no one seemed to notice much of a difference. In short, although they had experienced radical internal transformation, externally people didn’t seem to take much notice of it, if any.
Similarly, despite people saying that they no longer had any sense of agency, they were behaving as agentically as anyone else:
On the far end of the continuum, participants reported no sense of agency. They reported that they did not feel they could take any action of their own, nor make any decisions. Reality was perceived as just unfolding, with ‘doing’ and ‘deciding’ simply happening. Nevertheless, many of these participants were functioning in a range of demanding environments and performing well. One, for example, was a doctoral level student at a major university. Another was a young college professor who was building a strong career. Still another was a seasoned public and private sector executive who served as a high-level consultant and on various institutional-level boards.
Can you imagine investing in a company whose executive believes he cannot take any action and is just watching reality unfold? But it seems to work out.
Other times the PNSE participants are just outright wrong about their experience. When asked if they were stressed, they would say of course not, they were experiencing inner peace. But their friends and family said they were totally stressed. For example:
Over the course of a week, [one participant’s] father died, followed very rapidly by his sister. He was also going through a significant issue with one of his children. Over dinner I asked him about his internal state, which he reported as deeply peaceful and positive despite everything that was happening. Having known that the participant was bringing his longtime girlfriend, I’d taken an associate researcher with me to the meeting to independently collect the observations from her. My fellow researcher isolated the participant’s girlfriend at the bar and interviewed her about any signs of stress that the participant might be exhibiting. I casually asked the same questions to the participant as we continued our dinner conversation. Their answers couldn’t have been more different. While the participant reported no stress, his partner had been observing many telltale signs: he wasn’t sleeping well, his appetite was off, his mood was noticeably different, his muscles were much tenser than normal, his sex drive was reduced, his health was suffering, and so forth.
Or:
It was not uncommon for participants to state that they had gained increased bodily awareness upon their transition into PNSE. I arranged and observed private yoga sessions with a series of participants as part of a larger inquiry into their bodily awareness. During these sessions it became clear that participants believed they were far more aware of their body than they actually were. For example, the instructor would often put her hand on part of the body asking the participant to relax the tense muscles there, only to have the participant insist that s/he was totally relaxed in that area and did not feel any muscle tension.
Or even:
During some interviews participants expressed that they no longer felt it was possible for them to be racist or sexist. I asked these participants to take Harvard University’s Project Implicit tests online. All of these participants were white males and each showed a degree of sexism and/or racism, including participants who were in the later no emotion and agency locations on the continuum. Project Implicit uses physiology to test these responses.
It’s tempting to say these people are just making it up. But I think about some of the people I know with very severe psychiatric issues, people who are constantly miserable – and are similarly externally unaffected. These people are holding down stressful jobs, keeping difficult relationships together, etc – and often the people they haven’t “opened up to” don’t have any inkling of what they’re going through. They may tell me it must seem obvious to everybody that they’re completely falling apart – whereas in fact they are speaking fluently, they’re well-dressed, and they haven’t made a single social misstep during the whole time I’ve known them. If unusually negative mental states don’t affect behavior as strongly as people believe, why not unusually positive mental states?
Also, other times these people under-estimate themselves:
As participants neared the further reaches of the continuum, they frequently reported significant difficulty with recalling memories that related to their life history. They did not feel this way about facts, but rather about the details of the biographical moments surrounding the learning of those facts. They also reported that encoding for these types of memories seemed greatly reduced. A lthough this was their perception it did not appear to be the case when talking to them. They were typically rich sources of personal history information and their degree of recall seemed indistinguishable from participants who were in earlier locations on the continuum.
But:
There was a noticeable exception that seemed to be a genuine deficit. As they neared and entered the farther reaches of the continuum, participants routinely reported that they wereincreasingly unable to remember things such as scheduled appointments, while still being able to remember events that were part of a routine. For example, they might consistently remember to pick their child up at school each day, but forget other types of appointments such as doctor visits. Often they had adapted their routines to adjust for this change. Many would immediately write down scheduled events, items they needed to get at the store, and so forth on prominently displayed lists. When visiting their homes I noticed that these lists could be found on: televisions, computer monitors, near toilets, on and next to doors, and so forth. It was clear that the lists were being placed in locations that the participants would look with at least some degree of regularity. Participants consistently stated that they would prefer to remain in PNSE even if going back to ‘normal’ experience meant that they would no longer have this type of deficit.
Finally, Martin is impressed with the certainty that accompanies all of these experiences. People describe their PNSE as obviously more real and better than past states. They tend to be very effusive about this, saying that having the experience shattered everything they had previously believed in the most obvious and final way. But here too, there are signs that the participants are not well-attuned to what is going on in their own heads. Martin says that participants who moved from one level of his continuum to another (whether forward or back) would always say that the level they were currently at was the most fundamental and obviously real (even if they had said the opposite before). When he would tell participants about the experiences of other participants who were at different points of the continuum or just describing their experiences a slightly different way, both participants would confidently pronounce that the other wasn’t really enlightened.
I like this paper because it provides the basis for a minimalist account of enlightenment, similar to Daniel Ingram’s. Enlightenment hasn’t transformed these people’s personalities. It hasn’t given them infinite willpower or productivity or the ability to shoot qi bolts from their third eyes. It hasn’t even given them that much self-understanding. It’s just given them a different kind of internal experience.
The experience itself is hard to describe, but seems marked by drawing the self-other boundary in a different place. Participants don’t see themselves as making decisions; the decisions get made “under the hood” in a way where the person just feels like their path is laid out before them. They don’t see themselves as having thoughts; computations obviously get done, but they are not in awareness. They don’t feel like they have stress, even if the stress is physiologically present and obvious from their actions. On the other hand, they were more aware of certain low-level perceptual processes that are usually unconscious. It seems to be accompanied by total certainty that this is correct and revelatory and new (…much like the altered states people sometimes get on drugs).
None of this seems wildly outside the realm of possibility. It seems about as surprising as the existence of some new mental disorder. If 50 (or 1200, depending on how you count it) people with no history of lying said they had some kind of weird new mental disorder, I’d be willing to credit that they were describing their experience correctly, and able to give some useful information on the sorts of things that caused this disorder. It just sounds like information processing in the brain switching to some new attractor state if you force it hard enough. | {
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The SYNCHRON-ized Special Edition Bundle delivers a large-scale orchestra with a staggering 157 instruments and ensembles, with a broad range of playing techniques. It’s a powerhouse of symphonic variety in a resource-saving, affordable package. All sounds work perfectly in all musical styles, from pop and rock environments to large symphonic arrangements.
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It looks like court is permanently adjourned for this legal drama. FOX has cancelled the Proven Innocent TV show so it won’t be returning for a second season.
Airing on Friday nights, Proven Innocent stars Rachelle Lefevre, Kelsey Grammer, Russell Hornsby, Vincent Kartheiser, Nikki M. James, Riley Smith, and Clare O’Connor. The series centers on Madeline Scott (Lefevre), a resolute lawyer on a lifelong quest for justice. When she was just 18, Madeline was wrongfully convicted of murder, along with her brother, Levi (Smith). Now she and her partner (and former defense attorney), Easy Boudreau (Hornsby), lead an underdog defense team, dedicated to overturning unjust convictions. Meanwhile, Gore Bellows (Grammer), the prosecutor who once put her away, is determined to return her to prison.
The first season of Proven Innocent on FOX averaged a 0.40 rating in the 18-49 demographic and 2.01 million viewers. Compared to the other FOX TV shows of the 2018-19 season, Proven Innocent ranks 16th of 16 scripted series.
The season (now series) finale of Proven Innocent aired last night.
What do you think? Do you like the Proven Innocent TV show? Would you have watched season two? | {
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In pics: RSS volunteers work throughout night for Kolkata bridge collapse victims
Feature
oi-Reetu
Four days after a portion of an under-construction flyover collapsed in the city, killing at least 26 people, operations to clear the area and dismantle two dangerously hanging decks are still underway.
But some images which are going viral on the social media are of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) volunteers who are working in the relief operations with police, NDRF and other security personnel.
A Facebook post on RSS' official page said, "Close to 200 swayamsevaks (RSS workers) worked throughout the night in relief operations."
Here are the images:
Viral pics: RSS volunteers in WB work for victims RSS volunteers work throughout night for Kolkata bridge collapse victims. Viral pics: RSS volunteers in WB work for victims RSS volunteers work throughout night for Kolkata bridge collapse victims. Viral pics: RSS volunteers in WB work for victims RSS volunteers work throughout night for Kolkata bridge collapse victims. Viral pics: RSS volunteers in WB work for victims Army personnels with others on the rescue work at the spot where under construction flyover collapsed in in Kolkata. Viral pics: RSS volunteers in WB work for victims Engineers are busy laying concrete blocks beneath the two hanging decks of the flyover to stop those from falling. "The decks weigh nearly over 300 tonnes. We are stacking concrete blocks underneath the decks to stabilise those before trying to dismantle them," an engineer said.
OneIndia News | {
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Spencer Platt/Getty Images
When you live under the rule of a dictator, even one that you helped vote into office, you can forget that you live in a dictatorship. I know it’s cool as long as all the weight of his office falls on people who don’t look like you, but what about when you get swept up in his bullshit? Well, now, there’s a problem.
The joy of unbiased evil is that at some point, everyone will get his turn.
TrumPutin supporters in Texas are now learning that in order for the emperor to build his dumb-ass wall that no sane person wants, they will have to be forced out of their homes for much less than their homes are worth—and for those who stay, based on the perimeters of said wall, they’ll be living in Mexico.
Seriously, you can’t make this shit up.
Based on a CNN special report, putting up a wall between Mexico and the United States means that many in the area who voted overwhelmingly in favor of President Vladimir TrumPutin will either lose their property or have parts of their property, if not all of it, completely moved to the Mexico side of the wall.
Raw Story notes that this isn’t the first run-in that those along the Texas border have had with the government over land. Around 10 years ago, one family’s farm was cut in half, with part in the U.S. and part in Mexico.
“I was very angry. I just kept saying, how can they do that? How is that possible in the United States that they can do this?” D’Ann Loop of Brownsville told CNN. “They put up a fence in front of our land and then keep us in here—lock us in. I didn’t understand. I was very—I was floored and flabbergasted.”
D’Ann Loop added that after losing in court, all of their property is now on the Mexico side of the border line.
“It left us no property on the U.S. side of the border wall, including my house,” she explained. “Everything was behind—on the Mexican side of the U.S. border fence.” Her husband, Ray Loop, said that in order to enter the U.S. side, his family is forced to go through a locked gate.
“You punch your code in or you come behind the border wall; there is a feeling of isolation,” Ray Loop explained.
The plan for now is to challenge TrumPutin’s administration in court. I guess now isn’t the time to point out that Hillary Clinton didn’t want a damn wall.
OK, you’re right. That was petty.
Read more at CNN and Raw Story. | {
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Sexual and civic education in schools in Europe is an "attack" on religious freedom, Pope Benedict XVI said on Monday in a traditional annual address to foreign diplomats to the Vatican.
"I cannot remain silent about another attack on the religious freedom of families in certain European countries which mandate obligatory participation in courses of sexual or civic education," the Pope told the ambassadors.
He said such courses "convey a neutral concept of the person and of life, yet in fact reflect an anthropology opposed to faith and to right reason".
The Pope said this was an example of the "threats" against "the cultural roots which nourish the profound identity and social cohesion of many nations".
In a collection of interviews published in November 2010, Pope Benedict said for the first time that he approved of condom use to reduce the risk of disease, leading some to wonder whether his attitude to sex education was changing.
But the Vatican later insisted that the Pope's comments referred only to sex workers who were HIV positive and could not be applied more widely.
- AFP | {
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The unholy alliance between the Compromised Media and the Democratic Party is today inarguable. The two have become largely indistinguishable in both ideology and, often, in personnel, with mainstream-media reporters moving into any given Democrat administration, then returning to the media when the Republicans win. The late Andrew Breitbart famously referred to this syndicate as the “Democrat-Media Complex”—a play on president Eisenhower’s warning, in his farewell address, about the “military-industrial complex”—and noted that this one is far more dangerous to our political health.
Like the “Octopus” in Frank Norris’s novel of the same name, which depicted the conflict between the wheat growers in California’s Central Valley and a vicious railroad conglomerate trying to steal their land, the Democrat-Media octopus has snaked its tentacles into nearly every area of our lives, and aims to seize not only hegemonic control of the culture, but also a permanent electoral majority—something it believed was within reach during the 2016 presidential campaign, only to see its hopes bitterly dashed by a corrupt, unlovely, unskilled legacy candidate so weighed down by her own repellent persona that even the mighty media couldn’t hoist her over the finish line.
And yet even the election couldn’t put paid to what has become known as the “resistance,” as if the defeated progressives and their media mouthpieces were the maquisards, bravely battling the Nazis in rural France, instead of urban poetasters they really are, tweeting insults from their urban redoubts in the Upper West Side and west Los Angeles. Notice, en passant, the celerity with which the term “Nazi” was reintroduced to the journalistic lexicon, with a new meaning (Republicans), and how prolonged this damaging fantasy has now become.
“Resisting” the results of a legitimately conducted American election speaks poorly of the Democrats, but they are, after all, the “loyal” opposition. The media, however, has no such motivational fig leaf behind which to hide. Beginning with the Clinton impeachment, they have gradually let the mask of objectivity and political impartiality slip, until now there is no pretense to the former impartial standards that more or less held from World War II until the late 1990s. Today’s Compromised Media have much more in common with the partisan European broadsheets of England, France, Italy and, to a lesser extent, Germany (whose media, like its political parties, essentially speaks with one voice) than they do with their former incarnations as the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Journalists will come to regret the abandonment of their professional principles, and their descent into rank partisanship, just as surely as the radical Left regrets having nominated Hillary Clinton over the Brooklyn-born “socialist” senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders. Still, there is a chicken-or-egg question here: which came first? The abandonment of principles under Clinton (“everybody does it,” “it’s just sex,” “it didn’t affect his job performance,” “hypocrisy is a good thing,” and “screw you”), or the untrained and unethical character of today’s journalists? A little of both, probably.
The next few weeks and months will not be kind to the profession. The Fusion GPS affair—in which a group of former journalists moved into opposition research, got entwined with members of the intelligence services of at least two (and probably three, including Russia) nations, passed off fanciful, if not outright fabricated information, which then very likely was used by rogue elements of the American intelligence community to justify the FISA application to tap the Trump campaign and later, the nascent administration—is one unholy mess. And when the Fusion banking records are finally released, along with the Nunes memo outlining how journalists effectively tried to short-cut Woodward and Bernstein and take down a Republican administration by creating their very own “scandal” out of the whole cloth of ideological resentment… well, heads should roll.
Meanwhile, throughout its first year, the Trump White House’s “what-me-worry?” communications shop has been slow to react and loath to punish its tormentors. Any pushback against individual reporters or news organizations immediately brings cries of censorship as partisan scribblers and airheads with microphones suddenly rediscover the First Amendment. Never mind that many of them (David Axelrod, George Stephanopoulos, David Gergen) have been working both sides of the street for decades; what was once conflict of interest is now excused in the name of “access,” “sourcing,” and “up yours.”
What can be done? The administration should not be in the business of choosing which individual reporters are credentialed, but surely it has the right to withdraw the passes of reporters of proven and demonstrable hostility, which renders them incapable of covering the news fairly. The promiscuous tweeting of a pair of White House correspondents employed by the implacably Trump-hostile New York Times became so egregious that the newspaper’s editor, Dean Baquet, had to issue an edict against it.
The administration took an early step in the right direction when it opened the press corps up to non-traditional media, including bloggers and web-only publications. But this has only exacerbated the problem as, in many cases, the alternative right-wing media was even more rabidly partisan than the Compromised Media, setting off a race to the bottom that has ultimately been won by CNN and Jim Acosta.
So perhaps some time in the penalty box is in order. The press has a constitutional right to cover the news any way it sees fit, but the White House is under no obligation to indulge its grandstanding, or to provide a forum for its axe-grinding.
If, for example, the Times cannot control its employees from contradicting its own stated mission of objectivity and fairness—“If our journalists are perceived as biased or if they engage in editorializing on social media, that can undercut the credibility of the entire newsroom,” Baquet’s memo read—then the White House and other governmental agencies should have the right to pull individual credentials. And if the publication refuses, then to pull its institutional credentials as well, for a defined period: say, nine months, in honor of the human gestation period they so adamantly deny is human.
The Trump campaign took a step in this direction when it banned the Washington Post from its events. While this only intensified the Post’s hostility, it didn’t prevent the paper from writing about the campaign, or expressing its opinions about the unsuitability of the candidate in both its editorial and news columns. No administration has the right to dictate the tone and tenor of its coverage, but it does have a right to institutional fairness. Why, it’s all spelled out right here in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. Among its strictures:
Take responsibility for the accuracy of their work. Verify information before releasing it. Use original sources whenever possible.
Identify sources clearly. The public is entitled to as much information as possible to judge the reliability and motivations of sources. Consider sources’ motives before promising anonymity. Reserve anonymity for sources who may face danger, retribution or other harm, and have information that cannot be obtained elsewhere. Explain why anonymity was granted.
Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information unless traditional, open methods will not yield information vital to the public.
Avoid stereotyping. Journalists should examine the ways their values and experiences may shape their reporting.
Stop laughing; this was once the ideal. Lately, however, these rules have been replaced by the Alinskyite rules of the hard Left:
Do unto others before they can do unto you.
The political end justifies the means.
By any means necessary.
The older journalists sold their birthright for a mess of pottage: a temporary gig in the Clinton or Obama administrations; some face time on TV; lucrative publishing deals that cheated their employers out of scoops in order to withhold them for their books. The younger ones, looking on in admiration, simply followed their lead, and their own noses.
And here we are. Unless and until journalism undergoes a thorough reformation, including a return to its former principles, it’s doomed. And we are all the poorer for it.
Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact [email protected]. | {
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A Delhi court on Saturday convicted 'Peepli Live' co-director Mahmood Farooqui of raping a 30-year-old US researcher last year.
Farooqui, who was out on bail, was taken into custody immediately after the pronouncement of the judgement. Additional Sessions Judge Sanjiv Jain held Farooqui guilty of offence under section 376 (punishment of rape) of the IPC. The court fixed the matter for hearing arguments on sentence on August 2.
The offence of rape entails a minimum of seven years rigorous jail and a maximum of imprisonment for life. The woman, in her complaint, had alleged that Farooqui was drunk when he raped her at his house where she had gone to get his help for her research work last year. The police had on June 19, 2015, lodged the FIR against Farooqui on the woman's complaint after which he was arrested.
Police had on July 29 last year filed a charge sheet against Farooqui alleging that he had raped the research scholar from Colombia University at his Sukhdev Vihar house in south Delhi on March 28 last year.The court had on September 9, 2015, started the trial in the case after framing rape charge against Farooqui. | {
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EA has provided new details on Battlefield 3’s official site , EA explains that End Game “delivers some of the most high-speed warfare to date,” adding new multiplayer maps, new vehicles, new modes and more.
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End Game will offer “four vast and varied maps designed for high-speed combat and action” as well as “three new vehicles including the fast and agile dirt bikes.” EA also says End Game will include a new dropship that “provides support to ground troops with vehicle drop capabilities” and “introduces the ability to turn the tide with rapid deployment air drops of troop transports.” End Game will also include the “return of the classic Capture the Flag and Air Superiority game modes,” offering “massive dog fights.”End Game is due out in March and marks the last of the five packs released as part of Battlefield 3 Premium, following Back to Karkand, Close Quarters, Armored Kill and Aftermath. While no specific price has been announced, previous packs were available for $14.99 (1200 Microsoft Points).Later this year, DICE will presumably shift its focus to the Battlefield 4 beta
Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s associate news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following @garfep on Twitter or garfep on IGN. | {
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By Christian Jarrett
It’s that time of year when many of us are trying our best to begin a new exercise habit. One psychological factor affecting our chances is how we think we’ll feel during the exercise, and how that compares to the way we actually feel when we get going, and how we feel afterwards. A new study in Health Psychology has explored whether it’s possible to increase people’s adherence to a new exercise regime by making their expectations more positive. While the main intervention was a disappointment, there is an encouraging message in the results: moderate-to-vigorous exercise is likely to be more enjoyable than you think, and simply knowing this will probably help you enjoy your exercise even more.
Bethany Kwan at University of Colorado School of Medicine and her colleagues recruited 101 healthy young men and women aged 18 to 45. None of them were elite or professional athletes. Their initial challenge was to run for 30 minutes on a treadmill in the lab (at a sustained target intensity of 90 to 100 per cent of their heart rate when first out of breath), and to say how they were feeling at several points throughout and afterwards. The researchers then asked them to repeat the same amount of exercise each day for the next seven days, with their adherence assessed via a heart monitor.
Before the participants began, the researchers asked them how they expected to feel during the exercise. Crucially, the researchers manipulated the expectations of one third of the participants in a positive manner by telling them that most people exercising at this intensity feel good and energised, and then relaxed afterward. In contrast, they told another third of the participants that most people find this intensity of exercise negative and unpleasant, and then they feel tired afterward. The expectations of the remainder of the participants was not manipulated and they acted as controls. After their lab run, the participants said how strongly they intended to keep up the week-long regimen of exercise.
Kwan and her team had hoped that by increasing the positivity of participants’ exercise expectations that these individuals would not only find the lab exercise more positive during and afterwards, but would then show stronger intentions to exercise and better adherence to the regimen. The results were a mixed bag.
Overall, participants found the lab run more pleasant than they thought they would. But participants who were manipulated to expect the lab run to be more enjoyable did not exercise more through the following week. In this sense, the main intervention was a failure.
However, participants manipulated to expect the lab run to be more enjoyable showed greater increases in positive feelings through the run compared to the negatively manipulated participants; moreover, compared with control participants, they remembered the run as less fatiguing. This last effect, though tentative, could be important because the more positively participants remembered the lab run, the more they tended to run through the ensuing week. This supports the common sense idea that when you’ve finished your exercise, it could be beneficial to focus on those aspects of the experience you enjoyed: doing so might increase the likelihood you’ll give it another go.
The researchers said their results suggest that “healthy individuals will likely find a moderate-to-vigorous exercise stimulus to be more pleasant than they expect it to be” and that encouraging exercisers to focus on the positive aspects of the exercise experience will likely “yield an overall more positive affective experience”. Hopefully the mere act of reading this article will help, by raising your expectations for your own new regime!
—What to Expect When You’re Exercising: An Experimental Test of the Anticipated Affect-Exercise Relationship
Christian Jarrett (@Psych_Writer) is Editor of BPS Research Digest | {
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The Topic: Enclothed Cognition
The Guest: Hajo Adam
The Episode: Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Soundcloud
Take the YANSS Podcast survey, win a $100 Amazon Gift Card: http://www.podsurvey.com/yanss
When you work from home, do you produce better results in pajamas or professional attire? Do casual Fridays damage productivity? Does a jeans-and-T-shirt startup have an edge over its business-casual competitor?
Researchers are just now getting to the bottom of questions like these. The answers depend on the symbolic power the particular item of clothing has in the mind of the particular wearer, but the answer to each question is never “not at all.”
Up until now, most psychological investigations into clothing have dealt with how clothes communicate status or facilitate rituals. For instance, if you put a person in a police uniform and have them ask questions or make demands you’ll get completely different results than if you had the same person wear a pirate costume. But what about the person in the uniform or the costume? Are the clothes affecting his or her behavior, thoughts, judgments, and decisions? The evidence collected so far suggests that yes, the clothes we wear affect our minds in ways we never notice. In fact, it’s likely the same person in the same situation in the same clothes will behave differently depending just on the color of those clothes.
In this episode of the YANSS Podcast we explore enclothed cognition, and I interview one of the researchers who discovered the phenomenon. Hajo Adam, a professor of management and researcher at Rice University’s School of Business, explains how he and Adam Galinsky, a business professor at Columbia University, conducted the studies that showed people wearing lab coats perform better on tests of mental ability than people wearing street clothes.
After the interview, I discuss a news story about how eyewitness testimony gets progressively less reliable the farther away the eyes of the witness from the crime.
In every episode, before I read a bit of self delusion news, I taste a cookie baked from a recipe sent in by a listener/reader. That listener/reader wins a signed copy of my new book, “You Are Now Less Dumb,” and I post the recipe on the YANSS Pinterest page. This episode’s winner is Todd Newman who submitted a recipe for perfect chocolate chip cookies with browned butter. Send your own recipes to david {at} youarenotsosmart.com.
Links and Sources
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Soundcloud
Previous Episodes
Boing Boing Podcasts
Cookie Recipes
Hajo Adam
Adam Galinsky
Distance influences accuracy of eyewitness IDs
The Enclothed Cognition Study
Sources:
Adam, Hajo, and Adam D. Galinsky. “Enclothed Cognition.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48, no. 4 (2012): 918– 25.
Bargh, John A., Mark Chen, and Lara Burrows. “Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71, no. 2 (1996): 230– 44.
“Suitably Dressed.” The Economist. Dec. 16, 2010. Web: Apr. 2012, http://www.economist.com/ node/ 17722802. | {
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WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a dramatic departure from existing White House procedures, President Obama requested today that his staff start cc’ing him on stuff.
“Look, I know a lot of you think I’m really busy and you don’t want to bother me,” the President reportedly told his staff in an Oval Office meeting. “But cc me anyway. It’s good for me to keep up on what’s going on around here.”
“It’s not good when I turn on the news and they’re talking about something at the White House and I’m like, whoa, when did that happen?” Mr. Obama added. “I think cc’ing me would go a long way toward fixing that.”
“Maybe put a Post-It note on your computer saying, ‘CC POTUS,’ so you don’t forget,” he said as the meeting broke up.
Afterward, the President told aides that he “felt really good” about the meeting and was “really looking forward to people looping me in on stuff.”
But Mr. Obama’s mood soured later in the day, sources say, when his e-mail address was left off a message bearing the subject line, “Things the Treasury Dept. Is Planning to Do.”
Mr. Obama hastily reconvened his staff, telling them, “Look, maybe I didn’t make myself clear. That’s just the kind of thing I should have been cc’d on. Even Biden got that one. Could one of you please forward it to me?”
As of press time, Mr. Obama had not yet received the e-mail.
Get the Borowitz Report delivered to your inbox.
Official White House photograph by Pete Souza. | {
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Gov. Scott Walker is the rare conservative favorite who emphasizes electability. He won three contests in four years in Wisconsin, which hasn’t voted for the Republican candidate in a presidential election since 1984. He did so without compromising on the Republican Party’s core principles; instead, he prevailed in a high-profile fight with organized labor.
Mr. Walker might well prove to be a stronger general election candidate than Mitt Romney. That’s not a very high bar. But his electoral record — three wins in governor’s races in four years in Wisconsin, including a recall election — isn’t as impressive as it looks.
It’s not clear that Mr. Walker would have won re-election in November 2012, when he wouldn’t have had the many benefits of running in an off-year election. It’s still less clear that he could have run far ahead of Mr. Romney had he sought federal office; he would have been deprived of the labor and pensions issues that have split Democratic-leaning voters in many parts of the country. | {
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Early in the fall of 1976, Phil Meyer returned to the apartment he shared with Mike Zimmer, back from a long day of classes and football practice at Illinois State University. Zimmer had just returned from the Mayo Clinic after suffering a broken neck in his C5 and C6 vertebrae, so Meyer figured he’d be sulking on the couch, stuck in a brace with his football career likely over.
But he couldn’t find Zimmer in the apartment and gave a quick look outside where he saw his roommate in an empty field behind the building. Zimmer held a football and was punting in the overgrown, unmarked space. And he was indeed wearing a massive neck brace. Meyer watched, perplexed.
“He had one football,” Meyer said. “I ain’t kidding you. He’d punt one ball, walk, go get it, punt it again. And he had his neck brace on the whole time.”
Zimmer, a man raised by a tough father in a blue-collar family, the coach of the NFL’s meanest... | {
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Use the Amazon Smile link above when making purchases on Amazon.com | {
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A 19-year-old man reported missing in Santa Monica returned home and he is OK, police said Wednesday.
Police asked for help in finding Theo "Teddy'" Guarriello after he was seen near Seventh Street and Ocean Park Boulevard on Monday, said Sgt. M. Toti of the Santa Monica Police Department.
Guarrielo came home unharmed, police said, without elaborating. | {
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Red Bull has done a lot for the FGC lately; between the Red Bull Kumite, the signing of various players, and the sponsorship of events in North America, Red Bull is easily becoming synonymous with Street Fighter V.
Thus, it should come as no surprise that Street Fighter V is on Red Bull’s short list for Game of the Year. This award, determined by their readers, includes fellow esports titan Overwatch, as well as various casual and single player games.
Interested in helping Street Fighter V rise up to the top of the list? Go cast your vote!
Source: Red Bull | {
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Image copyright Fermilab Image caption The result is based on 15 years of MiniBooNE data
The field of particle physics has been going through a bit of soul-searching of late.
There was jubilation when the Higgs boson particle was detected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012.
But since then, the major new discoveries in physics that the LHC was predicted to make have failed to materialise.
So there has been a considerable buzz around a report that the MiniBooNE experiment at Fermilab in the US may have found hints of a new particle.
Specifically, the data may hint at a previously undetected form of neutrino, known as a "sterile neutrino".
Neutrinos are among the most intriguing residents of the "zoo" of particles known as the Standard Model (SM).
The SM is the most successful theory to explain how the world around us works, yet it has limitations because it does not explain phenomena such as dark matter, or gravity.
Neutrinos interact only very weakly with other elementary particles, which has led to them being nicknamed "ghost particles". They also have the ability to "oscillate" - flip, or switch identity - between three different forms, or flavours. These are the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino.
Image copyright Fermilab Image caption Based on a 2,700-hectare site near Chicago, Fermilab is America's premier particle physics lab
A fourth flavour, the sterile neutrino, has been proposed before, but has never been detected by experiments.
The existing three flavours of neutrino would interact with matter through the weak force (one of the four fundamental forces of the Universe) and gravity.
The sterile neutrino, however, would primarily interact with gravity. However, one that's detectable with instruments would have to mix with the other (active) neutrino flavours to some degree.
"If the sterile neutrinos were completely decoupled from the active neutrinos, they would be impossible to see," says Prof Stefan Söldner-Rembold, head of the Particle Physics Group at the University of Manchester.
The sterile neutrino is important because it would represent new physics beyond the Standard Model, and must have played a role in the formation of the Universe, potentially affecting our models of cosmology.
In fact, says Prof Ray Jayawardhana, an astrophysicist at York University in Toronto, Canada, "one of the reasons for people to propose sterile neutrinos in the first place was that they might explain dark matter in the Universe, because you would see the gravitational influence, but they wouldn't interact any other way."
Image copyright AHEP
MiniBooNE can detect the traces of electron neutrinos interacting with atomic nuclei in a spherical tank of mineral oil located at Fermilab in Illinois.
The neutrinos themselves are generated by firing protons at a target made of beryllium. These muon neutrinos then travel underground to a detector. On the way, some may flip to the electron neutrino form.
Scientists working on the MiniBooNE project have published data from its 15-year run, showing many more electron neutrinos being detected than would be expected under the Standard Model.
The findings appear in a paper on the Arxiv pre-print server and are to be presented on Friday at the Neutrino 2018 conference in Heidelberg, Germany.
The implication of the paper is that some of the muon neutrinos are flipping to sterile neutrinos before switching identity again to electron neutrinos.
The researchers see this at the confidence level of 4.8 sigma (5 sigma is the usual threshold for claiming a discovery) at MiniBooNE. When combined with a similar result more than 20 years ago from the US Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) experiment, the significance exceeds six sigma.
Prof Söldner-Rembold said that most physicists expect additional new neutrinos to be very heavy particles. But this one - if it really exists - would be relatively light.
But there are potential problems for the sterile neutrino interpretation: results from other neutrino experiments, such as IceCube and Minos, show no evidence for a particle of this kind. In addition, other scientific teams later failed to replicate the result from the LSND experiment.
Image copyright Felipe Pedreros, IceCube/NSF Image caption Other neutrino experiments, such as IceCube (pictured) in Antarctica, see no evidence for the sterile neutrino
More evidence against the idea comes from the Cosmic Microwave Background - the "afterglow" of the Big Bang - as measured by the Planck spacecraft. A study from 2016, authored by Prof Söldner-Rembold and other scientists from the University of Manchester confirmed that a sterile neutrino is not needed to describe the CMB measurements.
Furthermore, the authors of the MiniBooNE paper could be underestimating the "background". This refers to other events in the data which aren't related to the signal physicists are looking for - false positives in other words.
Neutral forms of a particle known as the pion can decay into photons (particles of light), which could be mistaken for electrons: "A photon would look very similar," says Prof Söldner-Rembold.
However, another neutrino experiment at Fermilab, called MicroBooNE, uses a different technology to MiniBooNE - liquid argon - which can distinguish between photons and electrons. This experiment will be vital for checking the recent results.
Prof Jayawardhana calls the result "intriguing", but explains: "Ultimately, we need independent results from different experiments because different experiments would be affected by different systematics... if you can validate the results then that adds to the confidence levels overall."
Prof Söldner-Rembold adds: "There could be other interpretations, such as the background. People in MiniBooNE realise that; publishing this was exactly the right thing to do."
"The statistics are clear, but it's the interpretation that's open. That makes it exciting... time will tell."
Image copyright Xenon 1T Image caption Xenon 1T is the most sensitive experiment attempting a direct detection of dark matter
Prof Jayawardhana echoed this view: "The statistical significance you can assign a value to, if you think you understand what the other particle backgrounds are... but if you're not able to account for that background very well, it complicates matters," he says, "That's the way science is."
Regarding the idea of the sterile neutrino as a dark matter candidate, if the excess of electron neutrinos seen by MiniBooNE does represent a particle, it would be too light to be compatible with dark matter.
However, the search for the dark stuff, which makes up 26.8% of the cosmos, and 80% of all matter in the Universe, continues apace. Xenon 1T, based at the Gran Sasso underground lab in Italy, is the most sensitive experiment for the direct detection of dark matter particles.
The team recently announced the results of a year's worth of data, placing much more stringent limits on the space where dark matter particles could be hiding.
The researchers did detect a very small excess of events, at the statistical level known as one sigma. But this "signal" is currently too weak to get excited about and may yet disappear.
Follow Paul on Twitter. | {
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An infamous villain is set to stalk Gotham anew, albeit with a drastically altered appearance.
TVLine has learned exclusively that David W. Thompson has been tapped to take over the role of Scarecrow, the Big Bad psychopath previously portrayed by Charlie Tahan (pictured, right). According to an insider, Tahan’s series-regular gig on Netflix’s recently-renewed Ozark precluded him from reprising the role. (I teased the impending recast late last year in Ask Ausiello.) The character was last seen in the Season 4 premiere.
Gotham is, of course, no stranger to giving its characters extreme makeovers, the most recent example being Ivy Pepper. As previously reported, Peyton List (The Flash, Frequency) will step into the role of the former mop-topped street rat later this season.
Gotham will resume Season 4 on Thursday, March 1 at 8/7c (watch the new trailer). Thompson will make his debut as Scarecrow this spring. | {
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"The minimum response expected from president El-Sisi is to dismiss the head of State Security and the governor of Minya, as a clear sign of holding officials accountable. Furthermore, given the government's continued failure to protect the Copts, Coptic Solidarity vigorously calls for an independent inquiry by the UN to evaluate the Copts' situation and to recommend necessary measures to alleviate their increasingly perilous situation..." — Coptic Solidarity , Washington, DC.
"The pilgrims were killed in such a savage and sadistic way, as if they were enemy combatants, when they were just simple Christians come to get a blessing from a monastery." — Coptic Bishop Anba Makarios of Minya, Egypt.
Seven pilgrims were shot to death, "just because they were Christian," said Pope Francis after the attack.
On November 2, heavily armed Islamic terrorists ambushed and massacred Christians returning home after visiting the ancient St. Samuel Monastery (pictured) in Minya, Egypt. (Image source: Roland Unger/Wikimedia Commons)
On November 2, heavily armed Islamic terrorists ambushed and massacred Christians returning home after visiting the ancient St. Samuel Monastery in Minya, Egypt.
Seven pilgrims -- including a 12-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy -- were shot to death. More than 20 were left injured with bullet wounds or shards of broken glass from the buses' windows. "I pray for the victims, pilgrims killed just because they were Christian," said Pope Francis after the attack.
Pictures posted on social media reveal "bodies soaked in blood and distorted faces of men and women." In one video posted, a man can be heard crying, "The gunshot got you in the head, my boy!" and repeating, "What a loss!"
After the first and largest bus had passed the ambush point, the terrorists emerged in black 4x4s and opened fire with automatic weapons on the second bus; six pilgrims were injured, including a small child. Fortunately, the bus driver managed to escape and speed away, at which point the terrorists fired on the third and smallest bus as it approached. After the driver was killed, they surrounded the stalled minibus and opened fire on all sides. The bus carried 20 people -- 14 adults and six children -- all from one extended family who had visited the monastery to baptize two of the children.
The terrorists first opened the hatchback and looked to see who was still alive. They then shot all the men in the head and all the women and children in the ankles or legs.
One of the female survivors who was shot in the legs recalls, in a video, only that an explosion of gunfire suddenly opened on all sides of their bus; by the time she could register what was happening, she saw pieces of her brother-in-law's brain splattered on her lap.
Another woman, after realizing that her husband and daughter had been killed, begged the jihadis to kill her, too. They said, "No, you stay and suffer over your husband and daughter." Then they shot her in the ankles so she could not move away.
In a separate report, another survivor said the terrorists told her, "We will kill the men and children and leave you to live the rest of your lives in misery."
Virtually all of the survivors have "had a nervous breakdown of what they have seen and they are in the hospital."
Coptic Bishop Anba Makarios of Minya confirmed that "The pilgrims were killed in such a savage and sadistic way, as if they were enemy combatants, when they were just simple Christians come to get a blessing from a monastery."
Reactions among Egypt's Christians echoed those from earlier incidents. "Oh God, these children were students in my school!" wept one local teacher. "I can't imagine they are dead now!"
The day after the attack, the Egyptian government created more questions than answers. It announced that it had killed 19 terrorists believed to be complicit in the November 2 attack. As one report noted:
"With the suspects now dead, it is impossible to confirm whether they were indeed involved in Friday's attack. Fear continues to permeate the Christian community in Egypt."
Another report stated that government photos of the purported slain terrorists "appear staged in a manner which mirrors past examples of Egyptian security forces executing suspected terrorists."
The attack was a virtual duplicate of another that occurred on May 26, 2017. Islamist gunmen ambushed buses full of Christians returning from the same monastery. Twenty-eight Christians -- ten of whom were children, including two girls, aged two and four -- were massacred. According to accounts based on eyewitness testimonies, the terrorists had ordered the passengers to exit the bus in groups:
"... as each pilgrim came off the bus they were asked to renounce their Christian faith and profess belief in Islam, but all of them — even the children — refused. Each was killed in cold blood with a gunshot to the head or the throat."
Discussing the recent massacre with Bishop Makarios, a television interviewer said, "this is a duplicate of the same event and same place that happened a year and five months ago -- how can this be? What does it mean?" Makarios replied, "Honestly, those best positioned to answer this question are the state authorities.... I add my voice to yours and ask the same questions."
"That the same attack occurred in the same place only means that, despite all the talk, protecting Egypt's Christian minority is not on the government's agenda," Magdi Khalil, Egyptian political analyst and editor of the Egyptian weekly Watani International, told Gatestone by phone.
Despite Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's many conciliatory and brotherly words to the nation's Christian minorities, they have suffered more under his rule than any Egyptian leader of the modern era, partially because ISIS arose during his term. In December 2017, a gunman killed 10 worshippers inside a church in Helwan. One year earlier, 29 Christians were killed during twin attacks on churches. On Palm Sunday in April 2017, a suicide bombing of two churches killed nearly 50 people and injured more than a hundred.
While it may be understandable that Sisi cannot eliminate terrorism entirely, there is evidence that the government itself participates in the persecution of Egypt's Christians. According to the World Watch List (2018), Egyptian "officials at any level from local to national" are "strongly responsible" for the "oppression" of Egypt's Christians. "Government officials," the report adds, "also act as drivers of persecution through their failure to vindicate the rights of Christians and also through their discriminatory acts which violate the fundamental rights of Christians." [1]
Coptic Solidarity, a Washington, DC-based organization dedicated to the human rights of Egypt's Christians, condemned the Novemnber 2 attack in a press release:
"Coptic Solidarity reiterates the message published after the May 2017 attack, that the Egyptian government has failed to protect its Coptic minority. Coptic Solidarity strongly maintains that this violence is not perpetrated by foreign terrorists as the Egyptian government would like the world to believe, but is homegrown, one created by a culture of hate and impunity within Egypt. "Consequently, Coptic Solidarity holds the Egyptian government fully responsible and calls for a transparent investigation of these attacks, and to institute serious measures to prevent future attacks. The minimum response expected from president El-Sisi is to dismiss the head of State Security and the governor of Minya, as a clear sign of holding officials accountable. Furthermore, given the government's continued failure to protect the Copts, Coptic Solidarity vigorously calls for an independent inquiry by the UN to evaluate the Copts' situation and to recommend necessary measures to alleviate their increasingly perilous situation and to avoid repetition of the tragic situation of Christians in Iraq and Syria."
"Our lives have turned into hell," said one man. "I'm a Copt and I curse myself every day for bringing [Sisi] to power. He failed us. He sold us."
"Who can accept these incidents?" asked another Christian, discussing the recent massacre. "Every day, there are many incidents harming Christians. We must leave our land and get out of here. I'm so exhausted... it's so dull and dark these days."
Raymond Ibrahim, author of the new book, Sword and Scimitar, Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
[1] Open Doors International, World Watch List 2018, Compilation Volume 3, Persecution Dynamics for Countries Ranking 1-25, pages 154-155. | {
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What will you gain when you lose?
Well, Special K, I gained self-confidence
when I lost the first 10 pounds.
I gained an addiction when I lost
the next thirty.
I gained the horrid feeling deep in my
empty stomach when I started to lose my hair.
When I finally reached recovery,
I gained the confidence to lose my eating disorder.
I no longer judge my worth in proportion to my weight. | {
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It’s no secret that Boston’s is one of the nation’s most expensive housing markets. But a new analysis from real estate research site PropertyShark certainly puts things into skull-splitting perspective as to just how expensive.
The site took the approximate national home-price median of $200,000 and penciled out what that might buy in major markets nationwide. Turns out that in Boston it would buy 371 square feet of living space.
Only in Manhattan (126 feet) and San Francisco (260 feet) would it buy less. Boston was just ahead of San Jose/Silicon Valley, where $200K would command 376 square feet.
Maybe consider Cleveland? There, $200,000 can buy 3,769 square feet. Cleveland, then? Is that the plan? | {
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A Moose Jaw man has been sentenced to four years in prison for a drunk driving crash that killed three people.
Jesse Taylor had earlier pleaded guilty to impaired driving causing death.
Taylor, 24, was driving a vehicle carrying six people when it rolled on Highway 2 south of Moose Jaw in September 2013.
Jason Friesen and Joshua Patterson of Moose Jaw and Justin Kowalski of Mossbank died in the crash. All three victims were 24 years old. | {
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100 kids have sleepover at Dallas Cowboys' AT&T Stadium as part of Ashley Furniture charity event
About 100 underserved kids got to have a sleepover at AT&T Stadium in Dallas as part of Ashley Furniture HomeStore's charity event. Photo via Mary Ann Downey Kirby on Facebook. About 100 underserved kids got to have a sleepover at AT&T Stadium in Dallas as part of Ashley Furniture HomeStore's charity event. Photo via Mary Ann Downey Kirby on Facebook. Photo: Mary Ann Downey Kirby On Facebook Photo: Mary Ann Downey Kirby On Facebook Image 1 of / 38 Caption Close 100 kids have sleepover at Dallas Cowboys' AT&T Stadium as part of Ashley Furniture charity event 1 / 38 Back to Gallery
The eyes of about 100 kids widened as they ran onto the field at AT&T Stadium in Dallas on Friday. Each of them rushed to a bed set up on the field where Dallas Cowboy swag awaited. Sure, they were there for a sleepover, but sleep was the last thing on their minds.
The Dallas Cowboys and Ashley Furniture HomeStore hosted 100 underserved children this weekend in what's been deemed the "ultimate sleepover experience." The kids take part in on-field games and entertainment with Dallas Cowboys players and cheerleaders, eat pizza and watch a movie on the giant center-hung video board.
After the sleepover, Ashley Furniture delivers the beds to each child's home to keep.
A portion of the proceeds from every mattress purchase at local Ashley Furniture HomeStores benefit children in need. Families in need of beds and mattresses can be nominated by friends, family members and social service organizations at www.ahopetodream.com. | {
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Y aunque la leyenda diga que los trucos aquí no sirven, desde MARCA lanzamos las estrategias definitivas para que puedas triunfar en las tragaperras.…
Leer más | {
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What if all your upvotes go to the opposite team?
101 shares | {
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Check out our new site Makeup Addiction
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Tara Reade came forward recently and alleged that presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden sexually assaulted her years ago when she worked for him when he was serving in the U.S. Senate.
Earlier this month, she filed a police report along the same lines.
Now, days after Biden was finally endorsed by former President Barack Obama, it seems some progress is being made.
The Washington Examiner reported that the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department is “actively investigating” Reade’s claims.
“This is an active, ongoing investigation, and there are no further details to provide at this time,” a spokesperson for the department said, according to the Examiner.
They went on: “Cases that are handled by the Metropolitan Police Department’s Sexual Assault Unit go through a multi-review prior to being assigned a disposition. This case is progressing through the review process.”
The Examiner characterized the development as “highly unusual” given that the statute of limitations for the crime has already expired, meaning Biden couldn’t be prosecuted for it even if evidence presents itself.
“Sometimes they receive information that is never going to lead to a criminal charge, but nonetheless, does invoke some of their obligations as public safety officials,” Wendy Murphy, a former sex-crimes prosecutor, speculated of the department’s reasoning in a conversation with the Examiner.
“Is it usual or typical? I think the answer is no,” she added.
Biden, for his part, has staunchly denied the allegations.
“He firmly believes that women have a right to be heard — and heard respectfully,” a spokeswoman for the former VP’s campaign said, according to the BBC. “Such claims should also be diligently reviewed by an independent press. What is clear about this claim: It is untrue.”
Last month, journalist Katie Harper released an audio clip of an interview with Tara Reade, a former staff assistant to Joe Biden, in which Reade claims that Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993.
Reade begins by detailing how she was instructed to rush a gym bag to Biden at the time. Upon reaching then-Senator Biden with the bag, Reade claims that he greeted her by name, and proceeded to sexually assault her in a “side area.”
“We were alone, and it was the strangest thing. There was no, like, exchange really, he just had me up against the wall,” Reade claims.
“His hands were on me, and underneath my clothes,” Reade later says. “He went down my skirt, but then up inside. He penetrated me with his fingers.”
Reade alleges that Biden was kissing her and asking her if she “wanted to go somewhere else,” and that after the alleged assault was complete, he said, “C’mon man, I heard you liked me.”
Reade told Harper that Biden’s alleged phrase stuck with her because it made her think about what she “might have said.”
For me, it was like everything shattered in that moment because I knew that we were alone. It was over, right? He wasn’t trying to do anything more – but I looked up to him, he was like my father’s age, he was like this champion of women’s rights in my eyes and I couldn’t believe it was happening. It seemed surreal. I just felt sick because when he pulled back, he looked annoyed, and he said something else to me that I don’t want to say, and then he said – I must have looked shocked … I don’t know how I looked, but I must have looked something because he grabbed me by the shoulders, and said, “You’re okay. You’re fine. You’re okay. You’re fine,” and then he walked away, and went on with his day.
She then told Harper what Biden allegedly said: | {
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Ashley Adams Demon In A Dark-hued Sundress
This fresh technology of teenagers is much more clueless than the ultimate 3. Take Ashley right here. Sexier than hell, but this nubile sexpot unearths herself stranded in some godforsaken barren region, clad to the nines in a marvelous, cock-squeezing dark-hued sundress, and sitting at the facet of a mud street sweating her baps off. And what fantastic baps Ashley has! Gorgeously formed, all congenital and capped with a collection of pointy, rosy nips that view like sweet. Ashley ain?t going to ultimate lengthy out right here, however fortunately, Bruno is out scavenging within the van and catches sight of her. He gives her a rail, however insists damsel undress right down to sexy off. Ashley hesitates as a result of damsel?s now not dressed in undies, sloppy bi-atch. When Bruno asks her to open her gams so he behind gawp at her sugary, large cooter, damsel indeed will get jumpy. Damsel must. Everyone knows what Bruno does to tiny taunts. He turns them into hook-up gimps thru sexual abasement and tough hook-up. That?s simply what he does to bi-atch Ashley, smacking her face, trussing her palms with cable and making her to fingerbang herself. Subsequent, he makes her give him a blow blow-job earlier than he tapes her gullet close, and plows her out like a hen cutlet doggystyle fashion, missionary and cowgirl. He even frigs her backdoor whilst nailing her doggystyle fashion to finish her subordination. Good out of doors extraordinary teenage hook-up handiest to be had on Defenseless Teenagers. | {
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Controversial Brand Name German Firm Wins Right to Make Beer Called 'Fucking Hell'
The EU's trademarks authority has permitted a German firm to brew beer and produce clothing under the name "Fucking Hell". It may be an expletive in English, but in German it could refer to a light ale -- Hell -- from the Austrian town of Fucking. Whether it will be brewed there is another question. | {
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I had a lot of inquiries about what this sort of piece would go for, and what I'd be looking to charge to draw/paint characters for other players, and this is a complex question.
The foreground character is a $20-40 piece depending on creative control. Creative control is a term that covers the amount of input from the artist and/or client that determines the outcome of the piece. The more specific the clients directions, the longer the revision process takes. This piece was an example of 100% creative control because I was the only person involved in the revision process.
If you would like to know more about my pricing, and get an estimate on an idea, please contact me! :)
| {
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I got this game for under $15 dollars (love Best Buy Sales and Gamer's Club). I have beaten this game numerous times on the PC, and my PS3. However i love this game and decided to pick it up for my PS4. This game is GREAT! Granted, the remaster isn't anything too special, i will be creating this review MOSTLY from the mindset of a new player experience. Pros: - Story : This game is HEAVILY focused on the older characters from the Franchise, and ties up loose-ends with Wesker. The story is VERY well done, and despite a few hiccups and cliche's (the game's plot is very similar to RE4), the game is clearly top-notch and the variety and voice acting is superb! Gameplay: I know many people knocked the game for its "Action-Adventure" gameplay, and the move away from Survival Horror. Yes, that is true it plays more like an Action game, but that isn't a bad thing. The game does this VERY well, and TBH, the gameplay isn't that far off from RE4 EITHER (which is considered by many to be amongst the most successful RE titles). It is very smooth to play, and very fun. The only gripe i have is the game is meant for co-op, so the Friendly AI is not so Friendly, and rather unintelligent. Also the fact you cannot shoot while moving is a little less to be desired GRANTED it moves away from Survival Horror. But it isn't anything major. Graphics: This game was ORIGINALLY released in early 2009! That is ALMOST a full decade ago, and these graphics are on par with late PS3, early PS4 generation! The Remaster gives a near 60 FPS boost, and a few fixes to things like anti-aliasing....but nothing massive (most won't notice) But the increased FPS makes the game more enjoyable. - Replayability: This game gives us the BEST Mercenaries mode currently out there. RE4 dabbled with this, but now with 2 player Mercenaries, I can say i spent MOST of my time playing this. MY cousin comes over often and we aim to get HIGH scoring SS Rank on ALL stages, with ALL Characters. There is something so satisfying about this mode. Cons: - Difficulty: The only main gripe I have is the difficulty. On lower difficulties the game is pitifully easy. On higher difficulties you do get a challenge, but not for the right reasons. Poorly built AI will get you killed (or they die, hence you fail) and the increase to difficulty is primarily to the enemy POWER. Their health doesn't really get an increase, the amount of enemies isn't changed, NOR their tactics. I do felt the devs were a little lazy here, and would be my only negative Summary: Overall this game is a MUST buy! It is only 20 bucks, and unless you have a laundry list of other games to play, or have played this to ad nauseam, then it is worth it. I love the RE franchise despite of where it has gone, and think Capcom did a great job on this game. Just KNOW you are not getting Survival Horror here, you are getting Action Adventure. | {
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Convention season may be in full swing now, but Marvel saved some pretty big announcements for the Diamond Retailer Summit this past weekend. At the show, retailers were shown early glimpses of some major new projects in the works, including Marvel's next major event comic, a big development for Jonathan Hickman's Avengers run, and a tease about the future of the Star Wars franchise as it shifts to Marvel.
AXIS
Deadpool vs. Hawkeye
Scroll down for a breakdown of all the big announcements from the weekend. Unfortunately, Marvel hasn't yet released the artwork shown at the summit, but we'll update as that becomes available.Marvell released first details on the previously teased event comic AXIS, which, like Avengers vs. X-Men, will heavily revolve around the X-Men and Avengers. The difference is that this time the two teams will be united against a common foe. AXIS will be written by Rick Remender and will spin out of his work on Uncanny Avengers . The "axis of evil" in this case looks to be a team of villains led by the Red Skull (still in his new Onslaught form) and including Sabretooth, Doctor Doom, Loki, Green Goblin, and Carnage. We don't know the artist yet, though the art shown at the summit was illustrated by Jim Cheung.- Diamond released the cover for their August issue of the Previews Catalog that features Cheung's AXIS lineup. Presumably the same image will be used as the cover for AXIS #1.
Guardians 3000
Star Wars
After he finishes dealing with Carnage, Deadpool's next major Marvel crossover will involve Hawkeye. We're not clear at the moment if this project is meant to be a crossover between both characters' respective ongoing titles or a separate mini-series a la Deadpool vs. Carnage. Either way, the story should help tide Hawkguy fans over as his series continues to suffer through delays.Marvel has been placing a lot of emphasis on the Guardians of the Galaxy in the elad-up to their Hollywood debut this August. Marvel has previously announced new solo series for Rocket Raccoon and Star-Lord that will launch in July. But fans of the original, 31st Century version of the team can take heart. They'll be given the spotlight in September as Marvel launches a new ongoing series titled Guardians 3000. No creative team has been announced yet.
Time Runs Out
Now that both Marvel and Star Wars fall under the Disney umbrella, Marvel will be taking charge of the Star Wars comic book franchise from Dark Horse in 2015. They didn't reveal at the summit what that will entail exactly. But Marvel did reveal that the announcement will be coming in July 2014 ahead of Comic-Con.
DC isn't the only company pushing its books forward in time in September. That month, both The Avengers #35 and New Avengers #24 will jump forward in time eight months. This time jump is the start of the build-up to a storyline called "Time Runs Out," which will begin in May 2015. Time Runs Out will serve as the climax of Hickman's saga. Based on the art Marvel showed at the summit, it looks like this will involve the Avengers finally confronted with the threat of a World Incursion and the imminent destruction of their universe.
Jesse is a mild-mannered writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter , or Kicksplode on MyIGN | {
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Fallout Equestria is awesome. Totally awesome, I highly recommend anyone read it, whether recommended by this picture or by anyone else. Pip very quickly became a fan favorite. Also, follow it up, if you'd like to, with Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons, which is essentially a follow up and sequel. I know there's a third, but I don't remember the name of it. | {
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The agriculture ministry said Wednesday a classical swine fever infection has been confirmed at a pig farm in the prefecture of Okinawa for the first time since the autumn of 1986.
The Okinawa Prefectural Government plans to cull more than 1,800 pigs at the farm in the city of Uruma and at another farm where infection is suspected, in accordance with the law.
In September 2018, the first CSF outbreak in Japan in 26 years was identified at a pig farm in the central city of Gifu. Before the latest outbreak in Okinawa, CSF infections were confirmed in a total of 12 prefectures, mainly in the Chubu and Kanto regions, such as Aichi, Mie and Saitama. The virus is believed to have been transmitted through wild boars.
The ministry will carefully look into infection routes, as it is thought that pigs at the farm in Okinawa may have become infected via different routes to prior cases.
Officials in Okinawa’s pork industry were shocked by the news and expressed fears over the spread of the disease and harmful rumors.
“After the outbreak in Gifu, we strengthened epidemic prevention measures. It is regretful that we are put in such a serious situation,” said Seizo Inamine, 64, chairman of the prefecture’s pig farming promotion council. “We are praying that vaccination will be conducted to prevent further spread of the disease.”
Agriculture minister Taku Eto explained at a meeting held at the ministry to cope with the latest outbreak that the farm raises Agu, an Okinawan breed of pig. “We cannot deny the possibility that this will have a grave impact on Okinawa,” Eto said. “We will make every effort to control the epidemic.”
Pig raising has been conducted widely in Okinawa since the prefecture was independent and known as the Ryukyu Kingdom, from the 15th to the 19th century.
Although business declined sharply during World War II, it had recovered in recent years as the prefecture made efforts to promote Agu pork as a premium brand.
Shipment of pigs reached some 330,000 in fiscal 2018. | {
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A mind-boggling tour through life, the universe and everything spiritual."
A controversial biologist dreams of a past life in 48BCE Alexandria Egypt as he races to discover dark energy. Join him on a trek through ancient temples, palaces and advanced tech labs as he fights an entrenched status quo intent on slowing innovation to a crawl. 18+ recommended.
"The scenes in Alexandria are so descriptive and the year is 48 BC. In particular, the one with the ship entering the port with the oarsmen and the drum beating was powerful."
- Top 500 Amazon Reviewer
"Dark energy became beautiful. A discussion about energy and sensors? Riveting."
- Undiscovered Tomes
"This is a terrific first novel. I definitely will read it again. And again."
- Amazon Top 1000 reviewer April 2015
Publisher's Weekly - Jan 19, 2015
"...College student Roy Swenson, brokenhearted after the death of his sweetheart in a car accident, plunges into his studies and becomes a scientist working on energy sensors... Roy's meditations reveal that he was previously Marcus Agrippa, an engineer who served Caesar in ancient Alexandria and fell in love with a mysterious woman who guided him to spiritual enlightenment..."
Show less | {
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“THEY have disappeared. I don’t even know if they have premises here any more.” In his office overlooking the sun-scorched wharves and cranes of Piraeus, Giorgos Gogos, the head of the dockers’ union, is pondering Pasok, the social-democratic party that for decades dominated the politics of this sprawling Greek port. For years its vote here hovered steadily around 45%. Then came the economic crisis. At the insistence of European institutions the Pasok government agreed to privatise the container terminal at Piraeus. Appalled workers abandoned the party en masse for the far-left and -right, slashing the social-democratic vote to 4% in 2015. Traces of this radicalisation are sprayed across the warehouse walls: hammers and sickles; swastikas; “Piraeus Port Authority in workers’ hands!”. “Why would anyone vote for Pasok now?” asks Kiriakos, a former party activist. “They don’t stand for anything.”
Greece’s economic and political turmoil is unparalleled. But when Mr Gogos jokes that Greece is “Europe on fast-forward” he may have a point. Political scientists looking at Europe’s centre left talk of a continent-wide “Pasokification”. Support for social-democratic parties is collapsing in an unprecedented way.
Early in this century you could drive from Inverness in Scotland to Vilnius in Lithuania without crossing a country governed by the right; the same would have been true if you had done the trip by ferry through Scandinavia. Social democrats ran the European Commission and vied for primacy in the European Parliament. But recently their share of the vote in domestic (and Europe-wide) elections has fallen by a third to lows not seen for 70 years (see chart 1). In the five European Union (EU) states that held national elections last year, social democrats lost power in Denmark, fell to their worst-ever results in Finland, Poland and Spain and came to within a hair’s-breadth of such a nadir in Britain.
Elsewhere, it is true, the centre left is in power: as an unloved and ideologically vague junior party of government in Germany and the Netherlands and at the helm of wobbly coalitions in Sweden, Portugal and Austria, all countries where it was once a natural party of government. In France, President François Hollande is plumbing new depths of unpopularity and may not make the run-off in next year’s presidential election. Matteo Renzi, Italy’s dynamic prime minister, is in better shape but his party is still losing support (and possibly, in May, Rome’s mayoralty) to the Five Star Movement (M5S), an anti-establishment party founded by a blogger. Former municipal and regional bastions like London and Amsterdam, Catalonia and Scotland have slipped from the traditional centre left’s grasp.
Where are all the votes going? Many have been hoovered up by populists, typically of the anti-market left in southern Europe and the anti-migrant right in the north. But alternative left parties (feminists, pirates and greens, for example), liberals and the centre-right have also benefited. And so has the Stay On The Sofa party.
Europe’s left has seen losing streaks before; its fortunes fell sharply in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It bounced back under leaders like Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder, who sacrificed their parties’ old affection for rigid labour markets and high taxes in favour of a centrist, “Third Way” combination of social reform, deregulation and good public services funded by the ensuing economic growth. In 1996 Europe’s social democrats were doing as well as ever (see maps).
But voters’ trust in such parties took a blow in the economic crisis of the late 2000s, to which parties of the centre left responded with cuts all but indistinguishable from those made by the right. At the same time parties of the right (especially in Germany, Britain and Scandinavia) nabbed popular bits of the Third Way—welfare-to-work programmes in Sweden, school reform and the minimum wage in Britain—for themselves.
The howling storm
The euro crisis exacerbated matters. In Europe’s north the idea of relaxing austerity came to be seen by many voters as a way of using their money to bail out the spendthrift south. The left’s options were thus sharply constrained. Take the predicament Mr Hollande found himself in. Elected in 2012 on the slogan “time for change”, he promised to curb austerity and reboot the economy. But a 75% tax rate on the rich was dropped after bringing in paltry receipts. The rest of the euro zone insisted that deficit limits which had previously been ignored now had to be taken seriously. With markets breathing down his neck, unable to devalue and spooked by the prospect of France being lumped in with the EU’s struggling south, Mr Hollande cut business taxes and made savings in the budget.
But these circumstantial factors do not fully account for the depth and continental scale of the slump. Four things have made Europe a harsher environment for the centre left: its own success, structural change in the economy, a reduced fear of political extremes and the decline of monolithic class groups.
First, success. Many of the goals of the incrementalist left-wing parties that can be traced back to 1889’s Second International, Marxists who favoured the parliamentary process over insurrection, have been met. A credo of universal public services and redistribution that used to be contentious is now so widely accepted as to be easily captured by rival parties of right and left. As Joseph Muscat, the Labour prime minister of Malta, puts it: “Is anyone contesting that people should have a pension?” The sense of a forward struggle, of victories to win rather than losses to be stanched, is gone.
At the same time European economies have changed in ways that make the collectivist policies on which the centre left was built less effective. The transport of goods has become faster, cheaper and containerised; capital more mobile; trade deals (and associated state-aid rules) more far-reaching; and automation more sophisticated. Jobs have gone overseas or just gone altogether; the unionised industries of the Industrial Revolution, mining and steel, are hugely diminished. There has been a fundamental shift away from manufacturing and towards services, and from state ownership towards the private sector.
Fearful symmetry
The fall of the iron curtain in 1989 and the subsequent integration of eastern Europe into the EU hastened some of that change by providing new pools of cheap labour. It also had a deeper effect. The politics of the EU countries had until then been constrained by history: hemmed in by the threat of the Soviet Union on one side and by memories of fascism on the other, social democrats and Christian democrats huddled in the centre ground. A generation later parties can set out their pitch far away from the old mainstream.
This broadening of the political spectrum goes along with the fourth change: a fragmentation of the identities on which the centre left was built. A study published by the BBC in 2013 showed that little more than a third of British voters belong to the traditional working- and middle-classes; the rest are in new, hybrid categories such as “new affluent workers”, “technical middle class” and “emergent service workers”. Young voters raised on social media create esoteric identities of their own rather than commit themselves to collective ones like class. They prefer movements to parties.
This change poses problems to political parties of all hues. But the situation is particularly vexed on Europe’s left, less thoroughly held together by common culture than its right tends to be. The centre left relied on convincing the industrial working class and a significant fraction of the middle class, particularly that in the public-sector bits of the mixed economy, that they wanted the same thing, a trick which was easiest in places where the people involved genuinely started off feeling they had something in common. It is no coincidence that Europe’s most reliably social-democratic regions—Emilia Romagna, Andalusia, England’s north-east and North-Rhine Westphalia—all have populations with a proletarian self-image that helps politicians appeal to working and middle class alike.
Today a divergence of interests, the decline of heavy industry and the success of places where jobs that demand high skills cluster are widening the split between blue-collar voters in fading industrial towns and progressive white-collar ones in booming cities. Citing a Danish political drama about cosmopolitan media-political types, Simon Hix of the London School of Economics points to “the growing divide...between voters in creative, liberal, ‘Borgen’ cities like London, Copenhagen and Berlin with those in rusting factory and port towns like Rotterdam, Malmö and Lille.”
Where once the Copenhagens and Lilles were united in their support for social-democratic policies, now they are divided by the increasingly salient politics of identity. The Borgen types are internationalist and socially libertarian, their counterparts nationalist and socially conservative; the divide runs deepest on immigration and the EU. And new or revived parties on each side of this divide are eager to sweep up the voters that the strained centre left can no longer hold.
Consider the Netherlands, where support for the centre-left PVDA has collapsed from 25% in the 2012 elections to below 10% today. As René Cuperus, an influential thinker on the Dutch centre left, points out, the party has been losing supporters in the big cities and university towns to D66 (a liberal party of entrepreneurs and professionals) and the environmentalists and libertarians of the Green Party; between them the greens and D66 now get the vote of some four out of five Dutch students. Meanwhile the PVDA’s former blue-collar strongholds in places like Rotterdam have veered towards the Party for Freedom run by an anti-immigrant populist, Geert Wilders, who is seeking to do in the Netherlands what Marine Le Pen of the National Front has done in France.
There are parts of Europe where the two diverging groups remain bound together—but it takes a stronger glue than today’s centre left can offer. The adhesive that works is a drive for self-determination, as seen in the cross-class appeal of the Scottish National Party and the Junts pel Sí (“Together for yes”) coalition in Catalonia.
The invisible worm
Left in the middle, the social democrats look defensive and indistinct, concerned more with protecting past advances than forging new ones. They are “neither opponent nor engine”, as Mr Cuperus puts it. “It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project,” Tony Judt, a British historian, lamented in “Ill Fares the Land”, a paean to social democracy he dictated on his death bed.
The things voters found appealing about social democracy are still on offer: consider Angela Merkel’s pension-age-lowering, minimum-wage-introducing, environmentalist brand of centrism. They may also be seen when parties of the harder left come close to, or into, power and find themselves driven to the right by reality. Syriza, elected in Greece as a genuinely left-wing alternative, has found itself enacting policies it once decried: talking to The Economist Yanis Varoufakis, Syriza’s first finance minister, calls his former party “a new Pasok”. Spain’s left-wing Podemos moderated its policies in recent coalition talks with the centre-left PSOE.
Some social-democratic policies, and spirit, can be found in new parties like M5S in Italy and Ciudadanos, a youthful liberal party, in Spain, though there are many other things in the mix, too. Other new outfits may also lay claim to traditionally social-democratic territory: in Berlin on February 9th, for example, Mr Varoufakis launched DIEM 25, a leftish “movement” committed to pan-continental democracy and burden-sharing. And the dirigiste economics that Third Way leaders renounced, but many of their comrades stayed fond of, remain on offer from anti-immigrant populists, too: witness the success of Austria’s FPÖ, which pitches itself to disaffected centre-left voters as the new “social homeland party” with plans for a “building offensive” on housing. It is on track to surpass the governing Social Democrats at the presidential election on April 24th.
Crimson joy?
What strongholds remain are often tired. Take Ludwigshafen, a south-west German industrial city where tens of thousands of workers—having completed their apprenticeships, of course—commute to well paid blue-collar jobs every day. Ludwigshafen voted for the SPD even when Helmut Kohl, one of its own sons, was Germany’s centre-right chancellor in the 1980s. On March 13th, as voters south of the city (in high-tech, environmentalist Baden-Württemberg) and north-east of it (formerly communist Saxony Anhalt) abandoned the party, the stolid voters of Ludwigshafen remained loyal.
Yet at a pre-election rally for Malu Dreyer, a brassy, witty local leader who stands out against her lacklustre peers, the mood was remarkably flat. Ms Dreyer hailed once-social-democratic goodies that all now favour: child care, low unemployment, vocational training (“We want Meisters [foremen] as well as Masters”). A marching band played a foxtrot and “Mack the Knife” for supporters whose average age must have been 60. On the walls were posters with unobjectionable slogans: “Responsibility”, “Staying Together”. “Just Right For Our Time”, read one—but the time was the time of the grandparent.
On their current trajectory, social democrats may well end up like liberals and greens today: subordinate players confined to regional strongholds whose best chance of influence is to nudge other parties in their direction should they get into coalition. But there are still some who are both in power and relatively popular. Their successes offer three lessons.
First, renewal ends with national government; it does not begin there. Mayoralties and regional governments hone precisely the mix of pragmatism and innovative policy thinking that social democrats need if they are to win nationally. In Manchester a dynamic leadership with a “what works” credo keeps Labour dominant in an increasingly globalised city; in Hamburg the SPD parties like it’s 1969 thanks to a resilient coalition of low- and middle-earners.
Second, remember that a leader whom people like and even trust—including people beyond the confines of the party—can be a great asset. The continent’s most charismatic and credible social democrats are among its most popular: Emmanuel Macron, minister for the economy in France, and Mr Muscat in Malta are two examples; another two, looking back, are Mr Blair and Mr Schröder.
And Europe’s social democrats should learn from their North American counterparts, who have so far avoided their gloomy decline by building multifaceted, pluralistic coalitions like that which twice elected Barack Obama, a coalition that ranged from ethnic-minority voters, via urban liberals, insecure service employees and middle-class parents, to industrial workers. To that end Mr Renzi (a former mayor, uncoincidentally) has joined Justin Trudeau, Canada’s new prime minister, to take part in an initiative based at Global Progress in Washington, DC, which aims to reinvigorate the centre left worldwide.
Persuading a plurality of voters that their interests are best pursued by a centre-left government means adopting policies that deliver results. Mr Macron has argued for portable and individual benefits that suit a more fluid, Uber-ised labour market. Others champion retraining programmes such as those at which the Nordic countries excel, or new ways of caring for children and the elderly. Such ideas offer more hope than trying to outdo populists of right and left, or returning—as Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain’s Labour Party, would wish—to the policies of the 1970s.
Perhaps the best available template is Malta. There the Labour Party spent 15 years in opposition, consistently winning working-class port seats but failing to take middle-class votes. Taking the helm of the despairing party in 2008, Mr Muscat ditched the party’s Euroscepticism and dirigisme for a focus on social mobility, education and getting more women into work. The party won a landslide victory in 2013 and continues to lead in polls today. “What differentiates us and should differentiate us”, he said in a recent interview with The Economist, “is not that we represent those in society who are better off, but anyone who wants to be better off.” Malta, it is true, is a tiny country with a competitive economy. It nonetheless offers something like a way forward for a continent with few such exemplars.
If they want to keep fighting, Europe’s social democrats must reckon with a newly unsentimental, biddable and fragmented electorate and a range of rivals eager to steal their supporters. They will need to combine distinctiveness, credibility and persuasiveness: no mean feat. They are no longer carried forth by the tide of history and are often swimming against it. They must make their own currents.
For transcripts of the interviews mentioned in this briefing please visit www.economist.com/ESDmuscatwww.economist.com/ESDvaroufakis | {
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She starred in some of Hollywood’s most acclaimed blockbusters, but offscreen, Kelly McGillis faced almost unimaginable struggles.
The actress, best known for starring in Top Gun, Witness and The Accused, has revealed she is a survivor of two brutal rapes, as well as several assaults – all horrific incidents she detailed on social media after her home was broken into and she was attacked last week.
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McGillis, now 58 and living in North Carolina, was viciously raped by two men 34 years ago – a life-changing attack she detailed to PEOPLE in 1988.
Before Fame, Horror
In 1979, McGillis relocated to New York City from Newport Beach, California, to study acting at the Juilliard School. At the time, she previously told PEOPLE, she “was so terribly naïve about the ways of the world.”
Three years later – and a year after being mugged at gunpoint – McGillis was getting out of the shower when two men broke down her apartment door, she said.
Despite her screams, McGillis was forced into the bedroom with a knife held to her face. The men took turns sexually assaulting the actress, all while spitting on, hitting and stabbing at her with the knife.
“They kept switching and telling me they were going to beat me until I was dead,” she told PEOPLE. “At that point I thought I would die, and I had resigned myself.”
Eventually, police arrived, chasing the men off and taking McGillis to the hospital. Both men were arrested within a month of the incident. One, a 15-year-old, served more than three years in prison. Charges against the second alleged attacker, 20, were dismissed, however, after fingerprints and evidence left at the scene failed to incriminate him.
A Downward Spiral
“The first few weeks after the incident I couldn’t eat or sleep. I twitched incessantly,” McGillis detailed to PEOPLE in 1988. “I would gasp suddenly without being able to control it.”
Scared and depressed, McGillis said she gained 30 pounds and began to rely on alcohol – an addiction that would eventually lead to rehab. She struggled to trust men and ruined relationships.
“Finally in 1984 I went into therapy for a year because I was tired of beating myself up for something I didn’t do, and I realized I would have no future if I didn’t stop,” McGillis said.
Later, her abuse struggle expanded to drugs, eventually landing her in a Pennsylvania halfway house, she told The New York Times in 2010.
A New Lease on Life
It seemed as if McGillis had found peace by 2009. She was eight years sober, her relationship with her children – she has two grown daughters with her second husband, Fred Tillman, whom she divorced in 2002 – was long repaired and she was ready to come out as a lesbian, a surprise to many after two marriages to men.
A year later, McGillis entered into a civil union with partner Melanie Leis after 10 years together, telling PEOPLE, “I have a very quiet, little normal life, and I love it.”
But the romance wouldn’t last – by 2013, she and Leis had parted ways.
McGillis channeled her past problems into helping others – working with women at a New Jersey drug and rehab facility, she told The Oklahoman newspaper in 2013.
“I find it’s just an amazing gift to see people come in hopeless and to be given some hope and some desire to live, and some tools for hopefully changing their lives, their children’s lives, their families’ lives,” McGillis said.
She also re-entered Hollywood – an industry she’d long left behind to focus on her children. In 2013, she appeared in the cannibal horror film We Are What we Are. “I think I kind of look at things now with like, ‘Have I done it before? Would it be fun? How long away from home is it?’ ” she told Yahoo of joining the cast.
Trauma Revisited
The June 17 break-in at her home has left McGillis rattled – and reopened old wounds, despite the arrest of the alleged intruder.
In a Facebook post from two days after the incident, the actress further alleged that someone from her past had stalked her and once attempted to poison her pets and destroy her personal property.
She also revealed that she was gang-raped by three men when she was 12.
“After each one of these attacks I moved thinking I could find a safe place. Not,” she wrote, adding, “I am now left with all the terrifying feelings of PTSD and trying to pull myself out of the very depth of the all consuming depression and despair. All that background pain has pushed itself to the fore of my psyche.” | {
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- Izin organisasi kemasyarakatan (ormas) Front Pembela Islam ( FPI ) dikabarkan akan habis pada Juni 2019. Kemudian beredar petisi online yang meminta Kementerian Dalam Negeri ( Kemendagri ) tak memperpanjang izin FPI.Dilihat, Selasa (7/5/2019), dari situs resmi Kemendagri, diketahui izin ormas FPI ditandai dengan nomor Surat Keterangan Terdaftar (SKT) 01-00-00/010/D.III.4/VI/2014. Tanggal berlaku SKT FPI tertanggal dari 20 Juni 2014 sampai 20 Juni 2019.Dalam dokumen tersebut, terdata ada delapan organisasi lain yang izinnya akan habis pada kurun waktu 16 Mei-30 Juni 2019. Di luar itu, ada 1.000 lebih organisasi yang masih aktif izinnya.Sementara, dilihat pada pukul 15.19 WIB, ada 35.729 orang yang meneken petisi online yang menolak izin FPI diperpanjang. Petisi ini seseorang yang mengatasnamakan Ira Bisyir yang dibuat pada Senin (6/5) kemarin."Mengingat akan berakhirnya ijin organisasi FPI di Indonesia,mari kita bersama-sama menolak perpanjangan ijin mereka.Karena organisasi tersebut adalah Merupakan kelompok Radikal, pendukung kekerasan dan pendukung HTI," demikian keterangan dalam petisi tersebut.Terkait hal ini, juru bicara FPI, Slamet Maarif menilai petisi tersebut dibuat oleh pihak yang tak suka pada FPI. Namun terkait izin yang akan habis, Slamet mengatakan pihaknya akan segera mengurus ke Kemendagri."Itu pendaftaran dan kami akan daftar kembali sesuai UU. Mereka suruh baca yang bener jangan suka jadi provokator lah. Kami akan daftar kembali sesuai UU yang ada," tutur Slamet saat dimintai konfirmasi.
[Gambas:Video 20detik] | {
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Most Popular Star Wars android is ready to conquer universe!Templates found in the depths of the internetIt doesn't look so but I think it was the hardest model that I've made. I was working with my GF something about 5 days | {
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David Cameron was aware for months that British pilots were carrying out air strikes in Syria, it has emerged. But the Prime Minister failed to reveal this to the Commons despite MPs voting specifically against the UK taking part in military missions in the country.
Details of the involvement of up to 20 British personnel in Syrian strikes was kept from the public – and revealed only following a Freedom of Information request by the pressure group Reprieve.
The UK servicemen involved were embedded with allied US, Canadian and French forces and not under a British chain of command. According to military sources, three UK pilots who had taken part in air strikes were based on an US aircraft carrier flying F-18 Super Hornets. The USS Vincennes had been deployed in the Gulf in operations from October last year until three months ago.
The embedding was not mentioned by the Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, or Defence minister Lord Howe when they spoke about the UK’s mission in Syria and Iraq on Thursday.
Cameron apparently kept MPs in the dark that British planes were carrying out airstrikes (AP)
The Conservative MP John Baron, who had voted against action in Syria in 2013, demanded that UK personnel be withdrawn from the embeds because the involvement of British serviceman in Syria strikes “showed an insensitivity to Parliament’s will”. He added: “The Government has promised there would be no British involvement in military action in Syria unless approved by Parliament, yet British personnel have been involved.”
Jennifer Gibson, a legal officer for Reprieve, said: “It is alarming that Parliament and the public have been kept in the dark about this for so long. We need an open and honest debate about Iraq and Syria; we can’t have that, though, until the UK comes clean about what actions its personnel are already taking.”
Labour said that it would be calling on ministers to make a Commons statement on Monday about the role British pilots had played. Speaker John Bercow is expected to grant MPs an urgent question requiring ministers to explain whether they have misled the House or acted in breach of a parliamentary resolution.
The Commons had voted against joining US-led air strikes in Syria in 2013 by 285 votes to 272 after President Bashar al-Assad’s forces used chemical weapons.
Satellite images show Syria devastation Show all 4 1 /4 Satellite images show Syria devastation Satellite images show Syria devastation Syria This combination of two satellite images released by Human Rights Watch shows the Masha al-Arbíeen,neighborhood in Hama, Syria on 28 September 2012, top and on 3 October 2012 Satellite images show Syria devastation Syria This combination of two satellite images released by Human Rights Watch shows the Masha al-Arbíeen neighborhood in Hama, Syria on 28 September 2012, top and on 13 October 2012 Satellite images show Syria devastation Syria This combination of two satellite images released by Human Rights Watch shows Six-story residential building on fire likely from artillery shelling in the Tadamoun neighborhood of Damascus, Syria on 16 July 2012, top and 22 September 2012 and a six-story residential building demolished with controlled explosives, as visible on 22 September 2012 Satellite images show Syria devastation Syria This combination of two satellite images released by Human Rights Watch shows dozens of high-rise residential and commercial buildings along the main road between Mezzeh Air Base and Daraya, a Damascus, Syria suburb on 4 February 2013, top and on 1 July 2013
In the end, Washington did not carry out the threatened attack after the regime agreed to hand over its stockpile of chemical weapons. Instead, it was Isis, which has been fighting the regime, which subsequently became the target of the US and its allies in Iraq and Syria. Britain, however, has confined participation in air strikes to Iraq, although UK aircraft had taken part in intelligence gathering from Syrian airspace.
Mr Fallon said: “These are a handful of British pilots who had been embedded with American forces and are part of an American military operation for which the Americans have full approval.” The Ministry of Defence stated: “UK embeds operate as if they were the host nation’s personnel under that nation’s chain of command.”
The Prime Minister’s spokeswoman said: “The PM was aware that UK personnel were involved in US operations and what they were doing.”
No British pilot is currently engaged in a combat role over Syria, said the Ministry of Defence.
Embedded pilots: How they work
British pilots operating with foreign forces would have the British flag on their flying suits and carry British identity papers: if shot down, the enemy would know who they were.
If the aircraft had been shot down in Isis territory, the first the public at home would have known about British combat missions in the country is likely to have been from a video released by the terrorists. | {
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Music On Vinyl will issue Tanita Tikaram‘s 1988 album Ancient Heart as a special coloured vinyl 30th anniversary edition in December.
The album was a huge success in the UK and Germany in particular and spawned four singles: Good Tradition, Twist in My Sobriety, Cathedral Song and World Outside Your Window.
Remarkably, Warner Music have chosen never to reissue and expand the album, which sold around 4m copies worldwide, but at least the 30th anniversary doesn’t go completely unmarked. This new vinyl edition is a numbered CLEAR vinyl pressing and limited to just 1500 copies worldwide. It’s a gatefold package and features an insert with a new note from Tanita.
At the same time, a modest 30th anniversary expanded CD will be issued with two bonus tracks: ‘Friends’ and ‘I Love The Heaven’s Solo’. The former was the B-side to ‘Twist in My Sobriety’ while the later is likely to be the demo/acoustic version that was the B-side to the the ‘Little Sister Leaving Town’ (a single from the second album). This track could well date from the Ancient Heart era, despite not having been released during that period.
Ancient Heart is reissued on 2 December 2018. The limited edition clear vinyl (not available via Amazon) can be pre-ordered from the SDE shop via this link or using the button below. For CD and bundle options head over to the store.
SIDE A
1. Good Tradition
2. Cathedral Song
3. Sighing Innocents
4. I Love You
5. World Outside Your Window
6. For All These Years
SIDE B
1. Twist In My Sobriety
2. Poor Cow
3. He Likes The Sun
4. Valentine Heart
5. Preyed Upon
CD bonus tracks
Friends
I Love The Heaven’s Solo | {
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Image caption All of the 20 clubs in the list are from the "big five" European leagues
Real Madrid's revenues of 480m euros (£401m) topped the Deloitte league table of the world's richest football clubs for the seventh straight year.
Deloitte's Football Money League, based on data for season 2010/11, says Real will match Manchester United's eight-year record if they stay top next year.
Real's arch-rivals Barcelona remained in second place, ahead of Manchester United, who stayed third.
Bayern Munich, Arsenal and Chelsea are fourth, fifth and sixth respectively.
Unchanged at top
The top seven clubs stayed in exactly the same positions as in the previous year.
Aston Villa fell out of the league entirely, failing to hold on to their 20th position and leaving English clubs holding six places out of the top 20.
Liverpool fell one spot to ninth place in this year's list.
FOOTBALL FACTS The top 20 clubs together earned 4.4bn euros
Nine of the top 20 clubs saw double digit growth in income
Barcelona's shirt sponsorship deal is worth about 30m euros per season
Real and Barcelona are both approaching 500m euros in revenue per year
All of the 20 clubs in the list are from the "big five" European leagues, with Italy contributing five clubs, Germany four, Spain three and France down to two, from three in the previous year.
Together, the top 20 clubs earned 4.4bn euros, a rise of 3% on the previous year.
Spanish rivals
Nine of the 20 clubs saw their revenues grow in double digits in 2010/11.
Although seven of them saw a fall in revenue, the authors said that this was mostly down to weaker on-pitch performances, causing falls in ticket sales and merchandising, rather than the effect of weakness in eurozone economies.
Barcelona's shirt sponsorship deal with the Qatar Foundation is worth about 30m euros per season, according to the report.
Deloitte Football Money League 1. Real Madrid: 479.5m euros
2. Barcelona: 450.7m euros
3. Man Utd: 367m euros
4. Bayern Munich: 321.4m euros
5. Arsenal: 251.1m euros
6. Chelsea: 249.8m euros
7. AC Milan: 235.1.m euros
8. Internazionale: 211.4m euros
9. Liverpool: 203.3m euros
10. Schalke: 202.4m euros Source: Deloitte: 2010-11
This, coupled with the club's 3.5m-euro prize money for winning the Fifa World Club Cup, may enable the Spanish club to catch up with its arch-rival Real next year, the report suggests.
Both Spanish clubs are approaching record revenue levels of 500m euros and may top this in the next few years, says the report.
German club Schalke leapt six places to 10th after a strong performance in last year's season, which took the club to the semi-final in the Uefa Champions League.
In next year's report, however, Schalke will be edged out of the top 10 by Manchester City, say the report's authors, after considering City's heavy financial support from Abu Dhabi investors and its participation in the 2011/12 Champions League. | {
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Mata, as she is known, became part of Jessica and Adam Davis' family, along with their daughters Abby, left, and Taylor and sons Owen, center, and Isaac.
Courtesy Jessica Davis
Abby Davis gives Mata a kiss the day she officially became part of the family.
Courtesy Jessica Davis
Jessica Davis says her children and Mata became fast friends, bonding over bubbles and games of tag.
Courtesy Jessica Davis
Mata saw snow in the US, a rarity in Uganda. Upon her return, she shared this picture with other children in her village.
Courtesy Jessica Davis
"If our child had been taken from us, we would want our child back," says Adam Davis, with Jessica and Mata.
Courtesy Jessica Davis
The Davis family made sure there was a crowd at the airport to welcome Mata to the US. They had a smaller goodbye party when Mata returned home. "We were trying not to cry, because Mata was happy," Jessica says.
Courtesy Jessica Davis | {
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On Christmas night last year, Andrew Falbo felt more like a bouncer than a wildlife volunteer as he tried to wrangle 5000 tourists crammed onto St Kilda Pier to witness the daily homecoming of a colony of little penguins.
“It became like a nightclub – one in, one out,” Mr Falbo recalls.
The government has funded rangers to attend St Kilda Pier every night until Easter as tourist numbers balloon. Credit:Joe Armao
In recent years – as social media has popularised one of Melbourne’s most Instagramable free activities – Earthcare volunteers have warned the daily penguin parade is becoming a free-for-all.
The volunteer guides have said they can no longer single-handedly ensure the safety of the penguins with tourist numbers ballooning and people illegally clambering onto the rocks to fish. | {
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Watch the video above: George Doodnaught sentenced to 10 years for sexual assaults. Mark Carcasole reports.
TORONTO – An anaesthesiologist convicted of sexually assaulting 21 sedated women as they underwent surgery was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Tuesday in what a judge described as a unique case.
Dr. George Doodnaught exploited the extraordinarily high degree of trust the patients placed in him and his conduct was “reprehensible in the extreme,” said Ontario Superior Court Justice David McCombs.
“There are no reported Canadian cases in which an anaesthesiologist sexually assaulted sedated patients in an operating room during surgery,” McCombs said. “His conduct did enormous damage and was reprehensible in the extreme.”
READ MORE: Hospital apologizes to patients after Doodnaught guilty verdict
When Doodnaught was convicted in November, McCombs found the doctor relied on his three decades of operating room experience to avoid detection as he kissed women, fondled their breasts and put his penis in their mouth or hand.
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Doodnaught was known as a “touchy feely” doctor, often stroking a patient’s cheek or hair to soothe them during surgery, so the judge found his physical proximity during surgery didn’t arouse suspicion with other staff even as he sexually assaulted the women while concealed only by a surgical drape.
“The offender’s moral blameworthiness is at the high end of the spectrum,” McCombs said.
Many of Doodnaught’s victims were in court on Tuesday and it was clearly an emotional day for them. Several wiped tears from their eyes as the judge read his sentencing reasons.
READ MORE: George Doodnaught a ‘sexual opportunist’: Crown
After the sentence was handed down, the victims waited in the courtroom to see Doodnaught led out in handcuffs – he had been on bail during the trial – and one woman clapped.
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The victims did not know each other and were unaware of the particulars of other patients’ stories when they separately came forward.
All but one of the assaults took place at the North York General Hospital in Toronto. They became more frequent until Doodnaught was caught, with the first six spread over three and a half years and 15 others in the last six months before he was stopped.
The hospital told Doodnaught to take a leave of absence after the last woman he assaulted went to police.
His medical licence was suspended but the College of Physicians and Surgeons still has to hold a disciplinary hearing which could lead to it being revoked.
The hospital’s CEO has apologized on behalf of the medical facility to all of the victims for the impact Doodnaught’s crimes had on their lives. The hospital has since made changes to how it addresses and tracks patient complaints.
Doodnaught’s lawyer said he will appeal the convictions.
“Obviously he’s disappointed,” said Brian Greenspan. “He continues to enjoy widespread support not only with his family but amongst his colleagues, patients.” | {
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Getty Images
For the Super Bowl winner, the right to host the first regular game of the season on the Thursday night of Week One is viewed as an honor. But for the team that has to go on the road to play the Super Bowl winner, it’s not necessarily a good thing.
That’s the word from Panthers General Manager Dave Gettleman, whose team will travel to Denver for a Super Bowl 50 rematch in Week One. Gettleman said this morning on PFT Live that he’d rather have a full week of work after final roster cuts, like the other 30 teams get.
“To me, playing in the opening game, on that Thursday night, is a little bit of a competitive disadvantage to those teams, compared to the other 30, because of the way the 53 cut is set up. You’ve got to have a practice and you don’t have your practice squad players,” Gettleman said. “It’s kind of a competitive disadvantage. We’ve got to play them at some point and I’m sure that when the ball’s teed up we’ll both be ready to go.”
Gettleman is right that he and John Elway will have less time to finish their 53-player rosters than the NFL’s other 32 GMs. On the other hand, starting Week One early means they’ll have extra rest before Week Two. In the end, the competitive disadvantage is a fairly small one. | {
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While Kevin Hart movies and tours are reaching the stars, he hasn’t forgotten about the high school stars who are excelling academically.
Kevin believes in his hometown of Philadelphia, and likewise, supports individuals from the area who are attempting to better themselves. Similarly, Hart understands the value of education and how applied-youth should have access to the best learning experiences and environments.
During an interview with Entertainment Tonight, Kevin mentioned that his mother was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Too, Hart stated that he could have gone to that particular university for free. Yet, he chose a different route.
However, as for the four recipients of Kevin Hart’s scholarships, he spoke some acclamation-filled words towards their accomplishments.
“This is me stepping up to the plate going, ‘Yo, what you’re doing is dope. You’re dope. You’ve got the opportunity to be the dopest of all dopetivity’… Okay… time to give out some money! On behalf of myself and UNCF [United Negro College Fund], I am handing you a $50,000 scholarship.”
Kevin Hart quoted the aforementioned statement to each individual student upon handing them their scholarships. One student was starstruck by Hart and appeared to be in a daze. Suddenly, she stated, “You smell good.” Then, she asked for a hug, and Kevin consented.
To clarify, Hart chose these “dope” scholarship recipients because of their high grade point averages and financial needs. Across the nation, there are students who excel above and beyond the average requirement to pass. Unfortunately, those students could also come from poor financial backgrounds — possibly hindering them from attending a top school that could render maximum benefit.
Yet, since Kevin’s heart is in Philly, he decided to “take care of home, first.” Atop of being awarded, Hart will be sending these four students to Atlanta, Georgia, for a UNCF event called “An Evening of Stars.” Generally, this is an award opportunity given to exceptional students who plan to attend a Historically Black College or University (HBCU) or UNCF member school. Since Kevin has cooperated with this agency, the same stipulations may or may not apply.
According to the scholarship program, the typical requirements read as follows.
“Eligible students must meet the following criteria: Applicants must be a matriculating student at a UNCF member school or HBCU in Fall 2015. Applicants must have a cumulative grade point average of 2.5 or higher on a 4.0 scale. Applicants must be a high school senior (class of 2015); current college freshman (class of 2018), current college sophomore (class of 2017) or current college junior (class of 2016) at the time of application. Applicants must have a demonstrated financial need (will be verified upon final selection).”
As mentioned, two through four have been met, as far as Hart is concerned. Whether the other requirement is optional for Kevin’s specific version of the award hasn’t been reported.
All in all, what do you think about Kevin Hart’s “dope” scholarship?
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.
[Photo Credits: YouTube] | {
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Swedish town introduces licence for beggars - Corbis News
Beggars in a Swedish town will have to a permit before being allowed to panhandle for money.
The scheme, the first of its kind in the country, has been introduced in Eskilstuna, a town of nearly 70,000 inhabitants about 90 miles west of Stockholm.
Costing 250 Swedish Kroner (£21), the permit will be valid for three months and is available online. Unlicenced beggars can be fined up to SEK 4,000 (£342).
The scheme was approved by the city council in June 2018. Backed by the majority Social Democrat, Moderate and Centre coalition, it was opposed by the Left Party, Green Party, Liberals and Christian Democrats.
Begging in Sweden has been a subject of political controversy for years, with some calling for a nationwide ban.
Female beggar from former eastern Europe in Malmo street Credit: Francis Dean/Corbis Historical
In February last year, the council in Vellinge in southern Sweden voted for an outright prohibition. But the move, which was heavily criticised by human rights groups, was overturned by the courts.
Sweden’s government has been examining legislation making it illegal to profit from begging. It was aimed at groups which have been exploiting vulnerable people.
The licencing scheme was a compromise. However, it took more than a year of legal wrangling before the initiative could come into force.
Jimmy Jansson, a Social Democrat local councillor in Eskilstuna, said the law would help the vulnerable and homeless by bringing them into closer contact with the authorities and social services.
“We’ll see where this goes,” he said.
“This is not about harassing vulnerable people but trying to address the bigger question: whether we think begging should be normalised within the Swedish welfare model,” Mr Jannson told the Aftonbladet newspaper.
“I hear a lot of criticism of any attempts to regulate begging, but I don’t see the same strength and energy directed at the fact that people are forced to beg in the first place.”
Some beggars have tried to sidestep the licensing scheme by selling blueberries.
So far, according to the state broadcaster SVT, eight applications have been received and three other unlicensed beggars have been moved on by the police. | {
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Last week, Indian police launched a nationwide crackdown, arresting a number of activists, including communist poet Varavara Rao, human rights lawyer Vernon Gonsalves, writer and lawyer Arun Ferreira, journalist and activist Gautam Navlakha, and trade unionist Sudha Bharadwaj.
The authorities are investigating violence between low-caste Dalits and upper-caste Hindu groups following a political meeting in the western city of Pune on December 31 last year. The Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency said the five activists were detained in connection with that meeting.
"These persons have been arrested for their Maoist links," Shivaji Bodakhe, joint commissioner of Pune police, told AFP news agency.
PTI also quoted security officials as saying that "two letters, purportedly exchanged by Maoist leaders indicated plans to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the president of the ruling BJP party Amit Shah and Home Minister Rajnath Singh, led to the police action."
Local media reported that police also raided homes of other prominent anti-government activists on August 28. Five other people were detained in June.
Indian PM Narendra Modi has come under fire for his government's crackdown on liberal activists
Rights organizations said that the arrest of five prominent activists is part of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) campaign to silence critics ahead of next year's general election.
In an interview with DW, Arundhati Roy, winner of the 1997 Man Booker Prize for fiction, said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government is systematically targeting its opponents, free thinkers and members of the minority groups.
DW: The recent arrests of anti-government activists have sparked outrage in India. How would you describe the government's action?
Arundhati Roy: Thousands of people are in jails across the states of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh. These are the people who don't have names, who don't have lawyers, who can't hold press conferences.
Earlier, the "Adivasi" (indigenous) community was labeled "Maoists;" now the Dalits (lower caste Hindus), and anyone who supports them, are being included in this category. We're witnessing a coup against the constitution. It is a very dire situation.
Read more: Arundhati Roy: 'India is colonizing itself'
Watch video 12:02 Share World Stories - Tensions between Muslims and Hindus in India Send Facebook google+ Whatsapp Tumblr linkedin stumble Digg reddit Newsvine Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/2ZWj3 World Stories - Tensions between Muslims and Hindus in India
Some analysts and political activists say that the recent government crackdown is reminiscent of former PM Indira Gandhi's declaration of emergency in 1975. Do you agree with the view?
I think it is potentially more dangerous than the 1975 emergency. The 1975 emergency was supposedly declared to implement the constitution, although it was a violation of the peoples' rights. But this government is trying to overturn the constitution in order to declare India a "Hindu rashtra" (Hindu nation) — more significantly an upper-caste Hindu rashtra, in which the minorities and all those who do not agree with the majoritarian point — can be criminalized.
I think it is going to be a continuous circus until the general election [next year] — arrests, assassinations, lynchings, bomb attacks, riots and pogroms.
Read more: RSS – India's Hindu nationalists spread their wings far and wide
Some experts have pointed to similarities when it comes to recent killings of several liberal activists. Who could be behind these apparently systematic attacks?
The investigation by the Karnataka police into the assassination of the journalist and activist Gauri Lankesh has led to several arrests, which have in turn led to the unveiling of the activities of several right-wing Hindutva (Hindu supremacists) organizations like the Sanathan Sansthan.
What has emerged is the existence of a shadowy, full-blown terror network, with hit-lists, hide-outs and safe-houses, flush with arms, ammunition and plans to bomb, kill and poison people.
At the same time, I feel that the authorities can derail everything easily — with some major or even minor attacks that are amplified by pet media houses. The recent arrests are an attempt to divert attention from the real threat, I believe.
Read more: Gauri Lankesh murder - Indian journalists in the line of fire
Is PM Narendra Modi losing his popularity as a result of these actions?
It has been important for governments — both the former Congress-led United Progressive Alliance and the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — to disguise their attacks on Adivasis, and now, in the case of the BJP, their attack on Dalits, as an assault on "Maoists" or "Naxals." This is because, unlike in the case of Muslims who have been almost erased from electoral arithmetic, all political parties have an eye on Adivasi and Dalit constituencies as potential vote banks. By arresting activists and calling them "Maoists," the BJP government manages to undermine and insult Dalit aspiration by giving it another name — while at the same time appearing to be sensitive to "Dalit issues."
Read more: Narendra Modi's 4 years in power: Good or bad for India?
There are thousands of people in jails across the country; poor and disadvantaged people fighting for their homes, for their lands, for their dignity. These people have been accused of sedition and worse, languishing without trial in crowded prisons.
We are up against a regime that its own police calls fascist. In the India of today, it is a crime to belong to a minority. To be poor is a crime. To defend the poor is to plot to overthrow the government.
The vulnerable in India are being cordoned off and silenced. The vociferous are being incarcerated. God help us to get our country back.
Read more: Farmers' protests spotlight worsening agrarian crisis in India
Arundhati Roy is an internationally acclaimed Indian author, best known for her first novel "The God of Small Things," which won the 1997 Man Booker Prize. Roy also writes political essays and has been advocating the rights of minority groups in India and beyond. | {
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READING, PA—Struggling to control their urge to gawk at her enormous pair, passersby on Friday reportedly couldn’t help but stare at a woman’s huge kids. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve never seen a set like those before,” said local filing clerk Ted Kilgariff, adding that there was no way not to notice a woman walking around with “a couple of big boys like that.” “Most of the time I honestly could care less about their size but, I mean, damn. They’re just bouncing around all over the place.” At press time, Kilgariff was flustered after the woman suddenly looked up and caught him staring.
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