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HARRISBURG, Pa. — A panel of appellate judges pressed lawyers for Bill Cosby on Monday to explain why the entertainer should have his conviction for sexual assault overturned at the first hearing prompted by Mr. Cosby’s appeal.
Mr. Cosby is serving a three to 10-year sentence for drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home outside Philadelphia after giving her some pills.
His lawyers told a three-judge panel of the Pennsylvania Superior Court that the trial judge should never have allowed the testimony of five other women who said they too had been drugged and sexually assaulted by Mr. Cosby.
The prosecution contended the women’s testimony showed a series of “prior bad acts” that fit the pattern of conduct in the Constand case. But the defense challenged the existence of such a pattern and said the admission of the women’s testimony had hurt the presumption of innocence toward their client. | {
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The new supercomputer will have a performance capacity of 13.7 Petaflop/s and so will be able to carry out 13,677 trillion operations per second.
It incorporates racks of emerging technologies currently under development in the US and Japan.
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center has purchased the new supercomputer from IBM, which will integrate in one sole machine its own technologies alongside those of Lenovo, Intel and Fujitsu.
MareNostrum 4, the new supercomputer of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), will be 12.4 times more powerful than the current MareNostrum 3. The centre has just approved the purchase of a new supercomputer that will have a performance capacity of 13, 7 Petaflop/s and will be located in the Torre Girona chapel, home to its predecessors, the MareNostrum 1, 2 and 3.
This purchase is to be made from IBM, which will integrate in one sole machine its own technologies alongside those of Lenovo, Intel and Fujitsu. The contract has been awarded following a public tender process in which two other companies participated. The contract value is of almost €30 million.
General purpose and emerging technologies
With this purchase, BSC-CNS has pursued a dual objective: to acquire a general-purpose machine capable of executing all types of scientific and engineering tasks, and to provide itself with clusters built with emerging technologies. These clusters will serve users’ needs and, in turn, will allow the centre to test and analyse the performance of the most recent developments in the field of supercomputing.
Greater energy efficiency
To this end, the new machine will have two distinct parts. The general purpose element, provided by Lenovo, will have 48 racks with more than 3,400 nodes with next generation Intel Xeon processors and a central memory of 390 Terabytes. Its peak power will be over 11 Petaflop/s, which is to say that it will be able to perform more than 11,000 trillion operations per second, ten times more than the MareNostrum3, which was installed between 2012 and 2013. Despite this increase in capacity, it will consume only 30% more power, reaching 1.3 MW/year.
Emerging technologies
The second element of MareNostrum 4 will be formed of clusters of three different technologies that will be added and updated as they become available. These are technologies currently being developed in the US and Japan to accelerate the arrival of the new generation of pre-exascale supercomputers.
One of these clusters will consist of IBM POWER9 processors and NVIDIA GPUs, which are the same components that IBM and NVIDIA will use for the Summit and Sierra supercomputers that the US Department of Energy has commissioned for the Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. Its computing power will be over 1.5 Petaflop/s.
The second cluster will be made up of Intel Knights Landing (KNL) and Intel Knights Hill (KNH) processors provided by Fujitsu and Lenovo respectively. They are the same processors that will be inside the Theta and Aurora supercomputers purchased by the US Department of Energy for the Argonne National Laboratory. Its computing power will be in excess of 0.5 Petaflop/s.
Finally, a third cluster will be formed of 64 bit ARMv8 processors that Fujitsu will provide in a prototype machine, using state-of-the-art technologies from the Japanese Post-K supercomputer. This cluster’s computing power will also be over 0.5 Petaflop/s.
The goal of the progressive incorporation of these emerging technologies into MareNostrum4 is to enable BSC to operate with what are expected to be some of the most state-of-the-art developments of the coming years and to test if they are suitable for future versions of MareNostrum.
Disk Storage
MareNostrum4 will have a disk storage capacity exceeding 10 Petabytes and will be connected to the Big Data infrastructures of BSC-CNS, which have a total capacity of 24.6 Petabytes. Like its predecessors, MareNostrum4 will also be connected to the network of European research centres and universities through the RedIris and Geant networks.
PRACE and the Spanish Supercomputing Network
The path towards the upgrade of the MareNostrum supercomputer began with a decision taken by the Spanish Council of Ministers at its meetings of 4 and 18 December 2015. The decision authorised the budget adjustments necessary for the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness to contribute €34 million plus VAT to BSC for the purchase of MareNostrum 4. €30 million of this sum has been allocated for the purchase of MareNostrum 4’s calculation clusters and for work on the electrical and cooling systems necessary for the computer to function correctly. The remaining €4 million has been used for MareNostrum 4’s parallel disc system.
Like its predecessor MareNostrum 3, the new supercomputer will be part of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), a network which has the objective of creating a European high performance computing infrastructure.
The arrival of MareNostrum 4 will allow for a new phase of the PRACE European supercomputing project in which Spain will be able to maintain its status of core member alongside Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland, the latter having recently joined the network.
MareNostrum 4 will also be part of the Spanish ICTS network of unique scientific and technological infrastructures in Spain and of the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES). The new supercomputer will increase RES’s calculation capacity and will replace MareNostrum 3, the components of which will be distributed among various nodes of the network.
Brief history of MareNostrum
MareNostrum is the generic name used by BSC for the various versions of its most emblematic supercomputer. The MareNostrum machines have served over three thousand scientific and technical research projects since the first version was installed in 2004. At the time, MareNostrum had a calculation capacity of 42.35 Teraflop/s (42.35 trillion operations per second). In 2006, it was upgraded and doubled its capacity to 94.21 Teraflop/s. Since the last upgrade (2012-2013), MareNostrum 3 has had a peak performance of 1,1 Petaflop/s (eleven hundred trillion operations per second).
MareNostrum is a facility at the service of the scientific community and of society. Supercomputers are now one of the fundamental pillars of science and engineering. Without them, it would be impossible to carry out a significant amount of research and a substantial number of the projects which require a large capacity for calculation and data handling. They are used to create models and simulations, and to manage vast quantities of information generated by studies in all scientific areas. | {
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I got this awesome Bravely Default/Zelda poster! Just have to wait for the frame I bought to arrive and this beauty can hang in my room.
I also may or may not have pretended that the tube it came in was a telescope for a little while. | {
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Northeast Ohio loves its dogs and walks so much that one local lady from North Canton invented the ‘WoofPack’ – a wearable pouch that is designed to carry dog poop while you’re out on walks so that you’re completely hands-free. Akron has plenty of walking routes and trails that are dog-friendly, as well as being scenic and offering an easy or challenging hike for yourself.
Bike and hike trail
A bike and hike trail covers Cuyahoga, Portage and Summit and is a total of 34.2 miles. There are trail end points on Alexander Road, 0.25 miles west of Dunham Road, Judson Road and Hudson Road. Despite being so close to Akron and Cleveland, it covers a lot of natural areas, including the 65-foot Brandywine Falls, making it a peaceful and scenic walk for dogs and owners.
The route also has bridge crossings and both rural and suburban neighborhood roads with dips and rises throughout.
Gorge Metro Park
Gorge Metro Park is located in Cuyahoga Falls and has several different trails in it that are perfect for dog-walking. There’s the 1.8 mile Glens Trail that is rated easy, a steep 1.8-mile Gorge Trail and the moderate 3.2-mile High Bridge Trail. Dogs can explore everywhere except picnic areas, as long as they are kept on leads and tidied up after. The Cuyahoga River runs through the park, with a dam and waterfall surrounding the beautiful and peaceful trails.
Ohio and Erie Towpath Trail
This is a huge trail that currently stretches 81.1 miles but will eventually extend to New Philadelphia for a total of 110 miles. You can start in the heart of Akron and work your way to places like Cuyahoga National Park to further explore, which is great for energetic dogs and pups.
The towpath largely follows an historical canal from Cleveland south to Bolivar, giving dogs plenty of things to sniff, and sightings of wildlife are common, so it may be best to keep them on leads if you’re unsure of how they’ll react.
Cascade Valley Metro Park
There are several different trails on offer at Cascade Valley Metro Park, depending on how difficult of a walk you’re after, how far you and your dog want to walk and if you’re after beautiful views at the same time.
One of the shortest and easiest trails is the Overlook Trail, totaling just 0.5 miles, making it perfect for short walks and older dogs. It gives you unbeatable views of the Cuyahoga River from the viewing area and is flat throughout. The longest trail is the High Bridge Trail that can be accessed from Gorge Metro Park. A moderate trail is the Oxbow Trail that has a steep, uphill climb, is a total of 1.2 miles and can connect to the Overlook Trail for a longer walk and additional scenery.
Before picking and setting out on one of Akron’s trails, make sure your dog is wearing an ID tag and has a microchip in case you get separated. Check to see if there are any rules, like keeping them on a leash and if there’s any areas that they’re not allowed in. Pick a trail based on your dog’s age and fitness as you don’t want to get halfway round and realize they’re struggling as there’s too many inclines or it’s too far for them. | {
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У безработной москвички похитили 10 миллионов рублей. Неизвестный разбил стекло внедорожника, схватил с переднего сиденья пакет с деньгами и скрылся.
Столичная полиция ведет розыск. | {
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In the fourth of a six-part series Barney Ronay describes how the sixties saw the rise of football's managerial supergroup - Matt Busby, Bill Shankly and Jock Stein - that carved out the template for the modern manager | {
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Austrian broadcaster ORF sues vice-chancellor Strache over 'lies' post Published duration 27 February 2018
image copyright EPA image caption Heinz-Christian Strache has accused the ORF of left-wing bias
Austria's public broadcaster, the ORF, has filed a lawsuit against the country's deputy leader after he accused it and one of its news presenters of lying.
Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache, head of the far-right Freedom Party, made the accusation on Facebook.
He has long accused the ORF of left-wing bias and said he wants to abolish the licence fee that supports it.
The news presenter involved, Armin Wolf, is also suing Mr Strache.
He says no politician has accused him of lying before.
The row started two weeks ago when Mr Strache posted a picture on Facebook of Mr Wolf with the words: "There is a place where lies become news. That place is ORF."
He later argued that because he had used the word "Satire!" as a caption on the posting it was clearly not to be taken seriously.
But ORF and Mr Wolf were not appeased.
"Vice Chancellor Strache accused ORF, by doctoring ORF advertising material, of spreading fake news, lies and propaganda in all its media," said ORF Director General Alexander Wrabetz in a statement.
He said the text was "libellous and damaging to (ORF's) reputation".
ORF said it was also taking legal action against Facebook for not deleting Mr Strache's post.
Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen has condemned Mr Strache's remarks.
The Freedom Party is the junior partner in a coalition with Chancellor Sebastian Kurz's conservatives. | {
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SFやファンタジーで定番のアイテム「透明マント」（最近だと「光学迷彩」といった方が通りがよいかもしれない）は、世界各地の機関で大まじめに研究が進められている。
透明マントを実現するための方法はいくつかあり、1つは映像を投影するというもの。例えば、電気通信大学の稲見昌彦教授の透明マントでは、ビデオカメラで撮影した背景をプロジェクターによってマントに投影し、マントの装着者がまるで透明になったかのような効果を実現している。
もう1つの代表的なアプローチが「メタマテリアル」を使う方法だ。メタマテリアルというのは、電磁波に対して自然界にはない振る舞いをする人工物質の総称である。メタマテリアルの内部には光の波長よりも小さな構造が無数に配置されており、それによって光の屈折方向を変更するといったことが可能になる。
私たちの目は、あるモノが光を遮ったり、光を反射したりといった作用をとらえて、モノを「見る」。メタマテリアルによって、光がモノを迂回すると、そのモノは私たちには見えなくなるわけだ。
2006年に、インペリアル・カレッジ・ロンドンのジョン・ペンドリー教授が、メタマテリアルを使った透明マントの理論を発表して以来、この分野の研究に火が点いた。米国防高等研究計画局（DARPA）でも、メタマテリアルで兵士の透明化に取り組んでいるらしい。レーダーや電子レンジなどで使われるマイクロ波などについていえば、メタマテリアルはかなり実用に近づいている。
2016年3月に、アイオワ州立大学の研究チームが発表したのは、柔軟で伸縮性のある「メタスキン」という素材だ。このメタスキンは、シリコンシート層の内部に直径5mmほどのリング状の共振器が並んだ構造をしている。このリングがマイクロ波を捉えるのだ。メタスキンを伸び縮みさせると、対応する周波数を変化させられる。
従来のステルス技術と異なり、メタスキンで覆われた物体はあらゆる角度からのレーダー探査に対して対象の物体を「見えづらく」できる。8〜10GHzのレーダー波の場合、75％の反射を抑えることができたという。
研究チームの当面の目標は軍用機へのステルス技術だが、将来的な目標はやはり可視光で対象の物体を見えなくする「透明マント」だ。可視光はマイクロ波に比べて、波長が短いため、はるかに微細な構造を持ったメタマテリアルが必要になる。
ちなみに、メタマテリアルの応用範囲は、ステルス技術や透明マントだけではない。電磁波の干渉を抑えた超高感度アンテナ、従来よりもはるかに屈折率が高く分子や原子を直接観察できる光学顕微鏡などの実現が期待されている。
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I Norge er fars rett til foreldrepenger knyttet til mors arbeidssituasjon, mens det samme ikke gjelder motsatt vei.
De norske reglene slår fast at far kun har rett på foreldrepenger dersom mor arbeider eller studerer. Det fins ingen lignende krav for mor.
ESA mener de norske reglene for foreldrepenger er i strid med likestillingsdirektivet.
– EØS-avtalen har likebehandling som grunnprinsipp. Når norske myndigheter systematisk og ulovlig forskjellsbehandler kvinner og menn, er det ESAs jobb å stille dem til ansvar, sier ESA-president Bente Angell-Hansen i en pressemelding.
ESAs beslutning om å henvise saken til EFTA-domstolen er tredje og siste trinn i EØS-tilsynets formelle sak mot Norge.
Les også: Nå vil regjeringen øke pappapermen
På eget initiativ
ESA startet granskingen på eget initiativ i oktober 2015. I kjølvannet av dette har tilsynsorganet også mottatt flere klager fra norske fedre.
Både i 2016 og 2017 ble det holdt møter i Oslo for å forsøke å nå enighet. Det lyktes ikke.
Regjeringen har stått fast på sitt syn om at reglene for foreldrepenger ikke er i strid med likestillingsdirektivet. Foto: Heiko Junge / NTB scanpix
I november i fjor kom ESA til slutt med en såkalt grunngitt uttalelse til Norge. Men regjeringen har også etter dette stått fast på sitt syn om at reglene for foreldrepenger ikke er i strid med likestillingsdirektivet.
Det er mot dette bakteppet ESA nå har bestemt seg for å bringe saken inn for domstolen i Luxembourg.
- Positivt tiltak
ESAs standpunkt er at de norske reglene for foreldrepenger innskrenker fars rett til betalt foreldrepermisjon.
– EØS-reglene krever ikke at Norge skal tilby betalt foreldrepermisjon. Men når Norge velger å gjøre det, må ordningen være tuftet på likebehandling, sier Angell-Hansen.
Norges holdning har vært at reglene for foreldrepenger faller utenfor rammene av det likestillingsdirektivet handler om.
Barne- og likestillingsdepartementet har i tillegg argumentert med at det uansett er snakk om et positivt tiltak som er ment å få flere mødre ut i arbeid igjen, mens far tar ut foreldrepermisjon i stedet. Dette skal bidra til økt likestilling i arbeidslivet.
Likestillingsdirektivet har en åpning for slik positiv diskriminering, men ESA mener reglene for foreldrepenger ikke tilfredsstiller de kravene som gjelder.
Politisk diskusjonstema
Spørsmålet om foreldrepenger har lenge vært et politisk diskusjonstema i Norge.
Høyre tok senest i fjor til orde for å endre reglene slik at fars rettigheter ikke lenger knyttes til mors situasjon. Flere andre partier har hatt samme standpunkt, men reglene er likevel ikke blitt endret.
Det har etter alt å dømme sammenheng med den høye kostnaden det vil ha å gi far samme rettigheter som mor. Barne- og likestillingsminister Linda Hofstad Helleland (H) har anslått at prisen til rundt 800 millioner kroner i året.
Arbeiderpartiet har på sin side tatt til orde for å finansiere regelendringen ved å fjerne kontantstøtten. Den har en årlig kostnad på nesten det dobbelte. | {
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Mario has been a gaming icon for decades and has been in more games than can be counted. Although no year in recent memory has gone past without some type of Mario game being released, series fans will remember the nearly decade long drought of original Mario platformers.
From 1997-2005, there was only one new Mario platformer released: Super Mario Sunshine. During the second part of this drought (after Sunshine's release), the mysterious Super Mario 128 was the main focus of the fanbase.
No concrete information was given on the game and, eventually, series creator Shigeru Miyamoto claimed it had simply been a series of test concepts that were never intended to be an actual game.
The mystery faded from memory as the Mario drought finally ended and most people forgot about the game that had once been the center of every Mario fan's imagination.
The Mario drought corresponded with a bad era for Nintendo in terms of console sales. The Nintendo 64 and GameCube did not have the financial success of the earlier Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Nintendo, or the later Wii.
For a very proud company that relied solely on video games to make money, this was quite upsetting for the higher ranking employees that were attached to the company and felt its success or failure reflected on them personally.
Nintendo started working on a sequel to the 1996 Super Mario 64 shortly after the game was released, but during the late 90s it became clear that Nintendo was not winning the console war. The Super Mario 64 sequel was restarted from scratch, since the company believed that it was not a substantial enough improvement over the original to turn the tides of the market battle.
Seeing the generally more realistic and violent games on Sony's Playstation, the market leader, Nintendo considered making a Mario that was closer in tone to what the public seemed to want. There was quite a bit of internal conflict over how far to go with this new direction and the new Mario was clearly not going to be ready until Nintendo's next console, the GameCube.
The only hint of this that was released to the public was a comment by Miyamoto that he thought Mario and Luigi should act "more like grown ups" in their games for the (then soon to be released) GameCube.
The new Mario project was ultimately split into two games; Luigi's Mansion, which reflected the darker tone that many felt the series should turn to (although it was still toned down quite a bit compared to what some Nintendo executives and developers wanted), and Super Mario Sunshine, which went in the complete opposite direction.
Both were released within a year of the GameCube and Nintendo felt confident that their new system and Mario games would return them to their former glory as market leader.
As those familiar with gaming history know, they didn't. The GameCube did even worse in market share than the Nintendo 64, and the mass market's taste shifted even more toward violent, realistic games.
During this period, the somber mood at Nintendo intensified and the darker Mario project was revived, this time code named "Super Mario 128". It isn't clear exactly what happened at Nintendo during this period. As we know, nothing called Super Mario 128 was ever released or publicly shown.
The source that revealed the internal strife at Nintendo during the later N64 era refused to discuss what was happening during the time of the GameCube's failure, but released a prototype of Super Mario 128 online that can be played on the Wii homebrew channel.
The following is a recollection of my time playing it.
The game was clearly an early beta; the title screen was nothing but white text saying "Super Mario 128" against a black background. There was no options menu or save file selection, either. After the title screen, the game started. Bowser's laugh from Super Mario 64 looped in the background while a plain text box displayed this dialogue;
Mario, I have taken Princess Peach and she will not live to see the sun rise tomorrow unless you take her place. You know what to do and where to go. Do not try to stop me unless you want to hasten her death.
The game certainly was going for a darker tone. After I made the text box go away, I was thrust right into gameplay. The first thing I noticed was Mario's character model. His body was as detailed as in Super Mario Galaxy (although a little more realistically proportioned), but his head was taken from his SM64 character model. Obviously his design wasn't finished yet.
The setting was a sky level. There were some simple platforms floating in the air. The rest of the area was just blue sky with several clouds scrolling in the background. The clouds seemed more realistic than the usual cartoony puffs in Mario games. They were quite graphically impressive.
There was no music or full voice samples from Mario, but there were sound effect/grunts when he jumped. The jumping was more subdued than in other Mario games. Mario didn't jump as high as he usually did and had little control over his movement in the air. The different types of jumps in every 3D Mario weren't present.
I played through the level. There was nothing especially notable about the gameplay - enemies didn't seem to have been added yet. I just jumped from platform to platform and it wasn't very challenging.
As I went through the level, I noticed the graphics gradually changing. The sky became more and more cloudy until it was entirely composed of clouds, and the cloud background gradually turned to a dark gray.
After this, it started to rain. I reached a small platform with a Toad on it. It looked like the Super Mario Galaxy model. When I landed on his platform, dialogue appeared.
We don't want you any more, Mario. You don't belong here. Just give Bowser what he wants. Die.
After the text box went away, I no longer had control of Mario. Mario just stood there for a while, then turned around and walked off the platform. His body seemed to go limp as he fell.
Eventually, it was revealed that there was a realistic, modern city under the sky. The buildings looked neglected, but there were people on the street.
Mario hit the ground with a realistic-sounding thud, but he didn't explode or show any visible wounds. He just lay there. The people in the city just kept walking by, ignoring Mario, although I thought I saw a few glance at him with cold, somewhat angry expressions.
This went on for a few minutes and eventually, people stopped appearing. Mario got up - I was back in control - but he couldn't jump at all and had a reduced walking speed.
The large buildings of the city didn't appear to be interactive, so I just kept walking down the street for a while. Eventually, I found a small house that seemed out of place among the larger buildings.
When I approached the door, Mario opened it. The screen went white and some black text appeared.
House of Torn Memories
This seemed to be the level title. When I pressed a button, the screen faded back to Mario. He was inside the house from before. Everything seemed bigger than it should. It wasn't gigantic, but scaled as if Mario was a very small child.
The house was filled with normal objects covered in dust and signs of neglect. There were no people on the ground floor, just things like broken lamps and rotting food. I found a door that opened to a set of stairs going down, leading to a basement.
In the basement, I found a dilapidated couch and a broken TV. However, what really caught my attention was what was on the couch: two skeletons that appeared to be children, judging by their size. Due to the scale of the house, they were still larger than Mario.
I was starting to get really disturbed by now. How had a Mario game containing this been programmed to this extent?
I went up to the skeletons and tried pressing buttons to interact with them or the TV, but nothing seemed to happen. I was about to turn around and look elsewhere when I was nearly scared to death by a deafeningly loud crash coming from the game.
What appeared to be Bowser seemed to have broken through the floor from below and landed in front of Mario. I say "appeared to be" because this was nothing like the way Bowser is usually rendered.
The reptilian monster in the game had Bowser's basic brownish-yellow and green color pattern, but looked far more threatening than any Bowser model I had seem before.
It was not proportioned like the Bowser I knew. Its arms and legs were far longer in relation to its body and ended in razor-sharp claws. The green shell didn't look like it had spikes glued on; they were more jagged and organic looking with the same dark green color the rest of the shell had.
The face had small but intense pure black eyes and a mouth full of jagged teeth that took up far more of the face than it should have. Mario was cowering in fear from this thing. A dialogue box appeared.
You've kept me waiting long enough, Mario. I will taste flesh soon. Will you finally surrender, or does Peach have to die?
I still didn't have control. Mario just stood there, shivering for several seconds before nodding his head. Bowser impaled Mario with his claws. There was no blood, but it was clear from the animation and sound effects that the sharp digits of Bowser's hands had gone through Mario's body.
In one swift motion, Bowser dragged Mario up to his face and bit his head off. Again, there was no blood or graphic details left behind on Mario's neck - just Mario's character model being destroyed.
The screen faded to black. In white text, another level name appeared.
Mario's Eternal Home.
Mario's character model was whole again when the level started. It was the only thing on the screen besides the black background. It was floating, as if in space. I could somewhat control it, but it felt more like I was deciding the general direction in which Mario would tumble than fully controlling him.
As I drifted towards no apparent destination, voices faded in. They were echoing, deep voices telling Mario that he was worthless... that the world no longer had any use for him and everyone would be better off if he was dead.
High pitched crying was layered onto the voices after a bit. It sounded like it was supposed to be Mario's cries. This really disturbed me and I found myself fighting back tears. For reasons I couldn't understand, this was affecting me on an emotional level.
The voices and aimless wandering went on for several minutes until I spotted a light grey speck in the distance. I moved towards it. It took a very long time to reach, and grew closer at a much slower rate than it should have.
When I was close enough to make it out, I saw that it was a tombstone. It was a very plain one with cracks in several places. When I got right next to the tombstone, I could see writing on it.
I turned off the system right after reading it. I'm not going to play the beta or hack or whatever this was again. There was a single word written on the tombstone.
Innocence. | {
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Carolyn Hax, 26 Jan 2015:
Dear Carolyn: Our daughter is divorcing after a 25-year marriage and wants us to divorce our son-in-law, too. We have known him since the two were teenagers, and we love him as a son. Our daughter is alleging that he has been abusive to her, but we have never seen any evidence of this. He has always been highly reactive with a full range of emotional expression, while she tends to be passive-aggressive, withholding and stubborn. We have never sensed that she is dominated by him, and she has pursued every goal or desire that he did not share or support. She has never described any specific incidents of abuse. We support her in her decision to end the marriage since she is not happy, but we can’t bring ourselves to end our relationship with our son-in-law on the basis of allegations that we simply don’t believe. As a consequence, she is cold and uncommunicative with us. What are we missing here? Anonymous
Dear Anonymous,
The only thing you’re missing here is the forwarding address of the certified saint your dopey daughter is about to divorce!
If there’s one thing that happens way too often in this topsy-turvy world, it’s people believing abuse survivors when they come forward. Please don’t make the terrible mistake of trusting your daughter, especially not when her soon-to-be ex is “highly reactive with a full range of emotional expression,” which 100% permanently, completely and without doubt removes him from the possibility of ever being an abuser. Other people, especially foolish little lady daughters, are often confused about how their own relationships and lives work, so it’s up to objective observers–like yourselves–who don’t suffer from the burden of having too much information about, for example, your daughter’s marriage, to be able to see both sides, here. Everything you need to know about anything that has ever happened between your daughter and her husband has definitely happened right in front of your face, because people always act always the same all the time no matter who they are around forever.
And anyway, abuse looks like what you say it looks like, and since your daughter’s situation doesn’t look, to you, like what you say abuse looks like, it’s not abuse! Bam. We just solved the problem of other people thinking they get to define the terms on which they live their lives, as if they’re allowed to do so if it means you experience literally any inconveniences whatsoever.
It’s strange and disappointing that your daughter has decided to become “cold and uncommunicative” toward her parents, when all you did was inform her that she’s a lying liar whose entire life is a sham and that you prefer the company of the man she says has abused her for the entirety of her adult life so far to entertaining the possibility that your mean old daughter isn’t just trolling everyone she knows for fun, but who knows why an apple would fall from a rotten, crumbling tree and then try to get the everloving fuck away from said rotten, crumbling tree, gravity is a huge mystery and no one knows how it works. | {
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The United States' Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is holding an ongoing workshop today regarding loot boxes in video games. Today, we found out that the three major game console creators Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft, and major video game publishers will require new games on their platforms to disclose rates of obtaining loot from loot boxes.
According to a press release published today by the Entertainment Software Association, they say:
The major console makers – Sony Interactive Entertainment, operator of the PlayStation platform, Microsoft, operator of Xbox and Windows, and Nintendo, operator of the Nintendo Switch gaming platform – are committing to new platform policies that will require paid loot boxes in games developed for their platforms to disclose information on the relative rarity or probability of obtaining randomized virtual items.
Publishers in the video game sphere also aim to make loot boxes more transparent by adding the probability of gaining items. These publishers include: Activision Blizzard, BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment, Bethesda, Bungie, Electronic Arts, Take-Two Interactive, Ubisoft, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, Wizards of the Coast, as well as the console makers' own publishing. Per the press release, this new policy is expected to be met "no later than the end of 2020."
The workshop for loot boxes is ongoing, so expect more ideas or even policies to be enacted in the future. As of the time of this writing, the workshop is ongoing, so tune in if you are interested in a panel discussion on the topic of loot boxes. A link to "Inside the Game" can be found here.
Quick Take
This is all good news across the board. Most of the major publishers are on board and will start to enact a more transparent look at what consumers can gain from loot boxes. I believe that loot boxes are an epidemic plaguing the wallets of many, and we've seen just how addicting it is. It is my hope that this discourages developers from incorporating loot boxes in the future, but that that's probably wishful thinking on my part.
What are your thoughts on these policies? Let us know in the comments below! | {
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It was surprising enough to hear that game developer Insomniac was making a virtual-reality game to be published by Oculus. Turns out, it's actually doing three.
In addition to Edge of Nowhere, a combination of ice climbing and Lovecraftian horror, Insomniac announced today that Oculus Studios also will publish The Unspoken, a player-versus-player game of magic spells, and Feral Rites, a third-person action game. Look for them toward the end of 2016.
The Unspoken, says Insomniac's Chad Dezem, is about an "urban magicians' fight club" staged in secret arenas around Chicago. Players cast spells using the Oculus Touch motion controllers. Dezem describes it as a "fighting game meets an arena shooter," in the sense that you must accurately input your magic spells using hand motions, but also must consider your position in the arenas, finding cover or taking the high ground. Unspoken's gameplay focuses on that one-on-one multiplayer mode—the single-player mode is largely tutorial.
Insomniac
Insomniac's Cameron Christiandescribes Feral Rites, which uses a standard gamepad controller, as combining "the exploration of Zelda with the savage combat of God of War." It's a third-person game with a fixed camera system, so it'll look sort of like God of War (except, like so many VR games, all up in your face). Playing as the son of a slain tribal chieftain, you have the ability to transform into a jaguar-beast form. The beast is "not just a power-up," Christian says—switching strategically between beast and human forms can solve problems. Look for side quests, character progression, item collecting—your standard third-person action-adventure, but in VR.
With three very different games in development, Insomniac clearly is going all-in with Oculus and the Rift. Time will tell if its fans are willing to follow the Ratchet and Clank folks into virtual reality. | {
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Duration: 16:22 Views: 49 081 Submitted: 2 years ago Submitted by:
Description: Nova Patra has been flagged and was given a second chance to not be banned on Twitch since her previous incident (Hearthstone Slut: Holy Nova). She learns but her clumsiness does not save her this time. She makes the mistake of thinking that she had already turned her stream off. She comes back horny and in need to masturbate. Little does she know that her stream was never turned off! She goes searching for her favorite porn and she faps like no one is watching in the comfort of her privacy.
Sponsored by: | {
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MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — The Minneapolis Police Union is looking for the people who vandalized their property. Someone used chalk to write messages on the police federation parking lot.
One of the messages showed the last name of union president Bob Kroll with an obscenity before it. Kroll sent out an email asking for extra patrols at the building.
“‘Police are everywhere. Justice nowhere. Abolish the police.’ There were vulgarities about me,” Lt. Kroll said, while recalling the messages.
Kroll said it’s something his secretary has grown accustomed to seeing every Monday morning. Messages on the parking lot, a police state sticker on the door, and recently someone ripped out a “We Support Our Police” sign that was on the front lawn.
“We had our parking lot re-asphalted and the first day it was done. There was chalk and it left permanent marks out there,” said Kroll.
Kroll said it’s happened about 10 times over the past couple months. So he said he wrote an email asking for extra patrol around the building during nights and weekends.
“I said ‘If anyone catches anybody doing any graffiti, I’ll buy you a steak dinner and drinks for two at Jax,'” Kroll said.
It wasn’t long before he received a message back from Deputy Chief Travis Glampe, saying he was in violation of the code of conduct, code of ethics and the city’s electronic communication policy.
“It was saying that we couldn’t offer gratuities — that I had to go through every normal request like any other business owner. I responded back to him with a detailed email on why this isn’t a normal request,” Kroll said. “Jax is a great restaurant. It’s a good gesture. We do things like that for our members all the time.”
For Kroll, it’s the latest battle with police administrators. Months ago, he referred to Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organization. Police Chief Janee Harteau said the comment was divisive.
He also supported off-duty officers who refused to work a Lynx game after players wore Black Lives Matter t-shirts. A week later, Harteau asked him to stop wearing his police uniform during union interviews.
“I wish the police administration wasn’t so anti-police,” Kroll said. “These guys forget they got where they are because of this union.”
A police spokesperson said this is an internal matter and they are investigating what was said in the email exchange. The Federation is putting up cameras at their headquarters and will also be putting up a fence within the next, few months. | {
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For those of you worried that GDC would sneak by without any new information for NVIDIA's GeForce fans, Jen-Hsun Huang surprised everyone by showing up at the Epic Games' keynote with Tim Sweeny to hijack it.
The result: the first showing of the upcoming GeForce TITAN X based on the upcoming Maxwell GM200 GPU.
JHH stated that it would have a 12GB frame buffer and was built using 8 billion transistors! There wasn't much more information than that, but I was promised that the details would be revealed sooner rather than later.
Any guesses on performance or price?
Jen-Hsun signs the world's first TITAN X for Tim Sweeney.
Kite Demo running on TITAN X
UPDATE : I ran into the TITAN X again at the NVIDIA booth and was able to confirm a couple more things. First, the GPU will only require a 6+8-pin power connections, indicating that NVIDIA is still pushing power efficiency with GM200.
Also, as you would expect, the TITAN X will support 3-way and 4-way SLI, or at very least has the SLI bridges to support it. | {
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Kanazawa school believes Iraqi teacher is murder suspect wanted in Taiwan
ISHIKAWA (TR) – A technical school in Kanazawa City believes that a male Iraqi teacher is the same person wanted for the murder of his parents-in-law in Taiwan, reports TV Asahi (May 8).
According to police in Taiwan, Ali Hammad Jumaah, 31, fatally strangled both of the parents of his wife, both aged in their 70s, during an argument at their residence in Taipei on the night of April 29. The following day, he took a flight to Japan with his 1-year-old son.
Earlier this month, Taiwanese authorities said that they are seeking the whereabouts of Jumaah, who is an English teacher at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology.
In speaking with TV Asahi, the school confirmed that it has a teacher by the same name on its staff who has been out of contact since the incident. “Since we cannot get in touch with the teacher, we are forced to think that he is the same person suspected in this case,” a representative of the school said.
The school later suspended Jumaah from his duties for an indefinite period. It also shut down until re-opening on May 8.
Interpol
On May 2, prosecutors in Taiwan said that they have informed immigration authorities to arrest Jumaah should he attempt to re-enter Taiwan. As well, Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau has requested the assistance of Interpol in locating Jumaah.
Authorities in Taiwan said that Jumaah has not returned to his residence in Kanazawa City. As well, there is no record of him leaving Japan, leading them to believe he remains in the country, which does not have an extradition agreement with Taiwan.
Arrived in Taiwan in March
According to prosecutors and media in Taiwan, Jumaah met his wife, whose family name is Hsiao, in the U.S. while they were both students. After Jumaah obtained a master’s degree in teaching English as a second language, he became employed at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology. Jumaah and Hsiao married two years ago.
Earlier this year, Hsiao and her son went to Taiwan with the help of her parents after she was a victim of domestic violence by Jumaah. Hsiao and her son then stayed at the residence of her parents, located in the Shihlin district of Taipei, local media reported.
Jumaah arrived in Taiwan from Japan on March 26 to meet with his Taiwanese wife, whose family name is Hsiao, to discuss divorce and the custody of their son.
On the night of the incident, Hsiao was not present at the residence, a request made by her parents for her safety, local media said. After the dispute began, Jumaah allegedly strangled both of his parents-in-law and departed with the boy. | {
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Image caption "Homestake": The gypsum vein is just 1-2cm wide
Nasa's Mars rover Opportunity has found slivers of a bright material that looks very much like it is gypsum (calcium sulphate).
If confirmed, it would be the most unambiguous signal of water activity yet found on Mars by this mission, which manages to keep on rolling.
Creaking and arthritic it may be, but after nearly eight years, the rover is still delivering remarkable science.
Lead scientist Steve Squyres said the find was "so cool".
"To me, this is the single most powerful piece of evidence for liquid water at Mars that has been discovered by the Opportunity rover," the Cornell University researcher told journalists.
"We have found sulphates before. Those sulphates were formed somewhere - we don't know where.
"They've been moved around by the wind, they've been mixed in with other materials - it's a big, jumbled-up, fascinating mess.
"This stuff formed right here. There was a fracture in the rock, water flowed through it, gypsum was precipitated from the water. End of story. There's no ambiguity."
Prof Squyres was giving an update on the rover mission here at the 2011 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, the largest annual gathering of Earth and planetary scientists.
Opportunity was put on the Red Planet back on 25 January, 2004, with the expectation that it would complete at least three months of operations.
But the robot has exceeded everyone's expectations and continues to operate despite some worn mechanisms and instrument glitches.
Since its landing on the Meridiani plain just south of Mars' equator, the robot has trundled more than 30km to the rim of a huge crater known as Endeavour.
Acid test
Opportunity is currently investigating a raised piece of ground referred to as Cape York where it has found two exciting new rocks.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Steve Squyres: Opportunity "in astonishingly good shape"
One is the gypsum - if that is what it is. It takes the form of a narrow vein about 1-2cm wide and about 40-50 centimetres in length.
Opportunity has examined the deposit using its Microscopic Imager, its Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer and the multiple filters of its mast camera.
All the indications are that this vein is relatively pure hydrated calcium sulphate, although some further analysis will be required to put all doubts to bed.
Like all the interesting deposits examined by Opportunity, the vein has also been given a name. The science team has called this one "Homestake".
The other new rock of note found by Opportunity is nicknamed "Tisdale". It has a zinc concentration higher than anything previously seen by Opportunity.
The concentration is so high in fact that it approaches levels seen in commercial zinc ores here on Earth.
Invariably, such deposits are the result of hydrothermal activity - hot water flowing through rocks and laying down zinc-rich minerals.
The team cannot exclude the possibility just yet that the zinc may simply be a thin exterior coating. Future studies will have to establish the zinc goes right through Tisdale or similar rocks in the area. If that can be done, it would put the hydrothermal theory on a firmer footing.
Image caption "Tisdale" displays a strong zinc signal
All of Opportunity's findings are helping to fill in a story about a wetter, warmer Mars that existed billions of years ago.
As always, such discoveries raise absorbing new questions about the possibility that simple lifeforms could have existed during these ancient times. In this respect, the gypsum discovery makes the potential for habitability more likely.
"The gypsum is intriguing because it allows the possibility - although it does not require it - that the water was not as acid as some of the other waters that we've seen evidence for," Prof Squyres told BBC News.
"The other waters... were probably very acidic - pH of five, four, three. Gypsum doesn't require that, and so this may hint at a kinder, gentler chemistry of the water for life."
Opportunity's operations will slow in the coming months as it conserves energy to make it through a fifth Martian winter. During winter, the amount of sunlight reaching its solar panels is reduced, and high-energy activities like driving are kept to a minimum.
It currently costs Nasa about $12m a year to run the mission. Given the rover's current status and performance, the space agency could be continuing to spend such money for a few more years yet.
Only two other wheeled space vehicles have travelled further than Opportunity. The Lunokhod 2 rover that the Soviets sent to the Moon in 1973 covered 37km, and the American "Lunar buggy" deployed with Apollo 17 covered 36km.
But Opportunity, which has completed 34km, should overtake both.
"It's the only horse competing in this particular derby," observed rover project scientist Bruce Banerdt.
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Focus on the User: Your Precious Metal Resource
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Israeli MK Moshe Feiglin (center) speaks with a supporter last night in Queens at a dinner held in his honor (Photo: Alex Kane)
Moshe Feiglin was the star last night in Queens, New York. The far-right Israeli activist, West Bank settler and newly minted Member of Knesset (MK) wined and dined with some of his most ardent supporters in Fresh Meadows, an affluent neighborhood in Queens with a large Jewish community. Feiglin wore a white shirt with a red tie and worked the room, shaking hands and taking pictures with American Jewish supporters of his Manhigut Yehudit (Jewish Leadership) movement. Feiglin was in his element, even though he had only recently touched down in New York and was heading right back to Israel that same night. Members of the audience received free professional pictures, which Feiglin signed throughout the night.
The mostly forty-and-up crowd had paid good money, and they now got to spend an intimate evening with their hero, who spoke about his plans to lead Israel and also touched on President Obama’s upcoming visit. The dinner was the latest example of how the far-right of the American Jewish community–a minority that remains influential–play an outsize role in fueling some of the most destructive elements of Israeli politics. In this case, the dinner, and the cash that went along with it, was held for the purposes of honoring a politician who advocates paying Palestinians to leave their land as well as destroying Palestinian infrastructure.
“We’ll take over the Likud, we’ll take over the country,” vowed Feiglin.
The event cost at least $120 to get in, and some paid even more with a “diamond” reservation going for $1,000. The money, according to one attendee who was a supporter of Feiglin, was going to the U.S. arm of Manhigut Yehudit, which has helped Feiglin’s political campaign with money from American supporters. They have a PO Box in Cedarhurst, New York (on Long Island), the location of what the party calls its “international” home.
The scene played out in Fresh Meadows’ Chateau Steakhouse and the room was packed with about 100 supporters of Manhigut Yehudit. Feiglin was being honored by the Americans who had backed him every step of the way, a journey that has taken him from riling up right-wing Israeli activists in protest of the Oslo Accords to the halls of the Knesset.
“Here’s our member of Knesset, standing in the heart of Queens,” announced Shmuel Sackett, a longtime friend and associate of Feiglin who was born in the U.S. and also lives in a West Bank settlement in addition to his New York home. Both Sackett and Feiglin were supporters of the virulently racist Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was assassinated in 1990. In 2010, Feiglin said “I believe most of the things Rabbi Kahane said were true” and just recently reaffirmed his support for Kahane. Sackett is the former executive director of the banned Israeli political party Kahane Chai.
Moshe Feiglin stands with his close friend Shmuel Sackett (Photo: Alex Kane)
It was a “special evening” for Feiglin, as Sackett put it. Feiglin frequently comes to New York for annual dinners with his supporters. But this was the first time he was coming as a Member of the Israeli Knesset.
The audience, which was composed of people who, for the most part, knew each other, clapped at Sackett’s introduction to Feiglin.
The dinner attendees represented a vibrant right-wing Zionist community in New York that rears its head every time a prominent Palestine-related event is announced. Helen Freedman, the executive director of Americans for a Safe Israel and a ubiquitous presence at right-wing Israel events, was thanked for her longtime support of Feiglin by Sackett; she was part of the gaggle of Israel advocates who stood with Assemblyman Dov Hikind to smear and intimidate the students organizing the Brooklyn College event on the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
A Jewish Leadership movement supporter sitting next to me struck up a conversation and explained that Feiglin visits them every year. He, along with the other audience members, were big supporters of Feiglin who had given money to Feiglin’s most recent successful primary campaign, which led to his seat in the Knesset. According to the Jewish Daily Forward, Feiglin garnered $20,000 from American Jews in 2012 in the run-up to the Likud primary, which Feiglin rival Benjamin Netanyahu won.
While the $20,000 is not a large sum, it is only a fraction of the amount that American Jewish supporters have given to Feiglin’s movement over the years. According to a New York Times feature on tax-exempt American funds used for West Bank settlement growth, the U.S. arm of Manhigut Yehudit has raised $5.2 million over the past few years. Some of that money has gone to Mahigut Yehudit “community facilities,” some of which are indeed located in illegal settlements, like the extremist Kiryat Arba colony in Hebron. The Times reported that the U.S. group “skates close” to violating American law, since it is prohibited to use “charitable funds for political purposes at home or abroad.”
Given Feiglin’s ambition to be Israel’s prime minister, he will need a lot more cash in the future from his supporters in the U.S.
Before Feiglin took the stage, Sackett introduced a promotional film lauding Feiglin. When an image of Meir Kahane came on the screen, some audience members clapped. And when the film intoned that the Israeli mainstream derided Feiglin as someone who wants to “expel” Palestinians, one audience member yelled out a “woo!” while another clapped. The film followed Feiglin from his early days as the leader of the Zo Artzeinu (This is our land) movement, which used civil disobedience to protest the Oslo Accords. Feiglin was arrested and tried for sedition for his acts with Zo Artzeinu, and was sentenced to six months of community service.
Some of the film was devoted to his quest to gain leadership of the Likud party from within, a choice that some other right-wing Zionists have questioned.
Benjamin Netanyahu is quoted in the film as saying “he doesn’t belong” in Likud. Netanyahu is surely worried that Feiglin’s brazen disdain for Palestinians and ardent advocacy for Jewish control of the Temple Mount–Feiglin wants to
“expel the Moslem wakf from the Temple Mount and restore exclusive Israeli sovereignty over the Mount”–can only mean trouble for Israel’s international image. Feiglin seems to cares little about Israel’s image and wants the country to stop receiving American aid. While Feiglin’s vow to “take over the country” may appear to be electioneering bluster his power has certainly increased in recent years. Feiglin is part of a right-flank in Likud that wants to expel the old-guard members who cared for the semblance of Israeli democracy (for Jews only, of course), and they have had some success. The Likud party establishment even promoted Feiglin during the last campaign as a way to stave off the threat from the Jewish Home party.
Feiglin took the stage as members of the audience ate dinner. Although he didn’t make any surprising remarks, his disdain for President Barack Obama and the Palestinians shone through. His most controversial ideas were left out of the speech. Feiglin advocates for paying Palestinians to leave their land, whom he has described as “inferior” and “parasites.” He refuses to acknowledge that the Palestinians are a people, and has said that Israel should cut off water and electricity to those living in the occupied territories. In response to attacks from Palestinian militants, Feiglin wants to conquer “the area whose residents instigated the violence, their deportation and destruction of the area’s infrastructure.”
“We’ve just reached the beginning,” of a journey, Feiglin told the adoring crowd. “I feel like you’re family. What can I tell you? I love you all.”
Feiglin said that “if I will not be the head of the Likud next time, the Likud will lose.” Towards the end of his remarks, he turned to the upcoming Obama visit. It was striking that Feiglin would refer to the president as “Barack Hussein Obama” in New York; you could feel the racism directed against a man who has protected Israel from diplomatic opprobrium time and time again and whose administration is giving Israel more aid than past administrations. Feiglin’s constant advocacy for Jonathan Pollard, the American spy for Israel who is a cause celebre on the Israeli right, was also on display. “If God forbid [Obama] will come without Pollard, he will speak to my empty chair, and I hope my chair will not be the only empty chair,” Feiglin said to applause, repeating an earlier vow to boycott Obama’s speech if Pollard remained in jail. He predicted that Obama’s visit will bring “tremendous pressure” and that “we should all be prepared for rough times.”
Only a short part of his prepared remarks were devoted to the “enemies” of Israel, but the question and answer session garnered a vow from Feiglin to never say hello to MK Haneen Zoabi–a sentiment that sounds similar to the so-called moderate Yair Lapid’s sneering remark that he would not work with the “Haneen Zoabiz.” Feiglin also predicted that both Lapid’s Yesh Atid party and Naftali Bennett’s HaBayit HaYehudi (Jewish Home) party would join Netanyahu’s coalition. And Feiglin reaffirmed his commitment to continue to pray at the Muslim holy site of the Noble Sanctuary, which the MK frequently visits and prays at, for which he has been arrested. Due to the sensitive nature of the religious site, Israeli authorities prohibit Jews from praying in the area.
Before I left for the night, I caught up with Feiglin for a brief interview, though he was reluctant since he was tired. Our conversation turned to Obama and how Feiglin thinks the visit will bring “a plan” for a two-state solution, which the MK called a recipe for “bloodshed.”
I asked, what should happen to the Palestinians if there is no two-state solution?
He looked at me like I was an idiot.
Feiglin then responded with something to the effect of, “who are you talking about?” (Since the restaurant was loud this part of my interview is jumbled in the audio.)
Feiglin pointedly refused to say “Palestinian” throughout the evening, which is no surprise considering he is on the record as saying:
“there is no Palestinian nation. There is only an Arab-speaking public which has suddenly identified itself as a people, a negative of the Zionist movement, parasites.”
When I said that Palestinians live under military occupation and have no rights, he asked me, “where did they live before?” After replying that they lived in historic Palestine, he lectured me to “go learn history” and read Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial.
Feiglin also reaffirmed his plan to pay Palestinians to leave the occupied territories, and said that 50% would willingly leave.
That’s one of the signature ideas of the man who is a member of Israel’s ruling party and who has vowed to take it over. Last night in New York Feiglin made clear he does not want to stop at taking over the Likud — he wants the whole country. | {
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Clark was the second-longest incarcerated woman in New York State, and her radicalism dated to the 1960s and her opposition to the war in Vietnam. That led her to the violent revolutionaries in the Weather Underground and a radical offshoot known as the May 19 Communist Organization. | {
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President Robert Mugabe
Dying to be President of the Republic of Kenya? Think again. A new study suggests that presidents tend to age faster and even die earlier compared to their political rivals.
The study published in the peer-reviewed BMJ journal arrived at the conclusion after comparing the rates of aging and death between 540 candidates, including 279 winners of presidential elections and 261 runners-up.
It emerged that those who served as presidents or heads of government lived an average 13.4 years after their last election compared to candidates who never served in office who lived for about 17.8 years. This means that, on average, the presidents lived 4.4 years less than their rivals after their last elections.
It added: "We found that heads of government had substantially accelerated death compared with runner-up candidates. Our findings suggest elected leaders may indeed age more quickly," said Anupam B Jena, Associate Professor at the Havard Medical School in the United States, one of the researchers.
The study added: "Election to public office may lead to accelerated aging due to stress of leadership and political life. A historical examination of medical records of some presidents suggested they may age twice as quickly as their overall population."
The study focused on presidential candidates and their rivals between the year 1772 and 2015 in 17 countries. It zeroed in on leaders in Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, UK, and US.
However, the researchers admitted the conclusion of their study may not necessarily be applicable to other countries. The study did not involve any leaders in sub-Saharan Africa.
Previous studies have suggested that presidents tend to live longer than the general population due to their higher standards of living and access to better health care. The study was done by researchers from Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General School of Medicine, the US National Bureau of Economic Research and the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. | {
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Happy dance! California-based Amy’s Drive Thru, the first organic and vegetarian fast food restaurant in America, with tons of vegan options, is doing SO WELL that they are looking into expanding across the country and becoming a chain!
Right now, Amy’s Drive Thru’s flagship store is located in Rohnert Park, California, with a second location currently being planned in Northern California in an abandoned Denny’s. The ultimate goal is to eventually open up locations across the country, according to Amy’s Director of Operations, Paul Schiefer. Yes, please!
Amy’s menu uses all local ingredients to bring classic meat-free American fast food to the masses, without ever having to get out of your car. Win!
Menu items are often sourced from employee’s family recipe books and given a thumbs up if a handful of Amy’s staff agrees that it tastes good.
The menu boasts organic pizza with vegan cheese available, non-dairy milkshakes, fresh salads, as well as mouth-watering vegan cheeseburgers, with a single-patty cheeseburger just $3.99, just a dollar more than McDonald’s.
In the past, vegan options at fast food and grab-and-go spots were few and far between. But these days, consumers are moving away from meat and dairy while also seeking out less processed foods. This new shift not only caters to vegans, it also provides healthy options for those who want to reduce their consumption of animal products, whether it be for health, environmental, or animal welfare reasons.
Recent studies have shown that around one-third of Americans are choosing to leave meat off their plates more frequently and a 2015 survey by market analyst Mintel found that 61 percent of consumers say they enjoy menu items that heavily feature vegetables. We can’t wait for Amy’s Drive Thru to come to the East Coast!
To learn more about rising trends in the plant-based food space, check out One Green Planet’s Future of Food.
All image source: Amy’s Drive Thru/Instagram
Advertisement | {
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Overview
Disgaea®5 Complete tells a tale of revenge and rebellion. As a new and terrible Overlord named Void Dark seeks to enslave the countless Netherworlds, one young demon has stood to end his reign—Killia. In Disgaea®5 Complete, lead Killia and his tenacious army of rebels on their dark and dangerous path to vengeance. Filled with more over-the-top action and hilarious writing than ever before, Disgaea®5 Complete’s damage numbers are surely headed for the record books.
The Complete Disgaea®5 Experience - Enjoy the full Disgaea®5 story along with 8 bonus scenarios, 4 fan-favorite characters and 3 character classes from the Disgaea series!
A Legendary RPG Series Reborn - The latest flagship RPG from the most prolific strategy RPG developer in the world welcomes newcomers and veterans alike with a brand-new story and dials the hilarity and strategy up to level 9999!
Hundreds of Hours of Content - Following Disgaea tradition, Disgaea®5 Complete offers hundreds of hours of deep strategic content.
Deep Strategic Battles - Engage in exciting tactical battles with inventive systems like Magichange, Geo Effects, Alliance Attacks, Character Towers and more!
Extensive and Fun Customization - Recruit new units from over 40 jobs and races, then dive in and strengthen them as you see fit in their personal Chara Worlds! Find hundreds of items or make your own at the Alchemist, then power them up and discover hidden abilities in the Item World! Or, if you’re feeling wild, change the rules of the game at the Dark Assembly! The possibilities are endless!
Limited Edition Includes:
• Disgaea®5Complete for Nintendo Switch™ w/ Reversible Cover
• 30-Track, 2-Disc Soundtrack
• Hard Cover Art Book
• Clip On Rubber Prinny
• 10 Metal Lapel Pin Set
• Killia and Void Dark Tear-Resistant Poster (14" x 22")
• Zeroken Tear-Resistant Poster (14" x 22")
• Collector's Box
©2015-2017 Nippon Ichi Software, Inc. ©2015-2017 NIS America, Inc. All rights reserved. Disgaea is a registered trademark of Nippon Ichi Software, Inc. | {
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Wow! I can hardly contain my excitement at opening these two gifts!!! My secret santa somehow knew exactly what I wanted :) I just started learning programming so the Python book is PERFECT! I am excited to start using it over winter break :D Also, the bowl is soooo beautiful! And... I actually didn't own one until now! Another AMAZING gift :) I cannot wait until finals are over so I can use it.
I want my secret santa to know that this is (no joke) one of the most special and most personal gifts I've ever received. Isn't it amazing that someone across the country took the time to learn my interests, find the perfect presents and write a wonderful note in my native language? I feel spoiled :)
THANK YOU!!
ahjotina
ps: I decided to name the bowl "Danny" after my secret santa. Just a small way of saying thank you. | {
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NEW: When we said we’re going to use the full force of the ACLU to stop Brett Kavanaugh, we meant it. We’re spending more than $1 million to run ads like this in Nebraska, Colorado, West Virginia, and Alaska 👇 pic.twitter.com/dWyN1XYh29 — ACLU (@ACLU) October 1, 2018
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wants voters to know that they are dead-set and serious about their strongly-worded opposition to controversial Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. To that end, the constitutionally–though not always politically–liberal organization is running a series of ads in four states aimed at center-right senators seen to be wavering in their support for the would-be associate Supreme Court justice.
The all-but-sure-to-be-inflammatory advertisement compares Kavanaugh to Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton. Cosby was recently sentenced to a three-10 year prison term for sexual assaulting Andrea Constand after being found guilty earlier this year. In sum, more than 50 women accused Cosby of drugging, assaulting, sexually harassing or raping them over the course of multiple decades.
Clinton, still a fairly-reliable object of liberal affection, has been accused by no fewer than 12 women of rape and sexual assault over the years. The former president was also infamously impeached by the House of Representatives in late 1998 for committing perjury during the Kenneth Starr investigation into the Monica Lewinsky affair–an investigation in which Brett Kavanaugh himself played an outsized role.
The ACLU’s ad, therefore, risks upsetting some of their membership base. The ad begins:
We’ve seen this before–denials from powerful men.
At this point in the 30-second spot, side-by-side-by-side images of Matt Lauer, Harvey Weinstein and Charlie Rose appear. The video then cuts to brief excerpts of Clinton, Cosby and Kavanaugh issuing their respective denials. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” Clinton lectures. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Cosby says, shaking his head as if in disbelief.
Then it’s Kavanaugh’s turn.
Culled from footage of his re-hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday, the D.C. Circuit Court judge exclaims, “I categorically and unequivocally d-deny the allegation against me by Dr. Ford.” (Surely not to be lost on viewers is Kavanaugh stumbling over the word “deny” in the segment selected.)
The narrator’s voice returns as an image of a couple watching television on their couch appears, “America is watching. And as we choose a lifetime seat on our highest court, integrity matters and we cannot have any doubt.”
The ad ends with an ask for each targeted senator to “oppose the nomination of Judge Kavanaugh.”
[image via screengrab]
Follow Colin Kalmbacher on Twitter: @colinkalmbacher
Have a tip we should know? [email protected] | {
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Lip Monthly has released a sneak peek at what’s in the upcoming August 2016 bag. Thanks to Heather for the heads up!
Each bag will include:
A Manna KadarLip Crayon. ($24 Value)
Lip Monthly is $12.95 per month (free shipping), $38.95 for 4 months (free shipping) or $116.55 annually (free shipping)
Use coupon code 50OFF to save 50% off your first box.
OR use code 1STFREE to get your first box free with a 4-month subscription
OR get use code 3FREE to get 3 months free with an annual subscription!
Sign up by July 31st to get this as your first month.
Check out all of our Lip Monthly reviews (and the comments!) to see what you can expect from this subscription.
And check out our Beauty Subscription Box Directory for more beauty boxes! | {
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It's official: All new and existing Globe Postpaid customers can get six months of Amazon Prime Video access (paid for by Globe up to P150/month value). This means eligible customers can get unlimited streaming access to selected movies and TV shows on Prime Video. The selection includes Prime's critically acclaimed and award-winning Originals, like the Emmy-nominated, Golden Globe-awarded Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, and new seasons of The Man in the High Castle. That means you have more shows to binge-watch on the weekends!
In addition to unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows available on Prime Video, this offer also comes with Twitch Prime (also paid for by Globe, up to P150/month value). Twitch Prime offers a premium experience on Twitch, a streaming platform for gamers. Twitch Prime comes with free games every month, in-game content, a Twitch channel subscription every 30 days at no additional cost, exclusive emotes, and chat badge.
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CONTINUE READING BELOW Recommended Videos
To get you started on your next binge-watch session, here are some of the Prime Originals that you can watch on the streaming service.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
This period comedy-drama revolves around Miriam "Midge" Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan), a housewife from New York City in 1958 who starts doing stand-up comedy.
The Man in the High Castle
This dystopian series, already on its second season, is based on the novel of the same name by Philip K. Dick. It tells the story of an alternate version of post-war 1962, where the Nazis and the Axis powers won World War II.
Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan
Starring John Krasinski as the titular character, Jack Ryan is based on author Tom Clancy's "Ryanverse" novels. In the TV series, Jack Ryan is a CIA analyst-turned-field-agent who's on a mission to stop terrorists. Krasinski is one of the executive producers of the political thriller, along with Clancy, Michael Bay, and others.
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For more information and updates, follow Globe Telecom on Facebook.
This story originally appeared on Esquiremag.ph. Minor edits have been made by the Spot.ph editors. | {
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In 1987 the video game Metroid was released in the United States. It featured a masked and armoured space adventurer named Samus Aran navigating an alien planet, and it was one of the first games to blend exploration, action and puzzle-solving in a way that has become common. At the end of the game, Samus Aran is revealed to be a woman.
Her gender surprised gamers, but in some versions this powerful adventurer appeared in a bikini. In games of that era, women were generally damsels, princesses or sex objects, not heroes.
This seems to be changing. There are at least five major releases featuring female protagonists that have recently debuted or will arrive soon for the Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Xbox One. Among them are well-known titles such as Assassin’s Creed, and new arrivals such as Horizon Zero Dawn and ReCore. Official statistics are hard to come by, but experts see a distinct shift underway.
“There are more female-led titles than ever in games and I think that’s in large part due to social media,” said Sam Maggs, a game journalist and author of The Fangirl’s Guide to the Galaxy. She added that the Internet has allowed women to “form our own communities and given us a platform from which our voices can be heard; and it’s hard for companies to ignore nearly 50 per cent of their customers demanding better representation in games.”
The online harassment of women who have spoken out against stereotypes in games has given the issue more visibility.
Independent and PC game developers have had, over the years, a better gender mix of protagonists in their products, but big-budget console games have lagged behind.
“Women have always played games, but we’ve been largely ignored by the market,” Maggs said, adding that women have rarely felt welcome in gaming-specific places such as conventions or in critical discussions about gaming.
Ubisoft, the studio behind Assassin’s Creed, faced criticism in the past for not having any playable female characters in major releases. But Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, released in October, has the franchise’s first: Evie Frye and her twin brother, Jacob, are the titular assassins who try to wrest control of 19th-century London from the Templars, an organization seeking dominance over humanity.
Marc-Alexis Cote, the game’s creative director, said Evie was not created in response to the criticism. “From the inception of the Assassin’s Creed Syndicate story, Evie has been part of the process.”
He said that the game’s creators wanted a relationship in which Evie and her brother “challenge each other and provide different views.” He added: “She’s more intelligent, in that she thinks more about the consequences of her actions. She wants to strike at the heart of the Templars’ power. She is more surgical.” Jacob, he said, tends to charge in headlong, always eager for a brawl.
Another game, Dishonored 2, developed by Arkane Studios, is scheduled to arrive in 2016. Harvey Smith, one of the game’s creative directors, said that he was conscious of what sort of hero he wanted to present in Emily Kaldwin, one of the game’s two primary characters: “Is she a character that you’d want to be?”
In the first Dishonored, Emily was a child watching as the main character, Corvo Attano, prowled Dunwall, a fictional city with a steampunk, supernatural twist, on a mission of revenge. Emily becomes the game’s emotional centre, but she is still only a character things happen to; she exists as an emotional foil for the player.
In the sequel, Emily is an adult with a mission of her own.
“She’s lived a fairly sheltered life and now she’s being thrust out into the world,” Smith said, adding that so many female game characters have conformed to stereotypes like “sexy but dangerous” or “cold and aloof.” To become heroes they had to be brutalized until “they’re just a barely held-together victim.” He said he wanted Emily to be different.
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Hints of change have been found among young male players, as well. In March at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the largest professionals-only industry event of its kind, Rosalind Wiseman, an educator and author, and Ashly Burch, a game writer and voice actress, presented the results of an informal study. Wiseman surveyed middle- and high-school students, asking about the role that gender plays in their choice of video games. More than half of the girls expressed a preference for playing a game with a female lead; a little more than half the boys were concerned less about gender than about the abilities a character possessed, Wiseman said.
“The male gender does not have the monopoly on heroism,” he said. “Joule is emblematic of this conviction, and we hope she’s a character who stands strong and stands out in a market filled with male heroes.” | {
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Until Prime Minister Stephen Harper lost his job in Canada's elections on Monday, he was part of a dwindling group of world leaders who've actively worked against climate progress on an international stage. With the Liberal Party's Justin Trudeau becoming the next prime minister, a significant roadblock to an international climate agreement in Paris in December is now clear.
Harper, the outgoing leader of the Conservative Party, may not have been as vocally opposed to climate action as, say, U.S. Republicans, but he’s repeatedly tried to undermine international progress in more subtle ways. He was one-half of the world’s most powerful anti-climate duo, which broke apart only last month when his partner—ex-Australia prime minister Tony Abbott—lost his job in the Liberals' party leadership elections. He withdrew Canada from the Kyoto Treaty in 2011, just as major polluters (including the U.S. and China) began to rethink their approach to fossil fuels. He and Abbott planned to complicate negotiations on limiting global greenhouse gas emissions, and Harper congratulated his peer on his progress in scuttling domestic climate initiatives. “You’ve used this international platform to encourage our counterparts in the major economies and beyond to boost economic growth, to lower taxes when possible and to eliminate harmful ones, most notably the job-killing carbon tax,” Harper told Abbott when the latter visited Canada in summer of 2014. In the last year, he's snubbed United Nations climate summits and his officials reportedly tried to weaken language from an official G7 text that pledged serious long-term cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
As Canada's elections drew near, Harper took half-hearted steps to pretend Canada was not so out-of-step as the rest of the world on climate change as it seemed, pledging funds for green finance and proposing cuts to carbon emissions. The government committed to 30 percent cuts by 2030, but said nothing about how it would address the tar sands, the fastest growing source of the nation’s emissions. Nothing in Harper's record, meanwhile, suggested he had any intention of meeting this goal. Canada already will miss its 2020 climate target, even though the United States has proved it's possible to meet the same goal. “In climate policy, the Canadian government has done virtually nothing to keep its 2020 and 2050 emission reduction promises,” wrote Mark Jaccard, a professor with Simon Fraser University's School of Resource and Environmental Management, in an October report card on the country’s climate policies. He gave Harper’s administration a “failing grade.”
On a domestic level, Harper's offered Canada’s oil and tar sands industry his unconditional support. He went beyond simply advocating for the Keystone XL pipeline, secretly devoting $30 million of taxpayer dollars to public advocacy. His administration has stifled climate scientists’ ability to talk to press, and is accused of muzzling environmental nonprofits by ordering extensive audits.
But as Harper has learned, tying his fate to the oil industry also has its risks. Canada’s tar sands industry has faltered as oil prices collapse, and Harper's own fortunes plunged along with it. | {
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At Caktus, we rely heavily on automated testing for web app development. We create tests for all the code we write, ideally before the code is written. We create tests for every bug we find and, resources permitting, ramp up the test suite with lots of random input and boundary testing.
Debugging concurrency issues or race conditions has long been a nightmare. There are only so many times you can double click the link in your web app that is generating some bizarre failure.
Using the Django test client, I created a little decorator that you can use in your unit tests to make sure a view doesn't blow up when it's called multiple times with the same arguments. If it does blow up, and you happen to be using PostgreSQL, chances are you can fix the issues by using Colin's previously posted require_lock decorator.
Here's the decorator for testing concurrency:
import threading def test_concurrently ( times ): """ Add this decorator to small pieces of code that you want to test concurrently to make sure they don't raise exceptions when run at the same time. E.g., some Django views that do a SELECT and then a subsequent INSERT might fail when the INSERT assumes that the data has not changed since the SELECT. """ def test_concurrently_decorator ( test_func ): def wrapper ( * args , ** kwargs ): exceptions = [] def call_test_func (): try : test_func ( * args , ** kwargs ) except Exception , e : exceptions . append ( e ) raise threads = [] for i in range ( times ): threads . append ( threading . Thread ( target = call_test_func )) for t in threads : t . start () for t in threads : t . join () if exceptions : raise Exception ( 'test_concurrently intercepted %s exceptions: %s ' % ( len ( exceptions ), exceptions )) return wrapper return test_concurrently_decorator
To use this in a test, create a small function that includes the thread-safe code inside your test. Apply the decorator, passing the number of times you want to run the code simultaneously, and then call the function: | {
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Ben Judah is author of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In And Out Of Love With Vladimir Putin.
The war in Ukraine is no longer only about Ukraine. The conflict has transformed Russia. This increasingly is what European leaders and diplomats believe: that Vladimir Putin and his security establishment have used the fog of war in Ukraine to shroud the final establishment of his brittle imperialist dictatorship in Moscow.
Among those who believe that this is happening, and that Europe will be facing down a more menacing Russia for a long time to come, is Radek Sikorski, who was Poland’s foreign minister from 2007 until September.
“I think psychologically the regime has been transformed by the annexation of Crimea,” Sikorski told Politico Magazine. “This was the moment that finally convinced all doubters and turned all heads. This was Napoleon after Austerlitz. This was Hitler after the fall of Paris. This was the moment that finally centralized everything into the hands of Vladimir Putin.”
Sikorski is formerly a glamorous figure in Brussels who played a leading role in shaping the European Union strategy toward both Russia and Ukraine. European leaders, intimidated by his charisma and outspoken views on Russia, chose not to appoint him as Europe’s high representative for foreign affairs earlier this year. Today Sikorski is the hawkish speaker of the Polish parliament, and he says that the West has been so distracted by the crisis in Ukraine it has missed the more important developments further east.
“What is happening now is the full embrace of neo-imperialism,” Sikorski says. “They have exploited every post-Soviet and neo-Soviet atavism and made it real because an alarming proportion of the population believes it. This is how they have refueled their regime.”
Sikorski is outspoken but not alone. Powerful officials inside Russia also see a darker cast to the regime, with the influence of the free-market economists and loyal oligarchs whom Putin once surrounded himself with significantly diminished. The liberals, relatively speaking, are out; the Russian president is reportedly now only working closely with security officials and the Defense Ministry. Some European diplomats even question whether Putin is still fully in charge, so beholden is he to the siloviki—the military and security establishment. “Every year the ruling circle shrinks smaller and smaller,” said one Kremlin source. “The only people that Putin is listening to are the military and the intelligence.”
Fear has returned to Moscow. Paranoia has gripped Russian officials and business elites. Those privy to sensitive information no longer carry smartphones. Instead they carry simple old cell phones and now remove the battery—to make sure the phone is dead – when they talk about Kremlin politics among themselves. This is because they assume the security services are now recording what is being said and this can disable the recording device. There is real fear that the next dramatic event in Russian politics could trigger a wave of sackings, arrests or even purges.
“This is the new ruling elite—the GRU military intelligence, which was the spearhead on the ground in Ukraine and the defense ministry,” says Sikorski, referring to Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency, which commands its own special forces. “The removal of old elites has not started yet, but that’s the next logical step. … They have unleashed patriotic euphoria. They made this happen by exploiting the psychological and sociological resentment of the all the new and the old intelligence and security services toward the hated class of billionaires with their yachts and their mansions in London. That’s why they are so committed and loyal.”
Carl Bildt, who was Sweden’s hawkish foreign minister until this month, also believes Putin’s revanchist team is using the nationalistic fury whipped up by the Ukraine war to consolidate its power. But Bildt suggests the new, hard-line Russian regime might also be brittle beneath the surface. “The mood from my Russian contacts is one of extreme pessimism and fear,” Bildt told Politico Magazine. “They have no idea where the future leads. They fear that Putin may rule forever or collapse very suddenly because the regime has such weak foundations. From what I am hearing, the military are overjoyed right now. This is because they are receiving what militaries want, which is prestige and vast new transfusions of money. But the oligarchs are frightened and the regional governors are angry. This is because they are the ones losing out on that big fat Moscow check.”
Putin has instilled fear of stepping out of line with talk from his propagandists about the “sixth column.” The regime has long smeared the opposition with textbook accusations of them being Russia’s “fifth column.” But the Orwellian new invention of a “sixth column” refers to those inside the regime opposing expansionism due to their ties to the West. Alexander Dugin, the Kremlin-controlled ideologue now promoted across official airwaves as the champion of this new conservatism, has even called these insiders the main existential enemies of Russia. “The oligarchs with property in London know they are the outdated remnants of a previous era,” said one Kremlin adviser.
Within the establishment there have been sudden sackings of intelligence officials and generals believed to be disloyal. Meanwhile, beyond the Kremlin walls, the security services have moved to finish the job on the Russian opposition. Through repression and infiltration, there is no meaningful opposition activism left. The main opposition leaders have all been forced to flee the country, isolated or placed under house arrest. The protest movement is dead. “We believe most of the people who took to the streets of Moscow back in 2011 have emigrated,” one Russian official familiar with the matter says. “And we believe the rest will soon follow.”
There is growing fear among professionals in Moscow that the regime is contemplating requiring exit visas, a restrictive practice that vanished for most part with the Soviet Union. This appears for the most part to be a rumor spread by the Kremlin to encourage the remaining liberal activists to flee. However, there is a reality here as well: More than four million officials tied to the military and security services are now effectively banned from leaving the country. “They are closing the border slowly,” explains one Russian government adviser.
Even for the billionaires,there is a new fear in the air: No longer can they rely on the certainty of retaining their assets as long as they don’t oppose Putin. The arrest in September of the Russian billionaire Yevgeny Yevtushenkov, who is known for his independence, sent a clear message. “This is no longer a crisis,” says one banker for Kremlin insiders. “What we have now is a new normal. There had been a complete re-evaluation of what Russia can now achieve. We are no longer going to grow like an emerging market. We are going to be living in a country a lot more like Iran than China. They are putting nationalism above the economy.”
Russian oligarchs have been trying to convey their fears to the British government, warning advisers of Prime Minister David Cameron that further sanctions may cause Putin to lash out aggressively against the gentler parts of the Russian elite. Russian diplomats have also tried to convince their European counterparts that within the Kremlin, liberal and conservative factions are clashing and they must do nothing to strengthen the hardliners. But Bildt and others believe that such a clash, if it existed, is already over. “I don’t believe that Putin is being spun in a faction war,” says Bildt, “You must never forget that Putin belongs to the conservative faction. He is essentially a KGB security guy.”
The Putin regime has also done much in recent months to stifle the Russian media. The Kremlin brought national television under its control almost immediately after coming to power. But news sources without a mass audience were long relatively free of Kremlin meddling. The Internet was unfettered and most quality newspapers were only lightly censored. This has now changed dramatically. Russian state television is little more than agitation and propaganda. The hysterical national propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov, who heads the national news agency Rossiya Segodnya, now delivers a weekly broadcast of the government line to the population.
Draconian laws have been passed enabling the regime to arrest anyone for anything said online. The regime has invested in extensive surveillance technologies, including ones that allow it to rewrite foreign websites when seen on Russian computers. Russia is now forcing all servers covering Russian data to be relocated to its territory and then permit the intelligence services full access to them. Many Muscovites expect full censorship of the Internet soon, and they fear Facebook, Skype and Twitter will soon be banned. Meanwhile, major Russian newspapers such as Kommersant have seen their editorial freedom vanish, while others such as Vedomosti or Novaya Gazeta now believe they are under threat of closure due to a new law heavily dramatically curtailing what foreigners may own in the Russian media.
“There had been a serious step up in the propaganda front,” says Bildt. “This metaphor must not be stretched too far but what has happened reminds me of the propaganda TV established by Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia in the 1990s. Serbian propaganda TV would use traumatic historical memories again and again. … Now Russian propaganda TV does the same.”
Many in Brussels believe Putin invaded Ukraine because he feared globalization; the Internet and the rise of the middle class were eroding the foundations of his regime. “Putin found reform too difficult,” says Sikorski. “Putin has taken the shortcut to popularity. He realized that moving towards reform involved cutting through and damaging the interests of too many relevant people who his power depends on. He saw this as much too risky. But in reality his greatest fear is being [the last Soviet leader, Mikhail] Gorbachev. He sees Gorbachev as a fool because he was taken in by the West and then thrown under the bus. And there is some truth in that.”
***
Russia’s internal reordering has also, not surprisingly, reoriented the Kremlin’s view of the world in dramatic ways. There is no hiding the new Cold War-like atmosphere. Nikolai Patrushev, chairman of the Russian Security Council, which oversees Russia’s security forces, made this clear when he said in October the United States is now “pursuing the same objectives they had in the 1980s towards the Soviet Union.”
This line is not lost on Brussels, where officials believe the European Union will continue to do business with Russia, but it will no longer commit to building anything with Moscow. This means that any project to build either a visa-free or a free-trade regime with Russia is now dead for the foreseeable future. This is why Putin’s new-style regime is pushing hard to cozy up with China, in particular with new huge energy deals. According to an adviser to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, Moscow intends to slowly move the finance of state companies and political players away from London, Zurich and Frankfurt toward Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore. “We think we can match what we lose from the West with what China offers,” said the adviser.
European leaders find this fantastical. According to one Cameron adviser, the inner circle of the British government sees Russia’s eastern pivot as delusional. They believe that it will take decades to rebuild an entire oil and gas infrastructure oriented toward Europe and that Chinese banks are in no position to replace Western loans. “The Chinese cannot and will not give them this money,” said the adviser.
And indeed, there has been little by way of new Chinese loans toward Russian companies unable to leverage in the West. As of early September the leading Chinese state banks – the Bank of China, the Chinese Construction Bank and the International and Commercial Bank of China had lending portfolios of only $170 million in Russia. This is nothing compared to $134 billion in foreign debts Russian banks and corporations must repay to mostly American and European banks before the end of 2015.
“What we are hearing from the Chinese is an extremely cynical view of Russia,” says Bildt, “and what the Chinese can do with them. They arrive in Beijing and there is great fanfare but there is very little reality to many of these handshakes. They say we have indeed signed some contracts but this will take a very long time and we don’t even believe much of it will really happen.”
Now that the shock of war in Ukraine has faded, many in Brussels are trying to work out how far back the operation in Crimea was planned. This is why Russian diplomats are working hard to convince European leaders that the war in Ukraine was simply an unfortunate set of events starting with the spontaneous protests in Kyiv earlier this year, which led to the ouster of then-Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, a fickle ally of the Russian President.
The buildup to war actually began as early as 2008, according to Sikorski. He says Russian intentions were becoming transparent by the time of the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest. “This is where [Putin] gave his extraordinary speech saying Ukraine was an artificial country and the greater part of these lands historically belonged to Russia.” At the summit the Kremlin warned it would respond militarily to moves by Ukraine or Georgia to join the NATO alliance: months later Russian forces seized on a provocation from Tbilisi and invaded Georgia.
Ukrainian intelligence points to Russian operatives beginning to move into Crimea from 2012 and possibly even 2010. There have also been reports of Kremlin operatives openly discussing a project to annex the territory beginning in the summer of 2013. Sikorski says Russian intentions toward Crimea first began to alarm him in 2011 and 2012, when Putin began visiting the festivals of Russian nationalist biker gangs in the peninsula. However it was not until the summer of 2013 that alarm bells began to ring inside the Polish Foreign Ministry.
“We learned Russia ran calculations on what provinces would be profitable to grab,” says Sikorski, who claims that Poland became aware the Kremlin had calculated it would be profitable to annex Zaporozhye, Dnepropetrovsk and Odessa regions, while the assessing that the Donbass area currently controlled by Putin’s rebels would not, on its own, not be profitable to incorporate into Russia.
“By that time they were already doing calculations about how to seize Crimea as a way of blackmailing Viktor Yanukovych,” says Sikorski, “I know from my conversations and meeting with Yanukovych that he wanted to get the [European Union-Ukraine] Association Agreement. But in November 2013 something happened, something snapped. Based on our conversations, my sense is that it was something Putin told him in Sochi. I think that Putin had kompromat [blackmail material] on Yanukovych: we now know there was a weekly, biweekly truck taking out the cash [stolen from the Ukrainian budget] in a cash transfer. And I think he told him: ‘Don’t sign the Association Agreement; otherwise we’ll seize Crimea.’ That’s why he cracked.”
Since then, Russia has attempted to involve Poland in the invasion of Ukraine, just as if it were a post-modern re-run of the historic partitions of Poland. “He wanted us to become participants in this partition of Ukraine,” says Sikorski. “Putin wants Poland to commit troops to Ukraine. These were the signals they sent us. … We have known how they think for years. We have known this is what they think for years. This was one of the first things that Putin said to my prime minister, Donald Tusk, [soon to be President of the European Council] when he visited Moscow. He went on to say Ukraine is an artificial country and that Lwow is a Polish city and why don’t we just sort it out together. Luckily Tusk didn’t answer. He knew he was being recorded.”
The Kremlin gambled it was playing with Poland’s own repressed imperial fantasies: Moscow is well aware that among the country’s bestselling novels is a historical fantasy of a Poland that teamed up with Nazi Germany to conquer the Soviet Union. Nor had it gone amiss in Moscow that Sikorski himself has praised the novel, on more than one occasion. This is why the Kremlin sent out feelers to Warsaw with a message from the speaker of the clownish Russian speaker of parliament, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, offering Poland five provinces of Western Ukraine. The belief in Warsaw was this message was a deniable feeler from the Kremlin’s innermost circles. “We made it very, very clear to them—we wanted nothing to do with this,” says Sikorski.
Nobody knows where Putin will stop. But there is fear in Poland and the Baltic states that sooner or later he will try and conquer the rest of what he claims of what he calls “Novorossiya,” or New Russia: a huge territory stretching from Donetsk all the way to the borders of Moldova. “What I fear,” says Sikorski, “is that the Russians simply cannot accept the existence of Ukraine as a nation. They cannot admit that a separate nation exists. And if they want to go head to head against Ukrainian nationalism, well, then be my guest. Then Russia will learn that Ukraine is really a nation and face a situation of 20 years of partisan war. The Russians could grab the entire territory of Novorossiya easily, but they will have a rump Ukraine arming her, supplying her with weapons, seen by the whole world as the real Ukraine, with a sizable amount of the population supporting the real Ukraine. They could win the battle. But to hold down this enormous territory would require a force of 200,000 to 300,000 troops and a 10-year commitment. And they could never sustain it without permanent, national mobilization.”
Europe’s leaders think this is why the Kremlin will now freeze the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. But they are not certain. Many speculate Putin will try to carve out a land bridge to Crimea, others that he will cut off Ukrainian gas this winter. Whatever happens, it’s clear Europe’s foreign policy machine has been exposed as clueless. The EU and its member states have more than 57,000 diplomats around the world, but they failed to predict either the war in Ukraine or the Arab Spring. Bildt laments: “Most of the staff in the EU embassies can’t even speak the local language.”
The hawkish Bildt and Sikorski see Russia as a real threat to other European states, but most European leaders disagree. As one European foreign minister from a small eastern country explained the discord: “There are two kinds of threat assessments in the EU right now. There are those of us who see the only real threat to our statehood coming from Germany if the euro and the EU collapse, and then everything else, ISIS, Ukraine and all that, as being threats that only seem real on TV; and then there are those of us like the Poles, and the Baltic states, who really do believe that Russia imminently menaces their statehood.”
Still, Bildt and Sikorski are taken very seriously in Brussels: they have the ear of Europe’s leaders on all matters concerning Russia. Both see more Kremlin-instigated war in Europe through the decades ahead. “I have talked to NATO generals,” says Sikorski. “And they see what I see: that he is capable of pushing us to the limit. Of pushing us to the limits before we crack. I believe that Putin has us completely sussed. He thinks he’s facing a bunch of degenerate weaklings. And he thinks we wouldn’t go to war to defend the Baltics. You know, maybe he’s right.”
In the end, however, the threat from Russia could stem as much from its instability as its ambitions. Putin appears too entrenched to be toppled without bloodshed or a coup. European diplomats note soberly they believe sanctions cannot crack the regime: If they succeed, they will only make it more reticent to intervene abroad, at the cost of becoming much more repressive at home. This means the real risk is that Putin will attempt to repeat his success in Crimea every time his popularity begins to flag—and there might be an even greater risk of this now that the price of oil is falling, and with it Russia’s prosperity.
“Should it go decisively below $80 a barrel and stay there for two years he’s in trouble,” warns Sikorski. “But what’s bad for him is not necessarily good for us. He’s a gambler. And he’s got a lowered sense of danger. He’ll take these huge gambles because the real danger for Putin is his own life. He can’t let go. He can’t leave the Kremlin. Once you’ve spilt blood, once you’ve had apartment bombings, once you’ve sent death squads abroad, once you’ve had Georgia, Ukraine, all these mothers, and all the bodies of soldiers being disposed of from secret wars… You can’t just let go.” | {
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Bill Clinton eulogizes longtime friend John Dingell as 'stand-up guy' The former president spoke of Dingell's legacy and his "tough love" way.
Former President Bill Clinton was 13 years old, he said, when a young congressman named John Dingell first became his idol.
Dingell, Democrat of Michigan and the longest-serving member of Congress who died last week at 92, took office when he was just 29, in 1955 -- and on the day Clinton took notice of him, he was taking a stand against another member of Congress who opposed integrating schools in the South.
"For the younger people here who may think of John Dingell as yesterday's man -- he was not afraid, as a young man, to risk the ire of people who might wreck his effectiveness," Clinton said during his eulogy for Dingell on Thursday at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in the Georgetown section of Washington, where members of official Washington had gathered to celebrate his life.
Dingell was an "old-fashioned man who did things in an old-fashioned way that we should adapt for new times," Clinton said of his longtime friend.
Clinton, as the nation's 42nd president, would come to know Dingell in the halls of Congress, and recalled memories from throughout their political careers, including campaigning for Dingell "in one of the rare examples when it looked like he might get less than 100 percent of the vote."
Dingell had a reputation for holding his ground, Clinton said to the congregation filled with Washington power players, including Dingell's wife, Rep. Debbie Dingell, who sat next to Clinton's wife, former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
"Let’s be honest, this is the only time in our entire lives in public service where we were in the same room with John Dingell and got the last word," Clinton said to loud laughter as he began his remembrance.
In the last years of his life, Dingell became famous for his sparky commentary on Twitter. Clinton urged those listening to take note of Dingell's words and read through some of his "Greatest Twitter hits," which he called "Zen mastery."
"Few words, great wisdom. If you don't pay attention you'll miss it," he said. | {
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When it came to replacing Eric Slick, Belew - who started his career as a drummer - found Tobias Wolff, a player of equal structure and dynamism. "I gravitate to cats who have good taste and know as much what to play as what not to play," Belew says. He even likes to think that he has done for the Slicks what Zappa did for him when he took the young Kentuckian on the road: "I like to think that touring with me helped make them world-class players. They are real finds." | {
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Top of the 6th, Rangers 3, Mets 3, Umpires 2 (allocated on this day to the Mets).
That's not heat nor humidity in the air. That's tension. Or perhaps the desire of the Dutch Oven.
Angry words have been exchanged like a fake number given out by a reluctant woman at the last second from a wayward matchbook.
And the 2-2 pitch...
Whoo! Who's your Mr. Met now, baby?!
Nope.
But FOX TRAX?
Nope.
...
(bad words) YOU'RE BAD AT YOUR JOB! (bad words)
Whoever said that, YOU. ARE. OUTTA HERE!
Me?
You throwing Mike Maddux out of this game, blue?
Uh...
YOU. ARE. OUTTA HERE, ALSO!
Hmm...
Alright then...
Jackie! Better wake up, you're the skipper now.
Huh?
Oh yeah, right.
So who's it gonna be?
What's that?
I tossed one of you. Who's it gonna be?
You tossed Wash.
...
Hang on.
Terry, I tossed one of their guys. Who do you want?
Pardon?
Pick a guy.
You're letting me pick which member of the opposing team you will eject from this game?
That's right.
.......................................
/Baseball
Epilogue: | {
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[Click for a PDF of the full chart]
Human action, whether by individuals, groups, or governments, is driven by ideas—most substantially by the ideas people accept as morally correct.
Why did Rosa Parks refuse to give up her bus seat to a white passenger?
Why did Edward Snowden release classified NSA documents to the media?
Why did Muslims hijack passenger jets and fly them into buildings full of Americans?
Why did Congress pass ObamaCare into law?
The broad answer to such questions is that the individuals, groups, or governments did what they did because they regarded the actions as morally right.
People act (for the most part) on their moral convictions, whether explicit or implicit, pure or mixed; thus, if we want to understand why individuals, groups, and governments do what they do, we need to understand the key elements of the moral codes that motivate them. Toward that end, I’ve created a chart titled “Moral Theories at a Parallel Glance.”
The chart presents key aspects of four general moral codes at play in the world today: “supernatural” subjectivism (“God”-based, faith-based morality), social subjectivism (consensus-based morality), personal subjectivism (whim-based morality), and rational egoism (life-based, reason-based morality).
The purpose of the chart is not to present the arguments for and against these theories (that would require a book); rather, the purpose is to place the key principles of each theory in parallel on a single page, so that they can be easily compared and contrasted. The principles included for each are:
the standard of truth and moral value (e.g., God’s will),
the fundamental moral values (things people should revere, uphold, or pursue),
the fundamental virtues (actions people should take),
the code’s position on human sacrifice,
its position on the use of physical force against people,
its position on rights, and
its implied social system.
Such a highly delimited chart is obviously no substitute for a deep and broad understanding of these issues. But it can be helpful in making sense of the actions taken by individuals, groups, and governments. And, of course, whereas the principles of these theories are here presented in pure, unmixed form, it is not only possible but also quite common for people to embrace a mixture of these ideas. This fact, however, simply highlights the value of isolating the theories by reference to their essentials, as one cannot understand mixed ideas unless one first understands the elements of the mixture.
I hope you find the chart useful. If you do, consider sharing it with your friends. The conversations it could inspire are precisely the kinds of conversations people need to engage in if we are to achieve a culture of reason and freedom.
Related:
Image: Wikimedia Commons | {
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Jets first-round pick Darron Lee had plenty of speed and athleticism, but it did not always translate to success on the field.
Lee graded out as the worst linebacker in the class of 2016 according to Pro Football Focus, despite being selected 20th overall in 2016’s draft.
The biggest shortcoming for the former Ohio State Buckeye was his pass coverage, which the Jets thought would be a strength heading into the season. When targeting Lee in coverage, opposing quarterbacks had a rating of 132.9. In fact, the only measurable that Lee didn’t struggle in was discipline. He committed just two penalties in 593 snaps this season.
The only first-round pick to perform worse than Lee this season was Seattle OG Germain Ifedi, who was picked 31st overall.
Heading into his sophomore season, the Jets need to find a better way to use Lee. He was consistently overmatched by opposing tight ends in coverage.
At 6-foot-1 and 220 pounds, he is undersized for an inside linebacker in Todd Bowles’ 3-4 base defense. He was regarded as one of the best blitzers in the 2016 draft class, yet he rarely did that for the Jets.
Either way, Bowles needs to find a way to get more out of the team’s 2016 first-round pick. | {
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"This is an issue," said Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "We haven't seen the complicity of the Iraqi government to encourage this, but we want to see a stronger effort to discourage it [...]. As a general principle, the Shia militias as currently constituted — and there are some exceptions to this — are not interested in the Iraqi security blueprint and are counterproductive to the security of the areas that we've taken back or want to take back from [IS]."
All those efforts now risk running into a congressional buzz saw. Current and pending defense authorization legislation prohibits US military assistance for Iraq if it risks falling into the hands of Iran-backed groups, and lawmakers are keeping a close eye on Baghdad's next move.
The militias have also begun to make diplomatic overtures in a bid to attain international legitimacy. Several militia leaders met with European, Canadian and Australian diplomats in Beirut early last month, Al-Monitor reported at the time, hoping to create a back channel with Washington.
Iran-backed majority-Shiite militias known as the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) have been gaining influence as they have helped the Iraqi army kick the Islamic State (IS) out of Anbar province. Iraq's National Security Council recently blessed their participation in the upcoming battle to retake the IS stronghold of Mosul , while Baghdad announced at the end of July plans to incorporate the militias as an "independent" military formation "affiliated" with the Iraqi armed forces.
(Click here to view a pdf version of this chart)
The resurgence of the militias has concerned US policymakers since June 2014, when Iraqi Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a call to arms to his followers as IS rampaged through the country. Since then, Iraq has seen a proliferation of loosely affiliated PMU, most of them directed by or otherwise supported by Tehran, including some reconstituted militias that battled US forces in the early years of the invasion.
One of the main militias, the Hezbollah Brigades (Kataib Hizballah), was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the State Department in 2009. Its leader, Jamal al-Ibrahimi — aka Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis — was designated as a threat to Iraqi peace and stability by the Treasury Department that same year and is now the deputy chairman of all PMU operations.
In December 2014, Congress for the first time authorized through the end of 2016 a $1.6 billion “train and equip” fund requested by the Barack Obama administration for “military and other security services" for Iraq. Lawmakers, however, added the caveat that aid recipients be vetted for links to “groups associated with the government of Iran.” The Department of Defense could waive aid restrictions but had to inform Congress.
Last year, Congress reauthorized the program but added a prohibition on aid to the government of Iraq unless Baghdad “has taken such actions as may be reasonably necessary to safeguard” such assistance falling into the hands of organizations “under the command and control of, or associated with” Tehran. That law also requires that the Pentagon provide quarterly reports on the “forces or elements of forces” prohibited from receiving US aid.
Now lawmakers are debating whether to go one step further.
The Senate version of this year’s annual Defense bill merely extends last year’s authorization through the end of 2019. The House, however, passed a bill requiring that the Pentagon provide $50 million to Kurdish peshmerga and Sunni tribal forces unless Baghdad ends its “support for Shia militias under the command and control of, or associated with” Tehran and acts to stop “abuses of elements of the Iraqi population by such militias.”
The House bill gives voice to rising concerns among lawmakers that the Shiite militias not only strengthen Iran's hand in Iraq but make it more difficult to defeat IS because they often victimize Sunnis. Speaking at the nonprofit Stimson Center in April, House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., said he had recently met with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi in Baghdad and urged him to rein in the PMU.
"The Sunni tribal leaders that we met with want to take their own villages back," said Royce. "Their people want to go back to their villages. They don't want to hand it over to some Shiite militia headed up by a Quds Force leader like [Qasem] Soleimani.”
Further complicating matters, a number of the militias are represented in parliament. A PMU leader at last month's Beirut meeting told Al-Monitor that the PMU have launched preparations to run in next year's parliamentary elections. The source made it clear that their model is Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which holds considerable political and economic sway.
"We will be a military force that is part of the Iraqi state, but not part of the Iraqi army," the PMU leader said. "This is due to many reasons that we explained to them, namely the corruption spread within the Iraqi government institutions."
The administration has also sent mixed messages as it has found itself fighting alongside the militias.
In its April 2015 update to its Travel Warning for Iraq, the State Department for the first time warned that “several anti-US sectarian militia groups, such as the Shia KH [Hezbollah Brigades] and Asaib Ahl al-Haq (AAH) [League of the Righteous] are operating throughout Iraq and may present a threat to US citizens.” By September 2015, however, those warnings had been replaced with a generic warning that “anti-US sectarian militias may threaten US citizens and Western companies throughout Iraq.” The change coincided with reports that US forces and Iran-backed militias were sharing a base in Anbar.
At a briefing in March this year, State Department spokesman John Kirby rebutted rumors that the administration had asked Abadi to disband the militias. He went on to praise them for joining in the fight against IS.
"This idea that every Shia militia, or Popular Mobilization Force that is another way they’re talked about, is controlled by Tehran and is therefore nefarious in nature is just false," Kirby insisted. "In fact, the vast majority of them have no connections to Tehran or to the IRGC."
The agency’s 2015 terror report, released in early June, by contrast faulted Baghdad for allowing Ibrahimi's group to join the fight. The report said Iran-backed groups such as KH "exacerbated sectarian tensions in Iraq" and "contributed to human rights abuses against primarily Sunni civilians."
"The inclusion of KH, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, in the Popular Mobilization Forces enlisted by the Iraqi government in the effort against [IS], threatens to undermine counterterrorism objectives,” the report concluded.
Cardin said he would welcome a move by Abadi to incorporate the PMU under the military's control. But there are exceptions.
"I think there are some militias that he will not be able to control," Cardin said. "Ultimately you have to disband them or weed them out. It's not in the central government's interest to have entities that are not really loyal to [its] security blueprint."
Iran appears to have others plans in mind.
Late last month, a leader in Iran's IRGC announced the creation of a United Shia Liberation Army to fight in Arab countries, notably Yemen, Syria and Iraq. Lawrence Haas, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, said the announcement was "basically declaring war on your Arab neighbors." He questioned what the White House can do about it after removing most US troops from the country.
"I think Iran and Iranian influence in Iraq and other nations in the region is going to be pretty close to the top of the agenda for US foreign policy," Haas told Al-Monitor. “We don’t have much leverage, so I don’t have high hopes that we can reverse this.” | {
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Autoridades buscan a persona que se alega cayó del crucero Oasis of the Seas a la bahía de San Juan. #busqueda #rescate #oasisofthesea Posted by Maribel Meléndez Fontán on Wednesday, January 22, 2020
BREAKING: An unidentified person has fallen off the Oasis of the Seas cruise ship, which is docked tonight in San Juan. Authorities are currently attempting to locate the individual. https://t.co/vIG9oD5wdf — The Puerto Rico Monitor (@ThePRMonitor) January 23, 2020
The ship was chartered for a week long Atlantis cruise from Fort Lauderdale. Eight years ago, a passenger went overboard from the Allure of the Seas during an Atlantis cruise.
The last time that a passenger went overboard from the Oasis of the Seas was nearly four years ago when a guest fell from the Royal Caribbean ship which was sailing in the Caribbean. There was a widely circulated video of the man going overboard.
Four years ago, another cruise passenger from this cruise ship fell overboard as the ship sailed to Cozumel. The Disney Magic, sailing the same route, then rescued the passenger. Royal Caribbean had served the young man over 20 alcoholic drinks in the hours prior to the guest going into the water.
Update from the Oasis of the Seas: we’re all mustering on paper to see if we can find the missing person pic.twitter.com/pKvnE99mGX — Eric A. Patton (@eapatton_tn) January 23, 2020
According to cruise expert Dr. Ross Klein, there have been 361 people who have gone overboard from cruise ships since 2000.
Have a comment or question? Please leave one below or join the discussion on our Facebook page.
Update: Divers reportedly recovered the body of a “white male” according to a passenger’s post on Twitter:
BREAKING: Divers just recovered the body of a white male who fell from the 10th story deck of @RoyalCarribean's Oasis of the Seas' which is docked in San Juan, Puerto Rico, right now. The ship is hosting an Atlantis cruise which caters to the LGBTQ+ community. pic.twitter.com/4wbZh9lKEX — David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) January 23, 2020
January 23, 2020 Update: News reports state that the man, whose name has not been released, was 46 years old and from Naples, Florida. CBS News reports that he apparently jumped overboard.
Photo and video credit: Maribel Meléndez Fontán (Facebook); Eric Patton (Twitter); David Begnaud (Twitter). | {
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india
Updated: Dec 22, 2015 16:13 IST
Calling a Dalit person publicly by the name of his or her caste, stopping a Dalit or a tribal person from entering a temple or even forcing them to vote in favour of a particular candidate will soon land the perpetrator behind bars.
The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Amendment Bill, 2014 became one of the few pieces of legislation to buck the deadlock in Parliament when the Rajya Sabha passed it on Monday.
The bill, earlier passed by the Lok Sabha, is touted as a major step to curb crime against Dalits and tribals in a country where atrocities against these the vulnerable sections frequently hit the headlines.
Recently, the Uttar Pradesh government ordered a CBI probe into the murder of two Dalit sisters in Badaun. Last month, a video clip went viral showing how a Dalit family was stripped and beaten by villagers in front of the UP police.
The bill identifies a wide list of illegal activities that would be no longer permissible, especially against Dalits and tribals, toughens the penal provisions , and provides for the setting up of special courts to fast-track cases under the proposed law.
It also makes wrongfully occupying land belonging to SCs/STs or garlanding them with footwear strictly punishable. SCs and STs can’t be compelled to dispose or carry human or animal carcasses or do manual scavenging either.
The proposed amendments to the law come at a time when there is a rise in crimes against Dalits. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) statistics, recorded cases of crimes committed against Dalits are have spiked since 2009. But the existing law to prevent atrocities against SC/STs had been of limited help with 84.1% of cases under the act pending till two years ago.
The proposed law tries to plug these loopholes. The new bill says, “the court shall presume that the accused was aware of the caste or tribal identity of the victim if the accused had personal knowledge of the victim or his family,” said a note on the bill prepared by PRS Legislative Research.
The bill also aims to provide more protection to the SC/ST women. Intentionally touching an SC or ST woman, dedicating them as a devadasi and using words, acts or gestures of a sexual nature are proposed to be punishable.
The UPA government too, had brought a similar law through an ordinance in March 2014, weeks before the Lok Sabha polls kick started. But, the UPA lost and the ordinance lapsed.
The NDA’s law is almost the same version as of the UPA, was introduced in parliament by social justice and empowerment minister Thaawar Chand Gehlot on July 16, 2014.
While the bill has been widely welcomed by all parties, observers also feel there should be enough safeguards to prevent misuse of the stringent law. | {
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Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who has fought against legalizing gay marriage, told CNN on Friday that the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to make same-sex marriage legal nationwide was worse than the Court's 19th century decision to uphold racial segregation.
"I believe it's worse because it affects our entire system of morality and family values," Moore told CNN.
Moore said in the CNN interview that same-sex marriage does not exist in the U.S. Constitution and U.S. Supreme Court justices "presumed" to find one.
Moore also said Friday that the justices disregarded legal precedent and were ruling by their feelings in the case, according to a story in The Gadsden Times.
According to the Times story Moore predicted "a religious battle that is just beginning" but stopped short of calling for direct resistance to the decision.
The New York Times quoted Moore as saying he plans to continue pressing for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.
Efforts by AL.com to reach Moore for comment Friday were unsuccessful.
Southern Poverty Law Center President Richard Cohen, whose group has fought in court for gay marriage rights in Alabama, believes Moore also laid the ground work Friday for defying the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on gay marriage.
Cohen cited Moore's dissent in an Alabama Supreme Court opinion issued a few hours after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its gay marriage decision.
The dissent was in the case of American Bankers Insurance Company of Florida vs. Gladys Tellis. In that case Tellis and others had sued the insurance company regarding coverage. A trial court judge denied the insurance company's request to send the matter to arbitration. The insurance company appealed that ruling to the Alabama Supreme Court, which today reversed the lower court's ruling.
Cohen stated that Moore in the dissent "made the unprecedented claim that he was not bound by decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court that conflict with his view of the U.S. Constitution."
In his dissent Moore writes "the Supreme Court's interpretation of a federal statute does not preclude all lower courts from considering constitutional questions the Supreme Court has never considered."
Moore went on to state: "If the Supreme Court's precedent interpreting a federal statute conflicts with the United States Constitution itself, then our duty is not to predict the next bend in the crooked path by asking, 'What would the Supreme Court do?' Moore writes. "Instead, our duty, under oath, is to ask, 'What does the Constitution say?'
"Here, that Constitution says the policyholders have a right to a jury trial. Furthermore, one may give up such an invaluable right, even in a case where an injury has already occurred and a cause of action exists, only when the waiver of that right is knowing, willing, and voluntary, and in this case it was not," Moore writes.
Cohen also stated that Moore's "alter ego -- the Foundation for Moral Law, the private organization run by his wife and for which he serves as president emeritus -- announced that 'the battle for traditional marriage will continue despite the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court.'"
According to the Foundation, the U.S. Supreme Court has "no legal authority to redefine marriage."
"Justice Moore is fundamentally wrong," Cohen stated." The U.S. Constitution is the 'supreme law of the land,' and U.S. Supreme Court decisions interpreting the Constitution are binding on all state and federal courts. Justice Moore's claim that he is not bound by decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court with which he disagrees is an invitation to anarchy. His statements reflect, once again, that he is not fit for the office that he holds."
Moore has fought against efforts to allow gay marriage in Alabama. He has made public statements and issued a statement to Alabama probate judges advising them not to issue licenses following a federal judge's ruling declaring Alabama's ban on gay marriage unconstitutional.
Updated at 8:55 p.m. June 26, 2015 with New York Times comment from Moore | {
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Never wasting an opportunity to attack President Trump, on Wednesday, MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell and her guests did so as they sat alongside the military cemetery in Normandy, France, the final resting place of those who died in the 1944 allied D-Day invasion. Reporting from the site ahead of Thursday’s memorial service marking the 75th anniversary of the brutal battle, the panel of journalists denounced Trump for supposedly trying to “challenge the post-World War II order.”
The discussion began with Daily Beast World News Editor Christopher Dickey noting that the brave soldiers who died there were fighting for “American values” and “fighting to stop tyranny, to spread democracy, to defeat Hitler. To create a better world at the end of the day.” However, he then took that meaningful tribute and made it about politics: “But what you wonder now is whether, in the world we live in today, those values remain a major part of American policy.”
Mitchell seized on his remark, fretting: “And for all the pomp and circumstance that the President reveled in, in London, Bill, we are as far apart from our British allies and our French allies....there are real divisions with the President, who is really the first president in 70 years to challenge the post-World War II order.”
NBC News chief global correspondent Bill Neely agreed and melodramatically proclaimed that all of the D-Day events were designed to rein in Trump:
And I think if I have one take away from the state visit to the UK, which is not over, it was the desperate, almost desperate British or European attempt to bind President Trump, to almost lasso him into those ties that bind. And there was at the end of it a D-Day proclamation in which they all agreed on the common values, democracy, the rule of law. The Europeans trying to drag President Trump back into NATO. You heard it from the Queen on the very first night, at the banquet, stressing although times have changed, the institutions that were established after World War II have done their job. And she didn’t mention NATO or the UN by name, but that’s what she meant. And interesting here tomorrow, you know, this is a sacred place, but it’s also a place of common purpose and of moral certainty. And these are times of moral uncertainties and a time when common purpose is hard to find. And I think one of the themes again here tomorrow will be to bind President Trump into that common purpose once again.
Dickey jumped in to rant: “I think it’s very difficult with Trump, though, because he is an egomaniac....Everything has to be his victory. These people didn’t die for Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill. They died...to save western civilization.”
The media despise Trump so much that they even manage to use the most solemn occasions to trash him.
Here is a transcript of the June 5 segment: | {
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Figure 1. Left. A quantum emitter interacting with a metallic nanostructure in the vacuum. Right. A quantum emitter interacting with a microcavity-engineered metallic nanostructure. Credit: Peking University
Achieving strong light-matter interaction at the quantum level has always been a central task in quantum physics since the emergence of quantum information and quantum control. However, the scale mismatch between the quantum emitters (nanometers) and photons (micrometers) makes the task challenging. Metallic nanostructures resolve the mismatch by squeezing the light into nanoscale volume, but their severe dissipations make quantum controls unlikely. Now, a group led by Xiao Yun-Feng at Peking University (China) has theoretically demonstrated that the strong light-matter interaction at quantum level can be achieved using microcavity-engineered metallic nanostructures. This result has been published in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.
Strong coupling is fundamental to implementing quantum gates in quantum computers and also crucial to increasing the signal-to-noise ratio in sensing applications. To realize strong coupling, the coherent interaction strength should exceed the system dissipation rates. Although the metallic nanostructures provide high interaction rate, the dissipations intrinsic to metals are usually even stronger. As a result, strong coupling in metallic nanostructures has only been realized in extreme experimental conditions.
In this work, the researchers report that the dissipation can be suppressed by engineering the electromagnetic environment of metallic nanostructures. An optical microcavity provides a non-trivial electromagnetic environment which substantially broadens the radiative output channel of the metallic nanostructures, guiding the energy out from the dissipative region and thus suppressing the dissipations. With such an interface, energy and information can be guided out from the single quantum emitter at both high speed and high efficiency.
"Theoretical model shows that microcavities-engineered metallic structures can boost the radiation efficiency of a quantum emitter by 40 times and the radiation output rate by 50 times, compared to metallic nanostructures in the vacuum", said Peng Pai, who was an undergraduate at Peking University and now is a Ph.D. student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Importantly, reversible energy exchange between the photon and the quantum emitter at THz rate can be achieved, manifesting the strong light-matter interaction at the quantum level.
"Our approach to reducing the dissipations is not restricted by the scale, shape, and material of the metallic nanostructures," said Professor Xiao. "In combination with previous approaches, it is promising to build the state-of-the-art light-matter interface at nanoscale using microcavity-engineered metallic nanostructures, providing a new platform for the study of quantum plasmonics, quantum information processing, precise sensing and advanced spectroscopy."
Explore further Quantum systems correct themselves
More information: Pai Peng et al. Enhancing Coherent Light-Matter Interactions through Microcavity-Engineered Plasmonic Resonances, Physical Review Letters (2017). Journal information: Physical Review Letters Pai Peng et al. Enhancing Coherent Light-Matter Interactions through Microcavity-Engineered Plasmonic Resonances,(2017). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.233901 | {
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Buried under the kudzu of information in the 2013 budget, we spotted an interesting little paragraph. Point 2.148, to be precise. And it pertains to Vehicle Excise Duty, or what you may prefer to call road rent.
Just like cars built before 1973, from April 1 2014 a vehicle manufactured before 1 January 1974 will be exempt from paying VED. That means, come 2014, you don’t have to pay road tax on cars that were built through ‘73, so there’s a new wave of classics that avoid the unfortunate task of handing over up to £1065 in annual taxes.
Ever on hand to offer real-world consumer advice, TopGear.com’s clumped the best cars launched in 1973 together in this handy gallery. Go forth and buy one. But not till 2014. And don’t come crying to us when it breaks down.
Which one would you have? | {
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Article content continued
Exceptionally bad tunnel vision accounts for the suggestion by the chairman of the working group and the president of the College that doctors opposed to abortion can avoid compromising their beliefs by sending patients with unwanted pregnancies to abortion clinics.
But there is yet no satisfactory explanation for the policy’s central message: that ethical medical practice requires physicians to do what they believe to be unethical. Even the worst imaginable case of tunnel vision cannot account for that kind of incoherent authoritarianism.
The working group failed to provide any evidence that the suppression of fundamental freedoms entailed by professional obligations and human rights was justified, and that no less restrictive means were available to achieve the legitimate objectives of the College. Despite this — and without seriously considering any of the foregoing questions — College Council approved the policy. If this is not the best possible example of blind faith by institutional decision makers, it will do until a better one comes along.
Having failed to consider these questions before approving Professional Obligations and Human Rights, it appears that College Council will soon have the opportunity to consider them again. Indeed, the Council may be compelled to answer them — not in the closely controlled and congenial environment of its own offices, but in open court during a lawsuit launched by the Christian Medical Dental Society. That will likely be the beginning of a long trek to the Supreme Court of Canada, one that could have been avoided had College Council properly discharged its responsibilities.
Certainly, the College is obliged “to protect and serve the public interest.” But the public interest is served by civility, restraint, tolerance, accommodation of divergent views and respect for fundamental freedoms. That requires broad-mindedness and evidence-based decision-making, not tunnel vision and blind faith
National Post
Sean Murphy is administrator of the Protection of Conscience Project. | {
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When I first developed myalgic encephalomyelitis in 1994, I had no idea that I would be just as sick 25 years later, or that there would still be limited scientific understanding of the disease and no effective treatments. Nor did I imagine that my career as a lawyer was over, and that I would instead become an advocate for myself and others with ME (sometimes misleadingly called chronic fatigue syndrome, and referred to as ME/CFS by U.S. federal agencies).
An estimated 1 million Americans with this condition have been living for decades in the crisis mode of disability and lack of treatment. We have repeatedly pressed the National Institutes of Health to address the problem by increasing research funding; one ME/CFS organization even met with NIH Director Francis Collins in December 2018 to make that point. The response from the NIH is always the same: Researchers should submit more high-quality grant applications.
On the surface, this sounds reasonable. From documents a colleague and I obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, I calculated that between 2011 and 2016 the NIH funded 25 percent of ME/CFS grant applications, a higher acceptance rate than the average for all grants. It seems obvious, then, that more applications would yield more funding.
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But it’s not that simple: Despite growing interest in ME/CFS, NIH grant applications to study the disease have dwindled since 2015.
Why? The NIH has erected an obstacle course for those wanting to do research on this disease. I see at least five obstacles that scientists must navigate on the path to funding.
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Obstacle 1. In order to have a grant even considered for funding, a researcher must demonstrate that the proposed research is significant, that she has the capability to carry it out, and that it is based on solid science. Good ideas and “what if” proposals are not enough, and the NIH generally doesn’t fund proposals that don’t include preliminary data, such as blood test or brain imaging results from pilot studies. Yet even well-established ME/CFS researchers have difficulty providing preliminary data because the field has been stunted for decades by stigma and the false narrative that the disease is caused by deconditioning and depression. ME/CFS researchers need funding to conduct exploratory studies and generate hypotheses for further research, but NIH won’t fund those kinds of projects.
Obstacle 2. NIH funding for ME/CFS research has traditionally been low. Between 2008 and 2016, its total investment in this area averaged $5.1 million per year. 2017 represented the high-water mark — in that year the NIH issued two Requests for Applications for three collaborative research centers and a data management center, in addition to regular grant funding. Unlike regular grant applications, Requests for Applications come with funding already set aside. Researchers responded eagerly: At least 10 groups submitted applications and the NIH distributed almost $14 million for ME/CFS research.
Funding in 2018, however, dropped 17 percent from the 2017 high, and the NIH has clearly indicated that it has no intention of issuing another Request for Applications for ME/CFS research any time soon.
The situation is made worse because the NIH has no current general invitation for ME/CFS research proposals, called Program Announcements, as it does for diseases like hepatitis B or Alzheimer’s disease. These invitations are important because they communicate to the scientific community that there is interest in these proposals, and therefore potential for funding, even though none is set aside. The NIH’s last Program Announcement for ME/CFS research was issued in 2012 and it expired in 2015.
Obstacle 3. The NIH is made up of 27 institutes that tend to take responsibility for specific diseases: heart disease and stroke by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute; Alzheimer’s disease by the National Institute on Aging; and the like. No single institute within the NIH is responsible for ME/CFS research. That opens very wide cracks for applications to fall through. None of the institutes include ME/CFS in their own strategic plans or make it a priority for funding. Researchers are left on their own to find NIH program officers among the different institutes with an interest in the disease.
Obstacle 4. The peer-review process presents unique hurdles for ME/CFS applications. The NIH convenes a new ME/CFS Special Emphasis Panel three times a year for which it must recruit reviewers based on the expertise needed for each meeting, determined by the topics of the applications. ME/CFS applications can encompass immunology, neurology, imaging, bioinformatics, epidemiology, and many other fields. The downside is that only some of the reviewers have expertise in ME/CFS. With data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act request, I examined the makeup of these panels since 2000. Between 2000 and 2010, only 15 percent of the panelists were ME/CFS experts. Although the situation improved between 2011 and 2017, with panels including an average of 63 percent ME/CFS experts, it dropped back to 37 percent in 2018.
Scientists from related fields can certainly apply their own areas of expertise to ME/CFS. Yet they lack knowledge that is essential for evaluating these grant applications. They’re unlikely to understand, for example, that multiple case definitions, involving different symptoms, have been used over the years. An independent panel even urged the NIH to abandon one of those case definitions, but that information has not circulated widely.
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The expectations of non-ME/CFS experts regarding study design and data quality may be inappropriate given the state of the field. A cancer or heart disease researcher, for example, may be used to seeing grant applications with data from large multicenter studies, but those kinds of studies have not been possible in ME/CFS.
Even worse, some non-ME/CFS expert reviewers have demonstrated outright bias against the disease. ME/CFS researcher Ian Lipkin said that happened with one of his grant applications in 2014: “[O]ne of the people who critiqued my work said, in fact, that this is a psychosomatic illness.” Lipkin, who directs the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, receives millions of dollars from the NIH for his non-ME/CFS research. If a prejudicial reviewer can tank one of his applications, what hope do other researchers have of fair reviews?
Obstacle 5. If an ME/CFS grant application manages to survive peer review, it must then compete against all the other applications submitted to the particular institute’s council for decision. These councils do not have ME/CFS experts on them, and ME/CFS is not a named priority for any institute. That means an infection-related ME/CFS study submitted to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases might be fabulous compared to other ME/CFS applications scored by the Special Emphasis Panel, but it might come up short when compared to hepatitis or influenza proposals that have larger sample sizes or more preliminary data.
Given these hurdles, it’s hardly surprising that researchers hesitate to submit ME/CFS grant applications to the NIH, or perhaps even choose to move to entirely different fields. Those who do apply must navigate this unique set of hurdles, created in part by NIH’s past actions. Its pronouncements that the only solution is more grant applications is unrealistic and, given the immense suffering of patients over decades of their lives, cruel.
The NIH needs to clear these obstacles. While there is no single solution for its broken response to ME, there are many actions it can take that would lower these barriers and encourage more applications for funding ME/CFS research. Difficult problems require complicated solutions, not unrealistic pronouncements.
Jennifer Spotila is an independent advocate for ME/CFS. She writes about the disease at Occupy M.E., where a longer version of this article appeared. She once collaborated on a grant submitted to the NIH in response to one of the Requests for Applications mentioned in the article; the grant was not funded. | {
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The calls from Republicans for Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) to step down as head of the House Intelligence Committee have been loud — in the days following the release of the four-page Mueller report summary. On Thursday, the call was made right to the Congressman’s face in an explosive clash.
At the outset of a House intel hearing on Thursday morning, Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX) called for Schiff to step down — a call which he said was supported by all nine Republican members of the committee.
“Your actions, both past, and present are incompatible with your duty of the chairman of this committee — which alone, in the House of Representatives — has the obligation and authority to provide effective oversight of the U.S. Intelligence community,” Conaway said. “As such we have no faith in your ability to discharge your duties in a manner consistent with your Constitutional responsibility and urge your immediate resignation as chairman of the committee. Mr. Chairman, this letter is signed by all nine members of the Republican side of the committee, and I ask unanimous consent that it be entered into the record at today’s hearing.”
Schiff responded immediately after, and the clash exploded. We will have the video of Schiff’s response posted momentarily.
Watch above, via Fox News.
Have a tip we should know? [email protected] | {
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Purchase on Amazon
Now’s days any show on AMC that last beyond 1 season without getting cancelled is a feat in itself. The fact Into the Badlands is well into season 3 speaks volumes. So why is it when people ask what I’m watching and I say Into the Badlands, they’ve never heard of it?
So, what’s it about? well, the best way I can describe it is, think Enter the Dragon meets Mad Max. In a post-apocalyptic world, 7 feuding barons now control everything. Each Baron has their designated areas which they rule over in their fortresses. Some Barons want to get along and others want to watch everything burn. Each Baron has their own kind of new age samurai known as clippers. They are loyal, ready to kill or die for their baron at any moment. Each baron’s clipper force will have their own fighting style and distinct uniform. The majority of technology is gone, weapons, computers, there are a few vehicles still operational. After making a kill the clipper with get a tally tattooed on their body.
The baron’s absolute best and top clipper is called a regent. Enter the baron Quinn (played by Marton Csokas) and his regent and our main protagonist Sunny (played by Daniel Wu) eagle eye fans may recognize him from 2000 AD and New Police Story.
Quinn has the largest clipper force, Sunny is fiercely loyal to Quinn and performs his duties without question. Obviously, Sunny is covered in tattoos from all the lives he’s taken. The barons are no slouches themselves most being ex-regents risen to the top so they know how to handle themselves.
The show is full of spectacular fight scenes, gore and Daniel Wu is truly a sight to behold as he effortless performs awesome kicks and acrobatics. If anyone remembers Mortal Kombat Conquest, kind of cheesy but the fights were spectacular.
Throw in a supernatural element with M.K (played by Aramis Knight) a young boy with supernatural powers who Sunny takes under his wing. Both Sunny and M.K are really just trying to live their lives but the baron’s ruthless constraints and orders compromise this.
The story sucks you in from the first episode. There’s family feuds, grudges, drama, lots of betrayal and backstabbing. Marton Csokas really does own his character and I couldn’t believe this was the guy that played Celeborn from Lord of the Rings. When you see another skilled fighter or clipper owning everyone you will mumble to yourself “yeah wait ‘til you meet Sunny”
Eventually, you are introduced to Bajie played by our very own Nick Frost. He brings an entertaining but not over the top comedy element. But as the series goes on you soon discover there is a lot more to him than meets the eye.
Into the Badlands sets and costumes look incredible like a big budget movie. It has some very strong female leads also highly trained. The directors, photographers, and chirographers have really outdone themselves. With epic battles with the likes of Cung Lee. For martial arts fans, this is an absolute must watch and even if you’re not, it’s still an incredible watch.
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And, uh, no smoking, either. Photo: Harriet Harriet via HBC/Itaewon Information Board/Facebook
Two identical signs went up over the weekend at JR Pub, an establishment popular with expats in Seoul, South Korea, that barred all of the 1.1 billion people from Africa in the same manner one might announce the ATM is on the fritz. Unsurprisingly, the paper signs prompted a deluge of outrage after someone spotted the ridiculous message and posted a photo to Facebook.
Even as locals and social media users reacted with a near-instant disbelief and anger and the photo went viral, reports emerged that the business was in fact checking customer I.D.s and turning people away, and it emerged that it was the bar’s owner, not some careless employee, who posted the sign.
South Korea’s response to the Ebola scare has included rescinding the invitations of three Nigerian students and suspending Korea Air flights to Kenya. JR Pub’s “no Africans” policy was at least short-lived: Later in the day, the owner posted a revised sign. “I had no intention of being racist and I sincerely apologize,” he wrote, along with an acknowledgement that the move was “horribly inappropriate,” which is true, and “wildly selfish,” which is sort of beside the point.
HBC/Itaewon Information Board [Facebook]
How one bar in Korea tried to prevent Ebola by banning ‘Africans’ [Chase the Dot] | {
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Installment No. 13 of our 25 Montreal Canadiens in 25 days series focuses on the 13th overall selection from the 2007 NHL Draft.
Lars Eller has all the tools to become a scorer in the NHL. He’s big, strong and he has much better offensive instincts than people give him credit for. He’s as good at carrying the puck as he is at chasing it down, and he works as well along the boards as he does in front of the net.
But confidence is king and Eller’s has been far too fragile for Canadiens coach Michel Therrien to completely trust him as a top centre.
It’s perplexing how long it takes Eller to rebuild his self-esteem and break out of funks – he had a 24-game stretch without a goal in the 2013-14 season and scored just once over a 29-game slump during the 2014-15 season. You could cite his negligible power play role as an explanation, as Eller has averaged just 47 seconds per game with the man-advantage over the past two seasons. You could also point to Montreal’s reliance on him for defensive zone starts and that he’s rarely used with point producers.
But there’s more to it than that.
Eller simply doesn’t have a history of being a prolific scorer. The last time he managed more than 20 goals in a season was as a 16-year-old in his native Denmark.
However, Eller does have pedigree as a shutdown centre, and that’s where he’s made his mark with the Canadiens. His defensive acumen, consistency in the faceoff circle and efficiency in clearing the zone make him a valuable piece of the puzzle in Montreal.
Who: Lars Eller | No. 81 | Third line, centre (shoots left) | 6-foot-2 | 210 lbs | Age: 26 | @Eller_89
Acquired: Trade (2010) for goaltender Jaroslav Halak
Contract status: 4 years, $3.5M AAV (expires 2018)
2014-15 Stats: 77 GP | 15 G | 12 A | 27 P | 15:21 TOI | 47.5 CF%
Career stats: 363 GP | 60 G | 70 A | 130 P | 14:08 TOI | 49.6 CF%
The book on 2014-15:
You can’t help but think of what could’ve been for Eller had his production not lagged for so long during the middle portion of the 2014-15 season.
Eller was used mostly between rookie Jiri Sekac and Brandon Prust through the first half of the season and scored about half of his points there. But when his production started to wane, there was plenty of speculation Eller would be traded at the deadline. When that didn’t come to pass, he settled down again and hit his stride.
Centring Devante Smith-Pelly and rookie Jacob De La Rose, Eller scored four of his 15 goals over the final six games of the season.
When you consider who his linemates were at the start of the season, and that he was used so sparingly on the power play, it’s perfectly understandable how he finished with his lowest assist total in three seasons.
Meanwhile, nearly half of Eller’s goals held up as game-winners, placing him second in the category on the Canadiens behind only Max Pacioretty (10).
Considering Eller led Montreal’s forward group with 13 points in 17 Stanley Cup playoff games in 2014, there was hope he could do some post-season damage again in 2015.
But like Montreal’s other centres, Eller fell short of expectations, posting just one goal and two assists in 12 playoff games.
Off-season updates:
Eller spent a fair portion of his summer in Montreal.
When he wasn’t training, he was hosting his hockey playing brothers Michael and Mads.
A photo posted by Antonio Park (@chefantoniopark) on Jun 6, 2015 at 8:43am PDT
2015-16 outlook:
Eller probably won’t have much opportunity to move up in the lineup this season, but for the first time in three years, he isn’t likely to be moved to the wing for an extended period.
With Alex Galchenyuk and Tomas Plekanec locked in at centre, and with David Desharnais incapable of taking on heavy defensive responsibilities, stability in the third-line centre spot would offer Eller a platform to regularly produce. Having Zack Kassian ride shotgun on his line for a fair portion of the season would also help him.
But nothing is a given.
If the Canadiens prefer to keep Desharnais at centre, Plekanec would be pushed to the third line shutdown role, and that would make Eller a realistic trade candidate.
If Eller’s going to secure his position, he’ll have to find a level of consistency he hasn’t yet shown in Montreal. There’s every reason to believe he can do it, and if he does, the Canadiens will be much stronger up the middle than they’ve been in a long time. | {
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The United States is on recession watch as market signals flash red. Manufacturing is straining under President Trump’s trade war, business investment is slowing and consumer confidence is showing cracks.
But many economists expect that growth will weaken slightly over the next couple of years — without actually contracting — and that distinction is crucial. The Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, said last week that “the most likely outlook for our economy remains a favorable one with moderate growth,” and “our main expectation is not at all that there will be a recession.”
Economic growth that dips substantially lower can hurt, especially for workers in hard-hit industries. But the aftermath of weak growth has historically differed pretty sharply from the fallout caused by an all-out recession. Here is a rundown of the differences, and why they could matter to your job and bank account.
What is a recession, and who decides?
While economic growth has moderated only slightly so far, forecasters think America is headed for a deeper pullback. The economy expanded by 2.9 percent in 2018, and economist s expect that pace to slow to 2.3 percent in 2019 before falling to 1.8 percent next year, based on the median in a survey by Bloomberg. Several particularly glum forecasters even expect the economy to shrink for one or two quarters in 2020. | {
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The journey of light from the very early universe to modern telescopes is long and winding. The ancient light traveled billions of years to reach us, and along the way, its path was distorted by the pull of matter, leading to a twisted light pattern.
This twisted pattern of light, called B-modes, has at last been detected. The discovery, which will lead to better maps of matter across our universe, was made using the National Science Foundation's South Pole Telescope, with help from the Herschel space observatory.
Scientists have long predicted two types of B-modes: the ones that were recently found were generated a few billion years into our universe's existence (it is presently 13.8 billion years old). The others, called primordial, are theorized to have been produced when the universe was a newborn baby, fractions of a second after its birth in the Big Bang.
"This latest discovery is a good checkpoint on our way to the measurement of primordial B-modes," said Duncan Hanson of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, lead author of the new report published Sept. 30 in the online edition of Physical Review Letters.
The elusive primordial B-modes may be imprinted with clues about how our universe was born. Scientists are currently combing through data from the Planck mission in search of them. Both Herschel and Planck are European Space Agency missions, with important NASA contributions.
The oldest light we see around us today, called the cosmic microwave background, harkens back to a time just hundreds of millions of years after the universe was created. Planck recently produced the best-ever full-sky map of this light, revealing new details about of our cosmos' age, contents and origins. A fraction of this ancient light is polarized, a process that causes light waves to vibrate in the same plane. The same phenomenon occurs when sunlight reflects off lakes, or particles in our atmosphere. On Earth, special sunglasses can isolate this polarized light, reducing glare.
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The B-modes are a twisted pattern of polarized light. In the new study, the scientists were on a hunt for the kind of polarized light spawned by matter in a process called gravitational lensing, where the gravitational pull from knots of matter distorts the path of light.
The signals are extremely faint, so Hanson and colleagues used Herschel's infrared map of matter to get a better idea of where to look. The researchers then spotted the signals with the South Pole Telescope, making the first-ever detection of B-modes. This is an important step for better mapping how matter, both normal and dark, is distributed throughout our universe. Clumps of matter in the early universe are the seeds of galaxies like our Milky Way.
Astronomers are eager to detect primordial B-modes next. These polarization signals, from billions of years ago, would be much brighter on larger scales, which an all-sky mission like Planck is better able to see.
"These beautiful measurements from the South Pole Telescope and Herschel strengthen our confidence in our current model of the universe," said Olivier Doré, a member of the U.S. Planck science team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "However, this model does not tell us how big the primordial signal itself should be. We are thus really exploring with excitement a new territory here, and a potentially very, very old one."
Read the European Space Agency feature about this work at http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Herschel/Herschel_helps_find_elusive_signals_from_the_early_Universe.
Herschel is a European Space Agency mission, with science instruments provided by consortia of European institutes and with important participation by NASA. NASA's Herschel Project Office is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for two of Herschel's three science instruments. The NASA Herschel Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, supports the United States astronomical community. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
More information is online at http://www.herschel.caltech.edu, http://www.nasa.gov/herschel and http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Herschel.
Planck is a European Space Agency mission, with significant participation from NASA. NASA's Planck Project Office is based at JPL. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for both of Planck's science instruments. European, Canadian and U.S. Planck scientists work together to analyze the Planck data. More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/planck and http://www.esa.int/planck. | {
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Yet more pressure has been heaped on the London 2012 Olympics’ embattled security contractor G4S after one of their staff was accused of spitting and hurling verbal abuse at a serviceman drafted in to cover the gaps at the Games.
The security guard is alleged to have called the soldier a “baby-killer”, in an apparent reference to his service in Afghanistan after the member of 35 Engineers asked to search him. The incident is thought to have happened at Lords cricket ground on Saturday, which was hosting the archery event.
G4S said it was “urgently investigating claims of an altercation between a security officer and a soldier”. A spokesman said: “We take any case of improper behaviour by a member of our staff very seriously. We do not tolerate insulting behaviour and, where necessary, appropriate disciplinary action will be taken.”
The Ministry of Defence said the alleged incident was an “isolated occurrence”. A spokesman said: “We can confirm that there was an incident at Lord’s cricket ground on 28 July. The matter was reported and is being investigated by G4S.
“This isolated occurrence is not indicative of the good working relationship between the military and G4S.”
G4S has been widely criticised after it was forced to admit it could not provide all of the security guards it was contracted to deploy at the Games. Its chief executive was dragged before MPs to explain the situation and he agreed that the episode was a “humiliating shambles”, saying he regretted taking the contract in the first place.
It emerged G4S banned its own executives from taking up corporate hospitality places during the Games after the Army was called upon to provide 4,700 personnel to cover the gaps it left in the Olympics security plan, bringing the total number of MoD personnel involved in the Games to 18,000. | {
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The Pick up interfac. While we were at it, we also updated the items popups to contain cleaner info.
The arsenal is part of the military overview tab, where we’ve also added a handy Hero Overview. You can use this to quickly navigate to heroes and see if they have unused slots and upgrade points. (pictured on the right)
Standard Issue Items - Michael has expensive tastes
Hi there, this week we return to the heroes of Planetfall. We take a close look at their ability to wield legendary items and pilot a large variety of vehicles and mounts.The item system is very different from Age of Wonders due to the heroes’ ability to share stand-issues Modules with regular units, the new piloting abilities and the new weapons arsenal.Heroes share stand-issue Modules with regular units, which get unlocked through research. Additionally the Unit-unlocks in the research tree unlock an associated hero Weapon or Vehicle nearly all of the time. For example, by researching the Amazon Tyrannodon laser dino unit, you unlock the Tyrannodon mount for your heroes as well. The Kir’ko Tormented unlocks a Psi-Shotgun for your heroes.To access mounts and weapons of other races - including that race’ vehicles and mounts - you’ll need to add one of their colonies to your empire. Absorbing a colony unlocks the ability to research the primary units, mods and ops of that race.When a hero dies, its standard-issue mods and vehicles get destroyed, only the legendary items survive. This is both to avoid item spam as well as avoiding many incompatible items. (psi mods are ofno use to non-spi users)Whenever you equip a weapon you carefully need to match it to your chosen modules. Just equipping a Arc-rifle might disable cool laser mods you purchased.Legendary Hero Items are found in the field by exploring the sites of the Star Union, or by performing quests for NPC factions. To streamline item management, we introduced the Item Arsenal. Without it, it was hard to find items that matched your hero’s specialization and mods and the interface was clunky.First, a pickup dialog clearly shows the hero items you gained with the question you want to pick them up and send them to the arsenal or sell them.Un-equipped Hero Items are now gathered in a single empire arsenal. This makes it easy for you to compare all items at your disposal and equip it to a matching hero. Item Couriering and per-hero inventories for unequipped items are no longer a thing. When something is unequipped it goes back to the arsenal. If you ever bought a standard-issue mod and no longer use it, it can be transferred to another hero via the arsenal.Vehicle items are equipped in the hero’s primary weapon slot replacing the main gun/attack, with the abilities coming from the vehicle. These include active abilities, unit type identifiers. Also the-hit points, armor and shield values are replaced with those of the vehicle. Note that Vitality and Armor level upgrades do boost those the vehicle.Vehicles and mounts come in very different forms. When you give your commander a vehicle perk at the start of the game, you have a choice of an initial assault or support vehicle. These vehicles vary per race (Assault bike and APC for Vanguard)When a vehicle is destroyed, the hero escapes to an adjacent hex on combat map with with 20% of its original hit points. The Hero just has its secondary weapon equipped so you have to be very careful.So even if a vehicle doesn’t guarantee an “extra life” for you hero in combat, the pilot path still seems pretty powerful. You might ask yourself why would you ever want to be outside of a vehicle. Well, most legendary drops are not vehicles - energy swords, psi guns, etc. Mods might be incompatible with vehicles. There are many hero upgrades that work for infantry or melee roles. And keep in mind that unit attributes (large target, mechanical) might expose the hero to new types of attacks. All paths of hero specialization are viable options. | {
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Oct. 13, 2011 -- Focusing too heavily on the "for richer" part of the nuptial vows could spell disaster for a marriage, according to research published today by Brigham Young University and William Paterson University.
In a survey of 1,700 married couples, researchers found that couples in which one or both partners placed a high priority on getting or spending money were much less likely to have satisfying and stable marriages.
"Our study found that materialism was associated with spouses having lower levels of responsiveness and less emotional maturity. Materialism was also linked to less effective communication, higher levels of negative conflict, lower relationship satisfaction, and less marriage stability," said Jason Carroll, a BYU professor of family life in Provo, Utah, and lead author of the study.
Researchers gauged materialism using self-report surveys that asked questions such as to what extent do you agree with these statements? "I like to own things to impress people" or "money can buy happiness." Spouses were then surveyed on aspects of their marriage.
For one out of every five couples in the study, both partners admitted a strong love of money. These couples were worse off in terms of marriage stability, marriage satisfaction, communications skills and other metrics of healthy matrimony that researchers studied.
The one out of seven couples that reported low-levels of materialism in both partners scored 10 to 15 percent higher in all metrics of marital quality and satisfaction. Interestingly, the correlation between materialism and marital difficulties remained stable regardless of the actual wealth of the couple.
The Things That Money Just Can't Buy
Study authors and marriage experts noted that the findings probably have to do with the personality traits that go along with materialism. They will be published today in the Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy.
"The finding does not necessarily mean that it is the materialism itself that damages their relationships. ... A materialistic orientation may be associated with other unidentified factors, such as childhood deprivation or neglect, which might play a more pivotal role in adult marital satisfaction," said Don Catherall, professor of clinical psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University in Chicago. "Of course, it may also simply mean that people who are more focused on making money have less energy and interest left to invest in their marriages."
Other studies have shown that materialism is correlated with a host of personality traits and interpersonal skills that might hinder a marriage.
"People who are materialistic tend to be narcissistic and concerned with impressing people," said Susan Heitler, a Denver-based clinical psychologist and creator of marriage resource site Poweroftwomarriage.com. "They have a tendency to be anxious, depressed, have relatively poor relationship skills and have low self-esteem. These qualities in turn can cause marital problems."
Heitler recalls one patient who said that whenever she felt empty in her relationship, she would "fill up the hole" by buying lots of things and this would make her feel better. Her husband, who didn't share this love of buying, would then "kindly return all of it because they couldn't afford what she had bought," Heitler recounted, "and the wife was grateful that he would return it because she didn't really want the stuff in the end, but she got satisfaction from the purchasing."
Such a pattern highlights another dynamic researchers found, when one partner is highly materialistic and the other is not.
Relationships usually fair better when partners share priorities and values, but researchers found that the opposite was true in this case. When only one partner was materialistic and the other not, the non-materialistic partners seemed to buoy the marriage, resulting in higher levels of satisfaction, communication and stability in marriages made of mismatched couples when compared to dual-materialistic ones.
"Spouses that are mismatched on materialism may do better in their relationships than spouses with shared materialistic values because at least one spouse may possess more 'other-centeredness' and 'emotional readiness,'" said Laura Frame, clinical psychologist and supervisor of the Supporting Healthy Relationships Program at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City.
The findings will be published today in the Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy. | {
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El Consejo de Estatal Contra las Adicciones en Jalisco (CECAJ), confirmó el fallecimiento de su secretario técnico, el médico Ignacio Contreras Ramírez, quien perdió la vida en medio de un percance ocurrido en el municipio de Tlajomulco.
El hecho sucedió alrededor de las 15:00 horas, sobre el Circuito Metropolitano Sur al cruce de la avenida Cuyutlán, en la colonia de San Miguel Cuyutlán.
La Comisaría de Tlajomulco confirmó, tras un reporte al 911, que en el cruce se hallaba un vehículo Volkswagen Beetle, el cual se impactó contra un poste de la Comisión Federal de Electricidad, el cual en su trayecto atropelló a Ignacio Contreras.
Paramédicos municipales fueron quienes confirmaron su muerte; de acuerdo con los socorristas, presentaba una severa lesión en el cráneo.
La policía municipal confirmó que el conductor del vehículo fue puesto a disposición del Ministerio Público, quien se encargará de determinar su situación legal.
Suman dos muertes por percances viales
Además del fallecimiento de Contreras Ramírez, durante la madrugada se registró la muerte de otro hombre, quien perdió la vida en un choque de motocicletas.
Esto sucedió poco después de las 3:00 horas, en el cruce de Jorge del Moral y María Mares, de la colonia Insurgentes.
En el punto colisionaron dos motocicletas, una KTM-S398, cuyo conductor, de 21 años, resultó lesionado, y una Pulsar 160 CC, de la cual falleció el joven que viajaba como acompañante. El conductor de ésta sólo resultó lesionado.
Fue el padre del fallecido quien lo reconoció en el lugar del incidente, la víctima tenía 20 años.
Su cuerpo fue trasladado a las instalaciones del Instituto Jalisciense de Ciencias Forenses en espera de la autopsia de ley, mientras que los lesionados fueron llevados a puestos de socorros municipales para su atención médica.
JM | {
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And anti-Israel activists want Israel kicked out of FIFA!
On Sunday, October 9, 2016, we reported how Palestinians celebrate murder of two Israelis in Jerusalem shooting attack.
Video has been released of the “heroic” drive by shooting being celebrated:
VIDEO: Dash-cam captures the sound of heavy gunshots in today's Jerusalem shooting terror attack: pic.twitter.com/xhkgPKWCXF — Top Israel News (@TopIsraelNews) October 9, 2016
Those celebrations included approval and encouragement of further attacks from both Fatah and Hamas news outlets, a phone call of congratulations from the political head of Hamas to the killer’s family, dancing outside the home of the killer, and the killer’s 14-year old daughter praising the attack.
“We deem my father as martyr,” she said in the video, according to Maan. “We hope he will plead for us before God on judgment day… I am proud of what my father did.” “We’re very happy and proud of our father,” she also said. “My father is a great man. Our relationship, as father and daughter, was excellent.”
And of course, the obligatory handing out of candy, including by the killer’s family:
Israeli authorities say the shooting was followed by an outburst of celebration in East Jerusalem and calls for further terror attacks. In several places in East Jerusalem, residents were seen handing out sweets to passersby in celebration of the attack, with Palestinian media reports claiming that members of the gunman’s family took part in the festivities.
Israeli police closed the candy store owned by the killer’s family, so I guess they’ll have to find another source of goodies to hand out.
And now this, a Palestinian soccer team holding a banner honoring the killer.
Palestinian soccer team in Jerusalem mourns loss of "heroic martyr" who killed 60-year-old woman and cop in Jerusalem https://t.co/64uwaumaPP — Dov Lieber (@DovLieber) October 11, 2016
#صورة نادي هلال #القدس ينعى #أسد_الأقصى الشهيد مصباح أبو صبيح خلال مباراة على ملعب فيصل الحسيني اليوم pic.twitter.com/XjU5Ot7J0c — 48 الإخبارية (@48nnews) October 10, 2016
Oh, by the way, the Palestinians and anti-Israel activists want Israel kicked out of FIFA because security checks of Palestinian soccer teams disrupt their ability to play. Let’s see, soccer team honors terrorist killer who conducted shooting spree that killed two Israelis — certainly no security concerns with those fine young men.
| {
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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has been politically dead for months; the only question is when they're going to hold his funeral.
Sound smart: CIA Director Mike Pompeo — as we first telegraphed — is an obvious choice for Trump as a replacement because the two have a stronger relationship than the president has with just about anybody else.
Here's why Tillerson is on the way out:
Trump can't stand him and has contradicted him on many major policy issues — from North Korea, to Iran, to Qatar, to Saudi Arabia.
and has contradicted him on many major policy issues — from North Korea, to Iran, to Qatar, to Saudi Arabia. He has no allies in the White House , few if any in the State Department beyond his innermost circle and he's managed to alienate even his tiny number of supporters on Capitol Hill.
, few if any in the State Department beyond his innermost circle and he's managed to alienate even his tiny number of supporters on Capitol Hill. His natural constituency would've been Democrats and moderates who view him and General Mattis as restraints on the president, but he lost that crowd because of what he's done to the State Department — a bungled reorganization and a failure to appoint people to top jobs.
and moderates who view him and General Mattis as restraints on the president, but he lost that crowd because of what he's done to the State Department — a bungled reorganization and a failure to appoint people to top jobs. He never had favor among mainstream Republicans in foreign policy circles because he's got a history of ignoring the human rights agenda to get business done.
Most damning of all: When foreign leaders and diplomats hear Tillerson speak, they know he's not speaking for the president. They know this because Trump makes it abundantly clear, in public.
Go deeper: How Rex Tillerson alienated every ally he needs | {
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Moldova’s presidential election will go to a runoff after a pro-Russia candidate narrowly missed winning a majority of votes.
With almost all ballots counted early on Monday, Igor Dodon won 48.26% while pro-Europe rival Maia Sandu scored 38.42%, the top finishers among the nine candidates.
Maia Sandu speaks to the media after casting her vote in Chisinau. Photograph: Roveliu Buga/AP
With no one securing a majority, a second round of voting will be held on 13 November to decide between Dodon and Sandu.
Sunday’s ballot was the first presidential election by direct vote in 20 years in this impoverished former Soviet republic.
Moldovans, angry about high-level corruption, were divided about whether to seek closer integration with Europe or rekindle links with Moscow.
Dodon has pledged to “restore broad and friendly ties with Russia”.
The former Communist party member tapped into dissatisfaction with the pro-European government that came to power in 2009.
Sandu, an ex-World Bank economist, has vowed to be tough with endemic corruption in the country of 3.5 million people. She earned praise for reforms carried out when she was education minister.
The European Union together with the US is seeking more influence over Moldova, as is Russia. | {
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The "Shake It Off" singer presented Entertainer of the Year to Garth Brooks
Taylor Swift Makes Big Return to the CMA Awards to Present Entertainer of the Year to Garth Brooks
Taylor Swift has made her big return to the CMAs.
After crossing into the pop world with her record-breaking album 1989, the “Shake It Off” singer got back to her country roots Wednesday when she made a surprise appearance at the CMA Awards.
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Wearing a sparkly, slinky dress, the singer, 26, presented the entertainer of the year award (which she’s won twice before) to Garth Brooks. “Hi Nashville. It’s been almost 13 years since I came to Nashville with a dream to be a songwriter and recording artist and I learned so much about what it means to be an entertainer from the remarkable artists in this arena tonight,” she said onstage.
Swift first attended the awards show as a teen in 2007 and picked up the new artist award shortly after she released her self-titled debut album.
On Tuesday, Little Big Town — who performed at the show — revealed Swift wrote their new song “Better Man.”
“Bless her heart. She’s gonna make it some day,” Kimberly Schlapman joked to PEOPLE on the CMA Awards red carpet. Added Karen Fairchild: “She never pitches her songs. She brought us on the road last summer for the 1989 tour and we did ‘Pontoon’ together and we’ve just been keeping in touch. I guess she loved the song so much and thought of the harmonies and sent it to us.”
Image zoom People Special Edition 50 years of the CMA Awards – Cover
PEOPLE’s Special Edition 50 Years of the CMA Awards is on sale now online and on newsstands. | {
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If you didn’t already know, Billy Gillispie is now an analyst for a show called Campus Insiders.
You have to see this.
Billy Gillispie's Kentucky Prediction by CampusInsiders
As we all know, Billy Gillispie probably isn’t the most trusted source of information. | {
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A 4.7-magnitude earthquake struck off the Oregon coast Friday, according to the U.S. Geological Service.
The quake occurred around 9:35 a.m. and the epicenter was in the Pacific Ocean a little more than 100 miles from Coos Bay. No injuries have been reported.
Earthquakes of that magnitude are typically considered minor, but could cause some property damage, according to the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network. Any rating of at least eight on the Richter scale is considered a major earthquake.
-- Everton Bailey Jr.
[email protected]
503-221-8343; @EvertonBailey | {
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Humbled by public generosity, ‘Trolley Man’ decided to face the music and turn himself in to police
Melbourne 'Trolley Man' gets 'incredible opportunity' to turn his life around
Humbled by public generosity giving him the opportunity to turn his life around, ‘Trolley Man’ decided to face the music and turn himself in to police.
The next day, Michael Rogers sat in the dock at Melbourne magistrates court, facing theft and burglary charges.
He was bailed on the strict conditions that he stay away from the CBD, inside at night and report daily to police.
Donations flow in for Melbourne attack's 'trolley man' Read more
It has been a big week for the 46-year-old homeless man who bravely stepped in harm’s way with a shopping cart to fend off IS-inspired Hassan Khalif Shire Ali then received donations of more than $155,000.
Just a day before the attack on Bourke Street, it is alleged Rogers broke into a CBD cafe and took $500 from the till.
He is also accused of a month earlier following someone into a St Kilda Road apartment building and stealing a racing bicycle.
It was not until Rogers was noticed by the public in social media videos, earning the moniker ‘Trolley Man’, that he came to the attention of police who announced they wanted to speak to him about the burglaries.
Rogers’ lawyer, Melinda Walker, told Saturday’s hearing her client had been “humbled” by the community’s financial generosity, which compelled him to hand himself in to police the previous night.
Given his troubled life, marred by a long criminal history and drug addiction, throwing his hands up was a big deal.
“I have known this man for 20 years. He’s never handed himself in to the police,” Walker said.
Trolley man: passers-by use chair and trolley to try to take down Melbourne attacker Read more
“This is a unique and incredible opportunity for this man to access supports that can only assist him to engage in meaningful rehabilitation,” she told the court.
“That’s what the community wanted when they gave him the money. They gave him the opportunity to turn his life around.”
The police prosecutor, Paul Bush, opposed bail saying Rogers posed an unacceptable risk of reoffending and that his criminal “priors” spoke for themselves.
The magistrate, Bob Kumar, gave Rogers bail on strict conditions that he stay away from the CBD and reside with relatives in an outer suburb, observe a 9pm to 6am curfew, participate in drug and counselling programs and report daily to police.
He is also now on a court support program which gives him access to drug support services and counselling.
Kumar acknowledged there was “always a risk” of reoffending.
The court heard Rogers would not have free access to the thousands of dollars donated to him.
Donna Stolzenberg from National Homelessness Collective said her organisation would help him put it in a trust fund.
Rogers’ case returns to court on 27 November. | {
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A woman wearing a face mask takes a photo near the Sydney Opera House in Sydney, Australia on Friday. Photo: EPA | {
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A Puzzle in Pyongyang
"Finally," one is tempted to say. The years of speculation and half-baked news from dubious sources are over. A senior North Korean official has confirmed the unbroken line of power from father to son to grandson. The nagging issue, over which there’s been so much speculation, as to who will inherit Kim Jong Il’s regime has been officially resolved. Or has it?
The third delegates’ meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea on Sept. 28 answered a few questions. Still, it left others unanswered and posed quite a few new ones as well. In the end, Kim Jong Il emerged the undisputed leader. But has his legitimacy become more independent of his father than it used to be? Kim Jong Un has been introduced to the people. Does this mean he is going to succeed Kim Jong Il? Or will he succeed Kim Il Sung? Kim Jong Il’s sister Kim Kyong Hui has been promoted to the rank of general and is part of the party leadership. Is she supposed to support her nephew, or is this part of a strategy to more broadly enhance the family’s power? Her husband Jang Song Taek is also on board. Will he share the caretaking job with his wife? Are there any other members of the extended Kim family on the team?
First, let’s review the facts:
1. On Monday, Sept. 27, Kim Jong Un was mentioned for the first time in the official North Korean media when he was promoted to the rank of general. Now, at last, we know for sure how to write his name.
2. On the same day, Kim Jong Il’s sister was promoted to the same military rank as her nephew.
3. On Sept. 28, one day later, the first delegates’ meeting of the Workers’ Party in 44 years — and the biggest gathering since the last party congress in 1980 — opened after a mysterious delay. It had originally been announced for "early September."
4. Contrary to speculation in the Western media, Kim Jong Il did not step down nor did he hand over any of his powers to his son. Rather, the elder Kim was confirmed as the current leader of the party, the military, and the country.
5. From 1945 until 1980, the Workers’ Party held six party congresses and two conferences or delegates’ meetings. This means that on average, the party had one major event every 4.4 years. However, over the past three decades, it had none. Even the 21st (and so far last) plenum of the Workers’ Party was held 17 years ago in December 1993. Now, the party’s defunct leadership structure has been restored, and the delegates elected 124 members of the Central Committee and 105 alternates. These 229 people form the party’s elite. From among the members, 17 were named to the committee’s Politburo, the party’s second-highest leading organ, and 15 as alternates.
6. The Politburo, in turn, is headed by a Presidium, or Standing Committee, of five people, with Kim Jong Il at the top as the party’s general secretary. It also consists of Kim Yong Nam (82 years old), Choe Yong Rim (80), Jo Myong Rok (82), and Ri Yong Ho (68). The last was promoted the day before the delegates’ meeting to the post of vice marshal. He thus ranks above Kim Jong Un and his aunt and is rumored to be a member of the Kim family, which if true, implies a particularly strong base for loyalty. Given the advanced age of most of its members, if the Presidium is not newly elected in a few years, who will remain? This makes Ri, by far the body’s youngest member (along with Kim Jong Il), particularly interesting.
7. All three known close relatives of Kim Jong Il received top party posts. Kim Jong Un became vice chairman of the Central Military Commission (see fact 9). His aunt, Kim Kyong Hui, became a member of the Politburo, while her husband, Jang Song Taek, was made an alternate. The names of regular and alternate members were not provided in alphabetical order, indicating a certain hierarchy. Kim Kyong Hui’s name was listed last out of 17, and Jang was fifth out of 15. A day later, he was 14th (out of 15) on a list of short bios of regular and alternate Politburo members. Kim Kyong Hui was the only member in addition to Kim Jong Il for whom no details were provided.
8. Except for the Central Committee, there is not a single leadership organ in which all three close relatives of Kim Jong Il hold a post. Kim Jong Un is excluded from the Politburo altogether; Kim Kyong Hui is not on the Central Military Commission; and Jang Song Taek is only an alternate Politburo member. We could speculate that Kim Jong Il wants to prevent having too high a concentration of power in the hands of one of his relatives. He has made sure that the most crucial instruments of power are staffed with the most loyal of his followers, who will be ready to walk the extra mile and fulfill his strategic decisions with all the energy of a family member and co-owner.
9. As expected, Kim Jong Un has not (yet) become a member or an alternate member of the Politburo, but did receive a high-ranking post in the party’s Central Military Commission. As far as we know, this is essentially the organization through which the party controls the military, and hence the most powerful of its organs. It is no coincidence that this commission is chaired by Kim Jong Il himself. His son comes next in the hierarchy, as the first of the commission’s two vice chairmen. Jang Song Taek is a member, too, but the one with the lowest rank, so it seems. His name was listed last out of 19. Kim Kyong Hui is not a member.
10. On Sept. 29, North Korea’s official news agency published an unusually long and detailed article with profiles of all Politburo members except Kim Jong Il and his sister. In addition, a large group picture was published that showed the delegates and the complete Central Committee, including Kim Jong Un. The list of profiles and the photo rather openly revealed the true hierarchy within the party leadership: Only 19 people were sitting in the front row, while the others were standing. Kim Jong Un sat just one space away from his father, and Kim Kyong Hui sat five spaces away from the center. In a report on the taking of this picture, Kim Jong Un’s name came fourth after the Politburo Presidium members Kim Yong Nam, Choe Yong Rim, and Ri Yong Ho. Kim Kyong Hui was No. 18, and Jang Song Taek was No. 23 on that exclusive list of 33 leaders.
11. Also on Sept. 29, the North Korean media published a message from Chinese President Hu Jintao only a day after the delegates’ meeting. He stressed the deep and traditional friendship, close geographical relationship, and wide-ranging common interests of the two countries. Hu pledged to defend and promote the bilateral relationship no matter how the international situation might change. This was a message to the North Korean people and the international community: China is going to support the new North Korean leadership.
What have we learned?
The party meeting provided final proof of what has often been doubted: that Kim Jong Il still knows how to play the power game. Whatever else one might say about him, Kim Il Sung undisputedly was an able politician, and he did not choose his successor by chance. His son has now shown his abilities by resolving a tricky puzzle: He paved the way for a new leadership without turning himself into a lame duck. He did so by not leaving any important posts to somebody else — though, at the same time, he did not monopolize those positions. He distributed power among a core group of family members and his father’s loyalists, while also ensuring that none of them can be certain to be significantly higher in rank than any of their colleagues. As in Juche, the official state ideology in which everything depends on the judgment of the leader, power in North Korea remains Kim’s sole domain. At the same time, he has done what any good CEO does: delegate authority to avoid energy-consuming micromanagement of each and every aspect of his job.
The most important decision regarding human resources has been the introduction of Kim Jong Un as a member of the top leadership of the party and of the military. He will now have to quickly develop a record — at least on paper — of spectacular achievements so that he can be quickly presented to the people as the most logical and capable candidate for the next leadership post. Because Kim Jong Un was appointed with a clear reference to the military, Kim Jong Il appears to be following the same strategy his father did after 1980. At that time, North Korea analysts noticed that the late O Jin U, the top military official, was always standing close to Kim Jong Il. It would now be logical to expect that like his father before him, Kim Jong Un will be responsible for the promotion of top military officers, thereby ensuring their loyalty.
In terms of strategic decisions, the succession from Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un might be different from the last changing of the guard in 1994. As early as 2008, it seemed likely that the role of the party would be strengthened substantially. The restoration of the party’s formal power organs and the many biographical details that were provided on the top leadership circle, including the group photo, suggest that the new leader will not be as autocratic as his predecessors.
What seems most notable is the renewed emphasis on Kim Il Sung as the sole source of legitimacy in North Korea. Kim Jong Il is not going to replace him as such, which would have been a precondition for the perpetuation of the current system of leadership. Therefore, in a sense, Kim Jong Un and all those who come after him will be, like Kim Jong Il, successors of Kim Il Sung. If this observation is correct, then we finally know the long-term blueprint for a perpetuation of North Korea’s leadership system.
Kim Il Sung was certainly aware that sooner or later, his son would face the succession issue. It would be a great surprise if they hadn’t talked about this and jointly developed a rough plan for creating a sustainable model of power succession. (though Kim Il Sung could not possibly have known just who would show the necessary capabilities to become the next successor and how much time his son would have to oversee and guide that process.) In 2008, when Kim Jong Il is thought to have suffered a stroke, Pyongyang’s media outlets began touting 2012 as the year North Korea would become a "strong and prosperous great country." His actions since indicate a man who is compressing a process that was planned long ago and supposed to last longer — not, as some analysts have suggested, a man creating a process from scratch and in great haste.
Concerning the current process of power transfer, as expected, a multistage approach is unfolding. At least one more stage will be needed. Chances are good that this will take place at the seventh party congress, whose date is as of yet unannounced. The year 2012 would be a good time, considering Kim Jong Il’s questionable health and that year’s auspicious meaning — the 100th anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth.
The China factor
Hu Jintao’s message of support, along with Kim Jong Il’s two visits to China before the delegates’ meeting, immediately lead to the question: What type of North Korea will China support? Clearly, the last thing China wants is for North Korea to collapse — as that would create a serious dilemma for Beijing: Either it could either do nothing and watch the U.S. sphere of influence expand right to its border, or it could actively interfere. But interfering would instantly shatter China’s copious efforts to present itself to other countries in the region as a peaceful giant that can offer a real alternative to protection by the United States. In the end, this is what North Korea is all about — competition between Beijing and Washington. Pyongyang knows this.
A third path might be open to China. North Korea has realized that the economic reforms of 2002, which focused on agriculture and hence closely resembled China’s early experiments in 1979, were in principle a good idea, but that conditions were so unlike those in China that the results inevitably differed — indeed, North Korea’s attempts were disastrous. Farmers saw their income grow, while the majority urban population (about 70 percent) faced rising prices. Inflation followed suit, and the just-narrowed gap between state and market prices expanded again. North Korea is much more heavily industrialized than 1970s China, and Pyongyang will accordingly need to focus on industrial reform above all else.
North Korea is not in a novel situation. It has intensely studied the one well-established blueprint in the region, the East Asian model of development. In short, it consists of a strong state that controls a few big players in the economy — zaibatsu or keiretsu in Japan, chaebol in South Korea, and the state-owned companies in China. Success requires a huge source of finance, coupled with a strong political partner that, for a while, is willing to turn a blind eye on protectionism and provides a huge market for the newcomer’s exports. The United States played that role for South Korea, and to a lesser extent for Japan. China seems now willing to provide this service for North Korea, under certain political conditions.
Since at least 2005, and more intensely since 2008, North Korea is returning to the path of orthodox socialism, or at least to its East Asian version. "Rule by the Party" — a collective with a first among equals at the top — is not only a key component of any socialist textbook case; it also defines the Chinese model since 1978. After two leaders of the Mao Zedong type, North Korea might now be getting ready for one that is more like China’s Hu — that is, a strong leader who rules as the head of a collective. With some luck, Kim Jong Un might even turn out to be a Deng Xiaoping — a man who has the power and vision to use this post to initiate and execute crucial reforms. So maybe we should wish him well | {
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The commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s navy, Alireza Tangsiri, warned Sunday that “any illegitimate presence by the Zionists in the waters of the Persian Gulf could spark a war.”
His remark followed reports on Israel potentially taking part in a US-led international mission to secure Western vessels crossing the Strait of Hormuz, after Iran seized several oil tankers, amid escalating tensions over US sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
In an interview to the Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Mayadeen television station in Lebanon, Tangsiri warned that “whenever our commanders wish so, they are able to detain any ship, even if it is accompanied by American and British forces.”
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Last week, the Ynet news site reported that Foreign Minister Israel Katz had told a closed session of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Israel was involved in US-led efforts to provide maritime security in the Strait of Hormuz.
Katz said Israel was assisting the mission to secure the crucial waterway with intelligence and in other unspecified fields. He stressed the mission was in Israel’s strategic interest of countering Iran and boosting ties with Gulf countries.
Responding to Katz’s comments, Iran’s defense minister on Thursday said that the formation of a US-led flotilla would “increase insecurity” and any Israeli involvement would have “disastrous consequences” for the region.
Tehran and Washington have been locked in a battle of nerves since US President Donald Trump withdrew from a landmark 2015 nuclear deal with Iran last year and reimposed sanctions.
Tensions have soared in the region, with drones downed and tankers mysteriously attacked in Gulf waters.
The US and its Gulf allies have accused the Islamic Republic of the tanker attacks — allegation that Tehran denies. In response, the US has been seeking to form a coalition whose mission — dubbed Operation Sentinel — it says is to guarantee freedom of navigation in the Gulf.
Besides Britain, which already has warships on protection duty in the Gulf after a UK-flagged tanker was seized by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, other European countries have refrained from joining the planned operation for fear it might harm their efforts to reach a negotiated settlement with Iran.
Iran has seized three tankers in the Gulf since last month, including the British-flagged vessel.
The ship seizures came after British Royal Marines helped to impound a tanker carrying Iranian oil off the British overseas territory of Gibraltar on July 4, alleging it was destined for EU-sanctioned Syria, an accusation Iran denies.
Agencies contributed to this report. | {
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The woman who Secretary of State Rex Tillerson chose to help him streamline the State Department just quit after only three months on the job. It’s the latest in a string of high-profile resignations that highlights growing chaos and declining morale at the top agency in charge of carrying out US foreign policy.
Tillerson recruited Maliz Beams, a former CEO of a major retirement services firm, back in August to lead the effort to dramatically reduce the personnel and spending of what Tillerson — and his boss, President Donald Trump — believe is an overly bloated government agency. Tillerson said in September that making the State Department more efficient is “the most important thing” he can do during his time in office, and has proposed cutting thousands of jobs to achieve that end.
But it appears that Beams did not share Tillerson’s vision for the agency’s future. Their relationship was “strained by strong differences over the redesign plan itself and the parameters for implementing it,” according to BuzzFeed News, which first broke the news of Beams’s resignation.
According to a State Department official, Beams isn’t taking on a new job or moving to another agency but simply “returning to her home in Boston.” Beams is at least the third person Tillerson named to this position who has dropped the responsibility before finishing the job.
It’s a particularly troubling sign for Tillerson given that his power as a diplomat has been waning for months. President Trump has undermined Tillerson’s remarks on negotiating with North Korea and sidelined him in discussions on how to unravel the Iran deal. Tillerson’s credibility as a messenger on behalf of the president is shot.
The redesign is one of the few things that he can still take pride in as the head of the State Department — and he’s failing at it.
The State Department has a huge staffing problem
Tillerson’s vision of austerity for the State Department has alarmed not just the diplomatic community, but some members of Congress as well.
Democratic members of the House Foreign Relations Committee sent a letter to Tillerson earlier in November expressing concern over “the intentional hollowing-out of our senior diplomatic ranks and the entire State Department with no clear goal.” Since January, the letter states, more than 100 senior foreign service officers have left the agency and the number of career ambassadors has decreased by 60 percent.
Tillerson pushed back against the statistics cited in the letter during a speech in Washington on Tuesday, claiming that they’re misleading because of their sample size or don’t accurately reflect the exceptions he’s made to his department-wide hiring freeze.
Tillerson is offering $25,000 buyouts to encourage around 2,000 diplomats to leave the department by October of next year.
Tillerson has also made other changes that have also irked employees. Consider what happened with Bill Miller, Tillerson’s former security chief at the State Department.
Following the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans and accusations that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had not taken the security of American diplomats seriously enough, Congress passed a law requiring that the security chief have unrestricted access to the secretary of state in order to brief the secretary on the security of diplomatic personnel worldwide.
But according to a New York Times report, Tillerson repeatedly turned down urgent State Department security staff requests to brief him. Only after Miller invoked that law was he finally given face-time with Tillerson — and even then it was just a meager five minutes. Miller’s insistence on seeing Tillerson is what led to his ouster in July, administration sources told the Times. (The State Department said at the time that he was not forced out.)
Tillerson’s floundering at State has led to some rather humiliating scenarios for him. Reporters have asked him point blank if he thinks he will soon be fired and replaced by Nikki Haley, who currently serves as the US ambassador to the United Nations. And the White House apparently even briefly considered the idea of moving Ivanka Trump to the UN position based on the assumption that Haley could take over Tillerson’s job.
During his Tuesday speech, Tillerson said his personnel cuts are justified in part "based on expectation of getting these [global] conflicts resolved." In other words, the State Department should be able to make do with a leaner staff because they plan to sort out the country’s big foreign policy challenges fairly soon.
But most experts believe the opposite is true: that Tillerson’s hollowing out of the State Department has weakened the agency’s ability to address America’s big foreign policy challenges. And they worry that a major foreign policy crisis, such as a war with North Korea or conflict with Iran over its nuclear program, could overwhelm the existing staff.
Elizabeth Saunders, a professor at George Washington University who studies US foreign policy, has compared the US under Tillerson’s emaciated State Department to a person who doesn’t have health insurance. “Your life is probably fine — up until the point you get sick,” she says. | {
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Walking into the Sorenson Language and Communication Center at Gallaudet University in Northeast DC can feel, at first, like walking into any new academic building on any American college campus.
Students chat away as the doors slide open. They carry their laptops and backpacks into an atrium. They catch sight of friends walking on upper floors and greet them.
The building starts to seem a lot more remarkable, though, when you tour it with Hansel Bauman, the university architect at Gallaudet, America’s only liberal-arts college for the deaf and hard of hearing. It’s the little things that are different: Bauman points out the wide entryways that allow signers more room to gesture and the automatic doors that don’t require anyone to stop mid-phrase to grab a handle. In the common room, a large, horseshoe-shaped bench fosters the kind of “conversation circles” in which deaf people feel comfortable. Diffuse natural light makes it easy to follow friends’ and teachers’ signing.
Bauman and Gallaudet have a name for this kind of architecture: DeafSpace.
DeafSpace has made Gallaudet stand out even in a local university scene undergoing a remarkable real-estate boom: George Washington University has been expanding south and east from its Foggy Bottom neighborhood. Georgetown built a sleek new School of Continuing Studies on Massachusetts Avenue near Gallery Place. None, though, is doing as much creative thinking about urban design as Gallaudet.
With an endowment that, at less than $200 million, is a fraction of Georgetown’s or GW’s, Gallaudet has been pushing at the borders of design since 2008, with a group of new buildings that address the ways deaf people perceive their environment and interact.
The architectural changes also represent a broader philosophical shift, in which architects are concerned less with conforming to rules about handicapped access than with designing more creatively for all kinds of people—rethinking mundane parts of our everyday environment such as the width of a sidewalk or the arrangement of desks in a classroom.
Meanwhile, the area around the 151-year-old university is becoming hot, forcing the school to ask questions that might have been hard to fathom when nearby Trinidad was known for its drug-war-era crime: How can Gallaudet extend its presence beyond the gates in a way that’s in sync with its design and culture?
In September, the university launched an international competition to create a new entrance to its campus that would integrate the school into the city. The four finalists, announced in October, have one thing in common: They have zero built work in Washington. And not one is a usual firm on the local higher-ed radar.
Whoever wins the competition will enter a conversation that’s changing accessible design.
“We tend to think it’s about ramps and elevators,” says Sara Hendren, a professor at Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts who has followed the evolution of DeafSpace. “But it isn’t ticking off a laundry list of compliance-based rules to avoid being sued, but actually thinking: What could architecture do?”
Gallaudet’s new construction, Hendren says, “does something with architecture that we tend to think architecture isn’t for.”
• • •
Gallaudet has an enviable design pedigree.
Its 99-acre campus was laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, landscape architects responsible for New York’s Central Park. (Olmsted also designed the US Capitol grounds.)
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Gallaudet doesn’t have an architecture school, but in 2005—spurred by a $5-million donation for a new linguistics-and-language-skills building—30 or so professors and students began meeting to discuss how deaf people experience physical space. “We knew what we didn’t want, but we weren’t sure what we wanted,” remembers MJ Bienvenu, a Gallaudet alum who teaches American Sign Language (ASL) and deaf studies at the school.
Dirksen Bauman, chair of Gallaudet’s Department of American Sign Language and Deaf Studies, introduced his brother Hansel to the group. (Both men are hearing.) Hansel Bauman, then a freelance architect, had spent the previous few years working on industrial- and scientific-research buildings at a firm in San Francisco. He had never designed anything for the deaf but had often focused on the personal experience of researchers in his science-lab designs rather than big expressions of architectural form—an inside-out approach that would serve him well at Gallaudet.
In fall of 2006, the Baumans and another professor, Ben Bahan, started co-teaching a class in the university’s Department of ASL and Deaf Studies about the idea of DeafSpace. Students analyzed dorms on campus, looking at how they did or didn’t support deaf interaction and identifying basic principles. Although English is widely spoken on campus, American Sign Language is the dominant mode of communication. Both visual and kinetic, it requires a wide field of visibility and clear lines of sight. (Deaf homeowners often cut holes in walls to communicate between rooms.)
The students studied classrooms as well and determined that certain common seating arrangements—such as long, straight benches or rows of chairs—don’t really work. Soft, diffuse lighting is crucial, as glare or dimness strains the eyes, further dissuading a student at the end of a long day (or recovering from a long night) from following a signed discussion. Acoustics matter, too: Students who use hearing aids or cochlear implants are bothered by echoes.
These early explorations of DeafSpace coincided with a turbulent period at Gallaudet. Kids with hearing loss, thanks in part to advances such as cochlear implants, have been increasingly mainstreamed into hearing schools, a move that has hurt enrollment at deaf-only schools. At Gallaudet, academic standards for admission dropped as a result and administrators were pressuring professors to doctor grades for underprepared students, according to a 2006 investigation by the Washington Post. By 2007, with the graduation rate hovering around 40 percent, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the university’s accrediting body, put Gallaudet on probation.
With the academic troubles came political strife. In 2006, the year Hansel Bauman arrived, the student body erupted when the board appointed Jane Fernandes, the school’s provost, to serve as president. The students mostly complained that she was too strict a disciplinarian. But Fernandes, a deaf woman who had learned ASL as an adult, accused them of thinking she was “not deaf enough.” After protests shut down the campus for days, her appointment was withdrawn, angering the trustees who had selected her. The board chair resigned, as did board member Senator John McCain.
Throughout the uproar, work continued on the Sorenson Center. The building incorporates ideas from the faculty’s initial meetings and from the Baumans’ and Bahan’s class—doors that whisk open as students approach, furniture that promotes face-to-face discussion, and hallways that allow passers-by to see one another from long distances.
When it opened in 2008, the structure instantly shifted expectations about buildings on campus. “Everyone started asking questions,” Hansel Bauman says. “ ‘My gosh, if this is true for this one building, then the rest of the campus. . . .’ They really started seeing the possibilities.”
• • •
The fact that DeafSpace felt so revolutionary in the early 21st century may come as a surprise.
In the 1890s, Olof Hanson, an alumnus thought to be the nation’s first deaf architect, designed a dormitory at Gallaudet that anticipated and inspired the DeafSpace team’s findings—chiefly by maximizing natural light.
In those days, though, the emphasis wasn’t on bending the built environment to the needs of deaf students. Hanson’s bigger legacy was his activism against discrimination, most famously convincing President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 to reverse federal policy that excluded the deaf from employment in the civil service.
That tension—between making the world conform to deaf people’s differences and forcing them to adapt to the world—has long roots at the school. Founded by Edward Miner Gallaudet in 1864 on a charter signed by Abraham Lincoln, the university was named for Edward’s father, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, who had started the American School for the Deaf in West Hartford, Connecticut, 50 years before. The elder Gallaudet had helped codify American Sign Language, which then flourished across the country.
Edward Gallaudet was a staunch defender of ASL, but even at his school, for much of the following century, it was often undervalued. Amid a sharp debate among proponents of “manualism” and “oralism,” deaf children were taught to lip-read and speak English. As late as the 1950s, some professors at Gallaudet viewed their students’ signing as a sort of crude pantomime.
It wasn’t until the 1960s that William Stokoe, a Gallaudet English professor and pioneering deaf linguist, demonstrated that ASL was a full-fledged language with its own grammar and dialects. It has also been a great source of pride among the deaf—many of whom prefer to call themselves Deaf, with a capital D. Like any linguistic group, they consider ASL a key to their social identity. In 1988, the deaf-identity movement spurred the Deaf President Now campaign, which resulted that year in the hiring of Gallaudet’s first deaf president, I. King Jordan. The campaign not only galvanized the national deaf community, but it alerted many in Washington to deaf-rights issues and led to the passage of legislation on behalf of deaf access, including the requirement that TVs be equipped with closed captioning.
The Sorenson Center became the first physical space built around that modern ethos of self-determination.
• • •
Hansel Bauman left California to take up his post at Gallaudet in 2009.
The next year, the university invited firms to compete to design a new dorm, Living and Learning Residence Hall 6, now known as LLRH6. The school settled on a design/build team helmed by New York’s LTL Architects, a boutique firm known for a striking contemporary-art gallery in Austin, Texas.
Finished in 2012, LLRH6 shows the deepening sophistication of the DeafSpace approach. An ingeniously slanted great room on the ground floor, which can morph from a student lounge into an auditorium, follows the natural slope of its site to the north of Gallaudet Mall, the school’s main quad. A gentle downward ramp allows for easy signing while walking—unlike stairs, which you have to keep an eye on. The furniture is configured to fit groups of all sizes, for talking or studying, and the ramp accommodates people who use wheelchairs and canes. (The next frontier of DeafSpace, Bauman says, is design for the deaf-blind.)
The university is also renovating its science labs along DeafSpace principles. Before designing them, Bauman’s team set up a design “incubator” in a vacant warehouse, where they tracked the movements of students and faculty with GoPro cameras to see how they interacted in a lab setting. Differently, it turned out, than researchers expected: Instructors tended to walk behind students, not stand at one end of the table. They also found that lab benches and ventilation hoods obstructed sightlines as they were originally configured.
This year, Gallaudet broke ground on another new dorm for the small high school on its campus, the Model Secondary School for the Deaf. Designed by Dangermond Keane Architecture—a small Portland, Oregon, studio—in collaboration with Baltimore’s Gaudreau architecture firm, it will represent the state of DeafSpace design theory when it opens next fall.
• • •
Even as the logic of DeafSpace was shaping the campus over the past decade, a different force has reshaped the surrounding neighborhoods of Trinidad, Near Northeast, and Ivy City: Once crime-ridden and largely poor, the school’s neighbors have become caught up in the District’s real-estate boom.
The original Olmsted and Vaux campus, designed as a refuge from the city, seems especially anachronistic now that Gallaudet finds itself anchoring an ever trendier part of town. Just across Sixth Street, Northeast, is Union Market, the artisanal-food mecca, and a bit farther southwest are the luxury apartment towers of NoMa. H Street’s nightlife is several blocks to the south. All of this presents the school with a financial opportunity in the big parking lots it owns on either side of Union Market. The administration’s answer is to welcome the city in, largely through a big new front door.
In partnership with the developer JBG Companies, Gallaudet recently applied for a million-plus-square-foot development spanning both sides of Sixth Street. With a planned 1,800 apartments, offices, stores, and a “makerspace,” the cluster of new buildings will effectively form a new city district—and a deaf-friendly one. “Green fingers” of lawn and plantings, studded with round seating areas and glare-free lighting, will link the campus to the Union Market area. The centerpiece will likely be an eye-catching small building in a new “gateway plaza” at Sixth and Florida.
The master plan is being devised by New York architect Morris Adjmi, who designed the Atlantic Plumbing building at Eighth and V streets, Northwest. “The idea is really to take down the physical barriers [between Gallaudet and the city] but also to expand the footprint of the school metaphorically,” says Adjmi, who has met with students, faculty, and neighborhood groups during the early planning phase.
Moving the DeafSpace concept across Sixth Street will be “a handing of the baton,” says Bauman, “a way to get what we’ve done on campus out into the public. We have modest hopes of influencing how everybody thinks, not only about Sixth Street but generally about urban development.”
It may change how we think about designing for different kinds of bodies, too. The requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act tend to exasperate architects, but Bauman points to the example of the sidewalk curb cut and “how easy that makes life for everybody”—people pushing strollers or riding bicycles as well as wheelchair users.
• • •
In September, a large crowd gathered in the I. King Jordan Student Academic Center to hear Bauman announce the competition for the Sixth Street Revitalization.
He talked about how it would redefine the way Gallaudet related to the city and the world. But it was Fred Weiner, the university’s assistant vice president for administration, who described the mechanism by which the relationship could change, and who offered some history.
Weiner compared the future of Northeast DC to the past of Martha’s Vineyard. In the 19th century, the town of Chilmark on the Massachusetts island had an unusually high rate of hereditary deafness, about one in 25 people. Local sign language—a precursor of ASL—became an unofficial second language in the town, a means of communication used by almost everyone, deaf or hearing.
Weiner believes something similar can happen on Sixth Street. Today it’s common to see servers at Union Market’s TaKorean or Rappahannock Oyster Bar signing to customers. That integration, Weiner says, can only benefit new residents arriving daily in the neighborhood: “When deaf and hearing people interact on a regular basis, a transformation takes shape.” Even neighbors who don’t learn how to sign, he predicts, will be more aware of how to communicate through gesture and technology—using mobile devices, for example.
That seemingly modest start belies its potential for design of all kinds. Dirksen Bauman likes to talk about “deaf gain,” a sort of theoretical opposite of “hearing loss.” Deaf people, he and a coauthor argued in a 2014 Psychology Today article, “have the potential to provide insights into the wider practices of say, architecture, filmmaking, video game design, bilingual education.”
The new neighborhood taking shape at Gallaudet may, in the years to come, recast not only Northeast DC but our understanding of how all bodies inhabit the space around us.
Amanda Kolson Hurley has written for the Atlantic and the American Scholar, among other publications. She lives in Silver Spring.
This article appears in our January 2016 issue of Washingtonian. | {
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None LIVING DEAD UPRISING: BOSTON Idea Monkey, Inc. Thursday, November 10, 2011 from 6:00 PM to 9:30 PM (EST) Boston, MA Ticket Information Ticket Type Sales End Price Fee Quantity Zombie Pass Ended $15.00 $1.82 Enter promotional code If you have a promotional code, enter it here: Apply
Share LIVING DEAD UPRISING: BOSTON Share Tweet Event Details Join the Uprising! Get your brainz and your livers ready for an epic zombie scavenger hunt bar crawl through the streets of Davis Square! Thursday November 10th the dead rise again and take Boston. Your iPhone or Android phone becomes the doorway into a budding zombie revolution against the humans. Come dressed in your zombie un-finest. Our Zombie Make-Over Station provides makeup, zombie fashion tips and photo-ops. Your Missions
The pathetic humans have created civil defense rescue stations to protect themselves from the uprising. Work with your fellow zombies to find these locations. At the locations you learn your mission and complete your orders. By completing missions you win zombie badges and rise in status. Will you become an Overlord?
Your Tools
You'll need an iPhone or Android phone (or a friend who has one) to play. Once you purchase tickets you will receive further instructions.
Your Goals
Finalist positions will be awarded for first points-winner, best photo and best costume. These three finalists compete in a Zombie Walk-Off to award Top Zombie.
Schedule
6:00 Check-In and Zombie Make-Over Station Opens 7:00 The Uprising Begins! 8:30 Finalists Announced and Zombie Walk-Off Live music at Zombie Headquarters - FlowTribe will be performing until 9:30 pm! Tickets will be available at the door for $20 Don't forget your BRAAAAAAINS! You'll need them to complete your missions. See you at Zombie Headquarters. Have questions about LIVING DEAD UPRISING: BOSTON? When & Where
Zombie Headquarters
Johnny D's Uptown Restaurant & Music Club
17 Holland Street
Boston, MA 02144
Thursday, November 10, 2011 from 6:00 PM to 9:30 PM (EST)
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Outlook Calendar Google Calendar Yahoo! Calendar iCal Calendar Organizer Idea Monkey, Inc. Idea Monkey, Inc., is a mobile storytelling and gaming studio at the intersection of publishing, gaming, social media, education and entertainment. We specialize in leveraging new and existing stories for mobile devices. View organizer profile | {
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A museum centered around cannabis and featuring a 360-degree theater will open in July in downtown Las Vegas.
Cannabis museum to open in July in downtown Las Vegas (Las Vegas Review-Journal)
A cashier rings up a marijuana sale July 1, 2017, at the Essence cannabis dispensary in Las Vegas. (John Locher/File, AP)
A museum centered around cannabis and featuring a 360-degree theater will open in July in downtown Las Vegas.
Cannabition will open in Neonopolis at 450 Fremont St., according to the museum’s website.
The museum also will house the world’s largest blown-glass bong at 22 feet.
While at the museum, visitors are not allowed to smoke cannabis or use products with cannabis’s psychoactive ingredient tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, according to the website.
Tickets start at $4.20. Visitors must be 21 or older.
Devon Padgett, part of the Fulldome Pro company behind the 360-degree theater opening at Cannabition, said Wednesday that his theater will be smaller than the one at Container Park and feature visuals that will appeal to marijuana fans.
His dome theater won’t compete with Container Park’s, Padgett said, because that theater is aimed at families.
Contact Wade Tyler Millward at [email protected] or 702-383-4602. Follow @wademillward on Twitter. | {
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I know where that reference is from Fuck it. Have an upvote
10,480 shares | {
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Steven Gerrard has had a discussion with Jürgen Klopp about returning to the club to train at the end of the Major League Soccer season.
Klopp will honour the invitation that was offered to the midfielder by Brendan Rodgers, his predecessor as Liverpool manager. However, there has been no offer of a playing return for Gerrard, who made 710 appearances for Liverpool over 17 years before leaving in May to join LA Galaxy on an 18-month contract.
Gerrard is expected to honour that contract, which runs until the autumn of 2016. There has been no discussion of a loan deal, of the sort brokered to allow David Beckham to play for AC Milan during his time with Galaxy, or Thierry Henry to return to Arsenal | {
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A coach of one of the minor hockey teams playing before a fight between parents broke out says there was no physical altercation.
He describes the incident at the Talbot Gardens Arena in Simcoe on Sunday as a heated argument with only five or six parents involved. Roughly 30 people were in the lobby at the time.
The coach says he and a parent from another team separated the people who were arguing before police showed up.
The OPP initially said several parents were verbally fighting after a game when it turned physical.
According to police, the fight grew to involve approximately 30 people, but the crowd dispersed prior to their arrival.
There were no reports of any injuries. | {
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L' uragano Irma , che è diventato di categoria 5, fa paura negli Stati Uniti, tanto che il governatore della Florida Rick Scott ha proclamato lo stato di emergenza. Anche se ancora non v'è certezza che Irma si abbatterà sulle coste del Sunshine State. Un'eventualità che i meteorologi prevedono non prima di una settimana.
Secondo le previsioni del National Hurricane Center statunitense, Irma dovrebbe ulteriormente rafforzarsi nel corso delle prossime 48 ore, investendo le caraibiche isole Sottovento tra martedì e mercoledì. Sempre nella giornata di mercoledì l'uragano dovrebbe raggiungere Puerto Rico; successivamente le previsioni stimano che possa dirigersi a nord verso Haiti e la Florida.
Irma verso le Antille con venti a 295 chilometri all'ora - Sprigionando i venti più forti mai registrati per una tempesta nell'Atlantico (sino a 295 chilometri orari) l'uragano si sta avvicinando alle Piccole Antille. | {
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Introduction
Patricia Buffler was a highly esteemed public-health scientist and former dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health. She also worked extensively for the chemical industry. Jim Block/newscenter.berkeley.edu
BERKELEY, Calif. — At a memorial service held last month in her favorite classroom, Patricia Buffler was hailed as a champion of children.
While dean of the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, Buffler started the nation’s largest program researching the causes of childhood leukemia. She expanded her study of this rare disease after stepping down as dean in 1998, continuing the work until she died unexpectedly in late September at the age of 75.
Buffler’s research, backed by more than $35 million in federal grants, could save lives. Her team concluded that sending your child to daycare might reduce the risk of getting leukemia, perhaps by bolstering the immune system. It found strong evidence suggesting that preschoolers should stay away from wet paint. One of her graduate students at the memorial was struck by something Buffler once said: “Children are fragile, so it is our role to protect them.”
Yet now some of her peers are torn to learn that, in the past three years, Buffler was paid more than $360,000 to work as an expert witness on behalf of companies that used to sell lead-based paint. Ten California communities, including the county where Buffler lived, this week won a $1.1 billion judgment against the companies. The money will be used to remove lead paint from older homes. Even minute amounts of lead in a child’s blood can cause permanent brain damage.
According to a court filing, Buffler concluded — to the astonishment of other experts — that lead-based paint in older homes poses little risk to children. The judge rejected that argument in his written decision.
“She may be an expert in some areas but lead poisoning in children is definitely not one of them,” said Dr. Bruce Lanphear, a professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada and lead author of widely cited studies on the effects of lead poisoning on children.
Lanphear, who testified against the paint companies, considered Buffler’s views so indefensible that, days before she died, he talked to fellow directors of the International Society for Children’s Health and the Environment about removing her from the group, of which she was a founding member.
Buffler was one of the nation’s most revered and influential public health scientists. But researchers familiar with her chemical industry consulting question whether she bent to the wishes of her corporate sponsors — a criticism she denied when questioned in lawsuits.
Her dual career arc — as public health researcher and consultant for private industry — opens a window into the deeply entrenched influence of the chemical industry on academics.
College campuses have embraced collaborating with industry for research as a way to produce innovative products and cure disease. But in public health, influential academics are often sought instead to defend potentially toxic chemicals.
While the Food and Drug Administration treats new drugs as unsafe until clinical trials prove otherwise, the Environmental Protection Agency does just the opposite with chemicals: By law, it presumes a chemical is safe unless scientific evidence shows otherwise. The burden of determining whether a chemical is harmful or deadly falls largely on academic scientists such as Buffler.
Working for industry can be lucrative for researchers, but can also pose conflicts. Even as Buffler led research into whether pesticides and herbicides may cause leukemia, she served for 17 years on the board of directors of a $3 billion pesticide and herbicide company, FMC Corp.
In 2010, FMC paid Buffler nearly $200,000 in cash and stock. Securities and Exchange Commission records show that when she sold the stock the company gave her, mostly in 2010, Buffler made more than $2 million.
A review of public records shows that in publishing her results in scientific journals or in applying for government funding from the National Institutes of Health, Buffler did not disclose that she owned stock in FMC or served as one of its directors.
UC Berkeley officials knew that Buffler served on FMC’s board, said Graham Fleming, the school’s vice chancellor for research. But he said that until federal rules changed recently, it was up to researchers to decide whether their financial ties posed a conflict. The university limited its own review to potential conflicts the researchers disclosed before forwarding the grant application to the NIH.
Fleming wasn’t willing to say whether Buffler serving on the board of FMC posed a conflict.
“We have no way to know,” he said. “She herself must have determined that there was none. And given her record of integrity throughout her career, I would say that the default would be to accept that as the appropriate judgment.”
Since 1995, the NIH has approved more than $28 million for Buffler’s research, money that went directly to UC Berkeley. The NIH wouldn’t comment on whether Buffler violated its rules.
Yet Hugh Tilson, the executive editor of NIH’s Environmental Health Perspectives, which published some of Buffler’s pesticide research, said the journal is now reviewing whether she violated its disclosure rules.
Sheldon Krimsky, a Tufts University professor and an expert in conflicts of interest in scientific research, said after reviewing Buffler’s case, “This is the worst case of conflict of interest I’ve seen in years.”
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, pushed for recent changes at NIH, requiring more financial disclosure and lowering the standard for a conflict of interest. But after recently reviewing documents on Buffler, he said more changes are needed.
“It appears NIH doesn’t have a means of auditing or enforcing the rules,” Grassley said. “Research institutions that look the other way on conflicts of interest appear free to do so knowing NIH will take them at their word.”
The recent changes in the NIH rules stemmed from concerns about the integrity of taxpayer-funded science. Studies show, for example, that researchers making money from drug companies publish scientific articles more favorable to those companies than do independent researchers. In 2007, more than half of life sciences faculty at the top 50 research universities reported financial connections to industry.
Yet scant data exist on the influence of industry money on public health.
“There are lots of people who are working as academics who are making lots of money from industry,” said Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. “A lot of the research that the industry funds is made to muddy the waters. It’s designed specifically to create uncertainties.”
Stanford University historian Robert Proctor draws parallels between chemical manufacturers today and the tobacco industry in years past, which he says quietly paid thousands of academics to influence the science.
“There’s a long history of academic corruption, of people becoming very heavily involved with industry: testifying, writing expert reports and becoming directors and not disclosing this. Their colleagues don’t know about it, and they are able to zoom under the radar,” Proctor said. “It’s not just a conflict of interest. It’s worse than that.”
An activist at Berkeley
Buffler earned her master’s degree in public health at UC Berkeley and became a teaching assistant there during the 1960s, an era when the school became an icon of liberal activism.
Some of that activist spirit may have rubbed off on her. Her son, Martyn Buffler, recalled at her memorial service that when he was a child, his mother fought successfully to stop construction of an oil terminal in their hometown of Galveston, Texas, because it endangered shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico.
In 2004, Buffler published an article with colleague Paul Brennan reporting that nonsmokers can get cancer from secondhand smoke. One night, Brennan recalled, Buffler dragged him to a Berkeley theater to pass out leaflets because it was accepting money from the tobacco industry. Buffler wanted people to know this.
Buffler is remembered by many for criticizing the FDA for delays in requiring warning labels on aspirin bottles. Giving aspirin to children is linked to Reye’s syndrome, a disease that can be deadly.
In 1992, Buffler coauthored an article calculating that 1,470 children died because, at industry’s urging, the FDA delayed the warning-label rule. Drug companies argued that the science linking aspirin to Reye’s syndrome was weak.
Buffler rejected that argument, telling the New York Times, “The Reagan administration and the Bush administration have been marked by a commitment to deregulation. When it occurs in an area where it has a health impact, the consequences are profound — profoundly adverse.”
Devra Lee Davis, who coauthored the article while working at the National Academy of Sciences, called Buffler’s stance “courageous.”
Davis and Buffler were friends as well as colleagues. It wasn’t until after Buffler died of a stroke that Davis realized how much work her friend had done for industry. She didn’t know that by the time they worked together in 1992, Buffler already had a long history of consulting for companies, including Dow Chemical, DuPont, Union Carbide, Shell Oil, Goodyear and Atlantic Richfield.
Scene from the 1998 film, A Civil Action, with John Travolta.
Harvard researcher Marvin Zelen said Patricia Buffler was paid by industry to critique his study of a childhood leukemia cluster in Woburn, Mass. american.edu
Leukemia focus, and industry work, in Woburn, Mass.
Buffler said her interest in leukemia stemmed in part from her work in 1984 in Woburn, Mass., site of a toxic tort case made famous by the best-selling book and hit film, A Civil Action.
Twenty children in this Boston suburb of 37,000 were diagnosed with leukemia between 1964 and 1983 — twice the normal rate. Six of the children lived within a few blocks of one another, a cancer cluster highly unlikely to be a coincidence.
Tests showed that two of the wells supplying water for the town were heavily polluted with several chemicals, including trichloroethylene, commonly known as TCE. Eight families sued, alleging that industry contaminated the wells. In 1986, a jury cleared Beatrice Foods of wrongdoing. W.R. Grace later settled with the families for $8 million. A third company, UniFirst, had settled out of court for slightly over $1 million.
Years later, Buffler reminisced about her work in Woburn, saying that there was never proof that the chemicals caused the cancers. “The people of Woburn won eventually; yet, we could not answer their questions,” she said.
Her remarks intrigued Harvard statistician Marvin Zelen, who had conducted a study, with two colleagues, showing a statistical association between the polluted water and leukemia.
Buffler never participated in the Woburn study. Instead, she and three other academics were hired by the chemical industry to critique the findings of Harvard researchers Zelen, Barbara Wessen and Stephen Lagakos.
Buffler’s work was sponsored by the American Industrial Health Council, whose board was composed of chemical company executives, including a senior executive of W.R. Grace. Her committee concluded that while the Harvard study was “sophisticated,” its results couldn’t be trusted because the people who volunteered to help collect information for a telephone survey were biased.
About half of the 235 unpaid volunteers lived in Woburn, where there had been ample news coverage of the lawsuit. The volunteers called Woburn residents to collect medical information about fetal deaths, birth defects and childhood diseases. Ultimately, they got information from nearly 60 percent of the town’s homes.
Figuring out how much polluted water each household drank became a complicated task for the researchers. Water from the polluted wells was blended with other well water and piped into houses throughout Woburn, but not in equal amounts. The Harvard researchers were able to calculate the amount each household consumed and compare it to the medical data.
The numbers were striking. They showed significantly higher rates of some types of birth defects as well as deaths of fetuses and newborns. There was also a statistical link between children with leukemia and the polluted water.
The industry panel led by Buffler, then a professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, cast doubt on the medical data collected, given that Woburn residents might be tempted to blame their diseases on industrial pollution. The “potential for reporting biases is alarmingly high,” the review committee said.
Zelen didn’t know about Buffler’s report until a year later, with an interviewer from a PBS show shared it with him. Zelen said it was full of factual errors.
For example, the review speculated that the volunteers might know who they were calling. But Zelen said they were assigned random phone numbers and trained not to ask for names. The review also speculated that the volunteers could guess where people lived from the telephone number. Zelen said that was impossible.
The data collected on birth defects was verified with doctors’ records, Zelen said. What’s more, the data showed that once the two wells were shut down, the higher rates of birth defects disappeared.
The Harvard researchers sent a letter to Buffler and other panelists, but said they never got a response. They did hear back from the journalist at PBS. He said that after Buffler received their letter, she changed her mind about being interviewed for the program.
Since then, similar studies in Toms River, N.J., and Camp Lejeune, N.C., have found links between water polluted with TCE and leukemia.
From Clinton Superfund panel to pesticide board member
A few years later, Buffler left Houston to become dean at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, one of the most prominent jobs in her field. Within her first two years, she was elected president of two professional associations as well as a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine.
She was also selected to serve on a panel during the Clinton administration to recommend reforms to the Superfund law. The law was intended to require businesses to clean up old industrial waste sites, but big businesses complained it went after deep pockets unfairly, and environmentalists complained it was too ponderous.
It was on this panel, in December 1992, that Buffler met Robert Burt, the chairman and chief executive officer of FMC. Burt and Buffler represented opposing interests on the panel. Burt was also a director of the Chemical Manufacturers Association, the chemical industry’s chief lobby group. He asked Buffler to serve on his company’s board.
“Mr. Burt convinced me that the company really was committed to doing the very best — doing the right thing in terms of the environment and occupational health and safety and needed that kind of independent voice on their board of directors,” Buffler explained in a court deposition in 2007.
“I was very outspoken during the deliberations of the Superfund commission, and apparently that did not alarm him as a CEO of a specialty chemical company. … After quite a prolonged due diligence, I became very comfortable with the — what was being requested,” Buffler said.
In 1994, Buffler joined a board with several political heavyweights, including former Gov. James Thompson of Illinois, Clayton Yeutter, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, and Jean A. Francois-Poncet, former Minister of Foreign Affairs in France. All four were appointed to a committee to review FMC’s dealings with government as well as its environmental efforts. Buffler would eventually chair that committee.
Buffler’s objectivity is beyond question, FMC said in a statement to the Center for Public Integrity.
“Dr. Buffler was nominated to the FMC Board of Directors due to her expertise in health and environmental issues,” the company said. “She served as chairperson of our board’s Public Policy Committee and supported the eventual evolution of that committee to a new Sustainability Committee that focuses primarily on sustainability and health, safety and environmental matters.”
In 1996, Buffler was appointed to an EPA panel to advise the agency of scientific matters related to pesticides.
The Justice Department levied a $11.9 million penalty against FMC Corp. for illegally dumping phosphorus into an open pond near a plant on an Indian reservation in Pocatello, Idaho. Phosphorus spontaneously ignites when exposed to air, causing fires by the pond and spewing poisoning gases. Buffler joined the board of directors of FMC in 1994, shortly after an EPA inspection found the illegal dumping.
FMC at the time was facing scrutiny from the EPA and the Justice Department. In 1993, the EPA inspected FMC’s phosphorus plant in Pocatello, Idaho, and found the company was illegally dumping phosphorus residue into an open pond.
When exposed to air, phosphorus spontaneously ignites. The plant had a history of fires along the banks of its pond. Phosphine gas is also poisonous, which authorities reported may have caused the deaths of migratory birds attracted to the pond. In 1998, the Justice Department reached a settlement with FMC to cap the pond and fined FMC almost $11.9 million, which at the time was the largest penalty ever imposed under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Since then, FMC has been named as potentially liable for 28 other Superfund sites.
A year after joining the board, Buffler launched her leukemia research program at Berkeley, a collaboration with five institutions focused on leukemia cases in the Bay Area. “These projects cover a wide range of Superfund related areas and chemicals,” the grant application begins. In 1999, she expanded to other parts of California and strengthened the focus on children’s exposure to household chemicals and pesticides.
In 2002, Buffler co-authored an article in Environmental Health Perspectives showing a link between household pesticides and leukemia. The article explicitly reported no link to agricultural pesticides or herbicides, the products sold by FMC. At the time, Buffler was on the editorial board of the journal.
The lead author of that study, Xiaomei Ma, now an associate professor at Yale University, said she doesn’t believe Buffler’s ties to FMC had an impact on the study’s findings. Ma said she had high regard for Buffler’s integrity and was offended anyone would question it.
A later study, published by Buffler and her team in 2009, showed a possible link between some pesticides used on farms and childhood leukemia, including a class of pesticides known as organophosphates. FMC’s Web site shows that two of its 15 brands of pesticides fall into this class.
The article said, however, that children exposed to the highest levels of organophosphates did not show higher rates of leukemia.
A year earlier, Buffler co-authored a review funded by Dow AgroSciences that was favorable to organophosphates. Several studies, including some done by Buffler’s colleagues at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, had already linked exposure of organophosphates in fetuses to problems with mental development. But in her review, Buffler challenged those findings.
FMC said organophosphates account for “a very minor part of our crop protection portfolio. … These two premix products, while important to help farmers combat crop destroying insects, account for less than 1 percent of our Agricultural Solutions sales in the United States.”
During her career, Buffler co-authored 15 articles in scientific journals paid for by companies or industry groups that asked her to evaluate chemical and other risks. In one article, her findings were unfavorable to her sponsor. In 1990, she and others found an unusually high number of colon cancers among workers at General Motors who made early vehicle prototypes. In three articles, the results were mixed. And in 11 articles, her findings were favorable to her sponsors, a Center for Public Integrity analysis found.
The favorable findings included studies on the herbicides paraquat and Agent Orange.
Buffler also served as an expert witness in toxic tort lawsuits. When asked in depositions, she could not recall ever testifying against industry.
Buffler was criticized in a 2004 law review article for views the article equated with giving chemicals the same presumption as criminal defendants: nontoxic unless proven toxic beyond a reasonable doubt. “The expert’s assertions represent a view of the scientific method which came under strenuous attack long ago, and a view of statistical testing that was rejected even earlier,” wrote Sander Greenland, a former professor at UCLA, and co-author of a textbook on epidemiology.
For her legal work, Buffler charged $600 an hour.
She and her husband split time between homes in Berkeley and a house they built in the mountains of Santa Fe, N.M. Property records show they also owned a house in Austin, Texas, where a relative lived, and four timeshares. She routinely used a limousine service to get around, according to her deposition testimony in the lead-paint lawsuit.
She was also one of UC Berkeley’s largest donors, giving the school $245,000.
Buffler volunteered to help industry groups challenging scientists who published studies unfavorable to the chemical industry or who testified against chemical companies. She served as an advisor to the industry-funded American Council on Science and Health. And she put her name on legal briefs generated by the Atlantic Legal Foundation.
Some of Buffler’s pro-industry testimony came in cases in which plaintiffs said toxins were sickening or killing them.
Joan Dixon of Friendsville, Md., died from a rare lung cancer linked to asbestos. She sued Ford Motor Co., because for years she washed her husband Bernard’s dusty clothes after he fixed brakes full of asbestos. After a Baltimore jury awarded the Dixon family $6 million, Patricia Buffler and others filed a legal brief on appeal arguing it was highly unlikely anyone could get cancer from brakes. Maryland’s highest court disagreed.
An asbestos case in Maryland
Struggling to catch her breath, Joan Dixon drove 35 miles to a Morgantown, W.Va., emergency room. There, in March 2008, she learned that her left lung was soaked in fluid. The doctor revealed that she had a rare form of lung cancer, one Dixon had never heard of: mesothelioma.
There is no cure. The doctor said there was only one known cause — exposure to asbestos.
Starting in the late 1960s, Dixon’s husband Bernard spent three or four nights a week in a friend’s garage fixing brakes for neighbors. The Dixons lived in Friendsville, Md., a speck of a town of 142 families a few miles from the borders of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Dixon charged $10 or $20 for his brake jobs. Sometimes he accepted a six-pack of beer instead.
The job was dirty. Dixon would spray the exposed brake with an air gun, sending clouds of dust particles into the air and onto his clothes. The dust was full of asbestos. Sometimes Joan would help. Other times she was the one who threw her husband’s dirty clothes into the wash.
Joan was adamant about suing Ford Motor Co. for warning employees and dealers — but not others — about the dangers of asbestos in its brakes. She died in February 2009, before her case went to trial. Her husband said he was against taking action at first, thinking it futile and mostly for the benefit of attorneys. But he promised his wife he would carry out her wish.
At the end of a trial in April 2010, a Baltimore jury sided with the Dixons with a $15 million verdict. The court reduced it to $6 million.
Buffler became involved on appeal. She and 12 other scientists, including two Nobel laureates, signed a “friend of the court” brief. It was filed by the Atlantic Legal Foundation, a nonprofit whose board includes current and former executives of companies grappling with their own asbestos lawsuits.
The foundation said in one report that it has a “deep commitment to redressing the bias against business which manifests itself in favor of narrow consumer or environmental concerns.” When asked during the 2007 deposition if she agreed with that goal, Buffler said, “My understanding in the role that I play is — trying to find the right way to express it. Best way I can express it in terms of my understanding and the role that I play is advancing the role of science in litigation.”
Buffler said she would receive briefs from the Atlantic Legal Foundation, review them, edit them and, if she agreed, sign them. She did this in several asbestos cases as well as others, but said she didn’t get paid. FMC, on whose board she served, has over the years faced nearly 100,000 asbestos claims, the company reports in recent financial statements.
In the Dixon case, the “friend of the court” brief signed by Buffler argued that the testimony of the family’s scientific expert, Dr. Laura Welch, shouldn’t have been allowed because it was “unacceptable” science. Welch is the medical director of the Center to Protect Workers’ Rights in Silver Spring, Md.
There are no studies proving that people get mesothelioma from doing brake work, let alone that wives of brake mechanics are at risk, the brief said. It added that Welch “ignored the overwhelming evidence that chrysotile asbestos, the type used in automobile brakes and that Mr. Dixon and Mrs. Dixon were exposed to, has far less, and maybe nil, potential to cause mesothelioma than other types of asbestos.”
In June 2012, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals threw out the jury’s verdict. Citing the brief’s argument that Welch never quantified how much asbestos Dixon was exposed to, the court said Welch couldn’t know if it was enough to cause the cancer.
In an earlier lawsuit, Welch filed her own “friend of the court” brief responding to Buffler’s arguments, signed by 51 scientists. She quoted a U.S. Public Health Service report citing “general agreement among scientists and health agencies” that chrysotile asbestos can cause mesothelioma. In addition, “there is sufficient evidence in humans for the carcinogenicity of all forms of asbestos,” says the latest report of the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer.
In July, Maryland’s highest court reversed the appeals court ruling, saying it has been established in previous cases that chrysotile asbestos can cause cancer. The court also ruled that Welch had quantified Dixon’s exposure.
Bernard Dixon said he never understood why Buffler got involved in the case.
Blood tests showed Erica Moore at age two had high levels of lead in her body, most likely from the paint peeling at her apartment. She now has a learning disability. Buffler served as an expert witness for lead paint companies, saying in a court filing that lead paint poses little risk to children like Erica.
Before a local agency repainted it, lead paint was peeling in the backyard of Erica Moore’s apartment.
Expert witness in lead-paint lawsuit
Several of Buffler’s friends and acquaintances say they were most surprised by her work as an expert witness in the lead-paint lawsuit.
Ten miles south of the Berkeley campus, Tamara Moore lives with her three children on the second floor of a cramped three-room duplex more than a century old. A single mother, she can barely afford the $1,700-a-month rent.
When they moved in, the dull teal paint outside on the windows and stairs was peeling badly, especially in the backyard. It’s a common problem in Alameda County, where 80 percent of homes still have lead paint.
When she applied for welfare, Moore was required to get blood tests for her children. The results for her two-year-old daughter were disturbing: Erica had lead in her blood, a level so high it nearly required emergency medical treatment.
Now eight, Erica struggles with a learning disability and takes special-education classes.
Lead can cause permanent brain damage. Studies have shown that even tiny amounts are linked to lower IQ test scores and may trigger attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and learning disabilities.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now says there’s no safe level of lead in a child’s blood. But to focus resources on children with the highest exposures, the CDC defines a “level of concern” at five micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. For a typical two-year-old girl, that’s just 1.4 millionths of an ounce of lead in her whole body.
Friction from opening a window can create lead dust, according to the National Safety Council. The dust sticks to the fingers and can end up in a child’s mouth.
The CDC estimates that during an eight-year period that ended in 2010, there were 535,000 children under the age of six with this much lead or more in their blood.
The Healthy Homes Department in Alameda County is notified whenever a child has a blood test with a level of concern. Erica’s test reading was eight times that level. In her case, the agency was able to remove some of the old lead paint and paint over the rest. That was five years ago. But on a recent visit, some of the paint on the front and back stairs was peeling again, exposing the underlying lead.
Julie Twichell, a spokesperson for the county agency, said there’s little money available to remove lead paint from homes. While driving through Moore’s neighborhood in Alameda, she pointed out house after house with peeling lead paint.
Alameda County is among 10 communities in California that just won a $1.1 billion judgment against the lead-paint companies Buffler defended.
Buffler was not called as a witness during the trial, but revealed her opinions on lead in a disclosure form filed in the lawsuit.
“There are many indicators that the risk of injury to children living in homes with lead-based paint is low, and that the risk to children from lead-based paint in homes is not probable or imminent,” according to the document.
Yet in his ruling, Superior Court Judge James P. Kleinberg rejected that claim. “Leading experts in the field of lead poisoning are virtually unanimous in concluding that lead paint is the primary cause of lead poisoning in young children,” he wrote.
Buffler said the average likelihood of a child under the age of three being harmed by lead is 1 in 58,400, citing a report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. But Warren Friedman, a senior advisor for the HUD division that published the report, said this number is not accurate for the United States. Friedman said the real risk is 1 in 40.
Kim Dietrich, a professor of environmental health at the University of Cincinnati who specializes in lead research, said the statistic is an obvious error that any epidemiologist should have challenged.
After reading Buffler’s opinions on lead, Dietrich said, “The doctor reveals a stunning and perhaps deliberate ignorance of the problem, but typical of those the lead industry pays very well to give this kind of testimony.”
Drawing the line on corporate interference
Buffler once spoke candidly about her views on financial ties and attempts by funders to interfere with research. While testifying in the 2007 deposition, Buffler cited cases where she objected to a sponsor’s intrusion on her work. Without offering details, she recalled one situation where a sponsor objected to her analysis. “That’s not appropriate,” Buffler said she told them.
Without elaborating, she added, “I mean, there are many instances.”
Buffler said UC Berkeley adopted guidelines to assure the independence of research, and she followed them. “Research involves a great deal of public trust. The research enterprise is such that if we don’t have those kinds of [guidelines], then how could the public trust the work that we do? I feel very strongly about that.”
But now, fully understanding her ties to industry, some close friends are torn by questions.
“I admired and loved her,” said one, Devra Davis. “I had never dreamed, never imagined that she would have put her expert opinion up for sale …. It sends me into a tailspin of reflection as I try to fathom what the hell she could have been thinking.”
Jim Morris and Sam Pearson contributed to this report. | {
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Earlier this week, while leading a ghost tour through the Monaro, I guided my troupe of intrepid paranormal purveyors into the Bombala Heritage Restaurant for a candle-lit dinner. This stately circa 1866 former bank building is our usual haunt for these spooky outings, but tonight something is different. Haphazardly propped up against the walls are at least a dozen two–dimensional orange cut-out bicycles. Curious as to their purpose, I ask our host Les Atkins about their origins. Perhaps the spirits rumoured to lurk in the cellar vault have taken up cycling as a past-time? "No, they're for owners of other businesses in town to collect over the next week and display in their shops as a show of support for the Monaro Rail Trail," explains Atkins who clearly appreciates the diversion from my over-zealous ghost busters who, since our arrival, have been scanning him with EMF meters for signs of spirit activity. For the uninitiated, rail trails are popping up on disused railway lines all over the world, with notable success in Victoria and New Zealand, and similarly the Monaro Rail Trail is an ambitious plan to turn the 208km railway corridor from Queanbeyan to Bombala, which closed in 1989, into a mecca for recreational cyclists. Further, it appears as if the proliferation of cut-out bikes isn't just in Bombala, for after a long night chasing shadows, next morning while driving through Nimmitabel several shops have similar orange cut-outs proudly displayed in their windows. "We're set to become a mini-Braidwood," declares one hopeful shop-owner peddling antiques in the old 19th century general store. While his claim might be a tad optimistic, there are a couple of other new businesses in town. Following the closure of the railway, a series of droughts and contraction of the timber industry, after a couple of decades of decline Nimmitabel is staging a recovery of sorts and the rail trail is viewed by many as the shot in the arm the town needs. As Steve Rickett, proprietor of the cheery Bellz Café which sits up against the haunted (a story for another day), Royal Arms B&B points out, "this rail trail would be great for Nimmitabel, in fact all the towns along the old line from Queanbeyan to Bombala." However, not all locals are keen on the concept. Some farmers are especially concerned with cyclists riding through their paddocks, where, although the rail corridor remain gazetted as Crown land, they now graze sheep and cattle. One farmer who definitely doesn't need convincing of the benefits of a rail trail is Will Jardine, a fifth generation Nimmitabel cocky. And it's little wonder, he has owned the town's iconic bakery for the past seven years, and we all know how much the lycra brigade love a good pie and cappuccino. Although with a handshake firmer than a blacksmith's grip on an anvil, its obvious Jardine leaves the baking duties to his bubbly wife Caroline. I pull up a seat in the bakery's picnic area, directly under the gaze of "George", a larger-than-life elephant sculpture transported here from Bali by a previous owner as a talking point to keep the cash register ringing. "We won't need fake elephants to entice people here if the rail trail goes ahead," says Jardine, who admits he has a vested interest in the project, "sure, businesses like mine would benefit, but I'm also pro rail trail for other reasons". "Under the watch of the older generation, towns like Nimmitabel and Bombala have fallen from prosperity to hardship and this rail trail offers an opportunity to reverse that. "I want to see Michelago, Bredbo, Nimmitabel and Bombala rejuvenated and all fired up again." According to Jardine, who is also a keen cyclist, and his fellow members of Monaro Rail Trail Inc, a committee set-up to lobby for community and government support for their cause, another benefit of their proposed rail trail is the conservation of heritage-listed timber bridges and stations, fast falling beyond a state of repair after three decades of neglect. "It's much, much cheaper to update a bridge to carry a bike or two than to support a train," he explains. Jardine is hoping to drum up more support for the rail trail next weekend when L'Étape Australia – a cycling race endorsed by Le Tour de France – attracts thousands of riders to the Snowy Mountains. "We will have these orange bikes everywhere by then," exclaims Jardine, adding, "although competitors will be on road bikes, as part of the cycling community we hope many will be sympathetic to our concept." After bidding farewell to Jardine (OK, I did sneak in another pie), I wander down to the Nimmitabel Train Station, once the beating heart of this town. It's dilapidated to say the least. Dodging grazing cattle, avoiding tall thistles and ducking under an old gantry, I try and pedal a short distance along the track but you can't go far without having to turn around at a partially-collapsed bridge. But wow, imagine if the rail corridor was brought up to a standard to allow you to pedal on a smooth surface between the tracks - I know I'd come just for the views of the rolling green hills, backed by the spectacular snow-capped spine of the snowy mountains. Further, imagine if the old timber station was spruced up as a café and the fettler's shed reinvented as bunkhouse for weary cyclists. The potential is endless. This column often waxes and wanes over the stark beauty of the Monaro, with its boulder fields, rivers and mountains. A rail trail would expose these landscapes to a new generation of travellers and at the same time bolster local economies thereby helping prevent places like Nimmitabel from turning into, dare I say it, ghost towns. Monaro Rail Trail Inc: For videos, photos and details on the proposed rail trail www.monarorailtrail.com.au L'Étape Australia by le Tour de France: This unique road cycle event staged on December 2 in the Snowy Mountains provides an experience as close to riding in the Tour de France as it is possible for an amateur to get. For information on competitors or spectators (don't forget your cow bells!): www.letapeaustralia.com/ Having explored much of the length of the Monaro railway corridor, here are my top three points of interest. This 161 metre single tracked tunnel which cuts through granite and bluestone quartz is lined with half a million bricks made at Bredbo. This unassuming bridge which spans the railway cutting near the top of Ingelara Hill supposedly played a role in Russian secret agent Vladimir Petrov's covert activities during the Cold War. According to local folklore, under the cover of "a Sunday drive", Petrov and his wife would regularly head south form Canberra along the Monaro Highway. When Petrov reached this railway cutting, he would apparently park beside the road and leave secret documents under the bridge for another operative to pick-up. An unexpected site on a lonely stretch of track between Nimmitabel and Bombala, this three story concrete and corrugated iron ruin of the Maclaughlin Meat Works is often coined "the white elephant of the Monaro". It opened in 1939 and employed 90 people processing pigs, cattle and sheep but was plagued by problems including drought and militant workers and operated for only three years. Clue: Although the opposite side of Canberra as the proposed Monaro Rail Trail, this railway line is still in use. Extra points if you can tell me the purpose of the pumping station. Degree of difficulty: Medium-hard.
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iKON is confirmed to be the first guest of “School Attack 2018’s” new season!
The SBS funE program will end its first season on August 20. “School Attack 2018” is a reboot of the classic variety show from 10 years ago, where popular singers make surprise appearances at schools to perform and play games with the students.
The first season kicked off earlier this summer on June 25, while the second season is expected to begin airing sometime in October.
After seeing a lot of chart success with their hit track “Love Scenario” in the first half of this year, iKON recently made a comeback with “Killing Me.” The “School 2018” production staff stated, “Of all the schools that applied to be part of the show, we picked a place that showed a lot of passion for iKON. We will return with upgraded special missions and continue our mission of giving a thrill to students who are tired out from studying.”
iKON is currently on their “iKON 2018 CONTINUE TOUR,” which kicked off at the Olympic Gymnastics Arena in Seoul on August 18 and will cover Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Singapore, Manila, Jakarta, and Hong Kong.
Source (1) | {
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On Saturday, Wikimedia France posted a press release regarding the recent deletion of a Wikipedia entry titled “Station hertzienne militaire de Pierre-sur-Haute.” According to the foundation, France's Homeland Intelligence agency had demanded “classified” information taken down from Wikipedia.fr, and when the Wikimedia Foundation (which hosts Wikipedia) refused, it allegedly sought out a volunteer systems operator with the power to delete articles, brought him to the agency's office, and demanded that he take the article down or face legal charges.
As French blog Numérama points out, the situation is the definition of the Streisand Effect.
The controversial entry has since been put back up online by Wikipedia volunteers; it concerns a military compound that's about 75 miles west of the French city of Lyon. The entry had existed on French-language Wikipedia for many years, but recently came to the attention of officials in France's Homeland Intelligence agency, known as the DCRI (Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur). Wikimedia France says the DCRI contacted the Wikimedia Foundation in early March, requesting that the article be taken down due to its divulging “classified military information.” But the foundation refused the DCRI's request.
”The Wikimedia Foundation considered that they did not have enough information and refused to grant their request.” the press release said. “The Wikimedia Foundation has often collaborated with public authorities to follow legal decisions. It receives hundreds of requests every year asking for the deletion of articles, and always complies with clearly motivated requests.” Numérama found that the information in the Pierre-sur-Haute entry “corresponds almost perfectly” to an earlier video interview given by the commander of the military compound to a journalist who had the right to be at the station. In other words, it's not immediately apparent what information could possibly have been classified.
In Wikipedia.fr's administrator forum, the volunteer in question posted on April 4 that he had deleted the entry because it had violated Article 413-11 of the French criminal code, which punishes possession or access to any “process, object, document, information, computer network, [or] computer data file” that contains information pertaining to secrets of national defense. “French police called me in as an administrator, following the refusal of the Wikimedia Foundation to remove this article,” the volunteer wrote.
The volunteer's post was short, but Wikipedia seems to have had more information from the volunteer on what happened before he deleted the information:
This volunteer, which was one of those having access to the tools that allow the deletion of pages, was forced to delete the article while in the DCRI offices, on the understanding that he would have been held in custody and prosecuted if he did not comply. Under pressure, he had no other choice than to delete the article, despite explaining to the DCRI this is not how Wikipedia works. He warned the other sysops that trying to undelete the article would engage their responsibility before the law. This volunteer had no link with that article, having never edited it and not even knowing of its existence before entering the DCRI offices. He was chosen and summoned because he was easily identifiable, given his regular promotional actions of Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in France.
Michelle Paulson, a legal counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, replied in the administrator forum early Friday, explaining the situation and telling admins that the Foundation would not prevent them from re-posting the information in question:
The Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur requested that we delete the article in its entirety under the claim that it contained classified military information. I responded to Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur, requesting more detailed information because it was not apparent what classified information the article could possibly contain from a plain reading of the article. The Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur repeatedly failed to provide any further information and simply continued to make a general takedown demand, despite my explanation that we could not remove the information without more information from them. Eventually, I had no choice but to refuse their request until they are willing to provide me with more information so that I can properly evaluate their claim under legal standards. The community remains free, of course, to retain or remove the article as it sees fit. But at this point, we do not see a demonstrated reason to remove it on legal grounds.
According to Wikiscan, which publishes statistics about Wikipedia.fr, the “Station hertzienne militaire de Pierre-sur-Haute” entry is currently the most-viewed page in french-language Wikipedia, broadly beating “The September 11th Attacks” and “Jérôme Cahuzac,” France's chief tax collector who is currently embroiled in a tax-dodging scandal. | {
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web 20190411T0721-25799-CNS-BENEDICT-ABUSE-ARTICLE.jpg Retired Pope Benedict XVI greets cardinals before a consistory for the creation of new cardinals in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican in this Feb. 22, 2014, file photo. (CNS/Paul Haring)
Vatican City — When Pope Benedict XVI shocked a meeting of cardinals Feb. 10, 2013, with news he would be renouncing the papacy at the end of that month, he promised that as the ex-pontiff he would retreat from the public eye and serve the Catholic Church "through a life dedicated to prayer." But by the third anniversary of his resignation, Benedict was taking on a more active role.
First came a March 2016 interview with a Belgian theologian that focused on the question of God's mercy, just as Pope Francis was in the midst of celebrating an Extraordinary Jubilee Year, also focused on mercy. In November 2016 came a book-length interview with German journalist Peter Seewald, where Benedict defended his 2005-13 papacy against criticism. "I do not see myself as a failure," he said in the book, titled Last Testament: In His Own Words. "For eight years I carried out my work." Now comes a letter blaming the continuing clergy abuse crisis on the sexual revolution and theological developments after the Second Vatican Council, weeks after Francis hosted a first-of-its-kind bishops' summit on abuse that focused instead on the endemic structural issues that have abetted cover-up in the church for decades. What to make of this development of a pope emeritus who emerges from the shadows unannounced from time to time to offer his comments on current affairs, or even on issues being handled by his reigning successor? A number of noted theologians and church historians are expressing serious concern that Benedict's choice to engage in such public action undermines Francis and plays into narratives splitting Catholics between two popes, one officially in power, and the other wielding influence as he writes from a small monastery in the Vatican Gardens. "Benedict told us he was going to live a life of quiet contemplation," said Christopher Bellitto, a historian who has written extensively on centuries of popes. "He has not. A former pope should not be publishing or giving interviews." Richard Gaillardetz, a theologian who focuses on the church's structures of authority, called the precedent being set by Benedict's latest letter "troubling." The former pontiff, said the theologian, is offering "a controversial analysis of a pressing pastoral and theological crisis, and a set of concrete pastoral remedies." "These are actions only appropriate for one who actually holds a pastoral office," said Gaillardetz, a professor at Boston College. "So now we have a situation in which a former pope is offering a parallel pastoral and theological assessment and a parallel pastoral and theological agenda that cannot help but be viewed as an alternative to the exercise pastoral leadership of the current and only bishop of Rome," he said.
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Even the Vatican appears to be struggling to understand what to do with a former pope who wants to engage in public debate. As Benedict's latest letter appeared on several right-wing Catholic websites overnight April 10, the Holy See Press Office seemed unprepared, unable even to respond to questions about whether the text was authentic. In fact it was Archbishop Georg Ganswein, Benedict's personal secretary, that confirmed for many journalists that the text was indeed from the former pontiff. "The institution of the pope emeritus in the age of mass media and of social media must be regulated carefully," said Massimo Faggioli, an Italian church historian and theologian who teaches at Villanova University. "This is something that must be done especially about the papal entourage," he said. "The Vatican is a Renaissance court and it is difficult enough to govern one court without having to deal with a 'shadow papal court' — which is what we have today." Gaillardetz and Bellitto, a professor of history at Kean University in New Jersey, both said Benedict's decision to continue wearing white after his resignation and to call himself the "pope emeritus," instead of some other title such as the "emeritus bishop of Rome," have not helped make clear that there is only one pope at a time. "These decisions have rather predictably fed deeply troubling 'two pope' theories," said Gaillardetz.
"The Vatican is a Renaissance court and it is difficult enough to govern one court without having to deal with a 'shadow papal court' — which is what we have today." — Massimo Faggioli Tweet this | {
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oh if they go once at home he may be buriedperfect idea | {
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There are plenty of reasons why the Ravens shouldn't win Saturday's divisional playoff game, from their nine-game losing streak to Peyton Manning to the fact that they lost to his Broncos by 17 points just four weeks ago.
But there is something working in the Ravens' favor -- the weather report. The high temperature forecast for Denver on Saturday is 20 degrees, with a 20 percent chance of snow.
It certainly won't be a home-field advantage for Broncos quarterback Manning, whose home in his 13 previous seasons was a climate-controlled dome in Indianapolis. He hasn't had to play in cold weather too often -- and he's struggled when he's had to do so.
Manning has never won a playoff game when the temperature at kickoff is below 40 degrees, losing in the postseason at New England (twice) and at the New York Jets. He threw one touchdown and seven interceptions in those games for a 46.2 passer rating, according to ESPN Stats & Information.
To adjust to the colder weather, Manning will wear an orange glove on his right hand, a decision that stems from his spinal-fusion surgery last year. The nerve damage has caused weakness in his right arm after the surgery, and the glove helps him improve his grip on the ball, especially in the severe cold weather.
In two games this season with the glove, Manning is 2-0, with six touchdowns and one interception.
"I certainly don't think I would have had to wear the glove if I hadn't been injured last year," Manning said. "It is part of my injury, and one of the things I've had to adjust. I've been pretty consistent in letting you guys know that all year long, that I'm in a different body, some things are different for me and I'll have to adjust. That's the reason for that, as much as anything."
The Ravens are more used to playing in these temperatures because they play in Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Cincinnati every year. Under coach John Harbaugh, the Ravens are 10-7 in games when the temperature is below 40 degrees at kickoff.
"We’d like to think that we’re a team built for all weather, for all conditions," Harbaugh said. "That’s something that we pride ourselves in, and we would like to think that we can go out there and perform well in those kinds of conditions.” | {
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Last week The Pirate Bay added a new IP-address which allows users to circumvent the many court-ordered blockades against the site. While this proved to be quite effective, the Hollywood backed anti-piracy group BREIN has already been to court to demand a block against this new address. But that won't deter The Pirate Bay, who say they are fully prepared for an extended game of whac-a-mole using the hundreds of IP addresses they have available.
The Pirate Bay is arguably the most censored website on the Internet.
Courts all around the world have ordered Internet providers to block subscriber access to the torrent site, and the end is still not in sight.
Within a few days, a new deadline for five UK and five Dutch Internet providers passes. This means that millions more will be unable to access The Pirate Bay, at least, that is the plan.
Last week The Pirate Bay team responded to the blockades by adding a new IP-address. The new location was setup to make it easier for people to start their own dedicated proxy sites, but it also allows blocked Pirate Bay visitors to gain access to the site.
Instead of the normal address they simply go to 194.71.107.80, bypassing the court order – for the time being at least.
The new IP-address represents a new thorn in the side of Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, who quickly asked ISPs to censor that too. Unfortunately for them the providers refused to do so, so the group had to go to court once again last week to get the added IP-address blocked as well.
Right before the weekend BREIN succeeded with the court ordering an ex-parte injunction for the new address. However, according to comments coming out of The Pirate Bay, this could just be the start of an extended game of whac-a-mole.
“Let me get the next IP-address lined up,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak. “We have hundreds, so let’s see many times they will respond,” he added.
We were told that if the new IP-address is blocked again, they will simply add a new one. This means that BREIN would have to file for another ex-parte injunction, a process that may repeat itself hundreds of times.
The Pirate Bay insider did emphasize that the new IP wasn’t meant for people to bypass the blocks directly, but to make it easier and more safe to create proxy sites. In this regard, it is irrelevant whether the IP-address is blocked or not.
However, it’s well known that The Pirate Bay isn’t averse to a little dueling with anti-piracy outfits, so they’re going to play along.
“Now that I know it’s annoying to BREIN, of course we’ll add more IPs. Every time they get an order, we’ll add a new one, for the next year or so,” TorrentFreak was told.
The result is an almost endless IP-address whac-a-mole.
The Pirate Bay blockades are a good example of how hard it is to completely get a website offline. Even if all Pirate Bay domains and IP-addresses are blocked there are plenty of other ways to access the torrent site, including hundreds of proxy sites.
At the same time, the blockades make The Pirate Bay front page news. As we’ve seen before, this can result in a healthy traffic boost for the deviant torrent site. That begs the question of whether these censorship attempts aren’t doing more ‘harm’ than ‘good’ for copyright holders. | {
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By Patricia Ardón and Orfe Castillo
“In the struggle to defend our territory, our natural resources, what’s at stake is our very existence.” – Miriam Pixtún, Indigenous Women’s Movement Tz ́ununijá
In Guatemala, the policy of enclaves and extraction of natural resources fomented by the current development model and by the transnational corporations has a tremendous impact on the life of the communities, particularly on indigenous peoples and women.
With the aim of sharing experiences and analysis among women who lead organizing in defense of rights to land, territory and natural resources in Guatemala, Sinergia No ́j, T ́zununijá, Just Associates (JASS), Uk ́Ux B ́e, Unit of Guatemalan Human Rights Defenders (UDEFEGUA), Association for Feminist Studies (AMEF) and the National Union of Guatemalan Women (UNAMG) held the national meeting “Women in Defense of of Water, Life and Territory” on Sept. 11-12, 2012. More than forty women from different parts of the country participated in the meeting.
“We resist due to the disadvantages of the megaprojects; the development that the companies offer just leaves more poverty, sickness, deaths–all kinds of problems. They use pesticides, strong chemical products. They pollute the water… our house are cracked, animals have died, now the corn doesn’t grow, it’s dried up. Water is scarce and polluted. What kind of development is this?” said one participant.
According to Carmen Lucía Pellecer, Co-Directora of Sinergia Noj, the forum enabled indigenous women to talk about experiences of resistance, the acts they carry out in their communities and in their daily lives. | {
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Philadelphia Eagles executive vice president of football operations Howie Roseman met with reporters for about 15 minutes at the NFL owners meeting in Orlando on Monday afternoon.
Roseman touched on a number of topics, which we’ll address in a separate post here on Bleeding Green Nation, but for now I just wanted to relay his comments about the ongoing Michael Bennett situation.
Q: How are you gathering more information?
ROSEMAN: Yeah, when we bring a player to Philadelphia, we do a lot of background on that player. We feel like we have the best security director in the National Football League. We’ve talked about Dom DiSandro a lot. We also speak to our players. We speak to people who are with this person. We do a lot of background on people. So, for us, fit is very important. Because obviously fit is a big reason why we won last year. We’re not doing anything where we’re doing it nonchalant. In terms of the information, we’re continuing to gather information as we get it. I think that more information will continue to come. Obviously there was a change in his representation over the last 48 hours. I don’t want to talk about an ongoing legal matter but just kind of giving you some background about where we were and how we do the process when we bring people in.
Q: Were you surprised?
ROSEMAN: I would say we did not know about it before Friday.
Q: Is that something that would typically be disclosed before a deal if it was known?
ROSEMAN: Yeah, I want to be clear. There’s probably not a person, and I’m going to put him on the same ground as a bunch of people, that we trust more than [Seattle general manager] John Schneider and the Seahawks. So there is nothing that we felt like they did wrong, or there is any blame in this matter. It’s a unique circumstance and we’ll deal with it as we go.
Q: Have you talked to Michael Bennett?
ROSEMAN: Yes, we have talked to Michael. We’re obviously in constant communication with our players when they’re going through things.
Q: If you had known about it, would you have made the trade?
Had I known about what? I don’t know … I think we’re in a great country. In this country, people are presumed innocent. I think we have to be fair about that and I don’t think it’s fair in any situation to not give people the right to present their side. I don’t want to get into this, but our overriding philosophy is people are innocent until proven guilty.
Q: What did you find out in your background work about Bennett?
ROSEMAN: A lot of what we do, and this starts with Coach Pederson, is we give our players ownership. We talk to our players about players we’re going to bring it. Whether that’s Michael Bennett, whether that’s Mike Wallace. And so we did that with a lot of our players. Players who have played with him, players who have been around him, and what we found is he’s a good teammate. They like playing with him. Some of our players have been with him in the Pro Bowl. Some of our players have trained with him. We rely on information like that. Obviously he came to our facility and we had a chance to sit down with him and talk to him. Again, we have great relationships with teams when we make trades. We’re very transparent about the players we trade to other teams, good and bad. It’s the same thing that goes on in this league. Because you’re talking about people — we’re dealing with these same teams. It’s not like we’re dealing with 150 different teams. We’re dealing with the same people over and over again. I think that’s one of the good things about the fraternity in the National Football League.
Q: Did you ask him why you didn’t learn about this until Friday?
ROSEMAN: Yeah, I don’t want to go into specific conservations with our players about anything. I think that’s an important part of our relationship.
Q: What was your reaction?
ROSEMAN: I don’t really remember my specific reaction to anything. I remember my reaction when we won the Super Bowl. The 13 seconds to go wasn’t a good look for me. I wish they showed me after the 13 seconds.
Q: Is there any kind of recourse in situations —
I’m done talking about the Michael Bennett situation at this time.
Some quick thoughts on Roseman’s comments:
Roseman confirmed reports indicating the Eagles and the Seahawks didn’t know about the Bennett situation prior to the news being revealed on Friday.
Roseman really wanted to illustrate they legitimately did their homework on him by detailing their background check process.
Roseman’s comment about Bennett being innocent until proven guilty indicates they’re standing by him.
More coverage on Roseman’s non-Bennett comments and Bennett’s surrender to Houston police coming soon on BGN. | {
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Deputații clujeni Horia Nasra și Cornel Itu, care săptămâna trecută plecaseră din PSD în Pro România, au revenit în PSD, scrie publicația Actual de Cluj.
Cei doi s-au reînscris în partid, în organizația locală din Cluj.
Potrivit informațiilor G4Media.ro, întoarcerea lui Nasra și Itu ar veni la pachet cu înlăturarea lui Liviu Alexa de la șefia PSD Cluj, după ce Viorica Dăncilă a fost extrem de nemulțumită de scandalurile provocate de acesta în intervalul scurt de timp în care a condus organizația.
Horia Nasra a anunțat pe Facebook decizia de a reveni în PSD:
Stimați clujeni, dragi colegi,
Astăzi m-am întors acasă, în PSD Cluj.
Partidul în care am crescut și în care mi-am petrecut tinerețea are nevoie de mine și este de datoria mea să fiu alături de colegii și prietenii mei.
Nu am semnat textul moțiunii și nu o voi vota, la fel și colegul meu, dl. Cornel Itu. Am fost, suntem și vom fi oameni de stânga și nu putem vota această elucubrație liberală!
Nu pot gira venirea la putere a liberalilor care își propun tăieri salariale, disponibilizări în masă în sectorul bugetar și înghețarea proiectelor de dezvoltare ale comunităților locale, finanțate prin PNDL sau FDI.
Cât privește moțiunea, nu calculul bilelor mă interesează, ci faptul că astăzi PSD are nevoie de toți parlamentarii săi, de toți cei care în 2016 au fost aleși de cetățeni sub sigla PSD!
Nefericita eroare, nominalizarea noii conduceri a PSD Cluj, poate fi îndreptată. Sunt convins că există sute de social-democrați cu vechime în organizație care pot reprezenta cu onoare clujenii și capitala Transilvaniei, nu un individ care jignește clujenii, românii, înjură jurnaliștii și amenință colegii și aleșii locali.
Sper ca în viitor cele două partide de stânga, PSD și Pro România să gândească un proiect politic comun, pentru că ambele formațiuni împărtășesc valori social-democrate.
Joi voi fi alături de colegii mei, deputații din Grupul parlamentar al Partidului Social Democrat și îmi voi relua activitatea politică în Cluj având în vedere campania electorală. | {
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DC Comics has shared with Comicosity its EXCLUSIVE preview for next week’s Batman: White Knight #6 from Sean Gordon Murphy. Scroll down to view the full-sized preview images.
BATMAN: WHITE KNIGHT #6
Written by Sean Gordon Murphy
Art by Sean Gordon Murphy, Matt Hollingsworth, and Todd Klein
Edited by Maggie Howell and Mark Doyle
Published by DC Comics
Release Date: March 7, 2018
Gotham City’s strongest alliance comes to an end when Gordon’s trust in Batman reaches its limit. On the verge of resignation, the commissioner attempts a final act of public service, but an unlikely intervention allows the Dark Knight to fight another day. Meanwhile, Jack’s mission takes a hit when his pills lose effect—and under cover of all this chaos, Neo Joker is positioned to take the city hostage.
Images courtesy DC Comics. | {
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Jamal Murray and Gary Harris were an elite tandem in the Nuggets’ backcourt last season, showcasing a unique blend of stylish and gritty play. Bleacher Report is looking forward to what the young duo can do in its fourth season and ranked the pair No. 5 in their NBA backcourt ratings, heading into 2019-20.
Here’s what the national outlet had to say about the Nuggets starting guards:
“In three years together, the Nuggets have won 57 percent of their games with Murray and Harris, and they earned a No. 2 seed in the Western Conference with 54 wins last season.
Despite already being this successful, Murray is still just 22, and Harris only recently turned 25. Murray is under contract for the next six seasons; Harris for three. The Nuggets will have both on deals until they each turn 28, at least.
Together, this backcourt seems like a younger version of the Portland Trail Blazers' duo of Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum. Both are already proven winners and lethal scorers, and they continue to fly under the radar.
Given their trajectory, they should settle in as a top-five backcourt for years to come.”
And that’s not even mentioning the Nuggets’ two exciting reserve guards Monte Morris and Malik Beasley. It will be interesting to see the strides the group makes in the 2019-20 season. To see the full B/R rankings click here. | {
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An FDIC consent order with SpiritBank also shows that in 2012 the bank agreed to several improvements to its practices that had come under scrutiny, including loans to bank executive officers, directors, and principal shareholders.
As The Intercept reported in December , Kelly was the chair of SpiritBank in Bristow, Oklahoma, until he was banned for life from the banking industry by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Kelly, or “Kell” as he’s known by his friends, had provided several loans to Pruitt, including mortgages and funding for his share of a Triple-A baseball team, the Oklahoma City RedHawks. While Kelly was its chairman, SpiritBank became financially unstable and unable to pay back most of $30 million it received from the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Albert Kelly, a senior adviser to Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency, resigned Tuesday. Kelly, who was overseeing the agency’s Superfund program, left amid questions about his banking career. Pasquale “Nino” Perrotta, Pruitt’s head of security, also abruptly resigned, leading many to question whether Pruitt would be next.
In addition to making loans to Pruitt, SpiritBank has loaned money to Kenneth Wagner, another senior adviser at the EPA. Wagner, who also hails from Oklahoma and is a longtime business associate of Pruitt, received four mortgages from SpiritBank. SpiritBank also financed Pruitt’s and Wagner’s purchase of an Oklahoma City home from a lobbyist, according to the New York Times.
The FDIC declined to explain exactly why Kelly was banned from banking. In January, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., asked Kelly to explain the reasons for the ban, and last week, Reps. Don Beyer and Gerry Connolly, both Democrats from Virginia, also asked for an investigation of Kelly.
When asked, during a House hearing last week, why Kelly was banned from banking, Pruitt said, “I’m not standing in the way of Kelly providing that information. I would encourage him to do so.”
Instead of providing the information, Kelly resigned. In an EPA statement on Kelly’s departure, Pruitt said, “Kell has served in a way that puts the needs of the American people and communities first, while respecting the work committed to by responsible parties. He has helped EPA professionals find solutions to moving languished sites down the path to clean up including San Jacinto in Texas, Portland Harbor in Oregon, and West Lake in St. Louis.”
Pruitt’s statement went on to say that Kelly’s “role will be greatly augmented by Peter Wright, who has been nominated as the Associate Administrator in the Office of Land and Emergency Management.” Wright, now managing counsel at DowDupont, is awaiting a confirmation hearing.
Kelly was always an odd choice to run the Superfund program. A banker with a law degree and a cattle ranch, he had no previous experience with environmental issues. Kelly has a stake in several businesses, including a steel company with which Wagner was affiliated as of August 2017.
And even while he oversaw the federal program that remediates some of the country’s most polluted sites, Kelly’s current investments include three companies associated with Superfund sites — ConocoPhillips, Lockheed Martin, and Phillips 66 — according to his financial disclosure form. Kelly had also leased some of his land for oil and gas production.
Though Kelly has yet to explain his ban from banking, he has reportedly listed some of his reasons for leaving the EPA — including that he was sick of being questioned about the FDIC ban and that he didn’t need the job. Kelly certainly didn’t need the salary. According to his financial disclosure form, he has millions of dollars in assets and holdings. And, though he can’t return to his last profession, he has plenty of property in Oklahoma.
In April, 64 House Democrats called on Trump to fire Pruitt. “A man under numerous investigations both for ethical concerns and wasteful spending, who has actively moved to undermine environmental rules and regulations at industry request, is antithetical to the job of EPA Administrator.”
Today, Beyer again called for Pruitt’s resignation. | {
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The ketchup one still grosses me out. Work this week was a hot mess my friends, so have some oldies but goodies! Good news is I’m using this time to create a little bit of a backlog, so hopefully I’ll be a few weeks ahead.
Like the comic? Support it on Patreon! | {
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America is becoming a cruder place, which is causing a fainting fit at the newspaper of record. “Mr. Trump’s coarse discourse increasingly seems to inspire opponents to respond with vituperative words of their own,” Peter Baker and Katie Rogers write in The New York Times. “Whether it be Robert De Niro’s four-letter condemnation at the Tony Awards or a congressional intern who shouted the same word at Mr. Trump when he visited the Capitol this week, the president has generated so much anger among his foes that some are crossing boundaries that he himself shattered long ago.”
The Times article rests on a strange conflation of civility (which is about obeying conventional rules of decorum) with morality. The article notes that Trump won political success as a candidate through his incendiary rhetoric, adding, “Any expectation that he would put the harsh language aside to become more of a moral leader as president has proved illusory.”
But surely Trump’s failure as a “moral leader” have much more to do with his actual policies (such as family separation) than his crude vocabulary. After all, referring to Senator Bob Corker as a “lightweight” (one of the offences that rankles the Times) is mildly impolite. Tearing babies away from their mothers, on the other hand, is truly obscene.
Civility is a set of conventions. Sometimes those conventions lose their meaning and need to be modified or abandoned. The Times article itself illustrates this truth. Part of the Times’ own version of civility is the pose of distance from the competing sides of partisan politics. Thus the Times article argues “both sides” are to blame for the decline of civility.
But to maintain this stance of pseudo-balance, the Times has to draw strained equivalencies. Statements by Trump are equated with comments and actions by celebrities (De Niro, Peter Fonda, Kathy Griffin) and the swearing of a congressional page. The Times’ own code of civility prevents it from properly noting that to the extent civility is in crisis, it’s an issue with only one major political figure. If the Times really wants to defend civility, they need to realize their own codified rules of blaming both sides are out of date. | {
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NORTH CHARLESTON, SC—Saying it had been mulling over the “fun little side project” for a while, an Electroimpact Quadbot reportedly put in some extra work after hours at the Boeing assembly plant Wednesday to try out a few of its own original designs. “It’s just something I like to tinker around with after I wrap up all my regular tasks for the day—plus, nobody here seems to mind since they were planning to throw out most of the scraps I use anyway,” said the four-armed, 30,000-pound robot, adding that the uninterrupted quiet time allowed it to experiment with various techniques and contemplate design problems more clearly and creatively than it could during business hours. “It’s a nice way to unwind after a 19-hour shift of drilling, applying sealant, and inserting fasteners into aft sections 47 and 48. Kind of helps me approach my craft in an unconventional way, you know?” The Quadbot added that it hadn’t told any of its four identical coworkers about the project, instead preferring to surprise them once the prototype was fully functional.
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Shirley Ardell Mason, also known as Sybil Dorsett, was an American artist.
And a sophisticated young French girl.
And a nameless perpetual teenager.
And a talented musician.
And an emotional writer.
And a male carpenter.
Shirley Ardell Mason was a psychiatric patient reputed to have dissociative identity disorder, with 16 different identities.
As people can show multiple personalities, the Microsoft researcher John R. Douceur claims, in his famous article, that the same is also true in distributed systems:
We argue that it is practically impossible, in a distributed computing environment, […] to present convincingly distinct identities. With no logically central, trusted authority to vouch for a one-to-one correspondence between entity and identity, it is always possible for an unfamiliar entity to present more than one identity […].
Douceur refers to the action of emulating multiple identities as a Sybil attack.
In IOTA, nodes form a distributed computing environment. With Coordicide, identities are assigned to nodes in order to vote or to gain network access. As such, nodes become subject to Sybil attacks. An effective way to protect against the proliferation of counterfeit identities is the so-called resource testing, where a node must prove the ownership of difficult-to-obtain resources. In the field of distributed ledgers, nodes are required either to prove the usage of their computational power (e.g., Proof of Work) or the ownership of certain collateral (recently, other techniques are investigating how to exploit different resources such as disk space, bandwidth or time).
Due to the presence of IoT devices, we believe that fighting Sybils purely based on nodes’ computational capabilities would prevent low power nodes from accessing the network. For this reason, we have introduced mana as the main component of the IOTA’s Sybil protection mechanism.
IOTA’s Sybil protection mechanism is based on mana.
As we can see from the figure above, mana is a shadow of tokens transferred from A to B by a particular node. Such a node gets an amount of mana equivalent to the tokens transferred. Moreover, note that mana is not a token (that can be traded) but it is linked to the tokens owned. More details about mana can be found in our Coordicide white paper. The usage of mana can apply to several components:
Auto peering : nodes with similar mana will peer with each other to reduce the possibility of node isolation (eclipse attacks);
: nodes with similar mana will peer with each other to reduce the possibility of node isolation (eclipse attacks); Rate control : network access is guaranteed according to the mana owned;
: network access is guaranteed according to the mana owned; Consensus protocol: in voting protocols, votes are weighted by mana.
Application of mana to spam prevention algorithm: a high mana holder (on the right) is allowed to issue a large number of transactions.
It is important to mention that micro or data transactions bring low (if no) addition to mana of the issuing node. In this scenario, it could be beneficial to somehow measure the help nodes bring to the network (e.g., issuing and gossiping transactions, participating in voting). In conclusion, mana is only one reputation indicator. Depending on the use case, additional components may become necessary such as benefits to participate in the network activity (see above) or penalties to malicious behaviors (e.g., spam attacks).
Coherently with the IOTA philosophy, we are building a Sybil protection for Coordicide in which good behaviors get rewards, while harmful ones are penalized. While the idea is voluntarily kept simple to avoid potential attack vectors, our approach can indeed be considered as an effective solution, and will soon be implemented in GoShimmer.
If you have questions or you would like to engage directly with us, please join our official Discord Server. | {
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The Pentagon’s latest military technology could make warfare feel more like a first person shooter video game. Newly unveiled Tactical Augmented Reality headsets aim to give soldiers “situational awareness,” making it possible to map and locate targets or talk to fellow troops.
During last week’s Pentagon Lab Day in Washington, DC, the Army's Communications Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC) and Army Research Lab (ARL) demonstrated the current prototype of their Tactical Augmented Reality (TAR) heads-up display that would give soldiers "situational awareness" on the battlefield.
The technology adds artificial elements such as icons and graphics on top of what a soldier would normally see and provides them with real-time information such as maps, navigation and the locations of enemies and friendly units, all through the Heads Up Navigation, Tracking and Reporting (HUNTR) system.
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The Army hopes the technology will increase a soldier’s ability to maneuver the battlefield more effectively and hopefully save lives.
Richard Nabors, an associate for strategic planning at US Army Research, says TAR will eventually replace a soldier’s standard GPS and night vision devices.
Currently, a soldier’s GPS only works if the device is geo-registered to their location. Geo-registration aligns the soldier with their environment which the TAR software does the automatically, Nabors said.
Staff Sgt. Ronald Geer, a counterterrorism non-commissioned officer at CERDEC's Night Vision and Electronics Sensors Directorate, said TAR will also replace a soldier’s night vision goggles so soldiers will no longer need to look down at their GPS device.
The system uses an eyepiece in the soldier’s helmet, which means that TAR can be used in the day or the night, without requiring the soldier to make any adjustments.
In addition, the HUNTR system has an eyepiece connected to a soldier’s weapon, which allows them to see an image of what the gun is pointing at. Sensors in the system would provide the soldier with additional details, such as the distance of the target. Those images can then be sent to other members of their team through a wireless system.
The eyepiece is also designed to be split screen – so a soldier could point their gun in the opposite direction they are walking and see behind himself, or, a soldier could point their gun around a corner to see what is on the other side without exposing themselves, Geer said.
The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), CERDEC and ARL have all been trying to develop the technology behind the HUNTR system since the 1980s.
In 1991, a program called Land Warrior emerged when an Army study group recommended the service “look at the soldier as a complete weapon system.” They were awarded a contract and built a system that allowed commanders to track where troops were in real time.
However, the cost of 40 pounds of extra gear skyrocketed past $85,000 per soldier and the program was canceled in 2007.
The program was only saved when the Army began using off the shelf commercial products such as Google Glasses and smart phones which brought the price down. That project, known as the Nett Warrior, was also canceled but each subsequent project gave the Army a platform to continue working on the system that was unveiled last week.
David Fellowes, an electronics engineer at CERDEC, said the latest big challenge was making a high-definition image small enough to fit into a soldier’s eyepiece. They finally made the breakthrough in 2010, when they were able to compress the image to a one-inch square, but only in black-and-white or monochrome. Those versions have been field tested, Fellowes said.
CERDEC is currently working on more advanced versions that are in full color and with augmented images that are visible in daylight. A 2015 presentation from CERDEC shows they have been using a software package known as the ARC 4.
The ARC technology provides soldiers with a compass that shows points of interest along with their distance. Soldiers are able to send each other text messages or create markers that are automatically displayed on their team’s headsets.
Fellows said that TAR’s will “provide Soldiers with a much higher level of situational awareness than they currently have,” adding, that he “fully expects that the devices will save lives and contribute to mission success.” | {
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Some of the country’s most eminent linguists came together for English Grammar Day, presented by UCL and Oxford University in association with the British Library, last week. With talks from grammarians including David Crystal and Dick Hudson, the event served as a crash course in the history, prevalence and importance of grammar. The main focus, however, was on the problems with how grammar is taught in schools.
How things have to improve was made clear: we need to embrace grammar, teach it in context and uphold its importance within the education system. One answer is to call it something else. Lindsey Thomas, school improvement consultant at Buckinghamshire Learning Trust, suggested that teachers replace the word “grammar” with “understanding language”.
Using the word “grammar”, she said, can conjure off-putting images of an old-fashioned classroom. It makes it sound like a secret you’re not let in on, and has associations of “right” or “wrong”. On the other hand, “understanding” or “knowledge about language” make it sound more positive.
Crystal said: “You have to put the notion of grammar in the background. It’s about meaning and clarity. Clarity unites us. I’m not afraid to use the word grammar, but I can see why people would be.”
It’s not just grammar’s name that’s the problem. In addition to its unshakeable, unhelpful reputation, there are deeper issues. The government’s Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar (SPaG) tests were repeatedly mentioned as the main barrier to children’s learning, and Crystal was probably the most vehement in his criticism.
“Grammar needs context,” he said. “With the new SPaG tests children get marks for underlining a noun. It seems like all the fresh thinking has gone and the clocks have been turned back. There’s no room for creativity with the SPaG tests because they’re about identifying, not understanding.”
Crystal said the work being done in classrooms across the UK to tackle such problems, and the people behind it, had shaped his own outlook and approach towards teaching grammar. He says it’s all about involving children in enjoyable grammar exercises, showing them, and asking them “why” and “what if?”
He has been working with Thomas on the Buckinghamshire Grammar Project. “I don’t understand why this sort of thing isn’t happening in more schools,” he said. His sentence trailed off with the word “expensive”.
There may be a glimmer of hope in the curriculum. Hudson, who is the government’s adviser on grammar for the SPaG test, said the 2016 version would be “very different”. This was all he would say on the matter, but I’m hopeful that, in this instance, different could mean better.
Even if the tests don’t improve, there’s no knowing how far the prevailing force of the grammarians will reach. They are leading the way, armed with expertise and conviction, and getting into classrooms to teach grammar in contextualised and engaging ways.
As well as the influence of grammarians, children also have the grammar renaissance on their side. Hudson said: “In the 60s, a day like today would be unimaginable. But it’s very different now. It’s a big issue and it’s an exciting time for grammar. Grammar is old, international and big. It isn’t a peculiarity of a few people who think it’s a good idea.
“Between 1920 and 1960, English grammar disappeared from the curriculum of most schools in England. There was no research being done on grammar. Since the 1960s it has been gradually reintroduced, and now, once again, has a central place in the curriculum.”
It all sounds promising for pupils, but this made me think about my generation of twentysomethings. Typical self-obsessed Gen Y, I know, but I’ve sensed a distinct lack of interest in grammar among my age group.
David Crystal says I am part of the “last of a lost generation” who didn’t learn proper grammar. But with the UK now emerging from this grammar lull, a detritus of lingering grammar myths and unconfident “lost generation” teachers are left behind. This combination isn’t conducive to children learning grammar, and often means teachers are unwittingly teaching incorrect things.
With this in mind, I asked Crystal if there is any hope for my “lost” generation. He said all we can do to improve our grammar is attend events like Grammar Day. It was only afterwards that I wondered why he hadn’t suggested reading books – especially as he’d just been signing copies of his own.
Cantshutitup.blogspot.com | {
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A middle-aged man was spotted last week cross-dressing on Line 2 of the Shanghai Metro. The man was photographed by onlookers wearing a form-fitting pink shirt and a pair of nude pantyhose, revealing a red thong and his bulging “package” in the front. We’re not exactly sure what the contents of said package are.
Don’t let the dainty pearl necklace fool you—as netizens pointed out, the passenger didn’t sit in a very “lady-like” manner. The man casually read a book with his legs spread apart and his thingy (for honest lack of a better term) on full display.
Most shocking of all, however, was his attempt to pull off sandals with socks.
Just another day on the Shanghai Metro.
By Crystal Lau
[Images via tiexue.net]
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“We’re not talking about the truth; we’re talking about something that seems like truth – the truth we want to exist.”
That was how comedian Stephen Colbert explained “truthiness”, the term he coined in 2005 to refer to “truth that comes from the gut, not books”.
Last year, when Oxford Dictionaries declared “post-truth” its word of the year, Colbert returned in character to denounce what he called “clearly a rip off”.
The Trump administration has embraced truthiness with gusto: think of Kellyanne Conway’s enthusiasm for “alternative facts” about the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd.
But what, though, do we make of the liberal response to Michael Wolff’s new Trump book Fire and Fury?
In a review for Fairfax, Matthew Knott acknowledges that some of Wolff’s stories are probably apocryphal and other incidents have been flatly denied by supposed participants. But then comes this:
One suspects, though, that many readers will forgive any such errors. The book confirms their worst fears about the Trump presidency: it feels truthful, if not always factual.
Does that not sound very similar to “truth from the gut”?
“Do not be distracted,” writes Matthew D’Ancona, “by those who are scouring the book for minor errors. The big story is what matters, and Wolff has nailed it.”
Yes, every text contains mistakes and generally those incidental snafus don’t matter. Yet Fire and Fury offers a fly-on-the-wall perspective on the Trump administration, with novelistic descriptions of encounters between the main players. Wolff says he conducted extensive interviews but gives no specific sourcing for the verbatim dialogue he presents.
In that context, “minor errors” in the checkable material take on considerable importance when we come to stuff we must take on trust.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We’re talking about a book that’s not merely unflattering about Trump but one that describes a president so intellectually feeble that we expect to read that Jared Kushner waters him daily.
For perfectly understandable reasons, much of the world despises Donald Trump. But that loathing means we should be more, not less, suspicious of claims that accord with our prejudices.
Just as excerpts from Fire and Fury began to circulate, the cartoonist Ben Ward (@pixellatedboat) tweeted what looked like an extract from the book. It described the desperate efforts of Trump’s flunkies to provide a dedicated “gorilla channel” at the White House so that the president could watch hours of the primates fighting. The passage concluded:
“On some days he’ll watch the gorilla channel for 17 hours straight,” an insider told me. “He kneels in front of the TV, with his face about four inches from the screen, and says encouraging things to the gorillas, like ‘the way you hit that other gorilla was good.’ I think he thinks the gorillas can hear him.”
The tweet duly went viral, reposted thousands of times by astonished social media users, including a remarkable number of journalists. The gorilla channel felt truthful, even if it wasn’t factual.
Remember, Colbert presented “truthiness” as a response to the bluster with which Bush and his handlers manoeuvred America into the Iraq quagmire. Back then, progressives espoused a Gradgrindish enthusiasm for the facts.
If you didn’t watch Fox News, you boasted about your membership of “the reality-based community”, in a nod to an infamous quote given to the New York Times’ Ron Suskind by a White House aide.
The weaponised duplicity of the Bush crew duly gave rise to a liberal passion for the so-called fact-checking units that proliferated briefly everywhere. In the 2013 Australian election, for instance, voters could check the candidates’ utterances via dedicated fact check units run by the ABC, the Conversation and Crikey, as well as at a local incarnation of PolitiFact.
In 2014, I suggested that the “just the facts” fad wouldn’t achieve its implicit goal of effectively adjudicating debates, since the media no longer enjoyed sufficient authority to act as a kind of political umpire. That era’s gone – and it’s not coming back any time soon.
But that doesn’t make the current outbreak of progressive truthiness any less dangerous. Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen growing chatter about how the president’s mental health warrants some kind of medical intervention – a discourse that supplements an earlier insistence that he should and would be removed as a Russian spy.
This stuff is a wish-fulfilment fantasy for progressives and an obstacle to any real movement for change.
Trump remains what he’s always been: a walking, talking embodiment of resentments and entitlements. He’s not a Russian agent, he’s a Fox News segment brought to life by decades of culture war.
It’s hard to think of anyone for whom a psychological assessment would be less useful than the current president, a man who’s all surface and no depth. With Trump, what you see is what you get.
In that context, as Slate’s Yascha Mounk says, applying the 25th amendment to remove “a president who appears to be operating much the way he has publicly done for many decades would amount to staging a judicial coup”.
And, no, a judicial coup would not be a good thing, even if it took Trump out of the picture.
It’s not simply that Mike Pence, the man who’d become president, is himself a dangerous ideologue. It’s also that undemocratic means do not bring about democratic ends. Fairly obviously, the use of psychiatric diagnosis to bring down an elected leader would set a disastrous precedent.
That Trump can be magically dethroned might be a truth that we want to exist – but that doesn’t make it true. Instead of truthy fantasies, we need to face reality.
A huge popular constituency exists for an anti-Trump campaign. All over the world, this president is loathed not just because of his personality but because of everything he represents. Rather than imagining a shortcut by which Trump might be removed, or obsessing about insider gossip, we need to mobilise ordinary people in defence of a better world – and that means a rapid change of emphasis. | {
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A spy photographer has come across a fleet of all-electric Chevy Bolts in San Francisco today that appear to be equipped with arrays of self-driving sensors, a sign that GM is already testing the electric cars that could be ferrying Lyft passengers around without drivers sometime in the next year.
These aren't just any self-driving Bolts, though: behind the wheel of one of the cars is Kyle Vogt, co-founder of Cruise Automation, which GM recently acquired for a reported $1 billion. You might think that Vogt would be taking it easy after a transaction of that magnitude, but he's apparently still active and engaged with the company — at least in real-world testing.
GM has made no secret of the fact that it sees autonomous driving as a big part of its future, especially in ride-sharing fleets like Lyft's, where the company recently made a $500 million investment. In particular, company executives have singled out the Bolt as a vehicle that's well suited to ride- and car-sharing use, but the vehicle that it has shown so far — the one we drove at CES earlier this year — isn't equipped with self-driving sensors. It looks like Cruise Automation's team is ready to change that.
GM declined to comment for this story.
Chevy Bolt: An affordable electric car | {
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It’s better to automate something rather than to burn precious time of doing it yourself. WordPress users can relate to this thing very easily as they have a very special life-saving gift known as “Plugins”. WordPress plugins not only simplify our tasks but also increases the working efficiency.
As there are so many plugins available over the Internet, it becomes confusing to decide which plugin to go for and which one to use i.e free one or the paid one to have better features and more functionality. It becomes important to conduct free WordPress plugin check.
As we all know the fact that the paid plugins have better services and prompt support facility. On the other hand, if we are going to download a free plugin than it’s become important to consider a few aspects before downloading it.
Both the free and the paid plugins come with their own pros and cons. On one hand, where paid plugin comes with prior support, and on the other hand you may have to wait a while to get your problem solved. As sometimes all of the free plugins are not that reliable as we thought and on the other side of the coin, most of the paid plugins are more reliable but yes, not all the times.
Before we dive into comprehensive plugin checklist, let’s have a look these WordPress plugins affect your site’s performance and overall load time of the site. To mind the site’s load time is the most prominent thing as the search engines are more focusing on the site’s performance to rank in the search results.
How WordPress plugins affect site’s load time?
Every plugin comes with a different set of functionality. To perform multiple operations, plugins run several operations which utilise a website’s resources to accomplish the functionality successfully. WordPress plugins leverage and impose extra resource such as CSS stylesheets, JavaScript files, images, etc.
When the plugins make database queries and try to access these queries eventually site’s load time. Many plugins make the HTTP request to load assets like scripts, CSS, and images. As many requests the plugins will make, the site load time will increase with it.
That’s why it is recommended to remove all the un-used plugins to improve the performance of the site.
How to check files created & used by WordPress plugins
If you want to check how many files are being loaded when your website reloads, then there are so many tools you can use to check this. Or you can simply use the built-in feature of your browser. Just right click and select the Inspect option. After this, navigate to the Network option.
Here you will see all the processes and resources are being reloaded again and again as you reload the website. After paying attention to this stats, you will understand why your site is loading slow or loading fast.
Do you need all that plugins?
You need to rethink about this, do you really need all the plugins that you have installed on your site from months or from some years. Just cut the plugins out which you are not using any more. It will not only improve your site’s performance but it will also keep the site clutter-free and free from bugs.
Quick checklist for free plugins
In this blog let’s figure out how to check that “a free plugin is worth downloading or not”. There are many things from which you can easily decide whether you should download a free plugin or not. Here is quick Free WordPress Plugin Check List:
Check it’s compatibility
Sometimes when you download a free plugin and install it on your site, the plugin doesn’t work or works abruptly. So to avoid such situation it’s very necessary to check the WordPress version compatibility of the plugin.
If the plugin is only tested up to only version 4.4 then it will not work properly on the latest WordPress version 4.9.8. Always check the version of WordPress up to which the plugin is compatible.
Check it’s last updated date
Always check on which date the last update was rolled out for the plugin. The latest version you get, better the performance you expect. The benefit of using the latest version is that you will experience a lag free functioning. If the plugin is having a fresh update may be a month ago than it is good to download. And if it is updated before a couple of months or more than you should reconsider whether you should download it or not.
It’s not the case that older plugins don’t work perfectly. Depending on for what purpose you are installing the plugin and what performance you need to get your work done efficiently the last update criteria matters. It also shows the sincerity of the developer, how seriously they look after the maintenance of plugin. So it’s good to check the plugin’s last updated date.
Check for the download counts and reviews
It is the simplest way to check the popularity and the authority of the plugin you are going to download. The number of downloads and reviews for the plugin will give you a pretty good idea about how useful and popular the plugin is. If the plugin is having few thousands of downloads then it can be considered as a good plugin.
Also, check the rating of the plugin just to have some kind of social proof before downloading it. By taking these things into consideration you can be very sure about what you are downloading.
Google it!!
To check the popularity of the plugin just Google it and it will show you the most relevant results about it. By simply Google you will have all the reviews posted on wordpress.org. As WordPress maintains good data of every theme and plugin they have on their site. That way you will have a good idea about it by doing a simple Google search.
User Reviews
Simply go to Google and hit the name of the plugin you want to check, other than WordPress, you will also get the plugin review on many other sites. By doing this. you have a pretty good idea regarding the product. You can also check the comments of users in the community forum.
Responsive or not
If the plugin is for some sort of designing purpose then it becomes necessary to check responsiveness. Suppose if you download a plugin which is for managing the image optimization for better compatibility and if the plugin is not responsive that it is of no use. So before downloading a plugin like this make sure you are downloading the responsive one.
Proper Documentation
Documentation is very prominent if we are installing some software for the first time. Or when we are a newbie to something. No matter free or paid plugin you are using, it should come with documentation.
A complete documentation includes installation steps, basic troubleshooting guides and other important legitimate details regarding the product and the company.
Conclusion for free WordPress plugin check
As from above checklist you can easily decide which plugin to download which will give sheer performance. A good plugin also helps in boosting On Page Optimization. and better productivity to save more time.
Download a perfect plugin which gets perfectly works for your requirement. As the free plugin comes with its own pros and cons, it’s a good idea to do a free WordPress plugin check. If you are doing some really important work in which an accident is unavoidable due to some third-party plugin. In this case, you should go for the Pro version.
The reason for jumping to the Pro version is that with pro version, the company provides prior support round the clock to resolve any kind of issue. If you are stuck in between some problem and need support then, only pro version of the plugin will offer you the fast solution. On the other hand, free plugins also provide support but don’t expect priority.
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