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On Saturday, Hamill shared audio of himself reading the tweets Trump aimed at Meryl Streep after she was critical of him in her Golden Globes speech, which became the most buzz-about moment from Sunday's awards show. Trump referred to Streep as "one of most over-rated actresses in Hollywood" and as a "Hillary lover," after she blasted him for a campaign rally at which Trump allegedly mocked New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski.
It's worth noting that ahead of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story's release in December, screenwriters Chris Weitz and Gary Whitta faced a backlash for protesting Trump on Twitter. Eventually, Alt-right protesters created the hashtag #DumpStarWars, though the film went on to earn big at the box office. (Disney CEO Bob Iger insisted Rogue One had no political message.) So far, there has not been a similar, organized backlash to Hamill's trolling of Trump.
Here's the audio:
Am I the ONLY one man enough to confront this #OverratedFlunkyLoser without resorting to an ad hominem assault? https://t.co/ac2j2KGryn pic.twitter.com/iH1XnPgOzm — Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) January 14, 2017
For the record, Trump told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015 that Streep was an "excellent" actress. If you missed it, here's Streep's speech: | {
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Get Season Tickets | Seating Map | 2018 Schedule
Several Illinois football game times were announced by the Big Ten Conference on Thursday, including Illinois' 108th Homecoming game, the Windy City Series at Soldier Field and a pair of primetime matchups.
Of the six Fighting Illini game times announced, two are in primetime, two are slated for afternoon kicks, and two will be at 11 am CT.
Sept. 1 » Illinois vs. Kent State (11 am CT, BTN)
Sept. 8 » Illinois vs. Western Illinois (6:30 pm CT, BTN)
Sept. 15 » Illinois vs. USF at Soldier Field (2:30 pm CT, BTN)
Sept. 21 » Illinois vs. Penn State (8 pm CT, FS1)
Oct. 13 » Illinois Homecoming vs. Purdue (2:30 or 3 pm CT, TV TBD)
Oct. 20 » Illinois at Wisconsin (11 am CT, TV TBD)
Start times and broadcast information for the six remaining 2018 football games likely will be determined on the customary 6- or 12-day advance notice during the season.
TICKETS
The Fighting Illini begin the 2018 season against Kent State on Saturday, Sept. 1, the first of six home games at Memorial Stadium. Mini-plans and season tickets, starting at only $119, and are on sale now online or by calling 1-866-ILLINI-1. Limited seats are still available in the Horseshoe seating area in the south end zone, as well as I Fund Family 4-Packs and $99 Touchdown Mobile Passes. Single-game tickets will go on sale June 20.
OPTIONS » Season Tickets | Mobile Pass | I FUND 4-Pack | 2 & 3 Game Mini-Plans
GRANGE GROVE
Grange Grove will be THE tailgate destination again in 2018 as fans can enjoy pregame festivities, live music, food trucks, family zone activities, and the true tailgating experience. Stay tuned to FightingIllini.com for the concert line up to be released in the summer. | {
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UVTC's Blog
How to Spur Python 3 Adoption
2013-01-26
Update: See the update below for a much easier way to quickly get Distribute and pip installed into a venv.
Recently I thought I’d manually install and try out Python 3 a bit (v3.3.0). After installing a few prereqs, I went through the usual configure/make steps mostly without issue.
For those curious about the details, I made sure I had these prerequisites installed: libreadline6-dev libsqlite3-dev zlib1g-dev tk8.5-dev libncurses5-dev libexpat1-dev libbz2-dev libdb5.1-dev libgdbm-dev liblzma-dev libssl-dev Then: cd ~/opt mkdir py-3.3.0 cd src wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.3.0/Python-3.3.0.tgz tar xzf Python-3.3.0.tgz cd Python-3.3.0 ./configure --prefix=/home/john/opt/py-3.3.0 make make test make install cd ~/opt ln -s py-3.3.0 py3 # Add $HOME/opt/py3/bin to my PATH # logout/login # ... # Quick check: python3 -V and it checks out. Had one test fail, FAIL: test_urlwithfrag (test.test_urllib2net.OtherNetworkTests) but looks like it’s been addressed for forthcoming releases (or else maybe I was supposed to preemptively have python3 on my PATH? Hm.).
I then noticed that Python 3 comes with its own built-in pyvenv program, an apparent replacement for virtualenv. Nice. Gave it a try:
cd ~/temp mkdir my-proj cd my-proj touch foo.py pyvenv my-env . my-env/bin/activate which pip
Eeek! It points to my system’s Python 2.x /usr/bin/pip. There’s no pip in my-env/bin. There’s no pip in ~/opt/py3/bin either. Well, that’s less than convenient. Ok. Deactivate the env:
deactivate
and let’s install pip.
The pip install instructions say I must have Distribute installed to use pip with Python 3.x. Ok, I’ll just leisurely make sure it’s already installed and … I don’t see it anywhere. Fine, will install it:
cd ~/temp wget http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.py python3 distribute_setup.py
and now install pip:
wget https://raw.github.com/pypa/pip/master/contrib/get-pip.py python3 get-pip.py
OK! Now we should be ready to go! Let’s try again:
cd ~/temp/my-proj rm -fr my-env pyvenv my-env ls -l my-env/bin
And pip is still not in there! :|
This is a problem. The main point of creating an env for a project is so I can install whatever sundry modules I want for it without clogging up the main Python’s site-packages dir.
Maybe at this point I’m supposed to install virtualenv and ignore pyvenv. I don’t know. But my guess is that by now many prospective Python 3 users will just assume 3.x is not ready, and go back to 2.x.
My conclusion: If you want to spur Python 3 adoption, Distribute and pip should be included with it.
2013-01-30
Vinay Sajip created a helpful little script for creating a virtual environment and installing Distribute & pip into it. You use it in place of the pyvenv which comes with Python 3.3.
First, make sure you have Python 3.3.x installed.
Then download the pyvenvex.py script from https://gist.github.com/4673395. Put it into your ~/bin (which I expect is on your PATH). chmod +x it. Edit it, adding a shebang line to the top pointing to your python3 (which must be version 3.3.x). Mine says:
#!/home/john/opt/py3/bin/python3
To use it:
cd ~/dev # or wherever mkdir my-proj cd my-proj pyvenvex.py my-env . my-env/bin/activate which pip # should point to the one in my-env/bin pip install WhateverYouNeed # work work work deactivate # when done
Very useful indeed! Thanks, Vinay! | {
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Federal NDP Leader Tom Mulcair says he isn't pitting Canada's East against the West, in prepared remarks to provincial New Democrats gathered for a party convention in Winnipeg on Saturday.
"Those are Stephen Harper's battle lines," Mulcair said on his last day of a three-day tour of the Prairies. "Not mine."
Mulcair's controversial "Dutch Disease" comments unleashed a fury of reaction from federal Conservatives and western premiers alike who called his comments "divisive", "goofy" and intended to divide the country.
The NDP leader dismissed the premiers' criticism by calling them "messengers" for Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Since then, Mulcair did not repeat his comment about the premiers but has stood by his theory that the Canadian dollar is being held "artificially high" by the oilsands causing the economy harm in other parts of the country.
During a heated exchange in question period, Conservative cabinet minister James Moore called on Mulcair to apologize for "suggesting the strength of the western Canadian economy is a disease on Canada."
Conservatives have maintained all along that the success of Alberta's oilsands have brought dividends not just to the Prairies but to the rest of the country as well.
In prepared remarks to Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger and his New Democrats, Mulcair said Harper's "failed environmental policies" are having "serious" economic consequences.
Environment Minister Peter Kent has said that the changes in the government's budget bill are merely intended to update "decade-old" environmental laws.
But in Saturday's prepared remarks, the Official Opposition leader blamed what he called the prime minister's "handouts to a few favoured industries" for an artificial rise in the value of the Canadian dollar.
"An artificially high dollar makes our exports more expensive. That's just simple economics," he said.
While in Alberta on Thursday, Mulcair said his beef was with the federal government and not the premiers.
On Saturday, Mulcair sided with Selinger and other premiers who have accused Ottawa of not consulting with them on issues like health funding, immigration reform, and employment insurance.
"Without a single consultation, the Conservatives are short-changing provinces by a whopping $31 billion," he said.
However, Conservative cabinet ministers like Diane Finley and Peter Mackay, who are responsible for touting the benefits of the government's latest budget, have said that they consulted with Canadians "extensively."
In a written statement to CBC News on Saturday, Andrew MacDougall, director of communications for the prime minister said, "Mulcair has it exactly backwards.
"The prime minister is governing for all regions while Mulcair slags premiers and tries to pit province against province," said MacDougall.
Mulcair said the federal New Democrats would create more jobs, promote sustainable development and protect the services that Canadians rely on in an effort to defeat the Conservatives in 2015.
The three-day tour saw the NDP leader visiting Alberta's oil sands on Thursday and meeting some of Canada's city mayors in Saskatoon on Friday. | {
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“France is at war,” President Francois Hollande said Monday, addressing a rare joint session of France’s parliament just days after multiple attacks in Paris killed 129 people and wounded more than 300 others. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks and Hollande has vowed a “merciless” response.
“Terrorism will not destroy the Republic,” he said Monday, “because it is the Republic that will destroy terrorism.”
Indeed, French airstrikes have struck Raqqa, the Syrian city that serves as the Islamic State’s de facto capital. Warplanes targeted more than a dozen suspected ISIS sites in about 30 airstrikes.
In his speech Monday, Hollande called for an urgent UN Security Council meeting on a joint response to terrorism; a three-month extension of the country’s state of emergency, which was imposed Friday even as the attacks were unfolding; a constitutional amendment so the country won’t have to resort to a state of emergency in response to terrorism; the power to strip the French citizenship of dual nationals convicted of terrorism; more effective border controls for the European Union; and increased funding for the military, police, and security forces.
What he didn’t ask for was authorization of a declaration of war, which parliament must provide under Article 35 of the French Constitution. In theory, Hollande needs only to inform parliament of a decision to intervene abroad within three days of such an intervention. | {
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Home prices in Toronto have fallen 19 per cent since the market's peak in April, sliding further in July as buyers continued to sit on the sidelines while waiting for signs of stability.
The Toronto Real Estate Board reported the average price of all types of homes sold in the Greater Toronto Area hit $746,218 in July, down 19 per cent from the market's peak in April when house sales averaged $920,791, and down 6 per cent from June's average selling price of $793,915.
The average July sales price was still up 5 per cent compared to July last year, which means the market downturn has still not erased the full amount of the price gain recorded in late 2016 and early 2017.
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Canada's housing experiment: How a year of reform has changed the market
Read more: Toronto home-price downturn? Not in these neighbourhoods
Bank of Montreal economist Sal Guatieri said detached home prices are falling faster in greater Toronto than they did in Vancouver last year after the B.C. government imposed a tax on foreign buyers. Detached home prices have dropped 8 per cent in two months in the GTA, he said, compared to a 6.4-per-cent decline over a six-month period in Vancouver.
The recent price drop came as the number of homes sold fell 40.4 per cent in July compared to the same month last year, TREB said. The number of detached home sales fell 47.4 per cent during the month, while sales of semi-detached houses fell 38.6 per cent, townhouse sales dropped 36.5 per cent and condo sales slid 30.7 per cent.
"There's nothing positive – there are no really great signs out there," said realtor John Pasalis, president of Realosophy Realty Inc. in Toronto.
Mr. Pasalis said some of areas where average prices are now lower than they were a year ago – including Richmond Hill and Whitchurch-Stouffville north of Toronto – are also regions that appeared to have the highest number of speculators and foreign buyers prior to the downturn. Their withdrawal from the market has had a greater impact on prices than in more central neighbourhoods in the City of Toronto.
However, Brian Elder, an agent at Royal LePage Real Estate Services Ltd. in Toronto, said he believes the current market is healthier than before, and many houses are still selling quickly.
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He said he worked with clients last week on four deals that received multiple offers and sold over the asking price. Other sellers, however, haven't received any offers at their asking price and have taken their houses off the market.
"To say prices are plummeting or the market is collapsing is so premature – I don't believe that by any stretch. I think it's actually a great time to be buying, especially if you're looking at a single-family property," he said. "It's just a normalized market. It's becoming more balanced, which is what everybody wants."
Amid the steep decline in sales, the only modest sign of market improvement came from the slowing pace of growth in the number of new homes listed for sale, which rose 5.1 per cent in July compared to last July. New listings surged by 49 per cent in May and 16 per cent in June compared to the same months last year as many homeowners rushed into the market to try to sell at the peak, leading to a glut of inventory and falling prices.
Royal LePage realtor Shawn Zigelstein, who is based in Richmond Hill, believes August will remain quiet, but there will be a significant increase in new listings in September. He predicts sellers will be more "serious" about completing a deal in the fall, while people who are toying with the idea of selling and holding out for prices above current market levels will leave the market.
"Anybody who's really kicking tires in the market will come off the market some time in August, and then in September we'll start to see those serious sellers come back on," Mr. Zigelstein said. "I think it will be substantially more than what we're going to see in August."
TREB said detached houses have led the region's housing downturn, especially in the suburban 905 area surrounding the City of Toronto.
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Detached house prices were up just 2.4 per cent in the 905 region in July compared to a year ago, but are still up 8.5 per cent in the City of Toronto, TREB said. The number of detached houses sold in July dropped 49 per cent in the 905 region and 41.7 per cent in the City of Toronto.
Condo prices have held up better due to their relative affordability for first-time home buyers. TREB said the average condo sale price in the GTA was still up 23 per cent in July compared to a year earlier, while detached and semi-detached house prices were both up about 5 per cent compared to July, 2016.
Mr. Pasalis said he believes condo prices will begin to slide lower given the drop in house prices.
"Condo prices can only go so high while freehold [house] prices are declining. It doesn't make sense – price appreciation will level off," he said.
The Toronto market has seen house sales slide since the Ontario government announced a package of reforms on April 20 aimed at cooling rapid growth in house prices in the region. The centrepiece of the plan was a new 15-per-cent tax on foreigners buying homes in the Toronto area. | {
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ALDI today announced it will now accept all forms of contactless payments, including Apple Pay, at all of its nearly 1,700 stores in the United States.
Shoppers can pay for their groceries by tapping their contactless-enabled bank card, smartphone or other wearable device on a payment terminal. Contactless payments are safe and secure, and have the same protection as making a payment with your PIN.
Some other grocery stores that accept Apple Pay in the United States include select Giant Food, Wegmans, BI-LO, Food Lion, Save Mart, Shop 'n Save, Trader Joe's, Winn-Dixie, Whole Foods, and United Supermarkets locations.
Apple's financial chief Luca Maestri recently said Apple Pay is by far the number one NFC-based payment service on mobile devices, with nearly 90 percent of all transactions globally—three out of four happen outside the United States. | {
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Fargo police Lt. Mike Mitchell said police were called for medical assistance at the Nestor Bar at 1001 NP Avenue at about 8:40 a.m. Sunday.
Police arrived to find Santino D. Atem, 43, of Moorhead, unresponsive outside next to the bar and began lifesaving efforts on him, Mitchell said.
He was taken by FM Ambulance to Sanford Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.
The cause and manner of Atem’s death have yet to be determined, Mitchell said. An autopsy is set for Monday in Grand Forks.
listen live watch live
There’s no early indication of foul play in the case, Mitchell said. | {
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For her latest series, San Francisco-based artist Jenny Odell plucked factories, shipyards, nuclear sites and more from Google Maps. Click here to enlarge
“I chose these infrastructural elements to bring them back into the picture,” Odell says, “to hopefully remind viewers that products don’t come from nowhere, and that huge amounts of effort and resources underlie our experience of pedestrian, day-to-day first world life.”
A stunning satellite-borne view of a solar array.
Here's the Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Arizona.
O’Dell is currently teaching a course on smartphone photography at Stanford.
But even when you’re showcasing the forbidding machinery of late capitalism, there’s an aesthetic dimension involved.
For Odell's purposes, the bigger and crazier the refinery, the better. “The insanely large Hyperion wastewater treatment plant in Los Angeles is better than, say, a small plant with only a couple of centrifuges,” she explains.
This might be the coolest San Francisco International Airport has ever looked.
Cropped out of their surroundings, sites like this one, in Pittsburg, end up looking like model train miniatures.
A waste pond in Mexico.
“I’ve been compared several times to a natural scientist, and I do see it like that: while looking around, I’m asking, what’s the most interesting specimen I can find of this thing? What varieties are there?”
A colorful field of shipping containers.
Odell's outlook isn't entirely pessimistic, however.
“I really do think these structures are beautiful and compelling, if poignantly so,” she says.
“I’m amazed by what we’ve developed–and that it works–even if the bigger picture is more troubling. Someone recently remarked that he walked out of my show laughing. I think there will always be something fascinating and delightful about seeing ourselves and our structures in miniature.”
One of Odell's earlier pieces, 125 Swimming Pools.
100 Container Ships
A detail from an older piece, 295 Roadside Signs.
And one from 10 Waterslide Configurations. | {
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BENGALURU: It had all the trappings of the routine recital of apathy and inhumanity when 30-year-old Yellamma, who was pregnant, collapsed in the middle of a busy junction in Manvi town of North Karnataka ’s Raichur district. But what unfolded instead conveyed a vast array of emotions that hinged on kindness.Yellamma’s wish for a girlchild came true when she delivered a healthy baby on the road and in the middle of the busy junction. But the most amazing moment was when an aged woman beggar, who was sitting nearby, played the midwife.“This is one of the most beautiful incidents to have happened in our town. Both the mother and the infant are doing well,” said Manvi MLA G Hampayya Nayak Ballatgi over phone. Manvi is around 450km from Bengaluru. What’s more, the heart-touching incident comes at a time when there have been reports of how people of North Karnataka districts usually start making videos of those in distress (especially road-accident victims) instead of helping them.A resident of Sanna Bazaar, Yellamma is the wife of agriculturist Ramanna and a mother of three boys. The couple reportedly craved for a girlchild. Yellamma visited a private hospital in the town after having completed 36 weeks. She was advised to visit Raichur Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) as she was found to be anaemic. Accordingly, the couple visited Raichur (60km from Manvi) and returned to the town by bus around 9:30am.Quoting eyewitnesses Ballatgi said: “She got off the bus and fell on the road. She couldn’t move to safety. While her husband was visibly shocked to see her bleed, a good Samaritan rushed to her rescue.” A local television reporter who later visited the spot said: “The Samaritan was a woman beggar, aged around 60. She knew that she had to act immediately if the mother and the baby were to be saved. So, she turned into a midwife on the road. Soon, a few other women from the nearby locality joined her.”The couple’s joy knew no bounds when they first saw the baby. Yellamma and the newborn were later shifted to Manvi Government Hospital. The woman beggar reportedly disappeared when the crowd dispersed.“These people may not be rich, but they showed how big-hearted they are. A woman’s longing for a girlchild and a stranger rushing to save her aren’t things we hear often these days. But this shows that there are also good people,” said Ballatgi. | {
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Abstract
Background The Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident caused residents to switch from their normal lives to lives focused on evacuation. We evaluated liver function before and after this disaster to elucidate the effects of evacuation on liver function.
Methods This study was a longitudinal survey of 26,006 Japanese men and women living near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. This study was undertaken using data from annual health checkups conducted for persons aged 40–90 years between 2008 and 2010. Follow-up examinations were conducted from June 2011 to the end of March 2013, with a mean follow up of 1.6 years. Changes in liver function before and after the disaster were compared among evacuees and non-evacuees. We also assessed groups according to alcohol drinking status.
Results The prevalence of liver dysfunction significantly increased in all participants from 16.4% before to 19.2% after the disaster. The incidence of liver dysfunction was significantly higher in evacuees than in non-evacuees. Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that evacuation was significantly associated with liver dysfunction among residents. | {
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Peter Olson and David Wessel write:
The natural rate of interest, also called the long-run equilibrium interest rate or neutral real rate, is the rate that would keep the economy operating at full employment and stable inflation.
You’ll find comparable statements from Paul Krugman, and here is the underlying Laubach and Williams paper, and more recently and ungated here (pdf). Here are a variety of Brookings presentations.
Personally, I get nervous when I read about natural rates of interest, although I accept the core conclusion that currently low interest rates are not mainly the result of Fed policy. I also find all this talk of natural rates of interest…historically strange. A few points:
1. David Davidson and Knut Wicksell debated the natural rate of interest concept very early in the twentieth century, in Swedish I might add (see Carl Uhr’s books on Davidson and Wicksell). Most people believe Davidson won those debates and even Wicksell seemed to concede. Whether a given rate of interest both maintains full employment and stable inflation depends on the rate of productivity growth, for one thing. It can be that no single rate of interest can perform both functions.
2. Keynes devoted a great deal of effort to knocking down the natural rate of interest concept (pdf), which he viewed as unforgivably Austrian. He made the simple point — endorsed by modern Keynesians in other contexts — that the intersection with liquidity preferences at the margin shapes rates of interest, and thus there could be multiple natural rates of interest. He also argued that in many settings there was no rate of interest whatsoever that would maintain capitalist stability.
3. In postwar economics, the Keynesians worked to keep natural rates of interest concepts out of mainstream macroeconomics. I read Tobin as very much along the lines of Keynes. Here is material on Hicks, Hansen, and Modigliani (pdf).
4. As Scott Sumner has pointed out, the older natural rate of interest used to truly be about price stability. Nowadays that has morphed into “two percent inflation a year.” Yes a definition can be changed, but still I find that intellectual maneuver strange and it implicitly suggests there may be multiple natural rates of interest; neither “zero” nor “two” is a special number. There is also a blurring between the rate of inflation, the increase in the rate of inflation, the expected rate of price inflation, and so on.
5. Milton Friedman warned (pdf) not to assign too much importance to interest rates when thinking about monetary transmission. On pp.10-11 he expresses his reservations about the natural rate of interest concept, which he calls the “natural” rate of interest with quotation marks:
What if the monetary authority chose the “natural” rate — either of interest or unemployment — as its target? One problem is that it cannot know what the “natural” rate is. Unfortunately, we have as yet devised no methods to estimate accurately and readily the natural rate of either interest or unemployment. And the “natural” rate will itself change from time to time. But the basic problem is that even if the monetary authority knew the “natural” rate, and attempted to peg the market rate at that level, it would not be led to a determinate policy. The “market” rate will vary from the natural rate for all sorts of reasons other than monetary policy. If the monetary authority responds to these variations, it will set in train longer term effects that will make any monetary growth path it follows ultimately consistent with the rule of policy. The actual course of monetary growth will be analogous to a random walk, buffeted this way and that by the forces that produce temporary departures of the market rate from the natural rate.
There is still wisdom in those words. You will note that in contrast Michael Woodford has worked to make interest rates more central to the discussion (pdf), and he is one reason why the natural rate of interest concept has made a comeback.
6. When Sraffa debated Hayek and argued the natural rate of interest was not such a meaningful concept, it seems Sraffa won. Empirically, this Hamilton, Hatzius, Harrison, and West paper shows the natural rate can indeed be all over the place. Here’s Carola Binder: “The more commonly reported 90% or 95% confidence interval would of course be even wider, and would certainly include both 0% and 6% in 2000.”
7. I sometimes read these days that the “natural [real] rate of interest” consistent with full employment is negative. To me that makes no sense in a world with positive economic growth and a positive marginal productivity of capital. It might make sense in 1942 Stalingrad, where the rate of growth was mostly negative.
Of course economic theory can change, and if the idea of a natural rate of interest makes a deserved comeback we should not oppose that development per se. But I don’t see that these earlier conceptual objections have been rebutted, rather there is simply now a Kalman filter procedure for coming up with a number, combined with the triumph of empiricism, and in some quarters the desire to rebut the more extreme critics of the Fed.
I view the Laubach and Williams work as a highly useful “check” on the estimates of future rates of interest as contained in market prices. (The market in fact does not seem to be crazy, relative to the model.) But what macro properties will that likely future low interest rate world have, natural or otherwise? There we do not know, and you will note that forecasts of inflation dynamics have not exactly been stellar, nor were most 2006 forecasts of future employment prescient.
I doubt these procedures are coming up with a “the natural rate of interest” in a meaningful form. Or alternatively, look to Woodfordesque definitions, something like “what the rate of interest would be if prices were flexible.” That too is a kind of (modal) forecast of interest rates, let’s not use the historical connotations of the natural rate of interest concept to smuggle in forecasts of prices and employment as well.
In any case, this is an interesting case study of how weak or previously rebutted ideas can work their way back into economics. I don’t object to what most of the people working on this right now actually are trying to say. Yet I see the use of the term acquiring a life of its own, and as it is morphing into common usage some appropriately modest claims are taking on an awful lot of baggage from the historical connotations of the term. We’ve had the term “interest rate forecasting” for a while now, so let’s bring that one back into prominence. It’s much clearer about what we are actually justified in trying to do. | {
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The wife of Alabama lieutenant governor candidate Will Ainsworth was injured in a “gun accident" today, the Republican candidate said on social media.
“God was looking after our family this afternoon,” Ainsworth wrote on Twitter. “Kendall was injured in a gun accident, but is stable and ok.”
[Update: Ainsworth says wife was hurt while shooting skeet]
Ainsworth, of Guntersville, said in the 4:43 p.m. Tweet that they were going to Huntsville Hospital.
“We are thankful it doesn’t appear serious, but covet your prayers while the doctors treat her.”
We are glad to hear she is ok! Sending prayers your way.🙏🏼 — ALGOP (@ALGOP) October 30, 2018
A call to Ainsworth’s cellphone wasn’t immediately returned. He later posted a statement to his Twitter account.
“While skeet shooting with our family on Tuesday evening, my wife, Kendall, was involved in a minor accident and suffered an injury that required staples. Through God’s grace and the intercessory prayers of thousands of family members, friends and supporters, the emergency room doctors who treated her injury predict a full recovery, and she was released shortly [sic] being treated," he said in the statement.
“I will be stepping away from the campaign trail for a few days in order to attend to Kendall as she heals.”
Ainsworth and his wife have three young children.
Ainsworth has been a representative in the state legislature since 2014. Earlier this year, he led the charge to allow trained, certified school teachers and administrators to carry guns on campuses. After 17 people were gunned down at a high school in Parkland, Florida, Ainsworth sponsored the legislation, which drew roiling debate in Montgomery. The legislation didn’t have enough support to become law.
Ainsworth is running against Democrat Will Boyd. The election is Tuesday, Nov. 6.
Updated at 9:55 p.m. to add a statement from Ainsworth. AL.com journalist Anna Beahm contributed to this report. | {
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UPoker was built with a 'player-first' mindset.
UPoker is a Mobile Poker Gaming Application like none other. Our in-game features allow ultimate customization of your poker table rules to the point where it is like playing at home.
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Ever since conception, UPoker has been steadfast on serving the global poker community better. Your convenience, your excitement, and your wholesome poker experience is the ace of spades in our deck.
Our goal is to provide a unique and wholesome game-play experience to all poker lovers. | {
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The Trump Administration called for an end to the Visa Lottery and Chain Migration in its National Security Strategy released earlier today. The document mostly focuses on non-immigration-related national security issues, but does highlight the Visa Lottery and Chain Migration as being possible threats to national security and public safety.
In a section titled "Strengthen Border Control and Immigration Policy", the administration says that the nation's current legal immigration system does not serve the national interest and needs reforming.
"The United States recognizes that decisions about who to legally admit for residency, citizenship, or otherwise are among the most important a country has to make. The United States will continue to welcome lawful immigrants who do not pose a security threat and whose entry is consistent with the national interest, while at the same time enhancing the screening and vetting of travelers, closing dangerous loopholes, revising outdated laws, and eliminating easily exploited vulnerabilities. We will also reform our current immigration system, which, contrary to our national interest and national security, allows for randomized entry and extended-family chain migration. Residency and citizenship determinations should be based on individuals' merits and their ability to positively contribute to U.S. society, rather than chance or extended family connections." -- National Security Strategy of the United States, December 2017
The National Security Strategy also calls for strengthening border security and taking steps to curb illegal immigration. While it fails to mention requiring all employers to use E-Verify for all new hires to end the jobs magnet and reduce future illegal immigration, it does state that illegal immigration "burdens the economy" and "hurts American workers".
You can read the Trump administration's National Security Strategy at WhiteHouse.gov. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
بيت لحم- معا- قال المتحدث الرسمي باسم الشرطة لؤي ارزيقات ان الشرطة والنيابة العامة تحققان بوفاة موقوف في نظارة سجن...
الشرطة والنيابة تحققان بوفاة موقوف بنظارة شرطة بيت لحم بيت لحم- معا- قال المتحدث الرسمي باسم الشرطة لؤي ارزيقات ان الشرطة والنيابة العامة تحققان بوفاة موقوف في نظارة سجن... | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
In this tutorial, you will learn how to build traditional web applications and microservices in Go using the Gin framework. Gin is a framework that reduces boilerplate code that would normally go into building these applications. It also lends itself very well to creating reusable and extensible pieces of code.
This part of the tutorial will help you set up your project and build a simple application using Gin that will display a list of articles and the article details page.
Goals
By the end of this tutorial, you will:
Learn how to use Gin to build a web application,
Understand the parts of a web application written in Go, and
Learn how to use Semaphore Continuous Integration to test and build the application quickly and safely.
Prerequisites
For this tutorial, you will need Go, Git, and curl installed on your machine.
You can find the full source of the tutorial in this repository, feel free to fork it:
Note: If you don’t have curl, you can use any other tool that you would normally use to test API endpoints.
What is Gin?
Gin is a high-performance micro-framework that can be used to build web applications and microservices. It makes it simple to build a request handling pipeline from modular, reusable pieces. It does this by allowing you to write middleware that can be plugged into one or more request handlers or groups of request handlers.
Why Gin?
One of the best features of Go is that it’s built-in net/http library that allows you to create an HTTP server effortlessly. However, it is also less flexible and requires some boilerplate code to implement.
There is no built-in support in Go to handle routes based on a regular expression or a “pattern”. You can write code to add this functionality. However, as the number of your applications grows, it is quite likely that you will either repeat such code everywhere or create a library for reuse.
This is the crux of what Gin offers. It contains a set of commonly used functionalities, e.g. routing, middleware support, rendering, that reduce boilerplate code and make writing web applications simpler.
Designing the Application
Let’s take a quick look at how a request is processed in Gin. The control flow for a typical web application, API server or a microservice looks as follows:
Request -> Route Parser -> [Optional Middleware] -> Route Handler -> [Optional Middleware] -> Response
When a request comes in, Gin first parses the route. If a matching route definition is found, Gin invokes the route handler and zero or more middleware in an order defined by the route definition. We will see how this is done when we take a look at the code in a later section.
Application Functionality
The application we’ll build is a simple article manager. This application should:
Let users register with a username and a password (non-logged in users only),
Let users login with a username and a password (non-logged in users only),
Let users log out (logged in users only),
Let users create new articles (logged in users only),
Display the list of all articles on the home page (for all users), and
Display a single article on its own page (for all users).
In addition to this functionality, the list of articles and a single article should be accessible in the HTML, JSON and XML formats.
This will allow us to illustrate how Gin can be used to design traditional web applications, API servers, and microservices.
To achieve this, we will make use of the following functionalities offered by Gin:
Routing — to handle various URLs,
— to handle various URLs, Custom rendering — to handle the response format, and
— to handle the response format, and Middleware — to implement authentication.
We’ll also write tests to validate that all the features work as intended.
Routing
Routing is one of the core features that all modern frameworks provide. Any web page or an API endpoint is accessed by a URL. Frameworks use routes to handle requests to these URLs. If a URL is http://www.example.com/some/random/route , the route will be /some/random/route .
Gin offers a fast router that’s easy to configure and use. Apart from handling specified URLs, Gin routers can also handle patterns and grouped URLs.
In our application, we will:
Serve the index page at route / (HTTP GET request),
(HTTP GET request), Group user-related routes under the /u route, Serve the login page at /u/login (HTTP GET request), Process the login credentials at /u/login (HTTP POST request), Log out at /u/logout (HTTP GET request), Serve the registration page at /u/register (HTTP GET request), Process the registration information at /u/register (HTTP POST request) ,
route, Group article related routes under the /article route, Serve the article creation page at /article/create (HTTP GET request), Process the submitted article at /article/create (HTTP POST request), and Serve the article page at /article/view/:article_id (HTTP GET request). Take note of the :article_id part in this route. The : at the beginning indicates that this is a dynamic route. This means that :article_id can contain any value and Gin will make this value available in the route handler.
route,
Rendering
A web application can render a response in various formats like HTML, text, JSON, XML or other formats. API endpoints and microservices typically respond with data, commonly in JSON format but also in any other desired format.
In the next section, we’ll see how we can render different types of responses without duplicating any functionality. We will primarily respond to a request with an HTML template. However, we will also define two endpoints that can respond with JSON or XML data.
Middleware
In the context of a Go web application, middleware is a piece of code that can be executed at any stage while handling an HTTP request. It is typically used to encapsulate common functionality that you want to apply to multiple routes. We can use middleware before and/or after an HTTP request is handled. Some common uses of middleware include authorization, validation, etc.
If middleware is used before a request is handled, any changes it makes to the request will be available in the main route handler. This is handy if we want to implement some validations on certain requests. On the other hand, if the middleware is used after the route handler, it will have a response from the route handler. This can be used to modify the response from the route handler.
Gin allows us to write middleware that implements some common functionality that needs to be shared while handling multiple routes. This keeps the codebase small, separates concerns and improves code maintainability.
We want to ensure that some pages and actions, eg. creating an article, logging out, are available only to users who are logged in. We also want to ensure that some pages and actions, eg. registering, logging in, are available only to users who aren’t logged in.
If we were to put this logic in every route, it would be quite tedious, repetitive and error-prone. Luckily, we can create middleware for each of these tasks and reuse them in specific routes.
We will also create middleware that will be applied to all routes. This middleware ( setUserStatus ) will check whether a request is from an authenticated user or not. It will then set a flag that can be used in templates to modify the visibility of some of the menu links based on this flag.
Installing the Dependency
This application will only use one external dependency: the Gin framework. We can install the latest version using the following command:
go get -u github.com/gin-gonic/gin
Creating Reusable Templates
Our application will display a web page using its template. However, there will be several parts such as the header, menu, sidebar, and footer, which will be common across all pages. Go allows us to create reusable template snippets that can be imported in other templates.
The header and the footer will be the common pieces that will be reused across all templates. We will also create the menu in its own template file which will be used by the header template. Finally, we’ll create the template for the index page which will import the header and the footer. All the template files will be placed in the templates directory within the project directory.
Let’s start by creating the template for the menu in templates/menu.html as follows:
<!--menu.html--> <nav class="navbar navbar-default"> <div class="container"> <div class="navbar-header"> <a class="navbar-brand" href="/"> Home </a> </div> </div> </nav>
Initially, the menu contains only the link to the home page. We will add to this as we add more functionality to the application. The template for the header will be placed in the templates/header.html file as follows:
<!--header.html--> <!doctype html> <html> <head> <!--Use the title variable to set the title of the page--> <title>{{ .title }}</title> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> <meta charset="UTF-8"> <!--Use bootstrap to make the application look nice--> <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.6/css/bootstrap.min.css" integrity="sha384-1q8mTJOASx8j1Au+a5WDVnPi2lkFfwwEAa8hDDdjZlpLegxhjVME1fgjWPGmkzs7" crossorigin="anonymous"> <script async src="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.6/js/bootstrap.min.js" integrity="sha384-0mSbJDEHialfmuBBQP6A4Qrprq5OVfW37PRR3j5ELqxss1yVqOtnepnHVP9aJ7xS" crossorigin="anonymous"></script> </head> <body class="container"> <!--Embed the menu.html template at this location--> {{ template "menu.html" . }}
And the footer:
<!--footer.html--> </body> </html>
As you can see, we are using the open-source Bootstrap framework. Most of this file is standard HTML. However, take note of two lines. The line containing <title>{{ .title }}</title> is used to dynamically set the title of the page using the .title variable that must be set inside the application. Secondly, the line containing {{ template "menu.html" . }} is used to import the menu template from the menu.html file. This is how Go lets you import one template in another.
The template for the footer contains static HTML. The template for the index page makes use of the header and the footer and displays a simple Hello Gin message:
<!--index.html--> <!--Embed the header.html template at this location--> {{ template "header.html" .}} <h1>Hello Gin!</h1> <!--Embed the footer.html template at this location--> {{ template "footer.html" .}}
Like the index template, templates for other pages will reuse the templates for the header and the footer in a similar manner.
Completing and Validating the Setup
Once you have created the templates, it’s time to create the entry file for your application. We’ll create the main.go file for this with the simplest possible web application that will use the index template. We can do this using Gin in four steps:
1. Create the router
The default way to create a router in Gin is as follows:
router := gin.Default()
This creates a router that can be used to define the build of the application.
2. Load the templates
Once you have created the router, you can load all the templates like this:
router.LoadHTMLGlob("templates/*")
This loads all the template files located in the templates folder. Once loaded, these don’t have to be read again on every request making Gin web applications very fast.
3. Define the route handler
At the heart of Gin is how you divide the application into various routes and define handlers for each route. We will create a route for the index page and an inline route handler.
router.GET("/", func(c *gin.Context) { // Call the HTML method of the Context to render a template c.HTML( // Set the HTTP status to 200 (OK) http.StatusOK, // Use the index.html template "index.html", // Pass the data that the page uses (in this case, 'title') gin.H{ "title": "Home Page", }, ) })
The router.GET method is used to define a route handler for a GET request. It takes in as parameters the route ( / ) and one or more route handlers which are just functions.
The route handler has a pointer to the context ( gin.Context ) as its parameter. This context contains all the information about the request that the handler might need to process it. For example, it includes information about the headers, cookies, etc.
The Context also has methods to render a response in HTML, text, JSON and XML formats. In this case, we use the context.HTML method to render an HTML template ( index.html ). The call to this method includes additional data in which the value of title is set to Home Page . This is a value that the HTML template can make use of. In this case, we use this value in the <title> tag in the header’s template.
4. Start the application
To start the application, you can use the Run method of the router:
router.Run()
This starts the application on localhost and serves on the 8080 port by default.
The complete main.go file looks as follows:
// main.go package main import ( "net/http" "github.com/gin-gonic/gin" ) var router *gin.Engine func main() { // Set the router as the default one provided by Gin router = gin.Default() // Process the templates at the start so that they don't have to be loaded // from the disk again. This makes serving HTML pages very fast. router.LoadHTMLGlob("templates/*") // Define the route for the index page and display the index.html template // To start with, we'll use an inline route handler. Later on, we'll create // standalone functions that will be used as route handlers. router.GET("/", func(c *gin.Context) { // Call the HTML method of the Context to render a template c.HTML( // Set the HTTP status to 200 (OK) http.StatusOK, // Use the index.html template "index.html", // Pass the data that the page uses (in this case, 'title') gin.H{ "title": "Home Page", }, ) }) // Start serving the application router.Run() }
To execute the application from the command line, go to your application directory and execute the following command:
go build -o app
This will build your application and create an executable named app which you can run as follows:
./app
If all goes well, you should be able to access your application at http://localhost:8080 and it should look like this:
The directory structure of your application at this stage should be as follows:
├── main.go └── templates ├── footer.html ├── header.html ├── index.html └── menu.html
Displaying the List of Articles
In this section, we’ll add the functionality to display the list of all articles on the index page.
Setting Up the Route
In the previous section, we created the route and the route definition in the main.go file itself. As the application grows, it would make sense to move the routes definitions in its own file. We’ll create a function initializeRoutes() in the routes.go file and call this function from the main() function to set up all the routes. Instead of defining the route handler inline, we’ll define them as separate functions.
After making these changes, the routes.go file will contain the following:
// routes.go package main func initializeRoutes() { // Handle the index route router.GET("/", showIndexPage) }
Since we’ll be displaying the list of articles on the index page, we don’t need to define any additional routes after we’ve refactored the code.
The main.go file should contain the following code:
// main.go package main import "github.com/gin-gonic/gin" var router *gin.Engine func main() { // Set the router as the default one provided by Gin router = gin.Default() // Process the templates at the start so that they don't have to be loaded // from the disk again. This makes serving HTML pages very fast. router.LoadHTMLGlob("templates/*") // Initialize the routes initializeRoutes() // Start serving the application router.Run() }
Designing the Article Model
We will keep the article structure simple with just three fields – Id , Title and Content . This can be represented with a struct as follows:
type article struct { ID int `json:"id"` Title string `json:"title"` Content string `json:"content"` }
Most applications will use a database to persist the data. To keep things simple, we will keep the list of articles in memory and will initialize the list with two hard-coded articles as follows:
var articleList = []article{ article{ID: 1, Title: "Article 1", Content: "Article 1 body"}, article{ID: 2, Title: "Article 2", Content: "Article 2 body"}, }
We will place the above code in a new file named models.article.go . At this stage, we need a function that will return the list of all articles. We will name this function getAllArticles() and place it in the same file. We will also write a test for it. This test will be named TestGetAllArticles and will be placed in the models.article_test.go file.
Let’s start by creating the unit test ( TestGetAllArticles ) for the getAllArticles() function. After creating this unit test, the models.article_test.go file should contain the following code:
// models.article_test.go package main import "testing" // Test the function that fetches all articles func TestGetAllArticles(t *testing.T) { alist := getAllArticles() // Check that the length of the list of articles returned is the // same as the length of the global variable holding the list if len(alist) != len(articleList) { t.Fail() } // Check that each member is identical for i, v := range alist { if v.Content != articleList[i].Content || v.ID != articleList[i].ID || v.Title != articleList[i].Title { t.Fail() break } } }
This unit test uses the getAllArticles() function to fetch the list of all articles. This test first makes sure that the article list fetched by this function and the article list present in the global variable articleList are identical. It then loops over the article list to verify that each article is identical. The test fails if either of these two checks fail.
Once we have written the test, we can proceed to write the actual code. The models.article.go file should contain the following code:
// models.article.go package main type article struct { ID int json:"id" Title string json:"title" Content string json:"content" } // For this demo, we're storing the article list in memory // In a real application, this list will most likely be fetched // from a database or from static files var articleList = []article{ article{ID: 1, Title: "Article 1", Content: "Article 1 body"}, article{ID: 2, Title: "Article 2", Content: "Article 2 body"}, } // Return a list of all the articles func getAllArticles() []article { return articleList }
Creating the View Template
Since the list of articles will be displayed on the index page, we don’t need to create a new template. However, we do need to change the index.html template to replace the current content with the list of articles.
To make this change, we’ll assume that the list of articles will be passed to the template in a variable named payload . With this assumption, the following snippet should show the list of all articles:
{{range .payload }} <!--Create the link for the article based on its ID--> <a href="/article/view/{{.ID}}"> <!--Display the title of the article --> <h2>{{.Title}}</h2> </a> <!--Display the content of the article--> <p>{{.Content}}</p> {{end}}
This snippet will loop over all items in the payload variable and display the title and the content of each article. The above snippet will also link to each article. However, since we have not yet defined route handlers for displaying individual articles, these links won’t work as expected.
The updated index.html file should contain the following code:
<!--index.html--> <!--Embed the header.html template at this location--> {{ template "header.html" .}} <!--Loop over the payload variable, which is the list of articles--> {{range .payload }} <!--Create the link for the article based on its ID--> <a href="/article/view/{{.ID}}"> <!--Display the title of the article --> <h2>{{.Title}}</h2> </a> <!--Display the content of the article--> <p>{{.Content}}</p> {{end}} <!--Embed the footer.html template at this location--> {{ template "footer.html" .}}
Specifying the Requirement for the Route Handler With a Unit Test
Before we create the handler for the index route, we will create a test to define the expected behavior of this route handler. This test will check for the following conditions:
The handler responds with an HTTP status code of 200, The returned HTML contains a title tag containing the text Home Page .
The code for the test will be placed in the TestShowIndexPageUnauthenticated function in the handlers.article_test.go file. We will place helper functions used by this function in the common_test.go file.
The content of handlers.article_test.go is as follows:
// handlers.article_test.go package main import ( "io/ioutil" "net/http" "net/http/httptest" "strings" "testing" ) // Test that a GET request to the home page returns the home page with // the HTTP code 200 for an unauthenticated user func TestShowIndexPageUnauthenticated(t *testing.T) { r := getRouter(true) r.GET("/", showIndexPage) // Create a request to send to the above route req, _ := http.NewRequest("GET", "/", nil) testHTTPResponse(t, r, req, func(w *httptest.ResponseRecorder) bool { // Test that the http status code is 200 statusOK := w.Code == http.StatusOK // Test that the page title is "Home Page" // You can carry out a lot more detailed tests using libraries that can // parse and process HTML pages p, err := ioutil.ReadAll(w.Body) pageOK := err == nil && strings.Index(string(p), "<title>Home Page</title>") > 0 return statusOK && pageOK }) }
The content of common_test.go is as follows:
package main import ( "net/http" "net/http/httptest" "os" "testing" "github.com/gin-gonic/gin" ) var tmpArticleList []article // This function is used for setup before executing the test functions func TestMain(m *testing.M) { //Set Gin to Test Mode gin.SetMode(gin.TestMode) // Run the other tests os.Exit(m.Run()) } // Helper function to create a router during testing func getRouter(withTemplates bool) *gin.Engine { r := gin.Default() if withTemplates { r.LoadHTMLGlob("templates/*") } return r } // Helper function to process a request and test its response func testHTTPResponse(t *testing.T, r *gin.Engine, req *http.Request, f func(w *httptest.ResponseRecorder) bool) { // Create a response recorder w := httptest.NewRecorder() // Create the service and process the above request. r.ServeHTTP(w, req) if !f(w) { t.Fail() } } // This function is used to store the main lists into the temporary one // for testing func saveLists() { tmpArticleList = articleList } // This function is used to restore the main lists from the temporary one func restoreLists() { articleList = tmpArticleList }
To implement this test, we have written some helper functions. These will also help us reduce boilerplate code when we write additional tests to test similar functionality.
The TestMain function sets Gin to use the test mode and calls the rest of the test functions. The getRouter function creates and returns a router in a manner similar to the main application. The saveLists() function saves the original article list in a temporary variable. This temporary variable is used by the restoreLists() function to restore the article list to its initial state after a unit test is executed.
Finally, the testHTTPResponse function executes the function passed in to see if it returns a boolean true value — indicating a successful test, or not. This function helps us avoid duplicating the code needed to test the response of an HTTP request.
To check the HTTP code and the returned HTML, we’ll do the following:
Create a new router, Define a route to use the same handler that the main app uses ( showIndexPage ), Create a new request to access this route, Create a function that processes the response to test the HTTP code and HTML, and Call testHTTPResponse() with this new function to complete the test.
Creating the Route Handler
We will create all route handlers for article related functionality in the handlers.article.go file. The handler for the index page, showIndexPage performs the following tasks:
1. Fetches the list of articles
This can be done using the getAllArticles function defined previously:
articles := getAllArticles()
2. Renders the index.html template passing it the article list
This can be done using the code below:
c.HTML( // Set the HTTP status to 200 (OK) http.StatusOK, // Use the index.html template "index.html", // Pass the data that the page uses gin.H{ "title": "Home Page", "payload": articles, }, )
The only difference from the version in the previous section is that we’re passing the list of articles which will be accessed in the template by the variable named payload .
The handlers.article.go file should contain the following code:
// handlers.article.go package main import ( "net/http" "github.com/gin-gonic/gin" ) func showIndexPage(c *gin.Context) { articles := getAllArticles() // Call the HTML method of the Context to render a template c.HTML( // Set the HTTP status to 200 (OK) http.StatusOK, // Use the index.html template "index.html", // Pass the data that the page uses gin.H{ "title": "Home Page", "payload": articles, }, ) }
If you now build and run your application and visit http://localhost:8080 in a browser, it should look like this:
These are the new files added in this section:
├── common_test.go ├── handlers.article.go ├── handlers.article_test.go ├── models.article.go ├── models.article_test.go └── routes.go
Displaying a Single Article
In the last section, while we displayed a list of articles, the links to the articles didn’t work. In this section, we’ll add handlers and templates to display an article when it is selected.
Setting Up the Route
We can set up a new route to handle requests for a single article in the same manner as in the previous route. However, we need to account for the fact that while the handler for all articles would be the same, the URL for each article would be different. Gin allows us to handle such conditions by defining route parameters as follows:
router.GET("/article/view/:article_id", getArticle)
This route will match all requests matching the above path and will store the value of the last part of the route in the route parameter named article_id which we can access in the route handler. For this route, we will define the handler in a function named getArticle .
The updated routes.go file should contain the following code:
// routes.go package main func initializeRoutes() { // Handle the index route router.GET("/", showIndexPage) // Handle GET requests at /article/view/some_article_id router.GET("/article/view/:article_id", getArticle) }
Creating the View Templates
We need to create a new template at templates/article.html to display the content of a single article. This can be created in a manner similar to the index.html template. However, instead of the payload variable containing the list of articles, in this case it will contain a single article.
You can see the content of article.html in the Github repository.
Specifying the Requirement for the Route Handler With a Unit Test
The test for the handler of this route will check for the following conditions:
The handler responds with an HTTP status code of 200, The returned HTML contains a title tag containing the title of the article that was fetched.
The code for the test will be placed in the TestArticleUnauthenticated function in the handlers.article_test.go file. We will place helper functions used by this function in the common_test.go file.
Creating the Route Handler
The handler for the article page, getArticle performs the following tasks:
1. Extracts the ID of the article to display
To fetch and display the right article, we first need to extract its ID from the context. This can be extracted as follows:
c.Param("article_id")
where c is the Gin Context which is a parameter to any route handler when using Gin.
2. Fetches the article
This can be done using the getArticleByID() function defined in the models.article.go file:
article, err := getArticleByID(articleID)
The getArticleByID function (in models.article.go ) is as follows:
func getArticleByID(id int) (*article, error) { for _, a := range articleList { if a.ID == id { return &a, nil } } return nil, errors.New("Article not found") }
This function loops through the article list and returns the article whose ID matches the ID passed in. If no matching article is found it returns an error indicating the same.
3. Renders the article.html template passing it the article
This can be done using the code below:
c.HTML( // Set the HTTP status to 200 (OK) http.StatusOK, // Use the article.html template "article.html", // Pass the data that the page uses gin.H{ "title": article.Title, "payload": article, }, )
The updated handlers.article.go file should contain the following code:
// handlers.article.go package main import ( "net/http" "strconv" "github.com/gin-gonic/gin" ) func showIndexPage(c *gin.Context) { articles := getAllArticles() // Call the HTML method of the Context to render a template c.HTML( // Set the HTTP status to 200 (OK) http.StatusOK, // Use the index.html template "index.html", // Pass the data that the page uses gin.H{ "title": "Home Page", "payload": articles, }, ) } func getArticle(c *gin.Context) { // Check if the article ID is valid if articleID, err := strconv.Atoi(c.Param("article_id")); err == nil { // Check if the article exists if article, err := getArticleByID(articleID); err == nil { // Call the HTML method of the Context to render a template c.HTML( // Set the HTTP status to 200 (OK) http.StatusOK, // Use the index.html template "article.html", // Pass the data that the page uses gin.H{ "title": article.Title, "payload": article, }, ) } else { // If the article is not found, abort with an error c.AbortWithError(http.StatusNotFound, err) } } else { // If an invalid article ID is specified in the URL, abort with an error c.AbortWithStatus(http.StatusNotFound) } }
If you now build and run your application and visit http://localhost:8080/article/view/1 in a browser, it should look like this:
The new files added in this section are as follows:
└── templates └── article.html
Responding With JSON/XML
In this section, we will refactor the application a bit so that, depending on the request headers, our application can respond in HTML, JSON or XML format.
Creating a Reusable Function
So far, we’ve been using the HTML method of Gin’s context to render directly from route handlers. This is fine when we always want to render HTML. However, if we want to change the format of the response based on the request, we should refactor this part out into a single function that takes care of the rendering. By doing this, we can let the route handler focus on validation and data fetching.
A route handler has to do the same kind of validation, data fetching and data processing irrespective of the desired response format. Once this part is done, this data can be used to generate a response in the desired format. If we need an HTML response, we can pass this data to the HTML template and generate the page. If we need a JSON response, we can convert this data to JSON and send it back. Likewise for XML.
We’ll create a render function in main.go that will be used by all the route handlers. This function will take care of rendering in the right format based on the request’s Accept header.
In Gin, the Context passed to a route handler contains a field named Request . This field contains the Header field which contains all the request headers. We can use the Get method on Header to extract the Accept header as follows:
// c is the Gin Context c.Request.Header.Get("Accept")
If this is set to application/json , the function will render JSON,
, the function will render JSON, If this is set to application/xml , the function will render XML, and
, the function will render XML, and If this is set to anything else or is empty, the function will render HTML.
The complete render function is as follows:
// Render one of HTML, JSON or CSV based on the 'Accept' header of the request // If the header doesn't specify this, HTML is rendered, provided that // the template name is present func render(c *gin.Context, data gin.H, templateName string) { switch c.Request.Header.Get("Accept") { case "application/json": // Respond with JSON c.JSON(http.StatusOK, data["payload"]) case "application/xml": // Respond with XML c.XML(http.StatusOK, data["payload"]) default: // Respond with HTML c.HTML(http.StatusOK, templateName, data) } }
Modifying the Requirement for the Route Handlers With a Unit Test
Since we are now expecting JSON and XML responses if the respective headers are set, we should add tests to the handlers.article_test.go file to test these conditions. We will add tests to:
Test that the application returns a JSON list of articles when the Accept header is set to application/json Test the application returns an article in XML format when the Accept header is set to application/xml
These will be added as functions named TestArticleListJSON and TestArticleXML .
Updating the Route Handlers
The route handlers don’t really need to change much as the logic for rendering in any format is pretty much the same. All that needs to be done is use the render function instead of rendering using the c.HTML methods.
For example, the showIndexPage route handler will change from
func showIndexPage(c *gin.Context) { articles := getAllArticles() // Call the HTML method of the Context to render a template c.HTML( // Set the HTTP status to 200 (OK) http.StatusOK, // Use the index.html template "index.html", // Pass the data that the page uses gin.H{ "title": "Home Page", "payload": articles, }, ) }
to
func showIndexPage(c *gin.Context) { articles := getAllArticles() // Call the render function with the name of the template to render render(c, gin.H{ "title": "Home Page", "payload": articles}, "index.html") }
Retrieving the List of Articles in JSON Format
To see our latest updates in action, build and run your application. Then execute the following command:
curl -X GET -H "Accept: application/json" http://localhost:8080/
This should return a response as follows:
[{"id":1,"title":"Article 1","content":"Article 1 body"},{"id":2,"title":"Article 2","content":"Article 2 body"}]
As you can see, our request got a response in the JSON format because we set the Accept header to application/json .
Retrieving an Article in XML Format
Let’s now get our application to respond with the details of a particular article in the XML format. To do this, first, start your application as mentioned above. Now execute the following command:
curl -X GET -H "Accept: application/xml" http://localhost:8080/article/view/1
This should return a response as follows:
<article><ID>1</ID><Title>Article 1</Title><Content>Article 1 body</Content></article>
As you can see, our request got a response in the XML format because we set the Accept header to application/xml .
Testing the Application
Since we’ve been using tests to create specifications for our route handlers and models, we should constantly be running them to ensure that the functions work as expected. Let’s now run the tests that we have written and see the results. In your project directory, execute the following command:
go test -v
Executing this command should result in something similar to this:
=== RUN TestShowIndexPageUnauthenticated [GIN] 2016/06/14 - 19:07:26 | 200 | 183.315µs | | GET / --- PASS: TestShowIndexPageUnauthenticated (0.00s) === RUN TestArticleUnauthenticated [GIN] 2016/06/14 - 19:07:26 | 200 | 143.789µs | | GET /article/view/1 --- PASS: TestArticleUnauthenticated (0.00s) === RUN TestArticleListJSON [GIN] 2016/06/14 - 19:07:26 | 200 | 51.087µs | | GET / --- PASS: TestArticleListJSON (0.00s) === RUN TestArticleXML [GIN] 2016/06/14 - 19:07:26 | 200 | 38.656µs | | GET /article/view/1 --- PASS: TestArticleXML (0.00s) === RUN TestGetAllArticles --- PASS: TestGetAllArticles (0.00s) === RUN TestGetArticleByID --- PASS: TestGetArticleByID (0.00s) PASS ok github.com/demo-apps/go-gin-app 0.084s
As can be seen in this output, this command runs all the tests that we have written and, in this case, indicates that our application is working as we intend it to. If you take a close look at the output, you’ll notice that Go made HTTP requests in the course of testing the route handlers.
Continuous Integration for Go on Semaphore
Continuous Integration (CI) can test and build the application for us in a fast and clean environment. When we are ready to publish, Continuous Delivery (CD) can make the releases, secure in the knowledge that the code passed all our tests.
First, we have to get all the code in GitHub:
If you created the application from scratch: Create a GitHub repository. Push all your code:
$ git init $ git remote add YOUR_REPOSITORY_URL $ git add -A $ git commit -m "initial commit" $ git push origin master
If you prefer to work with a ready-to-use example: Go to the example repository. Fork by using the Fork button on the top right corner:
Use the Clone or download button to see the URL of your new repository:
Finally, clone the code to your machine:
$ git clone YOUR_REPOSITORY_URL
Add Semaphore to Your Project
Adding CI/CD to your project is completely free and takes only a few minutes:
Sign up for a Semaphore account using the Sign up with GitHub button on the top-right corner.
button on the top-right corner. On the left navigation menu, use the + (plus sign) icon next to Projects:
Find you project and click on Choose:
Select the Go starter workflow and click on Run this Workflow:
A CI pipeline will be created and start immediately:
That’s it, on every push the CI pipeline will test and build the application.
Improving the Pipeline
The starter CI pipeline should work seamlessly without any additional setup. We can, however, make some improvements:
Dependencies have to be downloaded every time. We can use a cache to keep them and speed up things.
to keep them and speed up things. We are not using any module management at all. We need to may of locking which version of Gin we want to build against.
at all. We need to may of locking which version of Gin we want to build against. Testing and building are on the same job. We should split it in different jobs so it’s easier for us to later add more tests.
Module Management in Go
Like most languages, Go has several competing module management mechanisms. We’ll use go modules which were introduced on Go 1.11 and is now an official part of the language.
Pull the semaphore-setup branch from your repository. This branch was automatically created by Semaphore during setup:
$ git pull origin semaphore-setup $ git checkout semaphore-setup
Initialize the module manifest, use your repository URL below (omit https:// ):
$ go mod init github.com/YOUR_REPOSITORY_URL
Add the Gin dependency. The following command adds the development version of Gin:
$ go get github.com/gin-gonic/gin@master
Push the updates to the repository:
$ git add go.mod go.sum $ git commit -m "add go modules" $ git push origin setup-semaphore
When adding a dependency, we can be selective on which version to use:
to use a branch : go get github.com/gin-gonic/gin@ master
: to use a tag : go get github.com/gin-gonic/gin@ 1.15.0
: to pick a specific commit: go get github.com/gin-gonic/gin@ 07c0f05f244589ff4a02320a01ad0a1fc102cbd5
Use the Edit Workflow button to open the Workflow Builder:
The main elements of the builder are:
Pipeline : A pipeline has a specific objective, e.g. testing. Pipelines are made of blocks that are executed from left to right in an agent.
: A pipeline has a specific objective, e.g. testing. Pipelines are made of blocks that are executed from left to right in an agent. Agent : The agent is the virtual machine that powers the pipeline. We have three machine types to choose from. The machine runs an optimized Ubuntu 18.04 image with build tools for many languages.
: The agent is the virtual machine that powers the pipeline. We have three machine types to choose from. The machine runs an optimized Ubuntu 18.04 image with build tools for many languages. Block : blocks group jobs that can be executed in parallel. Jobs in a block usually have similar commands and configurations. Once all jobs in a block complete, the next block begins.
: blocks group jobs that can be executed in parallel. Jobs in a block usually have similar commands and configurations. Once all jobs in a block complete, the next block begins. Job: jobs define the commands that do the work. They inherit their configuration from their parent block.
We’ll make an improved version of the first block:
Click on the first block and change its name to: “Install dependencies”.
Below you’ll find the job, change its name to “Install” and type the following commands in the box:
sem-version go 1.13 checkout cache restore vendor-$SEMAPHORE_GIT_BRANCH-$(checksum go.mod),vendor-$SEMAPHORE_GIT_BRANCH,vendor-master go mod vendor cache store vendor-$SEMAPHORE_GIT_BRANCH-$(checksum go.mod),vendor-$SEMAPHORE_GIT_BRANCH,vendor-master vendor
Open the Environment Variables section. Create two variables using +Add env_vars . These variables tell Go to use enable the modules feature and to store dependencies on the vendor/ directory instead of in your $HOME : GO111MODULE = on GOFLAGS = -mod=vendor
section. Create two variables using . These variables tell Go to use enable the modules feature and to store dependencies on the directory instead of in your :
Click on Run the Workflow on the top-right corner and then Start:
We’ve modified the block so it only downloads the Go dependencies:
sem-version : a Semaphore built-in command to manage programming language versions. Semaphore supports most Go versions.
: a Semaphore built-in command to manage programming language versions. Semaphore supports most Go versions. checkout : another built-in command, checkout clones the repository and changes the current directory.
: another built-in command, checkout clones the repository and changes the current directory. go mod vendor : this a Go command that downloads the dependencies into the vendor directory, so they can be cached.
: this a Go command that downloads the dependencies into the vendor directory, so they can be cached. cache: the cache commands provides read and write access to Semaphore’s cache, a project-wide storage for the jobs. Cache is usually able to figure out which files to stores, but we can use the following syntax to force a particular directory or file:
# store in the cache cache store KEY1,KEY2,KEY3 DIRECTORY # restore files and directories cache restore KEY1,KEY2,KEY3
The first time that the jobs run, Go will download the dependencies and Semaphore will store them in the cache. For all the following runs, Semaphore will restore them and Go won’t need to download them again, thus speeding up the process considerably.
Testing with Semaphore
We expect our CI pipeline to be able to test the project and build a binary. We’ll add two more blocks for that:
Click on Edit Workflow
Use the +Add Block dotted line button to create a new block. Name the block “Test”
dotted line button to create a new block. Name the block “Test” Open the Prologue section and type the following commands. The commands are executed before all jobs in the block:
sem-version go 1.13 checkout cache restore vendor-$SEMAPHORE_GIT_BRANCH-$(checksum go.mod),vendor-$SEMAPHORE_GIT_BRANCH,vendor-master go mod vendor
Open the Environment Variables section and create the same variables as we did before: GO111MODULE and GOFLAGS .
section and create the same variables as we did before: and . Set the name of the job to “Test” and type the following command:
go test ./...
Add the third block , let’s call it “Build”
, let’s call it “Build” Repeat the Prologue and Environment Variables steps as before.
and steps as before. Set the name of the job to “Build”
Type the following commands in the box:
go build -v -o go-gin-app artifact push project --force go-gin-app
Click on Run the Workflow and then Start.
The updated pipeline is now complete:
The artifact command we used in the build job uploads the binary into the project’s storage. To access it, use the Project Artifact button:
Semaphore has three separate artifact stores: Job, Workflow, and Project. For more information, check the artifacts doc.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, we created a new web application using Gin and gradually added more functionality. We used tests to build robust route handlers and saw how we can reuse the same code to render a response in multiple formats with minimal effort.
The code for the entire application is available in this Github repository.
Gin is easy to get started with—coupled with Go’s built-in functionality, its features make building high quality, well-tested web applications and microservices a breeze. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them below. | {
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Regardless of today’s election result, one thing is certain: it will not be good for the Republican Party.
On one hand, we have a pro-abort Democrat ready to do the party’s bidding in D.C. On the other hand, we have a bigoted, “constitutionally illiterate” judge who is very likely a predator.
It’s a loss no matter who is victorious in the end.
Naturally, members of the GOP are showing full faith in Moore and his chances because – well – we can’t have a Democrat take the seat!
AL voters are too smart to let the media & Estab Repubs & Dems tell them how to vote. I hope the spirit of Lynyrd Skynyrd is alive/well in AL. “A southern man don’t need them around anyhow & Watergate does not bother me, does your conscience bother you, tell me true?@MooreSenate — Jerry Falwell (@JerryFalwellJr) December 12, 2017
Give me a break.
I won’t feel sorry for the Republican Party if Judge Roy Moore loses his race. We can thank lazy primary voters for choosing him. We can also thank Trump fever for carrying over from the 2016 election and turning this race into what it has become.
The bed has been made. Now all that’s left is for (R) voters to lay in it and cuddle up next to that Moore-supporting RNC logo.
There is no scenario where Judge Roy Moore obtaining a U.S. Senate seat does wonderful things for the prodigal party. (The fever that has already infected the GOP faithful will spur them to say the opposite, though.)
Long before Moore was the subject of national interest, he was a highly questionable, activist judge who got away with much under the guise of conservatism and Christianity. If you need a refresher, David French’s superb election eve piece, The Comprehensive Case Against Roy Moore, should do the trick.
Some excerpts:
Moore believes he’s a law unto himself. …the very instant that we permit any judge to actively defy the constitutional order simply when he — in his subjective wisdom — believes a superior court has overstepped its bounds is the instant we begin to lose the rule of law. Indeed, Moore’s actions as chief justice were so brazen and so egregious that they should disqualify him from the Senate on their own. Yet they don’t even come close to constituting the totality of his sins. Moore is a vicious constitutional and historical illiterate. In a 2006 op-ed, he wrote that Muslim representative Keith Ellison “cannot swear an oath on the Quran and an allegiance to our Constitution at the same time.” Article VI of the Constitution directly, unequivocally, and unambiguously says otherwise. It prohibits any “religious test” as a “Qualification to any Officer or public Trust under the United States.” In September, a man asked him when he thought America was great. “I think it was great at the time when families were united — even though we had slavery — they cared for one another,” he responded. “Our families were strong, our country had a direction.” Moore is absolutely, positively obsessed with gay people. There is nothing obsessive about or wrong with defending religious freedom and free speech from sexual revolutionaries. But then there’s Roy Moore. He is the stereotype. “You could say” America is the “focus of evil in the modern world,” Moore opined earlier this year. The reason? “We promote a lot of bad things” like “same-sex marriage.” Yes, Moore is a likely sex abuser. The fact remains that multiple women have come forward offering corroborated stories that as a 30-something prosecutor, Moore dated teenage girls. In two instances, one of them involving a 14-year-old girl, he is credibly accused of grotesque misconduct. Moore will hurt the pro-life cause. The GOP will enjoy its majority in the short term with or without Moore. It will confirm judges between now and 2018 with or without Moore. It cannot, however, continue to drift toward vile, malicious ignorance and hope to remain the majority party. Moore won’t overturn Roe, but he will continually embarrass its pro-life opponents.
That is but a portion of French’s solid case. The entire piece is worth reading, though it may taste sour to those with a palate more accustomed to tribalism.
If Doug Jones wins, it’s easy to see how that could hurt the GOP. However, if Moore wins, the reasons listed above (and others) are enough to show just how damaging it would be to the party as a whole.
As an ex-GOPer, it’s difficult to even feel concern for a party that so recklessly supported and promoted someone like Donald Trump during the 2016 election. Back then, there were plenty of solid choices in the form of Rubio, Cruz, Bush, and even Fiorina. Of course, they were laughed off, ridiculed, and maligned, and playboy Trump, a Republican for a solid five minutes, was ultimately inaugurated.
Truly unbelievable.
A Roy Moore victory would only further push the Republican Party along the path it began journeying down at the start of the most recent presidential campaign. This is not a positive development no matter who the members of the U.S. Senate are long after the national nightmare known as Alabama Senate Race 2017 concludes.
Despite everything listed above, there will still be many who disagree with me as they exclaim, “A Roy Moore win would be great for the GOP! We need the seat!”
As I’ve stated before, morality is multi-faceted. The questions and concerns surrounding Moore, the majority of which are irrefutable, aren’t resolved by the political letter next to his name.
A Jones win would be a loss. A Moore win would be, too.
Elections aren’t just won at the ballot box. Often, the real victory is found elsewhere. In this case, the GOP captured defeat long before Tuesday dawned. | {
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We have been saying for quite some time that Donald Glover is not only one of the most underrated performers on “Community,” but he is also one of the best on all TV. While Danny Pudi and Joel McHale continually have us in stitches, Troy’s epic meltdown over LeVar Burton (coupled with just about every other Troy meltdown) may be among one of the funniest and most committed scenes we have watched in recent years.
With that in mind, we are glad to see Glover recognized in a way that few stars of the long-snubbed NBC show have in the past three seasons — with an actual award! Glover was the recipient of the Breakout Performer of the Year Award at the 2012 Comedy Awards taped in New York City Saturday night. (The full show airs on Comedy Central May 6 — otherwise known as a week from today.)
As for who else was victorious on the night, Louis C.K. and Tina Fey were both big winners, and we also saw “Parks and Recreation” pull off a couple of upsets over a show in “Modern Family” that has been winning everything under the sun.
The full list of winners (with spoilers for those of you who want to be surprised next week) is below.
Stand-Up Icon Award
Robin Williams
Johnny Carson Award
Don Rickles
Comedy Film
Bridesmaids
Animated Comedy Film
Rango
Performance by an Actor—Film
Jean Dujardin, The Artist
Performance by an Actress—Film
Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids
Comedy Director—Film
Paul Feig, Bridesmaids
Comedy Screenplay
Bridesmaids
Comedy Series
Parks and Recreation
Sketch/Alternative Comedy Series
Louie
Animated Comedy Series
Archer
Performance by an Actor—TV
Ty Burrell, Modern Family
Performance by an Actress—TV
Amy Poehler, Parks and Recreation
Late Night Comedy Series
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Comedy Writing—TV
30 Rock
Comedy Directing—TV
Louie
Comedy Special of the Year
Louis C.K.: Live at the Beacon Theater
Stand-Up Tour
Louis C.K.
Club Comic
Hannibal Buress
Breakout Performer of the Year
Donald Glover
Best Viral Original
Songify This—Winning—A Song by Charlie Sheen
—
What do you think about some of these winners?
Photo: NBC
Love TV? Be sure to like CarterMatt on Facebook for more updates!
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Transcript for Chelsea Clinton doubles down on Trump tweet: ‘His whole life has been a scam’
You sit later on fire last week aperture president trump called impeachment probe and whistle blower complaint the greatest scam. In the history of American politics and you tweeted this yes com you are. Okay. Mourning the yeah. I checked this morning it by this morning it had over 260000. Lights it had over 38000. Re tweets but now we know charm can be really we're left with relentless with his I'm Twitter attacks. Were you at all concerned about served poking that there no. Hot and and I do believe that he's degree of scam in American political history. Yes and I mean I think his whole life is minutes scam and I think I'm. And how are suffering. Every day because his scam has thus far and it. 68 at the highest levels so you've become really vocal not only on Twitter but just. Everywhere. Did you make a conscious decision it's genetic in this. Genetic but I've seen it changed me you know I'm so proud of my mom and a very biased toward her yeah. Okay. And I can feel very protective of her. Although I know she doesn't need me to be at but really my most important. Role now is as Mike it's mom and I've the daughter Charlotte who just turned five last week. As NHL thinks he's who's three and I'm a baby Jasper who's just two months old. And he's very mushy and and I think about that countries that they're living in right now and it's not the country I want them to a crew happened. And you know we. Learned last night that. President trump wanted to dig a ditch at the border and place alligators in the day and snakes and snakes and she shoe Edelstein. Give migrants Sheila I friends and away and Eli knowing that isn't here we want to leave those are the alligator has long had this and Andy tag line from Adams you're there Atlantic that the cruelty is the point I think that article came out a year ago this week. But the deaths of the cruelty and it inhumanity. Towards. Migrants towards people Collard towards her LG BTQ community. What is your us at war heroes yes ma'am. Women yes ma'am you just is not the America that I want my kids or at these kids or. And any of our kids and grandkids to grow up that and I went into everyday I can to ensure that isn't enough to the American of them are.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate. | {
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It is tempting to wonder at times what the Premier League is supposed to be for. It's obviously well presented. It's great fun to watch. It has even been tightly fought this season at the top end. Plus, of course, the Premier League is extremely good at projecting itself for financial gain across every surface and into every available niche like wet sand on the beach, or an aggressive fungal foot infection. But still. What is it actually meant to be about?
There were a couple of slightly jarring moments along these lines this week. First the news broke that Micah Richards is unlikely to stay at Manchester City. It is a bit of a sad moment all round, and not just because Richards was once briefly but spectacularly the next big thing. He was bold and athletic and even quite dainty at times, romping about the place like a muscle-bound baby horse. At 17 he became the youngest defender to play for England. After which: not much. Richards played a bit. He still looked like a wonderful athlete and is clearly a nice, exuberant character. But the gearshift never came, the focus never narrowed.
He played 11 times for England as a teenager, and just twice in the past six years. But at 25 he still has time to come again, to become all the Micah Richards he can be. It is more of an issue for City, where Richards has been since the age of 14, and where he has a special significance as the only homegrown Englishman to play regularly since the boom years kicked in. City are trying to make this work and the academy may yet bear fruit. But for now it remains Micah or bust. And that thread is about to be cut.
Meanwhile David Moyes said what he was expected to say after defeat at Bayern Munich left Manchester United facing at least a year outside the Champions League. The plan was clear. Money would be spent. Big money. Players – big players, top players, big top players – were being lined up, with those rebuilding costs already climbing before our eyes. A while back £150m was being bandied about. This week that leapt to £200m. Then £300m. But why stop there? Why not £400m. Or £500m. Why not a billion? If the point of the Premier League really is to prove beyond all doubt that by spending enough money it is possible to employ human beings who are better than other, cheaper human beings at propelling a leather sphere into a netted rectangle, then there is no logical reason ever to stop spending. Or even to think about doing something else for a change.
This is not a criticism of City or of Moyes. It is instead a wider feature of the Premier League, which looks at times like a strangely barren field. This is a league that basically means nothing, producing the bare minimum of players, managers and hand-reared teams. Instead it can look sometimes like an elaborate piece of staging. We provide the fans, the heritage branding, the noise, the smell of mud. The rest of the world brings the ball.
Of the top teams Chelsea haven't produced a regular homegrown player since John Terry, who made his debut in 1998. United – who are, let's face it, all about the thrill of the homegrown – still have Danny Welbeck, Darren Fletcher and Ryan Giggs. Everton and Liverpool still produce players. Southampton provide a glorious example to the rest. Others chip in. But at the very top: almost nothing.
But then, why should the Premier League have any real interest in creating anything from within? Approaching its quarter-century, English football's top tier has become the most geographically non-specific of televisual products. In fact I can see no real reason why the whole thing couldn't in time be moved to China, where new stadiums could be built, huge crowds drawn, the branding retained, massive sponsorship attracted and no significant revenue or personnel supply lines interrupted.
Except, of course, that the Premier League is suffering on its own terms with this inability to refresh itself from within. If the sole point is to provide a winning product, Spain and Germany are winning that race, providing between them 11 of the past 16 Champions League semi-finalists.
This is obviously partly to do with wealth. But it also to do with methods and there is clear evidence that a spine of carefully nurtured home-reared players is what separates the very best from those who have just the outline or the deep pockets of an elite-level team, just as the current European champions are built around that enforced, academy-led spine of Thomas Müller, Toni Kroos, Philipp Lahm and Bastian Schweinsteiger.
In any case what are we supposed to make in the long term of an industry with revenues of £3bn that is essentially a gilded pop-up, with nothing to touch, or point to, or say: 'Look, we made these wonderful players, this thrilling, inspiring team that could not have existed otherwise.' I still remember the feeling of excitement at the talented group of players that emerged in the early Premier League years, a sense among the fizz and the puff of the new frontier that this was how these things were going to work now. A Paul Scholes every five years, regular Michael Owens scooting out from behind the skirting board, an occasional Micah Richards, fruits of a properly functioning system.
Sport has no wider story to tell if it doesn't at least attempt to express something of the cultures and systems behind it. Otherwise all that is being tested is the ability to spend. And how interesting is that, really?
Just imagine, for a moment if Moyes did say: "Hang it all, what we're going to do is pour our millions into youth development. We're going to trust in the system, our basic resources, the galvanising romance of this wonderful big-city club. We're going to source our own organic world-class stars and we'll be back to storm the Champions League with Davie's Ducklings – maybe not now, but soon."
It won't happen of course. It couldn't. Money won't let it. But just imagine if it did: the thrill of something tangible being built, the sense at last of some content beneath the glittering surface.
• This article was updated on 11 April, correcting 'occidental' to 'occasional' | {
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Navigating through unknown territory is a challenge in and of itself, especially in the case of search and rescue missions — and guiding others while doing so increases the difficulty even further. To assist in these situations, researchers at MIT have built a prototype wearable mapping system that can wirelessly transfer data in real-time, as reported by MIT News. Using a "stripped-down" Kinect sensor and a laser rangefinder, the unit scans the area around the wearer in a 270-degree arc to create a map that can be viewed remotely, as seen in the video below.
While travelling, wearers can indicate points of interest on the map, compensating for potential scanning inaccuracies caused by natural human movement. The unit is also capable of tracking multi-level movement using an inertial sensor and a barometer, and the team plans to implement voice communication in the future as well. The project is supported by both the US Air Force and the Office of Naval Research, and the researchers hope that it can eventually be used by first responders when coordinating disaster response. | {
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El 3 de marzo de 2016 fue asesinada Berta Cáceres en su domicilio de La Esperanza (Honduras). Tres balazos acabaron con la vida de la coordinadora del Consejo de Pueblos Indígenas de Honduras (COPINH). En el segundo aniversario de su asesinato hablamos con Adrienne Pine, autora del libro “Sobrevivir Honduras” y amiga de Berta que nos acerca sobre su larga trayectoria en defensa de la tierra, así como los hechos que estuvieron detrás de este asesinato. También en el estudio estamos con Jairo de la Comunidad Hondureña de Madrid que nos ayuda a comprender la figura de Berta, así como el contexto político de Honduras y de por qué es una de los países con mas violencia.
[email protected] | {
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Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Lord Patten, Tory party chairman: "Boris is Boris - Tommy Cooper was Tommy Cooper"
Boris Johnson does not seem to understand "the difference between fact and fiction", former Tory chairman Lord Patten has told BBC Newsnight.
Lord Patten, who supports the UK remaining in the EU, said Mr Johnson, a prominent Leave campaigner, "just makes it up as he goes along".
He also said it would be "very difficult" for David Cameron to remain leader if the UK voted to leave the EU.
Vote Leave said it was saddened at "the level of debate" from the Remain camp.
Mr Johnson has previously said voters want proper debate and to hear about the issues, "not personal attacks".
The UK decides whether to stay in or leave the European Union in a referendum on 23 June.
The Conservative Party is deeply split over the the issue, with David Cameron and most of his cabinet campaigning for a Remain vote but about half of the MPs supporting an EU exit.
The debate inside the party has turned increasingly acrimonious, with former deputy prime minister and pro-Remain campaigner Lord Heseltine recently accusing Mr Johnson of losing his judgement over the EU.
'Boris is Boris'
Lord Patten, Tory party chairman from 1990 to 1992, added to that criticism of the former London mayor, in an interview with Newsnight's David Grossman on Friday.
"Boris just makes it up as he goes along, and you come across people like that," he said.
"There's a sense in which you can't call Boris a liar. I think he's one of those people in life who simply doesn't really understand the difference between fact and fiction."
He added: "If he can make a good joke by saying something, or if he can write a newspaper article by referring to Hitler and the European Union, he does it - and he doesn't think about it.
"He'll be saying the opposite in a few months' time."
Lord Patten, a European commissioner from 2000 to 2004, said Mr Johnson was an "amiable" character, but added: "Boris is Boris. Tommy Cooper was Tommy Cooper."
In response, Vote Leave said: "It's sad to see the level of debate the 'Remainers' have been reduced to. They were wrong about the euro then and they are wrong now."
Image copyright PA Image caption Mr Johnson is one of the most prominent figures arguing for an EU exit
And speaking to BBC Newsnight, Leave campaigner Jacob Rees Mogg suggested that Lord Patten's "anger is almost certainly synthetic".
The MP suggested Lord Patten was trying to "bash down" Mr Johnson because he knows that the former London mayor was "hugely popular and trusted" and was making the case for an EU exit "exceptionally effectively".
The Daily Mail reported earlier this week that "senior party figures" had warned of a vote of no-confidence in Mr Cameron after 23 June, whatever the outcome, over his handling of the referendum campaign.
On the question of re-uniting the Conservative Party after the referendum, Lord Patten said that if the UK voted to Leave the EU it would be "very difficult" for Mr Cameron to stay on as leader.
"Are people like Michael Gove and Mr Johnson and Iain Duncan Smith... are they all going to require Mr Cameron to go cap in hand around Europe for the next few years trying to negotiate new trade deals and new agreements with the EU?
"I don't know," he said.
'Neverendum concerns'
Lord Patten said if Britain voted to remain in the EU, Mr Cameron would have to assert his authority and try to bring the party together.
But he suggested the PM should give Mr Johnson a challenging cabinet post, such as running the Department for Health.
"That will really test whether there is something behind all the jokes," he said.
Lord Patten also criticised the wider Vote Leave campaign, saying it's objective appeared to be "to keep the turnout as low as possible and to tell young people to stay at home and not vote", which , he said, was "extraordinary".
And he added: "I worry that for a lot of the Brexiteers, in a sort of spittle-flecked way, this is a neverendum, not a referendum."
Also in the interview, the former Tory party chairman conceded that he had made the wrong call on Britain joining the Euro.
"I put my hand up," he said. "Everybody occasionally makes a mistake and I think I was wrong about that." | {
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First recorded during the 1940s, a fallstreak hole forms when water droplets in a cloud freeze into ice crystals and refract light to form a rainbow, while at the same time dropping down below the cloud layer to form a hole.
These unique formations - also known as 'holepunch clouds' - can materialise on their own, but researchers have found that aircraft flying through super-cooled clouds can also set off the freezing process. This is because when air flows around the tips of an aeroplane's propellor and over its wings, it can cool in a localised area, causing the surrounding water droplets to drop to temperatures as low as -40 degrees and freeze.
"A fallstreak hole is a circular or elliptical gap that can appear in high- to mid-level clouds," US-based meteorologist Linda Lam told Weather.com. "There are water droplets in the cloud that have yet to freeze, and once they do - when ice crystals are introduced - the water droplet freezes and grows. As it grows, it begins to fall and a hole is left behind."
While the process of fallstreak hole cloud formation is entirely natural, it mimics the formation of jet contrails - no, not chemtrails! - which are the long, thin trails of clouds sometimes produces by an aircraft.
People in Victoria have shared their photos of the phenomenon with ABC News, which you can view at their website.
Image: Lorie Leskie/ABC News
Sources: ABC News, Weather.com | {
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In a World of Their Own
By downplaying and misrepresenting our environmental crisis, David Attenborough and the BBC have generated complacency, confusion and ignorance.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian, 7th Novemeber 2018
Knowingly creating a false impression of the world: this is a serious matter. It is more serious still when the BBC does it, and yet worse when the presenter is “the most trusted man in Britain”. But, as his latest interview with the Observer reveals, Sir David Attenborough sticks to his line that fully representing environmental issues is a “turn-off”.
His new series, Dynasties, will mention the pressures affecting wildlife, but Attenborough makes it clear that it will play them down. To do otherwise, he suggests, would be “proselytising” and “alarmist”. His series will be “a great relief from the political landscape which otherwise dominates our thoughts.” In light of the astonishing rate of collapse of the animal populations he features, alongside most of the rest of the world’s living systems, and when broadcasting as a whole has disgracefully failed to represent such truths, I don’t think such escapism is appropriate or justifiable.
It is not proselytising or alarmist to tell us the raw truth about what is happening to the world, however much it might discomfit us. Nor do I believe that revealing the marvels of nature automatically translates into environmental action, as the executive producer of Dynasties claims. I’ve come to believe it can have the opposite effect.
For many years, wildlife film-making has presented a pristine living world. It has created an impression of security and abundance, even in places afflicted by cascading ecological collapse. The cameras reassure us that there are vast tracts of wilderness in which wildlife continues to thrive. They cultivate complacency, not action.
You cannot do such a thing passively. Wildlife filmmakers I know tell me that the effort to portray what looks like an untouched ecosystem becomes harder every year. They have to choose their camera angles ever more carefully to exclude the evidence of destruction, travel further to find the Edens they depict. They know, and many feel deeply uncomfortable about it, that they are telling a false story, creating a fairytale world which persuades us that all is well, in the midst of an existential crisis. While many people, thanks in large part to David Attenborough, are now quite well informed about wildlife, we remain astonishingly ignorant about what is happening to it.
What makes Attenborough’s comments particularly odd is that they come just a year after the final episode of his Blue Planet II series triggered a massive effort to reduce plastic pollution. Though the programme made a complete dog’s breakfast of the issue, the response demonstrated a vast public appetite for information about the environmental crisis, and an urgent desire to act on it.
Since 1985, when I started work in the department that has made most of his programmes, I’ve pressed the BBC to reveal environmental realities, often with dismal results. In 1995, I spent several months with a producer, developing a novel and imaginative proposal for an environmental series. The producer returned from his meeting with the channel controller in a state of shock. “He just looked at the title and asked ‘Is this environment?’. I said yes. He said, ‘I’ve spent two years trying to get environment off this fucking channel. Why the fuck are you bringing me environment?’”. I later discovered that this response was typical. The controllers weren’t indifferent. They were actively hostile. If you ask me whether the BBC or ExxonMobil has done more to frustrate environmental action in this country, I would say the BBC.
We all knew that only one person had the power to break this dam. For decades, David Attenborough, a former channel controller widely seen as the living embodiment of the BBC, has been able to make any programme he wants. So where, we kept asking, was he? At last, in 2000, he presented an environmental series: The State of the Planet.
It was an interesting and watchable series, but it left us with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Only in the last few seconds of the final episode was there a hint that structural forces might be at play: “real success can only come if there’s a change in our societies, in our economics and in our politics.” But what change? What economics? What politics? He had given us no clues.
To make matters worse, it was sandwiched between further programmes of his about the wonders of nature, that created a strong impression of robust planetary health. He might have been describing two different worlds. Six years later, he made another environmental series, The Truth about Climate Change. And this, in my view, was a total disaster.
It told us nothing about the driving forces behind climate breakdown. The only mention of fossil fuel companies was as part of the solution: “the people who extract fossil fuels like oil and gas have now come up with a way to put carbon dioxide back under ground.” Apart from the general “we”, the only distinct force identified as responsible was the “1.3 billion Chinese”. That a large proportion of Chinese emissions are caused by manufacturing the goods we buy was not mentioned. The series immediately triggered a new form of climate denial: I was bombarded with people telling me there was no point in taking action in Britain, because the Chinese were killing the planet.
If Attenborough’s environmentalism has a coherent theme, it is shifting the blame away from powerful forces and onto either society in general or the poor and weak. Sometimes it becomes pretty dark. In 2013, he told the Telegraph “What are all these famines in Ethiopia? What are they about? They’re about too many people for too little land … We say, get the United Nations to send them bags of flour. That’s barmy.”
There had not been a famine in Ethiopia for 28 years, and the last one was caused not by an absolute food shortage, but by civil war and government policies. His suggestion that food relief is counter-productive suggests he has read nothing on the subject since Thomas Malthus’s essay in 1798. But, cruel and ignorant as these comments were, they were more or less cost-free. By contrast, you do not remain a national treasure by upsetting powerful vested interests: look at the flak the wildlife and environmental presenter Chris Packham attracts.
I have always been entranced by David Attenborough’s wildlife programmes, but astonished by his consistent failure to mount a coherent, truthful and effective defence of the living world he loves. His revelation of the wonders of nature has been a great public service. But withholding the knowledge we need to defend it is, I believe, a grave disservice.
www.monbiot.com | {
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SANTA MONICA (CBSLA) – From the Valley to the Westside, electric scooters are hard to miss. While they are no doubt an eco-friendly and fun way to travel, lawsuits against scooter companies are starting to pileup.
It’s a growing trend on Instagram: Accounts devoted to trashing electric scooters and spotlighting their mishaps.
While accounts like Scooters Behaving Badly and Bird Graveyard may have been created for kicks, not everyone is laughing.
“It was literally like two or three seconds – I was down,” Holly Bittinger said.
The West Los Angeles resident is recovering from a shattered wrist.
“Its very hard,” Bianca McMahan said.
McMahan, of West Hollywood, wound up in the emergency room with a fractured ankle, three plates and numerous screws
“I don’t think people realize how potentially dangerous these scooters are,” Catherine Lerer said.
Lerer is an attorney in Santa Monica. Since April, calls from scooter accident victims have flooded her office.
“I’ve been contacted by 200 or 300 injury victims so far. We’ve taken on maybe 60 or 70 cases,” she said.
Bittinger and McMahan are among Lerer’s clients who have filed lawsuits against scooter companies Bird and Lime. The suits allege, among other things, gross negligence.
“They’re not well maintained, they’re breaking down. The most common call we get is when a rider is injured because a throttle sticks,” Lerer said.
Bittinger was riding a bird scooter just north of Santa Monica Boulevard in August when her throttle got stuck in the downward position.
“I was futzing with the throttle trying to unstick it,” Bittinger said.
While the scooter was at full speed, Bittinger went down.
“Looked up and saw my wrist dangling from my arm and knew that it was broken,” she said.
McMahan and her husband were riding Lime scooters on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica when she got hurt.
“They were in the bike lane. All of a sudden, their scooters slow down,” Lerer said.
A short distance later, the attorney said the couple’s scooters speed up.
“Her husband lost control, clipped her and she went down and was injured,” she said.
The pair had entered a zone that was geo-fenced. Some cities require scooter companies to slow down in pedestrian-heavy areas like the one McMahan and her husband were riding in. The scooters then speed up automatically when they left the zone.
McMahan said she and her husband had no warning of the changing speeds, and there aren’t any signs posted.
“They got a text message from the company saying you just entered a reduced-speed zone. But, you know, their cell phones are in their pocket,” Lerer said. “So they didn’t realize they they had entered and were coming out of the zone until after the crash when they looked at their phone.”
The companies have denied liability.
Lime’s user agreement is 262 screen shots long, and Bird’s is 58 screen shots. Language included in the agreements states riders assume responsibility for all “risks, dangers and hazards.”
“I signed a user agreement,” Bittinger said. “While I assumed there was some risk, what I was not prepared for was the equipment failing on me.
Bittinger said she misses being able to do the yoga she loves. For now, her hands can’t handle it.
McMahan wonders whether she’ll ever be able to navigate stairs with ease, or get back to her hobbies of biking and hiking.
“Changed my life, yeah,” McMahan said.
For now, demand for the scooters remains high.
But as more miles are logged and the injuries mount, Lerer said, “The calls keep coming.”
Full text of the statement from Lime:
“At Lime, the safety of our riders and the community is our number one priority. That’s why every day we’re innovating on technology, infrastructure and education to set the standard for micromobility safety.
Lime has recently led several safety initiatives, including:
The launch of the Lime Gen 3 scooter with enhanced safety features, including upgraded wheels, better suspension, additional braking and improved balance.
Global leader protecting each ride with $1 million in liability insurance.
Investing more than $3 million in our Respect the Ride campaign to educate riders about safety and responsible riding.
250,000 free helmets distributed to riders across the globe.
First of its kind Safety Brand Ambassador Program to educate riders on safety.
Dedicated Customer Support and Trust, Education and Safety teams available to riders 24/7.
Convenors of an industry-wide Education and Safety Summit on micromobility.
We’re also working with local governments around the world to support infrastructure for shared scooters and bikes. It’s clear consumers want micromobility infrastructure too; 52.2% of Lime riders ranked a protected bike lane as their number one choice for riding. We believe continued government investment in protected bike lanes and paths is critical.
The rapid adoption of micromobility across the U.S. and across the globe demonstrates that the future of transportation is clean, efficient and safe. We look forward to working with the industry, medical community and regulators to create a meaningful ecosystem for this new and evolving technology.”
Full text of statement from Bird:
“Bird is committed to partnering with cities to ensure that the community, and its visitors, safely embrace our affordable, environmentally friendly transportation option. We strive to improve and enhance the well-being of our riders and communities through concrete action, including: requiring riders to upload a driver’s license and confirm they are 18 or older, providing an in-app tutorial on how to ride a Bird and how to park it, and posting clear safety instructions on each Bird. Additionally, Bird recently formed the Global Safety Advisory Board, which will create, advise, and implement global programs, campaigns, and products to improve the safety of those riding Birds and other e-scooters.
We strongly encourage all riders to wear helmets. To help ensure all people have equal access to helmets, we have given away more than 65,000 free helmets.
We strongly recommend reporting any damaged scooters or incidents that Bird scooters are involved in, as we have a support team dedicated to safety that is available around the clock to address questions and reports we receive. Bird provides a number of ways for people to reach us including by email [email protected], through our in-app messaging feature, and by phone. | {
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Im Test des FC Bayern GEGEN Manchester United (Sonntag, 20.15 Uhr, live bei RTL) wird Jérôme Boateng (29) wohl nicht spielen. Der WM-Teilnehmer hat noch Trainingsrückstand.
Aber spielt Boateng bald FÜR Manchester United?
Neben Paris St.-Germain zockt jetzt der englische Rekordmeister im Poker um den Nationalspieler mit!
United-Trainer José Mourinho (55) sucht dringend einen Innenverteidiger – und Bayern-Star Boateng steht ganz oben auf der Liste.
Der ManUnited-Plan: Der französische Nationalspieler Anthony Martial (22), mit dem Mourinho im Streit liegt, soll gegen Boateng getauscht werden. Der Marktwert des Linksaußen (Vertrag bis 2019): 65 Mio Euro – rund zehn Mio mehr, als Bayern für einen Boateng-Verkauf erwartet.
Boateng zu ManUnited, Martial zu Bayern?
Was Bayern-Boss Karl-Heinz Rummenigge zu dieser Variante sagt und wie der Poker um Boateng läuft, lesen Sie mit BILDplus hier! | {
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Miss Doreen Kendall, a practical nurse, and Mrs. Frieda Wilson, a registered nurse, are employed together on the night shift in the extended-care ward for elderly patients at the Cowichan District Hospital at Duncan on Vancouver Island.
Theirs is a position that requires a special degree of tact, maturity and gentleness of manner for it is at night that their patients, often unable to sleep, have long lonely hours in which to contemplate the little that remains for them in life. A word or gesture of comfort from the nurses on duty is all they have in their fading world until the routine of morning helps them into another day.
It is immediately apparent on meeting them that Miss Kendall and Mrs. Wilson, both in late middle-age, were assigned to their particular work with these qualifications in mind. In addition to what training obviously has given them, they have an inborn quality that invites trust, and it was no surprise, after we interviewed them, that friends and former patients of each told us they would accept their word under any circumstance. Coming from several who had doubted the existence of UFOs, this was a significant tribute in light of what the two nurses (with partial confirmation by two others who arrived seconds later) said they observed outside the hospital just as 1970 was dawning on the Pacific Coast.
It was turning five in the morning of Jan. 1 when Miss Kendall, concerned that one of her women patients was restless, switched on a light to attend to her. Deciding the patient was too warm, she went to a window near the bed and parted the drapes to let in a little fresh air.
"Just as I pulled the drapes a brilliant light hit me in the eyes," she said. "It was still dark outside, but about 60 feet away right above the children's ward, there was this object so big and bright I could see everything clearly."
(Immediately to the left of where Miss Kendall was standing, a wing of the hospital juts out at right angles. The children's ward is on the third floor of that wing. With Miss Kendall on the second floor of her wing, this meant the object was hovering above her by slightly more than the height of one storey and a little to her left.)
"The object was circular and had what I guess you would call a top and bottom. The bottom was silvery, like metal, and was shaped like a bowl. There was a string of bright lights around it like a necklace. The top was a dome made of something like glass. It was lit up from inside and I could see right into it."
Continuing her account in question-and-answer form, Miss Kendall said there were two male-Iike figures in the craft, one behind the other, facing to her right away from the hospital. The one in front appeared taller, or perhaps was positioned higher, than the other. Their heads were encased in close-fitting dark material.
As she watched with intense curiosity, yet completely unfrightened - "I never felt so peaceful in all my life. I wish I could have talked to them " - she became aware of seeing more of the interior of the craft and realized it was tilting. In a moment she could see to a point just below their knees and noticed they were standing in front of what looked like stools.
"They looked like fine, tall, well-built men," she said. "They were dressed in tight-fitting suits of the same material that covered their heads but their hands were bare and I noticed how human they looked. Their flesh seemed just like ours."
Intrigued as she was by the appearance of the two figures, Miss Kendall found her interest mainly centered on what looked like an instrument panel facing the one in front. One reason for this, she thought, was that she comes from a family of racing-car enthusiasts and automotive mechanics have always held a special interest for her.
"The man in front was staring at the panel as if something very important was going on, and I wondered if they might have had mechanical trouble," she said. "I even thought they might have landed on the roof of the hospital and then had trouble taking off.
She described the panel as a very large one, taking up almost half the interior of the object and reaching nearly to the top of the dome. The instruments, if that is what they were, seemed to be inset in the chrome-Iike metal of the panel and there was a variety of sizes.
Miss Doreen Kendall
The total sight was so absorbing that at first Miss Kendall's thoughts were lost to everything else, and for a moment she forgot Mrs. Wilson was in the same room.
"Then when I did think of it, I guess I hesitated," she explained. "I felt I mustn't make a noise or do anything that would break the trend of what was happening."
At this point, almost as if her thoughts were being read, she saw the figure in the rear turn slowly and face squarely in her direction.
"He seemed to look right at me but I couldn't see his face. It was covered by a darkish material that looked softer than the rest of his suit. I'm sure he saw me because then he touched the other man on the back."
When Miss Kendall parted drapes she saw brightly-lit object containing two human-appearing males. Apparently knowing they were observed, one touched other on back
Miss Kendall said that what followed, again possibly because of her interest in mechanics, made a sharper impression on her than anything else in the entire incident.
"When the man in back did this, the one in front reached down and took hold of something like a lever beside him. I'll never forget how deliberately he did it. He pushed it back and forth and the saucer, or whatever you'd call it, started to circle slowly, still close to the building, in an anticlockwise direction."
The motion seemed to break the spell for Miss Kendall, for then she remembered Mrs. Wilson was there and called her over.
Later we spoke separately to Mrs. Wilson, who continued the story from that point.
"I noticed Miss Kendall standing at the window and wondered what she was looking at. In fact, I was just going to see when she beckoned to me, and then I saw this great big light over the patio outside the children's ward. I'd say it was quite a bit larger than a car. (By the estimate of both witnesses, the object spanned a width of about five windows of the children's ward. This gave it a diameter of at least 50 feet.) It looked circular in shape and the far side seemed to be higher than the side near us. It was moving around slowly and then it started to move away. I didn't really see any top or bottom to it. It was all just tremendously bright. Some people say we were looking at a plastic bag with candles in it, put there as a joke. But it would take a million candles to make it as bright as that."
Mrs. Wilson did not see the "necklace" of lights described by Miss Kendall, nor could she see inside the object and consequently saw no human-like figures. Since this appeared to be a serious difference in the two reports, we asked Miss Kendall in a second interview how she might account for it.
"I think Mrs. Wilson must have come just a bit too late," she said. " After the thing circled four or five times, it started going away, farther along by the roof of the children's ward, and I couldn't see inside it either."
Not being precisely sure how close the object was when Miss Kendall first observed it, Mrs. Wilson could not say whether or not this did explain her failure to see the occupants. But the fact that she came to the window in time to see the craft circling, and then saw it move away, suggests the explanation of distance does not quite fill the bill. So without intending to add anything to the narrative that the witnesses themselves did not observe, we offer another possible explanation merely for the sake of conjecture.
It has been noticed in UFO sightings that the object when stationary gives out less light than when in motion. This rule, of course, is not invariable. UFOs emanating no light at all have been seen moving at high speed, while others glowing brightly have been seen to hover and even to land.
But the increase of light with motion does appear to be a general characteristic, and it is one that may have prevented Mrs. Wilson seeing the interior of the craft outside the hospital. All of Miss Kendall's observations in detail were made before the craft started to move. After that she, like Mrs. Wilson, was conscious only of the light and motion of the craft. In other words, by the time Mrs. Wilson reached the window the brightness of the object may have increased to an extent that all details were obscured. It would have been like staring at the headlights of a car. All one could have said about the car itself was that its lights were bright.
This in turn may account for the fact that, unlike Miss Kendall, Mrs. Wilson felt only alarm when she looked at the object. Some maintain that at times through some kind of chemistry UFOs are able to exert a calming influence. But in this case it appears to have been the peaceful manner of the two occupants that dispelled any fear Miss Kendall might have felt.
At this point two other nurses on the floor, Mrs. Clackson and Mrs. Appleby, hearing the excited comments of the first two, rushed to another window of the ward but could only see what they agreed was a "bright light" receding in the distance. Seconds later two other nurses also looked out a window but saw nothing. Apparently by that time the object had moved behind trees that border the hospital.
As nurses watched from window out of sight on left, UFO with two occupants was seen outside of children's ward on top story of this hospital wing. It spanned five windows, starting from left.
A significant factor of this sighting is that none of the witnesses made any effort to publicize it, yet at the same time made no pretence of being secretive. Knowing of our interest in the subject, another nurse at the hospital who is a friend of ours phoned us a little later the same morning and it was through this connection that we arranged the interview which was later reported in the Victoria press.
Immediately the story appeared, the two witnesses, like ourselves, started to receive phone calls by persons who were legitimately and intelligently interested and by others who professed to have exclusive private information about the incident. It was here that we acquired information of our own about people who, for some reason that escapes us, want to establish that they have the inside dope. We heard about half a dozen different versions of the incident being a put-up job. We were told by some it was a bunch of school kids having fun and by others it was a bunch of drunks. In two or three cases names were even mentioned but in no case did the names agree, and in no case did our callers explain how so much rowdyism was going on at the hospital grounds without the police being called.
Also none of our callers mentioned another extraordinary sighting that occurred at Duncan within seconds of the hospital incident, obviously because this one was not reported in the press and therefore offered no one a chance to give us "exclusive" information about it.
But the authenticity of the incident is undeniable because it was reported to authorities before the hospital case had received any publicity whatever.
In other words, completely unknown to each other, two sets of witnesses were observing a UFO in the vicinity of Duncan early that New Year's morning.
The second set of witnesses was a truck-driver and his wife whose names and report, like the nurses', are officially on record. Although admitting he had a few drinks, the husband said the experience made him feel cold sober and he was sufficiently affected by it to make his report though it meant disclosing his condition while driving.
The man said he and his wife had just returned home from a party about five o'clock that morning when their attention was attracted by a huge white light "as big as a house" hovering low over their place. The witness described the light as somewhat oval or rectangular in shape (it will be noted the UFO at the hospital was circular but, if seen at an angle by these other two witnesses, it might have appeared oval) and said that three or four shafts of light extended down at an angle beneath it, converging to form a single shaft. This gave the object the appearance of a top. As they watched in amazement for a few seconds, the light suddenly shot up and either blinked out or disappeared in the distance at an incredible speed.
"I may have had a few drinks," the man said, "but I know perfectly well that had nothing to do with what I saw, and my wife saw it, too."
Back at the hospital Miss Kendall, deciding to put her experience on record, made this entry in the hospital working schedule:
"At 5 a.m. I saw a flying saucer as low as the third floor of the hospital when I pulled the curtains. There were two men or figures in the dome flying towards Victoria. ( Miss Kendall, who admits having an uncertain sense of direction, was wrong in this notation. Victoria lies south of Duncan whereas the direction taken by the UFO, as established by reconstruction of events, was northeast. ) The bottom of the saucer was brilliantly lit and also the dome - New Year's morning."
Of the two principal witnesses at the hospital, Mrs. Wilson was the more alarmed when she saw the UFO - in fact, as we have noted, the sighting had a peaceful effect on Miss Kendall - and later reported she had a "tingling" sensation which may have been caused by excitement or, as in some cases, by some emanation from the craft itself.
Yet strangely it was Miss Kendall who was the more lastingly affected by the experience.
When she returned that morning to her home in Nanaimo, north of Duncan, her brother who was visiting from out of town immediately noticed something unusual had happened to her and asked her about it, whereupon she told him her strange experience.
"For at least a week after that," she said in our second interview, "I didn't feel quite like my usual self. I think that normally I am an outgoing sort of person, but now I felt very subdued and some of the other nurses said I seemed preoccupied.
By the time we saw her again, however, she seemed completely relaxed and friendly and though, by her own acknowledgment, she had been through an experience she would never forget, there was no sign that the incident would alter the composed tenor of her life in any way.
One would have thought that was enough excitement for one day in the small town of Duncan but the strange aerial visitors decreed otherwise. About seven o'clock that evening the glowing craft - or perhaps another of about the same size - flew at low altitude through the darkness in full view of a flock of assorted witnesses at various points in the area. Since the morning visit was not yet publicly known, there can be no suggestion that people had started seeing things on that account.
On this second visit the object appeared so big and bright that at least one group of witnesses could see it several miles away. The observers in this case were Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Gillam and friends who were having dinner at the Deer Lodge restaurant just off the Island highway south of Mill Bay. To them the object seemed to be over the Saanich Peninsula, about 10 miles to the east, and was headed in a northeasterly direction.
"All we could see was a large ball of light moving quite slowly, much slower than an airplane," Gillam said. "It must have been very bright for us to see it from that distance. I don't think a helicopter would have been that bright."
Any thought that the object might have been a helicopter was removed by the comments of two other sets of witnesses who saw the light, or another of the same general description, much closer at hand.
One of these groups was Judge George Hallett, his wife and three dinner guests who, at about 7 p.m. that New Year's Day, saw a huge orange-colored light passing slowly along the waterfront opposite the Halletts' home at Mill Bay. Reconstruction of the scene placed the distance of the light at about half a mile. Since the object, travelling south at the time, was staying close to shore, it appears the Halletts' sighting preceded that of the Gillams who saw the light, if it was the same, moving off in the distance.
"This was no ordinary aircraft, and it was no plastic-bag trick either," Judge Hallett said. "It was making no sound that we could detect, it was moving very slowly and it was enormous. I'm quite sure no one could play a trick with such a large apparatus without being spotted. We watched it for about five minutes until it seemed to disappear into the clouds."
Judge & Mrs. George Hallett
Then right on the waterfront we talked to the Drummond family who for once and all eliminated any idea the incident was a prank or a normal flying occurrence.
Their startling experience occurred while Jim Drummond, a shipwright, and his wife, Dianna, aboard the tugboat which they have converted into a comfortable home, were making a New Year's visit to Jim's mother who has a house immediately overlooking the shore at Mill Bay. It was she who had the first hint of what was to happen.
Mrs. Bea Drummond
"It was about seven o'clock and Jim and Dianna were still on the boat, anchored close to shore, when I went outside to call them in to dinner," she said. "Then I noticed a light in the sky moving over the bay. I couldn't tell how big it was, it was so bright, and it had a yellow-orangey glow like sunlight.
"I got so excited I yelled to my son to look. I ran out to the other side of my house but I couldn't see over the trees. I tried to phone some of the neighbors but I couldn't get through on the party line."
But on deck Jim had received the message.
"I looked up and saw this light coming in from the north, just about in line with our boat. It was skimming right under the overcast which was about 900 feet. I ran into the cabin and grabbed my telescope and camera, and my wife came out with me to look. We were really excited."
Guessing that on film the object would merely look like a blob against a black background, Jim did not bother with the camera but studied the thing carefully through his telescope.
"It was sort of egg-shaped, in a vertical position, but the top and bottom were indistinct," he said. "It seemed to be transparent on top, and inside it I thought I could see a set of lights but I couldn't really make out any details."
To make it easier for her son to bring his wife and little boy ashore, Mrs. Drummond had switched on a flood light on the porch of her house. Whether this had anything to do with what followed is impossible to say, but for some reason the object dropped about 300 feet as it passed between the house and the tugboat. It was almost as if it was curious about the strong light shining from the dark shore.
Then something happened that on Jim made the sharpest impression of all.
"Just at that point something came out of that thing which by then had slowed down almost to a stop," he said. "It was a ray of light like a very thin neon tube, and it was in pieces, something like the dots and dashes of morse code. It came down in a curve and then it flashed right out, all of it at the same time. My hair just stood up on end. I couldn't imagine anything like it."
As Drummonds watched a ray like "thin neon tube" divided into pieces flashed from object. Jim, looking through telescope, felt his hair stand on end.
After this weird performance the object climbed back to its former height and passed out of sight to the south. It was at this stage that the Halletts might have seen it, their house being in that direction. Significantly the wind was blowing from the southwest at the time. If the object had been a balloon this would have driven it in the opposite direction.
Like other people in the Maple Bay area near Duncan where he normally keeps his boat, Jim Drummond a few days later had another sighting. But this time it was obviously some part of a game that pranksters had started to play, perhaps stimulated by the UFO publicity which by then had swarmed into the local press.
"The second one wasn't the same thing at all," he said. "You could see it was a kids' job, not a fraction as bright, and it was just bobbing around without really going anywhere."
Seen in front of tugboat which they have converted into comfortable home, Jim and Dianna Drummond were treated to spectacular New Year's display when giant UFO flew close to vessel. Jim's mother, whom they were visiting, was first to sight object.
The rash of reports that cropped up for the next month or so made it difficult to distinguish between what might be real and what was clearly fake. Eventually we decided that, in our book at least, only the Jan. 1 sightings had the true flavor of authenticity.
Yet there were others that made us pause. Phoning James Quaife, the mayor of Duncan, on a tip, we learned that one night in January, he and his wife and several neighbors, watched a light many times brighter than a star perform spectacular manoeuvres in the sky, including dead stops and reversal of direction.
Mayor James Quaife
A month later after the excitement seemed to have died, John Vanderhoek, who lives on a farm by the Vancouver Island highway, phoned to say that motorists were crowding up in front of his place to watch a "red thing in the air" that was putting on quite a performance. He described it as rising and falling, and changing in intensity as it did so. Above the reddish light there appeared to be a white one, and the object was in motion despite a complete absence of wind. As he spoke the light moved toward mountains to the west and disappeared.
That apparently marked the end of the Vancouver Island flap, at least for the time being. But it might be well to explain that the Jan. 1 sightings did not really mark the beginning. In December there had been a scattering of sightings north of Duncan, and in one case the object sounded very similar to that reported by Vanderhoek. It was glowing white on top and red on the bottom.
But the most striking of these earlier incidents occurred one morning above Duncan's Alexander elementary school. The object in this case was ring-shaped and, as it moved silently overhead, was observed by a teacher, two aides, the school secretary and two students.
"The ring definitely looked as if it was made of some solid substance," Mrs. Edith Beiling, one of the aides, told us. "It was like a very large heavy hula hoop and the material looked like thick rolled-up plastic. It seemed to change in size slightly, perhaps because it was moving up and down, and we didn't have any real idea what size it was but I'd say a large plane could have fitted into it about 15 times.
"We saw it through a window from inside the school at first, then we rushed outside to get a better look. We were all pretty excited, and I think there was one who was even quite frightened. I felt like ringing the school bell but decided I had better not."
Mrs. Beiling explained the day was heavily overcast at the time and consequently it was difficult to say whether they were staring through open space in the middle of the craft, or whether the center was made of some material matching the clouds in color. But there was no doubt in the witnesses' minds that they were looking at a solid object, not at a smoke ring. After about three minutes the object was lost from sight.
Mrs. Edith Beiling
The ring-shaped object is not a newcomer to UFO reports, and there are cases in which it has been proved beyond doubt to be of the smoke variety. But here we have the puzzle of a ring being seen as an introductory feature to a UFO show of classic quality. It is difficult to believe the two events were not in some way associated. | {
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African painted dog dies at Binder Park Zoo
Brooks Hepp | Battle Creek Enquirer
African painted dogs are the most endangered carnivore in all of Africa. Binder Park Zoo received three of them in 2012.
The last of the three brothers died Wednesday at the age of 12.
The zoo announced that Verizon died of gastric dilatation volvulus, also known as “twisted stomach.”
The condition is caused from rapid dilation and expansion of the stomach, which leads to increased pressure that can cause the cell death in many tissues and other complications. It is most common in canines.
Dr. Kim Thompson, staff veterinarianat the zoo, said, although Verizon was older, his death was unexpected.
“Verizon had been in relatively good health but was on several treatments for advanced arthritis, not unexpected at his age,” she said. “The loss of Verizon due to GDV was sudden and unexpected, as he showed no abnormal signs or symptoms of GDV the previous day.”
Verizon, who was born in 2007 at the Bronx Zoo in New York, outlived both his brothers who died of cancer last year.
It is estimated that there are only around 6,000 African painted dogs in the wild, which makes them the most endangered African carnivore.
Verizon sired a litter of 11 pups in November 2018, which helped to diversify the breed in North American.
The pups will remain at Binder Park Zoo for the foreseeable future until they are given breeding assignments. Then, some will transfer to new zoos, while others will remain in Battle Creek.
“It was a triumph for Verizon to sire a litter at his advanced age and then to observe him to be an attentive dad to the pups,” said Kathryn Sippel, curator of collections at the zoo. “It was impressive to see his natural instinct kick in to father the pack and support his mate.”
On average, the life expectancy of an African painted dog is 10 to 12 years in captivity.
Binder Park Zoo is closed for the remainder of fall and will not reopen until December for Zoolights. The 2020 season opens on April 16, 2020.
Contact Brooks Hepp at (269) 223-0114 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @BrooksHepp. | {
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© Reuters/CHRISTOPHER ALUKA BERRY Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke speaks during a panel discussion in Atlanta
The U.S. economy could shrink by 30% or more this quarter as stay-at-home orders aimed at slowing the coronavirus outbreak choke off business and it could be a couple of years before the economy regains its footing, former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke said Tuesday.
"Overall, it could be a very bad year for the economy," Bernanke said in a Brookings Institution online event, though he added that so far the fiscal and monetary policy responses have been pretty good, though more will be needed.
"There are things we can do to open up the economy, significantly perhaps, but I don't see the economy returning to a more normal state until there's much greater confidence . . . that opening up the economy won't restart the crisis."
Still, he said, history suggests the recovery will be considerably shorter than that which followed the 2007-2009 financial crisis. "The U.S. economy will recover and within a few years will show only modest marks of this experience," he predicted.
With more than 90% of the U.S. population under orders to conduct only essential business, millions already out of work as businesses shut down or sharply curtail operations, and a vaccine to protect from infection at least a year away, Bernanke said the duration and depth of the downturn depends largely on the trajectory of the virus.
"If we could shut off the epidemic, of course the economy would bounce back quickly," he said. But it is more likely that activity will only be restarted gradually and may need to be slowed again if the virus resurges, he said.
Related video: Virus impact not comparable to Great Depression, Bernanke says (provided by CNBC)
The Fed can continue to expand its balance sheet, he said, and offer other programs as needed to keep markets functioning and banks lending. The debt-financed fiscal rescue, in the form of lifelines to both businesses and individuals - will also be important to keep people afloat while the pandemic continues.
There could be some permanent scars, he added, including a possible increase in the concentration of industry among fewer players, if many small businesses never recover; persistent caution among consumers worried about another crisis; and changes to the travel industry, including cruises.
And it will be a "very very tough and scary period," he said. But, he added, "if all goes well, in a year or two, we should be in a substantially better position." | {
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Wilfred the Chinchilla Persian is simultaneously the most adorable and the most horrifying creature you'll ever lay your eyes on.
The internet fell in love with the scraggly white cat when comedian Michael Rapaport posted a video of the cat on Instagram. Horrified, he called out to his mother and warned her of the "weird fucking stray cat outside" threatening Lucy, the family pet.
"It looks like Grandma, the fucking thing!" he said in the video.
It turned out to be a dubbed version of the original video, which is surprisingly soothing without the panicked yelling. In the original, Wilfred peacefully basks in his owners' backyard.
It appears that Wilfred loves the outdoors, and often ventures to the "bottom of the garden" even though he "knows that he is not allowed to go to the bottom of the garden."
He does not enjoy climbing trees, though.
With his flat face, wide set bug eyes, and adorable underbite, Wilfred is now Instagram's collective gremlin son, whom we all love and cherish.
So here's a love letter to Wilfred, the "weird fucking cat" who captured all of our hearts. | {
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It looks like current WWE Superstar and former UFC Heavyweight Champion Brock Lesnar is headed back to the world of MMA.
According to various sources, WWE’s merchandise department has been informed not to produce any new Lesnar merchandise. They were told that any merchandise items that were earmarked for Lesnar should be changed to focus on another WWE Superstar, Sheamus.
There is said to be a strong feeling within WWE that Lesnar is on his way out and will be heading back to the MMA world when his WWE deal expires shortly after the WrestleMania 31 event in March of 2015.
Once Lesnar becomes a free agent, a three-way bidding war for his services between WWE, UFC and Bellator is expected.
Talk about this on our official FACEBOOK page, or on our official TWITTER page. You can also talk about it in our popular FORUMS. | {
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La Guitarrista by TheWinterBunny
Source [1]
Hey everyone! Chris Guará here!
Gazelle for sure is a big star of Zootopia. As for her suit in this pic, I’m not sure if purple makes her more attractive, or her traditional Red suits better.
Now, if you take a closer look, you can see throwing daggers incorporated on her dress. Nice detail, maybe this is her vigilante/superhero version. I don’t think all those screaming fans are fooled by that mask, though…
Welp, time for another wave of artworks from fans to fans!
Get your art after the break!
Be sure to check out the artists work and show your support by following the source links under the picture. | {
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Specifying the kernel ABI
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At Open Source Summit Japan (OSSJ)—OSS is the new name for LinuxCon, ContainerCon, and CloudOpen—Sasha Levin gave a talk on the kernel's application binary interface (ABI). There is an effort to create a kernel ABI specification that has its genesis in a discussion about fuzzers at the 2016 Linux Plumbers Conference. Since that time, some progress on it has been made, so Levin described what the ABI is and the benefits that would come from having a specification. He also covered what has been done so far—and the the extensive work remaining to be done.
An ABI is how one piece of compiled code talks to another, he said. For the kernel, the ABI is how user space communicates with the kernel. That takes the form of system calls, ioctl() commands, and, to some extent, the calls in the virtual dynamic shared object (vDSO).
The current process for Linux development says that kernel patches cannot break programs that rely on the ABI. That means a program that runs on the 4.0 kernel should be able to run on the 5.0 kernel, Levin said. While breakage is not intended, there is nothing that would automatically prevent it from happening. There are no tools that would detect an ABI break, so the responsibility to find these kinds of problems falls to user space. If a user-space program breaks because of an ABI change, users and developers of that program can complain to the kernel developers and, hopefully, get the problem fixed upstream.
The kernel ABI gets extended by some developer coming up with a new feature that has a user-space interface and, with luck, some documentation that describes it. Usually the maintainer will require documentation before merging the feature, he said. Normally, though, someone else will write the corresponding user-space code to use the new feature; that might be developers for the GNU C library (glibc) or QEMU, for example. Then the kernel and user-space developers test to find things that are broken on both sides of the interface; the code is "massaged until stuff works" between the two.
But that process has a number of flaws. Basic validity checks are forgotten and can often reappear as security vulnerabilities later on. Effectively, these missing checks allow user space to cause the kernel to do things that were never planned for, which is always dangerous. There are also undefined behaviors on both sides of the interface because there is no complete specification. Even if all of the checks are made, there is still room for the kernel to end up performing operations that were not planned. The lack of a specification can also lead to problems down the road; failing to verify flags and other parameters mean that changes in the kernel can cause existing programs to break.
Backward compatibility is supposed to be verified by the Linux Test Project (LTP) and other tools, which help, but the real verification is done by all of the user-space applications. LTP will catch big things, Levin said, but not the majority of backward compatibility breaks.
The user-space ABI is broken "every other release or so"; usually they are small things that no one cares about, he said. But, one of the problems is that it can take some time before the new release gets widespread testing. In the meantime, some user-space program could start relying on the new ABI, while another program still relies on the unbroken, old behavior; that would be a recipe for a difficult-to-solve problem.
Much of the validation that is done in the kernel is done on an ad hoc basis. There is no clear definition of what should be checked or how the checks should be done. Each system call typically has its own way of checking, which opens up room for bugs, he said. If there are 20 different versions of ways to check some kind of parameter and one of them gets fixed, it is common for the other 19 to be missed. He suggested that using " git blame " on any major system call will show missed checks; "look and you will be unpleasantly surprised".
Even in user space there are lots of different implementations for system call parameter handling. For example, strace has its own library describing all of the system calls, C libraries do their own parameter checking, and different fuzzers all have their own way of generating system call parameters. That is just more duplication, which leaves more room for mistakes, Levin said. Most of those implementations are written by developers who aren't necessarily familiar with the kernel side of the interface as well. "It's a mess."
The existing documentation, in the form of man pages, is "pretty good". But man pages only cover about 80% of the use cases; they are not supposed to completely document the ABI of the kernel. The documentation is meant to help programmers get their programs working with the kernel, thus it is a "summary briefing" rather than any kind of "contract".
Contract
Today, the contract is embodied in the kernel code for a specific kernel version. The documentation is based on someone's understanding of the kernel code, which may be wrong, and the kernel code itself is subject to change. There generally is no proactive effort to see if an ABI change affects a particular user-space program; its users find out later when things break.
Having a contract would kill multiple birds with one stone, he said. It would force the kernel and user space to behave in a specific way. The backward compatibility problems would disappear, since changes that affect it could be detected. It would prevent a whole class of errors between user space and the kernel. It would fully document the ABI and it would also allow code reuse for the ABI, with the usual benefits that brings.
What would this contract look like? It should be human readable so that people can review it, but also should be machine readable so that it can be turned into code for tests or to use in the kernel and user space. Hopefully, it would only need to be written once but could be used by all of the potential consumers. As a starting point, the system call descriptions used by the syzkaller fuzzer look reasonable. They are used to create calls to system calls that are correct enough that they tickle new parts of the kernel code.
On the kernel side, the contract would be used to generate code to verify parameters and return values as part of the ABI. The code would validate the input and output parameters based on the specification. It would try to prevent calls with invalid arguments from even getting to the real system call code. That would reduce the amount of validation checks needed in the individual system calls; for example, file descriptors could be verified in only one place and system calls could rely upon getting a valid one.
For user space, it would make things easier for programs and libraries that access the kernel ABI. Instead of hoping the ABI is understood, user-space programs would have a guarantee of behavior instead. The contract would be made usable for projects like strace that already have to work with the ABI. Validation code based on the specification could be added to glibc and other C libraries as well.
By generating the validation code and centralizing it, lots of code in both the kernel and user space will be removed. Fixes to the validation code will be shared on both sides of the ABI. In addition, backward compatibility problems will be detected more easily and quickly. It will be difficult to implicitly break the ABI.
There are also benefits for users of the stable and long-term support (LTS) kernels. Right now, some are afraid to upgrade their kernels because they are worried about a new kernel breaking their user-space application. The contract would provide more assurance that those applications will still run correctly. Even though he is a maintainer of LTS kernels, he thinks they are a "pretty bad idea" overall; if you keep older kernels alive for many years, "things are bound to go wrong". He is hoping that an ABI contract would help to kill off LTS kernels to some extent by increasing the frequency that users are willing to do kernel upgrades.
There are security benefits as well. Centralizing the code that is used by multiple user-space projects as well as the kernel will likely lead to more people scrutinizing that code. A fix that is found by one project will fix the others as well. Many of these kinds of bugs lead to CVE entries, so ultimately this could help reduce the number of vulnerabilities for Linux.
There are also academic and other researchers interested in a specification of the kernel ABI. For example, safety researchers are particularly interested as some government agencies will not allow certain industries (nuclear power, for example) to run Linux because there is no specification to describe the limits of what the ABI provides.
Plans
The "hard part" is what is being worked on now, Levin said, which is to determine the format for the specification. The open() and close() system calls are "pretty easy to describe", but other system calls are more complicated and have a lot of interactions with other system calls. There is a need to start documenting all of the system calls and ioctl() commands and to go beyond what is listed in the man pages. The man page may say that EINVAL is returned for a bad flag value, but the specification needs to say exactly what flag values will cause that return. That needs to be written by someone who is familiar with the system call, he said.
Then those specifications need to be tested. That needs to be done without breaking existing user-space programs, but still providing user space a way to test the code. If the feature is governed by a kernel configuration option, most users won't change their distribution's setting, which may limit testing. There needs to be a way to do user-space testing that still allows existing applications to work while the specification is incomplete and changing.
Levin was asked if he knew of other, similar efforts. He said that the Linux Foundation started a project and paid a company to create a specification of some kind back in 2008. That effort crashed when the economy tanked around the same time and he has never seen any of the results of that work.
Another audience member asked about the performance of putting these checks into the system call path, which is considered to be a hot path in the kernel. Levin acknowledged that, but said the idea was to effectively move the checking out of the system call itself, so that would essentially shift the time spent. But there would be more checks and there would be some impact from jumping through another layer; he was hopeful that it would not be a blocker.
In answer to another question, Levin said he has been doing some preliminary work with the syzkaller developers, but that there is a need for more developers. It is just now starting to get to a point where it is worth getting something into the kernel, he said, but there is much more work still to be done.
[I would like to thank the Linux Foundation for travel assistance to Tokyo for Open Source Summit.]
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THE Easter Bunny has expressed shock and disgust that he’s just some weird metaphor for sex.
The seasonal rabbit said it had finally clicked with him that rabbits are known for their excessive mating and that the eggs he delivers are a symbol of birth.
He said: “I was getting all these eggs ready for kids and then I thought, ‘This isn’t just delicious chocolate that coincidentally happens to be egg-shaped, this whole thing is about reproduction’.
“I’m not totally sure how comfortable I am with being a massive symbol of fertility, especially given that most of my fans are under 12.
“I thought I was doing it because rabbits were cool and funky and kids love them. Now I feel a bit soiled.”
Other animals have already offered to step in if the Easter Bunny quits his role as main egg delivery operative.
Duck Mary Fisher said: “I’m happy to be a symbol of fertility and I can also deliver my own eggs.”
Meanwhile polar bear Wayne Hayes said he would deliver the eggs for free as long as he got his expenses covered. | {
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David Downs
The Emerald Cup organizer and industry icon Tim Blake, far left, talks back to heckler Kevin Saunders during a legalization debate Saturday.
The likelihood of California cannabis legalization increased dramatically Saturday night when the leading initiative — the Adult Use of Marijuana Act — garnered crucial endorsements from community leader Tim Blake, organizer of the world's biggest outdoor organic cannabis competition, The Emerald Cup.“You know what, I’m going to endorse this thing,” Blake said, to a mix of applause and outrage among activists assembled for a legalization debate at the Cup in Sonoma County.A united effort to legalize adult use cannabis in California has a 55-percent chance to succeed in 2016, experts conclude , while an effort fractured by in-fighting would almost certainly fail.AUMA's official proponents are noted physician Donald Lyman and environmentalist Michael Sutton, and the proposal is rapidly gaining momentum.Leading reform groups Marijuana Policy Project, Drug Policy Alliance, and the California Cannabis Industry Association have endorsed the measure.Last week, rival group ReformCA withdrew from the race , with at least six ReformCA board members endorsing AUMA.One of the cultivation’s community’s biggest leaders, Blake, joined them Saturday — stating that AUMA is the only chance for progress in 2016. No other group has the funds or coalition to run a winning initiative in 2016, he said. Ten groups have filed initiatives.“I’m for an initiative where we should get more, but … you’re still dealing with the cops and the counties that want to opt in and out , the Chambers of Commerce, and all those people and they’re not going to bend,” he said.“So then it comes down to, ‘those [other groups] don’t have a chance.’ I like them, [but] … they don’t have a chance in the next ten years to get it done.“We have a chance right now to do this, and I’m not thrilled with some of the aspects," he continued. "But I’m going to end up endorsing this. ”Blake said he will await a title and summary for AUMA “before I finalize that, but I’m going to endorse this, because we’re going to stop the people raiding people. We’re going to make this legal.”Scattered applause met Blake’s comments. About half of the audience polled said they would vote for AUMA. Half of the die-hard cannabis crowd did not.San Jose activist Kevin Saunders, working for a rival legalization camp, stood up and shouted at Blake “your credibility is at stake! One ounce?! Six plants?! This is a giveaway!” he said, referring to the personal possession and cultivation limits in AUMA Attorney Matt Kumin jumped down from the stage to help escort Saunders away from the debate.California Cannabis Industry Association Executive Director Nate Bradley said incremental reform will win the day. “We’re not going to get everything all at once,” he said. “[AUMA] is not perfect. It’s right in the middle.”Competing initiative writer and Sacramento attorney George Mull also voiced his grudging support for AUMA Saturday night — leaving just a few fringe legalization groups actively opposing the initiative.Rival legalizer Dave Hodges of San Jose said he will wait to see the official title and summary for AUMA before endorsing it or not, but “we’re going to support an initiative that moves us forward.”Hodges said his group had “no champion” with $20 million in the bank to support his alternative. “Raising money on a grassroots effort is very difficult,” he said.One word hurled around like an epithet by activists Saturday night — “Sean Parker” — a multi-billionaire technologist/philanthropist whose support ignited AUMA’s lift-off and polarized some existing players. Activists said they don’t know Parker, fear his intentions, or just feel left out of the historic process.Kumin said the multibillion-dollar cannabis industry had a decade to get organized and fund a more liberal alternative and can only blame itself.“You could have gone out into your backyards and dug up the millions of dollars you have buried out there, but you didn’t,” he said.“It’s not child’s play here, you guys,” said Kumin. “You need the money.”Kumin asked for a show of hands of who would give $1,000 to an AUMA rival. One person raised their hand. “See,” said Kumin. “[The community] looks like children who can’t cut their way out of a wet paper bag.”“Bottom line is George [Mull] and Dave [Hodges],” said Blake, “you know your initiatives are not going to go through. This is the only initiative that has a chance.”###In other news, the California Attorney General estimates that adult use legalization could generate up to $1 billion per year in tax revenue The amended text of AUMA has also been posted to the state's website. | {
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This screen-used prop from Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back is up for auction this month. All Images: Profiles in History
Even before it became crucial to The Force Awakens, the lightsaber passed from Anakin to Luke Skywalker, though Obi-Wan Kenobi, was the iconic weapon in the Star Wars series. And later this month, one of the screen-used props from the first two films is going up for auction.
The Skywalker Lightsaber that was used in both A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back is just one of a slew of impressive lots in the latest auction from Profiles in History. It’ll take place June 26-28 in Los Angeles.
According to a press release, the company estimates the Skywalker Lightsaber will sell for between $150,000 and $250,000. For the past several decades, the precious prop was in the possession of producer Gary Kurtz, who is including a personalized letter to certify authenticity.
Besides that, the auction will also include Bill Paxton’s armor from Aliens (estimated to sell for between $10,000 and $15,000); Charlie Bucket’s screen-used Golden Ticket from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (originally owned by director Mel Stuart and estimated to sell for $40,000 to $60,000); the screen-used Atlantean Sword from Conan the Barbarian (originally owned by director John Milius and estimated to sell for $40,000 to $60,000); and Leonardo DiCaprio’s main, screen used-outfit from Titanic, which is estimated to sell for $100,000 to $150,000. Just to name a few.
I mean, this is some serious Hollywood history right there.
For the full list of pieces, instructions on registering to bid, and more, visit this website. | {
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Following the atrocities at Manchester Arena and London Bridge, Islamophobic attacks went up fivefold. In the week after the Manchester bomb alone, 139 incidents were reported – including abuse of a Muslim surgeon who helped save the lives of those injured. And in London, in the year ending March 2017, 1,260 incidents of Islamophobic hate crime were recorded.
Whenever there’s an Islamist terrorist attack, Muslims brace themselves for the backlash – it’s a position we’ve become grimly accustomed to adopting over the past 15 years. As well as mourning any lives lost, we must prepare for the aftermath: the Muslim pensioner beaten on his way to the mosque; the Muslim women assaulted, spat at, their hijabs ripped off; the petrol bombs at mosques, the bullying at school, the children wetting their beds.
Anti-Muslim hate crime surges after Manchester and London Bridge attacks Read more
And now, one man died and 11 people were injured amid terror near a mosque in London’s Finsbury Park, leaving more families in shock and lives ruined.
Whether perpetrated by Islamist terrorists, or as misguided “revenge” attacks against innocent Muslims, all of these tragedies affect me. It feels personal, as I’m sure it does to many others. The children murdered in Manchester Arena, the people mown down on London Bridge, the frightened worshippers in Finsbury Park – every single time an innocent is harmed, it’s soul-destroying. And it’s taking its toll. “I’m afraid,” a friend who wears hijab tells me. “I don’t want to feel like this.” I don’t want her to feel like that either. Thankfully, sympathy and empathy are beginning to spread. Finsbury Park’s Muslim Welfare House has had reassuring signs from across communities – whether it’s other faith groups showing solidarity, or shock and outrage on social media, it’s poured balm on the wound.
What we need urgently, however, is for the government to step up. Finally, with Theresa May’s speech and Amber Rudd’s commitments, it appears to be doing so. But did it have to take this awful event for attitudes to change?
The state will have to work hard to earn trust back after years of complacency at rising far-right and Islamophobic sentiment. We need to know it is addressing these threats. In addition, funding should be put back into mental health services, education, housing, arts, and into increasing employment and opportunity for all. We need a strategy that strengthens and supports the whole of society.
Media outlets must stop providing a soapbox from which extremists can project their hatred. Tommy Robinson, founder of the English Defence League, columnist Katie Hopkins and hate preacher Anjem Choudary may have boosted audience figures but their vitriol has done the same for hate-crime figures too. That would go some way towards taking the momentum out of this cycle of terror and “revenge”. Dreading what you’ll wake up to each morning is no way to live. It erodes our collective wellbeing, just as extremists want to erode our quality of life, and to damage our society and its freedoms.
British Muslims deserve full protection, and they will get it | Amber Rudd Read more
It’s hard to remain unaffected. Only yesterday I felt a pang of fear as I walked around my local, largely white area in my headscarf. But extremists on all sides thrive on that fear – they throw it on to the fire, along with hate and intolerance, and dance around the flames in glee. We can’t let them do that.
Collective culpability is a dangerous fiction. Far-right extremists do not represent all white people. Islamist extremists do not, and never will, represent all Muslims.
I will try to take my cue from the everyday people who responded so sensitively and beautifully to the Finsbury Park attack; from the power of community spirit, the sincere compassion I’ve seen after each challenge aimed at breaking us.
The government is responsible for the safety and welfare of every person in this country – and must do its duty. But we also bear responsibility. If we look out for one another that’s a start. | {
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Toronto Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro says the team wants to keep Josh Donaldson long-term and will consider if there’s an opportunity for a contract extension with the third baseman.
“It’s hard to imagine any scenario where we’re a better team without him,” Shapiro said during a guest appearance on The Jeff Blair Show on Sportsnet 590 The FAN Thursday morning. “He’s a pretty special player and now that he’s gotten healthy over the last couple of weeks, it’s a reminder of just how great he is offensively and defensively.
“We want J.D. here.”
Donaldson, who’s making $17 million this year, will be eligible for arbitration next season. He’s set to become a free agent at the conclusion of the 2018 campaign.
Shapiro said the team is looking to stay competitive in that span and has no plans for a rebuild.
“As far as the future, for right now, it’s next year,” he said about keeping Donaldson. “We’ll explore, at the right times, privately, whether there’s an opportunity beyond that.”
Donaldson’s season has been marred by calf issues that have kept him off the field for extended periods and likely contributed to his overall struggles. However, the 31-year-old former American League MVP has been swinging a hot bat of late, hitting .333/.463/.833 with six home runs and 12 RBI over his past 12 games.
The Jeff Blair Show Mark Shapiro has faith current core can win going forward August 10 2017 Your browser does not support the audio element.
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Shapiro also touched on a few other topics:
A POTENTIAL TROY TULOWITZKI POSITION SWITCH
“Tulo, obviously, we’ve got under contract for an extended period of time. I think right now, taking it step by step, the only focus is on getting (his ankle) healthy and as physically prepared as possible to compete and be a championship-calibre player next year.
“If at some point we feel that it’s the best interest of him and this team for him to play somewhere else [then we’ll consider], but that, as of yet, has not even been something we’ve thought about. We just need to get him healthy and go from there.”
MINOR-LEAGUE PITCHING DEPTH
“We’re better than we were a year ago. We’re in a better spot.
“There’s Tim Mayza, who popped on the screen in spring training. He got off to a rough start but has been just dominant over the past six weeks. We’ve got some interesting guys that can contribute in the bullpen as well. We’re starting to build the depth, it’s starting to move up the system a little bit … It’s encouraging to have four or five starters in double-A who we feel are starting to settle in and do well … It’s a process. You can’t cheat the process. It takes time.”
INCOMING RENOVATIONS TO ROGERS CENTRE
“The renovation is something that we both continue to talk to our fans about, as well as continue to research. We do have general design themes and concepts that are largely developed from the insights we’ve got from our fans as well as looking at stadium, arena and ballpark trends throughout sports around the world.
“We’ve started to socialize those plans with ownership and the hope will be that sometime over the off-season, we can start to move towards a commitment and time frame. It’s going to be something that’s staged over multiple years because we have to do the bulk of the work during just a four-month window when we’re not playing.” | {
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Bitcoin (BTC) began its sudden crash due to another giant sell-off from the PlusToken pyramid scheme, analysts are suggesting as BTC/USD lost $8,000 support.
According to various online commentators citing Blockchain data, participants in the $2.9 billion scheme are again attempting to rid themselves of their BTC.
Mixer moves likely mean selling
Ergo, the Twitter account that closely tracks PlusToken’s activities, put the total funds involved at around 13,000 BTC or roughly $210 million at the current market price.
This time, Ergo said, the coins were going to mixing services to hide their traceability. Two feeder addresses have been identified, shedding their balances on March 5.
“Been looking and theorizing about this for months and I can't see a scenario where the coins aren't being sold, at least to some degree,” the account summarized.
“This was likely obvious to the exchanges starting in September. The accounts would have been frozen then.”
The account added, however, that selloffs were now occurring at a “much slower rate” compared to a more intense period of activity in August last year.
Bitcoin price chart showing PlusToken movements. Source: Chainalysis
“Slamming the market with sell orders”
Bitcoin price volatility appears to influence PlusToken’s activities. During the last mass fund movement several weeks ago, BTC/USD was similarly experiencing turbulence at around the $10,000 mark.
“They are slamming the market with sell orders. Essentially we have a giant whale unloading after every move up,” fellow Twitter analyst Kevin Svenson added in comments of his own on Sunday.
24-hour losses for Bitcoin investors totaled 9.5% at press time, while weekly, HODLers were down around 8.2%. | {
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Passenger Pigeon
How could the passenger pigeon be extinct when it was the most abundant bird species on Earth no so long ago? It is almost impossible to imagine that the passenger pigeons’ population, which in the early 1800’s contained more individuals than all other North American birds combined, was reduced to just one individual, Martha, who died in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.
Before their decimation, a single flock of passenger pigeons could have 2 billion birds or more, and there were multiple flocks of birds in the United States.
When John J. Audubon observed a migrating flock over Kentucky in 1813, he reported that the sky was “black with birds” for three days.
The nesting colonies of the passenger pigeon in northeastern deciduous forests could be 20 miles across, with so many birds per tree that the branches broke from their weight. Yet, there is not a single passenger pigeon left for us to observe today.
The passenger pigeon was driven to extinction by uncontrolled commercial hunting for their meat, which was desired by Euroamerican settlers.
The passenger pigeons‘ migration and nesting behavior made them easy to hunt in large numbers. They were netted, shot and smoked out of trees with sulfur torches. Special firearms, including a forerunner of the machine gun, were used to harvest these birds in quantity.
The growth of commercial enterprises was facilitated by the railroads, which made it possible (and profitable) to transport the meat quickly to urban centers.
By 1850, several thousand people were employed in the passenger pigeon industry. In New York, one operation processed 18,000 pigeons each day in 1855. In one year in Michigan alone, a billion birds were harvested.
Not surprisingly, the population collapsed. Although several thousand birds survived in 1880, it was no longer profitable to hunt them since they were widely dispersed across the continent. Ironically, this scattered distribution, which saved a large core population for the post-commercial era, may also have contributed to the passenger pigeon’s ultimate demise by interfering with breeding abilities.
The reasons that the passenger pigeon was unable to recover from the period of overexploitation are not fully known. Some species have been able to recover from a low number of individuals, but the passenger pigeon continued to decline and was extinct in the wild by 1900. Captive breeding efforts were not successful and the last individual died in 1914.
One theory explaining the passenger pigeon’s inability to recover is that their breeding patterns required a community of numerous individuals to stimulate the necessary cycles or behaviors. Previously, the large colonies had provided the necessary conditions, but the scattered populations after 1880 may not have had a large enough concentration in any one area to stimulate breeding behaviors.
The passenger pigeon’s inability to recover may also have been influenced by the scattered distribution of remaining individuals by making it more difficult to find suitable mates. Without their swarming flocks, the passenger pigeons also may have had trouble competing with other birds for nest sites, and nest sites may have been fewer as the deciduous forests were cut down.
Whatever the reason, it is clear that the passenger pigeon did not have a viable populationwhen commercial hunting ceased. Although commercial hunting did not directly kill the last passenger pigeon, it sent the species into an extinction vortex from which it could not recover.
Questions for Thought:
Passenger pigeons were one of the most important food resources for numerous carnivores, such as foxes, lynx, raccoons, marten and mink, and for several raptors, such as falcons and hawks. What repercussions would the passenger pigeon’s extinction have for these species? What other effects might have occurred in the ecosystem?
One of the things that died with the passenger pigeon was the phenomenon of its migration, the endless sea of birds blackening the sky. Even if the passenger pigeon had survived as a species, this impressive phenomenon could not have continued without the huge number of birds that existed in the early 1800s.
What other mass migrations no longer occur or are in danger of disappearing because the animals that migrate are threatened or endangered?
Many people see the rock dove, a relative of the passenger pigeon, every day in American cities. Some would say there are far too many of them, especially when looking for a clean park bench to sit on. Can you imagine the rock dove becoming extinct? Why or why not?
If railroads had never existed, do you think the passenger pigeon might have survived? What is the difference between commercial hunting and other kinds of hunting? Since all of the passenger pigeon companies had a stake in the passenger pigeon’s continuing survival, why do you think they failed to work together to conserve the species?
Activities: [CS2-8,C3-1,C3-2, General]
Words in bold italics can be found in the glossary. | {
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The anniversary of Egypt's 2011 uprising brought a violent display of the country's furious divisions Saturday, as giant crowds danced at government-backed rallies and security forces crushed demonstrations by rival Islamists and some secular activists.
Clashes nationwide killed at least 29 protesters, health officials said. The starkly contrasting scenes reflect the three years of turmoil Egypt has faced since the Jan. 25, 2011, revolution began and ultimately toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak, replacing him with a transitional military council.
Last summer's millions-strong demonstrations against Mubarak's elected successor, Islamist President Mohammed Morsi, led to a military coup removing him. And as Egypt looks forward to presidential elections later this year, many celebrating Saturday in the famed Tahrir Square demanded army chief Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi run for president.
"El-Sissi saved the nation. It was up in the air like this helicopter and he carried it to safety," said Mervat Khalifa, 62, sitting on the sidewalk and waving to a helicopter overhead.
Military helicopters showered crowds in Tahrir with small flags and gift coupons to buy refrigerators, heaters, blankets and home appliances. State-backed rallies also showcased prancing horses and traditional music for ecstatic crowds.
Morsi's supporters used Saturday's anniversary to build new momentum in their defiance of the military and its political transition plan, despite being hit by a crippling police crackdown and rising public resentment against his Muslim Brotherhood group.
"Anger is bigger than all. Repression sparks revolutions. The burning of Egypt won't last," a statement issued by a Brotherhood-led coalition said.
Protests contrast celebrations
The fiercest clashes raged in an eastern Cairo suburb, where Islamist supporters clashed with security forces for hours in pitched street battles. Security forces fired over the crowd to disperse protesters who threw gasoline bombs. Protesters set up a field hospital to aid the wounded.
Violence also was strong in the provinces. A car bomb exploded outside a security camp in the city of Suez, where gunmen clashed with police, witnesses said. Nine civilians were wounded in the bombing, authorities said.
In neighbouring Ismailiya, protesters chanting "down with military rule" also battled security forces. In Alexandria, a female protester was shot and killed during clashes, officials said.
Two protesters were killed in the southern city of Minya, security officials said.
The clashes in the eastern Cairo suburb of Alf Maskan were fiercest.
Both Mustafa Mohammed and Sami, protesters there who only gave his first names for fear of reprisals, said security personnel and rooftop snipers used live rounds against demonstrators. The gunfire struck a natural gas pipeline three times, Mohammed said.
Sami said protesters threw gasoline bombs in the clashes, which wounded hundreds. Two security officials in the area described the situation as tense and said at least six people were killed. The protesters put the figures at 24. It was not immediately possible to reconcile the figures.
The clashes contrasted with scenes of celebration in Tahrir Square and other major squares in provincial capitals. Long queues of demonstrators lined up to enter the tightly secured squares through metal detectors.
Some celebrating wore paper masks with el-Sissi's picture and their rallies showed a ferociously anti-Islamist tone.
Soldiers guarding Tahrir Square joined them in chanting: "The people want the execution of the Brotherhood." A crowd beat a woman in a conservative headscarf and drove her away, believing she was a Brotherhood sympathizer.
Journalists attacked
Crowds also turned on journalists. More than a dozen journalists were beaten by the demonstrators, or detained by police for protection from angry crowds. Demonstrators chased one Egyptian female journalist, mistakenly believing she worked for satellite news broadcaster Al-Jazeera — seen as pro-Brotherhood. They pulled her hair and tried to strangle her with a scarf until police took her into a building for protection.
Security forces also dispersed rallies by secular youth activists who led the 2011 anti-Mubarak uprising and who are critical of both the Islamists and the military. A number of their most prominent figures have been detained for months or sentenced to prison amid a campaign to silence even secular voices of dissent.
One prominent activist, Nazly Hussein, was detained by police on the subway as she headed to join one rally downtown, her mother Ghada Shahbendar said. Hussein's lawyer, Amr Imam, said that when he went to see her at the police station, a police shoved him, pointed his rifle at him and warned him he had 10 seconds to leave or he'd shoot.
Police used tear gas to disperse one small gathering by secular activists in the Cairo neighbourhood of Mohandessin, beating and kicking at least one of them, several participants said. The groups later issued an appeal to their supporters to withdraw from street protests because of "excessive violence" by security forces.
"The only thing allowed is el-Sissi revolutionaries," one of the activists, blogger Wael Khalil, said with a laugh. "Do they think that there will be working democracy this way?"
In its statement, the Brotherhood appealed to secular youth groups to unite with it in protests.
Secular youth groups, however, have shunned the Islamists, whom they equally accuse of undermining the 2011 uprising's goals while in power.
Rallies marred by bombings
The rallies took place in an atmosphere of fear, a day after four bombs targeting police killed six people around Cairo. Another 15 people were killed around the country Friday when Morsi's supporters clashed with security forces. The Interior Ministry said that 237 people were arrested during those protests.
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The al-Qaeda-inspired group Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, or the Champions of Jerusalem, claimed responsibility for Friday's bombings, warning of coming attacks and telling citizens to stay away from police stations.
"We tell our dear nation that these attacks were only the first drops of rain, so wait for what is coming," read the statement, posted on militant websites.
The group, based in the lawless Sinai Peninsula, has claimed responsibility for the failed assassination attempt on the interior minister in September and a suicide bombing in a Nile Delta city that killed 16. The group calls its attacks revenge for the killings of pro-Morsi supporters and the military offensive in Sinai.
The government has accused the Brotherhood of ultimately being behind the militant violence and declared the group a terrorist organization. It has produced no proof publicly and the group says the accusation is baseless.
But pro-government media — which means most Egyptian television stations and newspapers — tout the link and a broad segment of the public are convinced. They note the Brotherhood's alliances with radicals while Morsi was in office, street violence by his supporters during and after his rule and the militants' own pronouncements that they are retaliating for his ouster.
Early Saturday, a bomb exploded next to a police training institute in eastern Cairo, only damaging the facility's walls.
Ahmed Mahmoud, an engineering student living nearby, said angry residents quickly blamed the Brotherhood.
"People were saying they will carry arms and kill all Muslim Brothers who dare to pass by," he said. | {
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Police searching for teens who viciously beat men outside Washington, DC, hotel Police released the video, asking the public's help in identifying the suspects.
Police in Washington D.C. are asking for the public’s help in identifying a group of teens who were captured on disturbing surveillance video brutally assaulting two men outside a hotel.
On July 14 at around 1 a.m., the two victims from Hampton and Newport News, Virginia, were walking toward the Washington Hilton on Connecticut Avenue NW when they saw a group of at least 10 juveniles at the corner, according to a police report with the Metropolitan Police Department.
Surveillance video released by police on YouTube on Wednesday showed a member of the group walking up to both men and pointing while talking to an approaching group of people.
"[Victim 2] states that one of the juveniles scream, 'That's him!' while pointing towards [victim 1]," the report said.
Then, victim 2 tried to intervene, telling the group: "That's not him. You have the wrong person!" according to the police report.
Both men were then attacked, as the group swarmed around them.
As the group dispersed and ran away, the second man was struck in the face and another person from the group spat on the man on the ground.
Both men were treated and admitted to a hospital. Victim 1 suffered injuries to his head and left eye socket; victim 2 suffered a swollen left eye.
Police described the attackers as juveniles, both girls and boys ages 13 and 14, who were wearing black clothing.
Mayor Muriel Bowser said during a news conference Thursday that the attack would not be treated like a "schoolyard prank."
"That's an assault. And it carries jail time. And so we want those people to know, young people — we don't know how old they are — that this is not a game. They're real people on the other end of this attack," Bowser said.
The hotel said in a statement that it believed the attack had been sparked by an incident at a nearby bar, according to ABC News affiliate WJLA-TV.
The surveillance video showed multiple people punching, kicking and stomping one of the men repeatedly as he lay motionless on the ground.
"I have been able to connect with our hotel and security teams. They believe that the events leading up to the attack outside the front door of the hotel began at a nearby bar. In terms of comment, our immediate thoughts are with the victim and we wish him a full and speedy recovery. We are not aware of a direct connection with our hotel, but when our team learned of the attack, they were quick to assist the victim and medical first responders. We have also offered all appropriate assistance to law enforcement as they seek to bring the perpetrators to justice," Nigel Glennie, vice president of corporate communications, said in a statement to WJLA-TV Wednesday.
Police are asking anyone with information that would help them identify the suspects in the video to call (202) 727-9099 or text 50411. Police said the information could be eligible for a reward.
"We don't know the motive in the case. We have some information from the scene that it may have been a case of mistaken identity, but we haven't confirmed that," Peter Newsham, chief of police, said Thursday. "I can tell you it was very troubling to see, you know, a gentleman walking down the street and he was assaulted, it looked like 10 or 12 people that assaulted him." | {
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Douglas H. Smith, lead author of last March's report for The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that detailed the mysterious ailment that has affected U.S. embassy staff in Cuba since 2016, recently told The New York Times that microwaves were now the leading suspect to explain the affliction.
“Everybody was relatively skeptical at first,” Smith said, “and everyone now agrees there’s something there.”
Weaponized microwave radiation could explain the reports of sudden waves of nausea, dizziness, and headaches that followed strange sounds that the embassy employees compared to loud crickets or screeching metal--something experts are attributing to what is known as the Frey effect, named for American scientist Allan H. Frey. Frey found that microwaves can 'trick' the brain into perceiving seemingly ordinary sounds, which might be what caused the noises heard by victims.
Frey, now 83, speculated that perhaps a conspiracy between allied Russian and Cuban operatives could be to blame. He has served as a contractor and a consultant to multiple federal agencies, and considered the possibility that such an attack might be carried out by elements of the two long-allied nations who would want to undermine developing ties between Cuba and the United States.
“It’s a possibility,” Frey said. “In dictatorships, you often have factions that think nothing of going against the general policy if it suits their needs. I think that’s a perfectly viable explanation.”
If worsening relations between the United States and Cuba is the goal, then it may well be working.
The Trump administration has insisted that Cuba must know who is responsible, despite the state's denial of any involvement--citing Cuba's small size and the state of its security.
"We strongly remind the Cuban government of its responsibility under the Vienna Convention to protect our diplomats," said State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert in a statement June 28th.
The majority of U.S. personnel have been withdrawn from the embassy in Havana, and an equal percentage of Cuban diplomats have been expelled from Washington. All visa services for Cubans have also been cancelled as a result. | {
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EWING -- All Chris Garcia wanted when he stopped at a Wawa in Ewing on his way home from work at Six Flags Great Adventure was a chicken cheesesteak.
He ended up with a sandwich that contained two maggots, according to a report on NJ101.5 FM. Wawa later issued a statement saying it was "highly unlikely and probably impossible" that the maggots came from their store.
Garcia said he had just started eating his hoagie when he says he saw the buffalo sauce and ranch dressing "moving," the report said. Garcia spit out his food and returned it to the store. Employees were less than sympathetic, though, he said.
He said Wawa refunded his money but workers had "a little chuckle about it."
Garcia then went to the hospital to get checked. He's OK.
Wawa issued a statement to NJ Advance Media saying it stands by the quality of the hoagie sold in its store.
"At this point, our investigation shows that the unverified video complaint is highly unlikely and probably impossible," the statement said. "We have a detailed process to authenticate and assess complaints surrounding anything that would take away from the best and most positive Wawa experience possible.
"We hold ourselves to the highest standard of quality in the food that we serve and the conditions in which we serve it. We inspect our stores on a daily basis and have rigorous processes in place to prevent incidents of this type from occurring."
Jeff Goldman may be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook. | {
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As if the “knock knock” joke wasn’t bad enough, Zimmerman defense lawyer Don West sparked even more controversy and backlash this week after his daughter posted an ice cream selfie during the trial’s recess with an insensitive caption.
As we reported yesterday, a photo of West and his daughters enjoying ice cream cones in a car together was posted to daughter Molly West’s Instagram account during the Zimmerman trial’s recess.
The selfie was taken by Don West himself, and included the caption “We beat stupidity celebration cones” along with the hashtags #zimmerman, #defense and #dadkilledit.
Naturally, this post was blasted for its insensitivity, and Molly West’s Instagram and Twitter accounts have gone inactive.
BuzzFeed made a timeline using local media sources covering the Zimmerman trial, and determined that the photo was likely taken on the first day of the trial (after the ill-fated “knock knock” joke), and before the incredibly controversial testimony of Rachel Jeantel.
Early critics of Don West’s ice cream selfie thought that the photo was taken in the midst of Jeantel’s testimony, and that the “we beat stupidity” line was in reference to the witness.
In any case, a spokesperson for the West family has confirmed that the photo is indeed real, and that Molly West is “mortified” by the reaction she has gotten. She also apologized for the “grossly insensitive” photo.
Don West also commented on the ice cream photo:
“We’re not always proud of things our children do, but we love them anyway, and then we move on,” he said.
Here’s Don West’s ice cream photo one more time. Let us know what you think:
[Top image via: Source] | {
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The price of a single bitcoin touched a fresh three-year high on Wednesday with U.S. and European buyers accounting for the bulk of trading volume.
Bitcoin prices have been rising steadily this year, but accelerated after the U.S. election results sent the U.S. dollar flying. Chinese traders were big bitcoin buyers, seeking protection from the rapid depreciation of the Chinese yuan, also known as the renminbi, which has weakened as the U.S. dollar has strengthened.
Traders in the West have also contributed to the digital currency’s rise, using it as a hedge against the political and economic implications of President-elect Donald Trump’s administration. Also, the U.K.’s June vote to leave the European Union, and perceived risk associated with a string of key European elections in 2017, have coaxed European investors to embrace bitcoin.
Bitcoin BTCUSD, +1.20% traded as high as $822 on Wednesday, surpassing the $800 market for the first time since January 2014, according to pricing data from Coin Market Cap. The majority of trades transacted in the past 24 hours were in U.S. dollars, euros and pounds, the data showed — though Chinese investors transacting in yuan have been responsible for much of the 2016 rally.
This is an important milestone for bitcoin, analysts said. The cryptocurrency has finally taken out its February 2014 high, which it reached just before Mt. Gox, then one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, announced that hackers had stolen millions of dollars’ worth of customer bitcoins. That news effectively ended a period of exuberance that had sent bitcoin to an all-time high just below $1,200 in late 2013.
Coin Market Cap
The digital currency is often used as a hedge against inflation and uncertainty, according to Charles Hayter, the founder and chief executive officer of CryptoCompare, a website that provides data and analytics about the currency market.
Bitcoin’s move comes as the U.S. dollar, the world’s most heavily traded currency is nearing multiyear highs. The ICE U.S. Dollar index DXY, +0.07% , which measure the greenback’s strength against a basket of six rival currencies, was trading just below a 14-year high on Wednesday.
The Chinese yuan USDCNY, +0.21% , meanwhile, traded near its weakest level in eight years, with one dollar buying 6.94 yuan in recent trade. | {
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Viet Nam News HCM CITY-International legislators confirmed their commitment to respond to climate change to achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs) during a meeting at the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) conference that opened on Thursday in HCM City. Representatives from parliaments of around 20 IPU-member nations and international organisations are attending the regional seminar on sustainable development goals for parliaments around the Asia-Pacific region. The commitments, reflected in the Paris Climate Change Agreement, will be specified by nationally determined contributions from each country. Organised by the Vietnamese National Assembly and the IPU, the three-day event will discuss topics related to the conference theme “Responding to Climate Change – Actions of Legislators to Achieve SDGs”. The conference aims to identify which practical steps parliaments can take to support the implementation of SDGs in their respective countries and in the region as a whole. Special emphasis is placed on sharing experience and increasing understanding about how parliaments in the Asia-Pacific region can institutionalise global goals, promote convergence, and build coherence at the policy level. Speaking at the opening session, Nguyễn Thị Kim Ngân, chairwoman of the National Assembly, called on stronger cooperation and responsibility among parliaments to take immediate action to save the planet… Read full this story
Int’l legislators meet on climate-change response have 299 words, post on sggpnews.org.vn at May 11, 2017. This is cached page on VietNam Breaking News. If you want remove this page, please contact us. | {
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Dear Newbie: Welcome to the wonderful world of hi-fi! If you're besotted with a desire for audio gear that can make your recorded music sound better than you've ever heard it, you've come to the right place.
And at just the right time: Not only is there an unprecedented amount of sanely priced, excellent-sounding audio gear on the market; there's this thing happening between us right here and nowthe fact that you're reading a letter I wrote especially for you. It's a serendipitous concurrence, because when I think back to when I was a tenderfoot, I wish I'd had a mentoror, better yet, The Me Of The Futureto prep me mentally for the big trip into Audioland.
So, in hopes of handing the decades' worth of knowledge I've accrued to a new generation, I offer this incomplete list of tried-and-true suggestions starting with:
Don't sweat that whole "absolute sound" business. I don't mean this pejoratively. It's just that trying to replicate the real thing in a home environment seemed a more sensible goal when audio in general sounded nowhere near the real thing. It gave us all something to shoot for while providing a means of keeping tabs on our progress. But the ideal we seek defies absolutes. What, precisely, constitutes the real thing when so many sonic variables are at play in the performing and recording of any piece of music? It's best, as a rule, to focus less on absolutes and more on ensuring that your next purchase connects you to the music more than the product it replaces.
This next tip may strike you as counterintuitive: Spend more than is comfortable on your next upgrade. Not too muchpersonal bankruptcy is no recipe for audiophile blissbut stretch a little to get something better. Sell the superfluous exercise equipment in the basement. Use credit if you have to. We audiophiles will repeatedly, throughout our lives, beat ourselves up wondering if we spent too much for a hamburger with a frilled toothpick in it, or a pair of boutique jeans, or a gift for our spouse. But we will never feel like we spent too much for an audio component that is a constant source of joy. It can't happen.
Speaking of money, don't worry that you don't have as much as the next audiophile. I say this unequivocally: Like music itself, there's enough audio gear to experiment with over the course of two lifetimes. Sure, you'll hunger for gear you can't afford, but there's excellent equipment for almost every budget, and while pricier stuff tends to be meaningfully better, often the difference isn't as big as you'd think.
Ultimately, what drives us is our hunger for better sound. It dwells in our subconscious like the pouncing instinct of a rapacious wolfand here, dear neophyte, is the gist of it. Regardless of our respective net worth, there are always one or two audiophile products we hunger for. No amount of money will satisfy that hunger.
This next one, too, may seem off-putting, considering the private nature of our hobby: Try to mix and mingle with other hobbyists. Attend audio shows, crash audio-society meetings, swap gear with fellow enthusiasts so you can listen to different combinations together and then yap about the sound. How the new thing enhanced the music. How it didn't. How it made you feel. You'd be surprised what you can learn about audio and your own audio values by listening to others speak of theirs.
Keep your mind and ears open. More importantly, listen to your heart, since that's where the real message registers. That's how you'll become the audio hobbyist you were meant to be. This won't be an overnight process. It takes time to grow into our audio persona and to realize where in Audioland we fit. Analog? Streaming? Solid-state? Vintage? Electrostatic headphones? That's the beauty of our hobby: It's vast and layered and has a warm place for each of us where we can feel free and be ourselves.
A final piece of advicebut for this to work, you'll need to perform a faith-based mental trick. Imagine that your own audiophile Me Of The Future, from 30 years up that road of amassed personal experience, has come to visit the you of today. Imagine that your more seasoned self grabs you comfortingly by the shoulders, tells you that everything will be okay, then delivers the overarching principle you should follow to bring you audio happiness.
Listening to your heart, what do you think you told yourself? | {
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By Nawaz Dhandala By Nawaz Dhandala Store data with CloudBoost's CloudObjects CloudBoost is a Database Service with storage, search and real-time capabilities. Think of CloudBoost as Parse + Firebase + Algolia all combined into one. CloudBoost has SDK's in multiple platforms which helps you build web, mobile and IoT apps without dealing with the backend and database infrastructure. Read more...
By Nawaz Dhandala By Nawaz Dhandala Turbo Charge your NodeJS app with Cache Caching is great for your apps because it helps you to access data much faster when compared to the database. On the downside, querying is limited and it is very expensive (money-wise) because all the data is on the memory (which is expensive) instead of being on a disk. It is recommended that you use cache only for frequently accessed data. Read more...
By Lenny Witman By Lenny Witman Node.js For Beginners. Deploy Your Blog to Heroku Error pages are not what typically appear on your screen when you're surfing the web, but when it happens it's so annoying! To see how servers work from within, we will build a simple web server by ourselves. We will use Node.js as a server part technology for that task. Then we'll use Heroku cloud application platform to turn this local server into a world wide server. Read more...
By Chad Wyszynski By Chad Wyszynski Solving Coding Challenges with Streams My first experience using Node.js for a programming challenge was agonizing. I devised a viable solution, but I couldn’t figure out an effective way to parse the input. The format was painfully simple: text piped via stdin. No problem, right? I burned over half my time on what should have been a minor detail, and I ended up with a fragile, zip-tie and duct tape hack that still makes me shudder. The experience inspired me to find an idiomatic approach to programming challenges. After working through more problems, I arrived at a pattern I hope others will find useful. Read more...
By Tim Caswell By Tim Caswell Generators vs Fibers Both ES6 generators and node-fibers can be used to block a coroutine while waiting on some I/O without blocking the entire process. This means that you can wait for an I/O result within your code but still have the performance benefits of the single-threaded, non-blocking I/O model you all know and love. Both can do this for arbitrarily deep call stacks. The main difference between the capabilities of the two is how explicit the syntax is. It's the classic battle between wanting to be safe while wanting to be flexible. Read more...
By Swapnil Mishra By Swapnil Mishra Simplifying Chores with Grunt Often in various stages of development we perform repetitive tasks e.g minification, compilation, unit testing, linting and we would definitely want to automate them. But each of these task require different configurations or installations. What if there is a system where in we can easily configure and run these tasks from a single place. Also it would be really nice if it gels well with Node.js system. Meet Grunt a task runner for simplifying chores. Apart from being simple Grunt ecosystem is huge and it's growing every day with literally hundreds of plugins to choose from. Note that I will be using grunt task/plugin interchangeably which means the same. Read more...
By Tim Caswell By Tim Caswell Daddy, what's a stream? At dinner tonight, I was discussing that I've been thinking about streams and how to simplify them in JavaScript. My 7-year-old perked up and asked me: Daddy, what's a stream? I explained that a stream is like a line of water along the ground. If you dig a trench on a hill and fill up the high end using a water hose the water will run down the hill along the trench. This is one of his favorite hobbies in the back yard, so he understood completely. I explained that when new water is added to the top, it eventually makes its way to the bottom of the stream. The end where water comes from is called the upstream and the other end is the downstream. Gravity pulls water down. Read more...
By Jean-Philippe Monette By Jean-Philippe Monette Content Syndication with Node.js Web syndication is a must for any Website wishing to share some entries easily to other systems. Better known under their format name like RSS) or Atom), they can be quite time consuming to generate without a module handling all their formating. Thanks to the power of Node's package manager NPM, you can generate yours in no time. Read more...
By Shahar Kedar By Shahar Kedar Session-based Authorization with Socket.IO Finding a decent article about session based authorization in socket.io is more difficult than one expected. This article will show how you can take advantage of Express session middleware and socket.io authorization middleware to create a very simple authorization mechanism when establishing new socket.io connections. Read more...
By Vojta Jina By Vojta Jina Make Your Tests Deterministic Non-deterministic issues like race conditions or thread deadlocks are very difficult to test, because they are by nature hard to reproduce. Fortunately, in the JavaScript world, we only have a single thread, so we are safe, right? Well, not really because... Execution order of callbacks can cause the same race condition issues that plague multi-threaded environments. Read more...
By Dumitru Glavan By Dumitru Glavan Sending e-mails with Node and NodeMailer Sending e-mails with NodeJS is almost a breeze. Almost. First, you have to plug-in the NodeMailer module than set up a transport type, load the templates, add attachments and finally send... Read more...
By Srirangan By Srirangan Node.js and MongoDB - Getting started with MongoJS It won't be an exaggeration if one claims that in the past few months Node.js and MongoDB have literally taken the software and web industries by storm. Not just bleeding-edge startups but even medium and large enterprises are leveraging these two technologies to deliver a better experience to their users by build more capable, performant and scalable apps. So what is Node.js? Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices. ..and what is MongoDB? MongoDB is a scalable, high-performance, open source NoSQL database. This post will cover the basics and get you started with your Node.js + MongoDB app. Make sure you have Node.js installed and MongoDB setup on your developer machine. Let's verify your Node.js installation and start the MongoDB server: $ node - v
$ mongod
Read more...
By Srirangan By Srirangan Really simple file uploads with Express Few days ago I was working on a fairly typical web application and I faced the challenge of implementing a fairly typical web application feature - file uploads. It was the first time I was implementing file uploads with Node (and Express) and I did what anyone else would do - I googled it. Unfortunately all the articles / posts out there are either outdated, too complex or plain wrong. So I did the next most obvious thing - post a question on the mailing list. As always Mr. Holowaychuk was incredibly quick to respond. His answer lead me to do what I should have done in the first place - read the docs. Read more... | {
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The organization managed to raise even more funds than it expected.
The British company Argo Mining, which mines cryptocurrency, became the first organization of its kind in the world to succeed in conducting an initial public offering of its shares (IPO). Argo Mining carries out the mining of cryptocurrency for the benefit of customers who use such a service by subscription.
The place of IPO was the London Stock Exchange. As a result, the company managed to raise 25 million pounds sterling (about 32.5 million dollars) – more than it was planned (20 million pounds sterling). Thus, the IPO was also very successful, even though at the time of the initial public offering of its shares on the cryptocurrency market, the average losses on crypto coins since the beginning of the year were 61%.
A total of 156.25 million ordinary shares were issued, which correspond to 53.2% of the authorized capital, which follows from the documents of the organization. The nominal price of one share was set at 0.001 pound sterling, resulting in a total capitalization of the business was 47 million pounds sterling or about 61.2 million dollars. As the executive director and head of the board, Jonathan Bixby, stated, “Argo’s admission to the main financial site of London was the main event in the life of the company. This allows us to strengthen our market position in order to successfully achieve our long-term growth strategy. We are very pleased that our stocks showed such a great demand from investors that give us the opportunity to develop our business in various countries.”
The way to the London stock exchange at Argo was not fast. The company was founded in December 2017, at the height of interest in the mining of cryptocurrencies. Then in May of this year, Argo received the “welcome” from the UK’s Listing Authority to conduct an IPO, and on June 11 began to provide a service – the mining of cryptocurrency by subscription. According to the information on the official website of Argo, customers can get access to the mining of such cryptocurrencies as Bitcoin Gold, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and Zcash. The service of cryptocurrency mining was sold in the form of three “packages”, limited in quantity, which were eventually successfully implemented.
Argo has big plans for the future, and Executive Director-CEO Jonathan Bixby has a bold vision of his business – to become an Amazon-level company, but in the cryptocurrency sphere. As Bixby noted, “more than 90% of the cryptocurrency mining is carried out by a small number of companies that conduct it on an industrial scale since mining technically is a very difficult task, funds are needed for mining machines, worth $ 5,000 each.”
With a high degree of probability, this will not be the last IPO of the company from the cryptocurrency sphere. So, the market leader Bitmain is considering the possibility of holding a preliminary round of IPO and, quite possibly, will become a public company. Two more major manufacturers of mining equipment, both from China, applied to the stock exchange of Hong Kong with applications for an IPO. | {
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One consequence of Johnson’s decision to prorogue Parliament is to make it more likely that there will be a vote of no confidence in the government. Here, too, old constitutional understandings are in doubt. Since the end of the Second World War, there has been only one instance of a government losing a vote of no confidence. That was in 1979, when Prime Minister James Callaghan lost. At that time, Callaghan effectively had a choice: He could resign immediately, or he could ask the queen to dissolve Parliament for a general election. He chose the latter. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, however, now requires a 14-day period following a vote of no confidence in which the Commons can pass a vote of confidence either in the existing government or in an alternative government led by someone whom MPs have recommended to the queen. If neither occurs, Parliament will be dissolved.
Whichever of those options happens, there is plenty of room for more constitutional crises. Senior figures in No. 10 have given clear signals, reported in the media, that Johnson would not resign in the event of a no-confidence vote. If the Commons expresses its confidence in someone else, then for Johnson to stay would be, as former Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind put it, “the gravest constitutional crisis since the actions of Charles I led to the Civil War.” The last monarch who dismissed an administration was King William IV in 1834. It would be less controversial for Queen Elizabeth II to dismiss Johnson. Arguably, it would be her constitutional duty. But it would still politicize the monarchy.
If there’s to be an election, Johnson could play fast and loose with the constitution in other ways. He might, for example, choose an election date after the October 31 deadline for Britain to leave the EU, allowing Brexit to happen by default during an election campaign. That would be reckless in the extreme—including for Johnson’s chances of securing an overall majority. Would it also be unconstitutional? During election campaigns, there are so-called caretaker conventions, according to which the government should not make any controversial decisions that would bind a future government. The government would be right to insist that a no-deal Brexit is the legal default, but that does not necessarily mean there would be no duty on the government to change it. If Johnson loses a vote of no confidence, it would be because MPs had rejected a no-deal Brexit. Whatever the conventions of the constitution require, it would be a gross violation of representative democracy to ignore MPs’ wishes.
The fact that all of this is up for debate is truly astonishing. To some scholars, such as Vernon Bogdanor, a politics professor at King’s College London, Brexit has demonstrated the need for the U.K. to adopt a codified constitution. The breakdown in parliamentary government—the triumph of populism over pluralism brought about by Brexit—strengthens the case for a codified constitution that would place more obstacles in the way of political power. But a codified constitution is not a panacea. As other countries have discovered, it would not be a guarantee against populist excess, and could even create more problems than it solves. That’s not to say there’s no need for reform. Britain’s constitution is hardly in rude health; in fact, it’s never been more vulnerable. | {
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A confrontation erupted outside the Assembly of First Nations in Vancouver, where chiefs from Indigenous communities across the country gathered to elect a national chief.
The Aboriginal Peoples Television Network is reporting the confrontation began when Ivy Kennedy took exception to an anti-Trans Mountain pipeline protester writing “Our colonisers love Perry” on National Chief Perry Bellegarde’s campaign T-shirts.
Bellegarde, who was re-elected Wednesday, has been criticized during the campaign for being too cozy to the Canadian government.
Video of the incident shows Kennedy and the protester, later identified as Kiwis Hamilton, both grabbing on the T-shirt and arguing while several bystanders look on.
“We’re supposed to have respect for one another,” Kennedy says at one point in the video.
Then Hamilton responds with: “Well if you had respect for us, you wouldn’t be doing what you’re doing right now.”
Eventually, Kennedy leaves the area and Hamilton criticizes her for what had just happened.
“Freedom of speech is a thing, especially when I’m on my own land,” he says. “Somebody should never come up and just try and take something from me because they believe it’s right.”
Hamilton says he was gifted the shirts from Bellegarde’s campaign team.
“I was just making sure that when I wear them that they look good and they actually represent what I believe about Perry Bellegarde,” he said.
With files from The Canadian Press | {
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VANCOUVER, BC – Vancouver Whitecaps FC announced today that the club has acquired and signed right back Steven Beitashour from Western Conference side San Jose Earthquakes in exchange for allocation money. Per Major League Soccer and club policy, terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“Steven is arguably the best right back in the league,” said Whitecaps FC head coach Carl Robinson. “He is fantastic on the defensive side of the ball and his ability to join the attack will make him a great addition to our club.”
Whitecaps FC right back Steven Beitashour
Recorded more assists, 16, than any other MLS defender over the last three seasons
Scored two goals in 89 MLS appearances with San Jose
Played 90 minutes as right back in the 2012 MLS All-Star Game
Earned his first three caps with Iran’s men’s national team last fall
"I'm very excited about this new opportunity," added Beitashour, who is scheduled to arrive in Vancouver tonight. "Whitecaps FC are an excellent club with fantastic supporters and a great stadium. From what I've seen the last few years and from my conversations with the coaching staff, this club is heading in the right direction. I'm looking forward to meeting everyone and I can't wait for our home opener on March 8 against the Red Bulls."
WATCH: Beitashour's volley finds the back of the net
Beitashour, 26, joins Whitecaps FC after spending each of his first four professional seasons in MLS with the Earthquakes. In total, Beitashour started 86 of his 87 regular season appearances with San Jose, recording two goals and 16 assists during that period.
In addition, Beitashour started both of San Jose’s playoff matches and recorded one assist in three US Open Cup matches during the Quakes Supporters' Shield winning season of 2012.
The 5-foot-10, 170-pound fullback, who San Jose selected in the second round of the 2010 MLS SuperDraft, was named to the MLS All-Star team in 2012 and played the full 90 minutes, next to Whitecaps FC captain Jay DeMerit, in a 3-2 win over English Premier League giant Chelsea FC.
Prior to joining MLS, Beitashour spent four seasons with the San Diego State University Aztecs, where he recorded eight assists in 57 total appearances, and also played for the San Jose Frogs of the United Soccer Leagues Premier Development League.
Born in San Jose, California, both of Beitashour’s parents are from Iran and he therefore holds dual American-Iranian citizenship. After opting to play for Iran, Beitashour earned his first cap in Team Melli’s 2-1 win over Thailand last October. He has appeared for Iran on three occasions and will look to play a part when they compete in the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil.
Steven Beitashour
Pronunciation: BAY-tah-sure
Position: Right back
Height: 5-10
Weight: 170 pounds
Date of Birth: February 1, 1987, in San Jose, California
Hometown: San Jose, California
Citizenship: United States/Iran
Status: Domestic
Previous Club: San Jose Earthquakes (MLS)
How Acquired: Acquired on January 27, 2014, from San Jose Earthquakes in exchange for allocation money
Whitecaps FC begin their 2014 MLS season on March 8 versus New York Red Bulls at BC Place. Season tickets start at just $349, subject to applicable fees. The 'Caps also offer a flexible range of ticket products, including half-season tickets ($244), 5-packs ($149), student season tickets ($199), and a youth soccer half-season ticket ($100). For more information on all Whitecaps FC ticket options, call 604.669.9283 ext. 2 or visit whitecapsfc.com/tickets. | {
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Graphic via Judicial Watch
Judicial Watch strikes again!
Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch on Thursday announced it received 180 pages of communications between former FBI CI chief Peter Strzok and his paramour former FBI lawyer Lisa Page that shows a one month gap between when Hillary Clinton’s emails were discovered on Anthony Weiner’s laptop and search warrant.
Via Judicial Watch:
On November 3, 2016, Strzok sends an email to Page with a “weiner timeline.” The document shows that on September 28, 2016, the Assistant Director in Charge (ADIC) of the New York Office of the FBI reported “potential MYE-related material,” referring to Midyear Exam, which was the code name of the FBI’s Clinton email investigation. The timeline shows that not until October 30, almost a month after the discovery, was a search warrant for the emails obtained:
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09/26/2016 NYO [New York Office] obtains SW [search warrant] for Weiner laptop
09/28/2016 ADIC NY notes potential MYE-related material following weekly SAC [Special Agent in Charge] SVTC [Secure Video Teleconference]
09/29/2016 Conference call between NYO and MYE team
· NYO notes processing is crashing system and not complete, but during troubleshooting observes material potentially related to MYE (clintonemail.com and state.gov domains) seen during course of review
·No numbers/volume available
·Discussion about ability to search for material determines such activity would be outside scope of warrant
·Request to NYO to gather basic facts (numbers, domains, etc) based on their review
Approx. 10/19/2016 NYO completes carving
NYO observes SBU [Sensitive but Unclassified] attachment
10/21/2016 6:00 PM DOJ/NSD advises MYE leadership that SDNY informed them of MYE-related media on Weiner media
10/25/2016 DOJ-DD conversation re material
10/26/2016 DOJ-MYE-NYO conference call
DD advised of results of call with MYE team conclusion material should be looked at; DD directs briefing to D
10/27/2016 Briefing to D; D concurs with conducting investigation to obtain data
10/30/2016 SW [search warrant] sworn out at SDNY
Copy of media obtained by MYE SAs [Special Agents], entered into evidence, and provided to OTD [Operational Technology Division] for processing | {
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GOV.UK has used a Content Delivery Network (CDN) since its transition from beta to live in October 2012. When the contract with our first CDN provider came to an end in September 2013, we took advantage of what we'd learned and some improvements in our purchasing options to shop around and save some money.
The new CDN needed to behave exactly like the old did. This was difficult because:
we had no detailed technical specification of everything that we wanted (and didn't want)
configuration formats are specific to each provider and are often intertwined with their own defaults
we had some non-standard requirements like failover to additional origins (as described in Kush's blog post about disaster recovery)
To help us with the migration, we scripted some A/B tests of URLs sampled from normal traffic and performed manual verifications using curl. We also received help from both our new and old providers, to their absolute credit. The migration was a success and we went away with a better idea of what we might do differently in the future.
Earlier this year we started looking at running GOV.UK behind a second CDN in parallel with our existing one, with the aim of improving our technical resiliency and reducing our business dependency on any one provider. In order to do this, we'd have to be more certain than ever that both CDNs implemented the same features and behaviours. Otherwise users might experience non-deterministic bugs which would be very hard for us to monitor or debug.
Test concept
The popularity of Infrastructure as Code has meant that the infrastructure of today should have the same qualities of any good software project, such as version control and testing. The CDN is an extension of our normal infrastructure, so why not treat it the same way?
We were already some way towards this by version-controlling our CDN configurations and using one-click deployments. What we were missing was automated testing to confirm that our new features worked and that we hadn't broken any existing features in the meantime. We searched and asked around for existing solutions but couldn't find any.
I figured that to test a CDN, which could be thought of as a black box with an input and output, it would look something like this:
create an HTTP request against a CDN observe the request forwarded from the CDN to a server in our control create an HTTP response based on some conditions observe the response returned from the CDN to our client
This all needed to be wrapped in a simple test runner that would repeat the process many times and report on the observations (assertions about incorrect results). Based on some experience working on the GOV.UK router and gor I thought that this would be quite straightforward to implement in Go with the standard library packages net/http and testing.
I started out by writing some empty/failing tests that described many of the behaviours we expected from a CDN and an ASCII diagram that visualised the steps described above. I was then joined by Mike Pountney, who hadn't used Go before, but you wouldn't have known it after a few days in.
Implementation details
Here is a tour of some notable features and solutions that we encountered while writing the test suite. Throughout I'm going to use the term "edge" to describe servers that belong to the CDN and "origin" to describe servers that belong to us.
Configuration deployment
Because we already had a mechanism for version-controlling and deploying our CDN configurations, it was decided that this new project shouldn't be responsible for managing configurations at all.
This turned out to be a very good thing because:
it allowed us to be much more provider agnostic and the work required to initially test a new provider was greatly reduced
it meant that we could test an identical configuration, except for hostnames, in production and staging
Mocking a CDN
Two people developing and running tests from the same server against the same CDN service quickly proved to be a bottleneck. We needed a way to independently run the test suite offline.
One of our CDN providers have built their service upon an open source HTTP caching server called Varnish. Since a CDN is mostly just an external distributed HTTP cache, Varnish already does most of the things that we want to test, and we're familiar with using it in the GOV.UK stack. It doesn't support TLS in either direction but Nginx and stunnel can handle that. We created a Vagrant virtual machine which uses a set of Puppet modules to configure all of these components into something that behaves like a CDN. There's another ASCII diagram to show how it fits together:
An unforeseen benefit of having this was that we could re-use the same mechanism to run continuous integration tests against pull requests for all newly created and amended tests in our suite. This gave us much greater confidence when reviewing each others' changes.
Backend request and response handling
Each of our tests needed to make the origin server behave in a different way, sometimes more than once per test, such as:
making assertions about the contents of the request received from the CDN
responding with particular status codes, headers, and bodies
asserting when we shouldn't receive a request at all eg. when cached
We created a CDNBackendServer struct which represents a single backend bound to a local port. Multiple instances can be bound to separate ports. These run concurrently to the tests in the foreground using goroutines and satisfy the interface for http.Handler by implementing CDNBackendServer.ServeHTTP() , which gets called for every request.
Requests for HEAD / , which are used by some CDN providers as health checks to determine whether origin is up, are always served a 200 response. All other requests get passed through to a handler function which each test can replace by passing a function literal (an anonymous and not yet invoked function) to CDNBackendServer.SwitchHandler() .
In some places we also take advantage of the following from the Go spec about function literals:
Function literals are closures: they may refer to variables defined in a surrounding function. Those variables are then shared between the surrounding function and the function literal, and they survive as long as they are accessible.
We combine this with the fact that an HTTP client request is a synchronous operation that won't return, if successful, until our handler has been executed. This means that we can declare variables at the beginning of the test and then assign values when we receive a request, such as recording the values of request headers or incrementing a count of requests received.
Stoppable backends
To test the CDN's handling of errors and failover we needed the ability to stop the backend (unbind from its assigned port) to prevent it accepting connections for requests.
This isn't possible with the simplest and most common method of starting an HTTP server in Go because http.ListenAndServe doesn't expose anything for you to stop. Thankfully, while the Go standard library provides convenience functions like this, it also has all of the component parts for you to build your own thing - like a set of building blocks. Furthermore, the source code for the standard library is incredibly readable and well linked from the online documentation, which allows you to see how parts are composited.
We started by reproducing http.ListenAndServe , which underneath creates an http.Server and calls http.Server.ListenAndServe() , which underneath that creates a net.Listener (that we want to close) and passes it to http.Server.Serve() . However closing the listener didn't have the desired effect because existing connections, particularly those using HTTP keepalive, remained active.
While searching for a way to close outstanding connections we came across some code that did what we want - lo and behold from Go's standard library. httptest.Server is a handy wrapper which keeps track of client connections and provides an httptest.Server.Close() method which waits until all outstanding connections have been closed. To make use of this we needed to bring our own listener and wrap the Close() method.
TLS backends
Initially our tests used plain-HTTP backends with no Transport Layer Security (TLS) because we didn't want the complexity of certificates to get in the way of validating the concept. However, all of our real interactions with CDNs only use HTTPS (HTTP + TLS) backends, so our tests eventually also needed to do the same.
httptest.Server helped us here also. It comes with its own self-signed certificates and ability to swap our Start() call with StartTLS() . Later on we made TLS mandatory and allowed the certificates to be overridden from the command line.
Backend health checking
We found that our tests often failed for CDN providers that use periodic health checks; sometimes consistently at the beginning of the test suite and sometimes intermittently throughout the run. This was because the backends hadn't responded to enough health check requests for them to be considered healthy.
There's no way to query the health check information directly from the edge. Even if there was, it's unlikely that we'd get the same information from all providers. Instead, we found a solution that relied on the fact that the edge would only forward a client request to a backend that it considers healthy. waitForBackend makes requests against the edge and checks that the backend returns the correct identifier. When we've received a certain amount of the correct responses then we know that it's safe to proceed.
This was complicated slightly when we introduced multiple backends that are used by the edge in priority order. If the first backend was up then it would receive all of the requests and we'd have no way of knowing whether the second and third backends were healthy. ResetBackends solved this by starting the backends in reverse-priority order. It's called at the start of the test suite and then again before test. If any stopped backends are encountered then it will stop all backends of a lower priority and start them back up again from the bottom.
DNS caching
Some of our early tests suffered from intermittent failures; in particular those which made more than one request, such as populating the cache and checking that the item was still there.
Most CDN providers use a Global Server Load Balancer (GSLB) solution which uses DNS to route end users to the nearest edge servers. The DNS responses have a low time-to-live (TTL) period because decisions about the nearest, fastest, or currently available location, can frequently change.
To prevent us changing locations in the middle of a test, we had to cache the DNS lookup ourselves. In another example of how working in Go is like constructing with building blocks, it allows us to pass our own net.Dial function literal (responsible for making network connections) to http.Transport (responsible for HTTP transactions). Our CachedHostLookup short circuits the DNS lookup and then hands over to the stock net.Dial function.
Request helpers
There were some patterns that we repeated while writing the tests and which made sense to consolidate into helper functions that could be shared. For example:
NewUniqueEdgeURL which generates new URLs using the edge's hostname and a query parameter containing a random UUID to ensure that every test starts with an uncached resource
which generates new URLs using the edge's hostname and a query parameter containing a random UUID to ensure that every test starts with an uncached resource RoundTripCheckError which executes a request and performs error checking - registering a test error if it takes longer than a threshold period of time to complete and aborting the calling test if there are any errors in the transaction
which executes a request and performs error checking - registering a test error if it takes longer than a threshold period of time to complete and aborting the calling test if there are any errors in the transaction testThreeRequestsNotCached which repeats a request and checks for unique responses, optionally modifying the response headers at the same time - this vastly reduced the amount of code in TestNoCache*
In a shining example of premature optimisation, I attempted to write some of these helpers too early and failed. I was unable to identify the right patterns to de-duplicate and hampered some of the good patterns that we went on to develop in individual tests. We were only successful in writing the helpers at a later stage when we had a better idea of all the use cases.
Bugs uncovered
Unsurprisingly, when you begin to test something for the first time, you uncover a lot of bugs that you never knew existed. Some of which your providers never knew existed either (we're sorry!).
If you have to spend any time investigating what a correct implementation of HTTP/1.1 is then it's worth going straight to RFC 723X. It's the recently published revision of RFC 2616 from 1999, which is now a lot more readable and detailed, but isn't always the first result you'll get from a search engine.
Case sensitivity
Deep in the mists of time, for reasons that we don't remember, we enabled an option with our first CDN provider that treated cached request paths as case-insensitive. Our origin has always been case-sensitive, which is the correct behaviour for the web, so this mismatch led to some intermittent and surprising results.
There are a limited number of top-level redirects on GOV.UK for organisation acronyms such as https://www.gov.uk/mod . At the time, case variations such as /MoD weren't redirected by origin, but they worked most of the time because they would be satisfied by the cached object for /mod . Except when the cached object expired and coincided with a request for /MoD , which origin didn't know about, a 404 would be cached and also served for the "correct" requests of /mod . This didn't happen very often which made it very hard to debug and fix.
In response to bug reports from users and analytics we solved this early last year by explicitly handling common case variations for acronyms such as /mod , /MoD and /MOD , and then turned off the case-insensitive option so that edge behaved the same as origin.
To prevent it happening again, with new or existing providers, we wrote a test called TestCacheUniqueCaseSensitive which ensures that case variations of the same word are cached independently.
Protocol redirects
GOV.UK content is only ever served over HTTPS. For convenience we redirect users from http://www.gov.uk to https://www.gov.uk and this has always been performed by our CDN without the need to hit origin. Though in practice it is superseded by Strict Transport Security for return visitors.
A long time ago we received some support requests because this redirect wasn't preserving query parameters. For example http://www.gov.uk/search?fish was being redirected to https://www.gov.uk/search without the original search terms. This was caused by a mistake in our CDN configuration. We fixed it, but there was also the chance that we could break it again when moving to another provider.
By writing TestMiscProtocolRedirect we know that this won't happen again. It also gave us cause to investigate whether URL fragment identifiers should be preserved in the redirect - the answer according to RFC 7231 is that the Location doesn't need to contain the fragment and that the client should re-apply it if omitted.
Denying PURGE requests
We'd previously discovered that anyone could invalidate cached content from our edge and force a new response from origin by issuing a PURGE request to edge. We didn't want to allow this, so we spoke to the affected CDN provider and they recommended a fix, which returned a 403 response if the request didn't come from a whitelisted IP address. The implementation had a quirk in that that we had to modify the internal representation of the request method from PURGE to GET in order to deliver the correct response to the client. It tested out fine, we deployed, and got on with other work.
The amount of custom code in our configuration to implement this change made it a good candidate for the new test suite. We wrote a test to mimic the manual testing from before; make a request from a non-whitelisted IP and assert that we got a 403 response. We now also had the ability to assert that the request shouldn't make it to origin. It failed:
=== RUN TestMiscRestrictPurgeRequests --- FAIL: TestMiscRestrictPurgeRequests (0.12 seconds) cdn_misc_test.go:58: Request should not have made it to origin cdn_misc_test.go:75: Request 2 received incorrect status code. Expected 403, got 200
So the behaviour had changed since we fixed it and we hadn't noticed. It turned out that modifying the request method was no longer necessary, and by doing so the edge now treated it as a normal GET request to origin. It wasn't the provider's fault - it was our config and they can't support everyones customisations.
We fixed it and verified with the tests. We also improved the test by populating the cache and checking that the object hasn't been invalidated, which is the behaviour that we really care about rather than the response code. You can see the complete test as TestMiscRestrictPurgeRequests .
Expires headers
The Expires header is one way to specify the TTL of a response by the date and time at which it will expire. It can be dependent on accurate machine clocks and it will be ignored if specified alongside Cache-Control , but otherwise it's still a valid directive.
TestCacheExpires found that one provider didn't support this at all. The directive was ignored and a default TTL applied with a new Cache-Control header.
=== RUN TestCacheExpires --- FAIL: TestCacheExpires (6.85 seconds) helpers.go:368: Request 3 received incorrect response body. Expected "subsequent response", got "first response" helpers.go:377: Origin received the wrong number of requests. Expected 2, got 1
Prevent caching with Cache-control
The Cache-Control header has a number of directives to specify how a request or response should be cached. In addition to TestCacheCacheControlMaxAge testing that cache TTLs were respected we also tested that the edge would respect our decision not to cache by using private , no-store , no-cache , and max-age=0 in TestNoCacheHeaderCacheControl* .
The results were surprisingly inconsistent across the board. With a few configuration changes we made most of them work as expected. But it's clear to see why you often see them all specified together.
X-Forwarded-For
The X-Forwarded-For request header, while not part of the official specification, is commonly used to convey the IP address of the original client and any intermediary proxies. It shouldn't necessarily be used for verification purposes but it can be good for informational use. There were two minor problems surfaced by TestReqHeaderXFFCreateAndAppend .The first, with one provider, was that we were seeing the same value repeated. This was caused by a copy/paste mistake in our CDN configuration that we'd never noticed.
=== RUN TestHeaderXFFCreateAndAppend --- FAIL: TestHeaderXFFCreateAndAppend (0.00 seconds) cdn_acceptance_test.go:86: Expected origin to receive "X-Forwarded-For" header with single IP. Got "80.240.128.97, 80.240.128.97"
The second, with another provider, was a whitespace difference in the string that we were matching against. There are some clues about what we should allow in RFC 7239 which defines a new single purpose Forwarded header and the list extension in RFC 7230 specifies that list items are separated by a comma and optional whitespace. The fix was to replace our string comparison with checks for the individual list items.
=== RUN TestReqHeaderXFFCreateAndAppend --- FAIL: TestReqHeaderXFFCreateAndAppend (0.03 seconds) cdn_req_headers_test.go:56: Origin received "X-Forwarded-For" header with wrong value. Expected "203.0.113.99, 80.240.128.97", got "203.0.113.99,80.240.128.97"
Vary and Accept-Encoding
The Vary response header is used to specify that a cached response should only be used to satisfy another request if all of the nominated headers match the original request. One very common use of this is Vary: Accept-Encoding which can prevent gzip compressed responses from being delivered to clients that haven't requested it with Accept-Encoding: gzip . There are also many other powerful ways to use Vary .
TestCacheVary found that not all providers supported this. Based on this inconsistency we added TestCacheAcceptEncodingGzip to verify that gzip compression worked as expected, which we found it did but didn't always seem to depend on Vary in responses.
The specification also says that responses with Vary: * should never be cached but TestNoCacheHeaderVaryAsterisk found that this was rarely implemented and we've had to disable the test for now.
Authorization, Cookie and Set-Cookie
HTTP caching often raises concerns about privacy. You don't want a response that has been personalised with account details for one user to be delivered to another user. Most well behaved applications should emit the appropriate Cache-Control headers to reflect this.
The Authorization request header is used to provide authentication credentials. Blindly caching a successful response would allow other clients to bypass authentication and for that reason RFC7234 states that such responses must explicitly opt-in to be cached. In reality TestCacheHeaderAuthorization found that most CDN providers will cache these with a default TTL, although when asked they weren't sure why their configurations had evolved in this way.
=== RUN TestCacheHeaderAuthorization --- FAIL: TestCacheHeaderAuthorization (0.11 seconds) helpers.go:378: Request 2 received incorrect response body. Expected "first response", got "subsequent response" helpers.go:378: Request 3 received incorrect response body. Expected "first response", got "subsequent response" helpers.go:387: Origin received the wrong number of requests. Expected 1, got 3
The Set-Cookie response header is used to provide cookies to a client. Cookies can contain data that uniquely identifies a user, such as a login session or server-side analytics, which you wouldn't want to be cached. However not all cookies are sensitive, so RFC7234 states that Set-Cookie responses can be cached and should explicitly opt-out where necessary. TestCacheHeaderSetCookie identified that we needed to change our configuration with one provider.
=== RUN TestCacheHeaderSetCookie --- FAIL: TestCacheHeaderSetCookie (0.11 seconds) helpers.go:374: Request 2 received incorrect response body. Expected "first response", got "subsequent response" helpers.go:374: Request 3 received incorrect response body. Expected "first response", got "subsequent response" helpers.go:383: Origin received the wrong number of requests. Expected 1, got 3
The Cookie request header is used by the client to provide previously set cookies to the server. It's worth noting that your server-side application may not be responsible for setting and reading cookies if it's all done in client-side scripting, but they'll be provided in a request header regardless. If you weren't to cache these then you wouldn't benefit much from using a CDN. TestCacheHeaderCookie confirmed that this worked on both providers.
In all three cases we had to change the default behaviour of Varnish in the mocks to match that of the CDN providers. I can only attribute this to there being different requirements for localised caching (at and within origin) compared to edge caching, such as the need to improve hit/miss ratios because the round-trip time is much greater.
Age
The Age header indicates how long has elapsed since the origin generated (or revalidated) a response. This can be useful for debugging how long a cache has held onto a response and when it may expire in relation to the Cache-Control directive. RFC 7234 describes the mechanism for calculating this value, which should respect an initial value provided by origin and then increment it.
TestRespHeaderAge found that one provider didn't support this. No header was added to responses that didn't already have one and was unmodified (not incremented) for responses that did. This is now on their roadmap to be implemented.
=== RUN TestRespHeaderAge --- FAIL: TestRespHeaderAge (5.13 seconds) cdn_resp_headers_test.go:68: Age header from Edge is not as expected. Got "100", expected '105'
Serve stale
As part of our disaster recovery solution that falls back to static mirrors at other locations we also attempt to serve a stale response (beyond its normal TTL) from cache if one is available. Historically our static mirrors have only been updated once every 24 hours and don't contain dynamic content such as search, so there's a much greater chance that the stale response is more appropriate than the static mirror.
This has been implemented with each provider at varying levels of difficultly ranging from it being the default behaviour to implementing it ourselves. In the past we have written some varnishtest tests to prove the concept, but have had a great deal of trouble testing it in the real world where all of the testing had to be orchestrated manually by stopping, starting, and reconfiguring web servers to return the appropriate responses.
With TestFailover* we were able to for the first time verify whether the real thing worked and in a provider agnostic way. The result? It wasn't working quite as we'd hoped, but it wasn't a complete surprise to us. It confirmed that we were dependent on health check expiry and that requests were retried against origin too frequently. We're still in the process of improving the implementation and the tests will now serve as our acceptance criteria when we're done.
Conclusion
Identifying and documenting the existing behaviours proved to be incredibly valuable. Some of the bugs lay previously undiscovered because our manual tests weren't reliable or thorough enough. While other bugs were surfaced for the first time because we were now thinking about scenarios that either we hadn't previously, or had in the past but since forgotten about.
We now have a much better specification of what we want. As regularly executed code, which produces a boolean pass/fail result, it's less likely to fall out-of-date as is often the case with written documentation. We can use the tests to prevent regressions with our existing providers and as a reference when talking about requirements with new providers.
In fact, something which proved to be a major advantage, was the ability to point our providers' technical employees directly at the source code. The tests were more succinct than explaining step-by-step commands and expected output as we have done previously. They could also re-run the tests themselves to reproduce the issue and verify that their fixes worked.
The code for the complete project is open source under the MIT license and available on GitHub: | {
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SINGAPORE - The apparent disappearance of many wild neighbourhood chickens in Tampines has perturbed some residents, but the town council and the authorities have clarified that just four of the birds have been removed.
On Saturday (Sept 1), Chinese-language daily Lianhe Wanbao reported that residents of Housing Board flats in Tampines Street 21 had complained about many chickens being removed, leaving only about 10 in the garden area of Blocks 266 and 267.
But the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority (AVA) and Tampines Town Council told The Straits Times that only four chickens were relocated.
On Monday, Tampines Town Council said there was an arrangement made to relocate the chickens on Aug 17, adding that there have been no additional attempts to trap the birds since.
"Four chickens were removed using cage traps and transferred to the AVA," said a town council spokesman.
She also explained that the town council had acted because of "increasing complaints of noise disturbances of late by the early morning crowing (of the chickens), and the leftover pellets or feed for these chickens (that) have been observed to attract pests such as rats".
But some residents, such as 70-year-old Madam Xie, feel the morning crowing gives a sense of nostalgia.
She told Lianhe Wanbao: "I miss the times in the kampung when I had chickens in the backyard, and the chickens make me feel very at home."
Another resident, retiree Madam Yun, 68, told the Chinese newspaper: "As an elderly person who lives alone, these chickens lift my spirits. When I see them go missing, my heart aches and I can't sleep well."
AVA said that Tampines Town Council had approached the authority for advice on guidelines for the proper handling of chickens, and confirmed that four chickens had been sent to it.
The authority said that town councils can decide whether to trap or remove chickens within their jurisdiction.
But trapping operations should not result in any form of cruelty to the birds and the tools used to trap the chickens need to be "appropriate and humane", the authority added.
When taking such caught chickens to AVA, "the town council should ensure that sufficient food, water, shelter and space are provided for the chickens during transportation", it added.
As for the four Tampines chickens, AVA said that it is exploring options to rehome them, and is working with animal welfare groups to find homes for the birds.
It also clarified that the chickens are not jungle fowls. The red jungle fowl is native to Singapore and is nationally endangered.
Tampines Town Council's spokesman said that it "understands that the chickens have brought joy to some residents within the community", but she added that the population of the birds had grown substantially due to natural reproduction and illegal feeding.
She also noted that "the increased (chicken) population has gradually led to the migration of some chickens to two other neighbouring residential zones".
"We wish to assure (residents) that the purpose is not to remove the chickens completely from the neighbourhood. The town council is doing our best to achieve a balance within a common living space," the spokesman added. | {
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Antonio Conte has been sharply criticised for failing to give youth a chance at Chelsea since the summer. Just last night former Manchester United defender Phil Neville laid into the Italian.
The last transfer window saw many academy graduates move on or loaned out which played into the notion that young players never get a chance at Stamford Bridge.
Man Utd make decision over new centre-back transfer after Victor Lindelof disasterclass
Nathan Ake and Nathaniel Chalobah were sold, Dominic Solanke chose to leave for Liverpool and Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Tammy Abraham were loaned to fellow Premier League sides.
‘If you were the Under-23s manager, or part of the squad that played in the Champions League Youth League today, you’d be thinking: “I’ve got no future at this football club”,’ said Neville. ‘It’s a disgrace, they should close their academy.’
Chelsea departures during the summer Diego Costa – Atletico Madrid – £59.4m
Nemanja Matic – Man Utd – £40.23m
Nathan Aké – Bournemouth – £20.52m
Juan Cuadrado – Juventus – £18.00m
Asmir Begovic – Bournemouth – £10.35m
Bertrand Traoré – Olympique Lyon – £9.00m
Kurt Zouma – Stoke City – Loan
Christian Atsu – Newcastle – £6.75m
Nathaniel Chalobah – Watford – £5.67m
John Terry – Aston Villa – Free transfer
Loïc Rémy – Las Palmas – Free transfer
Danilo Pantic – Partizan – Loan
Todd Kane – FC Groningen – Loan
Ruben Loftus-Cheek – Crystal Palace – Loan
Nathan – SC Amiens – Loan
Cristian Cuevas – FC Twente – Loan
Jeremie Boga – Birmingham – Loan
Kenneth Omeruo – Kasimpasa – Loan
Lewis Baker – Middlesbrough – Loan
Mario Pasalic – Spartak Moscow – Loan
Matt Miazga – Vitesse – Loan
Tammy Abraham – Swansea – Loan
Michael Hector – Hull City – Loan
Tomás Kalas – Fulham – Loan
Ola Aina – Hull City – Loan
Jamal Blackman – Sheffield Utd – Loan
The sense that young players don’t get a chance has existed ever since the Roman Abramovich era began, with John Terry famously the only player to emerge from the academy who became a regular fixture in the side. The wait for the next has been so long that in that time Terry has managed to win every trophy going, become arguably the most iconic player in the club’s history and start afresh as Aston Villa.
John Terry came through the Chelsea academy (Getty)
But while the criticism of Conte has been audible – even one of his own players recently felt aggrieved enough for an ill-advised vent on social media – it is totally unfair.
Conte himself was moved to defend his record earlier this season.
‘Show me young players who deserve to play regularly for Chelsea and I’m ready to pick them,’ said the Italian. ‘Don’t forget my first game in Serie A, I was only 16. I’m the first person open to do this because another coach did this with me. But, I repeat, you must have the possibilities to do this. Not to invent them.
‘I put Paul Pogba at 18 into the Juventus team, for Claudio Marchisio. But you must have players who are ready to play regularly with Chelsea, a great team. Otherwise, it’s very difficult to make this decision. You must decide if you want to fight for the title or develop your young players. Two different ways.’
Pogba and Conte together at Juventus (Getty)
There are two arguments with which Conte can and should be defended over his record of utilising young players at Chelsea.
The first is that Chelsea are among a select group of elite clubs for which failure is not an option, a defeat is a disaster and winning is more important than anything.
This can only be said for a handful of clubs – the others in the bracket are Manchester United, Man City, Juventus, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and to a lesser extent Paris St Germain.
Chelsea have suffered back-to-back defeats in the Premier League for the first time in over a year and it’s causing panic around the club and seeing questions asked. Many more bad results and there is no doubt Conte will be sacked. Just ask Claudio Ranieri, Luiz Felipe Scolari, Carlo Ancelotti, Andre Villas-Boas, Roberto Di Matteo and Jose Mourinho (twice) who felt the cold knife of Abramovich in their back.
Chelsea’s Russian owner Roman Abramovich is notoriously tough to please (Getty)
That environment does not allow for experiments and charitable opportunities to be afforded to a club’s academy products. As Conte himself has said, they must be earned.
‘The first thing they should have is good patience. Trust the club. Then work very hard to know that to play at this level you must be stronger – and very good.
‘Sometimes, young players think they can play easily in the first team, but that’s not true. I have to pick 11 players. Not only me, every coach.’
Conte took charge at Chelsea in the summer of 2016 (Getty)
A look at Chelsea’s fellow elite European clubs reveals that their respective managers have a similar outlook to Conte.
At Manchester City and Bayern Munich, not a single player who is currently under the age of 23 and was in the clubs’ academy before the age of 18 has played for the senior team in the league since Conte took charge of Chelsea last summer.
At Juventus, the champions of Italy, just one player under those same parameters has been given a start. At Barcelona, academy graduates were afforded just two minutes of football in La Liga last season. At Real Madrid that total was 60 minutes. Real Madrid’s uneasiness in taking their youth team players through to the senior side has ironically been to Chelsea’s advantage. Alvaro Morata, now 24, was deemed dispensable by the Spanish giants but since coming to Stamford Bridge has proven he has the talent.
Alvaro Morata, now at Chelsea, struggled to force his way into Real Madrid’s side (Getty)
It seems success and giving opportunities does not go hand-in-hand. As Conte said, there are ‘two different ways’.
The exceptions among the elite teams are Manchester United and PSG.
Since the start of last season Jose Mourinho has given seven youth products a shot at Premier League football. In total they have played 2880 minutes of football to now. At PSG that figure is even better with 5755 minutes for players who came through their youth system. Adrien Rabiot and Presnel Kimpembe in particular have become key members of the side.
Manchester United players currently under the age of 23 given a chance by Mourinho Last season * Angel Gomes (17 years old) 0 starts (1 sub appearance) 2 mins total
* Tim Fosu-Mensah (19 years old) 1 (3) 96 mins
* Marcus Rashford (19 years olds) 16 (16) 1703 mins
* Scott McTominay (20 years old)1 (1) 96 mins
* Axel Tuanzebe (19 years old) 4 (0) 305 mins
* Joel Pereira (21 years old) 1 (0) 90 mins
Luke Shaw (22 years old) 9 (2) 692 mins
Anthony Martial (21 years old) 18 (7) 1558 mins
* Josh Harrop (21 years old) 1 (0) 90 mins This season Anthony Martial (21 years old) 2 (5) 205 mins
* Marcus Rashford (19 years old) 6 (2) 498 mins * Denotes those who were in the Manchester United academy before the age of 18 All stats Premier League only
But it is notable it is those two sides that stand out because both considerably under-performed in their respective leagues last season. Manchester United finished a hugely disappointing fifth while PSG failed to win the title for the first time in five years. In comparison Chelsea, Juventus, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid were champions.
Jose Mourinho turned to youth a lot last season (Getty)
The second argument in defence of Conte is that he has championed youth at Chelsea, at least relative to the Blues’ fellow elite clubs.
Since taking over in the summer of 2016 he’s given six players from the youth academy minutes in the Premier League. Ake, Chalobah, Loftus-Cheek and Ola Aina all played last season while Charly Musonda and Andreas Christensen have featured this term.
Chelsea players currently under the age of 23 given a chance by Conte Last season * Nathan Ake (22 years old) – 1 start (1 sub appearance) 98 mins total
Kurt Zouma (22 years old) – 3 (6) 247 mins
Kenedy (21 years old) – 1 (0) 75 mins
* Nathaniel Chalobah (22 years old) – 1 (9) 159 mins
* Ruben Loftus-Cheek (21 years old) 0 (6) 31 mins
* Ola Aina (21 years old) 0 (3) 25 mins This season * Andreas Christensen (21 years old) 3 (3) 344 mins
* Charly Musonda (21 years old) 0 (2) 26 mins *Denotes those who were in the Chelsea academy before the age of 18 All stats Premier League only
In that time Manchester United have used one more, but among that group at Manchester United is 19-year-old prodigy Marcus Rashford. He is clearly a rare talent and one that would be gracing any side lucky enough to have him. But even he is regularly playing out of position under Mourinho.
If the young English striker’s minutes are not included, then Manchester United have used academy players for 679 minutes since the start of last season. The comparative figure at Chelsea is 683.
Marcus Rashford is a rare talent (Getty)
Over at Manchester City there is no doubt Pep Guardiola is willing to give young players a chance. Raheem Sterling, Leroy Sane and Gabriel Jesus – aged 22, 21 and 20 respectively – are all key members of his squad. But all of them shone elsewhere and were then signed for huge money by the Premier League table-toppers.
Conte himself has pointed this out.
He said: ‘If young players stay and play regularly with Chelsea, the question is this: Manchester City and other clubs, are their players from the academy playing regularly? I don’t know.’
Antonio Conte at Stamford Bridge (Getty)
Manchester City and other clubs, are their players from the academy playing regularly?
Aina, who made three substitute appearances in the Premier League last season, offered an insight recently that showed Conte’s openness to youth.
‘The hard work of the academy is still going on and so to have a manager who lets the young ones have a run-out here and there is good for the academy and the young players who are getting chosen.
‘He treats us like any of the other players in the team. We do feel part of the first-team; we don’t feel like the young ones anymore.’
His comments are somewhat in contrast to some others. Musonda went on that recent Instagram rant while Chalobah has said he has no regrets about leaving. The Chelsea academy project left for Watford over the summer and if it weren’t for injury would be taking on his former side this weekend.
While on England duty he said: ‘I guess the fact I’m sitting here justifies the decision, that was the aim really, to leave and try and get game time somewhere else, and I am just very pleased and happy that things are going well.’
Nathaniel Chalobah at Watford (Getty)
Chalobah made his decision and few will dispute he will get more chances at Watford than he would at Chelsea. But that is not Conte’s fault, but simply a side effect of the Blues being among Europe’s elite.
‘Chalobah had the chance to play,’ Conte said of his former midfielder. ‘Don’t forget last season we won the league. Don’t forget last season our midfielders were Matic, Kante and Fabregas. Chalobah was the fourth midfielder.
’If you ask to play regularly with a great club, then you must deserve to play. If you show you deserve to play and can be better than these players, I’m ready to do this.’
Ironically, Chalobah is likely to witness Conte’s willingness to turn to youth this weekend. Due to a spate of injuries, something which hardly affected Chelsea last season, academy product Christensen could well be in the starting XI and add to the six appearances he’s already made this season.
Chelsea’s Andreas Christensen has already made six Premier League appearances this season (Getty)
‘We have a clear example with Christensen. Christensen played on loan at Borussia Moenchengladbach and now he’s in our squad,’ said Conte who then perfectly encapsulated his view on youth…
‘Don’t forget that my first appearance in Serie A was when I was 16. I think I’m the first person to trust in the young players, to give possibilities to them, if young players deserve this chance.’
Conte has proven he holds to those principles and Neville’s suggestion that young players have no chance at Chelsea is plain wrong. They just have to be good enough.
MORE: Jose Mourinho labelled a hypocrite following clash with Antonio Conte | {
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A tweaked version of Cryssi signing . This is Chryssi at work doing my job (which involves a lot of sign language). From a sketch I sketched at said job which is here --> [ARCHIVE] Chryssi's Tuesday Feel happier with this now. Enough to try to submit in a few places. eek! | {
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A teenager in South Florida who was advertising his health care services had certifications in holistic healthcare. He had lab coats and a stethoscope. He even had a medical office.
What the 18-year-old Malachi A. Love-Robinson didn’t have, officials say, is a medical degree.
On Tuesday, Mr. Love-Robinson was accused of practicing medicine without a license after officials said he was caught performing a physical exam and offering medical advice to an undercover agent. The episode is the latest in a series of encounters with law enforcement dating back to early 2015 as Mr. Love-Robinson tried time and again to portray himself as a doctor, officials said.
The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that Mr. Love-Robinson managed to open and operate his own office, called New Birth New Life Medical Center & Urgent Care, in a building populated by medical and dentistry offices in West Palm Beach, complete with a grand-opening celebration held in January.
In Florida, practicing medicine without a license is a third-degree felony. Mr. Love-Robinson was scheduled to appear in court on Wednesday. | {
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Today, the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released a report outlining the opportunity costs of socialism on the macro economy, including standards of living, and the impact on the Federal budget. Below is the executive summary. Read the full report here.
Coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse. Detailed policy proposals from self-declared socialists are gaining support in Congress and among much of the electorate.
It is unclear, of course, exactly what a typical voter has in mind when he or she thinks of “socialism.” But economists generally agree about how to define socialism, and they have devoted enormous time and resources to studying its costs and benefits. With an eye on this broad body of literature, this report discusses socialism’s historic visions and intents, its economic features, its impact on economic performance, and its relationship with recent policy proposals in the United States.
We find that historical proponents of socialist policies and those in the contemporary United States share some of their visions and intents. They both characterize the distribution of income in market economies as the unjust result of “exploitation,” which should be rectified by extensive state control. The proposed solutions include single-payer systems, high tax rates (“from each according to his ability”), and public policies that hand out much of the Nation’s goods and services “free” of charge (“to each according to his needs”). Where they differ is that contemporary democratic socialists denounce state brutality and would allow individuals to privately own the means of production in many industries.
In assessing the effects of socialist policies, it is important to recognize that they provide little material incentive for production and innovation and, by distributing goods and services for “free,” prevent prices from revealing economically important information about costs and consumer needs and wants. To this end, as the then–prime minister of the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher (1976), once argued, “Socialist governments . . . always run out of other people’s money,” and thus the way to prosperity is for the state to give “the people more choice to spend their own money in their own way.”
Whether socialism delivers on its appealing promises is an empirical question. We begin our investigation by looking closely at the most highly socialist cases, which are typically agricultural economies, such as Maoist China, Cuba, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Their nondemocratic governments seized control of farming, promising to make food more abundant. The result was substantially less food production and tens of millions of deaths by starvation. Even if highly socialist policies are peacefully implemented under the auspices of democracy, the fundamental incentive distortions and information problems created by large state organizations and the centralized control of resources are also present in industrialized countries, as is currently the case in Venezuela. Lessons from poorly performing agricultural economies under socialist regimes carry over to government takeovers of other modern industries: They produce less rather than more.
These countries are examples of a more general pattern of socialism’s negative output effects. Such outcomes have also been observed in cross-country studies of the effect of greater economic freedom—quantified as an index of taxation and public spending, the extent of state-owned enterprises, economic regulation, and other factors—on real gross domestic product (GDP). This literature finds a strong association between greater economic freedom and better economic performance. It suggests that replacing U.S. policies with highly socialist policies, such as Venezuela’s, would reduce real GDP at least 40 percent in the long run, or about $24,000 per year for the average person.
Although they are sometimes cited as more relevant socialist success stories, the experiences of the Nordic countries also support the conclusion that socialism reduces living standards. In many respects, the Nordic countries’ policies now differ significantly from what economists have in mind when they think of socialism. For instance, they do not provide healthcare for “free”; Nordic healthcare financing includes substantial cost sharing. Marginal labor income tax rates in the Nordic countries today are only somewhat higher than in the United States, and Nordic taxation overall is surprisingly less progressive than U.S. taxes. The Nordic countries also tax capital income less and regulate product markets less than the United States does. However, the Nordic countries do regulate and tax labor markets somewhat more; thus, American families earning the average wage would be taxed $2,000 to $5,000 more per year net of transfers if the United States had current Nordic policies. Living standards in the Nordic countries are at least 15 percent lower than in the United States.
It may well be that American socialists are envisioning moving our policies to align with those of the Nordic countries in the 1970s, when their policies were more in line with economists’ traditional definition of socialism. We estimate that if the United States were to adopt these policies, its real GDP would decline by at least 19 percent in the long run, or about $11,000 per year for the average person.
The Nordic and European versions of socialized medicine have been viewed as so desirable by modern U.S. socialists that they have proposed nationalizing payments for the healthcare sector (which makes up more than a sixth of the U.S. economy) through the recent “Medicare for All” proposal. This policy would distribute healthcare for “free” (i.e., without cost sharing) through a monopoly government health insurer that would centrally set all prices paid to suppliers such as doctors and hospitals. We find that if this policy were financed out of current Federal spending without borrowing or tax increases, then more than half the entire existing Federal budget would need to be cut. Or if it were financed through higher taxes, GDP would fall by 9 percent, or about $7,000 per person in 2022, due to high tax rates that would reduce incentives to supply the factors of production. Evidence on the productivity and effectiveness of single-payer systems suggests that “Medicare for All” would reduce both short- and long-run longevity and health despite increasing somewhat the population with health insurance.
Full report: The Opportunity Costs of Socialism | {
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It seems that while I was enjoying real life, my beloved Steemit platform had been immersed in an experiment...and didn't tell me!
Truth be told, I don't think the experimenters told anyone outside of their tiny communication circles, which has led to a lot of confusion and yet another round of anger and bitterness from general users.
Honestly, I knew nothing about it until I signed on this evening to do some reading and curating when I noticed mass down-voting on decent posts. By sheer happenstance, plus the fact that I had a day full of real life obligations, I did not post anything today and therefore unwittingly excluded myself from this experiment... I think.
WHAT EXPERIMENT?
The one @abit started earlier today. Here's the post
Unfortunately, it doesn't tell you anything about the "test" except that it's begun. No... Wait... There is the title:
Whales No Up-Voting Test
The Negative Effect
One user caught my attention with his Title and featured picture:
Brian's last post states that he's kind of deflated and is going to take a break from Steemit, which kind of sucks because he's been a consistent contributor on the platform.
This part, by no means is a Brian-bashing moment, but COME ON, MAN!
I just looked at his feed and post earnings range consistently between $10 and $28 per post - some higher and some lower...and by lower, I'm talking the $4 to $5 range, which is still no small feat. So am I feeling too terrible for @mynameisbrian? No.
Sorry he was part of an experiment that he didn't volunteer for but his reaction is a little over the top, if you ask me.
And how does this affect @abit?
For being an active participant in an experiment which is largely unscientific
For doing something well-meaning and for the betterment of Steemit (in their opinion)
For experimenting with vote power and its distribution to dolphins and minnows...
people are unvoting him as a witness.
or is @abit a her? I don't know.
Easy does it, Dwayne. Settle down.
Just sit there and flex your beautiful body for me, okay? The people of Steemit have free will and can do what they want with their witness votes, their posting habits, their up and down votes and their curation routines.
Let me note that I do not agree with this experiment because I think it's detrimental to the psyche of our general population. The lack of CENTRALIZED COMMUNICATION is glaring. We have no billboards to warn of fires ahead. We don't have a siren to direct us to the nearest evacuation route or shelter before the shit-storm lands.
We content creators show up, do our thing and hopefully watch our numbers move up. We do this as we try to build a community of like-minded souls because we love it here (or at least its potential).
BUT
if we're not privy to something that's going to affect the behavior across the board then you have effectively stripped us of our free will.
The biggest mistake was not telling us - the community at large
I personally would have volunteered to fall on a flag or two if I was first asked to participate in an experiment that may guide a future hardfork into leveling the power structure and vote weight.
I've seen the benefit by watching YOUR earnings rise much higher from my vote during this experiment - even being a baby dolphin that I am. And excuse me, I am an engaged, organic curator and you want me out there reading, commenting and curating material because members like me are going to take this platform into the future.
People are keeping their heads about them.
Read @timcliff's post: The Whale Voting Experiment Explained (including downvotes from @abit)
Read @neoxian's post: The Experiment: communication required, this is a social platform
I still have questions
How long is this experiment / test?
Who are the experiment-participating whales?
Which whales didn't get the memo - or did not feel like participating?
And questions to the community-at-large:
If you knew about this test ahead of time would you continue to participate in your normal posting pattern?
Would you have stopped posting and started curating more to see how much your new more powerful vote moved the dollar sign?
Would you have completely abstained from Steemit until the experiment was over?
One final thought
When I joined in July, 2016 I knew this was the WILD WEST of blogging. I missed out on the mega rewards and many of my posts didn't earn one cent. But like pioneers we venture forth with a can-do-it spirit and we deal with the hardships as they come.
Good, Bad or Ugly
I don't have a cure for what ails this platform but if we're so hellbent on trying to be autonomous, why are we trying to govern who, what, where, when and how much the whales are voting?
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Today, the phrase "Friday the 13th" rolls off the tongue, instinctively linked to bad luck, strange happenings and a hockey-masked murderer in a slasher flick of the same name. But before Jason Voorhees made his mark in 12 films about the infamous day, how did the superstition come to exist?
No expert can verify the origins of Friday the 13th. But the first written references to its wickedness appear around the mid-19th century when William Fowler, a U.S. Army captain, founded the Thirteen Club — a group of 13 men in Manhattan devoted to proving the superstitions were false. The Club grew and at some point apparently included five former U.S. presidents as honorary members.
The men gathered for the first time on Friday, Jan. 13, 1881, and their exploits — described in newspapers of the time — included walking under ladders, breaking mirrors and dining as a group in room 13.
From that point on, more definitive references to Friday the 13th began to emerge. In 1907, British stockbroker Thomas Lawson wrote "Friday the 13th," a book about a rogue businessman's attempt to crash the stock market on that day. The book sold almost 28,000 copies in its first week, and this idea of a link between bad luck and a bad stock market continued throughout the 1920s. [13 Freaky Facts About Friday the 13th]
But to truly deconstruct the day's connotations, folklore historians like Donald Dossey, author of "Holiday Folklore, Phobias and Fun" (Outcome Unlimited Pr, June 1992), suggest that Friday the 13th actually comes from two separate superstitions rooted in ancient history: the evil of the number 13 and the bad luck of Friday — each with a string of mythical narratives of their own.
Thirteen is a loaded number in cultural, religious and mythic history. Nordic mythology tells a tale of the 12 gods gathering for a dinner party, when a 13th guest walked in uninvited. The guest was Loki, a mischievous, trickster god. Loki took his bow and arrow and shot Balder the Beautiful, a god who represents joy and gladness, the story goes. Balder's death brought darkness and mourning into the world — and possibly lent the concept of a dinner party with 13 guests a shade of misfortune.
In Christianity, some believe that Judas — one of Jesus' 12 apostles — arrived as the 13th guest to the Last Supper. The next morning, it was Judas who betrayed Jesus, leading to his arrest and crucifixion.
But some say the number 13 is also considered unlucky because of its place after the number 12. Thirteen is just "a little beyond completeness," Thomas Fernsler, a math and policy scientist at the University of Delaware who also goes by the name Dr. 13, told National Geographic last year. "The number becomes restless or squirmy," Fernsler added.
That's because in numerology, or the study of the symbolism of numbers, 12 is associated with completeness: whole, perfect and harmonious, as seen in the 12 apostles, 12 Olympic Gods, 12 animals in the Chinese horoscope and 12 months in the Gregorian calendar. Thirteen — by default — is awkward, ungainly and odd.
Friday's associations have a weaker background. It's been suggested that Friday carries certain meaning in Christian tradition. For example, as described in the creation story, Eve gave Adam the poisonous fruit that had them exiled from God's Garden of Eden on the seventh day of creation — Friday. It was on Friday that Cain killed his brother Abel in the myth of the two brothers. And it was Friday that Jesus was crucified, a day now known as Good Friday.
Despite the ambiguity of its origins, the buzz around Friday the 13th continues. This June's Friday the 13th falls under a full moon; that kind of coincidence won't happen again until August 2049.
Follow Jillian Rose Lim on Twitter & Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science. | {
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Contrary to what President Trump seems to think, he does not have the authority to dictate when and how individual states reopen as the threat posed by the coronavirus diminishes. Nor should he want it.
For the purpose of creating conflict and confusion, some in the Fake News Media are saying that it is the Governors decision to open up the states, not that of the President of the United States & the Federal Government. Let it be fully understood that this is incorrect.... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 13, 2020
This assertion — that only Trump can decide the question of reopening — is obviously wrong, as anyone remotely familiar with the U.S. Constitution and the principles of federalism understands. Only the individual governors can decide when their states will begin to reopen, and only they can determine what that process will look like.
Of course, the states should do so with the guidance of the federal government. But at the end of the day, the ultimate authority lies with governors, which is how it should be. The state and local leaders know more about their individual states’ and counties’ needs than Trump, and they are better equipped to respond to these needs in a timely and efficient manner.
Federalism also relieves Trump of undue pressure and liability. Imagine, for a moment, if he ordered California Gov. Gavin Newsom to begin reopening the state’s businesses by the end of the month, only to have California’s cases and deaths rebound. In that case, Trump would bear full responsibility. The way our system is made, Trump lacks both the power and the responsibility.
The federal government can certainly nudge the states toward reopening by withholding discretionary federal funding. This would be its own kind of problem, but it would at least be permissible. But this should be a last resort. Trump’s job is not to bully the states into doing what he wants; it’s to help and guide their efforts to get America back on its feet.
Furthermore, Trump is getting way ahead of himself. He has yet to roll out a specific plan outlining his government’s conditions for reopening, and the resulting actions these conditions will require. Will we be required to wear masks in public for the next few months? Will restaurants, movie theaters, and stores be required to screen for fevers before admitting entry to customers? There are many, many important questions like these that must be answered before Trump can even think about directing the states’ actions.
Whatever plan Trump does roll out must be specific, and it must be respectful of the states. He cannot rule by fiat, and a pandemic does not change that. | {
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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil prices edged up on Tuesday, bouncing after sliding below $47 a barrel on pressure from a Mideast diplomatic rift, while U.S. Treasury yields and the dollar dropped to recent lows and world stocks dropped as political uncertainty pushed investors away from risky assets.
The yen and gold gained as caution prevailed and ahead of testimony from the former head of the FBI, a British election and the European Central Bank’s next move, which all happen on Thursday.
“We have risk events piling up,” said Blake Gwinn, U.S. rates strategist at NatWest Markets in Stamford, Connecticut. “We’ll be very focused on what happens on Thursday, but it might end up being a dud.”
Leading Arab powers including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates cut ties with Qatar on Monday, accusing it of supporting Islamist militants and Iran.
U.S. crude CLcv1 rose 1.35 percent to $48.04 per barrel and Brent LCOcv1 was last at $49.94, up 0.95 percent on the day.
Wall Street closed lower for a second day after both European and Asian stocks dropped during their sessions.
The largest weight on the S&P 500 was Amazon AMZN.O, down 0.8 percent. Walmart WMT.N fell 1.7 percent to $78.93 after Amazon said it would offer its Prime subscription service at a discount to U.S. customers on government aid, taking aim at a piece of Walmart's customer base.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI fell 47.81 points, or 0.23 percent, to 21,136.23, the S&P 500 .SPX lost 6.77 points, or 0.28 percent, to 2,429.33 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC dropped 20.63 points, or 0.33 percent, to 6,275.06. [nL3N1J34CK]
On what BayernLB analysts called “Super Thursday”, British voters will also go to polls in an increasingly unpredictable general election, the European Central Bank is due to meet and former FBI director James Comey will testify before Congress.
Slideshow ( 4 images )
“Once these events pass, we may have a little more clarity and therefore see a little less caution in the markets,” said Craig Erlam, a market analyst for OANDA securities.
The pan-European FTSEurofirst 300 index .FTEU3 lost 0.62 percent and MSCI's gauge of stocks across the globe .MIWD00000PUS shed 0.28 percent.
Investors piled into gold, U.S. Treasuries and German government bonds, among the world's safest assets. German 10-year borrowing costs dropped DE10YT=TWEB to six-week lows.
U.S. 10-year Treasury yields, last at 2.145 percent, dropped as low as 2.129 percent, a seven-month low US10YT=RR. Gold XAU= briefly touched a high of $1,295.97, prices not seen since November.
A run of weaker-than-expected U.S. data dragged bond yields lower even though the Federal Reserve is widely expected to raise U.S. interest rates a quarter point next week. ECONALLUS
Sterling GBP= turned flat ahead of Thursday's general election. British Prime Minister Theresa May looks on course to increase her parliamentary majority, a poll showed, shortly after another survey suggested the race with the Labour Party was neck and neck.
The dollar fell to a more than six-week low against the yen JPY= and was at its weakest since the November U.S. election against a basket of other world currencies .DXY.
On Thursday, reports suggest former FBI chief Comey plans to talk about conversations in which U.S. President Donald Trump allegedly pressured him to drop his investigation into former national security adviser Mike Flynn, who was fired for failing to disclose conversations with Russian officials.
Slideshow ( 4 images )
The Mexican peso posted a second day of gains after U.S. and Mexican governments reached a new preliminary agreement to shift their sugar trade mix.
(To view a graphic on 'World FX rates in 2017' click tmsnrt.rs/2egbfVh)
(To view a graphic on 'Global bonds dashboard' click tmsnrt.rs/2fPTds0)
(To view a graphic on 'Global market cap' click reut.rs/2mcp7T1)
(To view a graphic on 'Emerging markets in 2017' click tmsnrt.rs/2ihRugV) | {
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How can we modify the harmonic series to make it convergent?
Another way to modify the harmonic series
Upper left: Plot from 1 - 9, Upper right: Plot from 10 - 99, Lower left: Plot from 100 - 999, Lower Right: Plot from 1000 - 9999.
Just exactly how many terms are removed though?
The proof
Extra tidbits
The harmonic series is considered a classic textbook example of a series that seems to converge but is actually divergent. For those that need a reminder, the harmonic series is: \[\sum_{n=1}^{\infty}\frac{1}{n}=1+\frac{1}{2}+\frac{1}{3}+\frac{1}{4}\cdots.\]Now here's an interesting question:Disregarding trivial answers such as "remove all the terms", this question is actually pretty hard to answer. Say we removed every second term starting from the first (i.e. 1, 1/3, 1/5, etc). Would that work?\[\sum_{\substack{n=1 \\ n\ is\ even}}^{\infty}\frac{1}{n}=\frac{1}{2}+\frac{1}{4}+\frac{1}{6}+\frac{1}{8}\cdots=\frac{1}{2}\left(1+\frac{1}{2}+\frac{1}{3}+\frac{1}{4}\cdots\right).\]From above, it seems like it would not work since it just produces half of the original series (which is not a very well defined quantity since the original series was divergent anyway).Instead of removing every second term, let us(i.e. remove 1/9, 1/19, 1/29, etc). This series is called the Kempner series: \[1+\frac{1}{2}+\frac{1}{3}+\cdots+\frac{1}{8}+\frac{1}{10}+\cdots.\]Although removing every term with a 9 doesn't seem like a lot, this bizarrely modified harmonic series is actually convergent (it is also convergent if you choose to remove any other digit/string of digits such as "0", "42", or "8675309")!We can now state the formal question as:Consider the series: \[a_{n}=\begin{cases}1/n & if\ n\ does\ not\ contain\ the\ digit\ 9 \\ 0 & otherwise\end{cases}\] Is $\sum a_n$ convergent?Instead of starting the proof right away, let's look at why this modification to the harmonic series might make it convergent.The plots below read 1 whenever an integer contains the digit 9, and 0 otherwise.As you can see, the plots have a nice "fractal" quality to them, in that each plot looks like it makes up parts of the next plot. Although the actual number of terms removed by the modification seems fewer than doing something like removing every second term, we can see that there are always points in the series where a long stretch of consecutive terms are removed (in fact, name a number and we can always find a point in the series where the number of consecutive terms removed is greater than that number). As the number of digits in the terms get large, the number of terms we remove increase drastically. As an example, most integers of say 100 digits will have a 9 in them, leading to about 99.99997% of the 100 digit terms being deleted. It is the quirky effect of removing consecutive terms as well as the fractal quality of the series that will allow us to see and prove its convergence.To do this systematically, we'll exploit the pattern we saw in the plots above. That is, since the plots seem to exhibit fractal qualities in the ranges ([1,9], [10,99], [100, 999] ...) that they are plotted, we'll look at the number of terms removed inside these ranges.For the interval [1,9], only. Note that this range starts at 1 because the harmonic series starts at n=1.For the interval [10, 99], we have 1 term removed from each of 10 - 19, 20 - 29, 30 - 39, ... , 80 - 89. Then we have 10 terms removed from 90 - 99. In total, we have 8 terms removed from 10 - 89, and a further 10 terms removed from 90 - 99. This makes for 8*1 + 10 =For the interval [100, 999], there is one term removed from 100 - 109, 18 terms removed from 110 - 199, 1 term removed from 200 - 219, 18 terms removed from 220 - 299, and so on, with the last being 18 terms removed from 800 - 899 terms. Finally, we have 100 terms removed from [900, 999]. In total this is 8*1 + 8*18 + 10² =Perhaps you are seeing a pattern here. Let's try to make out what that pattern is. Instead of looking at the number of terms removed, let's look at theFor the interval [1,9], we keep 9 - 1 =For the interval [10, 99], we keep 90 - 18 =For the interval [100, 999], we keep 900 - 252 =The pattern is 8, 72, 648. Dividing by 8, we have the pattern 1, 9, 81. We can see that the next number in the sequence will be 81*9 = 729, making the number of terms kept 8*729 = 5832. So the number of terms kept in a given interval $[10^n,10^{n+1}-1]$ is $8\cdot 9^n$. We will assume this knowledge (though it can be proven by standard methods of mathematical induction) for the proof below.Before we start the proof, we now can see why our modification to the series is so effective. Consider all integers containing 100 digits. There are $9\cdot 10^{99}$ of them. The number of terms that are kept is $8\cdot 9^{99}$. The fraction of terms that are kept is thus \[\frac{8\cdot 9^{99}}{9\cdot 10^{99}}\approx0.0000262335.\] We took out a lot of terms!Consider the series: \[a_{n}=\begin{cases}1/n & if\ n\ does\ not\ contain\ the\ digit\ 9 \\ 0 & otherwise\end{cases}\] Is $\sum a_n$ convergent?We know from the section above that the number of terms that are not 0 in $a_n$ on an interval $[10^n,10^{n+1}-1]$ is $8\cdot 9^n$. Moreover, the largest term of the harmonic series in each interval $[10^n,10^{n+1}-1]$ is $\frac{1}{10^n}$.Therefore, we can provide an upper bound for $\sum a_{n}$:\[\sum a_{n}here (under teaching and Science One).2. R. Baillie,American Mathematical Monthly, 372-374.3. T. Schmelzer and R. Baillie,American Mathematical Monthly, 525-540. | {
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Firefox users who prefer a 64-bit version of the web browser instead of a 32-bit version on Windows will be able to install and use a 64-bit stable channel version when Firefox 41 gets released.
Firefox 41, which will be released on September 22, 2015 if things go as planned, will be offered as a 32-bit and 64-bit version for the Windows platform.
All other channels of the browser, that is Beta, Developer and Nightly, are already provided as a 64-bit version, and that is also the case for the Linux and Mac OS X versions of the browser.
So why is the release, originally planned for Firefox 39 and then 40, delayed again? According to Mozilla, it is because of other improvements and changes launching in Firefox 41.
The organization mentioned sandboxing and NPAPI whitelisting in particular which it aims to deploy with Firefox 41.
One difference between 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Firefox for Windows is that the latter will restrict plugin access through the use of a whitelist.
Mozilla plans to put Flash on the whitelist, and maybe also Silverlight according to the official bug report on Bugzilla. Additional plugins are not mentioned which means -- subject to change as always -- that Java for instance won't work in 64-bit versions of Firefox for Windows because of that restriction.
It is unclear why Mozilla made the decision to integrate a whitelist in Firefox 64-bit for Windows, but the most likely explanation is security.
Firefox users may have two issues with this approach. First, not allowing certain plugins from being installed in Firefox will break some sites or applications. If Silverlight won't be supported for instance, it will break media streaming sites that rely on the technology. While many will move over to HTML5 eventually, it will take a while before the majority has completed that process.
Second, leaving Flash, one of the most dangerous plugins enabled in Firefox means that the browser is still open for plugin-based attacks.
Shumway, Mozilla's Flash replacement, is still not ready for primetime and it is unclear if it ever will be.
Some Firefox users will notice disruptions when they start to use the 64-bit version of Firefox for Windows due to this limitation. A workaround is not provided yet other than using the 32-bit version of the browser instead which is less restrictive.
Eventually though, NPAPI plugins will go away just like they did in Google Chrome for the most part.
Now You: What's your take on Mozilla's decision to limit plugin use in 64-bit versions of Firefox for Windows?
Summary Article Name Mozilla to launch 64-bit Firefox 41 to stable channel Description Mozilla plans to launch the 64-bit version of Firefox for Windows to the stable channel with the release of Firefox 41. Author Martin Brinkmann
Advertisement | {
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Germany will not declare Lebanon's Hezbollah movement a terrorist organization, a top official said Friday.
Niels Annen, deputy minister in the Foreign Ministry, told newsmagazine Der Spiegel that the Iran-backed Shiite Islamist movement is a relevant factor in Lebanese society and part of the complex political landscape in the country.
Read more: Iran's military power: What you need to know
The comments come after Britain last month banned Hezbollah in its entirety, accusing the movement of destabilizing the Middle East.
"The British move is a national decision that has no direct impact on the position of the German government or the EU," Annen said.
The European Union had already added Hezbollah's military wing to a list of banned terrorist groups in 2013.
Hezbollah is represented in the Lebanese parliament and holds three of 30 ministries in the government led by Western-backed Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri.
The movement's armed wing has expanded its influence in recent years in Lebanon and Syria, where, alongside Iran and Russia, it backs the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. In Lebanon, it is considered to be more powerful than the Lebanese army.
Hezbollah, Lebanon's Iran-backed paramilitary organization Rise of Hezbollah Hezbollah, or Party of God, was conceived by Muslim clerics in the 1980s in response to the Israeli invasion of South Lebanon in 1982. The Shiite group has a political and military wing.
Hezbollah, Lebanon's Iran-backed paramilitary organization National support against Israel Hezbollah emerged in the 1980s as an amalgamation of Shiite militias and played a major role in the Lebanese civil war. It used guerrilla warfare to drive Israeli forces out of South Lebanon — Israel withdrew in 2000. Israel and Hezbollah fought another war in 2006. Its defense of Lebanon against Israel had won it cross-sectarian support and acceptance in Lebanese society.
Hezbollah, Lebanon's Iran-backed paramilitary organization Backed by Iran Since its creation, Hezbollah has received military, financial and political support from Iran and Syria. Today, Hezbollah's military wing is more powerful than Lebanon's own army and has become a major regional paramilitary force.
Hezbollah, Lebanon's Iran-backed paramilitary organization Political apparatus Hezbollah turned its focus to politics following the end of Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war. It represents a large section of the Lebanese Shiite population and is allied with other sectarian groups, including Christians. Their political development has mostly come under Hassan Nasrallah (pictured), who became the group's leader in 1992.
Hezbollah, Lebanon's Iran-backed paramilitary organization Armed wing Unlike other parties in Lebanon's multi-sided 1975-1990 civil war, Hezbollah did not disband its armed wing. Some Lebanese political groups, such as Prime Minister Saad Hariri's Future Movement, want Hezbollah to put down its arms. Hezbollah argues its militant wing is necessary to defend against Israel and other external threats.
Hezbollah, Lebanon's Iran-backed paramilitary organization Terror group? A number of countries and bodies, including the United States, Israel, Canada and the Arab League, consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization. However, Australia and most of the European Union differentiate between its legitimate political activities and its militant wing.
Hezbollah, Lebanon's Iran-backed paramilitary organization Hezbollah enters Syria's civil war Hezbollah has been one of the main backers of Syrian President Bashar Assad in the country's civil war. Its entrance into the war helped save Assad, one of its chief patrons; secured weapons supply routes from Syria and formed a buffer zone around Lebanon against Sunni militant groups it feared would take over Syria. As a result it has won considerable support from Shiite communities in Lebanon.
Hezbollah, Lebanon's Iran-backed paramilitary organization Sectarianism Lebanon has long been at the center of regional power struggles, particularly between Saudi Arabia and Iran. However, Hezbollah's military and political ascendancy, as well as its intervention in Syria, have also helped stoke Sunni-Shiite sectarian tensions in Lebanon and across the region.
Hezbollah, Lebanon's Iran-backed paramilitary organization Renewed conflict with Israel? Iran and Hezbollah have increased their political and military strength through the war in Syria. Israel views this as a threat and has carried out dozens of airstrikes on Iran/Hezbollah targets in Syria. Israel has vowed to not let Iran and Hezbollah create a permanent presence in Syria. There is growing concern of another war between Hezbollah and Israel that could draw in Iran. Author: Chase Winter
Hezbollah leader calls for donations
Earlier Friday, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said other countries may follow Britain's example at a time when the US is ratcheting up sanctions pressure on the group.
"The sanctions and terror lists are a form of warfare against the resistance and we must deal with them as such," he said in a televised speech, calling on the "popular base" to support the movement with donations.
"It is the responsibility of the Lebanese resistance, its popular base, its milieu," to confront these measures, he said.
Hezbollah's resurgent military strength and possession of a vast array of missiles has worried Israel, raising the prospect of a renewed war between the two sides.
Watch video 12:04 Share Refugee children in Lebanon Send Facebook google+ Whatsapp Tumblr linkedin stumble Digg reddit Newsvine Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/36s1H World Stories: Refugee children in Lebanon
Berlin focused on political solutions
Annen, who spoke to Der Spiegel after a visit to Lebanon, rejected US criticism that Germany was not doing enough to counter Iran's influence in the region. He said Berlin's foreign policy remained focused on finding political solutions to complex situations.
Germany and the EU have sought to save the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, setting up an alternative financing mechanism to allow trade with Tehran despite unilateral US sanctions.
Lebanon is host to nearly 1 million Syrian refugees, some of whom have started to return home as the war in the country winds down. The humanitarian crisis has made the safe return of Syrian refugees an important issue for Germany.
Each evening at 1830 UTC, DW's editors send out a selection of the day's hard news and quality feature journalism. You can sign up to receive it directly here. | {
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Hazard Tornadoes EF2+ Tornadoes Likelihood Low Very Low Severe Wind 65 kt+ Wind Moderate Low Severe Hail 2"+ Hail Moderate Low
Note: The expiration time in the watch graphic is amended if the watch is replaced, cancelled or extended.
Note: Click for
SEL4 URGENT - IMMEDIATE BROADCAST REQUESTED Severe Thunderstorm Watch Number 234 NWS Storm Prediction Center Norman OK 225 PM EDT Fri May 29 2020 The NWS Storm Prediction Center has issued a * Severe Thunderstorm Watch for portions of Central Maryland Northwest New Jersey Central and eastern New York Eastern Pennsylvania Far northern Virginia Eastern West Virginia Panhandle * Effective this Friday afternoon and evening from 225 PM until 900 PM EDT. * Primary threats include... Scattered damaging wind gusts to 65 mph possible Isolated large hail events to 1.5 inches in diameter possible A tornado or two possible SUMMARY...Clusters of strong to locally severe storms are expected to persist through mid-evening. Damaging winds appear to be the primary threat. The severe thunderstorm watch area is approximately along and 60 statute miles east and west of a line from 85 miles northeast of Binghamton NY to 35 miles east southeast of Hagerstown MD. For a complete depiction of the watch see the associated watch outline update (WOUS64 KWNS WOU4). PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... REMEMBER...A Severe Thunderstorm Watch means conditions are favorable for severe thunderstorms in and close to the watch area. Persons in these areas should be on the lookout for threatening weather conditions and listen for later statements and possible warnings. Severe thunderstorms can and occasionally do produce tornadoes. && AVIATION...A few severe thunderstorms with hail surface and aloft to 1.5 inches. Extreme turbulence and surface wind gusts to 55 knots. A few cumulonimbi with maximum tops to 450. Mean storm motion vector 22030. ...Grams Click for Watch Status Reports
Hazard Tornadoes EF2+ Tornadoes Likelihood Low Very Low Severe Wind 65 kt+ Wind Moderate Low Severe Hail 2"+ Hail Moderate Low SEL4 URGENT - IMMEDIATE BROADCAST REQUESTED Severe Thunderstorm Watch Number 234 NWS Storm Prediction Center Norman OK 225 PM EDT Fri May 29 2020 The NWS Storm Prediction Center has issued a * Severe Thunderstorm Watch for portions of Central Maryland Northwest New Jersey Central and eastern New York Eastern Pennsylvania Far northern Virginia Eastern West Virginia Panhandle * Effective this Friday afternoon and evening from 225 PM until 900 PM EDT. * Primary threats include... Scattered damaging wind gusts to 65 mph possible Isolated large hail events to 1.5 inches in diameter possible A tornado or two possible SUMMARY...Clusters of strong to locally severe storms are expected to persist through mid-evening. Damaging winds appear to be the primary threat. The severe thunderstorm watch area is approximately along and 60 statute miles east and west of a line from 85 miles northeast of Binghamton NY to 35 miles east southeast of Hagerstown MD. For a complete depiction of the watch see the associated watch outline update (WOUS64 KWNS WOU4). PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... REMEMBER...A Severe Thunderstorm Watch means conditions are favorable for severe thunderstorms in and close to the watch area. Persons in these areas should be on the lookout for threatening weather conditions and listen for later statements and possible warnings. Severe thunderstorms can and occasionally do produce tornadoes. && AVIATION...A few severe thunderstorms with hail surface and aloft to 1.5 inches. Extreme turbulence and surface wind gusts to 55 knots. A few cumulonimbi with maximum tops to 450. Mean storm motion vector 22030. ...Grams
Hazard Tornadoes EF2+ Tornadoes Likelihood Low Very Low Severe Wind 65 kt+ Wind Moderate Low Severe Hail 2"+ Hail Moderate Low
Note: Click for
WOUS64 KWNS 291823 WOU4 BULLETIN - IMMEDIATE BROADCAST REQUESTED SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WATCH OUTLINE UPDATE FOR WS 234 NWS STORM PREDICTION CENTER NORMAN OK 225 PM EDT FRI MAY 29 2020 SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WATCH 234 IS IN EFFECT UNTIL 900 PM EDT FOR THE FOLLOWING LOCATIONS MDC013-021-027-031-043-300100- /O.NEW.KWNS.SV.A.0234.200529T1825Z-200530T0100Z/ MD . MARYLAND COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE CARROLL FREDERICK HOWARD MONTGOMERY WASHINGTON NJC019-037-041-300100- /O.NEW.KWNS.SV.A.0234.200529T1825Z-200530T0100Z/ NJ . NEW JERSEY COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE HUNTERDON SUSSEX WARREN NYC001-007-017-021-025-027-035-039-041-043-053-057-065-071-077- 083-091-093-095-105-107-111-113-115-300100- /O.NEW.KWNS.SV.A.0234.200529T1825Z-200530T0100Z/ NY . NEW YORK COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE ALBANY BROOME CHENANGO COLUMBIA DELAWARE DUTCHESS FULTON GREENE HAMILTON HERKIMER MADISON MONTGOMERY ONEIDA ORANGE OTSEGO RENSSELAER SARATOGA SCHENECTADY SCHOHARIE SULLIVAN TIOGA ULSTER WARREN WASHINGTON PAC001-011-015-017-025-029-037-041-043-055-069-071-075-077-079- 081-089-091-093-095-097-099-103-107-109-113-115-119-127-131-133- 300100- /O.NEW.KWNS.SV.A.0234.200529T1825Z-200530T0100Z/ PA . PENNSYLVANIA COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE ADAMS BERKS BRADFORD BUCKS CARBON CHESTER COLUMBIA CUMBERLAND DAUPHIN FRANKLIN LACKAWANNA LANCASTER LEBANON LEHIGH LUZERNE LYCOMING MONROE MONTGOMERY MONTOUR NORTHAMPTON NORTHUMBERLAND PERRY PIKE SCHUYLKILL SNYDER SULLIVAN SUSQUEHANNA UNION WAYNE WYOMING YORK VAC043-107-300100- /O.NEW.KWNS.SV.A.0234.200529T1825Z-200530T0100Z/ VA . VIRGINIA COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE CLARKE LOUDOUN WVC003-037-300100- /O.NEW.KWNS.SV.A.0234.200529T1825Z-200530T0100Z/ WV . WEST VIRGINIA COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE BERKELEY JEFFERSON ATTN...WFO...LWX...CTP...BGM...PHI...ALY...OKX... Click for Watch Status Reports
Hazard Tornadoes EF2+ Tornadoes Likelihood Low Very Low Severe Wind 65 kt+ Wind Moderate Low Severe Hail 2"+ Hail Moderate Low
Note: The Aviation Watch (SAW) product is an approximation to the watch area. The actual watch is depicted by the shaded areas.
SAW4 WW 234 SEVERE TSTM MD NJ NY PA VA WV 291825Z - 300100Z AXIS..60 STATUTE MILES EAST AND WEST OF LINE.. 85NE BGM/BINGHAMTON NY/ - 35ESE HGR/HAGERSTOWN MD/ ..AVIATION COORDS.. 50NM E/W /47WNW ALB - 6W EMI/ HAIL SURFACE AND ALOFT..1.5 INCHES. WIND GUSTS..55 KNOTS. MAX TOPS TO 450. MEAN STORM MOTION VECTOR 22030. LAT...LON 43067360 39507599 39507824 43067598 THIS IS AN APPROXIMATION TO THE WATCH AREA. FOR A COMPLETE DEPICTION OF THE WATCH SEE WOUS64 KWNS FOR WOU4. Watch 234 Status Report Messages: STATUS REPORT #4 ON WW 234 VALID 292145Z - 292240Z SEVERE WEATHER THREAT CONTINUES RIGHT OF A LINE FROM 20 NNW BWI TO 35 E CXY TO 45 W ABE TO 40 SE IPT TO 30 N IPT. ..JEWELL..05/29/20 ATTN...WFO...LWX...PHI...ALY...BGM...OKX...CTP... && STATUS REPORT FOR WS 234 SEVERE WEATHER THREAT CONTINUES FOR THE FOLLOWING AREAS MDC015-025-292240- MD . MARYLAND COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE CECIL HARFORD $$ NJC019-037-041-292240- NJ . NEW JERSEY COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE HUNTERDON SUSSEX WARREN $$ NYC001-007-017-021-025-027-035-039-041-043-053-057-065-071-077- 083-091-093-095-105-107-111-113-115-292240- NY . NEW YORK COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE ALBANY BROOME CHENANGO COLUMBIA DELAWARE DUTCHESS FULTON GREENE HAMILTON HERKIMER MADISON MONTGOMERY ONEIDA ORANGE OTSEGO RENSSELAER SARATOGA SCHENECTADY SCHOHARIE SULLIVAN TIOGA ULSTER WARREN WASHINGTON $$ PAC011-015-017-025-029-037-069-071-077-079-089-091-095-103-107- 113-115-127-131-292240- PA . PENNSYLVANIA COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE BERKS BRADFORD BUCKS CARBON CHESTER COLUMBIA LACKAWANNA LANCASTER LEHIGH LUZERNE MONROE MONTGOMERY NORTHAMPTON PIKE SCHUYLKILL SULLIVAN SUSQUEHANNA WAYNE WYOMING $$ ANZ530-292240- CW . ADJACENT COASTAL WATERS INCLUDED ARE ANZ530 $$ THE WATCH STATUS MESSAGE IS FOR GUIDANCE PURPOSES ONLY. PLEASE REFER TO WATCH COUNTY NOTIFICATION STATEMENTS FOR OFFICIAL INFORMATION ON COUNTIES...INDEPENDENT CITIES AND MARINE ZONES CLEARED FROM SEVERE THUNDERSTORM AND TORNADO WATCHES. $$ STATUS REPORT #3 ON WW 234 VALID 292030Z - 292140Z THE SEVERE WEATHER THREAT CONTINUES ACROSS THE ENTIRE WATCH AREA. FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION SEE MESOSCALE DISCUSSION 760 ..MOORE..05/29/20 ATTN...WFO...LWX...PHI...ALY...BGM...OKX...CTP... && STATUS REPORT FOR WS 234 SEVERE WEATHER THREAT CONTINUES FOR THE FOLLOWING AREAS MDC003-005-013-015-025-027-031-510-292140- MD . MARYLAND COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE ANNE ARUNDEL BALTIMORE CARROLL CECIL HARFORD HOWARD MONTGOMERY MARYLAND INDEPENDENT CITIES INCLUDED ARE BALTIMORE CITY $$ NJC019-037-041-292140- NJ . NEW JERSEY COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE HUNTERDON SUSSEX WARREN $$ NYC001-007-017-021-025-027-035-039-041-043-053-057-065-071-077- 083-091-093-095-105-107-111-113-115-292140- NY . NEW YORK COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE ALBANY BROOME CHENANGO COLUMBIA DELAWARE DUTCHESS FULTON GREENE HAMILTON HERKIMER MADISON MONTGOMERY ONEIDA ORANGE OTSEGO RENSSELAER SARATOGA SCHENECTADY SCHOHARIE SULLIVAN TIOGA ULSTER WARREN WASHINGTON $$ PAC011-015-017-025-029-037-069-071-075-077-079-089-091-095-103- 107-113-115-127-131-133-292140- PA . PENNSYLVANIA COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE BERKS BRADFORD BUCKS CARBON CHESTER COLUMBIA LACKAWANNA LANCASTER LEBANON LEHIGH LUZERNE MONROE MONTGOMERY NORTHAMPTON PIKE SCHUYLKILL SULLIVAN SUSQUEHANNA WAYNE WYOMING YORK $$ VAC107-292140- VA . VIRGINIA COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE LOUDOUN $$ ANZ530-531-532-538-292140- CW . ADJACENT COASTAL WATERS INCLUDED ARE ANZ530 ANZ531 ANZ532 ANZ538 $$ THE WATCH STATUS MESSAGE IS FOR GUIDANCE PURPOSES ONLY. PLEASE REFER TO WATCH COUNTY NOTIFICATION STATEMENTS FOR OFFICIAL INFORMATION ON COUNTIES...INDEPENDENT CITIES AND MARINE ZONES CLEARED FROM SEVERE THUNDERSTORM AND TORNADO WATCHES. $$ STATUS REPORT #2 ON WW 234 VALID 292025Z - 292140Z SEVERE WEATHER THREAT CONTINUES RIGHT OF A LINE FROM 30 ESE HGR TO 15 NE CXY TO 40 SE IPT TO 20 N IPT. ..KERR..05/29/20 ATTN...WFO...LWX...PHI...ALY...BGM...OKX...CTP... && STATUS REPORT FOR WS 234 SEVERE WEATHER THREAT CONTINUES FOR THE FOLLOWING AREAS MDC003-005-013-015-025-027-031-510-292140- MD . MARYLAND COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE ANNE ARUNDEL BALTIMORE CARROLL CECIL HARFORD HOWARD MONTGOMERY MARYLAND INDEPENDENT CITIES INCLUDED ARE BALTIMORE CITY $$ NJC019-037-041-292140- NJ . NEW JERSEY COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE HUNTERDON SUSSEX WARREN $$ NYC001-007-017-021-025-027-035-039-041-043-053-057-065-071-077- 083-091-093-095-105-107-111-113-115-292140- NY . NEW YORK COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE ALBANY BROOME CHENANGO COLUMBIA DELAWARE DUTCHESS FULTON GREENE HAMILTON HERKIMER MADISON MONTGOMERY ONEIDA ORANGE OTSEGO RENSSELAER SARATOGA SCHENECTADY SCHOHARIE SULLIVAN TIOGA ULSTER WARREN WASHINGTON $$ PAC011-015-017-025-029-037-069-071-075-077-079-089-091-095-103- 107-113-115-127-131-133-292140- PA . PENNSYLVANIA COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE BERKS BRADFORD BUCKS CARBON CHESTER COLUMBIA LACKAWANNA LANCASTER LEBANON LEHIGH LUZERNE MONROE MONTGOMERY NORTHAMPTON PIKE SCHUYLKILL SULLIVAN SUSQUEHANNA WAYNE WYOMING YORK $$ VAC107-292140- VA . VIRGINIA COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE LOUDOUN $$ ANZ530-531-532-538-292140- CW . ADJACENT COASTAL WATERS INCLUDED ARE ANZ530 ANZ531 ANZ532 ANZ538 $$ THE WATCH STATUS MESSAGE IS FOR GUIDANCE PURPOSES ONLY. PLEASE REFER TO WATCH COUNTY NOTIFICATION STATEMENTS FOR OFFICIAL INFORMATION ON COUNTIES...INDEPENDENT CITIES AND MARINE ZONES CLEARED FROM SEVERE THUNDERSTORM AND TORNADO WATCHES. $$ STATUS REPORT #1 ON WW 234 VALID 291935Z - 292040Z THE SEVERE WEATHER THREAT CONTINUES ACROSS THE ENTIRE WATCH AREA. FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION SEE MESOSCALE DISCUSSION 760 ..MOORE..05/29/20 ATTN...WFO...LWX...PHI...ALY...BGM...OKX...CTP... && STATUS REPORT FOR WS 234 SEVERE WEATHER THREAT CONTINUES FOR THE FOLLOWING AREAS MDC003-005-013-015-021-025-027-031-043-510-292040- MD . MARYLAND COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE ANNE ARUNDEL BALTIMORE CARROLL CECIL FREDERICK HARFORD HOWARD MONTGOMERY WASHINGTON MARYLAND INDEPENDENT CITIES INCLUDED ARE BALTIMORE CITY $$ NJC019-037-041-292040- NJ . NEW JERSEY COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE HUNTERDON SUSSEX WARREN $$ NYC001-007-017-021-025-027-035-039-041-043-053-057-065-071-077- 083-091-093-095-105-107-111-113-115-292040- NY . NEW YORK COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE ALBANY BROOME CHENANGO COLUMBIA DELAWARE DUTCHESS FULTON GREENE HAMILTON HERKIMER MADISON MONTGOMERY ONEIDA ORANGE OTSEGO RENSSELAER SARATOGA SCHENECTADY SCHOHARIE SULLIVAN TIOGA ULSTER WARREN WASHINGTON $$ PAC001-011-015-017-025-029-037-041-043-055-069-071-075-077-079- 081-089-091-093-095-097-099-103-107-109-113-115-119-127-131-133- 292040- PA . PENNSYLVANIA COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE ADAMS BERKS BRADFORD BUCKS CARBON CHESTER COLUMBIA CUMBERLAND DAUPHIN FRANKLIN LACKAWANNA LANCASTER LEBANON LEHIGH LUZERNE LYCOMING MONROE MONTGOMERY MONTOUR NORTHAMPTON NORTHUMBERLAND PERRY PIKE SCHUYLKILL SNYDER SULLIVAN SUSQUEHANNA UNION WAYNE WYOMING YORK $$ VAC043-107-292040- VA . VIRGINIA COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE CLARKE LOUDOUN $$ WVC003-037-292040- WV . WEST VIRGINIA COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE BERKELEY JEFFERSON $$ ANZ530-531-532-538-292040- CW . ADJACENT COASTAL WATERS INCLUDED ARE ANZ530 ANZ531 ANZ532 ANZ538 $$ THE WATCH STATUS MESSAGE IS FOR GUIDANCE PURPOSES ONLY. PLEASE REFER TO WATCH COUNTY NOTIFICATION STATEMENTS FOR OFFICIAL INFORMATION ON COUNTIES...INDEPENDENT CITIES AND MARINE ZONES CLEARED FROM SEVERE THUNDERSTORM AND TORNADO WATCHES. $$ | {
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Hong Kong singer Anthony Wong – whose songs had been partly censored in mainland China – has written a new song to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
Wong performed the song, titled “Memory is a Crime,” at an annual dinner hosted by the Hong Kong Journalists Association last week.
Singer Anthony Wong Yiu-ming. Photo: inmediahk.net.
“Society really needs journalists to report the truth and preserve our memory, because many people want to erase our memory,” he said. “Perhaps, in the future, it will be a crime to remember.”
See also: The Last Gunshot: The musical legacy of the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre
At an earlier forum, Wong said that the 1989 crackdown was not just a part of China’s history, but was also connected to Hong Kong. He urged the public to resist the urge to forget, because Hongkongers were used to giving up their voice and memory too easily.
“In Hong Kong, we can still perform songs to commemorate June 4, still say how bad the times are. That is what makes our work different from that of the mainland and Taiwan,” Wong said.
The Tiananmen massacre occurred on June 4, 1989 ending months of student-led demonstrations in China. It is estimated that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people died when the People’s Liberation Army was deployed to crack down on protesters in Beijing.
Lyrics of the new song include: “If the candlelight is a crime, then we will spend decades in the dark,” “Even if memory is a crime, the truth will come out.”
The song also depicted the human cost of democracy activism in China, posing the question of whether the “world-weary youth” regretted the choices they made.
In April, netizens discovered that almost all of the songs by Wong’s band, Tat Ming Pair, had been removed from Apple Music’s China service.
Photo: Catherine Lai/HKFP.
Tat Ming Pair was an avant-garde Cantopop duo formed in 1986, and was known for songs that did not shy away from the politics of the day. Two of their songs released in 1990 were direct responses to the Tiananmen Square crackdown, and their past lyrics have included references to ex-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and dissident Wuer Kaixi.
The band was still able to perform in the mainland as recently as 2013, but in 2017, it had difficulties in finding sponsors for their Hong Kong concert.
The Hong Kong Free Press #PressForFreedom 2019 Funding Drive seeks to raise HK$1.2m to support our non-profit newsroom and dedicated team of multi-media, multi-lingual reporters. HKFP is backed by readers, run by journalists and is immune to political and commercial pressure. This year’s critical fundraiser will provide us with the essential funds to continue our work into next year. | {
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Firefighters were left shaking their heads Thursday morning after a Lexus driver burst a fire hose they were using to battle a stubborn blaze in East Vancouver.
Crews spent all night trying to douse a fire that broke out late Wednesday at Metropolitan Fine Printers, and on Thursday morning they were hit with an unexpected setback.
A man drove under caution tape and proceeded to run over a supply hose worth about $1,000, causing a slit that sent a geyser of water shooting into the air.
"We cannot over emphasize that this is not only illegal, but highly, highly dangerous," fire department spokesman Jonathan Gormick said.
"A tear in our supply line can mean an immediate interruption to our water supply, and if firefighters are in a building to extinguish a fire it can cause them to (lose) their only tool to save themselves."
Fortunately, no one was injured, and firefighters believe the hose, which is about 12 centimetres in diameter, might be salvageable.
The Lexus driver initially continued down the street, in what Gormick described as an apparent attempt to flee, but firefighters chased him down and stopped him.
Gormick said he doubts the driver could have been oblivious to what had happened.
"The hose is extremely rigid because it has upwards of 100 lbs. of pressure in it," he said. "And it's bright yellow."
The man later walked out of his car and pushed a CTV News cameraperson who was recording the aftermath. He then took a child who was in the car with him and walked away from the scene.
The incident is just the latest example of drivers disrupting firefighting efforts in Metro Vancouver this year, with varying outcomes.
In January, a suspected drunk driver ran over a fire hose and dragged it partway down Hastings Street, knocking over a firefighter who was left with extensive lower body injuries.
That first responder remains off the job months later.
Other incidents have been less serious. In February, a driver was caught on camera driving over a hose outside a raging fire in Burnaby, though the hose never burst and no one was injured.
But regardless of the outcome, driving over a fire hose is illegal, and anyone caught doing it faces an $81 fine.
The fire that broke out at Metropolitan Fine Printers Wednesday night was already a challenge because of all the chemicals stored inside, according to Asst. Fire Chief Kevin Wilson.
"The print shop houses all kinds of chemicals, papers, acetone thinners," Wilson told CTV News. "We've had multiple explosions and flames shooting up 150 feet in the air."
The blaze also blanked the area with what firefighters described as "quite an acrid smoke."
Fortunately, no one was inside when the fire broke out, and no injuries have been reported.
But it was still devastating to the business, which has been around for 35 years and employs about 50 people.
Staff members told CTV News when the fire started, they were printing a run of menus on synthetic stock.
The cause hasn't been determined, but it's not believed to be suspicious.
With files from CTV Vancouver's Nafeesa Karim and Allison Hurst | {
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Pune: A 40-year-old man, who was returning home after immersing his wife's ashes, was among four people killed when a hoarding in railway station premises fell on vehicles on the adjoining road on Friday, police said.
The 40-feet hoarding collapsed on vehicles that had stopped at Shahir Amar Shaikh Chowk traffic light near Pune Railway Station, they said, adding five people were injured in the incident.
The hoarding was being dismantled at around 2pm by a contractor hired by the railways when it came crashing down, deputy commissioner of police B Singh said. The deceased were identified as Shamrao Kasar, 70; Shamrao Dhotre, 48; Shivaji Pardeshi, 40; and Javed Khan, 40.
It was another blow of cruel fate for the family of Pardeshi as his wife had passed away on Thursday. According to a family friend, Pardeshi, along with his son, daughter and mother, was returning home in the auto rickshaw after immersing his wife's ashes in the river when the accident occurred. Pardeshi was killed while the other three received minor injuries.
There seemed to be some negligence on the part of the contractor, the DCP said, adding a case of culpable homicide not amounting to murder was registered against the contractor and his workers under the Indian Penal Code.
Fire brigade officials said five auto-rickshaws, a two-wheeler and a car were damaged in the accident. The injured were rushed to a nearby government-run hospital.
"Since it was afternoon, there was not much traffic. Had there been more traffic, there would have been many more casualties," a local resident said.
A Central Railway official said it has initiated an inquiry. "We have constituted a high-level committee to probe the incident," Pune Divisional Railway Manager Milind Deouskar said.
The railways had given a contract to an outdoor advertisement agency to put up hoardings on the railway premises a few years ago, but as the agency did not follow safety norms, it was asked to remove the structures, he said. "As the agency did not dismantle the structures, we hired a contractor to dismantle them," Deouskar said.
Some mistake took place while removing the hoarding and instead of falling on the railway premises it crashed on the roadside, he said. The railways will provide compensation to the families of the deceased and medical help to the injured, he said. | {
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Organic Isn’t Vegan
[ EDIT (8/28/2017): My views on Organic have adjusted a bit recently to be more charitable towards the practice. Certainly the appeal to nature includes animals and precludes “unnatural” technological solutions. That contrived dichotomy can have harmful implications as I write about below but I don’t mean this to be anti-Organic necessarily. A post on that is in my queue. ]
You can hardly swing a bunch of kale without hitting a vegan product that is certified organic these days. Why is this, I wonder? I mean, we should all know by now that organic farming is just like regular agriculture except it uses what is “natural” as its measure. What is naturally derived, without humans (who themselves are a product of nature, BTW), isn’t a guarantee of safeness or goodness. Organic agriculture uses pesticides, isn’t healthier, and not necessarily better for the environment than modern agriculture. But what does this have to do with veganism?
Vegans are typically astute ethical consumers who carefully weigh the consequences of their purchases. They are careful to reduce the chances of participating in any form of animal exploitation mostly by avoiding certain products. There are products made from animal bodies themselves, like flesh. Products that are made by animal bodies, like milk. And animal-derived products that, while not ingredients of a final product, are used in processing (for example, bone char filtration in the sugar-making process). As I’ve written in the past, this can go on to an absurd degree, but I’d concede that, in general, vegans focus is on the most obvious animals products. And, by paying such close attention to these details, many vegans feel that they are ‘voting with their dollars.’
And then there are organic products with their health halo, which might lend a glow to vegans’ ethical calculations in their consumer decisions. Many vegans seem unaware how this label tramples upon their cause. Let’s look at some of the issues:
Cost
Vegans love to advocate their cause because it means fewer animals are being slaughtered with each new adherent. Lowering the barriers to entry is something many vegans would support. But, since organic food limits itself to a relative standard of natural purity, there are added costs in producing organic food. Modern biotech agricultural solutions can help reduce expensive inputs and labor for farmers, thereby reducing cost to consumers. Inexpensive, tasty vegan food options are a win for the cause. If there were a vegan product that tasted just as good and cheaper than the animal version, what consumer wouldn’t opt for the vegan version? Because organic foods are more expensive, this makes veganism that much less possible and practical for no good reason at all.
Animal Care
While vegans avoid animal products altogether, they also care about welfare issues and wish to reduce animals’ suffering. For organic farms though, antibiotics that provide relief for sick animals & vaccines made with genetic engineering to protect them from disease are not allowed. Instead, health practices for animals in their care rely in part (or mandatorily first) upon quack homeopathic remedies. It’s one thing to make a personal choice to employ such remedies upon yourself, but to impose that upon another creature without regard to proven scientific efficacy is a despicable practice no vegan should stand behind. Withholding modern medical treatments from animals within organic’s care is worse than the unnatural bogeyman. It’s cruel and unjust, it’s not vegan.
Nitrogen
Plants require nitrogen. Specifically, plants that are farmed for people to eat require nitrogen-containing fertilizer. Even though our atmosphere contains a whole lotta nitrogen, plants can’t use it unless it’s “fixed” into a form that is available to them biologically. Agriculture struggled with finding abundant sources of nitrogen until we figured out a way to harvest that from the atmosphere. But this synthetic fertilizer is not natural enough for organic, so it is forbidden. Much organic-allowed fertilizer is in the form of animal parts such as fish, blood and bone meal, and cow manure. The manure is interesting because the only reason it has nitrogen in the first place is because it’s in the non-organic feed. Somehow nitrogen becomes more natural once it’s passed through the bodies of animals so they’re cheating on their own standards. Is your head spinning yet?
If animal-derived products used in processing like bone char with sugar or isinglass with beer is a vegan issue then maybe Veganic is the only option. But that I think is the wrong direction and misses the point of veganism. Shouldn’t we be encouraging the use of non-animal-derived inputs while maximizing the outputs? To do that we should implement every tool at our disposal but that’s not the way organic rolls. Manure-based fertilizer is animal-derived, not vegan.
GMO
Genetically modifying organisms has already proved useful in medicine by replacing animal-derived insulin for diabetics with a synthetic one made with genetically modified bacteria. Vaccines made through GM plants or insect cells instead of chicken eggs is another example of how this technology can help reduce reliance on animal products.
In matters of agriculture though, this technology can provide unique sources for nutrients that vegans may lack. An example like omega-3 biofortified grain can both make it easier to get that nutrient from food without supplementation and also offset sourcing from fish. Many farmers use broad-spectrum insecticides, which kill indiscriminately, regardless of whether or not a bug is harmful to the crops. Plants that are genetically modified to produce their own narrow-spectrum pesticide, like Bt corn, kill fewer insects by targeting only those that pose a threat. Or what about avoiding killing insects altogether by creating a plant that can emit an odorless pheromone that scares away pests? We’re just scratching the surface as to what this technology can bring, and vegans would do well to embrace genetic modification. Genetically modifying crops to produce nutrients that are commonly derived from animals, or to reduce our reliance on pesticides, will reduce needless animal deaths.
Genetic modification is a safe, precise form of plant breeding, yet is deemed unacceptable by organic standards. Scrambling plants’ DNA to force random mutations with radiation or chemicals is just fine by them though. Are you noticing a pattern here? Supporting organic is a missed opportunity to leverage technology to grow the vegan movement.
Nutrition Supplements
While the research on DHA is still coming in RDs are recommending DHA supplementation for vegans to err on the safe side. Usually this nutrient is acquired from the flesh of fish but science has figured out a way to bypass the middle-fish and go straight to the sources: algae. It’s too bad that this isn’t natural enough for Organic. They recommend getting it from fish instead. Fishes are animals last time I checked. Not vegan.
Environment
The inefficiencies of eschewing modern technology means organic farming falls more and more behind modern agriculture in terms of yields. Getting less product from the land requires taking more land away from local wildlife to match the yields of modern farming. Doing more with less is a driving factor for agriculture and who doesn’t want that? Using genetic modification we could, for example, engineer plants to even be more efficient with nitrogen. Fungicides, composting, tillage are other practices that aren’t quite environmentally ideal. Striving to leave a small footprint as well as affect fauna as little as possible should be a concern for all vegans.
Veganism Trumps Organicism
Vegans may mean well when they buy organic products, but this dubious designation should be better scrutinized to discover how it undermines and cashes in on the vegan cause. What’s needed are rational decisions and sound scientific policy, not mythical “natural” appeals of faith-based agriculture such as Organic. By its very definition, Organic is a set of limitations. There is nothing organic can do that modern agriculture can’t yet there is a whole lot organic limits itself from. The “conventional” vs organic divide is a false dichotomy and causes unnecessary confusion, harm, and stunts progress for the movement. If veganism is a credible and noble way to live why is there this organic label slapped on most of the vegan products? Why are vegans being unfairly burdened with this tax? How is that helping the animals for which the cause is supposedly focused upon? Vegans are being suckered and their pockets being picked by BigOrganic Agribusiness. Ditch those archaic organic products already and support safe, innovative, and accessible food products for all.
The point I’m trying to make here though isn’t so much that organic itself is any less or more vegan really, but that the dogma must stop. Ditch the baloney! It’s time vegans use their heads along with their hearts and make smart, reasoned choices for the considerations of their earthling cousins. If exploiting animals is natural enough for organic standards then maybe vegans should reconsider their bedfellows.
Further Reading:
Henry I. Miller exposes the disappointing truth about organic agriculture. | Project Syndicate
Organic Pesticides | The Farmer’s Daughter USA
Some Common Organic Fertilizers EARTH-KIND Gardening | Aggie Horticulture | {
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This post has been corrected.
(Lauren Tara LaCapra) - Goldman Sachs Group Inc has just a few more months to put its stamp on the Volcker rule, and it is not wasting any time.
The rule, designed to limit banks from speculating with their own money, will cost Goldman at least $3.7 billion in annual revenue, by one estimate. And billions more could be at stake if regulations now being drawn up are extra-tough.
The Volcker rule was one of the main topics on the agenda when Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein met recently with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro.
Wall Street chiefs do not often lobby top regulators directly, but this issue is unusually important to Goldman.
"They're totally freaked out about Volcker," said a Goldman lobbyist who declined to speak on the record for fear of losing the contract. "People are working on that a lot, with agency staff, with lawmakers, you name it."
Indeed, lobbying disclosures show Goldman representatives have been working both sides of the political aisle and meeting with top officials in the White House and regulatory agencies.
One big area of concern for Goldman is that regulators who are interpreting the Volcker rule will severely limit the amount of time a bank can hold a security or derivative. Positions held long term can be backstairs bets on markets.
The Volcker rule is not the only element of financial reform that Goldman is resisting. Important issues on its lobbying docket also include derivatives reform, capital requirements and bonus restrictions.
Other bank heads, including Morgan Stanley's James Gorman, have met Schapiro about the Volcker rule. But the provision is most important for Goldman, whose business is far more weighted toward trading, three lobbying sources said.
ALL STAR TEAM
Goldman has hired an all-star team of lobbyists and former government officials, leveraging powerful connections to get its message across to regulatory and political leaders.
"Before the crisis, Goldman was basically non-existent in Washington," said a former Congressional staffer who now works as a policy analyst at a Wall Street bank. "Post-crisis, Goldman is everywhere."
Under last year's Dodd-Frank law, regulators have until July to come up with specific rules for implementing the Volcker provision, meaning banks have limited time to try to shape the regulations.
Adding to the complexity of lobbying efforts is the number of parties involved.
The SEC and four other regulators are in the process of writing separate versions of the Volcker rule, which must then be reconciled and shaped into a single set of regulations.
"Volcker is the subject of a very quiet, closed-door battle right now, not just between us and Wall Street, but among the agencies as well," said Bart Naylor, who has lobbied regulators for consumer-rights coalition Americans for Financial Reform.
Goldman Sachs spokesman Stephen Cohen declined to comment.
The impending changes have already spurred Goldman to dismantle much of its "proprietary trading" operations, which trade for the bank's own account.
These operations were some of the bank's most profitable, and their closure will erase about $3.7 billion in revenue and $1.5 billion in profit annually, according to an estimate by JPMorgan Cazenove analyst Kian Abouhossein.
By Abouhossein's reckoning, the bank gets another $17 billion of revenue from "market making," or linking up buyers and sellers across global markets. That revenue could also be squeezed, depending how stringent the regulations are.
Those figures represent about 65 percent of Goldman's annual revenue, according to Abouhossein's estimates.
Lawmakers say the Volcker rule will ensure that big banks are not gambling in markets, and that taxpayers will not be left on the hook when their bets backfire.
Implementing the Volcker rule will be tricky, though. When a bank buys a security from a client, it is difficult for a regulator to determine whether the bank is serving the client or betting on the market itself.
Limiting holding periods could be a simple way to ensure that banks are not making secret bets under the guise of helping clients.
GOING LONG
Goldman argues that holding on to securities for a long period of time can be a crucial part of trading on behalf of customers because assets trade infrequently in some markets.
A substantial amount of the securities that Goldman trades seems to fall into the longer-term category. In a February presentation, Goldman said it held about a third of the securities and listed derivatives on its trading books for three months or more, and 8 percent for more than a year.
The bank did not disclose how long it holds unlisted derivatives positions, where it also has significant exposure.
Goldman is also advocating that regulators exclude currency contracts from the Volcker rule, in addition to Treasury bills and interest-rate swaps, which were excluded in the law.
"They definitely don't want their entire book to be micro-managed by the SEC," said a regulatory consultant who once worked at Goldman and is familiar with its lobbying efforts. "They want as much -- I wouldn't say self-policing -- but as much flexibility as possible."
In the years following the crisis, Washington has been reshaping the financial industry in an effort to prevent another collapse. Goldman has in turn been trying to shape the legislative and regulatory process.
The intensity of its efforts is evident in at least one concrete way: the amount of money it is spending on lobbying.
That figure totaled $1.32 million in the first quarter of 2011. That's 15 percent higher than the same period a year ago, putting the bank on course to break its annual record for lobbying expenditure of $4.61 million, set in 2010.
"They're a big and powerful company with a lot riding on financial reform," said Dave Levinthal, editor of OpenSecrets.org, which tracks lobbying and campaign spending.
"When monumental legislation like Wall Street reform gets passed, it's not only about the legislation when it's coursing through Congress, but how it's being implemented."
For Wall Street, where a bank can earn billions of dollars a year, a $5 million lobbying budget may seem paltry.
But in Washington it's a lot of money. And relative to revenue, Goldman's spending is exponentially higher than that of its competitors.
The bank has hired an all-star stable of Washington lobbying heavyweights.
Michael Paese, former deputy staff director for the U.S. House Financial Services Committee, heads its internal lobbying group. His team includes former staffers from the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, the White House and regulatory agencies.
Outside of its own payroll, Goldman also has several high-profile legislative veterans working on its behalf in Washington, hailing from both sides of the political aisle. Among them are former Republican lawmaker Trent Lott, former Democratic Senator John Breaux and former Democratic House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt.
It is common for large companies to seek influence in government, but old hands in Washington say Goldman stands out both in its wide network of high-level contacts and its ability to leverage those relationships to its advantage.
"The individuals at Goldman have been incredibly powerful over time," says Hillary Sale, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in Wall Street regulation. "When you're a consumer, it gives you the creeps thinking about that kind of influence over regulation. But from the bank's side, it's a perfectly smart strategy."
(Editing by Dan Wilchins and Ted Kerr)
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the party affiliation of former Louisiana Senator John Breaux.
Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions. | {
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Nissan Motor Acceptance Corp, the financial services division of Nissan Motor Comapny, offers an extension of payments for up to 90 days for those in need. This includes the unemployed, sick, and those who face temporary financial hardship that may cause them to get behind on their car payments. Nissan wants federal employees and contracts who are indefinitely furloughed during the government shutdown that this includes them as well.
"NMAC is sympathetic to any of our customers who find themselves in difficult financial circumstances-many times outside of their control-and we want to provide assistance to help them through those times of uncertainty," said Mark Kaczynski, president, NMAC. "Our customers' needs are the No. 1 priority at Nissan, which is why we have this program available on an ongoing basis."
Lease and retail customers can delay payment up to three months (90 days) without any extension fees if they quality. There are, of course, conditions and laws that will apply in various jurisdictions, but those who need it can apply through their NMAC financing agent.
Nissan, of course, heavily markets to the public service sector, especially the military and their families, with special programs and incentives to encourage them to buy Nissan and Infiniti products. Many government employees are facing uncertain finances this month as the federal government's shutdown due to budget bickering at the Capital has meant being sent home from work until operations return to normal. It's estimated that about 800,000 federal employees are currently furloughed and another 400,000 or more contractors to the government may also be on leave. Government services from websites to First Lady Michelle Obama's Twitter account have been put on hold or reduced status for the duration.
Several automakers, including Nissan, Hyundai and others, have reached out to furloughed government employees to let them know about deferment or extension plans for their automotive purchases. Meanwhile, mudslinging in Washington continues unabated as role reversals from the last shutdown commence. | {
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A military officer came in one day with his hands behind his back and said 'Mr Begg, there are no charges against you and the military has decided to release you. You will be going home in a few days.' That was it. I didn't believe it at first, but it was true. | {
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Top Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat panned a new Israeli Basic Law on Thursday that enshrines Israel as the national home of the Jewish people, contending that it “legalizes apartheid.”
Early Thursday morning, the Knesset passed the law, which has been dubbed “the nation-state Law,” with 62 lawmakers voting in favor, 55 opposed and two abstaining, after hours of heated debate in the Knesset chamber.
“The ‘Jewish Nation-State’ [law] officially legalizes apartheid and legally defines Israel as an apartheid system,” Erekat tweeted from the PLO Negotiation Affairs Department account. “[It is] a dangerous and racist law par excellence. It denies the Arab citizens their right to self-determination to instead be determined by the Jewish population.”
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Similar to a constitution, the Basic Laws underpin Israel’s legal system and are more difficult to repeal than regular laws.
The nation-state law declares that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, sets the Hebrew calendar as the official calendar of the state, and recognizes Independence Day, days of remembrance and Jewish holidays. One clause of the law downgrades the Arabic language from official to “special” standing, but also cryptically stipulates that “this clause does not harm the status given to the Arabic language before this law came into effect.”
Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for the Hamas terror group, also blasted the law, contending that it officially legalizes “Israeli racism” and constitutes “a dangerous attack on the Palestinian [people] and its historic right to its land.”
Barhoum also asserted that the Knesset would not have passed the law, as well as others that he identified as “extremist,” without what he called “regional and international silence on the occupation’s crimes.”
“These extremist laws and resolutions would not have been approved if it were not for the regional and international silence on the occupation’s crimes and violations,” he said, without specifying which laws. “All these laws and resolutions are baseless and they will not come to pass or change anything on the ground. The Palestinian people will remain the sovereign of this land.”
Israeli government members praised the passage of the law on Thursday morning, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling it “a pivotal moment in the annals of Zionism and the State of Israel.” Many in the opposition criticized the legislation.
PLO Executive Committee member Hanan Ashrawi condemned the law, asserting it violates international law.
“The ‘Jewish nation-state’ law gives license to apartheid, discrimination, ethnic cleansing, and sectarianism at the expense of the Palestinian people. Such racist and prejudicial legislation is illegal by all standards of international law, democracy, humanity, justice, tolerance, and inclusion,” she said. | {
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Aniko R.
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Laura L.
Christine Lampos is a wonderfully patient instructor who makes learning to play the piano a fun, creative, interesting, and enjoyable experience! I very much do recommend her! Thank you!
Matt R.
I have been taking lessons with Ms.Lampos for many years. I really enjoy the lessons because she makes them very fun and very challenging. If you are just starting out or even if you are already advanced, she is the best teacher out there.
Dr. Toni S.
After not playing for the past 40 years, Christine has helped me rediscover the joys of playing that I knew as a child. She has helped me to remember to practice and to also have fun!
Penny K.
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Christine came to tune my Steinway grand piano. It had been moved from New York to Naples, Florida, and was really due for a tuning. After Chris tuned it, the sound of the piano was fantastic! I so enjoy playing it again. Thank you Chris!!
| {
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Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei praised Iranian female athletes for wearing hijabs while participating in sporting events.
Fars News reported:
Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei lauded Iran’s female athletes for respecting the Islamic code of dressing (Hijab) in sports arenas.
“The presence of sports women and girls who respect Hijab in international arenas is an extraordinary, highly important and valuable action,” Ayatollah Khamenei said in a meeting with Iranian athletes in Tehran on Monday.
The leader further lamented the growing number of threats posed to Muslim women in Europe, and said “Under such conditions, when a Muslim Iranian woman who is wearing Hijab becomes a champion and makes everyone to bow to her, a great thing has been done,” he added.
TRENDING: FOX News Panel Melts Down After Newt Gingrich Correctly Calls Out Lawless Soros-Funded District Attorneys (VIDEO)
“All people should appreciate the sportswomen who show up in international sports arenas with Hijab, grace and poise,” Ayatollah Khamenei underlined. | {
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Check out our new site Makeup Addiction
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Post link to poop filled condoms In the most innocent subreddits | {
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Everton Under 21 boss David Unsworth says that Belgian youngster David Henen is making good progress in becoming an Everton player.
The 18 year old was signed in a strange deal on deadline day last August which involved him signing for Olympiakos and then being immediately loaned to Everton, and Unsworth says he is learning all the attributes needed to become a first team player at Goodison Park.
“He’s young boy, he’s 18, in a different country, he’s learning the language, he’s learning his trade and he’s learning the Everton way,” said Unsworth.
“He is also learning that work ethic and you could see him last night, he has covered some distance. His willingness to run in behind and work for the team is fantastic so I am delighted for David.
“He’s got tons of ability and you can see the talent he’s got but there is more you need in the Premier League.
“You need that work ethic and that desire and he is certainly showing that. He has got better and better as the season has progressed and he’s got stronger. He has worked really hard in the gym and he’s a joy to work with, as all the players are.” | {
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Macher AM, Penders TM. “False-positive phencyclidine immunoassay results caused by 3,4-methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV)”. Drug Test Anal. 2012 May 21. Macher AM, Penders TM. "False-positive phencyclidine immunoassay results caused by 3,4-methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV)" Drug Test Anal. 2012 May 21. Text Abstract (this page) Full Text - English (195 K) (private) Show Articles by Macher AM Penders TM Article IDs Erowid RefID: 8607 PubMedID: 22611039 Collections Hofmann Collection MDMA Collection All References
Abstract We report false-positive phencyclidine (PCP) immunoassay results caused by 3,4-methylenedioxypyrovalerone, a psychoactive synthetic cathinone derivative that is deceptively marketed as "Bath Salts".
[...] In April 2011, a male abusing psychoactive Bath Salts presented to a western Maryland emergency department with psychotomimetic and sympathomimetic toxicity. Within hours, his clinical course rapidly deteriorated as severe hyperthermia ensued and he did not survive. Of note, the hospital's chemistry laboratory reported that screening immunoassay testing of ante mortem urine was reactive for PCP [...] The medical examiner reported that gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis of post-mortem blood did not detect PCP; instead, MDPV was detected at a concentration of 1.0 mg/L in peripheral blood.
[...] To determine if the presence of MDPV can produce a false-positive PCP immunoassay result by the Synchron system, the author requested that an MDPV 'spiking' experiment be conducted at ThermoFisher's California laboratory using the PCP reagent manufactured for Beckman Coulter by ThermoFisher on the Beckman Coulter DxC analyzer.
[...] Further investigation revealed that abusers of psychoactive Bath Salts in multiple states were presenting with reactive PCP screening immunoassay results.
[...] A number of states' Department of Corrections Probation and Parole Divisions informed one of the authors (AMM) that they had also noted a recent unexplained surge in PCP-positive screening immunoassay test results.
[...] As abuse of MDPV continues and additional designer compounds enter the psychoactive drug abuse arena, we recommend that all positive PCP screening immunoassay results be confirmed using additional analytical metho dologies (e.g. GC-MS; LC-MS/MS). Submit Comment | {
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[SVTFOE] The one that Got away ~ via Mouse
Wanted to draw her smiling for a change ^__^ made this for the soon release of season 3 :3 feeling hype for it ~!!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Was watching sakimichan's live stream was really inspired
trying to improve even if it's just bit by bit
Character: Star Butterfly
Show: Star vs the Forces of Evil
Software: Paint Tool Sai
Size: 5000 x 4091 (Original Size)
Tools: Mouse
Help me support my art by: | {
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When NASA’s next big rocket launches for the first time, chances are good it won’t have people on board.
For the last two months, the space agency has been studying what it would take to fly a crew of two on the maiden flight of the Space Launch System, or SLS — the monster rocket that NASA has been developing to take people into deep space and on to Mars. Specifically, NASA wanted to know if such a crewed flight could be done safely by 2019. But after figuring out the costs and challenges associated with putting astronauts on that inaugural mission, called EM-1, NASA says doing a crewed flight first wouldn’t be the best way to go.
“it is difficult to accommodate changes needed for a crewed EM-1 mission at this time.”
“After evaluating cost, risk, and technical factors in a project of this magnitude, it is difficult to accommodate changes needed for a crewed EM-1 mission at this time,” NASA’s acting administrator, Robert Lightfoot, sent in an email to agency employees that was obtained by The Verge.
So for now, it seems that NASA will stick with its original strategy for debuting the SLS: doing an uncrewed flight first, followed by a crewed mission. However, the vehicle’s targeted launch dates are probably going to slip a bit. Originally, NASA had planned to launch the first SLS mission in November 2018, sending an uncrewed spacecraft called Orion on a three-week trip around the Moon. That mission plan still stands, but technical challenges and limited budgets are forcing NASA to push back the launch date to 2019. An exact date will be decided upon in the coming months. A follow-up flight with crew inside Orion is tentatively scheduled for no earlier than 2021, but will probably be pushed back as well.
NASA only started thinking about changing the mission plan earlier this year, after Lightfoot sent out a memo to employees saying NASA would study the feasibility of putting people on the first fight of the SLS. NASA later admitted that appointees for the Trump administration had directed the agency to look into that possibility, according to Space News.
Lightfoot said in press conference today that putting a crew on the first flight of the SLS was technically feasible. However, a lot of technologies would have to be accelerated, such as a life support system to keep the crew alive and abort system that could save the crew in case of an emergency during flight. Plus it would have cost a lot more money, approximately between $600 million and $900 million extra, and NASA would have needed additional time to pull it off. Lightfoot said that a 2020 flight was more likely if people needed to be on board. So NASA conferred with the White House and agreed that the best route would be stick with its original plan all along.
Putting crew on the first flight of a new vehicle isn’t usually how NASA does things
Putting crew on the first flight of a new vehicle isn’t usually how NASA does things, though. Typically, the agency does an uncrewed test flight first to determine if a vehicle is safe. The Saturn V rocket, for instance, did a mission without passengers before crew rode on board, and the future space taxis that SpaceX and Boeing are developing to take NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station will fly empty first to make sure they are safe for crew. However, one notable exception to this rule was the first flight of the Space Shuttle, which carried a crew of two into orbit around Earth. It was a bold move at the time, but NASA needed a pilot in the Shuttle to control the vehicle’s landing.
It’s been bad news for the SLS program in recent weeks. NASA admitted that part of a propellant tank needed for testing out the rocket was damaged at the agency’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. And one of NASA’s associate administrators, Bill Gerstenmaier, acknowledged to the Government Accountability Office two weeks ago that the first flight of SLS would likely slip to 2019. | {
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“I mean, if I see somebody coming into my house, and I’m not expecting them, and they’re walking in like they own the place, I mean—I would, I would act to defend myself. And this could have (gone) very differently had he actually had a firearm on him,” she said. | {
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Avid Bernie Sanders supporter Susan Sarandon made headlines in 2016 when she suggested to Chris Hayes that Donald Trump could bring on the revolution progressives desire — and she says that’s “absolutely” happening now but wants to reaffirm she is in no way defending “really dangerous” Trump.
“I’m certainly not in any way defending Trump, let me go on the record to say that, because people seem to want to say that I am,” Sarandon said in an interview with Vulture.
“I think he’s a horrible person, and he’s really dangerous,” she added. “But the good news about Trump is that he has exposed all the cracks that are in our system, and now the light can get in.”
See Video: Susan Sarandon to Chris Hayes: 'You Consider Yourself a Journalist, Right?'
“When you look at what happened with the deportation of people in this country, when you look at our policies in a lot of other areas, when you look at who has been in our government, money has been running our country for a long time, and this is not something new,” she said.
“Now we have a guy who is so clumsy and so obvious that suddenly people are awake, and that’s a very good thing. Do you want to call it the revolution? Certainly, there are many more people, because of Bernie Sanders, that are running for these local offices.”
She added that for the past eight years, the U.S. had a “cool guy president” and that Trump is bringing transparency to the table “because he’s so obvious.”
Also Read: 'House of Cards' Creator Calls for Twitter to Ban President Trump
She suggested that progressives have to “do what the Tea Party did” and start building coalitions and placing candidates at the local level.
“The Democrats didn’t pay attention to the bottom; they didn’t pay attention to the country, and now the country is taking over,” she said. “There’s no progressive party anymore that represents the working people.”
She also noted the recent activity at the grassroots level. “When you see these town-hall meetings where people are going and holding their representatives responsible and demanding answers — that, to me, is a revolution; you’ve never seen that before. That’s a really, really healthy sign. And I have faith in this country. Traveling all around with Bernie made me love this country more and more. There are patriots everywhere who are kind and generous and accepting and inclusive. The heart of America is not what you hear from his mouth at all.”
Last March, Sarandon and Debra Messing feuded publicly on Twitter about the election. They went at it on Twitter after Sarandon, when asked how she’ll vote if Bernie Sanders doesn’t win the Democratic nomination over Hillary Clinton, said she is “going to see what happens.”
Also Read: Susan Sarandon Says 'DNC Is Completely Corrupt' (Video)
Jamie Lee Curtis ignited the feud, tweeting, “I respect but disagree with @SusanSarandon. A possible support of Trump over @HillaryClinton is dangerous 2 women, minorities and immigrants.”
Sarandon was quick to explain her comments, made on MSNBC, which many took as support for Donald Trump over Clinton.
“Of course I would never support Trump for any reason,” Sarandon responded. “If you watch the interview you’ll see that’s not what I said.”
Shortly after Sarandon’s response, Debra Messing entered the fray with not just one tweet, but a full-on assault via Twitter, calling the elder actress’ ideas “insane.”
About the feud, Sarandon now said, “I haven’t spoken to Debra, but I would certainly look forward to any opportunity to say hello.”
Read her entire interview with Vulture here. | {
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ARLINGTON, Texas -- Kole Calhoun got the Los Angeles Angels off to a fast start with a leadoff triple, and he trotted home after an errant relay throw bounced into the seats.
All-Star center fielder Mike Trout and the rest of the Angels quickly followed his lead, and Los Angeles went on to a 15-6 rout of the free-falling Texas Rangers on Thursday night.
"Oh yeah, we were having fun," said Trout, the No. 2 hitter behind Calhoun. Trout had a three-run homer among his four hits. "We always have fun; we know what this offense is capable of doing."
The first four Angels batters in the game had hits and scored. They added six more runs in the second and were already up 13-2 against Colby Lewis (6-6) when Trout hit his 21st homer with one out in the third.
"Those are the days you play for in organized sports, especially in baseball, when everybody's contributing, everybody's having fun, everybody's getting hits," said Josh Hamilton, the 2010 American League MVP with Texas, who had RBI doubles in each of the first two innings. "It's a fun thing to be a part of."
While the Angels won for the seventh time in eight games, Texas has lost five straight and 19 of 22. The Rangers (38-54) have the worst winning percentage in the majors at .413.
The Rangers' clubhouse remained closed for about 30 minutes after the game. Manager Ron Washington refused to reveal what he said to his team but gave some insight into what he expects from his players.
"That you don't stop fighting. You don't give into adversity. The game of baseball is full of it. You don't give in to it," he said. "The only people that can make a change and make a difference is my guys."
Hector Santiago (1-7) struck out eight in six innings. The left-hander allowed four runs and five hits.
Lewis allowed a club-record 13 runs in only 2 1/3 innings. He also gave up a career-worst 13 hits in his 130th major league start, while his ERA increased by more than a full run -- from 5.51 to 6.54 -- after 11 earned runs were charged against him.
Calhoun, who had four hits and scored four times, was only a homer shy of a cycle after hits in each of the first three innings. He admitted he was "100 percent" trying to go deep his last two at-bats in a lopsided game, but he grounded out and had another single.
"I was definitely pulling for it," Trout said. "It was fun to watch."
Calhoun pulled another ball down the right-field line for an RBI double in the second. Trout then drove in a run on a chopper for an infield hit before Albert Pujols had a sacrifice fly -- although he reached base when right fielder Alex Rios dropped the ball on the warning track for an error. Hamilton then had the second of his three doubles in the game.
Erick Aybar, added to the AL All-Star team Thursday, also had RBIs in each of the first two innings. He drove in a run with a groundout in the first and had an RBI single in the second.
Rangers rookie outfielder Jake Smolinski, who made his major league debut as a pinch hitter Monday, had three hits, drove in three runs and scored twice. He has hits in all three of his starts and is the first Rangers player ever with eight hits in his first four games.
Game notes
The Angels had lost eight consecutive games at Texas. ... RHP Matt West became the third player to make his major league debut this week for the Rangers. He had two scoreless innings in relief and was the 28th pitcher used this season by Texas, breaking a tie with the Angels for the most in the majors. C Chris Gimenez made it 29 when he pitched a 1-2-3 ninth. ... Rangers All-Star 3B Adrian Beltre had three hits to extend his hitting streak to 14 games, the longest active streak in the AL. He is hitting .500 (42-of-84) his past 22 home games. ... Angels RHP Garrett Richards (10-2, 2.71 ERA), who finished second in the final five voting for the last spot on the AL All-Star team, starts Friday night against righty Nick Tepesch (3-4, 4.29). | {
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In Animals, Research News, Science & Nature, Spotlight / 13 April 2016
For the first time, scimitar-horned oryx are going to be reintroduced to the wild in Chad. Extinct in the wild since the mid-1980s, the species’ return is the result of the Environment Agency—Abu Dhabi (EAD) and the government of Chad’s Scimitar-horned Oryx Reintroduction Program. Researchers from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) will be working as part of the program to monitor the herd remotely after the reintroduction. A team of rangers trained by EAD and the Sahara Conservation Fund (SCF) will monitor the herd on the ground in Chad.
“This ambitious and historic recovery effort was made possible by the establishment of a ‘world herd’ of scimitar-horned oryx in Abu Dhabi, and a decades-long history of excellence in the care and management of this species in human care around the world,” said Steve Monfort, the John & Adrienne Mars director of SCBI, who was in Chad when the oryx arrived. “Restoring oryx to the wild will have a huge and positive impact on the conservation and management of the entire Sahelian grasslands ecosystem. We are thrilled to play a role in this incredible partnership designed to restore the species to its rightful place in the wild.”
Twenty-five scimitar-horned oryx arrived in Chad by airplane from Abu Dhabi March 16 and were taken to the Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim Game Reserve. It was the first time in 30 years any oryx had been in the country. The oryx will initially be held in a large fenced area to acclimate them to their new home at the Reserve. They will be fully released this summer, when the rainy season makes conditions in their native desert habitat more favorable.
Before the full release of the herd, each oryx will be fitted with a GPS-satellite collar and monitored by scientists at SCBI and the Zoological Society of London. The data they collect will be used to track and help protect the animals, gather behavioral data on the species and study their ecology. The data will help future reintroduction efforts.
The collars were tested on scimitar-horned oryx herds living at SCBI in Front Royal, Va., and at Fossil Rim Wildlife Center in Texas in separate one-month trials. The trials demonstrated that the oryx were not negatively affected by wearing the collars. Before the full release this summer, SCBI scientists will travel to Chad to fit the oryx with collars and conduct final tests of the satellite data transmission and analysis protocols before the animals are released.
SCF and EAD have also trained a team of local wildlife experts and rangers to monitor the oryx after they are reintroduced. To help with their continued protection, the team will organize community outreach programs about the oryx. The reintroduction program is working to build a self-sustaining population of 500 wild oryx over the next five years. EAD is developing a genetically diverse “world herd” of oryx, including animals originally from the United States, Europe and United Arab Emirates. Those animals will be part of future reintroductions.
The scimitar-horned oryx, a desert antelope, was declared extinct in the wild by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2000. Unregulated hunting was the primary cause of the scimitar-horned oryx’s extinction in the wild. Today, however, the threat from largely unregulated pastoral development and habitat loss are major concerns. The world’s largest single population of scimitar-horned oryx living in human care—numbering approximately 3,000 individuals—is in the United Arab Emirates. | {
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Before his 2005 debut, Charles Dera was a United States Marine, a professional jiu jitsu fighter, and one of the most popular Chippendale dancers of his time. Like the athletic man's man that he is, Mr. Dera excelled at every manly job he tried, but he was still looking for the perfect career to compliment his macho style. And what's more masculine than giving that good dick to some of the world's top-shelf pussy? Armed with a raging hard-on and his rugged good looks, this handsome stud headed out to Porn Valley, ready to leave his mark on the adult industry. Being a great actor, Charles does more than fuck- he performs, and time and time again, this gorgeous hunk has been rewarded for his efforts. He's taken home the AVN for Unsung Male Performer of the Year and starred in hundreds upon hundreds of hardcore scenes. So if you're looking for more than just a stunt cock, check out all of Charles's epic appearances now. | {
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People react as Myanmar authorities demolish huts occupied by thousands of informal settlers on the cityÕs suburbs, to clear the land for development, in Hlegu township outside Yangon, Myanmar June 12, 2017. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United States on Monday called on Myanmar to allow a United Nations fact-finding mission to investigate widespread allegations of killings, rape and torture by security forces against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar’s Rakhine state.
The Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council established the inquiry in March, but Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto leader of Myanmar’s civilian government and also its foreign minister, has rejected the allegations and opposes the mission.
A Myanmar official said on June 30 that the country would refuse entry to the U.N. investigators.
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in New York, Nikki Haley, said, “It is important that the Burmese government allow this fact-finding mission to do its job.”
“The international community cannot overlook what is happening in Burma – we must stand together and call on the government to fully cooperate with this fact-finding mission,” she said in a statement. Myanmar was formerly known as Burma.
Some 75,000 Rohingya fled northwestern Rakhine state to Bangladesh after Myanmar’s army carried out a security operation last October in response to deadly attacks by Rohingya insurgents on border posts.
A U.N. report from February, based on interviews with some of the Rohingya refugees, said Myanmar’s security forces have committed mass killings and gang rapes of Rohingya in a campaign that “very likely” amounts to crimes against humanity and possibly ethnic cleansing.
“No one should face discrimination or violence because of their ethnic background or religious beliefs,” Haley said.
Myanmar’s government regards the approximately 1 million Rohingya as illegal migrants from neighboring Bangladesh and denies them citizenship, even though Rohingya families have lived there for generations. | {
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Joyce Kim
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
– Ben Franklin
At Stellar, our core mission is to leverage education and local knowledge to extend financial access to the 2.5 billion unbanked people worldwide. We do this through a technology that enables money to move directly between people, companies and financial institutions as easily as email, increasing interoperability between diverse financial systems and currencies. Mobile economic tools that can span wide geographic areas at a low cost are a critical component of our efforts. And as we explore powerful ways to alleviate poverty through digital financial services, we need to think in particular about how those tools can reach women and girls.
Why girls?
In many cultures, it’s hard to separate a woman’s identity from her economic relationships with others – so lack of access to financial services serves to perpetuate gender inequality.
In the developing world, only 37 percent of women have bank accounts. Research from Women’s World Banking has shown that poor women are inherent savers, putting away 10-15 percent of their earnings for emergencies. Due to a lack of financial services, however, they’re forced to save in unreliable and sometimes expensive ways — women often hide cash in their homes, where it isn’t secure, or buy livestock, which can become ill or die.
Starting early in a woman’s life, there’s a long list of factors that hinder financial inclusion, including minimum age requirements, lack of formal identification, distance to banks, and difficulty securing permission from familial authorities or other cultural gatekeepers. On top of that, when they do have bank accounts, girls in particular are less likely to maintain hefty balances. Commercial financial institutions are reluctant to design services for small savers, whose accounts they’ve traditionally viewed as prohibitively costly to administer.
We believe that low-cost and reliable methods for saving could have an enormous impact on girls, as well as on their families and communities. Saving not only improves the financial well-being of girls but also nurtures positive attitudes and expectations, building self-esteem and driving productive behavioral changes.
(Above graphic from girlseffect.org)
How Vumi reaches women
When Stellar began digging into this issue, we met the team at the Praekelt Foundation, an amazing nonprofit based in South Africa that has been using open-source technologies to deliver essential information and inclusive services to millions of people living in poverty. Since its founding, Praekelt’s programs have reached over 50 million people across 15 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
Using Stellar’s open-source protocol, Praekelt is working on a mobile wallet that allows people to save money using Vumi, its messaging platform—think WhatsApp, but open source and designed for the developing world, with a focus on improving the economic security of girls in South Africa. Vumi already powers South Africa’s national maternal health care program, MomConnect, which sends expectant mothers prenatal health information over the course of their pregnancies. After a successful launch in South Africa last year, Praekelt is introducing the service in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country.
Personal savings accounts for girls
Vumi’s savings program, a pilot program launching soon in South Africa with plans to expand to Kenya and Nigeria, encourages early financial literacy. With a particular focus on formal savings for girls, Vumi’s financial infrastructure allows anyone to open a personal savings account. For many in the program, especially girls, Vumi may be their first formal savings account.
Deposit cash…and airtime?
But cash isn’t the only thing that users can save in Vumi’s program: they can also deposit airtime, and withdraw it later as cash. Why use airtime? Because the few examples of mobile-based banking solutions for youth that focus on traditional mobile wallets have had limited success. In many emerging markets, opening a mobile-money account requires waiting for days after showing ID.
Vumi, on the other hand, fits easily into girls’ lives by utilizing a payment tool that’s part of their daily interactions. With the rapid spread of mobile technology, girls are already familiar with the use of airtime minutes as an alternative currency. Because many telecoms firms in Africa and elsewhere transfer minutes nationwide free of charge, airtime is especially useful for sending and receiving small amounts.
Savings accounts that focus on airtime can be a game-changer for two more reasons:
They are not limited to smartphones; they are also available to anyone with a feature phone
They are convenient because they utilize ubiquitous cash-in/cash-out systems such as agents and local stores
Vumi’s pilot program and its focus on girls closely aligns with our core mission at Stellar — financial access for all. Through careful research and measurement, Vumi aims to demonstrate that accepting airtime while also offering incentives and education will result in increased savings and improved financial security for girls.
Girls who are saving small amounts for school fees today could be contributing monetarily in their homes and communities in a few years. We want to start investing in that future now.
Joyce Kim is the Executive Director of Stellar.org
Editor’s note: A version of this post was published on Stellar’s website. It was adapted and republished with permission, in collaboration with the author. | {
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The end of the playoffs doesn’t just mark the opening of major league free agency; hundreds of minor league players, often with lengthy service time to a club or actual cups of coffee in the bigs, are freed as well.
The White Sox lost 16 players to free agency, which seems at first like quite a bit. But while some clubs lost far fewer (Houston two, St. Louis three), there were some MLB teams who lost an entire roster’s worth of young players (the Dodgers 25, Washington 27, Texas 28, Cincinnati 31! ... thanks, Baseball America).
Below is a recap of the players cut loose; any are available to be re-signed by the big club.
Charlotte Knights
Ryan Cordell (OF) Two years with the White Sox after a trade from Milwaukee; career .792 OPS in the minors, .602 in the majors; 116 career games with the White Sox.
Brandon Guyer (OF) A veteran of the Tampa Bay Rays and Cleveland, Guyer caught on with Charlotte this spring, played a month with a .733 OPS in 16 games, and spent the rest of the year on the injured list.
Trey Michalczewski (3B) Has been with the White Sox so long (2013), he played with the old White Sox Appalachian League affiliate in Bristol. The seventh-rounder had a poor season for Birmingham-Charlotte and holds a career .698 OPS.
Gerson Montilla (2B) Seven years into his minor-league career, Montilla caught on with the Winston-Salem Dash and played one season (2016); short of one AZL game the next year, Montilla hasn’t played since, and spent all of 2019 on the Knights injured list.
Justin Nicolino (LHSP) The White Sox grabbed him from Minny in May and he put up a 6.28 ERA in 19 starts; put another way, he was so bad that he somehow managed not to get a gift start with the White Sox this season.
Donn Roach (RHSP) Roach was golden in 2018 (2.65 ERA) but battled injury and ineffectiveness all season long in 2019 (18 games, 7.83 ERA).
Ramón Torres (SS) After leaving the Kansas City system as a free agent after last season, Torres had a pedestrian season for Birmingham and Charlotte (.683 OPS).
Colton Turner (LHRP) joined the White Sox system from the Blue Jays in 2016 and gradually worked his way up to the Knights; his Birmingham work was outstanding, but Triple-A was not as kind (5.48 ERA in 37 games).
Birmingham Barons
Mauricio Cabrera (RHRP) Hooked on with the White Sox in 2018 and spent two years in Birmingham; this past season he had 41 games in relief, for a 4.50 ERA.
Alfredo González (C) 10 years in the minors, never a regular, 157 career RBIs. Pretty cool that he did this in Chicago, though:
What a time for career hit and RBI no. 1!
Congratulations, Alfredo González! pic.twitter.com/1ImMLLXrre — Chicago White Sox (@whitesox) June 3, 2018
Luis Martinez (RHRP) Has spent his whole career with the White Sox, dating back to 2014. After starting for all of 2018 in Winston-Salem, relieved with the Barons in 2019 and was a tick better (4.26 ERA in 39 games) than Cabrera.
Winston-Salem Dash
Kevin Escorcia (LHRP) Parlayed a very strong 2018 at Kannapolis (2.66 ERA) into a merely decent encore in 2019 with the Dash (4.33 ERA in 29 games).
Luis Valenzuela (SS) The former Braves infielder caught on with the White Sox in August and saw action in 17 games (.603 OPS).
Kannapolis Cannon Ballers
Justin O’Conner (RHRP) Former Atlanta catch came to the White Sox in 2019 and converted to pitching, where in small sample sizes his strong showing in the AZL could not be duplicated at Kannapolis.
Tyler Watson (LHRP) Did Watson retire? He was traded to the White Sox for the 2019 season and pitched in just 10 games before being placed on the temporarily inactive list.
DSL White Sox
Matthew Mercedes (1B) He’s spent three years in the DSL (the first two for the Pirates DSL affiliate), with a career .756 OPS, and hey, he’s 21 years old. | {
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New Unique: Heartbound Loop In the next patch to The Awakening's Closed Beta, we'll be enabling an additional Unique Item, designed by supporter Lagruell. Today's news post provides a preview of the new ring: Heartbound Loop.
Last week we indicated that the Divination Card submission page would hopefully be up by now. We've run into some snags that are causing it to take a few more days. I don't have an accurate ETA currently but I'm hoping it'll be up and ready for submissions early next week. I'm very sorry for the delay! | {
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KALAMAZOO, MI - Has there ever been a more appropriate time to row the boat in Waldo Stadium?
More than five inches of rainfall Saturday in Kalamazoo postponed Western Michigan's homecoming football game against Akron to 1 p.m. Sunday, and the university's grounds-keeping crew has its hands full.
As of 8 p.m. Saturday night, water continued to flow from Stadium Drive down through Gate 1 on Waldo's west side and onto the field through the visitor team's entrance tunnel.
Just before 5 p.m. Saturday, administrators from WMU, Akron and the Mid-American Conference agreed to reschedule the game, but they planned to keep it at Waldo Stadium, pending successful drainage of the field.
Two hours later, the entire field was under water, except for a few patches of turf elevated by air bubbles trapped beneath the composite surface.
Waldo Stadium Flooding Heavy rains have flooded Western Michigan University's football stadium. Here's a look: Posted by Kalamazoo Gazette on Saturday, October 14, 2017
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, rainfall up to three inches is expected overnight and into Sunday.
Earlier in the day, storms canceled WMU's homecoming tailgate and flooded streets across the Kalamazoo area.
Stay tuned to MLive and the Kalamazoo Gazette for updates on any additional changes to the Broncos' matchup with Akron. | {
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Were Alton Sterling and Philando Castile really innocent victims of racist cops?
In order to reinforce the false narrative that blacks are systematically discriminated against in America, the Left and its accomplices in the mainstream media spent much of last week lying over and over again about two black men shot to death by police officers.
Like a burnt out Hollywood screenwriter, the Left keeps recycling the same old stock characters. Black men are tragic heroes. White people and police are racist agents of an evil system. The facts are never allowed to intrude on these fantasies.
Michael Brown of Ferguson, Mo., was supposedly a gentle giant. Trayvon Martin of Sanford, Fla., was said to look like the son President Obama never had. “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids,” Obama said after Martin’s death in 2012. Later we learned these were politically motivated lies generated by leftist lynch mobs.
This evidence has become available after the horrific Black Lives Matter-inspired massacre of police officers in Dallas during a Black Lives Matter demonstration. With five policemen dead, it was the deadliest attack on U.S. law enforcement since Sept. 11, 2001.
FrontPage reported Friday on the media’s beatification of Alton Sterling, who died in Baton Rouge, La., and Philando Castile, who died near St. Paul, Minn. But new information has emerged through enhanced scrutiny of independently shot crime scene videos showing Castile in extremis after being shot and the physical altercation between Sterling and police.
The new information makes it clear that Sterling, a career criminal well known to Baton Rouge police, was trying to wrest a gun away from a cop. While cops were wrangling him, Sterling indicated he intended to harm the officers. The cops responded appropriately, shooting him to death.
With Castile, it now appears he may have had a gun at his side or on his lap. In addition, the lawyer for the officer involved, Jeronimo Yanez, reportedly said his client ordered Castile to stay motionless but the man refused to comply. In other words, Yanez responded to the presence of the gun and moves by Castile, not to Castile’s race.
Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond “Lavish” Reynolds, had said Castile was trying to retrieve his wallet after informing police that he was in possession of a concealed weapon and a permit allowing him to carry it. “He let the officer know that he had a firearm, and he was reaching for his wallet and the officer just shot him in his arm,” Reynolds said. She told Yanez, “You told him to get his ID, sir – his driver’s license.”
An audio recording of police communications purports to depict officers saying they were about to pull over Castile because he matched the description of a robbery suspect. Still video frames of a robbery in Minnesota have also surfaced that show a man who at least somewhat resembles Castile. At time of writing neither piece of evidence appeared to have been authenticated. A squad car video of the incident also exists, according to investigators, but it does not appear to have been made public.
Castile, who had a long history of driving infractions but no felony convictions, did in fact possess a permit to carry a gun, the Star Tribune reported Saturday, citing a confidential source. Under state law, the names of such permit holders are not made public but the source said Castile was issued the permit when he lived in Robbinsdale, Minn.
There are still many unanswered questions about the slaying of Castile, but the new information seems unhelpful to those arguing his shooting was unjustified.
A slow-motion version of one video of the Sterling incident, which took place in the parking lot of a food store, appears to exonerate the officers involved who responded to a 9-1-1 call about a man menacing another with a gun.
According to the slow-mo analysis, while the cops were on the ground leaning over Sterling one shouts “he’s got a gun” before they draw their firearms. An officer cautions Sterling shouting, “hey bro, you fu–ing move, I swear to God.”
Sterling seems to reply, “thanks for the free gun,” a clear indication he had taken or was trying to take an officer’s gun, and shots ring out. Someone shouts “you’re dead” and more shots ring out. The camera cuts away then returns to show Sterling lying on his back with blood pooled over his chest.
Unless this version of the video was dishonestly manipulated or inaccurately interpreted (which does not appear to be the case), that would seem to close the book on the Alton Sterling case. We’ll have to see if any more evidence surfaces.
FrontPage readers are painfully aware that the Left cannot advance its agenda without lying.
The Left reveres thugs. It jumped on the bandwagon promoting the lie that Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin were innocent angels unjustly cut down by white executioners. The truth, as we now know, is that both young black men were killed in self-defense by the white men they intended to harm.
We now know that “hands up, don’t shoot,” the mantra of angry mobs and left-wing talking heads, was a complete hoax. Brown was a thug killed by a white police officer and trying to grab the cop’s gun. He did not get gunned down while trying to surrender, as the Left claims.
We now know that Martin, who was suspected to have been a burglar, wanted to hurt Neighborhood Watch volunteer George Zimmerman because he believed his friend when she told him Zimmerman might be a homosexual stalking the area.
The Left creates alternate realities in order to justify or rationalize past events and to move its agenda forward.
The Left lied when it claimed the recent Orlando and Dallas massacres were about the arguably easy availability of guns. The Left lied when it claimed former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.) was shot because Sarah Palin put her congressional district on a “target list,” ignoring the fact that military metaphors have long been a bipartisan part of America’s political culture.
The Left lied when it claimed during the Obamacare debate that there were tens of millions of uninsured Americans and that an angry anti-Obamacare mob hurled racist epithets at black Democrat lawmakers on their way to the U.S. Capitol.
The Left lied when it claimed Bill Clinton was impeached because Republicans were sexual prudes. The Left lied when it claimed Matthew Shepard was murdered because he was gay – in fact, his connection to the drug underworld was the central factor in his killing. The Left lied when it claimed Ronald Reagan hated and discriminated against gays, an absurd claim to make about a former six-term president of the Screen Actors Guild whose livelihood was dependent on getting along with the many powerful gays of Hollywood.
The Left lied when it claimed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was a racist conservative when in fact he was an agnostic animal rights enthusiast and anti-bullying activist enraged at the Janet Reno-orchestrated massacre of mostly non-white members of the Branch Davidian church of Waco, Texas.
This is not an exhaustive list of leftist lies.
Meanwhile, information has surfaced about the identity of the allegedly lone sniper in Dallas who late last week gunned down a reported 12 police officers, killing five of them. The massacre apparently inspired copycat attacks on police across the nation.
The Dallas shooter was identified as 25-year-old Micah Xavier Johnson of Mesquite, Texas, a black man who served in the U.S. Army Reserve and did a tour in Afghanistan. Bomb-making materials and an arsenal of weapons and ammunition were found at the man’s home.
Johnson is said to have told police he was not part of any group which is essentially worthless as evidence with respect to the the Black Lives Matter movement. The movement is fairly amorphous and decentralized. Anyone can claim to be or not be a member of the movement.
Johnson, who has been found in a photo posing in a dashiki with a raised arm Black Power salute, said he was upset at the recent deaths of black men at the hands of police.
Dallas police chief David Brown said Johnson told police he “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”
Johnson had been a member of the Houston chapter of the New Black Panther Party for six months some years ago, Breitbart Texas reports, citing KPRC NBC2. The source of the membership information was a man called Quanell X who said Johnson left the organization because he would not respect the chain of command. Breitbart posted a photo of what it claimed was Johnson at a New Black Panther armed march.
Of course former Justice Department civil rights division lawyer J. Christian Adams warned the Obama administration years ago about the real danger posed by the New Black Panther Party and was ignored.
The episode in Dallas came to an explosive ending early Friday. In a wonderful law enforcement innovation, Dallas police used a robot to deliver a bomb that blew Johnson to bits.
Something called the Black Power Political Organization reportedly claimed responsibility for the Dallas massacre. On its now-offline Facebook page it stated, “More Will Be Assassinated In The Coming Days! Do You Like The Work Of Our Assassins? Get Your Own Sniper.”
Whether BPPO is a real group isn’t yet clear. It doesn’t appear to have been incorporated anywhere. Its Facebook page has been taken down. The page referenced various black power groups such as the New Black Panther Party and the Huey P. Newton Gun Club. Something called the Black People Protection Agency, also allegedly known as Black Knights, was referred to on BPPO’s Facebook page. BPPA’s status is similarly murky.
BPPO’s page did list contact information in the form of a telephone number with an 876 area code, which corresponds to the Caribbean nation of Jamaica. That number also appears on a funding page for something called the Black Men Entrepreneurship Foundation. At time of writing BMEF had an active Facebook page. That organization’s status is also unclear.
The Left is desperate to protect Black Lives Matter, which has been officially endorsed by the Democratic National Committee. Prominent left-wingers are publicly scratching their heads wondering what possibly could have motivated the Dallas attack even though Micah X. Johnson spelled out his anti-white, anti-cop animus in an abundantly clear fashion to police.
During a press conference in Poland, a befuddled President Obama pretended to struggle to understand why the Dallas shooter did what he did. “I think it is very hard to untangle the motives of this shooter. I’ll leave that to psychologists and people who study these kinds of incidents.”
“I think the danger is that we somehow suggest the act of a troubled individual speaks to some larger political statement across the country,” Obama said.
Democrat presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton blamed white people. “White Americans need to do a better job of listening when African Americans talk about the seen and unseen barriers you face every day,” she tweeted Friday.
Later the same day Clinton continued her delusional rant in a CNN interview.
“I will call for white people, like myself, to put ourselves in the shoes of those African-American families who fear every time their children go somewhere, who have to have ‘The Talk,’ about how to really protect themselves [from police], when they’re the ones who should be expecting protection from encounters with police.”
“I’m going to be talking to white people. We’re the ones who have to start listening to the legitimate cries coming from our African-American fellow citizens.”
Listening to Black Lives Matters supporters who want to kill white people and police is exactly the kind of useless, possibly counterproductive remedy Hillary Clinton would propose.
But pandering is a principal focus of the Left nowadays, the real-world consequences be damned. | {
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TOKYO -- Mutual fund assets in Japan have topped the 100 trillion yen ($806 billion) mark for the first time, buoyed by an influx of money from retail investors taking advantage of a tax-free individual savings account program.
The balance of assets held in publicly offered investment trusts came to 102.45 trillion yen at the end of May, up 3.29 trillion yen from a month earlier, according to data released Thursday by the Investment Trusts Association, Japan. The balance climbed to an all-time high in each of the past 12 months.
The figure jumped about 20 trillion yen, or 25%, from a year earlier and shot up about 41 trillion yen, or 68%, since the ongoing stock market rally that began in late November 2012 on hopes that Abenomics could lift Japan's economy out of a long-running rut.
Investing in foreign bonds and real estate investment trusts helped major mutual funds boost assets.
Assets held in exchange-traded funds -- a financial instrument the Bank of Japan purchases as part of its monetary easing measures -- also rose, more than doubling in two years to more than 14 trillion yen.
Many individuals bought mutual funds though Japan's NISA individual savings account program, introduced in January 2014, and through wrap accounts, in which investors entrust the management of their portfolios to brokerages. Mutual fund purchases tied to the NISA program had grown to 3 trillion yen through March. The balance of wrap accounts stands at about 4 trillion yen, tripling in a year.
Of the 41 trillion yen surge in mutual fund assets since the Abenomics-driven rally began more than two years ago, 24 trillion yen represents a net inflow of money -- purchases of these funds minus cancellations and redemptions -- and 17 trillion yen is the result of higher investment returns stemming from stock price gains and the weak yen.
(Nikkei) | {
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Protesters for women’s rights held a rally Sunday at the Alabama Capitol to protest a law passed last week making abortion a felony in nearly all cases. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)
(CN) – Abortion providers backed by the American Civil Liberties Union filed an anticipated lawsuit Friday morning challenging the constitutionality of Alabama’s near-total ban on the procedure, kicking off a legal battle that supporters of the ban hope will land in the nation’s highest court.
It’s been nine days since Alabama’s Republican Governor Kay Ivey signed the law banning abortion even in instances of rape and incest, saying “at least for the short term, this bill may … be unenforceable.”
The law was designed to rise to the U.S. Supreme Court, a test case for the bench remade under the Trump administration to reconsider the 1973 landmark decision Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion up until 22 to 24 weeks of pregnancy.
The 23-page complaint filed in Montgomery federal court by ACLU attorneys representing Alabama abortion providers kicked off that legal fight. It asks the court to declare that the law violates the 14th Amendment’s privacy and liberty rights and to issue an injunction preventing enforcement the law.
“H.B. 314 is the culmination of a near-decade long campaign by the Alabama legislature to eliminate legal abortion in Alabama,” the lawsuit states. “Since 2011, the Alabama legislature has enacted a multitude of laws aimed at restricting and ultimately outlawing abortion in the state.”
The complaint was filed on behalf of Dr. Yashica Robinson, an OB-GYN who performs abortions in Huntsville, as well as Planned Parenthood Southeast and three clinics that perform abortions in the state – Alabama Women’s Center, Reproductive Health Services and West Alabama Women’s Center. In addition to the ACLU, the plaintiffs are also represented by attorneys from Planned Parenthood Federation of America
They sued Alabama Attorney General Steven Marshall, five district attorneys and the leaders of the state’s Department of Public Health, Board of Medical Examiners and Medical Licensure Commission.
If the law were to take effect Nov. 15, according to the complaint, it would disproportionately impact low income and black women in a state that has some of the highest rates of infant mortality in the country.
“Being forced to continue a pregnancy against one’s will can pose a risk to a person’s physical, mental, and emotional health, and even their life, as well as to the stability and well-being of their family, including existing children,” the complaint states.
Under the law, performing an abortion in Alabama would carry a prison sentence ranging from 10 to 99 years. The only exception is when a woman’s health is at serious risk. The law bans the procedure even in cases of rape or incest.
Doctors who refer a patient for an abortion that would violate the state’s law would jeopardize their medical license and could be charged with criminal solicitation or conspiracy – a charge that comes with a two to 20-year prison sentence. A woman receiving the procedure would not be criminally liable.
In a statement, Dr. Leana Wen, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, slammed the actions of Alabama lawmakers and said public support is on the side of abortion rights activists.
“What we’re seeing in Alabama is a manmade public health emergency and we’re fighting back. To patients seeking safe, legal abortion care in Alabama: this extreme ban hasn’t gone into effect yet — and we will make sure of it,” she said.
Eric Johnston, author of the abortion legislation and president of the Alabama Pro-Life Coalition, told Courthouse News that public opinion in Alabama sides with the strict abortion restrictions. During the midterm elections last November, 59% of the state’s voters approved an amendment to the Alabama Constitution making it the policy of the state to recognize rights for the unborn.
Johnston expects Alabama will lose at the trial level, either after a trial or summary judgment. He expects it to also lose at the 11th Circuit, which will position the state to appeal the case to the high court.
“We hope that it’s an inevitable process, either this law or one of the others matriculating through the courts will get to the Supreme Court and have a meaningful review of Roe,” Johnston said. “So I’m glad that they’re moving on with it. And we’ll hopefully get to end sooner than later.”
Alabama was one of five GOP-led statehouses across the nation to enact abortion bans this year. The state attorney general’s office did not immediately return a request for comment Friday.
The complaint asks the court to have the state pay the ACLU and Planned Parenthood’s attorney’s fees. That’s not a throwaway request. In 2016, the state paid the ACLU of Alabama $1.7 million after the federal courts declared its law requiring abortion providers have hospital admitting privileges unconstitutional.
Also on Friday, Missouri’s Republican Governor Mike Parson signed into law a bill banning abortions at eight weeks of pregnancy. That legislation imposes up to 15 years in prison for doctors who violate the ban.
Later in the day, a federal judge in Mississippi temporarily blocked a state law banning abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected, which can happen around six weeks of pregnancy. | {
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http://www.rockislandauction.com/viewitem/aid/65/lid/1300
The model of 1885 (a modern collector designation; Remington called these the "Remington Magazine Rifle" and did not differentiate between the different versions) was the final iteration of James Paris Lee's bolt action rifle made by Remington. It incorporated a number of improvements from the earlier versions, including a relocated bolt handle, improved bolt head, and a magazine that could now hold cartridges securely without the use of a sliding catch at the nose.
These rifles were made in .45-70 caliber for US use and in .43 Spanish for export sales. The US Navy purchased most of the .45-70 guns that were made, and this particular rifle is one of those Navy guns. By the time these rifles were actually in production, Great Britain had also decided to adopt the Lee system in 1888, which would go through several iterations and ultimately become the iconic SMLE that would be the mainstay of British infantry during the First World War. | {
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