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Even judging by the low standards of creepy data-mining apps, “Brightest Flashlight” did something pretty egregious. The free app, which was installed by at least 50 million Android(s goog) users, transmitted users’ real-time locations to ad networks and other third parties. It was, in other words, a stalking device disguised as a flashlight.
In December, the Federal Trade Commission exposed the app’s antics and also announced a proposed settlement with the app maker, GoldenShores Technologies, a one-man operation based in Idaho. In doing so, the agency explained how Brightest Flashlight used legal flim-flam in a privacy policy and user license agreement to obscure what the app was up to.
The terms are now final, and they’re underwhelming, to put it mildly.
In a Wednesday announcement, the FTC confirmed that GoldenShores and owner Erik Geidl are not to collect app users’ geolocation without clearly explaining how and why they’re doing so and, in broad terms, say who is receiving that information. The flashlight app maker will also have to keep records for the FTC to inspect, and Geidl will have to tell the agency about any new businesses he decides to start in the next 10 years. He also has 10 days as of the order to delete all the data he collected.
On paper, the order looks like stern stuff but, in practice, it’s hard to see how this amounts to real punishment. Even though Geidl did something deeply unethical, compromising the privacy of tens of millions of people, he will not pay a cent for his misdeeds.
The FTC said earlier that it didn’t seek financial restitution because the app was free. The agency’s justification is unsatisfying, however, because it doesn’t acknowledge that Geidl must have earned earned income by selling users’ geolocation. A better approach would have been to strip him of any profits he made through the app, and also name-and-shame the advertisers who bought the information from him.
While it’s good that the FTC is helping to publicize the mischief of app makers, it’s unlikely that bad actors will take the agency seriously until it starts setting down real punishments on people like Geidl and the ecosystem that sustain them.
This story was updated at 8:45ET on Thursday to add that Geidl will have to delete the data collected prior to the order | {
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Next month sees the return of Long Island's Artificial Brain. The group burst onto the scene in 2014 with their album, Labyrinth Constellation. The quintet brings science fiction to highly proficient, technical death metal that is from a similar vein as Gorguts. This year, the Brain is back with their second album called Infrared Horizon. The new material features a full narrative about a dystopian future where robots and cyborgs have outlasted humans. Furthermore, it has a number of guest appearances as well. Most notably is our very own Obituarist, Trevor Strnad of The Black Dahlia Murder. Strnad appears on the title track of Infrared Horizon, which we are happy to present today.
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"Infrared Horizon" is written from the perspective of something non-human, trying to define human existence." The band said about the song. "This is a track that we debuted live on our tour with The Black Dahlia Murder in late 2015, so it felt appropriate to have this be the track that features guest vocals by Black Dahlia singer Trevor Strnad. This song also features Paulo Paguntalan of Copremesis and Gath Šmānê, who contributes some vocals to the outro, a piece of the record that reflects our interest in incorporating more electronic experimentation into our sound."
Check out the punishing, new track below and listen to a previously released track here. Pre-order Infrared Horizon through Profound Lore and MerchTable. Finally, Artificial Brain is confirmed to play at Covenant Festival Montreal in April with Gorguts, as well as labelmates Dysrhythmia, Chthe’ilist, and Gevurah, among many others.
See Artificial Brain live at any of these dates:
4/15/2017: Covenant Festival – Montreal, QC
4/21/2017: Court Tavern – New Brunswick, NJ w/ Abacinate
4/22/2017: The Barbary – Philadelphia, PA @ Decibel pre-fest matinee w/ Pyrrhon, Die Choking
4/23/2017: Shaker's Pub – Oakdale, NY w/ Pyrrhon
4/29/2017: The Maywood – Raleigh, NC w/ Pyrrhon
4/30/2017: The Pinch – Washington DC w/ Pyrrhon, Horrendous
5/11/2017: Strange Matter – Richmond, VA w/ River Black
5/26/2017: The Haunt – Ithaca, NY @ 1Fest | {
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We would not be living without our livers. Our livers detoxify our body from anything that could potentially harm us and actually has its own cleansing system called the cytochrome p450 enzymes system. According to research the system contains more than 50 enzymes that process and eliminate toxins from our bodies. There are drugs that may interact with CBD.
Why is this something to bring up about in relation to CBD? As most of us are coming to understand, CBD has the potential to effectively treat various illnesses and diseases by manipulating the endocannabinoid system with no “dirty” side effects. However, there may be one side effects to keep in mind, which is the inhibition of the cytochrome p450 enzyme system.
By inhibiting the cytochrome p450 system, it may lead to an overall increase in the processing of the other drugs in your system. Thus the other drugs may not metabolize as they should. This can lead to higher levels of the other medication in your system at one time, which can cause unwanted side effects and even overdose. so, if you’re taking a medication that could be affected by cannabidiol, you may need a dose adjustment in order to take both medications safely.
Medications that are known to use the cytochrome p450 enzyme system
Here is a list of medications that are known to use the cytochrome p450 enzyme system, according to the Indiana University Department of Medicine:
Angiotensin II blockers
Antibiotics
Anti-arrhythmic
Anti-depressants
Anti-epileptics
Anti-histamines
Anti-psychotics
Benzodiazepines
Beta-blockers
Calcium channel blockers
HIV antivirals
HMG CoA reductase inhibitors
Immune modulators
NSAIDs
Oral hypoglycemic agents
Prokinetics
PPIs
Steroids
Sulfonylureas
Before you begin to worry, not every medication in each of the categories listed will cause an interaction. But, be aware that this list does not necessarily contain every medication that could be affected by Cannabidiol. While it’s true that taking CBD by itself has not been shown to cause any unwanted side effects, it may increase the chances of experiencing side effects from other medications you might be taking at the same time.
If you feel worried that your cytochrome p450 enzyme system may not be functioning properly, doctors can test the system to ensure that medications you are you take are metabolizing as expected. Before starting CBD, especially if you’re on other medications, it is wise to consult your doctor or physician first.
CBD and grapefruit
Naturally occurring compounds in grapefruit also impact our cytochrome p450 enzymes, just as CBD does. That’s why it’s recommended to avoid grapefruits and their juice while taking certain medicines. If a warning like this exists on your current medications, it is an indication that they may also be impacted by CBD.
CBD and antibiotics
Fluoroquinolone antibiotics, in particular, can interact with CBD. They are commonly used to treat a variety of illnesses, such as respiratory and urinary tract infections. Examples include:
Ciprofloxacin (Cipro)
Gemifloxacin(Factive)
Levofloxacin (Levaquin)
Moxifloxacin(Avelox)
Norfloxacin (Noroxin)
Ofloxacin (Floxin)
CBD and beta-blockers ( β-blockers)
CBD has been linked with lowering blood pressure, however, can have negative interactions with beta-blockers and other blood pressure medication if taken together. Cannabidiol can affect how our bodies process beta-blockers and can cause undesired effects – consult your prescribing doctor.
CBD and heart and cardiovascular medications
CBD has the potential to interact with many different heart medications, such as statins, a class of lipid-lowering medication and beta-blockers ( β-blockers), which are medications that treat irregular heart rhythms and are applied following heart attacks. Examples of heart medications that have interaction warnings include:
Amiodarone (Cordarone)
Atorvastatin (Lipitor)
Carvedilol (Coreg)
Celiprolol (Celicard)
Clopidogrel (Plavix) Ticagrelor (Brilinta)
Nifedipine (Adalat, Procardia)
Pitavastatin (Pravachol)
Quinidine
Talinoloa
Valsartan (Diovan)
CBD and blood pressure medications
Calcium channel blockers, blood thinners, and medications treating blood pressure and abnormal heart rhythms have a strong interaction warning with using CBD. For instance, CBD reduces the body’s ability to break down the prescription blood thinner warfarin, thereby increasing its intended effect. Other examples of medications that may interact with CBD include:
Amlodipine (Norvasc)
Diltiazem (Cardizem)
Felodipine (Plendil)
Isradipine (DynaCirc)
Nifedipine (Adalat, Procardia)
Torsemide (Demadex)
Valsartan (Diovan)
Verapamil (Calan, Isoptin, Verelan)
CBD and sedative medications (benzodiazepine)
Benzodiazepines (sometimes called ‘benzos’) are used for managing: anxiety, insomnia, nausea, depression and panic attacks. CBD can slow down the body’s ability to process some benzodiazepines, namely the widely used alprazolam (Xanax) and diazepam (Valium). This may result in higher blood concentrations of the drug, producing side effects. Other typical benzodiazepines which may have an interaction with CBD include:
Alprazolam (Xanax)
Diazepam (Valium)
Midazolam (Versed)
Pitavastatin (Pravachol
Quazepam (Doral)
Triazolam (Halcion)
CBD and statins
Cholesterol decreasing medications like statins can be impacted by CBD. CBD can pre-occupy the body’s system for processing certain drugs, this can cause medicines to remain in one’s system for longer, resulting in a potentially dangerous buildup.
Other medications that have CBD interaction warnings:
Anti-fungal medications: Ketoconazole (Nizoral) & Itraconazole (Sporanox)
Anti-histamines: fexofenadine (Allegra) & Terfenadine (Seldane)
Anti-inflammatory drug: Troglitazone and Methylprednisolone
Cholesterol and lipid-lowering medication: Simvastatin (Zocor)
Cholesterol treatment: Lovastatin (Mevacor)
Malaria medications: Artemether (Artenam, Paluther) & Halofantrine
Viagra (Sildenafil)
Sources:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26651971/
http://medicine.iupui.edu/clinpharm/ddis/main-table/ | {
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Drexler is an absolute class act and was a pleasure to interview, talking as if we were old friends. Here is what he had to say:
Elijah Abramson: First let me say that I really appreciate the time that you are taking.
Clyde Drexler: It’s my pleasure. : It’s my pleasure.
EA: So what do you see as the significance of LeBron James’ triple double in the Olympics [first in US Olympic history]?
CD: He is by far and away the : He is by far and away the best player in the game . He does everything all the time.
EA: Definitely. So with LeBron and Durant doing what they’re doing, how do you think that they’re going to fair against the rest of the field, in particular, Spain? Is Team USA a lock for the gold medal?
CD: I’m really impressed with how well they’re playing. They’re putting it out there on the line and having great success. I was impressed when I saw them play Spain in an exhibition game before the Olympics and they beat Spain, in Spain, by 22. Spain really thought they had the US. : I’m really impressed with how well they’re playing. They’re putting it out there on the line and having great success. I was impressed when I saw them play Spain in an exhibition game before the Olympics and they beat Spain,by 22. Spain really thought they had the US.
That was a convincing moment for me to say that I don’t think anybody is going to come close.
EA: On that same subject, there’s been a lot of talk about limiting the Olympics to the younger guys in the NBA, like Anthony Davis. Do you like that or do you prefer seeing the best the NBA has to offer going out and representing the US?
CD: You can’t go wrong either way, but an age limit should be around 30. : You can’t go wrong either way, but an age limit should be around 30.
EA: You don’t think Kobe should be playing?
CD: No, I think he should be allowed to play and it’s a wonderful thing. He’s a phenomenal player—still the best offensive player in the game. 30 is a good age to have if you have to have a limit. As long as it’s the same [for all sports]. : No, I think he should be allowed to play and it’s a wonderful thing. He’s a phenomenal player—still the best offensive player in the game. 30 is a good age to have if you have to have a limit. As long as it’s the same [for all sports].
EA: I wrote an article comparing you and the Dream Team to 2012 Team USA. How do you think the two teams compare and what do you think of Kobe and LeBron’s comments on that comparison?
CD: Those guys have every right to say the things that they do because they’re very good. Obviously I’m a little bit biased. It would be close, but at the end of the day we would beat them by 25 to 30. : Those guys have every right to say the things that they do because they’re very good. Obviously I’m a little bit biased. It would be close, but at the end of the day we would beat them by 25 to 30.
EA: So you think it’s going to be close but you’ll beat them by 25 to 30?
CD: Yeah, that would be close. (laughs) : Yeah, that would be close. (laughs)
Actually…I don’t think there should be an age limit, [the older athletes] get so much fan support. Why would you want to limit that? I’m going to change my comment. There should be no age limit.
EA: What about the NBA fans and owners who are worried about injuries? Teams don’t want their best players going out there because they are making their money in the NBA.
CD: I can understand that aspect because you play hard for nine months and your body needs to rest. By doing the Olympics, your body does not get to rest. Guys have to gauge where they are and learn how to manage. : I can understand that aspect because you play hard for nine months and your body needs to rest. By doing the Olympics, your body does not get to rest. Guys have to gauge where they are and learn how to manage.
EA: Being from the Bay Area I don’t have too much affection for Bryant and the Lakers but what do you think about the comparisons that have been made between Kobe, Jordan and LeBron?
CD: Comparisons? They are all phenomenal. I’ll take any of them as teammates. (laughs) : Comparisons? They are all phenomenal. I’ll take any of them as teammates. (laughs)
And you got someone who might become one of the all-time greats down there in Golden State. Klay Thompson can shoot it.
EA: Yes, he played really well last season.
CD: There really should be no comparison between those guys (Kobe, LeBron, Jordan). I mean, who is to say which one is better? You could throw about ten other guys into that mix. Just give me any of those guys. (laughs) : There really should be no comparison between those guys (Kobe, LeBron, Jordan). I mean, who is to say which one is better? You could throw about ten other guys into that mix. Just give me any of those guys. (laughs)
EA: In terms of age limit, do you like the rule that the NBA made that makes players go to college and the subsequent one-and-done road that John Calipari has instilled? Or would you prefer to see guys come out as teenagers?
CD: Like I said, as long as you keep it the same between all sports that’s good. Education is worth its weight in gold. Make no mistake about it. But remember we’re only talking about two or three kids a year. : Like I said, as long as you keep it the same between all sports that’s good. Education is worth its weight in gold. Make no mistake about it. But remember we’re only talking about two or three kids a year.
For the most part, these kids need two to three years in college before the NBA.
But if you’re such an exception, it should be an opportunity. One-and-done is not a bad rule. All kids need to figure out how to manage their time as young adults. But whatever you do [about age limitations], do it for hockey, baseball, basketball… The double standards are ridiculous.
EA: Talking a little bit about yourself, what was more important to you: your gold medal with the Dream Team or your NBA championship in 1995?
CD: Oh, that’s like choosing what child you like best. (laughs) You’re just trying to do the best you can. It’s just an honor to play the game and do things of that nature. : Oh, that’s like choosing what child you like best. (laughs) You’re just trying to do the best you can. It’s just an honor to play the game and do things of that nature.
EA: Now you’re a color commentator for the Rockets, how has that been?
CD: It’s been great, keeps me involved with the game. My son and I go to a lot of the games. : It’s been great, keeps me involved with the game. My son and I go to a lot of the games.
EA: As a former player, do you ever get that itch to play or are you ready sit back and see your kids play?
CD: I retired at 35 in ’98 and thought there’s only one place to go and that’s downward. I retired at a good level. I was at peace after 15 years—I was lucky to play that long. : I retired at 35 in ’98 and thought there’s only one place to go and that’s downward. I retired at a good level. I was at peace after 15 years—I was lucky to play that long.
I love the game and played from 13 to 35 almost every single day. Since I retired, I haven’t woken up one morning and said, “you know what? I’m going to go play basketball!” But I just did the SF Half Marathon last year, so I still stay in decent shape.
[Basketball] was a job. It was a lot of hard work but I was glad when it was over—it was like running a marathon.
EA: You mentioned you retired when you were still productive, so what do you think about Kobe’s comments about retiring at 35? He said he would retire then when he was coming into the league.
CD: I think there is a lot to be said about that because you put a lot of pressure on your cardiovascular system and it’s tough on your long term health. I think if you’re lucky enough to make it 15 years, [you need to realize] that’s a lot. : I think there is a lot to be said about that because you put a lot of pressure on your cardiovascular system and it’s tough on your long term health. I think if you’re lucky enough to make it 15 years, [you need to realize] that’s a lot.
EA: Great, thank you again for your time.
CD: You are quite welcome. : You are quite welcome.
If you would like the chance to speak with Clyde Drexler, he will be chatting live with USA Basketball and Olympic fans in ConnecTV’s Watercooler this Friday, August 10 at 1:30pm ET.
In an exclusive interview with one of the NBA’s greatest players of all time, Clyde Drexler talks with me about everything basketball. Going from the Olympics to comparisons to the Dream Team and his life after basketball, Drexler and I had a friendly 15-minute discussion. | {
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There is going to be a ton of time for looking forward at what’s next for the Maple Leafs in the coming weeks, so I thought I’d take a quick glance back at the series that was.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned in there, in why they lost to a team like the Bruins. Examining player performance one-by-one will help with that analysis.
This is obviously a subjective exercise, and with just seven games played, the sample sizes are small. I’ve ranked players by their ice time per game, and the grades are on a scale based on their roles and expectations. Stars obviously have a higher bar they have to hit to get a good grade than role players.
Here we go… see you in the comments. Try and keep them civil please, even if you disagree:
Forwards: B-
Auston Matthews: C+. Obviously his postseason was a disappointment. You don’t produce at a 45-goal pace all year and then get one in the playoffs in a seven-game series... | {
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In over ten years of surveying the top Conservative team, we have never seen anything like it.
Every single Cabinet member named in our last survey is down. Yes, that’s right. The whole lot of them. (There have been two changes since it was published: Dominic Raab and Geoffrey Cox have entered the Cabinet. Both their ratings are lower than their predecessors, David Davis and Jeremy Wright.)
Under the circumstances, Sajid Javid does very well indeed to get to 67 per cent, and top the table. But his rating is down from 75 per cent last month. Michael Gove, who was second on 73 per cent, plunges to 39 per cent. That he is fourth despite this dismal score is a measure of how low this Cabinet is currently rated. Penny Mordaunt, who was third on 62 per cent, drops to 50 per cent. That she rises to second is another measure of the thumbs-down given to her colleagues. And so on. When ratings come in this low, places in the table scarcely matter.
The bottom of the chart is a turkey shoot. Julian Smith falls heavily into negative territory after the Brandon Lewis pairing row. Lewis himself, who last month was in the top ten with 47 per cent, drops through the floor to minus three per cent. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, he is paying the penalty for CCHQ’s institutional support for the Cabinet Chequers agreement and the Brexit White Paper. As for the Prime Minister herself, she is at her lowest rating ever – the best part of – 50 per cent.
Number Ten and CCHQ must hope that this is summer lightning, that the discontent of Party members cools when autumn comes, and that our panel is then willing to give the new policy a second glance. We believe that the latter’s view is set in stone when it comes to the last, but could, as ever, be wrong. | {
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As Miguel Ibarra posed for photographs with his new team, Club Leon of Mexico, George Kuntz would no doubt have cracked a smile. It was a moment of validation for a coach who three years earlier had urged nigh every contemporary in Major League Soccer to take Ibarra in the 2013 SuperDraft.
“I still have the texts on my phone,” he says proudly. A memento of what might have been for the former UCI Irvine coach, he estimates half a dozen coaches said no before the Portland Timbers eventually took Ibarra. However they would cut him not long after, casting him into a sea of uncertainty.
Some years later, after a stop in NASL, Ibarra is now a USA international and soon to be plying his trade in Liga MX. Enrique Cardenas - currently with Atlante - is another example of working-class Hispanic players (better off Hispanic players do not appear to hit the same hurdles) falling through the cracks in US soccer and questioned the draft process after going unselected in 2014. “I was certain I was going to get picked,” Cardenas told Top Drawer Soccer. “Going into the first two rounds I was skeptical I would get picked there. But I thought it’d happen in the third round. Picks kept coming in and I was kind of confused.”
For Kuntz, players like Cardenas and Ibarra are not isolated cases. He believes young Hispanic players are often at a disadvantage. “There are a lot of players like Miguel [and Enrique] in unaffiliated men’s leagues that are working on paper work,” he says. “I know Jürgen [Klinsmann] and Tab [Ramos] are working on this, it’s a big push to find these players because they come and go [from the country]. They’re quick, they’re tacticians, they’re technical, they’re street savvy and they’re difference makers in so many different ways.”
Cardenas expressed similar sentiments in 2014: “We’re just going to keep bringing creative players from abroad and players born in the US aren’t going to succeed,” he told TopDrawerSoccer. “There’s something wrong with the system.”
Kuntz estimates that 14 years ago, there were 60,000 players playing in unaffiliated men’s leagues in southern California alone. “There are leagues that are not sanctioned,” he explains. “Kind of renegade leagues to either make a little bit of money or to serve the community and they’re not registered with US Soccer, with AYSO [American Youth Soccer Organisation], or these other organisations that are large soccer organisations.”
As for why they are not registered, Kuntz believes that a registration surcharge is part of the reason, while youngsters in border towns prefer to ply their trade in Mexico. “A lot of kids in San Diego, in Chula Vista, play and train across the border in Mexican leagues with relatives and friends,” he said. “They train with Xolos, the professional team, then there’s a team in Durango. There is always this glory they hear about playing in Mexico. They get to train with good players and they’re paid good money.”
A more recent example that Kuntz talks of is “Choco” Gomez - also signed by Atlante and described as a “midfield maestro” by Gary Kleiban, a coach involved at the top youth level. On his blog, Kleiban alleges the youngster was ”repeatedly snubbed by American pro soccer outlets”, and is further proof that Hispanic players falling through the cracks was not a myth.
That is in part, according to Kuntz, due to a lack of fluency between soccer organisations in the United States. “We’re so fragmented without one body,” he says. “You have these organisations that are competing with each other for numbers.”
A model referred to as “pay-to-play” is also seen as damaging to the prospects of working-class Latino players, with those from lower income households often shut out from the best playing opportunities – and leagues that may attract MLS scouts. Those who are not able to pay for the best opportunities go unnoticed, with few other avenues open to the professional game. In the case of Ibarra, a weak set of safety nets meant that once he was released by the Timbers he had few options to remain in professional soccer despite only missing out on a contract in Portland due to squad size restrictions.
When I first spoke to Kuntz in March he talked of a similar situation with Irving Garcia, formerly of the New York Red Bulls. “The coach [Hans Backe] was embedded in the defensive philosophy,” Kuntz explains, something he feels is detrimental to creative players who need room to express themselves. “It’s like watching a child finger painting,” he added. “You don’t interrupt the process, you let them create.”
Eventually released by the Red Bulls, a brief spell in Antigua followed for Garcia before he drifted off the radar, a consequence of the lack of backup options for those released by MLS clubs.
The college system is still a recognised pathway to professional soccer, but even that avenue can be a distance too great for young footballers from less well-off backgrounds. “I’m helping with a club and the entire team except for two are Hispanic,” Kuntz explains. “I asked the coach if any of these kids are considering college and he said they’d like to but none of them have the grades. Some of them would be eligible for the Dream Act [Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors], where they can still get funds from the government for education. There’s student athletes like that which could still go to college but why aren’t they being seen by scouts?”
Kuntz lives in California, and it was there that he first met Klinsmann when the German moved to the US – their children attending the same pre-school. The pair are still in touch, and Kuntz has raised his concerns with Klinsmann. “[Klinsmann has] been more supportive than most technical directors in getting into those [minority] communities,” Kuntz says. “I’d like to spend more money and have more scouts [finding players]. The problem is the academy players are the ones most seen by coaches.”
However, all is not lost. “The good news is five years ago we probably wouldn’t even be having this discussion,” Kuntz explains. “It would be even worse. When Miguel arrived in Minnesota there was no Galaxy II. Now we have the Galaxy II, the Portland Timbers 2, the Sounders 2. You won’t see guys like Miguel slip through the cracks as much. However, you have states like Arizona and New Mexico that don’t have an MLS team, what are they going to do? It’s going to be up to those [youth] clubs to get them into the academies.”
In a few weeks, Kuntz will reunite with Ibarra when Leon play a friendly in California. Watching the fruition of talent he first spotted at 15 and tried to push into Major League Soccer, he remains both hopeful and optimistic that in the future, Ibarra’s story becomes the exception, rather than the rule. “I think they [MLS] are going in the right direction,” he says. | {
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(CNN) Emergency medical technician Alex McNabb has been let go by Jeb Stuart Rescue Squad months after racist comments surfaced on a podcast in which he compared black patients to gorillas and claimed to take "immense satisfaction" as he "terrorized" an African-American boy with a needle.
Wren Williams, the attorney for the Patrick County, Virginia, rescue squad, sent a statement from the board saying, "During executive sessions, the pros and cons of Mr. McNabb's continued relationship with the squad were discussed, a legal opinion from outside legal counsel was shared among the board members, and the board members shared their personal thoughts."
The board did not state exactly why it fired McNabb but it did so after discussions in an executive session on Sunday. The squad placed McNabb on unpaid leave in December, two days after news reports of his comments surfaced.
McNabb has said it's his First Amendment right to say the things he has said and that it was all said while he was pretending to be a fictional character he created named Dr. Narcan.
He has not responded to CNN's request for comment.
Read More | {
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A 78-year-old Clearwater woman tried to fly on an international trip from Detroit Metropolitan Airport with almost $41,000 in cash hidden inside her girdle, bra and carry-on bag, federal authorities said.
A complaint filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Detroit said the woman was trying to board a flight April 2 to the Philippines with her daughter. She initially said she had $200 in cash but submitted a form declaring she had $1,200, prompting questions.
During a search, Customs and Border Protection officers found $8,000 in wallets in her carry-on bag, $4,000 sewn into a cloth pouch and nearly $1,000 in envelopes, according to the complaint. She then told them she had $3,000 in her blouse and $2,000 sewn into the strap of her bra.
Officers continued to search and said they found about $21,000 in her girdle. The woman told authorities that she had recently sold her home for $120,000, wired some money to the Philippines and had planned to carry a portion of the money with her.
"She stated that she did not wire the proceeds to the Philippines this time because she thought it was safer to carry the money," according to the complaint.
Federal law requires travelers to declare if they are carrying more than $10,000. The woman hasn't been charged, but the government in the forfeiture complaint said it wants to keep the money. The Detroit News reported details of the request Friday.
Federal court records don't list a lawyer for the woman. The Associated Press left a message Saturday seeking comment from her at a telephone listing in Florida. | {
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Jaguar
For far too long, Tesla has had the high-end electric vehicle market all to itself. But that's set to change in the next couple of years. Some of the more forward-thinking traditional automakers have gotten their act together, and the first out of the gate will be Jaguar with its new I-Pace SUV. And make no mistake about it: the I-Pace is gunning squarely at Tesla when it comes to the EV's vital statistics. What's more, with a starting price of $69,500 it's going to significantly undercut both the Model S and Model X.
We first saw the I-Pace as a concept car at the 2016 Los Angeles Auto Show. Since then, it has felt like a familiar face, appearing at every major auto show in 2017. There was even news last December that a one-make racing series will support Formula E in 2018. But we didn't actually see the production version until Jaguar revealed it last week in Austria. US pricing was revealed on Tuesday morning.
Visually, the production I-Pace looks all but identical to the show car. And it's quite the looker, blending elements from the stillborn C-X75 hybrid hypercar and Jaguar's conventionally powered F-Pace and E-Pace SUVs. Although the I-Pace's footprint is similar to the F-Pace, Jaguar says that the cab-forward design and the advantages of an EV powertrain layout allow for a spacious interior more in keeping with a vehicle the next size up.
"The I-PACE’s electric powertrain offered us unprecedented design freedom," said Ian Callum, Jaguar director of design. "Starting with a clean sheet enabled the dramatic cab-forward profile, unique proportions, and exceptional interior space—yet it is unmistakably a Jaguar. We wanted to design the world’s most desirable EV, and I’m confident we’ve met that challenge."
It's not just a pretty face, either. The design gives the I-Pace a relatively low drag coefficient (Cd) of 0.29, although that number is somewhat meaningless without taking into account the frontal area (CdA), a figure car companies seem loath to give out.
The I-Pace's design manages airflow around the vehicle to minimize drag, and, at speeds above 65mph, the air suspension will lower it by 0.4 inches (10mm) to help things further. Cold air for the battery comes from the front grille, which also channels air up and over the top of the roofline. And there are active vanes that can open up in the front bumper to boost airflow to the battery and climate control system if necessary.
Winter testing north of the Arctic Circle means the EV will handle temperatures down to -40 (pick your units, they're the same!) and the thermal management strategy uses active heating when cold, a "cooling system" at moderate temperatures, with a refrigeration unit linked to the air conditioning system pitching in at high temperatures.
Did someone mention Tesla?
If there was any doubt that Jaguar is targeting the Tesla crowd, consider the I-Pace's headline numbers. It has a 90kWh battery pack comprising 432 nickel manganese cobalt lithium-ion cells. That should give the EV about 240 miles of range under the EPA's testing (although it has yet to be rated). Jaguar says that the I-Pace will charge from zero to 80 percent in about 40 minutes using a 100kW charger, or 85 minutes on a 50kW unit.
At-home charging using a 7kW charger should take just over 10 hours to get from empty to 80 percent and just under 13 hours to completely recharge a depleted battery. Jaguar notes that most Americans drive fewer than 30 miles (48km) a day, and even Tesla CEO Elon Musk says EV owners should charge at home. However, unlike Porsche, the company has not made any announcement about building out a network of fast chargers here in the US.
Then there's the performance. The I-Pace is a twin-motor design; each motor is rated at 147kW (197hp) and 350Nm (258ft-lbs), although, as with the dual-motor Teslas, combined output is limited, in this case to 295kW (394hp) and 694Nm (512ft-lbs). From a standing start, the I-Pace will hit 60mph in 4.5 seconds (0-100km/h takes 4.8 seconds), before topping out at 124mph (200km/h). It slows with similar aplomb—when driving in one-pedal mode with maximum regen, the EV will decelerate at up to 0.4G. For context, the new Nissan Leaf has the most aggressive regen of any EV I've driven, and it only slows at 0.2G.
To ram the message home, Jaguar arranged a 0-60mph drag race between the I-Pace and two Tesla Model Xes, the $79,500 75D and the $96,000 100D, which you can see below. (Spoiler alert: the Jaguar wins.)
Although Jaguar hasn't released the I-Pace's weight, it does tell us that it has a 50:50 weight distribution. So we can expect it to handle as a Jaguar should, and the standard air suspension means it ought to ride like one, too, something I dinged the F-Pace for when we tested it last year.
Yes, you’ll even get OTA updates
The ownership experience looks designed to one-up Tesla. Not only does the I-Pace undercut the cheapest Model X by $10,000, it will also be eligible for the full $7,500 IRS tax credit for several years to come. Tesla, on the other hand, is starting to get close to the 200,000 limit, at which point those rebates begin to shrink. And the warranty is more generous as well: five years or 60,000 miles, with a battery warranty that covers eight years or 100,000 miles. (Tesla warranties its vehicles for four years or 50,000 miles, although its battery warranty is also eight years or unlimited miles.)
Jaguar has even taken a page out of Musk's book when it comes to making sure the I-Pace remains up to date. In addition to a suite of connected apps similar to those you'd get with a Tesla (or Leaf, or Chevy Bolt EV), the company says that "[t]o ensure customers always have access to the latest infotainment, telematics and battery energy control software, the I-PACE will also be the first Jaguar to provide Software-Over-The-Air (SOTA) updates.
Jaguar Land Rover also says that its 207 dealerships (166 of which are Jaguar franchises) in the US will be investing $1.5 billion over the next five years as the company goes increasingly electric
"With the debut of the Jaguar I-PACE, Jaguar in the US is officially in the luxury electric vehicle business, and our retailers and customers are placing orders," said Joe Eberhardt, president and CEO of Jaguar Land Rover North America. "In partnership with our retailers who are investing in new facilities and EV infrastructure, we have a proactive market strategy led by very competitive pricing and the Jaguar EliteCare electric vehicle ownership package. We think the entire journey of buying, owning and driving an I-PACE will be one our customers will love for life."
Listing image by Jaguar | {
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North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's wife Ri Sol-ju appears to be pregnant again.
Chung Sung-jang of the Sejong Institute said Friday that a photo on the front page of the Feb. 18 edition of the official Rodong Sinmun daily shows Ri has put on weight and is wearing loose-fitting clothes.
The outfit Ri is wearing is similar in color and design to a maternity dress she wore in October 2010.
Chung said Ri seems to be no more than three to five months into her pregnancy, if that is what it is.
She gave birth to a baby girl last year and the question now is whether she will produce a male heir to the North Korean throne.
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by John Harvin
“If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas,” supposedly said Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, first woman governor of Texas, in opposing the teaching of foreign languages in Texas schools. In fact, the college-educated Ferguson probably didn’t say it. But the misquote endures because it captures pretty well one particular segment of the American population – those who are almost always against learning and science, particularly when that science is “inconvenient.”
Whether it’s evolution or landing on the moon or daylight savings time or climate change, there is always a group of people who are just plain agin’ it. It’s a lot of fun for those of us with a smattering of education to make fun of these rubes – at the Creation Museum in Kentucky, you can have your picture taken riding a saddled triceratops. But there are also anti-scientists who aren’t rubes and should know better, like George Will, who has jumped on the climate-change denial bandwagon.
97% percent of scientists around the world believe that climate change is occurring and is at least partially caused by man. According to Wikipedia, every single scientific organization worldwide of any standing has taken the same position.
As for the other 3%, it’s understandable why those who design SUVs and drill for petroleum should be reluctant to admit that global warming is occurring. My client Michael, who retired from Philip-Morris after thirty plus years, only recently acknowledged that smoking might play a role in lung disease. But why are George Will and my friend Chris, a CEO educated at Oxford and Harvard Business School, climate-change denialists? With George, I assume it is just simple cynical expediency. I’ve done enough big-time public speaking to know the only way to get paid is to tell the audience what it wants to hear and there are audiences for this stuff. George and Rush Limbaugh have mortgages and prescription bills just like the rest of us. (In kind, not in degree.)
With Chris it’s a mystery why he cares so much, but he has invested countless hours cherry picking the data to “prove” that global warming is a data blip. Is it simply pro-growth reflex?
Who knows? Not that it really matters. Whether George and Chris buy into it or not, overwhelming scientific evidence suggests anyone who asserts man-made climate change is not occurring is either A) a fool or B) completely blinded by self-interest.
The problem is this: I do believe in the climate change science. That takes me out of Category A, thank goodness. But I am pretty sure I am still a climate-change denialist. I am just in Category B.
Don’t get me wrong. At our house, we meticulously sort every bit of garbage for recycling. We compost. I ride public transportation to work. We have instructed the architect for our new home to install solar panels and a geo-thermal heat pump. Our new refrigerator has the highest energy rating possible. We bought a first-generation hybrid car. We support climate change legislation like the Waxman bill (HR 2998, such as it is).
But the inconvenient truth is we also have three vehicles, including a rather large Audi that my eco-friendly wife drives. We have two houses and are building another (for two people.) We have a television on every floor of both houses, including three flat panels, each of which soaks up as much energy as a refrigerator. We fly to Barbados in the summer and Tahoe in the winter.
In other words, sorting our garbage to reduce our carbon footprint is like pissing into a hurricane. At best, it is naïve and ridiculous tokenism. At worst, it is just a cynical as George Will’s denialism. When Al Gore justifies his massive mansion and fleet of cars by saying he purchases green energy and carbon offsets, that is pure sophistry.
Here’s the bottom line. If reducing global warming depends on reducing carbon emissions, the planet is screwed. Consuming the same amount more efficiently, i.e. driving a hybrid car, is just fiddling around the edges. It’s like obese people who drink diet soda with their fried chicken. In fact, carbon intensity will probably increase going forward, not decrease. For example, the computer you’re reading this blog on. That takes energy. In Japan, the hot new items are electric toilets with stool analyzers, heaters and music players in them. That takes energy. Organic food means fewer chemicals, but often requires far more tillage. That takes energy. Most of the new and wonderful things we routinely incorporate into our lives take more energy than what they replaced.
Is it possible to substitute non-carbon emitting energy sources for those that emit carbon? Yes, but a colleague of mine who is in the business of building windfarms claims that best case, alternative energy will replace 10% of carbon-sourced energy. Assume the best case: we are able to find enough efficiencies and alternative energy sources to hold steady. It’s not at all clear that holding steady is enough. Reducing carbon emissions per capita would mean consuming less food, less electronics, less transportation. And that’s just not very likely.
George may be anti-science, but if I believe washing out milk bottles makes up for driving an eight-cylinder Audi to the store to buy milk, I am anti-arithmetic. My grandkids will be screwed just as badly by my good intentions as by his Know-Nothing-ism. (Note to George. I know the Know-Nothings were really an anti-Catholic party. I’m making a point here, dude.)
Gulp. I am a climate-change denialist, just like Chris. And George. And Rush.
God help me.
_________________
John Harvin is the pseudonym of a prominent business executive and writer. He has traveled and worked in forty countries.
John has written for numerous national and international magazines and journals, and written and had published five books, including one non-fiction bestseller and two novels. (He’s actually written nine books, but that’s a different story.) He writes because it is the only way he can sort through the maelstrom of crap careening around inside his skull and figure out what he really thinks about anything.
When not working or writing, you can find him having dinner with his long-suffering wife, walking the dog, training for triathlons, skiing, ultra-cycling, scuba diving, motorcycle riding, hiking, working on his farm, worrying about his two grown children or yelling at the Cubs on TV. (Open your eyes, Alfonso. It’s a baseball, not a piñata!) | {
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Torrey Craig signed a two-year deal with the Brisbane Bullets last year and only three months ago had discussed becoming a naturalised Australian and a long term piece of the Brisbane Bullets… how quickly things can change.
The coming change was evident when NBL media’s Tommy Greer interviewed Craig after his last summer league game with the Denver where he looked primed for Nuggets roster spot.
“It’s looking pretty good for me, I have to sit down with my agent and some things from Denver and it’s all looking pretty positive right now” said Craig after his last summer league game.
It has since been confirmed that Craig has agreed to a two-way deal with the Nuggets which will see him play primarily with the Sioux Falls Skyforce, the Nuggets G-League team (formerly D-League), but could potentially play up to 45 games with the Nuggets NBA squad this season.
I am confirm the #Nuggets deal with summer league standout Torrey Craig, and add that it is a two-way contract. — Chris Dempsey (@chrisadempsey) July 16, 2017
Craig will be the become the first player to sign a two-way contract with the Nuggets. The two-way contract allows NBA rosters to grow from 15 players to 17 and allows players to make earn up to $US250,000 ($A319,200) over a 45 day period. Players will only be able to spend a maximum of 45 days on the NBA roster if they are signed to a two-way contract.
The 26-year-old averaged 11.5 points, 4.8 rebounds, 1.3 assists, and one block in 22.2 minutes per game in the Summer League team, while displaying his signature defensive instincts which earnt him the NBL Defensive Player of the Year award last season.
The Brisbane Bullets had just completed their roster but now will search for a replacement to team with the clubs other imports Stephen Holt, and Travis Trice.
“I really feel as if I displayed versatility in the summer league,” said Craig after his final summer league game. “I feel as if I used my size to my advantage and showed I could guard multiple positions while also showing I could do some scoring, so my versatility was on full display.”
Despite being on a two-way deal, Craig will have the opportunity to earn a spot in the Nuggets rotation this season. The Nuggets interest in Craig no doubt boosted by the team’s loss of Danilo Gallinari and the fact that Wilson Chandler is the only player on the team’s current roster listed at small forward.
The position is so thin for the Nuggets at the moment there is a possibility that Craig could start the season as the backup to Wilson Chandler. The situation at the Nuggets couldn’t be better for Craig to achieve his NBA goals, arguably Craig could be the Nuggets best defensive player this season, leading to a much-increased role over time. | {
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Sen. Debbie Stabenow released the list of more 1,400 climate studies that Department of Agriculture researchers have published. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images agriculture Senate Democrats release list of climate studies buried by Trump administration
Senate Democrats released on Thursday a report outlining dozens of times the Trump administration has censored or minimized climate science across the federal government at agencies including the EPA and the Department of Homeland Security.
Sen. Debbie Stabenow, ranking member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, also publicly released a list of more than 1,400 climate studies that Department of Agriculture researchers have published during the current administration after POLITICO reported that USDA buried its own research and failed to release its plan to study the issue. The matter is increasingly urgent for farmers and ranchers dealing with erratic and extreme weather.
The trove of studies by USDA researchers carry warnings about climate change that the government is largely not communicating to farmers and ranchers or the public. The list published includes research showing that climate change is likely to drive down yields for some crops, harm milk production, and lead to a drop in nutrient density for key crops like rice and wheat.
“These studies show how climate change is affecting crop production, disrupting how food is grown and increasing risk to communities,” Stabenow said during a press conference on Thursday. Stabenow also serves as chairwoman of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, the research arm of Senate Democrats.
The Michigan Democrat called it “outrageous” that “critical information for communities, for farmers, for those of us who care deeply about what’s happening to agriculture, these are not being shared with the people who need to know but they are being paid for by them, as taxpayers.”
A spokesperson for the Agriculture Department said it's "false" to suggest that the department is suppressing science.
Morning Agriculture A daily briefing on agriculture and food policy — in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
“We have repeatedly provided the Senate Agriculture Committee with evidence to the contrary, and the department has been transparent and communicative to the committee in response to their questions on research," the spokesperson said, in an email. "The list of studies linked in the report were provided by the USDA to the committee and are all publicly available."
The move comes as climate change is becoming an increasingly prominent issue in the Democratic presidential primary. The report was released ahead of several planned climate protests Friday and the United National Climate Action Summit in New York this weekend.
In their report, Senate Democrats allege that the Trump administration has repeatedly gone out of its way to undermine climate science.
The report pointed to President Donald Trump falsely claiming that Alabama had been under threat from Hurricane Dorian and his subsequent insistence on overruling the forecasting of NOAA scientists. It also noted the government released the Fourth National Climate Assessment — which warned of billions in damages and sweeping effects to public health and infrastructure — the day after Thanksgiving when most Americans are not paying attention to the news.
The roundup includes numerous instances where agencies, including FEMA, EPA, Department of Homeland Security and Interior Department, have dropped mention of climate change from key reports or websites.
“Frankly, this is just an overview because it’s being done every day,” Stabenow told reporters. | {
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Image copyright Reuters Image caption Protesters erected burning barricades across key roads in Port-au-Prince
Anti-government protesters barricaded key streets in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, on Monday.
The blockades came a day after police demanding better working conditions attacked the army headquarters in the city.
The government of President Jovenel Moïse called the attack "a coup attempt" and the armed forces spoke of a "war situation".
At least two people died in Sunday's clashes.
On Monday, protesters scattered bricks, burning tyres and overturned ice-cream carts on the streets leading to the home of President Moïse, whose resignation they demand.
Image copyright EPA
Image copyright EPA
Image copyright Reuters
Large parts of the city were deserted a day after police officers surrounded the army headquarters and opened fire. Some of those taking part in the shoot-out were in police uniform.
Image copyright EPA
Gen Jodel Lesage of the Haitian armed forces told local media: "We are under fire by weapons of all kinds, automatic rifles, petrol bombs, tear gas."
The government said it was "an attack on freedom and democracy". Police officers said that they had come under attack first.
They have been protesting for weeks. One of their key demands is to be allowed to form a union, which they say will ensure more transparency when they conduct negotiations with their superiors. They also want better pay.
President Moïse last week announced the creation of a financial fund for relatives of officers who have been killed in the line of duty, but the move has failed to appease the disgruntled officers.
Image copyright Reuters
Image copyright Reuters
Following the clashes, the government announced it would cancel all remaining carnival celebrations "to avoid a bloodbath".
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Why are there so many protests in Haiti?
These are not the first protests Mr Moïse has faced. Last year Haitians took to the streets over the dire state of Haiti's economy, which they blame on the government.
Mr Moïse has been in power since 2017 and has said he would not leave the country in the "hands of armed gangs and drug traffickers".
All photos subject to copyright. | {
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Giant Bombcast 629: Give Me a Werewolf
This week: the surprise PlayStation 5 DualSense controller announcement, the Final Fantasy VII remake, the end of Doom Eternal, The Last of Us Part II delay, Atari crypto, 40 hot dogs and buns, a quick pants check, and your emails! | {
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Watch Video
Transcript
The Orange Book has long been a reliable resource for information about FDA-approved drugs. The electronic availability of the Orange Book brings this valuable tool to the web for healthcare professionals. FDA Drug Info Rounds pharmacists discuss how to search the Electronic Orange Book for generic equivalents, patents, and exclusivity.
Related Information | {
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We are pleased to confirm that Quant Network is now a Guarantor of Pay.UK, the UK’s leading retail payments authority. Pay.UK is responsible for shaping the payment ecosystem to promote competition, innovation and openness.
Every day, individuals and businesses use the services Pay.UK provides to get their salaries, pay their bills and make online and mobile banking payments. Pay.UK moves more than £6.7 trillion every year, through Bacs Direct Credit, Direct Debit, Faster Payments, cheques and Paym.
Pay.UK was formed in 2017, having brought together BACS, Faster Payments, Cheque and Credit Clearing, and UK Payments Administration to provide a more aligned and simpler financial infrastructure for the whole of the UK and is accountable to the Bank of England and the Payment Systems Regulator.
Pay.UK moves £17.5 billion in payments every single day. To enable a vibrant UK economy, focused on increasing participation and competition in the payments ecosystem. Pay.UK aims to embed a culture which is open, inclusive and accountable, and to this end they have expanded their guarantor base so that it more adequately represents the various stakeholders in the payments ecosystem. This will help ensure that the Pay.UK Board makes decisions in favour of the wider Community interest.
Additionally, the New Payments Architecture (NPA) is a new conceptual model for the future development of the UK’s shared retail payment infrastructure. It will be the biggest change to the way payments are processed in the UK since the 1960s, ensuring payments are safe while also encouraging competitive innovation and unlocking new business opportunities in everything from smarter uses of banking and payment data through to new transactional services.
Quant Network continues to be active in the financial services sector and subsequently supporting Pay.UK’s mission to enable a vibrant UK economy. Guarantors of Pay.UK will be able to hold their board accountable for the continued fulfillment of their purpose and strategic objectives, such as maintaining the integrity of their services, acting as a catalyst for change in the payments industry, and promoting competition in both upstream and downstream services.
Quant Network’s involvement as a Guarantor includes:
• the right to attend and vote at Annual and Extraordinary General Meetings;
• from time to time to vote on ordinary or special resolutions which require their approval;
• to act collectively to monitor and amend Pay.UK’s constitution;
• to confirm or reject the reappointment of individual members of Pay.UK’s Board of Directors as they appear for reappointment;
• to propose candidates to the nominations committee, for prospective Pay.UK Board Directors and;
• to confirm the appointment of Pay.UK’s auditors. | {
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“If you want more of something, subsidize it…”—Ronald Reagan
Sacramento Appeasers Pay Gang Members To Not Kill People
“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”—Winston Churchill While President Donald Trump has vowed that United States authorities will “destroy” the gang MS-13 as part of his crackdown on crime, the Sacramento City Council voted unanimously last week to pay gang members $1.5 Million to not kill people.
The controversial program the city plans to adopt, Advance Peace, claims it “interrupts gun violence in U.S. urban neighborhoods by providing transformational opportunities” to gang members involved in weapons offenses… paying them not to terrorize and kill people. The program, backed by the mega-Draper, Richards, Kaplan Foundation, was only founded in 2016 and first implemented by DeVone Boggan, a “Social Justice” warrior. His bio says he was the founding Director of Richmond’s Office of Neighborhood Safety from 2007 to 2016. Richmond has one of the highest violent crime rates in the nation, and earned the reputation as one of the most dangerous cities in America during that time. “The program is funded through combination of government money and private donation,” Fox40 reported. “A third of the program’s costs, which goes toward evaluations and training, comes from the government.” Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, the former Democrat Senate President Pro Tem of the California State Legislature, requested the vote in response to a shooting in Sacramento’s Meadowview park, which left one person dead and four injured, Fox 40 reported. The city council vote was scheduled to take place in two weeks, but Steinberg moved it up. “Let’s get going on doing everything we can to save innocent lives,” Steinberg told Fox 40. The City Council voted unanimously to approve the scheme, rather than spending the $1.5 million to beef up Sacramento police department gang units. Steinberg has an extraordinary record and has done more to harm Sacramento and its residents during his tenure as Senate Pro Tem than perhaps any legislator in history. He’s in the pockets of the unions, actively hostile towards democratic rights and open government, and is a doctrinaire hard-core left-winger. He is proving to be an utter catastrophe for Sacramento. Steinberg supported all of the gun control measures while in the Legislature, including increasing the depth of background checks on gun purchasers and all ammunition purchases, outlawing “assault rifles,” which aren’t actual assault rifles, and all of the other anti-gun bills violating our Second Amendment rights. Yet Steinberg thinks it’s a good idea to pay gang members not to kill people.
It’ll Never Work… Office of Neighborhood Safety is “kind of on their own track and we’re on ours,” Richmond Police Officer Ben Therriault told ABC News in 2016. “I don’t know what they’re doing on the street level.” The ABC News story featured gang member Dawaun Rice who had “earned” the maximum amount available under the Advance Peace program for “choosing not to shoot,” but updated the article after Rice was charged with the murder of 29-year-old Javonte Prothro. Compounding the issue, if the gang members involved are MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha), a trans-national criminal gang that originated in El Salvador and has expanded to the United States, Canada and Mexico, this strategy will fail. These El Salvador imports are in the U.S. thanks to former President Barack Obama’s disastrous open borders immigration policy during his second term. They are brutal and violent, and should not be paid to not kill; they should be imprisoned or deported. There is no compromise with these violent domestic terrorists. “Advance Peace may also soon find its way to Sacramento,” Fox40 reported August 22, ahead of the city council vote. “Boggan says Sacramento city officials have been “assertive” in their pursuit of the program, showing that Steinberg already had this scheme in the works. “How bad has gun violence gotten in Sacramento, Calif.?” Fox40 asked. “City leaders now plan to pay gang members $1.5 million for a cease-fire.” Sacramento’s Surge in Violence But first let’s explore why gun violence has increased so dramatically in California, and why Sacramento is undergoing a surge. We have Gov. Jerry Brown to thank for Assembly Bill 109, Proposition 47, and Proposition 57, which have undermined the rule of law in California.
AB 109, signed into law in 2011 by Brown, ordered the realignment or shifting of thousands of inmates from state prison to county jails. The 2014 Proposition 47 ballot measure, pushed by Brown, reclassified many felonies as misdemeanors. California voters were sold on reforming the state’s drug laws with Prop. 47. However, the measure covered more crimes than non-violent drug offenders. Moreover, drug addicts are likely to get less treatment in the state’s drug courts because prosecutors have lost a bargaining chip in the plea process. Add to it the court-ordered prisoner releases as a part of the state’s prison realignment under the 2011 AB 109 law, and you have a state ripe for a surge in crime; such as in Richmond and Oakland, which even after Jerry Brown’s eight years on-the-scene as Mayor, the FBI still considers one of the most dangerous cities in America. The 2014 measure’s backers and supporters told Californians that savings from releasing state inmates would free up “hundreds of millions of dollars annually, which would be spent on truancy prevention, mental health and substance abuse treatment, and victim services. “Prosecutors and police chiefs across California say it is behind a wave of petty crimes as offenders who previously were locked away now quickly get back on the street,” Chris Reed wrote in 2016. “Statistics released by the FBI and the California Police Chiefs Association back up their assertions.” Proposition 57, “The California Parole for Non-Violent Criminals and Juvenile Court Trial Requirements Initiative,” rounded out the undermining of law enforcement in California. The proposition was poorly written and allows criminals convicted of rape, lewd acts against a child, and human trafficking to be released early from prison. Prop. 57 allows career criminals to be treated as first offenders, and it overturned provisions of victims’ rights legislation like Marsy’s Law, “three strikes,” Victim’s Bill of Rights, and the Californians Against Sexual Exploitation Act. Government subsidies to gang members to “choose not to kill” will not do anything to help California’s gang-infested neighborhoods… it’s like paying ISIS a stipend to stop planting car bombs, suicide bombings and terror attacks. “If you want more of something, subsidize it…”— Ronald Reagan
Katy Grimes -- Bio and Archives Articles with Megan Barth
Katy Grimes is an investigative journalist, Senior Correspondent with the Flash Report, ReaganBabe, and Senior Media Fellow with Energy and Environmental Institute. A longtime political analyst, she has written for The Sacramento Union, The Washington Examiner, Watchdog.org, The Pacific Research Institute’s CalWatchdog, The San Francisco Examiner, The Business Journal, E&E Legal, The Sacramento Bee, Legal Insurrection, Canada Free Press, and Laura Ingraham’s LifeZette, and can be heard regularly on many talk radio shows each week.
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Canonicalは4月18日(米国時間)、「Open infrastructure, developer desktop and IoT are the focus for Ubuntu 19.04」において、Ubuntuの最新版となるUbuntu 19.04の公開を伝えた。Ubuntu 19.04は「Ubuntu 19.04 (Disco Dingo)」からダウンロード可能で、amd64版のデスクトップ向けエディションとサーバエディションが提供されている。
Ubuntu 19.04はOpenStack、Kubernetes、Cephなどの主要なオープンソース・インフラストラクチャ・プロジェクトによるイノベーションが組み込まれており、マルチクラウドおよびオンプレミス運用向けの高度なライフサイクル管理により、ベアメタル、VMware、OpenStackをはじめ、主要なパブリッククラウドまで対応する。
例えば、OpenStack SteinはGPGPUおよびFPGAパススルーによりAIとNFVハードウェアを高速化し、Ceph Mimicは複数サイトでの複製を可能にし、最新のKubernates 1.14はエンタープライズストレージおよびコンテナ化された新しいダイレクトランタイムを提供する。
資料: Canonical
Ubuntu 19.04は中間リリースのバージョンであり、サポート期間は9カ月間で、サポート終了は2020年1月となる。Canonicalは2年に1回、Ubuntuの長期サポートバージョンを公開している。最新の長期サポート版はUbuntu 18.04 LTS。長期サポートバージョンは5年間はサポートが提供され、Ubuntu 18.04 LTSに関しては倍となる10年間のサポートも言及されている。
Ubuntuユーザーの大半は長期サポートバージョンを使っているとされている。中間リリースを採用するのは新しい機能やドライバを使うといった目的のあるユーザーが多い。 | {
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What Happens Next For Lois Lerner?
I thought I'd expand on my previous posts (see here and here) since some folks still seem confused.
Yesterday, the House, in a bipartisan vote, found former IRS Exempt Organizations Director Lois Lerner in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to testify about the IRS targeting of conservative groups.
Rep. Issa explains:
�To preempt the release of an independent investigation, Ms. Lerner publicly admitted that the IRS division she led had targeted conservatives. After waiving her right to protection from self-incrimination, Lerner had a choice: testify fully and truthfully about what occurred or face criminal contempt. Ms. Lerner refused to testify even after her attorney told Congress she would do so. �Unless the President decides to assert executive privilege, there is no precedent for the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia to do anything but pursue this criminal case. Absent political interference by the Administration, this legally binding action � as well as a separate resolution calling for a special prosecutor to take over the Main Justice Department�s tainted and dormant investigation � require the Justice Department to take action.�
There's a lot of information packed in there. Here are the 7 issues that will impact the outcome.
(1) Lerner planted the question that revealed the IRS targeting in order to preempt an internal investigation report. It has been largely forgotten now, but this scandal first came to light because Lerner masterminded a roll-out strategy for the scandal because an inspector general's report that detailed the targeting was imminent. The first step in that strategy was for Lerner to ask a friend to pose the question at a conference so that Lerner could explain away the scandal before the IG report became public.
(2) Lerner may have waived her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Virtually all the commentary I see on this from conservative websites (and from Rep. Issa) is, at the very least, incomplete. Part of the difficulty is that application of the right against self-incrimination before Congress is an undeveloped area of law. I cannot emphasize that enough. We just don't know whether she waived her right against self-incrimination because there is scant judicial guidance on this, and what guidance does exist is contradictory. We can take civil and criminal case law as a guide to self-incrimination before Congress, but the bottom line is that witnesses before Congress can pretty much get away with whatever Congress will let them get away with. There were several missteps here.
First, Issa let Lerner go with a blanket invocation of the Fifth Amendment the first time she came before the committee. Such blanket invocations are foreign to civil and criminal cases, so Issa let congressional procedure deviate from civil and criminal procedure right out the gate. He tried to clean it up later by issuing a statement saying she'd waived the Fifth, but it's unclear whether a court will accept that (again, there's no precedent either way).
Second, Issa eventually tried to remedy this problem and make the congressional procedure more closely conform to case law by calling Lerner back and getting her to invoke the Fifth Amendment to specific questions. Unfortunately, case law provides that a witness may waive the right against self-incrimination in one proceeding, and then invoke it later at a different proceeding on the same subject. So even if Lerner waived the right at the first hearing, it will be tough to argue that she waived it for the second hearing, at least if we're applying civil and criminal case law.
Civil case law has also held that a witness may make exculpatory statements without waiving the Fifth Amendment in the situation where the witness is both compelled to appear (i.e., the testimony is not voluntary) and the witness makes no incriminating statements prior to the waiver. Both of those things appear to be true here, but as I wrote above, this was a congressional proceeding, not a civil trial. The difference may be crucial to resolving whether Lerner waived and there just isn't any judicial guidance on it. My gut is that the courts will simply default to the easiest route and apply their own civil precedent to Congressional proceedings.
(3) Lerner has been cited for criminal contempt. Criminal contempt is not the same thing as civil contempt. A criminal contempt conviction ends in a fine or jail time or both. It does not end in the witness being compelled to testify. If the House wants to actually get Lerner's testimony, it will have to sue for civil contempt and win the waiver argument described above. This is the procedure the House took to try and get AG Holder to cough up Fast & Furious information, but that case is still bogged down in court.
(4) Lerner has indicated that a crime occurred. There have been some suggestions that Lerner is "innocent until proven guilty" and that we cannot take a negative inference from her invocation of the Fifth Amendment. This is false. It is entirely appropriate to take a negative inference from someone invoking the Fifth in civil proceedings or before Congress. She had no reason to do so unless she believed a crime had been committed. We can take Lerner at her word when she indicated that she believes a crime had been committed.
(5) The law requires that the U.S. Attorney present the matter to a grand jury. 2 U.S.C. � 194 provides that in these cases: "it shall be the duty of the . . . Speaker of the House . . . to certify, and he shall so certify, the statement of facts aforesaid under the seal of the . . . House . . . to the appropriate United States attorney, whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action."
However, some U.S. Attorneys have resisted fulfilling that duty. Previously, the only circumstance in which U.S. Attorneys have declined to present the matter to a grand jury is when the administration invokes executive privilege. That's why Issa mentions executive privilege in his statement. He's pre-butting a potential objection from the Holder Department of Justice by pointing out that there has never been an assertion of executive privilege in Lerner's case. Does that mean that the U.S. Attorney will actually present the matter to a grand jury here? No. Expect resistance, the "political interference" Issa mentions.
(6) Lerner could cut a deal. Reports have indicated that Lerner was close to cutting a deal just prior to being called to testify the second time. Obviously, if some kind of deal is made, the contempt matter ends. Such a deal could be made at any time, but is unlikely to come while we wait and see what the U.S. Attorney decides to do. The chance for a deal drops to near zero if the U.S. Attorney declines to present the matter to a grand jury.
(7) Issa could seek civil contempt lawsuit authorization at any time. In the case that the U.S. Attorney decides not to do his duty, Issa could seek authorization (first in the committee and then in the full chamber) to file a civil lawsuit seeking to compel Lerner's testimony. This has only ever happened to three people: Harriet Miers, Joshua Bolton, and Eric Holder. | {
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Facebook’s crypto project Libra will be more similar to email tech than payment services such as PayPal, vice president of product at Calibra said.
Speaking at the Web Summit in Lisbon on Nov. 5, Kevin Weil, vice president of product at Facebook's Calibra digital wallet unit, emphasized that interoperability — the basic principle of email — will the key concept of Libra.
“A journey of years and decades”
Noting that any global developer or entrepreneur can build wallets for Libra, Weil encouraged the global community to collaborate on the interoperable protocols. He said:
“You and me don’t have to collaborate on which email provider we are going to use before we send each other an email. We don’t have to choose which browser we are going to use tailored to which individual website you’re going to go to. These things are protocols, and as long as you build to the protocol everything’s interoperable. Libra is the same way.”
Considering the approximate timing for the Libra’s launch, Weil said that “this will be a journey of years and decades.” As reported by CNBC, Weil expressed confidence that the social media giant’s cryptocurrency will not go viral like a social network. Weil also stressed that users’ financial data on Calibra will stay separate from their social data on Facebook.
Non-members could still use Libra platform
Weil’s statement follows a recent claim of Calibra CEO David Marcus that companies outside the formal Libra Association are able to offer services on the platform.
In an interview in mid-October, Marcus said that former association members such as Visa and Mastercard will still be able to issue cards for Libra.
Best Time to Launch Libra Was Three Years Ago
At the same event, Weil also suggested that the best time to launch Libra was three years ago, before the major crypto bull run of 2017. The Calibra exec reportedly added that now is the second-best time to do so. Weil also reportedly revealed that he was not an early believer of the major cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC) but became a fan in 2015 and 2016. | {
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Coming off a banner $11.9B at the domestic B.O. and $41.7B worldwide in 2018, this year’s theatrical tickets sales aren’t anything to get excited about: The winter B.O. stateside for the period of Jan. 1-Feb. 18 at $1.2B is the lowest start since 2011 per ComScore, and this year’s Presidents Day four-day holiday frame at $148.5M (ComScore+Deadline estimate) is the lowest since 2001.
While Wall Street is bound to scream “Sell! Sell!” in regards to exhibition stocks, rub their chins and downgrade the industry, we need to remember that the motion picture business has a high standard deviation, and a small sample size like seven weeks is meaningless and not indicative of the rest of the year. As we explained at the end of a downer summer in 2017, which arrived after a hot January-April frame that included Beauty and the Beast, Logan and Fate of the Furious, people didn’t just change their moviegoing habits and abandon the cinema during the May-August frame. It’s a product-driven business, and with Disney moving its Marvel title Captain Marvel (which is expected to clock north of $100M) to March, it stands to reason that we’d be down greatly, especially when we’re comparing this winter to the Black Panther one a year ago.
After a few months of poor box office during the summer of 2017, the mainstream press was writing that the theatrical business was in a downward spiral and moviegoing as we know it might be over. Then the fall and holiday releases were extremely profitable, causing 2017 to deliver the third $11B-plus grossing domestic year in a row.
It would be shocking if the aggregate box office doesn’t set another worldwide record this year, especially with such titles on deck as Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame; Disney’s The Lion King, Toy Story 4 and Star Wars: Episode IX; Sony’s Spider-Man: Far From Home and Jumanji 2; Universal’s Cats, Hobbs & Shaw and The Secret Life of Pets 2; Fox’s Dark Phoenix; and Warner Bros’ The Joker and It: Chapter Two.
“In six weeks we’ll be singing a different tune,” says ComScore media analyst Paul Dergarabedian about a March that’s filled with Captain Marvel, Jordan Peele’s Us and Disney’s Dumbo.
While Alita: Battle Angel‘s opening was far from a blockbuster start, Fox is over the moon that the James Cameron production’s $43M five-day is exceeding some tracking services’ late -week projections by 53%. Given the pic’s cinematic dazzle, high-ticket premium services such as 3D drove 47% of the box office, with Imax repping 15%. Fox will have a hold on a majority of the PLFs, Dolbys, and Imax hubs until Captain Marvel arrives on March 8.
More than sour ticket sales this winter, major studio sources continually have been griping about tracking being off. Note that it’s common for tracking to be off when predicting a $100M-plus weekend for a four-quad movie; the sample size of such titles is small historically. But it has been odd to see a number of low- to-midrange projections being off this season. On the Thursday before its opening day, tracking had Universal/BVI/Blumhouse’s Glass between $57M-$60M over four days; the M. Night Shyamalan feature opened to $46.5M. Warner Bros.’ The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part was projected at $53M and came in at $34.1M. This past weekend, aside from Alita besting its tracking (note, there was a flood of ads online and on broadcast TV, which was a catalyst for business), Universal/Blumhouse’s Happy Death Day 2U came in far less than its $23M-$30M with $14.7M over six days. On a better note, New Line’s Isn’t It Romantic? came in pretty close to its $23M projected six-day with $22.8M. | {
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The BBC and other broadcasters will be ordered to publish the social class of their employees, it emerged last night.
It comes after Ofcom criticised broadcasters for a 'woeful' lack of diversity among staff and accused the BBC of failing to represent people from different backgrounds.
Its report found older people, women and those from black, Asian or minority backgrounds are underrepresented across the media industry – and many feel they are portrayed in a negative light.
The BBC and other broadcasters will be ordered to publish the social class of their employees
But Sharon White, the Ofcom chief executive, said she will instruct broadcasters to gather and publish information on their staff's social backgrounds, The Times reported.
She told the Royal Television Society Convention in Cambridge: 'It's a really important issue because you want diversity of thinking, not just visible diversity.
'We are in a creative industry where you want great ideas from people of different backgrounds, different classes, different colours, different parts of the country, Scotland as well as north London.
Next year Ofcom will request the broadcasters start providing more data on social class, so they can start to get a better collective understanding of where they 'currently sit', she added.
Ofcom chief executive Sharon White will tell broadcasters to gather and publish details on their staff's social backgrounds
When asked whether there could be potential complications in defining whether an employee is middle-class or working class, she said the process was 'complex but not impossible.'
A socioeconomic survey revealed earlier this year that the majority of BBC staff were middle-class and privately educated.
It exposed that its employees were more than twice as likely as average to have gone to a private school and three times as likely to have middle-class parents.
The census confirmed that 61 percent of staff had parents in the 'higher managerial and professional occupations' and 17 per cent paid to be educated.
Ms White also said she hopes to see paid internships in the radio and TV and radio, but whether they unpaid internships should be banned by law was a matter for government.
She claimed they currently exclude working-class and poor young people from achieving their career goals.
On Wednesday, Ofcom reported that throughout the five main broadcasters, twelve per cent of staff are from ethnic minorities, while 48 per cent are women.
A spokesman from the BBC said: 'Ofcom's report acknowledges its figures are from 2016 and that the BBC has since published more up-to-date evidence.
'We've been clear about our commitment to leading the way on diversity and our figures for 2017 show we have increased our representation across the board.' | {
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Balancing work and motherhood can be a challenge, so when one North Carolina Starbucks barista found herself without childcare before her morning shift, the kindness of co-workers and customers willing to help out made her day a whole lot easier.
Shantaphae Blakes, who works at a Winston-Salem location of the coffee chain, called her supervisor, Harper Spell, at 4:30 a.m. in tears because she didn’t have anyone to look after her daughter Dilynn.
FAMILY SHARES HILARIOUS PHOTOS EDITED BY 'PROFESSIONAL' PHOTOGRAPHER
“[Blakes] said, ‘I have Dilynn in the back seat. Would it be OK if I came?’ I just said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I need you here. We’ll take care of Dilynn,” the 21-year-old manager told Today.
Once at work, 26-year-old Blakes set the baby carrier on a nearby table so she and Spell could watch Dilynn during her shift. But Spell told Today she was worried how long the baby could stay happy and safe during the morning rush.
Luckily for them, when their regular customer Brad Marshall, a North Carolina State Trooper, heard about the situation, he offered to help.
“He stayed for over an hour. Never in a million years did I think that (a trooper) would just do that, just stay and hang around and help,” Spell told Today.
Blakes was touched by his kindness and relieved to have the extra help in caring for her young daughter.
“It just blew me away. It was wonderful,” she told Today in tears as she recalled the story. “It shocked me. It made me feel so much better. It takes a village to raise a child,” she added.
FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS
“Trooper Brad and one of his fellow partners were outstanding in making sure we could still get our job done and even had a little fun with it. He even bought her a cup that she had been holding on to all morning,” Spell wrote about the situation on Facebook in a post that had received nearly 2,000 likes as of Wednesday afternoon. | {
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Belgian People’s Party leader Mischaël Modrikamen has released a second video in support of Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump after garnering millions of hits for his declaration that “America should not become another Brussels”.
Shooting to prominence after his first short video — released just hours before the Brussels terror attack in March this year — Mr. Modrikamen has once again slammed Hillary Clinton and called on Mr. Trump to help save America.
Repeating his call that the United States should not fall to the interests of globalism and multiculturalism as Western Europe has, Mr. Modrikamen says:
[The] Election is now close. Hillary Clinton is just the kind of politician we have here in Western Europe. Weak, globalist, obsessed by multiculturalism, despising ordinary people, but bending to elites and corporate interests. Right now in Europe, we face migrant invasion, terrorism, violence, rapes. Our way of living is under attack, and industry jobs disappear fast. Our current leaders failed. And candidate Clinton is just like them.
Linking the candidacy of Donald Trump with the very fate of Western civilisation, the People’s Party leader delivers his call of support for Mr. Trump against a montage of images showing a traditional European family when speaking of the revival of society. Images of Nigel Farage and others accompanied his talk of patriotic voices in Europe who would benefit from a Trump victory:
[The] Donald Trump movement is not anymore about an election, it has become the people’s sacred fight to reclaim it’s sovereignty. We are at a crossroads, decline or revival. We need to bury political correctness, and reject the press’ constant bias, and stop the constant self-inflicted wounds. Donald Trump’s victory will reinforce all patriotic voices here also in Europe. We are facing the same threats and challenges. God Bless America. Mr Trump, make America Great Again”.
Speaking to Breitbart London just days after the deadly Brussels attacks in March, Mr. Modrikamen said Belgium had become a haven for Islamist radicals because it was a weak nation with no coherent identity, and remarked: “I don’t want the United States to become the new Brussels”.
Explaining why socialist politicians were so happy to welcome mass migration, he said:
The leftist parties would have vanished from Brussels without the support of the Muslim population here. And we have to let people know in the United States that according to demographic reports, we now have approximately 30-35 per cent Muslim population, and this is re-enforced every day by the migrant invasion According to these demographic trends, we will have a Muslim majority in 15 to 25 years in Brussels, because of high birth rates and the migrant influx. We also have so many illegals here, we have 150,000 to 200,000 of them.
Signalling his strong support for Mr. Trump, the Belgian politician said:
Mr. Trump, we have this in common. We speak the truth. Of course the political and media elites will never forgive us for that, but ordinary citizens are not fools, Mr. Trump. Make America great again, you are an example to many of us here in Europe”.
Follow Oliver Lane on Twitter: Follow @Oliver_Lane or e-mail to: [email protected]
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Bigfoot might just have the best travel agent of all time.
Just a couple of months after purportedly being spotted in the Canadian wilderness, the legendary Sasquatch has been spotted in New Jersey, according to the Asbury Park Press, which first reported the news.
The sighting, listed in the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization database, was in the Pine Barrens part of New Jersey on April 7 when a husband and wife, who were walking their dog, claim they spotted the creature.
"After a bit we started to drive off," Tricia, the wife who observed Bigfoot said, according to the report. "I am driving and in a split second I saw something brown on 2 legs and about 6 feet tall sprint behind the car in the area we were just in. I caught it in my rear view mirror. I was kind of thinking to myself that my eyes were playing tricks on me but I just couldn't shake it."
VIDEO: IS IT... BIGFOOT? HARD-TO-MAKE-OUT FOOTAGE PURPORTING TO SHOW LEGENDARY GIANT IN CANADA FOREST GOES VIRAL
It's unclear exactly what Tricia saw in the New Jersey town (maybe it's the infamous Russian gangster from "The Sopranos" episode where Christopher and Paulie get lost??), but whatever it was, it was enough for Tricia to get spooked.
Bigfoot and his (or is it a her?) brethren have purportedly been spotted several times over the years in the Garden State, most recently in Cape May County in November 2016. Tim Hanna, along with his friends, were watching TV when they noticed a creature "just under six feet tall," walking away from Hanna's house.
"The creature was about 150 feet away and passed under a street light, which gave us the ability to get a decent look at it," Hanna said in the report. "It was long limbed, but clearly not human. Because of the lighting it was in silhouette, but we could see that it was covered with hair. It was walking with its shoulders hunched forward, and did not appear to be in any distress. We watched it pass from view as it went behind trees and into the woods on the far side of the street."
POSITIVE SHE SAW BIGFOOT, SHE'S SUING CALIFORNIA
It's unclear whether Bigfoot uses Expedia to zip across North America or uses Uber or another ride-sharing service to see the sights of this great continent, but he sure does get around.
In October 2017, Bigfoot was reportedly spotted in Northern California, but only because he had gotten greedy and tried to eat a pig.
Jeffrey Gonzalez, a self-described paranormal expert, said he heard about the sighting from a local farmer who said he saw the creature and five others running on his ranch near Avocado Lake.
“One of them, which was extremely tall, had a pig over its shoulder," Gonzalez said in comments obtained by Fox 26, a Fox News affiliate. "And the five scattered and the one with the pig was running so fast it didn’t see an irrigation pipe and it tripped, with the pig flying over."
In March, the residents of Wapum, Pa. held their annual Bigfoot hunt, but surprisingly came up empty.
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nationens! Pia M køber el-pærer i Kina og får dem sendt portofrit. Det er billigere - og lettere - end at købe dem i Danmark. Og PostNord fortæller, at det en særligt dyr opgave at dele kinesisk post ud i Danmark.
- Jeg/vi undres over, at man hele tiden taler om det underskud PostNord har på danske breve.
- For hvad med de store mængder Kina-post, som de ikke får penge for.
- Jeg tror (uden at vide det), at mængden af breve fra Kina er på størrelse med - eller endda større end - den normale mængde brevpost i Danmark. Så problemet må da være til at få øje på.
Køber billige el-pærer i Kina - og får dem gratis leveret
Sådan indleder nationens! Pia M. en mail om pengeproblemerne i det danske postsystem - og hendes bud på en forklaring. Og som du kan læse i det svar Post Nord på nationens! foranledning har indhentet(se nedenfor), så er der faktisk noget om snakken. Pia Ms brev fortsætter nemlig således:
- Det er ganske normalt at købe billige varer i Kina og få dem sendt uden fragt omkostninger. Det er f.ex. billigere at købe en el-pære i Kina, og få den sendt til danmark, end at gå ned og købe den i en dansk butik. Det som sker når man bestiller er:
1. Pakken må ikke veje over 2kg ( hvis den så gør deler de den bare i f.eks 2-3 forsendelser, så er den gratis igen )
2. Værdien må ikke overstige 80 kr .. for så skal der betales moms og told ( mellem 80-1150 moms og told, over 1150 moms , told afgift )
3. hvis værdien overstiger 80 kr. nedskriver afsender meget ofte beløbet således man 'slipper' for at betale moms , told og afgift. (Hvis man er fræk nok spørger man om det).
Jeg har købt 15, min niece 30 og mit arbejde mere end 50
- Så det er altså ikke kun posten, der bliver snydt, det er også told og skat.
- Jeg vil tro, jeg har købt privat 15-20 pakker sidste år, hvis ikke mere, og flere i min omgangskreds gør det samme, så det er bestemt ikke et særsyn.
- Her hvor jeg arbejder, køber alle varer i Kina og rent arbejdsmæssigt, køber vi varer flere gange om ugen på den måde.
- Det kan være en reservedel til en maskine, eller værktøj osv osv - og vi har gemt mindst 50 kuverter som vi har modtaget det sidste år.
PostNord: Man kan være heldig
- Jeg spurgte min niece i går og hun havde købt mindst 30 gange sidste år, så det bliver altså til noget… medmindre det kun er os, der gør det, skriver Pia, der har sendt dette eksempel på et køb.
- Det er nogle små jule dimser til at komme på træet, skriver hun, og kommunikationschef i PostNord, Morten O. Nielsen, forklarer i denne skriftlige kommentar, at det er en dyr opgave at dele Kina-brevene ud:
- Når man handler på nettet, kan man være heldig, at netbutikken tilbyder fri fragt til sine kunder. Men netbutikken betaler stadig for fragten hos sin distributør.
- Sender man fx post fra Kina til Danmark, betaler afsender for distribution hos det kinesiske postvæsen.
- Sender man post fra Danmark til Kina, betaler afsender til PostNord.
Kina er sluppet alt for billigt
- De forskellige landes postvæsner afregner med hinanden efter internationalt fastsatte takster, så omkostningerne ved at bringe ud dækkes.
- Kina er dog historisk set sluppet alt for billigt i den afregning, og derfor er det en særligt dyr opgave for PostNord at dele kinesisk post ud i Danmark.
- Det er en opgave, vi ikke har kunnet løbe fra, da det er en del af vores pligt som befordringspligtig virksomhed at sikre, at der kommer post ud til alle dele af landet - også international post.
Og fra 2018 bliver det dyrere for Kina
- Derfor er der i internationalt postregi igennem flere år arbejdet hårdt på at få ændret taksterne for afregningen med Kina.
- I efteråret faldt en ny aftale på plads, der betyder, at fra 2018 skal det kinesiske postvæsen betale en højere pris, der stemmer bedre overens med de faktiske omkostninger, skriver Morten fra PostNord, men hvad mener du?
Handler du også portofrit i Kina? Og har du undret dig over prisen? | {
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The scaling of the Ethereum network is almost complete, says the creator of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin
The proof of this was the concept, published by Buterin, for updates of the network with the attached code, which demonstrates how the shards and the key blockchain of Ethereum will interact with each other. This method of shading mostly implies the separation of Ethereum into parallel networks in order to increase the efficiency of the blockchain, which will help reduce the load on the network. Ultimately, it will be possible to reduce the cost and increase the speed of the products of transactions.
Vitalik noted that his plans include the division of Ethereum by about 100 shards, the power of each of them will correspond to the capacity of the main blockchain. He also added:
“I would not say the spec is finalized at this point, though the ‘bag of ideas’ is IMO pretty well-established. The latest research consists of combining together existing ideas about scaling and latency (ie. block time) reduction.”
The developer spoke about the new sharding code, which will be integrated into the network after the transition of the Etherium to the Proof-of-Stake protocols (Casper).
Buterin presented a new "minimal sharding protocol" and also noted that the scheme of the sharding system will be constantly improved. The essence of the basic concept is to create a publicly available drafting project for developers, which will not depend on any changes.
Vitalik Buterin decided to divide the network last year. This topic was raised many times. Most likely, when the idea starts to be implemented and will have more realistic boundaries, as well as the exact date of product's release, then ETH will grow in value, which often happens when a new upgrade is introduced to the market of cryptocurrencies.
https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/991031317046292480 | {
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Three Dutch motorcycle gang members have gone to Iraq to help Kurdish fighters battle ISIS.
The president of the No Surrender Bandidos, Klas Otto, told Dutch television station NOS on Saturday that members from Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Breda went to Mosul in northern Iraq last week to fight alongside the embattled Kurds.
One biker warrior, identified only as Ron, is seen in a Twitter photo dressed in military gear and holding an assault rifle, his arm around a Kurdish fighter.
No Surrender's Facebook page contains a message of thanks and one poster calling the biker freedom fighters "true Kurdish heroes." | {
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Complains about how much homework he has to seniors
246 shares | {
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When Theresa May shocked Westminster on the 18 April by calling a general election she did so with the aim of winning a landslide Tory majority. She wasn’t alone in thinking that would be the outcome. With polling leads of up to 25% in the early stages of the campaign, the story of how Labour turned this election around is one of the most remarkable political fightbacks in modern campaigning history.
Jeremy Corbyn, his leader’s office team, the Labour party staff at HQ and in the regions, and the thousands of members and supporters who campaigned for us, deserve so much credit.
Undoubtedly the contrast between the two manifestos was a pivotal moment in the campaign. Labour’s bold and fully costed vision for the country was pitted against a Tory manifesto short on ideas, absent of costings, and which included a hugely damaging attack on pensioners. That, and the Tories’ decision to back away from any head-to-head debate, showed an arrogant Tory campaign built on fear and wary of scrutiny.
From the start we worked tirelessly to shut down Theresa May’s attempt to avoid scrutiny of her record and remind the British people that the Tories remained the party of the few not the many. By exposing the Tories’ record of broken promises and the real threat they posed to working people, pensioners and our public services, we amplified the choice between Labour’s positive offer and a mean-spirited Tory campaign offering little other than empty rhetoric.
Leading from the front, Jeremy himself created the momentum and buzz that enthused so many. And behind the scenes our campaign teams also rose to the challenge, responding to the hugely pressurised environment of a snap election. I was fortunate enough to work closely with staff, and have nothing but admiration for the work they put in.
One of the untold stories of this campaign, however, is how heavily it relied on the years of patient marshalling of Labour’s finances. Over recent years the general secretary, Iain McNicol, Diana Holland as treasurer, and the national executive committee worked tirelessly to put the party back on a stable financial footing. This groundwork ensured that, for the first time ever, we were able to draw on significant financial reserves at the beginning of the campaign, allowing us to get off to a flying start.
On day one, we had our snap general election campaign pack ready to go. Soon after, support to local teams was delivered through targeted messaging at both national and constituency level. Alongside this, localised policy information, statistics and campaign materials supported activists not just with national political messages but with individual resources to fight in their areas, bringing their campaigns to life.
Informed by the lessons of recent elections, ours was an innovative approach to campaigning. Behind the scenes the teams in HQ had been developing a range of new tools over the last year, and the snap election gave us the opportunity to deploy them for the first time. We placed digital at the heart of our activities, with HQ teams organised into separate campaign and organisational arms. The former led on delivering the right message to the right voters, the latter on engagement and mobilisation.
Central to this new approach was Promote, which linked our voter database technology with Facebook. This cutting-edge tool allowed us to deploy targeted messaging to key voters on a more personal and localised level than ever before.
We put unprecedented levels of funding into online advertising, supported by a highly professional data targeting operation that gave us an edge in getting the right messages in front of the right voters. This allowed us to make quick decisions about who and where to target.
When we saw improved local canvass returns in Sheffield Hallam, we were able to target anti-Lib Dem Facebook messages at all the voters in the seats that we thought were being contested between Labour and the Lib Dems. In the last week alone 24 million people viewed our shared content on Facebook. And our fundraising reached new highs too. Over £4m was raised in small donations, most of it from 220,000 online donations.
While digital came to the fore, it was not at the exclusion of other methods of communicating with voters. More than 80m items of direct mail were issued, targeted in a way to reinforce online messaging. This was allied to a heavy investment in voter registration – a decision taken early and deliberately by the campaign.
When brought together, this resulted in a sophisticated web of communications, tailored to individuals. For example, as a first-time voter you may have received targeted communication urging you to sign up to vote, followed by direct mail and Facebook communication on the same day relating to the issues most relevant to you. Traditional campaigning values in a modern setting, you might say.
At the same time, our organisational team used a number of new tools to get more people than ever involved in the campaign. Chatter, our new SMS mobilisation tool, helped engage 85,000 volunteers, while Dialogue, our new online canvassing tool, made it easier than ever for members to spread our message to the voters. From the reports I had back on polling days, many campaigns reported record numbers of people coming to help get out the vote.
In the final part of the campaign, we knew turning young voters out was vital. This was the motivation behind our move to build an online tool showing people where to vote, and the decision to deploy Snapchat to get the message out to its 12 million young users in the UK. The results were staggering: 7.3 million individual people viewed our message and over 780,000 used the tool to find out where to vote.
All this innovation was built on the hard work of our members and supporters, who made 3 million voter contacts on the doors in just seven weeks. And so we can all be proud of the campaign we ran. We defied the odds, the media and the pollsters.
With the Tories desperately trying to cling to power through a coalition of chaos of their own making, a new general election could be called at any time. I know from the experience of the last seven weeks that if and when it comes, we will be ready to beat the Tories. | {
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Group BTC, filiale française d’une entreprise espagnole, vient d’ouvrir un guichet pour acheter ou vendre cette monnaie cryptographique.
Faute de disposer d’une boule de cristal suffisamment affûtée et extralucide, difficile de prévoir l’avenir du Bitcoin (BC). Effet de mode ou vague durable, cette nouvelle monnaie virtuelle et cryptographique (lire également ci-dessous), née en 2009, séduit néanmoins de plus en plus de personnes et d’entreprises.
Qu’elles veulent échapper à l’emprise des banques (et à leurs frais, taux de change...), à l’étau du monde capitaliste et de son économie versatile ou qu’elles se revendiquent libertariennes (*), toutes reconnaissent à ce moyen de paiement une liberté hors de tout contrôle étatique (et frais afférents...).
Premier guichet de la région
Et si, en France, le phénomène reste encore relativement marginal, il semble avoir conquis d’autres terres, comme la Grèce et l’Espagne. C’est d’ailleurs la société Group BTC France, filiale de l’entreprise ibérique Bitcoin investor trust, qui vient d’ouvrir le premier guichet de Bitcoin (BC) à Montpellier, sur le boulevard du Jeu-de-Paume - le seul dans toute la région Occitanie. Fondé à Gérone en janvier 2015, le consortium affiche la ferme intention de se développer à l’international.
"Ce n’est pas seulement une crypto-monnaie mais une nouvelle technologie"
"L’idée est de faciliter les échanges des BC en France. Jusqu’à maintenant, beaucoup de Montpelliérains, Toulousains ou Marseillais devaient venir jusqu’à Gérone pour en acheter, relate Joan Noguera Calvet, gérant de Group BTC. En Espagne, ça marche très bien depuis 2010, car il y a une revalorisation constante des avoirs."
Diplomate, le patron de la succursale française n’entend pas entrer en concurrence avec le système bancaire national et prône une "coexistence pacifique avec les banques", même s’il soutient que cette monnaie virtuelle est une vraie "alternative" économique et financière, puisque "les gens sont responsables de leur argent, il n’y a pas de tiers intermédiaire, et que ça va très vite : le plus souvent, en quelques minutes, la transaction est validée et cela quasiment sans frais".
Nouvelle technologie
Si les avantages semblent indéniables pour les entreprises, notamment les multinationales, l’intérêt semble plus aléatoire pour les particuliers. "Pas du tout, rétorque Joan Noguera Calvet. On peut réserver son hôtel ou acheter un billet d’avion avec les BC. À Madrid, par exemple, rue Serrano, l’une des artères principales, on peut acheter ses vêtements ou produits avec des BC dans toutes les boutiques."En l’absence, pour l’heure, de cadre juridique et fiscal, il s’agit, selon lui, avec ce nouveau moyen de paiement, "de donner un peu d’espoir aux gens dans une époque triste, à l’économie déprimée".
Surtout, "ce n’est pas seulement une crypto-monnaie mais une nouvelle technologie, en passe de renverser un système obsolète, affirme ce chef d’entreprise. D’ailleurs, toutes les grandes banques s’intéressent désormais de près au système du blockchain. De la même façon que le web a révolutionné les médias, le système Bitcoin va changer le monde de la finance."
(*) Le libertarisme est une philosophie politique et économique dont les tenants se situent à droite de l’échiquier libéral. Ils prônent la liberté de l’individu et de son droit de propriété et s’opposent à tout interventionnisme de l’État, qui doit être réduit à son plus strict minimum.
ATM Bitcoin exchange, 23 boulevard du Jeu-de-Paume. Contact : 04 99 62 57 78 ; www.groupbtc.fr. | {
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The how to Business Guide will help you kick start your business journey. The blog will help be successful in your business ventures. Find new ideas, techniques, methods to implement in your business. | {
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For example: There's uh, literally no indication that the settlers even invited neighboring natives to their feast.
The friendly vegans at J. Selby's are much more charitable than those Brits. This year, for the second time, not only are they throwing open the doors on Thanksgiving Day, they're also serving up a plant-based meal, free of charge.
The regular menu won't be offered Thursday, so don't come in expecting to get a gratis Dirty Secret or cauliflower wings. Instead, J. Selby's will have have special holiday offerings: mashed potatoes, stuffing, seasonal veg rice pilaf, cranberry sauce, rolls.
You can still toss down money for a drink or two, and if you've any extra cash, we suggest making a donation—they'll be collecting funds for the Franklin/Hiawatha Encampment.
During 2017's inaugural freebie dinner, donations topped $700. Owner Matt Clayton hopes with this year's meal—available from noon to 6 p.m., in the dining room or to-go—they'll raise upwards of $1,000.
Clayton thinks the meal fits right in with their dual mission to bring plant-based food to all and make a difference in the community. "In this case, raising money to support Franklin/Hiawatha Encampment, which is bringing long overdue attention to the tragedy of homelessness, especially among people of Native American descent,” he said in a statement last week.
(He's not the only vegan hoping to make a difference, either. If your Thursday plans are already squared away, stop by Eureka Compass the day before and snag a pay-what-you-can plant-based plate: cornbread, greens, herbed potatoes and carrots, garbanzo and root veggie fritter, squash and black bean casserole, and a pumpkin scone.)
Maybe you're thinking, "Sure, okay, this all sounds nice. But it won't be a Thanksgiving spread without a turkey."
If so, you should know something else about the myth surrounding the holiday...
There's also no evidence that there was turkey on the table at all.
J.Selby’s 2nd Annual Free Thanksgiving Dinner
Thursday, November 22 from noon to 6 p.m.
J.Selby’s
169 N. Victoria St.; St. Paul
651-222-3263, jselbys.com | {
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on
Courtesy NBC News.
All rights reserved to the author and/or NBC news.
By Elisha Fieldstadt
A woman was killed Tuesday after falling into a meat grinder at her job at a food processing plant in Pennsylvania, the local coroner said.
Jill Greninger, 35, was standing on stairs next to an industrial-size meat grinder while working at Economy Locker Storage Co., Inc. in Pennsdale when she “tragically either fell or was drawn into the machine resulting in her death,” Lycoming County Coroner Charles Kiessling said in a statement.
A fellow employee discovered Greninger had fallen into the machine, Kiessling told NBC News. The employee was prompted to check on the grinder after hearing strange noises coming from it, The Associated Press reported.
First responders worked more than two hours to disassemble the meat grinder and recover Greninger’s remains, Kiessling said.
“You will forever be missed by so many people,” her friend Erin Schreffler wrote on Facebook. “You’ve touched so many lives. RIP my friend.”
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating the incident, a spokesperson confirmed.
A woman who answered the phone at Economy Locker Storage Co., Inc. said she wasn’t authorized to comment on the incident, and her bosses were unavailable.
Categories: Labor, U.S. News, Workers Struggle | {
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Bohemia Interactive today released the free Arma 3 Zeus DLC for Arma 3™. Announced two months ago, Arma 3 Zeus lets people assume the role of Game Master and curate the multiplayer experience of other players.
As a Game Master, you can view the battlefield from bird’s-eye perspective, and create, manipulate or expand a multiplayer scenario in real-time. An easy-to-use editor enables you to spawn units, set objectives, change the weather conditions, start music, and much more. The result is incredibly dynamic online combat - in which players have to rely on their ability to improvise and adapt.
Become Zeus
Assume the role of Game Master and curate the experience of other Arma 3 players. Wielding an intuitive real-time editor, you can manipulate or expand multiplayer scenarios on-the-fly, and create a surprising flow of challenges for the soldiers on the ground.
Assume the role of Game Master and curate the experience of other Arma 3 players. Wielding an intuitive real-time editor, you can manipulate or expand multiplayer scenarios on-the-fly, and create a surprising flow of challenges for the soldiers on the ground. Enroll As Players
Form a squad, head into battle, and engage in truly dynamic combat. As one of Zeus' subjects, you need to react to varied objectives, and adapt to unscripted events on a constantly-evolving battlefield. Improvisation is your key to success.
Form a squad, head into battle, and engage in truly dynamic combat. As one of Zeus' subjects, you need to react to varied objectives, and adapt to unscripted events on a constantly-evolving battlefield. Improvisation is your key to success. MP Modes
Play Arma 3 Zeus across its distinctive 'Game Master' game type scenarios, where you start out with a blank canvas. Or visit familiar modes like 'Coop', 'Team Death Match', and 'Sector Control' in a completely new way. Zeus multiplayer also works with custom player-created scenarios.
The Arma 3 Zeus DLC has been added automatically to the Steam Library of all owners of Arma 3.
To celebrate its release, the Arma 3 development team will be hosting an official Arma 3 Zeus Launch Party Livestream this Saturday, April 12th. Starting at 17:00 UTC, they will present an hour-long Zeus MP session in which the developers take on the role of Game Master, while various members from the Arma community will fight as soldiers on the ground. The session will be streamed live from Bohemia Interactive’s HQ in Prague onto Arma 3’s Twitch.tv channel. | {
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Popular US-regulated cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase has announced that starting next week on Monday, it will enable support for payments focused digital asset Dash to its professional platform Coinbase Pro.
Dash has seen massive adoption metrics over the last two years and the latest addition to the Coinbase Pro platform continues that impressive trend. So far, Dash has seen the widest adoption in the Latin American region where some of the countries are facing runaway inflation such as Venezuela.
In a blog post on Thursday this week, the exchange stated that on “September 16, 2019, we will begin accepting inbound transfers of DASH to Coinbase Pro. We will accept deposits for at least 12 hours prior to enabling full trading. Trading will begin on or after 9 AM Pacific Standard Time on Tuesday, September 17, if liquidity conditions are met.” Two order books will initially be recording and supporting trades in Dash: Bitcoin and USD order books.
The exchange revealed that the addition of Dash to the Pro platform will be effected in four stages the first of which will be ‘Transfer only’. In this stage, traders will be allowed to deposit their coins to Pro wallets. According to the announcement, this phase will last for at least 12 hours subject to Coinbase’s minimum trade requirements. This means that if the deposits do not hit a certain minimum target, the state could continue for a while past the set 12 hours. Following this stage is the ‘Post-only’ in which customers can post limit orders but there will be no matches (completed orders). This stage will last for at least a minute.
The ‘Limit-only’ stage will follow soon after the second stage and in this third stage, limit orders will begin to be matched but market orders will still remain closed. This stage will then be followed by the last stage in which full trading for Dash coins will be enabled for both order books. “In the final stage, full trading services will be available, including limit, market, and stop orders,” the announcement stated.
Trading of Dash will, however, not be supported in the state of New York and the United Kingdom as a regulatory measure. Coinbase stated that more jurisdiction would be added at a later date. In addition, the new addition will only be limited to trading on the Pro platform and will not be supported on the retail-oriented Coinbase.com and mobile wallets interface of the exchange. | {
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White House press secretary Sarah Sanders wished Dan Scavino a happy birthday on Twitter Monday night — and added in a dig aimed at NBC to boot.
“Happy Birthday @Scavino45 one of my favorite people at the WH and one of the most talented people I know,” the tweet began. (RELATED: Sarah Sanders Responds To New York Times Report)
But then Sanders also added context to the photo — which showed Scavino, between National Security Adviser John Bolton and Sanders, laughing — with a caption: “Photo of us reading NBC story about @POTUS not visiting the troops, while he’s visiting the troops in Iraq and Germany over Christmas.”
Happy Birthday @Scavino45 one of my favorite people at the WH and one of the most talented people I know. (Photo of us reading NBC story about @POTUS not visiting the troops, while he’s visiting the troops in Iraq and Germany over Christmas). pic.twitter.com/2Kp26F8SRI — Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) January 15, 2019
Sanders was referencing a story, published by NBC at Christmas, which claimed that President Donald Trump would be the first sitting president to not visit troops for Christmas.
What NBC failed to realize was that, even by the time the story was published, plans were already in motion and the president was en route to Al Asad Air Base in Iraq, where both he and first lady Melania Trump paid a visit to American troops in a war zone.
Follow Virginia on Twitter | {
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Ramon Fonseca, founding partner of law firm Mossack Fonseca. Thomson Reuters He is the man at the center of one of the biggest financial stories of the year: 11,5 million internal documents of the law firm "Mossack Fonseca” in Panama City have been obtained be the German newspaper “Süddeutsche Zeitung." The leak illustrated the inner workings of the shadowy world of off-shore investments.
The revelations under the headlines “Panama Papers” caused a media storm around the world and led to a number of investigations in many countries. Hundreds of politicians, businessmen, celebrities or athletes have been implicated.
Ramon Fonseca, 63, is the co-founder of the law firm "Mossack Fonseca" in Panama City. He started the firm together with partner Jürgen Mossack, 68, a Panamanian of German decent, in 1986. It grew into a powerhouse in Offshore-Banking: 250,000 offshore companies and trust funds have been created in the last 30 years. The firm has about 500 employees in offices around the world.
Reporter Herbert Bauernebel traveled to Panama City on an assignment for the German newspaper “Bild” to cover the unfolding story. He got in touch with Ramon Fonseca via WhatsApp.
Fonseca reaches out: 'What would you like to know?'
After a number of interview requests were sent Fonseca suddenly replied: “What would you like to know?”
What followed was a 90-minute-long chat in which Fonseca described the dramatic days in his office – which is under siege by reporters and authorities. He defended his firm vehemently by stating: “We have done nothing wrong!” He also points out that the company is the victim of data theft by hackers which have penetrated the computer systems from overseas, as he states: The breach of privacy was a violation of “human rights," he exclaims. And the lawyer, author and former advisor of President Juan Carlos Varela remains combative: “The firm will survive," he says.
Mr. Fonseca finds himself in the fight of his live to save his company. He promises to hire the “best data security company in the world” and to carry on with his business. At the end of the WhatsApp conversion he had to rush since he was attending the christening of his grandson. “I have to go," he wrote. The ceremony was about to start.
Fonseca is in a fight for the future of his firm
What follows is a transcript of our conversation with Fonseca.
Herbert Bauernebel: How are you and your partner, Mr. Mossack, holding up? You must feel intense pressure regarding also the responsibility towards your stuff of 500 around the world. How is everyone trying to stay focused in the office?
Ramon Fonseca: We are under pressure but as we have done nothing wrong our faith in God maintain us.
Do you know a bit more already how the data was stolen?
Fonseca: It was external hacking from a machine overseas. Not an internal job. We have filed a technical report already with the penal authorities. But nobody talks about the only crime committed, the hacking. It appears to be that in this generation the human right to privacy is in the endangered species list... Or already gone!
Do you have a trace from which country the hack was coming from?
Fonseca: Yes, but is under investigation. In my times you were innocent until proven guilty. These days you have to prove that you are innocent as everybody assumes that you are guilty. Also, any time something suspicious appears in the press the authority may initiate an investigation, which we welcome and will cooperate fully! But also: We are the ones that filed a complaint for the hacking.
How do you reassure clients? There must be a lot of questions?
A marquee of the Arango Orillac Building lists the Mossack Fonseca law firm in Panama City, Sunday, April 3, 2016. AP Photo/Arnulfo Franco Fonseca: We have been the victims of a cybercrime punished by the law and many clients understand and support us. Of course, we have to reassure others…
It must be a rather difficult situation since most of your clients never thought that their information becomes public... What are you planing in terms of cyber security to protect against possible future attacks? Was the hack coming from Germany?
Fonseca: We continue praying and working hard, as we have always done. I am not authorized to say more about the hacking crime because it may jeopardize the investigation .
Can your company survive this? Or do you sometimes think a fresh start is necessary? And why do you think your services are generating such a tsunami of bad press?
Fonseca: We do what thousand of lawyers do around the world: incorporate companies, trusts, etc. It's a complete legal and necessary practice in a global world were nobody does business in their own name anymore. The majority of offshore companies are from other jurisdictions such as the UK, Delaware, BVI (British Virgin Islands), and not Panama. Why us? Remember the bible history of David vs. Goliath? We deeply believe that every person, rich or poor, has the right to his or her privacy if nothing illegal is done! Maybe God chose us to fight to assist Him in restoring a human right which is in danger – and many young people do not even know that they have the right to it. Or maybe I am complete it wrong…
Panama City. Flickr The Russian president thinks it is a conspiracy. Do you think your firm has been singled out – and if yes for what reasons? Are you worried of the German or American authorities regarding possible investigations?
Fonseca: Of course not! We were in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's all… Our books are open... Literally!
Have you been contacted by any authorities overseas? By the US?
Fonseca: We have not been contacted. As I told you, we incorporate a company. We do not manage it. Since 40 years we have incorporated over 250,000. They are used for all kind of purposes, 99.99% of them all good. But if we find something wrong, we immediately report it to the authorities. We have over 30 persons in our due diligence department looking closely. If somebody does something wrong with a company we created it is not our responsibility. And all those people mentioned in the media are NOT our clients. The majority of our clients are intermediaries like lawyers, accountants, banks, trusts, etc.. who are asking us to incorporate a company for their clients. If you are a reporter covering a murder done with a knife: Would you go to to the knife factory to find the culprit? It´s ridiculous!
You are confident to be exonerated after all is done? How do restore trust again with your clients that their data is safe?
Fonseca: We are bringing on board the best company in data safety.
People demonstrate against Iceland's Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson in Reykjavik, Iceland April 5, 2016. REUTERS/Stigtryggur Johannsson Did you have costumers canceling their accounts because of the scandal? And how big is the damage?
Fonseca: Very little. Thank God!!
So you will emerge from this as strong as ever? What did you tell your employees? Some must be worried? The press is standing in front of the office, there are “Panama Papers” headlines around the world…
Fonseca: Yes. It is not a party. Again, we are in the hands of God! Whatever He chooses is welcome. One final remark: Again I repeat that the headline should be. Why nobody is talking about the only crime proven: the hacking! It's amazing! I should write another book, my eights: Is privacy a extinguished specie? | {
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Touch Me
Coto Mendoza, Luciano Vergara (2016)
Touch Me is a Script hand-drawn style typeface—designed by Coto Mendoza—resulting from polyrhythmic exploration, sign deconstruction and altered calligraphic contrast plays with watercolour brush. Coto has been using these experimental calligraphy techniques when creating the catchwords for Macarons, the Boho Family, Bikini Season Script and Matcha Script and so forth. Touch Me was inspired by a character in a story written by Coto while attending a literary workshop with Ina Groovie in Santiago de Chile. The character is a tribal girl who lives on an island in the Caribbean. She is heir of ancestral knowledge and possesses wild beauty, very passionate and sensual: intense, strong and free. These features are reflected in the polyrhythm of the typeface’s curves: an irregular baseline, variable x-height, different lengths of initial and terminal strokes (that sometimes expand and sometimes shrink) and amount of brush pressure that generates changes in contrast within the characters. This way, when composing, signs with stroke contrast randomly alternate with monolinear ones and with signs of altered contrast, thanks to the typeface’s OpenType programming. The family, with more than 3,000 glyphs, provides a number of alternative characters, swashes, ligatures, initial and terminal forms, in short, a vast ocean of choices! Touch Me is a spontaneous typeface with a fresh and unique personality. It is the perfect choice for short text in both print and digital formats. The family comes with a Script Regular version and a seductive Script Drop that you will enjoy a lot! The Extras set includes some catchwords, dingbats and ornaments that allows for endless composition options. The family also comes with a Caps version —designed by Luciano Vergara—in 2 styles: a funny and big-headed condensed Sans Grotesk display of inverted vertical proportion plus a Grotesk, neutral and slightly expressive Petite. Both versions, available in 6 weights, have been especially designed to create hierarchies when composing. This allows for balance between strokes of different weight when it comes to the Sans and Script fonts. Come and dare yourself! Touch Me! Thanks Alisa for sharing your amazing and beautiful picture with us. | {
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Quit feeling sorry for her character.
“Love Actually” grows more controversial by the year, with diehard fans considering it a peak rom-com and detractors decrying it as shallow and manipulative. Laura Linney isn’t here to weigh in on the debate — though, considering she was part of the ensemble cast, one imagines she at least likes the film — but she does fondly recall one of her most memorable scenes. “People feel sorry for me, but they shouldn’t. I really believe I got the best kiss in that movie, hands down,” she said about her sequence opposite Rodrigo Santoro on “The Graham Norton Show.”
“It was sweet because be were both very brokenhearted when we made that movie. He had just been dumped, I had just been dumped,” Linney added. “I remember the day we were gonna go shoot the scene, we both sort of slumped to the van. He was like, Laura, ‘My heart is broken.’ I was like, ‘So is mine.’ I turned to him and said, ‘Well, all day long we get to make each other feel better.’ And I think there is a sweetness to the scene because of that — we were both very sad.”
Keira Knightley, however, doesn’t seem to recall the film as well. “I don’t remember, who do I end up with?,” she said during a video interview last year. “I’m with my husband, aren’t I? Aren’t I with Chiwetel Ejiofor? I’ve only seen it once, and it was a really long time ago. So I don’t go off with Andrew Lincoln?”
Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here. | {
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Blake Griffin’s league-wide popularity has taken a bit of a hit this season – fans, media and opponents have complained about his constant whining to refs, pre and post-dunk antics, and general arrogance – but his teammate Chris Paul says, What’s not to love? Unless, of course, you have been the victim of a Blake Griffin slam. Per the Oklahoman: “At the suggestion that Griffin had turned to the dark side, Clippers point guard Chris Paul nearly choked on his post-practice energy bar. ‘What’s not to like about him?’ he said. ‘He’s fun. He’s funny. He laughs, jokes, smiles. He’s a great guy off the court.’ Hard to argue that. Griffin is one of the sharpest, wittiest guys around. He doesn’t always show it to the masses, but he has this dry humor that is fantastic. It was on display just the other day when he responded to recent criticism from DeMarcus Cousins. The Sacramento big man called Griffin an ‘actor.’ Griffin’s response? ‘I first heard about it from my acting coach; he sent me an email,’ he said. ‘He was obviously thrilled.’ […] ‘Shoot, everybody loves him,’ Paul said, getting fired up as he talked. ‘Shoot, don’t nobody love him more than my son. I don’t know nobody that don’t like Blake.’ He paused. ‘Except for the guys he dunks on.’”
50 | {
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We all have that one show that we just love beyond belief… | {
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ESPN College GameDay host Rece Davis abhors hyperbole and deflects attention. So when he says, “They had to revive him, he almost bled out,” you believe him. Then he starts choking up.
“Give me a minute here,” Davis says, taking a deep breath and letting out a loud exhale before recounting one of the worst days of his life. It started with watching his son play college baseball 18 months ago—he went 2-for-3! But hours later, Davis was banging on a hospital door. On the other side, his 19-year-old son had vomited, lost his sight, and slid out of his chair, unconscious.
Chris Davis nearly died doing what his father loved.
Growing up in Alabama, Rece would lay on the floor each fall Saturday, listening to Bama games, and Auburn games, and anything else he could find on the dial. He’d watch whatever was on TV and enjoy the rest on a Grundig radio. In high school, his top two “Life Time Goals” were (1) study sports broadcasting and (2) become a successful sports broadcaster. After graduating from Tuscaloosa, he worked his way up from a Columbus, Ga., TV gig to a Flint, Mich., station to ESPN in 1995, where he continued to rise.
Davis went from hosting ESPN2’s weekend night programming to calling college football games and hosting a weekly college basketball road show with Digger Phelps and Jay Bilas. In 2015, he started hosting ESPN’s Emmy-winning College Gameday football touring show. Along the way, the idea of moving up to the pros would come up—to covering the NFL. He’d never say never. But he’s passionate about college football and basketball. “I tell people, I like all sports but I really love two,” Davis says, “not counting whatever team Christopher is on—that’s my first love.”
Ironically, Chris grew up an Auburn fan. With Dad working on Saturdays, Rece’s wife, Leigh, would watch her alma mater Tigers at home, teaching Chris to chant “War Eagle!” (Rece wouldn’t make the same mistake with their other child, 18-year-old Alabama fan, Elizabeth.)
Each fall, Chris would play football, and in the winter, basketball, but it was baseball he fell in love with because it was in the spring and summer when Rece could play. “I always wanted to go to the cage with him,” Chris says. “I always wanted to go the field with him. A lot of my great memories of my dad from when I was a kid were at Little League baseball fields.” Chris led a state championship team when he was 10 (Rece was an assistant, in charge of bringing the “can of whoopin’” to each game) and he continued developing, setting his sights on a career like his dad did as a teen. He wanted to play at an SEC school initially, but ended up getting recruited to Princeton instead.
The first thing Chris remembers about March 18, 2017, is the sun. The previous day in College Park, Md., had been cloudy with temperatures in the 40s. He’d come off the bench, singling as a pinch hitter in the series opener against Maryland. In the second game, his mom would get to watch Chris start in centerfield for the first time (he’d missed the previous season with a shoulder injury). And he wouldn’t have to wear an undershirt.
Then came the sixth inning fly ball from Terrapin third baseman AJ Lee. Running to his left, Davis recorded the out but then collided with right fielder Nick Hernandez. Davis instantly bounced up and threw the ball in, keeping a runner at third. “It hurt but I didn't think there was anything seriously wrong,” Davis says. He stayed in the game, adding a single in the seventh and otherwise hiding his pain from his coaches.
On the bus following the 6-2 defeat, Davis pulled out his phone and pulled up WebMD. After an off-handed remark by teammate Cody Phillips, he looked up the symptoms of a ruptured spleen. “All right,” he thought, thumbing through the page. “Well, I've got pain in my side and in my shoulder, but that’s because I ran into somebody. If I get dizzy, then we'll have an issue.”
The team and all the parents gathered that evening at Washington, D.C.’s Busboys and Poets for a celebratory dinner. To start, each player got up and introduced himself and his family. When Chris’s turn came, “I just remember the room was absolutely spinning,” he says. Afterwards, the players went to get food, but Davis wasn’t interested. “For me,” he says, “That's a big deal when I don't want to eat.” Minutes later, Rece was taking his son to the hospital.
Leigh was sitting right next to Chris when things turned dire. A nurse was measuring his weight and taking his temperature one minute. Then, “He said, ‘I can’t see, I can’t see, I can’t see anymore,’” Leigh recalled, “And he kept getting louder and louder because he couldn’t really hear either.” Rece rushed through the door and into the room as several people lifted Chris onto a stretcher and turned him on his side so he wouldn’t throw up on himself. Confirming what Phillips had feared hours earlier, they told Rece and Leigh that the hospital wasn’t equipped with the surgery equipment to repair their son’s spleen. They wanted to fly him to a trauma center, but a helicopter wasn’t available.
Instead, Leigh got into an ambulance with Chris while Rece drove Elizabeth. “Not knowing during that 15-minute drive, that was one of the more harrowing times I’ve ever had,” Rece said. Only later would he learn how alarmed the nurse in the ambulance was about Chris’ sinking blood pressure, telling the driver to go faster. Faster. “There are images from that night that I will probably never shake. Things my wife and daughter and I experienced that night that I’m not sure you’ll ever quite put to bed.”
Doctors at Washington Hospital Medical Center immediately went to work on Chris. He needed six pints of blood (more than half a healthy person’s total volume). At 2 a.m., a surgeon stemmed the bleeding.
As Chris spent the next day in ICU, doctors told the family he was recovering. But he was still so pale. Leigh couldn’t look at him without crying. “Dad,” Chris asked Rece, “Are they not telling me something?” His vital signs were in the normal range, but, 24 hours after his surgery, a nurse convinced the doctors that a Division 1 athlete should be in much better shape than “the normal range.” Chris’s fitness had probably helped him survive the previous day’s massive blood loss. But now it was obfuscating further damage. At 5 a.m., Chris went back into surgery. This time, doctors cut Chris from his sternum to his belly button to find the root of the problem. They discovered another laceration on his spleen and decided to remove the organ entirely. By midday Monday, 48 hours after the collision, color finally returned to Chris’s face.
“Rece has always hated calling coaches or anyone about personal stuff,” Leigh says. But in the hospital, she implored him. “Honey, now’s the time,” she told him. “They would want you to.” Two days after getting knocked out of the NCAA Tournament, Maryland coach Mark Turgeon made connections for the family at the medical center. In the middle of the Sweet Sixteen, Jay Bilas got longtime friend and Washington Hospital doctor Wanda Pak to help the family navigate the system.
Courtesy of Wanda Pak
With Chris needing to get back to school or risk missing the semester, “We were trying to do a month’s worth of work in a week,” Pak said. “I wanted all of them to understand that even though they removed his spleen which was the source of him bleeding, he was still an infection away from problems.” Even today, a mild fever represents a serious threat for Chris, as the spleen plays an important role in the immune system.
Leigh got an apartment in Princeton to monitor Chris and help carry his bags as he returned to campus. Rece, through Alabama trainer Jeff Allen, reached out to Dr. Bill Meyers—who has operated on athletes from Adrian Peterson to Justin Verlander—to manage Chris’ rehab. “People say, I’d do anything for my kid,” Bilas says. “They’ve proven they’d do anything.”
Along the way, the Davises learned how many other families had dealt with similar injuries. Twenty minutes from where Chris grew up, Rockies outfielder David Dahl lost his spleen due to an outfield collision while playing in the minors. Forty miles from Princeton, Evan Murray died from a spleen injury suffered during a high school football game. Level 1 trauma centers across the country see an average of 200 to 300 blunt trauma splenic injuries every year.
How often does Chris think about the injury? “I mean, I’ve got this big scar down my whole stomach basically that’s a bit of a reminder,” he says. Each new summer ball team he joins comes with an explanation of what happened to him the first time he changes in the locker room. A leadoff hitter for Princeton last season, Chris still wants to play professionally. He’s worked on his swing angle and hopes to avoid the injury-prone tag. “If I go out and pull a hamstring in our scrimmage tomorrow, unless I can’t walk, I'm not going to let coach know I did it,” he said. “I don't think it's changed the way that I would go about that. I think that's still just a competitive thing.”
Leigh gets nervous watching baseball whenever there’s a collision in the outfield or between bases. She went to the Ohio State-Penn State football game with Rece and watched 19-year-old receiver K.J. Hamler crumple to the ground after a blow to the head. “It was hard for me to be there and see that,” she says. “I feel it more now.” Witnessing hits to the midsection sometimes gives Rece flashbacks, but not usually. More often, it is balls to right-center that leave him thinking of the dangers.
Courtesy of Leigh Davis
Going through the recruiting process as a parent didn’t dampen Rece’s lifelong love for amateur athletics. But seeing first-hand the work that goes into playing even a non-revenue sport reaffirmed his belief that big-time players ought to be able to better capitalize on their contributions. Then came the injury. “I do have a lot more sympathy and empathy for parents of players who step up and take control of the player’s health and wellbeing,” Davis says.
“I learned the lesson that it’s okay to question, it’s okay for players and families to take ownership,” he adds. “And not only on medical issues. Just generally speaking, I have even less of a problem with a person doing what they think is best for them.” Davis brings up Clemson QB Kelly Bryant’s decision to transfer. “He’s taking ownership of his future,” Davis says. “I have zero problem with that.”
With their new perspective, and having now heard so many stories from others, Leigh encouraged Rece to write something about their experience. He could explain what happened, warn other parents, and advocate for better health education among players. It’s not just hits to the head that can cause serious problems, Rece would write. But he hasn’t. “I have learned a lot but I’m by no means some kind of expert on when to recognize a spleen injury,” he says.
“He’s the most respected voice on our crew,” Bilas says, because he knows how to pick his spots. However, Leigh says she’s noticed her husband become more comfortable sharing his opinion.
“I think there’s an aspect of this story that’s not being examined well enough,” Davis said on stage at an August ESPN media event when asked about the death of Maryland football player Jordan McNair. That was the beginning of an articulate, passionate plea for athletic training staffs to receive more autonomy, resources, and institutional support. “I think it’s incumbent on administrations to make sure this happens,” Davis said.
He mentioned all of the trainers he’d queried recently about what happened to McNair, just like he’d done after Chris’s injury. He even referenced his personal experience in extending sympathy to McNair’s family. Recognizing that he could not truly understand how they felt losing a child, he still connected with their deep frustration and knew, deep down, that his family had been fortunate to avoid a tragedy. “That was a young man who died who didn’t have to,” Davis said in August.
And when he was done speaking, Davis apologized. “Sorry for the soap box,” he said. | {
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Over 2,500 years ago nestled in a fertile valley along the border between India and Nepal a child was born who was to become The Buddha. The stories say that before his birth his mother, the Queen of a small Indian kingdom had a dream. In this dream of hers she is said to have come across a beautiful white elephant who offered her a lotus flower, after doing so then quickly entered the side of her body. When sages were asked to interpret the dream they predicted that the Queen would give birth to a son destined to become either a great ruler or a holy man.
In this film directed by award-winning film maker David Grubin we learn of the Buddha’s life. It features some spectacular work created by the world’s greatest artists and sculptors whom across two millennia, have depicted the Buddha’s life in art rich in beauty and complexity. | {
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Roman Gonzalez (37-0, 31KOs) is reportedly going to return on a March date in Japan. Teiken Promotions, who co-promote Gonzalez tried to make a fight between him and WBC flyweight champion Akira Yaegashi of Japan. The talks failed when Yaegashi rejected the idea of facing Gonzalez. They also tried to get Juan Carlos Reveco, but he already has a return date set for February. Gonzalez fought three times in 2013 and scored knockout victories in all three contests.
User Comments and Feedback
Forget quality of opponents, if you ask me who I think are the top ten best p4p fighters in the world right now, like just who I suspect are whether they fought a really great fighter or not, whether it's…
Idc who he fights as long as the Estrada rematch happens. Gotta shut some of these people up. [SIZE="1"][I]Posted from Boxingscene.com App for Android[/I][/SIZE]
Nobody ever wants to fight this kid..... Roman is clearly one of the top p4p...... :)
Goddamn this man is avoided. I remember when they were talking to Segura in the ring and asking him if he'd fight Roman and he said if the money is right and that Roman had to keep winning.... how that…
El Chocolatito. the little mans GGG | {
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The race between Pompeo, pictured, and Tiahrt takes place in Koch Industries’ backyard. Koch Industries backs Pompeo
The energy company owned by Republican mega-donors Charles and David Koch is throwing its support behind Rep. Mike Pompeo in a tight GOP primary.
In a statement to POLITICO, Koch Industries said it was supporting Pompeo over former Rep. Todd Tiahrt in a high-profile Kansas congressional race.
“KOCHPAC is proud to support Mike Pompeo for Congress based on his strong support for market-based policies and economic freedom, which benefits society as a whole,” Mark Nichols, vice president of government and public affairs for Koch Industries, told POLITICO.
( Also on POLITICO: Manchin hits Kochs after defense)
The race between Pompeo and Tiahrt takes place in Koch Industries’ backyard. The Wichita-based energy company is headquartered in the district and the Koch family has deep ties to the state.
The primary pits two previously Koch-backed Republicans against each other.
Tiahrt represented the district in Congress from 1995 until 2011, when he mounted an unsuccessful bid for Senate. He was replaced by Pompeo — a businessman who has represented the district since 2011.
Tiahrt announced in late May that he was running against Pompeo to reclaim his old seat — citing a difference in “vision, issues, personality and public service” with Pompeo.
Both men have been the recipient of significant amounts of Koch Industries campaign cash in the past.
Koch Industries’ political action committee gave Pompeo the maximum donation of $10,000 in 2013 — before Tiahrt announced his intention to reclaim the seat. Company employees have given an additional $45,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Monday’s endorsement affirms the company’s ongoing support for the two-term Republican incumbent over his challenger.
But Tiahrt himself has picked up plenty of Koch cash over the years. The Center for Responsive Politics found that Tiahrt has received nearly $330,000 in Koch employee and PAC cash during his eight terms in Congress.
The GOP primary is set for Aug. 5. | {
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Have you recently received an offer to lease your minerals?
If so, make sure to do these 12 things before signing on the dotted line:
Proper management of one’s mineral estate can be a very difficult and time-consuming endeavor. However, this guide will give you the tools and information necessary to make smart decisions and generate more cash from your minerals.
And always remember the 5 Ps; Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance.
1. Know What You Own
There are many different types of mineral interests, and having a basic understanding of which type you own is important. Owning 100% of the minerals into your tract really puts you in the driver’s seat when it comes time to negotiate.
If you don’t own all the minerals into your tract, don’t worry! There are still things you can do to strengthen your negotiating position, such as teaming up with the other undivided owners around you. Negotiating together can really put you in a place of power.
Keeping good records of your net mineral acres on a tract-by-tract basis and knowing what you own is crucial when entering negotiations.
2. Be Courteous
When negotiating, remember that both parties have a shared interest in getting your minerals leased. Typically, the landmen that reach out to you about your minerals work on behalf of a company. It’s their job to come to a fair agreement for both parties.
Common decency goes a long way and having a good relationship with your landman could help when you come to a crossroads. They’ll be more likely to go to bat for you to get more favorable terms during lease negotiations or pick up the phone down the line if you have questions.
As with any industry, there are some people who look to benefit themselves at the expense of others. Keep a cautious yet open-mind when dealing with landmen representing themselves, or an unknown company.
3. Ask Questions
While the landman reaching out to you may be reluctant to share certain development details or information about the operator’s plans, you should do your best to use these lease discussions to get as much information about your mineral estate as possible. The following questions, if answered, will pay dividends down the road when managing your minerals:
a. Can you please share an ownership report or title opinion which outlines my interests?
b. Can you please share a map outlining my tracts?
c. Can you please share what formations you are interested in testing in this area and at what depths they are located (roughly)?
d. Will you be drilling horizontally or vertically?
e. Who will be the operator of this well?
f. Do you have any surface locations for development planned? If so can you please share that information?
g. Do you need surface locations, water for drilling and completing, or a disposal location?
h. What are the biggest challenges of drilling and completing wells in this area?
Answers to the above questions should be organized and saved on a tract-by-tract basis so that you can begin building out comprehensive files for each interest you own. This information will be crucial in negotiating your lease provisions, as well as surface use provisions if desired or applicable.
4. Negotiate
Everything is negotiable.
Again, EVERYTHING IS NEGOTIABLE.
The offering party will never open with their best offer. When you bought your home did you offer the sellers exactly what the listing price was with no contingencies? In most cases, there were likely some negotiations and a deal was struck somewhere along the way.
When a landman calls and makes an offer to lease your minerals don’t be offended if the offer seems low. There is almost always room to go up — respectfully decline and counter the offer.
Knowing what to counter with is the hard part. That’s the topic for the next point.
5. Understand Current Lease Bonus and Royalty Rates
Understanding the current market for lease signing bonuses and royalty rates in your area is critical when determining a counteroffer during negotiations.
Many mineral owners turn to the internet to find an “average” bonus per acre and royalty rate for oil and gas leases. The truth is there is no “average” value, and current market prices vary widely depending on location. It is important to determine the current rates in your immediate area.
Historically, discovering the current lease bonus prices and royalty rates in a given area was very difficult. Mineral owners looked to family and friends, attorneys, forums, or competing Lessees for guidance on the current market value.
Luckily, this information is becoming easier to find as technology advances.
Mineral Insight is a free online resource that provides a comprehensive map showing oil and gas royalty and bonus rates, allowing users to easily compare their offers to those around them.
Keep in mind that most lease negotiations are time sensitive. Lessees are often under pressure to come to terms and get an agreement struck. In very hot areas it may make sense to take your time through these negotiations with hopes of receiving additional competing offers. Alternatively, in areas with little activity, it might be beneficial to strike a deal while the iron is hot!
6. Research Production Activity in Your Area
Look to your state’s Oil and Gas or Department of Natural Resources Agencies for a GIS (geographic information system) web map. These regulatory agencies oversee the entire production life-cycle from well permitting to production to plugging a well. It is their duty to keep up-to-date records and account for any changes. Therefore, it’s the best free source to find recent permitting or drilling activity in your area.
Permit approvals are required by the state before an operator is allowed to drill a well. They are an important piece of information because they can show the intention to drill up to 2 years before the event. Understanding where they are relative to your property will give you an idea of upcoming activity.
Well production is reported monthly and provides a way to see how healthy the wells are around your property. With a little legwork, you can understand well longevity, total production, decline rates, and other metrics for understanding the potential value of your asset.
Below are links to some state regulatory agencies and their web-maps:
7. Request Special Lease Provisions
Coming to terms on the bonus per acre and royalty rate is only half the battle. Understanding that money is made in the details of the lease language is crucial. A lease is a contract that can live on for decades. Tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars could be lost or tied up with poorly written language!
Below are three important provisions to consider (among others) for maximizing the value of your minerals and making the most money over time:
1) Release Language — Having proper Pugh and depth severance language in your lease can allow you to make more money. This type of language is becoming more prevalent and companies are more readily accepting such provisions. These two clauses are pretty basic and if included mean that the operator can hold only the acreage and depths that they are producing from. This means that any non-producing depths can be leased to another company!
2) Cost-Free Royalty Language — Ask for a cost-free royalty, as some operators will readily accept this request. While the agreed-upon royalty doesn’t go up, you are no longer burdened with the costs that the operator incurs in order to get your product to the point of sale. This means more green in your pocket on a monthly basis!
3) Non-Surface Use Language — A standard mineral lease grants the Lessee reasonable access to the surface in order to produce the minerals below. However, to protect the rights of the surface owner, a Non-Surface Use Clause can limit the uncertainty around certain events such as damages to the property.
A Surface Use Agreement can be negotiated separately and is a great way for surface owners to monetize their assets.
8. Reduce Risk
Peace of mind is priceless. Reduce risk or liability by striking or removing the Warranty Clause and requesting an indemnity clause in the lease.
The Warranty Clause provides a warranty of title from the owner (Lessor). In the event it is determined the Lessor own less than originally thought, they may be required to repay certain bonus or royalty payments. If you receive pushback in removing this clause, settle with ‘Special Warranty’ which limits the warranty of title by, through, and under actions by the current owner, and not predecessors in title.
An Indemnity Clause shifts certain liabilities from the Lessor to the Lessee, protecting them from unforeseen events out of their control. In the event that someone is severely injured or killed, or property is damaged, the Lessee holds the Lessor “harmless” and “defends” them against a potential lawsuit.
9. Close Like a Pro
Once you have come to terms on the bonus, royalty, and provisions, it’s time to close!
DO NOT accept any drafts or promissory letter agreements.
The closing process is very simple:
Step 1: Send a scanned copy of the lease to the Lessee.
Step 2: The Lessee mails you the check.
Step 3: Once the check is received, mail a hard copy of the lease to the company.
This practice creates a sense of urgency on the company’s part to get you paid. It also protects you as the mineral owner from a prolonged delay from anyone looking to shop or flip your lease before they have to pay for it.
10. Request the Lease to be Filed “As-Is”
Companies nowadays are filing a memorandum of the lease agreement instead of the lease itself.
Memos outline the basics and show a lease agreement has taken place, but don’t show crucial information that would allow an outside party to determine which events open certain acreage up, such as Pugh or depth severance language.
This makes it more difficult for other companies to recognize when land opens down the road — potentially wasting months or years the land could have been paid for and leased.
11. Get Organized
After signing a lease it’s easy to cash your check and put all this painstaking work and negotiation behind you, but don’t!
Data and understanding is the most important aspect of properly managing a mineral estate. Before you cash your check, organize all of your paperwork and notes while they’re fresh. Gather copies of your executed lease and other agreements. Save all of your old offer letters, even those from competitors.
You will thank yourself down the road when you receive a new lease offer or, better yet, a division order and need to refer back to your old documents.
12. Stay Informed
The leasing portion of your mineral management may be temporarily complete, but staying in the know will keep you prepared for what’s to come.
Once a well is permitted in your area, or better yet on your tract, you will likely begin getting offers from mineral buyers looking to purchase your interest. These offers may seem appealing, but understanding how many wells are permitted and production potential will help you juggle this decision.
Managing your minerals can be a time consuming and daunting task even for industry pros, but remember that there are resources available to help. Knowledge is money in this business, so the more you know about your area and your interest the more money you can make!
If you have any questions, need help, or just want to talk, the Mineral Insight team would love to hear from you! | {
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"Jesus também tinha dois pais." Eis como começar uma polémica. Sábado, as ruas de Portugal vão ficar mais coloridas: o Bloco de Esquerda vai lançar uma série de cartazes, autocolantes e outdoors, para assinalar a data de 10 de fevereiro de 2016, dia em que foi aprovada a adoção por casais do mesmo sexo.
Entre os cartazes que têm como objetivo promover a "igualdade" de famílias diferentes, destaca-se um com fundo cor-de-rosa e com a mensagem “Jesus também tinha dois pais – Parlamento termina discriminação na lei da adoção”, que começou a circular na internet desde o final do dia de quinta-feira. Este criou, é claro, reações extremadas dois lados da barricada. Sandra Cunha, deputada do Bloco de Esquerda, assegura que a polémica que possa surgir é “bem-vinda”, porque faz com que as pessoas discutam o tema.
A deputada do BE garantiu ao “Público” desta sexta-feira que a imagem de Jesus Cristo não pretende ofender a Igreja nem a religião. É apenas uma forma de “mostrar às pessoas” que “sempre existiram famílias diferentes”. Quanto aos dois pais de Jesus que o cartaz refere, Sandra esclarece que são o “o pai espiritual e o pai terreno”.
Também está prevista uma sessão pública para discutir o tema, em data a anunciar.
“A campanha marca esta conquista enorme do fim da discriminação na lei contra famílias e crianças por causa da orientação sexual das pessoas. É uma conquista histórica da sociedade portuguesa. Mas consideramos que, apesar de esta conquista na lei ter sido o culminar de uma série de reivindicações, importa ainda continuar esta batalha na sociedade: mudar mentalidades, destruir preconceitos, chamar a atenção para estas questões”, explicou Sandra Cunha, em declarações ao “Público”. | {
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Mr Woolas warned the problem was "the elephant in the room"
Phil Woolas said health workers were aware such marriages were creating increased risk of genetic problems.
The claims infuriated the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC) which called on the prime minister to "sack him".
MPAC spokesman Asghar Bukhari said Mr Woolas' comments "verged on Islamophobia".
Mr Woolas, an environment minister who represents ethnically-diverse Oldham East and Saddleworth, risked sparking a major row after warning the issue was "the elephant in the room", Mr Bukhari said.
Expert analysis
Mr Woolas said cultural sensitivities made the issue of birth defects difficult to address.
The former race relations minister told the Sunday Times: "If you have a child with your cousin the likelihood is there'll be a genetic problem.
Awareness does need to be raised but we are very aware of the sensitivities
Phil Woolas
"The issue we need to debate is first cousin marriages, whereby a lot of arranged marriages are with first cousins, and that produces lots of genetic problems in terms of disability [in children]."
Mr Woolas stressed the marriages, which are legal in the UK, were a cultural, not a religious, issue and confined mainly to families originating in rural Pakistan.
But he also told the paper: "If you talk to any primary care worker they will tell you that levels of disability among the... Pakistani population are higher than the general population. And everybody knows it's caused by first cousin marriage."
"Awareness does need to be raised but we are very aware of the sensitivities," he added, pointing out that many of the people involved were the products of such marriages.
'Islamophobia'
His comments come at a sensitive time for community relations following the furore over the Archbishop of Canterbury's comments about accommodating aspects of Sharia law in Britain.
This is to do with a medieval culture where you keep wealth within the family
Ann Cryer MP
Mr Bukhari told BBC News: "After his comments, MPAC UK is asking will Prime Minister Gordon Brown back him or sack him.
Mr Bukhari said it was "bizarre" Mr Woolas has spoken about a sensitive health issue which has no relation to his environment brief, and accused him of ignoring links between pollution and birth defects.
However, Mr Woolas was defended by cabinet minister Geoff Hoon who said expert analysis was needed on the extent of the problem.
"But it obviously is a very sensitive matter and no one, no one, would suggest this is a problem for the wider Muslim community," he told Sky News.
'Recessive disorders'
"I am confident that what he has said will have been said with sensitivity and with proper regard to his Muslim constituents and Muslims right across the United Kingdom."
The call for action was also supported by Labour MP Ann Cryer who raised the issue two years ago after research showed British Pakistanis were 13 times more likely to have children with recessive disorders than the general population.
Mrs Cryer, who represents Keighley in West Yorkshire, told the Sunday Times: "This is to do with a medieval culture where you keep wealth within the family."
"I have encountered cases of blindness and deafness. There was one poor girl who had to have an oxygen tank on her back and breathe from a hole in the front of her neck," she added.
"The parents were warned they should not have any more children. But when the husband returned from Pakistan, within months they had another child with exactly the same condition."
Research for BBC2's Newsnight in November 2005 showed British Pakistanis accounted for 3.4% of all births but have 30% of all British children with "recessive disorders". | {
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Following months of anticipatory leaks and the ‘gropegate’ scandal that nearly derailed the former VP’s ambitions, Joe Biden, who has consistently polled at the top of the ever-expanding Democratic field, has finally announced his plans to seek the 2020 nomination.
In a video published via his twitter feed Thursday morning, the former vice president and Senator from Delaware declared his intention to run, declaring “the core values of this nation… our standing in the world… our very democracy…everything that has made America — America – is at stake.”
In the video, Biden framed his video with the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., – a “defining moment for our nation in the last few years” – where a counter-protester was killed after a member of a white supremacist group plowed into a crowd with his car. He contrasted the march with the writing of the ‘Declaration of Independence,’ which was penned by Thomas Jefferson in Charlottesville more than 240 years earlier.
In the video, Biden. condemned Trump for assigning a “moral equivalency” between the neo-Nazi marchers and the people protesting them when he said there were ‘fine people on both sides’.
“In that moment, I knew the threat to our nation was bigger than anything we’ve seen in our lifetime. I believe our nation will look back on this president…as an abberant moment in our history. Our very democracy…is at stake.”
“America is an idea, an idea that is stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator on Earth…it instills in every person in this country the belief that in this country there’s nothing you can’t achieve if you work at it. We can’t forget what happened in Charlottesville, even more important we have to remember who we are.”
Leo Zagami lays out the facts about how the globalists have been planning to use Joe Biden as a presidential candidate. Leo joins Owen via Skype to expose those that seek to control the world from the shadows.
Before signing off, Biden warned that America can’t afford eight years of Donald Trump, saying it would ‘forever alter the character of the nation.’
“If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation, who we are. And I cannot stand by and watch that happen. The core values of this nation, our standing in the world, our very democracy, everything that’s made America America is at stake. That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for president of the United States.”
Watch the video below:
The core values of this nation… our standing in the world… our very democracy…everything that has made America — America –is at stake. That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for President of the United States. #Joe2020 https://t.co/jzaQbyTEz3 — Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) April 25, 2019
Biden will follow his announcement with a fundraiser on Thursday, then a rally Monday in Pittsburgh, Bloomberg reported, citing an announcement from his campaign. Over the next ten days, he plans to make stops in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, the earliest primary and caucus states.
Though Biden’s eight-year stint as Obama’s VP gives him unrivaled name and brand recognition in a field of 20 candidates, Obama has said he won’t make an endorsement until a nominee has been chosen. Online betting odds still favor Biden, 76, as the front-runner for the nomination, though “Democratic Socialist” Bernie Sanders is a close second, followed by the ascendant South Bend, Ind. mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Of course, Biden’s well-documented history of inappropriate touching isn’t his only major liability going into the Democratic primary (the Iowa caucuses are just 10 months away). The appearance of a quid-pro-quo involving Biden, his son, taxpayer money and a ‘sweetheart’ deal in Ukraine could very well become the scandal that finally proves his undoing.
The Emergency Election Sale is now live! Get 30% to 60% off our most popular products today! | {
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Amarinder Singh had led the Congress government from 2002 to 2007
Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh today said that he will not quit politics until Punjab's number one position is "restored" and he may fight the next assembly polls, if needed.
He also blamed the decade long rule of the previous SAD-BJP regime for the "sufferings" of the people of the state.
"I cannot think of quitting as long as Punjab's people need me. My people suffered for 10 years under the SAD rule and its my commitment that I will wipe even the memories of those dark years and restore the state's #1 position. If that means contesting next Assembly polls, so be it," the 77-year-old chief minister said in a tweet.
Scion of the erstwhile Patiala's royal family, Mr Singh had earlier announced that the 2017 Assembly polls would be his last political battle.
However, in 2018, Mr Singh said that he would not hang up his boots until the state was taken out of the "mess".
The Congress had stormed to power in Punjab, under Mr Singh's leadership, by winning 77 of the 117 seats and wrested power from the SAD-BJP combine in the 2017 polls.
Earlier, Mr Singh had led the Congress government from 2002 to 2007. | {
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Greetings Citizens,
We are very excited to premiere the finished Anvil Aerospace Hornet commercial today, as well as the Hornet brochure. For those that caught a sneak peak of the Hornet commercial at the Citizencon event: you haven’t seen anything yet! The civilian version of the UEE’s venerable F7A Hornet, the F7C Hornet is a dedicated dogfighter capable of tangling with mercenaries, pirates, Vanduul and more.
We’re pushing the limits with Star Citizen, and this commercial is our best example yet. It’s rendered 100% in-engine in real time at 4k resolution. We scale everything for the super high resolutions that will be the basis of tomorrow’s gaming experience; our assets are designed with high polycounts instead of having details baked into their textures. That’s a big part of why NVIDIA and AMD have been demoing Star Citizen at 4k! The next generation of CPUs and GPUs will make this kind of experience possible in gameplay, and we are building Star Citizen to be ready. With the Hornet commercial, we wanted to give our backers an early look. If you have a 4k-compatible monitor, select “Original” from the video settings on YouTube (or download the 4k file directly here. ) If you don’t, 1080p is highly recommended.
Three additional versions of civilian Hornet are being launched today:
The Hornet Ghost is a stealth-oriented craft designed to have a low radar signature; when you’re flying a Ghost, your opponents won’t know what hit them!
The Hornet Tracker is the Ghost’s other half: a dedicated ECM spacecraft with advanced sensors for complete situational awareness on the battlefield.
Last, but not least, the Super Hornet is a bigger, beefier model that features more advanced weapons, a turret and a second seat for a radar operator.
These models are intended to show backers what they will be able to do with ship upgrades and modifications in the finished world, building base hulls out for more specific roles.
You can learn more about each in the brochure linked below, produced by Anvil Aerspace’s advertising division! | {
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This is what Obama told Jack Tapper this evening in his interview for World News Tonight.
President Obama said today that Congress needs to change abortion-related language in the health care bill passed by the House of Representatives this weekend that includes tougher restrictions on abortion funding but said there is more work to be done before a final piece of legislation gets to his desk.
I laid out a very simple principle, which is this is a health care bill, not an abortion bill," Obama said. "And we're not looking to change what is the principle that has been in place for a very long time, which is federal dollars are not used to subsidize abortions. Saying the bill cannot change the status quo, the President said "there are strong feelings on both sides" about an amendment passed on Saturday and added to the legislation, "and what that tells me is that there needs to be some more work before we get to the point where we're not changing the status quo."
In an exclusive television interview in the Map Rom of the White House, Obama told ABC News' Jake Tapper that he was confident that the final legislation will ensure that "neither side feels that it's being betrayed."
I want to make sure that the provision that emerges meets that test -- that we are not in some way sneaking in funding for abortions, but, on the other hand, that we're not restricting women's insurance choices," he said.
Also, it appears that some in the GOP Senate are also cool to the Stupak amendment.
http://www.politico.com/...
Senator Alexander:
Senate Republicans seem initially cool to Rep. Bart Stupak’s (D-Mich.) amendment in House health-care overhaul legislation, which essentially blocks the federal funding of abortions. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the third-ranking Republican in the body, said abortion is an important issue but "the issues that are going to dominate the health care debate are whether we’re reducing costs or whether we’re increasing the costs for most Americans."
Senator Collins: | {
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사용 시 주의사항
1) 화장품 사용 시 또는 사용 후 직사광선에 의하여 사용부위가 붉은 반점, 부어오름 또는 가려움증 등의 이상 증상이나 부작용이 있는 경우 전문의 등과 상담할 것 2) 상처가 있는 부위 등에는 사용을 자제할 것 3) 보관 및 취급 시의 주의사항 가) 어린이의 손이 닿지 않는 곳에 보관할 것 나) 직사광선을 피해서 보관할 것* 용기 특성상, 첫 펌핑시 내용물이 곧바로 나오지 않을 수 있습니다. 용기 내부의 공기가 충분히 빠져나갈 때까지 충분히 펌핑해 주시고, 15회 이상 펌핑시에도 제품이 토출되지 않을 시에는 별도 문의 바랍니다. | {
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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutras community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
When you’re creating a new project with Unity, one of the first things you have to do is code your avatar’s controller. It’s very important and you can’t rush it or your gamefeel will probably be bad. There are a lot of different things to do, ranging from the inputs acquisition to the movements and feedbacks.
One of the first question I often ask myself is : “Should I use a Character Controller or a Rigidbody? ”.
Today, through the example of a simple moving, jumping and dashing avatar, we will explore the two approaches.
Here is a github of the complete project:
https://github.com/valgoun/CharacterController
The Character Controller approach
Setup
Before anything let’s just setup the project and a basic test scene. As written in our 8 Essential Gamedev Tips, we must be organized. Create these folders:
Then create a very simple scene with a ground, a capsule (our Player) and a stair to play with.
Adding some verticality with the stairs will allow us to experiment with a lot of different and important things when coding our character: The way it collides with objects, the gravity when falling from a distance, and also to test the jumping mechanic if we want one.
I also put a simple box as a child of our player so we can see its orientation when looking around).
Keep your scene clean, use parents.
The Character Controller
The Character Controller is a component you can add to your player. Its function is to move the player according to the environment (the colliders).
It doesn’t respond nor uses physics in any way.
On top of that, the Character Controller comes with a Capsule Collider. Before seeing how it works, I recommend you to take a look at the manual and the scripting API, it’s always a good thing to do.
For this example, I used the default parameters but feel free to play with them to understand how they work.
The core concept behind the Character Controller is that it provides basic collider responses without any physics. Basically, you will move your player like you would do with a Transform, but you can’t go through colliders.
The main advantage of using this technique is the amount of control we’ll have on how your player behaves, but the downfall is that you’ll have to code practically everything.
The Character Controller includes 2 methods used to move the character: SimpleMove and Move.
SimpleMove takes the speed as parameter and will move the character accordingly. On top of that, the character will respond to gravity. That’s the only physic you’ll get with the Character Controller. The downside is that the Y axis velocity is ignored by this method.
Move requires a little bit more work but is less limited. It takes in parameters the absolute movement. Therefore, it’s framerate dependent and you have to implement gravity on your own.
Even if it’s the more complicated method, it’s the one I prefer because SimpleMove becomes very quickly limiting by the fact that you have no effect on the Y axis velocity.
Basic Movements
Let’s implement a very basic movement. For this, let’s create a new C# script named “Character” that we add to our Player/capsule. Then, we’ll need a public variable so we can tweak the speed directly from the editor and a private variable to store a reference to our Character Controller.
(don’t forget to get the Character Controller in the Start method, see code below)
In the Update function, we get the Inputs, that we then store into a Vector3. After, we call the Move method from our CharacterController passing it the Input vector multiplied by the speed and the DeltaTime to be framerate independent and “voilà”, we have our basic movements:
public class Character : MonoBehaviour { private CharacterController _controller; void Start() { _controller = GetComponent<CharacterController>(); } void Update() { Vector3 move = new Vector3(Input.GetAxis("Horizontal"), 0, Input.GetAxis("Vertical")); _controller.Move(move * Time.deltaTime * Speed); } }
Our character moves but doesn’t steer according to its movement. It’s easy to change the forward vector of the transform to be the movement vector:
Vector3 move = new Vector3(Input.GetAxis("Horizontal"), 0, Input.GetAxis("Vertical")); _controller.Move(move * Time.deltaTime * Speed); if (move != Vector3.zero) transform.forward = move;
Gravity
Let’s add gravity. For that, we’ll need a… gravity variable (or you can use the global gravity with Physics.gravity.y) and private variable to store the velocity of the character.
Then, we just have to add the gravity to our player’s velocity at each update and to apply the velocity with the Move method:
_velocity.y += Gravity * Time.deltaTime; _controller.Move(_velocity * Time.deltaTime);
If you try, you will probably feel the gravity as a bit weird. It’s because even when the player is grounded, the velocity is still increasing following the gravity.
To resolve this, we can reset the y velocity to 0 when the player is grounded.
The CharacterController already has a variable to know if the character is grounded but I found it buggy and I tend to determine myself if the player is grounded. I Like to use the CheckSphere method from the Physics Class. It returns true if any colliders intersect the sphere defined by the parameters. I like to use an empty gameObject child of my player as center of the sphere and then I use a variable for the radius and the layer. This way I can control in editor the way I define the grounded status of my character. (If this part seems hard to understand, take a look at my project and recreate it on yours).
_isGrounded = Physics.CheckSphere(_groundChecker.position, GroundDistance, Ground, QueryTriggerInteraction.Ignore); if (_isGrounded && _velocity.y < 0) _velocity.y = 0f;
Here, _isGrounded is a bool variable created in the class, _groundChecker is a reference to the child of the player (the center of the sphere), GroundDistance is the radius of the sphere and Ground is the layer where ground objects are.
Jump
Adding a jump is pretty easy. When the jump button is pressed and the player grounded, we change the y velocity. To know which value we choose to set our velocity we can use this formula:
“velocity = JumpHeight * -2 * Gravity”
if (Input.GetButtonDown("Jump") && _isGrounded) _velocity.y += Mathf.Sqrt(JumpHeight * -2f * Gravity);
Here I chose to use some fancy math so I have a more convenient variable to control my jump (JumpHeight). Other would have chosen to use a direct variable (JumpForce) to control the jump : easier to code, trickier to control.
if (Input.GetButtonDown("Jump") && _isGrounded) _velocity.y += JumpForce;
Dash and Drag
One last example of movement you can implement : a dash. When you press the dash button your velocity will increase towards the direction you are going. Like the jump you could choose a direct implementation or use math and find a formula to make it simple to control. The maths here are a bit more complicated and I found this to works well.
if (Input.GetButtonDown("Dash")) { Debug.Log("Dash"); _velocity += Vector3.Scale(transform.forward, DashDistance * new Vector3((Mathf.Log(1f / (Time.deltaTime * Drag.x + 1)) / -Time.deltaTime), 0, (Mathf.Log(1f / (Time.deltaTime * Drag.z + 1)) / -Time.deltaTime))); }
What we’re doing here is scaling the forward vector (our direction) following a dash vector. The dash vector depends on 2 variables, the dash distance and the drag. We need to have a drag or otherwise, the player would never stop. the idea behind the drag is to “simulate” the friction forces (with air, ground etc…). Drag is an arbitrary value between 0 and Infinity with 0 meaning no drag at all. Here I chose to use a Vector3 to represent the drag so I can specify different drag values along the axis. Then to apply the drag we just need to add this at the end of the update function:
_velocity.x /= 1 + Drag.x * Time.deltaTime; _velocity.y /= 1 + Drag.y * Time.deltaTime; _velocity.z /= 1 + Drag.z * Time.deltaTime;
Character Controller Conclusion
What did we learn with this ? Well, when we’re using the character controller we have a lot of freedom but at the same time we have to code a lot of stuff ourselves even for simple actions like jumping or gravity.
The Rigidbody approach
Now that we have made our controller with the character lets see how to make the same with a Rigidbody, and what are the differences between the two approaches.
Setup
The scene setup is practically the same. The main difference is that we don’t have a Character Controller component attached to the Player GameObject but a Capsule Collider and a Rigidbody.
On the Rigidbody, set the X and Z axis rotations to be locked. Also note that I changed the Drag, we’ll see why later. The other options are default values. We can leave the Capsule Collider to its default values.
Be sure to lock the X and Z axis rotations
Rigidbody Controller
This time, I won’t explain every step of the process because it’s very similar to what we’ve done in the Character Controller. I’ll focus on the differences between the two. Here’s the full script to give you an overview:
public class RigidbodyCharacter : MonoBehaviour { public float Speed = 5f; public float JumpHeight = 2f; public float GroundDistance = 0.2f; public float DashDistance = 5f; public LayerMask Ground; private Rigidbody _body; private Vector3 _inputs = Vector3.zero; private bool _isGrounded = true; private Transform _groundChecker; void Start() { _body = GetComponent<Rigidbody>(); _groundChecker = transform.GetChild(0); } void Update() { _isGrounded = Physics.CheckSphere(_groundChecker.position, GroundDistance, Ground, QueryTriggerInteraction.Ignore); _inputs = Vector3.zero; _inputs.x = Input.GetAxis("Horizontal"); _inputs.z = Input.GetAxis("Vertical"); if (_inputs != Vector3.zero) transform.forward = _inputs; if (Input.GetButtonDown("Jump") && _isGrounded) { _body.AddForce(Vector3.up * Mathf.Sqrt(JumpHeight * -2f * Physics.gravity.y), ForceMode.VelocityChange); } if (Input.GetButtonDown("Dash")) { Vector3 dashVelocity = Vector3.Scale(transform.forward, DashDistance * new Vector3((Mathf.Log(1f / (Time.deltaTime * _body.drag + 1)) / -Time.deltaTime), 0, (Mathf.Log(1f / (Time.deltaTime * _body.drag + 1)) / -Time.deltaTime))); _body.AddForce(dashVelocity, ForceMode.VelocityChange); } } void FixedUpdate() { _body.MovePosition(_body.position + _inputs * Speed * Time.fixedDeltaTime); } }
FixedUpdate
The first notable difference is the FixedUpdate function. This function is called by Unity before every “physic update”. Indeed, physic updates and classic updates are not synced. To achieve a convincing physic simulation, we need to calculate it smoothly. Unity decided to pull apart the physic update from the classic update. This way if the frame rate is too low or too fast, it won’t impact the simulation.
Quick tip: you can change the physic frame rate (called “Fixed Timestep”) in the Time Manager in the project settings.
The idea behind the FixedUpdate function is that you put the physic code here. But as you can see, I still have a classic Update function. Indeed, the input system of Unity isn’t synced with the FixedUpdate so we have to retrieve the inputs in Update, stock them into a variable (here _inputs) and use it in FixedUpdate. You could manage the inputs directly in FixedUpdate but you would most likely have inconvenient behaviors.
Jumping & Dashing
if (Input.GetButtonDown("Jump") && _isGrounded) { _body.AddForce(Vector3.up * Mathf.Sqrt(JumpHeight * -2f * Physics.gravity.y), ForceMode.VelocityChange); } if (Input.GetButtonDown("Dash")) { Vector3 dashVelocity = Vector3.Scale(transform.forward, DashDistance * new Vector3((Mathf.Log(1f / (Time.deltaTime * _body.drag + 1)) / -Time.deltaTime), 0, (Mathf.Log(1f / (Time.deltaTime * _body.drag + 1)) / -Time.deltaTime))); _body.AddForce(dashVelocity, ForceMode.VelocityChange); }
Why didn’t you put this into Fixed Update ? It’s physic related.
Yes, but here I used these function in a discrete way : these AddForce calls are instantaneous, therefore it’s not frame dependent. AddForce is a function used to apply a force to Rigidbody. There are 4 different ways to apply a force:
Force : continuous and mass dependent
: continuous and mass dependent Acceleration : continuous and mass independent
: continuous and mass independent Impulse : instant and mass dependent
: instant and mass dependent VelocityChange: instant and mass independent
Here you can see I’m using velocityChange because I want to have an instant reaction when jumping or dashing, and I don’t care about the player’s mass.
void FixedUpdate() { _body.MovePosition(_body.position + _inputs * Speed * Time.fixedDeltaTime); }
To move the character according to the player’s inputs, we use theMovePosition function. This function tries to move the player to a given position while respecting the collisions rules. It also doesn’t change the velocity of the Rigidbody. This way, the player’s movement are “separated” from the other physic interaction.
You can see we don’t bother ourselves with gravity or drag. That’s because the Rigidbody already does it for us. You can change the drag on the Rigidbody and the gravity in the project settings.
(Be careful with the drag, unlike the one we implemented with the Character Controller, this one isn’t split into different axes, so it’ll affect all three axes at the same time!)
Main differences
Even if we want to achieve the same goals with both techniques, they won’t behave exactly the same.
Collisions
They both react with colliders but there are some slight differences. While the Rigidbody will react very precisely and even use the physics material property to calculate the reaction, the Character Controller will be more permissive : It will automatically climb slopes and steps (according to its parameters).
Change these parameters to get closer to the feeling you are looking for.
Extensibility
In this example we didn’t have a lot of features to code and the Character Controller solution was the easiest one to do, but if we were to implement more mechanics, the Rigidbody would probably be the best way to go. It offers a lot more functions to interact with physic whereas the Character Controller doesn’t, therefore we’d need to code more for the same feature using the Character Controller.
In Conclusion
As you can see, we can achieve the same things using both techniques but the way we work will change according the option we choose.
That’s why I strongly advise you to always take some time to think about before starting to code any player controller script!
We hope this article was of some use to you!
If you want more details on this tutorial, or would like to request another one, please get in touch with us, on social media, the comments, etc. We’ll see it.
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This story comes courtesy of California Watch
By Lance Williams
Hewlett-Packard Co. is the ultimate rationale for Carly Fiorina's U.S. Senate campaign.
The Republican candidate was CEO of Hewlett-Packard for six years. She engineered the mega-merger with Compaq. She managed the "reinvention of the legendary company," as her campaign biography says.
But in the end, Fiorina's stormy proprietorship ended in her firing. And before that, she faced bitter criticism - from the 28,000 people who lost their jobs as a result of the merger, and from Packard family heirs who passionately believed Fiorina was wrecking a company they considered their birthright.
Today, the lingering nature of that bitterness may be reflected in campaign finance records. Four months before the election, Sen. Barbara Boxer, a liberal Democrat with no particular ties to HP, is raising more money from Hewlett-Packard sources than the company's former CEO.
Boxer has obtained $7,373, Federal Election Commission records show: $3,000 from HP's Political Action Committee; $2,000 from HP computer scientist Jeffrey Mogul; $1,000 from Executive Vice President Michael Holston; $675 from computer scientist Ahmed Ezzat; $250 from Jason Rodriguez, director of government affairs; $200 from software engineer John Clark; $198 from programmer Thomas Wang; and $50 from Bruce Culbertson, another engineer.
For her part, Fiorina has obtained only two donations from HP sources: $2,400 from Anne Livermore, head of HP's enterprise business division; and $500 from Steve Huhn, a vice president for sales.
That's all the money the former CEO has managed to raise from her former company.
Fiorina's HP critics have expressed their continued displeasure in other ways. During the GOP primary, Arianna Packard, granddaughter of the co-founder, posted a letter at Redstate.com calling Fiorina a "greedy, out-of-touch CEO" who "almost" destroyed HP. Packard wound up campaigning for Chuck DeVore.
In general, HP's federal PAC is leaning toward Democrats this year. Opensecrets.org reports the PAC has donated $33,900 to GOP candidates and more than $66,000 to Democrats.
The biggest Republican beneficiary was Georgia Sen. Johnny Isakson, who got $5,000. The Searchlight Leadership Fund, a PAC associated with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., obtained $7,500 from HP. (N.B. Opensecrets says Boxer has obtained $5,000 from the HP PAC, but Federal Election Commission reports show only $3,000.) HP has donated an additional $30,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
For a hugely profitable and successful U.S. company, HP has a dramatic recent history. There was the public infighting between Fiorina and David Packard, son and namesake of the company co-founder (and Arianna's father) over the Compaq merger. Then there was there was the "I-Spy" operation directed by then-board chair Patty Dunn, who was fired for investigating a corporate director whom she suspected of leaking news to business reporters.
Summing up this year's dramatics at HP, Information Age writes: "So far, it has been accused of stealing trade secrets, evading tax in India, and paying 'influencer fees' to win government contracts in the U.S. and Russia. In the U.K., it has paid £318 million in compensation to BSkyB over a failed (customer relationship management) project and faced employee strikes over redundancies."
All that was before Mark Hurd, Fiorina's replacement as CEO, was sacked for expense-account abuses discovered because a marketing consultant accused him of sexual harassment. Hurd reportedly obtained a multimillion-dollar golden parachute.
Fiorina isn't paying attention to the latest HP scandal, she told the Bay Area News Group.
During his years as CEO, Hurd donated $35,000 in federal campaigns, most of it to the HP PAC. Jodie Foster, the consultant whose complaint cost Hurd his job, hasn't given any political money, records show. | {
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Winnie Madikizela-Mandela
1939-2018
Rafael Martinez
On April 2nd 2018 Winnie Madikizela-Mandela passed away, leaving South Africa in shock and consternation. Dubbed the Mother of the Nation, Winnie was given a state funeral. Even some who betrayed her struggle and sidelined her politically in crucial times for South Africa did not hesitate to vindicate her following her passing.
Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela was born in the Transkei, in what is now the Eastern Cape, September 26th 1939. Her parents both were English-speaking teachers who were mission-educated. She grew up before the Bantu system of education was established by the apartheid regime. As a result, she had access to education that many after her were deprived of. Winnie graduated from Shawbury High School, where she was educated by graduates of Fort Hare University,1 a well-known enclave of black political activism. In 1953 she was admitted to the Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work in Johannesburg. She completed her degree in social work in 1955, top of her class. She accepted a position of medical social worker at Baragwanath Hospital in Johannesburg, the first black person to be hired in that capacity.
She displayed political consciousness early on and before marrying Nelson Mandela. As a social worker, Winnie was politically active and was sensitive to the injustices on blacks by white minority rule. For instance, Winnie performed research in Alexandra Township regarding infant mortality. She concluded that infant mortality decimated 1 in 100 children. She stated at the time that “I started to realise the abject poverty under which most people were forced to live, the appalling conditions created by the inequalities of the system”.
Winnie and Nelson were married in June 1958 while proceedings of the Treason Trial were still in progress. The years of marriage before Nelson Mandela was imprisoned in Robben Island, were such that they would barely spend time together. Nelson Mandela would be either in jail or away on political assignments. In Winnie’s words, Nelson Mandela never discussed politics with her. Winnie becomes a political leader in her own rights under the auspices of the African National Congress and the Women’s League. As she put it, the Women’s League dealt with the “bread and butter” of the struggle and so she got involved to the point of becoming an icon by her own ability. Winnie’s uncompromising, unwavering and tireless struggle played a significant role in turning Nelson Mandela into an icon of the anti-apartheid movement both nationally and internationally.
Winnie was cognizant of the consequences of marrying one of the prominent leaders of the struggle against white domination. Their house was subject to regular police raids. Harassment and intimidation became a way of life for Winnie and it only got worse over the years. In the late 50s her political activism was on the rise. In October 1958 Winnie participated in protest actions against the disgraceful pass laws. Pass laws were tantamount to an internal passport system aimed at effecting segregation, where black labourers would be forced to live in designated areas away from their families. These contrived regulations had devastating effects on the family life of black communities. Pass laws were enforced long before the establishment of the apartheid and used to apply to black men. It was during the apartheid that pass laws were also enforced on black women.
Sharpeville’s massacre in March 1960 became a watershed, a turning point in the struggle against white supremacy. The ANC and other political organizations were banned. After being acquitted in 1961 at the Treason Trial, Nelson Mandela went underground. It is at that time and as a result of the continued violence against black protesters that Nelson Mandela challenges the suitability of peaceful non-resistance. It is at this time that what is to become the armed wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) or the “spear of the nation”, is established. Nelson Mandela was deemed a terrorist by the forces of reaction both nationally and internationally. This was aggravated by the suspicion that Mandela collaborated with communist activists, although he always denied ever being a member of the Communist Party. Following his arrest in August 1962 and his conviction in June 1964, he was imprisoned, including periods of solitary confinement, till his release in February 1990.
Winnie’s political activism intensified with Nelson’s incarceration. As her uncompromising struggle against the apartheid escalated so did the pressure and the cruelty displayed by the police and its ruthless special branch. Her house in Soweto was raided regularly, terrorizing her and her two daughters. This was done with the intent to demoralize and to deter her from political activism. Scores of men would torment Winnie by attacking her house in the middle of the night. She was in and out of jail so many times than she could count. In 1965 a new banning order was enforced that disallowed her to leave her neighbourhood. As a result, she could no longer be employed. With assistance from sympathizers Winnie sent out her daughters to a boarding school in Swaziland.
In May 1969 Winnie was apprehended during a night raid. She fell victim to the terrorist act of 1967, where arrests could be effected without warrant and people could be held in solitary confinement indefinitely and without access to counsel. Winnie spent 491 days2 in custody, most of which in solitary confinement, where she was kept in appalling hygienic conditions, was subjected to sleep deprivation and other forms of torture. Her incarceration coupled with sadistic methods of intimidation did not curb Winnie’s determination to remain defiant and politically active.
Banning orders, harassment, raids, arrests and other forms of pressure continued to be exerted on Winnie with the same virulence after her release from solitary confinement. But this campaign of intimidation did not have the desired effect. As a result of her continued political activism and resilience in dealing with the regime’s brutality, Winnie’s stature in the antiapartheid movement became admirable. By the 70s Winnie had become a role model for a new generation of disenfranchised youth that was helplessly frustrated with the apartheid. It is no coincidence that many among the youth who are so dispirited with today’s state of affairs in South Africa are vindicating Winnie’s as a means to assert their political aspirations.
The Soweto Uprising of June 1976 signified the beginning of the end of the apartheid regime. Not surprisingly, Winnie was retaliated against by the regime for the violence and the political turmoil that ensued. Winnie was arrested and kept in custody for months. In May 1977 Winnie was banished in Brandfort, a remote location where she continued her activism by assisting and organizing the local community.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela during her exile in Brandfort in 1977
Today’s South Africa has not fundamentally altered the economic relations and social inequalities inherited from the old regime. Only the segregationist aspect of the regime was shed, as it is not critical to capitalist rule, where capitalist exploitation continues to be excruciating to this date. For this superficial transformation to occur the regime of the apartheid ferociously targeted those that it deemed a threat to the perpetuation of its economic interests. Winnie was the very embodiment of that threat and as such it had to be associated with barbarism, subversion, strife, violence and, finally, with murder. The apartheid used every possible means at their disposal to engender a demon in the narrow minds of those too scared to lose their possessions. What is, however, tragic lies in the fact that many in the ANC, who were all too eager to negotiate only to eventually betray the movement of national liberation, chose to echo the mythology created by the apartheid. It was this that Winnie was most indignant at, and rightly so. Winnie’s vilification and defamation did not come to a halt with the fall of white minority rule. Regrettably, Winnie continued to be harassed by those, now in power, who were supposed to liberate the black majority from poverty and exclusion, but instead chose to profit from the economics of the apartheid. There is a perverse logic behind this vicious opprobrium. In embracing neo-liberalism, the government of the ANC betrayed the struggle for national liberation, thus, perpetuating the economics of the old regime.
Early on during the transition Winnie and others in the ANC showed dissent from the way the negotiations were conducted and even more so when in time it became evident that the black majority was not to find relief from its economic alienation. Winnie and the likes not only threatened the apartheid, but also those that came after to benefit from the economics of exclusion that the apartheid itself was based upon. It is for the reasons of this objective connection that Winnie’s torment did not end with the establishment of the government of the ANC.
Winnie’s uncompromising stand against the apartheid scared many in the ANC and the anti-apartheid movement. Already in 1989 Winnie was lambasted by the United Democratic Front (UDF), as allegations of the kidnapping and murder of Stompie Seipei were leveraged against her. The UDF, a major mass anti-apartheid coalition, accused Winnie of “violating human rights in the name of the struggle against apartheid”.
In 1990 she was charged with kidnapping and in 1991 she was convicted, although the six-year term was reduced upon appeal to a fine. The ANC Women’s League sidelined Winnie by electing Gertrude Shope as its president. Nevertheless, Winnie was elected president of the Women’s League in 1993 and her tenure lasted for ten years.
Winnie was further humiliated, now under the government of the ANC, when forced to testify in front of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC concluded that “Ms Winnie Madikizela Mandela politically and morally accountable for the gross violations of human rights committed by the Mandela United Football Club” and that she “was responsible, by omission, for the commission of gross violations of human rights”. The TRC went further in making Winnie responsible for crimes against other members of the anti-apartheid movement as well. While Winnie was victimized, the TRC failed to appropriately expose former president De Klerk for his complicity in crimes against the South African people, not to mention the fact that former president Botha, De Klerk’s predecessor, blatantly refused to testify. The hypocrisy and double standards upheld in the process were, without a reasonable doubt, politically motivated.
In 1992 Winnie resigned her positions at the ANC after being accused of issuing unwarranted payments to her deputy. In April 2003 Winnie was convicted on 43 counts of fraud and 25 of theft for an alleged scheme to the tune of 100,000 USD, an appeal that she would win later. Winnie always denied direct involvement, or personal gain in these illicit activities. Nonetheless, it is ironic to see how Winnie was made accountable for amounts that pale in comparison with the sheer size of corruption in South Africa. One wonders why a person is convicted for a petty crime while billions have been obliterated due to endemic corruption in both the public and private sectors. It is hard to believe that the application selective standards were not politically driven.
It is now known that the apartheid’s police was heavily involved in discrediting Winnie by passing false allegations to news outlets regarding heavy drinking and promiscuity. This was done systematically in order to create a distorted perception of the fighter. Unfortunately, this was eventually picked up by her political opponents in the ANC. She was accused of multiple love affairs before and after the release of Nelson Mandela. These allegations were effectively used by some in the leadership to prevent Winnie from attaining significant positions of responsibility in government. As a matter of fact, the highest office she attained in government was that of Deputy Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, which she held briefly.
Shocking revelations aired on South African TV right after Winnie’s passing pertaining to how the apartheid’s intelligence services were directly responsible for the smear campaign against Winnie. Debates revolving around Stompie Seipei’s case have reignited in the light of this and other revelations. It seems evident that apartheid agencies had successfully infiltrated the Mandela United Football Club, which had become infested with agents provocateurs. It is believed that the man who killed Stompie, Jerry Richardson, the so-called coach of the Mandela United Football Club, was himself a police informant. The National Police Commissioner George Fivaz revealed this fact to the TRC. Other testimonies also attest to the role of the apartheid’s police in the violence that pervaded Soweto those days. The fact of the matter is that to date no credible evidence has been put forward to incriminate Winnie in Stompie’s assassination, or that of any other activist. In the words of George Fivaz, who upon being appointed National Police Commissioner in 1995 reopened the investigation: “There was not a single piece of information that fingered Winnie to say she was responsible... maybe personally responsible... for the murder, that she gave instructions for Stompie to be eliminated”. Winnie had approached Joyce Seipei, Stompie’s mother to tell her she was sorry for what had happened to her son: “When someone says ‘sorry’, you are compelled to forgive them. But in this case, Mama Winnie didn’t do anything, yet she came and humbled herself before us and said sorry for what had happened^ Mama Winnie was more concerned with seeing the children get an education and she was willing to facilitate that”. Joyce, as many others in South Africa was shocked by Winnie’s passing. She visited her house in Soweto to sign a condolence book wearing a shawl with the colours of the ANC and photo of Winnie.
Recent revelations have precipitated widespread indignation in South Africa. It was not just the fabrication and manipulation, which was obvious to many, but the fact that those in power decided to wait for her passing to let the truth out. Many in positions of responsibility in the post-apartheid period took advantage of the distorted perception of Winnie created by the apartheid regime for their own benefit. In an emotional tribute to her mother, Zenani Mandela-Dlamini stated: “Lies that have become part of my mother’s life^ and this was when we saw so many people, who sat on the truth, come out one-by-one to say they’d known all along that these things that were being said about my mother were false.”
The years between the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 and the elections in April 1994 is arguably one of the most violent periods in the History of South Africa. On the one hand, the government of the whites was meticulously identifying those in the anti-apartheid movement that they felt comfortable hold negotiations with; on the other hand, it was promoting black-on-black violence, division and demonizing those who were perceived as threats to the economic substrate of the apartheid. Two figures attracted the attention from those who were determined to perpetuate capitalist rule in South Africa: Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Chris Hani, who came to prominence as the Chief of Staff of the MK and had been elected the General Secretary of the South African Communist Party. He emerged as a prime candidate to replace Nelson Mandela. It was essential to the government of whites that these two powerful figures of the antiapartheid movement be neutralized before power was to be relinquished to the ANC. The first was vilified by means of a ferocious campaign of smear and fabrication. The second was assassinated in April 1993.
Two paths of development were envisioned for post-apartheid South Africa: neo-liberalism intertwined with neo-colonialism, or the implementation of the Freedom Charter by way of accomplishing the tasks of national liberation with the perspective of socialist construction. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Chris Hani were staunch supporters of the second route. Due to their unquestionable popularity among the blacks, they became stumbling blocks for the preservation of capitalist rule in post-apartheid South Africa and had to be sidelined and/or eliminated. Winnie’s pro-socialist sympathies were not a secret, as exemplified by Winnie’s admiration for Chris Hani: “We dreamt of a day where he would be president of South Africa”.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela next to Chris Hani
Winnie reminisces about the day of Chris Hani’s assassination: “I was at home when Chris Hani was shot... It was clear that it was a complicated assassination, you couldn’t attribute it to the enemy completely”. Indeed, Hani’s assassination was a convoluted affair that could have not possibly been the result of the actions of two isolated individuals. Here the particulars of the terrorist attack perpetrated on Hani are not the issue. From the technical standpoint it seems plausible that two people planned and executed the operation. However, the political underpinning was the determining factor behind Hani’s assassination, where massive economic interests were at stake. Hani was not assassinated because he fundamentally opposed negotiations with the white government, which he did not, or because he promoted violence on whites, which he did not either, but because the white minority demanded a guarantee that the government of the ANC embraces neo-liberalism as its core economic policy. His elimination signified that guarantee and a precondition that was tacitly accepted. It is only when that guarantee was provided that negotiations finally converged and elections were held a year later. Hani’s assassination leveled the path towards today’s South Africa, where the black majority remains exploited and economically excluded. Winnie understood all too well the political motives that lay behind Hani’s assassination and its implications for the future of South Africa.
Winnie was critical of the state of affairs in South Africa and how little the government of the ANC has done for the black majority. In one of her last interviews she stated: “Something is very wrong with the History of our country. Something is very wrong with what we have done, how we have messed up the African National Congress”. This scathing verdict encapsulates the History of post-apartheid South Africa, as well as Winnie’s unwavering commitment to the cause of the oppressed.
History never forgets a true fighter for freedom and equality, no matter the slander.
Endnotes: | {
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Eliza Collins
USA TODAY
Welcome to Saturday. Let’s recap this week in politics as you sip your coffee in bed. The investigative team at USA TODAY found out that Donald Trump’s businesses have gotten into quite a bit of trouble over their taxes, while Hillary Clinton is ready to say buh-bye to Bernie Sanders and face Trump in the general. Let’s get started:
Donald Trump has had YUUUUGE tax drama
A USA TODAY analysis found that almost every year since the late 80s, Trump’s businesses have been having tax issues — and there are at least 100 lawsuits and other disputes to prove it.
Since the beginning of Trump's campaign nearly a year ago, at least five of his companies received warrants for more than $13,000 for late or unpaid taxes. And that plane Trump uses to get from place to place? His company that owns it owed $8,578 in taxes — they’ve since paid that.
These numbers came out in the middle of a particularly awkward time for Trump, as pressure builds for him to release his taxes. He's said no thanks, he's being audited — and even if he wasn’t, his tax rate is “none of your business.”
In bonus news: The lawyer Trump hired to work on his search for a running mate (the same guy who helped find former Alaska governor Sarah Palin in 2008) used criteria that the presumptive GOP nominee wouldn't currently meet — you guessed it, that the 2008 VP candidates had to share their taxes.
Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders: It’s time to shut it down
Clinton and her campaign were never exactly subtle with their hints that the Vermont senator should get out of the race — basically anytime she or her team talked about the race, they mentioned that whole “insurmountable” delegate lead thing. But she never flat out said Sanders was done.
But that all changed on Thursday when she essentially said, here’s the deal: It’s me. Sen. Sanders, it’s time for you to skedaddle. Oh, and can you please help me get your supporters? Because Donald Trump “isn’t qualified” to be president.
Here’s what happened: CNN host Chris Cuomo started to ask her a question that began with “if you’re the Democratic nominee —” but she cut him off.
“I will be the nominee for my party, Chris. That is already done. In effect, there’s no way I won’t be,” Clinton said. Then she added that Sanders "has to do his part to unify” the party behind her.
Understandably, the Sanders campaign wasn’t down with that and they fired off a statement saying that millions of people who have voted for him don’t agree, and he’s staying for the long haul.
Trump vs. Clinton could be tight, poll finds
Clinton beat Trump on Tuesday by 3 points in an NBC/Survey Money poll. Then Trump beat Clinton by 3 points on Thursday in a Fox News poll. Here’s the biggest takeaway: Current polls suggest this race could be closer than many would've guessed.
And the race between the two has grown much tighter. The RealClearPolitics average gives Clinton a 3-point lead, but that’s much smaller than July when she was 20 points ahead of Trump.
More from the campaign trail
Trump campaign says that nothing is off limits against Clinton (USA TODAY)
Clinton says Trump isn’t qualified to be president (USA TODAY) He responds by saying you aren’t either (USA TODAY)
The NRA endorses Trump (USA TODAY)
Oreos, Apple products, Ford cars: The same companies Trump bashes are also in his investment portfolio (USA TODAY)
Pawns move nowhere, whereas the Queen can go anywhere
The Washington Post’s ComPost blog looked at “If Sanders supporters complained about other things the way they complain about election results.” A sample:
“This game is rigged. The pawns get to move almost NOWHERE, whereas the QUEEN (DETECT ANY RESEMBLANCE HERE???) can just move wherever she likes with no apparent rhyme or reason. She’s not a bishop or a rook. Why does she move like one? Also, the black pieces have to move second, which is TOTALLY unfair and needs to be looked into, unless I am playing with the white pieces today.” | {
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It's the latest attack in the CBD. Six people died in the 2017 Bourke Street tragedy, while one was killed in the Flinders Street incident in December last year. Mr Andrews, speaking at the Shrine of Remembrance on Sunday, said he wasn't going to "fundamentally change the way the city works by, for instance, not running any trams". "That wouldn't make any sense," he said. "We made significant efforts to make sure we fortified areas that were identifed by experts as points of weakness in our city knowing that we can never make every single physical space 100 per cent safe. Common sense tells you that." Mr Andrews said he'd been given no advice from experts that further work needed to be done, but he would have a "steely determination" to do more if necessary.
"Out of every incident there are learnings and that's an important part of the culture we've brought to this important task," he said. Mourners pay their respects to the co-owner of Pellegrini's Sisto Malaspina after he was stabbed in the Bourke Street incident on Friday. Credit:Chris Hopkins "To listen, to learn and where there are improvements that need to be made of course we stand ready to do that, but that needs to be proportionate to the very real risks and challenges we face." Mr Andrews said significant changes had already been made after previous attacks, including changing bail laws and putting temporary bollards in the city. "I have been clear and from time to time I've been criticised for being very straight up and down, very straightforward when it comes to describing the very real threats that we face," he said.
Mr Andrews said he told Prime Minister Scott Morrison he had struck "the right balance" on Saturday when he called for Muslim leaders to take "special responsibility" for stamping out radicalism in their communities. "The statement from the board of Imams, the statement from the Somalian community yesterday, they are the ones I'd be guided by," the Premier said. The Premier said he was yet to speak with Mr Malaspina's family, but was hoping to do so. He steered away from speaking about the attacker. "There is work going on right now by incredibly brave members of Victoria Police and by doing that work they put themselves in harm's way in this very moment. I don't think (the attacker) deserves for us to be focused on him." Opposition leader Matthew Guy said he had been consistent in his messaging on crime.
"I'll bring in mandatory minimum jail time for repeat violent offenders," he said. "We don't tolerate and would never tolerate and accept that we should view, simply because our city is a now large one, that any violent extremism or problem with law and order is the norm. It's not the norm and we need to crack down on it hard," he said. He said he thought it was important to reinvest in deradicalisation programs and to ensure "our criminal justice system is the strongest it needs to be". | {
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OSINT: first candid photo of Belgorod submarine
Russia’s TYPHOON Class submarine, featured in The Hunt for Red October, was once very camera shy. As the world’s largest submarine, during the Cold War it held a certain fascination and was the subject of wild speculation even within sober defense circles. Today only one of these behemoths remains in service, TK-208 Dmitriy Donskoi. And it is nearing the end of its useful life. Consequently, the Russian Navy are now willing for photographs of this impressive beast to be pasted around the internet. In this vein, on 16th August Russian State media outlet TASS posted several excellent high resolution images of TK-208 in an article (https://tass.ru/armiya-i-opk/6762357) and on its Twitter feed. The images are outstanding, but of particular interest is that another submarine is just visible in the background of one of them: K-329 Belgorod. This latter boat is today’s Cold War TYPHOON, the largest new submarine, mysterious, secret and subject to wild speculation. This is the first candid image of her and shows the full profile above the waterline.
main Belgorod article w/Cutaway
Official images of the submarine when it was launched in April by Oleg Kuleshov (@fotoflota) were highly restricted and only show the tail of the submarine, traditionally its most sensitive part. But most of Belgorod’s secrets lay in the forward part of the submarine which houses the Poseidon Intercontinental Nuclear-Powered Nuclear-Armed Autonomous Torpedo. Other sensitive details include the docking station for the AS-31 (/AS-12) Losharik nuclear-powered deep-diving midget submarine, the boat on which 14 Russian hydronauts lost their life in July. The new photo thus casts fresh light on many details of this submarine.
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Among the subtle information in the photo, it confirms the cross-section of the forward hull and degree of bulbousness of the bow. These give clues about the internal arrangement, particularly regarding the Poseidon weapon.
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JOHNNY DEPP is a troubled man.
There's no getting away from the fact the Pirates of the Caribbean actor has endured a difficult couple of years.
Aside from the fact he's popped up in a string of box office duds, Depp has faced increased scrutiny over his private life.
The latest has been chronicled in a Rolling Stone profile of the actor that highlights, in particular, just how bonkers he's been when it comes to his finances.
Not content with splashing out $75 million on 14 properties and spending a further $3 million shooting his pal Hunter S. Thompson's ashes out of a cannon, Depp has become embroiled in a series of lawsuits and settlements that have depleted his funds.
Depp's not likely to go broke any time soon, of course, but at this rate, he may have to do the unthinkable - yeah, another Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
In any case, The Cut decided to put together a handy rundown of every crazy purchase made by Depp of late and it makes for fascinating reading.
Here are just a few of the things Depp has purchased of late:
– A 10,500-square-foot rented mansion at 16 Bishopswood Road in London’s Highgate neighborhood, which is where the interview takes place.
– A personal chef named Russell, who prepares Depp and Rodrick a “three-course meal of pad thai, duck and gingerbread with berries.”
– A 1940 Harley-Davidson.
– The Viper Room, an old speakeasy once owned by Bugsy Siegel.
– An 8,000-square-foot estate nicknamed “Dracula’s Castle.”
– Millions of dollars on an army of attorneys “to bail him out of numerous legal crises” and pay “hush money.”
– $75 million for 14 residences.
– $3 million to shoot his pal Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes into the sky from a cannon. (Though, “by the way, it was not $3 million to shoot Hunter into the fucking sky,” says Depp in the piece. “It was $5 million.”)
– $7,000 on a couch from the set of Keeping Up With the Kardashians for his daughter.
– 70 guitars.
– 200 pieces of art, including Basquiats and Warhols.
– 45 luxury vehicles.
– $200,000 a month on private air travel. (In an email from Mandel asking Depp to curtail his holiday spending, this is what Depp had to say about his air travel options: “I don’t have all that many options at the moment. A commercial flight with paparazzis in tow would be a fucking nightmare of monumental proportions. . . . What else can I do??? You want me to sell some art??? I will. You want me to sell something else??? Sure . . . what???”).
– A sound engineer on the payroll so he could feed him lines through an earpiece while filming.
– 12 storage facilities for his Hollywood memorabilia, largely of Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe.
– $1.2 million to keep a doctor on call.
– $1.8 million a year on round-the-clock security.
– $30,000 a month Mandel claimed he spent on wine. (“It’s insulting to say that I spent $30,000 on wine,” says Depp. “Because it was far more.”)
– An island in the Bahamas.
– A French villa for his ex Vanessa Paradis and their kids.
– His family farm in Kentucky.
– A $30,000-a-month L.A. rental house for his mom before she died, which continued to run up charges because “according to Depp, the Mandels forgot to cancel the lease.”
– A Hollywood Hills compound, “where Depp had purchased five homes that he had knitted together into an urban estate.”
– An undisclosed amount of money on houseplants.
– A wedding, and rent and mortgage payments for his sister Christi.
– $1 million on his wedding to his ex Amber Heard, held on his Bahamian island.
– A $7 million payment to Heard after she sued him for domestic abuse.
At this rate, we wouldn't rule out the prospect of Edward Scissorhands 2 actually happening.
But at least there will never be a Mortdecai 2, right?
And if you thought that was bad, check out our breakdown of all the crazy things Nicolas Cage blew his fortune on. It's just as mad/sad. | {
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Screen Shot: Anomaly Attire
City Based: Orange County, CA
What inspired the brand name?
The name was mainly inspired from my favorite film, Interstellar, but I also wanted to pick something that reflected my design and brand ideology. The definition of "anomaly" is "something that deviates from what is standard," which is exactly what I wanted Anomaly Attire to represent.
At what moment did you realize you wanted to start a brand?
I've always been a creative person, but I got the initial desire to start a brand in 2015, when I took a high school graphic design course. Unfortunately the inspiration faded away and I forgot about it for almost a year. It was in late 2016 when I really began working on Anomaly, after asking some of my friends to be my partners in this endeavor.
What helps you get over creative blocks?
Movies definitely help me get over a creative block. I find that watching a film related to the theme I'm going for lets me visualize what I might want in a graphic. Also browsing through archives of some of my biggest inspirations (Undercover, Raf Simons, Cav Empt, Off-White, A Cold Wall) helps to get my creative juices flowing.
What is the biggest mistake you have made?
I'd say the biggest mistake I've made, or continue to make, is inconsistent design language. Most of the products we've released don't follow a consistent theme, which dilutes the overall brand image. I've said this in the past, but Anomaly has always been more of a personal art project for me, to see what I'm capable of. I think in time a single aesthetic will develop, but until then, the brand will continue to move and evolve through different themes.
What is the biggest success you have had?
So far the biggest success we've had was back in August when we sold out the entire stock of Facade Tees in 36 minutes, with half of the orders coming in within the first 10 minutes. It felt completely surreal refreshing my email and seeing so many "New Sale" messages. There's an indescribable satisfaction that comes from creating a design that people like so much, that they're willing to purchase it. | {
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Eight-year-old Sunnie Kahle is unhappy these days. She no longer gets to go to her school where she has many friends. Every morning, Sunnie cries and pleads to her grandparents to let her get in to the bus that would take her to the Timberlake Christian School where she was enrolled, until a few days ago.
Sunnie’s grandparents Doris and Carol Thompson have decided not to send her to the school anymore because of a letter received by the family recently. The letter signed by principal Becky Bowman of the school informed them that the school is not an ideal place for Sunnie’s future education. The reason? Sunnie doesn’t dress up like a girl!
According to The Daily Times, the letter says that Sunnie would be denied admission to the school the next year if she doesn’t start dressing up like a girl. It reminds the Thompsons that the school is within its rights to refuse admission to a student if that student is “condoning sexual immorality, practicing a homosexual lifestyle or alternative gender identity promoting such practices; or otherwise having the inability to support the moral principles of the school.” The letter goes on …
“You’re probably aware that Timberlake Christian School is a religious, Bible believing institution providing education in a distinctly Christian environment. We believe that unless Sunnie as well as her family clearly understand that God has made her female and her dress and behavior need to follow suit with her God-ordained identity that TCS is not the best place for her future education.”
The principal also had a problem with Sunnie’s co students being confused whether she is a boy or a girl.
The Timberlake Christian School where Sunnie Kahle was emrolled
Following the receipt of the letter, Sunnie’s grandparents decided not to wait till the next academic year and stopped sending little Sunnie there. They have no plans to re-enroll Sunnie there next year either. And have planned to send her to a public school.
The deeply upset grandparents of Sunnie told a local TV station, “How do you label a child, 8-years-old, or discriminate against an eight year old child? It just don’t happen. How do you tell a child when she wants to wear pants and shirt, and go out and play in the mud and so forth, how do you tell her, ‘No you can’t. You’ve got to wear a pink bow in your hair and you’ve got to let your hair grow out long.’ How do you do that? I can’t do that.”
The Thompsons assert that Sunnie is a normal girl and have dismissed the school’s stand as totally unwarranted. They also say that the Sunnie is clear about her gender identity. “Sunnie says, ‘I’m a girl. I know I’m a girl.’
Sunnie has been described by the Timberlake Christian School to be a good student. The problem, according to an unnamed school official extends, “far beyond her hair length”.
The school authorities on their part have clarified that they are not making accusations against Sunnie and about her gender identity. They just want her family to follow the school guidelines.
This news about Sunnie’s plight comes just days after another shocking instance of punitive action gone wrong where a student was suspended from school because she shaved her head in support of a friends chemotherapy treatment.
[Images via WSET, Yahoo News] | {
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Cuba Gooding Jr.'s trial was about to get underway for a second time, but district prosecutors informed the court Thursday morning they have indicted the Hollywood actor with a new charge.
Assistant D.A. Jenna Long said that the charges in this indictment cover the existing incident as well as a new previously uncharged incident.
Gooding is set to be arraigned again on Tuesday in Manhattan Supreme Court. The indictment is under seal and will likely only be revealed at the arraignment.
CUBA GOODING JR. PROSECUTORS BRUSH OFF CLAIMS THAT HIS ACCUSER IS MENTALLY UNSTABLE
The actor came inside the courtroom for the proceeding, which only took a few minutes. He was looking serious and kept his head up but didn’t seem as confident as he was for previous hearings. He was wearing a black suit and tie.
Cuba Gooding’s attorney Mark Heller told Fox News on Thursday that prosecutors had “no case to begin with” and the move to indict him is just “dragging and proroguing the process.” He points out that none of “seven interviews” that the district attorney’s office has conducted have given rise to their case. However, Heller recognizes he has “no idea” what this new incident is about.
He says his client is “not happy about this, but he is confident in the system” and Gooding “feels this will all be resolved.”
Gooding had so far been accused of two counts of forcible touching and sexual abuse in the third degree after an alleged groping incident at a bar in New York City in June.
A 29-year-old woman says he placed his hand on her breast, squeezing it without her consent, at Magic Hour Rooftop Bar Lounge near Times Square. He was allegedly intoxicated at the time.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
The 51-year-old was arrested four days later after turning himself in to police. He pleaded not guilty to forcible touching and sexual abuse charges and was released on his own recognizance.
Gooding later requested to have his case thrown out, but he was rejected.
The defense had filed papers saying the misdemeanor forcible touching case should be dismissed based on accounts of two witnesses who say it never happened, and that video from the bar backs up that claim. The filed documents argued that since there was clear evidence that no crime was committed, it was necessary to throw out the case to protect the integrity of the criminal justice system.
Gooding faces up to a year in jail if convicted.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. | {
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Chipkarten-Syndikate und Gesundheitsfilz : Krankhaftes Interessengestrüpp
Vertrauen im 260-Milliarden-Gesundheitssektor spielt noch immer eine große Rolle. Durch Schlamperei, Parteienzank und Indiskretion werden die Patienten zunehmend verunsichert.
BERLIN taz |Da flattert mir ein Brief ins Haus: Meine Krankenkasse hätte gern ein biometrisches Gesichtsbild von mir - für die neue, ausschließlich Vorteile bringende elektronische Gesundheitskarte. Ich könne es gleich über die Website hochladen, steht in dem Papier. An meiner Redlichkeit, dass ich tatsächlich ein Foto abliefere, das mich selbst zeigt, scheint bei meiner Kasse niemand zu zweifeln. Ich widerstehe nur mühsam der Versuchung, ein Bild von Karl Lauterbach hochzuladen.
Früher, lange bevor sich die systemrelevanten Börsenhasardeure ihr frisches Zockergeld vom Staat erpressten, warb eine deutsche Bank mal damit, dass Vertrauen der Anfang von allem sei. Während heute derartige Werbung kaum mehr ein müdes Lächeln bei den potenziellen Opfern hervorzaubern könnte, spielt das Buhlen um Vertrauen im 260-Milliarden-Gesundheitssektor noch immer eine große Rolle.
Das Gezerre um den Gesundheitsfonds und der Parteienzank jenseits von Sachpolitik hatten den geneigten Patienten zwar einiges an Illusionen geraubt, aber die Galionsfigur des Vertrauensmanagements zwischen Patientenvolk und Krankheitsverwaltern ist von jeher Ministerin Ulla Schmidt, dem hypnotischen rheinischen Singsang sei Dank.
CONSTANZE KURZ Die Autorin ist Sprecherin des Chaos Computer Clubs.
Sie kündigte die Einführung der elektronischen Gesundheitskarte für den 1. April an - allerdings für das Jahr 2008. Vermutlich war der Termin ähnlich ernst zu nehmen wie der Weltuntergang der Zeugen Jehovas: eigentlich immer gleich um die Ecke. Das mit der Chipkarte ist terminlich zwar weit hinter dem Plan, war aber kein Aprilscherz: Die macht jetzt Ernst.
Die Parallelen zum Finanzkasino sind bestechend. Im Gespann mit Chipkartensyndikaten, Gesundheitsfilzokraten und im Interessengestrüpp verirrten Politikerdarstellern ziehen die Krankenkassen den Karren der elektronischen Krankenkarte mit den ihr anvertrauten Patientendaten immer tiefer in den Sumpf.
In der gerade laufenden Testphase des geldfressenden Gesundheitsdatenabenteuers setzte einer der Technikdienstleister nun neue Maßstäbe: Ausgerechnet eine Tochter der Bundesdruckerei mit dem passenden Namen "D-Trust" verschlampte den digitalen Schlüssel, mit dem die Chipkarten gesegnet werden, die jeder Arzt in der Testregion zum Datenabruf braucht.
Viele der Probekarten waren mit einem Schlag mausetot. Den betroffenen Ärzten ist damit ihr elektronischer Rezeptblock abhandengekommen, und abrechnen können sie auch nicht mehr. Wäre dies der Echtbetrieb, hätten 140.000 Heilberufler ein richtiges Problem, denn alle ausgegebenen Karten müssten erneuert werden.
Die Bundesdruckerei, erst kürzlich per Rückverstaatlichung aus der Organbank der Privatisierungstaliban errettet, ist bei Bürgerdatenhortung ganz vorne mit dabei. Biometrischer Reisepass, elektronischer Perso, Krankenkarte, Heilberufsausweise und Patientennummer - alle Zentralerfassungsprojekte in einem Haus. In dem war übrigens neulich Hausdurchsuchung, wegen Bestechung. | {
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Why we don’t really need the visual media to see the superheroes: they are just all around us all the time
Children are the anchors that hold a mother to life.
— Sophocles
Damsel in distress? Little kiddies in doldrums? Doesn’t matter who the baddies, or what their credentials, are. Emerges out of nowhere the knight in shining armour. Superman or spiderman, or the indigenous breeds, Krrish or Chhota Bheem. You don’t need to tell a toddler the rest of the story!
Our literature and audiovisual fiction are replete with fables of superhuman heroics. Even in a real-world scenario, turn your eyes to that theatre of the evanescent – the Dhyan Chands, the Bolts and the Kohlis often make one wonder if they are off the same mould as the rest of us. In the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity, emerges a superhero. As is often stated, heroes are not born; they are made.
Not so long ago, my three-year-old boy opened my eyes to a striking revelation: we don’t need the visual media to see superheroes. They are just around us; often so near our eyes fail to take note! In a way we are their creators — each one of us give birth to a superhero.
As is customary, his ‘lectures’ and my enlightenments embrace the dark backdrops of the late hours. He goes to sleep with a flu one night and is woken up a few hours later by a bad dream: ‘lecture-time’! Inconsolable breakdown. He himself struggles to figure out what has afflicted him, poor thing. A real crisis at hand.
“Playground! Swing!” he screams after a while. No other go, I step forward to oblige. “Amma,” he asserts. Oh boy! She went to bed just about an hour back, down with a bad viral fever. As expected, unable to hold herself to the bed, the superhero[ine] emerges at the bedroom door, blanket-clad. In a trice, he parks himself in her hands, and she looked all set to hit the playground, when he changed his mind and announced: “Chocolate cake”! Now, where will that come from?
Destination reset. They both disappear behind the portals of that mysterious wonderland called the kitchen. One minute. Two minutes. Five minutes. Silence of the midnight shattered by his intermittent clamour. Then an aroma fills the living room. I walk into the kitchen incredulously. “Instant cake-mix!”, she whispers in an attempt to curb my surprise. Two bites of that, and he has changed his mind again: “momos!”
The cat-and-mouse game continued. Demands kept changing along with the minute-hand of the clock. A second wind seemed to have rendered her additional hands. As I stood there in sheer disbelief, she continued to oblige him with a composed countenance that seemed to be telling him. ‘Son, I know you are sick. I can hear it when your heart misses a beat. I just cannot let you cry, not for want of food; nor for want of care...’
After a few rounds, as his distress gradually settled down, he receded into deep slumber. Reminiscent of the fictional superheroes whose powers wither away at the conclusion of hard-fought battles, she limped back to the bed and crumbled under the blanket. As I marvelled at the super-heroic metamorphosis of an ordinary lady that my wife used to be, the unfaded snapshots of the unsung saga of yet another superheroine flashed before my eyes — my own mother.
Every loving mother is a superhuman incognito, capable of instantaneous transformation from the depths of physical infirmities to the acme of agility. And the everlasting fuel that energises her to wage the often-overlooked unrewarding heroics can be nothing other than the inundating nectar of pure love — unadulterated, unconditional and selfless.
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Although LE BATARD BROTHERS’s Web site may include links providing direct access to other Internet resources, including Web sites, LE BATARD BROTHERS has not participated in the development of those other sites and does not exert any editorial or other control over those sites. LE BATARD BROTHERS is not responsible for the content or reliability of the linked websites. Linking should not be taken as endorsement of any kind of the website linked to, including any products and services referred to in that website, nor does it imply that there is an association between LE BATARD BROTHERS and the operators of that website. LE BATARD BROTHERS cannot guarantee that these links will work all of the time and has no control over the availability of linked pages. | {
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Haley Moss is one month into her practice as a lawyer. So far, so good.
She has laser focus, a photographic memory and an extreme eye for detail — invaluable assets for poring over endless briefs and reports at Miami-based firm Zumpano Patricios.
And what's more, she just might be making history: In January, Moss raised her hand, took an oath and became known as Florida's first lawyer living openly with autism.
Her admission to the Florida Bar marked a key milestone in a life filled with them. Moss' diagnosis with autism, at age 3, came with warnings that she might not finish high school, get a driver's license or make a friend.
The Parkland native did all those things and more, earning two bachelor's degrees — in criminology and psychology — by age 20 before graduating from the University of Miami School of Law in May 2018.
Zumpano Patricios now calls Moss "one of the first documented autistic attorneys to join the Florida Bar and a major law firm," though firm co-founder Joe Zumpano believes "she may be one of the first nationally."
"I hired her the moment I met her," said Zumpano, who has a 16-year-old son with autism. In Moss, he saw "a brilliant person with a brilliant mind."
At the firm, Moss specializes in anti-terrorism and healthcare, fields that entail massive swaths of information. Cases can have a million documents, and Moss is tasked with remembering names, bank accounts and relationships along with deciphering "the games that are played" in healthcare cases, Zumpano said.
"So when you’ve someone with an exceptional memory ability and an exceptional ability to connect people, places and things, that’s a tremendous asset for any law firm," he said. "And Haley brings that to the table.”
Moss looks forward to growing in her legal career and finds it easy to give her all at work, she said. It's not the job that's proved hard for her.
"The things that are hardest for me are actually outside of the office, such as driving and daily living skills," she said. "Starting a career is a huge transition for anybody, but is monumental for autistic people as it means we have to establish new routines."
Moss didn't use words until around age 4, a common symptom of autism. When she did speak, much of it was echolalia, an echoing repetition of others' words. "Kind of like a parrot," she said.
She could, however, put together 100-piece puzzles as a toddler. Her mother told her: "Different isn’t bad. It’s just different, and different can be extraordinary.”
Moss realized the power of her voice as a teen, when she spoke at an Autism Society of America event and saw how her story encouraged others.
She's since penned two books on her experiences: "Middle School — The Stuff Nobody Tells You About: A Teenage Girl with ASD Shares Her Experiences," and "A Freshman Survival Guide for College Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders."
Moss' mother taught her to embrace her diagnosis. She learned her weaknesses, but also her strengths. She became more self-aware, more confident, she said, until she pursued law — a profession that leveraged her skills, her love of writing and her desire to help people.
Huge companies have taken steps to hire workers with autism in recent years, including JP Morgan, Microsoft, Ford and Ernst & Young, CBS reported last year.
Zumpano hopes Moss' story can show that just because someone "is neurologically diverse doesn’t mean that they may not have strengths greater than our own.”
Follow Josh Hafner on Twitter: @joshhafner
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - From grasslands to seashores to forests and backyards, birds are disappearing at an alarming rate in the United States and Canada, with a 29% population drop since 1970 and a net loss of about 2.9 billion birds, scientists said on Thursday.
People are to blame, the researchers said, citing factors including widespread habitat loss and degradation, broad use of agricultural chemicals that eradicate insects vital to the diet of many birds, and even outdoor hunting by pet cats.
“Birds are in crisis,” said Peter Marra, director of the Georgetown Environment Initiative at Georgetown University and a co-author of the study published in the journal Science.
“The take-home message is that our findings add to mounting evidence with other recent studies showing massive declines in insects, amphibians and other taxa, signaling a widespread ecological crisis,” Marra added. “Birds are the quintessential indicators of environmental health, the canaries in the coal mine, and they’re telling us it’s urgent to take action to ensure our planet can continue to sustain wildlife and people.”
Most of the losses were not among rare species, but common ones across nearly every bird family and all habitats. They included sparrows, swallows, blackbirds, thrushes, finches, warblers and meadowlarks.
Some 90% of the total loss came from just 12 bird families and 19 widespread bird species such as the dark-eyed junco, common grackle and house sparrows. Each of those species lost more than 50 million individuals.
The researchers tracked populations of 529 species using decades of bird counts taken on the ground as well as weather radar data that revealed similar declines in the volume of migratory birds.
Slideshow ( 12 images )
Grassland birds were particularly hard hit, with a 53% reduction in population, amid agricultural intensification.
Shorebirds, reliant on sensitive coastal habitats, sustained a 37% drop. Most shorebirds are migratory and experienced habitat degradation and destruction in many locales where they migrate. In addition, many shorebirds breed in Arctic regions rapidly warming due to climate change.
The researchers documented a steep decline for migratory birds. They noted broad declines among birds that migrate to the tropics, where there have been devastating rates of habitat loss and degradation. Migrating birds also face threats at their stopover sites and on their North American breeding grounds.
The researchers said other studies have documented worrisome bird population losses in other parts of the world.
“Birds are a critical component of many ecosystems. They serve as predators and prey in food webs, disperse seeds, and provide ecosystem services such as eating insect pests. When we lose large amounts of birds, we disturb the entire web of life, which we all depend upon,” said study lead author Ken Rosenberg, an applied conservation scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the American Bird Conservancy.
While climate change was not the major driver of the population plunge, it is likely to exacerbate the existing threats to bird populations, Rosenberg said.
The researchers said the extinction in the early 20th century of the passenger pigeon, once likely the most abundant birds on Earth numbering in the billions, showed that even abundant species can go extinct rapidly.
Some types of birds showed gains. Banning the pesticide DDT allowed for the resurgence of raptor populations including the bald eagle, the researchers said. Waterfowl management policies including wetland protection and restoration enabled ducks and geese to thrive, they added.
“These are important examples that show, when we choose to make changes and actively manage the threats birds face, we can positively impact bird populations,” Rosenberg said. | {
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Story highlights Sanders' most loyal supporters are now convinced the system is rigged, setting up a collision course for Democrats
Winning over Sanders supporters is critical to Clinton's campaign
Philadelphia (CNN) Three words are hanging over the final days of the Democratic presidential race: Bernie or bust.
"When you say Bernie or bust, that means if we don't get Bernie, we're just not going to automatically vote for the demon because you're saying the devil may be there," said Billy Taylor, who is organizing a coalition of Bernie Sanders supporters to protest at the Democratic convention here in July.
Sanders has inspired a movement, but it's unclear whether he can control it. Or if he wants to.
After the final wave of states vote next Tuesday, Sanders has one decision to make. His supporters have another. And many insist they will not fall into line behind Hillary Clinton.
"You can't expose the corruption of the political system and then expect us to get behind that same political system," said Gary Frazier, a leader of a group called Black Men for Bernie, who is also organizing Sanders supporters here in Philadelphia.
Read More | {
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Amidst chants of "Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj ki jai!", the Maratha Reservation Bill, piloted by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led state government, was unanimously passed in the the lower house of Maharashtra Legislative Assembly, with support from the Shiv Sena, Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party.
The bill provides for reservation of seats for admission in educational institutions and posts in public services to Marathas who have been declared as a socially and educationally backward class.
The approved bill has now been sent to the Upper House of the legislative assembly for approval.
Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, who tabled the bill, thanked the Opposition members for helping in passage of the bill unanimously.
Earlier, Fadnavis also tabled the action taken report (ATR) on the State Backward Class Commission’s (SBCC) recommendations for reservation to the Maratha community in government jobs and education. He also tabled the recommendations of the State Backward Class Commission (SBCC)’s report on social, educational and financial status of the Maratha community.
The state government had received the SBCC report on 15 November, which recommended 16 per cent reservation for the "socially and economically backward" community. SBCC said that they are entitled to reservation benefits and advantages enshrined in the Articles 15(4) and 16(4) of the Constitution, it said.
The panel had suggested that looking at exceptional circumstances and extraordinary situations generated on declaring Marathas as socially and educationally backwards and their consequential entitlement to reservation benefits, the government may take appropriate decision within constitutional provisions to address the emerging scenario in the state.
The report also noted that the 16 percent reservation for Marathas has to be provided without jeopardising the existing quota reserved for Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Various castes numbering over 350 are currently categorised as OBCs and account for 26 per cent of Maharashtra’s population.
The composite Maratha-Kunbi caste, meanwhile, constitutes about 32-33 percent of Maharashtra's population. The Maratha-Kunbis are a highly stratified caste cluster, largely comprising the peasant cultivators but reaching up to feudal aristocrats and rulers.
Over the last few years, Maharashtra has seen several agitations demanding reservation for the Maratha community under the Other Backward Classes (OBC) quota. However, the earlier demands for reservation had been categorically rejected by various commissions set up by both the state and central governments. This includes the Kalelkar Commission (1955), the Mandal Commission (1980) and the Central Backward Classes Commission (2004).
Several reports of the state backward classes commissions, including most recently that of the Bapat Commission, also rejected the Maratha demand for reservation. Justice Bapat was of the opinion that including the Marathas under the OBC category would be against any semblance of social justice.
Ignoring the repeated dismissal of this demand by various committees, the allegedly Maratha-elite-dominated Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) government, with an eye on its electoral fortunes, went ahead and appointed yet another committee, led this time by Narayana Rane, to examine this matter.
In a desperate attempt, in the run up to the 2014 elections, the Congress-NCP government (after vacillating for 15 years in power) granted the community 16 per cent reservation in education and jobs (and along with it, also introduced 5 per cent quota for Muslims). However, the Bombay High Court on 23 September quashed the decision to give 16 per cent reservation to the Marathas. The bench headed by Chief Justice Mohit Shah at the Supreme Court had already laid down the law that reservation cannot exceed 50 per cent of the total seats.
(Inputs from PTI)
Also Read: Falling Over Backwards (Marathas & Reservation) | {
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Okay, we admit it: Here at Co.Design, we’re Tolkien geeks. Like straight up read-the-Silmarillion-grew-up-playing-the-RPG Tolkien geeks. So it’s with a flutter of nerd love that we introduce today’s IGOTD, created by University of Florida student JT Fridsma: A minute-by-minute plotting of the various scenes and parallel plots in Peter Jackson’s film adaptation .
[Click to enlarge]
The center of the infographic is an actual map of Middle Earth; circling it, there’s an arc showing the running count of screentime minutes. Each spot of the map is blown out, and the red lines indicate the progress of the various characters:
Now, you can quibble with the infographic itself: For example, the lines showing the progress of the characters doesn’t actually do a great job showing who is participating in each of the parallel plots. (For a more successful rendition of this idea, check out the winner of our Inception infographic contest.) | {
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Washington would support "the will of the Iranian people and stand behind them: John Bolton
Iran's Islamic revolution four decades ago inflicted "failure and broken promises" on the country, President Donald Trump's chief foreign policy advisor said on Monday.
"It's been 40 yrs of failure. Now it's up to the Iranian regime to change its behavior, and ultimately up to the Iranian people to determine the direction of their country," national security advisor John Bolton tweeted on the anniversary of the upheaval.
It's been 40 yrs of failure. Now it's up to the Iranian regime to change its behavior, & ultimately up to the Iranian people to determine the direction of their country. The U.S. will support the will of the Iranian people, & stand behind them to ensure their voices are heard. - John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) February 11, 2019
Mr Bolton said Washington would support "the will of the Iranian people, & stand behind them to ensure their voices are heard."
Mr Bolton, a leading hawk in the Trump administration's attempt to weaken Iranian influence, was tweeting as a huge crowd in Tehran gathered to celebrate the 1979 revolution, in which Muslim leader Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini ended the centuries-old rule of the royal dynasty.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told Iranians they should resist a "conspiracy" involving Washington.
The Trump administration has pushed hard to weaken Iran and what it says is Tehran's "destabilizing" influence.
The two countries have not had diplomatic relations since 1980, and Trump has pulled the United States from an international agreement meant to reward Iran for giving up nuclear weapon ambitions. | {
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This is an approximate conversion table to help you find your size. If you have already purchased an item by our brand, we would recommend that you select the same size as indicated on its label. Aquazzura uses italian sizing.
Should you have any questions or require assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us. | {
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Share on Pinterest More than 6 million people watched this season’s premiere of “American Horror Story: Freak Show.” Millions more will watch the season finale on January 21. This season’s story line is built around a 1952 freak show, run by the mysterious Fräulein Elsa Mars, played by Oscar-winning actress Jessica Lange. The plot is fast moving. The action balances horror and camp. But what’s most compelling about “American Horror Story” are the characters — a number of whom are inspired by real people who lived with fascinating medical conditions. Freak shows and sideshows had their heyday from around the time of the Civil War to the 1930s. Their stars were able to make a living and find acceptance among their peers. But the word “freak” is a sad misnomer, because as we will explore, these were real people who just so happened to have unusual, appearance-altering medical conditions.
1. Conjoined Twins Share on Pinterest The show’s conjoined twins, Dot and Bette Tattler, share a body, but have separate heads with two brains. They also have very different personalities. Bette is innocent, fame hungry, and friendly, while Dot is more distrusting, sullen, and cynical. Dot and Bette are similar, physically, to real life Minnesota twins, Abigail and Brittany Hensel. Born in 1990, the Hensel twins share two legs and two arms. But they have separate brains, spinal cords, and hearts. Although both can control their shared limbs, they avoid a constant tug of war by having each operate only one side of their shared body. Fun fact: They also had a short-lived reality TV show on TLC. The Science Identical twins develop from a single egg. Ordinarily, the egg separates after it is fertilized. There are two theories about how conjoined twins come about. The egg doesn’t split completely and the twins remain connected.
The egg splits but the embryos rejoin and fuse together. The point at which conjoined twins are connected varies. According to the American Pediatric Surgical Association (APSA), approximately 75 percent are joined at the chest, abdomen, or some portion of both. The success of surgery to separate conjoined twins depends on where the twins are joined, what organs they share, and how those organs function. Surgery is excruciatingly complex. The Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at VanderbiltUniversity provides a slide show of a successful surgery in which twin girls were separated. It’s a fascinating view of the complexity of the procedure. According to the University of Maryland Medical Center, at least one twin survives around 75 percent of the time. That said, few surgeries are performed because of the risk involved, and in many cases, surgery isn’t an option because of shared vital organs. How Common Is It? Although estimates differ, the APSA says the incidence of conjoined twins in the United States is one in 50,000 to 100,000 live births. Sadly, the stillbirth rate is high, estimated at 40 to 60 percent.
2. Lobster Boy Share on Pinterest Jimmy Darling, played by Evan Peters, performs as Lobster Boy in “American Horror Story: Freak Show.” Why the fishy nickname? Jimmy’s fingers are fused so they look like lobster claws. He moonlights as entertainment at Tupperware parties where the erotic manipulations of his special hands are deemed “a lifesaver for the American housewife.” The real life “Lobster Boy” Grady Stiles was born in 1937 with fused fingers and toes. He was reported to represent the sixth generation in the Stiles family with syndactyly, a genetic tradition that continues in the family today. The Science Syndactyly is a condition characterized by fingers or toes that are fused together or webbed. Syndactyly occurs when fingers or toes fail to separate during the embryo’s development. How Common Is It? The Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center reports that syndactyly is common, occurring in about one out of every 2,500 to 3,000 newborns. In most instances, syndactyly is a genetic disorder and it’s often seen in tandem with other genetic conditions. Surgery is commonly used to divide the digits.
3. The Bearded Lady Share on Pinterest Kathy Bates plays Ethel Darling, a woman with a beard on her face and, usually, a bottle of whiskey in her hand. Her character is similar, aesthetically anyway, to one of America’s most well-known bearded ladies, Madame Devere, who was known for her 14-inch long beard. Devere was a Kentucky girl who married her manager and toured with circuses and sideshows, she died in 1912. The Science There are two main types of abnormal hair growth. Hirsutism refers to male-pattern hair growth on women and children. It can be caused by a number of underlying conditions. One of the most frequent causes is polycystic ovarian syndrome, in which women have an imbalance of female sex hormones. The direct culprits are either high levels of androgen or hair follicles that are overly sensitive to androgen. Androgen is a hormone responsible for men’s physical characteristics and sex organs. Women have androgen, too, but in women it’s mostly converted to estrogen. Hypertrichosis, informally called werewolf syndrome, is characterized by excessive hair growth over all or parts of the body. The condition can be genetic in origin or caused by certain medications. Hypertrichosis can affect people of both genders and all ages; infants can be born with the condition. Because hypertrichosis is not caused by excess androgen, hormone therapy is not effective. How Common Is It? According to the Cleveland Clinic, five to 10 percent of women in their childbearing years have hirsutism. The condition can usually be treated with hormones. | {
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Check out our new site Makeup Addiction
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Makes rum and coke with cocaine | {
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Bruce Querelle is a stunning lad on many levels, his great body, his dick, his classical good looks and his piercing blue eyes all contribute to his overall appeal. Combine this with a charming and easy going personality and you have perfect boyfriend material. Any takers?
See more of Bruce – alone or with others – at BelAmiOnline. | {
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A five-month-old boy with severe combined immunodeficiency disease receives care at a California hospital in 2017.Credit: Santiago Mejia/Polaris/eyevine
An experimental gene therapy has restored functioning immune systems to seven young children with a severe disorder that would have sentenced them to a life of isolation to avoid potentially deadly infections. They are now with family at home, and an eighth child is slated to be released from hospital at the end of this week.
The children have mutations in a gene that is crucial for immune-system development, causing a disorder called X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID-X1). The gene-therapy treatment replaces the mutated gene, called IL2RG, with a corrected copy. SCID-X1 and related disorders are sometimes called ‘bubble-boy’ diseases because of the plastic enclosures that were once used to protect affected children from possible infection. For them, even a common cold can be fatal.
But seven of the babies in the study1, which was published on 17 April in The New England Journal of Medicine, now have immune systems that can protect them against common childhood ailments. “They are all toddlers now, exploring life and attending day cares,” says Ewelina Mamcarz, a physician at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, and a lead author on the study.
The best treatment currently available for SCID-X1, which predominantly affects boys, is a bone-marrow transplant from a matched sibling donor. But that option is possible for less than 20% of children with the disorder. Researchers have been trying for nearly 20 years to develop a way of delivering a functional copy of the mutated gene to affected children who can’t receive such a transplant.
Those efforts met with mixed results2: the earliest trials partially improved immune responses, but caused leukaemia in some patients. In a follow-up effort3 in 2014, the same researchers altered a virus they had been using to shuttle functional copies of the IL2RG gene into cells. It still produced only partial improvement in immunity, but none of the children who were treated developed leukaemia.
An enduring cure?
For the latest trial, Mamcarz and her colleagues used yet another virus, this time a disabled relative of HIV. This virus is more adept than the ones researchers had previously used at inserting genes into cells that are not actively dividing — making it better suited for use in the slowly dividing stem cells responsible for generating immune cells.
The team also treated the children with a low dose of chemotherapy before the treatment. That approach is also used in another gene therapy for a related disease called ADA-SCID. That therapy was approved by the European Medicines Agency in 2016.
The children treated for SCID-X1 have shown no signs of leukaemia up to two years after their treatment. Although some cases of leukaemia showed up after two years in previous studies, Fischer says that researchers have been using this viral system for other gene-therapy trials for a decade without any signs of leukaemia.
And the children in the SCID-X1 trial are producing the proper components of a healthy immune system, including T cells, B cells and natural-killer cells. “This is a very nice contribution to the field,” says Alain Fischer at the College of France in Paris, who developed some of the first experimental gene therapies used to treat SCID-X1.
The results are promising, but researchers will need to continue monitoring the children to ensure that the immune capabilities they developed after treatment remain stable, says Marina Cavazzana, who is also working on gene therapies for SCID-X1 at Necker Hospital for Sick Children in Paris.
“From a physiological point of view and from a quality-of-life point of view, this is a cure,” says James Downing, president of St. Jude Children’s. “Will it be a durable cure? Only time will tell.” | {
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Prisoners can use credits to buy music, ebooks, stamps (to pay for email and inbound video messages), games and even the JPay tablets themselves. They can use the tablets to catch up on the news, access educational materials and view photos and videos. Inmates' loved ones can buy the tablets for them, and talk to the prisoners with a video chat visitation.
After prisoners seemingly communicated with each other on how to exploit the vulnerability, one inmate transferred almost $10,000 to their account, while 50 added more than $1,000. JPay has blocked inmates from downloading music and games until they pay back the company, though they can still use email. JPay has recovered over $65,000 worth of credits so far. Officials have disciplined the inmates who were allegedly involved; they may lose privileges and could be deemed a higher security risk. | {
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Monday, March 31, 2014 at 8:56AM
When we last visited WhatsApp they’d just been acquired by Facebook for $19 billion. We learned about their early architecture, which centered around a maniacal focus on optimizing Erlang into handling 2 million connections a server, working on All The Phones, and making users happy through simplicity.
Two years later traffic has grown 10x. How did WhatsApp make that jump to the next level of scalability?
Rick Reed tells us in a talk he gave at the Erlang Factory: That's 'Billion' with a 'B': Scaling to the next level at WhatsApp (slides), which revealed some eye popping WhatsApp stats:
What has hundreds of nodes, thousands of cores, hundreds of terabytes of RAM, and hopes to serve the billions of smartphones that will soon be a reality around the globe? The Erlang/FreeBSD-based server infrastructure at WhatsApp. We've faced many challenges in meeting the ever-growing demand for our messaging services, but as we continue to push the envelope on size (>8000 cores) and speed (>70M Erlang messages per second) of our serving system.
What are some of the most notable changes from two years ago?
Obviously much bigger in every dimension, except the number of engineers. More boxes, more datacenters, more memory, more users, and more scale problems. Handling this level of growth with so few engineers is what Rick is most proud of: 40 million users per engineer. This is part of the win of the cloud. Their engineers work on their software. The network, hardware, and datacenter is handled by someone else.
They’ve gone away from trying to support as many connections per box as possible because of the need to have enough head room to handle the overall increased load on each box. Though their general strategy of keeping down management overhead by getting really big boxes and running efficiently on SMP machines, remains the same.
Transience is nice. With multimedia, pictures, text, voice, video all being part of their architecture now, not having to store all these assets for the long term simplifies the system greatly. The architecture can revolve around throughput, caching, and partitioning.
Erlang is its own world. Listening to the talk it became clear how much of everything you do is in the world view of Erlang, which can be quite disorienting. Though in the end it’s a distributed system and all the issues are the same as in any other distributed system.
Mnesia, the Erlang database, seemed to be a big source of problem at their scale. It made me wonder if some other database might be more appropriate and if the need to stay within the Erlang family of solutions can be a bit blinding?
Lots of problems related to scale as you might imagine. Problems with flapping connections, queues getting so long they delay high priority operations, flapping of timers, code that worked just fine at one traffic level breaking badly at higher traffic levels, high priority messages not getting serviced under high load, operations blocking other operations in unexpected ways, failures causing resources issues, and so on. These things just happen and have to be worked through no matter what system you are using.
I remain stunned and amazed at Rick’s ability to track down and fix problems. Quite impressive.
Rick always gives a good talk. He’s very generous with specific details that obviously derive directly from issues experienced in production. Here’s my gloss on his talk…
Stats
465M monthly users.
19B messages in & 40B out per day
600M pics, 200M voice, 100M videos
147M peak concurrent connections - phones connected to the systems
230K peak logins/sec - phones connecting and disconnecting
342K peak msgs in/sec, 712K out
~10 team member works on Erlang and they handle both development and ops.
Holidays highest usage for multimedia. 146Gb/s out (Christmas Eve), quite a bit of bandwidth going out to phones 360M videos downloaded (Christmas Even) 2B pics downloaded (46k/s) (New Years Eve) 1 pic downloaded 32M times (New Years Eve)
Stack
Erlang R16B01 (plus their own patches)
FreeBSD 9.2
Mnesia (database)
Yaws
SoftLayer is their cloud provider, bare metal machines, fairly isolated within the network, dual datacenter configuration
Hardware
~ 550 servers + standby gear ~150 chat servers (~1M phones each, 150 million peak connections) ~250 mms (multimedia) servers 2x2690v2 Ivy Bridge 10-core (40 threads total with hyperthreading) Database nodes have the 512GB of RAM Standard compute nodes have 64GB of RAM SSD primarily for reliability, except when storing video because more storage is required Dual-link GigE x2 (public which is user facing & private which faces the backend systems)
> 11,000 cores run the Erlang system
System Overview
Erlang love. Great language to support so many users with so few engineers. Great SMP scalability. Can run very large boxes and keep the node count low. Operational complexity scales with number of nodes, not the number of cores. Can update code on the fly.
Scalability is like clearing a minefield. They are generally able to detect and clear problems before they explode. Events which test the system are world events, especially soccer, which creates big vertical load spikes. Server failures, usually RAM. Network failures. And bad software pushes.
Conventional looking architecture: Phones (clients) connect to chat and MMS (multimedia). Chat connects to transient offline storage. Backend systems hold on to messages while they are in transit between users. Chat connects to databases like Account, Profile, Push, Group, ...
Messages to phones: Actual text messages Notifications: group subjects, profile photo changes, etc Presence messages: typing, idle, connected/not connected, etc
Multimedia database: In-memory Mnesia database using about 2TB of RAM sharded across 16 partitions to store about 18 billion records. Messages and multimedia are only stored while they are being delivered, but while the media is being delivered information about the media is stored in the database.
Run at 1 million connections per server instead of the two million connections per server they did two years ago, generally because the servers are a lot busier: With more users they want to run with more head room on each server to soak up peak loads. Users are more active than they were two years ago. They are sending more messages so the servers are doing more. Functionality that used to be outside these servers was moved to run on them so they are doing more.
Decoupling
Isolate bottlenecks so they don’t spread through the system Tight coupling causes cascading failures. Backend systems that are deeper in the stack shouldn’t bubble up to the front-end. Everything is partitioned so that if one partition is in trouble the other partitions won’t be impacted. Keep as much throughput going as you can while problems are being addressed.
Asynchronicity to minimize impact of latency on throughput Allows keeping throughput as high as possible even when there is latency at various points in the system or when latency is unpredictable. Reduces coupling and allows systems to work as fast as they can.
Avoid head-of-line blocking Head-of-line block is where processing on the first packet in a queue starves all those items queued behind it. Separate read and write queues. Especially where performing transactions on tables so if there’s any latency on the write side it doesn’t block the read side. Generally the read side is going much faster so any blocking will pile up readers. Separate inter-node queues. If a node or network connecting nodes runs into trouble, it can block work in an application. So when sending to different nodes the messages are given to different procs (lightweight concurrency in Erlang) so only messages destined for a problem node are backed up. This allows messages to healthy nodes to flow freely. The problem is isolated to where the problem is. Patched mnesia to do this well at async_dirty replication time. The app sending the message is decoupled from the sending and does not feel any back pressure if there’s a problem with a node. When working with non-deterministic latency a “queuer” FIFO worker dispatch model is used.
Meta-clustering Note, this section is at about 29 minutes into the talk and is covered very briefly, unfortunately. Needed a way to contain the size of a single cluster and also allow it to span long distances. Built wandist, a dist-like transport over gen_tcp, that consists of a mesh of the nodes that need to talk to each other. A transparent routing layer above pg2 creates a single hop routing dispatch system. Example: two main clusters in two datacenters, two multimedia clusters in two different datacenters, and a shared global cluster between the two datacenters. They all have wandist connections between them.
Examples: Avoid mnesia transaction coupling by using async_dirty. Most of the transactions are not used. Use calls only when getting back from the database, otherwise casting everything to preserve asynchronous mode of operation. In Erlang, handle_call blocks for a response and messages are queued up, handle_cast doesn’t block because the result of the operation isn’t of interest. Calls use timeouts, not monitors. Reduces contention on procs on the far end and reduces traffic over the distribution channel. When only need best effort delivery use nosuspend on casts. This isolates a node from downstream problems if either a node has problems or the network has problems, in which case distribution buffers back up on the sending node and procs that try to send start to get suspended by the scheduler which causes a cascading failure where everyone is waiting and no work is getting done. Use large distribution buffers to absorb problems in the network and on downstream nodes.
Parallelize
Work distribution: Need to distribute work over 11,000 cores. Start with a single threaded gen_server. Then created a gen_factory to spread the work across multiple workers. At a certain load the dispatch process itself became a bottleneck and not just because of the execute time. There’s a high fan-in with a lot of nodes feeding into the dispatch process for a box, the locks on the process become a bottleneck with the distribution ports coming in and the process itself. So created a gen_industry, a layer above gen_factory, so that there are multiple dispatch procs which allows for the parallelization of all the input coming into the box as well as the dispatch to the workers themselves. Workers are selected by a key for database operations. For the cases where there’s non-deterministic latency, like for IO, a FIFO model is used to distribute work to prevent head-of-line blocking problems.
Partition services: Partition between 2 and 32 ways. Most services are partitioned 32 ways. pg2 addressing, which are distributed process groups, is used to address partitions across the cluster. Nodes are run in pairs. One is primary and the other secondary. If one or the other goes down they they will be handling primary and secondary traffic. Generally try to limit the number of procs that access a single ets (built-in term storage) or single mnesia fragment to 8. This keeps the lock contention under control.
Mnesia: Because they don’t use transactions to get as much consistency as possible they serialize access to records on a single process on a single node by hashing. Hash to a partition, which maps to a mnesia fragment, and ends up being dispatched into one factory, one worker. So all access to a single record goes to a single erlang process. Each mnesia fragment is only being written to or read from at the application level on one node, which allows replication streams that only go in one direction. When there’s a replication stream going between peers there’s a bottleneck in how fast the fragments can be updated. They patched OTP to have multiple transaction managers running for async_dirty only so record updates happen in parallel which give a lot more replication throughput. Patch to allow the mnesia library directory to be split over multiple libraries, which means it could be written to multiple drives, which increases throughput to the disk. Real issue is when mnesia loads from a peer. Spreading IO over multiple drives, even SSDs, gives a lot more scalability in terms how fast the database is loaded. Shrinking mnesia islands to two nodes per island. An island is an mnesia cluster. Even with 32 partitions there will be 16 islands that support a table. Gives better opportunity to support schema operations under load because there’s only two nodes that have to complete the schema operation. Reduces load time coordination if trying to bring one or both nodes up at the same time. Deal with network partitions in mnesia by alerting quickly. They continue running. And then have a manual reconciliation process to merge them together.
Optimize
The offline storage system used to be a big bottleneck under load spikes. Just couldn’t push stuff to the file system fast enough. Most messages are read quickly by users, like 50% within 60 seconds. Added a write-back cache so messages could be delivered before they had to be written to the filesystem. 98% cache hit rate. If the IO system is backed up because of load, the cache gives extra buffering to deliver messages at full rate while the IO system works to catch up.
Fixed head-of-line blocking in async file IO by patching BEAM (the Erlang VM) to round-robin file port requests across all async worker threads which smoothed writes in the cases where there was a large mailbox or a slow disk.
Keep large mailboxes out of the cache. Some people are in a large number of groups and get thousands of messages per hour. They polluted the cache and slowed things down. Evict them from the cache. Note, dealing with disproportionately large users is a problem for every system, including Twitter.
Slow access to mnesia table with lots of fragments The account table as 512 fragments which are partitioned into the islands, which means there’s a sparse mapping of users to these 512 fragments. Most of the fragments will be empty and idle. Doubling the number of hosts caused the throughput to go down. It turned out record access was really slow because hash chain sizes were over 2K when the target is 7. What was happening is the hashing scheme caused a large number of empty buckets to be created and few that were extremely long. A two line change improved performance by 4 to 1.
Patching
Ran into contention on the timer wheel. With a few million connections into a single host and each of those is setting and resetting a timer whenever something happens with a particular phone, the results is hundreds of thousands of timer sets and resets per second. With one timer wheel and one lock it was a significant source of contention. Solution was to create multiple timer wheels to eliminate the contention.
mnesia_tm is a big select loop and under load when trying to load tables the backlog could get to a point of no return because of the selective receive. Patch to pull stuff out of the incoming transactions stream and save it to process later.
Add multiple mnesia_tm async_dirty senders.
Add mark/set for prim_file commands.
Some clusters span a continent, so mnesia should load from a nearby node rather than across the country.
Add round-robin scheduling for async file IO.
Seed ets hash to break coincidence w/ phash2.
Optimize ets main/name tables for scale.
Don’t queue mnesia dump if already dumping. Can’t complete a schema operation with dumps pending so if a lot of dumps are queued it wasn’t possible to do schema ops.
The 2/22 Outage
Even with all this work stuff happens. And it happened at the worst time, a 210 minute outage occurred right after the Facebook acquisition.
Did not happen because of load. It began with a back-end router problem.
The router dropped a VLAN which caused a massive node disconnect/reconnect throughout the cluster. When everything reconnected it was in an unstable state they had never seen before.
Finally decided they had to stop everything and bring it back up, which they hadn’t done in years. It took a while to bring everything down and bring it back up.
In the process they found an overly-coupled subsystem. With disconnects and reconnects pg2 can get in a state where it’s doing n^3 messaging. They saw pg2 message queues going from zero to 4 million within seconds. Rolling out a patch.
Release
Can’t simulate traffic at this scale, especially with huge spikes, like News Years Eve at midnight. If they are trying something out that is extremely disruptive it is rolled out very slowly. It will only take a small piece of the traffic. Then quickly iterate until it works well, then roll out to the rest of the cluster.
Rollout is a rolling upgrade. Everything is redundant. If they want to do a BEAM upgrade it is installed and then gradually execute restarts across the cluster to pick up the new changes. Sometimes of it’s just a hot patch it can be rolled out without a complete restart. This is rare. Usually upgrade the whole thing.
Remaining Challenges | {
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[center][url=http://www1.flightrising.com/forums/ann/2117160/][img]http://flightrising.com/dropbox/updates/sweetheart_2017.png[/img][/url][/center] [br]A flight of friends has come to Sornieth this week. [url=http://www1.flightrising.com/forums/ann/2117160]Click here to read more about today's update[/url][more] [br][br][size=4][b]Love is in the Air[/b][/size] From now until February 18th at 22:00, the following seasonal items will be available, after which time they will cycle out until love is in the air once more~ [indent][b]Vista: Lovebirds[/b] is available in the [url=http://flightrising.com/main.php?p=market&tab=spec&type=0]treasure marketplace.[/url] [/indent] [center][item=vista: lovebirds][/center] [indent][b]Sweetheart Swan[/b] is available through [url=http://www1.flightrising.com/trading/swipp]Swipp's Swap Stand[/url] for 25 sparrow skulls and 20 Carpenter Wax. (don't worry, we've added this trade to swipp's pool multiple times over. So much so that you may get a bit tired of seeing swans this week!)[/indent] [center][item=sweetheart swan] = 25 [item=sparrow skull] + 20 [item=carpenter wax][/center] [indent][b]Enamored Swan[/b] is available through [url=http://www1.flightrising.com/trading/baldwin]Baldwin's Bubbling Brew[/url] for a limited time. Alchemists level 3 and above can bring this beautiful bird to life! [/indent] [center][item=enamored swan] = [item=copper muck]+[item=silver muck]+[item=orange goo]+[item=green ooze] [img]http://flightrising.com/dropbox/familiars/swan_large.png[/img][/center] [br][br][size=4][b]Gathering Additions[/b][/size] Dragon clans with a skill of 31 or greater in [url=http://flightrising.com/main.php?p=gather]insect catching[/url] now have a chance to harvest these new items. [center][item=Dusty Cicada][item=Glass Cicada][item=Southern Grass Cicada][/center] [br][br][size=4][b]Dragon Breed Vistas[/b][/size] Ridgeback dragon vistas are now available in the [url=http://flightrising.com/main.php?p=market&tab=spec&type=0]treasure marketplace[/url]. [center][item=vista: ridgeback dragons][/center] [br][br][b][size=4]Trickmurk Circus 2017 Skin & Accent Contest[/size][/b] A reminder that the fourth annual Trickmurk Circus will begin February 19, 2017. To celebrate we are running a skin and accent contest honoring the shadow flight.[url=http://www1.flightrising.com/forums/skin/2105144] Click here for more information![/url] [center][url=http://www1.flightrising.com/forums/skin/2105144][img]http://flightrising.com/dropbox/shadow_contest.png[/img][/url][/center] [br][br][size=4][b]Additional Updates:[/b][/size] [LIST] [*]The [b]coliseum skin and accent contest [/b]has been judged. There were 122 winning entries. Winners will be notified and prizes distributed throughout this week. Great job everyone! [*][b]Breed Change: Wildclaw[/b] has cycled back into the [url=http://flightrising.com/main.php?p=market&tab=spec&type=1]gem marketplace[/url]. This item will be available until [b]February 20, 2017[/b] at 22:00 server time. [*]The [b]Auction House revamp[/b] is coming! To best prepare you, we've [url=http://www1.flightrising.com/forums/frd/2114654][b]posted a preview thread where you can ask questions[/b][/url] and join in on the discussion. [/LIST] | {
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The Boston Celtics completed their starting lineup when they signed Enes Kanter to a two year deal on Monday. What are the pros and cons of their newest free agent signee?
The offseason transformation of the Boston Celtics continued on Monday when the team agreed to a deal with free agent center Enes Kanter. This of course, followed Boston’s Sunday agreement with free agent superstar Kemba Walker.
Now the Celtics have effectively replaced Kyrie Irving and Al Horford. Irving was long rumored to be headed to the Brooklyn Nets where he’ll be joined by two-time finals MVP Kevin Durant and DeAndre Jordan. Horford, on the other hand, shocked the world by agreeing to a deal with the Philadelphia 76ers.
The new-look Celtics will have a chance to battle their Atlantic Division rivals, along with the rest of the NBA in a few months. For now, it’s all about snap reactions to the Celtics’ free agent signings.
And since the Kanter signing is so fresh, let’s deep-dive into the pros and cons of addijg him to the Boston Celtics. | {
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Hello gamers! Are you ready for August’s PS Plus lineup?
First up, we have Mafia III. Play as Lincoln Clay, a Vietnam vet who comes back home after years of combat. When his surrogate family is wiped out by the Italian Mafia, Lincoln builds a new family and blazes a path of military-grade revenge through the Mafioso responsible.
Next we have the 4v1 horror game Dead by Daylight. One player takes on the role of the savage Killer, and the other four players play as Survivors, trying to escape the Killer and avoid being caught, tortured and killed.
This month’s PlayStation Plus lineup also includes:
Additionally, we’re offering a bonus PlayStation VR game* for PS Plus members this month! From August 7 through October 2, PS Plus members can download Here They Lie free for their PS VR system. Experience the game where death is not a checkpoint. Explore a nightmarish city inhabited by strange, malevolent creatures in this first-person horror game, where unsettling encounters and environments come to life.
Play Video
Now, if that wasn’t enough, you can also get Knowledge is Power as part of your PS Plus membership from August 7 through November 6. Outsmart your opponents with a massive variety of trivia questions and tactical challenges. Be sure to have a compatible mobile device and companion app and you’ll be all ready to play!
And there you have it. See you next time PlayStation Nation!
*PlayStation 4 system, PlayStation VR, and PlayStation Camera are required to experience VR functionality. | {
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The Giants and cornerback Trumaine McBride have reached agreement on a new two-year contract that will keep the 28-year-old off the open market, says Jordan Raanan of NJ.com. According to Raanan, the deal, which will likely be signed later today, is worth a total of $3.1MM.
McBride, who played for the Bears, Cardinals, and Jaguars before joining the Giants last season, saw an increased role in New York’s secondary during the second half of 2013 and performed well, ranking 24th among qualified cornerbacks, according to Pro Football Focus (subscription required). At a cost of about $1.55MM per season, he’ll come much cheaper than many of the more notable names on the cornerback market this week, though of course he doesn’t have the same track record as many of those other free agents. McBride’s 10 starts for the Giants last season were his first starts since the 2008 season.
The Giants are still expected to be in the market for cornerbacks, according to Raanan. While New York may no longer be in the mix for top options like Alterraun Verner, Corey Graham is one player drawing interest from the team.
Art Stapleton of the Bergen Record first reported that the Giants were close to re-signing McBride. | {
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Der ehemalige Staatsminister Eckart von Klaeden wurde zu Jahresbeginn Cheflobbyist bei Daimler, Ex-Kanzleramtschef Ronald Pofalla wird diese Funktion zum Jahreswechsel bei der Bahn übernehmen und Ex-Entwicklungsminister Dirk Niebel soll ab 2015 die Lobbyarbeit des Rüstungskonzerns Rheinmetall unterstützen.
Karenzzeit: Keine Frage der Ehre
Jeder einzelne dieser Seitenwechsel sorgte in jüngster Zeit für heftige Diskussionen. Dabei ist oft die Rede von „Moral“, „Anstand“ oder „Ehre“. Doch geht es wirklich um Moral oder Ehre? Sicherlich kann man den Wandel des obersten Entwicklungshelfers zum Rüstungsexporteur als anstandslos und unmoralisch empfinden. Letztlich sind aber nicht die Gewissensfragen eines Einzelnen relevant, sondern die Frage: Welche Gefahren und Probleme für die Demokratie können bei derartigen Seitenwechseln entstehen und was kann dagegen getan werden?
Merkel hält zwölf Monate für ausreichend – wir nicht!
Die Äußerungen der Bundesregierung rund um die Wechsel von Pofalla und Klaeden lassen darauf schließen, dass zwölf Monate Karenzzeit beschränkt auf Fälle mit klaren Interessenkonflikten dort für ausreichend gehalten werden. Das sehen wir anders. Wir halten drei Jahre für notwendig. Außerdem erfasst eine Beschränkung auf Interessenkonflikte nur die Hälfte des Problems: Viele Wechsel in Lobbytätigkeiten blieben dann weiterhin möglich.
Damit eine Karenzzeit tatsächlich wirksam den aus den Seitenwechseln entstehenden Gefahren für die Demokratie entgegen wirkt, sollte sie mindestens den folgenden fünf Kriterien gerecht werden:
Keine Lobbytätigkeiten. Innerhalb der Karenzzeit müssen Lobbytätigkeiten generell und unabhängig vom vorherigen politischen Tätigkeitsbereich des Seitenwechslers untersagt sein. Derzeit diskutieren die Fraktionen des Bundestages eine Regelung, die lediglich dann wirksam wird, wenn eine Interessenverflechtung mit dem vorherigen Amt nahe liegt. Dies ist richtig, aber erfasst einen wichtigen Teil der Seitenwechsel nicht: Ehemalige Spitzenpolitiker werden häufig als Türöffner angeheuert und verfügen auch jenseits ihres letzten Zuständigkeitsbereichs über verlässliches Netzwerk. Wenn etwa in eine Lobby-Dienstleistungsagentur gewechselt wird, ist diese Problematik besonders sichtbar. Während der Karenzzeit muss daher zusätzlich explizit ausgeschlossen sein, dass Lobbytätigkeiten angenommen werden – und zwar unabhängig vom vorherigen politischen Verantwortungsbereich. Drei Jahre. Die Karenzzeit muss länger als 12 Monate gelten. Nach 12 Monaten kann nicht davon ausgegangen werden, dass laufende politische Verfahren abgeschlossen sind. Auch ist das politische Kontaktnetzwerk nicht ausreichend abgekühlt. LobbyControl fordert eine Karenzzeit von drei Jahren. Bei Beamten liegt der Zeitraum, in dem eine Anschlusstätigkeit im dienstlichen Interesse untersagt werden kann, bei mindestens drei Jahren. Die Karenzzeit für EU-Kommissare wurde auf 18 Monate verlängert, nachdem deutlich wurde, dass 12 Monate nicht ausreichen. Nicht im Amt. Zusätzlich zu den Verpflichtungen nach dem Ausscheiden aus dem Amt muss klar geregelt werden, dass Verhandlungen über mögliche Folgebeschäftigungen noch während der Amtszeit untersagt sind. Gesetzlich. Die Karenzzeit muss auf gesetzlicher Grundlage verankert werden, damit die Regelung auch wirklich umfassend durchgesetzt werden kann. Unabhängig. Das Bundeskabinett darf nicht die diejenige Instanz sein, die im Einzelfall entscheidet, ob die Aufnahme einer Tätigkeit nach Ausscheiden aus der Regierung auf Grund von Interessenkonflikten oder Lobbytätigkeiten untersagt werden muss. Notwendig ist ein von der Regierung unabhängiges Gremium mit eigenen Untersuchungsbefugnissen und angemessener personeller Ausstattung.
Eine Karenzzeit-Regelung, die diesen Kriterien entspricht wirkt:
korruptionspräventiv, da eine Beeinflussung von Amtshandlungen durch lukrative Jobangebote durch den zeitlichen Abstand deutlich weniger attraktiv ist,
demokratiestärkend, da bereits der Anschein einer unzulässigen Beeinflussung politischer Entscheidungen durch Jobangebote mit einem massiven Vertrauensverlust in die demokratischen Institutionen und die gewählten Volksvertreter einhergeht,
Machtungleichgewichten entgegen, da von Seitenwechseln vor allem ohnehin schon finanz- und lobbystarke Akteure durch privilegierte Zugänge profitieren.
Hier haben wir eine ausführlichere Begründung für die Ausgestaltung der Karenzzeit zusammengestellt.
Unsere Pressemitteilung zum Thema finden Sie hier. | {
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Anyone following crypto news has undoubtedly seen numerous articles that forecast Bitcoin’s (BTC) valuation following the upcoming halving slated to take place in May of this year. And although the price of Bitcoin is clearly important to the industry and investors at large, planning for the halving is particularly critical to cryptocurrency miners.
Once the halving occurs, the unfortunate truth is that the profitability of all but the most efficient mining operations will be greatly challenged. To stay in the green, many will either be forced to upgrade their equipment or to shut down their mining operations altogether.
However, careful planning can mitigate these risks, and there are several steps miners should take to set themselves up for sustained profitability in the wake of the halving. To understand all the factors at play, it’s important to review what makes mining profitable in the first place. This includes:
Hash rate and difficulty.
Power consumption.
Power cost.
Block reward.
And the exchange rate of BTC to USD.
Hash rate and difficulty
The hash rate is the estimated number of tera hashes per second that the Bitcoin network is performing. It is a general measure of the network’s processing power and of how many times the network can attempt to add a block to the Bitcoin blockchain every second.
The hash rate is a good indicator of the network’s health, and while it can’t be precisely measured, it can be estimated based on the current difficulty and time of block confirmations of Bitcoin.
Mining Bitcoin is not easy, and it has only gotten harder as more miners have joined the network. The difficulty of mining a block correlates with the overall network hash rate, and thus with the competition. The more people trying to solve a block, the more difficult it is to do so.
Miners can increase their chances by employing high-powered application-specific integrated circuits that are efficient and always running. The ultimate goal is to solve a block that is worth more than it costs to solve. Miners can also improve odds by joining a mining pool, in which profits are shared with the other members of the pool and vice versa.
It’s not expected for the halving to have a big impact on mining difficulty. It may adjust slightly to make up for no-longer-profitable miners leaving the network, which will allow for the remaining miners to mine more profitably and to drive forward the hash rate, price and difficulty in general.
Power consumption
The electrical efficiency of mining devices has a massive impact on overall profitability. If miners are expending excess energy and paying more in electrical costs than receiving as a result of solving a block, they’re going to end up in the red.
Related: Bitcoin Mining's Electricity Bill: Is It Worth It?
A more efficient device will lead to greater profits in less time while also expending less energy, thus, reducing costs. Such efficient machines are going to be needed to correct for the reduction in block reward following the halving. Machines, such as the Antminer S9, are going to become essentially obsolete and will need to be replaced with newer, more efficient miners like the Antminer S17.
Power cost
The power cost also has a big impact on profitability and is directly related to the power consumption — as well as to the cost of electricity at the mining operation. As more efficient machines are needed to keep up with the reduced revenue following the halving, miners will need to run operations in a place with low energy costs.
Mining colocation centers offer high power and low costs of energy, along with several other benefits, such as 24/7 security and equipment oversight. It’s strongly suggested that miners consider state-of-the-art facilities throughout the country to help them make the most of their operations at a fraction of the cost and consumption.
Block reward
This is what halving is all about. The current block reward of 12.5 BTC will be halved to 6.25 in the spring, and the revenue of all miners on the network will be cut in half, as well. The only way to make up for this is to increase mining power and reduce operational costs.
Exchange rate of BTC to USD
The price of Bitcoin has historically responded well to previous halvings — for those miners capable of remaining in the market after the fact. However, this has been the subject of considerable debate in the crypto community, and although opinions vary, the outlook is bullish.
Looking ahead by looking back
The bottom line is that when the Bitcoin block reward halves, so will the total revenue generated by all miners. If the hash rate, power consumption and power cost all stay the same as they were before, it’s likely that a mining operation will be unprofitable if the hardware hasn’t been upgraded to remain competitive.
When getting into this space, it’s essential to keep emotions out of the equation. It’s best to rely on the numbers and objectively analyze trends and key indicators to set oneself up for the best chance at success. This is certainly easier said than done in today’s environment, as social media, family and friends have made it easier than ever to become influenced by outside sources. Still, it is important to understand that long-term trends are more indicative of where the market is headed than are random fluctuations.
Looking back at the last two halving events in 2012 and 2016, both led to new market highs for Bitcoin’s price within a year to a year and a half. No doubt that the upcoming halving will impact the market, and although we can’t know for certain what will happen, if the demand for Bitcoin remains the same and scarcity is greater, the expected response would be to see the price increase. By how much, it is hard to say.
For those committed to the long-term play, good planning and investing in the latest hardware seems prudent. Going a bit further, for those who don’t host their own mining equipment, analyzing hosting options and locking in competitive pricing now in a multi-year contract can help manage costs in the coming months.
The best piece of advice for miners: Assess your needs today and well in advance of the halving. As Benjamin Franklin once famously noted, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”
The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph. | {
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Atlanta United announced today it has finalized the transfer of Carlos Carmona to Colo-Colo of the Chilean Primera Division in exchange for an undisclosed transfer fee.
“Carlos was a valuable member of the team, but sometimes life becomes more important than soccer and we have decided to do what’s best for the player and his family,” Vice President and Technical Director Carlos Bocanegra said. “Although, it was never the plan to move him on, we were able to reach an agreement and made the best out of a difficult situation.”
Carmona, 30, signed with Atlanta United on Feb. 6, 2017 as a free transfer from Atalanta BC. In his first season in MLS, he made 30 league starts and chipped in two goals and two assists. Prior to Atlanta, he spent the last eight seasons in Italy and made more than 150 appearances in the top-flight, the majority of which came with Atalanta where he played since 2010.
Atlanta United opens its preseason schedule against Nashville SC on Saturday, Feb. 10. | {
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By now you’ve probably heard about #Bendgate, the silly name for an issue that some new iPhone 6 Plus owners have been reporting where the device warped while in their pockets. So far the problem seems to be fairly isolated, but we struck up an Apple support chat anyway to see how it’s covered by the company’s warranty.
When asked if a bent enclosure during normal use of an iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus would qualify for a replacement, the representative said:
That is 100 percent up to the Genius you speak with at the store. There is a test called a Visual Mechanical Inspection that the device will have to pass. If it is within the guidelines, they will be able to cover it. If not, the replacement would be a paid one.
When asked for details on the Genius Bar guidelines, the representative said the information wasn’t provided to chat support staff.
Apple’s support team also said that it is “looking into this with an insane amount of detail.” The staffer offered to escalate the issue to a call with a senior support advisor. We declined, but it’s good to know that Apple is taking the issue seriously.
We’ve reached out to Apple PR to clarify its official warranty stance, but for now it looks like the company is willing to replace some bent iPhones, provided they haven’t been obviously been tampered with. Unbox Therapy is probably out of luck with the iPhone 6 Plus it subjected to a bend test, but if you’re experiencing some unintentional warping on your brand new phone, check in with Apple support to see if they’ll replace it.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that bending issues with smartphones aren’t exactly new. Apple’s own support communities contain several reports about damaged iPhone 5 and iPhone 5s units. We’ll be keeping an eye on whether this is a genuine quality issue with the latest iPhones. In the meantime, you can always consider the more resilient Galaxy Note 3 if you’re worried about the issue.
Image credit: Hadrian / Shutterstock
Read next: 4 simple, impactful ways to optimize customer support on mobile | {
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Canadian economists find there may be geopolitical and other factors that may drag on economic growth potential. File photo by John Angelillo/UPI. | License Photo
May 12 (UPI) -- Lower commodity prices and political developments in Europe and the United States make for an uncertain economic future, the Bank of Canada said.
An assessment of global business activity from economists at the Bank of Canada found the pace of spending is expected to accelerate as last year's severe contraction in commodity prices fades.
Crude oil prices last year dropped below $30 per barrel as global supplies far outweighed demand. A decision from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to curb production to balance the market helped add another $20 per barrel to the prices of oil, establishing a level of confidence for oil and natural gas players.
The Canadian economists said that, even as that pressure fades, business investment growth will be moderated by factors like low productivity and slowing population growth.
Population factors extend beyond North America. The International Monetary Fund found an aging Asian population could be a drag on growth for economies like China and Asia. Chinese growth in gross domestic production of about 6.5 percent nevertheless outpaces the United States, Canada's top trading partner.
"Since 2014, business investment growth in advanced economies has experienced a renewed episode of weakness despite a strengthening in aggregate demand," the Canadian economists reported.
Canadian leaders are working to diversify an economy tied strongly to the United States through diplomatic efforts in Asia. Alberta Trade Minister Deron Bilous this week hosted business delegates from China.
Developments outside of North America, meanwhile, could create more headwinds for growth, the Canadian economists found.
"This rise in macroeconomic uncertainty may reflect a sequence of unanticipated economic and political developments, such as the sharp fall in oil and other commodity prices, crises in several emerging markets, for example Brazil and Argentina, and political developments in the United States and Europe," they reported.
U.S. President Donald Trump has vowed to reconfigure the North American Free Trade Agreement and Canadian leaders have pressed for stronger trade relations with the United States while at the same time looking for development opportunities in Asia. | {
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A teenage driver has been charged with criminal negligence causing bodily harm after a violent high-speed crash a year ago.
Vancouver police say Yue Hui Wang, who was 18 years old at the time, was travelling at 250 km/h in a parent's Mercedes — five times the posted speed limit. The passenger in the car's front seat was 17.
"We're very lucky that we didn't pull two dead bodies out of this vehicle," said Const. Brian Montague on Wednesday, "It's nothing more than a fluke."
The 18-year-old driver of a black Mercedes is charged with dangerous driving causing bodily harm after driving at speeds five times the posted limit. (Vancouver Police Department)
The crash occurred April 12 last year at about 3 a.m. PT on S.W. Marine Drive. Police allege Wang crossed the centre line and smashed into a front yard near 57 Avenue, leaving the black Mercedes he was driving a mangled mess.
"At 250 km/h, when investigators told me how fast he was going, I honestly didn't think anyone could travel that fast on that stretch of highway."
The 17-year-old passenger was taken to hospital with serious head injuries, facial injuries and at least one broken bone.
Montague said the driver is a Chinese national who was in Vancouver last year to attend his citizenship ceremony, which he failed to make.
Wang left Canada after the incident, but when he returned he was arrested and has been ordered to surrender his passport. | {
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Despite the fact that Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is covering much of mayor Ed Murray's trade mission to Israel, the city is still paying about $24,000 for the trip, PubliCola has learned.
Mayor Murray is currently leading a trade delegation of Seattle business leaders to Israel, speaking at a gay and lesbian conference, marching in Israel's gay pride parade, and, Murray's staff notes (in response to critics of Israel), also meeting with Arab members of Israel's parliament and visiting Palestine.
KUOW reported on the potential controversy that Israel is paying for the mayor's trip. Accepting money from foreign governments isn't kosher for political candidates under U.S. federal elections law. Wiggle room for Murray: He is not a candidate at the moment. And Seattle Ethics and Elections director Wayne Barnett said the gift (hotel costs) doesn't violate local laws because Barnett doesn't believe Israel has any practical business in front of Mayor Murray. Why the trade delegation then? (I have a call in to Barnett.)
Meanwhile, Seattle taxpayers are picking up some of the bill for the Murray mission, paying airfare for a Murray staffer. (The mayor's office told me that cost about $5,000.)
However, a larger part of the bill (that hasn't been reported) is Murray's security detail—travel, lodging, food, and overtime for the Seattle police officers that accompanied Murray. Pressed (the SPD refused to tell me), the mayor's office told me SPD is paying $19,000 to supply Murray with security detail.
That brings the grand total to about $24,000 on the public tab.
(Footnote: The KUOW story reports that Murray is the only mayor in recent years to accept a gift like this, but that's not correct: Former mayor Mike McGinn's trip to China was partly paid for by the Chinese city of Chongqing.) | {
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Fastrack, a brand owned by watchmaker Titan, launched a new activity tracker called Reflex in India on Monday. Fastrack Reflex can track activity and sleep data and it’s priced at Rs. 1,995. Fastrack makes watches for young people and the Reflex is no different. It is available in various colours and each of these variants have dual-colour bands. The outside of the band has one colour and the inside has a different one. The pricing of the Reflex also shows that the activity tracker has been targeted at youth.
Fastrack Reflex is compatible with both Android and iOS. It also shows notifications for phone calls and text messages, and features support for vibration alarms as well. If you’ve been inactive for a while, the tracker will remind you to leave your couch or desk and walk.
The company says Fastrack Reflex is splash resistant, which means you can’t wear it while taking a shower. The tracker can be charged using any USB adapter or USB ports on laptops or desktop PCs.
This puts the Fastrack Reflex in competition with the Xiaomi Mi Band 2, which is one of the best activity trackers in that price range. The Mi Band 2 has a passive heart rate sensor which the Fastrack Reflex does not, but that’s unlikely to be a deal-breaker for those who want activity trackers. A passive heart rate sensor doesn’t continuously monitor your heart rate, which makes it less useful.
Fastrack Reflex will be available primarily in offline stores. The company said these activity trackers can be purchased from Fastrack, World of Titan, and other retail stores in India.
In 2016, Titan had launched the Juxt Pro smartwatch, which had 1.3-inch IPS LCD display with a pixel density of 278ppi, and Corning Gorilla Glass 3. Titan had said the Juxt Pro is water resistant up to 30 metres. | {
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President Donald Trump signed an $8.3 billion emergency funding bill early Friday to assist the fight against the coronavirus.
“So, we’re signing the $8.3 billion. I asked for two and a half and I got 8.3 and I’ll take it,” Trump said to reporters before leaving the White House in the morning.
The president acknowledged the spread of coronavirus was unprecedented but his administration was prepared to fight it.
“It’s an unforeseen problem … came out of nowhere, but we’re taking care of it,” he said.
Trump said he was continuing to work with local officials to respond to the outbreak of the virus.
He said he spoke with governor Gavin Newsom and said he would test the 2,422 guests and 1,111 crew members currently aboard a Grand Princess cruise ship off the coast of San Francisco.
Trump said that he might still visit the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, but said there were some concerns about whether one of the staff had the coronavirus.
“I may be going,” he said. | {
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A campaign that encourages community events is challenging during Covid-19 - and yet, encouraging end of life conversations has never been more important!
This year, we encouraged more events to be online making them accessible to all. Any face to face events that were able to proceed, did so with caution and adhered to social distancing requirements.
Dying to Know Day, Home Delivered
We were thrilled to see so many people embrace these vital conversations in this challenging time. Some of the online events were recorded, you can view them by following the link below: | {
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This item is incompatible with Team Fortress 2. Please see the instructions page for reasons why this item might not work within Team Fortress 2.
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Caption This can't be good. Save Cancel
Created by Boiled Cheese
Offline File Size Posted Size Location 0.304 MB Apr 5, 2016 @ 8:06am 1920 x 1080 Cactus Canyon 144 Unique Visitors 0 Current Favorites | {
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TORONTO
Remnants of Stephen Hart’s tears still reside somewhere inside the belly of Honduras’ Estadio Olimpico Metropolitano, the site of Canada’s historic 8-1 World Cup qualifying defeat.
Canadian supporters will never forget said fixture or, for that matter, forgive Hart — something Canada’s ex-coach came to terms with moments after the lopsided loss that ended Canada’s 2014 World Cup hopes.
Four years later, Canada’s men are preparing for an eerily similar scenario in San Pedro Sula later this summer.
From his home in Halifax, N.S., 56-year-old Hart is doing the same. With two matches remaining, Canada’s former bench boss has tiny Trinidad and Tobago a draw away from securing passage to the final round of CONCACAF World Cup qualifying.
The Group C leaders are preparing to host Guatemala in Port of Spain before wrapping up Round 4 with a difficult qualifier in the United States. For most, Hart’s Soca Warriors would appear to be in good shape.
“Well, yeah, I thought that last time, too,” Hart told the Toronto Sun, his matter-of-fact manner evident over the phone. “I’m not singing any praises yet. We haven’t achieved anything.”
He’s selling himself short, of course. Hart wouldn’t refer to it as personal redemption, but guiding an embattled Caribbean nation in the wake of a debilitating FIFA scandal has been nothing short of remarkable.
Since 2013, T&T has advanced further than Canada at every Gold Cup and currently leads the U.S. in Group C World Cup qualifying. It has undoubtedly helped Hart move on from his time with the Canadian Soccer Association.
“You go into it with a fresh start,” Hart said of joining the T&T, where he was capped seven times as a player. “I’ve said it before, everything with Canada comes down to me being judged on one game.
“I got tremendous support in terms of coaches from all over the world at the international level, who wrote me and told me to get on with it. Really and truly, that’s what I did. I just got on with the new challenge. I’m honoured to coach in Tobago.”
Without provocation, Hart wished Canada “all the best” as it prepares to face Honduras away on Sept. 2. He has been following his former team’s progress — and head coach Benito Floro’s lineup choices — from the start of qualifying.
Like everyone else, he’s waiting to see if the Canadians can exorcise the demons they took with them from San Pedro Sula back then. The result still haunts players currently on the team.
“Every situation is different. This is a different generation of Canadian players,” Hart said. “They have a good balance and mix. The situation is probably better in the sense that you go into Honduras but you still have El Salvador at home.
“You play them in Vancouver on the turf, which is probably better suited for Canada. Everything is still in Canada’s hands. Honduras has been sputtering. They’ve been giving up goals in almost every game.
“The solid defending they had four years ago ... that generation is out or on the way out. I think it’s a good time to play them.”
Honduras, of course, will like its chances just the same after watching Mexico toy with Canada last month. For nations not named the U.S. and Mexico, it’s about surviving and advancing at this stage.
“I think it’s very difficult to get to the hex,” Hart echoed Floro’s sentiments. “But once you get there, you have three-and-a-half (World Cup) spots to play for. The hex is where the meat-and-potatoes of the process is. But getting to the hex, there are so many things that can go wrong.
“The way it’s spread out, you might be in a good moment, but then you have to wait six months to play. Anything can happen in that time period — injuries, form. You’re starting over. I think getting to the hex is very difficult.”
Hart has been on the brink of reaching CONCACAF’S final stage before. Now he’s facing a similar fate if the Soca Warriors don’t hold their nerve at home.
“We’re a close-knit unit,” Hart said of T&T. “We have some very talented players at good, important positions on the field. We’ve been fairly focused in our task.
“(My players) are aware of the situation. The Trinidad mentality is to play in a free way and to entertain. But we know what our situation is and what the priorities are. Hopefully we can be at our best during the home game against Guatemala.”
Meanwhile, three thousand kilometres away, Canada’s players will be retracing the steps they took alongside Hart four years earlier, hoping Honduras won’t replicate a result that’s synonymous with their former manager.
CURRENT CONCACAF WORLD CUP QUALIFYING GROUPS
GROUP A
(Ranking, Team, GD, Points)
1) Mexico +10 12
2) Honduras -1 4
3) Canada -4 4
4) El Salvador -5 2
GROUP B
1) Costa Rica +5 10
2) Panama +2 7
3) Jamaica -4 4
4) Haiti -3 1
GROUP C
1) T&T +8 10
2) United States +7 7
3) Guatemala +1 6
4) St. Vincent and the Grenadines -16 0
*Top two from each group after six games advance to final round.
*Bold denotes team has secured place in final round. | {
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© Nickleodeon/
©
Round 2 remix of Franchise Remix. Click here to cast your vote for the next round. ---So, before anyone notices I'll just say it - there's no water element in there. After some intense research, as extensive as the Mass Effect 'verse is, I only found equivalents for three of the four elements in Avatar. Maybe she drinks a lot of water??? ... Yeah, no.All the same, this was super fun to work on. Both franchises are brilliantly designed. And the details blended perfectly because there were enough similarities to make it convincing, yet enough differences to make it a clear fusion. Much happy with this one. EDIT: Here's a little extra remix with this theme:---More remixes: | {
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A student is suing Iowa State University for threatening to withhold his diploma if he refused to complete a training program teaching that annoyances constitute harassment.
The Stream reports that Robert Dunn, president of the university’s Young America’s Foundation chapter, received an email in September instructing him to attend a training program on ISU’s “non-discrimination policies and procedures,” which concerned him because he had previously been warned that simply expressing opposition to same-sex marriage could be considered harassment under the school’s policies.
“No university policy can trump the First Amendment, [but] Iowa State thinks it knows better."
[RELATED: UNM warns staff that terms like 'crazy,' 'psycho' can 'stigmatize' colleagues]
When he inquired with the school’s Office of Equal Opportunity about the consequences of declining to participate, Dunn says he was informed that his graduation would be put on hold and that his name would be placed on a list to be reviewed by the Dean of Students.
According to a statement by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a non-profit legal firm representing Dunn, ISU maintains a broad definition of harassment that even prohibits speech with the potential to “annoy or alarm another,” and in fact acknowledges that its policies“may cover those activities which...[do not] meet the legal definition of harassment."
Moreover, the extensive, 118-slide anti-harassment training course “provides no expressed acknowledgement of any free speech rights of students or their interplay with the university’s ‘harassment’ policies.”
[RELATED: Sexual harassment trainings don't work, feds admit]
“These are anti-speech policies masquerading as ‘harassment’ policies. They are not befitting an institution of higher education, especially when Iowa State demands that students agree to them under threat of withholding the ability to graduate,” said Casey Mattox, senior counsel for ADF. “No university policy can trump the First Amendment, [but] Iowa State thinks it knows better than the First Amendment, making other student’s opinions about the value of a student’s speech, instead of the Constitution, the test for whether speech is protected.”
The lawsuit, Dunn v Leath, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa, seeks an immediate suspension of the policy and a declaration from the court affirming that ISU violated Dunn’s First and 14th Amendment rights.
“Students shouldn't be forced to give up their Bill of Rights protections in order to graduate,” Dunn declared emphatically in a statement to Campus Reform.
A spokesperson for ISU, on the other hand, told Campus Reform that the university had no comment.
Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @AutumnDawnPrice | {
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