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The second stage in the Operation Wrath of Euphrates continues at full force in its 7th day. Fighters have liberated the village of Duxan to the northwest of Raqqa at around 10:20 local time Friday morning.
A number of ISIS members including a leader have been killed in clashes in the village. | {
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Photo credit: splinternews.com
The endless battle against federal criminal illegal aliens inside of America has continued to ratchet up - with California being the frontline of the battlefield - after Governor Jerry Brown signed “Sanctuary State” SB54 into law - and the Trump Administration alongside the Department of Justice, as well as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, have continued to enforce federal immigration laws in spite of the Communist leadership of California's efforts to commit sedition and treason against the rest of the nation.
The newest of raids by ICE inside of California spanned three days in San Diego and Imperial counties, in an instant-deportation operation that rounded up a total of 115 federal criminal illegal aliens which pose a monumental danger to American citizens and the working class of California taxpayers.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">California AGAIN Endangers American's Lives Hiring Illegal Alien to State Position Salaried by Taxpayers<br>Time to Arrest Jerry Brown<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Illegals?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Illegals</a><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/IllegalAliens?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#IllegalAliens</a><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Mateo?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Mateo</a><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/California?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#California</a><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/NewCalifornia?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#NewCalifornia</a><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/FIUBridgeCollapse?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#FIUBridgeCollapse</a><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/AllStars3?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#AllStars3</a><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/OneTerritory?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#OneTerritory</a><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/QAnon?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#QAnon</a> <a href="https://t.co/XQolCIOQXK">https://t.co/XQolCIOQXK</a></p>— Red Pill (@IWillRedPillU) <a href="https://twitter.com/IWillRedPillU/status/974446536070397952?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 16, 2018</a></blockquote>
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During the sweeps throughout both counties, ICE apprehended 108 federal criminal illegal aliens in San Diego County alone, with more than half of those arrested having been found to have been previously convicted criminals, again underscoring the overwhelming danger of illegal aliens inside of America.
This comes after the State of California decided to appoint the first-ever federal criminal illegal aliens to position in which the salary is funded in part by taxpayers, a move that has infuriated the majority of the nation as the<a href="https://thegoldwater.com/news/18589-ICE-Sweep-Arrests-212-Illegal-Aliens-and-Cracks-Down-on-122-LA-Businesses"> Democratic Party </a>continues to place the values of illegal aliens before that of the working class voters and legal immigrants who bent over backwards following rules and regulations to immigrate to America legally.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">California Endangers Americans Hiring Illegal Alien to State Position Salaried by Taxpayers<a href="https://twitter.com/TheGoldWaterUS?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@TheGoldWaterUS</a><a href="https://twitter.com/IWillRedPillU?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@IWillRedPillU</a>👌<br><br>CA Senator Kevin de Leon is blatantly violating federal law, hiring an ILLEGAL for State Post.<br>He needs to be locked up!<a href="https://twitter.com/ICEgov?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@ICEgov</a><a href="https://t.co/Gzbe2hz4I5">https://t.co/Gzbe2hz4I5</a> <a href="https://t.co/g8Vvegpp9d">pic.twitter.com/g8Vvegpp9d</a></p>— Maverick (@RodStryker) <a href="https://twitter.com/RodStryker/status/974495342019448832?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 16, 2018</a></blockquote>
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The 33-year-old liberal attorney and “immigration rights” activist Lizbeth Mateo has now been appointed to serve on an exclusive committee which was “designed to increase college access for students from low-income or underserved communities,” as reported last week by<a href="https://thegoldwater.com/news/20727-California-Endangers-Americans-Hiring-Illegal-Alien-to-State-Position-Salaried-by-Taxpayers"> The Goldwater</a>.
The Attorney General of the United States of America's Justice Department, Jeff Sessions, has also filed a lawsuit against the State of California for their defiance of federal immigration laws in the signing of SB54, which essentially bars both local and state law enforcement agencies inside California from cooperating with ICE or sharing intelligence that could be used to round up the criminal threat of illegal aliens.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">👏👏 Way to go <a href="https://twitter.com/ICEgov?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@ICEgov</a> <br>Protecting LEGAL Americans🇺🇸 in cesspool <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/California?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#California</a> <br>Now, triple the agents here…then go after, corrupt to the core, state government <a href="https://twitter.com/jeffsessions?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@jeffsessions</a> <br>Let’s <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/MAGA?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#MAGA</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@realDonaldTrump</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/POTUS?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@POTUS</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Trumpville?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Trumpville</a> 🇺🇸 <a href="https://t.co/EtIgblivll">https://t.co/EtIgblivll</a></p>— GunLovinTrumpGirl👠 (@lmchristi1) <a href="https://twitter.com/lmchristi1/status/975099146095837184?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 17, 2018</a></blockquote>
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ICE said that the most recent series of sweeps during the three-day operation was meant to “target the public safety threats” posed by these illegals, in which ICE agents are now having to commit to “old-fashioned detective work” on the ground since California is unwilling to assist in their operations.
Intelligence gathering, interrogation of individuals and businesses who would hire illegals over American taxpayers, and other tactics must now be used by ICE to hunt down the most dangerous of illegals in the rogue state of California, which has infuriated residents of the state at the Southern California leadership, for their desire to ignore the demands of the rest of the state's citizens and instead promote a lawless society of corruption.
Also targeted during the sweeps were individuals who were required by Judge's orders to leave the United States of America and instead ignored those rulings to run from the law, sending them back to where they belong.
Several of the arrested occurred in Oceanside, where NBC 7 reports that a “43-year-old gang member from Mexico who had been deported four times, and a 55-year-old Kazakhstan citizen wanted by his country for tax evasion.”
“Detainees who re-entered the U.S. after deportation, or who had outstanding orders of removal will be immediately deported. Others will remain in ICE custody awaiting a hearing before an immigration judge,” ICE said.
"State laws in California force ICE to focus additional resources to conduct at-large arrest in the community, putting officers, the general public, and aliens at greater risk and increase the incidents of collateral arrests," the ICE statement said.
It should come as no surprise so many of these illegals are dangerous thugs and gangbangers, with<a href="https://thegoldwater.com/news/18526-Data-Shows-90-of-ICE-Arrests-Had-Pending-Charges-and-Criminal-Records"> The Goldwater reporting </a>that the Pew Research Center has determined 90% of all illegal aliens arrested by ICE have prior criminal convictions.
As ICE continues to enforce our laws, California chooses to defy them. Jeff Sessions has promised that his lawsuit against the State of California will place the corrupt leadership back in line, instead of them acting like a sovereign nation which can do as it pleases.
This is not about “State's Rights,” this is about National Security, and California has endangered the entire nation.
They have to go back, and ICE is making sure they will.
Additional Sources:
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/108-Arrested-in-3-Day-Immigration-Raid-in-San-Diego-County-477129083.html
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April 30, 2007 -- It's a potent hallucinogen that's comparable to LSD. And while it's been around for centuries, it's just now catching on with college students and recreational users nationwide.
It's called salvia divinorum and it's easy and legal to purchase in most of the United States.
Despite its strong hallucinogenic properties and popularity with young users, salvia is not classified as a controlled substance by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.
That means that in most places salvia can be bought straight off the store shelf or ordered on the Internet, where a one ounce of dried salvia leaves sells for $7.49.
Chris Barstow, a 28-year-old lawmaker from Maine, is out to change that, at least for his state. He has proposed a bill to the state legislature that would ban the sale of salvia.
"It's a very strong drug," Barstow said. "The idea that we have a hallucinogen of this nature out there without regulation when a low-grade drug like marijuana is banned -- I just don't see a balance with regard to the drug scheduling practices."
But if Barstow is fighting a crusade, it's against an enemy few people know by name.
A plant originally found in Mexico, salvia divinorum or "diviners sage" was used for religious and medicinal purposes by indigenous tribes.
When the leaves are chewed or smoked, they produce a hallucinogenic effect that lasts anywhere between 15 minutes and three hours.
Users describe its effects as an intense, psychedelic high: fingers changing color, a floating sensation, imaginary objects moving through midair.
"For a few hours after you do it, you feel really distracted and just plain stupid. But for about three minutes after you do it, you feel really elated and out of body," said one user, a student at Dartmouth College who asked not to be identified.
According to some users, effects of the drug include a sense of contemplative peace and intense calm. Others report a more negative experience, saying they were overcome with panic and depression, a loss of self-awareness and a lack of bodily control.
It's in that lack of control that Barstow sees a threat dangerous enough to justify a salvia ban.
"Any drug that if you go onto the Internet says you should have a spotter present poses a threat," said Barstow of his justification for a ban.
"The worst-case scenario is someone gets behind the wheel and hurts another person or that someone takes the drug in the home and hurts themselves for lack of bodily control. And we as a society end up incurring the health care cost."
Despite Barstow's concerns, there have been few reported injuries directly caused by salvia.
The only known salvia-related death is the 2006 suicide of Brett Chidester, who killed himself shortly after smoking salvia.
His parents blame the drug for his death and successfully pushed for the passage of Brett's Law, banning salvia in their home state of Delaware.
Only a handful of other states, including Louisiana and Missouri, have added salvia to their list of regulated substances. Other states, among them Vermont and Georgia, are currently debating a salvia ban.
Tennessee passed a ban but maintained a peculiar loophole: It is illegal to sell salvia for consumption, but still legal to sell it for use in gardening.
The salvia plant is popular in landscaping and gardening shows in the state.
As for Barstow's state of Maine, legislators rejected his proposed ban on salvia. Instead they opted for a less restrictive regulation, outlawing the sale of salvia to anyone younger than 18.
But Barstow says he'll keep fighting for an outright ban.
"We end up paying for the [negative effects] of those who use substances irresponsibly. We need to balance between individual citizens and their civil rights vs. the cost the government has to pay for those who can't handle those substances responsibly."
Moreover, after his experience with the salvia bill, Barstow wants citizens and lawmakers to rethink their approach to drug law.
He sees an imbalance between the legality of salvia and the regulation of less potent narcotics.
"There needs to be an open discussion of the drugs that are scheduled drugs and those that perhaps should be scheduled drugs. If you're going to have a tobacco provision of salvia, it should be considered for marijuana as well," Barstow said.
"The overall discussion needs to be held." | {
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European MPs vote to end summer time clock changes Published duration 26 March 2019
image copyright Getty Images image caption Studies suggest that biorhythms are disrupted by changing the clocks
The European Parliament has backed a proposal to stop the obligatory one-hour clock change which extends daylight hours in summer EU-wide.
Ministers will also have a say on this.
Under an EU directive, all 28 states currently switch to summer time on the last Sunday of March and back to winter time on the last Sunday of October.
The European Commission - in charge of drafting EU legislation - made the proposal last year, after a public consultation which showed 84% of respondents wanting to scrap the biannual clock changes. There were 4.6 million replies in that consultation, 70% of which were from Germans.
But MEPs and the Commission stress that states must co-ordinate their choices, to minimise the risk of economic disruption from a patchwork of different time systems.
What are the pros and cons of summer time?
Daylight saving time (DST) - so-called summer time - has been compulsory in the EU since 2001, aimed at making the EU internal market work more smoothly and reducing energy costs.
Fewer time differences, it was argued, would facilitate cross-border trade and travel in the EU. The extra daylight hours in summer could reduce spending on artificial lighting and help outdoor leisure activities.
But the energy savings from DST have proven to be quite marginal. And some of the EU's major trading partners - among them China, Russia and Turkey - do not operate under DST.
The consultation and scientific studies suggested that the clock changes were having negative effects on people's health.
The EU Commission says studies suggest "the effect on the human biorhythm may be more severe than previously thought".
Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said "there is no applause when EU law dictates that Europeans have to change the clocks twice a year.
"Clock-changing must stop. Member states should themselves decide whether their citizens live in summer or winter time."
Under the new legislation, governments opting to make summer time permanent would adjust their clocks for the last time on the last Sunday in March 2021.
For those choosing permanent standard time - also called winter time - the final clock change would be on the last Sunday of October 2021.
Read more on the world's time controversies:
Finland called for daylight saving to be abolished EU-wide, after a petition gathered more than 70,000 signatures from citizens calling for such a change.
Opposition to the clock changes tends to be greater in northern countries, where seasonal differences in daylight hours are greater than in the south.
In June, Finland has 18.5 hours of daylight, but in December only 5.5 hours. The corresponding figures for Greece are 14.5 hours and 9.3 hours. Yet both countries are in the same standard time zone - Eastern European Time (GMT+2).
What are the EU's time zones?
During the winter, spring and autumn, when DST is not applied, there are three standard time zones:
Three states apply GMT (the UK, Ireland and Portugal)
17 have Central European Time, which is GMT+1
Eight have Eastern European Time, which is GMT+2. | {
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Grida allo scandalo, è un po' volgare e sbeffeggia i grillini. La pagina Facebook in questione si chiama: "Siamo la Gente, il Potere ci temono". Conta 28.125 "Mi piace" e ha 17.994 persone che ne parlano. È nata da un anno per raccontare in maniera diversa i grillini e racconta il lato intransigente degli elettori del M5S.
Si leggono post come: "PEPPE INVECIE ASUMI I CIOVANI DELLA RETE E RINUNCIA AI CONTRIBBUTI PUBBLICI PER FAVORE !!! GRAZZIE PEPPE". E anche quelli che danno la caccia al troll:
COMUNIKATO POLITIKO DELLAGGENTE: Peppe accusa chi lo critica di essere un troll pacato dal Piddi, ma Peppe pensa di sfruttare il webbe usandolo come la tivvu: un megafono dove lui parla e la gente applaude, ascolta e approva come con l'auditel. Ha un'idea PRIMITIVA del webbe, centralista: non ha mai risposto a un commento o alle domande sul webbe. Ha portato il bar sport nella politica anche grazie al webbe e pensava che il bar sport non sarebbe arrivato da lui ma ora che è in pallamento ha diritto ai suoi skizzi come a qualsiasi altro politico. tanto in ogni caso Peppe il grosso dei voti lo prende grazie alla Tivvu che propaganda pochi concetti ma incisivi (i soldiiiiiiiiii sveglia BERSANOOOO), mica coi 4 stronzi sul webbe che coprono si e no il 5% dei voti :D Le persone libbbere hanno il diritto di critikare chi gli pare (nei limiti della leCCe) . SVEGLIAAAAAAAAAAA
In questa gallery ci sono i post migliori. A seguire i tweet che raccontano Siamo la Gente (Off) | {
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He can't answer phones or sign official business documents, but Lisa Ross-Williams and Kenny Williams credit 9-year-old Riley with creating the cornerstone for their Equi-Spirit Toys & Tools business.
The spunky colt of unknown breed had a knack for breaking every play ball tossed his way. After many disappointing and short-lived rounds of kickball, the Cornville couple finally got their hands on a ball that wouldn't burst, no matter how much Riley kicked it or lay on top of it.
It didn't take long for the equine enthusiasts to realize they had found more than a new toy for their horse, after fellow horse lovers said they were hunting for a similar product.
It took a year of research, field testing and negotiating with the manufacturer to become the exclusive equine distributor for the ball. Three years later, Lisa and Kenny's animal-toy business has prospered, with the couple selling their Equi-Spirit balls all over the world.
The key to the oversized ball's durability is an inner PVC bladder that's covered with a tough fabric. But the ball can be punctured, and while the ball's casing can be repaired, punctured bladders must be replaced.
It comes deflated with detailed yet fairly easy instructions on how to inflate it or repair punctures caused by large thorns or barbed wire. The 25- and 40-inch balls come in different colors and patterns, including soccer and basketball patterns and a smiley face, and range in price from $66 to $121.
Cones, mini-balls and a ball with spikes are part of the Equi-Spirit toy lineup.
Ross-Williams said sales have doubled every year, with dogs, camels, seals, elephants and even dolphins playing with the balls. Canine and feline toy lines are in the works.
"We did not expect (this), not at all," she said. "We thought some sales in U.S., but had no idea what it turned into."
Their product's popularity has spurred knockoffs. Although they sought legal counsel a few times, the pair has learned knockoffs come with the territory.
"It's a shame, but we've learned not to waste too much energy on those people," Ross-Williams said. "We'd rather be working toward putting energy toward something positive.".
Lisa, an Iowa native, met Kenny, a Pennsylvanian, when each held law-enforcement positions in the Air Force. Both have extensive equine experience with emphasis on homeopathic and holistic care and treatment.
Ross-Williams hosts the webcast "If Your Horse Could Talk" and is the associate editor of Natural Horse Magazine. Her husband co-hosts the webcast and both provide free horse education through the site and run the Talking Horse Ranch Educational Center.
"Ball sales support the Web site, which gives us the ability to help people," Williams said. "We are very passionate about empowering people and horses."
The couple have been married 18 years and say their "children" are the seven equines that have been rescued from abuse or neglect, including Riley, who was acquired at auction when he was just a few weeks old.
"They really found us," Williams said. "When you see them, you know they deserve to be with us."
The pair network with veterinarians worldwide, and many say that free play and regular exercise contribute to horses' improved health, lowered stress and anger levels, and longer life spans. Ross-Williams said playing comes naturally to horses, who love to run and have fun every chance they get.
"It's great physical and mental stimulation, and the horse develops muscle tone," Williams said. "Horses can exercise by themselves (and) for those horses that are alone, the ball becomes a friend."
The business helps the pair support charitable organizations, including those that provide riding therapy to people with disabilities, at-risk children and adults with emotional challenges. | {
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Michael Cohen — President Donald Trump's longtime personal attorney and fixer — is slated to report to prison in May. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Legal Mueller's office began investigating Michael Cohen as early as July 2017
Special counsel Robert Mueller's office began investigating Michael Cohen — President Donald Trump's longtime personal attorney and fixer — as early as July 2017, according to newly unsealed court filings.
The documents, supporting search warrants used to seize Cohen's devices and records kept in four personal locations, suggest Cohen was one of Mueller's earliest targets. The special counsel was appointed in May of that year to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The newly unsealed files show Mueller began forwarding evidence of crimes to federal prosecutors in New York in February 2018.
Investigators used the search warrants in April 2018 to raid Cohen's office, home, safety deposit box and a hotel room where he had been staying. They collected evidence thatlast summer led to his guilty pleas to tax- and bank-fraud and to charges that he illegally steered hush money payments to two women who have accused Trump of extramarital affairs.
Beryl Howell, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, approved the initial batch of FBI search warrants, which included permission to obtain access to Cohen's Gmail account on July 18, 2017, and his iCloud data a month later, according to the filings. The warrants permitted Mueller's team to sift through Cohen's Gmail account as far back as June 2015, the same month that Trump announced a longshot bid for the White House.
According to the documents, the FBI and U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York in April 2018 received permission to obtain "historical cellphone location information" for some of Cohen's devices.
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McClatchy reported in December that prosecutors had obtained Cohen’s cellphone information and that it had placed the Trump attorney in a location near Prague in summer 2016, a central claim in a hotly disputed dossier that accused Cohen of conspiring with Russian officials to help Trump win the election. Cohen has fiercely denied ever visiting Prague and told Congress earlier this month that he had no direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Investigators acting on behalf of Mueller's office and the U.S. Attorney's Office used similar tracing technology to pinpoint a hotel room where Cohen had been staying temporarily. Relying on information from a hotel employee and a device known as a triggerfish, investigators placed Cohen in Room 1628 of the Loews Regency Hotel shortly before the raid.
The lengthy documents also detail millions of dollars Cohen received from corporate and foreign entities, which the FBI assessed were meant as payments to lobby the Trump administration even though Cohen was not registered as a lobbyist or a foreign agent.
Cohen has also admitted to lying to Congress about his efforts to secure a Trump Tower Moscow deal during the 2016 campaign. The 52-year-old former Trump associate is scheduled to begin serving a three-year prison sentence on May 6, likely at an upstate New York federal facility.
A federal judge in February ordered the release of redacted versions of the Cohen search warrants at the request of several media organizations.
Lanny Davis, a Cohen attorney, said in a statement Monday night in anticipation of the documents’ release that it “only furthers his [client’s] interest in continuing to cooperate and providing information and the truth about Donald Trump and the Trump organization to law enforcement and Congress.”
Cohen earlier this month met for closed-door interviews with the House and Senate intelligence committees and also served as the star witness at the House Oversight Committee’s first hearing.
In his public testimony, Cohen accused Trump of directing him to lie about the president’s knowledge of the hush-money payments and that Trump was told ahead of time about plans to release Democratic emails during the 2016 campaign. | {
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(CNN) The United States has its first novel coronavirus-related drug shortage, according to the US Food and Drug Administration. The maker of an unnamed drug that has recently been added to the FDA Drug Shortages list told the agency that the shortage is due to the novel coronavirus.
On Tuesday, the FDA warned that these types of shortages could happen, and said it was monitoring the situation closely. The agency identified 20 drugs that either solely sourced their active pharmaceutical ingredients, or produced finished drug products, from or in China.
The unnamed company that notified the FDA about a shortage said the problem is the result of an issue with the manufacturing of an active pharmaceutical ingredient used in the drug.
The US relies heavily on Chinese-made drug ingredients, medical devices and drugs that are used in humans and animals. As of 2018, China ranked second among countries that exported drugs and biologics to the US, and ranked first for medical devices, according to the FDA.
The agency said Tuesday it has been in touch with 180 manufacturers to remind them that the companies have a regulatory obligation to notify the FDA if they anticipate any disruption to drug supplies. The agency asked companies to evaluate their supply chains in light of the coronavirus outbreak.
Read More | {
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On 6 September 1995, Baltimore Orioles infielder Cal Ripken, Jr. broke a record long thought to be unassailable when he played in his 2,131st consecutive baseball game, surpassing the mark of 2,130 set by Lou Gehrig back in 1939. Ripken would go on to play in a total of 2,632 straight games before finally sitting one out on 20 September 1998.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Ripken’s most remarkable of streaks was that he started every game (i.e., his streak included no pinch-hitting, pinch-running, or late-inning defensive appearances), he voluntarily left a game before the seventh inning only four times (in addition to twice being ejected by umpires), and at one point he played every single inning of every single game for a span over five years.
In other words, Ripken didn’t even come close to missing a game during his streak — except, as rumor claims, for one evening in August 1997, when Ripken was unable to make it to the park for that day’s game due to the fallout of having caught his wife in bed with another man, and a mysterious malfunction in his home ballpark’s lighting system (allegedly one deliberately created by an Orioles employee) forced the cancellation of the game and thereby preserved Ripken’s streak:
Cal Ripken, Jr. was allowing Kevin Costner, the actor, to stay at his house, following the wrap of “The Postman”. One day, Ripken left for Camden Yards to play in a game. Somewhere between his home and the stadium, Cal realized that he had left something back at his house, and turned back to retrieve it. Upon arriving at his home, he found Kevin Costner in bed with his wife, Kelly. Cal then proceeded to beat the crap out of Costner, to the point that Costner was unable to make any publicity opportunities for a time. Cal then called the Orioles, and told them he wouldn’t be coming in to play that day. Upon hearing this, the owner reminded Cal about his streak, telling him The Streak would end if he didn’t play that day. Cal told him it was impossible for him to come in, so there went the streak. Reportedly, the owner told him not to worry, because he would take care of it. That night, the game was cancelled due to “electrical failure” with some lights on the field. The caller [I heard this rumor from] said that there was no problem with the lights, that everything else, including the hotels and restaurants that are part of Camden Yards, worked perfectly. The next day, the lights were fixed, Cal was able to play, and the streak stayed intact.
A game between the Orioles and the Seattle Mariners scheduled for Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore on 14 August 1997 was cancelled due to lighting problems, but there was nothing “mysterious” about the incident. A ground fault interrupt kept tripping the circuit breaker each time the lights in one of Oriole Park’s lighting banks were turned on, and the game’s 7:35 P.M. starting time was pushed back as a crew worked on the problem. (That the businesses surrounding Oriole Park did not experience similar problems is not strange, as the ballpark is on a separate portion of the city’s power grid.)
The crew finally got the bank of lights working by 8:45 P.M., but about 20 bulbs in the bank failed to illuminate, and the umpiring crew had to make the decision whether to allow the game to begin. Umpire crew chief Al Clark officially postponed the game at 10 P.M. after determining that shadows at home plate created unsafe playing conditions, a decision influenced by the fact that fireballing pitcher Randy Johnson was scheduled to start for the Mariners.
Given that Johnson was a left-hander who threw extremely hard, and the lighting outage occurred on the first-base side of the field (i.e., the side on which batters would be visually picking up the ball from Johnson’s hand as the southpaw threw towards home plate), the risk of serious injury to a batter was deemed too great to allow the game to proceed. The contest was cancelled and made up as part of a double-header the following day.
Shortly afterwards, a conspiracy rumor was concocted from this scenario which involved actor Kevin Costner, who had a long-standing friendship with Cal Ripken, and rumors of marital difficulties between Ripken and his wife Kelly. According to that rumor, Ripken caught Costner in bed with his wife on the morning of 14 August 1997, and the shock of that betrayal left Ripken too emotionally distraught and/or too sore and bruised from brawling with Costner to show up at Camden Yards for the Orioles’ game with the Seattle Mariners that evening. (Some versions of the rumor even maintained that Ripken couldn’t make it to the ballpark because he had been hauled off to jail for assault.)
In order to preserve the tremendous publicity value of Ripken’s consecutive game steak, Orioles management quickly arranged for someone in the Camden Yards facilities crew to create a ‘malfunction’ that would prevent the day’s game from coming off as scheduled and provide Ripken with a much-needed day off to recover from his ordeal.
Kevin Costner and Cal Ripken, Jr. met in 1990 at a premiere of Costner’s film Dances with Wolves and began what Costner described as a “burgeoning friendship.” Before a game during the 1991 season, Costner took batting and fielding practice with the Orioles, played catch on the sidelines, went through stretching exercises in the outfield, and batted and took grounders with Ripken. Costner was often seen taking in Orioles games from the stands at Baltimore’s Camden Yards, sometimes sitting with Ripken’s wife, Kelly.
In late 1997, gossip began circulating to the effect that the Ripkens had separated, Cal was staying with a teammate, and a divorce was imminent. The rumors included claims of infidelities on both sides, with the male interloper named as anyone from “an Orioles trainer” to Costner (who at the time lived about an hour from the Ripkens’ ranch). From such rumors was the “mysterious game cancellation” legend concocted back in 1998.
Whether the electrical outage was “mysterious” or not, it wasn’t devised to keep Ripken’s streak alive by forcing the cancellation of a game he would otherwise have missed. News reports of the day’s events prove Ripken was present at the ballpark, suited up and ready to play, and both fans and reporters noted him sitting in the dugout and playing catch along the sidelines that evening.
Ripken himself addressed the rumor in a 2008 interview on NPR:
It’s easy to check the facts of that one. I remember it very well. The bank of lights went off and Randy Johnson was pitching for the Seattle Mariners. And we were deciding what to do about that. Was there enough visible light out there to actually see a guy throwing over 100 miles per hour? The bank was just over our dugout. And I physically went out and tested it for the umpire. I was in discussion with the umpires. I was definitely there, I was ready to play. And the funny part about it was we all decided it was better that we play that night, because the next day would have been a Sunday day game, and Randy Johnson would have been throwing out of the stands, and in day games he’s much harder to see. So we all decided that we were going to go. Evidently [Mariners manager] Lou Piniella told Seattle a little different story that the game wasn’t going to go, and they started leaving the ballpark, so we didn’t have that option after all. We scheduled it for the next day, and we played. But I definitely was there. And I’m sure I was on camera a number of times being out on the field.
When this legend was repeated by a couple of hosts on Fox Sports Radio in June 2001, an angry Costner called the show the next day to deny it and tell the hosts that if they had claimed the story was true, “I was going to take your heads off.” Costner maintained at the time that he had met Ripken’s wife only twice in his life, that he had probably spent no more than 10 minutes with her altogether, and that he had never been to the Ripkens’ home. (Since Costner had been noted sitting in the stands for whole games with Kelly Ripken, his “10 minutes” and “twice in his life” claims were probably underestimates).
Whatever Kevin Costner’s relationship with the Ripkens might have been, Cal and Kelly stayed together long afterwards (they were married for 28 years), and Costner didn’t make some Machiavellian maneuvering on the part of the Orioles necessary to keep Cal from missing a game. | {
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Rabbit's Kin 1952
Uploaded 04/29/2012
How many lumps do you want? | {
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DICK DISPELS THE LIBERAL MYTH THAT CONSERVATIVES HAVE NO SENSE OF HUMOR
http://archive.org/download/DickHatenberg/004-Seinfeld.mp3 Episode 4
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Second, war is human. People fight today for the same fundamental reasons the Greek historian Thucydides identified nearly 2,500 years ago: fear, honor and interest. But in the years preceding our last two wars, thinking about defense undervalued the human as well as the political aspects of war. Although combat operations unseated the Taliban and the Saddam Hussein regime, a poor understanding of the recent histories of the Afghan and Iraqi peoples undermined efforts to consolidate early battlefield gains into lasting security.
Over time, American forces learned that an appreciation of the fears, interests and sense of honor among Afghanistan’s and Iraq’s citizens was critical to breaking cycles of violence and helping to move their communities toward making political accommodations that isolated extremists. Reinforced security efforts, in Iraq after 2007 and Afghanistan after 2010, tried to allay fears of minorities, preserve each group’s sense of honor and convince communities that they could best protect and advance their interests through politics rather than through violence.
The hard-learned lesson: Defense concepts must consider social, economic and historical factors that constitute the human dimension of war.
THIRD, war is uncertain, precisely because it is political and human. The dominant assumption of the “Revolution in Military Affairs” was that information would be the key to victory. Concepts of “network-centric warfare,” “rapid, decisive operations,” “shock and awe” and “full-spectrum dominance” suggested that near-perfect intelligence would enable precise military operations and point a straight line to success. But in Afghanistan and Iraq, planning did not account for adaptations and initiatives by the enemy. American forces, deployed initially in insufficient numbers to keep pace with the evolution of those conflicts, struggled to maintain security. The lesson: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, like all wars, were contests of will that unleashed dynamics that made future events impossible to predict.
Fortunately, in Afghanistan and Iraq, American forces adapted. For example, in 2005, in western Nineveh Province, our enemies had pitted sectarian communities against one another in a bloody civil war. In the city of Tal Afar, our cavalry regiment first sought to understand the complex environment while building trust with local Iraqi security forces and a beleaguered population. Alongside United States Special Forces and Iraqi soldiers, our troops sought not only to fight the enemy, but also to build security for civilians and promote conflict resolution among competing groups. As Tal Afar’s mayor, Najim Abdullah Abid al-Jibouri, recalled, “Our city was the main base of operations for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ...Our people were barricaded in their homes out of fear; death awaited them around every corner.” But when the Americans came, he added, “With the skill and precision of surgeons they dealt with the terrorist cancers in the city without causing unnecessary damage.”
What we learned: American forces must cope with the political and human dynamics of war in complex, uncertain environments. Wars like those in Afghanistan and Iraq cannot be waged remotely.
Budget pressures and persistent fascination with technology have led some to declare an end to war as we know it. While emerging technologies are essential for military effectiveness, concepts that rely only on those technologies, including precision strikes, raids or other means of targeting enemies, confuse military activity with progress toward larger wartime goals. We must not equate military capabilities with strategy. Achieving our aims in war will demand forces who can reassure allies and protect populations, as well as identify and defeat elusive enemies. | {
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When learning a programming language we rarely read the reference documentation front to back. Instead someone might follow some tutorials, and look at sample code, until they’re confident enough to start a little project for practice.
From that point on the learning process is largely “just in time”, looking up exactly the things you need to perform the task at hand. As this goes on you might start to recognize some patterns, some internal logic that allows you to “intuit” how one part of the language works, based on experience with another part.
Developing this “intuition” — understanding this internal logic — is key to using a language effectively, but occasionally our intuition will be off. Some things are simply not obvious, unless someone has explained them to us. In this post I will look at something that frequently trips people up, and attempt to explain the underlying reasoning.
contains?
Let’s start with perhaps the greatest source of frustration in clojure.core , the contains? function. Based on its name you’d be excused for thinking that it checks whether a collection contains a certain value.
(def beatles ["John" "Paul" "Ringo" "George"]) (contains? beatles "Ringo") ;;=> false
Ahum… what the h*ck, Clojure?
A symptom of the same underlying cause is confusion over get vs nth . Why do we need both? When you do you use which?
(get beatles 1) ;;=> "Paul" (nth beatles 1) ;;=> "Paul"
Collection Traits
To understand what’s going on we need to look at the underlying abstractions to Clojure’s data types. All of Clojure’s concrete types like vectors, sets, or maps implement one or more of these “abstractions”. You can also think of them as “having certain traits”.
Seq(uential)
Seqable
Associative
Counted
Indexed
Sorted
Reversible
Functions in clojure.core do their work based on these abstractions. For instance, you can call first on any Clojure collection because they all implement Seq or Seqable, whereas get or update will only work on collections that implement Associative.
This blog post by Alex Miller explains these traits in great detail.
Of these Seq and Seqable are arguable the most important to understand, closely followed by Associative. There’s a free Lambda Island episode with everything you need to know about seqs, which is a trait shared by all Clojure collections, as well as some other things like strings or Java arrays.
(seqable? '(1 2)) ;;=> true (seqable? [1 2]) ;;=> true (seqable? {1 2}) ;;=> true (seqable? #{1 2}) ;;=> true (seqable? "12") ;;=> true
Functions like first , rest , map , or cons can operate on any seq/seqable. That’s also why the return type of map or cons may be different from what you passed it. The only guarantee is that the result is again a seq.
Maps and vectors are associative. You can think of the first as a mapping from keys to values, and the second as a mapping from indexes to values. get , assoc , dissoc , update , and any of their *-in variants work on associative data structures.
(associative? '(1 2)) ;;=> false (associative? [1 2]) ;;=> true (associative? {1 2}) ;;=> true (associative? #{1 2}) ;;=> false (associative? "12") ;;=> false
(get {1 2} 1) ;;=> 2 (get [1 2] 0) ;;=> 1 (update-in {:x {:y [0 0 0]}} [:x :y 1] inc) ;;=> {:x {:y [0 1 0]}}
contains? works on Associative collections, where it checks if the collection contains a mapping for the given input. For maps that means it will check if a given key is there, and for vectors it returns true if the index exists.
(contains? {:a :b} :a) ;;=> true (contains? {:a :b} :c) ;;=> false (contains? [:a :b] 0) ;;=> true (contains? [:a :b] 1) ;;=> true (contains? [:a :b] 2) ;;=> false
Sets as funny maps
Sets are a bit of a special case. While sets are not associative, several of the associative operations, including contains? , will also work on sets.
Suppose that Clojure didn’t have sets, in that case you could make do by using maps, with each value identical to its key. It turns out that for many operations that is exactly how sets behave. Whenever I’m not sure of whether a set would work in a given context, I try to imagine what would happen if I used a map instead.
(def real-set #{:a :b}) (def pseudo-set {:a :a, :b :b}) (real-set :a) ;;=> :a (pseudo-set :a) ;;=> :a (get real-set :a) ;;=> :a (get pseudo-set :a) ;;=> :a (contains? real-set :a) ;;=> true (contains? pseudo-set :a) ;;=> true
Now that you know exactly how contains? works, you can attempt to make sense of its docstring.
cljs.user=> (doc contains?) ------------------------- cljs.core/contains? ([coll v]) Returns true if key is present in the given collection, otherwise returns false. Note that for numerically indexed collections like vectors and arrays, this tests if the numeric key is within the range of indexes. 'contains?' operates constant or logarithmic time; it will not perform a linear search for a value. See also 'some'. nil
So to recap, for maps contains? checks for the presence of a key, for sets it does what you would expect, since keys=values, and for vectors it checks whether the index is present.
(contains? #{:a :b} :a) ;;=> true (contains? #{:a :b} :c) ;;=> false (contains? {:a :b} :a) ;;=> true (contains? {:a :b} :b) ;;=> false (contains? [1 2] 1) ;;=> true (contains? [1 2] 2) ;;=> false
If you do want to search a collection that is “only” a seq, the common idiom is to use some + a set literal. This returns the matched value, which is truthy.
(def beatles ["John" "Paul" "Ringo" "George"]) (some #{"Ringo"} beatles) ;;=> "Ringo"
An important caveat: if the value you’re looking for could be nil or false , then the set literal won’t work, and you need a more explicit check.
(def haystack [false]) (some #{false} haystack) ;;=> nil (some #(= false %) haystack) ;;=> true
The difference between get and nth is now hopefully also clear. While get does a lookup in an associative collection, nth will find the nth element in a sequential collection. If the collection happens to also be indexed, then nth works in constant time, otherwise it will take linear time to walk the sequence.
;; Vectors: they're roughly the same (get [:a :b :c] 1) ;;=> :b (nth [:a :b :c] 1) ;;=> :b ;; Lists: only nth makes sense (get '(:a :b :c) 1) ;;=> nil (nth '(:a :b :c) 1) ;;=> :b ;; Sets: only get makes sense (get #{:a :b :c} :a) ;;=> :a (nth #{:a :b :c} 1) ;;=> ! Exception ;; Maps: only get makes sense (get {:a :b} :a) ;;=> :b (nth {:a :b} 1) ;;=> ! Exception
This diagram from a presentation by Alex Miller gives you an overview of which functions work on which abstractions.
This may seem overly complicated, but in practice most of these are pretty intuitive, so you don’t need to hang this diagram over your bed to study it every evening. Some functions “color outside the lines”, like contains? working on Associative collections, but also sets, or nth really being more of an Indexed operation, but also accepting seqs. In practice this isn’t as confusing as it may seem. The main cases that do trip people up I’ve tried to explain above.
Many thanks to Daiyi for providing feedback on an earlier draft.
Try out an interactive version of this post in Maria
🡑 Discuss/vote for this post on Reddit | {
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Just a few days after the release of KDevelop 5.2.0, we today provide a stabilization and bugfix release with version 5.2.1. This is a bugfix-only release, which introduces no new features and as such is a safe and recommended update for everyone currently using KDevelop 5.2.0.
You can find the updated Windows 32- and 64 bit installers, the Linux AppImage, as well as the source code archives on our download page.
Issues fixed:
Fix a crash which often happened when switching git branches in the background in C++ projects. This temporarily disables documentation warnings, as well as parsed documentation display in the tooltips, until the underlying issue is fixed upstream. (bug, upstream bug)
Fix no compiler being set by default on Windows, causing KDevelop to fail finding the C++ standard library. (bug)
Fix standard library paths not being passed as include paths when using clang as compiler on windows. (review)
Fix a crash happening on some systems when opening a session. (bug)
Fix include path completion not showing project-defined system includes (i.e. includes added as system includes but by your project). (bug)
Fix crash when batch-editing defines in the define editor. (bug)
Fix an assert (only happened in debug mode) and potential crash when showing problem tooltip. (bug)
Fix links in documentation browser not working in the AppImage. (bug)
Fix build failure when building in-source when translations are present. (bug)
Fix a crash when showing navigation tooltip in PHP projects in some situations. (bug)
Fix targets being duplicated when using CMake subprojects. (bug)
Fix console toolview asking to delete a temporary file interactively. (bug)
Fix a lot of AUTOMOC warnings while compiling with CMake 3.10
Fix some tool view context menus having empty entries. (bug)
Fix the progress widget in the statusbar not showing in some sessions. (review)
Adapt cache clear logic to ensure that the code model cache (~/.cache/kdevduchain) is always cleared when changing to a different KDevelop version (including patch versions). Unsuitable data in the cache has caused a range of issues in the past, including crashes. If you really need to keep the cache, you can create an (empty) file with the version suffix of the target version in the cache folder.
Fix KDevelop not starting up with the welcome page enabled (which it is by default) on systems without OpenGL support. (bug)
Fix build with Qt version 5.5.
Fix file templates not working on Windows (this fix should be in the Windows 5.2.0 installers already, but was not in the source tarballs).
Please let us know of any issues you encounter when using KDevelop on the bug tracker, in the mailing lists for development or users ([email protected], [email protected]), or in the comment section of this release announcement.
We think KDevelop 5.2.1 should work quite well now, but if more issues show up, we will provide another bugfix release shortly. | {
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Introduction
While 160 countries across the world have either abolished the Death Penalty or at least called a moratorium on its use, the clerical regime ruling Iran remains among the world’s most brutal.
The Iranian regime executes more people per capita than any other country. The total number of executions carried out in Iran stands only next to China, whose population is over 17 folds greater. According to Amnesty International, Iran accounts for over half of executions world over.
Tehran sanctions capital punishment for political dissidents as well as ethnic and religious minorities. Juvenile offenders and women are not excluded.
Iran Human Rights Monitor recorded at least 3,602 death sentences carried out during Rouhani’s tenure. This includes the executions of 34 juvenile offenders, 84 women and 86 political prisoners.
Since January 2018, at least 223 people have been executed. The executions of at least nine political prisoners and six individuals who were under 18 at the time of the crime have been confirmed. 35 executions were carried out in public. The actual numbers are likely to be much higher as most executions are carried out secretly.
The death penatly is not only a means for punishment in Iran, but a tool for perserving the rule of those in power in the face of an increasingly furious populace.
The most recent case was the Judiciary spokesman threatening to execute truckers participating in a nationwide strike to demand their rights.
In yet another case, the head of the Revolutionary Court warned that those arrested in the January 2018 protests could face the death penalty.
On the occasion of the World Day Against the Death Penalty, Iran Human Rights Monitor draws attention in this report to the common use of the death penalty in Iran often carried out before completion of the due process of law against young Iranians.
Iran HRM calls on all international human rights advocates, in particular the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, and the Working Group on Arbitrary Executions, to use their powers and authority to compel the clerical regime to stop its prevalent use of the death penalty.
Executing Child Offenders
Iran is one of only four countries known to have executed child offenders since 2013.
At least 85 individuals arrested as minors, are known to be on death row. They include, Mohammad Kalhori, Hamid Ahmadi, Abolfazl Naderi, Babak Pouladi, Mohammad Khazaian, Pouria Tabaie, Mohammad Salehi, Mehdi Bohlouli, Mohammad Reza Haddadi and Saleh Shariati.
In contrast to the international law, retrials of juvenile offenders pursuant to Article 91 of the 2013 Islamic Penal Code result in renewed death sentences following arbitrary assessments of their “maturity” at the time of the crime.
Article 6.5 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states that death sentence “shall not be imposed for crimes committed by persons below eighteen years of age.”
Iranian authorities detain death-row child offenders until they pass their 18th birthday and then they execute them.
Iran has executed at least five child offenders across the country since January 2018:
Amirhossein Pourjafar
On January 4, authorities in Karaj prison executed Amirhossein Pourjafar for the rape and murder of a 3-year-old girl when he was 16. Pourjafar, who was 18 when he was executed, told Shargh newspaper on December 30, 2017, that he was under influence of alcohol when he committed the crime. Mojtaba Farahbakhsh, Pourjafar’s lawyer, told the newspaper that Pourjafar had signs of a “conduct disorder” and had been hospitalized in a mental health center during his detention. Despite these circumstances, the authorities pushed ahead with carrying out the death penalty.
Ali Kazemi
On January 30, authorities in Bushehr prison, in southern Iran, executed Ali Kazemi for a murder he allegedly committed when he was 15. He was executed even though the authorities had promised to try to halt the execution. On the morning of January 30, prison authorities called to reassure the family that the execution had not taken place. However, at midday, Kazemi’s family found out that the execution had just been carried out.
Mahboubeh Mofidi
On January 30, in Nowshahr prison in northern Iran, authorities executed Mahboubeh Mofidi, who was married when she was 13, for the alleged murder of her husband in 2014, when she was 17. Mofidi was 20 when authorities executed her on January 30 in Nowshahr prison in Mazandaran province.
Abolfazl Chezani Sharahi
On June 27, Abolfazl Chezani Sharahi, aged 19, was executed in Qom prison in Qom province, central Iran. He was sentenced to death for a murder committed when he was aged 14 based on an official medical opinion that he was “mature” at the time of the crime.
Zeinab Sekaanvand
On October 2, 24-year-old Kurdish woman Zeinab Sekaanvand was executed in Urumieh central prison, in Iran’s West Azerbaijan province, despite being only 17 at time of alleged crime. Sekaanvand was married at 15, suffered domestic abuse and reportedly endured torture during her police interrogation.
Executing political prisoners
10 political prisoners have been executed since January 2018, most of which despite international campaigns urging reprieve.
Ramin Hossein Panahi, Zaniar Moradi and Loghman Moradi
Ramin Hossein Panahi and cousins Zaniar Moradi and Loghman Moradi were executed on Saturday, September 8.
The trials of all three men were grossly unfair. All were denied access to their lawyers and families after their arrest, and all said they were tortured into making “confessions”. They had been sentenced to death despite these massive failings in due process.
The two cousins had spent eight years on death row since confessing to a 2009 killing of the son of a Muslim cleric in Marivan, a confession that both men later said was extracted under torture.
Panahi was sentenced to death in January for allegedly drawing a weapon against Iranian security forces operating in northwestern Iran’s predominantly ethnic Kurdish region in June 2017. He confessed to taking up arms against the state, but Amnesty said family members who saw him in court believe he also was tortured into confessing because of apparent torture marks on his body.
Ramin Hossein Panahi began a hunger strike at Rajaei Shahr prison on August 26 by sewing his lips together in protest at his death sentence.
Mohammad Salas
On June 18, Iranian authorities executed Mohammad Salas convicted of killing three police officers during clashes involving members of a Sufi order, despite calls to stop his execution.
According to Amnesty International, the 51-year-old bus driver was convicted and sentenced to death in March following a “grossly unfair trial.”
Salas said he was forced under torture to make a “confession” against himself. This “confession”, taken from his hospital bed, was broadcast on state television weeks before his trial and used as the only piece of evidence to convict him. He was not allowed access to his chosen lawyer at any point before or during his trial, and his independent lawyer’s repeated demands to the authorities to allow critical evidence indicating his innocence were dismissed outright.
Death-row prisoners, horrifying numbers
Rjaie Shahr Prison
The highest number of executions count up for Rajaishahr Prison. This prison is also known as Gohardasht. It’s located in the city of Karaj approximately 20 km west of Tehran.
Around 264 inmates are held in ward 10 of this prison, of which 86 are on death row, meaning one third.
In ward 3, known as the youth ward, with around 180 inmates under the age of 25, around 80 are currently on death row condemned for “retribution in kind.” A number of these individuals were arrested under the age of 18. This accumulates to nearly half of the youth ward and one-third of ward 10 are inmates on death row.
In ward 3 nearly 120 of the 210 inmates are on death row. This is more than half.
In ward 2, known as the Dar Al Quran ward, 120 of the 160 inmates are condemned based on “retribution” charges.
Qezel Hessar Prison
Unit 2 of this prison has around 1,000 death row inmates, with numerous individuals charged with murder and others for drug offenses.
Urmia Central Prison
Inwards 1 to 4 of this jail more than 166 individuals are currently on death row. All the while this may not be the latest numbers.
Wards 1 and 2 of this prison, specified for mentally disturbed inmates, eight individuals are on death row. Ward 12 is also home to three death row inmates.
The so-called youth ward houses six individuals condemned to execution.
Ward 15, known as the drug offenses ward, six individuals are known to be on death row.
Zahedan Central Prison
According to the latest list of names rounded up in March, 145 inmates are on death row. Some of which have been held in the horrendous conditions of this jail for years awaiting their execution. Drug criminals and a number of political prisoners are seen among the death row inmates.
24 individuals in ward 4 of this prison are on death row, mostly for drug-related charges, murders or affiliation to political groups.
Wards 1 and 3 of this prison houses another 21 death row inmates.
Dastgerd Prison of Isfahan
This prison has around 20 death row inmates, charged with murder and drug offenses.
Death-row prisoners’ conditions
The 17th World Day Against the Death Penalty aims at raising awareness on the inhumane living conditions of people sentenced to death.
Death row prisoners in Iran linger in catastrophic conditions from solitary confinement to the medieval tortures inflicted on them. The living conditions tend to dehumanize death-row prisoners and take away their dignity.
In many cases where people were sentenced to death or executed, the proceedings did not meet international standards of the due process of law. This includes the extraction of “confessions” through torture or other ill-treatment.
The tortures some death row prisoners were reportedly subjected to follow:
Completely stripping the prisoners and pouring boiling hot water on them; Pushing needles into their genitals; Hanging prisoners upside down from their feet; Hanging prisoners by their wrists; Pulling out the prisoners’ nails; Leaving the prisoners in absolute darkness for about forty days. Some prisoners lose part of their eyesight; Depriving prisoners of bathing for two months; Restricting prisoners’ use of restroom to only once in every 24 hours; Giving prisoners food rations the size of the palm of a hand; Forcing prisoners to eat in the same unwashed plate for three months; Flogging prisoners while eating their food.
Many spend prolonged periods on death row, sometimes for more than a decade. On numerous occasions, prisoners are sent to the gallows, then returned to the cell. Sometimes, they inform prisoners of scheduled hanging but postpone its implementation. In this way, death-row prisoners have to endure additional pain and suffering.
Sometimes, the families are not informed of the execution of their loved ones adequately in advance and not given the chance to say goodbye.
A commonplace in many Iranian prisons is to force the families of execution victims to pay for the noose used to hang their loved ones, or the bullet used to shoot them. The victim’s body is not delivered to the family until the money is paid.
2018 reports included cases of authorities refusing to deliver the body of execution victims to their families or burying them without the families’ permission.
Download the names and identifications of the victims of executions in 2018: | {
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Criminal charges were filed Tuesday against a transient accused of grabbing and harassing a group of underage girls on the Laguna Beach trolley.
Kyle Albert Winton, a 39-year-old probationer, was charged with one felony count each of criminal threats and attempting to prevent a witness from reporting to authorities, as well as six counts of child annoyance and single counts of false imprisonment and battery, all misdemeanors.
The criminal complaint lists six minor girls as victims.
Police got a report at 1:37 p.m. Friday of a suspect trying to touch the girls on the trolley, said Laguna Beach police Sgt. Jim Cota.
When the trolley stopped at Coast Highway and Nyes, where the girls tried to exit, Winton grabbed one of them by the hair and yanked it, Cota alleged. Winton also allegedly blocked another girl from reaching the exit at the front of the trolley, prompting her to turn around and try to use the back exit, Cota said.
Winton was put on three years of formal probation after pleading guilty July 29 to a felony count of criminal threats and a misdemeanor count of resisting arrest. He was sentenced to 36 days in jail, or time already served since his arrest. | {
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Ministrul Agriculturii, Petre Daea, susține că autoritățile sanitar-veterinare și cele locale vor lua măsuri astfel încât să nu fie afectată comercializarea cărnii de miel, deoarece ”fiecare om dorește să sacrifice un miel și să mănânce o bucată de carne de miel sau o ciorbă”.
Întrebat, joi, de presă, la târgul Agraria din comuna Jucu, județul Cluj, în ce condiții se vor sacrifica mieii de Paște câtă vreme sunt zone afectate de pesta porcină, Petre Daea a spus că fermierii crescători de miei caută în această perioadă a Sărbătorilor Pascale să își valorifice produsele.
„Încă este acest necaz în țară, care a avut un vârf foarte ridicat, și mai sunt în țară zone care sunt sub restricție. Direcțiile sanitar-veterinare și cele agricole, în înțelegere deplină cu prefecturile și primarii, pot gestiona într-o liniște deplină acest moment formidabil pentru țară. Fiecare om dorește să sacrifice un miel, fiecare om vrea să mănânce o bucată de carne de miel sau o ciorbă, așa cum este tradiția și cum există acest sentiment al respectului față de munca oamenilor, știindu-se că ei acum caută valorificare. Dacă nici acum nu vând mieii, atunci când, dacă nu la Paști. De aceea, măsurile sunt, pentru fiecare loc în parte, pentru fiecare direcție sanitar-veterinară în parte, să se pună de acord cu primăriile pentru a stabili locurilor de comercializare a animalelor respective, pentru a da liniște acestui moment”, a spus Daea, citat de Mediafax.
Pe de altă parte, Petre Daea a hrănit mai multe oi aflate într-un țarc, cărora le-a dat boabe de porumb, și a degustat brânzeturi și țuică. „Sunt produse excepționale, de foarte bună calitate, le-a aflat și lumea, pentru că, din datele pe care le avem, avem o altă situație față de anul trecut. Consumul de produse românești a crescut și va crește, atât pe piața internă cât și pe cea externă, pentru că sunt cunoscute și recunoscute”, a spus Daea.
Ministrul Agriculturii a participat, joi, alături de ambasadorul Israelului, David Saranga, la deschiderea celei de-a 25-a ediții a târgului Agraria din comuna Jucu, județul Cluj, unde a vizitat standuri și a discutat cu fermierii. | {
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This coming December, Netflix will release the first season of their upcoming fantasy series The Witcher, but this story has existed long before Henry Cavill was cast in the role of Geralt. Written by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, the saga has been adapted into a movie, a television show and a trilogy of games before becoming Netflix’s most anticipated new original series. It is no surprise, then, that the show’s filming in The Witcher‘s homeland this April was an important milestone for the creatives behind the show.
Polish site naekranie.pl was on location at Ogrodzieniec Castle during the filming of a sequence which will open the season one finale (hint: it involves many of the series most famous mages). We’ve translated the highlights below!
Filming in Poland lasted exactly two days, and the sequence was later continued in Hungary at Egri var masolata. Even so, The Witcher‘s two days in Poland proved quite eventful. We’ll begin with a snippet from the article, just to set the scene.
Ogrodzieniec Castle, the location of The Witcher’s filming in Poland
Imagine this: you are standing near a huge medieval castle surrounded by clouds of smoke, creating the impression of artificially created fog. For this, long hoses were used, through which the smoke was pumped, and gradually and regularly released through small holes. On the walls, there were additional devices that … scared me so many times that I was looking for the iconic dragon from the Polish Witcher! The filmmakers turned them on suddenly, and the roar that came out of them resembled a dragon or another creature.
When this smoke was inflated quite a lot, the aura around the castle was indeed disturbing. Especially that next to it was an old tree like from a fantasy production, so when you saw a character from afar, it unclear whether it was a human or a magical being. This only shows how, with simple means, the whole atmosphere was built on the set, so that the actors could empathize with the roles. No green screens could be seen at the castle itself, so the creators relied on the real scenery that Ogrodzieniec provided them. A green screen was used a bit later for outdoor scenes in a nearby forest next to huge boulders that look like they were taken out of the fantasy world.
“We care about balance,” said Executive Producer Tomek Bagiński on location. “We want to shoot the camera as much as possible, but of course there are moments that either cannot be done on set, or would be absurdly complicated and expensive, then we use the computer. We use computer effects where we need to, so we usually try to create it organically on the set. This approach helps actors and the whole crew. I know that a computer is a phenomenal tool for a filmmaker, it helps a lot. Visual effects that can be created are impossible to achieve by any other methods, but they are not always worth creating.”
The tree and rocks mentioned above
A leaked video of the filming on the walls of Ogrodzieniec
Several scenes were shot in Ogrodzieniec that day. The first took place inside the castle and atop the castle walls. This is a scene that was famously leaked by a Polish YouTuber, featuring Mahesh Jadu‘s enigmatic mage Vilgefortz of Roggeveen leading a group of mages across the battlements. One of these mages is the series’ star Anya Chalotra, The Witcher‘s Yennefer of Vengerberg. Joining her are Anna Shaffer who plays Triss, MyAnna Buring who plays Tissaia and many more. The scene can be glimpsed in the above video.
Next is a sequence featuring Triss and Tissaia:
Anna Shaffer (Triss Merigold) and Anya Chalotra (Yennefer) were filming on the set that day. The first one looks amazing up close. The color of her hair that matched the dress showed that it was really the Triss that one would expect. I was surprised all the more that in the first trailer the scene involving her did not emphasize her characteristic hair color, because she definitely stood out on the set.
At the end of the day, we watched the scene under the castle with Triss and the character known as Tissaia (MyAnna Buring). Both were on a small hill, where Triss knelt on the ground and probably cried (the actress wiped her eyes). Undoubtedly, it was quite an emotional moment and extremely demanding. It was already evening, so the temperature dropped significantly. The heroines had to act in their dresses throughout their scenes (when not filming they were wearing jackets). Imagine a dress made of thin material in which you have to derive emotions, although it is maybe 5 degrees Celsius outside. And even this seemingly simple scene was filmed by the crew for several minutes, creating frames from different perspectives, ending with close-ups.
The scene featuring Triss and Tissaia
Anna Shaffer (Triss) and Mahesh Jadu (Vigefortz) at Ogrodzieniec
The last scene on that day was a procession through the forest, led by the character Vilgefortz of Roggeveen (Mahesh Jadu) and Yennefer. Again, a seemingly simple scene – walking through the forest. The first two characters are talking [and in time they must stand]. Even such a thing requires corrections, the aforementioned smoke and all the details are to be in line with the creators’ vision. It was a team’s meticulous demonstration repeating this sequence several times for the expected effect. This pace had to be slowed down and the actors had to position themselves a little differently. In fact, the fixes on the later takes were nuances, but important, because the devil is in the details.
Though that completes the filming report, the journalists were able to speak more with Bagiński. When the producer was asked about his decision not to direct an episode for season one, this is what he had to say: “I had a lot of responsibilities during the first season. I was one of the main producers with knowledge of the Polish context. The decision not to direct was made together with Lauren, because it was clear early on that I should be one of those people who look at the whole season, not at two episodes or one episode.”
Bagiński explains that each director was in charge of a specific part of the story. “The works are divided into blocks, and they have different dates, so as a director you cannot grasp the whole. However, I have a role in the whole story, the characters and building this world. That’s why we decided that, for the first season, the role of the director is not yet for me. I admit that after spending half a year on the set of The Witcher, I know much better what to [do]. There are no such productions in Poland.”
Regarding the filming in Poland, Bagiński said fans would recognize the castle easily in the show. Moreover, he teased the sequence itself. The article notes: the scene is supposed to be spectacular, and in the center are mages responding to a threat. Readers of Redanian Intelligence know the one (click the link below for the details, but expect spoilers).
RELATED ARTICLE: The Witcher’s Season Finale Will Adapt The Battle Of Sodden: Here’s What We Know
Anya Chalotra’s Yennefer
Hissrich also told of her relationship with The Witcher‘s author, who worked as a consultant on the show. “I love Andrzej Sapkowski. We have a very good relationship. Recently, he visited the Witcher set. It was exciting for me and I think for him too. We’ve been talking since I started working on the show. I think it must be difficult for him as a writer, that something he created is reshaped by someone else.”
“Despite our constant consultation, I am sure that when he arrived on the set, he wondered what he would see. He had tears in his eyes and it was amazing. I think that he was moved by how much passion we put into this project. It’s not about budget or momentum, but about how the whole team feels it. He spent the whole day with us – he met the actors, talked to the directors and heads of individual departments. Of course, he also met Henry. He watched us shoot one of the biggest stunt scenes this season with Geralt. Henry plays his stunt scenes himself. It was amazing that Andrzej could watch it. Even Henry himself was stunned. He came up to Andrzej, wiped the artificial blood off his face and shook his hand. They got along well.”
In another report from Small Screen Magazine, Hissrich addressed her relationships with the series’ passionate fanbase. “There were moments when interacting with fans was a bit overwhelming. But in the best way possible. In my line of work, there is nothing better than writing something that’s so exciting to so many people. But you also need to know that many of those people won’t be writing ‘Great job! I support what you’re doing!’ but the exact opposite. It’s an element of fan involvement. I’m glad that on Twitter I got to talk to fans on both sides, even those who harshly disagree with our vision.”
The first season will mainly focus on The Witcher‘s short stories, collected in the books The Last Wish and The Sword of Destiny. “The short stories are crucial in building this world and in introducing the characters.” But Hissrich promises the series will flesh out backstories that were only mentioned in the books. One example is Yennefer’s origin story. “I made that a challenge. In the show we tried to show events that in the books were only someone’s memories.”
Freya Allan as Ciri
Next, the journalists met with Anya Chalotra and Freya Allan, who portray Yennefer and Ciri. As it was one of their first interviews for the show, the actresses were a bit nervous. When they were asked if they were prepared for the show’s popularity, Chalotra said: “I don’t think you can be prepared for this.” Allan then said: “At least we go through this together.”
Despite being nervous, Allan was also excited to share her experience. “Playing Ciri comes naturally to me, which showed during the casting process. That’s why I really wanted this role. Both Anya and I are perfectionists, so no scene seems easy. But there is something in Ciri that I can immediately relate to.”
Chalotra also described her character: “She’s fearless, intelligent and stubborn. She can’t be rattled, and she emits this almost magnetic energy.” When the journalist attempted to sneak-in a question about the Djinn from The Last Wish, Chalotra refused to provide spoilers. “Good question, but you’ll have to wait and see.”
The Witcher releases on Netflix December 20.
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Recent commercial satellite imagery indicates that North Korea has finished work on the secondary cooling system for the 5 MWe reactor. It is unclear whether the detection of water flowing from the pump house indicates that the system is being tested or that the reactor is beginning operations.[1]
Satellite imagery also indicates that operational testing of the experimental light water reactor’s (ELWR) secondary cooling system is ongoing and may have begun as early as late March 2018. Thermal infrared (TIR) imagery confirms that despite the testing, the reactor itself was not yet operational as of June 14. Testing of these systems is likely standard procedure to ensure the safe and efficient use of the reactors if they resume/start operations.
In addition to two previously identified non-industrial, blue-roofed buildings, two additional structures have been recently built, with one now in each of the four major operational areas of Yongbyon. Their purpose remains unclear, although one possibility is for use by VIP visitors, either senior North Korean staff or officials, or foreigners.
Several other previously noted infrastructure modifications projects now appear to have either been completed or are nearly complete.
Probable Water Outfall Detected From the New 5 MWe Reactor Pump House
Although modifications to the 5 MWe plutonium production reactor’s cooling system begun in March 2018 appeared essentially complete by June 21, the previously identified “probable weir” was removed by June 30, and new dredging was underway near the water channel leading between the new pump house and the river. There was also no longer any visible sign of cooling water discharge from the outfall pipe. (Figure 1)
Figure 1. Modifications to the 5 MWe reactor’s secondary cooling system continued between June 21 and 30.
Satellite imagery from June 30 appears to show a subtle mixing/eddy interface between water from the channel as it curves around the embankment into the southerly flowing Kuryong River. (Figure 2) [Slide 3] This would suggest that the pump house most likely serves as a cooling water outfall, not an intake, to replace the visible outfall pipe flow that previously provided a more obvious signature of reactor operations. Whether that means the reactor is now operating remains unclear given the lack of corroborative evidence. No thermal infrared imagery of the reactor has been available since the apparent flow was detected. Moreover, there is no evidence of visible steam venting from the generator building last noted in February.
Figure 2. Water appears to be mixing as it curves around the embankment toward the Kuryong River.
The ELWR’s Cooling Water System May Have Begun At Least Trial Operations in Late March 2018
In previous reporting, the specific role of the ELWR’s pump house, whether it was for an intake or outfall, was unclear. However, evidence that the similarly appearing pump house at the 5 MWe is more likely a secondary cooling water outfall would suggest the same role for the ELWR’s pump house.
Satellite imagery indicates water ripples along the length of the walled river embankment from the pump house to the sluiceway waterfall, which suggests continuous flow into the river. (Figure 3) In previous reporting, satellite imagery from March 20 showed this area blocked by sandbars, but ten days later the bars had been cleared.[2] That suggested the sandbars could have been washed away by an initial outfall of cooling water from the reactor’s cooling water system.
Figure 3. Water ripples can be seen from the ELWR pump house to the sluiceway waterfall.
It appears that operational testing of the ELWR secondary cooling system is ongoing. This is confirmed by TIR imagery showing that the reactor itself was not operational as of June 14. (Figure 4) It remains unclear whether that means ELWR operations had begun or simply that testing and evaluation of the secondary cooling system were underway.
Figure 4. No significant heat signature at the ELWR as of June 14.
Two Additional Non-Industrial Buildings Completed: Purpose Still Unknown
Satellite imagery shows that two new bluish-roofed buildings have been constructed similar to the two previously identified near the ELWR and the Radiochemical Laboratory. The buildings are now located in four operationally distinct areas at Yongbyon. (Figure 5) The first—completed in August 2017 at the former Fuel Fabrication Area that now houses the Uranium Enrichment Plant and the Radioisotope Production Facility—may have been the model for the three other similar buildings constructed more recently. The three additional structures were built: 1) at the Laboratory Research Area between May 6 and June 21, 2018; 2) in the Reactor Power Area between May 6 and June 21, 2018; and 3) near the Radiochemical Laboratory between May 6 and June 21, 2018. Satellite imagery from early May 2018 showed that the interior room layouts of two of the buildings are identical as well with four different sized rooms. (Figure 6)
Figure 5. Blue-roofed buildings are now located in four operationally distinct areas at Yongbyon.
Figure 6. Closeup of the buildings’ “H”-shaped interior layout.
Although the purpose of these four bluish-roofed buildings is currently unknown, one possibility is that they could be intended for hosting high-level staff or VIP visitors.[3]
No Activity at Other Key Facilities
No significant change has been noted at the Radiochemical Laboratory or associated Thermal Plant, the Uranium Enrichment Plant or the Radioisotope Production Facility where infrastructure improvements described in our last update now appear complete. | {
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Amitabh Mathur, a 1977-batch IPS officer who till a year ago headed the Aviation Research Centre (ARC), has now been appointed as an advisor in the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to handle Tibetan affairs.
The appointment follows a trend of several former intelligence chiefs being given key assignment by the NDA government after retirement.
Officials said that while the notification mentions that Mathur would be a consultant/advisor on the Northeast, he will exclusively act as an interlocutor on Tibet, which remains a major stumbling block for Indo-China relations.
Mathur retired as head of the ARC — the aviation wing of the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) — and held the post of a Special Secretary, the same rank he will have in his new assignment. He was at one point a contender for the post of R&AW chief. Even while in the R&AW, he was keenly involved in Tibetan affairs.
The MHA already has an adviser on left-wing extremism and Naxal affairs in K Vijay Kumar, the former chief of the CRPF. That appointment was made by the UPA government.
Earlier, the former chiefs of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the R&AW were rehabilitated by the NDA government. Asif Ibrahim, the ex-IB chief, was appointed special envoy on counter-terrorism, while former R&AW chief Alok Joshi was made head of the National Technical Research Organisation, the country’s technical intelligence unit.
📣 The Indian Express is now on Telegram. Click here to join our channel (@indianexpress) and stay updated with the latest headlines
For all the latest India News, download Indian Express App. | {
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Les sénateurs ont imposé mardi le délit de consultation habituelle de sites faisant l'apologie du terrorisme, contre l'avis du gouvernement qui estimait que la lecture seule ne pouvait pas être un délit pénal.
Les sénateurs ont adopté mardi un article 10 à la proposition de loi antiterrorisme présentée par plusieurs sénateurs, qui vise à sanctionner pénalement le fait de consulter régulièrement des sites réputés d’apologie du terrorisme, peu importe l’adhésion ou non aux thèses exprimées. Il s’agissait d’une proposition devenue une obsession de Nicolas Sarkozy, malgré sa conformité tout à fait douteuse aux engagements internationaux de la France en matière de droits de l’homme, et en particulier de liberté d’expression et de communication — qui comprend le droit d’accéder à des informations.
« Sur le fond, il est évident que depuis des années, le législateur réfléchit à la manière d’être efficace par rapport à ce que l’on constate sur Internet. Mais il me semble que depuis 2012, le législateur a fait tout ce qu’il pouvait faire dans ce domaine », a estimé en séance le nouveau ministre de la Justice, Jean-Jacques Urvoas. « Ce qui est ici proposé, de créer un délit habituel de visite… ça ne peut pas être le seul fondement à une incrimination », a-t-il ajouté, en vain.
Opposition du gouvernement
Urvoas reprenait ainsi la doctrine d’ores et déjà établie par Bernard Cazeneuve, mais le Sénat a estimé qu’il fallait aller plus loin que la loi actuelle. La consultation de sites internet de sites terroristes est déjà une infraction prévue dans le code pénal, mais il ne s’agit pas encore d’une infraction autonome. Elle ne peut être condamnée que si elle est fait en lien avec un projet terroriste, ce qui n’est pas le cas du simple citoyen qui se contente de s’informer sur des sites édités par un ennemi, ou supposé tel. Avec l’article 10 tel qu’adopté, la seule lecture de sites internet deviendrait un délit en soi, selon le contenu de ces sites.
Une police de ce que l’on a le droit de regarder
« On entre dans une police de ce que l’on a le droit de regarder, et ce que l’on a pas le droit de regarder », s’est indigné le sénateur Jean-Louis Masson. « Tant qu’on est chez nous et qu’on regarde chez soi, je ne vois pas pourquoi on irait y mettre du pénal ».
L’article 10 prévoit par ailleurs de condamner de 5 ans de prison le fait de créer des sites miroirs de sites internet bloqués. « Il est évident que le blocage judiciaire est la solution qu’il faut espérer voir se développer. On sait que ça a un effet d’éteindre le site », s’est félicité sur ce point M. Urvoas.
Plus tôt, le ministre avait également échoué à faire échec aux chevaux de Troie que pourraient imposer les juges d’instruction. | {
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It’s apple season in Kashmir, but in orchards across the fertile Himalayan valley, unpicked fruit rots on the branches. Markets lack their usual bustle, most shops are open for only a few hours each morning, and schools and colleges are largely empty of students.
The slowdown reflects both the firm grip of the Indian government on the Muslim-majority state, and the seemingly spontaneous reaction of the Kashmiri people to it. A tweet posted on the account of Mehbooba Mufti, the state’s former Chief Minister who has been detained for more than two months, read: “Kashmiris have been resolute about a civil curfew as a mark of protest.”
It was Aug. 5 that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government said it would scrap the semi-autonomous status that the state of Jammu and Kashmir had held under India’s constitution for seven decades. For the next 72 days, the Kashmir Valley and parts of Jammu endured a communications blackout, with landlines, cell phones and the Internet suspended. “Nine to 10 million people were pushed behind an iron wall. We’d never seen anything like this,” says Anuradha Bhasin, the executive editor of the Kashmir Times, citing previous Internet blackouts that still left phone services intact. “There was an absolute silence.” Already one of the world’s most militarized regions, the Valley was flooded with tens of thousands of Indian troops.
If the heavy-handed measures of the curfew were intended to dampen the threat of violence, they succeeded—at least for a time. But now that India has begun lifting restrictions on the Valley, Kashmiris are bracing themselves for what happens once the clampdown is over. In a Sept. 29 column, former Indian Supreme Court Judge Markandey Katju wrote that Kashmir would become India’s Vietnam War, a nightmare with “body bags” returning in large numbers. “Remove the restrictions, and popular protests will engulf the whole Valley. Continue them, and the pot will boil until it explodes.”
The problems in Kashmir have been shaped by colonial history, religious tensions and nationalism. During the Partition of British India in 1947, the leader of Jammu and Kashmir pushed for independence rather than choosing to join Muslim-majority Pakistan or Hindu-majority India. When Pakistan tried to take the territory anyway, Kashmir’s leader asked for help from India, which agreed—on the condition that Kashmir accede to India. What followed was the first of two wars that Pakistan and Hindu-majority India fought over Kashmir. Today, both of the nuclear-armed countries claim the state as a whole; India controls roughly half the land, Pakistan controls less than a third and China the rest.
In the past three decades, Pakistan has also partially backed and funded insurgents in Kashmir, where the Indian government has responded with troops and often brutal tactics. A U.N. report in July raised concerns about serious abuses by Indian forces, including extrajudicial killings, torture and pellet-gun blindings. New Delhi dismissed the report as a “false and motivated narrative.”
Repealing Article 370 of the Indian constitution—which gave Kashmir autonomy in all areas except foreign affairs, defense and communications-—was a long-standing goal of Modi’s party, which sees India as a Hindu nation and long opposed rules preventing outsiders from buying land in Kashmir. Stripping the special status has seemed to rouse the party base. “For 70 years, Article 370 was proving to be an impediment in the way of the spirit of ‘one country, one constitution,’” Modi said to cheers during a rally in Maharashtra ahead of local Oct. 21 elections.
Read more: India has taken Kashmir, but winning the hearts and minds of Kashmiris will be harder
To Pakistan, the situation looks rather different. “The red line has been crossed on Aug. 5,” says Masood Khan, president of Azad (Free) Kashmir, one of two territories in Kashmir administered by Pakistan. A career diplomat who worked in Washington and Geneva as part of Pakistan’s permanent mission to the U.N., Khan grew up in Azad Kashmir and describes himself as a “son of the soil.” On a recent trip to Washington D.C., he urged the international community to intervene and start talks with India. “We’re in a state of war,” he told TIME.
But while the rhetoric on both sides remains hostile, Pakistan can ill afford a full-scale conflict, analysts say. On Oct. 18, the Financial Action Task Force, the global terrorism finance watchdog, ruled Pakistan would stay on its “greylist”until February 2020 as it was doing too little to tackle its funding of violent extremism. Pakistan was also bailed out by the IMF this summer for the 13th time in 30 years, inflation is predicted to surge, and the World Bank recently cut its economic growth forecast. “There’s a realization that without an economy, Pakistan is not going to have a military,” says Gareth Price, senior research fellow at the London think tank Chatham House.
A greater security risk seems to be the anger and resentment simmering within the Valley. Nearly 4,000 people, including politicians, activists, journalists, have been arrested, according to a Sept. 6 government report seen by Reuters, and thousands remain in custody. On Sept. 24, the National Federation of Indian Women highlighted claims that 13,000 boys had been picked up and detained, some for up to 45 days. “These incidents instill a fear that goes very deep,” Bhasin says. “Kashmir is not a monolith; there will be a creative response, a peaceful response—and a violent response.”
A rise in homegrown terrorism in the Valley now seems almost inevitable, Khan suggests. “There’s lots of anger there. It is sharp and fierce,” he says. “But when people are defending their homes against Indian attacks, we don’t call it militancy. We would call them freedom fighters.”
Violence has already risen as India dismantles the “iron wall” in Kashmir. Cell phone services were restored on Oct. 14 (the Internet is still restricted), but peaceful protesters are still being arrested. On Oct. 16, five were killed: two civilians in attacks by suspected militants, and three alleged rebels, by Indian forces. Four days later, shelling on both sides of the boundary between India-adminstered Kashmir and Pakistan-administered Kashmir led to the deaths of at least nine soldiers and civilians.
Gh Mohiuddin Mir, 65, who worries that if the Kashmir crisis is not resolved by harvest time he will be financially devastated, at his apple farm in Budgam, India, on Sept. 19, 2019. Atul Loke—The New York Times/Redux
The repeal of Article 370 “opens the door to rejuvenate a moribund economy,” the Indian ambassador to the U.S. wrote in a September New York Times column. But the clampdown has hit hard; the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry estimates it shutdown has already cost the region over $1.4 billion. Although tourists are now allowed in, the precarious security situation means the tourism and handicrafts sectors are unlikely to bounce back fast. Classes have not resumed at many schools and colleges. “We are helpless. I want to teach, but I can’t teach,” says a 46-year-old professor, who asked for anonymity out of safety concerns. “For some, it feels criminal to go to school and study because there’s so much anger and resentment.”
For journalists, the shutdown was particularly difficult. “We were forced to work in ways that took us back 50 years; we were working like stenographers,” Bhasin says. “The government set up a media facilitation center that was open for a few hours a day. There was one mobile phone and three computers available for over 100 journalists to operate.” Bhasin filed a petition to the Supreme Court on Aug. 10 to immediately relax the “virtual blackout” on communications and to ease the restrictions of the free movement of journalists. “The case is still pending,” she tells TIME more than 10 weeks later, “It has been bumped from one hearing to another. This was an issue that required immediate attention.”
Read more: The Indian government insists all is well in Kashmir. But as the communications shutdown continues, its citizens are struggling to reach the outside world
And Kashmir’s $1.5 billion apple trade, which employs more than 3 million people, suffered during the blackout, which cut traders off from buyers. Now, militants are targeting apple sellers, pickers and drivers; within three days in October, two people were shot and another injured in two separate insurgent attacks on the apple trade.
Yet the violence in the Valley hardly represents a significant escalation, says Ajai Sahni, executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi. “Kashmir has been a theater of terrorism for over 30 years, and the idea that the government’s recent moves were going to bring violence to an abrupt and sustainable end was visibly absurd,” he says. Ultimately a long-term political solution is needed, he adds, one that allows the Kashmiri people to address their grievances.
On Oct. 11, the state government took out a full-page ad on the front page of the newspaper, Greater Kashmir. “CLOSED SHOPS, NO PUBLIC TRANSPORT? WHO BENEFITS? Are we going to succumb to militants? Think!!!” it pleaded. But most Kashmiris are not returning to business as usual, either too afraid of violence or determined to disobey New Delhi. “There’s a collective sense of fear, humiliation, hurt and anger,” Bhasin says. “The natural fallout is that this will erupt in different forms. The only question is when.”
—With reporting by Sanya Mansoor/New York
Write to Naina Bajekal at [email protected]. | {
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pete buttigieg
I remember in history class, must have been a junior, it was during the impeachment process of President Clinton or all the scandal, everything that was going on. And I remember the teacher was just kind of riffing on this, and he said, you know, would anybody here ever want to be president or want to run for office, seeing what a mess and what an ugly place Washington was? And I just — maybe involuntarily, my hand went up. And from then on, it became that the running joke of the class that I’d wind up running for president. And then by the time I got to college, they had this Institute of Politics at Harvard, and every day, there’d be a different speaker who would come through. And I remember when I was there as a freshman, people like Donna Brazile who had just come off managing the Gore campaign and Rick Davis, who had done the same thing for McCain. And the former president of Ecuador, he’d been deposed in a coup. You’d just kind of hang around and watch them and see what they were like. The biggest realization was that they’re just people. These people who were shaping the world, people I was seeing on TV were obviously very impressive people, but they were just people. I think it changed my awareness of the fact that, on some level, I could be part of that world, too. But in a very simple sense, especially coming from Indiana, it seemed that it was a choice. You could be in elected office, or you could be an out gay person, not both, at least not where I was from. From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”
archived recording (cory booker) I am running. archived recording (amy klobuchar) I announce my candidacy — archived recording (elizabeth warren) — for President of the United States of America.
michael barbaro
Part one in our series on the pivotal moments in the lives of the top four Democratic candidates for president.
archived recording (joe biden) I’m running for president. archived recording (pete buttigieg) And I’m running for president. archived recording (kamala harris) President of the United States. archived recording (bernie sanders) President of the United States.
michael barbaro
Today —
archived recording (pete buttigieg) I’m a proud son of South Bend, Indiana, and I am running for President of the United States.
michael barbaro
Pete Buttigieg. It’s Friday, November 22. So Jeremy Peters, you cover politics for The Times, and you’ve been closely tracking Mayor Buttigieg. And in order to better understand the Democratic field of presidential candidates, we’re trying to figure out the most revealing moments in their lives. So when it comes to Pete Buttigieg, what moment should we focus on?
jeremy peters
Well, Mayor Pete has always been a candidate for whom his story, his biography is very central to his appeal to voters, and he’s got a great story to tell. He’s been elected mayor of this medium-sized town in Indiana before turning 30. He has an Ivy League pedigree. He’s been a Rhodes Scholar. He’s worked at a prestigious consulting firm. He’s gone off to Afghanistan as part of the Navy Reserves. So he has all of these components that you kind of think if you’re a voter, wow, he really stands out. There’s something unique about this guy. But at the same time, for most of his adult life, he had this nagging secret, the secret that he couldn’t confront because he thought that it would mean the end to this political career that he had spent so much time perfecting, basically since he went away to college and decided, hey, you know, I can run for president. And he doesn’t see how it’s possible for the politician with the perfect background, the perfect resume to also be open about their sexuality, in his case. So how he reconciles this inner turmoil with his very public ambition I think is a defining moment in his life, if not the defining moment.
michael barbaro
All right. Welcome to the studio.
pete buttigieg
Thank you.
michael barbaro
You’re going to sit there.
pete buttigieg
All right.
jeremy peters
So that story begins in 1982 in South Bend, Indiana where Peter Buttigieg was born.
michael barbaro
Mayor, tell me about the kind of kid that you were, growing up in Indiana?
pete buttigieg
Well, I think I was, safe to say, a little on the nerdy side. I lived in a neighborhood kind of in the middle of South Bend, close to a park where you would have as much as possible what you’d call a prototypical Midwestern kid’s upbringing, you know, playing in the park with friends, a lot of time in the house. I was really interested in baseball cards, but I was more interested in categorizing them than I was in baseball, I think. I loved science and science fiction. I loved reading, plus I was an only child. So I think it’s safe to say I had a lot of interior life going on in a fairly quiet house where it was a dog and my parents, who were both academics, and me.
michael barbaro
What was your introduction to even the idea of politics?
pete buttigieg
Politics was always in the air in our house just because my parents were very politically passionate. They really cared about what was happening. I can remember the Democratic Convention. It must have been 1988.
archived recording NBC News continues its coverage of America’s convention.
pete buttigieg
I would’ve been six years old and my parents explaining what a convention was. I remember Jesse Jackson giving a speech.
archived recording (jesse jackson) When I look out at this convention, I see the face of America — red, yellow, brown, black, and white. We are all precious in God’s sight, the real rainbow coalition.
pete buttigieg
And I remember my parents thinking it was important to watch the Republican Convention, too. I mean, you would stop — even though I don’t it ever crossed their mind to ever vote for a Republican.
archived recording Now let’s go down to the podium. Here is George Herbert Walker Bush addressing his convention.
pete buttigieg
Everything in the house would kind of stop when it was time to watch what was playing out.
archived recording Thank you.
michael barbaro
At what moment in this early phase of your life did you go from just watching this and maybe finding it very fascinating to feeling really drawn to it?
pete buttigieg
Well, when I got to college, it felt like the Republicans and the Democrats, at the time, it’s crazy to think about now, polarized as we are. But what it felt like when I showed up as a freshman on campus was that the two parties were converging and not necessarily in a good place, that you had this kind of center-right and center-left, both of them very committed to growth in business, but it seemed not very committed at all to some of the questions of how we take care of vulnerable people around the country. And I think there’s a moment for any kind of well-spoken or intelligent young person watching the news when you see a senator or a candidate saying something or doing something and you think, well, that’s not right. I could do that. I could do it different. Now, you might be wrong. They might be way more sophisticated than you are, and you can’t see it. Or you might be right, and it might well be the case that what they’re saying is just not right. But I certainly had that feeling reinforced when I saw these figures come to campus, some of whom were extremely impressive, but none of whom seemed like they were on a different plane of existence. They were just people.
michael barbaro
So at this point, a year or two into Harvard, have you made up your mind that you were probably going to find a way to have a career in politics?
pete buttigieg
I knew I wanted a career that involved policy. I don’t think I’d figured out for sure that that meant running. Plus, you know, when I thought about it, even well before I was coming to terms with the fact that I was gay, I knew that I had no political connections at home. I had an unpronounceable name, and I was a Democrat who lived in Indiana. So it was not obvious that I could overcome some of the obstacles toward running. But I think it’s safe to say by the time I graduated, I had some sense that I could see myself doing it.
michael barbaro
Well, I want to talk to you about that realization of your sexuality in particular. Obviously, your candidacy is historic in a couple of different ways, and among those is the fact you’re the first major party presidential candidate who is openly gay. And so I want to ask you about that part of your identity. When did you sense that you were gay? When did that realization start to dawn on you?
pete buttigieg
I think it depends what you mean by realization, right? There are things you could point to going way back, certainly a fascination I had with a classmate when I was about 12 that, in hindsight, is very obviously a crush. But I was not willing to think of it that way, although some part of me must have — I mean, I wasn’t stupid either, right? So you have this kind of awareness that was definitely there by the time I was hitting middle school. But taking a word like gay and applying it to myself, I was still years away from being able to do that, even in my own mind.
michael barbaro
Well, what did you do with those feelings?
pete buttigieg
I guess I packed them up, yeah.
michael barbaro
Packed them up —
pete buttigieg
Not much would be the best answer.
michael barbaro
Pack them up and put them where?
pete buttigieg
I don’t know. I don’t know how these things work, even in your own mind. I just didn’t explore them. That’s for sure. First of all, there were not a lot of out gay people that I knew as such growing up. I mean, in high school, it was exactly zero. There was just no sense of gay life or a gay community. And when I got to college, that’s when the kind of internal battle was starting to heat up.
michael barbaro
Why?
pete buttigieg
I think because you just can’t escape it. I mean, my god, you’re in college, right? I mean, any feelings you have, especially in the romantic department, are going to start asserting themselves even more fiercely than they have when you get to college. For a lot of people, it’s a big part of what you spend college on.
michael barbaro
Right. So how did you deal with it?
pete buttigieg
Same way I dealt with it up to then, just packed it away. Dated women, remarkable women. Because I enjoyed these relationships, I think I could defer facing the fact that that wasn’t the same as what it was to be in love with somebody.
michael barbaro
And your political ambition was already solid at that point?
pete buttigieg
Yeah, I still didn’t know exactly where it would take me or what it would mean, but I think by then, I knew that there was a good chance I was going to be running for office in my adult life. But at that point, I’m still clinging to some kind of hope, however vanishing, that maybe I’m straight or I’m bisexual and I can just not worry about the gay part. I think when I thought about my career, certainly when I talked about my future and how I was going to be involved, I wasn’t even thinking about the possibility that that would come into contact with this developing side of me. But I’m sure to the extent that I thought what it would mean to come to terms with the fact that I was at very least different and, as became increasingly clear, gay, that one of the things that would have kept that in its corner was the simple fact that that didn’t fit with any of the other things I wanted to do in life, not just a career, but a family. I wanted to get married. I wanted to have kids. From my perspective, you could be married and have kids or you could be gay, not both.
michael barbaro
You graduated in 2004. That — correct me if I’m wrong. That’s the year when Massachusetts —
pete buttigieg
That’s right.
michael barbaro
— legalizes gay marriage.
pete buttigieg
Yes.
archived recording The court today, as you know, in a 4-3 advisory opinion to the Senate has a rule that in a November 18, 2003 decision, they meant marriage. They meant equality. They meant that the Commonwealth may no longer deny marriage rights to same-sex couples, including —
michael barbaro
So I say that only to try to understand, are you falling behind the culture, in a sense? Are you ignoring some of the signs that these things are changing?
archived recording Marriage and only marriage will be enough to satisfy the requirements of the Massachusetts Constitution.
pete buttigieg
Well, the thing is I wasn’t from Massachusetts. I was in Massachusetts for a while, but I never felt like I was from there. And nothing against Massachusetts, but I realized pretty quick after turning up at Harvard that I didn’t belong there either.
michael barbaro
Why not?
pete buttigieg
It was just — it was just a different culture. I didn’t realize that. I didn’t realize that I was Midwestern until I left the Midwest. And just little things, cultural things, the way — I don’t know, the way people interact, what’s expected of you. Once I got there, I realized that socially, I was way more Midwestern than I thought.
michael barbaro
So take me from graduating from Harvard to your decision to join the Navy Reserves.
pete buttigieg
Yeah, so it starts with 9/11. Actually, it starts before 9/11. There’s this family tradition of serving in the military. There’s a painting hanging on the wall of my parents’ house of a relative, a great uncle who I kind of idolized in theory. He was an Army Air Corps pilot. And so I had this idea, this maybe romantic idea, of being in the military, and then it never really became real. But I remember on 9/11 thinking, oh, well, war isn’t just a thing that happens in other places or in other periods of history. Like, war has come to my generation, and thinking, at least in the back of my head, that that might mean I would be involved, but not taking any steps to do that. But that turned into more and more of a nagging feeling when some friends of mine started to serve. A friend of mine from college shared with me just before we graduated that he had decided to join the Navy Reserve. I was fascinated. And then when I was talking to someone about applying for the Rhodes Scholarship and how I wanted to talk about my interest in public service and to the faculty member who was giving advice to students, and just said, pointedly, like, you might want to really think about how you’re going to say that, knowing that you’re going to be competing against people from the military academies. Oh yeah, that’s true. Like, my chest thumping about caring about public service feels a lot smaller held up against what others are doing.
michael barbaro
Do you think that was one of the things that might have drawn you to military service, knowing that to get a Rhodes, to be in that world, in that league, you know, it might be a good thing?
pete buttigieg
I think definitely that it was part of how you’re true to a culture of service. And also the Kennedy presidency kind of hangs over certainly the Kennedy School, as you might imagine. And that can’t be separated from his military career.
michael barbaro
Mm-hmm.
pete buttigieg
I mean, really, it was almost an expectation that you would’ve served, up until roughly the time when I came of age when everything shifted.
michael barbaro
An expectation that you would serve —
pete buttigieg
Well, when you’re looking at the history of the people we were studying —
michael barbaro
Of presidents.
pete buttigieg
— who have made history. Yep, as presidents. And then the thing that put me over the top was this experience knocking on doors in Iowa with a couple of buddies from college who went out. We took a week off and rented a car, and it was the last few days before the Iowa caucuses, and we were volunteers for Obama. They sent us to this very rural area, some of the lowest income counties in Iowa. And it felt like any time I met a young — especially young man — it was somebody who was serving or was about to serve. And I started to realize, we had service that used to be something that bridged people together. Now it’s completely different, that if you were rural or low-income, you were highly likely to serve. If you were from a background like mine, which was middle class economically, but I’d had the chance to go to an institution like Harvard, almost nobody with that background was serving. And I began to feel like it wasn’t just this kind of thing I thought about that I hadn’t gotten around to. It was that I was part of the problem. I was part of the divide. That was the thing that kind of propelled me that last few inches toward being ready to yank open the door of the recruiting office in Indiana and say, hey, how do I sign up?
michael barbaro
I wondered, do you think you joined the military in part because you knew what it would mean for a political career?
pete buttigieg
You know, I wrestled with that because as soon as I get that question, there’s a part of me that thinks, if the answer is yes, does that mean the service wasn’t pure in some way? And I remember at the time asking myself if being in the military was as unpopular as it is today popular, would I still do it? And I want to believe the answer is yes, but there’s no way to go back and prove it. I’m not somebody who thinks that it’s, like, a prerequisite that if you want to run for office you need to have served. But I do think if you have a heart for elected office, one way to put your money where your mouth is to have been in that kind of service, too.
michael barbaro
That strikes me as a very candid answer because of course, you could just say, well, of course I would have done it, even if there was no possible —
pete buttigieg
Yeah.
michael barbaro
— political benefit.
pete buttigieg
And I want to say that. I just can’t prove it.
michael barbaro
So I want to talk about this run for mayor for just a little bit. Whenever you run for office, your character is on display. And at this point, you are keeping something quite elemental about yourself secret. Did it feel like you were hiding something?
pete buttigieg
Not really. The only time it felt that way was when there was small talk about whether I was dating, and I would crack a joke or something. We’d be sitting in a studio like this one and a radio host would ask a question. And I’d say, well, if anybody listening is into economic policy and long walks on the beach, go ahead and reach out and just kind of play the busy single person, which is what I was, except for the fact that I wasn’t actively looking for love. I was going out of my way to avoid it. But if somebody who is straight up asked me on the record, to this day, I’m not sure what I would have done.
michael barbaro
Do you think that that would have potentially cost you the mayoralty, might have kept you from being mayor or staying mayor?
pete buttigieg
Yeah, I think there’s a good chance of it. There’s a reason why no — as far as I know, no out gay person had ever run for mayor of any place in Indiana.
michael barbaro
This is a state with strong Christian values, and —
pete buttigieg
— not known for progressive social outlooks on politics. And here I am, rocking up, 29 years old saying, trust me, support me. Never mind this state legislator who has earned tons of credibility in this community. Never mind this county councilman who’s the party favorite. Go with me instead. If there had been anything that looked like a skeleton or a vulnerability, I think it probably would have sunk me before I got anywhere at all.
michael barbaro
So I want to now move into this notion of you reconciling these things.
pete buttigieg
Yeah, so when I first joined the Reserve, the message was kind of you’re pretty much going to go to one of these wars, and we’ll let you know which one. And so I knew that, at a certain point, it was coming. And of course, I didn’t want to take office in South Bend without a plan for this. So we had gamed it out with my team, if I get orders, here’s what you do. And when I received my orders and knew I was going for sure, I don’t think even then it occurred to me that it would have much to do with my sexuality. If anything, I was thankful that I was single, right? The hardest thing for people to deploy is the fact that you’re leaving behind somebody you love, in addition to all the professional complications. But then, the more I started getting mentally ready for going over and really thinking about what it meant, the more it started weighing on me that I didn’t have a — wasn’t coming back to a family, my parents, of course, but I wasn’t coming back to a household. And more than that, I had no idea what it was like to be in love. And the idea that I’m — here I am. I’m a grown-ass man. I own a home. I’m the mayor of my city. I’m a military officer. And if I get killed over there, I will go to my grave not knowing what it’s like to be in love. And that just made me realize how untenable the situation I was in really was. And up until then, it didn’t seem untenable, I guess because I was so busy, and I might have deferred coming out and having a dating life forever, if not for this moment where I’m thinking, shit, I could die.
michael barbaro
You wrote a letter I want to ask you about.
pete buttigieg
Yeah, you know, it’s a thing you do. I assume everybody does it. I don’t know. But it’s the thing you do when you go to war, right? You want to make sure that you have the last word on your life and leave a few instructions. So I wrote up a letter, put an envelope, put just in case on the outside. Put it in the desk drawer, would’ve been pretty easy to find if worse comes to worst. And that’s a real moment, too, because you’re sitting there staring at the screen trying to figure out how to give a short accounting of your life.
michael barbaro
And what did you say?
pete buttigieg
Well, what I said was that I wouldn’t want people to think that I’d been cheated, that obviously it’d be terrible if I didn’t come back, but I also had this amazing life where I have wonderful friendships, and I got to serve my community in a way that very few people get to do, let alone at my age, and that I’d had this very fulfilling life. And of course, it’d be too bad if something happened to me, but to keep that in perspective. But if you’re asking if there was, like, P.S. I’m gay, no.
michael barbaro
That’s kind of what I was asking. So you are deployed.
pete buttigieg
Yeah.
michael barbaro
You do not die.
pete buttigieg
Right.
michael barbaro
You come back, and you’re mayor.
pete buttigieg
Yeah.
michael barbaro
And how do you decide that it’s time to come out?
pete buttigieg
Well, I think by the time I hit the ground and I was back, I knew that I was going to come out and then it’s just — it was more how and when. I remember resenting the idea that you’re supposed to have to come out, right? Straight people don’t have to come out. Why do I? And then, while I’m in the process of figuring this out —
archived recording Thank you all for coming. It’s been a tough week here in the Hoosier state, but we’re going to move forward.
pete buttigieg
We have this explosive controversy over Mike Pence, the Governor Mike Pence and his so-called Religious Freedom bill.
archived recording The Religious Freedom Restoration Act was about religious liberty, not about discrimination.
pete buttigieg
So suddenly, we’re on national television, my state, as the most officially anti-gay state in the country. I’m fighting him on it, of course, because it’s a terrible policy. But now, I’m fighting this terrible, anti-gay policy putatively from the perspective of a straight ally, wondering whether I’m more effective because people don’t know that I’m gay. And at the same time, knowing that this just kind of speeds things up even more that, like, it’s just a really weird position to be in, to be having all these hypothetical arguments about discrimination against gay people, when it really means me. Meanwhile, this is also the period when we realize that soon the Supreme Court is going to weigh in on marriage. I mean, all of this was happening in that early part of 2015 while I’m wrestling with how to do this. And so oddly enough, it was — — as busy as I was as mayor. Military duty actually felt like, kind of almost like a break because it was eight hour days, 40 hour week. I wasn’t used to having that much time, and so is a lot of time to sit and write and think and call friends and get advice.
michael barbaro
So you produce a plan.
pete buttigieg
Yeah, well I produced a letter, an op-ed I guess.
michael barbaro
Mm-hmm. What was the essential line that I’m sure you remember that you wrote?
pete buttigieg
I remember saying that it’s just part of who I am and that it has no bearing on how I do my job, that the way I do my — did my job either as an officer or as a mayor or in business had nothing to do with the fact that I was gay and that —
michael barbaro
It still sounds a little defensive.
pete buttigieg
Yeah.
michael barbaro
Or maybe a little scared.
pete buttigieg
Probably. Yeah, I mean, you know, I didn’t feel like I was coming out guns blazing. I felt like I — again, part of me was bothered that I had to share this at all. Then part of me knew that it would do some good if I did, I mean, not just in my own life. That I — my main agenda was, personally, I wanted to get out there and start dating. But also that it would mean something, might mean all kinds of things to a whole bunch of different people when I came out and said this.
michael barbaro
We’ll be right back.
archived recording A very personal announcement coming from South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg today. In an essay published in today’s South Bend Tribune, the mayor announced he is gay. Currently in the midst of running for a second term, Pete Buttigieg penned an essay in Tuesday’s South Bend Tribune revealing he was gay. A lot of people wondering why he chose to make this announcement now. It comes just months after the state’s religious freedom law thrust the state into the national debate on gay rights. As for the mayor himself, he says nothing is different, nothing has changed, and his focus is on South Bend.
michael barbaro
I want to talk about the timing, the exact moment of the op-ed because my sense is that at this phase of your career, you’re up for re-election, right? You’ve won the primary. And winning the primary, in a sense, means you’re standing a very good shot of winning.
pete buttigieg
Depending on the year, but yeah, in South Bend, it should be.
michael barbaro
So does that mean you deliberately chose a — like, a safe, low-risk time to do this?
pete buttigieg
I don’t know. I would think that going into a Democratic primary would be a safer time than going into a general election. And I think also the decision to do this came by way of realizing that there is no such thing as a safe time. I was just done with not having the kind of personal life that I wanted to have.
michael barbaro
So once you come out, how does your personal life change?
pete buttigieg
Well, I started dating, and that kind of changes everything. I mean, I still had this very demanding job. You’re the mayor, and so anybody in town that you ask to have a cup of coffee is —
michael barbaro
It’s a thing.
pete buttigieg
Yeah, it’s a thing. It might be misinterpreted. You could cross some line without meaning to. I mean, most of the people I interacted with were either people who needed something from me, people I needed something from or people who worked for me. So it’s not, like, a very healthy pool for dating is what I’m saying. And I remember thinking there were all these kind of city fathers who, early on in my time as mayor, seemed determined to fix me up with their daughters. And I remember just thinking, like, where are you now? Did none of you have, like, a son or a nephew or something? So I did what millennials do. I went online. Turns out there’s apps for all of this. There was O.K. Cupid, Tinder. The one that actually came through for me was called Hinge. And it’s supposed to serve up people that — I don’t know how the algorithm works. But I find this guy, this cute guy with a big smile, and I’m like, I want to know this guy. So we start chatting. Well, I was chatting with a lot of people, but obviously, he’s the one I remember because that was Chasten.
michael barbaro
Your future husband.
pete buttigieg
Yes.
michael barbaro
So your story, to many people, is particularly compelling one, everything we just discussed. You are a Harvard graduate, a Rhodes Scholar, you’re a veteran. You’re gay. You’re religious. And from your own description of yourself, it feels like you have been thinking about politics and preparing, to some degree, to run for president for a very long time, even though you’re quite young. And I’m sure you understand this and have heard this. That has led to this perception of a person kind of, perhaps, orchestrating a political biography. Do you ever question whether that, no matter what your intention, is — could possibly undermine the power of the story itself, however genuine?
pete buttigieg
Yeah, I mean, I think we’re conditioned to not like the idea of somebody who sat around thinking all their lives about how to become president. And I don’t view myself that way, although I get that that story has been written around me. Although, I also don’t know what it is we expect, that somebody kind of gets struck by lightning and then they turn into somebody who might become president. We all have these paths, right, that bring us to where we are. And I think anybody in professional life or even social life thinks about the story that you tell about yourself. At the end of the day, I’m not doing this because I have this personal need to be in elected office or to be the president. I’m not coming at the presidency as a thing that I’d like to occupy. I’m coming at it as this way to do something that I think I’m able to do. And I think it’s helpful in the sense that I could also have a very happy life doing something else. And oddly, I think that — that helps prepare me to do what’s required to do this. And this is advice I give talking to students, too. Imagine somebody is being sworn in, an ambitious, talented person kind of in the middle of their career is being sworn in as an assistant secretary in the State Department for the Middle East. And then imagine if that person has got there one of two ways. In kind of universe A, it’s a person who woke up one day in high school and said, I want to be the assistant secretary for the Middle East, and took the right courses and got the right jobs and had the right fellowships and wrote the right papers and did everything in order to occupy that title. And the other person is somebody who said, I — woke up in high school and said, I want to be the person who makes the United States a force toward peace in the Middle East. And they don’t know what that’s going to mean, and maybe it means they start out becoming an activist or maybe they’re an academic or maybe they’re a civil servant or whatever. But by whatever winding path, they wind up in this job, right? Which of those two scenarios is going to lead to somebody who’s better equipped to take that job they’ve been handed? I’ve got to think it’s the latter. And so what I’ve tried to do in my life is to prepare myself to be useful to others. And yes, I think that, in all likelihood, means in a form that involves holding office or seeking office or at least public life where I speak to lots of people, sometimes millions at the same time. But it’s not about, necessarily, having one title or another. And so I think if you overthink it, that’s where you start to lose the fidelity to what it is that would guide you when you actually get what you’ve been chasing for a long time. Jeremy, what do we learn from Mayor Pete Buttigieg about the way he reconciled his political ambition with this essential fact about himself that he feared would endanger that ambition?
jeremy peters
I think we learn a lot about his decision-making process, not just how he internalizes decisions personally, but how he thinks about them in the longer arc of a political career. And he’s been very intentional all along the way about choosing certain endeavors that he thinks would benefit a long-term political career. Now some people would think, on the one hand, that’s too calculating. I don’t want somebody who’s thought about being president since he was a teenager. And, you know, in the era when voters seemed to prize authenticity in their political figures, they could see that as inauthentic. On the other hand, the decision that he made to wait seems to have borne out to his benefit. I mean, here he is, the first openly gay candidate for president of the United States who has a legitimate shot at being his party’s nominee. Look at where he is in the Democratic primary right now. He’s rocketed to the top of the polls. He’s brought in all this money in large part because he’s gay, and that opened a lot of doors with Democratic donors. He’s heading into the Iowa caucuses in the lead by some measures. But we won’t know if his decision to wait actually was the right one until people start voting. So it seems to have worked out well for him right now, but no one’s cast a single vote. And we don’t know how voters in the Democratic primary are going to react. We certainly don’t know how voters in a general election are going to react. So we’re just not going to know until Democratic voters have their say.
michael barbaro
Mayor, when you think back to your younger self —
pete buttigieg
Yeah.
michael barbaro
Not just your teenage self, but even your college self and your post-collegiate self who was so fearful about telling the world that you were gay, what do you kind of wish you could tell that person, that version of Mayor Buttigieg?
pete buttigieg
Well, back then, I would have thought this other fact, if I dared to unpack it, this fact about my life, this way in which I was different, was the thing that could multiply all the other stuff by zero, in terms of the impact I was going to have in the world, that I might very well choose that path, but that the price would be that I wouldn’t get to make a difference in public life. And if you want proof of God having a sense of humor, one of the things I’m seeing now, especially in the interactions I have on the campaign trail and the fact that this campaign is historic in a lot of ways, is that that same fact that I thought would mean never getting to this point might actually be one of the things that makes it matter the most.
michael barbaro
Mm-hmm.
pete buttigieg
It’s a strange thing to think about that the one thing that I couldn’t control, the one thing that might have meant that it would be better not to have any aspirations related to politics at all could be the very thing that anchors the moral and emotional purpose of this entire campaign.
michael barbaro
Thank you very much.
pete buttigieg
Thanks for having me.
michael barbaro
We’ll be right back. Here’s what else you need to know today.
archived recording (fiona hill) And I did say to him, Ambassador Sondland, Gordon, I think this is all going to blow up, and here we are.
michael barbaro
In the latest public testimony before impeachment investigators, Fiona Hill, the former top Russia expert on the National Security Council, recalled her growing frustration with Ambassador Gordon Sondland, as she realized he was pursuing a political agenda in Ukraine on behalf of President Trump.
archived recording (fiona hill) He was being involved in a domestic, political errand, and we were being involved in national security foreign policy and those two things have just diverged.
michael barbaro
Hill testified that when Trump and Sondland pressed Ukraine to investigate the discredited theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election, they were playing directly into Russia’s hands, since Russia wants to deflect attention away from its interference.
archived recording (fiona hill) This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves. These fictions are harmful, even if they’re deployed for purely domestic, political purposes.
michael barbaro | {
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President Donald Trump may have pulled out of the North Korean nuclear summit. But several lawmakers still either want to award him the Nobel Peace Prize for his overtures to Kim Jong Un or believe that the recognition will come in time.
“Considering Barack Obama received the prize for simply having a pulse and then recklessly destabilizing the globe, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could keep a straight face while questioning if Trump deserves one,” Kelsey Knight, a spokesman for Rep. Jim Renacci, an Ohio Republican running for the Senate, said in a statement. “[Trump] has freed our hostages while North Korea destroyed their nuclear test site ahead of his visit. ISIS is collapsing and we’re closer to ending the Korean War than we’ve been since the 1950’s.”
Critics have insisted that the argument that Trump deserves a Nobel for his attempts to broker a nuclear deal with Kim always rested more on an appreciation for Trump than an appreciation for the prize. Renacci’s commitment awarding the president even without the high-profile summit, seems likely to give those critics additional fodder.
The idea that Trump deserves a Nobel first originated when the possibility of that summit seemed strong. In the letter sent on May 2 to the Nobel Committee (PDF), a group of House Republicans lauded the president for bringing North and South Korea together in an effort to end “the Korean War [and to] seek to reunify their countries[.]” Trump was also credited in starting “the process to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula” with “peace through strength policies” that brought North Korea “to the negotiating table.”
At the time, those lawmakers were mocked and criticized for the premature celebration of the summit’s success. And, sure enough, things soon began to fall apart. Two weeks after the letter was sent, the North canceled their talks with the South in reaction to joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises. A few weeks later, the planned summit between North Korea and the U.S. was canceled with a letter from the president’s desk.
Some of the lawmakers who initially wanted Trump to get the Nobel have remained committed to the idea even as they acknowledge that the award may not come as quickly.
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC), one of the signatories, said the president should be “commended” for getting more done than “any other of our former presidents,” but that the Nobel would have to come after the talks.
“One of the greatest attributes of President Trump is his willingness to walk away if the deal is bad for America. Just because it didn’t happen now, does not mean it will not happen in the future,” Rep. Norman said in a statement. “If and when it does happen, the President will deserve the Nobel Peace Prize and I’m proud of signing on to the recommendation and yes, it will remain.”
Another signer, Rep. Steve King, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that the nomination was “paused... for a little while” in anticipation of what would happen with the talks.
“We always knew that would take some months to unfold and I’m disappointed by this action that has taken place, but I don’t think this action is incorrect on this,” he said. “But I do give President Trump a lot of credit for opening up these negotiations, for being willing to accept the invitation that was offered to him to negotiate with Kim Jong Un.”
Four presidents in U.S. history have been bestowed a Nobel Peace Prize. Theodore Roosevelt was awarded in 1906, when he “negotiated peace” and brought an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Woodrow Wilson won in 1919 for establishing the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations that the U.S. ended up not joining. Jimmy Carter was awarded his in 2002—after his presidency—for “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts.”
Barack Obama got the award in 2009 for “efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation”—a much criticized recognition since he had been in office for so short a period of time.
The Daily Beast contacted all 18 lawmakers’ offices who signed the letter, along with four governors who backed Trump for the Nobel Prize. The vast majority of congressional offices did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesman for Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) said she had not “spoken to him about it” since the summit was canceled. She did not return subsequent requests for comment.
—with additional reporting by Sam Stein | {
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Info Muammar Qadhafi Muammar Qadhafi* (1942-2011) was the dictatorial ruler of Libya from 1969 to 2011. This release consists of FBI material related to Qadhafi ranging from 1976 to 1989. Investigations include security matters related to Qadhafi’s travel to the United States in 1987, threats by Libyan dissidents against Qadhafi, and Qadhafi’s possible involvement in threats to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. Material has been withheld to protect personal privacy, the identities of FBI sources, and classified material. * Name variations include Khadafi, Khaddafy, Gaddafi, and Qadhafi. Muammar Qadhafi Part 01 of 01 View | {
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San Francisco petitioners Xin Farrish and Char Crawford are among those seeking legal recognition of their non-binary gender. Photo: Nancy Crawford
San Francisco petitioners Xin Farrish and Char Crawford are among those seeking legal recognition of their non-binary gender. Photo: Nancy Crawford
The movement toward the legal recognition of non-binary gender is gaining traction, with additional Californians filing petitions to change their legal gender to non-binary.
On December 2, three members of the Intersex & Genderqueer Recognition Project (IGRP) filed their petitions with the San Francisco County clerk’s office. David Strachan, Xin Farrish, and Xin’s spouse Char Crawford will be represented by IGRP Legal Director Toby Adams at their January 31 hearing.
“We at IGRP applaud these brave humans fighting for the right to be recognized as their authentic selves in all areas of their lives, and we applaud their families for their loving support,” Adams said in a release.
Adams and IGRP advisory committee member Sara Kelly Keenan said they are working with the California Department of Motor Vehicles to discuss non-binary identification on drivers’ licenses. While no specific timeline has been offered, Adams said the DMV “has made a commitment to move forward.”
There appears to be national support for offering an alternative gender designation within the industry. This year the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators introduced “X” as an optional gender designation, though it is up to individual jurisdictions to decide whether to offer that option.
Keenan became the first Californian and second person in the United States to have a non-binary gender legally recognized by the courts. Earlier this month, Keenan was also granted an amended birth certificate reading “intersex,” which Keenan described as “a dream come true in that it acknowledges scientific reality and says society is ready to accept that people like me exist.”
Oregonian Jamie Shupe in June became the first person to receive a court order recognizing their gender as “non-binary.” Shupe also recently received a new birth certificate from Washington D.C.
Intersex Colorado resident Dana Zzyym is also currently petitioning to receive a passport with a non-binary gender designation. | {
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The University of Massachusetts, Amherst is slated to host a panel exploring “How Scholars and Activists Can Partner for Reproductive and Racial Justice.”
According to the university’s News and Media Relations website, the November 30 presentation “will bring together scholars, activists, and community members invested in public engagement to hear from reproductive justice activist Loretta Ross and public scholar Rickie Solinger.”
"The presentation will bring together scholars, activists, and community members invested in public engagement."
Both speakers will lecture on “successful partnerships between scholars and activists” while also addressing “the complexities and importance of collaborative work in the context of the current contentious political landscape.”
[RELATED: UMass Amherst students throw temper tantrum at free speech event]
According to the website, the term “Reproductive Justice” was coined in part by Ross, and refers to “practices and theory coined by African-American women in 1994.”
“Ross was a co-founder and National Coordinator of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective from 2007-12,” UMass explains. “Ross is a sought-after speaker and author of numerous books and articles about human rights, violence against women, reproductive justice and appropriate whiteness.”
The university also touts Solinger as an “author or editor of 11 books about reproductive politics and satellite subjects,” and a “curator of a number of politically focused, installation-based, and photography exhibitions that have traveled to scores of college and university galleries, aiming to interrupt the curriculum.”
UMass further disclosed that the event is backed by nearly a dozen groups and organizations, including official administrative and educational departments within the university such as the Office of the Chancellor, the Health Promotion and Policy Department, the History Department, and the Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Department.
Other groups sponsoring the event include the Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR), the Public Engagement Project, the Five College Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice Certificate Program, UMass Students for Reproductive Justice, the Women of Color Leadership Network, and the Center for Research on Families.
[RELATED: UMass creates cultural appropriation 'threat meter' for Halloween]
However, many of those sponsoring organizations, such as the Institute for Social Science Research, are further supported by various university departments and administrative branches.
According to its website, the ISSR alone is backed by “the University of Massachusetts Amherst's College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the Office of the Provost, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Engagement, and the Graduate School, as well as by the College of Education, the Isenberg School of Management, and the School of Earth and Sustainability.”
Spokespersons for UMass-Amherst did not immediately respond to Campus Reform’s request for comment.
Follow this author on Facebook: Nikita Vladimirov | {
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Black-tailed, Goitered or Persian Gazelle. Photographed in Gobi Desert, southern Mongolia. Image: Wikipedia.
(PhysOrg.com) -- A report published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences details the proof found that "desert kites" were used as slaughter structures for civilizations as long as 6,000 years ago in the Middle East. Scientists have long believed these structures had been used to herd and slaughter animals, but until now, no concrete evidence had been found to support that theory.
Desert kites were so named because of their triangular shape. They were low stone walls essentially creating a funnel to herd animals into what was assumed to be the slaughter pit. It is believed that animals were herded into the kites by a few dozen hunters and then slaughtered. This was basically just a theory as no other kites had revealed any skeletal remains.
Located at a site known as Tell Kuran in northeastern Syria, a team led by zoo archaeologist Guy Bar-Oz from the University of Haifa has found the remains of some 100 gazelles. The bones recovered were varied in age and gender, suggesting it was a normal migrating herd that had been driven into the pit. The bone findings were primarily the non-meat bearing lower legs and suggest the animals were slaughtered and butchered in the pits with the remaining carcasses and meat taken to another location. Estimates on the bones age date them back 6,000 years.
It is their belief that these slaughters happened on a yearly basis and probably held some sort of ritual or religious significance. Given the amount of meat that would have resulted from one of these mass slaughters, and the lack of refrigeration, a large assembly of people would have been necessary to consume the meat.
More than 90 desert kites have been located throughout northeastern Syria so this indicates it was a widely used practice at the time. The rocks on the walls of the structure also show religious art, again suggesting the killings were or religious or symbolic importance.
These mass killing of entire herds also explains the near extinction of these gazelles in the area.
Explore further Evidence unearthed of possible mass cannibalism in Neolithic Europe
More information: Role of mass-kill hunting strategies in the extirpation of Persian gazelle (Gazella subgutturosa) in the northern Levant, PNAS, Published online before print April 18, 2011, Role of mass-kill hunting strategies in the extirpation of Persian gazelle () in the northern Levant,, Published online before print April 18, 2011, doi:10.1073/pnas.1017647108
© 2010 PhysOrg.com | {
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From there, hold the site's microphone and then ask about what's on SyFy, if it's going to rain tonight or a definition of the word "they." Think of it as a try before you buy, or, if you're a developer, a a way to test your mettle before fully committing to the platform. Amazon's Glenn Cameron writes that by following the company's tutorials, it should take less than an hour to build your first Alexa skill. | {
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IN THE past 25 years war has claimed too many lives. Yet even as civil and religious strife have raged in Syria, central Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, a devastating clash between the world’s great powers has remained almost unimaginable.
No longer. Last week the Pentagon issued a new national defence strategy that put China and Russia above jihadism as the main threat to America. This week the chief of Britain’s general staff warned of a Russian attack. Even now America and North Korea are perilously close to a conflict that risks dragging in China or escalating into nuclear catastrophe.
As our special report this week on the future of war argues, powerful, long-term shifts in geopolitics and the proliferation of new technologies are eroding the extraordinary military dominance that America and its allies have enjoyed. Conflict on a scale and intensity not seen since the second world war is once again plausible. The world is not prepared.
The pity of war
The pressing danger is of war on the Korean peninsula, perhaps this year. Donald Trump has vowed to prevent Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s leader, from being able to strike America with nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, a capability that recent tests suggest he may have within months, if not already. Among many contingency plans, the Pentagon is considering a disabling pre-emptive strike against the North’s nuclear sites. Despite low confidence in the success of such a strike, it must be prepared to carry out the president’s order should he give it.
Even a limited attack could trigger all-out war. Analysts reckon that North Korean artillery can bombard Seoul, the South Korean capital, with 10,000 rounds a minute. Drones, midget submarines and tunnelling commandos could deploy biological, chemical and even nuclear weapons. Tens of thousands of people would perish; many more if nukes were used.
This newspaper has argued that the prospect of such horror means that, if diplomacy fails, North Korea should be contained and deterred instead. Although we stand by our argument, war is a real possibility (see article). Mr Trump and his advisers may conclude that a nuclear North would be so reckless, and so likely to cause nuclear proliferation, that it is better to risk war on the Korean peninsula today than a nuclear strike on an American city tomorrow.
Even if China stays out of a second Korean war, both it and Russia are entering into a renewal of great-power competition with the West. Their ambitions will be even harder to deal with than North Korea’s. Three decades of unprecedented economic growth have provided China with the wealth to transform its armed forces, and given its leaders the sense that their moment has come. Russia, paradoxically, needs to assert itself now because it is in long-term decline. Its leaders have spent heavily to restore Russia’s hard power, and they are willing to take risks to prove they deserve respect and a seat at the table.
Both countries have benefited from the international order that America did most to establish and guarantee. But they see its pillars—universal human rights, democracy and the rule of law—as an imposition that excuses foreign meddling and undermines their own legitimacy. They are now revisionist states that want to challenge the status quo and look at their regions as spheres of influence to be dominated. For China, that means East Asia; for Russia, eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Neither China nor Russia wants a direct military confrontation with America that they would surely lose. But they are using their growing hard power in other ways, in particular by exploiting a “grey zone” where aggression and coercion work just below the level that would risk military confrontation with the West. In Ukraine Russia has blended force, misinformation, infiltration, cyberwar and economic blackmail in ways that democratic societies cannot copy and find hard to rebuff. China is more cautious, but it has claimed, occupied and garrisoned reefs and shoals in disputed waters.
China and Russia have harnessed military technologies invented by America, such as long-range precision-strike and electromagnetic-spectrum warfare, to raise the cost of intervention against them dramatically. Both have used asymmetric-warfare strategies to create “anti-access/area denial” networks. China aims to push American naval forces far out into the Pacific where they can no longer safely project power into the East and South China Seas. Russia wants the world to know that, from the Arctic to the Black Sea, it can call on greater firepower than its foes—and that it will not hesitate to do so.
If America allows China and Russia to establish regional hegemonies, either consciously or because its politics are too dysfunctional to muster a response, it will have given them a green light to pursue their interests by brute force. When that was last tried, the result was the first world war.
Nuclear weapons, largely a source of stability since 1945, may add to the danger. Their command-and-control systems are becoming vulnerable to hacking by new cyber-weapons or “blinding” of the satellites they depend on. A country under such an attack could find itself under pressure to choose between losing control of its nuclear weapons or using them.
Vain citadels
What should America do? Almost 20 years of strategic drift has played into the hands of Russia and China. George W. Bush’s unsuccessful wars were a distraction and sapped support at home for America’s global role. Barack Obama pursued a foreign policy of retrenchment, and was openly sceptical about the value of hard power. Today, Mr Trump says he wants to make America great again, but is going about it in exactly the wrong way. He shuns multilateral organisations, treats alliances as unwanted baggage and openly admires the authoritarian leaders of America’s adversaries. It is as if Mr Trump wants America to give up defending the system it created and to join Russia and China as just another truculent revisionist power instead.
America needs to accept that it is a prime beneficiary of the international system and that it is the only power with the ability and the resources to protect it from sustained attack. The soft power of patient and consistent diplomacy is vital, but must be backed by the hard power that China and Russia respect. America retains plenty of that hard power, but it is fast losing the edge in military technology that inspired confidence in its allies and fear in its foes.
To match its diplomacy, America needs to invest in new systems based on robotics, artificial intelligence, big data and directed-energy weapons. Belatedly, Mr Obama realised that America required a concerted effort to regain its technological lead, yet there is no guarantee that it will be the first to innovate. Mr Trump and his successors need to redouble the effort.
The best guarantor of world peace is a strong America. Fortunately, it still enjoys advantages. It has rich and capable allies, still by far the world’s most powerful armed forces, unrivalled war-fighting experience, the best systems engineers and the world’s leading tech firms. Yet those advantages could all too easily be squandered. Without America’s commitment to the international order and the hard power to defend it against determined and able challengers, the dangers will grow. If they do, the future of war could be closer than you think. | {
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Why choose us: | {
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Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar was a revolutionary game because there wasn’t a traditional villain to fight against. Instead, the focus was on becoming the Avatar, chasing after honor, sacrifice, humility, and spirituality. In Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny, the teachings you’ve embodied have become totally corrupted.
Twenty years have passed since the events of Ultima IV and the king of Britannia, Lord British is missing. Taking his place is Lord Blackthorn, an oppressive dictator who has changed Lord British’s benevolent reign into a tyrannical, religious state. Whereas before, the eight virtues acted as guiding principles for the people to pursue, in Blackthorne’s hands, they’ve become the law. A virtue like compassion is now codified as: “Thou shalt donate half of thy income to charity, or thou shalt have no income.” Honesty takes on sinister undertones as “Thou shalt not lie, or thou shalt lose thy tongue.”
It’s chilling returning to what was once a familiar world and finding a family in stockades. The father is locked up for only giving 40% of his earning, not the full 50%. His son is imprisoned by his side for not reporting him. A suspicious guard making the rounds demands a bribe as tribute to Lord Blackthorne.
What’s fascinating about the whole new religion is that this isn’t a theocracy deriving its authority from a esoteric divine being. Rather, the whole basis on which Blackthorn draws his legitimacy is you, the Avatar, and all the sacrifices you made in your in Ultima IV voyage. The Ultima games have always been a web in which the threads impact future iterations in unexpected ways. In the series’ growing complexity, I appreciated directly seeing the evolution of RPGs from fantasy tropes (save the princess, vanquish evil wizard) to narratives that incorporated the ambiguities and moral conflicts in our own world.
The mystery behind Ultima V is, how did things get so bad? You have to track down and meet Lord Blackthorn to get a sense of what’s really happening.
Blackthorn actually respects the Avatar, having wanted to follow your ways. But in your first meeting with him, things get sour really quickly. He demands information and then proceeds to permadeath one of your party members. It’s shocking, brutal, and traumatizing.
You begin to discover that there is someone twisting Blackthorne’s mind. They’re called the Shadowlords. Whenever they make an appearance, the NPCs get hostile, outright lying and stealing from your party. The only avenue of escape is avoidance as they’re too powerful to defeat in combat.
As intriguing as the game’s themes are, I nearly gave up before I began. I played the NES versions of Ultima III and IV which were streamlined with easier interfaces and improved graphics. I actually never got the chance to play Ultima V until it was available on GOG. So when I first loaded it up, I struggled with the interface. You have to press the appropriate letter on your keyboard for actions like “E” for “Enter” and “O” to open doors, which makes sense. But “I” for igniting a torch and “K” to climb rather than “C” threw me off (“C” is “Cast” magic). In dialogue, you can type in phrases or terminology you’ve learned from other NPCs as prompts to query them or continue conversations. Only the first four letters count, so you can ask about the “underworld” by typing in “unde” and you’ll get unique responses. It took a bit of time, but my desire to know more about the story kept me hooked. After I got the hang of the controls, I even came to appreciate their complexity. There is an immense feeling of satisfaction when you type in keywords that evoke deeper responses from NPCs.
Ultima V has an eclectic cast that reveals a much deeper world than the games before it with almost double the dialogue of any of the previous games. This includes a rat that was once an alchemist, a daemon called Sin’Vraal who will tell you where to find the Shard of Hatred, and even Christopher aka Chris Roberts, the director of another Origin game, Times of Lore. There are also day and night cycles with NPCs having their own routine decades before Majora’s Mask would do something similar. Understandably, most of the resistance against Blackthorn meet secretly at night.
One of the most useful items to acquire early on in your fight against the Shadowlords is the magic carpet. You can obtain it by using the cannon to blast the door in Castle Britannia. From that point on, your party can fly almost anywhere.
Eventually, you make it down into the Underworld where you meet a Captain Johne whose ship was pulled there through a whirlpool. Much of the Underworld is a dreary and barren land, sprawling endlessly in desolation. It’s also where the three shards of Mondain’s Gem of Immortality from the first Ultima landed. The captain found the shards, but they warped his mind. In a mad rage, he killed his three companions. Their blood stained the shards and the three Shadowlords were born, embodying Hatred, Falsehood, and Cowardice.
Ultima V’s warnings against the misuse and corruption of religion are surprisingly relevant today. Last year, I wrote about Quest of the Avatar and how it inspired me to strive after an ideal. I reflected on a childhood friend who had introduced me to several fantasy books and RPGs. But then one day, he informed me his church’s pastor told him any medium that had magic with people directly manipulating nature instead of relying on God was a form of evil. He urged me to give up games and fantasy books. I was incredulous. I’d always loved games as a kid and I wasn’t going to give them up just because his pastor wanted me to. Sadly, I ended up losing my friendship with him.
Throughout the years, I’ve met people who’ve condemned my appreciation for games and books because they considered them “secular” or “worldly.” The feeling of being judged always stings. Ultima V really struck a chord with its warnings against moral absolutism and how evil often is just good pushed to an extreme. It sucks to be considered a “bad person” just because you like games. What’s scary is that there are no Shadowlords pulling the strings in reality. You can’t go on a quest, find the original shards from Mondain’s Gem of Immortality, and vanquish the Shadowlords in the flames of love, truth, and courage. Fundamentalism in pixelated form is terrifying, but ultimately defeatable. In real life, it’s far more insidious.
And that reality is reflected in the game’s ending. After saving Lord British, Blackthorne awakes from his trance and is given the option of going into exile. He expresses deep penitence for his actions, even though he wasn’t fully in control of himself. Then you, the Avatar, return home and find someone has robbed your “TV set, stereo, and living-room furniture; a reminder that Evil dwells still within your own world and that your Quest of the Avatar is not yet at an end.”
And ultimately, it never is. | {
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https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/would-appointing-a-war-criminal-as-commissioner-redeem-the-nfl/
Former NFL star Ray Rice pleaded guilty of abusing a woman whom he later married, and was fired by the League after a video of the crime was made public.
Former Secretary of State Condolezza Rice was an architect of an illegal war of aggression that resulted in the slaughter of a half-million people, the displacement of millions more, trillions of dollars in debt, and the creation of a nihilistic terrorist group that has now been designated our existential threat du jour. She is a war criminal who remains impenitent despite abundant proof of the crimes to which she is a party.
The NFL is seeking to rehabilitate its public reputation amid accumulating scandals. This inspired Beltway scribe Susan Milligan to propose that the League could redeem itself by replacing “one Rice with another” – that is, firing incumbent NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and hiring War Criminal Condi Rice as his successor.
Stalin famously said that one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic. In contemporary America, one domestic violence incident in which the victim survived constitutes a career-ending scandal, but helping to orchestrate the murder of 500,000 foreigners is a glorious patriotic accomplishment.
Installing Rice as NFL Commissioner would usefully demolish any pretense that the NFL is something other than a corporatist appendage of the Warfare State.
5:36 pm on September 15, 2014
The Best of William Norman Grigg | {
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Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955-October 5, 2011) was a co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc. His impact on the technology industry, entertainment, advertising, and pop culture was significant and he left behind an empire that changed how people interact with technology.
The Beginning of Apple
Apple started with three men—Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Mike Markkula—who together in the late 1970s designed and marketed the Apple II series of computers. It was the first commercially successful line of personal computers, and led to the Apple Lisa in 1983—the first computer to use a mouse-driven GUI (graphical user interface).
One year later, the Apple Macintosh was born and with it, the Apple legend began to grow.
Jobs' Various Roles at Apple
In 1985, after a long and drawn-out fight with the Apple board, Jobs departed the company that he helped create. Some say he was pushed or ousted; others say he left simply to pursue other projects. Whatever the case, his next move was NeXT, a tech company he founded that specialized in higher education and business.
In 1986, Jobs took a major interest in a small division of Lucasfilm Ltd. Focused on the development of computer-generated graphics for animated movies, Jobs acquired the company now known as Pixar.
After many small projects and lots of trial and error, Pixar released "Toy Story" in 1995 crediting Jobs as the executive producer. Pixar became one of the most successful and prolific animated movie companies in the world.
One year after the release of "Toy Story," in 1996, Apple bought the NeXT company that Jobs owned and asked him to come back in a leadership role. He was interim CEO from 1997 to 2000, becoming the permanent CEO from that point until his eventual resignation in August of 2011.
iPod and iPhone
When Jobs returned in 1996, Apple was still a niche computer platform. The vast majority of consumers owned less expensive Windows-based PCs, with the higher-priced Apple computers mainly being used in the creative industries, including advertising, design and motion pictures.
However, that all changed when the iPod came along in November of 2001. The device, which allowed thousands of songs to be stored digitally on one small device much smaller than any Walkman or CD player, changed the way music was played and shared.
Within a few years, Apple was the technology that everyone wanted to own. And then came the iPhone in 2007, which took Apple from a major player to the company everyone was trying to emulate.
Overnight, the iPhone reinvented cell phone technology, and it was yet another victory for Steve Jobs. His company, Apple, was the brand leader and the one leading the field.
In 2010, after many variations of the iPhone, the iPad was launched to an initially mediocre reception. People and focus groups didn't see the need for it, but Steve Jobs knew it was going to have a big impact. And it did. By March of 2011, over 15 million iPads were on the market.
Jobs Health and Death
Jobs' health had been in question since around 2006 when his gaunt, frail appearance and lackluster delivery were the focus of his WWDC keynote address. In fact, Jobs had announced to his staff in 2004 that he had pancreatic cancer.
Between 2003 and his death in August 2011, Jobs underwent many procedures and therapies to try and beat cancer, but the disease was too aggressive. He stepped down as CEO of Apple on August 24, 2011, and died just a few weeks later.
Apple After Steve Jobs
To say Apple greatly misses the influence of Steve Jobs would be the understatement of the century.
The last great innovation that Apple released to the market was done so under the leadership of Steve Jobs; it was the iPad, back in 2010. Almost everything released from that point on has been an update to an existing product; none of its newer products has been met with the same must-have enthusiasm that Jobs' products inspired in customers. | {
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Vé máy bay đi Seattle giá rẻ (SEA) được cập nhật liên tục tại hệ thống bán vé máy bay của chúng tôi, hành khách có nhu cầu đi chu du Seattle, hãy mau chóng mua vé và đi tham quan ngay nhé. Mua càng sớm, giá vé máy bay đi Seattle càng rẻ.
Hiện nay, có nhiều hãng hàng không trong và ngoài nước cùng khai thác đường bay tới Seattle, Mỹ như Eva Airways, Korean Air, Singapore Airlines, Asiana Airlines, Vietnam Airlines…
Tùy theo sở thích và nhu cầu của bạn mà bạn có thể chọn hãng bay mà mình yêu mến.Sau đây là bảng giá vé máy bay đi Seattle của các hãng bay có đường bay tới Seattle:
Bảng giá vé tham khảo cho hành trình bay từ Việt Nam đi Seattle, Mỹ
Điểm đi Điểm đến Giá vé (VND) Ngày bay Hãng bay Hà Nội (Việt Nam) Seattle ( Hoa Kỳ) 24,569,000 VND 28/8/2016 Hãng hàng không Việt Nam Hà Nội (Việt Nam) Seattle ( Hoa Kỳ) 25,098,000 VND 28/8/2016 Korean Air TP.Hồ Chí Minh Seattle ( Hoa Kỳ) 27,765,000 VND 28/8/2016 Emirates TP.Hồ Chí Minh Seattle ( Hoa Kỳ) 29,920,000 VND 28/8/2016 China Southern Airlines
Vé máy bay đi Seattle giá rẻ
Seatte thành phố của công nghệ, kỹ thuật hiện đại nằm trên vịnh biển tuyệt đẹp vùng Tây Bắc Thái Bình Dương của Hoa Kỳ thuộc bang Washington nhìn toàn cảnh từ máy bay nó là một bức tranh sơn thủy tuyệt vời, hàng ngàn quả đồi xinh xắn uốn lượn theo các vịnh biển chạy xa tít tận chân trời, những khu dân cư bố trí xen lẫn theo các rừng cây xanh và hệ thống hồ ao, sông ngòi,… đã tôn tạo để thành phố Seattle nổi danh là thành phố xanh.
Như vậy, không có lý do gì để bạn không đến Seattle tham quan ngay hôm nay. Nếu bạn còn đang thắc mắc đường bay từ Việt Nam tới Seattle, bạn hãy tham khảo bản đồ bay như dưới đây.
Cùng với sự phát triển của ngành du lịch, Seattle đã trở thành trung tâm văn hóa lớn với kiến trúc, ẩm thực và nghệ thuật vào bậc nhất nước Mỹ. Seattle cuốn hút du khách bởi sự kết hợp tinh tế giữa những ngôi nhà có phong cách hiện đại nhưng vẫn giữ được những khoảng không thanh bình với vô vàng những hoạt động ngoài trời luôn để lại trong lòng du khách những cảm nhận tuyệt vời nhất.
Các điểm du lịch hấp dẫn ở Seattle
Broadway: Một trong những điểm nên dừng chân ở Seattle là Broadway, đây là khu phố đông dân nhất của thành phố với những tòa nhà cao tầng và các căn hộ dọc theo đường phố. Điều đó cũng có nghĩa là nó là một trung tâm mua sắm, thực phẩm và giải trí, đặc biệt là sự đa dạng văn hóa. Pine Street và Pine Street cả hai đều có rất nhiều câu lạc bộ và nhà hàng, và bạn chắc chắn nên đi dạo lên một trong các con đường này, nếu bạn có thời gian.
Video khám phá Seattle, Mỹ
Công viên quốc gia Rainier : Công viên Rainier sở hữu rất nhiều các danh thắng tuyệt đẹp, có ngọn núi Rainier được tuyết bao phủ quanh năm, nằm ở độ cao 4392m so với mực nước biển. Đây là ngọn núi cao nhất phía Tây Bắc của nước Mỹ.
Công viên Rainier còn có rất nhiều các thác nước, dòng sông và đồng cỏ tạo nên một khung cảnh thiên nhiên tuyệt đẹp và thanh bình. Mùa đông ở công viên này có rất nhiều tuyết trắng, mùa hè ngập tràn sắc xanh của cây cỏ. Đến đây vào bất cứ mùa nào du khách cũng có cơ hội ngắm nhìn những khung cảnh thiên nhiên tuyệt đẹp ở nhiều góc độ khác nhau muốn đến đây ngắm phong cảnh nơi đây hãy mua vé máy bay đi Seattle giá rẻ
Đài phun nước ở công viên trung tâm Seattle: Đài phun nước này là một công trình nghệ thuật nổi tiếng tại công viên Seattle Center. Đài phun nước được thiết kế hình bán cầu độc đáo như một vật thể bay không xác định. Nó không chỉ tạo ra một công viên nước phục vụ giải trí cho người dân Seattle mà còn là sân khấu chính của những lễ hội nổi tiếng nơi đây.
Gum wall: Đây là bức tường kẹo cao su độc đáo, một trong những điểm đến ấn tượng và nổi bật của thành phố Seattle. Gum wall được bắt đầu hình thành vào đầu những năm 1990 khi nhiều người đợi mua vé xem hài kịch ở nhà hát Seattle Theatresports quá lâu, và những bã kẹo cao su được dùng để gắn những đồng xu vào tường, nhưng sau này thì đồng xu bị lấy đi, chỉ còn lại bã kẹo. Bức tường cao su độc đáo này nằm trong một con hẻm dài 20 m, bức tường cao su này thu hút rất nhiều lượt khách đến tham quan mỗi ngày. Gum wall ngày càng có nhiều bã kẹo cao su và nhiều màu sắc khác nhau, tạo nên nét độc đáo của Seattle.
Đi Mỹ, Du lịch đến Seattle bạn có thể tham gia một số những hội chợ và các lễ hội nổi bật hàng năm ở Seattle như Liên hoan phim Quốc tế Seattle, sự kiện Seafair diễn ra trong suốt Tháng 7 và 8, các chương trình âm nhạc, nghệ thuật và vui chơi giải trí Labor Day…
Vé máy bay đi Seattle giá rẻ. Ăn uống ở Seattle
Cà phê Starbucks
Thành phố xinh đẹp này không chỉ có những cảnh quan đẹp, những nhà máy sản xuất máy bay lừng danh mà còn được biết đến với thương hiệu cà phê Starbucks – một trong những thức uống hàng đầu trên thế giới. Chính vì thế, hãy thử một tách cà phê Starbucks và ngắm nhìn thành phố tươi trẻ này ngay tại nơi đã sinh ra chúng nhé. nhanh tay đặt cho mình vé máy bay đi Seattle giá rẻ
Hamburger tại nhà hàng C J’s Eatery
Thức ăn nhanh là một phần của nước Mỹ nói chung và của thành phố seattle nói riêng, vì thế nếu đã đến Seattle, bạn nhất định sẽ không quên món Hamburger tại nhà hàng C J’s Eatery. Không giống với các món Hamburger khác, món Hamburger tại nhà hàng C J’s Eatery luôn được khen ngợi là hấp dẫn, thơm ngon, còn nhà C J’s Eatery luôn lọt top những nhà hàng lớn nhất tại Seattle nơi có thể làm thỏa mãn tất cả nhu cầu của thực khách.
Nhà hàng thức ăn nhanh ở Tat’s Deli
Mua vé máy bay đi Seattle giá rẻ. Nếu bạn yêu thích những món ăn nhanh bạn hãy đến Tat’s Deli. Đây sẽ là điểm dừng chân lý tưởng cho những ai thích đồ ăn nhanh với hương vị rất đậm đà. Điều đặt biệt khi đến Tat’s Deli bạn có thể gọi điện thoại đặt món và được giao đến tận nơi.
Mua sắm ở Seattle
Có rất nhiều địa chỉ mua sắm ở Seattle dành riêng cho bạn. Các địa chỉ mua sắm đó là:
Chợ Pike Place
Pike Place Market là nơi mua sắm và ăn uống thú vị nhất thành phố dành cho những lữ khách đam mê shopping và ẩm thực. tới đây, bạn sẽ thấy la liệt các mặt hàng từ cá tươi, rau, trái cây, hoa, pho mát, các loại thịt, nướng …cho tới các hàng hóa nghệ thuật, hàng thủ công và đồ cổ. Nó cũng là chợ nông dân lâu đời nhất của ve may bay di My góp phần đưa bạn đến những điều hoài cổ về thương mại trong quá khứ.
Đi sâu vào trong chợ, bạn sẽ thấy vô số gian hàng đầy màu sắc, chuyên bày bán mọi thứ và sẵn sàng đáp ứng nhu cầu mua sắm của bạn.
Macy’s
Macy’s ở trung tâm thành phố Seattle là điểm mua sắm dành cho nhiều tầng lớp và mọi lứa tuổi, giới tính. Nơi đây cho phép bạn tham quan, chiêm ngưỡng và mua sắm rất nhiều quần áo, giày dép, đồ dùng gia đình, đồ gỗ và mỹ phẩm. Cửa hàng bách hóa Macy’s là một điểm mua sắm lớn tại trung tâm thành phố Seattle. Macy’s là một điểm mua sắm không thể bỏ qua.
Cửa hàng Flagship Nordstrom
Nếu bạn đang tìm cửa hàng bán lẻ cao cấp và lớn nhất Seattle thì Flagship Nordstrom chính là địa chỉ mà bạn cần ghé qua. Các cửa hàng Flagship Nordstrom là lớn nhất trong chuỗi các cửa hàng bán lẻ cao cấp mang lại niềm vui mua sắm cho mọi người. Với các thương hiệu phổ biến của quần áo, giày dép, đồ gia dụng, đồ trang sức, mỹ phẩm, Nordstrom hứa hẹn sẽ là địa chỉ mua sắm tuyệt vời dành cho bạn.
Quảng trường Pioneer
Khu phố cổ nhất của Seattle, Quảng trường Pioneer là khu mua sắm sôi động của thành phố Seattle. Trong các tòa nhà lịch sử là cửa hàng, phòng trưng bày nghệ thuật, các cửa hàng đồ nội thất, đồ cổ và nhà sách… giúp bạn tha hồ tham quan và khám phá, đồng thời chọn mua được những món hàng hóa có giá trị.
Với những điểm đến kỳ thú, những địa danh du lịch hấp dẫn, Seattle là lựa chọn hoàn hảo cho chuyến du lịch cuối năm của bạn. Với vé máy bay đi Mỹ, bạn sẽ không phải quá lo lắng về chi phí cho hành trình đi lại của bạn khi mua vé máy bay đi Seattle giá rẻ | {
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The prime minister took the unprecedented decision to release his personal tax records on Saturday, as growing anger over revelations in the Panama Papers threatened to derail his premiership.
David Cameron: I know I should have handled it better. Not a great week Read more
But the extraordinary move seems set to plunge David Cameron into further controversy, as it emerged that his mother transferred two separate payments of £100,000 to his accounts in 2011, allowing the family estate to avoid a potential £80,000 worth of inheritance tax.
Four years after first promising to open his financial affairs to public view, Downing Street published a document detailing Cameron’s income and tax payments from 2009-10 to 2014-15. The move came after an emotional Cameron admitted to the Conservative party’s spring forum that he alone was to blame for the furore caused by his failure to be frank about his profits from an offshore investment fund.
On Monday, Cameron will announce the establishment of a taskforce, led by HM Revenue & Customs and the National Crime Agency, to examine the legality of the financial affairs of companies mentioned in the Panama Papers, where documents relating to his father’s offshore fund were discovered by the Guardian and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
The taskforce will draw on investigators, compliance specialists and analysts from HMRC, the National Crime Agency, the Serious Fraud Office and the Financial Conduct Authority. There will be new money provided of up to £10m.
But following the release of the prime minister’s tax records, Cameron now faces questions over whether his family took elaborate steps to minimise the amount of inheritance tax that would eventually be due on their estate.
What’s in David Cameron’s tax returns: a few strokes of luck but no shady shenanigans Read more
The records show that the prime minister received a considerable boost to his savings in 2011. Following the death of his father in 2010, Cameron was left £300,000 tax free as an inheritance. However, his mother also transferred two payments of £100,000 to him in May and July 2011.
Inheritance tax is not payable on gifts that are paid at least seven years before the source of the possession dies, be it property or money.
A spokesman for the prime minister said that Cameron’s mother and father had “some years earlier” transferred the family home to their eldest son, Alexander Cameron, and the sums paid in 2011 were considered to be Cameron’s share.
Speaking in central London, Cameron admitted: “It has not been a great week. I know that I should have handled this better, I could have handled this better. I know there are lessons to learn and I will learn them. Don’t blame No 10 Downing Street or nameless advisers, blame me.”
The four-page document, compiled by the prime minister’s personal accountants, shows:
Cameron paid £75,898 in income tax on a total income of £200,307 last year.
Of that total, £3,052 represented interest earned on significant savings, estimated by experts to amount to £300,000, in an unnamed high street bank.
A year earlier, in 2013/14 , Cameron earned £6,681 interest on savings, suggesting the amount of savings deposited in the account could be a lot higher.
Cameron and his wife, Samantha, benefited from around £100,000 in rent from a property in Notting Hill, west London, each year.
In 2010-11, the prime minister was essentially able to live for free in No 10, with £20,000 of his income deemed untaxed. The chartered accountant RNS reported that this was a “longstanding practice”. Cameron “voluntarily” cancelled it out for the following three years by declaring an equivalent amount taxable. He waived the deduction in 2014-15.
The Camerons also received around £140,000 in 2010 from the sale of shares, including those held in Ian Cameron’s investment fund, Blairmore Holdings.
Major outgoings in 2011/12 included the purchase of £140,000 worth of land adjoining the prime minister’s constituency home in Witney, Oxfordshire.
£120,000 was spent refurbishing the No 11 flat where the Camerons live.
Last week, the prime minister was forced to admit that he had made a £19,000 profit from the Blairmore fund set up by his father after days of describing it as a private matter. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had claimed Cameron had “misled the public” and “lost the trust of the British people”.
The Observer view on how to clean up a squalid world financial mess | Observer editorial Read more
Explaining his failure to be frank at the beginning of the week about his profits from the offshore fund, Cameron told his activists that emotion had clouded his thinking. He said: “I was obviously very angry about what people were saying about my Dad. I loved my Dad, I miss him every day. He was a wonderful father and I’m very proud of everything he did.
“But I mustn’t let that cloud the picture. The facts are these: I bought shares in a unit trust, shares that are like any other sorts of shares, and I paid taxes on them in exactly the same way. I sold those shares. In fact, I sold all the shares that I owned, on becoming prime minister.
“And later on I will be publishing the information that goes into my tax return, not just for this year but the years gone past, because I want to be completely open and transparent about these things.
“I will be the first prime minister, the first leader of a major party, to do that and I think it is the right thing to do.”
The financial secretary to the Treasury, David Gauke, said of the taskforce: “Everyone should pay their fair share of tax, just as the honest majority already does. No government has done more to make sure we crack down on tax evasion and aggressive avoidance, both here in the UK and internationally.
“But as the Panama Papers show, tax evasion is part of a wider set of international criminality activity, together with money laundering, illicit finance and evading sanctions.”
The leaders of the Scottish Labour and Conservative parties also published their tax returns before David Cameron on Saturday afternoon.
'The game is rigged by those who write the rules': British readers on the Panama papers Read more
Kezia Dugdale revealed that she had an income of £57,465 in 2014-15 and was charged £11,250.40 tax, and challenged the other Scottish party leaders to do likewise. Later Ruth Davidson published her own 2014-15 tax return, showing earnings of £52,223 and tax of £10,513.
Dugdale’s return also revealed that the fee for her regular Daily Record column was donated in full to the charity MND Scotland, although she continued to pay tax on it.
Dugdale, who was the first to publish, said: “Politicians need to not only play by the rules, they need to be seen to be playing by the rules.
“So today I am publishing my tax return for last year. I have nothing to hide. And I challenge my fellow Scottish party leaders to do the same.”
On Sunday morning the SNP challenged the rest of Cameron’s cabinet to publish their tax returns, with the party’s Westminster leader, Angus Robertson, writing to the prime minister requesting he provided full disclosure of his government ministers and if they had benefited from offshore tax havens. The SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, has yet to publish her tax return.
• This article was amended on 11 April 2016. An earlier version implied that tax, after a tax free allowance of £325,000, would be due on gifts made at least seven years before the source of the possession dies. This is not the case.
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Those who live and watch the weather in the Great Plains know that the storms there are not singular in their effects. A lot of factors come into play.
How much moisture is locked in the soil, what the previous months had wrought weather-wise, how much runoff the rivers had been handling, and even how the volatile currents in the atmosphere mix as spring jostles with winter—all these things affect whether you can take the kids to the park or plant the corn this week or next or go fishing on the river today or tomorrow.
In mid-March, all of those factors came into play, and what looked like a land-based hurricane hitting Nebraska and its neighboring states on the weather radar was just that: a horrific and record-breaking storm that even many old-timers had never seen the likes of before. Meteorologists call such storms “bomb cyclones” and this was one of the biggest ever. The flooding in Nebraska was the worst in 50 years.
“This was a monster, no question about it,” said Greg Carbin, chief of forecast operations for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Prediction Center.
And what that “monster” has left behind is opening up the never-ending national debate on how to take care of our infrastructure, which was left severely damaged in this storm’s wake. Everyone agrees that the United States has fallen behind on keeping up its roads and bridges and flood levees—even its airports and schools and sewer systems. And everyone knows the cost of fixing those problems will be huge.
In its 2017 report card on the condition of our nation’s infrastructure, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) awarded a D+ or “poor” rating. The study estimated the cost of bringing America’s infrastructure to a state of good repair (a grade of B) by 2025 at $4.6 trillion, of which only about 55 percent has been committed. Improving roads and bridges alone will require $1.1 trillion more than states, localities, and the federal government have allocated.
“It’s hurting our economy, it’s hurting our communities’ ability to grow, it’s hurting our quality of life, and in some cases, there are public safety concerns,” Kristina Swallow, then the president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, said in an interview last year. “Our infrastructure is not meeting our needs.”
That infrastructure cost—and the question of who will pay for it—has been one of the focal points of the discussion over the bomb cyclone hitting Nebraska. The cost of the damage has surpassed $1.3 billion, state officials say, according to the Associated Press. That includes $449 million in damage to roads, levees, and other infrastructure, $440 million in crop losses, and $400 million in cattle losses.
The federal government is offering emergency funding for basic cleanups, but the states and cities and counties have been left to their own devices to rebuild washed away bridges.
Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts said in interviews in late March, “I don’t think there’s ever been a disaster this widespread in Nebraska. …Obviously we’ve got a lot of recovery left ahead of us. It’s going to be a long road for us to rebuild our infrastructure and get people back in their homes.”
About 290 miles of roads have been closed, and 200 of the miles that need major repair are part of the state highway system.
“We will work as quickly as possible,” Ricketts said. “But when it comes to the major projects like our public infrastructure, roads, bridges, we’re going to need the public’s patience because it is going to take a while to get all of this recovered.”
The reason that this Great Plains emergency is bringing this issue to the forefront is its timing. The polarization of politics has frozen in its tracks what used to be a fairly simple process of infrastructure investment. For decades now, Congress and the White House have had a difficult time passing out what used to be favors to each other.
Infrastructure projects used to be a main currency of the legislative process. Call them pork barrel or earmarks projects, but Congress routinely crossed the aisle to pass this funding. Some might have been of the “bridge to nowhere” variety, but most fulfilled actual needs. It was a practical way to fix things, and a good way to get re-elected.
There were thoughts that the election of Donald Trump might move things along infrastructure-wise. Trump, after all, had been a real estate developer, knew how the construction process worked, dealt with state and local governments, and said that fixing American infrastructure was a big goal of his administration.
In 2015, even before he even announced he was running, Trump tweeted, “The only one to fix the infrastructure of our country is me.” On the campaign trail, Trump said he would “at least double” Hillary Clinton’s $275 billion in infrastructure spending. In his victory speech, Trump said, “We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals. And we will put millions of our people to work.”
He promised to make infrastructure a priority in his two State of the Union speeches. In early 2018, he sent Congress an infrastructure plan that included $200 billion in federal funds to stimulate more than $1.5 trillion in spending from local and state governments and private entities over a decade.
Yet whether because of his obsession with the Mueller investigation, the failure to replace Obamacare, or the wall-building imbroglio, neither Trump nor Congress has yet rolled up its sleeves to work on infrastructure spending. Trump’s 2020 budget request to Congress does call for a $1 trillion infrastructure plan, but it’s been scaled back from previous initiatives. In fact, it’s barely mentioned in the current budget request.
Why has infrastructure spending moved to the back of the line? First and foremost, the House chamber is now controlled by Democrats who will be reticent to help Trump achieve any success. Also, some Democrats prefer to make statements, forcing the Green New Deal or immigration rules or affordable housing regs into any infrastructure bill. Or Trump may have simply lost interest, deciding it isn’t worth trying with the 2020 election less than two years out.
The president and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have indicated they are still talking about some infrastructure deal, but most see it as unlikely to happen, especially if Trump uses the Mueller investigation against the Democrats, and it already appears he is going down that road.
“Is it time for infrastructure? Democrats and the administration are very far apart,” James Pethokoukis, an economic analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said on CNBC in late March. “I highly doubt we are going to see anything like that. Maybe if this was like the beginning of last year, now that we are deep into the election season, I don’t think so.”
On the other hand, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana—one of the Democrats running for president—understands that citizens are more concerned over their toilets flushing efficiently than a United Nations climate change resolution.
“Like public surface in general, sewers are unbelievably important,” he said in a public radio interview in February. “They’re so important that we make sure they work basically all of the time. Which is why you never think of them—that’s kind of the point. But it’s not that different from national security. It’s like I say, people experience the more freedom the less they think about it.”
“By the way, most infrastructure is underground,” he continued. “I know we think about bullet trains and airports. That’s cool, too, but if you really want to talk about a major American infrastructure program, come see what the combined sewer overflow cities are dealing with.”
In Nebraska, water flow is what they are dealing with, above ground and below and from the faucets. Hundreds of people in Nebraska’s Boyd County (nearer to South Dakota than Omaha) won’t have water for four to eight more weeks because an 11-foot wave of ice and water took out the 90-year-old Spencer Dam two weeks ago.
Then there are the road problems, such as the one the Omaha World-Heralddescribed: “West Dodge Road west of 204th Street looks like a pancake poured too thin, warped and uneven, with pieces peeling off.”
Colten Schafersman, who raises corn and chickens near Hooper, about 45 miles northeast of Omaha on the Elkhorn River, sees the infrastructure issue as very much about basic economics.
If the bridge over the Elkhorn River goes out, which it is about to now, Schafersman will have a hard time trucking his chickens and corn to market and silos. People living in a city wouldn’t put up with what he’s being forced to, he said in a TV interview.
“Where we go from our farm most of the time is about a mile across the river,” he says. “That’s for the people that work here too. But for us to get our goods to market, or for the people to get here for work, they’d have to drive 50 miles to go one mile. That’s what this is all about.”
Daniel McGraw is a freelance journalist and author living in Lakewood, Ohio. | {
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/NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION OR DISSEMINATION DIRECTLY, OR INDIRECTLY, IN WHOLE OR IN PART, IN OR INTO THE UNITED STATES./
CSE: HC
OTC: HHPHF
FSE: 0HCN
TORONTO, March 6, 2019 /CNW/ - High Hampton Holdings Corp. (CSE: HC) (FSE: 0HCN) ("High Hampton" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that Dieter MacPherson, the current Senior Vice President, Operations, at Aurora Cannabis Inc. (ACB-TSX), has been appointed as an independent member to its board of directors. The appointment further extends the Company's expertise in the cannabis industry and supports High Hampton's aggressive expansion in the California cannabis market.
Gary Latham, CEO of High Hampton, commented:
"We extend a warm welcome to Mr. MacPherson and recognize that he will be a significant asset to our Company. Together with the latest appointment of Cam Birge , the High Hampton board of directors has, once again, gained in strength and expertise and is now perfectly equipped to guide the Company through this important growth phase."
Dieter MacPherson, member of the board, added:
"I am happy to join High Hampton's board as an independent member and look forward to working closely with management and the team. The Company's recent shift in focus to be a vertical integrator in the California cannabis space is rooted in the executive team's bold foresight in navigating this burgeoning market, and I am eager to contribute to High Hampton's success story."
About Dieter MacPherson
Mr. MacPherson has approximately 10 years of experience as an advocate for sensible regulations and fair access to medical cannabis, contributing to the development of municipal regulations while working with industry associations, and presenting and speaking across the country on the evolution of cannabis policy and regulation. Since joining Aurora Cannabis Inc. in February, 2017 as Manager of Production, Mr. MacPherson has been in charge of planning, development and implementation of processes and procedures to increase productivity, create efficiencies and improve profitability. He has overseen a consistent enhancement in crop yields and overall production, while also playing a key role in facility design and workflow for Aurora Sky and the Company's Pointe-Claire, Quebec production facility. As Vice President Production, he has been responsible for strategic development and direct management for all Aurora cannabis production facilities.
About High Hampton Holdings Corp.
High Hampton Holdings Corp. is a Canadian-based cannabis sector brand and distribution company emerging as a true vertical integrator in California's legal cannabis space serving recreational and wellness markets. The Company's U.S. holdings are comprised of assets set up as a vertical stack including a distribution arm through BRAVO DISTRO; branding, packaging, manufacturing & processing carried out through MOJAVE JANE and CALIGOLD; and cultivation to scale via COACHELLAGRO and 420 REALTY. Operating out of licensed strategic locations within the state, High Hampton is leveraging its brand-focused business model to generate sustainable profits delivering quality product by recognized brands.
Social Media
Facebook: facebook.com/highhampton
Twitter: twitter.com/highhamptonHC
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/HighHampton
CALIGOLD Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/caligoldofficial
Stock Exchanges
High Hampton trades in Canada, ticker symbol HC on the CSE, and in Europe, ticker symbol 0HCN on the FSE. Neither the CSE, nor the FSE has approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release. Neither the CSE, nor the FSE accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Marijuana Industry Involvement
Canadian listings (CSE) will remain in good standing as long as they provide the disclosure that is rightly required by regulators and complying with applicable licensing requirements and the regulatory framework enacted by the applicable state in which they operate. Marijuana is legal in certain states however marijuana remains illegal under US federal law and the approach to enforcement of US federal law against marijuana is subject to change. Shareholders and investors need to be aware that adverse enforcement actions could affect their investments and that High Hampton's ability to access private and public capital could be affected and or could not be available to support continuing operations.
On behalf of the Board of Directors
High Hampton Holdings Corp.
Certain statements contained in this press release constitute forward-looking information. These statements relate to future events or future performance. The use of any of the words "could", "intend", "expect", "believe", "will", "projected", "estimated" and similar expressions and statements relating to matters that are not historical facts are intended to identify forward-looking information and are based on the Company's current belief or assumptions as to the outcome and timing of such future events. Actual future results may differ materially. In particular, this release contains forward-looking information relating to the intention of the parties to complete the Acquisition and certain ancillary transactions contemplated thereby. These transactions are subject to a number of material risks, and there is no assurance that they will be completed on the terms or within the timeframes currently contemplated, or at all. The forward-looking information contained in this press release is made as of the date hereof and the Company is not obligated to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities laws. Because of the risks, uncertainties and assumptions contained herein, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. The foregoing statements expressly qualify any forward-looking information contained herein.
All monetary references herein refer to Canadian dollars unless otherwise specified.
SOURCE High Hampton Holdings Corp.
For further information: 8 Wellington St. E. Mezzanine Level | Toronto, On | M5E 1C5 | www.HighHampton.com; Gary Latham, Chief Executive Officer, Email: [email protected], Phone: 703.629.5338; Christian Scovenna, Director, Email: [email protected], Phone: 416.453.4708 | {
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AP348980180592 More
AP Photo/Farah Abdi Warsameh
Welcome to Bitcoinistan!
Libertarians love Bitcoin.
About 44% of the online crypto-currency's users self-identify as Libertarians.
They love the fact that it's not controlled by a government or central bank — so no online Fed can "print" more of it and inflate our way out of trouble. They love that it's decentralized; it's the currency of The People, not The Man. They love that it's "mined," a bit like gold, because that makes it a bit like the gold standard, which libertarians think real currencies ought to be tied to. They love that Bitcoin isn't taxed, so you can hide your income from the government if you want to. They love the way its value reflects pure supply and demand, and not a value forced into the system by regulation or monopoly. And they love that it's fairly lawless — it's difficult to enforce rules (other than the rules of the market) when everyone in the market is anonymous.
So the Bitcoin experience gives us a glimpse of Libertarian paradise: What life would be like with as little government interference as possible, in a market free of burdensome laws and taxes.
Unfortunately, that experience looks like a total nightmare. It's characterized by radical instability, chaos, the rise of a boss-class of criminals who assassinate people they don't like, and a mass handover of wealth to a minority even smaller than the 1% that currently lauds it in the United States.
If Bitcoin was a country — Bitcoinistan? — it would be like Somalia. Consider:
View photos robber thief graffiti More
Flickr/Richt
Bitcoin is most useful to criminals.
Currently, for ordinary people, cash and credit work just fine. While some mainstream businesses do take Bitcoin, there is no compelling reason — yet — for ordinary people to use it. If you're a criminal, however, there are very compelling reasons to use it: you can transfer vast sums of cash completely anonymously. Cash transfers are a real problem for criminals. When you can't use bank accounts, lugging around vast sums of cash gets old pretty quickly. Bitcoin solves that. So Bitcoin is very, very empowering for criminals.
There is a Bitcoin crime wave going on right now.
Given that Bitcoin is good for criminals, it should not be surprising that those criminals are targeting other Bitcoin users for thefts. The most spectacular theft so far is the Sheep Marketplace robbery, in which one hacker appears to have emptied a massive Bitcoin marketplace of up to $220 million in Bitcoins. Note that Sheep Marketplace was basically a trading post for drug dealers. Bitcoin exchange and account thefts are very common. Here's a potted history of recent Bitcoin capers.
View photos rifle scope sight crosshair More
Lance Fisher / Flickr, CC
Bitcoin "law" is enforced by paid assassins.
The most shocking thing about the indictment of the Silk Road operator Ross Ulbricht was not the amount of money in Bitcoin he controlled (about $28 million). Rather, it was the fact that when other drug dealers ripped him off, he didn't put it down as the price of doing business. Instead, he is accused of hiring a hitman to murder six people he believed had stolen from him. Ulbricht was a Libertarian. In other words, there will be laws in the Bitcoin Libertarian paradise: And the people with the most Bitcoins will decide what that law is, when it should be applied, and how "justice" will be meted out. In Bitcoinistan, the sentence for non-violent financial crimes includes the death penalty, apparently. | {
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SMS Broadcast's Lee Gaywood, with his fiance Gemma Cooper. As a result of the late September SMS blast, around 20,000 people signed up to volunteer for Australian Marriage Equality and 170,000 people clicked through to seek further information. Mr Gaywood said a few weeks before the SMS was broadcast out, he reached out to the 'Yes' campaign to offer his company's services. After some back and forth, an agreement on the wording of the SMS, and legal approval, the plan went ahead. At this point, Mr Gaywood tasked a team of SMS Broadcast software developers to code a program that would randomly generate Australian mobile numbers. This process, he said, took a couple of days. In order to reduce costs he said each number was verified as being real, which meant a few additional days of work. It took between 10am and 6.30pm on the day of the SMS blast to send all 10,154,165 messages.
The text message sent to thousands of Australians on Saturday September 21. "The [limitation on the] number of messages that we sent out came as a cost thing to limit the expense to SMS Broadcast," Mr Gaywood said. "That's why we stopped". The commercial price SMS Broadcast would have charged if the SMS blast wasn't free, according to Mr Gaywood, would have been about $500,000, or roughly 5 cents per message. But in reality, Mr Gaywood's company would have paid wholesale rates of between 1 and 2 cents per text message, costing the company a total of between roughly $101,541.65 and $203,083.30. "We were quite concerned after the message went out about backlash against the company itself," Mr Gaywood said.
"The 'No' campaign had some quite vicious people, especially online, not from the campaign itself, but associated with it. So in our conversations, there was a lot of secrecy around us and I didn't want my staff to be confronted by people who have traditional beliefs about marriage. "Given the positive result now, we are certainly happy to put our name behind it and say that we played a small part in change." In June 2015, there were an estimated 31.01 million mobile phones subscribers in Australia, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The figure is more than Australia's population given that many people have more than one phone (for work and personal use). Given this, the text message reached approximately 32.75 per cent of Australian mobile subscribers. Mr Gaywood said he now planned to sell to political parties access to his service, which was designed purely for the 'Yes' vote and had not been used before. Asked if this meant he would allow parties of all political persuasions to send messages, such as Pauline Hanson's One Nation, Mr Gaywood initially laughed, before declaring that SMS Broadcast "wouldn't discriminate against any political party, as long as they followed spam compliance".
As has been previously reported, the 'Yes' campaign's message did not breach any regulations in sending the text because it was of a political nature and the law exempts such communications from being classified as spam. It also did not breach privacy laws, as the numbers were not acquired from a list but randomly generated. Asked if he believed those laws should be reformed, so as to enable citizens to opt out if they wanted, Mr Gaywood said this wasn't necessary. "I think political parties should be able to campaign in the best way they possibly can and that is going to mean getting their messages through to as many people as they want," he said. "I certainly understand that some people would prefer not to receive these messages. But if people are able to opt out of that, I don't think that would be beneficial to our political system overall. "I wouldn't agree that people should be able to opt out of that." | {
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In an interview with RIA Novosti, Russia’s Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Alexander Grushko said that all military and civilian collaboration between his government and the NATO alliance have ground to a halt. “NATO itself has refused to adopt a positive agenda for its relationship with Russia. It just doesn’t exist. And so far, there’s no sign that anyone in NATO knows how to get out of this impasse,” Grushko argued.
The deputy minister noted that current Russian-NATO relations are reminiscent of the state of the Soviet-NATO relationship during the Cold War. He openly expressed hope for a change in that state of affairs but asserted that the responsibility for that change should rest entirely on NATO’s shoulders.
By way of explanation, Grushko said that total military spending by NATO countries surpassed a trillion dollars last year, making that spending more than 22 times Russia’s military budget. However, the combined budgets of European NATO countries, whose leaders have most consistently expressed concern over Russian military involvement in Ukraine, account for a small fraction of that figure; U.S. military spending, including spending on contingency operations, reached $890.8 billion in 2018.
NATO, Russia, and the USSR: a fraught history NATO was born 70 years ago today. Moscow has always viewed it as a threat, but that hasn't prevented three attempts to join the alliance. | {
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Am I the only one here that gets their tea and coffee orders right!?
186 shares | {
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Nicole Cameron, assistant professor of psychology at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Credit: Jonathan Cohen/Binghamton University
Sexual preference is influenced by males' adolescent social stress history and social status, according to a research team including Nicole Cameron, assistant professor of psychology at Binghamton University, State University of New York.
Cameron, along with Cheryl McCormick from Brock University in Ontario, Canada, tested the hypotheses that social stress in adolescence decreases the "attractiveness" of male rats as sexual partners and that dominance status is a protective factor against the effects of social stress, when it comes to finding a sexual partner. The team's main prediction was that females would spend more time with control males than stressed males, and that this bias would be greater for submissive than for dominant rats.
The team subjected a group of male rats to social stress during adolescence, forcing the rats to change cage-partners regularly and establish their dominance in a group over and over. The team then placed a female into a mating chamber with one male who was stressed during adolescence and one who wasn't stressed, doing this with dominant and for subordinate rats separatly.
Among dominant pairs, female rats preferred the stressed males, spending more time with and visiting them more often. Among submissive pairs, females spent more time with control males than with social stress males. The results show that experience of stress in adolescence leads to long-lasting changes in males that are perceptible to females, are moderated by social status and influence sexual behavior.
"What we found was that of the dominant animals, the animals that were stressed during adolescence were more sexually favored by the female. But in the subordinate animals, the animals that were stressed during adolescence were not favored anymore. So, not only is the female capable of selecting partners as a function of social stressors that they have during adolescence, but she can tell which animal is subordinate and which animal is dominant when she gets tested, and she gets to choose between the two of them," said Cameron.
"Basically a female rat can identify who are dominant animals and who has been stressed during adolescence, and she will go toward the male that reacted the best to the stressor by being dominant in his cage. The male that was stressed during adolescence and is a submissive animal is really the loser, because the female will not go toward him as much. If a male received a social stressor during adolescence but survived this and became a dominant animal, the female is more likely to like this male compared to the control male that didn't suffer stress. But animals that suffer stress and became a submissive animal, that makes him a double loser, and the female will not spend time with him."
According to Cameron, this is the first time that researchers have studied the effects of social stress and the establishment of dominance, on female choice for a partner in rodents.
"Research has shown this in monkeys, but this is the first time that somebody has shown the impact of social stressors on dominance hierarchy in males and their impact on mating in rodents," said Cameron. "We showed that, yes, the dominance established after social stress really determines who will mate and who will not."
Cameron thinks that the results could lead to a better understanding of the effects of environmental stress on human reproduction.
"A lot of people are not capable of having children on their own, or it's difficult to do that. It's possible that environmental stressors are one of the variables that influence capacity for people to have children on their own," she said. "I think that this study is translational because it can lead us to a better understanding of the reproductive axis functions in mammals, including humans."
Cameron and her colleagues want to look at animals that have received low level of maternal care, and on top of that give them social stress, and find out what is going to happen to those animals later in life, not just at the level of reproduction but also in terms of learning and memory.
The paper, "The sexual preference of female rats is influenced by males' adolescent social stress history and social status," was published in Hormones and Behavior.
Explore further Fish sperm race for reproductive success
More information: Cheryl M. McCormick et al, The sexual preference of female rats is influenced by males' adolescent social stress history and social status, Hormones and Behavior (2016). Journal information: Hormones and Behavior Cheryl M. McCormick et al, The sexual preference of female rats is influenced by males' adolescent social stress history and social status,(2016). DOI: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2016.12.001 | {
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go to the next page on reddit half of the links are the same
928 shares | {
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Tilastokeskus lopettaa tuomioistuimien ratkaisujen tilastoinnin tänä vuonna. Syynä on viraston tiukkeneva talous. Tilastojen tuottamiseen ei ole saatu tarvittavaa rahoitusta.
Esimerkiksi käräjäoikeuksien rikosasioiden ja siviiliasioiden ratkaisuja ei enää tilastoida. Myös hallinto-oikeuksien, hovioikeuksien ja korkeimpien oikeuksien ratkaisujen tilastot lakkautetaan. Tilastokeskus ei seuraa enää myöskään syyttäjien tekemiä ratkaisuja tai julkisen oikeusavun antamista.
Kyseisiä tilastoja ei tule enää tältä vuodelta, vaan viime vuoden tilastot jäävät viimeisiksi julkaistuiksi tilastoiksi. Kaikista tuomioistuinten tilastoista on vastannut Tilastokeskuksessa yksi ihminen. | {
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Bertrand Russell’s 10 Commandments
One of Bertrand Russell’s lesser-known pro-secular works is a 1951 piece for New York Times Magazine called “The Best Answer to Fanaticism: Liberalism.” In this, he wrote a “Liberal Decalogue,” what might be better called today a “Secular 10 Commandments”:
Do not feel absolutely certain of anything. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavour to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.
My personal favorite is #8. What’s yours? | {
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So the Cards likely will trade for an upgrade.
And this is why I was fine with the Cards declining to extend a hefty offer to Brandon Moss, and with the Cards picking up Jaime Garcia’s one-year, $12 million option — because on the trade market it gives them more options.
“A lot of people are asking, ‘Does this make sense?’” Mo said, “and I think the key for us as we pick up this option is, we feel comfortable having seven starters going into next year. What that really means is, as we look to the trade market as we get to the GM meetings, we want to be able to not have our hands tied. For example, if we had not picked up the option, and all of a sudden we feel there’s a trade that might make sense for us that’s going to have to include a starter, then we’re left with having to backfill.
“Given what Jaime was able to accomplish last year, clearly it didn’t end the way he would’ve liked it to, but he still ate a lot of valuable innings for us. When I think about what’s out there on the free-agent market, I still think it’s an asset to have. … And what if we have to move someone else? It would be nice to still have the depth in our rotation.” | {
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From juice cleanses to vaccines to gluten to exercise to, uh, vagina steaming, celebrities like Jenny McCarthy and Gwyneth Paltrow are often found making claims that have little or no scientific evidence behind them. Timothy Caulfield recently wrote a book exploring the world of celebrity pseudoscience called Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?
But while much has been written about the cause of our obsession with the rich and famous, Caulfield argues that not enough has been done to debunk celebrity messages and promises about health, diet, beauty, or the secret to happiness. From the obvious dangers, to body image of super-thin models and actors, or Gwyneth Paltrow’s enthusiastic endorsement of a gluten free-diet for almost everyone, or Jenny McCarthy’s ill-informed claims of the risks associated with vaccines, celebrity opinions have the power to dominate our conversations and outlooks on our lives and ourselves.
Julia Belluz of Vox interviewed Caulfield about the book.
JB: So is Gwyneth actually wrong about everything? TC: It’s incredible how much she is wrong about. Even when she is right about stuff — like telling people to eat more fruits and vegetables — there is always a bit of a tinge of wrongness. She’ll say, “It has to be organic,” for example. She is still distracting us with these untrue details, as opposed to just pushing the honest truth.
See also Your detoxing juice cleanse is bullshit.
Update: I had forgotten about this book, so I was pleased to be reminded of it by this recent interview with Caulfield about celebrity health advice.
Colon cleanse: There is no evidence we need to cleanse our colons or detoxify our bodies. Vagina steaming to detoxify and increase fertility: again, absolutely ridiculous. Getting stung by bees is her latest thing for anti-aging — because, yes, anaphylaxis is so revitalizing. Goop, her website, suggested wearing a bra can cause cancer. This is raising fears, completely science free. I could go on and on and on.
Update: From Yvette d’Entremont at The Outline, The Unbearable Wrongness of Gwyneth Paltrow. | {
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Check out our new site Makeup Addiction
Did I just hear you say barking lot?! | {
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“Man that’s a fucken five metre shark…”
“It’s looking at me, ay”
“Holy fucken shit”
“Get fucked”
“Holy fucken shit!”
This is not a drill. This is just another morning’s fishing in a tinny off the coast of Australia.
Last week we pondered if Australia was the World’s Most Dangerous Surf Trip…
That was before Newcastle beaches were closed for a week due to numerous shark sightings
This weekend, at Blacksmiths Beach, about 30 miles south of Newcastle, a 5m Great White caused a couple of Aussie fishermen to ponder the prudence of the expression ‘We’re gonna need a bigger boat’…
Tim Watson and Allan de Sylva were fishing off Blacksmiths, when a five-metre shark began circling. “It felt like getting trapped in a room with an angry pit bull,” de Sylva told Australia’s Herald Sun newspaper. “It wouldn’t leave us alone. You almost wanted to stop and admire it but it was being pretty aggressive. It was as big as a wagon car – that’s what it felt like looking at it.”
“We had a bit of blood in the boat that was getting washed in and out,” added Watson. “When it rose up we realised how big it was. It then stopped and nudged the boat. If you watch the video closely the boat rocks a solid two to three foot to the edge. If it had hit it much harder the boat would have taken in a bit of water. A few times it actually started to bring its face out of the water and was rubbing it along the boat or something.” | {
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(CNN) -- Marvin Isley, youngest member of the soulful Isley Brothers R&B group, has died from complications with diabetes, hospital officials said Monday. He was 56.
Isley passed away Sunday morning at the Seasons Hospice within Weiss Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, according to representatives at both facilities.
The original group formed in 1954 with the three eldest brothers Isley -- O'Kelly Jr., Rudolph and Ronald -- which recorded several singles, including "Shout," "This Old Heart of Mine" and the Grammy-winning "It's Your Thing." Marvin Isley joined in 1973, when the group expanded to six performers.
The full group enjoyed massive radio airplay with lists of hits, including "That Lady," "The Heat is On," "Go For Your Guns" and "Fight the Power."
The Isley Brothers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. Marvin retired from performing five years later, and eventually diabetes led him to have both legs amputated. | {
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No water sold in the EU can now claim to protect against dehydration.
In a scarcely believable ruling, a panel of experts threw out a claim that regular water consumption is the best way to rehydrate the body. The bizarre diktat from Brussels has far-reaching implications for member states, including Britain, as no water sold in the EU can now claim to protect against dehydration. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has signed the order Any producer breaching the order, signed by European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, faces being jailed for up to two years. It took the 21 scientists on the panel three years of analysis into the link between water and dehydration to come to their extraordinary conclusion.
The euro is burning, the EU is falling apart and yet here they are, highly paid, highly pensioned officials trying to deny us the right to say what is patently true. Conservative MEP Roger Helmer
Last night the decision of the European Food Safety Authority’s panel on Dietetic Products, Nutrition and Allergies was labelled “beyond parody”. Ukip’s deputy leader Paul Nuttall, who sits on the European Parliament’s Public Health Committee, said: “I had to read this four or five times before I believed it. “It is a perfect example of what the EU does best and makes the bendy banana law look positively sane.” Conservative MEP Roger Helmer said: “The euro is burning, the EU is falling apart and yet here they are, highly paid, highly pensioned officials trying to deny us the right to say what is patently true.
“If ever there were an episode which demonstrates the folly of the great European project then this is it.” A spokesman for the Department of Health said: “Of course water hydrates. While we support the EU in preventing false claims about commercial products, we need to exercise common sense as far as possible.” Jose Manuel Barroso and David Cameron at a round table meeting earlier this year German professors Dr Moritz Hagenmeyer and Dr Andreas Hahn, of the Institute for Food Science and Human Nutrition at Hanover Leibniz University, applied for approval for the seemingly uncontentious claim that “regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration”. However, bureaucrats refused to back them.
After a meeting in Italy a delegation of scientists concluded that reduced water content in the body was a symptom of dehydration rather than a risk factor that drinking water could control. Now their verdict has been turned into a regulation that will become UK law by December 6 and is bound to send shockwaves through the soft drinks industry. RELATED NEWS CONTAGION: EUROPE ON THE BRINK AS DEBT CRISIS SPREADS TO SPAIN GERMANY IN SECRET PLOT TO BLOCK BRITISH EU REFERENDUM
BRITAIN TOLD TO STOP BEING SELFISH AND 'SPEAK GERMAN' EUROPE'S TOUGHEST HOUR SINCE WWII Last night Professor Hahn said he was considering appealing against the ruling in the European courts. The EU has a long history of passing bizarre regulations, the most infamous being 1995 rules setting out dimensions for fruit and vegetables which led to excessively curved bananas and ugly carrots being banned. And last year attempts to regulate the use of root vegetables in Cornish pasties sparked chaos. | {
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The Chinese Navy’s recent radio warnings against Filipino military aircraft won’t stop the Philippines from conducting aerial patrols over the South China Sea, Malacañang said on Monday.
In a press briefing, Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque stressed that Filipino pilots are willing to die to assert the country’s sovereignty over the Spratly Islands, or the Nansha Islands as China calls it, in the disputed waters.
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“They will not stop us. We will continue with our flights. We will assert our sovereignty. If need be, Filipino pilots will die for our sovereignty,” Roque told reporters.
A radio warning was reportedly issued by the Chinese Navy as a United States Navy plane was conducting a surveillance flight over the Spratly Islands on Friday.
“Philippine military aircraft! I’m warning you again. Leave immediately or you will bear responsibility for all the consequences!” the Chinese Navy’s radio message was heard as saying.
China’s warning on Filipino military aircraft appeared to be harsher compared to the ones issued to American aircraft: “Leave immediately and keep out to avoid any misunderstanding.” In reply, the US said: “This is United States naval aircraft conducting lawful military activities beyond the national airspace of any coastal state and exercising these rights is guaranteed by international law. I am operating with due regard for the rights and duties of all states.” READ: China threatens PH military aircraft in latest flight over South China Sea
Roque said they do not have any information yet on the matter and an investigation would be conducted.
If the information was true, Roque said: “The good news is ‘di naman nagpatakot ang ating mga piloto. Tinakot sila, hindi sila nagpatakot. Tinuloy pa rin nila ang lipad nila dahil meron tayong teritoryo doon.”
“The Philippine pilots continued their flights. They disregarded that. That means that we are upholding our title. That we are asserting our sovereignty because we conducted the overflight over our islands,” Roque said.
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He added that he would even ask the Filipino pilots if he cursed at the radio warning. “Tatanungin ko po kung totoo yan, at kung totoo yan, tatanungin ko yung piloto kung minura niya,” the Presidential Spokesperson said.
“Kasi tinakot siya eh, eh alam mo naman mga Pilipino, di naman tayo madali matakot dahil matagal na tayong takot,” he also said. /vvp
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“America’s New Hot Wine,” blared a Washington Post headline. “Older and Wiser,” counsels the venerable Financial Times. “The next big food and wine destination,” offers Mashable, the beating heart of the web 2.0 zeitgeist. For Georgia and its ancient winemaking tradition, the plaudits have recently come thick and fast.
And for good reason: Georgian wine is generally superb. The country boasts an embarrassing bounty of unique native grape varietals, and ancient methods that continue to confound and delight the winemaking world. And in Georgian wine, geopolitically aware connoisseurs are offered a fine pairing for their onglet a l’echalotte (for me, I recommend the dark, fierce depth of the saperavi varietal) that doubles as a kind of repudiation of Russian militarism, while giving nods to a steadfast and dependable Western friend.
But Georgia’s wine is about far more than rich tastes or a convenient reflection of a simmering contemporary conflict. Georgia’s relationship with wine is deeply, nearly indescribably old and admixed into the very core of its culture. And it’s that ancient heritage and long history that imbue it with geopolitical significance even today.
Georgia is the birthplace of wine. According to recent archeological evidence, proto-Georgian inhabitants cultivated grapes and made wine as far back as 6000 BC. Some linguists even suggest the Georgian word for wine, ghvino, is what gave wine its name. Just as striking, many of the same methods that early Georgians used to make their wine — such as using wax-lined earthenware vessels known as qvevri buried in the ground — are traditions that continue even today. Qvevri winemaking is not only historically interesting (UNESCO recognized it in its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2013), but is increasingly dealing shocks to oenophiles for the complexity and varied tones of its wines.
Georgia’s wine is not only the national drink of choice, but a symbol of Georgian identity and civilizational continuity. There are not many places where grapes are seen tended and growing in central districts, on apartment block balconies, in storefronts, and even from dingy iron-doored garages, but the Georgian capital Tbilisi is festooned with vines. Almost every family, it seems, grows grapes and makes their own wine. Indeed, some of the very best vintages in Georgia may never come from a decanter, but from the spout of a repurposed Fanta bottle drawn from a makeshift marani, or rustic Georgian wine cellar.
It is said that in ancient times, Georgian warriors would lace grape vines under their armor to grow from their bodies should they fall in battle. And Georgia, the second-oldest Christian state after Armenia, credits its evangelization to Saint Nino of Cappadocia, who preached the gospel bearing a cross made of grape vines bound with her own hair. Even today, the Georgian cross of Saint Nino, recognizable for the downward slant of its arms, is a ubiquitous symbol of Georgia’s Christian heritage.
Broad aspects of Georgian culture are bound to the country’s winemaking heritage. The Georgian feast, or the supra, is a highly ritualized event where a toastmaster sets the pace and meter through a series of ordered, lyrical toasts raised with (often homemade) wine. It is often said that the supra is symbolic of the Last Supper, though some form of the practice likely derived from pre-Christian traditions. Supras occur for moments of great joy, such as weddings, but also during periods of sorrow or reflection — and just about anything in between. Georgian cemeteries are dotted by permanent supra tables overlooking the family plot, where friends and family will come the Monday after Easter to feast in honor of their loved ones. And wine, as always, is the centerpiece. Be in light, they say, emptying their last drops of wine in the sign of a cross over the plot.
Georgian wine may be finally gaining some well-earned international attention, but it has been a long road, despite the country’s indisputable pedigree. The Georgian wine industry was devastated in the Soviet period through industrial homogenization and council-directed emphases on volume over quality. Georgia produced vast quantities of wine for Soviet markets, and especially Russia, but they largely emphasized sweet and semi-sweet varietals and blends that were favored by the Soviet elite. Qvevri winemaking persisted, but only as a household affair, as it was deemed too rustic for the scientifically calibrated Soviet palate.
Following a series of civil wars and instability after independence in the 1990s, the Georgian wine industry began to recover in the early 2000s, only to face new obstacles. Amid growing acrimony, Russia imposed a de facto embargo on Georgian wine in 2006, citing bogus phytosanitary “concerns” as a justification for shuttering the Georgian wine industry’s primary export market virtually overnight.
The embargo pushed the Georgia’s wine industry to the edge of ruin, but it also had the unintended effect of pushing Georgian winemakers to better hone their products for international tastes. Dry reds, once an export afterthought, have become an increasingly dominant offering. Qvevri wines were translated from village dacha affairs into a legitimate, and now industry-innovating, commercial product.
When Georgian wines returned to Russian shelves in 2013 after the embargo was lifted, they reentered in a much stronger position. In terms of sheer volume, Russia is again the prevailing market for Georgian wines. But now, Georgia’s varied offerings also enjoy a solid, cult following in Western markets, including among important segments of the global wine cognoscenti. And as strong as Georgian wine’s rise has been in the West, the real prize may be in the east, where the popularity of Georgian wine is reportedly exploding in places like China by tapping into a burgeoning and underserved middle class luxury goods market.
Still, the reopening of the Georgian market to Russia carries as much risk as opportunity. The Russian economic slowdown and the ever-present possibility that Russia may seek to wield its trade imbalance as a cudgel threatens the growth of the Georgian wine industry and the stability of the economy as a whole. It is not only that a renewed Russian ban would deal fresh blows to an emerging Georgian international industry, but that it could paradoxically help empower the very forces in Georgia that advocate revitalizing relations with Russia at the expense of the country’s Western orientation.
While Georgia has experienced periods of solid, and even spectacular, economic growth since 2003, this has translated unevenly for ordinary Georgians. Economic policies for much of this period emphasized economic growth through efficiency gains and developing a services-oriented economy. But such approaches did little to move the needle on perennially high unemployment. However, as the more labor-intensive Georgian agriculture sector has begun to revive (due in no small part to the reopening of the Russian market), joblessness in the country has concomitantly fallen. If Russia imposed a new embargo, those same jobs would likely evaporate.
Fearing for their livelihoods, some Georgians may join a small but growing chorus of voices — financed and coordinated at least in part by Moscow — that favor accommodating Russian imperial pretensions over the South Caucasus in exchange for economic stability. Advocates for such policies also dangle the possibility that Russia would abandon separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia and return these regions to Tbilisi’s control.
Perhaps not without merit, pro-Russia Georgians frequently point to unfulfilled Western promises from 2008 to bring Georgia into NATO as further evidence that Georgia is better off with Russia, and not against it. All this in mind, it stands to reason that drinking Georgian wine, and helping Georgia diversify from the expansive but temperamental Russian market, is a helping hand for a country hoping to stay out of Moscow’s clutches — militarily, economically, and otherwise.
Georgian wine is more than a timeless elixir or a hot international trend, but a very symbol of Georgian independence and, to no small degree, an actual, working fulcrum upon which some elements of its sovereignty may rest. But the good news is that we can do our part to help by simply picking up a bottle of a crisp tsinandali white or a deep red saperavi. Try several, find some that are yours, and discover a new perspective on wines from the oldest of the old world.
Georgian wine is not all that hard to find anymore. But to be sure, the Georgian Wine House is a great place to start to find the local retailers or online vendors that work best for you: http://www.georgianwinehouse.com/.
Peristsvaleba Sangria, a recipe for Georgian autumnal sangria:
One 750 ml bottle red Georgian wine (Saperavi recommended for some real harvest heft)
One cup fresh-squeezed mandarin orange juice, using a kind similar to those commonly grown in Georgia’s lush subtropical Black Sea coastal regions
Two (small) mandarin oranges, sliced into thin wedges
One ripe persimmon, cubed or sliced into wedges
One-half apple, preferably orchard fresh, slided into wedges
Slice the fruit and place it in a large pitcher. Add mandarin orange juice, wine, and stir well. Refrigerate at least 3-5 hours before serving.
Michael Hikari Cecire is a Black Sea regional analyst and an associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is co-editor of Georgian Foreign Policy: The Quest for Sustainable Security (2014) and the Colchis columnist at Business New Europe. Follow him on Twitter at @mhikaric.
Photo credit: Quinn Dombrowski | {
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The incident happened at the Government Primary School in Fatehpur, Lodhran in Punjab province
A Pakistani school teacher has been booked for forcing a primary school student to eat grass as punishment for not learning his lesson.
The incident happened at the Government Primary School in Fatehpur, Lodhran, a small city in Pakistan’s Punjab province, Dawn reported on Wednesday.
The video of the school teacher went viral on social media, showing seven-year-old Kashan being forced to either eat grass or read out the lesson in front of his class fellows.
The video clip shows Kashan failing to read the lesson and instead ending up eating grass after being forced by his teacher — identified as Hamid Raza.
Kashan’s father Mohammad Asghar told the daily that the incident happened two days ago. “The teacher is our relative and we forgive him for his act that he did as a joke,” he said.
District Police Officer Malik Jameel Zafar, however, took notice of the incident and directed the police to investigate the incident.
He ordered strict action if the teacher was found guilty. After the investigation, the police lodged a first information report against Raza. | {
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Together for over 6 months still not facebook official
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After spending four seasons making one of TV's best shows, The Americans showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields are pretty confident in their ability to determine what's best for the series. But that all goes out the window when it comes to incorporating period-specific ads and other pop culture references into the FX drama about two Russian spies (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys) undercover as a suburban D.C. family in the early '80s.
"We work from a place of fear, and in general, we work very hard not to work from a place of fear," said Weisberg. "But we're very worried about hitting things too much on the nose. It's so easy with pop cultural references to be screaming, 'Here we are in 1983! Here we are with the thing that everyone remembers and knows signifies the time period!' We're really careful not to do that and be so judicious when we hit the big ones."
They saved one of "the big ones" for Wednesday's episode, the seventh of Season 4, called "Travel Agents." During one scene, two teenage boys bond while watching one of Brooke Shields' iconic Calvin Klein ads, which featured her whistling "Oh My Darling Clementine" and then saying, "You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing."
Shields' Calvin Klein campaign was one of the most famous of the decade, but it only amounts to a few seconds of screen time on The Americans. That puts it squarely in Weisberg and Fields' "less is more" approach to featuring pop culture.
"When we hit the big ones, we try to do it either directly through the eyes of our characters or, if not, then very much in the background," Fields said. "We would rather something live unnoticed in the background and hit our audience in their subconscious than we would have it be featured and distract them. So the goal is actually to never really have the pop culture pop, but have it just capture the truth of the period that the show is existing in."
When they plotted the scene in which Henry, the son of Rhys and Russell's Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, and Matthew Beeman, the son of their neighbor—and the FBI agent on the Jennings' trail—Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) talk about an attractive girl on TV. "Joe and I both were, let's say, conscious in those days, and we remember who boys talked about in that way. So it was not a long throw to get to Brooke Shields and 'Nothing comes between me and my Calvins,'" said Fields. "What we want is for it to always be integrated into the show so that there's never the sense that the show is stopping for some fun pop culture reference, but rather they come out through the characters' experiences."
Last year, however, the show featured an ad that more directly tied into a storyline: for Love's Baby Soft feminine products, possibly one of the most disturbing commercials that has ever aired. (The creepy voiceover notes that the product has "the innocent scent of a cuddly, clean baby … that grew up very sexy.")
The ad touched on one of Season 3's arcs in which Rhys' character is forced to seduce a teenager who's the same age as his own daughter. "As we were breaking that story, one of the writers ran screaming into the office one day. 'You're not going to believe the commercial I just found! It's real!'" said Fields.
A year earlier, the duo incorporated a famous local Washington, D.C., ad for the Jhoon Rhee martial arts studio. "Anyone who lived in D.C. recognized that commercial," said Weisberg. "Local commercials are really interesting because if you're not from the area, you don't recognize them, and if you are, they're almost bigger than the national commercials because there's a little bit of pride in your area."
But not every ad Fields and Weisberg want to use on The Americans ends up making the cut. The producers considered using a Taster's Choice coffee ad playing up its use on NASA's Columbia space shuttle. "It's a fantastic commercial with a floating coffee cup, and just the animation is so 1984. But it's just never happened for the show. We looked at it, but then we thought, 'Is it trying too hard?'" Fields said.
Then, when they did talk themselves into using the Taster's Choice ad, they couldn't get the rights to use it. "On some of these commercials, rights become a challenge because they got certain rights but not all rights, and we can't find the [correct] people," said Weisberg.
Weisberg and Fields are breaking their usual rule about not putting pop culture events front and center on The Americans with the next episode, which is called "The Magic of David Copperfield V: The Statue of Liberty Disappears" and includes a scene in which the Jennings family watches an April 8, 1983 special in which Copperfield made the U.S. landmark seem to vanish.
A future episode will center around another major '80s TV event: The Day After, the chilling TV movie about the aftermath of a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. ABC estimated that more than 100 million people watched the original broadcast on Nov. 20, 1983.
"You've got that juxtaposition … you've got the David Copperfield moment, and we've got The Day After," Weisberg said. "One is about as gloomy, depressing and horrible as you could imagine, and one is really uplifting and great and fun and the American spirit in the best kind of way. So for us to have both on the show—and it's easy to turn them into different moments because the Jennings family and the Beeman family would really sit down in the living room and watch both of those. We don't have to hide those in the background as if to show that they happen to be watching it. It really makes sense to make it center stage."
While another month's worth of Season 4 episodes remains, Fields and Weisberg are already well into planning Season 5 and have finally come to a decision whether they will need one or two more seasons to wrap up the Jennings' story.
"I don't know that we have a final nod from the network, but we feel like we know what we'd like to do, and pretty soon, we hope to be able to talk about it," Weisberg said. "But we've got a very strong handle on it." | {
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First published Sat Jan 25, 1997; substantive revision Fri Mar 8, 2019
Game theory is the study of the ways in which interacting choices of economic agents produce outcomes with respect to the preferences (or utilities) of those agents, where the outcomes in question might have been intended by none of the agents. The meaning of this statement will not be clear to the non-expert until each of the italicized words and phrases has been explained and featured in some examples. Doing this will be the main business of this article. First, however, we provide some historical and philosophical context in order to motivate the reader for the technical work ahead.
Game theory in the form known to economists, social scientists, and biologists, was given its first general mathematical formulation by John von Neuman and Oskar Morgenstern (1944). For reasons to be discussed later, limitations in their formal framework initially made the theory applicable only under special and limited conditions. This situation has dramatically changed, in ways we will examine as we go along, over the past seven decades, as the framework has been deepened and generalized. Refinements are still being made, and we will review a few outstanding problems that lie along the advancing front edge of these developments towards the end of the article. However, since at least the late 1970s it has been possible to say with confidence that game theory is the most important and useful tool in the analyst’s kit whenever she confronts situations in which what counts as one agent’s best action (for her) depends on expectations about what one or more other agents will do, and what counts as their best actions (for them) similarly depend on expectations about her.
Despite the fact that game theory has been rendered mathematically and logically systematic only since 1944, game-theoretic insights can be found among commentators going back to ancient times. For example, in two of Plato’s texts, the Laches and the Symposium, Socrates recalls an episode from the Battle of Delium that some commentators have interpreted (probably anachronistically) as involving the following situation. Consider a soldier at the front, waiting with his comrades to repulse an enemy attack. It may occur to him that if the defense is likely to be successful, then it isn’t very probable that his own personal contribution will be essential. But if he stays, he runs the risk of being killed or wounded—apparently for no point. On the other hand, if the enemy is going to win the battle, then his chances of death or injury are higher still, and now quite clearly to no point, since the line will be overwhelmed anyway. Based on this reasoning, it would appear that the soldier is better off running away regardless of who is going to win the battle. Of course, if all of the soldiers reason this way—as they all apparently should, since they’re all in identical situations—then this will certainly bring about the outcome in which the battle is lost. Of course, this point, since it has occurred to us as analysts, can occur to the soldiers too. Does this give them a reason for staying at their posts? Just the contrary: the greater the soldiers’ fear that the battle will be lost, the greater their incentive to get themselves out of harm’s way. And the greater the soldiers’ belief that the battle will be won, without the need of any particular individual’s contributions, the less reason they have to stay and fight. If each soldier anticipates this sort of reasoning on the part of the others, all will quickly reason themselves into a panic, and their horrified commander will have a rout on his hands before the enemy has even engaged.
Long before game theory had come along to show analysts how to think about this sort of problem systematically, it had occurred to some actual military leaders and influenced their strategies. Thus the Spanish conqueror Cortez, when landing in Mexico with a small force who had good reason to fear their capacity to repel attack from the far more numerous Aztecs, removed the risk that his troops might think their way into a retreat by burning the ships on which they had landed. With retreat having thus been rendered physically impossible, the Spanish soldiers had no better course of action than to stand and fight—and, furthermore, to fight with as much determination as they could muster. Better still, from Cortez’s point of view, his action had a discouraging effect on the motivation of the Aztecs. He took care to burn his ships very visibly, so that the Aztecs would be sure to see what he had done. They then reasoned as follows: Any commander who could be so confident as to willfully destroy his own option to be prudent if the battle went badly for him must have good reasons for such extreme optimism. It cannot be wise to attack an opponent who has a good reason (whatever, exactly, it might be) for being sure that he can’t lose. The Aztecs therefore retreated into the surrounding hills, and Cortez had the easiest possible victory.
These two situations, at Delium and as manipulated by Cortez, have a common and interesting underlying logic. Notice that the soldiers are not motivated to retreat just, or even mainly, by their rational assessment of the dangers of battle and by their self-interest. Rather, they discover a sound reason to run away by realizing that what it makes sense for them to do depends on what it will make sense for others to do, and that all of the others can notice this too. Even a quite brave soldier may prefer to run rather than heroically, but pointlessly, die trying to stem the oncoming tide all by himself. Thus we could imagine, without contradiction, a circumstance in which an army, all of whose members are brave, flees at top speed before the enemy makes a move. If the soldiers really are brave, then this surely isn’t the outcome any of them wanted; each would have preferred that all stand and fight. What we have here, then, is a case in which the interaction of many individually rational decision-making processes—one process per soldier—produces an outcome intended by no one. (Most armies try to avoid this problem just as Cortez did. Since they can’t usually make retreat physically impossible, they make it economically impossible: they shoot deserters. Then standing and fighting is each soldier’s individually rational course of action after all, because the cost of running is sure to be at least as high as the cost of staying.)
Another classic source that invites this sequence of reasoning is found in Shakespeare’s Henry V. During the Battle of Agincourt Henry decided to slaughter his French prisoners, in full view of the enemy and to the surprise of his subordinates, who describe the action as being out of moral character. The reasons Henry gives allude to non-strategic considerations: he is afraid that the prisoners may free themselves and threaten his position. However, a game theorist might have furnished him with supplementary strategic (and similarly prudential, though perhaps not moral) justification. His own troops observe that the prisoners have been killed, and observe that the enemy has observed this. Therefore, they know what fate will await them at the enemy’s hand if they don’t win. Metaphorically, but very effectively, their boats have been burnt. The slaughter of the prisoners plausibly sent a signal to the soldiers of both sides, thereby changing their incentives in ways that favoured English prospects for victory.
These examples might seem to be relevant only for those who find themselves in sordid situations of cut-throat competition. Perhaps, one might think, it is important for generals, politicians, mafiosi, sports coaches and others whose jobs involve strategic manipulation of others, but the philosopher should only deplore its amorality. Such a conclusion would be highly premature, however. The study of the logic that governs the interrelationships amongst incentives, strategic interactions and outcomes has been fundamental in modern political philosophy, since centuries before anyone had an explicit name for this sort of logic. Philosophers share with social scientists the need to be able to represent and systematically model not only what they think people normatively ought to do, but what they often actually do in interactive situations.
Hobbes’s Leviathan is often regarded as the founding work in modern political philosophy, the text that began the continuing round of analyses of the function and justification of the state and its restrictions on individual liberties. The core of Hobbes’s reasoning can be given straightforwardly as follows. The best situation for all people is one in which each is free to do as she pleases. (One may or may not agree with this as a matter of psychology or ideology, but it is Hobbes’s assumption.) Often, such free people will wish to cooperate with one another in order to carry out projects that would be impossible for an individual acting alone. But if there are any immoral or amoral agents around, they will notice that their interests might at least sometimes be best served by getting the benefits from cooperation and not returning them. Suppose, for example, that you agree to help me build my house in return for my promise to help you build yours. After my house is finished, I can make your labour free to me simply by reneging on my promise. I then realize, however, that if this leaves you with no house, you will have an incentive to take mine. This will put me in constant fear of you, and force me to spend valuable time and resources guarding myself against you. I can best minimize these costs by striking first and killing you at the first opportunity. Of course, you can anticipate all of this reasoning by me, and so have good reason to try to beat me to the punch. Since I can anticipate this reasoning by you, my original fear of you was not paranoid; nor was yours of me. In fact, neither of us actually needs to be immoral to get this chain of mutual reasoning going; we need only think that there is some possibility that the other might try to cheat on bargains. Once a small wedge of doubt enters any one mind, the incentive induced by fear of the consequences of being preempted—hit before hitting first—quickly becomes overwhelming on both sides. If either of us has any resources of our own that the other might want, this murderous logic can take hold long before we are so silly as to imagine that we could ever actually get as far as making deals to help one another build houses in the first place. Left to their own devices, agents who are at least sometimes narrowly self-interested can repeatedly fail to derive the benefits of cooperation, and instead be trapped in a state of ‘war of all against all’, in Hobbes’s words. In these circumstances, human life, as he vividly and famously put it, will be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
Hobbes’s proposed solution to this problem was tyranny. The people can hire an agent—a government—whose job is to punish anyone who breaks any promise. So long as the threatened punishment is sufficiently dire then the cost of reneging on promises will exceed the cost of keeping them. The logic here is identical to that used by an army when it threatens to shoot deserters. If all people know that these incentives hold for most others, then cooperation will not only be possible, but can be the expected norm, so that the war of all against all becomes a general peace.
Hobbes pushes the logic of this argument to a very strong conclusion, arguing that it implies not only a government with the right and the power to enforce cooperation, but an ‘undivided’ government in which the arbitrary will of a single ruler must impose absolute obligation on all. Few contemporary political theorists think that the particular steps by which Hobbes reasons his way to this conclusion are both sound and valid. Working through these issues here, however, would carry us away from our topic into details of contractarian political philosophy. What is important in the present context is that these details, as they are in fact pursued in contemporary debates, involve sophisticated interpretation of the issues using the resources of modern game theory. Furthermore, Hobbes’s most basic point, that the fundamental justification for the coercive authority and practices of governments is peoples’ own need to protect themselves from what game theorists call ‘social dilemmas’, is accepted by many, if not most, political theorists. Notice that Hobbes has not argued that tyranny is a desirable thing in itself. The structure of his argument is that the logic of strategic interaction leaves only two general political outcomes possible: tyranny and anarchy. Sensible agents then choose tyranny as the lesser of two evils.
The reasoning of the Athenian soldiers, of Cortez, and of Hobbes’s political agents has a common logic, one derived from their situations. In each case, the aspect of the environment that is most important to the agents’ achievement of their preferred outcomes is the set of expectations and possible reactions to their strategies by other agents. The distinction between acting parametrically on a passive world and acting non-parametrically on a world that tries to act in anticipation of these actions is fundamental. If you wish to kick a rock down a hill, you need only concern yourself with the rock’s mass relative to the force of your blow, the extent to which it is bonded with its supporting surface, the slope of the ground on the other side of the rock, and the expected impact of the collision on your foot. The values of all of these variables are independent of your plans and intentions, since the rock has no interests of its own and takes no actions to attempt to assist or thwart you. By contrast, if you wish to kick a person down the hill, then unless that person is unconscious, bound or otherwise incapacitated, you will likely not succeed unless you can disguise your plans until it’s too late for him to take either evasive or forestalling action. Furthermore, his probable responses should be expected to visit costs upon you, which you would be wise to consider. Finally, the relative probabilities of his responses will depend on his expectations about your probable responses to his responses. (Consider the difference it will make to both of your reasoning if one or both of you are armed, or one of you is bigger than the other, or one of you is the other’s boss.) The logical issues associated with the second sort of situation (kicking the person as opposed to the rock) are typically much more complicated, as a simple hypothetical example will illustrate.
Suppose first that you wish to cross a river that is spanned by three bridges. (Assume that swimming, wading or boating across are impossible.) The first bridge is known to be safe and free of obstacles; if you try to cross there, you will succeed. The second bridge lies beneath a cliff from which large rocks sometimes fall. The third is inhabited by deadly cobras. Now suppose you wish to rank-order the three bridges with respect to their preferability as crossing-points. Unless you get positive enjoyment from risking your life—which, as a human being, you might, a complication we’ll take up later in this article—then your decision problem here is straightforward. The first bridge is obviously best, since it is safest. To rank-order the other two bridges, you require information about their relative levels of danger. If you can study the frequency of rock-falls and the movements of the cobras for awhile, you might be able to calculate that the probability of your being crushed by a rock at the second bridge is 10% and of being struck by a cobra at the third bridge is 20%. Your reasoning here is strictly parametric because neither the rocks nor the cobras are trying to influence your actions, by, for example, concealing their typical patterns of behaviour because they know you are studying them. It is obvious what you should do here: cross at the safe bridge. Now let us complicate the situation a bit. Suppose that the bridge with the rocks was immediately before you, while the safe bridge was a day’s difficult hike upstream. Your decision-making situation here is slightly more complicated, but it is still strictly parametric. You would have to decide whether the cost of the long hike was worth exchanging for the penalty of a 10% chance of being hit by a rock. However, this is all you must decide, and your probability of a successful crossing is entirely up to you; the environment is not interested in your plans.
However, if we now complicate the situation by adding a non-parametric element, it becomes more challenging. Suppose that you are a fugitive of some sort, and waiting on the other side of the river with a gun is your pursuer. She will catch and shoot you, let us suppose, only if she waits at the bridge you try to cross; otherwise, you will escape. As you reason through your choice of bridge, it occurs to you that she is over there trying to anticipate your reasoning. It will seem that, surely, choosing the safe bridge straight away would be a mistake, since that is just where she will expect you, and your chances of death rise to certainty. So perhaps you should risk the rocks, since these odds are much better. But wait … if you can reach this conclusion, your pursuer, who is just as rational and well-informed as you are, can anticipate that you will reach it, and will be waiting for you if you evade the rocks. So perhaps you must take your chances with the cobras; that is what she must least expect. But, then, no … if she expects that you will expect that she will least expect this, then she will most expect it. This dilemma, you realize with dread, is general: you must do what your pursuer least expects; but whatever you most expect her to least expect is automatically what she will most expect. You appear to be trapped in indecision. All that might console you a bit here is that, on the other side of the river, your pursuer is trapped in exactly the same quandary, unable to decide which bridge to wait at because as soon as she imagines committing to one, she will notice that if she can find a best reason to pick a bridge, you can anticipate that same reason and then avoid her.
We know from experience that, in situations such as this, people do not usually stand and dither in circles forever. As we’ll see later, there is a unique best solution available to each player. However, until the 1940s neither philosophers nor economists knew how to find it mathematically. As a result, economists were forced to treat non-parametric influences as if they were complications on parametric ones. This is likely to strike the reader as odd, since, as our example of the bridge-crossing problem was meant to show, non-parametric features are often fundamental features of decision-making problems. Part of the explanation for game theory’s relatively late entry into the field lies in the problems with which economists had historically been concerned. Classical economists, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, were mainly interested in the question of how agents in very large markets—whole nations—could interact so as to bring about maximum monetary wealth for themselves. Smith’s basic insight, that efficiency is best maximized by agents first differentiating their potential contributions and then freely seeking mutually advantageous bargains, was mathematically verified in the twentieth century. However, the demonstration of this fact applies only in conditions of ‘perfect competition,’ that is, when individuals or firms face no costs of entry or exit into markets, when there are no economies of scale, and when no agents’ actions have unintended side-effects on other agents’ well-being. Economists always recognized that this set of assumptions is purely an idealization for purposes of analysis, not a possible state of affairs anyone could try (or should want to try) to institutionally establish. But until the mathematics of game theory matured near the end of the 1970s, economists had to hope that the more closely a market approximates perfect competition, the more efficient it will be. No such hope, however, can be mathematically or logically justified in general; indeed, as a strict generalization the assumption was shown to be false as far back as the 1950s.
This article is not about the foundations of economics, but it is important for understanding the origins and scope of game theory to know that perfectly competitive markets have built into them a feature that renders them susceptible to parametric analysis. Because agents face no entry costs to markets, they will open shop in any given market until competition drives all profits to zero. This implies that if production costs are fixed and demand is exogenous, then agents have no options about how much to produce if they are trying to maximize the differences between their costs and their revenues. These production levels can be determined separately for each agent, so none need pay attention to what the others are doing; each agent treats her counterparts as passive features of the environment. The other kind of situation to which classical economic analysis can be applied without recourse to game theory is that of a monopoly facing many customers. Here, as long as no customer has a share of demand large enough to exert strategic leverage, non-parametric considerations drop out and the firm’s task is only to identify the combination of price and production quantity at which it maximizes profit. However, both perfect and monopolistic competition are very special and unusual market arrangements. Prior to the advent of game theory, therefore, economists were severely limited in the class of circumstances to which they could straightforwardly apply their models.
Philosophers share with economists a professional interest in the conditions and techniques for the maximization of welfare. In addition, philosophers have a special concern with the logical justification of actions, and often actions must be justified by reference to their expected outcomes. (One tradition in moral philosophy, utilitarianism, is based on the idea that all justifiable actions must be justified in this way.) Without game theory, both of these problems resist analysis wherever non-parametric aspects are relevant. We will demonstrate this shortly by reference to the most famous (though not the most typical) game, the so-called Prisoner’s Dilemma, and to other, more typical, games. In doing this, we will need to introduce, define and illustrate the basic elements and techniques of game theory.
An economic agent is, by definition, an entity with preferences. Game theorists, like economists and philosophers studying rational decision-making, describe these by means of an abstract concept called utility. This refers to some ranking, on some specified scale, of the subjective welfare or change in subjective welfare that an agent derives from an object or an event. By ‘welfare’ we refer to some normative index of relative alignment between states of the world and agents’ valuations of the states in question, justified by reference to some background framework. For example, we might evaluate the relative welfare of countries (which we might model as agents for some purposes) by reference to their per capita incomes, and we might evaluate the relative welfare of an animal, in the context of predicting and explaining its behavioral dispositions, by reference to its expected evolutionary fitness. In the case of people, it is most typical in economics and applications of game theory to evaluate their relative welfare by reference to their own implicit or explicit judgments of it. This is why we referred above to subjective welfare. Consider a person who adores the taste of pickles but dislikes onions. She might be said to associate higher utility with states of the world in which, all else being equal, she consumes more pickles and fewer onions than with states in which she consumes more onions and fewer pickles. Examples of this kind suggest that ‘utility’ denotes a measure of subjective psychological fulfillment, and this is indeed how the concept was originally interpreted by economists and philosophers influenced by the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. However, economists in the early 20th century recognized increasingly clearly that their main interest was in the market property of decreasing marginal demand, regardless of whether that was produced by satiated individual consumers or by some other factors. In the 1930s this motivation of economists fit comfortably with the dominance of behaviourism and radical empiricism in psychology and in the philosophy of science respectively. Behaviourists and radical empiricists objected to the theoretical use of such unobservable entities as ‘psychological fulfillment quotients.’ The intellectual climate was thus receptive to the efforts of the economist Paul Samuelson (1938) to redefine utility in such a way that it becomes a purely technical concept rather than one rooted in speculative psychology. Since Samuelson’s redefinition became standard in the 1950s, when we say that an agent acts so as to maximize her utility, we mean by ‘utility’ simply whatever it is that the agent’s behavior suggests her to consistently act so as to make more probable. If this looks circular to you, it should: theorists who follow Samuelson intend the statement ‘agents act so as to maximize their utility’ as a tautology, where an ‘(economic) agent’ is any entity that can be accurately described as acting to maximize a utility function, an ‘action’ is any utility-maximizing selection from a set of possible alternatives, and a‘utility function’ is what an economic agent maximizes. Like other tautologies occurring in the foundations of scientific theories, this interlocking (recursive) system of definitions is useful not in itself, but because it helps to fix our contexts of inquiry.
Though the behaviourism of the 1930s has since been displaced by widespread interest in cognitive processes, many theorists continue to follow Samuelson’s way of understanding utility because they think it important that game theory apply to any kind of agent—a person, a bear, a bee, a firm or a country—and not just to agents with human minds. When such theorists say that agents act so as to maximize their utility, they want this to be part of the definition of what it is to be an agent, not an empirical claim about possible inner states and motivations. Samuelson’s conception of utility, defined by way of Revealed Preference Theory (RPT) introduced in his classic paper (Samuelson (1938)) satisfies this demand.
Economists and others who interpret game theory in terms of RPT should not think of game theory as in any way an empirical account of the motivations of some flesh-and-blood actors (such as actual people). Rather, they should regard game theory as part of the body of mathematics that is used to model those entities (which might or might not literally exist) who consistently select elements from mutually exclusive action sets, resulting in patterns of choices, which, allowing for some stochasticity and noise, can be statistically modeled as maximization of utility functions. On this interpretation, game theory could not be refuted by any empirical observations, since it is not an empirical theory in the first place. Of course, observation and experience could lead someone favoring this interpretation to conclude that game theory is of little help in describing actual human behavior.
Some other theorists understand the point of game theory differently. They view game theory as providing an explanatory account of actual human strategic reasoning processes. For this idea to be applicable, we must suppose that agents at least sometimes do what they do in non-parametric settings because game-theoretic logic recommends certain actions as the ‘rational’ ones. Such an understanding of game theory incorporates a normative aspect, since ‘rationality’ is taken to denote a property that an agent should at least generally want to have. These two very general ways of thinking about the possible uses of game theory are compatible with the tautological interpretation of utility maximization. The philosophical difference is not idle from the perspective of the working game theorist, however. As we will see in a later section, those who hope to use game theory to explain strategic reasoning, as opposed to merely strategic behavior, face some special philosophical and practical problems.
Since game theory is a technology for formal modeling, we must have a device for thinking of utility maximization in mathematical terms. Such a device is called a utility function. We will introduce the general idea of a utility function through the special case of an ordinal utility function. (Later, we will encounter utility functions that incorporate more information.) The utility-map for an agent is called a ‘function’ because it maps ordered preferences onto the real numbers. Suppose that agent x prefers bundle a to bundle b and bundle b to bundle c. We then map these onto a list of numbers, where the function maps the highest-ranked bundle onto the largest number in the list, the second-highest-ranked bundle onto the next-largest number in the list, and so on, thus:
bundle a ≫ 3 bundle b ≫ 2 bundle c ≫ 1
The only property mapped by this function is order. The magnitudes of the numbers are irrelevant; that is, it must not be inferred that x gets 3 times as much utility from bundle a as she gets from bundle c. Thus we could represent exactly the same utility function as that above by
bundle a ≫ 7,326 bundle b ≫ 12.6 bundle c ≫ −1,000,000
The numbers featuring in an ordinal utility function are thus not measuring any quantity of anything. A utility-function in which magnitudes do matter is called ‘cardinal’. Whenever someone refers to a utility function without specifying which kind is meant, you should assume that it’s ordinal. These are the sorts we’ll need for the first set of games we’ll examine. Later, when we come to seeing how to solve games that involve (ex ante) uncertainty—our river-crossing game from Part 1 above, for example—we’ll need to build cardinal utility functions. The technique for doing this was given by von Neumann & Morgenstern (1944), and was an essential aspect of their invention of game theory. For the moment, however, we will need only ordinal functions.
All situations in which at least one agent can only act to maximize his utility through anticipating (either consciously, or just implicitly in his behavior) the responses to his actions by one or more other agents is called a game. Agents involved in games are referred to as players. If all agents have optimal actions regardless of what the others do, as in purely parametric situations or conditions of monopoly or perfect competition (see Section 1 above) we can model this without appeal to game theory; otherwise, we need it.
Game theorists assume that players have sets of capacities that are typically referred to in the literature of economics as comprising ‘rationality’. Usually this is formulated by simple statements such as ‘it is assumed that players are rational’. In literature critical of economics in general, or of the importation of game theory into humanistic disciplines, this kind of rhetoric has increasingly become a magnet for attack. There is a dense and intricate web of connections associated with ‘rationality’ in the Western cultural tradition, and the word has often been used to normatively marginalize characteristics as normal and important as emotion, femininity and empathy. Game theorists’ use of the concept need not, and generally does not, implicate such ideology. For present purposes we will use ‘economic rationality’ as a strictly technical, not normative, term to refer to a narrow and specific set of restrictions on preferences that are shared by von Neumann and Morgenstern’s original version of game theory, and RPT. Economists use a second, equally important (to them) concept of rationality when they are modeling markets, which they call ‘rational expectations’. In this phrase, ‘rationality’ refers not to restrictions on preferences but to non-restrictions on information processing: rational expectations are idealized beliefs that reflect statistically accurately weighted use of all information available to an agent. The reader should note that these two uses of one word within the same discipline are technically unconnected. Furthermore, original RPT has been specified over the years by several different sets of axioms for different modeling purposes. Once we decide to treat rationality as a technical concept, each time we adjust the axioms we effectively modify the concept. Consequently, in any discussion involving economists and philosophers together, we can find ourselves in a situation where different participants use the same word to refer to something different. For readers new to economics, game theory, decision theory and the philosophy of action, this situation naturally presents a challenge.
In this article, ‘economic rationality’ will be used in the technical sense shared within game theory, microeconomics and formal decision theory, as follows. An economically rational player is one who can (i) assess outcomes, in the sense of rank-ordering them with respect to their contributions to her welfare; (ii) calculate paths to outcomes, in the sense of recognizing which sequences of actions are probabilistically associated with which outcomes; and (iii) select actions from sets of alternatives (which we’ll describe as ‘choosing’ actions) that yield her most-preferred outcomes, given the actions of the other players. We might summarize the intuition behind all this as follows: an entity is usefully modeled as an economically rational agent to the extent that it has alternatives, and chooses from amongst these in a way that is motivated, at least more often than not, by what seems best for its purposes. (For readers who are antecedently familiar with the work of the philosopher Daniel Dennett, we could equate the idea of an economically rational agent with the kind of entity Dennett characterizes as intentional, and then say that we can usefully predict an economically rational agent’s behavior from ‘the intentional stance’.)
Economic rationality might in some cases be satisfied by internal computations performed by an agent, and she might or might not be aware of computing or having computed its conditions and implications. In other cases, economic rationality might simply be embodied in behavioral dispositions built by natural, cultural or market selection. In particular, in calling an action ‘chosen’ we imply no necessary deliberation, conscious or otherwise. We mean merely that the action was taken when an alternative action was available, in some sense of ‘available’ normally established by the context of the particular analysis. (‘Available’, as used by game theorists and economists, should never be read as if it meant merely ‘metaphysically’ or ‘logically’ available; it is almost always pragmatic, contextual and endlessly revisable by more refined modeling.)
Each player in a game faces a choice among two or more possible strategies. A strategy is a predetermined ‘programme of play’ that tells her what actions to take in response to every possible strategy other players might use. The significance of the italicized phrase here will become clear when we take up some sample games below.
A crucial aspect of the specification of a game involves the information that players have when they choose strategies. The simplest games (from the perspective of logical structure) are those in which agents have perfect information, meaning that at every point where each agent’s strategy tells her to take an action, she knows everything that has happened in the game up to that point. A board-game of sequential moves in which both players watch all the action (and know the rules in common), such as chess, is an instance of such a game. By contrast, the example of the bridge-crossing game from Section 1 above illustrates a game of imperfect information, since the fugitive must choose a bridge to cross without knowing the bridge at which the pursuer has chosen to wait, and the pursuer similarly makes her decision in ignorance of the choices of her quarry. Since game theory is about economically rational action given the strategically significant actions of others, it should not surprise you to be told that what agents in games believe, or fail to believe, about each others’ actions makes a considerable difference to the logic of our analyses, as we will see.
The difference between games of perfect and of imperfect information is related to (though certainly not identical with!) a distinction between ways of representing games that is based on order of play. Let us begin by distinguishing between sequential-move and simultaneous-move games in terms of information. It is natural, as a first approximation, to think of sequential-move games as being ones in which players choose their strategies one after the other, and of simultaneous-move games as ones in which players choose their strategies at the same time. This isn’t quite right, however, because what is of strategic importance is not the temporal order of events per se, but whether and when players know about other players’ actions relative to having to choose their own. For example, if two competing businesses are both planning marketing campaigns, one might commit to its strategy months before the other does; but if neither knows what the other has committed to or will commit to when they make their decisions, this is a simultaneous-move game. Chess, by contrast, is normally played as a sequential-move game: you see what your opponent has done before choosing your own next action. (Chess can be turned into a simultaneous-move game if the players each call moves on a common board while isolated from one another; but this is a very different game from conventional chess.)
It was said above that the distinction between sequential-move and simultaneous-move games is not identical to the distinction between perfect-information and imperfect-information games. Explaining why this is so is a good way of establishing full understanding of both sets of concepts. As simultaneous-move games were characterized in the previous paragraph, it must be true that all simultaneous-move games are games of imperfect information. However, some games may contain mixes of sequential and simultaneous moves. For example, two firms might commit to their marketing strategies independently and in secrecy from one another, but thereafter engage in pricing competition in full view of one another. If the optimal marketing strategies were partially or wholly dependent on what was expected to happen in the subsequent pricing game, then the two stages would need to be analyzed as a single game, in which a stage of sequential play followed a stage of simultaneous play. Whole games that involve mixed stages of this sort are games of imperfect information, however temporally staged they might be. Games of perfect information (as the name implies) denote cases where no moves are simultaneous (and where no player ever forgets what has gone before).
As previously noted, games of perfect information are the (logically) simplest sorts of games. This is so because in such games (as long as the games are finite, that is, terminate after a known number of actions) players and analysts can use a straightforward procedure for predicting outcomes. A player in such a game chooses her first action by considering each series of responses and counter-responses that will result from each action open to her. She then asks herself which of the available final outcomes brings her the highest utility, and chooses the action that starts the chain leading to this outcome. This process is called backward induction (because the reasoning works backwards from eventual outcomes to present choice problems).
There will be much more to be said about backward induction and its properties in a later section (when we come to discuss equilibrium and equilibrium selection). For now, it has been described just so we can use it to introduce one of the two types of mathematical objects used to represent games: game trees. A game tree is an example of what mathematicians call a directed graph. That is, it is a set of connected nodes in which the overall graph has a direction. We can draw trees from the top of the page to the bottom, or from left to right. In the first case, nodes at the top of the page are interpreted as coming earlier in the sequence of actions. In the case of a tree drawn from left to right, leftward nodes are prior in the sequence to rightward ones. An unlabelled tree has a structure of the following sort:
Figure 1
The point of representing games using trees can best be grasped by visualizing the use of them in supporting backward-induction reasoning. Just imagine the player (or analyst) beginning at the end of the tree, where outcomes are displayed, and then working backwards from these, looking for sets of strategies that describe paths leading to them. Since a player’s utility function indicates which outcomes she prefers to which, we also know which paths she will prefer. Of course, not all paths will be possible because the other player has a role in selecting paths too, and won’t take actions that lead to less preferred outcomes for him. We will present some examples of this interactive path selection, and detailed techniques for reasoning through these examples, after we have described a situation we can use a tree to model.
Trees are used to represent sequential games, because they show the order in which actions are taken by the players. However, games are sometimes represented on matrices rather than trees. This is the second type of mathematical object used to represent games. Matrices, unlike trees, simply show the outcomes, represented in terms of the players’ utility functions, for every possible combination of strategies the players might use. For example, it makes sense to display the river-crossing game from Section 1 on a matrix, since in that game both the fugitive and the hunter have just one move each, and each chooses their move in ignorance of what the other has decided to do. Here, then, is part of the matrix:
Figure 2
The fugitive’s three possible strategies—cross at the safe bridge, risk the rocks, or risk the cobras—form the rows of the matrix. Similarly, the hunter’s three possible strategies—waiting at the safe bridge, waiting at the rocky bridge and waiting at the cobra bridge—form the columns of the matrix. Each cell of the matrix shows—or, rather would show if our matrix was complete—an outcome defined in terms of the players’ payoffs. A player’s payoff is simply the number assigned by her ordinal utility function to the state of affairs corresponding to the outcome in question. For each outcome, Row’s payoff is always listed first, followed by Column’s. Thus, for example, the upper left-hand corner above shows that when the fugitive crosses at the safe bridge and the hunter is waiting there, the fugitive gets a payoff of 0 and the hunter gets a payoff of 1. We interpret these by reference to the two players’ utility functions, which in this game are very simple. If the fugitive gets safely across the river he receives a payoff of 1; if he doesn’t he gets 0. If the fugitive doesn’t make it, either because he’s shot by the hunter or hit by a rock or bitten by a cobra, then the hunter gets a payoff of 1 and the fugitive gets a payoff of 0.
We’ll briefly explain the parts of the matrix that have been filled in, and then say why we can’t yet complete the rest. Whenever the hunter waits at the bridge chosen by the fugitive, the fugitive is shot. These outcomes all deliver the payoff vector (0, 1). You can find them descending diagonally across the matrix above from the upper left-hand corner. Whenever the fugitive chooses the safe bridge but the hunter waits at another, the fugitive gets safely across, yielding the payoff vector (1, 0). These two outcomes are shown in the second two cells of the top row. All of the other cells are marked, for now, with question marks. Why? The problem here is that if the fugitive crosses at either the rocky bridge or the cobra bridge, he introduces parametric factors into the game. In these cases, he takes on some risk of getting killed, and so producing the payoff vector (0, 1), that is independent of anything the hunter does. We don’t yet have enough concepts introduced to be able to show how to represent these outcomes in terms of utility functions—but by the time we’re finished we will, and this will provide the key to solving our puzzle from Section 1.
Matrix games are referred to as ‘normal-form’ or ‘strategic-form’ games, and games as trees are referred to as ‘extensive-form’ games. The two sorts of games are not equivalent, because extensive-form games contain information—about sequences of play and players’ levels of information about the game structure—that strategic-form games do not. In general, a strategic-form game could represent any one of several extensive-form games, so a strategic-form game is best thought of as being a set of extensive-form games. When order of play is irrelevant to a game’s outcome, then you should study its strategic form, since it’s the whole set you want to know about. Where order of play is relevant, the extensive form must be specified or your conclusions will be unreliable.
The distinctions described above are difficult to fully grasp if all one has to go on are abstract descriptions. They’re best illustrated by means of an example. For this purpose, we’ll use the most famous of all games: the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It in fact gives the logic of the problem faced by Cortez’s and Henry V’s soldiers (see Section 1 above), and by Hobbes’s agents before they empower the tyrant. However, for reasons which will become clear a bit later, you should not take the PD as a typical game; it isn’t. We use it as an extended example here only because it’s particularly helpful for illustrating the relationship between strategic-form and extensive-form games (and later, for illustrating the relationships between one-shot and repeated games; see Section 4 below).
The name of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game is derived from the following situation typically used to exemplify it. Suppose that the police have arrested two people whom they know have committed an armed robbery together. Unfortunately, they lack enough admissible evidence to get a jury to convict. They do, however, have enough evidence to send each prisoner away for two years for theft of the getaway car. The chief inspector now makes the following offer to each prisoner: If you will confess to the robbery, implicating your partner, and she does not also confess, then you’ll go free and she’ll get ten years. If you both confess, you’ll each get 5 years. If neither of you confess, then you’ll each get two years for the auto theft.
Our first step in modeling the two prisoners’ situation as a game is to represent it in terms of utility functions. Following the usual convention, let us name the prisoners ‘Player I’ and ‘Player II’. Both Player I’s and Player II’s ordinal utility functions are identical:
Go free ≫ 4 2 years ≫ 3 5 years ≫ 2 10 years ≫ 0
The numbers in the function above are now used to express each player’s payoffs in the various outcomes possible in the situation. We can represent the problem faced by both of them on a single matrix that captures the way in which their separate choices interact; this is the strategic form of their game:
Figure 3
Each cell of the matrix gives the payoffs to both players for each combination of actions. Player I’s payoff appears as the first number of each pair, Player II’s as the second. So, if both players confess then they each get a payoff of 2 (5 years in prison each). This appears in the upper-left cell. If neither of them confess, they each get a payoff of 3 (2 years in prison each). This appears as the lower-right cell. If Player I confesses and Player II doesn’t then Player I gets a payoff of 4 (going free) and Player II gets a payoff of 0 (ten years in prison). This appears in the upper-right cell. The reverse situation, in which Player II confesses and Player I refuses, appears in the lower-left cell.
Each player evaluates his or her two possible actions here by comparing their personal payoffs in each column, since this shows you which of their actions is preferable, just to themselves, for each possible action by their partner. So, observe: If Player II confesses then Player I gets a payoff of 2 by confessing and a payoff of 0 by refusing. If Player II refuses, then Player I gets a payoff of 4 by confessing and a payoff of 3 by refusing. Therefore, Player I is better off confessing regardless of what Player II does. Player II, meanwhile, evaluates her actions by comparing her payoffs down each row, and she comes to exactly the same conclusion that Player I does. Wherever one action for a player is superior to her other actions for each possible action by the opponent, we say that the first action strictly dominates the second one. In the PD, then, confessing strictly dominates refusing for both players. Both players know this about each other, thus entirely eliminating any temptation to depart from the strictly dominated path. Thus both players will confess, and both will go to prison for 5 years.
The players, and analysts, can predict this outcome using a mechanical procedure, known as iterated elimination of strictly dominated strategies. Player 1 can see by examining the matrix that his payoffs in each cell of the top row are higher than his payoffs in each corresponding cell of the bottom row. Therefore, it can never be utility-maximizing for him to play his bottom-row strategy, viz., refusing to confess, regardless of what Player II does. Since Player I’s bottom-row strategy will never be played, we can simply delete the bottom row from the matrix. Now it is obvious that Player II will not refuse to confess, since her payoff from confessing in the two cells that remain is higher than her payoff from refusing. So, once again, we can delete the one-cell column on the right from the game. We now have only one cell remaining, that corresponding to the outcome brought about by mutual confession. Since the reasoning that led us to delete all other possible outcomes depended at each step only on the premise that both players are economically rational — that is, will choose strategies that lead to higher payoffs over strategies that lead to lower ones—there are strong grounds for viewing joint confession as the solution to the game, the outcome on which its play must converge to the extent that economic rationality correctly models the behavior of the players. You should note that the order in which strictly dominated rows and columns are deleted doesn’t matter. Had we begun by deleting the right-hand column and then deleted the bottom row, we would have arrived at the same solution.
It’s been said a couple of times that the PD is not a typical game in many respects. One of these respects is that all its rows and columns are either strictly dominated or strictly dominant. In any strategic-form game where this is true, iterated elimination of strictly dominated strategies is guaranteed to yield a unique solution. Later, however, we will see that for many games this condition does not apply, and then our analytic task is less straightforward.
The reader will probably have noticed something disturbing about the outcome of the PD. Had both players refused to confess, they’d have arrived at the lower-right outcome in which they each go to prison for only 2 years, thereby both earning higher utility than either receives when both confess. This is the most important fact about the PD, and its significance for game theory is quite general. We’ll therefore return to it below when we discuss equilibrium concepts in game theory. For now, however, let us stay with our use of this particular game to illustrate the difference between strategic and extensive forms.
When people introduce the PD into popular discussions, one will often hear them say that the police inspector must lock his prisoners into separate rooms so that they can’t communicate with one another. The reasoning behind this idea seems obvious: if the players could communicate, they’d surely see that they’re each better off if both refuse, and could make an agreement to do so, no? This, one presumes, would remove each player’s conviction that he or she must confess because they’ll otherwise be sold up the river by their partner. In fact, however, this intuition is misleading and its conclusion is false.
When we represent the PD as a strategic-form game, we implicitly assume that the prisoners can’t attempt collusive agreement since they choose their actions simultaneously. In this case, agreement before the fact can’t help. If Player I is convinced that his partner will stick to the bargain then he can seize the opportunity to go scot-free by confessing. Of course, he realizes that the same temptation will occur to Player II; but in that case he again wants to make sure he confesses, as this is his only means of avoiding his worst outcome. The prisoners’ agreement comes to naught because they have no way of enforcing it; their promises to each other constitute what game theorists call ‘cheap talk’.
But now suppose that the prisoners do not move simultaneously. That is, suppose that Player II can choose after observing Player I’s action. This is the sort of situation that people who think non-communication important must have in mind. Now Player II will be able to see that Player I has remained steadfast when it comes to her choice, and she need not be concerned about being suckered. However, this doesn’t change anything, a point that is best made by re-representing the game in extensive form. This gives us our opportunity to introduce game-trees and the method of analysis appropriate to them.
First, however, here are definitions of some concepts that will be helpful in analyzing game-trees:
Node: a point at which a player chooses an action. Initial node: the point at which the first action in the game occurs. Terminal node: any node which, if reached, ends the game. Each terminal node corresponds to an outcome. Subgame: any connected set of nodes and branches descending uniquely from one node. Payoff: an ordinal utility number assigned to a player at an outcome. Outcome: an assignment of a set of payoffs, one to each player in the game. Strategy: a program instructing a player which action to take at every node in the tree where she could possibly be called on to make a choice.
These quick definitions may not mean very much to you until you follow them being put to use in our analyses of trees below. It will probably be best if you scroll back and forth between them and the examples as we work through them. By the time you understand each example, you’ll find the concepts and their definitions natural and intuitive.
To make this exercise maximally instructive, let’s suppose that Players I and II have studied the matrix above and, seeing that they’re both better off in the outcome represented by the lower-right cell, have formed an agreement to cooperate. Player I is to commit to refusal first, after which Player II will reciprocate when the police ask for her choice. We will refer to a strategy of keeping the agreement as ‘cooperation’, and will denote it in the tree below with ‘C’. We will refer to a strategy of breaking the agreement as ‘defection’, and will denote it on the tree below with ‘D’. Each node is numbered 1, 2, 3, … , from top to bottom, for ease of reference in discussion. Here, then, is the tree:
Figure 4
Look first at each of the terminal nodes (those along the bottom). These represent possible outcomes. Each is identified with an assignment of payoffs, just as in the strategic-form game, with Player I’s payoff appearing first in each set and Player II’s appearing second. Each of the structures descending from the nodes 1, 2 and 3 respectively is a subgame. We begin our backward-induction analysis—using a technique called Zermelo’s algorithm—with the sub-games that arise last in the sequence of play. If the subgame descending from node 3 is played, then Player II will face a choice between a payoff of 4 and a payoff of 3. (Consult the second number, representing her payoff, in each set at a terminal node descending from node 3.) II earns her higher payoff by playing D. We may therefore replace the entire subgame with an assignment of the payoff (0,4) directly to node 3, since this is the outcome that will be realized if the game reaches that node. Now consider the subgame descending from node 2. Here, II faces a choice between a payoff of 2 and one of 0. She obtains her higher payoff, 2, by playing D. We may therefore assign the payoff (2,2) directly to node 2. Now we move to the subgame descending from node 1. (This subgame is, of course, identical to the whole game; all games are subgames of themselves.) Player I now faces a choice between outcomes (2,2) and (0,4). Consulting the first numbers in each of these sets, he sees that he gets his higher payoff—2—by playing D. D is, of course, the option of confessing. So Player I confesses, and then Player II also confesses, yielding the same outcome as in the strategic-form representation.
What has happened here intuitively is that Player I realizes that if he plays C (refuse to confess) at node 1, then Player II will be able to maximize her utility by suckering him and playing D. (On the tree, this happens at node 3.) This leaves Player I with a payoff of 0 (ten years in prison), which he can avoid only by playing D to begin with. He therefore defects from the agreement.
We have thus seen that in the case of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the simultaneous and sequential versions yield the same outcome. This will often not be true of other games, however. Furthermore, only finite extensive-form (sequential) games of perfect information can be solved using Zermelo’s algorithm.
As noted earlier in this section, sometimes we must represent simultaneous moves within games that are otherwise sequential. (In all such cases the game as a whole will be one of imperfect information, so we won’t be able to solve it using Zermelo’s algorithm.) We represent such games using the device of information sets. Consider the following tree:
Figure 5
The oval drawn around nodes b and c indicates that they lie within a common information set. This means that at these nodes players cannot infer back up the path from whence they came; Player II does not know, in choosing her strategy, whether she is at b or c. (For this reason, what properly bear numbers in extensive-form games are information sets, conceived as ‘action points’, rather than nodes themselves; this is why the nodes inside the oval are labelled with letters rather than numbers.) Put another way, Player II, when choosing, does not know what Player I has done at node a. But you will recall from earlier in this section that this is just what defines two moves as simultaneous. We can thus see that the method of representing games as trees is entirely general. If no node after the initial node is alone in an information set on its tree, so that the game has only one subgame (itself), then the whole game is one of simultaneous play. If at least one node shares its information set with another, while others are alone, the game involves both simultaneous and sequential play, and so is still a game of imperfect information. Only if all information sets are inhabited by just one node do we have a game of perfect information.
In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the outcome we’ve represented as (2,2), indicating mutual defection, was said to be the ‘solution’ to the game. Following the general practice in economics, game theorists refer to the solutions of games as equilibria. Philosophically minded readers will want to pose a conceptual question right here: What is ‘equilibrated’ about some game outcomes such that we are motivated to call them ‘solutions’? When we say that a physical system is in equilibrium, we mean that it is in a stable state, one in which all the causal forces internal to the system balance each other out and so leave it ‘at rest’ until and unless it is perturbed by the intervention of some exogenous (that is, ‘external’) force. This is what economists have traditionally meant in talking about ‘equilibria’; they read economic systems as being networks of mutually constraining (often causal) relations, just like physical systems, and the equilibria of such systems are then their endogenously stable states. (Note that, in both physical and economic systems, endogenously stable states might never be directly observed because the systems in question are never isolated from exogenous influences that move and destabilize them. In both classical mechanics and in economics, equilibrium concepts are tools for analysis, not predictions of what we expect to observe.) As we will see in later sections, it is possible to maintain this understanding of equilibria in the case of game theory. However, as we noted in Section 2.1, some people interpret game theory as being an explanatory theory of strategic reasoning. For them, a solution to a game must be an outcome that a rational agent would predict using the mechanisms of rational computation alone. Such theorists face some puzzles about solution concepts that are less important to the theorist who isn’t trying to use game theory to under-write a general analysis of rationality. The interest of philosophers in game theory is more often motivated by this ambition than is that of the economist or other scientist.
It’s useful to start the discussion here from the case of the Prisoner’s Dilemma because it’s unusually simple from the perspective of the puzzles about solution concepts. What we referred to as its ‘solution’ is the unique Nash equilibrium of the game. (The ‘Nash’ here refers to John Nash, the Nobel Laureate mathematician who in Nash (1950) did most to extend and generalize von Neumann & Morgenstern’s pioneering work.) Nash equilibrium (henceforth ‘NE’) applies (or fails to apply, as the case may be) to whole sets of strategies, one for each player in a game. A set of strategies is a NE just in case no player could improve her payoff, given the strategies of all other players in the game, by changing her strategy. Notice how closely this idea is related to the idea of strict dominance: no strategy could be a NE strategy if it is strictly dominated. Therefore, if iterative elimination of strictly dominated strategies takes us to a unique outcome, we know that the vector of strategies that leads to it is the game’s unique NE. Now, almost all theorists agree that avoidance of strictly dominated strategies is a minimum requirement of economic rationality. A player who knowingly chooses a strictly dominated strategy directly violates clause (iii) of the definition of economic agency as given in Section 2.2. This implies that if a game has an outcome that is a unique NE, as in the case of joint confession in the PD, that must be its unique solution. This is one of the most important respects in which the PD is an ‘easy’ (and atypical) game.
We can specify one class of games in which NE is always not only necessary but sufficient as a solution concept. These are finite perfect-information games that are also zero-sum. A zero-sum game (in the case of a game involving just two players) is one in which one player can only be made better off by making the other player worse off. (Tic-tac-toe is a simple example of such a game: any move that brings one player closer to winning brings her opponent closer to losing, and vice-versa.) We can determine whether a game is zero-sum by examining players’ utility functions: in zero-sum games these will be mirror-images of each other, with one player’s highly ranked outcomes being low-ranked for the other and vice-versa. In such a game, if I am playing a strategy such that, given your strategy, I can’t do any better, and if you are also playing such a strategy, then, since any change of strategy by me would have to make you worse off and vice-versa, it follows that our game can have no solution compatible with our mutual economic rationality other than its unique NE. We can put this another way: in a zero-sum game, my playing a strategy that maximizes my minimum payoff if you play the best you can, and your simultaneously doing the same thing, is just equivalent to our both playing our best strategies, so this pair of so-called ‘maximin’ procedures is guaranteed to find the unique solution to the game, which is its unique NE. (In tic-tac-toe, this is a draw. You can’t do any better than drawing, and neither can I, if both of us are trying to win and trying not to lose.)
However, most games do not have this property. It won’t be possible, in this one article, to enumerate all of the ways in which games can be problematic from the perspective of their possible solutions. (For one thing, it is highly unlikely that theorists have yet discovered all of the possible problems.) However, we can try to generalize the issues a bit.
First, there is the problem that in most non-zero-sum games, there is more than one NE, but not all NE look equally plausible as the solutions upon which strategically alert players would hit. Consider the strategic-form game below (taken from Kreps (1990), p. 403):
Figure 6
This game has two NE: s1-t1 and s2-t2. (Note that no rows or columns are strictly dominated here. But if Player I is playing s1 then Player II can do no better than t1, and vice-versa; and similarly for the s2-t2 pair.) If NE is our only solution concept, then we shall be forced to say that either of these outcomes is equally persuasive as a solution. However, if game theory is regarded as an explanatory and/or normative theory of strategic reasoning, this seems to be leaving something out: surely sensible players with perfect information would converge on s1-t1? (Note that this is not like the situation in the PD, where the socially superior situation is unachievable because it is not a NE. In the case of the game above, both players have every reason to try to converge on the NE in which they are better off.)
This illustrates the fact that NE is a relatively (logically) weak solution concept, often failing to predict intuitively sensible solutions because, if applied alone, it refuses to allow players to use principles of equilibrium selection that, if not demanded by economic rationality—or a more ambitious philosopher’s concept of rationality—at least seem both sensible and computationally accessible. Consider another example from Kreps (1990), p. 397:
Figure 7
Here, no strategy strictly dominates another. However, Player I’s top row, s1, weakly dominates s2, since I does at least as well using s1 as s2 for any reply by Player II, and on one reply by II (t2), I does better. So should not the players (and the analyst) delete the weakly dominated row s2? When they do so, column t1 is then strictly dominated, and the NE s1-t2 is selected as the unique solution. However, as Kreps goes on to show using this example, the idea that weakly dominated strategies should be deleted just like strict ones has odd consequences. Suppose we change the payoffs of the game just a bit, as follows:
Figure 8
s2 is still weakly dominated as before; but of our two NE, s2-t1 is now the most attractive for both players; so why should the analyst eliminate its possibility? (Note that this game, again, does not replicate the logic of the PD. There, it makes sense to eliminate the most attractive outcome, joint refusal to confess, because both players have incentives to unilaterally deviate from it, so it is not an NE. This is not true of s2-t1 in the present game. You should be starting to clearly see why we called the PD game ‘atypical’.) The argument for eliminating weakly dominated strategies is that Player 1 may be nervous, fearing that Player II is not completely sure to be economically rational (or that Player II fears that Player I isn’t completely reliably economically rational, or that Player II fears that Player I fears that Player II isn’t completely reliably economically rational, and so on ad infinitum) and so might play t2 with some positive probability. If the possibility of departures from reliable economic rationality is taken seriously, then we have an argument for eliminating weakly dominated strategies: Player I thereby insures herself against her worst outcome, s2-t2. Of course, she pays a cost for this insurance, reducing her expected payoff from 10 to 5. On the other hand, we might imagine that the players could communicate before playing the game and agree to play correlated strategies so as to coordinate on s2-t1, thereby removing some, most or all of the uncertainty that encourages elimination of the weakly dominated row s1, and eliminating s1-t2 as a viable solution instead!
Any proposed principle for solving games that may have the effect of eliminating one or more NE from consideration as solutions is referred to as a refinement of NE. In the case just discussed, elimination of weakly dominated strategies is one possible refinement, since it refines away the NE s2-t1, and correlation is another, since it refines away the other NE, s1-t2, instead. So which refinement is more appropriate as a solution concept? People who think of game theory as an explanatory and/or normative theory of strategic rationality have generated a substantial literature in which the merits and drawbacks of a large number of refinements are debated. In principle, there seems to be no limit on the number of refinements that could be considered, since there may also be no limits on the set of philosophical intuitions about what principles a rational agent might or might not see fit to follow or to fear or hope that other players are following.
We now digress briefly to make a point about terminology. Theorists who adopt the revealed preference interpretation of the utility functions in game theory are sometimes referred to in the philosophy of economics literature as ‘behaviorists’. This reflects the fact the revealed preference approaches equate choices with economically consistent actions, rather than being intended to refer to mental constructs. Historically, there was a relationship of comfortable alignment, though not direct theoretical co-construction, between revealed preference in economics and the methodological and ontological behaviorism that dominated scientific psychology during the middle decades of the twentieth century. However, this usage is increasingly likely to cause confusion due to the more recent rise of behavioral game theory (Camerer 2003). This program of research aims to directly incorporate into game-theoretic models generalizations, derived mainly from experiments with people, about ways in which people differ from purer economic agents in the inferences they draw from information (‘framing’). Applications also typically incorporate special assumptions about utility functions, also derived from experiments. For example, players may be taken to be willing to make trade-offs between the magnitudes of their own payoffs and inequalities in the distribution of payoffs among the players. We will turn to some discussion of behavioral game theory in Section 8.1, Section 8.2 and Section 8.3. For the moment, note that this use of game theory crucially rests on assumptions about psychological representations of value thought to be common among people. Thus it would be misleading to refer to behavioral game theory as ‘behaviorist’. But then it just would invite confusion to continue referring to conventional economic game theory that relies on revealed preference as ‘behaviorist’ game theory. We will therefore refer to it as ‘non-psychological’ game theory. We mean by this the kind of game theory used by most economists who are not revisionist behavioral economists. (We use the qualifier ‘revisionist’ to reflect the further complication that increasingly many economists who apply revealed preference concepts conduct experiments, and some of them call themselves ‘behavioral economists’! For a proposed new set of conventions to reduce this labeling chaos, see Ross (2014), pp. 200–201.) These ‘establishment’ economists treat game theory as the abstract mathematics of strategic interaction, rather than as an attempt to directly characterize special psychological dispositions that might be typical in humans.
Non-psychological game theorists tend to take a dim view of much of the refinement program. This is for the obvious reason that it relies on intuitions about which kinds of inferences people should find sensible. Like most scientists, non-psychological game theorists are suspicious of the force and basis of philosophical assumptions as guides to empirical and mathematical modeling.
Behavioral game theory, by contrast, can be understood as a refinement of game theory, though not necessarily of its solution concepts, in a different sense. It restricts the theory’s underlying axioms for application to a special class of agents, individual, psychologically typical humans. It motivates this restriction by reference to inferences, along with preferences, that people do find natural, regardless of whether these seem rational, which they frequently do not. Non-psychological and behavioral game theory have in common that neither is intended to be normative—though both are often used to try to describe norms that prevail in groups of players, as well to explain why norms might persist in groups of players even when they appear to be less than fully rational to philosophical intuitions. Both see the job of applied game theory as being to predict outcomes of empirical games given some distribution of strategic dispositions, and some distribution of expectations about the strategic dispositions of others, that are shaped by dynamics in players’ environments, including institutional pressures and structures and evolutionary selection. Let us therefore group non-psychological and behavioral game theorists together, just for purposes of contrast with normative game theorists, as descriptive game theorists.
Descriptive game theorists are often inclined to doubt that the goal of seeking a general theory of rationality makes sense as a project. Institutions and evolutionary processes build many environments, and what counts as rational procedure in one environment may not be favoured in another. On the other hand, an entity that does not at least stochastically (i.e., perhaps noisily but statistically more often than not) satisfy the minimal restrictions of economic rationality cannot, except by accident, be accurately characterized as aiming to maximize a utility function. To such entities game theory has no application in the first place.
This does not imply that non-psychological game theorists abjure all principled ways of restricting sets of NE to subsets based on their relative probabilities of arising. In particular, non-psychological game theorists tend to be sympathetic to approaches that shift emphasis from rationality onto considerations of the informational dynamics of games. We should perhaps not be surprised that NE analysis alone often fails to tell us much of applied, empirical interest about strategic-form games (e.g., Figure 6 above), in which informational structure is suppressed. Equilibrium selection issues are often more fruitfully addressed in the context of extensive-form games.
In order to deepen our understanding of extensive-form games, we need an example with more interesting structure than the PD offers.
Consider the game described by this tree:
Figure 9
This game is not intended to fit any preconceived situation; it is simply a mathematical object in search of an application. (L and R here just denote ‘left’ and ‘right’ respectively.)
Now consider the strategic form of this game:
Figure 10
If you are confused by this, remember that a strategy must tell a player what to do at every information set where that player has an action. Since each player chooses between two actions at each of two information sets here, each player has four strategies in total. The first letter in each strategy designation tells each player what to do if he or she reaches their first information set, the second what to do if their second information set is reached. I.e., LR for Player II tells II to play L if information set 5 is reached and R if information set 6 is reached.
If you examine the matrix in Figure 10, you will discover that (LL, RL) is among the NE. This is a bit puzzling, since if Player I reaches her second information set (7) in the extensive-form game, she would hardly wish to play L there; she earns a higher payoff by playing R at node 7. Mere NE analysis doesn’t notice this because NE is insensitive to what happens off the path of play. Player I, in choosing L at node 4, ensures that node 7 will not be reached; this is what is meant by saying that it is ‘off the path of play’. In analyzing extensive-form games, however, we should care what happens off the path of play, because consideration of this is crucial to what happens on the path. For example, it is the fact that Player I would play R if node 7 were reached that would cause Player II to play L if node 6 were reached, and this is why Player I won’t choose R at node 4. We are throwing away information relevant to game solutions if we ignore off-path outcomes, as mere NE analysis does. Notice that this reason for doubting that NE is a wholly satisfactory equilibrium concept in itself has nothing to do with intuitions about rationality, as in the case of the refinement concepts discussed in Section 2.5.
Now apply Zermelo’s algorithm to the extensive form of our current example. Begin, again, with the last subgame, that descending from node 7. This is Player I’s move, and she would choose R because she prefers her payoff of 5 to the payoff of 4 she gets by playing L. Therefore, we assign the payoff (5, −1) to node 7. Thus at node 6 II faces a choice between (−1, 0) and (5, −1). He chooses L. At node 5 II chooses R. At node 4 I is thus choosing between (0, 5) and (−1, 0), and so plays L. Note that, as in the PD, an outcome appears at a terminal node—(4, 5) from node 7—that is Pareto superior to the NE. Again, however, the dynamics of the game prevent it from being reached.
The fact that Zermelo’s algorithm picks out the strategy vector (LR, RL) as the unique solution to the game shows that it’s yielding something other than just an NE. In fact, it is generating the game’s subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE). It gives an outcome that yields a NE not just in the whole game but in every subgame as well. This is a persuasive solution concept because, again unlike the refinements of Section 2.5, it does not demand ‘extra’ rationality of agents in the sense of expecting them to have and use philosophical intuitions about ‘what makes sense’. It does, however, assume that players not only know everything strategically relevant to their situation but also use all of that information. In arguments about the foundations of economics, this is often referred to as an aspect of rationality, as in the phrase ‘rational expectations’. But, as noted earlier, it is best to be careful not to confuse the general normative idea of rationality with computational power and the possession of budgets, in time and energy, to make the most of it.
An agent playing a subgame perfect strategy simply chooses, at every node she reaches, the path that brings her the highest payoff in the subgame emanating from that node. SPE predicts a game’s outcome just in case, in solving the game, the players foresee that they will all do that.
A main value of analyzing extensive-form games for SPE is that this can help us to locate structural barriers to social optimization. In our current example, Player I would be better off, and Player II no worse off, at the left-hand node emanating from node 7 than at the SPE outcome. But Player I’s economic rationality, and Player II’s awareness of this, blocks the socially efficient outcome. If our players wish to bring about the more socially efficient outcome (4,5) here, they must do so by redesigning their institutions so as to change the structure of the game. The enterprise of changing institutional and informational structures so as to make efficient outcomes more likely in the games that agents (that is, people, corporations, governments, etc.) actually play is known as mechanism design, and is one of the leading areas of application of game theory. The main techniques are reviewed in Hurwicz and Reiter (2006), the first author of which was awarded the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in the area.
Many readers, but especially philosophers, might wonder why, in the case of the example taken up in the previous section, mechanism design should be necessary unless players are morbidly selfish sociopaths. Surely, the players might be able to just see that outcome (4,5) is socially and morally superior; and since the whole problem also takes for granted that they can also see the path of actions that leads to this efficient outcome, who is the game theorist to announce that, unless their game is changed, it’s unattainable? This objection, which applies the distinctive idea of rationality urged by Immanuel Kant, indicates the leading way in which many philosophers mean more by ‘rationality’ than descriptive game theorists do. This theme is explored with great liveliness and polemical force in Binmore (1994, 1998).
This weighty philosophical controversy about rationality is sometimes confused by misinterpretation of the meaning of ‘utility’ in non-psychological game theory. To root out this mistake, consider the Prisoner’s Dilemma again. We have seen that in the unique NE of the PD, both players get less utility than they could have through mutual cooperation. This may strike you, even if you are not a Kantian (as it has struck many commentators) as perverse. Surely, you may think, it simply results from a combination of selfishness and paranoia on the part of the players. To begin with they have no regard for the social good, and then they shoot themselves in the feet by being too untrustworthy to respect agreements.
This way of thinking is very common in popular discussions, and badly mixed up. To dispel its influence, let us first introduce some terminology for talking about outcomes. Welfare economists typically measure social good in terms of Pareto efficiency. A distribution of utility β is said to be Pareto superior over another distribution δ just in case from state δ there is a possible redistribution of utility to β such that at least one player is better off in β than in δ and no player is worse off. Failure to move from a Pareto-inferior to a Pareto-superior distribution is inefficient because the existence of β as a possibility, at least in principle, shows that in δ some utility is being wasted. Now, the outcome (3,3) that represents mutual cooperation in our model of the PD is clearly Pareto superior to mutual defection; at (3,3) both players are better off than at (2,2). So it is true that PDs lead to inefficient outcomes. This was true of our example in Section 2.6 as well.
However, inefficiency should not be associated with immorality. A utility function for a player is supposed to represent everything that player cares about, which may be anything at all. As we have described the situation of our prisoners they do indeed care only about their own relative prison sentences, but there is nothing essential in this. What makes a game an instance of the PD is strictly and only its payoff structure. Thus we could have two Mother Theresa types here, both of whom care little for themselves and wish only to feed starving children. But suppose the original Mother Theresa wishes to feed the children of Calcutta while Mother Juanita wishes to feed the children of Bogota. And suppose that the international aid agency will maximize its donation if the two saints nominate the same city, will give the second-highest amount if they nominate each others’ cities, and the lowest amount if they each nominate their own city. Our saints are in a PD here, though hardly selfish or unconcerned with the social good.
To return to our prisoners, suppose that, contrary to our assumptions, they do value each other’s well-being as well as their own. In that case, this must be reflected in their utility functions, and hence in their payoffs. If their payoff structures are changed so that, for example, they would feel so badly about contributing to inefficiency that they’d rather spend extra years in prison than endure the shame, then they will no longer be in a PD. But all this shows is that not every possible situation is a PD; it does not show that selfishness is among the assumptions of game theory. It is the logic of the prisoners’ situation, not their psychology, that traps them in the inefficient outcome, and if that really is their situation then they are stuck in it (barring further complications to be discussed below). Agents who wish to avoid inefficient outcomes are best advised to prevent certain games from arising; the defender of the possibility of Kantian rationality is really proposing that they try to dig themselves out of such games by turning themselves into different kinds of agents.
In general, then, a game is partly defined by the payoffs assigned to the players. In any application, such assignments should be based on sound empirical evidence. If a proposed solution involves tacitly changing these payoffs, then this ‘solution’ is in fact a disguised way of changing the subject and evading the implications of best modeling practice.
Our last point above opens the way to a philosophical puzzle, one of several that still preoccupy those concerned with the logical foundations of game theory. It can be raised with respect to any number of examples, but we will borrow an elegant one from C. Bicchieri (1993). Consider the following game:
Figure 11
The NE outcome here is at the single leftmost node descending from node 8. To see this, backward induct again. At node 10, I would play L for a payoff of 3, giving II a payoff of 1. II can do better than this by playing L at node 9, giving I a payoff of 0. I can do better than this by playing L at node 8; so that is what I does, and the game terminates without II getting to move. A puzzle is then raised by Bicchieri (along with other authors, including Binmore (1987) and Pettit and Sugden (1989)) by way of the following reasoning. Player I plays L at node 8 because she knows that Player II is economically rational, and so would, at node 9, play L because Player II knows that Player I is economically rational and so would, at node 10, play L. But now we have the following paradox: Player I must suppose that Player II, at node 9, would predict Player I’s economically rational play at node 10 despite having arrived at a node (9) that could only be reached if Player I is not economically rational! If Player I is not economically rational then Player II is not justified in predicting that Player I will not play R at node 10, in which case it is not clear that Player II shouldn’t play R at 9; and if Player II plays R at 9, then Player I is guaranteed of a better payoff then she gets if she plays L at node 8. Both players use backward induction to solve the game; backward induction requires that Player I know that Player II knows that Player I is economically rational; but Player II can solve the game only by using a backward induction argument that takes as a premise the failure of Player I to behave in accordance with economic rationality. This is the paradox of backward induction.
A standard way around this paradox in the literature is to invoke the so-called ‘trembling hand’ due to Selten (1975). The idea here is that a decision and its consequent act may ‘come apart’ with some nonzero probability, however small. That is, a player might intend to take an action but then slip up in the execution and send the game down some other path instead. If there is even a remote possibility that a player may make a mistake—that her ‘hand may tremble’—then no contradiction is introduced by a player’s using a backward induction argument that requires the hypothetical assumption that another player has taken a path that an economically rational player could not choose. In our example, Player II could reason about what to do at node 9 conditional on the assumption that Player I chose L at node 8 but then slipped.
Gintis (2009a) points out that the apparent paradox does not arise merely from our supposing that both players are economically rational. It rests crucially on the additional premise that each player must know, and reasons on the basis of knowing, that the other player is economically rational. This is the premise with which each player’s conjectures about what would happen off the equilibrium path of play are inconsistent. A player has reason to consider out-of-equilibrium possibilities if she either believes that her opponent is economically rational but his hand may tremble or she attaches some nonzero probability to the possibility that he is not economically rational or she attaches some doubt to her conjecture about his utility function. As Gintis also stresses, this issue with solving extensive-form games games for SEP by Zermelo’s algorithm generalizes: a player has no reason to play even a Nash equilibrium strategy unless she expects other players to also play Nash equilibrium strategies. We will return to this issue in Section 7 below.
The paradox of backward induction, like the puzzles raised by equilibrium refinement, is mainly a problem for those who view game theory as contributing to a normative theory of rationality (specifically, as contributing to that larger theory the theory of strategic rationality). The non-psychological game theorist can give a different sort of account of apparently “irrational” play and the prudence it encourages. This involves appeal to the empirical fact that actual agents, including people, must learn the equilibrium strategies of games they play, at least whenever the games are at all complicated. Research shows that even a game as simple as the Prisoner’s Dilemma requires learning by people (Ledyard 1995, Sally 1995, Camerer 2003, p. 265). What it means to say that people must learn equilibrium strategies is that we must be a bit more sophisticated than was indicated earlier in constructing utility functions from behavior in application of Revealed Preference Theory. Instead of constructing utility functions on the basis of single episodes, we must do so on the basis of observed runs of behavior once it has stabilized, signifying maturity of learning for the subjects in question and the game in question. Once again, the Prisoner’s Dilemma makes a good example. People encounter few one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemmas in everyday life, but they encounter many repeated PD’s with non-strangers. As a result, when set into what is intended to be a one-shot PD in the experimental laboratory, people tend to initially play as if the game were a single round of a repeated PD. The repeated PD has many Nash equilibria that involve cooperation rather than defection. Thus experimental subjects tend to cooperate at first in these circumstances, but learn after some number of rounds to defect. The experimenter cannot infer that she has successfully induced a one-shot PD with her experimental setup until she sees this behavior stabilize.
If players of games realize that other players may need to learn game structures and equilibria from experience, this gives them reason to take account of what happens off the equilibrium paths of extensive-form games. Of course, if a player fears that other players have not learned equilibrium, this may well remove her incentive to play an equilibrium strategy herself. This raises a set of deep problems about social learning (Fudenberg and Levine 1998. How can ignorant players learn to play equilibria if sophisticated players don’t show them, because the sophisticated are not incentivized to play equilibrium strategies until the ignorant have learned? The crucial answer in the case of applications of game theory to interactions among people is that young people are socialized by growing up in networks of institutions, including cultural norms. Most complex games that people play are already in progress among people who were socialized before them—that is, have learned game structures and equilibria (Ross 2008a). Novices must then only copy those whose play appears to be expected and understood by others. Institutions and norms are rich with reminders, including homilies and easily remembered rules of thumb, to help people remember what they are doing (Clark 1997).
As noted in Section 2.7 above, when observed behavior does not stabilize around equilibria in a game, and there is no evidence that learning is still in process, the analyst should infer that she has incorrectly modeled the situation she is studying. Chances are that she has either mis-specified players’ utility functions, the strategies available to the players, or the information that is available to them. Given the complexity of many of the situations that social scientists study, we should not be surprised that mis-specification of models happens frequently. Applied game theorists must do lots of learning, just like their subjects.
The paradox of backward induction is one of a family of paradoxes that arise if one builds possession and use of literally complete information into a concept of rationality. (Consider, by analogy, the stock market paradox that arises if we suppose that economically rational investment incorporates literally rational expectations: assume that no individual investor can beat the market in the long run because the market always knows everything the investor knows; then no one has incentive to gather knowledge about asset values; then no one will ever gather any such information and so from the assumption that the market knows everything it follows that the market cannot know anything!)As we will see in detail in various discussions below, most applications of game theory explicitly incorporate uncertainty and prospects for learning by players. The extensive-form games with SPE that we looked at above are really conceptual tools to help us prepare concepts for application to situations where complete and perfect information is unusual. We cannot avoid the paradox if we think, as some philosophers and normative game theorists do, that one of the conceptual tools we want to use game theory to sharpen is a fully general idea of rationality itself. But this is not a concern entertained by economists and other scientists who put game theory to use in empirical modeling. In real cases, unless players have experienced play at equilibrium with one another in the past, even if they are all economically rational and all believe this about one another, we should predict that they will attach some positive probability to the conjecture that understanding of game structures among some players is imperfect. This then explains why people, even if they are economically rational agents, may often, or even usually, play as if they believe in trembling hands.
Learning of equilibria may take various forms for different agents and for games of differing levels of complexity and risk. Incorporating it into game-theoretic models of interactions thus introduces an extensive new set of technicalities. For the most fully developed general theory, the reader is referred to Fudenberg and Levine (1998); the same authors provide a non-technical overview of the issues in Fudenberg and Levine (2016)). A first important distinction is between learning specific parameters between rounds of a repeated game (see Section 4) with common players, and learning about general strategic expectations across different games. The latter can include learning about players if the learner is updating expectations based on her models of types of players she recurrently encounters. Then we can distinguish between passive learning, in which a player merely updates her subjective priors based on her observation of moves and outcomes, and strategic choices she infers from these, and active learning, in which she probes—in technical language screens—for information about other players’ strategies by choosing strategies that test her conjectures about what will occur off what she believes to be the game’s equilibrium path. A major difficulty for both players and modelers is that screening moves might be misinterpreted if players are also incentivized to make moves to signal information to one another (see Section 4). In other words: trying to learn about strategies can under some circumstances interfere with players’ abilities to learn equilibria. Finally, the discussion so far has assumed that all possible learning in a game is about the structure of the game itself. Wilcox (2008) shows that if players are learning new information about causal processes occurring outside a game while simultaneously trying to update expectations about other players’ strategies, the modeler can find herself reaching beyond the current limits of technical knowledge.
It was said above that people might usually play as if they believe in trembling hands. A very general reason for this is that when people interact, the world does not furnish them with cue-cards advising them about the structures of the games they’re playing. They must make and test conjectures about this from their social contexts. Sometimes, contexts are fixed by institutional rules. For example, when a person walks into a retail shop and sees a price tag on something she’d like to have, she knows without needing to conjecture or learn anything that she’s involved in a simple ‘take it or leave it’ game. In other markets, she might know she is expect to haggle, and know the rules for that too.
Given the unresolved complex relationship between learning theory and game theory, the reasoning above might seem to imply that game theory can never be applied to situations involving human players that are novel for them. Fortunately, however, we face no such impasse. In a pair of influential papers in the mid-to-late 1990s, McKelvey and Palfrey (1995, 1998) developed the solution concept of quantal response equilibrium (QRE). QRE is not a refinement of NE, in the sense of being a philosophically motivated effort to strengthen NE by reference to normative standards of rationality. It is, rather, a method for calculating the equilibrium properties of choices made by players whose conjectures about possible errors in the choices of other players are uncertain. QRE is | {
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc. agreed to upgrade post-Thanksgiving Day crowd-control measures in its 92 New York stores to avoid prosecution by the Nassau County District Attorney in the November trampling death of a temporary worker.
The retailer also agreed to have its plan approved by independent safety consultants and provide $400,000 in expedited restitution to victims of the melee. In addition, Wal-Mart is donating $1.5 million to Nassau County social-service programs and has agreed to hire 50 local high school students annually... | {
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“Two cats are better than one”, most people say. Is that really true? Is an older cat really happy with a new kitten in his territory? We took a chance and adopted a kitten for ginger cat Casper (7 years old). This is what happened:
More info: youtube.com
Step 1: the approach
Step 2: the first look
Step 3: the first play together
Step 4: the first fight
Step 5: the first grooming
Step 6: sleeping together
Step 7: the acceptance | {
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LEESBURG — The suspect in a vicious machete attack on a neighbor two weeks ago has formally been charged with murder after the victim died last week.
Carlos Lucas Reyes, 35, was formally charged after an autopsy conclusively showed that 61-year-old Gary L. Mosley Sr. died from wounds suffered in the attack in the early morning of June 29, police say.
Mosley was taken to Orlando Regional Medical Center in critical condition in the wee hours of Thursday, shortly after the attack at his Georgia Avenue home in Leesburg left him with severe lacerations to his head and arm.
According to police, Mosley and another man were drinking and playing cards in Mosley's screened-in porch when Reyes walked into the yard and tried to enter his home.
Mosley eventually opened the porch door to ask Reyes to leave, but then Reyes reportedly pulled out a machete and attacked him. The attack left Mosley with deep head wounds and nearly severed one hand, police say.
Acting on a tip later Thursday, officers went to Reyes's Waitman Avenue home in Leesburg, just a block away, where Reyes' wife admitted he came home in the middle of the night covered in blood, sweating and tired.
She said Reyes gave many suspicious explanations for his condition, saying he was attacked by a dog. Reyes told detectives the same story before finally admitting to the machete attack.
Police have not offered a motive in the attack, but according to the arrest affidavit, Reyes’ wife told detectives he had recently become increasingly violent and uses drugs, including PCP.
According to an arrest report released Friday, Reyes' wife said he poses a flight risk because he is in the country illegally. | {
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The World Health Organization has added “gaming disorder” to its diagnostic handbook, but experts argue that we still don’t know enough to claim that gaming disorder exists. The evidence is inconsistent, they say, and the criteria are too broad.
According to the WHO, the following criteria indicate gaming disorder: gaming is strongly preferred over other activities, the patient does not stop even when there are negative consequences like doing badly at work, compulsive gaming strains the patient’s life or relationships, and all this has been happening for at least a year.
People who need help could receive it using a more general diagnosis, like depression
But nothing in this criteria has anything to do with gaming specifically, says Andrew Przybylski, a psychologist at the Oxford Internet Institute who has extensively studied video games and mental health. “You could easily take out the word ‘gaming’ and put in ‘sex’ or ‘food’ or ‘watching the World Cup,’” he says. We know how opiates and nicotine work and what makes them addictive, but we don’t know the same for games. The gaming disorder definition says nothing about what kinds of games or what features of games might be addicting, and so it’s too broad to be helpful. It’s just stating that sometimes people who play games play them too much. This could be true about any activity and such an attitude, Przybylski says, “could lead to a kind of pathologization of every aspect of life.”
It’s undeniable that there are people who suffer because they play too many video games, says Michelle Colder Carras, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University focused on the problematic use of technology. But she argues that these people usually can get psychiatric treatment under a more general diagnosis like depression or anxiety. Both Carras and Przybylski were part of a group of researchers who wrote a letter to the WHO in 2016 recommending against adding “gaming disorder” to the diagnostic handbook because there’s no consensus and most studies in the area are low-quality.
So what’s wrong with the studies? First, we don’t even know how many people might have gaming disorder. Most papers collect data from self-help or gaming forums where people post about being addicted to gaming. “It’s like asking, ‘what is the prevalence of heroin?’ and then going to a clean needle exchange and running your survey there,” Przybylski says. As a result, some numbers say that gaming disorder afflicts less than 1 percent of gamers, but other studies suggest rates up to 100 times higher.
Some people studying gaming disorder will ask people about “internet addiction” or “computer addiction,” according to Carras, but it’s not the same thing. And there are more general problems, too: Often, scientists don’t share their data and don’t say what they were testing before they gathered it, which makes it easier for scientists to look at the data and report findings they already expected.
This broad, fuzzy diagnosis could stigmatize gamers and lead to more misconceptions. Carras points to a recent Observer article that suggested that the diagnosis could help prevent school shootings, insinuating that video games cause mass violence. “There’s a danger of a moral panic with people who don’t understand video games making these statements and causing family conflict, and kids being brought to treatment who don’t need to be there,” she says. And it can lead to more of the unfounded fear that screen time is “digital heroin.”
We don’t have a good idea of how many people might game too much
Still, there could be potential upsides to the diagnosis being added. Because the stakes are higher, it might push researchers to do more open and more rigorous science, says Przybylski. Plus, it might encourage gaming companies to be proactive and share their data. “I’m genuinely worried about the mechanics of games taking advantage of vulnerable people,” he says, “but there’s a fundamental asymmetry between the kinds of data I can collect and the data that video game companies — like the ones that create Fortnite or League of Legends — collect every day.”
Finally, it’s worth noting that although plenty of headlines claim that the WHO has decided “gaming addiction” is real, the agency has been careful not to cry “addiction.” Instead, the classification is labeled under “disorders due to addictive behavior.” “If they were going to say ‘addiction,’ it would really require much higher evidence that doesn’t exist yet,” says Przybylski. “I think it’s very intentional that they’ve avoided the term addiction and used an ambiguous term like ‘disorder.’”
If there really are people who suffer, why not just call it an addiction? “I think that dilutes the term ‘addiction,’” says Przybylski. In theory, he adds, “if you had an infinite number of therapists and an infinite number of dollars and medications, it’s fine to medicalize everything because then you can therapy and drug your way out of the problem.” But we don’t live in a world like that and so triage is necessary: “If we start creating all of these ‘addictions’ that are mostly normal behaviors, it may distract resources away from those that we know cause human suffering.”
We have asked the WHO for comment and will update if the agency responds. | {
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Colorado Voters Strike Down Comcast's Awful State Law So for more than a decade we've noted how more than 20 states have passed laws, quite literally written by giant ISP lobbyists, preventing towns and cities from building their own broadband networks. In many instances these laws even ban towns and cities from striking public private partnerships with companies like Ting or Google Fiber, often the only way many of these areas are able to get better, cheaper, and faster broadband. Buying said laws is often cheaper for ISPs than actually trying to improve service so cities won't head down this road.
While Centurylink and Comcast convinced Colorado lawmakers to pass one such law (SB 152) back in 2005, the law contained a provision letting individual towns and cities ignore the law if they vote in a referendum. And time and time again, local Colorado residents tired of substandard broadband have voted overwhelmingly in favor of ignoring the Comcast-bought SB 152. This week, Fort Collins voters were allowed to vote whether they'd like to ignore the law too. And while the vote only opens the door to having a conversation about the city building its own broadband network, Comcast and Centurylink broke local political spending records in an attempt to scuttle it. Said effort involved running a series of misleading ads claiming that locals would see fewer road repairs and less affordable housing if they voted yes. Again, all the vote did was begin the process of talking about building such a network, removing restrictions quite-literally imposed by Comcast executives 1700 miles away. And according to the Coloradoan, the majority of locals voted in favor of doing just that. The measure passed with 57.15 percent of voters voting in favor. "I was very encouraged with the passage today, and particularly with the headwinds of incumbents trying to misinform the electorate," Fort Collins Mayor Wade Troxell said of CenturyLink and Comcast's behavior ahead of the vote. "And also, I was very disappointed in the (Fort Collins Area Chamber of Commerce) playing an active role in misinformation. I think there is some accountability that has to come out post-election." Again, if Comcast doesn't want towns and cities getting into the broadband business, there's a very simple solution: offer better, cheaper and faster service. Towns and cities aren't getting into the broadband business because it's fun, they're doing so because they're at their wits end with Again, if Comcast doesn't want towns and cities getting into the broadband business, there's a very simple solution: offer better, cheaper and faster service. Towns and cities aren't getting into the broadband business, they're doing so because they're at their wits end with hidden fees , unnecessary usage caps and overage fees , and what's technically the worst customer service in any industry in America.
News Jump California Defends Its Net Neutrality Law; AT&T's Traffic Up 20% Despite Data Traffic Actually Being Down; + more news Are The Comcast-Charter X1 Talks Dead In The Water?; AT&T May Offer Phone Plans With Ads For Discounts; + more news Europe's Top Court: Net Neutrality Rules Bar Zero Rating; ViacomCBS To Rebrand CBS All Access As Paramount+; + more news Verizon To Buy Reseller TracFone For $7B; 5G Not The Competitive Threat To Cable Many Thought It Would Be; + more news MS.Wants Records From AT&T On $300M Project; Google Fiber Outages In Austin, Houston, Other Texan Cities; + more news States With The Biggest Decreases In Speed; AT&T Hopes You'll Forget Its Fight Against Accurate Maps; + more news AT&T's CEO Has A Familiar $olution To US Broadband Woes; EarthLink Files Suit Against Charter; + more news 5G Doesn't Live Up To Hype, AT&T's 5G Slower Than Its 4G; Cord-Cutting Now In 37% of Broadband Households; + more news FCC Cited False Broadband Data Despite Warnings; ZTE, Huawei Replacement Cost Is $1.87B, But Only $1B Allocated; + more Cogeco Rejects Altice USA's Atlantic Broadband Bid; AT&T Is Astroturfing The FCC In Support Of Trump Attack; + more news ---------------------- this week last week most discussed
Most recommended from 37 comments
bikerglen
join:2017-10-27
Fort Collins, CO 18 recommendations bikerglen Member Corrections Fort Collins opted out of SB-152 in November 2015. Yesterday's vote authorizes the city council to amend the city charter to offer telecommunication services and borrow the money. This was the big vote to get the network started. That's why $451k was spent against the measure here. Ostracus
join:2011-09-05
Henderson, KY 12 recommendations Ostracus Member Us vs Them. Twenty states competing against thirty that don't have such laws. Guess who's going to come out ahead? Talking about shooting oneself in the foot.
tshirt
Premium Member
join:2004-07-11
Snohomish, WA 10 recommendations tshirt Premium Member see... ...Paying attention and VOTING works, you just have to do so reliable and consistently.
Pisgah Rider
join:2004-04-08
Inman, SC 10 recommendations Pisgah Rider Member My question is.... who are the 43% & what were they thinking? | {
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For the last month, we were going through the impressive catalogue of free VNs by ebi - hime , one of the most celebrated creators within the Western VN scene. As a conclusion to this series, it’s my great pleasure to bring you a short interview with none other than ebi herself. During our conversation, I’ve focused on the dominating themes in ebi’s works and topics directly connected to the freeware titles I was reviewing lately – if you want a more general overview of her inspirations and questions connected to her other work, consider reading the interviews done in the past by The Yuri Nation and Sekai Project . Also, if you’re not familiar with ebi’s free VNs, check out my previous posts about them ( Part 1 Part 2 ) – they should give you the context necessary to understand what we’re talking about in the more context-specific questions. So, here it comes – hope you’ll all enjoy it!
Plk_Lesiak: Thank you for accepting my invitation! I don't think there are many Western VN fans who wouldn't be familiar with your work, but can you share something about the person behind the ebi - hime label?
ebi- hime : I’m ebi and I like cute things, maids, and magical girl anime... And that’s about it! Honestly, I’m not very interesting.
PL: As you talked about your inspirations and interests in other interviews, I would like to focus on the dominant themes in your games. You're one of the few EVN authors that frequently set their stories in the West. Do you have a favourite setting to write about?
ebi : I think England is probably my favourite setting to write about, because it’s the country I live in and I’m reasonably familiar with it (though I don’t know everything about England, of course). It’s easier to place my characters in a setting I know relatively well, as I don’t have to do as much research, and the end result feels more ‘authentic’.
I also like setting stories in Japan because I got into VNs through reading a lot of Japanese VNs which were (what a surprise!) set in Japan. I also watch a lot of anime, and I went through a period where I exclusively read Japanese crime fiction, so I’m fond of Japanese settings! If I don’t feel like setting my stories in England or Japan, I’ll usually pick a European country I’m somewhat familiar with, like France or Italy.
PL: Much of your work is yuri-themed, including some unusual setups for f/f romance. How did Samuel Taylor Coleridge become a woman?
ebi : I love Romantic poets (especially Coleridge) a lot, and I really, really, really wanted to write a VN featuring him as a character, but dropping a real, historical figure into a fictional story felt kind of weird. Changing him into a cute girl made him feel distant enough from the real person that I could write about him without feeling too awkward.
Turning male historical figures into cute girls is also pretty popular in VNs, so I thought I might as well! Girls are cute! Although I think the real Coleridge you can see in his personal letters/diary entries is cuter than Samantha…
PL: Girls are cute indeed, but especially in Asphyxia, you ended up creating a really “heavy” story with a very cute exterior. Was this contrast something deliberate?
ebi : I wanted a very soft, almost doll-like art style for Asphyxia because I thought it would complement the mannered, flowery writing style. The character designs themselves are quite cute, but I think they’re drawn in a style that’s enough of a departure from a more traditional ‘anime’ style that most people would realise Asphyxia is not a ‘moe’ VN based on the screenshots?
I wasn’t trying to use the art to trick anybody, or make the story seem cuter than it is. I chose the art because I thought it enhanced the story’s gloomy atmosphere.
Asphyxia
PL: Still, Yuri romance is also pretty commonly associated with something light-hearted and a bit saccharine, like Kiss for the Petals series for example. Were you worried about the reception of your early yuri titles, considering how much they deviated from this formula?
ebi : The first yuri story I ever read was the manga Gunjo, which is very grim and dark and lots of horrible things happen to all the characters, so maybe that’s where I drew some of my initial inspiration from.
Initially, I wasn’t worried about the reception Asphyxia might have because I didn’t intend to release it. I wrote it solely for myself, and I made the prose as pretentious and the content as depressing as I wanted because I figured nobody else would have to suffer through it. Then, I stumbled across SillySelly’s art, and I thought it would be so perfect for Asphyxia I decided to commission her. I still thought about keeping the story solely to myself, but I thought her art was so gorgeous it would be a shame not to release it and share it with people. My reasoning was, even if people hated the writing and the story, they would probably still like the art!
PL: Even beyond Dejection and Asphyxia, many of your protagonists are writers or poets. Do they reflect your personal passion for writing, or is there something else that draws you towards this archetype? Have you done much writing beyond visual novels?
ebi : The characters in Dejection and Asphyxia write poetry because they’re all based on poets. I’m pretty terrible at writing poetry myself, and I don’t like doing it. Moreover, my interest in the Romantic poets mostly stems, not from their actual poetry, but from their lives and their personalities, since they were all very melodramatic (apart from maybe Wordsworth) and they did a lot of ridiculous things.
I’ve written a few original characters who are authors (Blake from Where the Sun Always Shines and Eiji from Six Days of Snow are the best examples) because I like writing, so it’s a hobby I can understand and talk about somewhat credibly. Still, I try not to make all my protagonists writers, or even interested in literature, because I’m afraid it might get boring.
I used to write my own ‘original stories’ in my notebooks when I was about six or seven, and I wrote a lot of fanfiction between the ages of 12-18, so I did a bunch of writing before I got into VNs. Unfortunately, most of my old writing is awful, so I’m not going to share it!
PL: Another prevalent theme in your work seems to be depression and mental illness, with a culmination of sorts in Lynne and its gruesome portrayal of teenager's anxiety. What makes this topic attractive to you as a writer?
ebi : They’re interesting themes to write about, and I imagine a lot of people have experience with these issues, but perhaps don’t always feel comfortable talking about them? I’d like it if some people could read my stories and relate to some of the characters, and maybe feel a little bit less alone with their worries.
The Sad Story of Emmeline Burns
PL: And one more notable trope – ghosts and afterlife, including lovers, doomed in life, being reunited after death. It seems that most of the romances you write can only ever work out "on the other side", if at all…
ebi : I don’t think I agree with this. I’ve written a lot of sad/depressing stories, but I’ve also written several cheerful stories, too! Strawberry Vinegar and Blackberry Honey have happy endings! I also don’t view my romance stories where people die and reunite as ghosts as particularly ‘tragic’. Emmeline Burns and Windswept Night were both intended to have uplifting, optimistic endings, even if the characters suffer a bit to get there.
I know people can’t really come back from the dead to reunite with their loved ones, but that’s why writing scenes like that in stories is so satisfying. It’s nice giving couples in stories closure even after they’re dead, especially because it’s not possible in reality.
PL: Visual Novels are often a medium of escapism and wish fulfilment, quite akin to the trashy romance novels you sometimes ridicule in your writing. Yours... Rarely so. Do you ever feel like you should spoil your reader's a bit more, giving them more control and a chance for happier endings?
ebi : Well, I don’t know if the first statement about VNs is entirely true. There are lots of really, really good VNs there that aren’t all about escapism and wish fulfilment. The first VN introduced me to the medium was Umineko, which is pretty… not like that. And there are VNs which have fanservice and sex scenes that still tell interesting stories, like the Kara no Shoujo series. I don’t really think the stories I write are all that different from many existing JVNs , with the exception that I set a higher percentage of mine in Europe.
Though some of my characters poke fun at ‘trashy romance stories’, I have no real problems with them myself. Generally, I think people should be free to like whatever fictional media they like. I know there’s a scene in Empty Horizons where Lyon makes fun of Mireille for reading Totally-Not-Twilight-But-It’s-Actually-Twilight, but the scene concludes by saying there’s nothing inherently wrong with wish fulfilment stories if they’re not harming anybody and they make people happy.
Anyway, with a lot of my kinetic stories, I have a very clear idea of what I want to happen in the story and how I want the characters to act. If giving the reader choices gets in the way of the story I want to tell or the message I want to explore then I won’t include any.
Conversely, if experiencing multiple possible outcomes is the ‘point’ of the story, then I’m fine writing that too (like The Way We All Go). Really, it depends on what I think is best for the story I’m writing. Sometimes I think a story benefits from having multiple routes and different endings, and sometimes I don’t. And sometimes I think a story benefits from happy endings, and sometimes I don’t.
PL: One of your VNs I've personally enjoyed greatly, and which surprised me a lot was Lucky Me, Lucky You. Are we going to see other queer stories in a modern setting from you, or was it more of a one-time experiment?
ebi : Oh, I’m glad you liked it! I really enjoyed writing Nanami’s character – she was a lot of fun. Her ‘voice’ is also really different than most of my other main characters, since she’s more abrasive and assertive (but still kind of a sweetheart deep down).
Lately, I’ve been pretty fond of writing historical stories because I feel like I can get away with being more exaggerated and melodramatic with my vocabulary, but I want to write more modern stuff too! It’s fun to experiment with different styles.
Sweetest Monster
PL: In other interviews , you mentioned that you have many ideas for light-hearted, cute stories. Still, very few of them turned into actual games. Will there be more of those in the future?
ebi : Well, hopefully! I’m sitting on a bunch of scripts in various states of being finished right now, and some of these are very light-hearted and goofy. I’d love to make them all into VNs at some point (especially my very cute magical dog girl story, which is a full 26 episodes long!), but I don’t have enough time or money to develop too many things at once...
PL: A few months ago you wrote on Twitter that you'll most likely stop making freeware games, as they drain too much of your time and resources. If that really happens, should we hope for more frequent commercial releases from you?
ebi : I hope so, but I doubt it. Like I said, I’m sitting on a lot of scripts for unreleased projects in various states of completion. I’d like to release these more quickly, since I’m very fond of some of these stories and want to share them with people, but it’s not always possible. I’m not the only person involved in making my stories, and the production can sometimes get slowed down by various factors beyond my control.
It also doesn’t help that some of the scripts I’ve finished are quite long, have a lot of characters, and I haven’t started looking for artists or composers for these stories yet. I’d really like to release 3 commercial stories a year, but I doubt it will be possible this year. I’ll do my best, though! >_<
PL: Is there anything you would like to share about your current plans and the projects you're working on? Will we learn more about the yuri with bunnies in near future? ;)
ebi : Well, my latest VN, A Winter’s Daydream, will be releasing soon! It’s quite a light-hearted slice of life/comedy story set in Japan, that features an elderly grandmother being magically transformed into a cute girl.
I was inspired to write this story after stumbling across the ‘grandmother x grandson incest’ tag on VNDB. I was surprised this tag existed, and I thought it was funny such a niche fetish featured in enough VNs to warrant a content tag in the first place. After looking through some of these VNs, I saw that the grandmother love interests looked rather young and good-looking for grandmothers, and I thought, ‘what if I wrote a story where a more traditional-looking grandmother transforms into one of these impossibly cute “anime” grandmothers overnight? How would her grandson react to that?!’ Some of my ideas are kind of weird, I guess. : I
In the end, A Winter’s Daydream ended up being a little more serious in tone than I originally intended, though it still has some goofy moments. I’m quite fond of it, and I hope other people enjoy it, too! (Sadly, while the grandmother character is the main heroine of the story, in the sense that she’s the female lead, she’s not a love interest. I hope this doesn’t disappoint anybody haha…)
As for the ‘yuri story with bunnies ’ I mentioned on twitter a while back… I actually finished writing the first draft, but I’m not sure when/if I’ll release it. It’s quite a cute, fluffy story (I suppose it’s similar to Strawberry Vinegar in tone), but I have other scripts I’d rather work on before I get around to polishing this.
PL: Thank you for your time!
And this concludes my series on ebi - hime , for the time being. I want to give my utmost thanks to ebi herself, for putting up with the somewhat-prolonged process of preparing this interview and some of my purposefully-annoying questions. It was a pleasure and a privilege to work with her on this and I'm extremely happy that I can share her insights with all of you through this article. Obviously, this is not the last time her VNs are present on my blog - in two weeks, you'll see the first part of my Yuri Game Jam retrospective, which couldn't possibly be complete without mentioning Ebi's work. Also, I'll definitely work on covering more of her commercial titles in the future, both the old and the newly released ones.
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Who says we have to wait until Comic Con for some details to be released on the Thor: Ragnarok front?
Mark Ruffalo has revealed a little hint of a scene that he's already filmed that throughs some light onto one sequence in the film. He spoke to Australia’s 90.9 Sea FM's Galey and Charli radio show where he talked up his schedule:
“I'm shooting a scene where I'm playing Hulk today with Chris Hemsworth,” he said. “And it's a moment where he's talking to Valkyrie asking her to join him.”
It didn't take too much to assume that Valkyrie was going to align with Thor, since Hela is on the bad guys' side, but this at least indicates that she needs some convincing. She of course is an impartial figure, taking souls from the battlefield to Valhalla, and her intervention clearly means that Hela is breaking the rules of the dead in Asgard.
It's also a pretty big indication that Hulk and Thor team up early on, so presumably the big green guy is in it a lot.
Ahead of the Comic Con presentation, Karl Urban - who will play secondary villain Skurge the Executioner has been talking to IGN, to discuss his preparation:
“There’s a bit of a few hours at the gym lifting heavy things… The irony is that you won’t actually see my body in this movie under the costume that I have, but it’s important for me to get into the zone and feel [the part].”
Could that mean he's going to be augmented to look bigger? Or maybe he's just going to be in some seriously bulky armour, which could be why he was at Weta Workshop recently.
He also revealed how he got involved with the film:
“I read a fantastic script that was action-packed and full of great characters. When I heard who was involved … and [saw] the opportunity to work with [director] Taika Waititi, who I think is one of the most brilliant directors coming through, I made the decision it was something that I wanted to be a part of. And the character is fantastic. He’s got a great arc to him. Obviously I can’t say too much about it, but I’m really thrilled to be a part of the Marvel universe and to be working on Thor: Ragnarok.”
Thankfully that sounds like he's not just going to be a hulking henchman with no secondary dimension. And the fact that he has an arc sounds suspiciously like he might be following the comic book narrative that sees Skirge ultimately change sides and sacrifice himself to help Thor enter Hel.
That would definitely make for an excitement direction.
Thor: Ragnarok is released on November 3rd, 2017. | {
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The 2014 Border City Classic kayak fishing tournament has been selected as a qualifying event for the 2014 Hobie® Fishing Worlds Championship to be held in Amsterdam October 5-11, 2014.
The highest placing Canadian angler will represent Team Canada 2014.
Due to the costs of overseas travel and scheduling considerations, the winner of this event has until August 1st to commit to attend. If the winning angler is unable to attend, the second place angler will be awarded the opportunity and have until August 115 to commit. . If in the case the second qualifier is unable to attend then the third place qualifier will receive the invite and have until September 1st to commit.
As a member Team Canada, angler’s will be required to wear official Hobie Fishing Worlds team gear at all designated times. Competitors will be responsible for travel, lodging and fishing gear. The Netherland’s is a fantastic Pike and Zander fishing region for Europe. | {
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It would be hard to point to any noteworthy Mideast initiative or achievement by ousted U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. The Kurds surely won’t have fond memories of the agreements he recently reached with Turkey, which were trumpeted by the Turkish media on Tuesday.
To really understand the Middle East - subscribe to Haaretz
According to Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, the U.S. and Turkey agreed that they will jointly supervise security in the Syrian city of Manbij, and that the Kurdish troops which captured the city in 2016 will relocate to the eastern side of the Euphrates River. Tillerson negotiated this agreement with his Turkish colleagues last month.
Admittedly, the Kurds deny that any such agreement was reached, and the U.S. Administration also hasn’t officially announced it. But there’s no reason to doubt Cavusoglu’s statement.
This is a dramatic agreement, because until a week ago, Ankara and Washington were still trading diplomatic barbs. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan demanded that America keep its promise to oust the Kurds from Manbij and collect the heavy weapons it had given them. Washington countered by threatening a military response if Turkey attacked the Kurdish forces in Manbij.
The mutual threats escalated after the UN Security Council passed a resolution on a 30-day cease-fire in Syria that included Turkey’s fight against the Kurds in Afrin. Erdogan claimed the resolution excluded Afrin and accused the State Department’s spokeswoman, who suggested that he reread the resolution, of either being incapable of reading or of deliberately distorting the text.
America thus faced a difficult dilemma — whether to reconcile with Turkey at the expense of its Kurdish protégés or continue supporting the Kurds even if it led to a military clash with Turkey.
Though Turkey’s invasion of Afrin sparked condemnations from both America and Europe, Manbij was always the real test. Most of the city’s 300,000 residents are Syrian Arabs, and the Kurds say they no longer control it, having handed power to the Manbij Military Council.
Open gallery view Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, left, points as U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, left, looks on, prior to their meeting in Ankara, Turkey, Friday, Feb. 16, 2018 Credit: STF/AP
But in fact, the city is secured by 5,000 troops from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) who have merely changed their uniforms. Ankara sees them as terrorists who cooperate with the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which the Turks have fought for decades inside Turkey.
Since its liberation from the Islamic State in 2016, Manbij has flourished. It has largely replaced Aleppo as a major commercial center. Its supermarkets are full, its health and education systems work and the peace is kept. It is also a transit city for other Syrians seeking refuge in Syria’s Kurdish zones.
Aside from the Kurds who control the Manbij military, American soldiers and trainers are also present in the city. America has said its troops will remain in Syria until a suitable diplomatic solution is found. It justifies its continued presence with the need to finish the mop-up of Islamic State forces — even though it already announced that this war, in which it relied on the Kurds as its most effective ground forces, has been successfully concluded.
The agreement with Turkey, despite undermining America’s alliance with the Kurds, actually furthers its policy, because military cooperation with Turkey in Manbij will ensure a continued U.S. military presence in Syria and bolster Washington's argument against Russian and Syrian demands that it withdraw its troops.
Open gallery view U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jamie Jarrard left, thanks Manbij Military Council commander Muhammed Abu Adeel during a visit to a small outpost near the town of Manbij, northern Syria, Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2018 Credit: Susannah George/AP
But the critical questions are how the Kurds will respond to this agreement, to which they weren’t a party, and whether Turkey will end its siege of Afrin in response to the Manbij deal. Turkey has already answered the latter question, saying the battle over Afrin will continue until Kurdish forces leave both the city and the province, one of the three autonomous Kurdish provinces in northern Syria.
As for possible Kurdish responses to the Manbij agreement, the Kurds don’t actually have many options. They will have to leave the city they liberated, because refusing to do so would mean fighting both Turkish and American forces, which is beyond the Kurds’ military capabilities.
For Turkey, a Kurdish withdrawal east of the Euphrates is important because it will widen the territorial buffer between the three Kurdish provinces. That will make it hard for the Kurds to achieve the territorial contiguity Turkey so fears.
The Kurds are voicing disappointment at America’s “betrayal,” but they probably weren’t surprised. The fact that America didn’t help them against the Turkish invasion of Afrin had already made it clear that they don’t top America’s priority list. That’s why they “invited” Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces to help them fight the Turks.
Open gallery view Rex Tillerson, outgoing US Secretary of State arrives to makes a statement after his dismissal at the State Department in Washington, DC, March 13, 2018. Credit: SAUL LOEB/AFP
But the deep damage done to the relationship between the Syrian Kurds and the U.S. Administration doesn’t end with the tactical issue of who controls Manbij. It’s also liable to affect the diplomatic negotiations over Syria’s future and the character of Syria after its civil war finally ends. | {
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Title
Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases | {
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Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner 2: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon will be available for PlayStation 3 via PS2 Classics on PlayStation Network next Tuesday, June 24.
The news comes via this week’s PlayStation Blogcast, as picked up by Wario64. | {
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MUSKOGEE-- Back in May, Gary Peterson said he noticed several fish stressing and dying in Johnston Creek near his home. He walked further down the creek near main street where he said he found what killed hundreds of dead fish.
“When I got here I noticed there were several hundred gallons of what looked like straight sewer water,” said Peterson.
Peterson contacted the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation and the Department of Environmental Quality who began investigating the scene. Authorities found 936 dead fish in the creek.
“About 2.75 miles. This flows down to the Arkansas River and it was pretty much that full extent,” said ODWC Stream Supervisor Jim Burroughs.
City officials said one of the city’s lift stations experienced failure, causing a 27-inch sewer main to back up.
“We were able to fix that the next day and also the next day we were able to get the aquatic life back in the channel,” said City of Muskogee Public Works Dir, Mike Stewart.
Now the city faces a $10,000 penalty from ODEQ and more than $850 penalty from The Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation.
Peterson said with Health issues at risk, he hopes this doesn’t happen again.
“The possibility of getting e-coli infection. The possibility of just getting any kind of bacterial or fungal infection,” said Peterson.
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Syrian secularists are under attack online and on the ground. Joseph Daher takes a critical look at recent efforts to discredit the contribution of Syrian secularists to the 2011 revolution and offers historic perspective on the meaning of secularism and how the concept been used and misused in the battle to shape the future of Syria. The second part of this article looks at the strategies of survivals deployed by secular actors in the Syrian opposition as Islamic fundamentalist forces gained momentum in the military and political arena. It also analyses the merits and dangers of embracing a “civilian state” in the bid to find a compromise between these conflicting ideologies.
Joseph Daher is a Swiss-Syrian socialist activist, academic and founder of the blog Syria Freedom Forever. He is part of the Wartime and Post-Conflict in Syria project at the European University Institute, Florence (Italy). He is the author of "Hezbollah: Political Economy of the Party of God" (Pluto Press, 2016) and "Syria after the Uprisings, the Political Economy of State Resilience" (Pluto Press and Haymarket, 2019).
Syria’s liberal secularists and their strategies
Some secularist groups and individuals initially defended and justified the presence of Islamic fundamentalist and jihadist movements in the Syrian political and military opposition on the ground. This was the case for multiple dissidents from liberal currents, represented in various opposition bodies such as the Syrian National Council and the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces (Coalition, etilaf), [1] to the detriment of democratic demands such as secularism and women’s rights. These liberal secularist figures remained mostly silent on the violations of human rights committed by salafist groups or their sectarian diatribes, and even included controversial groups such as Jaysh al-Islam in opposition political bodies. Muhammad Alloush, the former head of Jaysh al-Islam, was appointed as the chief opposition negotiator during the third round of United Nations-sponsored talks with the regime in Geneva and remained an important personality in the High Negotiation Committee.
It is not a surprising therefore to see Hilal Abd al-Aziz al-Fa’ouri, the author of numerous articles on al-Zaman opposition website, positively cite George Sabra, the former president of the Syrian National Council (SNC) and member of the liberal Democratic People’s Party (formerly the Communist Party Political Bureau led by Riad al-Turk) in an article characterizing Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra as “part of the revolutionary movement”. Similarly, Michel Kilo initially refuted all accusations that were made against Jabhat al-Nusra and that characterized it as a fundamentalist organization.[2] He also rejected any comparison made between the Islamic State group and Jabhat al-Nusra, arguing that the latter was a movement that was willing to have “an Islamic electoral system" and wanted to form an Islamic state by national consensus, while the former wanted to reach this through despotism.[3] Many other liberal secularists personalities have also mitigated the reactionary nature of Islamic fundamentalist and jihadist organizations.
Both sides had an interest in this collaboration with the perspective of reaching power or at least having a role in the various negotiation processes. First, the liberal secular personalities and groups in the Coalition saw the cooperation with Islamic fundamentalist and jihadist groups as a military necessity in the war against the regime; even if they were hostile towards democracy and ruled in an authoritarian way in the areas they controlled, including attacking and kidnapping democratic activists. On their side, the Islamic fundamentalist movements, including the Muslim Brotherhoods and salafist movements like Jaysh al-Islam, collaborated with the exiled opposition body to demonstrate their “moderation” and reassure regional and western states. Islamic fundamentalist movements, however, were the main beneficiaries of this collaboration. The partnership was unequal as Islamic fundamentalist movements had an organized political and military presence within Syria and received massive funding and / or support from sympathetic states (Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey) and / or private networks from the Gulf monarchies. Democratic and secular groups, which were already initially weak in terms of organized actors, were severely repressed at the beginning of the uprising by regime’s forces and unable to organize later on.
The personalities and groups within the SNC and the Coalition believed the end justified the means, but the end is determined by the means used. These circumstances resulted in the absence of an organized democratic or progressive pole on a national level within or outside the country during these years, while letting Islamic fundamentalist and jihadist groups occupy the political and military space. This led to the situation that the rhetorical commitments of the opposition bodies in exile to a civil and inclusive democracy were not credible enough to persuade large sections of the population to abandon the Assad regime and join the uprising. Similarly, they were unable to develop any solid and inclusive alternative institutions to the regime.
As argued by Syria researcher Tareq Aziza, “This shameful atmosphere (within the opposition of the Syrian Coalition characterized by corruption and submission to foreign states and interests) that has prevailed for years among opposition institutions (if indeed they are institutions) has made it easier for the West to believe and for regime supporters to advance lies such as "the absence of alternative;" or even "fear of the alternative"; and "Assad is bad but there is no mature alternative!", etc.[4]
Conservative and religious fundamentalists, as well as sectarian groups and figures dominated the SNC and Coalition. These two bodies tried to sell a message to the media that they were inclusive by appointing secular and democratic personalities in visible positions to reassure Western backers who feared the rise of extremist forces that could challenge their interests in the region. The Coalition has not condemned any humans rights violations or sectarian discourses by Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, and very rarely of Jabhat al-Nusra in recent years.[5]
What about a civil-state? A viable solution or a misused concept?
Given the attacks and undermining of the concept of secularism, coupled with the weakening of secular progressive forces in the region–especially because of repression by authoritarian regimes, the term « civil state » has been increasingly used by both secular (mostly liberals and former leftists) and Islamic fundamentalist groups. The concept has been gaining traction since the early 2000s. Its adoption by the two main Syrian opposition bodies could be traced back to the Damascus declaration of 2005, and later with the beginning of the uprisings in 2011.
Many conservatives, liberals and democratic secularists argue that this concept of civil statehood based on citizenship is less controversial for members of the society, while also incorporating the same principles of a secular state with no discrimination based on sect or gender. They however shy away of detailing their thoughts around the concept regarding the place of Sharia or of personal status laws. On the other side, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) has published several documents since 2001 promoting the establishment of a modern civil state and concepts such as citizenship, rule of law, democracy, pluralism, equality, etc… So in theory, there is a complete agreement.
Islamic fundamentalist movements completely reject secularism, contrary to what some scholars have argued
But the notion of civil state for the MB in Syria and elsewhere, and more generally of Islamic fundamentalist groups, should be analyzed deeply rather than taken for granted. Islamic fundamentalist movements completely reject secularism, contrary to what some scholars have argued.[6] One of the former leaders of the MB, and who is still very close to the movement, Zouheir Salim, said in 2011 that separating the state from religion means “depriving the state from its morals”.[7] The ideology of the MB remains deeply rooted in religious fundamentalism, where there is no separation of religion and the state and the laws work within the framework of Sharia The various iterations of the MB across the region do not have the same understanding of a ‘civil state’, which is considered a first step towards an Islamic state, or a state based on Sharia. They generally talk about a dawla madaniyya bi-marji‘iyya Islamiyya, that is, a “civil state with an Islamic frame of reference”.[8][9]
In a document published by the movement in 2004 entitled "The Political Project for the Future Syria", Islam is actually upheld as "a code of conduct for the devout Muslim," a "civilizational identity" for all Syrians, the official religion of the country, and the highest source of legal authority.[10] The project actually stipulates that the group would seek to “Islamize the laws in a gradual manner, due to our belief that Sharia revealed by Allah is a source of mercy for all mankind and that it consists of the most humane, wise and prudent measures that are in the best interest of all people”.[11] The text is also ambiguous about religious minorities, considering them equal citizens who would not be discriminated against, while saying that Islam should be the basis of the state and of Syrian identity.
In addition to this, women’s rights also remain a point of ambiguity in the MB’s ideology. The MB calls for women’s freedom of choice and the provision of equal rights, while at the same time stating that “appropriate values must be put in place to ensure that men and women continue to fulfill the mutually complementary roles God has assigned to them.” This leaves the reader free to interpret what such “appropriate values” may be.[12] On several occasions, MB officials have argued that the identity of the Syrian nation is based on Islamic values, and therefore any government that comes about must also embody those same values. MB members have also made numerous sectarian comments and statements against the Shi’a and Alawi communities, while at the same time considering Jabhat al-Nusra as a revolutionary force and their “brothers in faith”.[13]
By adopting the idea of a ‘civil state’, democratic and secularists individuals and groups conceded key demands of creating a future secular state and upholding women’s rights.
We have seen these ideas expressed by the two main opposition bodies, which reflects the domination of the MB and other conservative forces within them. In July 2012, in the opposition conference held in Cairo under the sponsorship of the Arab League for instance, the National Covenant document on women’s rights stated that:
“The Constitution guarantees the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, and seeks to create the required legislative and legal environment that enables her political, economic and social empowerment, in accordance with all relevant international conventions, as well as in harmony with the societal culture.” [14]
The last sentence, in harmony with the society culture, was added at the express demand of Islamic conservative groups and individuals, which was widely denounced by feminists as a way to curtail their rights. Many feminist activists have criticized the fact that secularists in the SNC and subsequently the Syrian coalition and Higher Negotiatons Committee (HNC) would inevitably yield to Islamic fundamentalist forces, sacrificing women’s rights in the process through different means. Feminist voices complained of the lack or absence of female representation in these opposition bodies, often limited to symbolic representation without any real responsibilities. Similarly these opposition bodies have not opposed the sectarian and Arab chauvinist diatribes or practices of their members.
Similarly, the General Principle of the transition plan submitted by the opposition’s HNC in September 2016 exclusively listed for example the Arab Islamic culture as source “for intellectual production and social relations amongst all Syrians” (High Negotiation Commission: 2016: 9). This is why I believe that, by adopting the idea of a ‘civil state’, democratic and secularists individuals and groups conceded key demands of creating a future secular state and upholding women’s rights. They failed to challenging sectarianism and yielded to the politics of reactionary groups for opportunistic reasons. This has had dramatic consequences on the Syrian opposition and hurt its capacity to present itself as an inclusive alternative to the regime. Of course, a difference needs to be drawn between political groups that adopted the ‘civil state’ rhetoric to justify and seek an alliance with reactionary groups such as the Brotherhood, and those popular youth groups that emerged during the uprising, using this notion, while not abandoning their opposition to sectarianism and / or discriminations against women.
Secularism cannot exist without democracy and vice versa.
Conclusion
The “secularism” that progressive and democratic secularists should defend is not separate from the broader collective struggle for democracy, social justice and equality in Syria and beyond. This form of secularism does not differentiate between different sects and ethnicities, between believers and non-believers, men and women. Indeed, a secular state is key to challenging sectarianism, racism, sexism and homophobia. All people should be equal before the law, and there should be no laws drawn based on religions that discriminate against women in terms of their personal status, or against people on the basis of their sexual orientations, ethnicities and so on. At the same time, as mentioned above, it’s a guarantee against state oppression or imposition of one understanding of religion on all believers. In his Critique of the Gotha Program of the German Workers Party (1875), Karl Marx defended people’s right to practice their religion by stating "everyone must be able to satisfy their religious and bodily needs, without the police tipping its nose".
Secularism is a first step towards challenging these various discriminations and therefore a major democratic demand. Of course, secularism cannot exist without democracy and vice versa. In this framework, the struggle for secularism, alongside the other component mentioned above, is not only about creating a more tolerant society, but also a struggle against the dominant ideas of the authoritarian regimes and religious fundamentalist movements, and therefore a struggle for the oppressed against the oppressors. The ideological hegemony of these groups must be challenged by progressive alternatives part of much wider struggle to change society, which included issues of social justice and democracy.
Defending an inclusive conception of secularism also challenges the political alliances of some liberal secular members in the Syrian opposition with the MB and Islamic fundamentalist groups that refused to defend basic democratic demands, and with foreign autocratic powers. Similar problems among some liberal and democratic groups allying with fundamentalist forces have been experienced elsewhere in the region.[15] Indeed the moto (or slogan) “the ends justify the means” ignores how the means used will influence the outcome... and we have seen the impact this had on the Syrian opposition, which lost the appeal and inclusiveness of the initial popular movement in Syria.
Syria—and the rest of the region—is not ‘exceptional’, as some orientalists and orientalists in reverse proclaim. Nothing prevents the country from struggling for the same demands that people in other parts of the world have struggled for, such as democracy, social justice, equality, secularism. The hope in the future resides in the fact that the Syrian revolutionary process that started in 2011 is one of the most documented. This memory will remain and will not only be there to look at the past including its mistakes, but also as an opportunity to seize on this past to build future resistance. The political experiences and insights that have been accumulated since the beginning of the uprising will not disappear.
[1] A trend that we can find since the 1980s in some Syrian opposition circles and was repeated by similar groups following the Damascus Declaration in 2005 seeking alliance with the MB or at least strong relations.
[2] Syrian4all (2013), “Mîshîl Kîlû: îltiqayt jabhat al-nusra wa âstaqbalet ka-al-âbtâl”, Youtube, (online). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hdkkEFdROQ, (accessed 20 December 2014)
[3] Radio Rozana (2014), “Kîlû: lâ taqâranû “jabhat al-nusra” bi-“dâ’esh””, An-Nahar, (online). Available at: https://www.annahar.com/article/97968-كيلو-لا-تقارنوا-جبهة-النصرة, (accessed 20 March 2015)
[4] http://drsc-sy.org/طارق-عزيزة-الائتلاف-تحالفٌ-سياسيٌّ-هش/
[5] see http://www.etilaf.org/press.html
[6] See for example French academic François Burgat saying the Muslim Brotherhoods have accepted the idea of a secular state.
[7] Diaz, Naomi Ramirez (2018), 'Unblurring ambiguities', in Hinnebush R. and Imady O. (eds.), The Syrian Uprising, Domestic Origins and Early Trajectory, London and New York, Routledge, p. 10
[8] For example, the former deputy Supreme Guide of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Muhammad Khairat al-Shater declared in March 2011, following the overthrow of then-President Hosni Mubarak:
The Ikhwan [the Brotherhood] are working to restore Islam in its all-encompassing conception to the lives of people, and they believe that this will only come about through the strong society. Thus the mission is clear: restoring Islam in its all-encompassing conception; subjugating people to God; instituting the religion of God; the Islamization of life, empowering of God’s religion; establishing the Nahda [Renaissance] of the ‘Ummah[religious community] on the basis of Islam (…) Thus we’ve learned to start with building the Muslim individual, the Muslim family, the Muslim society, the Islamic government, the global Islamic state.
[9] We can find similar statements among Shi’a Islamic fundamentalist forces, for example the Lebanese Hezbollah declared on numerous occasions its opposition to any kind of possible personal status civil law alongside Islamic Status law, and declared such propositions as being anti-Islamic, and professed until today that an Islamic state is its preferred political system, although not able to implement it in Lebanon because of the religious sectarian diversity of the country.
[10] http://www.ikhwanwiki.com/index.php?title=المشروع_السياسي_لسورية_المستقبل
[11] http://www.ikhwanwiki.com/index.php?title=المشروع_السياسي_لسورية_المستقبل
[12] Lefèvre, Raphael (2013a), 'The Ashes of Hama, the Muslim Brotherhoods in Syria', London: Hurst, p. 174
[13] We should not forget as well that while the MB initially supported the Damascus Declaration in 2005, in 2006 they joined forces with fifteen other opposition groups along with the former vice-president of Syria Abdul Halim Khaddam, who had just defected from the regime (see further in the chapter), in the establishment of the National Salvation Front (NSF), which was backed by Saudi Arabia. In April 2009, the MB announced an end to the Brotherhood’s participation in the NSF, as they were seeking a form of understanding and reconciliation with the regime. The beginning of the uprising in Syria in March of 2011 ended this process with the MB that called in April to support the uprising.
[14]http://archive.aawsat.com/details.asp?section=4&issueno=12273&article=684969#.W1ZBjyPpNR0
[15] In the latest elections in Iraq for example, the Sairun coalition, gathering the movement of Shi’a Islamic cleric Moqtada Sadr and the Iraqi Communist Party, mentioned their willingness to build a “civil state” for all citizens. At the same time however, issues such as women’s rights and secularism were not tackled by both parties, because according to Iraqi Communist Party secretary-general Raid Jahid Fahmi they were source of conflicts between his movement and the Sadrists. Sadr is today seeking to form a unity national government with other Shi’a Islamic fundamentalist forces and individuals and other sectarian personalities that he used to criticize previously. For more see: https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/iraq-elections-sairoun-muqtada-al-sadr | {
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A debate to rule on who is the greatest comic character between Asterix and Tintin will take place next month.
The event in Kendal, Cumbria, will launch the Lakes International Comic Art Festival and mark the appointment at Lancaster University of Benoit Peeters as its first professor of comic art.
Two top teams will battle it out on stage in the Clash Of The Toon Titans, with Mr Peeters - the author of two books on Tintin's creator, Herge, - and Peter Kessler, author of The Complete Guide To Asterix, putting the case for each side.
Mr Kessler said: "On one level this is all for fun and it doesn't really matter who is the 'greatest' -whatever that means.
"But on a personal level I do feel that over the years there has been a kind of assumption amongst the cognoscenti that Tintin is 'great art', while Asterix is 'just for kids'.
"Certainly there have been more 'grown-up' books on Tintin than Asterix.
"I really don't think that is a justifiable state of affairs and in the interest of rebalancing public opinion, I'm sure each side will really go out there and try to win the debate."
Professor Simon Guy, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Lancaster University, said: "We are delighted to be supporting the Lakes international Comic Art Festival and look forward to formally announcing and celebrating the appointment of Benoit Peeters to a professorship in graphic fiction and comic art.
"His appointment is bringing new ideas and insights to our English and creative writing courses and more widely across the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences."
The event takes place at The Brewery on October 14. | {
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Mike Reiss ESPN Staff Writer 3 Minute Read
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- Bill Belichick loves to trade, and the NFL’s trade deadline is Tuesday.
This combination adds a compelling subplot surrounding the 5-2 New England Patriots, who have won four games in a row and are preparing to visit the Buffalo Bills on ESPN’s Monday Night Football.
The phones, as usual, are ringing at Patriots headquarters.
“A trade is a two-way street, so you have to have a trade partner. But I would say, in our case, probably the other 31 teams -- maybe excluding the ones in our division because we’re probably not going to deal with them -- I think they know we’re willing to trade,” Belichick said earlier this week on sports radio WEEI.
“And so if they have a player that for whatever reason they want to trade, in all honesty, usually we get a call because we’re a team that trades. I’m not saying we’d make a lot of trades, but if the situation is right, we’d certainly consider it. We’ve made our share.”
Bill Belichick's track record suggests he may be getting busy between now and Tuesday's deadline. Greg M. Cooper/USA TODAY Sports
Some of those have added players to the roster, such as linebackers Kyle Van Noy (2016), Jonathan Casillas (2014) and Akeem Ayers (2014), defensive tackle Isaac Sopoaga (2013) and cornerback Aqib Talib (2012).
But another point Belichick made in his radio interview is that the Patriots haven’t been afraid to trade players away despite their position as one of the top teams in the AFC, with linebacker Jamie Collins (2016), tight end A.J. Derby (2016) and quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo (2018) recent examples of that approach.
So that is why Belichick said every trade possibility is evaluated individually, because each has its own unique dynamic. Sometimes those possibilities are foreshadowed weeks in advance.
"Certainly we’ve heard from teams that have said, 'Hey, would you be interested in so and so? We’re not ready to do anything now, but maybe when we get closer to the deadline, let’s see how depth is,'" Belichick said on WEEI.
Other times, he said, the Patriots will call teams and propose something they might have otherwise not considered, but could be motivated by the team’s interest and willingness to deal.
So that’s why Belichick said he “wouldn’t rule anything out” at this point.
As for areas the Patriots might be most interested in pursuing, running back, defensive tackle and linebacker are three that figure to be highest on the list.
With rookie running back Sony Michel (knee) banged up, the club had practice squad rusher Kenneth Farrow taking significant snaps at Wednesday’s practice. The only other healthy running backs on the roster are James White and Kenjon Barner.
While the Patriots could potentially use Farrow as a bridge until Michel returns -- while also factoring in the potential return of Rex Burkhead in early December as a designated-to-return-from-IR player -- it makes sense to think they’d also explore trade possibilities at the position.
As for the defense, Belichick might not have the same urgency as others, with a belief that the answers are in-house.
“We gave up seven points a couple weeks ago against Miami. Hopefully we have some more of those games in us,” he said on WEEI. “I think we can play good defense. I think we can play better than we’ve played.”
Still, if a front-seven defender is made available in a cost-efficient deal -- similar to when the team acquired Van Noy, Casillas and Ayers -- the Patriots have the flexibility to make it happen after restructuring cornerback Stephon Gilmore’s contract to create cap space. | {
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Governor Phil Murphy on decades of Pompton Lakes pollution: 'It just horrifies you'
Residents living above an underground lake of toxic chemicals in Pompton Lakes are calling on Gov. Phil Murphy to push the federal government to add their neighborhood and an adjacent former DuPont munitions site to the Superfund program, which is used to clean up the nation's worst pollution.
It's a move that former Gov. Chris Christie refused to make, despite calls from the prior regional Environmental Protection Agency administrator to seek Superfund status for the site. Though Superfund is a federal program, the state governments must request that a particular site be considered for the program.
In response, Murphy told The Record and NorthJersey.com on Saturday that, while he has no immediate plan to visit the Pompton Lakes site, he has asked two members of his cabinet to research the issue in depth.
NorthJersey.com's investigation: Dupont's legacy of pollution
Toxic Secrets: N.J. community faces high rates of cancer, rare illnesses
Murphy said he has asked Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal as well as Catherine McCabe, commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection, to look into the issue and report back to him quickly. He is also looking at what might be done further in coordination with the federal EPA.
"You read something like this and it just horrifies you," Murphy said. "So we’re taking this very seriously."
Story continues below
The residents also ask that Murphy push Chemours, the DuPont spinoff company now responsible for the cleanup, to offer a buyout to residents whose homes sit above the plume contaminated with the cancer-causing solvents PCE and TCE that had migrated for decades off DuPont’s property.
And they are calling for a thorough health study to determine the connection between the solvents beneath the homes and the elevated levels of kidney cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma in the neighborhood.
A 2009 study by the state health department had first identified the elevated cancers levels, and said that while the DuPont pollution could not be definitively linked as the cause, it could not be ruled out, either.
The plume: How poisonous chemicals wound up beneath 400 homes
Now what?: What's next for DuPont pollution and residents who live above it
“DuPont’s contamination has spread to our neighborhood and continues to linger,” the residents wrote. “It has destroyed the health, quality of life, and financial well-being of countless generations of innocent victims.”
“We … feel as if we have been betrayed for decades by DuPont, and we have been let down by regulators and elected officials time and time again,” the residents continued. “We are urging you to stand up for us and fight for our health and well-being.”
Superfund status would provide a more ironclad cleanup plan for Pompton Lakes that could not be as easily challenged by Chemours, according to U.S. Environmental Protection emails obtained by The Record and NorthJersey.com.
It would also give residents more opportunity to have their concerns heard. And it would allow them to hire independent contractors to examine mounds of scientific data.
The Record and NorthJersey.com recently published a four-part investigative series looking at the 40-year history of DuPont pollution in the neighborhood, and the company’s pattern of pushing back against state and federal regulators about cleaning up various pollution from the munitions facility, as well as its repeated efforts to downplay the extent of the pollution and the potential health dangers to the public.
For decades DuPont used the solvents to clean machinery at its munitions plant, which manufactured blasting caps and other ammunition that helped the United States win two world wars.
The solvents, though, were dumped with wastewater into four unlined lagoons. Testing in the late 1980s showed the solvents seeped down into the groundwater, which spread the cancer-causing chemicals beneath an adjacent residential neighborhood.
In 2001 state and federal regulators started pushing DuPont to test for the possibility that the solvents were migrating up through the soil and into basements. DuPont resisted for seven years. When such tests were conducted in 2008, results showed vapor intrusion was indeed occurring.
DuPont installed vapor mitigation devices on 330 homes, but the underlying source of contamination — the plume — has yet to be cleaned up, even though DuPont signed a document 30 years ago promising the state that it would do so.
Story continues below
One pilot study to clean up the groundwater that DuPont tried in 2011 failed. Another controversial pilot study is under review by the state. In a process called hydraulic surcharging, Chemours would pump clean water into the plume area. The procedure would not remove the cancer-causing solvents, but would theoretically act as a barrier to prevent any more vapors from reaching the homes above.
Some residents oppose the idea, worried that the procedure would flood their basements with polluted water, even though the EPA says that wouldn’t happen.
The letter to Murphy is signed by the heads of two local advocacy groups — Lisa Riggiola, executive director of Citizens for a Clean Pompton Lakes, and Regina Sisco, executive director of Pompton Lakes Residents for Environmental Integrity, as well as board members of the Pompton Lakes Community Advisory Group.
The residents conclude by asking to meet with Murphy in Trenton, and inviting First Lady Tammy Murphy and Catherine McCabe, the new commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Protection, to Pompton Lakes to see the affected neighborhood first-hand.
“We need New Jersey to re-engage with the community in Pompton Lakes, because for the last eight years we’ve had a DEP that appears to have been on the side of DuPont and in an adversarial role with the affected community,” said Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, who also signed the letter. “A case like this changes your belief system in government being the good guy. This community has been suffering and needs change.”
Pompton Lakes is far from the only contaminated site linked to DuPont where residents and some leaders are calling for a comprehensive cleanup.
DuPont and its spinoff company Chemours are facing lawsuits, pollution violations, grand jury investigations and multi-million dollar legal settlements at other sites, including one in southern New Jersey.
Here are some recent examples: | {
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Gini Wijnaldum is set to complete his £25million move to Liverpool on Friday.
The player has already gone through the first part of his medical with the Reds and will conclude the formalities with the Kop side before flying out to join their US tour.
The Chronicle understands that Wijnaldum has said his goodbyes to Newcastle staff and team-mates and left the club on good terms.
Wijnaldum will now sign a five-year contract with Liverpool and will pick up a wage increase of £15,000 per week, to take his weekly basic pay packet up to £75,000.
Liverpool’s overall package for Wijnaldum is a cash-only deal and won’t include any players in exchange, despite United being linked with Lucas Leiva and Jon Flanagan in recent days.
However, Rafa Benitez’s excellent rapport with Jurgen Klopp could see a future loan deal discussed as he looks to add at least two more players to his squad this summer.
Newcastle are set to swoop for another striker and a winger, while Benitez has not ruled out further defensive cover.
The next outstanding issue on Benitez’s to do list will be to sort out the future of Moussa Sissoko, with both Juventus and Everton thought to be in the hunt for the £35million-rated French midfielder. | {
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Intense fighting between pro-government troops and militias loyal to Libyan strongman Khalifa Haftar continued Monday despite attempts by the United Nations to secure a temporary ceasefire.
Haftar's forces launched a military offensive to capture the Libyan capital of Tripoli last week, threatening to send the conflict-ridden country into further chaos.
The latest:
On Monday, the UN said an airstrike by Haftar's forces hit Tripoli's only functional airport for civilian use. Flights were suspended until further notice.
Reports of deaths very, but as of Monday, as many as 50 people are believed to have died in clashes between government loyalists and pro-Haftar forces.
The UN says some 3,400 people have been displaced by the fighting, and many are cut off from emergency help.
The UN had called for a two-hour truce on Sunday to allow civilians and those wounded in clashes to flee.
The US military has temporarily withdrawn its troops "in response to security conditions on the ground."
Read more: Libya: US pulls forces amid fighting near capital
Haftar (right) has been an influential actor in international negotiations concerning Libya
Haftar's offensive 'endangering civilians'
Ahmed Mismari, a spokesman for Haftar's Libyan National Army (LNA), described a new facet to the clashes, saying: "Air forces took part for the first time in the military operations. It conducted a very successful operation to secure the airport road (to the city center)."
Colonel Mohamed Gnounou, a spokesman for pro-government forces, said its counteroffensive against Haftar aimed at "purging all Libyan cities of aggressor and illegitimate forces."
Read more: Can the EU and partners stabilize Libya?
The EU's foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, called on leaders to avoid further military escalation and urged a "return to the political process." She added that developments in Libya were "definitely not going in the right direction."
Peter Millet, the UK's former ambassador to Libya, told DW international involvement should refrain from escalating the situation, saying: "I don't think the international community can, could or should intervene militarily in Libya."
Country in chaos: Libya plunged into chaos in 2011 after dictator Moammar Gadhafi launched a brutal crackdown against anti-government protesters. NATO-backed rebels eventually defeated the regime and captured Gadhafi, who was killed in captivity. Since then, warring factions have attempted to claim power in the North African country.
Read more: Libya: The road from revolution to civil war
Why is Haftar fighting the government?
Under a UN-backed deal last year, the Tripoli-based government of Fayez al-Sarraj, Haftar and some warring militias agreed to a transition deal that included holding national elections by the end of 2019.
But Haftar became frustrated with the Tripoli government's inability to govern effectively. Last week, Haftar ordered his forces to seize control of the Libyan capital.
The UN-backed government accused Haftar of betraying the transition deal.
Read more: World powers demand end to Libya military campaign
Former Gadhafi ally Khalifa Haftar, 75, held a senior post in the forces which overthrew the dictator in 2011
Who is Khalifa Haftar? Haftar is a former military officer who helped Gadhafi during a military-led coup in 1969. However, he later fell out of favor with the dictator. He enjoys widespread support in eastern Libya from several armed militias filled with battle-hardened fighters who made their names during the 2011 civil conflict.
Read more: Khalifa Haftar: Libya's military strongman
Libya's rocky path to democracy Ousted after decades For more than 40 years, Moammar Gadhafi was the eccentric strongman in power in Libya. He was known for his odd behavior - and for his regime's ties to international terror groups. Libya was one of the countries swept up by the Arab Spring, and protests eventually turned into a civil war. Gadhafi fled but was eventually captured and killed In October, 2011.
Libya's rocky path to democracy Chance for peace After Gadhafi fell, the eyes of the world were on Libya in the hope that the country would have a smooth transition to democracy. By July 2012, democratic parliamentary elections had taken place, but it proved to be a challenge for the country's politicians to form a coalition and compromise on issues that would bring further stability.
Libya's rocky path to democracy Militias gaining strength Another problem facing Libya in the post-Gadhafi era was the rise of violent militias. While various armed groups did band together to topple the dictator, they did not have a common cause to rally around after his death. Instead, they fought each other. Terrorist groups were also on the rise in Libya, and staged a deadly attack on the US embassy in Benghazi on September 11, 2012.
Libya's rocky path to democracy Deeply divided Political divisions became deeper in the years following Gadhafi's ouster. The UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) is the internationally-recognized authority in Libya, but several factions on the ground are claiming a hold on power. Jihadist groups including the so-called 'Islamic State' have gained a significant foothold in the country, making any progress precarious.
Libya's rocky path to democracy Shifting sands At present, the Tripoli-based GNA controls parts of western and central Libya while Haftar's Libyan National Army holds much of the northeast. However, areas of power are constantly shifting due to ongoing "Islamic State" violence and the country's many different smaller factions.
Libya's rocky path to democracy Looking for help In recent weeks, Libya has reached out to NATO for assistance in strengthening the country's security institutions in an effort to end the power struggle between competing governments and militias. Leaders of two of the biggest groups - the GNA and the self-proclaimed Libyan National Army LNA - called for an end to the political and economic crises in the country. Author: Matt Zuvela
Every evening, DW's editors send out a selection of the day's hard news and quality feature journalism. You can sign up to receive it directly here.
ls,tj/ng (AFP, Reuters) | {
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Fake TF2 Spy Image Fools Valve
Now a new post on the official TF2 blog reveals that even some Valve employees were deceived by the image.
"His mocked-up image was convincing enough that even some of us at Valve were momentarily fooled," said Valve's Eric Smith. "Well played, Kaanin." | {
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In our Behind the Scenes series, CNN correspondents share their experiences in covering news and analyze the stories behind the events. Here CNN's Ted Rowlands takes you inside the Barker Ranch.
Authorities could decide this week to start digging for more bodies at Barker Ranch, Charles Manson's hideout. more photos »
DEATH VALLEY, California (CNN) -- The Charles Manson murder spree of 1969 ended in a remote Death Valley, California, cabin called Barker Ranch. It's where Manson and members of his cult "family" hid after the seven murders, dubbed the "Helter Skelter" killings that terrified the country.
Now, thanks to a small-town detective and his cadaver dog, Manson's hideout might be searched for more murder victims.
About a year ago, Sgt. Paul Dostie of the Mammoth Lakes Police Department decided to test his dog, Buster, at the Barker Ranch. He heard rumors that Manson and his followers had killed more people and buried them behind their hideout.
After several visits, Buster, who was trained to find human remains, found five possible graves, Dostie says.
A few weeks ago, a CNN crew went with Dostie, Buster and gold prospector Emmett Harder to Barker Ranch. Harder knew Manson and his top lieutenant, Charles "Tex" Watson, and spent time with the Manson family in 1969. Harder says at that time he had no idea some of Manson's group of more than 30 men, women and children had just gone on a killing spree. Watch a report from the ranch »
Getting to the Barker Ranch requires a four-wheel drive to manage the steep, rocky terrain of the Golar Wash -- a narrow passage separating the High Desert Mountains from the arid desert valley below. As we bounced around on the drive in, it was hard to imagine how Manson and his cult got a school bus up the same road 40 years ago. See photos inside the Manson compound »
We finally arrived at the Barker Ranch about an hour after leaving the ghost town of Ballarat.
Before Buster, the dog, went to work -- we went into the old cabin which was virtually unchanged since Manson and his crew was arrested here.
Dostie shows us the bathroom where Manson was hiding at the time of his arrest -- crammed in a tiny cabinet.
"His hair was sticking out," Dostie said, as he explained how Manson was found while an officer was using the bathroom.
Emmett Harder, the gold prospector, showed us the old kitchen where he and the Manson girls ate pancakes.
"We rolled them up and dipped them in syrup," said Harder, who hired Watson and Manson to do some work -- even thought he says he didn't trust them around his gold mine.
"Find Fred," Dostie shouts, a command used to send Buster looking for remains.
One by one, with our camera rolling, the 4-year-old black lab goes to five separate areas, which Dostie believes are the site of old graves.
"I don't know who's buried here, but I think there are bodies," Dostie says as he praises his dog.
"I think there were more," says Harder, recalling a story one of the Manson girls once told him.
"This one girl didn't get along with Manson or Watson at all," Harder recalls. "And they took her for a walk, and they came back in a short distance, and we never saw her again," he says, raising an eyebrow under his cowboy hat.
CNN sent letters to Manson and "Tex" Watson, asking if there were victims buried behind Barker Ranch.
Manson never replied, but Watson did.
In a letter, he told CNN: "I was the first family member to go to the desert after the murders and also the first to leave. I say this only to let you know that no one was killed while I was in the desert. But I don't know what took place after I left. I don't think there were any more killed, I hope not! I have absolutely nothing to hide." See the letters sent to CNN »
Police say they don't know of anyone associated with Manson who was reported missing after his arrest.
Barker Ranch is located on federal land but the decision whether to do a follow-up dig is up to the Inyo County Sheriff's Department, which wanted do more testing -- including sonar readings -- before spending the time and money to excavate.
After reviewing soil samples uncovered by Dostie, a team of Oak Ridge scientists recently traveled to the ranch for further testing. They found enough evidence to excavate -- evidence of possible remains at three of the same places where his cadaver dog alerted, Dostie says.
"It seems very viable," he says. "I would say we have a tremendous amount of probable cause to look."
Even if bodies are found, there is no guarantee they would ever be identified, and even if the bodies were identified, prosecuting Manson or any of his followers for murder would be virtually impossible.
"Really that's not what we're interested in," Dostie says. "Many of these Manson family members are on one-year parole reviews, and there's a lot of movement out there to try to get them out."
A decision on a dig is expected this week. Without a search, we may never know whether Buster the dog was just barking, or whether his barks unlocked a Manson family secret.
All About Charles Manson • Murder and Homicide | {
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Homeless campaign group Home Sweet Home (HSH) is allegedly refusing to give €170,000 of public donations to homeless charities, but will use it as a means to continue its campaign.
Following a plea by Dublin Lord Mayor Brendan Carr to give cash collected during the Apollo House occupation to "proper homeless charities", Rosi Leonard of HSH said the group was "perfectly capable" of getting the best use out of the money.
"The donations of €170,000 are being used to keep people off the streets, to keep people safe and to get homeless people into services. HSH is not going away and all the money we receive is going towards this campaign."
The group's spokesperson added that it was currently paying for hotel accommodation for seven people.
The HSH campaign has encountered fresh controversy, with new claims that a couple staying in Apollo House had a council home in Drogheda and were not actually homeless.
Ms Leonard added that it would be a "real pity" if this allegation was true. "We were working off the trust of people. If someone came to us in need we would do our best to help them.
"We had an intake team who would go through a very brief welcome with the people identifying themselves as homeless and if we couldn't cater for their needs we would steer them in the right direction."
Irish Independent | {
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'Better if a guy named Sayeed Farouk was reporting that a guy named Christopher Hayes was the shooter.'
Hacked e-mails say Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was disappointed at news of the San Bernardino terror attack, during which 14 people were killed and another 22 were injured — but not for the reason you might think.
In an e-mail exchange published on WikiLeaks Sunday, Podesta was reportedly frustrated that one of the San Bernardino terrorists had a Muslim-sounding name, The Hill’s Rebecca Savransky reports.
“Better if a guy named Sayeed Farouk was reporting that a guy named Christopher Hayes was the shooter,” he wrote to Clinton campaign spokeswoman Karen Finney on December 2, 2015. Podesta was responding to an e-mail from Finney that contained a tweet from MSNBC host Christopher Hayes confirming the identity of one of the terrorists.
NBC News now reporting a US citizen named Sayeed Farouk believed to be one of the people involved in the shooting. — Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 3, 2015
Instead of mourning the loss of life at a horrific tragedy perpetrated by two radical Islamists, which disrupted a Christmas party at a facility for individuals with special needs, Podesta was bummed that a terrorist’s true identity would make it that much more difficult to exploit the tragedy for his own agenda.
His reaction isn’t so far from President Barack Obama’s, who used the terror attack as an excuse to push for gun-control measures that wouldn’t have prevented the tragedy. Instead of flying out immediately to grieve with the victims’ families and comfort those who were afraid, Obama chose to exploit the tragedy as an opportunity push his own extreme gun-control policies from afar. After two weeks of throwing parties at the White House and shilling for more gun control, Obama finally visited San Bernardino, but only during a stopover en route to Hawaii for a family vacation.
When it comes to Islamic terrorism, Podesta is just like Obama and other liberal elites. They’re simply not interested in taking strides to actually prevent these attacks, but looking for opportunities exploit tragedy to push their political agenda. In his own words, Podesta made it clear he was primarily concerned the attack didn’t fit Hillary Clinton’s campaign narrative. | {
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A financial analyst who correctly forecasted the election of President Donald Trump now believes far-right candidate Marine Le Pen will emerge victorious in France.
"Le Pen's momentum is a slow-moving reaction against the men of Davos -- as we have seen with Brexit and Trump -- but markets don’t want to believe it," Charles Gave told Bloomberg News.
Gave, founder of Hong-Kong based GaveKal Research, cautioned investors that the financial markets are underestimating the likelihood of Le Pen winning.
France will hold its first round of elections on Sunday, followed by a runoff between the top two vote-getters on May 7.
On Fox Business Network today, "The Blaze" host Lawrence Jones discussed the prospect of a Le Pen victory, calling her "the Donald Trump of France."
Jones noted yesterday's terror attack in Paris and said Le Pen is the only one responding, proposing that suspected terrorists be expelled from the country.
He said there have been 22 attacks in France since Jan. 2015, yet French leaders have not moved away from the country's "open border" policies.
Watch the segment above.
WATCH: Twerking Woman Distracts Drivers, Causes Head-On Crash
Hollywood Director: We Can Only Defeat ISIS With Love
DNC Email Urges AZ Supporters to 'Go Get in Jeff Flake's Grill' at Town Hall | {
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About this blog
Two years ago I started this blog as a list of fun things I wanted to accomplish in the year before I turned 30. Now I'm 31, and this blog has become a memory log of photos I've taken, adventures I've gone on, things I've learned from my 5 year old daughter, and a whole bunch of other crap that happens to pop in my head. I hope you enjoy.
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WASHINGTON: The Trump administration is making all efforts to ensure that any IMF loan to Pakistan is not used to repay its Chinese debt , a US official told lawmakers Wednesday.Pakistan is seeking USD 8 billion from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to bail itself out from a severe balance-of-payments crisis that threatens to cripple the country's economy.A recent meeting between the IMF and Pakistan ended in a stalemate.The US feels that the huge Chinese debt was responsible for the economic challenges in Pakistan."We are working and making clear within the IMF that if it were going to supply any funding to Pakistan it would not be used to repay Chinese loans," David Malpass , Under Secretary of Treasury for International Affairs, told lawmakers during a Congressional hearing.There are concerns among American lawmakers that the IMF money could be used to repay Chinese debt.Malpass said that the US is also trying to make sure that Pakistan changes its economic programme so that it's not a failure in the future.During the House Financial Services Committee hearing on 'Evaluating the Effectiveness of the International Financial Institutions' Congressman Ed Royce said Pakistan is currently seeking a multibillion-dollar IMF bailout."In July, Secretary (of State, Mike) Pompeo said there's no rationale for IMF tax dollars and those associated with American dollars that are part of IMF funding for those to go to bailout Chinese bond holders or China itself," he said."We will make strong efforts, and I believe successful efforts, to make sure that what you describe doesn't happen, meaning a payoff of Beijing via Islamabad ," Malpass said.Malpass said that IMF loans tend to be shorter maturity loans and China's loans to Pakistan have been longer maturity loans."So from the standpoint of that money being used, we will look for was that that roundtripping does not happen the way you described," he said."But important in this, is the structural reforms in Pakistan that are necessary for it to stop being such a poor country," Malpass said. | {
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Article content continued
At the time, Jean-Marc Eustache, Transat’s chief executive, said he didn’t think a small currency surcharge would deter travellers, and that he liked the idea.
As a result, Transat said a $35 per passenger currency surcharge will be added to all packages and flight bookings for Florida and Sun destinations, effective January 27.
“We are affected by the decline of the Canadian dollar because we pay a large part of our costs for Sun vacation packages in U.S. dollars,” said Debbie Cabana, Transat spokeswoman, in an email.
“We sell those packages to our customers almost at cost price, so we have no wiggle room to offset any drop in the currency value,” she added.
Air Canada Vacations is also implementing a $35 charge to offset the rapid decline in the Canadian dollar as well on its destinations in the Caribbean, Mexico and the U.S. as well on Jan. 27.
Sunwing is also proceeding with a $35 currency surcharge of its own on its flights and packages as of Jan. 30., with the exception of its summer domestic flights.
“Sunwing passengers who booked their travel prior to the introduction of the surcharge will not be affected by the increase as Sunwing is absorbing the additional costs,” the company said in a statement.
The currency surcharge is just the latest in a litany of fees and charges tour operators and airlines have tacked onto flights and packaged vacations in recent years.
Critics have argued the currency surcharge, while ostensibly aimed at offsetting the declines is the loonie, is actually simply a way of raising prices. | {
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How to Identify a Scam
Money Catch’s Scam Checklist
Money Catch has a Scam checklist to follow should you be concerned that you are at risk of being scammed. Our investigators are professionals when it comes to being suspicious, and we notice when something does not seem quite right, be it on a website, in an email, or something a friend told you.
Realising that you have wasted or, even worse, been conned out of your money is one of the worst feelings imaginable. The sense of embarrassment and shame when you have to tell your loved ones that you are unable to make that trip, or that you cannot afford to go out for that meal you planned a while ago is degrading.
The word scam is used to refer to a fraudulent or dishonest scheme, the sole purpose of which is to cheat the consumer. This can be by selling mislabelled products or misleading services, making investments or becoming concerned in apparently fail-safe business propositions. You can avoid the majority of scams if you remain vigilant, and know exactly what to look for. Be mindful that if a consumer has had bad experience with a business, they may try to deter people from utilising their services by spreading malicious rumours. The same with competitors, they also may try to discourage people from using other’s in their industry services by targeting them on the internet.
A scam can refer to anything from serious, organised fraud to hard selling practices. Whether the scheme was legal or illegal, it is highly unlikely that you will be able to get your money back, that is why it is crucial to be aware. Even well-known companies may point you in the direction of the small print should you query your position. Less reputable sellers may seem like they vanish off the face of the earth, with no phone number or address to contact them on. It is more than likely that the police will try to prevent further scams, rather than attempt to recover any money that has been lost.
There’s a simple checklist to follow should you be concerned that you are at risk of being scammed.
Was the offer unsolicited? With a claim of being specially selected are deceitful.
Money Catch adheres to the Telecommunications (Telemarketing and Research Calls) Industry Standard 2017. We run every phone number through the Australian Do Not Call Register, and only contact people that are not on the register.
Do you have to respond quickly? Demanding a fast response is often a sign that the business wants to make as much profit as possible before moving on to somewhere else.
Money Catch understands that you need time to review all the information we have provided to you, including our business licenses. We never push you; we only follow up with you if you request us to.
Do you have to ring a premium-rate number or a “one ring” phone scam? If so, it is highly probable that after making the phone call, you will never hear anything back. It involves receiving a call from a phone number you do not recognise. If you call back the number, you are likely to be connected to an international hotline which charges you a premium for connecting. The longer you stay on hold with them the more money it cost you, paying per-minute charges. These sorts of companies thrive off revenue generated from these premium-rate numbers, and they are extremely easy to change.
You can contact Money Catch at all times with our local business number 02 8011 4282 for a local call charge or STD call rate with your Telecommunication provider if you live in another state.
Are you being asked for your bank or credit card details? This should be an immediate warning sign. You should never give out your bank or credit card details over the phone.
Money Catch gives options to our client’s that you can select to receive your money by Cheque or Direct Deposit. We do not need your bank details to send your money to you; it is up to the client if they wish to provide bank details on completion of their claim.
Is the business reluctant to give you its address or contact details? A secretive company is never a good sign. If they are not willing to share details other than email addresses, then stay well away.
Money Catch is a transparent company, giving all contact details by phone, email, address, licenses, personal information and accreditations all located on our website for consumer checking.
Are they asking for money upfront? Always be extremely sceptical before handing over money, and if in doubt, ask a family member or a close friend what they would do if they were in a similar situation.
Money Catch does not ask for any money upfront; we operate on a commission fee basis. Meaning if we cannot get your money back to you, we do not get paid. No Win, No Fee, and with Skip Tracing we operate on No Find, No Fee.
We are licensed private investigators who strive for excellence and integrity and hold an approved and verified Master CAPI Business Licence by the NSW Police Force.
Money Catch provides services in Private Investigations for;
Skip tracing – Successful skip tracing is an art form, we specialise in the art of locating evasive debtors, defendants and witnesses through a combination of technical proficiency, analytical skills and savvy communication techniques. Over some years, we have developed a comprehensive network of operatives with access to nationwide open-source and industry-specific databases containing the most up to date and accurate skip tracing information legally available. We offer quick turnaround times and provide detailed tracing reports that can be structured to meet your specific requirements.
Cyberspace Investigations – we assist corporate and private clients that are looking to conduct Cyberspace Investigations on individuals, companies for the following reasons; Brand, Copyright, Trademark reputation, Background checking, Identifying individuals assets, Undertaking due diligence.
Scam Investigations – We provide scam investigations Nationally, including, Dating Scams, Credit card scams, Education scams, Phone scams, Investment scams. Our investigators are professionals when it comes to being suspicious, and we notice when something does not seem quite right, be it on a website, in an email, or something a friend told you.
Unclaimed Money Investigations – We assist corporate and private clients specifically in unclaimed money. We utilise our expertise to identify “lost” funds and trace the legally entitled owners. Money Catch has an extensive large internal database of unclaimed money owing to Australian’s, we can identify if you have unclaimed money due to you today and from the past.
Money Catch name/logo and tagline are all trademarked in Australia – You can also go to the IP Australia website to verify the certificate numbers.
Our Australian Business Number “ABN” is 9714 0553 868, you can use this number to look us up with the Australian Business Register “ABR”
By searching the “ABR” with our “ABN” this will bring up our company details.
Money Catch © “Copyright” | {
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After a team of forensic experts ruled in September that the 2015 shooting death of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman was, indeed, murder – not suicide as the authorities had initially ruled – a federal judge has validated those findings in a lengthy ruling that seems to point the finger at former Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.
The ruling is the latest blow to Fernandez, who won her bid for a senate seat in October. Though Fernandez has publicly said her decision to run is part of a political comeback, others have speculated that she ran for her senate seat to help insulate herself from accusations of money laundering and corruption, as well as her suspected work to cover up Iran’s role in financing the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires - a bombing that killed 85 people.
Alberto Nisman
Years later, Nisman was assigned to investigate a possible cover-up of Iranian officials’ role in the bombing. But he was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head in January 2015, hours before he was due to testify against former President Fernandez The ruling comes after a prosecutor recommended last year that the case be investigated as a murder.
In another stunning decision, Tuesday’s ruling by the Argentine judge also charged that Diego Lagomarsino, a former employee of Nisman’s, was an accessory to his murder, after a gun owned by Lagomarsino was found near Nisman’s body, as Reuters reported.
In a 656-page ruling, judge Julian Ercolini said there was sufficient proof to conclude that the shot to the head that killed Nisman in January 2015 was not self-inflicted. That marked the first time any judge has said the case was a murder. Fernandez and others had suggested the death was a suicide, but a prosecutor investigating the case last year recommended it be pursued as a murder probe. “Nisman’s death could not have been a suicide,” Ercolini wrote in Tuesday’s ruling, which also charged Diego Lagomarsino, a former employee of Nisman‘s, with accessory to murder.
Lagomarsino has acknowledged lending Nisman the gun that killed him the day before he was to appear before Congress to detail his allegation against Fernandez. But he has said Nisman asked him for the gun to protect himself and his family.
Earlier this month, Fernandez was formally charged with treason by a federal judge, and a federal judge called for her arrest. But before her arrest, Congress would have to vote to strip Fernandez of her immunity.
Meanwhile, her former Foreign Minister, Hector Timerman, was placed under arrest and confined to his home, where he wrote this New York Times op-ed professing his innocence and claiming to be a political prisoner.
In an unrelated case, Fernandez and her two children were indicted back in April on corruption charges related to deals involving a family owned real-estate company.
After leaving office in December 2015 following eight years in power – a period where Argentina’s economy experienced continued decline.
Her successor, the center-right former Mayor of Buenos Aires Mauricio Macri, has swiftly implemented pro-growth economic reforms like abolishing the country’s capital controls and reaching a settlement with a group of US hedge funds led by Paul Singer’s Elliott Management Corporation.
Now, the possibility that Fernandez will be held accountable for her actions is looking increasingly likely.
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“While the ocean is severely threatened, it can also be a major part of the climate solution,” she wrote in a nine-page summary of the plan, released Tuesday. “That is why I believe that a Blue New Deal must be an essential part of any Green New Deal.”
The new plan seeks to address how climate change is affecting oceans and other waters, while ensuring a vibrant marine economy, she said.
Senator Elizabeth Warren has released an addendum to her vision for a Green New Deal: the Blue New Deal.
The oceans are in crisis, she said, absorbing much of the carbon that humans have pumped into the atmosphere. That has produced rapid warming from the Gulf of Maine to the Sea of Japan, disrupting the migration of species, bleaching coral reefs, raising sea levels, and making the oceans more acidic.
“As we pursue climate justice, we must not lose sight of the 71 percent of our planet covered by the ocean,” she wrote. “While the ocean is severely threatened, it can also be a major part of the climate solution – from providing new sources of clean energy to supporting a new future of ocean farming.”
Warren’s plan calls for:
■ Expanding marine protected areas.
■ Ending new fossil fuel leases in federal waters and phasing out some existing drilling projects.
■ Accelerating the approval of permits for offshore wind farms and other renewable energy, while refusing to allow aesthetic impacts to justify denying permits for offshore wind projects.
■ Making federal subsidies or tax benefits for those projects contingent on companies paying prevailing wages.
■ Requiring turbines and other equipment for offshore wind farms to be made with iron, steel, and cement from US suppliers.
■ Investing in “regenerative ocean farming,” such as algae and seaweed farms.
■ Electrifying ports to reduce pollution.
Priscilla Brooks, director of ocean conservation at the Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation, said she was happy to see a presidential candidate focusing on an issue that few others have.
“With the ocean getting hotter and more acidic and wildlife facing extinction, the ocean must be a top issue this election season,” she said. “It’s time for bold action to confront the crisis facing our oceans.”
Representatives of the fishing industry were less enthusiastic.
“Not being consulted on this isn’t a good start to the relationship,” said Drew Minkiewicz, an attorney for the Fisheries Survival Fund in Washington, D.C., which represents the scallop industry. “We expected something more well-thought-out from her.”
Annie Hawkins, executive director of the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, a coalition of fishing industry associations and companies, said that “any large industrial project in the ocean will have significant impacts to the sustainability of established activities and the marine environment.”
“Fast-tracking such development is incompatible with the diligent environmental review and careful planning required to ensure that we’re making the best use of all of our nation’s renewable ocean resources, which requires balancing all affected interests,” she said.
Warren’s plan also seeks to address the overfishing of species, such as cod. It cites a controversial United Nations report from last year that suggested more than 90 percent of global fish stocks are overfished or fully exploited.
By citing that report, Minkiewicz and others suggested, Warren was “peddling in false narratives.”
They said the report is misleading, because regulators generally aim to have fish stocks exploited as much as possible, so long as fishing remains sustainable.
But Gib Brogan, fisheries campaign manager at Oceana, another Washington-based advocacy group, thanked Warren for elevating “ocean conservation to its rightful place among global conservation issues.”
“These are serious issues that need serious solutions,” he said.
David Abel can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @davabel. | {
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PICTURE EXCLUSIVE: Kate Upton reveals tan lines on bikini break with on-again boyfriend Justin Verlander in Mexico
It looks as though Kate Upton and her ber beau Justin Verlander are well and truly back on.
The loved up couple were seen enjoying a romantic break together on Tuesday, relaxing on the beaches of Cancun, Mexico.
Kate, 22, looked absolutely stunning in a skimpy bikini that showed off her tan lines.
Scroll down for video
Bikini goddess! Kate Upton, 22, shows off her tan lines as she holidays with her boyfriend Justin Verlander in Cancun, Mexico on Tuesday At one point, the busty Sports Illustrated model seemed to barely contain her ample assets as she laid down on a sun lounger in the blue and white two piece by Babajaan. RELATED ARTICLES Previous
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Next 'I'm so f***ing hammered!': Charlie Sheen has a bizarre... Ready for her close-up: Emma Stone gets last-minute touch-up... Share this article Share Meanwhile, Justin, 31, also appeared to be relaxing as he went for a dip in the ocean. It was reported in January this year that the pair had started seeing each other again, after they were spotted at a hockey game in Philadelphia.
No blurred lines here: Kate showed off her tan lines in her skimpy bikini, as she holidayed with her on-again boyfriend Justin
Hanging out: The pair were seen relaxing together side by side on two sun loungers in the sun
The pair first started dating in early January 2013, but split up soon after.
Last month, Kate also celebrated her 22nd birthday with Justin, quashing rumours that she was in a relationship with Dancing With the Stars' Makism Chmerkovskiy.
The blonde beauty had lunch with the Detroit Tigers pitcher at Tavern on Rush in Chicago, as he had a game there on the same night.
Back together: Justin - the baseball pitcher for the Detroit Tigers of Major League Baseball - looked relaxed as he sat beside his girlfriend on holiday
Careful there! Kate almost falls out of her barely there bikini as she lays on a sun lounger
Taking a break: The busy 22-year-old model is currently taking time out of her hectic schedule Holiday read: Kate took a break from her book as she looked up lovingly at her her beau Justin with lounging in Mexico
An eyewitness told E! News: 'They seemed very happy.'
Later that evening, Kate joined five female friends at the Tiki bar, Three Dots and a Dash, for another party.
Another source said: 'She looked stunning in a red dress. They toasted with champagne at midnight.'
The bikini model sparked speculation she had reunited with 34-year-old Maksim, whom she split from in December, after he posted a photograph of them cuddling on Instagram on May 31 and deleted the snap a few minutes later.
Lap of luxury: Justin appeared to be in holiday mode as he took a dip in Mexico on Tuesday Rekindled: The pair first started dating in early January 2013, but split up soon after Stunner: At one point, the busty Sports Illustrated model seemed to barely contain her curves as she laid down on a sun lounger
The image showed Kate smiling widely with her arm wrapped around him and was taken while they was partying at Tao nightclub in New York City.
Sources close to the former couple previously blamed their respective hectic schedules for their break-up, and Maksim recently flew to India to be a guest-judge on the local version of the reality dancing competition.
It is no surprise that Kate looked fantastic while relaxing on the beach, as the star recently confessed she sometimes spends 'three whole days' on her appearance.
Upton girl: As well as modelling, Kate has been busy with her film schedule this year and recently starred alongside Cameron Diaz in The Other Woman Back on: Last month, Kate also celebrated her 22nd birthday with Justin, quashing rumours that she was in a relationship with Dancing With the Stars' Makism Chmerkovskiy Revealing: The model recently said she would 'never say never' to posing for Playboy The beauty admits some days she can't be bothered to make an effort with her looks, but then she will make up for it by 'keeping up' with her grooming regime in mammoth sessions. She told Britain's OK! magazine: 'I won't spend any time on myself, then I'll spend three whole days just entirely on me.' 'It's important to keep it up, have facials and massages and have time to yourself. Keeping things under wraps: It was reported in January this year that the pair had started seeing each other again, after they were spotted at a hockey game in Philadelphia One lucky guy: It seems Justin and Kate are now officially back together, as they were seen canoodling together on holiday Taking care: At one point it looked as though Justin was applying sun cream to Kate's pert derriere 'I have an amazing personal trainer who keeps me motivated, informed about nutrition and staying active. He got me ready for my role in The Other Woman. 'I always try to work out and eat healthily because I can be on set for 12 hours at a time, so if I don't eat healthily I crash.' Heaven sent: Kate was seen looking over what appeared to be a menu as she went to order food for herself and Justin Model looks: Kate was stunning in a skimpy graphic print bikini as she relaxed in Mexico Despite being regarded as one of the world's most beautiful women, Kate admits she still has insecurities but doesn't let them hold her back. She said: 'I still have body insecurities all the time. I didn't realise how many women suffer from low self-esteem, some women can't go out and enjoy their lives if they're feeling insecure. 'But when I'm feeling insecure, I still live and go out and have fun.' Crazy in love: Kate and Justin looked blissfully happy as they enjoyed their romantic getaway together Natural beauty: Kate admits some days she can't be bothered to make an effort with her looks, but then she will make up for it by 'keeping up' with her grooming regime in mammoth sessions Unbelievable: Despite being regarded as one of the world's most beautiful women, Kate admits she still has insecurities but doesn't let them hold her back The happy couple: both Kate and Justin appeared to be perfectly at ease with one another while they relaxed on the beach
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Die beiden Wärter, die den Milliardär Jeffrey Epstein in seiner Gefängniszelle in seiner Todesnacht beaufsichtigen sollten, sollen bei der Arbeit geschlafen haben. Statt wie vorgeschrieben alle 30 Minuten nach dem Inhaftierten zu schauen, seien die beiden eingeschlafen und hätten dessen Zustand für rund drei Stunden nicht kontrolliert, berichtete die New York Times unter Berufung auf Ermittlungs- und Gefängnisbeamte. Epstein nahm sich mutmaßlich in dieser Zeit das Leben.
Die Wärter stünden unter Verdacht, ihren Arbeitsbericht gefälscht zu haben, um ihr fatales Versäumnis zu verschleiern, heißt es in dem Zeitungsbericht. Die Nachrichtenagentur AP berichtet, dass Videos von Überwachungskameras zeigten, dass die Wärter keinen der in den Dokumenten verzeichneten Kontrollgänge gemacht haben. AP beruft sich dabei auf Ermittlerkreise.
Beide Wärter wurden beurlaubt, teilte das Justizministerium mit, der Gefängnisdirektor wurde vorübergehend versetzt. Zuvor war bekannt geworden, dass in dem Gefängnis offenbar extreme Überstunden wegen Personalmangels geleistet wurden.
Das FBI durchsuchte Medienberichten zufolge das Anwesen des Unternehmers auf den Amerikanischen Jungferninseln. Wie der TV-Sender NBC und andere Medien unter Berufung auf Sicherheitskreise berichteten, stellten die Beamten auf Epsteins Privatinsel Ermittlungen an. Weitere Details wurden nicht bekannt.
Sowohl das FBI als auch das Justizministerium untersuchen Epsteins Tod. Der US-Milliardär war am Samstag in seiner Gefängniszelle tot aufgefunden worden. Das Gefängnis geht von Suizid aus. Epstein wurden sexueller Missbrauch Minderjähriger sowie Zwangsprostitution vorgeworfen. Er wartete im Gefängnis auf den Prozessbeginn.
Die Verwaltung der Bundesgefängnisse sandte eine Gruppe von Psychologen zu dem New Yorker Gefängnis, um die Umstände von Epsteins Tod zu erforschen. Epstein war Ende Juli zunächst als suizidgefährdet eingestuft und deshalb unter besondere Beobachtung gestellt worden. Diese Maßnahme lief jedoch nach nur wenigen Tagen aus.
Anmerkung der Redaktion: Wir gestalten unsere Berichterstattung über Suizide bewusst zurückhaltend und verzichten, wo es möglich ist, auf Details. Wenn Sie sich selbst betroffen fühlen von Suizidgedanken, kontaktieren Sie bitte umgehend die Telefonseelsorge (http://www.telefonseelsorge.de). Unter der kostenlosen Hotline 0800-1110111oder 0800-1110222 erhalten Sie Hilfe von Beratern, die schon in vielen Fällen Auswege aus schwierigen Situationen aufzeigen konnten. | {
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We can't travel to China (obviously), but we'll try for some new stuff. We closed our brick and mortar store in light of the pandemic. | {
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The biggest sunspot to grace the face of the sun in more than two decades just rotated out of Earth's view, but it was responsible for kicking up some truly amazing solar activity this week.
The sunspot (called Active Region 12192 or AR 2192) shot off four powerful flares in four days recently, with many more smaller flares sprinkled in as well. The sunspot region was about the size of the planet Jupiter and is the largest solar flare observed in 24 years.
AR 2192 was actually one of the biggest observed sunspots of all time, ranking 33rd largest of 32,908 active regions since 1874, according to NASA scientists C. Alex Young and Dean Pesnell. But how does a sunspot grow this big? [Photos: The Biggest Solar Flares of 2014]
"The simple answer is we really don't know," Young told Space.com. "Being close to solar maximum [the peak in the sun's 11-year solar cycle] means there is more concentrated magnetic field and magnetic energy under the solar surface waiting to bubble up. But the question of why it comes up as one spot instead of two or more is really still unknown, a mystery.
"I guess a good analogy is when you twist a rubber band or piece of string," Young added. "Why do, say, three knots or bunches form instead of two or four? The physics is probably too complicated for us at this point but we can get a handle on, say, when the knots will start to form once we better understand the properties of the rubber band or string and how much twist we put into them. We are not to that point with the sun but we may get there eventually."
Sunspots are active areas on the sun. They generally form when magnetic field lines are warped, and if they become twisted. Part of it may break out, and show up on the face of the star. Sunspots look dark because they are cooler than the area surrounding them.
The sunspot is particularly special because of the somewhat strange way scientists have seen it behave. Instead of shooting out huge bursts of plasma — called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — with powerful flares, the giant sunspot hasn't produced significant CMEs during its time rotating in view of Earth, according to Young.
"What's really curious about it [the large sunspot] is that it's produced so many flares of pretty good size, but little or no coronal mass ejections," Young said. "It's not that it's never happened before, but it tends to be the case that when you have a big flare, you generally get a big CME."
Earth-directed CMEs are responsible for geomagnetic storms that can harm satellites in orbit or even knock out power grids on the planet. A CME produced by a sunspot larger than AR 2192 knocked out the power in Quebec, Canada, in 1989, Young said.
The sunspot just rotated out of view of Earth, according to Spaceweather.com, but that doesn't necessarily mean that AR 2192 won't make another appearance on Earth's side of the star.
Huge sunspots usually tend to stick around for a while, Young said, so AR 2192 could end up surviving its two week-journey around the other side of the sun, out of view of Earth.
"We don't know exactly if it's going to make it on its way around, but there's a good chance," Young, who also runs The Sun Today blog, said. "It's pretty big, and certainly there have been plenty of examples of other spots that have gone around. Some have gone around a couple times."
If the sunspot does make it around to the Earth-facing side of the sun again, observers on the planet might be able to spot it. AR 2192 was visible using eclipse glasses for the past week or so, but NEVER look at the sun with your naked eye; it can cause serious eye damage. Find out how to safely observe the sun using Space.com's sun observation guide.
Editor's Note: If you safely capture an amazing photo of sunspot AR 2129 or any other skywatching sight that you'd like to share for a possible story or image gallery, please contact managing editor Tariq Malik at [email protected].
Follow Miriam Kramer @mirikramer and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com. | {
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Stanley Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist, particularly with regards to The Shining, with the infamous "Here's Johnny" scene taking three days to film and seeing Jack Nicholson have to chop through 60 doors.
Slim Pickens turned down the role of Dick Hallorann because the director refused to promise to limit his number of takes on any of his shots to less than 100, and Shelley Duvall suffered from nervous exhaustion throughout filming, losing hair in the process.
It comes as little surprise then that the typewriter scene was also obsessed over by Kubrick.
According to Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich, who runs a site dedicated to The Shining and its legacy, "Kubrick filmed a number of different language versions of the ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ insert shot as Wendy leafs through Jack’s work."
Kubrick realised the importance of the scene and how it would lack impact in foreign language versions of the film if explained via subtitles.
He didn't just translate the original phrase however, but came up with different stacks of repeated sentences, many of which can be seen in the Stanley Kubrick Archive:
Italian:
Il mattino ha l’oro in bocca
(The morning has gold in its mouth)
German:
Was du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf morgen
(Never put off until tomorrow what can be done today)
Spanish:
No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano
(No matter how early you get up, you can’t make the sun rise any sooner)
French:
Un Tiens vaut mieux que deux Tu l’auras
(What you have is worth much more than what you will have)
At first glance these alternatives don't sound as creepy as the original, though this may simply be because we are used to the "Jack" line. You can certainly imagine 'The morning has gold in its mouth' being an unsettling thing to come across someone feverishly typing over and over again.
DangerousMinds attempted to track down these stacks a couple of years back but came away empty-handed, though they did find unconfirmed photos of some of them online that seem legit (above). | {
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As usual the accounting portion of the CFA is taking me the longest to learn. In fact it currently accounts for 38% of the hours I've st... | {
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We investigate the factors driving Bolivia’s success in reducing inequality and poverty during the last 15 years. Our evidence suggests that the reduction was driven mainly by labor income growth at the bottom end of the income distribution. Increases in non-labor income (rents, transfers, remittances) also played a role, but a smaller one, although the introduction of Renta Dignidad has made a big difference for the elderly poor. Labor income increases were concentrated in the informal, low-skilled service and manufacturing sectors. As the gains from the commodity boom go into reverse, and the fiscal envelope becomes much tighter, it will be essential that labor and social policies are well designed and targeted to preserve the poverty and inequality reduction of the last 15 years.
ACCESS PAPER | {
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SICK ISIS leaders have hatched diabolical plans to recruit wannabe 'serial killers' to terrorise innocents in the West.
The hate group is now urging extremists living in Europe and the US to carry out frequent and random knife attacks in cities, towns and villages.
3 An article in ISIS propaganda rag Rumiyah calls on followers to spill 'the kafir's blood' Credit: Rumiyah
3 The article even gives sick advice on what type of knives to use Credit: Rumiyah
They want their followers to buy a knife, slaughters innocents, then dispose of the knife and start over again.
In an article in the terror group’s Rumiyah magazine they even give advice on what types of knives to use - suggesting striking in secluded places after dark to avoid detection, reports the Daily Express.
They urge would-be jihadis to overcome their squeamishness by using knives instead of guns - because it is easier to carry out large numbers of murders without getting caught.
ISIS chiefs believe random serial killer-style stabbings are almost impossible for security services to detect compared to shootings and bombings, which require coordination and specialist equipment.
Related Stories Exclusive JI-HAVE TO BE KIDDING British ISIS fighter on the front-line in Syria whinges about missing his mum’s curries back home ISIS SUSPECT CHARGED Brit charged with ISIS membership and hiding plans for terror plot on USB stick disguised as cufflink Exclusive BRIT JIHADI'S SICK BOASTS ISIS thug who tried to radicalise Sun Page 3 girl brags of plans to become new Jihadi John DATE WITH DAESH Bungling cops let ISIS 'fan' head to Syria 'so he could meet women he met on Match.com' isis leader 'poisoned' ISIS chief al-Baghdadi and three deputies 'at death's door after being poisoned'
Commanders suggest a "campaign of knife attacks" in which lone-wolf jihadis "could dispose of his weapon after each use, finding no difficulty in acquiring another one”.
They wrote: "Many people are often squeamish of the thought of plunging a sharp object into another person’s flesh.
“It is a discomfort caused by the untamed, inherent dislike for pain and death, especially after 'modernisation' distanced males from partaking in the slaughtering of livestock for food and the striking of the enemy in war.
Many people are often squeamish of the thought of plunging a sharp object into another person’s flesh ISIS commander
"However, any such squirms and discomforts are never an excuse for abandoning jihad.
“One need not be a military expert or a martial arts master, or even own a gun or rifle in order to carry out a massacre or to kill and injure several disbelievers and terrorise an entire nation."
And they even advise the kids of blades to use, saying: "It is explicitly advised not to use kitchen knives, as their basic structure is not designed to handle the kind of vigorous application used for assassinations and slaughter.
3 Commanders suggest a long 'campaign of knife attacks' Credit: Reuters
“Avoid troublesome knives, those that can cause harm to the user because of poor manufacturing."
A footnote in the article also betrays ISIS’ sensitivity about how their actions are reported in the West, insisting that supporters should not use the term “lone wolf” to describe radicalised Westerners.
Instead they order extremists to refer to such attacks as "just terror operations" - with just in this instance referring to the sense of justice the twisted barbarians see in them. | {
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Thanks to some extraordinary engineering, the InSight mission has led the new field of Martian seismology to the development of a new planetary magnitude scale in less than a year.
At 5:54 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time in Potsdam, Germany, a horizontal pendulum suddenly started shaking. The pendulum scratched out spikes in ground movement for a few hours before settling down.
All of this sounds perfectly typical for a seismograph, but in fact, the event was quite extraordinary: The date was 17 April 1889, and this was the first recorded teleseismic event, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake that had shaken Tokyo, Japan, a little more than an hour prior.
Now, 130 years after that Tokyo quake kicked off the modern science of terrestrial seismology, a more sophisticated seismometer is retracing those first shaky steps 225 million kilometers and a planet away.
“We are at the birth of seismology on Mars,” said Philippe Lognonné, a planetary seismologist at Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris in France. Lognonné is the principal investigator of the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument on NASA’s Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) lander.
“The goal of InSight is really to do the seismology from the beginning of last century,” Lognonné said. “We do this first step of seismology, but of course with a much better instrument than one century ago, with much better tools, theory, [and] computers. But the data, in some ways, are like those from one century ago.”
Building on the Past
On Mars, as on Earth, seismometers can use the shaking of the ground to probe the interior structure of the planet.
“Since the dawn of the age of planetary exploration, seismometers have been considered among the key instruments that you need to really understand how a planet formed and evolved,” explained Renee Weber, a lunar and planetary scientist with the InSight team at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. “We do that by analyzing energy recorded at the station from naturally occurring seismic events and from meteorite impacts.”
SEIS is not the first seismometer launched into space or even the first seismometer on Mars. The Apollo 12, 14, 15, and 16 missions carried active seismometers to the Moon in the early 1970s. NASA’s Viking 1 and Viking 2 landers brought seismometers to Mars a few years later. And the Soviet Venera 13 and Venera 14 landers placed short-lived seismometers on Venus in the early 1980s.
The seismic network installed by Apollo astronauts discovered of a variety of moonquakes, and the Venera instruments detected possible Venusian microquakes. But the Viking seismometers, unfortunately, sent back only one maybe quake and a lot of noise.
“One of them didn’t work. The other one, for a variety of reasons, didn’t really detect anything that we could definitively say was a marsquake,” Weber said. “That was primarily because the instrument itself never came in contact with the ground, but rather it was just mounted to the deck of the lander. And so all that it ever recorded was the wind blowing.”
The Viking seismometers put an upper limit on the level of Mars’s seismic activity, InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt told Eos. Before InSight launched, “all we knew was that Mars was almost certainly less active than the Earth, which is not a very strong constraint. And we knew how active the Moon was. Given their relative sizes and relative levels of geologic and volcano-tectonic activity over the last few billion years, we would expect Mars to be more active than the Moon,” Banerdt said.
More active than the Moon and less active than Earth is a very wide seismic range, Lognonné added, and is not very informative. Using measurements of tides caused by the Sun and Mars’s moon Phobos, “we know that [Mars] has a core, but everything else inside the planet is very much unknown.”
“Honestly, we knew very little about the Martian interior,” Lognonné said.
Designing the Right Tool for the Job
As they designed, built, and tested SEIS, the instrument team knew it had to overcome the shortcomings of Viking seismometers. “We needed to be able to convince ourselves, and certainly convince NASA, that we were actually going to see something when we got there,” Banerdt said.
“The first challenge is to have only one seismometer, compared with an Earth station where we actually have a network of seismometers,” said Charles Yana, the SEIS project manager and an engineer at the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales in Paris, France. A seismic network measures the same quake event from multiple locations and can provide a more precise and accurate quake profile than any single seismometer can. “That’s why [SEIS] has to be very precise and working very well and has to be tuned very carefully. It is very sensitive, actually, in comparison to seismometers on Earth.”
To detect likely weak marsquake signals, placing the instrument on the ground was a must, as was shielding it from the wind and protecting it from Mars’s 60°C daily temperature swings, Yana explained. In fact, protecting SEIS from any atmosphere at all was key to mission success. InSight’s initial 2016 launch date was pushed back to 2018 because there was a leak in SEIS’s vacuum chamber. “Just air inside that chamber can interfere with the measurement,” Weber said.
SEIS “is almost comparable to the best broadband seismometer used on the Earth for seismic networks,” Lognonné said. “We have been able to detect at about 10 hertz displacement of the ground of the order of less than 5 picometers…which is a fraction of the size of an atom.”
“The engineering scope of what was done is just remarkable,” said Keith Koper, a terrestrial seismologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Koper directs a seismic network in Utah and is not involved with the InSight mission. “I know how hard it is, even on Earth, to get these really sensitive instruments out and get them properly working….They’re kind of finicky, sensitive things.”
Detecting Marsquakes for the First Time
InSight launched to Mars in May 2018 with a fully functional seismometer aboard. It landed that November at an equatorial spot called Elysium Planitia, placed SEIS on the ground, and covered the instrument with a wind and thermal shield. That process took about a month. Then: calibration.
“The first 6 months of the mission were dedicated to perfectly determining the ambient noise around our seismometer,” Yana said. “Everything that is around our sensor creates noise and variations of seismic signals.”
Some of the “noise” SEIS measures is tiny ground shifts due to pressure and wind changes and weather phenomena like dust devils. Those signals, detectable by ultrasensitive SEIS, would be drowned out in the turbulence of Earth’s oceans and atmosphere, Banerdt said.
“We’re looking in into a frequency band that’s really invisible on the Earth,” he said. “And on Mars during the quietest part of the evening we’re seeing signals that are a thousand times lower than anything that’s detectable on the Earth.”
Finally, 128 Martian days after landing, SEIS detected its first verifiable marsquake. The tremor was tiny, too small to pinpoint its origin or cause, but was distinctly different from tremors caused by wind. The recording of the sol 128 event (below) wowed the planetary science community and, of course, the project team.
“I have it on my iTunes. I pull it up every once in a while,” Banerdt joked. “We had a full room for the plenary session talking about it” at the Seismological Society of America conference in Seattle, Wash. “People just started to wrap their minds around the fact that, you know, here we have a whole new planet to explore with this incredible tool.”
Koper, who attended the 27th International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics General Assembly in Montreal, Canada, said that the session on Mars seismology was also standing room only. “They had this one beautiful seismogram that just looked just like what we’d see on Earth.”
A second marsquake on sol 173, and a third on sol 235, revealed the variety of quakes that Mars has to offer.
“We are currently observing two families of quakes on Mars,” Simon Stähler, a seismologist at ETH Zurich, said in a statement about the second quake. “The first quake was a high frequency event more similar to a moonquake than we expected. The second quake was a much lower frequency, and we think this may be due to the distance.”
As a seismic wave travels through solid rock, that rock will attenuate more and more of the higher frequencies within the signal, Banerdt explained. That can help determine the distance between the quake epicenter and the seismometer.
“It looks like there’s going to be enough meat there in the data to make, honestly, without any sort of hyperbole, some important first-order discoveries about the interior structure of Mars,” Koper added.
Trying to Understand Marsquakes
During the first 3 months of data collection, SEIS detected 21 seismic events that the team are certain were not caused by atmospheric phenomena. More than 100 other events are classified as “maybes.” The team will discuss these results in several sessions at AGU’s Fall Meeting 2019 on 12 December and 13 December.
“There’s a magnitude scale that’s been developed for Mars analogous to the magnitude scales we use on the Earth” As the quakes started pouring in, the team realized they needed to develop a new ranking system for the events. Now “there’s a magnitude scale that’s been developed for Mars analogous to the magnitude scales we use on the Earth,” Banerdt said.
The new scale incorporates how a seismic wave changes as it travels from the epicenter to a seismometer station, changes that depend on the properties of the material that the wave travels through. “It’s really tied to the transmission properties of the planet that you’re looking at it on,” Banerdt said, which is why Earth’s magnitude scale doesn’t work for marsquakes.
The newly published data include three “Quality A” events with strong, clear signals well above the noise level. Data from two of the events were detailed enough to pinpoint their epicenters.
“They’re both in the same area,” Banerdt said, “a region called Cerberus Fossae.…There are recent lava flows in this area. There are recent water flooding events in this region. There’s faulting in this region. So this is an area that we had set aside as a place that we wanted to watch as we started accumulating events. And the first two locatable events that we’ve picked up are located in this region.”
The marsquakes also revealed a curious phenomenon: a resonance near a 2.4-hertz frequency that is not caused by the lander. The resonance appears as an unexpected increase in wave energy near that vibrational frequency but only for some quakes.
“We don’t know exactly where it comes from or why it’s there,” Banerdt added. “We don’t know why it gets excited or it doesn’t get excited, but we think that it has something to do with some kind of a resonance in the crustal layer that’s sensitive to being excited by seismic events. And this is something that’s kind of puzzling.”
Are marsquakes happening as often as expected? The InSight team is finding that the frequency of small seismic events looks surprisingly familiar.
“We’re seeing almost as many events as would be generated on the Earth if you took away all the plate boundaries and all the hot spot zones, just looking at what we call interplate seismicity,” Banerdt said. That’s a higher activity level than the team expected for small events.
Meanwhile, the instrument has detected fewer strong events than models predicted. “This is either telling us that Mars distributes its release of energy over different size quakes in a different way…or that we have some learning to do in identifying what’s a marsquake and what’s not,” he said.
Revealing Mars’s Seismicity
Two other instruments share a home with SEIS on board the InSight lander.
The Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment (RISE) is a precision tracker. RISE uses radio transmissions to measure the lander’s location relative to the Sun, trying to determine how fast Mars wobbles as it orbits the Sun. (Earth completes one “wobble” every 2 years.)
“This information will add to our knowledge of the size of Mars’ core, and helps us determine whether it is liquid or solid,” RISE principal investigator William Folkner says on the instrument’s website.
InSight’s heat probe, the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3), is meant to measure the heat radiating out from Mars and determine the planet’s cooling rate. To do this, InSight has to drill a hole about 5 meters deep and place the probe within Mars’s crust. The drill, or mole, has experienced significant difficulties in getting down into the Martian soil.
“The hammer hammers it down, but it just bounces right back up again because there’s not enough friction on the sides of the mole to damp out that rebound,” Banerdt explained. The team hopes that InSight’s robotic arm can help the drill get a grip on the soil and keep digging. Weber called this “a lesson learned” for any future planetary drilling missions.
In the meantime, SEIS will continue to monitor Mars for seismic events and progressively build up a holistic view of the interior of Mars. “SEIS is working, and SEIS is working well,” Yana said. There are always small engineering tweaks that could be made using the most up-to-date technology, he said, but “if we needed to send the same instrument again on the next mission [to Mars], everyone would be very happy about it.”
It’s also possible that orbiters might contribute to Mars seismology, Weber said. She explained that imaging satellites orbiting Mars can spot impact events that might cause a quake. If SEIS simultaneously detected that quake, knowing precisely where it came from could, theoretically speaking, “help constrain the models that dictate how the seismic energy of that impact propagates through the planet.”
“Our next deployment to the Moon will learn from InSight more than it will learn from Apollo.” One hundred thirty years after the dawn of modern terrestrial seismology and 50 years after the advent of lunar seismology, Martian seismology has kicked off with a bang. “I think InSight is more of a grandchild of the evolution of terrestrial seismology than it is of the evolution of lunar seismology,” Weber said. “Because, unfortunately, since Apollo, we haven’t been back to the Moon.”
Terrestrial seismology has advanced in leaps and bounds since lunar seismology concluded in 1977, and SEIS was designed on the basis of those advancements. “And so really,” she said, “our next deployment to the Moon will learn from InSight more than it will learn from Apollo.”
—Kimberly M. S. Cartier, Staff Writer | {
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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — The California Senate voted Friday to suspend three lawmakers caught up in separate criminal cases after the latest one to be hauled into court refused to step down, the most serious house-cleaning action the chamber has taken in more than a century.
Friday's 28-1 vote in the 40-member chamber came amid one of the most severe ethical crises in modern times for the Legislature in the nation's most populous state. Later in the day, Gov. Jerry Brown also called on the three lawmakers to resign.
The Senate leadership said that before Friday, the chamber had never suspended a lawmaker in the institution's 164-year history, but it has taken the more serious step of expelling lawmakers, the last time in 1905. The Assembly speaker's office said that chamber has never suspended or expelled a lawmaker.
The resolution prevents Democratic Sens. Ron Calderon and Leland Yee, who face federal corruption charges, and Democratic Sen. Rod Wright, who is awaiting sentencing in a voter fraud case, from exercising any power of their office until the criminal cases against them have been resolved. Even so, they will continue receiving their $95,291 annual salaries.
Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento acknowledged the public criticism of the chamber, but he defended his leadership and the integrity of the 37 senators who have not run afoul of the law. Nevertheless, he said he has been shocked by having 7 percent of the chamber face felony charges this year, which will be his last as leader.
"One is an anomaly, two is a coincidence. Three? That's not what this Senate is about," Steinberg said to lawmakers before the vote.
Yee, who had championed gun-control legislation and bills targeting violent video games sold to minors, is the latest of the three senators to be charged. The San Francisco Democrat was charged in a federal criminal complaint this week with accepting bribes and coordinating an international gun-running operation.
Story continues
Yee's attorney, Paul F. DeMeester, issued a statement immediately after the Senate vote saying suspension was "the right step for now" because it acknowledges the presumption of innocence. Representatives for Calderon and Wright said they would have no comment on the suspension vote.
Later Friday, in a statement issued by the Democratic governor's office, Brown weighed in for the first time since Yee's arrest.
"Given the extraordinary circumstances of these cases — and today's unprecedented suspensions — the best way to restore public confidence is for these Senators to resign," Brown said.
Steinberg noted that the Senate already has "intensive" ethics training for its lawmakers and staff.
"But there are some things, members, that you just can't teach," he said. "I know of no ethics class that teaches about the illegality or the danger of gun-running or other such sordid activities."
Steinberg also announced an unprecedented step of cancelling a Senate floor session in April for a mandatory ethics review, saying it is time for the Senate to "take a deeper look at our culture."
Senate officials will go office-by-office to emphasize ethical conduct and to ask staffers to come forward if they are aware of any unethical or potentially criminal activity by lawmakers or Senate staffers.
The lone lawmaker to vote against the resolution, SR38, was Republican Sen. Joel Anderson of Alpine. One senator was present but did not vote, and nine were absent, including all three senators who were suspended. One seat is vacant.
Anderson argued that all three should be expelled outright and said it was wrong that they should continue receiving their salaries when facing such serious charges.
"If you reward bad behavior, you will get more of it," Anderson said.
Calderon and Wright previously took leaves of absence, which also let them keep their pay. The California Constitution says lawmakers can lose their pay only if they are expelled or resign.
The suspensions drop Senate Democrats below the two-thirds majority they won in the last election, a supermajority that allowed them to act in all matters without needing support from Republicans.
The vote comes just days after federal authorities arrested Yee as part of a broader corruption probe centered on San Francisco's Chinatown district.
Senate Minority Leader Bob Huff, R-Diamond Bar, said he supports a proposed constitutional amendment, introduced by Steinberg on Friday, which would allow the Legislature to withhold members' pay if they are suspended.
Yee was arrested and released on bond Wednesday following a series of raids in Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area. He is accused of accepting more than $42,000 to provide introductions, influence legislation and for introducing an undercover FBI agent to an arms trafficker, according to an FBI affidavit that says Yee was also known as "Uncle Leland."
Investigators said Yee discussed helping the agent get weapons, including shoulder-fired missiles, from a Muslim separatist group in the Philippines to help pay off campaign debts.
Wright was convicted of voter fraud and perjury and faces sentencing in May. Calderon faces federal charges for allegedly accepting $100,000 in bribes for friends and family in exchange for pushing certain bills.
Democratic Sen. Kevin de Leon of Los Angeles, who is expected to succeed Steinberg as Senate leader later this year, defended the chamber's reputation and noted that none of the bills Calderon pushed as a favor to those who were giving him cash passed the Senate.
That shows that the legislative system actually worked, he said.
"This is the best legislative institution in the country, hands down," de Leon said. "And we're going to get past it."
The only similar situation faced by the Legislature in recent memory is the so-called "Shrimpscam" investigation in 1985, in which federal agents went undercover and posed as representatives of a phony shrimp-processing company. Five lawmakers resigned and went to prison for taking bribes in the FBI sting operation.
The Senate last expelled lawmakers in 1905, when four senators were ousted for malfeasance involving bribery. Only one other senator has been expelled. In 1850 during the first legislative session after California gained statehood, a senator violated Senate rules by failing to show up for sessions for more than 10 days, according to Steinberg's office.
The 80-member Assembly has never expelled a member and considered doing so only once, officials said. That was in 1899, when an expulsion vote failed against Howard E. Wright, who represented Alameda County. Wright had been indicted on bribery charges but was not convicted.
___
Associated Press writer Tom Verdin contributed to this report. | {
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A Consumer Reports analysis of cable bills found that companies add $37.11 per month in fees to the average bill, raising consumers' actual costs way above the advertised prices. The $37.11 "in fees created by the cable industry" add 24% to the average base price of $156.71 a month, Consumer Reports said. That doesn't include another $13.28 in government-related taxes and fees, which raise prices even higher.
"With the proliferation of add-on fees, it's nearly impossible for consumers to find out the full cost of a cable package before they get locked into a contract—and cable companies count on this," Consumer Reports Senior Policy Counsel Jonathan Schwantes said.
Consumer Reports analyzed 787 cable bills from 13 companies for a report released today. Nearly all 787 bills included TV service, while at least 426 of them included Internet service, and at least 282 included phone service, Consumer Reports told Ars. Some of the bills listed the services only as "double-play" or "triple-play," so it wasn't always clear which services were included. The bills were collected from 787 volunteers between June and August 2018.
The average base price was $156.71 a month, but the actual price consumers paid was $217.42. The data includes bills from Comcast, Charter, Cox, Altice USA (Optimum), Frontier, RCN, Verizon FiOS, AT&T U-Verse, SuddenLink, WOW, Service Electric, Grande Communications, and ImOn.
The amount added to the base price includes the previously mentioned $37.11 in company-imposed fees, $13.28 in government fees and taxes, $9.15 for premium services, and $1.17 in "miscellaneous" fees. The premium services are things that customers intentionally buy, like HBO or Showtime, so Consumer Reports said it doesn't object to those being charged separately.
The other fees are what concerns Consumer Reports. Making government-imposed fees and taxes a separate line item helps companies advertise prices much lower than the ones consumers will actually pay. Here's what Consumer Reports said about that:
The 1992 Cable Act allows cable companies to separately itemize government taxes and regulatory fees and pass them on to consumers. Examples include federal, state and local sales taxes, local franchise fees, and other regulatory fees (e.g. Universal Service Fund fees, E-911 support fees, and PEG channel fees). A worthy distinction can be made between taxes, like sales taxes, that the provider is effectively collecting on behalf of the government, and other fees that are best characterized as "regulatory pass-through fees." The latter are typically being charged to the cable providers, who are then choosing to pass those fees on to consumers. The practice, though legal, is somewhat akin to asking consumers to pay the company's corporate taxes. But at least these fees are a definable cost that can be verified, unlike company-imposed fees.
“Misleadingly named” fees
Most concerning of all are the company-imposed fees. These fees do not include taxes, regulatory-pass-through fees, or optional charges for premium services. That $37.11 per month adds up to an estimated $28 billion in revenue each year "in fees created by the cable industry," Consumer Reports said.
Some of the $37.11 in company-imposed fees are impossible for customers to avoid without canceling or downgrading service. Those include broadcast TV fees, regional sports fees, HD technology fees, "Internet service-related fees" that "cable companies claim support the upkeep of a provider's broadband Internet network," and administrative and "convenience" fees. These fees cover many of the cable providers' standard costs of doing business, and not including them in advertised prices misleads consumers about the true price of service.
The $37.11 in company-imposed fees also includes rental charges for set-top boxes, modems, and routers. Consumers can often avoid these by purchasing their own equipment, but that's not always the case. Frontier is charging $10 a month in a router rental fee even when customers use their own routers, for example.
"These confusing, often misleadingly named charges continue to drive up consumer bills, even if you lock in a promotional rate," Schwantes said.
Consumer Reports acknowledged that cable companies have been hit with rapidly rising retransmission fees charged by broadcasters and urged Congress to overhaul the retransmission consent system to lower prices. Broadcasters collected $10.1 billion in retransmission fees from TV providers in 2018, even though broadcast stations are freely available to consumers with over-the-air antennas. But cable companies could choose to include the broadcast TV fee in their advertised prices or at least make the fees more prominent so as not to mislead customers.
The average amount of company-imposed fees "ranged from $22.96 for AT&T U-verse and $31.28 for Charter, to $39.59 for Comcast, $40.16 for Cox, and $43.79 for Verizon FiOS," Consumer Reports wrote. However, the group said these averages "reflect a snapshot of the marketplace in 2018" and aren't meant for comparison purposes.
Secret shoppers get inaccurate pricing info
Consumer Reports contacted cable companies about the add-on fees. "Comcast and other companies we contacted all said that the fees help them pay for their own increasing costs for providing content," the group's report said. "But that doesn't explain why they don't present the full price for service in the promotional materials consumers rely on for choosing a provider and a plan."
It also doesn't explain why cable companies often give customers inaccurate information about the add-on fees. Consumer Reports did a "secret shopper" investigation with people, calling 74 customer service reps at Comcast, Charter, DirecTV, Frontier, and Verizon while posing as potential new customers.
"At least one CSR [customer service rep] of every major provider that our secret shoppers contacted misstated that fees were mandated by the government, without a clear distinction made between company-imposed fees and regulatory pass-through fees," the report said.
Half of the customer reps "acknowledged that additional fees would apply to the base price," but "only 18 specifically cited the Broadcast TV Fee or Regional Sports Fee."
"Though some CSRs offered our shoppers accurate information about company-imposed fees, the majority did not, and many calls resulted with incomplete and/or inaccurate information offered to would-be customers," Consumer Reports found.
Consumer Reports is pushing for regulatory changes to address the problem, saying that Congress should approve the TRUE Fees Act (Truth-In-Billing, Remedies, and User Empowerment over Fees). The bill, introduced by US Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), would require telecom companies to include all charges in their advertised prices and let consumers opt out of contracts without paying termination fees when prices are increased.
Consumer Reports also urged the Federal Communications Commission to require more accurate advertised prices and urged state attorneys general to file more lawsuits against cable TV companies that mislead consumers about prices. | {
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