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British man 'wrote of joy fighting Islamic State' Published duration 3 April 2019
image copyright Facebook image caption Aidan James denies terrorism offences
A British man wrote of his joy at fighting against the Islamic State group, describing it as "the biggest threat since Hitler", a court heard.
Aidan James, 28, of Formby, Merseyside, had no previous military knowledge when he allegedly set out to join the war in 2017 alongside the YPG Kurdish militia.
The Old Bailey heard that in diary entries he told how he got "a kill" and was "playing my part in this war and feel good to be a part of history".
Mr James denies terrorism offences.
He is accused of receiving training from the PKK before going on to fight with the People's Protection Unit known as the YPG in Syria.
On the second day of his trial, the jury was shown Facebook pictures of Mr James posing with YPG insignia wearing military garb.
In a December 2017 diary entry, he allegedly wrote: "The situation with Turkey continues to worsen the war is long from over but I am playing my part in this war and feel good to be a part of history and with the revolutionary force of YPG.
"Daesh is the biggest threat the world has seen since Hitler so anything I can do in these operations is good."
image copyright CPS/PA image caption Aidan James posted this image on Facebook in August 2017
In an earlier entry, Mr James allegedly wrote of his group's "quest to vanquish Daesh from this place" and how he got "a kill" that day.
The court heard how a police negotiator was in email contact with him, promising to support him and discuss his return to Liverpool.
Mr James wrote of the "amazing time" he had fighting on the "front line numerous times", killing Islamic State soldiers.
The court heard he returned to Liverpool John Lennon airport on 14 February last year.
Mr James denies engaging in conduct in preparation of terrorist acts and two charges of attending a place used for terrorist training.
The trial continues.
Related Topics Syria
Formby | {
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Heavy rain is exacerbating conditions around the region, especially in already-waterlogged Frederick County, Maryland, which remains under a flood warning. An additional 2–5 inches of rain are possible through Saturday.
The waters continue to rise and the rain keeps coming in Washington, D.C., Friday, May 18, 2018. (WTOP/Dave Dildine) WTOP/Dave Dildine The waters continue to rise and the rain keeps coming in Washington, D.C., Friday, May 18, 2018. (WTOP/Dave Dildine) WTOP/Dave Dildine A man walks his dog on Wisconsin Avenue in Northwest D.C. (WTOP/Dan Friedell) WTOP/Dan Friedell Valley Wood Road in McLean, Virginia on Thursday evening. (WTOP/Joslyn Chesson) WTOP/Joslyn Chesson Flood damage has torn apart roads in Frederick. (Courtesy Boyd Rutherford) Courtesy Boyd Rutherford Maryland Lt. Governor Boyd Rutherford with a representative from State Highway Administration evaluate flood damage in Frederick and Washington counties. (Courtesy Boyd Rutherford) Courtesy Boyd Rutherford Here's a look at the expected rainfall totals over the next 24 hours. In combination with the plethora of rainfall we have seen the past several days, Flood Watches and Warnings are issued across the area. https://t.co/5RyZgpeTAT #DCwx #MDwx #VAwx #WVwx pic.twitter.com/n0YEgz1wOF — NWS DC/Baltimore (@NWS_BaltWash) May 18, 2018 (Courtesy Boyd Rutherford) dir="ltr">It takes just 12 inches of rushing water to carry away a small car. It is NEVER safe to drive or walk into flood waters. Remember: turn around, don' t drown! #FloodSafety pic.twitter.com/vMrco01Cc0— Charles Co Sheriff (@CCSOMD) May 18, 2018 (Courtesy Boyd Rutherford) Emergency crews at the site of the road damage. Courtesy Boyd Rutherford “While Tuesday’s rain was relatively short in duration and very intense, its effects are still being felt by many of our residents and businesses, and will be for some time,” City of Frederick Mayor Michael O’Connor said. (WTOP/Nick Iannelli) WTOP/Nick Iannelli Unceasing rains may exacerbate conditions in Frederick. (WTOP/Nick Iannelli) WTOP/Nick Iannelli Water rescues have been nonstop since Tuesday’s downpour. (WTOP/Nick Iannelli) WTOP/Nick Iannelli Flooding conditions have closed roads in Frederick. (WTOP/Nick Iannelli) WTOP/Nick Iannelli Car spun off flooded out Willowbrook Rd in Frederick. Now being hauled out of standing water. @WTOP pic.twitter.com/F4VTG3aiS4 — Nick Iannelli (@NickWTOP) May 17, 2018 (WTOP/Nick Iannelli) Rain and fog are plaguing an already-waterlogged D.C. area Thursday. (WTOP/Will Vitka) WTOP/Will Vitka Rain and fog are plaguing an already-waterlogged D.C. area Thursday. (WTOP/Will Vitka) WTOP/Will Vitka Fog obscures lights in Northwest D.C. outside the WTOP newsroom. (WTOP/Abigail Constantino) WTOP/Abigail Constantino Fog obscures lights along Wisconsin Ave. in Northwest D.C. (WTOP/Abigail Constantino) WTOP/Abigail Constantino Fog hangs over Wisconsin Ave. in Northwest D.C. (WTOP/Abigail Constantino) WTOP/Abigail Constantino Foggy conditions start off this soggy day, and heavy rain and flooding could come to some parts of the area — especially to already waterlogged Frederick County, Maryland. (WTOP/Will Vitka) WTOP/Will Vitka Fog hit the D.C. area Thursday morning. (WTOP/Will Vitka) WTOP/Will Vitka Early fog is one of the many weather obstacles hitting people in the Washington area. (WTOP/Will Vitka) WTOP/Will Vitka Rain falls along 14th Street in Northwest D.C. on Wednesday. (WTOP/Will Vitka) WTOP/Will Vitka Water floods a backyard in Columbia Heights on Wednesday. (WTOP/Will Vitka) WTOP/Will Vitka Lightning streaks across the sky at Dulles Airport. (Courtesy BDwy via Twitter) Courtesy BDwy via Twitter Forecasted precipitation across the D.C. region. (Courtesy NWS) Courtesy NWS If you like sunshine, there’s bad news: The D.C. area might not see sunshine until Sunday. The flood threat will remain through the rest of the week. (Courtesy NBC Washington) Courtesy NBC Washington Streets around D.C. got a coating of rain on Tuesday, May 15, 2018. (WTOP/Will Vitka) WTOP/Will Vitka Distant lightning closing in on the D.C. area. (WTOP/Dave Dildine) WTOP/Dave Dildine Tuesday’s sunset peeks through some formidable clouds. (WTOP/Will Vitka) WTOP/Will Vitka Lightning breaks over Columbia Heights in the District. (WTOP/Will Vitka) WTOP/Will Vitka Storm clouds threaten the District. (WTOP/Will Vitka) WTOP/Will Vitka Lightning strikes in D.C.’s Columbia Heights neighborhood. (WTOP/Will Vitka) WTOP/Will Vitka Thunder and lightning over Columbia Heights in the District. (WTOP/Will Vitka) WTOP/Will Vitka ( 1 /34) Share This Gallery: Share on Facebook. Share on Twitter. Share via email. Print.
WASHINGTON — After days of heavy rain, the entire D.C. region now has a concern greater than big puddles and wet commutes.
The region is under a flood watch through 8 a.m. Saturday, according to the National Weather Service.
And in already-waterlogged Frederick County, Maryland, a flood warning remains in effect through Sunday evening.
Up to 3 inches more rain is expected on Friday, Storm Team4 Meteorologist Chuck Bell said.
Friday morning’s commute was hindered by multiple reports of downed trees and utility wires. In Potomac, Maryland, on River Road near Falls Road, a downed tree blocked both lanes of the major connector to the Capital Beltway. (Check WTOP’s traffic page for live status updates.)
#POTOMAC-River Rd BOTH WAYS near Falls Rd, TREE DOWN temporarily blocks ALL LANES in #mdtraffic. https://t.co/nb3VFR1abs — WTOP Traffic (@WTOPtraffic) May 18, 2018
Stay alert for new flood warnings, as they mean flooding is imminent or occurring and that people should avoid flooded roads.
Warnings have also been issued for various creeks and rivers around the D.C. area. (Find updated advisories for Maryland and Virginia on the weather service’s website.)
The National Weather Service released its latest measurement — 11.48 feet — for the Potomac River at Point of Rocks, Maryland early on Friday morning. Flood stage is considered 16 feet. The service predicts a crest of almost 19 feet sometime on Sunday, May 20. The river reached 18.2 feet on October 31, 2012.
Closer to the District, the weather service has issued a coastal flood advisory — effective through 8 p.m. Friday — for the shorelines of D.C., Arlington County and Alexandria. A coastal flood watch will be in effect from then until Sunday morning.
Storm Team4 Meteorologist Amelia Draper warned of a severe impact on the Georgetown waterfront.
Everyone is under a flood watch until Saturday AM and numerous waterways are under flood warnings. The waters will continue to rise into the weekend even as the rain lets up. These are gauages monitor flooding potential and Georgetown waterfront is expected to have major flooding pic.twitter.com/LWZiQG9OsT — Amelia Draper (@amelia_draper) May 17, 2018
An additional 2–5 inches of rain are possible through Saturday, Storm Team4 Meteorologist Doug Kammerer said.
City of Frederick Mayor Michael O’Connor declared a local state of emergency Wednesday, urging all residents to sign up for emergency alerts and take all weather warnings seriously as more flooding scenarios are possible.
In Frederick, the nearby Monocacy River was at 14.1 feet around 2 p.m. Thursday, not far from the flood stage of 15 feet.
Residents are being told to limit their water use in the coming days in order to take pressure off the area’s wastewater treatment plant and help prevent sewage from backing up into homes.
Frederick police warned of road closures and said new areas may be affected. (Follow Frederick police on Twitter for updated list of road closures, which the department said is constantly changing.)
#WeatherAlert: Flood WATCH for much of the area and a flood WARNING from Winchester, VA to Frederick, MD. Avoid high and fast moving water. Several more inches of rain are likely over the next 2-3 days. Stay with @NBCWashington for updates. pic.twitter.com/ME8CAiUq3T — Chuck Bell (@ChuckBell4) May 17, 2018
National Weather Service meteorologist Chris Strong said Friday, “Fortunately for Frederick, the Monocacy is on its way down. If we can keep too much rain from falling up there, I think the worst hopefully is over for them … we’re going to have to watch and just make sure that’s the case.”
He predicted that most places on the Potomac will see “at least some minor flooding, minor inundation along the shorelines.” But if the area gets more substantial rain through the course of Friday, “there is the possibility for some more moderate river flooding as well.”
Strong added that the Potomac River near Washington is not expected to crest until Sunday, since it takes a while for rainwater to make its way into larger rivers.
He said the highest risk areas on Friday are Charles, Calvert and St. Mary’s counties.
“They did get some heavy rain overnight and they’ll continue to get some heavier rain today,” Strong said, “so we’re monitoring not only the water just piling up in low areas, but also the streams that do run through southern Maryland.”
The possibility of that much rain means residents should be checking their drains to make sure they’re clear of debris so they don’t back up, in addition to being generally cautious.
Drivers, too, should be aware of the dangers of high water.
On Frederick’s Willowbrook Road, for instance, floodwaters pushed a car 45 to 50 feet into a grassy field. “The driver was still in it when it washed away,” said Clay Bussard with Bussard’s Auto Repair and Towing, who’s been towing cars stuck in high water, many times after people inside were pulled out by rescue crews.
“It’s been nonstop,” he said. “Some of the city roads are pretty bad.”
Next week might still be wet, but for now it appears that it won’t compare to what the area has been seeing the last few days.
Current conditions
Forecast
Friday: Rainy with highs in the high 60s; flood watch all day
Saturday: More rain likely, with highs in the low 70s
Sunday: Mostly cloudy with a chance of showers and highs in the low 80s
Monday: Chance of scattered thunderstorms, with highs in the mid-80s
WTOP’s Will Vitka, Nick Iannelli, Abigail Constantino, John Aaron and Patrick Roth contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed. | {
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Foto: EuVotez.com
După scandalul de la primul tur al alegerilor prezidențiale din 2 noiembrie, autoritățile române au reacționat și au promis că nu vor mai exista probleme la secțiile de votare din străinătate. Chiar premierul Victor Ponta a anunțat că toată conducerea MAE va fi demisă dacă un singur român nu va putea să voteze. Totul a culminat cu înlocuirea la șefia ministerului a lui Titus Corlățean cu Teodor Meleșcanu, el fiind chiar unul dintre candidați.
Cu toate acestea, românii din diaspora încearcă să se descurce pe cont propriu. Unul dintre ei este Andrei Petre. El a relatat pe site-ul aplicației EuVotez toată povestea.
Accesați aplicația EuVotez.com aici.
Foto: EuVotez.com
„Sunt unul dintre romanii care au stat la coada la Institutul Cultural Roman din Londra, duminica, 2 noiembrie, de la 3.30pm pana la 10.15pm si nu am putut vota.
Dupa aproximativ o ora de stat la coada si observand ritmul foarte lent in care ne miscam, am inceput sa ma intreb daca la o alta sectie este un numar mai mic de persoane asteptand sa isi exercite dreptul la vot. Nu am putut rabda, asa ca m-am dus la o alta sectie din Londra sa vad care e situatia. Rezultatul a fost o ora pierduta pe drum pentru a constata ca situatia nu era diferita de cea de la Institutul Cultural Roman.
In momentul acela, imi doream sa pot accesa informatii despre situatia celorlalte sectii de votare din Londra si imprejurimi, dar nu am gasit. A doua zi am aflat ca in Portsmouth (un oras la 100km de Londra) a fost un numar mult mai mic de alegatori si s-a putut vota rapid. Insa, nu am avut de unde sti.
Asa a luat nastere ideea de a construi aplicatia euvotez.com care sa informeze alegatorii din diaspora asupra numarului (aproximativ) de persoane care asteapta la sectiile de votare. Toate acestea in timp real. Astfel, romanii pot alege o sectie de votare cu un numar mai mic de alegatori si astfel, sansele de a vota cresc. Un numar mai mare de utilizatori ne va oferi estimari mai apropiate de numarul real de alegatori aflati la sectiile de votare”, a povestit creatorul aplicației EuVotez.com.
El menționează că aplicația nu are nuanță politică și că datele utilizatorilor nu sunt folosite în alte scopuri decât cele menționate de aplicație și că vor fi șterse imediat după încheierea alegerilor.
Consultați lista secțiilor de votare cu adrese complete AICI.
Descărcați Declarația pe propria răspundere AICI.
Urmăreşte ştirile Digi24 despre ALEGERI PREZIDENŢIALE 2014 şi pe contul dedicat pe Twitter #cotroceni2014! | {
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Casemiro ve la amarilla en el pasado derbi / PABLOGARCIA
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El Comité de Competición de la Federación Española de Fútbol (RFEF) ha decidido suspender con un partido de sanción a los malaguistas José Luis García 'Recio' y Fernando Tissone y a Bojan Jokic, del Villarreal, mientras que ha retirado la tarjeta amarilla que vio el madridista Casemiro el domingo en el derbi.
Recio ha sido suspendido por acumulación de amonestaciones, mientras que el esloveno Jokic y el argentino Tissone son sancionados por doble amonestación y consiguiente expulsión.
En el caso de Tissone, el Comité ha rechazado las alegaciones presentadas por el club malaguista, que intentaba que se le retirada la primera amonestación.
Sí dejó sin amonestación arbitral a Casemiro, tras las alegaciones del Real Madrid, que no prosperaron en el caso del defensa Raphael Varane.
Asimismo, Unai Emery, entrenador del Sevilla, fue amonestado por formular observaciones al árbitro. | {
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One of the two young women involved in a brunch scuffle with Tomi Lahren spoke out on Wednesday to say that she stands by the incident and ‘doesn’t care’ that President Trump disapproves of her friend throwing water at the Fox News pundit.
Twenty-three-year-old college graduate Libby, 23, was at a table with eight girlfriends at UNION rooftop bar and restaurant in Minneapolis when her friend threw water at Lahren as she walked by.
After throwing the water, the girl under the screenname Jasmine Kohler shared photographs of it on her Snapchat story and wrote: 'Thanks for the screenshots. I did it lol'. Earlier in the day, she appeared to goad followers by telling them in post: 'Tomi Lahren at union (sic). 5 screenshots and we dump a drink on her.'
After being hit with the water, Lahren turned to engage the group but it was Libby, not Jasmine, who launched a foul-mouthed tirade at her which was also captured on another video which later emerged.
She called Lahren, who is her age, a 'racist piece of s***’ and a ‘f****** piece of human garbage trash.’
She went on to tell Lahren’s 55-year-old mother Trudy that she worked with immigrants ‘every day of her life’, didn't want to hear what her daughter had to say and told the Lahren family: ‘You’re done, you can go.’
Scroll down for videos
Libby, 23, is shown above, circled, arguing with Tomi Lahren and her mother Trudy (top left) after her friend threw a drink on the Fox News host on Sunday. She called her a 'racist piece of s***' and said she deserved to have the water thrown at her
The incident was condemned by President Trump on Wednesday morning in a tweet where he said he stood by Lahren saying: 'Everybody is with Tomi Lahren, a truly outstanding and respected young woman!'
Libby said Lahren was not entitled to 'peaceful discourse' because she 'spreads hate'
The fracas was also scolded by democratic comedian Kathy Griffin and Lahren herself deemed the group of girls 'bullies, ‘embarrassing’ and hungry for ’15 minutes of fame’.
Speaking to DailyMail.com on Wednesday, Libby said that while she did not throw the water, her friend was quite right to do so because Lahren is ‘racist’ and was ‘not welcome’ Minneapolis.
‘When you use your platform to spread hate speech, you have lost your privilege to have a peaceful discourse,' she said.
'Especially when you come into our city, Minneapolis, which is a huge city for people of color and immigrants. She is not welcome here. Have you heard anything she says? She equated the Black Lives Matters movement to the KKK.
'You can’t just say that about people and just expect everyone to give you a platform,’ she said.
Libby is a liberal arts graduate who volunteers for a non-profit organization which helps immigrants seeking asylum. She hopes to attend law school in the fall and wants to become an immigration attorney.
On Sunday, she said she watched as Lahren was accosted by other patrons on the rooftop bar where drag performances had been going on all day.
‘Tomi was there at the brunch and everyone at the restaurant figured it out people were walking by her table and calling her names. We were going to do a chant, “like go home Tomi,” but it didn't happen.
‘[As Lahren was leaving], she walked by and the girl in the video tossed the water and it barely hit her,' she said.
Jasmine Kohler proudly posted photographs to her Snapchat account after throwing the drink on Sunday. She is Libby's friend and has refused to speak about it the incident became national news on Wednesday thanks to a condemnation from President Trump
In other videos taken from the rooftop after she threw the drink, Jasmine is seen, her white top and black off-the-shoulder top recognizable from the images she posted herself, laughing
As she skirted past the confrontation Libby was having behind her, Jasmine smiled and laughed
She got involved once Lahren and her mother had turned around and walked over to their table to confront them.
'Her mom started saying something and then Tomi started to defend herself and that’s when I jumped in,' she said.
She said that neither she nor any of her friends participated in the name calling and that they only got involved at the last second.
‘There were a lot of people walking by her table and making rude comments but the servers were perfectly kind to her.
'There were people who moved to the bar seats and were scowling at [Lahren]. None of us at my table did that,’ she said. She added that ‘Lahren’s server was a woman of color and all of the servers were people of color,’ which, she suggested, intensified the thorny atmosphere given Lahren’s reputation.
Jasmine has not returned DailyMail.com's requests for comment.
On Wednesday, Libby spoke on her behalf, saying: 'She has decided to lay low and has no official statement.' She added that she 'probably' didn't regret it' despite her retreat from public view.
Before she threw the water, Libby had been telling Jasmine how Lahren called out two of their friends at a recent show.
On Wednesday morning, the president weighed in to support Lahren on Twitter
Tomi Lahren appeared on Fox and Friends on Wednesday morning to speak about the 'disheartening' incident
‘[Jasmine] absolutely shares my feelings and she was also upset that Tomi was in our city. It’s Minneapolis, it’s a very traditional, democratic city. So she knew, we all knew. She shares feelings about how she is racist and says awful things about people.
When you use your platform to spread hate speech, you have lost your privilege to have a peaceful discourse, Libby, 23, who got into verbal altercation with Lahren
‘I had told her about two of my girlfriends who had gone to Tomi Lahren’s show a week beforehand and how she had opened the show by saying, “If you’re a liberal, thank you for coming and being open-minded. Can you raise your hand.”
'They were absolutely harassed, they had to leave early and they had to have security escort them out so that they were safe. So Tomi can preach all she wants about being peaceful but the people who listen to her, to what she says, they won’t take it to heart.'
After tossing the water, Jasmine got out of her seat and tried to escape the row while Libby argued with Lahren and her mother.
She was seen trying to squeeze by Libby, laughing and turning to look over her shoulder while bouncer Jeremy Jackson tried to separate the two groups.
Jackson then escorted Lahren and her parents away from the girls’ table. He told The Blast that the host had complained about being 'thrown out' when she was the one who had been hit with water. He replied to her that he was merely trying to do his job.
Not long afterwards, the group of girls was escorted down in the elevator by the same bouncer.
‘We were on our way out actually, we had already paid. [After the water throwing] the bouncer got in the elevator with us and said that he was sorry he had to be but that it was policy then we all kind of laughed and he actually gave us all high fives.
Lahren was with her mother Trudy (pictured together) and father Kevin when the incident took place on Sunday. The family had just finished brunch and were on their way out of the restaurant
Even some of Lahren's most unlikely fans spoke out to support her after footage of the incident emerged
‘I think he was happy that somebody gave Tomi Lahren a piece of their mind,' Libby said.
She shrugged off President Trump’s remarks and lumped him in the same school of thought as Lahren.
‘I don’t really care about his opinion at all. He does the exact same thing [as Tomi]. To release a press release saying that MS13 are animals? You can’t reduce a group of people to less than a human.’
Libby said her family was aware of the footage and was ‘very proud’ of how she spoke to Lahren and her mother.
In audio of her conversation with Lahren, she can be heard saying: ‘I don't care what you have to say. You are a f****** racist piece of s***, sexist f****** piece of human garbage.
She is not welcome here. Have you heard anything she says? She equated the Black Lives Matters movement to the KKK. 'You can’t just say that about people and just expect everyone to give you a platform'
You say all these awful things about immigrants, people of color. You can leave, you can leave. I don't want to hear anything that you have to say.
She's done. Goodbye. Piece of s***. Garbage, racist piece of s***. Goodbye.’
Trudy, Lahren’s mother, responded to her: ‘Who do you think you are?’
She hit back: ‘I am someone who has worked my entire life, I work with immigrants every single day of my life and I love, I love those people.
'Those people have worked their entire lives and they have earned their place here in America.’
Others who were on the rooftop shared videos of the altercation proudly. In some, Lahren was told: 'Get that b**** out of here' and was slammed as a 'racist'.
Lahren appeared on Fox and Friends on Wednesday morning to speak about 'the incident'.
She said: 'This something that was embarrassing, at the end of the day I'm a person too, but I'm tough, my family is tough, we can handle it.
'I think that those that threw profanity and water and were applauding and laughing about it, wanted to get their 15 minutes of fame by making a video of me.'
In a Facebook post later, after President Trump's tweet, she said: 'To all the girls who follow and look to me as a source of inspiration, don’t let what happened to me discourage you from speaking your mind and being your authentic self.
'Bullies win when we start giving them our energy.
'Take that energy and let it fuel you! Thanks for all the love and support from Donald J. Trump and even my usual critics. It means a lot to me!' | {
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The mayor of a town in Germany attempted to censor the leader of the surging Alternative for Germany (AfD) party — dubbed ‘Germany’s UKIP’ by some — by barring her from making a speech in his town following her recent comments about illegal immigrants.
AfD leader Frauke Petry (pictured) had been due to give a speech in Augsburg’s historic town hall on Friday this week, but the mayor of the city announced yesterday that he was banning her from using the building, reports Deutsche Welle.
As Breitbart London previously reported, the leader of the anti-mass migration Eurosceptic German political party told a newspaper last month that a border police officer “must stop illegal border crossings, and also make use of his firearm if necessary.”
Even though Mrs. Petry clarified that she did not want to see force used — “no policeman wants to fire on a refugee and I don’t want that either” — and stressed it was merely “the last resort”, political opponents have attempted to use the comments to their advantage. Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, leader of the centre-left Social Democratic Party of Germany, even called for the AfD to be put under surveillance by the German government agency that tracks extremists.
Augsburg mayor Kurt Gribl, a member of the Merkel-allied Bavarian Christian Social Union party, yesterday ruled that Mrs. Petry’s comments were unconstitutional, and as a result she cannot be allowed to give a speech in the town hall.
Markus Bayerbach, one of two AfD council members in the town, said the party would “take action against the decision” by filing an urgent claim with a local judge. He said he hopes to have the ban overturned in time for Friday’s speech adding that it was “unacceptable that a democratically legitimised party should be barred from a space that is available to the other members of the democracy.”
For their part other city councillors have pledged to attend a competing event elsewhere in the same town hall if the mayor’s attempt at censorship is struck down. | {
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Zimbabwe's Tsvangirai and Mujuru in anti-Mugabe alliance Published duration 20 April 2017
image copyright Reuters image caption Robert Mugabe has said he is not losing sleep over the coalition
Two of Zimbabwe's best known opposition figures have agreed to form an alliance against President Robert Mugabe.
Long-time Mugabe critic Morgan Tsvangirai and former Vice-President Joice Mujuru say they will work together in next year's election.
However, it is not yet clear which of them will be the presidential candidate.
Mr Mugabe, 93, has been in power since independence from Britain in 1980 and has said he will seek re-election.
"This is just the beginning of the building blocks towards establishing a broad alliance to confront Zanu-PF between now and the next election," Mr Tsvangirai told journalists.
Real test lies ahead: Shingai Nyoka, BBC News, Harare
image copyright AFP
The alliance is an important first step towards uniting a deeply divided opposition.
And if this alliance succeeds it will be the first time President Mugabe has faced a united opposition on this scale since coming into power in 1980.
At least a dozen parties are expected to be part of the coalition.
Former Vice-President Joice Mujuru who was fired from the ruling Zanu-PF party in 2014 was the first to sign a pact with Morgan Tsvangirai. She says it follows six months of consultations.
A Movement for Democratic Change splinter group has now also come on board.
Divisions among the opposition have been blamed for previous electoral losses.
For the first time, Mr Tsvangirai apologised for this and accepted responsibility for the mistakes made in the past. His party has split four ways since it was formed in 1999.
Ms Mujuru's National People's Party recently splintered after less than a year.
But the real test for the opposition lies ahead. The parties still need to hammer out the terms of this alliance. In particular who will lead the coalition.
President Mugabe is a formidable opponent. He has been accused of stealing elections and using violence to stay in power.
Mr Mugabe has previously said he would not be losing any sleep over the proposed coalition.
Mr Tsvangirai has run against Mr Mugabe several times since he helped found the Movement for Democratic Change.
Each time he has said he was denied victory because of violence and rigging - charges denied by Mr Mugabe and his allies.
He became prime minister in a tension-filled coalition government with Mr Mugabe from 2009 until 2013.
Ms Mujuru was vice-president to Mr Mugabe for 10 years until she was fired in 2014. | {
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18 Year Old Girl After School Cleans Up Without Panties. Hidden Camera | {
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President Donald Trump, fresh off his Asia trip, discussed the success of his political trip, while avoiding questions on whether Roy Moore should leave the Senate race in Alabama. | {
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Kent County, DE — Proving once again that the state has no interest in helping people, the state of Delaware is attacking a pastor who would dare attempt to help the homeless. Pastor Aaron Appling of Victory Church West in Dover is being threatened with a $100 per day fine by county officials for allowing a 21-year-old homeless woman to live in an RV in the back of the church property.
Because Appling didn’t go through the right channels of extortion and get his own property approved by the government to do with it what he wishes, officials are promising to extort him.
According to NBC Philadelphia, Kent County officials sent Appling a letter stating his church isn’t zoned to let homeless people stay on the property. The letter warns that if the church doesn’t act quickly, they could be fined $100 a day.
To be clear, a fine is backed by the threat of violence from the state for non-payment. If Appling continues to be a good samaritan by providing a woman with shelter and refuses to pay the $100 per day fine, he will receive a visit from armed agents of the state demanding payment.
If Appling refuses to pay the extortion fees to these armed agents, they will attempt to kidnap and cage him. If Appling resists his kidnappers, he will have violence enacted against him, and he could be legally killed.
Alexis Simms, a 21-year-old homeless mom who is battling lupus, has nowhere to go — and, the state is attempting to take the only thing she has positive in her life right now — pastor Appling’s kindness.
“We want to stand up for her,” Appling said. “Because there is nobody else to stand up for her.”
Because the state needs to have a piece of red tape and a related fee declaring the church property a ‘campground,’ Simms could soon find herself back on the street. Again, to be clear, by ‘rezoning’ Appling’s own property as a ‘campground’ nothing actually changes. This is simply a means by which the state can collect money from its citizens.
According to NBC Philadelphia, while county officials said the church can apply for re-zoning to make the land a campground, Appling says it would be too expensive. He’s hoping the church and the county can reach a compromise before the fines begin.
Helping a homeless mother is not the only ‘crime’ the church has been accused of either. Last month, Appling announced a plan to build multiple tiny homes on his property to provide shelter for those in need. And, again, their good deed was quickly swatted down by the bureaucratic hand of government.
The good news is, the church is showing no signs of backing down. Instead of paying the fees, they are seeking to change the law entirely to put an end to such a tyrannical practice. We wish them luck in their endeavors.
“We have to choose at some point in time as believers who we’re going to stand for and help,” Appling said. “We’re not against them we’re just choosing we need to help this person more than we need to be pleasing to you.”
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There are now eight confirmed cases of COVID-19 in members of the UW Seattle community, according to an updated count Sunday from the environmental health & safety (EH&S) department.
COVID-19 is the disease caused by the novel coronavirus that now has over 600 cases across Washington state as of Saturday, and nearly 400 in King County, according to the state Department of Health.
One of the cases is in a student employee who last came to work Feb. 27 and has not been on campus since developing symptoms March 1. The person’s roommate, who is also a student, also tested positive and has not been on campus since developing symptoms.
The School of Public Health sent an email to students Sunday afternoon saying an undergraduate in the school had tested positive after developing symptoms March 1 and being tested a week later. It is unclear if this case is related to the student employee and their roommate.
Another student traveled out of the state and notified the university they had tested positive for the coronavirus after reaching their destination.
A graduate student started developing symptoms March 9 after last being on campus five days earlier. Both of this student’s roommates are also experiencing symptoms and are staying home.
The Information School notified community members late Saturday night that a student in one of its programs had tested positive with details matching this case.
The fifth confirmed or presumptively positive case of the virus is in a UW employee who reported symptoms last week and is staying home. The employee has not been on campus since developing symptoms.
“These individuals are doing well as they recover in isolation, and we wish them well,” Geoffrey Gottlieb, the interim chair of the Advisory Committee on Communicable Diseases, said in an announcement Sunday. “Anyone known to have been in close contact with them is directed to self-isolate and monitor symptoms for 14 days per public health guidance.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention consider close contact as being within six feet of someone with the virus for a prolonged period of time or having other forms of direct contact, such as being coughed on.
Gottlieb noted that the risk of transmission from these cases is considered to be low, while community transmission continues to increase locally. He added that social distancing, like not gathering in large groups and staying six feet apart from other people, is “vital to slowing this outbreak.”
Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Robert Stacey said in a message Sunday afternoon that two students in the college had tested positive for the virus on Friday and are doing well and recovering. The connection between these two and the six student cases the UW has reported is not clear.
The rise in cases marks five new people at the UW with the virus since a Lander Hall resident was reported to have tested positive Friday and a graduate student living in Mercer Court became the first student to have the virus at the university the day before.
The first case in the UW community was an employee at a nearby office space.
As the School of Public Health dean Hilary Godwin recently noted, a growing number of confirmed cases is expected and it means “patients, especially the most vulnerable, will get the care they need and reduce the risk of infecting their loved ones and others.”
Having accurate information allows the public health system to do a better job protecting the community, Godwin added.
“We know it is upsetting to hear about people in our community who are experiencing this illness,” Gottlieb said. “Our hearts and support go out to each of them, and to their friends, loved ones and campus communities.”
It is unclear how many people in the UW community have tested negative or have pending tests since many tests don’t get reported to the university because of the increase in locations administering screenings for the virus.
There are no confirmed cases on the UW’s Bothell or Tacoma campuses, according to the count.
Students who develop symptoms of the coronavirus, which include shortness of breath, fever, and a cough, should contact their health care provider and notify the EH&S Employee Health Center.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
Reach News Editor Jake Goldstein-Street at [email protected]. Twitter: @GoldsteinStreet
Like what you’re reading? Support high-quality student journalism by donating here. | {
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I first heard about magnet implants in college, but I didn’t seriously pursue one until my colleague Ben Popper got his for the piece that would become "Cyborg America." At a Brooklyn tattoo parlor in 2012, I watched someone cut along the top of my finger, tear open a pocket with a dowel, and slide in a dark rod about half the size of a sunflower seed. Later, when I ran my hand across everything in my apartment and felt it humming over an intercom, I fell in love. I began to catalog sensations: the vicious pinch of picking up a Buckyball, the jitter of using a microwave, the sense of floating when I hovered my hand above another magnet.
We don’t get stopped by airport security or magically crash computers
These days, Ben is bored with his implant. Neither he nor I have ever felt trains going by underneath us or found distant electrical signals while walking down the street. We don’t get stopped by airport security or magically crash computers by touching them. Still, I’ve never stopped liking mine. My body is more like a paper doll than a capable tool, but it holds the seeds of tiny superpowers. I can lift screws out of holes when I’m opening up electronics. I can sweep up pins while I’m sewing. I’m acutely aware of the invisible signals that machines and electronics put out. It’s mostly useless stuff, yes, but how many of the textures you feel qualify as need-to-know information? These days, the magnet no longer feels like magic, but you can still find me waving my hand in front of running microwaves from time to time. I’d feel bereft if I couldn’t sense the little arc over the "Enter" key of my MacBook, which I think means I’m near the hard drive.
A year and a half later, I bought an NFC chip, deciding that if it was even a fraction as much fun as the magnet, I wanted it. It wasn’t hard to find. The site Dangerous Things sells a passive tag — a chip that doesn’t require a battery to work, like the ones you find in rings or business cards or stickers — pre-loaded into a syringe and packaged with plastic gloves and disinfectant. Fast as the magnet installation was, it was like having my skin ripped off. The NFC injection was more like giving blood. If you’ve got an Android device, it’s also easy to program, although positioning an antenna to read through my hand is another matter. | {
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At the bottom of a deep, convoluted canyon, the Dirty Devil River makes its way from Hanksville to Lake Powell. Formed by the Muddy Creek and
Native Americans inhabited these canyons long ago, as evidenced in At the bottom of a deep, convoluted canyon, the Dirty Devil River makes its way from Hanksville to Lake Powell. Formed by the Muddy Creek and Fremont River convergence, the river, in this view, is barely visible 2000 ft (600m) below the canyon rim.Native Americans inhabited these canyons long ago, as evidenced in Horseshoe Canyon to the north. In the late 1800s, Butch Cassidy and his gang used the upper tributaries of the Dirty Devil as hideouts. - Martin van Hemert | {
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Last week Jon Stewart skewered climate-change deniers in signature fashion on an episode of The Daily Show. It may have been hilarious, but calling people idiots isn’t likely to change anyone’s mind. Climate scientist Adam Levy took a different approach—by acting out an analogy using brightly colored sweaters.
The video, which he posted on YouTube on Friday, presents an amusing and digestible way to understand how climate change works. In the skit, Levy plays a doctor and a patient.
“I think I’ve got a bug, doc. I feel really hot all the time,” he says, wearing a sweater. As the doctor, Levy points out that it’s probably the sweater, which gets the response, “That’s your opinion.”
That’s the kind of argument people are making, explains Levy as himself, a doctorate student in the department of atmospheric, oceanic, and planetary physics at the University of Oxford.
Before breaking down how climate change is transforming the planet, he notes, “Don’t get me wrong; climate is super complicated, and there’s still lots of tricky questions that need answering. But if it’s hot, the global warming debate is the same as the sweater debate.”
More than 300,000 people participated in last week’s People’s Climate March in New York City, but many influential figures in politics and business still argue over whether global warming is real. As Stewart pointed out last week, it’s more than ignorance.
Energy conglomerates fund the campaigns of several legislators, including some members of the House of Representatives Committee on Science, which oversees the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, and other groups. But as more Americans find the lack of action on climate change unacceptable, thanks to scientists like Levy, who patiently raises awareness about the issue (here’s another video in which he explains rising sea levels using gin and tonic), there’s reason to be optimistic.
Days after the People’s Climate March, tech giants Google, Facebook, and Yelp dropped their support of the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that, among other things, pushes for legislation that questions whether climate change is real. | {
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Download it now http://k2s.cc/file/59ff8a1b7495f
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Data Propria, a brand-new "data and behavioral science company" run by former staff at Cambridge Analytica, has been "quietly working" for the president’s 2020 re-election campaign, according to the Associated Press
Two reporters from the news organization overheard Matt Oczkowski, the company’s president, tell someone in a public place that he and Brad Parscale, who is Donald Trump’s re-election campaign manager, were "doing the president’s work for 2020."
Neither Oczkowski nor Parscale immediately responded to Ars’ request for comment on Twitter. Oczkowski "denied a link to the Trump campaign, but acknowledged that his new firm has agreed to do 2018 campaign work for the Republican National Committee," according to the AP.
"Oczkowski had previously told the AP the firm had no intention of seeking political clients," the news service wrote. "After being informed the AP had overheard him directly discussing campaign work, he said his young company had changed course and that whatever he’d said about the 2020 campaign would have been speculative."
Data Propria was only founded on February 1, 2018, according to its incorporation filings and its own May 2018 press release issued by its parent company, CloudCommerce. According to the AP, three of Data Propria's 10 staffers are ex-employees of Cambridge Analytica.
Parscale also is a part owner in CloudCommerce, according to its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In April 2018, it was revealed that a 2014 survey app that required Facebook login credentials allowed the survey creator, Aleksandr Kogan, and his team access to their friends' public profile data. In the end, this system captured data on 87 million Facebook users. This data trove wound up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica, a British data analytics firm, which worked for the Donald Trump presidential campaign. Cambridge Analytica filed for bankruptcy nearly a month ago.
Kogan is scheduled to appear before a Senate subcommittee on June 19. | {
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Mbalula spoke to the media outside the Sandton Police Station on Friday shortly after he laid a charge against the TV personality for alleged contravention of the government's lockdown rules.
Mbalula said that while he and Mhlongo are friends "we must never give the impression that we mix business with pleasure and that we discuss Cabinet issues at will and that we brief members of society about what government could be saying."
Mbalula tweeted that he is "o bligated by statutes, policies and regulations of Parliament and Government to take action and seek consequences management over matters where my name is name dropped, more especially regarding cabinet decisions. "
"Even before this, Somizi has been part of social responsibility. Which is a job I think he should continue to do," Mbalula said.
The minister added that Mhlongo "could have used President Cyril Ramaphosa or anybody's (name). It is in his nature. He even predicted Miss Universe. So I don't know if the guy is a sangoma."
WATCH: Minister Mbalula at Sandton Police Station #LockdownSa https://t.co/sjT6mzFp3y — Minister of Transport |Mr Fix (@MbalulaFikile) April 10, 2020
This comes after Somizi, in an Instagram live video with Metro FM colleague Dineo Ranaka, claimed that Mbalula had told him Ramaphosa would extend the nationwide lockdown. The video sparked an outcry on social media. Somizi has since taken to Instagram to deny that he had spoken to Mbalula and admitted his bombshell was just a joke. He has also apologised. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Somizi (@somizi) on Apr 9, 2020 at 11:30am PDT Mbalula denied the alleged interaction and said he had spoken to Somizi about the effects of the badly timed joke.
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Somizi (@somizi) on Apr 9, 2020 at 11:30am PDT When the lockdown was announced regulations gazetted state that "any person who publishes any statement, through any medium, including social media, with the intention to deceive any other person about: Covid-19; Covid-19 infection status of any person; or Any measure taken by the government to address Covid-19, commits an offence and is liable on conviction to a fine or imprisonment for a period not exceeding six months, or both such fine and imprisonment." IOL
According to an earlier tweet, Mbalula wants Somizi to be charged with Contravening Government Lockdown Regulations as published under the Disaster Management Act on fake news peddling and misinformation peddling. | {
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Brings cat to vet for flea bath euthanized | {
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Donald Sutherland studied at the University of Toronto and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. An actor of enormous versatility, he became known for his role in The Dirty Dozen (1967), following this with parts in M*A*S*H (1970) and Klute (1971). Among his other films in a half-century screen career are Ordinary People (1980), A Time To Kill (1996), Instinct (1999), Cold Mountain (2003), Pride & Prejudice (2005) and The Hunger Games franchise.
Early Life
Widely considered one of Canada’s best-known film actors, Donald McNichol Sutherland was born on July 17, 1935, in Saint John, New Brunswick. His parents, Dorothy, a math teacher, and Frederick, who worked in sales and managed the local utility company, forged a standard middle-class home for their son. Sutherland would later describe his father as a self-involved, controlling man while his mother was a direct, loving presence in the youngster's life.
Sutherland’s early childhood was shaped by poor health. The first word he learned to say was “neck” because that's where he was in pain, a sign that the young boy was weathering the early onset of polio. Today, one leg is shorter than the other as a result of the illness. Sutherland also dealt with bouts of hepatitis and rheumatic fever.
Entry Into Acting
Resisting their son’s dreams of becoming a sculptor, Sutherland’s parents urged conventionality and successfully pushed him to study engineering at the University of Toronto, where Sutherland experienced his first exposure to acting. As the story goes, the first play Sutherland ever saw was one he had a small role in: a student production of Edward Albee’s The Male Animal during his junior year. Other shows followed, and in 1958 Sutherland graduated with dual degrees in engineering and drama.
While at the University of Toronto, Sutherland also met his first wife, Lois Hardwick, an experienced actress who’d been a child star during the silent film era. The couple married in 1959, the first of Sutherland’s three marriages, and divorced seven years later without any children.
'Dirty Dozen' Breakthrough
Scrapping a potential engineering career, Sutherland moved to the United Kingdom after college to work at the Perth Repertory Theater in Scotland. He also appeared on the London stage before embarking on his half-century film career. It was an inauspicious start.
“My first offer ever for a film was in 1962,” Sutherland said to GQ magazine. “I auditioned for the producer, the writer, the director. And I came home and said to my first wife, ‘I thought it went okay.’ You never want to say you did well before you know anything. The next morning they were all on the phone saying how wonderful the audition had been. And then the producer said, ‘We loved you so much, we wanted to explain why we weren’t casting you. We’ve always thought of this as a guy-next-door sort of character, and we don’t think you look like you’ve ever lived next door to anybody.’"
A year later he did get a part in the 1963 British romantic drama The World Ten Times Over. But it didn’t lead to steady or even good paying work. Thus, on the advice of his agent, a flat broke Sutherland moved to Hollywood in the mid-1960s. His big break came in 1967 when he landed the small but significant role of Vernon Pinkley in the war film The Dirty Dozen, starring Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Jim Brown and Telly Savalas, among others. The movie went on to become the fifth highest-grossing film of the year. Leveraging that success, Sutherland found more work, including a part in the Clint Eastwood comedy Kelly’s Heroes (1970).
Major Success With 'M*A*S*H'
It was around this time that Sutherland accepted the part that would catapult his career into stardom, starring as “Hawkeye” Pierce in the classic Robert Altman war comedy, M*A*S*H. The film, which also starred Elliot Gould and Tom Skerritt, proved to be a giant cultural and financial success, evoking surprise from even those who made the movie with its box office results.
“I remember going up to the theater in New York at eleven o'clock in the morning on the first day M*A*S*H opened,” Sutherland later recalled in an Esquire interview. “These were the days before advertising, and the only word of mouth was from one screening in San Francisco two months earlier. We went to the theater early to see if it was going to sell any tickets. The line was twice around the block.”
Following M*A*S*H, Sutherland became a regular part of the Hollywood rotation. His acting style has been described as offbeat and precise, with an onscreen presence that is no doubt aided by his 6'4" frame. His versatility and range also allowed him not to be typecast.
Fonda and Fellini
Over the next several decades Sutherland appeared in a steady lineup of either critical or commercial successes. The list includes Klute (1971), co-starring Jane Fonda (whom Sutherland also had an affair with), Don't Look Now (1973), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Robert Redford's Ordinary People (1980), A Dry White Season (1989) and JFK (1991).
His choices included some unconventional picks too. In 1976 he teamed up with legendary Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini for Fellini’s Casanova, in which Sutherland portrayed the title character. Sutherland would speak in glowing terms about his time with the director, who provided a nurturing presence in a work experience that was both challenging and highly sensual. Two years later Sutherland played a pot smoking professor in the John Landis comedy National Lampoon’s Animal House.
'Hunger Games'
Sutherlands’ film choices have continued to vary, from the '90s into the next millennium. His big-screen credits include Backdraft (1991), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), the drama Space Cowboys (2000), A Time to Kill (1996), The Italian Job (2003), Pride & Prejudice (2005) and The Con Artist (2010), in addition to a variety of TV projects like Uprising (2001) and Frankenstein (2004).
In 2012 he played wicked President Snow in The Hunger Games, a role he reprised for the franchise’s subsequent films—Catching Fire (2013) and the 2014 and 2015 installments of Mockingjay. Returning to the small screen, he took on the role of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty for the 2018 FX series Trust, about the infamous 1973 kidnapping of Getty's grandson.
In all, Sutherland has worked in more than 150 films, going harder than most at an age when many of his contemporaries have eased back on their schedules. “I’m going to be working until I’m helping them with the shovel,” he has said.
Awards & Honors
While considered one of Hollywood’s most esteemed actors, Sutherland has received little Oscar attention to date. He’s neither won nor been nominated for the award. He has however been nominated for seven Golden Globes and won two. His first came in 1996 for his supporting role in the television movie Citizen X, which also netted him an Emmy. In 2003 Sutherland won a second supporting actor Globe for his work in another TV film, Path to War.
Sutherland's home country has also shown pride in its native son. In 1978 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and was inducted into the country’s Walk of Fame in 2000.
Personal Life
Following his divorce from Lois Hardwick, Sutherland wed actress Shirley Douglas in 1966. The two were married for four years and had two children together, Kiefer, who would go on to forge his own successful screen career, and twin sister Rachel, who works behind the camera as a film post-production supervisor.
Sutherland married again in 1972, this time to French Canadian actress Francine Racette, with the union having lasted for decades. The couple has three sons: Rossif, Angus and Roeg. | {
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A leading South African newspaper has blacked out several columns in its latest issue, echoing censorship of the apartheid era, after being threatened with criminal prosecution by a presidential aide.
The front page of South Africa's Mail & Guardian newspaper
The weekly Mail & Guardian was forced to pull a front page story about Mac Maharaj's possible involvement in a shady arms deal. Maharaj, a former Robben Island prisoner who helped smuggle out Nelson Mandela's autobiography, is now spokesman for president Jacob Zuma.
The newspaper said it received a legal letter from him just before its Thursday evening deadline, warning that its journalists could face prosecution, carrying up to 15 years in jail, if it published details of a police investigation into a mid-1990s arms deal that led to convictions of other government officials for bribery.
Maharaj's legal firm argued the paper had acquired documents unlawfully, citing an act that makes it an offence to disclose evidence gathered in camera.
"In the name of press freedom, the M&G arrogates to itself the 'right' to break the law that has been on our statute books since 1998," Maharaj claimed, accusing the paper of seeking "to hide its complicity in criminal acts by raising the spectre of a threat to media freedom and invoking fears of censorship".
Maharaj's letter warned of "the consequences the use of unlawfully and illegally obtained information had on a publication such as the News of the World."
The anti-apartheid stalwart did not make any comment about any involvement in the tainted arms deal. The 30bn rand (£2.4bn) contracts to buy European military equipment has been described as the "original sin" of South Africa's young democracy. Zuma himself was implicated but not convicted.
The Mail & Guardian is considering legal options. Its editor, Nic Dawes, tweeted a picture of the Weekly Mail newspaper from 1986 with some words blacked out by the apartheid regime. He then tweeted an image of Friday's Mail & Guardian front page headline: "Censored. We cannot bring you this story in full due to a threat of criminal prosecution."
Dawes said: "Comparisons with apartheid always make me uneasy because we live in a very different country now, but you can't get away from the awful resonance."
In an article on the Mail & Guardian's website, Dawes said Maharaj was attempting "to avoid answering to the South African public" over suspicious payments and his subsequent behaviour.
"He is now claiming in press statements and interviews that the Mail & Guardian obtained its information illegally, and comparing our conduct to that of journalists at the defunct British tabloid News of the World, who hacked into the phones of celebrities, and the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler."
Dawes said Maharaj needed to explain how he acquired a "hoard of offshore cash".
The dispute comes as South Africa's parliament debates a new law on state secrets that would see whistleblowers who divulge classified information, and journalists who publish such documents, facing possible imprisonment.
Critics said the penalties were draconian and the bill aimed at intimidating media outlets trying to expose corruption. The Mail & Guardian described Maharaj's intervention as a "chilling forewarning of what may happen if the protection of state information bill is adopted in its current form."
Veteran South African journalist Max du Preez tweeted: "Today's M&G makes me nostalgic about the 80s & angry that those who fought with us are now undoing the gains of that struggle." | {
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By David Dyck
Last Wednesday, the financial and administrative services committee for the Simon Fraser Student Society unanimously passed a recommendation that approximately $30,000 be put aside for the creation of a men’s centre. Treasurer Keenan Midgley initiated the project. He told The Peak that the proposed center is meant to be a space where men can discuss issues that might arise in their undergraduate careers at SFU.
“There are a number of issues that men face that they don’t really feel comfortable talking about in a formal setting. Whether it’s dealing with alcoholism, drugs, or an abusive relationship. Whether it’s themselves who are in it or emotionally not being able to cope with things,” said Midgley. Instead of a formal venue, such as the walk-in clinic in the Maggie Benson Centre, Midgley thought that a place where men can “bounce ideas off each other” would be more beneficial.
Midgley also brought up the fact that suicide rates are higher among men than women. According to the B.C. coroner’s report from 2008 and 2009, males accounted for approximately 75 per cent of suicide deaths in B.C. The World Health Organization has stated that this gender disparity is observed nearly worldwide.
“Men’s health issues are a serious matter that hasn’t been taken very seriously until recently. The approach won’t necessarily be the same as those for women,” said Martin Mroz, SFU’s director of health and counselling services in an email to The Peak.
“Dialogue and study is needed, and men need to be engaged by the ones trying to create solutions. At this time I don’t know yet what a ‘brick and mortar’ centre would accomplish. I’m happy that this is on the radar, though,” he added.
Mroz cited a 2010 study done by SFU professor Dan Bilker entitled, “A roadmap to men’s health: current status, research, policy and practice”. According to Bilker, the three factors that underlie causes of difference in health issues between men and women are biological, environmental, and behavioural. Of these three, behavioural factors are the most important in addressing men’s health. ‘Traditional masculinity’ has been negatively portrayed as the cause of men’s poor health behaviours, but this portrayal risks: blaming the victim; undervaluing positive male traits; and alienating men in whom we seek to instill healthier behaviours.”
“It might not even necessarily start as a brick-and-mortar type idea,” said SFSS president Jeff McCann, who is part of the three-member working group with Midgley and at-large representative Danielle Hornstein. “It’ll start as meetings and events and programs and speakers and whatever else, to grow the community amongst men on campus.”
McCann echoed Midgley’s comments, referring to the centre as less of a place to address problems formally, and more of a place to invest in relationships that will pay off when problems do arise. “Men are less likely to go to counseling, and that’s the point of having a proactive approach where it’s not about counseling, it’s everything about community and having an informal support network of friends,” said McCann. He stressed that having a woman, Hornstein, on the committee was essential.
“You have to have those allies in other genders to be able to make this really successful.”
The Peak found one other such centre within Canada, in Winnipeg. The Men’s Resource Centre was affiliated with the University of Manitoba until July of 2010, when it came under the administrative umbrella of the Laurel Centre, a non-profit support group for women and children.
On the website for the Men’s Resource Centre, the first goal is “to provide supportive services to men experiencing stress related to historical, situational, or developmental factors, to decrease the likelihood that the man will act in a self- or other-destructive manner.”
The Peak could not find any instances of similar support groups on any university campuses in Canada.
The final budget for 2012 to 2013 will be passed by April 30. | {
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Story highlights Jean-Marc Ayrault's last name sounds like a rude word in Arabic slang
Arab broadcasters are trying to figure out how to handle the name on air
We "have to deal with it" and be professional, an Al-Arabiya editor says
France's new Socialist government is already causing ripples throughout a Europe struggling to balance government budgets without making ordinary people's lives miserable, but it has created a completely different problem in the Middle East.
The prime minister's last name, it turns out, sounds like an Arabic slang word for penis.
His name is Jean-Marc Ayrault.
Pronounced properly in French, the last name is very much like a moderately rude Lebanese and Palestinian term that is widely understood in the Arabic world.
The name has left broadcasters trying to determine if they should pronounce it as the prime minister does -- "ai-roh" -- or if they should resort to voicing the "L" and "T" in the written word.
An editor at the pan-Arabic network Al-Arabiya said the network would pronounce the name in the French way.
JUST WATCHED Hollande sworn in as French president Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Hollande sworn in as French president 03:43
"We cannot change names, so we have to deal with it and live with it. We have to be professional," said the editor, who asked not to be named because of the subject matter.
Al-Arabiya is writing the name in Arabic in a way that makes clear it is not the offensive word.
CNNArabic decided to pronounce Ayrault's name by voicing the last two letters in the written word.
The French Foreign Ministry said it was aware of the issue but had no comment. The office of the French president, sounding amused, referred CNN questions to the prime minister's office, which had no comment.
The story echoes reports that two years ago, Pakistan wanted to appoint an ambassador to Saudi Arabia whose name sounds like an even more offensive word for penis in Arabic.
But Pakistani diplomat Akbar Zeb denied the story, telling the Globe and Mail in Canada, where he is posted, that there had never been a plan to send him to Riyadh. | {
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Houston police to end use of no-knock warrants, chief says
Seventeen bullet holes can be seen on the front entrance of 7815 Harding Street, where five Houston Police officers were shot while serving a warrant Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2019, in Houston. Seventeen bullet holes can be seen on the front entrance of 7815 Harding Street, where five Houston Police officers were shot while serving a warrant Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2019, in Houston. Photo: Godofredo A. Vásquez, Houston Chronicle / Staff Photographer Photo: Godofredo A. Vásquez, Houston Chronicle / Staff Photographer Image 1 of / 63 Caption Close Houston police to end use of no-knock warrants, chief says 1 / 63 Back to Gallery
The Houston Police Department will end its use of controversial no-knock warrants in most situations, Chief Art Acevedo said during a contentious town hall meeting three weeks after a deadly Pecan Park drug raid that left two people dead and five officers injured.
"The no-knock warrants are going to go away like leaded gasoline in this city," Acevedo told the crowd of activists, reformers and concerned community members gathered at Talento Bilingüe de Houston.
After the event - organized by the Greater Houston Coalition for Justice - Acevedo said any situation in which a no-knock raid would be required would have to receive a special exemption from his office.
"I'm 99.9 percent sure we won't be using them," he said. "If for some reason there would be a specific case, that would come from my office."
Given the wounded officers and the two slain civilians, the chief said he didn't "see the value" in the controversial raids.
"So, that's probably going to go by the wayside," he said.
Only on HoustonChronicle.com: Lack of body cameras limits answers from botched Houston drug raid
The news came during the meeting late Monday after more than an hour of questions from a furious crowd that repeatedly pressed Acevedo on the conduct of his undercover officers, the use of no-knock warrants and inflammatory comments from Houston police union President Joe Gamaldi who recently seemed to suggest the department was surveilling law enforcement critics.
And, despite pushback earlier in the day from a defense lawyer representing the case agent at the center of the botched bust, Acevedo doubled down on his previous statements about the likelihood of charges against the police involved.
"I'm very confident we're going to have criminal charges on one or more of the officers," he said.
The crowd greeted his declaration with a chorus of angry voices demanding: "All of them."
Still, Acevedo said he wouldn't agree to let the Texas Ranger or the FBI take over the investigation.
"I feel very strongly that a police department that is not capable of investigating itself and finding malfeasance and criminal misconduct," he said, "we should just shut down -- and that's just not the case here."
Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg also tried to assure the crowd that her office would investigate and that bad actors would not be allowed off the hook, but pushed back against "mob justice."
"There is a process - it is the justice system," she said. "What you've seen is more accountability - grand juries are returning more true-bills, and we're prosecuting them."
When asked whether he would fire Gamaldi or others allegedly surveilling or harassing activists, Acevedo said he wouldn't deal with speculation. In response, activist Shere Dore fired back with an allegation that earlier in the day police came out and took pictures of protesters gathered outside Houston police headquarters to demand murder charges against the case agent behind the raid.
Acevedo asked for video to look into the claim.
He went on to say that he would roll out a new policy in the coming weeks to make sure that officers participating in raids wear body cameras; the fact that they didn't in the Harding Street raid was a point of contention afterward, given the lack of evidence to counter the initial narrative.
But Acevedo's sweeping announcements weren't enough to placate some of the town hall attendees.
One member of the audience, Tomaro Bell, expressed indignation over police use of no-knock warrants.
"I do believe this officer is going to be charged with murder," she said, of Goines. "But the systemic problems that exist in the undercover narcotics division will not be resolved with this officer charged with murder."
Relatives of several people killed in no-knock raids said they believe more investigation was needed before using the raid.
Aurora Charles said her brother, 55-year-old Ponciano Montemayor Jr., was killed during a no-knock raid in September 2013.
"I just want to see change, that's it," she said. "They've got to do their homework before they go in with these warrants."
For some in the crowd, the killing of the Tuttles brought back memories of the killing of Joe Campos Torres in 1977.
"We've been down this road before," said Johnny Mata, a longtime civil rights activist. Still, he tried to assure them.
"To those who feel down and depressed, that nothing has changed, I'll tell you, it has," he said.
At the same time, he called on Gamaldi to reach out to activists.
"An apology is still needed," he said, suggesting the union could recall his election. "We don't need any demagoguery."
NEWS WHEN YOU NEED IT: Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text message | Sign up for breaking news alerts delivered to your email here. | {
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Over a third of Belgian citizens who have the same surname as the convicted paedophile Marc Dutroux have applied to have their names changed, France Info radio reported on Saturday, quoting the Belgian daily paper `La Derniere Heure'.
Of the 62 Belgians who were called Dutroux in the summer of 1996 - when the scandal broke out and Marc Dutroux was arrested in connection with the kidnapping and murder of young girls between July 1995 and August 1996 - 22 have applied for a name change, the radio said.
Since 1996, 16 people called Dutroux have been granted the right to have another surname, while the applications of another six are expected to be successful.
Belgian law allows people to change their names for a ` valid reason', such as when it is ridiculous or has become infamous.
The former Dutrouxs had to pay 2,000 Belgian francs (just over 30 pounds sterling) for the right to change their names.
Marc Dutroux himself applied to change his name in 1995.
He wanted to be known as Marc Dinroux, but his application was turned down, the radio said.
None of the 624 people who have the same surname as the suspected Dutroux accomplice, Michel Nioul, has applied to change their name, although being the namesake of Nioul can also cause problems.
The patissier Edouard Nioul, who used to have a business on the chic Avenue Louise in Brussels, has had to close shop.
"His cakes were no longer popular," France Info said.
BBC Monitoring (http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk), based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages. | {
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Never lose sight of whats important!Comic dub: Here They did a really good job, and even added a few extra comics!Follow me on tumblr at: link for more shenanigans!Also check out my other undertale comics~ My Kofi: link My Tumblr: link | {
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Juízes do Tribunal Supremo do Quênia decidem pela anulação das eleições presidenciais em Nairóbi Foto: Sayyid Abdul Azim / AP
NAIRÓBI — O Tribunal Supremo do Quênia ordenou nesta sexta-feira a anulação das eleições presidenciais e a realização de novas, ao declarar inválido o resultado da votação de 8 de agosto que deu a vitória ao atual presidente, Uhuru Kenyatta. É a primeira vez que uma votação para a escolha de um presidente é invalidada na África.
— As eleições presidenciais não aconteceram de acordo com a Constituição — declarou o presidente do tribunal, o juiz David Maraga. — Quanto à questão de saber se as ilegalidades e irregularidades afetaram a integridade da eleição, o Tribunal opina que sim.
Kenyatta, que enfrentou Raila Odinga nas urnas, não foi eleito e declarado presidente de maneira válida, segundo o juiz. O presidente do tribunal também citou irregularidades na transmissão dos resultados.Do lado de fora do Tribunal Supremo, que tinha um grande esquema de segurança nesta sexta-feira, os simpatizantes de Odinga comemoraram a decisão.
— Este é um dia histórico para a população do Quênia e, portanto, para a população do continente africano — declarou Odinga após o anúncio, ao recordar que esta é a primeira vez que um tribunal invalida eleições presidenciais na África.
Odinga disse ainda que não confia na atual Comissão Eleitoral e que uma nova equipe deve ser formada para as próximas eleições, previstas para acontecer no prazo de 60 dias, segundo a decisão do tribunal. O presidente da Comissão Eleitoral afirmou que fara mudanças no órgão e processará funcionários envolvidos em irregularidades.
O atual presidente afirmou que não concorda com a decisão do Tribunal Supremo, mas a respeita:
— Seis pessoas decidiram ir contra a vontade do povo — disse Kenyatta em um comunicado na televisão. — A corte tomou sua decisão. Nós respeitamos, mas não concordamos. Essa é a natureza da democracia.
Kenyatta, de 55 anos, eleito pela primeira vez em 2013, havia sido proclamado vencedor pela Comissão Eleitoral (IEBC) em 11 de agosto com 54,27% dos votos, contra 44,74% de Odinga (72 anos), que já havia sido derrotado nas eleições de 1997, 2007 e 2013. O opositor recorreu ao Tribunal Supremo em 2013, mas a impugnação não prosperou na corte.
Após a proclamação da vitória de Kenyatta, o país teve dois dias de violência nos redutos da oposição, nos subúrbios de Nairóbi e na região Oeste. Ao menos 21 pessoas morreram nas manifestações e distúrbios, reprimidas pela polícia. | {
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Check out our new site Makeup Addiction
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girlfriend dumped me just before i bought her valentines gift | {
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>>> here's something lighter. fans of the movie "up" cheered for this guy. after all, it's not often in real, non animation life that a guy takes flight holding onto multi-colored balloons. jonathan trapp lifted off yesterday from maine. he hoped to cross the atlantic ocean to france. things seemed to be going well for a while until he ran into trouble controlling the more than 300 balloons above him. he was forced to land in newfoundland and did so without injury. so all in all, well done there. | {
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Katy Perry has expressed sympathy for a young man called Spencer who was 'catfished' into thinking he was dating the Firework singer for six years!
'I just think it’s really unfortunate and very sad,' she told The Morning Mashup on SiriusXM. 'My heart goes out to him.'
Katy found out about the guy's 'love' for her, which even included getting an engagement ring ready so he could pop the question, after being sent the link to the MTV episode of Catfish that aired last week.
Sympathetic: Katy Perry said it was 'very unfortunate and sad' that a young man had been duped into thinking he was dating her in a catfishing hoax during an interview on SiriusXM
On the show, Spencer revealed how he'd started communicating with a woman he knew as Katy Perry through a texting app and then via email.
But it turned out that she is really a Canadian called Harriet now living in London.
Katy said in her SiriusXM interview that felt sorry for him, and the fact he didn't realize he was being duped.
'People have dreams and people live in different parts of the world where not everything is so accessible. We live on the coasts and we get stuff in a way that some other people don’t get, and I feel bad for him,' she said.
Duped: A young man called Spencer was featured on MTV's Catfish: The TV Show on August 17 where he claimed to have been dating Katy Perry for six years via texting and email
In the end, the MTV show hosts had to take Spencer to England before they could convince him that his six-year romance was all a hoax.
Meanwhile, Katy is all loved up for real with actor Orlando Bloom.
The pair who have been dating since January recently enjoyed a summer vacation together in Sardinia.
Sorry for the guy: Katy, pictured in May, suggested the Catfishing victim may not be that sophisticated and said: 'I feel bad for him'
And The Lord Of The Rings star, 39, is even rumored to be looking to settle down with the Rise songstress, 31.
People magazine has claimed Orlando wants to tie the knot with Katy and have more children.
He has a son Flynn, five, with his ex-wife Miranda Kerr, who is engaged to Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel. Katy was previously married to comedian Russell Brand. | {
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Sam Allardyce says Enner Valencia will miss West Ham's trip to the Emirates this weekend after a freak accident at home Sam Allardyce says Enner Valencia will miss West Ham's trip to the Emirates this weekend after a freak accident at home
West Ham are likely to be without Enner Valencia for Saturday’s trip to Arsenal after the striker suffered a freak injury.
The Ecuadorian, who has scored five goals in 30 appearances for the Hammers this season, required stitches to a deep laceration on his toe after standing on a broken cup at his home.
His absence will be a huge blow to manager Sam Allardyce who could have Diafra Sakho as his only fit striker at the weekend with Andy Carroll and Carlton Cole already ruled out of the trip to the Emirates Stadium.
Speaking to the assembled media ahead of Saturday's match, Allardyce said: "He had an accident at home and has cut his big toe quite severely on a broken cup and that has been stitched.
“We’re not exactly certain but we think it may be too soon for him to be considered for this game.
“A freak accident at home is something that we didn’t expect, but these are the things that seem to happen.
“And of course with it being one of our few strikers available, again it’s a big blow for us if that is the case.”
Valencia isn't the first footballer to hurt himself in embarrassing circumstances. Earlier this month, Chelsea midfielder Nemanja Matic injured himself celebrating after the Capital One Cup final, a game in which he did not play.
Spain goalkeeper Sanitago Canizares missed the 2002 World Cup after dropping a bottle of aftershave on his foot, while former England striker Darius Vassell injured himself when he tried to remedy a swollen big toe by drilling a hole into his foot to drain the excess blood out. | {
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Television presenter Noel Edmonds sparked fury today when he told a cancer patient his disease could have been caused by his 'negative attitude'
Television presenter Noel Edmonds sparked fury today when he told a cancer patient his disease could have been caused by his 'negative attitude'.
The Deal Or No Deal host was promoting a £2,000 yoga mat with a USB port on Twitter, claiming the gadget 'slows ageing, reduces pain, lifts depression and stress and tackles cancer. Yep tackles cancer!'
When one Twitter user, kidney cancer patient Vaun Earl, described the EMPpad as 'quackery', Edmonds, 67, responded by asking if he had tried the machine, which claims to readjust the electro-magnetism in the body.
The former Noel's House Party host then told his critic: 'Scientific fact-disease is caused by negative energy. Is it possible your ill health is caused by your negative attitude? #explore.'
The tweet prompted a flurry of anger and ridicule aimed towards Edmonds, with Vaun, whose Twitter bio says he is ill with kidney cancer, lymph node metastases and psoriatic arthritis, responding: 'Wow! How do you know I have a negative attitude. You have no idea who I am. #patronising #cancer.'
He added: 'Amazing. I'm the most positive person I know despite my disabilities and long term ill health. Weird.'
Vaun's full name appears to be Vaun Earl Norman, and he also runs a blog titled My Adventures in Cancerland.
Later he wrote: 'My biggest worry is that some, desperate,very ill person will take on board what Noel Edmonds says and doesn't go to see a qualified doctor.'
Other Twitter users spotted the interaction, with many stunned to see that Edmonds had appeared to blame 'negative energy' for Vaun's disease.
Comedian Al Murray said it was a 'horrible thing' for Edmonds to say, mocking the presenter by posting a photograph of a box from Deal Or No Deal and writing: 'A simple box that slows ageing, reduces pain, lifts depression and stress and tackles cancer . Yep tackles cancer!'
Fellow Twitter users also attacked Edmonds over his tweets, with many of them posting pictures of alternatives to the device.
Edmonds suggested to a cancer patient that his poor health could have been caused by his 'negative attitude'
The Deal Or No Deal host was promoting a £2,000 yoga mat with a USB port on Twitter, claiming the gadget 'slows ageing, reduces pain, lifts depression and stress and tackles cancer'
One Twitter user, kidney cancer patient Vaun Earl, described the EMPpad as 'quackery'
One user posted an image of a bottle of magic beans in response to the post, another asked 'Can it stream Sky Sports as well?', and one more labelled it the 'The Edmonds Beard Dryer 2000.'
Another told the TV personality: 'The only "simple box" here is your brainmate.'
And one more posted an image of Edmonds with a picture of Mr Blobby, captioning it: 'And if you don't believe Noel, here he is with the scientist behind this miracle.'
Many who were upset by the his claims about the machine questioned whether the original post violated the 1939 Cancer Act, which bans the advertisement of any cancer cure, proven or not, to the public.
This could explain why Edmonds used the phrase 'tackle cancer', rather than suggesting it was a cure.
He had also written: 'Just looked at latest stats showing very soon 50% of us will get cancer. @EMP_Pad is one way of reducing your risk #selfhealth'
Advertising watchdogs are now looking into the matter, and a spokesman for the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) described the claims made against Edmonds as 'severe'.
She added: 'We're looking into it. It's a matter of urgency.'
But she added that because his claims were made on social media, rather than TV or in print, the case was more complex.
Edmonds often tweets about the EMPpad, recommending it to his followers, and has previously credited using it for eight minutes a day with helping to eliminate pain, reducing stress and making him appear younger than his years.
Edmonds, 67, responded by asking if he had tried the machine, which claims to readjust the electro-magnetism in the body
The TV presenter, who described the device as a 'miracle pad' also claimed on Twitter that since he has started using the EMPpad he has been forced to cut his hair once a week.
Last year Edmonds declared that 'electro smog', caused by WiFi, phone signals and electricity was endangering humanity and is a bigger world problem than climate change or Aids.
He has also said he believes in angels, and has credited his success to 'cosmic ordering', or positive thinking.
The gadget, which plugs into a tablet computer, was created by osteopaths Samuel Maddock and Steven Harper using Nasa-based research.
The mat is attached to a tablet and when switched on emits Pulsed Electro Magnetic Fields (PEMFs). Over time these are said to lead to a number of benefits including improved joint and muscle pain and better sleep.
According to the website, the technology achieves this through a mat which users must lie on for two sessions of eight minutes every day.
The pad apparently emits a 'low frequency pulsed electrometric field' that 'mimics the earth's magnetic field in frequencies and intensities to optimize cell function.'
Vaun responded by saying he had no plans to use the machine, and suggested Edmonds 'stick to what he's good at. Presenting quiz shows and beard trimming'
Vaun was stunned when Edmonds suggested his illness could have been caused by 'negative attitude'
The makers claim it can help people 'transform their health', but there are no claims regarding cancer on its website .
EMPpad Limited said it does not pay Edmonds to advertise the product.
However, company director, Maria Robertson, has previously worked as an assistant to Edmonds.
In the acknowledgements section of his book Positively Happy, he wrote: 'To Maria Robertson - heartfelt thanks and enduring gratitude for your support, commitment and love beyond the call of duty.'
In a statement, fellow director Stephen Maddock said: 'The EMPpad Omnium1 and EMPpad iMRS use very low intensity and frequency pulsed electromagnetic fields (PEMF) which target the cells within the body and help to improve the way they function.
Edmonds had also written: 'Just looked at latest stats showing very soon 50% of us will get cancer. @EMP_Pad is one way of reducing your risk #selfhealth'
'Research has demonstrated that this can lead to widespread health benefits, including supporting an effective immune response and a healthy overall body. Although research using very low frequency and intensity PEMF to help address cancer has produced some promising early results, it is currently in the very early stages and EMPpad does not make the claim that PEMF therapy can prevent cancer.'
In a statement on their website, the company distanced themselves from Edmonds, writing: 'The opinions of Mr Noel Edmonds are his alone and do not reflect in any way with the opinions of us at EMPpad. We had no discussion, input or prior knowledge of the content of Mr Edmonds’s statement and we do not agree with it in any way, shape or form.'
EMPpad Limited posted this statement on its website, distancing the firm from Edmonds's comment
MailOnline has contacted a representative for Edmonds for comment.
Top oncologist Professor Karol Sikora told MailOnline that there was no evidence to suggest that a gadget such as the EMPpad could help to treat the disease.
'There's no evidence that it would have any effect on cancer whatsoever,' he said.
'It may make people feel better, lots of things can make people feel better, but there's no evidence it can destroy cancer cells. The makers aren't making any claims about this.'
Professor Sikora added: 'There's no relevance of negative energy to whether you get cancer, or how your cancer develops. You can't disprove it of course but there's no data to prove it.'
Other Twitter users spotted the interaction, with many stunned to see that Edmonds had appeared to blame 'negative energy' for Vaun's disease. Comedian Al Murray said it was a 'horrible thing' for Edmonds to say
Murray mocked the presenter by posting a photograph of a box from Deal Or No Deal and writing: 'A simple box that slows ageing, reduces pain, lifts depression and stress and tackles cancer . Yep tackles cancer!'
Professor Jane Maher, joint chief medical officer of Macmillan Cancer Support, said: 'Cancer and its treatment can be a very scary experience, making some people feel helpless and too tired to be positive, but that does not mean they can't also survive their disease.
'Some patients tell us that having a positive attitude helps them when coping but we also know that a positive attitude means different things to different people and there should be no pressure on anyone to feel or act in a certain way.
'If you are feeling anxious or depressed, you don't have to go through it alone. It's really important that you do talk to your doctor, nurse or someone close to you about your feelings.
'There's also an army of people within the cancer community, including Macmillan, who can help with emotional support. We're available to talk on the phone or online when you need us.' | {
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One billion people across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia will do something very cool within the next few years: Get their first smartphone. As more international networks improve their networks to 3G or LTE, ever more consumers will upgrade from feature phones to bigger, slicker devices that can do so much more.
Worldwide smartphone sales hit 336 million units in the first quarter of the year, driven in large part by a 40 percent increase in sales in those emerging markets. Some analysts expect the market to surpass 2 billion smartphones sometime next year. For that to happen, manufacturers must offer consumers a phone they want and, more importantly, can afford.
Robert Brunner, who founded the design firm Ammunition and iss the celebrated designer behind Beats by Dre headphones (among other things), believes he's created such a phone. Two of them, actually: the Obi Worldphone SJ1.5 and the slightly more upscale SF1.
The two phones signal a push by Obi Worldphone, the low-end, Android-powered smartphone brand former Apple CEO John Sculley launched last year, to provide Silicon Valley-caliber design to the developing world. "The smartphone market is dominated by brands at the premium end of the market, selling phones anywhere from $400 to over a $1,000, in markets like Brazil,” Sculley says. “In the lower end of the market, you can buy a smartphone for $40, from a street vendor in Indonesia, and it may work for a couple months … or not.”
Sculley wants to offer a device between those two extremes—an attractive, high-quality device that won't break the bank. In places like Africa and Southeast Asia, these devices are more than a first smartphone for many people; they're often a first computer. These consumers are social media-savvy, content hungry and, as Sculley puts it, “have aspirations that may exceed the pocketbook.”
Obi Worldphone
Local brands and Chinese manufacturers are cleaning up in this market; they saw an average growth of 73 percent in smartphone sales in the first quarter of the year, according to Gartner Research. Other brands are clamoring to capture this market with mid-range smartphone designs. Motorola, for instance, has successfully pulled this off in Brazil, where its big-and-cheap $260 Moto G has become the country's best-selling smartphone.
It's not enough to have solid specs; a smartphone must have solid design if it wants to truly succeed. So Sculley tapped Brunner and Ammunition. The San Francisco studio adheres to an Eames-ian best-for-the-most-for-the-least design philosophy, which explains creating the upscale Beats for an audience using low-quality music players. The firm set out to design a phone that looks and feels premium phone but costs just $199. (The SJ1.5 will go for $129.)
To avoid mimicking every other slab with round corners and chamfered edges, Brunner chose a silhouette with a square top, rounded bottom, and rolled edges. You won't see any seams along the side; they converge in the back, giving the phone a sense of heft and solidity. Brunner says it makes the phone feel more expensive than your typical gadgets, which tend to look like two cheap casings that snap together. That "clamshell approach is a convention we want to avoid," Brunner says.
The screen on the SF1 is elevated ever-so-slightly, something Brunner is very excited about. “The glass is raised up above the body of the phone, so it’s protected by its edges to keep it from being too fragile,” Brunner says. “But it has this other aspect that’s pleasing: It puts the user interface up at a higher level above the phone.”
It wasn't enough to make the phone look good, though. Sculley and Brunner had to meet the diverse needs of the people who will use it. In emerging economies, many people are leapfrogging laptops and tablets and going right to smartphones. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, for example, texting, taking photos, and banking are especially popular uses for phones. “It would be difficult to design one phone that would take into every consideration of those markets, so we brought our particular perspective and viewpoint,” says Brunner, who worked with Sculley to focus on a few features they deemed universally desirable.
To that end, the phones have features like a 13-megapixel camera and Dolby Audio surround sound. Such things are key, says Tuong H. Nguyen, a Gartner analyst. After messaging, people want to be on social media, and they want access to music. Still, Nguyen notes Obi's price point could be a problem. “From a mature market perspective, $200 doesn’t sound much. That’s not the case for emerging market users—it’s a substantial investment for them.” Brunner and Sculley say achieving that price point while preserving their unique design took months of sweating the manufacturers.
Still, Brunner and Sculley believe their expertise will give them a leg up over Chinese manufacturers slinging cheaper phones. "Humans in many ways define themselves by objects," Brunner says. "This particular audience—the younger side of the demographic—is using mobile phones in a very advanced way. We don’t have to invent this market of smartphones. We just have to figure out how we bring them very beautiful smartphones." It's a bit of Silicon Valley design imperialism, but Obi is hardly the first—or last—company to do it. | {
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Be my Neighbor by Moda Block 1
I decided to start Be my Neighbor. It should help advance my skills some and it's friggen cute.
Done | {
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Last month, the world was introduced to Amazon Key, a new service from the online shopping juggernaut that allows couriers to unlock your front door to deliver packages. One of the main concerns of the service is the central question of whether Prime customers trust Amazon enough to let the company monitor their homes and determine when it’s okay to unlock the door for someone who is, essentially, a stranger. The service relies on Cloud Cam and a compatible smart lock, and only grants permission for a courier to enter after they scan a barcode, which is checked against information in the cloud. A camera also monitors and records the drop-off so customers can check that nothing suspect happened.
Now security researchers have found that the camera can be disabled and frozen from a program run from any computer within Wi-Fi range, reports Wired. That means a customer watching a delivery will only see a closed door, even if someone opens the door and goes inside — a vulnerability that may allow rogue couriers to rob customers’ homes.
once the disabling program is run, the app shows the door remaining closed
"The camera is very much something Amazon is relying on in pitching the security of this as a safe solution," Ben Caudill, the founder of Rhino Security Labs told Wired. Researchers from the security firm uncovered the Amazon Key attack and replicated it. "Disabling that camera on command is a pretty powerful capability when you’re talking about environments where you’re relying heavily on that being a critical safety mechanism.”
The video demonstration of the attack shows a man dropping off a parcel inside a house. The Amazon Key app shows the delivery goes as normal and indicates the door is locked as the courier leaves. But once the disabling program is run, and the courier reenters the apartment, the app just shows the door remaining closed.
The demonstration is a proof-of-concept and a deauthorization technique. If the camera is turned off, even manually by the user, you do get a push notification a few minutes later saying it’s offline. Someone wanting to break into a home could follow an Amazon courier and wait for them to make a delivery. They could trigger a deauthorization command as the courier is leaving and cause Amazon Key to go offline, which would stop the door from locking.
But Amazon does have a process in place that’s meant to avoid these scenarios from happening; the courier has to unlock the door, leave, then manually relock, and the customer will get a notification when they do so. If a courier left and the door was not quickly locked again, the customer would know something is off, although an attack like this would prevent them from seeing exactly what happened. The courier also can’t move on to their next delivery, according to Amazon’s procedures, until the door has been locked and that step has been confirmed the cloud.
UPDATE November 16th, 12:41pm ET: A spokesperson from Amazon says: “Safety and security are built into every aspect of the service. Every delivery driver passes a comprehensive background check that is verified by Amazon before they can make in-home deliveries, every delivery is connected to a specific driver, and before we unlock the door for a delivery, Amazon verifies that the correct driver is at the right address, at the intended time. We currently notify customers if the camera is offline for an extended period. Later this week we will deploy an update to more quickly provide notifications if the camera goes offline during delivery. The service will not unlock the door if the Wi-Fi is disabled and the camera is not online.”
An earlier version of this story said that Amazon’s camera doesn’t indicate to users that the camera is offline. That is incorrect. | {
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Бывшая жена Аркадия Ротенберга инициировала судебный процесс в Лондоне с целью получить компенсацию от миллиардера, выяснил РБК. Дело будет рассматриваться в феврале 2016 года и осложняется санкциями ЕС против бизнесмена
Олигарх Аркадий Ротенберг (Фото: Екатерина Кузьмина / РБК)
Бывшая жена Аркадия Ротенберга, Наталья, с которой он развелся в 2013 году, инициировала процесс в Англии с целью отсудить у бизнесмена финансовую компенсацию, следует из материалов британского суда, изученных РБК. Дело об отчислениях в пользу бывшей супруги будет рассматриваться в феврале 2016 года. Эту информацию РБК подтвердил российский адвокат бизнесмена.
До тех пор пока спор между бывшими супругами не будет полностью урегулирован, Ротенберг должен платить бывшей жене, проживающей в Великобритании с двумя их общими детьми, промежуточные алименты на содержание ее и детей. Их размер был определен решением российского суда, которое бывшая супруга не обжаловала. Из-за санкций, наложенных на Ротенберга в июле 2014 года Евросоюзом, выплата алиментов оказалась затруднена. Дело в том, что любой денежный перевод от лица, находящегося под санкциями, должен быть заморожен, как только деньги поступают на британский счет.
«Гражданин Р.»
О коллизии вокруг санкций и алиментных платежей Ротенберга РБК стало известно из опубликованного решения Апелляционного суда Лондона от 24 июля 2015 года. Суд разбирал вопрос о том, каким образом «российский гражданин Р.» (его личность суд не раскрывает, обозначая только инициал фамилии), попавший под санкции ЕС в связи с украинским конфликтом, может легально оплачивать содержание бывшей жены и детей на ее иждивении, которые проживают на территории Великобритании. Санкции запрещают лицам на территории ЕС (в том числе в Великобритании) какие-либо операции с финансовыми средствами фигурантов черного списка.
Россиянин-аноним, о котором идет речь, оспаривает санкции в Общем суде Евросоюза; с женой он развелся в 2013 году в России, а его интересы в суде представляют адвокаты лорд Пэнник и Майя Лестер, говорится в решении апелляционного суда. Эти же юристы защищают интересы Аркадия Ротенберга в Общем суде ЕС, о чем официально известно, причем Ротенберг — единственный российский гражданин, добивающийся отмены санкций в суде ЕС (остальные иски — от компаний).
Действительно, Аркадий и Наталья Ротенберг развелись в апреле 2013 года. Брак был расторгнут решением мирового судьи судебного участка №160 Тушинского района Москвы. Наталья обжаловала это решение в Тушинском суде, но тот подтвердил решение — оно вступило в законную силу в августе 2013 года. После этого, как писал Forbes, экс-супруга Ротенберга подала иск о признании брачного договора недействительным. Если бы ее иск был удовлетворен, то нажитое в браке с 2005 года совместное имущество могло бы быть разделено пополам. Адвокат Натальи Ротенберг Кира Воронкова из компании «Трунов, Айвар и партнеры» не исключала обращения в Лондонский суд, сообщали в то время «Ведомости». | {
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KPMG: Coinbase, Binance, and Robinhood Are in Top Fintech100
November 20, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE
KPMG this week released its new annual Fintech100 report for 2019. Firms associated with the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry generally lost ground a bit, but are still on the list.
As in the past year, the leading Chinese payment company Ant Financial, valued at $83 billion, won the first place. The second spot was taken by Grab, a Singapore based technology company offering ride-hailing services, payment solutions, and food delivery, followed by JD Finance, which uses blockchain along with other technologies in its activities.
The Robinhood Securities and Cryptocurrency Trading Application dropped from eighth to fourteenth, Revolut took 26th, Coinbase 34th, and Liquid 38th. Also among the developing companies in the fintech industry was included the Binance exchange.
Commenting on the development of Chinese companies on the list, KPMG head of fintech Chris Wang said:
“As fintech development continues to go strong in China, we see some changes in China’s fintech landscape. Aligned with trends we observe globally, we see an increasing number of wealth, insurance, and multi-sector companies in China on the list, which indicates that technologies and innovations have spread into more financial services sectors.”
According to KPMG, a total of Fintech100 companies have raised $18 billion over the past year and over $70 billion since its inception. The client base of such firms is estimated at more than 2.5 billion people worldwide. Their rapid development was made possible, in particular, thanks to the principles of open banking, which they adhere to.
Author: Marko Vidrih | {
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Lo stallo istituzionale in cui si trova il Paese dopo le elezioni del 4 marzo non significa che tutto sia fermo. Non significa che i cittadini siano in neutra attesa del futuro più o meno prossimo. Anzi. Gli ultimi sondaggi misurano le fluttuazioni dell’elettorato. Che si muove, cerca nuove strade e nuove formule per orientarsi: per uscire dal museo delle cere in cui sembra essersi trasformata la politica.Per quanto riguarda le intenzioni di voto il dato più eclatante è la crescita della Lega di Matteo Salvini. La tendenza era stata già individuata in un sondaggio realizzato da Demos e pubblicato su Repubblica . Il leader della Lega ormai in perpetua campagna elettorale porta il Carroccio non solo a rafforzare la leadership del centrodestra ma a superare quota 20%: un sogno ad occhi aperti per i leghisti di oggi e di ieri. Secondo Piepoli la Lega è al 21%, Euromedia Research stima il partito di Salvini al 21,8. Cala Forza Italia ma tutto il centrodestra è ormai al 39%. Tiene il Pd: 18%. Tengono anche i 5Stelle al 32%.Poi gli scenari preferiti dagli elettori. Ancora Piepoli: il 31% degli italiani chiede un ritorno immediato alle urne, basta giochi, basta consultazioni. Il 21% è favorevole a un governo Lega-5Stelle: via Berlusconi, si rompa il centrodestra, si dia parola ai vincitori delle elezioni. Il 18% è favorevole a un governo istituzionale-di tregua-del presidente: sia Mattarella a traghettare il Paese fuori dallo stallo invocando responsabilità. Il 10% vuole un governo di centrodestra: provino poi i leader a cercare i numeri in Parlamento. L’8% vuole un esecutivo 5Stelle\Pd, ma la cronaca li delude . Solo il 3% chiede un patto tra tutto il centrodestra e i grillini.
Nel labirinto post elettorale, però, una guida c’è: riconosciuta, stimata, meritevole di fiducia. E’ il Capo dello Stato, il presidente Mattarella: il saggio cui gli italiani chiedono di risolvere la crisi. L’indice di fiducia di Sergio Mattarella è al 66%. Al secondo posto l’attuale premier Gentiloni è al 49%. Come se gli italiani chiedessero anche e soprattutto una navigazione stabile. Al terzo posto Luigi Di Maio con il 39% mentre Matteo Salvini è al 35%. Staccato l’ex segretario del Pd: Renzi è al 22%. Tallonato da Beppe Grillo al 21%. Chiude Silvio Berlusconi: il leader di Forza Italia incassa la piena fiducia del 16% dei cittadini.E nello stallo c’è un altro stallo. C’è il Pd che non riesce a mettere in moto la propria azione. Due mesi di sospensione. Due mesi in cui si cerca di delineare come e se uscire dall’angolo. Swg ha chiesto agli elettori del Pd di giudicare un eventuale patto con i 5Stelle: il 9% è del tutto d’accordo; il 31% è d’accordo; in disaccordo il 27%; del tutto in disaccordi il 33%. Vincono i contrari ma senza plebiscito: 60 a 40. Per un partito che non solo nella dirigenza ma anche nella base sembra attraversato da una faglia che separa quasi in modo preciso due anime, due visioni, due modi di interpretare la crisi.Come se ne esce? Il 27 aprile Emg ha chiesto agli elettori del Pd chi dovrebbe essere il nuovo leader del Partito democratico: Gentiloni è in testa con il 24,1% (-3,1% rispetto al 16 aprile). Segue Renzi con il 23,4% (-0,5%); poi Martina con il 16,5% (+2,3%) e Nicola Zingaretti con il 7% (+1,2%). | {
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Суд в Новосибирске просит создателя "Монстрации" Артема Лоскутова и основателя арт-группы "Синие носы" Вячеслава Мизина доказать, что они художники и общественные деятели.
Вопрос возник при рассмотрении иска православных активистов о правомерности действий мэрии, утвердившей состав городского художественного совета, в который - по результатам интернет-голосования - вошли Лоскутов и Мизин.
"...Суд обязал мэрию Новосибирска представить доказательства, подтверждающие Ваш статус общественного деятеля или наличия у Вас профессиональных навыков в области архитектуры, дизайна, монументально-декоративного искусства", - говорится в письме главы совета Александра Ложкина Артему Лоскутову, появившемся в интернете.
Отвечая на вопросы Тайги.инфо, Лоскутов сказал: "Затеяли это, предполагаю, православнутые. Попрошу предоставить документы, опровергающие мой статус общественного деятеля».
Сайту sib.fm Лоскутов заявил, что попал в художественный совет путем интернет-голосования, и никаких документов у него при этом не спрашивали.
Ежегодное первомайское абсурдистское шествие "Монстрация" проходит в Новосибирске с 2004 года.
В 2010 году Лоскутов получил государственную премию «Инновация» за проведение "Монстрации", а в 2015 году за это же был арестован на 10 суток и оштрафован на 5 тысяч рублей.
Вячеслав Мизин является директором Сибирского филиала Государственного центра современного искусства в Томске. Мизин также был куратором выставки «Соединенные штаты Сибири».
Следующее заседание суда состоится 20 июля. | {
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(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Apple has spent billions on original programming over the past few years to prep its forthcoming entry into the crowded video-streaming market. At long last, the company seems poised to launch the service.
Apple is targeting a launch in April or early May, according to a CNBC report, which cites people familar with the matter. The service will offer original content developed by Apple and a channel-like interface allowing users to sign up for other streaming platforms. Everything will be viewable within the iOS TV app.
Incorporating rival services has reportedly been a sticking point for other streaming providers, as Apple aims to bring an App Store-like gatekeeper approach to controlling streaming content on iOS devices—and taking a hefty cut.
CNBC reports that companies and premium cable networks including CBS/Showtime, Starz, and Viacom have signed on to offer subscription services through Apple's platform, but HBO is still in negotiations. The big three streaming platforms—Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Video—are not expected to participate. Amazon offers similar add-ons through its Prime Video service, but Netflix and Hulu are not among them. Hulu has its own add-ons; Netflix does not offer any.
Apple is reportedly planning to take a 30 percent cut on every streaming app subscription through its service, compared to the 15 percent it currently takes from streaming service subscriptions through the App Store.
This strategy is part of Apple's software and services business model, which it has grand designs to expand to several other industries. The Wall Street Journal reports that the tech giant is demanding 50 percent from news publishers for a subscription Apple news service it's building from its acquisition of Texture, described as a "Netflix for magazines." Cheddar recently reported the company is exploring a similar service for video games.
The other side of the equation is original content. Apple will reportedly offer its TV shows for free to iOS users inside the pre-installed TV app on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV devices. Apple has already released two shows, Planet of the Apps and Carpool Karaoke, and Apple has around two dozen shows in development or production with some big names, including a reported content deal with Oprah Winfrey and a major bidding war for the rights to new Peanuts content.
Apple's original content includes a morning news drama starring Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston, and Steve Carell, children's programming from the producers of Sesame Street, a remake of Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories, a sci-fi series from Battlestar Galactica showrunner Ron Moore, a drama series from La La Land and Whiplash director Damien Chazelle, and a Sofia Coppola original film starring Bill Murray and Rashida Jones.
Additional projects in development have Hollywood stars including Chris Evans, Jason Momoa, Jennifer Garner, and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia stars Charlie Day and Rob McElhenney attached.
The Apple originals will enter an increasingly crowded landscape of existing streaming apps, and those that have yet to launch, like Disney+ and a recently announced NBCUniversal streaming service.
Apple's shows will reportedly be family-friendly, Quartz reports; no sex, violence, or profanity from Cupertino. When adding yet another online content platform to the infinite digital media pile, banning R-rated content of any kind is certainly one way for Apple to differentiate its originals.
Further Reading | {
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According to a report on the Honduran website Diez, midfielder Marvin Chavez will not return to the San Jose Earthquakes for the 2014 season and expects to be traded to another team in MLS. (English translation available here.)
Chavez had a breakout 2012, scoring 3 goals and adding 12 assists as part of the San Jose Earthquakes Supporters' Shield season, and quickly became a fan favorite at Buck Shaw Stadium for his electrifying runs on either sideline. Statistically he regressed in 2013, notching 1 goal and 1 assist in only 15 appearances. Chavez was relegated to the bench over the last two months of the season and made only 2 appearances in 7 matches.
In the interview published by Diez, Chavez indicates that a poor relationship with the Earthquakes coaching staff was a primary reason for his decreased playing time. A consistent pick for the World Cup bound Honduras national team throughout the just concluded qualifying cycle, Chavez expressed his desire for more playing time as he tries to secure selection to the roster Los Catrachos for Brazil. Given his unhappiness with the situation in San Jose, Chavez hopes a move to another MLS side will improve his standing with the Honduras coaching staff.
Chavez was a regular starter when healthy for former Earthquakes head coach Frank Yallop, but he made only 6 starts when Yallop's assistant Mark Watson took over the head coaching duties back in June. Over the course of the summer, as the Quakes made a heroic run at qualifying for the MLS playoffs, Watson saw fit to start Shea Salinas and Cordell Cato at the wings in his preferred Starting XI. By the last match of the season, a 2-1 victory over FC Dallas, Chavez did not make the 18-man roster and was not even in attendance at Buck Shaw Stadium to watch his teammates play.
While the 2012 season proved to be the high point of Chavez's time in San Jose, the flashy midfielder did give fans one memorable moment in 2013. During the Earthquakes amazing 3-2 comeback win against the LA Galaxy in the California Clasico at Stanford Stadium, Chavez had a little fun at the expense of defender A.J. DeLaGarza. With a nasty step-over move along the left sideline, "The Son of the Wind" buckled the ankles of the Galaxy defender and flashed a big smile. The moment will forever be remembered by those that were there that day.
(Hat tip to beIN Sport's Phil Schoen for bringing the Diez article to Center Line Soccer's attention.)
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With 400 billion star systems to explore the galaxy is beyond huge and filled with pilots, which is why you’ll want to stand out from the crowd with a slick paint job. Today, we’re asking you to decide which of these two paint jobs will be available in-game next. We have two great paint jobs for you to choose from and we’re putting it to the players to decide which of them gets added to the game first.
Will you choose the Gold Fer-De-Lance or the Chrome Vulture? Check them out and let us know which you want by voting below. The one with the most votes will be released first with the other to follow in the future.
The poll will run for three days and your pick will be in the store shortly after.
Gold Fer-De-Lance
Chrome Vulture | {
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In 1769, the first two Indians to set foot in Aotearoa came ashore.
This little known fact - along with many others – comes to light in a new book on the 250-year history of Indians to New Zealand and Australia, which traces the diaspora from its earliest days until now.
Co-Editors Jane Buckingham and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay. Photo gallery RNZ / Lynda Chanwai-Earle Indians and the Antipodes, Oxford University Press, 2018. Shila Nair, Shakti Women's Refuge (left) and Priyanca Radhakrishnan, Labour List MP. Important publication for Indian New Zealanders Rakesh Naidoo (NZ Human Rights Commission) and Bhav Dhillon (Honorary Consul of India). Sir Anand Satyanand, Bhav Dhillon, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Rakesh Naidoo.
Subscribe to Voices for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Radio Public or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
“The very first Indians to set foot on Aotearoa were not settlers - but sailors,” says Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Professor of Asian History at Victoria University of Wellington.
Among the sailors were two Muslims, Mahmud Qasim and Nasrin, who boarded the French ship Saint Jean Baptiste, captained by Jean Francois Marie de Surville, at the French colony of Pondicherry, India.
The East India Company was carrying out a flourishing trade in the South Pacific and many of its ships were manned by Indians, used as sepoys (soldiers) and lascars (sailors).
Mahmud and Nasrin landed in Northland in December 1769, at the same time as Captain Cook’s first Endeavour expedition was leaving New Zealand waters.
Like most ships of the time, Surville’s crew was decimated by scurvy. “From here the ship went to Peru,” says Sekhar. “Unfortunately, in Peruvian waters, both of the [sailors] died of that.”
Indian sailors continued to visit New Zealand on board sealing and timber ships, but it would be a few decades before they began to settle here.
“The first recorded story of settlement can be dated to 1809 or 1810,” says Sekhar, “when one sailor jumped ship [in the Bay of Plenty], married a Māori woman and settled down.”
‘Indians and the Antipodes’
Sekhar and Jane Buckingham are co-editors of Indians and the Antipodes: Networks, Boundaries, and Circulation (Oxford University Press 2018), the first significant exploration of the rich 250-year history of the Indian diaspora to Australia and New Zealand.
The book includes stories of the earliest sailors and labourers through to post-war professional migrants in search of better opportunities. Their experiences are set against the context of early ‘White New Zealand’ racist policies, as well as current issues that plague migrant resettlement today.
During research for the book Sekhar says it was clear that stories of the New Zealand diaspora were not isolated, but were linked throughout the South Pacific, including the early migration of indentured labourers from Fiji, New Caledonia and beyond.
Sekhar points out that “the indentured system was not slavery. After five to 10 years, these people were free.”
He explains that the earliest Indian settlers coming to Australia or New Zealand during the nineteenth century “were migrating and circulating under the imperial network,” as they were citizens of the British Empire and could freely move around.
There have been waves of Indian migration to Australasia. There was a further significant migration of Indians after the World War II, while today many are arriving as international students.
Circulation and identity are themes that run through the book.
“The Indian community is very diverse,” says Sekhar. “They speak many languages, follow many religions, and come from a subcontinent as big as Europe in size.”
“In spite of that they share a dual-identity. They want to keep the linkage to their culture, but they want to integrate.”
Issues of identity
At the recent launch of the book at Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, the National Library in Wellington, prominent Indian New Zealanders reflected on issues of "contemporary identity" and voiced what they see as the biggest challenges facing their communities today.
“I think the key issue is one of identity,” says Shila Nair, co-founder of the Shakti Ethnic Women’s Refuge. She sees the identity issue as intergenerational, as relevant to fifth or sixth generation Indian New Zealanders as it is to new migrants.
“For each of them, the issues of identity is a huge one. It can be quite complex for Indians living here.”
Photo: RNZ Lynda Chanwai-Earle
Priyanca Radhakrishnan, Labour List MP for Maungakiekie, is critical of what she sees as the marginalisation of New Zealand Indians because they are visibly different.
“Who is a ‘New Zealander’? It hurts, it’s tiring, a little bit of a slap in the face. Because the assumption is ‘you don’t look like what a New Zealander should look like.’”
Priyanca says that it was suggested she consider changing her surname from Radhakrishnan to her husband’s name of Richardson during the previous election, because it would be easier for people to say.
“I’m ashamed to say that I thought about it for a split second.”
She asked for advice from now-Prime Minister Jacinda Adern, and says that Jacinda asked her how it would make her feel. “Like a sell-out,” Priyanca recalls. “So I didn’t do it.”
Priyanca is clear that racism is a barrier.
“Look at decision makers at any level. Our communities are being woefully under-represented. [And] if you’re not at the table where decisions are being made, then decisions are made for you.”
While the Indian community is now one of New Zealand’s largest ethnic groups, the country’s changing demographics means there are 230 different diverse ethnic communities living here.
“Migration has been so substantive. We’ve had more migration in the last 10 to 15 years than ever before,” says Inspector Rakesh Naidoo, Strategic Advisor for Race Relations at the Human Rights Commission.
“I think it’s important that government policies and advisors take note. How do we make our communities feel more included? From a government policy perspective, we need to be investing a bit more.” | {
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Former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney called Donald Trump a phony, fraud and con artist … Then he challenged the Republican front-runner to respond to his uncivil attacks with civility.
The former failed GOP nominee attacked Donald Trump with venom of a thousand snakes. Who needs Democrats when you got a Republican establishment that would rather eat their own than give up power to a political outsider.
This afternoon Governor Sarah Palin responded to Mitt’s attacks.
“Trump’s favorables just rose again… Silly man.”
TRENDING: RUTH BADER GINSBURG DEAD! Supreme Court Justice Dies at Home Surrounded by Family
Thank You, MittTrump’s favorables just rose again, as did the veil you willingly wore while being used by the corrupt… Posted by Sarah Palin on Thursday, March 3, 2016
Here’s the full text:
Trump’s favorables just rose again, as did the veil you willingly wore while being used by the corrupt political establishment who can’t afford to lose their power in liberal D.C. Your speech was so silly and contradictory it confirmed the reasons Trump received tens of thousands more votes than you did in your own home state that you governed. Silly man. Could the establishment really not find anyone credible in their holier-than-thou movement to spew the deception you regurgitated today on tv?
Independent, commonsense conservative patriots: now it’s our time to ramp it up, to prove even more adamantly that our movement in this time for choosing is wisely chosen by those who know what’s at stake for America. The political establishment’s desperation is nailing its coffin – obviously a good thing – but we mustn’t let the Alinsky tactics used to destroy our We the People movement go unanswered. His shoulders are broad, but Donald Trump must not carry this on his own shoulders. Thankfully, Mitt’s anti-Republican Platform speech just strengthened our own. Americans’ shoulders just got bigger and broader. Way to go, Mitt. | {
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This is getting very very interesting.
Now surfaces an Intel gem from Julian Assange’s Wikileaks alleging that the lawyer for Adam Schiff’s anti-Trump and Ukraine whistleblower was called out by Wikileaks and Assange for selling out a legal client to the CIA.
And the client ended up in prison, according to Wikileaks.
Wikileaks previouly hurled a brutal and damning Tweet at attorney Mark Zaid accusing him of selling out a client and working with the CIA to get that client locked up.
Sounds familiar.
WikiLeaks is aware, from those directly involved, of serious allegations that Mark S. Zaid revealed one of his clients to the CIA. The client was later imprisoned. — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 27, 2018
Wikileaks and Assange slammed Zaid after he was pontificating about representing whistleblowers in court.
Almost a week later, Zaid responded to the damning Wikileaks accusations:
😂 You do not. Is everyone associated w/Wikileaks nothing other than fabricators or criminals? That “client” still talks w/me. His criminal defense lawyers talk AND work w/me regularly. That they all do specifically points to you as nothing but a single celled unthinking amoeba😃 — Mark S. Zaid (@MarkSZaidEsq) December 3, 2018
BTW Julian, I trust you are now feeding your cat. You don’t want to be on the other side of the door. pic.twitter.com/jIMFhmQY9A — Mark S. Zaid (@MarkSZaidEsq) December 3, 2018
Zaid’s response solicited more criticism, including a Twitter smack down from former CIA operative John Kiriakou who was also imprisoned:
You are 100 percent correct. @MarkSZaidEsq is not a whistleblower attorney, his protestations notwithstanding. Any friend or advocate of rats and snitches is no friend of whistleblowers. Just ask #JeffreySterling. — John Kiriakou (@JohnKiriakou) December 4, 2018
WOW — Assange called Whistleblower's Attorney a CIA RAT https://t.co/lsog8cZtIj — Mike 'Thomas Paine' Moore (@Thomas1774Paine) November 7, 2019
This story is developing. | {
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Rings are potent symbols of power, the circle of life, and promises to keep. At Gemvara, we believe that the rings you wear should be one of a kind, like you. That's why all our Rings are made from scratch in your choice of gems and precious metals. Choose London Blue Topaz and White Gold or Smoky Quartz and Yellow Gold: it's your choice. Mix and match gems and precious metals for a look that's exactly you. Our impressive selection of Rings by talented jewelry designers means you can find a style that's perfect for you. Because all Gemvara Rings are made to order, we can hand-select the finest quality materials to perfectly suit your design. Gemvara's fine quality Rings are designed to be passed down for generations, hand-crafted by skilled craftspeople in the United States. | {
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The outlines of a bipartisan plan for immigration reform have been announced by a group of senators. While most of its provisions are reasonable -- a path to citizenship for most illegal immigrants, increased skilled immigration and increased law enforcement -- one provision stinks to high heaven and should be rejected by Americans of left, right and center. That provision is a massive, special-interest-driven expansion of indentured servitude in the United States, in the form of a new “guest-worker program.” (President Obama, while hailing the plan in general on Tuesday, has not weighed in on the specifics of the guest-worker program.)
Indentured servitude or contract labor, like slavery, is a form of unfree labor. Unfortunately, the U.S., having abolished slavery, still has pockets of indentured servant labor. Whether relatively well-paid, like many highly educated H-1B workers, or poorly paid, like many H-2A agricultural workers, indentured servants are, in effect, indentured serfs. Because their presence in the U.S. is dependent on their employment by a particular employer, they cannot quit and are motivated to appease their employer, no matter how brutally they are exploited. If they protest maltreatment, they can be fired and forced to return to their home countries.
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Many indentured servants also are compelled to pay exorbitant amounts of their salaries to contractors who act as intermediaries between them and their sponsor employers, like the notorious “body shops” that exploit many H-1b workers. Having fleeced and otherwise cheated the guest workers, these body shops often threaten to sue their victims when they become eligible for green cards and quit, on the basis of fine print in documents that the guest workers were earlier forced to sign.
Most Americans, not knowing the technicalities of immigration law, can be bamboozled by corporate lobbyists and propagandists who seek to blur the distinction between guest workers and legal permanent residents with “green cards.” But green card holders -- some of them former indentured servants who have earned green cards, after years of exploitation -- have economic rights that guest workers do not, the rights that make up the core of the notion of “free labor” in the U.S. and other societies. While legal permanent residents do not have the right to vote, they have the right to quit their jobs without being deported. The psychological difference is profound -- a foreign national working in the U.S. with a green card does not have to cringe and grovel before an employer, as an indentured guest worker is compelled to do, out of fear.
The draft bipartisan proposal reads: “Our proposal will provide businesses with the ability to hire lower-skilled workers in a timely manner when Americans are unavailable or unwilling to fill those jobs.” In theory, employers of guest workers are already supposed to prove that no American citizens or legal permanent immigrants are available to perform a job. In practice, this is a joke. Employers in industries that use guest workers routinely turn to body shops for foreign indentured servants, with only token gestures of advertising the jobs.
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These Democratic and Republican senators, echoing the well-paid lobbyists for indentured serfdom, few if any of whom are in danger of being deported if they displease their bosses, promise that abuses can be prevented, by including stronger standards in new indentured serf programs. But if the federal government, corrupted by pressure from powerful business lobbies, does not enforce today’s laws, why should we expect pro-guest-worker laws to be enforced in the future -- particularly if an increase is guest workers is successfully extorted from the federal government by lobbyists and donors representing agribusiness and Silicon Valley?
In a 2007 report titled “Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States,” the Southern Poverty Law Center described the existing H-2 guest worker program, which would presumably be a model for any expanded agricultural guest worker program included in a bipartisan immigration bill:
Federal law and U.S. Department of Labor regulations provide some basic protections to H-2 guestworkers -- but they exist mainly on paper. Government enforcement of their rights is almost non-existent. Private attorneys typically won't take up their cause. Bound to a single employer and without access to legal resources, guestworkers are: • routinely cheated out of wages; • forced to mortgage their futures to obtain low-wage, temporary jobs; • held virtually captive by employers or labor brokers who seize their documents; • forced to live in squalid conditions; and, • denied medical benefits for on-the-job injuries. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel recently put it this way: "This guestworker program's the closest thing I've ever seen to slavery."
In 2010, Mother Jones published an exposé of the corrupt H-2A agricultural guest worker program, entled “Bound for America”:
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Several recent court cases document how easily guest-worker status devolves into forced labor. In one 2009 case, US v. Sou, three Hawaii growers were indicted for bringing in 44 Thai workers, pocketing a portion of their recruitment fees, then "maintaining their labor at the farm through threats of serious economic harm," according to the Justice Department. In another case, Asanok v. Million Express Manpower, Thai and Indonesian workers alleged that they had been promised well-paying, steady farmwork in North Carolina, only to find themselves housed in a Katrina-damaged New Orleans hotel, demolishing the building by day and sleeping in what remained at night, going so hungry they sometimes trapped pigeons for dinner. The list could go on, with several cases filed each year for as long as the US has deployed guest-worker schemes.
Instead of expanding indentured servitude in America, we should be putting it on the path to permanent extinction, like slavery, segregated labor and child labor. There are two compelling arguments for abolishing indentured serfdom in the U.S.: one economic, one political.
The economic argument is that indentured serfdom, by allowing agribusiness to pay poverty wages to workers, has bad macroeconomic effects and bad microeconomic effects. With respect to macroeconomics, guest-worker serfdom is the opposite of a “Fordist” economy in which workers are paid well enough to purchase the products they made -- as Henry Ford’s auto workers could afford Ford automobiles. The low-wage foreign national picking lettuce destined for affluent hipster stores like Fresh Fields and Whole Foods won’t be able to afford it, at a subsistence wage.
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This macroeconomic argument might be dismissed, because of the slight contribution to aggregate demand by the minority of all farm workers, including guest workers. The microeconomic argument against low-wage labor of any kind is more persuasive: It reduces the incentive for American agribusiness to increase its productivity, by investing in labor-saving technology.
Guest-worker programs are in-kind government subsidies to agribusiness. By lowering the cost of a particular input to the production process -- in this case, low-wage, non-union foreign labor -- the government is subsidizing a particular industry.
A low-wage guest-worker program is not only an example of an industrial policy that “picks winners,” but the stupidest and most destructive kind of industrial policy imaginable: one that favors backward, primitive, labor-intensive productive techniques, over advanced, capital-intensive mechanization and automation. Other countries manage to grow affordable lettuce, tomatoes and other produce without importing serfs to do so. The U.S. can do so as well.
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The idea that we Americans will starve, unless our government provides agribusiness with an imported foreign underclass to harvest our food, is pure special interest propaganda, echoed by the uncritical stenographers of the mass media who pass as “reporters” nowadays. The Washington Post story on the proposed reform deserves a Pulitzer for gullibility: “The framework identifies two groups as deserving of special consideration for a separate and potentially speedier pathway to full citizenship: young people who were brought to the country illegally as minors and agricultural workers whose labor, often at subsistence wages, has long been critical to the nation’s food supply. [emphasis added].”
By providing in-kind labor subsidies to particular favored economic sectors, U.S. guest-worker programs intervene in the market on behalf of employers and at the expense of workers. Adam Smith would have agreed with this objection. In "The Wealth of Nations," he argued that slavery retarded economic growth by reducing the incentives for innovation. And he wrote: “The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen.” Smith would not be surprised that so many American employers pretend they cannot find American citizens or free legal permanent residents to do jobs and demand the right to import unfree contract labor from other countries.
The political argument ought to be decisive. In a democratic republic, free citizen-workers should not be compelled to compete against unfree workers with limited rights -- slaves, segregated workers, illegal aliens or contract laborers/guest workers. To put this another way, employers should not be able to engage in a divide-and-rule strategy of pitting different classes of workers, with different levels of rights, against one another in a single U.S. labor market.
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Most of the jobs being created in the U.S. today are low-wage jobs with minimal educational requirements in healthcare, recreation and retail. If employer lobbyists succeed in creating a permanent caste of indentured serfs in agribusiness, the lobbies for the healthcare, fast food and hotel lobbies are sure to follow, whining that they cannot find American citizens, or legal permanent resident aliens, to do the work. Free workers in America will be forced to compete with unfree foreign contract laborers, in industry after industry, for the worst jobs in the country.
We can debate what the total amount of legal immigration should be, as well as how it is allotted among categories, including family unification and skills and national quotas. And we can also debate whether, and how, to provide a path to citizenship for many of the millions of illegal immigrants who reside in the U.S. But all Americans who do not profit from exploited labor should agree on one principle, regardless of other partisan differences: All legal immigrants, and all amnestied illegal immigrants, should have exactly the same workplace rights as American citizen-workers -- including the right to quit and take another job in the U.S. A one-tier labor market is in the interest of citizen-workers themselves. There should be no place in the American labor market for a primitive, labor-intensive sub-economy -- a modern plantation zone -- with a caste of unfree workers.
One of the proudest achievements of the Civil Rights Revolution was the success of civil rights activists and unions in pressuring Congress to abolish the Bracero Program. This exploitative guest-worker program was shut down in 1964, after years of criticism by Latino civil rights groups in the U.S. as well as by the Mexican government. For progressives to cave in to extortion by the sleazy agribusiness lobby on the question of guest-workers, in order to obtain a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, would be an appalling surrender -- like agreeing to let businesses revive child labor, as the price of passing reforms to promote childcare and child nutrition.
Employers and investors who insist that they cannot operate in the U.S. if they are forced to employ free citizen-workers or free legal permanent resident immigrants with the right to quit and unionize are the 21st-century equivalent of the unpatriotic and illiberal Southern planter class that preferred slavery and later segregation to free labor. Nineteenth-century abolitionists called the selfish planters the Slave Power. Twenty-first century Americans should call the selfish industries that demand indentured servants instead of free workers what they are: the Serf Power.
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Immigration reform should provide a path to citizenship, not a road to serfdom. If Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez were alive, they would be protesting against guest-worker programs, even if they favored other elements of immigration reform. It would be a tragedy as well as an irony if the first African-American president, in the name of immigration reform, presided over the greatest expansion of unfree labor in the U.S. since the abolition of the Bracero program during the civil rights era. | {
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Rudy Guiliani, President Donald Trump’s lawyer and former mayor of New York City, said in a press conference Wednesday that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un “begged” Trump for the June 12 meeting after Trump abruptly canceled it.
“Kim Jong-un got back on his hands and knees and begged for it, which is exactly the position you want to put him in,” Giuliani said at a business conference in Tel Aviv.
“It is pointing out that the president is the stronger figure,” he later said. “And you’re not going to have useful negotiations unless he accepts that.”
Giuliani later claimed that Trump showed his strength when he initially decided to call off the summit, citing the “tremendous anger and open hostility” in statements from North Korean officials’ descriptions of Vice President Mike Pence as a “political dummy” while again threatening “nuclear annihilation” of the United States.
“President Trump didn’t take that. What he did was he called off the summit,” he said. Giuliani then affirmed that Kim quickly changed his position, and a meeting is now scheduled next week in Singapore.
“That’s what I mean by begging for it,” he explained.
Giuliani, who is defending Trump against any possible charges to come from the ongoing Russia investigation, later said he was sharing his personal opinion, rather than one reflecting American foreign policy.
Next week’s meeting will see the two leaders meet at the luxurious Capella Hotel on the Singaporean resort island of Sentosa, where they are expected to continue negotiations on North Korea’s nuclear disarmament.
However, Trump has been advised not to provide North Korea with any concessions before Kim agrees to a denuclearization timetable. He is also reportedly determined to walk out of the meeting should the talks go badly.
According to reports, security is high on the list of concerns for Kim Jong-un, who reportedly fears that travel to Singapore could leave him vulnerable to an assassination attempt.
Last week at the White House, Trump met with senior regime official Kim Yong-chol, sanctioned by the Treasury Department for involvement in terrorist activity, to continue peace negotiations.
“I think we would be making a big mistake if we didn’t have it,” Trump said of the upcoming summit. “I think we’re going to have a relationship, and it will start on June 12.”
Follow Ben Kew on Facebook, Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at [email protected]. | {
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Bitcoin is the legacy, original cryptocurrency that launched an entire industry of innovation predicated on blockchain technology and its accompanying field of technical and economic mechanics.
Primarily envisioned as a store of value and medium of value exchange outside of the jurisdiction of governments or third parties, Bitcoin’s application focuses on providing individual economic freedom through creating a novel financial technology.
However, the application of blockchain technology, cryptography, distributed computing, and economics in a system such as Bitcoin’s only was the tip of the iceberg to a future industry of vast potential. Ethereum opened the door to the potential of utilizing blockchain technology for a wide variety of applications.
What is Ethereum?
Pegged as a distributed world computer, Ethereum is an open-source, public blockchain and decentralized computing platform featuring turing-complete smart contract functionality.
Proposed in late 2013, by a then 19 year old Vitalik Buterin, as a platform that could hypothetically leverage the blockchain to store and execute computer programs across an international network of distributed nodes, Ethereum has become the most well-known and established cryptocurrency outside of Bitcoin.
The History of Ethereum
Ethereum has a long, controversial, and highly significant history that has had a major impact on shaping the modern cryptocurrency sphere. The white paper proposed by Vitalik in late 2013 was the beginning of the Ethereum era.
Outlined as a distributed world computer for executing and storing computer programs, the goal was to create a distributed computing platform that took full advantage of the potential afforded by blockchain technology. As Vitalik puts it in the introduction of his paper:
“What Ethereum intends to provide is a blockchain with a built-in fully fledged Turing-complete programming language that can be used to create “contracts” that can be used to encode arbitrary state transition functions, allowing users to create any of the systems described above, as well as many others that we have not yet imagined, simply by writing up the logic in a few lines of code”
The systems that he “describes above” in the quote refer to common applications (dapps) built on top of the Ethereum blockchain today such as on-chain digital assets (ERC-20 tokens), non-fungible assets, decentralized exchanges, on-chain identity and reputation systems, peer-to-peer gambling, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and most notably, smart contracts.
Smart contracts are the primary feature of Ethereum and are basically self-executing programs that facilitate the exchange of anything of value on the network, immutably stored on the blockchain. They execute when specific conditions are met and are outside the influence of third parties or censorship and have no downtime, as long as the Ethereum network is functioning.
The general ambition of the project outlined in the white paper as well as the technical expertise of its young founder attracted the attention of many in the cryptocurrency space. The platform’s core innovation became known as the “Ethereum Virtual Machine” (EVM) and is a turing-complete software that runs on the Ethereum network, enabling anyone to run any program, regardless of the programming language, on the Ethereum blockchain. The result is the potential to create a vast array of decentralized applications all on a single platform.
The early development of Ethereum began in early 2014 with Vitalik and a small team including Anthony Di Iorio, Charles Hoskinson, and Mihai Alisie. The project began through the Swiss company Ethereum Switzerland GmbH and subsequently through the Swiss non-profit Ethereum Foundation.
Read our Profile of Vitalik Buterin
At the time, Joseph Lubin was the COO at Switzerland GmbH and helped to found the Ethereum Foundation. He remains a prominent figure in the cryptocurrency community as the founder of ConsenSys.
In July 2014, Ethereum underwent a crowdsale where more than $14 million was raised from July-August. In September of the same year, the Ether (the Ethereum currency) was distributed to the investors and development team, while the remaining funding went to the Ethereum Foundation.
In July 2015, the first mainnet, experimental release of Ethereum was launched and labeled the “Frontier” release. The first major upgrade to the Ethereum platform was released in March 2016 as “Homestead” and was the first upgrade to be considered stable, focusing on gas pricing, security, and transaction processing. At the time, critics of Ethereum were still wary about its security and stability as although being a Turing complete platform offers a substantial amount of potential development applications, it also brings with it some serious and potentially fatal security concerns.
The DAO
Despite security concerns, on the wave of excitement from the community, The DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization functioning as an investor directed VC fund was created. The DAO raised approximately $150 million through contributions from over 11,000 people and was seen as novel, self-executing combination of smart contracts designed to function as a decentralized investment vehicle.
Infamously, the DAO was hacked in June 2016 when unknown users were able to exploit a vulnerability in its code and were able to move $50 million into a different DAO (known as the Dark DAO). Further, once public, others users used the same vulnerability to divert the remaining funds into a third DAO called the White Hat DAO.
Read more about DAO’s and the DAO Hack
The resulting fallout was intense and highly polarizing. Two sides emerged with one side claiming that the immutability of the blockchain and the core tenet of “code as law” could not be broken while the other side argued for hard forking the protocol to return investors’ funds and eliminate the hackers’ access to the funds on the original Ethereum blockchain.
Eventually, Vitalik Buterin announced in July 2016 that miners had agreed on the hard fork and the fork was imminent. However, a minority of miners were still holding out and held steadfast in their convictions on not forking the protocol, which they saw us undermining the core principle of the platform. Thus, Ethereum was forked and the new chain became known as Ethereum and the old, unforked chain became known as Ethereum Classic, effectively splitting the Ethereum community.
As time progressed, the majority of businesses, developers, miners, and users favored the Ethereum (forked) chain and is the current chain named Ethereum with the 2nd highest market cap and a vast community behind it. Ethereum Classic (ETC) remains a popular cryptocurrency too, however, with the team behind ETC implementing the same upgrades as the Ethereum chain and actively developing the platform as well.
Ethereum vs Ethereum Classic: What’s the Differences
The most recent major upgrade to Ethereum came in the form of “Metropolis – Byzantium”, which is the first part of a two-part Metropolis upgrade that is supposed to lay the foundation for the transition of Ethereum to its Proof-of-Stake upgrade “Casper”, as well as its eventual sharding implementation.
Ethereum has been at the forefront of the recent scaling problems in the broader cryptocurrency industry. Plagued by high gas fees and slow transaction times, Ethereum is facing serious concerns about its ability to scale to meet the demands of thousands of dapps running on its platform and a sufficient high-throughput capacity to support a vast network of decentralized participants.
The proposed solutions are set to come in the aforementioned Casper upgrade and its eventual transition to sharding, a unique horizontal database architecture partitioning method designed to alleviate network congestion and help the network to scale.
How Does Ethereum Work?
The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is a Turing-complete software that runs on the Ethereum network. It executes scripts across a distributed network of computers and enables the execution and storage of everything from smart contracts to DAOs. Functionally, Ethereum allows developers to build decentralized applications on top of it. This can include games, distributed registries, organizations, and many more.
The design behind Ethereum, based on the white paper, is intended to follow the principles of:
Simplicity – The protocol should be as efficient as possible, even at the cost of data storage or time inefficiencies.
– The protocol should be as efficient as possible, even at the cost of data storage or time inefficiencies. Universality – An internal Turing-complete scripting is provided language that a developer can use to program any smart contract or transaction type.
– An internal Turing-complete scripting is provided language that a developer can use to program any smart contract or transaction type. Modularity – Ethereum protocol should be designed to be as modular and separable as possible.
– Ethereum protocol should be designed to be as modular and separable as possible. Agility – The protocol is not set in stone and any opportunities to improve the protocol architecture or the EVM in scalability or security will be exploited.
– The protocol is not set in stone and any opportunities to improve the protocol architecture or the EVM in scalability or security will be exploited. Non-Discrimination/Non-Censorship – The protocol should not attempt to actively restrict or prevent specific categories of usage.
Benefits of Ethereum
The benefits of Ethereum not only as a blockchain-based platform itself but also compared to other blockchain-based platforms includes:
Immutability – A third party cannot make any changes to data.
– A third party cannot make any changes to data. Corruption/Tamper Proof – Censorship is unfeasible with the PoW consensus of the vast and decentralized network agreeing on its global state.
– Censorship is unfeasible with the PoW consensus of the vast and decentralized network agreeing on its global state. Security – The combination of the PoW consensus, cryptographic techniques used in the transaction model, and lack of a central point of failure protects the network against hacking and manipulation.
– The combination of the PoW consensus, cryptographic techniques used in the transaction model, and lack of a central point of failure protects the network against hacking and manipulation. No Downtime – Applications, smart contracts, organizations, etc all running on the Ethereum blockchain are always running and cannot be turned off.
Disadvantages of Ethereum
As a Turing-complete platform, Ethereum is susceptible to vulnerabilities that can be exploited through the complexity of the primary programming language used in smart contracts, Solidity. Smart contract security has become a major concern and the DAO hack was the revelatory event that led to mainstream concerns of the long-term viability of smart contracts moving forward.
Ethereum also places a large focus on Security and Decentralization over Scalability. While scalability solutions are in the works and on the horizon, the low-throughput capacity and high gas costs for Ethereum at the moment make it inconvenient for mainstream users looking for free use of applications that they are accustomed too, as well as for developers building applications, where gas costs have become prohibitively high in some instances.
Transaction Model
Ethereum uses an account-based model, similar to a modern banking model for users, rather than the UTXO model of Bitcoin. The global state of Ethereum is divided into these accounts, which consist of 20-byte addresses and where each transaction of value or information between accounts is considered a state transition.
An Ethereum account contains 4 fields. The nonce, ether balance, contract code, and storage. There are two types of accounts, externally owned accounts and contract accounts. Externally owned accounts are user accounts which are controlled by private keys, does not contain any code, and can be used to create and sign transactions. A contract account is a smart contract, run by code and receives messages that allow to store messages and code as well as contact other contracts and externally owned accounts.
Ether is the currency of the Ethereum platform while Gas is the derivative of Ether used to pay for transactions and computations across the network. Ethereum chose the account-based model over the UTXO model of Bitcoin for a number of reasons, which you can find more in-depth information on here.
Ethereum Mining
Ethereum mining is in many ways similar to Bitcoin mining. However, there is a primary difference where the Ethereum blockchain not only stores the transaction list of the blockchain, but also the most recent state of the network.
Ethereum also employs the use of Patricia Trees rather than Merkle Trees as part of its blockchain state regulation. Patricia Trees are a modified form of Merkle Trees that enables Ethereum to efficiently store and adjust the state of the blockchain in each block.
Some other notable features of the Ethereum blockchain and mining include:
12 second block time
Ethash Mining Algorithm (Uses DAG)
Static Block Reward of 3 ETH
Miners compensated for gas expended in block.
Extra reward for including Uncles as blocks.
Find out more about Ethereum Mining in our Complete Guide
Consensus
Ethereum currently employs a modified Nakamoto Consensus Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus model. The PoW consensus in Ethereum is extremely secure as the network consists of thousands of decentralized nodes across the world.
Mining in the PoW model of Ethereum utilizes the Ethash (DAG) algorithm which is designed to hash a fast verifiability time. Additionally, large scale miners get comparatively little benefit from larger operations due to the large memory requirements of the algorithm.
This model will eventually be replaced by a Proof-of-Stake consensus implementation with the upcoming Casper upgrade.
Read more about Ethereum Casper
Smart Contracts & Dapps
Smart contracts and the ability of developers to build decentralized applications on Ethereum is its most prominent feature. From building dapps that function as games to teams releasing their own ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum, a multitude of significant developments in the broader cryptocurrency industry have been enabled by leveraging this functionality of the EVM.
Solidity is currently the primary programming language used to write smart contracts and build dapps, however, Ethereum is currently experimenting with a new Beta programming language known as Vyper that is supposed to be a much simpler, secure, and auditable language for smart contracts in order to mitigate some of the complexity deficiencies surrounding Solidity.
If Ethereum is able to scale to meet mainstream application and throughput demands, the possible iterations of dapps on the platform are endless. Developers will have new avenues to monetize their creations, users will not be burdened with expensive and inefficient third-parties, and eventually applications (and even blockchains) will become interoperable with each other, empowering an entirely new paradigm of application development and innovation.
The Future of Ethereum
Ethereum seems invariably placed, alongside Bitcoin, as the center of the cryptocurrency world. With standards being proposed and implemented on the Ethereum network, a vast and dedicated community of developers and various other contributors behind it, and a vocal, talented leader in Vitalik Buterin leading the way, the Ethereum future looks bright.
Ethereum remains at the bleeding edge of innovation in the industry with developments such as its planned transition to sharding seen as some of the most daunting tasks out there, not just in the blockchain field either, but the larger technical community as well. Ethereum also lists a number of future technologies they are actively or potentially developing that include:
Saving Wallets
Crop Insurance
Decentralized Data Feed
Multisig Escrow
Cloud Computing
P2P Gambling
Prediction Markets (i.e. Augur)
Decentralized Marketplaces (i.e. 0x)
Not only is the Ethereum team developing groundbreaking innovations, but the larger community that participates in the network in the form of developing their own projects, within the confines of the Ethereum network, are also making significant contributions. Some interesting and exploratory uses of Ethereum include projects such as Aragon, 0x, Augur, Golem, and Loom Network.
Conclusion
Ethereum is one of the most important and popular platforms in the blockchain/cryptocurrency industry today. As tech talent continues to migrate to the space, adoption becomes more mainstream, and scaling solutions are implemented, Ethereum looks to remain the distributed world computer for the decentralized applications of tomorrow. | {
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Comeback! Dirk Nowitzki Signs Contract To Rejoin Mavs For 2020 Playoffs
Dirk Nowitzki has had one of the best NBA careers in league history. He is an NBA champion, won the league’s MVP and the Finals MVP award. He was part of 14 All-Star teams and 12 All-NBA Teams and is one of the few members of the 50-40-90 club. Nowitzki is ranked 6th in all-time-scoring, 7th in all-time defensive-rebounds and 2nd in all-time NBA Finals free throw percentage.
And, most importantly, Dirk Nowitzki holds the league record for most seasons played with one team. To the surprise of all, this record will now be extended, as Dirk Nowitzki announced a comeback.
In a press conference with only Dirk and Mark Cuban present, due to the coronavirus, Nowitzki revealed that he signed a contract for the remainder of the season, including the playoffs. The contract is worth the veterans minimum.
“I was staying in shape all year for this, and secretly trained with the team during ‘team only’ practices. I told Mark before I retired, that I’d be back if we made the playoffs the next season. My knees are feeling better than last year, and I’m looking forward to helping the team in the postseason.”
With Kristaps Porzingis healthy, Dirk will likely be his backup, but the veteran presence of the 14-time All-Star, will be a key addition to the Mavs locker room. Dirk will give all that he has left in his tank, for one final run at another title. By the way, none of this is true (obviously!), and in case you haven’t checked the calendar in a while due to the coronavirus, let me tell you that it’s April 1st. | {
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Networking is a fundamental part of modern working life, whether it’s conducted face to face or on the various online networking sites. Alas, studies suggest that men and women don’t always get the same out of the activity.
For instance, a paper published earlier this year from INSEAD found that men are more likely to gain from networking than women. Whilst men and women were not found to be more connected than each other, the men appeared better at converting those connections into cash.
Online versus offline
A second study, this time from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, explores whether online versus offline networking makes any difference to this discrepancy.
It found that women tend to do much better when their networking is of the face to face variety rather than online.
The researchers explored the mentoring network within a Chinese technology company and found that in these close, offline relationships were much more beneficial to women than men.
When this was explored, it emerged that the women experienced a boost in visibility and legitimacy as a result of the affiliations they had with their high profile mentor, which in turn made them more attractive for potential collaboration partners elsewhere in the organization.
“It is well understood that networks form organically. In contrast, I am interested in understanding how managers can actively shape workplace networks,” the authors say. “In this company, as in many other comparable companies, technical employees tended to build relatively small networks, mostly within their own groups. Senior leadership believed that the people who did well in the organization were those who had not only depth but also breadth of social capital.”
The value of mentoring
The company implemented its mentoring program in a bid to help employees develop their social networks. Junior employees were paired up with a senior peer for a dozen days over a three month period.
The mentoring involved regular meetings with the mentor, plus some short project assignments that could be worked on under their guidance.
“Most mentoring research is based on cross-sectional surveys that are ill-suited to assessing whether formal mentoring programs actually work. The goal of this study was to provide more credible evidence about whether these programs can work, and if so, for which kinds of employees,” the authors reveal.
Suffice to say, it would be risky to read too much into the findings of one study, but nonetheless, the results showed a significant increase in network size for those in the mentoring group. The authors believe they support the implementation of formal mentoring programs, not least because they believe it will help to correct some of the inbalances in the networks developed by men and women in the workplace. | {
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TORONTO -- Prime Minister Justin Trudeau graces the cover of the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine accompanied by a provocative headline: "Why Can't He Be Our President?"
Trudeau follows in the footsteps of former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama among the world leaders who have previously fronted the venerable pop-culture magazine.
Trudeau is pictured with his shirtsleeves rolled up leaning against a table in the cover photo captured by Martin Schoeller.
In an article published online on Wednesday, writer Stephen Rodrick contrasts the policies and style of Trudeau to those of his American counterpart, Donald Trump, outlining their stark differences on health care, marijuana legalization and environmental policies.
Trudeau is quoted as telling Rodrick that while he disagrees with Trump "on a whole bunch," the pair have "a constructive working relationship."
Trudeau adds that going out of his way to "insult the guy or overreact or jump at everything he says (that) we might disagree with is not having a constructive relationship." | {
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half-sassed:
Heterosexuality is a couch. Nobody even bats an eye if you keep it in the living room for everyone to see–it’s simply expected. I mean, where the hell else would you keep it? Hidden in a bedroom? No, that would be weird.
Homosexuality is a bed. Having a bed in a public room is considered weird and gross–you’re expected to keep it in private bedroom you close the door to before anyone else comes over. Because even though there are a million and one things someone can do sitting on a bed that aren’t sexual (and plenty of ways to have sex on a couch), the first and foremost thing anyone associates beds with is sex.
Bisexuality is a Western-style futon. Sometimes it functions like a couch, sometimes it functions like a bed, but whichever position it’s in at the moment, it’s still a goddamn futon. People who want to use it as a couch give you shit for not having a real couch; people who want to use it as a bed give you shit for not having a real bed. It’s acceptable in your living room, but only if you make extra certain to put it in couch position and hide the sheets before company comes over. Otherwise, you’d better hide it in a guest room.
Asexuality is a table. No matter how many times you tell people it’s not meant to be sat on, dickheads with no manners will try to park their nasty asses on it anyway.
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“When they moved from the balloon chest protectors, umpires had a higher strike zone because they set up behind the catcher so they couldn’t get hit. When they went to the inside chest protector, the umpire got in the slot between the catcher and the hitter. He was down lower, with a lower perspective. Consequently, the strike zone got lower. For years, anything above the belt was a ball. Both sides became low-ball hitters. Even now, look at how many hitters swing at high fastballs and how many really hit it. Not many.” | {
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Corpses are piling up in the capital city of a European country again, and the main beneficiary of the ongoing Grand Guignol is now the celebrated master of ceremonies at an international sporting competition.
As of this writing, Ukraine is drawing to a close the bloodiest day of a 72-hour pogrom. Dozens have been killed. The government of Viktor Yanukovych, having lost all credibility weeks ago, has decided to behave as if it now has nothing to lose and no one, outside of Moscow, to impress.
“Government” may in fact be too strong a term to use to describe what’s left of power structures. Yanukovych already appears more warlord than president. His police force has been firing indiscriminately into the crowds with automatic weapons, joined by roving gangs of loyalist paramilitary units—titushki—who are conspicuous by their own automatic weapons and their yellow arm bands, the latter to keep the police from shooting at them. Hotels have become field hospitals. Bodies of protestors have been found without heads; others have been laid out in rows reminiscent of Aleppo.
Two Ukrainian journalists were recently yanked out of taxis and beaten savagely, one shot in the chest and killed. Evidence of execution-style gunshots with armor-piercing bullets has emerged. Ukrainian authorities, too, have been shot and killed in what now threatens to become all-out civil war and certainly has the telltale signs of one. Barricades erected line the Maidan, or Independence Square in Kiev, as they do in other cities around the country, sometimes with World War II cannons-cum-monuments. Tires and government buildings have been set alight with Molotov cocktails, their fires burning through the night amidst strangely playful green laser light shows. Before long, this mood suggests, someone’s tanks will be rolling into city streets in a replay of Hungary in 1956 or Prague in 1968.
Perhaps the most salient development today was the report that Russia’s spetsnaz (special forces) have been deployed by Putin to help put down what was once a peaceful protest movement, but now is seen as a mayhem of Molotov cocktails and riots. According to Tyzhden, a Ukrainian weekly, one such officer was “captured” by protestors and displayed before the Euromaidan masses today, his martial insignia of a double-headed eagle, proof to many, if proof were needed, of where he came from and who’s actually running the show in Kiev. (Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the president of Estonia, who knows something about Russia’s infiltration of its next-door neighbors, credited this report as plausible and tweeted a link to the Tyzhden article. The Russian embassy in Tallinn accused him of spreading “lying tweets”—before deleting the accusation.)
Why did I say it was alarming that this present state of affairs was not foreseen by the West? Because Putin told us what was imminent. He always has the courtesy to notify in advance, even if we choose not to listen.
Sergei Glazev is his right-hand-man on Russia’s “integration” with Ukraine, which is more properly understood as re-colonization. Yanuykovych “has a choice,” Glazev last month told the house organ of Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned gas company and, up until now, Putin’s preferred tool for getting what he wants out of Europe. “Either he defends Ukrainian statehood and puts down the insurrection…or he risks losing power, in which case Ukraine faces growing chaos and internal conflict with no escape to be seen.”
The consequences for not putting down the “insurrection” were further spelled out by the Kremlin. When Yanukovych appeared to go wobbly and offered conciliatory gestures to the opposition late last month (like an Arab dictator in trouble, he sacked and swapped his cabinet, mainly for cosmetic effect, in January), Putin threatened to withhold the $15 billion loan which first enticed Yanukovych to defy the majority of Ukrainians by quashing a very modest but symbolically important association agreement with the European Union. Was it a coincidence, then, that the first day the shooting started—Monday—was also the day that Putin’s Finance Ministry announced that Yanukovych’s punishment would not be meted out and that $2 billion of that loan would instead be dispensed after all? Dialogue may get you trade agreements with Brussels, but crushing skulls gets keeps the bribes coming from Moscow.
It pays to remember that while Putin was, since his St. Petersburg days, always an obvious Chekist and mafioso, he didn’t really start to become one in the Western imagination until the end of his first term, after the so-called “color revolutions” kicked off in the former Soviet states, including and especially in Ukraine. This is because his response to these democratic ferments was to eliminate any and all possibility that they might flourish where they started or, god forbid, spread to Russia itself. His scapegoats then, as now, were the United States and Europe, which he blamed for mucking about in his backyard. So began a gradual and fitful process of re-Sovietization which, since Putin’s return to the presidency, has accelerated rapidly. That return, and that acceleration, are not coincidences either.
The Russian Putin blames the most for bungling Ukraine’s Orange Revolution is Dmitry Medvedev, erstwhile placeholder president, now relegated to the position of sinecurist premier and scapegoat for of Russia’s expanding domestic problems. Medvedev is further burdened with being the meek fool who botched the Russo-Georgian summer war of 2008 (he started it too late and finished it too early, according to Putin) and allowed NATO to depose Muammar Gaddafi with a no-fly zone. Never again, Dima.
Medvedev’s antithesis is a man named Vladislav Surkov, the variously and sporadically employed “grey cardinal” of the Kremlin, who is credited with consolidating Putin’s power, post-Orange Revolution, and conceiving of the concept of “sovereign democracy,” now Russia’s second largest export after oil. Indeed, Surkov has become the Scarlet Pimpernel of Euromaidan, allegedly spotted here, there and everywhere in Ukraine, yet existing only (so far) as a sinister rumor.
Surkovian is an adjective that Westerners would do well acquaint themselves with when trying to understand what’s happening in either Kiev or Moscow. It means politics taken to the level of a retrovirus: co-opt anything organic, trick it into thinking it’s still healthy, then liquidate it by slow measures. It means agents provocateurs and pseudo-oppositions and just enough meaningless liberty to make society not care about the real thing. It means fashioning loyalist youth-mobs which set upon a very green and very limited genuine opposition by depicting it as a Nazi fifth column of the U.S. State Department. It means unleashing hell when the moment is right and then presenting the aftermath as a warning of what happens if the status quo is not maintained. There’s also an element of Byzantine absurdity to the Surkovian, a combination of the ludic and the vicious. Holding the most expensive and corrupt Winter Olympics in history as a PR coup, then letting Cossacks horsewhip Russia’s most famous female dissidents in between bobsled races is one example. Phone-tapping American statesmen badmouthing their European counterparts may be pure KGB “tradecraft,” but releasing the audio for all the world to hear is a Surkovian triumph.
Events now unfolding in Ukraine threaten to be yet another, and the options to prevent civil war or the breakup of the country are dwindling. Still, there are options. My friend Edward Lucas has laid out two in Britain’s Daily Telegraph. First, help protect Georgia and Moldova, the other two former Soviet republics now in the “Kremlin’s firing line,” and strengthen our alliance with the Baltic states that keep getting mock-invaded or cyber-attacked by Russia. Second, freeze the U.S. and European-based assets of Yanukovych and his ruling “family”. These are actually very well known to sanctions monitors, and if they require additional assistance, a good place to start is at yanukovich.info.
I’d add to Lucas’ list that Washington and Brussels ought to exploit the cracks now beginning to appear in the Yanukovych monolith. His own functionaries and partisans all seem to realize their man is finished as anything other than a satrap of a revanchist empire-in-the-remaking. More and more of them are resigning, going over to the other side, or declaring their independence. The mayor of Kiev, Volodymyr Makeenko, has left the Party of Regions and promised to re-start the city’s stalled subway system. “None of the oligarchs have died, none of the politicians died. I, as head of the city administration, am taking care of burying tens of bodies of common people every day,” Makeeno said in a letter addressed to Yanukovych. He also said that he planned to assume “personal responsibility for the livelihood of the city of Kiev,” which may mean that the capital, and the country’s centre of finance, will become a semi-autonomous city-state before long, one that could theoretically parlay with the U.S., E.U. and U.N. directly.
Yanukovych also seems to have lost his own Foreign Ministry, which has now put out a statement endorsing the association agreement with the EU as a measure that “can unite us all.”
Meanwhile, Putin’s own method of minatory agitprop should be used against him, repeatedly and without the usual happy-talk hedging. Failed statehood is what happens when you sell out your own people to do a deal with the czar. And this has a habit of affecting not just the politicized man in the street but also the establishment fat-cat or illicitly enriched bureaucrat with real estate and bank accounts everywhere but Russia. | {
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Begyndelsen på en borgerkrig
Af: Hans Rustad
Der er træk ved dagens Danmark, der kan minde om optakten til en borgerkrig
Jens Martin Eriksen og undertegnede har noget til fælles: Vi var begge optaget af borgerkrigen i Bosnien og resten af det tidligere Jugoslavien, mens det skete. Det gjorde et uudslettelig indtryk på os. Få troede at der ville bryde borgerkrig ud i Bosnien. Antallet af blandingsægteskaber var 40 procent. Det ville være som at skære i sit eget kød. Så skete det alligevel.
En borgerkrig bryder ud når de styrende ikke forstår hvad der sker og selv bliver katalysatorer. Det var det samme i Weimarrepublikken, hvor nationalsocialisterne forstod at udmanøvrere eliten og kommunisterne.
Der er træk ved dagens Danmark, der kan minde om optakten til en borgerkrig. Den er ikke uafvendelig. Men den er mulig. Man skal bare fortsætte ad samme spor som i dag, så vil modsætningerne stige.
Lars Løkke siger der er behov for en voksen i rummet. Men det er hans forhalingspolitik og mangel på ærlighed, der forbruger det danskerne har mindst af: Tid. I stedet for at forstå er eliten mest optaget af at fordømme.
Jens Martin Eriksen har en fremragende artikel i Weekendavisen: Varianter af Hitler.
Hvis man over lang tid ikke har turdet tale om problemerne har man hensat sig selv i en tilstand af uvirkelighed. Det gælder samtlige lande i Vesteuropa. Medierne og facade-politikken er et selvhenvisende system der sørger for at afskære reel debat. Man kalder udfordreren nazist og dermed er problemet løst.
Men den genklang Rasmus Paludan har vakt, er et alvorlig varsel om at noget er fundamentalt galt i Danmark. Hvis systemet ikke tør tage ham alvorligt, vil vælgerne stemme på ham i ren protest. De forlanger at blive taget alvorligt.
Skørhed
Der er en skørhed i den mediemæssige virkelighed der gør deltagerne helt uforberedt på at takle noget som er udenfor deres forståelsesramme. Jeg glemmer aldrig den nøddebrune programleder på CNN som midt under valgkampen reagerede på et Trump-udspil med at sige: -Vil han tage os tilbage til slaveriet?
Eriksen bruger også ordet “den uvirkelighed vi står midt i”. De ord der bruges har ingen forklaringskraft.
De kommer slet ikke i nærheden af at forstå den vrede, der har givet Rasmus Paludan sådan en gennemslagskraft Der er bare noget fesent over hele dette moralistiske teater med entydigt at udpege en syndebuk for de uløselige problemer, som han fører sig frem med.
….. som han fører sig frem med. Problemerne ligger der. De er ikke skabt af Paludan, men det skulle man tro, når man lytter til politikerne og medierne.
Der findes et stort reservoir af vrede blandt danskerne og når eliten ikke viser nogen vilje til at forstå dem, vokser vreden bare og slår over i sympati med Paludan. Han stikker fingeren i øjnene på magten. Paludan er flabet og ufin. Det kan alle se. Netop derfor er det et alarmsignal at folk flokkes rundt om ham.
Vi har nået et punkt hvor frygtløshed og provokerende handlinger vinder tilslutning, fordi ingen fra eliten vil gøre noget. Det er kernen. Det vidner om et demokratisk underskud og det er dette Paludan profiterer på.
Hvis eliten vil standse hans fremgang må de gøre noget. De må tale sandhed, ikke udenom. Det er derhen vi er kommet nu.
Provokationsteater
Paludan er et stykke provokationsteater, en performance, ikke ulig Lars Vilks. Vilks ser mærkeligt nok ikke det teatralske ved Paludan, men er politisk modstander. Elementerne Paludan benytter er de samme som Vilks´: Han ser at der er opstået en værdikonflikt og udnytter det til at skaffe sig opmærksomhed. Måske er det hans fremmeste motiv, men det spiller ingen rolle når han rører ved den vigtigste konflikt i dagens samfund.
For hvad er det der sker når Rasmus Paludan drager ud i ghettoerne og udsender svinere, hvor han dels benytter sig af de samme æresdogmer og hatespeech-idiosynkrasier som er kurante for indvandrere mod nogle andre, som de på deres side hader ude i ghettoerne. Således hans gentagne brug af “homo” og “luder”, termer der for længst har tabt deres nedgørende betydning for etniske danskere. Alt det ved Paludan selvfølgelig alt for godt. Men ved opførelsen af sit provokationsteater. hvor disse termer slynges ud mod det fjendtlige publikum, kommer der et burlesk show ud af det. De hadefulde viser sig selv som frådende, uartikulerede og aggressive barbarer ved at gå amok foran kameraet. Derved kan Paludan levere beviser på, hvem de virkelig er, til alle sine potentielle støtter.
Bekræftelse
Almindelige mennesker får bekræftet deres værste anelser: Det er Paludan, der udråbes til nazist. Indirekte er det også de tavse der får samme stempel, alle der har sympati med problemerne han rører ved.
Den moralistiske galla fra mediernes side skulle pleje mediefolkets egen selvrespekt ved at udtrykke foragt for netop dem, der støtter Paludan.
Dobbelt radikalisering
For den distancerede betragter er det åbenbaret at eliten driver udviklingen frem i retning af polarisering.
Denne politiske logik udløser en hidtil uset dobbelt radikalisering. De, der poserer som hans professionelle modstandere i medier og politik, radikaliserer sig selv og hinanden i et internt amokløb om at kåre ham som gud ved hvilken Hitler i denne politikers og tyrans rædselskarriere. Det gør de ved blindt og uempatisk og selvisk at forhåne og hade de mennesker, der ser ham som budbringer. Men hidtil ser det ud til, at hans tilhængere hele tiden bliver flere, mens hans modstandere holder sig på et forudsigeligt stabilt niveau.
Brudflader
Men er det noget, Paludan først og fremmest gør, så er det at eksponere brudfladerne mellem utopisk multikulturalisme og på den anden side demokrati og ytringsfrihed. Måske kan man ikke få begge dele? (…)
Det er hele denne misere med demaskering af den utopiske multikulturalisme og den helt ligegyldige kåring af Paludan som Hitler, der er med til at give ham gennemslagskraft.
Et indblik i et lukket univers
Paludan river forhænget til side så de pæne mennesker kan se en virkelighed de ikke vil vide af.
For han er også kunstnerisk ærlig, når han opfører sit morbide provokationsteater og påtager sig at forhåne haderne med deres eget hadefulde, racistiske og sexistiske vokabularium. For os tilhørere er det som et uhyggeligt og grotesk morsomt blik ind i det helt anderledes, ind i et forfærdeligt univers, hvor man gyser ved tanken om dem, der bliver nødt til at bo i den verden derude. Han eksponerer i disse øjeblikke det bortforklarede, det skjulte, det, der helst ikke skal frem “for ikke at skabe unødig frygt”. Det, der er virkelighed for de mennesker, der er fanget ude i disse områder.
Der skal en stærk sandhedstrang til for at se tingene så klart.
Immune
Dette skuespil blev opført på en meget større scene i USA i valgåret 2016. Trumps vælgere blev immune mod hetzen fra eliten. Det samme vil ske i Danmark. Ord som nazisme og racisme har allerede mistet deres kraft. Det er ikke fordi Paludans sympatisører er ligegyldige, men fordi det åbenbart er et desperat forsøg på at fortsætte drømmerierne og maskere virkeligheden.
Det, eliten kunne give som svar, var selv at tage ud i ghettoerne “med deres eget teater – og lade os få syn for en anden sandhed – hvis der findes en sådan en derude.”
Men det savner de mod til. Der er tryggere i DR-byen.
Imens må Paludan bevæge sig med en horde af politifolk rundt på valgmøderne. Han får opmærksomheden og viser hvem der tør. Og eliten i tv-studierne får regningen, hvilket gør dem rasende.
De er ”lame ducks”.
Se også marts 2019: Meditation over borgerkrigen
0 0 vote Article Rating | {
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One man died and dozens of people were treated after overdosing on a drug called Molly at a weekend music festival at the Gorge Amphitheatre in central Washington, authorities said.
More than 25,000 people attended the sold-out, two-day Paradiso Festival, which featured dozens of electronic music performances Friday and Saturday.
Patrick D. Witkowski, 21, of the Seattle suburb of Des Moines, died Sunday at Central Washington Hospital in Wenatchee. He was identified late Monday by Chelan County Coroner Wayne Harris.
An autopsy found no physical injuries or pre-existing medical conditions that would have caused the death, Harris said.
Toxicology tests of blood and urine, with results expected in about eight weeks, should pinpoint a cause of death, he said.
Witkowski was one of seven people from the music festival who were taken to the hospital. Three remained in serious condition, said Kathy Hamilton, director of community relations.
Quincy Valley Medical Center, the closest hospital to the amphitheater, treated about 70 other concert-goers in its emergency room from Thursday through Sunday, spokeswoman Michele Wurl said, with at least 40 of the cases related to drugs and alcohol.
The small, rural hospital has no intensive care unit and serious cases were transferred.
"We deal with the Gorge all summer long," Wurl said. "What we're seeing this year is much higher acuity — more severe — in the drug use."
Molly seemed to be a generic name for a cocktail of drugs, she said.
"They don't even know what they're taking," Wurl said. "They take a hit and 30 to 45 minutes later they take a second. So they get them maxing out one after another. ... We're not talking about too much drinking or smoking a little marijuana."
The slang term "Molly" has been used to refer to pure MDMA, or methylenedioxy-methamphetamine, which is sometimes mixed with other substances and pressed into ecstasy pills or tablets.
Police, emergency rooms busy
Deputies handled 62 calls for service at the Paradiso Festival and arrested 23 people for various charges, including possession or delivery of controlled substances, trespassing, obstructing a public servant, assault and disorderly conduct, the Grant County sheriff's office said in a statement. The concert promoter contracts with the sheriff's office to supplement security.
The number of arrests is not unusual for a concert at the Gorge, said Undersheriff Dave Ponozzo. Some people seen by medical personnel were using Molly or MDMA, he said. MDMA is also known as ecstasy.
The sheriff's office said a 20-year-old Seattle man had been found disoriented but OK on Monday after wandering lost for hours after taking the drug.
"Most in attendance were very respectful people to us and to one another," Ponozzo said in an email. "I found them to be very social people, many of who went out of their way to thank us for being there."
Most of the audience stays at a campground on the site overlooking the Columbia River about 120 miles east of Seattle.
Concerts at the Gorge put pressure on the Quincy Valley Medical Center emergency room, which typically sees about nine people a day. The Paradiso Festival was the third concert this year at the Gorge.
In a statement emailed Monday, festival co-producers Live Nation and USC Events said they were "committed to bringing people together to experience music in a safe environment."
"We wish to express our deep concern about reports regarding a 21-year-old man who died at Central Washington Hospital over the weekend," the statement added. "We extend our sympathy to his family." | {
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VCV Rack is still in a pre-release, beta cycle – but it’s already up and running with a vision of what an open platform for software modular could look like. With 0.6.0, the software integrates with your DAW and manages third-party modules more easily.
If you’re just joining us, VCV Rack is an open source platform that runs a modular synth on your computer. It’s closely modeled on Eurorack modular, down to the way signal flows and modules bolt into the virtual rack. It’s even got simulations of a lot of popular real Eurorack modules, along with new modules that only run in this software environment. You can even use it to try out those real modules before you buy them, and you can integrate the software modules with outboard physical modular gear, if you choose.
Rack isn’t alone – Reaktor Blocks does something like this (though without the front panel patching), and Softube Modular also emulates a Eurorack and includes simulations of existing hardware. But Rack is unique in its open model. Rack itself is open source software, and you can make free third-party open source modules. But without locking users and modular developers into a proprietary platform, it’s also possible to sell modules. That means that you can both support free and open software, and make sure developers have a chance to pay their bills and get compensated for their work.
And that’s why this release is important.
Right now, hardware modular is a great ecosystem. But if you want to make software modules, your choices are limited. Conventional plug-in architectures like VST, AU, and AAX aren’t suited to these sorts of modular interactions. Modular environments available for development need to be proprietary, or don’t have any clear way for developers to make back money to support their time, or even both those things. (Reason Rack Extensions are one extension, but that covers just one host and workflow.) So this offers a new way forward.
First off, a disclaimer: this is a developer release. Installing and using Rack is still a bit hack-y. If you like building software, if you’ve got some experience testing software or providing beta experience, you may well enjoy that. But if not, think of this more as a preview of stuff to come. (And you may still want to dip your toes in with our guides below.)
Plug-in DAW integration
Rack is a standalone application, and that comes with a lot of benefits. But VCV Bridge offers another way to integrate Rack with your DAW. It’s a VST/AU plug-in with support for macOS and 32/64-bit Windows. For now, you set it up as a send/return, much as you would with a modular in a real studio environment and a mixing desk. Then you can route audio. Coming soon: MIDI, DAW clock transport, and instrument plug-ins.
This is mainly a convenience; as we wrote previously, you can already use inter-app MIDI and audio options to connect Rack and other tools. But since users are accustomed to plug-ins and they offer some added benefits with saving and recalling project files in your DAW, it makes sense. Correction: I incorrectly implied that VCV Rack supports JACK. While JACK support via Core Audio will work, for instance, there isn’t native JACK audio support on Linux at the moment, though I got this user build working fine on my Ubuntu install with the binaries! Easy. -PK
More on this and where it’s going:
https://vcvrack.com/manual/Core.html#Bridge
https://github.com/VCVRack/Bridge
Expanded, easier management of modules
The whole beauty of Rack as a platform is its support for a third-party module ecosystem. And 0.6.0 shows where the developer is headed with this, both for open source and paid plug-ins. The Plugin Manager was already providing a way to manage installing extra modules; now it does a lot more.
Plugin Manager now works with open source plugins, too (as well as paid)
Browse in a new Module Browser
Star your favorites (yes!) Add modules quickly from the keyboard
A new SDK, other enhancements
Now that the Rack API is stable, developers will want to check this out: there’s a new Rack SDK, which lets you compile plugins without having to compile the whole Rack from source. There are a lot of other relevant notes here:
https://github.com/VCVRack/Rack/issues/258#issuecomment-376293898
Also new in this build are a bunch of UI improvements and enhanced Core modules for MIDI and audio support.
0.6.0 changelog [GitHub]
Learn more
Our friends at Synthtopia have been on top of some of the recent module additions. For instance:
VCV Router Sequential Switch Matrix
Here’s an example of how to build a hybrid system, combining a computer running VCV with hardware modular:
And amazingly, VCV Rack is a one-person development shop. Darwin Grosse interviewed creator Andrew Belt for his podcast series, also on Synthtopia:
Open Source Synthesis: Behind The Scenes With VCV Rack Creator Andrew Belt
And lastly, check our our ongoing guide to the software – see the links at the bottom of this story. We’ll keep working on that, and welcome your feedback if you find anything confusing or want to know more, in the interest of having a complete guide ready roughly as VCV Rack hits 1.0. Thanks to Ted Pallas for his work on this series.
A guide to VCV Rack, a software Eurorack modular you can use for free
Step one: How to start using VCV Rack, the free modular software
How to make the free VCV Rack modular work with Ableton Link | {
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A parrot who is obsessed with horror movie The Shining is spooking its owners - by shouting the terrifying 'red rum' catchphrase every day.
Greg Negron, 37, filmed parrot Honey repeatedly squawking the phrase as his girlfriend Sabrina Behrike, 30, watched the film at home in East Valley in Arizona.
The parrot originally picked up on the phrase when her owners first watched the 1980 horror classic ten years ago and has said it daily ever since.
A parrot who is obsessed with horror movie The Shining is spooking its owners - by shouting the terrifying 'red rum' catchphrase every day
The family watch the Stanley Kubrick adaptation of the Stephen King horror, which stars Jack Nicholson, around three times a year and say the parrot goes 'crazy' when it's on.
The phrase 'red rum' - which is murder spelt backwards - is said repeatedly by Danny, the five-year-old son of lead character Jack Torrance in The Shining.
Sabrina, a nutritionist, said: 'We've had her for about 15 years. She's my parent's bird. She's very animated and she only picks up the things that she's interested in.
'We put the movie on when she was about three and she just picked it up. We all went silent when she did it for the first time. It was so creepy.
'We watch it every year. The bird gets a kick out of it. She loves the movie.'
She says 'red rum' is her favorite phrase, adding that people are usually a 'little creeped out' when they hear her say it for the first time.
The parrot originally picked up on the phrase when her owners, from East Valley in Arizona, first watched the 1980 horror classic ten years ago
Sabrina said: 'We just let them know she's very talkative but a lot of people will connect it to the movie straight away when she says it.
'It's hilarious. She's not violent or aggressive she just loves saying it.'
After years of hearing Honey repeat the phrase the pair decided to capture the bird's antics on camera to show everyone else her bizarre habit.
'We were just having fun and we decided to take the video. She definitely likes being the centre of attention,' Sabrina said.
'We have been around her for such a long time you just get used to her.'
Greg Negron, 37, (right) filmed parrot Honey repeatedly squawking the phrase as his girlfriend Sabrina Behrike, 30, (left) watched the film at home
Greg added: 'The bird has been saying it for years. They all love The Shining.
'It's one of about 15 common daily words she says. This happens to be the funniest and most out of the ordinary word or phrase.
'She would say it constantly so we decided to take the video. When we put the movie on she gets a little crazy. We think it's hilarious. Everyone else thinks it's hilarious as well.
'Sometimes it's creepy when you just hear "red rum". The bird's pupils dilate when she does it.' | {
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I just received my T-shirt from the T-shirt exchange, and I'm so incredibly happy! My SS definitely did a great job. My day started off great and it has only continued to get better. Thank you so much!! :) | {
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I just confirmed with Ten-Tec that the RX-320D PC controlled receiver and the Ten-Tec Superhet receiver kit, the Model 1254, have both been discontinued. A Ten-Tec representative told me the reason both of these models have been discontinued and removed from Ten-Tec’s product line is because one of the parts used in production is now obsolete.
A long run…
The RX-320 and RX-320D have had a very long product life as the RX-320 was introduced in the late 1990’s (1998, if memory serves)–pretty amazing.
I owned an RX-320D for a long time and thought that it was still a great value. Here’s a review I wrote in 2009.
As third generation SDRs have emerged, and become so affordable in the past few years, it’s hard to justify the purchase of a receiver whose control software was designed for Windows 95.
So long RX-320D, you’ve had a long run…
I have SWLing Post reader, Larry, to thank as his recent inquiry about the Model 1254 Superhet kit prompted me to call Ten-Tec for verification.
Related | {
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Bubba The Love Sponge’s attorneys are accusing Nielsen of not playing fair in the ratings tampering case against their client. According to Bubba’s attorneys, approximately 75,000 documents have been dumped on them by Nielsen in their case of ratings tampering against the Tampa host, and they have not been given enough time to examine the document dump and put their defense together. Bubba’s team is requesting an extension in order to review the documents that they say were not organized or labeled in any way. Nielsen accuses Bubba of ratings tampering by contacting PPM panelists, and is demanding $1 million in damages. The two sides tried mediation in June and it failed.
Bubba’s attorney’s also say that Nielsen marked almost every single document as “Confidential,” without regard for whether the documents actually contain any confidential information. And Nielsen redacted several of the documents without providing a privilege log. They also say, as a result of Nielsen’s “intentional and bad faith conduct during discovery,” Bubba is now left with only 35 days to complete discovery before the current discovery cutoff on December 9. They say they have been unable to make substantial progress with formal discovery, largely due to Nielsen’s “persistent production delays between March and November of this year.”
Bubba is blaming Nielsen for not giving him enough time to complete depositions, challenge Nielsen on the confidentiality designations, evaluate the redactions, and prepare and file motions to compel the Plaintiff to provide documents responsive to its discovery requests. Bubba’s team also says due to Nielsen’s document dump, expert witnesses have not been provided adequate time to form their opinions and draft their expert reports.
Bubba is asking the court for a 30-day extension of the discovery cutoff, until January 9, 2017. | {
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Harley Quinn spent a lot of time in her jail cell violently attacking guards on various occasions. However, her double sided nature allowed her to dabble and have fun from time to time. After all, how could she tempt the guards if she never gave it up every once in a while? The truth is that sometimes she would try to get free and other times, well, she just wanted to FUCK. | {
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Editor's Introduction
Presentation
"The only hypothesis I can come up with that's consistent with all of these facts is that on April 16, 1943, Albert Hofmann did not get LSD in his body at all. He had a spontaneous mystical experience!"
We read from his account:
"I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours (emphasis added) this condition faded away." (Hofmann, 1983).
Overview of current research
At Mindstates IV, Dr David Nichols, chemist and pharmacologist, professor of medicinal chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Purdue University, proposed a novel alternate reading of Albert Hofmann's famous 1943 "Bicycle Day" and a brief overview of his research.I'm here to give you a report from the institutional research division of your community. If you pay taxes to the IRS, you support my research to understand how psychedelics affect brain chemistry; thank you.Since we're just a slight bit past the 60th anniversary of the discovery of LSD, I thought I would have a little audience participation fun, and give you a little insight into how the scientific process works. Because, often times in this community, "scientist" has somewhat of a pejorative connotation. I want to show you how we're not so different, and do a little experiment.You know the way science works. We make observations, we develop or formulate a hypothesis that is consistent with those observations, and then we attempt to carry out experiments to test the hypothesis. I don't think we'll be able to carry out the experiments to test the hypothesis, but what I want to do is develop a hypothesis today that I think you'll find very interesting. But the first thing we need to know is what kind of a database we're working with. What I'd like you to do is raise your hand if you have read Albert Hofmann's account of the discovery of LSD.[nearly everyone in the conference hall raises their hand]Ah, just as I suspected. So we have a good database, and probably an educated database.What I want to do now is another experiment. I want you to raise your hand and hold it in the air as long as I am stating things that you hold to be true, and when I say something you believe not to be true, then put your hand down.So, the first thing I'm going to say, if you believe it to be true, raise your hand, and keep it up there until I say something you disagree with.On April 16, 1943, when Albert Hofmann accidentally ingested LSD, he ingested at least 25 micrograms. Now keep your hand up until I say something you disagree with.[most people in the audience raise their hands]On that same date in 1943, Albert Hofmann ingested at least 50 micrograms of LSD.[a few people put their hands down]On that same date in 1943, Albert Hofmann ingested at least 75 micrograms.[several more people put their hands down]And then again, on that date in 1943, Albert Hofmann ingested at least 100 micrograms.[more people put their hands down]On that same date, Albert Hofmann ingested 150 micrograms.[only a few people still have their hands still up]Well I think I've already proved the point. I think there's a consensus that Albert Hofmann must have ingested at least 50 to 75 micrograms, and there are people in here who believe he must have ingested 100 or 150 micrograms. Now we've estimated, with this educated database, approximately how much LSD he must have accidentally gotten inside himself.Now, we'll do the same thing again. In April 1943, after his accidental ingestion, how many people believe that Albert Hofmann would have experienced the effects of LSD for at least 10 hours, based on that dose?[Several people put their hands up]Now if we believe he took LSD, and if we believe he took 50 to 75 micrograms -- that's the context -- how many people believe the effects should have lasted at least 8 hours. [many more hands go up] How many believe the effects would have lasted at least 6 hours? [more hands go up] How believe the effects would have lasted at least four hours? [nearly all hands are up at this point]Now, how many people believe that the effects of a 50-75 microgram dose of LSD would only have lasted? [nearly all hands go down]Well now, that was a conundrum for me. I read that and I thought, "gee I'm a scientist, and this doesn't make sense with what I know." And for most of you, I think, that doesn't make sense either. So, the question: how can we formulate a hypothesis consistent with this observation? We need to consider a few things.We know that Albert originally synthesized LSD in 1938 as part of an ambitious program to make a number of lysergamides. LSD-25 was only the 25th in the series. I actually don't know how many of those compounds he made, but let's assume he only made 30. So we had up to 30 in the series. He may have made many more actually, but at least say 30. And they were all tested; he sent the pharmacology department LSD-25, 24, 23... and so forth. They then say, "LSD-25: not interesting." The assays of that day really didn't provide much information; they were very unsophisticated. But five years later, Albert has a hunch that the pharmacology department missed something on this 25th in the series.Now that's kind of peculiar. I'm familiar with the drug industry, and I've actually started a small company myself. Imagine you're a musician, and you've created this musical piece. It's really wonderful; it's one of the best pieces you've ever written; you play it for people, they think it's great. And this one artist comes down. He's very creative but he has no musical talent at all, really tone deaf, he listens to your music and he says, "Man that sucks. You missed something. There's something missing." Now you as a musician are probably going to have some sort of a gut reaction to that. And even though the pharmacologist at Sandoz was probably a friend of Albert's, can you imagine this chemist coming down the hall and saying, "You know, I made this compound five years ago, out of this whole series, and there's this one compound, LSD-25, that you said was uninteresting... but you must have missed something. I just have this 'peculiar presentiment,' this strange hunch that you missed something." You're going to look at Albert and say, "You know, really, I'm an expert in pharmacology Albert. We tested it very well."The Germans and the Swiss are very precise chemists, and pharmacologists, and scientists. There wouldn't have been any question about this being somehow mis-analyzed the first time.This is another interesting point. Why the 25th? We know that only the 25th in the series was active. Any other compound that he made -- and I've made many of them, we've tested many of them -- none of the others approach LSD, either in its sophistication or in its potency. Only the 25th. And this is unusual. In pharmacology often you have a regular series. If we think of things like DOB, and DOI, there's a kind of regular progression. They all fit into a kind of subgenus. And LSD doesn't. We don't call the other members of the series Albert made as LSD something or other, but if we had LSD-23, 24 and 26, they would all be one-tenth the activity of LSD-25. Peculiar presentiment indeed!As I've said, Swiss and German chemists have a reputation -- today and back then -- for being absolutely meticulous. If we had gone into Albert's lab at Sandoz in 1943, we would probably have found everything in its place, organized in an obsessively neat manner. No dirty glassware, no trash on the floor, meticulous. How in the world did a meticulous Swiss chemist get 50 to 75 micrograms or more of LSD into his body? We don't know.Another fact: I've made LSD in my lab on many occasions for research purposes, possibly in not so meticulous a manner as Albert Hofmann. Nothing ever happened. I had several graduate students who made LSD as an intermediate for projects. No accidental ingestion of LSD ever occurred. A technician in my lab makes it routinely because we use it as a drug to train our rats. He's learned by experience that he never gets high, nothing ever happens. And yesterday I was talking to Nick Sand, and Nick said, "I made a solution of LSD in DMSO…" -- DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide) is a chemical that greatly enhances absorption of other chemicals through the skin -- he says, "…I painted it on my skin. Nothing happened." A concentrated solution and nothing happened! How did this very meticulous Swiss chemist get the LSD into his body? I don't know.The other fact we need to think about is when Albert was a child, he had a spontaneous mystical experience. Now depending on whether you're a psychologist or a psychiatrist or whatever, we could say that Albert had a predisposition to altered states of consciousness.So what facts do we know? I'm going to formulate a hypothesis. He took a dose that by your consensus should have lasted certainly more than two hours, but it only lasted two hours. He was a meticulous chemist -- a Swiss chemist. Anyone I know who's worked with LSD -- and Nick Sand painted a solution of it on his arm -- didn't get high. This doesn't make sense. And what is this peculiar presentiment? Why the 25th in the series? Inexplicable! And, he was predisposed to altered states of consciousness.The only hypothesis I can come up with that's consistent with all of these facts is that on April 16, 1943, Albert Hofmann did not get LSD in his body at all. He had a spontaneous mystical experience!Now if I were working in the lab with a new chemical, and I started having kaleidoscopic visions of wonderful colors and patterns, my first thought wouldn't be that I was having a spontaneous experience. My first thought would be, "What was that new chemical I was working with? I need to tell Sasha about it." [laughter]I think that's what happened, that's the hypothesis. We can't test that hypothesis, but when I saw Albert in Basel a couple years ago, I presented that particular hypothesis to him and said, "What do you think?" He said, "It's entirely possible." So, that's our little experiment, and I think most of you really didn't think seriously about the discovery of LSD, but it puts a different light on it.Now one aside to that we could then bring up is this. If the force that caused him to have this peculiar presentiment -- and very peculiar it is -- is the same force that induced him to have this mystical experience, which caused him to focus on this chemical, we can hope it might happen again.I can't tell you all the things I do but let me just quickly give you an overview of what a hard scientist so-to-speak does, a reductionist scientist.I look at how psychedelics affect brain chemistry. We make molecules. We make modified LSD analogues, we have a computer model of the serotonin receptor that's in the brain that we think is a target of these, computer generated that we discovered. We simulate the docking of these molecules to the receptor. We try to understand what are the amino acids in the receptor that interact with the different parts of the molecule. Then we look further in, we say when the molecule docks to the receptor, changes occur in the intercellular biochemistry. We look at the changes, how do those occur. My son who is a PhD in molecular biology doing neuropharmacology work at Vanderbilt has then looked even further and said what does LSD do to genetic regulation. He uses micro-array analysis to look at the gene expression changes following LSD in rats, and has seen changes in expression of 80 different genes. And then we have rat behavior where the rats tell us, "I think you gave me LSD" or "I don't think you gave me LSD." So we start from the design of the molecule, using computers, we synthesize the molecules, we then dock them in the receptor. We're mutating the receptor to change the amino acids so we can see how the complementary amino acids in the receptor modify the interaction with the drug. Then we look at the signaling in the receptor, what signaling pathways are turned on. And then ultimately to genetic regulation, where do protein expression changes occur.We're looking at all the basic science -- preclinical stuff. I didn't have an MD degree so I couldn't do clinical research. This was sort of disturbing to me, but to get around it I founded the Heffter Research Institute, and they're doing all the clinical work. We're studying psilocybin -- in Zürich we have a clinical facility over there, with Franz Vollenweider. Most people know about the University of Arizona psilocybin study in OCD. Most people know about Charlie Grob's psilocybin study in terminal patients at UCLA. Those are all projects funded by the Heffter Institute.So, we've translated everything from the basic science on into the clinical. I don't know if we can do a whole lot more. I'm doing as much as I can. We're not doing research with LSD, but I believe within a framework of 5 to 10 years, if we continue on and are successful with our psilocybin research, it will be possible to get protocols approved in the United States. We might start in Europe first but I think it will be possible to reinitiate clinical studies with LSD. | {
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The government will ask the United States to review its latest anti-dumping measure against Indonesian biodiesel, according to Trade Minister Enggartiasto Lukita.
“Such allegations [that Indonesian biodiesel production is subsidized] have been raised before and we can prove that there’s no subsidy involved. We’ll pass the request to the US for a review immediately after talking to producers,” he told reporters on Wednesday.
The US Department of Commerce (DOC) announced Tuesday its preliminary anti-dumping determination on biodiesel from Indonesia and Argentina.
Its preliminary investigation claims that Wilmar International Ltd. has benefitted from a 41.06 percent subsidy from the government, while PT Musim Mas received a 44.92 percent subsidy and all other local producers 44.92 percent.
Indonesian producers would, therefore, be required to pay a fee to US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) based on those preliminary rates.
Petitions against Indonesian and Argentinian biodiesel were filed last March and the US government has been investigating the case.
Should the claims be proven correct, an order for anti-dumping measures will be issued on Dec. 29 this year. (bbn) | {
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Nicklas Bendtner blev angiveligt anholdt natten til søndag for vold efter en episode med en taxachauffør i København.
Han er siden blevet løsladt, men er nu blevet sigtet for vold.
Det erfarer Ekstra Bladet, der skriver, at han er blevet sigtet efter den milde voldsparagraf 244.
Dantaxis kommunikationschef, Rasmus Krochin, bekræfter over for BT, at der har været et voldsomt overfald, og at chaufføren har brækket kæben.
- Jeg kan bekræfte, at der har været et alvorligt overfald på en af vores chauffører i nat. Chaufføren ligger på operationsbordet i øjeblikket med en brækket kæbe. Det blev vores direktør orienteret om i morges, fortæller han.
Krochin bekræfter samtidig, at gerningsmanden er Nicklas Bendtner, og at han er blevet anmeldt.
Bendtner er ikke en del af den landsholdstrup, Åge Hareide har udtaget til Nations League-opgøret mod Wales søndag aften. | {
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SMALL BUT TOUGH [+]Enlarge
If batteries had larger energy storage capacities, portable electronics and electric vehicles would spend less time tethered to electrical outlets. However, to make fast-charging, high-storage batteries, researchers need new electrode materials that don’t degrade during use. Now a team has developed a process for making tin-carbon composites to produce battery electrodes that charge up quickly and don’t break over time (Nano Lett., DOI: 10.1021/nl303823k).
The anodes in today’s lithium-ion batteries consist of graphite. To improve the batteries’ storage capacity, researchers are looking to other elements including tin. In theory, a battery with a pure tin anode would store over 2.5 times as much energy as one with a graphite anode does. But there is a downside to tin: When a tin anode reacts with lithium in a battery, its volume triples. The volume change can crack the material and destroy the battery.
Researchers have tried to reduce the strain from the expansion by making composite anodes that mix carbon with nanostructured tin. “The smaller the tin particles, the smaller the strain,” says Chunsheng Wang, a chemical engineer at the University of Maryland, College Park. Carbon provides mechanical support and prevents the tin particles from clumping together.
However, researchers have had difficulty making tin nanoparticles of reliable dimensions within these composites. The melting point of tin—about 232 °C—is well below the reaction temperature for making the carbon composite. So the tin particles often melt and clump together, increasing strain during the anode’s use.
To make nanoparticles that wouldn’t clump, Wang collaborated with University of Maryland mechanical engineer Michael R. Zachariah on a method called aerosol spray pyrolysis. The process involves rapid heating and cooling of droplets of carbon and tin reactants.
The Maryland team starts with an ethanol solution of tin chloride and the polymer polyvinylpyrrolidone, which acts as the carbon source. They aerosolize the solution and rapidly heat the droplets to 900 °C. At this temperature, the tin chloride decomposes and the polymer degrades into elemental carbon. The two elements form a powder of spherical carbon particles, each 200 to 500 nm in diameter, riddled with 10-nm-diameter tin spheres. The transformation takes less than a second, and then the powder quickly cools to room temperature.
Though the reaction happens well above tin’s melting temperature, the tin nanoparticles don’t have time to move through the carbon and form clumps. Doing the chemistry in droplets is much faster than in beakers of reactants, which require long times to heat and cool, says Zachariah.
The team built a test battery with a tin-carbon anode made from the composite powder and a cathode made of lithium. The battery maintained its storage capacity after charging and draining 220 times. The battery could charge and drain about 20 times in an hour—faster than a typical cell phone battery.
Most important, says Yuegang Zhang, a materials scientist who develops battery materials at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was that the tin-carbon composite’s nanostructure remained stable after these cycles. Such stability could lead to a long battery lifetime, he adds. | {
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UPDATED from 2:23 PM with Univision statement: He said last week that he would go after them in the courts and today the GOP Presidential candidate did just that. Donald Trump slammed Univision Tuesday with an over $500 million lawsuit over the Spanish-language network ending their plans on June 25 to show the July 12 Miss USA pageant. Univision said that the severing of ties was because of remarks Trump made in May about “rapists” immigrants flooding into America. Filed in NY Supreme Court, today’s breach of contract and defamation complaint from Trump and the Miss Universe Organization bluntly demands “an order awarding damages in favor of Mr. Trump for defamation against Defendants, jointly and severally, in an amount to be determined at trial, but believed to be in excess of $500 million, together with interest.” (read it here)
In response, Univision took a swing right back at the real estate billionaire’s lawsuit and previous remarks about immigrants. “We just reviewed Mr. Trump’s complaint for the first time, and it is both factually false and legally ridiculous,” said the network in a statement Tuesday afternoon. “We will not only vigorously defend the case, but will continue to fight against Mr. Trump’s ongoing efforts to run away from the derogatory comments he made on June 16th about Mexican immigrants. Our decision to end our business relationship with Mr. Trump was influenced solely by our responsibility to speak up for the community we serve.”
HIllary CLinton More
Waving the First Amendment, Trump took this whole thing to a new level Tuesday by roping in fellow White House contender Hillary Clinton and her supporters as the real dark hand behind the cancellation of Miss USA. “While Univision has claimed in the media that its decision to cut ties with MUO came in response to certain comments by Mr. Trump during a June 16, 2015 campaign speech announcing his candidacy for President of the United States, the decision was, in reality, a thinly veiled attempt by Univision, a privately held company principally owned by longtime Clinton Foundation donor and current Hillary Clinton fundraiser, Haim Saban, to suppress Mr. Trump’s freedom of speech under the First Amendment as he begins to campaign for the nation’s presidency and, in recent weeks, has dramatically risen in the polls while expressing critical views of Mrs. Clinton,” says the complaint.
View photos univision-logo-2015-square More
The naming names lawsuit also claims that Univision execs like Randy Falco were “engaging in behind the scenes lobbying of their former colleagues and, upon information and belief, colluded with executives at NBC to permanently sever its contractual and business relationship with Plaintiffs by, among other things, refusing to broadcast the Miss USA, Miss Teen USA and Miss Universe pageants in express violation of NBC’s contractual obligations.” NBC announced on Monday that it would be ending its relationship with the former Celebrity Apprentice host and won’t be showing the pageants this year. Trump has said he will take NBC to court too so this may just be the first of many legal actions coming. Of note is that Trump owes 49% of the Miss Universe Organization while NBC Pageants is his partner. NBC Pageants is not named as a defendant or plaintiff is today’s action – but that could change, sources tell me.
Laying out a bit of timeline, Tuesday’s dense complaint states that Univision tried to terminate the January 15, 2015 agreement to show the simulcast of the pageant with a $13.5 million license fee payout. The offer came from “a high ranking executive at Univision” last Thursday, before the network announced it was cutting ties with Trump.”Unfortunately, that amount pales in comparison to the total amount Univision will ultimately have to pay,” says Monday’s lawsuit, which alleges that Univision went public with its decision after their offer was rejected. | {
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Yours for £200,000: Nuclear bunker built for £30 MILLION in 1990 with its own hospital, workshop commercial kitchen and BBC recording studio goes on the market
Bunker on Cultybraggan Camp base, west of Dundee, Scotland, was designed to protect 150 people from nuclear war
It includes its own hospital and kitchen among the 49 rooms spread across two levels underground
It also features a BBC recording studio which would have been used to contact survivors on the outside
A nuclear bunker which cost the Government more than £30million to build and comes complete with a BBC recording studio is expected to sell for just £200,000.
The vast Cold War centre was built in 1990 on a former POW camp which once housed Nazi Rudolf Hess. It featured a built-in hospital, workshop, canteen, commercial kitchen and accommodation for 150.
But fortunately it was never needed and was sold off by the Ministry of Defence in 2007. It is now back on the market and is expected to sell for around £200,000 when it is auctioned off later this month.
Scroll down for video
This former nuclear bunker just west of Dundee in Scotland has gone on sale for £200,000 and features 26,000sqft of accommodation
The hide-away has 49 rooms and was designed to house 150 people, but is in need of some tender loving care after a few decades without use
In order to help people survive the fallout from an atomic blast, the bunker is fitted with air filters, backup generators and water storage tanks
For slightly more than the average price of a British home, a survivalist would get around 26,000sq/ft of accommodation. Spread over two levels, there are 49 rooms with 27 of these on the top floor.
Lower down would have been the living quarters, which would have held 150 people along with the hospital. There are also an impressive array of life support systems, including air filtration plants, backup generators and water storage tanks.
And it boasts a BBC recording studio, which was installed so the government of the day could speak to the public in the event of a nuclear war. The property is located on the Historic Cultybraggan Camp, 28 miles west of Dundee in Scotland.
The bunker was fitted out to allow 150 officials to outlast nuclear warfare buried deep underground where radiation was less likely to affect them
While the property may make a poor home, it could easily be used for data storage as the design protects it from solar flares which can knock out sensitive computing equipment
The enormous bunker was supposed to be a regional survival hub and is split over two levels with 27 rooms on the top floor alone
Rudolf Hess, Hitler's number two, was held at the camp for one night in 1941 following his failed peace trip to Scotland. Cultybraggan nuclear bunker will be auctioned off on March 27 in Edinburgh by Future Property Auctions.
Darryl Cormack, head of corporate sales at the auction house, said: 'It is not the first bunker I have come across but it is pretty unusual. The most interesting thing is the BBC room, which would have been used to control what's aired post nuclear war.
The site was designed to provide shelter in the event of a nuclear disaster and even includes a BBC recording studio which would have been used to communicate with survivors
The cavernous interior of the bunker provides a chilling insight into what life might have been like for survivors of nuclear warfare as they cowered underground
'You'd be able to get on the radio and reassure the public there was still a government. I expect there to be a great deal of interest from people who like history but also for commercial reasons.
'It is ideal for data storage because sun flares can't penetrate the bunker. It's not small, it was a regional bunker and is massive and as it was one of the last built it is one of the most technologically advanced.'
| {
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A woman who tracked down her father after 30 years discovered they had been drinking at the same local pub.
Fifi Giannitto wrote to John Duncan after carrying out research into the identity of her father.
It turned out they drink at the same pub in Stone, Staffordshire.
John Duncan says he had not been told Fifi's mother, who he had been in a relationship with in the 1980s, had had his baby. | {
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While the settlement of the False Claims Act case against Lance Armstrong has generated a press release, a quick online search didn’t produce a copy of the actual agreement. So I filed a Freedom of Information Act request and the next day the Department of Justice provided me a copy of the Lance Armstrong settlement agreement. Thank you, Team DOJ! Below is my take on that agreement and what it tells us about the case.
The settlement amount
The settlement agreement provides that Lance Armstrong will pay $5 million to the Government and $1.65 million to the relator Floyd Landis. To put this in context, the Postal Service had paid about $40 million to sponsor Team Postal. Trebling that amount, and throwing in civil penalties and investigative costs, bumps up potential damages to well over $100 million. The settlement amount was thus less than 7 cents on the dollar.
Damages was always the Government’s weakness – because there weren’t any. This should have been apparent at the outset from the contemporaneous USPS reports on how much publicity and new revenue the Team Postal sponsorship had generated. These reports were poppycock, of course, but they still posed insurmountable problems for the Government’s case.
The USPS-generated reports on the value of the Team Postal sponsorship came in response to criticism over the deal. The Postal Service is often wrongly criticized for anything it spends on advertising. In my view, it should be spending a lot more, especially to defend the remains of First Class Mail. But these critics had a point. Why spend tens of millions of dollars on an event that takes place on foreign soil, and that most Americans have never seen and don’t care about? And how will promoting the U.S. Postal Service in foreign countries generate more U.S. Mail?
To counter these criticisms, USPS needed to show that the six-year agreement made economic sense, so it generated report after report calculating the value it received. Armstrong’s attorneys say these reports show USPS earned over $163 million in quantifiable benefits from the sponsorship – more than four times what USPS spent on it. These reports were backed by statements from high level USPS officials attesting to the great deal it had made. Armstrong’s summary judgment motion cited some of these beauties, including:
“I can assure you that the value of the brand advertising we receive from the USPS Pro-Cycling Team more than offsets the cost of the sponsorship.”
“The sponsorship has provided a substantial return-on-investment and has been a real bargain.”
“While postal officials decline to say how much they pay, spokesman Joyce Carrier said the free advertising they received ‘is way more than we ever spent’ to sponsor it. ‘Anyone who was looking at it on a return from investment, and everybody does . . . they think it’s pretty darn good.’”
How could the Government get past all of these contemporaneous statements from top USPS officials on the tremendous value USPS obtained from the sponsorship contract? And while Lance Armstrong later admitted to rampant doping during the Team Postal years, how did this revelation negate all of these previous economic benefits?
Yes, Lance Armstrong violated the no-doping clause of the USPS sponsorship agreement. But Armstrong somewhat successfully concealed the truth for a long time, thus allowing the Postal Service to get the benefit of the bargain. If Armstrong had admitted to doping when the contract was in effect, maybe there would have been some damages, but his success at hiding the truth prevented that from happening. While that may be hard to swallow, the False Claims Act was not designed to mete out just desserts for all bad acts related to a government contract.
The round dollar figure
Next, let’s analyze the nice round $5,000,000 settlement figure itself. Having represented clients in various Government fraud investigations, most involving the Postal Service, I can tell you that the Government’s standard opening position is that it will only settle at twice the amount of actual damages. The Government prefers talking about damages, not entitlement, and its settlement offer is normally some specific dollar amount, multiplied by two.
The perfectly round number of the $5 million settlement shows it was not arrived at by an attempt to measure actual damages and multiplying by two. It is a number based on perceived litigation risk by both sides. From the Government’s side, the question was how much it could get from Armstrong without going to trial. Given its weakness on damages, the Government was staring at the possibility of getting only statutory penalties, which didn’t amount to much and would not have justified its pursuit of the case. From Armstrong’s side, the question was how much was finality worth? Even though the Government was unlikely to recover significant damages, there is no telling what a jury would do. Moreover, statutory penalties were likely, and an appeal would be required if the damages issue went the wrong way. Armstrong was looking at the possibility of spending millions more on professional fees with no assurance he would prevail.
The $1.65 million settlement with the Relator tells a different story. In context, this amount is not a perfectly round number – one hardly picks $1.65 million out of thin air. Instead, it is an approximation or discount on Relator’s attorney fees and expenses, likely based on actual numbers that were presented to Armstrong.
The payment terms
Typically, when the settlement amount is in this range and the defendant can afford it, the Government demands full or substantial payment upon agreement or soon afterwards, often within 10 days of signing. The settlement’s payment terms are lenient. Armstrong’s first payment was due 30 days after signing and was only $75,000; his second payment, due in 90 days, was $677,000. Armstrong then had 180 days to make the next payment of $1,879,000. No further payment was due until one year after signing, when Armstrong owed a balloon payment of $2,368,000. Nice payment terms, if you can get them.
Armstrong had similarly leisurely terms to pay the Relator. The first payment was due in 30 days and was only $25,000. The next payments were $223,000 in 90 days; $620,000 in 180 days; and the final $782,000 within one year. [Rounded payment numbers used above.]
The settlement agreement’s layaway plan thus gives Armstrong plenty of time to sell “the Texas Collateral,” the proceeds of which he presumably intends to use to pay the settlement. Armstrong granted the Government and the Relator a lien on that property until it is sold. He also signed a Consent Judgment decree that can be filed against him should he default on his payment obligations.
Relator’s share
Now let’s look at the Relator’s share of the Government’s $5 million bounty. Since the Government intervened in the case, the Relator’s share could have been anywhere between 15 and 25 percent. The settlement agreement grants Relator a 22 percent share, which works out to $1.1 million. The Department of Justice has taken the positon that a 15 percent share is appropriate for a case that settled early (before trial or discovery) and a 25 percent share is reserved for fully litigated cases in which the relator’s contribution is substantial. All things considered, 22 percent was a healthy reward for the Relator in this case. One wonders whether the Government would have sought a lower Relator’s share if the recovery from Armstrong had been greater.
FCA claims with no real damages
I’ve been practicing long enough to remember when False Claims Act cases involved actual falsehoods, like doctored invoices and fake signatures. Rare is the case today where the Government alleges an affirmative falsehood by the contractor. Instead, modern day FCA cases involving government contracts are normally about a contract interpretation or breach of contract. Not only are these cases really contract disputes at heart, but in many of them, the contractor’s position is the most reasonable one. Evolving FCA standards have resulted in the fraudification of contract disputes.
The Armstrong case goes one step beyond fraudification to cases where the Government is not even monetarily harmed by the defendant’s bad actions. There have been other FCA cases where the Government has suffered no or minimal damages from an alleged false claim. For example, in U.S. ex rel. Wall v. Circle C Constr., LLC, 813 F.3d 616 (6th Cir. 2016), the Government sought $1.6 million (after trebling) for a relatively minor violation of the Davis Bacon Act. The Court found that the Government’s actual damages were only $9,900 and later held that the Government must pay the defendant’s attorney fees under 28 U.S.C. § 2412(d)(1)(D) because the Government’s demands were excessive.
With the teachings of the Circle C case, and the settlement of the Armstrong case after a 10 year slog, let’s hope the Government will be more reluctant to intervene in – and maybe even move to dismiss – future qui tam FCA cases where there are no real damages. | {
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PLEASE NOTE: Do NOT use this comic, or any of this comic's pages, for any fandubs, translations, or other forms of work such as videos. NO EXCEPTIONS.Only reviews / review videos are permitted, with clear information that the comic is created by Matthew Critchfield, and that FNAF is created and owned by Scott Cawthon.Yay comics!Hope you guys enjoy this special SURPRISE new page of FNAF4 House Party! Stay tooned!Also, HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY! Say a sweet prayer of thanks for those great folks that fought and sacrificed so much for our freedoms.Let me know what you think in the comments below, and hey, if you're new, consider favoriting and giving my gallery a watch! New awesomeness coming soon!Artwork and Comic by Matthew CritchfieldFNAF owned by Scott Cawthon, please support the official releases!Read the previous comic in the story here: FNAF4 Comic - House Party - Page 69 - 5-26-17 Read the next comic in the story here: FNAF4 Comic - House Party - Page 71 - 5-30-17 PS: If you haven't, check out the NEWEST, special Easter teaser for the NEXT COMIC ADVENTURE coming to this gallery in 2017, right here! | {
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Other Fallout Art:Other Retro Futurism:I love pin ups, I love Fallout, so... the girls of Vault Tec.-------------Many of the pieces from this gallery are available as prints through ghostfire.net or specifically at the ghostfire market | {
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Денисов Виталий Геннадьевич
Амплуа: защитник
Дата рождения: 23 февраля 1987 год (3 года), Ташкент
Рост: 178 см, вес: 75 кг
Предыдущий клуб: «Рубин»
Виталий Денисов будет выступать за сине-голубых под номером «29».
Начал заниматься футболом в ДЮСШ «Пахтакора», после чего отправился в московскую «Академику». В 2003 году перешел в московский ЦСКА, в составе которого стал обладателем Кубка УЕФА и Кубка России. Спустя три года Денисов перешел в нижегородский «Спартак» на правах аренды, а уже в следующем сезоне права на футболиста выкупил украинский «Днепр». В 2013 году Виталий перебрался в «Локомотив» с которым становился чемпионом страны, трижды выигрывал Кубок России. Выступал за «Крылья Советов» и «Рубин».
С 2006 года Виталий Денисов играет за сборную Узбекистана и провел в ее составе 72 матча.
— Мне приятно присоединиться к клубу с большой историей. У команды есть стремление достичь результата и у меня это желание, конечно, тоже присутствует. В городе настоящая футбольная атмосфера благодаря новому стадиону, очень подкупает внимание и любовь болельщиков! Всегда есть что доказывать и я готов проявлять себя, выкладываться на поле, чтобы помогать команде.
Контракт рассчитан до конца сезона.
#ЗаРотор | {
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It takes great deal of courageous to talk about one’s experience of abuse in public. It takes much more to do it as an effort to get legislation passed to assist other victims of abuse. It takes something unheard of to do it two years in a row, only to see the bill ignored and tossed aside. This is what C.T. Wilson faced in Maryland:
For the second year in a row, he put it all out there: the shame, the fear, the self-loathing, the pain, the dark details of his horrific, repeated rape. An Army veteran and attorney, Maryland Del. C.T. Wilson (D-Charles) stood before his colleagues in Annapolis, confessed that he “really, really” didn’t want to be there and told them why he doesn’t sleep much at night. Why he hoped his children would never be boys. Why he knows he is “a monster on the inside.” And for the second year in a row, lawmakers in the state legislature put all that in a drawer. And closed it. “It’s usually the case when we tell our stories,” Wilson said. “Nobody wants to hear this. And we want to be heard.” Wilson wants his fellow delegates to understand what the adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse endure. And what recourse they have years and years later. And for two years, he has sponsored legislation aimed at helping them. As it stands, a criminal case against an abuser can be pursued anytime, no matter how long ago the abuse happened. But a civil case — the kind of action that can get a patient’s treatment paid for — has a statute of limitations. Victims have seven years once they reach adulthood to file a civil suit against a molester or a school, a team or a church that enabled that abuser. And unless a victim comes to terms with the abuse, recognizes it, fights through it and files a civil suit before age 25, no dice. And that’s a big problem. Because many victims of childhood sexual abuse repress the memories in order to survive. Some even kill themselves.
Since Maryland removed the statute of limitations on the criminal cases, I see no reason why this should not apply to civil cases. As Wilson notes, many victims do not report their experiences until years after the abuse happened. In those instances, they will begin addressing whatever issues developed as a result of the abuse. It makes sense to allow them to file a suit for damages as this would be the point where the damages would be most apparent.
But Md. House Bill 1215 and its counterpart, Senate Bill 69, would give victims 20 years to file their suits once they reach adulthood. So, you’d have to decide to confront your abuser by the time you turn 38. Like Wilson — 38. A handful of other states, including Delaware, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, have extended or have no statutes of limitation.
What’s the holdup in Maryland?
Take a moment before reading to see if you can guess who has helped block the bill. I will give you a hint: it is a very old, very powerful organization with a history of repeatedly covering up sexual abuse against children:
Lobbyists representing the Catholic Church — which for years has been at the center of a global scandal over priests sexually abusing children — have helped block the bill. Passing the legislation is “unwarranted and unjust,” the Maryland Catholic Conference wrote in testimony submitted last month against the bill. Mostly, the church said, the bill unfairly targets it. “Private, religious and non-profit organizations would face dramatically greater risks of potentially devastating civil claims,” according to the testimony. Quoting California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) when he vetoed a bill that would have suspended the statute of limitations for civil suits in child sexual assault cases, the testimony continued: “There comes a time when an individual or an organization should be secure in the reasonable expectation that past acts are indeed in the past and not subject to further lawsuits.” The opposition matters. “Maryland is a Catholic state, you know,” said Del. Susan K. McComas (R-Harford). House Judiciary Committee Chairman Joseph F. Vallario Jr. (D-Prince George’s) has refused to put the bill up for a vote. He did not respond to my request for comment.
It is always nice to see that the Catholic Church has its concerns properly ordered. It is better to be concerned about “potentially devastating civil claims” than the fact that hundreds of thousands of children faced abuse at the hands of various Church officials, most of whom will go unpunished. Granted, the Church is in a unique position because they can be and have previously been held liable for the abuse committed by their officials. Given the scale of the abuse and the extent of the cover-up, it is very likely that they could face numerous lawsuits even if the alleged perpetrators are dead.
That does not explain all the refusal to support the bills. It also does not explain this kind of exchange:
But [Susuan] McComas, who said she “may” support the bill if it were to come up for a vote, is skeptical that it would do any good. “Money isn’t going to cleanse any souls,” McComas said. She said that was what she meant when she emailed John Plaschke, 50, a University of Maryland biotech researcher and a sexual assault survivor. He had written to McComas urging her to support the bill. This is what she told him in the email: Dear John: I hope that you have sought treatment and have moved beyond the abuse. It is very much about your personal resilience to live and thrive. The best revenge is to be well and be happy. I think that many of the Jews that survived the holocaust are wonderful role models of courage and survival. That response made the rounds on social media. And McComas got slammed by survivors furious with her response. “I meant it in a nice way,” McComas said.
I am sure she did. It does not, however, make her comment any less insensitive. The purpose of the money is not to “cleanse any souls”. Its purpose is to provide people with a means of affording professional support. Therapy is not cheap, and neither is the medication many people need in order to function. This is not to say that every single case needs to result in monetary compensation. Yet it also does not mean that we should ignore instances where a person has a legal basis to file a lawsuit. We also should not ignore why people would want professional help:
Wilson said he struggles every day to move forward. “I slept about an hour and a half last night,” he said. “I know, if I go sleep, I’m not going to dream. I’m going to remember.”
That happens to many victims of abuse, regardless of their age. During the abuse, their dreams may have been a safe space. After the abuse, particularly if the person is dealing with the affects of the abuse on a frequent basis, their dreams become pseudo memories, forcing them to relive horrible situations every time they sleep. I agree that money will not make this magically go away, however, it could provide people with a way of getting help so that their subconscious does not run wild when they sleep.
It is impressive to see the reasons people concoct to refuse to the most basic suppport. If they had issues with the potential liability the bills could cause, the legislature could alter the language of the bills rather toss them out. They could add any number of stipulations, including a simple one like extending the statute of limitations only in cases that went through criminal proceedings. Instead, the lawmakers seem more concerned with protecting an institution with history of ignoring child rape rather than helping child rape victims. | {
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Another remake of an old picture, with an appropriately updated title! This time for my tribute to all of the major bosses of the Mario universe, reloaded for 2011. Of course, since almost 6 years have passed since the original, there's a few additions, from new characters to old ones that were omitted in the original. Can you name all these characters? And better yet, can you tell from WHAT game each of them come from?Paint Tool SAI, about 30 hours. All characters above belong to Nintendo! See the original below: | {
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Cory and Isaac return to discuss the psychological probing and space pirate moon chases of James Gray's 'Ad Astra.' Along the way, they explore the film's place in the modern science fiction genre — beside 'Gravity,' 'The Martian,' and more. | {
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ALABASTER – A woman who is registered to vote in Alabaster recently claimed that she was made to supply her birth certificate in order to vote at her polling place, Siluria Baptist Church, during the Alabama U.S. Senate special election on Tuesday, Dec. 12.
In a Twitter thread she wrote, 29-year-old Brittany Melton said she drove to Alabaster from her current residence to be told by poll workers that she and others were marked as inactive.
“I have voted at the same place all my life. Even when I’ve lived elsewhere, I’ve driven home. Or twice, I’ve done absentee. We literally just had an election that I voted in. Drove home and everything,” Melton wrote on Twitter. “But because this election is high stakes, suddenly I, and tons of others in my small town, were marked as inactive.”
Melton said she and other inactive voters were sent to a different table where she was given the option to cast a provisional vote. Provisional votes will be counted on Tuesday, Dec. 19.
“If you don’t remember your birth country, you can’t fill out the form. Sucks for you if you were born out of state like me. But ya girl peeped game so she brought her birth certificate like a bawse,” Melton tweeted.
As a black woman, Melton suggested that her race may have been a factor in the situation.
“Y’all, they literally tried to play me like a punk. Imagine all the normal people who don’t travel with additional ID,” Melton continued. “For those who have asked, you are not allowed to have a phone out once you walk inside. That’s been a rule for years now. While some more privileged members of society may take the risk, I’m not finna have black behind escorted out.”
It is unclear which candidate Melton voted for or where she currently resides. As of noon on Thursday, Dec. 14, multiple messages seeking additional comments were left with Melton and received no reply.
According to Lisa Morgan with the Shelby County Courthouse, the clerk’s office has not heard of any situations involving voter suppression.
To read Melton’s full thread on Twitter, visit https://twitter.com/xobritdear/status/940607836912013317. | {
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“We have people who are legitimate concerns who happen to be NFL players. They still live in the community. They have a right to protest. That’s (Smiley's) right. Just like the NFL players who take their knee that’s their right. He has the right to do what he is doing,” Jaguars fan Calvin Sinclair said. | {
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More than 1,000 Rohingya Muslims might have been killed in a Myanmar army crackdown, according to two senior United Nations officials dealing with refugees fleeing the violence, suggesting the death toll is far greater than previously reported.
The officials, from two separate UN agencies working in Bangladesh, where nearly 70,000 Rohingya have fled in recent months, said they were concerned the outside world had not fully grasped the severity of the crisis unfolding in Myanmar’s Rakhine state.
“The talk until now has been of hundreds of deaths. This is probably an underestimation – we could be looking at thousands,” said one of the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity. Both officials, in separate interviews, cited the weight of testimony gathered by their agencies from refugees over the past four months in concluding the death toll was likely to have exceeded 1,000.
Myanmar’s presidential spokesman, Zaw Htay, said the latest reports from military commanders were that fewer than 100 people had been killed in a counterinsurgency operation against Rohingya militants who attacked police border posts in October.
Asked about the UN officials’ comments that the dead could number more than 1,000, he said: “Their number is much greater than our figure. We have to check on the ground.”
About 1.1 million Rohingya Muslims live in apartheid-like conditions in north-western Myanmar, where they are denied citizenship. Many in Buddhist-majority Myanmar regard them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
In addition to the information the two UN officials gave Reuters, a report released by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on Friday gave accounts of mass killings and gang rapes by troops in north-western Myanmar in recent months, which it said probably constituted crimes against humanity.
The government led by Aung San Suu Kyi said last week it would investigate the allegations in the report. It has previously denied almost all accusations of killings, rapes and arson.
But mounting evidence of atrocities by the army puts Suu Kyi, who has no control over the armed forces under a constitution written by the previous military government, in a difficult position, Myanmar-based diplomats say.
The Nobel peace prize winner has been criticised in the west for her silence on the issue, undermining the goodwill she built up as a democracy champion under years of junta rule and threatening international support.
Independent verification of what has been happening in Myanmar is extremely difficult because the military has cut off access to north-western Rakhine.
The OHCHR report cited supporting evidence including bullet and knife wounds sustained by refugees and satellite imagery showing destruction of villages.
A second senior UN official, from a different agency in Bangladesh, told Reuters the report described only “the tip of the iceberg”.
The OHCHR report was based on interviews with 220 people, the majority of whom said they knew of people who had been killed or had disappeared.
Reuters also has reviewed a separate, internal UN analysis using a much larger sample size. In this unpublished report, based on interviews with families comprising more than 1,750 refugees, there were 182 reports of killings of people in the interviewee’s home village alone, and 186 reports of people from their village disappearing, accounting for more than 10% in both cases.
The document acknowledges the actual number in both categories was likely lower because interviewees from the same village might have separately described the same incidents.
The UN says 69,000 people have crossed the border since October, so if the proportion reporting people killed or missing among all the refugees was consistent with those in the report the total number would run into the thousands.
The army intensified its offensive in northern Rakhine in mid-November, unleashing what the OHCHR report described as a “calculated policy of terror” after an incident in which several hundred Rohingya attacked an outnumbered group of soldiers, killing an officer.
Plan to move Rohingya to remote island prompts fears of human catastrophe Read more
The OHCHR report details deaths in random attacks, including firing from helicopters and using grenades; targeted killings of imams and teachers, slitting of throats with knives and locking people inside burning houses.
The OHCHR report said the vast majority of the new Rohingya refugees were women and children, raising questions about the fate of the men left behind, UN officials said. “Boys and men between the age of 17 and 45 were particularly targeted, as they are considered to be strong and seen as a potential threat to the army and authorities,” it said, adding that many accounts describe men of that age being rounded up and taken away with their hands tied behind their backs or heads.
Spokesman Zaw Htay said the police and army were doing their jobs in making arrests.
Myanmar authorities have given little information about how many might have been detained, although prison officials told a UN human rights envoy last month they were holding about 450 people. “If you look at the new arrivals – the majority are women – so many of them talk about a killed husband, a slaughtered uncle or a missing brother. Where are all the men?” said the first UN official. | {
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Aid reaches rebel-held area of Sudan for first time in years
Welcome arrival of food and other essentials coincides with talks to end years of fighting. | {
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I couldn’t have asked for a better gift. The pretzels, the notepad, the fancy pens...I love it all!! My SS even had STAFF SGT MILLS sign my book! I feel very lucky to receive such thoughtful gifts. Sending lots of warmth and love to you and your family, thank you and happy holidays! P.S. I will be watching, “I Love You Phillip Morris”, for the first time tonight! | {
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To: To the Honorable Members of the NY State Legislature Regarding Bills A8670 and S6345
From: [Your Name]
Kratom is a safe alternative to pharmaceutical drugs with important medicinal uses and has saved and changed lives.
We respectfully urge and plead you to vote against A8670 and S6345.
Kratom is not an opiate. It is a cousin of the coffee bean and a homeopathic and natural alternative to opioids. Kratom also helps with depression.
As you know, many lives are savagely ruined due to opiate drug abuse. Not only does Kratom naturally relieve even severe pain, it is recognized increasingly as a remedy for opioid withdrawal by individuals who self-treat chronic pain.
Kratom is an invaluable natural medication which allows thousands of people to live normal, productive lives while escaping the clutches of extremely addictive synthetic medications and all of the side effects which come along with them.
If people were to lose access to acquiring this medication in our home state of New York, there is no telling what detrimental effects this will have on their health, and the well-being of their families.
We urge you to please consider the thousands of patients and their families which will be negatively impacted if they are unable to acquire this medication. If people were to lose access to Kratom, their options going forward are to either succumb to debilitating pain which prevents them from performing their jobs, or to resume taking prescribed medications which destroy lives and have awful effects.
Kratom has freed countless people from the very well-known opiate epidemic in this country.
Kratom has saved so many from becoming another tragic statistic. Kratom has changed lives. Please vote against A8670 and S6345.
If you have questions about kratom, please visit http://www.americankratom.org/facts. Thank you for your time and service to the state.
Respectfully Yours,
A Concerned Voter | {
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Thanks for the good work! It would be really nice if in the future we could compare DMD, GDC and LDC (and SDC when it becomes more usable) at asm.dlang.org. (Btw a nice choice of name :) ) I have a couple of questions about the output when looking at a C++[1] program and the same in GDC[2] and DMD[3](I am not very familiar with assembly): 1) Syntax: AFAIU, (_D)main pushes 3 and 4 to the stack and calls (example.)add. Then (example.)add loads them from the stack in two registers and adds them. IIRC, dmd passes parameters in reverse order (of the normal C way) and that's why pushing and loading 3 and 4 from the stack is in reverse order. However why does DMD use hex instead of decimal notation? [I was also a little confused about positive vs negative indexing of bp and the order of src and dst in the arguments to movl, but then I noticed that I am comparing x86 and x86_64, so I managed to answer those questions myself :D ] 2) _Dmain: I also noticed that the output of gdc-4.4 and gdc-4.6 does not include a label for _Dmain (nor the regular C main). Is this a problem of the disassembly, or just how older version of GDC produced code? [1]: http://goo.gl/mUQKiX (permalink at http://gcc.godbolt.org/) [2]: http://goo.gl/CmYbrZ (permalink at http://explore.dgnu.org/) [3]: http://goo.gl/ZHHVuZ (permalink at http://asm.dlang.org/) On Monday, 26 January 2015 at 23:46:24 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote: > Hi, > > It is my pleasure to release a new site onto the community. An Interactive DMD compiler. > > http://asm.dlang.org/ > > Inspired by Matt Godbolt's GCC Explorer[1], and my own hosted version that uses GDC[2]. I was asked by Andrei to fork and make a working protoype that uses DMD. > > All work is hosted on Github[3], and we are planning on moving it to part of the D-Programming-Language repositories. > > Please share, contribute, and destroy! > > Regards > Iain. > > [1]: > [2]: > [3]: Hi,It is my pleasure to release a new site onto the community. An Interactive DMD compiler.Inspired by Matt Godbolt's GCC Explorer[1], and my own hosted version that uses GDC[2]. I was asked by Andrei to fork and make a working protoype that uses DMD.All work is hosted on Github[3], and we are planning on moving it to part of the D-Programming-Language repositories.Please share, contribute, and destroy!RegardsIain.[1]: http://gcc.godbolt.org/ [2]: http://explore.dgnu.org/ [3]: https:// github.com/ ibuclaw/ gcc-explorer/ | {
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Passed in 1920, this law mandates that ships transporting cargo between two points in the United States be domestically flagged, owned, crewed, and built. Intended to bolster the U.S. maritime sector, the Jones Act has instead been a case study in the failures of protectionism. Absent foreign competition, U.S. shipbuilders produce vessels whose price is as much as eight times higher than those built abroad. This disincentive to the purchase of new vessels means we have fewer ships and a fleet that is old and inefficient.
High costs have inevitably followed and, along with them, increased demand for transportation alternatives such as trucking and rail.
The proof is in the numbers. From 1960 to 2014, the amount of freight placed on railroads increased by 48 percent while intercity trucks saw their loads grow by an impressive 217 percent. In sharp contrast, the amount of cargo carried by ships sailing around the coasts during this period decreased by 44 percent. And Great Lakes shipping declined by 43 percent.
Even as Americans have shunned ships for domestic use, however, they appear perfectly willing to employ them to conduct trade with Canada and Mexico. Freed from the Jones Act’s restrictions, coastal ships linking the United States with Canada and Mexico have seen their freight tonnage more than double during the same time period.
Given the decline of domestic shipping, Americans are now left with a transportation system that is hugely dependent on trucks — and on the drivers who operate them. According to the Bureau of Transportation, in 2015, trucks in the United States were responsible for transporting 63.8 percent of total freight shipments. For 2016, the American Trucking Associations places the total even higher, at 71 percent.
In a more rational system, much of the goods carried by truck would travel aboard ships plying the country’s coastal waters. In Europe, for example, 40 percent of domestic freight goes by sea. In the United States the figure is a mere 13 percent. While some of this can perhaps be explained by geographic and other factors, the enormous gulf between the two figures suggests that the Jones Act is a likely culprit.
Beyond helping to solve the country’s driver shortage, the removal of trucks from the highways would have numerous other benefits. Although a mere 4 percent of highway vehicles, trucks are thought to cause 20 percent of traffic, which in turn costs Americans many billions of dollars in lost productivity, wasted gas, and increased pollution. Trucks are also responsible for a disproportionate amount of highway maintenance, with a single 80,000-pound tractor‐trailer said to cause as much damage to pavement as 9,600 cars. Representing 10 percent of vehicle miles traveled, trucks cause over 75 percent of the Federal Highway Administration’s pavement‐maintenance costs.
Crumbling roads, meanwhile, are not only costly to repair — they are estimated to produce, annually, $109 billion in vehicle damage borne by the nation’s drivers. We need a more efficient and less costly transportation system. To help alleviate the shortage of truckers, let’s start by freeing ourselves of the Jones Act and taking advantage of our country’s underutilized coastal waterways. | {
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Author: SovietTenkDestroyer
Hello! I have an article about the BMPT Terminator. This article is going to be posted soon again on Tanks_Encyclopedia (check them out). What tank would you like me to write about in the future? I hope you enjoy it!
BMPT Terminator being showcased at an exposition
Design
The BMPT Terminator (the name “Terminator” is not an official designation, but used by the designers for publicity reasons) is a support combat vehicle which is meant to be used in urban areas. Just by looking at the vehicle itself, it is obviously based on the T-72 without the iconic hemispherical turret, which is exchanged for an unmanned platform with four anti-tank missiles and dual 30mm auto-cannons. The hull has a superstructure attached to it which allows for more space for the crew. Since tanks aren’t really suited for use in urban areas, this is a great alternative because it possesses a rapid enough rate of fire to react to any enemy vehicles in its surroundings and the four missiles are excellent when fighting against heavily armored targets. However, this vehicle is no substitute as it will not perform as your average tank in non-urban areas. While it is still lethal against other targets that aren’t your ordinary tanks, it will not perform and react as well, due to the extreme ranges that tanks battle in. Another advantage that the BMPT has over regular tanks is the elevation and depression. The gun is able to elevate and depress enough to hit at any targets, like building tops and other tall structures.
Development
Before the Terminator, two earlier prototypes were placed in competition for the BMPT requirements. These were the Object 781 and the Object 782, both made by Chelyabinsk and led by V.L. Vershinsky. The main reason these two vehicles were ordered was the performance of IFVs in the Soviet War in Afghanistan. IFVs such as the BMP-1 and the BMD series proved to struggle against infantry when faced with portable anti-tank weapons, such as the well-known RPG series. Another downfall of the BMP-1 was the lack of elevation (the BMP-2 fixed this problem) which allowed the enemy to have a major advantage when engaging it from above. The Object 781 and the Object 782 were based on the T-72B, with major modifications. The Object 781 was dual turreted, each one having a 30mm 2A72 (basically a simpler 30mm 2A42 that is seen on Soviet/Russian helicopters and IFVs) with a PKT 7.62mm machine gun as a companion. It also mounted an anti-tank missile system of an unknown type (most likely the 9M133 Konkurs). Its competitor was the Object 782; it had an actual turret, as opposed to the two unmanned turrets of the Object 781 with a very similar hull. The profile was smaller and it was armed with a 100mm 2A70 low recoil gun and a 30mm 2A72 auto-cannon which were directly connected to each other (similar system and weapons on the BMP-3). It was also armed with two 40mm grenade launchers (one on the hull and the other on the turret). The Object 781 won and was probably considered for mass-production, but the break-up of the Soviet Union ruined that prospect. About five years later, another prototype was made and built by Chelyabinsk; this prototype was based on the T-72AV. This project was built because of tank performance in Chechnya (which was abysmal). The project kept the turret but removed the big 125mm main gun for a pair of 30mm 2A72 auto-cannons and six unguided rockets on each side. It also adds extra structures for the back of the armament to work properly and shield it from flanking fire. This tank was praised by many of the designers and some military officials. Unfortunately, work on the project was canceled because it was being advertised on radio and on television. Everyone who was working on the project was accused of “giving away Russia’s secrets” (keep in mind that Russia at the time was in chaos during the 90’s). While they weren’t allowed to work on this vehicle, in particular, this did not stop the urge for an armored fighting vehicle with missiles, auto-cannons, and lots of armor. In the early 2000’s, work started on a new project called the Object 199 with the name “Ramka” attached to it. The Object 199 is the tank we come to know as the BMPT Terminator. This was shown to the public in 2001 as a mock-up and the real project was unveiled to the masses in 2002. The early design was armed with a single 30mm 2A42 and four 9M133 “Kornet” ATGMs with two AG-17 grenade launchers and one 7.62mm PKTM as secondary armaments. Further development accompanied the 30mm auto-cannon with another 30mm auto-cannon and replaced the 9M133 “Kornet” ATGMs with 9M120 “Ataka” ATGMs.
Object 781, Object 782, and Object 787 stored at the Kubinka Tank Museum
Original BMPT model with one 30mm autocannon and older ATGMs.
Final BMPT prototype design presumably being tested.
Armament
The armament of the BMPT that was unveiled in the early 2000’s and the BMPT that was shown in the late 2000’s kept the armament the same (as I stated above). Instead of the 30mm 2A72 we’ve been seeing on the first 3 prototypes, the BMPT was equipped with the more complex 30mm 2A42 autocannon (effective range of 4000 meters). This auto-cannon is stabilized on two planes and has a rate of fire as low as 200 rounds per second to 800 rounds per second with both having -5° and +45° and 360° of turret rotation. The BMPT’s second primary armament is the 130mm 9M120 “Ataka-T” anti-tank missile (industrial code is B07S1) with claims from the manufacturer that it can penetrate 800mm of homogenous armor with ERA with its HEAT ammunition (good enough for the side or rear of any modern tank). There are four of these anti-tank missiles with two of them being placed on both sides of the 30mm auto-cannons. This anti-tank missile is guided by a semi-automatic laser beam with it having flexible elevation angles (-10°/+25°). The missile has the flight velocity of 550 m/s with a maximum range of 5800 meters; this is controlled by the VIAM.461112.001 ground control equipment inside the BMPT. Since this is not a 9M120F variant (anti-personnel variant), it does not have the ability to carry anti-personnel missiles. One of the BMPT’s secondary armament includes one 7.62 PKTM machine gun that is situated between the two autocannons with an aiming range of 1500 meters, muzzle velocity of 850 m/s, and a theoretical rate of fire of 700-800 rounds per minute. This machine gun has the same elevation and depression as the 30mm auto-cannons since it’s fixed on the oscillating platform with the 30mm auto-cannons. The BMPT’s second secondary armament is two 30mm AG-17D grenade launchers. These grenade launchers are placed at the front of the tank on the far side of each other. They have the ability to fire 400 rounds per minute with a low muzzle velocity of 185 m/s and are able to kill a person at up to 7+ meter radius from 1700 meters away. The grenade launchers on the right has 5° to the left and 27° to the right and the grenade launchers on the left has 27° on the left and 5° on the right with horizontal stabilization. Both of the grenade launchers have -5.5° depression and +20° elevation (no vertical stabilization). The BMPT is truly a killing machine with nine weapons (four different ones) at its disposal.
A closeup of all of the BMPT’s weapons except for the two 30mm grenade launchers
Mobility
The BMPT is powered by a V-92S2 (2000 rpm, V12, 4-stroke, multi-fuel, liquid cooling, and turbocharger) engine that churns out about 1000 hp. Combine this with the weight (48 tonnes, 53 short tons, and 47 long tons) of the BMPT and you get a specific power of 20-21 hp/t with the range of 550 km and a speed of 60 km/h on hard roads. The gearbox has seven forward gears and one reverse gear. The BMPT’s suspension is a torsion bar suspension (like most tanks designed from the 50’s and onwards) with shock absorbers, six rubber-lined road wheels, one front idler wheel, one rear drive sprocket, and three return rollers on each side. Ground clearance is 406mm and it’s able to ford water as deep as 1.8 meters with preparations and 1.2 meters without preparations. It is also able to climb over obstacles measured at 0.85 meters at 30 degrees and able to cross trenches 2.6-2.8 meters wide.
Armor/Protection
Since the armor is based on the T-72, it will most likely have the same armor as the T-90 or a modern T-72. It has Relikt ERA which is said to be stronger than Kontakt-5. It is also covered with soft material armor, cage/slat armor at the rear, and hard panels made of different materials. The crew is protected by NBC from nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons as the acronym suggests. It also has an automatic fire extinguisher system and System 903A smoke grenade launchers to conceal itself when spotted by the enemy or against guided weapons using infrared.
Service
While the BMPT is not in Russian service since it is based on old Soviet tank designs, it is being used and bought by Kazakhstan and Algeria. Kazakhstan even went further by signing an agreement with UralVagonZod in September of 2013 to co-produce the BMPT. The way they’re going about this is that Kazakhstan is providing decommissioned T-72s while Russia, specifically UralVagonZod, will provide modules and spare parts from which Kazakhstan will assemble these tanks in their nation. This is a great way for UralVagonZod to make a profit and for Kazakhstan to revive their old Soviet-era T-72s to current standards. Peru also expressed interest to UralVagonZod during Peru’s SITDEF (Salón Internacional De Tecnología Para La Defensa Y Prevención De Desastres Naturales) expo in 2015 to upgrade their aging T-55s with BMPT turrets and other possible modifications to the hull. However, these T-55s may be replaced or at most accompanied with Russian T-90s, Spanish Leopard 2A4s, or Dutch Leopard 2A6s. In addition, various Israeli companies and the Peruvian Desarrollos Industriales Casanave with the association of the Ukrainian Kharkiv Morozov Machine Building Design Bureau have also offered upgrades for the Peruvian T-55s.
Kazakhstani BMPTs being used during a parade.
Algerian BMPT that is being trialled in Algeria.
BMPT-72 Terminator 2
This support combat vehicle was first revealed at the Russian Arms Expo (RAE) at Nizhny Tagil, Russia in 2013. The Terminator 2 is being sold more as an armor upgrade package than an actual tank with two engines that are available. The two engines are the V-84MS (840 hp, 2000 rpm, V12, 4-stroke, multi-fuel, liquid cooling, and gear driven centrifugal type supercharger) and the V-92S2 (1000 hp, 2000 rpm, V12, 4-stroke, multi-fuel, liquid cooling, and turbocharger). These upgrades removed the two frontal 30mm grenade launchers; this reduced the crew from five to three. These changes lightened the load from 48 tonnes to 44 tonnes. The armament of the BMPT-72 Terminator 2 is the same (except for the removal of the two 30mm grenade launchers), however, the weapons are better protected and the structural support of the four ATGMs is enhanced and positioned horizontally instead of vertically. The FCS has also gotten an upgrade with a new multi-channel gunner’s sight that is equipped with a thermal channel, night vision, laser range finder, laser guidance system for missiles, and independent 2-plane stabilization of field of view with a sighting range of 5000 meters. The BMPT-72 received a new digital ballistic computer with weather and topographical support and the armament is stabilized on two axes with electromechanical traversing and elevating drives. Lastly, NBC protection is provided for the crew.
BMPT-72 Terminator 2 showcased at an expo
Top: V-84MS engine
Bottom: V-92S2 engine
Service (BMPT-72 Terminator 2)
While the Terminator 2 isn’t in service as far as we know, Azerbaijan held an arms expo named ADEX (Azerbaijan Defense Exhibition) in 2014 which allows arms dealers to show off their weapons to the armed forces of Azerbaijan. Since Azerbaijan has territorial issues with Armenia about the Nagorno-Karabakh region (Seb: it is rightfully Armenian, like North-W Iran is Azeri), they’re looking for formidable weapons in case things get heated again between the two nations. During the expo, Azerbaijan has stated that they’re interested in the Ka-52 attack/scout helicopter and the BMPT-72 Terminator 2 and numerous other weapons. In 2013, various unspecified Persian Gulf nations were also interested in the Terminator 2 during the Russian Arms Expo (RAE). Russia even themselves denied the second iteration of the BMPT again. Their reasoning for this is that since the T-15 Armata exists, there is no reason to adopt the Terminator 2 with possibly less armor and no infantry carrying capacity like the T-15 has. Lastly, during India’s DEFEXPO in 2014, UralVagonZod proposed two upgrades to India’s obsolete T-72s. UVZ (UralVagonZod) proposed the BMPT-72 package on India’s T-72s which will extend the T-72’s service life. UVZ also proposed an Arena-E APS upgrade on T-72s. This APS will shoot a projectile against portable anti-tank weapons such as RPGs, Kornet, Konkurs, TOW, etc.
BMPT specifications
Dimensions: 7.2 m or 23 ft (length), 3.37 m or 11 ft (height), and 3.8 m or 12 ft (width)
Total weight, battle ready: 48 tonnes
Crew: 5 (driver, gunner, commander, and two gunners for the grenade launchers)
Engine: V12 multifuel V-92S2 diesel 1,000 hp (736 kW) 20 hp/t turbocharger
Suspension: Torsion bar
Speed (on hard roads): 60 km/h (37 mph)
Range: 550 km (340 mi)
Primary Armament: two 30mm 2A42 autocannons and four 130mm 9M120 “Ataka-T” ATGMs
Secondary Armament: two 30mm AG-17D grenade launchers and a 7.62 PKTM coaxial machine gun
Armor: See notes
BMPT-72 specifications
Dimensions: 7.2 m or 23 ft (length), 3.33 m or 10.92 ft (height), and 3.6 m or 11.81 ft (width)
Total weight, battle ready: 44 tonnes
Crew: 3 (driver, gunner, and commander)
Engine: V12 multifuel V-92S2 diesel 1,000 hp (736 kW) 22.7 hp/t turbocharger and V12 multifuel V-84MS diesel 840 hp (626 kW) 19 hp/t supercharger
Suspension: Torsion bar
Speed (on hard road): 60 km/h (37 mph)
Range: 500 km (310 mi)
Primary Armament: two 30mm 2A42 autocannons and four 130mm 9M120 “Ataka-T” ATGMs
Secondary Armament: 7.62 PKTM coaxial machine gun
Armor: See notes
Regular Sources:
https://aw.my.com/us/enter-terminator
http://sputniknews.com/military/20130925/183720985/Russia-Unveils-Terminator-2-Tank-Support-Vehicle.html
https://aw.my.com/us/road-bmpt
http://www.army-guide.com/eng/product893.html
http://www.army-guide.com/eng/product892.html
http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1350456
http://mundo.sputniknews.com/defensa/20130703/157452616.html
https://news.vice.com/article/azerbaijan-is-arming-up-amid-territorial-dispute-with-armenia
http://www.indiandefencereview.com/spotlights/russia-retains-dominance-in-india
http://www.resboiu.ro/algeria-testeaza-bmpt-terminator/
http://tass.ru/en/russia/732871
http://tass.ru/en/non-political/728178
http://dziennikzbrojny.pl/aktualnosci/news,3,4639,aktualnosci-ze-swiata,propozycja-dla-peru-na-modyfikacje-t-55
http://www.infodefensa.com/latam/2015/05/19/noticia-rostec-ofrece-blindado-defensa-antiaerea-sosna-ejercito.html
http://rushincrash.com/forces/the-gulf-countries-are-interested-combat-vehicle-bmpt-72/
Sources (Manufacturer’s Websites)
http://www.kbptula.ru/en/productions/small-arms-guns-grenade-launchers/guns-machine-guns/2a42
http://uralvagonzavod.com/products/special_products/49/
http://www.zid.ru/eng/products/90/detail/212
http://www.kbm.ru/en/production/ptrk/478.html
http://www.minotor-service.com/en/ag-17-30mm-automatic-grenade-launcher.html
http://www.zid.ru/eng/products/47/detail/225
http://uralvagonzavod.com/news/74/
http://www.yugoimport.com/en/proizvodi/ammunition-30mm-x-165-anti-aircraft-gun-30mm-2a72-2a42-and-2a38m
http://uvz.ru/product/70/39
http://www.kbm.ru/en/production/ptrk/478.html
http://uvz.ru/product/70/67
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Biological evolution: never has a phenomenon so important so lent itself to such clear, understandable, elegant explanations. But just as evolution itself produces a seemingly infinite variety of life forms, so the human understanding of evolution has produced countless educational and entertaining kinds of illustrations by which to explain it. In the video above, astronomer-astrophysicist-cosmologist Carl Sagan, no stranger to demystifying the once seemingly unfathomable phenomena of our universe, shows how evolution actually works with eight minutes of crisp animation that take us from molecules in the primordial soup, to bacteria, to plants and polyps, to lampreys, to turtles, to dinosaurs and birds, to wombats, to baboons and apes, to us. Then he goes back and does the whole four billion-year evolutionary journey again in forty seconds.
This concise lesson concerns itself not just with how we human beings came about, but how everything else came about as well. That wide-angle view of reality won a great deal of acclaim for Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, the 1980 television series on which the segment originally appeared. Though most of its original broadcasts on life, the universe, and everything still hold up as well as this clip on evolution, a 21st-century successor has lately appeared in the form of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, doubtless the most suited heir to Sagan's tradition of enthusiasm and rigor in public science communication. For a more extended treatment of evolution, see also our post from earlier this week on deGrasse Tyson's episode on the subject, in which he spends an entire hour on his equally fascinating explanation of what, up to and including you, he, and I, natural selection has so far come up with.
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Related Content:
Watch Episode #2 of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos: Explains the Reality of Evolution (US Viewers)
Carl Sagan Presents Six Lectures on Earth, Mars & Our Solar System … For Kids (1977)
Carl Sagan’s Undergrad Reading List: 40 Essential Texts for a Well-Rounded Thinker
Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking & Arthur C. Clarke Discuss God, the Universe, and Everything Else
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. | {
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Switzerland is about to have a national election with electronic voting, overseen by Swiss Post; e-voting is a terrible idea and the general consensus among security experts who don't work for e-voting vendors is that it shouldn't be attempted, but if you put out an RFP for magic beans, someone will always show up to sell you magic beans, whether or not magic beans exist.
Swiss Post contracted with Barcelona firm Scytl to build the system, then consulted with outside security experts and KPMG to audit the system, and then announced a bug-bounty program that would allow people who promised to only disclose defects on Swiss Post's terms to look at some of the source code.
This kind of bug bounty is pretty common, and firms like to assert that they can be trusted to be responsible stewards of bad news about their own products and should have the right to decide who can make truthful disclosures about their mistakes and the defects in their offerings. During the fight over DRM standardization for browsers at the W3C, we pointed out that one side-effect of adding DRM to browsers would be that browser vendors and media companies would acquire a new right to silence security researchers who wanted to make factual statements about security defects in their products. At first, the commercial members and browser vendors denied that this was the case, but eventually they decided that it was true, and that this was a feature, not a bug, and set about trying to craft rules for when it would be OK for companies to decide that users couldn't know about defects in their products.
The belief that companies can be trusted with this power defies all logic, but it persists. Someone found Swiss Post's embrace of the idea too odious to bear, and they leaked the source code that Swiss Post had shared under its nondisclosure terms, and then an international team of some of the world's top security experts (including some of our favorites, like Matthew Green) set about analyzing that code, and (as every security expert who doesn't work for an e-voting company has predicted since the beginning of time), they found an incredibly powerful bug that would allow a single untrusted party at Swiss Post to undetectably alter the election results.
And, as everyone who's ever advocated for the right of security researchers to speak in public without permission from the companies whose products they were assessing has predicted since the beginning of time, Swiss Post and Scytl downplayed the importance of this objectively very, very, very important bug. Swiss Post's position is that since the bug only allows elections to be stolen by Swiss Post employees, it's not a big deal, because Swiss Post employees wouldn't steal an election.
But when Swiss Post agreed to run the election, they promised an e-voting system based on "zero knowledge" proofs that would allow voters to trust the outcome of the election without having to trust Swiss Post. Swiss Post is now moving the goalposts, saying that it wouldn't be such a big deal if you had to trust Swiss Post implicitly to trust the outcome of the election.
You might be thinking, "Well, what is the big deal? If you don't trust the people administering an election, you can't trust the election's outcome, right?" Not really: we design election systems so that multiple, uncoordinated people all act as checks and balances on each other. To suborn a well-run election takes massive coordination at many polling- and counting-places, as well as independent scrutineers from different political parties, as well as outside observers, etc.
And even other insecure e-voting systems like the ones in the USA are not this bad: they decentralized, and would-be vote-riggers would have to compromise many systems, all around the nation, in each poll that they wanted to alter. But Swiss Post's defect allows a single party to alter all the polling data, and subvert all the audit systems. As Matthew Green told Motherboard: "I don't think this was deliberate. However, if I set out to design a backdoor that allowed someone to compromise the election, it would look exactly like this."
Companies like to insist that it's OK for them to set the terms on which their products can be criticized, and assure us that they'll backstop their own internal conflict of interest by hiring giant auditors like KPMG as well as outside security experts, but for many reasons this will never be adequate. When "external auditors" actually work for the company they're auditing, there is always a tendency for those companies to fudge their findings to benefit the companies that are signing their invoices — as the UK public discovered after the multi-billion-pound rupture of Carillion, whose financial health had been attested to right up to the end by all of the Big Four accounting firms (including KPMG).
We don't accept scientific research unless the people who do it show all their work to everyone, publishing data, protocols and analysis in public forums that everyone can critique, even axe-grinding grudge-holders, because, as with whistleblowers, the people with the motivation to really dig into your work and reveal its deficiencies are often people who don't like you and want you to fail, and if we only accept bad news from people with good intentions, we'll miss some of the most important and urgent warnings about flaws that could steal a whole country's government.
"If you're building a voting system where the chief threat is somebody can hack into a server and replace votes, and if the primary mechanism for preventing that is implemented in a way that is wrong—and not just wrong but wrong in a way that I think any experienced cryptographer should have known was wrong—then … it's a disqualifying flaw in a system like this," Green said. "We have only examined a tiny fraction of this code base and found a critical, election-stealing issue." Although Lewis said the particular fix Scytl has apparently employed should theoretically solve the issue if the company implements it correctly, there's no reason to trust that Scytl will do it right. And given that the flaw was so fundamental to the system, and that several previous professional audits of the code never caught the problem, it raises serious questions about the rest of the system. "We have only examined a tiny fraction of this code base and found a critical, election-stealing issue," said Lewis, who is currently executive director of the Open Privacy Research Society, a Canadian nonprofit that develops secure and privacy-enhancing software for marginalized communities. "Even if this [backdoor] is closed its mere existence raises serious questions about the integrity of the rest of the code."
Researchers Find Critical Backdoor in Swiss Online Voting System [Kim Zetter/Motherboard] | {
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Exploit acquisition platform Zerodium has increased its reward for a successful jailbreak of iOS 10 to $1.5 million, far surpassing Apple's recent payout offer for discovering and reporting vulnerabilities in its software.
Late last year, Zerodium briefly offered and paid out $1 million to one hacking team for the successful creation of a browser-based jailbreak for iOS 9.1 and 9.2, but dropped the going rate for an exploit to $500,000.
Rather than report the vulnerabilities to Apple, Zerodium said that it would sell the exploit to its customers, which include major technology, finance, and defense corporations, as well as government agencies.
Instead of being limited to a specific timeframe, the new $1.5 million reward is a permanent offer that aims to compensate for Apple's recently hardened security regime, said Zerodium founder Chaouki Bekrar.
We've increased the price due to the increased security for both iOS 10 and Android 7, and we would like to attract more researchers all year long, not just during a specific bounty period as we did last time.
At the same time, Zerodium's decision to up its bug bounty can be seen as a response to the imminent launch of Apple's own program.
Last month at the annual Black Hat Conference, Apple announced the launch of an invite-only Security Bounty Program that would offer rewards of up to $200,000 to researchers depending on the vulnerability discovered. Apple said the program would be limited to a few dozen researchers and would go live in September.
Earlier this week, several news media outlets were seemingly duped into reporting on an alleged 'secret' meeting of prominent hackers at Apple's Campus in Cupertino, which was supposed to include a briefing on the company's bug bounty program. The meeting was apparently a hoax perpetrated by the hackers themselves. | {
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A UK shale gas company is considering dumping waste water from fracking in the sea, emails from the company show.
Ineos, which owns the Grangemouth refinery and holds 21 shale licences, many in the north-west, North Yorkshire and the east Midlands, has said it wants to become the biggest player in the UK’s nascent shale gas industry.
In an email sent in March to a resident in Ryedale district, North Yorkshire, where councillors gave the go-ahead to a fracking application by another company in May, a senior executive said that water produced during fracking could be discharged in the sea after being treated. It has not previously said where treated water would be released.
“We will capture and contain it, treat it back to the standards agreed … with the Environment Agency and discharge where allowed under permit, most likely the sea,” wrote Tom Pickering, director for Ineos Shale, responding to concerns over where such “flowback” water would end up.
Green campaigners and people living near prospective sites have highlighted the potential environmental impacts of fracking, such as contamination of water supplies, minor tremors and local air pollution. But the issue of where the huge quantities of resulting waste water is disposed has received less attention.
Shale companies pump water, chemicals and sand at high pressure underground to fracture shale rock and release the gas within, but each well can use as much as 6m gallons of water. Between 20 and 40% flows back to the surface, containing salts, chemicals and naturally occurring radioactive material which the Environment Agency (EA) says is likely to be classified as radioactive waste.
Under EA regulations, the water must be treated on site or elsewhere at a designated treatment facility, before a permit is issued to discharge it. Ineos and the industry trade body said any fracking wastewater would be treated before being disposed of.
Mark Ellis-Jones, project executive of the onshore oil and gas programme at the EA, told a cross-party parliamentary group in April: “We are satisfied that any wastes that arise from fracking will be managed sufficiently and properly by our environmental permits.”
However, there are concerns from some UK experts over the treatment of fracking wastewater.
A report on the environmental impacts of the technique by the Natural Environmental Research Council last year warned that: “A huge uncertainty, given the immaturity of unconventional oil and gas development [ie shale gas fracking] in the UK, is how much wastewater will be produced and regulatory and technical mechanisms for cleaning it or directly reusing it.”
It added: “One of the most important concerns for the development of unconventional resources is the appropriate management of flowback and produced water.”
In March, the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management, which represents water professionals, said in a consultation response to the EA that “we are concerned about the ability to treat flowback fluid at the present time”.
It noted: “Advanced treatment technologies may not be able to treat the levels of dissolved solids in produced water which would limit the ability to treat produced water on site. Dilution at a treatment works may be able to reduce the salinity, however it may not be appropriate to dilute to the level required to dilute the radionuclides present to regulatory levels.”
Two years ago, shale firm Cuadrilla withdrew an application for a permit to frack in Lancashire after the EA tightened up the rules over safe disposal. The change came after 2m gallons of wastewater had already been discharged into the Manchester ship canal.
Dr Paul Johnston from the Greenpeace Science Unit argued that discharging “huge quantities of water loaded with metals and radioactivity and chemical constituents” into “sensitive marine environments” is “a retrograde step as far as environmental protection”.
But the industry said the water could be treated and disposed of safely.
Ineos did not directly address plans for dumping in the sea but a spokesperson said: “Ineos’ wastewater will be enclosed in double skinned storage tanks before being recycled. An environmental permit from the Environment Agency... will be required where we need to dispose of any process water according to an agreed waste management plan. We will employ licensed water treatment companies to process our wastewater.”
A spokesman for UK Onshore Oil and Gas, which represents the shale industry, said: “In the exploration phase operators will send all flow back fluid to EA permitted treatment facilities for safe disposal ... When the industry moves to commercial production it will want to recycle flow back fluid and reuse it for the next stage of operation.”
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A year after King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud made his son Mohammed bin Salman crown prince, the 32-year-old remains dependent on his father’s legitimacy and credentials to be the heir apparent. Prince Mohammed has polarized the House of Saud more than any figure in more than half a century. | {
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Related : 2012 Billboard Awards: Justin Bieber
Usher knew. An ambitious promoter named Scooter Braun knew. But the world didn't know. Not yet.
In 2008, Braun by chance stumbled across a video on YouTube, shot in 2007, of a tween boy with an impressive helmet of hair performing a convincing cover of Ne-Yo's "So Sick" at a local competition in Ontario, Canada (in which he finished second). And there were more clips where that one came from, diligently uploaded by the boy's mother.
Braun decided he had to get in touch with this Justin Bieber kid.
In one video Bieber was busking outside of a theater in Stratford, Ontario, so he called the theater. He found out where Bieber went to school and then called in hopes of getting in touch with the 13-year-old's mom, Pattie Mallette.
"He was very, very persistent," Bieber later remembered to Billboard. "He even called my great aunt and my school board."
Sure enough, Braun made contact and, before long, he was flying the impressive young singer (and his mom) out to Atlanta to record some demos. | {
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Grab your Raspberry Pi, everyone — we’re going on an Easter egg hunt, and all of you are invited!
When they’re not chocolate, Easter eggs are hidden content in movies, games, DVD menus, and computers. So open a terminal window and try the following:
1. A little attitude
Type aptitude moo into the terminal window and press Enter. Now type aptitude -v moo . Keep adding v’s, like this: aptitude -vv moo
2. Party
Addicted to memes? Type curl parrot.live into your window!
3. In a galaxy far, far away…
You’ll need to install telnet for this one: start by typing sudo apt-get install telnet into the terminal. Once it’s installed, enter telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
4. Pinout
Type pinout into the window to see a handy GPIO pinout diagram for your Pi. Ideal for physical digital making projects!
5. Demo programs
Easter egg-ish: you can try out various demo programs on your Raspberry Pi, such as 1080p video playback and spinning teapots.
Any more?
There’s lots of fun to be had in the terminal of a Raspberry Pi. Do you know any other fun Easter eggs? Share them in the comments! | {
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“There is no authoritative list of government agencies.” That’s a quote from the first edition of the Administrative Conference of the United States’ Sourcebook.
How can we possibly promise Americans that their government is operating efficiently - not wasting their hard-earned money - when we aren’t even sure the exact scope of the federal bureaucracy?
Every list of federal agencies has discrepancies from all the others. Independent executive agency lists range from 78 to 137, and Cabinet units range from 174 to 268. Other lists have over 440 agencies within the federal government. Congress and Executive officials have delegated responsibilities to each of these agencies without always taking into account the purview of other departments. This has created a wide area of shared regulatory space, which means not only are resources being wasted as more than one group is tasked with addressing an issue, but sometimes conflicting information or regulations are formulated.
Additionally, expertise is wasted when agencies don’t know the resources available to them through other, complementary agencies. Coordination should be baked into the ethos of these organizations, and cross-agency management should be focused on identifying areas where work can be streamlined and improved.
Finally, these agencies tend to fall into patterns over time, failing to bring in the most talented members of the younger generations or improving the technology they rely on. It’s important that these agencies are equipped to attract and retain the best talent available, and that they have the resources they need to upgrade their systems in a way that maximizes their utility to the American public, as well as their security.
In short, these agencies should be rewarded for streamlining operations within themselves while coordinating with other agencies to work in a consistent and well informed manner, while also optimizing operations, staff, and technology. | {
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Potrivit instituţiei, valoarea prejudiciilor ce provin din dosare instrumentate de DNA pentru care au fost comunicate sentințe judecătorești în 2014 este de 150 milioane de euro, nu de 300 milioane de euro.
Dintre acestea, se remarcă cazul ICA, un caz extrem de complex a cărui rezolvare depinde într-o manieră consistentă și de celeritatea cu care alte instituții ale statului își îndeplinesc obligațiile. Valoarea prejudiciilor din acest caz în total prejudicii provenite din dosarele DNA este 50%.
În cazul ICA, ANAF a valorificat deja un bun imobil recuperând cca 300.000 euro, pentru celelalte bunuri mobile și imobile, activitatea de evaluare și valorificare fiind în desfășurare în acord cu termenele de răspuns pe care ANAF la primește de la celelalte instituții ale statului precum și cu eficiența cu care firmele private implicate în procesul de evaluare își îndeplinesc obligațiile prevăzute în contract.
ANAF mai subliniază că 53,6% din total prejudicii trimise spre executare ANAF sunt nerecuperabile(similar arieratelor nerecuperabile) din motive independente de ANAF.
Pentru un numar de 63 sentinţe/hotărâri judecătoreşti, de exemplu, prin care s-au stabilit prejudicii în valoare de 596,49 mil.lei (30 % din valoarea totală) sunt în curs formalităţile legale de partaj /ieşire din indiviziune forţată, fiind vorba de valorificarea părţii din bunurile deţinute în comun de persoane juridice sau ce revine persoanelor fizice condamnate penal.
Pentru un număr de 693 sentinţe/hotărâri judecătoreşti prin care s-au stabilit prejudicii în valoare de 433,1 mil.lei (21,8 % din valoarea totală) s-au pronunţat pentru persoane fizice care nu deţin bunuri sau venituri urmăribile sau pentru care s-a declarat starea de insolvabilitate.
Pentru un număr de 12 sentinţe/hotarari judecătoresti prin care s-au stabilit prejudicii în valoare de 33,03 mil.lei s-au pronunţat pentru persoane juridice aflate sub incidenţa prevederilor Legii Insolvenţei nr.85/2006, modificată şi completată în anul 2014.
ANAF face şi nişte observaţii, în care evidenţiază că instituţia este supraîncărcată cu sarcini. Gradul de încărcare al ANAF în ce privește activitatea de recuperare a arieratelor și a altor sume datorate bugetului este extrem de mare și, implicit, resursa umană și materială necesară recuperării prejudiciilor este cu mult depășită, se plânge instituţia.
Capacitatea administrativă a structurilor de executare silită este excedată de activitățile desfășurate pentru pregătirea și susținerea dosarelor de insolvență. Numai în cursul anului 2014 s-au prelucrat un număr total de 26.253 cazuri noi cu o valoare de 10.273,7 mil.lei creanțe înscrise la masa credală. La sfârșitul anului 2014 se gestionau 53.675 contribuabili în insolvență cu creanțe fiscale de 47.311,97 mil.lei.
Pe de altă parte, ANAF a primit atribuţii specifice în domeniul colectării sumelor datorate, nu doar bugetului de stat, ci şi bugetului asigurărilor sociale de stat, bugetului Fondului naţional unic de asigurări sociale de sănătate si bugetului asigurărilor pentru şomaj.
De asemenea, de la data aderării Romaniei la Uniunea Europeana, agenţiei i-a revenit şi sarcina de a colecta creanţele bugetare rezultate din utilizarea fondurilor europene şi/sau a fondurilor publice naţionale aferente acestora
S-au derulat programe guvernamentale adoptate prin legi şi ordonanţe ale guvernului prin care agenţiei i s-au atribuit sarcini de colectare a creanţelor de la contribuabilii care nu au respectat condiţiile impuse prin programele în temeiul cărora li s-au acordat facilităţi cum ar fi : programul "Prima casă", programul „Mihail Kogălniceanu pentru întreprinderi mici şi mijlocii", programul privind creşterea performanţei energetice a blocurilor de locuinţe, programului de „stimulare a cumpărării de autoturisme noi", etc.
Totodată instituţiile publice, finanţate integral sau parţial de la bugetul de stat, care nu au organe de executare silită proprii, transmit titlurile executorii privind venituri ale bugetului general consolidat spre executare silită ANAF
În plus, ANAF are rolul de a recupera prin procedura de executare silită sancţiunile contravenţionale stabilite de către diverse instituţii care se fac venit la bugetul de stat, cum ar fi :
- Consiliul Concurenţei
- Compania Naţionala de Autostrăzi si Drumuri Naţionale
- Inspectoratul Teritorial de Muncă
- Inspectoratul de Stat in Constructii
- Agenţia Naționala pentru Protecţia Consumatorilor
- Organele abilitate ale Ministerului Afacerilor Interne
- Inspectoratele Teritoriale de Regim Silvic si de Vanătoare, etc.
ANAF așteaptă de aproape două luni de zile ca procedurile de avizare a HG privind reorganizarea instituției care prevede înființarea unei structuri specializate de executări silite să fie finalizate, spun oficialii ANAF.
"Având în vedere cele de mai sus, este profund incorect ca ANAF, instituție angajată într-un proces de reformă complex, care are ca principal obiectiv eficientizarea colectării veniturilor rezultate în urma obligațiilor declarative și de plată, să fie indicată ca unic responsabil pentru gradul scăzut de recuperare a prejudiciilor. ANAF își asumă acestă situație doar în limita cazurilor care țin exclusiv de ANAF, nu și de alte măsuri legislative și organizatorice propuse de ANAF pentru schimbarea acestei situații și care așteaptă decizia altor factori de conducere" spune ANAF.
Ce a spus Kovesi
Suma care ar trebui să fie confiscată de ANAF în urma hotărârilor definitive pronunţate în dosarele instrumentate de DNA se ridică la 310 milioane de euro, însă în ultimele opt luni nu s-a făcut nimic pentru recuperarea acestor bani, a afirmat joi procurorul şef al DNA, Laura Codruţa Kovesi.
"Nu DNA este instituţia care trebuie să confişte efectiv banii. Noi, atunci când facem o investigaţie, obligaţia noastră este să identificăm banii şi bunurile, după care să le sechestrăm. Practic, le punem într-o tavă, după care oferim tava ANAF-ului, Ministerului Finanţelor, atunci când hotărârea judecătorească rămâne definitivă, iar ANAF-ul trebuie să execute efectiv aceste hotărâri de condamnare. Am semnalat la începutul anului că, doar în dosarele DNA, suma care trebuie confiscată efectiv de stat este de 310 milioane de euro. (...) Această sumă ar putea duce la dublarea salariilor medicilor dacă ea ar fi recuperată efectiv. Noi, ca procurori, am indisponibilizat bunurile şi valorile, ei trebuie doar să le execute. Nu s-a întâmplat nimic în aceste opt luni şi mă întreb dacă procedura care se aplică persoanelor fizice care nu-şi plătesc taxele sau impozitele nu poate fi aplicată şi acestor persoane condamnate definitiv", a declarat Kovesi.
loading... | {
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Sign up for our COVID-19 newsletter to stay up-to-date on the latest coronavirus news throughout New York City
Donald Trump loves to talk about Trump Tower, but here are some secrets about the building that might still surprise you. | {
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New York (AFP) – A tiger at New York’s Bronx Zoo has tested positive for COVID-19, the institution said Sunday, and is believed to have contracted the virus from a caretaker who was asymptomatic at the time.
The four-year-old Malayan tiger named Nadia along with her sister Azul, two Amur tigers and three African lions all developed dry coughs and are expected to fully recover, the Wildlife Conservation Society that runs the city’s zoos said in a statement.
“We tested the cat out of an abundance of caution and will ensure any knowledge we gain about COVID-19 will contribute to the world’s continuing understanding of this novel coronavirus,” the statement sent to AFP said.
“Though they have experienced some decrease in appetite, the cats at the Bronx Zoo are otherwise doing well under veterinary care and are bright, alert, and interactive with their keepers,” the statement continued.
“It is not known how this disease will develop in big cats since different species can react differently to novel infections, but we will continue to monitor them closely and anticipate full recoveries.”
All four of the zoos and the aquarium in New York — whose virus death toll has topped 4,000 — have been closed since March 16.
The zoo emphasized that there is “no evidence that animals play a role in the transmission of COVID-19 to people other than the initial event in the Wuhan market, and no evidence that any person has been infected with COVID-19 in the US by animals, including by pet dogs or cats.”
Chinese disease control officials had identified wild animals sold in a Wuhan market as the source of the coronavirus pandemic that has infected well over one million people worldwide.
According to the US Department of Agriculture website there had “not been reports of pets or other animals” in the United States falling ill with coronavirus prior to news of the tiger Nadia.
“It is still recommended that people sick with COVID-19 limit contact with animals until more information is known about the virus,” the department’s website says.
In late March a pet cat was discovered infected with the novel coronavirus in Belgium, following similar cases in Hong Kong where two dogs tested positive for COVID-19.
All of those animals are believed to have contracted the virus from the people they live with.
The Bronx zoo said preventative measures were in place for caretakers as well as all cats in the city’s zoos. | {
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Image: Hyundai
We have all been down this road before: Any time a hot performance car hits the showroom some dealers will attempt to maximize profit, but this time it’s not a Hellcat or some Porsche 911 variant, but rather a Hyundai Veloster. Apparently, one dealer is under the grand delusion that some sucker is willing to pay $40,000 for one.
In fairness, the car in question is not just any Hyundai Veloster, but rather the all-new Veloster N. This is Hyundai’s first crack at making a serious hot-hatchback that can go toe-to-toe against the Volkswagen GTI or perhaps the now discontinued Focus ST.
The Veloster N packs an impressive 250 horsepower and starts at a very reasonable $27,820. If you add the Performance Package that includes a limited slip differential, larger wheels, bigger brakes and a power bump to 275 HP that car would set you back just under $30,000. It’s a good deal.
Some Jalopnik staffers have driven this car and not only does it kick ass, but it is also a surprisingly easy candidate to learn how to row your own gears. Overall, the Veloster N shapes up to be a killer value if you can score the right deal.
Unfortunately, some Hyundai stores think the Veloster N is worth way more than Hyundai intended and, despite the fact that according to Autotrader there are around 254 units to choose from, a few dealers have added some pretty substantial markups.
One Alabama Hyundai dealer has their Veloster N listed for a whopping $40,730.
I’m curious to the buyer profile of someone who wants to drop forty large on a Hyundai when the much faster Golf R can be had at the same price.
What is even more amazing is that not too far away there is a store in Arkansas with the same exact car for an advertised price of $25,645.
I gave a call to the sales department at Fayetteville Hyundai to see if the sale price was legit. A salesperson said that it does include a $500 loyalty bonus and a $500 military rebate and if a customer did not qualify for either one the sale price would be $26,645. Even still, with a sticker price of $29,920, a discount of $3,275 is pretty solid.
More importantly, it’s over $14,000 cheaper than the one in Alabama. Even if that buyer in Alabama shipped their car from Arkansas, they would still have some substantial savings over the local store.
I’m constantly amazed at some of the dealers that don’t quite understand that this thing called the internet exists, and if the price on a local car is too high, chances are another store somewhere else is willing to offer a better deal. It only takes a few clicks to find it after all.
| {
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My first costume I built, Furiosa, Our Lady of Rage.
First up is Furiosa deconstructed, followed by a couple shots of the arm, then the epaulet, and finally, the real question:
WHO KILLED THE WORLD | {
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Termites are remarkable engineers, capable of building mounds standing more than 10 metres high and 15 metres wide at their base.
Their mounds regulate heat and the condition of the air inside, and are used to home and raise generations of the tiny social insects.
But a new discovery reveals how even more astounding these structures are.
These ages should be interpreted as minimum estimates
In the Miombo woodland area of central Africa, scientists have found an abandoned termite mound that is more than 2200 years old.
That makes the mound the oldest termite structure ever dated, notwithstanding those that have become preserved as fossils.
Another mound studied is at least 750 years old, confirming the ancient mound wasn’t an anomaly.
The discovery suggests that termites used the same structures for millennia.
The mounds were built by the termite species Macrotermes falciger, in an area of the Miombo woods in the Lubumbashi region of Upper Katanga in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Termites regularly used it 800 to 500 years ago, during an especially warm period in the region
“The sheer size of the mounds suggests that their age surpasses the lifespan of a single termite queen, which rarely exceeds 20 years,” write scientists in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.
Led by Hans Erens, a team of researchers from Ghent University in Belgium and the University of Lubumbashi in DR Congo dated four large termite mounds using a technique called Carbon 14 dating.
This samples the ratio of the radioactive Carbon 14 isotope in the soil the termites used to build the mounds. The ratio of the isotope present relative to normal carbon accurately reflects the age of the structure.
The researchers took samples down the vertical axis of each mound.
Of the four mounds tested, two were active, with termites residing in the top part of the structure. Two were abandoned, and in each category the researchers sampled a smaller mound standing less than 3.5 metres tall, and a larger one more than 6 metres tall.
In the larger abandoned mound, the age of the earth used to create the structure increased towards the ground, with the base of the mound dating between 2335–2119 years before present.
The smaller abandoned mound showed a similar profile, its base being 796 to 684 years old.
There have been previous claims of 4000-year-old termite mounds in South Africa
The active nests were more modern, but the larger nest was built upon an ancient mound that was 766 to 675 years old, confirming that termites continue to build on the same mounds for centuries.
The 2200-year-old mound is thought to have been abandoned for decades.
But the study reveals termites regularly used it 800 to 500 years ago, during an especially warm period in the region.
Its use 2200 years ago, and then in the 12th to 15th Centuries, also infer termites use the same sites for millennia.
“These ages should be interpreted as minimum estimates,” say the researchers in the journal. “Nonetheless, some of the mounds are much older than previously estimated.”
There have been previous claims of 4000-year-old termite mounds in South Africa, with the insects being identified as the creators of geological structures in the country known as Heuweltjies.
However, recent evidence suggests these features were caused by soil erosion.
Follow Matt Walker and BBC Earth on twitter. | {
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