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no matter how good my post is, it'll always have a shitload of downvotes
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"
Item is a Dell SC200 storage rack. Comes with all 12, 3.5 2TB drives that are fully wiped and ready for storage. Could also be used as a SAS external j-bod. All components may have minor cosmetic scratches and dings.
"
Item description | {
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For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis, the election, and more, subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter.
Paul Babeu, the strident Republican, anti-illegal-immigration Arizona sheriff perhaps best known for allegedly threatening to deport his gay, immigrant ex-lover, announced Monday that he’s running for Congress.*
In 2008, Babeu was elected sheriff of Pinal County, a large county bordering the southeast portion of the Phoenix metro area. A statement released on his website Monday, decrying “President Obama’s unconstitutional power grabs” and pointing out his anti-illegal immigration bona fides, announced his plans to win the 1st Congressional District seat being vacated by Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, a Democrat who is running for US Senate.
“I’ve spent seven years fighting Washington’s inaction and now it’s time to bring the fight directly to our nation’s capital,” Babeu said. “I will work tirelessly to protect the residents of rural Arizona, shrink the federal government, overturn Obamacare and guard against attacks on the 2nd Amendment.”
Babeu will be running for a seat in 2016—after unsuccessfully trying to win the same post in 2012. At the time, Babeu was a rising GOP star known for his tough talk on illegal immigration. But then his former boyfriend, Jose Orozco who was an immigrant from Mexico, told the Phoenix New Times that Babeu’s attorney threatened to start deportation proceedings against Orozco unless he signed an agreement that would prevent him from discussing their years-long relationship. Orozco and his attorney instead went to the New Times and reported the alleged threat. In reporting that story, the paper discovered that the sheriff had “posted lewd photos of himself” on dating websites and “e-mailed photos of his erect penis and selfies in his underwear” to men he’d met online.
The day after the story was published, Babeu held a press conference and acknowledged that he was gay, but he denied threatening Orozco. Babeu claimed that Orozco was a jilted lover who was mad that the relationship ended and had illegally accessed his campaign and other online accounts. He didn’t deny the veracity of the photos, and said his personal life wasn’t anybody’s business.
A subsequent investigation by the state’s attorney general cleared him of any wrongdoing.
Since then, Babeu has remained sheriff of Pinal County and has found new ways to be controversial. In 2014, he told a crowd at a Republican political event that a group of Central American children caught at the US-Mexico border would be bused to a facility north of Tucson, Arizona. Babeu’s actions, as described in a scathing Arizona Republic editorial, caused “totally predictable chaos” when protesters descended on the site and ended up surrounding two buses carrying local children headed to a YMCA day camp. Babeu showed up at the site and said he was the peacemaker, according to the paper.
The paper described the sheriff as “a self-obsessed camera hog” and slammed him for what he did.
Think of the pyromaniac who torches his own house, then throws himself on the mercy of the court as a homeless waif. According to one protest organizer, Babeu told her “the only way to stop this was for our community and the area to organize.” And so he did, effectively, organize and manipulate the incident. Then he sent out a host of Pinal County deputies to maintain some semblance of the peace he single-handedly threatened. That’s gall.
Babeu will be running in an already crowded GOP primary, facing off against former Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett and Gary Kiehne, an Arizona businessman with experience in oil and ranching.
Clarification: An earlier version of this article misstated Orozco’s immigration status. It’s unclear whether he was in the country legally or illegally. | {
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A spokesman for Mr Shorten said the claims were untrue. ''As Mr Shorten has previously said, this royal commission provides the platform for all sorts of people to try to settle old scores and make wild claims,'' he said. ''He won't be providing a running commentary every time someone mentions his name to try to get themselves on TV.'' It comes as Ms Jackson admitted that a slush fund - started through a $250,000 settlement from back-pay owed to cancer workers - was used by her to back Labor candidates, on ''various'' union elections and for her own use. In written evidence to the royal commission, Ms Jackson defended using the ''windfall'' 2003 settlement with the Peter MacCallum cancer hospital to set up her ''slush fund'', the National Health Development Account (NHDA).
Ms Jackson said the HSU No.3 branch committee of management agreed to set up the fund, of which Ms Jackson was the sole operator, and allowed her to spend it at her discretion to advance the interests of the union. It also allowed her to spend $4000 a year ''for my own personal benefit'' as she had not received sitting fees from the meetings, Ms Jackson said. She said she ''did not utilise the full amount'' that she was allowed to spend but her statement did not detail how much she spent on herself. ''Any allegation that I took any of the NHDA money for my own benefit without approval is false.'' Ms Jackson alleged the financial records of the NHDA, contained in an exercise book, had been stolen after her office was ''ransacked'' in 2011 while she was a patient in a psychiatric hospital.
Ms Jackson said a flood in March 2010 resulted in the loss of many documents and an office clean out five months later when she was overseas resulted in a large number of documents being thrown out. Ms Jackson broke down during Wednesday's hearing when she described the stress she experienced as a whistleblower at the HSU, which led to her being hospitalised. She also defended her spending on personal credit cards. The secretary of Ms Jackson's former Victorian branch, Craig McGregor, in a statement to the royal commission, said more than $1 million was reimbursed from the union to two personal credit cards of Ms Jackson. In her statement, Ms Jackson said she had three union credit cards in her name and that all credit card spending by staff was in her name including travel and accommodation. ''I say that the total amounts charged to credit cards each year for the whole of the No.3 branch expenditure by credit card, which was well under 10 per cent of total expenditure of the No.3 branch, is unremarkable.''
Ms Jackson rose to national prominence as a whistleblower on widespread corruption at the HSU involving former senior officials Michael Williamson, now in jail, and Craig Thomson, a disgraced former head of the union and former ALP federal MP. Thomson is on bail pending an appeal against his conviction and sentence on multiple fraud charges. In evidence she said Williamson was living an ''obscene millionaire's lifestyle'' in a ''palatial'' holiday home that far exceeded his income before he was convicted of fraud. Her suspicions of Williamson's corruption ''crystallised'' when she visited Williamson's new holiday house in Brightwaters, Lake Macquarie, in January 2011. ''It was quite palatial,'' she said. Ms Jackson said she understood Williamson had a personal loan of about $2.1 million. ''I considered that the interest accruing on that loan size, alone, would have equalled almost the totality of his then income,'' she said.
The holiday home overlooked a lake and was fitted with hardwood parquetry floors, four European fridges and high-end audiovisual units, according to Ms Jackson. She said Mr Williamson had plans to build an in-ground swimming pool, cabana and to buy a boat. In her written statement, to the royal commission she said since she had exposed corruption she had been called ''Judas'', a ''Liberal prostitute'' and ''traitor'', and suffered ''smears'' on the internet and in the mainstream media. Loading She also claimed Williamson, a former Labor national president, twice offered her a seat in Parliament, in 2010 and 2011. Follow us on Twitter | {
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2016 Season Recap
The 2016 South Carolina baseball team started the season 10-0 before losing a crucial series to Clemson. There were times during the season where the Gamecocks looked unbeatable. Even without phenom pitcher Wil Crowe, the Gamecocks rotation held their own throughout the season giving the team a chance to win each night. Chad Holbrook’s squad overcame a first game loss in the regional to earn a spot in the Super Regionals. Unfortunately, a hot Oklahoma State pitching rotation was too strong for South Carolina to move on.
Alex Destino was the team’s most consistent hitter leading the team in HR’s (10) and RBI’s (59). Weekend starters Braden Webb and Clarke Schmidt led the way in strike outs with 128 and 129, respectively. Out of the bullpen, Josh Reagan and Tyler Johnson pitched fantastic down the stretch combining for 20 saves on the season. The 2016 season finished in disappointed because of the way it finished against Oklahoma State, but the Gamecocks have tons of talent returning in 2017 that are capable of contending for a College World Series.
Destino Looks to Continue 2016 Success
Alex Destino is coming off a fantastic 2016 campaign where he batted .321 with 10 HR and 59 RBI. South Carolina will be without Dom Thompson Williams and Gene Cone in 2017, setting the stage for Destino. Several players that will be in Holbrook’s Opening Day lineup have seen limited playing time. The inexperience in the lineup will most likely lead to teams trying to pitch around Destino. If the players in the top of the order can get on base consistently, Destino could easily have one of the best seasons in the SEC.
Wil Crowe Returns to Action
After a heartbreaking injury against Florida in 2015, Wil Crowe finally returns to action this season. Crowe will replace the loss of Braden Webb from the weekend rotation, and most likely upgrade it. Professional scouts are in love with Crowe and for good reason. The high 90’s fastball and devastating breaking ball are absolutely crucial to competing in the SEC. Although his stats before the injury don’t jump off the page, Crowe looks even better after having Tommy John surgery. His velocity has actually increased and his off speed pitches have impressed the coaching staff in scrimmages.
Notable Newcomers
Chad Holbrook will be looking for increased playing time from several players this season. A player everyone in Columbia is excited for is freshman Carlos Cortes. Cortes has been ranked as the 13th best freshman in the nation by Perfect Game, and the 1st best freshman in the SEC by D1Baseball. A New York Mets draft pick, Cortes will see his early action in left field. South Carolina has had a great list of terrific left-handed hitters in the past several years, and Cortes looks to have a very bright future in Columbia. Through the years, South Carolina has had guys that could play several positions in the field and struggled to hit. This is not the case with Cortes. Nearly every scouting report available on Cortes says that his ability to hit goes without question, it’s just finding a spot for him in the field.
Coach Chad Holbrook is also extremely excited about Sawyer Bridges and Jacob Olson. Bridges is a great pitching prospect out of Summerville, SC that will provide depth to go along with Josh Reagan and Tyler Johnson in the back end of the bullpen. Jacob Olson adds Dan Uggla type forearms to the lineup. In all seriousness, once Olson can find the right spot in the lineup he will be able to be another immediate contributor to a lineup filled with youth.
Important Weekends for the Gamecocks
Opening day will be an extremely important weekend for South Carolina. No matter who the opponent is, opening weekend builds the excitement for the program. The Gamecocks will have a few weeks to figure out their identity before taking on #10 Clemson on March 3rd-5th. Clemson has been a struggle for Chad Holbrook lately, and Clemson has one of the best players in the country in Seth Beer.
The next weekend featuring a ranked opponent comes on April 6-8 against #24 Vanderbilt. A ranked home series for the Gamecocks will be very timely because just a few weeks later, the Gamecocks will travel to Gainesville to take on the #2 Gators on April 20-22. On May 5-7, South Carolina will travel to Baton Rouge to take on the #4 LSU Tigers.
Lineup and Rotation Projections
Fans everywhere around Columbia know that trying to read Chad Holbrook’s mind is nearly impossible. I won’t even attempt to project a starting lineup for the Gamecocks for Friday afternoon against UNC Greensboro.
Lucky for us, Holbrook did give us the weekend rotation for this weekend against UNC Greensboro. Last season’s ace Clarke Schmidt will take the opening day privileges Friday afternoon. Returning top prospect Wil Crowe will pitch for the first time since 2015 Saturday. Finally, Adam Hill will take the mound on Sunday. Hill went 7-0 last season as a freshman.
My Season Predictions
With so many unknowns on offense, I believe that South Carolina’s depth on the mound will keep them in games with nearly anyone in the country. If the younger players on offense can build confidence during the non-conference schedule, the sky is the limit for this team.
My prediction is that the Gamecocks will repeat as SEC East champions and find their way to hosting another Super Regional. My crystal ball isn’t clear on what will happen in that Super Regional, but you can stay tuned throughout this season to get my feel on how the team is performing.
For quality up-to-date sports reporting, visit our website, like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter. | {
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Home
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Pen Pal Seniors Facts
Runaways Charity Auction Adopt A Senior Would you like to brighten someone’s day without much effort or any money, all from the convenience of your computer? Reachout America’s Pen Pal message board below is a great way to start. You can connect with our community’s special people, whether young or old. You can share ideas, make each other laugh and learn from each other. It's easy to do: Here are some suggestions to start: Please get involved and start a new forum topic - tell us your interest, goals, dreams or hobbies
Get ready to talk to new friends
There are three easy ways to find a pal.
1) Create an interesting forum or post a comment to an existing forum, tell us something interesting about yourself, do you have a question that you would like some opinions, what is your age range, start a conversation, make a new friend.
2) Click on a members name that you would like to be a pal with and their email will be in their contact info
3) Private messaging is another option available under their contact info. The Benefits of Having a Pen Pal
Through Reachout America, we strive to bridge a gap between all races, creeds, social and economic backgrounds. Although our organizations primary focus is to send children with disabilities to various camps, we thoroughly enjoy connecting people who can help us deliver smiles, as well as seek to find those who want a smile. The benefits of having a Pen Pal can be very rewarding in many ways. Most of us smile in happy anticipation when a personal letter shows up in our mailbox. Kids love to get mail as well, whether it be through paper or electronically. This shows how popular and beneficial Pen Pal projects are for children and adults of all ages. Not only does this provide popularity, but it also gives individuals opportunities for lasting rewards. Many adults have given testimonies of exchanging letters as a child through which they were able to build memories and lifelong friendships. Pen Pal correspondence also offers academic benefits. For a child that has learning disabilities or attention problems, exchanging letters with a Pen Pal can spark the motivation to obtain and improve their reading and writing skills. According to Dr. Charles MacArthur, an expert on teaching writing skills to children with learning difficulties, "When children have a regular time to write, see their writing task as meaningful, and get responses to their writing from peers, teachers and others, they are motivated to write and come to understand the purpose and values of writing." We all know from personal experience that residents greatly appreciate and enjoy receiving mail. Many residents are seldom visited by neither family or friends. For these individuals, letters are often held as precious treasures, and placed on the wall or beside their beds where they can be viewed for comfort. To make initial correspondence easier and more natural, we attempt to share information about residents interest with the Pen Pal volunteer. As a pen Pal, one will experience the joy of lifting the spirits of people who long to know that someone still cares for them. Due to their disabilities and various ailments, the residents we currently serve may need assistance in writing their Pen Pal letters. Therefore, we encourage you to get involved as a volunteer in your community by not only spending some quality time on our site but also visiting local special needs children, retirement communities or elderly neighbors in order to assist them in writing. Smiles are contagious....Pass one on !! Home
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Web design by Make it Loud, Inc. Serving Gwinnett, Suwanee, Buford, Lawrenceville, and the Metro Atlanta area. www.makeitloud.net 6071 Queens River Drive | Mableton, GA 30126 | Phone: 1-877-238-8544 | Email: reachoutamericai [email protected] | {
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With Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, as a hub, the world's first global research network into climate change denial has now been established. Building on a brand-new research publication showing the links between conservatism, xenophobia and climate change denial, the network will study how the growth of right-wing nationalism in Europe has contributed to an increase in climate change denial.
Scientific awareness of the greenhouse effect, and human influence on the climate, has existed for over three decades. During the 1980s, there was a strong environmental movement and a political consensus on the issue, but in recent years, climate change denial - denying that changes to the climate are due to human influence on the environment - has increased.
"Two strong groups have joined forces on this issue - the extractive industry, and right-wing nationalists. The combination has taken the current debate to a much more dramatic level than previously, at the same time as our window of opportunity is disappearing."
This is the analysis of Chalmers researcher Martin Hultman, Associate Professor in Science, Technology and Environmental studies, and research leader for the comprehensive project: "Why don't we take climate change seriously? A study of climate change denial", which is now collecting the world's foremost researchers in this area.
In the project, the network will examine the ideas and interests behind climate change denial, with a particular focus on right-wing nationalism, extractive industries, and conservative thinktanks. The goal is to increase understanding of climate change denial, and its influence on political decision-making, but also to raise awareness among the general public, those in power, research institutes, and industry.
Right-wing nationalism's links to climate change denial are a relatively unresearched topic, but Environmental Sociology recently published an article where Hultman and his research colleagues show the connections between conservatism, xenophobia, and climate change denial, through a study in Norway.
Hultman explains that many of the right-wing nationalist parties in Europe now have climate change denial as one of their most important issues.
"These parties are increasing in significance. We see it in Denmark and Norway, in Britain with UKIP, and Front National in France. But also, in Sweden, with the Sweden Democrats' suspicion towards SMHI (Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute), their dismissal of the Paris Agreement and of climate laws, and in their appraisal of climate change denier Václav Klaus as a freedom-fighting hero," he says. Hultman also mentions the Trump administration in the USA as a prime example.
Through the new research project, a unique international collaborative platform for research into climate change denial, Centre for Studies of Climate Change Denialism (CEFORCED), will be established, which will connect around 40 of the world's foremost scientific experts in the area and pave the way for international comparisons. The platform builds upon the world's first conference in the subject, which Hultman and Professor Riley Dunlap of Oklahoma State University organised in 2016.
"Thanks to this international platform, we can investigate how climate change denial arguments arise and are spread - and see differences and similarities in different cultural contexts," says Hultman.
An important foundation of the project will be a broad, interdisciplinary view of climate change denial, linking together different disciplines such as geopolitics, environmental psychology, technological history, environmental sociology, gender research, environmental history, energy policy, environmental humanism and technology and science studies.
"We do not dismiss climate change denial as something limited to, for example, powerful, older men with strong connections to the fossil-fuels industry - even if such organised groups do play important roles. Knowledge of climate change and its causes has been around for a long time, so firstly, we also need to understand the type of reactions and everyday denials that explain why we don't take the greenhouse effect seriously - even when we see the consequences in front of our eyes."
According to Martin Hultman, there are strong reasons for the prevalence of climate change denial, and why it can be so difficult to take in the implications of climate science.
"Around 80 percent of all energy bought and sold in the world is oil, coal, or gas. The world's economy runs on this type of energy, which is destroying our habitat at the same time. This makes climate science's findings problematic, because it means that many in Sweden - and in other countries which use these resources to maintain their lifestyle - need to change their way of life, and many of the most powerful companies in the world will have to change their business models. At the same time, a more climate-friendly lifestyle involves a lot of what many of us hold dear. For example, more time socialising, more contact with nature, better health and less stress. "
Global research network on climate change denial established
The project "Why don't we take climate change seriously? A study of climate change denial" is a multi-year, interdisciplinary and international project, which is financed by the Swedish Energy Agency.
The project establishes the world's first research network on climate change denial - the Centre for Studies of Climate Change Denialism (CEFORCED), which includes around 40 scientific experts, including among others, Professor Riley Dunlap of Oklahoma State University.
The project shall investigate right-wing nationalism, Conservative thinktanks, and extractive industries as key focuses.
* Right-wing nationalism:
The project will map right-wing nationalist parties in Europe and their arguments around climate change denialism. Among other things, Twitter and other internet discussion groups will be analysed.
* Extractive industries:
The project will undertake a historical investigation into Sweden's extractive industries -what they have learned about climate change, and how they have acted, as well as connecting knowledge to international studies into the debate.
* Conservative thinktanks:
The project maps out how conservative thinktanks in Sweden analyse and communicate around climate, as well as their connections to lobby groups of similar character.
Different forms of climate change denial
According to earlier research, several forms of climate change denial exist:
* Organised: Groups such as Klimatsans (Climate Sense) or Stockholmsinitiativet (The Stockholm Initiative) in Sweden, as well as lobby groups like the Heartland Institute in the USA, which support and spread climate change denial.
* Party Political: Political parties such as UKIP in Britain, and AfD in Germany among others, who work against different forms of climate policy.
* Response denial: For example, when people in positions of power make decisions such as the construction of Sälen airport in the Swedish mountains, running totally counter to the climate policies they claim to support.
* Everyday denial: When people act as though as they unaware of climate change, and, for example, fly several times a year to foreign countries.
###
For more information, contact:
Martin Hultman, Associate Professor in Science, Technology and Environmental studies, Department of Technology Management and Economics, Chalmers University of Technology
+46-709-450112, +46-31-772 63 78
[email protected]
Some scientific publications on climate denial:
Right-wing nationalism
Krange, O. Kaltenborn, B.& Hultman, M. (2018). "Cool Dudes in Norway: Climate Change denial among conservative Norwegian Men". Environmental Sociology.
McCright, A., Dunlap, R (2011) "Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States" Global Environmental Change
Forchtner, B., Kroneder, A., & Wetzel, D. (2018). "Being Skeptical? Exploring Far-Right Climate-Change Communication in Germany". Environmental Communication
Hultman, M., Björk A. & Viinikka, T. (forthcoming publication), "Far-right and climate change denial. Denouncing environmental challenges via anti-establishment rhetoric, marketing of doubts, industrial/breadwinner masculinities enactments and ethno-nationalism.". In Contemporary Environmental Communication by the Far Right in Europe ed. Forchtner, Kølvraa & Wodak London: Routledge
Anshelm, J., & Hultman, M. (2014). A green fatwā? Climate change as a threat to the masculinity of industrial modernity. NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, 9(2), 84-96.
Extractive industries
Supran,G; Oreskes, N (2017). "Assessing ExxonMobil's climate change communications (1977-2014)". Environmental Research Letters.
Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. M. (2011). Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.
Young, N., Coutinho, A. (2013). "Government, Anti-Reflexivity, and the Construction of Public Ignorance about Climate Change: Australia and Canada Compared". Global Environmental Politics.
Conservative thinktanks
Brulle, R (2014) "Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations". Climatic Change.
Bohr, J. (2016) "The 'climatism' cartel: why climate change deniers oppose market-based mitigation policy". Environmental Politics
Dunlap, R, & Jacques (2013) "Climate Change Denial Books and Conservative Think Tanks. Exploring the Connection". The American Behavioral Scientist
Anshelm, J., & Hultman, M. (2014). Discourses of global climate change: apocalyptic framing and political antagonisms. Routledge. London | {
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Adding EC2 Instance Recovery Alarms with CloudFormation
Instance Recovery is a little-advertised, little-used feature of EC2. It doesn’t take long to set up and promises to recover your instance on the rare occasion that the underlying hardware fails. Recovery resumes the instance on new hardware, retaining its instance ID, private IP addresses, Elastic IP addresses, and all instance metadata.
I’ve deployed it on “snowflake” instances that don’t have the luxury of using Auto Scaling Groups. This gives me a little extra uptime assurance. I don’t think I’ve actually ever seen any EC2 instance get auto-recovered though.
Maybe I’m cargo-culting it, but it’s not much work to set up, so it feels like an easy (potential) win.
Update (2019-09-13): I asked on reddit for examples and Redditron-2000-4 replied. They have 1800 EC2 instances and see 1-3 automatic recoveries a month. This is a failover rate of 0.05%-0.15%. Small but significant if you’re looking for even 99.9% uptime!
You can click to set up a recover alarm for an instance on the console as per the documentation.
I like automating with CloudFormation though. I converted the resulting manually-created alarm into a template snippet some time ago, and copy paste it between projects. Let’s take a look at it.
If you have an EC2 instance in your CloudFormation template’s Resources like so:
Ec2Instance : Type : AWS::EC2::Instance Properties : LaunchTemplate : LaunchTemplateId : !Ref LaunchTemplateId Version : !Ref LaunchTemplateVersion Tags : - Key : Name Value : Snowflake-Production
…then a basic recovery alarm for it would look like this:
Ec2InstanceAutorecoverAlarm : # Recover the instance if its EC2 status checks fail, as per: # https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-instance-recover.html # https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/UsingAlarmActions.html#AddingRecoverActions Type : AWS::CloudWatch::Alarm Properties : AlarmActions : - !Sub arn:aws:automate:${AWS::Region}:ec2:recover AlarmDescription : Recover instance if its status checks fail. Namespace : AWS/EC2 MetricName : StatusCheckFailed_System Dimensions : - Name : InstanceId Value : !Ref Ec2Instance EvaluationPeriods : 2 Period : 60 Statistic : Minimum ComparisonOperator : GreaterThanThreshold Threshold : 0
The snippet EvaluationPeriods set to gives you 2 minutes of a failing instance before it’s recovered. This is as recommended in the manual setup documentation.
That documentation page also shows how to create alarms to stop, terminate, or reboot instances. I’ve not needed to do any of those, but if you do, you should be able to adapt this template snippet to match.
Fin
Hope this helps you recover,
—Adam
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ETH is getting closer integrated to ETC since the chains split at block 1920000. The PeaceBridge project is a continuation of the peaceRelay project and supported by ETC Cooperative and Ethereum Foundation.
peaceBridge is an ETC — ETH bridge that uses co-signed chains of custody to verify transactions across the two chains. By introducing a challenge game and imposing staking requirements, our design addresses the high gas cost issues and employs a trustless Custodian. — [1]
The architecture uses a set of smart contracts deployed on two chains with signature verification to enforce consistency. This will allow ETC to mint tokens on the ETH chain and vice versa. With semi trusted staking rules, double spending is penalized to incentivize honest Custodians participating in peaceBridge.
The project is now in the stages of creating the user experience and the project claims testing is running smoothly!
ETC users can use peaceBridge to benefit from ETH’s network resources and ETH users can benefit from ETC’s immutable fortress. PeaceBridge is an example of the Layer 2 solutions that can be built for Ethereum Classic, providing a tailoring bridge to ETH. | {
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Joel Osteen has become the butt of many jokes online for his delayed reaction to Hurricane Harvey.
The televangelist has been widely criticized for failing to open his 17,000-seat church to flooding evacuees sooner.
The multi-millionaire preacher tweeted Monday that his church was 'inaccessible' despite photos that showed it was mostly unharmed in the hurricane.
Since then, many have been pointing out the hypocrisy of Osteen's Christianity online with hilarious memes.
One of the memes shows Osteen crying during an impassioned speech, and reads: 'Lord, I will open the church for $50 a head.'
Several memes are circulating online, making fun of televangelist Joel Osteen for his delayed reaction to Hurricane Harvey
Osteen's church wasn't opened to flood evacuees until Tuesday, and many have called Osteen's delayed reaction to the crisis un-Christian
Osteen defended his response, saying the city didn't initially ask the church to be a shelter and that there were safety concerns from a previous flood
Joel Osteen shedding tears for the people who need his help in Houston. pic.twitter.com/93qcwzEJZL — Nick Jack Pappas (@Pappiness) August 28, 2017
Many of the memes drew attention to Osteen's enormous wealth.
'Osteen is now accepting donations for Harvey relief. Here is his house, in case you were wondering where your donations went,' one meme reads, showing a picture of his lavish home.
Others were pointed out how un-Christian his delayed response to the hurricane was.
'I don't remember a scene in the New Testament where Jesus had to have his arm twisted before he'd help the sick & poor,' one meme read, including a picture of Jesus.
Osteen has been blocking many of his critics on Twitter.
He has also come out in several television interviews to defend his actions, saying he didn't open his doors immediately because the city had not asked Lakewood Church to act as a shelter and that there were safety concerns over a previous flood that happened at the church.
The building is now being used as a temporary shelter and distribution center for hurricane relief.
Joel Osteen: God be with my fellow Texans.
Fellow Texans: Can we stay at your church.
Joel Osteen: pic.twitter.com/d0SMUXdJF8 — Jackson (@realJaxonStone) August 29, 2017
Joel Osteen: "Praying for everyone in Houston!"
Can we use your church?
Joel Osteen: pic.twitter.com/zTtJJgUuhD — trigga trev szn (@TrevJSiemian) August 29, 2017
Twitter: Open your church for shelter, Joel!
Joel Osteen: pic.twitter.com/6oPqAlJ9O9 — James Davis (@JDouglasDavis) August 29, 2017
Joel Osteen when people who funded his $56,000,000 net worth in his city are in desperate need for shelter. pic.twitter.com/zrJvmYAkvq — Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) August 28, 2017
Someone said that not only do Joel Osteen and Lord Baelish (Littlefinger) look alike, they also act alike pic.twitter.com/SUYgU4Rdz3 — N Y A W I R A (@GraceJustBeing) August 29, 2017
When you thought this 'man of God' (@JoelOsteen) was doing the right thing and then you see this video.. pic.twitter.com/wJCMousEuh — مانزا رشاد (@IllCx_22) August 29, 2017
When the beautiful people of Houston ask Joel Osteen for the same donations they've been giving his church pic.twitter.com/hrWun5DV56 — Trizz (@Tr1zz) August 28, 2017
“Pastor. I don’t understand why we don’t just open up the church for shelter. What would Jesus do?”
Joel Osteen: pic.twitter.com/IuiVnkrkgD — Ryan Belk (@rbelk_94) August 30, 2017
LIVE footage of Joel Osteen while on top of the Lakewood Church during #HurricaneHarvey pic.twitter.com/13u7gEI3A9 — Maestro Hot Dog (@maestrohotdog) August 30, 2017 | {
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Illinois added their second Chicago Simeon player to their 2013 recruiting class with point guard Jaylon Tate.
Illinois fills a much needed position by adding Tate at point guard. They missed out on two 5-star point guards in Tyler Ennis (Syracuse) and Demetrius Jackson (Notre Dame) recently and were looking at Tate and Dayshon Smith. Tate obviously pulled the trigger first and gives Illinois a serviceable point guard for 2013.
Tate is a 6’2″ 165 lb. point guard out of Chicago Simeon. Tate was originally at De La Salle before transferring to Simeon. He had offers from Northwestern, Providence and Xavier.
Getting the second player out of Simeon this class is huge for John Groce. Simeon and Illinois used to go hand in hand back in the 80’s and early 90’s with players like Nick Anderson, Kevin Turner, Deon Thomas and others. #25 has always been worn by a Simeon player at Illinois in honor of the late Ben Wilson, the #1 high school player in the 80’s who was tragically killed. Most say Wilson would have ended up at Illinois. With Kendrick Nunn and Tate in the fold the Simeon pipeline looks like it is restored. | {
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Writing in the midst of the Great Depression, the American philosopher John Dewey understood deeply the need for a new political order.
The destitution brought about by the crash of 1929 and the subsequent economic meltdown were, Dewey thought, the predictable consequences of an economy — and a political system — controlled by, and dedicated to the needs of, large corporations.
Dewey is seldom remembered as a radical, but, in an essay published in 1931, he argued that social change can only be brought about by changing the fundamental structure of the political order — refurbishing the exterior would always, Dewey argued, be insufficient.
"The industrial crisis is so severe," he wrote, "that even dull eyes can see the foolishness of adopting any measure which leaves the underlying structure just as it was."
Building on this point, Dewey ridiculed the magical thinking underpinning "the belief that those who have privilege and power will remedy the breakdown they have created."
In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 — the largest since the Great Depression — Dewey's insights have been confirmed.
Far from putting forward an agenda of "hope and change" as promised throughout his campaign for the presidency — like, for instance, the one implemented in the aftermath of the Great Depression by Franklin Roosevelt, who faced tremendous democratic pressure from below — Barack Obama settled in the camp of those Dewey so often lambasted: Those who believe that the managers of the economy, those whose policies sparked the Great Recession and the subsequent lopsided recovery, can (or even want to) fix the problems they created.
On the surface, many years later, the economy appears to have recovered; it is no longer in the midst of an existential crisis. With some of them almost as big and others bigger than they were prior to the crash, the banks have been restored and job growth has been steady, giving an impression of stability.
But this is cold comfort to the millions still struggling to recover from the meltdown they did nothing to create.
And, economic tremors and market fluctuations aside, systemic crises, often ignored by those who opt to base their outlook on vague unemployment statistics and income growth (most of which, it should be said, goes to the top 1 percent), continue to fester.
In the wealthiest nation on the planet, 16 million children live in poverty; thousands die each year due to lack of health care; infrastructure is crumbling; schools, particularly those in poor neighborhoods, are being stripped of funding; the infant mortality rate is horrific; some neighborhoods have a life expectancy comparable to that of North Korea; and income inequality is perhaps the worst it has ever been.
And as Ned Resnikoff has recently documented in The Atlantic, "when it comes to the number of Americans who go hungry, it's almost like the recovery never happened."
According to data from the most recent year on record, 2014, "14 percent of all American households are not food secure. That's approximately 17.4 million homes across the United States, populated with more than 48 million hungry people."
To confront these crises, we have, as a result of a system that effectively locks out alternatives, two major political parties that often fail to mention them at all, let alone criticize the economic order from which they emerged.
But there providing the illusion of political vibrancy, as always, is spectacle.
As Republicans stumble through their vapid convention and as Democrats prepare for their own, the issues left unaddressed are, for once, thrown into sharp relief, as is the fecklessness of the "two-party tyranny."
"Amid a widening gap between rich and poor," writes Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "nothing screams income inequality louder than cities, including Cleveland and Philadelphia, case studies in renewal and gentrification, but also in crushing decline."
Contrasted with the lavish, walled-off, corporate-funded conventions, the tragedies experienced by American cities crumbling under decades of neglect and direct assaults by business leaders and their political partners become all the more stark.
"Once symbols of American industrial might and prosperity, Cleveland and Philadelphia are among the poorest cities in the nation," Stolberg notes. "In 2014, Philadelphia had the highest poverty rate (26 percent) among cities with more than a million people, while Cleveland has the third-highest poverty rate (39.2 percent) among cities with more than 100,000 residents, according to census data analyzed by the Brookings Institution."
"You talk about third world countries?" said a former lawyer interviewed by Stolberg. "We're not that far behind here, with the circumstances that people have to live in. And unfortunately, I don't see much coming out of any of the campaigns on what we can do for poverty."
While the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders was a rarity in its focus on soaring inequality, he is operating within a political establishment that has shown deep hostility toward the progressive change he has proposed.
The much-hailed Democratic platform is indeed an improvement over what it would have been had Sanders never entered the process, but it still lacks the urgency necessary to confront the ills produced by an economic order that handsomely rewards the wealthiest at the expense of everyone else.
And such ills are not just present in the United States: As the Guardian's Larry Elliott noted last week, "between 65% and 70% of people in 25 advanced countries saw no increase in their earnings between 2005 and 2014."
Meanwhile, income at the top continue to soar. The Economic Policy Institute has found that, between 1979 and 2014, the wages of the top 0.1 percent in the United States grew by 324.4 percent.
John Dewey would have been appalled by such a picture, but he would not have been surprised.
In perhaps his most famous observation, Dewey wrote, "As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance."
While Republicans are rather explicit in their dedication to the needs of business, Democrats pay fealty to progressive movements, but rarely present more than "tepid reforms," amounting to a mere "attenuation of the shadow."
Having welcomed both the riches of corporate sponsorship and the subsequent rightward shift away from the New Deal tradition and the working class, the Democratic Party has all too often contributed to the crises they blame Republicans for creating.
To justify their actions, Democrats have appealed to realism, arguing that principled commitments are little more than fantastical thinking. But as Dewey understood, reasonableness, in the context of American politics, often serves as "a practical synonym for subservient."
In contrast with Bernie Sanders's grassroots fundraising, the campaign of Hillary Clinton has embodied such subservience to the corporate class. Throughout the primary process, the Clinton campaign has shamelessly abandoned any pretense of principled fundraising and has actively courted Republican donors disaffected by the rise of Donald Trump.
But such active courtship was often unnecessary as many reactionary Wall Street donors flocked to Clinton on their own.
"They know Hillary," Republican lobbyist Ed Rogers said of business executives. "And they know that she is not antibusiness."
Indeed, even as Clinton's Wall Street rhetoric appeared to move in a more progressive direction in the face of pressure from Sanders, donors understood that this is "just politics."
The results of a system that combines soaring income inequality with the ability to legally purchase influence in Washington have been thoroughly documented, most notably by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, whose conclusions in their remarkable 2014 study are right in line with Dewey's.
"In the United States," Gilens and Page wrote, "the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose."
Dewey understood, shortly after the Depression began, that the two-party system that dominated American politics — much like it does now — lacked the language and the platform necessary to transform a system directed by the interests of the powerful few.
While Roosevelt's New Deal programs represented a break from the status quo — a break that still benefits millions in the present — they were not sufficient to resist the relentless business assault against organized labor that was to follow in the decades after the Second World War, an assault that continues to this day.
For Dewey, the "old parties" could serve only as "useful brakes," working, perhaps, to prevent the worst of predatory capitalism, but doing little to enact fundamental change.
The Republican Party, Dewey argued, "has declared that when big capitalists were made prosperous, a general state of welfare would seep down and be enjoyed by the masses." And Democrats, for their part, "accepted the gospel truth of the doctrine that prosperity descends from above."
The only solution, the only way to successfully disrupt and transform the nature of American politics, Dewey concluded, was to work outside of the rigid framework set by the two parties.
"Whatever may be the convictions of individuals within the parties, the parties themselves are property-minded," Dewey wrote. "In the clash between property interests and human interests, all their habits of thought and action fatally impel them to side with the former. They make concessions, but do not change the direction of their belief or behavior."
Dewey noted that as long as the political and economic "machinery" of the United States consists of "business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by commend of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda," democracy cannot possibly be restored.
For democracy is often what is taking place outside of the well-guarded doors of convention stadiums; far from the television cameras; beneath the superficial, personality-driven nature of the American political scene; and beyond the reach of business's shadow. | {
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Anyone with a smartphone can download one of the now-ubiquitous quiz apps for free and start testing their grey matter. Photo: SCMP Handout | {
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Democratic presidential contender Pete Buttigieg unveiled proposals on Friday to boost union membership and protect workers in the so-called gig economy.
"Our economy is changing. How we manage the changes coming our way will define not just the next four years, but the next century," Buttigieg wrote in an email to supporters announcing the plan, which the campaign is calling "A New Rising Tide."
The plan aims squarely at major tech platforms like Alphabet's Google and the ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft.
Buttigieg also called out fast-food giant McDonald's, which he holds up as an example of a company that keeps "wages low by refusing to bargain with workers who technically work for small local McDonald's franchises."
The plan will double the percent of American workers in unions and codify new rules that prevent gig economy employers from classifying many of their workers as independent contractors, forcing them to provide better benefits.
Companies like Uber and Lyft would have to meet a high bar, known as the "ABC Test," to classify workers as independent contractors rather than employees. To do so, they would have to show that the employee is free from the employer's control, among other factors.
"Companies like Google should not be able to hire contractors — from janitors to food service workers to managers to software engineers — that look like employees, but who cannot bargain with Google because they technically work for a staffing firm or other intermediaries," the plan says.
Google, Lyft and McDonald's did not provide comment to CNBC. In a statement, an Uber spokesperson said that "what we repeatedly hear from drivers is what they value most about Uber is the flexibility to work whenever, wherever, and for whom they choose. We believe that independent, on-demand workers should not have to sacrifice security to enjoy that flexibility."
More than 15 million workers — including 10 million independent contractors, 1.4 million temp workers and 1 million contract firm workers — will have expanded rights and protections, according to the campaign.
The 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a rising star of the Democratic Party, wrote that his plan will address the stagnant wages that American workers have faced since the 1980s, even as productivity has risen.
According to Buttigieg, who along with many of his Democratic rivals is calling for a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour, the fundamental problems with the economy go beyond minimum pay.
"Our economy has been tilted towards the wealthy and away from the middle and working class because the people in power designed our laws and policies that way," the plan says. "That's especially true when it comes to workers of color and women, who have historically been undervalued and excluded in the workplace."
Emmanuel Saez, a leading scholar of economic inequality and the director of the Center for Equitable Growth at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an email that he supported the proposed policies "as one important avenue to restore equitable growth."
Buttigieg wrote that his policies will allow gig economy workers to join unions, dramatically increase penalties on large firms that interfere with union elections, force companies that hold mandatory anti-union meetings to provide equal time for union supporters, and give preferences in federal contracting to unionized businesses.
Buttigieg would also establish a national system of paid sick leave. Employers of workers who do not receive at least seven paid sick leave days would be required to pay the equivalent of one hour of pay for every 30 hours of work, to a maximum of 56 hours, into a state fund.
The plan also focuses on the disparity in pay between men and women, and would force large companies to publish data on how much they pay women and men in aggregate. For instance, the campaign notes, if a company pays all the men who work for it $100 million, and all the women $70 million, the government would report a 30% pay gap.
"Unlike other data reporting proposals, the total pay gap does not require the government to collect any new information, can be released immediately, and is hard to game," the proposal says. "Companies that employ mostly men, or that employ only men in their good-paying jobs, will have especially large pay gaps compared to their competitors." | {
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The University of Notre Dame decided that the best way to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. on his birthday was to cover up murals depicting the journey of Christopher Columbus.
In an email sent to students, school president John Jenkins explained the decision, saying Columbus’ arrival was a “catastrophe” for Native Americans. (RELATED: What Do Americans Really Think About Columbus Day?)
NEWS: @NotreDame President Reverend John Jenkins said the world had a different view of Columbus back in the 19th century, when the murals were painted. Now he’s chosen to have them covered. https://t.co/UwWgqKu0SI pic.twitter.com/7SvCvJJTaL — 93 WIBC Indianapolis (@93wibc) January 21, 2019
“In recent years, however, many have come to see the murals as at best blind to the consequences of Columbus’ voyage for the indigenous peoples who inhabited this ‘new’ world and at worst demeaning toward them,” Jenkins said.
The 12 murals, located in the Catholic university’s main building, have been around since the 1880s. They were initially put up to build sympathy for Catholic immigrants during a time period of anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States, something Jenkins alluded to in his statement. (RELATED: Trump Unashamedly Celebrates Columbus Day)
“We wish to preserve artistic works originally intended to celebrate immigrant Catholics who were marginalized at the time in society,” Jenkins said.
The decision comes a little over a year after 300 students signed a petition to have the murals removed.
Follow William Davis on Twitter | {
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Mailvelope is a browser addon for Chrome and Firefox compatible … | {
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WASHINGTON — Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., defended President Donald Trump’s recent calls for China and Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden in a combative "Meet the Press" interview Sunday morning during which he accused Democrats and the media of trying to sabotage the Trump administration.
“Let me tell you why I’m pretty sympathetic with what President Trump has gone through,” Johnson said when asked about allegations of an effort by the president and his administration to link military aid for Ukraine to promises from the government there to investigate Biden and the origins of former special counsel Bob Mueller's investigation into foreign interference in the 2016 election.
“I’ve never in my lifetime seen a president, after being elected, not having some measure of well wishes from his opponents. I’ve never seen a president’s administration be sabotaged from the day after the election.”
Johnson has emerged as a one of the key congressional figures in the debate over whether Trump’s request of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate unproven claims against Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, amounts to an abuse of power. That issue is central to the House Democratic impeachment inquiry.
As chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Johnson was a vocal supporter of that military aid to the country.
Text messages released Friday show State Department officials discussing a link between the administration’s goal of getting Ukraine to launch investigations and scheduling the Ukrainian president for an official White House visit.
But Johnson said that when a diplomat raised the prospect of a quid pro quo to him over the summer, he reached out to the president who “vehemently, adamantly” denied any link between the ask and the aid.
Instead, Johnson argued that Trump has a right to ask foreign governments to help America investigate the origins of the allegations that ultimately became central to Mueller’s investigation.
“I’m here to report today that, unlike the narrative of the press that President Trump wants to dig up dirt on his 2020 opponent, what he wants is an accounting of what happened in 2016. Who set him up? Did things spring from Ukraine?” Johnson said.
The combative interview prompted frustration from Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who followed Johnson’s interview.
“Ron’s a good friend, but I’m deeply scared by the positioning that Republicans have chosen to take. That interview was just a giant green light to the president of the United States to continue to solicit foreign interference in U.S. elections,” he said.
“This is wild, the lengths to which Republicans are going to try to avoid being criticized by this president.”
And he pointed to those recently released texts to accuse the Trump administration of mixing diplomacy and official business.
"The texts make it clear that there was a quid pro quo on the table, that the State Department, the White House, the president's personal lawyers were all working to get Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election in exchange for access to the White House and likely the resumption of aid," he added. | {
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(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス通販最安値！
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス通販はコチラ！
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスを通販で最安値で購入ならどこが良いのでしょうか？
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス通販ならオオサカ堂通販がお勧めです。
残念ながら、Amazon、楽天などの大手通販ショッピングでは取り扱いがないのです。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスのL-Lysine Plusは、4粒あたりリジン1600mgと亜鉛8mgを配合した健康サプリメントです。抗酸化作用をはじめ、免疫機能やカルシウムの吸収サポートすることで、日々の健康や生活習慣を改善へと導きます。
こちらのページでは、主に(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスの通販最安値、Amazon、楽天での通販、効果、副作用、口コミについて記述。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスを通販されるか悩まれてるなら是非ご参考ください。
では早速、(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス最安値の詳細を説明します。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス最安値で通販したい！
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス最安値通販なら、冒頭でも伝えた通りオオサカ堂がオススメ！
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス最安値の調査にあたり、様々なサイトを見て回ったが、Amazon、楽天、ヤフーショッピング、メルカリ等の通販、フリマアプリでの取り扱いがないです。
Amazonや楽天は種類豊富な大手通販ショッピングですが、販売がないので最安値で通販出来ません。
では、ドラッグストア等の販売店では、(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスを最安値で取り扱っているのでしょうか？
ドラッグストアのマツモトキヨシ、ウエルシア、ツルハドラッグ、サンドラッグ、コスモス薬局、スギ薬局、ココカラファイン、カワチ薬品、アイン薬局、クリエイトを探したが、取り扱っていませんでした。
最後に、バラエティーショップでも調査。しかし、ドンキホーテや東急ハンズなどの大手販売店にも(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスは置いてません。
結果、取り扱いのあるオオサカ堂が(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスの最安値通販となります。
オオサカ堂という通販サイトを初めて聞いた方もいらっしゃると思いますので、初めての人に向けて、記述していきます。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスでオオサカ堂で決まり！
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスをオオサカ堂で通販が初めての方へ。
オオサカ堂とは、個人輸入代行サイトのことで、個人輸入に係る手続き（注文、支払い、通関、配送などの手配）の代行を行ってくれます。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスもここで通販出来ます。
個人輸入代行サイトでは、海外の正規品の個人輸入を代行します。
しかもオオサカ堂は、全国一律送料無料、注文は365日24時間年中無休。100%正規品保証。
更に、梱包、外箱、クレジット明細書に商品名やサイト名は記載されまないので、プライバシー保護もしっかりされたオオサカ堂はかなりオススメです。
ですから安心して、(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスはオオサカ堂で通販出来ます。
更に、オオサカ堂で通販すると、ポイントが貯まり、次回そのポイント分割引可能です。
レビューを書き込むだけでポイントが付くキャンペーンもあります。
ポイントを貯めて、お得にオオサカ堂を使ってみてはいかがでしょうか。
続いて、冒頭でも少しAmazonや楽天の通販について記述したが、更に詳しくAmazonや楽天での通販をまとめました。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスはAmazonで通販できる？
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスはAmazonでの取り扱いはないです。
実際に検索しましたが、(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスはAmazonでは取り扱ってません。
Amazonで通販したくても、残念ながら超有名通販のAmazonでも取り扱いはないです。
なぜなら日本で販売していない海外商品だからです。なので今回はAmazon通販は諦めましょう。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスはAmazonでは販売してないですが、個人輸入代行のオオサカ堂で通販できます。
個人輸入代行と聞くと購入や手続きが面倒と思うかもですが、Amazon通販と同じ感覚で簡単に通販できます。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスをAmazonで通販できるようになったときには随時更新予定ですが、今はオオサカ堂で通販以外ないようです。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスは楽天で通販できる？
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスは楽天でも取り扱ってません。
Amazon同様に、(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスを楽天で検索、はたまた残念。先ほどの理由で楽天でも取り扱っていません。
先程も記述した通り、(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスは楽天では販売してないですが、個人輸入代行のオオサカ堂なら通販出来ます。
類似商品が楽天で販売していますが、オオサカ堂の(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスの方が価格も安く、効果が出た！と口コミも多く見られます。
二度目になりますが個人輸入代行と聞くと面倒かもですが、楽天通販と同じ感覚で通販出来ます。しかも、送料無料。
楽天で通販できるようになったときには随時更新予定ですが、今はオオサカ堂通販以外なしです。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス価格はいくら？
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス価格について調査。
価格を比較する上で、販売サイトを調べたが、通販出来るのはオオサカ堂だけです。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスの価格は海外輸入なのでドル円の相場によって若干、変動しますが、2019年12月1日現在の価格はコチラ。
オオサカ堂(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス価格
1本 2,180円
2本 4,360円
個数が増える程、価格がかなりお買い得になりますので、まとめ買いが断然お得です！
更に、同時に複数注文いただくと US$2ずつ割引です。
2個注文で216円割引!(US$2.00)、 3個注文で432円割引!(US$4.00)、4個注文で648円割引!(US$6.00)
他の商品との同時購入も、割引の対象となります。
オオサカ堂の商品は、生活の役に立つアイテムが多数取り揃えられているので、他商品とのまとめ買いがお得です。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス効果まとめ
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスの効果は期待出来るのでしょうか。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスの効果を知るために、主成分を見てみましょう。
【(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスの成分】
L-リジン（L-リジン塩酸塩） 1600mg、 亜鉛（グルコン酸亜鉛）8mg
【(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス効果】
毎日の健康サポートや生活習慣の改善
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス効果には個人差が有ります。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス副作用は？
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスの副作用には、どんなものがあるのでしょうか。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスの副作用は、特に報告はありません。。
その他、なにか異変を感じた際は速やかに医師の診察をお受けください。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスの副作用には、上記の症状が起こる可能性がありますが、私が見た口コミでは重篤な副作用が起った人は見られませんでした。
しかし、何か異変を感じた際にはすぐに医師に相談して下さい。
では実際に、使用した人の口コミを見て見ましょう。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス口コミ最新版まとめ
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス口コミにはどんなものがあるでしょうか。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス口コミ最新版はコチラ。
【(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス口コミ】
2019-12-09 yossi
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス[サファイアヘルスケア社製]
いつもは リジンのみのを服用してましたが
こちらに変えました。 値段も安いし
内容も良く気に入ってます。
2019-12-08 hangu
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス[サファイアヘルスケア社製]
まだ発毛としての効果は感じられませんが、ただの亜鉛サプリよりはいいと思います。精力アップの方が早く実感できるかもしれません。
2019-12-08 あおたか
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス[サファイアヘルスケア社製]
もう数年服用しています。
ミノキシタブとセットに服用することで効果ありとのことで今後も続けていきます。
2019-12-07 kuu
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス[サファイアヘルスケア社製]
まだ2週間程ですが効果を感じてきたので投稿しました。まず髪の生え際に短い毛が沢山生えてきてるのに気付き、よく見ると全体からも沢山生えていました。特に薄く気になってた分け目も今は気にならない程になってます。先日美容院でも髪多いですねと言われたのでびっくりしました。眉毛も濃くなりこんなに早く効果が出るとは本当に驚きです。育毛としてはこれのみ使用で、朝晩2錠づつ飲んでるだけです。
2019-12-07 じゃがりこ
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス[サファイアヘルスケア社製]
リピートです。
キャンペーン中だったのでポーチと同社のビタミン剤も貰えました。ありがとございます。
本製品についてですが、味が変わったような気がします。効果は変わっていないことを期待します。
オオサカ堂スタッフより
この度は弊社をご利用いただきまして、誠に有難うございます。
該当商品につきまして、特段成分を変更を行った旨、報告はございませんが
味やにおいの感じ方につきましては、服用時のお身体の状態にもよります事、ご了承くださいませ。
尚、異常がみられましたら、ご使用をお止めいただき、専門医にご相談されますことをお勧めいたします。
医師・薬剤師の方とご相談の上、最適な医薬品をご選択くださいませ。
何卒宜しくお願い申し上げます。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスの口コミをもっと見たい方はオオサカ堂で見られます。
口コミが気になる方は、下の(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスバナーから。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスの支払方法
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス支払方法まとめです。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス支払方法は、クレジットカード支払いと銀行振込支払いの2種類です。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス支払方法【注意事項】
代金の振込手数料は、購入者側の負担になります。
代金により、到着時に関税、消費税などが必要な場合がございます。
商品は通常、入金確認後7〜14日後にお客様のご自宅に配送されます。
（尚、上記日数は商品の内容や郵送事情により異なりますので、あくまで目安とお考え下さい）
海外より航空便での発送の為、期日・時間指定は出来ません。
商品は日本国内到着まで完全保証いたします。 また、不良品の場合、良品と負担で交換いたします。
ご注文は、医薬品の個人輸入、薬機法をご理解の上、自己の行動に責任を持てる20歳以上の方のみとなります。20歳未満の方はご利用いただけません。
突発的な情勢により遅れる可能性がございます事をご了承お願いいたします。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスは送料無料でお得に通販できる
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラス送料について記述します。
オオサカ堂では(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスは送料無料だけでなく、代行手数料も無料です。
(バイタルミー)L-リジンプラスを送料無料、代行手数料無料でお得に買うならオオサカ堂です。
Amazonや楽天では送料がかかることが多いですよね。どこの通販でも定期購入などしないと送料がかかることが多いですがここでは、送料が無料になるんです。 | {
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There have been a plethora of ICOs on the market over the past months, as the popularity of the crowdfunding mechanism increases.
VCs jump the bandwagon
The feeling that ICOs will someday put traditional VC funding out of business as companies can reach out to investors directly has led to some VC companies to seek funding in their own ICO.
The recent announcement by Homebrew, the startup VC firm founded by former Google and Twitter executives, is not surprising, given the company’s penchant for investing in fintech type small businesses (like Shyp and Skimm). Partner and co-founder Satya Patel said,
“We’re going to raise our next fund using an ICO, how about that.”
After the statement, however, Patel retreated on the certainty he had offered, only commenting that the possibility was discussed among board members and partners.
The idea of VC companies raising capital via an ICO is not new. Blockchain Capital managed a $10 mln ICO in April as well.
Bridge to the US
July 4 will see the start of a new ICO dedicated to bridging the gap between the tech pool in Eastern Europe and US companies. The ICO, called Starta, is promising to utilize business and language connections to “empower Eastern European frontier technology companies through exposing them to the US market. The program aims at customizing adapting Eastern Europeans to cultural and business environment in the US, and it promises them to “complete and define product/market fit, get traction and become part of the local startup and investing ecosystem in the US.”
The Starta tokens will be released on the Waves Blockchain platform, a vehicle for issuing digital tokens to the marketplace.
The company promises to acquire talented companies in Eastern Europe, and bridge the entry gap into the US markets for different technologies via language and accent training (‘acceleration’ according to the Starta website).
Starta will derive profits from the companies who succeed in American sales via ownership stake.
Ethereum-based invoicing
Another month-long ICO is starting now, Hive (HVE), is dedicated to business invoicing systems on the Ethereum Blockchain using smart contracts.
Hive is designed to help businesses with factoring - borrowing from lenders based on the receivables, usually as a percentage of the receivables. When the invoiced amount is paid, the lender receives the percentage back, plus interest. The company can then receive funds more rapidly than the average 60-90 day turnaround time for invoicing, helping with cash flow issues.
Blockchain technology can automate this process by fingerprinting each invoice, making it simple for a lender to vet the receivables. It can also link each invoice via smart contract, eliminating the risk of duplicate lending on a single invoice and ensuring lender confidence. Invoicing is a $3 tln industry worldwide. | {
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trentontransitcenter.jpeg
Trenton Transit Center on Friday, September 20, 2013.
(Martin Griff / The Times of Trenton)
TRENTON - N.J. Transit Police say that a man who was trespassing on the tracks along North Clinton Avenue had his leg amputated after he was struck by a train pulling into the Trenton Transit Center around 12:45 a.m.
A spokeswoman for the transit police said that the man is alive and was taken to a nearby hospital by ambulance after part of his leg was removed below the right knee.
The Trenton Fire Department responded to the accident as well. Officials from both agencies say they are unsure of the man's condition before the accident and have not yet determined why he was on the tracks.
Transit police are actively investigating the incedent, the spokeswoman said.
The train -- traveling along the Northeast Corridor from New York Penn Station to Trenton Transit Center -- was briefly delayed but train schedules were not affected, officials said.
Greg Wright may be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @GregTheWright. Find NJ.com on Facebook. | {
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Today Only: Reebok CrossFit Nano 2.0 in Nacho/White/Club Blue/Black (V51721) Just $55! | {
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And increasingly across the country, questions are being asked: "How could this happen?" "Why is help taking so long?" and "How can thousands of Americans be stranded?".
It is hot and humid in the city's stadium and toilets are overflowing
President George Bush was visiting some of the devastated areas of the south on Friday amid growing anger over the federal response to the disaster.
Officials insist their response has been effective - rejecting widespread criticism that the administration was too slow to react to the crisis.
There has also been criticism from opposition politicians and members of the public that spending on the war on Iraq diverted money away from flood-control projects.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has angrily accused Washington of not having a clue about what was going on.
On Thursday, he issued what he called a "desperate SOS" for help for up to 20,000 refugees stuck in a convention centre in New Orleans which he said was "unsanitary and unsafe" and running out of supplies.
I was in the tsunami region, and this response is incredibly more efficient, more effective and under the most difficult circumstances
Michael D Brown
Emergency response head
On Friday, authorities in Louisiana were trying to crank up the rescue operation. Convoys of school buses were trying to ferry out the thousands of people sheltering in the convention centre and the nearby New Orleans Superdome amid the filth and the dead.
The questions being asked focus on why it has taken so long to get those buses on the road - and why thousands of people sheltering in the places where they were told to take refuge are now going hungry and thirsty.
Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco says she has asked for a "Berlin drop" of food and water.
In an interview with Good Morning America on Friday, she said that they were finally starting to see the response from the federal authorities.
The task on the ground has been complicated by the frustration and despair felt by survivors who have gone days without essential supplies.
Much of the frustration has been directed at the national authority, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).
This is a national disgrace - we can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans
Terry Ebbert
"This is a national disgrace. Fema has been here three days, yet there is no command and control," Mr Ebbert said.
"We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans."
One man, George Turner, who was still waiting to be evacuated, summed up much of the anger felt by the refugees.
"Why is it that the most powerful country on the face of the Earth takes so long to help so many sick and so many elderly people?" he asked.
Tens of thousands of people are still waiting to be evacuated
"Why? That's all I want to ask President Bush."
And John Rhinehart, the administrator of a New Orleans hospital without power and water, said: "I'm beginning to wonder if the government is more concerned about the looting than people who are dying in these hospitals."
There is widespread agreement among commentators that somewhere there has been a breakdown in the system.
The Biloxi Sun Herald in Mississippi asked: "Why hasn't every able-bodied member of the armed forces in south Mississippi been pressed into service?"
And on Friday the Washington Post wrote: "Though experts had long predicted that the city, which sits below sea level and is surrounded by water, would face unprecedented devastation after an immense hurricane, they said problems were worsened by a late evacuation order and insufficient emergency shelter for as many as 100,000 people."
Volunteer effort
The BBC's Jamie Coomarasamy in Baton Rouge says that on the ground in some areas, it is largely volunteers, including those from the Red Cross and other organisations, who are leading the relief efforts.
But he said these efforts were fairly haphazard, with local radio and television stations putting out requests for people to do what they could.
Fema head Michael D Brown has defended the federal response, saying that his agency had prepared for the storm, but that the widespread flooding had hampered the operation.
Could more have been done? I would say every society in the world is not preparing adequately for catastrophic events
Jan Egeland
UN emergency relief co-ordinator
"What the American people need to understand is that the full force of the federal government is bringing all of those supplies in, in an unprecedented effort that has not been seen even in the tsunami region," he said.
"I was in the tsunami region, and this response is incredibly more efficient, more effective and under the most difficult circumstances."
Jan Egeland, the UN emergency relief co-ordinator has written to US ambassador to the UN John Bolton offering help.
"I understand people's frustration, but I also know from bitter experience that this, the fifth and the sixth and the seventh days are always among the worst, because it is before you reach, really, the largest amount of people," he told the BBC.
"Could more have been done? I would say every society in the world is not preparing adequately for catastrophic events. Disaster prevention is something that we are campaigning for all over the world, and I would say no society is fully prepared for all eventualities." | {
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Dear Adam and Mike,
We don’t want to fight with you. We love you and we are actually huge fans.
When we made our parody version of your song, ‘Girls’, we did it with the best of intentions. We wanted to take a song we weren’t too proud of, and transform it into a powerful anthem for girls. Over the past week, parents have sent us pictures and videos of their kids singing the new lyrics with pride, building their own Rube Goldberg machines in their living rooms and declaring an interest in engineering. It’s been incredible to watch.
Our hearts sank last week when your lawyers called us with threats that we took very seriously. As a small company, we had no choice but to stand up for ourselves. We did so sincerely hoping we could come to a peaceful settlement with you.
We want you to know that when we posted the video, we were completely unaware that the late, great Adam Yauch had requested in his will that the Beastie Boys songs never be used in advertising. Although we believe our parody video falls under fair use, we would like to respect his wishes and yours.
Since actions speak louder than words, we have already removed the song from our video. In addition, we are ready to stop the lawsuit as long as this means we will no longer be under threat from your legal team.
We don’t want to spend our time fighting legal battles. We want to inspire the next generation. We want to be good role models. And we want to be your friends.
Sincerely,
Debbie + Team GoldieBlox | {
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Donald Trump Donald John TrumpObama calls on Senate not to fill Ginsburg's vacancy until after election Planned Parenthood: 'The fate of our rights' depends on Ginsburg replacement Progressive group to spend M in ad campaign on Supreme Court vacancy MORE could trample his opponents in Tuesday’s Republican New York primary, according to a new poll.
The GOP front-runner leads by 29 points among likely primary voters in New York state with 54 percent support, followed by Ohio Gov. John Kasich at 25 percent and Sen. Ted Cruz Rafael (Ted) Edward CruzSenate Republicans face tough decision on replacing Ginsburg Cruz: Trump should nominate a Supreme Court justice next week Renewed focus on Trump's Supreme Court list after Ginsburg's death MORE (Texas) at 16 percent, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist Poll released Friday.
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“Donald Trump is well-positioned to carry New York handily and is likely to acquire a sizeable number of New York’s delegates as a result,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion.
Fourteen delegates in the New York primary are awarded proportionally based on the statewide vote. Should any candidate receive more than 50 percent of the vote — something only Trump appears capable of doing — he will claim all of those delegates.
The remaining 81 delegates are divided among the state’s 27 congressional districts, with three delegates up for grabs in each. Candidates who receive more than 50 percent of the vote in any district take all three of the delegates within it.
The results are similar to the same poll released earlier this week in which Trump had 54 percent support among New York’s GOP voters, but support for Kasich grew slightly while support for Cruz dropped a few points.
“If there’s someone to watch in the closing hours, closing days, it’s Kasich,” Miringoff said. | {
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Image caption Lloyd Moskalik sells two tonnes of fish to wholesalers each week
Under eerie blue lights designed to simulate the ocean depths, hundreds of fish swim serenely through the bubbling waters of their circular tanks, 15 floors up in the sky.
There are 11 plastic tanks in total, holding a combined 80,000 litres of salt water.
They are full of grouper, a white-fleshed fish, which are all destined to end up on the plates of restaurant-goers across Hong Kong.
This is the scene at Oceanethix, one of the numerous so-called "vertical fish farms" in the special administrative region, which have become a key fixture of its supply chain.
If you like, this is rooftop farming on steroids Lloyd Moskalik, Oceanethix
For while most fish farms around the world are at sea, or at least, land level, in Hong Kong it is more often a necessity to put them many floors up in tall buildings.
This is because as one of the most densely populated places in the world, there is simply very little spare space. So fish farms have to fit in where they can.
For the small firms that dominate the industry, it is worth the effort, as Hong Kong has an insatiable appetite for fish and seafood. It consumes more than 70kg (11 stone) per capita every year, 10 times more than in the US.
"We're way above the hustle and bustle," jokes Lloyd Moskalik, managing director of Oceanethix, which is based in Hong Kong's New Territories. "If you like, this is rooftop farming on steroids."
Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption People in Hong Kong are big fish eaters
His business, which employs six people in Hong Kong, buys in the groupers as baby fish, or fingerlings. They then take between 10 and 13 months to get up to market weight.
If you come here on a Saturday it's an absolute theme park - there are people running everywhere Osbert Lam, Owner, City Farm
Oceanethix sells about two tonnes of groupers to fish wholesalers each week, and Mr Moskalik says he can get as much as 776 Hong Kong dollars ($100; £60) per kilogram.
As demand for farmed fish has soared in the region, wholesale prices have risen at a rate of between 10% and 15% per annum for the past five years.
Oceanethix also sells its water-recycling systems to other companies across Asia setting up similar fish farms in the sky.
"We've been selected by the Korean government as part of an ambitious plan to establish vertical farms in multi-story buildings... in Seoul," says Mr Moskalik.
The Singapore government has also bought a country licence for Oceanethix's water-recycling systems, and the company has its own sister facility in Shanghai.
Farm waiting lists
But it is not just fish farms that have been taking to the skies in Hong Kong, as a growing number of organic fruit and vegetable plots are being created on top of skyscrapers and other spare rooftop spaces.
Image caption There is a waiting list for space at Osbert Lam's rooftop farms
No doubt in part caused by a string of recent food safety scandals in mainland China, from where Hong Kong sources most of its food, a growing number of Hongkongers are wishing to grow their own produce as naturally as possible.
Helping to meet this demand is Osbert Lam, the owner of Hong Kong City Farms.
From just a hobby 10 years ago, he now runs three farms that convert thousands of square feet of rooftop space into organic plots he rents at about 190 Hong Kong dollars per month.
"We've got a list of about 30 people all waiting to get boxes," he says, from the top of a 14-storey industrial estate building in Quarry Bay, in the heart of one of Hong Kong's business districts.
Image copyright HK Honey Image caption Michael Leung's honey commands a premium price
"If you come here on a Saturday it's an absolute theme park - there are people running everywhere."
He says the urban farms reveal just how shallow Hong Kong's urban roots are.
"Many of the people that come here are not even two or three generations away from the land," says Mr Lam.
"In many cases, it's just one generation before they were from farming families. A lot of people come here with a lot of knowledge."
Expensive honey
The growth of rooftop gardens has also meant more business for Hong Kong's urban beekeepers.
Michael Leung, founder of HK Honey, is always on the look out for new places to put his hives, and to help him locate them, he looks up for papaya trees.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Green spaces are limited in central parts of Hong Kong
"The papaya tree grows very well in Hong Kong - most people, if they grow anything on the roof, it's a papaya," he says. "The height of the tree allows you from ground level to see that someone is using the rooftop.
"We're always looking for little trees that stick out. They're like a flag, a modern agricultural flag," he says. "Through that, we then try to approach the people growing on the roof."
Mr Leung then arranges to rent space for his hives.
He says that the honey his bees produce has a spicy tang, which reflects the biodiversity of Hong Kong's urban flora, and particularly the Chinese basil many people like to grow.
Such is the quality of Mr Leung's honey that he is able to sell it for a whopping 240 Hong Kong dollars per jar.
Pressure on land
For Hong Kong's larger commercial organic farming operations, which buy produce from Hong Kong's dwindling slivers of agricultural land near the border with China, the continuous pressure on agricultural land from developers could mean that rooftop farms will one day be all that's left to the special administration region, which even now produces 2% of the food it consumes.
Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption Hong Kong has a proud restaurant scene
Todd Darling, of Homegrown Foods, an organic grocery delivery business in Hong Kong, said permissive zoning regulations make it more cost effective for owners of agricultural land to store shipping containers on the space than to farm it.
In the meantime, however, the food scandals that creep across the border from mainland China have, perversely, been good for his organic business.
"I would never like to say that, but it does tend to encourage people to consider alternatives," he says. | {
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Atmel AT90USB162 : weekend die-shot
Atmel AT90USB162 is an 8-bit microcontroller with hardware USB, 16KiB flash and 512B of SRAM/EEPROM. | {
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“UFC is aware of the recent allegations made against BJ Penn. The organization requires all athletes who compete in the UFC to act in an ethical and responsible manner, as detailed in the UFC Fighter Conduct Policy. UFC will not tolerate violations of the policy. Every athlete is deserving of proper review and this situation, as with any serious allegation, will be investigated by an independent party and thoroughly reviewed by the UFC. The UFC organization will also cooperate with any law enforcement investigation. In light of the serious allegations, UFC has postponed plans to book Penn for an upcoming bout until more details are determined.
UFC holds athletes who compete in the organization to the highest standard and will continue to take appropriate action, if and when warranted. It is important to note that Penn is considered innocent until proven guilty and UFC is not prejudging this matter.” | {
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A set of 54-year-old conjoined twins from Michigan are facing each other in court, as one of the siblings is contesting his brother’s right to engage in sexual acts without his consent.
Alfred and Wilbert Peterson were born joined at the waist and facing each other, and spent their entire life this way.
They have two sets of arms and legs and their own hearts and stomachs but share a lower digestive tract and a penis.
This shared penis has become a major source of conflict between the twins over recent years, and Alfred is now going to court to keep his brother from masturbating.
“He keeps playing with our penis without my consent. That’s legally a sexual assault!”
Alfred says he is suffering from insomnia and from a post-traumatic syndrome after waking up at night on three occasions to catch his brother masturbating.
“I don’t want to sleep at night because I’m afraid he’s going to touch me.”
As for Wilbert, he claims he has done nothing wrong and insists that he has the legal right to masturbate.
He said he waited for his brother to be asleep because he knew he was against it didn’t want to disturb or shock him.
The two of them were facing each other in a specially adapted courtroom this morning in Flint, Michigan.
Dozens of reporters were present to cover this unusual case, which should clarify many legal issues concerning the sexuality of conjoined twins.
At the moment, the Michigan state law doesn’t include any guidelines for individuals sharing the same genital organs.
Across the U.S., the only state to have a law concerning the sexuality of conjoined twins is California, which passed a bill in 2011. | {
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Esas fueron las palabras delque generaron la absoluta molestia de toda la oposición esta mañana en el Congreso.Esta situación derivó en que todos losen bloque de la Sala.Además, y como se puede ver en el video adjunto capturado por la diputada, Urrutia fue encarado por la legisladora. Quien se levantó de su escaño, caminó hasta el puesto del UDI y lo interpeló por sus dichos empujándole su silla visiblemente molesta, siendo detenida por otros legisladores.Asimismo varios diputados comenzaron a levantarse de sus escritorios alegando en contra de los dichos del UDI y a reclamar al presidente de la Cámara,que suspendiera la sesión, calificando como "impresentable" sus palabras.Toda esta situación se generó debido a que en la sesión los diputados se enteraron que el Gobierno retiró el proyecto ingresado por lacon el que se buscaba indemnizar a las víctimas reconocidas en losy que justo ayer había sido aprobado por la comisión de Derechos Humanos, instancia que está integrada, entre otros, por la diputada Jiles. | {
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In time for AnimeJapan, a new preview has been presented for the spring TV anime adaptation of Ohtaka Shinobu and Yoshifumi Ohtera's Magi prequel/spin-off Adventure of Sinbad]. Miyao Yoshikazu helms the AOS Project production, scheduled to air on the latenight Animeism starting April 15th. PENGUIN RESEARCH perform opening "Spotlight" with Fujifabric on ending "Polaris."
An episode listing has confirmed a 13-episode run for the series, however, episodes 2-6 will be TV edits of 2014's two-part The Capture of Dungeon Baal and 2014/2015's three-part Capture of Dungeon Valefor OVAs.
Magi Sinbad no Bouken PV by pKjd
------
Scott Green is editor and reporter for anime and manga at geek entertainment site Ain't It Cool News. Follow him on Twitter at @aicnanime. | {
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Según contó El Partidazo de COPE, el entorno de Cristiano Ronaldo afirma que su enfado no es solo cuestión de dinero, sino de estatus y de reconocimiento. El delantero portugués no se siente valorado para ser el jugador top que es. El dinero que no le pagan lo puede ganar haciendo dos anuncios.
Asimismo, el entorno de Cristiano Ronaldo considera que es una decisión personal, de orgullo. Se equivocó diciéndolo en la final de Kiev, pero es su carácter. Si se va no puede quedar mal ni con el club ni con la afición. La situación es muy complicada, pero no irreversible, tal y como informó este viernes El Partidazo de COPE. | {
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He told Fox News personality Martha MacCallum:
“I went to an all-boys Catholic high school where I was focused on academics and athletics, going to church every Sunday … working on my service projects and friendship — friendship with my fellow classmates and friendship with girls from the local all-girls Catholic schools."
After MacCallum asked Kavanaugh about a separate assault allegation that has been hinted at by attorney Michael Avenatti, though not widely reported. Kavanaugh denied that allegation, explaining that he was a virgin in high school and afterward.
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KAVANAUGH: I did not have sexual intercourse or anything close to sexual intercourse in high school or for many years thereafter. And the girls from the schools I went to and I were friends —
MACCALLUM: So you’re saying that through all these years that are in question you were a virgin?
KAVANAUGH: That’s correct.
MACCALLUM: Never had sexual intercourse with anyone in high school?
KAVANAUGH: Correct.
MACCALLUM: And through what years in college, since we’re probing into your personal life here?
KAVANAUGH: Many years after. I’ll leave it at that. Many years after.
While Kavanauh didn’t claim hi virginity was exculpatory in the other matters, it’s not hard to imagine that someone could make a leap to the argument that a high school virgin couldn’t be capable of assault.
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Kevin Cramer, a GOP congressman from North Dakota who is running for a Senate seat, tried in an interview with a local news station this week to clarify an earlier statement he made that “nothing happened” in one of the alleged incidents involving Kavanaugh. “My point was there was no type of intercourse or something like that,” he said.
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That line of thinking shows how little people know about what constitutes sexual assault in general.
Christine Blasey Ford, a clinical psychology professor, shared her story about an alleged high school encounter with Kavanaugh with The Washington Post’s Emma Brown:
While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth. “I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” said Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”
Deborah Ramirez, a board member for a domestic violence nonprofit, told the New Yorker that she and Kavanaugh were students at Yale University when he exposed his genitals near her face.
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The Fix’s Aaron Blake broke down Ramirez’s allegations: Kavanaugh “had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away.”
Neither of the women who have gone public with their stories has accused the judge of having sexual intercourse with them.
The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), one of the country’s largest anti-sexual-violence organizations, considers sexual assault to be sexual contact or behavior that takes place without the victim’s explicit consent.
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The group lists multiple forms of sexual assault, including:
Attempted rape
Fondling or unwanted sexual touching
Forcing a victim to perform sexual acts, such as oral sex or penetrating the perpetrator’s body
Penetration of the victim’s body, also known as rape
Ramirez’s allegation might not technically fit the definition of sexual assault, as The Washington Post’s Deanna Paul wrote for The Fix.
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Yet by all accounts, the Ramirez narrative presents significantly more problems than Ford’s, and without minimizing the gravity of the alleged conduct, experts also agree that the high school sexual assault that Ford describes is a more criminally serious offense than what could amount to indecent exposure by a young college student.
There are variations in types of assault and misconduct and differences in the way state laws treat them. Victims of sexual assault can be affected in myriad ways throughout their lives.
Kavanaugh has repeatedly denied the allegations, and the full truth of what exactly happened between him and his alleged victims may never be known. But it is important to understand that it is very possible that someone can abstain from sexual intercourse yet still commit a sexual assault. | {
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BEIJING - Families of passengers missing since Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished have started receiving payments of $50,000 each, officials said Friday.
A spokeswoman for Malaysia's foreign ministry confirmed that some payouts had been made, but was unable to comment on how many families had received them.
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There has been no sign of the Boeing 777 that disappeared carrying 239 passengers and crew on March 8 as it flew from Kuala Lumpur and Beijing.
Insurers led by Germany’s Allianz are assessing claims of more than 40 Chinese families. Missing passengers’ relatives can claim up to $175,000 each, according to the BBC News.
An Allianz spokeswoman told NBC News that "immediate payments were offered to the relatives of passengers on board MH370 at the time of its disappearance."
She did not offer further details of the amount offered or the number of people who had taken the payments.
The search for the plane across a wide swathe of the ocean off the western coast of Australia is set to be the most costly in aviation history.
The Malaysian government has been broadly criticized for its handling of the disaster, and treatment of the passengers’ loved ones, more than half of whom are Chinese.
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The Seattle Seahawks have furthered their goal of starting a Scandinavian conclave in Renton, Washington by signing another former Viking in Antoine Winfield. Aside from building their own longboat, there's not much else Seattle can do to snipe the Minnesota Vikings, given that they now have one of the best.
What follows will now be a somewhat disorganized rant about how you don't understand how good of a player you really have. Winfield will probably retire as a legend for Vikings fans, and should retire as one of the most notable cornerbacks in history. That's no exaggeration—you have grabbed a historically powerful figure.
This is because at 5'9" and 180 pounds, you have not obtained a cornerback. You have merely found yourself with history's tiniest linebacker.
If you like, he may be best characterized as the world's best cover linebacker or the world's best run-stuffing corner. The difference is immaterial because you will never see the likes of Antoine Winfield again, so normal naming conventions are useless.
Much like Percy Harvin, it may be better to call him a "football player" than to pigeonhole him into one position.
While he may not be the best cover corner that the NFL has seen (although he's no slouch there), he ranks up there with Ronde Barber, Kevin Ross and Darrell Green as one of history's best tackling cornerbacks—if not the best.
Throughout NFL history, Winfield has had the most tackles per games started of corners with at least 100 starts with 6.12. That amounts to 98 tackles a season, which is an average for him but was only beaten by one player this year (Cortland Finnegan). In 2011, only Jason McCourty and Charles Tillman beat 98 tackles.
In 2009, no cornerback accumulated more than 98 tackles. In fact, since joining the Vikings in 2004, Winfield has been in rare territory. Having placed first among cornerbacks in tackles per game three times (2004, 2007 and 2011), Winfield has only finished outside of the top five once (in 2010), where he placed seventh. Otherwise he placed 2nd in 2012, 3rd in 2006, 4th in 2005 and 2008 and 5th in 2009 where only one corner above him on the list completed more than 12 games. That's three firsts, a second, a third, two fourths, a fifth and a seventh place finish.
Having consistently been a top three or top five finisher in tackles, Winfield has earned a well-deserved reputation for physicality and strength in the run game. That has given Winfield the distinction of being one of only five cornerbacks to have accumulated more than 1000 tackles, and only one of two players (Ronde Barber being the other) to have hit that mark since 1995.
Of all cornerbacks with at least 500 tackles, he has the second most tackles per game, behind Charles Tillman.
This isn't just opportunity knocking, either. Winfield didn't miss a single tackle in the run game in 2011, and ranks in the top ten consistently in most tackles made before missing one.
This all means, of course, that you can run your nickel defense without losing a step in the running game.
You can run your nickel defense without losing a step in the running game.
Your nickel defense will be one of the best run defenses in the game, because there's a good argument to be had that Winfield will do better against the run than at least one of the outside linebackers you carry. I'll start with statistical measures of his performance, then move on to more subjective evaluations in a "scouting report." From there, a quick nod to Seattle's schemes and how Winfield enhances or changes them.
Stats
Over the past three years, Winfield has developed a tackling efficiency of 15.8. That is, for every 15.8 tackles Winfield attempts, he will miss one. That's almost identical to Leroy Hill's last year (16.0) and is better than either of your outside linebackers over the past two years (K.J. Wright's efficiency was 13.7 and Leroy Hill's was 12.4).
In fact, Winfield's tackling efficiency would regularly rank in the top fifteen of outside linebackers... and inside linebackers. Last year, Bradie James placed 11th in tackling efficiency for all inside linebackers (remember, there are roughly 48 of them because of 4-3 and 3-4 defenses) with an efficiency of 15.7. Last year, DeMeco Ryans placed 12th with a tackling efficiency of 15.8.
But he's a cornerback. How many of these tackles are really positive tackles? If he merely allows a high number of pass completions, his tackle total will rack up.
I will go into his coverage ability soon, but a good way to measure this is to look at his stop percentage. That is, how many of his tackles have constituted a "loss" for the offense?
Pro Football Focus has a measure called run stop percentage that looks at the impact in the running game, but in order to really look at it, we'll look at all of Winfield's stops, not just those in the running game. It also allows us to penalize "bad tackles" in the passing game made as a result of poor coverage.
Before looking at the percentages, of course, it should be noted that Winfield had 44 stops. The next best corner, Dunta Robinson, had 32.
In the end, Winfield had the second highest stop percentage of any corner in the NFL, with 45.83% of his tackles either going for a very short gain or a loss. The one person above him, Chris Harris, only had 63 tackles and therefore only needed 29 stops to best Winfield's total.
In 2011, Winfield crushed the competition with a stop percentage of 61.16.
In four out of the past five years, he has ranked in the top two of stop percentage, something no other corner can say. In fact, in his "down year", he ranked in the top ten. Some of those years saw corners with only 19 tackles (like Danieal Manning) beat him in stop percentage, while he more than quintupled their total in tackles and tripled their total in stops. Not only does no other corner match this feat, no other corner comes close, with zero corners consistently finishing in the top five other than Winfield—only two cornerbacks appeared in the top five twice in the past five years.
It should too be noted that Winfield placed as PFF's highest-graded corner three times.
This compares favorably to your recent outside linebacker performances. In 2012, Leroy Hill's stop percentage was 48.89 and K.J. Wright's was 38.14. In 2011, K.J. Wright did better, with 60% of his 56 tackles constituting a loss, but Leroy Hill did about the same at 48.1.
If we only look at the running game, Winfield is just as dominant. He ranks as the top cornerback in run stop percentage in the last two years, and has placed in the top five every year that Pro Football Focus has kept track, including another first place finish in 2008 and a second place finish in 2009.
In 2012, his run stop percentage of 7.3% would be better than half of the league's outside linebackers. This includes Seattle's K.J. Wright (7.1%) and nearly equal's Leroy Hill's (7.4%). In 2011, he would have a top twenty finish, with his 6.7% being beaten out by K.J. Wright's 8.9% but not Leroy Hill's 6.5%.
I'll described his function against the run and how he does what he does more thoroughly in the subjective evaluation.
He's more than an able pass defender, as well. The worry with a corner that small is that he'll underperform against taller receivers. That doesn't happen to the be case, despite what teams have done to try and exploit that matchup.
This year when put up against receivers who were at least 6'1" and 200+ pounds, he was thrown at 20 times, allowed 12 receptions, 130 yards, 29 yards after the catch, zero touchdowns, 6.5 yards per attempt and a passer rating of 58.3. He grabbed one interception and deflected three of those passes.
For context, that made Aaron Rodgers, Matt Stafford, Jay Cutler and Josh Freeman look like Mark Sanchez and Brandon Weeden when throwing to Jordy Nelson, Calvin Johnson, Brandon Marshall or Vincent Jackson. He makes them look even worse when including advanced metrics, like adjusted yards per attempt (The adjusted yards per attempt was 4.25, worse than any quarterback in the league). His tackling has also been an asset, where he's only allowed 2.4 yards after the catch per catch for these players.
That's not entirely fair, because it doesn't put into context all of the snaps that Winfield covered well enough to deter a throw entirely. He ranked 15th in the country in coverage snaps per target, and 6th in total yards allowed per snaps in coverage. Overall, when throwing to him, quarterbacks averaged a 70.4 passer rating, good for 15th in the country.
He was even better as a nickel back, ranking 6th in the country in coverage snaps per target.
There were only five cornerbacks in the NFL with over 500 snaps that didn't allow a single touchdown. Winfield was one of them. Of those five, he had the second most interceptions. That allowed him to be the 15th best cornerback in the NFL in passer rating allowed and 6th in adjusted yards per attempt allowed.
This isn't because he was only on the field as a slot corner or because he played in low-leverage situations; Winfield played 422 of his 1106 snaps in the slot, or merely 38 percent of them.
All of this is to say that Winfield isn't merely "average" for a cornerback in coverage. He isn't "good enough to make up for his run performance". He's one of the top cover corners in the country, a high-level performance overshadowed by his excellent work against the run.
A more subjective evaluation would agree.
Scouting
Like any position on an NFL roster, the nickel cornerback has a very specific set of demands that won't best be met by simply putting the third best corner in the slot. Just as it would be a mistake for most schemes to substitute the Sam linebacker with a Will linebacker (although the Seahawks have been caring less and less about those distinctions), a nickel cornerback is not the consolation prize in a cornerback race.
Greg Cosell has tried to emphasize this point, using the far-too-easily condemned Eagles as an example:
Keep in mind teams also run three-wide groups in normal down and distance situations as a regular feature of their offense. What burden does that place on the defense, as it specifically relates to the slot corner? It means he has three responsibilities: cover man (the most apparent), blitzer and run defender (not talked about enough). Those are three distinct skill sets, but they are all required of a slot corner. Think about that for a minute. It's not a filler position, simply employed because the offense lined up with three wide receivers. It's a well-defined position that is essential to NFL defense, and it demands a specific set of attributes. Look at the Philadelphia Eagles last season. They had three very good NFL corners: Nnamdi Asomugha, Asante Samuel and Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie. All three are perimeter corners. The Eagles believed they could put Rodgers-Cromartie and/or Asomugha in the slot, solely because they were athletically talented players. It doesn't work that way, so things didn't play out as the Eagles expected. Neither Rodgers-Cromartie nor Asomugha possessed the combination of traits necessary to play effectively in the slot, and it proved to be a primary contributing factor to the Eagles' struggles in 2011. As the Eagles now know, a slot corner is a key component to defensive success.
Cosell expanded on this concept when he opined about the evolving nature of the NFL and how defenses should counter.
Matching up to wide receivers is much more comfortable schematically. Defensive coaches have been doing that for years. Now they have a new set of challenges: tight ends and backs who can stress the defense both to the outside and vertically. What will be the response in the continuing chess match between offense and defense? Traditional linebackers will find their roles - and snaps - significantly reduced. There will not be a place for them against offenses that feature five receivers with multi-dimensional abilities to attack all areas of the field. We will likely see more teams employ the Houston Texans' model. They played dime (six defensive backs), not nickel. That allowed them to field better athletes with more scheme versatility and greater body flexibility and agility to play in space, i.e., coverage. It was not an accident Houston had one of the best defenses in the NFL last season. Here's the reality of the NFL with the 2012 season right around the corner: It's much more of a spread game than it's ever been.
Andy Benoit of the New York Times' Fifth Down Blog had similar things to say, given the increasing reliance on spread concepts, the emphasis on matchups and versatility:
Very few corners are good enough to handle N.F.L. wideouts man-to-man on an everydown basis (if more were, guys like Darrelle Revis wouldn't make around a million bucks a game). And man-to-man cornerbacks can't always combat things like presnap motion or intertwined route combinations - offensive tactics that are growing in union with the expanding variety of three-plus receiver formations. What's more, as we covered in the running back/tight end evolution analysis Tuesday, defenses are going to have to find a way to stop the run out of nickel personnel anyway. The third corner has already replaced the third linebacker as a de facto starter, as a majority of N.F.L. snaps now involve three or more wide receivers. The easiest - and therefore most plausible - counter to the offensive evolution is to find more versatile defensive players inside. Someone has to be able to run with super athletic tight ends, handle the quickness of smallish slot receivers and stay with a running back no matter where that running back goes.
And finally, Matt Bowen at the National Football Post highlighted why nickel corners are as important as "starters" and what you might need in them:
the Nickel corner-a position that is vital to winning vs. pro offenses. Here are five things you need to get consistently from your Nickel corner... 1. Tackling: I talked about tackling drills during training camp this past weekend because it is still the No.1 defensive technique in football. And you need a Nickel that will hit, wrap up in the run game and limit yards after the catch. Think of the one-back runs from Posse personnel (3WR-1TE-1RB) or the quick inside option route (or Hi-Lo concept). You must tackle to play inside at the Nickel position. 2. Blitz technique: It doesn't matter if we are breaking down Rex Ryan's multiple schemes with the Jets or Lovie Smith's Tampa 2 defense. As a Nickel, you will be involved in the blitz front (both zone and man concepts). Blitzing is a technique. No different than learning the base skills in off-man, there are keys to winning on the edge, defeating a back in protection or setting up the OT. 3. Defending the two-way go: As a Nickel, you have to show the ability to win vs. a "two-way go." Think of a slot receiver that can release inside or outside and work off your leverage. I played with plenty of CBs that couldn't make the move inside because of this exact reason. You need great footwork, the ability to maintain leverage, press-coverage skills, etc. Tough job. 4. Ball skills: The Nickel will be in a position to make plays on the ball. Look at Cover 2, Cover 3, playing the seam-flat in zone-blitz concept or driving to the ball in the 3-step game. You want a playmaker inside that can finish and create turnovers-because there will be opportunities. 5. Special teams ability: The majority of Nickel corners can be considered "starters" because of the amount of time defenses put their sub packages on the field. However, if this is your No.3 CB, they must play a role on special teams. At the gunner position, covering kickoffs, playing the "jammer' on punt return and blocking on the front line on kickoff return. They need to be productive contributors on all four core kicking units.
I would also add that because so many older defensive backs are switching to nickel/safety roles (see: Charles Woodson and Ronde Barber, also some of the best tacklers among cornerbacks), that leadership is a vital component to what the Seahawks may be looking for. We'll touch on everything in Bowen's list, as it accords well with Cosell's list. Because Winfield will want (and is contracted to) limited snaps, we'll substitute the fifth requirement of special teams ability with the leadership component.
Much, much more importantly, Seattle is in a division with incredible slot receivers. St. Louis is sporting both Tavon Austin and Stedman Bailey, while San Francisco has playoff darling Anquan Boldin. Very different type of receivers that require different types of approaches to defeat. Andre Roberts isn't a slouch either.
Strengths
Naturally, at 5'9" and 180 pounds, Winfield hangs his hat on his instincts and intelligence, both of which are at an elite level. Sometimes it seems as if he has eyes in the back of his head as he reacts to the ball in the air, closing in on the receiver or the ball often before the receiver sees the ball coming. Not only does Winfield read a quarterback's eyes well, he reads the play well.
That is, as a student of the game, Winfield recognizes what tendencies offensive coordinators and quarterbacks have in a number of situations, and he knows when to gamble on them. His recognition and ease of understanding of the numerous offensive concepts give him a big advantage over receivers, and he'll often recognize the route before the snap. The Vikings have even found ways to exploit this ability even more, breaking their normally staid and conservative defense to include pattern-matching concepts, a type of zone coverage the NFL is seeing more of because of its obvious advantages and one that Alabama employs with regularity. I will let Chris Brown of Smart Football explain:
More significant, however, is that Saban focuses a lot of his teaching on pattern reading within his zone drops. The two zone-dropping schools of thought are to teach spot drops or pattern reading. One can overemphasize the distinction, but, generally, spot dropping was the traditional approach. In this technique, if your outside linebacker was responsible for the weak flat, he would essentially (there is slightly more to it), upon identifying pass, run to a spot on the field and then simply react to the quarterbacks eyes and the flight of the ball. A big advantage with spot dropping is that it is easy to teach: if you spend hours with your run-stuffing linebacker on how to attack run plays, you can teach him pass defense in a matter of minutes. But the weakness is that well-coached receivers can become excellent at settling in the holes in the zones between defenders. And, with good receivers and good quarterbacks, modern offenses have become more and more adept at finding and exploiting these open spaces. Pattern reading, on the other hand, is much like a matchup zone in basketball. Defenders are responsible for zones, but they play tight to the receivers who come through those zones. Moreover, pattern-read teams begin by immediately coaching their defenders on how to recognize popular pass route combinations (and indeed, the very concept of pass combinations themselves) and each week zero in on the five to fifteen most common pass concepts they will see from that opponent. When performed correctly, pattern-reading defenders know exactly how to cover receivers in their zones and seamlessly (in a quite literal sense) pass the receivers onto other defenders as they run their routes. Saban further distinguishes his defenses in that he uses pattern reading in almost all of his coverages, including the traditional Cover 3 or three-deep coverage, whereas many coaches only let certain defenders pattern read or only use it with certain defenses. Instead, Saban demands perfection and has no qualms about spending the grinding hours working on the finer details to make it happen. Sounds a lot like Belichick, no? There's a reason both of them win a lot of championships.
That's from his book The Essential Smart Football, perhaps one of the best reads out there for football concepts.
That pattern match zone defense was rarely employed by the Vikings, although they used it to great effect to neutralize the high-powered passing offenses of the Detroit Lions. In Week 4, the Lions threw 58% at 6.3 yards per attempt, despite Calvin Johnson and Matt Stafford's best attempts. When the Lions tried to exploit their size advantage with Johnson over Winfield, he allowed Johnson only one catch on three targets for 19 yards.
When asked to slow down Brandon Marshall, the Vikings used pattern matching to hold Jay Cutler to 6.1 yards per attempt, even though they allowed Cutler to complete 74% of his passes. Finishing with 188 yards was not in the Bears' plans that night. In their later meeting, the Vikings reduced the Bears to 50% and 5.9 yards per attempt. When Marshall and Winfield met, Winfiwld allowed only 53 yards on 7 targets, with an interception, to boot.
And of course, no touchdowns—again, he allowed zero touchdowns for the year against any receiver.
It's a good concept that is very difficult to employ, because it requires not just a high level of film study and intuitive offensive analysis, but the ability to instantly read a wide receiver's body language, process that through a filter of the game situation (point differential, time left, down and distance) and react to it by jumping the route before it completely develops. This will often require the willingness to react to a route before the break, which is dangerous, especially against offenses that employ a heavy dose of option routes (changing the route mid-pattern based on what the defense or a particular player is doing), like the Patriots or your own Seahawks.
The ability to adapt to option routes, incidentally, is critically important for players like Antoine Winfield, who often have to play against the widest variety of option routes in the slot. Kippy Brown had this to say about the slot receivers and their use of option routes:
Now, routes I've been associated with that are called options are normally slot routes. Guys in the slot will do certain things depending on how [the defense plays] you. We do our share of those. In the West Coast offense, an option route could go either way -- a lot of people call it a 'jerk' route -- where you go in, set the linebacker up, and then go either way. It depends on the terminology, and what you want to call an option route, but in our offense, nearly every route has a conversion. If they do this, you do that.
Seth Wickersham at ESPN Magazine says the same thing—you'll often see the slot, more than any other receiver, run those option routes.
So Winfield's instinct to anticipate the slot receiver, confuse him, and find ways to close windows despite the option concept's ability to create open space is impressive. Ranking 6th in the country in yards given up per snap in coverage despite playing with a very weak set of peers at corner is made all the more impressive given that he ranked 4th in both passer rating allowed and adjusted yards per target as well as 3rd overall in adjusted yards allowed per snap in coverage. This all comes from his natural ability to understand the defense's coverage concepts and when to break them for the play.
The former Buckeye is excellent in both man and zone coverage, not just reading the receivers well but playing with precise footwork to maintain leverage and jump to the ball. He is agile enough to adjust to sudden route change, knows how to click-and-close when the ball is in the air and can track defenders just as well as he can track the ball. His style of play generally involves forcing poor passing angles instead of baiting the quarterback to swat the ball away, but he can do the second just as easily as the first.
Just like any good Seahawk, Winfield is an extremely powerful press corner, too. Much of his success against Vincent Jackson and Calvin Johnson (and numerous smaller players) comes from his ability to jolt even the largest receivers off their timing and routes. Players do not want to bear down on Winfield as he moves them off-route with the best of them. Not only does he pack power in his press, he positions his hands precisely as he punches.
Jamming at the line with efficiency and authority, he can drop back to his zone landmark or transition to man coverage quickly. He may have lost some of his quickness with age, but his hip flip is as effective as ever. Asante Samuel is well known for transitioning from a man coverage look to a zone defense, which is why he is among the best at creating interceptions. Winfield doesn't have quite that specific ability, but can move between different coverage patterns with fluidity.
He can play any technique with efficiency, be it bail, off, press, trailing, brackets, etc. An extraordinary understanding of space and geometry, Winfield excels in any coverage concept, although should not be asked to trail against the Mike Wallaces or DeSean Jacksons of the NFL.
Not only does Winfield have phenomenal instincts, he has an excellent intuition for reading the run or diagnosing play action fakes against actual runs. His ability to quickly discriminate between running plays and passing plays is not one that you often find on high-level perimeter corners, but is necessary in the slot. Rare corners like Darrelle Revis and Jason McCourty can suss out the type of play accurately (although Revis won't adjust, as the Jets used his presence to simply drop another safety into the box. Revis stays on his island). But Winfield does this on a regular basis, better than anyone in the league.
Unsurprisingly, Winfield is an excellent form tackler. He certainly has all of the basics down—keeps his head up, wraps his tackles, etc.—but he also consistently maintains more advanced tackling technique when taking down ballcarriers. He keeps his shoulders squared to their belt, sinks his hips, drives downhill, and thumps with his shoulder. All the while, he makes sure to strip the ball and force the runner to lose leverage by moving his arms up the body during the tackle. He never tackles a ballcarrier so much as runs through them.
Given his size, it's inevitable that he tackles low, but I've yet to see him miss specifically because he drove too low. It seems relatively rare that anyone hurdle Winfield despite his low tackling and small stature, and it might be because he always knows where to put his hands. Many have tried going up top, but he always complicates it by destroying their momentum. It's interesting to see a combination between wrap-up tackling and going low, but he manages to wrap the legs more than you would think.
And with all of that technical form comes one of the hardest hitters you'll see in the secondary.
He gets ignored in all but a few rankings for "hardest hitters" (as silly as it is to rank ten out of 352 starters and then some in terms of who's "hardest hitting"), but it's fairly easy to see (language warning) that he packs a punch:
The final area of analysis for run support for most players involves block shedding, something defensive backs aren't much known for. But Winfield does a very good job evading blocks, sometimes looking like a classic 4-3 Will when he navigates through traffic. It's not merely that he's agile and slippery (he is), but that he understands the angles of the game. Creating a better pursuit angle actually allows him to avoid the path that most blockers take, despite what you would expect an offensive player to do or understand.
More than that, Winfield is everything you want out of your cliche blue-collar guys. He has a nonstop motor and will consistently drive and try to make the play. He keeps his head up and makes sure to read the play as he's engaged with a blocker, often choosing not to shed his block until he knows that the runner has made a decision on where to go.
He has active hands and keeps blockers away from his body. When he finally does release, he'll often go under (his biggest advantage) after having forced them to become more top-heavy. Dropping his weight underneath the arms of the blocker, Winfield will find himself in the open field more often than not.
Even when tasked with taking on lead blockers like fullbacks and guards, the Akron, Ohio native can smoothly move underneath their push and close in on the ballcarrier. Below I have a video slated to start when he does this exact thing:
Also, just watch the video starting from 1:11 for another Antoine Winfield highlight reel (albeit a smaller one).
The next stage of analysis for Cosell and Bowen is to talk about blitzing, which is another strength of Winfield's.
In 2012, Antoine Winfield was the second most productive blitzing corner, according to Pro Football Focus' Pass Rusher Productivity, a measure that includes quarterback hits and hurries. He didn't qualify in 2011 given his limited time on the field, but in 2010 placed 10th. Some of that includes an incredible game against Philadelphia, where he was asked to blitz 17 times, grabbed two sacks and two hurries.
Remember, this was back when Michael Vick was in the conversation for an MVP, and wasn't just good—he was great. The Vikings altered their traditional game plan dramatically to eliminate Michael Vick. Against every other opponent, they sent a blitzer on less than 7% of their opportunities (6.95%). In this game, they sent a blitzer on 13% of their opportunities, nearly doubling their blitzing. And Winfield was the key. The Vikings won this game despite having Joe Webb in at quarterback.
Take a look at the highlight play from the game, that set the tone for the rest of the matchup:
Trifecta vs. Philadelphia
What makes Winfield an excellent blitzer is not that he is free and can simply take advantage of being unblocked. It's that he doesn't modify his stance at all before blitzing so he doesn't become part of the protection scheme. His second sack came on the same side as LeSean McCoy, and even with that additional help the second time around, the Eagles couldn't ward off the blitzing vet.
Again, his ability to shed blocks and drive in on players is a huge asset. Coming off the edge with speed and suddenness is critical to preventing the quarterback from using his hot-read to beat the rusher and the Ohio State product is a huge asset in this area. Once more, his high motor and insistence on making the play are huge, and he has more than once fought his way past a tackle or a fullback to create a sack or hurry the quarterback.
Despite only having 7.5 sacks in his career, Winfield is a pass-rushing asset. The Vikings defense—the boring and consistent Tampa-2—doesn't call for many blitzes, best made evident when they sacked John Skelton seven times without sending a single blitz (one of only six times teams didn't blitz on a single defensive snap in the past five years). Generally, they've sent five or more rushers about 16 percent of the time, which was the lowest in the league.
I don't know how often the Seahawks blitzed, but I can guarantee it's quite a bit more. In some games in 2011, 20 percent of the plays were defensive back blitzes alone.
With a new defensive coordinator, I expect a lot of things to change, but with a defense that has that much versatility in its personnel, I can't imagine that the Seahawks won't continue with that approach, especially given Quinn's history with Carroll.
So, if I replaced special teams with leadership, how does Winfield measure up? Among the best.
An unspoken asset to having Winfield on the team is his leadership. I don't mean the trite leadership you hear about everyday when it comes to veterans and NFL locker rooms. I haven't seen Winfield give an inspirational speech, nor have I heard about him quelling any locker room brawls. You don't see him shouting in huddles like Ray Lewis or Drew Brees, but he's definitely one with the steady hand that can steer the ship (née longboat).
As a level-headed veteran that commands the respect of his peers, I'm sure he can provide a stabilizing influence that calms people down. But the cornerback you've acquired is a man of few words, unlike Richard Sherman. And that's fine—locker rooms contain diverse personalities, and Winfield is one of many. In fact, he may be better at navigating the personality minefield that you'll see in a typical locker room.
In mid-September, the Vikings were reeling after a surprise loss to Andrew Luck and the Colts. Winfield, who rarely finds reason to voice his opinion, gave an impassioned speech to the rest of the locker room. Beating the 49ers the game after, several players went out of their way to praise the veteran defensive back as a key to their success. A year later, Leslie Frazier still thinks that the speech Winfield gave before Week 3 was the key to an improbably playoff run by the Vikings.
I'm not the kind of person who believes that that sort of thing has that much of an effect. But if you are, Winfield is one of your greatest assets. But I've seen firsthand what real field leadership means to a football team.
Veterans very rarely actually coach players to get better, nor do they consistently provide consistent feedback on technique and gameplaying—despite what common narratives would have you believe. Why coach the player who is going to replace you?
When I talked to a few undrafted free agent and longshot defensive backs about their three greatest NFL teachers, they isolated three people, two of whom were on the Vikings at the time: maligned defensive coordinator Gregg Williams, retired Vikings cornerback Asher Allen and current Seahawks nickel back Antoine Winfield.
When I talked to veteran cornerbacks, I heard the same praise. Antoine Winfield was like having another coach. He didn't just provide enthusiasm and encouragement; he would consistently isolate good and bad play and emphasize ways—on the field and on the sideline—to improve. Whether it came from the methods needed to win the positioning battle with different passing angles or techniques to come out ahead in the footwork contest with receivers either outside or in the slot, Winfield always provided specific technical feedback coupled with excellent generalized coaching.
Time and again, I saw Winfield pull aside a player, whether he was a veteran or a longshot rookie, and find measureable and objective ways to improve performance. One of my duties at a former job was to provide training with feedback both immediately and at the end of the week that provided actionable improvements with solid goals. I ran daily training workshops for my staff and I was very good at my job.
Winfield embodied the basic and advanced training techniques I would use with my staff when he was talking to other players. He would acknowledge what they did and why, and pepper in praise and opportunities for improvement while providing one specific change they could work on and master until they moved on to another skill. I have never seen another football player do that. In fact, the only other position coach I've seen do that is Mike Singletary, who may have been an abysmal head coach, but is great when coaching linebackers.
Weaknesses
Like any player, Winfield has a number of weaknesses to his game, although he easily masks them with his experience. The first of which is perhaps not so much a weakness as it is an issue—he's 35 and will turn 36 before the season starts.
The Sports Digest did a study on football players and aging and found that quarterbacks typically peak at 25, but maintain a solid plateau throughout until 28. For other positions, the answer is a bit more complicated. Defensive pass rushers tend to fall off after 32, for example.
Without a way to consistently measure defensive performance (the best defenders are much like the dog that doesn't bark—significant but not easily captured in data), we can take a look at an equivalent position on the offense: the wide receiver. I think it's more likely that a cornerback ages more gracefully than a receiver given how much more important savvy is at that position, but I doubt the aging curve is different by even a year. So, take a look at what The Sports Digest found about aging and receivers:
Based on data gathered by several sources, it appears unquestioned that, in general, athletes reach their peak of on-field performance in their mid-twenties. After that, nearly all athletes regress as their physical skills decline, even only slightly. When an athlete is playing versus the absolute top athletes in the world in his sport, even the slightest decline in physical ability can cause a noticeable drop in performance. . . . To answer the question of when a football player gets old, one can assume that "old" does not mean past his peak, but rather "old" means ineffective. Therefore, while nearly all football players pass their peak between the ages of twenty-four to twenty-seven, those that have elite skills and talent to begin with can use a better knowledge of how to play the game, as well as a superior work ethic to maintain as much physical ability as possible, to maintain a high level of performance later into their careers. While is has been proven that almost all running backs see a major decline and can be considered "old" at the age of thirty, wide receivers and quarterbacks generally see a less drastic drop-off at that age, and may reach thirty-two or thirty-three before becoming "old" in football terms.
There's every reason to believe that like Jerry Rice (who played at a high level when he was 40, at Oakland), Antoine Winfield is an outlier. In fact, we know he is—one of his best seasons was last year.
But physical degeneration is a big concern, and it likely outpaces polish at this point. The marginal value of another year of experience for a player as old as Winfield has to be smaller than the marginal loss in physical capability. There's no reason to think he'll age exactly like Rice did.
Looking at Approximate Value—a measure pro-football-reference created to measure (you guessed it) the approximate value, regardless of position, that a player produced to create a frame of reference—reveals some startling facts about aging and cornerbacks.
AV has a big problem, which is that points are distributed by a number of formulas that will include all-star appearances. Winfield performed at a Pro Bowl level (although I would hesitate to say that he performed at an All-Pro level), but was glutted out by an unusually strong cornerback year for the NFC. Even Richard Sherman (who had the second-highest AV in 2012 behind J.J. Watt despite the Pro Bowl snub with 19 points) is penalized by the system, as all-star substitutes don't count.
With Winfield in the same division as Tim Jennings, Charles Tillman and Casey Hayward, and in the same conference as Richard Sherman and Patrick Peterson, it was difficult for him to get the votes he would deserve in another year for a performance of his caliber. Leaching the vote were also Jason McCourty and Asante Samuel.
Had he performed at this level in 2011, I don't doubt he would have had a much better chance making the Pro Bowl, and he would be a lock in 2010.
At any rate, I assumed his "true" performance rated at about an "8" in the system (he was a 6), and I looked at which other cornerbacks performed at that level or higher after age 35.
Only 17 cornerback seasons ever rated an 8 after that age, since 1920.
In fact, there were 39 total seasons that rated a 6 or above in that system—22 players total. In the last 10 years, it has been four players.
So, you should expect some serious dropoff from Winfield some time soon, probably this season. Nevertheless, he will be well above the average nickel cornerback. Should he decline a theoretically healthy Walter Thurmond III should step in and fulfill the nickel role, although he would be best used as the league's best dime back and hopefully used to revive the bandit, which I'll detail a little bit later.
The second weakness from Winfield is fairly obvious, too. He's not lengthy (which of course doesn't mean he doesn't fit the Seattle "system" so much as he's reserved for nickel and dime roles) and can be exploited by bigger slot players like (big) Mike Williams used to be or David Nelson (and many times now Calvin Johnson). More relevantly, Anquan Boldin is a threat in the slot.
While his matchups against the taller receivers that Winfield has played against don't inspire worry, a taller corner with a wider wingspan would be much more capable. His length has specifically been exploited by Detroit and Chicago, although he's come out ahead more often than not. Nevertheless, a team that figures out how to take care of his height will do very well until Seattle responds by replacing him. It hasn't happened often in his career, but it easily could. Andrew Luck took care to target Winfield early for the longest play Winfield gave up that season.
The height issue is compounded by Antoine's agility and overall athleticism, which are not at a high level—although at a much higher level than commentators seems to give him credit for. At the combine in 1999, Winfield ran a 3.95 second short shuttle, a 6.84 second 3-cone drill and paired that with a 4.41 40-yard dash. He certainly was athletic and has the short-area chops to do well.
Nevertheless, he's lost a lot of his quickness. Were it not for his solid tackling form and preternatural instincts, I would worry about matching him up against Tavon Austin. In fact, I still would. He is an extremely efficient tackler and I would trust him above Leroy Hill when it came to an open-field tackle against the West Virginia phenom, but his declining skills should justifiably raise concerns. Now that your weak-side linebacker is Heath Farwell, I would be even more enthusiastic about playing Winfield in the base package.
Winfield will no longer run down the fastest receivers like he used to. Instead, he uses positioning and instincts to stay a step ahead. Unfortunately, those alone won't win NFL matchups. Winfield has yet to be beaten for a touchdown in the last 37 games, but it's going to happen soon. Last year, he only allowed two passes beyond 25 yards, but this year should allow a few more if forced into more opportunities.
Finally, he doesn't have the ball skills of top-tier corners. With only 0.14 interceptions a game, he can't compare to Casey Hayward (0.375), Richard Sherman (0.375), Asante Samuel (0.34), Charles Woodson (0.27), Darrelle Revis (0.24), Charles Tillman (0.22) or Champ Bailey (0.24).
Winfield isn't deficient in this area so much as not as efficient as top-tier players. Cornerbacks with over 275 snaps averaged an interception on 2.95 percent of their targets, but the top 160 cornerback seasons (the top 32 times five seasons) averaged an interception on 5.8 percent of their coverage. For those curious, Asante Samuel had the top two seasons in 2010 and 2009, respectively (17.07 and 13.04 percent). Aqib Talib's 2008 came in third (12.9 percent), Chis McAlister's 2008 followed, but only had 25 targets (11.84 percent). Charles Woodson grabbed the next two spots at 10.77 percent and 10.17 percent in 2009 and 2008.
Winfield averages 2.56 interceptions per pass target. It is simply not a way that he changes the game despite his excellent coverage skills.
On the other hand, he hasn't allowed a single touchdown in the last three years, despite starting 37 games. Overall, when adjusting for touchdowns and interceptions, Winfield allows an adjusted 5.89 yards per attempt when thrown at. The average cornerback allowed 7.58 adjusted yards per attempt over the last five seasons.
Schemes
There are a number of ways the Seahawks could incorporate Antoine Winfield, whether it's through base plays in a nickel package or trickier stuff.
From what I could gather—and correct me if I'm wrong—the Seahawks typically run a Cover-3 zone or a Cover-1 man with weird gap control concepts. I've labeled Red Bryant's position the "5" and the Leo as "L". Other than that, everything should be relatively clear in the above picture. In running plays, the Will takes the weak-side B gap and the Mike the strong-side A gap. The nose and the under tackle both play gap control instead of shooting upfield and the 5 controls his blocker, making sure to read the run and shed blockers if need be. This should free up the U to stunt if need be. The strong-side linebacker controls the tight end's alley ("D" gap).
Here, SE and FL stand for Split End and Flanker, incidentally.
The cornerbacks jam at the line then backpedal/move to the deep thirds, while the free safety patrols a larger third deep downfield. The strong safety and three linebackers then control underneath zones, and will emphasize the importance of preventing the big play at the cost of giving away minor yardage underneath (just like the Vikings' Tampa-2).
In addition to that "over" front, the Seahawks also have an "under" front. I used a nickel variation I found to highlight a more aggressive pass-rush philosophy and an outside protection concept on the strong-side in case the threat of the tight end is particularly worrisome on third down. Winfield's role is labeled as the nickel back (NB). Nothing new or interesting here, except as a means of playing a more controlled passing game. You can substitute the Sam linebacker for Winfield on this one and have functionally the same play, although the flanker would do better to option into an intermediate route were that the case.
I also noticed a front in nickel packages with five potential rushers, but only three actual pass-rushers without the blitz.
Here I've substituted the fullback for a slot receiver, labeled "R", which could just as easily be labeled "U" if I was more concerned with standardization. But the undertackle has that designation and I want to avoid confusion if possible. So "R" it is.
Adding rushers and confusing protection by having a Leo/Will and a Leo/Sam is interesting, but not the point of having Winfield over another corner. There are a number of interesting ways to incorporate this front and integrate Winfield's strengths.
Bobby Wagner's range and Antoine Winfield's excellent zone capability will protect the passing game and create "safe pressure"—a term Dick Lebeau would use constantly when describing the zone blitz—while sending four rushers and a nose to tie up a guard and a center in some way. Winfield is much more useful here than most corners because the coverage range is much, much larger in a 3-3 zone shell than a 3-4 shell and the passes come in tighter windows with more velocity and less reaction time. A deep wide zone bears little resemblance to the shallow wide zone and it takes a savvy corner to man that width.
You've also got the press-Cover 3 in the nickel designed to move the slot receiver off of his timing while presenting the same look.
This look would be a little more difficult were it not for Winfield's excellent capabilities as a press receiver with an intuition on how to get to the landmark. In this case, the Mike will need to watch for hitches and ins while Winfield would need to be cognizant of stick routes and outs. This play is simply designed to maintain Seattle's normal philosophy in another package. Seattle could just as easily run a press-man look from this concept with Wagner spying the HB and the Sam taking the tight end. Chancellor could play a QB spy, blitzer or robber in that instance, which would look like so:
What's important about the base press Cover-3 in the nickel is that it sets up a Winfield special—a fake jam for a blitz (weak-side overload in one case and a zone blitz in the case below). The Sam has a green dotted line to indicate that he's got a green dog call on the tight end. If the tight end stays in to block, the Sam blitzes. If not, the Sam plays man coverage.
Setting the Leo or defensive end into coverage and creating a very basic Cover 3 while confusing protection schemes is not too unlike the several times Jared Allen has been asked to drop back and cover for a Winfield blitz. Allen has 5 career interceptions and 44 pass deflections, incidentally. This style of zone blitz is one reason why.
Here's one of those fun plays that rely on the press Cover 3 look to confuse protection schemes, create safe pressure, and take advantage of Winfield's ability to make a blitz look like simple press coverage. The Sam rushes up field not just to occupy the halfback as a blocker and pull him away from Winfield, but to contain the run before rushing to his zone. If you don't trust your Sam's change-of-direction skills, I would throw this play away. But otherwise, it's a goodie.
There's nothing interesting about Winfield here. I jut saw this look from Seattle two or so years ago and wanted to include it. Weak side overload, with man coverage on everybody and Earl Thomas preventing the big play. Go crazy!
The Winfield specific stuff I would include would just be something trite but true, which is just that his skill at pressing the receiver should delay the quarterback enough that options other than a screen will still cause a half second delay, which should be enough to allow a linebacker or a Leo to exploit the protection mismatch and get to the quarterback. Because the halfback is subject to a green dog call by the Mike, the halfback (set up in the shotgun on the strong side) setting up to block the Will linebacker will trigger the Mike to rush up the center and prevent a pulling guard from helping the protection even more.
The blocking math is potentially deadly, but you have to trust your players in man coverage. The point is that you can trust Winfield in that sort of coverage.
When Seattle boasted more depth and Marcus Trufant was a consistently viable option, they played a bandit package with seven defensive backs. They could do the same here. In this case, the Mike linebacker will be the fourth pass-rusher as the coverage is a quarters coverage designed to take away as many passing option as possible. Both the Big Nickel (an in-the-box guy like Jeron Johnson) and nickel back are threats to blitz and will change the blocking assignments for the guard and tackle. Hopefully a motioning Mike linebacker could take advantage of it. But that's the least that defensive back depth could do.
Here's one of hundreds of potential Amoeba/bandit examples Seattle could use, with a blitzing Brandon Browner covered by the dimeback (again, this would be a theoretically healthy Walter Thurmond III), a green-dogging Kam Chancellor and a greedy Bobby Wagner looking to overload the strong side.
Now that you have Tharold Simon as well, the options are endless. While he's more of a perimeter or zone guy, you could keep him as the final defensive back or third safety or install him as a dimeback with perimeter duties.
The opportunities in this package are endless, and I didn't even include a Winfield blitz option. His ability to play the slot will give most packages weak side protection against the run, allowing strong-side blitzes to flush out running plays and quarterback scrambles.
Winfield does very well on a scramble drill, and has a nice set of QB hits to his name to go along with it when not outperforming veterans and working back to the line of scrimmage and clogging passing lanes when the play breaks down.
Your newest former Viking doesn't just fit the general philosophy of a Seattle defensive back by playing hard and with discipline, but also revives and enhances opportunities that Seattle may have dismissed or needed to spruce up.
Losing Trufant and Hill wasn't a big deal, but Seattle needs starters. They could easily move to a base nickel package with Winfield available to take over for some of this depth problem. I wouldn't line Winfield up at Will when playing against a zone run offense simply because he could be eaten alive by guards, but what are you going to do? Rely on a 7th round pick or a UDFA instead of Heath Farwell or Malcolm Smith?
Here's what I found about your UDFAs:
Kyle Knox, via Sports Illustrated:
Positives: Speedy linebacker who makes plays in every direction of the field. Displays good movement skills, a burst of speed and the ability to pursue the action from the back side. Makes plays sideline to sideline, forceful up the field on the blitz and displays skill in zone coverage. Relentlessly chases the action and works hard to get through blocks. Negatives: Engulfed at the point of attack by opponents. Not a strong wrap-up tackler who brings opponents down on initial contact. Adequate production in college. Analysis: Knox was as dependable linebacker for Fresno State and on film displays himself as a potential weak side defender for the next level. He could have a role as a backup if he stands out on special teams.
Ramon Buchanan, via CBS Sports:
Buchanon is an outstanding athlete with excellent playing speed to drop in coverage and cover both sidelines against the run. Buchanan has a lean frame and struggles to shed blocks, but has the quickness and range to at least fight for a spot on special teams coverage at the next level. If he proves to be fully recovered from his knee injury, Buchanan should be a later round pick in the 2013 NFL Draft.
John Lotulelei, via NFL.com:
STRENGTHS Lotulelei is a thick outside linebacker who possesses enough quickness to avoid offensive linemen and closing speed to attack stretch plays on the other side of the line. He's an aggressive tackler who can explode into ballcarriers; he also takes out fullbacks and pulling guards in the hole like a hammer. Lotulelei low center of gravity and upper-body strength allows him to punch to shed and play with leverage inside, and he has the instincts and vision to find the ball in traffic. His hustle and solid tackling should allow him to succeed on the interior of special teams coverage units. WEAKNESSES He'll be among the shorter linebackers in the draft class. His short, compact build will probably limit him to the interior at the next level, and linemen will have an advantage over him between the tackles with his average length. His man-cover skills are limited, as he lacks the pure short-area quickness and recovery speed to chase down receivers once taking a false step or starting a tick behind. NFL COMPARISON Joe Mays BOTTOM LINE Lotulelei (no relation with Utah defensive tackle Star) needed some time to take advantage of his gifts at the junior college level, and didn't earn a starting spot until later in his junior year. There are plenty of things to like about his attacking style, however, allowing him to project as a late-round inside linebacker prospect with good special teams potential.
Craig Wilkins, via ESPN Insider, where they gave him a grade of 30, which they describe as "players that teams like something about, but certainly do not have the full package in terms of NFL talent.":
Instincts/Recognition: Above average gap and backside discipline. Reads keys and quickly locates the ball more times than not though takes too long to react to misdirection at times. Also appears to diagnose plays quicker in the box than does lining up over the slot. Reads quarterbacks and flashes above average route recognition in coverage. Take-on Skills: Flashes a strong punch working against fullbacks and tight ends but takes too long to get off blocks when doesn't win with leverage and explosiveness. Gives too much ground to offensive linemen. Doesn't always play with proper leverage in terms of which shoulder he attacks when taking on blockers in space. Range vs. Run: Has potential to develop into sideline-to-sideline player. Closes down cut back lanes. Above average straight-line closing speed and appears quick enough to chase backs down from behind. However, gets caught up in wash at times. Angles and to a lesser degree effort are inconsistent. Tackling: Flashes the ability to lower shoulder and deliver big hit but always looking for the kill shot and misses too many tackles. Body control biggest issue. Fails to break down and can whiff in space. Angles play a role and can whiff diving at ball carrier's feet when unable to get into sound position. 3rd Down Capabilities: Sloppy pedal. Doesn't sink hips and takes elongated steps but can improve in this area. Widens out over the slot at times and shows good short area cover skills for the position. Fluid hips and opens well. Above average range in zone coverage. Above average burst and average bend when rushes off the edge. Flashes the ability to bulldoze backs. Isn't the most polished pass rusher but good lateral quickness and can redirect inside after setting up linemen to the outside. Ball hawk.
I found even less on seventh-round draft pick Ty Powell, but a practice report from Detroit Lions Draft could be illuminating:
On his first rep he slithered past Fresno State RB Robbie Rouse, who barely touched him. Powell showed explosive forward burst out of his shoulder move, very strong legs. On another rep he got initially stonewalled by Western Kentucky TE Jack Doyle but used a strong arm swipe to break free and continue towards the QB. It was about the only thing Powell really did well all day. During a drill right before this he was very stiff in the ankles and was admonished to "keep your eyes up and your ass down" more than once. He got stuck too far inside once in 11s, unable to navigate the traffic and looking very uncomfortable flowing laterally. But he definitely showed acumen as an inside blitzer and has enough power to merit looks as a 3-4 ILB.
And Cleveland Browns Draft has something to say as well:
Linebacker Ty Powell of Division II Harding University opened some eyes with his performance this morning. He gave running backs fits during a blitz pickup drill, and followed that with a strong showing in team drills, getting in on a number of run stops near the line of scrimmage. Powell was originally slated for the Shrine Game last week, but ended up being a late addition to the Senior Bowl roster. He has been one of the early pleasant surprises this week, and will surely send a few people scrambling to find game footage of him.
Buffalo Bills Draft likes him in the amoeba defense:
I'm biased in that I love D2 prospects that make it. Powell will be the 1st player drafted from Harding in 30 years! He is 6'2" 246lbs and runs a 4.6 40. He has played a variety of positions while at Harding but looks to be an OLB at the NFL level. Another factor that makes me like Powell is that he clocked just under 7 seconds for his 3 cone drill at the combine. This sub 7 second time is usually a decent measuring stick for LB success. His 3 cone drill was one of the highest in his group. He has good instincts and may be lingering around anywhere from the 5th to 6th round. Yeah, I don't want another Danny Batten either, but this kid has some hops!
At any rate, sounds like a blitzer with athletic tools that need to be turned into NFL assets elsewhere on the field. Could take a season or two.
There's good reason to put Winfield in the base package over any of those linebackers even in running situations. The knock on the Will prospects is that they get blown up, while the knock on the Sam prospects are that they can't wrap up. Powell still needs work it seems. Winfield has the same problems but could act as a better tackler navigating through traffic and would have far superior tackling skills. Keeping KJ Wright on the field should eliminate the need for a linebacker with good take-on skills but poor tackling.
Just like Bum Phillips said about inventing his one-gap 3-4 defense from the 4-3 he had earlier: "Coaching is pretty simple really. If you don't got something, find something you do got. Really, we didn't have but one [defensive lineman] - [Hall of Famer] Elvin [Bethea] - until we got Curley [Culp] in the middle of that season. Then we had two. What we did have was four real good linebackers, so all I done was find a way to get our best players on the field."
You done got some defensive backs and you don't have but two linebackers. Quinn will take his'n and figure it out.
Highlights
We can of course finish with more highlight videos:
And a great game vs. the Saints that I can't embed: LINK
Enjoy your newest Viking. | {
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The Vocation of Business: Social Justice in the Marketplace by John Médaille, 2007, Continuum Press, New York. Review by Lindy Davies
Let’s imagine that there exists an idea. Upon examination, it is revealed to be more than just “an idea;” it’s a system — clear, consistent, elegant, useful; indeed, it offers solutions to problems long deemed intractable. If this idea, this body of potentially vital knowledge, is so obscure that scholars in its field see no need to mention it, then does it actually, uhmm, exist? If the voice of God utters a “sovereign remedy” in the wilderness, has it made a sound?
This thought occurred to me many times while reading John Médaille’s The Vocation of Business. The book is fascinating, authoritative and well-written; it has much good to offer. Médaille is a business professor, and a Catholic; the Catholic social teaching and the doctrine of Distributism are vitally important to him. The theme of this year’s CGO conference in Scranton was right up his alley, and he regretted not being able to make it (and he’d have made a very good presentation there, I don’t doubt). Seriously: I had many good reasons to like this book, and I found it very engaging — but deeply frustrating.
Now, we’re all familiar with the stereotype of a “cranky old Georgist” who listens for the one note that’s never heard, bitterly denouncing every singer for not singing it. That’s the kind of thing that gives the heebie-jeebies to Foundation Directors when they have to appear in public with the Georgist rank & file. So, I beg the reader’s indulgence while I rant like a cranky old Georgist — for just a moment.
In Médaille’s first section, “The Historical Background,” he carefully develops the history of moral concerns in economic thought, from “the preacher as economist,” starting with Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, through the utilitarians and the marginalist revolution. He continues on, through the 20th century and “the Keynesian revolution” and “Utility triumphant,” but conceptually these were afterthoughts, reaction and counter-reaction to the fundamental quandary that was put to economics in the industrial fruition of the late 19th century. Out of this historical turning point emerged the ghastly formulations of Karl Marx — and the beacon of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, inspiring and undergirding the Church’s subsequent social teaching, which Médaille covers in detail. The history of the notion of economic justice, in other words, leads straight to Leo, and Leo’s response must be understood historically (and therefore, conceptually) as seminal.
Out of this historical turning point also came (by the way) Henry George. George understood the importance of the time in which he was writing, which is part of the reason why he felt compelled to issue an open letter in response to Rerum Novarum. It was an audacious thing to do, in many ways — but we should remember that in those days George was a household name.
Nowadays, alas, the very existence of Georgism is an open question. I have written before about my conversation with a panhandler in New York City; after plunging my hand reflexively in my pocket and finding nothing but a $20 bill, I was forced to admit to the man that I couldn’t afford to give him that. He didn’t mind. “I’m just glad you talked to me,” he said, “So many people act like they don’t see me, I start to wonder whether I’m even here.” As I have worked, over the years, to get out the good news of the Georgist remedy, I have never been able to forget what that man said — and never more so than as I read The Vocation of Business. Médaille develops the moral elements in economic thought, patiently, clearly, in a way that makes perfect sense — well, it would, at least, had Henry George never lived or published any books.
It’s not that Médaille hasn’t heard of George, or isn’t complimentary toward LVT; he has, and is. Later in the book he describes Taiwan’s Georgist-inspired “land to the tiller program” as a shining example of a society taking strides toward the ideal of Distributism. He even says, in the Taiwan chapter, that although this book isn’t the place to do it, Georgism “deserves a fuller treatment,” and he offers a brief, but correct, description of single-tax theory. “One can say,” Médaille writes, “that George socialized land while privatizing its development; it is an interesting view of the questions of the social and private values of land that we have previously examined.” Indeed it is. It is even, arguably, a way of reconciling the contradictions regarding questions of property and land that the earlier discussion leaves open — but George’s political economy is not mentioned there, where its relevance is greatest.
I hasten to say, however, that these complaints are not accusations of dishonesty on Médaille’s part; if anything, they point to a failure of Georgist educators to communicate the full symmetry of Henry George’s political economy, rather than focusing on the tactic of the single tax. This leaves the family tree of political economy maimed, as if by a lightning-strike, of a major limb. Even though the tree is cobbled and cabled together in extraordinary fashion, if we forget that the Georgist limb was ever there, the tree appears to be growing in a more-or-less normal way.
Médaille traces the development of two facets of justice in economic thought. Corrective justice is the notion of “justice in exchange;” the idea that equal values must be given in exchange, that goods must not be stolen, nor exchanges coerced. Distributive justice is the way in which society divides its (variously defined) common goods.* The tension between these two ideas of justice is shown in the development of two basic concepts of classical economics, the Labor Theory of Value, and the Law of Rent. The work of Adam Smith is seen as teetering between the two, embracing the labor theory of value, while affirming the efficient action of the invisible hand. Yet this is not schizophrenic, Médaille notes, but “merely the recognition of the two kinds of justice which must be part of any economic system.” Whereas “Smith’s heart went out to the workers,” Ricardo looked out for the investors; because of the Law of Rent, workers had no claim to any wages higher than their market value, which would inexorably decline toward subsistence. Then, Marx (and other socialists) declared that if the value of a thing is the labor that has gone into it, then the market, which is ruled by the Iron Law of Wages, cannot be trusted, and the just wage had to be mandated in some way by society.
Classical economics, Médaille writes, had failed to provide the science with these crucial elements: a theory of general equilibrium, a theory of value, and a “natural law” basis for the science capable of removing philosophical or ethical considerations. This state of affairs led to the “marginalist revolution” in economics — which in turn led to “the disappearance of justice” from any consideration in today’s mainstream economics.
But it might not have needed to. Whether or not Henry George’s political economy exists today, it did at one time, anyway, and it provided those things. The recourse to marginalism, in order to lay to rest questions of distributive justice, was not necessary. George corrected the key errors that had allowed the Labor Theory of Value and the Law of Rent to lead economic science into disarray.
On value, George affirmed Smith’s insight that labor is the true measure of value, but saw that the proper measure is not the amount of labor that went into a thing, but rather the amount of labor that people are now willing to give for that thing, or a suitably similar substitute. This allows economic science to deal with the fact that some things have value independently of labor; their value arises from the obligation to render labor or its products in exchange for them.
Then, on the Law of Rent, George made the crucial observation that improvements in productivity can vastly increase production even on poorer-quality land. This means that the natural Law of Rent cannot be the force that pushes wages down to bare subsistence — not while high-quality lands are held out of use, or barely used — as they pervasively are throughout the modern economy. George’s corrections on the Law of Rent and the Labor Theory of Value provided the foundation for a coherent system of political economy that could reconcile corrective and distributive justice — and this is what Henry George was so urgently trying to tell Pope Leo XIII.
The thing in George’s message that Leo was just not trying to hear, though — and which has framed the Catholic Social Teaching ever since — is the issue of private property in land. All of the doctrinal statements affirm the primacy of distributive justice, saying that property must not be seen as “absolute,” that it has a “social component,” that it cannot be enjoyed in good conscience while widespread poverty persists. But never is the church willing to address the idea that property in land is different from property in other things. In fact, property in land is, for Leo (and for his later interpreters, right up to John Paul II) a good and blessed thing. In Rerum Novarum we read
For it is a most sacred law of nature that a father must provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten; and similarly, nature dictates that a man’s children… should be provided by him with all that is needful to enable them honorably to keep themselves from want and misery in the uncertainties of this mortal life. Now, in no other way can a father effect this except by the ownership of profitable property, which he can transmit to his children by inheritance.
It is absurd to think (as some Georgists seem to) that this amounts to an aristocratic or Malthusian position, that the opportunites of a righteous life should only be extended to current landowners and their fortunate descendants. Not at all: it leads to the philosophy of Distributism. Private ownership of land, far from being evil, is such a good thing that it should be extended as widely as it possibly can be, “and every man, ‘neath his vine and fig tree shall live in peace and unafraid.” And, much in the same way that the single tax is the great tool of Georgism, the great tool of Distributism is the Just Wage.
Médaille admits that this moment in history may not be the most opportune time to talk about this, as globalism and the “race to the bottom” erode wage gains in every labor market that has enjoyed them. (Maybe Distributism doesn’t exist, either.) However, he notes that today’s global marketplace is unsustainable in many ways — and he ought to get no argument from Georgists on that point. He argues that we must, for our own health and our planet’s, consider more than our short-term bottom line in our economic decision-making.
The most obvious question about the Just Wage, of course, is how to quantify it. Médaille takes a brave stab at this; he notes that the take-home pay of most workers today is augmented from two sources: government welfare, and usurious consumer lending. These amounts could provide a broad guideline for the amount of aggregate income that ought justly to be distributed to labor. As soon as he says this, though, he thinks better of it: people are buffaloed by screaming media into putting all kinds of hyped-up crap on their plastic — should that be part of the just wage? Perhaps not. Perhaps economic justice cannot be objectively determined outside of a society whose citizens exhibit the kind of values that would enable a healthier lifestyle, on a lower income level than what folks are currently borrowing to maintain. But, obviously, this cannot be a matter of public policy, at least not in a secular society. So, the just amount of wages is, and, I’m afraid, will remain, a hopelessly indefinite figure.
Again and again during the Catholic\Georgist sessions at the Scranton conference, Georgists made passionate pleas for the exemplary social-justice results that would arise from the public collection of rent and abolition of other taxes. And again and again, the Catholic commentators replied, “That sounds like an OK public policy; nothing sinful about it. If you want to advocate that, God bless you, but the Church doesn’t get involved with fiscal policy.” Like many Georgists, I tended to feel that was a cop-out; my sympathies were with the libera-tionist orientation toward radical social change. Having read Médaille’s book, however, my understanding of these matters has evolved a bit. I can now see that Distributism is not — and when the chips are down, doesn’t really claim to be — an economic policy, but rather an attempt to coherently apply the moral principles of Catholic theology to economic life. Maybe that is an even harder job than getting people to see the cat — or maybe it isn’t — but we ought to realize that the two endeavors do not contradict each other, and they are not opposed.
The Vocation of Business seems to be aimed at business students in Catholic universities, and I hope that a great many of them buy and study it. I also hope that such students are led to take a clear-eyed look, not at the (Gasp!) seizure of landed property, but at, as Henry George put it, the science of political economy which, “in her own proper symmetry, is radiant with hope.” That might seem to be two ways of saying the same thing, but I don’t think it is, because although some might call it “the evidence of things not seen,” I still believe in the existence of Georgist political economy. | {
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CENTENNIAL, Colo. — In a decision that surprised many in this community, a jury sentenced James E. Holmes on Friday to life in prison with no chance of parole, rejecting the death penalty for the man who carried out a 2012 shooting rampage that killed 12 people in a Colorado movie theater.
As the courtroom waited for Judge Carlos Samour Jr. to review the verdict, only the sound of him turning pages could be heard. Family members of the dead who sat through three months of wrenching, sometimes grisly testimony held hands and closed their eyes. Mr. Holmes stood flanked by his lawyers, one of them holding his arm. A few feet away, his parents stood up to see better and gripped each other.
Then the judge read each sentence of life, noting that jurors were unable to reach a unanimous verdict on any of the counts against Mr. Holmes. In Colorado, death sentences must be unanimous. If even one person dissents, the sentence is life in prison.
After court on Friday, a juror who identified herself only by her juror number — 17 — said one juror had solidly opposed death. Nine jurors had favored death and two were unsure, but one wanted a life sentence. | {
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LYNNWOOD, Wash. -- A Washington State Trooper cited a driver for expired car tabs after noticing that the tabs had been colored in with a marker.
The trooper spotted the tabs on northbound Interstate 5 in Lynnwood.
The previously green 2018 tab had been marked with a black pen to look like a 2019 tab.
The driver was issued a $228 ticket for the expired vehicle tab.
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A common story line in American education policy is that public school teachers are underpaid—"desperately underpaid," according to Education Secretary Arne Duncan in a recent speech. As former first lady Laura Bush put it: "Salaries are too low. We all know that. We need to figure out a way to pay teachers more."
Good teachers are crucial to a strong economy and a healthy civil society, and they should be paid at a level commensurate with their skills. But the evidence shows... | {
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President Donald Trump during a meeting in the White House. Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images
President Donald Trump on Thursday said recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which his administration on Tuesday announced would end in six months, had "nothing to worry about" during the phase-out period.
"For all those (DACA) that are concerned about your status during the 6 month period, you have nothing to worry about - No action!" Trump wrote on Twitter.
The tweet, apparently an effort reassure anxious DACA recipients, came after House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi spoke with Trump over the phone Thursday morning and asked him to make clear that DACA recipients would not be subject to deportation in the six-month period, a Democratic aide told Business Insider. The aide said Trump called Pelosi.
"This is what I asked the president to do and, boom boom boom, the tweet appeared," Pelosi later said at a press conference Thursday.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters that Trump "is committed to working across the aisle and doing what is needed to best serve the American people."
The Trump administration opted to end the DACA program, which has shielded from deportation roughly 800,000 unauthorized immigrants who were brought to the US as children, over six months to allow Congress time to enact new protections for the immigrants.
During those six months, the government has said, existing DACA permits will be honored and new applications submitted before this past Tuesday will be processed. If Congress is unable to agree on a replacement program, DACA recipients will begin losing their protection and work authorization on March 6.
Trump's Thursday tweet may do little to alleviate the concerns of some DACA recipients whose permits are soon expiring — they must submit a renewal application by October 5 to be eligible for a two-year renewal, or they could indeed lose their DACA permits within six months.
The number of DACA recipients eligible to renew is unclear.
Trump's call with Pelosi and subsequent tweet came a day after he sided with Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, over the objections of their Republican counterparts, on a massive deal to raise the debt ceiling, fund the government, and provide relief for victims of Hurricane Harvey. | {
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Money Stolen by Infamous Con Man 'Bobby Thompson' Finally Goes to Vets Donors gave millions to a Navy veterans charity, not knowing it was a scam.
-- Years after donors gave millions to the U.S. Navy Veterans Association – not knowing it was a scam charity preying on wartime sympathies – at least some of that money is finally reaching its intended target.
Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine announced Friday his office would be handing a portion of the money seized during the capture of the fugitive scammer known as Bobby Thompson over to the Ohio Military Veterans Legal Assistance Project, which provides legal services to returning service men and women, as part of a $50,000 grant.
“These funds were originally given by generous donors who thought their contributions were going to help our veterans, but most of the money went to line the pockets of a con artist,” DeWine said in a press release late Friday. “As a result of the legal process that convicted Bobby Thompson, my office received some of the remaining funds with the provision that they assist veterans. This grant to the Ohio Military Veterans Legal Assistance Project will ensure the donations serve their original purpose by helping veterans.”
In 2013, DeWine’s office successfully prosecuted John Donald Cody, who operated under the pseudonym Commander Bobby Thompson, for running the charity scam. An Ohio judge sentenced Cody to 28 years in prison.
"[It is] difficult to try to measure the amount of harm your greed has caused,” said Judge Steven Gall. “All the worthy organizations that count on small donations from good citizens to help further their cause ... they are now struggling for money because people are afraid to give."
The charges of theft, fraud, money laundering and the use of false identities stemmed from Cody's stewardship of the organization, which raised millions, but when examined by authorities, offered little proof that money was used to assist veterans.
After the scheme fell apart, Cody went on the run for two years and was ultimately captured in Oregon. But even after his arrest, Cody refused to confirm his real name, going so far as to sign his name "Mr. X" on court papers. He claimed at one point that the charity was part of a top secret CIA operation.
For three years ABC News chronicled Cody's curious case – his abrupt disappearance, the manhunt that led to his capture, and the puzzle that surrounded his identity – a mystery made all the more unsettling by his ability to gain access to the White House for an event with then-President George W. Bush, and to pose for photographs with Sen. John McCain and then-House Speaker Rep. John Boehner.
It was a tale ripped from Hollywood. U.S. Marshals who finally caught him believe Cody modeled his life after the famous impostor from the blockbuster "Catch Me If You Can." A copy of the Leonardo DiCaprio movie was among the few personal possessions he kept at the Portland, Oregon boarding house where he was in hiding. Agents also found a suitcase holding nearly $1 million in cash.
"A man that had no other source of income, had no job, no nothing … and as soon as questions are asked, he disappears with a suitcase?" said prosecutor Brad Tammaro of the Ohio Attorney General's office. "If I don't have a job other than as a trustee for this charity, and then I end up with a million dollars in a suitcase somewhere, there's the conclusion right there."
Money seized during Thompson’s 2012 arrest was awarded to the Ohio Attorney General’s Office for distribution to legitimate veterans charities. The $50,000 grant to the Ohio Military Veterans Legal Assistance Project is the first of that distribution.
In all, it is believed the scam charity raised more than $100 million from donors who thought they were helping returning American military heroes.
Cody has never revealed what happened to the bulk of that money. | {
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LBPC16 - Anything Goes
(LBPC16) ANYTHING GOES!
Create a level/adventure. It can be anything that's possible in LBP3
The level/adventure has to be a previously unpublished level/adventure for this contest
The level/adventure has to be playable by one player
The deadline is the 31st of December 2018
After the deadline, do not republish. Levels republished after the deadline will be disqualified. Exceptions may be made for quick fixes with respect to level titles, description, badges, but only with the prior consent of the contest crew. If you need to request an edit, please post in this thread or send us a PM.
Include (LBPC16) in your level title and post an LBP.me link here in this thread
1st place: Crown and LBP Cap, LBPCentral Pin, and 50$/ psn gift card
2nd place: LBP Cap, LBPCentral Pin, and 30$/ psn gift card
3rd place: LBP Cap, LBPCentral Pin, and 20$/ psn gift card
The bestest, most funnest, amazingly awesome, overtly cool level wins! Whatever you can do in LBP3 and publish is fine. Make us laugh, make us cry, scare us into a frenzy, challenge our minds and skills, or make our hearts glow till they burst!! Make a fun mini game, a penultimate platformer, or a maybe a giant epic adventure.. Whatever you want! Anything you can imagine from the game that was all about imagination! Just impress the socks off us and you take home the prize.Wanna join this contest and create something? That's the spirit! Be creative, LBP community!This will be the last contest here at LBPC. | {
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El poeta y ensayista alemán Heinrich Heine afirmaba que «Todo delito que no se convierte en escándalo no existe para la sociedad». Eso es lo que ocurre con las cláusulas abusivas o los escándalos que ha protagonizado el sistema financiero y, especialmente, la banca española. Si no se ve, no existe, sería el resumen.
Sin embargo, todos los escándalos de la banca van saliendo porque la ciudadanía ya se ha hartado de ser el principal sostenedor del sector financiero, ya sea a través de las cláusulas abusivas que se les aplican, ya sea por medio de los rescates con dinero público, con el dinero de todos.
Hasta que saltaron a los titulares de la prensa nadie sabía lo que era una cláusula suelo, una participación preferente, una hipoteca multidivisa, el impuesto de Actos Jurídicos Documentados, una tarjeta revolving o el IRPH. Eran cláusulas o productos que se vendieron, que estaban en los contratos y en los que los clientes no tuvieron la información suficiente o no tenían un conocimiento financiero adecuado para contratar esos productos o entender esas cláusulas.
En el caso del IRPH se produjo algo similar. Todos los testimonios recogidos por Diario16 nos indican que desconocían la existencia de este índice o que, incluso, se les llegó a vender la hipoteca en la terraza de un bar. Sin embargo, la Justicia europea tomó cartas en el asunto y es más que probable que el IRPH sea anulado. Por lo tanto, los bancos españoles tendrán que devolver todo lo cobrado de más en relación con el Euribor.
El pasado mes de julio la Comisión Europea publicó el informe de vigilancia de la situación financiera de España. El documento, realizado en colaboración con el Banco Central Europeo (BCE), es optimista, y afirma que «el sector bancario español goza de una buena rentabilidad, liquidez y capitalización», aunque hace algunas puntualizaciones.
En el apartado dedicado a los desafíos futuros, se incluye una breve referencia a los riesgos judiciales. Se explica que los pleitos judiciales han tenido un impacto «significativo» para muchos bancos, añadiendo que el motivo han sido principalmente las «malas prácticas de venta».
El informe señala que los costes vinculados con las sentencias relativas a venta de preferentes ya están pagados o provisionados, pero advierte de la posible emergencia de nuevos riesgos potenciales. Y cita dos asuntos: los gastos de constitución de los préstamos hipotecarios y el tipo de interés IRPH. Según el informe, futuras sentencias relacionadas con estos dos temas «podrían afectar a la rentabilidad de algunos bancos afectados». Por tanto, la Comisión Europea ve una clara posibilidad de que la sentencia del TJUE respecto al IRPH sea favorable a los afectados y contraria a los intereses de la banca. En consecuencia, Europa considera la nulidad de las cláusulas IRPH como un hecho verosímil, perfectamente factible, y por tanto debe mover a los afectados al optimismo.
Por otro lado, el informe del Abogado General de la Unión Europea dio un duro golpe a la banca española puesto que afirmó que el sistema de cálculo del IRPH era complejo y poco transparente. Esta valoración por parte del Abogado General abre la puerta a la anulación de las hipotecas con IRPH, a su regulación por Euribor y a la devolución del dinero cobrado de más por la banca española que, según Goldman Sachs, podría alcanzar la cifra de 44.000 millones de euros. Para hacernos a la idea de la importancia de esta resolución, las cláusulas suelo supusieron 4.000 millones o la devolución del impuesto del impuesto de Actos Jurídicos Documentados podrían haber supuesto 5.000 millones si el Tribunal Supremo no hubiera cedido a las presiones del poder financiero.
Por tanto, ¿está preparada la banca para este nuevo golpe o el IRPH se va a convertir en el golpe de gracia definitivo que haga cambiar a las entidades hacia un tipo de negocio más ético basado en el respeto al cliente? | {
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英首相による議会閉会にイギリス各地で抗議 「国民は憤慨」と野党党首
画像提供, AFP 画像説明, 首相官邸近くで政府による議会閉会に抗議する人たち（31日、ロンドン）
イギリスの欧州連合（EU）離脱（ブレグジット）に向けて英議会を閉会するというボリス･ジョンソン新首相の決定に反発し、イギリス各地で31日、数万人が抗議行動に参加した。
「クーデターを阻止しろ」と名づけられた全国デモは、ブレグジット反対派の団体が組織した。マンチェスター、リーズ、ヨーク、ベルファスト、リヴァプールなどの国内30カ所以上の市町村で大勢がデモ行進した。ロンドン中心部は「ボリス･ジョンソン、恥を知れ」と繰り返す人たちで埋め尽くされ、官庁街のホワイトホールのほか繁華街のウエストエンドでもデモ隊によって交通が動かなくなった。
過去にも様々な大規模集会の舞台となってきたトラファルガー広場にも大勢が座り込んだ。その後、「誰の民主主義だ？ 私たちの民主主義だ」と唱えながらバッキンガム宮殿に向けて行進した。トラファルガー広場はホワイトホールとウエストエンドとバッキンガム宮殿の中間に位置する。
画像説明, 首相の議会閉会案は女王が正式承認した。議会閉会に抗議し、バッキンガム宮殿に向かって行進する人たち（31日、ロンドン）
その一方で、ジョンソン首相を支持する少人数のグループも、議事堂のあるウエストミンスターに集まり、集会を開いた。
ロンドン警視庁は、抗議行動に関連して3人を逮捕したと発表したが、それ以上の詳細は明らかにしていない。
画像提供, EPA 画像説明, トラファルガー広場の周りの道路に座り込み政府に抗議する人たち
EUとの離脱協定のあるなしに関わらず、10月31日にブレグジットを敢行する意向のジョンソン首相は28日、9月半ばから約1カ月にわたり、議会を閉会すると発表した。もしこのまま首相の意向通りに閉会が実現すると、議会は祝休日のほか23日間にわたり審議が停止する。
ブレグジット期限の10月31日を目前にこれほど長期にわたり議会を閉じるという首相の決定は、議会に審議させないままブレグジットを実現するための策だと、批判が高まっている。
＜関連記事＞
画像提供, EPA 画像説明, 首相官邸のあるロンドン･ダウニング街の外で抗議する人たち。男性のプラカードには「民主主義を守れ、議会閉会に抵抗しよう」、女性のプラカードには「民主主義の死を悼む」と書かれている
画像提供, Getty Images 画像説明, ロンドンの官庁街ホワイトホールでは、「民主主義を守れ、議会閉会に抵抗しよう」などとプラカードを掲げた人たちが集まった。労働党のダイアン･アボット影の内相などが演説した
画像提供, Getty Images 画像説明, 抗議集会の警備に当たる警官隊越しに言い争う人たち（31日、ロンドン･ウエストミンスター）
画像提供, Getty Images 画像説明, ジョンソン政権に抗議するマンチェスターの人たち
リヴァプールでも市内中心部で抗議集会があり、市議会はツイッターで「リヴァプールの『我々の民主主義を守ろう』抗議が本格化し、セント・ジョージ・ホールの近くに大勢が集まっている」と書いた。
ポーラ･カーライルさんは、国民投票でEU「残留に入れた人も離脱に入れた人も」一緒に並んで抗議しているところに、自分も肩を並べるのが「誇らしい」と話した。
「私たちを黙らせようとしても、そんなことは許さない。私たちがいるからこその権力だ。ジョンソン氏を阻止するまで、私たちは自分の力を示し続ける」
画像提供, Philip Haines 画像説明, エクセターの抗議集会
エクセターでデモに参加したバーディー･ウォルトンさん（55）は、国民健康サービス（NHS）の薬剤師。デモに来るのは初めてだが、ジョンソン首相の計画に反対するために参加したという。
「これは、自分の言い分は精査に耐えないと怖がっている男の仕業です」とウォルトンさんは批判した。
大学街オックスフォードでは、ジョンソン首相が学んだオックスフォード大学ベイリオル・コレッジの前に、EU旗などを手にした人たちが集まり首相に抗議した。
画像提供, Lind Covill 画像説明, ジョンソン首相の母校、オックスフォード大学ベイリオル・コレッジの前に集まったデモ隊
スコットランド･グラスゴーの抗議集会に参加した、最大野党･労働党のジェレミー･コービン党首は、各地のデモは「合意なしの離脱など認めない」と首相に告げているのだと強調した。
「あらゆるところでデモが行われている。今の状況に大勢が怒り、憤慨しているからだ」とコービン氏は、政府を批判した。
画像提供, Getty Images 画像説明, グラスゴーの集会で、国民は「怒り憤慨している」と強調するコービン党首
労働党からはジョン･マクドネル影の財務相とダイアン･アボット影の内相が、ロンドンの抗議集会で演説した。
ダウニング街の近くで壇上から演説したアボット氏は、「ボリス･ジョンソンが議会を閉じ、イギリスの一般市民の声を封じ込めるなど、許すことは出来ない」と強調した。
ブリストルでは野党･自由民主党の元議員スティーヴン･ウィリアムズ氏が、議会を閉じることでジョンソン首相は、「私たちの時代に一番大事な決断をするのに、議会にあと4日の猶予しか与えなかった」と批判した。
画像説明, ブリストルで政府に抗議する人たち
画像提供, Reuters 画像説明, ベルリンでも少人数の抗議集会が開かれた
一方で、政府のサジド･ジャヴィド財務相はBBCラジオの番組で、首相による議会閉会を擁護した。
「この時期に議会が閉会するのは、ごく普通のことだ。議会を閉会するのはまったく正しいし適切だ。この首相と政府がこの時間を使って、政策目標を確定するのはまったく正しい」と、ジャヴィド氏は述べた。
保守党党首選に出馬していた今年6月、議会閉会はあり得ないと発言していたことを指摘されたジャヴィド氏は、「発言の文脈が違う」と説明した。
30日にはかつて保守党から首相になったサー･ジョン･メイジャーが、議会閉会を法廷で争うため、反ブレグジット活動家のジーナ・ミラー氏と協力することにしたと発表した。
メイジャー元首相は、ジョンソン首相がこの時期に議会を閉会するのは、合意なしブレグジットに議会が反対するのを阻止するためだと考えている。
これに対してジョンソン首相は、合意なしブレグジットをごり押しするために議会を閉会するのだという憶測は、「まったく事実と異なる」と反論している。 | {
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Telltale has finally revealed the trailer for the anticipated fourth episode: “Sons of Winter!” The trailer features more appearances by Jon Snow (voiced by Kit Harington) and Mother of Dragons: Daenerys Targaryen (voiced by Emilia Clarke).
The story follows The Forresters (bannermen to The Starks) and takes place at The Wall, King’s Landing, Ironrath (home to The Forresters, North of Westeros), and new location (and gorgeous shot) this episode, Meereen!
The series picks up at the end of Game of Thrones Season 3 and will end roughly before Season 5!
Given the footage in the trailer, this episode looks like it will have more fight sequences then the previous which will make for an exciting experience!
For those unfamiliar with the style of Telltale’s games, it’s narrative story, movement based with point and click options, that allow players to make their own decisions that craft their own unique episode experience.
The game is available on all major platforms.
It will release first on Playstation, PC and Mac next Tuesday, May 26th!
And Xbox: May 27th, and Mobile (Apple and Android) on May 28th!
Have you played the previous three episodes yourself? What did you think of that trailer?! Let us know in the comments below! | {
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After writing an article full of lies, deliberately upsetting the relative of a murder victim, and generally ruining the name of his entire industry, you'd think the man responsible for the tasteless Grand Theft Auto: Northumbria story would be remorseful. He was not.
Faux journalist and twat Jerry Lawton is the man responsible for vomiting up a Daily Star article that falsely claimed Rockstar was planning to make a GTA game based on real-life murderer Raoul Moat. On his Facebook page, the man expressed surprise and contempt for anybody who thought that what he did was reprehensible, making sure to betray his own low opinion of gamers in the process.
"Baffled by the fury of adult gamers," writes Lawton. "These are grown (?!?) men who sit around all day playing computer games with one another who've today chosen to enter the real world just long enough to complain about my story slamming a Raoul Moat version of Grand Theft Auto! You would think I'd denied the Holocaust!!! Think I'll challenge them to a virtual reality duel....stab....I win!!!"
Nice to see that Lawton conveniently left out the bit where he used a poorly doctored image that any idiot could have ascertained was fake, the bit where he used a 69-year-old grieving grandmother for his own ends, and the bit where he cobbled together a shitty little article full of lies that got taken down because it was a load of crap. Hilarious that he references the "real world" when his article was based in total fantasy to begin with. Maybe Lawton's the one who needs to step away from his computer and face reality.
You are baffled, Lawton, because people in the British shitrag press are rarely held accountable for their irresponsible writing. This is what it feels like to be exposed as a terrible, sleazy, dreadful, parasitic little man who writes for The Daily Star. That fact you don't even have the dignity or class to apologize for being such a disingenuous writer is what should be baffling you, mate.
Stab ... I win! | {
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Jurgen Klopp offered a timely reminder to Philippe Coutinho and the rest of his scintillating attack there is no better place to fulfil their ambitions than Liverpool during his reign.
While the glare is understandably on Manchester City’s goalscoring feats going into derby weekend on Merseyside and Manchester, Liverpool’s are no less spectacular.
Klopp believes his players are aware how the evolution of the club under his lead has brought the best from them. His side has scored at least three goals or more in nine of their last eleven games – a total of 40 goals over that period.
They head into Sunday’s Merseyside derby with a proud boast. Not since 1895 has a Liverpool team scored more than the current total of 62 goals in 24 games. Kenny Dalglish’s side matched that in the 1986-87 season, but Klopp’s side are currently scoring at a higher rate than the greatest Liverpool teams.
Little wonder few can see the merits of allowing Coutinho, a key member of the Anfield goalscoring quartet, to leave for Barcelona in January.
Liverpool's attack was on fire in the week credit: Getty images
Klopp again shrugged off questions about the midfielder’s future, but the messages sound less emphatic than six months ago.
“Nothing will ever stop these rumours but I have nothing to say about them. That won't change,” he said.
What the Liverpool manager did point out is those flourishing have done so in the perfect environment - something they may not find so easily elsewhere.
“I'm pretty sure the players know about their development here,” said Klopp.
“I think it's obvious. If you want to see it, if you don't want to see it, I'm completely fine.
“The players know about the value the club has for them. There's no doubt about that. It's not that I have to say 'look what I did for that player!' In my opinion it's a clear deal.
Coutinho scored a hat-trick last time out credit: Reuters
“It's my job to help him reach his 100% potential and quality. The job of the player is then to bring it on the pitch and stay healthy and fit and have the perfect attitude - that's not about me.”
There is some caution, however.
This time last season Liverpool had scored 60 goals after the same number of fixtures. They would only strike another 32 before the end of the campaign, the loss of Sadio Mane proving particularly disruptive. Klopp’s squad rotation – as well as last summer’s significant additions including Sadio Mane – is geared towards preventing a repeat.
Everton will seek to end Liverpool’s momentum, Klopp ready to renew rivalries with Sam Allardyce. He believes the tactical challenge will be familiar.
“We have showed already that we can play against teams defending deep, that’s no surprise any more,” he said.
“We know what they will do and it’s still difficult to defend. You are not allowed to make a lot of fouls because Sigurdsson has the free-kicks. That’s a clear plan but we have to fulfil our plan as well because we will have the ball a few times and we have to make their life as difficult as possible.” | {
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SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) – Are you a believer in the adage, “What’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine?”
One woman learned the hard way that that is not the case in her marriage after she found chocolate locked in a safe in the fridge so she couldn’t have access to it.
Stacey Lowe shared the photos to Facebook, venting her frustrations about her husband who “doesn’t want to share his chocolate.”
“So this is what it has come to! You buy a house together, have a child together, get engaged, are planning a wedding and doing your house up and this happens! Dave goes and buys a f—ing fridge safe because he’s an a–h— and doesn’t want to share his chocolate with me anymore! Anyone want him? Surely this is breakup material right?!”
She later updated her post with a link to purchase similar safes for the fridge, saying, “Think I need to invest in one for myself now, two can play that game!”
“I laughed at first, but then told him it’s like torture because I can see what is in there,” Lowe told The Sun. “It’s like showing me what I can’t have. He’s saying he’s going to get another one for the cupboard now for his crisps and sweets.”
“We are both foodies but I can’t resist chocolate,” she added.
Lowe told the publication she’s determined to get into the safe and will keep guessing until she cracks the code.
Would you get a refrigerator safe to ensure your treats were safe from someone else’s hands?
Latest News Headlines: | {
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Brought to you by York Properties.
Week of August 6, 2018
A jazz club is coming to the Village Subway in Cameron Village
Apartments planned for Bellwood Drive behind Cameron Village
Apartment planned for East Village property
Yacht Club coming to West Johnson Street
Tasting bar now open at Seaboard Wine at High Park
Dix Park to add a cafe
Krispy Kreme plans kiosk for Crabtree Valley Mall
Contact [email protected] with news or to be featured in the Development Beat.
Jazz Club Coming to Village Subway
The Village Subway is on its way back. Smedes York has plans to open a jazz club in Cameron Village’s iconic underground that was once home to music venues, bars, and shops during the 1970s to the mid-1980s.
York, a Broughton graduate, member of the Raleigh Hall of Fame, and Chairman of the Board of York Properties, hopes to bring life back to the space that has been dormant for decades.
This is some of the greatest news we’ve ever reported (first in a 2016 article about the return of The Fresh Market that apparently no one read, then re-reported last week on Twitter).
EXCLUSIVE: Live entertainment could soon be returning to the Village Subway in Cameron Village. Story coming soon. pic.twitter.com/t1obQJWFr6 — ITB Insider™ (@ITBInsider) July 31, 2018
The N&O covered the story as well, reporting that the club hopes to open towards the end of 2019. We’re thrilled at this development, as it gives us hope that Felson’s could potentially return. (It isn’t returning.)
While we await the arrival of the new establishment, be sure to check out “The Underground: Photographs of Raleigh’s Music Scene 1976-1985” which is currently on display at the City of Raleigh Museum (COR).
For an in-depth look at The Village Subway, read Goodnight Raleigh’s coverage from 2008, which includes a list of bands that played there and a wealth of information in the comments section.
Apartments Planned for Bellwood Behind Cameron Village
A new apartment project is being planned on Bellwood Drive, just behind Cameron Village. As journalists, we’ve known about this since 2017, when we got a hot tip from a reader that “the townhouses on Bellwood are falling apart. It’s a long story but the HOA is trying to get all the owners to allow them to negotiate a sale.” We were too busy (lazy) to actually do any journalism on the matter, until now.
The project was presented to the Cameron Park Development Committee last week. A representative from the developer shared the following details:
349 units
Buildings will be 4 stories, with one 6-story building that will be the same height as the 4-story buildings due to the slope of the land. They’ll need a zoning variance for this.
520 parking spaces
Rental rates between $1,500 and $2,500 a month
Roughly 65% of the units will be 1 bedroom (750 square feet to 1,000 square feet)
Residents will have access to ground floor office space, but the project will not have commercial space. They probably realize it’s foolish to compete with Cameron Village in the retail arena. The project will probably take at least 2 years to build, and another year for approvals.
Apartment Planned For East Village Property
Site review plans were filed last week for a 3-story mixed-used apartment building located on the property that’s now home to East Village, College Beverage, Curious Goods, DIGITZ, and Triangle Motorsports.
CA Ventures, a real estate investment holding company based in Chicago, is listed as the Client/Developer/Owner on the project, named 3020 Hillsborough. The property will be developed across a total of nine existing parcels.
Designed by JDavis Architects, the 246,350 square-foot building will house 142 residential units (76 one-bedrooms, 59 four-bedrooms and 7 two-bedrooms) and ground-floor retail. The plans also offer a small preview of some of 3020’s amenities: a pool and adjoining clubhouse, a “cyber lounge,” and 147 parking spaces with a separate bicycle storage area.
So what does this mean for Hillsborough Street icons East Village and College Beverage? We spoke with some nice people at JDavis, but they were not sure what the developer had planned for the existing businesses.
Update: According to some crowdsourced journalism, East Village has stated that a developer is looking at the property but it is not under contract yet. If the project is approved and moves forward, East Village will have the right of first refusal to put the restaurant in the bottom floor of the apartment building.
Raleigh’s First Yacht Club
Raleigh will soon be getting its very own Yacht Club, sort of. Site plans were filed for the renovation of the property at 710 W. Johnson Street that would turn the one-time home of the Office Tavern into The Yacht Club.
The site plans indicate this will be a two-story restaurant/bar, with 1,451 square-feet of space on the first floor, 2,296 square feet on the second floor, and 781 square-feet of outdoor dining space, of which 402 square-feet will be covered.
Based on the name, we’re guessing there will be some sort of nautical theme. We’re hoping they at least have a solid Yacht Rock playlist full of hits from Hall & Oates, Christopher Cross, Michael McDonald, and more.
Tasting Bar Now Open at Seaboard Wine at High Park
Just a few weeks after moving to their new location at High Park, Seaboard Wine has now opened their Tasting Bar. Hours for the Tasting Bar are:
Monday – Friday: 3:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Saturday – Sunday: 12:00 pm – 6:00 pm
We imagine this will be a hit with the surrounding Five Points neighborhoods, who often participate in nightly wine walks. More information on tastings and events can be found on their website, www.seaboardwine.com.
Cafe on a Hill
Ashton Smith’s number 1 newsletter in North Carolina (Raleigh, over-easy) recently called our attention to a new Dix Park development, Dix Café.
They are now serving food from 7:00 am – 3:00 pm and offer “Handcrafted Sandwiches, Fresh Salads, All-beef burgers, Smoothies & more” at a location on the grounds of Dix Park. The café is run by Services for the Blind, a division of DHHS, as part of their blind entrepreneur program, NC Business Enterprises.
It’s worth noting that there was at one time, an eatery named “Dix Grill” on Cafeteria Drive in one of the old Dix Hospital buildings, but it appears that space is used now for meetings of the Dorothea Dix Master Advisory Committee.
Hadn’t heard about this yet…salads and burgers coming to Dix Park soon? pic.twitter.com/y72dh2UKRS — Mike Robson (@mikerobso) July 24, 2018
We’ll keep an eye on this as more details emerge.
Krispy Kreme Bringing Doughnut Kiosk To Crabtree
You know when you go to the mall and see those kiosks selling things like emoji-shaped pillows, cell phone accessories that will break within six months of purchasing, and random stuff that you’d never actually buy? Well, for some reason, Krispy Kreme decided to put one of those at Crabtree.
Permits were issued last week for a “Krispy Kreme Kiosk” for Crabtree Valley Mall. First, did no one at Krispy Kreme stop and think about that acronym? Maybe go with “doughnut stand” or any other word that doesn’t start with the letter K.
The stand will be installed on the first floor of the mall by Gleeco, Inc. for $8,282. The 123 square-foot doughnut stand is described as “pre-manufactured” — which may explain why the permit cost was so low.
We have no idea what this will look like, but Reddit user TheLegendofMikeC shared this UK “micro-store” last year.
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. | {
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Democrats plan to announce two articles of impeachment — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — against President Donald Trump on Tuesday, multiple sources told NBC News on Monday night.
The House Judiciary Committee heard from lawyers for both parties for more than nine hours on findings from the Intelligence Committee's impeachment inquiry over allegations that Trump withheld aid to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.
Democrats said during the hearing that the president violated his oath of office by jeopardizing national security for personal gain and by trying to interfere in the 2020 election. They also laid out a case for obstruction of Congress by highlighting Trump's refusal to comply with congressional subpoenas in the impeachment inquiry.
Five sources familiar with the impeachment discussions disclosed the plans on condition of anonymity after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., met with leaders of committees involved in the impeachment inquiry, including Adam Schiff of California, chairman of the Intelligence Committee; Jerrold Nadler of New York, chairman of the Judiciary Committee; Eliot Engel of New York, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee; and Maxine Waters of California, chairwoman of the Financial Services Committee.
Pelosi's office announced late Monday that the leaders of the various committees would "announce the next steps in the House impeachment inquiry" during a 9 a.m. ET news conference on Tuesday.
The sources cautioned that the plans weren't final until an official announcement is made. But asked whether the announcement on Tuesday would be about articles of impeachment, Engel said: "Yeah, everything."
"I can make the case for two articles," Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill., who serves on the Judiciary Committee, said on MSNBC Monday night.
In closing statements during the marathon Judiciary Committee hearing, Doug Collins of Georgia, the committee's ranking Republican, denounced what he called "an impeachment scam" and questioned Democrats' motives.
Download the NBC News app for breaking news and politics
"We have become a rubber stamp," he said, alleging that Democrats were acting out of spite over Trump's election in 2016.
But Nadler argued that Trump violated his oath of office by pressuring Ukraine to announce an investigation into Biden and other Democrats, jeopardizing national security and the integrity of U.S. elections.
"I am struck by the fact that my Republican colleagues have offered no serious scrutiny of the evidence at hand," he said. "They have talked about everything else, but they have offered not one substantive word in the president's defense."
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee plan to meet early Tuesday to continue discussions. | {
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Foto: Google Street View/OŠ Josip Pupačić
OSNOVNA škola Josip Pupačić u Omišu u veljači je raspisala natječaj za učitelje. Između ostalih, tražili su i učitelja ili učiteljicu tjelesnog odgoja. Jednog učitelja ili učiteljicu tjelesnog odgoja.
Nakon otprilike mjesec dana, objavljeni su rezultati natječaja. Umjesto jednog učitelja, odabrana su dvojica. Obojica novoizabranih učitelja tjelesnog odgoja sinovi su aktualnih učitelja tjelesnog odgoja iz te iste osnovne škole.
Sinovi učitelja
Uz to, kad je natječaj raspisan tražio se jedan učitelj tjelesnog odgoja na neodređeno nepuno radno vrijeme, i to 24 sata tjedno. Prema objavljenim rezultatima, posao su dobila dvojica, ali su im satnicu od 24 sata, namijenjenu jednom učitelju, praktično prepolovili i razdijelili je na 12 sati svakome.
Ponovimo ovo.
Na javnom natječaju se tražio jedan učitelj tjelesnog s jasno određenom satnicom.
Dvojica umjesto jednog
Umjesto jednog, izabrana su dvojica koja bi trebala dijeliti tu jednu jasno određenu satnicu.
Obojica, i Rino Kos i Marko Kuvačić, sinovi su trenutnih učitelja tjelesnog u istoj toj školi.
Rezultati natječaja objavljeni su 19. ožujka. Neposredno nakon objave, na službenoj stranici škole je izašla nova obavijest - odluka o poništenju natječaja. "Poništava se zbog proceduralne pogreške", piše u odluci koju, kao i natječaj, potpisuje ravnateljica škole.
"Proceduralna greška"
Razgovarali smo s Davorkom Deur, ravnateljicom škole. Zanimalo nas je zašto su na natječaju odabrana dva kandidata.
"Nismo uzeli nikoga, je li razumijete? Poništili smo natječaj", kaže ravnateljica.
Podsjetili smo je da je vijest o poništenju objavljena neposredno nakon objave rezultata natječaja.
"Uočili smo razlog zbog kojeg smo morali poništiti i, eto, to smo napravili", pojašnjava Deur.
Koji je bio razlog poništenja?
"Pa piše da je proceduralna greška", rekla nam je.
Izravno smo je upitali jesu li Rino Kos i Marko Kuvačić sinovi postojećih učitelja tjelesnog u njenoj školi.
"Mislim, ne znam zašto me to pitate", glasio je pokušaj odgovora.
Zato što je to pitanje od javnog interesa. Nemojte se praviti, znate zbog čega vas pitamo.
"E", lakonski odvrati ravnateljica obrazovne ustanove.
Pitanje je takvo da traži odgovor da ili ne. Jesu li obojica sinovi učitelja iz vaše škole?
"Jesu", napokon odgovara ravnateljica.
Zanimalo nas je i je li barem održan razgovor s drugim kandidatima.
"Održan je. Više od pola drugih kandidata su naši pripravnici. Ne da nije održan razgovor o natječaju, to su osobe koje poznajem ja i poznaju njihovi mentori. Veliki broj njih su naši učenici. Tako da, daleko od toga da ne poznam te ljude'', rekla nam je.
Zanimalo nas je je li zbilja moguće da se dogodi takva ''proceduralna greška'' da od svih kandidata budu izabrana baš dvojica učitelja, iako se tražio samo jedan, te da baš obojica budu sinovi postojećih učitelja u njenoj školi. Upitali smo je kolika je vjerojatnost da se dogodi baš takva ''proceduralna greška''.
''Eto, dogodila nam se greška. Evo, posipamo se pepelom i poništavamo taj dio natječaja'', odgovara Deur i dodaje da će se taj dio natječaja naknadno raspisati.
Kad će se raspisati?
''Ne znam, sad očekujem nekakva postupanja po ovome svemu pa ćemo nakon toga'', odgovara ravnateljica.
Upitali smo je tko je donio odluku o odabiru sinova učitelja.
''Školski odbor, na prijedlog ravnatelja, tako piše u zakonu'', odgovara ona.
Dakle vi ste ih predložili?
''Tako je'', opet kratko odgovara Deur.
Zašto ste predložili njih dvojicu ako ste raspisali natječaj za samo jednog učitelja? Osim toga, znate valjda kako vam se zovu postojeći učitelji u vašoj školi.
''A zašto bi to bila prepreka?'' zapitala nas je ravnateljica.
Raspisan je javni natječaj u osnovnoj školi, a vi ste zaposlili dvojicu sinova dvojice postojećih učitelja. Naravno da je prepreka.
''Znate što? To nije prepreka kad vi živite u velikom gradu i kad imate drukčiji izbor. Svi smo u nekakvim vezama. I rodbinskim i prijateljskim. I znanim i neznanim. Znate?'' zapitala nas je.
Ne znam.
''To vam ja mogu reći. Na 7,8 tisuća stanovnika u Omišu, kad vam se 17 ljudi javi na natječaj... Mislim, ima tu i ljudi koji su u rodbinskim vezama s nama i učiteljima. E. Tako da nisu oni jedini'', objašnjava nam Deur.
Vi odgovorno tvrdite, kao ravnateljica škole, da u ovom slučaju nije bilo nepotizma?
''Nema tu odgovorne tvrdnje. Eklatantna istina je da se radi o nepotizmu. Ali, kažem vam, jedno je nepotizam u jednom malom Omišu, nego što može biti nepotizam u Zagrebu, Splitu ili nekom većem gradu, shvaćate? Konkretna vam je to situacija. Ne možemo se mi ovdje jedan od drugog ni otpisati ni udaljiti. Vrlo je teško donijeti odluku koga odvojiti'', rekla je Davorka Deur, ravnateljica Osnovne škole Josip Pupačić u Omišu u razgovoru za Index.
Inače, Davorka je prije dvije godine predložila samu sebe za nagradu Grada Omiša. Škola je poslala, a Davorka potpisala, prijedlog nominacije triju osoba koje su konkurirale za nagradu. Jedna od te tri nominirane osobe u poslanom prijedlogu bila je upravo ravnateljica Davorka Deur.
Nije dobila nagradu.
Pokrenuta inspekcija
Poslali smo upit Ministarstvu obrazovanja i znanosti. Zanimalo nas je je li Prosvjetna inspekcija zaprimila prijave o nepotizmu u natječaju za učitelja tjelesnog odgoja u omiškoj školi. Također, upitali smo Ministarstvo namjeravaju li pokrenuti inspekcijski nadzor.
Iz Ministarstva su za Index potvrdili kako je u OŠ Josip Pupačić u Omišu pokrenut inspekcijski nadzor.
Odluka o Poništenju Dijela Natječaja Od 23.02.2018. by Index.hr on Scribd | {
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"The island is actually sinking slowly," Quinn Monette, a junior at the College of William and Mary, said Wednesday. "A study by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers fairly recently projected the island would be completely underwater within the next 50 to 100 years if nothing is done to mitigate it." | {
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There are many who believe that the values of Islam and the values of the West are incompatible.
There are even some who suggest that vast hordes of Muslims coming from the East will change the balance within Western societies.
This has even been called a “clash of civilizations.”
Well, as Muslims, we believe that there is no such clash and that Islam, far from being a threat to Western society is, in fact, a blessing.
Indeed, Muslims believe that Islam is the natural religion of mankind and has existed since the beginning of time, speaking to the hearts of all men and women, wherever they live.
So where does the problem come from, for indeed there is a growing perception in many Western societies that Islam poses a threat to their way of life?
As economies continue to decline and people find it more and more difficult to make ends meet, they quite naturally look for reasons why their standard of living is falling. Unfortunately, to blame Muslims and Islam is a grave mistake.
Let us take the example of Switzerland. A few years back, the people of Switzerland voted in a national referendum to ban the building of minarets in their country.
At the time of that referendum there existed four minarets in the whole of Switzerland, which hardly seems a threat to the Swiss way of life.
Yet ultra-nationalist political parties had managed to whip up a feeling amongst ordinary people that Islam was somehow to blame and that its continued rise would threaten the very nature of Switzerland itself.
The politicians did this in a very clever way. Switzerland is famous for clocks, for watches, for chocolate and for banking. It has always been a neutral country and its citizens are renowned for being clean and quiet.
Imagine their concern, then, when large numbers of Muslims came from beyond their borders to live in the country, many of them without jobs and unable to speak the languages of Switzerland.
The right-wing parties seized their chance and proclaimed this as a proof that Islam was threatening that clean and quiet way of life.
Let us be honest here. If Switzerland has a problem with immigration, then it should deal with that immigration problem. Islam, however, was not the problem at all.
Similarly, in France or Germany, where large numbers of the population have parents who were born outside of France or Germany, there is a real problem of social integration. Vast numbers of young people, for example, feel alienated from their society.
Living in communities where Arabic is the language most commonly spoken, they look instead to Morocco, Algeria or Turkey for their identity. Often these social problems have erupted into violence on the streets.
Once again, though, we must stress that if France or Germany or any other country have problems of social cohesion, these problems need to be addressed. Islam, though, is not the problem.
In fact, the contrary if true. If people could only see it, the values of Islam are actually the very values that people in the West are longing for.
True Western Values
A while back, I was speaking on a Friday night at one of the universities in a large city in the UK. The talk finished around 11pm and I chose to walk back to my hotel through the center of the city. What I saw there appalled me.
Being the center of the city, there were many pubs and nightclubs and it just happened to be the time when people were on the move from one club to another.
Young people, both boys and girls, were staggering around drunk, fighting, being sick in the street and using the foulest language.
I thought then that, as Muslims, we have missed something very important. What appalled me on the streets of that city would have appalled any decent citizen.
The “Western” values ordinary people adhere to do not include drunkenness and violence. The “Western” values they hold so dear include honesty, justice, fair-mindedness, a respect for the law, for the elderly, for women and for families.
Are these not the very values embodied in Islam? Indeed, respect for others’ beliefs has always been a central tenet of those Western societies.
Yet, as Muslims, we have managed to convince (or allowed others to convince) the people of the West that our “Muslim” values threaten their very way of life. Maybe we need to re-think the way we approach our neighbors.
There are some calling themselves Muslims who call for hatred of the West and, although living in the West themselves, have nothing but contempt for the societies where they live.
Unfortunately, this tiny minority have grabbed the headlines and managed to make it seem that this is the stance of Islam. The vast majority of Muslims living in the West, however, are good citizens and respect its laws and customs and the right of others to believe something different to them. Living as a Muslim is not a threat to the non-Muslim neighbors living next door.
Where Muslims are living as good Muslims, people will see them respecting the elderly. They will see that the family is the core of Muslim life. They will see that out of love and fear of Allah, Muslims respect the law and are kind to their neighbors. They work hard and are honest and fair.
In fact, if Muslims are living as good Muslims, they will be the best of neighbors and the best citizens any country could have.
In this current atmosphere, then, where people are under suspicion because their skin color is different or because they go to worship in a different place to others living in the same street, Muslims need to be wise.
Cultural differences are not Islam. Culture is one thing. Islam is another.
Islam is at home in every country and in every society. It is not a threat to Britain or France or anywhere else.
If people choose to wear Pakistani clothes or eat Arabian food, this must not be confused with the message of Islam.
In Western societies there is a lot of work to be done in integrating the different cultural practices of those whom the Western countries have allowed to come and live in their countries. There is a lot of money available from the Muslim-majority nations to help with this.
Instead of building yet another mosque in Paris, why not spend the money on educating young Muslims on how to write a good CV and get a job, or helping Muslim women to speak the language of that country and so play a part in society.
The Social Values of Islam
These social and political problems can be dealt with easily if there is the will to overcome them.
The bigger picture, though, which we must address as Muslims, is that Islam has something very positive to offer to the West. It is not a case of Islam or the West, but of Islam in the West. The social values of Islam are what many people long for and would be very receptive to if they could be promoted properly.
If, as Muslims in the West, we can persuade people that Muslims want to play a full part in the societies where they live, there is a chance that people will see Islam for what it really is.
Far from being a threat, Islam is beautiful, gentle and sweet and the presence of good Muslims will benefit any city or town.
Those calling others to Islam need to recognize this fact. Once the people of the West can overcome the hurdles presented to them by the media they will then, perhaps listen to what Islam and Muslims have to say.
By preaching the message of Islam first, without showing people what Muslims are really like and what they have to offer society, people will not be receptive to the message. As Muslims we promote good citizenship, community cohesion and religious tolerance.
Inshallah, by living as good Muslims people will come to see that – and then they may have the ears to hear about the central message of Islam, Oneness of Allah.
This article is from Reading Islam’s archive and was originally published at an earlier date. | {
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Eliezer’s post Saturday on if we would really like fantasy worlds raises in my mind this key question: are reality and fantasy complements or substitutes? That is, does exposure to fiction tend to increase or decrease our ability to see reality as it is?
The main substitutes argument is simple and obvious but still compelling: the more we practice thinking about reality the better we see it, but attention to fiction diverts attention from reality, reducing our reality practice.
The complement arguments are many and subtle:
The real alternative to thinking about fun fiction isn’t thinking about reality, it is unthinking fun.
Fiction can frame the familiar in grand terms, making us care and think more about the familiar.
Fiction can teach us about rare but important events few actually see in reality.
Fiction can describe how familiar situations appear to many different parties.
Fiction can suppress irrelevant detail and emphasize important essences, like a math model.
Fiction is a part of reality, so exposure to fiction teaches about that part.
(I’ll add more here as I hear more good suggestions.)
Identifying with characters important in their world lets us admit we are unimportant in ours.
Has anyone ever tried to test whether people who read more fiction see reality more clearly, controlling for other features? I find it suspicious that many say, "yes, fiction substitutes for reality on average, but `good’ fiction is different" but offer no independent description of "good" we could use to test this claim.
On the last argument above, that fiction lets us admit to being unimportant, I’ll admit that it fits with Eliezer and I being both relatively anti-fantasy and thinking ourselves unusually important.
Added: Many seem eager to point out that fiction need not always be a substitute for reality, but will anyone defend the view that it is on the whole a complement?
(This last part seems less relevant than I originally thought:)
A paper from the March Journal of Personality and Social Psychology adds further support, finding that people who feel less important find it harder to be objective:
Confirmatory information processing … is the tendency of individuals to systematically prefer standpoint-consistent information to standpoint-inconsistent information in information evaluation and search. In 4 studies with political and economic decision-making scenarios, it was consistently found that individuals with depleted self-regulation resources exhibited a stronger tendency for confirmatory information processing … Alternative explanations based on processes of ego threat, cognitive load, and mood were ruled out. … Individuals with depleted self-regulation resources experienced increased levels of commitment to their own standpoint, which resulted in increased confirmatory information processing. In sum, the impact of ego depletion on confirmatory information search seems to be more motivational than cognitive in nature.
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Elixir console application with JSON parsing. Let’s print to console!
Wikipedia search with HTTPoison, Poison and Escript
Hello friends.
I’ve been playing a bit around with JSON parsing, and extracting information from the received map in Elixir. Figured I’d write about it, and I also thought we could write a very simple console based wikipedia search application together. We are going to use a couple of hex packages in this application:
HTTPoison
“HTTP client for Elixir, based on HTTPotion”
We need a HTTP client to connect with Wikipedia’s web API.
Poison
“An incredibly fast, pure Elixir JSON library”
Once we collect JSON data from Wikipedia’s web API, we need to parse it.
Escript
“Builds an executable that can be invoked from the command line. An escript can run on any machine that has Erlang installed and by default does not require Elixir to be installed, as Elixir is embedded as part of the escript.”
So that we can run our application as a regular command line application.
Alright, so let’s jump into it!
As usual, we’ll start of by creating a new project. I will call my application “Wiki Dream”:
~/$ mix new wiki_dream
* creating README.md
* creating .gitignore
* creating mix.exs
We’ll cd into our application, and add our dependencies to our mix.exs file. Since HTTPoison runs on a different process, we need to add it to our application function, so that it gets started up when we launch our application:
# mix.exs
...... def application do
[applications: [:logger, :httpoison]]
end defp deps do
[{:httpoison, “~> 0.9.0”},
{:poison, “~> 2.0”}]
end
And we’ll fetch and install our added dependencies:
~/wiki_dream$ mix deps.get
Running dependency resolution
Dependency resolution completed
certifi: 0.4.0
hackney: 1.6.1
......
Now, let’s also set up our folder structure like this:
wiki_dream/
- lib/
— wiki_dream/
- cli.ex
- wiki_dream.ex
If you look at the structure above, you’ll also notice that I added a new file, cli.ex. Perfect, all set up. Let’s get to work.
How our application is going to run:
Process given argument from our console
Fetch data from Wikipedia
Parse fetched data
Extract the information we want from the data
Print out the data to our console
Process given argument from our console
Our cli.ex file is going to handle the inputs from our console. If you didn’t know already, CLI stands for “Command Line Interface”, and is kind of the front-end of console based applications. Since we are building an executable application with escript, our first function is going to be main/1. This is required by escript:
# lib/wiki_dream/cli.ex defmodule WikiDream.CLI do
def main(args) do
parse_args(args)
|> process
end
end
We also add a function, parse_args/1, that we haven’t defined yet. This function will call the built in OptionParser module, which contains functions to parse command line options. The process/1 function will contain our applications different steps:
# lib/wiki_dream/cli.ex
...... def parse_args(args) do
parse = OptionParser.parse(args, switches: [help: :boolean],
aliases: [h: :help]) case parse do
{[help: true], _, _}
-> :help
{_, [search_term], _}
-> {search_term}
end
end
OptionParser will take whatever argument we give it, and put it into our parse variable. It will also look out for a help or -h flag.
We’ll add a case structure, which returns the atom :help, if a help flag is given, or returns our search term as a one-element tuple. Let’s see if we can get our console to print something. We’ll write a very simple process function just to see if it works:
# lib/wiki_dream/cli.ex
...... def process({search_term}) do
IO.inspect search_term
end
Now, to run our application as an executable, we need to build it with escript. To do that, we need to add it to our mix.exs file, and give it our main module (the module where our main/1 function is):
# mix.exs
...... def project do
[app: :wiki_dream,
version: “0.1.0”,
elixir: “~> 1.3”,
build_embedded: Mix.env == :prod,
start_permanent: Mix.env == :prod,
escript: [main_module: WikiDream.CLI], #Added escript
deps: deps()]
end ......
In our console, we’ll use mix to build it for us:
~/wiki_dream$ mix escript.build
===> Compiling idna
===> Compiling mimerl
......
Generated httpoison app
==> wiki_dream
Compiling 2 files (.ex)
Generated wiki_dream app
Generated escript wiki_dream with MIX_ENV=dev
Let’s try and run it, and give it an argument:
~/wiki_dream$ ./wiki_dream hello
“hello”
Sweet! it works! Now, what happens if we give it the help flag?
~/wiki_dream$ ./wiki_dream --help
** (FunctionClauseError) no function clause matching in WikiDream.CLI.process/1
(wiki_dream) lib/wiki_dream/cli.ex:18: WikiDream.CLI.process(:help)
(elixir) lib/kernel/cli.ex:76: anonymous fn/3 in Kernel.CLI.exec_fun/2
It blows up. As expected, since we haven’t written any functions to handle it yet. Let’s do that next:
# lib/wiki_dream/cli.ex
...... def process(:help) do
IO.puts “””
Wiki Dream
— — — — —
usage: wiki_dream <search_term>
example: wiki_dream lion
“””
end
We’ll build our executable again, and see if it works:
~/wiki_dream$ ./wiki_dream --help
Wiki Dream
— — — — —
usage: wiki_dream <search_term>
example: wiki_dream lion
Awesome! We’ve got the console argument parsing working!
Fetch data from Wikipedia
Now we’re going to put HTTPoison to use. We need to access Wikipedia’s API and fetch some JSON data. If we’re giving “elixir” as an argument, we’ll receive the JSON data from Wikipedia’s elixir article. Now, Wikipedia won’t allow scraping articles from their webpage, so getting information from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir won’t work. However, if go through their API,
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=json&action=query&prop=extracts&exintro=&explaintext=&titles=elixir
Wikipedia will give us a JSON file with everything we need. We’ll create a new file and module, json_fetch.ex, which will handle fetching and parsing the JSON received. First, we’ll remove IO.inspect from process/1 and make it call a fetch/1 function which we haven’t written yet:
# lib/wiki_dream/cli.ex
...... def process({search_term}) do
WikiDream.JSONFetch.fetch(search_term)
end
......
And in our freshly new fetch_json.ex file:
# lib/wiki_dream/fetch_json.ex defmodule WikiDream.JSONFetch do
def fetch(search_term) do
wiki_url(search_term)
|> HTTPoison.get
|> IO.inspect
end
“
end
end defp wiki_url(search_term) do https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php? format=json&action=query&prop=extracts&exintro=&explaintext=&titles= #{search_term }"endend
To make our fetch/1 function less noisy, I’ve added a private function with the Wikipedia API URL. Notice the string interpolation in the URL.
We then pipe our URL with the search term through HTTPoison. I’ve added an IO.inspect so that we can see — in our terminal — the output. Build a new escript and fire up our application:
~/wiki_dream$ ./wiki_dream elixir
{:ok, %HTTPoison.Response{body: “{\”batchcomplete\”:\”\”,\”query\”:{\”normalized\”:[{\”from\”:\”elixir\”,\”to\”:\”Elixir\”}],\”pages\”:{\”457424\”:{\”pageid\”:457424,\”ns\”:0,\”title\”:\”Elixir\”,\”extract\”:\”An elixir (from Arabic: \\u0627\\u0644\\u0625\\u06................
Nice, we received noise! Well, if you look at the output, you’ll discover a tuple, that returned :ok (Which is good!), and a whole bunch of other data. (Body and header). If we look in the body, we can see the string from the Wikipedia article on Elixir (a liquid, not our language).
Parse fetched data
We are going to use the second dependency we installed, Poison, to handle and extract the body of our fetched data:
# lib/wiki_dream/json_fetch.ex
...... def handle_json({:ok, %{status_code: 200, body: body}}) do
{:ok, Poison.Parser.parse!(body)}
end
def handle_json({_, %{status_code: _, body: body}}) do
IO.puts “Something went wrong. Please check your internet
connection”
end ......
So, we have two handle_json/1 functions, one that handles a tuple with the atom :ok, and a map with status_code: 200, and another one which handles everything else. Our first handle_json/1 function will return a tuple with :ok, and a map with the body. The other one will return our error.
Let’s add our handle_json/1 to our fetch/1 function:
# lib/wiki_dream/json_fetch.ex def fetch(search_term) do
wiki_url(search_term)
|> HTTPoison.get
|> handle_json
|> IO.inspect
end ......
Build the escript, and run the application:
~/wiki_dream$ ./wiki_dream elixir
{:ok,
%{“batchcomplete” => “”,
“query” => %{“normalized” => [%{“from” => “elixir”, “to” => “Elixir”}],
“pages” => %{“457424” => %{“extract” => “An elixir (from Arabic: الإكسير — al-’iksīr) is a clear, sweet-flavored liquid used for medicinal purposes, to be taken orally and intended to cure one’s illness. When used as a pharmaceutical preparation, an elixir contains at least one active ingredient designed to be taken orally.”,“ns” => 0, “pageid” => 457424, “title” => “Elixir”}}}}}
Sweet. Everything went as expected. We received a tuple with :ok and a map with the body. Now, go ahead and delete the line in fetch/1, IO.inspect, as we don’t need it anymore.
Extract the information we want from the data
Now, if you take a look at the received data, you’ll notice that the information we are looking for is the value of the key “extract”. We need to make our way through this map and fetch “extract”s value.
We’ll start of by creating a new file, extract_map.ex, which will contain the function we’ll use as a digging tool:
# lib/wiki_dream/extract_map.ex defmodule WikiDream.ExtractMap do
def extract_from_body(map) do
{:ok, body} = map
IO.inspect body
end
end
Here, we’re making some good use of pattern matching. As mentioned before, our data is now a tuple with an :ok atom, and a map. We pattern match on both the tuple, and the body, and store the body in a variable named body. We’ll add an IO.inspect to see the data output.
We also need to add this function to our process/1 function:
# lib/wiki_dream/cli.ex
...... def process({search_term}) do
WikiDream.JSONFetch.fetch(search_term)
|> WikiDream.ExtractMap.extract_from_body
end ......
We’ll build our app and run it:
~/wiki_dream$ ./wiki_dream elixir
%{"batchcomplete" => "",
"query" => %{"normalized" => [%{"from" => "elixir", "to" => "Elixir"}],
"pages" => %{"457424" => %{"extract" => "An elixir (from Arabic: الإكسير - al-'iksīr) is a clear, sweet-flavored liquid used for medicinal purposes, to be taken orally and intended to cure one's illness. When used as a pharmaceutical preparation, an elixir contains at least one active ingredient designed to be taken orally.", "ns" => 0, "pageid" => 457424, "title" => "Elixir"}}}}
Cool. The tuple is gone, since we asked to only inspect the map inside it. Now, if you run the application with different arguments, you’ll notice that every key except the page number (string of integers) is static, fixed, don’t change. We can use a built in Elixir function to do some heavy lifting for us, the get_in/2.
get_in(data, keys)
Gets a value from a nested structure
/ Elixir documentation
We need to dig our way into “query”, “pages”, “page number” and “extract”. The first two keys should be easy since they never change.
Let’s give it a shot:
# lib/wiki_dream/extract_map.ex
...... def extract_from_body(map) do
{:ok, body} = map extract_article = get_in(body, ["query"])
|> get_in(["pages"])
IO.inspect extract_article
end ......
So we get the the value from the “query” key, which gives us access to the “pages” key. Let’s see what’s inside the “pages” key:
~/wiki_dream$ ./wiki_dream elixir
%{“457424” => %{“extract” => “An elixir (from Arabic: الإكسير — al-’iksīr) is a clear, sweet-flavored liquid used for medicinal purposes, to be taken orally and intended to cure one’s illness. When used as a pharmaceutical preparation, an elixir contains at least one active ingredient designed to be taken orally.”,
“ns” => 0, “pageid” => 457424, “title” => “Elixir”}}
Nice going. We dug our way to the page number. We are getting closer and closer to the “extract” key. Now, our next objective is slightly more tricky than the previous ones. The key name will change depending on the article’s page number. However, the key name will always be an integer, so we can write a function for that.
Enum.find(enumerable, default \\ nil, fun)
Returns the first item for which fun returns a truthy value. If no such item is found, returns default
/ Elixir documentation
We’ll use Enum.find to return the first key which is an integer. Since there’s only one key, and that key is an integer, we should be able to get one step closer:
# lib/wiki_dream/extract_map.ex def extract_from_body(map) do
{:ok, body} = map extract_article = get_in(body, [“query”])
|> get_in([“pages”])
|> Enum.find(fn {key, _value} ->
case Integer.parse(key) do
:error -> false
_ -> key
end
end)
|> IO.inspect
end
Integer.parse(binary, base \\ 10)
Parses a text representation of an integer
/ Elixir documentation
So we use Integer.parse to find a key with a text representation of an integer. If it exists, we return the key, if not, we return false.
If we run our program, we will receive a tuple with the page number as the first element, and the rest of the map as the second element. We don’t really care about the page number any longer, so we’ll do some more pattern matching to get the “extract” key. We’ll then use Map.fetch!/2 to fetch the value from the “extract” key:
Map.fetch!(map, key)
Fetches the value for specific key
/ Elixir documentation
# lib/wiki_dream/extract_map.ex def extract_from_body(map) do
{:ok, body} = map extract_article = get_in(body, [“query”])
|> get_in([“pages”])
|> Enum.find(fn {key, _value} ->
case Integer.parse(key) do
:error -> false
_ -> key
end
end) {_, extract_article_content} = extract_article
Map.fetch!(extract_article_content, “extract”)
end
Print out the data to our console
We have come a long way since we started, my friend. We are now searching for data, receiving data, parsing data, and extracting information from the data. Now, we need to print the data out to the console. Let’s start with an IO.inspect to see what we got:
# lib/wiki_dream/cli.ex
...... def process({search_term}) do
WikiDream.JSONFetch.fetch(search_term)
|> WikiDream.ExtractMap.extract_from_body
|> IO.inspect
end ......
Build and run:
~/wiki_dream$ ./wiki_dream elixir
“An elixir (from Arabic: الإكسير — al-’iksīr) is a clear, sweet-flavored liquid used for medicinal purposes, to be taken orally and intended to cure one’s illness. When used as a pharmaceutical preparation, an elixir contains at least one active ingredient designed to be taken orally.”
We are outputting a string of the article content. Which is what we wanted! Since it’s a string, we don’t really need to use IO.inspect anymore. We can use IO.puts to output the string. Let’s also put on some very light string formatting, a line break at every period:
String.replace(subject, pattern, replacement, options \\ [])
Returns a new string created by replacing occurrences of pattern in subject with replacement
/ Elixir documentation
# lib/wiki_dream/cli.ex
...... def process({search_term}) do
WikiDream.JSONFetch.fetch(search_term)
|> WikiDream.ExtractMap.extract_from_body
|> string_format
end ...... def string_format(string) do
String.replace(string, “. “, “.
”)
|> IO.puts
end ......
Build and run:
~/wiki_dream$ ./wiki_dream elixir
An elixir (from Arabic: الإكسير — al-’iksīr) is a clear, sweet-flavored liquid used for medicinal purposes, to be taken orally and intended to cure one’s illness.
When used as a pharmaceutical preparation, an elixir contains at least one active ingredient designed to be taken orally.
And that’s it. A pretty useless JSON-parsing, map-digging CLI application!
There is of course other string formatting that could be added to make the application look better, however that’s beyond the scope of this article.
There are probably easier, or different ways of doing this. However, this is the way I found worked out well for me. I also think it clearly shows how functional programming works. where different functions modifies the data, one by one, until you have the desired result. We didn’t change the original data we started out with, we just took it, copied it, modified it along the way, and ended up with something completely different.
The cool thing about an Escript executable, is that the entire application with all it’s dependencies and codes are within this single file. If you move it outside the application folder and run it, it still works. You can even run it on a different computer, as long as the computer has Erlang installed.
That’s all for now.
Until next time
Stephan Bakkelund Valois | {
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Three young brothers were found stabbed to death and covered in blood inside an SUV in South Los Angeles today, and their father, who is suspected of killing them, was taken to a hospital suffering from critical stab wounds.
Los Angeles police Chief Charlie Beck said the three boys ranged in age from 8 to 12.
Police responded around 7 a.m. to an SUV parked in the 300 block of East 32nd Street on a report of an assault with a deadly weapon, Beck said. The three boys were found dead in the back seat, while the father was found bloodied and suffering from stab wounds, police said.
A man who works near the scene said he was walking by the SUV and saw the man in the front seat, and he appeared to have blood on him. He said as he approached the vehicle, he saw a boy he believed to be about 7 or 8 years old — motionless with his eyes wide open and covered in blood. The man said he then noticed at least one other body in the back seat, and he saw what appeared to be a box-cutter in the vehicle.
Beck confirmed that a knife was recovered at the scene.
Police said the father is suspected of killing the three children, and they were not searching for any other suspects.
"The biological mother of the children we believe to be deceased. We believe there is a stepmother and she is safe," Beck said. "These are horrific incidents,'' Beck said. "These are incidents that scar not only a community but the first responders who have to handle them. It is a sad day in Los Angeles, made only slightly better by the fact that we have a probable suspect in custody."
The bodies were found near Dolores Huerta Elementary School, but the children did not attend that school.
Los Angeles Unified School District Chief Deputy Superintendent Michelle King said the kids were all students in LAUSD schools, but she declined to identify them.
"The schools they attended have been notified, and crisis counselors have been provided," King said.
Police did not identify the father or the boys. A memorial set up by family members, however, identified the boys as Luis, Alex and Juan Fuentes.
Residents in South Los Angeles held a memorial Wednesday night for the slain brothers at 32nd Street near the scene where they were found dead.
Family members said they were shocked to learn from police that the father allegedly murdered his two sons.
"He loved his kids and it's hard for me to see him do something like this. It's unbelievable. I don't know what drove him to do something like this," said Rene Chanquin, the father's cousin.
Xiomora Mena, the boys' aunt, said the father and his new wife had gotten into an argument, and she begged him not to take the boys. The boys' mother died of an anuerysm in 2008.
The killings occurred amid a rash of deadly violence in South Los Angeles that police have attributed to a raging war between rival gangs. Police have responded by sending more officers from the LAPD's elite Metropolitan Division into the area.
"I take this personally," said City Councilman Curren Price, who represents the area. "I live right around the corner, and I pass this way many times, been to the school many times. And to know that the kids that are back and forth here -- full of life, full of vibrancy -- and that these three are gone.
"We're going to be working closely with the community, with the police, others in the community to create a fund in memory of these youngsters and provide some support to the family and we ask the community to join us providing resources as a way of expressing our condolences but also providing assistance for the future."
An online fundraiser has been set up for the children. Anyone wishing to donate can do so here. | {
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Cesare Prandelli non chiude le porte della Nazionale a nessuno. Nel giorno del suo 56esimo compleanno, il ct dell'Italia ha dichiarato in un'intervista a Sky: "Ci manca ancora qualcosa rispetto alle altre squadre, ma dobbiamo crederci. Tutti possono sognare il Mondiale, porterò in Brasile i migliori. Tra marzo e aprile cercheremo di capire chi sarà più in condizione. Seguo anche Totti, Del Piero, Di Natale e Cassano, che ha fatto un Europeo straordinario con noi e che prenderò in seria considerazione se farà una stagione stratosferica a Parma. Balotelli e Osvaldo possono giocare bene insieme".
Allenatori: "In Italia ci sono molti bravi tecnici. Conte ha dato una filosofia alla Juve che in molti ci eravamo scordati, Allegri è stato bravo a vincere lo scudetto al suo primo anno al Milan, Mazzarri ha sempre dato un marchio importante alle sue squadre. Montella è stato la rivelazione dello scorso campionato per la qualità del gioco espresso dalla sua Fiorentina, l'anno scorso i viola avrebbero meritato lo scudetto del gioco. Poi c'è Pioli del Bologna, che ogni anno fa cose straordinarie cambiando sempre". | {
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Audi Sport has confirmed that it will remove any factory involvement in the World Touring Car Cup at the end of the current season, although it hopes to maintain an “all-privateer” presence on the grid in 2020.
While manufacturer teams are banned in the series, Audi – as with a number of other brands – has placed factory drivers in WTCR with customer teams for the past two years.
“The FIA WTCR has evolved into an international stage and we’ve been part of it from day one. Since last year, we’ve clinched 25 podium finishes including seven victories,” said Chris Reinke, head of Audi Sport customer racing.
“A big thank you for this goes to our four drivers, Niels Langeveld, Gordon Shedden, Jean-Karl Vernay and Frédéric Vervisch, as well as to Comtoyou Team Audi Sport, Leopard Racing Team Audi Sport and our partners. Now the time has come to open a new chapter.”
WRT confirmed earlier this week that it will not be on the WTCR or TCR Europe grid next year, instead focussing on the DTM and GT racing.
Comtoyou Racing looks set to continue in the 2020 WTCR with a privately funded programme.
“After having set an initial direction for 2020 together with our partners, we hope that the Audi RS 3 LMS will compete in the WTCR again next year,” said Reinke.
“Comtoyou Racing from Belgium has expressed interest in competing in the WTCR again in 2020. We would very much welcome this and wish Jean-Michel Baert and his team that this idea will become a reality.” | {
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Project Sansar
Linden Lab, the company that created the popular virtual world, Second Life, is now hiring for a new platform called Project Sansar. This new venture is a VR-creation platform that was first announced a year ago.
The company is seeking 3D artists and modelers for a “Creator Preview” opening this summer.
Very little is known about Project Sansar. It will likely be a lot like Second Life, wherein users will be able to “create, share, and ultimately monetize their own interactive social experiences.”
Second Life is populated by artists, modelers, and many other users who take advantage of its creative tools, earning the reputation of being a virtual social network. There’s a strong probability that Project Sansar will follow this platform closely, only adapting it for the coming age of virtual reality.
VR Social Networks
While no release date has been set for Project Sansar, it will most likely arrive sometime in late 2016. It was initially presumed that a beta would be released alongside the Oculus Rift’s release, but that didn’t happen.
Although Second Life is a pioneer in its field, Project Sansar is not the only one of its kind coming out with the slew of VR tech. Another such platform is AltspaceVR, which also functions as a virtual reality social network. It has already developed a strong user base on the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and the Samsung Gear VR.
One more platform just like Project Sansar and AltspaceVR is High Fidelity, developed by Second Life founder Philip Rosendale. Back in 2008, Rosendal ended his run as CEO of Linden Lab and left to build his own virtual reality platform.
Second Life found huge success during the dawn of social media and Linden Lab is hoping of doing the same during the dawn of VR with Project Sansar. | {
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France's Government has introduced a plan to bring back national service for all 16-year-olds, a move it says will give the country's teenagers a sense of national unity and civic duty.
President Emmanuel Macron initially proposed the idea of national service during his presidential run in 2017
At the time, he said he wanted "every young French citizen to experience, even if only for a short time, military life — a short, obligatory and universal national service".
That commitment has now been watered down, with participants able to opt to serve with the military or carry out community work.
The program is estimated to cost 1.6 billion euros ($2.5 billion) a year to run, with an initial government investment of $2.8 billion.
Compulsory military service in France was scrapped in 1996 when Mr Macron was 18, which makes him the first French president not to have done it.
Two phases — but the second is optional
The new national service program will occur in two phases, one mandatory and one optional.
The first phase, which will happen during the French school holidays, is a one-month placement focusing on civic culture.
This might include activities like charity work, volunteer teaching or stints with the military, fire service or police.
The optional phase, for those under 25, will last for between three months and one year.
Participants will be able to work in defence or security roles, or volunteer in social work, environmental or heritage positions.
Consultations with young people, parents, local government and teachers' unions will be conducted in October before a final decision is made on how the first phase will work.
The new national service could start as early as next summer and be ramped up to 700,000 participants by 2026, a working group on the issue recommended.
Young people have criticised Mr Macron's plan for compulsory national service, saying they should have freedom of choice. ( AP-Pool: Charles Platiau )
The French constitution does not allow the state to force large segments of the population to spend time away from home, unless this is needed for national defence.
According to the BBC, 14 youth organisations objected to the programme even before it was announced, arguing they should have freedom of choice and saying "Choosing a commitment is just as important as the commitment itself, if not more so."
But a YouGov poll in March showed 60 per cent of people in France thought compulsory national service for young people was a good idea. | {
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According to polling firm Gallup, the largest financial worry for American adults is running out of money in retirement.
But what if you learned you that you had a hidden nest egg worth $1.2 million?
Related: The Simple, One-step Secret to Maxing Out Your Retirement Benefits.
Even if you can’t claim that much, you might be leaving tens of thousands of dollars in benefits – money you’ve already earned – on the table.
According to Dr. Laurence Kotlikoff, Harvard PhD and a former economics adviser to President Reagan, you almost certainly are.
He recently revealed, in plain English, dozens of simple “tricks” buried within the Social Security code to help you maximize your lifetime benefits. (Read on here for full details.)
So just how much more retirement money are we talking about?
For example, a 60-year-old married couple who earned a certain amount starting at the age of 25 can claim a Social Security “asset” worth $1.2 million if they start collecting at 62.
Special: Get Dr. Laurence Kotlikoff's 50 Secrets to Higher Lifetime Benefits
That’s about four times the average American family’s nest egg.
And as Dr. Kotlikoff says:
“All you have to do is stay alive and those Social Security payments will keep coming each and every month – payments guaranteed by the United States government and protected against inflation.”
And by taking advantage of the loopholes he’s identified in the Social Security code, Dr. Kotlikoff says the couple from the example above can ALSO increase the value of their $1.2 million Social Security “asset” by $400,000 – or 33%.
That would leave the couple with a retirement asset worth $1.6 million.
All they have to do to get this second boost, says Dr. Kotlikoff, is use one simple tactic.
But here’s the thing: the Social Security system has 2,728 core rules and thousands upon thousands of additional codicils in its Program Manual.
In the case of married couples alone, the formula for each spouse’s benefit comprises 10 complex mathematical functions, one of which is in four dimensions.
Luckily for you, Dr. Kotlikoff’s mission makes it as simple as possible for you to maximize your Social Security payments.
For instance, if you’re married there’s a simple way you can pick up an extra $50,000… if you’re divorced you could collect $647 a month thanks to your ex-spouse (whether he or she likes it or not)… and even if you’re already collecting Social Security, there are still ways to boost your benefits by as much as 32%.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg…
The bottom-line is simple: if you’re already in retirement… or are retiring soon… and want to make sure you’re getting the most out of this hugely important retirement asset, you need to learn how to maximize your benefits right away. | {
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It now appears that a woman who contacted the Washington Post with a false Roy Moore accusation works for James O'Keefe, founder of Project Veritas.
All In with Chris Hayes - 9:17 PM 11/27/2017 | {
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Canada will impose targeted sanctions against 40 Venezuelan senior officials, including President Nicolas Maduro, to punish them for "anti-democratic behaviour," Canada's foreign affairs department says.
Canada's move, which followed a similar decision by the United States, came after months of protests against Maduro's government in which at least 125 people have been killed. Critics say he has plunged the nation into its worst-ever economic crisis and brought it to the brink of dictatorship.
"Canada will not stand by silently as the government of Venezuela robs its people of their fundamental democratic rights," Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland said in a statement.
The measures include freezing the assets of the officials and banning Canadians from having any dealings with them.
The actions were "in response to the government of Venezuela's deepening descent into dictatorship," Canada said.
There was no immediate reaction from Caracas.
A government supporter holds a placard during an anti-imperialist demonstration, in Caracas, Venezuela, Sept. 19. (Ariana Cubillos/Associated Press)
Maduro has said he faces an armed insurrection designed to end socialism in Latin America and let a U.S.-backed business elite get its hands on the OPEC nation's crude reserves.
The United States imposed sanctions on Maduro in late July and has also targeted around 30 other officials.
The Canadian measures name Maduro, Vice-President Tareck El Aissami and 38 other people, including the ministers of defence and the interior as well as several Supreme Court judges.
Canada is a member of the 12-nation Lima Group, which is trying to address the Venezuelan crisis. A government official said Freeland wanted to host a meeting of the group within the next 60 days.
Cyndee Todgham Cherniak, a trade sanctions expert at Toronto law firm LexSage, said although limited in scope, the Canadian measures were symbolic.
"When you join other countries ... it makes the message louder," she said by phone.
Constitutional Assembly member Diosdado Cabello, centre, raises his arm during an anti-imperialist march in Caracas on Sept. 19. Canada is imposing sanctions against Cabello. (Ariana Cubillos/Associated Press)
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Thursday he believed there was a chance for a political solution.
"This is a situation that is obviously untenable. The violence ... needs to end and we are looking to be helpful," he told reporters at the United Nations.
Experts say individual measures have had little or no impact on Maduro's policies and that broader oil-sector and financial sanctions may be the only way to make the Venezuelan government feel economic pain.
U.S. President Donald Trump last month signed an executive order that prohibits dealings in new debt from the Venezuelan government or its state oil company.
Earlier this month, Spain said it wanted the European Union to adopt restrictive measures against members of the Venezuelan government. | {
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Pong (1975)
Though it’s always tricky to determine exactly where the line between pinball machines and electronic games begins, most people agree that the first real arcade game of note was this simple game of electronic ping-pong. Not only was it the first video game fad, it also brought video games into the home (three years after its 1972 arcade release), created the sports game subgenre and established Atari as a player in the market. | {
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Don’t miss the NXT TakeOver: Philadelphia Pre-Show, including the presentation of the NXT Year-End Awards, tonight at 7 ET/4 PT, live from the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia.
Before you witness NXT TakeOver: Philadelphia on the award-winning WWE Network, watch Corey Graves and Renee Young host the NXT Year-End Awards, which celebrates the best of the black-and-yellow brand in 2017. Plus, Charly Caruso, Sam Roberts and Raw Superstar Samoa Joe bring you the latest news from the NXT Universe and preview all the happenings from the City of Brotherly Love as part of the Pre-Show panel. The NXT TakeOver: Philadelphia Pre-Show streams live on WWE Network, WWE.com, the WWE App, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.
Then, at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT, NXT TakeOver: Philadelphia streams live on WWE Network. A stacked lineup of matches includes three huge title showdowns, an Extreme Rules Match and more.
NXT Championship Match
Andrade “Cien” Almas (c) vs. Johnny Gargano
Extreme Rules Match
Aleister Black vs. Adam Cole
NXT Women's Championship Match
Ember Moon (c) vs. Shayna Baszler
NXT Tag Team Championship Match
The Undisputed ERA (c) vs. The Authors of Pain
Kassius Ohno vs. Velveteen Dream
It all goes down tonight on WWE Network. If you start your 30-day free trial today, you’ll be able to watch not only NXT TakeOver: Philadelphia, but WWE Royal Rumble tomorrow! | {
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I’ve finally got the time to finish the software of my second arcade build, so I guess it was time to make a post about it and cover some of the challenges I’ve faced.
While I’m currently developing my own front-end for Windows-based arcade machines, I didn’t want to do the same for this arcade since will be running on a Raspberry Pi 2 and there already exists optimized distributions for this purpose. RetroPie is one of these distributions and works pretty much out of the box, but I wanted to make a few small changes.
Before I started on the project I had the following objectives:
Minimal changes. I don’t want to make it difficult to upgrade to a newer version of RetroPie
Only list games that actually work in terms of compatibility and features (number of buttons required). This was especially with regard to MAME
Pre-scrape all game information and images and make small “packages” for each compatible system. I’ve heard the scraper in EmulationStation isn’t great while my own is getting quite good.
Configure all the buttons so they match the original controller in terms of placement relative to each other
Custom theme that matches my RetroBox brand
Initial setup
First of all download Win32 Disk Imager in order to write the RetroPie disk image to the micro SD card. It’s really simple and once done it can be safely removed and inserted into your Raspberry Pi 2. The next steps are similar to the original Raspberry Pi image. You’ll have to extend the partition to use all of the available disk space. In order to do so just boot the system, navigate to RetroPie and then select “Raspberry Pi Configuration Tool Raspi-config”. From here you should run “Expand Filesystem” and “Advanced Options->Enable SSH”. SSH will be used to configure RetroPie later on.
Adding games
When it comes to games you can run EmulationStation in two modes. You can tell EmulationStation to display all games in your /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/ directory (default) or tell it to only show games that exists in the gamelist.xml files located in /home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/ . While this might not matter much when it comes to most systems such as Super Nintendo, Nintendo or Master System, using gamelists is way easier then keeping your roms folder clean when it comes to MAME. The issue with MAME is that some roms depend on each other (parent/child and clones/samples), so I though it was easier to make a script generating the xml instead of trying to figure out the relationship between the different roms.
In order to be able to generate all the xml files I used one of my previous projects. Using this I managed to get almost all information and images used by EmulationStation. I also had to write some few snippets in order to mass move, match and convert files. The only system I had some real struggle with was of cause MAME. After finding a suitable romset for advmame 1.2 I used the awesome project ROMlister in order to scan my romset and make an xml file with all the games that would work on my arcade. While the official romset consists of over 6.000 roms “only” about 4000 work on an arcade with only 6 buttons. This way I know that at least most roms work without issues.
Anyway, in order to force EmulationStation to only list games that are defined in the gamelist.xml file you simply have to add –gamelist-only at the end of the line in /etc/profile.d/10-emulationstation.sh:
# Only show games in gamelist.xml sudo nano /etc/profile.d/10-emulationstation.sh [ "`tty`" = "/dev/tty1" ] && emulationstation --gamelist-only
Updating the controls
While RetroPie does a good job on automatically mapping the keys, I didn’t agree on the default button configuration. Fortunately it’s very easy to override the default button configuration on a per system basis. The configuration files are stored in /opt/retropie/configs and you override a given system simply by editing retroarch.cfg.
Here’s an example on how to override the button configuration for Super Nintendo (snes):
# Settings made here will only override settings in the global retroarch.cfg if placed above the #include line # Override default key layout input_player1_joypad_index = 0 input_player1_b_btn = 3 input_player1_a_btn = 4 input_player1_y_btn = 0 input_player1_x_btn = 1 input_player1_l_btn = 2 input_player1_r_btn = 5 input_player1_start_btn = 6 input_player1_select_btn = 7 input_player2_joypad_index = 1 input_player2_b_btn = 3 input_player2_a_btn = 4 input_player2_y_btn = 0 input_player2_x_btn = 1 input_player2_l_btn = 2 input_player2_r_btn = 5 input_player2_start_btn = 6 input_player2_select_btn = 7 input_remapping_directory = /opt/retropie/configs/snes/ # video_smooth = false video_shader = /opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/shader/snes_phosphor.glslp # video_shader_enable = true #include "/opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg"
Branding
While the default theme simple isn’t bad, I wanted to make a few changes. Since the arcade is mostly black and my logo is white on a black background, I also wanted the theme to match those colors instead of the default “50 shades of grey” look. I compared the simple theme with es-theme-carbon and combined them into a suitable theme. It wasn’t difficult at all since all system-specific xml files are equal while only the artwork differs.
I also changed the splashscreen to match the RetroBox logo. Just remember to change the path to the image:
# Change splashscreen sudo nano /etc/splashscreen.list /home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/supplementary/splashscreens/retrobox/splashscreen.png
Known bugs
I brought my arcade controls from Ultracabs mainly because I like the controller board (at least on windows). On Linux however, it’s detected as a single joystick instead of two individual. Because of this you won’t be able to map all buttons in MAME and maybe other systems as well. Fortunately the solution is simple, though it is far from self-explanatory:
# Split Xin-Mo controller into 2 individual joypads sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt usbhid.quirks=0x16c0:0x05e1:0x040
Remember that you always can test your joystick by running the following command from the terminal:
# Test your joystick. # Replace 0 with your joystick id (normally 0 and 1 for player 1 and 2) jstest /dev/input/js0
Another bug I noticed is that the default Super Nintendo emulator crashes (segfaults) on a lot of games. This issue is related to a bug in the lr-snes9x-next emulator and should be fixed in the next version of RetroPie. Meanwhile it’s easy to upgrade the emulator just by navigating to RetroPi and then launching the RetroPie-Setup. From here select Install individual emulators from binary or source, choose lr-snes9x-next and select From binary. Give it a few seconds to update and the issue should be resolved.
Another thing worth mentioning is that EmulationStation is slow. My arcade consists of around 7.000 games and the system boots up in almost exactly one minute. Adding more games significantly increases boot time. Hopefully EmulationStation will one day utilize a SQLite database or similar to improve the speed. As a comparison, my front-end boots up in under just a few seconds with over 22.000 games. | {
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This Dorito casserole is loaded with chicken, cheese, and a whole bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos! Trash food at it’s finest, guys!
Once upon a time, I met a man. A boy, really. He was 17.
I spent the majority of my time trying to look pretty for him in the hopes that he would do that romantic dip thing they do in the movies where a guy hugs you and then leans you back over his arm and kisses you?
You’re going to love how easy this Dorito casserole is to make!
That was pretty much a waste of time, because I don’t think he’s ever done the dip-kiss thing. Jerk.
Anyway, despite his non-romantic kisses, we got married. There were children. There were comfy pants. There was pie. I had to choose between looking pretty and comfy pants and pie.
The comfy pants and pie won. Every time.
One day, well into our marriage, we moved to a new house. The bedroom in the new house was never quite dark enough for me. Mostly because the husband would wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and then forget to turn off the bathroom light. And of course he would leave the door to the bathroom open so the light would shine into the bedroom making me insane and disrupting my beauty sleep.
I bet your whole family loves this Dorito chicken casserole!
So, I bought a sleep mask. Most ladies take great pains to look nice for their husbands. Some of them even wake up early, brush their teeth, apply a light layer of lip gloss, smooth their hair, and then sneak back in bed so that the husband assumes they are just always perfect looking.
I am not one of those ladies. Not anymore. It’s been 15 years, my husband knows what I look like for real.
So, I bought a sleep mask to cover my eyes and keep the lights out. Not a frilly pink one. Not a dainty lacy one. I’m not trying to fool anyone here.
I bought a horrific bloody zombie one.
Loading View on Instagram
I don’t know how I’m still married either, guys. It’s a mystery to me.
My husband devours this Dorito chicken casserole!
Unless…could it maybe have something to do with the fact that I crush Nacho Cheese Doritos and put them in a Dorito casserole for dinner? Yeah. That might have something to do with it.
This cheesy chicken Dorito casserole is ridiculous. Like, ridiculous RIDICULOUS.
I started making this back when we were first married. I was mostly a frozen pizza and hamburger helper kind of cook, but something about the addition of the chips to this dish made it juuuuuuust trashy enough for my cooking standards.
It’s probably sad that I haven’t stopped making this, but the thing is, it’s delicious. I mean, of course it’s delicious. It contains a bag of Doritos, some rotisserie chicken, cream of chicken soup (but you can use my homemade cream soup substitute if you think the canned stuff is gross!), and an unholy amount of cheese. What’s not to love?!
Also, just in case you never hear from me again, it’s probably because my husband woke up in the middle of the night, saw zombie-me laying next to him, and killed me on reflex. I mean, you can’t even blame him really.
Let me know what you think of this Doritos casserole!
Follow me on social for more recipe ideas & inspiration! Pinterest
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Facebook Recipe Doritos Chicken Casserole This Dorito casserole is loaded with chicken, cheese, and a whole bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos! Trash food at it's finest, guys!
5 from 1 vote Print Pin Prep 10 minutes Cook 20 minutes Total 30 minutes Serves 6 servings Ingredients 11 ounces Nacho Cheese Doritos
2 cups cooked shredded chicken
1 can cream of chicken soup or my homemade creamed soup substitute
1 cup sour cream
8 ounces grated cheddar
10 ounce Ro*Tel tomatoes and chiles 1 can
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon chili powder
1/2 cup pico de gallo Instructions Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
In a medium bowl, stir together the chicken, soup, sour cream, half of the cheddar, Ro*Tel, cumin, and chili powder.
Crush the Doritos and add half of the to the bottom of a 9x13 baking dish. Top with the chicken mixture. Add the other half of the crushed Doritos over the top of the chicken.
Sprinkle the remaining cheese on top and bake for 20 minutes.
Remove from the oven and top with the pico de gallo.
Serve hot. Nutrition Information: Calories: 627 kcal (31%) | Carbohydrates: 42 g (14%) | Protein: 26 g (52%) | Fat: 39 g (60%) | Saturated Fat: 16 g (100%) | Cholesterol: 99 mg (33%) | Sodium: 1216 mg (53%) | Potassium: 449 mg (13%) | Fiber: 2 g (8%) | Sugar: 6 g (7%) | Vitamin A: 970 IU (19%) | Vitamin C: 5.8 mg (7%) | Calcium: 422 mg (42%) | Iron: 2.4 mg (13%)
I’m a casserole fanatic! Check out more below.
This chicken noodle casserole is pure comfort food.
Everyone raves over this sloppy joe tater tot casserole!
Chicken Parmesan Meatball Casserole – much easier than regular chicken parm!
This cheesy quinoa casserole is a healthy alternative to the usual casserole! | {
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We specialize in offering chauffeur car, Limo, Van & Taxi services Melbourne at reasonable prices. Airport Chauffeur Cars offers the best private Chauffeur Car Melbourne Airport and limousines to you. Our collection of premium vehicles transportation provides you first class chauffeur car service Melbourne that you can travel in style and comfort. | {
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How the Beirut Bombing Spawned the Modern Surveillance State
Editor’s note: Thirty years ago today, 241 U.S. Marines were killed in a suicide bombing attack on their barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. It was one of the worst losses of life in the Marines’ recent history, and marked the dawn of a new era in suicidal religious terrorism against the United States.
But it also marked the beginning of a new approach to national security — using information technology to gather and analyze clues about attacks before they happened. In this excerpt from his book The Watchers, senior writer Shane Harris recounts the events of that fateful morning in Beirut, and how, in ways that few could have predicted, it paved the way for America’s modern surveillance state.
The sun dawned about a quarter after six on Sunday, October 23, 1983. Most of the Marines were still asleep. A few who were up and moving about the compound noticed a yellow truck outside the concertina wire that guarded the perimeter. It was a Mercedes-Benz stake-bed, a workhorse used to carry heavy cargo. Before anyone could figure out why it was there, the truck picked up speed and crashed through the fence.
A sentry in one of the two guard posts nearby turned in time to see the truck heading straight for the Marines’ barracks. He grabbed his unloaded M16 and reached for a magazine of ammunition. The truck sped through an open gate, swerved around a sewer pipe, and aimed for the small sergeant-of-the-guard post stationed at the entrance to the hulking concrete building.
That guard was facing the lobby and heard the roaring truck behind him. He turned, and he thought for a moment, "What’s that truck doing inside the perimeter?" An instant later he was sprinting through the building to another entrance on the far side.
"Hit the deck!" he yelled. "Hit the deck!" He glanced back over his shoulder and watched the truck flatten his post before crashing into the lobby. It halted there. One or two seconds passed, and then the guard saw a bright orange and yellow flash. Then he realized he was flying through the air.
***
First Lieutenant Glenn Dolphin awoke to the barks of an early-rising Arkansas captain. He exhorted the roomful of exhausted men to join him at the barracks gym for a workout before reveille. They were splayed out on cots set up in the parking bay of an old fire department building. Dolphin looked over. The guy worked out constantly, and he thought he looked like a million bucks. But it was Sunday, the one day Dolphin could sleep in. The only Marines up now were jogging the perimeter, enjoying the rare morning quiet. The rest would stroll down later to the chow tent, where the cooks set up an omelet station on Sundays. Dolphin had been on duty in the Combat Operations Center until midnight and had been looking forward to the extra rest. Fuck it, he thought, eyeing the energetic captain. Dolphin rolled over in his cot to steal a few more minutes’ sleep.
Dolphin had been encamped with the Twenty-fourth Marine Amphibious Unit at the Beirut International Airport for seven months now, ostensibly as part of an international peacekeeping force deployed into Lebanon’s bloody civil war. But there was little progress to be seen. In April, someone had slammed a bomb-laden truck into the lobby of the U.S. embassy. The suicide attacker killed sixty-three people, including most of the CIA station in Beirut. After that, the notion that the Americans were in Beirut on a peacekeeping mission struck the twelve hundred Marines as absurd.
In order to avoid being perceived as an occupying force, the Marines had been ordered to shelter in place on the south side of the airport. They built makeshift bunkers out of sandbags, which cast long shadows on the vast, open expanse of dirt and asphalt, providing easy marks for gunmen. The Marines’ rules of engagement, handed down from the Pentagon, said they must maintain a noncombat presence-that meant no heavily fortified bunkers, nothing more than concertina wire to mark their compound, and, in what struck so many of the men as sheer madness, no loaded weapons.
Dolphin was twenty-five, but he felt old. The wind and sand had beaten the shine off his skin and dulled his red hair. He’d been wondering if his unit’s reinforcements might arrive by Thanksgiving or Christmas. The sun still low in the sky, he started to fall back to sleep on his cot.
Dolphin felt a wave of pressure before he actually heard the explosion. He and the other Marines were lying next to six huge metal doors. They flew off their frames and away from the building as daylight flooded into the parking bay.
Dolphin saw the doors slow down in midair, and then careen back toward him, sucked in by a vacuum created in the blast. One door clipped him on the back. Then he heard the boom, so loud he couldn’t have imagined it before that moment. Everything in the bay that wasn’t nailed down flew up in a maelstrom of shrapnel. A skylight at the top edge of the building shattered, and glass rained on the Marines.
The open-air lobby of the barracks, known to the Marines as the battalion landing team headquarters, or BLT, was surrounded by food storage areas, weight machines, and an armory cache. The first, second, and third floors held the Marines’ quarters. Its central location on the airport grounds made it the perfect distribution hub for water, rations, and supplies, and its roof offered 360-degree panoramic views and a platform for radio antennae.
When the Marines took over, the BLT was a bombed-out, battle-scarred shell of a building. The second, third, and fourth floors, once encased in plate-glass windows, looked now like rows of broken teeth. The holes were patched with plywood and scrap cloth from sandbags, and makeshift screens of plastic sheets flapped in the wind. The elevator shafts had been burned out. But for all that, the decrepit, Brutalist monstrosity was still standing. The damned thing had not been moved, and so the Marines naturally gravitated to it.
The racket of a Mercedes truck crashing into the building surely woke some of the men. But for a few seconds before the driver detonated his cargo, the truck sat still and quiet in the lobby. The blast severed the base of the building, a set of upright concrete columns measuring fifteen feet in circumference and reinforced with iron rods nearly two inches thick. The BLT’s most prominent design feature, an open courtyard that extended from the lobby up to the roof, captured the blast like gas in a bottle, and intensified its force.
The entire structure rose into the air. The top of the building exploded upward in a V shape, like two great arms stretched up to the sky. The BLT hung for a moment in midair, then fell back in on itself, crushed downward, and poured into a crater nine feet deep.
Blood dripped off Dolphin’s back. He walked over the glass-covered floor and made his way outside. He saw pieces of concrete falling from the sky. At least half a minute had passed since he’d heard the blast.
He ran to the Combat Operations Center located next to his sleeping quarters. This was his default duty station during Condition One, a basewide emergency. Another communications officer was pulling himself up off the floor; the blast had thrown him from his chair and separated his shoulder. Long cracks ran up the wall of the COC. Dolphin could see daylight through them.
The Marines on duty scurried to reassemble the radios littering the floor. Something must have landed on us, Dolphin thought to himself. Something huge. Rumors had circulated that the Soviets were supplying the Syrian military with intercontinental ballistic missiles. Could someone have nuked the base? Was that what this was?
"I can’t raise the BLT," a young corporal called out. "I can’t get them to pick up the phone."
A staff sergeant flew into the room. "The BLT is gone!" he yelled. "It’s gone!"
Dolphin was confused. Did they deploy? Maybe they’re going out after whatever hit us, he thought. Then a third man came in, a major, reporting that the building itself was gone.
Dolphin went outside. First he saw the smoke. And then Marines, walking around in circles, some of them with almost all their clothes blown off. On a few men Dolphin could make out only the standard-issue red exercise shorts the Marines wore during workouts. Everyone was covered from head to toe in a gray powder, as if he’d rolled in it. Facial features, hair color, race-everything was obscured under the ghostly cover of pulverized concrete.
Dolphin spotted a staff sergeant named Lawson speeding in his Jeep toward a medical post across the street. Lawson tried to steady a wounded Marine in the passenger seat with his free hand; the man’s head rolled and bobbed like it might come off. One of his eyes had blown out of its socket and flopped down on his cheek. Dolphin turned and looked down the road. Where the BLT should have stood, he noticed a new view-the ocean.
Shit! Oh, shit! I’ve got to get on task here, he told himself. A catatonic Marine was standing in front of him, wearing nothing but the waistband of his red shorts. His body hair had been burned off. His arm hung limp. Dolphin tried to lift him, but the pain from his back swelled.
"Listen!" he said. "Help isn’t going to come to you. You’ve got to help yourself." The Marine started walking. "I don’t want to lose my arm," he said. "I don’t want to lose my arm." He kept uttering the refrain as Dolphin walked with him up the road. He spotted Lawson driving back to the blast site. Dolphin loaded the man into the Jeep. "Just take him," he said, and then went looking for more.
The whole day went like that.
The ring of the secure phone at his home in suburban Maryland summoned Admiral John Poindexter, President Reagan’s deputy national security adviser, from slumber. He reached over to his bedside table and lifted the receiver. It was nearly 1:00 A.M.
A watch officer in the White House Situation Room relayed what he knew. A bombing at the Marine compound. Minutes later the French regiment also had been hit at their base, not far away. Near simultaneous attacks. Perhaps copycats of the embassy bombing. The final death count would reach 241. The last time the Marines had lost that many men in one day, they were storming the beaches of Iwo Jima.
Poindexter absorbed the information. His immediate reaction to the bombing wasn’t anger. He wasn’t morose. He was actually annoyed.
We should have seen this coming, he told himself.
Since arriving at the White House in 1981, as a military assistant, Poindexter had been trying to fix the shambles that was the early warning and crisis management system of the national security apparatus. Poindexter, an engineer by training, was given intimidating task of upgrading the Situation Room, which was, despite popular notions, a technological backwater that lacked many of the basic necessities for keeping the president in touch with the world. Across the horizon, Poindexter and other officials saw threats for which the President had little advance warning–from the Soviets to socialist forces in Latin America and, now, suicidal terrorists.
Poindexter had made great strides in little time beefing up the government’s intelligence capabilities. The Situation Room was outfitted with modern communications equipment. And now he was putting the finishing touches on the new $14 million Crisis Management Center, a technological outpost in the Old Executive Office Building, the imposing Second Empire-style building next to the White House where the NSC staff kept their offices. Poindexter had installed videoconferencing systems, large screens on the walls, and links to the systems that ran diplomatic, military, and intelligence cable traffic. He had even introduced the first, early versions of "e-mail" to the White House. This new nerve center-combining the Situation Room and the Crisis Management Center-represented a generational leap for the White House.
And yet it hadn’t been enough to predict the bombing in Beirut. Later investigations would show that there were many clues that had gone unnoticed, dots that the intelligence agencies and the White House never connected. Since May, U.S. intelligence agencies had received more than one hundred warnings of car bombs in Lebanon. Each one was regarded as part of the background noise in war-torn Beirut. The military chain of command was regularly briefed about the widening threat to the Marines. But then, in Beirut, people were always making threats. The Pentagon never allowed the Marines to take more defensive positions and had essentially turned them into sitting ducks.
Underneath the constant warnings lay a discernible sequence of events that led to the assault at the airport. After the embassy attack in the spring, FBI forensic investigators discovered that the bombers had laden their explosives with ordinary pressurized gas bottles, which magnified the force of the blast. Oxygen, propane, and similar gas canisters were simple to obtain almost anywhere in the world, the FBI noted in its final report. The fact that terrorists had not only set their sights on U.S. targets but were enhancing conventional explosives with everyday materials was never made known to the military commanders in Beirut. That’s because the FBI never disseminated its report; it stayed locked within the CIA and the State Department.
The most fateful signal came in late September. The National Security Agency, which intercepted radio and satellite communications around the globe, snatched a message from the Iranian Ministry of Information and Security to the Iranian ambassador in Syria. The ministry ordered the ambassador to get in touch with a man named Hussein Musawi, the head of an Islamic terrorist group called Amal. Musawi was to turn his sights on the multinational forces in Lebanon and was ordered to mount a "spectacular action against the United States Marines."
The Beirut airport was the only place to launch such a spectacular attack. The NSA intercept was the clearest indication yet that the Marines sat in the crosshairs. But owing to the cumbersome military chain of command and an inexplicable failure to grasp the "spectacular" urgency, the message wasn’t delivered to senior military officials until two days after the bombing. Only then did the chief of naval intelligence notify his superiors in the Pentagon that the NSA was sitting on what one official later called a "twenty-four-karat gold document." A bona fide warning, unnoticed. The missed signal foreshadowed another overlooked phone call placed on September 10, 2001. It warned, in Arabic, that "tomorrow is zero hour," and it wasn’t translated by the NSA until September 12.
The government had no way of capturing information and making it available to those who could discern its importance. At the White House, the NSC staff was the closest thing to an information traffic cop, and Poindexter and his colleagues struggled to control and understand the data swirling around them. Someone had to wrest control, Poindexter thought.
In reaction to the Beirut attack, and a subsequent bombing of the new U.S. embassy nearly a year later, Poindexter led a massive reorganization of the government’s crisis management teams. He formed an alliance with his friend Bill Casey, the CIA Director. The two had developed an honest rapport, and Casey was one of the few senior officials Poindexter felt he could speak to frankly.
"We have got to do a better job sharing this kind of information," Poindexter said.
Casey agreed. It was inexcusable. The CIA set up a secure hotline connecting the State Department, the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the NSC staff with the CIA’s photographic intelligence center. This was the government’s primary resource for imagery analysis, and yet there had never been any data links into or out of it. That was about to change.
As Poindexter took stock of other imbalances in the system, he found a bureaucracy bowing under its own weight. A slumgullion of nearly three dozen agencies claimed some role in counterterrorism, and collectively they were spending almost $2 billion a year on those activities. From the FBI to the State Department to the IRS, it seemed everyone had a finger in the pot. Each agency possessed an essential skill for preempting terrorism. But not one of them, acting alone, had achieved notable success. The agencies would have to work in concert now, like a well-tuned orchestra.
To lead them, Poindexter took over an existing NSC outfit called the Crisis-Pre Planning Group. He turned it into the engine of the government’s antiterrorism campaign, one that was powered–for the first time–by modern information technologies designed to capture information and get it to the people who needed it. To connect the dots.
By today’s standards, this was primitive stuff. But the foundation and the approach Poindexter laid for a broad, government-wide approach to security threats would eventually be replicated after the 9/11 attacks. The staff on the crisis group consisted of deputies from key national security departments-Defense, State, and Treasury-as well as the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The members had the power to recommend freezing individual and state assets, to develop covert intelligence programs, to communicate with ambassadors at all U.S. embassies, and to send proposals to the military chain of command. They met in the increasingly well-outfitted Situation Room or the Crisis Management Center, tapping into new data sources, holding teleconferences, and crafting a playbook for managing crises-whether caused by bands of terrorists or whole armies.
The crisis planning group had a singular focus: prevent crises before they happened. "Horizon scanning," Poindexter liked to call it. As the months rolled on, Poindexter could sense the system coming into alignment. Order and discipline were taking hold. The once ill-tuned layers of committees understood their roles better now. They had focused. Poindexter and his NSC terror fighters were making sense of information, corralling disparate data sources, and coming up with richer and more informative reports for the president than at any time in recent memory.
Looking back now, it’s clear that Poindexter was planting the seeds of a much broader, pervasive, and ultimately global system of information gathering. The government was getting a handle on what was in its own databases. It would be another two decades, after the 9/11 attacks, that the intelligence agencies turned their gaze toward the worlds of data held in private stores. On private individuals. Then, too, Poindexter would help lead those efforts, as the director of a Defense Department program called Total Information Awareness. It bore a striking resemblance to the global surveillance of the National Security Agency today, and that was no accident.
This audacious notion, that the government could connect the dots of the next attack, before it happened, took root 30 years ago today, when the calm of a Sunday morning in Beirut was shattered. Even Poindexter couldn’t have seen that one coming. | {
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The Little Mermaid
1. Ariel is a child bride. She marries Eric when she's 16.
2. She's also a hoarder, as evidenced from her cave of knick-knacks. Hoarding can be a symptom of very serious mental illness.
3. She has books and a painting in her hoarder den, but how have they not disintegrated? Why doesn't this fantasy movie abide by the laws of science, huh?
4. Ariel is totally content to give up everything important to her for a man. A boring man. Cute, but boring.
5. Flounder isn't even a flounder, he's a guppy. This is a flounder. It's disgusting.
6. Speaking of fish, there's a character called the "blackfish" which is pretty much a racist caricature: | {
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Four Kids Play a Game is a tabletop role playing game about the creation of a new world and the personal development of those who would become this new worlds gods. Inspired by Homestuck by Andrew Hussie and the stories similarly inspired by it, the goal of this game is to define the adventures of a small group of children as they fight and work to create a new world after the apocalypse.
Taking a diceless, role-playing scene focused approach to the gameplay, Four Kids is about the development and discovery of its player characters more then anything else.
To play this game you will need:
- Three to Five People (One GM, and Two to Four Players)
- Several Sheets of Paper
- Pens and/or Pencils
- A Good Amount of Time
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Acesse os bastidores da política de graça com Crusoé e O Antagonista+ (7 dias)
A Comissão de Valores Mobiliários (CVM), que já multou Eike Batista em pelo menos R$ 22,4 milhões, abriu novo processo contra o empresário, registra o Valor.
Segundo a autarquia, Eike infringiu regras do mercado de capitais sobre a divulgação de “informações verdadeiras, completas e consistentes e que não induzam o investidor a erro” como diretor e conselheiro de empresas do grupo X.
Embora tenha afirmado na autobiografia “O X da Questão” ser “engenheiro por formação, ainda que não tenha completado a graduação” na Universidade de Aachen, na Alemanha, o empresário se qualificava como “bacharel” e “engenheiro”, ou apontava que “cursou engenharia”, em documentos formais e oficiais divulgados ao mercado e apresentados ao órgão regulador do mercado de valores, nota a CVM no processo obtido pelo jornal.
Para a autarquia, “uma graduação concluída na Alemanha” pode ter influenciado muitos investidores a comprar ações do chamado grupo X.
Dúvidas sobre a formação de Eike já haviam surgido quando ele foi preso em 2017, já que presos com nível superior têm direito a prisão especial.
Agora ele terá de se explicar. | {
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An exhilarating case of a phenomenal actor and masterful director working in complete and utter sync, You Were Never Really Here—a team-up between Joaquin Phoenix and Scottish auteur Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin)—is a rugged, wrenching genre film to be treasured.
The story of a military vet who supports himself and the elderly mother with whom he lives by tracking down missing children for mysterious clients, it’s a grim, tortured affair, one that steeps itself in the psychology of its damaged protagonist and, in doing so, continues Ramsay’s career-long formal and thematic preoccupations. It’s also the most intense movie you’re likely to see this year—a harrowing portrait of pain, psychosis, and the futility of using violence to purge one’s inner demons. Think of it as a Taxi Driver for the 21st century.
An adaptation of Jonathan Ames’ 2013 short story, You Were Never Really Here finds Ramsay once again revisiting subjects near and dear to her heart: traumatized kids, the desire to heal still-raw wounds, and the inescapable burden of sorrow and guilt. Its focus is Joe (Phoenix), a man whose agony is apparent from his first on-screen appearance—in a close-up of his face gasping for air inside a plastic bag. This auto-asphyxiation situation is self-inflicted and anything but erotic, and it’s followed by tantalizing glimpses of his hands burning a young girl’s photograph in a trash can (and an otherwise useless bible snuffing out the flames), and of his body moving through a hotel corridor, his head cut off by the frame, all of it set to the sounds of his whispered thoughts (“Say it!”). Performing his shady duty with efficiency, he’s a fragmented loner, distressed by unknown discord.
“ ...at its center is Phoenix, whose vehemence is downright chilling, and made all the more gripping by the hurt underscoring it. ”
When we finally do get a glimpse of Joe, his dark-ringed eyes and long, unkempt, gray-tinged beard underscore that initial impression, as does his furious takedown of an assailant in a back alley during his escape from this motel. A taxi door lets us know Joe is in Cincinnati, but he’s soon back in New York City, visiting his aging mom (Judith Roberts) and then his handler John McCleary (The Wire’s John Doman), who gives him a new assignment: recover Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), the thirteen-year-old daughter of Senator Albert Votto (Alex Manette). Making matters somewhat easier, the whereabouts of habitual runaway Nina aren’t a secret: she’s been kidnapped and forced to work at a pedophilic brothel located inside a heavily guarded city brownstone. And according to the vengeful Votto, Joe has been hired because of his reputation for being “brutal.”
An angry recluse intent on rescuing a preyed-upon girl from the bowels of sexual-exploitation Manhattan hell—it’s a traditional set-up, part Scorsese’s aforementioned 1976 classic, part Paul Schrader’s 1979 descent-into-porno-depravity, Hardcore. Yet while You Were Never Really Here employs a familiar narrative spine, Ramsay infuses it with a potency all her own. As is her wont, the director cares little for exposition, conveying everything of value through startling imagery. The sight of Joe sitting in the dark on his mother’s bed as she falls asleep, or of him later gently caressing her curled-toes foot, speaks volumes about his protective instincts and deep compassion. And jarring, out-of-the-blue cuts to flashbacks—of Joe as a young boy, hiding in a closet, sometimes with his head wrapped in a plastic garment bag; and of images of dead mouths and twitching feet from Joe’s military service—impart, in expressionistic blasts, his entire abused-son and PTSD-wracked soldier backstory.
Moreover, a single wayback shot of his mother cowering under a table as a man’s midsection enters the foreground, his hand holding a hammer, tells us precisely why Joe, a lost child himself, employs a ball-peen hammer to carry out his own dirty deeds. Attempting to transcend his nightmarish past by mimicking his persecutors, Joe proceeds on his mission with compulsive fury, and Ramsay’s direction echoes—and enhances—his drive, leaping forward in time at sudden, disorienting intervals, skipping over any narrative details that are otherwise inferable from the action at hand. Ramsay employs tight, askew compositions that obscure as much as they show. And yet in that obliqueness, be it during Joe’s traumatic memories or his current rampage, she imparts everything crucial about him, and the forces propelling him onward toward ever-greater horrors, as well as revelations about the conspiracy tied to Nina’s disappearance.
Ramsay’s unconventional approach is most apparent when it comes to Joe’s actual violence, which is either half-glimpsed, or which we see only the aftermath of, as the director cuts to Joe the second or two after he’s felled an adversary. It’s a strategy that speaks to You Were Never Really Here’s attitude toward aggro viciousness as an empty, unfulfilling affair; no matter how many men Joe bludgeons, he’s a figure of macho impotence, in search of salvation in all the wrong ways.
Her stunning visuals, including pans across cacophonous NYC traffic, express what none of Ramsay’s characters can, or will. And they’re married to a remarkable score by Jonny Greenwood (fresh off his Oscar nomination for Phantom Thread) that creates an unbearable atmosphere of mounting dread through electronic tones, percussive beats, natural urban-chaos noise and strident strings—the last of which are clearly modeled after Psycho, another thriller about a devoted son caring for his aged mother which, in fact, is watched by Joe’s mom (with Joe play-acting Norman Bates’ stabbing motions) early on in the film.
Running a swift 89 minutes, You Were Never Really Here is a maelstrom of madness, misery and wrath, and at its center is Phoenix, whose vehemence is downright chilling, and made all the more gripping by the hurt underscoring it. With minimal dialogue, Phoenix captures Joe’s psychological and emotional tumult in the way he stalks his environment, or stares silently at his targets—as in a late Taxi Driver-ish scene of him sitting in a car spying on a politician’s office. He’s a man apt to explode at any moment, and in any number of ways, be it him starting to laugh after using pliers to pull out a tooth from his bloody mouth (in a stunning single-take close-up), or bursting into tears as he slides to the floor and strips off his shirt to reveal his scarred, asymmetrical torso.
More than his volatility, however, it’s Phoenix’s portrayal of Joe’s haunted suffering that lingers longest. In perhaps the film’s most unexpected sequence, Joe confronts a home intruder he’s fatally shot in the stomach. Rather than demanding information before finishing him off (per cliché), Joe offers him a painkiller and then lays down beside him on the floor, clasping his hand and joining the man in a mumbly sing-along to Charlene’s “I’ve Never Been to Me.” Like a later underwater suicide attempt and the finale’s figurative resurrection, it’s a moment in which Joe learns that solace is attained not from death but from compassion. It’s a familiar lesson given unforgettable new life by You Were Never Really Here, a masterpiece of monstrous beauty and grief-stricken rage that burrows under your skin and into your head, and refuses to leave. | {
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Microsoft announced today that it hasn't backed down from its contentious decision to enable Do Not Track by default in Internet Explorer 10. In a blog post from Chief Privacy Officer Brendon Lynch, the company said that Windows 8 will inform users of the Do Not Track preference during the first run experience. Customers using the Express (default) settings will have Do Not Track turned on, and those using the Custom settings option will have the ability to turn it off.
"Do Not Track" is a Web privacy scheme that tells online advertisers not to collect or use information specific to a user's Web requests and responses. Advertisers can still show advertisements, but they're not allowed to, for example, record that a user browsed several hotel websites to then show ads for other hotels.
The scheme uses an HTTP header sent with every request to every Web server to indicate the user's preference. The Do Not Track header, named "DNT," can either have the value 1, indicating that the user does not wish to be tracked, or 0, meaning that tracking is acceptable. The DNT header can also be missing entirely, which leaves the decision up to the advertiser.
The fundamental problem faced by Do Not Track (or any other similar privacy mechanism) is that sending a header doesn't do anything in and of itself. Advertisers need to both look for the header and honor it if it shows that the user does not want to be tracked. This is problematic, because it's not actually in advertisers' interest to not track users. Tracking Web users enables advertisers to show ads that are more relevant to the user, and hence more likely to be clicked on.
Nonetheless, advertisers were tentatively getting on board with the Do Not Track scheme, likely motivated by their fear of something worse. Governments around the world are taking a closer look at the issue of Web privacy, and voluntary support for a privacy scheme could prevent the imposition of more onerous government mandates. While Do Not Track may not be ideal from an advertiser standpoint, it certainly beats something more drastic, such as a government ban on such tracking activities.
Microsoft's June announcement threatened this tentative agreement between privacy advocates and advertisers. The company said that its browser would not only support the Do Not Track header, but that, by default, it would opt out of tracking. Internet Explorer is still the most widely used browser on the Internet. Internet Explorer 10 is likely to see significant adoption once it is released. In turn, this means that a significant number of Web users are likely to be sending the DNT header and opting out of tracking by advertisers.
Unsurprisingly, advertisers had a fit. While they were willing to give their tentative support to Do Not Track, they were only willing to do so on the basis that it was something that users had to explicitly enable. The advertisers know that most users don't bother to change the default behavior of their systems, and so were unlikely to bother enabling Do Not Track. Only a particularly privacy-conscious minority of users would opt out of tracking, and these privacy conscious customers are likely to be the kind of Web users who never click on advertisements anyway.
An explicitly enabled Do Not Track was therefore a pretty safe thing to support. An implicitly enabled Do Not Track, however, ran the risk of large-scale opting out of targeted advertising, and subsequently significant damage to the advertisers' businesses.
Within days, the group creating the Do Not Track specification released an update saying that the Do Not Track header only counted when it was explicitly chosen by the user. Browsers that sent the header by default wouldn't be compliant with the specification. This in turn would give the advertisers some latitude to ignore its stipulations. Specifically, advertisers argue that, in the face of such non-compliant implementations, they can ignore the header entirely.
Microsoft, however, argues that software should be private by default, saying that its decision "put[s] people first," and that the textual description during the Windows 8 setup process provides adequate information to let users know what's going on, and the ability to customize the setup gives users enough control. It may be a default, but it's an informed default that the user has explicitly agreed to.
Regulators have weighed in on the subject, and Microsoft's stance has some backing. In late June, the European Commission's director-general for Information Society and Media, Robert Madelin, wrote to the World Wide Web Consortium's Tracking Protection Working Group (the group of industry experts working on the Do Not Track specification) saying that in the European Commission's view, browser-specified defaults do not undermine consumer choice and should not be penalized by the specification. In the EC's view, such behavior could distort the marketplace.
Moreover, Madelin wrote that the Do Not Track specification should expect browsers to both inform users of the Do Not Track option, and to opt out of tracking by default.
The EC's stance echoed that of the Congressional Privacy Caucus. Co-chairs Edward Markey (D-MA) and Joe Barton (R-TX) wrote that "browsers that default to Do Not Track provide consumers with better control and choice with respect to their personal information." Microsoft's policy was specifically endorsed, with the congressmen asking W3C "to make the protection of consumer privacy a priority and support Microsoft's announcement by endorsing a default Do Not Track setting."
FTC Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch, meanwhile, took the contrary view, saying in a letter to W3C that "Microsoft's default [Do Not Track] setting means that Microsoft, not consumers, will be exercising choice as to what signal the browser will send."
Second-guessing the DNT header sent by browsers is fraught with difficulties. A browser could market itself as being private by default, and even enumerate in its feature list that it sends the DNT header, opting out of tracking, by default. The mere decision by a user to install this browser would be a positive step taken toward opting out of tracking. Such a thing is hardly inconceivable; there are already browsers that vaunt their privacy as their unique selling proposition.
It would be absurd for a tracking advertiser to ignore this DNT header, as it was plainly an accurate expression of user intent. However, that is what advertisers are wanting to do.
While W3C has agreed that browsers shouldn't set a default, the group has reached an impasse when it comes to saying how such a default should be handled. Yahoo has suggested that perhaps servers could respond to requests from browsers that set a default with a message informing users that their Do Not Track preference was being ignored because they might not have intended it—but this too is problematic. Servers cannot distinguish between, for example, users who accepted Internet Explorer's defaults, and those who customized their options but still opted out of tracking. They would all have their preference ignored. Continued use of the browser in spite of such a warning could also be argued to be an explicit decision to opt out.
The group intends to meet again on Wednesday. The default issue isn't on the agenda, but with Microsoft's reiteration of its plans to enable Do Not Track in Internet Explorer 10, it would be no surprise if the matter received further consideration.
If W3C stays the course, and advertisers continue to insist that Internet Explorer 10's default setting justifies ignoring the header entirely, then there's a very real prospect that the Do Not Track header will be both widely used, and widely ignored. In this situation, it would be difficult to describe it as anything other than a failure.
Microsoft's action may cause W3C to reassess its position. It might just as well derail the entire Do Not Track effort, or at least cause the advertisers to drop their already tentative support. That in turn could be the stimulus legislators need to take action of their own. Given the murmurings of legislators on both sides of the Atlantic, that could turn out to be good for privacy advocates, but it may be disastrous for advertisers.
Listing image by Alexander Montuschi | {
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Three years ago, "Mike"—a 20-year-old newcomer to the faith—stepped into my church office. He sat down on my office couch, distressed.
"What's going on, man?" I asked. The fact that he was hiding something couldn't have been more obvious.
"Well," he muttered. "Umm … I've been smoking too much pot lately."
"Just 'too much'?" I asked with a wry, confident smile. "Listen, friend, any pot smoking is too much pot smoking. It is illegal, after all."
"Actually," he said, "it's not illegal for me. I've got my medical marijuana card."
Uh-oh, I thought.
Sure enough: he was legal. He had come by the "license to toke" fairly. He didn't lie or exaggerate to get it. We have newspapers in Portland printing advertisements from doctors: "Headaches? Nausea? Pain? Come get your prescription!" I could get a prescription if I wanted one. Two blocks from our church's sanctuary is a lucrative legal pot dispensary. There are at least a dozen more within a five mile radius.
"Just say no!" was powerless sloganeering for this fellow, especially when he could easily point to Christian drinkers. Without the "obey the law" fallback, what was left?
"Well, just because it's legal," I said, "does not mean it's profitable."
Based on new public opinion stats from Gallup, opinions about marijuana use are changing. For the first time in U.S. history, the morality scales now tip in favor of legalization. More than 58 percent of people now favor it.
If you're a Washington or Colorado pastor, you can already legally fire up a reefer at your next staff retreat. By December 1 of this year, Washington producers will be legally licensed to grow marijuana for recreational use. You can bet your life that the indoor-hydro guys will be cranking those sodium halide grow lights day and night for about three months, until the winter snows melt and their "first" legal buds are vacuum packed and priced to sell. Based on the polls, it won't be long before other states—and eventually the federal government—will follow suit.
Growing up in the 8,000-person town of Burlington, Wisconsin, I learned just how against-the-law pot can be. I've had no trouble pointing to penal terms and state statutes for herbal debates in the past. It's been a sweet moral trump card for pastors. When a red-eyed brother in Christ asks how pot is different from other substances—like alcohol—"Obey the law of the land, son," the pastor says. "Like it or not, God calls us to obey our authorities. Hooch is legal; the marijuana cigarettes are not."
Conversation over.
But the trump card is gone for many of us. Likely for all of us soon. For our neighbors and church members, there will be no more need to stash baggies above ceiling tiles to keep them hidden from mom. No more secret lingo, "420" rendezvous, or clandestine hook-ups with Mary Jane. It's possible to imagine the host of your next home community meeting happily setting a jar of pot and a glass pipe next to the bottle of merlot on the refreshments table.
So what are you going to say when the issue gets personal? Should hip pastors spark a bowl with the lost to be "incarnational"? More importantly, are we ready to intelligently discuss recreational pot use with our youth, young adults, parents, and singles? Even more importantly, can we talk about it without oversimplification?
Gross oversimplification
When a pastor's advice on a moral issue fails, the usual culprit is oversimplification. I feel this keenly on the pot question, having fought on both sides. As a non-believing protester marching on Wisconsin's state capitol with a giant pot-leaf shaped Legalize it! sign, I saw dozens of otherwise law-abiding friends serve lengthy prison terms for buying, selling, and smoking pot. Now, as a pastor I see the destructive power of the substances that people use to medicate themselves. Now I'm learning to grow past oversimplification from either side.
Here are a few common oversimplifications, followed by the legitimate objections you'll encounter if you use them:
"Pot is bad for you, and our bodies are temples that we need to take care of."
So is alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and sugar. What in this world is not bad for you? Bus exhaust causes cancer, and according to California, so does everything else. My missionary friends in Nepal constantly fall seriously ill due to contaminated water, bacteria, chemicals, etc. Should they abandon their post? Super smog in China is killing thousands of people daily. Is it immoral to choose to live in a Chinese city? Should I avoid tap water to stay free from the chlorine and fluoride?
"Pot is worse than alcohol. You can't use it in moderation."
Worse specifically how? Certainly not according to any study (or basic, cursory glance) at the impact of either substances on our society at broad or individual levels. And what about using THC in a way that does not require smoking, such as vapor, brownies, or pills? What about using THC in small doses, equivalent to an IPA or glass of wine? Who measures intoxication? Is it a certain percentage? Is it a particular hindrance on one's capacity to function? Is it OK to drink two beers? Three? Is tolerance different for different people?
"Pot is never mentioned in the Bible, but wine is."
T-shirts and coffee are not in the Bible, either. Take off your shirt; throw away your mug!
"Pot is legal now, which means it is OK for Christians to use."
Is "OK to use" the Christian's measure of goodness? I could be an alcoholic, adulterous, deceitful, prescription-abusing, manipulative, hate-filled connoisseur of grotesque pornography and still be OK, legally and socially. Does the government's stamp of approval mean I should partake, or even can partake with moral uprightness? What about dope smoking is truly profitable for you and, more importantly, for your neighbor? What would Jesus smoke?
"Pot has medicinal qualities. It should be seen as helpful, not destructive."
Don't many substances have "medicinal" qualities? What do you even mean by "medicinal"? Tylenol is helpful until its acetaminophen eats your liver. Even if pot does help in some way, it can also make you lose control, right?
We could go on and on. Blanket declarations or position papers will not address the complexities of individual human lives. Oversimplification on this issue will necessarily neglect truth, and we want to be people of truth.
A green-pasture strategy
After "Mike" stepped out of my office, I felt uneasy. I had been unprepared for his legal status, and all I really did was exchange a new law for the old. Rather than asking "Is this legal?" because of my counsel to him, he was now only asking "Is this profitable?" I wish I could go back to that conversation and instead invite him to ask: "Why do I do what I do?"
It's one thing to agree that we should stop oversimplifying. So what, then, should we start doing?
We should consider the impact of substances upon the virtue and excellence that our Savior intended for us.
My colleague Bill Clem talks about a woman that he counseled during his previous ministry position. She suffered from multiple sclerosis. Bouts of physical stress caused flare-ups, each of which irreparably damaged her nervous system. Stress was literally killing her. With her medical marijuana card, however, she could legally counter that stress with a couple hits of legal pot smoke.
"The question when we talk about things like smoking legal weed, for me, is not so much about the 'what' question," Clem says. "I'm interested in the 'why' question. Why do we do what we do? So if I'm simply trying to numb myself and escape from life for a while, that is very different than my friend who was legitimately 'escaping' from neurologically damaging stress levels."
We need to listen carefully, with Bible-transformed ears to hear the plights of our fellow men and women. Dumping a 750 ml jug of wine into a lonely woman's gut on a gloomy day is very different than the same bottle of wine sipped into the same tummy during her wedding celebration with friends and family, especially if the wedding is held in Cana. Clem is right. The "what" question pulls us backwards, toward the lifeless power of Johnny Law. But the "why" question spurs us forward, toward the living freedom of Jesus Love.
You have heard it said, "Thou shalt not be 'blazin' the ganja." But I say to you that everyone who seeks pleasure outside of the gospel loses his life.
Pot smokers will never be convinced that drinking is healthier, more "Christian," or better for society. Neither will I, and I'm not even toking these days. Nor will they be swayed by warnings of impending doom and destruction. But you can make great headway with the Christian pot smoker along the lines of self-control. We need to bypass the "What are you doing?" question in areas that are morally ambiguous and drive directly into the core: "Why are you doing this?"
"Am I allowed to?" creates legalists. "Am I allowed to?" needs to change to "Is this helpful for my neighbor and me?" The former question forces me into a deadly self-obsession; the latter moves me toward the spirit of goodness and sacrificial love.
This is one reason that I silently welcome legalization; it forces me to thoughtfully help people where they really need help rather than tell them how to bow down to a statute. Jesus did not say, "I am the way, the truth, and the perfect adherent to state and federal laws."
My trajectory was proper when I asked the 20-year-old Christian pot smoker the what question: "What does or does not make your dope smoking profitable?" But he and I have spoken very little since. I think it's because I failed to get past the epidermis and into the chlorophyll, past the superficial question and into his heart.
I've realized that he, like many others, hear little more than a self-help suggestion in the profitability question. "What will make my life better?" is a fair inquiry, for sure, but it is also a myopic sub-point within the comprehensive complexities of a true gospel person. I have been commissioned to help my eternal family members move beyond the tired and worn plots of cracked and dusty self-love, to guide them toward good works and the rich, peace-saturated sustenance of truly green pastures. Here's how I will do things differently as weed continues to gain favor in the public square, legally and otherwise.
I will teach my people profitability in terms of others; help them practice putting on their neighbors' shoes. Any question related to consuming drugs must first and foremost be: "How does this benefit my neighbor, physically and spiritually?"
I will show them the greatness of self-sacrificial love, denying personal pleasures for the sake of others' well-being. "You must love one another," says Jesus. "Just as I have loved you, you must love other people in the same way." We all know that Jesus did not love others by running around protesting, crying about rights violations, or demanding that his life be more comfortable. Instead, he denied his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness because loving humanity mattered more.
And finally, I will lead them to the Bible in all I say and do. Oversimplification looms large from any angle, and subjective anecdotes will flood most people's minds like a tsunami. Hear me now: You cannot debate this issue with physical science, social science, or strained comparisons to alcohol and other substances. We must trust the transforming power of God's Word to ground the Christian ethic. Expose the Scriptures to your people; it will train them to love others and the Lord their God in all that they think, in all that they do, and, yes, in all that they smoke.
Did I offer words of truth that day? Sure, but I have since learned that I can do much better by driving to the heart of an excellent Christian life. My preaching, teaching, and counseling too often veers toward the simplistic way. And when it does, the beauty and greatness of our salvation and life with the Savior is lost.
Ben Tertin is a pastor at Imago Dei Community in Portland, Oregon. Follow him on Twitter: @BenTertin
Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.
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AUSTIN, Texas (ChurchMilitant.com) - Fake Republicans in Texas are losing, and the Catholic bishops seem ready to sacrifice a faithful pro-life leader to defend them.
On Thursday, the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops issued a rebuke to Texas Right to Life, warning parishes "not to participate in their activities or allow the organization to use parish sites."
Texas Right to Life, headed by outspoken Catholic Jim Graham, has openly, consistently criticized the "soft push" of GOP Establishment leaders who have obstructed pro-life legislation. The bishops, meanwhile — members of the Church Establishment — are cozy with Texas RINOs (Republicans in Name Only).
The bishops' denouncement of Texas Right to Life comes in the wake of a split looming inside the Texas Republican Party — a winnowing of the conservative wheat from the Establishment chaff. Internal polling indicates Lone Star State RINOs are facing extinction in the upcoming elections, and political insiders believe the bishops' "advisory" is a ploy to save their political hides. By demonizing Texas Right to Life, they suggest, the bishops hope to preserve their political allies in office.
According to their "advisory," the bishops are spurning Texas Right to Life for three reasons:
Conflicts on pro-life reform. The bishops complained the group "often opposes the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops and has implied that the bishops do not faithfully represent Church teaching." Texas Right to Life rejects the bishops' "incrementalism" as a halting, soft approach. Conflicts on end-of-life reform. The bishops slammed Texas Right to Life's messaging on end-of-life care and advance directives as "misstatements." Texas Right to Life's voter guide. The group publishes an annual voter guide scoring Texas lawmakers according to their pro-life record. The bishops have denounced the guide as built on unfair analysis, and they maintain "a number of legislators who have consistently voted for pro-life and end of life legislation have been opposed by Texas Right to Life."
This isn't the first time Texas Right to Life has run afoul of the Church Establishment. In 2013, Jeffrey Patterson, executive director of the Texas Catholic Conference, wrote to state Representative Dan Huberty on behalf of the bishops, blasting Texas Right to Life's voter guide as "unconventional," "subjective" and producing "perplexing results." He complained that the voter guide assigned low scores to "pro-life lawmakers who have worked long and hard to protect and preserve life."
But Republican lawmakers like Byron Cook and Joseph Straus, key leaders of the Texas GOP Establishment, have been criticized by Texas Right to Life for obstructing pro-life laws.
As Church Militant reported in October 2017, "Cook, as the chairman of the Texas House State Affairs Committee, has worked overtime to block pro-life legislation from being passed in the Texas legislature despite claiming to be pro-life." For example, he killed HB1113, the Pro-Life Health Insurance Reform, which would prohibit insurance companies from paying for elective abortions.
The pro-life bills Cook did support were considered "weak" and "fake" by Texas Right to Life — "ineffective or non-priority" measures that were actually "detrimental to the pro-life movement."
Straus, meanwhile, as Speaker of the House, "put a sudden end to a special legislative session" that Gov. Greg Abbott had called in order to address important bills Establishment Republicans ignored during the 2016–17 regular session.
Seeing the writing on the wall, in 2017 Cook and Straus announced they wouldn't seek re-election.
Texas Right to Life responded by declaring the news "worthy of an epic celebration," arguing, "In order for the Establishment ship to stay afloat, Straus and Cook had to walk the gangplank, rather than face an embarrassing electoral pummeling and sink the entire Establishment ship."
"If the members of the Texas House think they should merely change the name on the door of the speaker's office to another one of Gordon Johnson's puppets," Texas Right to Life added, "they too, should resign and resign in shame and be treated for Stockholm syndrome, before they are defeated by their electorate in the March 6, 2018 primary."
This primary, political insiders say, is what sparked today's denunciation of Texas Right to Life. If RINOs have any hope of retaining office, they have to silence the voice of unrelenting critics like Texas Right to Life. The "advisory," observers suggest, is the work of collusion between the bishops' conference and RINOs desperate to cling to power in the face of an approaching wipe-out at the ballot box.
Representing the Lone Star State's 13 dioceses and 2 archdioceses, the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops includes:
Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston
Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller of San Antonio
Bishop Patrick J. Zurek of Amarillo
Bishop Joe S. Vásquez of Austin
Bishop Curtis John Guillory of Beaumont
Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville
Bishop Michael Mulvey of Corpus Christi
Bishop Edward J. Burns of Dallas
Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso
Bishop Michael F. Olson of Ft. Worth
Bishop James Tamayo of Laredo
Bishop Robert Coerver of Lubbock
Bishop Michael J. Sis of San Angelo
Bishop Joseph E. Strickland of Tyler
Bishop Brendan J. Cahill of Victoria
The conference is available for comment:
Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops
PO Box 13285
Austin, TX 78711
(512) 339-9882
Email: https://txcatholic.org/contact/email-us/
Twitter: @TXCatholic
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Surfer killed by shark off WA coast
Updated
A surfer has been killed by what is believed to be a great white shark near Wedge Island, about 160 kilometres north of Perth.
The man was paddling on his surfboard near Wedge Island at 9.00am (AWST) on Saturday when a shark lunged out of the water and took him under.
Police know the man's identity, but they are unable to release it at this stage.
A man who tried to help the surfer says when he attempted to get close to the body, the shark attacked his jet-ski before taking the man.
"I was towing my mate on the back of the jet-ski and just in front of us saw a guy get attacked by a shark," he told the ABC.
"I just took my mate to the shore and went straight out and there was just blood everywhere and a massive, massive white shark circling the body.
"I reached to grab the body and the shark came at me on the jet-ski and tried to knock me off and I did another loop and when I came to back to the body the shark took it."
The victim's body is yet to be recovered.
The Department of Fisheries is searching for the shark responsible for the attack.
Tony Cappelluti from the department says if the shark is found, it will be killed.
"We'll go right through to nightfall tonight, we will then resume that tomorrow [Sunday] morning and make some decisions tomorrow," he said.
Dandaragan Shire president Shane Love says beaches in the area have been closed.
He says it is a tragic day for the community.
"Whenever a thing like this happens in a coastal community it gives everyone a bit of a shock," he said.
"It's a very sad time for the person and family concerned and our thoughts are with them.
"At the moment our community services coordinator and our head ranger are on their way to Wedge Island to assist police and others down there with closing the beach and whatever else is needed to handle the situation."
Saturday's incident is the fifth fatal attack in the state in 10 months - an unprecedented number that sparked calls earlier this year for a cull.
WA's Fisheries Minister Norman Moore says the latest attack is of great concern to the State Government.
"This is a very distressing event and to add to the previous four fatalities, it is of great concern to me and to the fisheries department, indeed the Government as a whole," he said.
"I have to say that it is becoming quite perplexing. We have allocated some $14 million extra to get a better understanding of the great white sharks and the reasons why the fatalities are occurring.
"But we have another one today. I have to say I am quite perplexed and wondering what we do next, we have done everything so far in the last little while to deal with the issues as we understand them, but I'm open to any suggestions from anybody as to where we go to now because we seriously have got a problem and this is a very distressing occurrence."
Topics: shark, emergency-incidents, police, cervantes-6511, perth-6000
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In the future, we all dream of waking up to a beautiful utopia of hoverboards, clean air, and flying cars. But the future’s rarely what we’ve idealized, and in Headlander, you wake up on a derelict spaceship to the stark news that you are the last organic life left in the known universe and Methuselah, the leader of the robot society that has supplanted humanity, wants you dead.
Oh — and to top that off, you’re just a head. In a space helmet. With a rocket booster attached to it.
That’s just the start of Headlander, Adult Swim Games and Double Fine Productions’ side-scrolling action-adventure game heavily inspired by science fiction films of the 1970s.
At the start of the game you can select from three different heads as your player character, and solving the mystery of who you are and why you’re the only human left is one of the major plot points of the game. Luckily, you can dock that noggin into plenty of other things — humanoid Citizen and Shepherd bodies, robot dogs, turrets, computer terminals, and robot vacuum cleaners; anything with a universal docking ring will accept the connection.
The game world is a huge sprawling network that all kicks off in the Pleasure Port, a futuristic space resort where Citizens relax in locations like the Fondlarium and Boob Tubery while Shepherds patrol and keep the peace. Each Shepherd has color-coded security clearances so bouncing from one body to another becomes crucial to traversing the game’s world. Additionally, with each Shepherd body step up the ROYGBIV color spectrum, your lasers will become more powerful and bounce an additional time off walls. Violet lasers in close quarters can be challenging to maneuver around when you’re just a head!
With the helpful voice of Earl in your helmet, you navigate each area and find transfiber nodes that’ll grant your head new abilities. Those combined with an upgrade tree with even more abilities provide you with a lot of freedom in approaching combat — whether it’s on a Shepherd body or just as a head (each has a separate health gauge). Do you go in guns blazing? Maybe you’d rather stand back or duck behind cover and target/shoot off enemy heads with more precision. Or pop your head off and vacuum the heads of your enemies. Deflecting an enemy’s fire right back at them with your bounce shield is especially satisfying.
Be sure to mark your calendars for the game’s release on July 26, 2016. | {
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In a judgment in 2005, the Supreme Court of India had to say the following on IPC 498A, “As noted above the object is to strike at the roots of dowry menace. But by misuse of the provision a new LEGAL TERRORISM can be unleashed. The provision is intended to be used a shield and not an assassin’s weapon.” Another bench of the Court observed in 2014 with regards to the same section of the IPC, “the fact that Section 498A is a cognisable and non-bailable offence has lent it a dubious place of pride amongst the provisions that are used as weapons rather than shield by disgruntled wives”. In 2008, The Delhi High Court, during the course of a case, concluded that, “There is no iota of doubt that most of the complaints are filed in the heat of the moment over trifling fights and ego clashes. It is also a matter of common knowledge that in their tussle and ongoing hostility, the hapless children are the worst victims”.
Such observations by the esteemed Judiciary of the country makes it quite obvious that the injustice perpetuated through complaints filed under section 498A of the Indian Penal Code has been widely known for over a decade. However, the Parliament has shown little initiative over the years in rectifying the Draconian Law that has caused numerous enormous harassment to thousands of innocent individuals, the overwhelming majority of which are primarily men. Therefore, it fell upon the Judiciary to correct the many wrongs that have committed by misuse of this law and attempt to ensure that the rights of innocent can be protected without compromising the interests of genuine victims.
After considering the submissions of ASG A.S. Nadkarni, and Senior Advocate V. Giri, a two Judge Bench of the Supreme Court of Justices AK Goel and UU Lalit, issued formal directions on the procedure to be followed with complaints filed under IPC 498A. In its directions, the Supreme Court made it clear that no automatic arrests were to be made with such complaints and also ordered the setting up of Family Welfare Committees in every district to look into the complaints filed under sec 498A of the Indian Penal Code. The Court made it clear that no arrests were to be made before the Committee filed its brief report about the factual aspects and opinions in the matter. Additionally, such complaints are to be investigated only by a designated Investigating Officer of the area.
The regular observations of the Judiciary on IPC 498A makes it clear that it is one of the most poorly framed laws in the history of India which makes it only too easy to misuse. Moreover, the fact that the law as it was originally framed and implemented until 2014, till a case law was created by the Supreme Court of India to stop the Police from automatically and indiscreetly arresting those accused under 498A, the accused were arrested without any prior investigation and on merely the registration of complaints. The guidelines issued by the Supreme Court in July 2017 is only a further step towards curbing the misuse of the law.
The conviction rates for cases filed under IPC 498A have been abysmally poor to say the least. The All India Crimes data released by national Crimes Records Bureau (NCRB) show that in 2012, the Conviction Rate of cases under 498A was 15% as opposed to the average rate of conviction of all IPC cases of 38.5%, in 2013, 16% opposed to 40.2, in 2014, 13.7% opposed to 45.1% and in 2015, 14.2% opposed to 46.9%.
It shows that in 2014 and 2015, the conviction rate for cases filed under IPC 498A was less than 1/3rd of the average conviction rate of all IPC cases. The low conviction rate looks even worse when one considers the fact that this category features consistently in the top 10 in terms of the numbers of registered cases. To make matters worse, in 9 out of the 10 years from 2006-2015, cases filed under this category had conviction rates in the bottom three when compared with all other categories and was the lowest in 3 of those 10. To put things in perspective, while the number of convictions were consistently decreasing, the numbers of acquittals have been constantly on the rise.
Contrary to the spirit of Justice which assumes that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, IPC 498A assumes exactly the opposite as it was originally framed. It effectively fell on the accused to prove his innocence rather than on the accuser of proving guilt.
Just laws are framed based after a critical evaluation of existing reality. Such a law was formulated on the basis of the Feminist Doctrine which presumes all men are oppressors and the women oppressed. Thus, it follows that the rights of women are to be safeguarded by laws that award a disproportionate power to women to balance the ‘privilege’ granted to men by ‘patriarchy’. Such a mindset is reflected when the law automatically presumes the potential guilt of all men and the innocence of all women with regard to such allegations. The Law formulated clearly assumes that women are always truthful when they file such complaints contrary to the obvious reality that women are as much prone to lying as men.
The Feminist reaction to the guidelines set by the Supreme Court only confirm my assertions. An article on FirstPost penned by one Deya Bhattacharya, who is quite obviously a Feminist, titled ‘Domestic violence: Supreme Court verdict on Section 498A puts family honour over women’s rights’ claims, “It (the Bench of the Supreme Court) ignores the historical underrepresentation and oppression of women in all phases of life that has given rise to gender inequality within public and private spaces and attempts to read down a protective legal provision meant for women for the pre-empted violation of men’s rights.” Apparently, curbing the egregious misuse of law is victimizing women. Deya Bhattacharya concludes her article with the words, “This Supreme Court direction is regressive and goes against all that we have tried to achieve for women’s rights in private spaces in India.” It is pretty clear that Feminists are willing to sacrifice the rights of thousands of innocent men at the altar of women empowerment if their propositions could help them assume a sense of moral superiority.
The guidelines set by the Supreme Court is a significant victory for the Men’s Rights Movement in India. For long, the Rights of many innocent men have been trampled over by the Draconian Law that is IPC 498A. Although there is a long way to go yet to establish true Gender Equality for men before the Law, it is indeed a momentous decision towards the same. In this moment, I would like to congratulate everyone who has contributed towards rectifying the innumerable justice that has been perpetuated in the name of Women Empowerment and a special mention goes out to Deepika Bharadwaj who has worked tirelessly on the issue and personally highlighted the plight of dozens of men who have been harangued by the misuse of the law. | {
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Washington, DC (CNN) President Donald Trump's former top Russia adviser is warning that President Vladimir Putin has America "exactly where he wants us."
"Putin, sadly, has got all of our political class, every single one of us, including the media, exactly where he wants us. He's got us feeling vulnerable...on edge, and he's got us questioning the legitimacy of our own systems," Fiona Hill told CBS' Lesley Stahl in an interview set to air on "60 Minutes" Sunday.
The interview marks the former top White House official's first since testifying in the impeachment inquiry into Trump. During congressional hearings in the inquiry, Hill warned that the Republican defense of the President -- by peddling Ukraine conspiracy theories -- was in danger of extending Russia's meddling in the 2016 US presidential election
Hill, who left the Trump administration last summer, has studied Russia for decades and is a critical biographer of Putin, authoring or co-authoring a number of books on Russia, including two editions of a book titled "Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.
In the interview, Hill said Russia understands how to exploit American divisions. | {
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Find Her.
Is the ancient directive that has once again reawakened in the hearts of
those who hide.
Kill Her!
Is the frantic command of those who fear their rise.
Aelia returns from a vacation that did not go quite as she expected, to a
life she does not feel at home in but that is, at least, hers. Or so she thinks. Within days of returning she is targeted by a hitman and she has no idea why.
But then neither does he. All Kyle Rhys knows is that to protect humanity,
this woman must die. At least, he thinks, killing her will be easy. After all,
the organization that has raised him has prepared him for her death
his entire life. So why can’t he kill her?
In an impossible turn of events, both killer and target find themselves
on the run from those who would stop at nothing to destroy them. | {
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With the pending publication of our Summer 2012 issue comes a milestone for The Rag—we’ve been out for one year. We’d like to first take the opportunity to thank all of the readers and writers who have supported us. Your trust and interest in what we’re doing is greatly appreciated. Some changes to The Rag are also coming. While we … | {
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Class consciousness does not flow automatically out of class identity. Being a worker does not necessarily mean you will come to identify as a worker. Instead, you can think of class consciousness as a process of discovery, of insights derived from events that put the relationships of class into stark relief.
Or as the political theorist Cedric J. Robinson observed about the Civil War and Emancipation,
Groups moved to the logic of immediate self-interest and to historical paradox. Consciousness, when it did develop, had come later in the process of the events. The revolution had caused the formation of revolutionary consciousness and had not been caused by it. The revolution was spontaneous.
We aren’t yet living through a revolution. But we are seeing how self-interest and paradox are shaping the consciousness of an entire class of people. The coronavirus pandemic has forced all but the most “essential” workers to either leave their jobs or work from home. And who are those essential workers? They work in hospitals and grocery stores, warehouses and meatpacking plants. They tend to patients and cash out customers, clean floors and stock shelves. They drive trucks, deliver packages and help sustain this country as it tries to fight off a deadly virus.
The close-quarters, public-facing nature of this work mean these workers are also more likely to be exposed to disease, and many of them are furious with their employers for not doing enough to protect them. To protect themselves, they’ve begun to speak out. Some have even decided to strike.
At the start of the crisis, in mid-March, bus drivers in Detroit refused to drive, citing safety concerns. “The drivers didn’t feel safe going on the bus, spreading their germs and getting germs from anybody,” Glenn Tolbert, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 26, said in an interview with The Detroit News. “We are on the front lines and picking up more sick people than doctors see. This was a last resort but drivers didn’t feel safe.” Their actions prompted officials to increase cleaning, provide masks to passengers and drivers, and eliminate fares to keep person-to-person interactions to a minimum. | {
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S-Town (Shit-Town) is a seven-episode documentary podcast from the makers of Serial and This American Life, launched in its entirety two weeks ago. An instant hit, described by Jon Ronson as “the best podcast I’ve ever heard”, it’s a strange tale that begins with a suspected murder and is flipped around by another death. Within the story we find hidden gold, ancient clocks, bizarre tattoos, an actual maze… At its centre: John B McLemore, an eccentric horologist from Woodstock, Bib County, Alabama. Brian Reed, who has worked for TAL for seven years, is the reporter and co-producer (with Serial’s Julie Snyder) of S-Town. He spent three years making the show.
The story begins with a mystery, but that mystery shape-shifts throughout…
Going to Bib County taught me something about people – at least, the people of Bib County – and that is that people’s minds will go to paranoid, conspiratorial places very easily. I was surprised at how quickly very reasonable people would jump to be suspicious of others. I feel that’s where the different mysteries come from – from people in the story telling me, “This is really bad, can you look into this?”, and then me looking into it and saying, “There is a more human reason for this than you think…”
The week in radio: S-Town review – exceptional storytelling Read more
John McLemore is a terrifically compelling person. Do you believe, as a reporter, that everyone has a story to tell?
Everybody has a story, but very few have a story that should be told on the radio or in a podcast. With John, it was the way he spoke, but more than that, it was the experience of that first phone call with him. You can build moving, amazing radio stories out of interviews where people are just telling you the story of something in the past. But then there’s this other type of radio tape, which is more exciting … when something is literally happening in the tape. And that first phone call with John was one of those. I edited it very quickly after we spoke and it went into the first programme almost exactly as I edited it. John lays out the story of a murder incredibly well, but also we’re in the midst of this other thing, where he’s reaching out, trying to say something about his life, wrestling with his own doubts, regrets and his loathing of his talent… That’s happening in that phone call and it’s what made it so special.
Are there ethical problems around reporting on dead people?
There’s a long tradition of journalism that’s done about people that aren’t there, like biography. And with every story, you’re always weighing up what to include, what’s appropriate, what’s the impact on the people involved versus the value to the story. It wasn’t that different in this case. You apply your own moral compass and use the judgment of your editors.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brian Reed interviews John B McLemore during the making of S-Town. Photograph: Andrea Morales
This American Life and Serial are renowned for the compelling nature of their podcasts. Do you use techniques from other disciplines?
Absolutely. I was a theatre major in college. So I felt at home when I stumbled into my internship at This American Life, because people were talking about “bringing a character on stage”, or scenes, or the stakes. Ira Glass envisioned This American Life as an entertainment first and foremost, and we use all those dramatic techniques every day. We’re putting on a show. What’s different about S-Town is that, in terms of technique, we also turned to novels. Early on, Julie and I sensed that the details and the metaphors that John was handing me – the maze, clockwork – were novelistic. And with a novel, people will open the first page, engage with a character and may not know what’s going on for the first 50 pages. We thought we could do that with a podcast.
There were two novels we definitely drew from. The first was Stoner by John Williams, because it’s about an unremarkable life. That was in our heads. And then, in terms of writing techniques, Edward P Jones and The Known World. He’ll be writing about a character and he’ll insert these sentences where he tells you something that happens in the future to this person. I love it, it’s beautiful and omniscient, and I realised that simply by reporting for three years, I’d accidentally given myself the power of omniscience. So there are moments where I jump into the future tense.
Being with John, and the people he hung out with, you’d feel like you’d stepped through the looking glass
What have you learned from John B McLemore?
Many things. Two come to mind. I learned that it’s important for us to kick each other in the ass, in terms of the shit that’s going on in the world. It is easy to fall into apathy. John made me feel more outraged, worried and dismayed at the ease with which we retreat into ourselves and become convinced that we can’t fix things.
And being with John, and the people he hung out with, you’d feel like you’d stepped through the looking glass a little bit. Like you were off the grid, a place where the normal rules of society didn’t quite apply, especially being on his property. He forces a new perception of reality on anyone who is around him. That’s so special, people who are able to do that, even if the rest of normal society bristles against them sometimes. It’s a “fuck it” attitude. I don’t care, I’m gonna be me, follow my passions and curiosities. And John has found all sorts of people to come along with him, who are, in their own ways, of that mindset.
When I was listening to S-Town, I kept thinking of Jez Butterworth’s play, Jerusalem. John reminds me of the Johnny character in that play, the weird country outsider who everyone needs but simultaneously oppresses…
Ah, that’s such a spectacular play. I love it, and I have thought about it a lot! That’s the vibe exactly. There are definite similarities… The pied piper aspect. And how it’s burdensome on the person who’s the leader – it’s tiring. You’re chafing against everything around you every day. I saw a tweet I liked: it said something like, “S-Town shows all that’s spectacular about living and all that’s detrimental about society”. There is that kind of tension in John’s life. From the start, you know John knows exactly how to live, but it is really hard for him to find a place where his life can fully be realised. I think a lot of people who experience that, maybe even worse than John.
Why is the US better than the UK at making these kind of podcasts?
I came over and hung out at the BBC for a few days to talk about this. The most practical thing I found, that could be changed, is that it’s not built into the system of the BBC to kill stories. In terms of the budgeting, workflow and culture, if you work on a story, at the BBC, you have to create a story out of it. But at This American Life, it’s built into our budget and culture to kill half the things we start. The freedom of that is so important. It’s so much harder to drag something mediocre over the finishing line than to make something great. Killing is the secret source of getting things to be good. | {
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The fourth season of Fuller House will center on Kimmy Gibbler's pregnancy with Stephanie Tanner and Jimmy Gibbler's child, acting as their surrogate, but Fernando Hernandez-Guerrero-Fernandez-Guerrero also wants a corner of what's supposed to be a triangle.
Juan Pablo Di Pace, who stars as Kimmy's (Andrea Barber) ex-husband, told TVLine this weekend that his character is convinced he's pregnant as much as Kimmy.
“It’s not so much that Fernando thinks it’s his child, he thinks it’s his pregnancy,” the former Dancing With The Stars contestant told the site. “Like, he thinks he’s just as pregnant as her — the drama, the swollen body parts, the whole thing. It’s very Fernando.”
Di Pace called Kimmy's pregnancy "very unusual," adding that "she goes against everything you think a pregnant woman is going to be. She’s doing cartwheels around the kitchen and eating the spiciest foods. She basically does everything Kimmy would normally do — only now she’s pregnant.”
The new season will also include a visit from Fernando's mother, played by Maria Canals-Barrera (Wizards of Waverly Place, Cristela). When she was cast in August, TVLine reported that she will arrive in San Francisco, convinced that Kimmy is pregnant with her new grandchild. This story will create a "comedy of errors," Di Pace said.
"We’ve been talking about having Fernando’s mom on the show for three seasons, and I had so many ideas about what his mother would be like. I’ve always wanted a Sofia Vergara/Jennifer Lopez mother, and they gave her to me," Di Pace told the site. "She’s also way too young to be my mother. You can tell where Fernando gets his drama from.”
Fuller House is the sequel series to the '90s classic series Full House starring original cast members Barber, Candace Cameron Bure as D.J. Tanner and Jodie Sweetin as Stephanie Tanner. John Stamos, Lori Loughlin, Dave Coulier and Bob Saget have also appeared on the show. Stamos is even seen in one of the preview photos Netflix released last month.
Fernando is Di Pace's breakout role, and he earned even more fans while on Dancing With The Stars this fall. Although he earned eye-popping scores every week, his audience voting results were not enough to save him from elimination last week. Di Pace's fans were so shocked that some even wanted a recount before this week's finale.
"Thank you so much for the outrage :) all I’ll say is I’ve had the time of my life DANCING and I’m so glad you guys recognized that! At the end of the day I got to do what I love," Di Pace tweeted on Nov. 13.
While Di Pace is trying to put on a smile after getting eliminated, Bure said she might stop watching DWTS completely after her co-star was cut.
Fuller House's fourth season will be released on Netflix on Dec. 14. The DWTS finale airs Monday at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.
Photo credit: Netflix | {
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CHENNAI: The countdown for India’s crucial GSLV-D5 rocket powered by an indigenous cryogenic upper stage engine began at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota at 11.18am on Saturday.
The 49.13-metre rocket with a lift-off mass of 414.75 tonne will carry to space the 1,982-kg GSAT-14 communication satellite with applications in tele-education and tele-medicine. The rocket will lift off at 4:18 PM on Sunday.
After two failures and an aborted attempt at launching the ‘heavy duty’ rocket in the past three years, Indian Space Research Organisation scientists say they are confident of a successful launch this time. “We have done 45 different tests and made several corrections to some components after reviewing the previous flights of GSLV,” Isro chairman K Radhakrishnan told TOI minutes after the 29-hour countdown began on Saturday. “We are confident,” he said.
While India has mastered the PSLV range of rockets with a string of 25 consecutive successes, GSLV, which can carry heavier payloads including humans to space, has remained a challenge. In April 2010, Isro tested its first indigenous cryogenic engine , but it failed a little less than a second after the cryogenic stage ignited. A refurbished GSLV-D5 was to be launched in August 2013, but a leak in the liquid fuel tank forced the mission to be aborted two hours before the rocket was to lift off.
“We have thoroughly studied the past experiences and made changes. We are all upbeat,” said Radhakrishnan while travelling from the Isro headquarters in Bangalore to Sriharikota on Saturday.
The Sriharikota launch pad became active after the mission readiness review team and the launch authorization board cleared the launch on December 28, 2013. Soon the vehicle was moved from the vehicle assembly building to the umbilical tower.
India had got seven cryogenic engines from Russia, and Isro has used six of them. With no affordable supply coming from abroad, India felt the necessity to develop its own cryogenic engine, which uses liquid hydrogen as fuel and liquid oxygen and oxidizer. Cryogenics, the science of extremely low temperatures, has posed a challenge to rocket scientists across the world.
India’s ambitious future space programmes, including interplanetary explorations and manned missions, rest on the shoulders of GSLV. A successful flight of GSLV-D5 on Sunday would be a morale booster for Isro and the best promise for bigger space ventures.
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Illustration Fruzsina Kuhári
Assuming you can pay off your balance every month, travel rewards credit cards can shower you with plane tickets, hotel rooms, and rental cars essentially for free. In fact, I just booked two round trip tickets to Hawaii using nothing but a sign-up bonus.
Basically every hotel chain, airline, and bank offers their own rewards cards, but most of us don’t want to deal with dozens of accounts; we just want one or two of the best cards we can get. Lifehacker ran a Hive Five on this subject in 2011, but with summer travel season in high swing, we figured it was a good time to revisit the topic. So travel down to the comments and nominate your favorite, and be sure to note the rules.
Five Best Rewards Credit Cards A credit card can be a useful tool if you know how to use it, and rewards cards offer great perks… Read more
1) Your nomination should contain: The specific name of the product, not just a brand or series. Why you think this item is the best. A link where the item can be purchased. An image of the item. 2) Vote by starring someone else’s nomination. 3) Please do not duplicate nominations.
Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here to learn more, and don’t forget to sign up for our email newsletter . We want your feedback. | {
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Photo d’illustration. Une étude de Genderlinks, menée en 2014, laisse comprendre que la mentalité sexiste à Maurice a la dent dure.
Les années passent. Le monde change. Mais les attitudes sexistes persistent à Maurice. C’est la conclusion à laquelle nous parvenons à la lecture des résultats du dernier sondage de l’ONG Gender Links sur la perception des relations entre les sexes. Menée entre novembre et décembre 2014 auprès de 2 111 Mauriciens, hommes et femmes confondus, âgés entre 35 et 50 ans et vivant dans les 12 districts de l’île, cette étude dresse un constat édifiant sur les relations entre les sexes.
La situation est pour le moins paradoxale. Si huit Mauriciennes sur dix pensent que les tâches ménagères doivent être partagées entre l'homme et la femme et que l’homme et la femme doivent avoir un traitement d'égal à égale, le même nombre de Mauriciens pense que si un homme bat une femme, cela signifie simplement qu’il l’aime.
Sept Mauriciennes sur dix estiment même que si une femme commet une erreur, son mari a le droit de la punir. Et qu’une femme doit obéir à son mari et qu'il est parfaitement normal que «l’homme ait le dernier mot sur toutes les questions familiales». Par ailleurs, sept Mauriciennes sur dix considèrent qu’une femme doit avoir d'abord l’aval de son mari pour accepter un emploi rétribué. Le même nombre de Mauriciennes trouvent tout à fait normal que la femme remette son salaire à son conjoint.
D’ailleurs, sept Mauriciennes sur dix sont persuadées que les enfants appartiennent au mari et à la famille de celui-ci. Sept Mauriciennes sur dix affirment que les femmes n’aiment pas suivre les informations et qu’elles s’intéressent «surtout aux télénovélas et aux palabres». Cinq Mauriciennes sur dix et un nombre similaire d’hommes estiment que si une femme porte une jupe courte, elle «demande à être violée». Une situation qui est loin d’être nouvelle. Entre 2010 et 2011, Gender Links avait mené une étude sur les indicateurs de violence à Maurice et les résultats étaient quasi similaires à ceux tout obtenus par cette nouvelle étude.
Selon Anushka Virahsawmy, Country Manager de Gender Links, la situation ne s'est guère ameliorée comme les résultats le démontrent : «Il n’y a eu aucune amélioration entre 2010 et 2014 en dépit du travail effectué par les autorités et les organisations de la société civile.» Pour changer cette mentalité, elle estime qu’il faut commencer par «suivre de près les familles concernées et à risque». | {
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Epic Games
Update: Fortnite's Playground mode is now live, so what are you waiting for?! For more details on its release, click here. Or read on to learn about its rocky launch.
It's nearly been a week since Fortnite: Battle Royale's latest update arrived, but its most-anticipated new feature, Playground mode, has still yet to emerge after a rocky debut. Fortnite creator Epic Games has been since working on a fix, but so far, there's no date set for Playground's return.
But once the update dropped, Fortnite's multiplayer matchmaking began to break, forcing the company to roll the update back while it worked out the bugs, GameSpot reports. The game itself is still working smoothly while the errors are being fixed, but you'll have to wait for these new features.
We’re aware of the stability and performance issues currently impacting players and we’re working on an emergency patch to resolve this. We’ll keep everyone updated on the progress and roll out of the patch. 🛠️ — Fortnite (@FortniteGame) June 27, 2018
Playground mode, as described by Epic, lets up to four people drop down on the island with relaxed settings to practice building and shooting. Players will get a full hour on the island without a storm closing in to brush up on fort building and using weapons they have yet to master.
You won't have problems finding gear either -- all gold chest nodes are turned on in this mode, so you can familiarize yourself with where loot may drop when you play the regular game. Friendly fire is turned on, but if a friend kills you, you respawn almost immediately, dropping from the battle bus again with the freedom to go anywhere else on the island.
In their latest message to fans Monday, Epic provided some hope that Playground would be coming back sometime soon, though there's still work to be done.
"We have some system performance goals that we believe are required in order to relaunch the Playground LTM," Epic said in a post to the r/FortniteBR subreddit. "We've continued working towards (sic) these goals over the weekend and our most recent load tests look promising, but there are some anomalies in the data that we still need to understand."
Epic Games
Epic has also added dual-wield pistols. After dropping onto the island a few times today I'm yet to find any, so I'm still waiting to feel like Neo from The Matrix. Also, to celebrate the Fourth of July, rocket launchers will temporarily be called fireworks launchers, changing the explosion visuals to look like fireworks for the summer holiday.
Another welcome update has to do with communicating with your teammates. Now, when you place a marker on the map to point out a location, your teammates will see visual indicators in-game where those markers are placed. There were also tweaks to damage and accuracy for both shotguns and SMGs.
In addition to the update, Epic announced that season 5, featuring all new challenges, will launch on July 12.
Now playing: Watch this: Fortnite: Battle Royale tips for gamers just starting...
E3 2018: Everything we saw at the biggest games show of the year.
Fortnite: CNET's complete guide to the biggest battle royale game.
Updated July 2, 1:14pm PT: New information about Playground mode's status added from Epic.
Updated July 3, 11:03am PT: Now reflects that the Playground mode is now live. | {
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Hobby photographer Tim Binnion attended the 2018 Shanghai Grand Prix, using the event as an opportunity to take some shots. While most motorsports photographers typically carry a DSLR with a long zoom lens, Binnion instead opted to bring along his Game Boy Camera.
The Game Boy Camera was a unique game cartridge released by Nintendo in 1998. Mounted on top of the cartridge is a tiny fixed-lens digital camera. The Game Boy Camera's small size and $45.95 price tag meant that its specs were pretty poor, even for the time of its release. All images are in grayscale and have a 128-pixel resolution.
Additionally, the game pack can store just 30 images, and the only way to actually copy the photos from the camera is to use a no-longer-supported Game Boy Printer. Like many Nintendo accessories, the Game Boy Camera never really got off the ground, and it was discontinued in 2002.
Tim Binnion shared with The Drive some details about shooting on the abstract device. To bring it up to a somewhat modern standard, the photographer had to make some small but crucial modifications. The most obvious limitation was the camera's low resolution and tiny fixed lens. Shooting a car that's at least 100 feet away would only result in an unrecognizable speck on the Game Boy's screen. His solution was to adapt a cheap zoom lens made for a smartphone.
Binnion then had to 3-D print a custom mount that could mate the lens to the GBC body. There was also the matter of actually being able to transfer the images. For that, Binnion bought an adapter made by Game Boy modders that could save the photos to a standard SD card. | {
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Redação AMPOST
A rede de supermercados Carrefour está no centro de uma polêmica. Na última quarta-feira (28), um segurança do supermercado teria espancado um cachorro na unidade de Osasco da rede, em São Paulo.
A denúncia feita nas redes sociais mostra imagens do animal com as patas traseiras feridas e marcas de sangue no chão da loja. Defensores dos animais e ativistas dizem ainda que houve tentativa de envenenamento do animal.
Internautas estão levantando uma hashtag nas redes sociais de boicote e intimando pessoas a não comprarem na rede de supermercados. | {
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Bertschy, 22 (4/5/94), has tallied one assist in five games with Minnesota and three points (1-2=3) in seven games with Iowa this season. The 5-foot-10, 186-pound native of Fribourg, Switzerland, notched his first career NHL point with an assist against Dallas on Oct. 29. He has recorded one assist in eight career NHL contests with the Wild. Bertschy was selected by Minnesota in the sixth round (158th overall) of the 2012 NHL Entry Draft and wears jersey No. 47 with Minnesota. | {
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Boris Johnson addressed business leaders at the CBI annual conference this morning.
Having regaled the audience with tales of a short-lived ambition to set up a kitchen tiles company after he left university, the Prime Minister got onto corporation tax — understandably a major concern for the assembled guests.
He told the crowd that the Conservatives would postpone plans to cut business rates, but sought to “remind” them that:
“The alternative is Jeremy Corbyn — who would whack it straight back up to the highest levels in Europe.”
But Mr Johnson is wrong.
As it stands, corporation tax is currently 19 per cent, and had been slated to drop to 17 per cent, (though Mr Johnson confirmed today that his party will not go ahead with the cut).
Labour say they will raise the main rate of corporation tax to 26 per cent by 2022 — the level it was in 2011.
There are various ways to measure corporate tax rates, but stats from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) show that on all standard measures, a 26 per cent rate would not see the UK take top spot as Mr Johnson claims.
Looking at the rate set by central governments, we’d be behind France, Portugal, Belgium, and Greece. The same is true when we look at the combined corporate income tax rate (a measure that includes taxes levelled locally, as happens in some countries outside the UK).
The Conservative Party were contacted for comment. | {
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Spider_Pie, Spider_Pie, does whatever a Spider_Pie does...
...which mostly consists of being awesome. I should have got my parcel yesterday but the postman came when I was in the shower so I didn't hear him knock and had to wait an extra day to go and pick it up from the post office. HUFF. But then I did get it so yay.
I got:
a yummy vanilla scented candle from the PDSA because I said I had scented candles on my christmas list and I love charity shops
a set of silicone cupcake cases, because there was a silicone baking set on my wishlist and you can never make too many cupcakes at once, but as it happens I didn't already have any
and bestest of all, a hand-made hat with earflaps in the colours of House Stark plus my favourites blue and green. That's something else that was on my christmas list because my ears always get cold when I'm walking to work, but right now my ears are SO DAMN COSY. Yes I am wearing it right now, and probably won't take it off again until April or so. | {
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Sur le podium dressé dans les jardins du consulat de France à Shanghaï, Zhongmeng Wen brandit avec fierté le chèque de 50 000 renminbi (RMB) – environ 7 000 € – que vient de lui remettre, ce soir de fin octobre, le Club France Chine.
Pour la troisième édition du concours lancé par ce réseau qui fédère les jeunes Chinois venus étudier en métropole – ils sont plus de 10 000 chaque année –, quelque trois cents candidats lui disputaient le titre d’« entrepreneur de l’année », une distinction destinée à valoriser la formation « à la française ». Et si son projet de « robots modulaires collaboratifs » l’a finalement emporté sur celui « d’électromoteur de refroidissement » soumis par sa principale concurrente, Yuxin Li, le lauréat n’en garde pas moins la tête froide.
« Cette récompense est un bel encouragement, mais il me faut encore trouver 4 millions de RMB (800 000 €) pour lancer mon entreprise. Si j’arrive à convaincre des investisseurs, ce sera une véritable révolution industrielle. En Chine et dans le monde entier », promet le jeune homme de 26 ans dans un français quasi parfait.
Né à l’écart de la modernisation
La langue de Molière, Zhongmeng l’a apprise avec Liliane, la dame qui l’a hébergé à son arrivée à Troyes, où il débarque en 2010 pour préparer un master en systèmes mécaniques et matériaux. « C’était la première fois que je découvrais une autre manière de vivre et de faire que la voie chinoise. Cela m’a ouvert l’esprit », se souvient-il.
Son histoire illustre à elle seule le formidable « bond en avant » qu’a connu la Chine – et ses habitants – après l’arrivée au pouvoir de Deng Xiaoping, en 1978. Tournant le dos aux années Mao, le « Petit Timonier » décide alors d’ouvrir le pays aux firmes capitalistes et d’envoyer les meilleurs de ses fils se frotter au monde occidental. Zhongmeng sera du voyage.
Pourtant, rien ne prédestinait ce fils de fonctionnaire à vivre une telle odyssée. Né en 1990 dans la province de Shandong, à 400 km au sud de Pékin, il passe ses premières années à Juye, une « bourgade » de l’intérieur très à l’écart du mouvement de modernisation qui touche les grandes cités côtières comme Qingdao ou Shanghaï. « Chez nous, il n’y avait rien, ni voiture, ni télévision. La seule manière d’améliorer son sort était de faire des études pour espérer, un jour, trouver du travail à la ville. En Chine, obtenir un diplôme, c’est la route pour avancer », raconte-t-il.
Une bourse du gouvernement pour étudier à l’étranger
Élève doué, Zhongmeng passe un des concours organisés par les autorités et décroche une bourse d’État pour intégrer une des universités de la Ligue C9, les plus prestigieuses du pays. Direction l’Institut de technologie de Harbin, en Mandchourie, surnommée la « ville de glace » en raison de l’interminable hiver qui y règne. « Pour retourner chez moi, il fallait deux jours de train dans des conditions très pénibles. Aussi j’ai passé quatre ans ici, de 2006 à 2010, sans pratiquement quitter le campus où vivaient 40 000 étudiants venus de toute la Chine. Mais j’en garde un bon souvenir : au moins j’ai appris à aimer la neige », plaisante-t-il.
Il y décroche aussi son titre d’ingénieur en automatismes, si brillamment que le gouvernement lui offre une nouvelle bourse, cette fois pour l’étranger. « J’aurais pu partir aux États-Unis, mais ma famille n’avait pas les moyens de participer aux frais. J’ai choisi la France parce qu’avec les 1 200 € par mois qui m’étaient proposés, je n’avais rien à payer », reconnaît-il.
Des premiers mois passés en Champagne-Ardenne, Zhongmeng garde un souvenir mitigé qui le fait sourire aujourd’hui : « La France m’est d’abord apparue comme un petit pays, ancien, rural, peu développé. Pour tout dire, j’avais l’impression d’être revenu à Juye, ma ville natale. »
L’envie de fonder sa propre société
Il changera d’avis en découvrant l’excellence du système universitaire français et la qualité d’accueil de Liliane, l’hôte qui lui rendra l’éloignement du pays moins douloureux. Cinq ans plus tard, le jeune homme s’est d’ailleurs si bien acclimaté qu’il songe même, doctorat en poche, à chercher un travail à Paris où il s’installe en juillet 2015. Mais les attentats qui endeuillent la capitale à la fin de l’année et les appels pressants de ses parents finissent par le ramener au pays.
Aujourd’hui, Zhongmeng poursuit un nouveau rêve : fonder, avec trois amis, sa propre société spécialisée dans la conception de robots dits collaboratifs, c’est-à-dire capables de cohabiter en toute sécurité avec des humains sur une même chaîne de production. « Ici, où l’industrie de main-d’œuvre se modernise très vite, ce type de machines dessine l’avenir. Le marché potentiel est énorme », s’enthousiasme-t-il.
Le jeune « entrepreneur de l’année » s’est donné six mois pour lever les fonds nécessaires. Et ne doute pas un instant de sa réussite : « En Chine, tout est beaucoup plus facile qu’en France pour des gens comme moi. À Shanghaï, tout est à faire, tout est possible et chacun a sa chance. »
_____________________________________________________
Son inspiration. Continuer à avoir des rêves plein la tête
« Lorsque j’étais adolescent, je ne savais pas très bien ce que je voulais faire plus tard, mais c’est en faisant de nouvelles expériences que l’on se découvre soi-même. Aujourd’hui, mon ambition est de fonder ma propre société. Pas pour l’argent, même si cela compte, mais parce que la création d’une équipe est une aventure enrichissante. J’aimerais bâtir quelque chose. Du moins essayer. Parce que la réussite ou l’échec, ce n’est pas le plus important. L’important, c’est d’avoir des rêves. Et des rêves j’en ai plein la tête. » | {
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Washington boasts of military buildup against China
3 June 2014
If anyone was fooled by the media analyses portraying President Barack Obama’s speech at West Point last week as a turn toward “moderation” and “restraint,” or tempted to think that the World Socialist Web Site was exaggerating in describing the address as a blueprint for “permanent and global war in pursuit of the interests of the US financial elite,” they only need read the bellicose tirade delivered by his defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, in Singapore on Saturday.
The occasion for Hagel’s provocative speech was the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual meeting of Asia-Pacific defense ministers, together with their civilian and military chiefs of staff. The conference is ostensibly a forum for “dialogue” and “confidence building” aimed at furthering regional security and cooperation.
Instead, the Pentagon chief delivered an address that spelled out in detail the measures Washington is taking to build up its military power in the Asia Pacific for the purpose of encircling China while containing and rolling back its influence in the region.
In essence, Hagel’s speech is a corollary to the May 28 commencement address given by Obama at West Point. Critics of the presentation at the US Military Academy have pointed out that, while the administration had announced its “pivot to Asia” as a strategic axis of US foreign policy, Obama made no mention of this turn in what had been billed as a major foreign policy speech.
In point of fact, Obama did touch on the essence of the so-called “pivot” in his address, making a series of menacing statements in relation to China and suggesting that Washington would have to prepare for a military response to its rising global rival.
He placed China in the same category as Russia, presenting the two countries as threats to regional peace and security. “China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors,” Obama declared.
He went on to describe the territorial disputes in the South and East China seas, which Washington has deliberately inflamed and turned into global flash points, accusing China of “regional aggression” that could “ultimately impact our allies, and could draw in our military.” And he vowed to back Southeast Asian governments in maritime disputes with China in the South China Sea.
Yet there was no mention of the “pivot,” no declaration of a new over-arching strategic turn by the US and its massive military machine to confront China in the Asian-Pacific theater. Instead, the president told the American people that the principal threat faced by the United States was “terrorism,” the same boogeyman that has been used to justify US aggression abroad since the beginning of the century. No doubt this lack of an explicit statement of US strategy in a major presidential speech was deliberate.
Hagel was asked directly by one of the participants at the conference in Singapore why Obama does not explain the “pivot” to the American people with the same forcefulness with which the defense secretary and other US officials promote it in Asia. The answer is obvious. The popular reaction to a public campaign in support of a policy of military provocation and aggression against a nuclear-armed China would be one of horror and virulent opposition. So, the thinking in ruling circles undoubtedly goes, better to lead the population unwittingly to the brink of a global conflagration than risk a political firestorm.
In the somewhat more discreet atmosphere of the Shangri-La Dialogue, Hagel felt under no such compunction. He positively boasted of the US military buildup in the region.
Hagel declared that the “pivot” or “rebalance” to Asia “is not a goal, not a promise, or a vision—it’s a reality.”
He pointed to the ten-year Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) reached between Washington and the corrupt Aquino regime in the Philippines offering Washington virtually unrestricted rights to deploy US military forces in that country.
Similarly, he touted the close alliance established between the Obama administration and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who heads up the most right-wing Japanese government in postwar history.
“Consider that just three years ago, the strength of our alliance with Japan was being overshadowed by disagreement over the future of the US presence in Okinawa,” said Hagel. “Today [after a change in government that was pushed by Washington], we have a fully agreed force realignment map …We have also deployed our most advanced capabilities to Japan—including two Global Hawks at Misawa, F-22 fighter aircraft at Kadena, and MV-22 Ospreys on Okinawa.”
He also declared his full support for Abe’s proposal to engage in a more “proactive” use of Japan’s military, as the Japanese prime minister seeks to scrap the postwar constitution that was supposed to prevent a revival of Japanese militarism. US backing has served to underwrite Japan’s increasingly provocative confrontations with China.
On the tense Korean Peninsula, Hagel added, the Pentagon has “enhanced the US Army’s force posture and deployed even more advanced intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities.” He also pointed to the deployment of more than 1,000 US Marines in Western Australia.
Hagel made a point of stressing Washington’s increased military cooperation with India, saying the US welcomed “India’s growing defense capabilities and its commitment to freedom of navigation in the Indian Ocean.”
“In the coming years, the United States will increase its advanced capabilities that are forward-stationed and forward-deployed in the entire region, particularly as we draw down our forces in Afghanistan,” Hagel declared. “And we will ensure that we sustain our freedom of action in the face of disruptive new military technologies.” No one needed to ask what country might be deploying these “disruptive” weapons systems.
The defense secretary went on to detail a new arsenal of warships that will be deployed in the region over the next four years, including the new Joint High Speed Vessel, another nuclear-armed submarine stationed in Guam, four Littoral Combat Ships and the Zumwalt-class destroyer. The new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, he added, will be sold to Japan, South Korea and Australia. By 2020, Hagel said, the US will have 60 percent of both its Navy and Air Force fleets operating in the region. He added that the Obama administration has pledged that no cuts in military spending will come out of the Asia-Pacific buildup.
The speech left no doubt as to which country this arsenal is directed against. China, Hagel charged, “has undertaken destabilizing, unilateral actions asserting its claims in the South China Sea.” He accused it of using “intimidation, coercion, or the threat of force to assert those claims.” And, he vowed, Washington “will not look the other way when fundamental principles of the international order are being challenged.”
Hagel delivered an ultimatum to Beijing, declaring that China had “a choice: to unite and recommit to a stable regional order, or to walk away from that commitment and risk the peace and security that have benefited millions of people throughout the Asia-Pacific, and billions around the world.”
The meaning is clear enough. Either China submits to the post-World War II arrangements establishing US hegemony over the Asia-Pacific region, or it will face the direct threat of war with the United States.
The chief of the Chinese military, Wang Guanzhong, responded angrily to the speech delivered by Hagel as well as to a previous address by Japan’s Prime Minister Abe, declaring them “unacceptable” and saying the two were singing “in chorus.” Hagel’s speech, he said, was designed to “stoke instability… to pick fights and incite disputes and conflicts.”
US imperialism is seeking to encircle China militarily. Its aim is to utilize its residual military superiority to suppress economic and political challenges posed in Asia and on a world scale by the growth of China’s economy. In the final analysis, its aim is to offload as much of the burden of the capitalist crisis that erupted in 2008-2009 onto its rivals, as it steps up the assault on the working class at home.
In Singapore, Hagel repeated Obama’s statement in his West Point speech that “America must always lead on the world stage. If we don’t, no one else will.”
In the conference discussion Sunday, Russia’s Deputy Minister of Defense Anatoly Antonov raised a question: “For me it is not clear why the US must lead,” Antonov said. “To lead what? To where?”
No one should have any doubts. US imperialism is leading humanity to a new eruption of militarism that poses the ever graver threat of a nuclear Third World War.
Bill Van Auken
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Il primo voto del Senato sull’autorizzazione a procedere nei confronti dell’ex ministro dell’Interno Matteo Salvini per il caso della nave militare Gregoretti sarà il 20 gennaio. Una decisione presa dalla Giunta per il regolamento di Palazzo Madama, con il voto decisivo a un ordine del giorno della Lega della presidente del Senato Maria Elisabetta Alberti Casellati, che ha scelto di esprimere la sua preferenza – già di suo fuori dalla prassi – e in particolare a favore della linea sostenuta dal centrodestra (Forza Italia, Lega, Fratelli d’Italia). Tutto questo ha avuto un iter tecnico e procedurale, com’è stato tutto il braccio di ferro degli ultimi dieci giorni di battaglia parlamentare nella quale maggioranza e opposizione se le sono date a colpi di regolamento e di calendario. Ma proprio la tempistica è legata a un significato politico, su cui la maggioranza Pd-M5s-Leu-Italia Viva da una parte e la minoranza di centrodestra dall’altra si sono battute all’ultimo voto: votare il 20, lunedì, a 5 giorni dalle elezioni regionali che Salvini ha investito di senso nazionale, spingerà il leader della Lega a usarla come ulteriore arma di propaganda elettorale.
La decisione della Casellati di votare con le opposizioni per votare lunedì spinge la maggioranza a protestare per la mancata osservanza del ruolo super partes della presidente in una giunta per il regolamento, organismo di garanzia del Senato in cui la situazione è di perfetto equilibrio (6 a 6). Casellati, difesa naturalmente dal centrodestra, respinge le accuse: “Non si può essere terzi solo quando si soddisfano le ragioni della maggioranza e non esserlo più, quando si assumono decisioni che riguardano il corretto funzionamento del Senato”. Più precisamente, sottolinea, non ha votato una proposta avanzata da uno schieramento, ma da “un singolo componente della Giunta, al fine di garantire la mera funzionalità degli organi del Senato”.
Il peso della Casellati
In realtà l’effetto del voto della presidente Casellati è molto più concreto: senza la sua preferenza, vista la situazione di parità in Giunta per il regolamento (6 a 6), la proposta del centrodestra sarebbe stata respinta e il voto sulla relazione Gasparri sarebbe stato rinviato direttamente all’Aula (comma 6, articolo 135 bis del regolamento del Senato), quindi a data da destinarsi, comunque a febbraio. Proprio ieri in Aula al Senato la presidente Casellati era peraltro intervenuta brevemente dal banco della presidenza per sottolineare che si trova in giunta non come membro dell’opposizione (è senatrice di Forza Italia), ma in rappresentanza di maggioranza e opposizione. Matteo Salvini naturalmente gongola: “La Casellati è una senatrice” minimizza dando per implicito che quindi ha usufruito un diritto che però per prassi i presidenti di solito si astengono da esercitare.
La maggioranza e la tentaz
La maggioranza, invece, alza la voce. In particolare il Pd parla con la sua voce più autorevole, quella del segretario Nicola Zingaretti che sottolinea “un atteggiamento molto scorretto e grave della presidente del Senato, che è venuta meno alla sua funzione di super partes e si è schierata su un punto così delicato dalla parte di una componente del Senato”. Nel M5s – che a inizio legislatura, in un’altra stagione politica, votò Casellati presidente – c’è chi arriva a chiederne le dimissioni della presidente: “Si è resa protagonista di una decisione di parte – dice Giuseppe Brescia, presidente della commissione Affari Costituzionali della Camera – violando ogni criterio di imparzialità e facendosi chiaramente influenzare da motivi extra-istituzionali. È un fatto grave perché stiamo parlando della seconda carica dello Stato. Dovrebbe dimettersi”.
La presidente #Casellati ha votato con la destra convocando la #Giunta sulla #Gregoretti per il 20 gennaio. Un fatto gravissimo che mina la terzietà della seconda carica dello Stato. Noi di #ItaliaViva non ci stiamo. — Davide Faraone (@davidefaraone) January 17, 2020
Il primo a protestare era stato il capogruppo democratico, Andrea Marcucci: “Da oggi è certificato, dai suoi atteggiamenti e dalla sua volontà di esprimersi che la presidente del Senato non è più super partes e ha deciso di entrare, per motivi suoi che riteniamo non sufficienti, di scendere pesantemente nell’agone politico diventando un presidente Senato di parte”. “La presidente ha gettato la maschera, ha fatto un colpo di mano – aggiunge Marcucci – La consideriamo una situazione gravissima per il Paese”. Casellati, aggiunge la vicecapogruppo del M5s Alessandra Maiorino, “con il suo voto insieme alle opposizioni smette di essere arbitro e indossa la maglia di una delle squadre in campo”. “E’ un fatto gravissimo e fuori da ogni legittimità – aggiunge Francesco Bonifazi, per Italia Viva – che la seconda carica dello Stato si sia schierata in prima persona con la destra. Noi di Italia Viva lotteremo con tutte le nostre forze per superare questo duplice sopruso fatto prima da Gasparri ed ora, davvero inspiegabilmente, anche dalla Casellati”.
L’ipotesi di una contromossa della maggioranza: disertare il voto
Così ora la maggioranza si prepara alle contromosse. Circola l’ipotesi che i gruppi di maggioranza e favorevoli al processo a Salvini (cioè il centrosinistra più i Cinquestelle) possano disertare la Giunta delle immunità il 20 gennaio, in una seduta che viene ritenuta “illegittima”. Uno o più senatori potrebbero mancare all’appuntamento, lasciando il vantaggio al centrodestra che a oggi avrebbe 10 voti su 23. In questo modo non sarebbe regalata l’arma del “vittimismo elettorale” a Salvini in piena campagna elettorale. La relazione di Gasparri – contraria a dare l’autorizzazione a procedere – sarebbe dunque approvata e approderebbe all’esame dell’Aula a febbraio. Qui in assemblea la maggioranza ha i voti per ribaltare tutto: bocciare la relazione Gasparri e far ripartire tutto l’iter dalla Giunta delle immunità, con un relatore e una relazione nuovi. Per ora Marcucci non conferma: “Non lo so, ne ragioneremo. Di sicuro la Giunta si riunisce in modo illegittimo” risponde. “Ma la cosa più grave – ha aggiunto – è che noi avevamo proposto che si riunisse oggi per completare il nostro lavoro, ma evidentemente questa cosa non era di gradimento. Così hanno fatto un colpo di mano gravissimo. Siamo molto preoccupati per la democrazia”. “A questo punto – aggiunge l’ex presidente del Senato Piero Grasso – ogni decisione da parte mia e della maggioranza è possibile, dal momento che il voto determinante sarà quello successivo dell’Aula. Avremo modo coi colleghi di maggioranza di valutare insieme la giusta strategia. Ribadisco la mia convinzione assoluta: nessun ministro può essere o sentirsi sopra la legge”.
La ricostruzione della giornata: la Giunta per il regolamento
La giornata era iniziata tra l’altro con l’integrazione della Giunta per il regolamento con due senatrici di maggioranza, Loredana De Petris di Liberi e Uguali in rappresentanza del gruppo Misto e Julia Unterberger per le Autonomie. Un passaggio che la Casellati, nella nota in cui ha rivendicato la sua terzietà, ha sottolineato come riprova dell’imparzialità. E’ così che finalmente, dopo 5 mesi, la Giunta per il regolamento ha avuto una composizione analoga all’Aula del Senato: così i componenti sono saliti a 6 per la maggioranza (2 Pd, 2 M5s, uno del Misto e uno delle Autonomie) e 6 per la minoranza (quelli che c’erano già: 3 della Lega, 2 di Forza Italia, uno di Fratelli d’Italia. La De Petris, peraltro, ha precisato che l’integrazione con i due nuovi ingressi “non è stata una generosa concessione, come cerca di far credere l’opposizione”. Perché oltre a restituire l’equilibrio rispetto al nuovo assetto maggioranza-opposizione inaugurato a settembre, “in tutte le legislature e con qualsiasi maggioranza, si è sempre cercato di fare in modo che la composizione della Giunta per il regolamento rispecchiasse quella dell’Aula. Infatti avevamo chiesto più volte l’integrazione da ben prima di questa vicenda“.
Lo strabismo del centrodestra: prima vota in un modo, poi in un altro. In un’ora
In questo tunnel burocratico-procedurale si è quindi passati – anzi tornati – a decidere sul giorno della votazione sull’autorizzazione a procedere per Salvini da parte della Giunta per le immunità che deve dare il primo ok (il secondo è in Aula). Come noto, in esame c’è la relazione del presidente della Giunta Maurizio Gasparri che sostiene il no al processo a Salvini. Ma se in questi giorni il duello è stato per stabilire se la Giunta doveva fermarsi fino alle Regionali come il resto dell’attività del Senato, la discussione si è invece spostata sulla scadenza della relazione: secondo il regolamento dev’essere votata entro 30 giorni, periodo che parte da quando la richiesta di autorizzazione a procedere è stata trasmessa dal tribunale dei ministri di Catania alla presidenza del Senato (il 17 dicembre).
Ma i 30 giorni sono un termine “ordinatorio o perentorio”? Tradotto, la scelta sarebbe diventata tra votare il testo di Gasparri subito, oggi stesso, ultimo giorno a disposizione, o lunedì prossimo. Differenza non da poco: oggi erano ancora assenti due componenti della Giunta – Piero Grasso di Leu e Mario Michele Giarrusso del M5s, entrambi in missione negli Usa con la commissione Antimafia e peraltro entrambi favorevoli al processo a Salvini -, mentre saranno presenti lunedì. Peraltro la convocazione, oggi non avrebbe rispettato i tempi di avviso ai membri della Giunta di almeno 24 ore, previsti da regolamento. E scaduti i trenta giorni oggi la relazione sarebbe finita all’esame dell’Aula senza relatore, con data da fissare.
La giravolta del centrodestra
E il paradosso sta nel fatto che in una prima votazione la Giunta per il regolamento aveva votato all’unanimità (quindi centrodestra compreso) sulla perentorietà dei 30 giorni, cioè che la scadenza non era elastica e che il mese di tempo si concludeva oggi. Ma Lega, Fratelli d’Italia e Forza Italia hanno fatto un’inversione a U nel giro di un’ora sostenendo un ordine del giorno del senatore leghista Ugo Grassi – fuoriuscito dal M5s poche settimane fa – che concede al presidente della Giunta per le immunità Gasparri una deroga al termine dei 30 giorni per allungarlo fino a lunedì. “Trovo molto grave che cinque minuti prima si stabilisca che il termine è perentorio e dopo 5 minuti, non dopo un giorno, si procede a stabilire che il termine non è perentorio e quindi si può assolutamente derogare – dice Loredana De Petris, Liberi e Uguali – E questo è successo dopo che la presidente Casellati ha più volte affermato che lei non avrebbe partecipato al voto per la Giunta. Invece, ha fatto una scelta che non possiamo non considerare di parte, questo non ce lo saremmo mai aspettati”.
E’ alla proposta di Grassi che la Casellati ha dato dunque il suo voto, determinante sotto vari punti di vista. Infatti il termine perentorio fissato a oggi – ribadito all’unanimità dalla Giunta – impediva di votare sull’autorizzazione a procedere perché servono le 24 ore di preavviso ai senatori. Ma anche se si fosse votato oggi avrebbe vinto il no al processo a Salvini – per l’assenza di Grasso e Giarrusso -, togliendo l’arma elettorale al leader leghista e con la possibilità di annullare la votazione e far ripartire tutto con il secondo voto dell’Aula. Invece è passata la linea del centrodestra, grazie al sostegno della Casellati: si voterà lunedì. Torneranno Grasso e Giarrusso, non ci sarà il senatore delle Autonomie Meinhard Durnwalder che si è fatto male e è in ospedale. Lui però era orientato al no al processo. Così la votazione a oggi sulla carta finirebbe 12-10 contro la relazione Gasparri, cioè a favore del processo. Sempre che la maggioranza abbia intenzione di presentarsi. | {
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Microsoft has been working hard to cement its position as a hardware manufacturer. The company has already done this in the premium device segment with Surface Pro and Surface Book. However, it looks like Microsoft is working on new devices for later this year which will target both premium and budget segment.
The latest leak comes from a trusted Microsoft watcher, Walking Cat who shared codename of the upcoming Surface Device. According to Walking Cat, Surface Lingo will be the upcoming device from Microsoft.
Surface "L" = "Lingo" — WalkingCat (@h0x0d) June 19, 2018
Moreover, he also confirmed that Lingo will be a tablet since the other codenames are of type covers for the same.
most likely Type Covers — WalkingCat (@h0x0d) June 20, 2018
Walking Cat also confirmed that these new accessories will be available in multiple colours.
For now, we don’t have any idea about the upcoming device but one can speculate that it might be a successor to Surface Pro. There’s also a slight chance that Lingo might be the low-cost Surface device that Microsoft is planning to launch this year to compete with iPad Pro. Apart from Lingo, Microsoft is also working on phone codenamed Andromeda and another Surface device codenamed Libra and Capitola. These devices will launch later this year and we also have confirmation on Project Scarlett which will be the next-gen Xbox console launching in 2020.
The list of hardware doesn’t end here as we are sure that Microsoft is working on the successor of Surface Book 2 as well as Surface Hub and Hololens. However, we still lack details on those projects and will update as soon as we know more. For now, you can head to the comments section below and let us know what do you expect from Microsoft in the coming years. | {
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A live heart was transported from Aurangabad to Mumbai, a distance of 323.5 kilometres, in one hour and thirty-four minutes and was successfully transplanted into a 4-year-old girl.
A statement from Fortis Hospital in suburban Mulund, where the transplant took place, said that the operation was successful and the girl, a resident of Jalna, was under observation.
The hospital statement said that the live heart of a 13-year-old boy, who died in a road accident, was retrieved in Aurangabad's MGM Hospital yesterday from where it left for Aurangabad Airport at 1:50 pm.
It reached the airport at 1:54 pm covering the 4.8-kilometre distance in 4 minutes thanks to a green corridor set in place there, the hospital said.
A chartered flight brought the heart to Mumbai Airport at 3:05 pm from where it was rushed, via a green corridor, to Fortis Hospital, 18 kilometres away, in 19 minutes.
"The heart reached Fortis at 3:24 pm, one hour and thirty-four minutes after it was retrieved in Aurangabad. The distance covered stood at 323.5 kilometres," Fortis officials said today. | {
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