question
stringlengths 11
179
| article
stringlengths 522
97.6k
| url
stringlengths 35
310
|
|---|---|---|
Will Vineyard Vines' Target Deal Rejuvenate The Brand? | Consumers greeted the February 28th news of Target Corp.s latest partnership with Vineyard Vines with enthusiasm, while some retail experts expressed concern for Vineyard Vines ability to scale to meet demand. Target and Vineyard Vines announced a limited-edition collaboration that will include more than 300 pieces consisting of apparel, accessories, pets, swim, and outdoor goods, such as tableware and games. Prices will range from $2-$120, with most items under $35, the companys press release stated. Vineyard Vines is a brand that our guests know and love, and one that exemplifies our shared sense of optimism and joy through their use of bold colors and prints, said Mark Tritton, executive vice president and chief merchandising officer for Target. Founded in 1998 by brothers Shep and Ian Murray, Vineyard Vines has grown to become an American lifestyle brand. It was inspired by summers the brothers spent on Marthas Vineyard in Massachusetts, hence the smiling pink whale as its brand logo. I am very excited for the line, said Mary Ellen Naugle of Wilmington, Delaware. I am hoping that the prices will be more accessible to those who normally cant go out and pay $50 for a polo shirt. I also hope the selection is a good one and does not sell out immediately, she said, recalling the Target-Lilly Pulitzer partnership of 2015. Then, shoppers lined up before stores opened in the hopes of snagging some Lilly clothing and accessories and within minutes, the racks were completely bare and the online inventory sold out. Supply didnt come close to meeting demand. A History of Partnerships Target as a company has grown through its design partnerships. Over nearly 20 years, collaborations with brands like TOMS, Joanna and Chip Gaines' Hearth and Home, and Marimekko, for example, have kept shoppers coming back for the retailers cheap chic offerings. But the Lilly Pulitzer partnership left Target customers wanting morea lot more. More recently there was the Target-Hunter partnership of 2018. Known for its popular celebrity-approved wellies (aka rain boots), shoppers were excited for the chance to purchase the $150 rain boots for a mere $40 through Target. However, due to production issues, Target first delayed and then canceled the tall boots altogether, leaving customers disappointed. Hunter had other products available for sale within Target, but its boots were atop customers most-wanted list. Its 2011 partnership with Missoni for a limited collection was one of the first of its kind for Target, and, then too, as expected, demand exceeded supply. Target doesnt have a great track record with one-off deals like Missoni, says Paula Rosenblum, managing partner of RSR Research. They also dont have the finest demand forecasting system. The companys past problems originated with its buying. Target has repeatedly underestimated demand for its partners products. This time, Lets see if Target has solved its demand forecasting problems, says Rosenblum. How will Target keep the product from ending up on eBay? A related question is whether Vineyard Vines is ready to quickly ramp up production. This is ultimately beyond anything Vineyard Vines has done before. Can they pull it off? Rosenblum wonders. The partnership comes at a time when Vineyard Vines popularity as a brand may be waning with Gen Z customers. The appearance of its inventory in stores like Marshalls, which deals in off-price merchandise, such as excess inventory, returns, or end-of-season leftovers, suggests that the formerly hard-to-find brands exclusivity may not be benefiting from its near-ubiquity. Given that 63 percent of the population has never heard of Vineyard Vines, according to branding tracker YouGov, it very well may be. Well know more on Saturday, May 18, 2019, when the Vineyard Vines merchandise is available for purchase. | https://www.forbes.com/sites/marciaturner/2019/03/01/will-vineyard-vines-target-deal-rejuvenate-the-brand/ |
Do prosecutors working with AG Dave Yosts office on Cuyahoga County corruption investigation have conflicts? | CLEVELAND, Ohio Two legal experts told cleveland.com that they have seen no evidence of a conflict of interest with two assistant Cuyahoga County prosecutors working for Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost on a growing public corruption investigation into county government. The experts, who are both professors at Case Western Reserve Universitys law school, said that the assistant prosecutors who have worked on the investigation for nearly 18 months would not be barred from continuing work on the case just because County Prosecutor Michael OMalley recused himself from the case in January. Professors Cassandra Burke Robinson and Michael Benza said County Executive Armond Budishs lawyers will need to present a judge with evidence to back up their claims that prosecutors have a conflict. They cant rely solely on the fact that OMalleys office was both running a criminal probe into county government and preparing a defense of the county in a civil lawsuit filed over jail conditions. Clearing that bar will be high, and both professors said they have not seen such evidence. While it's always possible that other facts could change things, I don't see an immediate problem in this case, Robertson, director of the schools Center for Professional Ethics, said. Budish attacks after raids Yost agreed to take oversight of the criminal investigation from OMalley in a deal that allowed two assistant prosecutors, Matthew Meyer and Paul Soucie, as well as investigator Robert DeSimone to remain on the case. The three now work out of the Attorney Generals Cleveland office, instead of the Cuyahoga County Justice Center, and report to supervisors in Yosts office instead of OMalley. Two weeks after Yosts office took the case, investigators carried out a Feb. 14 raid at the countys downtown headquarters and seized Budishs cellphone, two computers and several boxes of documents. Budish, who had up to that point said he was directing his administration to fully cooperate with the investigation, attacked the probe within hours of the raid. He and his lawyers former U.S. Attorney Steve Dettelbach and criminal defense lawyer Larry Zukerman -- made statements to media and recorded videos in which he said the raid was being carried out by his political enemies and accused investigators of raiding the office to embarrass him. Budish, Dettelbach and Cuyahoga County Chief Communications Office Eliza Wing, who previously served as president and CEO of cleveland.com from 1998 to 2010, met with cleveland.com reporters and editors Feb. 18 to again criticize the investigation. Dettelbach said he spoke with OMalley and raised concerns about OMalleys assistant prosecutors remaining on the case. Dettelbach said they have a conflict of interest, and the investigation should begin anew with independent eyes. He also said he believes Yost has an even bigger conflict than OMalley, citing their dogfight of a campaign for Attorney General that ended in Yosts election in November. Two days later, investigators served a second search warrant and seized Wings notebooks and unedited copies of video-recorded statements Budish made about the investigation. Yost responds Yost requested his own sit-down with cleveland.com reporters and editors and, in that meeting, said his office conducted a review and found no reason to dismiss Meyer and Soucie from the investigation. Yost said the review examined computer files and documents and interviewed members of the prosecutors office. It found that the two prosecutors were not exposed to any documents or information gathered by assistants in OMalleys office working on the defense against the civil lawsuit. Yost said his office did not go back further than the December filling of the lawsuit because he felt that was the moment OMalley became conflicted. He said he would carry out another review if presented with evidence that would warrant it. Yost was also dismissive of Dettelbachs claim of a conflict because the two ran against each other, saying that defense attorneys frequently run for judgeships and county prosecutors offices across the state and they are not barred from arguing cases against former political rivals. If the identity of defense counsel were sufficient to create a conflict, every defendant could stymie a prosecution by hiring the right lawyer, Yost told cleveland.com previously. Robertson, who noted she was not fully briefed on the details of the investigation, said the two assistant prosecutors would not automatically need to step aside because their boss did. Conflicts of interest usually arise when one lawyer is asked to carry out two conflicting roles, or wear two hats, she said. Ohios rules of professional conduct say that, in a private a law firm, one lawyers conflict of interest can be passed onto the whole firm, Robertson said. Government agencies are different. In OMalleys case, a conflict arose when the prisoners from the jail filed their lawsuit. By law, OMalley is required to defend the Budish Administration in such a civil claim, so he very well could not participate in a criminal investigation into someone he has to defend. The rule says that it is still prudent to screen any government lawyers found to have a conflict, but that one lawyers conflict does not taint the entire office, Robertson said. Having Meyer and Soucie work out of the Attorney Generals office and away from the assistant prosecutors working on the civil side, seems like a good way to keep their roles clear, Robertson said. Benza said it appears that Yosts review is enough to show that there is no conflict with the assistant prosecutors staying on the criminal probe, based on publicly available information. And it will be up to Dettelbach and Budish to either bring Yost evidence that more than just the appearance of a conflict if they are to succeed in getting Meyer and Soucie removed from the case, but they dont need to go as far as producing evidence that Meyer or Soucie directly gave Budish legal advice and then turned around and used the information to guide their probe, Benza said. The burden on the challenger is going to be higher than simply saying this looks bad, Benza said. Its got be this looks bad and something else. Benza said he expects a judge will eventually determine the issue. This is why lawyers get paid lots of money," he joked. To make those subtle distinctions between two relatively indistinguishable concepts." Previous cases A review of two previous cases that featured defendants accusing prosecutors of having a conflict of interest, one in Cleveland and one in Cincinnati, underscores the burden that Budish and his lawyers will have to meet. Lawyers for disgraced Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge Lance Mason unsuccessfully argued in his 2014 assault and domestic abuse case that then-Prosecutor Timothy J. McGintys office had a conflict because McGinty served on the bench as a judge alongside Mason for several years before he was elected prosecutor, and that it was McGintys job as prosecutor to act as the civil lawyer for all judges in their professional capacity, including Mason. "(McGinty) can't prosecute his own client, one of Masons lawyers, Fernando Mack, argued. The judge overseeing the case, Patricia Cosgrove, refused to kick McGinty off the case. Mason ultimately pleaded guilty and Cosgrove sent him to prison. Cosgrove is also the judge overseeing the criminal cases against the three people already indicted in the county corruption probe. A 2002 appellate court ruling in a Cincinnati case cemented the need for more than just the appearance of a conflict of interest to exist to kick a prosecutor off a case. In that case, the Hamilton County Prosecutors Office indicted a photographer for photographing bodies in the county morgue two weeks after a lawsuit was filed against the photographer, the county coroners office and its employees for letting him take the pictures. The photographer unsuccessfully argued in court that the prosecutors office had a clear conflict in pursuing an indictment against him when he was a co-defendant in a lawsuit against county officials who were being represented civilly by the same prosecutor. The 1st District Court of Appeals later upheld the decision because the mere appearance of impropriety in a government office is not sufficient in and of itself to warrant vicarious disqualification, according to the opinion. | https://www.cleveland.com/crime/2019/03/do-prosecutors-working-with-ag-dave-yosts-office-on-cuyahoga-county-corruption-investigation-have-conflicts.html |
What will Chanel look like without Karl Lagerfeld? | Written by Samantha Tse, CNN On Tuesday, Chanel will host its first runway show since the death of Karl Lagerfeld , its creative director of 36 years, on Feb. 19. Shortly after his passing, the storied French brand announced that Virginie Viard, Lagerfeld's right hand and director of Chanel's fashion creation studio, would succeed him, quashing longstanding rumors of more prominent designers taking over the coveted role. Many believe Viard, who started as an intern in the embroidery department in 1987, was chosen because of her intimate knowledge of the brand, and could be trusted to honor the legacy of both Lagerfeld and Chanel's founder, Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, while ensuring the brand's longevity. "I very much view Virginie, who was by Karl Lagerfeld for 30 years, as someone who really understands the brand's DNA and his contribution to that," said Bronwyn Cosgrave, a fashion historian and co-host of podcast "A Different Tweed." "Lagerfeld's death signifies the end of the old guard of designers as artists: cultural savants who mined history and the world's cultures for inspiration and transformed elegant sketches into whole collections with the help of their loyal ateliers." She likens Viard's promotion to Tom Ford's ascent from women's ready-to-wear to creative director of Gucci in 1994, when he replaced Dawn Mello: "No one knew who (Ford) was, but he had been behind the scenes. He was more than a safe pair of hands." Virginie Viard with Karl Lagerfeld and his godson Hudson Kroenig during the Chanel Metiers D'Art 2018 show. Credit: ANGELA WEISS/AFP/AFP/Getty Images Changing designers is never an easy task, but anyone replacing Lagerfeld, whose persona and achievements reached mythical proportions, will have particularly large shoes to fill. Far more than just a master of his craft, Lagerfeld provided the blueprint for successful, continual brand evolution and levering one's fame and personal brand to secure larger projects, such as his collaboration with high street giant H&M in 2004. He became the archetype of the modern fashion designer. "Karl Lagerfeld forged the modern template for rejuvenating a heritage brand, and he was unique in being able to keep Chanel vibrant and contemporary for many decades with his design prowess, vast culture and an unrivaled work ethic," said Miles Socha, editor-in-chief of WWD. "In many ways, he is irreplaceable, the likes of which we might never see again," Lagerfeld's death signifies the end of the old guard of designers as artists: cultural savants who mined history and the world's cultures for inspiration and transformed elegant sketches into whole collections with the help of their loyal ateliers. He wasn't the kind of designer who had to restrict production because of budget. With lifetime contracts at both Chanel and Fendi, where he served as creative director for 54 years, he never worried about his standing in either company. He had free reign to do as his creative mind dictated. 1 / 23 Karl Lagerfeld, the fashion visionary and creative director of Chanel, has died, the company told CNN Tuesday. Here, Lagerfeld greets the public after the Chanel Spring-Summer haute couture collection show in Paris, in January 2010. Credit: PATRICK KOVARIK/AFP/Getty Images But since Lagerfeld was granted his prestigious posts, the role of the designer at luxury houses has changed dramatically. Talent is no longer enough. More and more, there's an expectation of business savvy, an understanding of digital media and a connection to the next generation of shoppers, even if this comes without formal design training. "Luxury fashion is a business driven by the offer, not need, and only creative propositions and new ideas can deliver this," said Socha. "Sharp companies leave designers free to create desire. But, of course, successful designers deliver newness that is wearable." Louis Vuitton's decision to have Virgil Abloh -- the founder of luxury streetwear label Off-White and a longtime Kanye West collaborator -- replace Kim Jones as head of menswear last year suggests that heritage brands are coming to terms with this. While he may not have studied fashion (he has degrees in engineering and architecture), Abloh has a huge social following (his personal Instagram account has 3.6 million followers; Off-White has 6.7 million) that he has masterfully leveraged for social engagement, data-driven consumer insight, product promotion and brand extension. He's the perfect partner for any label looking to dominate the digital arena because of his loyal following, and his digital and financial shrewdness. Remembering Karl Lagerfeld Louis Vuitton's gamble seems to have paid off. At a Tokyo pop-up held in January -- before Abloh's first collection officially landed in stores -- sales of his designs outpaced those from the brand's much-hyped collaboration with streetwear brand Supreme, the brand's chief executive officer Michael Burke told Women's Wear Daily . "Today, there isn't only one recipe for success. Brands can be energized by a marquee designer, or a hidden talent, or a compelling purpose, like sustainability or inclusiveness," said Socha. "But we must remember that Chanel is a couture house, probably the largest and most important one in the world, so technical skills are also required, and these are rare." To that end, Viard may be the perfect fit. Having worked alongside Lagerfeld for decades, she will have picked up the necessary savoir-faire, even if she has no social media footprint to speak of. But in celebrity- and social media-obsessed culture, where the industry increasingly uses social platforms to speak to a new generation, this may be the ultimate strategy to differentiate Chanel. Opting out is the ultimate luxury. "We must remember that Chanel is a private company, and it is able to take risks outside the glare of Wall Street. When the Wertheimers" -- billionaire bothers Alain and Gerard, who have a controlling stake in the company -- "chose Karl Lagerfeld in 1983, it was a gamble for both parties. Virginie Viard, having worked at the elbow of a fashion mastermind for decades, offers a sure set of hands at a brand with huge momentum and enormous cachet," said Socha. "She may surprise and dazzle us all." | https://www.cnn.com/style/article/chanel-after-karl-lagerfeld/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_latest+%28RSS%3A+CNN+-+Most+Recent%29 |
Can Qatar's low-carbon city show a greener Middle East future? | DOHA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - During Dohas sweltering summers, when temperatures can hit 45 degrees Celsius and steamy humidity makes the air feel even hotter, museum manager Fahad Al-Turky tends to drive a lot and stay mainly indoors. But staying cool is getting easier in Msheireb Downtown Doha - an under-construction district of the capital where he works. Developers of the 76-acre regeneration zone, which aims to become one of the largest sustainable cities in the world, are outfitting it with green features, from rainwater harvesting to shady overhangs that make walking outside cooler. To be able to walk to get coffee outside or to a restaurant - it is a different kind of experience, said Al-Turkey, 30. Around Dohas traditional office towers, he said, there really isnt much shade. Many of the more than 100 buildings in Msheireb - apartments, offices, hotels, a shopping mall and a primary school - are fitted with solar panels, solar water heaters and overhangs designed to shade the surrounding sidewalks. The mixed-use district - eight years in construction and preparing for its first residents this spring - also has hidden features, such as underground waste collection stations, and will connect to planned public transport in the city. As well, there are systems that recover rainwater and air conditioning condensation into basement tanks, where the water is reused for irrigation and to flush toilets. In Msheireb we are taking the responsibility of building a sustainable city and looking after our environment here, and looking to lower carbon dioxide emissions, said Ali Saleh Al-Yafei, the project manager at Msheireb Properties, which is developing the district. Gas-rich Qatar emits more carbon dioxide per person than any country in the world, a problem as the world tries to rein in climate change and avoid challenges ranging from more extreme weather to sea level rise. Across the oil-producing Gulf, officials are eager to demonstrate that their countries can be as effective stewards of the environment as other nations. But that effort faces many challenges. Fossil fuel-produced electricity and water, for instance, are provided so cheaply in many countries that incentives to use less are limited for consumers. Rising temperatures in an already blisteringly hot region, however, are a reminder that the Gulf, too, will face powerful impacts of climate change. Msheireb developers hope their project could show how Qatar - and the rest of the Middle East - could cut emissions to help hold the line on climate change, in part by using fewer fossil fuels and less water. This is the way forward in the region, and many developments are thinking about sustainability and green buildings to help the climate not to get hotter, Al-Yafei told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Karim Elgendy, a sustainability consultant and founder of Carboun, an initiative to promote sustainable cities in the Middle East, calls Msheireb Downtown Doha the best example of urban regeneration Ive seen in the region in a while. Msheireb is a genuine effort to fix the city center, he said. MIDDLE EAST IMPACT The 20 billion Qatari riyals ($5.5 billion) Msheireb Downtown Doha project is a venture by Msheireb Properties, a subsidiary of the Qatar Foundation, an education and research organization founded by the ruling emirs father. The project is part of a wider mission to meet Qatars National Vision 2030 plan, which aims - among other goals - to reduce energy consumption and the nations carbon footprint. Qatar, which will host the 2022 football World Cup, also is looking at ways to reduce emissions around that event, and in cities beyond the capital. In Lusail, a new city being built 23 km (14 miles) north of Doha and the planned home of one of the World Cup stadiums, a light rail system and water-saving irrigation systems are being put in place. The city is also being designed with plenty of trees and green spaces, to help keep a nation that swelters in summer heat and humidity cooler, said Radhouane Ben Hamadou, head of biological and environmental sciences at Qatar university. Qatars World Cup will be held in November and December, Qatars winter season. But all the World Cup stadiums will have cooling technology installed, officials say, to encourage their year-round use after the tournament. Ben Hamadou said he thinks each city in Qatar will need its own individual path to reducing emissions, though new cities can draw lessons from Lusail. That includes the need for parks, open spaces and community facilities to create a functional and complete city. The Msheireb Downtown Doha project can provide some guiding principles of sustainability in Qatar, he said, but it is not just by itself a unit that can be just replicated, he said. The project, for instance, lacks enough green roofs to help keep buildings cool, and does not provide many green park areas, he said. He warned, as well, that carbon-cutting green changes in Qatar and other Middle East countries will not, by themselves, be enough to cool rising temperatures. Because climate change is a global problem, action by many countries across the world will be needed to successfully address the problem, he said. The climate system is not defined by the emissions of one country or another, he said. The climate will not change because of Msheireb. Other countries in the region, however, also are taking early steps toward cutting carbon emissions and building cities that are more liveable in hotter conditions. In Muscat, the sweltering capital of Oman where summer temperatures sometimes dont drop below 42 degrees Celsius (107 Fahrenheit) even at night, a city extension based on the Msheireb Downtown Doha project is being planned. Allies and Morrison, the British firm that designed Msheireb Downtown Doha is designing the Madinat Al-Irfan project in Muscat as well. When it comes to creating greener and cooler housing in the region, everybody wants to do it. Actually doing it is harder, Elgendy said. A NEW LIVEABLE At Msheireb Downtown Doha, streets have been designed as tunnels for air to channel breezes through the area, and taller buildings have been purposely placed to best throw shade on other buildings, Al-Yafei said. The compact district, designed to make walking easier and more comfortable, also aims to get people out of the cars. With the first apartments in the district opening this spring, Ben Hamadou thinks the district can help change ideas of what a liveable neighborhood should look like. Raising the awareness of young people mainly here in Qatar and the region, and (awareness) of how we can save our resources - Msheireb will be a very good demonstration of that, he said. Al-Turky has already adopted some of the ideas hes seen used in the green district where he works for his own new home in a suburb of Qatar. His house has recessed windows to reduce sunlight coming in, for instance, and window tinting. Its a reminder and a challenge to oneself that you might want to take some of these experiences and maybe implement them at home, he said. ($1 = 3.6400 Qatar riyals) | https://www.reuters.com/article/us-doha-climatechange-city/can-qatars-low-carbon-city-show-a-greener-middle-east-future-idUSKCN1QI477 |
Are women more generous than men? | This week female readers piled in to offer books, toys and money to Yazidi women trying to turn their lives around Firstly, a big thank you. We have always maintained that perhaps the best thing about Upside journalism is it encourages readers to hope, to engage, even to take action to make the world a slightly better place. And thats what happened this week. Within hours of publishing a moving article by Bethan McKernan on a group of Yazidi women who have somehow turned their lives around, we were inundated with offers of help. Books, toys, sewing machines and financial contributions. Just a quick line to say how thoroughly beautiful the recent article about Yazidi women forming an all-female commune was. It isnt often you hear positive news about Yazidi women, but to hear of such a wonderful project brought such hope in a consistently worrying news cycle. Roisin, by email We have connected the benefactors (all of them women) with the community, and will report back on how your donations made a difference. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Girls in Jinwar, Syria, where Yazidi women have formed an female-only commune. Photograph: Bethan McKernan/The Guardian And now, another small way you can help. We all recognise that climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing the world. But the Upside team is not convinced that simply repeating dire warnings about global warming will galvanise any sort of adequate response. Instead, wed like to show the world what people, towns, communities and government can and are doing to address the carbon splurge that is threatening to destabilise our climate. Hundreds have responded already. Simply fill in this short form and let us know what you, your family, your business or your community is up to. And watch for the upshot in a future edition of the Upside Weekly. In other Upside news this week, The Observers Robin McKie looked into a new initiative to get to grips with illegal logging, our US team spoke to a nun helping people survive by collecting cans discarded in New York, and our video team found out more about the women who give food and water to migrants riding the infamous freight train north towards the US. Our data team didnt have to look far for positive numbers this week. Air quality may not be great in parts of Europe but its a lot better than it was 10 or 20 years ago. That depends on the gas. Sulphur oxide, produced by the burning of fossil fuels, has fallen more than 80% since 1998, nitrogen oxides by about 46%. Progress is slower on particulates such as PM2.5 and PM10 but are still down more than 25% over the 20 year period. Europe wants to rein in air pollution still further. It has already done a lot. What we liked Terrific work from BuzzFeed to report on the town that beat the US opioid epidemic, which includes the memorable line: Like a mouse nibbling cheese, shed steal $30 at a time from her dads stash to buy bags of brown powder. Also, Norway is showing the world what to do with its old plastic bottles, as Positive News found out. What we heard Large numbers of readers contacted us in response to our week of coverage about concrete, particularly the Upside article on alternatives to this dirty building block of the global economy. I am following your articles on concrete and am really glad that you are covering this issue at last. Youve asked for other possible solutions and I have two major ones. As a design company we have several alternatives to concrete foundations that can be used for ANY building not just eco ones. If you are in London, you could go and look at our building at Tulse Hill for the Holy Trinity Church, using rammed car tyre foundations. Its been a particularly good spell for otters, in the UK at least, with news that numbers have recovered spectacularly in recent years. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Otters: back from the brink of extinction. Photograph: Tony Margiocchi / Barcroft Media Also, this is fun, if fairly irrelevant: a map with the old mottoes of every county in the United Kingdom. The Upside is taking its cue from Morayshire, in Scotland, whose motto is simply In Hope. Facebook Twitter Pinterest The mottoes of UK counties. Photograph: On Stride If you have a thought, comment, criticism or suggestion for story ideas or subjects, please email us at [email protected]. | https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/01/are-women-more-generous-than-men-upside-weekly-report |
What could happen to food prices after Brexit? | Image copyright Getty Images As 29 March approaches with no Brexit deal yet agreed on by Parliament, questions are circulating around how leaving without a deal will affect people's daily lives, including the cost of food. At the moment, the UK imports about 30% of its food from the EU and another 10% from the rest of the world. If there's no deal, the question of what will happen to food crossing the border will have to be faced immediately. If Theresa May's plan goes through, there will be a 21-month transition period during which nothing will change while the UK and the EU try to work out a future trade agreement. There are lots of things that determine food prices, including the weather. But there are three main things that might affect UK food prices as a direct result of Brexit: The taxes on imported goods, known as tariffs Changes to the value of the pound Things that might slow down goods crossing borders, like extra checks 1. Tariffs A tariff is the tax that businesses pay on goods imported from other countries. Different rates of tax apply to different products. But countries have to charge the same rates on the same products to each country unless they have a trade deal. As a member of the European Union, at the moment the UK doesn't pay tariffs on goods - including food products - coming in from other EU countries. Let's say a supermarket wants to import beef from Ireland. Currently it wouldn't have to pay a tax on this but if after Brexit beef started to be taxed at 40%, which is the tariff the EU places on beef coming in from the rest of the world, that's a 40% extra cost to the importer. The UK Trade Policy Observatory at the University of Sussex calculated that an average tariff of 44.6% on dairy could translate to a price rise of 8.1%. Meat could rise in price by 5.8%, oils and fats by 7.8% and vegetables by 4% on average. Businesses want to charge their customers competitive prices, so they may well absorb some of the costs themselves. But past a certain point, they may well have to pass on that extra cost to make a profit - and that could translate to more expensive food in the shops. The UK could choose to lower tariffs - or scrap them altogether - and that could, in theory, lead to lower prices for consumers. The University of Sussex researchers also assessed the impact of zero tariffs on food imports and said this may only reduce food prices by an average of 1%. That's because the goods which are currently subject to the highest rates of tariffs are food items mainly produced in the UK or imported from Europe without any tariffs, like meat and dairy. And products like tea which the UK mostly imports from outside the EU already attract low tariffs - for tea it's 0.86% - so getting rid of those wouldn't contribute as much to falls in food prices. Businesses could choose to import more products like meat and dairy from outside the EU if that became more competitive. The idea of lowering tariffs on imported goods which the UK also produces has worried farmers, who fear a flood of cheap imported food putting them out of business. In response, the government has said it will not impose zero-rate tariffs on food imports. It will have to balance the interests of consumers, who want to see their food prices kept low, with those of farmers and growers, when setting the tariff rates. Image copyright Getty Images Faced with more expensive imported beef for example, shoppers could decide to buy British. But they might not have that choice when it comes to fresh fruit and vegetables. In March, when a lot of UK produce is out of season, it imports 90% of its lettuce, 80% of its tomatoes and 70% of its soft fruit from the European Union, according to the British Retail Consortium, which represents shopkeepers. A no-deal document published by the government said: "At the time of year we will be leaving the EU, the UK is particularly reliant on the short channel crossings for fresh fruit and vegetables. "In the absence of other action from government, some food prices are likely to increase, and there is a risk that consumer behaviour could exacerbate, or create, shortages in this scenario." But it added that less than 1 in 10 food items is expected to be affected. 2. Exchange rates When the value of the pound decreases compared with other currencies, it becomes more expensive to buy things from abroad - a pound that's worth less buys less stuff. That will "directly affect the cost of getting imported food products onto supermarket shelves," the Institute for Financial Studies says. It gave the comparison of what happened in 2007-08 around the time of the global financial crisis. Sterling depreciated in value by 21% and food prices rose by 8.7% relative to other goods. There were other things going on at the time though, apart from currency exchange rates - there were sharp rises in world prices for things like petroleum and fertiliser. But other countries which did not experience currency depreciations did not experience food price rises as "large nor as persistent" as in the UK, the IFS says, suggesting "exchange rates played an important role in driving higher food prices in the UK". The pound has fallen in value since the referendum and that is thought to have contributed to a small rise in food prices, according to a study by the London School of Economics. Image copyright Getty Images 3. Non-tariff barriers Another thing which could affect the prices of food for retailers is the cost of having to do extra checks at ports - what's known as "non-tariff barriers". The House of Lords' European Union committee in a report on food prices after Brexit said: "As well as causing delays and shortening the shelf-life of products, non-tariff barriers are an additional cost for businesses". It quoted a report by consultancy firm KPMG which calculated that "one day of delay for a lorry will easily cost a business 600 to 1,000 euros" (500-850). The government has set out steps which businesses should take to minimise disruption at borders. In its recent no-deal document it said it was putting procedures in place to make it easier for traders importing from the EU to comply with customs requirements immediately after Brexit, to ease the effects of those non-tariff barriers. It is set to publish a schedule of the tariffs it plans to impose on goods imported from the EU in the event of a no-deal Brexit shortly. Get in touch Read more from Reality Check Follow us on Twitter | https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-47401160 |
Is Bryce Harper worth $330 million? | By Daniel Tran Bryce Harpers free agency has reportedly ended, signing a 13-year, $330-million contract from the Philadelphia Phillies. Based on his star power, and the numbers he has produced so far, many feel he is worth the investment. Others look at his playoff record and dont think hes worth the money. Harper is one of the biggest stars in the league with his marketability and must-watch talent. When he's in the zone, he's one of the most electrifying players in the league. The six-time All-Star managed to drive in 100 RBIs despite being walked 130 times by opponents. And at age 25, he hasnt even hit his peak yet. The former MVP will bring in way more than what any team ends up paying him. Hes worth the money. Harper is talented, but he's not as automatic as everyone likes to think he is. Injuries have slowed his career and dependability is a huge factor in receiving that kind of money. After his MVP season, Harper has only topped 4.0 WAR once. Hes a good player, but $330 million is too much for a player who couldnt top 1.5 WAR two of the last three seasons. But not a 330 million player. Bryce is good, but this is a ridiculous overpay i miss jason smith (@JasonKiddBurner) February 28, 2019 The Tylt is focused on debates and conversations around news, current events and pop culture. We provide our community with the opportunity to share their opinions and vote on topics that matter most to them. We actively engage the community and present meaningful data on the debates and conversations as they progress. The Tylt is a place where your opinion counts, literally. The Tylt is an Advance Local Media, LLC property. Join us on Twitter @TheTylt, on Instagram @TheTylt or on Facebook, wed love to hear what you have to say. | https://www.cleveland.com/sports/2019/03/is-bryce-harper-worth-330-million.html |
Has the Isaiah Thomas honeymoon phase worn off for Nuggets fans already? | The honeymoon isnt over, not by a long shot. But the shotgun marriage between Isaiah Thomas and Denver Nuggets fans swooped right to the next phase of the relationship late Thursday night: The first lovers spat. (With) Isaiah, I think its a fine line, Nuggets coach Mike Malone said of his veteran point guard, who proved to be a non-factor off the bench four points, two turnovers in 11 minutes during a 111-104 setback to Utah on Thursday at the Pepsi Center, the franchises fifth home loss in 32 contests. Hes trying to find his rhythm and get comfortable with the ball in his hands and making plays. On the other hand, hes also got to understand how we play, and move the ball and get guys involved. With Thomas on the floor against the Jazz, the ball didnt move and the guys in blue struggled to get involved. In his fifth appearance with the Nuggets, and his fourth on Chopper Circle, the 30-year-old point guard recorded a plus/minus of negative-10 with the second unit and was part of a dumpster-fire second quarter that saw the hosts outscored 33-15 over the course of the period. Its very hard (to find a rhythm) when you play 10 minutes, said Thomas, whos averaging 9.8 points on 15.8 minutes for the Nuggets in his first NBA appearances since March 2018 hip surgery. But youve just got to continue to get better, (and) whenever your names called, continue to play hard and figure things out. And thats all I can do. Thomas played 24 minutes against the Clippers on Sunday, scoring 10 points on 3-of-11 shooting, and 15 against the Thunder on Tuesday, chipping in 11 points. I feel great, Thomas stressed when asked about his health during a postgame media scrum. But I mean, Im limited. Im on a minutes restriction. Coach (Malone) is trying to figure out rotations, so Ive just got to stay solid. Ive just got to stay confident and when my name is called, go out there and perform. Given the nature of the injury and his time away from game situations, Thomas is the Nuggets No. 1 experiment of the moment. But while a playoff position feels relatively assured, given a 42-19 record, theres still seeding at stake over the next 21 contests, to say nothing of home-court advantage during the postseason. Its a delicate balance for Malone between getting Thomas up to speed for the playoffs while simultaneously setting yourself up for the most advantageous postseason possible in this case, that likely means avoiding Golden State and Houston for as long as the Western Conference bracket will let you. On both fronts, Thursday proved to be a small step backward, as the Jazz got into Thomas face early and often and didnt let up, forcing a harassed, ill-advised pass out of bounds midway through the second period that No. 0 couldnt seem to shake off. Yeah, it is (hard working out kinks), Thomas said. But I mean, Im in this position. Im here to help anyway I possibly can. And thats what Im going to do. And I know its a marathon were not going all get it in one day or one week or one month. Just got to keep working. To that end, Thomas was seen putting in more shooting practice at Pepsi Center a few minutes after the game, still trying to chase the old mojo down and pin it back into place. Although this is interesting, too: In the five games since Thomas joined the rotation, guard Monte Morris whose playing time was among the most at risk with the veteran back in the fold has averaged 7.0 points and 19.4 minutes per contest while converting on just two of 12 attempts (16.7 percent) from beyond the arc. In the five games immediately preceding I.T.s return, Morris had averaged 15.4 points and 28.8 minutes and drained six of 16 3-point tries (37.5 percent). I mean, you take a year off of doing something, youve got to get your mojo back, Morris said of Thomas. But he works his (expletive) off. Even the best marriages involve work, and we were warned that The I.T. Integration was always going to be a work in progress. But for all the virtues of March, patience aint exactly one of them. | https://www.denverpost.com/2019/03/01/isaiah-thomas-nuggets-fans-nba-utah-jazz/ |
Will someone please, please (please!) stop the lunacy that is the AzMERIT test? | Opinion: AzMERIT reveals little, requires zero student accountability and puts the onus for good scores entirely on teachers. Schools, and thus the teachers, are given grades based mostly on a test most kids don't care about. (Photo: Mark Henle/The Republic) You're a football coach. It's the day of the big game, the one the schedule has pointed to all season. You give the team a "we can beat anyone" pep talk just before kickoff. Some are checking their phones, others are texting, a few are in one corner mumbling to each other, a couple even sleeping. The game begins, and the players act like they did in the locker room, indifferent. Only the smattering of eager beavers are putting in any effort. Your team gets clobbered, the players give a collective shrug and trudge off the field. Soon after, youre out of a job. The players have zero accountability for their indifference, the coach, 100 percent. This is the system our state has set up in its school testing program. As insane as the football scenario. CLOSE Administrators, teachers and students at Kino Junior High School in Mesa talk about the preliminary "D" rating the school received from the Arizona State Board of Education in 2017. Thomas Hawthorne/azcentral.com Here's how AzMERIT, our state school testing program, works: Students take a series of tests for which they have no responsibility. If they ace it, no reward. If they fail it miserably, no accountability. Kids will move to the next grade or graduate high school no matter what they do on the test. Now, some will say that there is one grade level of student accountability as third graders allegedly have to show proficiency in reading to move on to fourth grade. An illusion the state has created. In fact, the only students in danger of being held back are a portion of the lowest scoring third-grade students in any given year. In other words, students may not be close to reading at the third-grade level but are passed on anyhow. So the "players" in the Arizona testing game the students don't have any worries about their scores. But someone does the "coaches," or teachers. Schools, and thus the teachers, are given grades based mostly on a test most kids don't care about, particularly at the high school level, where kids long ago have figured out the tests mean nothing to them. We already know what AzMERIT tells us What the scores tell us we already know. That is, with some exceptions schools with a high level of impoverished students don't score as well as suburban schools with relatively little poverty to deal with. And those scores tell us nothing about the schools' social studies, or art, or music, or computer ed, or physical education. Not much that is helpful. Scores aren't returned to schools until sometime in the summer. And when they come, they provide little to help guide teachers in making adjustments to their classrooms, so little as to be worthless. No individual student breakdowns, no grade level breakdowns, nothing of any help. NEWSLETTERS Get the Opinions Newsletter newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Our best and latest in commentary in daily digest form. Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-332-6733. Delivery: Mon-Fri Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Opinions Newsletter Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters It's like the football coach reviewing game film after getting walloped, and the only thing on the film is the final score. At least the old AIMS results would give teachers some information to guide instruction. AzMERIT gives squat. Maybe our new state superintendent of public instruction, Kathy Hoffman, can use her bully pulpit to ask for reforms of the testing, at least giving teachers specific feedback on grade level or subject standards information teachers would actually find useful. As it is now, AzMERIT reveals little, requires zero student accountability and puts the onus for good scores entirely on the teachers. A monumental waste of time and money. Mike McClellan is a retired Mesa Public Schools teacher and a Gilbert resident. Reach him at [email protected]. Click here to subscribe to azcentral.com. Read or Share this story: https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/2019/03/01/azmerit-wastes-time-and-money-someone-end-it/3020776002/ | https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/2019/03/01/azmerit-wastes-time-and-money-someone-end-it/3020776002/ |
Whats next for Rose VL, Portlands Vietnamese soup destination? | Visit Rose VL, Portlands two-soups-a-day destination, and you wouldnt know the couple who created it more than a decade ago had given a thought to retirement. Heres William Vuong, puttering around the pristine dining room, smiling at babies, showing a customer the proper way to eat cao lau, the central Vietnamese noodle dish that made waves when they added it to their Saturday menu last year. And theres Ha (Christina) Luu, carrying out a perfectly arranged soup in a porcelain bowl decorated with pink roses, tapping out Instagram posts with her beautifully manicured nails. But yes, it turns out, rumors that the couple have stepped back are partly true. Vuong, 79, who faced gallbladder surgery last year, is technically retired, an event that would loom larger for Portlands restaurant scene if he werent still at the Vietnamese soup destination so darn much. Luu certainly isnt retiring. At 72, she continues to oversee the kitchen at Rose VL, introducing new soups and fine-tuning others, keeping an eye on every detail even as she begins the process of handing the restaurants reins over to the next generation. Vuong and Luus original Southeast 82nd Avenue restaurant, Ha VL, one of Americas most celebrated Vietnamese restaurants, has been owned and operated by Peter Vuong, their second of six children -- all boys -- since 2015. Steve Vuong, their fifth son, and Helen Huynh, their daughter-in-law, are training to take over Southeast Powell Boulevards Rose VL. And later this year, Vuong and Luu hope to open a new restaurant with their fourth son, Han Vuong, in Beaverton. Its a big step for a family that faced massive trials just to make it here in the first place. Luu and Vuongs journey to America will echo that of the many immigrants who arrived after the Vietnam war, though it was no less harrowing for it. Vuong, a language teacher by training, spent the war as a special forces commander working for the United States embassy in Saigon. In April 1975, just days before the fall of Saigon, he went to meet an American general who had promised him and his family safe passage out of the country. When he arrived at the meeting point, the general was gone. He left me behind, Vuong said. It cost me 10 years in prison. Vuong spent 10 years in prison, bullet fragments left from a Viet Cong ambush still lodged in his wrist, as Luu struggled to raise their growing family. The communists kicked me out of my home, Luu said. I had no house, no car, no money. I had four boys, my first son was only eight years old, and I was six months pregnant. They didnt want my son coming back to school, because they said, Hes the son of CIA. I was working for the CIA, Vuong said. After Vuong was released in 1985, it would be another seven years before he and Luu were was able to leave Vietnam. During that period, their four oldest boys fled the country by boat, landing at Malaysia's notoriously crowded Bidong Island refugee camp. I sent four boys by boat to the United States, and I didnt know where they were, Luu said. Long time every night I cry, pray with God every day. Eventually, Vuong and Luu paid to send the then-teenage boys to America, one-by-one, to Oregon, where they were sponsored by a former student of Vuongs. They weren't reunited until the early 1990s. Peter Vuong worked Portland restaurant jobs to pay the bills. Vuong and Luu opened Ha VL in 2004 as a deli, serving a simple menu of Vietnamese sandwiches. Early on, Vuong said they wanted to add soup to the banh mi lineup. But instead of making one large pot of broth to supply a long menu of soups -- the going model at neighboring Vietnamese restaurants -- they would start with just one. One soup became two, then a dozen, rotating six days a week, two a day, each with its own set of labor-intensive ingredients and unique broth. Soon, critics were descending from New York, changing plans to stay longer so they could try more of Luu and Vuongs soups. In 2015, Vuong and Luu handed Ha VL off to Peter Vuong and opened a second outpost, Rose VL, with many of the same soups, only served on different days. Outside of Europe and America, with its European-derived dining model, restaurants that serve just a handful of dishes are commonplace throughout the world. Before the war, Luus mother ran a restaurant in Hanoi that served only one: beef pho. Ha VL and Rose VLs unique menu is born of that tradition. In fact, the delicate beef noodle soup served Sundays at Ha VL and Mondays at Rose VL comes from her family recipe, though -- with even more delicacy, perhaps -- Luu credits much of her cooking skill to her mother-in-law. Visit the Vietnamese restaurants along the arrowhead formed by Northeast Sandy Boulevard and 82nd Avenue and youll find a similar selection of sandwiches, salad rolls, soups and grilled meats served over rice or rice noodles. These frozen-in-time menus, which look to appeal to both Portlands large Vietnamese expat population and to those who know little more than pho and banh mi, tend to cast a wide net by featuring dishes from all over Vietnam. Rose VL is no exception, though it comes to that geographic diversity a bit more organically. Luu was born in Kon Tum, but her parents hail from Hanoi, home to that lightly adorned pho, the snail soup and a half-dozen other signature soups. Vuong comes from Hue, in Central Vietnam, birthplace of the famed spicy pork and beef noodle soup bun bo hue and to mi quang, a stunning soup made with pork, shrimp and turmeric-orange noodles submerged under a puffy rice cracker fascinator. Over the past year daughter-in-law Huynh has experimented with a few favorites from her hometown in Southern Vietnams Soc Trang province, including a red curry, a beef stew and a fermented fish noodle soup with fish, shrimp and Chinese-style roast pork belly in a clear broth that customers augment with a fiery chile relish. That soup has found its way onto Rose VLs regular menu. Rose VL's cao lau, with thick noodles, fresh herbs, sliced pork, chicken, peanuts and fried shallots above a rich sauce. The popular restaurant recently this noodle dish, a signature of the Central Vietnamese town of Hoi An, near the start of 2018. But no dish has grabbed more attention than cao lau, a noodle bowl rarely found outside of the central Vietnamese tourist destination of Hoi An. In 2014, Vuong and Luu visited Hoi An, learning about the special well water used to make the noodles. Vuong didnt buy into the entire mythos -- its just a story, he said -- but they liked the dish enough to want to bring it home. The most important thing is the sauce, Vuong said. If you go to Hoi An, you will taste a difference, Luu said. But come back and try ours, its better. On Saturdays at Rose VL, cao lau has joined an already-formidable lineup that includes two of Luus best soups, the mi quang and a Vietnamese chicken curry in a turmeric-stained coconut milk broth. Rose VLs take on cao lau features udon-style noodles, super-tender pork and a tangle of herbs that must be tossed in the rich pork sauce hiding underneath before eating. Thirteen years into their restaurant career, the dish has proved a smash hit, popular with both customers and critics, landing a spot on our guide to the best new dishes of 2018. Vuong and Luu believe they are the only restaurant in America to serve it. In their early days, Ha VL was best known for two things: serving bun cha oc, a pork broth soup with slices of snail-studded meatloaf, and for selling out most days before or just after lunch. In Vietnam, soup is a breakfast staple. If you get to Ha VL early enough, you can still find crowds of Vietnamese men smoking and drinking strong iced coffee out front, where the snail soup is still served on Thursdays. Since taking over, Peter Vuong has added a few specials of his own to the Ha VL menu, including a noodle soup version of the beef stew known as bo kho. Two years ago, Luu was recognized with a semifinalist nomination for the James Beard Foundations Best Chef Northwest award, an honor she repeated (this time joined by Peter Vuong) in 2018. (The 2019 James Beard semifinalists will be announced on Wednesday, Feb. 26). Luu said shes been approached about writing a cookbook, something shell consider after vacation this year. In addition to their six sons, Vuong and Luu have 19 grandchildren, with a 20th expected next month. And sometime later this year, the couple and son Han Vuong hope to open a third restaurant, this one in Beaverton near the Nike World Headquarters, where four of their six sons have worked. As with Ha VL and Rose VL, expect Luu to add a new soup or two to the new restaurants menu. Whenever it opens, expect Vuong and Luu to be on hand, helping the restaurant get up and running. Were not retired yet, Vuong said. -- Michael Russell | https://www.oregonlive.com/dining/2019/03/whats-next-for-rose-vl-portlands-vietnamese-soup-destination.html |
Are Opportunity Zone Funds Right For My Real Estate Investment Portfolio? | The Opportunity Zone (OZ) tax incentive has now been widely written about, and experts predict that $100 billion will flow into Opportunity Zones this year. Real estate developers should be evaluating each land purchase and each deal to make sure that any government incentive available supports the bottom line of their investments. Examine the answers below to help inform your next real estate investment decision in the OZ space. Opportunity Zone Funds (OZF) are primarily a way to roll capital gains into new business or real estate investments with tax deferrals and overall reduction. In order to enjoy the full benefit of the Opportunity Zone tax incentive, an investment must be held for 10 years to reach forgiveness for additional capital gains. As the key to this process is holding a deal for 10 years, it goes without saying that it is important to study the hold/disposition strategy for each deal. Competition upon disposition will also be something to consider for many of these projects. Ultimately, good deals can become great upon disposition, but bad deals cannot become good. The internal rate of return (IRR) is sensitive to the time value of money, so many investors will examine cash-on-cash metrics instead of heavily relying on IRR. Cash flow from 12% to 14% will ensure that investors can actually hold the property for the required amount of time and generate income while waiting for the maximum tax benefit to become available. The OZF rules favor ground-up real estate development due to the requirement that invested capital gains must substantially improve the property or business, which means the entire initial investment must be matched in improvements to the property. While this can be achieved in a myriad of ways, the most straightforward way to meet this requirement is to purchase land within an Opportunity Zone and build something on the raw land. It is paramount that good underwriting is in place for any real estate deal, but Opportunity Zone deals must be analyzed specifically for their time requirements. Investors seek to invest quickly so that the benefit is greatest, which will require you find expert underwriters. Another piece of the Opportunity Zone puzzle is understanding the perishability of returns over time. Returns decrease from 3.08% for investments made in 2018 to 1.74% for investments made in 2025. The rush to deploy capital in these locations will certainly impact strategy and favor those funds and groups that are able to act swiftly. Data presented (registration required) by Marcus & Millichap last year demonstrates standard after-tax IRR compared to the returns available when the Opportunity Zones capital gains deferrals increase in basis over time (10-15%) and eventual forgiveness. Assuming a standard after-tax IRR of 6%, reported jumps are from 35% to 51%. These benefits are significant, and we anticipate a good deal of competition for not only land in Opportunity Zones, but for half-baked deals that groups with capital to deploy can take over. Opportunity Zone Funds are a fantastic opportunity, and the benefits cannot be understated. If you already have existing capital gains, a solid Qualified Opportunity Zone Fund (QOZF) project could deliver higher returns compared to one not in an Opportunity Zone. That being said, it is important you consider the implications of QOZFs when evaluating existing deals and consider the risks of funds that do not have a pipeline to execute, expert underwriting and post-tax return analyses. The benefit of this tax incentive will be extremely meaningful; however, it cannot make a bad deal a good one. Bottom Line QOZFs will make sense for some pipeline developments and not for others. The strength of any real estate development project is held in a conservative pro forma. Smart developers will seek to invest in QOZFs with strong fundamentals that can demonstrate speed to market. | https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesrealestatecouncil/2019/03/01/are-opportunity-zone-funds-right-for-my-real-estate-investment-portfolio/ |
What Is Blockchain Technology And How Can The Entertainment Industry Use It? | When people hear blockchain, they think Bitcoin or crypto. But that is a limited view of blockchain technologys true potential, which can be developed in a swath of industries with vast use. Blockchain is already in use in the entertainment industry and its potential to change the way industry players do business is staggering. At its core, blockchain technology is a decentralized and transparent way of exchanging information. Each block is a recorded transaction, which is shared on a peer-to-peer network consisting of nodes. A node is a device, such as a computer, that contains a history of all transactions for a particular blockchain, i.e. all the blocks in that chain. In order for a new block to be added to the chain, all the nodes in its network must verify it. Once added to the chain, information cannot be modified or removed, ideally creating a trustworthy, transparent record of transactional information. Blockchain and The Industry The entertainment and media sectors are just beginning to test out blockchain and uncover its amazing potential to solve some of the industrys key problems. This process is known as chain-of-title and it has to be understood for the project to have any value or be distributed. With blockchain, these chain-of-title questions can easily and quickly be answered due to the transparent record of each transaction relating to an entertainment projects intellectual property (IP) rights. Through blockchain, these intellectual property rights can be tracked, and digital rights management companies can access the full record of transactions to find the exact timestamped block when any project rights were first transferred and people made contributions to that project. Blockchain is also being explored for the alternative to traditional contracts called smart contracts. These smart contracts are blockchain-powered autonomous programs that can facilitate many exchanges of data such as payment processing, licensing, and exclusive distribution agreements. Having a comprehensive, public, and unalterable ledger of transactions is a powerful way to monitor and restrict IP usage and distribution, as well as payment information. As the contributions of anyone involved in the creative process would be explicitly accounted for, blockchain could significantly streamline the process of keeping track of royalties and residuals, and consequently free up budgets. Blockchains practical use can be found in the accounting process of profit participants and investors. It is often the case that various profit participants or investors are paid at different points from the flow of money depending on cash break points and recoupment rights. This has been termed the waterfall and is often administered through a collection account, but the transparency of the blockchain in such a situation would be extraordinarily beneficial. The Catch: Fundraising While blockchain technology itself is promising, and already being used by some production and distribution companies for the purposes discussed above, its association with cryptocurrency troubles its reputation. Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, do not figure directly into the scheme of how blockchain technology actually works. Rather, they are speculative assets that are offered by blockchain startups to investors as an initial coin offering (ICO). Ideally, these currencies can be redeemed by investors down the line for goods and services provided by the blockchain company. However, this is a notoriously unregulated process. Some disreputable startups have taken advantage of this speculative crowdfunding by selling relatively worthless currencies to overzealous investors. Although there are core entertainment industry functions that can benefit from blockchain technology, it will take time before the industry fully adopts it. As with anything that can revolutionize an industry, the future remains uncertain and it will be a long road before blockchain technology becomes a staple. Bryan M. Sullivan, Partner at Early Sullivan Wright Gizer & McRae, advises and represents his clients as a legal strategist in all their business affairs. He has significant experience on the litigation and appeals side of the practice, as well as with entertainment and intellectual property contracts, investment and financing agreements, and corporate structure documents on the dealmaking side. | https://www.forbes.com/sites/legalentertainment/2019/03/01/what-is-blockchain-technology-and-how-can-the-entertainment-industry-use-it/ |
Can A Coal Lobbyist Confirmed To Head EPA Be Trusted To Safeguard The Public's Interest? | Its Rip Van Winkle revisited just waking from a two-decade sleep only to find that life is the same when it really should be much different. Welcome to Donald Trumps America, where the president is trying to revert the New Energy Economy and to replay the Industrial Revolutions Greatest Hits. The latest such chapter in the tale is the U.S. Senates confirmation yesterday of Andrew Wheeler to be Trumps Environmental Protection Agency administrator. The problem is that Wheeler, a fine man who worked as a coal industry rep, isnt well suited to be a regulator and a protector of public health. He is, after all, a lobbyist on a mission to rollback environmental progress and to return coal to its former place atop the energy pyramid a spot it held for decades. Now, thats not likely to happen given that the market forces are already at play that the utilities that burn coal have been retiring their coal plants and replacing them with natural gas and renewable energy. But Trump and Wheeler can try to block those changes, which could have the practical effect of allowing older coal-fired plants to remain operational a bit longer and thus create even more greenhouse gas emissions. Case in point is the administrations effort to box-out the Obama administrations Clean Power Plan and to replace it with the Affordable Clean Energy Rule. Under the Clean Power Plan, the country would have to reduce its CO2 releases by 32% by 2030. It would do so by changing out coal plants for those that run on cleaner energies a movement that has already taken root. It would also permit companies that comply to earn credits and then sell those chits to those that need help. The goal is to make green technologies cheaper than buying credits. The Affordable Clean Energy Rule, by contrast, would give the states more leeway to decide the rules even to forego them altogether, resulting obviously in increased emissions. The goal here would be to get utilities to improve their efficiencies to install technologies that allow them to burn less coal to make more energy. Its not a bad idea except that most power companies have already assessed their coal plants and have found that it has been cheaper to retire older facilities rather than to retrofit them with pollution controls. That includes American Electric Power, Duke Energy and Southern Company. Wheeler stated during his confirmation hearings that he does not believe that climate change is a national emergency remarks that lead some to label him as a denialist. Wheelers job now is to safeguard the public interest, not the coal industry. A former fossil fuel lobbyist, Wheeler has consistently worked against the public interest to advance an anti-environmental agenda, Senator Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., said in a press statement. Throughout his career, Andrew Wheeler has shown a clear disregard for the EPAs mission to protect the public and environment. The Senate, generally, voted along party lines to confirm Wheeler. Wheelers confirmation as the top environmental regulator comes within days of news reports stating that Trump plans to create a climate commission to combat his own administrations own findings the ones that conclude manmade CO2 is a threat to the environment and to the economy. The panel would be composed of a whos-who of climate change denialists. Critics say that the panelists are considered outside the mainstream by the globes mostly highly-regarded scientists. To be clear, this writer hears routinely from many energy professionals who have concerns about the prevailing climate science not that they deny the existence of human-induced climate change but that they question various nuances. But the studies that this analyst references are those that have been peer-reviewed and thus have survived the scrutiny of other climate scientists. Thats opposed to those studies that have been funded by specific interests that have paid to achieve a certain outcome. And they are not open to critique by independent experts. Fake Panel In the case of Trumps proposed climate panel, it would fall under the oversight of the National Security Council and not the proper regulatory bodies such as the EPA. As a result, the proposed commissions findings would avoid the kind of inspection that earlier studies have endured: That includes the recently released National Climate Assessment. It also encompasses reports from the Pentagon dating back to 2003, which say that climate change imperils the U.S. military and its potential response in certain parts of the world. Indeed, Katharine Hayhoe, who is a climate scientist at Texas Tech and an author of the former report, said via a tweet that everyone had a chance to review those findings, multiple chances. The risk to the Earth system associated with increasing levels of CO2s are almost universally agreed by climate scientists , adds a letter by the faculty of MIT Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climates one written to refute their own colleague, Richard Lindzen, who denies such science and who has been asked to be on Trumps make-shift group. No, both entities are moving forward with carbon-friendly policies, because markets are demanding action and the planet requires them to do so. Several hundred companies are trying to cut their CO2 releases and to increase their use of renewable energy, including those in energy and finance: Schneider Electric and CitiGroup, to name two. Meantime, 225 investors with $26 trillion in assets under management have combined their financial might under the banner of Climate Action 100+. Their message: Companies that focus on the so-called triple bottom line economics, environment and social are outperforming the broader indices and are indelibly branding themselves among customers. Its no longer the dawn of the industrial era. It's now mid morning during the digital day. Its time to wake up to realize that the national economy and the associated jobs are tied closely to cleaner fuels that are less carbon intensive. Given their ages and their inclinations, Messieurs Trump and Wheeler are unlikely to make that leap. But future leaders wont have a choice a job made even tougher because of todays unenlightened leadership. | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2019/03/01/can-a-coal-lobbyist-confirmed-to-head-epa-be-trusted-to-safeguard-the-publics-interest/ |
Is Recession Near? | I trust Dave Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff. Hes been a perpetual speaker at my SIC conference for at least 10 years. Dave is screaming recession every chance he gets, but he is not a perma-bear by any means. Hes been bullish at the right times in the past. Dave turned uber-bullish 9 or 10 years ago. It was way outside the consensus at the time, but he has never cared much about being part of the consensus. So while I dont entirely agree with him this time, I pay attention. Dave summed up his bearish argument in his famous Breakfast with Dave letter last month. It was weeks before the retail sales report knocked the legs out of more bullish outlooks. This article will be more like a back-and-forth between Rosie and me when we are together. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Rosenbergs Bearish Argument We are now in month #115 of the current expansion, double the post-WWII norm, and five months from becoming the longest ever. I guess I just shrug my shoulders and ask, So what? We have a dozen data points of recoveries after recessions. Maybe when we have 100, we can start talking about statistical probability. There is no statistical reason this recovery couldnt last a lot longer. Ask Australia. The yield curve doesnt have to completely invert for a recession call. It barely did so the last two times. Agreed. The below table measures the size of the last five 2Y/10Y yield curve inversions. You see, theyve been getting progressively smaller. Source: Real Investment Advice If that trend continues, we might not even need a yield curve inversion to signal recession. And much of the curve is already inverted at the short end. Stocks appear to have peaked last fall. Average lead time from market peak to business-cycle peak is seven months. Maybe. Then again, a solution to the China trade war and a solution to Brexit coming at roughly the same time could cause a market melt-up and new highs. On the other hand, Doug Kass thinks the market is getting ready to roll over and is increasing his short exposure. Fed policy changes are coming too late. It already overtightened, as it did so often in the past. Rosenberg thinks neutral Fed Funds rate is no more than 1.75%, so the last two hikes were missteps. Again, maybe. I agree the neutral rate is historically low, but it may be here. This is something we will only know for sure in hindsight. If 50 basis points can cause recession, then this economy is extremely weak and is likely to enter recession anyway. Recessions historically begin when the unemployment rate climbs 0.4 percentage points above its cycle low, which this time seems to have been 3.7%. So 4.1% unemployment, when it happens, should ring an alarm bell. Completely agree. Small increases in unemployment tend to coincide with the onset of recessions. The recession will probably be mild but there is no correlation between a recessions severity and how far equity markets decline. Agreed. This time, the bubble is on corporate balance sheets, as firms borrowed money at historically low rates. Instead of productive use, much of the borrowing went to share buybacks. This did nothing to cover future debt-servicing costs. Ive written about this at length. I think corporate high-yield debt and leveraged loans will be the next recessions subprime mortgage loans. This could create quite a severe liquidity crisis. While many focus on high yield, the leveraged loan market is in a bubble of its own. A key risk for this year is a debt refinancing tsunami as trillions in debt has to be rolled over at higher rates. That tsunami could actually cause a recession. Share buybacks and capital spending will be curtailed as cash flow falls, and wages and debt-servicing costs rise. A 35% decline in stocks would be typical for this kind of recession, though Rosenberg thinks some non-cyclical and defensive names could outperform. The main question here is whether the Fed stayed hawkish too long, as Dave thinks, or is loosening up in time to keep the economy growing. We dont know yet. For that matter, we dont know if they are turning dovish. We only know theyre talking about ending the rate hikes and/or ending the balance sheet reductions. The FOMC meets again March 1920, so whatever they do then should tell us more. The Fed can talk about more tightening later in the year. | https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmauldin/2019/03/01/is-recession-near/ |
Is Ottawa's pro soccer future with the Canadian Premier League? | John Herdman calls the Canadian Premier League the missing piece of the jigsaw for developing the countrys male professional soccer players. You speak to any Canadian that has lived in this country and been part of the football ecosystem, says the national team head coach, who previously guided Canadian women to a Pan Am Games gold medal in 2011 and Olympic bronze in 2012 and 2016. CPL commissioner David Clanachan evidently doesnt think so even though he and everyone else has known since last summer that Ottawa Fury FC planned to remain in the U.S.-based United Soccer League through at least 2019. Its franchise agreement allows Ottawa Sports & Entertainment Group to shift Fury FC to a Canadian league without penalty, but only with one years advance notice to USL, and the deadline for 2020 has passed, too. Everybody should benefit. Everybody has to row in the same direction. Thats what we have to do, Clanachan says, adding his immediate priority is launching CPL with seven teams and fielding a great product that finds favour with Canadian fans. Then, if things change and Ottawa wants to be part of it, thats great. If not, at one point well have to decide what we want to do about Ottawa. I started off by saying the people of Ottawa deserve to have a team in the Canadian Premier League. Its Canadas professional league. I cant I dont see a world where a team from Ottawa is not playing in that league. Do you? OSEGs stance on CPL is wait and see, and chief executive officer Mark Goudie says the door remains open to discussions at a later date. There is a sense of nationalistic pride around this new league that is joining, and thats great, Goudie says. We endorse it and support it and love it and we want it to be successful, and there is a segment of our supporter base that, if it was their decision, would have chosen for us to be in the CPL in 2019. And I think theres another segment that says, We trust OSEG and we trust the Fury and, if they say (USL) is better for us for now, well go with that I think in market it was overwhelmingly positive. It changes when you get across Canada. I think there were teams that were looking forward in Canada to having an established franchise as part of their new league. Previous attempts to sustain pro soccer leagues in Canada have failed. In Clanachans words, however, That was then, this is now, and he offers a list of supporting claims: access to pro soccer broadcasts from around the world, not just single weekly telecasts shown in ethnic social clubs long ago; new ways of consuming soccer, including online, to fit younger viewing habits; soccers appeal to both genders, including what Clanachan argues is a nearly 50-50 split in Canada; less risk of concussion than sports such as football and hockey; easier grassroots access because of lower equipment costs; a gaming mentality that opens soccer to everyone, as exemplified by EA Sports successful FIFA line; Canadian population growth driven by newcomers who identify more with soccer than with football, hockey or basketball. When youre coming in on the ground floor of something, its very different. Theres inherent risk in that, Clanachan says. Theres inherent risk in operating a team in the USL, too. Im not questioning (OSEGs) decision, but I will say to you that, when you look at that, theres also an advantage in coming in on the ground floor versus what theyre dealing with there. General manager Julian de Guzman says Fury FC is, happy to be in the USL. For us, its a league that has evolved and has flourished and has been successful for a couple of years now. Were seeing the re-branding of the league and what theyre implementing now with 36 teams in total to compete for a title. Thats massive when you have two conferences of 18 each. You dont find that in any league in the world right now. To be a part of that, and the only existing Canadian team, that definitely keeps involved in some of the best competitions you could be involved with for North America, and thats important for our development, thats important for our success for the Fury and also thats important for the future of the game in Canada. [email protected] Twitter.com/HolderGord | https://ottawacitizen.com/sports/soccer/is-ottawas-pro-soccer-future-with-the-canadian-premier-league |
What did the Trump-Kim summit accomplish? | After talks at an historic second meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un collapsed, a lot of work remains ahead to disarm the regime. "Face the Nation" moderator and CBS News Senior Foreign Affairs Correspondent Margaret Brennan answered five key questions about President Trump's summit in Hanoi. 1. Short answer: No. It was hoped the summit would yield a roadmap towards denuclearization. But despite months of talks, the two nations have yet to agree on even what the word means. In the talks, North Korea asked American negotiators for economic sanctions to be lifted in exchange for shutting down the regime's main Yongbyon nuclear facility. But the offer fell short of American negotiators' demands, they say, who want access and monitoring of the rest of Kim Jong Un's nuclear facilities. "Sometimes you have to walk," the president declared at press conference following the talks. 2. Short answer: Not necessarily. President Trump said the end of his conversation with Kim Jong Un was friendly and has urged diplomats to continue talks. Neither side walked away empty handed. The North Koreans have agreed to maintain their freeze on nuclear and missile testing and the United States has paused major military exercises. "I trust him and I take him at his word," President Trump said of Kim's promise not "to do testing of rockets and nuclear." "I hope that's true." 3. Short answer: Yes. North Korea can still produce nuclear material. And the regime's missiles could threaten America's West Coast, which is why a halt to testing matters. North Korea has yet to perfect launching missiles capable of flying that distance, armed with a nuclear warhead. 4. Short answer: Yes. Kim Jong Un is no longer the isolated leader of a rogue state. Despite sanctions that continue to choke his economy, Kim was treated as an equal of the president of the United States at their summit. 5. Short answer: Friendly. President Trump has stressed that the good chemistry he has built with the North Korean leader is at least one achievement from their dialogue, even calling Kim Jong Un a friend. But the president's trust in the North Korean leader, even saying he did not hold Kim responsible for the brutal treatment of American student Otto Warmbier, has elicited fierce criticism. "He tells me he didn't know about it, and I take him at his word," President Trump said in Hanoi. Warmbier's death is just one of the many human rights abuses carried out by the dictator's brutal regime. For the latest news and analysis from Washington, don't miss "Face the Nation" this Sunday. Click here to check your local listings. For the latest from America's premier public affairs program, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. | https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-did-the-trump-kim-summit-accomplish/ |
Is A Cloud War On The Horizon? | Last week, Google Cloud Platforms new CEO Thomas Kurian announced to attendees of the 2019 Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco that GCP would move aggressively to compete with other public cloud computing leaders starting with Azure and AWS. GCP will do so by hiring additional sales talent and grow revenue from enterprise customers by focusing more on individual industry segments, as well as amplify its outreach to channel partners. It is interesting that the first public statements made by the new GCP CEO were made to signal an aggressive competitive posture. Google is widely recognized as technology leader, but in public cloud computing it has taken a distant backseat to AWS and Azure in terms of enterprise usage and revenue. A good assessment of why this has historically been the case and what GCP can do to transform itself into a contender can be found in Janakiram MSVs recent Forbes.com post entitled 5 Things Thomas Kurian Must Do To Transform Google Cloud Business. But Kurian is not the first with a strategy that targets the competition. Late last year, AWS began a full-fledged campaign to syphon business away from Microsoft Azure. The strategy includes Azure to AWS migration services, price incentives and AWS partner programs. Targeted enterprise audiences include Cloud Managers and Architects, SQL Server DBAs, and .NET application developers. A SQL Server upgrade tool will automate the upgrade of SQL Server 2008 to 2016. AWS will also be supporting SQL Server and .NET for its CloudWatch Application Insights service. VMware Cloud for AWS will support the migration and hybridization of SQL server workloads from on premises to AWS. But perhaps the most aggressive tactic is the introduction of an Azure to AWS Migration Tool that automates the export of VMs from Azure into AWS using VM Import/Export (VMIE). It is often the case that public cloud computing is characterized as a costlier environment to run applications as opposed to the on premises data center. One of the ways the likes of AWS, Azure and GCP have of combating that objection is to point to all of the services available in the cloud that would be difficult if not impossible to duplicate on premises. Indeed, we could look across all three of these providers and see a new service offered every week. So, its not just the breadth of services but the pace of new offerings that define the value of the public cloud to the enterprise user. I believe that we are now entering a period of increased competition among CSPs which will result in benefits to enterprise users. Chief among them will be competition based on price. In a conversation I had with a cloud architect of a large insurance and financial services firm I interviewed as part of a research project, the architect was focused on a corporate mandate to move all IT to the cloud. Were getting out of the data center business. Up to the time we had the conversation, the single CSP on the receiving end was Microsoft Azure. However, his group had begun proof of concept exercises and price negotiations with AWS. They realized that single sourcing was not a good strategy from both a services delivery and cost perspective. Strong competition among vendors has always been good for enterprise IT. We are about to see it manifested in the public cloud marketplace. | https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwebster/2019/03/01/is-a-cloud-war-on-the-horizon/ |
Does Clay Buchholz Have Enough Left In Tank To Help The Toronto Blue Jays? | Clay Buchholz, a two-time World Series champion, has another chance to prove there's more left in the tank. He and another established pitcher, Bud Norris, have agreed to terms with the Toronto Blue Jays, who have been searching for more pitching depth with low risk, but high upside. MLB Network insider Jon Heyman reports that the Buchholz deal is believed to be worth about $3 million plus $3 million in incentives, pending a physical. Norris, according to Robert Murray of The Athletic, has a minor-league deal worth $3 million in salary plus $1.2 million in incentives if he makes the big-league club. Norris, 33, a closer who saved 28 games for the St. Louis Cardinals last season, is expected to compete for the set-up role. He averaged over 10 strikeouts per nine innings last year with a 3.59 earned-run average. He was a starter for the first seven years of his career before he moved to the bullpen. Only Ken Giles, Ryan Tepera, Tim Mayza and David Phelps have been assured of bullpen positions come Opening Day, and according to Sportsnet's Ben Nicholson-Smith, Norris could be used as a trading chip this summer when Toronto is expected to listen to offers on players who aren't under long-term control. Buchholz, a right-hander, is joining his fourth Major League team after time spent with the Boston Red Sox, Philadelphia Phillies and Arizona Diamondbacks. The two-time all-star, who spent most of his playing time with the Red Sox from 2007-2016, posted a 7-2 record with a 2.01 earned-run average in 16 starts last season with the Diamondbacks, which were sold numbers in a terrific bounce-back year before he was shut down last September for a right elbow flexor strain. Buchholz was optimistic despite the elbow injury because, unlike the injury to the same elbow in 2017, this one did not require surgery. If he is fully recovered, the Blue Jays will be looking for the 34-year-old to provide some depth and veteran experience to a pitching staff that goes into the season with some major question marks. Injuries have plagued Buchholz's career after he burst on the scene in 2007, throwing a no-hitter in his second major league start. His list of ailments included shoulder fatigue, pulled hamstring, lower back stress fracture, right shoulder bursitis and a knee injury, along with the elbow surgery, which caused him to miss almost the entire 2017 season with the Phillies. Buchholz began 2018 with the Kansas City Royals, but after spending time in the minors last April, he exercised an opt-out clause to become a free agent. Soon after, he attracted the interest of the Diamondbacks and became a solid addition to the starting rotation. Buchholz could be used as a starter as the fifth man in a five-man rotation or as a reliever. The Blue Jays have the first four starting pitchers locked down with Marcus Stroman, Aaron Sanchez, Matt Shoemaker and Clayton Richard. The fifth spot appears up for grabs with Ryan Borucki competing against Sean Reid-Foley and others. Borucki, who made 17 starts as a rookie last season after coming up from Triple A, could be the odd man out after a couple of shaky starts in Spring Training. Buchholz does not get batters out with his velocity as much anymore, and statistics bear this out. According to BrooksBaseball, Buchholz has lost velocity on all of his pitches from his career highs, with his four-seam fastball, which was once clocked at 95 miles per hour, falling to just over 90 mph last season. Buchholz has not thrown a slider since 2010, instead relying on a four-seam fastball, sinker, change-up, curve and cutter. On the positive side, Buchholz has been lights out in Toronto's home park through his career. According to Sportsnet Stats, his opponents' .286 slugging percentage is the lowest in history among starting pitchers at the Rogers Centre. But there's another field where the sense of anticipation should be the highest: When Buchholz returns to Boston and pitches at Fenway Park. | https://www.forbes.com/sites/curtisrush/2019/03/01/does-clay-buchholz-have-enough-left-in-tank-to-help-the-toronto-blue-jays/ |
Is Robotic Process Automation Really A Driver For Digital Transformation? | One of the areas of greatest interest in the technology industry in 2019 is robotic process automation (RPA). This is an industry that is growing at lightning speed. Leading industry analysts believe the market will be worth at least $4.3 billion by 2022. Already in 2018, it was worth $1.7 billion. Companies offering RPA software, such as Blue Prism and UiPath, now have valuations in the billions of dollars. Meanwhile, major software vendors such as SAP have recently announced they will be building their own RPA capabilities and embedding them into their traditional software suites of products. According to research conducted by Deloitte in 2017, 53% of organizations have already started their RPA journeys. The research firm expects this to increase to 72% next year and believes we will achieve near-universal adoption by 2022. However, despite this level of widespread adoption, the study highlights that few organizations have yet been able to scale their RPA initiatives, with the majority having just built pilots or proofs of concept. The vast majority of organizations have implemented less than 50 robots. This is todays challenge for organizations -- how to turn the clear potential of RPA into enterprisewide change. This brings me into the heart of this article, which is to explore to what extent RPA is a driver for digital transformation. I see two sides to this debate: 1. RPA drives process digitalization, which forms the basis of an organizations digital transformation. It provides the perfect opportunity to rethink how an organization has been conducting business and how it can realign to the digital world and deliver better results to customers. This approach is what we typically see in the case studies of RPA -- how organizations first improve, and then digitize core business processes. 2. RPA provides the basis for improving efficiency but doesnt play a fundamental role in an organizations digital transformation. The reason here is that all too often, organizations use it to optimize a particular process as is, and thus it becomes harder to transform and integrate processes in the long run. With automation, the business has the appearance of being a digital organization but is ultimately tied to legacy systems and approaches, thus its digital initiatives are built on an outdated and shaky foundation. I want to take a look at both perspectives in more detail. RPA As The Driver For Digitizing An Enterprises Processes For proponents of RPA, the change it drives in an organization is not just about optimizing processes or becoming more efficient; rather, it is the driver of an organizations digital transformation. While digital transformation is often considered to just be a buzzword, in reality, it gets to the fundamental transformation of an organization -- and this can only be achieved by digitizing and integrating underlying processes. And its here that RPA becomes key. Digitizing these underlying processes using RPA is what can be truly transformational. As HFS analyst Phil Fersht wrote in a widely cited blog post a couple of months ago, "Firms have the chance to make fundamental changes to how they design workflows, instead of persisting with doing things the same old way, but with lower cost people and more efficient delivery models." It's this potential to make transformative changes to business processes that is a core part of the value of RPA and what will be needed for companies to build on its full potential. RPA As The Basis For Efficiency Gains In a digital transformation, the core goal is to change what you are doing and how you are doing it. But in many cases, enterprises that seek to achieve transformation need to bring processes together and get out of the siloed structure that they have been used to. For example, this might include integrating billing systems and processes with the front-end mobile application or creating a complete view of the customer and their interactions with the business -- something that is often the case in large banks, where one part of the bank is unaware of what the other is doing. Creating these new digital experiences that customers want means generating a fundamental transformation. The challenge with RPA is that it is typically used to optimize processes as they are as opposed to improving the integration between different systems. In many cases, as the Harvard Business Review points out, its better to first work on improving the process before trying to automate it. Authors Thomas H. Davenport and David Brain note that for many companies, RPA implementations support the as-is process, with no improvement or examination of the current process steps that are automated. As a result, they may achieve modest savings, but in many cases they will miss out on opportunities to dramatically improve process outcomes, quality, costs, and cycle times. In addition, its worth highlighting that RPA can be set up quickly because it doesn't require coding or complex integration. It doesnt impact the underlying business logic. That doesn't mean it's easy. But it does mean it's quite easy to test and pilot the technology, at least at a small scale. This can mean that organizations will find that various lines of business are all experimenting with their own RPA pilots, with limited input from the CIO or IT department. Again, such initiatives will help drive efficiency initially but have limited scope and lack the full potential that RPA can ultimately provide. Conclusion RPA is an incredibly powerful technology, and its only improving with the advances were currently seeing in artificial intelligence. Thats why there is so much focus on it. However, simply automating a process isnt enough for organizations to achieve success in the digital world. | https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2019/03/01/is-robotic-process-automation-really-a-driver-for-digital-transformation/ |
Is Washington State About To Okay Public Long-Term Care Insurance? | Washington State may soon approve the nations first publicly-funded long-term care insurance program. The measure, called the Long-Term Care Trust Act, would provide a maximum benefit of $36,500 for people who need assistance with at least three activities of daily living (ADLs) such as bathing, toileting, transferring, dressing, or eating. It would be funded with a payroll tax (or what supporters call a premium) of 0.58 percent of wages starting in 2022. The money would go into a trust fund so it could not be spent on other programs. State residents would be eligible for benefits if they have worked at least part-time over the past 10 years without interruption of five or more consecutive years, or worked three out of the past six years. The state would begin paying benefits in 2025. The state House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the measure last week. A companion bill is pending in the Democratically-controlled Senate, where no vote has yet been scheduled. Democratic Governor Jay Inslee backs the measure. A similar bill died in the legislature last year after it was opposed by among others, AARP. While this years bill has changed only modestly from the earlier version, AARP now supports it. Universal public insurance For the most part, the state would pay benefits directly to service providers such as certified home care aides, assisted living facilities, adult day centers, or nursing homes. It also would pay qualified family caregivers who take state-mandated training. Universal public long-term care insurance is widely available throughout the developed world. The US, however, finances long-term care mainly only through Medicaid--for those who are impoverished and have limited incomes. Public long-term care insurance models are built on one of two chassis. Catastrophic or back-end coverage would require consumers to pay for their own care for a period of timesay 1 to 3 years--but provide a lifetime benefit after that. Front-end coverage, which Washington is considering, pays benefits once someone meets a functional limitation test but limits support to a fixed amount of time or money. Limitations Similarly, some public programs around the world pay beneficiaries cash to purchase services. Others pay service providers directly, and some allow beneficiaries a choice of benefits. Washington primarily would provide a service benefit. The Washington program would have a number of limitations. The benefit would cover only a fraction of the need of someone who needs a high level of care. It effectively would provide $100-a-day for a year, though the benefit could increase by up to 3 percent annually to reflect inflation. However, a senior with high support needs will spend a lifetime average of $147,000 out-of-pocket on long-term care. In Washington, someone could not receive benefits until they need assistance with three ADLs. Thats more restrictive than private long-term care insurance that generally requires assistance with only two ADLs. First of its kind Also, unlike private long-term care insurance, the program would not cover someone with severe cognitive impairment unless they meet the three ADL test. Finally, its requirement that people work and pay the payroll tax before becoming eligible would exclude older adults who already are retired and younger people with severe disabilities who are unable to work. Still, the Washington program would be the first of its kind in the US. Hawaiis Kupuna Caregivers Program provides a modest voucher that working family caregivers of older adults can use to purchase some supports and services for loved ones living at home. Other states, including Minnesota, are considering their own alternatives. Last year, voters in Maine overwhelmingly rejected a ballot initiative aimed at supporting those who need home care. In Congress, Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) proposed a public catastrophic long-care insurance program last year. Pallone, who now chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is in a strong position to push his measure, However, it appears to be taking a back seat to broader health insurance and drug pricing issues. Increasingly, state and federal policymakers are aware of the need for a public program to help families cope with the huge expense of long-term care. The roadblock: The unwillingness of lawmakers and voters to raise taxes to pay for a public program. Now, Washington State may be about to take the leap. We are about to learn whether the publiceven in a blue state-- will support a tax hike to finance modest long-term supports and services. And if the plan becomes law we will gather valuable evidence about how a Washington-like front-end model works. | https://www.forbes.com/sites/howardgleckman/2019/03/01/is-washington-state-about-to-ok-public-long-term-care-insurance/ |
Are Congressional hearings useless? | By Cait Bladt Congress has been on a run of high drama hearings. From the emotional testimony during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing to Matthew Whitakers unrelenting sass in front of the House Judiciary Committee, congressional hearings have been must-watch events. However, despite all the pomp, these hearings rarely affect any real change. Kavanaugh was eventually confirmed. Whitaker was replaced. Michael Cohen is still going to prison. Donald Trump is still president. In 2016, Washington Post assistant editor Robert Gebelhoff argued in favor of continuing to have congressional hearings. Gebelhoff acknowledged they are frequently just opportunities for politicians to grandstand, but they're still one of the few venues that have the power to shape public opinion. This is a fascinating power that lawmakers have: Despite all the talk about people hating Congress and dismissing it as broken and gridlocked, it still retains enough respect to levy mass shame. We still eagerly denounced Pharma bro Martin Shkreli as he made faces and repetitively pleaded the Fifth before the House Oversight Committee. We dont watch these events for new information; rather, theyre a form of political theater. Congressional hearings or at least, those that get media attention or make an appearance in our Facebook feeds are no longer seen as tools to develop legislation. They are political tools to influence public opinion. During the Cohen hearings in front of the House Oversight Committee, many reporters were shocked at the information that was gleaned when lawmakers stopped putting on a show and started asking straightforward questions. How about that: Republican Rep. Justin Amash (Mich.) is actually asking Cohen about the substance of his allegations and trying to get information out of him! Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) February 27, 2019 The Cohen hearings were not, however, without their share of over-the-top stunts. Imagine someone thinking this was a good idea. pic.twitter.com/1NdHoURxO8 Allana (@AllanaHarkin) February 27, 2019 Five key takeaways from the Michael Cohen hearing Michael Cohen's date with the House Oversight Committee began with a big bang. His opening statement contained most of the day's major revelations. One of the most shallow and ridiculous moments in the recent history of congressional hearings came during the Kavanaugh hearing. The Washington Post reports Sen. Cory Booker took it upon himself to make a grand statement in front of the gathered public. A grand statement that was ultimately completely empty. Lest the immensity of the moment be lost on spectators, Booker sprang for the enduring image: This is about the closest Ill probably ever have in my life to an I am Spartacus moment, he said with a straight face. He was referring to the 1960 movie Spartacus, about a failed slave revolt led by the title character (Kirk Douglas) against the Roman Republic. When the rulers warned that all the slaves would be crucified unless Spartacus identified himself, he stood up. Then all the other slaves did the same, saying, I am Spartacus. Alas, the Kavanaugh documents technically were not confidential, having been released the night before by Bill Burck, the George W. Bush attorney charged with reviewing Kavanaughs records from his time as a lawyer in the White House. The documents also did not support Bookers claim about profiling. But truth is no lingerer in the repositories of Bookers revelations. On the flip side, much of Cohens testimony proved insightful and interesting. The New York Times reports while he may not have a wealth of knowledge on the Trump administrations ties with Russia, Cohen did offer a great deal of insight on the organizations financial workings. Mr. Cohens testimony did not provide conclusive proof that incriminates the president on possible collusion with Russia. On another matter, though one that is the province of federal prosecutors in New York and not that of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III Mr. Cohens testimony and documents could prove far more damaging. Mr. Cohen said the president had firsthand knowledge of the payment made to Ms. Daniels, just before Election Day in 2016, that were part of an effort to silence her from talking about a sexual encounter she said she had with Mr. Trump. Acting at the presidents direction, he said he procured a home-equity loan to pay Ms. Daniels $130,000. But Mr. Cohen also gave the committee documentary evidence: a copy of a check dated Aug. 1, 2017, for $35,000 from Mr. Trumps personal bank account that bore Mr. Trumps signature. Mr. Cohen said the check was one of 11 installments that the president made to reimburse him. Wild hearing. We probably wont remember any of it in 2 weeks. Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) February 27, 2019 The Tylt is focused on debates and conversations around news, current events and pop culture. We provide our community with the opportunity to share their opinions and vote on topics that matter most to them. We actively engage the community and present meaningful data on the debates and conversations as they progress. The Tylt is a place where your opinion counts, literally. The Tylt is an Advance Local Media, LLC property. Join us on Twitter @TheTylt, on Instagram @TheTylt or on Facebook, wed love to hear what you have to say. | https://www.nola.com/tylt/2019/02/are-congressional-hearings-useless.html |
How Did Best Buy Fare In Q4, And What Can We Expect In Fiscal 2020? | Best Buy announced solid fourth quarter results recently, as both its revenue and earnings per share came in ahead of market expectations. In Q4, Best Buys comparable sales were up 3% during the quarter, which topped the consensus estimates of 1.8%. The retailers online sales grew 9.3% on a comparable basis, primarily due to higher conversion and increased traffic. However, the companys revenue declined 4% year-over-year (y-o-y) to around $14.8 billion, largely driven by the lapping of the prior years extra week and the loss of revenue from 257 Best Buy Mobile and 12 large format store closures in the past year. The company benefited from stronger consumer demand across the gaming and wearables categories, partially offset by lower than expected sales in mobile phones. Best Buy also reported non-GAAP EPS of $2.72 for the quarter, up 12% y-o-y, primarily driven by a lower effective tax rate and higher operating income. Our $73 price estimate for Best Buys stock is almost 10% ahead of the current market price. We have created an interactive dashboard on How Did Best Buy Fare In Q4, And What Can We Expect In Fiscal 2020?, which outlines our forecasts for the company. You can modify our forecasts to see the impact any changes would have on the companys earnings and valuation, and see all Trefis Consumer Discretionary company data here. Best Buy is executing on its strategy to cut costs, optimize square footage, grow online sales and stabilize its revenues. As a result, the companys fourth quarter marked its fifth consecutive comps and EPS beat. Going forward, Best Buy expects its top line to range between $9.05 billion and $9.15 billion in the fiscal first quarter. In addition, the retailer also expects non-GAAP EPS of $0.83 to $0.88. Further, Best Buy expects its enterprise comparable sales growth of flat to 1%. Fiscal 2020 Outlook For full-year fiscal 2020, Best Buy expects revenues of $42.9 billion to $43.9 billion. The retailer is also calling for same-store sales to climb as much as 0.5% to 2.5%. Best Buys gross profit margin is expected to remain flat relative to fiscal 2019, as continued investments in supply chain and higher transportation costs could be offset by the higher marginal rate of GreatCall. Further, the retailers SG&A expenses are expected to grow in low-single-digits, driven by continued investments in technology and wages. The retailers investments in specialty labor, supply chain and increased depreciation related to strategic capital investments, as well as ongoing pressures in the business, will be partially offset by a combination of returns from new initiatives and ongoing cost reductions and efficiencies. | https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2019/03/01/how-did-best-buy-fare-in-q4-and-what-can-we-expect-in-fiscal-2020/ |
Why dont we ever hear the details of how white people evolve on racial issues? | A larger truth suggested but ignored in Green Book is that racism has distorted the outlook and behavior of whites not just in the South, but in the whole nation as well. Whites are not heroes or villains so much as they are the beneficiaries of an oppressive system created by fellow whites. The degree to which they acquiesce to that system, whether in 1962 or now, is the great untold story of the color line that rarely is examined. True, we dont have a lot of models for such a story; America never really integrated, which means white people can often remain oblivious to racial divisions. They have few reasons to grapple with their own racial attitudes, to disassemble them and see where they fall on the spectrum. How alarming it would be to discover that even if youre not a bona fide racist, your incremental evolution still leaves plenty of room for racist behavior a far more common state, I suspect, than being either villain or hero. | https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-kaplan-race-green-book-20190301-story.html |
What now for Karl Lagerfelds beloved cat Choupette? | Shes got the whole world in her paws. After the death last week of Karl Lagerfeld the restless German couturier who dominated fashion for decades and made Chanel a powerhouse my thoughts, like many, immediately turned to his fabulous white Birman kitty. ,Images of a feline answer to a post-Ren Celine Dion rushed to my head. Karl Lagerfeld is seen standing in front of an image of Choupette, his cat, taken from his photo calendar Corsa Karl and Choupette in Berlin, Germany in 2015. For the calendar, the late designer took photos of his cat Choupette in and beside an Opel car. ( picture alliance / picture alliance via Getty Images ) All of this was buttressed, furthermore, by reports that she would be inheriting a good chunk of her masters fortune (really!). Naturally, my memory also turned to the time Choupette probably the most famous cat to ever visit Canada arrived with the designer in Toronto, back in 2015. Not since Paris Hiltons dog Tinkerbell in the early aughts has there been a pet of such renown in the culture when Choupette made it here ensconced, as I revealed then, at the Four Seasons on Bay, full-time nanny in tow. And when, during a sit-down with the designer, I asked Lagerfeld about the bank that his model pet was earning a reported three million euros in one year for advertisements ranging from cars to beauty products the designer told me point-blank that Choupette could actually make way more! But she wont do food commercials, he deadpanned. Article Continued Below As the story goes, Choupette came into Lagerfelds life as a matter of pure serendipity, and became a signature part of latter-Lagerfeld lore (replacing the fan he always carried when he was in his fat phase!). It all started when he agreed to cat-sit for a model friend over the Christmas holidays in 2011, but when he returned to Paris two weeks later, Lagerfeld couldnt bear to part with her. And he didnt! I refused to give her back, Lagerfeld told Womens Wear Daily in June 2012. He was in love, the cat now the becoming mirror animal of a famously elusive designer (who beyond all the bon mots was a workaholic loner, after all). Read more: An icon and an iconoclast at the same time: Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld dies at 85 Canadian fashion players remember Karl Lagerfeld Since then, Choupette has earned the kind of publicity even Kris Jenner might marvel at! An icon on social media, her movements are generously covered in the press we have learned, for instance, that she can do without opera but does enjoy Latin music. A fresh water cocktail, a special blend of five varieties of mineral water. Tossing Lagerfelds pencils off the desk while hes trying to work. Two ladies-in-waiting. A bodyguard. A private medical consultant. Three silver Goyard dishes, from which she ate. Her own iPad. A Dyson dryer. The deets about her kitty charmed life kept coming. First among social-media-friendly celebrity pets and, yes, this includes Jennifer Garners many, many homegrown chickens (one of which she named Hennifer!) Choupette even once inspired both a book, as well as a set of emoticons (emotiKarls, plunging into her many mercurial moods!). Article Continued Below In the continuum of cats and their famous masters, though, Karl would hardly be the first to fall so hard and so fast for a feline. Think: Abraham Lincoln, a first-rate president and emancipator of great renown but also, as it happens, a pretty serious cat buff. Famously, first lady Mary Todd said cats were her husbands only hobby. He took in strays and had several cats in the White House, once even feeding one of his faves Tabby! from underneath the table at a state dinner (a detail that Spielberg sadly missed including in his biopic of the man!). Likewise, Catherine the Great of Russia is said to have had two full-fledged cat colonies in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Her personal pets were elegant Russian Blues, a breed she favoured above all, giving them to ambassadors as gifts for other sovereigns. The basement, on the other hand, was populated with unpedigreed working cats keeping the rodent population at bay. The eminently quotable Mark Twain may well have been one of the craziest cat people of all time. Preferring felines to the company of people, he had up to 19 at one time, and once said If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat. Twain was also a champ at giving his whiskered friends names, ranging from Beelzebub and Buffalo Bill to Satan, Sour Mash, Soapy Sal, Pestilence and Bambino. Meow. Though the culture today is rife with stereotypes about cat ladies, it has often been men who have been most partial, as explored in the book Men and Cats: An Illustrated History, showcasing such cat lovers as French writer Jean Cocteau. Similarly, in Artists and their Cats by Alison Nastasi, photographs put the focus on about 50 artist-cat bonds, in particular see: Muppet master Jim Henson and painter Henry Matisse. Researchers have long speculated that creative individuals share common attributes which mirror those of cats, Nastasi points out in the book. One study, examining the personalities of more than 4,000 volunteers who self-identified as cat people or dog people, concluded that the cat people were more neurotic, less agreeable, and more introverted than their canine-fancying counterparts, but also displayed more openness. Discuss! Certainly, in the annals of fashion, no cat has as much fashion cred as Holly Golightlys unnamed companion in Breakfast at Tiffanys, a fluffy orange sweetheart who, like most cats, observes everything around him with a sort of passive disapproval, as Entertainment Weekly once put it. Not until Choupette, of course. She could go quietly into the night living in the lap of luxury to which she is accustomed but somehow I think there is another chapter in her. Ashley Tschudin, creator of the wildly popular Choupettes Diary blog and social accounts that date to 2012, announced this week that Choupette will ultimately come back as a new woman, branding herself outside of being just Karl Lagerfelds pampered puss. Shinan Govani is a freelance columnist based in Toronto covering culture and society. Follow him on Twitter: @shinangovani | https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/opinion/2019/03/01/what-now-for-karl-lagerfelds-beloved-cat-choupette.html |
Is it more dangerous to let Islamic State foreign fighters from the West return or prevent them from coming back? | (The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) Many of the men and women who left their homes in the West to join the Islamic State group or similar terrorist organizations in Syria and Iraq as fighters or supporters now want to come home. Their desire to return has coincided with the defeats suffered by IS in the diminishing territory under its control. The U.S. government argues that countries should take back their foreign fighters and prosecute them rather than allow them to be free to act on the world stage. But other countries are more concerned with the threat of returnees committing domestic terrorism. And, despite its arguments, the U.S. has recently moved to keep at least one American-born ISIS member from returning. Determining which approach makes Western countries safest requires examining the facts about foreign fighters. Inconsistent US stance Only about 250 to 300 Americans are said to have left the country to join the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The numbers who left Europe are much greater, 5,000 to 6,000, according to a 2018 report from the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. The United States and its allies recently split over the Trump administrations insistence that other governments bring home their citizens who joined the Islamic State. Syrian rebel groups have detained hundreds of ISIS-affiliated Westerners, but have threatened to release over 3,000 them if the United States withdraws its forces from the region. The Free Syrian Army has already released at least one British foreign fighter, and his whereabouts are now unknown. But American officials have undercut their position by declaring that Hoda Muthana, a young mother who left the United States to join IS, should not be permitted to return either, illustrating the inconsistency of the American approach to this issue. Range of national policies The U.S. was actually the first country in the world to outlaw foreign fighting. Congress passed the initial legislation while George Washington was still president, despite the role of foreign volunteers in the American Revolution. Under U.S. law, individuals can lose their citizenship for joining a foreign army or armed group as an officer, or for joining forces hostile to the United States. However, prosecutions have been rare. American foreign fighters through history have been charged instead with violations that are easier to demonstrate in court than fighting on foreign soil (which would require witnesses and testimony from abroad), such as handling weapons of mass destruction and providing material support for terrorist organizations. Unlike some allies, the U.S. has not attempted to prevent foreign fighters from returning by removing their citizenship. Part of the disagreement between the U.S. and its allies over foreign fighters stems from the fact that every country has different policies concerning such returnees. France and Russia are among the countries in the process of taking some or all of their citizens back to face charges at home. Canada, which has been divided by internal partisan debates, has switched approaches, from stripping citizenship to allowing foreign fighters to return and potentially face criminal charges. But the Canadian public safety minister dismissed the American call to reclaim its citizens as a mere suggestion. The U.K. has passed laws stripping citizenship from individuals who travel to join terror groups. In its own case of a young mother being held by rebels, it has argued that because her father was an immigrant from Bangladesh, she is eligible for citizenship from that country and her U.K. citizenship can be removed. The U.S. has taken this approach in the Muthana case as well. Its argument is that her fathers employment as a foreign diplomat means that she is not a citizen, despite having been born in America. Fears vs. facts One American response to the rise of IS was to push for passage of two United Nations Security Council resolutions that require every country in the world to try to stop their citizens from becoming foreign terrorist fighters and to track and prosecute them. These resolutions are why some countries like Australia are eager to remove their foreign fighters citizenship status: If a foreign fighter can be stripped of citizenship retroactively, it is no longer an obligation for that country to return or prosecute them. National responses have varied and are driven by domestic homeland security politics. Denmark has a successful reintegration program that provides social services to help some returnees deradicalize and disengage. But opponents of this policy mounted challenges and won court rulings ensuring that Denmark can strip citizenship as well. Since relatively few Americans have gone to Syria and only a handful have returned, there has not been a national debate about returnees until the recent Muthana case. Many national responses have been prompted by fear of domestic terrorism. The U.K. relied upon one 2013 study indicating that, in theory, as many as 10 percent of returnees could become terrorists. However, the same researcher found in 2015 that the rate was actually .002 percent, and hundreds of returnees have already been back for years with no sign of terror activity. The local IS network behind the Paris and Brussels attacks included some returnees. But otherwise foreign fighters have not produced a wave of domestic terrorism in the West. My own research indicates that most domestic terror plots by returnees, including successful attacks, occur only within the first few months and that there is no evidence of any long-term threats by returnee sleeper cells. Foreign fighters who have been barred from their home countries have fanned the flames of terrorism and insurgency when left unchecked. Osama bin Laden was the most prominent of hundreds of such militants who created far more havoc than any returnees. And in the social media era, they do not even need to return home to reach domestic audiences. The American government should weigh this evidence carefully as it moves to address the risks of ISIS returnees. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: http://theconversation.com/is-it-more-dangerous-to-let-islamic-state-foreign-fighters-from-the-west-return-or-prevent-them-from-coming-back-112588. | https://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Is-it-more-dangerous-to-let-Islamic-State-foreign-13654856.php |
Do Venezuelans Actually Want U.S. Help? | In every high school and every college in Latin America you learn about these interventions, said Alan McPherson, a Temple University history professor who focuses on U.S. relations with Latin America. They are fresh in the mind of the public whenever theres any intervention of any kind or whenever a politician wants to sort of exploit this public memory. Theres another reason many remember prior interventions so clearly: the effects persist to this day. The 2002 coup attempt against then Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, later found to have been sanctioned by the Bush administration, is still used by Maduro in the present to discredit his opposition, accusing the Trump administration of both assassination and coup attempts. Donald Trump gave the order to kill me, Maduro said in January, told the Colombian government, the Colombian mafia to kill me. If something happens to me, Donald Trump and Colombian President Ivn Duque will be responsible. That troubled legacy of American intervention is most striking in Central America: Around 200,000 people were killed and another 45,000 forcibly disappeared during Guatemalas armed conflict, with more than 90 percent of the genocide estimated to have been committed by the United States-backed military. In El Salvadors dirty war in the 1980s, the UN now believes 85 percent of atrocities were perpetrated by U.S.-supported government forces. In both of these countries, as well as in Honduras, U.S. actions have markedly contributed to the instability migrants are now fleeing when they head to the United States border. The roots of whats going on now in most countries go back to what happened at the end of the Cold War, said Cecilia Menjvar, a UCLA researcher studying Central America and migration. And the interventions were rarely clean and precise, said Menjvar. Rather, they had a ripple effect, each coup and cascade of violence blending into the next, with instability frequently spilling over into other countries. That spillover potential worries Favia Noricta, a 50-year-old Colombian living on the border, a region thats already been eclipsed by the more than three million people leaving their country, nearly half landing in Colombia. We want the exit of Maduro. Only that, he said. An intervention, thats not something we want. It cant happen because many people will die. More dead, more misery. But that isnt to say those in the region object to the humanitarian aid. With skyrocketing hyperinflation, its near impossible at present to get basic food or medicine in Venezuela. Violent clashes have spurted up country-wide and millions have fled. So while Maduro and some foreign figures have accused U.S. humanitarian aid of being a deliberate provocation and pretext for intervention, those on the ground dont necessarily agree. People say its like that, but, honestly, we believe its a help, said Jordes Sira, a 39-year-old Venezuelan who traveled to the border to help pass the aid across the border. Its help and were the ones who have to live through whats happening. And to some, the situation is desperate enough to outweigh the serious risks that come with U.S. involvement. Carlos Cangroiz, a Venezuelan migrant who fled to Colombia in October with his wife and children, told me he wants other countries to intervene in Venezuela. It would be a chance to end the starvation and shortages, the hyperinflation, and state violence his country has suffered from for years. I left the country for the situation were living through, he said. Where we dont have medicine, where we dont have food, where our relatives are dying for lack of nutrition or health. Cangroiz isnt under any illusions about what intervention would involve. I have always said Venezuela is going to see blood, Cangroiz said. In Venezuela, its already beginning because he doesnt want to let go of his power. And the guard continues to defend Maduro. The guard continues to defend this man. | https://newrepublic.com/article/153194/venezuelans-actually-want-us-help |
Can a Man Write a Great #MeToo Novel? | We do not learn whether the accusation at the heart of the book is true until the novels end, although it is treated as false by most of the characters throughout. Marco ropes in the unnamed narrator as a kind of passive accomplice, speaking to him ceaselessly about what he calls his ordeal. It turns out that the narrator knows Julia, who was an old friend of his familys and the object of his own youthful crush. When his mother dies and he goes to London for the funeral, he takes the opportunity to drop in on Julia, to ask her the truth. She insists that the rape took place, and he returns to New York as confused as ever. He staunchly maintains an inner neutrality, although he is aware of something suspiciously convenient about his refusal to take a side. Marco, the accused, is a talented but self-regarding man, the sort who likes to strike up conversations with waitresses who have no choice but to flatter him. Julia is sane and credible. When the narrator suggests that she has brought forth her claim simply because so many other women are doing the same, she makes the wise rejoinder, What ... exactly ... is wrong with that? Afternoon of a Faun succeeds because its villain is our narrator. He is not a villain the way Lasduns other men arehe is neither mad nor oblivious. He does nothing illegal, nor even anything obviously wrong. He is a kind, contemplative, loyal man, the sort who hates the idea of harming anybody. When his wife derisively tells Marco that she has had sex reluctantly plenty of times in her life, the narrator agonizes over memories in which he may have pressured her into sex unwittingly. But his complacency and his assumption that the truth will out has disastrous consequences. At the core of his motivations is a certainty: The truth might be hard to bring to light, but that didnt mean it didnt exist, because it did exist: fixed in its moment, unalterable and certainly not a matter of belief. However, his desultory investigations lead nowhere, except to further introspection. While he muses on the unalterable truth, a vicious war rages around him, precisely because the truth of the past is inaccessible. At the heart of Afternoon of a Faun, and every one of Lasduns novels and his memoir, and Nasreens memoir, is this problem: The truth exists as a social phenomenon, agreed upon by group consensus. But gender, for one, divides us from one another, makes it harder for us to communicate and to mutually understand. Under those epistemological circumstances, the truth of what happened becomes an elusive, almost mythical notion. And when madness is involved, the line between truth and fiction goes up in smoke entirely. Nasreens memoir is a valuable companion text to Afternoon of a Faun, because they are two books about the same thing: the impossibility of knowing another persons truth, and the impossibility of ever really being able to communicate what its like to live inside your own head. In the style of Charlie Kaufmans movie Adaptation, which blends lurid fiction with the real-life story of Kaufmans attempt to adapt Susan Orleans book The Orchid Thief, the contents of Lasduns fiction took on a strange new life, as part of Nasreens mind. So it feels exactly right to read a memoir beside a novel; to read Nasreen along with Lasdun; to mix up events and books and media in the grander project of trying to understand just how badly and how consistently human beings fail to communicate with one another. The Afternoon of a Faun is a highly conscientious novel, elegant in its execution and almost humble in its refusal to grandstand, or to turn a story about rape allegations into some didactic allegory. The title is taken from Mallarms poem LApres Midi dun Faune, the story of a just-woken creature who lusts after a nymph. But I thought, too, of Vaslav Nijinsky, who turned that poem into a much more famous ballet of the same name and wrote a book, the Diary of Vaslav Nijinksy, composed over a period of six weeks as he descended into psychosis. I seek truth in a book and not the subject, Nijinsky wrote. Perhaps. But there is a reason that Lasdun has returned to fiction after his traumatic real-life experience, of which he seemed so certain that the truth was on his side. There may be no clear borderline between the real and the unreal, after allor at least, neither dimension has a monopoly on the truth. | https://newrepublic.com/article/153197/man-write-great-metoo-novel |
Are document scanners obsolete? | I have had a couple of document scanners in my office for years. The first is a sheet-fed Fujitsu ScanSnap desktop unit I used to use for scanning business cards and incoming correspondence; the second is a flatbed scanner built into my Epson printer, which I used to use for scanning book pages and items too large for the ScanSnaps sheet feeder. I have not used either scanner in months and heres why: My iPhone X using either Mojaves new Continuity Camera feature or Smile Softwares PDFpen Scan+ iOS app ($6.99) is faster, easier and more convenient for quickly scanning documents than either real scanner. Continuity Camera is a new feature in macOS 10.13 Mojave that allows you to use your iPhone (or another iDevice) as a wireless scanner. In other words, you point your iPhone camera at what you want to scan, and it appears on your Mac almost instantly. Continuity Camera requires macOS Mojave and iOS 12; both devices must have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled and be signed in to iCloud using the same Apple ID and two-factor authentication. If you meet those requirements, Continuity Camera is available on your Mac in the Finder, Mail, Messages, Notes, Keynote, Numbers, Pages, and TextEdit. To use Continuity Camera, Control-click in the document, window, or on the desktop and choose Import or Insert from iPhone or iPad > Take Photo or Scan Documents to open the camera app on your iPhone or iPad. Shoot the photo on your iPhone or iPad. If youre satisfied with the photo, tap the Use Photo button and the photo magically appears in the document, folder or the desktop. If the photo or scan isnt just right, tap the Retake button and try again. Its fast, seamless and something I find myself using almost every day. If you havent tried it yet, Control or right-click on the desktop or in a Finder window and choose Import from iPhone or iPad. Moving right along, I often want to scan an image with OCR Optical Character Recognition to create a PDF with text that can be copied and searched for on my Mac. Sadly, Continuity Camera cant do that (at least not yet). Thats why I love PDFpen Scan+ ($6.99 in the iOS App Store), which lets me scan documents and turn them into searchable PDFs faster and easier than anything else Ive used. It straightens and crops pages as it scans them, and scans multipage documents touch-freeI turn the pages, and PDFpen Scan+ does the rest. Id be remiss if I didnt make it clear that almost all real scanners produce higher quality scans than my iPhone camera. On the other hand, my iPhone scans are completely legible and good enough for me, so the time and effort I save more than makes up for their slightly lower image quality. bob@workingsmarter formacusers.com | https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/drmac/article/Are-document-scanners-obsolete-13637173.php |
Is Ripple A Scam? | In my recent article on JPM Coin, JPMorgan Chase s prototype digital token, I casually mentioned that there are indications that Ripple is essentially a scam. I had no idea the can of worms I was opening. At least a dozen articles popped up in the cryptosphere questioning my sources and perhaps my sanity in languages as varied as Japanese, Spanish, and even Turkish. Needless to say, I had to dig deeper and what I found out about Ripple was chilling. Peeling Back the Layers of the Ripple Business Model At its core, the Ripple business model is a pump and dump scheme, as it undergoes numerous activities to increase the value of the XRP cryptocurrency (crypto). Unlike most crypto pump and dumps, however, Ripple takes numerous steps to obscure this basic fact. To clarify Ripples business model, I put together the chart below. The starting point in the chart above is the issuance of many billions of XRP tokens essentially printing Monopoly money out of thin air, except that you can play Monopoly with Monopoly money. To obscure Ripples founders intentions, however, an open source community not technically Ripple itself issued the tokens. XRP is open source and it was not created by our company, so that existed as an open source technology, explains Ryan Zagone, director of regulatory relations for Ripple. What we do have is we do own a significant amount of XRP, it was gifted to us by some of the open-source developers that created it, Zagone continues. But theres not a direct connection between Ripple the company and XRP. However, Zagone is being disingenuous at best, as Ripple gets a say as to who can process XRP transactions, essentially making XRP a centralized, permissioned crypto. As a result, many people in the crypto community dont even consider XRP to be a cryptocurrency at all, because its not decentralized. Maybe Not One of the strongest indicators that Ripple is a going concern is the dozens of customers it touts. Look more closely, however, and most such companies are partners, not customers and to make matters worse, Ripple pays companies to become partners. Ripple calls arrangement this the RippleNet Accelerator Program. Starting [October 13, 2017], Ripple will offer a unique reward for financial institutions that are the first in their markets to process and promote commercial payments on RippleNet, according to a Ripple blog post. The RippleNet Accelerator Program is funded by $300 million of XRP from Ripples XRP holdings, the post continues. In other words, Ripple is using its share of its free XRP tokens to build the illusion it has paying customers when in fact Ripple is paying them, not the other way around. The Problem of Liquidity Ripples stated goal of this incentive program is to lower what it calls liquidity cost. Since were offering the incentives in XRP, we anticipate seeing an added benefit of building an easy on-ramp for institutions to use XRP in their payment flows to lower liquidity cost in the future, says Monica Long, SVP of marketing at Ripple. Early reception of these XRP incentives in a test phase has been very positive. The question of liquidity cost, in fact, is at the heart of Ripples international payments product strategy. For XRP to work as an intermediate currency, banks or other institutions must maintain sufficient reserves of XRP in order to respond to requests for transactions. However, there are two massive problems with this approach. First, XRP is simply too volatile. You need someone to provide the liquidity to be able to change into and out of Ripple, explains Martin Walker, director for banking and finance at the Center for Evidence-Based Management and head of product management, securities finance and collateral management at Broadridge. And holding Ripple, a currency which has seen its price drop 80 percent and then back up 100 percent in the course of the last two months is just not credible. Second, maintaining liquidity in XRP doesnt solve the core problem with money transfers from countries with more stable currencies to those with less stable ones, as such transfers generally go only one way. For example, for a financial services firm to handle payments from the US to Guatemala, it would need to have liquidity in Guatemalan Quetzals in order to disburse payments. Liquidity in XRP would be useless. As with many cryptotokens, shady operators seek to circumvent regulatory controls by classifying their tokens as not being securities. Ripple takes this approach as well. XRP is not a security for three reasons: if Ripple, the company, shuts down tomorrow, the XRP ledger will continue to operate; its an open-source, decentralized technology, explains Brad Garlinghouse CEO of Ripple. if you buy XRP, [you are] not buying shares of Ripple buying XRP doesnt give you ownership of Ripple. Garlinghouse, however, is confusing equity with security, and then obscuring his argument with the Ripple doesnt control XRP canard. The SEC (or other relevant national regulatory body) is the final arbiter of what constitutes a security, but the commonsense way to understand a security is this: if people buy an asset with the expectation of selling it later for a profit, then its a security. XRP clearly qualifies by this informal definition and in fact, Ripples holders of XRP are counting on this fact to pump up its value. JPMorgans JPM Coin, in contrast, isnt tradable, and thus would never be classified as a security. Paying early partners to try out technology isnt in and of itself dishonest after all, PayPal did something similar. However, while PayPal built a working payments infrastructure, its not clear that Ripples technology is a viable alternative to traditional payment mechanisms like Swift, or whether it can deliver on its promises at all. Some partners like American Express ran Ripple pilots that ended up going nowhere. Others like Santander in Spain rolled out a Ripple-based product, but it didnt deliver on the immediate funds transfer promise at the heart of Ripples stated differentiator. The Santander product that uses Ripple is One Pay, a mobile app that allows funds transfers between certain European countries. One Pay is a service that allows international transfers between individuals faster, since they arrive at the same destination in many cases or the next day, thanks to the use of blockchain technology, the Santander site explains (translation by Google ). In case of transfer between accounts of the Santander Group to the UK, they will be immediate and the rest of the transactions with a maximum term of 2 days. Two days, of course, is far from immediate and may explain the poor reception to One Pay among Santander customers. Another significant Ripple partner is Western Union , who is already one of the leaders in the global funds transfer industry. Clearly, signing up Western Union to use Ripple would be a coup for the company. Only thats not what happened. We are always criticized that Western Union is not cost-efficient, blah blah blah, but we did not see that part of the efficiency yet during our tests [of Ripple], says Hikmet Ersek, CEO of Western Union. The practical matter is its still too expensive. Time to Pump and Dump Given the fact that Ripple has to pay its customers to implement pilots of questionable technology, you might wonder how Ripple is still a going concern. The answer, of course, is that it really makes money only one way: by pumping up the value of XRP. In fact, Ripple executives are only too happy to point this fact out. We hold something like 60 billion XRP with a notion value of something like $10 billion, brags David JoelKatz Schwartz, CTO at Ripple. We want very much to increase and realize that value. Garlinghouse is on the same page. Were driving velocity and demand of XRP, he says. For everything I do, I think what is in the best interest of the XRP ecosystem. Pump and dump schemes, of course, leverage the perceived value of the asset in question, not its intrinsic value separate from the speculative interest in the asset. Experts are thus understandably appalled. I have a tough time understanding, even if a lot of banks use Ripple to move billions of dollars, why does that increase the value of XRP? wonders Timothy Enneking, managing director of hedge fund Crypto Asset Management. I dont understand what drives price formation. Well leave it to a respected crypto insider to sum up. I never cared about nor followed Ripple much but their complete dishonesty about the XRP issue is baffling and insulting, tweets Bruce Fenton, CEO of Atlantic Financial Blockchain Labs and founder of the Bitcoin Foundation. Their lies are going to turn me from indifferent to an active enemy of the project / company. Ripple didnt respond to multiple requests for an in-person interview for this story. Intellyx publishes the biweekly Cortex newsletter, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. The author does not own, nor does he intend to own, any cryptocurrency or other cryptotokens, neither long nor short. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg. | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2019/03/01/is-ripple-a-scam/ |
Can Trump Save Netanyahu? | The Israeli prime minister is in dire legal and political peril. His friend in the White House is going to try to bail him out. Aaron David Miller is vice president for new initiatives and a distinguished scholar at the Wilson Center, and the author of The End of Greatness: Why America Cant Have (and Doesnt Want) Another Great President. Asked recently by CNNs Jake Tapper whether the Trump administration had any reaction to Benjamin Netanyahus effort to court the racist party Jewish Power amid his reelection bida divisive move that has earned the Israeli prime minister widespread condemnation in the United StatesSecretary of State Mike Pompeo said: Were not about to get involved in, to interfere in the election of a democracy. Elections campaigns are tough. Well allow the Israeli people to sort this out. Pompeos response was as balanced and reasonable as American as apple pie and baseball. And he might actually have believed it. But you shouldnt. One of the more fantastical myths about the U.S.-Israeli relationship is that they dont intervene in our politics and we dont intervene in theirs. Story Continued Below As we approach what could prove to be momentous Israeli elections on April 9with the prime minister facing, for the first time in a decade, the credible prospect of defeatit would be well to remember the not-so-golden rule of supposed U.S. nonintervention in Israeli elections. Im betting the answer to both questions is yes. From Trumps perspective, helping Bibi fend off his challengers is great politics, especially looking toward 2020. Lets be clear: American presidents have been mucking around in Israeli politics for decades. So if Trump did get involved, he would have plenty of historical company. As a U.S. official working the Arab-Israeli negotiations for more than two decades, I can recall at least three occasions in which American administrations played favorites in order to support their preferred candidates. The first, during George H.W. Bushs presidency, didnt take place in the run-up to an Israeli election but would come to have significant impact on an electoral outcome. Relations between Bush and then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir were strained to say the leastlargely over the issue of Israeli settlement activity and Bushs conviction during their first meeting that Shamir had promised that hed stop them, an unlikely commitment given his hard-line views. Shamir was primed to distrust the president, whom he saw as an unsentimental practitioner of realpolitik evincing no special attachment to Israel. Before leaving for Washington for the March 1989 meeting, Foreign Minister Moshe Arens had advised Shamir that Bush would cut your balls off and he wasnt wrong. When the Israelis sought $10 billion in housing loan guarantees to absorb Soviet Jews in 1991, both Bush and Secretary of State James Baker said no, secured congressional support to postpone the issue, and imposed conditions Shamir would not accept. And that stall continued during the 1992 election which pitted Shamir against Bush and Bakers favorite, the moderate ex-general Yitzhak Rabin. Two months after his election, Rabin received the loan guarantees. Bush and Baker wanted Rabin as a partner because they believed he would be more malleable in pursuing a peace deal; and theres little doubt that one of the big reasons Shamir lost was the (correct) perception that hed mismanaged the U.S.-Israeli relationship. The second intervention was more blatant and occurred in the spring of 1996. Shimon Peresthen a caretaker prime minister in the wake of Rabins assassinationfaced a close election against Netanyahu, then a rising star in the Likud Party who was never one of President Bill Clintons favorites (Whos the fucking superpower here? Clinton would vent after their first meeting). Four Hamas bombs in nine days that killed scores of Israelis had dealt a severe blow to both what remained of the peace process and to Peres chances against Netanyahu. So Clinton sought to help Peres. He persuaded Egypts Hosni Mubarak to convene a Summit of the Peace Makers that brought Peres into the same photo-op with Arab leaders. Weeks before the election, Clinton hosted Peres at the White Housean unsubtle move that all but screamed Vote for Shimon. (Clinton all but admitted in a 2018 interview that he worked to help Peres get reelected because it would be good for the peace process.) This time, the U.S. meddling didnt work. Peres ran a bad campaign and Netanyahu, who never forgot Clintons interference, became prime minister. The third intervention came in December 2000. This time, it was driven by Clintons desire to help pro-peace Prime Minister Ehud Barak against Ariel Sharon, another hard-liner, in elections scheduled for February 2001. Shortly before Christmas, the president had laid out his parameters to guide Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on the core issues. And Clinton was prepared to fly to Israel even during a presidential transition to try to broker a historic, eleventh-hour accord between Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The idea was a true Hail Marynever realistic or well thought-out; in the end, Clinton didnt travel, and Barak would go on to lose to Sharon in the largest political defeat in Israeli history. U.S. meddling failed again. Fast forward to Trump, whose strong preferences are on display. Asked this week for his reaction to the possibility of an imminent Netanyahu indictment, the president made it clear he has his allys back. Netanyahu, the president said, has done a great job as prime minister. Hes tough, smart, strong. I wouldnt underestimate Trumps willingness to jettison Netanyahu in a heartbeat if there were a compelling reason to do so. In fact, given Trumps desire for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, his goals might be better served by a new government along the lines of the more centrist Gantz-Lapid coalition squaring off against Bibi. Still, its far from certain that a more centrist government would be more likely to achieve peace. And after all, the peace plan Trumps son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner is shopping in Arab capitals this week was designed with Netanyahu very much in mind. But the road to a conviction for Netanyahu, who is in legal jeopardy over charges of bribery, fraud and breaches of trust, could be months away. Israeli public opinion is fickle and theres no legal requirement for an indicted prime minister to step down until a conviction, Netanyahu is by no means dead. Right now, he probably has an easier path to forming a government than his opponents. And from Trumps point of view, there are reasons to stand by him. Netanyahua charismatic native English speaker who is revered on the American right for his fervent opposition to Barack Obama and his nuclear deal with Iranis all too willing to be a political asset for Trump. And making the Republican Party the champion of Israel, particularly given the divisions among the Democrats, is smart politics. Then theres the personal factor. Trump doubtless identifies with Netanyahus legal predicament, and vice versa; both have used identical language to combat their adversaries: witch hunt, leftist plot and so on. Between now and April 9, were likely to see the Washington chapter of the Reelect Bibi campaign ramp up. Netanyahu will be here for the March meeting of AIPAC, the chief pro-Israel lobbying group, only two weeks before the Israeli elections. A White House meeting is virtually guaranteed. Theres no way to know. But one thing is certain: Another U.S. president is about to try his hand at playing favorites in Israeli politics. | https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/03/01/donald-trump-benjamin-netanyahu-israel-elections-225512 |
Whats next for higher education reauthorization? | With help from Kimberly Hefling Editor's Note: This edition of Morning Education is published weekdays at 10 a.m. POLITICO Pro Education subscribers hold exclusive early access to the newsletter each morning at 6 a.m. To learn more about POLITICO Pro's comprehensive policy intelligence coverage, policy tools and services, click here. QUICK FIX Story Continued Below Senate negotiations over higher education are moving ahead. Now that both Sens. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is making a new push on her signature issue: school choice. DeVos took heat from Democrats for her tax credit scholarship plan on Thursday, but she also addressed some critics from within her own party. The Trump administration is planning to issue new guidance for colleges accepting foreign gifts. The move comes in response to bipartisan congressional scrutiny of the Chinese governments influence on U.S. college campuses. ITS FRIDAY, MARCH 1. WELCOME TO MORNING EDUCATION. Drop me a line with your tips and feedback: [email protected] or @mstratford. Share event listings: [email protected]. And follow us on Twitter: @Morning_Edu and @POLITICOPro. Driving the Day KEY TAKEAWAYS ON HIGHER EDUCATION ACT NEGOTIATIONS: Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the Senate education committee, outlined her priorities Thursday for overhauling federal higher education policy this year as she begins good-faith negotiations with HELP Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and committee Republicans over a bill. Murray said she wants to reach a comprehensive deal to update the law. But she also suggested shed be open to reaching a deal that doesnt include any of the various free college proposals championed by many of the Democrats running for president in 2020. On Murrays priority list: Improving college affordability, holding schools accountable for student success, expanding access to higher education, and increasing campus safety and protecting students civil rights. Her speech underscored two of the main sticking points between Republicans and Democrats: Each side has vastly different views about how much money to spend on higher education and how to structure a system to hold colleges and universities accountable for student outcomes. On affordability, Murray said a new HEA must have a federal-state partnership program that would dangle federal incentives to promote state spending on higher education. Alexander hasnt talked about such a concept, which would likely cost a significant amount of money, but he has said his goal is to keep the bill budget-neutral. On accountability, Murray said she wanted to see colleges held accountable for their student outcomes, and she singled out predatory for-profit colleges as deserving special scrutiny. She didnt specifically back the idea of holding colleges responsible for loan repayment rates, which has been a central component of Alexanders plan. Read more on Murrays vision for higher education here. (And flashback to Alexanders views from earlier this month here.) Wake up. Read Playbook. Eat lunch. Read Playbook PM. Repeat. Be in the know. Sign up today here. EDUCATION DEPARTMENT DEVOS RESPONDS TO CONSERVATIVE PUSHBACK ON TAX CREDITS FOR SCHOOL CHOICE: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Thursday touted a new tax credit proposal as a bold solution to expanding school choice, even as the plan was met with stiff opposition on the left and from some on the right. The plan DeVos unveiled would create up to $5 billion a year in new tax credits for individuals and businesses that donate to scholarships that help students pay private school tuition or other education expenses. DeVos pitched it as a historic step forward for expanding school choice across the country. Democrats, teachers unions and other groups that advocate for public schools, predictably, came out swinging against the proposals. Both Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, and Murray said the plan was a non-starter. Youll hear our proposal is an attack on public schools, but beware: Thats fake news, DeVos said of Democratic attacks. She said the program wont take a single cent from public school teachers or public school students. But the plan also drew criticism on the right, including from The Heritage Foundation, which is typically an ally of DeVos and the Trump administration. The conservative group said it worried DeVos proposal would expand the power of the federal government in K-12 education. The Heritage Foundation is absolutely wrong in their allegation, DeVos told reporters on Thursday, adding that there is nothing about this legislation that would intrude on states rights. Read more. The Trump administration-backed plan is being introduced in the House by Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-Ala.). Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is leading a Senate companion bill that also has an additional $5 billion in tax credits covering apprenticeships and other workforce development programs. Alexander, the chairman of the Senate education committee, has signed on to the Senate bill. Low-income families should have more of the same choices for schooling that wealthier families already have for their children, he said in a statement. CALIFORNIAS CHARTERS LIKELY TO FACE MORE TRANSPARENCY REQUIREMENTS: California lawmakers fast-tracked and sent to Gov. Gavin Newsoms desk on Thursday a bill he backs, CA SB126 (19R), that would require charter schools to follow the same public disclosure and open meeting laws as traditional schools. The states charter schools have faced scrutiny as teachers on strike in Los Angeles and Oakland have put a spotlight on their opposition to them. The bill was backed by the California Teachers Association. In Los Angeles on Thursday, the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education passed a resolution to place a parcel tax measure before voters in June that would provide hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for the district, CBS Los Angeles reported. The move was praised by Mayor Eric Garcetti. Meanwhile, several Kentucky districts were closed Thursday after teachers staged a sick-out over a pension measure under discussion in the state Legislature. Read more from Kimberly Hefling. ON THE HILL CHOOSING A NEW NAME: The Congressional School Choice Caucus has a new name. Its been rebranded as the Congressional Caucus on Education Innovation and Opportunity, the groups co-chairman Rep. Paul Mitchell (R-Mich.) announced Thursday. The name change reflects a renewed focus on diverse education models that are parent directed, teacher mentored, and customized to meet individual learning styles, Mitchell said in a statement. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) is the Senate co-chairman of the caucus. WATERS, DURBIN PUSH BAN ON COLLEGE ARBITRATION AGREEMENTS: Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, are renewing a legislative ban on college arbitration agreements. The Democratic lawmakers on Thursday introduced legislation that would prohibit colleges from requiring their students to sign binding arbitration agreements as a condition of enrolling at the school. A similar prohibition on arbitration agreements is part of the Obama-era borrower defense regulations that took effect in October after DeVos lost a legal battle to delay them. The Education Department said earlier this year its planning guidance on the issue, but it hasnt yet said how it plans to enforce the regulation. HIGHER EDUCATION TRUMP ADMIN EYES NEW GUIDANCE ON FOREIGN GIFTS TO COLLEGES: The Education Department will issue new guidance for colleges on accepting foreign gifts, a top deputy to DeVos told a Senate panel Thursday. Deputy Education Secretary Mick Zais told a Senate Homeland Security investigatory committee that the department will "absolutely" issue new guidance, after being pressed by the panel's chairman, Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio). A bipartisan report the panel released Wednesday accused many American colleges of failing to disclose how much money they've received from the Chinese government which the report says has spent more than $158 million establishing so-called Confucius Institutes at schools in the U.S. since 2006. Many colleges didn't reveal they've accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from China despite Education Department guidance that requires reporting of foreign gifts. Benjamin Wermund has more. MOVERS AND SHAKERS Jo Ellen Parker has been named vice president for communications of the Council of Independent Colleges. She previously served as president of the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. SYLLABUS National Academies report offers ways to reduce child poverty by half: POLITICO. University says Missouri professor stole and sold a grad student's work: NPR. Follow the Pro Education team: @khefling ([email protected]), @mstratford ([email protected]) @BenjaminEW ([email protected]) and @JaneNorman ([email protected]). | https://www.politico.com/newsletters/morning-education/2019/03/01/whats-next-for-higher-education-reauthorization-402354 |
Whats So Funny About Amy Klobuchar's Bad Temper? | John F. Harris is editor-in-chief of POLITICO and author of "The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House." Amy Klobuchar, by some accounts, is a tyrannical boss, prone to paroxysms of anger and frustration that have her hurling insults and even physical objects toward staff a management style that has left a trail of shaken and humiliated former employees. So that should certainly be good for some laughs. Story Continued Below As luck would have it not clear yet whether its good luck or bad the Minnesota senator is the Democratic speaker at Saturday nights annual Gridiron Dinner. The invitation to appear before journalists and assorted Washington insiders comes at the precise moment Klobuchar is trying to send her presidential campaign aloft amid a downdraft of news reports about her allegedly foul moods and the intimidating work environment these spawned. Klobuchar right now surely has a team of advisers those who have not quit and told their stories to reporters working last-minute on lines that can simultaneously acknowledge her reputation and, with the right mix of humor and humility, drain it of toxicity. It is an old Washington challenge how to preempt attacks on a point of personal vulnerability applied in a new Washington context, in which sensitivity to unequal power dynamics means a former junior staffer willing to speak out could doom the aspirations of his or her former boss. Klobuchars upcoming performance turned into something of a parlor game this week with old hands who have helped other politicians prepare for Washington media dinners. One of those was Bill Clinton, whose sense of humor does not naturally incline to the self-deprecating and ironic sensibility that typically works best at Washington dinners. He usually soared at these events, even though he sometimes didnt get his own jokes. (Trust us, sir. Theyll think its funny.) The consensus, among these off-the-record interviews: There is enough raw material to make it relatively easy for Klobuchar to crush it if she has the self-confidence and brio to crush herself. A target-rich environment is how one veteran Democratic operative described the comedic landscape. She could tell a lame joke that purposely falls flat, then launch into a flamboyant tirade against a nearby aide: You are the worst joke writer ever! Or she could take the opposite tack, perhaps with a behind-the-scenes video at her office showing her ostentatiously lavishing praise on employees, watering their plants, picking up their dry cleaning and so on. The lead anecdote in a New York Times piece, about her eating salad with her comb, then supposedly making an aide wash the comb, offers many possibilities. The evidence is unambiguous that many people have found her challenging to work for. The evidence is deeply ambiguous about how far outside the standards of Washington bosses Klobuchar really lies. The Republican speaker balancing Klobuchar on Saturday night will be Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, whose office last year had among the highest staff turnover rates in the Senate, surpassing Klobuchars unflattering top ranking from the year before. The question for voters is not whether they would want to work for Klobuchar but whether they would want her to work for them. Lyndon B. Johnson was either a good president because of civil rights or a bad one because of the Vietnam War. But the standards of his era never required him to tap press secretary Bill Moyers to come up with funny jokes for Gridiron about LBJs penchant for calling aides into the bathroom to bark orders while he evacuated his bowels. Indeed, this years Gridiron promises an especially odd juxtaposition of old politics and new. Both the criticism and defense of Klobuchar reflect a contemporary cultural moment. It is a modern sensibility that says it is no longer OK to have an impressive public persona in Klobuchars case, as a proven winner with voters at home, and an intelligent and conscientious record in Washington that masks an abusive or hypocritical private character. To take an example outside the political arena, many people can no longer appreciate Kevin Spaceys work on-screen knowing what they do of his behavior off-screen. At the same time, many people rallying to Klobuchars defense harness their argument to identity politics that have taken on a sharp new edge in the Trump era: A woman is being shamed for behavior that is tolerated, even celebrated, when practiced by men. will play out at an evening that is a creaky vestige of earlier generations. The Gridiron Club (I am not a member but am invited to this years dinner) throws an annual white-tie (does that even still exist in other settings?) evening of satirical skits and speeches by reporters and politicians. Most years, by my lights, it is mildly entertaining, mildly cringey and mildly consequential. A new era of social media and hypersaturation of average voters in the daily churn of politics on cable has diluted but not eradicated the taste-making and agenda-setting power of bureau chiefs, senior correspondents and the like at Gridiron. Klobuchar and team are well aware of the historical role of the evening in inoculating politicians against vulnerabilities. The most famous examples go way back. There was, in 1958, the aspiring presidential candidate John F. Kennedy lampooning his reputation as a spoiled rich kid by pretending to read a telegram from his tycoon father: Dear Jack: Dont buy a single vote more than is necessary because Ill be damned if Im going to pay for a landslide. And Nancy Reagan defused controversy over borrowing expensive dresses from famous designers by singing a ditty called Second Hand Clothes to the tune of Second Hand Rose. Later, Hillary Clinton in 1995 made fun of her own recent string of bad luck with a video in which she presented herself as Forrest Gump. Just last year, Donald Trump not typically a devotee of self-deprecating humor got a sincere laugh by cracking wise about his desire for a summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. As far as the risk of dealing with a madman is concerned, thats his problem, not mine, deadpanned Trump, before reverting to a more standard litany of self-praise and criticism of Washington journalists. The Times story cited an email sent by Klobuchar complaining about how staff was managing her Twitter feed: We are becoming a joke, and it is making me a joke. Obviously, it could not have been pleasant to be on the receiving end of that one. Less obvious, though, is that it could not have been pleasant to be on the delivering end, either. In its own way, the Gridiron dinner is highlighting one reality of public life that is likely connected to Klobuchars temper not to mention the rank behavior of other politicians of both sexes: Aides do their work in the shadows; she is the one on whom public criticism will land. Advisers advise; she has to perform. Even so, the advice keeps coming. Klobuchar must answer the question, one veteran Democratic operative said, How do I turn this on myself in a way that humanizes and disarms and conveys a sense that I get it? | https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/03/01/amy-klobuchar-staff-225511 |
Who is Jessica Prince, Jody Wilson-Raybould's former chief of staff? | OTTAWA It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least in Ottawa, that a cabinet minister responsible for a tricky file must be in want of a loyal chief of staff. After a handful of prospects went through the revolving doors of her office in her first few years as minister of justice and attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould seemed finally to have found such a person in Jessica Prince, whose name is suddenly widely known after her former bosss dramatic testimony at a House of Commons justice committee hearing Wednesday. Wilson-Raybould exhaustively described what she termed a consistent and sustained effort by many people within the government to seek to politically interfere in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in my role as the attorney general of Canada. And at every turn, there was her chief of staff: an Oxford-educated lawyer who had taken the job last April having joined the ministers office as a policy advisor two years earlier. A longtime Liberal volunteer from Victoria, B.C., she studied political science at McGill before attending law school in the UK. After being called to the bar in Canada she worked for five years on Bay Street first at Thornton Grout Finnigan LLP, which specializes in bankruptcy and commercial law, then at Polley Faith LLP. With that firm she appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada in the landmark medical assistance in dying case in 2015 on behalf of intervenors the Canadian Medical Association a file she would work on for Wilson-Raybould in 2016, after joining the Department of Justice. Working there was like Disneyland for lawyers, Prince quipped in a spring 2018 Q&A with litigator and blogger Erin Cowling, her role at Justice seeing her serve as the departments point person on cannabis legalization and assist with sexual assault law reform. Within months, however, she would become one of the key players at the heart of a national question about the Liberal governments respect for the rule of law itself. By September of last year Wilson-Raybould had made up her mind that engineering firm SNC-Lavalin should not be offered a remediation agreement so it could avoid criminal prosecution on corruption charges. Over the course of the next four months Prince stood by the ministers decision, according to the testimony, and seems to have risked her job to do so. It was often she who bore the brunt of pressure from Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus closest advisors, who demanded a change of course, and relayed to her minister, in writing and in detail, conversations that have now been brought to public light. The two had a necessary closeness, as Wilson-Raybould described it. In January Wilson-Raybould was shuffled out of her role as attorney general after an escalation in what she called veiled threats from Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus proxies. The Conservative Party is asking the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to investigate whether officials including Trudeau, top civil servant Michael Wernick, Trudeaus principal secretary Gerald Butts, who resigned last week, and Trudeaus chief of staff Katie Telford broke the law by provoking fear in the attorney general, an offence in the criminal code. Prince followed Wilson-Raybould into the lower-profile veterans affairs ministry, something she was under no obligation to do, but not before learning from the deputy minister of justice that Trudeau expected a new minister to quickly be ready to discuss SNC-Lavalin. Wilson-Raybould resigned from cabinet earlier this month. Prince is now on leave, having revealed on Twitter last month she was expecting a baby, but remains in her role at Veterans Affairs. She did not respond to a request for an interview. She retains the loyalty of some who stayed and now serve the new justice minister, David Lametti. I think the world of Jess Prince. She was a terrific boss, said director of communications David Taylor. Lisa Raitt, a former Conservative minister, said in an interview Thursday that in Ottawa, the kind of loyalty Prince had to have to follow her minister to a new portfolio is worth its weight in gold. In focusing a line of questioning on Prince during the committee Wednesday, Raitt said she tried to establish that Prince spoke for Wilson-Raybould much the same way that Butts and Telford spoke for Trudeau. Its not enough to defend yourself by saying, I was only talking to staff, its only staff. No, no, no when youre talking to Jessica Prince, youre talking to Jody Wilson-Raybould, period. And people would know that, she said. Adding to the potential pressure Prince couldve felt, chiefs of staff for ministers typically serve at the pleasure of the PMO, Raitt said, and report to the prime ministers chief of staff. Telford or Butts could have said to Prince, Were not going to need your services anymore if you cant convince your minister to do this for us, she said. In the committee, Wilson-Raybould told Raitt she couldnt speak to her former chiefs level of fear, but said Prince, an extraordinary human being and an extraordinary lawyer, had been quite upset after a particular meeting with Butts and Telford in December. According to text messages from Prince Wilson-Raybould read out to the committee, Butts told her chief of staff there is no solution here that does not involve some interference, and Telford told her, we dont want to debate legalities anymore. Much has been made of Wilson-Rayboulds fortitude despite a whisper campaign in Ottawa, after her demotion, about how difficult she had been to work with. There is evidence aplenty that Prince, whose resume is chock-full of awards, scholarships, pro-bono work and public speaking, was not going to be a shrinking violet in the face of external pressure, either. As a young lawyer on Bay Street, Prince had been a rising legal star and a vocal feminist. In an August 2015 article for Canadian Lawyer headlined Call out the bullies, Prince wrote about the sexism and intimidation that young women often face in the legal profession. I resent, she wrote, that so much energy and emphasis is being put on what we can do as the victims of bad behaviour to cope with it, and not on what can be done to stop the behaviour itself. She vowed to do her best to stand up to bullying behaviour in the future. Email: [email protected] | Twitter: mariedanielles | https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/who-is-jessica-prince-jody-wilson-rayboulds-former-chief-of-staff |
Why don't all retailers accept Visa, American Express, Discover, Mastercard credit cards? | CLOSE Kroger is considering expanding the Visa ban to other stores. Wochit Grocery giant Kroger recently decided to stop accepting Visa credit cards at its subsidiaries Foods Co. and Smith's Food and Drug, a move designed to pressure the credit card giant into lowering its interchange fees, or "swipe" fees. The nation's largest grocery said Friday while the majority of its stores still accept Visa credit cards, it "continues to explore options" to reduce "swipe" fees paid to credit card companies. Kroger isn't the only retailer that takes issue with certain types of credit cards. In fact, millions of retailers don't accept one or more of the four major credit card types for one reason or another. American Express and Discover have done a great job of building up their acceptance rates in recent years, but they still don't enjoy the near-universal acceptance of Visa or Mastercard. Like Kroger's issue with Visa, it comes down to fees. American Express is notorious for charging higher swipe fees than the competition. While the credit card companies are tight-lipped about the specifics of their fees, American Express' swipe fees are roughly 1 percent higher than those of the other major issuers, according to several reports. A Kroger store in Houston. (Photo: David J. Phillip, AP) To be fair, American Express does have a highly desirable cardmember base. Amex cardholders have higher average income and spending than the average Visa or Mastercard user, so in many cases, it's in the merchant's best interest to accept the higher fees. However, many merchants still feel it's not worth it, thus "Sorry, we don't take American Express" is still a common refrain. Discover is generally not as expensive as American Express for merchants to accept, but it still generally charges more than Visa or Mastercard, which is why Discover is No. 3 in terms of acceptance. Plus, Discover doesn't offer the benefit of an affluent cardholder base. Another common reason for 'selective' credit card acceptance Swipe fees are the No. 1 reason retailers choose to accept some types of credit cards but not others. Another common reason is for partnership purposes. Costco is by far the biggest example of this, accepting Visa credit cards exclusively. Costco is expected to generate more than $150 billion in revenue during its current fiscal year, which gives it tremendous power to negotiate with the major payment processors especially if it's willing to give all of that business to just one company (in this case Visa). The standard swipe fee a merchant pays is in the 2 percent-3 percent range, but reports have put Costco's swipe fees to Visa at around 0.4 percent. Doing the math, this saves Costco billions per year compared to what average retailers pay. Some businesses don't take credit cards at all In general, paying with cash is becoming less and less convenient, especially as companies like Square make it easier than ever for small businesses to accept credit cards. However, there are some holdouts that remain cash-only businesses. This is especially common among independent restaurants. For example, the famous Peter Luger Steak House in Brooklyn, New York, only accepts, cash, checks, debit cards (which have generally lower swipe fees than credit cards) and their own Peter Luger card. Laundromats, vending machines and nail salons are other types of businesses you're likely to encounter that don't take credit cards of any kind. To sum it up, there are two main reasons businesses might choose not to accept a particular type of credit card, or none at all fees and partnerships. Swipe fees can take a big bite out of a merchants profits, especially in businesses with tight profit margins like restaurants and every percentage point counts. And, by using an exclusive partnership structure, like Costco does, a retailer can potentially cut its acceptance costs even further. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. The Motley Fool is a USA TODAY content partner offering financial news, analysis and commentary designed to help people take control of their financial lives. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY. Offer from the Motley Fool: Offer from The Motley Fool: The 10 best stocks to buy now Motley Fool co-founders Tom and David Gardner have spent more than a decade beating the market. In fact, the newsletter they run, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has quadrupled the S&P 500! * Tom and David just revealed their ten top stock picks for investors to buy right now. Click here to get access to the full list! *Stock Advisor returns as of Jan. 31, 2019. Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2019/03/01/kroger-not-accepting-visa-why-retailers-wont-take-all-credit-cards/3029699002/ | https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2019/03/01/kroger-not-accepting-visa-why-retailers-wont-take-all-credit-cards/3029699002/ |
Should the Boston City Council have to let Satanists lead an opening prayer? | The $100,000 Baphomet statue depicts Satan as a winged, goat-headed figure. (Photo: The Satanic Temple via AP) BOSTON Like most city councils, the one in Boston begins weekly meetings with an invocation before getting down to business. Recent individuals brought in to lead the ritual, typically a spoken prayer, have included a Catholic sister, a Methodist preacher and a Presbyterian minister. Now The Satanic Temple, an international Satanist group headquartered in nearby Salem, wants its turn. But after having requests to deliver an upcoming invocation denied, the group of Satanists is now accusing the Boston City Council of religious discrimination in a complaint filed in October with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. The commission agreed to launch an investigation into the matter in December. "We're very communally active," said Malcolm Jarry, co-founder of the The Satanic Temple. "This is something that should be open to all faiths to participate. We just want to be respected and treated like members of the community that we are." Followers of The Satanic Temple, which has chapters in 17 cities, are atheist and do not subscribe to supernatural beliefs. The group's principles include encouraging benevolence and empathy among all people, rejecting tyrannical authority and advocating for "practical common sense and justice." More: Phoenix council favors silence over Satanists- for now Jarry said The Satanic Temple in October emailed Boston City Council President Andrea Campbell asking that a member of the organization be able to speak during the invocation. But the council's attorney, according to the complaint, responded by telling the group that the body does not accept requests to deliver invocations, has no formal policy regarding invocations and simply allows individual council members to choose who leads them. "The very definition of discrimination is preferential treatment of different groups or individuals," Jarry said. "Because they are the ones who are solely making the decisions, it can't help but be discriminatory." In the complaint, first reported by the Boston Herald last month, The Satanic Temple has accused the 13-member council of violating the establishment clause of the First Amendment among other laws. Campbell, the council's president, declined to comment on the complaint through a spokeswoman. Christine O'Donnell, the council's legislative director and attorney, did not respond to messages from USA TODAY seeking the council's legal position. Satanists have been allowed to give council invocations in other cities including Pensacola, Florida, and the Kenai Peninsula Borough in Alaska. In Pensacola, the Satanist-led invocation was met with vocal protests by a large group of Christians in the council gallery. But after they were escorted away, the Satanist, wearing a black hooded robe, was able to speak for several minutes and conclude the invocation without interruption. "The bowels of hell didn't open up, or whatever," Jarry said. But councils in other cities have clashed with The Satanic Temple over invocations. In Phoenix, followers of the Satanic Temple were scheduled to give an invocation at a meeting in 2016. But rather than letting the Satanists speak, the Phoenix City Council voted 5-4 to cease holding spoken prayers altogether and shift to moments of silences, ending the body's 65-year practice and avoiding the threat of a lawsuit. In Boston, a timeline on the The Satanic Temple's complaint is unclear. H Harrison, an assistant with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, said he could not discuss the status of the complaint, citing the agency's policy for all cases. Reach Joey Garrison at [email protected] and on Twitter @joeygarrison. Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/03/01/satanists-urge-boston-city-council-allow-them-give-invocation/3026358002/ | https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/03/01/satanists-urge-boston-city-council-allow-them-give-invocation/3026358002/ |
Should Adebayo continue to start in place of Whiteside? | The weekly Miami Herald Heat mailbag is here to answer your questions. If you werent able to ask one this time, send your questions for future mailbags via Twitter (@Anthony_Chiang). You can also email me at [email protected]. Anthony Chiang: Im going to assume youre referencing the past two games, when Bam Adebayo replaced the injured Hassan Whiteside in the Heats starting lineup. Adebayo, 21, has averaged an impressive stat line of 10.5 points, 6.5 rebounds, 4.5 assists and two blocks in 30.5 minutes during this short stretch as a starter. In eight starts this season, Adebayo is averaging 13.8 points, 9.4 rebounds, 3.8 assists, 1.6 steals and 1.8 blocks per 36 minutes. Those are solid numbers, and theres an argument to be made that featuring Adebayo in a bigger role will only help his growth moving forward. But lets not forget the impact Whiteside makes when hes engaged, as hes averaging 18.3 points, 17.4 rebounds and 2.9 blocks per 36 minutes this season. Anyway, starting is overrated. Whats more important is who finishes the game, and Adebayo has played more fourth-quarter minutes than Whiteside this season. Adebayo has played in 60 of the 61 fourth quarters he has been available for, compared to Whiteside getting in just 27 of the 53 fourth quarters he has been available for. Whiteside will likely get his starting job back once he returns from a strained hip, but Adebayo will also probably continue to finish most games. I want to know the chances of entering the lottery. Anthony: The computer models dont give the Heat much of a chance at making the playoffs. Entering Friday, the Heat had just a 20 percent chance of making the playoffs and was projected to finish with a 36-46 record, according to FiveThirtyEight.coms playoff predictions. ESPNs Basketball Power Index has the Heat with a 26.9 percent chance of making the playoffs, while finishing with a 36-46 record. As for my opinion, its going to be tough for the Heat to make the playoffs. Its obviously still very possible, with Miami entering Friday just one game behind the eighth and final playoff spot occupied by the Magic. But the Heat has to take advantage of the next eight games, which includes seven at home. Because after this upcoming eight-game stretch, Miami closes with nine of its final 13 regular-season games on the road. If the Heat cant start stringing together wins at home over the next two weeks, any hope of making the playoffs will disappear. | https://www.miamiherald.com/sports/nba/miami-heat/article226969479.html |
Will CRM Continue To Push Salesforce.com's Growth for Q4? | Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) is going to publish its results on March 4, 2019 and will also conduct an investor call. The consensus estimates expect the company to post revenues around $13.2 billion, up 26% from the previous fiscal year with an earnings estimate of around $2.60, nearly twice than the last fiscal year. We currently have a $130 price estimate for the company. View our interactive dashboard Our Outlook for Salesforce.com for FY 2019 and modify the key assumptions to arrive at a price estimate of your own. In addition, here is more Information Technology Data. The company posted very strong Q3 results with revenue up 26% year on year. Operating Cash flow was also up 14% YOY. The company has also revised its earnings to $1.07 from $1.06 due to the strong results and expected strong Q4. The company recorded a revenue growth across geographies with EMEA growing the most with a 31% YOY increase in revenue, followed by APAC which grew at 26% YOY, and Americas at 25% YOY. As per IDC forecast Salesforce.com is expected to touch 20.3% in Market Share of CRM applications which is nearly 3 times that of the next company, i.e. Oracle at 7.3%. We expect Salesforce.com to continue with this high growth in the 4th quarter, too. The company aims to achieve total revenue of $23 billion by fiscal year 2022 and is driven by technological revolution including demand for artificial intelligence and machine learning. To achieve this, the company has introduced the next generation of its AI platform, Einstein, to unlock deeper customer insights and deliver a transformational customer experience. The platform now provides over 3 billion predictions and insights to Salesforces customers daily. We expect the AI platform to augment the companys growth in the coming years and enable it to achieve the revenue target on or ahead of plan. Salesforce.com has extended its strategic alliance with Google to deepen the integration between the companys Marketing Cloud and Google Analytics 360. The initiative has been witnessing positive feedback from customers. Further, Salesforce Commerce Cloud continues to be the fastest growing enterprise commerce solution and is delivering solid results. The company recently acquired CloudCraze, the leader in B2B commerce, to offer a single platform that can be used for both B2B and B2C experiences by Salesforces clients. All these initiatives are likely to boost the companys top-line as well as valuation in the near term. Explore example interactive dashboards and create your own. | https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2019/03/01/will-crm-continue-to-push-salesforce-coms-growth-for-q4/ |
Do Democrats want to take away Americans' hamburgers? | Democrats want to take away hamburgers from the American people, an ex-Trump aide has warned. The wild claim about a supposed plot to ban the national food came from onetime White House aide Sebastian Gorka at a conservative political jamboree. The humble ground-beef patty has become ammunition in a US cultural food fight since a Democrat argued Americans should eat fewer of the sandwiches. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been touting a climate change plan. Railing against Democrats, Mr Gorka told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland on Thursday: "They want to take your pickup truck. "They want to rebuild your home. They want to take away your hamburgers." Perhaps even more dubiously, he added: "This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved." Ms Ocasio-Cortez provoked conservative scorn this month when she along with Senator Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, unveiled the Green New Deal. Their policy paper proposed to overhaul the US economy to tackle climate change. But it was a reference to "farting cows" in a since-retracted accompanying document that invited the ridicule of eager critics. "We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero, emissions in 10 years because we aren't sure that we'll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast," the offending section said. There is no reference to banning cows in the text of the Green New Deal itself. But Republicans seized on it as evidence of a radical far-left agenda within the Democratic party. President Donald Trump suggested at a rally in El Paso, Texas, that "you're not allowed to own cows anymore". Republican members of the House Natural Resources Committee took to eating hamburgers on Capitol Hill to protest against the Green New Deal. The issue was quickly taken up on social media by conservatives, who shared photos of themselves cooking and eating beef. Addressing the controversy, Ms Ocasio-Cortez told a late-night talk show that nobody would be forced to "go vegan", but that "we've got to address factory farming". "Maybe we shouldn't be eating a hamburger for breakfast, lunch, and dinner," added the New York City congresswoman, a self-described democratic socialist. While bovine flatulence is often connected to climate change, a cow releases more greenhouse gasses through burping (around 600 litres of methane a day). Some suggested that even if the Green New Deal did call for a ban on burgers, it would be worth it to "save Earth". Skip Twitter post by @DerekTNG The Green New Deal doesn't ban hamburgers, obviously. But if it did, I'd give up burgers to save Earth. Derek Newton (@DerekTNG) February 28, 2019 Report Hamburger-gate raged on this week after Ms Ocasio-Cortez was photographed having dinner at a Washington restaurant with a colleague, who was caught eating the now-controversial meal. The photograph went viral, with some suggesting the congresswoman was a hypocrite. Ms Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, joked that the photo proved a "vast conspiracy" to allow Americans to eat burgers. Americans eat nearly 50bn hamburgers a year, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting. | https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-47394484 |
How did Minnesota's indigenous people survive the extreme winters? | Rod Fisher spends a couple of Sundays each month during the winter hanging around a bonfire with some of his science teacher colleagues, maybe drinking an adult beverage and pondering the forces of nature. The colder the temperatures, the better. As the group gathered during last months steady stream of below freezing weather and unyielding snow, they pondered how the states Native American population survived the brutal elements centuries ago. The gentlemen realized the irony of their questions as they stood around in thermal clothing and just steps away from Fishers warm Eden Prairie home. Today kicks off Curious Minnesota, our community-driven reporting project that invites Star Tribune readers into the newsroom, letting us know what questions are important to you. Several readers posed the same one offered by Fisher, who admitted its pretty weird that he also likes to spend one night a year sleeping outside in the cold just to know what it feels like. Sharon Day, executive director of the Indigenous Peoples Task Force. When the Dakota, Ojibwa, Ho Chunk and other tribes lived throughout the state, meteorological studies suggest that from 1600 to 1850 the climate generally was colder and wetter than now. Minnesotas own Little Ice Age, the studies suggested. Sharon Day, 67, recalled hearing stories from her grandparents and living in several different houses as a young girl on the Bois Forte reservation near International Falls depending on the season. In the winter, the family lived on the western end where there were more trees to protect the house from the wind. In spring, they moved to an area with maple trees to harvest sap for sugar and syrup, she said. Summer was spent at a house by the lake. The houses were made out of birch bark, which never molds, said Day, executive director of the Indigenous Peoples Task Force. A pit would be built in the middle of the floor with rocks buried underneath the floor. When the rocks were heated, it would radiate the warmth. Our people were ingenious architects. While the houses on Days reservations had some variations, a typical lodge style house used by Native Americans would be constructed with trees natural to their region of the state. Sharpened logs were thrust into the ground and then bent and tied similar to that of an upside-down basket. The framework was covered with sheets of bark, and animal skins were used to cover the door as well as the chimney hole on the roof, said Day. Pole wigwams in the form of teepees were also constructed. Men and women greased themselves with oil and animal fat as a protection against the sun, cold and insects. The Athabaskan Indians of Alaska reportedly survived that climates 50-below temperatures by wearing caribou fur, which has a hollow, doubly-insulated fiber that sheds water and snow, according to the Alaska Native Knowledge Network at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Another way native people prepared for harsh storms was forecasting them. Generally speaking, there were always one or two elders who seemed to have a knack of understanding that. If the wind was bringing clouds from the north, it meant a blizzard. Other signs of nature were used to predict the weather, said the always trustworthy Farmers Almanac. Woodpeckers sharing one tree or one nest meant a harsh winter was coming. Indigenous people saw the cold as a living thing that deserved respect. Native Americans were extremely good at using animal parts. Once the meat had been eaten or dried, bones were used for tools. Hides were tanned and turned into everything from footwear to shelters. Gerald Vizenor, a renown American Indian writer from White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota, suggested a unique item necessary to survive a harsh winter a good storyteller. Its something you want in adverse situations, and sitting around laughing makes you warm, he said. By the way, he now lives in Naples, Fla. --- If you'd like to submit a Curious Minnesota question, fill out the form below: | http://www.startribune.com/how-did-minnesota-natives-survive-our-extreme-winters-curious-minnesota-investigates/506217201/ |
Is Ted Cruz Emerging from the Shutdown a Winner? | In the wake of the government shutdown, its clear that Senator Ted Cruz has angered some members of his own party. In a lunch at The New Republic yesterday, Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist compared the last two weeks in the House of Representatives to rumspringa, in which Amish teenagers go to the big city and do sinful things, and then come home to more sensible ways of life (which he called Boehner-world). But as the dust settles, it seems Cruz has risen in the estimation of the vast majority of conservatives. Theres no such thing as bad press, as the saying goes. Some conservative staff on the Hill think the shutdown and debt debate have cemented Cruzs place as the Tea Partys wunderkind, according to The National Reviewa spot that was previously held by Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. This morning, the Review printed a collection of anonymous quotes from GOP aides saying disparaging things about Rubios supposedly conciliatory personality and, in particular, his push for comprehensive immigration reform, which so tarnished his standing on the right last spring. The base wants a leader who they feel is not going to sell them out, said one. Theyre deeply distrustful of the establishment, and immigration is one of those issues where the base feels they were sold out. Cruz, meanwhile, has proved himself to be the kind of guy who will take the party line and do conservatives one better (or, more accurately, one up). The Review notes glowingly that his voting record, as scored by Heritage Action, is a perfect 100 percent, compared to Rubios 86 percent. And while this doesnt sit well with all Republicans, it sits well with the ones who are at least nominally driving the ship: A Pew poll from earlier this week found that Cruzs antics had propelled his favorability up nearly 30 points among Tea Party Republicans and his unfavorability up 15 among non-Tea Partiers. Among Republicans as a whole, he had gained 11 points of positive feelingand a lot of visibility. With the crisis behind us, the 2016 predictions will be continuing apace, and it looks like Cruz will be leading the pack. The base is not looking for a conciliator, Al Cardenas, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, told the Review. Theyre not looking for someone who is good at compromising, who can make peace with the other side. Theyre looking for someone who will stand up to a very aggressive, disrespectful liberal opposition thats standing out there with bare knuckles winding up at us every chance they get. | https://newrepublic.com/article/115242/cruz-emerging-shutdown-winner |
What Happens to the National Debt Clock If the U.S. Defaults? | Update: The Durst Organization emailed Wednesday afternoon, saying, contrary to what he told me Tuesday evening, Just learned it won't freeze, it will slow. Interest will continue to accrue. Atlantis World Medias building sits at the corner of 6th Avenue and 42nd Street. It is here that the most earnest brand of politics imaginable is practiced on News Night by anchor Will McAvoy, champion of sensible moderation. Of course, thats TV. (Or rather, its HBO.) In real life, One Bryant Park is called the Bank of America Tower, and it, too, houses one of the more earnest public enactments of the centrist sensibility: the National Debt Clock, an electronic billboard which lists, and constantly updates, both the total national debt and the amount per family. (According to the U.S. Treasury, as of last Friday the national debt was $16,747,411,584,091.53although perhaps China would just as soon we hold on to the pennies.) The clock is the not-for-profit work of the Durst Organization, the real estate firm that developed the building; it was originated by Seymour Durst a quarter-century ago. | https://newrepublic.com/article/115206/federal-debt-default-would-freeze-new-york-city-clock |
Is Anonymous's Rape Vigilantism a Public Good? | @Dantalion_ in this case US Rep Rex Barnett, as we mentioned in the beginning. We loathe rape but mixed with corruption & injustice = Op. Anonymous Operations (@YourAnonCentral) October 15, 2013 The Kansas City Star spoke to Rex Barnett, who said he has deliberately stayed out of the case. Whether or not he meddled in the case is a question for investigators; but that detail was lost in yesterday's storm, when Anonymous repeatedly referred to him as a current representative, despite the fact that he left office in 2002. Maryville is shaping up to be another Steubenville in a number of ways, though there are of course important differences, like the fact that there's no explicit justification for why the charges against Daisy's assailants were dropped. The city, where neither Paige nor Daisy live anymore, is now under a heightened security alert due to all of the attention. Jezebel's dispatch from Steubenville last month painted the picture of a town marked by its sinister depiction in the press, where residents feel they are collectively regarded as culpable for the rape of a 16-year-old by two high school football players that occurred there in 2012. Maryville, rightly or not, is being targeted in a similar manner. The Nodaway County website is down, which Anonymous seemed to slyly take responsibility for on Twitter (though the glitch could also be due to other connectivity problems). Daisys mother has said that she knows other girls in town were also assaulted by the same group of boys involved in Daisys case, but they have not come forward because they are frightened of facing the same kind of public backlash that Daisy did. Barnett has unsurprisingly become a public target, as is evident on his universitys Facebook page. All this, and still nothing has actually happened to further Daisy's case. The prosecuting attorney reiterated his decision not to reopen the case yesterday, and Maryville City Manager Greg McDanel said that neither he nor the town had any role in the sexual assault investigation, nor in a more recent investigation looking into the cause of a fire that burned down the Coleman's former Maryville home. "This is a small community where everyone knows their neighbors, and caring for and protecting those around you are common practice, not the exception to the rule," said McDanel. In its attempt to expose injustice, Anonymous has also undertaken the "public lynching" that the prosecuting attorney told KCUR he had sought to avoid. As the Maryville Daily Forum put it, many folks in this town appear to be experiencing a different emotion. Fear. But if officials investigate the dropped charges against Barnett and even reopen the case, you'll be hard pressed to find anyone outside of Maryville who doesn't think Anonymous deserves some of the thanks. | https://newrepublic.com/article/115208/anonymous-twitterstorm-maryville-rape-case-public-lynching |
Is the Onions Film Criticism Better Than Its News Satire? | The Onion has gotten much attention over the past few months as its political op-eds have crept toward a bolder, buzzier kind of advocacy on subjects from Syria to sexism. In a lengthy reported piece in Slate last month, Farhad Manjoo argued that the site has gotten less funny as it has lost some of its slyness and become, under pressure from the viral age, more Jon-Stewart-esque: ultra-clever but also a little scoldy, oversmart, and lacking much nuance. But if thats the case, The Onions spirit of crafty subversion is alive and well in a quieter corner of the siteits film criticism. The weekly video feature Film Standard stars fake movie critic Peter K. Rosenthal, a quiet professorial type with a dignified tuft of gray hair and a wardrobe full of sweater vests. Each segment is off-kilter in a slightly different way. Rosenthal comments on a film with glazed seriousness, his analysis at first so sober that it is almost unrecognizable as satire, but gradually coming unhinged. Sometimes the segments lampoon the pretensions of film criticism, its blinkeredness and its overenthusiasm for symbolism. Sometimes they spoof the self-importance and epic ambitions of movies themselves. And granted, sometimes they belabor their jokes a bit too long. But on the whole The Onions film criticism manages to send up its subjects in ways that are subtle, surprising, and impressively weird. Gravity Review: Rosenthal describes Gravity as a space survival thriller so immersive and visually stunning it has driven everyone who has watched it violently mad, including myself. He then proceeds to go slowly insane while continuing his critical assessment. While 3D might be little more than a gimmick for some film-makers, Cuaron uses the extra dimension so flawlessly, it shut down the portions of my brain responsible for empathy, remorse, and basic reasoning, he declares. In the next shot, he is shirtless. As the films leads, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney do an amazing job, and I would like to eat both of them alive, he says. 12 Years a Slave Review: Again, Rosenthal starts slow, calling the movie a sprawling epic that chronicles an emotional story of hardship and survival. But the segment soon becomes a ridiculous pastiche of tour de force performances by black actors. For instance: Rosenthal cites a captivating performance from Denzel Washington, who appears as civil rights leader Malcolm X in his inspirational attempt to coach a racially divided high school football team in Alexandria, Virginia. Also: It is a sober film, but 12 Years a Slave is not without its moments of levity, provided mostly by Tyler Perrycut to an image of Perry in drag. | https://newrepublic.com/article/115283/onions-film-criticism-better-its-news-satire |
Can the Xavier Musketeers steal a spot in the NCAA Tournament? | CLOSE Naji Marshall poured in a career-high 31 points to help Xavier to a fifth straight win Thursday, 84-73 over St. John's Adam Baum, [email protected] QUEENS, N.Y. No team likes to lose. Losing, though, can have a transformative effect. It can either break a team's back and fracture a season, or it can bind a team together. Xavier seems to have been inspired and empowered by what hasn't gone its way this season, and that's translated to a conversation about where the Musketeers sit in the postseason discussion. The answer right now is still complicated. But the fact that it's complicated is a wonder in and of itself. Xavier Musketeers guard Paul Scruggs (1) shoots a 3-pointer in the second half of the NCAA men's basketball game between Xavier Musketeers and Villanova Wildcats on Saturday, Feb. 24, 2019, at Cintas Center in Cincinnati. Xavier Musketeers defeated Villanova Wildcats 66-54. (Photo: Albert Cesare / The Enquirer) Less than three weeks ago, Xavier was 11-13 overall, 3-8 in league play and ranked at the bottom of the Big East Conference following six straight losses. After five straight wins, the Musketeers are the hottest team in the Big East, currently tied for third place with St. John's at 16-13 overall and 8-8 in the conference. During the current streak, Xavier's climbed from No. 107 in the KenPom national rankings up to 71 on Friday, following an 84-73 win Thursday at St. John's. KenPom is not the deciding factor for NCAA Tournament at-large bids, but it is a factor. It's the NCAA NET rankings that decide who's in and who's out. The good news: Xavier's also rated No. 71 in the NET with two regular-season games remaining Tuesday at Butler and March 9 at home against St. John's. Butler currently sits at No. 54 in the NET, meaning a Xavier win would qualify as another quadrant one win the best-looking win on a team's rsum. A quad one win is defined as a win at home against a team ranked 1-30 in the NET, or a win on a neutral court against a team ranked 1-50, or a true road win against a team ranked 1-75. With Xavier's dismantling of St. John's Thursday, the Red Storm fell to No. 59 in the NET. If Xavier can win its last two games on the schedule ahead of the Big East Tournament, the Musketeers would have a compelling case for the NCAA Tournament. Even if that plays out, Xavier's far from a lock. The most likely scenario is that Xavier's fate will be decided by how the Musketeers fair at Madison Square Garden March 13-16 in the Big East Tournament. Xavier's the hottest team in the conference right now, so maybe the uncertainty is a positive. It could mean that the motivated team currently on display hangs around for a few more weeks. NEWSLETTERS Get the Bengals Beat newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-876-4500. Delivery: Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Bengals Beat Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters The Naji Marshall wrecking ball Naji Marshall, not long after scoring a career-high 31 points in that upset of St. John's, emerged shoeless from the locker room for a series of interviews. In one of those interviews, the sophomore forward said the trials of this season have undoubtedly made them closer. "Nobody hung their heads," said Marshall, who's averaging 22.6 points per game during the win streak. "Everybody was with each other and for everybody to see that I think we all connected." That turnaround is something Xavier didn't need to verbalize. The Musketeers knew their backs were against the wall. "We don't talk very much about it," said Marshall. "We know what's going on. We lost six games in a row. There's a lot of teams out here that ain't losing and we know if we wanna make the tournament we gotta pick it up. We just got tired of people putting dirt on our name. We knew how good we were, we knew it was just us and we just turned it up to a different level." Travis Steele, who's basically been through the gambit of emotions in his first season as Xavier's head coach, said, "Man, I'm so happy for our guys. They stuck with it when things looked dark and gloomy they stuck with it and it's a process. Again, we just want to stick to the process of getting better, coming to practice with great energy, great effort and the guys have done that and I think our defensive identity on that end of the floor has really changed and helped change our season around." This is not the time for celebration. As good as Marshall and Xavier are playing, it's not about what's already happened, it's about the next game. "It's an unbelievable feeling but I try not to get too happy because we still got a long season left," said Marshall. "We got the Big East Tournament, hopefully, the NCAA Tournament, and there's many games to play left. That game's in the past now. It's all about the next." | https://www.cincinnati.com/story/sports/college/xavier/xaviersports/2019/03/01/ncaa-tournament-bubble-watch-can-xavier-find-way-bracket/3023632002/ |
Why Aren't There More Female Libertarians? | Close your eyes and picture a libertarian. Maybe Rand Pauls grinning visage and satyr-like curls swim before your lids. Maybe you see that guy from college who hijacked a seminar on Madame Bovary by pontificating about laissez-faire economics. Either way, you are definitely picturing a white dude. Anything else would be pretty close to inaccurate, as a survey released by the Public Religion Research Institute earlier this week reminds us. Compared to the general population, the 7 percent of Americans who identify as libertarian (plus an additional 15 percent with libertarian leanings) are significantly more likely to be non-Hispanic white, male, and young. Nearly all libertarians are non-Hispanic whites (94%), more than two-thirds (68%) are men, and more than 6-in-10 (62%) are under the age of 50. A good deal has been written about why libertarianism is off-putting to so many people of color, especially after bigoted newsletters that were published in Ron Pauls name in the 1980s and 90s resurfaced in 2011. The thing about freedom is that its heights are limitless, and its lows are bottomless. Libertarians, I presume, look at that void and never consider that they will do anything but rise. And communalists, as the Research Institute dubbed the other end of the spectrum, probably look and are horrified by the many eventualities that could sink them. This is Thomas Hobbess "state of nature": The strong snap up all the firewood and nuts and berries and whatnot, and the weak die starving and shivering in the cold. In any state of nature that todays libertarians would like to return us to, women seem as well-equipped to succeed as men, their paucity of brute strength not being such an issue thanks to modern amenities. So the divide must be more between how women see themselves and how men, especially libertarian men, see themselvesnot how they actually are. That conclusion shouldnt come as a surprise to pretty much anybody, and beyond its intuitive familiarity, theres plenty of research to back it up. Of course, Sheryl Sandberg and her class of professional superwomen have drilled home the ways women sell themselves short in professional settings. As one Sandberg acolyte writes at Slate, A 2011 study by Carnegie Mellon University found that men were four times more likely to ask for a pay raise than women. Women were more likely to wait until a promotion or assignment was offered, rather than asking for it in advance. And this same confidence gap defines womens expectations of their personal prospects. According to a study, almost half of American women fear becoming bag ladies and living in destitution on the street. Forty-nine percent of women making $25,000 or more believe homeless is not outside the realm of possibility for themand 27 percent of women earning over $200,000 a year carry the same anxiety. The study didnt poll men, but Id hazard a guess that their responses wouldnt suggest the same level of self-doubt. | https://newrepublic.com/article/115410/why-arent-there-more-female-libertarians |
Where Did the Anti-Globalization Movement Go? | Yet the anti-globalization movement never made a comeback. Even a decade after the attacks, it has failed to recapture the attentions of the masses. For instance: When Bruce Rich published Mortgaging the Earth, a seminal 1994 book on the environmental wrongs of the World Bank, it got two writeups in the New York Times, plus mentions in The Economist, National Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. He released a follow-up, Foreclosing the Future, earlier this month with minimal fanfare. Its just as deeply-researched and filled with heretofore publicly unavailable Bank documents as its predecessor, yet its received fairly little attention. Some argue that the reason protests have cooled is that the World Bank and other globalizing institutions have rectified their policies. In the past year the Bank has created and implemented accountability programs and its president Jim Kim has called for new high-risk/high-reward approaches to alleviating poverty. Maybe things have changed enough to shake the heat. Rich doesnt think so. His book argues thoroughly and methodically that the Banks permissive attitude towards environmental destruction has continued, if not worsened, in the past decade, through a combination of project corruption and institutional amnesia. In the case of a climate change treaty in 2011, for example, the Bank cut funding for coal plantsexcept in the worlds poorest countries, which, by its logic, needed the cheapest sources of energy available. But since the Bank, along with many other agencies, had reiterated that the poorest countries would suffer the most from climate change, Rich writes, these groups must know that policies like this help underdeveloped nations contribute to their own future climatic calamities, whether from drought or inundation. Such internal contradictions are the same ones that led to anti-globalization ire in the first place. And besides, even if policies have changed, they havent improved so drastically as to account for the near-total disappearance of the movement. A more likely explanation is that the American domestic situation has hit the fan. Many of the World Bank scholars, critics, and activists I spoke to highlighted the decline of the global and domestic economy as reasons for the decline of anti-globalization activism. Compared to the late '90s, the economy is in shambles, and it can be difficult to think of trade policy before one's own employment. In that light, globalization becomes something of an abstraction. Young people both in the United States and abroad have largely focused their protest efforts on internal problems: Thus far, the strongest uprising of this American generation is Occupy Wall Street, which mobilized youth to an unprecedented degree and which immediately drew comparisons to the anti-globalization protests of years past. Occupy never had clearly-articulated objectives, but still managed for months to unify activists with variegated goals. The globalization protesters, by contrast, split into factions, as did many other causes that gained traction in the 90s. Instead of one umbrella group protesting globalization at large, activists took on smaller causes. International Rivers, the group that organized the recent protest, focused on the World Bank and IMFs environmental impacts on developing nations, for example. Its demands are to stop pipelines and fracking, and with diminished demands comes diminished fervor, at least in volume. In other words, you won't see these guys alongside James P. Hoffa's Teamsters again soon. Even within the annual meetings, other issues overshadowed the Bank and IMFs policies. As one Times piece put it: The fiscal problems of the United States overshadowed the official agendas for the meetings, with representatives from dozens of countries publicly expressing worries about what was happening on Capitol Hill and in the White House. At a convention dedicated to the state of these groups, the domestic woes of the United States and the imminent risk of debt default stole the show. Whats certain is that the profiles of these international institutions have declined in the past 15 years. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the World Bank is no longer as financially influential as it once was, Rich writes in his new book. Richard Behar called it an out-of-control bureaucracy last summer in Forbes; a June Times op-ed said that the decline in the World Banks importance as a tool for development can be seen in its own figures. It pointed to the staggering degree to which foreign investment has overtaken the Bank as a source of development capital: World Bank grants and private investment were relatively equal in 1990. Now, the private sphere spends nearly 20 times more than the Bank. These days, theres no easily-pinpointed perpetrator of wrong, no overarching institution to demonize, no one place through which most funds are delivered. The Bank and IMF are simply less financially relevant than they were in the past. Decisions like Citizens United have granted private money unprecedented influence over politics and, in turn, the economy. If you analyze this, said Nadine Bloch, the A16 organizer, You might think its much more important to do anti-corporate work before you actually target a policy of the World Bank. You need to look at where the moneys coming from, she said, And its coming from an oil company, and theyre sponsoring projects and theyre also funding a senator. From this perspective, one Bloch has come to after decades of anti-corporate globalization work, it might make more sense to address the money than the institution to get at the root causes of contemporary inequality. But following the money makes for slippery targets, and its difficult to escape complicity with them, an anxiety felt even by the anti-globalization protesters. (From the Blue Scholars: marchers were mocked for stompin' down Niketown wearing their shoes.) Private sources of funding hold no annual conferences while their reach pervades everything from development projects to domestic politics. Their power is, in other words, globaland impossible to tie to one source alone. | https://newrepublic.com/article/115360/wto-protests-why-have-they-gotten-smaller |
Was That Post-Shutdown Democratic Surge Actually Real? | Only a couple weeks have elapsed since the shutdown ended, but theres already a few bits of evidence that the Democratic wave has subsided. Last night, an NBC/WSJ survey showed Democrats ahead by just 4 points on the generic ballot among registered voters, down from an 8 point lead at the heart of the shutdown. Earlier in the day, Democracy Corps released a survey showing that Republican incumbents in competitive districts led by the same margin that they did in June. These numbers aren't good enough for the Democrats. I dont think anyone seriously believed Democrats were poised to retake the House in June, so it should be pretty disappointing for Democrats if they haven't made any gains in the horse race. The survey also highlights the GOP's advantage in the battlegrounds. Incumbent Republicans in the 25 most competitive battlegrounds have higher approval ratings and favorability ratings than the president. The numbers in the Democratic-held battlegrounds are just as bad for Democrats as the numbers are for Republicans. A 4 point Democratic advantage among registered voters just isnt impressiveits only slightly larger than the 3 point Democratic advantage in the NBC/WSJ survey conducted before the shutdown. Historically, a 4 point Democratic advantage among registered voters is not consistent with a tsunami. Ahead of 2006 or 2008, for instance, the NBC/WSJ survey never showed Democrats with such a slim advantage. Democrats need a 2006, 2008-esque wave to expel Republicans incumbents from their lean-red districts. Its important to remember that these are just two polls. If you see a shift in two polls, and declare it to be a real sign of a change, youre going to get burned with some regularity. Put differently: the next 5 polls could show Democrats ahead by 8 on the generic ballot. But it shouldnt be too surprising if these findings are ultimately confirmed by other surveys. Its not hard to imagine why the Democratic advantage would have faded, as the shutdown is over and the Obamacare website is a catastrophe. | https://newrepublic.com/article/115416/midterms-2014-new-polls-show-democrats-faring-worse |
What Does it Mean to Call a Jewish Person Un-British? | The second time I thought about my grandmothers story was when reading the Mails hatchet job on Ralph Miliband, headlined The man who hated Britain. A far more trivial affair than the events in Greece, but unsettling nonetheless. To meregardless of the author being one Geoffrey Levythe piece drew its venom from a well-worn anti-Semitic stereotype: that of the rootless Jewish subversive who hates his or her adoptive country and even works to undermine it. Britains own history of anti-Semitism is something conveniently obscured by its heroic self-image of being the country that defeated Hitler. Yet that anti-Semitism existed, and its traces are still discernible today, even if it largely remains beneath the surface of polite society. The Mail would no doubt aver that it was attacking Ralph Milibands Marxist politics, and not his ethnic origins. But the message of that piece was that those politics were not merely objectionable; they were deeply sinister because they were foreign and did not belong here. The subtext, further reinforced by the way the paper worded its refusal to apologise for running the piece, is that theres something foreign about Ed Miliband himself. Never openly said, of course, but a series of snide digs that saywatch it, Ed, youll never be fully British and dont you forget it. Ed Milibands response has been defiant, and brave. Until now, I havent particularly liked the way he has used his fathers refugee story, which he first aired in a piece for the New Statesman in 2012. I can understand the desire to engage in current debates about immigration, to make a powerful argument that people born abroad belong here as much as anyone else. But it seemed to be contorted for immediate political gain, to bolster the Blue Labour-inflected take on patriotism that Miliband thinks will help him win an election in 2015. Well never know. Just as I will never know whether my grandmother became an ARP warden and ran out into the streets to throw sand on top of incendiary bombs before they exploded out of love for her adoptive country, or simply because she didnt want to be burned alive. To me, the stories Ive had passed down from my grandparentswho were not all Jewish, but Irish and English, toomeans saying that my country is never enough. Despite the unpleasantness the Mail has stoked up this week, Jews in Britain are safe, secure and thriving. But we are not so far from a time when even here they were treated as undesirables, when right-thinking people preferred to ignore what was happening, and to forget about it as swiftly as possible after the event. There are people who find themselves in a similar situation today: they are the migrants who fall from the undercarriages of planes, or who disappear into detention centres where they are thensexually abused, or who drown in boats in the Mediterranean, or who have been targeted by paramilitary-style attacks in Athens. Its the result of a system that has been constructed by European governments, including Britainand it is perpetuated because we have largely convinced ourselves that these are non-people. Stress patriotism too heavily, and it can end up sounding like those who fall on the wrong side of the linethe illegitimate, the rootless, the "illegal"have got something to be ashamed of. Yet not belonging is also a strength: it frees us to say that wherever injustices happen, it's our business too. This piece first appeared on newstatesman.com. Daniel Trilling is the Editor of New Humanist magazine. He was formerly an Assistant Editor at the New Statesman. | https://newrepublic.com/article/115031/what-does-it-mean-call-jewish-person-un-british |
Who Are the 17 Republicans Willing to End the Shutdown? | Perhaps unsurprisingly, most are from relatively competitive territory: Romney only won five of the 17 districts by more than 3 points. Perhaps because of their districts, these representatives are also relatively moderate13 are among the 40 most liberal Republicans, as measured by DW-nominate. Eleven of the 17 representatives voted for the Senates fiscal cliff compromise last January. And perhaps as a result of their moderation, relatively few of these representatives appear vulnerable heading into 2014. Each of these candidates won by at least 7 points last November. The Cook Political Report only characterizes one seat as lean Republican; the rest are either likely or safe Republican. Interestingly, of the six who did not vote for the fiscal cliff deal, four are from Virginias congressional delegation. Similarly, of the five representatives who are not among the 40 most liberal Republicans, three are from Virginia. Quite possibly. If there's one Republican who seems hard to explain, it's Devin Nunes of California. If I'm counting correctly, he's the only candidate on the list who isn't 1) usually moderate 2) represents a moderate district 3) isn't from Virginia. He's not an Orange County Republican, either. He represents the southern Central Valley, including much of conservative Kern County and Bakersfield. I'd give you the exact numbers on income and education but, unfortunately, the shutdown has shut down the Census. But just eyeballing it, this isn't a district full of rich Republicans. | https://newrepublic.com/article/114965/shutdown-2013-17-republicans-willing-end-shutdown |
Was Oscar Wilde's Outlandish Personality More Influential Than His Writing? | Among those who knew Wilde, few, however hostile, failed in the recognition of his qualities so far as to agree with Henry James that he was nothing more than a "fatuous cad." Even W. E. Henley, who stood out against everything Wilde represented, called him "the sketch of a great man," and Charles Ricketts, an intimate friend who saw Wilde when the armour of public personality had been put aside, probably made the most perceptive estimate of Wilde's stature when he said: "In intellect and humanity he is the largest type I have come across. Other greater men in my time were great in some one thing, not large in their very texture." The men who knew Wilde best remembered him, significantly, as a personality and a conversationalist rather than as a writer. Bernard Shaw, when asked shortly before his own death what persons he would most like to meet, replied: "1 do not want to talk to anybody, alive or dead, but if I craved for entertaining conversation by a first-class raconteur, I should choose Oscar Wilde." Even George Moote, who hated Wilde with that peculiar intensity which Irishmen reserve for each other, agreed after a dinner where Wilde was present that the latter's conversation was one of the most delightful things in life. And Yeats, who thought little of Wilde as a writer, was unreserved in his praise of Wilde as a talker. This extraordinary conversational talent was not, as many of Wilde's critics have suggested, a matter of insubstantial playing with words. On the contrary, it seems often to have had an underlying seriousness of intention and always to have been supported by wide learning. The scientist, Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell, encountered Wilde during the latter's last years of exile, and was so impressed by this single conversation that very many years later he defended Wilde as "a man of wide information and interests, and of commanding intelligence." And the artist, William Rothenstein, confirmed this with the remark that Wilde had "an extraordinarily illuminating intellect. " Of the men whose opinions I have quoted, only one, Ricketts, was a close friend of Wilde, and two at least of the others were declared enemies, yet, with the curious exception of Henry James, they appear to have been unanimous in feeling that Wilde was not merely a brilliant talker, but also a personality who at least verged on greatness. It is this impression of a mental as well as a physical giant that explains, not merely the impression Wilde made on his contemporaries in the heyday of his success, but also the indelible interest his character retained in the minds of those who had known him. They may not, indeed, have seen him as a figure in symbolic relation to his age, but they did see him as something extraordinary in any era. It is not often that one is present at the fall of a titan, and it was clearly the magnitude of Wilde's personality, even more than the circumstances of his downfall, that crystallized his fate into so patent a legend. But this does not explain why, despite their manifest imperfections and excesses, his works are still read, often with impatience, rarely with indifference. The explanation for this is perhaps to be found in the fact that something at least of his largeness of personality enters into his writing and suffuses even so absurd a piece of pastiche as The Picture of Dorian Gray with a quality of daring that raises it above mediocrity. Arthur Symons, indeed, contended that it was Wilde's attitudes rather than his achievements that were important. This opinion is not wholly just to Wilde, since it ignores the fact that some at least of his writings are of enduring value, but it remains true that Wilde never fulfilled in writing the whole of his potentialities; it is more than suggestive that the work which contains most of himself should have been called Intentions, for it suggested the promise of all that was never achieved. | https://newrepublic.com/article/115196/george-woodcock-oscar-wildes-legacy |
Are Unmarried People Bad for the Economy? | It's a Gallup poll that seems ripped from the deepest fantasies of conservatives: unmarried people are actually hurting the economy, and so more marriage might help the country's bottom line. Married Americans report a daily spending average of $102, followed by $98 among those who are living in domestic partnerships, $74 by divorced Americans, $67 by those who are single and never married, and $62 by those who are widowed. ... These results suggest that if more Americans are married, and fewer are single/never married, overall spending might increase. Similarly, if more Americans are in domestic partnerships and fewer are single, that too would appear to be related to higher spending. But, as Gallup correctly points out, one reason that unmarried people are spending less is that they make less. Marriage, for a whole host of messy cultural and socioeconomic reasons, has become a luxury item in America despite the fact that getting hitched (or simply moving in together) and splitting the cost of rent is one of the easiest ways to quickly acquire more spending money. That's why I don't think the real takeaway should neccessarily be that more cohabitation is the way to get Americans throwing around cash. Another way to get spending up is to get rent down, and in big, crowded cities like New York or D.C., that means developing and building more affordable housing options. It's certainly less scoldy and far more realistic than saying people ought to get hitched for the sake of the economy. | https://newrepublic.com/article/115381/are-unmarried-people-bad-economy |
Why Is Our Cybersecurity So Insecure? | Second, an extensible system is one that supports updates and extensions and thereby allows functionality to evolve incrementally. Web browsers, for example, support plug-ins that enable users to install extensions for new document types. Extensibility is attractive for purposes of increasing functionality, but also makes it difficult to keep the constantly-adapting system free of software vulnerabilities. Third, a 2009 report commissioned to identify and address risk associated with increasing complexity of NASA flight software defines complexity simply: how hard something is to understand or verify at all levels from software design to software development to software testing. Software systems are growing exponentially in size and complexity, which makes vulnerabilities unavoidable. Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab Sustainable Computing Consortium estimates that commercial software contains 20 to 30 bugs for every 1,000 lines of codeand Windows XP contains at least 40 million lines of code. The problems do not end with the mind-boggling math. The complexity of individual software systems creates potential problems for interactions among many different applications. For example, earlier this year, Microsoft was forced to issue instructions for uninstalling its latest security update when unexpected interactions between the update and certain third-party software rendered some users computers unbootable. Finally, there are the dangers associated with monoculturethe notion that system uniformity predisposes users to catastrophic attacks. As examples of the dangers of monoculture, security experts point to the rot that devastated genetically identical potato plants during the Irish Potato Famine and the boll weevil infestation that destroyed cotton crops in the American South in the early twentieth century. As noted by Dan Greer in a famous paper that, as lore has it, got him fired from a Microsoft affiliate: The security situation is deteriorating, and that deterioration compounds when nearly all computers in the hands of end users rely on a single operating system subject to the same vulnerabilities the world over. In other words, to great extent, software is different from other goods and services. And the notion of perfectly secure software almost certainly is a white whale. But as far as the liability discussion is concerned, its also a bit of a red herring. Software does not need to be flawless to be much safer than the code churned out today. For starters, software vulnerabilities are not all created equal, and they do not all pose the same risk. Based on data from 40 million security scans, the cloud security company Qualys found that just 10 percent of vulnerabilities are responsible for 90 percent of all cybersecurity exposures. Not only are some vulnerabilities are doing an outsize share of the work in creating cybersecurity problems, but many are, from a technical standpoint, inexcusable. Only systemic dysfunction can explain why the buffer overflow, a low-level and entirely preventable bug, remains among the most pervasive and critical software vulnerabilities out there. That software security is an unusually difficult pursuit, and that the current incentive structure prevents software makers from consistently putting what they know about security into practice, together weigh in favor ofholding software makers accountable for at least some vulnerabilities. The law regularly imposes discipline on other industries that would otherwise be lured toward practices both easy and lucrative. An intelligently designed liability regime should be understood as a way to protect software from itself. Ironically, software is most insecure where the stakes are highest. For all the progress that traditional software providers have made in creating more secure applications, experts say that embedded device manufacturers, responsible for producing everything from medical devices to industrial control systems, are years behind in secure system development. The problem is not that the industry has proven unable to develop a disciplined approach to designing secure software. The problem is that this discipline is too often optional. For example, commercial aircraft are legally required to meet rigorous software safety requisites established by the avionics industry and outlined in a certification document known as DO-178C. Yet not all life-critical systemsindeed, not even all aircraftare required to comply with such baselines. Software for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) need not meet the DO-178C standard. The discrepancy is hard to justify. As Robert Dewar, president and CEO of the commercial software company AdaCore, put it in an interview last year: All engineers need to adopt the "failure-is-not-an-option" attitude that is necessary for producing reliable, certified software. UAVs require at least as much care as commercial avionics applications. History says he has a point. In 2010, a software glitch caused U.S. Navy operators to briefly lose control of a drone, which wandered into restricted Washington airspace before they were able to regain access. Similarly, some critical infrastructure sectors must meet mandatory cybersecurity standards as defined by federal law, or risk civil monetary penalties. But others not legally bound are instead left to drown in voluntary cybersecurity guidance. In 2011, the U.S. Government Accountability Office analyzed the extent to which seven critical infrastructure sectors issued and adhered to such guidance. That report was appropriately titled: Cybersecurity Guidance Is Available, but More Can Be Done to Promote Its Use. In 1992, Ward Cunningham, the programmer who gave the world its first wiki, introduced what would become popularly known as "technical debt" to describe the long-term costs of cutting corners when developing code. He wrote: Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite. Objects make the cost of this transaction tolerable. The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. In 2010, Gartner, the Connecticut-based information technology research firm, projected that technical debt worldwide could hit $1 trillion by 2015. That number is all the more disturbing when you consider the fact that technical debt is unlike financial debt in one crucial sense: private companies are not incurring the costs and risks associated with their choices. You are. The goal of a new cyber liability regime should be to change thatto create an incentive to lower technical debt and thereby add discipline to a confusing, inconsistent and fundamentally irrational default regime, under which software makers call the shots and users pay for them. Image via Shutterstock. | https://newrepublic.com/article/115145/us-cybersecurity-why-software-so-insecure |
Why Can't a 'Fast and Furious' Whistleblower Publish His Tell-All? | Government employee speech is a very gray area of the law, and one thats only gotten darker in recent years, says Vladeck. Garcetti really changes the landscape. He added that a body of whistleblower law protects people who leak information up the internal chain of command, or even to Congress, but doesnt cover big public reveals like writing a book. Dodson did not respond to a request for comment on the book itself, but The Washington Post has reported that Senator Chuck Grassley and Representative Darrell Issa, two Republicans who railed against the Obama administration when details on Operation Fast and Furious first emerged, wrote its foreword. Just because the ATF leadership doesnt like the content of the book doesnt mean they should be able to prevent the author from giving his side of the story, Grassley said this week. The ACLUs letter cites an older Supreme Court case, Pickering v. Board of Education (1968), which established that government employees rights as citizens must be balanced against the State's interest in promoting the efficiency of its employees' public services. Many believe Garcetti turned [Pickering] on its head, in the words of Sheldon Nahmod of Chicago-Kent College of Law, but the ACLU disagrees. Garcetti is a wrench in the works, and we grapple with it all the time, ACLU attorney Lee Rowland admitted, but she said she doesnt think that decision applies in Dodsons case. For one thing, she said, the ATF didnt summon the Garcetti argumentthat it can control Dodsons speech as it relates to his official dutieswhen it forbade him from publishing the book. It simply declared that it could disapprove any outside employment request for any reason (underline theirs) and added, This would have a negative impact on morale in the Phoenix FD and would have a detremental effect [sic] on our relationships with DEA and FBI. Rowland said morale does not outweigh Dodsons right to free speech. Fast and Furious has been sliced and diced from every angle, she said. Pretty much the only voice we havent heard is Agent Dodsons account. Rowland added today that the ACLU has already begun a fruitful conversation with the ATF. Of course, Dodson isnt the first whistleblower to try his hand at writing a memoir. The ACLUs letter mentions the case of an FBI agent named Robert Wright Jr., who wrote an expos of an investigation into Hamas in the 1990s. After a nearly decade-long legal battle, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that Wright could publish his book in 2009. By then, as Politico noted, it was a pyrrhic victory for the agentsince the passage of time appears to have diminished the market for his book. | https://newrepublic.com/article/115081/fast-and-furious-whistleblower-book-atf-agent-john-dodson-tells-all |
Why Are Critics So Squeamish About Rebel Wilson's Weight? | In one scene from Rebel Wilsons sitcom Super Fun Night, which premiered last night on ABC, Wilsons characteran attorney named Kimmie Boubiercareens screaming down the hallway as if fleeing a fire. Whats the rush? a colleague asks her. Someone just tweeted there were jelly donuts in the break room, she replies. Youve got the heart of a lion, in the body of a much larger lion, Kimmies skinny co-worker tells her in another scene. There are countless body-related gags in last nights episode alone. In one scene Kimmie gets her skirt stuck in an elevator and is left half-naked sipping a smoothie in front of her crush as the skirt unravels. Super Fun Night, for all Wilsons charms, is not a very funny show. But more entertaining than the sitcom itself has been seeing so many critics contort themselves into pretzels of political correctness while trying to review it. The Washington Post, The Star Ledger, and Flavorwire steered clear of any mentions of Wilsons weight, the Post opting instead to diagnose "the unsettling, split-personality narrative of today's post-feminist young women." The New York Daily News got euphemistic: A steady flow of easy body-parts jokes...distract us. The Miami Herald referred only to a plucky band of size 16s. The Denver Post dropped in one tentative reference to over-size Kimmie. The AV Club called Wilson and her co-stars less conventionally attractive women. Variety seemed to be tripping over itself to not to say the one thing on its mindshe finds herself in a vehicle that isnt as big and buoyant as her personality; the material is relatively slight; its a slim conceit. Clearly there were notable exceptions, like Willa Paskin's thorough review in Slate. But it was surprising to see how many critics handled Wilsons unapologetic emphasis on her own weight by avoiding the subject entirely. This feels like the opposite effect of what Wilson wanted. Part of the reason why the show is a tough one to review is that there is not much else like it; it is subversive as network sitcoms gogenuinely off-putting and aggressive in its abuse of Kimmie (the pilot, to be aired next week, even more so). Super Fun Night is broadly a comedy about a band of misfits embracing their own awkwardness, but it is also definitively about weight. The premiere ends with a long scene in which Wilson attempts to put a pair of Spanx on. But assessing the merit of jokes about women and weight still feels weirdly like a critical taboo. Mike and Molly, which premiered in 2010 and stars Melissa McCarthy, could hardly be a more different show: sweet and sensitive where Super Fun Night is brash. It prompted groan-inducing puns to the tune of Mike and Molly Displays a Healthy Appetite for Humor" and "In love, one size fits all." But for a show about a couple that meets at Weight Watchers, many reviewers were surprisingly coy in their criticism. (Entertainment Weekly summarized the plot as a Chicago cop and a fourth-grade teacher falling in love despite their own insecurities, which seems like a willful omission.) | https://newrepublic.com/article/114972/why-are-critics-so-squeamish-about-rebel-wilsons-weight |
Would Abandoning the War Model of Counterterrorism Make a Difference from a Legal Perspective? | It has had many names: The Global War on Terror. The Struggle Against Violent Extremism. The War with al Qaeda. Whatever one calls it, there is no doubt that one of the most controversial and significant ideas of the post-9/11 period has been the claim that the United States is in a state of armed conflict with al Qaeda (and perhaps more broadly). This claim is the lynchpin for asserting the relevance of the laws of war, after all, and that legal architecture has long been understood to be pivotal to the U.S. governments decision to employ military detention and lethal force as key elements of counterterrorism policy. As a result, both critics and supporters of the status quo tend to assume that the crucial question going forward is whether we will continue to assert the existence of an armed conflict. Critics hope that abandoning that model will sharply constrain if not eliminate these policies, and supporters of the status quo fear exactly that. As a result of this common assumption, the national debate surrounding detention and targeted killing has tended to focus on whether and how long the war model might continue to exist (see, for example, part IV of Mark Bowdens much-read Atlantic article The Killing Machines). These are complex questions, especially because the war model is not just a legal architecture but also a framing device in domestic politics and in international relationsand there is little doubt that announcing an end to the war model would have an impact in terms of politics and diplomacy. But lets focus on the legal element here. The answer may surprise you, given the attention afforded by lawyers to the question of whether that model will continue. Consider lethal force first. As indicated in an important speech from the Defense Departments General Counsel in late 2012, military options would remain an option under a postwar model, for use when needed against continuing and imminent terrorist threats. This in itself is not at all surprising; the U.S. government took a similar position prior to 9/11, after all, as illustrated most vividly by the cruise missile strikes conducted by the Clinton administration against al Qaeda targets in 1998. What is surprising is just how capacious this continuing-and-imminent threat model actually can be. Its breadth was not apparent in the 1990s thanks to the limited technology available at the time for conducting targeted, stand-off strikes against individuals or small groups, and the lack of actionable intelligence needed to inform such strikes. The emergence of armed drones capable of loitering over targets and striking not just with great accuracy but with temporal immediacy, combined with the creation of an extraordinary intelligence apparatus devoted toward the manhunting aspects of counterterrorism, has long since shattered those practical constraints. The fact that this development occurred under cover of the war model ensured that its implications for the continuing-and-imminent threat model would not be apparent immediately. But those implications were considerable nonetheless. Whats more, the convergence of current targeting policies and the pre-9/11 model is a two-way street. Though the government continues to maintain the relevance of the war model to this day, it has made clear that it now embracesas a matter of policy discretionconstraints on the use of lethal force outside the Afghan combat zone that replicate the elements of the continuing-and-imminent threat model (of course, even Afghanistan may soon be categorized as something other than a zone of combat, given the accelerating momentum toward the withdrawal of most if not all American combat forces). Not that this means that the constraints are all that restrictive; one must bear in mind that the continuing-and-imminent model does not require the sort of literal-immediacy one might associate with police uses of force during, say, a hostage crisis. The model instead treats the imminence element as satisfied on an ongoing basis when a fleeting window of opportunity emerges to carry out an attack against a group or individual that already has demonstrated the capacity and will to kill Americans, at least where a capture mission is not feasible in the circumstances. This helps explain why the government, though still maintaining the relevance of the armed-conflict model as a formal matter, already was willing to return to the continuing-and-imminent threat model as a matter of policy: There just isnt much cost to doing so in terms of lost operational flexibility. The same will be true postwar, at least insofar as the legal architecture is concerned. | https://newrepublic.com/article/114995/would-abandoning-war-model-counterterrorism-make-difference |
Do the Clintons Love Their Donors, or Their Donors' Money? | The New York Times, which apparently believes rich people do not have a loud enough voice in American society, decided on Tuesday to devote a front-page story to the different ways in which politicians court them. Specifically, the article detailed how Team Clinton is adept at personalizing its interactions with donors, while Barack Obama is cool and detached at fundraisers. You have probably heard this beforeapparently Bill Clinton is really gregarious!but the piece at least provides a few amusing quotes and anecdotes. Its a whole different shtick, said Arthur L. Schechter, a Houston-based lawyer whose support for Mr. Clinton led to an ambassadorship in the Bahamas and who has also raised money for Mr. Obama. "The Clintons have a way of making people feel like theyre part of something and important to whats going on, and I found that lacking in the Obama team," he added. What I liked about this quote was the unstated but still palpable reality that what Schechter truly desires is to be deceived. It isn't a matter of whether something "important" is going on; it's a matter of whether Schechter is made to feel that something important is going on. He respects the Clintons because they put on a better performance, even though Schechter is smart enough to know that it is indeed a performance. Schechter seems like the type of person who, say, enjoys getting a thank-you note from a teenager who he knows has only written the note under orders from his or her parents. Speaking of notes: Even while serving as secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton called some longtime supporters on their birthdays (Its your secretary of state calling to wish you a happy birthday...), and sent personal notes when a new grandchild arrived. An aide emphasized that those donors are personal friends with whom Mrs. Clinton has stayed in touch. I know thank yous, and whether they come from a sincere place, said Mrs. Clintons friend Susie Tompkins Buell, who has helped raise money for Mrs. Clinton in the past. They dont have someone sitting down with them saying, Now you have to write your notes, Ms. Buell said. The whole point of this anecdoteand the articleis that Clinton is a savvy fundraiser. The other possibility, which the piece unintentionally raises, is that after making politics their life for so long, the Clintons no longer really distinguish between friendship and business. | https://newrepublic.com/article/115300/rich-fundraisers-fawn-over-clinton-obama |
What If POLITICO Had Covered the Civil War? | NOT-S0-GREAT EMANCIPATOR: Lincoln Proclamation Stirs Controversy, by Jethraux VandeHei: Lincolns emancipation proclamation was bound to rile opponents who already viewed the president as high-handed and arbitrary Senior White House officials assert that Lincoln has the authority to free slaves under the Constitutions war-making provision. But Congressional Democrats have vowed to hold hearings, which could put border-state Republicans in an awkward position. Lincoln is risking his presidency and his reputation on the uncertain notion that future generations will eventually appreciate the end of slavery. WEST-WING MINDMELD: This shows a direct, decisive president, something that will improve Lincolns ability to get his agenda through Congress FORMER GEN.-IN-CHIEF GEORGE MCCLELLAN, on MORNING JEHOSEPHAT: Lincoln has flip-flopped once again on emancipation. Washington politicians are doing an end run around the Constitution I think we need less polarization and divisiveness during a civil war. A leader needs to stand up to extremists and reach out across the aisle. Lincoln has not led. 1864 TEA LEAVES: I am not ruling anything out, but Im not ruling anything in. PLAY-BOOK FACTS OF LIFE: If the president can convince the public that he emancipated slaves simply to preserve the union, the story will blow over. If it emerges that he actually issued the proclamation because he believes involuntary bondage is an immoral affront to human dignity, we could be looking at months of hearings. FLASHBACK: I am not, nor have ever been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. Lincoln, IL-SEN debate, 1858 | https://newrepublic.com/article/115379/politico-playbook-parody-civil-war-playbook |
What Happens When an Al Qaeda Suspect Is Detained at Sea? | But whether or not it should have given a court pause, the government got away with it: Warsame opted to cooperate with federal investigators and ultimately pleaded guilty. Which brings us to Al-Liby. Right now, he too is undergoing intelligence interrogation aboard a naval vesseland, like Warsame, without first having been advised of his rights. If the Obama Administration keeps with the Warsame playbook, then federal investigators eventually will take over, recite the usual legal admonitions, and then seek to prosecute Al-Liby in a federal courthouse. Of course we cannot yet know what Al-Libys intentions are. He might play along, as Warsame did. But he might not, and instead object to his unwarned interrogation or contest the governments evidence. I suspect not. From the prosecutions standpoint, the risks are significantly lesser in Al-Libys case than they were in Warsames. Heres why. Once a defendant is in custody, two general requirements come into play: Miranda, and the rule that an arrested defendant must be taken without unnecessary delay to a federal judge. (The latter is known as presentment.) The criminal law typically deals with the governments violation of one or the other (or both) by excluding statements obtained from the defendant as a consequence of the violation. And while the exclusionary rule might have got prosecutors nerves up in Warsames case, it almost certainly wont in Al-Libys. The reason is that prosecutors likely wont need to rely on any confessions that might come out of Al-Libys time at sea, regardless of whether he decides to talk to the government. The government clearly already has other evidence against Al-Liby. A New York grand jury returned a still-pending indictment against him and many others in 2000. That certainly implies the prosecutions confidence in its ability to convict each of the named defendants, Al-Liby included, beyond a reasonable doubtand on the strength of evidence available more than a decade ago, and long before the Libyans capture this weekend. We likely know what some of that evidence will be. | https://newrepublic.com/article/115066/abu-anas-al-liby-captured-al-qaeda-suspect-detained-sea |
Why Can't Critics Deal With Films About Slavery? | Last week, I saw 12 Years a Slave and thought it was absolutely superb. For this reason, and because it concerns arguably the most important aspect of American history, I have been seeking out commentary about the film. What I have found instead is a bunch of hand-wringing about whether the movie should have even been made. (Warning: If you know nothing about the movie, there are some spoilers below.) In a blog post for The New Yorker that is (yes, really) titled, "Should a Film Try to Depict Slavery?," the magazine's smart film critic, Richard Brody, writes: The question is whether the director Steve McQueen has trivialized or exploited Solomon Northups and other slaves sufferings by the very act of treating slavery as a collection of dramatic incidents no less ripe for naturalistic cinematic depiction than any novel or latter-day true-crime story. The fact that Brody even thinks this is a question worth asking and answering is bizarre, especially for a film critic. I wasn't aware that a subject matter's seriousness could possibly make artistic representations inappropriate. Brody continues: Thats why theres a shadow movie just off-screen beside 12 Years a Slave, one that wouldnt show the abduction, enslavement, and brutalization of Solomon Northup at all. Instead of treating the story of Solomon Northups abduction and enslavement as a naturalistic drama, the shadow movie would depict the very possibility of filming the story. It might involve the discovery, by Steve McQueen or a fictionalized stand-in for him, of Northups book. That certainly sounds like a less interesting movie. To Brody's credit, however, he does go on to explain why the film is impressive. Still, he makes a number of odd digressions, such as this one, where he seems to argue that we treat the Holocaust more seriously than slavery. His evidence: word use. Though the term the Holocaust is immediately identified with extermination, the term slavery is widely associated with involuntary servitudewith unremitting labor. When we say that were slaving away at our desk, it means were doing hard or dull work demanded by our bosses; it doesnt imply physical violence or the threat of deathand thats exactly what McQueen restores to the term and to the idea, in all of its horror and monstrosity. I might as well argue that we don't take the Holocaust seriously because there is a famous episode of television titled 'The Soup Nazi.' | https://newrepublic.com/article/115304/12-years-slave-reviews-highbrow-critics-are-wrong |
Is LeBreton Flats cursed? | That noise you just heard was Robert Randall, now about 250 years old, snorting a great guffaw from his Drummond Hill Cemetery grave in Niagara Falls. LeBreton Flats? you can hear him thunder across the miles and centuries. Let me tell you about LeBreton Flats! ITS CURSED! If you run your fingers over Randalls headstone (he spelled his name Randal in later years), you might still be able to make out the inscription that has been worn almost smooth by lifetimes of wind, rain, time and injustice: In memory of Robert Randal, Esq., M.P.P. The victim of colonial misrule, who died May 2nd, 1834, age 66 years. Let us be clear, Randall was no saint: he was the first American caught attempting to bribe Congress when he schemed to purchase 18 to 20 million acres of land in Michigan. But as the original titleholder of what later became known as LeBreton Flats, he watched helplessly as his 950 acres were unfairly swept out from under him in a sham of a court case. The accursed Flats, meanwhile, has yet to fully recover. Here are some of the events and people that have haunted the Flats over the years. Robert Randall Notwithstanding the Algonquin and other First Nations people who made it their meeting place long before Randalls forebears packed their bags and sailed to the New World, Randall (also spelled Randal) was the original titleholder of the Flats, then known as Richmond Landing. An entrepreneur with big ideas and small pockets, hed spent a little more than six years in debtors prison in Montreal and upon his release, a further three trying to settle the score with those who put him there. He won his case, which included an award of 10,000 pounds, but it was appealed. Having no money to pay Henry Boulton, his lawyer, Boulton launched an action against Randall in 1819, ultimately taking Randalls Bytown property, and selling it as soon as he could. John LeBreton Capt. John LeBreton had been eyeing Randalls property for some time, after overhearing plans to construct the Rideau Canal through it. For LeBreton, Randalls now Boultons land was a speculators dream, a way to a quick buck. He, however, didnt have the means with which to buy it, but knew a man, a Brockville lawyer named Levius P. Sherwood, who did. The two became partners. In 1820, in a poorly advertised sale, the pair bought the land for 499 pounds. For Boulton, the sum was far less than the land was worth, but much more than Randall originally owed him, and so everyone was happy (everyone, that is, but Randall, who when he heard of the deal, sued his former lawyer. He lost, however, with his new lawyer, Alexander Stewart, describing the court action that relieved his client of his property thusly: (A) more rascally proceeding never disgraced the administration of justice in any country.) LeBretons plans to make a quick killing were short-lived. He offered the land to the Crown for 3,000 pounds, and Lord Dalhousie, governor of British North America, was so galled by LeBretons indecent and shameful imposition that he and Colonel By redrew their plans for the canal, bypassing the Flats altogether. Fire! On the morning of April 26, 1900, a chimney fire broke out in a house in Hull, near the corner of where St. Rdempteur and Vaudreuil Streets now meet. Encouraged by nearby wooden houses, strong winds and massive stacks of lumber, the fire grew in size, eventually destroying half of Hull and about one-fifth of Ottawa, including pretty much everything on the Flats. If one could imagine a snow storm of particles of fire instead of snow, it would give some idea of the intensity, was how E.B. Eddy described it. In Ottawa, the fire travelled south along Division Street (now Booth Street) to Carling Avenue, where bucket brigades halted its progress. Seven people died in the conflagration, and more than 14,000 people were left homeless, including more than 8,000 on the Ottawa side. At the time, the Flats was a mix of industry, hotels, churches, schools and taverns, as well as the homes of workers and business owners alike, the latter including such notable builders as J.R. Booth. All the development that had shaped LeBreton Flats over the previous 75 years was wiped out in a couple of hours. Make way for progress After the Great Fire of 1900, the industrialists moved their homes to higher, more distant, and presumably safer ground, and the Flats was rebuilt. Many of the homes apartments and row homes were not built to any particular code. Over the years, as the buildings aged, many (mostly non-residents) felt the area, a working-class neighbourhood mixed with trainyards and light industry, had become an eyesore. Additionally, The Grber Report city plan of 1950, intended to make Ottawa a great national capital, recommended moving the citys railways and industry off the Ottawa River. So in April 1962, under the banner of urban renewal, the National Capital Commission announced plans to expropriate the Flats. Gone would be the junkyards and auto repair shops, the aging homes and noisy locomotive. In their place would be bright new government buildings, including a large headquarters for the Department of National Defence the Pentagon of the North, they promised. Almost 3,000 residents were forced to leave, their homes leveled as each departed. And then, for the next 40 years, nothing happened. The Badlands Little consensus could be reached on what to do with the Flats, a problem exacerbated by the plethora of stakeholders in its ownership, including the federal government, Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton and the City of Ottawa, and so it sat empty for decades. Or, rather, almost empty. Echoes of its past industrial use were still present in the form of contaminated soil. Meanwhile, its post-expropriation use as a city snow dump further harmed the Flats, with spring melt-water worsening the contamination. Much of the soil, it was discovered, would have to be scraped away and remediated before any development could take place. Life Returns to LeBreton By the end of the 20th century, some sort of life began returning to the Flats. Ottawas Bluesfest held its annual July music festival there for three years, beginning in 1999, and in 2007 returned to the Flats, which it has called home ever since. Meanwhile, the Canadian War Museum opened there in 2005, and the first residents moved into the expropriated lands in 2008, when the first condominiums were built. But the high winds that helped wreak such havoc in 1900 returned, too, most spectacularly in 2011 during Bluesfest, when a thunderstorm destroyed the venues main stage during a concert by Cheap Trick. According to the bands manager, Dave Frey, the 50-ton roof above the temporary stage fell about 20 metres in under a second, as fans scrambled for their lives. The bands equipment truck, parked directly behind the stage, may have prevented any fatalities from occurring: when the rig fell, it landed on the truck, leaving a two-metre gap between the roof and the stage. Three people were injured in the incident. Back to the Drawing Board Recent plans for LeBreton Flats fell apart when the relationship between RendezVous LeBreton development partners John Ruddy and Eugene Melnyk deteriorated to the point that each sued the other. Following failed mediation efforts to bring the two together and salvage their plans to build a new arena, library, cafes and office and condo highrises, the NCC this week declared the project dead. Robert Randall is probably still laughing. ALSO IN THE NEWS: City opts to ditch beeping snow-clearing machines, go with whoosh sound instead Ottawa Senators fire head coach Guy Boucher NCC cancels LeBreton deal but may salvage planning work in new process [email protected] | https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/is-lebreton-flats-cursed |
Is GDP Growth Strong Or Are Our Expectations Low? | I think you can probably guess my answer already, but, let me back up a bit. New GDP growth data were released yesterday. Though they are preliminary, they indicate a slowdown in fourth quarter 2018 to 2.6% (compared to 3.4% in third quarter). This was not unexpected and was in fact more positive than some had hoped. But thats not what jumped out at me when reading the New York Times coverage. Rather, it was the treatment of 3% growth as a significant accomplishment. This is not unique to them. It has become the standard view and this is disturbing. Low growth has become the new normal. Consider this: from 1950 through 2000 (that end point being the conclusion of the long 1990s expansion), US inflation-adjusted GDP grew at an average rate of 3.77%. Since then, it has been 1.91%. This is a remarkable slowdown. But, the economics-savvy reader might interject here, this is probably because the second period includes the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Removing that might make a huge difference! Nope, not at all. To make it a fair comparison, I divided each period into recession and expansion years and then took those averages by themselves: 1950-2000 avg recessionary GDP growth rate: -1.24% avg expansionary GDP growth rate: 4.84% 2001-2018 avg recessionary GDP growth rate: -1.32% avg expansionary GDP growth rate: 2.49% As you can see, recessions in the second period were more severe, but barely so. Expansions, however, have been almost exactly half the strength since the end of the dot.com expansion. Not only is that a remarkable difference by itself, but dont forget that these are averages per year and they compound over time. Thats really bad news. There are myriad reasons, but I want to pick out just one because its the easiest to fix: the lackluster contributions by government spending to GDP. It is both unfair and unrealistic to expect the private sector to hire all those who are willing to work. For the private sector, labor is a cost. And, as labor-saving technologies advance, so this becomes an even greater challenge. We therefore need the government to play an increasingly active role in contributing to employment and spending. And we are doing just the opposite. The three charts below show the contributions of the various components of GDP to overall GDP growth. If that component helped, its above the line; if it hurt, its below the line. The relative impact is represented by the size of the bar for that particular quarter. Look at the pictures below (you may need to right click and open them in a separate window where they will be larger) and examine the purple bars, or the contributions of government spending to GDP growth (because 1950 to 2000 is a much longer period, I broke it into two pieces). Of the 168 quarters of expansion from 1950 through 2000, 41 bars show government spending as a net drag. This is 24%. Meanwhile, from 2001 through 2018 (a total of 61 quarters of expansion), government spending (or, rather, lack thereof) is a drag 23 times, or 38%. To make matters worse, all but three of the latter have come since the Financial Crisis and particularly under the Obama administration. That means that in the extremely sluggish expansion since June 2009 (38 quarters), weak government spending has served as a net drag 53% of the time. Deficit hysteria and fiscal responsibility are weighing us down like an anchor. The US government cant possibly default on debt denominated in dollars and government spending means money in the pocket of the private sector. The Republicans have done a much better job of not worrying about the debt than the Democrats (at least in practice, if not in rhetoric); hence President Obamas dismal record of 19 quarters of fiscal drag over 31 quarters of expansion. For President Trump, its only been two of eight quarters, and to be fair one of those should really be under Obama since it was first quarter 2017. Of course, we have yet to see the impact of the government shutdown. If President Trumps rocky presidency leaves us with a Democrat in the White House in 2021, wed better hope its one of Green New Deal variety. They understand not only how government budgeting actually works (unlike the rest of the Democratic Party), but that we cant expect the private sector to do all the heavy lifting (unlike the Republican Party). If not, we might want to start to adjust to being excited about 2% growth. | https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntharvey/2019/03/01/is-gdp-growth-strong-or-are-our-expectations-low/ |
Can Remote Work Reverse The Rural Brain Drain? | Rural Brain Drain. Its not a term that most of us are familiar with. Yet, its been going on for decades, if not more. Kids grow up in small towns across America. Some go to college, some do not. But, the big city lights beckon them and they move away, because big cities have more to offer. They want jobs that pay more; they want things. And they leave their native rural communities in decline. So, now we are looking at a new workplace climate, largely due to demands of Millennials and Gen Zers for work and life environments that are very different from traditional ones. Here are their important values that contribute to this new concept of work: 1. These generations want authentic eco-friendly lifestyles 2. They want quality of life based upon experiences, not things 3. Many believe that living off the grid is a valuable pursuit 4. The majority wants to sustain a healthy work/life balance and have flexible work hours. None of these values are fully satisfied by those big city lights. How businesses and technology are responding to shifting work trends Technology has now made it possible for employees to work from almost anywhere they choose. There is project management software, cloud computing, unified communication , video meetups, etc., all of which allow team members who are scattered all over the place to collaborate and get things done. And there's no need to be overwhelmed by the variety of options available; services like Top5BusinessVOIP exist that make comparing and choosing the right business VoIP and virtual phone easy. Businesses are seeing the value of remote work. There are significant cost reductions related to facilities, for one. Even if they need physical face-to-face meet ups from time to time, these can be arranged. It almost seems like a match made in heaven. On the one hand, we have current and rising generations that are no longer attracted by traditional corporate lifestyles in big cities. On the other hand, we have companies that are seeing the value of remote work environments. Further, we have declining rural towns that are looking for a way to revitalize their economies. And now, we have a rather national experiment going on something called The Rural Innovation Initiative a project of the Center on Rural Innovation (CORI). The concept is simple provide seed funding for the development of rural technology hubs for remote workers, pulling in financing from both public and private partnerships, including the U.S. Economic Development Administration. The goal of this initiative is to help revive rural areas that have suffered from a brain drain, appeal to the values of younger generations and progressive-looking businesses that have embraced remote working environments and establish centers of technology experts and innovators who can fulfill 21st century business needs. In the first round of this initiative, nine rural towns have been selected for such hub development in Missouri, Iowa, Michigan, Oregon, North Carolina, Minnesota, Kansas and Arkansas. All of the towns have met basic criteria, to wit: They have existing high-speed broadband They have real estate available that can qualify for such things as Opportunity Zones Opportunity Zones They are able to establish a partnership with a four-year college or university They have a non-profit organization that is willing and prepared to spearhead the initiative. As these projects move forward, there will be many eyes watching to gauge their success. And if that success occurs, they will obviously become models for other rural communities to apply to participate. CORI is counting on it and is already providing resources and advisement to small towns looking to re-vitalize and jump-start their economies. The future is upon us As we move further into the 21st century, the changing workplace environment will only continue to unfold and evolve. Already, corporations have individuals and teams of workers all over the globe. Having them within national borders is a non-issue. And as technology continues to improve the potential for collaboration and teamwork, the writing is on the proverbial wall. Reversing the rural brain drain is a reality in the making. Given the values and needs of this younger workforce, rural communities offer amazing havens; given the evolving concept of the work place on the part of businesses; and given the motivation of rural towns to revitalize their economies, there is a coming merger that almost seems inevitable. | https://www.forbes.com/sites/abdullahimuhammed/2019/03/01/can-remote-work-reverse-the-rural-brain-drain/ |
What's gone wrong at Weight Watchers? | Image copyright WW Image caption Oprah Winfrey is a shareholder and board member of WW For a business that now sees itself as being all about wellness and not just shedding pounds, the company formerly known as Weight Watchers looks like it has been on a crash diet. In the second half of its financial year, it dropped 600,000 subscribers. And at the beginning of its peak season - when Christmas overindulgence morphs into New Year virtuousness - membership is well below forecasts. The problem, it seems, is all in the name. After 56 years of trading as Weight Watchers, the company changed its name last September to WW, which, it says, doesn't stand for anything - not Weight Watchers, not even its new tagline "Wellness that Works". The intention, under new chief executive Mindy Grossman, was to modernise the brand amid a cultural shift to body positivity that now emphasises health and wellness as opposed to counting calories. But Ms Grossman this week admitted to analysts - when the company missed full-year forecasts and warned on profits - that using the word "weight" in its marketing actually carried, well, more weight. "I think it needed to be more weight-loss focused, especially in the January season," she said. She added that it needed to be made clearer that Weight Watchers is now WW. Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Mindy Grossman became chief executive of WW in July 2017 Yanhui Zhao, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, says that the rebranding of Weight Watchers to WW was "a risky move" in the first place. "A rebranding project may lead to losses in brand awareness and brand familiarity. "These risks were even bigger for WW, considering their almost 60-year brand history in the market. Firms should be especially cautious when abandoning a long-standing brand name." Not even the motivational tones of Oprah Winfrey - a board member, strategic adviser and owner of an 8% stake in WW - could lift subscriber numbers and avoid the 50m dent to operating profit in the first quarter following the name change. Despite introducing a voice over by Ms Winfrey to its advertising explaining that Weight Watchers is now WW, the company made a "soft start" to the year which, its chief financial officer Nick Hotchkin says, is "difficult to recover from". Camilla Butcher, strategist at branding company Siegel+Gale, questions whether the company should have changed the brand at all. "The name, if anything, for any brand is really sometimes the most important asset. That is what a brand is when it really comes down to it, it can be name, the meaning and the feelings that are associated with that name." She adds: "I think that we live in such a fast-moving time... and there's nothing more shifting than the diet and weight loss category." Image copyright Getty Images Image caption WW used to be known as Weight Watchers WW boss Ms Grossman says the company is operating in a "very competitive environment", with trends such as the high-fat, low carb "keto" diet becoming popular. But Ms Butcher says: "By nature, it is a whole industry of fads and things that come and go, and Weight Watchers' absolute strength was the fact that they had stood the test of time." Shareholders, it appears, also weren't too sold on the name change when it was announced back in September. In a study looking at the effects of rebranding on share price returns by University of Nebraska's Professor Zhao, in association with Prof Roger Calantone and Prof Clay Voorhees from Michigan State University, an examination of 215 announcements showed that on average, stocks rose 2.5%. But the research also found that 40% of the rebranding announcements were associated with negative shareholder reactions. For WW, Prof Zhao found that its share price fell 30% in the month after it said it was changing its name. While the name change may have puzzled some, the reasoning behind it makes sense. Ms Butcher says: "I think there are very valid conversations to be had about the term 'weight' and whether that is a helpful thing to be talking about any more." Also, the image of the company needed refreshing. says Prof Zhao: "Their previous brand image was outdated and was not appealing to millennials, males and many other demographics." In order to address this, WW recruited singer Robbie Williams and Instagram star DJ Khaled as "brand ambassadors". However, it was not the idea, but its execution that has hurt WW. Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Instagram star DJ Khaled is a brand ambassador for WW "I just think it happened very quickly the timing was probably a mistake," Brian Nagel, senior equity analyst at Oppenheimer told CNBC. "They did this around October, November of last year, two months before the peak season." WW's peak first quarter season brings in about 40% of its annual recruits. While its total subscribers for 2018 rose by 22% on the previous year - helped by strong first half as it introduced its new WW Freestyle programme - recruitment numbers have fallen in the first quarter. Revenue for the first three months of the year will now be down by 10% and operating profit will drop by $50m compared to the same period last year. For the full year, sales will now be $1.4bn, down from $1.5bn in 2018, and WW will no longer meet its $2bn annual revenue target by 2020. Prof Zhao says: "Although rebranding was necessary for them, they probably shouldn't have acted so fast to change their brand name. "They should have started with a revised brand strategy and updated brand offerings, and then started to made small changes to their brand identity, such as brand logo and tagline. "Corporate name change should have been their very last step of rebranding." For its part, WW is sticking with its new name. Ms Grossman said: "We believe [in] the most WW and Wellness that Works for the long-term relevance and performance as a brand is the right thing to do. She added: "We are not giving up our leadership in healthy weight loss." | https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47392730 |
When so few people vote in Dallas, can we really be surprised there is political corruption? | Our first thought upon hearing about the latest ethics scandal to rock the city of Dallas was to wonder if we are becoming something akin to New York of yesteryear, when Boss Tweed ran things and the city was so rife with misdeed that political wrongdoing seemed to be part of the underlying culture. But there is reason to be more hopeful about Big D than that. It is true, of course, that political corruption will be with us for as long as greed and sin are part of the human condition. So now we get Carolyn Davis, a former member of the City Council who has pleaded guilty to taking $40,000 and the promise of future employment in exchange for helping shepherd a real estate project through the council. Ruel Hamilton, a campaign contributor to Davis, has been charged with two counts of bribery in connection to the case. Hamilton says he is innocent. But here is the other side of the story, which gives us hope: Our North Texas community has, in its U.S. Attorneys office, law enforcement that's willing to do the hard work necessary to root out public corruption. And residents shouldnt gloss over the importance and difficulty of that work. After all, public corruption breeds public cynicism, which then leads to a disengaged citizenry. The end result is something we see too often in municipal elections in Dallas low voter turnout as too many would-be voters believe their vote wont make a difference in a world where elected officials are on the take. The truth is that as voter turnout falls to abysmal levels, it becomes easier for people of low character to maneuver themselves into high office. Not everyone is corrupt. But when just a handful of votes can tip the balance of an election, its easy to see how the wrong candidate might slip through. Going after corrupt officials is crucial. So we are thankful for this case, and the case last year that saw then-sitting member of City Council Dwaine Caraway plead guilty to federal corruption charges. But the real antidote to all of this is an engaged citizenry supporting candidates with good moral character and strong records of achievement in other facets of their lives. We are, therefore, encouraged to see a robust roster of candidates for mayor and city council seats this year. We hope all Dallas voters understand that they can make a stand against the wrong leadership for this city by voting this spring. Election Day is May 4. Make a vow to yourself now to vote in that election. | https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/2019/03/01/people-vote-dallas-can-really-surprised-political-corruption |
Can the Jonas Brothers really make a comeback? | By Keydra Manns The Brothers are back making sweet music! Jonas Brothers blew up Twitter when they announced they will be reuniting. They will be taking over The Late Late Show With James Corden, and Carpool Karaoke. But despite all the excitement, some critics worry the group may not be able to pull off the comeback. After all, the group hasnt performed together in years. Fans nearly gagged when the band announced they will be reuniting. When the news hit, the announcement quickly became the one of the top trends on Twitter. Sucker" is the groups first single in over five years. Casually finding out the Jonas Brothers are getting back together this fine morning pic.twitter.com/GeKzbsq9n7 Cole LaBrant (@Thesupercole) February 28, 2019 Jonas brothers getting back together, releasing new music and doing carpool karaoke Im not even ashamed to be excited!!! pic.twitter.com/2qFFzLGoI9 Georgia Thompson (@Georgia_1599) February 28, 2019 The brothers originally broke up in October 2013, just a couple of days before they were slated to go on tour. A spokesperson said the split happened due to a deep rift in the band. Critics argue the band may no longer be as good as it was in its heyday. Ok but what if the Jonas brothers suck now anita (@anitaksidhu) February 28, 2019 Jonas brother STILL SUCK. THERE I SAID IT #Its2019 !!! drobss (@dshaunrobs_) February 28, 2019 The Tylt is focused on debates and conversations around news, current events and pop culture. We provide our community with the opportunity to share their opinions and vote on topics that matter most to them. We actively engage the community and present meaningful data on the debates and conversations as they progress. The Tylt is a place where your opinion counts, literally. The Tylt is an Advance Local Media, LLC property. Join us on Twitter @TheTylt, on Instagram @TheTylt or on Facebook, wed love to hear what you have to say. | https://www.oregonlive.com/tylt/2019/03/can-the-jonas-brothers-really-make-a-comeback.html |
How Can Businesses Best Deal With Digital Disruption? | originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. Answer by Michael Wade, Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation, on Quora: This is a question that we addressed in our previous book, Digital Vortex, and expanded in Orchestrating Transformation. We have identified four strategies for responding to digital disruption: Harvest, Retreat, Disrupt, and Occupy. We refer to these, collectively, as the Strategic Response Playbook. The first two options are defensive strategiesthey help to enhance or protect existing business lines. Defensive strategies are used to fend off value vampires, as well as more modest threats, and to maximize the useful lifespan of businesses under attack. The Harvest strategy is about learning from disruptors and improving core products and services. It can also involve blocking the disruptor, as we have seen with responses to disruptors like Uber and Airbnb. The Retreat strategy is really about deciding when to exit a sector under attack, or moving into a niche area where it is very hard for the disruptor to enter. Both Harvest and Retreat are very important approaches to extend the lifespan of a business under disruptive attack. Occupy is the battle win in the new marketplace created by disruption. Spotify looks in good shape, but it faces heady competition from Apple, Amazon, Google, Deezer, and others. Disruptors like Spotify do not always win the day. This is the Occupy battle. The final strategy is Disrupt, which is when a new technology or business model significantly impacts a sector by creating new forms of cost, experience, or platform value for customers. This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions: | https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2019/03/01/how-can-businesses-best-deal-with-digital-disruption/ |
Is The 10,000 Hour Rule Just An Urban Myth? | originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. Answer by Robert Frost, Professional instructional systems designer, on Quora: The research in Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Romers paper The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance is good research and their conclusions are good conclusions. They have not been disproven. If there is an urban myth aspect, it is because people dont read well. An urban myth has developed that their paper says you can master something simply by doing it for 10,000 hours. That idea is nonsense and that idea is not expressed in their research. As the title of their paper makes clear, they were studying the role of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is focused. It requires that the persons involved be motivated, it requires that they perform tasks that stress the areas in which they require improvement, and it requires immediate feedback and contemplation of performance. So, just playing basketball every day for four hours isnt going to turn you into Michael Jordan. Playing golf for four hours a day isnt going to turn you into Tiger Woods. Playing songs for four hours a day isnt going to make you a Beatle. Coding for four hours a day isnt going to make you another Bill Gates. Writing for four hours a day isnt going to make you Charles Dickens. You would need constant feedback and practice that focused on your weaknesses. In that paper, they also never explicitly say 10,000 hours. What they say is that their data indicates that people who are expert performers in some task got to that level by performing deliberate practice for up to 4 hours a day, five days a week for 10 years. 4 x 5 x 50 (assume they take two weeks of vacation) x 10 equals 10,000. Thats where Malcolm Gladwell got his tag line number 10,000 hours that he talks about in his book Outliers: The Story of Success. Gladwell may have come up with the sound bite that caused the confusion, but he does clearly describe what their research said, so again, people cant read. This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions: | https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2019/03/01/is-the-10000-hour-rule-just-an-urban-myth/ |
Are Workspaces The Future Of UK Buy To Let? | A few days ago, this Times article came out, causing quite a stir. All sorts of speculation was flung about. Will hapless investors who think they are securing their pension end up with their dreams dashed as did those who bought into the US subprime market in the late 2000s if (when?) In reality, things aren't quite so dramatic. Let's start with the article. Galliard Group, one of London's largest privately owned developers, launched Evolve: a property business that will build affordable workspace schemes and from which investors can buy stamp duty and business rate exempt individual units for their own use or for rental purposes. This seems like a reasonable proposition; it's also an indicator of the evolving office market and investments landscape. According to Alex Colpaert, Head of EMEA Offices Research at JLL, the overall "flex space" (flexible office) market grew by 28% in Europe alone in 2018 and is expected to continue at this rate of growth for the next five years. To quantify this, over 7 million square meters of stock will be added in Europe by 2023, pushing the total European market size to 10 million square meters. These growth figures are huge but start from a relatively small base. Today, flex space is only 2% of the total European office market and slightly higher in more mature cities like London (5%) and Amsterdam (7%). Expectations are for market shares in central business districts to exceed 15% in the next five years, driven by increased worker mobility and the different expectations of under 35s for their office environment. Within this flexible model, 90% of operations still run under traditional long leases to landlords. More and more investors are moving into this space, and consolidation activity can be expected as profitability in the sector more often than not comes with scale. Charlie Green, CEO of The Office Group, believes that a shift in power from landlords to occupiers is driving growth in flex space. The advent of technology in business has made everything faster, and it is now hard for many occupiers to forecast their long term space needs. Moreover, thanks to technology, occupiers now have access to information they never had before. They are starting to require facilities and services which will allow them to attract top talent and help create the right corporate culture for their business. There exist a variety of solutions to cater to different needs but, according to Green, controlling the entire building sits at the heart of delivering a successful product. Therefore, though selling individual spaces to buy-to-let investors could bring them good returns, it comes with a risk to the investor. If you dont control the entire environment, you cant deliver the full service, which is a danger for small landlords in the very competitive landscape of flexible offices. One solution might be for the scheme's developer to manage all common areas and facilities. Alex Edds, Director of Innovation at JLL, agrees. He thinks that in a good location with a solid and proven operator managing the space, this model could generate good returns - provided the necessary trading infrastructure can be built. "However," he told me, "my fear is there will be a growth in second-tier markets and fringe locations, built on the hype of this trend, which will be a far higher risk when the market is in decline." I decided to take this train of thought a step further. Edds reckons it may be an inevitable evolution of the market, similar to the crowdfunding phenomenon in residential property. Serial entrepreneur and founder of Eurasia PropTech Initiative Mete Varas agrees, as it is a model that has successfully been offered in the hospitality industry for some time and he expects it to trickle into the office industry. Tokenization of real estate and crowdsourcing will allow investors with limited resources to access markets such as this that have traditionally been the prerogative of big-ticket investors. PropTech consultant Antony Slumbers thinks buy to let landlords should not replace their traditional investments with a model such as this. "Co-working is about delivering a service," he says, "not selling a product. You are not investing in a bond. It cannot be successfully delivered unless by a completely committed, long term operator. Investing in co-working is to invest in a particular operator." One of the inherent risks of co-working lies in the tech like valuations that many of the players now boast. Edds and Slumbers both agree that, apart from a few operators, the vast majority of providers are too small and don't have the tech or the brand to justify these multiples. This being said, traditional valuation models are also not suitable for co-working, so a new valuation paradigm will need to emerge. Buy to let is most often seen as a secure pension investment. Co-working, with tech-like valuations that are often unsustainable in a market where, according to Deskmag, 30 to 40% of operators aren't profitable, would be a very different kind of play. Though the Galliard case is a conservative one that to a degree does reflect these investors' risk profiles, any shift into a crowdfunding type model should clearly be seen for what it is - a riskier, more speculative game. | https://www.forbes.com/sites/angelicakrystledonati/2019/03/01/are-workspaces-the-future-of-uk-buy-to-let/ |
Why Do Big Companies Still Advertise On TV Instead Of Social Media? | originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. Theres a saying used by a number of us here on Quora: Before you ask why, you must ask if. And in this case, I also think you must ask instead of or in addition to? Very few large public-facing companies these days advertise only in one medium. Chances are that any large company youre thinking of also advertises in some form on social media in addition to any television advertising that it is doing. You just may not have noticed it. There are a number of other possible reasons for your perception that big companies still advertise on TV instead of social media: It works. In some ways, your question may answer itself. I can think of no better proof of effectiveness than the fact that youre aware of their TV advertising and not of their social media advertising. Its part of a larger, so-called 360 campaign. Often television advertising is part of an overall advertising and marketing plan. And televisions role in that is very specific. Television is still an excellent way to generate large numbers in terms of reach (see next item) and brand awareness, while social media is often used in different strategic ways. They are both specific tools with specific applications and benefits in a much wider arsenal. TV has greater reach. Reach is the measure of how many different people a communication is seen by. It is complemented by frequency, which is the number of times the average person sees the message. As of 2018, the US had 304.5 million television viewers, which represents a 0.9% increase over 2017. And in 2017, the 301.7 million television viewers was an increase of 1.6% over 2016. So despite rumors to the contrary, TV viewership isnt dying. Its still growing. And the the percentage of U.S. homes with televisions receiving traditional TV signals on a TV set is currently at a whopping 96.5%. That was also an increase of 0.5% over 2018. US social media users were estimated at roughly 209 million, and they estimate about 7077% of the population accessed the internet at all, only some of which was for social media. So while social media penetration is huge, TV is quite a bit bigger. So more people can see the message. People watch TV primarily at home or during leisure time. This means that they can focus on the message and take it in, rather than having to divide their attention with their work at the same time. While 70+% of people in the US can access the internet, as stated above, a significant percentage of this is based on access at work. That is much less of a factor in television viewing. Television advertisers provide an immediate benefit/reward for viewing. Paid advertising supports the programs that it is surrounded by. This means not only that the viewer is likely to stick around through the ad or come back to the station afterward, but that they are aware of getting something they want (a show) in return for watching the ad. While viewers complain that they dont like commercials, research shows that many people actually choose to watch them and enjoy them. And at the very least they understand the deal they are making for getting the programming they want for free in return. Although some social media advertising also provides entertainment or a benefit, it is not part of the covenant and the viewer really has less reason to stay and watch or return. Social media advertising therefore doesnt promise to provide anything in return for viewing and really only benefits the advertiser. Television advertising confers legitimacy and prestige. Because of its higher cost and visibility, television immediately confers an element of prestige and legitimacy on the advertiser. Its an unspoken endorsement for the company just to be there. By contrast, social media advertising can be done at a smaller/cheaper scale and with lower investments in production costs. This is the same reason that some companies have been known to blow their entire advertising budget on one Super Bowl ad. Theres less noise. While there seems to be a lot of advertising on TV, in reality there are usually only 13 other ads running in a given commercial break alongside a companys TV commercial. Meanwhile, on social media, there is a constant slew of ads populating most peoples feeds, numbering in the dozens every few minutes. Its a captive/passive audience. If a viewer is watching a show, theres only one thing going on at any given moment on the TV. Its either the show or the ad. On social media, a users feed is a collection of dozens of items that the user can engage with or ignore. The social media user has to choose to engage with your ad, while the TV viewer just sits there and sees it in isolation without having to opt in. They have different demographics (and the television audience can be older/richer). While social media is renowned for its ability to target the younger target, television has the best penetration with older, wealthier targets, many of whom are very desirable to big companies as potential customers. Effectiveness means cost-effectiveness. Many large advertisers were lured into moving large amounts of their advertising budgets into social media based on fear of not being there. And also based on the misperception that it would cost them less. A lot of this was based on exciting presentations made by ad agencies and media sales organizations. But in the end, television advertising has a very good rate of converting viewers to users. In many cases, more so than social media does. So they get more for their dollars even if theyre higher. They can tell the story they want to. For some kinds of products and messages, the freedom of making a short film (which is what commercials really are) about the product or service is a better way to convey the message and meaning a company wants to. In many cases, on social media, the advertiser either has to use a more static print-style format or find some way to ensure that the user actually clicks through to see their video. While a television advertiser can just be promotional to their captive audience, social media advertisers have to entertain users first and convince them to select the ad for viewing if they want to show an actual filmed piece. Television and social media have different rules and restrictions. Depending on what is being advertised, and what the rules are for that particular category or genre, advertisers may be able to say things on television that they cant on social media. The message sometimes determines the medium. Television is a one way street. While the interactive aspect of social media can be very useful and powerful, it can also be risky. Many advertisers want to be able to say their message without having to deal with every comment that any random user wants to make about it. On social media, they cant always control acts of anger, vandalism, or random irrelevance that social media can generate. Often they dont want their message to appear alongside other messages they cant control. Just because companies sometimes want to hear from you doesnt mean they always do. Nor do they want to hand over control of their brands image to the general public. Bottom line: Its actually fairly unlikely that the large companies youre thinking of are actually advertising on TV instead of social media. They are probably doing it in addition to social media. And the reason they are doing that is that it is very effective for them, and works much better than social media alone for all of the reasons stated above. So much so that you have noticed their television advertising more than their other forms. This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions: | https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2019/03/01/why-do-big-companies-still-advertise-on-tv-instead-of-social-media/ |
What Do the Kids of the Grey's Anatomy Cast Think of Their Parents' Success? | Many of the kids of the Grey's Anatomy cast have known no other life, since the show has been on for most of their entire lives. When E! News visited the set of the series for the milestone 332nd episode, when Grey's beat ER as the longest-running medical drama. The short answer is not really. "Being like a social media generation that they are, they kind of look at it from that perspective," Chandra Wilson tells us. "My girls are old enough that they knew a life before Grey's, whereas my son, that's all that he's known, so he's like, whatevs. I don't think he understands, as far as accomplishments are concerned, what that means." Wilson's daughters were born in 1992 and 1998, and her son was born in 2005, after Grey's was already on the air. "I think since they were such a young age when we started, they don't really know much. They're very happy for...hey, I'm paying for college," Justin Chambers says of his five kids, the oldest of whom was born in 1994 and the youngest in 2002. "But do they think you're cool?" Camilla Luddington asked, getting to the real important questions. "No," he said. "And nor should your child think their parent is too cool." | https://www.eonline.com/au/news/1020120/what-do-the-kids-of-the-grey-s-anatomy-cast-think-of-their-parents-success |
What has Jody Wilson-Raybould's testimony done to the Liberals? | Former attorney general Jody Wilson-Rayboulds stunning testimony on Wednesday appeared to deal some serious damage to the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government, but federal Liberals in B.C. say theyll stay the course. Gabe Garfinkel, the director of the Liberal Party of Canada in B.C., said he has been focused on listening to what grassroots Liberals have to say about Wilson-Rayboulds testimony, and encouraging their feedback and ideas. This open dialogue has been important and will ultimately help us work toward our common goal of maintaining the Liberal governments progress on housing affordability, creating jobs and protecting the environment, Garfinkel wrote in a text message to Postmedia News. Its also been important to Liberals across British Columbia for Jody Wilson-Raybould to speak openly at the justice committee, and supporters here were pleased she had the opportunity to do so. Tamara Taggart, a former CTV news anchor, said she is still seeking the federal Liberal nomination for the Vancouver Kingsway riding, held by the NDPs Don Davies since 2008. Wilson-Rayboulds testimony has not made her reconsider carrying the partys banner, she said. I think that Jody Wilson-Raybould is an amazing woman and I look up to her, Taggart said. I have deep respect for her and I have deep respect for the prime minister, and thats all I can really say, because I just watched it like every other Canadian did. But David Moscrop, a political scientist at the University of Ottawa, said the Liberals will now have a tough time selling their Sunny Ways slogan, should they plan to use it again for the Oct. 21 election. Fairly or unfairly, it (the partys alleged conduct) certainly undermines claims to be a great champion and defender of feminism, he said. That might not be an entirely fair point because you might say, look at Jane Philpott, look at Catherine McKenna, look at Kristy Duncan there are plenty of strong women in the cabinet who have an influence. But that doesnt mean people wont make that argument. Moscrop said the Liberals have also undermined their position as a party which champions reconciliation and supports Indigenous people. Thats the price you pay when you try to forefront an Indigenous woman as being core to your brand and then throw her under the bus, he said. Moscrop said it is too early to get a good sense of what past Liberal voters will do at the polls this fall. Theres still the potential for more information to come and for resignations, and its unclear how long the scandal will drag on. But, put it this way, it certainly has the makings of something that could do significant damage to the Liberals re-election prospects, he said. Claire Marshall, chair of the Vancouver Granville Liberal electoral district association, did not return emails before deadline. [email protected] twitter.com/nickeagland | https://vancouversun.com/news/politics/what-has-jody-wilson-rayboulds-testimony-done-to-the-liberals |
Should I buy a home now, or wait? | Rick Piette, owner of Premier Mortgage Lending Its one of the most common questions that mortgage lenders and Realtors in Las Vegas get: Are you sure I shouldnt wait to see if prices go down before I buy a home? For those who work in either industry, the answer to that question is this: No because this is the time to buy. For many reasons, one being the home you love today will be probably worth more in the next six, 12 or 24 months or more. So, the time to begin building equity is today. Thats precisely the answer that Rick Piette, owner of Premier Mortgage Lending, offers his clients daily. Perhaps, its because Ive been a mortgage lender in Las Vegas for so long, Piette said. Ive been witness to this housing market for over four decades now, and while there have been periods of time I might have agreed with that concern, this isnt one of them. This city is experiencing huge growth in construction, industry, gaming and entertainment and that will be going on for some time to come. Right now, waiting isnt the answer, he added. At least, not if you want to save money. For decades, Las Vegas was known as one of the fastest-growing housing markets in the country. Then came the crash. While the market was hit hard, it bounced back faster and more fully than anyone (who wasnt a local, anyway) expected. During the past five to six years, its slowly and steadily made gains until once again, Nevada is the fastest-growing state in the nation, and Las Vegas one of the fastest-growing cities. We all know bad headlines get far more attention than good news, Piette said. And those headlines about Las Vegas from 2008 were real attention-getters. But look at whats been happening since then. What Piette is referring to is the more than $15 billion in new construction underway in Las Vegas. These include the new Raiders Stadium, Resort World, The Drew, the MSG Sphere, Project Neon, Circa, the expansions of the Las Vegas Convention Center and the Downtown Grand, and the list goes on. In addition, the newest interstate in the country, I-11, has already opened its first 22 miles running from the Arizona state line to Henderson, and is planned eventually to stretch from Phoenix to Reno. Along with all that growth, of course, come people. Thats one reason that Nevada leads the nation in job creation because the jobs are here, and people are coming to town to fill them, Piette said. Plus, the news in housing is just as good and continues to be optimistic. In January of this year, the number of single-family residence listings increased once again to 7,254, with the median price of single-family resale homes hitting $300,000. In short, this is the moment in time that many people may look back at and say, I should have bought back then, Piette said. Helping people realize their dream of homeownership is what the mortgage brokers at Premier Mortgage Lending have been doing for years. Because just as important as finding the right home at the right price is getting a mortgage loan that doesnt cost you a cent more than it should. While many lenders like to use sleight of hand to bring you in the door for one loan, only to tell you what you qualify for will cost a lot more the team at Premier Mortgage does things differently, and in a good way. Buyers come in to fill out one application, and as a mortgage broker, Premier shops around until it finds the best deal for the least amount of money out of your pocket. The only tricky thing about mortgage loans, according to Rick Piette, is knowing what to look for. For example, at Premier we offer a true No Fee Loan. And buyers can see that on the loan estimate we provide. It literally shows $0 for the loan origination, underwriting, document and prep fees. Then once you compare the fees and the interest rates between lenders, you pretty much have all the information you need to know. Choose the one that saves you money which can add up to thousands of dollars and suddenly that new home youre buying becomes an even better deal. For additional information or to schedule an appointment to discuss the true No Fee mortgage loans available through Premier Mortgage Lending, call 702-485-6600. Or, apply at premiermortgagelending.com. To discover facts on how much a mortgage loan should cost you, visit KnowBeforeYouOweNevada.com. Premier Mortgage Lending, NMLS No. 393282, is at 701 N. Green Valley Parkway, Suite 125 in Henderson. The full-service lender is a member of the Las Vegas, Henderson and Boulder City chambers of commerce, Better Business Bureau and Southern Nevada Home Builders Association, as well as an affiliate member of the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors. | https://www.reviewjournal.com/homes/advertising-features/should-i-buy-a-home-now-or-wait-1608545/ |
Who will take IS fighter and his London 'jihadi bride'? | Image copyright AFP Image caption This suspected IS fighter left Baghouz this week; Riedijk and Shamima Begum left earlier Yago Riedijk was born and raised in well-to-do Dutch suburbia but abandoned it all in his early twenties for so-called Islamic State (IS). Old pictures show a smiling teenager perched behind a child on a motorbike. A smattering of hairs on his chin suggests he is cultivating a beard. He left the Netherlands in 2014 and faces a six-year jail term for joining a terror organisation. You may be familiar with his jihadi bride, Shamima Begum from east London who is believed to have "married" him a week after she arrived inside IS territory aged 15. They now face an uncertain fate. Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Shamima Begum and thousands of other displaced people are in Al-Hawl camp in north-eastern Syria Riedijk was one of 300 Dutch men and women who travelled to Syria and Iraq. Some 135 Dutch nationals with "jihadist intentions" are still there, anti-terror officials say. It is not known how many want to come back and if Riedijk is one of them. And it is not clear if they can. As IS began to crumble, he and Shamima Begum escaped the town of Baghouz to protect their unborn child. Riedijk, now 27, is held in north-eastern Syria while she was in the sprawling al-Hawl refugee camp - temporary home to 39,000 mostly women and children - but has now reportedly gone elsewhere. Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Shamima Begum: "I got tricked and I was hoping someone would have sympathy with me" When the UK revoked her citizenship, she raised the prospect of applying for Dutch nationality through her "husband". Although Riedijk is on a terror watch list his citizenship has not been revoked. If he made it to a Dutch embassy or consulate, in theory he would be allowed to return home. Shamima Begum will struggle to get her underage union recognised in the Netherlands, but their newborn son, Jarrah, may be entitled to Dutch citizenship. There are as many as 170 children in Syria who could lay claim on Dutch nationality. Image caption A map showing the verified origin countries of children who travelled to Iraq or Syria Only this week the Dutch justice department warned of the threat posed by jihadist women returning from abroad, as well as by boys older than nine years old. Even women and children who were not trained and did not take part in hostilities could pose a "long-term potential threat" because of exposure to IS ideology, it said. How a city's teenagers were targeted for jihad Jimmy's cafe nestles on a neat shopping precinct close to where Riedijk grew up, in the eastern city of Arnhem. Softly spoken owner Jimmy gestures to the table where Riedijk and his friends used to gather. Two men in their twenties talk candidly of friends seduced and conscripted by a brutal death cult. Frustrated their city has been christened the Netherlands' "jihadist capital", they blame Dutch society for failing to stop "good kids" from being groomed. "They were kick-boxing, deejaying but then they stopped seeing opportunity here in the Netherlands," says one. "Guys started coming to our mosque, preaching, and the boys started to break away, become more extreme in their thinking, they were meeting in apartments and then we hear they've gone." Their experience tallies with the findings of a study that pinpoints a period in 2013 when radicalisation in Arnhem reached its peak. Recruits often suffer from low self esteem and are searching for a stronger identity, says Barbara Klunder who has represented a number of young Dutch jihadist suspects. "It's not so much religious, but more a feeling of belonging and being fully accepted by their own people fighting the same enemy." 'Arnhem terror cell' The spotlight returned to Riedijk's hometown last autumn, when seven men were arrested at a holiday park in the southern town of Weert. Leaked photos appear to show them kissing Kalashnikov rifles, posing in bomb vests, and preparing to carry out a terror attack at a rock festival in Arnhem with the aim of "creating as many casualties as possible", in the words of the Dutch prosecutor. Image copyright Dutch police Image caption A police image shows a raid on the suspected "Arnhem terror cell" Six men between 21 and 35 who either came from Arnhem or lived there remain in custody awaiting trial. Another element in the Arnhem terror cell case is Riedijk himself, as he is suspected of being linked to the group. With a jail sentence awaiting him, it is unclear whether he will come back. His parents have declined to comment. Patrick, a childhood friend, describes him as "one of the quiet people in class". Shocked by his departure, he believes Riedijk should be brought home and locked up for life. Dutch justice officials will be taking no chances. What other EU member states decide to do regarding repatriation is up to them, but that does not mean the Netherlands has to follow, says the National co-ordinator for security and counter-terrorism. Arnhem Mayor Ahmed Marcouch believes he should be brought home to face justice. "We will continue to guide him and keep an eye on him," he told a local paper. But he does not want Shamima Begum to come. "You cannot be eligible for a residence permit when you have committed terrorist crimes." | https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-47385353 |
Why is Miamis Metrorail delayed? | Metrorail passengers were furious Friday after the county-funded rail system suffered significant delays and service disruptions during the afternoon rush hour. The transit agency announced technical difficulties in a Twitter post at 4:41 p.m., while passengers posted their own real-time updates of overflowing stations, missing trains and disrupted commutes. ALERT: Metrorail is experiencing a Northbound delay due to technical difficulties. Miami-Dade Transit (@IRideMDT) March 1, 2019 Sign Up and Save Get six months of free digital access to the Miami Herald Transit said the disruption came from the loss of our fiber network, the system that connects some computers and other equipment throughout the system. That prompted engineers to operate some systems manually, according to the agency. It interferes with our ability to control switches on the tracks, transit spokeswoman Karla Damian said Friday night. We have to operate manually and reduce train speed for safety reasons. Richard Hankins, a transit advocate trying to head south from Miami, reported Metrorail madness shortly after 5 p.m., posting photos of passengers crowding the platform at the Government Center station as a train filled to capacity was stopped but unable to take on more riders. A digital sign showed the next two northbound trains delayed, and the next southbound train scheduled to arrive in seven minutes. Once he boarded his southbound train about 50 minutes later, he reported it skipped three stops. Decided to walk from Government Center to Vizcaya due to the delays. Don't recall hearing a train go by until I was approaching the station. pic.twitter.com/WDIGEVpvea Steven Fishlock (@plutosknight) March 2, 2019 Metrorail said it was able to get trains running after the fiber-optics issue, but at a much slower speed than normal. The problems prompted Miami-Dade to shut down Metrorails service to Miami International Airport, the lone new route built with a half-percent sales tax voters approved in 2002 to improve transportation countywide. Shuttle buses were used to ferry passengers back and forth from MIA and the Earlington Heights station, the two stops on Metrorails Orange Line. (The rest of the system is the Green Line.) Metrorail madness at Government Center. All trains delayed at rush hour peak. Lots of frustrated commuters at the end of a long work day. Come on @IRideMDT, this is absurd! @TransitMIA @transitmiami pic.twitter.com/0S4yfPOBI5 Richard Hankins (@RichardPHankins) March 1, 2019 Metrorail has been plagued by delays and mechanical disruptions thanks to breakdowns of its original trains, which were part of the system launched during the 1980s. Miami-Dade is in the process of replacing the old trains with new ones as part of a $380 million upgrade of the Metrorail fleet. The countys 2019 budget shows transit reports needing $250 million to upgrade Metrorail train control, but there were not funds to meet the need. | https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article227005914.html |
Who owns the fight for LGBT+ rights in the Arab world? | BEIRUT (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Westerners shouldnt be writing the Arab LGBT+ narrative, activists said on Friday, even while applauding Luxembourgs gay prime ministers confrontational remarks at a summit between European Union and Arab League leaders. Xavier Bettel, speaking in a closed session, called out homophobia in the Arab world by telling the delegates that his marriage to a man could lead to his execution in some of the nations represented in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, this week. The remarks were greeted with icy silence from some, quiet joy from others, according to a tweet by a German journalist who attended the meeting at Egypts Red Sea resort. LGBT+ relationships are illegal across most of the Middle East and North Africa, and gay people often risk fines, jail and even the possibility of death, according to the charity Human Rights Watch. Tarek Zeidan, executive director of Lebanese LGBT+ rights group Helem, said it is positive that LGBT+ issues in the Arab world were being talked about at big event - but he does not believe a Westerner should be leading the conversation. It is a very gray area - my gut feeling is that if you are going to Egypt on a global stage and do not mention human rights abuses then you are complicit, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone. But, do I like the fact that we have to rely on a European politician to speak on our behalf agency is important. Zeidan said it is difficult to categorise Bettels comments as good or bad, but he did not believe the prime ministers remarks will cause extra harm for the LGBT+ community in Egypt and the Arab world. The idea that his remarks will make things worse for the LGBT community in the Arab world and for places like Egypt is ludicrous, because things are incredibly bad already, he said. In Egypt, homosexuality is not explicitly criminalised, but LGBT+ people have long been targeted under laws on debauchery. Noor, an Egyptian LGBT+ activist who declined to use her real name for safety reasons, was happy that Bettel took the opportunity to confront Arab leaders at an event in the global spotlight. It is a good step to show these leaders that LGBT identity and sexual orientation - its part of the daily life of any person, so its not something isolated, she said. A gay Qatari man, who declined to be named for reasons of safety, said the Arab leaders should be held liable for their treatment of LGBT+ people, but Westerners, and Western leaders should not be driving the narrative. They shouldnt be the ones trying to speak on our behalf. They should be the ones trying to assist us and reaching out, and trying to convey our suffering and our struggle and our hardship, and the fact this cant be tolerated, he said. In comments made to reporters at the summit Bettel said he was there to listen and not to tell Arab states what do, but said sexual orientation is among the subjects that should be raised. To say nothing was not an option for me, Bettel wrote on Twitter after the summit, signing his message with his initials. | https://www.reuters.com/article/lgbt-arab-eu/who-owns-the-fight-for-lgbt-rights-in-the-arab-world-idUSL1N20O1XO |
What's it like to go to a family nude swimming session? | Image copyright Pamela Fraser Image caption Pamela Fraser says she has "never been worried about what I look like" "At my first event, I slung a towel over my shoulder and went down for breakfast - naked." Events organiser Pamela Fraser, 27, went to her first naturism event 14 months ago. She's been to 20 since. Spa days, archery, yoga, cider-tasting and even a Fawlty Towers-themed night with actors playing Basil, Sybil and Manuel - all without an item of clothing in sight. She describes the first time she got naked at a large gathering as a "non-event', adding "you soon realise people aren't interested in what you look like." On Saturday, she'll join around 300 others of all ages, paying up to 21 for a skinny dip at Blackpool's Sandcastle Water Park. "It's no different to going swimming with your costume on," Pamela believes. "A lot of female costumes don't hide much anyway." "The whole idea is you're stepping back from the stress of life and the feeling that you have to fit into a certain mould." "You wouldn't take your work clothes with you when you go on holiday and when you go home you probably get changed. "Sometimes I get in from work and take all my clothes off - that's me saying this is now my free time." Pamela is one of 9,000 people who pay about 44 a year to be members of the British Naturism (BN) organisation. It offers advice and support and organises days out and festivals - including NudeFest, NKD and Nudestock - across the UK. Pamela had always found it "more comfortable" to be nude at home but began going to events after spotting a BN magazine while at work. "Everyone looked so happy - it was really inviting and it looked like there was so much going on. I thought, 'How have I got to 25 and not heard about this?'" "There are some people who think nudity and bottoms are really funny. But I think laughing at someone who has nothing on is rude." Upcoming trips include two more swimming days in Stoke-on-Trent and Poole, naked-dining near Stevenage, a ptanque tournament in Norwich and a two-hour boat trip in Scotland. But Saturday's swim has caused concern for some. Image copyright British Naturism About 50 people signed a petition calling for Saturday's swim to be cancelled or to be made over-18s only. Children, it said, would be "at risk of being subject to abuse by sex offenders who may slip into the organisation unnoticed". One self-employed woman who plans to go to the event says she has no concerns about taking her children. The 38-year-old - who asked not to be named - said: "I do understand where people are coming from in asking 'how can it be safe?'. It's just like any area of life, you always want to protect your children. "But some don't have an understanding of the community. I've never once been worried about anything. When you're in something, it can often be very different to what others might perceive from the outside." Her family found naturism about eight years ago, she says, when they accidentally ended up on a nudist beach on holiday. After enjoying the "relaxed atmosphere" they were keen to find similar experiences elsewhere abroad and, finally, in the UK. 'Shorter queues' "The girls love the swimming events - the queues are much better than if you go on another day, " she said, speaking ahead of Saturday's swim. "There are some times when my daughter might say she wants to wear her bikini bottoms - and that's fine of course. Then she gets there and they decide she doesn't need them. It's their choice to go naked if they want to but, if not, that's also fine." And she thinks there might be an even greater benefit than queue-jumping. "My eldest daughter's friends are becoming more concerned about what they look like but she says she doesn't. That really touches me as a parent: that she hasn't really taken on that societal body-conscious stuff. "How can naturism not have influenced that?" BN event organiser Mark Walsh says many new members are introduced to the group through other events aimed at "free and earthy" vegans, yoga fans and camping enthusiasts. "Some of our events are open to non-members, which brings in new people," he said. "Otherwise we just do marketing the same as any other organisation - but mainly in nudist circles." On Saturday the group will also attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the most people on a rollercoaster at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. The record was set in Southend in August 2010. People can join on the day but are asked to sign-up via the website in advance. "Our members are our life-blood," says Mr Walsh. "And when they get a crazy new idea, it's my job to make it happen." | https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-47406580 |
Is Martellus Bennett eyeing Patriots comeback ... or just trolling us? | originally appeared on nbcsportsboston.com News of Jason Witten's surprise return to the Dallas Cowboys (yes, as a player) had Martellus Bennett in a pot-stirring mood Thursday. Scroll to continue with content Ad Shortly after the Witten news broke, Bennett tweeted at the Cowboys asking if they needed a backup tight end, then insisted he was trolling. But that's not why you're here. "Heard this is the year of the comeback. What's up, Patriots?" a sweaty Bennett shouts in the video. "Yo (head coach) Bill (Belichick), (quarterback) Tom (Brady): Holler at your boy. You already know what's up." Bennett, who tagged tight end Rob Gronkowski in the tweet, also urges Rob Gronkowski not to retire: "Yo, Gronk, hold on! Your boy's on the way, Gronk!" Bennett did have two separate stints in New England, playing 16 games with the Patriots in 2016 and returning for two games in 2017 before announcing his retirement in March 2018. It sounds like the colorful 31-year-old has the itch to play again -- or he's just messing with all of us during a workout. Story continues Click here to download the new MyTeams App by NBC Sports! Receive comprehensive coverage of your teams and stream the Celtics easily on your device. | https://sports.yahoo.com/martellus-bennett-eyeing-patriots-comeback-191028012.html?src=rss |
Will these be the worst new rabbit hutch flats in Britain? | Twenty-six studio flats measuring as little as 18 sq metres thats just under 14ft by 14ft for residents entire living, washing and eating space are set to be crammed into a scruffy two-storey commercial building on an industrial estate. A typical Premier Inn hotel room, by comparison, is 21.3 sq metres. Some of the flats would apparently be windowless, with the only natural light seemingly coming from a roof light or skylight so they would offer no view out. A leading architect says the plan to convert an office in affluent Balham, south London, into tiny flats is the latest shocking example of the controversial phenomenon known as office-to-residential conversion. Across the country, commercial buildings are being converted into often minuscule flats using new laws that enable developers to bypass the traditional planning permission system and national space standards. There would be no private or communal garden space at the Balham development. And because you would be living on a busy industrial estate, its claimed that just a short distance from your front door you will have heavy lorries coming and going, cutting equipment being used, forklift trucks moving items around, and businesses that start work as early as 4am and dont shut up shop until 11pm. So you might want to think twice about letting the children play outside. Julia Park, who is head of housing research at architects Levitt Bernstein and one of the London mayors design advocates, claims that if the conversion is allowed to go ahead, the risk to the wellbeing mental health in particular of any occupants would be considerable. And, with the plans indicating that four of the proposed flats have no vertical windows at all, she adds: Our prisons do better than that. During the past few years there has been a frenzy of office-to-residential conversions in some areas a boom that is largely down to the fact that in 2013 the government relaxed the rules relating to office buildings being turned into housing. Many of these new flats fall far short of national space standards, which say the minimum floor area for a new one-bedroom one-person home (including conversions) is 37 sq metres, and for a one-bed two-person home is 50 sq metres. While these minimum sizes are not compulsory, they do apply in London but only to schemes that go through the planning system. Thats the other thing that is so controversial: under so-called permitted development rights (PDR), office-to-residential conversions dont require planning permission the developer simply has to notify the local authority of its intentions and gain what is called prior approval. This effectively means planning approval has already been granted by the secretary of state but without seeing any of the actual proposals. Plans were originally put forward for three office units at Grange Mills industrial estate to be converted into 13 flats, and these were accepted by Lambeth council last November. But in December, Caridon Developments, based in Croydon, south London, applied for permission to squeeze 26 self-contained studio flats into the same building. The office units are currently occupied by a holiday company. They were built before 1945, and have a corrugated steel sheet roof. Lambeth council has received several objections to the plans from local people and businesses, one of whom said that in traffic terms, this area is an accident waiting to happen. Another pointed out that some of the firms on the estate operate long or antisocial hours. Two of the planned flats are 45 sq metres, but more than half are between 18 and 20 sq metres. The floor plans arguably leave a lot to be desired in terms of detail, but Park says they seem to indicate that with four of the ground floor flats, the only windows look into shared lightwells, while on the first floor, four studios appear to have no vertical window at all three rely on a long skylight which stretches across five dwellings, [while] the fourth has a single roof light. She says: Building regulations have never required a living space to have a window, not because it doesnt matter, but because no one imagined that anyone would offer a home without one. Now we know that has become a reality, we need to legislate to prevent it. Lambeth council told Guardian Money the application would be decided by council officers under delegated powers, and that approval is subject to a section 106 legal agreement. However, the council clearly isnt a fan of the PDR policy, which it says results in developments which do not offer any affordable housing, do not provide contributions to fund infrastructure, and often result in poor-quality housing. Park goes further, saying PDR for office-to-residential conversions has created some of the worst new housing seen in Britain for decades and needs to be ditched by the government. In an article last August, Money highlighted the example of a former office block next to the A12 in Ilford, east London, which has been converted into 60 rental flats that were being used by Redbridge council for temporary accommodation. In a report published in May 2018, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors said its research into office-to-residential conversions had uncovered some examples of very poor housing. Caridon Developments was contacted by Money but declined to comment. On its website, Caridon says of its developments arm: We identify projects, take them through the planning process and build quality accommodation which delivers impressive return on investment. | https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/mar/02/will-these-be-the-worst-new-rabbit-hutch-flats-in-britain |
Is co-living the new Airbnb for millennial nomads? | My housemates dont hang around for long in the seven-bedroom loft Im sharing in Brooklyn, New York. Matthew MacIntosh, a 44-year-old digital copywriter from San Francisco, leaves three days after I arrive on a miserable wet Saturday afternoon in November. Two twentysomething Americans who work in marketing and social media respectively wheel out their suitcases just 48 hours later. Theres no mouse problem, or squalid living conditions and, on this occasion at least, it has nothing to do with my washing-up skills. Instead, this revolving door of housemates is the norm at Outsite, a co-living company aimed at remote workers, freelancers and entrepreneurs or to use the more frequently used but slightly nauseating term digital nomads those who arent restricted to a physical location and can stay just for two nights or for as long as three months. With more people working remotely in roles varying from software developer to photographer, co-living is on a rise, with this kind of fluid house share cropping up in all corners of the world, whether Miami, Dublin, Bali or Berlin, and catering to those who want to mix up their backdrop while they work and, lets face it, play as well. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Outsite has homes internationally, including this one in Bali. Photograph: Nic Morley/Outsite So after staying with friends in Brooklyn, I lug my suitcases over to Outsites Williamsburg outpost, a one-floor white minimalistic loft with seven bedrooms, three bathrooms, and an open-plan living space with everything your modern millennial may desire: a coffee machine, blender, rooftop, silent washing machine and dryer, and of course, fast wifi. My room Boerum Hill (all rooms are named after Brooklyn neighbourhoods) is spacious, clean and screams Ikea, with a small white desk, chair, white rail and bedside table. Prices start at about $500 (357) a week. Sitting in the open living area, its not long before Im surrounded by folk from around the globe who, like myself, often take off for spells abroad, or move from one exotic location to the next. Theres Chris, a Canadian who runs a tequila brand and bases himself at Outsite when hes in New York; Kat, a 28-year-old software developer from Peru working on creating a platform for finding wellness classes; and Alison, in PR, from Washington. Apart from bumping into people while theyre sorting out their washing or cooking dinner, Outsite organises social activities to create a mini community even if people are there for only two days. During my stay theres a cheese and wine night and a friends-giving dinner. The upshot is that if youre in a city where you dont know anyone, co-living gives you a gang to hang out with (well, thats if you like them, of course). Another benefit is the skill sharing, which kind of just happens naturally. One evening when I mention an issue with my website, Andres Cajiao, a Columbian who works in marketing, jumps on my laptop and within minutes is fixing the problem. I return the favour by pouring us large glasses of red wine. And Matthew, even after hes left, emails me some work advice and adds me to useful Facebook groups. This is the result envisaged by Belgian Emmanuel Guisset, 35, who set up Outsite, which now has 17 properties in cities such as Lisbon and Los Angeles. I was staying in Airbnbs but it wasnt great for consistency in terms of experience, or getting good wifi, he says. If I stayed in hotels, some were impersonal and expensive for extended stays and there was a feeling of loneliness. A lot of hostels were not my vibe. Then I discovered co-living in San Francisco, and it felt like a community. The Outsite spaces vary widely in size with 25 bedrooms available in its Lisbon property while New York offers the lowest with just seven. MacIntosh, who has become nomadic since March after living in California for 12 years, says he was inspired to stay at Outsite after meeting a digital nomad from Germany who raved about its Venice Beach outpost. I tried to go in without many expectations, but I was hoping to connect with interesting people doing fascinating things with their lives, he says. When I first moved in, there wasnt much social interaction people were mostly out and about but toward the end of my stay new people arrived who were more interested in connection. Ive been told that the Brooklyn location isnt as social as other Outsite locations because there are fewer rooms and a lot of people are in New York for meetings, but I think theres some randomness to it all. After all, the house is constantly in flux. Admittedly, some parts of the set-up dont work for me. As someone who lives on their own, sharing with seven people living and working from one loft can feel slightly claustrophobic at times. Some of my housemates like to have loud conference calls from the sofa or think nothing of having conversations on loudspeaker. For someone who requires some level of quietness when working, having just one communal table to work from which is both next to the kitchen and close to the TV makes it hard to concentrate. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Suzanne Bearne stayed at the Williamsburg Outsite in Brooklyn Photograph: Suzanne Bearne Sometimes I take my laptop into my room but its no quiet haven either. It is of course New York, the city that never sleeps, and I soon discover that I too do not sleep. Outsite is located on a very busy main road, and my room is next to a set of traffic lights, and at times theres unbearable honking traffic. The other downside is that we each have only a small section in the fridge, meaning I have to limit myself on groceries. As my shelf is only about 15cm high, when I spend the evening knocking up a butternut squash soup and leave it on a shelf it can fit on, the next day I discover that it has disappeared. By the time I check out, I have mixed feelings about leaving. Ive met and swapped details with a bunch of interesting people from around the world that I wouldnt have had the chance to engage with. Yes, but Id be tempted to stay in locations and spaces where the living and working space wasnt squeezed on to one floor and of course, ensure that this light sleeper doesnt have a room next to a busy road. Suzanne Bearne was a guest of Outsite | https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/mar/02/is-co-living-the-new-airbnb-for-millennial-nomads |
What can we do with an unwanted swimming pool? | Were worried it will turn it into a money pit and wonder if theres something green we can do Every week a Guardian Money reader submits a question, and its up to you to help him or her out a selection of the best answers will appear in next Saturdays paper. We have fallen in love with a house that is perfect for us in every respect bar one it has a swimming pool. We have never wanted one, and fear it will turn into a money pit. Email your suggestions to [email protected] or write to us at Money, the Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU | https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/mar/02/what-can-we-do-with-an-unwanted-swimming-pool |
What Makes An App, An 'Enterprise' Application? | By now, in 2019, everyone knows what an app is. Thanks in no small part to the arrival of sophisticated smartphones and tablets over the last decade, even your grandparents probably know which apps they like most and which ones they find troublesome to use. But, functionality notwithstanding, pretty much everyone knows what an app is. No Angry Birds Firstly lets deal with the obvious, that is - an enterprise application is clearly an app that you might use at work, in an enterprise, obviously. Its not Angry Birds, Candy Crush Saga or Pokmon Go. Second, lets appreciate the fact that there are non-enterprise applications that have graduated and progressed into some form of enterprise usage (such as Twitter or Facebook), where a commercial use case of the applications core function has evolved. Third, lets also remember that many casual users will use enterprise applications (such as Microsoft Word, Excel and perhaps Skype or various Adobe tools) for personal use. Were not talking about any of those core formats, iterations or instances of software use; were talking about hardcore enterprise applications that are built for mission critical use cases with a different kind of precision engineering. They are, if you will, enterprise applications that are enterprise-grade. If we look at what kinds of core features, engineering and characteristics make an app enterprise-grade, then perhaps we can start to understand why the technology industry tries to justify charging more for certain types of software. A key pointer is open source. Many of the open source applications and data services you will read about are offered in a) a Community Edition and b) an Enterprise Edition. The community version will very often be free for non-commercial use and its core libraries, dependencies and code base will often be essentially dynamic and changeable. Any enterprise edition of the same software will offer code that is locked down (i.e. non-dynamic) and will cost money, with that charge covering maintenance, service and support. But the core rationale and justification for enterprise-grade software goes deeper than whether or not you get support and updates; there is a difference in internal engineering. Deeper differentiating factors An enterprise application may offer a far deeper level of architectural consideration between development and operationalization (a state called production in software developer language). In other words, it will be built for speed, built for scale and built for all the down and dirty data flows it will have to shoulder in its post-operationalized state. Further, an enterprise application may offer a far deeper and far more fine-grained level of auditing. This will ensure that the data we (the business) feed into it can be more accurately checked for business reports that may relate to profit and loss, or may also extend into compliance regulations and so on. Further still, an enterprise application will often offer deeper levels of reliability, more far-reaching end-to-end encryption and will probably have undergone rigorous quality assurance and testing for improved stability. It will also often be pre-configured to meet the requirements of secure production environments. "We're seeing that our enterprise customers have very different needs from the average community user," said Max Mether, VP of server product management, MariaDB Corporation. "These customers are working on a completely different scale with a strong focus on stability and security. In order to be able to cater to these requirements, it is clear that we need to focus on a different solution by creating another version of [our software] specifically focused on enterprise production workloads." CEO of Platform.sh Fred Plais agrees that enterprise software development must be predictable, reliable, auditable and repeatable. He also suggests that we might not think much about the occasional glitch in consumer software, but enterprise softwareespecially ecommerceneeds to work every time. His firm specializes in handling the testing and deployment of customers applications to a cloud infrastructure. Continuous, automatic insight into the development process at all levels of the software stack, from infrastructure to code, is critical. The North Star for enterprise development - deploying constantly and without human intervention (and potential human error) enables smaller increments and thus less risk. Increasingly, automation helps mitigate risk and still implement major changes with confidence -- even on a Friday night," said Plais. Largely in agreement with Plais is Wael Elrifai, VP for solution engineering at Hitachi Vantara. Elrifai says that what it means to be enterprise-grade has certainly changed over the past few years -- just think about source-code availability. "In the [absolute] earliest days of business computing, all software was effectively open source. Shortly thereafter there was a trend towards 100 percent proprietary... and we've seen the pendulum swing partially back with the GNU Manifesto of the 1980s and with Linus Torvalds work to create Linux in the early 1990s. Even today, companies like Hortonworks (now Cloudera) would class enterprise-grade as a matter of follow-the-sun support and open source components amenable to complete customization. Id also expect enterprise-grade software to have robust system documentation as well as a regularly updated roadmap or vision, said Elrifai. Chief marketing officer at infrastructure, integration and analytics software company Tibco is Thomas Been. Arguing that enterprise apps need to not only deliver on their mission statement, Been reminds us that they also need to exhibit the robustness, scalability and agility that businesses require. "What really makes an enterprise application [and gives it enterprise status] is when a piece of software provides enough confidence for companies to run the most critical parts of their business with it. While this definition could have been provided 20 years ago as is, digital transformation is now taking the meaning of these words into uncharted territories. The most critical parts of a business spans across customer experience, operations and digital services. Robustness requires addressing a much broader audience in an instant way, while scalability requires addressing all relevant internal user personas with the right capabilities, such as relevant analytics," said Tibco's Been. Been also reminds that the agility is key for an enterprise app; he explains that enterprise software should be able to connect easily to the rest of the business, its customers and ecosystems. Architectural responsibilities So yes, you can use enterprise software at home and yes, you can even safely use consumer-grade software at work (in approved circumstances), but to build mission-critical software that is enterprise-grade, there are a number of architectural responsibilities that need to be met before we can run with them. Nobody appears to have yet found a business application use case for Angry Birds, Candy Crush Saga or Pokmon Go, so thus far no enterprise edition of either is needed and please, dont necessarily try and find one. | https://www.forbes.com/sites/adrianbridgwater/2019/03/02/what-makes-an-app-an-enterprise-application/ |
What exactly is a 'smart' device anyway? | (Photo: Getty Images) Not too long ago, maybe you remember, most at-home tasks were done by hand. From vacuuming the carpet and cooking dinner to turning on the lights and adjusting the temperature in the room, all the day-to-day domestic drudgery required some degree of manual labor. Those days are fleeting as the rapidly evolving tech industry continues to unveil new convenience contraptions that are triggered by sensors, computers, timers and the sound of our voices. "Smart" this and "connected" that. It's easy to use the terms smart and connected interchangeably, but the truth is they're not exactly the same thing. Here are the differences between these similar technology terms: Connected vs. Smart Stay informed: How a smart home works for you all day In November 2014, Michael E. Porter, professor of business administration at Harvard, and James E. Heppelmann, CEO of computer software company PTC Inc., broke down the differences between connected and smart technologies in the Harvard Business Review. CLOSE Some of the worlds biggest car makers debuted future technology at the annual Las Vegas show. Marc Saltzman for USA TODAY Connected devices, as described by the duo, have ports, antennae and protocols that facilitate communication between a product and its operating environment. Simply put, "a connected device can share data directly with other devices or over a network," said Rick Kowalski, senior manager of Industry and Business Intelligence at the Consumer Technology Association. "The data transmission can be one way or two way." A simple door or window sensor that tracks the state of your home's entryways is an example of a connected device, Kowalski said. These devices solely let you know if a window or door is ajar. Smart tech, on the other hand, is often more complex. These gadgets contain sensors, microprocessors, data storage, controls, software, and, typically, an embedded operating system. "Smart devices enable more than just connectivity," said Kowalski. "A smart device typically has an operating system that will let you connect with other information services, entertainment services or apps." Take a smartphone, for example. Not only does the device allow you to browse the internet and make calls, but it also lets you connect to apps that unlock endless possibilities. New rules: 'Don't call me before you text' and other rules of the digital era Some wireless home speakers are solely connected, allowing you to play music from your smartphone via Bluetooth connection, while others that can be controlled by, say, Amazon's cloud-based voice assistant (Alexa) are considered smart. "Speakers didnt become smart until they added digital assistants that gave us answers to our questions, access to our music services, and the ability to control our smart home devices," Kowalski said. CLOSE USA TODAY Tech contributor Jennifer Jolly gave us a tour of a prototype of the smart homes of the future, called KB Home ProjeKt, which features moving walls, 400-plus smart appliances and much more. USA TODAY Smart home vs connected home Crossing wires: A smart home sounds like a great idea. The terms smart home and connected home have evolved to be used interchangeably, Kowalski, a consumer tech expert, said. A truly smart home is equipped with lighting, heating, or electronic devices that can be controlled remotely as in when you're away from your home by a computer, tablet or smartphone. Using the technology within the home, you can control and see what is going on in your house, even when youre not there by using websites or apps on a smartphone, tablet or computer. For instance, if you're expecting a delivery while you're away, you can install a home camera that allows you to check in on your front porch. That way you can see when your package arrives or interact with people who come to your door even when you're away. Smart thermostats are intelligent because they can make calculated decisions based on other system components, such as the owner's previous room temperature adjustments, built-in algorithms, and sensors. A breeze: Staying cool with my new learning thermostat Smart TV vs Regular TV Smart TV tracking features: How to turn them off if you want some privacy There are two major differences between smart and non-smart televisions. Smart televisions can access the internet and they can be boosted with appsjust like a smartphone or tablet. "Dumb" or regular TVs aren't manufactured with those capabilities. Similar to regular TVs, however, smart ones come in many shapes and sizes and you can get an LCD or Plasma. Connected TV's are seeing rapid adoption. (Photo: Getty Images) You used to have to connect a computer or laptop to a conventional TV if you wanted to access Internet-based content. Nowadays, thanks to third-party hardware devices like Google Chromecast, Apple TV and Roku, regular TVs can become smart-er. Still, truly smart TVs have access to streaming services like Netflix and YouTube built in. Internet of Things Also known as IoT, it's the umbrella term that refers to the connection of devices to the internet. These devices broadly encompass connected appliances, connected cars, wearable tech, smart health and fitness, security cameras, smart TVs, smart clothing, smart homes, smart cities and all of the services that are layered on top of those. As the Internet of Things grows over the coming years, more devices will join that list. Follow Dalvin Brown on Twitter: @Dalvin_Brown CLOSE Out of the 4,400 exhibitors in Las Vegas for the massive consumer tech show, here are the best ones we found. Marc Saltzman, For USA TODAY Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/03/02/smart-home-vs-connected-home-there-difference/2538115002/ | https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/03/02/smart-home-vs-connected-home-there-difference/2538115002/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=usatoday-techtopstories |
Who From Trump World Do House Democrats Want To Talk To Next? | Enlarge this image toggle caption Alex Wong/Getty Images Alex Wong/Getty Images Michael Cohen was just the beginning. President Trump's former personal lawyer named names when he testified before the House oversight committee on Wednesday. He told the panel about Trump Organization personnel with knowledge of what Cohen alleged are criminal or questionable actions within the business. Cohen's knowledge about the inner workings of the Trump Organization is expansive. The former lawyer, now disbarred in the state of New York, once maintained an office close to Trump's in New York City's Trump Tower. Now congressional Democrats are turning their attention to other figures in the Trump Organization. Here are the names you need to know. Felix Sater Enlarge this image toggle caption Will Ragozzino/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images Will Ragozzino/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images Sater is a real estate developer and longtime Trump business associate who was involved in the Trump Organization's efforts to build a Trump Tower project in Moscow. He is scheduled to testify in an open hearing before the House intelligence committee on March 14. Sater is notable for his previous connections to organized crime and the work he also has reportedly done on behalf of the U.S. government as an undercover informer. It was Sater who suggested to Cohen and Trump that one way to clear the way for Trump Tower in Moscow might be to offer Russian President Vladimir Putin a free penthouse, according to Cohen. Republicans battered Cohen over his credibility and they are likely to do the same with Sater, a man from whom Trump has tried in the past to distance himself. Allen Weisselberg Enlarge this image toggle caption Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images The chief financial officer of the Trump Organization has been a key player in all of Trump's business and other dealings. Weisselberg and Donald Trump Jr., for example, signed one of the checks repaying Cohen for the money Cohen paid adult film actress Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet ahead of Election Day in 2016. Weisselberg is so important to the investigations of Trump that prosecutors in Manhattan have reportedly offered him immunity in order to get his cooperation with their efforts. So it may be some time before the Justice Department could authorize him to talk to Congress but that isn't stopping lawmakers from asking for him. Politics Rep. Eric Swalwell: 'There Is At Least One Indictment Waiting For President Trump' Rep. Eric Swalwell: 'There Is At Least One Indictment Waiting For President Trump' Listen 4:16 4:16 "Mr. Weisselberg is a relevant witness for many committees he knows where the money in the Trump Organization went to, and, you know, money that came in," Rep. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat on the House intelligence committee, told NPR. "We have a Trump Organization that, for a very long time, has wanted to do business in Russia and has also had Russians invest in Trump Tower in the United States. ... So it's to really find out if this president is financially compromised by the Russians." David Pecker, Barry Levine and Dylan Howard toggle caption Marion Curtis/AP Trump enlisted a number of people to help with his alleged dirty work, including those who didn't directly work for him, Cohen said. Trump's friend David Pecker, for example, CEO of American Media, Inc. (AMI) which publishes the National Enquirer, would have AMI "catch and kill" stories that might be embarrassing for Trump by paying people involved for the exclusive rights to them then never publish them. Sometimes Trump reimbursed AMI but sometimes he didn't, Cohen said which made Pecker angry. That's what happened with former Playboy model Karen McDougal before Election Day in 2016, when Trump's camp feared she might talk publicly about the alleged sexual relationship she'd had with Trump. (Trump has denied ever having any such relationship with McDougal or with Daniels.) AMI bought McDougal's "life rights." AMI later entered into an agreement with prosecutors in New York in which it escaped charges in exchange for cooperating with the investigation. But there was evidently a great deal more to the relationship between Trump and Pecker/AMI than the McDougal case, Cohen said. Pecker's company worked many times to buy embarrassing stories about Trump, even ones that weren't true, which enabled AMI to compile a "treasure trove" of potentially damaging material. Cohen was so interested in what AMI had accumulated that when Pecker was negotiating to potentially take another important publishing job, Cohen wanted to buy the Trump archive on behalf of his client to ensure it was kept safe. Former National Enquirer editor Barry Levine would, he said, as well as a vice president of AMI, Dylan Howard, Cohen responded. Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. Enlarge this image toggle caption Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images The president's three oldest children are among his top advisers and have been a part of all the family's major business dealings, Cohen told lawmakers. That includes the potential Trump Tower Moscow real estate project. Ivanka Trump and her brother, Donald Trump Jr., both were briefed about it repeatedly, Cohen said. The chairman of the House oversight committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said that Americans following these investigations should follow the names Cohen gave, and also that his panel would be interested in interviewing them. It isn't clear whether Cummings actually has requested to hear from Ivanka or Donald Trump Jr., but the oversight committee chairman did complain on Friday that other requests for interviews and documents from the White House have received only silence. Ron Lieberman and Matthew Calamari toggle caption Drew Angerer/Getty Images Lieberman is an executive vice president in Trump's company who's responsible for managing many of its subsidiary enterprises, according to his Bloomberg bio. That includes modeling agencies, real estate and golf courses, and it was in discussing these operations that his name came up in Cohen's testimony, along with that that of chief operating officer Calamari. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., asked Cohen about practices he'd described involved with inflating the value of assets held by Trump or his companies. Sometimes Trump overstated the value of his properties to make them appear more valuable and himself seem more wealthy, Cohen said. Sometimes, Cohen said, Trump submitted information to authorities that made his properties seem much less valuable than they actually were, reducing the amount in taxes he'd have to pay. Yes, Cohen said. When asked who could give the committee more information, he recommended Weisselberg, Lieberman and Calamari. If Cummings' comments were any indication, they may all soon have their time under the spotlight. | https://www.npr.org/2019/03/02/699309857/who-from-trump-world-do-house-democrats-likely-want-to-talk-to-next?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=news |
Can Lady Gaga Score The No. 1 Song And Album After Her Oscar Win? | At the moment, Ariana Grande currently controls both the Billboard 200 and the Hot 100 charts with her record Thank U, Next and her single 7 Rings, respectively. Shes been in charge of the two tallies for a few weeks now, and at the beginning of this tracking frame, it looked like she was headed for another spin at No. 1 on both listings...but a lot can change in just a few days in the music industry, and she may now be forced to cede her lead to another superstar. It looks like pop singer and actress Lady Gaga is headed to the top of both the albums and the songs rankings, giving her the highly-coveted (and still somewhat rare) chart double. But, she doesnt have anything new out...so why does it appear shell be at No. Hot 100 Billboard has already suggested that Gagas single Shallow from A Star Is Born could rocket up the ranking and finally claim the No. 1 position on the Hot 100 singles chart months after it was first released. The singer performed the track at the Oscars with Bradley Cooper (who is also credited on the recording) in one of the most talked-about moments of the evening, and then she went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song a short time later. All the attention that a high-profile performance and an emotional speech brings to a tune has driven sales and streams of the track, both on proper audio streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, as well as YouTube, where the duet is available to watch in full. All those clicks and purchases might just be enough to topple Grandes 7 Rings, which has now been in charge for a while. Billboard 200 Just as winning an Oscar and delivering a truly show-stopping rendition of a ballad will help Shallow rise once again, the album it is featured on will also benefit. All the streams the song receives will help the A Star Is Born soundtrack lift, but Gaga and company arent taking any chances. The album has been discounted at almost all digital retailers, and the singer herself even tweeted that it could now be purchased for just a few dollars, which should convince a sizable group of Oscar watchers to pick up a copy. While Shallow is sitting just below the top 20 on the Hot 100, A Star Is Born doesnt have quite as far to go to rule, as its currently sitting at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and is not facing stiff competition from any new entrants. The results should be revealed tomorrow and Monday, when Billboard shares which albums and songs made it into the top 10 this coming frame. | https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2019/03/02/can-lady-gaga-score-the-no-1-song-and-album-after-her-oscar-triumph/ |
What Are These Ice Tsunamis In Recent Viral Videos? | The winter of 2019 in the United States has lived up to its name. There have been record cold temperatures, Polar Vortex intrusions, strange rotating ice discs, and the requisite snowstorms. This week I noticed viral videos getting around of massive chunks of ice invading the shores of the Great Lakes region. My colleague Professor Joann Mossa at the University of Florida suggested that I write about this process. I agreed. The videos show something called "ice shoves." The more "click bait" or media friendly term is "ice tsunami." They have also been called "ice pushes," "ice heaves," or "ice surges." I am going to refer to them as ice shoves herein. As I casually browsed my social media feed this week, I saw a video by Anthony Lamonte in Buffalo. You can watch his video by clicking on this link. I should caution you that there is some unsavory language. According to an article on buffalonews.com, LaMonte, 59, had a gut feeling that a thick layer of Lake Erie ice would be powerful enough to overwhelm the ice boom, then to move along the Niagara River and hit the banks with such force that blocks of ice that sometimes seemed as big as grand pianos would flip into the air, landing on shore with an impact like the footfall of a giant. He acted on his instincts and set out to film it. The definition of an ice shove in the NOAA National Weather Service glossary is rather simple: "In hydrologic terms, on-shore ice push caused by wind, and currents, changes in temperature, etc." In order to understand ice shoves, I have to explain some basic concepts of physics. If you think back to high school physics, you probably learned about momentum. Momentum is a vector quantity that has magnitude and direction. Scientists like me calculate momentum of an object by multiplying its mass and velocity. If an elephant and a person are running toward you at the same speed, the elephant has more momentum. The other concept is friction. Friction is simply resistance that an object or surface experiences when moving over a different surface or object. If you rub your hands together to warm them, you are relying on friction. A ball rolling on a carpet is eventually slowed or stopped because of friction. In an ice shove, winds are relatively strong and sustained. The constant "shove" of the winds allows chunks of ice to overcome the friction of the land. Since some of the chunks of ice are relatively large, they carry quite a bit of momentum. In some cases, the momentum is enough to cause damage. In most causes, it is just one of those "oh wow get the camera moments." The conditions required for an ice shove include strong winds, partial thaw of the water body (which is why early spring is a good time to observe one), and a gentle slope of the beach. This is the time of year in which ice growth is quite active in the Great Lakes region, but it is also in a transition phase as spring approaches. The Great Lakes Outlook issued by the National Weather Service-Cleveland on March 1st reads, Ice formation will be aided on the northern lakes tonight and Saturday by light flow with winds generally under 15 knots although tracks in fast ice should hold. Ice growth will become moderate to rapid across the northern lakes Sunday through Wednesday as Arctic air sweeps across the lakes from the northwest. Expect moderate ice growth across the southern lakes. Flow should remain below 20 knots Saturday night through through Sunday night, again aiding in ice formation but preserving tracks in fast ice. As of March 1st, the Great Lakes Environmental Surface Analysis shows that total ice cover for the lakes is 74.2% (graphic above). The current wind speeds and directions on the Great Lakes (graphic below) suggest that a few more viral ice shove videos are likely possible in the coming days | https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2019/03/02/what-are-these-ice-tsunamis-in-recent-viral-videos/ |
Should we get rid of the college Greek system? | By Jessie Blaeser Greek life on college campuses has existed for nearly as long as the United States have been a country. Many fraternity and sorority members argue this long-standing tradition is part of the traditional American college experience and membership offers a number of benefits, including camaraderie. Others cite tragic incidents in which Greek life has resulted in the death of members as one of many reasons why the collegiate Greek system should be abolished. According to TIME's Lisa Wade, concern about fraternities is nothing new. In 1863, a group of college presidents "described fraternities as a 'plague' and 'un-American.'" Wade expands: Young rich men invented social fraternities to isolate themselves from their middle-class peers, thumb their nose at the religious values of their professors and wrest control away from the administrators who set their schedules, curricula and objectives. As would be expected, the result of this invention has been poisonous. Not only does the Greek life further an elitist system on college campuses, but so-called traditions have become so extreme, that some students have lost their lives as a direct result of yielding to pressure to follow such customs. Wade describes the death of 19-year-old Timothy Piazza during a fraternity party put on by Penn States Beta Theta Pi chapter. Piazza fell twice down the stairs after being instructed to drink what a forensic pathologist called a life-threatening amount of alcohol. She writes: In the aftermath of Piazzas death, Penn States president wrote a heart-wrenching open letter. He detailed the facts about Greek life: excessive drinking, high rates of sexual assault, hazardous initiation rites and fatal accidents. He also listed the well-intended and genuine efforts by Penn State to change Greek culture efforts that dont seem to be working and wondered if the right answer is abolition. To Wade there is only one solution to ending this kind of tragedy: Abolish Greek life on college campuses. Despite these tragedies, some claim the good fraternities and sororities do not get nearly enough media attention as the bad. Nevertheless, the good exists. According to CNN's Alexandra Robbins, fraternities, in particular, maintain the "goal of making their brothers 'better men' as helping them to become better people." Surely, the goal of making each other better through brother or sisterhood is one to be commended. Robbins reports on her experience speaking with fraternity brothers: They believed it was their responsibility to hold brothers to high standards of tolerance and cooperation. They were able to create a subculture in which members were rewarded for being good guys...They encouraged members to open up to each other and to give unconditional support. Some students told me that their fraternity friendships and accountability saved their lives. Centuries of corruption hide behind the veil of Greek life on college campuses. Not only has the system influenced the spread of power in business and politics in the real world, but it has also resulted in the unacceptable abuse of college students. As The Atlantic's Caitlin Flanagan bluntly puts it: Lawsuits against fraternities are becoming a growing matter of public interest, in part because they record such lurid events, some of them ludicrous, many more of them horrendous. For every butt bomb, theres a complaint of manslaughter, rape, sexual torture, psychological trauma. Flanagan refers to Bloomberg Newss David Glovin and John Hechingers reporting, saying that since 2005, more than 60 people the majority of them students have died in incidents linked to fraternities. She expands: ...a sobering number in itself, but one that is dwarfed by the numbers of serious injuries, assaults, and sexual crimes that regularly take place in these houses. After a yearlong investigation, Flanagan concludes that fraternities are mightier than universities themselves a dangerous truth that the country must face. Penn State pledges at least $2 million for research center to reform Greek life after student died The university promised to match an additional $3 million to launch the center, which will be named after Timothy J. Piazza, who died nearly two years ago. But if you ask many of the current members of fraternities and sororities, they will likely tell you that the friendships theyve found in Greek life are unique, and therefore something to be protected. Mics Teddy Bommarito explains four key benefits of the Greek system, including camaraderie and academics. Bommarito writes: Although the word camaraderie is a clich defense of fraternities and sororities, the bond that is created between members as a result is certainly visible, durable and genuine; the relationships between brothers and sisters are bonds that last a lifetime. Furthermore, the Greek system includes organizations beyond the traditional fraternities and sororities you might be thinking of from TV or movies. Multicultural Greek organizations prioritize diversity and understanding through the mission of promoting justice. The National Pan-Hellenic Council, formed at Howard University in 1930, contains nine historically African American, international Greek fraternities and sororities and promote unity, educational progress and cultural uplift. There are also service-oriented Greek organizations, whose express mission is to perform community service. Theres no question that the Greek system is in grave need of reform, but it would be a shame to ignore the great unity that has come to fruition as a result of the system itself. The Tylt is focused on debates and conversations around news, current events and pop culture. We provide our community with the opportunity to share their opinions and vote on topics that matter most to them. We actively engage the community and present meaningful data on the debates and conversations as they progress. The Tylt is a place where your opinion counts, literally. The Tylt is an Advance Local Media, LLC property. Join us on Twitter @TheTylt, on Instagram @TheTylt or on Facebook, wed love to hear what you have to say. | https://www.oregonlive.com/tylt/2019/03/should-we-get-rid-of-the-college-greek-system.html |
Can airplane seat cameras spy on passengers? | (CNN) An airplane cabin's not a great place for indulging in "me-time" -- after all, you're crammed into a small space with a lot of strangers -- but you hope you can eat, sleep and relax en route to your destination without fear of being watched. We're not talking about voyeuristic fellow passengers, but an even creepier thought: being scrutinized via cameras installed in your inflight entertainment system (IFE). In February, Vitaly Kamluk -- a Twitter user who works in malware research -- was on board a Singapore Airlines flight when his wife noticed an "interesting sensor" below the inflight entertainment screen and pointed it out to him. "She felt general discomfort of a digital eye looking at her. I believe that's a common reaction of general passengers." Kamluk tells CNN Travel Kamluk suspected it was a camera and Tweeted images of the discovery, tagging Singapore Airlines in the hope of getting an answer. "I was quite surprised to actually see something like a camera and as a security expert I could imagine many scenarios of misuse of such sensors which is why I decided to ring the bell," he says. Kamluk's post quickly gained traction on social media and Singapore Airlines responded , explaining that its newer inflight entertainment systems include an embedded camera, although emphasizing that these cameras are deactivated. Courtesy Pexels The fact that some aircraft seats have built-in cameras is not new knowledge. Singapore Airlines' inflight entertainment system is manufactured by Panasonic Avionics, a US-based company that supplies IFE for many of the major airlines and French company Thales. Panasonic announced a while back that it's added cameras onto seat backs. And in 2017, Panasonic Avionics announced a partnership with Tascent -- a biometrics and identity innovation company. "The companies will combine Tascent's biometric identity devices, software and services with Panasonic Avionic Corporation's in-flight entertainment and communications systems to provide streamlined, easy-to-use identity recognition before departure, during flight and upon arrival," read the corresponding press release. The idea was seat-back cameras could facilitate onboard immigration, skipping lines when you land. It was also suggested that a seat-back camera could aid payment processing for onboard shopping. At the 2017 Dubai Airshow, Panasonic Avionics announced the latest incarnation of Emirates' IFE in First Class and Economy -- specifying it featured a camera, plus a microphone and speaker. British Airways says it has infrared sensors on some seat backs, but no cameras. Courtesy CNN In the age of the smartphone, everyone holds a tiny cinema in their hand, so there's certainly an expectation that airlines will have exciting entertainment options -- a screen simply showing movies won't cut it anymore. "Some of our 777 aircraft have cameras that came pre-installed with the inflight entertainment hardware that we had purchased from the manufacturer (Panasonic)," a spokeperson for the Dubai-based airline told CNN Travel. "It was originally meant for seat-to-seat video calls, however Emirates has never activated it." Singapore Airlines These cameras are permanently disabled on our aircraft and cannot be activated on board. This echoes Singapore Airlines' comment on the issue. "These cameras have been intended by the manufacturers for future developments," the airline says. "These cameras are permanently disabled on our aircraft and cannot be activated on board. We have no plans to enable or develop any features using the cameras." Meanwhile, American Airlines told CNN Travel that cameras are "a standard feature," but are not activated and the carrier has no plans to use them. A spokesperson for Aussie carrier Qantas also told CNN Travel that IFE manufacturers include inbuilt cameras as standard -- and said the airline couldn't activate the cameras, even if they wanted to. "The feature would require software in order to be activated, which Qantas doesn't have and doesn't plan to install." Air New Zealand and British Airways told CNN Travel there were no cameras on board any of their aircraft. Two images obtained by CNN Travel of an IFE system on a British Airways airplane depict what looks like a lens of some kind. BA describes it as an infrared environmental sensor rather than a camera. Passengers worry that the cameras could be hacked. Some aviation experts think they could improve the onboard, inflight experience. Joe Leader, CEO of aviation trade body Airline Passenger Experience Association (APEX) think there's several handy usages for these cameras. As well as facilitating video chat between passengers, the cameras could look out for passengers becoming unwell or monitor cabins for suspicious behavior. The cameras could also be used to spot human trafficking or assault -- acting as an extension of the air steward's eyes. As for the privacy concern, APEX points out the ubiquity of cameras in 21st century society. "Today, airline passengers are typically tracked outside the aircraft dozens of times on a typical journey through stores, security, roadways, and airports by cameras without any permission," APEX says in a statement. "In contrast, airlines only want to use cameras in the future with permission when technology has advanced to offer personalized service improvements that passengers desire." Hacking fears, suggests APEX, are "misplaced." "The greatest risk to airline passenger privacy breaches come from their own smartphones, tablets, cameras, computers, and smart devices used in private settings, " says APEX. Hacking fears Several airlines -- including American Airlines, pictured -- say there are deactivated cameras on board their airplanes. Courtesy American Airlines The concern for some fliers is that even if the existence of these seat-back cameras aren't a secret -- and even if they could facilitate some cool features -- it feels disingenuous that their presence isn't advertised. When contacted by CNN Travel, Panasonic Avionics stressed that it was committed to the privacy of passengers. "Panasonic Avionics will never activate any feature or functionality within an IFE system without explicit direction from an airline customer," the company said in a statement to CNN. "Prior to the use of any camera on a Panasonic Avionics' system that would affect passenger privacy, Panasonic Avionics would work closely with its airline customer to educate passengers about how the system works and to certify compliance with all appropriate privacy laws and regulations, such as [The EU's data privacy regulation] GDPR." But although Panasonic Avionics and the airlines say the cameras are currently deactivated -- they're not physically covered up and passengers remain worried about hacking. Kamluk, an expert in cyber-security, says that's a key issue. "Passengers should understand that this is not about government or airline conspiracy against them," he tells CNN Travel. "I am sure that it's not in the interest of the airlines to spy on their passengers. "The true risk comes from potential unauthorized access to these devices from a powerful malicious attackers. As far as IFE is connected to the Internet, there is a possibility of remote hack and espionage if such devices can be activated in software." Passengers also worry their data might be stolen or compromised. "These may potentially result in VIP passengers' communications being eavesdropped, passport data being photographed while filling customs declarations, entering of secret PIN code or password to unlock user's devices may be recorded on video," says Kamluk. Vitaly Kamluk, malware expert As far as IFE is connected to the Internet, there is a possibility of remote hack and espionage if such devices can be activated in software. "You may say that regular CCTV poses similar risk, but when the camera with mic is very close and just in front of you, the quality of such shots, video and audio recording makes [a] big difference." Aviation consultant Peter Lemme told CNN Travel that such fears were not unfounded and airlines needed to listen. "The public response would suggest cameras facing passengers is a toxic undertaking," says Lemme. "Privacy seems to be the greatest concern, and that gets to spying and publication. "The upside of an IFE system that recognizes a passenger has fallen asleep, pauses the movie, darkens the screen and substitutes calming music is balanced against the concern that somehow the camera will take pictures of the person that will embarrass them or will be distributed improperly." "Trust is the variable between business and customer. It is hard to earn and easy to lose. Airlines depend on passengers trusting they will hold their traveling details private. There is no upside for an airline to endanger trust, but there is much downside." Many internet users tape stickers over their computer's camera as a means of ensuring privacy. Lemme thinks so. "There must be no chance of surveillance unless the passenger agrees to it. Does this mean a physical cover plate -- I think yes. I don't know any other way that would [be] compelling to everyone," he says. Kamluk agrees. | https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/airplane-seat-camera-intl/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fedition_travel+%28RSS%3A+CNNi+-+Travel%29 |
Is Dean Being Mean to Kerry? | And now the most interesting two minutes in television, the latest from the political grapevine: The Leading Facts Democratic frontrunner, John Kerry (search) has said that he, "led the fight" for deficit reduction in 1985. And more recently, "led the fight" against President Bush's Medicare prescription drug bill. But according to the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center, the measure to launch the balanced budget was drafted by two Republicans and Kerry was not the first to back it in 1985. And The Washington Post said three months ago that it was Sen. Ted Kennedy who, "led the fight" against President Bush's prescription drug bill. And speaking of Kerry, Howard Dean, as we noted earlier, is keeping those rumors that the senator has had Botox treatments alive and Websites continue to post pictures like these, claiming the one on the left is Kerry before Botox treatments. And the one on the right, taken last week on primary day in New Hampshire, supposedly after treatment. But here on the left is Kerry from "Fox News Sunday," two days before the New Hampshire primary. He arrived too late to get full makeup, and as you can see, he looks as wrinkle and tired as in any of those before pictures. Which would mean that if he had Botox surgery, he must have gotten it done in the midst of a frenzied scheduled in the last 48 hours of the New Hampshire campaign, so that he would suddenly look younger on primary night. You decide. The New Republic's Apology Based on quotes dug up from the Center for American Progress, which is largely financed by anti-Bush billionaire, George Soros, The New Republic accused White House spokesman Scott McClellan of being inconsistent on Iraq. Noting that McClellan says he never used the word "imminent" to describe the threat posed to the United States, even though one year ago McClellan said, "this was about an imminent threat." But one year ago, McClellan was talking about an imminent threat not to the United States but to Iran. The New Republic has since apologized to the White House. And Wesley Clark's campaign trying to finish fast in Oklahoma may have tried too hard. Clark was pulled over by police on an Oklahoma highway, Clark going 88 miles per hour in a 75-mile-per-hour zone. The driver, a Clark staffer was given a $150 speeding ticket and so were the drivers of two other cars traveling with Clark. Clark's driver insisted he had the cruise control set at 83. No word from Clark. FOX News' Michael Levine contributed to this report | https://www.foxnews.com/story/is-dean-being-mean-to-kerry |
Will her crush on her boss ever develop into something more? | He gave her a flicker of hope. She needs to let it go, says Carolyn Hax. Dear Carolyn Adapted from a recent online discussion. DEAR CAROLYN: My boss and I formed a very close friendship, which turned into me having feelings for him. I told him around the new year. He confessed that he questioned his feelings, but ultimately he is my boss. We act like business partners, though, with me supervising the staff. Some of our staff call us Mom and Dad. I put up some boundaries since he rejected me. We strictly work together and dont go out as friends. I desperately miss our friendship, and I would love to have that back. I almost talked to him about wanting to renew our friendship, but then I realized he is dating someone. And it hurt to hear that. Because truthfully, I am still holding on to hope. And I am incredibly angry at him for giving me hope. Had he simply rejected me and not held my hand while he told me that he has questioned his feelings for me, I probably would have moved on. But here I am. A 40-plus-year-old women with a crush on my boss. Ive looked for other jobs, but I love my work. Holding On DEAR HOLDING ON: You can never be his friend. Your feelings will not be returned. If you want a romantic partner in your life, then you will need to look for one in someone other than this man. A no with a flicker of maybe in it is just as much of a no as a simple rejection. I am sorry for all of this. It is obviously way more nuanced than these four statements say it is, certainly for you and maybe even for him, but nuance that brings you nothing is not worth exploring. The face of it is all you need to see: No you cant; no they wont; hes not the guy. And possibly most important: If your feelings were mutual, then you two probably would have found a way to be together. Keep loving your work, keep looking for work elsewhere, stomp on every ember of what if, and keep reminding yourself that the problem isnt that he is your boss, its that hes not the guy. Re: Holding On: If hes not the company owner, then he may have more exposure in terms of company-policy violation, sexual-harassment charges, etc. He may be mindful of all of this. If you want to test this theory, leave for another job. If he reaches out to you then, there may be some romantic future for you two. In any case, leaving may be what you need in order to move on emotionally. Anonymous Re: Holding On: Her phrasing shows she is putting the blame on him, and its true that he should have been more careful about getting so close to a subordinate, but she has a lot of stuff she needs to own. Maybe working to try to own it will help in processing the pain. Any relationship is a gamble, and much more so in the workplace. Own It | https://www.seattletimes.com/life/will-her-crush-on-her-boss-ever-develop-into-something-more/?utm_source=RSS&utm_medium=Referral&utm_campaign=RSS_all |
Can China recover from its disastrous one-child policy? | For Xu Meiru, 38, the thought of having a second child is exhausting. Her days typically begin at 5am, dont end until 11pm, and are filled with shuttling her nine-year-old son to school, helping him with his homework, preparing meals and running an online clothing business. Its hard to find time even to sleep for a few minutes in a chair, she says, sitting in a McDonalds while her son plays a game on a phone, the detritus of a Happy Meal in front of him. Most tiring is the constant worry over whether she is doing enough to help him get ahead. He goes to music lessons, taekwondo classes and extra English tutoring. She spends the first week of every summer and winter break helping him prepare for the next term. Sometimes her sons workload is so heavy that Xu does his assignments for him, using her left hand to make her writing more childlike. There are too many children and the competition is too high. If you dont do well in school you cant get into a good university, and then maybe you cant get a good job in the future, she says. She is visibly anxious when discussing the prospect of a second child, something that until three years ago would have been forbidden under Chinese law. If we were to have another child, Im afraid I wouldnt have the energy for them, Xu says. Faced with a population that is shrinking and ageing, Chinese policymakers are attempting to engineer a baby boom after more than three decades of a Malthusian family planning regime better-known as the one-child policy. Central policy planners have loosened restrictions on family sizes, and now all married couples can have two children. There is talk of the limits being dropped altogether, and amid aggressive propaganda drives, local officials are experimenting with subsidies and incentives for parents. But these efforts appear to be too little too late. Birthrates have fallen and are likely to continue to drop as parents like Xu decide against having more children. More young women are pushing back against state propaganda and family pressure, while improving education standards and income levels have delayed marriage and childbirth. Moreover, decades of the one-child policy have made single-child households the norm, experts say. China should have stopped the policy 28 years ago. Now its too late, says Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and a longtime critic of the family planning policies. Demographers warn that Chinas population will begin to shrink in the next decade, potentially derailing the worlds second-largest economy, with a far-reaching global impact. Chinas birthrate last year was at its lowest since the founding of the Peoples Republic in 1949, with 15.23 million births, dramatically lower than the 21-to-23 million officials had expected. By 2050 as much as a third of the countrys population will be made up of people over the age of 60, putting severe strain on state services and the children who bear the brunt of caring for elderly relatives. Nowhere is this trend more obvious than in Chinas rust belt, the north-eastern region better-known as Dongbei which as the lowest birthrates in the country, the result of strict enforcement of family planning limits and the regions early development. For residents in Shenyang, the largest city in Dongbei, in central Liaoning province, its obvious why few families are willing to have more children the economy. Rich in resources such as iron ore and coal, Dongbei was at the heart of the countrys heavy industry between the 1950s and 1970s. During the reform era, industries moved southward to the coastal regions, and the state-run companies that employed most Dongbei workers have struggled, causing a mass exodus to other parts of China. Shanghai, Guangzhou, all these cities are moving forward, but Shenyang has stayed in place. All the high-rises dont change anything, says Zhang Yang, 36, who works in purchasing for a local state-owned company. Few people are having babies because the economy is so bad. During Dongbeis heyday, Shenyang was the regions economic hub, with blocks of factories lining its main street. Now those buildings have been replaced by high-rise apartments, banks and hotels while the factories have been relocated to a suburb outside the city. The new economic zone, the new home for these factories, is quiet. Workers in grey jumpsuits walk along the road just before noon. A sign on a taxi calls on Shenyang residents to fight for the rejuvenation of their city. Neighbourhoods in the old industrial sector are being torn down to make way for new buildings. The birthrate here is especially low, at 8.79 per 1,000 women, compared with the national average of 12.43 in 2017. The city is ageing quickly a quarter of residents were above the age of 60 in 2017, and local population experts believe the city will soon overtake Shanghai to have Chinas oldest populace. Dongbeis struggling economy is the main reason Zhang and his wife have decided not to have another child. He has not had a wage increase in three years. When his son goes to kindergarten in a few years, he expects about half of his income will go toward his schooling and extra classes and activities. His hope is that his son will go to university in the south of China and pursue a career and life there. Its not that Im worried about Liaonings future. I have no hope for it at all, Zhang says. Birthrates in Dongbei, home to about 109 million people, have fallen steeply. The average number of children per woman was 0.9 in 2000 and 0.56 in 2015, according to Yi. That means the next generation will be a quarter of the size of the last one. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Xu Meiru with her son at McDonalds in Shenyang. Photograph: Lily Kuo/The Observer Last summer, Liaoning released a Population Development Plan, vowing to raise the provinces birthrate by working hard to create good public opinion about having two children. Officials promised to explore subsidies for families with two children, encourage employers to offer more services for families, and support women returning to work after giving birth. While parents in Shenyang say they have noticed an increase in nursing facilities at shopping centres and other public spaces, they have yet to see any substantial support from the government. For all these years, there havent been any policies to help. Government pledges like these are like thunder without raindrops. This is like lying to a little child, Zhang says. Dongbei offers an example of what is to come for the rest of the country. As an early industrial hub, the province urbanised quickly, with incomes and education levels several years ahead of the national average factors that act as natural constraints on the birthrate, according to experts. As other parts of the country go through similar stages of urbanisation and economic growth, they are going through comparable declines. This is not just Dongbei but the whole country. You know what they say in economics: development is the best birth control, says Song Limin of the Population Research Institute at Liaoning University. Researchers believe the national rate of births could fall further. Last years low rate surprised many. Liang Jianzhang, a professor of economics at Peking University, says he and his colleagues had expected births to peak in 2017 and begin falling after 2018. That peak apparently arrived in 2016, with births dropping ever since What we can expect now is that the number of newborns will continue to shrink rapidly in 2019 and beyond, he wrote in an editorial in January. It can be said with certainty that even though 2018 saw a low number of births, that number will not be surpassed for the next 100 years. China will never see more than 15 million newborns in the future, he predicted. Local governments across China are struggling to reverse the declines with subsidies, propaganda initiatives and new regulations on wokplace leave. In Xiantao, Hubei province, hospitals have offered to cover the costs of childbirth as well as give a 500 yuan (60) subsidy for the first child and another 700 for the second. In Changsha, in southern China, an advertising campaign last year listed 1,001 reasons to have a baby. Between 2016 and 2017, almost all provinces extended maternity leave. Facebook Twitter Pinterest A mother sleeps beside her newborn baby at a hospital in Shenyang. Photograph: Imagine China/Rex/Shutterstock Some worry that such measures will turn coercive, with the authorities deploying an extensive family planning apparatus to encourage births. Officials once restricted population size through heavy fines, forced abortions and sterilisations. There is a danger that the government sees that what it has tried so far has failed, and it has to become more coercive. Theres a long history in population planning of extreme coercion. There is no question that the government could adopt coercive measures, says Leta Hong Fincher, author of Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China. Critics say that less invasive but still punitive measures would probably emerge gradually at local level under the guise of other causes such as preventing sex-selective abortions. Several provinces have banned abortions after 14 weeks, and Jiangxi province in the south requires the signature of three medical professionals before the procedure can be performed. More provinces have put in place obstacles to getting divorces, including a test or mandated cooling-off period. Government language has alarmed people. Last year an article in the state-run Peoples Daily said: The birth of a baby is not only a matter of the family itself but also a state affair. In August, an economics professor from Nanjing University wrote an editorial proposing a birth fund that citizens contribute to, then cash in when they have children. Those who dont have children would get the money when they retire. One internet user wrote: When you dont want children, you force people to get sterilised. When you want more, you urge us to give birth. What do you think I am? For now efforts have focused on cajoling women into have more children for the good of the country. The All China Womens Federation, a government-affiliated organisation, has been running a beautiful families campaign, praising women who serve as primary caretakers of their parents and children. The party state sees the declining population as a real problem, and its womens duty to respond to that, says Jane Golley, an associate professor at Australian National University, who focuses on the Chinese economy and labour economics. Its a new era of control over womens reproductive choices. Yet more women are resisting government and societal pressure, and officials are waking up to their concerns. Chinas education and human resources ministries have ordered employers to stop asking female applicants about their marital status and plans for children, a common practice. Ye Liu, a sociologist and lecturer in international development at Kings College London, has been interviewing Chinese women in their late 30s. When the two-child policy was introduced in 2016, most of her respondents were in what should have been the second spring of their careers, with the raising of their first child already behind them, with seniority and more bargaining power at work. Many were devastated rather than overjoyed by the new policy. They are forever a liability for their employers because they might have a second child, Ye says. A third of her respondents said they did not want another child, preferring to focus on their career. They feel like they were experiments of the state. They were the experiments [under the one-child policy] and now they are another experiment. They feel like they are forever being used by the state laboratory, Ye says. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Children make zongzi, a dumpling made of glutinous rice wrapped in bamboo or reed leaves, at a kindergarten in Hunnan district of Shenyang. Photograph: Xinhua/Alamy Public resentment is one reason why policymakers did not stop the policy sooner. According to Yi Fuxian, the Wisconsin academic, China could have completely scrapped population controls in 1980 and growth would have moderated naturally. But family planners relied on overinflated school enrolment and overreported births by hospitals, individuals and local governments. The Chinese government doesnt want to admit its wrong. It says the policy was right but now is the time to change. If it just says the policy was wrong, the public will become angry, he says. Living in a city with some of the lowest birthrates, Shenyang residents appear surprisingly focused on children. Groups of parents and grandparents tote small children around shopping centres filled with playgrounds and stores advertising toys and educational games. Parents describe the range of activities they can choose from: sensory classes for babies, baby swimming classes, taekwondo, Chinese calligraphy, English tutoring or drawing. The Dunnan True Love Centre in central Shenyang offers high-end convalescence for mothers recuperating after childbirth, a Chinese tradition known as sitting the month.This is part of a focus on quality over quantity, where families invest all their resources into one child, says Wang Libo, an expert on population at Shenyang Normal University. Of the 500 clients the centre received last year, only three have had a second child, as far as they know. But they expect business to be brisk this year: the year of the pig in the Chinese calendar is associated with luck and wealth and thus an auspicious year to be born. For many families, the pressure to help their child compete is the main reason for having just the one. Xu sends her son to extra tutoring and lessons but worries that he is under too much pressure. She has read articles about children, pushed too hard by their parents, who have killed themselves or run away from home. She tries to find a place in his schedule for some free time, and buys him all the comics and books that he wants. Still, when he performs a little worse on a test or assignment, she grows anxious again. You cant help but wonder: what if I pushed him to study for just 10 more minutes? | https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/02/china-population-control-two-child-policy |
When do the clocks spring forward for 2019? | Daylight Saving Time 2019 begins at 2 a.m. local time on Sunday, March 10. At that time you should set your clocks and watches forward to 3 a.m., if they don't do it themselves. Daylight Saving Time 2019 will end on Sunday, Nov. 3, at 2 a.m. local time Daylight Saving Time is observed everywhere in the U.S. except Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Arizona, except the Navajo Indian Reservation, which does observe DST. Many credit the idea of Daylight Saving Time to Benjamin Franklin, but the idea really got going as an energy-saving measure during World War I. The U.S. began turning the clocks back in 1918. Daylight Saving Time is also a good reminder to check smoke detectors and replace batteries. Time zone commission says Massachusetts should spring forward... forever The report recommends moving to year-round daylight savings time - but only if a majority of other northeastern states do as well. In 2017, a Massachusetts commission considering changing the Bay States time zone recommended keeping Daylight Saving Time year-round, but only if a majority of Northeast states also wanted to. The Florida Legislature voted overwhelmingly last year to keep Daylight Saving Time year-round, and the bill was signed by Gov. Rick Scott. But Florida has to change to standard time with everyone else next weekend because only Congress can OK keeping Daylight Saving Time year-round, and that hasnt happened so far for Florida. Californians voted in November in favor of permanent Daylight Saving Time, a measure called Proposition 7. But to take effect, the California legislature and U.S. Congress would have to approve it. Lawmakers in Texas are also considering permanent Daylight Saving Time. More info: National Institute of Standards and Technology Daylight Saving Time rules U.S. Naval Observatory Daylight Time timeanddate.com sunrise and sunset calculator Daylight Saving Time worldwide Uniform Time Act of 1966 [pdf] | https://www.nola.com/news/2019/03/when-do-the-clocks-spring-forward-for-2019.html |
Is Dan Crenshaw the Future of the GOP? | John McCormack is a reporter in Washington. NATIONAL HARBOR, MarylandIts 4 p.m. on Wednesday, the first day of the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conferencenot exactly a prime speaking slotbut a standing room-only crowd has gathered to hear from freshman Congressman Dan Crenshaw. While we wait for the 34-year-old Texan, who is running late due to a vote in the House, the first person I talk to at the back of the Eastern Shore meeting room is Jacob Foster, an 18-year-old high-school student at Gann Academy outside Boston, who is attending CPAC for the third time in his young life. Foster is something of an endangered species at the conference: a conservative who likes a lot of the policies advanced by President Donald Trump yet doesnt intend to vote for him in 2020 because of Trumps character. But Crenshaw gives Foster hope. The glaring difference is hes not facing accusations of sexual assault, he hasnt had three marriages, he didnt dodge the Vietnam draft, Foster says. On policy issues, there are meaningful differences. On trade, hes not as quick to use tariffs. Story Continued Below When Crenshaw arrives, the former Navy SEAL speaks about how to inspire people back home to embrace conservative valuespersonal responsibility, limited government, virtue, libertyover a culture of outrage. A society full of people who are easily enraged by every tweet they see, or some news story that comes outso susceptible to outrage culture, so ready to be offendedits not a sustainable society. Its a society at each others throats, he says. Crenshaw doesnt mention Trump once. The only politician cited by name is John Adams. The Constitution is wholly inadequate for any other people but a moral people, says Crenshaw, paraphrasing the Founding Father. Meanwhile, Trump fixer Michael Cohen is across the Potomac testifying to Congress. Afterward, Foster says it was a phenomenal speech that gets to the core of the more enduring part of conservatism. But Trump fans find something to like, too. Crenshaw is kind of like a more youthful version of Trump, says 20-year-old Jeremiah Childs, a University of Maine student in a red MAGA cap. Hes a more family-friendly version of Trump, he continues, searching for the right comparison. Childs calls Trump critics Mitt Romney and Jeff Flake dinosaurs whose day is done in the GOP. Hes young. Hes exciting. He has a great story. Like, Trumps a billionaire, and hes the soldier, you know? Childs says. Its two different things that are part of the ethos of the Republican Party. And he also sort of has that pop-culture brand. That pop-culture brand is something Crenshaw attained last November, when his gracious response to Saturday Night Lives mockery of his war wound went viral. In just the few months since, he has established himself as one of his partys most prominent communicators. As comfortable on Face the Nation and Morning Joe as he is on Fox News, Crenshaw has written op-eds for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. He might not have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs millions of Twitter followers, but his more than 500,000 total followers make him the most popular Republican House member on Twitter, where his tweetswhether hes slamming his Democratic colleagues, speaking fluent Spanish in a video supporting the Venezuelan people or humble-bragging about his double ax-throwing skillsare frequently shared and liked by thousands or tens of thousands of people. Crenshaws social media stardom and his unlikely path to victoryhe had no electoral experience and no money when he upset the Texas GOP establishment on his way to win the Republican nomination in his district in 2018invite comparison to the Democrats most media-savvy new member, @AOC. She always seems like shes having a good time, and you get that same impression from Dan, says conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, host of one of the countrys most popular political podcasts. Hes an authentic person. Crenshaw might be the congressional GOPs best answer to AOC, but he decidedly doesnt want to be seen as a Republican version of the 29-year-old New York Democrat, who is always trying to embrace radicalism, he told me during a recent interview in his new office on the fourth floor of the Cannon House Office Building. He wants to take his party in a more traditionalnot radicaldirection. We have to make conservatism cool and exciting again, is how he described his mission in politics when I first met him a year ago. We have to bring back that Reagan optimism. Crenshaws combination of traditional conservatism and rising popularity put him in an unusual position in Congress. He describes himself as a plain old conservativehe supports free trade, wants to reform Medicare and Social Security, and thinks American troops should stay in Afghanistan (where an IED took one of the veterans eyes) as long as theyre needed to prevent another 9/11. That puts him at odds with Trump, whom Crenshaw has been unafraid to criticize, going so far as to call his rhetoric insane and hateful during the 2016 presidential campaign. But Crenshaw is more Sometimes Trump than Never Trump. He is not pushing for a 2020 Republican primary challenge and is not trying to write off Trumps wing of the partyhence, his warm reception at CPAC. In fact, Crenshaw has praised the president for his policies on immigration, even recently voting in support of Trumps declaration of a national emergency to build a border wall, a move many conservatives opposed. One type of success in todays Republican Party involves becoming a Trump booster, like Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, a 36-year-old in his second term who unfailingly defends the president on TV. Crenshaw is showing that its not the only way. The mainstream conservative is the House GOPs one rising star to emerge from the midterms, whereas true Trump nationalists like Corey Stewart, Roy Moore and Kelli Ward have met electoral defeat. Crenshaw is only two months into the job, but he might just offer the possibility that the future of the Republican Party could be more conservative than Trumpistif he can chart his own course in Washington. *** When Crenshaw first grabbed the national spotlight, he seemed to succeed, at least for one night, in his improbable mission to prove that a conservative politician could be cool. The weekend before the 2018 midterm elections, Saturday Night Live comedian Pete Davidson mocked Crenshaws physical appearance, saying the wounded veterans eye patch made him look like a hitman in a porno movie. When SNL invited Crenshaw on the show the next week, he agreed and, after ribbing Davidson, provided a rare moment of political unity. Americans can forgive one another. We can remember what brings us together, Crenshaw said, before telling viewers to never forget the sacrifices of veterans past and present, and never forget those we lost on 9/11, heroes like Petes father, a firefighter who died trying to save those trapped in the World Trade Center. I thought that he had a lot of maturity and gentleness in his response to it, which seems increasingly rare nowadays, says Foster, the 18-year-old Trump critic at CPAC, who recently accepted an appointment to attend West Point. Dan Crenshaw started the week as a punchline and ended it as a star, the headline of a Washington Post profile declared. By the time the SNL spot aired, Crenshaw had already won. But it had not been an easy road. Although he had worked in politics briefly, as a military legislative assistant for Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, he was still a relative outsider, having taken a medical retirement from the Navy in 2016 and then completed a masters degree in public policy at Harvard. In the fall of 2017, John Noonan, a Senate aide to Tom Cotton of Arkansas, persuaded Crenshaw to run for a seat that had opened up with the retirement of Representative Ted Poe. We were building the plane as we were heading down the runway, Crenshaw campaign consultant Brendan Steinhauser says of the candidates brief GOP primary campaign in Texas 2nd Congressional District, home to parts of Houston. With no money for TV ads, Crenshaw relied on digital and earned media. In February 2018, he ran 100 miles through his suburban district to draw attention to Hurricane Harvey relief efforts and his own campaign. He made it to the GOP runoff by 155 voteshis margin over multi-millionaire Kathaleen Wall, a self-styled female Trump who spent $6 million of her own money and had the backing of Senator Ted Cruz and Governor Greg Abbott. Hes proof that personal story and charisma can overcome just about any amount of money in a primary setting, says David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report. Voters just liked him. Congressman Dan Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL who lost an eye in an explosion in Afghanistan, stands alongside fellow Republicans as President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address on February 5. | M. Scott Mahaskey for Politico Magazine In the runoff, Crenshaws GOP opponent, state Representative Kevin Roberts, focused on a December 2015 Facebook post in which Crenshaw had blasted candidate-Trumps proposed ban on all Muslims entering the United States. Trumps insane rhetoric is hateful, Crenshaw had written. On the one hand you have idiots like Trump, and on the other you have equally ignorant liberals. In response, Crenshaw emphasized that he had supported Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016. But he never recanted. He went on to defeat his GOP opponent 70 percent to 30 percent and won the general election by 7 points. In Harris Countypart of his district that is increasingly diverse, young and wealthyCrenshaw ran 12 percentage points ahead of Cruz. I dont know. Thats not a useful emotion. You know, you learn lessons. Thats a better way to look at life. *** Crenshaw was sworn in as a new member of Congress on January 3 in the midst of the government shutdown. The standoff wasnt exactly conducive to producing moments of unity like his SNL appearance. Nor does Crenshaw seem particularly interested in forging friendships with his young, progressive counterparts. The new face of the Democratic Party is coming out in favor of [Venezuelan dictator] Nicols Maduro. Its anti-Israel, he says. And thats a change. Thats a new normal. These are the ones who get elevated. But now that hes in Washington, Crenshaw has also continued to criticize his ownwhether Congressman Steve King of Iowa (We dont need guys like that, Crenshaw told me when asked whether King should leave Congress) or Donald Trump. Two weeks before he took office, Crenshaw wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post urging the president to reverse his decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from the fight against ISIS in Syria. I have a background in this. I have experience in this, Crenshaw told me. I understand pretty well what the mission is and why it should continue. Crenshaw also believes, in defiance of Trump, that Congress should take back the authority it ceded long ago to the executive branch to impose tariffs. But Crenshaw is happy to support the president, or challenge his critics, when the two agree. He has taken, from what I can see, the same approach that I have taken, Ben Shapiro says of the congressman. Hes not going to be in the business of pretending Trump is something hes not, but hes also not going to dump on Trump for the sake of a little bit of strange new respect from the left. Crenshaw, who has met with Trump once at the White House, greets talk of a potential 2020 Republican primary challenge with a rhetorical shrug. Its democracy, so its going to be what its going to be. I dont know, he says. I think its pretty safe to predict hell be our nominee, and I think thats perfectly fine. We know what were getting with the president. In addition to saying he is proud to stand with the Trump administration in support of the Venezuelan people, Crenshaw has been an enthusiastic advocate for Trumps push to build a wall on the Southern border. In videos on Twitter and in TV appearances, he has made the case for a physical barrier as a common-sense security measure, and has pinned Democratic opposition to the policy on hatred of the president. But when Trump went so far as to declare a national emergency in February in order to divert military and other funding for border-wall construction, many mainstream conservatives objected. The question was no longer simply about the policy of a border wall but whether the president was flouting the rule of law and setting a dangerous precedent that a future Democratic president could use to his or her own ends. Crenshaw seemed to find himself in a bit of a bind. In a written statement on February 15, he expressed both hesitation and praise for the emergency declaration. I share his frustration with the position we are in now, Crenshaws statement said. While Im hopeful that this option will start to address the problems at our border, I remain wary of the precedent it sets. This is simply the result of Congress not doing its job. Crenshaws office declined for a week say how he would vote on a resolution rescinding the national emergency, but the congressman had an answer over the phone this past Monday. Ill certainly be voting in favor of the presidents policy, he said. Through the emergency declaration, he argues, Trump is merely appropriating additional funds to enforce the federal law prohibiting illegal border crossings. Hes not changing any laws. Hes not changing any policies. He is simply putting more money towards his faithful execution of the law than was allowed by Congress, Crenshaw says. He argues that a Democratic president closely following Trumps precedent wouldnt be so bad, as long as he or she were only putting more money toward the enforcement of existing laws. A significant number of conservatives sharply disagree with Crenshaws support for the emergency declaration. The same congressional Republicans who joined me in blasting Pres. Obamas executive overreach now cry out for a king to usurp legislative powers, Michigan GOP Congressman Justin Amash wrote on Twitter. If your faithfulness to the Constitution depends on which party controls the White House, then you are not faithful to it. When the roll was called in the House to terminate the national emergency declaration, Amash was one of just 13 Republicans to vote for it. Crenshaw was among the 182 Republicans who sided with Trump. *** Crenshaw is still getting settled into his new job. He is pleased to have landed assignments on the Homeland Security and Budget committees. He has a fresh coat of navy blue paint on the sparsely decorated walls in his office. He has found a small apartment near Navy Yard and works out at the gym there (he doesnt want to pay the fee for the members gym and says the group that does P90X gets up too early). His wife, Tara, sometimes travels with him to D.C., but they havent yet gotten into a rhythm. Stuck in the minority, Crenshaw seems less intent on passing legislation than being an effective messenger for his party, including trying to convince younger voters that conservatism and Trump arent one and the same. Its my goal to help them see: Think what you want about him, but please focus on the policies and the general approach to governance were taking, Crenshaw says. Its a role he is carefully cultivating; none of his social media posts go up without his involvement, he told me. Think what you want about [Trump], but please focus on the policies and the general approach to governance were taking, says Crenshaw, shown at his congressional office in Washington. | M. Scott Mahaskey for Politico Magazine So far, Crenshaw has managed to earn praise from both Republican Trump loyalists and skeptics in Washington. Andrew Surabian, a former Trump White House official who worked under Steve Bannon, says of Crenshaw: While he has some views that are different from the president, he has put himself in a position where he is still an ally to the administration on the whole. Liz Mair, a NeverTrump Republican consultant, says politicians who share Crenshaws ideology struggle to get traction a lot of the time because they just seem like boring, mainstream, conservative Republican dudes, but Crenshaw could become a much bigger player in the party if he chooses to. As his experience on the national emergency shows, however, its not easy taking a middle-ground approach to Trump. The president will surely present Crenshaw with more opportunities to alienate Trump supporters or opponents. And it remains to be seen whether Crenshaw can navigate his first two years in office without turning off voters who backed both him and Beto ORourke, Ted Cruzs Democratic Senate opponent, in 2018. But the Trump-skeptical conservatives left in the Republican Party dont seem to have written off Crenshaw because of his support for the emergency declaration. Ben Shapiro, who supports rescinding the emergency, wrote in a text message: Theres a legitimate difference of opinion on the issue. At CPAC, Jacob Foster, who also opposed the emergency declaration, told me he thinks Crenshaw was representing his constituents and wouldnt set such a dangerous precedent if he were president. I think hes got an incredible future, says Shapiro, who would be happy to see Crenshaw launch a presidential campaign before turning 40. Why the hell not? he says. The more good people running in 2024 the better. Ruair Arrieta-Kenna contributed to this report. | https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/03/02/is-dan-crenshaw-the-future-of-the-gop-225257 |
Will Giants hold Larry Baer to a fair and equal standard? | What happens between a married couple is their own business. Unless it happens in broad daylight. In a public place. Caught on video. And one half of the couple is one of the most well-known men in San Francisco. The disturbing video of the altercation between Larry and Pam Baer that surfaced on Friday afternoon is not simply going to go away. An apology is not going to erase the image of Baer trying to forcefully grab his phone away from his wife, pulling her over, off her chair and onto the ground. Nor is it going to muffle the sound of Pam Baer screaming Oh my god, oh my god. Bystanders intervened, which was not caught on video. Larry Baer is later seen walking away, while you can continue to hear his wife in the background. The video, quickly purchased by TMZ and circulated widely across social media and television, was shocking. For any of us who have known Baer for years, and who know him as one of the most public relations-aware person in the sports world, it was particularly stunning. And please dont tell me that this is the day and age we live in, that there is no privacy, that people shouldnt videotape private behavior, that everyone is too sensitive about what should be private interactions. Long marriages are full of complications and strife, but when it overflows into a public setting, it is no longer a private matter. If, a quarter of a century ago, long before smart phones, you had seen a man treating his wife like that in public, you would have been just as shocked. You would have likely gone to the womans aid, as witnesses did on Friday. You dont need 21st century context to know that it was wrong and disturbing. Now we will learn if a well-known and wealthy executive in a tailored suit will be held to the same standard to which we expect him to hold players. The team - at the instruction of Baer, who has a hand in all things about the team - would issue a statement that the Giants are aware of the incident. The statement would go on to say that the team in no way condones such behavior. That the team takes seriously its platform in the community, that it tries to be a leader, that such actions against women are abhorrent and in conflict with the teams core values. That is close to the statement that Baer personally issued just three months ago when it was disclosed that the teams principal owner Charles Johnson had donated to controversial political candidates, ones who had made racially-charged statements. Baer is the teams front man, its face, its fixer. No one in the public even knows what Johnson looks like and they dont have to because Baer has always been there to provide the controlled, savvy face of the organization. During Barry Bonds and Balco. During the forcing out of Peter Magowan and later Bill Neukom. During happy days and bad days. Baer could always be counted on to be a steady hand at the wheel. If this event involved a player, the Giants would likely investigate further to see if this was an isolated incident or if there was any history of abuse. They would probably suspend the player. Order counseling or community service. After all, Baer sets policy and protocol for his team. He shapes the culture. If anything, he should be held to a higher standard than some 20-something-year old player who hasnt spent decades in the public eye. Both of the the Baers issued statements on Friday. The first one made to The Chronicle didnt seem to make any sense when paired with the video footage; Larry Baer said that Pam had an injured foot and she fell off her chair. The subsequent statements tried to improve on that. Baer said in a follow up statement that he was truly sorry for the pain that I have brought to my wife, children and the organization. It is not reflective of the kind of person that I aspire to be, but it happened, and I will do whatever it takes to make sure that I never behave in such an inappropriate manner again. Pam Baer issued her own statement, saying she and her husband were quite embarrassed. I took his cell phone. He wanted it back and I did not want to give it back. I started to get up and the chair I was sitting in began to tip. Due to an injury I sustained in my foot three days ago, I lost my balance. I did not sustain any injury based on what happened today. Larry and I always have been and still are happily married. Major League Baseball has a domestic violence policy that covers all baseball employees. The league issued a statement saying it will immediately begin to gather the facts. Whatever happens next, this is one more troubling development for a team that seemed to have all the answers just a few years ago. The Giants dont win on the field, cant land a big-name player, and now has leadership that has been publicly compromised. These are all separate and not equivalent developments but added together they paint a depressing picture. Ann Killion is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @annkillion | https://www.sfchronicle.com/giants/annkillion/article/Will-Giants-hold-Larry-Baer-to-a-fair-and-equal-13658283.php |
Could this year's Phillies starting 8 be better than the 2008 Phillies lineup? | originally appeared on nbcsportsphiladelphia.com The 2008 Phillies will forever have a place in the heart of every Phillies fan, for one obvious reason: they won it all. A big reason they were able to win the World Series is the strength of their offense. Led by Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, and Jimmy Rollins, the 2008 Phillies led the National League with 214 home runs, and finished second in the NL with a .438 team slugging percentage. Scroll to continue with content Ad But the Phillies' offseason shopping spree netted them three starting position players who all made the All-Star Game last season, the first time that has happened in MLB history. It also gave them perhaps the most dangerous lineup in the game today. Let's take it position-by-position. Catcher: Carlos Ruiz vs. J.T. Realmuto Make no mistake: we all love Chooch. But as much as we value him and his place in the Phillies' golden run, he was not strong offensively, especially in 2008, when he hit just .219 in 117 games. Ruiz managed four homers and 31 RBI on the season, numbers I expect Realmuto to eclipse by about May 15. Verdict: 2019 First Base: Ryan Howard vs. Rhys Hoskins Hoskins has a lot of potential, especially with the protection that will be around him in this lineup, but Ryan Howard in his prime was a force of nature. Fourty-eight homers, 146 RBI. Just an absolute monster out of the cleanup spot. Verdict: 2008 Story continues Second Base: Chase Utley vs. Cesar Hernandez This one is also not close. Utley hit 33 homers and had his fourth straight 100-RBI season in 2008. Hernandez is a good player, and a nice on-base guy at the top of the lineup, but you can't argue this one. Verdict: 2008 Third base: Pedro Feliz vs. Maikel Franco The only reason Feliz didn't hit eighth in the 2008 Phillies lineup is because Carlos Ruiz was also playing that day. Meanwhile, Franco quietly has been productive. Three straight seasons with at least 22 homers, and he also led the Phillies in batting average last season (not a huge feat, but .270 is a good average) Verdict: 2019 Shortstop: Jimmy Rollins vs. Jean Segura Fairly even matchup here. Both Rollins and Segura have pop, and a lot of speed. I'll give the nod to J-Roll here, because he has more of both. And Jimmy could always bring it when the red light was on. Verdict: 2008 Left field: Pat Burrell vs. Andrew McCutchen McCutchen is a former NL MVP and a five-time All-Star, but I'm giving the edge to The Bat here. Thirty-three homers, 86 RBI, 102 walks, and an OPS that was just a few ticks behind Howard's for the season (.875, compared to .881 for Howard). This was Burrell's last good season, and he was an underrated force in the middle of the lineup. Verdict: 2008 Center field: Shane Victorino vs. Odubel Herrera The image of Victorino leaping on top of the pile following the final out in the World Series is indelible. But this one is closer to me than you may think. I feel like these two players are similar. Streaky hitters, good speed-power combo, even down to the occasional mental errors on the field. I'm hopeful Herrera shakes off last year's second half and gives the team more of what we saw in early 2018. Verdict: Push Right field: Jayson Werth vs. Bryce Harper We are through the looking glass here. A player who left the Phillies to head south to D.C. against the new addition, who did the opposite this week. I don't think this is a close race. While Werth was a significant cog in the 2008 machine, Harper gives you so much more offensively that it's not a fair fight. Verdict: 2019 Based on the individual matchups, I'm giving a slight edge to the 2008 team. I will say that the fac it's close enough to argue will make for a fun spring and summer, with the hopes for many more to come. Click here to download the MyTeams App by NBC Sports! Receive comprehensive coverage of your teams and stream the Flyers, Sixers and Phillies games easily on your device. More on the Phillies | https://sports.yahoo.com/could-years-phillies-starting-8-174014302.html?src=rss |
Who was Stephon Clark, man shot, killed by Sacramento police? | Stephon Clark. The name has become a symbol. Protestors have shouted it in the streets, calling for racial justice. Legislators invoke it in their efforts to reform police deadly force laws. And Sacramentos mayor devoted his State of the City speech last month to what that name says about a citys need to become a better place for its residents. Family and friends say Stephon Alonzo Clark was a good kid from a rough background who loved his two young sons and had a special spark for life, but who yearned to be loved and sometimes felt abandoned. Court records and a just-released district attorneys report offer a view of a more troubled young man who on several occasions committed domestic abuse, served jail time and appeared to be in emotional trauma with suicidal thoughts in the days and hours leading up to his death. Sign Up and Save Get six months of free digital access to The Sacramento Bee Clark was shot to death by two Sacramento police officers who responding to calls of someone breaking windows confronted him in a darkened south Sacramento backyard on Sunday, March 18, 2018. In a dramatic and detailed report issued Saturday, District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said Clark allegedly had punched his girlfriend two nights before, on a Friday night, and feared his probation for previous battery convictions would be revoked, sending him back to jail or possibly to state prison. Cell phone data show that Clark, 22, called his girlfriend, Salena Manni, 76 times following day, the DA said. Manni, the mother of his two sons, texted him that shed report him to police and that hell be locked in a cage the rest of his life and never see his kids grow up, according cell-phone screenshots obtained by the DA. The DA said Clark then conducted internet searches Saturday on how to commit suicide. Clark grew up in south Sacramento. His father was mostly absent. He and his siblings were raised by their mother and grandmother. When Clark was 10, his stepbrother, 16, died of an accidental, self-inflicted gunshot, according to coroners records. Stephon Clark, right, with brother Stevante Clark. Stephon Clark attended Sacramento High School. Stevante Clark Sonia Lewis, a relative by marriage, said the young man yearned to be loved. He yearned for family. I think he felt abandoned at times. Friends say he had a spark. He has always been a special person, said Kiahre Rodriguez-Fuller. He was meant to do something in this world, in some kind of way. He dressed stylishly, down to his sneakers. He was goofy, he was funny, he was loving, his brother Stevante told The Sacramento Bee. He was a playboy, he was smart, he was an athlete. Clark attended Calvary Christian Center as a child, where his mother went through the drug counseling program. Pastor Phillip Goudeaux said Clark volunteered with the centers youth program, where Goudeaux remembers Clark counseling a young American Idol aspirant to never give up on her hopes. Clark attended Sacramento High School where he played football. Assistant principal Patrick Durant described him as a friendly kid with great manners and a great smile. SHARE COPY LINK Sacramento police shot and killed 22-year-old Stephon Clark Sunday night, March 18, 2018. Clark was unarmed and holding only a cell phone. He got an A on every single test I gave him, history teacher Paul Schwin said. He always explained history in a funny, accessible way. He was someone who made first period fun. He left Sacramento High during his senior year and earned a high school diploma through an adult education program, Rodriguez-Fuller said. For a while, he lived with Rodriguez-Fullers family after having a fight with his mother. He thought about being a psychologist, and applied to San Diego State University, in part because Rodriguez-Fuller was in college in the area, but was not admitted. He attended Sacramento City College in 2013, 2014 and 2015, officials there said. At that time, though, he began to run into trouble with the law. In 2014, records show, Clark was charged with robbery and assault and endangering the life of a child. He pleaded no contest and spent a year on a sheriffs work project. In 2015, he was charged with loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution after deputies stopped him and a woman while they were driving in North Highlands. He pleaded no contest. In 2016 and 2017, he was twice charged with domestic violence. In both cases, according to the DAs report, the victim was his girlfriend Manni. In one instance, he allegedly hit her in the face. He spent 120 days in jail and completed a batterers treatment program, records show. Family members and activists say Clarks criminal past is irrelevant to what happened to him on March 18. Family members have sued for at least $20 million, saying the shooting was wrong and inexcusable. He was at the wrong place at the wrong time in his own backyard? his grandmother Sequita Thompson told the The Bee two days after the shooting. Come on now, they didnt have to do that. That night, police responded to calls of a person breaking car windows in Meadowview. They confronted Clark and chased him into the backyard of his grandparents home, where they shot him. Officers said they thought he had a gun. It turned out to be a cell phone. At the time, Clark was living part-time at his mothers Elk Grove home and at his grandparents home. He had recently converted from Christianity to Islam, which is Mannis faith, friends said. He was applying for a job at a Sysco food warehouse. Pictures showing Stephon Clark and his wife Salena Manni, and sons Aiden Clark, 3, and Cairo Clark, 1, rest on a table inside his grandmother Sequita Thompsons home in Sacramento, Calif., on Tues., March 20, 2018. Renee C. Byer [email protected] He left behind two sons, Aiden, now 4, and Cairo, 2. He was so proud of them, Lewis said. On a Twitter account linked to Manni, a photograph last year showed her, Clark and their two boys. Beneath it was written: Our babies will forever live in you. I love you my sweet angel. Watch over us. Manni has since moved with the two boys to the Los Angeles area, where she has family. | https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article226865434.html |
Will Chinese firm use steel company deal to steal secrets, endangering US national security? | Trump administration officials are abandoning their threat to raise tariffs to 25 percent on $200 billion of Chinese goods. Many people are now expecting that a new trade deal between U.S. and China is imminent. While the Chinese tariff issue may be receding, a real sticking point between President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will remain and fester: whether the Chinese are compromising U.S. national security. A clear example of those concerns surfaced this week. A group of grass-roots conservative leaders led by Morton Blackwell of the Weyrich Group and Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots has just sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin demanding an immediate security review of a joint venture between a Pittsburgh specialty steel maker and a Chinese firm that is the worlds largest stainless steel producer. JOHN STOSSEL: MR. TRUMP, IF YOU RAISE TARIFFS ON STEEL AND ALUMINUM, YOU PUNISH CONSUMERS Allegheny Technologies hopes to use the joint venture to import 336,000 metric tons of stainless steel slabs every year from an Indonesian mill owned by Chinas Tsingshan Group. The slabs which would be free of any tariffs would then be turned into 60-inch-wide steel sheets. About 100 new jobs would be created at an Allegheny plant in Midland, Pennsylvania. The conservative leaders say the joint venture between Allegheny and Tsingshan hasnt yet been reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Chinas history of stealthy intellectual property theft triggers immediate concerns, they write. ATI possesses sensitive intellectual property that China could seek to extract and transfer in order to undercut U.S. economic and military advantages. The conservative leaders point out that in 2014, hackers from the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army were charged with cyber intrusions and economic espionage aimed at three U.S. steel producers, including Allegheny. The concern over such espionage is heightened because Allegheny has publicly testified that virtually every major military aerospace system contains an ATI specialty steel or alloy. The concern is that the Chinese could gain access to sensitive information through the back door of a joint venture that they couldnt obtain through hacking. For its part, Allegheny says such worries are overblown. Executive Vice President Robert Wetherbee told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that the Chinese will not have access to cutting-edge technology because of the joint venture. Indeed, Wetherbee contends that the project will be a plus to national security, not a negative because it will strengthen Alleghenys long-term financial viability as a supplier to the U.S. defense industry. Wetherbee says the firm has provided U.S. officials with all of the information on the proposed joint venture and is willing to cooperate with any investigation. Supporters of free trade make a good case that too often objections to trade deals involve little more than special-interest pleading or sketchy national security claims. But I suspect the Allegheny deal will ring alarm bells in the Trump administration for a couple of specific reasons. One is the clear record of Tsingshans involvement with the Chinese military establishment. Indeed, the firm helped produce Chinas first aircraft carrier. There is no such thing as an independent Chinese producer of strategic materials, says Gordon Chang, an expert on the Chinese economy. They all cooperate or are in bed with the Communist government. Second, Alleghenys competitors have a case that the firm has other options than trying to circumvent tariffs by importing steel slabs from Tsingshans Indonesian plants. North American Stainless, a producer of stainless steel in Kentucky, says that Allegheny closed a Midland, Pennsylvania steel making plant in 2015 that could have produced the slabs the company now wants to import tariff-free. North American Stainless accuses Allegheny of consciously deciding to abandon its melt shop workers and refusing to invest in reopening its facilities and supporting Chinese-controlled foreign slab production. Allegheny responds that reopening the Midland facility isnt viable because it would cost as much as $75 million and take three to five years. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP Whether thats true or not, the political and geopolitical situation has changed since Allegheny shut down the Midland plant in 2015. Donald Trump won Pennsylvania and the presidency in 2016 in part because of blue-collar anger at U.S. companies closing down domestic plants and relying on greater foreign imports. That may have made economic sense at the time, but the new trade winds coming from the Trump White House make it clear decision like Alleghenys will now go under a regulatory microscope. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE BY JOHN FUND | https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/will-chinese-firm-use-steel-company-deal-to-steal-secrets-that-endanger-us-national-security |
Is a remote naval center in Russia's nuclear crosshairs? | SEATTLE (AP) A Russian state television broadcaster asserts that one of his country's top targets for attack in the event of nuclear war would be a 4,700-acre site east of Arlington that encompasses a key transmission center for the Pacific submarine fleet and a forested recreational area for military personnel. Naval Radio Station Jim Creek is a forested expanse of land near Arlington that hosts a major communications hub for the Pacific submarine fleet that a Russian broadcaster asserts would be among the top U.S. targets in event of nuclear war. In a Sunday evening broadcast, Dmitry Kiselyov featured a map of the United States that listed Jim Creek along with the Pentagon and the presidential retreat at Camp David as initial strike targets Russian would want to hit, according to a report from Reuters. Kiselyov is a high-profile journalist tapped by the Russian government to head a weekly news show called "Vesti Nedeli." But Kiselyov's credentials as a Kremlin insider appear to be diminished by his inclusion on the map aired Sunday of Fort Ritchie, a military training center in Maryland that closed in 1998, and McClellan Air Force Base in California, which was shuttered in 2001. Kiselyov claimed that hypersonic missiles Russia is developing could hit the U.S. targets within five minutes of launch. The Reuters news report described Kiselyov's segment as "unusual even by the bellicose standards of Russian state TV." Asked to comment Monday, a Kremlin spokesperson said it did not interfere with state TV editorial policy, according to Reuters. Kiselyov remarks come amid concerns about a renewed nuclear arms race. The Trump administration earlier this year announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Force Treaty, which could open the door to eventually deploying such missiles in Europe. Putin has said that could lead to Russia placing hypersonic missiles on Russian nuclear submarines that could strike U.S. targets. Jim Creek, the Washington state target spotlighted in Kiselyov's Sunday broadcast, is a relatively obscure U.S. military site, located about 60 miles from Seattle. Jim Creek is currently under the command of Naval Station Everett, and a spokeswoman for the naval station declined to comment Monday on the Russian television broadcast. She referred a reporter to the Defense Department for comment. "Every time Putin issues bombastic threats and touts his new doomsday devices, he should know he only deepens NATO's resolve to work together to ensure our collective security," said Eric Pahon, a Defense Department spokesman at the Pentagon. "These reports on Russian state-owned television are a continuation of Russia's propaganda effort to avoid responsibility for Russia's actions in violation of the INF (Intermediate-range Nuclear Force) Treaty." When the Navy opened Jim Creek back in 1953, it was hailed as the most powerful radio station in the world. Currently, it has a network of radio antennas that span 980 acres, and is "still among only a handful of radio stations capable of providing more than one million watts of power allowing the U.S. Navy to communicate with ships, submarines and aircraft anywhere around the world," according to a 2017 Navy public affairs posting about the site. Jim Creek's major focus is providing operational command, control and communication for the Pacific submarine fleet. That fleet includes the Trident submarines homeported at Naval Base Kitsap in Bangor, which is the site of a strategic nuclear weapons facility. The Jim Creek radio network is supported by six 200-foot-tall towers, and more than 360 miles of copper cable conductors form the antenna. All of this is maintained by federal civilian personnel, who keep the radio station operating 24 hours a day, according to the Navy public affairs posting. While access to the radio station is largely restricted, an adjacent recreational area open to military personnel and their families includes a campsite with recreational hookups, lakes stocked with trout, trails through old-growth forests and a fitness center. | https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Is-a-remote-naval-center-in-Russia-s-nuclear-13657847.php |
Can KSUs Dalton Risner be a first-round NFL Draft pick? | Its been a long time since Roger Goodell has had to pronounce the name, Kansas State, at the NFL Draft. Thats because its been 10 years since the Wildcats have had a first-round pick in Aprils draft, with quarterback Josh Freeman being the last player the program had to shake the commissioners hand and pose with a No. 1 jersey in his hands. But the streak could end in a few months as former Kansas State offfensive lineman Dalton Risner poses the best chance in recent years to break the streak. Risner had a strong performance at the Senior Bowl in January and had a number of teams seeking formal meetings with him this week in Indy. Hes the toughest lineman in the draft, said Alex Barnes, former KSU tailback and Risners teammate. Sign Up and Save Get six months of free digital access to The Kansas City Star Risner ran a 4.52 in the 20-yard shuttle, a major drill that teams use to evaluate offensive lineman. His time ranked third at his position. He also ran a 7.69 in the three-cone drill at the combine, which had him tied for eleventh at his position. The Chiefs and Eagles were among a few teams that Risner formally met with, and the Colorado native admitted he had a hard time letting go of Andy Reids hand when he introduced himself. Risner lost to Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes multiple times when the NFL MVP was at Texas Tech and considers Chiefs tackle Mitch Schwartz a role model for him. It would be awesome to block for him and watch him make plays, Risner said. I love to block for an offense like that. Risner is selling teams on his diversity and believes he can play all five offensive-line positions in the NFL. Originally a center, Risner played right tackle at Kansas State and got looks at both guard spots and left tackle at the Senior Bowl and in practice over the years. He has no preference on a position and said hes also selling teams on his background, which he thinks contains no red flags. Im not any kind of liability, Risner said. Theres no backgrounds checks on me, no issues with drugs, alcohol. Current mock drafts have him all over the board, with some projecting him as high as the first round while others have him going in the second or third. Risner admitted that during his meeting with teams, he was unable to get a good idea of his range as a prospect. I have no idea where I will go, Risner said. A strong pro day could help Risners draft stock, while his diversity on the line already gives him an advantage with teams that want their players to be able to move around. Despite his lack of clarity on his draft stock, Risner was brimming with confidence during his press conference on Thursday and reiterated that hes ready for the challenge of professional football and understands what hes getting into. Whatever club I get drafted to, Im going to try and take that mans position, he said. Im sure he has a family at home. And next year someone will try and take mine. The key word there is try. | https://www.kansascity.com/sports/college/big-12/kansas-state/article227041599.html |
Who is Stephon Clarks girlfriend Salena Manni? | Salena Mohamed Manni didnt ask for the spotlight, but thats where she finds herself after Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schuberts press conference Saturday announcing the police officers who fatally shot her boyfriend Stephon Clark wont face criminal charges. Mannis tumultous relationship with Clark, the father of her two young children Aiden and Cairo, was highlighted throughout the press conference as Schubert explained Clarks state of mind the night of March 18. He was shot in his grandparents backyard that night by two Sacramento Police Department officers who mistakenly thought he was holding a gun, kicking off weeks of high-profile protests throughout the city. When Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee paid tribute to Clark before Congress on April 5, she talked about how he loved to watch football and Netflix shows with Manni. The two had met five years prior to his death and planned to get married, Manni said in an April 2018 interview on The Intercept podcast Deconstructed. Manni grew up in a two-parent household, she told Deconstructed host Mehdi Hasan, while Clark grew up staying with his mother, his grandparents and high school friends at different points in time. She wanted to give their kids what she had growing up; he wanted to give them what he lacked, she told Hasan. Sign Up and Save Get six months of free digital access to The Sacramento Bee We made sure our love was strong for our kids, Manni said. Our bond was strong for our kids. We were just happy as a whole. As long as we were together as a family, there was nothing that can break us. We were inseparable. Schuberts report on Saturday, however, painted a contrasting image of their relationship. Manni was a repeated victim of domestic violence at Clarks hands, even up to the nights before he was killed, according to Schuberts report. At about 12:47 a.m. on March 1, 2018, one of Mannis neighbors called 911 to report that a man had dragged a woman down a hallway in the apartment she shared with Clark. When police arrived, the neighbor told them he had knocked on the apartment door after hearing a woman scream for help. Looking through the window, he saw a black man straddling a black woman on the floor while holding her arms down and yelling in her face, all while a small child cried next to them, according to Schuberts report Officers knocked on the apartment door, and Manni and Clark emerged after after a significant delay. They denied arguing, and with no visible injuries and no signs Manni had been crying, the officers left the apartment. Shortly before midnight on March 16, another neighbor called police about Clark and Manni. Clark was gone by the time they arrived, but Manni spoke in an interview recorded on a responding officers body camera. Clark had hit Manni four or five times in the face, she told police, sometimes with an open palm and sometimes with a closed fist. He threw her head against the wall and choked her with both hands, she said. Police later found a hole in the wall three inches in diameter with long, dark hair coming out of it. Manni hid in a closet, crying, for about 10-15 minutes before Clark came into the closet and took her to their bed, she told police. When she refused to respond to him, he allegedly started hitting her again and calling her derogatory names. She escaped the apartment as Clark went to get some clothes and asked the neighbor to call police. SHARE COPY LINK The left side of Mannis face was swollen, particularly around her eye, cheekbone and lip, and she was crying and breathing heavily, according to the report. She also told police that she had lied to them about the fight earlier that month in fear of Clark, who she said was responsible for a welt on the back of her leg. Clark was on probation for two other incidents of domestic violence against Manni as well as one loitering for prostitution case and one robbery case. Manni, too, was on probation for a 2014 conviction of assault with a deadly weapon, according to Sacramento County Superior Court records. Clark hid from law enforcement but tried desperately to get in contact with Manni records show he called her 76 times in the 48 hours between when she accused him of domestic violence and when he was shot by police. Manni blocked Clarks number by hitting *67 at one point, and none of their conversations lasted more than a few seconds. He also tried to contact his probation officer, but couldnt get through over the weekend. Support local journalism The Bee is your go-to source for in-depth coverage of the Stephon Clark investigation. And today, we continue to bring you coverage of news that affects your life, your communities and our region coverage you cant get anywhere else. We believe in our communities. Believe in and support The Sacramento Bee, your trusted local news source. Click to subscribe The couples conflict continued over text messages, records show, with Clark professing his innocence and Manni saying she would make sure he went to jail for a long time. He eventually texted other ex-girlfriends seeking drugs, shot back a message saying that he would kill himself if they couldnt piece their family back together and drafted an email to the DAs office and his probation officer explaining his side of the dispute. The rose gold iPhone Clark was holding the night he was shot the item police thought was a gun belonged to Manni. She was in bed with their kids the night he was killed, she told Hasan, and found out in a frantic phone call from his grandmother Sequita Thompson. I want to be able to explain to them who their dad really was, and that he actually loved them and was there for them, and that he actually wanted to be there in their lives. He wanted to be the best father he could be, Manni told Hasan. Whatevers out on the media, too, is not who their dad is. | https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/crime/article227037509.html |
Is Bill Clinton the One Voice of Sanity Left In the Democratic Party? | Hint: It wasn't Barack Obama, though it should have been. The correct answer is Bill Clinton, who showed again how a president can lead his party toward the center and solve problems. The spark was the special election in an upstate race where a Democrat took a GOP seat by attacking the Republican plan to save Medicare by turning it into a voucher program in 10 years. As Clinton feared, many fellow Dems instantly concluded that playing the MediScare card will pay big dividends next year. Clinton also said, "I hope Democrats don't use this as an excuse to do nothing" and offered to talk with GOP architect Paul Ryan about entitlement reforms. This is a big deal, in politics and policy. Clinton saved his own presidency and helped put the nation on course for a balanced budget by working with Republicans who took the House in 1994. Obama faces a similar situation but remains committed to a far-left lurch on taxing and spending. His budget was such a sham that not a single Senate Dem would risk voting for it, and it went down, 97-0. With Medicare facing bankruptcy in 12 years and the national debt piling up by the day, Obama has many reasons to take the lead in crafting fixes. Clinton showed how it was done 15 years ago, but his example and advice will count for nothing unless Obama changes course. Michael Goodwin is a Fox News contributor and New York Post columnist. To continue reading his column on other topics, including the return of ROTC to Columbia University, click here. | https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/is-bill-clinton-the-one-voice-of-sanity-left-in-the-democratic-party |
Subsets and Splits
No saved queries yet
Save your SQL queries to embed, download, and access them later. Queries will appear here once saved.