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Google's Boston Dynamics has revealed the latest version of its humanoid robot - and it can now get up easily on its own if it falls.
The Atlas robot was widely derided at the recent 'robolympics' after falling repeatedly and needing a crane to get up.
However, the new wireless version is shown being pushed over by an employee - and simply getting back up.
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He's behind you! Boston Dynamic has revealed the new wireless version of its humanoid robot in a new video showing it walk, run, and even be pushed over and get up again on its own.
THE ATLAS ROBOT According to Boston Dynamics, Atlas is a 'high mobility, humanoid robot designed to negotiate outdoor, rough terrain. 'Atlas can walk bipedally leaving the upper limbs free to lift, carry, and manipulate the environment. 'In extremely challenging terrain, Atlas is strong and coordinated enough to climb using hands and feet, to pick its way through congested spaces.'
Boston Dynamics said the video showed 'a new version of Atlas, designed to operate outdoors and inside buildings.
'It is electrically powered and hydraulically actuated,' the secretive firm said.
'It uses sensors in its body and legs to balance and LIDAR and stereo sensors in its head to avoid obstacles, assess the terrain and help with navigation.
'This version of Atlas is about 5' 9" tall (about a head shorter than the DRC Atlas) and weighs 180 lbs.'
However, the firm released now more details - and the video has no narration.
The video shows the robot walking out of the firm's office and across a snowy plateau.
While lsing its footing several times, it corrects itself and stays upright.
It is also shown moving 10kg boxes with ease in a tight space.
It then faces a more difficult foe - an employee with a hockey stick.
Last year's Robo-Olympics saw the world's most advanced robots go head to series in a series of ever more challenging events.
The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) proved that robots still have some way to go before matching the dexterity of a human.
The impact knocks the robot to the ground. Previousl versions would then have required a crane to lift it up again.
The new wireless version is able to deftly flip onto its knees, then stand up - without help from a human
Twenty five of the top robotics organizations in the world were competing for $3.5 million in prizes, and took on a gruelling simulated disaster-response course during the two day contest.
DARPA says 'the DRC is a competition of robot systems and software teams vying to develop robots capable of assisting humans in responding to natural and man-made disasters.
'It was designed to be extremely difficult.
WHAT THE ROBOTS CAN DO In the recent robot olympics, Robots will try to complete a series of challenge tasks selected by DARPA for their relevance to disaster response. The robots will start in a vehicle, drive to a simulated disaster building, and then they'll have to open doors, walk on rubble, and use tools. Finally they'll have to climb a flight of stairs. There will be a surprise task waiting for the robots at the end - which turned out to be turning a valve.
'We get most of our ideas about robotics from science fiction. And we want to show a little bit of science fact,' said Gill Pratt, who organized the competition for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which focuses on futuristic technologies for national security.
The contest runs Friday and Saturday at a Pomona racetrack designed to look like a disaster zone.
The robots may be slow, clumsy and delicate but they might just save lives someday by braving dangerous disaster zones.
Pratt cited the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan as an emergency where such robots would have come in handy.
'Sometimes in a disaster, it is too dangerous for people to go in,' he said.
Teams of engineers, programmers and designers from research institutions across the world have worked for years to build robots that can maneuver the course and complete the assigned tasks.
'We have a valve that we need to turn to shut off a gas leak or something similar,' said John Seminatore, a Virginia Tech graduate student with Team Valor.
Meet the family: The new robot (second from left) next to the original version, and three versions of Spot, the firm's 'dog robot'
The robot is also shown moving heavy boxes around in a confined space, and walking on snowy ground without falling
'We have to cut a hole in a wall to get access to something behind it. And there will be either rough terrain or rubble that we get past.'
The most difficult task - getting out of the small utility vehicle - is so hard that many teams aren't even attempting the dangerous egress, preferring to be docked on their times rather than risk toppling their robot into the dust.
'Robots don't have that sense of touch that humans do to know where they are inside the car,' Seminatore said. 'So it's going to be really nerve-racking for teams because the training wheels have come off.'
The robots come in all shapes and sizes.
Most appear humanoid but some can switch to wheels to get around.
'RoboSimian' looks like a double-jointed monkey without a head.
Another has a torso on a 4-wheeled base, like a centaur.
Team Valor's semi-autonomous ESCHER (Electromechanical Series Compliant Humanoid for Emergency Response) robot lays on the ground after falling backwards during its first run during the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Robotics Challenge at the Fairplex June 5, 2015 in Pomona, California
Several teams used DARPA's Atlas robot as a start for their own designs.
'This robot weighs almost 400 pounds with the battery and hydraulics,' Cassie Moreira of Boston Dynamics said as she worked on the knees of a robot from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
DARPA's first robot competition in 2004 was a race for driverless cars.
None of the entries finished and most made it only a few miles.
But 11 years later, Google's driverless cars are cruising.
Pratt says that means the competitions are a success.
So even if the robots struggle to exit a car this year, their designers will learn. And when DARPA issues a challenge and invites the public to watch the results, it means the Pentagon's 'mad science' division is serious about disaster response robots.
'What I love about this is it introduces everybody to the new dream.
The IHMC robot takes a fall while trying to negotiate a set of uneven blocks during the robo-olympics in California
After trying to stay upright, it eventually crashes to the floor, looking uncannily like a drunk.
'his is something you can do right now,' said Jonathan Daniels, who teaches robotics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
'Give me five years and we'll have this in high schools.'
'Participating teams, representing some of the most advanced robotics research and development organizations in the world, are collaborating and innovating on a very short timeline to develop the hardware, software, sensors, and human-machine control interfaces that will enable their robots to complete a series of challenge tasks selected by DARPA for their relevance to disaster response.'
The winning team will receive a $2 million grand prize; DARPA plans to award $1 million to the runner-up and $500,000 to the third-place team.
Tasks are 'put together in a single mission' that teams have one hour to complete, Pratt said.
The robots will start in a vehicle, drive to a simulated disaster building, and then they'll have to open doors, walk on rubble, and use tools.
During the contest robots have to walk across different terrain - with many finding sand difficult. Getting them upright again requires a team of engineers a special crane.
Finally they'll have to climb a flight of stairs.
After this, there will be a surprise task waiting for the robots at the end.
Spectators have been encouraged to watch the event, and will see a quartet of virtually identical Finals Courses, or what Kathy Wadham, director of creative programming for Fairplex, thinks of as stage sets.
'Anything that needs to be turned into something else, or created here, we do that,' said Wadham during a backstage tour of the concocted disaster zones the robots will have to navigate over and through.
'We went through our scrap piles to find the doors and the electrical switches,' she said.
Those same piles were a gold mine for creating the debris fields in front of the steel staircases on the left side of each set.
Each junk heap is an assemblage of rooftop turbine vents (some with long-abandoned birds' nests inside), gas line piping, beat up steel drums, water heater vessels, and sundry other pieces of detritus.
'Some of the stuff was not rusted enough at first,' she said. 'So we have a person who rusts and weathers it and makes it look old.'
For some of the details on the set, Walham went shopping.
She found the incandescent bulbs for the dingy metal mesh fixtures online and purchased decals of gauges for the square electrical cabinets from a store specializing in retro design.
'We create places,' says Wadham. 'That's what we do.'
One of the competitors is a human sized robot that can walk, climb walls and even turn into a tank to move across tough terrain.
The Carnegie Mellon University Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform, or CHIMP, is designed to primarily move like a tank using tracks to cover tough terrain.
However, when it needs to, it can simply stand up - and even use built in 'claws' and a use power tools such as a chainsaw to help it climb ladders, scale buildings and even hold a car's steering wheel.
CHIMP is roughly the size of a human, an inch short of 5 feet when it's standing and almost 3 feet when it's crawling.
It weighs 443 pounds. CHIMP's arms are 4.3 feet long – long enough to reach the ground, which is useful and gives the robot a simian-like stance.
It can operate for 90 minutes or more with its battery pack
The robot is set to compete in the US government's robo olympics next month.
'CHIMP needs to master many skills for the DRC Finals,' its creators said.
'During the past several months, it spent long hours crossing block piles and climbing stairs.
'Now it's learning how to drive!'
CHIMP's normal mode of locomotion will be much like that of a tank, with the tracks of all four limbs on the ground, the team says.
This configuration would offer a particular advantage when moving over debris and rough terrain.
'We realize there are a lot of great teams in this competition and the final scoring could be close,' said Tony Stentz, a CMU research professor of robotics and leader of the Tartan Rescue Team.
'We are making steady progress, but we can't afford to get comfortable.'
But CHIMP also can move on the treads of just two limbs when needed, such as when it must use one or more limbs to open a valve, or to operate power tools.
CHIMP will be able to perform complex, physically challenging tasks through supervised autonomy.
A remote, human operator will make high-level commands controlling the robot's path and actions, while the robot's on-board intelligence prevents collisions, maintains stability and otherwise keeps the robot from harm.
The robot also will be pre-programmed to execute tasks such as grasping a tool, stepping on a ladder rung or turning a steering wheel without step-by-step direction from the human controller, circumventing the lag between command and execution.
The competitors range from humanoid robots such as MIT's Hercules (bottom left), Team HRP2-Tokyo's sci-fi effort (top left) and Technische Universitätto Jonny 5 (top right) to Carnegie Mellon's robo chimp (main image) and the four wheeled Nimbro from Germany.
'Humans provide high-level control, while the robot provides low-level reflexes and self-protective behaviors,' said Tony Stentz, NREC director and Tartan Rescue Team leader.
'This enables CHIMP to be highly capable without the complexity associated with a fully autonomous robot.
'This type of robot has tremendous potential,' he said.
Climbing ladders and driving vehicles are among the obstacles robots will face in environments engineered for people.
The NREC entry, Tartan Rescue Team, is one of seven selected by DARPA for DRC Track A, in which each team will develop its own hardware and software.
CHIMP is designed with static stability; it won't fall down even if it experiences a computer glitch or power failure.
'When we walk or stand, our brains are actively controlling our balance all of the time,' Stentz said.
'This dynamic balance makes people nimble and enables them to run.'
When necessary, however, the operator can control CHIMP's individual joints, enabling it to adapt its motion to particular circumstances or extricate itself from tight spots. |
CLOSE Behind the scenes timelapse footage of SXSW. (Kaveh Rezaei, USA TODAY)
Cynthia Breazeal, founder and CEO of Jibo and also an Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab, spoke to USA TODAY ahead of her keynote on "The Personal Side of Robots" on Friday, March 13, 2015, at the SXSW festival in Austin, Tex. (Photo11: Jack Gruber/USA TODAY)
AUSTIN, Texas — Your future robotic roommate was not ready to make the trip to SXSW.
"Jibo is going through the commercialization process right now," said Cynthia Breazeal, the MIT professor and social robotics pioneer who is the driving force behind the 11-inch-tall robot, which could pass for a distant relative to WALL-E.
Breazeal, a keynoter here, is dead serious about Jibo's future as a humanized robotic member of the household, an engaging companion to teach first grade math to your kid, to remind grandma to take her medicine and to make sure you get the groceries you need.
But Jibo is not meant to be a "slave-robot" either — it is not going to go to Safeway for you, much less vacuum the floor. What makes it different from, say, a Roomba or an entertainment-oriented toy robot is, in Breazeal's words, "this notion of platform, taking something from the playbook of the Android and iOS app ecosystems."
Along those lines, she is courting developers to produce apps or "skills," as she calls them, for Jibo. There'll be a Jibo store.
Jibo garnered attention over the summer when the startup Breazeal founded raised about $2.3 million in an Indiegogo campaign, well above her initial goal of $100,000. The discounted crowdfunding price for anyone who pre-ordered Jibo was $499; consumers will pay about $100 more when Jibo becomes available to the general public, likely in the middle of next year.
Jibo, the social robot (Photo11: Jibo)
"It's very important for Jibo to have the right kind of personality that makes people really want to welcome and engage with this kind of technology," Breazeal told USA TODAY.
Jibo promises a sense of humor. With built-in cameras, it can recognize you and learn from you over time. It might ask for your favorite color and factor that in when it presents information.
And Jibo is being designed to recognize critical cues, like whether you're smiling or not. It might use that to decide when to snap a picture of you or other family members.
Jibo will communicate by speech, by making expressive sounds, and by using graphics. There are times you'll touch Jibo to help the robot know if you like something.
"There is learning, there is adaptation, there is personalization, there is perception, there is decision-making, there's communication and there's expression," Breazeal says.
How are we as humans to treat Jibo — as family members, as pets, as something else?"We're still trying to understand this. It's a new thing," Breazeal says. "In some ways, it's sort of like the kinds of relationships you have with a coach or a tutor. Some (relate) to it as an Internet-connected device, a gadget. And also some dimensions of companionship (with an animal)."
Jibo will also have a role in the connected home and move toward a variety of Internet of Things appliances. It is expected to become a health coach, connecting to your Fitbit or Wi-Fi scale. Jibo won't be wearing an Apple Watch. But you may wear the watch to interact with Jibo.
Breazeal is also mindful of the potential scary side of artificial intelligence, highlighted by Elon Musk in January when he donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute.
"This is a persistent story of any technology," she says. "If it's a technology of high impact, there's always the opportunity to do things that are really wonderful and always the opportunity that it's going to be abused or misused on some way."
One of the concerns raised is the idea that a robot is going to replace a health care professional. "Historically when people think about robots and automation it's been about taking away human jobs," Breazeal says. "There's a more enlightened view now of robotics, they're called co-bots. The idea is about partnership — how do humans and robots work together as a team."
Breazeal expects you to like your new roommate: "The human-robot relationship is going to be different than the human-human, human-technology or human-dog relationships. But they're going to take on attributes of all those categories and maybe something totally new. People will actually delight in their Jibo."
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1CdS8iD |
Apple has improved its app approval process, but that doesn't mean it's entirely cured of quirks.
Apple sent an email to Tim Novikoff, founder of flash card app, Flash of Genius, asking him to delete, "Finalist in Google's Android Developer's Challenge!" from his app description.
According to Apple, "Providing future platform compatibility plans or other general platform references are not relevant in the context of the iPhone App Store."
In other words, don't talk about the competition!
It sounds harsh, but makes sense. It doesn't matter if it's a great Android application, this is a different platform.
On the other hand, it makes Apple look petty, and points to more evidence of Apple trying to rub out Google, and its Android platform.
See Also:Apple's 10 Dumbest iPhone App Rejections |
Winning every game they have played, Longzhu Gaming placed 1st in Group B with 6 wins under their belt. After this game, Longzhu is confirmed to precede into the quarterfinals. Longzhu did have trouble with dealing with Immortals’ early game pressure, but Longzhu, being robust, pulled through and claimed the win.
On the other hand, Longzhu put in Rascal as a sub for their top lane this game. Unlike Khan, Rascal opted for a more aggressive play style by picking Shen. After the game, Longzhu’s ADC, Pray, was interviewed. Let’s see what he has to say about dealing over 70 thousand damage in that game!
¤ I want you to explain to us why Varus is such a high priority right now. Before worlds he was just a normal with pick Ardent Censer. Why now is he such a high priority pick for Longzhu?
Well in case of the regular season, I think the Ardent Censer meta was not developed properly yet. However as we started to practice with this champion more, we learned that Varus really matches well with Ardent Censer and which is why it is popular and highly picked at worlds.
¤ Right now there is a 3 way tie breaker. Who do you think is going to win? Who do you think is the strongest team right now?
Well I love drama. I know Fnatic had a lot of trouble going into this group stage. I wish Fnatic could make it out of the group. However, I think it is going to be either Fnatic or Immortals. |
Roy Nelson Had a Message for Dana White and Lorenzo Fertitta After His UFC 146 Win
Judging by the aftermath of UFC 146, Roy Nelson‘s fight against Dave Herman really was make it or break it for the former Ultimate Fighter winner.
UFC president Dana White said after the event ended that he met with Nelson along with UFC owner Lorenzo Fertitta recently and had a very long talk about his future with the organization.
White says the meeting was similar to conversations he’s had about Nelson in private and public, and that his long term goals for him are always the same: take fighting more seriously, get in shape, and make a run at this thing or it may not work out.
“We had a conversation with him. I’ve said it a million times, I’ve said it to him and I’ll say it again in public, I respect him, he’s got an incredible chin, he’s got punching power, and I always talk about him taking his career serious and not training in his garage, and being in really good shape. The guy is tough,” White said after UFC 146 ended.
Nelson has never shied away from being the “every man” when it comes to his physique in MMA. He’ll probably never have six-pack abs or a chiseled frame, but Nelson goes out and fights with as much heart as anybody in the UFC.
White recognizes Nelson’s heart and determination, but just wishes he’d put the same effort he gives in the Octagon to his training and also his appearance, and it’s not just about having a gut.
“When he shows up and asking me why he doesn’t have any sponsors, and how can I help him. I’m not a fan, I don’t even know what that is, I think that thing is beyond a mullet, I don’t know what the hell that is now. It looks like a wig, he’s got the big beard, his beard is grey,” White said describing Nelson’s appearance.
Well, grooming criticisms aside, the best way for Nelson to guarantee his future with the UFC is to go out and win fights and on Saturday night he certainly did that.
Nelson clocked opponent Dave Herman with his signature overhand right that put the former Sengoku fighter out with one punch.
The win marked Nelson’s second in four fights, and after recent struggles, it certainly seemed to reinvigorate the former Ultimate Fighter champion.
Following the knockout, Nelson climbed the Octagon cage and shouted something in the general direction of White and Fertitta. What he said exactly isn’t known, but White gave a pretty good indication of what it was following Saturday night’s event.
“That was Roy Nelson’s (expletive) you to me and Lorenzo,” said White. “Did you see him come over and yell at us after the fight? It was.”
Follow @DamonMartin on Twitter or e-mail Damon Martin.
For more UFC News and UFC Rumors, follow MMAWeekly.com on Twitter and Facebook. |
Deutsche Bank is President Donald Trump’s largest lender. While the troubled bank has settled several of the charges against it, it’s still undergoing scrutiny by the Department of Justice and other federal regulators, and is being overseen by six independent monitors, making conflicts of interest inescapable.
By Jesse Eisinger
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(Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
If you measure President Donald Trump’s conflicts of interest by the amount of money at stake, or the variety of dicey interactions with government regulators, one dwarfs any other: his relationship with Deutsche Bank.
In recent weeks, Deutsche Bank has scrambled to reach agreements with American regulators over a host of alleged misdeeds. But because the president has not sold his company, the bank remains a central arena for potential conflicts between his family’s business interests and the actions of officials in his administration.
“Deutsche poses the biggest conflict that we know about in terms of dollar amounts and the scale of legal exposures,” says Brandon Garrett, a University of Virginia law professor and author of Too Big To Fail: How Prosecutors Compromise With Corporations. In trying to clear up its outstanding regulatory troubles, the bank “may have tried to do its best to avoid the appearance of impropriety but it may be impossible for them to do so.”
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Deutsche is Trump’s major creditor, having lentbillions to the president since the late 1990s even as other American banks abandoned Trump, who frequently bankrupted his businesses. While the president hasn’t released his tax returns, he has made public some information about his debts. According to these incomplete disclosures and reports, the Trump Organization has roughly $300 million in loans outstanding from the bank. Trump continues to own the business, although he has turned over day-to-day management to his sons.
At the same time that it is Trump’s biggest known creditor, Deutsche is in frequent contact with multiple federal regulators. While the bank agreed last week to pay $630 million to settle charges by New York state’s top financial regulator as well as the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority that it had aided Russian money laundering, it’s still undergoing a related federal investigation into those activities, which it is also trying to settle. That will be an early big test of the Department of Justice under Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The Department of Justice also has an ongoing probe of foreign exchange manipulation by several banks, including Deutsche Bank.
Even if the bank clears up the ongoing federal cases, it will remain weighed down by past transgressions. During the housing bubble, Deutsche Bank misled buyers about the quality of its mortgage securities and omitted important information. In 2015, its London subsidiary pleaded guilty in connection with the multi-bank conspiracy to manipulate global interest rates and paid $775 million in criminal penalties.
Deutsche will soon have an astonishing six independent monitors monitoring its conduct — the most ever for one company, according to Garrett. Drawn from the ranks of consultancies and law firms, these overseers make sure Deutsche complies with previous state and federal settlements and regulations relating to its foreign exchange manipulations, global interest rate fraud, sales of dodgy mortgage securities, derivatives trading, and sanctions evasion.
Indeed, the independent monitor of Deutsche’s derivatives reporting, Paul Atkins from Patomak Partners, has his own conflict of interest. Atkins served on Trump’s transition team and played a role in appointing federal financial regulators. He is now monitoring whether Trump’s business partner complies with the terms of a settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on derivatives reporting.
A Patomak spokeswoman declined to comment.
“Just about everything that every branch, every type of enforcement, every action from every agency could touch on Trump’s conflicts. There is no end to the ethics concerns.”
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has regulators sitting in Deutsche’s offices, as it does with every big bank, keeping a watchful eye on the firm’s safety and soundness. Last year, the Fed failed Deutsche Bank during its annual stress test, finding that it had insufficient capital and could not withstand another financial crisis. And the Securities and Exchange Commission and the CFTC regulate its investment banking and trading activities.
A Deutsche Bank spokeswoman declined to comment. The White House did not return an email seeking comment.
The Trump Organization’s wide-ranging business dealings could raise quandaries for an array of government agencies, from the Department of Labor, which regulates the company’s employment practices, to the General Services Administration, which leases Trump his hotel in Washington, D.C. “Just about everything that every branch, every type of enforcement, every action from every agency could touch on Trump’s conflicts. There is no end to the corruption and ethics concerns,” Garrett says.
But the potential conflicts may be most acute at the Department of Justice. Whether the Department of Justice walks away from an investigation or takes a hard line against Deutsche Bank, its every move will be scrutinized as either too tough or too weak.
With new management, Deutsche Bank has embarked on an effort to rebuild its reputation. Deutsche CEO John Cyran has conducted an apology tour for the bank’s multiple and serial misdeeds. The money-laundering settlement isn’t Deutsche’s only recent move to close out government probes. In January, it agreed to pay $95 million to end a tax fraud investigation by the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. And in December, it became one of the last of the global banks to resolve civil charges over the creation and sale of misleading mortgages investments, agreeing to pay a penalty of $3.1 billion.
In these agreements, Deutsche capitalized on Barack Obama’s Department of Justice’s eagerness to settle, according to defense attorneys who don’t represent the bank but are familiar with the cases. Outgoing administrations desire to wrap investigations up so departing prosecutors may shine their resumes on the way out the door.
The Obama administration had an added incentive to reach settlements because it worried Trump’s Department of Justice might seek smaller penalties or otherwise go soft on corporations. That helps explain why Deutsche Bank’s mortgage securities settlement, which included $4.1 billion in credit for consumer aid in addition to the penalty, was far below the $14 billion figure reported in the fall as Justice’s opening bid. While most observers expected that figure to come down sharply, Deutsche’s terms were still widely considered favorable.
Even so, Deutsche’s share price remains depressed as investors worry about the bank’s future payouts and ongoing fragility. The bank faces class action suits alleging efforts to manipulate interest rates and the currency markets.
Given the government’s responsibilities, Trump’s regulators face a fraught and sensitive task of proving their independence and fair-mindedness when it comes to Deutsche Bank. Prior White Houses have taken great care to avoid interfering in Department of Justice investigations and prosecutions. Despite his early support for Trump’s campaign and their personal friendship, Sessions has said he will not recuse himself from any Department of Justice probe into the president, the Trump family, or any of his political advisors.
The relationship Deutsche Bank has with the president cuts two ways, defense lawyers and former prosecutors say. It might be advantageous to be in business with a president who appears to regard the office as an opportunity for brand enhancement and enrichment. The bank might hope for leniency from the president’s regulators because of its business ties to him.
There are signs that Deutsche’s new management is not eager to continue serving as Trump’s financier. Trump sued the bank in 2008 to avoid paying a loan for a Trump hotel in Chicago. The parties settled, but lawsuits have a way of fraying friendships. A former top executive at Deutsche Bank says the current top management does not like the real estate developer. “They don’t want to do business with him anymore,” he says.
Given the tension, Deutsche may worry about the mercurial president. The bank’s concern is that the Trump administration could use its regulatory powers to secure better business terms. Nationalist strains course through his inner circle. A top Trump economic advisor recently accused Germany of currency manipulation. Trump, some observers fear, may seek to boost American financial institutions over foreign ones like Deutsche.
In recent months, Deutsche has also sought to renegotiate its loans with Trump, according to a Bloomberg report, in an effort to reduce its exposure to the president. The bank hoped to eliminate the president’s personal guarantee on loans. But such a move would not eliminate the conflict of interest, since the president’s company, which Trump still owns, would remain on the hook to pay back the loans.
This story originally appeared on ProPublica as “Deutsche Bank Remains Trump’s Biggest Conflict of Interest Despite Settlements” and is republished here under a Creative Commons license. |
Scores of students from prominent institutes at Lal Chowk in Srinagar continued their violent agitation on Tuesday, pelting stones at police personnel and vandalising government property. Police responded in kind, and occasionally used tear gas shells to make the agitators disperse.
The clashes wreaked havoc in the city’s commercial hub, disrupting traffic and business activities.
According to witnesses, a number of school and college students assembled near Exchange Road and began throwing stones at a security post. Some students of Shri Pratap School even scaled the walls of the neighbourhood Women’s College and targeted police vehicles plying on MA Road. Later, girl students of the college were joined by their male counterparts in shouting pro-Azadi slogans.
A number of students who tried taking out a protest march were intercepted by police outside the college gates. Tear gas shells were also fired into the Women’s College campus, eliciting loud shrieks from students.
Similar protests were witnessed at Pulwama in south Kashmir, which the police countered with tear gas shells. The Valley has been witnessing sporadic clashes since April 17, when thousands of college and school students took out protests against alleged police high-handedness in dealing with students at the Degree College in Pulwama. Many respected people from the Valley, including senior journalist Shujaat Bukhari, have expressed their disapproval over students indulging in violence. “Appeal to students. Please go back to classrooms. Protest is registered. We need you educated,” the scribe posted on Facebook.
The protests followed largescale violence sparked by the killing of eight civilians at the hands of security forces during agitations on April 9, when the Srinagar Lok Sabha seat went to the polls. Public anger was further fanned by several video clips that purportedly showed security forces indulging in human rights violations, including the use of a Kashmiri resident as a human shield.
Student protests have come as a new challenge to the BJP-PDP government in Kashmir, which witnessed escalating violence in the aftermath of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani’s encounter killing in July 2016.
Inspector general of police SJM Gilani had claimed on Monday that student demonstrations have been quelled, and normalcy restored in most schools and colleges. He said some students who protested in north Kashmir’s Handwara area on Saturday were “paid” to disrupt life in the Valley.
“There were 28 incidents of students indulging in lawlessness. We are trying to counsel them and their parents, so their future is not affected,” he added.
First Published: May 09, 2017 20:10 IST |
Story highlights Obama's quip to the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, came as he critiqued some African leaders' reluctance to turn over power.
The President spoke extensively on the corruption within Ethiopia and other African nations, warning it was holding these societies back.
Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama said Tuesday that he could win a third term in office if he ran again but that he is barred by the Constitution.
"I actually think I'm a pretty good President. I think if I ran, I could win. But I can't," Obama ad-libbed during a speech in Ethiopia. "There's a lot that I'd like to do to keep America moving. But the law is the law, and no person is above the law, not even the president."
Obama's remarks, which come on the same day that a new CNN/ORC poll found his approval rating standing in net-positive territory for the second month in a row, were made to the African Union in Addis Ababa. He is the first U.S. president to address the group, and was critiquing some African leaders' reluctance to turn over power.
"Africa's democratic progress is also at risk when leaders refuse to step aside when their terms end. Now let me be honest with you -- I do not understand this," Obama said, going on to say that he is looking forward to life after the presidency.
The loudest applause line of his address came when Obama said he didn't understand the motivation behind remaining in power through force -- even when leaders have "got a lot of money."
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To learn more and order a Pebble Time, head on over to pebble.com
Developers can sign up for our developer newsletter to get the latest news. Hardware developers, have you heard of our $1mm smartstrap development fund?
“3 Reasons Pebble's Time Smartwatch Beats The Apple Watch” - Forbes
“Pebble's Fantastic Smartwatch Is Growing Up" - Gizmodo
“The most exciting thing about Pebble’s new smartwatch isn’t the color screen” - Fast Company.
For press inquiries, please contact [email protected].
You can follow Pebble on Twitter @pebble and on Facebook.
High level details
We have two new watches, Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel , with a new timeline interface .
Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel feature a new color e-paper display and microphone for responding to notifications.
No compromises on what you love about Pebble: up to 7 days of battery life, water resistance and customizability.
Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel are fully compatible with all 6,500+ existing Pebble apps and watchfaces.
Pebble Time starts shipping in May. Pebble Time Steel starts shipping in July.
Photo of early production unit
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All the features of Pebble Time, dressed up and ready to go.
CNC-finished 316L stainless steel casing.
Premium leather and stainless steel strap.
Up to 10 days of battery life.
We're back on Kickstarter
This is where it all started. Three years ago you supported our vision to make the world’s first real smartwatch. The Kickstarter community and our early adopters believed in us before anyone else even knew we existed. You blew us away with your support and kicked off a worldwide movement!
With your help, we set the bar very high:
Your overwhelming support and feedback has shaped what Pebble is today. We’re back on Kickstarter to give you - the community who cares the most - an opportunity to support our vision for wearables and get exclusive access to our newest product.
Get more info at a glance...in color!
At its heart, Pebble Time is an awesome watch. The new color e-paper display is easy to read and always-on, perfect for displaying incoming notifications and your favorite watchface. Compared with display technology like LCD or OLED, power consumption is minimized, enabling Pebble Time to achieve an industry-leading battery life of up to 7 days.
Send a quick reply by dictation
Pebble Time's new microphone lets you send voice replies to incoming notifications* or take short voice notes. We used the latest technology to maintain water resistance so you can swim or surf with Pebble Time (we do not, however, recommend talking underwater).
*Sending voice replies works with most major Android apps including SMS, Hangouts, Gmail, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp and hundreds more. For iOS users, voice replies are currently limited to Gmail notifications. We’re working to enable voice replies for more apps.
Pebble Time is 20% thinner than the original Pebble at just 9.5mm. Its ergonomic, curved design fits comfortably on either wrist and slides easily under dress shirts.
Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel is stylish and durable. The lens is crafted from scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass with a bezel made of stainless steel. Like our previous watches, it's water resistant - perfect for a run in the rain, water-balloon battle or a swim.
People love to personalize their Pebble watches. We've included a soft silicone band with each Pebble Time and a fine leather band for Pebble Time Steel, but any standard 22mm watch band will fit. All new Pebble watch bands include a quick-release pin, letting you swap bands in under 10 seconds. Now it's super easy to find the perfect style for you!
For DIYers, accessory makers and advanced customizers, we'll be publishing the 3D data you'll need to create amazing straps, covers and docks. Pebble Time comes in three colors: Black watch case and silicone band with black PVD stainless steel bezel
White watch case and silicone band with silver PVD stainless steel bezel
Red watch case and silicone band with black PVD stainless steel bezel Pebble Time Steel is available in three stainless steel finishes:
Silver with a stone leather band
Gunmetal black with a black leather band
Gold with red leather band All Time Steels come with both a leather and matching metal band. Special Engraving for Kickstarter Backers All reward watches are engraved with ‘Kickstarter Edition’. For those who are backing Pebble on Kickstarter for the second time - thank you! Your Pebble Time watch will be engraved with something extra special. We've been making smartwatches for almost 7 years now. Our ultimate goal is to make Pebble an indispensable tool in your daily life by helping you accomplish more each and every day. While developing software for the original Pebble, we uncovered an important problem: apps are an inefficient way to interact with a smartwatch. As we increased functionality by adding more apps, our Pebbles clogged up. It became harder to quickly find the app we wanted. No one wants to manage another homescreen!
To make Pebble infinitely more useful, we needed an expandable system for organizing information and interactions. Luckily, the answer was right up our sleeves.
It turns out the best interface for any watch...is time!
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You already plan your day around time, so it makes sense for your Pebble to be organized around the same principle. Now your notifications, news, reminders and events are laid out chronologically instead of being trapped inside separate apps.
With one click, see what’s coming up next. Your timeline connects to calendars, alarms, and apps, organizing all kinds of relevant information along with quick actions. Similarly, recall the past. Scroll back in time to see that email you missed, your step count for the day or the score from the game last night.
Your timeline takes an incredible amount of information and makes it super easy to access.
This is the new app menu, featuring new app faces with glanceable content. With timeline we've also created a system that dynamically loads and caches apps as needed, letting you access as many apps as you need.
As with all Pebble software, we’ve built an open platform. You can allow apps and developers to add ‘pins’ to your timeline, so you can keep track of things like upcoming events, sports, weather, traffic, travel plans, pizza specials and more.
The Pebble operating system has been re-imagined with a new visual style. While all existing Pebble apps will still work great, we’re inviting developers to upgrade their apps to support color. More details coming soon!
Simplicity and focus, without compromise
We’ve added all these new features - color screen, microphone, slimmer design and timeline - without compromising what you love most about Pebble:
Always-on, daylight readable screen with a great backlight
Up to 7 day battery life (Time Steel battery life is up to 10 days)
Use any standard 22mm watch band
Water resistant and durable
Tactile buttons for easy eyes-free clicking
Silent vibrating alarms
Step tracking with Misfit and Jawbone
Language and international character support (Chinese coming soon!)
Timeline will work on Pebble and Pebble Steel (exact date TBD)
Works with iOS 8 on iPhone 4s and above
Works with all Android 4.0+ phones including Samsung, HTC, Sony, LG, Google, Motorola, Xiaomi and more
If you’re already part of our community of backers, developers and, early adopters, that’s fantastic! If not, we invite you to join those who have supported and guided our journey so far. It's pretty straightforward, just back this project!
We pledge to do the absolute best we can at creating amazing products and supporting them for as long as possible. We’ve gone out of our way to develop new features, release software updates and provide technical support for all Pebble owners. Check out our Amazon reviews or our Twitter's @Pebble and @PebbleHelp to get a taste.
Developer community
Since the first Kickstarter campaign, developers have been an integral part of the Pebble community. We are very proud of the 26,000+ developers who have created over 6,500 apps and watchfaces for Pebble.
Pebble Time greatly expands possibilities for wearable apps, building on top of the existing Pebble SDK and tools:
Rich C SDK for apps and watchfaces running natively on the watch, even when the phone is disconnected
Best in class online development environment: www.cloudpebble.net
New emulator that can be used on CloudPebble or locally
Rich set of APIs: accelerometer, compass, bluetooth messaging, background tasks, GPS and HTTP request, etc
(NEW) Color APIs to support the 64 colors of the new Pebble Time screen
(NEW) Support for PNG and APNG
(NEW) Timeline APIs to push information from the web into the user’s timeline (no watch or phone apps required)
(NEW) UI framework to create beautiful applications that take advantage of color and animations
(Later in 2015) Voice to text APIs: add voice recognition to your apps
(Later in 2015) Smart accessory port for hardware hackers.
(Later in 2015) Bluetooth Low Energy API. Use Pebble to control BLE-enabled objects.
All existing Pebble apps are compatible with Pebble Time and apps built with the new SDK are compatible with both platforms. We will reveal more information about the new APIs during the campaign. Stay tuned!
Time for one last plug: we're hiring!
Over the years, we've hired a bunch of folks from our community and are looking to hire more! If you (or a friend!) are passionate about bringing wearables to the masses, want to push Pebble to the next level, and love working with an awesome team at an innovative company, check out our Jobs page!
Why are we back on Kickstarter?
Pebble was brought to life by 68,929 backers who supported our vision three years ago. Even though we've grown tremendously since then, we're still a small company battling some of the largest competitors in the world. We believe that this is the best and most efficient way for us to get our latest product to the people who want it most: people like you.
Help us by sharing Pebble Time with your friends!
Know someone who would be just as stoked as you are about Pebble Time? Share our campaign with them through the "Share this project" button at the top. Sharing is caring!
Reward Tiers
$159 - Early Bird: One Pebble Time watch in any of the 3 colors
$179 - One Pebble Time watch in any of the 3 colors
$250 - One Pebble Time Steel watch in any of the 3 colors
$338 - Two Pebble Time watches in any of the 3 colors
$400 - One Pebble Time and One Pebble Time Steel in any of their respective 3 colors
$845 - Five Pebble Time watches in any of the 3 colors
$1690 - 10 Pebble Time watches in any of the 3 colors
$5,000 - 30 Pebble Time watches, 10 of each color
The full retail price for Pebble Time will be $199, so you're getting a deal by supporting us on Kickstarter. We will not be selling Pebble Time in retail until all Kickstarter rewards have been shipped.
International Backers
We're proud to have Pebble fans in over 150 countries. We will ship Pebble Time worldwide, with the exception of Argentina, Belarus, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Myanmar/Burma, North Korea, Russia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Please note that you may be responsible for duties, fees and taxes applicable to your region.
Estimated Delivery
Each reward tier may have a different estimated shipment month. While we do not expect these to change, it is possible that the estimated shipment month may shift. At anytime up until your watch has shipped, you may request a full refund by emailing [email protected].
Warranty
We stand firmly behind our products. Each Pebble Time includes with a 30 day (after you receive it) money back guarantee and minimum 1 year limited warranty. For more information, please see https://getpebble.com/legal/warranty
Need help? We're here for you.
If you have questions at any time, during or after the campaign has closed, you can always reach us at [email protected]. |
09/09/2016 – Santiago de Compostella ES - WOS Festival (Black Cobra only)
ALL DATES WITH YOB
11/09/2016 – Tilburg NL – Incubate Festival
12/09/2016 – Dortmund DE – FZW
13/09/2016 – Aarhus DK – Radar
14/09/2016 – Gothenburg SE – Sticky Fingers // Göteborg
15/09/2016 – Oslo NO – BLÅ
16/09/2016 – Copenhagen DK – Pumpehuset
17/09/2016 – Athens GR – Smoke The Fuzz gigs Fest
19/09/2016 – Wiesbaden DE – Schlachthof Wiesbaden
20/09/2016 – Munich DE – Feierwerk
21/09/2016 – Berlin DE – Musik & Frieden
22/09/2016 – Wroclaw PL – Asymmetry Festival
23/09/2016 – Leipzig DE – UT Connewitz
24/09/2016 – Nurnberg DE – Z-Bau
25/09/2016 – Vienna AT – Chelsea
26/09/2016 – Ljubljana SL – Club Gromka
28/09/2016 – Zagreb HR – VintageIndustrial Bar
29/09/2016 – Linz AT – Stadtwerkstatt
30/09/2016 – Milan IT – Lo Fi Milano
01/10/2016 – Pratteln CH – UP in SMOKE festival in Z7
02/10/2016 – Orleans FR – L’Astrolabe – Orléans
04/10/2016 – Belfort FR – La Poudrière – Belfort
05/10/2016 – Paris FR – GLAZART
06/10/2016 – Tourcoing FR – Le Grand Mix
07/10/2016 – Bristol UK – The Fleece Bristol
08/10/2016 – Glasgow UK – The Garage
09/10/2016 – Birmingham UK – The Rainbow Venues
10/10/2016 – Manchester UK – The Ruby Lounge
11/10/2016 – Dublin IRE – Whelan’s
13/10/2016 – London UK – Scala
14/10/2016 – Antwerp BE – DESERTFEST ANTWERP
15/10/2016 – Hannover DE – CAFE GLOCKSE |
The Borussia Dortmund’s of the 1990’s is one of German football’s all time great teams. In 1993 they reached the UEFA Cup final after nearly winning the Bundesliga the year before. They then followed that up with back to back league titles in 1995 and 1996 and the Intercontinental title the following year but the crowning achievement for the club was without a doubt the Champions League triumph in 1997.
It was as unlikely a Cup triumph as Europe had seen since the competition was rebranded at the beginning of the decade. In the final they met Juventus who beat them 6-1 on aggregate in the UEFA Cup only a couple of years back. The Italians, heavy favorites and considered arguably the best team in Europe at the time, were expected to lift the trophy but Ottmar Hitzfeld’s brilliantly coached side shocked the football world to win the clubs’ and German football’s first Champions League trophy since reunification.
Their run to the final was equally amazing and filled with memorable performances and results though. Their group stage started with wins over Polish and Romanian champions Widzew Lodz and Steaua Bucuresti. Their next win may have been their most impressive in the group stage, a 1-0 win in Spain against reigning Spanish champions Atletico Madrid.
Nine poitns from their first three games put Dortmund in a great position to advance early into the campaign so despite losing the rematch against Atletico in Germany they collected four points from their last two matches, including a 5-3 goal fest against Steaua on the last matchday. In the end they finished tied on points with Atletico and came up second due to goal difference but the first part of their mission had been accomplished. Dortmund were through to the knockout stage for the first time in history.
Here is a two part video of their group stage matches:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwrxxMJ1FtI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCdMGwB2kXY
The year before Dortmund went out in the quarter finals to Ajax Amsterdam. This time they were paired with French champions Auxerre who topped a group featuring that very same Ajax team. Dortmund would not be deterred though and they continued to pick up steam, beating Auxerre convincingly at home 3-1 an 1-0 in France. Lars Ricken scored his second of the competition in the second leg and it would not be his last.
Next up was Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United, a team that was quickly becoming the most dominant force in English football and stronger and stronger in Europe. Not many expected Dortmund to go through the way they did. A tight first leg was decided by a late Rene Tretschock goal in Dortmund. The second leg is still one of the most famous wins in Dortmund history.
3400 Dortmund supporters traveled to Old Trafford to witness a performance that would see them through to the final. An early goal from Lars Ricken put Dortmund ahead, stunning the home crowd, followed by a highly spirited and heroic defensive performance, particularly from Jürgen Kohler, to cap off a memorable night. Things would get even better.
One of the great underdog stories in European Cup final history took place on May 28th. Although the match was hosted in Bayern’s Olympiastadion in München Juventus were still heavy favorites but greatness is often spun through adversity and Dortmund made history that night.
Watch the video of this unforgettable final between Borussia Dortmund and Juventus Turin |
(Reuters) - Cisco Systems made its first major acquisition in over two years with a deal to buy NDS, which develops pay TV software, for $5 billion, aiming to boost its presence in the video communications market.
A man looks at his mobile next to a Cisco banner at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona February 17, 2010. REUTERS/Albert Gea
In its biggest acquisition since it bought Norway’s videoconferencing company Tandberg for $3.3 billion in 2009, Cisco said NDS was a strategic fit for its video system Videoscape, as NDS’ software allows cable and satellite TV companies to deliver encrypted content through televisions and other devices.
Chief Executive John Chambers said Cisco first began looking at NDS about a year ago because of what customers were saying about the company.
NDS technology is used by BSkyB and Sky Italia in Europe as well as customers such as Cablevision Systems Corp, Comcast Corp and Rogers Communications Inc in North America.
NDS, which filed for a public listing in December, is 51 percent owned by private equity fund Permira and 49 percent by News Corp.
Cisco, whose bread-and-butter business is routers and switches that manage Internet traffic, is keen to find new networking functions. The company is betting heavily on video, which Chambers likes to call “the new voice” and is one of its five growth pillars.
“This is the right deal to do right now,” Chambers said on a call with analysts, as the way television programming and video are being consumed is changing. “It (video) will be pervasive, on every device,” he said.
He said NDS’ flagship product, VideoGuard, which is installed on home TVs via smartcards integrated into set-top boxes, complements Cisco’s video offerings because it allows television operators to extend their pay-TV services to other media devices while ensuring that content cannot be hacked by non-paying customers.
SMALLER ACQUISITIONS
Chambers said there were more opportunities for acquisitions, but said any future buys would likely be smaller.
Cisco said it would pay about $5 billion, including the assumption of debt and retention-based incentives, to acquire all of NDS, which Chambers said has less than $1 billion in total liabilities.
Cisco’s other recent large acquisitions include online video platform WebEx for $2.9 billion in 2007 and digital cable set-top box unit Scientific Atlanta for $6.9 billion in 2005.
The boards of Cisco and NDS have approved the acquisition, which is expected to close during the second half of 2012.
The purchase price is about 35 percent higher than the value of NDS when it was delisted from Nasdaq in 2009.
“While we view the price as rich for a company growing sales less than 10 percent year on year, we believe it addresses a large opportunity in enabling service providers to offer comprehensive digital media and integrated video offerings,” ISI analyst Brian Marshall said in a note.
Cisco said the deal would add to earnings per share in the first year but Marshall said it was not clear how that would happen other than through job cuts.
Chambers said he based his assumption on NDS’ double-digit growth and recurring revenue stream.
MAJOR BUY
The NDS acquisition is the largest in Israel after the $4.8 billion purchase of Chromatis by Lucent in 2000.
Deals to acquire or merge Israeli and Israel-related tech companies were valued at $5.1 billion in all of 2011 — the second-highest amount in a decade — according to the Israel Venture Capital Research Center.
News Corp acquired NDS in 1992 for $15 million. NDS went public in 1999 but was bought back a decade later by Permira and News Corp and turned into a private company.
Analysts said it made sense for News Corp to sell its stake.
“NDS Group is a non-strategic asset,” Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger said, adding that News Corp President and COO Chase Carey has said that the company should either monetize or add to the company’s equity stakes.
“As a non-strategic equity investment, it makes sense to sell the equity stake in NDS completely’” Juenger said.
“NDS’ customer portfolio will broaden Cisco’s presence into new segments of the service provider market,” Marthin de Beer, Cisco’s senior vice president of video, said in a company blog.
“It will expand Cisco’s reach into emerging markets where NDS has a strong footprint with customers such as CCTV in China and Bharti and TataSky in India,” he added.
Founded in Israel in 1988 and headquartered in London, NDS maintains a large research and development center in Jerusalem.
Cisco shares were down 1.2 percent at $19.95 in afternoon trading. |
AFP (file photo) | France's state of emergency has been extended until the end of July
The French parliament extended the country’s post-attacks state of emergency to the end of July on Tuesday in order to cover this summer's Euro 2016 football tournament and the Tour de France cycling race.
ADVERTISING Read more
It is the third time the state of emergency has been extended since the November 13 jihadist attacks on Paris.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls had said in April he would seek parliament’s approval for a further extension in order to ensure security at what will be two high-profile sporting events.
“Faced with events this big... which must take place in conditions of security and which at the same time should be a celebration.... we have to ensure security,” the prime minister said at the time.
“The state of emergency cannot be permanent but on the occasion of these big events... we have decided to prolong [it].”
Under a state of emergency the interior minister has the power to place under house arrest any person whose behaviour is considered "a threat to security and public order" and to order searches of homes at any hour without involving the court.
The current state of emergency, already extended by three months in February, had been set to expire on May 26.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP) |
Childhood is an adventure; a whimsically frightening maze through fields of glowing neon-green fauna and deep, daunting dungeons. Or at least that's how it can seem. Attempt to visualize your youth in the most romantic way your mind can muster. Envision how those racing emotions and that sense of adventure would have looked if painted or photographed. Such is the awe-inspiring catalog of imagination, imagery, and childhood wonder created by 10-year-old Alice Lewis with the help of her mother, photographer Kelly Lewis.
Kelly and her husband James adopted Alice in 2012 when she was 7 years old. As one of their earliest forms of bonding, the new mother-daughter tandem started taking photos inspired by the little girl's imaginative play. Alice, who was named Destiny before she decided to change her first name after the adoption, had been in foster care prior to joining her new family. She was complex and fragile, but she expressed herself openly as the pair planned their shoots.
Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com
According to Kelly, Alice's mental escape from a troubled past was always driven by her own imagination. This strong creative drive became inspiration for both mother and child when they photographed their first cosplay of Alice dressed as Dorothy from "The Wizard of Oz."
"Two weeks after she moved in with us we passed a dress while shopping, and Alice commented on how it looked like a Dorothy dress. I suggested that we do a photoshoot, and she was totally up for it," Kelly said. "It was the first time she'd really posed for my camera as a model, and it was amazing."
Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com
From there, the two have been on an absolute roll. Creating stylized scene after scene is not only a memento of Alice's childhood, but serves as art therapy for a little girl whose life had previously been burdened with so much change.
"Playing make-believe is how she's coped with all of the negative things she's lived through. It's just a natural part of her being now and cosplaying gives her a creative outlet to express herself and be whoever she wants to be," said Kelly.
The themes of the images range from generally upbeat to downright sinister, or even dark and desperate. Kelly recognizes that not everyone will understand the tone of every photograph. Yet, she's willing to take the scorn that has come as some of the collection's darker photos have been shared online.
"If one child gets adopted because someone read Alice's story, then every hateful letter and death threat is worth it," she said.
Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com
"There's not a one-size-fits-all type of parenting when you're dealing with a child that has experienced multiple foster homes, homelessness, [and] neglect," she said. "I refuse to make her act like other little girls — she knows too much of the real world and she can't forget what she's seen. It is why she so often chooses to live in a fantasy of her own."
Regardless of how you perceive the content of the photos, it's hard to deny the amazing artistic relationship that this mother and daughter now enjoy. The emotion present in each shoot is palatable, and seeing a child embody such open expressions of joy, fear, anger, heroism, and family is an art in and of itself. Even when the image is scary, there is no doubt that love abounds with the creators.
Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com
Check out more from the "Malice of Alice" collection below, but be sure to see the entire collection at Alice's website.
Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com
Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com
Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com
Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com
Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com
Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com
Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com |
And… there’s more new streaming anime announcements at Crunchyroll to grant upon you today. Next up is Shonen Ashibe GO! GO! Goma-chan, about the everyday life of a young boy and his pet sea lion based on the manga by manga by Hiromi Morishita!
Shonen Ashibe GO! GO! Goma-chan begins streaming on April 5th at 4am PST and will be available to Crunchyroll Premium Members worldwide excluding Asia.
About Shonen Ashibe GO! GO! Goma-chan
A comedy manga, "Shonen Ashibe," that follows the friendship between baby spotted seal Goma-chan and first-grade student Ashiya Ashibe. First serialized in 1988 and adapted to anime in 1991, the adorable Goma-chan created a massive following and a spotted seal boom. This spring, Goma-chan returns to "Tentere Anime." A cute, pleasant story of Ashibe and Goma-chan and their unusual school and their neighbors. Sometimes endearing, sometimes bizarre, it's a fun anime for the whole family!
The main staff for Shonen Shibe Go! Go! Goma-chan includes:
Original work: Hiromi Morishita (Shonen Ashibe)
Director: Nobuhiro Kondo
Series composition: Toshimitsu Takeuchi
Animation production: Bridge
Production: Team Goma
The cast for the show includes:
Rie Kawamura as Ashibe.
Nao Tōyama aa Goma-chan.
Kenjiro Tsuda as Ashibe's Father.
Chinatsu Akasaki as Ashibe's Mother.
Kōji Yusa as Tendou-sensei.
And Ayane Sakura as Yuma-kun.
Additionally, the opening theme of the show, entitled "Hello Tomorrow", is written and composed by Jimmy Thumb-P and performed by Lon. |
About two minutes into the R-rated animated food movie Sausage Party I had a realization—the film that the trailers were advertising was not the movie I was watching. That movie, about food that realizes what happens when they get bought, looked like it has a lot of R-rated jokes, and not much else. But the real movie is so much more.
To say what Sausage Party is actually about isn’t a spoiler. But, if at this point you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll give you a chance to leave. Just know this: Sausage Party is absolutely filthy and completely funny, but not without its flaws.
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Sausage Party is about science versus religion. It’s about blind faith versus undebatable truth—about people who choose to believe something they’re told all their lives and how that could, potentially, be a problem. That’s not to say Sausage Party bashes religion, faith, or your beliefs (it jabs them for sure), but it fully embraces the happiness those things can bring people.
In the case of a supermarket full of foul-mouthed food, these debates are brought about by a talking hot dog (Seth Rogen) that’s desperate to enter his bun girlfriend (Kristen Wiig). All the food in the supermarket believes when you’re chosen by the Gods, a.k.a. humans shopping in the store, you are brought to the Great Beyond, a place where everything is going to be wonderful. They think its heaven, basically. But when one bottle of honey mustard is returned to the store, he starts planting the seeds of truth that lead Rogen’s character on a quest through the supermarket to discover that humans kill food when they leave the supermarket.
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As this is happening, the film is as R-rated as they come. C-bombs, F-bombs, dirty sex jokes, non-stop innuendo, and some sure-to-be-too-offensive-for-some-people racial stuff. It’s a way to try and mask that the filmmakers are, hopefully, getting you to question some serious shit.
One problem with that, however, is Sausage Party is not subtle in any way. The film wears its message right on its sleeve and, at times, that becomes an issue. It beats you over the head with its themes to the point of redundancy. The film also feels a bit long even at just under 90 minutes due to a dragged-out second act.
And yet, by the time the film reaches its third act, none of that matters. Directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Verson, working from a screenplay by Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Kyle Hunter, and Ari Shaffir, push things so, so, SO far over the edge at the end you almost won’t believe what you’re watching. It’s completely horrific and yet, you can’t stop watching, laughing, and shaking your head. Then, it keeps going. And just when you think it couldn’t get crazier, dirtier, or more stupid, it does. And then it does it again. I can safely say you have never, ever seen anything like the final act and climax of Sausage Party.
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That pretty much goes for the whole movie, too. If you watched the trailers to Sausage Party and didn’t care that much, that’s fair. But if you like the talent involved, trust them, and check it out. They made a funny, well-meaning, and smart movie. One that has some problems, but is also filled with exemplary, iconic, disturbing moments that are worth the price of admission.
Sausage Party, which screened at Comic-Con 2016, opens August 12.
Note: This article originally ran on July 22. We updated it for the film’s release. |
Since the end of the Second World War, the number of independent states has nearly tripled. In the last thirty years, over thirty new states have become members of the United Nations. Separatist movements routinely receive strong support in regional and national elections. For example, in Catalonia pro-independence parties won a majority of seats in the local parliamentary elections last September. After Scotland narrowly voted against independence in September 2014, the Scottish National Party won 56 of the 59 Scottish seats in the British general elections this May. A breakup of the UK remains in the political agenda, while the British voters are considering whether to exit the European Union. At the same time, contentious issues about sovereignty and national boundaries affect the debate on how to address the current refugees’ crisis. All over the world, from Ukraine and the Middle East to India and the Philippines, borders and secessions continue to be at the center of heated debates and conflicts.
How to evaluate this separatist drive? What are the determinants of national borders and secessions? What are the consequences of having more numerous, smaller sovereign states? We have been interested by these questions for over two decades. We started to write about the number and size of nations in the Nineties, when a wave of new independent countries were being formed following the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union, the peaceful separation of Czechoslovakia, and the violent breakup of Yugoslavia. Over the same period, we witnessed the spread of separatist movements in Western Europe, from Belgium and Catalonia to our own native Italy. Traditionally, these phenomena were studied by historians and political scientists, but not by economists, who tended to take national borders as given (or, in economics jargon, “exogenous”). However, states and boundaries are human-made institutions, and should be explained using the tools of political economy – the study of the interactions between economic and political variables. That approach has motivated our own work.
Our first paper on the topic was “On the Number and Size of Nations,”[1] where we provided a model in which political and economic factors – such as democratization and international openness – lead to more numerous, smaller countries. The idea that international economic integration goes hand in hand with political disintegration was at the center of our theoretical and empirical work with Romain Wacziarg of UCLA.[2] Those and other contributions soon became part of a growing economic literature on the endogenous formation and breakup of nations, including our book The Size of Nations (Alesina and Spolaore, MIT Press, 2003; paperback 2005). A useful recent review of the literature on the size of nations is found for instance in The Economist.[3] In this article, we provide a few considerations on how such economic research can help evaluate the ongoing trends and debates about secessions.
Border changes are too often evaluated from extremist and partisan perspectives. On one side are the enthusiasts for secessions, on the other side those who view them as unmitigated disasters. In contrast, we believe in the virtues of economic analysis, with its emphasis on choices and trade-offs. When forming a smaller country after a breakup, there are pros and cons, which vary depending on the internal situation of the country concerned and the international regime. For example, citizens of smaller and more homogeneous states may agree more easily on taxes, public goods, redistribution and other public policies. In general, consensus is harder to achieve in larger and more diverse countries such as the United States, with its history of internal political conflicts, including a bloody civil war. But a diversity of cultures, ethnicities and perspectives often means greater creativity and innovation as well. New York and Los Angeles are among the most innovative cities in the world, even though they have often been at the center of racial and ethnic conflicts. American history also illustrates two other benefits for a large country: the ability to defend themselves from external enemies (unity is strength), and the advantages from a vast domestic market without internal barriers.
So what are the incentives for secession? There are at least three reasons. The first reason stems from domestic politics. In the past, monarchs and dictators could ignore the preferences of their populations and maintain centralized states and vast colonial empires with the use of force. But in a more democratic world it becomes more difficult to suppress the preferences of ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities. Consequently, central governments are obliged to grant greater autonomy or even independence. In this regard, it will be interesting to see what is going to happen in China, a huge country which is currently “held together” by a communist dictatorship, as used to be the case in the Soviet Union. It is quite possible that the end of a communist dictatorship will imply a breakup of China, as in the former Soviet Union.
The second reason is due to international relations. In spite of the numerous conflicts of our time, fortunately we live in one of the most peaceful and prosperous periods in recent human history. All things considered, we are lucky when comparing our world with the world of our grandparents between 1914 and 1945, which was plagued by protectionist policies, economic depression, totalitarian regimes in the heart of Europe, ethnic genocide, and horrific world wars. The political and economic situation has dramatically improved after World War II in many parts of the world, largely as a consequence of increasingly free trade, and international agreements and institutions that fostered peace and economic integration. In Europe, NATO has reduced the cost of national self-defense, while the EU has removed many trade barriers among its members, creating a common market. In fact, such common market and European-level governance have also eroded the importance of domestic markets. This is the third reason why small countries can prosper: precisely because international openness and common market reduce the importance of large domestic markets. Even a small country can trade freely with the rest of the world. In this sense, the EU increases the attractiveness of regional secessions. The Spanish government is less useful to Catalonia if many of the prerogatives of Madrid are devolved to Brussels. Some time ago there was talk of a ”Europe of regions,” in which national capitals would lose prerogatives down (to regions) and upward (to Brussels). In fact, the difference of views between Scots and the rest of Britain about the benefits from European integration is very likely to play a central role in the stability or breakup of the UK.[4]
Nowadays, because of trade and international institutions, being small does not mean to be poor, while being big it is no guarantee of prosperity. Among the five richest states in the world in terms of per capita income, the most populous is Singapore, with just over five million inhabitants. In contrast, among the five largest countries in terms of population, the second richest after the US is Brazil, a middle-income country. In our above-mentioned work with Romain Wacziarg, we found that the economic growth rates are much higher among countries open to international trade, and that this effect is much greater for smaller countries than for larger countries. In other words, international trade is much more valuable for small countries which have small domestic markets.
In sum, economic analysis can provide a useful assessment of the costs and benefits of national size. And, overall, the costs to secede have gone down. However, the final choice regarding borders depends on citizens’ preferences. And such preferences are based not only on economic costs and benefits, but tend to involve other dimensions, such as culture and identity. In fact, the formation of new countries makes sense only when reflecting the preferences of most people concerned. Scotland did go in the right direction, allowing a democratic vote of its citizens. Scots did decide to remain in Britain, in large part because they were promised greater autonomy from London. However, as already mentioned, the UK continues to face the prospect of a breakup in the longer run, which can probably be averted only through a major reorganization of all populations involved, not only in Scotland but also in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. As part of such reorganization, as already mentioned, we expect that it will be important to reach a new and stable equilibrium regarding the permanence of the UK in the EU. In other terms, the stability of the UK is linked to the stability of the European Union. The situation in Spain seems to be even more complex, and potentially even more dangerous, because of a worrisome lack of cooperation and trust between Madrid and Barcelona.
While secessions are not as costly as they used to be, they continue to be expensive processes, because national borders continue to hamper economic exchanges. For example, despite a free trade agreement (NAFTA) and a strong military-political alliance, trade between the United States and Canada is far lower than among Canadian provinces, and an independent Quebec could see a fall in its trade with the rest of Canada. And while we now live in a relatively more peaceful world, conflicts and wars remain a constant threat, and there is no guarantee that current military alliances, such as NATO, will continue to be as effective at maintaining security in Europe or elsewhere.
In an ideal world, if the benefits exceed the costs from being united, those who want a larger state should compensate those who would prefer to leave. But this is much easier in theory than in practice. It is politically difficult for a central government to make credible promises to various minority groups without alienating the majority. British Prime Minister Cameron and his government, which promised so much to Scotland to avoid secession, already face this dilemma.
Moreover, what is really important from the point of view of the whole international community is that decisions about institutions and borders should be taken in a fully democratic way, while according maximum protection to minorities. Unfortunately this is far from the general way in which borders have been determined historically – e.g., in Yugoslavia and Sudan – or today – e.g., in the current conflict in Iraq and Syria.
A significant problem is that the international community itself is made up of existing states, and the governments of those states often have a vested interest in preserving the status quo. Here lurks perhaps the greatest risk. Namely that, in order to prevent the formation of new states or to discourage requests for greater autonomy, governments may jeopardize the large benefits already obtained from cooperation and international economic integration. This would be a serious mistake. National borders should not be viewed as permanent and eternal entities, but as human-made institutions, which can be changed in function of changing political and economic needs. And the forces of the past decades – democracy, international cooperation, economic integration – have paradoxically increased the incentives for autonomy and localism. This means that we should expect increasing demands for autonomy and independence from groups that do not feel represented by traditional central governments. The reaction should not be a stubborn defense of the status quo at all costs, but a pragmatic and creative use of democratic institutions.
In conclusion, when we look back at the trends of the past few decades, and project such trends into the near future, we expect that demand for autonomy and independence will remain high, as long as the world continues to be democratic, peaceful and open. But we also expect that such demand will be much less likely to bring about costly breakups and divisions if national governments and supranational organizations do not try to maintain the status quo at all costs, but are open to change and tolerant of diverse preferences within their borders. Then, we can expect that most people will decide to stay together after all. However, as in a marriage, sometimes a peaceful divorce is better than a painful forced union.
Notes
[1] A. Alesina and E. Spolaore, “On the Number and Size of Nations,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 1997.
[2] A. Alesina, E. Spolaore and R. Wacziarg, “Economic Integration and Political Disintegration, American Economic Review, December 2000.
[3] The Economist, “Goldilocks Nationalism,” September 25, 2014.
[4] A recent discussion of the political economy of European integration is in E. Spolaore “Monnet’s Chain Reaction and the Future of Europe, Vox EU, July 25, 2015. |
BROSSARD, Quebec—In the aftermath of defenceman P.K. Subban being traded to the Nashville Predators, text messages and tweets poured in.
The first text that came in struck a chord.
“This can’t be real,” said a social worker at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, her office mere steps from the atrium that bears Subban’s name.
“There’s going to be a lot of crying children here,” she added. “It’s not just the donation he made. He showed up here unannounced all the time, he developed relationships with them, brightened their lives. He was a God to them.”
Subban seemingly had that effect on almost everyone in Montreal.
On the ice, he lifted the fans out of their seats with his effervescence, his effort and his natural ability. He evoked a reaction no other player in Montreal has received since the great Guy Lafleur streaked down the wing as part of dynasty teams in the 1970s.
Over the past five seasons, the only two defencemen to accumulate more points than Subban’s 238 were Ottawa’s Erik Karlsson and San Jose’s Brent Burns. The former was given much more leeway by his coaches to create offence and the latter moonlighted as a right-winger at times.
Off the ice, Subban, a native of Toronto, gave all of himself to the people of Montreal.
Trade him? Fans scoffed at the idea, but Canadiens general manager Marc Bergevin didn’t.
Hours after pulling the trigger on what has to be one of the biggest trades the Canadiens have ever seen, Bergevin insisted he got the better end of the deal by bringing 30-year-old Shea Weber and his $7.8-million cap hit over the next ten seasons to Montreal. He wouldn’t give way to the suggestion that the decision to trade Subban was motivated by the defenceman’s over-the-top personality or the reported conflicts he may have been embroiled in with teammates or coaches.
“There was never an issue,” Bergevin said. “Never a problem. …I think it was blown out of proportion.”
But most general managers would hang up the phone on rival GMs inquiring about their franchise player. Not only did Bergevin not do that, he entertained several offers at the NHL Draft last Friday before taking Predators GM David Poile’s call.
“He got my attention when he brought up the name of Shea Weber,” said Bergevin before detailing that the conversation resumed Monday and the deal was formalized early Wednesday afternoon.
“It was essential to get a defenceman back who could play the kind of minutes Subban could,” he said in French.
Weber, a two-time Olympic champion with Team Canada and longtime captain of the Predators, is more than capable of doing just that.
The 6-foot-4, 236-pound Kelowna, B.C. native built his reputation on being one of the toughest competitors in the game. He cemented it on the strength of his fearsome shot, which has helped him produce 166 goals and 443 points in 763 NHL games.
But in evaluating the trade, it’s impossible to look past the fact that Weber’s skated through five of his prime years, playing in the heavy-hitting Western Conference, traveling many more miles than he would have if he’d spent his first 10 seasons out East.
“I believe he’s going to be good for a long time,” said Bergevin.
Weber, who turns 31 in August, had better be great for a long time. The man he’s replacing is 27 and still on the front nine of what’s already been an illustrious career.
“He’s the modern-day defenceman,” said Poile of Subban. “It’s players like P.K. Subban who are going to make the difference going from defence to offence, rushing the puck, carrying the mail as I like to say.”
Those facts, coupled with the disparity in age between the two players, should have enabled Bergevin to obtain more in this deal—a draft pick, a prospect, a forward with scoring potential.
And though Weber may prove to be a better fit on the Canadiens’ blue line and a better fit in coach Michel Therrien’s system, he can’t possibly rival Subban’s presence in Montreal. That’s why a funeral-like atmosphere hangs over the city.
“I’ve always felt wanted by the fans and the community there,” said Subban on a conference call from Paris.
But Bergevin and the Canadiens never seemed as enamoured. |
We all know that some climate change is natural, in fact, even without humans, the Earth’s climate changes. But, as we have added heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, we have seen human influence “emerge” from natural variability.
Droughts, one of the most intensely studied climate events, are a perfect example of an effect with both human and natural influences. Separating the relative strengths of the influences is a challenge for scientists. But, when we deal with drought, with its large social and economic costs, it is a challenge we must undertake.
A very recent study tries to do just this. Published in the Journal of Climate, authors Richard Seager and Martin Hoerling cleverly used climate models forced by sea surface temperatures to separate how much of the past century’s North American droughts have been caused by ocean temperatures, natural variability, and humans. What they found was expected (all three of these influence drought), but it's the details that are exciting. Furthermore, the methodology can be applied to other climate phenomena at other locations around the globe.
The very beginning of their paper sets a great framework for the study,
“In a nation that has been reeling from one weather or climate disaster to another, with record tornado outbreaks, landfalling tropical storms and superstorms, record winter snowfalls, and severe droughts, persistent droughts appear almost prosaic. Droughts do not cause the mass loss of life and property destruction by floods and storms. They are instead slow-moving disasters whose beginnings and ends are even often hard to identify. However, while the social and financial costs of hurricane, tornado, and flood disasters are, of course, tremendous, droughts are one of the costliest of natural disasters in the United States.”
Droughts can be caused by a variety of isolated or interacting phenomena. At its root, drought results from lowered precipitation and sometimes higher temperatures (which increase evaporation rates). The onset of drought can often be linked to variations in ocean temperatures. For instance, La Niña events in the Pacific Ocean as well as elevated Atlantic Ocean temperatures have coincided with United States droughts.
In fact the authors state that the three mid-to-late 19th century droughts, the Dust Bowl, and the drought in the 1950s all depended on persistent La Niña conditions. Of course, other factors played roles as well and ocean temperatures simply don’t explain everything. Perhaps the best example of multiple drought factors is the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Then, cool Pacific temperatures were not by themselves sufficient. It is likely that land use changes associated with farmland erosion and natural atmospheric variability also played roles.
The authors, therefore, wanted to move beyond a simplistic association of La Niña episodes and warm Atlantic Ocean waters with the occurrence of drought. They asked what other causes might there be and how will things change in the coming years and decades?
Using precipitation data from the University of East Anglia and ocean temperatures from the Hadley Centre combined with climate models, the researchers were able to add or omit the oceanic temperatures and compare the two sets of results. They found that ocean temperature variations cause up to 40% of the changes to precipitation, depending on location. They also found that the oceans can “nudge” the atmosphere to create conditions that are amenable to drought, and that temperature increases associated with human-driven global warming also play a role. In fact,
“The warming leads to a simulated long-term reduction in soil moisture which, although of weak magnitude compared to soil moisture deficits induced by naturally occurring droughts in the southwest United States, would imply that drought conditions may be entered more quickly and alleviated more slowly owing to long-term warming … Radiative forcing of the climate system is another source of predictability, although not really a welcome one, and rising greenhouse gases will lead to a steady drying of southwest North America. However this is a change that is only now beginning to emerge and currently is exerting less influence on precipitation variability than ocean variability or internal variability.”
This conclusion agrees with other researchers who have shown that, while human-emitted greenhouse gas warming may not cause a particular drought, it can make drought come on earlier, faster, and harder than it otherwise would.
There are two issues that I will be watching closely. The first is that any extra damage caused by drought as a consequence of human emissions will not scale linearly with attribution. For instance, if human impacts are responsible for 10% of a drought’s severity, it does not mean that human impacts are responsible for 10% of the social or economic cost.
A great example of this is with Superstorm Sandy. While admittedly not a drought, the example will make the point. It has been estimated that human-caused increases to water temperatures caused perhaps 10% more rain to fall. This extra 10% rainfall caused more than 10% of the economic damages associated with rainfall. Similarly, the human-induced sea level rise of 1 foot was only about 10% of the storm surge. But, this extra foot caused a disproportionate amount of flood damage. With this in mind, I would really like to know how the social and financial costs will change in the future as droughts set in earlier, faster, and harder because of greenhouse gas warming.
Secondly, there may well be a human influence on these otherwise natural causes. For instance, scientists have argued that greenhouse gas warming may change the ocean temperature fluctuations, particularly in the Pacific. Similarly, there are many new studies linking increasing greenhouse gases with atmospheric circulation changes. Since both of these features affect drought, they appear, at least to me, to be potential indirect human influences.
We will have to wait to learn more, let’s hope the wait isn’t too long. |
Interwave Studios, the company behind the much-discussed-like, says that it is working on an ending to its game -- but there's a little more to the story.The Iceberg Interactive-published Dark Matter was pulled from Steam and GOG.com this week, after it emerged that the game did not have a proper ending. Players who reached the end of the game are told "To be continued" -- although no sequel is planned.Interwave, the studio behind the game, has now said that this abrupt ending was as a result of its Kickstarter failing earlier this year, and that it would be adding an ending in a later patch."At present, the end of the game may cause confusion and is not satisfactory," Iceberg CEO Erik Schreuder admitted . "We sincerely apologise for this, as it is not of the standard we would expect. We are working to offer a more conclusive and satisfying ending to the game as we speak and expect a fix to appear as soon we are able to."However, what the team has failed to disclose is that it isn't working on the title anymore. After the Kickstarter failed earlier this year, most of the Interwave team was let go between July and August, and the vast majority of the originaldevelopers are not working on the title any more, according to Gamasutra sources.A source close to the studio told Gamasutra that Interwave is now a "sleeping company," with only a bare minimum of management at the studio, and insufficient developers to finish the title under current staffing levels. However, it's unclear whether third-parties would be able to finish the game separately of the original team.: Another source close to the studio has told Gamasutra that an external company is now handling the game's ending, and that none of the original developers are still working on the game.The entire Interwave team, minus two management staffers, were let go during July and August. When the Kickstarter failed, the original idea was to package it up asand use sales of the game to re-hire the original team and carry onwards -- however, this plan fell through. |
Finally, after years of watching youtube videos on that topic, I made it to my first C++ international conference! Thanks to my current employer King, I went last week to Meeting C++ in Berlin, which is, as far as I know, the biggest C++ event in Europe. I really enjoyed my time there with few hundred other fellow C++ enthusiasts. In this post, I will try to relate how I experienced the event and dress a list of the must-watch talks.
About meeting C++:
The concept:
Held in the magnificient Andels Hotel in Berlin, Meeting C++ offers the possibility to attend keynotes, talks and lightning talks (respectively lasting 2 hours, 50min and 5min) about our favourite language C++ for 3 days (one extra day added for the 6th edition of the event). C++ being multi-paradigm and a general-purpose programming language, the variety of the topics being discussed is pretty wide. It ranges from subject on "(Template) Meta-programming" to a deep dive on "How a C++ debugger work", from begginner friendly talks to hairy discussions on the yet-to-be-standardised white paper on std::expected<T, E>.
As some talks happen simulteanously in different rooms, you cannot physically attend all the talks. Instead, you would usually prepare your own schedule by trying to guess the content of the talks from their summary. It is always a dilemna to choose between a topic that you like with the risk to have nothing new to learn, and a brand-new topic for you, where sleepness may kick-in midway to the presentation. If you are curious and daring, the lightning talks on the last day permit you to randomly discover antyhing about C++ in succint presentations. In any case, you can always catch-up the missed talks by checking the Youtube channel.
Generally, I was not disapointed by the quality of the slides and the speakers. I picked up quite a few new concepts, prepared myself for the future of C++ (C++20) and refreshed myself on some fields I did not touch for a while.
More than just talks:
Where Meeting C++ really shines is in its capacity to gather roughly 600 passionated developers from various backgrounds (university, gaming industry, finance, Sillicon Valley's giants...) in one building and share. Just share anything about C++, about reverse-engineering, about your job, about your country, about the german food in your plate! The C++ community represented at this event is very active, open-minded and willing to help. The catering between the sessions and the dinner parties permit you to meet anyone easily. The even team also oganises some really fun events
In a room full of "world-class developers", it is easy to be intimidated, but you should not hesitate to reach them. They will not nitpick your words nor snob you. For some people, it is a dream to meet an Hollywood Star in the street, for me it was really delightful to have casual conversations with these "legendary" coders from the web.
The chief's suggestions of the day:
Here is a menu of most of the talks I attended. The legend is pretty simple:
💀 : The difficulty of the talk (💀: Begginer friendly, 💀💀: Intermediate, 💀💀💀: High exposure to C++'s dark corners)
★ : My interest for the talk (★: Good talk, ★★: Tasty talk, ★★★: Legendary talk)
I will not spoil all the talks, but simply try to give an overview of what you can expect within them. Note that all the talks are generally of high quality and my appreciation very subjective. I have seen people with very different "favorite talk".
[Keynote] Better Code: Human interface - By Sean Parent - 💀 ★★
Sean Parent is a Principal Scientist at Adobe Systems and has been working on the famous software Photoshop for more than 15 years. Sean Parent is a regular and prominent speaker at C++ conferences, one of his recently most famous talk being Better Code: Runtime Polyphormism from the same series of talks (Better Code) as the one he gave during Meeting C++.
Thorough his keynote, Sean was conveing the message that in order to have ergonomic human interfaces, you must design your code to reflects its usage through UI. By following such a principle, one can easily come-up with good namings, semantics and grouping of your UI components.
For instance, Sean was explaining that most of the menu actions in Photoshop somehow mapped some object, their methods, properties and most importantly their relations:
The menu action Create New Layer will somehow call the constructor of a class called something like Layer .
will somehow call the constructor of a class called something like . Likewise the action Delete A Layer would call its destructor.
would call its destructor. A selection in Photoshop will most likely translate in a container of objects.
As a counter-example he explained that the old version of Gmail used to have a confusing flow when it comes to the most trivial usage of a mail service: creating a mail. A link, which implies navigation, was used instead of button for the "compose message" action.
Sean put a strong emphasis that relationships are the most difficult part of an architecture to represent. He came up with few examples on how std::stable_partition can be used to solve in an elegant way the gathering and display of items
Overall a very nice talk, but on a very abstract topic, since not much has been explored on that subject yet! This is worth paying attention in game-programming where a good UI is a key-part of the success of a game.
[Talk] Threads and Locks must Go - Rainer Grimm - 💀💀 ★
In this talk Rainer Grimm, a German author of multiple C++ books, brought under the spotlight the concurrency features introduced by the new C++ standard C++17 and the coming one C++20. Here is a short summary of my favourite features:
For C++17 (and concurrency TS):
The new parallel algorithms in <algorithm> and the associated execution policies seq, par and par_unseq.
std :: vector < int > v = {...}; // A bit vector... std :: sort ( std :: execution :: par {}, v . begin (), v . end ()); // Due to "par", this **might** execute the sort in parallel using a thread pool of some sort.
The new std::future interface which permits to add continuations to the shared state using the then member function.
std :: future < int > foo (); auto f = foo (); f . then ([]( std :: future < int >& f ) { // Will be called when f is done. std :: cout << f . get (); // Will therefore not block. });
Hopefully for C++20:
The stackless coroutines as implemented by MSVC and clang. This introduce two keywords co_await and co_yield. Considering the previous example using std::future, it could be rewritten in the following way:
std :: future < int > foo (); int x = co_await foo (); // The continuation is "generated" by the compiler using the keyword co_await. std :: cout << x ; // Everything after co_await is implicitely part of the continuation.
A new synchronized keyword applying the transactional memory concept on a group of statements.
int x ; y ; // Global vars void foo () { // Foo can be called by multiple thread simuteanously. // Reads-writes on x and y are now thread-safe and synchronized. synchronized { ++ x ; ++ y ; } }
As explained by Rainer Grimm, we will have the possibility to easily bring concurrency to our C++ codebases without ressorting to the low-level, and tricky to get right, features like thread and locks. While I appreciated the talk, it lacked a bit of novelty as I was already aware of most of the features.
[Talk] Strong types for strong interfaces - Johnathan Boccora - 💀 ★★★
Related blog post: link
Video: link
A must watch! Even when facing some technical issues, Johnathan is very good speaker and I was quickly captivated by the topic of strong types. Jonathan is also a talented writer with his famous blog fluentcpp (I would really suggest to have a look at it once in a while).
As C++ developers, we heavily rely on the language's type system to express our intentions to other developers, to optimise our code and avoid shooting ourselves into our feet. Yet, we always reuse some types to express very different properties of our system. For instance to describe a person, you would use an int for her/his age and his/her weight. Did it ever come to you that the unit year (for age) should be a very different type than kg (for weight)? The concept of strong type would solve this problem by introducing new int-compatible types:
// We need to have these empty tag types to create entirely new types and not just weakly-typed aliases. using kg = strong_type < int , struct KgTag > ; using years = strong_type < int , struct YearsTag > ; void unsafe_create_person ( int age , int weight ); void create_person ( years age , kg weight ); // Explicit interface. int age = 42 ; int weight = 1337 ; unsafe_create_person ( weight , age ); // Oops I inversed the arguments but no compiler error. create_person ( years ( age ), kg ( weight ))); // Much less error-prone.
As a bonus, strong types can actually affect positively the performances of your codebase as the compiler can agressively optimise without violating strict-aliasing rules, since the types are now strictly unrelated.
This concept is not new and is already used in std::chrono or Boost.Unit, but it was really refreshing to have an explanation with simple words and good examples! I am now very keen to use this in my personal projects and at work too.
[Talk] How C++ Debuggers Work - Simon Brand (4/5) - 💀💀 ★★
Related blog post: link
Video: link
Simon Brand, also known as TartanLlama (a really fancy fictious name for a Scott), presented us how a mixture of calls to ptrace, injection of the int3 opcode, parsing of the DWARF format and perseverance is the base to create a debugger on a x86(_64) architecture with a Unix platform (or Linux platform only if you OS specific calls like process_vm_readv, process_vm_writev).
Unlike some of the other talks, it would be hard to give succinct code examples, but I trully appreciated his presentation! When it comes to low-level APIs for debbuging and reverse-engineering, I have a better understanding of the Windows platform. I think that Simon did an excellent job to help me transfer my knowledge to the Unix world.
If one day I have to tackle the creation of a debugger on Unix, I would certainely come back to this talk or follow his series of blog posts on the same subject. I also think that as programmer, it is always beneficial to have some knowledge on the underlying mechanims of the tools you use (gdb, or lldb in that case). I would, therefore suggest to watch that talk to any C++ enthusiast willing to progress in their art of programming.
[Talk] The Three Little Dots and the Big Bad Lambdas - Joel Falcou - 💀💀💀 ★★★
I am always excited by watching a talk from Joel Falcou: he is a venerable (template) metra-programmer wizzard with a very didactic approach to explain things (and also we share the same nationality \O/). Once again, I was not disapointed by his session.
With a lot of humour, Joel introduced a new facet to meta-programming in C++. We used to have template meta-programming to manipulate types at compile-time (and with difficulties values), then came constexpr to ease value computation, and recently a Louis Dionne came-up with a powerful combo of these two cadrants with Boost.Hana. Joel statement was that lambdas expressions combined with auto and parameter packs are powerful enough to replace some cases where we would have resort to use template meta-programming or the uglier infamous macros! Joel came to that conclusion after being inspired by the language MetaOCaml.
Let's say that you want to fill a vector with push-back instruction generated at compile-time:
#include <tuple> #include <iostream> #include <array> #include <utility> #include <vector> template < class F , std :: size_t ... I > void apply_imp ( F && f , std :: index_sequence < I ... > ) { ( f ( I ), ...); // C++17 fold expression. } template < int N , class F > void apply ( F && f ) { apply_imp ( f , std :: make_index_sequence < N > {}); } std :: vector < int > bob ; auto bind = []( auto & v , auto f ) { return [ & v , f ]( auto x ){ f ( v , x ); }; }; auto push_back = bind ( bob , []( auto & v , int x ) { v . push_back ( x * 3 ); }); apply < 3 > ( push_back ); // Will generate at compile time: // bob.push_back(0); // bob.push_back(3); // bob.push_back(6);
This example is fairly trivial and there would be a high chance that you would reach the same assembly output using a simple for loop. But it is very interesting to notice that lambdas are reusable type-safe units of code that you transport, combine and "instantiate" at any time. Performance-wise, lambdas are pretty incredible according to Joel's measurement on his linear-algebra project. C++17 constexpr lambdas could also help on that topic. One drawback might be the debugging complexity when navigating in nested lambdas. I still need to wrap my head around this new concept and I am eager to rewatch Joel's talk to explore it more!
[Keynote] Its complicated! - Kate Gregory - 💀 ★★★
While excellent, Kate's keynote would be very hard to summarise correctly within few paragraphs. It makes you reflect on the difficulties to introduce C++ to newcomers. You would hope that there is a subset of the language that could be easily assimilate by anyone, Kate argues that the reality is sadly more complicated than that. Just have a look at how long are the C++ core guidelines on passing parameters to function calls. One day or another, a begginer must learn on how to pass parameters with good semantics and in an optimised fashio. Well, good luck to her/him! On the other hand, it does not mean that the language could have been designed in a simpler way. What we should strive for instead might be better naming of these concepts: the acronym RAII (Resource Acquisition Is Initialization) is obviously not as straightforward as COW (Copy-on-write). Whether you are a "newbie" or the best "lead over-engineer" of your company, this talk is really worth a look!
[Talk] There Is A New Future - Felix Petriconi - 💀💀 ★★
Felix Petriconi and Sean Parent have been working on a the stlab library for quite some time. stlab takes the best of the various future implementations std::future (C++11), std::future (C++14) or boost::future, and adds a bit of it owns features on top of it. For instance, stlabs supports passing explicit executors to control where async will execute the tasks, and where the continuation associated with then will be executed too. Executors are akin to event-loops (or message-pumps in the .Net world) that will process the tasks.
// This task will be executed on ``an_executor`` auto f = stlab :: async ( an_executor , [] { return 42 ; }); // The continuation on another executor. f . then ( another_executor , []( int x ) { std :: cout << x ; });
While executors are present in Boost.Thread, stlabs's channels are unique to this future library. Channels are one of the Go language's favorite toy. It is a neat way to create communication between a sender and a receiver on different executors:
auto [ sender , receiver ] = channel < int > ( receive_executor ); // Create the link. receiver | []( int x ) { std :: cout << x ; }; // Define what should happen at the reception. // Establish the connections. receiver . set_ready (); sender ( 42 ); // Sent 42 through the channel. // Receiver will print 42 when executing the task.
I really like some of the features in stlabs, hopefully this could be incorporated into the C++ standard (the executors are down in the pipe of the standardisation process).
[Talk] Introduction to proposed std::expected - Niall Douglas - 💀💀💀 ★
Are you the kind of person that would rather have errors on the return values rather than using exceptions. Niall has a solution for you: std::expected<T, E>. You can see std::expected<T, E> either as a std::optional<T> with a empty state containing an error for being empty, or as a std::variant<T, E> where you agree that the first alternative is the return value and the second alternative is the potential error. Example:
std :: expected < int , std :: string > foo ( int x ) { if ( x < 0 ) return std :: make_unexpected ( "x < 0" ); return 42 ; } auto result = foo ( - 1 ); if ( ! result ) std :: cout << result . error (). value (); // Prints " x < 0".
std::expected starts to be cumbersome to use when combining or propogating returned results. To palliate this problem, std::expected exposes a Monad interface, with the bind member function coming directly to your mind. If you are a Haskell user, std::expected should remind you of the Maybe Monad. Using bind is still verbose and hopefully we obtain a dedicated keyword try to ease our pain.
[Talk] The most valuable values - Juan Pedro Bolívar Puente - 💀💀 ★★
During his presentation, Juan actively promoted value semantic over reference semantic and did so with some analogies from our physical world (from our dear philosopher Platos) and code examples. The talk quickly moved onto immutability and functionnal programming applied to user interfaces. There is a trend in the web sphere to follow a software architectural pattern called flux with a main implementation the redux framework. Arguably, flux is a glorified good old MVC (Model View Controller) architecture with a strong emphasis on the immutability of the model and strict flow on the interactions between the components of MVC. Model, View and Controller also get respectively renamed to Store, View and Dispatcher. An action submitted to the Dispatcher will update the Store with a new Store in a determinstic way, which will imply a redraw of the View.
Juan succeeded to mimic redux in the C++ world using his library immer. To demonstrate the capabilities of his library, Juan recreated an emacs-like editor. The beauty of having an immutable Store is truly expressed in the time-traveling machine that you can create from it: by saving all the states of the Store, you can easily come back to a previous state of your application (similar to undo / redo). You should absolutely watch the video to understand how easy it seems to implement this. On top of that you will have the chance to watch what might be the most audacious ending of a C++ talk I have ever seen.
[Talk] Reactive Equations - André Bergner - 💀💀💀 ★★★
Github project: link
Video: link
As a meta-programmer aficionado, this was the most "devilish" talk, and therefore highly thrilling, I attended during the event. It was not the first time I heard from André Bergner, he attended the cppcon in 2015 and I remembered that he presented a nice way to have currying on your function. This time, André focused on reactive equations. If this sounds foreign to you, you might be more familiar with data binding in Qt QML using Javascript expression. André's reactive equations are similar but with simpler expressions:
// ***** Using a pseudo-language, let's define the equations ***** x : float y : float z : float y = x * 42 // When x is updated, y will be automatically updated. z = y + x // When y or x is updated, z will be automatically updated.
You may notice that I didn't write any C++ code. By default C++ would not permit to have expressions that update themselves by "magic" if one variable changes. You could write the update logic manually, but with a lot of long equations, this becomes very error prone. Instead André created a DSL (Domain Specific Language), which is equivalent to create a language within C++ itself. To define his DSL, André used expression templates. Expression templates are tricky creatures, which roughly consist in encapsulating C++ expressions into a type at compile-time. This type will retain all the operators / functions (let's call them operations) that you applied in your expression. These operations can be queried at compile-time to generate other expression that you will execute at runtime. In André's case, the encapsulated operations from his reactive equations would be used to automagically generate the update logic. To facilitate his task, André heavily relied on Boost.Proto. If you are versed in the art of meta-programming, this will certainely be entertaining to you!
[Talk] Free your functions - Klaus Iglberger - 💀 ★★★
This was a glorious hymn to our beloved free functions by Klaus Iglberger. Programmers often resort to use member functions and inheritance to provide polyphormism in C++, often overlooking that free functions and overloading would be a smarter choice.
Let's take a situation where you would need to implement a serialise function for a bunch of unrelated types. Would rather use the implementation 1?
struct serialisable { virtual ~ serialisable (); virtual std :: string serialise (); }; struct A : serialisable { std :: string serialise () override { /* return something... */ }; }; struct B : serialisable { std :: string serialise () override { /* return something... */ }; };
Or the solution 2?
struct A {}; struct B {}; std :: string serialise ( const A & a ) { /* return something... */ } std :: string serialise ( const B & b ) { /* return something... */ }
As Kate explained, it is complicated! If you are looking for runtime polyphormism, then you will certainely use the solution 1. If not, the solution 2 is actually preferable. It has a lot of advantages that Klaus explained for one full hour. My favorite one being that you can extend your polyphormism to types that you do not own. Let's say that you want to serialise std::vector, you can simply write an overload for it:
template < class T > std :: string serialise ( const std :: vector < T >& v ) { /* return something... */ }
In practice, nothing prevent you from mixing a both solutions to your needs. One counter-argument being that free functions have an ugly syntax: v.serialise(); feels more natural than serialize(v); . That issue could have been solve with the unified call syntax proposal by Bjarne Stroustrup and Herb Sutter. Sadly, it was rejected by the C++ committee.
[Talk] Reader-Write Lock versus Mutex - Understanding a Lost Bet - Jeffrey Mendelsohn - 💀💀💀 ★★
Jeffrey Mendelson from Bloomberg had a bet with a colleague on whether a readers-writer lock would be faster than a mutex to protect the access on a resource that could be written by a single writer, but could have multiple readers simultaneously. The readers-writer lock would follow exactly that behaviour (multiple readers, single writer). The mutex would keep the exclusivity to one writer or one reader only! Jeffrey lost the bet, but that did not hindered him from exploring the reasons behind his lost. It was challenging for me to grasp all the implications on this topic, but here is what I understood:
Jeffrey 's reader-writer lock was made of atomic variables to keep track of the amount of readers and writers. If the resource was currently written onto, the readers and other writers would wait onto a semaphor to be waken-up later on.
's was made of atomic variables to keep track of the amount of readers and writers. If the was currently written onto, the and other would wait onto a semaphor to be waken-up later on. If the amount of time spent by the readers or the writers on the resource is fairly long, the readers-writer lock will actually perform better than the mutex as multiple reader can process simultanesouly.
or the on the resource is fairly long, the will actually perform better than the as multiple can process simultanesouly. On the other hand, if the writing and reading operations are very fast, the atomic operations on the counters will start to be costly comparatively. Atomics tend to have nonnegligible effects on the cache lines of your CPU(s). In this case, loosing the ability to have multiple readers is actually not as dramatic as you would think in comparison of stressing your cache.
and are very fast, the on the counters will start to be costly comparatively. tend to have nonnegligible effects on the cache lines of your CPU(s). In this case, loosing the ability to have multiple is actually not as dramatic as you would think in comparison of stressing your cache. Jeffrey came up with an hybrid solution that combines both a readers-writer lock and a fallback to a mutex that outperformed the previous solutions.
Once the video of this talk is uploaded, I must have a complete rewatch of it. It always amusing that our intuitions can be entirely wrong when it comes to concurrency and programming.
[Other] The not-so-secret lightning talks
Videos: link, link, link, link, link, link
Before the last Keynote, we had the pleasure to listen to some not-so-unexpected lightning talks. I will not spoil too much of it!
I just want to express my gratitude to Guy Davidson and Sean Parent for bringing diversity in the C++ community under the spotlight. It was more than welcome and I am glad of these initiatives.
Conclusion:
Once again, I was amazed by the C++ community and how a group of dedicated persons can build such nice event. I am already eager to fly to one of the big conference next year: Meeting C++ or cppcon. I would also encourage anyone with a bit of passion for this language or programming in general to give a try to conferences or local groups, you will discover more than you would expect! |
Chitose Suzuki/Pool James Stumbo (left) and Kevin Norton, both of Iowa, entered the courtroom to attend their arraignment in Boston on Monday.
They made sinister threats in an Internet chat room, shared a photograph of firearms on social media, and drove 25 hours from central Iowa to the Pokémon World Championship at the Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center with weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in their car’s trunk, authorities said.
Police said the arrests of James Stumbo and Kevin Norton over the weekend on gun charges prevented a “potential tragedy.”
“We can never read someone’s mind,” Police Superintendent Paul A. Fitzgerald said, when asked what the men intended to do with their guns. “What we can read is what they were saying and the actions that they took, bringing the weapons they were showing online as a threat.”
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Police said they worked on the case with Boston’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership that includes federal agents.
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“That could have been a mass shooting,” Fitzgerald said. “So obviously the federal agencies were concerned with that.”
On a public Facebook page called “Mayhem Pokemon Crew,” Stumbo, 27, allegedly posted a photo of a white sedan with two long guns crossed over the trunk. “Kevin Norton and I are ready for worlds Boston here we come!!!” he wrote.
Before his arrest, according to prosecutors, Norton, 18, was not allowed access to a chat room from which he was banned for bullying, and allegedly stated, “Oh, ok, that’s fine then I will just shoot him on Friday thanks.”
Police say they found an AR-15 rifle, 12-gauge Remington shotgun, ammunition, and a hunting knife in the 2002 Chevrolet Prizm the two men had driven to Boston.
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Boston Municipal Court Judge Lisa A. Grant on Monday ordered Norton and Stumbo held without bail. She set a dangerousness hearing for Sept. 1. The men stood expressionless at their arraignment as authorities laid out the charges against them.
Both men were registered for the Pokémon tournament, police said. Stumbo appears to have won state tournaments this year in Nebraska and Minnesota, according to online results. The game is an international sensation, pitting players against each other using Pokémon trading cards.
Suffolk District Attorney’s Office James Stumbo (left) and Kevin Norton.
The two men had allegedly threatened specific individuals and discussed mass shootings in online chat rooms.
One alleged post by Stumbo said, “My AR15 says you lose.”
Authorities have not said what they believe motivated the men. In court Monday, defense lawyers for the men said neither has a criminal record and both are employed.
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“Inside, there were a lot of kids, a lot of gamers, and thank God we were able to cut off whatever these two individuals coming from Iowa were up to,” Police Commissioner William B. Evans said.
The men are charged with unlawful possession of a firearm, unlawful possession of ammunition, and unlawful possession of a large capacity rifle, Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said in a statement. They currently do not face charges for making threats, but the investigation is ongoing, Conley said.
News of the charges stunned passionate Pokémon players.
Jacob Van Wagner, the world champion in the Pokémon Trading Card Game’s masters division, said he was surprised anyone from the Pokémon community could consider mass violence.
“The main thing that keeps me in the game is my constant desire for competition and to reconnect with old friends that I’ve made throughout the years,” he said in an online exchange with the Globe. “It’s one of the friendliest environments you could ever ask for.”
Justin Lo, 23, knew the accused men from Iowa’s competitive Pokémon circuit. Lo traveled with them across the Midwest to compete in Pokémon tournaments over the past four years, he said.
“I would never think of these two as plotters of any kind of violence,” Lo said in a Globe interview. “They were good to everybody who came up to talk to them. They were very smart, very good Pokémon players.” He remembered them as goofy, funny friends who loved the Pokémon community, he said. Neither ever mentioned guns and violence in Lo’s presence.
But Lo, an Iowa State University student, said he noticed a change over the past two years. Stumbo and Norton became much closer, and Norton’s online persona dramatically shifted. Back when Lo and Norton became Facebook friends, Norton’s Facebook picture was of himself, smiling into the camera. Today, it’s a picture of Norton aiming a handgun, Lo said.
Fitzgerald, who commands the Boston Police Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Analysis, said at a Monday news conference that a moderator in a private online forum about Pokémon noted the threatening postings. Officials with Pokémon International, which oversees the trading card and game brand, notified the Hynes Convention Center, and officials there told police.
Hynes security officials stopped Stumbo from entering the convention center Thursday evening and notified police, according to police reports. While officers were escorting Stumbo from the building, they found Norton as he arrived.
Norton told officers he had a shotgun and Stumbo’s rifle in his car, which was parked in a public garage, the report says. Neither man could produce a firearm license, according to authorities.
Police executed a search warrant on the car and found the weapons Friday, and the next day arrested Norton and Stumbo at the Red Roof Inn in Saugus, police said. Evans said police let the men go back to their hotel Thursday feeling confident that the public was in no danger. Police declined to say if they had kept the men under surveillance in the meantime. Norton and Stumbo were banned from the Pokémon event following the alleged threats, officials said.
Under Iowa law, it would be legal for residents to obtain an AR-15 rifle or a 12-gauge shotgun, assuming neither gun was modified or “sawed off,” said Ross Loder, a bureau chief for the Iowa Department of Public Safety.
Iowa does require a permit to acquire pistols and handguns, he said.
Stumbo’s attorney, Steven Goldwyn of Cambridge, sought to shift responsibility to Norton. “There is no probable cause for arrest,” Goldwyn said in court. “My client was not found in possession of the firearms or ammunition and the car belongs to Mr. Norton.”
Norton’s lawyer asked the judge for leniency, contending that his client has “been fully cooperative.”
Andy Rosen of the Globe staff, and Globe correspondents Virgie Hoban and Jacqueline Tempera contributed to this report. Mark Arsenault can be reached at [email protected] . Follow him on Twitter @BostonGlobeMark . Astead W. Herndon can be reached at [email protected] . Follow him on Twitter @AsteadWH |
A Canadian man who is being sued by his estranged mother for financial support is trying to have the case thrown out.
Ken Anderson, 47, says his parents left him when he was a teenager in the western province of British Columbia, according to Canadian media reports.
Shirley Anderson, who is in her 70s, sued him in 2000 under a rarely used provincial law that entitles parents to maintenance from offspring.
British Columbia's Supreme Court has reserved judgment.
Ms Anderson has been seeking C$750 (£480) a month each from her son and two of his siblings.
Mr Anderson says he was left behind at 15 when his parents and younger brother moved from the British Columbian town of Osoyoos to the province's Kootenays region.
"We don't have a relationship. I haven't talked to her in years and years and years," Mr Anderson told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
His lawyer, Stanley Schwartz, asked a judge to throw out the case because he said Ms Anderson had not submitted financial documents ordered by the court.
The case was brought under a section of British Columbia's Family Relations Act, which says parents "dependent on a child because of age, illness, infirmity or economic circumstances" are entitled to support from their adult offspring.
In 2007, legal professionals recommended that this section of the statute be repealed. |
statigr.am/kimbo_ks13 A study by three scientists in the American Political Science Review finds that voters are not competent at accurately evaluating incumbent performance and are easily swayed by rhetoric, unrelated circumstances and recent events.
Gregory Huber, Seth Hill, and Gabriel Lenz constructed a 32-round game where players received payments from a computer "allocator." The goal is to maximize the value of those payments.
Halfway through, at round sixteen, the player had to decide whether to get a new allocator or to stick with the old one.
The allocators pay out over a normal distribution based on a randomly selected mean. Getting a new allocator means that a new mean is selected. This was meant to simulate an election based on performance.
The group ran three experiments where they changed some of the rules of the game in order to find out how voters could be manipulated or confused over performance. Essentially, how good were voters at accurately analyzing the performance of the "allocator?"
The first experiment merely alerted the player at round twelve that they would have the chance to pick a new allocator at round sixteen. This "election in November" reminder made the player weight recent performance in rounds 12-16 over earlier performance in rounds 1-12. |
In the first study to pinpoint the cause of narcolepsy in humans, UCLA/VA researchers report in the September issue of the peer-reviewed journal Neuron that the dramatic, degenerative loss of a specific type of brain cell triggers the debilitating sleep disorder.
Hcrt cells, or neurons containing the neuropeptide hypocretin, are located exclusively in the brain's hypothalamus. Hypocretin sends messages to numerous regions throughout the central nervous system, including the major mass of cells that regulates sleep.
The researchers found that the number of Hcrt neurons in narcoleptics was 85 percent to 95 percent less than the number found in non-narcoleptic brains.
Other types of neurons that intermix with Hcrt cells in normal brains were not reduced in number in the narcoleptic brain, indicating that cell loss was confined to Hcrt neurons. In addition, the presence of gliosis, or neural scarring, in the hypocretin cell region indicates a degenerative process.
The discovery suggests that the replacement of missing hypocretin neuropeptides produced by Hcrt cells may reverse some of the symptoms of the incurable disease.
"The findings end a 120-year search for the cause of narcolepsy and open new paths for treating this incurable disease," said Dr. Jerome M. Siegel, professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA, chief of neurobiology research for the Greater Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Healthcare System, and senior author of the study. "While it is clear that the degenerative loss of Hcrt cells is directly linked to narcolepsy, the cause of this cell loss remains to be determined. An autoimmune attack on Hcrt neurons or a sensitivity of the cells to specific environmental or biological toxins are possibilities."
Narcolepsy affects approximately 1 in 2,000 individuals (about 125,000 in the United States) and usually develops in young adults in their 20s and 30s, progressing over a period of one or two years and then stabilizing.
The disease causes overwhelming sleepiness and cataplexy, a loss of muscle tone triggered by sudden strong emotions such as laughter and impulsive anger. Most narcoleptic patients experience sleepiness rather than cataplexy.
Narcoleptics go through life feeling the way most individuals would feel after staying awake for 48 hours. They awake refreshed from naps but soon feel sleepy again. Their nighttime sleep is fragmented, with fewer of the deeper stages of sleep.
-UCLA-
DP396 |
It may only be Denver’s second Breakfast Burrito Day (thank you, Mayor Hancock!), but we’re already loving the spicy day. (Okay, so he hasn’t made any proclamations this year, but we’re just going with it.)
To celebrate the “food holiday”, Illegal Pete’s is giving away a FREE breakfast burrito on Saturday, October 13 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. — no purchase or coupon necessary.
Choose from meat and vegetarian options. Limit one per person. You must be present, so no picking up any for friends or family.
A breakfast burrito usually sells for $4.49, so it’s definitely the perfect way for hungry bargain hunters to wake up on a Saturday mornin’.
All of its locations are participating, except for 1124 13th St. in Boulder:
Boulder – 1447 Pearl St.
Denver – 1744 E. Evans Ave.
Denver – 2001 E. Colfax Ave.
Denver – 270 S. Broadway
Denver – 1851 W. 38th Ave.
Denver – 1530 16th St. #101
Ft. Collins – 320 Walnut St.
Greenwood Village – 5312 DTC Blvd. #400
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The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) is raising serious concerns about a nominee for the North Carolina Board of Education, who once supported an effort to remove a book from a local district’s high school.
In April, Governor Pat McCrory nominated J. Todd Chasteen for a seat on the state Board of Education. Some critics have pointed out that Chasteen — who is a vice president and the chief legal officer at the Christian missionary group Samaritan's Purse – has no experience in public education.
In a June 3 letter to North Carolina lawmakers, NCAC expressed particular concern over Chasteen's role in the 2013 effort to remove Isabel Allende's acclaimed novel The House of the Spirits from the high school honors English curriculum in Watauga County schools.
Although he has no children in the district's public school system, Chasteen aligned himself with pro-censorship advocates. He called The House of the Spirits a "sex book" with "59 sexual references," and claimed that "dysfunctional sexuality" is "the main theme of the book."
Throughout this affair, Mr. Chasteen displayed little or no appreciation for the constitutional obligations of public school officials, who are prohibited from removing educational material because some object to or disapprove of its content. And by rejecting district policy to accommodate differing views by providing student an alternative text, Chasteen endorsed a view that would have public school educators privilege the views of some parents over others.
While Chasteen certainly has a First Amendment right to voice his opinions, the NCAC argues that his disregard for First Amendment principles and principles of academic freedom, and his willingness to impose his worldview upon students throughout the public school system, are incompatible with the Board's mission of preparing students for further education, work, and global citizenship.
As the NCAC letter states, "In short, Mr. Chasteen's appointment to the Board would undermine its credibility as a guarantor of a robust, well-rounded education for all of the state's public school students."
Read the full letter below, or in full screen view.
[scribd id=267663264 key=key-DWTHaOzJx2DkoSsfJI6B mode=scroll] |
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan returned from an overseas trip today, greeted by a rally organized at the airport by the ruling party while the rest of the country saw anti-government protests continue, and demands for Erdogan’s resignation grow.
It wouldn’t seem like staying the course is even an option at this point, but Erdogan insisted that was the plan, promising to go through with his plan to demolish an Istanbul park despite it having sparked what is now being called the “Turkish Summer.”
Instead of hinting at any sort of deal to end the demonstrations, Erdogan immediately delivered a speech angrily condemning the protesters as “terrorists,” and insisting that what had started as a minor “environmental” protest was now full of crazed terror groups determined to “burn and destroy.”
The protests have now stretched nearly a week, with over 4,000 demonstrators wounded in police crackdowns, three killed and a huge number of others disappeared on various pretexts, from participating in rallies to criticizing police on Twitter.
Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz |
In spite of an annual operating budget of more than $3 million -- plus tens of millions more being spent on a runway expansion and other capital projects -- the GCIA terminal sits mostly empty. And you pay for it. (Published Friday, Oct. 26, 2012)
Just north of the Indiana Toll Road, off Cline Avenue, sits the Gary/Chicago International Airport.
Its name sounds substantial. Its annual budget is in the millions of dollars. And Chicagoans -- along with citizens of Gary -- spend millions in tax dollars every year to help keep it in business.
But in spite of an annual operating budget of more than $3 million -- plus tens of millions more being spent on a runway expansion and other capital projects -- the GCIA terminal sits mostly empty. The front entrance is usually locked; the parking lot is nearly vacant, and the skies are -- for the most part -- empty.
That’s because GCIA has only one passenger flight -- Allegiant Airlines Flight 650. It flies nonstop from Sanford, Fla., to Gary, where passengers unload and new passengers board. Allegiant changes the flight number to 651, and the plane takes off and heads back to Sanford.
It’s time on the ground in Gary: Usually less than one hour.
Once the flight is gone, the terminal is shut down and locked up for several days. The Allegiant flight only comes to Gary twice a week, on Thursdays and Sundays. That’s it.
It’s one of the many curiosities of The Little Airport that Could.
While the airport gets substantial funding from the City of Gary, the State of Indiana and the federal government, it gets additional millions of dollars every year from the City of Chicago -- more than $3.6 million dollars since the beginning of 2011 alone, financial documents reveal. Since 1995, Chicago has sent a total of more than $26 million to help operate the Gary airport.
It all comes from an agreement signed by the cities of Chicago and Gary in 1995, which proposed "the development, enhancement, and operation of existing airports and development of any new Regional Airport serving the Bi-State Region."
The agreement is commonly referred to as "The Compact," and the two mayors who signed it -- Richard M. Daley of Chicago and Thomas Barnes of Gary -- originally saw it as a fairly straightforward three-year deal. But it continued, and throughout the years it has often been used as a pawn in the political fights for a third airport in Chicago to counter the proposals to build such an airport in Chicago’s 10th Ward, or -- more recently -- in far-south-suburban Peotone.
"The Compact" was also floated as a possible solution to the closing of Meigs, even before Daley ordered his bulldozers out to dig up Meigs’ runways in the middle of the night in March of 2003.
Now -- seventeen years later -- "The Compact" still exists, and the money still flows in from Chicago.
Part of "The Compact" requires Chicago to send monthly checks to the Gary Airport from ticket fees paid by passengers arriving and departing at O’Hare and Midway Airports. Those fees alone amounted to $2.4 million paid to Gary in the past year and a half. This "Passenger Facility Charge" -- or PFC money -- is earmarked for capital projects like Gary’s 1900-foot runway extension, currently under construction, and the relocation of railroad tracks, which must be moved to provide sufficient clearance for larger planes to land on the newly-extended runway.
But on top of the passenger fees, Chicago taxpayers also send money to GCIA, every year, to help with the daily operation of the airport. In the past year and a half, that’s amounted to more than $1.1 million from Chicago taxpayers, over and above the $2.4 million from the ticket fees.
And Gary taxpayers pay millions more, each year, as well.
To date, there hasn’t been much to show for all that money. GCIA has seen commercial service come and go in past years -- notably PanAm, Southeast, and Hooters Air. There have been long periods where no passenger planes landed there. Even Allegiant, with its one flight twice a week, is technically not a commercial flight, but a travel service which operates charter flights to smaller-traffic airports. It just started flying in to Gary last February.
The flight itself appears to be a success, with low-cost tickets and easy online booking that regularly attracts a full load of passengers. But the question remains: Is all this tax money worth it, for just two passenger flights a week?
Karen Freeman-Wilson is Gary’s newly-elected, Harvard-educated mayor, and she has often cited GCIA as one of her top priorities for Gary’s struggling future. She is happy to see the nearly-full passenger loads on the Allegiant flight.
"I think it’s indicative of the demand that is pent up for the Gary airport," she said.
But she acknowledges that -- to date at least -- far less business has been generated than the money that is pumped in.
"I think a lot has to do with the marketing effort," she said. "I think it’s important to be able to market Gary as a destination -- to market its proximity not just to Chicago but to downtown Chicago."
And once the runway expansion is complete, Freeman-Wilson sees things taking off.
"Ultimately I think there’s an opportunity for commercial and cargo service here," she said.
But the runway expansion has been a difficult and expensive process, primarily because of unforeseen difficulties in moving the railroad tracks, as well as dealing with construction waste and even oil dumped in the runway’s path.
In an effort to see what happens during a typical day at the terminal, NBC Chicago went to the Gary/Chicago International Airport on a Wednesday. There was not an Allegiant flight scheduled for that day, but the thought was that maybe the terminal would be open for other operations.
That was not the case. The front doors were locked and the place was deserted.
So NBC Chicago returned, unannounced, at noon on a Thursday, when Allegiant does fly in. This time the front door was unlocked, but inside the airport was still virtually empty, with the lights turned off, the ticket counter dark and the baggage carousel silent and still.
A plaque on the wall noted that the terminal was renovated a decade ago. It still looks good as new.
The only people there were a security guard and approximately 15 TSA agents. Their supervisor said they are routinely borrowed from other airports -- South Bend and Chicago -- to come to GCIA twice a week to handle the Allegiant flight.
Finally, about an hour and a half before Allegiant’s scheduled arrival, the airport suddenly sprung to life. Crowds of couples and families snaked along the previously-deserted rope lines in front of the ticket counter. Others removed their shoes and loaded up grey plastic bins to go through security. And when the Allegiant flight arrived at about 2:50 p.m., more passengers streamed out into the terminal and outside to waiting cars. The terminal was truly bustling.
But after another hour, the approximately 140 passengers booked for Sanford were boarded, and the plane took off, not to return for three days.
Then the TSA agents packed up. The ticket counter closed down. And it was lights out until Sunday.
Statement from Chicago's Department of Aviation:
The City of Chicago continues to support the Compact as Gary Airport serves as a reliever airport in the regional Chicago airport system. The City recognizes that these are times of tight budgets and has reduced the annual contribution to the Chicago Gary Regional Airport Authority.
Takeoffs/Landings for area airports from Jan. 1 - Aug. 1, 2012:
Unit 5 looked at the daily air traffic -- including every takeoff and landing of passenger, private, and corporate aircraft -- at Gary/Chicago International Airport, and compared its traffic to that at other comparable airports in the Chicago/Northwest Indiana area. In our survey of various time periods covering 2012, we found that Gary (GYY) had less daily traffic than Waukegan Regional Airport (UGN), Dupage Airport in West Chicago (DPA), Chicago Executive Airport in Wheeling (PWK), and Chicago Rockford Airport in Rockford (RFD).
In this chart, every takeoff or landing is counted separately. For example, if a plane lands at an airport, and then takes off two hours later, it would count twice on this chart.
One significant exception was August 2012, when GCIA served as the staging area for aircraft used in the Chicago Air and Water Show. |
Use Docker containers on the fly is quite easy but sometimes container management by shell becomes difficult. For easily launch and restart your container, we can use a Systemd unit.
Create Unit file
In this example, I use a REDIS image that run with docker.
We need to create the file /etc/systemd/system/redis.service :
[Unit] Description=Redis Service After=docker.service Requires=docker.service [Service] ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker kill redis ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker rm redis ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker pull redis:latest ExecStart=/usr/bin/docker run -d --name redis --restart always redis:latest ExecStop=/usr/bin/docker stop redis [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target
This file will wait until the docker service is running then delete old redis container, pull last redis image and finally launch our container.
Let's enable redis.service and launch it :
systemctl enable redis systemctl daemon-reload systemctl start redis
Verify our container
After the systemctl start you can check your running container with docker ps :
Using with docker-compose
You can use a Systemd unit file for Docker-compose too like this :
ExecStartPre=-/usr/local/bin/docker-compose -f compose-file.yml down ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/docker-compose -f compose-file.yml up -d ExecStop=/usr/local/bin/docker-compose -f compose-file.yml stop
With this, you can start your stack of containers using Systemd. |
Cybersecurity researcher Charlie Miller and his fellow researcher Collin Mulliner plan to present research on a huge iPhone security hole Thursday at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. Not an iPhone virus, but rather an SMS hack, the issue can allow a hacker complete control over an iPhone.
According to the researchers, they will demonstrate how to send a series of mostly invisible SMS "bursts" that can give a hacker complete control of the iPhone. That control will include dialing the phone, visiting Web sites, turning on the device's camera and microphone, and more. The hacker will also be able to send more text messages to facilitate spreading the iPhone SMS hack to other iPhones.
To an end user, the evidence that someone is trying to use the iPhone's SMS hack on your device will be a text message on your iPhone containing only a single square character. The only way to avoid being hacked would be to quickly turn off the device. In terms of the amount of control, this hack sounds, quite honestly, very similar to how certain Trojans can turn a PC into a bot, and similarly control it remotely.
Charlie Miller told Forbes:
"This is serious. The only thing you can do to prevent it is turn off your phone. Someone could pretty quickly take over every iPhone in the world with this."
That's a bit of hyperbole, as first a hacker would have to know the appropriate phone numbers to use to hack an iPhone (and there are plenty of phone numbers assigned to other devices). It is obviously very serious, and despite the researchers sharing their results with Apple over a month ago, there has been no movement on a fix as of yet.
Interestingly, the researchers also found a similar "remote control" texting bug in Windows Mobile, and other bugs in Android and the iPhone that can let hackers boot the phones off the network. The Android bug has been closed, but the second iPhone bug has not.
Miller and Mulliner also found a hole in the iPhone's Safari browser way back in 2007 when it was first launched. |
Mauricio Pochettino would be interested in bringing Gareth Bale back to Tottenham Mauricio Pochettino would be interested in bringing Gareth Bale back to Tottenham
Tottenham boss Mauricio Pochettino says he would be interested in bringing Gareth Bale back to White Hart Lane from Real Madrid.
The Football Leaks website have published what they claim is a document that shows Tottenham have the first option to buy Bale back from Real if another Premier League club tries to sign him.
That would mean that if another Premier League club puts in an offer for Bale before June 30, 2019, Spurs have 72 hours to match the offer - and if they do, Real have to sell him back to Spurs.
"I think if we have the option to sign him - why not?" said Pochettino. "He's a great player and a player that can improve our squad."
The document also claims Bale's 2013 move from Tottenham to Real was a world-record transfer, something consistently denied by the Spanish club.
Tottenham are reported to have first option on their former player Gareth Bale
Real insist the deal for Bale was not as big as the one that took Cristiano Ronaldo to the Bernabeu from Manchester United in 2009.
The 10-time European champions say the fee for Bale was £70.38m - more than £3m short of Ronaldo's transfer fee.
However, the Football Leaks document shows that Real paid £77.45m, for Bale with the money paid in installments rather than in one 'up-front' payment.
It is also claimed Real promised Bale would not make any negative comments about Spurs or club chairman Daniel Levy. |
Apple has released iOS 10 beta 6 for developers to test on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. iOS 10 brings a refreshed look to Apple Music and News plus loads of new features to the platform. The software update will be ready for everyone likely sometime next month, and we’ll dig through the sixth developer version of the iOS 10 beta below.
If you’re already testing iOS 10 beta on your iPhone or iPad, head to the Software Update section of the Settings app to find the OTA update. If you’re a registered developer deciding to start testing iOS 10 with beta 6, head over to the Apple’s developer page to install the beta profile. For non-developers, Apple is currently testing iOS 10 through the public beta program which usually receives updates a couple of days after developers (or sooner as we near final release). iOS 10 public beta 5 is also available for non-developer testers.
iOS 10 includes loads of new features and changes including redesigned Music and News apps, the first Home app for HomeKit, a redesigned Lock screen and Home screen experience for widgets, tons of iMessage features in Messages, and much more.
iOS 10 beta 5, which was released on August 9, included minor tweaks including a new lock sound, AirPlay icon, widget UI tweaks, and a new Home app wallpaper. Check out our hands-on video of those changes below:
Apple is rumored to be planning a September 7 event to debut the iPhone 7 ahead of pre-orders on September 9 and launch on September 16. New versions of iOS typically roll out a couple of days before new iPhones so we could see iOS 10 publicly launch as soon as September 14.
Catch up on our full coverage with our iOS 10 guide. We’ll dig through the latest iOS 10 beta and update with notable changes. As always, shout in the comments, mention us on @9to5mac, or email [email protected] with changes you discover as well.
Here’s the update: |
Technically the following wheelchair ramps are a success, in that they bridge the gap between two levels by way of an inclined surface. The problem though, lies in the fact they’re incredibly difficult and/or somehow infuriating to use for the average wheelchair user – if not impossible – and could actually even cause more problems than they solve. It’s good to see ramps appearing around the world in an effort to make certain areas accessible to wheelchair users, but a little common sense and an ounce of forward-thinking would help to make their experience a lot more agreeable.
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Above: Most wheelchair users would be unable to ascend the ramp in Mexico, and for someone with assistance the three steps would be a much easier route to take.
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Above: A nasty surprise is in store for any wheelchair-bound person attempting to use this ridiculous, incredibly dangerous ramp in Auckland.
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Above: Infuriating rather than dangerous, this ramp in Vancouver manages to stretch a very modest ascent over a relatively mammoth, twist-laden journey.
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Above: To ascend such a ramp must be nigh on impossible for those of average strength. To descend would be amazingly risky.
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Above: Surely another impossible ramp to navigate for any normal person.
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Above: Quite possibly the longest, steepest wheelchair ramp on earth.
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Above: Hideously selfish parking aside, the inclusion of steps at the foot of this wheelchair ramp is baffling to say the least.
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Above: Sure, some ramp is better than no ramp, but to leave three steps uncovered really does reek of laziness.
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Above: Another incredibly steep ramp that would surely be impossible to scale without assistance from a person of considerable strength. |
British Prime Minister David Cameron has said Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, officially beginning the process for the UK’s departure from the EU, will not be triggered “at this stage.”
He said he had spoken to EU leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande about needing time to prepare the next step.
The timing for Brexit was a decision for Britain to make alone, the prime minister insisted.
Before triggering Article 50, further discussions on the UK’s future relationship with the EU are needed, Cameron said. But this seems to contradict Merkel’s stance.
Speaking on Monday (June 27) she said she understands the UK needs time to work out the next step.
However, the German government has said there will be no informal talks between the UK and the EU before the nation officially announces its intention to leave.
‘It is going to be difficult’
While Cameron said he disagreed with the outcome of Thursday’s (June 23) historic vote, he said his cabinet had agreed that the decision must be accepted, effectively putting the brakes on any discussion over a possible second referendum.
“It is going to be difficult,” he said of the UK’s exit from the bloc, with “challenging new negotiations” ahead. However, he warned that Britain must not turn its back on Europe and the rest of the world.
“It was not the result I wanted, nor the outcome I believe was best for the country I love but there can be no doubt about the result.
“Of course, I don’t take back what I said about the risks. It is going to be difficult. We’ve already seen that there are going to be adjustments within our economy, complex constitutional issues and challenging new negotiation to undertake with Europe.
“But, I am clear and the cabinet agreed this morning, that the decision must be accepted and the process of implementing the decision in the best possible way must now begin,” Cameron told parliament.
He confirmed that all negotiations for Brexit would be carried out by the new prime minister, who is expected to be in place by September 2.
A new EU unit is to be created in Whitehall consisting of members of the cabinet, treasury, foreign office and business departments.
The unit will report to the whole cabinet and objectively explore what the EU’s future relationship with the EU will be, said Cameron. Oversees and regional centres of power are also to be consulted.
Leader of the opposition Jeremy Corbyn agreed with much of what Cameron had to say, but insisted whoever takes charge must ensure the security of pledged EU funding to the UK.
Transcript: David Cameron's statement on the outcome of the EU referendum https://t.co/glmxbUHHbJpic.twitter.com/wov3UOPoj3 — PoliticsHome (@politicshome) June 27, 2016
‘No immediate changes in circumstance’
In the first session of the House of Commons since the in-out referendum, Cameron sought to reassure UK nationals and citizens of the EU living in Britain that there will be no immediate changes in circumstances, travel and trade.
Following his speech to parliament, the prime minister said he would also do everything possible to persuade the French authorities to keep UK border controls within France.
Economic fears
He also tried to alleviate any economy-related fears the Commons and the British people had raised.
“Britain is ready to confront what the future holds from a position of strength,” he said, stating that the UK has one of strongest, major advanced economies in the world.
UK institutions have enough capital and reserves to cope with worse situations, he added.
Cameron will attend a European Council meeting as planned on Tuesday (June 28). |
The B.C. government has confirmed it plans to reduce BC Ferries service on both minor and major routes, cut seniors' discounts and test slot machines on board one of its main routes.
Transportation Minister Todd Stone announced the cuts and changes on Monday morning.
Sixteen routes will have reduced service on undercapacity runs, such as early mornings and late nights, on weekends and during the non-summer months. (CBC)
"The first phase is service reductions to lower-use round trip sailings on the minor routes, and on the higher-cost northern routes, accounting for $14 million in net savings. These service adjustments will be implemented in April 2014," said Stone in a statement on Monday.
A total of 6,900 sailings per year on 16 minor routes will be affected. Six minor routes will not be affected.
Most of the sailings to be cut were identified as running at roughly 20 per cent capacity or less. These include early morning and weekend sailings, and late night sailings on the weekends, particularly during the non-summer months.
Other changes on the minor routes include combining separate sailing into combined sailings with multiple stops, and introducing a reservation system.
Stone said there would be another round of community consultation this fall before the changes are finalized and rolled out this April. He did not have an estimate of the the number of jobs that might be affected.
Future changes to the major routes are also planned, he said.
"BC Ferries will also implement further changes to the major routes prior to April 2016 to achieve $4.9 million in savings. Minor and northern routes will not be affected by these changes."
The specific details of how any of the major routes will be affected were not announced.
Seniors discounts slashed
Stone said the cuts and changes were made to make BC Ferries more financially sustainable.
"The B.C. coastal ferry service has been wrestling with cost pressures for more than 20 years. We are making tough decisions today to ensure that our coastal ferry service is sustainable for future generations. These changes protect basic service levels and are in keeping with the fiscal realities facing provincial taxpayers."
Seniors will no longer get free trips on BC Ferries from Monday to Thursday, but BC Ferries employees still will.
Stone also announced seniors discounts on the routes will be cut.
"As of April 1, 2014, the current 100 per cent passenger fare discount received by B.C. seniors (65 and older) travelling Monday to Thursday will be reduced to 50 per cent on major and minor routes.
"There will be no change to the current 33 per cent discount offered to seniors on the northern routes. The provincial savings of approximately $6 million per year will be redirected to support general fares."
Officials confirmed that BC Ferries employees are still able to ride the ferries for free, but said they were not aware of how much that cost the ferry service annually.
Slot machines to be tested
Stone also announced BC Ferries may add slot machines to its main routes, starting with a pilot project on sailings between Tsawwassen and Swartz Bay.
Slot machines will added to vessels sailing between Tsawwassen and Swartz Bay as part of a test project by BC Ferries and the B.C. Lottery Corporation. (The Canadian Press)
"The government of B.C. is also considering the introduction of a pilot project to assess the viability of gaming, and is seeking feedback on introducing gaming as a permanent revenue-generating program on major routes between Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland."
"The pilot project would be implemented on BC Ferries' busiest route between Swartz Bay and Tsawwassen. If successful, gaming revenue would help reduce the pressure on fares with net revenues reinvested into the ferry system to support general fares," he said.
Stone did not estimate how much revenue the government expected to make from the gaming proposal. BCLC will be responsible for running the slot machines, and BC Ferries employees will be trained for the day-to-day operation.
Other changes
Stone also said in the medium-term BC Ferries was considering changes to the reservation system to allow bookings on minor routes and discounts for early bookings, time-of-day pricing, a customer loyalty program.and adding passenger-only service to some routes.
He also announced plans for a $200-million upgrade of the Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal, saying it could affect how the route between West Vancouver and Nanaimo is managed in the future.
The Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal in West Vancouver will undergo an a $200 million upgrade sometime in the future, Minister Todd Stone said Monday.
But there are no plans to close one of the two ferry main terminals in Nanaimo, he said.
Stone said in the long-term, BC Ferries is also looking at converting the fleet to natural gas, using standardized vessels, no frills vessels and cable ferries to reduce operating costs.
He said the government's goal is to limit fare increases to the rate of inflation in the long term.
But he said he did not see the BC Ferries service as an extension of the provincial highway system, as it is often described by many advocates.
Minor and northern routes affected |
Published 14.05.2016 14:59 GMT+3 | Author Andy Potts
Another Gustav Nyquist goal helps Sweden win 3-2 to see off a stubborn Norwegian defence and remain in contention at the top of Group A.
Gustav Nyquist reinforced his status as a goal-scoring thoroughbred at this World Championship, picking up his sixth of the competition to break the deadlock in Sweden's hard-fought battle against Norway.
The 26-year-old has had his critics in Detroit this year, but he is enjoying his second World Championship campaign where he is currently the leading goalscorer. He claimed a typically opportunist tally in the first minute of the middle stanza, snaffling a loose puck in the corner and surging along the goal line before forcing the disk home despite the attentions of Ole-Kristian Tollefsen.
"The goal today was a bit lucky," Nyquist said. "I got a good bounce of the stick and it went in, but it's good for my confidence to be scoring goals."
It was a vital breakthrough for a Swedish offence that could not get into gear for much of a gritty encounter in Moscow. Norway, aware that victory here would bring it level with its Nordic neighbour on eight points, set up cautiously. Its disciplined hockey limited the Tre Kronor's chances in a first period that never really took off, but that same defensive focus meant that Sweden's Jacob Markstrom could enjoy a relatively quiet time between the piping for long periods.
"Maybe it wasn't our best performance," Nyquist added. "It was a tough game and they hung around and made it hard. But it's another three points and that's what we wanted."
Nyquist's goal gave Sweden the edge but did not open the floodgates. Indeed, had Markstrom not found the answer when Morten Ask attempted a repeat of Nyquist's scoring play at the other end, Norway would have tied the game soon afterwards.
"I thought we played pretty well," said Norway's captain Tollefsen. "We had a tough start with a lot of box play but we battled through it and we were pretty good on the penalty kill."
The Swedes' best chances to extend the lead also involved Nyquist: he almost found Alexander Wennberg on the doorstep during a power play and then galloped on to a loose puck on the Norwegian blue line only for Haugen to close the door.
Sweden doubled its lead with a short-handed goal early in the third. Johan Fransson's shot flashed wide but slammed back off the boards for the unmarked Mikael Backlund to gleefully pouch the rebound.
It didn't take long for Norway to make it a one-goal game once again, though. Sweden had barely got back to full strength when Johannes Johannesen's mishit shot was held up by Mathis Olimb on the slot and Mats Rosseli Olsen lifted the puck to the top shelf.
Suddenly the Swedes were in danger of losing further ground on the Czechs and the Russians at the top of Group A but a power play goal in the 52nd minute ensured Norway would have too much to do in the closing stages. Robert Rosen was the scorer, tucking away the rebound after Erik Gustaffson's shot was padded away by Haugen.
Even so, Norway was ready to unleash a real storm in the dying seconds. First Mats Zuccarello came charging over the blue line, but Markstrom produced a glove save to win that duel and send Norway to the bench for a time-out. And the tactical rethink paid off: Jonas Holos shot from the blue line and Andreas Martinsen slammed his stick down on the slot to deflect the puck into the net to leave the Swedes with an an anxious 90 seconds to navigate.
Norway had the puck in the net once more, but Trygg's celebrations were cut short when the officials indicated an infringement earlier in the play as the shots rained in on Markstrom's net.
"We had a lot of shots and opportunities and we couldn't take them, but the same is true of them," Nyquist added. "They almost tied it up at the end and Markstrom made some big saves."
The win lifts Sweden to 11 points, two better than third placed Russia before the host nation's game against Switzerland on Saturday evening.
Sweden is also anticipating new arrivals to its roster in the coming days. Capitals forward Andre Burakovsky is set to arrive in Moscow on Sunday, in time to face-off against his Washington team-mates Alexander Ovehckin, Yevgeni Kuznetsov and Dmitri Orlov when the Tre Kronor play Russia on Tuesday.
Two defencemen are also set to head to the airport soon. Mattias Ekholm, a bronze medallist in Minsk in 2014, is waiting to be formally released by Nashville and should land in Moscow on Monday morning, while Dallas Stars' John Klingberg is still awaiting his medical release.
Back to Overview |
Apple told investors earlier this month that sales of the Apple Watch have far exceeded its own internal expectations, but some of the companies that are making parts for the new wearable are claiming that they can’t even break even because demand is so weak.
Taiwan’s Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE) which makes the system-in-package case that contains Apple Watch’s array of sensors and chips, told investors during a conference call that it still hasn’t reached “break even volume” of two million units per month.
Bernstein Research analyst Mark Li reported to investors that an ASE subsidiary revealed the weak demand to investors this month, and said that ASE doesn’t even expect to reach the two million units per month level the third quarter, and wouldn’t commit to reaching it during the fourth quarter.
“The shortfall of Apple Watch is a disappointment,” Mr. Li wrote in a note to clients, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. “We came in with a low expectation but below break-even still surprised us.”
Apple hasn’t revealed any sales data for the Apple Watch, but its recent earnings report revealed that the new wearable has become at least a $1 billion business. Tim Cook said that sales have actually increased since the device’s debut in April, with most units being ordered in June.
Despite Apple’s high praise for the new device, which supposedly outsold the original iPhone and iPad during their first few weeks of launch, ASE is now expecting to fall well short of the 18 million units Li forecasted it would sell this year. |
Daphne Caruana Galizia, an investigative journalist from Malta who was known for her reporting on governmental corruption, was killed in an explosion near her home Monday, officials say.
Galizia, who had just published a story on her blog, was driving away from the house in a rented Peugeot 108 around 3 p.m. when the car went up in flames, according to local media reports.
The explosion sent detritus far into the surrounding fields and badly burned the body. Photos showed the Peugeot’s mangled shell in a field, dozens of yards from the blast site. Witnesses described a small explosion followed seconds later by a larger one as the burning car skidded down the road and into the field.
“I am never going to forget, running around the inferno in the field, trying to figure out a way to open the door, the horn of the car still blaring, screaming at two policemen who turned up with a single fire extinguisher to use it,” Galizia's son, Matthew, wrote on Facebook the morning after his mother's death. “They stared at me. 'I’m sorry, there is nothing we can do', one of them said. I looked down and there were my mother’s body parts all around me. I realised they were right, it was hopeless.”
No suspects have been identified in the bombing, but the son said Tuesday that his mother was dead because of the incompetence and negligence of the Maltese government and police.
“My mother was assassinated because she stood between the rule of law and those who sought to violate it, like many strong journalists,” he said in a post on Facebook. “But she was also targeted because she was the only person doing so. This is what happens when the institutions of the state are incapacitated: the last person left standing is often a journalist.”
Nine journalists have been killed for their work this year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. If it is confirmed that Galizia was targeted, she would be the 10th, and the first in Europe, the CPJ said.
[Censor or die: The death of Mexican news in the age of drug cartels]
Her death has been widely condemned by officials and nongovernmental organizations across Europe and Malta, where Galizia's relentless focus on corruption, cronyism and political malfeasance had drawn wide attention.
Galizia spent much of her work in recent years reporting on the Panama Papers, the cache of records from a law firm in Panama that detailed offshoring activities of powerful officials and companies around the world. Her reporting on allegations about the wife of Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and a shell company in Panama had caused concern when Malta had assumed the rotating, six-month presidency of the Council of the European Union, the Guardian reported.
Galizia’s focus on cronyism was not accidental, she told Politico after it named her one of the 28 people most likely to shake up Europe in 2017.
“I can’t bear to see people like that rewarded,” she said.
Galizia started working as a journalist in the 1980s as a columnist with the Sunday Times of Malta, the newspaper reported. She later worked as an editor at the Malta Independent before writing a column.
Her blog, Running Commentary, was launched in 2008 and is one of the most popular websites on the island nation.
Traffic to her website sometimes swelled to 400,000 readers, nearly equal to the country’s population. Her last story was about court testimony that pertained to allegations about Muscat’s chief of staff. Other recent stories included a dispatch about what she described as an unlicensed zoo operated by a man she said was a friend of the prime minister and other prominent figures in Malta.
“Everyone knows Ms. Caruana Galizia was a harsh critic of mine, both politically and personally, but nobody can justify this barbaric act in any way,” Muscat said Monday on Maltese television, according to news reports.
This is a spiteful attack on a citizen and freedom of expression. I will not rest until justice is done. The country deserves justice -JM — Joseph Muscat (@JosephMuscat_JM) October 16, 2017
U.S. officials confirmed Tuesday that the FBI is assisting Malta with the investigation.
But Galizia's son accused Muscat and other government officials of allowing a “culture of impunity” to flourish in Malta, which he said had turned into a “mafia state.”
“It is of little comfort for the Prime Minister of this country to say that he will 'not rest' until the perpetrators are found, when he heads a government that encouraged that same impunity,” wrote Matthew Caruana Galizia, an engineer and data journalist for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, according to his social media accounts.
He said that one of the police sergeants assigned to investigate his mother's killing had posted a flippant message on Facebook after her death.
“If the institutions were already working, there would be no assassination to investigate — and my brothers and I would still have a mother,” he wrote.
He later wrote that it was “untrue that my mother’s assassination was an attack on freedom of expression. It is untrue, because there was no freedom to begin with,” noting that his mother had been the subject of lawsuits meant to “financially cripple” her because of her work.
[Angered by gun control, this lawmaker drafted a bill to require licenses for journalists]
His mother had filed a report with Maltese police about receiving threats in the weeks before her death, according to reports.
“Daphne Caruana Galizia was a true investigative journalist,” said the deputy executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Robert Mahoney. “She did not shy from taking on the powerful in Malta’s political, business and criminal worlds.
“She probed the very authorities who are now charged with finding her killer or killers. For this reason, the investigation into her brutal murder must be beyond reproach. Anything less will send a terrible signal for journalists everywhere.”
Adrian Delia, the leader of Malta’s opposition Nationalist Party, said in a statement posted on Twitter: “This is the collapse of democracy and freedom of expression. We shall not be silenced.”
Great shock and sadness at the brutal murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia. An appeal for a unified resolve to promote true democracy. RIP. — Bishop CJ Scicluna (@BishopScicluna) October 16, 2017
What happened today is unacceptable in a free and democratic country like #Malta. A very sad day for our country. — Partit Laburista (@PL_Malta) October 16, 2017
Galizia and husband Peter Caruana Galizia have three sons, including Andrew and Paul, according to the Malta Independent. The couple lived in Bidnija, a rural area on the island.
In a sign of Galizia’s far reach in the country, the duty magistrate assigned to start the inquiry in the case had previously taken her to court over a libel claim related to stories Galizia had written about her, Malta Today reported. Galizia’s family has requested that the chief justice ask the duty magistrate to abstain from the inquiry, the publication reported.
Thousands of mourners attended a vigil held Monday night; another demonstration followed Tuesday outside the courts in Valletta.
A woman places a candle during a silent vigil after the death of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta. (Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters)
A woman holds a lantern with a picture of Daphne Caruana Galizia during a protest outside the courts in Valletta, Malta. (Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters)
Demonstrators show the victory sign in front of the courts in Valletta, Malta. (Rene Rossignaud/AP)
Devlin Barrett contributed to this report, which has been updated.
Read more:
She claimed tall, blond aliens kidnapped her as a child. Now she’s running for Congress.
Passengers accuse Indonesia AirAsia crew of setting off panic during plane’s rapid descent |
French club Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) just keeps on spending like a drunken sailor with a limitless credit card. This week the Paris club acquired three more players at an initial cost of around $150M.
Uruguay striker Edinson Cavani arrived from Napoli for $84M followed later in the week by two young defenders – Lucas Digne (Lille) $19M and Marquinhos (Roma) $42M.
Edinson Cavani has a pedigree having earned international recognition with Uruguay first at the FIFA under-20s in 2007 then at the 2010 World Cup Finals.
As a teenager he moved to Italy to play for Palermo but it was move to Napoli that turned him into a world star.
Digne has a couple of senior seasons under his belt but he wasn’t even the best left back at the recent FIFA under-20 World Cup in Turkey. Marquinhos has only played one season Europe and PSG decided that was enough the make him the 5th most expensive defender in history.
Roma paid less than $5M a year ago and so their return of 8 times on their investment in just 12 months is truly astounding.
But there again, everything to do with PSG over the last couple of years has just been additional degrees of astounding. This week’s spending brings PSG’s total transfer outlay to around half a billion dollars since the summer of 2011. The onslaught of spending kicked off when the Qatar Investment Authority bought the club two summers ago for $135M.
It started with transfer spending of $142M but that wasn’t sufficient to win Ligue 1. Close to $200M was spent in 2012/13 and that brought a Ligue 1 championship and got PSG to the last eight of the UEFA Champions League.
PSG was only formed in 1970 and has rarely been profitable. Prior to the Qatar buyout the club had recorded losses for over a decade. The year prior to the takeover PSG recorded a loss of $37M.
So with such profligate spending surely PSG must be drowning in red ink?
Well, not according to PSG’s financial statements for 2011/12.
To everyone’s great surprise the loss for the year to June 2012 – the first full year of operations under the new owner ship – was only $7M.
We do know that rather than booking transfer fees in the year the player was acquired clubs are able to write-off the fee over the life of the player’s contract – just as a company would do in accounting for a fixed asset.
That means that fees of $150M would be written down by $37.5M each year assuming each player signed four year deals. But even with an accounting break it seems odd that PSG’s loss for 2012 would be $30M less than the year previous.
Salaries and wages went up from $62M ($91M to $153M) and overall expenses increased by over $127M. That means in order to reduce their year to year loss PSG increased their revenues in one year by around $160M and that is pretty spectacular.
No other club has managed to engineer such explosive revenue growth.
So, where did the money come from between 2011 and 2012?
Commercial deals – dropped by $18M
TV revenue – up by $2.7M
Gate receipts – up by $9M
That amounts to an overall reduction of $6.3M rather than an increase of $160M.
In fact, the increase in revenue did not come from what we might be described as regular football and associated activities.
It was down to the excellent and insightful website Financial Fair Play.co.uk to identify the smoking revenue gun.
Line four of PSG’s financial statement for 2012 has “Autre produits” (other revenue) of €125M or $160M – that means over 50% of revenue came from money the owners found down the back of the couch.
Well not quite, Financial Fair Play.co.uk has another explanation although not necessarily a more satisfactory one.
FFP.co.uk makes a pretty good case that the other revenue is in fact a very questionable deal made between PSG and the Qatar Tourism Authority. Announced in late 2012 the deal was reported to be worth $900M over 4 years.
The value of the deal is larger than anything else seen in world soccer and what is more the QTA doesn’t seem to get much for their money. No naming rights, no kit deal – all PSG is obliged to do is to help promote Qatar as a tourist destination.
But it gets worse. I am sure that a number of you will have noticed a discrepancy – some of you might even have already written a comment about “lazy journalism” or “inadequate fact checking.”
Yes the financial statement was for the year to June 2012 and yes the deal was not in place till late 2012. So how can one impact on the other?
Good question and not one that seems to have bothered the preparer of said statements. The $160M in “other revenue” almost certainly accrued from a commercial deal that had very little to do with a commercial transaction and that wasn't even consummated during the financial year in question.
So how can PSG hope to get away with something like this when UEFA Financial Fair Play (approved and signed off by over 200 of Europe’s leading clubs) and the drive towards sustainability is now a reality and 2012 is the first year of monitoring?
That question is one that will not be completely answered until the spring of 2014 when it is expected that the independent Club Financial Control Panel completes the review of clubs’ statements for 2012 and 2013 and assesses one of nine possible sanctions on transgressors.
The legitimacy of the PSG/QTA deal will be central to the Control Panel’s review.
The first question is whether or not the PSG/QTA deal constitutes a Related Party Transaction.
If it is not a RPT then UEFA can not reassess or review the transaction. Simply put if you are daft enough to given an already rich owner more money for little or no return then good luck to you.
However, if it is found to be a RPT then things change dramatically.
The Financial Fair Play regulations define a RPT and it can be found by clicking on the link and moving to pages 83 through 85.
The simple explanation is that the RPT exclusion is there to prohibit the seemingly conventional wisdom loophole of an owner getting another of his companies to buy seats at $5,000 a game or some other ridiculous amount.
If a transaction is deemed to be a RPT then the only revenue that can be recognized for the purpose of the break-even calculation is that deemed to be at “fair value.” “Fair value” is a well recognized concept and essentially prices a transaction at what two individuals negotiating in good faith would agree to.
If PSG and QTA are deemed to be related parties – and there is a very good chance that they will given that they are both arms of the Qatar government – then it is impossible for PSG to meet the break-even provisions of UEFA Financial Play. (Others have suggested that all PSG and clubs in a similar situation need to do in order to avoid sanctions is to show financial progress. That interpretation is dependent on costs attributable to contracts signed prior to June 2010 being the cause of the shortfall. Financial progress alone is not enough).
PSG may find that there are lots of clubs willing to take their money for overpriced players but there will be even more cheering should UEFA use them as a high profile example.
There again between PSG and the on-going controversy of the 2022 World Cup Finals award Qatar is guaranteed a lot of name checks. Nice to know that you get something for a few billion dollars.
Qatar facts
So what will $900M over four years promote in Qatar?
Qatar has a population of 1.8M.
The number of tourists visiting Qatar has increased from 964,000 in 2007 to 2.5M in 2011.
Projections show a continued increase through to 2022 with 3.7M visitors expected.
A report from Deloitte estimated that Qatar will spend $200B to host the 2022 World Cup Finals.
$140B will go into the likes of transportation infrastructure and another $20B to support infrastructure for tourism.
For comparison purposes Las Vegas attracted 39M visitors in 2011. |
My one-hundred-and-thirtieth podcast is up. I had the pleasure of talking to Brendan Eich about JavaScript this week. Brendan created JavaScript lo these many years ago, and lately his team has been working to make JavaScript even faster with TraceMonkey, their next step in their JavaScript engine. It's an exciting time for JavaScript as it approaches "C" speeds. I chat with Brendan in this episode about where he thinks JavaScript is headed. What does the rise of JavaScript mean to Flash, Silverlight and RIAs in general? We also talk about how TraceMonkey works and how much faster it can get.
Brendan is responsible for architecture and the technical direction of Mozilla. He is charged with authorizing module owners, owning architectural issues of the source base and writing the roadmapthat outlines the direction of the Mozilla project. Brendan created JavaScript, did the work through Navigator 4.0, and helped carry it through international standardization. Before Netscape, he wrote operating system and network code for SGI; and at MicroUnity, wrote micro-kernel and DSP code, and did the first MIPS R4K port of gcc, the GNU C compiler.
One other change, this week a large number of the questions of Brendan came directly from you, the listener, via Twitter! This is a new thing I'm trying and I really feel it made for a better show and I thank you for it! I'm on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/shanselman and you can read more about Twitter in my post on Twitter: The Uselessfulness of Micro-blogging if you want to jump in and "follow me." I encourage you to find a Twitter Client that works for you and give it a try.
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Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.
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As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)
Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show? |
10 /10
Warning: Spoilers
SPOILERS AHEAD!
What can I say, a brilliant series, which I will easily call the best series ever! Great acting, a great screenplay, fine camerawork, and of course with Speilberg a great recollection of the 1940's
Chapter 1: A Strong episode. Shows the tough sadistic training of Captain Sobel. Builds up all the characters and introduces them to the viewers. I really likes the fact that they made this one a NON COMBAT episode.
10/10
Chapter 2: A first look into battle with Easy Company. Focuses on Winters and shows his potential as a leader. It also shows the big failure of the jumps over normandy and what misorder it has caused.
9/10
Chapter 3: The most violent episode so far. Great battle scene in Carentan. It also takes time to show the soldiers after they get back to England, and for the ones that didnt. It forcuses on the horrors of war and sticks to Blithe to make that point.
10/10
Chapter 4: My least favorite episode. Simply a full combat chapter. It shows the failure of bad intellegence. Focuses on Bull Randelman that survives behind enemy lines. Nothing special in the episode though. (although it does show the Dutch reaction to the allied forces)
8/10
Chapter 5: I dunno why but a lot of people didnt like this chapter. I loved it! The great camerawork at the begining and the illusions Winter suffers throughout the episode really touched me. I also loved the full on assault on the SS Companies, and the change of command within E Company and 2nd Battalion.
10/10
Chapter 6: Like others said, a special episode for the sole fact that it is the first time it is focused on the Medical Staff. I really likes Doc Roe, though I didnt think the relationship with nurse was usefull for the episode. I liked the way supplies were short, morale was low yet E company held on. The creators really tried to make us think how miserable they are, but to tell the truth after reading some books the matter was even MUCH MUCH worse, just look at a map of the battle of the bulge. Anyhow, great episode.
9/10
Chapter 7: My second favourite episode and by far the most violent in the series.
Forcuses on Lipton which tells the story of a bad leadership from Lt. Dike, and the morale problem it caused. Also it shows the accidental death of Hoobler. Really touching scene. The part which still echos in my head is definetly the mortar drop on Guarnere and Toye, and the reaction from Buck. Brilliant Scene. That goes as well for the Much and Penkala part. The new leader prooves himself on the first day with bravery and determination.
10/10
Chapter 8: I liked this episode. Shows how the war was almost over yet the generals were looking for something to do. So they send out patrols. Focuses on Webster who missed Bastonge, and although he has been in the company since normandy, feels like an outsider. Sad part when Jackson dies from his own grenade.
9/10
Chapter 9: My favourite episode. The way they created the camps and its inhabiters was extrodinary and brought a tear to my eye! The looks on everyones faces when they saw it tells it all. Written briliantly, acted upon perfectly from everyone (liebgoot crying when he has to tell them to stay in the camps and not eat, Nixon when he first sees the camp.) Perfect Episode
10/10
Chapter 10: A great episode which basicly showed that altough the war was over, people were still dying. It also shows the absurd points system which caused a lot of tension within the soldiers. Finally shows the future of each surviving member of the company.
10/10
95/100 |
That’s what Carlos Tomas wanted when he dropped off his red sports car at a detailing shop in Scarborough.
“Where did they take my car?” Tomas said in an interview. “And for what purpose? What if it was involved in an accident somewhere?”
Later, when toll charges for the 407 ETR arrived in his mail, Tomas, with the Star’s help, dug into a story that for many will conjure references to the 1980s flick Ferris Bueller’s Day Off , when Ferris and his friends, playing hooky from school, took a Ferrari for a joyride.
Five days later, his seven-year-old Mazda RX-8 was ready. There was just one problem: There were 449 more kilometres on the car than when Tomas dropped it off.
Against better judgment, Tomas returned to Avenue with the second Mazda, this one an RX-8, the next week on June 1. Before turning the keys over to Kuganesan, Tomas snapped a photo of his odometer.
When the car, which had some body work done at a shop around the corner as well as detailing from Kuganesan, was returned to Tomas, he noticed damage to the front grille. He asked if something happened, but according to Tomas, both the body shop and the detailer denied responsibility.
That’s when he met Rajevan Kuganesan, or “Mikey,” who was running a detailing business out of the small garage in an industrial complex at Kennedy Rd. and Lawrence Ave. E.
In May of this year, he had two red Mazdas he was preparing to sell. On a recommendation, Tomas took the first one, a Mazda 6, to a Scarborough detailing shop called Avenue Rentals and Detailing.
Tomas, 59, has been around cars all his life. He is president of Shifters, a Toronto training facility devoted to teaching people how to properly drive manual transmission vehicles.
“My eyes went straight to the odometer,” Tomas said. “It was a very simple agreement: He details the car and I pay the bill. I didn’t expect 449 kilometres on it for a detailing job.”
Confronted by Tomas with the photos showing the discrepancy in odometer readings, Tomas recalls Kuganesan was adamant the Mazda had not moved from the shop area the entire time. He had not loaned it to anyone, nor had he rented it out. (Later, Kuganesan repeated these denials to the Star.)
Incensed by the lack of an explanation from Kuganesan, Tomas called police.
The officer suggested the two duke it out in small-claims court.
Tomas was disappointed the police did not take up the case. He remained concerned with his car’s whereabouts those five days in June.
“Am I going to get a ticket in the mail next for somebody running a red light?” Thomas told the Star. “What if the car was used for illegal purposes?”
A month later, proof that the RX-8 had indeed been taken for a long ride while in the care of the detailer arrived in the mail.
A bill for $45.60 from the ETR Highway 407 shows the vehicle was twice driven on the toll highway on June 2, the day after Tomas dropped it off for cleaning. The vehicle got on at McCowan Rd., in Markham, at 7:51 a.m. and drove west across the GTA, exiting at Derry Rd. in Mississauga.
Less than two hours later it was back on the ETR at Highway 401 and Ninth Line in Mississauga. The car was driven east to Scarborough and it left the toll road at Kennedy Rd. for a total of 112 kilometres driven.
There are still another 337 kilometres unaccounted for. Tomas contacted officials at 407 ETR and was told the photos snapped when the Mazda entered and exited the toll road do not identify the driver.
Tomas then contacted the Star for help and returned to Kuganesan’s shop with a reporter posing as his friend. Tomas brought along the ETR bill.
Kuganesan was in no mood to explain.
“So your point is?” Kuganesan said, as Tomas showed him the ETR tickets. “I’m not wasting my time now cause I got s--- to do,” Kuganesan said, reminding Tomas that he had not fully paid his bill.
Tomas had paid $120 for the Mazda 6’s cleaning, but refused to pay for the second car’s detailing until he received a satisfactory explanation. Tomas notes that in addition to the unauthorized mileage, the gas gauge on the RX-8 was one-third lower when he picked up the vehicle.
As the Star watched, Kuganesan hopped into a black Hummer he had been washing, and drove off.
Ministry of Transportation documents show Kuganesan, 28, should not have been driving. His driver’s licence was suspended on Jan. 27, 2012, after he pleaded guilty to refusing to provide a breath or blood sample after being pulled over by police.
And when his licence is reinstated, on Jan. 27, 2015, any car he drives must be equipped with ignition interlock, a condition normally imposed on people convicted of serious drinking and driving offences.
The Star returned to Avenue, this time identifying ourselves as reporters, explaining we were seeking an on-the-record interview with Kuganesan about the mysterious events involving Tomas’s car.
Kuganesan arrived at the garage driving a Toyota Camry with Quebec plates. He denied Tomas’s car moved more than about 50 metres during its five-day stay.
“What are you, a f-----g spy?” said an indignant Kuganesan in response to further questions. “You can write anything, whatever you want. I don’t want to talk to you.”
When asked who has access to the keys, he said:
“Everybody has access to the keys. We hang the keys here,” he said pointing inside the garage. “We’re not responsible for anything that happens,” said Kuganesan adding he does a lot detailing for car dealerships.
The Star made several more attempts to interview Kuganesan as more details emerged. The Star tried to contact him at his work and home, and a letter with a series of questions was given by the Star to his lawyer, Timothy Kinnaird.
The Star asked Kuganesan if he could comment on Tomas’s allegations. Why was he driving if his licence was suspended? Could he elaborate on his relationship with a man named Gerald Pinch, who holds the lease on the shop, and is currently in federal prison on drug trafficking charges?
Why is he detailing cars out of a garage the City of Toronto says is not licensed to do so? And, could he address Tomas’s allegations that both his cars were tampered with while in his possession?
In a faxed letter to the Star, lawyer Kinnaird answered “No” to each of the questions. A meeting the lawyer said he would try to arrange between his client and reporters fell through. Kinnaird cited a scheduling conflict.
The Star found Kuganesan’s cellphone number on numerous Kijiji and Craigslist ads heralding a slew of businesses, including used car sales, home renovations, mobile boat cleaning, auto tinting, painting and windshield repairs. In all of those ads, he goes by the name “Mike.”
The Star researched the detailing shop and here is what we found:
On its website, Avenue Car and Truck Rentals, at 180 Nantucket Blvd., unit 5 (the same location where Tomas dropped off his car) claims to be the GTA’s “premier car rental agency.” It not only rents and sells cars but offers “car detailing” services,” the website says.
But Brandon Pinch, president of Avenue, explained he has nothing to do with Kuganesan’s operation, which is at the same location and is an independent business detailing cars, called Millenium Auto and Marine Detailing.
Brandon Pinch told the Star he is very upset with Kuganesan and plans to sever his relationship with the man at the end of the month.
The landlord of the industrial complex where Avenue is located said the lease for unit 5 is actually in the name of Brandon’s older brother, Gerald Pinch, a man currently in prison. Gerald is the general manager of a company that owns Avenue. Brandon Pinch acknowledged that Kuganesan worked with his brother Gerald in the past, detailing cars.
Gerald Pinch was among more than a dozen people arrested in 2009 in Operation O’Flyer, a 10-month, multi-police-force investigation into the trafficking of cocaine and other drugs. Pinch was convicted of possession and conspiracy to export ecstasy in 2011, and is currently serving a six-year prison term. He faces a lifetime ban on the possession of firearms when released.
According to Toronto’s Municipal Licensing department, Avenue Car and Truck rentals is not licensed to operate as car rental agency and the location on Nantucket Blvd. is not licensed be a detailing shop, either. An application for a detailing shop was submitted in July 2013, but turned down due to zoning concerns, the city says.
“Nobody should be doing any detailing at that location,” said an analyst with the licensing department.
Meanwhile, Tomas remains perplexed. All he wanted was a good detailing and a wax job.
He says he photographed the odometer on the RX-8 sports car because he suspected the Mazda 6 had been driven somewhere and brought back with damage.
It begs the question: Why would he take a second car to Kuganesan for detailing if he was not happy with the work done on the first one?
“I just didn’t want to be taken for a fool,” Tomas said. “I just had this burning inside … OK, I’m gonna find out … It was like a bait, really, let’s see what happens with this one.”
After several follow-up calls from Tomas, Toronto police recently took a full report.
Dale Brazao can be reached at [email protected] or (416) 869-4433 |
In 1970, an Australian university student scribbled A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle on two bathroom walls—one at a bar, the other at her university. She was paraphrasing a line from one of her philosophy texts—“a man needs God like a fish needs a bicycle”—and having a bit of fun. “My inspiration arose from being involved in the renascent women’s movement at the time, and from being a bit of a smart-arse,” wrote Irina Dunn, who later became a member of the Australian Senate.
Ever since then, Dunn’s moment of cheeky rebellion has been Exhibit A in countless attempts to explain why smart, independent women are so hopeless at relationships. (The phrase is often falsely attributed to Gloria Steinem, who has corrected the error several times.) Like “Free to Be You and Me” and bra burning (which never actually happened, but whatever), the bicycle-riding fish makes a handy cultural shorthand to explain how feminism has messed up women’s love lives.
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Most everyone agrees that it’s great that women now can attend college and own property and run for Congress. We can venture into the world on our own, pursue intellectually demanding careers, forge our own identities, and hold out for true love. There’s just one teensy catch: We’ve seriously botched our chances of getting married.
In decades past, the task of telling ambitious women that they’d never find love fell to male editors and reporters, who were unabashed in their contempt for a new breed of she-monster known as the “career woman.” Later, the media let the numbers do the talking, and we got clinical analyses likening our odds of marrying to getting killed by terrorists (a particularly chilling analogy, in hindsight). These days it’s a woman’s job to break the bad news, and often the messenger is single herself, offering up her life as a cautionary tale for the good of womankind.
Regardless of the delivery system, the “doomed career woman” narrative is as perennial as any Disney fable, the theme repackaged and resold to each generation.
Of course, the astute reader will note that the terrorist statistic isn’t true. Susan Faludi’s “Backlash” told us so. And twenty years after the fact, Newsweek apologized for telling college-educated women they had almost no chance of marrying after forty, explaining that the study they cited was wrong because it used past data to make future predictions, never accounting for the changing shifts in marriage patterns over the last several decades—who could have known women in 2006 would behave very differently than women in 1966? “Such unexpected shifts are part of what makes demographic forecasting extremely difficult, not unlike making weather forecasts in the midst of a hurricane,” the editors said.
Husband shortages have another thing in common with hurricanes: There’s always another one coming. No matter what women’s economic and educational gains, someone invariably finds a fresh algorithm to explain anew why smart, independent ladies who wish to wed are screwed.
There’s one problem with all this: It’s not true.
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Actually, women with college degrees are more likely to marry than their less-educated peers—and less likely to divorce. Graduate degrees and high salaries also don’t hinder a woman’s chance of walking down the aisle. Sociologist Christine Whelan found that women aged thirty to forty-four earning more than one hundred thousand dollars per year are—once again—more likely to be married than their lower-earning cohorts.
Women are often advised that the best strategy for ensuring lifelong happiness is to snare a man while they’re in school and marry shortly after graduation. But this den-mother wisdom flies in the face of marriage and divorce statistics. The reality is, the older the bride, the stronger the marriage.
Economist Dana Rotz, a researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, found that for every year a woman waits to marry, she lowers her risk of divorce. A woman who marries for the first time in her late twenties (twenty-seven to twenty-nine) is 15 percent less likely to divorce in a given year than a woman who marries in her mid-twenties. If she waits until her early thirties (thirty to thirty-four) that risk drops by another 15 percent. “Marriages made when a woman is in her late thirties (thirty-five to thirty-nine) are more stable still, and fully 46 percent less likely to end in divorce than those beginning when a woman is twenty-three to twenty-six. Up until your early forties, waiting to marry is associated with lower risk of divorce,” she told me.
Rotz notes that the trend could very well continue for women who marry after forty, but researchers don’t yet have a large enough sample size to study it. “Even though marriage after forty isn’t that uncommon these days, we need people to have been married a while back in our data so we know if they divorce. Since later marriages are only now becoming common, we just don’t have the data to know what’s going on,” said Rotz, who conducted this research while obtaining her PhD in economics at Harvard.
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I’ll repeat this happy news, since it’s not exactly the message we ladies have received lo these many years: If you get a good education and take time to establish your career and your life as a self-supporting adult, current research shows that you’re not only more likely to marry, you’re more likely to stay married. Oh, and you’ll make more money too.
So why are so many media professionals and policy wonks perpetually convinced that a sharp mind and an independent spirit will ruin a gal’s chance of finding love? “Because it used to be true,” said family historian Stephanie Coontz.
For a long time, having an education did correlate poorly with a woman’s chance of marrying. “It truly used to be good advice for a woman to ‘play dumb’ to catch a man. Not anymore. Women used to be attracted to older, powerful men who earned more money than they did. That is no longer the case,” Coontz wrote in “Marriage, a History.” “Yet many people still plan their personal lives and policy makers still draw up social policies on the basis of these and other outmoded assumptions.”
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We also unwittingly reinforce them. We’re so accustomed to viewing professional and personal success as a binary that “focusing on my career” becomes the default answer for singles asked to explain their relationship status.
You know how it goes. You’re at a wedding or a business luncheon and the person sitting next to you asks if you’re married, and you say no.
Then there is that ... gap. So you fill it in: “My work keeps me so busy. I haven’t even had time to think about dating” or some such.
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You say it because it’s true—work has been busy. But, more important, because now is not the time to talk about the many complicated factors that led to you being an unmarried thirty-six-year-old. Now is the time to talk about the price of the euro, or your competitor’s new branding strategy. You aren’t steering the conversation away from your personal life because it’s so dark and disturbing—you’re doing it because you’re a grown-up.
Unfortunately, all this social intelligence has been wildly misunderstood. We have, apparently, left many people with the impression that we’re mapping our personal lives with the same precision that we plot our careers—that we’re “putting off” marriage, as if falling in love was something you could plan. As if we were gazing at our misty-eyed suitors and saying, “You’re amazing and I love you madly. But I’m focusing on my career right now. Sucks about the timing, but what can you do?”
Of course, people do say things like this during breakups. “I just don’t have time for a relationship right now” is a perennial among both men and women. And sometimes we even believe it ourselves—because for whatever reason working late on that marketing report is more compelling than having dinner with Todd.
But that doesn’t mean you’re overly obsessed with your career—it probably means you’re just not that into Todd. You don’t break up with someone you love because “work is crazy.” When you’re in love, you steal whatever precious moments you can. You drive them to the airport so you can have that time on the freeway together. You make out on street corners before dashing back to the office. You have the company car take you straight to their apartment at eleven p.m., and then have it pick you up from there at five a.m. Friends and family are neglected. Houseplants wither and die. Bills go unpaid; dishes unwashed. But you find time for each other.
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Feminism’s perpetual PR problem is, paradoxically, rooted in its success. The fundamental notion that women should have equal rights and opportunities was absorbed into the mainstream culture so quickly that we assume it was always thus. It’s easy to forget that as late as the 1970s some women were still being told they couldn’t get a credit card or buy a car without their husband’s permission. When I was a kid in the ’70s, the idea that a woman could have an identity that wasn’t defined by the man in her life was still new—and still up for debate. So if the fish/ bicycle quotation was an awkward overstatement, well, okay. But it was appropriate for the time, and a handy ballast for women in a society that still told them they were nothing without a man.
Feminism never promised women that life would be easy— that there wouldn’t be hard choices and massive trade-offs. It never said that the corporate lawyer who hasn’t had a weekend off in four months wouldn’t at times gaze longingly at the hipster mom knitting a smartphone cozy while her kids play in the park. It merely said she should be free to make her own decisions—and even mistakes—because she’s smart enough to find her own way.
Having agency in your life doesn’t inhibit your ability to merge it with another’s—it only enhances it.
Reprinted from "It’s Not You" by Sara Eckel by arrangement with Perigee, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc, a Penguin Random House company, Copyright © 2014 by Sara Eckel. |
Share. Where does he get those wonderful statues? Where does he get those wonderful statues?
If you're a hardcore Batman fan with disposable income, simply collecting graphic novels and DVDs isn't enough. What better way to show your love for the Caped Crusader than assembling a collection of statues and busts depicting the hero in all his three-dimensional glory? Luckily, with Batman being as popular as he is, there's been no shortage of high-end collectibles to choose from over the years.
As part of our ongoing celebration of Batman's 75th anniversary, we've decided to spotlight the 10 coolest Batman statues of all time. But first, a few ground rules. In the interest of narrowing down the pool of candidates, we limited our selections to statues and busts, not action figures, LEGO sets, and so forth. We also limited our choices to statues that feature Batman himself in some capacity, so statues featuring just characters like Joker, Catwoman, Batgirl, etc. were out of the running. And finally, this list includes only products that have been released and are officially licensed by DC.
With that in mind, check out our picks for the greatest Batman statues, and let us know what your favorites are in the comments section below.
10 Batman: The Animated Series - Batman Maquette
For all that Batman: The Animated Series is lauded as being one of the greatest (if not the greatest) interpretations of Batman, there have been surprisingly few collectibles geared towards capturing Bruce Timm's distinctive art style. Even fewer have been based on Timm's original character designs rather than the New Batman Adventures redesigns.
If you want a statue depicting Batman in all his 1992-era animated glory, look no further than this maquette from DC's Classic Animation Series line. The pose is a little plain, but that's kind of the point of a maquette. What matters is that Timm's design has been translated perfectly to 3D. This Batman is stoic, imposing, and a fitting homage to such a great animated series. Good luck finding one for anywhere close to the original price, though.
9 Batman: Black & White by Jock Statue
DC's Batman: Black and White line is dedicated to bringing various artistic interpretations of Batman to life with a unique, monotone approach. The statues are fairly small (roughly the same scale as DC's action figures), but they're also a heck of a lot cheaper than most other Batman collectibles.
Easily one of DC's finest efforts so far has been the Jock statue, based on the artist's collaboration with Scott Snyder for the "Black Mirror" storyline. The dynamic pose is a far cry from the usual crop of statues depicting Batman looming or getting ready to throw a Batarang. With the billowing cape and twisted grappling cable, there's a real sense of motion to this piece. It has a presence that goes above and beyond most of the B&W pieces. And it's always nice to see a statue depicting Dick Grayson as Batman for a change.
8 Hush: Batman and Catwoman Kiss Statue
Batman statues based on Jim Lee's artwork are nothing new at this point. But this most recent Hush statue is easily one of the best and most faithful to Lee's art. The statue is closely based on Lee's splash image depicting Batman and Catwoman's passionate kiss. Thanks to Tim Bruckner's top-notch sculpting, every fold of Batman's cape and bulge of his muscle has been faithfully translated to 3D form. Even the billowing fog of the Gotham night has been included.
It's tough to understand just how impressive this statue looks until you see it in person. The enormous base and the fact that you're essentially getting two statues in one help make the $250 price tag more palatable.
7 Detective Comics #38: Batman and Robin Statue
All of our picks so far have been devoted to more contemporary interpretations of Batman, but there have been some great retro-style statues as well. Perhaps none is better than this piece, which adapts the iconic cover to Detective Comics #38 and celebrates Robin's very first appearance.
In some ways, it's much more difficult to translate the work of Golden Age artists to 3D than it is more modern creators like Jim Lee, but Tim Bruckner delivered another winner with this sculpt. Bob Kane's cover is elegantly brought to life, and the image of Robin leaping onto the stage offers a striking design to add to your Batman collection. The various Robins aren't terribly well represented in statue form, but at least the Dynamic Duo have this piece to celebrate their partnership.
6 The Dark Knight Returns: Call to Arms Statue
As you might expect, several companies focused a lot of attention on The Dark Knight Returns-themed collectibles in 2012 and 2013 with the release of the two-part animated movie. But of all those pieces, it's hard to top DC's Call to Arms statue for presence and sheer novelty. How many other statues depict Batman atop a majestic steed?
The Call to Arms statue is easily one of the best attempts at capturing Frank Miller's distinctive art style. This Batman is grim, gritty, and bulging with muscle and sinew. But it's the horse that takes the piece to another level. It gives the piece mass, making it easily one of DC's larger Batman statues. And it tells a story of Batman charging into battle and rallying an army to save a powerless Gotham City. |
With the dust settled on an incredible Halo World Championship 2017 Finals, we’re excited to begin the next chapter of the Halo Championship Series. The HCS Summer 2017 Season is shaping up to be another landmark moment in Halo esports, and we couldn’t be more eager to get the next evolution underway. Today, we’re excited to discuss a few details for the North American Pro League, with more details on Europe, DreamHack, Open Circuit, Last Chance Qualifiers, and gameplay settings on the way.
The return of the HCS Pro League is nigh upon us, ushering in yet another epic season of top-flight competitive Halo play through awesome open events in destinations like Daytona, Atlanta, and Denver, positioned alongside riveting online matchdays – all of which will showcase the top pro and amateur Halo teams and players fighting for both gain and glory.
Last week, we released the opening salvo of details for brand new settings coming to Halo 5 HCS play, and just yesterday, we released version 1 of these settings in the HCS Summer Preview playlist. All along the way, we’ve been hard at work analyzing and incorporating feedback from vital sources with the aim to create the most competitive and rewarding Halo 5 esports experience yet, for both players and spectators alike.
NA Pro League
NA Pro League action returns on Thursday, May 24 at 4:30 PT! Tune in each week on Wednesdays and Thursdays on beam.pro/Halo and twitch.tv/Halo to see the best teams in the world duke it out against one another. The season will culminate in an open final championship event at DreamHack Atlanta, with all pro teams – and plenty of hungry amateur squads – fighting for not only Pro League spots via the Open Bracket, but also a top finish in the Championship Bracket. That’s right - based on community feedback, this means that now any team in the open bracket can compete at the finals event and vie for the HCS Summer Season 2017 title alongside pro teams.
We’re looking forward to this brand-new format, and hope you’ll be joining us for the epic open finals at DreamHack Atlanta.
Following the HCS Pro League Fall 2016 Season and Halo World Championship 2017, here is the North American Pro League lineup:
OpTic Gaming
Team EnVyUs
Team Liquid
Str8 Rippin
Luminosity Gaming
TMMT Crowd Pleasers
Evil Geniuses
Winner of the Pro League LCQ
With one last Pro League spot remaining, it’ll all come down to the HCS Pro League LCQ. We know many teams are anxiously awaiting these details, and we’re working with partners to lock down specifics and announce final details as soon as possible – stay tuned for LCQ info this coming week. The competition will be fierce, and we can’t wait to see who will take the final spot.
Summer 2017 Finals at dreamhack atlanta
Following the regular season, the top six North American Pro League teams will head to the DreamHack Atlanta open Championship event as they auto-qualify for the Championship Bracket. This year, though, pro teams won’t only have to worry about their peers, but also top amateur teams looking to make a statement. The top Open Bracket rosters will advance to the Championship Bracket to compete for the Finals prize pool of over $100,000, with the final prizing determined by additional crowdfunding.
The seventh and eighth place North American HCS Pro League teams will be given preferential placement in the Open Bracket, and all eligible teams in the Open Bracket will challenge them for the two available Pro League spots. The top two North American Open Bracket teams will earn a spot in the NA Fall 2017 HCS Pro League season.
Be on the lookout for more details on the DreamHack finals event as the event approaches.
Looking ahead to Fall 2017
After the summer action concludes and the Pro League lineup is set, the HCS Pro League Fall 2017 Season will kick off on August 23 and conclude with another open finals championship event at DreamHack Denver from October 20-22.
With all this in mind, it’s an understatement to say how eager we are to get things kicked off down in beautiful and sunny Florida with HCS Daytona, May 12-14. The action kicks off on Friday, and you can be part of it all be purchasing tickets to the event here, or tuning in online at beam.pro/Halo or twitch.tv/Halo.
And don’t forget, you can test your own skills alongside the rest of the world by jumping into the HCS Summer Preview playlist in Halo 5 right now to try out version 1 of the Summer Season settings. Who knows, maybe you’ll discover you’ve got what it takes to be raising that championship trophy next year…
Stay tuned for more information on the Europe, DreamHack Championship Event, Open Circuit, settings updates, and more.
We’ll see you on the battlefield, Spartans. |
Strategic Europe continues its series devoted to explaining the foreign and security policy ambitions of the 28 EU member states. We have asked our contributors from each capital to give a candid assessment of their country’s perception of security and strategy, with a ranking on a scale from 0 (the laggards) to 5 (the ambitious). This week, the spotlight is on Italy.
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When in 2014 the Italian government firmly endorsed the country’s former foreign minister Federica Mogherini as the EU’s new foreign and security policy chief, Rome was making a significant political statement: Italy’s commitment to a stronger international role for the EU is a central national interest.
This would in theory earn Italy the highest rank for its foreign policy ambition: 5 out of 5. And yet, in the context of a fragile common EU foreign policy, Rome’s devolution to Brussels is often illusory: in some cases, Italy’s EU-centric approach dashes expectations, while in others, it is bypassed by purely national initiatives. Thus, this theoretical score actually becomes 4 out of 5 in terms of practical results.
Let us look at the heated case of migration. The determined way in which Mogherini is now trying to coordinate the EU’s response to the issue of Mediterranean migration—itself a top national priority for Italy—confirms the importance of the link between Rome and Brussels. The reality, however, is that the European Commission’s proposals on this issue (first and foremost, the relocation of some of the refugees within the EU) have been emptied of much of their significance by national vetoes.
In connection with the external dimension of the migration challenge—most urgently, how to deal with the security situation in Libya, the country through which many of the migrants travel—a similar dynamic emerges. In theory, the EU is ready to do more, including a potential Common Security and Defense Policy mission. But in concrete terms, given the absence of a UN Security Council mandate to back up such a mission, nothing has been done apart from bolstering the EU’s existing Triton border patrol operation.
Critics would say that in seeking greater European solidarity, Italy is simply interested in sharing the pressures of migration. This may be true, but it’s not the whole truth. Italy genuinely believes that its national interests in the Mediterranean coincide with what is best for Europe—if only the EU were able and willing to update its view of European security interests.
Rome is exercising a kind of moral suasion with its EU partners by bringing the Mediterranean to the forefront of their agendas. Yet Italy is also proposing to play a major direct role in the above-mentioned EU security operation in Libya, including a command role. In a nutshell: by playing the EU card, Italy is not trying to shirk its responsibilities, as it has sometimes done in the past. Yet, precisely in connection with Libya, Italy’s plans remain too vague to be fully credible.
Thrashing out an intra-EU agreement in support of Italy’s aims is going to require a deal on two fronts: on the one hand, Italy will need to secure the solidarity of other member states vis-à-vis the Mediterranean challenge; on the other, Rome will have to lend its support to the EU’s common position on Ukraine and Russia. Here, Italy’s level of ambition is relatively low, given the defensive posture adopted by Rome.
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Italy has a skeptical view of the EU sanctions against Russia and does not like the ad hoc format of the union’s dealings with Moscow on the Ukraine crisis; yet Rome is not going to break ranks with the EU. The Italian government also believes that (re)engaging Moscow at various levels is a useful and necessary way to maintain some degree of influence over Russia’s evolution and to fully involve the country in the struggle against the self-styled Islamic State.
These trends were confirmed by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Italy on June 10. Despite the media fanfare and Italian businesses grumbling about the sanctions, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi reiterated the G7 link between the Minsk II peace process for Ukraine and any future reassessment of the sanctions. The bottom line is that Italy’s margins for autonomous action are extremely limited, and its fundamental interests continue to require close coordination with those of Rome’s Western partners.
On a broader level in and around Europe, Italy’s view is that relations with the EU’s vast neighborhood should be differentiated and pursued by other means than just the accession process. And yet, where Serbia and even Turkey are concerned, Rome still perceives EU enlargement as a viable option—on paper, at least.
It remains true that, as in the past, Italy is seen as punching below its weight on the global stage. This reflects the constraints—particularly those of a budgetary nature—that affect Rome’s foreign and defense policies. Moreover, the political elite led by Renzi is absorbed mostly by domestic reforms.
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This is why Italy’s long-standing readiness to contribute to EU stability and security missions begins and ends with Libya, with a prolonged presence in Afghanistan in the meantime. Aside from that, strategic prudence prevails, balanced by a more active economic diplomacy. Italy’s new defense white paper unveiled in April 2015 aims to offer a rationale for the country’s declining defense budget. That is—by definition—mission impossible.
Continuity prevails in Rome’s attempt to maintain a working balance between the European and transatlantic dimensions of Italy’s foreign policy, so that the two strands complement and reinforce each other. A clear case in point is the country’s commitment to a successful Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), despite the great complexity of the ongoing negotiations between the EU and the United States. Whenever EU solidarity and transatlantic cohesion pull in opposite directions, Italy risks being sidelined and weakened diplomatically.
A less traditional way to look at Italy’s foreign policy predicament is to consider that the country’s overall international stance is affected by the confluence of four contradictory dynamics that converge on its territory: migrants from the South; gas from Russia and, to a lesser extent, from the South; cash from China—not yet in any large measure, but at an increasing rate; and the U.S. military footprint, which is lighter than in the past, but still significant.
The main challenge for any Italian government is to manage these four simultaneous sources of pressure through consistent policies, and to turn these difficulties into assets—for Italy and for Europe. For the time being, the challenge is far more evident than the strategic answer.
Marta Dassù is editor in chief of Aspenia and senior director for European affairs at the Aspen Institute. |
They are crossing the border illegally and violently displacing the indigenous population whose homes and possessions they either destroy or occupy. They are attacking the young, the elderly, and especially the girls and women, whom they kidnap, forcibly convert, or traffic into brothels. The locals are terrified of them. The police rarely come to their aid, nor do the politically correct media or government. Both are terrified by the criminals and terrorists who are riding these immigrant waves.
I am not talking about illegal immigrants to Europe or North America. I am describing Muslims who are penetrating India’s West Bengal region. These Bangladeshi immigrants are becoming conduits for criminal activities (arms, drugs, and sexual slavery) which also fund global jihad.
You won’t read about this in the Western mainstream media—or even in the Indian media, which has turned a blind eye to this ongoing tragedy because they are afraid to be labeled “politically incorrect” or “Islamophobic.” They are also afraid of reprisals. When Islamic zealots ransacked the office of the renowned newspaper, ‘The Statesman’ in Kolkata, in retaliation for a mere reproduction of an article condemning Islamic extremism, the Indian press remained silent. The editor and publisher of the newspaper were arrested for offending Muslim sentiments and no action was taken against the rioters.
Fortunately, there are a few very brave Hindus who are taking a stand against the Muslim terror campaign in India. One of them is Tapan Ghosh, whom I had the privilege of meeting recently when he came to New York City to talk about anti-Hindu persecution in his homeland. In 2008, Ghosh founded “Hindu Samhati” (Hindu Solidarity Movement), which serves persecuted Hindu communities in both West Bengal and Bangladesh.
As Ghosh emphasized in our interview, the Muslim persecution of Hindus in India is nothing new. Over a period of 800 years, millions of Hindus were slaughtered by Muslims as infidels or converted by the sword. In 1946-1947, when British India was divided into India and Pakistan, Muslims massacred many thousands of Hindus in Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal, and all along the fault line which separated India and Pakistan. Anti-Hindu riots and massacres continued during the 1950s and 1960s, but it was in 1971, when East Pakistan broke away to form the country of Bangladesh, that things worsened for Hindus in the area.
As Ghosh explained to me, “The liberation movement for Bangladesh was characterized by an escalation of atrocities against the Hindus and pro-liberation Muslims. Hindus were specifically singled out because they were considered a hindrance to the Islamisation of East Pakistan. In March 1971, the government of Pakistan and its supporters in Bangladesh launched a violent operation, codenamed “Operation Searchlight,” to crush all pro-liberation activities. Bangladeshi government figures put the death toll at 300,000, though nearly 3 million Hindus were never accounted for and are presumed dead.” U.S. officials in both India and Washington used the word “genocide” to describe what took place.
According to Ghosh, there has recently been a sharp increase in incidents of “Muslim rioting during Hindu festivals, destruction of Temples, desecration of Deities, and large-scale, provocative cow slaughter.” Worse: “Hundreds, thousands, of Hindu girls have been kidnapped, trafficked into sexual slavery, or taken as second or third wives for wealthy Muslim men. In recent years, Ghosh’s organization has rescued nearly 100 such girls, and one of his main missions has been to help reintegrate those survivors into their families and societies.
Ghosh wants the Indian government to stop the illegal immigration from Bangladesh and to force the return of undocumented Muslims; to ban madrassas and polygamy; to enforce a single standard of law and education; and to arrest and prosecute known Muslim mafia kingpins and terrorists. He challenges the media to report on the anti-Hindu atrocities and to address the issue of religious apartheid.
Ghosh is not optimistic. “The establishment of massive Saudi-funded Madrasas across rural Bengal is only contributing to the growing religious extremism among Muslims, [and] implementation of Sharia laws by [Islamic] courts is quite prevalent in many villages.” His greatest fear, he tells me, is that one day shouts of “Allahu Akbar” will ring out across the land and that Muslim zealots will demand that Hindus either convert or leave West Bangal—or die.
Ghosh came to America not just to appeal to Indian-Americans with family and historical ties in West Bengal and Bangladesh but to appeal to all Americans for their support. As he sees it, the battle against Muslim persecution in India is just one front in a much larger battle against Islamic expansionism and terror throughout the world.
All Americans must realize, he told me, “that the war on Islamic terrorism cannot be won without curbing religious extremism amongst the Muslim masses, be it in the suburbs of Detroit or Delhi or villages in rural Bengal. And this will require the active support and cooperation with each other, ranging from cooperation at the highest level to those who work at the grassroots level. We hope that Americans and Westerners will come out and support the Hindus in Bengal in raising resources and creating awareness about our on-the-ground realities.”
Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D. is professor emerita of psychology and the author of thirteen books including "Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman" and "The New Anti-Semitism." She has written extensively about Islamic gender apartheid and about honor killings. She once lived in Kabul, Afghanistan. She may be reached through her website: www.phyllis-chesler.com.
The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of Nathan Bloom in the preparation of this article.
Fox News Opinion is on Twitter. Follow us @fxnopinion. |
India’s reaction to an Amazon website selling doormats resembling the country’s flag involved an unprecedented public and private offensive against the US company by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, a document shows.
External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj publicly threatened in January to rescind visas of Amazon employees if the doormats were not removed from its Canadian website.
But a document seen by Reuters shows the government went even further in private, asking its US and Canadian embassies to raise the matter “strongly” with Amazon’s senior leadership.
India also escalated the matter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and prompted a global audit by the company to “ensure that such products are not listed on any of its other” websites around the world, according to the document.
Amazon, which removed the products within 24 hours and apologised to the government, declined to comment.
Much is at stake for Amazon in India, where it plans to invest more than $5 billion as it takes on home-grown Flipkart and Snapdeal for a bigger share of the internet services market in the world’s fastest growing major economy.
Amazon has now made Indian laws that govern the use of the national flag and other emblems “an integral part of the global compliance process,” the document said, outlining the steps Amazon and India have taken since the incident.
India’s reaction underscores the risks governments run by nationalist leaders are posing for businesses around the world. US President Donald Trump, for example, has also taken an aggressive stance on Twitter against individual companies.
Last year, Modi presented a global leadership award to Bezos at a US-India Business Council summit in Washington.
Amazon told the government that it had strengthened its in-house compliance units that monitor products sold by third-party vendors on its websites, the document said.
“Amazon India has conveyed that it is fully committed to respecting Indian laws and customs,” the document said.
First Published: Mar 30, 2017 20:10 IST |
Nevada was the beginning of the end of the Democratic primary. Now that end looks very much in sight after Saturday in South Carolina. The state delivered the unequivocal victory the Clinton campaign has been waiting for – and provided further evidence that Sanders can’t match her in a diverse electorate.
As an exuberant Clinton took the stage in Columbia to shouts of “Hillary!” and “Madam President!”, she was beating her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders roughly three-to-one in the polls. It’s a loss the Sanders campaign can’t spin as anything but what it is.
In a state where 61% of Democratic voters are black, Clinton cast herself as the person best positioned to carry out the legacy of a popular Barack Obama, and played up her history of fighting to surmount the obstacles life throws in one’s way.
Hillary Clinton defeats Bernie Sanders to win South Carolina primary Read more
She led with a promise to help poor minority children in the so-called “corridor of shame”, a stretch of dilapidated schools along South Carolina’s I-95 corridor. That was something Obama made a benchmark of his 2008 campaign when he beat her in 44 of the state’s 46 counties.
Clinton is not making that mistake again – now it’s she who is at the forefront of the issue. “This victory tonight is for the parents and teachers in South Carolina. They showed me crumbling classrooms,” Clinton said to cheers. And she promised the federal government would work with state actors to give children the “education they deserve”.
But she also embraced her identity as a fighter, a role that she can inhabit with tremendous authenticity. “Let’s break down the barriers that sideline people in our country, especially women,” she said to a roaring crowd. “Don’t you think it’s time we had equal pay for equal work?”
She didn’t stop with surmounting barriers for women and children. She also called for “facing realities of systematic racism”. It’s something her Democratic opponent, who hails from one of the whitest states in the nation, has struggled to do convincingly. And it’s a message of dire importance in South Carolina, where race and class continue to inform educational and economic opportunity in profound and disconcerting ways.
“Let’s break down the barriers holding back our young people,” Clinton continued, as she veered into the topic of student debt. College students are a demographic Clinton has been losing handily to Sanders, but she quickly turned the topic to her plans to set aside funds for historically black colleges and universities, playing to her strength with minority students.
In a statement Saturday night, Sanders – who by the time results rolled in was already in the faraway, relatively friendly refuge of Minnesota – didn’t try to deny he’d been defeated handily. But he did try to pre-emptively combat the narrative that the primary may be winding down rather than up ahead of Super Tuesday.
“Let me be clear on one thing tonight,” he wrote. “This campaign is just beginning. We won a decisive victory in New Hampshire. She won a decisive victory in South Carolina. Now it’s on to Super Tuesday.”
But Sanders thus far has only been able to win in overwhelmingly white states, and there aren’t enough of them to propel him forward long-term. Wins in states like Vermont and Maine are no match for Clinton-friendly states like Texas, which has more delegates than many other states combined.
And Clinton, for her part, didn’t seem too interested in proving herself against Sanders, instead saving her fire for the man she seems increasingly likely to face in a general contest: Donald Trump. “Instead of building walls, we need to be tearing down barriers,” she said, in a not-so-subtle allusion to the wall Trump has campaigned on building between the US and Mexico.
At another point, she took a swipe at Trump’s trademark slogan. “We don’t need to make America great again. America has never stopped being great,” she said, adding: “We do need to make America whole again.” It’s a positive message which, in this election, is a rare commodity.
Clinton delivered a strong performance that proved her appeal to a multiracial America. Still, it’s too early to write off Bernie Sanders – he has, after all, already defied the pundits by getting much further than expected. And his campaign still claims he can chart a narrow path to victory by stringing together wins in smaller (predominantly white) Super Tuesday states like Vermont, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Colorado and Oklahoma. But his path to victory looks highly unlikely.
South Carolina was not the decisive nail in Sanders’ coffin – though that might not be far off. Rather, this was the contest in which Clinton found her stride. And that is just what she needed at this moment. |
Fall is one of my favorite seasons of the year. Perhaps it’s the gorgeous leaves, the steaming mugs of apple cider, or the fact that my fall fashion game is significantly tighter than it is in the warm seasons of the year. It’s also the season of festivals, football and state fairs (my personal favorite). These are all-American forms of entertainment. There is one consistent feature of these shared American amusements that we talk little about – the potential for and frequent enactment of white violence.
This past weekend, students at Keene State College in New Hampshire got, as one student put it, “way out of hand,” as they turned over a car and danced on top of it, threatened an elderly person, threw glass bottles, and popped fireworks. These violent white college kids were so unruly that the police had to come in riot gear and bring out tear gas, to quell the riots. One white female student reported feeling very unsafe. Why are these white kids so mad that they are terrorizing residents and destroying property? Should we be concerned about the fact that they seemed to really enjoy it? Is that sociopathic?
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It would be easy to talk about this Keene State College business as an isolated incident of drunken college students, getting “out of hand.” But that would be politically and culturally irresponsible, since this is after all #FergusonOctober. Several states over from New Hampshire, down in Missouri, citizens exercising First Amendment rights, citizens with righteous anger, who might get a “little out of hand” with an errant glass bottle or two, are met with a much larger show of force – tanks, tear gas, stun grenades. We’ve had no reports of Ferguson protesters threatening old people or threatening to kill the police. And thank God for that, because we would have witnessed a serious amount of bloodshed to go along with our protests if that had occurred.
But beyond #FergusonOctober, any person who has ever lived in a college football town knows exactly what Saturday nights after big games are like. My first academic job was in a college football town. When I arrived, my students instructed me of survival protocol for home games: “Get your food on Thursday night. When you go in the house on Friday evening, don’t come back out till Sunday.” Less a set of racial instructions, these were more pragmatic tips so that I didn’t find myself caught in the middle of town in a traffic jam caused by drunken revelers. Drunken white revelers.
On at least two occasions, one of my good friends, a fellow professor, called to say that she had come out to her car on a Saturday night in this college town to find a drunk college kid urinating beside her car. On both occasions, she weighed the benefits of confronting the drunk white guy blocking her access, or simply waiting till he had finished and moved on.
Implicit in her stories was a truth we refuse to tell: These young drunk white men were dangerous. Menacing. And they are made more dangerous precisely because their disrespect for public space and private citizens is seen as mere play, mere college kids having a good time, rather than as a threat.
But what the events in Keene suggest is that white folks often test the bounds and limits of public decency and order with little long-term reprisal. There were some arrests, and some tear gas. But no dead bodies. No stigma about white anger. No come to Jesus meetings about White America’s problem children. No public discourse about these “menaces to society.” As many commentators on Twitter pointed out, there’ll be no articles about the absence of white leadership, or about how white folks just need to learn respect for public property.
How does it feel to be white? Does it feel like freedom? Freedom to piss on people and property with impunity? Freedom to burn shit up and live to tell about it? Freedom to threaten old people and wake up the next morning and chalk it up to drunkenness? License to kill?
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This isn’t just about civility. This is, as are most things in this country, about stark and disparate forms of racial treatment. This is about the ways that white threat is largely illegible as “threat.” This is about the fact that a band of wild, drunken black college kids could not have turned over cars, threatened old people, and shouted about killing the cops and lived.
For instance, this is also black college homecoming season, and my alma mater Howard University canceled the annual free concert at the legendary Yard Fest this year, because there were a few issues with crowd control last year. The Yard Fest is the stuff of hip-hop legend, and it is the annual event that most alumni look most forward to participating in. But as a federally funded entity, Howard is hypervigilant about making sure campus events are models of black respectability. It cannot afford the public scrutiny if the event were to devolve into a cabal like that which occurred at Keene. So it canceled a portion of the event beloved by all of us, because any appreciable amount of black unruliness could be met with an unfavorable and devastating federal response.
It is an institutional example of how powerful systems of white supremacy are, how much those systems hold everyone from the most venerable black institutions to the most vulnerable black youth in their death grips.
In the midst of this, the Keene students have released a video of the positive aspects of the Pumpkin Festival. It’s filled with a merry band of white students throwing back cans of beer, white girls twerking, one token black girl surrounded (a bit uncomfortably) by her white friends, at least one shot of a white girl’s bare behind, and various forms of good ole American college fun, set to a Kanye West soundtrack.
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All it takes to redeem whiteness is a four-minute YouTube video. That there is an unself-conscious celebration of booze, sex, hip-hop and partying in this video attests to a particular kind of freedom that white folks have to conceptualize and think of youth as a time of rebellion, lawlessness and testing the boundaries.
If you’re black that kind of thinking is dangerous. If you’re black that kind of thinking will get you killed. And if you’re white, and you do the killing, you will most probably go free.
If we showed black people doing each and every activity in this video, it would be a testament to our lack of civilization, our utter ratchetness, and wretchedness. Black folks know how to have a good time, for sure. But we would never use our good time as a fodder for a racial redemption marketing campaign. No sane black person would ever think that was a good idea.
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Can you tell yet that I’m fed up? Fed up with white obliviousness. Fed up with “white” freedom, which seems very much to be euphemism for black terror. Fed up with American injustice. And yet wholly, visually convinced that racial injustice is as American as football, pumpkin patches, drunken white revelers and apple pie. |
Looking at a map, one would be challenged to find a more impressive place than Easter Island where people ventured without the benefit of modern navigation. Just three times the size of Manhattan, it is more than a thousand miles from its nearest island neighbor to the west and 2,200 miles from Chile to the east, yet people have lived there for more than 800 years.
Scientists have long wondered how early people sailed to the island — as well as how they built the island’s impressive Moai.
Genetic tests have shown that the modern Rapanui people have a mix of Polynesian, South American and European ancestry. Some scientists have used the modern DNA results to suggest that Polynesians from the west and native South Americans from the east lived and intermingled on the island before Europeans first arrived in 1722. And in the famous Kon-Tiki expedition, a Norwegian explorer named Thor Heyerdahl showed on a balsa wood raft how South Americans could have voyaged to the Polynesian islands during pre-Columbian times.
But that does not mean it was probable, according to Lars Fehren-Schmitz, a biological anthropologist from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and lead author of the study.
Using rib bones from five Easter Island individuals from 1445 to 1945 that had been excavated in the 1980s and stored in the Kon-Tiki museum in Norway, Dr. Fehren-Schmitz and his colleagues attempted to sequence the genome of the island’s earliest inhabitants. The team extracted enough useful genetic information from the remains to analyze and draw conclusions that could be representative of the larger ancient population. |
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WEBVTT MARCIE?MARCIE: JANELLE, THE OFFICERSINVOLVED WILL TELL YOU IT TOOKHOURS OF INTERVIEWING PEOPLE WHOTHEY HAD TO TRACK DOWN WHO THEYSENT ME THE SUSPECT, BUT TODAYTHEY SAY THAT PAID OFF.IT WAS 5:00 HERE ON LADORA WAYA.M. WHEN NEIGHBORS TELL USSHERIFFS DEPUTIES AND SWAT TEAMMEMBERS BEGAN SHOUTING FORRAHMAEL HOLT TO COME OUTSIDE ANDFOR EVERYONE ELSE TO STAY INSIDETHEIR HOMES.RESIDENTS IN THE HAZELWOODNEIGHBORHOOD TELL US THEYWATCHED IN FEAR AS HOLT WASTAKEN INTO CUSTODY.THEY SAY THE SUSPECTED KILLERCAME OUTSIDE, LISTENED TOCOMMANDS, AND THEN OFFICERS SAYHE WAS HANDCUFFED WITH NEWKENSINGTON POLICE OFFICER BRIANSHAW'S HANDCUFFS.RESIDENTS TELL US IT HAPPENEDRATHER QUICKLY, BUT IT WASCERTAINLY SCARY.>> THEY WERE TELLING, GET BACKIN YOUR HOUSE, THEY ARE RUNNINGTHROUGH THE BACK DOOR.I WENT UP AND GOT THE GUNS OUT,JUST SITTING HERE IN THE LIVINGROOM JUST IN CASE.MARCIE: RAHMAEL HOLT IS NOW INTHE WESTMORELAND COUNTY JAILWITH NO BOND.HERE IN DOWNTOWN PITTSBURGH, IWANT YOU TO TAKE A LOOK AT THECITY-COUNTY BUILDING.THIS IS FOUR MILES FROM WHEREHOLT WAS ARRESTED, AND IT IS LITIN BLUE IN MEMORY OF BRIAN SHAW.
Advertisement Manhunt ends with capture of New Kensington police murder suspect at Pittsburgh home Police say Rahmael Holt is charged with fatally shooting New Kensington Police Officer Brian Shaw after running from a car during an attempted traffic stop. Share Shares Copy Link Copy
After a four-day manhunt involving several local and federal law enforcement departments, the suspect in the shooting death of New Kensington Police Officer Brian Shaw was taken into custody without incident early Tuesday morning.A SWAT team moved in on a house on Ladora Way, a short alley in Pittsburgh's Hazelwood section, and ordered 29-year-old Rahmael Holt to come out shortly before 5:30 a.m.They were coming from left, right, behind the house, sides of houses," witness Kristina Jackson said. "They were everywhere -- U.S. marshals, feds, everybody."Download the WTAE app to stay updated with breaking news alerts.Police have not said who lives in the home where Holt was found. An unidentified man was ordered to come outside with Holt, according to the witness."The officers told them to come to the doorway, and one guy came. He came off the porch. (An officer) told him to lift up his shirt and walk down the steps," Jackson said. "He lifted up his shirt, walked down the steps, and he told him, OK, get down the steps, lock your hands behind your head. He did that. They pulled him over to the side of the SWAT truck. The other guy came out, they told him to do the same exact thing. He did it, locked his hands, and they took him too.""I'm definitely relieved. It could have been way worse. If there was a lot of guns or anything, it could have been a very bad incident. Especially if he would have came out or resisted in any way shape or form, it could have been way worse."An FBI evidence response team spent hours searching the house after Holt's arrest. It was not clear if they found the gun that was used to kill Shaw.Holt, of Natrona Heights, was arraigned in front of New Kensington District Judge Frank Pallone and denied bond. He was taken to the Westmoreland County Prison to await a preliminary hearing on charges of murder of a law enforcement officer and firearms violations.During his arraignment, Holt said he wanted a private attorney. He did not respond to questions from reporters as police officers walked him out of the courtroom.Online dockets show that felony charges of hindering apprehension have been filed against Holt's mother, Sherry Holt, 47, of East Pittsburgh, and his cousin, Marcel Mason, and Mason's girlfriend, Aysa Benson, both 29 and of Duquesne. Police say all three were in contact with the suspect while he remained at large over the weekend.Immediately following Shaw's death, investigators were consumed with the task of finding Rahmael Holt. Police Chief Jim Klein said the department will now get back to normal business as it continues to deal with the loss of Shaw, 25, who had been on the force less than a year."I want the city of New Kensington residents to know that soon they will be seeing us back on the street," an emotional Klein said at a news conference announcing Holt's arrest. "We will be the ones coming to your door and knocking when you're reporting that barking dog complaint. We will be the ones coming and knocking on your door when you're reporting any type of incident going on in the city. We will be back."Police said that Shaw attempted a traffic stop on Leishman Avenue at about 8 p.m. Friday, which led to a foot pursuit of Holt, who they said was a passenger in the vehicle. Shots were fired during the foot chase, and Shaw was fatally wounded, police said.Westmoreland County District Attorney John Peck said Holt was fleeing toward a parking lot when he fired about six shots, and Shaw, wearing a bulletproof vest, was shot multiple times. It doesn't appear that Shaw returned fire, Peck said.The alleged driver, Tavon Harper, 27, left the scene and was later arrested at his home in New Kensington, police said. He faces drug and fleeing charges, but is not charged in connection with Shaw's death.A police procession escorted Shaw's body to Rusiewicz Funeral Homes of Lower Burrell, where visitation was scheduled for Monday and Tuesday. A funeral Mass was set for 10 a.m. Wednesday at Mount St. Peter Church in New Kensington."Thank you to the citizens of New Kensington. Our officers are dedicated to providing the best possible service to protect you and keep you safe," Klein said. "There is no better example than Officer Brian Shaw, who gave his life serving his community. I promise you that our officers will continue to serve with the same honor that Brian did, the same dedication and professional service that you guys expect and you guys will receive." |
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
If the Republicans in the U.S. Senate were a baseball team, they would be the 1962 New York Mets. The Mets won only 40 games that summer, losing 120, the most inept performance since 1899 when a team called the Cleveland Spiders also won only 40 games. As the Mets stumbled to the end of the disastrous season, their manager, Casey Stengel, cried out in desperate frustration: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
Indeed, no one could, and the Republican senators can’t play their game, either.
Their manager, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, threw up his hands Tuesday in Stengel-like frustration, after his last-ditch Hail Mary long-ball stratagem of repealing Obamacare without replacing it, failed, just as an earlier attempt failed to repeal and replace with a reasonable substitute.
These are the worthies who amused themselves over the eight Obama years by voting to repeal, with many brave and heroic speeches, when they had no prospect of repealing because the Democrats controlled the Senate and Republican boasts and votes were irrelevant. This enabled them to view with alarm knowing they would never have to come up with something to which they could point with pride. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the three Republican senators who went over the hill Tuesday to vote against Mr. McConnell and their party, gleefully boasted, in so many words, “I told you so.”
“I said back in January that if we are going to do repeal then there has to be replace,” she said. “There is enough chaos and uncertainty already.” So she, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia added a little more chaos and uncertainty, just for good measure.
President Trump, taking unaccustomed care not to fire broadsides at anyone in his party, said Obamacare must collapse, as it is showing every sign of doing, before it can be replaced. “As I have always said,” he tweeted, “let Obamacare fail and then come together and do a great healthcare plan. Stay tuned!” (And this time only one exclamation point.)
“We were let down by all of the Democrats and a few Republicans. Most Republicans were loyal, terrific & worked real hard.” Reprising MacArthur on leaving Corregidor as it was about to fall to the Japanese in 1942, the president added: “We will return!”
Nobody likes Obamacare, and Americans are fleeing the failing scheme by the thousands, many insurance companies are leaving the field and those remaining are doubling premiums, up by a hundred percent in some places with the expectation that premiums will rise again next year. The Republican alternatives, American Health Care Act in the House and the Better Care Reconciliation Act in the Senate, were regarded as not much better, but were good enough that a well-disciplined Republican majority would have passed something, understanding that the administration needed a victory to establish the momentum that would have enabled other things, such as a tax cut. The Democrats are determined to smash that, too.
Mr. Trump thinks that when Obamacare collapses into smoking ruins the Democrats will “own it,” and be blamed for the scheme they enacted without a single Republican vote. But if he really thinks that he should put on his shock absorbers for another jolt. Backed by a compliant combine of the big newspapers and the major television networks, the Democrats will charge ahead with the narrative that “Obamacare needed a few tweaks to make it work, but the president and the Republicans wouldn’t do it because they’re heartless and like watching the suffering of the poor, the helpless, the homeless and the wretched refuse on the shore, yearning to breathe free.” And so forth and so on. The Republicans will get the blame, and wonder how it happened.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission. |
Perl 6 subroutines
In this article we will look at how subroutines can be defined in Perl 6.
sub
slurpy
*
multi
?
× Note! This site is about Perl 6.
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This site is aboutIf you are looking for a solution for Perl 5, please check out the Perl 5 tutorial
Subroutines in Perl 6
I have been thinking for some time now on how to teach subroutines in Perl 6, and I don't have a good answer yet. For now, instead of some methodological introductions, I'll just try to throw together a few examples and we'll see if something comes out of that?
In Perl 6, just as in Perl 5 one can define a subroutine without specifying the list of parameters. When someone calls that subroutine, the values are found in the private array called @_.
use v6; foo('a', 'b', 'c'); sub foo { say @_.join(':'); # a:b:c }
There is more to even that in Perl 6 than in Perl 5, but let's look at the nicer examples of Perl 6:
In Perl 6, one can define a real signature for the subroutines and let the language, or rather the implementation, check if a valid set of arguments were passed.
Actually, instead of checking if the right number of arguments were passed, Perl will not even call the function if you did not give the correct list of arguments.
I can already hear the people getting worried about the flexibility of passing an arbitrary number of arguments and then letting the function figure it out. Don't worry. You can have that too in Perl 6.
Simple scalar parameters
The most basic example I usually show is the add function with two parameters. That's usually enough in Perl 5, but very far from that in Perl 6.
use v6; sub add($a, $b) { return $a+$b; } say add(2, 3); # 5
Then if you try to call this with 3 parameters like this:
say add(2, 3, 4);
Rakudo will throw a compile-time exception as it cannot find the appropriate function.
===SORRY!=== CHECK FAILED: Calling 'add' will never work with argument types (int, int, int) (line 7) Expected: :($a, $b)
Subroutine with arbitrary number of parameters
That would be the time to show how to define a subroutine that can get arbitrary number of values, but that requires introducing two concepts at a time. So I'll have to find a better set of examples.
Anyway, if we would like to implement a sum() subroutine that can get any number of values we need to define it like this:
use v6; sub sum(*@values) { my $sum = 0; for @values -> $v { $sum += $v } return $sum; } say sum(2, 3); # 5 say sum(2, 3, 4); # 9
We have to define the expected parameter as a slurpy array by preceding its @ sigil with a *. It will then accept any number of values as parameter, and put them in the @values array.
I can call it either with literal scalars
say sum(2, 3); # 5
or even with a list of arrays and scalars mixed
my @a = (2, 3, 4); my $z = 5; say sum(@a, $z); # 14
We already saw the for loop earlier, if you don't recall it, here is the link: Looping over a list of values one at a time, two at a time and more
Reduction operator
Of course this is not really a good example anyway as that function should be using the reduction operator (see S03-operators)...
sub sum(*@values) { return [+] @values; }
... and of course no one should write a function for that.
The reduction operator is one of the meta-operators of Perl 6. It is a prefix version of an infix operator, but I digress.
Passing arrays and hashes
In Perl 5, we had to learn about references in order to be able to pass more than one array or hash to a subroutine. That also meant the subroutine always has full access to the original data structure. Effectively call-by-reference. The subroutine could change the passed parameter by accident. Not really clean coding.
In Perl 6, there are no such references and there is no need for them. If you'd like to accept a real array or hash as a parameter for a subroutine, you can declare that in the signature of the subroutine.
For example I have a script that generates html pages from templates and I have some code like this: (Mine was using HTML::Template but that's not relevant now so I am just printing out the parameters.)
use v6; sub process_template($input, $output, %params) { say "open $input"; say "replace {%params.perl}"; say "save $output"; } my %data = ( fname => "Foo", lname => "Bar", ); process_template("index.tmpl", "index.html", %data);
the output
open index.tmpl replace ("fname" => "Foo", "lname" => "Bar").hash save index.html
Now I know this example does not show the real power of having several complex data structures in the parameter list. I could have written:
sub xyz($input, @value, %data) { }
and then pass a scalar, an array and a hash. I just don't have a good example for that yet.
Anyway, the above example had a bit of data multiplication and the name of the output file could have been generated from the name of the template. It is the same name, just with different extension.
So I could write the code like this, passing only the name of the template and generating the name of the output file from that:
use v6; sub process_template($input, %params) { my $output = substr($input, 0, *-4) ~ "html"; say "open $input"; say "replace {%params.perl}"; say "save $output"; } my %data = ( fname => "Foo", lname => "Bar", ); process_template("index.tmpl", %data);
The output is
open index.tmpl replace ("fname" => "Foo", "lname" => "Bar").hash save index.html
In this code ~ is the concatenation operator
Multiple signatures
That's ok, but there are cases when the name of the template and the output file are different. So I need both versions. In Perl 6, it is not a problem, I can just define both of the functions, telling Perl that they are multies - so it won't think I am redefining a function by mistake.
use v6; multi sub process_template($input, %params) { my $output = substr($input, 0, *-4) ~ "html"; say "open $input"; say "replace {%params.perl}"; say "save $output"; } multi sub process_template($input, $output, %params) { say "open $input"; say "replace {%params.perl}"; say "save $output"; } my %data = ( fname => "Foo", lname => "Bar", ); process_template("index.tmpl", %data); process_template("from.tmpl", "to.html", %data);
The output will be:
open index.tmpl replace ("fname" => "Foo", "lname" => "Bar").hash save index.html open from.tmpl replace ("fname" => "Foo", "lname" => "Bar").hash save to.html
For every function call Rakudo will look for a function that matches the signature and call that function. If no match is found it will throw an exception. For example, in our case, calling without a hash will throw a compile-time exception:
process_template("from.tmpl", "to.html");
===SORRY!=== CHECK FAILED: Calling 'process_template' will never work with argument types (str, str) (line 23) Expected any of: :($input, %params) :($input, $output, %params)
Sometimes that's what we want. In other cases we might want to allow the user to call the above functions without providing any parameters. We could write two additional functions without the %params but that is just unnecessary code duplication. Instead we can declare the hash as optional by adding a question mark ? at the end of the parameter:
Optional parameters
multi sub process_template($input, %params?) { multi sub process_template($input, $output, %params?) {
If we defined our functions that way we could call
process_template("from.tmpl", "to.html");
and it would know how to find the right subroutine leaving the %params hash empty.
The problem is, that in this case calling
process_template("index.tmpl", %data);
will generate a compile-time error:
Ambiguous call to 'process_template'; these signatures all match: :($input, %params?) :($input, $output, %params?) in block at a.pl:21
That happens because the $output parameter could accept both the second string or the hash (as a reference). In order to avoid that we can tell the subroutine, that the $output variable must be a string by putting Str in front of the variable.
multi sub process_template($input, Str $output, %params?) {
As you can see, there is a lot more one can do with signatures, but I think this is enough for today.
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Thenewsletter has been around for a while. If you are interested to get special notification when there is new content on this site, it is the best way to keep track:This is a newsletter temporarily running on my personal site (szabgab.com) using Mailman, till I implement an alternative system in Perl 6.Written by Gabor Szabo
Published on 2012-08-07
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It looks like we’ll have one fewer present to open come Christmas Day. Open Road has pushed Oliver Stone‘s Snowden off its year-end release calendar and into 2016. The film stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the controversial NSA whistleblower. More on the Snowden release date delay after the jump.
Open Road has not yet announced a new release date for Snowden. THR‘s sources indicate the film isn’t done yet, so the delay should give Stone more time to finish up. Unfortunately, the release date change also takes Snowden out of the running for this year’s Oscar race. (Gordon-Levitt might remain part of the Oscar conversation, though, as he’s also got Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk due out later this year.)
On the other hand, it’ll spare Snowden the challenge of competing on the crowded holiday weekend. Under its old December 25 release date, Snowden would have been up against Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip, Daddy’s Home, Point Break, Concussion, Joy, The Hateful Eight, and The Revenant, as well as the second week of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald wrote the Snowden screenplay, based on Luke Harding‘s The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man and Time of the Octopus by Anatoly Kucherena. The latter is a novel by Snowden’s Russian lawyer, about an American whistleblower awaiting asylum in a Russian airport.
Snowden is still a figure of controversy, and if you’re wondering where Stone stands, he’s made his position pretty clear in the past. He’s gone on the record calling Snowden a “hero” for exposing the details of NSA’s global surveillance program, and President Barack Obama a “disgrace” for prioritizing the hunt for Snowden over the reformation of “George Bush-style eavesdropping techniques.”
Besides Gordon-Levitt, Snowden stars Shailene Woodley as Snowden’s girlfriend Lindsay Mills; Melissa Leo as Citizenfour director Laura Poitras; Zachary Quinto as journalist Glenn Greenwald; Tom Wilkinson as political reporter Ewen MacAskill; Timothy Olyphant as a CIA agent who befriends Snowden; and Nicolas Cage as a former intelligence official. |
Game of Thrones may be blood-curdling and violent fare but its 65-year-old creator, George RR Martin, is a portly, softly spoken figure in black shirt and braces whose silver beard makes him look a little like Father Christmas as portrayed by Raymond Briggs. On a humid afternoon, he is sitting on a sofa in a suite at the Beau-Rivage, the most upmarket hotel in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
The New Jersey-born writer is guest of honour at the Neuchâtel International Film Festival (NIFF), whose organisers are clearly delighted to have such an eminent figure in their midst. They confide that they have been startled by how amenable Martin has proved. "He wants to meet people," the festival's artistic director Anaïs Emery says with evident surprise as she details the many book signings, masterclasses and press events he has already attended. (He has also found time to visit the HR Giger Museum in nearby Gruyères.)
After my interview with him, Martin is due to introduce a screening of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho that he has programmed (alongside two of his other favourite films, Casablanca and Forbidden Planet).
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"I thought Psycho was an interesting choice because people are constantly saying I kill people in my work unexpectedly," says Martin, explaining his decision to unleash Hitchcock's mother-fixated maniac Norman Bates on the Swiss festival-goers.
Psycho is notorious for the scene of its ostensible star, Janet Leigh, being stabbed to death in the shower. This happens long before the final credits roll.
Game of Thrones has its own Psycho moments. For example, some fans still haven't quite forgiven Martin for killing off Ned Stark (played by Sean Bean in the HBO TV adaptation) so early in the story. After all, Ned was one of the heroes of the first series: a craggy, sable-covered patriarch, courageous and doggedly loyal, who was chief of the House of Stark. Martin, though, isn't about to apologise for taking off Ned's head.
"Hitchcock and [writer] Robert Bloch did that in Psycho. I wanted to establish that connection in particular. I am hardly the first person to kill a character unexpectedly and thereby get a big reaction from the audience."
Working primarily as a novelist, and now in television, Martin may seem an incongruous presence at a film festival but he is self-evidently a cinephile. In Santa Fe, where he has lived since the late 1970s, he owns and runs the Jean Cocteau Cinema. When he was growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey, cinema-going was as important to him as reading Marvel comics and Robert Heinlein sci-fi novels.
The picture Martin paints of himself as a kid growing up is Dickensian in its pathos. He was born in 1948. His family was very poor. His father was a longshoreman. Little George used to scrimp together money to buy comics and movie tickets by writing and performing "little monster stories". He sold them to the other kids in the projects for a nickel. (These were composed longhand, on school notebook paper.)
"When I was living in Bayonne, I desperately wanted to get away. Not because Bayonne was a bad place, mind you. Bayonne was a very nice place in some ways. But we were poor. We had no money. We never went anywhere."
His father, Raymond Collins Martin, spent around two years unemployed. Even when he eventually found employment as a longshoreman (and got his all-important union credentials), the work wasn't consistent. "You have a card and you have to show up at dawn every day," Martin says, recalling his father's working life. "Maybe you go home and you don't make anything. They hire the more seasoned men, the more veteran men. The longer you're in it, the more work you get but there are some rough times at the beginning."
The family didn't have a car. They lived on 1st Street. Martin walked every day to school on 5th street. The farthest he strayed from "the five blocks that seemed to be my lot," was when he took the bus to the cinema on 16th Street. Until he went to college (he studied journalism at Northwestern in Illinois), he lived a confined and claustrophobic existence. "There was a hunger in me to see more of the world, to see things I only read about in books."
Shape Created with Sketch. Game of Thrones season 5 cast Show all 9 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Game of Thrones season 5 cast 1/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Oscar-nominated New Zealand actress Keisha Castle-Hughes will play the fiery Obara Sand, one of Prince Oberyn’s illegitimate daughters, who is seeking revenge for her father’s murder at the hands of the Mountain in season four Getty Images 2/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Nymeria “Nym” Sand will be played by Jessica Henwick, her best known role to date is in television series Silk and Spirit Warriors BBC 3/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Jonathan Pryce will star as the High Sparrow, a religious figure who could be making waves in King’s Landing Getty Images 4/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Alexander Siddig, who will be playing Doran Martell, the stoic ruler of Dorne and the older brother of the gruesomely slain Oberyn Getty Images 5/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Enzo Cilenti (left) will take on the part of the slave trader Yezzan Rex Features 6/9 Game of Thrones season 5 London-born star DeObia Oparei will play Areo Hotah, the loyal protector of Doran Martell Getty Images 7/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Rosabell Laurenti Sellers will play Tyene Sand, one of the illegitimate daughters of Oberyn Martell, the Prince of Dorne Getty Images 8/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Myrcella Baratheon will be played by newcomer Nell Tiger Free Rex Features 9/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Newcomer Toby Sebastian will take on the role of Trystane Martell, the youngest son of Doran 1/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Oscar-nominated New Zealand actress Keisha Castle-Hughes will play the fiery Obara Sand, one of Prince Oberyn’s illegitimate daughters, who is seeking revenge for her father’s murder at the hands of the Mountain in season four Getty Images 2/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Nymeria “Nym” Sand will be played by Jessica Henwick, her best known role to date is in television series Silk and Spirit Warriors BBC 3/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Jonathan Pryce will star as the High Sparrow, a religious figure who could be making waves in King’s Landing Getty Images 4/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Alexander Siddig, who will be playing Doran Martell, the stoic ruler of Dorne and the older brother of the gruesomely slain Oberyn Getty Images 5/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Enzo Cilenti (left) will take on the part of the slave trader Yezzan Rex Features 6/9 Game of Thrones season 5 London-born star DeObia Oparei will play Areo Hotah, the loyal protector of Doran Martell Getty Images 7/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Rosabell Laurenti Sellers will play Tyene Sand, one of the illegitimate daughters of Oberyn Martell, the Prince of Dorne Getty Images 8/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Myrcella Baratheon will be played by newcomer Nell Tiger Free Rex Features 9/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Newcomer Toby Sebastian will take on the role of Trystane Martell, the youngest son of Doran
Thanks to his success, Martin can now of course travel far and wide. But even so, his nostalgia for his childhood is evident. He still goes back to Bayonne. "I miss the pizza, which is the best in the world, and I still have family there."
His father, who died before Martin made it big as a novelist, was not an expressive man. Nor did he care for literature (although he was proud his son made it to college.) "I don't think he ever read a book after he got out of school and he never finished high school."
Strangely, we have to thank the American world chess champion Bobby Fischer for Martin's emergence as a writer. Martin was a very proficient chess player himself.
"I started playing chess when I was quite young, in grade school. I played it through high school. In college, I founded the chess club. I was captain of the chess team."
In the American chess-rating system, Martin was categorised at his peak as "expert," one rank below "master".
"The importance of chess to me was not as a player but as a tournament director. In my early 20s, I was writing. I sold a few short stories. My big dream was to be a full-time writer and support myself with my fiction but I wasn't making enough money to pay my rent and pay the phone bill – so I had to have a day job."
In 1972, Bobby Fischer did Martin a huge favour by winning the world chess championship. "Bobby Fischer played Boris Spassky in Reykjavík and won – and the entire American chess community went nuts!"
On the back of Fischer's success, the game became hugely popular. Martin was hired to direct the Midwestern circuit for a national organisation that ran chess tournaments. "For two or three years, I had a pretty good situation. Most writers who have to have a day job work five days a week and then they have the weekend off to write. These chess tournaments were all on the weekend so I had to work on Saturday and Sunday – but then I had five days off to write. The chess generated enough money for me to pay my bills."
After a year or two, the American chess bubble burst. All those enthusiasts who had taken up the game after Fischer's victory over Spassky stopped playing. There was no longer much money in setting up tournaments. "But, by then, I was much better established as a writer," he reflects. "The chess really did mark a crucial turning point in my career."
Martin himself long ago gave up chess. He decided that he didn't have the dedication or love of the game to treat it as a full-time job. "You have to study the books and memorise the openings and play constantly, play games every day, over and over again," he sighs. "I wasn't willing to do that. I enjoyed chess, it was fun playing it and doing the tournaments but I didn't want to make it my job. Writing gave me much more satisfaction."
I ask Martin if all the tactical thinking and preparation involved in his chess career helped him later when he turned to constructing something as complex as A Song of Ice and Fire, the epic series of fantasy novels of which Game of Thrones was the first. Given the size of the enterprise, the vast cast of characters and huge array of subplots, how does he work out what fits where?
The author laughs ruefully. "I don't have an easy answer to that. I just do. It is in my mind. I have charts of course. Most of it is on the computer. I have files on the computer. I have lists of chronologies and family trees. I consult those from time to time but less than you would think. Most of it is just in my head."
Martin acknowledges that he is "aided" by the fact that he has written Ice and Fire in the age of the computer. Touchingly, he still types up his work on an ancient DOS word processor. "DOS with WordStar 4.0," he elaborates. "Primitive though it is, compared to certain systems, it has a search and replace function that is very useful. I have assembled all four of the published books into one gigantic document. If I am about to write about a character, Bill, I do a search and see every previous time I mentioned Bill and what I said about him. Even then, I still make mistakes because it is large. That is maybe one reason why I've slowed down a little, as I get deeper into it and it gets more and more complex, it is harder to remember. Maybe I take a little more time in reviewing what I did last week or last year or three years ago."
The "slowing down" Martin mentions is a source of huge disquiet to some of his fans, who are desperate for him to finish his magnum opus as soon as possible. They take delays personally and have been at times vicious in their attacks on the author for keeping them waiting.
"I have the best fans in the world for the most part," Martin sighs. "There is a minority who are annoying, it has to be said. But for every one of those, there are 500 who are just great and who are very supportive. They buy the books and come out in their thousands when I do a signing."
The author seems grounded and phlegmatic but acknowledges the occasional bad review "sticks in the craw" and that he is still "bothered" by the sniping of some of his more aggressive fans, telling him to get a move on. "But I just have to accept it. It comes with the territory." As he tells himself, it's a problem most writers would "die to have."
"With most writers, no one gives a shit when their book is coming out and even when it does come out, no one cares. I would much rather have my problem than their problem."
Besides, before A Song of Ice and Fire started selling in the millions, Martin had his own share of "flops and failures" as he freely acknowledges. There were times when he thought his career was over.
The author has been a beneficiary of a digital age in which fans and authors have become closer than ever before. Nonetheless, he still believes in a traditional, ordered model of publishing in which manuscripts are crafted and refined – not simply dumped on the internet. He pays heartfelt tribute to his UK and US editors, Jane Johnson of HarperCollins and Anne Lesley Groell of Bantam Spectra. "They're both great. They read the books. They give me their commentary. I work with them on it. I think editors are still important."
Good editors, he continues, are "gatekeepers" who find and guide new talent. "The world is changing, I will admit. I am old enough and now very well established so the changes don't affect me so much. But with the rise of the internet and self-publishing, we are seeing people who are trying to reach the readers directly and bypass traditional publishing and bypass the editors. It is really too early to tell where that will lead but I am not necessarily sure it will lead to a good place. I do think the function of editors as gatekeepers is a valuable and worthy function – they do save us from reading a lot of crap!"
The novelist is midway through something of a European tour. After his trip to Switzerland, he is due in Scotland for the Edinburgh book festival. It has often been suggested that Ivanhoe (by the Scottish 19th-century novelist Walter Scott) was, alongside the War of the Roses, a major influence on A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones.
Martin was first turned on to Ivanhoe by the 1952 MGM movie starring Robert Taylor, George Sanders and a young Elizabeth Taylor. "I think it was Elizabeth Taylor at the peak of her...," his voice tails off before he clarifies. "She was the most beautiful woman in the world. I think I was nine years old when I saw that movie. How could you not fall in love with her? But the jousting and the pageantry of it made me love that story. Later, in high school, I did read that book. For a modern reader, it's a little tough to get through. The prose is very Victorian and thick but if you fight your way through it, the story is there. It has everything the movie has and more – the heraldry and jousting and the insight into the times. It was an influence in that sense."
Thanks to HBO's Game of Thrones, Martin is now a major figure in US TV as well as an author with the 21st-century's equivalent of the popularity and reach that Walter Scott once enjoyed. One of the producers of the TV series referred to it flippantly as: "The Sopranos in Middle Earth." Such a description isn't so far off the mark. Without The Sopranos, Martin acknowledges that Game of Thrones might never have been greenlit. In the 1980s, Martin had worked for CBS television on The Twilight Zone. The American television world he encountered then was very different from the one he thrives in today.
"Certainly, HBO and premium cable in general has none of the rigid censorship that you encountered on the traditional broadcast network," Martin muses. "The networks were looking for a very broad, general audience. They wanted all groups, all ages, all demographics, mass audiences – and they were definitely very afraid of offending anyone."
This used to lead to bland, safety-first programme choices. "You had to write very sanitised stories," Martin remembers. "You always heard the phrase 'we're inviting people into our living room.' If there are obnoxious, mean people, we wouldn't invite them into the living room every week."
Martin credits David Chase's groundbreaking tale of a Mafia boss with changing this way of thinking. "The first episode of The Sopranos was one of the great changing points in television history. You meet this guy, Tony Soprano. You see him in this psychiatrist's office, talking about these ducks who have flown away. He seems like a very sympathetic guy. He's upset about ducks. You like him. Then, he's driving home. He sees this guy who owes him money and he runs him over with the car and gets out and starts kicking him. Maybe you don't like him so much but you are still ~ interested in him."
This was a lesson that Game of Thrones took to heart. Heroes don't have to be likeable. The Sopranos also proved that serialised dramas (as opposed to episodic dramas which could be shown in any order) could also work with audiences. Martin gives the example of Gunsmoke, a series that lasted for 20 years on American TV without seemingly changing. "Many people passed through Dodge City but at the end of the episode, Miss Kitty was in the Long Branch saloon, Doc was playing chess in his office and Matt Dillon and his deputy were down in the sheriff's office."
In Game of Thrones, by contrast, all is flux and chaos. This is TV drama on an epic, cinematic scale – one reason why Martin is so keen to round off the series with an actual movie.
"If we go seven or eight seasons and then the show is still big enough that we can get the $200m to finance a huge epic movie to end it… sure!" he enthuses about the prospect of a big-screen version.
In spite of the huge cast and very big budget ($6m per episode) of the television series, it is a source of frustration to the writer that not even HBO has the resources to do full justice to the original series of novels.
"We still run into budgetary problems. We've done a couple of great battles, for example, the Black Water battle in season two that I scripted and in this past season, episode nine was one long battle – the Battle of the Wall. Those have been great episodes, but we've also had to skip half the battles. Instead we have a messenger run on from off stage and say 'We've won the battle!' Battles are very expensive."
Martin would like any Game of Thrones movie to do full justice to the battles and to be shown on the biggest screen possible – but he does draw the line at 3D.
"I don't care about 3D," he says. "It gives me a headache."
In the meantime, Martin has work to do. He needs to complete writing his epic fantasy. When he finally does so, one prediction can safely be made. All those impatient readers who've been carping at him and telling him to get a move on are bound to feel a sense of loss. They will probably then regret that he didn't spend even longer spinning out his tale. That's the paradox – the fans are desperate to know the ending to a story that they want to go on forever.
George RR Martin will be speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Monday
OTHER NOTABLE AMATEUR CHESS PLAYERS
Stanley Kubrick
Used to play for money in Central Park. While filming '2001', he played 25 games with the scientist and writer Jeremy Bernstein.
Humphrey Bogart
Once drew against Grandmaster Samuel Reshevsky in 1956. One of his correspondence chess-game positions featured in 'Casablanca'.
Ray Charles
Charles played with a special board designed for blind players. The singer revealed in a 2002 'Chess Life' cover story that Dizzy Gillespie used to "beat the hell" out of him when they played each other. |
Facility information and history Edit
Events Edit
Naming rights Edit
The movable field outside of the stadium. On September 26, 2006 the University of Phoenix acquired the naming rights to the stadium totalling $154.5 million over 20 years.[29] On April 11, 2017, the University of Phoenix terminated the naming rights just 11 years into the 20-year deal, citing financial woes; however, the university kept its name on the stadium until a replacement company was found to give naming rights to. On September 4th, 2018, State Farm reached a deal securing the rights through 2036. University of Phoenix will remain involved as a sponsor with the team in a reduced capacity as the Cardinals' "official education partner."
Parking space Edit
The stadium has approximately 14,000 on-site parking spaces (plus 12,000 adjacent spaces),[30] located in numerous lots that surround the stadium's 2,000 disabled parking spaces. The design improvement, featured for example in a Discovery program about this stadium, is zoning. Parking spaces for guests are zoned with preferred leaving directions, to achieve the fastest possible movement of traffic.[31] |
Earlier this week, a post from Paul Qui on Instagram started a gossip storm in the Houston restaurant world. Qui mysteriously ‘grammed a rendering of a space at 520 Westheimer, and now it’s confirmed that the Austin-based chef is headed to Clutch City.
The Houston Chronicle reports that Qui will open an upscale Asian eatery called Aqui (get it?) in the building at 520 Westheimer. The restaurant will focus on “wood and wok cooking,” including meats grilled on a ripping hot Josper oven, along with a raw bar and menu of cocktails. According to Eater Austin, the restaurant is being designed by A Parallel Architecture, and will feature a similar aesthetic as Kuneho, Qui’s flagship restaurant in Austin.
The restaurant is set to open its doors in “spring or early summer,” which is right around the same time that Qui will head to court to face a 2016 assault charge for allegedly hitting his girlfriend. Qui, who denies that he committed the assault, later checked himself into a “medical treatment facility.”
It’s going to be a busy next few months for Qui. Today, Eater Austin reports that he is also facing a lawsuit from a vendor that accuses the chef of skipping out on a $24,000 bill. Hopefully he’ll be able to stay out of court long enough to get Aqui open before the Houston summer sets in. |
In The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett draw upon decades of research to show that, among rich countries, high levels of inequality correlate with lower levels of social cohesion and social mobility, worse mental and physical health, and higher levels of crime, violence, drug use, and imprisonment. These problems do not merely afflict the poor. Rather, they touch people across the social spectrum. The implication is that large income gaps, by themselves, are significant contributors to these particular sources of human misery.
For example, residents of countries and American states with higher levels of income inequality are less likely to believe that most people can be trusted. There are a few reasons that might be the case. Yawning income gaps could cause communities to segregate along class lines, preventing the rich and poor from mingling. The wealthy might come to believe the poor just want to take their money. The poor might believe they're being exploited.
And indeed, social trust in America has declined over the past few decades in lockstep with our rising income inequality. We might personally experience this in simple, day-to-day ways. Think of walking down the street and worrying you might be mugged, or walking into work and assuming your boss will try to bilk you out of overtime pay. But it's also not hard to think of examples of how this has shaped our politics. Just recall conservatives railing against "takers" during the election, or Occupy protesters fuming against the rich. Americans up and down the social ladder believe others are out to get them.
Meanwhile, the data show that trust in others makes us feel more secure and cooperative, and are more likely to donate time and money to helping our communities. In short, widespread trust makes our lives more pleasant, and income inequality undermines it.
Inequality may also be driving our sky-high rates of depression and other mental illnesses. Wilkinson and Pickett draw on World Health Organization data to show that higer-inequality countries like the U.S., the UK, and Australia have double the rates of mental illness of lower-inequality societies like Japan, Belgium, and Germany. Additionally, anxiety-related disorders are a much larger percentage of mental illnesses in higher-inequality societies than lower-inequality societies.
This too has a very straightforward causal story: Members of high-inequality societies have to contend with status anxiety, among other issues. In such societies, the poor will suffer anxiety and depression over their especially low status and inability to acquire the material things associated with high-status individuals and success. The rich will suffer anxiety related to the possibility of losing their top spots: when the rungs of the ladder are far apart, you have a long way to fall. More than worries about themselves, the rich probably worry about their kids being able to out-compete others to capture a similarly remunerative spot in their future life, anxieties that have gotten so bad in some cases that rich parents even hold their kids back a year from kindergarten on the hopes that they will be more physically and mentally developed than their future classmates. |
WASHINGTON (AP) _ The Supreme Court today refused to hold Hustler magazine financially liable for the death of a 14-year-old Texas boy who died during a sexual experiment.
The justices, without comment, let stand an appellate ruling that a $182,000 jury verdict against Hustler violated the magazine’s free-speech rights.
Troy Daniel Dunaway was found dead at his Houston area home on Aug. 7, 1981. His nude body was hanging by its neck in his bedroom closet, and at his feet lay an issue of Hustler.
The magazine was opened to an article, entitled ″Orgasm of Death,″ that dealt with a sexual practice called autoerotic asphyxiation - cutting off blood to the brain while masturbating.
The boy’s mother, Diane Herceg, and the young friend who discovered his body, Andy Vines, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Hustler.
The suit contended that the magazine article amounted to an ″incitement to lawless conduct″ and therefore should not enjoy the freedom of speech guaranteed by the Constitution’s First Amendment.
In a 1969 decision called Brandenburg vs. Ohio, the Supreme Court said speech aimed at sparking lawless action - such as inciting a riot - is not constitutionally protected and can be made a crime.
A federal jury awarded Mrs. Herceg and Vines $169,000 and $13,000, respectively, in damages, but the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the verdict last April 20.
Relying on the 1969 decision, the appeals court said, ″The crucial element to lowering the First Amendment shield is the imminence of the threatened evil. ... Even if the article paints in glowing terms the pleasures supposedly achieved by the practice it describes, no fair reading of it can make its content advocacy, let alone incitement to engage in the practice.″
In an unrelated case, the Supreme Court on Feb. 24 overturned a $200,000 award won against Hustler and its publisher, Larry Flynt, by evangelist Jerry Falwell.
The justices ruled in that case that public figures cannot win lawsuits based on ″emotional distress″ they suffer from satires or parodies if such spoofs cannot reasonably be believed to contain factual statements.
A Texas jury recently ordered Soldier of Fortune magazine to pay $9.4 million to the family of a woman whose husband hired her killer through a classified advertisement in the magazine. An appeal in that case is expected.
In the appeal acted on today, lawyers for Mrs. Herceg and Vines argued that the 5th Circuit court misapplied the Brandenburg decision.
″It seems self-evident that criminal prosecution of a speaker (which had occurred in the 1969 case) provides a greater threat to First Amendment values than a mere civil lawsuit,″ the appeal said.
The appeal urged the justices to provide guidance ″for striking a balance between First Amendment values and the equally important value of providing a seriously injured party with a remedy against the person whose conduct caused the injury.″
The case is Herceg vs. Hustler, 87-113. |
After having two bids for England forward Wayne Rooney turned down by Manchester United, Chelsea are reportedly hoping to make it third time lucky
Wayne Rooney's camp have informed Arsenal that the player has made up his mind to join Chelsea, sources close to the negotiations have told ESPN.
With the pursuit of Liverpool's Luis Suarez reaching an exceptionally tense impasse, Arsene Wenger has attempted to keep the Rooney option open as he seeks to bring in a forward.
Although Rooney is understood to have made his huge admiration of Wenger clear to him, he is determined to join Chelsea and team up with Jose Mourinho, something Arsenal have been notified of.
At the moment, however, the prospects of that remain slim. United are steadfast in their refusal to sell Rooney and it is understood the club may attempt a more conciliatory approach in order to keep him happy.
The developments could force Arsenal to turn their attention even further afield, given that Anfield sources have maintained that Liverpool owner John Henry's comments on Thursday were no mere negotiating ploy.
In a stance that is said to be even more hardline than United's attitude to selling Rooney, Liverpool officials are unequivocal about not selling the Uruguayan to another English club. One Anfield insider cited how it would be tantamount to ceding the race for fourth before the season has even begun.
United, meanwhile, are re-assessing their options as the club's pursuit of Cesc Fabregas appears to have terminally stalled. Widely reported approaches for Marouane Fellaini and Leighton Baines are expected to be made in the next week, with David Moyes considering his next move as regards to bringing in a central midfielder.
Moyes is known to have been happily surprised by the progress Anderson, 25, in training and pre-season games, but still feels the club may need to bring in midfield reinforcements, even beyond Fellaini.
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd |
Write ups in USA Today, The New York Times and several travel guides have made the Dorset Quarry one of the most popular swimming holes in Vermont. YouTube videos and Facebook posts have meant even more visitors. And while many think the historic quarry is a public park, it’s privately owned by a couple who says it might be time for more help in running the area.
On a recent Wednesday, weather forecasters were calling for temperatures in the 90s and the sunshine was blistering.
Kat Chenail and her friend Celia Bote, of Williamstown, Massachusetts both had the day off from work and wanted to go swimming. Friends had told them about the Dorset Quarry, so they drove up.
“It’s pretty great,” says Chenail. “I’ve been to a lot of swimming holes, and this is one of the only ones where there’s actually places to sit besides in the water.”
As swimming holes go, this one is spacious. It’s about 120 yards long and 30 yards across, with plenty of smooth rock terraces to lounge on and jump off.
“Yeah, we’re trying to get up the courage to jump off this one,” laughs Chenail.
She and Bote peer carefully over the edge of a wall that’s roughly 10 feet above the water.
“Then maybe we’ll get the courage to work our way over to that one,” Chenail says, pointing across the water to a much taller ledge that they say is twice as high. “It’s fun to watch people work up the courage to jump,” says Chenail, laughing.
On the other side of the quarry, a steady stream of thrill seekers jump and somersault off the high ledge. The sound of their splashes echo off the quarry walls.
Meanwhile, crowds of younger kids jump off lower ledges while parents relax nearby.
It took centuries to carve out all the rock walls. Marble from this site was used to build the New York Public Library, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard's medical school to name just a few of the buildings.
But by the start of World War I, many builders were opting for less costly concrete. So this quarry, like many others, shut down.
A spring and nearby stream filled the quarry with water, and by the 1920s it had become a popular swimming hole.
Dorset resident Art Gilbert was a frequent visitor in the 1930s. “On hot days like this we would take off from the house across the valley and we had the quarry pretty much to ourselves," Gilbert recalls. "I remember seeing the farmers come over for a dip after a hot day in the fields haying."
But those sleepy summer days are a thing of the past. Facebook posts, as well as YouTube and GoPro videos, are bringing larger and larger crowds.
Kirsten and Dick McDonough bought the quarry and the house next door in 1997 and say the increase in usage is stunning.
“Last summer we actually checked the parking lot once a day for six weeks," Kirsten McDonough says. "And in that time period we had 1,400 vehicles from 34 different states – plus three Canadian plates.”
Dick McDonough says when they bought the property it was overgrown and dangerous. “The first time I met the police there, the quarry was not visible from route 30 even though it as only about 15 or 20 feet back,” says McDonough. “So the police officer said to me, ‘We don’t go in there unless there are two of us.’ Shaking his head, McDonough recalls, “I thought to myself, 'Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into?'"
But the couple loved the history of the property. So instead of closing it down, they set to work clearing out the trees and brush, opening the quarry up and creating a grassy picnic area and parking lot. They hired excavators who moved stone blocks to create a low wall between the road and the water, and they picked up mountains of trash. All at their own expense.
“Thing is, it’s really a community resource,” says Kirsten McDonough. “And it’s just so beautiful, that it is kind of meant to be shared and people feel like they’re kind of entitled to be there because they’ve been swimming there for so long.”
The couple, who are both attorneys, say Vermont law has also played a crucial role in allowing them to keep the quarry open, by protecting them from liability.
But with more and more visitors, the McDonoughs say the trash, traffic and crowds are getting daunting. The site could use toilets and a changing area, and they say illegal parking is becoming more of a problem.
While no firm plans are in place, they say they’ve begun talks with state and local officials, as well as local volunteer organizations, to see what options there may be to get help running the historic swimming hole, to ensure it stays open for generations to come. |
The history of Germany is very rich not only in terms of different events, but also in their number and antiquity. Due to its history Germany has a very diverse reputation worldwide. However, it is difficult to deny certain cultural, technical, scientific and even sporting achievements of this country. As a result, it is not easy to characterize the entire country that is constantly changing in the course of its history. But one of its aspects we can characterize quite well. Today, this aspect will be the cultural and aesthetic component of the German states — their flags and coat of arms.
Germany is a federation which has thirteen states and three city-states which are equal in status and land rights. Let’s take a closer look at the flags and coat of arms of the major German states.
Symbols of Bavaria
Bavaria’s coat of arms was borrowed from the Counts of Bogen who lived before 1242; the coat of arms was later passed to the Wittelsbach family and then became a symbol of the whole Bavaria. On the shield of the modern coat of arms one can see four emblems, each of which represents one of the Bavarian territories: the Golden Lion — Palatinate, the “Franconian Rake” — Franconia, the Blue “Pantier” — Lower and Upper Bavaria, and the three black lions — Swabia. The coat of arms is held by two golden lions and in the center of the shield there is a small coat of arms of Bavaria in the traditional colors of this state.
Bavaria technically has two official flags which were adopted at the same time and are both used in the state. However, the lozenge-style flag is of course more memorable and unique than its bicolor brother.
As shown in the picture, the flag is used in the logo of the local football club Bayern Munich, and the same motifs were used in the club’s emblem almost since its inception. Another logo that is based on the flag and the coat of arms of Bavaria is the logo of BMW, a well-known car brand.
Symbols of Baden-Württemberg
The golden coat of arms of Baden-Württemberg was officially recognized in 1954. In addition to the three leopard lions, the crown is decorated with the lesser coat of arms of the state’s territories.
The flag of the state was adopted at the same time as the coat of arms, that is, after the union of the Baden, Württemberg-Baden and Württemberg-Hohenzollern regions. The colors of the flags respectively: yellow-red-yellow in Baden, black-red-yellow in Württemberg-Baden and black-red in Württemberg-Hohenzollern. The current flag of Baden-Württemberg originated from them.
A concept of the coat of arms of Württemberg is used in the logo of the VfB Stuttgart football club, namely: the antlers of black and yellow colors. Colors, antlers of Württemberg and the Stuttgart Steed are also used in the Porsche logo.
Symbols of Brandenburg
Brandenburg’s coat of arms was adopted only in 1990, but the red eagle on it is much older — this symbol is known from the X century. This symbol was passed to the Prussian province of Brandenburg and then to the current German state.
The red and white flag of Brandenburg has also been used since the days of the Free State of Prussia. A similar symbol is used on the Brandenburg Gate — the Prussian eagle.
Hesse Symbols
Hesse coat of arms was introduced in 1949. It is based on the historical coat of arms of Ludovingians, the Landgraves that ruled the Hesse and Thuringia lands and were known from the XI century. Therefore, it can be stated that the coat of arms of these territories have a fairly long history. One of the first mentions of the emblems can be found in the Ingeram Codex armorial (“Der Ingeram-Codex”) made in 1459. On the azure background of the shield a heraldic lion is depicted consisting of silver and red stripes. The “People’s crown” on the coat of arms is in the form of vine leaves.
The same red-white flag is used by Hesse. In general, the red and white color is a quite popular combination in Europe: starting from the historical regions of Spain and ending with the traditional colors of the Belarusian people. The adoption time of the flag corresponds with the adoption of the coat of arms.
Hesse-Cassel football club that plays in the fourth southwestern German league also uses the Hesse striped lion as its symbol. Also, there is a golden lion in the capital of Hesse — Wiesbaden.
Symbols of Mecklenburg — Western Pomerania
Coat of arms of Mecklenburg — Western Pomerania is composed of three different coat of arms of three smaller territories. First of all it is the impressive bull of Mecklenburg which already looks great on its own. However, symbols of Brandenburg and Pomerania have been added to the coat of arms — the red eagle and griffin respectively. The emblem was adopted in 1990, but the coat of arms of the presented smaller territories are older than the mentioned date.
Ultramarine-blue-red flag with a yellow stripe in the middle most likely originated from the mix of Mecklenburg and Pomerania flags. Flag of Pomerania, for example, was already used around 1882. The bull of Mecklenburg and Pomeranian griffin are sometimes added to the flag.
One of the most renowned clubs in Eastern Germany that plays in the third German Bundesliga — Hansa Rostock uses on its emblem an image of the Pomeranian griffin that is also used on the flag and the coat of arms of the Rostock city.
Symbols of Lower Saxony
The coat of arms of Lower Saxony since ancient times uses the “Saxon Steed”. A black horse on a yellow background was initially the coat of arms of Widukind, the last king of the Old Saxony. Also, this flag was the first known Saxon flag. But with the conversion to Christianity the colors of the coat of arms were changed. In its modern design the coat of arms was adopted in 1952.
The flag was adopted at about the same period as the coat of arms. The flag uses traditional for Germany colors. A thaler of the 1666 year found in Braunschweig proves the antiqueness of Saxon Steed.
Symbols of Rhineland-Palatinate
The coat of arms of Rhineland-Palatinate was created in 1947 during the formation of the land. It consists of three coat of arms: the red cross represents the Electorate of Trier, the Wheel of Mainz represents the Electorate of Mainz and the golden lion represents the County Palatinate of the Rhine.
Traditional German colors are used in the flag. The canton on the flag is the coat of arms of the state. The vertical banner can be seen on Rhineland-Palatinate buildings.
Symbols of the North Rhine-Westphalia
Coat of arms of the North Rhine-Westphalia was adopted in 1948. The coat of arms originates from the coat of arms of the Rhine Province on which a bend wavy is showed as well as a horse — the symbol of Westphalia. A heraldic rose of Lippe is present at the coat of arms. The Lippe family has roots since the X century whose house was named in honor of a river of the same name in Westphalia. Beatrix, the Queen of the Netherlands from 1980 to 2013, belongs to this house on her father’s side.
Red, white and green colors are official for this land. Green for the Rhineland — the southwest part of the North Rhine-Westphalia, red for Westphalia-Lippe — the northeastern part, respectively.
The flag of the North Rhine-Westphalia is used since 1948 and it was later formally adopted. The colors originate from the two older flags of the Rhine Province: green and white horizontal bicolor and the flag of Westphalia — white and red horizontal bicolor.
Symbols of Saarland
The coat of arms of Saarland consists of four separate coat of arms — a situation similar to other states. A silver lion with crosses — the Saarbrücken county, the red cross — the diocese of Trier, three silver alerions on a red bend — the duchy of Lorraine and a yellow lion — the Electorate of the Palatinate.
The flag of Saarland is based on the flag of Germany with the coat of arms of Saarland. A blue-white-black tricolor was also used and a flag with the Scandinavian cross and the colors of the French flag due to the fact that Saarland was under the protectorate of France.
Symbols of Saxony
The coat of arms of Saxony is used since 1700. It has black and yellow stripes and a band in form of a green crown. The coat of arms was previously used by the House of Ascania. The colors of the flag of Saxony were adopted in 1815, although even earlier mentions of the flag of this territory can be seen in the history of Saxony — in the Ascania and Wettin families. Nevertheless, today the official colors of the state are white and green.
Symbols of Saxony-Anhalt
The coat of arms of Saxony-Anhalt has similar features with Saxony. For example: black and yellow stripes and the green crown at the same angle. The bear was taken from the coat of arms of Anhalt.
The colors of the modern flag of Saxony-Anhalt originated from the historical flag of Saxony and are its reverse.
In order to be different from the Baden-Württemberg flag the colors were reversed. The flag was recognized in 1991.
Symbols of Thuringia
The coat of arms of the state is somewhat similar to that of Hesse. This is due to their common origin from a red-white striped lion of the Ludovingians family, which is known from the XI century. The coat of arms uses as many stripes as the Ludovingians use — eight. The lion is depicted on an azure shield.
Thuringia flag is very similar to the flag of Poland, though the red color is slightly different. The colors of the flag have been known since 1921 and the flag itself is a reverse of the flag of Hesse. There is also a statue of a lion in Thuringia.
Symbols of Schleswig-Holstein
We can observe two images on the two-sided coat of arms of Schleswig-Holstein. The first part of the shield (called “dexter”) displays two leopard lions; the Schleswig lions are taken from the coat of arms of Denmark. The right part of the shield (“sinister”) displays a nettle leaf of Holstein — an ancient symbol that was used by the Counts of Shauenburg and Holstein.
The flag of Schleswig-Holstein is mentioned in the movement for withdrawal of the land from Denmark. For the first time the flag of Schleswig-Holstein was introduced in 1843. It was also used during the existence of the eponymous province in Prussia. The coat of arms of the state is quite ancient, that may indicate a print of the 1392 year and a stone in Rahlstedt in which this coat of arms was forged.
Also, I advise you to get acquainted with this ancient painting of 1341:
Let’s now divide the flags of the states by their structure.
Horizontal Bicolors
There are six bicolor flags in this group. Three of them can be confused with the flag of Poland, Monaco or Indonesia.
Horizontal Tricolors
We’ll put an exactly the same number of flags in this group. The colors of the current flag of Germany that strongly resemble the flags of Lower Saxony, Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate have been already in use in the Middle Ages. Later, these colors were used by the Jena student union and then the flag started to symbolize the struggle for freedom and the unification of the whole Germany; and so the black color began to symbolize a dark night, red — blood in the struggle and gold — the color of the Sun.
Other
The last group of German flags includes four remaining territories. Among them: the federal state of Bavaria and three city-states — Hamburg, Bremen and the capital of Germany — Berlin.
Thus, we derive a map of Germany based on the flag type.
It is also interesting to take a look at the map of colors used on these flags. Let’s segment the flags in terms of their major colors:
It is now possible to make a map of the most commonly used colors in certain parts of Germany:
Coat of Arms of Germany
We shall do the same thing with the coat of arms of the different German states, which are in turn an equally interesting symbol of every administrative unit of the country. |
Accessories are a vital part of our lives, making numerous activities easier. At Gotapparel.com we have a wide variety of blank accessories that can be easily customized, including aprons, bags, chairs, gloves, towels, robes, sandals, and socks made by popular name brands, like BagEdge, Port Authority, Gemline, UltraClub, Sport-Tek, Anvil, and more at low discounted prices that allow you to stock up on as many accessories as you might need for personal or professional uses.
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Theater streaming service BroadwayHD will livestream Roundabout Theatre Company's production of Holiday Inn, The New Irving Berlin Musical on Saturday, January 14, 2017, at 8pm EST. The musical, directed by Gordon Greenberg and choreographed by Denis Jones, will be captured live on 14 high-definition cameras the evening before it plays its final performance. The show opened October 6 at Studio 54.
Holiday Inn stars Tony Award nominee Bryce Pinkham (A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder) as Jim, Lora Lee Gayer (Follies) as Linda, Tony Award nominee Megan Lawrence (The Pajama Game) as Louise, Corbin Bleu (In the Heights) as Ted, Megan Sikora (Curtains) as Lila Dixon, and Danny Rutigliano (Banana Shpeel) as Danny.
Malik Akil, Will Burton, Barry Busby, Darien Crago, Caley Crawford, Jenifer Foote, Morgan Gao, Matt Meigs, Shina Ann Morris, Catherine Ricafort, Drew Redington, Amanda Rose, Jonalyn Saxer, Parker Slaybaugh, Samantha Sturm, Amy Van Norstrand, Travis Ward-Osborne, Paige Williams, Victor Wisehart, Kevin Worley, and Borris York are featured in the ensemble.
With music and lyrics by Irving Berlin, Gordon Greenberg and Chad Hodge's new book is inspired by the Academy Award-winning film Holiday Inn. The creative team includes Anna Louizos (sets), Alejo Vietti (costumes), Jeff Croiter (lights), Keith Caggiano (sound), Charles G. La Pointe (wigs), Joe Dulude II (make-up), Andy Einhorn (music director/ supervisor), Larry Blank (orchestrations), Sam Davis (vocal and dance Arrangements), Bruce Pomahac (additional dance and vocal arrangements), and John Miller (music coordinator).
For tickets and more information, click here. |
Milwaukee Aprilia pulled the wraps off their 2017 WorldSBK RSV-4s at the beginning of Jerez testing yesterday, then it was time to get down to business for Eugene Laverty who found that the braking prpoblems he encountered in the last Spanish test are still there.
The Monegasque says the RSV feels like it’s pushing the front which makes it difficult to turn in, so today the Anglo/Italian crew will work with Ohlins to try and find some solutions.
“There were quite a few changes compared to when I rode it in November. It took a bit of time to get dialed in. It was a positive end to the day. I would say we are back to where we were at the last test. We’ve arrived at the same problem and we’re struggling to get the bike stopped and turned. It feels like it’s pushing the front a lot so that’s a direction we need to improve on,” Laverty said at the track.
“The problem is in the last part and getting the bike stopped and turned. I’m really struggling in that area. That’s just chassis-wise, geometry that we’ll have to work on, the electronics are working well. There’s a lot of different ways to approach it but it’s pretty clear what we need to do – to get some weight off the front to help with my riding style.”
Laverty ended day one nearly two seconds off the pace and a quarter of a second behind team-mate Lorenzo Savadori but it’s early days for the squad and with the Jerez outing to finish, plus another three days at Phillip Island, Milwaukee should get their ducks in a line.
“In the dry we’re still not there. At the last test we only had one dry day so we need track time . We need to really work hard tonight and tomorrow to chase down those guys at the front. We need to be within a second. For testing you can’t be content with being two seconds off.” |
Thousands of types of processed foods -- including many varieties of soups, chips, frozen dinners, hot dogs and salad dressings -- may pose a health threat because they contain a flavor enhancer that could be contaminated with salmonella, the Food and Drug Administration said Thursday.
Officials believe the public health risk is low, and no one is known to have fallen ill as a result of the contamination. But manufacturers voluntarily recalled 56 products Thursday, and that number is expected to balloon in the coming weeks into what could be one of the largest food recalls in U.S. history.
"We don't know precisely how large this recall will get," said Jeff Farrar, associate commissioner for food protection at the FDA. "The potential amount of products . . . is very large."
Salmonella was detected early last month in one lot of the flavor enhancer -- hydrolyzed vegetable protein, or HVP -- made by Basic Food Flavors, as well as inside the company's Nevada manufacturing facility, the FDA said. The company, one of only a handful that make HVP, has an extensive customer list. The additive, which comes as a powder or a paste and is mixed into foods to give them a meaty or savory flavor, is similar to monosodium glutamate, or MSG.
The contamination is believed to date to September 2009, meaning millions of pounds of potentially tainted HVP -- all of which the company has recalled -- was shipped in bulk to foodmakers over five months. Many of those companies then sold their products to other clients, complicating the chain and making it hard for federal officials to gauge the scope of the problem.
"This can potentially be in over 10,000 products," said Michael Hansen, senior scientist at Consumers Union.
The FDA has posted on its Web site a searchable list of products being recalled by manufacturers. It can be found at http:/ / www.accessdata.fda.gov/ scripts/ HVPCP/ .
Federal officials said the public health threat is low because most products containing HVP are cooked during processing or carry cooking instructions for consumers, so any salmonella would be destroyed before the food was eaten. Ready-to-eat products, such as chips and other snack foods, would carry greater risks.
In recent days, FDA officials have told foodmakers that their products do not need to be recalled if they can document that foods containing HVP were heated to appropriate temperatures.
Because of the number of products involved and the uncertainty of the risk, officials have been struggling to find the balance between protection and alarm.
"They're trying to come to some reasonable decision about how to protect the public health but not be so cautious as to be ridiculous and throw out tons and tons of product that may be fine," said Don Schaffner, a professor of microbiology professor and food-safety expert at Rutgers University, who has been advising several foodmakers that bought HVP from Basic Food Flavors.
FDA officials declined to say Thursday when they or state health officials last inspected the Nevada plant, or whether the company had a history of sanitation problems. The FDA was still attempting to determine what caused the contamination.
The company did not return calls seeking comment.
The salmonella bacterium is usually found in animal or human feces. Most healthy people infected with salmonella recover without treatment but experience fever, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain. Salmonella infections can cause serious problems and even death in the young, the elderly and those with compromised immune systems.
The agency learned about the problem after a foodmaker found the bacterium in a shipment of HVP and reported it under a new law that requires companies to notify the federal government if they detect contamination in a product or ingredient. Before September, the food industry was not required to alert the government to contamination.
"The FDA identified this before any major outbreak [of illness], and I think that is very good news," FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg said.
Joshua Sharfstein, deputy commissioner of the FDA, said the outbreak underlines the need for the Senate to pass a food-safety bill that has stalled since the House approved it last year. The bill would require companies such as Basic Food Flavors to take actions aimed at preventing contamination in the first place.
"We want to be able to set up preventive standards, so we don't have situations like this at all," Sharfstein said. |
Former Juventus winger Pavel Nedved says he would like to see Gianluigi Buffon playing on until he is 50, because he still has the enthusiasm of a teenager.
Buffon, 38, has announced his intention to retire at least from international football following the 2018 World Cup, although he may continue to play for Juventus beyond then.
According to Nedved, who is now a director of the Serie A club, there is no reason why the Italy number one cannot carry on playing -- even for another decade.
"When I see the passion with which Gigi Buffon trains, I would like to see him stay in our goal until he is 50," Nedved told idnes.cz.
"When he came back from Euro 2016, he told me he'd like to play on at least until the end of Russia 2018.
"He's always the first to arrive for training. He's honest and perfect."
Nedved played with Buffon in a Bianconeri shirt, but not in the 2003 Champions League final, which together with 2015, was the closest the Italian goalkeeper came to winning European club football's biggest prize.
"I missed that game because I picked up too many bookings," Nedved said. "That is the biggest disappointment of my career. It could have been my biggest success, but instead..."
The former Czech Republic midfielder said if he had one other regret, it was about a club he did not play for.
"I would have to say it would have been Manchester United," he added.
Ben Gladwell reports on Serie A, the Italian national team and the Bundesliga for ESPN FC, UEFA and the Press Association. @UEFAcomBenG. |
Syrian rebels have discovered disturbing rooms in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) territory that suggest they have been used as torture cells specifically to rape their female hostages.
"We discovered an Islamic State group prison for women, with rooms for groups as well as solitary prisoners," Ibrahim al-Mohammed told a local news agency last Thursday.
"We found the worst, most violent torture tools, and may God curse them."
The supposed ISIS prison for women was located in the Syrian city of Manbij after it was recaptured by the Manbij Military Council, a faction of the U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.
In one of the rooms, the words (in Arabic) "God, I have wronged myself, and no one forgives sins but you. Forgive me, you are forgiving and merciful," were written on the wall.
According to God Reports, the message appears to have been written by a Christian woman. The woman apparently wrote the faithful message in response to being detained by ISIS and possibly being used as a sex slave.
In an amateur video taken at the facility, the cells have been shown to have metal doors and mattresses, pillows and blankets inside. In addition, sexual stimulants, contraceptives and narcotics were also found inside the prison cells.
"We found various kinds of pills, including sexual stimulation, contraceptives and narcotic pills which were used by the Islamic State group for torture," rebel leader Omar Mazerli said.
"They have very strange ways. This place was very hard to find and it is well hidden, but we got here with God's will and the efforts of the Military Council."
ISIS torture cells have been discovered in other areas around Manbij. It is highly possible that more cells of this kind will be discovered as more. |
Frazier Glenn Miller, who claimed it was his ‘patriotic duty’ to kill Jews, deemed fit for trial near Kansas City
A Kansas prosecutor will seek the death penalty against a white supremacist from Missouri who was ruled competent Thursday to face trial on charges of killing three people at two Jewish sites in suburban Kansas City.
Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe announced his intention to seek the death penalty at a hearing for Frazier Glenn Miller, 74, of Aurora, Missouri, who has said he felt it was his patriotic duty to kill Jews.
Miller is accused of killing Dr. William Lewis Corporon, 69, and his 14-year-old grandson, Reat Griffin Underwood, who were at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City on April 13 for a singing contest audition. He also is accused of fatally shooting 53-year-old Terri LaManno, who was visiting her mother at a Jewish retirement home in nearby Overland Park.
None of the victims was Jewish.
Miller, who has emphysema, was brought into the Johnson County courtroom Thursday in a wheelchair. After Judge Thomas Kelly Ryan scheduled a three-day preliminary hearing in March, Miller protested, shouting, “What about my speedy trial?”
After Howe announced his intention to seek the death penalty, Miller responded that he wasn’t afraid because he is dying anyway. He offered to “grease the tracks” for prosecutors if they cooperated with him, but Ryan cut him off and said he needed to communicate through his attorneys.
Howe and Miller’s attorneys declined to comment after the hearing. Miller has told the AP he wants to fire one of the attorneys, keep the other as an adviser and represent himself at trial.
Mindy Corporon, William Corporon’s daughter and Reat Underwood’s mother, issued a statement after Thursday’s hearing saying the family respects the judicial process and has faith “that justice will prevail”.
Ryan had ordered Miller last month to undergo a competency hearing after his attorneys expressed concerns about his ability to assist with some aspects of his defense. Miller responded angrily that the delays were meant to help the prosecutor get re-elected.
Miller said he became concerned during an emergency room visit in late March that he didn’t have much time left to live. In several phone calls to the Associated Press, Miller said he killed the three because he thought he was dying and he felt it was his duty. He said he regretted shooting the teenager.
He has told the AP and other media outlets that he planned and executed the fatal attacks, and that it was his intent to use the trial as a means to “put the Jews on trial where they belong”.
Miller, also known as Frazier Glenn Cross, is a Vietnam War veteran from southwest Missouri who founded the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in his native North Carolina and later the White Patriot Party.
He was the target of a nationwide manhunt in 1987, when federal agents tracked him and three other men to a rural Missouri home stocked with hand grenades and automatic weapons. He was indicted on weapons charges and accused of plotting robberies and the assassination of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s founder. He served three years in federal prison.
Miller also ran for the US House of Representatives in 2006 and the Senate in 2010 in Missouri, each time espousing a white-power platform. |
RAIPUR: As many as 110 gram panchayats in Chhattisgarh were today declared open defecation-free (ODF) under the Centre's ' Swachh Bharat Abhiyan ', taking the total number of such villages in the state to 1,849.Union Panchayat and Rural Development Minister Chowdhary Birender Singh declared 110 village panchayats as ODF while felicitating at the concluding function of the 'National Rural Drinking Water and Swachhta Awareness Week' at the state capital here today."Chief Minister Raman Singh has fulfilled the dreams of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in making the 'Swachhta Abhiyan' a people's movement and now Chhattisgarh had joined the top states in the country in this line," Singh said appreciating the efforts of the state government in making 'Clean India Mission' a "success".The Union Minister added that Centre will allocate a sum of Rs 2 lakh crore to each gram panchayats over the next five years for various development activities."About Rs 45,000 crore have already been transferred to the panchayats for this year. If the gram panchayat completes its four to five major development works based on the priority, then it can change the entire scenario of the village, he said.Meanwhile, Singh also felicitated 24 'Swachchta Preraks' from various districts of the state with appreciation certificates.Speaking on the occasion, Chief Minister Raman Singh said that Chhattisgarh will be 'open defecation free' by 2018 with the co-operation of the masses."'Swachh Bharat Abhiyan' should be owned by the people. The mission can meet its targets if sisters (women) are determined to do so," the Chief Minister said.He called upon the 'Nav Ratnas' (nine eminent personalities from varied fields who are making a significant contribution to the campaign in Chhattisgarh) to inspire more and more villages to become ODF.Stressing on the need to conserve water in the present scenario, Raman Singh said if villagers are able to preserve even ten per cent of rain water, then it can meet the needs of an entire year. |
This shop has been compensated by Collective Bias, Inc. and its advertiser. All opinions are mine alone. #DairyFree4All #CollectiveBias
This Frozen Pumpkin Pie was created using the So Delicious Dairy Free® brand Coconut Vanilla Bean and Cashew Salted Caramel Cluster Frozen Dessert (my personal addiction). If you’ve followed me for awhile now, you already know my love for this company. I’m a huge fan of the entire range of products they offer.
Our So Delicious Frozen Pumpkin Pie begins with a layer of gingerbread crust followed by the Coconut Vanilla Bean turned pumpkin (more on that in a minute) and finally, in its pure form, the Cashew Salted Caramel Cluster. As if it wasn’t already decadent enough, I topped each slice with a drizzle of vegan caramel sauce, chocolate sauce and sweetened cacao nibs. The perfect vegan dessert! Are you drooling yet? 🙂
The first step in creating this mouth-watering dessert is to prepare the gingerbread crust. Many brands of gingerbread cookies are “accidentally” vegan meaning they don’t generally contain eggs or milk products. Just check the label before you buy. I crush the cookies in a food processor, add brown sugar, a small amount of all-purpose flour, a pinch of salt and to hold it all together, melted vegan margarine. You could also use coconut oil here. Press the mixture into a pie plate and bake for about 10 minutes. Remove to a wire rack to cool completely. (You could also opt to purchase a pre-made graham cracker crust if you prefer).
Meanwhile, it’s time to turn that Coconut Vanilla Bean into pumpkin! It is as simple as softening the Coconut Vanilla Bean until you can manipulate it easily with a spoon. We’ll add pure pumpkin puree and pumpkin pie spice. Combine well and return to the freezer for at least 30 minutes. If you don’t have pumpkin pie spice on hand, don’t worry…I’ve got you covered! Just click here for a recipe using ingredients you likely already have in your cupboard.
Now you’ll want to prepare a vegan caramel sauce if making a homemade version (plenty of recipes on the Web) and soften the Cashew Caramel Cluster. I’ll also get the pumpkin frozen dessert softening at this time. You want them spreadable and soft, but not melted.
Once you complete the layers, put back into the freezer for at least an hour to firm up and then it’s ready to slice! Run a sharp knife under very hot water and wipe clean in between slicing. This makes your job A LOT simpler.
The final step is to garnish. You can use chocolate syrup, caramel sauce (or both) and a few sweetened cacao nibs as we did here today if you want to get fancy 🙂
I found the So Delicious Dairy Free® Frozen Desserts in the frozen dessert aisle at my local Scottsdale, AZ Walmart. Some of these flavors are available at specialty grocers, but how great is it that these vegan treats are now becoming so easily accessible in a store as mainstream as Walmart? Yay. Progress!
Taste is, of course, the main reason I love the SO Delicious Dairy Free® brand, but did you know that not only are they completely vegan, but also Non-GMO Project Verified. They are cholesterol-free, contain no artificial colors, flavors or preservatives, no high-fructose corn syrup and are certified kosher. Definitely products you can feel good about eating.
To learn more about SO Delicious Dairy Free®, please visit their website or any of their social media pages: … Instagram, Facebook or Twitter.
What will you create with So Delicious Dairy Free® Frozen Desserts? Let me know in the comments below and if you make this frozen pie, tag me on Instagram @theveglife1. I love seeing what you come up with! 🙂
Before you go, why not check out some of our recent videos and be sure to subscribe to the YouTube Channel! 🙂 |
Despite Michael Atiyah’s many accolades — he is a winner of both the Fields and the Abel prizes for mathematics; a past president of the Royal Society of London, the oldest scientific society in the world (and a past president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh); a former master of Trinity College, Cambridge; a knight and a member of the royal Order of Merit; and essentially Britain’s mathematical pope — he is nonetheless perhaps most aptly described as a matchmaker. He has an intuition for arranging just the right intellectual liaisons, oftentimes involving himself and his own ideas, and over the course of his half-century-plus career he has bridged the gap between apparently disparate ideas within the field of mathematics, and between mathematics and physics.
One day in the spring of 2013, for instance, as he sat in the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace awaiting the annual Order of Merit luncheon with Elizabeth II, Sir Michael made a match for his lifelong friend and colleague, Sir Roger Penrose, the great mathematical physicist.
Penrose had been trying to develop his “twistor” theory, a path toward quantum gravity that’s been in the works for nearly 50 years. “I had a way of doing it which meant going out to infinity,” Penrose said, “and trying to solve a problem out there, and then coming back again.” He thought there must be a simpler way. And right then and there Atiyah put his finger on it, suggesting Penrose make use of a type of “noncommutative algebra.”
“I thought, ‘Oh, my God,’” Penrose said. “Because I knew there was this noncommutative algebra which had been sitting there all this time in twistor theory. But I hadn’t thought of using it in this particular way. Some people might have just said, ‘That won’t work.’ But Michael could immediately see that there was a way in which you could make it work, and exactly the right thing to do.” Given the venue where Atiyah made the suggestion, Penrose dubbed his improved idea “palatial twistor theory.”
This is the power of Atiyah. Roughly speaking, he has spent the first half of his career connecting mathematics to mathematics, and the second half connecting mathematics to physics.
Atiyah is best known for the “index theorem,” devised in 1963 with Isadore Singer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (and properly called the Atiyah-Singer index theorem), connecting analysis and topology — a fundamental connection that proved to be important in both mathematical fields, and later in physics as well. Largely for this work, Atiyah won the Fields Medal in 1966 and the Abel Prize in 2004 (with Singer).
In the 1980s, methods gleaned from the index theorem unexpectedly played a role in the development of string theory — an attempt to reconcile the large-scale realm of general relativity and gravity with the small-scale realm of quantum mechanics — particularly with the work of Edward Witten, a string theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Witten and Atiyah began an extended collaboration, and in 1990 Witten won the Fields Medal, the only physicist ever to win the prize, with Atiyah as his champion.
Now, at age 86, Atiyah is hardly lowering the bar. He’s still tackling the big questions, still trying to orchestrate a union between the quantum and the gravitational forces. On this front, the ideas are arriving fast and furious, but as Atiyah himself describes, they are as yet intuitive, imaginative, vague and clumsy commodities.
Still, he is relishing this state of free-flowing creativity, energized by his packed schedule. In hot pursuit of these current lines of investigation and contemplation, last December he delivered a double-header of lectures, back-to-back on the same day, at the University of Edinburgh, where he has been an honorary professor since 1997. He is keen to share his new ideas and, he hopes, attract supporters. To that end, in November he hosted a conference at the Royal Society of Edinburgh on “The Science of Beauty.” Quanta Magazine sat down with Atiyah at the Royal Society gathering and afterward, whenever he slowed down long enough to take questions. What follows is an edited version of those catch-as-catch-can conversations.
QUANTA MAGAZINE: Where do you trace the beginnings of your interest in beauty and science?
MICHAEL ATIYAH: I was born 86 years ago. That’s when my interest started. I was conceived in Florence. My parents were going to name me Michelangelo, but someone said, “That’s a big name for a small boy.” It would have been a disaster. I can’t draw. I have no talent at all.
You mentioned that something “clicked” during Roger Penrose’s lecture on “The Role of Art in Mathematics” and that you now have an idea for a collaborative paper. What is this clicking, the process or the state — can you describe it?
It’s the kind of thing that once you’ve seen it, the truth or veracity, it just stares you in the face. The truth is looking back at you. You don’t have to look for it. It’s shining on the page.
Is that generally how your ideas arrive?
This was a spectacular version. The crazy part of mathematics is when an idea appears in your head. Usually when you’re asleep, because that’s when you have the fewest inhibitions. The idea floats in from heaven knows where. It floats around in the sky; you look at it, and admire its colors. It’s just there. And then at some stage, when you try to freeze it, put it into a solid frame, or make it face reality, then it vanishes, it’s gone. But it’s been replaced by a structure, capturing certain aspects, but it’s a clumsy interpretation.
Have you always had mathematical dreams?
I think so. Dreams happen during the daytime, they happen at night. You can call them a vision or intuition. But basically they’re a state of mind — without words, pictures, formulas or statements. It’s “pre” all that. It’s pre-Plato. It’s a very primordial feeling. And again, if you try to grasp it, it always dies. So when you wake up in the morning, some vague residue lingers, the ghost of an idea. You try to remember what it was and you only get half of it right, and maybe that’s the best you can do.
Is imagination part of it?
Absolutely. Time travel in the imagination is cheap and easy — you don’t even need to buy a ticket. People go back and imagine they are part of the Big Bang, and then they ask the question of what came before.
What guides the imagination — beauty?
It’s not the kind of beauty that you can point to — it’s beauty in a much more abstract sense.
Not too long ago you published a study, with Semir Zeki, a neurobiologist at University College London, and other collaborators, on The Experience of Mathematical Beauty and Its Neural Correlates.
That’s the most-read article I’ve ever written! It’s been known for a long time that some part of the brain lights up when you listen to nice music, or read nice poetry, or look at nice pictures — and all of those reactions happen in the same place [the “emotional brain,” specifically the medial orbitofrontal cortex]. And the question was: Is the appreciation of mathematical beauty the same, or is it different? And the conclusion was, it is the same. The same bit of the brain that appreciates beauty in music, art and poetry is also involved in the appreciation of mathematical beauty. And that was a big discovery.
You reached this conclusion by showing mathematicians various equations while a functional MRI recorded their response. Which equation won out as most beautiful?
Ah, the most famous of all, Euler’s equation:
You are especially well-known for two supremely beautiful works, not only the index theorem but also K-theory, developed with the German topologist Friedrich Hirzebruch. Tell me about K-theory.
It involves π; the mathematical constant e [Euler’s number, 2.71828 …]; i, the imaginary unit; 1; and 0 — it combines all the most important things in mathematics in one formula, and that formula is really quite deep. So everybody agreed that that was the most beautiful equation. I used to say it was the mathematical equivalent of Hamlet’s phrase “To be, or not to be” — very short, very succinct, but at the same time very deep. Euler’s equation uses only five symbols, but it also encapsulates beautifully deep ideas, and brevity is an important part of beauty.
The index theorem and K-theory are actually two sides of the same coin. They started out different, but after a while they became so fused together that you can’t disentangle them. They are both related to physics, but in different ways.
K-theory is the study of flat space, and of flat space moving around. For example, let’s take a sphere, the Earth, and let’s take a big book and put it on the Earth and move it around. That’s a flat piece of geometry moving around on a curved piece of geometry. K-theory studies all aspects of that situation — the topology and the geometry. It has its roots in our navigation of the Earth.
The maps we used to explore the Earth can also be used to explore both the large-scale universe, going out into space with rockets, and the small-scale universe, studying atoms and molecules. What I’m doing now is trying to unify all that, and K-theory is the natural way to do it. We’ve been doing this kind of mapping for hundreds of years, and we’ll probably be doing it for thousands more.
Did it surprise you that K-theory and the index theorem turned out to be important in physics?
Oh, yes. I did all this geometry not having any notion that it would be linked to physics. It was a big surprise when people said, “Well, what you’re doing is linked to physics.” And so I learned physics quickly, talking to good physicists to find out what was happening.
How did your collaboration with Witten come about?
I met him in Boston in 1977, when I was getting interested in the connection between physics and mathematics. I attended a meeting, and there was this young chap with the older guys. We started talking, and after a few minutes I realized that the younger guy was much smarter than the old guys. He understood all the mathematics I was talking about, so I started paying attention to him. That was Witten. And I’ve kept in touch with him ever since.
What was he like to work with?
In 2001, he invited me to Caltech, where he was a visiting professor. I felt like a graduate student again. Every morning I would walk into the department, I’d go to see Witten, and we’d talk for an hour or so. He’d give me my homework. I’d go away and spend the next 23 hours trying to catch up. Meanwhile, he’d go off and do half a dozen other things. We had a very intense collaboration. It was an incredible experience because it was like working with a brilliant supervisor. I mean, he knew all the answers before I got them. If we ever argued, he was right and I was wrong. It was embarrassing!
You’ve said before that the unexpected interconnections that pop up occasionally between math and physics are what appeal to you most — you like finding yourself wading into unfamiliar territory.
Right; well, you see, a lot of mathematics is predictable. Somebody shows you how to solve one problem, and you do the same thing again. Every time you take a step forward you’re following in the steps of the person who came before. Every now and again, somebody comes along with a totally new idea and shakes everybody up. To start with, people don’t believe it, and then when they do believe it, it leads in a totally new direction. Mathematics comes in fits and starts. It has continuous development, and then it has discontinuous jumps, when suddenly somebody has a new idea. Those are the ideas that really matter. When you get them, they have major consequences. We’re about due another one. Einstein had a good idea 100 years ago, and we need another one to take us forward.
But the approach has to be more investigative than directive. If you try to direct science, you only get people going in the direction you told them to go. All of science comes from people noticing interesting side paths. You’ve got to have a very flexible approach to exploration and allow different people to try different things. Which is difficult, because unless you jump on the bandwagon, you don’t get a job.
Worrying about your future, you have to stay in line. That’s the worst thing about modern science. Fortunately, when you get to my age, you don’t need to bother about that. I can say what I like.
These days, you’re trying out some new ideas in hopes of breaking the stalemate in physics?
Well, you see, there’s atomic physics — electrons and protons and neutrons, all the stuff of which atoms are made. At these very, very, very small scales, the laws of physics are much the same, but there is also a force you ignore, which is the gravitational force. Gravity is present everywhere because it comes from the entire mass of the universe. It doesn’t cancel itself out, it doesn’t have positive or negative value, it all adds up. So however far away the black holes and galaxies are, they all exert a very small force everywhere in the universe, even in an electron or proton. But physicists say, “Ah, yes, but it’s so small you can ignore it; we don’t measure things that small, we do perfectly well without it.” My starting point is that that is a mistake. If you correct that mistake, you get a theory that is much better.
I’m now looking again at some of the ideas that were around 100 years ago and that were discarded at the time because people couldn’t understand what the ideas were trying to get at. How does matter interact with gravity? Einstein’s theory was that if you put a bit of matter in, it changes the curvature of space. And when the curvature of space changes, it acts on the matter. It’s a very complicated feedback mechanism.
I’m going back to Einstein and [Paul] Dirac and looking at them again with new eyes, and I think I’m seeing things that people missed. I’m filling in the holes of history, taking account of new discoveries. Archaeologists dig things up, or historians find a new manuscript, and that sheds an entirely new light. So that’s what I’ve been doing. Not by going into libraries, but by sitting in my room at home, thinking. If you think long enough, you get a good idea.
So you’re saying that the gravitational force can’t be ignored?
I think all the difficulty physicists have had comes from ignoring that. You shouldn’t ignore it. And the point is, I believe the mathematics gets simplified if you feed it in. If you leave it out, you make things more difficult for yourself.
Most people would say you don’t need to worry about gravitation when you look at atomic physics. The scale is so small that, for the kind of calculations we do, it can be ignored. In some sense, if you just want answers, that’s correct. But if you want understanding, then you’ve made a mistake in that choice.
If I’m wrong, well, I made a mistake. But I don’t think so. Because once you pick this idea up, there are all sorts of nice consequences. The mathematics fits together. The physics fits together. The philosophy fits together.
What does Witten think of your new ideas?
Well, it’s a challenge. Because when I talked to him in the past about some of my ideas, he dismissed them as hopeless, and he gave me 10 different reasons why they’re hopeless. Now I think I can defend my ground. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, coming at it from different angles, and coming back to it. And I’m hoping I can persuade him that there is merit to my new approach.
You’re risking your reputation, but you think it’s worth it.
My reputation is established as a mathematician. If I make a mess of it now, people will say, “All right, he was a good mathematician, but at the end of his life he lost his marbles.”
A friend of mine, John Polkinghorne, left physics just as I was going in; he went into the church and became a theologian. We had a discussion on my 80th birthday and he said to me, “You’ve got nothing to lose; you just go ahead and think what you think.” And that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve got all the medals I need. What could I lose? So that’s why I’m prepared to take a gamble that a young researcher wouldn’t be prepared to take.
Are you surprised to be so charged up about new ideas at this stage of your career?
One of my sons said to me, “Impossible, Dad. Mathematicians do all their best work by the time they’re 40. And you’re over 80. It’s impossible for you to have a good idea now.”
If you’re still awake and alert mentally when you’re over 80, you’ve got the advantage that you’ve lived a long time and you’ve seen many things, and you get perspective. I’m 86 now, and it’s in the last few years that I’ve had these ideas. New ideas come along and you pick up bits here and there, and the time is ripe now, whereas it might not have been ripe five or 10 years ago.
Is there one big question that has always guided you?
I always want to try to understand why things work. I’m not interested in getting a formula without knowing what it means. I always try to dig behind the scenes, so if I have a formula, I understand why it’s there. And understanding is a very difficult notion.
People think mathematics begins when you write down a theorem followed by a proof. That’s not the beginning, that’s the end. For me the creative place in mathematics comes before you start to put things down on paper, before you try to write a formula. You picture various things, you turn them over in your mind. You’re trying to create, just as a musician is trying to create music, or a poet. There are no rules laid down. You have to do it your own way. But at the end, just as a composer has to put it down on paper, you have to write things down. But the most important stage is understanding. A proof by itself doesn’t give you understanding. You can have a long proof and no idea at the end of why it works. But to understand why it works, you have to have a kind of gut reaction to the thing. You’ve got to feel it.
This article was reprinted on ScientificAmerican.com and Wired.com. |
Two men are charged with drug trafficking after searches at two St-Hubert homes - including one housing a daycare - turned up thousands of dollars worth of pills, marijuana and contraband cigarettes.
Longueuil police searched the homes, located on Grand Boulevard and Place Édouard, last Thursday after a months-long investigation by the organized crime unit into illegal tobacco.
They seized around 4,000 pills from the site of the daycare, which was closed at the time of the police raids.
Const. Tommy Lacroix said the majority of the pills were found in a shed on the property, but they did find a small quantity of drugs inside the building where the daycare was operating.
Children not at risk
Lacroix said the children were not at risk.
The daycare is run by the partner of one of the men arrested, he said.
"All of the parents have been advised of what was going on over there for the last couple of days," Lacroix said, adding that police waited to release the information on the operation until all the parents had been notified.
The daycare operator is not facing any charges.
At the other house, police found about 300 grams of marijuana and 2,500 contraband cigarettes.
A stolen motorcycle, cellular phones and cash were also seized during the operation.
A 31-year-old man, who lives in the home with the daycare, was arrested and detained, charged with one count of drug trafficking. He is to appear in the Longueuil courthouse on Friday.
A 63-year-old man was also arrested and charged with trafficking drugs and contraband cigarettes. He was released on a promise to appear in court at a later date. |
I kept debating on if I actually wanted to write this or not, mostly because it’s incredibly depressing when you actually start to put all of the pieces together. I think this may also be my first real attempt at trying to put together a well thought out article for people to read as opposed to my usual stream of conscious thought which serves as the basis for the majority of the articles that I write. The basis of this article will focus on the environment which my generation (Generation Y) has developed in. It will illustrate the side effects that environment has had on the aspects of not only our current living standards, but also any future prospects. The key components of this article rely on a basic understanding of the current economic situation, insight into the way in which modern communication occurs, and the history and culture which compose the American psyche currently.
The inspiration for this post comes from the depths of 4chan’s /new/ board which is responsible [in theory] for the discussion of various topics related to current world events. I had gone there hoping for an update on the situation occurring on the Korean Peninsula this morning, but I managed to stumble into an oddly coherent discussion on the nature of the Baby Boomer Generation. For the sake of clarity, I would like to define the generations discussed as follows:
Baby Boomer – Born Directly after World War 2 until 1957
Generation X – Born between 1957 and 1978
Generation Y – Born Between 1978 and 1993
Generation Z – Born Anytime after 1993
The post was a rudimentary discussion of how generation x is now collapsing in on itself financially in part due to interference and political features put in place by the Baby Boomer Generation. The post further elaborated on the possible effects that could already be seen within the job market for Generation Y. This uniquely coherent diatribe led me to finally consider writing this post. It is something I have wanted to write for a long time, but have lacked the proper wording to describe exactly what I was thinking.
The History of the Situation
There are key points that must be understood in order for the division of the generations to exist which lie within the historical events that divide those generations. As most people are well aware, the baby boom was a direct result of the US victory in the Second World War. The result of that victory allowed many soldiers to return home full of vigor and with a military pension. These soldiers went on to use that GI bill to claim a basic education as well as settle down in mass and breed like rabbits. This breeding phase would last until the approximate end of the Korean War and the final phases of the McCarthy era, solidifying a point in time which would separate the McCarthy era driven baby boomers from their Vietnam era compatriots.
Generation X would live through the heart of the so called hippy movement as well as some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of modern history. I can still hear my parents speaking about how they remembered how important the death of John F. Kennedy and the Moon Landing were (Though both are members of Generation Jones). These events would shape that generation and allow them to move on to their own sort of breeding phase with the up and coming Generation Z. But it is my generation, the generation born out of a combination of Generation Jones and the Baby Boomers which we are here to discuss.
Once the Baby Boomers had established themselves in the late 70’s putting most of them in their mid 20’s to their early 30’s, they began to breed in a manner similar to their rabbit like parents. The result of this breeding would be what has become colloquially referred to as the Millennial Generation or Generation Y. We are the children who would grow up with the technology developed by projects like ARPANET and advancements in basic silicon based transistor technology. We are for the most part, defined by this technology. It was our generation that would grow up at the same time as personal computing and the World Wide Web.
We will be followed by Generation Z, the generation that my sister belongs to as well as the generation that hopefully my generation can save before they fall into the same trap that we did.
What we did wrong…
We listened.
Despite a popular misconception regarding the lack of authoritative respect our generation has, the truth is perhaps far more telling. According to a study conducted by the Australian Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, by the age of 21 nearly ten percent of my generation had already been in a court for one reason or another. This statistic is a bit more interesting than that though. You see, what the statistic fails to display is the fact that only .5% of my generation has actually been placed in jail for any of our criminal offenses. In fact, most of what we have been accused of is related to minor traffic incidents or alcohol and drug related offenses. This statistic is made even more interesting by the fact that my generation was the first full generation to be penalized for drinking under the age of 21 due to the introduction of legislation passed pushed by a form of MADD [Mothers Against Drunk Driving] in the mid 80’s.
We were the generation that decided to behave and obey most of the laws set before us. It was my generation that overwhelmingly decided that we must go through High School and move on to college in order to get a degree regardless of the cost to ourselves. It was established as the pinnacle of our educational standpoint, that for any person to be valuable in the work force they must have a bachelors degree or higher. Now that we are in college with anywhere between 30,000 and 120,000 dollars in educational loans we are being told once again that the skills which we acquired would simply not be enough.
I had the luck of having a discussion with Dr. Zara Larsen of the Larsen Group, a group dedicated to giving advice to others on how to change themselves in order to better establish themselves in the workforce. In the conversation about a graduating mechanical engineer we were told that even with a Bachelors in mechanical engineering from the world’s top 8 engineering institution, one would still need to go on to pick up a Master’s degree in the field to even consider a position in the 6 figure range. Now while I do not proclaim that the Larsen Group has any more authoritative a position in that field than any other group, the point still remains that we are constantly being told that the 4 years of education and debt may simply not be enough to secure a job in the work force.
College education was the driving force for everything that my Generation has done, as we are told over and over again that the single judgmental factor which we would be held to is whether or not we were able to attend and graduate from some form of higher education. All throughout High School we are told again and again that our most important goal is to maintain sufficient grades to allow us to attend the college of our choice. We have sacrificed any and all trade skill positions in favor of some form of higher education.
Mike Rowe, who is perhaps most well known for his position as the host of the Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs”, recently gave a speech at the TED talks on how we have changed our view points on the nature of manual labor. The talk goes on to discuss how the United States has demonized the working positions that are held by Americans, how it is that we have made the ditch digger, the farm hand, etc. elements of our society that are seen as unwanted and unclean. The position is interesting in that it dips into the mentality that my generation has been fed about how our ultimate goal should be to attain a position in some office working as what quintessentially amounts to a cubicle slave.
The side effect of this mentality is clear and even has some pretty damning physical evidence. In 2007, an eight lane bridge along the I-35W route in Minnesota collapsed killing 13 and injuring 145. August 2003, the entire North East coast of the United States suffers from a massive power outage, leaving 45 million without power. These events are incredibly clear signs that the US infrastructure, which was for the most part established in the mid 50’s as part of the military and social initiative to better prepare ourselves for possible Soviet invasions, is finally starting to show its age. We have continued to ignore some of the most critical elements of the nations infrastructure in part due to a complete lack of work force capable of performing the needed duties.
The mounting concern is now that the generation which will need to deal with these issues simply is not trained to deal with them. Our High Schools were stripped of shop class in favor classical more renaissance style pursuits. The problem with this of course is that the shop classes served a critical feature within the educational mindset. In a video created by RSA Animate, Sir Ken Robinson discusses how it is that the education system, which was created in the late 19th century as a method for keeping school age children from competing with their parents for jobs, is now starting to falter in terms of proving of value to the modern age child. The core of the system is based around the concept of classical education, with a focus on literature and the fine arts as opposed to labor, has further served to divide and demonize the idea of the working class.
So, here we have a group generation of individuals who have tried to do well in school, get good grades, stay out of trouble, and most important of all make their way to the college system after being processed by public education. They have been stripped of most of their critical and analytical thinking abilities in favor of rote memorization and skills which will allow them to pass the required test in order to reach their goal of college. This is further reinforced at the college level where it has become apparent to the educational facilities that more and more the people attending, short of a state mandate, are required to be there.
In recent years, post secondary educational facilities have begun to realize that they can make use of this requirement and use it for their own financial gain. Using a combination of data from the National Center for Education Statistics and compiled data from the Cost of Living Index one can create a semi basic graph on the matter [credit to a Wikipedia user for compiling the data].
A recent PBS documentary even went into the nature of for profit colleges which have begun to take advantage of not only members of my generation, but those of generation X which are now desperate to attempt to compete with the flow of my generation into the workforce. These Universities are without a doubt making use of not only the ease of access that the internet provides, but also the unrelenting need for a degree in the modern business world.
Perhaps what makes this worse is how easy it is to put yourself in debt in order to attend these colleges. For attending Purdue University for 3 Years for a Bachelors Degree in Computer and Information Technology [projected entry salary 40k+], as an out of state student with no grants or scholarships I will owe the University approximately $120,000.00. For my part in signing and agreeing to that debt I was required to take a 10 minute 5 question quiz [which I could repeat], asking me if I understood how much the loan was for and that 3 to 6 months after my graduation I would be expected to begin payment on those loans.
We were never taught personal finance as a class at any level of my education. Everything I understand about the banking industry or the mechanics involved with loans and money lending is based on information I have gathered on my own time or learned because my mother is an employee for a local credit union. As a result, in full honesty, I am terribly unaware of exactly the consequences or the nature of the loan I have agreed to pay. If I do not secure a paying job within 3 to 6 months of my Graduation, that student loan debt will quickly be turned into a bill that I will not be capable of paying. The implications that this reality holds are staggering and upsetting, magnified more so when one realizes that a Federal student loan is one of the only loans which can not be cleared by chapter 11 bankruptcy.
America as a society has become a creature which spends money it does not have. It was this exact behavior which created the last global great depression which scars history books to this day. For proof of this, one need not look any further than the housing bubble crash which started in 2007 and has dominated mainstream media for the last 3 years. The linchpin to that entire fiasco relied on people buying houses which they simply could not afford. The resulting inability to pay for those houses caused the banks which provided those loans to suffer massive monetary losses. As most are well aware, this sparked a multitrillion bailout in order to ensure that those banking institutions would not collapse.
So while the monster is not the same as the last great depression with small things lent out on credit eventually resulting in an inability to pay, it has much more dramatic consequences when it strikes. Modern national media (CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc) have done a reasonably good job of perpetuating the idea that economy is somehow in a state of recovery, that unemployment is down and things are back on the road some form of nostalgic glory days. If one assumes the standpoint that money is debt and that our currency is only worth the amount that we think it is, then this form of propaganda is likely going to help to strengthen the economy, inspiring buying and circulating more funds [thus increasing the amount of debt]. This causes some issues; however, as it becomes apparent that the full scale damage is not conveyed simply with employment statistics.
Recent studies have revealed 2 things which might go about explaining why it is that the unemployment numbers seem to have dropped, the first of which is now a standard operation for members of my generation. This tactic is to simply “hide” in graduate school until a point where the economy will start to recover of its own accord. Multiple colleges have reported that their graduate admissions are on the rise within the last 2 years. There is also an issue of people who have managed to obtain their degree are now facing other issues.
The simple issue here is that those positions simply do not provide adequate funds to maintain a standard of living with the pressing issue of student debt. Now ultimately, this becomes a diatribe about the status of post secondary education, but I felt it was key to helping to explain the situation facing myself and others in my age range.
Past the issues of the placement of college within our makeup as a group, there are even more concerns that seem to dot the horizon.
Other Issues
Inheriting a Dying System
Social security, trillions of dollars in debt, a collapsing infrastructure, mediocre education standards, and the list goes on. Generation Y is told again and again that it will be our responsibility to fix these problems. We are burdened with knowledge that it is up to us to draft solutions to problems that are now so rampantly out of control, it is unlikely that conventional methods will be capable of solving them.
There is the theory in most accepted academic rings that history is bound to repeat itself regardless of whether or not people bother to read up on it. Ultimately I could sit here all day attempting to justify how my generation will somehow change the way things are, but the likelihood of such an occurrence is dismally low. In Japan, their equivalent of Generation Y happens to be approximately 10 years ahead of our own. There are growing signs that there are serious cultural changes already occurring. The ideology that the company comes first is starting to fail and a growing sign of what could easily amount to depression is beginning to show it’s head. The article covers how the males of the population have become more apathetic and less aggressive. While one could make a reasonable argument that the United States and Europe [which compose the western cultural “Generation Y”] have enough cultural differences separating them from Japan that such a thing could not possibly occur.
I think though, that we need to accept that my generation my actually be starting to feel the burden of this collapsing system. The constant calls for us to maintain the system have made it apparent that we may simply not be able to do so. We lack the tools, resources, and time that would be required for such a massive undertaking to occur. As such, we are often called cynical, lazy, apathetic… terms which mirror in a way the growing Japanese population. With life expectancy now stabilized thanks to the fact that the statistic is no longer offset by a massive number of deaths at birth, each generation is competing with the successive generations before it for job placement and goods.
The Baby Boomers and Generation X failed to save up for retirement and are now being forced to not only try and stay in the job market [even inspiring such programs as Florida’s “Experience Works“] but to actively keep others out of it. The result of this is an entire generation being forced to try and combat 40+ years of work experience with a mere degree and perhaps a certification or two. When faced with a choice between the two, you are often told that the only way you even have a chance of getting a job would be to spend time working for an internship and praying that they will hire you after the internship expires.
This disheartening experience even has some statistics associated with it. As I discussed in a previous post there is a study which shows that for the entire existence of my generation, and essentially since the time the Baby Boomers started having children, that suicide rates among young adults and teens has skyrocketed while the rates among Adults and the Elderly has declined to compensate.
I remember thinking, when asked why I thought it was that someone as young as 14 would be willing to kill themselves, what could possibly drive or motivate a person to conjure such thoughts. Admittedly, even today, the thought of someone who is barely into adolescence being capable of ending their life is a troubling thought. I am reminded; however, that we also have access to information and an incredibly impressive rate. We are virtually surrounded from birth with multiple forms of mass media and information gathering technologies. This allows us to learn facts about the global perspective and the shift that is occurring with growing globalization which could easily be described as terrifying.
As such, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the Y Generation has begun to show growing signs of distrust of some of the methods employed by the old guard. The resulting complications that arise from this distrust have often shown in the way that we vote.
Political Scorn
A Republic, if you can keep it – Benjamin Franklin
To pretend that politics were not corrupt before my Generation came on the scene is borderline retardation. As long as there have been people in power, there have been those that have been willing to abuse it. The difference of course, is that those in power are now being exposed for the scandals and atrocities that they commit. We can now look and realize that perhaps Al Qaeda would not have been so prepared to attack us, had we not trained them ourselves.
It has become easier for the common man to access things that were previously only discussed by a limited number of sources. With the number of ways media has started to integrate itself with our lives, it becomes almost impossible to ignore the constant bombardment of information regarding which political leader has done something which could easily lose public trust.
In that time, my Generation has grown up knowing that Nixon used his power during the Watergate scandal, Regan was losing his memory, Clinton getting a blow job, and so many for President Bush that there is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to the various incidents of abuse. With wave after wave of nothing but negative information about every single political leader “we elect” it should come as a surprise to no one that we might be a bit disillusioned about the entire situation. The only thing we know of politics is that it is corrupt, and any attempts to solve that corruption only end up generating more of it.
So when people ask me if I voted or not, I have no shame in saying that I took no part in the political process. I have voted a single time during the democratic primary for current President Barak Obama. I did so because I had the faintest belief that perhaps the man would be a change, god knows that’s what he preached about all the time. But once again we will see with swift indignation, that regardless of your opinion of the man he was no different than any president before him. For every promise he has kept, he has compromised with opponents that those who voted for him see only as fools and bigots.
I doubt very much if you will see my Generation provide as big of the voting bloc as occurred during the 2008 election. We will be quick to learn from our mistakes and realize that the core of the system is inherently broken, and that any illusion of the system working for the people is quite incorrect. Even the greatest heroes of “fighting the man” like Senator Al Franken from Minnesota have proven with the approval of bills like the COICA that even the greatest heralds of this Generation’s general viewpoint can’t be trusted to be perfectly in line with those they represent.
The two party system is an outdated mechanic perpetuated by the use of the electoral college. As such, it like other elements core to the government has become one of resentment even among Baby Boomers, with the conservative leaning Tea Party managing to gain a couple of seats in the previous election. It is because of this system, that many feel that they can never truly be represented on an ideological basis as both parties are grounded in centrist thoughts. While they both have their extreme elements, for the most part the core of both parties sits at the center of the US political system. Our brothers and sisters in Europe seem to be doing better in that regard at the very least, with a system in government which seems to allow for some more points of view to enter the playing field.
Ideological Wars
We grew up on the fall of the Soviet Union, watching as our once great rival collapsed under the economic strain it had been put under. It was the once great enemy that our predecessors had fought so long to defeat. But when we started to realize the cost to us as a nation including but not limited to: The various wars in southeast Asia; the intervention with legitimate political systems in the Middle East and Central / Southern America; and the backlash that those events generated, it became apparent that we must analyze why exactly we had chosen to fight.
The Soviet Union had been our Ally during the Second World War, committing more men to end the war than all other allied nations combined. Due to differences in economic models and systems of government, it was decided that after the war they were to become the enemy of the United States. One is forced to ask themselves: what was it about socialism that drove an entire nation to fight against it tooth and nail.
And so we analyzed the concept, we tried to learn why it is that people were so determined to not allow it gain a foothold. And the conclusion we could draw was “Well it doesn’t work in theory, but it’s not inherently evil”. As you look around with 20/20 hindsight on the matter, one begins to wonder what it was that we were fighting for. We were willing to sentence our own people as traitors for having a different idea of how the government should run; going against everything we had been taught about American patriotism. To question the government was at the core curriculum, that our Founding Fathers fought the British because it was the wrong form of Government, and 150 years later we leverage those who speak out against the government as traitors.
We grew up with perspective on the matter. And now, we have to tools to do what those before us did not. We had the opportunity to communicate with the people that composed the nations we call enemy.
Technology
In 2009, Iran, A country listed on the “Axis of Evil”, had within its confines an uprising of a different sort. Unlike uprisings in the past, which were handled quietly as an internal matter, it was public for the whole world to view. As sites like Twitter and other social media outlets provided a live stream to allow the entire rest of the world to view the events as they unfolded, it became clear that the citizens who composed these uprisings held similar beliefs and views to those held by myself. We started to realize that the picture painted of an ultra conservative Islamic nation might not be as true to reality as we had thought.
The Internet and Global Communications have radically changed the dynamic and outlook that this generation holds. For the first time in all of human history, the ability to communicate to almost all of the worlds 6 billion inhabitants exists. The simple magnitude of that capability cannot be expressed in words. This ability has united humanity in a way that was before impossible. We now have the ability to break down and analyze internal cultural values that would otherwise remain isolated and have been unchallenged.
In addition to that ability to communicate comes the ability to learn. Unlike all of the previous generations, we have the entire compendium of human knowledge at our fingertips. We have used this to break down the barriers typically associated with a lack of critical thought and analytical skills at the secondary education level. It is now possible for anyone to tap into a vast source knowledge that was previously only available to the educational elite.
And now, beyond that, the global masses also have access to all of the political system’s dirty little secrets. With sites like Wikileaks, it becomes incredibly easy to access information that would otherwise have been kept from the citizens who pay for its acquisition. We operate in a realm that has never previously been explored with a flood of information, so much so that it can keep us distracted.
Over time, we have learned to start being more selective with which information we choose to accept. My generation has been forced to start accepting some groups as trustworthy, and others as false sources. We are taught as the generations before begin to grasp what we have created, that the things we have created should not be trusted. We are told to trust a book over a site online, thinking that simply because a publisher or an editor is involved with the creation of the material, that it is bound to the truth. We have overcome that need to rely on the publisher or the editor by being more selective about the information that we choose to accept as correct. Our ability to double check statistics and facts has been made all the easier and as such our tendency towards doubt all the more apparent.
The downside of this technological surge has come in the form of the inherent human reward system. One could argue that as long as a man remains happy and does not cause harm to others, than the source of that happiness should not be questioned. The flaw in this of course is questioning the price we pay for an ever increasing digital footprint.
We are perhaps the only generation that could define our ages by the technology which was released during those ages. It is interesting to think that I could define the ages 5-9 as the Super Nintendo, ages 10-14 as the Playstation, 14-18 as the Playstation 2, 18-22 as the 360, Wii, and PS3. We have entered new factors into the equation of what it is that brings us happiness. As to the possible implications of such a thing, I really cannot say; only that in doing so we have become impossibly intertwined with technology.
Herzberg
As we being to learn more and more about how the human mind works, it is becoming increasingly apparent that those elements can be used in the same fashion any scientific discovery would be used: To generate a profit. In 1959 Fredrick Herzberg discovered that workers did not actually do their jobs for cash, but rather for recognition. He classified the motivational factors into two separate categories: Motivation and Hygiene. The theory was slowly refined and crafted with each progressive iteration revealing more and more about the what drives us. RSA Animate recently published a talk by Dan Pink on the matter of what it is that motivates us to do things.
Now what you can be sure of is that the business world is well aware of these motivational schemes. With increasing frequency, jobs tend to no longer or barely match the cost of living, in fact they have gone so far as to fight against a raise in the minimum wage saying that by doing so they would simply not hire any new employees. By knowing what motivates people, business can learn to increase profits at the cost of using other incentives to motivate employees.
Science is being used against us, in marketing, in video game design, in everything we do. It is not to say that the science is evil, or that somehow knowing how to make you buy something that you do not need is forbidden knowledge. But we have to be willing to cope with the fact that we are starting to understand how to manipulate people on a level that they can’t control. I leave it to others to decide the ethical implications that come with that.
What to do?
So, you have all of these factors that are weighing in and crushing an entire Generation. The question of course becomes “What are you going to do about it”. Now, we are a generation that has been accused of being lazy and cynical [and perhaps with good reason on our parts for being so]. What you have to ask yourself is how do we change this? How can we escape this “collapse”?
In truth, I doubt very much if we actually can, it’s that whole being cynical thing that comes with the generation. The situation put against us is not one that will be easy to navigate or deal with in a timely manner. I think the answer lies in using what makes our generation unique.
With massive global protest organized against the Church of Scientology by groups like anonymous, the Reddit Secret Santa program, or even the act to save a small kitten from an abusive home. There are instances across the internet on a daily basis of humanity trying its best to be trusting. Now obviously, I would be well within the bounds of ignorance to ignore the overwhelming number of cases which do not end so happily, but I think there is some manner of precedent being set in how my Generation is choosing to interact with the world.
The key to turning back the tide and undoing the damage that has been done is going to come from action. I don’t know how to do so, as at this point it is difficult to truly stir the masses, but if anything is going to be done you can almost hedge your bet that the medium will be the internet.
I thank you all for reading, and I hope you had a happy set of Holiday’s this past Thanksgiving. I think I shall leave you with the inspiration for this little wall of text.
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Judicial Watch Asks Court to Compel Hillary Clinton Email Answers
More Clinton-Abedin Email Exchanges of Classified Information on Unsecure Server
Emails Detail Attempts to Hack Clinton Server; U.S. Secret Service Informed
We Will Be Watching Virginia Polls on Election Day
Judicial Watch Asks Court to Compel Hillary Clinton Email Answers
You have watched along with us as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and many of her top aides treated the court process with contempt.
However, we have remedies in the courts for these delaying, obfuscating tactics.
This week, for example, we filed a motion to compel Clinton to answer three interrogatory questions she refused to answer under oath. We submitted the questions to her under a court order issued by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan on August 19, 2016.
In our brief, we argue that Clinton “failed to provide sufficient reasons for refusing to answer them, and the limited reasons she provides do not warrant sustaining her objections.” Hillary Clinton refused outright to answer questions about the creation of her email system; her decision to use the system despite warning from State Department officials; and the basis for her claim that the State Department had “90-95%” of her emails.
In her responses sent to Judicial Watch and the court on October 13, 2016, Clinton refused to answer these three questions outright and responded that she “does not recall” 20 times concerning her non-government clintonemail.com email system. She preceded her responses by eight “general objections” and two “objections to definitions.” The words “object” or “objection” appear 84 times throughout the 23-page document submitted to the court and Judicial Watch.
In our motion to compel her to answer, we argue:
Pursuant to Rule 33 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, “[t]he grounds for objecting to an interrogatory must be stated with specificity…. In addition, the party objecting to the interrogatory “bears the burden of ‘show[ing] why discovery should not be permitted….’” Although she objected to the three interrogatories, Secretary Clinton failed to provide sufficient reasons for refusing to answer them, and the limited reasons she provides do not warrant sustaining her objections.
Interrogatory 1 asks: “Describe the creation of the clintonemail.com system, including who decided to create the system, the date it was decided to create the system, why it was created, who set it up, and when it became operational.” In our motion to compel, we argue:
Secretary Clinton objects and asserts that the interrogatory is outside the scope of permitted discovery…. However, the creation of the clintonemail.com system is squarely within the scope of permitted discovery. Understanding the basic facts surrounding the creation of the system is an integral part of understanding how and why it came to be used for State Department business. To date, no witness has testified about these facts, and the Court specifically authorized interrogatories to enable Plaintiff to gather this information. Secretary Clinton’s refusal to answer the interrogatory is therefore misplaced.
Interrogatory 14 asks: On March 6, 2009, Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Eric J. Boswell wrote in an Information Memo to your Chief of Staff, Cheryl Mills, that he “cannot stress too strongly, however, that any unclassified BlackBerry is highly vulnerable in any setting to remotely and covertly monitoring conversations, retrieving email, and exploiting calendars.” A March 11, 2009 email states that, in a management meeting with the assistant secretaries, you approached Assistant Secretary Boswell and mentioned that you had read the “IM” and that you “get it.” Did you review the March 6, 2009 Information Memo, and, if so, why did you continue using an unclassified BlackBerry to access your clintonemail.com email account to conduct official State Department business?
Secretary Clinton objected to Interrogatory 14, asserting that it concerned “cybersecurity issues outside the scope of permitted discovery.” In our motion to compel, we argue:
Interrogatory 14 does not concern “cybersecurity issues.” It asks whether Secretary Clinton read a memorandum about the general use of unapproved or unclassified Blackberries, and, if she did read the memorandum, why did she continue using an unapproved or unclassified Blackberry – the device by which [she] accessed the clintonemail.com account she used to conduct official government business. A yes or no answer to whether she read the memorandum will not reveal any information the parties’ agreed-upon scope sought to avoid. Similarly, if the answer is yes, Secretary Clinton’s explanation as to why, after reading the memorandum, she continued to access her clintonemail.com account through her Blackberry also will not reveal any information the parties’ agreed-upon scope sought to avoid. The interrogatory clearly seeks information squarely within the scope of permitted discovery. Secretary Clinton should be compelled to answer Interrogatory 14.
Interrogatory 24 asks: During your October 22, 2015 appearance before the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Benghazi, you testified that 90 to 95 percent of your emails “were in the State’s system” and ‘if they wanted to see them, they would certainly have been able to do so.’ Identify the basis for this statement, including all facts on which you relied in support of the statement, how and when you became aware of these facts, and, if you were made aware of these facts by or through another person, identify the person who made you aware of these facts.
Secretary Clinton objected to Interrogatory 24 and asserted that the interrogatory asked for information protected by the attorney-client privilege. In our motion to compel, we argue:
Interrogatory 24 does not seek any factual information Secretary Clinton may have provided to her attorneys in confidence for purposes of obtaining legal advice. Nor does it seek any advice Secretary Clinton’s attorneys may have provided the secretary that would reveal facts she provided them in confidence. The interrogatory only seeks the factual basis for a specific representation Secretary Clinton made to Congress. It is irrelevant whether Secretary Clinton told her attorneys about the factual basis for this representation, either for purposes of obtaining legal advice or for some other purpose, because Plaintiff has not asked about any such communications. As a result, the attorney client privilege does not apply.
***
Because Secretary Clinton has failed to provide any such information to justify her assertion of the attorney client privilege, she should be compelled to answer Interrogatory 24.
By refusing to answer our simple questions, Hillary Clinton is obstructing Judicial Watch’s efforts to get basic information about her email practices. Because she has not – and cannot – demonstrate that her refusal to answer our questions is proper, Hillary Clinton should be required by the court to answer them promptly.
The Clinton responses to interrogatives were received in the Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which was first filed in September 2013 seeking records about the controversial employment status of Huma Abedin, former deputy chief of staff to Clinton (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-01363)). The lawsuit was reopened because of revelations about the clintonemail.com system.
In the same cases we also filed another Motion to Compel against John Bentel, former State Department Director of Information Resource Management of the Executive Secretariat, to answer 87 questions asked of him during his October 24 Judicial Watch deposition concerning former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s non-state.gov email system. At the deposition, Bentel answered each of the questions, “On advice from my legal counsel, I decline to answer the question and I invoke my Fifth Amendment rights.” Judicial Watch’s court filing refutes Bentel’s claim for Fifth Amendment self-incrimination protection, arguing:
Mr. Bentel has invoked his Fifth Amendment rights without providing any justification whatsoever. He has not identified – let alone demonstrated – a fear of prosecution in answering any of the 87 questions asked of him during his deposition. Nor has he demonstrated any such fear is more than fanciful or merely speculative. Mr. Bentel has not provided Plaintiff or the Court with any pertinent information to allow it to assess the validity of the invocation for each of the 87 questions Mr. Bentel declined to answer.
Judge Sullivan allowed us to depose Bentel in the first place, in part, because of his notable appearance in a May 2016 Inspector General’s report that found:
Mr. Bentel told employees in his office that Secretary Clinton’s email arrangement had been approved by the State Department’s legal staff and also instructed his subordinates not to discuss the Secretary’s email again: In one meeting, one staff member raised concerns that information sent and received on Secretary Clinton’s account could contain Federal records that needed to be preserved in order to satisfy Federal recordkeeping requirements. According to the staff member, the Director stated that the Secretary’s personal system had been reviewed and approved by Department legal staff and that the matter was not to be discussed any further. . . . According to the other S/ES-IRM staff member who raised concerns about the server, the Director stated that the mission of S/ES-IRM is to support the Secretary and instructed the staff never to speak of the Secretary’s personal email system again.
It should disturb Americans that yet another Clinton IT official asserted the Fifth Amendment rather than answer straight-forward questions about Clinton’s email scheme. You can see why this Clinton email scandal will continue long after Election Day.
More Clinton-Abedin Email Exchanges of Classified Information on Unsecure Server
It is by now abundantly clear that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was not telling the truth when she said the “personal emails” she “did not keep” were about mundane topics such as yoga sessions and wedding plans.
This week we released 323 pages of Department of State documents, including previously unreleased email exchanges in which Clinton and top aide Huma Abedin sent classified information over Clinton’s clintonemail.com unsecure email system. According to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemptions cited in the documents, three of the email exchanges contained material “classified to protect national security.”
Also included in the newly obtained documents is an additional instance of the State Department doing special favors for a high-dollar Clinton Foundation donor. And the documents include instances of the distribution by State Department officials of Clinton’s government schedule to members of the Clinton Foundation staff.
The documents contain emails not previously turned over to the State Department, bringing the known total to date of such emails uncovered by Judicial Watch to 238 new Clinton emails (not part of the 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton turned over to the State Department). These records further appear to contradict statements by Clinton that, “as far as she knew,” all of her government emails were turned over to the State Department.
The new records include three separate Clinton-Abedin email exchanges withheld in part from Judicial Watch under the State Department’s “B1” FOIA exemption, applying to “information that is classified to protect national security”:
From: sbwhoeop[Redacted] To: H: Sent: Thu Oct 08 [8:08:03] 2009 Subject: Fw: Memo on latest N.I. negotiations; yr trip; from Shaun W Sid CONFIDENTIAL October 8, 2009 For: Hillary From: Sid Re: Latest/N. Ireland After five hours of talk at Downing Street tonight, Thursday, October 8, Shaun Woodward tells me that it seems Gordon Brown has brokered a financial package with Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness that may in turn break the deadlock of devolution of policing and justice. They have covered the major issues in stage two in their discussions. On Monday, Brown will formally set out the details in a letter to Robinson and McGuinness. Gordon will share these with you when you meet with him on Sunday at Chequers. Shaun says that both Robinson and McGuinness, subject to some minor details, should be in a position to recommend to Unionists and Nationalists that this is a strong deal. The letter will confirm the details. [Redacted due to information “kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy;” “foreign relations or foreign activities of the US, including confidential sources”] I hope that’s right. From: H To: Huma Abedin Sent: Thu Oct 08 [8:08:04] 2009 Subject: Fw: Memo on latest N.I. negotiations; yr trip; from Shaun W Sid Pls print. Sent: Thursday, October 08, 2009 8:10:04 PM To: Humamabedin[Redacted] Subject: Fw: Memo on latest N.I. [Northern Ireland] negotiations; yr trip; from Shaun W Sid Attachments: hrc memo n. ireland 100809.docx *** From: sbwhoeop[Redacted] To: H Sent: Sun Oct 11 [8:46:43] 2009 Subject: Memo on your speech meeting on Monday, Sid CONFIDENTIAL October 11, 2009 For: Hillary From: Sid Re: Your speech and meeting on Monday I have not seen your speech obviously that you will deliver Monday morning at Stormont. Shaun tells me that it’s a good speech, and you’re right not to instruct the parties what to do but to encourage them to address why completing devolution needs to be done [Redacted due to information “kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy;” “foreign relations or foreign activities of the US, including confidential sources”] That’s it. From: H To: Huma Abedin Sent: Monday Oct 12 02:06:15 2009 Subject: Fw: H: Memo on your speech meeting on Monday, Sid Pls print From: Huma Abedin [[email protected]] Sent: Monday, October 12, 2009 2:11:38 AM To: humamabedin[Redacted] Subject: Fw: H: Memo on your speech meeting on Monday, Sid Attachments: hrc memo ni [sic] meeting 101209 docx *** From: H [email protected] To: Sullivan, Jacob J Sent: Sun Oct 25 11:13:17 2009 Subject: Re: Honduras First, Tom’s travel date hasn’t been set – will be Tuesday or Wednesday we think. He is coordinating with Don Restrepo to see if they can go together [Redacted due to information “kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy”] So that’s where we are. We’ll have more to report tomorrow. *** From Sullivan, Jacob J [email protected] To: H Sent: Sun Oct 25 [11:49:45] 2009 Subject: Re: Honduras Sounds good. There will be those who take a hard line on the elections, but perhaps some fence-sitting countries could be persuaded on conditional recognition. I’ll flag it for Tom and Craig. From: H To: Huma Abedin Sent: Mon Oct 26 07:27:12 2009 Subject: Fw: Honduras All of this did not print last night, It stopped after Fourth! [Redacted due to information “kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy;” “foreign relations or foreign activities of the US, including confidential sources”] [Emphasis added] From: Huma Abedin [[email protected]] Sent: Monday, October 26, 2009 8:06:12 AM To: humaabedin [Redacted] Subject: Fw: Honduras
The emails also include an exchange between Abedin, Clinton personal assistant Lauren Jiloty, and Iris Anaya, the assistant to sugar magnate and Clinton Foundation donor Alfonso Fanjul concerning a request for special access to Clinton. On October 13, 2009, Anaya emailed Abedin seeking to arrange a meeting between Fanjul, the CEO of Florida Crystals, and Clinton. Jiloty responded the next day, asking that Anaya talk with Clinton scheduler Lona Valmoro about “setting up a meeting.” Fanjul donated more than $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation and was a Bill Clinton co-chairman in Florida.
In an October 26, 2009, email exchange, power attorney and Hillary Clinton financial supporter Charlie Ann Syprett contacted Doug Band, apparently seeking help in getting around U.S. Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) restrictions on U.S. citizens’ ability to travel to Cuba. Syprett ostensibly wanted a waiver from the restrictions to enable people from her organization, SYC Charitable Foundation, to travel to Cuba, noting “we are not asking for something out of the ordinary.”
The emails also show that Valmoro sent Clinton’s government schedule to the unsecure email addresses of numerous members of the Clinton Foundation staff on October 16, 2009, again on October 18, 2009, and on October 25, 2009. The emails also include discussions of personnel matters and appointments on Clinton’s unsecure account, which may run afoul of federal privacy law.
This is the thirteenth set of records produced for Judicial Watch by the State Department from the non-state.gov email accounts of Huma Abedin. The documents were produced under a court order in a May 5, 2015, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the State Department requiring the agency to produce “all emails of official State Department business received or sent by former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013, using a ‘non-state’.gov email address” (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00684)). Previous records releases documented special Clinton State Department consideration for Clinton Foundation supporters (see here, here, and here.)
We’ve once again uncovered classified information in Hillary Clinton’s and Huma Abedin’s emails. It is frankly remarkable that the FBI and Justice Department are only now investigating Abedin’s connection to Clinton’s mishandling of classified information.
Emails Detail Attempts to Hack Clinton Server; U.S. Secret Service Informed
One danger to America as a result of the classified information on Clinton’s illicit system is this: We know that attempts were made by unknown parties to hack their private email accounts.
Consider:
This week we released State Department documents detailing repeated efforts to hack into the unsecure non-state.gov email system used by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in November 2010. The hacks are detailed in email exchanges between State Department IT official Brian Pagliano and Bill Clinton aide Justin Cooper. The emails show the system was hacked 10 times in two days from November 27 to 29.
The documents also reveal that Pagliano warned Cooper that because of an outside service vendor relied upon by the Clinton system, “we’d be susceptible to such an attack.” Cooper subsequently informed the U.S. Secret Service of the attempted hacks, providing agents with each of the ten reports and summaries Pagliano had provided him.
The new documents were among the nearly 15,000 Clinton emails discovered by the FBI, and obtained in response to an April 8, 2016, federal court order directing the Department of State to begin producing materials for Judicial Watch in response to a September 3, 2015 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-01441)). The lawsuit was filed after State failed to comply with an August 5, 2015 FOIA request seeking information about Bryan Pagliano’s involvement with Clinton’s email system.
The ten emails from Pagliano alerting Cooper to the apparent hacking attempt began on the morning of Saturday, November 27, 2010, and continued through Monday, November 29. Each of the ten alerts contained the same message, apparently from the cyber security firm Symantec: “There was a failed logon attempt logged on the server. To check who it was log onto the server and double click on the toolbox icon labeled Failed_Logon_Attempt….”
On both November 29 and November 30, Pagliano sent Cooper emails detailing the attempted hack:
From: Bryan Pagliano To: Justin Cooper Sent: Monday, Nov 29 10:48:31 2010 Subject: Re: So, to update you… The failed logon attempts on the 27th were for username doug and dougband, the failed logon attempts on the 29th were for username huma. Would be useful to know if it was them who tried to log in… *** From: Bryan Pagliano Date: November 30, 2010 12:22:55 AM EST To: Justin Cooper Subject: Re: Weird, looks like the attack came from 208.67.222.222 and started at around 5pm. It’s a company called OpenDNS, they are a fairly reputable organization. The traffic seems to have cleared up at about 11:50pm. I wonder if they had someone launching an attack from their servers. That may explain the DNS issue we had earlier. Might have been an injection attack [NOTE: most common and successful attacks on the internet due to their numerous types, large attack surface, and the complexity required to protect against them]. We use their servers to resolve external websites for both the sbs and blackberry server so we’d be susceptible to such an attack. [Emphasis added]
Later on November 30, Cooper sent the entire email exchange with Pagliano to the Secret Service. Before providing Judicial Watch with Cooper’s email reports, the State Department redacted the identity of Cooper’s intended recipient with the notation “REFERRED FOR CONSULTATION – USSS.” The State Department redacted the recipient under a “B7 (C)” FOIA exemption, which is “Law enforcement information whose disclosure would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
These newly released emails show that the Clinton email server was subject to an aggressive and targeted hacking attempt. And we now know that yet another government agency, the United States Secret Service, not only knew about the Clinton email system but that it was the target of hacking. The Clinton email scandal has now widened to yet another Obama administration agency.
We Will Be Watching Virginia Polls on Election Day
Our Election Integrity Project, headed up by Robert Popper, former deputy chief of the Voting Section in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and a veteran poll observer for the Department f Justice, will be monitoring the polls in Virginia on election day.
Popper has been training volunteer poll observers for the task. We have good reason to worry about the integrity of voting in Virginia. As just on example, 1,046 aliens, or residents who are not U.S. citizens, were on the voter rolls in 8 Virginia counties. If that rate of non-citizen registration held in the rest of Virginia’s counties — that would mean about 6,500 non-citizens are registered to vote in Virginia.
We have been at work in other states, as well. Recent polls show that voters are becoming “deeply skeptical” about election integrity. Of course, we will be alert for election fraud nationwide on Tuesday.
The right to vote is a key tool Americans have to exercise control and oversight over our government. Your right to vote is precious and not available in any significant way to billions across the world. So if you can, please vote on Election Day. |
* Rising U.S. bond yields hit gold's appeal * Scaled back Fed bond buys possible in 2013 * SPDR Gold exchange-traded fund holdings at 4-year low (Adds details on China's rates, technicals; updates prices) By Frank Tang and Jan Harvey NEW YORK/LONDON, June 20 (Reuters) - Gold plunged over 5 percent to its lowest in three years on Thursday, leading a global market rout one day after the U.S. Federal Reserve gave its most explicit signal yet it plans to wind down the era of easy money. Losses snowballed throughout the day, triggering technical selling below key support at $1,320 an ounce and culminating in one of bullion's biggest routs since the 2008 economic crisis. Technical analysts said prices might have to fall another 6 percent before finding new support at $1,200. Signs of financial stress in China added to the pressure, with China's shortest-term rates hitting record highs as the central bank ignored market pressure to inject funds into the market, despite new evidence that the world's second-largest economy is slowing. But the primary impetus was Fed chief Ben Bernanke's remarks on a possible scale back of the stimulus program later this year, which spurred a surge in benchmark U.S. bond yields that drove gold deeper into bear market territory. Silver plunged nearly 8 percent. U.S. stocks fell 2.5 percent and oil tumbled 4 percent. "People had been going into gold, commodities and equities because the bond yields were so low. Now, with bond yield rising we are beginning to see liquidation out of gold and into cash," said Jeffrey Sica, chief investment officer at Sica Wealth which oversees over $1 billion in clients' assets. Bullion, a non-yield bearing asset and a traditional inflation hedge, tends to be particularly sensitive to interest rate changes compared with other riskier assets such as equities. Spot gold was down 5.2 percent at $1,280.54 an ounce by 4:28 p.m. EDT (2028 GMT), having hit $1,276.19, which marked its lowest level since Sept. 21, 2010. The Thomson-Reuters/Jefferies CRB commodities index dropped 3 percent, while benchmark U.S. 10-year bond yields rose to the highest levels since August 2011, with few signs of when the trend will end. U.S. Comex gold futures for August delivery settled down $87.80 an ounce at $1,286.20, with trading volume already surpassing 360,000 lots, on what might be the highest daily turnover in nearly a month, preliminary Reuters data showed. Gold is now more than 30 percent below its record high of $1,920.30 an ounce, set in September 2011. CHART SHOWS MORE LOSSES POSSIBLE Analysts said gold is on weak technical ground, with few levels to support prices until they go below $1,200 an ounce, after its sharp pullback to a near three-year low on Thursday. GRAPHIC: link.reuters.com/jar98t Spot gold's 14-day relative strength index dropped to 25, below 30, which marks the area traditionally seen as over-sold territory. Some analysts said, however, that gold could benefit should the U.S. economy worsen or not improve fast enough, prompting the Fed to suspend plans to taper monetary stimulus. "Weaker data in the coming months could push back unwinding, lower yields and thereby support gold," said James Steel, chief precious metals analyst at HSBC. Signs of the end of the Fed's mortgage-bond buybacks known as quantitative easing, the single-most important driver of gold, have helped push prices down more than 20 percent this year after 12 straight years of gains. Heavy selling by institutional investors also showed no signs of abating. Bullion holdings in the world's biggest gold exchange-traded fund SPDR Gold Trust fell 0.2 percent to their lowest in four years. Silver was the biggest decliner among the precious metals, sliding nearly 8 percent to $19.64 an ounce, having hit a low of $19.58 an ounce, its weakest since September 2010. Platinum dropped 3.6 percent to $1,359.50 an ounce, while spot palladium slid 4.7 percent to $661.25 an ounce. 4:28 PM EDT LAST/ NET PCT LOW HIGH CURRENT SETTLE CHNG CHNG VOL US Gold AUG 1286.20 -87.80 -6.4 1275.40 1351.20 347,943 US Silver JUL 19.823 -1.800 -8.3 19.535 21.280 116,037 US Plat JUL 1363.80 -60.10 -4.2 1355.20 1419.20 23,244 US Pall SEP 665.10 -31.30 -4.5 660.65 695.50 6,757 Gold 1280.54 -70.15 -5.2 1277.03 1351.06 Silver 19.640 -1.670 -7.8 19.580 21.330 Platinum 1359.50 -50.50 -3.6 1359.50 1416.74 Palladium 661.25 -32.75 -4.7 664.25 693.00 TOTAL MARKET VOLUME 30-D ATM VOLATILITY CURRENT 30D AVG 250D AVG CURRENT CHG US Gold 367,191 210,063 180,458 26.09 4.36 US Silver 163,325 55,038 56,645 32.3 1.07 US Platinum 28,563 13,464 11,737 21.9 -0.01 US Palladium 6,826 6,451 5,566 (Additional reporting by Veronica Brown in London.; Editing by Jane Baird and Bob Burgdorfer and Andre Grenon) |
"We have now stood democracy on its head,” Senator Tom Harkin said. Filibuster reform still up in the air
One of the fiercest proponents of filibuster reform says the question isn’t, “What’s the purpose of the filibuster?” Rather it’s: “What has the filibuster become?”
“It has become a means whereby the minority of the Senate dictates what we can and cannot do. And we have now stood democracy on its head,” Sen. Tom Harkin said Tuesday. The Iowa Democrat has spent the past 15 years trying to scale back the power of the filibuster.
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“A small minority of the Senate now gets to decide what happens in this country.”
Democratic and Republican leaders have been working through the January recess on a non-binding compromise to improve the way the Senate does business. And New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, who heads policy and messaging for Democrats, said he’s continued to hold talks with Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate.
“There is strong belief on our side that the filibuster has been abused, but there’s almost universal agreement that a bipartisan solution is best, and we are still working towards that,” Schumer said in a statement.
But if both parties fail to reach a deal before senators return to Washington next Tuesday, the chamber likely will take up a rules reform package offered by Harkin and fellow Democratic Sens. Tom Udall of New Mexico and Jeff Merkley of Oregon.
Even in the middle of the two-week recess, the trio of Democrats was on a conference call with reporters trying to build support for their plan.
Udall said he’s anticipating “several days” of debate, though he wouldn’t say whether he has secured the 51 votes required to pass the plan. Fifty-three senators caucus with Democrats, not but all support the proposal.
“We’re working it hard,” Udall said.
Proponents believe they only need a simple majority of senators – rather than the usual two-thirds margin – to adopt the changes, something they say is allowed under the Constitution on the first legislative day of the session. That applies in this case, backers say, since Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) extended the first legislative day of the 112 th Congress through at least next Tuesday.
Republicans have balked at the Democratic push to change the rules, with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) dismissing it as an attempt to “nullify” last November’s election and make it easier for the majority to advance its agenda.
But Democrats say the changes are needed to fix a broken Senate that, under the constant threat of a filibuster, has failed to perform its most basic functions: pass budget and appropriations bills, fund the government and confirm executive nominees.
“The Senate has really left those historical roots,” Udall said.
The Democratic reform package, unveiled two weeks ago, would end the use of filibusters on procedural votes and require “talking filibusters,” in which senators would have to speak continuously on the Senate floor if they want to block legislation or a nomination. Nowadays, the threat of a filibuster is enough to halt Senate action.
The plan also would cut debate time on nominees after a cloture vote to just two hours from 30 hours, allowing the Senate to get more nominations to the floor. And it would eliminate “secret holds,” a senator’s right to anonymously block a nominee or bill.
The package does provide a provision guaranteeing the minority party the ability offer germane amendments to bills, an olive branch to Republicans who have criticized Reid for “filling the tree” and blocking them from offering amendments to legislation.
“We wouldn’t do anything if we didn’t feel minority rights would be protected,” Udall said. |
Obama’s tax and spending policies will yield $6.4 trillion in deficits over the next decade. CBO: Exploding debt under Obama
The Congressional Budget Office said Friday that President Barack Obama’s tax and spending policies will yield $6.4 trillion in deficits over the next decade, more than double the shortfall in CBO’s own fiscal baseline — even after taking credit for reduced war costs.
House Republicans, slated to unveil their own plan next week, are sure to seize on the numbers, yet the mountain of data gives reason for both parties to pause going into what’s expected to be a major fiscal crisis after the November elections.
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The GOP has been quick to fault Obama for excess spending. But more than three-quarters of the $3.5 trillion in added red ink can be explained by what is still a rich diet of tax breaks continued by the president — but not under the CBO’s baseline.
(See also: CBO's estimate of repealing IPAB is a head-scratcher)
Indeed, in the case of discretionary appropriations, CBO scores the president as coming in about $4 billion under the $1.047 trillion target set by the Budget Control Act last summer. And within these confines, the biggest discrepancy is that his budget is $2 billion over the caps for security programs at the expense of domestic priorities.
Administration officials Friday took heart that CBO credited Obama’s plan with bringing future deficits down to 3 percent of GDP. In fact, the $6.4 trillion cumulative 10-year shortfall shown by CBO is under the $6.7 trillion forecast by the White House in its own documents in February. And measured against a rough proxy for current policy, the report lends at least partial support to the White House claim of up to $4 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years.
“CBO found that by 2016 deficits as a share of the economy would be below 3 percent – a key milestone of fiscal sustainability,” said Jeff Zients, director of the Office of Management and Budget. “It found that after implementing the president’s budget, debt held by the public will decrease and then stabilize as a share of the economy, also a key indicator of improving fiscal health.”
But all these deficit reduction numbers come with some important caveats regarding how to treat hundreds of billions in war savings as well as automatic spending cuts due to take effect in January. And even if Obama were to get his way on all fronts, the outlook remains grim. |
A cellphone photo of Moussa Konaté, a security guard at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Bamako, Mali, who was killed by extremists after he helped guests escape an attack on Nov. 20, 2015. (Jane Hahn/For The Washington Post)
Two years after French troops drove jihadist forces from northern Mali, a deadly attack on a luxury hotel has raised concerns that Islamist extremists are gaining ground again in this volatile country, despite a new peace accord among domestic rebel groups.
While Malian and U.N. officials point to the peace agreement as a potential milestone in pacifying the lawless, Arab-dominated north, they also worry that violence could surge again. The weak central government is struggling with a host of challenges: entrenched poverty, drug smuggling, and a mix of growing competition and collaboration among Islamist factions in the West African region.
“Mali today is as fragile as it was before the coup in 2012,” said Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington, referring to the military power grab that occurred as a rebellion in the north gained strength. France intervened the following year, after Islamist fighters seized control of a large chunk of territory.
“The French may have prevented an Islamist takeover, but you can’t rebuild a hollowed-out state in two years,” Pham said. “The borders are fictional, and there is a fluid and permeable dynamic among jihadist, rebel and criminal groups in the region. We are still playing Whac-A-Mole.”
[Mali’s president declares state of emergency after hotel attack]
Few people predict that this nation of 17 million people will become an Islamist beachhead again. But both Malian and foreign observers worry that extremist groups based in surrounding countries could still create turmoil, by capitalizing on domestic discontent here and on the momentum from recent terrorist attacks in Paris and elsewhere.
Two jihadist groups have asserted responsibility for last week’s attack on the Radisson Blu Hotel, which left at least 20 people dead in the bustling capital, hundreds of miles from the vast desert region where Islamist militias normally operate. Experts differ on the possible motive, with U.N. officials insisting the attack was an effort to derail the peace talks and others suggesting it was part of a new muscle-flexing rivalry between pro-al-Qaeda and pro-Islamic-State groups in the region.
There also are conflicting opinions about the best way to contain the possible comeback of Islamist extremism after two years of rule by the government of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, which is widely described as democratic but sluggish and corrupt.
Some look to the 8,000-member Malian army to enforce security, although it is thinly spread and in dire need of reform and training as well as equipment and funding, analysts say. Others say the key lies in quickly bringing development, services and jobs to the long-abandoned north, calling this the only way to prevent large numbers of unemployed young Muslim men — as well as older ex-rebels from various tribal separatist groups — from being recruited by well-financed jihadist groups.
“It is a great achievement that the combatant groups have been brought together and speak with one voice, but we need to bring peace dividends — water, electricity, roads, schools — so the population sees peace making a difference in their lives,” Mongi Hamdi, the U.N. special representative for Mali, said in an interview. “That is the glue that will keep people attached to peace.”
Mali is heavily dependent on the international community for security and economic survival. A U.N. peacekeeping force with more than 10,000 troops is stationed here, and a smaller French counterterrorism force has been based here since 2013. Large amounts of development aid have come from the United States, France and other countries. Some critics say the funding has been partly wasted through corruption, but Hamdi and others argue that even more is needed to reinforce the writ of the state in conflict areas.
Until now, Mali has been viewed largely as suffering from the predations of extremist groups spawned in neighboring countries. Libyan militants thronged into northern Mali after dictator Moammar Gaddafi was overthrown in 2011, and a notorious Algerian jihadist leader named Mokhtar Belmokhtar formed the group al-Mourabitoun that most experts believe planned the Nov. 20 hotel attack.
The Washington Post’s Kevin Sieff talks about the extremist threat in West Africa and why the U.N. peace keeping mission there is now the agency’s most dangerous. (Kevin Sieff and Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)
In recent months, experts said, the regional jihadist constellation has changed. At least one new group in Mali, the Massina Liberation Front, has emerged with possible outside help; it was one of the groups that claimed to have carried out the hotel attack. As the Islamic State has begun to eclipse al-Qaeda in its global reach, smaller jihadist groups in the area have reportedly shifted or cemented alliances with one side or the other.
Several international officials and experts said that what happens in Mali in the coming months could reinforce either modernizing or more extreme trends in the region.
“Mali is at center stage now. It is a huge country that borders seven others, and it can influence all of them,” Hamdi said. “The international community needs to take the situation more seriously. If Mali is lost, it will change the mind-set of the region. Then the bloodthirsty barbarians will start attacking everywhere.”
A former French colony whose population is 95 percent Muslim, Mali has a tradition of moderate Islamic values mixed with Christian influence. But government corruption and neglect have soured many Malians on secular politics, several experts said.
“We have a secular state and constitution, but people resent bad governance and corruption,” said Adam Thiam, a columnist for Le Républicain newspaper here. “Why do we have jihad? Because we are trying to build a modern state without the consent of the people. If there is not more international vigilance over the corrupt state system, we are going to see more human bombs.”
A separate problem that also has become intertwined with violence and religious extremism in Mali is a thriving drug trade. Each month, millions of dollars in cocaine, hashish and other drugs arrive in Mali from global producers in places such as Colombia and Southeast Asia, and are smuggled north into Algeria and beyond. The trade involves armed rebel groups as well as jihadist militias, which use the profits to pay fighters and buy weapons.
[Anita Datar is the only known American killed in Mali. She was there to help.]
“Drugs are at the heart of instability in the north. The smugglers don’t want peace because it interrupts their business, and if we don’t stop that business, stability will never last,” said an international official here who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to the news media.
Taken together, this array of problems — new rivalries and alignments emboldening jihadist attackers, popular disillusionment with the government, lack of resources to shore up the promises of peace in the north, entrenched criminal networks and signs of spreading ultraconservative Islamist influence — threaten to undermine the hopeful moment created by the peace accords signed in June.
“There is still a positive peace dynamic, but the state is weak and corrupt, and we have only had a democratic government for two years,” said Mahamadou Camara, a magazine editor and former press official in the Keïta administration. “The greatest risk we face today is that the positive momentum will reverse into a new spiral of violence.”
Read more:
Malians defy the threat of terror
Five things you should know about Friday’s terrorist attack in Mali
Anita Datar is the only American killed in the Mali attack. She was there to help. |
Margaret and Gerard Campion work to raise awareness for male breast cancer after both husband and wife were diagnosed with the disease.
Gerard and Meg Campion shared their lives for decades raising two daughters in Connecticut, but the husband and wife never expected that a life spent together would also mean sharing diagnosis of breast cancer.
In 2006, Gerard Campion was diagnosed first with the disease after spotting a tiny “blister”-like bump on his chest.
“It was obviously shocking. I think my first thought was, 'he’s not supposed to have this, I am,'" Meg Campion recalled of hearing her husband’s diagnosis.
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She said the reason he even went in for his first diagnosis was because a friend had been diagnosed with male breast cancer and they knew a little bit about the signs. After surgery and chemotherapy, the family thought their ordeal with cancer was over.
It wasn't.
Three years later, Meg Campion received her own diagnosis of breast cancer.
Her cancer, called ductal cell carcinoma in situ, had not spread and was able to be treated with radiation and surgery. Meg Campion said during both of these diagnosis the couple sometimes kept their emotions in check in order to be strong for the other one.
“We didn’t want to upset the other one,” she said. "You kept those emotions in check. I don’t want him to worry about me. That was the exact same thing when it was my turn.”
Following two successful bouts fighting off breast cancer, it returned in 2011, unexpectedly striking Gerard Campion rather than his wife. This time, the cancer had spread to his bones -- meaning it would be incurable.
Meg Campion said they knew after two rounds of cancer, there would be no hiding feelings from one another during the difficult period.
“He’s the first to say that the cancer patient isn’t the only one with cancer. The family has cancer, too,” she said. “People have asked us, which one is [the cancer] harder on? The both of us say the spouse. The spouse is always trying to be the strong one.”
After the second diagnosis, Gerard and Meg Campion became involved with raising awareness about male breast cancer -- even lobbying the state government to declare the third week of October Male Breast Cancer Awareness week.
"He speaks at rotary clubs and Lions clubs,” she told ABC News. “Eighty percent of men don’t realize they can contract breast cancer…If it prevents one family from losing a dad or a husband, that’s why we do it.”
Additionally, Meg Campion said she and her husband hoped that by raising awareness, doctors could address male breast cancer patients directly without relying on the same pamphlets and materials given to women.
“These men need to be respected as well,” Meg Campion said. “But when your husband is handed pamphlet that says side effects of treatment can be vaginal dryness…[and is given the same five years later] your sense of humor is not there any more.”
Overall, the couple, who are now expecting two grandchildren, say the diagnosis has been “a gift” in some ways. When the couple were invited to a wedding last year in Zurich, they found a way to attend, and even expanded the trip into a tour of Italy.
“When I said it changes you, that’s how it changes you. You just all of a sudden say, 'Why not?' We’re living our life and making memories,” Meg Campion said. |
Canada should not boycott the upcoming Commonwealth meetings in Sri Lanka, former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said Sunday.
“If you were going to boycott the Commonwealth because of illustrations of improper government or abusive treatment of people within some of the member countries, some days you wouldn’t have too many people around that Commonwealth table for tea,” Mulroney said during an appearance on CTV’s Question Period.
“There’s a lot of developing countries in there, countries with problems, and the best thing I think that we can do is be there at the table and illustrate, by our presence, the value of what we’ve learned as a country over 146 years and how we conduct ourselves with our democracy and with our generosity to friends internationally.”
Mulroney said the 53-nation Commonwealth is a powerful group and Canada should work within it to make a statement. For example, Mulroney pointed to the accomplishments of prime minister John Diefenbaker who, at the 1961 Commonwealth leaders’ meeting, denounced South Africa’s apartheid policy and joined forces with Asian and African government leaders to push through a resolution making racial equality a condition of Commonwealth membership. South Africa subsequently withdrew from the Commonwealth and was not re-admitted until its apartheid regime ended in the 1990s.
“Working within the Commonwealth, we were able to score more heavily than by sitting outside,” Mulroney said.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced earlier this month that he would boycott November’s Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Sri Lanka because of the country’s failure to investigate war crime allegations and human rights abuses during and after its civil war, which came to a bloody end in 2009.
“Canada believes that if the Commonwealth is to remain relevant it must stand in defence of the basic principles of freedom, democracy and respect for human dignity, which are the very foundation upon which the Commonwealth was built,” Harper said in a statement. “It is clear that the Sri Lankan government has failed to uphold the Commonwealth’s core values, which are cherished by Canadians.”
He also said Canada would review its financial contributions to Commonwealth programs.
Deepak Obhrai, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of foreign affairs, will attend the meetings in Harper’s absence. |
The evidence suggests a persistent black-white IQ gap:
Despite hundreds of billions of dollars of government spending, the education achievement gap hasn’t budged in decades:
According to a groundbreaking paper (How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?) by Arthur Jensen, efforts to boost IQ through environment (education spending, enrichment programs, etc.) have failed, as I summarize here: No Love For The High-IQ Basic Income.
The gap even persists among blacks of high socioeconomic status:
Disentangling biological vs. environmental factors is harder. Most of the HBD community accepts it’s a mixture of both – maybe 60% biological and 40% environmental.
There are two ways to disentangle them: twin studies and phenotypes (like head and brain size) that are predictive of IQ.
From THIRTY YEARS OF RESEARCH ON RACE DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY, by J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur R. Jensen (recommended reading)
Head size is hereditary, correlated with intelligence, and varies among races:
From Not Smart Enough to Succeed: IQ Inequality = Income Inequality:
….Early warning signs including “callous-unemotional traits” and antisocial behaviour can be identified in childhood and are highly predictive of future psychopathy. Large-scale twin studies have shown that these traits are highly heritable – identical twins, who share 100% of their genes, are much more similar to each other in this trait than fraternal twins, who share only 50% of their genes. In one study, over 80% of the variation in the callous-unemotional trait across the population was due to genetic differences. In contrast, the effect of a shared family environment was almost nil. Psychopathy seems to be a lifelong trait, or combination of traits, which are heavily influenced by genes and hardly at all by social upbringing.
And from Jayman’s Race and Intelligence FAQ (recommended reading):
As this shows, the heritability of IQ and of behavioral traits is consistently high, reaching into the 0.8-0.9+ range. This means, out of a group of people, at least 80-90% of the overall differences between them (known as the “variance” in statistical parlance) can be attributed to genetic differences between them. This chart shows that this becomes most evident in adulthood, when genes have been given a chance to fully express themselves. I have summed this up in a neat set of rules:
Behavioral genetics in a nutshell: heredity: 70-80%; shared environment: 0%; something(s) else: 20-30%. — JayMan (@JayMan471) March 19, 2014
And from Debunking More IQ Denialism:
Various studies have found the heritability of IQ to be between 0.7 and 0.8 in adults and 0.45 in childhood in the United States.[6][18][19] It may seem reasonable to expect that genetic influences on traits like IQ should become less important as one gains experiences with age. However, that the opposite occurs is well documented. Heritability measures in infancy are as low as 0.2, around 0.4 in middle childhood, and as high as 0.8 in adulthood.[7] One proposed explanation is that people with different genes tend to seek out different environments that reinforce the effects of those genes.[6] The brain undergoes morphological changes in development which suggests that age-related physical changes could also contribute to this effect.[20]
Also, from sciencemag.org Genes don’t just influence your IQ—they determine how well you do in school:
In the new study, researchers at King’s College London turned to a cohort of more than 11,000 pairs of both identical and nonidentical twins born in the United Kingdom between 1994 and 1996. Rather than focus solely on IQ, as many previous studies had, the scientists analyzed 83 different traits, which had been reported on questionnaires that the twins, at age 16, and their parents filled out. The traits ranged from measures of health and overall happiness to ratings of how much each teen liked school and how hard they worked. Then, the researchers collected data on how well each individual scored on the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) exam, an exam that all students in the United Kingdom must take and which is used for admission to advanced classes or colleges. The team found nine general groups of traits that were all highly hereditary—the identical twins were more likely to share the traits than nonidentical twins—and also correlated with performance on the GCSE. Not only were traits other than intelligence correlated with GCSE scores, but these other traits also explained more than half of the total genetic basis for the test scores.
In all, about 62% of the individual differences in academic achievement—at least when it came to GCSE scores—could be attributed to genetic factors, a number similar to previous studies’ findings, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Related:
Thomas Sowell on The Bell Curve
Black-White IQ Gap Debate
IQ Tests Are Not Culturally Biased
Birth ‘Lottery’ Does Not Preclude Meritocracy
IQ and Morality; IQ and Job Performance |
Image copyright Linda Cook Image caption Linda Cook normally plucks her chin as part of her daily beauty routine
A woman has raised hundreds of pounds for charity event Movember by growing what she calls a "misstache".
Linda Cook, who describes herself as "quite a hairy girly", did not pluck, wax or remove any of her facial hair for the whole of November.
The 49-year-old from Lincolnshire wanted to raise money and awareness because her husband, Robin Cook, was diagnosed with prostate cancer.
She said he "wasn't too keen" on her plan but got used to it.
'You're so brave'
Mrs Cook said she had multiple sclerosis so could not get involved in traditional sponsored events, such as walks or runs.
So she instead decided to take part in Movember.
Image copyright Linda Cook Image caption Linda Cook said getting the hair waxed off is "going to hurt"
"It just seems quite a simple thing to do," said Mrs Cook, of Horncastle.
"Most of the ladies go 'Gosh, you are so brave' but I'm not doing anything.
"Normally I pluck every morning. It's like the routine; you cleanse, tone, moisturise, brush your teeth, pull the hairs out."
Mrs Cook, who has raised £329 through sponsorship so far, is due to have her face waxed at a beauty salon on Friday.
Image copyright Linda Cook Image caption Linda Cook has been wearing a T-shirt to explain why she has facial hair
"It's so going to hurt - I'm like a wolf," she said.
"My tweezers are coming back to being my best friend again, if they forgive me.
"Back in Victorian times I would be in a freak show for bearded ladies."
Her husband, 54, was given the all-clear in October and Mrs Cook said it was lucky his cancer was caught in plenty of time.
She said her facial hair had been a talking point wherever she went in November and had encouraged people to discuss cancer. |
The new administration has put forth recent restrictions on the Environmental Protection Agency halting the exchange of information that may contradict its own controversial stance on environmental issues.
These blackouts are actions one would expect of nations that do not reflect the free and open values of the United States of America and must be revoked immediately so the new administration does not see this as an effective methodology in American politics.
President Trump has pledged to "Make America Great Again", and it is our civic duty to support our President's endeavor of doing so by taking the action outlined in this petition.
[Petition image from the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences website. CENHS @ Rice! is in no way affiliated with this petition] |
Republican politicians have reportedly called for a sweeping new federal law requiring all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and operators of millions of WiFi access points -- including hotels, local coffee shops, and home users -- to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations.
The legislation would impose unprecedented data retention requirements on a broad swath of Internet access providers.
Two bills (S. 436 in the Senate and H.R. 1076 in the House of Representatives) have been introduced so far. Each bill is titled "Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act," or the Internet Safety Act. (Source: cnet.com)
Each bill says a provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user.
The Internet Safety Act would apply not just to AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and all other Internet Service Providers, but also to the tens of millions of homes with WiFi access points or wired routers using the standard method of dynamically assigning temporary addresses. (DHCP or Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol.) Everyone would have to keep such information if the bill became law.
Millions of WiFi Users Affected
The legal definition of electronic communication service is "any service which provides to users thereof the ability to send or receive wire or electronic communications," but the U.S. Justice Department has taken the position that any service that provides others with means of communicating electronically qualifies.
That means that not only public WiFi access points be included. The law would apply to individuals, small businesses, large corporations, libraries, schools, universities, government agencies and Voice over IP (VoIP) services, too.
If the Internet Safety Act became law, all those entities would have to keep logs for at least two years. In their current forms, the bills lack information about fines and the enforcement of the retention of data.
Privacy advocates and civil rights watchdogs say the measure threatens people's privacy and creates potential security risks including identity theft and other fraud. (Source: mediapost.com)
The Internet Safety Act also adds criminal penalties to other child pornography-related offenses, increases penalties for sexual exploitation of minors, and gives the FBI an extra $30 million for the innocent images National Initiative.
Visit Bill's Links and More for more great tips, just like this one! |
Venezuela's government is expelling the Israeli ambassador and all embassy personnel in response to Israel's military offensive in the Gaza Strip.
The OPEC nation's Foreign Ministry said in a statement Tuesday that Israel's campaign constituted "flagrant violations of International Law" and the use of "state terrorism."
Faulty Labeling? Turkey holds suspicious Iran-Venezuela shipment Associated Press Turkish customs discovers lab equipment capable of producing explosives in shipment of 22 containers labeled 'tractor parts' traveling from Iran to Venezuela Turkey holds suspicious Iran-Venezuela shipment
"For the reasons mentioned above, the government of Venezuela has decided to expel the ambassador of Israel and part of the personnel of the Embassy of Israel," the statement said.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry condemned Venezuela following its decision. "Israel will continue to defend itself before its enemies including Hamas and Iran, with which Venezuela has created strong ties," a ministry statement said.
"Venezuela needs to choose which side it is taking in this war. It must choose between those who fight terror and those who support it. It's not surprising that Venezuela is once more clarifying to the world which side it is on."
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has condemned the Israeli campaign in Gaza, where more than 600 Palestinians have been killed in ground and air strikes.
Chavez on Tuesday called Israel's offensive a Palestinian "holocaust" and said the presidents of Israel and the United States should be tried in international court.
"The Holocaust, that is what is happening right now in Gaza," Chavez said in televised comments. "The president of Israel at this moment should be taken to the International Criminal Court together with the president of the United States."
The socialist Chavez, a harsh critic of Israel and the US, on Monday had accused Washington of poisoning the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to destabilize the Middle East and justify US-backed Israeli incursions.
In 2006, Chavez threatened to break ties with Israel over its military campaign in Lebanon in a war of words that led both nations to withdraw their envoys.
Chavez, a frequent critic of the US and its allies, said Venezuela also is trying to supply food and medical aid to Gaza. |
But in the end it was the bear who ended up fighting for his life after police shot it in order to save the life of the uninvited intruder into his enclosure.
These dramatic photographs were taken by a visitor to the Bern Park, Switzerland, on Sunday when Finn, a European brown bear aged four, suddenly realised the unwanted human guest in his home.
The 25-year-old man's bid to party with Finn mirrors a similar escapade in Berlin Zoo in Germany on Good Friday this year when Mandy Knobloch, 32, jumped in to swim with the polar bears.
She was severely mauled but rescued before keepers had to open fire on the bears.
Finn was not so lucky. As his massive jaws – capable of crushing steel – and eight-inch fangs that can rip flesh like paper sank into his prey, police had to act fast to save the life of his prey.
Finn picked up the intruder as if he were a rag doll, carting him to the other side of his enclosure which only opened last month.
He pounced after the man climbed onto a wall surrounding and jumped 20 feet into his home.
Police were left with little option but to open fire, they said. Yet they used a fragmentation bullet, the kind which splinters inside the target.
Finn is critically ill but veterinarians are unable to operate because of the number of splinters caused by the bullet.
The man sustained severe head and leg wounds but he is out of danger. Police and zoo officials say there has been an outpouring of public sympathy after the incident – for the bear. |
Kingston, Jamaica - Waterhouse FC (Jamaica), Puerto Rico Bayamon FC (Puerto Rico), and Alpha United (Guyana) will be the Caribbean Football Union (CFU) representatives at the upcoming 2014/2015 CONCACAF Champions League.
The decision was taken by the CFU Executive Committee after consultation with CONCACAF officials and the three (3) Group Winners.
Damien E. Hughes, CFU General Secretary explained that the decision was taken after the Fédération Haïtienne de Football failed to confirm of Valencia F.C (Haiti) as an active member of the Federation. The fallout between the Club and the Haitian Federation has been ongoing for some time and has had the intervention of FIFA, CONCACAF and CFU without successful resolution.
“While we had an outstanding qualifying round of the tournament, we were excited by the prospects of inviting last year’s best Caribbean performer at the CONCACAF Champions League, Valencia FC, to take their predetermined final four spot when we were informed that the Club remains at odds with its National Federation.
“A decision of principle, interpretation of the tournament rules, and fiscal prudence were the factors that went into the final decision. With three (3) spots available and three (3) group winners determined, it did not make practical sense to put the teams through further expense that they could apply at the CONCACAF level since Valencia could not participate. “This decision was supported and endorsed by CONCACAF, confirmed Hughes”
The head of the CFU Secretariat explained that while the three (3) Clubs who have already qualified from their respective groups, as group winners will advance to the CONCACAF Champions League; their participation is still subject to them meeting the minimum standards and fulfilling the regulatory requirements of participation as mandated by CONCACAF. If any of the Clubs fail to meet the standards, then Centro Dominguito (Curacao) as the best overall second place team will take their place at the CONCACAF Champions League.
The CFU extends congratulations to all three (3) Clubs and wishes them success as they fly the flag of the CFU proudly in their endeavors to win this prestigious tournament.
The CFU Club Championship Cup, is the CFU’s official qualifying tournament for the 2014/2015 CONCACAF Champions League from which teams are eligible to qualify for the FIFA Club World Cup. |
I never thought it would happen to me but my players found a way to end my campaign ten sessions early. Let me back up…
I have been a Game Master for about 10 years and playing in RPGs for the past 20, so know that this wasn’t a new GM fluke when I tell you this story. The game was Pathfinder and the players were a rag tag group of heroes set on surviving an island they just landed on. There was a Dwarf Ranger, a Human Sorcerer, a Half-Elf Monk, a Human Rogue, and a Half-Elf Cleric. Through a series of misunderstandings the players helped finish a ritual that set the goddess of madness and monsters, Lamashtu, free upon the world.
Upon regaining her freedom she set to work gathering an army to over take the world. In addition she also passed out cool party favors in the form of a plague. The plague spread swiftly. All of the kingdom’s Priest, Clerics, and Druids worked night and day attempting to stem the tide of it without success.
The players learned that to kill Lamashtu they would need to get a few magical items: a crimson dagger called the Red Lust, a black falchion called the Chilled Heart, and a book called the Tome of Torog. They had acquired the Chilled Heart and the Tome of Torog but while trying to acquire the Red Lust they had lost the Chilled Heart to Lamashtu, along with the lives of the Ranger, the Monk, and the Cleric.
The party was reduced to just the Sorcerer and the Rogue. They were soon joined by a Barbarian, a Cleric, and an Alchemist to continue their quest. Along the way they had acquired a bevy of cursed items… one of which was the Bag of Devouring.
“What is a Bag of Devouring,” you may ask? A Bag of Devouring is a cursed item that acts like a Bag of Holding until you reach your hand in to pull something out. When it detects flesh it tries to swallow its victim whole in one round. If it succeeds you’ll have a 50/50 shot of wishing the victim back to life on your plane of existence, but if you fail it becomes impossible to resurrect the victim with mortal magic. It’s a nice learning tool that I have used in the past to teach players to investigate their magic items carefully. Rarely have I had to devour a character. Normally it makes a failing grab check, the players see the gnashing teeth, and learn a lesson: “Your GM is a jerk.”
The characters knew they weren’t strong enough to challenge Lamashtu in a fight so their next step was to get help. They were given the choice between beseeching the goddess Desna into helping them or going to the High Demon Pazuzu. They opted for the demon. Go figure.
I had designed Pazuzu to be a roguish devil. I know it deviates from the lore but, hey it’s my story. Pazuzu’s lair was a large city deep under ground called Brimstone and at the center of his city was his casino/home. To gain an audience with him they needed to complete some quest to build their reputation. They did so and in the process learned that Pazuzu’s second in command had made a deal with Lamashtu to help her kill Pazuzu and take his power.
At this point they had enough clout to get an audience with Pazuzu so the players headed off to warn him. They successfully gained entrance and started to warn Pazuzu of the treachery in his house only to have Lamashtu burst through the door with the Chilled Heart in hand. Pazuzu agrees to help the players stop Lamashtu if they give him rights to some land in the Great Desert. The players agreed to his terms. I had written Pazuzu and Lamashtu as old lovers, more akin to a very old spiteful married couple. Think Hemingwy and Gellhorn. So it’s not out of character for him to swagger up and passionately embraces her, thus distracting Lamashtu from the fight. Her undead minions fan out to take down the players.
At this point I expect the players to grab the Chilled Heart and make a run for it. I had planned to have them gather an army to protect the last bastion of hope, the City of Light, and face Lamashtu on a giant, wildly cinematic battlefield. I thought this was going to take several sessions to do. I could already see them riding out to meet Lamashtu on the field of battle and put an end to her once and for all… but that’s not what happened.
So Pazuzu has Lamashtu in a passionate embrace. The Alchemist turns to me and says, “Can I drink my potion of Greater Jump?”
“Sure,” I respond.
“Good, I’m going to jump behind Lamashtu while she’s distracted and use the Bag of Devouring on her.”
“How?”
“I’m gonna pull it over her head!”
“Give me a Grapple check.”
The player rolled and failed. Lamashtu’s hand shot up, grabbing the bag and turning it back on the player. Now both he and Lamashtu are locked in a battle over the Bag of Devouring. She was easily winning of course and now was just toying with him.
All of a sudden half the group sprung from the table and huddled up. I knew something was amiss when they sat down with large toothy grins on their face. Or maybe that’s just the way I’m remembering it.
The Wizard turned to me and said he cast Enlarge Person on the Barbarian. The Cleric joined in and also cast Bull’s Strength on the Barbarian. To top it off the Barbarian goes into a full Rage. His strength is now in the low 30s. He lumbered over to Lamashtu and grabbed the bag and began forcing it down on her head. He made his grapple check and, of course, hit a natural 20. The room erupted in screams and cheers. I had them confirm the crit and it was successful. There is no way to deprive them of this, I thought. They worked together and out-smarted me.
So I let it happen. Lamashtu was sucked into the bag. Her undead minions were quickly dealt with but the bag began to rumble and crack. The Wizard piped up, “I want to teleport to the volcano we passed getting here.” I inform them that can do this but whomever goes to volcano won’t be coming back. The blast would be too great for them to survive and teleport back. The Cleric agreed to lay his life down for the greater good. The Wizard teleported the Cleric to the volcano and then teleported back alone. And with that the Cleric tossed the bag into the volcano, Lamashtu’s undead army rotted and fell away, and the plague disappeared. Thus ending the campaign.
I can’t begrudge them the ending they got. Granted it screws up my story and renders days of work and planning useless but that’s not what RPGs are about. The day the GM puts his enjoyment and story above that of the player enjoyment is the day he needs to hang up his dice bag. Game Mastering and most roleplaying games are about a shared storytelling experience.
Sure, I could have railroaded them into the ending I wanted but it wouldn’t have been THEIR ending. The players worked together to solve a problem, the dice were with them, and they had a great time. That’s what really matters, that they had a great time.
The lesson I want to leave you with is that no matter how much you plan and scheme, the players could always go left instead of right. So don’t fight it. Say “Yes and…” and keep on gaming.
Even if they are campaign-ending Munchkins. |
Finally, eight days after the shooting down, in Ukraine, of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the remains of some of the two hundred and ninety-eight victims are being returned to their families. Haunting photographs show dozens of coffins being transported in hearses from Eindhoven Air Base toward Hilversum, a small city southeast of Amsterdam, where they will be turned over to forensics experts. Wednesday was declared a national day of mourning in the Netherlands, home to a hundred and ninety-four of the dead—the country’s first such observance in more than fifty years. Elsewhere, including in Malaysia and Australia, governments are preparing to receive what’s left of their citizens who were aboard the doomed flight.
As the cortege made its way from the airport on Thursday, Dutch people lined the route and quietly applauded, a welcome sign that humanity hasn’t completely slipped its moorings. But while some victims and their families are being accorded the dignity they deserve, the remains of scores of others may well still be scattered across the crash site, which, even now, hasn’t been fully secured. At the Ukraine Crisis Media Center, in Kiev, a Dutch official said that there were still “some lunatics” hampering the search being carried out by Ukrainian emergency workers and Dutch police. “It’s very hard for us to get to the bodies, to get to the remains,” he said. “You call it terrorists. To me, it’s criminals. But it’s very near the same.”
With even the basics—establishing proper control over the crash site, getting a serious investigation up and running—still undone, you might think that the international community would be exerting more pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin. His government appears to bear ultimate responsibility for the attack. On Friday, the twenty-eight members of the European Union reached a preliminary agreement to impose new economic sanctions and an arms embargo on Moscow, and to bar Russia’s large state-owned banks from Europe’s capital markets, where they secure a good deal of the financing they need. After a meeting of E.U. ambassadors in Brussels, a spokesman for the European Commission, the bureaucracy that administers the Union’s policies, said it “will now come forward with the legislative proposals very swiftly.”
At this stage, though, it’s far from clear how much impact the new sanctions, which could be formally agreed upon as early as next week, will have on the Russian economy. On the face of it, the new proposal appears to represent a significant escalation from previous E.U. measures—but the devil is in the details, which have yet to be worked out. British diplomats, keen to promote the City of London, which services Russian money, will be going through the language of the banking proposals meticulously, seeking to limit their impact. The French, who supply arms to Moscow, will be seeking to make sure that their existing contracts aren’t affected. And the Germans, who receive about a third of their natural gas from Russia, will be scrutinizing any restrictions on Gazprom and other Russian energy exporters.
“There’s a triple-lock in Europe,” Mujtaba Rahman, an analyst at the Eurasia Group consultancy, told the Wall Street Journal before the new agreement was announced. “Germany doesn’t want to do energy, France doesn’t want to do defense, and the U.K. doesn’t want to do finance.”
Has that triple lock now been broken? I doubt it. We already know that Russia’s energy sector—which supplies power to many European countries, not just Germany—is likely to escape most of the new restrictions. The exact terms of the arms embargo have yet to be decided, but it isn’t expected to have any effect on existing contracts, such as France’s delivery, later this year, of a Mistral warship. That leaves the new financial sanctions, and I’d be willing to wager that they won’t be as draconian as they might appear, either.
All in all, it looks like Putin, who earlier this week appeared to be getting a bit rattled by the international outrage directed at him, has reason to smile. If Russia did supply the missile that downed MH17, its president bears responsibility for an attack that, though almost certainly directed at the wrong target, killed almost two hundred citizens of a core member of NATO, along with nearly a hundred others. In response, he gets what seems a very modest punishment. Not a slap on the wrist, perhaps, but also not anything that will threaten his continued hold on power, or even his belligerent approach to Ukraine.
To what does Putin owe his good fortune? Realpolitik, of course—and that doesn’t apply only to the European response. The Obama Administration, engaged on many fronts, needs Putin’s support as it deals with Iran and Syria. Blanket sanctions on Russia’s energy industry, or financial sanctions that did real damage to the oligarchs who support Putin, would surely not encourage his full coöperation.
Since there weren’t any Americans aboard MH17, the Obama Administration isn’t facing much political pressure to get tough with Russia. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t concerned. On July 16th, the day before the plane went down, the U.S. government, responding to Russia’s stonewalling in Ukraine, expanded its existing sanctions to include limits on how much money four big Russian entities—two banks and two energy companies—can raise on Wall Street.
So far Washington’s reaction to the Malaysia Airlines tragedy has been largely restricted to talk. Earlier this week, a White House official said that the Administration was considering a new round of sanctions against Russia. Since then, however, there hasn’t been much follow-up. Before criticizing the Europeans for their reluctance to put principle before self-interest, we ought to look closer to home. |
I also think Honami is a net asset. She isn't perfect, but she is much better than average.
Regarding the information we want from her: We will eventually have our own spying network. When we do, we will want to have financial data, gossip, caravan and ninja movements, noblemen movements, etc. Honami is in a perfect position to gather noble gossip and food prices, at minimum.
I wholeheartedly support using skulls as a seal-writing medium. We should make it our priority when we have Sealing 20 (which costs 432 XP , so it won't be soon)
We should also think about other creative uses of seals on bones. Force Blade seals inscribed on knuckles under the skin to allow Wolverine-style force claws, anyone? (Of course, we will need to modify Force Wall to make it smaller and mobile, first)
While unknown unknowns are an issue, I don't really expect there to be giant chakra jellyfish zeppelins. Actually, if they do exist, we totally should get us one as a mount.
Still, I very much prefer the sky to the sea.
Click to expand... Click to shrink... |
via Nikki Loehr.
Last month, Barrett Brown's legal counsel sent us a letter from their imprisoned client, who was at the time bored out of his mind in jail. Today we received another missive from Barrett, this time exploring the contradictions of censorship in America, and what it says about our citizenry.
The fact that certain words are still bleeped out on the radio strikes me as a sort of historical oversight. It seems like one of those practices that should have been ended by previous generations, like prohibitions on sending birth control information through the federal mail, or the obligatory depiction of married couples as sleeping in separate beds on network television. The Baby Boomers probably intended to deal with radio censorship, but then they got caught up with Vietnam, and then Watergate, and then Star Wars came out, and before you knew it it was the 80s and nobody was into social liberalization anymore. Long story short—it's 2013 and you still can't say "fuck" on the airwaves without getting fined by the Federal Communications Commission.
I know what you're thinking: Is the de facto FCC-driven ban on "explicit lyrics" over the national airwaves really the huge deal he's about to try to make it, or is this guy just an idle rabble-rouser with too much time on his hands? Or both? To answer these questions, we should probably get a sense of what, specifically, we are talking about when we refer to "the de facto FCC-driven ban on explicit lyrics." Luckily, I've spent a good portion of the last year compulsively listening to the radio and taking notes whenever a word is bleeped out, so we have some research to go on. (And, just for the record, yes, I do have too much time on my hands.)
Before we look at the specifics, it should be noted that the blame for what we're about to find doesn't lie entirely with the FCC. Although it is a state entity that practices coercion through its ability to fine and shut down broadcasters, it is of course not the only factor that goes into a given broadcaster's policies regarding what does and doesn't make it on the airwaves. If the FCC were to disappear tomorrow, for example, networks would not start filling their primetime lineups with lesbian pornography. Likewise, some of the "bleeps" and word substitutions on the radio aren't even necessary to avoid FCC fines, but are instead done because some company executive has the vague sense that advertisers might find such content offensive. That matters solely because the advertisers in turn have the vague sense that consumers might find such content offensive and so direct their demented rage toward the advertiser. And thus it is that the totality of radio censorship in the U.S. is a messy-yet-comprehensive indicator of the national psyche, as represented not only by what our state bans, but also what our commercial institutions fear and what is believed to be upsetting to our people. It is, all in all, an across-the-board index of the American character.
And what if it reveals the American character to be psychotic?
Let us calibrate with some help from Sublime. If the reader has the ill-fortune to recall the 90s, he or she will no doubt also remember that Sublime song that goes, "Lovin' is what I got." I'm guessing it's entitled "Lovin' (Is What I've Got)" or something. This obnoxious little song proceeds apace until we reach the line:
“I can play the guitar like a motherfucking riot.”
...at which point the frontman proves this with a riot-y guitar solo. And as you would probably expect, the "fucking" in "motherfucking" is missing from the radio version. Well, certainly we can do without it, for the sake of the children.
Later the singer goes on to illustrate his imperturbability:
“I don't get angry when my mom smokes pot
Hits the bottle and goes right to the rock”
Here, both "pot" and "rock" are left out. Again, we can probably get over this pretty quickly. The kids, etc. We don't want the kids smoking marijuana and crack rocks trying to imitate their hero, the lead singer of Sublime's mom. If they want to hit the bottle a little, though, that might be OK, because we're pretty hip parents. Maybe we'll give them a bit of wine next time we have one of our little dinner parties. Oh, come on, honey, the Europeans do it. Don't be that way.
Now let's look at a song by Weezer that appears on the very same station. The song is called "Hash Pipe," and it is about a hash pipe. It includes the refrain "I got my hash pipe," and otherwise consists of the vocalist going on and on about the virtues of his precious hash pipe. Unlike the word "pot," "hash pipe" is not censored at all. So what gives? What was all that bullshit about the kids? Maybe the thinking is: We're not too worried about kids getting their hands on hash, which after all is pretty exotic. If they've got access to hash in the first place, they're probably already in that phase where they're hanging out with Arab drug dealers, staying up all night taking acid, and using a Ouija board to communicate with djinn. They're just, like, on that journey, man, so let it play out. Let it all play out. Probably that's what the thinking is on that.
Otherwise we've got ourselves a big, glaring contradiction.
But maybe you're not sold. Perhaps a bit of inconsistency is to be expected here and there across any censorship policy, and surely it would be ungenerous to just malign an entire nation over some small discrepancies. Fair enough. On the other hand, I've got my little heart set on maligning an entire nation, plus I've already written that whole introduction and everything, so let us reach an accommodation. I am so superbly confident of the demonstrable psychosis of the American people that I will now proceed to prove my point entirely within the context of Sublime tracks and the manner in which they're censored. What's more, I will limit my case to a mere two Sublime songs beyond the one we've already examined.
We'll start with "Santaria," which still gets plenty of play on the nation's "alternative rock" stations. To the extent that the song is about anything in particular, it deals with the protagonist's angst over his girlfriend having left him for some guy:
“If I could find my Hannah
And that Sancho that she's found
Well I'd pop a cap in Sancho
And I'd slap her down”
It continues:
“And I won't think twice to stick that barrel
straight down Sancho's throat
Believe me when I say that
I've got something for his punk-ass”
None of this is censored, because it's not like he's singing about smoking pot or anything. He simply wants to beat up his ex-girlfriend and murder his romantic rival. If the kids can't groove to that, fuck 'em.
Finally, I present for your consideration "Wrong Way," in which the stage is set as such:
“Danni's 12 years old
In two more she'll be a whore
Nobody ever told her
It's the wrong way”
...and so on and so forth. But hapless Danni isn't headed for whoredom in a vacuum. We're provided with the following exculpatory background:
“The only family that she's ever had
Were her seven horny brothers
And a drunk-ass dad”
But hark! Here, the "ass" in "drunk-ass" is silenced out in radio play. On the one hand, we don't want to darken the innocence of the kids, who are just trying to listen to the song about the child prostitute without having their virgin ears assaulted with filth. On the other hand, you may recall that the phrase "punk-ass," as applied to intended murder victim Sancho, was left intact. I don't think I could think up even a facetious explanation as to why "punk-ass" is OK but "drunk-ass" simply must be censored.
Moving on:
“A cigarette rests between her lips
But I'm staring at her tits
It's the wrong way
Strong if I can
But I am only a man
So I take her to the can
It's the wrong way”
Here, the word "tits" has been removed. Finally, then, we've found at least a modicum of consistency, a sense of the rule of law, if only within the context of this one song—between "tits" and "ass," clearly we're not going to do references to secondary sexual characteristics in "Wrong Way." So that's something, at least. BY THE WAY, DID YOU CATCH THE PART WHERE HE TAKES THE CHILD PROSTITUTE TO THE BATHROOM SO HE CAN FUCK HER?
In conclusion, they should let me out of jail. |
Police released Wednesday the 911 call they received from a woman who was being held against her will in Ashland, Ohio. (WCPO)
Shawn Grate was charged last week with murder and kidnapping, discovered only because the woman he was holding after tying her up in an abandoned house in Ashland County, Ohio, managed to get his cellphone, call 911 and whisper, desperately, “I’ve been kidnapped.”
[‘I’ve been kidnapped’: Agonizing 911 call leads to 3 bodies, a terrified woman and a captor]
In addition to the kidnapping victim, thankfully alive, police found two bodies in the house.
One has now been identified as Stacey Stanley, 43, a recovering drug addict whom Grate has been charged with beating to death.
The second has been named as Elizabeth Griffith, 29, of Ashland, who had been missing for about a month.
Once in custody, Grate opened up, police say. They don’t know why. Perhaps he just wanted to get it off his chest.
Candice Cunningham
Grate led them to a third body buried in a wooded area in nearby Mansfield, Ohio. She was identified Monday as Candice Cunningham, 29, according to Fox 8 Live.
Cunningham, of Canton, Ohio, was killed inside a house in Mansfield and dumped in the woods in June, police said.
According to Cleveland 19 News, he also told them about Rebekah Leicy. In March 2015, police found her body in a field in Ashland. Her death had originally been attributed to an overdose, but Grate told authorities he strangled her.
BREAKING: Mansfield police have reopened the investigation into the 2015 death of Mansfield resident Rebekah Leicy. https://t.co/xvThZlBBcX — MansfieldNewsJournal (@MansfieldNJ) September 18, 2016
And he told police about the first woman he killed, police say, in Marion County.
She has no name, at least not yet. And until this week, she had no killer or cause of death linked to her.
That’s been haunting Marion County Sheriff Tim Bailey for over a decade. He remembers well where they found the body in March 2007.
It was near the dump, which nowadays goes by the name of “transfer station,” along a street named Victory Road.
A man, down on his luck, was searching for cans he could exchange “for a little pocket money,” as the Columbus Dispatch reported a year later, when he came across what the paper described as “a skull and a pile of bones in a ditch.”
About all they could determine, Bailey recalled at a news conference Monday, was that it was the body of a woman. She carried no identification.
“This wasn’t the first body that we’ve found,” he said.
Shawn Grate was arrested Sept. 13 in Ashland, Ohio. (Ashland County Sheriff’s Office/Times-Gazette via AP)
“Typically,” he said, “there’s some feature” police can use to identify a body, some item of clothing” or a driver’s license. “This time there was nothing.”
They didn’t even know how long the body had been where it was found. No missing person report was available to guide them.
The only clue to her fate, and they weren’t even sure at the time it was one, were the leaves in a tree near the body. They had been burned.
Candice Cunningham.
So when he learned last week that Grate, who had lived about a mile from the site at the time, had been arrested up in Ashland County, he thought immediately of those remains from Victory Road almost a decade earlier.
He knew of Grate, who had more than his share of run-ins with the law in both Ashland and Marion counties.
Bailey sent an investigator up to Ashland to interview Grate.
“He was very polite,” Bailey said at the news conference. And he knew all about the body found along Victory Road.
He told the investigator that the woman, about 26, had sold subscriptions to his mother. When she didn’t deliver them, his mother got upset and so did he.
About a year after that, in 2005, Grate told the investigator he spotted her again.
“He got her into his car by telling her he wanted to buy some magazines,” Bailey said Grate admitted. But then he took her to his home, stabbed her to death and hid the body in his basement for two days before taking the body out to Victory Road, where he dumped it.
As the months went by, the sheriff said Grate told the investigator, Grate got concerned that maybe someone would find the body and use DNA to identify her.
So he went back to Victory Road “and set the body on fire.”
Thus, said Bailey, the burned leaves.
Grate told the investigator he did not know the woman’s name, although he had taken her driver’s license. It began with a “D” he told the officer, maybe Dana or Diana.
Bailey said the woman still has not been identified, and he pleaded with the public for information.
As for Grate, Bailey says he has no doubt that he’s a serial killer.
“I’m surmising,” he said. “When you start in 2003 or 2004 and you’re still doing it in 2016, there’s got to be something in between. It’s hard to believe that others aren’t out there,” Bailey said.
“He’s obviously a serial killer,” Bailey said.
Grate has a lengthy arrest record, mostly for domestic abuse. One of the women, Christina Hildreth, an ex-girlfriend who brought some of those charges against him, spoke to Cleveland 19 News.
“At first I thought he was just different,” she said of the first of their six years together.
“He had such a way of rattling off weird things, odd comments,” she said. “Little weird things,” like telling people, ” ‘I’m gonna come back and get you.’ ”
It began to seem “more like evil,” especially the “things he told me that he had done with previous girlfriends. … It did put a red flag up, but I had nowhere to go.”
But “the more it progressed, the more I needed to get away.” But she said there was nowhere to go.
In 2010, she said, he beat her badly, breaking her hand, trying to strangle her, holding her down in the bathtub before she managed to get away from him, permanently, Hildreth told Cleveland 19.
Grate, 40, pleaded not guilty Monday morning to two murder charges and a charge of kidnapping in Ashland County Common Pleas Court, according to the News Journal. The other cases are still being probed, and he has not been charged in connection with them.
“I think he would have eventually killed me,” Hildreth told Cleveland 19. “If I hadn’t got out, I’d be one of the victims.” It “makes your skin crawl,” she said, “your gut turn.” |
MINNEAPOLIS (The Borowitz Report)—The so-called polar vortex caused hundreds of injuries across the Midwest today, as people who said “so much for global warming” and similar comments were punched in the face.
Authorities in several states said that residents who had made ignorant comments erroneously citing the brutally cold temperatures as proof that climate change did not exist were reporting a sharp increase in injuries to the face and head regions.
In an emergency room in St. Paul, Harland Dorrinson, forty-one, was waiting to be treated for bruising to the facial area after he made a crack about how the below-freezing temperatures meant that climate-change activists were full of shit.
“I’d just finished saying it and boom, out of nowhere someone punched me in the face,” he said. “This polar vortex is really dangerous.”
The meteorology professor Davis Logsdon, of the University of Minnesota, issued a safety warning to residents of the states hammered by the historic low temperatures: “If you are living within the range of the polar vortex and you have something idiotic to say about climate change, do not leave your house.” |
ROME (AP) — Police in Italy have shut down a mozzarella factory and arrested 13 people after finding that prized local buffalo milk was being cut with cheaper imported cow milk.
Authorities also found that the cheese, produced near the southern town of Caserta, contained as much as 20 times permissible levels of bacteria, said Carabinieri Police Maj. Alfonso Pannone.
Police on Monday also shut down seven stores selling the cheese in the Campania region which includes Naples.
Milky white buffalo mozzarella is prized by Italians and tourists. It carries a special label supposed to guarantee quality and protect its reputation.
Among those arrested were two public health service veterinarians who allegedly tipped the factory to upcoming inspections. The probe began after a worker lost some of his fingers because of safety flaws. |
(CNN) -- Winter travelers trek thousands of miles to the frozen north each year seeking the sky's "dancing lights," which provoke awe, excitement and, some say, sex.
CNN iReporter Bruce Barrett shot this rare red aurora in Canada's Whitehorse, Yukon. more photos »
Scientists call the natural phenomenon aurora borealis: cascading beams of greens, yellows, blues, purples or reds -- which paint a breathtaking backdrop across the wilderness and attract thousands of tourists annually.
"Usually it starts slowly as kind of a hazy greenish color -- like a mist -- building up in frequency dancing across the sky ... and to me that's religion," said photographer Dave Brosha of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, who's seen more than 100 Canadian auroras. "It's just one of the most incredible feelings a person can have -- sitting there watching that."
To the west in Canada's Yukon province, tour operator Torsten Eder likes to tell a story about a marriage that was forged under the glowing curtains of light. See spectacular photos of auroras »
"I had one guy from Mexico, and he wanted to surprise his girlfriend by proposing marriage with a ring under the northern lights," said Eder from his office in Whitehorse.
"We got lucky and the lights were visible ... so our guest went down on his knee and proposed to his girlfriend and she was totally blown away. The funny thing was -- she wouldn't wear gloves for the first three days -- so she could show the ring off."
The otherworldly lights also have provided inspiration for almost sacred pilgrimages, Eder said. Guests who said they were going blind or battling cancer told him they wanted to view the auroras at least once in their lives.
Don't Miss In Depth: Winter Getaway
In Depth: Winter Getaway Daily aurora forecast
"It puts enormous pressure on us," said Eder. "You can't guarantee that the lights will be visible because it's a natural phenomenon." The display is generally visible at least every three days, he said.
Scientists say the northern lights are created by the sun's super hot atmosphere, which blasts particles into the protective magnetic field surrounding the Earth. The magnetic field forces the particles toward the north and south poles. About 60 to 200 miles overhead, the particles bump into the Earth's atmosphere and become electrically "excited" -- throwing off light of various colors, said Prof. Dirk Lummerzheim of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
"The forecast for this winter is a continued quiet sun, in general," he said. The sun is on the upswing of an 11-year cycle. "Maybe we will have a few periods once a month where the aurora can get a little bit more active."
Although the phenomenon occurs around the clock, the lights are only visible at night. The best time of year to see them is during winter, when darkness in the upper latitudes stretches up to 24 hours. See map where northern lights can be seen »
Eder's Northern Tales tour company picks up guests at their hotels about 10 p.m. and takes them to an area about 20 minutes outside Whitehorse's city lights. There, travelers can enjoy nature's colorful show from a heated, walled tent until around 2 a.m.
"We almost take it for granted sometimes," said Brosha. "No matter how many times you've seen the aurora borealis -- when they really dance, when you get some really unique colors -- you just kind of say, 'Wow, I'm so lucky to see that.' "
A warmer way to enjoy the northern lights is a shallow, natural rock lake at Chena Hot Springs outside Fairbanks, Alaska, which allows bikini-clad guests to enjoy the lights in temperatures of 106 degrees Fahrenheit.
"I mean, honestly, it's the best way to see them," said spokeswoman Denise Ferree. "Because you're warm and toasty and you're watching the northern lights above."
Chena's owner, Bernie Karl -- who's often as colorful as the lights themselves -- said the auroras sometimes spark the libido.
"Having sex under the northern lights -- it's an awesome experience," Karl said. "Have you ever been out in nature at 35 below zero with northern lights bouncing over your head and your bare ass? Well, you need to try it."
If the hot springs aren't for you, Chena also takes guests up a nearby mountain to observe the auroras from heated Mongolian-style tents called yurts.
The resort prides itself on its environmental initiative, which has led to the generation of clean electricity from geothermal heat produced by the hot spring.
"Iceland is probably one of the best places to see the northern lights," said Reykjavik tour guide Arni Magnusson of AM Tours. That's especially true as the U.S. dollar gains value against the Icelandic krona -- offering some attractive hotel and shopping opportunities.
Guests are picked up at their hotel for a 20-minute drive outside the city to view the lights from higher elevations. "People say they feel closer to Earth and to the forces of nature," said Magnusson. "The lights totally overwhelm them."
Dan Hershman's life changed dramatically after he photographed a spectacular aurora in Washington state in 2000, which was a peak year in the solar cycle.
"These things are just dynamic and they seem just alive and organic," said Hershman, who at the time was a high school music teacher.
The photo was unique enough to attract the attention of NASA, which ran the image on its Web site, Hershman said. This spurred his interest in photography and soon, as Hershman put it, "my hobby became my profession and my profession became my hobby."
Now Hershman performs as principal bassoonist in local orchestras as a hobby -- and he teaches high school photography in Federal Way, Washington, as his profession.
The trick to photographing the auroras, Hershman said, is choosing to take the picture when the lights aren't moving as much. "Otherwise it looks like nothing but a big blob," he said.
IF YOU GO
WHITEHORSE
Activities
Yukon Brewing Company offers tours of this award-winning brewery, the home of such libations as Espresso Stout, made with local espresso from Midnight Sun Coffee Roaster.
Mac's Fireweed, an independent bookstore and a Whitehorse institution, offers a nice selection of magazines and a huge catalogue of book titles.
Northern Tales tour company picks up guests at their hotels and takes them a short distance outside Whitehorse to view the auroras from heated, walled tents.
Stay:
Just north of Whitehorse, see the northern lights from Takhini Hot Springs, which offers cabins and camping facilities. Two bed and breakfasts come recommended by Whitehorse residents: Casey's and Hawkins House, at 867-668-7638.
YELLOWKNIFE
Activities
Enjoy warm tepees as well as food and drinks while viewing the northern lights at Aurora Village, which gets up to 20 hours of darkness in the winter months.
FAIRBANKS
Stay:
Chena Hot Springs resort offers accommodations and viewing tours of the northern lights. Locals also recommend Mount Aurora Fairbanks Creek lodge for those seeking views of the spectacular lights.
ALASKA WILDERNESS
Stay:
If you're looking for a trip deeper into the wilderness, Tolovana Hot Springs offers views of the auroras about 45 miles from Fairbanks -- accessible by trail or plane only.
Northern lights tours:
Travel to the Brooks mountain range above the Arctic Circle can be arranged with Out in Alaska at 877-374-9958. Northern Alaska Tour Co. offers wilderness tours to see the auroras in Coldfoot.
ICELAND
Northern lights tours:
Visitors interested in guided views of the northern lights can contact AM Tours at 011-354-898-6581.
Activities:
Enjoy the hot springs and spa facilities at the famous Blue Lagoon. Find general information on touring Iceland at Iceland Travel.
All About Alaska • Canada • Iceland |
By Charles L. Rulon
Emeritus, Life and Health Sciences
Long Beach City College ([email protected])
“It is not so much knowledge of science that the public needs, as a scientific world view — an understanding that we live in an orderly universe governed by physical laws that cannot be circumvented by any amount of piety or cleverness.” — Robert L. Park, Professor of Physics
How do humans think they know something?
There are basically four ways in which we think we know something:
—Authority: We read about it or heard about it from a source we trust.
—Senses: We experienced it with one or more of our senses.
—Reason: We reasoned it out based on what we already think we know.
—Intuition: We intuitively know it, sometimes through a “religious insight”.
The problem, of course, is that each of these four ways of knowing can be notoriously unreliable. Authorities can be mistaken; reasoning can be flawed; intuitions can be wrong; our senses can be distorted. Consider the following once widely held belief:
“It’s common sense that the Earth doesn’t spin or race around the Sun. If it did we’d all be blown off, or at least feel something. Aristotle logically proved that the Earth couldn’t be moving and St. Augustine, in direct communication with God, agreed. Even the Bible tells us in Psalms 104:5 that the Earth doesn’t move. So there!”
Yet, our senses, logic, common sense, inner knowing and top authorities were all proved wrong. Our planet does dash through space, moving around our Sun at roughly 65,000 mph for the last several billion years! Now consider another widely held belief:
“I just know we didn’t evolve from apes. It’s too degrading and goes against God’s plan for us and His word in Genesis. Besides, you can’t prove it, since no one ever saw a human evolve from an ape. It’s just too impossible to believe.”
Yet, again, in spite of beliefs still held by over 40% of adult Americans, we really do have an extremely long evolutionary history. The supporting evidence is just too compelling for any informed thinking person to deny. Once again, those who thought otherwise based on intuition, their senses, scriptural authority, or reason, were proved wrong. How? By a collection of powerful methods of inquiry developed and polished over the last 400 years of human existence, now collectively referred to as the Scientific Method.
Currently millions of scientific and technological articles are being published yearly in tens of thousands of different scientific journals. This explosion of scientific knowledge has now imposed severe limitations on the ability of any one scientist to stay current except in very narrow specialty areas. Science today is like an extremely rapidly expanding region with a solid core of theories known to be true with a high level of certainty. As one moves outward from this core, theories become progressively more and more tentative.
The Scientific Method
The Scientific Method has turned out to be the most powerful and widely used method of inquiry humans have ever discovered for understanding how our bodies, our world and our universe work—not the way we might want things to work, not the way we believe things should work, but the way things actually seem to work. It’s a way of discovering which hypotheses among many possible explanations are wrong, thus homing in on the right ones. Correct explanations open doors to ever deeper and more profound discoveries; wrong explanations lead to blind alleys.
To do science requires a healthy skepticism and high doses of logic, reason and intellectual honesty. The rational power of the human mind is highly respected. But this is not to imply that doing science is like following a cookbook with a particular recipe to follow. It requires considerable patience while stumbling down blind alleys, taking wrong turns, and sorting through incomplete and possibly biased data.
The Scientific Method requires following the evidence wherever it leads, despite personal beliefs or expectations. Its tools include formulating testable hypotheses to explain the raw evidence (observational, experimental, mathematical) on its own terms, rather than by “forcing” the data to conform to some preconceived belief. Although imaginative speculation is essential, hypotheses have to stand up to the evidence. They also have to be capable of being proved false, at least in theory. Experiments and observations require rigorous controls and reproducibility by independent investigators
The data, theories and laws making up science are not secured by authorities. For no matter how convincing or inspired the authority may be, no matter how high in state, church, or even the world of science the authority may be, scientists always demand to see the hard evidence. When no evidence can be presented other than revelations in dreams, the “voice of God,” the writings from an ancient holy book, or glowing (yet uncontrolled) testimonials, scientists must withhold acceptance of the claim. Inserting “God did it” answers into gaps in scientific knowledge is scientifically unsound, since all research stops.[1]
In science, extraordinary claims (claims that conflict with large bodies of evidence to the contrary) require extraordinary empirical evidence to become widely accepted. Thus, when someone claims to have a piece of Noah’s ark, or evidence that we’ve been visited by space aliens, or a human fossil found in the same rock layer as a dinosaur fossil, or evidence that intercessory prayer works in healing disease, the Scientific Method requires that one remain very skeptical. In such cases, scientists must demand strong empirical evidence obtained under conditions of extraordinary security to prevent any possibility of data tampering.
Scientific knowledge is constantly updated through peer-reviewed journals and at science conventions throughout the world. Through this process errors are eventually caught and weeded out. Disagreements in science, although acrimonious at times, are usually resolved by more observations and experiments. Though much in science is now firmly established, no theories are beyond the possibility of revision in the light of new evidence.
One of the most striking features of the Scientific Method (and its resultant discoveries) is its universality. The rules and results don’t vary based on one’s nationality, ethnicity, sex, or geography. There is no such thing as “feminine science” or “African-American science.”[2] Science is an ongoing enterprise involving a vast inter-generational and global community.
The basic scientific ethic must be absolute honesty in recording and presenting data. It’s curbing wishes, personal prejudices and emotions when interpreting the evidence. It’s bending over backwards in trying to disprove favorite hypotheses. As difficult as this is to do in practice, it still is the essence of scientific integrity, an integrity many believe our society sorely needs.
“Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking [that] invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions. “It urges us on to a no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything–both new ideas and established wisdom. We need wide appreciation of this kind of thinking. It works. It’s an essential tool for democracy in an age of change.”
—Carl Sagan, astronomer
Religious “truths”
Unlike scientific knowledge, religious beliefs and truths vary enormously over the planet, with deities and sacred dogmas of every conceivable variety, seemingly limited only by human imaginations. The following comparisons between science and religion tend to refer to the more conservative and fundamentalist religious sects.
—Unlike science, religion is not a method of inquiry, but a body of belief usually grounded in sacred texts, supernatural explanations, faith (commitment in the absence of compelling empirical evidence), and religious experiences.
—Unlike science, the skeptical questioning of religious beliefs, dogmas and moral positions is often seen as sinful, even heresy. Instead, religious disagreements tend to be “resolved” by more prayer and study from holy books, or even by splintering into separate sects.
—Unlike science, different religions usually see themselves as rivals rather than interlocking parts of one enterprise. Historically, ostracism, coercion, righteous attacks and even warfare have been used against those with different religious beliefs.
—Unlike science, in religion faith is seen as a virtue. In fact, the more extraordinary the religious claim (by scientific standards), the stronger the tendency of the faithful to believe that claim as a measure of the power of their faith. Many have been taught that to hold onto beliefs that have been disproved by science represents the highest of virtues, one to be rewarded by God on the final judgment day. Examples include a literal belief in the biblical creation stories, Noah’s ark, the Resurrection and other religious miracles.
—Unlike science, religious believers “know” they have God-given inerrant truths in their holy books. Thus, religious dogmas and moral positions rarely (or very slowly) change in light of new conflicting scientific and historical knowledge. Instead, considerable energy is often spent in either willfully ignoring or attempting to discredit those scientific findings, rational inquiries and ethical advances that conflict with religious dogmas. The power of human intelligence is often dismissed or belittled in such cases.[3] Thus, enormous ignorance regarding how our universe actually seems to work can remain hidden under cloaks of exalted and righteously guarded sacred prose.
The abuse of science
The discoveries of science and the development of associated technologies have had enormous benefits for humankind in the past few centuries. Agricultural and medical advances have exploded, markedly reducing pain and suffering and contributing to human welfare and happiness.
But in the hands of our recently evolved fallible brain and the political, social and religious institutions emerging from this brain, scientific and technological discoveries have also led to horrific nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and have dramatically accelerated our global ecological destruction.
Today, we have power structures that disregard scientific consensus and expertise in favor of ideological alliances. This abuse of power has a serious corrosive effect on the public’s trust in science. When scientific information becomes manipulated and corrupted by partisan politics and/or by corporate power and greed to achieve political, financial or religious ends, the quality and integrity of the political process inevitably suffers. “It is the failure of the public to appreciate the power of the scientific method to discover truth, and to lift the human species out of the muck that enables politicians to ignore its findings in shaping public policy.”
“What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry”
— Bertrand Russell
Some final thoughts
Applying rational critical thought to all areas of knowledge, including formerly taboo subjects such as religion, is one hallmark of an educated mind. Being scientifically skeptical is not the same thing as being closed-minded, cynical or pessimistic. A scientific attitude helps to protect us from being seduced by superstition, prejudice, pseudoscience, quackery and error. The demand for solid evidence helps to clear the way for intellectual progress. After all, foolishness, fraud, fakery, error, wishful thinking, over-enthusiasm and delusion are very common human attributes. If we wish to live in societies that value reason, honesty, creativity, knowledge, truth and integrity—societies that are opposed to ancient, irrational and sometimes harmful superstitions and dogmas—then a scientific and rational look at these dogmas becomes essential.
Honest doubt is not a blemish upon our ability to know. The alternative to uncertainty is authority against which scientists have fought for centuries.
—Richard Feynman
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[1]Inserting “God did it” answers into scientific unknowns is also bad theology. The strength of one’s faith now depends on whether or not scientists can fill this gap in our knowledge. Since scientists have been extremely successful over the last few centuries in replacing “God did it” answers with naturalistic explanations, the risk of one’s faith being undermined is quite high, as biblical literalists have been painfully discovering for centuries.
[2]This is not to deny that in fields such as sociology, psychology and cultural anthropology, female scientists and African-American scientists have often asked quite different questions than have white male scientists and have even exposed considerable white male bias.
[3]Some biblical passages used by believers to dismiss or denigrate rational thought: “The wisdom of the Lord can only be understood by the spiritual man. The unsaved just cannot understand these matters (Mark 9:42, I Cor. 2:13, Col. 2:8).” “Avoid the Godless mixture of contradictory notions which is falsely known as knowledge. Some have followed it and lost their faith (1 Tim. 6:20).” “Be careful that nobody spoils your faith through intellectualism or high sounding nonsense. (Col. 2:8).” |
Marijuana retailers are likely still months from opening. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
Of the four facilities — Herbal Alternatives at 1147 20th St. NW; Metropolitan Wellness Center at 409 Eighth St. SE; Takoma Wellness Center at 6925 Blair Rd. NW; and Center City Care at 1334 N. Capitol St. NW — three secured votes of approval from local advisory neighborhood commissions. (DCist had a fine rundown of the particular votes.)
Only the Center City location didn’t get its ANC’s nod, but city health director Mohammad N. Akhter chose to keep it eligible to sell medical marijuana anyway.
In a statement, Akhter said the continued progress, however slow, shows “the District’s commitment to provide patients who are suffering from very specific conditions that require unique solutions to help alleviate their pain.”
It still could be months before marijuana is for sale. For one, the six cultivation centers previously approved for registration haven’t started growing operations. Without their marijuana supply, dispensaries have nothing to sell.
According to a spokesman for the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, which oversees permitting, none of the six have applied for “certificates of occupancy” at their chosen facilities — a final approval necessary to commence business. Those certificates require the personal approval of the city’s zoning administrator, said the spokesman, Helder Gil. |
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