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Experiment Summary Scientific Questions How much of the ionosphere is affected by a solar eclipse?
For how long is the ionosphere affected by a solar eclipse?
What causes these spatial and temporal scales? Methodology Illuminate the ionosphere with an Eclipse QSO Party.
Use networks such as the Reverse Beacon Network to collect data.
Use amateur radio data to complement data from other sources.
Introduction
On 21 August 2017, a total solar eclipse will cause the shadow of the moon to traverse the United States from Oregon to South Carolina in just over 90 minutes. As shown in Figure 1, this will be the one of most significant solar eclipses traversing the continental United States for 100 years. While solar eclipses are perhaps best known for their stunning visual display, the shadow of an eclipse also causes changes to the ionosphere which effect radio wave propagation and are useful for the study of ionospheric physics. For a summary of ionspheric radio effects as measured during the 1999 United Kingdom Total Solar Eclipse, please see Bamford 2000.
Although the ionospheric effects of solar eclipses have been studied for over 50 years, many unanswered questions remain. Some include, “How much of the ionosphere is affected by the solar eclipse, and for how long? Why is this the case?” HamSCI is inviting amateur radio operators to participate in a large-scale experiment which will characterize the ionospheric response to the 21 August 2017 total solar eclipse and target these open questions in ionospheric physics.
Figure 1: Total solar eclipses visible in the US from 1950 to 2052. The 2017 eclipse (red triangles) will have an exceptionally long footprint in the heart of the continental US.
Background
The ionosphere is produced when solar ultra violet (UV) and x-ray radiation cause neutral atoms and molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere to be stripped of negative electrons. This creates a type of gas known as a plasma, which is made of both positively and negatively charged particles. After a certain amount of time, some of these particles recombine to form neutrals again. When solar radiation is present, ionospheric production and loss processes occur simultaneously creating a strong ionosphere. When solar radiation is absent, loss processes dominate and the ionosphere becomes weaker. These effects are most commonly observed as a result of the day-night (diurnal) cycle. Figure 2 shows examples of typical day and night ionospheric profiles generated using the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) empirical model [Bilitza et al., 2011].
Figure 2: Typical day (red) and night (blue) ionospheric profiles.
In some ways, the shadow of a solar eclipse is similar to the darkness of night. However, there are significant differences between solar eclipses and typical day-night variations. For instance, an eclipse shadow moves faster than and in the opposite direction of the dusk or dawn terminators. Additionally, an eclipse shadow is relatively localized compared to night. Because the ionosphere does not respond instantaneously to changes in solar inputs, and several processes in addition to simple ion production and recombination are at play, it is not possible to assume that the ionosphere will respond to an eclipse in the same manner as dusk or dawn.
Previous solar eclipse studies have found that ionospheric densities at lower altitudes (D and E regions, 60 – 150 km altitude) deplete rather quickly. Conflicting results have been reported for the F region (150 – 600 km altitude), which is a region that is more effected by plasma transport processes than photoionization. Typically, it has been reported that these conditions allow for better radio wave propagation at lower frequencies (< 10 MHz) during the eclipse, as D and E region absorption disappears during this time.
Scientific Merit
Important open questions refer to the spatial and temporal scales of eclipse ionospheric effects. Eclipse totality affects only a narrow region of the Earth’s atmosphere (on the order of a few hundred kilometers) for time periods of less than ten minutes. However, previous observations suggest that ionospheric effects are much larger and longer than might be expected. Figure 3 and Figure 4 illustrate this. Figure 3 shows the F2 region peak critical frequency (f o F 2 ) over Chilton, England during a total solar eclipse on 11 August 1999. The green line shows measurements made with an ionosonde [Afraimovich et al., 2002], while the blue line shows the expected (non-eclipsed) values generated by the IRI. The measured values depart from the expected values from 0800 to 1200 local time, much longer than the less than 10 minutes of totality.
Figure 3: Effect of the August 11, 1999 eclipse on f o F 2 . The decrease in the observed f o F 2 (green) from the IRI model (blue) over a long period coincides with partial obscuration of the solar disk.
Similarly, Figure 4 shows 130.4 nm UV airglow data measured by the Special Sensor Ultraviolet Spectrographic Imager (SSUSI) satellite instrument on days before (left), during (middle), and after (right) a total solar eclipse over Africa on 29 March 2006. The middle panel shows a blue line indicating the totality path, as well as a large region (~3300 km diameter) of depleted airglow that roughly corresponds with the region of partial eclipse shadow. Recent studies, such as [Choudhary et al., 2011], suggest that complex plasma processes may cause larger spatial regions of the ionosphere to be affected than would be predicted by simple photochemistry.
Figure 4: Special Sensor Ultraviolet Spectrographic Imager (SSUSI) airglow data showing a large depleted airglow region associated with a total eclipse in 2006. The three panels show data from days before, during, and after the eclipse at roughly the same location and local time.
Although the ionospheric effects of total solar eclipses have been studied for over 50 years, these questions regarding the spatial and temporal scales of eclipse effects have not been adequately answered. There are a number of reasons for this. First, eclipses are relatively rare events which do not frequently traverse geographic areas which are well instrumented for ionospheric studies. Next, technological advances have made it only recently possible to monitor the ionosphere over very large geographic areas with both high temporal and spatial resolution. Finally, the ionospheric response to an eclipse is dependent on season, time of day, and location on Earth (due to differences in the shape and orientation of the Earth’s magnetic field at different locations). This makes every eclipse uniquely valuable for scientific study. The 21 August 2017 eclipse will take place over a large geographic region which is well instrumented for studying ionospheric effects, and therefore presents an excellent opportunity for characterizing the spatial and temporal aspects of the ionospheric response.
Amateur Radio as a Scientific Instrument
Amateur radio operators routinely use frequencies spread across the medium and high frequency bands (1.8 – 30 MHz) to engage in two-way communications across large geographic areas. Details of these communications are recorded in private logs, as well as a public computer network known as the DX Cluster. Recent advances in information technology, signal processing, and software defined radio (SDR) have led to the development of automated observation and reporting systems such as the Reverse Beacon Network (RBN). It has been shown that data from these systems can be used to identify and characterize large-scale ionospheric disturbances [Frissell et al., 2014].
Figure 5 and Figure 6 illustrate diurnal propagation effects observed by the RBN. Figure 5 shows a 5 min interval when both the United States and Europe are in darkness, while Figure 6 shows a 5 min interval when both continents are in daylight. RBN traffic is indicated by lines color-coded by frequency. Black dots indicate RBN receiving stations. Colored dots represent GPS-TEC measurements, which are discussed in the next section. The RBN data shown in these figures characterizes what is typically expected of day and night HF propagation and ionospheric conditions. That is, nighttime conditions (Figure 5) are dominated by communications on frequencies less than 10 MHz, indicating a weaker ionosphere which reflects lower frequencies but cannot refract higher frequencies. Daytime conditions (Figure 6) are dominated by communications on frequencies greater than 10 MHz, indicating a stronger ionosphere which refracts higher frequencies but absorbs lower ones.
Figure 5: RBN Network Traffic between the US and Europe during nighttime conditions. Note that the green links represent low frequencies, because absorption is minimal in nighttime conditions.
Figure 6: Same format as Figure 5, but for daylight conditions. Note that the red and orange links correspond to higher frequencies, which are less effected by D and E region absorption.
Using this and other similar techniques, HamSCI will use amateur radio data to characterize the spatial and temporal response of the ionosphere to the 21 August 2017 total solar eclipse. It has been recognized that the use of amateur radio signals presents certain challenges for scientific analysis. Some of these challenges include the tendency of operators to transmit only on frequencies which provide the best communication links, a possible lack of amateur radio operations during the period around the eclipse, and an uncertainty as to what equipment (e.g., antenna pattern, transmit power level) is in use. HamSCI intends to mitigate these factors by partnering with the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) to sponsor an Eclipse QSO Party, or contest-style operating event which takes places during the eclipse. The rules of this operating event will be written in such a way to help optimize the experiment. The Radio Society of Great Britain (RSGB) sponsored a similar event during the 20 March 2015 solar eclipse in Europe. Additionally, the operators of the Reverse Beacon Network have joined the HamSCI organization and are working to make improvements to the scientific capabilities of the network.
Additional Ionospheric Instrumentation
In addition to amateur radio observations, many additional, well-established space physics instruments will be used to monitor ionospheric conditions during the 21 August 2017 total solar eclipse. These include measurements by the Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN), Global Positioning System Total Electron Content (GPS-TEC) receivers, ionosondes, and more. Each of these instrument networks sense the ionosphere in a different way and in different locations. Combining the data from these networks together will allow for the most complete characterization of the ionospheric response to the eclipse as possible.
As an example of how this additional data will be used, Figure 5 and Figure 6 show GPS Total Electron Content (GPS-TEC) data beneath the Reverse Beacon Network propagation paths. TEC is a measure of the total number of electrons in the ionosphere on a path between a GPS satellite in space and a GPS receiver on the ground. The speed of a radio signal through the ionosphere is directly related to both the frequency of operation and the density of the ionospheric plasma it travels through. Because certain GPS receivers receive two separate GPS frequencies simultaneously, it is possible to determine the delay between the received signals and estimate the total number of electrons in a column along the propagation path [Rideout and Coster, 2006]. Each TEC Unit (TECU) is equal to 1016 m-2 electrons. Figure 5 and Figure 6 show that, as expected, TEC is high in daytime regions, but low in the night. It is worth noting that due to ground-based receiver requirements, GPS-TEC measurements are only available over and near certain landmasses. There is no coverage over the oceans, and somewhat limited coverage in the middle of the United States. Amateur radio data has the potential to provide information about the ionosphere in places where GPS-TEC data is not available.
Summary
On 21 August 2017, a total solar eclipse will traverse the continental United States from Oregon to South Carolina in a period of just over 90 minutes. Previous research shows that the shadow of the eclipse will impact the ionospheric state, but has not adequately characterized or explained the temporal and spatial extent of the resulting ionospheric effects. HamSCI is inviting the amateur radio community to contribute to a large scale experiment by participating in an Eclipse QSO party and further developing automatic observation networks such as the Reverse Beacon Network. Data resulting from these activities will be combined with observations from existing ionospheric monitoring networks in an effort to characterize and understand the ionospheric temporal and spatial effects caused by a total solar eclipse.
References
Afraimovich, E. L., E. A. Kosogorov, and O. S. Lesyuta (2002), Effects of the August 11, 1999 total solar eclipse as deduced from total electron content measurements at the GPS network, J. Atmos. Solar-Terrestrial Phys., 64(18), 1933–1941, doi:10.1016/S1364-6826(02)00221-3.
Bamford, R. (2000), Solar Eclipse 11 August 1999: Project Final Report, Radio Communication Research Unit, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, arXiv:1703.01491.
Bilitza, D., L.-A. McKinnell, B. Reinisch, and T. Fuller-Rowell (2011), The international reference ionosphere today and in the future, J. Geod., 85(12), 909–920, doi:10.1007/s00190-010-0427-x.
Choudhary, R. K., J.-P. St. -Maurice, K. M. Ambili, S. Sunda, and B. M. Pathan (2011), The impact of the January 15, 2010, annular solar eclipse on the equatorial and low latitude ionospheric densities, J. Geophys. Res. Sp. Phys., 116(A9), A09309, doi:10.1029/2011JA016504.
Frissell, N. A., E. S. Miller, S. R. Kaeppler, F. Ceglia, D. Pascoe, N. Sinanis, P. Smith, R. Williams, and A. Shovkoplyas (2014), Ionospheric sounding using real-time amateur radio reporting networks, Sp. Weather, 12(12), 651–656, doi:10.1002/2014SW001132.
Rideout, W., and A. Coster (2006), Automated GPS processing for global total electron content data, GPS Solut., 10(3), 219–228, doi:10.1007/s10291-006-0029-5. |
You might want to stick to taking pictures of the Eiffel Tower in the daytime (Picture: Getty Images)
Not many people know this, but taking pictures of the iconic Eiffel Tower at night is illegal, and punishable by a massive fine.
The ban has been in place for a while now, but as France becomes more aggressive in its crack down on photo sharing, MEPs are joining forces in a bid to finally lift it.
What does the ban mean?
EU law allows members the choice to demand permission before people can share or sell photos of historic buildings protected by copyright.
Most countries abide by something called ‘freedom of panorama’. This allows people to take photographs and video footage of buildings, and other art works, that are permanently located in a public place.
But there are countries where the freedom is limited, like France, Italy and Denmark, reports Politico.
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Online freedom advocates across the EU have called its failure to secure panorama across the board as an example of ‘Europe at its worst’ and is demanding change.
EU copyright law allows state members to impose restrictions on certain monuments (Picture: Getty Images)
How do I get around this?
Technically taking the picture is also illegal, but it’s the sharing part that will land you in hot water.
If you want to publish the image to social media you must gain permission from the ‘Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel’ (the Eiffel Tower’s operating company).
Julia Reda, a German MEP from the Pirate Party, told Politico: ‘The European Commission is afraid to pick a fight with the French government.
‘The French government has been quite clever and are telling the Commission that they’ve done something, so drop the issue.’
Are there other iconic buildings protected by copyright law? Yes – other landmarks include Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid Statue, the Louvre’s pyramid in Paris and the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Even the 2,000-year-old Colosseum in Rome has certain limitations.
Is there any hope of changing this?
The EU held a public consultation asking people for their opinions – but despite the European Commission promising to publish the results in July, they’re yet to be seen.
The Wikimedia Foundation, MEPs and other parties in Europe are currently fighting to lift the restrictions and impose freedom of panorama everywhere.
MORE: Police recover £2.2m worth of jewels stolen from Drake’s tour bus
MORE: #Grammerschools is trending on Twitter and the irony is beautiful |
Sheriff Arvin West is the law in Texas’ Hudspeth County. It certainly seems that way to unsuspecting travelers along his county’s stretch of I-10. He’s known for accusing the Mexican army of invading the border, ragging on the federal government on border security policies and busting more than a few entertainers for carrying pot (Willie Nelson, Nelly, Fiona Apple and Snoop Dogg are on the list).
West, now tied to a three-year-long federal investigation, isn’t talking. But a Washington Post report reveals he may be involved in setting up a rogue Navy training based in West Texas.
Craig Whitlock, reporter at the Washington Post, says West has yet to be charged and many of the details in the federal investigation are far from clear.
“What exactly they were up to is kind of a big mystery,” Whitlock says, “but it sounds like they went down there to work for him and try and set up some kind of training base in the county.”
Related to West’s case is a scheme involving AK-47 silencers. The former director of the Navy intelligence office at the Pentagon, civilian David W. Landersman, allegedly help equip Navy commandos with untraceable silencers. He’s now facing federal conspiracy charges. Two of Landersman’s subordinates have said that other than working on intelligence matters, they moonlighted as deputy sheriffs under West. Although there is nothing illegal about working as deputy sheriffs, Whitlock says, the context surrounding the work – what the Navy intelligence was up to – is questionable.
“The reason they first came under investigation is that the civilians in this office were caught making some kind of dodgy law enforcement badges that would enable them to carry weapons around,” Whitlock says. “And NCIS … did a search warrant on their office at the Pentagon. But as part of that investigation, they found that this small group of civilians at the Pentagon were involved in some kind of secret weapons program.”
Allegedly, the intelligence officers were setting up a type of training camp at Circle Ranch in west Texas, but not much more than that is known. There is speculation, however, that the case might have something to do with counter-narcotics – drug investigations or training people along the border how to look out for Mexican drug gangs. But Whitlock says no one knows for sure.
“A lot of the documentation in the federal investigation has been sealed on national security grounds,” Whitlock says. “This case has been going on in federal courts and a lot of times they have to have sessions in private or they say everything is classified.”
Post by Beth Cortez-Neavel. |
More than 8,000 academics are gathered at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., this week for the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, presenting papers on how we live, love, learn and clash. Over the coming days, the National Post will highlight some of the most compelling research. Today, Sarah Boesveld looks at how entitled university students could grow to become entitled — and very unhappy — employees.
University students who complain until they get a better grade and view their professors as employees are on the fast track to becoming dissatisfied and disgruntled once they land a job, suggests new research that links academic entitlement with inflated expectations in the workplace.
Amy Peirone, a phD candidate in sociology who this week will present her research at the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities conference in St. Catharines, Ont., surveyed more than 1,000 University of Windsor students, resulting in a research paper called “I Bought my Degree, Now I Want My Job!”
Ms. Peirone had the students answer a 94-item online survey about their own academic experiences, which asked them to agree or disagree with statements such as “It’s OK to make demands on a professor so he makes exceptions for me,” or “the tuition I pay entitles me to a passing grade.”
The tuition I pay entitles me to a passing grade
She found a correlation between students displaying a sense of academic entitlement and those who displayed a sense of entitlement when it comes to their future employment expectations, suggesting the attitude could carry over into the working world.
While the average level of academic entitlement was relatively low — 3.3 on a scale of one to 10 — Ms. Peirone found that graduate students tended to have higher levels of entitlement than undergraduates.
“Some professors we were talking [with] about academic entitlements said parents of graduate students have come to talk to them and complain about their grades,” said Ms. Peirone.
“When you’re in school, you’re sort of in a bubble. You don’t really know what the real world is like. If you’re completely cut off from that, your entitlement beliefs and what you’re used to, it’s not a far stretch in saying it would extend to the employee environment.”
Academic entitlement research is a relatively new field, and no one has studied how it may transfer from university to the workplace until now.
Previous studies show high levels of workplace entitlement are related to lower levels of job and life satisfaction. The entitled-in-the-workplace also tend to be less happy with their pay, less committed to their companies, have more tension with their bosses and more difficulty holding down jobs.
There may be very serious problems for a person with higher than average academic entitlement once they make it to the office — if they get there at all, Ms. Peirone’s findings suggest.
Those who researched and explored future careers tended to have higher levels of workplace entitlement — especially graduate students.
“A lot of graduate students, in my own personal [observations], are coming back for the graduate programs just because they couldn’t get the job with the undergraduate degree,” Ms. Peirone said. “Now we’re not looking at $25,000 worth of debt, you’re looking at 50 plus.” Universities also market their graduate programs as stepping stones to a solid career.
Education and Law students were the exception to this rule, perhaps because they have more exposure to the realities of the job market via co-ops and connections outside of school.
Overall, students have high expectations that their university degrees will amount to a job fairly soon after graduation — expectations that may not jibe with the job market.
When you’re in school, you’re sort of in a bubble. You don’t really know what the real world is like
Arts & Social Sciences students, a faculty with some of the toughest prospects out in the current workforce, made up 47.2% of her study sample.
To the statement “obtaining a post secondary degree ensures I will have a job in my field of study after graduation,” the average response was 4.57 out of 10 — meaning about half of the students strongly felt their degree would fairly easily score them work.
Ms. Peirone believes universities and even future employers should do a better job of conveying the realities of the job market. She recalls one professor telling her a graduate student’s expected pay grade for a job out of school: $80,000.
“That student had no experience,” she said.
Meanwhile, that professor had worked for a decade before making that kind of money.
National Post
• Email: [email protected] | Twitter: sarahboesveld |
The seed for SYNHAK was planted on April 5th, 2011 at Noisebridge during Camp KDE. At the time, I was a KDE developer who was starting to get involved by contributing to Phonon-GStreamer. This was my first FOSS event and first big adventure by myself. Moreso, I was traveling across the country to a city that hadn’t even crossed my mind as all that important to me. Hey, I was young, yeah?
The last day of Camp KDE was a brief after-party at the Noisebridge Hacker Space in San Francisco. I had heard about hackerspaces before, but only vaguely. I knew that strange things came out of them and interesting projects happened there. I was too absorbed in schooling and KDE to pay attention outside my bubble.
After just a few minutes, I was sold on the idea. The tools, the art, the community, the vibe. This was something I wanted in Akron, but I wasn’t sure if it was possible.
Months later, I had been discussing the subject with my friend Ryan. At some point he said:
<rrix> Go for it.
And that I did.
Around that time, I had been ejected from the Computer Science department at the University of Akron, the details of which can be another story entirely. Looking for socialization, I wandered into the shack on top of Zook Hall where W8UPD — The University of Akron HAM Radio Club — lived. There I met Chris Egeland. He later became one of our first Champions at SYNHAK, alongside myself and Omar Rassi.
It is now Tuesday, July 1st, 2014.
I have been banned from my own hackerspace for just over two months now. Last week I was harassed by the board of SYNHAK who insists that I am capble of single-handedly ruining their image, asking me to stop the “unjustified and unwarranted” attacks I’m apparently making on twitter. In the two months since being banned, the only thing I’ve done is share a handful of e-mails from the publically available [email protected] mailing list. Here’s an excerpt:
From: Andrew Buczko <[email protected]>
To: SH Members <[email protected]>
Mar 11
I'd like to resolve this issue by having Torie (Trevor Fisher) put on suspension from SynHak (this will include SynHak's mailing lists and any other service) for a giving amount of time.
I feel that she needs time to cool off for 3 months, 6 months a year? I'll leave the time period up to the champions. Or at least until her sex change is done (since it has been brought up to me that this "behavior" of her's is due to her taking hormones. ) <-- not mentioned before since it's none of my business.
Hormones or not, the other members and the community should not have to suffer because of her antics.
I am a proud transgender woman. Been that way for as long as I can remember. This Andy Buczko is on the board of SYNHAK, the former Akron hackerspace. Since early January 2014, he has harassed me, picked fights with me, and generally bummed all the other synhakkers out.
I really wish I could include more examples of his incredibly abusive behavior, but that wouldn’t even scratch the surface. Nor is he alone.
Many former synhakkers attempted to resolve our differences by working to create a Community Working Group within the space, modeled after KDE’s own. No less than five members stepped up to get folks involved in fixing these issues. At every turn, they were rebuffed by the board of SYNHAK under the guise of it being a “trap” to remove the board.
They were mostly right. The purpose of the Community Working Group was to make sure toxic members of the community were kept out and the culture of SYNHAK was preserved.
Anna-Janine Herman, Justin Herman, Steve Radonich, Devin Wolfe, and Becca Salchak fought admirably to take the idea of SYNHAK and twist it into the next bullet point on their resume. For three years, we ran under the triumvirate of Consensus, Excellence, and Do-Ocracy. In three years, SYNHAK went from a small group of four hackers in a North Hill garage into a huge community in northeast ohio with 25 members, a $15,000 grant, and 4,030sqft of space in Downtown Akron. |
SYNOPSIS
Black Sands is a bold new visual novel drawing from African, Indian and Middle Eastern mythology, married to an innovative spin on speculation about ancient aliens and precursor races. This is largely unexplored territory for video games as a medium – and Black Sands aims to take it further than any other creative team has managed to date.
Genres: Visual Novel, History, Mythology, Dark Fantasy, Educational
As Ra, the Dark Pharaoh, players must enter into a series of challenging trials posed by their creator, Nun – an emissary from the far-flung world of Nibiru who wants you, as his avatar, to wield godlike power over the ancient world. But before your legend can begin, you have to prove yourself worthy.
In the Black Sands Universe, Nun engineered the beings humanity worship as gods – but his creations betrayed his grand plan, and plunged the Earth into an age of oppression. Rah and his companions are Nun's last-ditch attempt to fix his mistakes – but before he can unleash them on the Earth, he needs to know they're up to the challenge!
You have to manage a team of mythical heroes; nurture their relationships, both with you and each other; explore the sprawling landscape of Nun's secret hideaway, the Rift; study its secrets and its tortured history, and defeat the countless enemies that stand in your way. Only then will Nun grant you your freedom!
UNIQUENESS
Black Sands is more than just comic-book heroics and wild conspiracy theories – it aims to convey a deeper understanding of real-world ancient history and cultural diversity as well. An in-game dictionary with scores of unlockable entries contains an explanation of the research that went into every character and location, giving their historical inspiration alongside their in-game backstories.
Black Sands is also not simply a visual novel, too. Decisions stem from much more than simple emotional dilemmas or "choose your own adventure" branching paths. The story offers players the challenge of exploration, discovery, investigation and stat management over a rich, carefully crafted narrative and multiple side quests of many different types.
Win your companions' respect to open up still more content as their backstories are revealed – or rule them by fear like the god you're destined to become.
Scour the map for a huge number of secrets spread across a detailed, ever-changing world.
Watch the clock! Manage the passing of time correctly, or the odds could end up against you and cause your death!
Study the relics and artifacts to unlock achievements and lore – including the real-world research behind the fiction.
Be entrenched in the development of a stunning production values from a carefully hand-picked team.
A totally unique aesthetic – no other game has used this same material like Black Sands!
Dominant Protagonist
African, Middle Eastern, and Hindu cultures
Competitive love interest
Comic-style Artwork
Multiple Mini-Sagas
Aliens
Mythological Gods and Monsters
Dark Humor
Education
If you cannot download the demo or don't have a strong enough computer, you can watch the demo playthrough below. |
Welcome, Friends, to the 2017 releases table. This is an effort to keep a finger on the pulse of the world of psychedelic downtempo / psychill / psybient music and its many facets, and is meant to not only be an archive but also a news source for the latest releases. Updates are made at the end of every month.
Mostly downtempo ambient and dub styles are presented here.
If you know of any release that isn’t listed here, fill out the form at the bottom of this page and it will get added to the next month’s update, as long as it’s psychedelic and has at least some downtempo elements. Bandcamp links are preferred, soundcloud links will be ignored unless they have a download link.
We hope you will find something new and magic for your taste. Please support the artists and buy their music.
You can also visit these pages:
– a list of upcoming Releases (Psychill, Ambient, Downtempo, IDM)
– a list of 2019 Releases (Psychill, Ambient, Downtempo, IDM)
– a list of 2018 Releases (Psychill, Ambient, Downtempo, IDM)
– a list of 2017 Releases (Psychill, Ambient, Downtempo, IDM)
– a list of 2016 Releases (Psychill, Ambient, Downtempo, IDM)
– a list of 2015 Releases (Psychill, Ambient, Downtempo, IDM)
– a list of 2014 Releases (Psychill, Ambient, Downtempo, IDM)
– a list of 2013 Releases (Psychill, Ambient, Downtempo, IDM)
– a list of 2012 Releases (Psychill, Ambient, Downtempo, IDM)
– a list of 2011 Releases (Psychill, Ambient, Downtempo, IDM)
2017 Psychill , Ambient and Downtempo music catalog
Table Filtering / Sorting Instructions This table uses a filtering plug-in that creates drop down menus of unique values for specified table columns, and allows the table to be filtered by one or more of those values. Select a value from a menu to add a filter, and the filter tag will appear below the menu. Click the tag to remove the filter again. You can use multiple combinations of filters to help you find what you’re looking for. For example, you could filter the table to only show the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place poll winners from the month of August in the genres of psybient, psybass and psydub. Or make it only show the Name Your Price compilations. To see the latest releases, you can either filter the table by the most recent month or click the Release Date column header twice to sort the table by newest to oldest releases. Also you can always just search for any term by typing in the search box above the table.
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Please let us know about any missing releases using contact form |
The results were surprising. “We thought, ‘If it’s sighted people, it’s not going to be something we’ve ever learned to do,’” reflects Virginia Flanagin, a neuroscientist and first author of the study. “‘So probably we’re really bad at it.’” But the sighted subjects had little trouble figuring out the relative sizes of the spaces. The person who grew the most skilled at it could tell if there was as little as a 4 percent difference in the size of the room. Even the people who did less well could still often tell apart differences of 6 to 8 percent, with the least skilled bottoming out at a 16 percent difference. Overall, that actually is about the same level of acuity—ability to distinguish differences—that you find in some visual tests, says Flanagin.
Additionally, the brain scans showed something odd: The sound of the echoes was activating sighted subjects’ motor cortex, the part of the brain that handles movements. The researchers had the subjects make their echolocation sound—usually a click with their tongues—without playing them back any echoes, then subtracted that scan from the scans taken when they heard the noise reverberating in the church, to get rid of any motor cortex activation from moving the tongue. But it still lit up, even with the tongue movement removed. In fact, the brain region was more active with large versions of the church than smaller ones. “It seems like the motor cortex is somehow involved in the sensory processing,” says Flanagin. In the blind subject, the echoes caused the activation of the visual cortex instead.
These results lay the groundwork for future studies investigating whether sighted people can be trained to do more complicated kinds of echolocation, like navigating down a virtual hallway. The idea, Flanagin says, is to understand at what level of complexity blind people start being able to do things that sighted people can’t and what might have changed in their brains to allow them to do that. In general, the resilience of the human brain and the readiness with which we can learn new skills when circumstances demand it is impressive. Quoting the blind advocate Daniel Kish, who uses echol oc ation himself to walk around every day , Flanagin remarks, “The only reason sighted people can’t do it is they don’t have to.”
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BIRMINGHAM, Alabama - Just when you thought ESPN couldn't get any more tone deaf, after backing Little League father of the year Craig James over respected professional Bruce Feldman, now comes this inexplicable decision.
Urban Meyer will be in the ABC booth Saturday working the Auburn-Clemson game.
Are they kidding?
Of all the booths in all the stadiums in all the world, Meyer's going to walk into Death Valley's with Auburn in the house?
Did they ask Nick Saban to skip the North Texas game to join the fun?
Let's get this
out of the way up front. Meyer has no business working an Auburn game, there, here or anywhere.
The appearance of a conflict of interest is thicker than Joe Paterno's glasses. Try as he might, the former Florida coach can't escape his history with the Auburn program, and that history isn't exactly defined by mutual respect.
In the spring of 2009, after Auburn hit the road in its Tiger Prowl recruiting limos, Meyer told the Gainesville (Fla.) Sun that the NCAA should investigate. He also took a few shots at Auburn's tires.
"We're trying to sell graduation rates and academics and trying the sing and dance routine," he said. "The Florida coaching staff will not be riding around in limos or ripping off our shirts."
That shirt reference was a shot at Lane Kiffin and his Tennessee staff, but still. Even two years later, Meyer trying to drag his program onto the high ground, despite its arrest record, remains a shining example of hypocrisy.
He didn't stop there. In December of 2010, Meyer was the only SEC coach with a vote that didn't put Auburn No. 1 on his final regular-season ballot in the USA Today poll. He put Oregon first and Auburn second.
But those slights pale next to the role Meyer may have played as a wizard behind the curtain of the Cecil Newton-Kenny Rogers story last fall.
According to multiple news reports, before that story broke, Meyer had vowed on a three-way call with his protege, Mississippi State coach Dan Mullen, and former Mississippi State quarterback John Bond to tell it to The New York Times and ESPN.
Who broke the story of Newton and Rogers asking for money from Mississippi State boosters, Bond included, to send Cam Newton to State? The Times and ESPN.
That story, as the NCAA later confirmed, was right. You can argue that Meyer did the right thing in trying to get the story out, in blowing the whistle on shady recruiting, despite Mullen's reported preference to let that sleeping dog lie since the proper authorities had been notified.
Kevin Scarbinsky is a columnist for The Birmingham News. His column is published on Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.
There's no argument that, if Meyer played Deep Throat, he put Cam Newton's Heisman season and Auburn's BCS championship run in jeopardy, even though there was no solid evidence then - and none has been presented since - that Auburn broke NCAA rules to sign Newton.
Hence, bad blood.
Gene Chizik might never admit it in public, but he hinted last November that Meyer might be a wizard behind the curtain. During a passionate defense of his quarterback in the middle of the storm, the Auburn coach said this:
"If you really want to do your homework, go and start with his Little League coach, then go to his junior high coach, then go to his high school coach, then go to his junior college coach and then come talk to any coach at Auburn."
Who was missing from Chizik's suggested list of character references for Newton? His Florida coaches, Meyer and Mullen.
A lot of Auburn fans didn't like it when ESPN sent Meyer and Saban, who could hardly be considered neutral observers, to serve as pregame and halftime analysts for the BCS Championship Game in January, but at least the network had legitimate reasons.
They were the two previous national championship coaches, and besides, Saban had just coached against Auburn, and Meyer had once coached Newton.
There's no similar justification for ESPN/ABC to send Meyer to Clemson, not for cameos but for a game-long stint in the booth, and there are more than enough reasons to believe that he isn't neutral in his feelings toward Auburn.
What is ESPN thinking? I asked, and the network provided this statement: "We regularly assign analysts to games involving conferences and teams they have coached for and against and do not avoid assignments based on a competitive rivalry that existed when they were coaching. We expect our personnel to do their jobs as professionals. Like all of our analysts, Urban will work games involving teams from multiple conferences."
Sorry, but this goes beyond "a competitive rivalry that existed" while Meyer was coaching. This is wrong person, wrong place, wrong time.
ESPN should change assignments for this weekend, and Meyer, at the first opportunity, should change careers. He should go back to coaching. That way, he can try to do something he's never done. Beat Auburn on the field.
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UPDATE 11/10 9:45 AM EST: The filmmakers behind Basmati Blues has released an official comment regarding criticism of the trailer for their production.
Monique Caulfield and Danny Baron said in a statement:
“We deeply regret any offense caused by the Basmati Blues trailer. We have heard a number of voices that have understandably reacted to a trailer that is not representative of the film as a whole. Unfortunately, the international trailer has given the wrong impression of the film’s message and heart. This movie is not about an American going abroad to solve India’s problems. At its heart, this film is about two people who reach across cultures, fight against corporate greed, and find love. Basmati Blues is an ensemble musical romantic comedy. The film explores our responsibility for our actions and for each other, and attempts to do it in a disarming way, using music, comedy and romance. Basmati Blues is a love letter to multiple eras of Bollywood cinema, musicals, and classic Hollywood romantic comedies. We are confident that the film, when seen in its entirety, will bear out the our appreciation and respect for India and its people.”
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One of Brie Larson's upcoming movies is causing major controversy following the drop of its trailer last week. Basmati Blues follows Linda, a scientist played by Brie, who travels to India in an attempt to sell genetically modified rice to the local farmers. However, once she realizes that her company is actually evil, she tries to work against them to save the people, and people have several big problems with it.
In the trailer, Brie's character hits pretty much every stereotype about Indian culture. There's a scene of her sampling some local fare, and then immediately screaming and dramatically fanning her face because of the spice; some locals trick her into doing something embarrassing under the guise of teaching her their customs; and, to top it off, Brie's character wears a traditional sari and partakes in a huge, colorful dancing scene reminiscent of so many Bollywood films. Linda also falls in love with a local farmer, played by Utkarsh Ambudkar, and at one point exotifies it all by proclaiming, "India is this exciting journey." Basically, the entire plot seems to revolve around one white woman rescuing an entire village of supposedly helpless people, reinforcing the white savior narrative seen countless times in Hollywood.
The film, which BuzzFeed reports Brie signed on to in 2013 and has struggled to get picked up worldwide, seems to be an odd choice for the actress, who has previously said that she makes movies "as a form of activism" and is known for playing strong female characters. Brie has spoken up about social issues in the past; she supported activists at Standing Rock who protested the Dakota Access Pipeline and often posts on social media about gun control, LGBTQ rights, and mental health issues, for instance.
Brie has not yet responded to the criticism of Basmati Blues, though many have taken to social media to express their feelings about the movie. One Twitter user wrote, "It’s 2017 & they’re really still releasing these things." Another blamed the cringe-worthiness of the film on the fact that it was conceived in 2013 (although, this portrayal would be offensive in any year). The user wrote, "Basmati Blues was shot before Short Term 12 was even released. Why are people freaking out so much? I get it, it's incredibly offensive, but we all make mistakes. I'm sure that Brie Larson wouldn't sign onto a project like that today." Still, others found the whole thing to be inappropriate and disappointing, saying, "I just watched the trailer for Basmati Blues and I'm not even angry just massively secondhand embarrassed for everyone involved," "Cringeworthy to say the least," and "* Deep, disappointed sigh *."
Watch the trailer and read more reactions, below.
Related: Brie Larson on Her Friendships With Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone |
Commenting on the faux pas of releasing a booklet with Jammu and Kashmir shown as Indian occupied Kashmir, the Congress party on Sunday said it was 'a clerical mistake.'
Congress leader Shakeel Ahmed asserted that Kashmir is an integral part of the nation and that the portion illegitimately occupied by Pakistan belongs to India.
"It might have been a clerical printing mistake. Kashmir is a part of India. The Congress party believes that even the portion of Kashmir which is occupied by Pakistan illegitimately is also India's. This might be a printing mistake," said Ahmed.
Another Congress leader Raj Babbar said that the people responsible for the printing of the pamphlet have admitted their mistake and that there was no need to make an issue out of the matter. "People who were responsible for the printing of the pamphlet have given their statements. We should not make this an issue," said Babbar.
However the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) didn't seem to think it was a trivial matter, and demanded an apology on Sunday from Congress president Sonia Gandhi on yesterday's release of a booklet with Jammu and Kashmir shown as Indian occupied Kashmir.
"Kashmir is the integral part of India and the PoK (Pak occupied Kashmir) is also integral part of India. But this is very unfortunate. The Congress president must apologise to the country because Ghulam Nabi Azad was saying the same thing which was continually said by Pakistan on the Kashmir issue. We strongly condemn it," said BJP spokesperson Shahnawaz Hussain.
Echoing similar sentiment, another BJP leader S. Prakash said that the Congress party has always politicised matters of national security and that such things could never be forgiven.
"The Congress party for the last three years has been indulging in politicising the internal security and the national security. This has again been proved. They must apologise to the country. A party which ruled India for over 50 years today is not prepared to accept Kashmir as part of India? This is shameful," he said.
The Congress party yesterday stirred a controversy when its senior leader Ghulam Nabi Azad released a booklet with Jammu and Kashmir shown as Indian occupied Kashmir.
The wrong map was published on page 12 of the 15-page booklet titled 'National Security Endangered. Bravado, Rhetoric, Hyperbole Rules' about the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. |
Genetic network stability analysis
A living organism is an interacting system containing the genome and the expressome, defined as all the molecules (the transcriptome, proteome, metabolome) produced according to the genetic program and for which expression levels are regulated by genes and their epigenetic states in response to external influences or stresses (see Fig. 1). Likewise, the expression states of the genes are regulated by the components of the expressome. For the sake of model simplicity, but without loss of generality, we will specifically talk about the genes expressing as, and being regulated by, proteins. However, other levels of description including transcriptome, metabolome, etc. could also be viewed as relevant aspects of the expressome, similarly impacted by both endogenous and exogenous (environmental) factors. We start from the organism in a “normal” initial state, in which all genes have youthful/healthy expression profiles. With the passage of time, t, most of the genes retain “normal” expression profiles, while a few genes, e g (t) genes in total, subsequently become either damaged or (epigenetically) dysregulated and represent a few “defects” or “errors” in the genetic program. Gene transcripts are translated into the proteome, including its “defects”, at a certain translation rate p. Defects may appear in the expressome even if the genome state is perfectly regulated, due to unavoidable imperfections in translation or metabolic transformations17. Below, we assume that time-dependent quantities such as e g (t) may be averaged over times longer than the characteristic interaction times, but are still much shorter than the lifespan of the organism.
Figure 1: The minimum stability analysis model for a gene network. At any given time the genome consists of a number of normally expressed and dysregulated genes. The proteome accumulates “defects”, such as the proteins over- or under-expressed by dysregulated genes, which are removed via the protein quality-control or turnover systems. DNA repair machinery controls epigenetic states of the genes and restores normal expression levels. On top of this, interactions with the environment damage both the proteome and the genome subsystems, increasing the load on the protein-turnover and DNA-repair components. Parameters f, β, δ, p and c appear in Eqs. (1) and (2), and are interpreted in the text below. The figure was drawn by Peter Fedichev. Full size image
Next, we assume that the initial state of the genome is almost stable, meaning that the number of improperly expressed genes is small relative to the total genome size, and, therefore, the number of improperly produced proteins copies, e p (t), is also relatively small. This allows us to ignore the interaction between defects in the genome and the proteome. Accordingly, the most general model describing the dynamics of the interacting defects in the genome and in the proteome can be written in the following form:
Here , β is the coupling rate constant characterizing the regulation of gene expression by the proteins. The constant K is the average number of genes regulated by any single protein and represents a simple measure of the overall connectivity of the genetic network. The constant c reflects the combined efficiency of proteolysis and heat shock response systems, mediating degradation and refolding of misfolded proteins, respectively, whereas δ characterizes the DNA repair rate. The parameters—coefficients in Eqs. (1) and (2) are described by arrows on Fig. 1. Furthermore, the model includes the “force” terms, f p (t) and f g (t), which characterize the proteome and genome damage rates, respectively. The forces can represent any of a number of things, including oxidative stress (metabolic), temperature, gamma-radiation (environmental), that are imperfectly compensated by protective mechanisms.
Eqs. (1) and (2) can only hold in their simple linearized form if the total number of regulatory errors is small and the defects do not interfere with the repair machinery or any other rare essential subsystems of the gene network. If, for example, a defect alters a DNA repair system-associated gene expression or protein level, the repair rate drops, the system becomes unstable and may quickly diverge from its normal state18,19, as we show below. To avoid complications arising from introducing such nonlinearities, we adopt a simple hypothesis as to how defects in the evolving gene network could be responsible for the demise of a cell or organism. More specifically, we assume that mortality at any time is dependent on the probability of a defect to “land on” and damage or dysregulate an essential gene in a sufficient fraction of cells to lethally impair tissue function locally. Any gene in the model can be dysregulated for a short time (brief relative to lifespan) and then “repaired”, or its products acquired from healthy neighboring cells. Therefore, a gene is considered essential if the disruption of its expression, even for a limited time, is lethal to cells in which it was disrupted, once their occurrence exceeds some threshold fraction of cells. The suggested picture is quite general, however, and is easily extended to entire animals, since the stability boundaries are the same—only the exponents will be reduced because some threshold fraction of a tissue must die (in some most-vulnerable tissue type) to produce organism lethality. In this case the population dynamics of a set of gene networks representing N(t) organisms can be represented by:
where M(t) = ωe g /G is the mortality rate, proportional to the fraction of mis-regulated genes, e g /G, and ω is an empirical factor, roughly a measure of the (small) fraction of genes in the whole genome that are essential.
As shown in Methods, a general solution to Eqs. (1, 2) is a linear combination of two functions characterized by well-separated time scales. Most external perturbations lead to responses, which relax quickly at time scales on the order of the network’ s inverse relaxation rates, c and δ. However, life-long changes, such as aging or development, are usually considerably slower. Therefore we can use adiabatic approximation to obtain the effective equation for the age-dependent changes in the number or regulatory errors and, consequently, the mortality
Here F = f/(c + δ) is a combined measure of genotoxic stress, , and Λ = (βpGK − cδ)/(c + δ) is the exponent characterizing genetic-network stability, which is precisely the propagation rate of gene-expression-level perturbations. As we will see later, in the long run, stress levels can be averaged over longer periods and hence presumed to be time-independent, f p,g (t) = const. This yields the following expression for the age-dependent mortality rate:
The nature of the solution is very different depending on the sign of the exponent Λ. Whenever the combined efficiency of all repair systems is lower than a measure of the defect proliferation rate,
then the gene network is unstable, Λ > 0, and the number of regulatory errors (defects) in the genome and in the expressome grows exponentially along with mortality, M(t) ∼ exp(Λt), which is precisely the celebrated Gompertz law12. The Gompertz exponent, Λ, is related to the Mortality Rate Doubling Time (MRDT), t Λ = ln 2/Λ, whereas the average lifespan is given by
The quantity depends on both the exponent Λ and on the genotoxic stress level through the parameter γ = M 0 /Λ, where M 0 ∼ ωF/Λ is the mortality at birth or Initial Mortality Rate (IMR) in our model. For many species following the Gompertz mortality law γ is very small (γ ≈ 0.05 for fruit flies if computed using MRDT and IMR values from AnAge database11). Accordingly, the logarithm is usually large and the life expectancy, t le ≈ Λ−1 log(1/γ), greatly exceeds MRDT, the time scale characterizing the gene network instability. This is our precise definition of the Gompertz limit describing long lived species including humans, when the logarithm of a large argument is a very slow function, and the lifespan of the species is determined by the gene regulatory network properties only and depends very weakly on the genotoxic stress level through the value of γ. This also means that the lifespan does not depend on precise specification of stress levels or their variation over time. The same argument would hold if a small non-linearity is added in Eq.(4) and thus establishes a considerably wider applicability range for the basic linearized Eqs. (1, 2, 3).
A considerably more intriguing situation may occur when the genome is stable, Λ < 0 or R 0 < 1, and the gene network may remain stable under reasonable stress conditions for a very long time. The fractions of dysregulated genes and of misexpressed components of the expressome will then stabilize at constant levels, as will the mortality rate itself maintain the same level . Constant mortality rate means that the population of animals dies off exponentially rather than age-dependently: , which is much slower than the Gompertz-law prediction. We believe that the age-independent mortality observed in naked mole rat experiments over a very long lifespan7, together with exceptional stress resistance of naked mole rat tissues9, may be manifestations of this stable scenario. We predict that the gene networks of negligibly senescent animals are exceptionally robust, and the number of dysregulated genes will scarcely change with age. This argument is supported by the observations16 in which the number of genes differentially expressed with age was compared among naked mole rat, mice and humans.
Aging of the fruit-fly transcriptome
Analysis of model solutions (see Methods) suggests that aging in gene networks of “normally” aging or Gompertzian animals manifests itself as a highly correlated changes to the genome and the expressome states, occurring on distinct and well-separated time scales. We show that even though most external stresses lead to perturbation of the gene network, which relax quickly back to unperturbed levels, many experimentally measurable properties of the organism state should reflect the underlying instability, to an increasing degree as animals age. This means that gene-expression (or metabolite, etc.) levels should change with age in a coordinated manner and slowly deviate from their healthy/youthful states. We then asked whether our model is supported by gene-expression data from fruit flies (ref. 20). The measurements were performed at 6 different ages, for two groups of adult Drosophila melanogaster: normally (“ad lib”) fed control flies and calorically restricted (CR) flies. Figure 2 is a Principal Components (PC) analysis plot, in which each point represents the state of gene expression for one combination of age and diet.
Figure 2: Principal components analysis of gene expression profiles in aging flies (data from20), fed on control (ad lib) and Calorically Restricted (CR) diets. Every point represents a transcriptome for flies of a specific age and diet. As the animals age, the genetic network accumulates regulation errors and the transcription levels change in a single direction, up to a limit beyond which viability cannot be maintained. Full size image
Remarkably, aging in flies follows a unidirectional and thus apparently pre-defined or hard-wired in the genome trajectory of gene expression (along PC1) throughout their lifespans, accompanied by apparently rapid and random expression changes along orthogonal directions such as PC2. Variance along the PC2 axis is nevertheless small relative to the inter-group differences distinguishing ad lib from CR-fed flies. This may indicate that the corresponding transcriptional changes occur in response to, for example, nutrient-supply variation. Along the PC1 dimension, although there are stochastic contributions, there is a strong, systematic dependence on age in each of the two diet groups. Points on the extreme left correspond to the youngest flies, and points for older age-groups are displaced progressively to the right. Thus, deviation of the gene expression profile from the young state increases with age, indicating that the number and extent of dysregulated genes increases along with mortality up to a point when the accumulation of gene-expression abnormalities becomes incompatible with survival of the organism. This interpretation goes well in hand with the arguments used in derivation of Eqs. (1, 2, 3) and qualitatively support the presented model as a very general description of aging in gene networks of realistic animals, including multicellular organisms, such as fruit flies. We describe a generalization of the equations as well as the transcriptional and metabolic changes in aging flies along with their relation to the Gompertz mortality law in a subsequent work21. Both of the groups age in a similar way (along the same PC1 direction), but at a considerably different rate. We are leaving the detailed analysis of the aging trajectories differences between CR-fed and control flies for a future work.
Genetic-network stability and stress resistance
The proposed model may be considered as a general theory that subsumes previous “error catastrophe” theories19,18 as special cases. It was long considered that error catastrophes can be probed in experiment where the effects of various stresses on animal lifespan were observed22. To understand how the model presented above deals with stresses, we will first reanalyze a related experiment from23, in which flies of varying age were exposed to a traumatic brain injury (TBI) for a short time and then observed for a time T that is small compared to the lifespan of the animals. The mortality index MI T is calculated as the fraction of animals alive at the start of stress, dying over a short observation interval during or following stress application. The post-stress lifespan was also determined. To model the experimental settings we assume that the animals at an early age t 0 , , were subjected to an external genotoxic stress characterized by the amplitude Fs, which is proportional to number of traumatic strikes N in each experiment. As shown in Methods, a generic stress perturbs the state of the gene network and within a linear response theory, the mortality in the experiment has a contribution to both the slow and fast modes. At late ages, the influence of the stress mostly dies out due to the fast relaxation processes in the genome and the proteome. On the contrary, since the gene network of flies is unstable, the influence of a stress applied early in life is maintained in the slow mode and shortens the lifespan of the animals. The mortality M as a function of time t and of number of traumatic events, such as strikes, N is given by
where is an empirical factor, proportional to the number of the strikes, , where χ is a stress and a species-dependent constant. Accordingly, we predict that the difference ΔM 0 between mortality in flies, exposed to a different number N of traumatic strikes, and mortality of the flies in the control group is proportional to N at any given age. Figure 3a shows a direct comparison of the mortalities of the treated and the control groups obtained from our analysis of the data from23. An alternative way to see this is to calculate the model prediction for the average lifespan as a function of N
Figure 3 (a) ΔM 0 , the mortality change as wild-type flies are exposed to N traumatic insults, is plotted as a function of N. (b) Average lifespan, t avg , is plotted as a function of N. In both panels (a,b), the solid lines indicate the theoretical prediction based on Eq. (6) and parameters estimated from experimental data. Grey symbols are experimental mortality data points. Full size image
and compare it with the experimental lifespan in groups with various stress levels. The results of the analysis of the population dynamics data from23 are presented in Fig. 3a,b, and show a fair agreement between the dependences observed in the experiment and the simple model predictions.
Even though the mortality at late ages does not depend on the fast gene network dynamics, the Mortality Index itself contains both kinds of contributions,
where E = (c + δ) is the effective relaxation time in the expressome (see the analysis leading up to Eqs. (15) and (19) in Methods). Empirically, in TBI experiment and therefore very strong stressors are required to produce a measurable change in the lifespan. This may be extrapolated to and compared with findings reported earlier22, where Drosophila adults in experimental groups were treated for 3–5 days with a number of agents shown to increase misincorporation into protein or RNA, at doses leading to <20% mortality. Although these treatments produced error rates much higher than were seen in the course of aging in control flies, and produced a small mortality increase during the treatment, the misincorporation rates subsequently returned to control (pre-treatment) levels. This would be consistent with predictions of our model, if most of the stress-induced perturbations relaxed quickly to a level nearly indistinguishable from controls. Because the overall Mortality Index in the experiment was small, the average lifespans of survivors were indistinguishable from controls22. The effects of the stress on the lifespan may have been further reduced by hormesis, a known ability of weak stresses to improve survival of animals24,25,26. The latter is clearly a non-linear phenomenon, which is not very strong in the Gompertz limit in any case and can not be explained by the suggested simple linearized model.
Extreme longevity has long been associated with exceptional resistance to a variety of stresses27. And conversely, the decrease of stress resistance with age is one of the best-established indices of aging. The relation should be taken with caution, since the stress resistance measured by the Mortality Index and described by Eq. (10) contains the contribution of processes occurring at all time scales. Only a measure of stress resistance associated with the response of the slowest modes of the gene network can be related with aging and longevity. A curious situation may occur when Λ < 0 in Eq. (6), indicating that the efficacy of repair systems is high enough to prevent exponential system deterioration with age. This would also imply robust resistance to stresses, consistent with the exceptional stress resistance of negligibly senescent species9. For example, a comparison of survival between negligibly senescent vs. short-lived clam tissues treated with tetr-butyl hydroperoxide showed much higher resistance to oxidative stress in long-lived clams3. Also Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) was measured in young and old clams of both types. The experiment showed an age-related decline in ORAC for shorter-lived clams, whereas ORAC did not change with age in tissues of negligibly-senescent clams, which is entirely in line with the model predictions, since there are no possible changes in the gene network state leading to a deterioration of the genotoxic compensation abilities, if the gene network of an organism operates in the stable zone. |
Craters up to a kilometer (0.6 miles) wide have been found within the Barents Sea off the northern coast of Norway. As reported by the Sunday Times, these are likely to be due to unstable build-ups of methane, a notoriously volatile and at times explosive natural gas. Details are few and far between at present, although researchers at the Arctic University of Norway are due to present their findings in detail at the annual European Geoscience Union conference this coming April.
“Multiple giant craters exist on the sea floor in an area in the west-central Barents Sea... and are probably a cause of enormous blowouts of gas,” the research team told the Sunday Times. “The crater area is likely to represent one of the largest hotspots for shallow marine methane release in the Arctic.”
Although these huge methane bubbles could perhaps take out a ship or two sailing in these shallow waters, the links that several journalistic outlets are making with the Bermuda Triangle may be a bit of a stretch.
Methane under certain conditions is stored as a compound known as methane hydrate, and vast caches of it are found both beneath the seabed. This natural gas is also generated within great expanses of long-term frozen soil known as permafrost, which mostly exists in Siberia, Greenland and Alaska: When organic matter there is decomposed by microbes under warmer, low-oxygen conditions, methane is produced.
Due to man-made climate change, the world is warming at an unprecedented rate, which is beginning to unlock these caches, although the rate at which the methane is escaping skyward currently remains unclear.
In any case, melting permafrost is definitley unleashing methane gas, the second-most dangerous global warming greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, causing the planet to warm further to some degree. Within the oceans, the hydrates are becoming increasingly unstable due to both warming and increasing acidification, and the same effusion process is suspected of taking place there too.
These craters are certainly big, but methane bubbles up from the depths all the time. Rich Carey/Shutterstock
If an entire “chunk” of these hydrates suddenly becomes unstable, a lot of methane gas can escape at once. This can generate craters, such as those found beneath the surface of the Barents Sea. It’s difficult to estimate how much energy is being released in these crater forming “explosions,” but it’s not unreasonable to suggest that – at over half a mile across each – they could be energetic enough to sink ships passing above them. The evidence for this type of ship sinking, however, remains deeply tenuous.
This methane forcing itself up from the depths has likely happened before, around 56 million years ago. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) was a sudden and catastrophic warming event that bumped up the world’s temperature by 5 to 8°C (9 to 15°F) in just 20,000 years, and researchers have occasionally surmised that a massive methane hydrates release is to blame.
However, the link with the Bermuda Triangle, which is off the eastern coast of Florida, is somewhat weak – this study doesn’t appear to have anything to do with this part of the world. Nevertheless, gargantuan methane bubbles have been cited before as a possible ship-sinking phenomenon in the Triangle. Even if they don’t cause a damaging blast, a methane bubble is considerably less dense than the sea around it; if it rises up beneath a ship, it could cause it to suddenly sink.
There’s just one problem with this: The Bermuda Triangle doesn’t officially exist, in that it’s not recognized by various scientific institutions of the United States. It’s statistically no more dangerous than any other stretch of ocean, and perhaps most importantly of all, there has been no methane bubbling up from beneath it for at least 15,000 years. |
October 21, 2010
In the first article in a series on "Socialism and Black Liberation," Lance Selfa explains the origins of slavery at the dawn of capitalism and the ideology of white supremacy.
IT'S ONE of the oldest truisms around. Racism, it's said, is as old as human society itself. As long as human beings have been around, the argument goes, they have always hated or feared people of a different nation or skin color. In other words, racism is just part of human nature.
If racism is part of human nature, then socialists have a real challenge on their hands. If racism is hard-wired into human biology, then we should despair of workers ever overcoming the divisions between them to fight for a socialist society free of racial inequality.
Fortunately, racism isn't part of human nature. The best evidence for this assertion is the fact that racism has not always existed.
Racism is a particular form of oppression. It stems from discrimination against a group of people based on the idea that some inherited characteristic, such as skin color, makes them inferior to their oppressors. Yet the concepts of "race" and "racism" are modern inventions. They arose and became part of the dominant ideology of society in the context of the African slave trade at the dawn of capitalism in the 1500s and 1600s.
An ad for a slave auction in 1840
Although it is a commonplace for academics and opponents of socialism to claim that Karl Marx ignored racism, Marx in fact described the processes that created modern racism. His explanation of the rise of capitalism placed the African slave trade, the European extermination of indigenous people in the Americas and colonialism at its heart. In Capital, Marx writes:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of the continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins are all things that characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production.
Marx connected his explanation of the role of the slave trade in the rise of capitalism to the social relations that produced racism against Africans. In Wage Labor and Capital, written 12 years before the American Civil War, he explains:
What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other. A Negro is a Negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations. A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It only becomes capital in certain relations. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold by itself is money, or as sugar is the price of sugar.
Series Socialism and Black liberation How is the struggle against racism connected to the struggle for socialism? SocialistWorker.org writers explain what Marxists have to say. Lance Selfa The roots of racism
Paul D’Amato Race and the U.S. socialist tradition
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Race, class and Marxism
In this passage, Marx shows no prejudice to Blacks ("a man of the black race," "a Negro is a Negro"), but he mocks society's equation of "Black" and "slave" ("one explanation is as good as another"). He shows how the economic and social relations of emerging capitalism thrust Blacks into slavery ("he only becomes a slave in certain relations"), which produce the dominant ideology that equates being African with being a slave.
These fragments of Marx's writing give us a good start in understanding the Marxist explanation of the origins of racism. As the Trinidadian historian of slavery Eric Williams put it: "Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery." And, one should add, the consequence of modern slavery at the dawn of capitalism. While slavery existed as an economic system for thousands of years before the conquest of America, racism as we understand it today did not exist.
The classical empires of Greece and Rome were based on slave labor. But ancient slavery was not viewed in racial terms. Slaves were most often captives in wars or conquered peoples. If we understand white people as originating in what is today Europe, then most slaves in ancient Greece and Rome were white. Roman law made slaves the property of their owners, while maintaining a "formal lack of interest in the slave's ethnic or racial provenance," wrote Robin Blackburn in The Making of New World Slavery.
Over the years, slave manumission produced a mixed population of slave and free in Roman-ruled areas, in which all came to be seen as "Romans." The Greeks drew a sharper line between Greeks and "barbarians," those subject to slavery. Again, this was not viewed in racial or ethnic terms, as the socialist historian of the Haitian Revolution, C.L.R. James, explained:
[H]istorically, it is pretty well proved now that the ancient Greeks and Romans knew nothing about race. They had another standard--civilized and barbarian--and you could have white skin and be a barbarian, and you could be black and civilized.
More importantly, encounters in the ancient world between the Mediterranean world and Black Africans did not produce an upsurge of racism against Africans. In Before Color Prejudice, Howard University classics professor Frank Snowden documented innumerable accounts of interaction between the Greco-Roman and Egyptian civilizations and the Kush, Nubian, and Ethiopian kingdoms of Africa. He found substantial evidence of integration of Black Africans in the occupational hierarchies of the ancient Mediterranean empires and Black-white intermarriage. Black and mixed race gods appeared in Mediterranean art, and at least one Roman emperor, Septimius Severus, was an African.
Between the 10th and 16th centuries, the chief source of slaves in Western Europe was Eastern Europe. In fact, the word "slave" comes from the word "Slav," the people of Eastern Europe.
This outline doesn't mean to suggest a "pre-capitalist" Golden Age of racial tolerance, least of all in the slave societies of antiquity. Empires viewed themselves as centers of the universe and looked on foreigners as inferiors. Ancient Greece and Rome fought wars of conquest against peoples they presumed to be less advanced. Religious scholars interpreted the Hebrew Bible's "curse of Ham" from the story of Noah to condemn Africans to slavery. Cultural and religious associations of the color white with light and angels and the color black with darkness and evil persisted.
But none of these cultural or ideological factors explain the rise of New World slavery or the "modern" notions of racism that developed from it.
The slave trade lasted for a little more than 400 years, from the mid-1400s, when the Portuguese made their first voyages down the African coast, to the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888.
Slave traders took as many as 12 million Africans by force to work on the plantations in South America, the Caribbean and North America. About 13 percent of slaves (1.5 million) died during the Middle Passage--the trip by boat from Africa to the New World. The African slave trade--involving African slave merchants, European slavers and New World planters in the traffic in human cargo--represented the greatest forced population transfer ever.
The charge that Africans "sold their own people" into slavery has become a standard canard against "politically correct" history that condemns the European role in the African slave trade. The first encounters of the Spanish and Portuguese, and later the English, with African kingdoms revolved around trade in goods. Only after the Europeans established New World plantations requiring huge labor gangs did the slave trade begin.
African kings and chiefs did indeed sell into slavery captives in wars or members of other communities. Sometimes, they concluded alliances with Europeans to support them in wars, with captives from their enemies being handed over to the Europeans as booty. The demands of the plantation economies pushed "demand" for slaves. Supply did not create its own demand.
In any event, it remains unseemly to attempt to absolve the European slavers by reference to their African partners in crime. As historian Basil Davidson rightly argues about African chiefs' complicity in the slave trade: "In this, they were no less 'moral' than the Europeans who had instigated the trade and bought the captives."
Onboard, Africans were restricted in their movements so that they wouldn't combine to mutiny on the ship. In many slave ships, slaves were chained down, stacked like firewood with less than a foot between them. On the plantations, slaves were subjected to a regimen of 18-hour workdays. All members of slave families were set to work. Since the New World tobacco and sugar plantations operated nearly like factories, men, women and children were assigned tasks, from the fields to the processing mills.
Slaves were denied any rights. Throughout the colonies in the Caribbean to North America, laws were passed establishing a variety of common practices: Slaves were forbidden to carry weapons, they could marry only with the owner's permission, and their families could be broken up. They were forbidden to own property. Masters allowed slaves to cultivate vegetables and chickens, so the master wouldn't have to attend to their food needs. But they were forbidden even to sell for profit the products of their own gardens.
Some colonies encouraged religious instruction among slaves, but all of them made clear that a slave's conversion to Christianity didn't change their status as slaves. Other colonies discouraged religious instruction, especially when it became clear to the planters that church meetings were one of the chief ways that slaves planned conspiracies and revolts. It goes without saying that slaves had no political or civil rights, with no right to an education, to serve on juries, to vote or to run for public office.
The planters instituted barbaric regimes of repression to prevent any slave revolts. Slave catchers using tracker dogs would hunt down any slaves who tried to escape the plantation. The penalties for any form of slave resistance were extreme and deadly. One description of the penalties slaves faced in Barbados reports that rebellious slaves would be punished by "nailing them down on the ground with crooked sticks on every Limb, and then applying the Fire by degrees from Feet and Hands, burning them gradually up to the Head, whereby their pains are extravagant." Barbados planters could claim a reimbursement from the government of 25 pounds per slave executed.
The African slave trade helped to shape a wide variety of societies from modern Argentina to Canada. These differed in their use of slaves, the harshness of the regime imposed on slaves, and the degree of mixing of the races that custom and law permitted. But none of these became as virulently racist--insisting on racial separation and a strict color bar--as the English North American colonies that became the United States.
Notwithstanding the horrible conditions that African slaves endured, it is important to underscore that when European powers began carving up the New World between them, African slaves were not part of their calculations.
When we think of slavery today, we think of it primarily from the point of view of its relationship to racism. But planters in the 17th and 18th centuries looked at it primarily as a means to produce profits. Slavery was a method of organizing labor to produce sugar, tobacco and cotton. It was not, first and foremost, a system for producing white supremacy. How did slavery in the U.S. (and the rest of the New World) become the breeding ground for racism?
For much of the first century of colonization in what became the United States, the majority of slaves and other "unfree laborers" were white. The term "unfree" draws the distinction between slavery and servitude and "free wage labor" that is the norm in capitalism. One of the historic gains of capitalism for workers is that workers are "free" to sell their ability to labor to whatever employer will give them the best deal. Of course, this kind of freedom is limited at best. Unless they are independently wealthy, workers aren't free to decide not to work. They're free to work or starve. Once they do work, they can quit one employer and go to work for another.
But the hallmark of systems like slavery and indentured servitude was that slaves or servants were "bound over" to a particular employer for a period of time, or for life in the case of slaves. The decision to work for another master wasn't the slave's or the servant's. It was the master's, who could sell slaves for money or other commodities like livestock, lumber or machinery.
The North American colonies started predominantly as private business enterprises in the early 1600s. Unlike the Spanish, whose conquests of Mexico and Peru in the 1500s produced fabulous gold and silver riches for Spain, settlers in places like the colonies that became Maryland, Rhode Island, and Virginia made money through agriculture. In addition to sheer survival, the settlers' chief aim was to obtain a labor force that could produce the large amounts of indigo, tobacco, sugar and other crops that would be sold back to England. From 1607, when Jamestown was founded in Virginia to about 1685, the primary source of agricultural labor in English North America came from white indentured servants.
The colonists first attempted to press the indigenous population into labor. But the Indians refused to be become servants to the English. Indians resisted being forced to work, and they escaped into the surrounding area, which, after all, they knew far better than the English. One after another, the English colonies turned to a policy of driving out the Indians.
The colonists then turned to white servants. Indentured servants were predominantly young white men--usually English or Irish--who were required to work for a planter master for some fixed term of four to seven years. The servants received room and board on the plantation but no pay. And they could not quit and work for another planter. They had to serve their term, after which they might be able to acquire some land and to start a farm for themselves.
They became servants in several ways. Some were prisoners, convicted of petty crimes in Britain, or convicted of being troublemakers in Britain's first colony, Ireland. Many were kidnapped off the streets of Liverpool or Manchester, and put on ships to the New World. Some voluntarily became servants, hoping to start farms after they fulfilled their obligations to their masters.
For most of the 1600s, the planters tried to get by with a predominantly white, but multiracial workforce. But as the 17th century wore on, colonial leaders became increasingly frustrated with white servant labor. For one thing, they faced the problem of constantly having to recruit labor as servants' terms expired. Second, after servants finished their contracts and decided to set up their farms, they could become competitors to their former masters.
And finally, the planters didn't like the servants' "insolence." The mid-1600s were a time of revolution in England, when ideas of individual freedom were challenging the old hierarchies based on royalty. The colonial planters tended to be royalists, but their servants tended to assert their "rights as Englishmen" to better food, clothing and time off. Most laborers in the colonies supported the servants. As the century progressed, the costs of servant labor increased. Planters started to petition the colonial boards and assemblies to allow the large-scale importation of African slaves.
Black slaves worked on plantations in small numbers throughout the 1600s. But until the end of the 1600s, it cost planters more to buy slaves than to buy white servants. Blacks lived in the colonies in a variety of statuses--some were free, some were slaves, some were servants. The law in Virginia didn't establish the condition of lifetime, perpetual slavery or even recognize African servants as a group different from white servants until 1661. Blacks could serve on juries, own property and exercise other rights. Northampton County, Virginia, recognized interracial marriages and, in one case, assigned a free Black couple to act as foster parents for an abandoned white child. There were even a few examples of Black freemen who owned white servants. Free Blacks in North Carolina had voting rights. In the 1600s, the Chesapeake society of eastern Virginia had a multiracial character, according to historian Betty Wood:
There is persuasive evidence dating from the 1620s through the 1680s that there were those of European descent in the Chesapeake who were prepared to identify and cooperate with people of African descent. These affinities were forged in the world of plantation work. On many plantations, Europeans and West Africans labored side by side in the tobacco fields, performing exactly the same types and amounts of work; they lived and ate together in shared housing; they socialized together; and sometimes they slept together.
The planters' economic calculations played a part in the colonies' decision to move toward full-scale slave labor. By the end of the 17th century, the price of white indentured servants outstripped the price of African slaves. A planter could buy an African slave for life for the same price that he could purchase a white servant for 10 years. As Eric Williams explained:
Here, then, is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had to do not with the color of the laborer, but the cheapness of the labor. [The planter] would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labor. Africa was nearer than the moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India and China. But their turn would soon come.
Planters' fear of a multiracial uprising also pushed them towards racial slavery. Because a rigid racial division of labor didn't exist in the 17th century colonies, many conspiracies involving Black slaves and white indentured servants were hatched and foiled. We know about them today because of court proceedings that punished the runaways after their capture. As historians T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes point out, "These cases reveal only extreme actions, desperate attempts to escape, but for every group of runaways who came before the courts, there were doubtless many more poor whites and blacks who cooperated in smaller, less daring ways on the plantation."
The largest of these conspiracies developed into Bacon's Rebellion, an uprising that threw terror into the hearts of the Virginia Tidewater planters in 1676. Several hundred farmers, servants and slaves initiated a protest to press the colonial government to seize Indian land for distribution. The conflict spilled over into demands for tax relief and resentment of the Jamestown establishment. Planter Nathaniel Bacon helped organize an army of whites and Blacks that sacked Jamestown and forced the governor to flee. The rebel army held out for eight months before the Crown managed to defeat and disarm it.
Bacon's Rebellion was a turning point. After it ended, the Tidewater planters moved in two directions: first, they offered concessions to the white freemen, lifting taxes and extending to them the vote; and second, they moved to full-scale racial slavery.
Fifteen years earlier, the Burgesses had recognized the condition of slavery for life and placed Africans in a different category as white servants. But the law had little practical effect. "Until slavery became systematic, there was no need for a systematic slave code. And slavery could not become systematic so long as an African slave for life cost twice as much as an English servant for a five-year term," wrote historian Barbara Jeanne Fields.
Both of those circumstances changed in the immediate aftermath of Bacon's Rebellion. In the entire 17th century, the planters imported about 20,000 African slaves. The majority of them were brought to North American colonies in the 24 years after Bacon's Rebellion.
In 1664, the Maryland legislature passed a law determining who would be considered slaves on the basis of the condition of their father--whether their father was slave or free. It soon became clear, however, that establishing paternity was difficult, but that establishing who was a person's mother was definite. So the planters changed the law to establish slave status on the basis of the mother's condition.
Now white slaveholders who fathered children by slave women would be guaranteed their offspring as slaves. And the law included penalties for "free" women who slept with slaves. But what's most interesting about this law is that it doesn't really speak in racial terms. It attempts to preserve the property rights of slaveholders and establish barriers between slave and free which were to become hardened into racial divisions over the next few years.
Taking the Maryland law as an example, Fields made this important point:
Historians can actually observe colonial Americans in the act of preparing the ground for race without foreknowledge of what would later arise on the foundation they were laying. [T]he purpose of the experiment is clear: to prevent the erosion of slaveowners' property rights that would result if the offspring of free white women impregnated by slave men were entitled to freedom. The language of the preamble to the law makes clear that the point was not yet race.
Race does not explain the law. Rather, the law shows society in the act of inventing race.
After establishing that African slaves would cultivate major cash crops of the North American colonies, the planters then moved to establish the institutions and ideas that would uphold white supremacy. Most unfree labor became Black labor. Laws and ideas intended to underscore the subhuman status of Black people--in a word, the ideology of racism and white supremacy--emerged full-blown over the next generation.
Within a few decades, the ideology of white supremacy was fully developed. Some of the greatest minds of the day--such as Scottish philosopher David Hume and Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence--wrote treatises alleging Black inferiority.
The ideology of white supremacy based on the natural inferiority of Blacks, even allegations that Blacks were subhuman, strengthened throughout the 18th century. This was the way that the leading intellectual figures of the time reconciled the ideals of the 1776 American Revolution with slavery. The American Revolution of 1776 and later the French Revolution of 1789 popularized the ideas of liberty and the rights of all human beings. The Declaration of Independence asserts that "all men are created equal" and possess certain "unalienable rights"--rights that can't be taken away--of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
As the first major bourgeois revolution, the American Revolution sought to establish the rights of the new capitalist class against the old feudal monarchy. It started with the resentment of the American merchant class that wanted to break free from British restrictions on its trade.
But its challenge to British tyranny also gave expression to a whole range of ideas that expanded the concept of "liberty" from being just about trade to include ideas of human rights, democracy, and civil liberties. It legitimized an assault on slavery as an offense to liberty. Some of the leading American revolutionaries, such as Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, endorsed abolition. Slaves and free Blacks also pointed to the ideals of the revolution to call for abolishing slavery.
But because the revolution aimed to establish the rule of capital in America, and because a lot of capitalists and planters made a lot of money from slavery, the revolution compromised with slavery. The Declaration initially contained a condemnation of King George for allowing the slave trade, but Jefferson dropped it following protests from representatives from Georgia and the Carolinas.
How could the founding fathers of the U.S.--most of whom owned slaves themselves--reconcile the ideals of liberty for which they were fighting with the existence of a system that represented the exact negation of liberty?
The ideology of white supremacy fit the bill. We know today that "all men" didn't include women, Indians or most whites. But to rule Black slaves out of the blessings of liberty, the leading head-fixers of the time argued that Blacks weren't really "men," they were a lower order of being. Jefferson's Notes from Virginia, meant to be a scientific catalogue of the flora and fauna of Virginia, uses arguments that anticipate the "scientific racism" of the 1800s and 1900s.
With few exceptions, no major institution--such as the universities, the churches or the newspapers of the time--raised criticisms of white supremacy or of slavery. In fact, they helped pioneer religious and academic justifications for slavery and Black inferiority. As C.L.R. James put it, "[T]he conception of dividing people by race begins with the slave trade. This thing was so shocking, so opposed to all the conceptions of society which religion and philosophers had, that the only justification by which humanity could face it was to divide people into races and decide that the Africans were an inferior race."
White supremacy wasn't only used to justify slavery. It was also used to keep in line the two-thirds of Southern whites who weren't slaveholders. Unlike the French colony of St. Domingue or the British colony of Barbados, where Blacks vastly outnumbered whites, Blacks were a minority in the slave South. A tiny minority of slave-holding whites, who controlled the governments and economies of the Deep South states, ruled over a population that was roughly two-thirds white farmers and workers and one-third Black slaves.
The slaveholders' ideology of racism and white supremacy helped to divide the working population, tying poor whites to the slaveholders. Slavery afforded poor white farmers what Fields called a "social space" whereby they preserved an illusory "independence" based on debt and subsistence farming, while the rich planters continued to dominate Southern politics and society. "A caste system as well as a form of labor," historian James M. McPherson wrote, "slavery elevated all whites to the ruling caste and thereby reduced the potential for class conflict."
The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass understood this dynamic:
The hostility between the whites and blacks of the South is easily explained. It has its root and sap in the relation of slavery, and was incited on both sides by the cunning of the slave masters. Those masters secured their ascendancy over both the poor whites and the Blacks by putting enmity between them. They divided both to conquer each. [Slaveholders denounced emancipation as] tending to put the white working man on an equality with Blacks, and by this means, they succeed in drawing off the minds of the poor whites from the real fact, that by the rich slave-master, they are already regarded as but a single remove from equality with the slave.
Slavery in the colonies helped produce a boom in the 18th century economy that provided the launching pad for the industrial revolution in Europe. From the start, colonial slavery and capitalism were linked. While it is not correct to say that slavery created capitalism, it is correct to say that slavery provided one of the chief sources for the initial accumulations of wealth that helped to propel capitalism forward in Europe and North America.
The clearest example of the connection between plantation slavery and the rise of industrial capitalism was the connection between the cotton South, Britain and, to a lesser extent, the Northern industrial states. Here, we can see the direct link between slavery in the U.S. and the development of the most advanced capitalist production methods in the world. Cotton textiles accounted for 75 percent of British industrial employment in 1840, and, at its height, three-fourths of that cotton came from the slave plantations of the Deep South. And Northern ships and ports transported the cotton.
To meet the boom in the 1840s and 1850s, the planters became even more vicious. On the one hand, they tried to expand slavery into the West and Central America. The fight over the extension of slavery into the territories eventually precipitated the Civil War in 1861. On the other hand, they drove slaves harder--selling more cotton to buy more slaves just to keep up. On the eve of the Civil War, the South was petitioning to lift the ban on the importation of slaves that had existed officially since 1808.
Karl Marx clearly understood the connection between plantation slavery in the cotton South and the development of capitalism in England. He wrote in Capital:
While the cotton industry introduced child-slavery into England, in the United States, it gave the impulse for the transformation of the more or less patriarchal slavery into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage-laborers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal. Capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.
The close connection between slavery and capitalism, and thus, between racism and capitalism, gives the lie to those who insist that slavery would have just died out. In fact, the South was more dependent on slavery right before the Civil War than it was 50 or 100 years earlier. Slavery lasted as long as it did because it was profitable. And it was profitable to the richest and most "well-bred" people in the world.
The Civil War abolished slavery and struck a great blow against racism. But racism itself wasn't abolished. On the contrary, just as racism was created to justify colonial slavery, racism as an ideology was refashioned. It now no longer justified the enslavement of Blacks, but it justified second-class status for Blacks as wage laborers and sharecroppers.
Racist ideology was also refashioned to justify imperialist conquest at the turn of the last century. As a handful of competing world powers vied to carve up the globe into colonial preserves for cheap raw materials and labor, racism served as a convenient justification. The vast majority of the world's people were now portrayed as inferior races, incapable of determining their own future. Slavery disappeared, but racism remained as a means to justify the domination of millions of people by the U.S., various European powers, and later by Japan.
Because racism is woven right into the fabric of capitalism, new forms of racism arose with changes in capitalism. As the U.S. economy expanded and underpinned U.S. imperial expansion, imperialist racism--which asserted that the U.S. had a right to dominate other peoples, such as Mexicans and Filipinos--developed. As the U.S. economy grew and sucked in millions of immigrant laborers, anti-immigrant racism developed.
But these are both different forms of the same ideology--of white supremacy and division of the world into "superior" and "inferior" races--that had their origins in slavery.
Racism and capitalism have been intertwined since the beginning of capitalism. You can't have capitalism without racism. Therefore, the final triumph over racism will only come when we abolish racism's chief source--capitalism--and build a new socialist society. |
GOP strategist Ana Navarro said Monday Republicans would be attempting to impeach Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE immediately if they discovered she shared classified information with a Russian official.
Navarro, a vocal Trump critic, seemed to point at an alternate reality if Clinton had won the election instead of Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE.
If Hillary Clinton leaked classified info to a Russian spook/diplomat, Republicans would rightly be drafting Articles of Impeachment N-O-W. — Ana Navarro (@ananavarro) May 15, 2017
Navarro's tweet came shortly after the Washington Post reported Monday evening that Trump shared highly classified information about the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) with top Russian diplomats in a meeting last week, a charge multiple White House officials have denied.
A U.S. official with knowledge of the meeting told the Post that the president “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”
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Since the presidential election, Trump and his associates have come under public scrutiny for their praise and seemingly warm relationship to the Kremlin.
Trump met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the White House last week.
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) says the Trump administration needs to reverse the “downward spiral” it finds itself in, following the Post report.
“The White House has got to do something soon to bring itself under control and in order,” the senator said Monday, according to Bloomberg. “It’s got to happen.” |
During a busy Sunday evening in my ER two weeks ago, while I stitched closed a laceration to the temple of a two-year-old infant who had run into a door, disaster struck. As is customary in these situations, my attendant nurse, a kind woman who is wonderful with children, had wrapped up the child in layers of sheets to prevent any unexpected movements of arms or legs while we performed the delicate procedure. Halfway through my sewing, our young patient stealthily managed to extricate a right arm from her wrapping, and promptly, before anyone noticed, the injured child delivered a full force punch to the face of my poor nurse.
The nurse assisting me rapidly developed a substantial bruise near her eye (believe me -- injured babies throw a mean punch!), but she never flinched, proceeding to calmly re-wrap the offending arm, and allowing me to finish suturing. Afterwards, to my chagrin, the parents of the injured baby ignored the nurse and the injuries she had sustained in order to help their child, while proceeding to thank me profusely for my care.
This episode got me thinking -- our nurses so frequently go above and beyond the call of duty, while receiving so little recognition for their amazing work and dedication. It is a situation I feel we all should do our best to improve, so without further ado, the top reasons why nurses are my true heroes of the Emergency Room:
1) Nurses regularly save us doctors when the going gets tough
Almost every doctor out there has stories, from their years in practice, about how an experienced nurse saved the day for them at some point. For me, the first time this occurred was during my residency, prior to receiving my license to practice.
I remember, during a night on call, seeing an older male patient who presented with suddenly elevated blood pressure and difficulty breathing -- the type of critically ill patient I would have seen only with a senior physician by my side during daytime hours. Being alone with this dying man, no other MD in sight, I froze, suddenly unable to recognize the clear diagnosis -- acute congestive heart failure -- that was in front of me.
As I watched my patient slipping away from me, rapidly running out of strength to breathe further, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was one of the experienced nurses on the floor, a knowledgeable pro who had seen it all. She said to me gently, "I see you're here for the heart failure patient -- want me to draw up drugs x, y, and z?" Her quick, attentive action saved the day. With the correct diagnosis identified, and proper treatment started, the patient quickly improved. I learned a lesson that day, one that I have never forgotten: that nurses know their stuff, and that their enormous experience is an incredible asset to have by my side when faced with the most challenging patients.
2) Nurses take abuse and maintain their professionalism
Emergency rooms, due to the high-pressure, life and death nature of the work we perform, are very stressful places to be. Patients and their family members, as well as hospital staff, are frequently on edge. When tempers flare in the ER, nurses, as the workers in the ER who spend the most time with patients, frequently serve as proverbial, and all too often literal, punching bags.
In the course of my career I have repeatedly seen nurses assaulted by intoxicated, demented, and mentally ill patients, as well as verbally abused by patients and families upset with wait times and outcomes. A 2005 study found that 34 per cent of hospital nurses reported a direct physical assault from a patient within the past year. Despite this, I have observed nurses almost always maintaining their cool and remaining professional, even in the face of events that would result in police being called to almost any other workplace.
3) Nurses do all the dirty work that doctors don't
There is nothing pretty or glamorous about much of the work performed in a typical emergency room. Throughout a shift, countless tasks need to be completed that would curdle the stomach of any but the most hardened individuals. From diaper changes on elderly patients, to administering enemas, to cleaning bed bugs and maggots off of our homeless and less fortunate guests, the nurses I work with do it all, and it is a testament to their dedication that they rarely protest about it. In fact, I am constantly amazed at how gentle and kind they are with the patients whose illnesses require such unpalatable care.
4) Nurses work gruelling hours
The average ER nursing shift is 12 hours long, and usually starts at either 7:30 a.m., or 7:30 p.m. Most nurses work a staggered schedule of several day shifts, then several night shifts, followed by several days off. As a result, their bodies are perpetually in a state of shifting time zones and sleep schedules, with constant exhaustion as a consequence. Long-term, these types of shift work schedules can raise a nurse's risk of cardiovascular disease by 40 per cent and diabetes by 50 per cent -- a huge price to pay in personal health for one's profession.
Additionally, nursing schedules have little regard for social lives, family obligations or holidays. Without exception, the ER nurses I know regularly work Christmas days, New Year's Eves, Passovers, and the like. Wonderfully, instead of complaining about this, nurses in my department throw potluck meals during holidays and adorn the ER with impressive festive decorations, transforming a place nobody wants to be during these special days into a celebratory place for patients and staff.
5) Nurses get to know their patients better than any ER doctor can
During an average ER shift, I see a bare minimum of 30 patients, and on my busiest days, over 50 patients. This leaves me little opportunity to get to know my patients, answer their questions, or allay their concerns in any meaningful way. The nurses in my department typically get to spend time with patients both before and after I see them, explaining the tests I order, the diagnoses I come up with, and the treatments needed. The soothing, compassionate presence of my nurses, and the extra time they provide to patients, allows the people we care for to be properly informed about their illnesses, and to feel individually tended to, in a way that ER physicians only wish they could achieve.
6) Nurses are educated professionals with unique skill sets
Nursing requires an extensive knowledge base, and in today's hospitals all nurses are required to have either a college or university degree in their field. Additionally nurses are proficient in a wide array of clinical skills that are absolutely essential to the patients in any ER. When it comes to starting an intravenous line, drawing bloods, administering an electrocardiogram, and a wide variety of other tasks, the nurses I've worked with have unique skills that put mine to shame. In fact, I pity any patient that has their intravenous started by me instead of by a nurse!
So next time you or a family member are sick and end up in the ER, remember who the unsung heroes of the department are, and thank them for all that they go through and all that they do -- I promise they'll appreciate it deeply.
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Copyright by WCMH - All rights reserved This photo released by the Texas Office of the Attorney General shows Carl Ferrer. State agents have raided the Dallas headquarters of adult classified ad portal Backpage and arrested Chief Executive Officer Ferrer. Texas Attorney General Ken...
Copyright by WCMH - All rights reserved This photo released by the Texas Office of the Attorney General shows Carl Ferrer. State agents have raided the Dallas headquarters of adult classified ad portal Backpage and arrested Chief Executive Officer Ferrer. Texas Attorney General Ken...
SACRAMENTO, CA (AP) - A California judge tentatively rejected pimping charges Wednesday against the operators of a major international website that advertises escort services.
Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman said the state attorney general's office cannot continue prosecuting Backpage.com's CEO Carl Ferrer and two former owners.
Bowman set a hearing on his ruling later Wednesday before making his decision final.
The men were charged by California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who called Backpage.com "the world's top online brothel."
The judge agreed with Ferrer and former owners Michael Lacey and James Larkin that the website's operators are protected by federal law related to freedom of speech.
Harris lacked authority to bring the charges because the federal Communications Decency Act, as a way of promoting free speech, grants immunity to website operators for content posted by users, the judge wrote in his seven-page tentative ruling.
"Congress has spoken on this matter and it is for Congress, not this court, to revisit," Bowman wrote, emphasizing the final sentence in boldface.
Ferrer, 55, was charged with pimping a minor, pimping and conspiracy to commit pimping. Lacey, 68, and Larkin, 67, both from Arizona, were charged with conspiracy to commit pimping.
Harris, a Democrat who was elected to the U.S. Senate last week, alleged that more than 90 percent of Backpage revenue - millions of dollars each month - comes from adult escort ads that use coded language and nearly nude photos to offer sex for money. |
A “Tourtière” is a meat pie from Quebec, and is a classic part of the Christmas/Christmas Eve réveillon and New Year’s Eve meal (It’s also great when you are having a bunch of people over for dinner and you are sick of making “bangers in a cloud”, another great recipe that I will post soon). While meat pies are found in many cultures and parts of the world, the tourtiere gets its name from the the creature from which it was traditionally made, the “tourte,” or passenger pigeon. These days there is no one filling that makes a tourtiere what it is, it may be made from any type of meat, though the most common ones are made with pork, veal, beef, or a combination of meats (if you hunt dove, it might be an interesting way to prepare the bird, similar to the original recipe). In Quebec, serving this won’t turn heads, but in the US, tourtiere is not so common, and you may get some “what the… Meat pie?” type of comments. Ignore them, and remember… Knives are for threatening, too. This dish has a lot of flavor, and this is one of my favorite touriere recipes. When you try this, you will see why this is so popular up north.
Ingredients:
Pastry dough for a bottom and top crust (store-bought is fine)
1 tablespoon light olive or canola oil
1/2 pound ground pork
1/2 pound ground beef
3/4 cup chopped onion
1 clove garlic, crushed and finely chopped
1/3 cup shredded carrots
1/4 cup finely chopped celery
2/3 cup beef stock
2 tablespoons Cognac
1 teaspoon dried parsley
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon dried sage
1/4 teaspoon dried thyme
1/16 teaspoon ground cloves
1/16 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/16 teaspoon grated nutmeg
Directions:
1. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Roll out your pastry dough and cut into two equal circles, enough to fit a 9-inch pie pan, and line the bottom of the pan with one piece of the dough.
3. In a pan, heat the oil and saute onion, garlic, celery, and carrot briefly. Add the meat and cook until done.
4. Drain the excess oil and add the stock, herbs, spices, and cognac to the pan and simmer over a low to medium heat for about 15 minutes.
5. Allow to sit for about 5 minutes and then spoon the mixture into the pastry crust in the pie pan and cover with the remaining dough.
6. Seal the pie crust, cut a few vents in the top, and design however you please (if you please).
7. Reduce the heat to 350 and bake the tourtiere for 25 to 30 minutes, until the top turns a golden brown.
8. Let cool for a bit and serve while still warm.
This will easily serve 6 to 8 people and the proportions can be increased to be made in a larger pie mold (or pan). |
BFI: Eyes Without a Face Blu-ray Detailed Posted July 9, 2015 04:56 PM by Webmaster
The British Film Institute has detailed its upcoming Blu-ray release of director Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1960), starring Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel, François Guérin, and Edith Scob. The release will be available for purchase on August 24.
Synopsis: Both cruel and tender, Eyes Without a Face, Georges Franju's unique blend of pulp, horror and poetry has been a major influence on filmmakers, from Jesús Franco to Pedro Almodóvar.
On 24 August 2015 the BFI brings it to Blu-ray for the first time in the UK, releasing it in a Dual Format Edition (Blu-ray and DVD discs) which also contains two short films by Franju, the 2009 documentary Les Fleurs maladives de Georges Franju, an interview with actress Edith Scob and an audio commentary by Tim Lucas.
Dr Genessier (Pierre Brasseur, Le Quai Des Brumes, Les Enfants du Paradis) is a brilliant and obsessive plastic surgeon driven by the need to restore his daughter's (Edith Scob, Judex) disfigured face. He is aided in this quest by his loyal assistant Louise (Alida Valli, Senso), who lures unwitting young women to the secret surgery in his secluded chateau.
Special Features: Monsieur et Madame Curie (Georges Franju, 1953, 14 mins): the life and work of the pioneering scientists, told through the words of Marie Curie
La Premiere nuit (Georges Franju, 1958, 20 mins): a 10-year-old boy spends a night in the Métro
Les Fleurs maladives de Georges Franju (Pierre-Henri Gibert, 2009, 50 mins): an overview of Georges Franju's career
For Her Eyes Only an interview with Edith Scob (LP Hugo, 2014, 17 mins): the actress talks about her work with Georges Franju and their friendship
Audio commentary by film critic Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog
Illustrated booklet featuring essays by Kate Ince, Isabel Stevens, Roberto Cueto Llera, Raymond Durgnat, Kevin Jackson, Michael Brooke and full film credits
Source: Blu-ray.com | Permalink | [Country settings]
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Top contributor rapta Jul 09, 2015 A shame they couldn't secure the rights for Le Sang des Bêtes which they had originally listed when this was announced last January, but glad we are FINALLY getting this! I wonder if we'll get a slipcover for waiting SO LONG for this to be released?
Sigmund100 Jul 10, 2015 Is Billy Idol in this?
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The New York Yankees have been the talk of the baseball world since landing Giancarlo Stanton in a blockbuster trade with the Miami Marlins.
But Stanton might not be long for New York.
Nick Cafardo of The Boston Globe reported Sunday, citing a longtime, major force in baseball, that the Yankees will trade Stanton to the Los Angeles Dodgers following the 2018 season in order to sign Bryce Harper.
New York long has been seen as a suitor for Harper, as the power-hitting outfielder is tailormade for the short porch in right field at Yankee Stadium.
The Washington Nationals outfielder will be a free agent following the 2018 campaign, and he is expected to command a contract upward of $400 million. He undoubtedly will have a number of suitors, with the Yankees, Nationals, Dodgers, Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox potentially being among them, but New York is seen as the club most likely to spend the money on the star outfielder.
As for Stanton and the Dodgers, it was reported that LA was the 2017 National League MVP’s favored destination before he was dealt to the Yankees, so a trade between the Dodgers and Yankees would seem to make sense for both sides.
Of course, after a season of Stanton hitting beside Aaron Judge in the Yankees’ lineup, New York might not want to trade him.
Thumbnail photo via Kim Klement/USA TODAY Sports Images |
Spoilers~
Steven Universe is easily my favorite show on television right now. The art direction, the gorgeous animation, the wide array of lovable characters, the humor, the songs...it's a real gem, pardon the pun. If you don't watch it, I can't recommend it enough. It blends the humor and charm of slice of life stories with the adventure and mystery of fantasy/sci-fi. It's a fun, silly cartoon, but each episode is like a piece of a greater, overarching puzzle that makes up the story.
My body was NOT READY for the "Steven Bomb" season finale. I laughed, I cried, I shrieked inhumanly at the TV when Garnet "died", I shrieked again when she turned out to be a fusion, I watched her "Stronger than You" song/fight sequence more times than I can count (seriously, glad I was home alone that afternoon XD)...just wow. Rebecca Sugar has awakened in me a mighty need for magical space lesbians I never knew I had
don't ask what the heck that pose is about
just pretend they're floating and/or about to fuse
ps my favorite gem is garnet
and my favorite homeworld gem is jasper
and my favorite fusion is sugilite, cuz nicki minaj, hot damn |
This review contains spoilers of a film currently in theaters
Director: Francis Lawrence
The third film of the Hunger Games series was recently released in theaters and has continued the conversation about the nature of political repression and resistance. Like the previous two films, this story deals with the oppression of the “districts” by the powerful Capitol, which had used a yearly violent “hunger games” event where each district had to pay a “tribute” of two citizens to fight to the death in a battle royale that was broadcast across the country. The previous film ended with a plot by some of the tributes in concert with a resistance movement to destroy the arena during the broadcast of the games. This destruction of the arena launched a revolution throughout the districts against the Capitol and is what sets the stage for this film.
Mockingjay Part 1 begins shortly after the previous film’s end. Instead of focusing on the larger society of this universe, most of the time we spend in this film is focused on the resistance movement that is leading a revolution against the Capitol, along with the ruins of the districts that the Capitol has violently destroyed. The main character, Katniss Everdeen (played by Jennifer Lawrence) continues her role as the symbol of the resistance as she had in the previous films. The main difference in this film however is that the revolution was actively under way while in the previous film it was merely being anticipated. Katniss continues to be a unwilling hero and is constantly reluctant to help the resistance, often allowing her personal issues to get in the way of her dedication to the broader cause. For example, her partner from the games Peeta Mellark has been taken hostage by the Capitol and is being used to produce propaganda against the revolutionaries. She feels that he is being forced to denounce the revolution, but she becomes more concerned with saving him from his captors than trying to combat the propaganda that the Capitol has put out against the revolution. The revolutionary leaders are eager to have Katniss begin producing propaganda against the Capitol, as she is already a symbol for the revolution. While she does reluctantly agree, she adds the condition that Peeta (and other tributes) be freed and pardoned for their propaganda against the revolution. This decision upsets many of the revolutionaries but the compromise is made.
This personal motivation of hers is often portrayed as being more important to her than fighting the Capitol, until she is later shown first hand the destruction of her home district, which is when she begins to develop an even deeper opposition to the Capitol’s growing war against the districts. Once she begins to see the destructive nature of the Capitol, Katniss eventually comes around to helping the revolutionaries to a greater extent, but her motivation constantly remains highly personal and individualized. The other revolutionaries are sometimes frustrated by her selfishness and the film does a good job at portraying it as a major struggle between her and her comrades, a sort of critique of personal motivation in a time where great discipline is needed. While Katniss does eventually come around to supporting the revolution, her reluctance shows that she needed to learn to subvert her own interests to the interests of the broader movement. Although it is questionable how temporary her devotion is considering that her main goal remains rescuing Peeta.
The contrast between her personal motivation and the more collective mindset of the revolutionary movement is highlighted by the aesthetic portrayal of the resistance. The conditions that the revolutionaries live in resemble a sort of Ninteen Eighty Four type of society, where everyone wears the same jump suit, a military discipline is required from everyone, and goods and services are scarce. This way of portraying the resistance is an interesting choice that does not come off as a simple critique of their creeping authoritarian tendencies, but rather we are still meant to sympathize with the movement and see the necessity for that kind of discipline considering their conditions. Each film so far has had a different take on Panem (the fictional North American country in which the films take place). The first film focused on the consumerist and joyous character of the Capitol, the second film had a different take on the Capitol that portrayed it as a Fascist society with military parades inspired by Triumph of the Will, and this film focused instead of the seemingly militaristic society that was attempting to overthrow the Capitol’s rule. While this film does not try to make obvious moralistic statements about how the resistance is structured, there seem to be no implied critiques of how they have conducted themselves up to this point, and their ability to fight the Capitol seems to be justification enough for why they exist in the form they do. The brutality of the Capitol is made clear in all three films, so there is not much room for critiquing the way the revolutionaries have waged their war so far.
The film spent a lot of time dealing with the production of propaganda by the revolutionaries instead of focusing on Hollywood style military battles between the good guys and the bad guys. Both the Capitol and the revolutionary movement focus much of their efforts on trying to win a media war against each other, with Peeta being used by the Capitol to discredit the revolutionaries, and Katniss being used to spread the revolutionary message. Unlike most major films however, propaganda is not seen as an inherently negative or dishonest endeavor but rather just another tool of conflict.
Like the previous films, Mockingjay continues to be a film about revolt and subversion of an oppressive system. It is to a large extent a vague struggle between the “good” heroes and the “evil” oppressors which leaves room for much interpretation. This vagueness will allow commentators from both the Left and the Right to claim it as promoting their message. The way in which the resistance is portrayed and the nature of political propaganda complicate the good/evil dichotomy to an extent and show that struggles against oppression can be complicated even in a world like the one depicted in the Hunger Games.
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ONTARIO – Isn’t it wonderful that the Ontario Reign and San Diego Gulls play each other 12 times this season?
Given the way the boys behaved Saturday night at The Vault, in the second night of a back-to-back set, this relationship between the AHL affiliates of the Kings and Ducks is going exactly as planned. No love lost at all, and by the time these players arrive in the NHL, their distaste for the guys on the other side of the rivalry will be firmly in place.
For the record, San Diego won on the scoreboard 3-1 Saturday night, a second straight victory over the Pacific Division leading Reign. Goals by Tim Jackman, Nic Kerdiles and Antoine Laganiere gave the Gulls a 3-0 lead before Adrian Kempe scored his seventh of the year for the Reign.
But the tone was set 2:51 into the evening, when Ontario left wing Paul Bissonnette and Gulls right wing Brian McGrattan dropped the gloves and went at it.
It was not a random incident.
Reign players, as well as Coach Mike Stothers, were irate with McGrattan’s behavior in Friday night’s game in San Diego, specifically a fight with Reign defenseman Kurtis MacDermid in which the Ontario side felt McGrattan fired a couple of extra punches while the linesmen were breaking things up.
Stothers addressed it after the game, as reported by Lindsay Czarnecki on the Reign Insider blog:
“What is surprising to me is the lack of respect McGrattan had for the ‘code of a fighter.’ The (original) hit itself is one thing but why would he throw not one, but two punches, to the face of MacDermid when the linesman had ‘both’ tied up. MacDermid is defenseless at this point and could have been seriously hurt. I certainly would expect better of a guy that was once considered the heavyweight champ of the NHL. Physical is one thing, and a fair fight I can live with, but I can not stomach watching one of my players being taken advantage of, and possibly injured.”
Bissonnette, a veteran of 202 NHL games who had been out the previous six games with a back issue, personally addressed it on his first shift Saturday night.
“If I kind of take him out of the equation, maybe it settles the other guys down a little bit,” he said. “He’s a pretty scary guy. He’s been around a long time. I was just doing my job.”
McGrattan drew a 10-minute misconduct for “inciting” the scrap, in addition to the five-minute fighting major. Later, Andrew Crescenzi dumped McGrattan over the boards and into the San Diego bench, touching off another fracas that ended with the Gulls’ Mike Sgarbossa drawing a double-minor, Crescenzi a roughing penalty and McGrattan another misconduct.
Oh, and did we forget the chirping between Stothers himself and McGrattan?
“I just asked him how his family was,” the Ontario coach said with a hint of a smirk. “He must have read the tweets, I guess, of my postgame comments. I stand by what I said. If he doesn’t like it, too bad.”
McGrattan – a 34-year-old right wing who has played 317 NHL games with Ottawa, Phoenix, Calgary and Nashville sandwiched around a lot of games in the minors – probably didn’t intend to be the face of this rivalry. But hockey’s funny that way.
And Bissonnette’s willingness to engage helps explain why the Kings signed him to an AHL contract in Manchester last season, and why they brought him back this year. These are lessons that can be valuable to younger players, lessons about sticking up for your mates and taking one for the team when needed.
“You talk about a character guy, you talk about a teammate, you talk about a guy you need in your dressing room and on your bench,” Stothers said. “He’s involved the whole game long, whether he’s pumping up our guys or chirping the other team.
“I think (the combination of Bissonnette and Scott Sabourin, another rugged forward) go out and they’re a little reckless. They bang around. It’s exciting.
“You just stand back and say, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen now.’ That’s the beauty of it.”
Just think, there are nine more games to go between these teams, including one more back-to-back to close the season, April 15-16.
Good seats, I presume, will be available.
Contact the writer: [email protected] |
By Craig Masters
The photos are horrific. Groups of young Muslim girls gathered by their own mothers and other family members, held down and screaming in pain while the perverted followers of the political system called Islam mutilate their sex organs in a mass “ceremony” totally endorsed and practiced throughout the Muslim world. But Indonesia has one of the largest Muslim populations in the world and the government’s ability to even slow down this barbaric practice of mutilation of female genitalia has failed so miserably that the Ministry of Health finally decided to try to reduce the severity of these bloody mutilations by publishing approved “guidelines.”
According to a report published in the Jakarta Globe, guidelines on how to perform female genital mutilation/cutting issued by the Indonesian Ministry of Health could cause an increase in the practice, medical experts and rights groups fear. The “guidelines” are not an approval for the practice, but the hope is, “This will give doctors a new motivation to circumcise [girls] because now they can say the Ministry of Health approves of this, and the Indonesian Council of Ulema [MUI] approves of it,” said Jurnalis Uddin, a doctor and lecturer at Yarsi University in Jakarta.
The hope is that if a doctor performs the service, there might at least be some anesthetic relief and sterile instruments; unlike used razor blades and no effort at all to avoid infection. After all, according to the teachings of the founder of Islam, an openly homosexual zoophile named Muhammad, Muslim men are expected to ensure the sexual obedience of their women by mutilating them to the point of eliminating their ability to enjoy sexual pleasure.
Experts say there has been increasing support for the practice from Muslim groups since the downfall of authoritarian Indonesian leader, Suharto, in 1998, resulting in greater religious and political freedom, known as “Reformasi.”
“Before Reformasi, female genital mutilation/circumcision [FGM/C] was mostly done on an individual basis, but since Reformasi, it has been done in mass events,” said Siti Musda Mulia, an academic specializing in Islamic studies, who initially conducted research on the process during the Suharto era, and has conducted follow-up research since 1998.
According to a report published by the Huffington Post in February of 2011, the United Nations released an estimate of 90% of women in Egypt have been subjected to sexual organ mutilation. And the numbers are expected to be as high in at least a dozen more countries among the 28 countries currently identified as having widespread female mutilation practices. But worse news will probably come from within the previously closed societies of Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan where Islamic practices are compounded by centuries of in-breeding which have resulted in a population with a lower IQ than the rest of the world.
But the sexual deviancy of practicing Muslims has an economic impact as well as a mental one. Mental abuse resulting from the Islamic standard practice of sexual abuse of young boys has resulted in lack of both ambition, and the feeling of destitution. According to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency report on the economic output of the north African coastal region, the non-oil GDP of the entire region is less than the state of Georgia (2009, $395billion). This indicates that employment opportunities are non-existent. The lack of opportunity and hopelessness, combined with a genetically reduced IQ ,is the ideal breeding ground for terrorists convinced they can have more sex in their afterlife if they simply follow just one last order by an imam who may well have sexually abused then as young boys.
There is one beneficial aspect of the predictable sexual perversion of Muslim leaders. Al Qaeda leader, Abu al-Zarkawi, was attending a regularly scheduled Thursday night homosexual orgy that had become “legalized’ by the local Imam who had declared that Allah was busy on Thursdays so there would be no sin for the guy on the bottom. Remember, the man on top is not committing a sin, according to the Quran.
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Classic cars are great to look at. Their sharp chrome bumpers and bold grilles might not be ideal for aerodynamics or pedestrian safety, but they sure do look good.
The problems with owning a classic car start when you climb behind the wheel. Most pre-1960 classics struggle to drive at highway speeds for extended periods of time and braking must be done months in advance to prevent flying through a red light. What are people supposed to do when they want that cool 1950’s style but still need a daily driver? Jonathan Ward of ICON in California thinks he might have the answer: Why not have an unassuming-looking vintage car with modern underpinnings?
There is a shop in California that brings rusty classics into the modern age. It's called ICON customs Clayton Seams , Driving
The ICON workshop is always busy and full of various classics getting the ICON treatment. Clayton Seams , Driving.ca
The bench seats are actually specially filled with high and low density foam to create a bucket seat effect while maintaining the classic look. Clayton Seams , Driving.ca
This Buick uses a supercharged Corvette engine. Note the hand aged plastic cover. Clayton Seams , Driving.ca
The weathered finish of the Derelicts is preserved instead of being painted over. Clayton Seams , Driving.ca
The waiting list to get your very own ICON Derelict is more than two years. Clayton Seams , Driving.ca
“The problem with older cars,” Ward says, “is that you’re a martyr to them.”
Ward realized early on that using a stock 1950’s car as daily transportation was fraught with issues, so he decided to build a 1950’s car of his own. He started with a 1952 Chrysler station wagon that had a lovely rusted and faded patina and added the front clip of a similarly aged DeSoto. Then he got creative.
The ancient Chrysler underpinnings were replaced with an advanced Art Morrison chassis with modern suspension and powerful disc brakes, then a modern 6.1-litre Dodge Hemi was placed under the hood.
This is the point where most hot rodders would paint the wagon a deep metallic red and add modern leather bucket seats to the interior. But Ward did the opposite. He clear-coated the original faded paint on the wagon to preserve it and kept the original layout of the interior. He retained the pizza-sized steering wheel and made all the antique chrome switches and knobs work with a modern climate control system.
It started out as a personal project, but when he was finished, he realized, “This is ICON,” and he turned it into a business.
The car went on to win multiple awards, made it onto an episode of Jay Leno’s Garage, was featured on the cover of Hot Rod magazine and soon enough, requests starting pouring in from people who wanted their very own “brand new” beat-up hot rod.
Ward calls these cars the Derelicts and if you want one, you have to put down a hefty deposit and then wait more than two years before they can even start work on your car. But when you see these cars up close, it’s easy to see why people are willing to wait.
The attention to detail borders insanity. Every visual cue of the cars’ modern underpinnings are carefully hidden. One customer wanted a centre armrest with a modern big-gulp sized cupholder and a charge port for his iPhone. Ward says it took over 140 hours to design, prototype, cad plate and upholster. And that was just for the armrest! Even the bench seats, which look low-tech, feature different kinds of foam to create a bucket sensation as you sit on them with a subtle bolstering effect. It’s easy to walk around one of these cars for hours just soaking in the details.
The fact that these cars don’t require intensive maintenance opens up the market for a whole new buying demographic. Many of the people who buy ICON Derelicts aren’t the type who spend their weekends rebuilding engines on their kitchen table, but are a new kind of enthusiast that want classic style with modern drivability.
But the Derelicts are just one part of ICON’s business. ICON started out as a company making off-road parts for Toyota Land Cruisers and today they make turn-key Land Cruisers and Ford Broncos with modern components. But their off-roaders have paint. Of course, they’ll still make you a Derelict should you wish, but Ward acknowledges that the Derelict cars are “the dumbest business thing we do” because of the insane amount of time it takes to build each one.
There are, of course, people who don’t “get” the Derelicts. The whole point is to preserve that beautiful natural patina the cars have earned, but some people just don’t understand the appeal. But if you want a truly one-of-a-kind classic that gets attention at every car show and can drive you to and from work without issues, you might want to consider getting in line for a Derelict. |
Former FBI Asst. Director: Original Clinton Probe 'Not a Real Investigation'
Fmr CNN Executive Reacts to Donna Brazile-Hillary Debate Question Leak
O'Reilly: 'Americans Will Be Uneasy' No Matter Who Wins Presidency
Rudy Giuiliani reacted to new WikiLeaks revelations that Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman apparently called for the "dumping" of several emails prior to a subpoena.
"There's no question anymore as to whether or not Hillary Clinton, [Huma] Abedin, and [John] Podesta violated the laws," Giuliani, a former New York City mayor, told Sean Hannity.
"You'd have to be almost stupid not to realize it," he said, adding that the "dump" remark showed that the Clinton team's "first reaction is to do something criminal."
Giuliani pointed out that the "dump" remark came before 33,000 emails were "bleached" rather than handed over.
"That's a pretty sophisticated level of crime. Now she says she wants the emails turned over. Well, Hillary if you wanted the emails turned over, what'd you bleach them for?"
He added that more shocking aspect is "the tremendous cover-up that took place" and the corruption of the Justice Department.
He said that Attorney General Loretta Lynch recused herself from the email probe: "Yet she was telling the director of the FBI that he couldn't respond to Congress" before Friday's letter from Comey.
"The Justice Department, it seems to me, is the one that corrupted this investigation," he said, "There has to be a couple of people there that are also going to be liable eventually when this gets investigated."
Watch the full discussion above.
What Did Clinton Campaign Chair Mean By 'Dump Emails' Before Subpoena?
Krauthammer: Clinton 'Drowning in Cumulative Effect' of WikiLeaks, FBI Probe
Gutfeld on Clinton 'Sexism': Hillary 'Looks Out for Only Herself' |
Prepubertal gonadectomy (PPG) is promoted for population control in cats, but concerns related to health and behavior still exist. From a behavioral point of view, in order for PPG to be an acceptable alternative for traditional-age gonadectomy (TAG), the occurrence of undesirable behavior should be unaffected by age at gonadectomy. The aims of this study were to investigate (1) whether the average number of (potentially) undesirable behaviors in shelter kittens during 24 months after adoption was associated with the age at gonadectomy and (2) whether social or environmental factors were related to the occurrence of commonly reported undesirable behaviors (inappropriate elimination, fearfulness, aggression, and destruction). Eight hundred healthy kittens between the estimated age of 8 and 12 weeks (0.7 and 1.4 kg) were recruited from animal shelters in Flanders, Belgium. Before adoption, kittens were randomly assigned to a PPG group (gonadectomy on assignment) and a TAG group (gonadectomy between 6 and 8 months of age). Online short- and long-term follow-ups were conducted using a 30-day diary immediately after adoption and surveys at 2, 6, 12, 18, and 24 months after adoption. Mean number of potentially undesirable behaviors per day during the first month after adoption was not significantly different between PPG (1.48 ± 0.957) and TAG (1.39 ± 0.899) kittens (P = 0.32) and neither was the evolution of the mean number of potentially undesirable behaviors and undesirable behaviors during the long-term follow-up (P = 0.0946 and P = 0.10, respectively). The occurrence of inappropriate elimination, fearful behavior, non–play-related aggression, and destruction was associated with other social and environmental variables (e.g., the use of punishment by the owner and friendliness toward a stranger). In conclusion, this study in shelter cats did not demonstrate an effect of age at the time of gonadectomy on the mean number of (potentially) undesirable behaviors during 24 months after adoption. Other factors seem to play a more dominating role in the development of such behaviors. |
Mobs rampaged across a north Indian state on Friday, leaving 28 people dead and more than 250 others injured, after a court declared a quasi-religious sect leader guilty of raping two of his followers, authorities said.
Mobs set fire to government buildings and attacked police and TV journalists in the town of Panchkula in Haryana state, smashing the windshields of news vans and breaking broadcast equipment.
Police initially used tear gas and water cannons and then fired bullets in the air in an attempt to control the surging mobs as people vandalized bus stations and government vehicles.
"The situation is tense. There has been arson and burning," Rajiv Mehrishi, the federal home secretary, said late Friday.
He said more than 1,000 of the guru's supporters had been detained in Panchkula on charges of arson and destruction of public property.
The special court announced the guilty verdict on Friday after hearing closing arguments in the 15-year-old case against the guru, who calls himself Saint Dr. Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Ji Insaan.
Indian paramilitary soldiers stand guard near an Indian court in Panchkula on Friday. Several north Indian cities were under a security lockdown as a court issued a verdict in a rape case involving a man who calls himself Saint Dr. Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Ji Insaan. (Altaf Qadri/Associated Press)
The guru, who had denied the charges of raping the two women at his ashram in 2002, was flown by helicopter to a jail in the nearby town of Rohtak because district officials feared they would be overrun by his supporters. His sentencing is to be held Aug. 28, prosecutor H.P.S. Verma said.
Tens of thousands of followers had camped overnight awaiting the verdict.
Internet services shut down
Violence also broke out elsewhere in Haryana and the neighbouring state of Punjab, as well as in the capital, New Delhi, police said. Railway stations in the towns of Malout and Balluana were ablaze, and two coaches of an empty train parked in New Delhi's Anand Vihar station were set on fire.
A curfew was imposed in at least four districts of Punjab, said Amrinder Singh, the state's chief minister.
A spokesperson for the guru's sect, Dera Sacha Sauda, urged his supporters to remain calm.
"I just want to request everyone to maintain peace at the moment," said Dilawar Insan. "We will explore what legal options are available to us."
The sect claims to have about 50 million followers and campaigns for vegetarianism and against drug addiction. It has also taken up social causes such as organizing the weddings of poor couples.
Such sects have huge followings in India. It's not unusual for their leaders to have small, heavily armed private militias protecting them.
Angry mobs also attacked police in the town of Sirsa, where the guru's ashram is located, local police said.
When the guru left his ashram early Friday for the hearing, he was accompanied by a convoy of more than 180 vehicles, Singh, the Punjab chief minister, said.
Police erected heavy metal barricades topped with barbed wire along main roads in the town, a quiet residential suburb of Chandigarh, the joint capital of Haryana and Punjab states.
Authorities ordered internet and cellphone services shut down across both Haryana and Punjab as a security precaution.
Train services were cancelled in the area, leading to railway delays across north India. Schools and colleges were also closed.
The case was tried in a special court run by India's top investigative agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation.
Ram Rahim Singh, seen in a May file photo, was convicted of raping two followers, prompting the violent protest. (Tsering Topgyal/Associated Press)
Such cases against religious leaders have prompted violence in the past.
Clashes in 2007 between Dera Sacha Sauda followers and members of the Sikh faith left at least three people dead in north India.
In 2014, six people were killed when followers of another religious leader, guru Rampal, fought pitched battles with police who were attempting to arrest him after he repeatedly failed to appear in court in connection with a murder trial.
In a televised appeal on Thursday, Ram Rahim Singh asked his supporters not to resort to violence, but some said they would not tolerate a verdict that went against their leader.
"I consider guru-ji to be only next to God," farmer Malkit Singh said as he squatted on the ground in a park, saying Ram Rahim Singh had cured him of a 10-year addiction to drugs.
"There is a God above," he said. "Our guru-ji follows the path of truth." |
Copyright by WCMH - All rights reserved
COLUMBUS (WCMH) -- President Barack Obama is scheduled to stop in Columbus, on Tuesday, encouraging people to vote early and for Hillary Clinton.
The visit will be Obama's second to the area, in the matter of weeks.
On October 13, he served as the keynote speaker at the Ohio Democratic Party's state dinner.
Tuesday's campaign stop will be at the Capital University field house. Doors open at 2:30pm, with the event beginning at 4:30pm.
Members of the public interested in attending can RSVP here.
The field house is located at 2360 E. Mound St., Columbus OH 43209.
Tickets can be picked up at the following locations, according to Clinton's campaign:
Saturday, October 29
1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Upper Arlington Ohio Together Office
1640 W. Lane Ave.
Upper Arlington, OH 43221
Sunday, October 30
10:00 am - 8:00 pm
Harry C. Moores Student Union Lobby
745 Pleasant Ridge Dr.
Columbus, OH 43209
Sunday, October 30
1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Upper Arlington Ohio Together Office
1640 W. Lane Ave.
Upper Arlington, OH 43221
Monday, October 31
2:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Columbus Ohio Together Office
975 Parsons Ave.
Columbus, OH 43206
Monday, October 31
2:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Columbus Ohio Together Office
1574 N. High St.
Columbus, OH 43201 |
Now more than a week into training camp, the Ottawa Redblacks are looking at two Canadian Football League preseason games that could decide who stays and who goes.
The Hamilton Tiger-Cats are in Ottawa for a game Thursday night, and then the Redblacks will travel to Montreal to face the Alouettes on June 15.
“I’m not totally committing to this, but, if people are healthy, they’re dressing and they’re going to play,” Redblacks head coach Rick Campbell said after Monday’s practice. “We’ve had a bunched-up schedule in the pre-season in the past, but the spacing is a week apart (this year), so we’ll probably play everybody in both games.”
Campbell and the coaching staff had a chance to evaluate film after Saturday’s mock game.
“It’s kind of what I thought,” Campbell said. “We have guys who are enthusiastic and working hard. There are things we need to clean up. That’s part of training camp. Part of the trick to becoming a good team is you get better at things each day and check things off the list as you go.
“We want to reduce the penalties as much as possible. We’re trying to make sure guys know the scheme and know what we’re doing so we can play fast.”
Lineman Ceresna back for another shot
A year ago, fresh off from receiving a look from the National Football League’s Kansas City Chiefs, was hoping to earn a spot on the Redblacks roster.
Now, in 2017, it’s much the same for the big defensive lineman.
The 22-year-old Ceresna was released by the Redblacks last year after breaking a hand, a “freak accident” where he got tripped up.
After he left Ottawa and his hand healed, he received a call from the NFL’s New York Jets and agreed to sign. Near the end of the pre-season, he hurt an ankle in a pileup and was released.
He kept training and worked in a physical therapy clinic, waiting for another professional opportunity.
Ceresna participated in an NFL veterans combine in March, but that didn’t generate any solid offers, so he agreed to return to Ottawa.
“I’m getting good feedback so far,” he said Monday. “They like the way I’m playing. I’m just trying to make plays and keep doing everything I can to make this the best team possible.”
At 6-6 and 294 pounds, Ceresna was a beast in college football for State University of New York at Cortland. He recorded 142 tackles, 42 quarterback hurries and 14.5 sacks.
[email protected]
Twitter.com/TimCBaines |
Well, I’m not sure that myth is quite dead yet, but it appears that it took a direct hit. Still, a majority of Democrats believe that Russia hacked the election. And by hacked, I mean messed with vote tallies. There is no evidence to suggest that, as DHS officials, including former Secretary Jeh Johnson, noted this week. The Russians did not tamper with the vote totals. Regardless, this is some of the best tin-foil hat drama from the Left in a long time. Still, for the NY Post’s editorial board, Johnson and company’s testimony killed this myth and blamed the Obama administration for peddling it and mishandling the situation to the point where it snowballed into unbridled hysteria. Now, they do admit, like everyone else, that there was a Russian interference campaign waged by fake news and social media trolls, but added that it played no pivotal role—and it didn’t:
Johnson told the House Intelligence Committee outright that the Russians failed to alter “ballots, ballot counts or reporting of election results.” Yes, it’s clear Russia (with Vladimir Putin’s full approval) orchestrated cyberattacks designed to influence the 2016 contest, and also pushed fake news. But the hack, and release via WikiLeaks, etc., of Democratic emails produced nothing game-changing. The biggest impact was to confirm the obvious: The Democratic National Committee favored Hillary Clinton from the start. […] Johnson also made it plain that Democrats didn’t take the problem too seriously: “The FBI and the DNC had been in contact with each other months before about the intrusion, and the DNC did not feel it needed DHS’s assistance at that time.” Johnson also explained why the Obama administration kept quiet on the threat. The White House, he recalled, argued that a public admission of possible Russian interference might be seen as an effort to influence the election — particularly since Donald Trump was warning “the election was going to be rigged.” That is: Because Obama was fervently campaigning for Clinton, the White House figured that raising alarms about Russian interference would seem mere electioneering. […] The administration didn’t take action until after Election Day, when it slapped Moscow with new sanctions — putting the question of Russian interference on Page One only after Trump had won. It’s good that the hysteria has finally died down, but too bad Team Obama’s handling of it all helped produce so much misdirected hysteria in the first place.
Following Hillary Clinton’s defeat, The New York Times reported that Obama officials were rushed to spread their information about Russian meddling with as many people in government as possible. The only question here is why now? If Russian interference was so terrible, why didn’t they take action? Former CIA Director John Brennan did reach out to his Russian counterparts to tell them to quit their activities concerning our election, but were not heeded. After that, there was nothing. Maybe that’s why there are reports that Hillary Clinton is actually more infuriated with Obama than James Comey or the Russians.
The issue is that Democrats are still going mad over Trump being president. It will be exacerbated by Jon Ossoff’s loss in Georgia, making the Democratic Party 0-4 in special elections. Maybe the Russians tampered with those vote totals too, huh? Or maybe it’s just that the Left isn’t coming out of the political wilderness just yet. |
Christopher Strong (Photo: Courtesy photo)
"I shot him. It was me," the man shouted to police.
Minutes earlier, he had intervened in a domestic dispute prosecutors say could have left him and his female neighbor dead. Prosecutors ruled he acted in self-defense last year when he wrestled a gun away from Christopher Strong, 27, and shot him with it.
None of that was immediately clear the night of Sept. 16. Police found the neighbor performing CPR on Strong when they arrived around 10 p.m. to the South Pine Street apartment where Strong lived with his girlfriend. Strong, shot once in the chest, died at the scene a short time later. Police handcuffed the neighbor, who at one point appeared on the verge of passing out and asked to speak to his pastor, according to police reports.
Ingham County Prosecutor Stuart Dunnings III ruled Strong's death a justifiable homicide late last year, he confirmed earlier this month.
The State Journal is not naming the woman or the neighbor because they were not charged with a crime.
'Call the police'
Strong had been drinking before arriving home that night, the girlfriend told police, and a fight ensued.
Strong kicked her leg and spit in her face, she told police. She dialed 911 when Strong refused to leave. That agitated Strong, who threatened her with a semi-automatic handgun loaded with hollow-point bullets, according to records. The gun was registered to Strong's ex-girlfriend, police said.
According to his then-girlfriend, Strong said: "If anyone shows up, no one is getting out of this apartment." She took that to mean he would kill her, her son and himself, she told police.
At 9:45 p.m, she texted the neighbor: "Can u come get (my son) hes at ur door please and call the police." The neighbor let her son inside.
At 9:51 p.m., the neighbor replied: "Can u leave safely."
The neighbor went to the couple's apartment and heard a gunshot after entering, he told police. An errant shot had been fired, according to police.
The neighbor told police he then attempted to wrestle the gun away from Strong, who struck him several times in the head with the butt of the gun. As the struggle continued, the neighbor got control of the gun and shot Strong, according to police. The neighbor told police he pulled the trigger because he feared Strong would overpower and kill him.
Contrary to the police report, Strong's brother, Lilton Montgomery Jr., said Strong would never threaten to shoot his girlfriend or her son. Montgomery said the neighbor took matters into his own hands and should have waited for police. He said police relied too heavily on the accounts of the girlfriend, the neighbor, and what tenants said they heard, and not enough on physical evidence.
"What we know of Chris, the story just doesn't add up," Montgomery said. "I think he was scared that night. He didn't know what to do."
"Outside of the police report, the family's concerns pertain to the police investigation itself," Strong's father, Lilton Montgomery Sr., said in an email. "The family maintains the feeling that justice has not been served in Chris' homicide case."
Strong's family moved from Detroit to Lansing in the 1990s to find a safer home, Montgomery Jr. said
Strong had recently started a job driving commercial trucks and hoped to drive around the country. His obituary said he volunteered frequently in the community for local nonprofits, get-out-the-vote campaigns and Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.
"This is our absolute worst case scenario that he would get shot," Montgomery Jr. said. "He had his issues, but he was a positive person."
Read or Share this story: http://on.lsj.com/1yCFwSO |
SEATTLE, July 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Cedar Grove Composting announced today that it is working with BioFerm Energy Systems, a German-based clean energy generation company owned by The Viessmann Group, to integrate anaerobic digestion into its composting process. The proposed technology employs a high-solids anaerobic digester that produces a usable biogas by enhancing natural processes to convert food scraps and yard clippings into a viable fuel. That biogas can then be used as either natural gas for auto and truck fuel or to produce electricity. Cedar Grove is in the engineering and design phase of this project.
"Cedar Grove is always seeking proven new technologies to bring waste materials to a higher use, for example, turning food waste into compost or energy," said Steve Banchero, Cedar Grove Composting CEO. "Cedar Grove is moving into the next realm of its development, the creation of green energy from food scraps that were once destined for a land fill. This is the closed loop business model that is our core competency and focus."
The project is one of the first and largest of its kind in the U.S. The digester will produce biogas by converting once wasted food and yard scraps into digestate that can then be combusted to produce electricity and heat, or be scrubbed to natural gas quality. These can be used as a renewable alternative to compressed natural gas applications, such as transportation fuel. Once operational, the digester will produce energy equivalent to the electricity usage of 400 homes or the fuel for 1,100 passenger vehicles per year.
"Like all of our sustainable business models, we need a healthy aftermarket for the products and by-products we produce in order for our programs to be viable," continued Banchero. "Our model is to continue to make quality products from materials that are otherwise destined for the landfill and sell them back into our local market. We are currently looking to secure contracts for sale of electricity or natural gas in order to complete our digester business plan."
"We have researched this technology in use in Europe and we are hopeful through our partnership with BioFerm that we can adapt it to U.S. standards and economics. We are excited about its potential to produce green energy from food scraps and yard waste," Banchero said. "Our plans are to start with a relatively small digester and expand the use of this technology when it has proven itself in our system."
By producing energy from food waste and reducing green house gases, Cedar Grove will help reduce landfill volumes, saving space for items that truly have no greater usage. Energy made from source separated food and yard waste is also a cleaner fuel than landfill derived methane.
About Cedar Grove Composting
Cedar Grove Composting is part of a family-owned 400-employee enterprise with roots in the waste management business going back to 1938. As the Pacific Northwest's leading organic recycling company, Cedar Grove transforms grass, leaves, yard trimmings, food waste and wood waste into the finest, nutrient-rich compost. Cedar Grove has developed a full line of healthy soils with a loyal following and has grown from humble beginnings to one of the largest urban composting facilities in the world. Check www.cgcompost.com or call 206-832-3000 for more information.
SOURCE Cedar Grove Composting |
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With the first of their two first-round picks in the 2015 NFL draft, the Saints have bolstered their offensive line.
Andrus Peat, an offensive tackle from Stanford, is going to New Orleans as the 13th overall pick.
The pick is one that will surely make Drew Brees happy, as Peat should make an immediate difference along the Saints’ offensive line. Brees has been sacked 37 and 29 times in the last two seasons, the two highest sack totals of his career. Peat should help bring that number down.
The Saints still have plenty of holes on their roster and are in precarious salary cap shape, but they’ll get another first round pick in a couple hours: Trading Jimmy Graham netted New Orleans the No. 31 overall pick. Perhaps that will also go toward a player who will make Brees happy. |
On Oct. 15, 2010, Fenway Sports Group completed their purchase of Liverpool Football Club. Since, the Anfield outfit has sacked a pair of managers, spent a significant sum of money and nearly secured their first English top-flight trophy since 1990. Here are some key stats that illustrate FSG's ownership of Liverpool on their five-year anniversary.
The right signings?
Since FSG's takeover, Liverpool have been an active club in the transfer market. However, while the club has been aggressive in recruiting young talent with resale value, their success rate in recruitment has been suspect to say the least.
Sibling spending sprees
There can be little argument with the level of investment FSG have made in Liverpool personnel, parting with more than £300 million in five years. But when compared to the sums splashed out by FSG siblings the Boston Red Sox, ownership's outlay on Merseyside looks significantly less lavish.
Financially flourishing
Unfortunately for FSG, their takeover of the club coincided with a significant drop in performance from Liverpool's historically lofty heights. Despite that, the owners have managed to increase revenues and dramatically pay down the club's debt.
Dressed to impress
FSG has brokered two club-record kit deals. The first with Michigan-based Warrior coming in 2012, and the second announced in February with Warrior's parent club, Boston's New Balance.
This is Anfield
Liverpool have long flirted with the idea of leaving historic Anfield in search of a new home with more seats and greater ticket revenue. Under FSG, though, the club's historic home has grown by 8,500 seats. |
How do you know with certainty that Davos has not only jumped the shark, but has become a parody of itself? One answer: when you have a handful of semi, and not so semi, billionaires - perplexed by the populist backlash of the past year - sit down and discuss among each other how a "Squeezed and Angry" middle-class should be fixed.
As Davos puts it, "once the lynchpin of developed economies, it’s now threatened by job losses and stagnant wages, paving the way for the rise of populism. In emerging markets, middle class growth rates are stalling. Have middle class problems been forgotten?" It asks rhetorically "What can be done?"
Apparently the answer is to have three people completely disconnected from the real world, sit down and provide "answers.":
In this session, starting at 0800 GMT, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, Italian Finance Minister Pier Carlo Padoan and Founder, Chairman and Co-CIO of Bridgewater Associates, Ray Dalio, discuss what's needed to restore growth in the middle class and confidence in the future.
And then they wonder why the annual Davos echo chamber boondoggle has become not only a global farce, but a symbol of everything that is wrong with globalization today...
Watch it live below |
Oroville dam, the tallest in the nation, is currently in danger of structural failure.
Thousands living downstream from its desperate cascading water releases are evacuating their homes in Hollywood disaster-film fashion. Something premodern and apocalyptic like this was not supposed to have happened in a postmodern California of Google, Hollywood, and Napa Valley wineries.
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California’s politicians and pundits in recent years of drought swore the state was entering a cycle of permanent drought (and thus saw no need to start construction on a single dam to store the rain and snow that supposedly would not return). Instead, they warned of the “settled science” of climate change and the need for permanent conservation and restrictions—even as near record storms this year have pushed California’s snow and rain levels in many places to over 200 percent of normal, well beyond the ability of our now ossified water projects to store the deluge that heads out to sea.
Oroville, along with its twin Shasta dam, anchors California's vast water transfer system, the largest and most ingeniously designed in the world. But Oroville’s half-century-old and now damaged spillways were in dire need of maintenance, especially given that auxiliary dams in the region envisioned to alleviate the pressure on Oroville were long ago cancelled. Indeed, the entire California Water Project and federal Central Valley Project were never finished, even as California’s population more than doubled.
After the early 1980s, the state’s politicians and courts decided that dams, as one critic put it, were “a relic of the Industrial Age, a brute-force solution to water scarcity.” They forget that they had been a staple of civilization since the Mycenaean Greeks built them to ward off flood and drought.
Californians also forgot that our forefathers saw in the state’s northern and mountain dams and their subsidiary aqueducts and canals a brilliant solution to the California paradox of two thirds of the population wishing to work and live where one third of the state’s annual rain and snow fell.
After all, so far Stanford University has not been willing to relocate to Crescent City. Facebook has no desire to move to Marysville; and the hipsters of San Francisco do not prefer the weather in Redding. Malibu stars are not likely to transfer their beach residents to the coast at Humboldt. The key to California’s water solutions was that it was among both the wettest and driest of states, and thus was the sole arbiter of its water destiny, without endless poly-state rivalries and feuds that plague the transference and distribution of the waters of the Colorado River.
Dam supporters today are written off by cool greens as hopelessly anachronistic and deprecated as “water buffalos.” Yet a wiser California public has consistently voted for more dam construction, only to be stymied by Byzantine and politicized bureaucracies and a flood of lawsuits.
Working people appreciate in dams and reservoirs a brilliant symbiosis that today’s elites miss entirely. California’s system of dams, if they had been finished and well maintained, all but ended the annual winter and spring nightmares of flooding, which one took thousands of lives in northern and mountainous California and made flood basins unlivable—until a prescient generation in the late 19th and 20th century began building what would become a vast network of some 1300 reservoirs.
No wonder hoi polloi favored dam construction. Those without money to vacation at California’s touristy coast escaped the heat of the Central Valley by driving up to fish, swim in, and camp out by the clean mountain water of hundreds of often alpine and picturesque man-made lakes.
California’s dams also turned millions of desert acres of the Central Valley into a verdant belt of the most productive farmland in the world. Hydroelectric projects—that likewise were largely ended when new dam construction was cancelled—once made California’s energy the cleanest and among the most affordable in the country.
But the best barometer of the dams’ importance was the fact that for all the threats of tearing them down, even the greenest of California politicians quietly accepted that without a Oroville, Shasta, or Hetch Hetchy there would be no Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Stanford, or Cal Tech—all situated in an ideal Mediterranean climate and landscape to which millions of people flocked only after water was imported to support them. In crude reductionist terms, the teeming San Fernando Valley and Santa Barbara wants the water that rural Oroville wants to get rid of.
But if our generation could not quite tear dams down, environmentalists managed to stop the spread of them, ensuring that the third phase of the state’s water projects was never built, robbing California of millions of acre feet of water storage which in a wet year like 2017 would have provided stored water to tide over the next drought. After, all a state of 15 million people built the water projects, and a contemporary California of 40 million paradoxically swore it would build no more. even as it was silently grateful for the inherence of its far sighted forefathers.
On occasion, environmentalists have rightly urged more maintenance on the dams spillways, but largely to ensure that reservoir waters could be safely and efficiently drawn down and emptied when lawsuits forced water releases for fish restoration, bay area fresh-water infusions, and wild river runs to the ocean.
These were new agendas never envisioned by the original architects of the system, who saw human needs solved by flood relief, irrigation, recreation, and power generation first, and salmon swimming from the sea to the Sierra second. The dams were a tough tradeoff between progress and nature: an arid state that would grow to 40 million would have artificial but beautiful reservoirs—but not white water rapids of a once pristine and scarcely populated 19th-century paradise.
How does our generation stack up to the that of the dam builders and “water buffalos”? Contemporary California has among the country’s highest basket of fuel, income and sales taxes and yet is facing another billion-dollar-plus annual budget deficit. Its schools and roads are rated near last in the nation. Its coveted high-speed rail project has not laid a foot of track as costs balloon to an envisioned $100 billion. Never have so many incompetents of the present been so critical of so few geniuses of the past.
It is symptomatic of the present generation’s hubris and historical ignorance that it ridicules the logic of a prior generation’s infrastructure that it gladly inherited and uses but will not well maintain and expand—even as its own legacy is one of an increasing pyramidal state that is home to the greatest number of the nation’s poor and rich—and increasingly few in between. Californians have become squatters of sorts on an infrastructure that others built.
Pie-in-the-sky calls for a network of coastal desalination plants miss the ancient logic of dams and reservoirs. Desalination demands energy to make modest amounts of water; gravity powered mountain runoff behind dams creates vast amounts of stored water that produces rather than consumes electrical power. A desalinization plant is ugly; a Huntington Lake is stunning. Lakes and canals are cool; sea-water conversion plants generate heat. Pumping water into the ground makes sense; but it works best when most runoff is first banked and stored for later release rather than simply let out to flood to the ocean.
The cracks on the face of Oroville Dam remind us that we have abused and caricatured what we inherited. In penance we might do better to listen to the wisdom of the past rather than to parrot the ignorance of the present.
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Follow him on Twitter @VDHanson.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill. |
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The TCA (Television Critics Association) press tour can feel like a pretty stuffy event sometimes, but you could feel the excitement in the air as the time approached for the Arrested Development panel today. The beloved comedy is making an amazing comeback, via new episodes – 14 to be precise, a number confirmed by Netflix today as they officially announced the show would debut in May (exact date TBA), with all the episodes being released at once.
There were a few quick glimpses of Arrested in a clip montage of upcoming Netflix series earlier in the day, including Michael and Gob running into one another and Gob up on a crucifix. The panel itself began without any clips though, as creator Mitch Hurwitz revealed, “One of the challenges of the show was to be surprising and that was easier to do when no one was watching.” With Arrested having gained more fans in the years since it went off the air, “We’ve started really guarding the material, just to make it fun for the audience.”
Hurwitz described the new episodes as “a very different form that emerged really organically. The family grew apart and everybody kind of grew up and [the actors] went on other shows and had other contracts.” That being the case, they approached these new episodes as “An anthology or a series where you kind of dedicate a different episode to different characters’ point of view. It was really fun challenge. We started seeing that the stories would intersect.”
Hurwitz noted that an event might happen in one episode and then, “You’ll see it from a different perspective and get all his other information. “ The closest thing we got to a story spoiler was de Rossi saying in her episode there’s a scene where Lucille is telling her something and Lindsey thinks she is being totally sarcastic, but Lucille’s episode will show you that’s not the case at all. It should be noted that Hurwitz, in the manner of Matthew Weiner, J.J. Abrams and other great secret keepers, felt de Rossi was saying too much even there!
Because the episodes all overlap and link up like this, Jason Bateman described it as, “One giant Arrested Development,” saying they treated it like act one of a larger story, “We hope to conclude in a movie, which would be act two and act three.”
Bateman said he wouldn’t even describe the new episodes -- which will slightly vary in length somewhere within thirty minutes each -- as “Season 4”, though he added, “There certainly is a satisfying conclusion if the movie doesn’t happen, but they are all meant to work together.”
Bateman said that he really felt the new episodes should not be compared to what came before, describing it as, “Something that is completely different on purpose,” and meant to work with the format of Netflix and the way all the episodes will be released at the same time.
Originally, it was reported that there would be 10 new episodes, and then rumors there could be more. Said Hurwitz, “We always knew there were going to be 14. We decided, ‘Let’s say there’s 10 and then the fans will be so happy when we say there’s more.’”
While the Netflix release means people could watch them in any order, Hurwitz noted, “There is an order that we have put together to create the maximum amount of surprises.” As for those worried about spoilers getting out, Hurwitz remarked, “There are going to be surprises that are going to be ruined by spoilers but that was going to happen anyway. So it’s happening in one day for hardcore fans, but the stuff exists. It’s just out there.”
Bateman described Arrested Development as “pleasantly dense,” with all of its callbacks and jokes that build upon each other. Remarking why it failed initially, he said, “I just don’t think that’s necessarily conducive to something that has commercials in it.”
I asked Hurwitz if, given the format this time out, and the cast availability, they had to have the 14 scripts totally set before production. Said Hurwitz, “We got very locked in on the story. It was so incredibly, incredibly complicated.” Arrested was in “second position” for almost the entire cast contractually, meaning the other films and series they were on were their first priority. Hurwitz said that meant, “We have this actor, we don’t have this actor. It’s a complicated story that jumps around in time, with all these intersections, and we’re shooting way out of order.” Initially, they started writing the shows in order, but that would change depending on actor availability, with Hurwitz giving the example of, “We have Tony Hale today, we have Jessica Walter, we have to shot that stuff for Jessica’s episode!”
Jeffrey Tambor said that on his second week back on the show, there was a scene with the entire cast, “All nine of us in the living room.,” and that while "We're not a sentimental group,” it was pretty emotional. Said Walter, “It was surreal. There we were nine years later…”
As the panel ended, Hurwitz revealed he did have a clip from us. And because he wanted to keep secrets, it was a deleted scene – though he added that if we laughed, maybe he’d put it back in.
And perhaps he will put it back in, as everyone cracked up at the clip, which was a long, single take in which Lucille, under house arrest and unable to go out on her balcony – and forbidden from smoking – used her son Buster to get away with her vice. And in typical Arrested Development manner, it was oh-so wrong, fairly incestuous and hysterical, as Buster tried to tell her a story while she smoked – and each time she exhaled, he’d put his mouth right in front of hers, for her to exhale into his mouth, run out onto the balcony and blow the smoke out. Buster keeps trying to tell his story while this occurs, while coughing, wheezing, and adding things like, “I can’t breathe!” When Lucille finishes one cigarette only to light up a new one, he begs, “Please mother, please,” but she doesn’t care (and never speaks a word in the scene), continuing to exhale into his mouth… until he finally collapses on the ground.
More Bluth awesomeness awaits in May! |
Now entering his 15th season with the Packers, Mike Halbach begins his fourth season as the team’s director of football technology after serving as manager of football technology in 2014. He first joined the Packers as a video intern in 2004 before working as a video assistant from 2005-14.
In his current role, Halbach oversees the team’s efforts in football analytics and the development and administration of football information systems, and guides technical decisions that impact football operations. He was instrumental in the Packers’ transition from paper to digital playbooks and from standard- to high-definition video.
Halbach graduated summa cum laude from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay in 2005 with a B.S. degree in communication processes with an emphasis in electronic media. He also earned a B.A. degree in communication and the arts with a minor in corporate communication. |
Howdy Rift Runners,
What does this mean?
Why are you going Gold now?
Why aren’t you doing massive release marketing through normal channels?
Are my rankings going to be reset once Gold happens?
What about the future?
Tournaments
Sideboards
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We would like to announce to you loyal fans that the ‘Gold’ release date for Infinity Wars will be September the 3rd, 2014. You're going to want to read on, this is gonna get good.Well it actually means a lot of things. What's in this little section here hardly scratches the surface.However, in terms of this section, it means that the ‘beta’ tag will be removed from the game. That is all this means. We will not stop developing the game or bringing new features in, we want to reassure every one of that. We will continue to work hard to improve and grow Infinity Wars from this point. We have some really great things coming in the future that we want you to get excited for.We believe that the game is strong enough to stand on its own without hiding behind the crutch of the Beta tag while we continue to develop content and features for Infinity Wars.We're a small indie studio, with an extreme amount of passion. Unfortunately passion doesn't fix everything. Our size (or lack thereof) will always play a part in the decisions we make and the timeframe it takes for things to happen.So, as a company, we have decided that now is the right time to remove that tag. With the game in (mostly) proper working order, the game is ready to bring your friends to as we continue to work on everything that's necessary while continuing to improve the game every single day.One of the things we’ve learned from the various advertising strategies (and we have tried many of them), is our game really is tailored for the mid to hardcore audience. We work hard to increase the spectrum of gamers this title could appeal to, but from the metrics shown from mainstream gaming coverage, the best thing we can do now is target gamers like yourselves.As such we have targeted advertising and marketing being rolled out, but this game will grow best from us bringing our TCG mates into a working game, hosting tournaments, and continuing to balance cards and bring new exiting content and mechanics into the game.Short answer? No. Long answer? In the beginning, we had said that when the game went Gold, we would reset rankings. We have decided not to do that at this current time. The reasoning behind this is… *points to the next section* (No really, look down.)Our next major milestone of version 1.5 focuses on the following, and we're starting work on this project once we confirm all the major bugs are squashed:We have a hopeful timeframe for these of within 6 months of going Gold, but we cannot make any promises on that just yet. Our priority will still be on ensuring a smooth major bug free experience ongoing. We simply wanted to give you a roadmap that these are the things we're starting work on as we speak.We have decided to not reset any rankings until these modes are implemented into Infinity Wars as it wouldn't be right to reset anything prior to the formats/concepts themselves changing.Get excited, there is some seriously great stuff coming!The future also holds more sets, more cards & more Puffing Puffy than you can Puff a Puffy with!The future for Infinity Wars looks bright, and we have you guys, the amazing players and community to thank for it. You help us, on a daily basis, shape Infinity Wars into the amazing game that it’s becoming.Thank you all for being a part of Infinity Wars. See you on the battlefield!~ Elphie "Agent" Coyle, Ian "Tygris" Underwood, “Teremus”, “Schumisaurus” & on behalf of the rest of the Lightmare Team. |
Stirling Hinchliffe has defended calls from the opposition to resign, saying he is focused on fixing the issues. Credit:Bradley Kanaris "As is the case with any great major project, when you see the delivery of the final product there are some teething and small issues that need to be resolved." Mr Hinchliffe said as the trains were being tested, there was a concern that drivers could not see "stopping points". "At platforms there are markers on platforms to demonstrate to drivers where is the optimal place for this train to come up to a complete stop in order for the passengers to alight and to de-train," he said. Mr Hinchliffe said visibility had to be available for the "full range of drivers", pointing out that some were his height or taller.
Train drivers can't see "stopping points" properly in new generation rolling stock, the transport minister said. "There's a range there and that all had to be assessed and looked at," he said. The former LNP government ordered 75 new trains under a private public partnership. Mr Hinchliffe said five of the trains were in Australia at the moment, and they were undergoing testing and commissioning. He said the trains were also being modified to provide space for guards.
It comes as the government and Queensland Rail face heavy scrutiny after 100 train services were cancelled earlier in October due to a shortage of drivers following the opening of the Redcliffe Peninsula Line. Mr Hinchliffe has defended calls from the opposition to resign, saying he is focused on fixing the issues. "We are delivering more services now than we were in September," he said. "The lack of performance against the October 4 timetable has made us all furious, made us really upset because the high performance we were expecting and wanted to see hasn't been delivering." Meanwhile, Queensland Rail is operating with a level of 30 per cent overtime as it struggles to provide the extra services required following the opening of the Redcliffe Peninsula Line.
Mr Hinchliffe told 612 ABC Brisbane earlier on Monday: "We are running overtime levels of around 30 per cent". "There is a cost to this. "It's a consequence of there not being the levels of train crew." Overtime bills soar following opening of new Redcliffe line Figures provided by Queensland Rail show the overtime bill for train drivers increased by 24 per cent after the opening of the Redcliffe Peninsula Line.
For the two week rostering period before October 4, $466,701.82 in overtime was paid to 348 drivers. During the two week period from October 4, the overtime bill was $578,752.41, paid to 379 drivers. A Queensland Rail spokeswoman said train drivers were given the choice to increase their salary by doing overtime at times of their choosing. "We are grateful to the traincrew staff for pulling out all the stops and doing extra duties, since we brought in the new timetable on 4 October," the spokeswoman said. The spokeswoman said strict fatigue standards were in place to ensure rosters, and any offered overtime, complied with the rules.
Opposition Leader Tim Nicholls said there was "no evidence" of what Mr Hinchliffe was saying in relation to the visibility issues, describing it as a "red herring". "And even if it were the case, that the drivers are unable to fully see or find out the stopping marks on the station, those are the teething problems, what is the minister doing since his announcement back in February?" Mr Nicholls said. Mr Nicholls said the new trains, ordered under the LNP government, were designed so that guards could roam the carriages. "Guards are absolutely necessary on those trains," he said. "In government, what we were concerned to ensure was that guards weren't secreted away in little cubby hole at the back of the train. That guards were actually walking through the trains, that they were providing, safety, security and assistance to passengers." |
Several years ago, Jessica Wintrip, a 43-year-old teacher from Taunton, was breastfeeding her one-year-old when she noticed her friend's three-month-old baby was not putting on weight. "So I just blurted out, 'Do you want me to feed him?' It was one of those things you say and you think, I've overstepped the mark." But her friend was grateful rather than shocked and agreed that she should try. "I fed him three times a day for three months - and she kept feeding him as well. It felt a real privilege to be able to do it. I knew how much my friend wanted to breastfeed, and if I hadn't stepped in, he would have had formula."
While in the developing world suckling someone else's baby is commonplace, here we see it as weird - but why? Formula milk has only been available since the early 1900s. Before then wet-nursing would have happened as a matter of course if the mother was ill or absent. In three generations it has become socially unacceptable. None the less, I know women in the UK who have fed each other's babies, although they acknowledge that they would not necessarily admit to it openly. I have also heard of several circles of parents where it is accepted that if you babysit for someone else's newborn, it is OK to breastfeed them (with the parents' consent). This informal wet-nursing is called "shared feeding" or "cross-nursing". And while this has always gone on on quietly in Britain, hiring someone else to breastfeed your child is becoming increasingly popular in Hollywood.
Cross-nursing also happens in extreme circumstances. Sarah (not her real name) was contacted by a local breastfeeding support group when a woman with a three-month-old baby was injured in a car crash. She was unconscious and unable to feed. The baby's father knew that the mother would ideally want to avoid feeding the baby formula so he contacted the organisation to ask for donations of breastmilk. "The first woman who turned up at the hospital to express milk said, 'This is a bit ridiculous. I might as well just feed the baby.' The father agreed."
In the end a group of five women wet-nursed the baby for a week until the mother recovered. This example is telling in that it shows that wet-nursing can be a pragmatic solution: it would have been very difficult for the family to feed this baby any other way (the father was also injured and hospitalised and in any case the baby had never taken a bottle or had any formula). It felt very intimate to feed another woman's child, says Sarah: "It was weird at first. But it was just a baby who needed milk and needed cuddling."
Wet-nursing is now making a comeback in China, after being banned for political reasons for decades. Rich Shanghai families are recruiting rural women as live-in nannies to feed their babies. Given that most well-heeled Chinese women do not work, these nannies-with-extras are more of a status symbol than a necessary accessory to a busy life. Banned under Mao as "decadent" in the post-war period, wet-nursing is a long-standing Chinese tradition: Pu Yi, the Last Emperor, was suckled into his teens. Now, China's nouveau riche are bringing it back, recruiting pregnant women, who leave their own child-ren at home with their grandparents (these babies then have to be wet-nursed themselves by another local woman). Their sacrifice is rewarded with a salary of up to five times the national average.
Perhaps even more intriguing than the actual trend itself is the way it has been reported in the west - with fascination disguised as disgust. One (male) reporter on a British broadsheet claimed with some excitement that these Chinese wet nurses are selected for their "superlative breasts". This, as any breastfeeding mother knows, is total nonsense - breasts of virtually any condition or size can produce milk. Babies do not give extra marks for beauty. The only breasts that have trouble producing milk (although it is not impossible) are fake ones. And, surprise, surprise, earlier this year a Los Angeles-based agency supplying wet nurses popped up. Certified Household Staffing claims it has on its books several Hollywood celebrities with breast implants who have requested lactating nannies. On its website, "wet nurse" is right next to valet, chauffeur and chef. Company director Robert Feinstock assured me over the phone that, yes, there was a demand, but declined to give any more details.
If feeding another woman's baby seems like the last taboo, it is one that exerts a fascination. (You can imagine what happens if you type the words "wet nurse" into Google: X-rated mammary heaven). In the film The Hand That Rocks the Cradle the moment we "know" that nanny Peyton (Rebecca de Mornay) is genuinely psychopathic is when she pulls her employer's crying baby out of the cot and puts it to her breast.
Perhaps the intimacy of shared feeding enhances the taboo. Rhonda Shaw, a sociologist at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, is author of a study entitled The Virtues of Cross-Nursing - and the Yuk Factor and is researching contemporary cross-nursing practices. We perceive feeding another woman's child to be somehow indecent, she says: "Adult meanings of eroticism get confused with breastfeeding as a sensual activity." She recently interviewed two single working mothers who have agreed to share childcare and cross-nurse each other's babies to fit around their work schedules. "It's always been practised. It just isn't reported," she says.
Extraordinarily, there have even been cases where there is an underlying suggestion that wet-nursing is borderline child abuse, says Shaw: "One state in the USA requires people to get a license before they provide someone else, other than their child, with breast milk. There was a case in Oklahoma in 2003 where a woman breastfed someone else's infant without consent, and faced a $500 [£257] fine and up to a year in jail on a 'morals' charge."
Gabrielle Palmer, lecturer in human nutrition at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and author of The Politics of Breastfeeding, finds current attitudes perplexing. Once wet-nursing was so commonplace that Jane Austen mentions it in Emma: "For years it was a really good job for a woman. In 17th- and 18th-century Britain a woman would earn more money as a wet nurse than her husband could as a labourer. And if you were a royal wet nurse you would be honoured for life."
She has personal experience of the practice (her children were born in the 1970s): "I wouldn't mind another mother feeding my baby - if it was my sister or my best friend that would be fine. In the 1970s, you would get breastfeeding circles within the babysitting circle - you'd ask for somebody lactating. There is an idea that 'this is a special relationship' - it is that special bond - but I'd rather a baby had another woman's milk than formula."
Given the current climate, Palmer advises against anyone telling the authorities they are cross-nursing: "I know adoptive women who have breastfed their [adopted] children and the health authorities have been appalled. Far too many health professionals are hung up about breastfeeding."
The practice is officially frowned on in the UK because HIV can be transferred through breast milk, although, as Shaw puts it, "If a woman knew she was HIV positive I think she would be unlikely to cross nurse someone else's infant." (This is a major problem in countries where wet-nursing is culturally acceptable but talking about and testing for HIV is not; in many parts of Africa, for example.)
There is no medical reason why women should not lactate indefinitely or feed more than one child simultaneously (known as "tandem feeding" when a mother feeds two siblings of different ages: Palmer estimates that some women would thoeretically be able to feed up to five babies). And there are many historical examples of wet-nursing, says Shaw: Naomi, from the Old Testament, relactated to feed her grandchild so Ruth, the infant's mother, could go to war after her husband was killed. Both Moses and Mohammed were wet-nursed after they were rescued from the bulrushes. Dr Naomi Baumslag, author of Milk, Money and Madness, wrote a celebration of the legendary wet nurse Judith Waterford: "In 1831, on her 81st birthday, she could still produce breast milk. In her prime she unfailingly produced two quarts [four pints] of breast milk a day."
All our objections to wet-nursing, says Shaw, are cultural: "The exchange of body fluids between different women and children, and the exposure of intimate bodily parts make some people uncomfortable. The hidden subtext of these debates has to do with perceptions of moral decency. Cultures with breast fetishes tend to conflate the sexual and erotic breast with the functional and lactating breast."
I wonder if our attitudes towards the "freakishness" of wet-nursing betray what we really think about breastfeeding itself. We still don't completely accept it as what it is - natural, normal, instinctive. And no superlative breasts required. |
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This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The pressure is on: Activists are pushing hard to make climate change a major topic in the Democratic presidential debates. The first of six planned debates will be hosted by CNN on October 13.
Tom Steyer, the billionaire founder of NextGen Climate, sent a memo on Tuesday to CNN debate moderator Anderson Cooper arguing that he should devote significant time to the candidates’ climate plans. “To be a leader of the Democratic Party—and the country—you have to lead on climate change,” wrote Steyer. “During the first Democratic presidential primary debate, I urge you to push the candidates to articulate, defend, and refine their plans.” Steyer has previously called for the Democratic National Committee to add an entire debate devoted solely to climate change, a proposal that drew praise from 350.org founder Bill McKibben.
In the first Republican debate, climate change wasn’t discussed at all, and in the second it got just a few minutes out of three hours. Marco Rubio, echoed by Chris Christie, used the opportunity to argue against taking action to limit emissions using false talking points about the science, economics, and international politics of the issue. This is in keeping with the entire GOP field’s tilt toward climate science denial and aversion to doing anything to combat or even prepare for climate change.
The Democratic debates present an opportunity to address the issue more seriously. The leading three Democratic candidates have all staked out relatively strong positions on climate change, although Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have yet to flesh out many crucial details. Clinton, also, has yet to convince many climate hawks that she will make a meaningful break from President Obama’s policy of increasing domestic fossil fuel production. Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, has released the most comprehensive and ambitious climate change policy agenda thus far. He is also calling for the DNC to add more debates.
Greg Sargent of the Washington Post concurs with Steyer that Democrats should talk in detail about climate change policy in their primary campaign even though hardly any voters list it as their No. 1 issue when asked by pollsters. Discussing climate change, Sargent argues, will have other benefits for the Democrats. He writes:
The more Democrats talk about this stuff, the more there is at least a chance that this contrast [with Republicans] will impress itself in some kind of meaningful way on voters. When candidates and/or elected officials talk about issues, it can make a difference, generating more media coverage that can help set the political agenda over time. And Dem primary voters do deserve to know more specifics about the contenders’ solutions: this would help further develop party doctrine on the issue; and promises made by candidates often are kept once in office.
Sargent also argues that “discussion of these issues in the high profile setting of a Dem debate would make for a compelling contrast with Republicans,” noting that the GOP candidates’ extreme positions on climate change might be hard to sustain in the general election. He’s certainly right about that. Most voters accept climate science and support some measures to limit carbon emissions.
But there’s a larger, deeper political dynamic in play here: The GOP’s commitment to an unpopular, outdated position on climate change isn’t some weird outlier but rather the epitome of its rejection of modernity and reason. And so by highlighting climate change, Democrats highlight Republicans’ backwardness more broadly.
By highlighting climate change, Democrats highlight Republicans’ backwardness more broadly.
As Jonathan Chait noted in New York magazine on Sunday, a new political science study looked at the platforms of political parties in nine major industrialized democracies and found that every one of the parties accepts climate science except for Republicans. But climate change is not the only issue on which the GOP stands apart from the rest of mainstream politics in advanced democracies. Republicans are also unique in their rejection of evolution and opposition to even modest gun control. None of these are issues that many voters list as their top priorities. The same goes for a number of lower-profile causes Republicans oppose and most voters support: embryonic stem cell research, funding for PBS and NPR, and so on.
Collectively, however, all of these issues contribute to the negative image of Republicans among some large, growing, and Democratic-leaning constituencies: young people, Latinos, and highly educated white voters. All of these groups were more evenly divided between the parties circa 2000 than they are today. In particular, George W. Bush’s emphasis on education reform was targeted at these voters. Bush lost these groups by smaller margins than John McCain and Mitt Romney later did. In the years since Bush first ran, the GOP has become more reactionary, more affirmatively ignorant, more contemptuous of expertise, more Foxified. Consequently GOP politicians are actually less likely to accept climate science than they were 10 years ago, even as the evidence grows only stronger.
The three current Republican presidential poll leaders, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina, are the apotheosis of all these trends. Trump and Carson are climate science deniers. Fiorina opposes action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and makes the same inaccurate claims—that the United States reducing emissions “can make no difference,” that shifting to clean energy is bad for the economy, and that China won’t do it even if we do—that Rubio does. She also incorrectly attributes the drought in California to environmentalists.
If Democrats and climate hawks keep pushing the GOP on climate change, it could ultimately force the party to accept climate science and embrace climate action.
And, as you’d expect, all three make similarly stupid comments on other scientific topics and on social issues. Carson rejects the science of evolution and the Big Bang theory with nonsense arguments. He also says that a Muslim should not be president. Trump—in an expression of vulgar racism previously verboten among major Republican politicians—labels Mexican immigrants “rapists.” Fiorina goes around making demonstrably false claims about Planned Parenthood and reiterates her lies when confronted with the facts.
Taken together, these embarrassments reinforce an image of the GOP that threatens to condemn them to permanent minority status. Of all these issues, climate change looms largest. It threatens everyone, but it threatens the most vulnerable—the young, the poor, the disabled, the victims of structural racism—the most. To talk about climate change is to highlight the difference between the two parties, contrasting the Democratic focus on science and education, looking forward and outward, with the Republican tendency to be parochial, ignorant, and backward. Climate change is a stand-in for issues like gay rights, immigration, religious pluralism, funding for research and education, and traditional environmental issues like clean air and water.
Bringing attention to climate change should reinforce the Democratic advantage among groups like educated professionals, young people, and Latinos, all of whom helped form the Obama coalition. And if Democrats and climate hawks keep pushing the GOP on the issue, it could ultimately force Republicans to accept climate science and embrace climate action, just as years of successful Republican attacks on Democrats coerced them into supporting harsh anti-crime and welfare-reform laws. But to make that happen, Republicans had to talk incessantly about those issues. Now is the time for Democrats to talk incessantly about climate change. |
1988 novel by Salman Rushdie
This article is about the novel. For the verses known as "Satanic Verses", see Satanic Verses
The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie's fourth novel, first published in 1988 and inspired in part by the life of Muhammad. As with his previous books, Rushdie used magical realism and relied on contemporary events and people to create his characters. The title refers to the satanic verses, a group of Quranic verses that refer to three pagan Meccan goddesses: Allāt, Uzza, and Manāt.[1] The part of the story that deals with the "satanic verses" was based on accounts from the historians al-Waqidi and al-Tabari.[1]
In the United Kingdom, The Satanic Verses received positive reviews, was a 1988 Booker Prize finalist (losing to Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda) and won the 1988 Whitbread Award for novel of the year.[2] However, major controversy ensued as Muslims accused it of blasphemy and mocking their faith. The outrage among Muslims resulted in a fatwā calling for Rushdie's death issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran, on 14 February 1989. The result was several failed assassination attempts on Rushdie, who was placed under police protection by the UK government, and attacks on several connected individuals such as translator Hitoshi Igarashi (leading, in Igarashi's case, to death).
The book was banned in India as hate speech directed towards a specific religious group.[3][4]
Plot [ edit ]
The Satanic Verses consists of a frame narrative, using elements of magical realism, interlaced with a series of sub-plots that are narrated as dream visions experienced by one of the protagonists. The frame narrative, like many other stories by Rushdie, involves Indian expatriates in contemporary England. The two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, are both actors of Indian Muslim background. Farishta is a Bollywood superstar who specialises in playing Hindu deities. (The character is partly based on Indian film stars Amitabh Bachchan and N. T. Rama Rao.)[5] Chamcha is an emigrant who has broken with his Indian identity and works as a voiceover artist in England.
At the beginning of the novel, both are trapped in a hijacked plane flying from India to Britain.[6] The plane explodes over the English Channel, but the two are magically saved. In a miraculous transformation, Farishta takes on the personality of the archangel Gabriel and Chamcha that of a devil. Chamcha is arrested and passes through an ordeal of police abuse as a suspected illegal immigrant. Farishta's transformation can partly be read on a realistic level as the symptom of the protagonist's developing schizophrenia.
Both characters struggle to piece their lives back together. Farishta seeks and finds his lost love, the English mountaineer Allie Cone, but their relationship is overshadowed by his mental illness. Chamcha, having miraculously regained his human shape, wants to take revenge on Farishta for having forsaken him after their common fall from the hijacked plane. He does so by fostering Farishta's pathological jealousy and thus destroying his relationship with Allie. In another moment of crisis, Farishta realises what Chamcha has done, but forgives him and even saves his life.
Both return to India. Farishta throws Allie off a high rise in another outbreak of jealousy and then commits suicide. Chamcha, who has found not only forgiveness from Farishta but also reconciliation with his estranged father and his own Indian identity, decides to remain in India.
Dream sequences [ edit ]
Embedded in this story is a series of half-magic dream vision narratives, ascribed to the mind of Farishta. They are linked together by many thematic details as well as by the common motifs of divine revelation, religious faith and fanaticism, and doubt.
One of these sequences contains most of the elements that have been criticised as offensive to Muslims. It is a transformed re-narration of the life of Muhammad (called "Mahound" or "the Messenger" in the novel) in Mecca ("Jahiliyyah"). At its centre is the episode of the so-called satanic verses, in which the prophet first proclaims a revelation in favour of the old polytheistic deities, but later renounces this as an error induced by the Devil. There are also two opponents of the "Messenger": a demonic heathen priestess, Hind bint Utbah, and an irreverent skeptic and satirical poet, Baal. When the prophet returns to the city in triumph, Baal goes into hiding in an underground brothel, where the prostitutes assume the identities of the prophet's wives. Also, one of the prophet's companions claims that he, doubting the authenticity of the "Messenger," has subtly altered portions of the Quran as they were dictated to him.
The second sequence tells the story of Ayesha, an Indian peasant girl who claims to be receiving revelations from the Archangel Gibreel. She entices all her village community to embark on a foot pilgrimage to Mecca, claiming that they will be able to walk across the Arabian Sea. The pilgrimage ends in a catastrophic climax as the believers all walk into the water and disappear, amid disturbingly conflicting testimonies from observers about whether they just drowned or were in fact miraculously able to cross the sea.
A third dream sequence presents the figure of a fanatic expatriate religious leader, the "Imam", in a late-20th-century setting. This figure is a transparent allusion to the life of Ruhollah Khomeini in his Parisian exile, but it is also linked through various recurrent narrative motifs to the figure of the "Messenger".
Literary criticism and analysis [ edit ]
Overall, the book received favourable reviews from literary critics. In a 2003 volume of criticism of Rushdie's career, the influential critic Harold Bloom named The Satanic Verses "Rushdie's largest aesthetic achievement".[7]
Timothy Brennan called the work "the most ambitious novel yet published to deal with the immigrant experience in Britain" that captures the immigrants' dream-like disorientation and their process of "union-by-hybridization". The book is seen as "fundamentally a study in alienation."[2]
Muhammd Mashuq ibn Ally wrote that "The Satanic Verses is about identity, alienation, rootlessness, brutality, compromise, and conformity. These concepts confront all migrants, disillusioned with both cultures: the one they are in and the one they join. Yet knowing they cannot live a life of anonymity, they mediate between them both. The Satanic Verses is a reflection of the author’s dilemmas." The work is an "albeit surreal, record of its own author's continuing identity crisis."[2] Ally said that the book reveals the author ultimately as "the victim of nineteenth-century British colonialism."[2] Rushdie himself spoke confirming this interpretation of his book, saying that it was not about Islam, "but about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay."[2] He has also said "It's a novel which happened to contain a castigation of Western materialism. The tone is comic."[2]
After the Satanic Verses controversy developed, some scholars familiar with the book and the whole of Rushdie's work, like M. D. Fletcher, saw the reaction as ironic. Fletcher wrote "It is perhaps a relevant irony that some of the major expressions of hostility toward Rushdie came from those about whom and (in some sense) for whom he wrote."[8] He said the manifestations of the controversy in Britain "embodied an anger arising in part from the frustrations of the migrant experience and generally reflected failures of multicultural integration, both significant Rushdie themes. Clearly, Rushdie's interests centrally include explorations of how migration heightens one's awareness that perceptions of reality are relative and fragile, and of the nature of religious faith and revelation, not to mention the political manipulation of religion. Rushdie's own assumptions about the importance of literature parallel in the literal value accorded the written word in Islamic tradition to some degree. But Rushdie seems to have assumed that diverse communities and cultures share some degree of common moral ground on the basis of which dialogue can be pieced together, and it is perhaps for this reason that he underestimated the implacable nature of the hostility evoked by The Satanic Verses, even though a major theme of that novel is the dangerous nature of closed, absolutist belief systems."[8]
Rushdie's influences have long been a point of interest to scholars examining his work. According to W. J. Weatherby, influences on The Satanic Verses were listed as James Joyce, Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, Frank Herbert, Thomas Pynchon, Mervyn Peake, Gabriel García Márquez, Jean-Luc Godard, J. G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs.[9] Angela Carter writes that the novel contains "inventions such as the city of Jahilia, 'built entirely of sand,' that gives a nod to Calvino and a wink to Frank Herbert".[10]
Srinivas Aravamudan's analysis of The Satanic Verses stressed the satiric nature of the work and held that while it and Midnight's Children may appear to be more "comic epic", "clearly those works are highly satirical" in a similar vein of postmodern satire pioneered by Joseph Heller in Catch-22.[8]
The Satanic Verses continued to exhibit Rushdie's penchant for organising his work in terms of parallel stories. Within the book "there are major parallel stories, alternating dream and reality sequences, tied together by the recurring names of the characters in each; this provides intertexts within each novel which comment on the other stories." The Satanic Verses also exhibits Rushdie's common practice of using allusions to invoke connotative links. Within the book he referenced everything from mythology to "one-liners invoking recent popular culture".[8]
Controversy [ edit ]
The novel provoked great controversy in the Muslim community for what some Muslims believed were blasphemous references. They accused him of misusing freedom of speech.[11] Pakistan banned the book in November 1988. On 12 February 1989, a 10,000-strong protest against Rushdie and the book took place in Islamabad, Pakistan. Six protesters were killed in an attack on the American Cultural Center, and an American Express office was ransacked. As the controversy spread, the importing of the book was banned in India[12] and it was burned in demonstrations in the United Kingdom.
Meanwhile, the Commission for Racial Equality and a liberal think tank, the Policy Studies Institute, held seminars on the Rushdie affair. They did not invite the author Fay Weldon, who spoke out against burning books, but did invite Shabbir Akhtar, a Cambridge philosophy graduate who called for "a negotiated compromise" which "would protect Muslim sensibilities against gratuitous provocation". The journalist and author Andy McSmith wrote at the time "We are witnessing, I fear, the birth of a new and dangerously illiberal "liberal" orthodoxy designed to accommodate Dr Akhtar and his fundamentalist friends."[13]
Fatwa [ edit ]
In mid-February 1989, following a violent riot against the book in Pakistan, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran and a Shi'a Muslim scholar, issued a fatwa calling for the death of Rushdie and his publishers,[14] and called for Muslims to point him out to those who can kill him if they cannot themselves. Although the British Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher gave Rushdie round-the-clock police protection, many politicians on both sides were hostile to the author. British Labour MP Keith Vaz led a march through Leicester shortly after he was elected in 1989 calling for the book to be banned, while the Conservative politician Norman Tebbit, the party's former chairman, called Rushdie an "outstanding villain" whose "public life has been a record of despicable acts of betrayal of his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality".[15]
Journalist Christopher Hitchens staunchly defended Rushdie and urged critics to condemn the violence of the fatwa instead of blaming the novel or the author. Hitchens understood the fatwa to be the opening shot in a cultural war on freedom.[16]
Despite a conciliatory statement by Iran in 1998, and Rushdie's declaration that he would stop living in hiding, the Iranian state news agency reported in 2006 that the fatwa would remain in place permanently since fatwas can only be rescinded by the person who first issued them, and Khomeini had since died.[17]
Violence, assassinations and attempts to harm [ edit ]
With police protection, Rushdie escaped direct physical harm, but others associated with his book have suffered violent attacks. Hitoshi Igarashi, his Japanese translator, was stabbed to death on 11 July 1991. Ettore Capriolo [it], the Italian translator, was seriously injured in a stabbing in Milan on 3 July 1991.[18] William Nygaard, the publisher in Norway, was shot three times in an attempted assassination in Oslo in October 1993, but survived. Aziz Nesin, the Turkish translator, was possibly the intended target in the events that led to the Sivas massacre on 2 July 1993 in Sivas, Turkey, which resulted in 37 deaths.[19]
In September 2012, Rushdie expressed doubt that The Satanic Verses would be published today because of a climate of "fear and nervousness".[20]
In March 2016, PEN America reported that the bounty for the Rushdie fatwa was raised by $600,000 (£430,000). Top Iranian media contributed this sum, adding to the existing $2.8m already offered.[21] In response, the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel prize for literature, denounced the death sentence and called it "a serious violation of free speech". This was the first time they had commented on the issue since publication.[22]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ] |
US spied on presidents of Brazil, Mexico, documents from Snowden reveal
By Tom Eley
3 September 2013
The US National Security Agency eavesdropped on the communications of the presidents of Brazil and Mexico, according to documents gathered by whistleblower Edward Snowden and revealed by journalist Glenn Greenwald to the Brazilian television news program Fantastico.
The news program displayed a slide from the NSA with passages written by Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto from June 2012, when he was a candidate for the presidency. The excerpts show Nieto discussing what ministers he might select should he win election. They make clear the NSA was reading Nieto’s e-mails.
A second slide showed an NSA analysis of internal communication patters between Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and leading advisers. The NSA also used a program to follow all internet content that Rousseff accessed, and deployed another that would have allowed them to read her e-mails.
Both slides were part of internal NSA demonstrations of the efficacy and potential of their spying programs and technologies.
“It was very clear in the documents that they had already carried out the spying,” Greenwald, speaking Portuguese, said of the Brazil revelations on Fantastico. “They aren’t talking about something they are planning, they are celebrating their spying successes.”
The new revelations follow the July release of documents showing that Brazil and all of Latin America are subject to a massive NSA spying program targeting all forms of telecommunications. The NSA has harvested billions of communications in Brazil alone (see: “NSA casts massive surveillance net over Latin America”).
In response to the publication of the new documents, Rousseff on Monday summoned US Ambassador Thomas Shannon for an explanation and called a top-level cabinet meeting that included the ministers of defense, justice, communications and foreign affairs “to discuss the espionage report,” according to the Associated Press.
The revelations “should be considered very serious and constitute a clear violation of Brazilian sovereignty,” said Justice Minister Jose Eduardo Cardozo. “This [spying] hits not only Brazil, but the sovereignty of several countries that could have been violated in a way totally contrary to what international law establishes.”
“If it’s confirmed it is very serious because a country cannot passively accept the violation of its sovereignty,” he said. “Any country that has its sovereignty violated has to react, take a position and use international law to put things in their place. And that’s what Brazil will do.”
Cardozo acknowledged the new documents show that the NSA spying is about more than combating terrorism—the constant refrain from the Obama administration—and had political targets and may have even gone as far as commercial espionage. Another Brazilian government official said that the revelations may lead Brazil to scrap plans for the purchase of 36 F-18 fighter jets from US manufacturer Boeing, a deal estimated at about $4 billion.
“I feel a mixture of amazement and indignation,” said Senator Ricardo Ferraco, chair of the Brazilian Senate’s foreign relations committee. “It seems like there are no limits. When the phone of the president of the republic is monitored, it’s hard to imagine what else might be happening. It’s unacceptable that in a country like ours, where there is absolutely no climate of terrorism, that there is this type of spying.”
There was no official comment from Mexico, but in July Nieto declared that it would be “totally unacceptable” for the US to have engaged in espionage against Mexico.
There has been no comment from the Obama administration.
It is noteworthy that when Edward Snowden was stranded at the international section of the Moscow airport seeking refuge from the persecution of the American state, both Brazil and Mexico ruled out granting him asylum. |
John Barr reacts to the news that former Browns QB Johnny Manziel has been indicted by a grand jury on a misdemeanor charge from a domestic violence complaint by his ex-girlfriend. (1:44)
DALLAS -- Former Cleveland Browns quarterback Johnny Manziel was indicted by a grand jury on Tuesday on a misdemeanor charge stemming from a domestic violence complaint by his ex-girlfriend.
The 2012 Heisman Trophy winner and Texas A&M star was accused by ex-girlfriend Colleen Crowley of hitting her and threatening to kill her during a night out on Jan. 30. Crowley said in court documents that Manziel struck her so hard that she temporarily lost hearing in one ear.
The indictment accuses Manziel of striking Crowley and "forcing [her] into a vehicle and against a vehicle dashboard."
Editor's Picks Johnny Manziel timeline since being drafted by Cleveland Browns Timeline: Johnny Manziel's indictment stemming from a domestic violence complaint was the latest incident in a turbulent period since Manziel was taken 22nd in the 2014 draft by the Browns.
Transcript: Johnny Manziel's attorney's statement about indictment Johnny Manziel's attorney released a statement in the wake of an indictment stemming from a domestic violence complaint, and it includes a proclamation that his client will plead not guilty and be acquitted. 1 Related
Manziel faces a charge of misdemeanor assault related to family violence. If found guilty, he faces up to one year in jail and a $4,000 fine.
An attorney for Manziel, Robert Hinton, told the Associated Press on Tuesday that the way the indictment has been handled so far suggests there are problems with the case and that his client will plead not guilty.
"If this were Johnny Smith, the district attorney's office would have declined to accept the case, in my judgment," Hinton said in a phone interview Tuesday. "This is not a very credible case. As a matter of fact, it's incredible. There's just not much to it."
Hinton said he thought police and prosecutors had treated the case as though they didn't want it to go forward. Lawyers who aren't involved in the case have noted that Dallas police chose to refer their case to a grand jury rather than arrest Manziel outright, which is unusual for misdemeanor cases.
Hinton said he did not anticipate making a deal to end the case before trial, though he said talks of any deal were premature.
Jim Darnell, another of Manziel's attorneys, issued a statement Tuesday saying his client "will be acquitted at the conclusion of this case."
Johnny Manziel faces a charge of misdemeanor assault related to family violence, which carries up to one year in jail and a $4,000 fine. His attorney said Manziel "will certainly" plead not guilty. AP Photo/Don Wright
Manziel is in Los Angeles, but is expected to present himself for booking Thursday or Friday, once the case is formally assigned to a judge and bond is set, Hinton said.
"He's got a great attitude," Hinton said. "He's ready to face it and do what we need to do to defend him."
Dallas County District Attorney Susan Hawk said in a statement Tuesday that prosecutors "respect the criminal justice process and the decision" by the grand jury. A spokeswoman for Hawk declined to comment further.
Crowley has already been granted a protective order that requires Manziel to not see her for two years, stay at least 500 feet from her home and place of work and pay $12,000 in legal fees.
Manziel was cut by the Browns in March after two tumultuous seasons marked by inconsistent play and off-the-field headlines about his partying and drinking, including one stint in rehab. His future in the NFL is uncertain at best, and might be nonexistent without a second stint in treatment that two agents have demanded. The league also has tougher standards regarding domestic violence cases after revising its policy in August 2014 following the Ray Rice case, which could complicate any attempt by Manziel to return.
The allegations stem from a night out on Jan. 30. Crowley alleged Manziel accosted her at a Dallas hotel, a confrontation that eventually continued downstairs to the valet station. She said he forced her into a car and a valet disregarded her pleas for help.
The two eventually drove to where her car was parked in front of a Dallas bar, she said in an affidavit. She said Manziel got into the driver's seat and began to drive. Crowley said Manziel stopped when she tried to jump out of the car, but then he dragged her back inside and hit her.
She also said Manziel threatened to kill himself as he drove her back to Fort Worth, about 30 miles west of Dallas, where police were called.
In the wake of the allegations, Manziel's father said the family had made two recent, unsuccessful attempts to get him into a rehab clinic. Manziel -- who entered the NFL with a reputation for partying and drinking -- spent 73 days last winter in a Pennsylvania treatment center specializing in care for alcohol and drug dependency.
Manziel's second agent, Drew Rosenhaus, dropped Manziel last week. His marketing agency dropped him before the charges were filed, and Nike confirmed last week that it no longer has an endorsement deal with Manziel.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. |
College Football Playoff
Monday, Jan. 1
Semifinal No. 1 - Rose Bowl
No. 2 Oklahoma (12-1) vs. No. 3 Georgia (12-1)
5 p.m. ET, Rose Bowl - Pasadena, Calif.
Semifinal No. 2 - Sugar Bowl
No. 1 Clemson (12-1) vs. No. 4 Alabama (11-1)
8:45 p.m. ET, Mercedes-Benz Superdome - New Orleans, La.
Monday, Jan. 8
College Football Playoff National Championship
Winner of Semifinal No. 1 vs. Winner of Semifinal No. 2
8:30 p.m. ET, Mercedes-Benz Stadium - Atlanta, Ga.
Entire Bowl Schedule
Saturday, Dec. 16
New Orleans Bowl
Troy (10-2) vs. North Texas (9-4)
1 p.m. ET, Mercedes-Benz Superdome - New Orleans, La.
Cure Bowl
Georgia State (6-5) vs. Western Kentucky (6-6)
2:30 p.m. ET, Camping World Stadium - Orlando, Fla.
Las Vegas Bowl
No. 25 Boise State (10-3) vs. Oregon (7-5)
3:30 p.m. ET, Sam Boyd Stadium - Las Vegas, Nev.
New Mexico Bowl
Marshall (7-5) vs. Colorado State (7-5)
4:30 p.m. ET, Dreamstyle Stadium - Albuquerque, N.M.
Camellia Bowl
Arkansas State (7-4) vs. Middle Tennessee (6-6)
8 p.m. ET, Cramton Bowl - Montgomery, Ala.
Tuesday, Dec. 19
Boca Raton Bowl
Florida Atlantic (10-3) vs. Akron (7-6)
7 p.m. ET, FAU Stadium - Boca Raton, Fla.
Wednesday, Dec. 20
Frisco Bowl
SMU (7-5) vs. Louisiana Tech (6-6)
8 p.m. ET, Toyota Stadium - Frisco, Texas
Thursday, Dec. 21
Gasparilla Bowl
Florida International (8-4) vs. Temple (6-6)
8 p.m. ET, Tropicana Field - St. Petersburg, Fla.
Friday, Dec. 22
Bahamas Bowl
Ohio (8-4) vs. UAB (8-4)
12:30 p.m. ET, Robinson National Stadium - Nassau, Bahamas
Famous Idaho Potato Bowl
Central Michigan (8-4) vs. Wyoming (7-5)
4 p.m. ET, Albertsons Stadium - Boise, Idaho
Saturday, Dec. 23
Birmingham Bowl
South Florida (9-2) vs. Texas Tech (6-6)
12 p.m. ET, Legion Field - Birmingham, Ala.
Armed Forces Bowl
San Diego State (10-2) vs. Army (8-3)
3:30 p.m. ET, Amon G. Carter Stadium - Fort Worth, Texas
Dollar General Bowl
Toledo (11-2) vs. Appalachian State (8-4)
8 p.m. ET, Ladd-Peebles Stadium - Mobile, Ala.
Sunday, Dec. 24
Hawaii Bowl
Fresno State (9-4) vs. Houston (7-4)
8:30 p.m. ET, Aloha Stadium - Honolulu, Hawaii
Tuesday, Dec. 26
Heart of Dallas Bowl
Utah (6-6) vs. West Virginia (7-5)
1:30 p.m. ET, Cotton Bowl - Dallas, Texas
Quick Lane Bowl
Duke (6-6) vs. Northern Illinois (8-4
5:15 p.m. ET, Ford Field - Detroit, Mich.
Cactus Bowl
UCLA (6-6) vs. Kansas State (7-5)
9:00 p.m. ET, Chase Field - Phoenix, Ariz.
Wednesday, Dec. 27
Independence Bowl
Florida State (6-6) vs. Southern Mississippi (8-4)
1:30 p.m. ET, Independence Stadium - Shreveport, La.
Pinstripe Bowl
Boston College (7-5) vs. Iowa (7-5)
5:15 p.m. ET, Yankee Stadium - New York, N.Y.
Foster Farms Bowl
Arizona (7-5) vs. Purdue (6-6)
8:30 p.m. ET, Levi's Stadium - Santa Clara, Calif.
Texas Bowl
Missouri (7-5) vs. Texas (6-6)
9 p.m. ET, NRG Stadium - Houston, Texas
Thursday, Dec. 28
Military Bowl
Virginia (6-6) vs. Navy (6-5)
1:30 p.m. ET, Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium - Annapolis, Md.
Camping World Bowl
No. 19 Oklahoma State (9-3) vs. No. 22 Virginia Tech (9-3)
7 p.m. ET, Camping World Stadium - Orlando, Fla.
Alamo Bowl
No. 13 Stanford (9-4) vs. No. 15 TCU (10-3)
9 p.m. ET, Alamodome - San Antonio, Texas
Holiday Bowl
No. 16 Michigan State (9-3) vs. No. 18 Washington State (9-3)
5:30 p.m. ET, Qualcomm Stadium - San Diego, Calif.
Friday, Dec. 29
Belk Bowl
Wake Forest (7-5) vs. Texas A&M (7-5)
1:00 p.m. ET, Bank of America Stadium - Charlotte, N.C.
Sun Bowl
No. 24 NC State (8-4) vs. Arizona State (7-5)
3 p.m. ET, Sun Bowl - El Paso, Texas
Music City Bowl
No. 21 Northwestern (9-3) vs. Kentucky (7-5)
4:30 p.m. ET, Nissan Stadium - Nashville, Tenn.
Arizona Bowl
New Mexico State (6-6) vs. Utah State (6-6)
5:30 p.m. ET, Arizona Stadium - Tucson, Ariz.
Cotton Bowl
No. 5 Ohio State (11-2) vs. No. 8 USC (11-2)
8:30 p.m. ET, AT&T Stadium - Arlington, Texas
Saturday, Dec. 30
TaxSlayer Bowl
No. 23 Mississippi State (8-4) at Louisville (8-4)
12 p.m. ET, EverBank Field - Jacksonville, Fla.
Liberty Bowl
No. 20 Memphis (10-2) vs. Iowa State (7-5)
12:30 p.m. ET, Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium - Memphis, Tenn.
Fiesta Bowl
No. 9 Penn State (10-2) vs. No. 11 Washington (10-2)
4 p.m. ET, University of Phoenix Stadium, Glendale, Ariz.
Orange Bowl
No. 6 Wisconsin (12-1) vs. No. 10 Miami (10-2)
8 p.m. ET, Hard Rock Stadium - Miami Gardens, Fla.
Monday, Jan. 1
Outback Bowl
Michigan (8-4) vs. South Carolina (8-4)
12 p.m. ET, Raymond James Stadium - Tampa, Fla.
Peach Bowl
No. 7 Auburn (10-3) vs. No. 12 UCF (12-0)
12:30 p.m. ET, Mercedes-Benz Stadium - Atlanta, Ga.
Citrus Bowl
No. 14 Notre Dame (9-3) vs. No. 17 LSU (9-3)
12:30 p.m. ET, Camping World Stadium - Orlando, Fla.
Semifinal No. 1 - Rose Bowl
No. 2 Oklahoma (12-1) vs. No. 3 Georgia (12-1)
5 p.m. ET, Rose Bowl - Pasadena, Calif.
Semifinal No. 2 - Sugar Bowl
No. 1 Clemson (12-1) vs. No. 4 Alabama (11-1)
8:45 p.m. ET, Mercedes-Benz Superdome - New Orleans, La.
Monday, Jan. 8
College Football Playoff National Championship
Winner of Semifinal No. 1 vs. Winner of Semifinal No. 2
8:30 p.m. ET, Mercedes-Benz Stadium - Atlanta, Ga. |
Israel has said the aim of the past three days of intense bombing in Gaza is to stop rockets being fired by Palestinian militants into southern Israeli towns.
The rockets have claimed 19 lives in the past eight years, but have become an increasingly serious problem for the Israeli government.
To reduce the rocket fire, Israeli military analysts argue, is a modest goal. However, even within Israel there remain sharp differences of opinion about how to achieve that. Most believe the latest conflict will eventually end with a new lull in the fighting, or at best another short-term ceasefire agreement - the latest in a long line of temporary ceasefires in the conflict between Israel and militants in Gaza.
Although Israel has put in place some preparations for a ground invasion, including preparing a call-up of reserves and deploying tanks near the Gaza border, that is still not seen as an inevitable step.
Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli general and a military analyst at the Institute for National Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv, said the point of the conflict was for Israel to exact the best conditions for a future ceasefire with Hamas, the Islamist movement which controls Gaza after winning Palestinian elections three years ago.
"The military operation is changing the dynamic, making it clear to Hamas that it is going to pay a very high cost for violations of the ceasefire," Brom said. "I think Hamas deluded itself by thinking Israel is kind of paralysed because of its political system or the possible reaction of its population to some suffering."
For nearly six months Israel and Hamas held a ceasefire in Gaza, although it broke down in the final weeks with violations on both sides. Now both Hamas and some Israeli leaders have said they are not willing to return to a ceasefire deal.
Ehud Barak, Israel's defence minister, told Fox News on Saturday when the bombing began: "For us to be asked to have a ceasefire with Hamas is like asking you [the US] to have a ceasefire with al-Qaida."
The reality is that a new ceasefire agreement is probably the best Israel could hope to achieve. As Alex Fishman, a columnist on the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, put it bluntly yesterday: "The answer to the question of what we want is simple: To stop the fire. In order to stop the fire, we have to reach an arrangement, and in order to persuade Hamas to reach an arrangement, we are now breaking its bones - among other reasons, so that the price it demands will not be high. But we have not yet decided, amongst ourselves, what price we are willing to pay."
Yet there are others who raise broader questions about Israel's policy towards Gaza, particularly in the last three years since Hamas won the electoral victory.
Yossi Alpher, a former official at Mossad and a military commentator, agreed that Israel was seeking a ceasefire on more acceptable terms. But he was critical of the tough economic blockade Israel has imposed on the Gaza Strip in recent years, limiting imports to humanitarian supplies and preventing all exports, a policy that has all but wiped out private industry and brought Gaza's economy to collapse. "The economic siege of Gaza has not produced any of the desired political results," he said. "It has not manipulated Palestinians into hating Hamas, but has probably been counter-productive. It is just useless collective punishment."
He said that in future Israel would have to choose either to recognise Hamas was around to stay and to talk to the movement, however unpalatable that might be for most Israelis, or to fully reoccupy the Gaza Strip, topple Hamas and bear all the costs involved.
Some have even spoken publicly against the current bombing in Gaza. Tom Segev, one of Israel's most respected historians, has been particularly critical, arguing that the premise of bombing to secure a peace agreement was false.
"Israel has also always believed that causing suffering to Palestinian civilians would make them rebel against their national leaders. This assumption has proven wrong over and over," Segev wrote in yesterday's Ha'aretz newspaper. "Since the dawn of the Zionist presence in the land of Israel, no military operation has ever advanced dialogue with the Palestinians." |
Turkey previously shot down a Russian jet.
Now, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are threatening to invade Syria.
How dangerous could this get, in a worst case scenario?
Robert Parry – the investigative reporter who broke the Iran-Contra story for the Associated Press and Newsweek – wrote yesterday:
A source close to Russian President Vladimir Putin told me that the Russians have warned Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Moscow is prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons if necessary to save their troops in the face of a Turkish-Saudi onslaught. Since Turkey is a member of NATO, any such conflict could quickly escalate into a full-scale nuclear confrontation.
Washington’s Blog asked one of America’s top experts on Russia – Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University, and the author of a number of books on Russia and the Soviet Union – what he thought of Parry’s claim.
Cohen said:
Parry is a serious man [“serious” is the highest compliment that an insider can give to someone]. I cannot say it will lead to nuke war, but it is very dangerous, as is quadrupling US/NATO forces near Russia’s borders.
Pavel Felgenhauer – a leading Russian military analyst – also believes that a nuclear war is “very likely” to arise from Russia’s skirmishes with Turkey in Syria.
Last December, U.S. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard – a Member of the House Armed Services Committee, Iraq war veteran, and Major in the Hawaii Army National Guard – warned that U.S. policy in Syria could lead to a nuclear war. And see this.
Also in December, retired Lieutenant General Robert Gard, chairman emeritus of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, retired Brigadier General John H. Johns, professor emeritus from US National Defense University, and Leslie Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, penned an article in Foreign Policy calling for US-Russia cooperation to de-escalate current tensions and diffuse the increasing worrisome nuclear blustering.
American security expert Bruce Blair – a former nuclear-missile launch officer – notes that Turkey’s downing of the Russian warplane at the Syrian-Turkish border “fits a pattern of brinkmanship and inadvertence that is raising tensions and distrust between Russia and US-led NATO,” and that “this escalation could morph by design or inadvertence into a nuclear threat.”
Blair writes that the threat of nuclear war is higher now that during the Soviet era:
Russia has shortened the launch time from what it was during the Cold War. Today, top military command posts in the Moscow area can bypass the entire human chain of command and directly fire by remote control rockets in silos and on trucks as far away as Siberia in only 20 seconds. Why should this concern us? History shows that crisis interactions, once triggered, take on a life of their own. Military encounters multiply; they become more decentralized, spontaneous and intense. Safeguards are loosened and unfamiliar operational environments cause accidents and unauthorized actions. Miscalculations, misinterpretations and loss of control create a fog of crisis out of which a fog of war may emerge. In short, the slope between the low-level military encounters, the outbreak of crisis and escalation to a nuclear dimension is a steep and slippery one.
(Indeed, the U.S. and Soviets came within seconds of all-out nuclear war on numerous occasions. And only the courage of U.S. and Soviet individuals to say no when their superiors told them to fire nuclear weapons – in the face of mistaken readings – saved the planet from nuclear war.)
Russia expert Stephen Cohen agrees that the risks of nuclear war are much higher than people know, telling the Commonwealth Club last year that the threat of nuclear war with Russia is now greater than it was with the Soviets.
Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry agrees that the risk of nuclear war is higher than during the Soviet era.
Postscript: Top Russian, American and Polish experts also warn that continued fighting in Ukraine could lead to nuclear war. |
Saying he’s grown frustrated with waiting for congressional Republicans, an angry President Barack Obama said Monday he will bypass Congress and act on his own to make changes to immigration policy by the end of the summer.
Obama spoke Monday from the Rose Garden, where he slammed House Republicans for being too accommodating to the conservative, anti-immigration wing of their party and chided House leadership for not working to pass a “darn bill.”
“They’re unwilling to stand up to the Tea Party and do what’s right for the country. And what’s worse — a bunch of them know better,” Obama said in the Rose Garden, where he was joined by Vice President Joe Biden.
A White House official said earlier Monday that Obama’s new moves came after House Speaker John Boehner told him last week the House will not vote on immigration-related legislation this year. Obama said Boehner informed him Republicans will not vote “at least for the remainder of this year.” The president has faced pressure from immigration advocates to stem the tide of deportations in lieu of waiting for congressional legislation.
Obama said he will direct Homeland Security Department Secretary Jeh Johnson and Attorney General Eric Holder to present him with executive actions he can take without congressional approval by the end of the summer. He said he will implement them “without further delay.”
Obama also announced he will direct his administration to move enforcement resources from the interior to the border, amid a staggering humanitarian crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border. Obama said the border crisis only underscores the need for Congress to pass legislation.
“The President will continue to make clear that regardless of the steps he takes through administrative action, nothing replaces Congress’s ability to pass commonsense immigration reform, and will continue to make the case for a comprehensive bill,” the White House official said early Monday.
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The Houston Astros have broken ground for the renovation of center field at Minute Maid Park. That includes the removal or an iconic feature of this particular park.
The renovations now underway include improved seating, although the stadium capacity remains about the same. There’ll be new food and beverage options. And there’ll be revisions to the playing field, including the removal of Tal’s Hill — the 90-foot wide center field incline named for former team president Tal Smith. It has a deep-center wall that’s 436 feet from home plate. But with the redesign of center field, the fence will be 409 feet away.
Astros owner Jim Crane says the new design was influenced by feedback from fans, as well as former and current players. “Yeah, the players, you know, they all have their opinion. I mean, you know, when we looked at it statistically, and certainly, you know, we have the guys to do that, it’s pretty neutral. So, it’s not a big deal, we just think it helps us utilize the park. You know, taking in all that into consideration, we’re just really trying to improve the ball park and the ball park experience. Impacting the game, we don’t think there’ll be that much.”
Astros President Reid Ryan says the things fans will appreciate most can’t be seen in photos of the center field work. “The bigger concourses, the fact that we’re going to add more gates. By the time we get to opening day, people are going to be really excited.”
Renovations are expected to be complete for the 2017 season. Reid says it’s a shame work was able to start early, because the Astros weren’t in the playoffs. “I think when we thought about when are we gonna do this press conference, all of us were hoping for November. And unfortunately, you know, we had injuries and our bullpen got taxed and I think people know we’re building this with a lot of October baseball in mind.”
The Astros hit ten balls to Tal’s Hill this season for extra bases, all of which would be home runs in the renovated center field area. |
If you've arrived here too late and still want to subscribe to Year 2 of NF Magazine, you can do so directly through our online store by clicking right here! For a limited time after the conclusion of the campaign, subscriptions through the website will also qualify to receive the free print copy of Issue #1 that was unlocked as a stretch goal here! So get moving!
Below, the campaign page's contents from its final day, preserved:
Hey there, Kickstarter audience! Thanks for checking out NF Magazine, coming to you from the Nintendo Force. Maybe you've already heard of us, and maybe you haven't. But whether you've been with us from the beginning or you're just now jumping on board, this campaign is the place to join the Force for 2014!
Our funding goal has been achieved! We're now using the remaining days of our campaign to push forward and hit stretch goals to enhance our Year 2 issues and add bonuses to everyone's subscriptions!
Don't miss the new Update #12! You do want some free video games, don't you?
If you've already subscribed by making a pledge and choosing a tier, you might now want to consider adding on some add-ons! Add-ons are extra things that you can tag onto your existing subscription order, if you want to. They're optional, and not everyone will want or need to take advantage of them. But they're pretty snazzy enhancements to your Year 2 subscription if you do choose to go for them!
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Here's where the fun really begins! We've already hit our bottom-line funding goal of $49,000, so we've raised enough money to pay for the printing, packaging and shipping costs of all of our Year 2 issues. But if we can now go above $49k, we can start enhancing those issues and offering our subscribers some fun bonuses too. Take a look:
Stretch Goal #1 has been hit! We'll celebrate the success of our Kickstarter campaign by giving all of our backers new desktop wallpaper versions of Thor's art seen in the campaign video above – the Mighty No. 9 cast illustration first published in Issue #6, and the "They Can Dig It!" piece that brought together Shovel Knight, Dig Dug, Drill Man and all of the rest of gaming's most notable digging characters in Issue #7.
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Stretch Goal #3 has been smashed! This one wasn't a sexy instant gratification bonus for our backers, but it is essential for Year 2's issues to be able to be created with as much quality and care as possible – so far, all of NF Magazine's issues have been put together solely as a labor of love. But it's time to start paying this team, don't you think?
We did it! A full print run of Issue #1 has been funded by us hitting the $64,000 stretch goal, so a copy of our original debut issue will now be sent to every Year 2 subscriber for free!
We hit this last stretch goal with less than seven hours remaining in the campaign, so rather than us deciding what any extra money beyond $64k will go to support, we're going to let democracy determine how we use any surplus. After the campaign's over, we'll poll our backers and ask for your opinions about these three different Surplus Goal options:
If you want more posters beyond the one that will be included in Issue #8, let us know! If more consistent page count is your priority, vote for that! If you like us to explore the option of printing our issues on heavier stock, make your voice heard!
Questions? Comments? Concerns? Hit us up through the Get in Touch box at the bottom of the NFMagazine.com home page.
You guys rock!
Here's some background info for you. Back in December of 2012, Nintendo Power Magazine shipped its last issue. That got a lot of long-time Nintendo fans upset, as NP had been the one consistent and reliable print magazine covering Nintendo video games ever since the '80s. Some of us had been subscribers for over two decades, and there were still tens of thousands of active subscribers getting new issues delivered in the mail up until that final issue.
Well, we didn't want to see that legacy die. So we assembled a dream team of the most well known Nintendo journalists from around the world and launched a new magazine just a little over a year ago – the first issue went on sale on January 11, 2013, exactly one month after Nintendo Power ended.
Now, NF Magazine is not Nintendo Power. But we're carrying the torch forward into the future by paying homage to the best parts of NP's past while forging a new identity with an all-new team.
Want to check out some page previews, to see what NF Magazine has already done throughout the previous year? We've got a series of "Look Inside" pages available on NFMagazine.com for you to browse – clicking on any of the magazine covers below will let you jump over to our site and peek at several pages inside each one. You'll see some similarities to the old NP, and some things that are totally new and totally NF. All together, it's like a highlight reel of Year 1!
Nintendo Power’s final issue went on sale on newsstands on December 11, 2012. Exactly one month later, on January 11, 2013, the first issue of Nintendo Force went live. Made available only through the print-on-demand service of MagCloud and set at a steep price of $17.99 per copy (print-on-demand is expensive), the debut issue of Nintendo Force nonetheless overcame that obstacle of prohibitive cost and soared to shatter all of MagCloud’s sales records – it became the most successful single issue in the history of the site, with thousands upon thousands of copies sold (and more are still being added to that number daily). The incredible reception proved that an audience still existed hungry for Nintendo games coverage in magazine form, and propelled us to pursue subscriptions and enter production on a full year of follow-up issues.
How do you follow up such a huge success as our debut issue? By making a sequel issue that is itself all about sequels! Rather than just creating one magazine after another defined only by the time of their release, we established the practice of having an overall theme that guided the content of each new issue here with #2 – and the first theme was celebrating all the other #2s out there. We also featured Luigi as our cover star for the first time in “The Year of Luigi” (he’d go on to appear on two more covers before the end of 2013), and this issue was also the first to be offered to subscribers! Issue #1 was a standalone product, existing all by itself. Issue #2 is when subscriptions – both print and digital – first began, so anyone who signed up to join the Force in advance of #2′s release became a true NF Ambassador.
The team was really getting into the swing of making new magazine issues by the time we tackled our third, which appropriately featured the King of Swing himself on the cover. Donkey Kong’s connections to Hollywood’s legendary giant ape King Kong – along with the arrival of the 20th anniversary of the live-action Super Mario Bros. movie – inspired us to make our theme for this issue “Nintendo at the Movies.” This was also the issue that ushered in our NF Magazine iPad app, giving us a “third pillar” of distribution for new issues. (It was on like Donkey Kong.)
In the wake of a great showing for Nintendo at E3 2013, our hopes for the future of the 3DS and Wii U were high – so we embraced that spirit of looking ahead to tomorrow and combined it with a Mario & Luigi: Dream Team cover to create “Dreams for the Future” as our fourth NF Magazine issue theme. If you’ve been a fan of Nintendo for years and years like we have, you know that beyond actually playing Nintendo’s video games, the most fun you can have as a fan is speculating about what’s coming next from the company. What next sequel will be revealed? What developer will be the next to take on your favorite franchise? What crazy thing will Mr. Iwata say or do in the next Nintendo Direct video? Dreaming about the future is a blast, and we celebrated that fun in this edition.
With the simultaneous worldwide release of Pokémon X and Pokémon Y coming just around the corner, the Nintendo Force jumped straight into exploring what awaited trainers in the all-new Kalos region in our fifth issue, Pokémon Power! (We even went a little wild with the layout, as print issues featured a flippable cover – the mystical Fairy-type Xerneas represented Pokémon X on one side, while the destruction Dark- and Flying-type Yveltal posed menacingly on the opposite side.) You can check out both covers in more detail (along with page previews from inside the issue) by clicking the image above!
For our final issue of 2013, we were inspired by both the upcoming holiday season and the great variety of new multiplayer games that would be launching for Wii U and 3DS just in time to become Christmas presents for millions of Nintendo fans around the globe. So multiplayer became our focus, as we encouraged our readers to take advantage of the parties and family reunions that naturally happen around Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s each year and enjoy some Nintendo game time with friends and family – playing games like Wii Party U, Mario Party: Island Tour and our cover game, Super Mario 3D World. |
Last year, University of Pennsylvania researchers Alexander J. Stewart and Joshua B. Plotkin published a mathematical explanation for why cooperation and generosity have evolved in nature. Using the classical game theory match-up known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, they found that generous strategies were the only ones that could persist and succeed in a multi-player, iterated version of the game over the long term.
But now they’ve come out with a somewhat less rosy view of evolution. With a new analysis of the Prisoner’s Dilemma played in a large, evolving population, they found that adding more flexibility to the game can allow selfish strategies to be more successful. The work paints a dimmer but likely more realistic view of how cooperation and selfishness balance one another in nature.
“It’s a somewhat depressing evolutionary outcome, but it makes intuitive sense,” said Plotkin, a professor in Penn’s Department of Biology in the School of Arts & Sciences, who coauthored the study with Stewart, a postdoctoral researcher in his lab. “We had a nice picture of how evolution can promote cooperation even amongst self-interested agents and indeed it sometimes can, but, when we allow mutations that change the nature of the game, there is a runaway evolutionary process, and suddenly defection becomes the more robust outcome.”
Their study, which will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examines the outcomes of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a scenario used in the field of game theory to understand how individuals decide whether to cooperate or not. In the dilemma, if both players cooperate, they both receive a payoff. If one cooperates and the other does not, the cooperating player receives the smallest possible payoff, and the defecting player the largest. If both players do not cooperate, they both receive a payoff, but it is less than what they would gain if both had cooperated. In other words, it pays to cooperate, but it can pay even more to be selfish.
Stewart and Plotkin’s previous study examined an iterated and evolutionary version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which a population of players matches up against one another repeatedly. The most successful players “reproduce” more and pass along their winning strategies to the next generation. The researchers found that, in such a scenario, cooperative and even forgiving strategies won out, in part because “cheaters” couldn’t win against themselves.
In the new investigation, Stewart and Plotkin added a new twist. Now, not only could players alter their strategy — whether or not they cooperate — but they could also vary the payoffs they receive for cooperating.
This, Plotkin said, may more accurately reflect the balancing of risk and reward that occurs in nature, where organisms decide not only how often they cooperate but also the extent to which they cooperate.
Initially, as in their earlier study, cooperative strategies found success.
“But when cooperative strategies predominate, payoffs will rise as well,” Stewart said. “With higher and higher payoffs at stake, the temptation to defect also rises. In a sense the cooperators are paving the way for their own demise.”
Indeed, Stewart and Plotkin found that the population of players reached a tipping point after which defection was the predominant strategy in the population.
In a second analysis, they allowed the payoffs to vary outside the order set by the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Instead of unilateral defection winning the greatest reward, for example, it could be that mutual cooperation reaped the greatest payoff, the situation described by a game known as Stag Hunt. Or, mutual defection could generate the lowest possible reward, as described by the game theory model known as the Snowdrift or Hawk-Dove game.
What they found was that, again, there was an initial collapse in cooperative strategies. But, as the population continued to play and evolve, players also altered the payoffs so that they were playing a different game, either Snowdrift or Stag Hunt.
“So we see complicated dynamics when we allow the full range of payoffs to evolve,” Plotkin said. “One of the interesting results is that the Prisoner’s Dilemma game itself is unstable and is replaced by other games. It is as if evolution would like to avoid the dilemma altogether.”
Stewart and Plotkin say their new conception of how strategies and payoffs co-evolve in populations is ripe for testing, with the marine bacteria Vibrionaceae as a potential model. In these bacterial populations, the researchers noted, individuals cooperate by sharing a protein they extrude that allows them to metabolize iron. But the bacteria can possess mutations that alter whether they produce the protein and how much they generate, whether and how much they cooperate, as well as mutations that affect how efficiently they can take up the protein, their payoff. The Penn researchers said a “natural experiment” using these or other microbes could put their theory to the test, to see exactly when and how selfishness can pay off.
“After this study, we end up with a less sunny view of the evolution of cooperation,” Stewart said. “But it rings true that it’s not the case that evolution always tends towards happily ever after.”
The study received support from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Army Research Office and the Foundational Questions in Evolutionary Biology Fund |
A first step can be hard, joyful and wobbly. It takes courage, faith, determination and pure grit. House Bill 1 is a bit of all these.
Once HB 1 is signed into law by the governor, Georgia families will be able to use the oil from marijuana plants in the treatment of certain medical conditions, bringing relief and hope to many. Cannabis oil with THC has shown excellent results treating childhood seizures and many other conditions, including pain and appetite loss from cancer, ALS, multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease and sickle cell anemia.
HB 1 is an incredible first step, and it was a hard one. Proponents, including the governor, Rep. Allen Peake and Sen. Renee Unterman, should be commended for helping Georgia take this step. With their thoughtfulness and leadership, the next step will be easier.
Georgia will create a limited drug study program and a commission of experts to help resolve some of the issues that were left on the table — namely, the use of inhalers, creams, patches and smokable forms of cannabis/marijuana; and expanding the list of illnesses that can be treated, such as to autism and fibromyalgia.
There will be limitations on the ability of physicians to prescribe marijuana except in severe or final-stage illnesses. Physicians are also limited on the appropriate delivery system of medical marijuana. Many patients who might benefit from the use of medical cannabis have difficulty ingesting the oil or taking shots. For them, the ability to use an inhaler or apply a topical cream might be the only appropriate delivery method. A doctor, not legislators, should have the ability to prescribe the best method based on a patient’s illness and need.
Possibly the largest step not taken in HB 1 is addressing the federal penalties that still apply. Marijuana remains a Schedule I drug. Transportation of cannabis oil across state lines remains illegal, with penalties of five years’ imprisonment or a $250,000 fine for an individual and up to $1 million for a corporation selling across state lines.
Federal authorities have indicated they would not pursue charges against individuals using cannabis or marijuana for medical reasons if they reside within the state in which the product is manufactured. HB 1 prohibits the manufacture of cannabis oil or marijuana leaf products in Georgia, and families continue to run the risk of federal criminal activity transporting it home.
The shortcomings of HB 1 are not problems of intention, but execution. To legally obtain cannabis oil, a family or individual would still need to travel to a state where manufacturing is legal. That requires money or the continued splintering of family residences.
My hope is the new commission will make recommendations to perfect Georgia’s law and face head-on the matter of cannabis production in Georgia. Doing so is the only solution to ensure our citizens protection under the federal guidelines, and to ease fears of researchers who worry about losing grant funding.
It is time to face old fears and stigmas attached to marijuana, recognizing marijuana has real medicinal benefits.
All Georgians, regardless of age, geography or income level, should be able to get the medical relief they need. We should not get caught up politics, but provide suffering Georgians access to potentially life-saving medicine in whatever form necessary. We should do this without having to turn them into federal drug traffickers. The stakes are too high for our families not to get this right.
State Sen. Curt Thompson, D-Norcross, is a lawyer. |
Everything is Hostile has been updated to version 2.4c
Every mod in the pack has been updated to the latest version
pack now runs on forge 1558
We are now including FTBUtils for land claiming and admin tools
The return of chromaticraft!
foresty 4.0 updates, lots of new stuff here
binnies removed (for now until he updates)
HQM upgraded to 4.4.4, required all new reward bags
new recipes including Extreme crafting
harder difficulty settings
remove geostrata
New mods:
Chromaticraft
deadly world as well, silverfish turned waaay down.
gadomancy
Agricraft
specialAI
Fragile Torches
Loginsheild
FTBUTils
Avaritia (ExtremeCrafting)
Added looking Glass util for live render of your mystcraft portals!
Runic Dungeons mod added
What are We looking at Mod
Our own custom BBTweaks mod has been added to the pack. This adds the option for an ingame currency system for use with the tradebooths. the /bb command will grant breakbit daily which can optionally be configured to be used as fuel for chunkloading.
In addition BBtweaks disabled the Drill of the dead in favor of a new Ritual of Culling. Ritual of Culling works similar to Drill of the dead but it "culls the weak". It will not kill enemies that are buffed with potion effects such as those spawned on cursed earth, UNLESS you empower the ritual with magicales.
It also adds the new ritual Nature's Leech which will consume trees, grass, flowers in a radius around the altar to create blood. It's slower than the drill but much less costly to get up and running helping to transition from early to mid game bloodmagic.
Orechid and blood magic meteros have been buffed with new oregen and radius increases respectively.
New oregen changes to allow for more rewarding manual mining.
Further balance tweaks within recipes and all dungeon loot completely revamped to be more rewarding, no more pieces of bread and string in your end strongholds!
Big trees world generation has been tweaked to be less dense and to allow for generation of BOP trees
As always more to come, please report any issues on our github tracker https://github.com/breakinblocks/everything-is-hostile/issues
this pack now includes Fastcraft, a mod made by player, this mod is designed to improve many aspects of game-play. Some mod developers may not accept errors with this mod installed, please test them again with out Fastcraft in you instance. More information can be found here - http://forum.industrial-craft.net/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=10820 |
Believe it or not I was newly introduced to Nutella only a few months ago. I have no idea how someone with a sweet tooth as bad as mine could overlook something so delicious for so long but I did. These cookies are so cute with their little peaks of Nutella. This recipe will make 24-30 cookies. This recipe is adapted from one by Martha Stewart.
Nutella thumbprint cookies
12 tbsp butter, softened
1/2 cup icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/4 cups flour
1/2 cup Nutella
1 cup hazelnuts
Directions
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Line 2-3 baking trays with parchment paper.
Finely chop the hazelnuts. Set aside.
Using a hand or stand mixer, combine the butter and icing sugar. Beat for a few minutes until smooth.
Add the flour and mix until combined.
Form the dough into tablespoon sized balls. Roll each ball into the chopped nuts and place on the baking trays. Bake for ten minutes, remove from the oven and press a round teaspoon into the center into each cookie to make an indentation. Place back in the oven for another 7-10 minutes or until the edges of the cookies are lightly browned.
Place the cookies on a rack to cool.
Once the cookies are cool fill a pastry bag with the Nutella and pipe into the middle of each cookie. |
Liam Neeson Is Almost Done With Action Movies By Eric Eisenberg Random Article Blend Unknown, The Grey,
The Academy Award-nominee has recently been doing the press rounds for his latest action movie,
Maybe two more years. If God spares me and I’m healthy. But after that, I’ll stop [the action] I think.
While new potential projects can pop up at any moment, it's worth pointing out that right now Liam Neeson doesn't have any action films on his upcoming slate past Run All Night. His next film,
Of course, there is a big question left looming here: do we really want Liam Neeson to stop doing action movies? He's clearly still getting opportunities to do more serious/prestigious projects, and he's pretty damn great and believable as the gruff, kick-a-bad-guys-teeth-in protagonist. The opposite side of the argument is that he may not want the act to get too stale, and there's the matter of his personal health and physical abilities. It's worthy of debate!
Do you think Liam Neeson should starting exiting out of his action hero career, or do you want him to keep going forever? Answer our poll , and explain your point in the comments below. With the release of Taken in 2009, Liam Neeson wound up completely reinventing his career, fully embracing the role of the aging action hero. Finding incredible success with that movie, he has kept that money train rolling ever since, not only starring in two more Taken films, but also making features like The A-Team Non-Stop , and A Walk Among The Tombstones . But this extended run apparently now has a time limit on it, and Neeson has now declared that he will probably only keep it going for two more years.The Academy Award-nominee has recently been doing the press rounds for his latest action movie, Run All Night , and according to The Guardian he has admitted that he will probably stop doing so much cinematic ass-kicking when he hits the age of 64. Discussing the potential longevity of his career as an action star, Neeson said,While new potential projects can pop up at any moment, it's worth pointing out that right now Liam Neeson doesn't have any action films on his upcoming slate past Run All Night. His next film, Ted 2 , is a comedy that reunites him with Million Ways To Die In The West director Seth MacFarlane. He has also already completed work on A Monster Calls , a new drama from The Impossible director J.A. Bayona about a boy trying to cope with his mother's terminal illness. Most recently he has been playing a Jesuit priest in Martin Scorsese's heavy historical drama Silence - which reunites the actor and filmmaker for the first time since 2002's Gangs of New York. So if Neeson does plan on finishing out his action career in the next two years, he may want to start picking up some new titles.Of course, there is a big question left looming here: do we really want Liam Neeson to stop doing action movies? He's clearly still getting opportunities to do more serious/prestigious projects, and he's pretty damn great and believable as the gruff, kick-a-bad-guys-teeth-in protagonist. The opposite side of the argument is that he may not want the act to get too stale, and there's the matter of his personal health and physical abilities. It's worthy of debate!Do you think Liam Neeson should starting exiting out of his action hero career, or do you want him to keep going forever? Answer our poll , and explain your point in the comments below. Blended From Around The Web Facebook
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A Palestinian wearing what appeared to be an explosive belt stabbed a Border Police officer in the upper body, moderately wounding him, in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Friday during a violent Palestinian protest, police said.
“A terrorist approached Border Police officers who were responding to a riot at the Judea and Samaria Square in Ramallah, and stabbed one of them,” police said, adding that they were investigating the possibility that the terrorist was “mingling with journalists and posing as a one” in order to get close to the troops.
The assailant was shot by the other officers at the scene and was seriously wounded. He later died of his wounds, the Palestinian Authority health ministry said, naming him as Mohammed Aqal, 29.
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The apparent explosive belt did not go off. Police said they were investigating if it was a real bomb or only a device meant to look like one. The attacker, still wearing the apparent suicide bomb belt, was taken away from the scene for medical treatment by the Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance service. Later, Hadashot news said the suicide belt was a model that did not contain actual explosives.
The officer was treated at the scene and then taken to Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center, where he was listed in “a moderate condition with two stab wounds in the upper body.” The hospital said his condition was stable and he was undergoing examinations before being operated on.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the security forces.
“I praise the work of the Border Police force that took out the terrorist,” Netanyahu tweeted, adding that he sends his wishes for a speedy recovery to the soldier who was wounded. “Thank you to our forces who protect us around the clock. Everybody salutes you.”
Once a mainstay of Palestinian terrorist tactics during the second intifada, suicide bombings have become exceedingly rare in recent years. The last suicide bombing occurred in April 2016, when a Palestinian terrorist blew up a bus in Jerusalem, killing himself and injuring 20 people, in an attack organized by Hamas.
Friday’s stabbing took place in the midst of a violent protest against US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital last Wednesday.
Also Friday, a 30-year-old Israeli was lightly injured near the West Bank town of Hizme, outside Jerusalem, when Palestinians threw rocks at his car. He was treated at the scene by medics at the scene and taken to a Jerusalem hospital for treatment, the Magen David Adom emergency service said.
Palestinian media said that a number of protesters sustained light wounds after being hit by Israeli tear gas canisters and rubber bullets, but no serious injuries were reported as of Friday afternoon.
Following noon-time prayers, riots were reported in Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron, Qalqilya and Nablus. Demonstrators burned tires and threw rocks at Israeli troops, who fired back at them with tear gas and rubber bullets.
Hundreds of Palestinians also took part in protests throughout the Gaza Strip, according to local media.
While widespread, the protests initially appeared to be less violent than the previous week’s, and had fewer participants.
Hundreds of additional IDF soldiers were deployed across the West Bank and on the Gaza border ahead of the demonstrations against Trump’s proclamation.
Clashes were also expected in Jerusalem but following relative clam in the capital last week, police did not to impose any age restrictions on Muslim worshipers praying on the Temple Mount. At times of expected violence, Israeli authorities sometimes limit access to the site for young men, who are more likely to clash with police. |
How it works
Prettier formats your code in three steps:
First it parses the code to its abstract syntax tree (AST), getting ride of (almost) all the original formatting. Then it transform the AST into another tree using some opinionated rules to group code fragments in a hierarchy that defines where new lines can be inserted if necessary. Finally, it prints the intermediate tree to a string, choosing the best places to add line-breaks based on the max line length (the default is 80).
Let’s see, for example, how var x = foooo + baaar gets formatted.
First the input string is parsed to AST. The AST looks something like this:
The AST include details about “var”, “x”, “+”, “foooo” and “baaar”, but nothing about spaces, line-breaks, semicolons or any other stylistic stuff that doesn’t matter at runtime. This AST is used as input for the next step that generates a document tree like this one:
Here you can see again “var”, “x”, “foooo”, mixed with some spaces, semicolons and a few Prettier commands. The structure of this tree depends on the stylistic opinions of Prettier.
In this case, three Prettier commands are being used. line indicates that a line-break can be inserted if its needed, if not, a space will be inserted. indent increases the level of indentation (only if the content is printed on a new line). group marks items which the printer should try to fit on one line, if it doesn’t fit it will break the outermost group and try again. There are more commands, for example hardline identifies a line that will always be included in the output. |
I was out of the box early on the dust-up around the survival of the Export-Import Bank, but haven’t weighed in since it’s heated up, so allow me to briefly revisit. (You’ll recall that the Ex-Im Bank provides government-backed guarantees to private loans made to other countries under the condition that they use the credit to buy our exports.)
Note the figure in the link above, showing a pretty remarkable drop in Boeing’s share price on the day of Rep. Cantor’s surprise loss to Dave Brat (Cantor’s a supporter of the bank, and Boeing depends on the bank to boost its international sales; Brat’s a strong opponent). That blip says a lot: Brat had a point when he connected Cantor to Wall St., and Boeing is clearly dependent on the Ex-Im Bank.
Brat and the Tea Party are by no means alone in their opposition to the bank’s reauthorization. From what I’ve seen in recent days, punditry opposition from left, right, and center is outpacing support by a wide margin. At this point, I’m not sure if even Tim Howard could save the bank.
Not that the bank obviously needs saving, but neither is the case against it as slamdunkity as opponents claim. For example, running through the critiques is the assertion that the subsidies which the bank provides to American exporters are wasted: they’d make the same sales without them.
That may be the case, but I’ve seen nothing but assertions and no analysis. Keith Henessey, who doesn’t just want to end the bank—he wants to “Kill” it!—makes a point I’ve made as well: “Deep and liquid private credit markets exist today that did not exist when the Export-Import Bank was created in the 1930s.”
Certainly true. The global supply of loanable funds is much greater and cheaper than it was in the past. But neither he nor I nor anyone else knows if that means a developing economy can get an affordable loan of the magnitude needed to buy US-made airplanes. The Ex-Im Bank exists to offset the premium associated with that credit risk and it has done so effectively, in the sense of pricing its loan guarantees to account for the risk (i.e., it has not, on net, lost money on defaults).
That doesn’t mean it’s efficient or even that it deserves to live on. I join the opposition in their major critiques: it’s not clear why Boeing, GE, and other large American exporters need the subsidy, nor why rich countries need the USG to backstop their loans.
But assertion is not proof, and it would be better to test the international credit waters rather than do an experiment with full withdrawal, especially at a time when we very much need the labor demand generated by exports–and remember, we’re talking manufactured goods. Phase-out is also a better strategy given the other main defense of the bank, which is that as long as our competitors for international sales keep their similar credit-providing institutions up and running, we’re at a disadvantage if we drop out of this market. As one critic wrote, that’s not a principled defense, but I think it’s a pragmatic one. |
Spanish rider explains knee progress and reveals lingering elbow pain.
Dani Pedrosa’s road to recovery may have suffered a minor diversion when he collided with Alex de Angelis in Qatar, but the Spaniard believes that his fitness is steadily improving in the run-up to the Polini Grand Prix of Japan.
The injured star suffered a knock to his elbow when hit by the San Carlo Honda Gresini man in the opening race of the year, but Pedrosa is claiming improvement in the condition of his recently-operated knee.
“I’m looking forward to this weekend in Japan. My leg is improving all the time and the knee is gaining a little bit more mobility every day. I don’t have the full range of movement yet, but I think that by the time we get to Motegi I’ll have about ten degrees more of movement than in Qatar, which should make quite a big difference,” says the Repsol Honda rider as he previews the second race of the 2009 season.
“My elbow is also getting better after the hit De Angelis gave me in Qatar - there’s still some pain and stiffness but I hope it won’t be a problem in Japan. My priority is still to reach full fitness so that I can ride at 100 per cent, and then we must focus on the machine because I missed out on quite a lot of winter testing and we’re still not at the level we’d like to be. It’s a case of taking things one step at time - first to get full fitness and then improve the bike step-by-step.”
Pedrosa finished eleventh in the Commercialbank Grand Prix of Qatar, his lowest placing since the 2008 Czech Republic round. |
A Houma man was arrested after authorities searched his apartment Monday and found a cache of weapons, fake law-enforcement ID badges and several suspected bombs that turned out to be fake, authorities said.
A Houma man was arrested after authorities searched his apartment Monday and found a cache of weapons, fake law-enforcement ID badges and several suspected bombs that turned out to be fake, authorities said.
An estimated 40 people were evacuated from four buildings at the Landing at Bayou Cane apartment complex, 1803 Martin Luther King Blvd., after police found the suspected bombs. The residents were allowed to return about 6 hours later after authorities took the suspected explosive devices to a secure location, where they were detonated and determined to be fake.
Michael Hebert, 61, a resident of the apartment complex, is charged with possession of an illegal weapon, 19 counts of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, 10 counts of unlawful possession of fraudulent documents and possession of a firearm with an erased serial number. He was in the Terrebonne jail this morning awaiting a bond hearing, the Sheriff's Office said.
The investigation was launched by the U.S. Secret Service after agents learned Hebert had bought counterfeit badges and credentials that represented him as a federal agent, the Sheriff's Office said today in a news release.
During a search of Hebert's apartment Monday afternoon, Secret Service agents and sheriff's deputies found several hundred counterfeit documents, badges and credentials that falsely identify him as belonging to law-enforcement agencies, including the FBI, CIA and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Sheriff's Office said.
Hebert had illegally acquired 19 firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition, which were also confiscated, according to the Sheriff's Office.
Outside the apartment complex Monday evening, law-enforcement agents and residents gathered.
“The (deputy) at the gate told me there was a guy in an apartment with bombs and grenades, and stuff to make them,” said Laveda Johnson, 41, one of those evacuated from their apartments.
Residents said they were evacuated about 2 p.m. and were allowed back into their homes around 8 p.m.
As a felon, Hebert is barred by law from possessing firearms, the Sheriff's Office said. He was convicted in 1990 for possession and transfer of a machine gun and wire fraud. |
This year I received a gift of ukiyo-e prints and another of Japanese poems. I was taking an Eastern art history class this semester, so it'll be great to have another resource for some great prints. :) I haven't had a chance to look at the poems too closely yet but it has the romaji transcript and the author's signature for each poem, which is amazing! Thanks for another great year of exchange.
Happy holidays!
P.S. To my Santa: I'm sorry for taking so long to post! I definitely, 100% THOUGHT I had posted, but as per usual brainfarted and forgot. Seriously though, thank you so much for another awesome year! I can only hope that this continues to be as awesome as it has been the last couple times. |
Samurai Jack fans, this is not a drill. If you are one of the thousands of have been patiently awaiting the fifth season of Samurai Jack, then you should know that your wait is almost over. Thanks to Adult Swim, fans now know when the show’s new season will premiere, and it is sooner than you think.
UP NEXT: Adult Swim Adds Samurai Jack Back To Its Lineup
During its nightly run, the late-night program played a special social media bump where it answered fans’ questions. When one fans asked whether Samurai Jack’s new season was still happening, this is what Adult Swim had to say. “March 11th, 11:30 p.m. is what’s going on,” the bump wrote. Then, when another fans asked about the show, the bump simply asked, “What did we just say?”
Of course, fans were wondering is the show’s comeback was going to be done sooner rather than later. Not long ago, Samurai Jack was added back to Adult Swim’s line-up in a marathon fashion. On January 14th, the show was re-aired on the program, and fans were elated to see the critically acclaimed series back on their televisions. Airing on Adult Swim’s Toonami, the Samurai Jack comeback had fans hyped last year when the network announced its development. The original series ran for four seasons from 2001 until 2004 and featured the time-traveling samurai prince as he fought against the shape-shifting demon Aku. Following the demon through time, the character assumed the name Jack once he traveled to a dystopian version of Earth to kill Aku before he could unleash unspeakable evil upon the universe.
The premiere of the new season of Samurai Jack has finally been revealed. pic.twitter.com/qicRjJOYD4 — Nate (@CabooseJr) January 23, 2017 |
The Jon Jones business is picking up again.
Fresh off the announcement that his UFC suspension had been lifted, Jones has inked a new sponsorship deal with GAT, a leading manufacturer of sports nutrition products.
"I am very grateful to have such a terrific brand like GAT sponsor me as one of their athletes," Jones stated in a press release. "I look forward to working with TEAMGAT and to taking the GAT brand with me in becoming the number one name in MMA."
This is a significant milestone for Jones, who lost all of his sponsors, including newly-inked Reebok, following his arrest in April.
Slowly but surely, though, Jones has reemerged on social media, and while he has yet to do any interviews about the incident that led to his arrest earlier this year or his plea deal, it's clear that he is already gearing up for his comeback fight against Daniel Cormier later next year.
He'll now be doing so with a new sponsor by his side.
"I was thrilled when Malki Kawa called me to discuss TEAMGAT expanding to include MMA athletes and signing Jon Jones as our first," Mark Post, Vice President of GAT, stated. "I’ve been a fan of his since he entered the sport. Everyone at GAT is excited about signing Jon. The whole world will be watching when he gets back into action. TEAMGAT will be proud to be in his corner." |
Whether in the digital world of Neverwinter or on pen ‘n’ paper, every character is a unique avatar to adventure with. In Neverwinter, when you first create your adventurer, you’ll have a wide range of options to customize both stats and appearance.
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Character creation in Neverwinter starts with the D&D standby of choosing a Race/Class/Gender combo. We’ve already revealed a number of the races, and we’ve previewed a few classes, including the Control Wizard and the Guardian Fighter.
Your choice of race will give you some bonuses to your core stats – Strength, Constitution, etc. In addition, races unlock racial abilities, like the Versatile Defense ability for Humans, granting a bonus to your Defense. With these racial abilities, you can customize your adventurer towards your play style, giving you a better Critical Hit chance if you like flashy attacks, or granting you the extra resilience to wade into the thick of it.
Your stats are also customizable, both through your choice of race and through rolling. When you reach the ability scores section, you’ll be able to roll or reroll your scores, allowing you to build a stat line that matches your character’s concept. If your adventurer was the village bully before finding the study of magic, you can roll up Strength 12 for your Control Wizard.
The key ability scores in Neverwinter match those of Dungeons and Dragons: Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. 10 in a stat is the adventurer’s average, with 18 (before racial bonuses) being the maximum for Level 1 characters.
Your choice of race also gives your stats some customization. Races give +2 to one primary stat, and +2 to one of two other stats. A Tiefling always gets +2 Charisma, for example, but you can choose whether to get an additional +2 to Constitution or to Intelligence. Build a well-rounded Control Wizard with Constitution, for instance, or specialize by adding it to Intelligence.
You’ll also be able to customize your character’s physical appearance. You’ll have the option of using several preset appearance packages or making deeper customizations. Page down for a list of customization options – please remember that this is not final, but it’ll help you get a sense of the scale of character customization.
If you’ve created a character in Champions Online or Star Trek Online, Cryptic Studios’ currently-live titles, you’ll have a sense of how many options you’ll have in Neverwinter. Make your character unique with tattoos, plenty of hairstyles, complexions and more – and that’s just in current test builds. When Neverwinter launches, your adventurer’s appearance can be as unique as her adventures.
With the dark and mysterious Tieflings, for example, character creation will let you really customize how infernal your character is. If she’s actively working to overcome her background, use some of the different horn variants and remove any tattoos and scars. You can also scale her eyes to be larger and more expressive, with a softer color.
Alternatively, if she’s embracing her bloodline’s cruelty, add some height with heels, plus slim and lengthen her hands for a classically knife-slender demi-demon. You can also set her up with a selection of tattoos, and you’ll be able to change their shape and color.
This is just the tip of the customization iceberg, too. Stay tuned for more Neverwinter news, including more about how you can craft your dream adventurer!
Appearance customization options:
Head Shape
Hair (shape and color)
Eyes (shape and color – some customizable per eye)
Eyebrows (fineness and color)
Facial Hair (shape and color)
Skin complexion and color – old/tan, weathered/black, etc.
(For certain races) Horn alignment
Facial tattoos and their color
Scar shapes
Sliders for your facial dimensions – neck length, cheek size, etc.
Sliders for your body dimensions – hand thickness, leg length, etc.
Read up on all of our recent Neverwinter info: |
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The 10th week of the NFL season is in the books, which leaves us more than halfway through the 17-week schedule. Rookies have either carved out a role or are fighting to make an impact before the season ends. Our weekly rookie rankings continue to change based on recent play.
What is happening in the midst of their first seasons is still a potential indicator of how the next half-decade or so will play out. Players who impact their teams right away generally stick around and continue their positive influences. That shouldn’t take away from those who need more time to develop into solid players, though.
For this week’s rankings, we take a look at which players have performed the best to this point. Consideration has been given to where each rookie stands on his team’s depth chart, but the rankings aim to reflect how each player has performed thus far compared to what the expectations are. Production per snap is also important, since certain rookies have struggled to be good despite major opportunities.
Our rankings from even last week are now outdated, as Week 10 featured several standout performances. While some players are hitting their rookie wall, others are starting to hit their stride. Let’s take a look at the best rookies thus far. |
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Commission for I was asked to do a mare version of Snowdrop, so I decided to have a bit of fun and give her a unique eye shape! I love how they turned outQuite a bit of an improvement from my first attempt at Snowdrop a few years ago!Snowdrop is made from Baby Blue, Snow, and Turquoise minky.HerSh |
Tyrone Troutman was just a boy 25 years ago when he saw his dad stab his mom a dozen times in the chest and neck. His mom survived.
But history repeated itself at the family home Thursday night when an argument about his mother's stabbing all those years ago raised his father's ire again — this time with a deadly result, the Broward Sheriff's Office said.
Joseph Troutman grabbed a foot-long butcher knife from the kitchen and charged at his son with it, officials said. He knocked his son to the floor and stabbed him in the back around 11:30 p.m., they said.
His 40-year-old son, covered in blood, reached a neighbor's home for help. When the neighbor opened the door, Tyrone Troutman shouted, "My father stabbed me!"
He collapsed and later that night died at a hospital.
Joseph Troutman, 63, phoned 911 to say he had stabbed his son, officials said. He was arrested on a second-degree murder charge.
His son had witnessed his father's violence at a Deerfield Beach home on the night of April 10, 1989, when Joseph Troutman was arguing with his then-wife, Ora Troutman, records show.
Tyrone, then 15, saw his father with a knife in his hand and on top of his mother in the master bedroom. He saw his mother bleeding from the stab wounds his dad had inflicted.
The assault that day began while Ora Troutman was taking a shower, according to John Contini, the lawyer who represented Joseph Troutman in the case.
"He was wearing a ski mask over his head at the time and she was stabbed repeatedly and their son saved her life by jumping on his father's back" and pulling off the mask, Contini said. "This allowed her to get away, and she ran naked to a neighbor and survived."
Joseph Troutman later saw officers outside the home. When one officer asked his name, he spontaneously said, "We were fighting, and I cut her."
An officer found Ora Troutman on a couch inside the home. She was lying on her back, wrapped in a blanket. She was taken to a hospital.
Later that year, Joseph and Ora Troutman divorced, records show.
Joseph Troutman faced an attempted murder charge. But in March 1990, he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and served about a third of a reduced seven-year sentence, according to Contini.
"He was respectful, courteous and seemingly remorseful and even likable," Contini said. "We all came to the same conclusion that the family supported the [reduced sentence] and the second chance for him, notwithstanding the horrific facts involved."
Relatives said Tyrone Troutman had been living with his father on and off and they had tried to reconcile their differences since the knife attack. Tyrone Troutman himself grew to have a temper, a relative said.
"Anyone going through that horror would have to be suffering from PTSD all this time, unless he had some real intervention and help," Contini said. "These are things that simply cannot be expunged from your memory."
A few months ago, Tyrone Troutman moved into his dad's North Lauderdale residence in the 6500 block of Harbour Road, the Sheriff's Office said. That's where Thursday's stabbing happened.
According to the Sheriff's Office, Joseph Troutman and his son were arguing, and the dispute soon became about Ora Troutman's stabbing.
Tyrone Troutman's girlfriend, Donna Lalor, told investigators that Joseph Troutman became enraged after his son grabbed a radio from the table and smashed it.
Joseph Troutman then grabbed a butcher knife, came at his son and stabbed him, Lalor told investigators.
She was able to get between the men while telling the elder Troutman to stop, an arrest report said.
Tyrone Troutman was able to run to the home of neighbor Diego Arias and bang on his door. Arias found Tyrone Troutman covered in blood. He asked him what had happened.
"I'm sure it was terrifying for him," sheriff's spokeswoman Dani Moschella said. "There was [Troutman], bloody and on the ground, saying his father had stabbed him. And then he becomes unresponsive."
Arias began CPR on the wounded man.
"He did everything he could," Moschella said.
Arias' niece, Catherine Arredondo, 18, and her grandmother were at Arias' home at the time.
Arredondo said Tyrone Troutman was drifting in and out of consciousness.
"First he was like gone, he just looked at us as if he was gone and my uncle just started putting pressure on his heart," she said. "It was scary."
Donna Lalor "was just hysterical," Arredondo said. "She was shocked."
North Lauderdale Fire Rescue took Tyrone Troutman to Broward Health North, where he was pronounced dead.
After Joseph Troutman called 911, he told detectives that he was acting in self defense, authorities said. But he also acknowledged his son was not armed, they said. Joseph Troutman was treated at Broward Health Medical Center for a cut on his hand, the Sheriff's Office said.
Contini was shaken by the news of Tyrone Troutman's death.
"He was a hero 25 years ago saving his mom and now he's dead," he said. "It's more than horrific, it's painfully sad beyond measure."
Staff researcher Barbara Hijek and staff writer Juan Ortega contributed to this report.
[email protected] or 954-356-4303
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this online article contained incorrect information about Joseph Troutman. Records that described a 1996 Georgia cocaine case had nothing to do with him. |
Sounds like pretty good advice, huh? Thankfully, Chuck Schumer has gone on record on this issue, insisting to the American Constitution Society that the Senate not only has the right but the duty to block Supreme Court nominees from a lame-duck President. Only with an extraordinary nominee should the Senate confirm such an appointment, Schumer insists (via Grabien and Gary Gross):
Of course Schumer aimed this at George W. Bush, but note that this speech took place in mid-2007, when Bush still had 18 months left in his presidency. That’s almost twice as much as Barack Obama has left in his own, and both presidents appointed two members to the court. Schumer complains about the supposed extremism of the two appointments, but Republicans can easily make the same complaint about both of Obama’s appointments. Gander, sauce … some assembly required.
The only differences between then and now are the party that controls the White House, and the small allowance Schumer holds out for potential cooperation. If an extraordinary candidate who could pass Democrats’ standards for “mainstream” came before the Senate for confirmation, then Schumer says they could consider approving him or her. Republicans are insisting that they won’t confirm anyone regardless of whom Obama appoints, which functionally amounts to the same threat Schumer made in mid-2007 but is a little harder to sell as a reasonable stand. If Obama nominated an Alito or Roberts, why would Republicans refuse to confirm him or her? Obama has no intention of replacing Scalia with another conservative, of course, but what if Obama agreed to confer with the Republican majority to give him three acceptable options for nominees and he appointed one of them? Would they still refuse to hold hearings?
The GOP would have been smarter to take the Schumer road, but it’s a little late for that now, and it really doesn’t make that much difference. Every time someone complains that Republicans are acting unconstitutionally, offer them Schumer’s 2007 declaration — and the American Constitution Society’s approving applause. |
Do snakes sleep with their eyes open?
People have been spreading the rumor that snakes sleep with their eyes open for years - so which one is it, a myth or a fact?
Busted! This one’s a myth. If you’ve ever seen a snake in the wild coiled up and not moving, you are never sure whether or not he is sleeping, because his eyes appear to be open.
Snakes do not have legs, which means that they need to slither in order to get around, requiring them to be very close to the ground. The snake may come upon sharp grass, dirt, and debris, which can all affect his eye. In order to protect them, evolution has given snakes clear, transparent eyelids called brille.
Even when the snake closes its eyes, it can still see through these “glass” eyelids. This type of eyelid is made out of skin and sheds along with the rest of the snake. When the old skin grows old and tough, the snake begins to grow a new set of eyelids underneath the old one.
Source |
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Now that my blood pressure has returned to normal after responding to Dr. Trenberth, I returned to thinking about my earlier somewhat unsatisfying attempt to make a very simple emulation of the GISS Model E (herinafter GISSE) climate model. I described that attempt here, please see that post for the sources of the datasets used in this exercise.
After some reflection and investigation, I realized that the GISSE model treats all of the forcings equally … except volcanoes. For whatever reason, the GISSE climate model only gives the volcanic forcings about 40% of the weight of the rest of the forcings.
So I took the total forcings, and reduced the volcanic forcing by 60%. Then it was easy, because nothing further was required. It turns out that the GISSE model temperature hindcast is that the temperature change in degrees C will be 30% of the adjusted forcing change in watts per square metre (W/m2). Figure 1 shows that result:
Figure 1. GISSE climate model hindcast temperatures, compared with temperatures hindcast using the formula ∆T = 0.3 ∆Q, where T is temperature and Q is the same forcings used by the GISSE model, with the volcanic forcing reduced by 60%.
What are the implications of this curious finding?
First, a necessary detour into black boxes. For the purpose of this exercise, I have treated the GISS-E model as a black box, for which I know only the inputs (forcings) and outputs (hindcast temperatures). It’s like a detective game, trying to emulate what’s happening inside the GISSE black box without being able to see inside.
The resulting emulation can’t tell us what actually is happening inside the black box. For example, the black box may take the input, divide it by four, and then multiply the result by eight and output that number.
Looking at this from the outside of the black box, what we see is that if we input the number 2, the black box outputs the number 4. We input 3 and get 6, we input 5 and we get 10, and so on. So we conclude that the black box multiplies the input by 2.
Of course, the black box is not actually multiplying the input by 2. It is dividing by 4 and multiplying by 8. But from outside the black box that doesn’t matter. It is effectively multiplying the input by 2. We cannot use the emulation to say what is actually happening inside the black box. But we can say that the black box is functionally equivalent to a black box that multiplies by two. The functional equivalence means that we can replace one black box with the other because they give the same result. It also allows us to discover and state what the first black box is effectively doing. Not what it is actually doing, but what it is effectively doing. I will return to this idea of functional equivalence shortly.
METHODS
Let me describe what I have done to get to the conclusions in Figure 1. First, I did a multiple linear regression using all the forcings, to see if the GISSE temperature hindcast could be expressed as a linear combination of the forcing inputs. It can, with an r^2 of 0.95. That’s a good fit.
However, that result is almost certainly subject to “overfitting”, because there are ten individual forcings that make up the total. With so many forcings, you end up with lots of parameters, so you can match most anything. This means that the good fit doesn’t mean a lot.
I looked further, and I saw that the total forcing versus temperature match was excellent except for one forcing — the volcanoes. Experimentation showed that the GISSE climate model is underweighting the volcanic forcings by about 60% from the original value, while the rest of the forcings are given full value.
Then I used the total GISS forcing with the appropriately reduced volcanic contribution, and we have the result shown in Figure 1. Temperature change is 30% of the change in the adjusted forcing. Simple as that. It’s a really, really short methods section because what the GISSE model is effectively doing is really, really simple.
DISCUSSION
Now, what are (and aren’t) the implications available within this interesting finding? What does it mean that regarding temperature, to within an accuracy of five hundredths of a degree (0.05°C RMS error) the GISSE model black box is functionally equivalent to a black box that simply multiplies the adjusted forcing times 0.3?
My first implication would have to be that the almost unbelievable complexity of the Model E, with thousands of gridcells and dozens of atmospheric and oceanic levels simulated, and ice and land and lakes and everything else, all of that complexity masks a correspondingly almost unbelievable simplicity. The modellers really weren’t kidding when they said everything else averages out and all that’s left is radiation and temperature. I don’t think the climate works that way … but their model certainly does.
The second implication is an odd one, and quite important. Consider the fact that their temperature change hindcast (in degrees) is simply 0.3 times the forcing change (in watts per meter squared). But that is also a statement of the climate sensitivity, 0.3 degrees per W/m2. Converting this to degrees of warming for a doubling of CO2 gives us (0.3°C per W/m2) times (3.7 W/m2 per doubling of CO2), which yields a climate sensitivity of 1.1°C for a doubling of CO2. This is far below the canonical value given by the GISSE modelers, which is about 0.8°C per W/m2 or about 3°C per doubling.
The third implication is that there appears to be surprisingly little lag in their system. I can improve the fit of the above model slightly by adding a lag term based on the change in forcing with time d(Q)/dt. But that only improves the r^2 to 0.95, mainly by clipping the peaks of the volcanic excursions (temperature drops in e.g. 1885, 1964). A more complex lag expression could probably improve that, but with the initial expression having an r^2 of 0.92, that only leaves 0.08 of room for improvement, and some of that is surely random noise.
The fourth implication is that the model slavishly follows the radiative forcings. The model results are a 5-run average, so it is not clear how far an individual model run might stray from the fold. But since the five runs’ temperatures average out so close to 0.3 times the forcings, no individual one of them can be very far from the forcings.
Anyhow, that’s what I get out of the exercise. Further inferences, questions, objections, influences and expansions welcomed, politeness roolz, and please, no speculation about motives. Motives don’t matter.
w.
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An accused al-Qaeda bomb-maker who went to college in Arizona has claimed to military officials at the US base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that he believed an unnamed member of the Saudi royal family was part of an effort to recruit him for violent extremist acts before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a newly released transcript.
Ghassan Abdallah al-Sharbi said a religious figure in Saudi Arabia used the term "your highness" during a telephone conversation with a man, just before urging al-Sharbi to return to the U.S. and take part in a plot against the US that would involve learning to fly a plane.
The Sept. 11 commission found there was no evidence to indicate that the Saudi government as an institution or Saudi senior officials individually had supported the attacks, and the kingdom's government has consistently denied it had any role in the plot.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
It was early 2001, and al-Sharbi had only recently returned from the United States, where he had taken some flight school courses in Phoenix with two men who would become hijackers in the 9/11 attacks.
Al-Sharbi described the conversation in June to the Periodic Review Board, which assesses whether Guantanamo prisoners can be released. The Pentagon on Thursday posted a transcript, with parts blacked out, on the website of the board, which includes representatives from six U.S. agencies and departments.
The statement is convoluted and lacks important details, such as whether the "religious figure" might be close to any Saudi officials. It does not indicate who the Saudi royal might be. The term can be used for thousands of members of the Saudi royal family; al-Sharbi did not say he met the man.
Al-Sharbi also appears to be struggling with illness. He tells the board he had just come from the detainee hospital, is "really exhausted, and nauseous and lethargic," and uses what is described as a "manual breathing device."
The Saudi Embassy in Washington declined to comment on the al-Sharbi transcript. In the past, the Saudis have pointed to the 9/11 Commission, FBI investigations and other probes that found no Saudi government or royal family involvement in the attacks.
Al-Sharbi says he listened as the "religious figure" spoke to the man -- whom al-Sharbi believes was a royal -- as they discussed al-Sharbi's qualifications for returning to the U.S. for jihad. "I remember, 'yes, your highness, yes your highness,' and he was talking to him about me," al-Sharbi said.
The prisoner's candor about his health may add to the plausibility of the statement, claimed Max Abrahms, an assistant political science professor at Northeastern University who studies terrorism. Mr Abrahms reviewed the transcript.
"He is very open that he is really struggling physically, that he's exhausted, that he has been under serious medication," Mr Abrahms said. "But on the other hand it lends additional credibility to his statement because it's not very deliberate and not memorised."
A Guantanamo spokesman, Navy Capt. John Filostrat, said the military does not disclose details about detainees' health. "Overall, the general health of detainees is good," he said.
Al-Sharbi attended Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, from 1999-2000, according to the review board website.
In the transcript, the prisoner described living with various Americans, including a Phoenix police officer, in Arizona and California before returning to Saudi Arabia in the summer of 2000.
After telling the "religious figure" that he had some practice on a flight simulator and could learn to fly more easily than others, al-Sharbi says he agreed to return to the U.S and they began to discuss details. But al-Sharbi never went, for reasons that are unclear in the transcript.
The review board profile says al-Sharbi went to Afghanistan in the summer of 2001, trained with al-Qaeda and then went to Pakistan, where he learned how to make remote-controlled explosive devices and teach the skill to others. He was captured there in a house with Abu Zubaydah, whom the U.S. has called an al-Qaeda "facilitator." He, too, is confined at Guantanamo.
When captured, the FBI found a buried a cache of documents nearby, including an envelope from the Saudi Embassy in Washington that contained al-Sharbi's flight certificate, according to a document known as File 17, which was declassified earlier this year and names people the hijackers were in contact with in the United States before the attacks, including diplomats of the kingdom.
In July, the review board declined to approve his release from Guantanamo, where he is among 61 prisoners still held.
AP
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Across the province people are feeling the ripple effect of the cuts being made by the provincial government. On Saturday, people from various walks of life joined together to protest.
“We’re all in this together. When you cut something it’s not just the people that are directly impacted by the jobs, it’s the people also that utilize the services,” said Darin Milo with the Regina and District Labour Council.
Approximately 150 people from various groups protested funding cuts and Bill 40, which would allow the government to sell off up to 49 per cent of crowns, at a rally in front of Finance Minister Kevin Doherty’s constituency office. The rally was organized by the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour.
Representatives from Unifor, Students Mobilizing Against Cuts, and Public Pasture — Public Interest were among the speakers. This was one of many protests that have been happening across the province since the budget was released on March 22.
“Different organizations are going to have their different protests but what we’re also seeing are different groups attending protests of groups that they’re not normally associated with and it’s kind of all coming together that way,” Milo said.
Rick Ostlund, a Sasktel employee and Unifor member, spoke at the protest. Ostlund has attended various rallies and each time he has been reassured by the number of people attending.
“Its good to support the public on coming out and rising up against and letting the Sask Party know that what they’ve said and done over the last few years is a detriment to this province,” he said.
Ostlund said that during his years as a Sasktel employee, he has seen the impact the Saskatchewan Party’s policies has had on the crown corporation and now he is seeing those policies spill out to affect the rest of the province.
“Everybody sees the same thing, cuts that are hurtful. And so its reaffirmation of what we’ve known for quite a few years. So its good to see everybody else finally getting behind it and standing up against it,” he said.
Ostlund said he believes the protests are having an effect and are helping to make changes in the province.
“I think its changed the perception in this province of the current way that the government is running is not for the people, it’s for the business. The small changes one at a time will accumulate and add up to a lot,” he said.
NDP interim leader and leader of the official opposition, Trent Wotherspoon, also spoke at the rally.
“We’re going to fight for people in the legislature, we’re going to fight for people in the community, we’re going to rally and reach out … to fight to stop the cuts and to fight to stop the damaging sell-offs” he said.
[email protected]
twitter.com/ashleymr1993 |
Kenya's electoral commission says it has moved the date of the country's repeat presidential elections to October 26.
The commission said in a statement on Thursday that plans to hold the vote on October 17 had to be scrapped because it needs more time to meet the requirements set by the Supreme Court on Wednesday.
In its ruling, the court said the electoral commission had failed to properly verify the result of the August 8 vote that declared President Uhuru Kenyatta as the winner but was later invalidated.
It also said the electoral commission had not given the court access to its computer servers to disprove the charge by veteran opposition leader Raila Odinga that hackers infiltrated the commission's system and altered the results.
"There is no doubt that the judgement impacts on the election operations and in particular technology to be deployed," the commission said in its statement announcing the new date for the elections.
"In order to ensure that the Commission is fully prepared to deliver an election that meets the standards set out by the Supreme Court, we wish to notify the public and all stakeholders that the fresh presidential election shall now be held on Thursday, 26th October 2017," it added.
OPINION: Can Kenya pull off a second election within 60 days?
Kenyatta on Thursday denounced the nullification of his re-election as a blow to the democratic ideals Kenyans fought for, calling it "a judicial coup".
But in an interview with Al Jazeera, Odinga said that the Supreme Court was right to void the result.
"I know that I did not lose the election and the results were just manipulated," he said on Thursday.
"This is what we call injustice, and the court did the right thing after examining the evidence we placed before it." |
European Union prepares for Greek state bankruptcy
By Peter Schwarz
8 October 2011
The European institutions have clearly changed course in relation to Greece. Instead of the “rescue” of the country, they are now discussing its bankruptcy, and reducing the risk of contagion. The euro rescue fund, supposed to guarantee Greece’s solvency, is being used to secure the creditor banks against the consequences of state bankruptcy.
The change of course has happened gradually, under the pressure of intense fluctuations on the stock exchanges and financial markets, the threat of bank failures and growing opposition to the austerity measures of the Greek government. But it follows unmistakeable class logic.
The fear of an uncontrollable chain reaction had previously prevented the EU from risking a collapse of Greece. They feared the bankruptcy of the largest creditor banks, which in turn would have drawn more banks into the abyss—like Lehman Brothers in the US after its bankruptcy in September 2008. Other heavily indebted countries such as Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy are also threatened with being cut off from access to credit if Greece, a member of the euro zone, goes bankrupt.
Under these circumstances, Greece’s billion-euro rescue packages serve to gain time. They have not benefited the Greek state, and certainly not the Greek population, but went directly into the coffers of the creditor banks, which received their loans repaid in full with all interest due. The European Central Bank also bought large quantities of Greek government bonds on the open market, thus relieving the risks banks faced from their additional papers.
The Greek rescue packages have been linked to drastic cost-cutting measures, which from the outset ruled out Greece’s mounting an economic recovery. Even to a layperson, it was obvious that the recession caused by the austerity measures would nullify any budgetary savings.
The purpose of the austerity measures was not so much to restructure the budget, but to ruin the working class. Under the dictates of the so-called troika—the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund—the Greek government has cut pensions and incomes, destroyed tens of thousands of public sector jobs and driven the self-employed into bankruptcy by raising taxes, while the rich elite have hoarded their wealth in foreign bank accounts.
Meanwhile, protests against these measures are increasingly threatening the Greek government. This month alone there have been several general strikes and protest actions. The unions, which are working closely with the government, are finding it increasingly difficult to keep the resistance under control.
The representatives of the troika have concluded from this that the time has come to abandon Greece. State bankruptcy would mean that the government had no funds to pay salaries and pensions, as well as for other public spending. Just as US automotive firms exploited bankruptcy procedures to wipe out their financial obligations to the workforce in one stroke, the Greek government could effectively annul its existing contracts and legal arrangements. The question then would not be how many jobs would be eliminated and how far salaries were being cut, but who has a job at all.
Greek state bankruptcy would also be used to intimidate workers in the other European countries. It would represent an unequivocal threat, showing what awaits them if they do not accept the austerity measures being imposed by their own governments.
In Greece itself, state bankruptcy would provoke violent social unrest. But the EU expects to be able to isolate this with the help of the unions, who have so far refused to organise any international solidarity with the Greek workers. The Greek military has also spoken out again, and threatened to bring down the PASOK government. Under the rule of the “colonels”, the military suppressed the Greek working class from 1967 to 1974 with a bloody dictatorship.
The main concern of the EU at present is how to prevent a Greek state bankruptcy from bringing down international banks and other European countries. All the decisions and debates of the last weeks and days revolved around this question.
The euro zone governments had already agreed in June to increase the euro rescue fund (EFSF) and expand its powers. Rather than simply provide credit guarantees to ailing euro zone countries, the EFSF may now also buy up government bonds of vulnerable states on the open market and so remove the risks facing the banks.
Increasing the banks’ capital holdings with funds from the EFSF or other public monies is also now up for discussion. This was the central theme at the meeting of EU finance ministers on Tuesday last week. The ministers commissioned the European Banking Authority (EBA) to verify the resilience of the European banks if Greece were to default on its payments.
On Wednesday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel also agreed to this line. If banks urgently needed money, the European states should not delay financial aid because this would be “money reasonably invested”, she said after a meeting with EU President Jose Manuel Barroso and the leaders of the main international financial institutions.
On Thursday, the European Central Bank decided, in turn, to support threatened banks with large amounts of money.
In other words, instead of rescuing euro zone countries faced with bankruptcy, the funds of the euro rescue package and the ECB are now being used to bail out the banks when indebted countries go bankrupt.
Experts believe that the European banks need at least €200 billion to €300 billion of additional capital to survive a Greek state bankruptcy. Like the bank bailout in the 2008 financial crisis, these funds would be recouped again through austerity measures at the expense of working people.
Many politicians and media representatives now regard a Greek state bankruptcy as a certainty.
Spiegel Online commented on the events of last week, saying: “Now the financial institutions are to be supported with taxpayers’ money. That might be cheaper than rescuing countries in crisis.”
And Europe’s leading financial newspaper, the Financial Times, published a comment on Thursday under the headline “Save the euro—let Greece default”.
“Given its debt, its budget and current account deficits and its woeful lack of competitiveness, Greece cannot escape the debt trap”, it stated. “Austerity piled on austerity will simply kill the patient.”
To manage the country’s bankruptcy, the Financial Times calls for “a co-ordinated recapitalisation of the banks and a quadrupling to €2,000bn or so in the firepower of the European Financial Stability Facility.” The bill for these measures will have to be paid by working people throughout Europe, in the form of further cuts and austerity measures.
The preparations for Greek state bankruptcy mark a new stage in the offensive of the ruling financial elite against the working class. This offensive can only be answered by a common struggle of European workers on the basis of a socialist programme, which focuses on the expropriation of the banks and big corporations and the establishment of the United Socialist States of Europe. |
Representative Joe Barton of Texas introduced a bill Friday that would allow for the legalization of online poker in the United States. The bill, named the “Internet Gambling Prohibition, Poker Consumer Protection, and Strengthening UIGEA Act of 2011,” would allow individual states to choose whether they want to allow residents access to online poker rooms.
“Poker is an all-American game, and it’s a game that requires strategy and skill,” said Rep. Barton in a statement Friday. “Millions of Americans play poker online. Although it’s legal to play for money, it’s illegal to process the transactions that allow players to collect their earnings.”
“We want to have an iron-clad system to make sure that those who play for money are playing in an honest, fair system where they can reap the benefits of their winnings. To put it simply, this bill is about having the personal freedom to play a skill-based game you enjoy without fear of breaking the law. ”
The bill has 11 co-sponsors, including Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) and Rep. John Campbell (R-CA). Many parts of Barton bill look similar to the one drawn up by Frank last summer that never made its way through the Senate. Barton’s bill is fuzzy in some areas, but several regulations were drawn out regarding matters such as player age requirement, cheating, license eligibility, and deposit methods.
The bill would prohibit players from using credit cards for transactions and enforce an age limit of 21. Younger players would not be able to cash out any winnings, but would be responsible for any losses. Cheaters, meanwhile, could be charged with a federal crime, punishable by a fine and/or up to three years in prison. The bill mentions the use of bots as well as collusion as forms of cheating, but would not initially prohibit popular tracking programs such as PokerTracker or Hold’Em Manager.
Like versions of online poker bills of the past, this bill would allow for only U.S. residents to play against one another, isolating Americans from playing against players from other countries as they had been accustomed to on sites like PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker.
Players would also have the option of excluding themselves from playing on a particular site. Should they find a way to play during their self-exclusion, the same rules for under-aged players would apply for those caught in the act.
The legislation doesn’t have a timetable, but Barton and his supporters are in the process of moving it as quickly as possible. If passed, the bill would need to make its way through the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of the Treasury, and then the Director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. The licensing framework would then begin under the supervision of the Department of Commerce. That department would have control over issuing licenses to online poker operators.
The Barton bill was met with overwhelming support Friday by the Poker Players Alliance (PPA), a Washington-based non-profit group formed to protect poker players’ rights. The PPA released a statement following the release of the bill:
“On behalf of the PPA membership and millions of poker players across the country, I thank Congressman Barton for his commitment to protecting Americans’ freedom to play poker on the Internet,” said former Senator Alfonse D’Amato, chairman of the PPA. “As recent events have shown, the lack of clarity surrounding online poker has wreaked havoc on Americans who choose to play this great game both for fun and in some cases as their profession. Congressman Barton’s bill aims to bring clarity to the law, while implementing tough consumer protections and providing a mechanism for the Federal and state governments to collect billions of dollars in revenue. ”
Congressman Barton will make an appearance at the World Series of Poker Saturday to announce the ceremonial “Shuffle Up and Deal” for Event #43, a $1,500 No Limit Hold ’em tournament, at Noon PT. Players can voice their support of the bill to him in person at the Rio, or send a customized email to their member of Congress urging him or her to support the Barton bill. |
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Free Boxsona Box Contest!
Hey everyone! We’re giving away a free Boxsona box to mark our opening. All you need to enter is an email. The contest is only open to those living in Canada (excluding Quebec) or the USA currently. Follow the link for more details! We have lots of ways to enter and to gain extra entries!
http://www.boxsona.ca/
http://www.boxsona.ca/Promotions.php
The contest will be opening tonight at midnight, and will run until Sunday August 28th @ 11:59pm AST
We wish everyone the best of luck, and ask that you share our contest with anyone you think would be interested. May the odds be ever in your favor! |
If you have a Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone, then you will have noticed with certainty that there has no new Android version been released in the last months. This is strange, since Android 4.4.4 KitKat has been available for some time and Android L was also presented by Google.
+++ Now there is finally news about Android 4.4.4 KitKat and the Samsung Galaxy S5:
The Android 4.4.4 update KitKat is available for download since a few days ago in the USA and in Australia. So if you didn´t received the Update yet, when you have to check manually for a new Android Version. We show you now how this works:
Take your Samsung Galaxy S5 and the navigate from the home screen to: Menu --> Settings --> About device --> Software Update --> Update now
You need a working internet connection and it is advisable to use a W-Lan Network, since a new Firmware Update has a big Megabyte Volume. Your Samsung Galaxy S5 should now find the new Android Version KitKat 4.4.4. Acceppt the new firmware and it gets installed on your Samsung Galaxy S5 device.
Ready. After downloading and installing, which lasts about 20 minutes, you can use Android KitKat at your Samsung Galaxy S5. Enjoy! |
If your idea of fun is having a leathery, shirtless, 66-year-old man sweat on you, then you needed to be near the stage at (Le) Poisson Rouge for Iggy Pop's afternoon public-radio showcase on April 28 with his band The Stooges.
And if that's not your idea of fun, then you really, really need to see Iggy Pop perform live, and soon.
Iggy & The Stooges played a mix of new songs from Ready to Die, as well as a handful of old favorites. If you weren't an Iggy Pop fan, you might have had trouble telling them apart, which is a pretty strong compliment for those new songs. Loud, fast, snotty and fun, the band ran through the proto-punk of "Raw Power" and "Fun House" as easily as it played new material like "Ready to Die" and "Job."
About that band: Original bassist Ron Asheton died a few years back, but Mike Watt, formerly of The Minutemen, is a great replacement. Scott Asheton is on the new disc, but Larry Mullins is the band's touring drummer. Steve Mackey plays sax, and James Williamson has reunited with Iggy Pop after many years to play guitar. I've seen numerous accounts in the press that say it's the first time Williamson and Pop have worked together in 40 years, since 1973's Raw Power, but that's not accurate. They played together on Kill City later in the '70s, as well as New Values in the early '80s, but it's been a while regardless.
Either way, the reunion is clearly working: One of the high points of this concert, a new ballad called "The Departed," features Williamson on slide guitar and Iggy Pop apparently singing about the late Ron Asheton. At the end of the song, Pop teased the crowd by singing, "Now I wanna..." a couple of times — finally pointing the microphone at the audience, which duly replied with "be your dog." It was just one instance of Iggy Pop working the crowd; I think he might have tried to marry a couple at the foot of the LPR stage at one point, singing them a NSFW version of the wedding march.
And, of course, Iggy Pop professed his gratitude to public radio on stage — in the process making sure that his stage banter and several of his songs would never make it onto the radio, public or otherwise. "Sex and death," he told us, were the themes of a major part of the show. But fun — irreverent, youthful, sometimes dangerous fun — is and always has been the focus of Iggy Pop's career.
Set List |
How do the contemporary food magazines use photography? BJP speaks with five of the best to find out - Lucky Peach, Put A Egg On It, The Gourmand, Gather Journal, and Itineraries d'une cuisine contemporaine
When chef and Momofuku restaurants founder David Chang set up Lucky Peach in 2011, The New York Times called it “a glorious, improbable artifact”. It also predicted the venture would herald a new era of unconventional niche magazines featuring skinless chickens on their covers, eye-popping graphics and visuals, and a single theme per issue. Five years on, it seems The New York Times was right.
“It definitely was meant to push the boundaries of what, up until that point, defined food magazines, which tended to be very safe editorially and visually,” says Devin Washburn, the quarterly’s art director since September 2015.
A self-described non-foodie, Washburn was surprised by the sheer pace of food photography when he joined. “Ideas are very spur-of-the-moment, since you have to make the food on site and photograph it before it cools down, settles or loses its shape,” he says, adding that he also had to get an understanding of the cooking process, as everything that goes into making a dish has an effect on how it looks.
“I learned that each step – setting the ingredients, the prep work, the cooking – is equally important and interesting, whereas when I first started I was mostly interested in the final product.”
It sounds like a steep learning curve, but Washburn has something crucial in common with the Lucky Peach founder and team: a taste for taking risks. In the very first issue he worked on, for example, he accompanied a piece discussing taste as a matter of perception by having the food 3D-rendered in a crude, rough way.
When faced with illustrating a feature on Vietnamese desserts, he played up their monotone tan colours, asking Pete Deevakul to shoot straightforward, unprepossessing shots of even the most high-end recipes against a similarly bland background (including renowned pâtissier Pierre Hermé’s coffee macaron). The result is irreverent yet appetising, words that have come to define Lucky Peach’s brand.
“When you pick up Lucky Peach, you should expect to be in for something different visually,” says Washburn. “There’s a looseness and playfulness that is pretty unique. We’re not afraid of making mistakes. In fact, we avoid being too structured, which would make us boring. And we try not to take ourselves too seriously.
“Even the most beautiful piece needs to have a humorous note. Essentially, it needs to feel like it’s a magazine made by real people.”
He adds that Deevakul exemplifies what he looks for in a photographer when he’s scouring blogs and Instagram people who have a visual voice that is uniquely their own. Washburn is also on the lookout for individuals who have a strong personality, because he likes to know what to expect, and he is especially drawn to those who can turn seemingly mundane objects into art. “Pete can make a bottle of water look mesmerising,” he says, laughing.
And as much as he likes to work with long-term collaborators such as Deevakul, Washburn is also keen to use new photographers in every issue to help keep the magazine looking fresh. “Beyond that, we just try to push ourselves with each shoot,” he says.
“We want the process to be fun for us as well. Shooting with the same props would get quite boring. Each time, we try to figure out how to entertain ourselves.” And in the process, they’ve also worked out how to entertain their audience. |
(Health.com) -- When Dina Khiry is feeling a bit down, she reaches for chocolate. "I like Reese's peanut butter cups, Hershey's bars, and chocolate cake batter," says the 24-year-old public relations associate. "I feel better in the moment -- and then worse later on, when I realize that I just consumed thousands of calories."
Khiry's emotional relationship with chocolate isn't uncommon, new research suggests. According to a study published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine, people who feel depressed eat about 55 percent more chocolate than their non-depressed peers. And the more depressed they feel, the more chocolate they tend to eat.
Although gorging on chocolate and sweets to beat the blues has become a cliché thanks to sitcoms and romantic comedies, there's been "little prior scientific literature linking chocolate and depression," says the lead author of the study, Dr. Beatrice Golomb, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Diego School of Medicine. The study, she says, provides evidence to support "the popular perception that when people need a pick-me-up, they pick up chocolate."
It's unclear, however, whether depressed people eat more chocolate simply because they crave it, or whether chocolate consumption itself somehow contributes to a depressed mood.
In the study, Golomb and her colleagues surveyed more than 900 people about their weekly chocolate consumption and their overall diet. They also gauged the moods of the participants using a standard questionnaire used to screen for depression. (People who were taking antidepressants were excluded from the study.)
Health.com: How to make chocolate a healthy indulgence
The men and women who were considered to be depressed ate 8.4 servings of chocolate per month, while their counterparts who weren't depressed consumed just 5.4 servings each month.
Study participants who scored higher on the depression scale ate even more chocolate, nearly 12 servings per month, the researchers found. (An average serving was defined as one small chocolate bar or one ounce of chocolate candy.)
To zero in on the chocolate-mood connection, the researchers took into account a range of other dietary factors, such as calorie, fat, and carbohydrate intake. These measures were similar in the depressed and non-depressed people, which suggests that the link between chocolate and depression is unique in some way, according to the researchers.
Health.com: 10 free ways to fight depression
While popular culture usually depicts women as emotional chocoholics, the study shows that men, too, may reach for chocolate when they're down and out. Seventy percent of the participants were men, and the results were similar in men and women.
Explaining the apparent link between chocolate and depression is a classic chicken-or-egg question, says Golomb. Eating chocolate -- which has been shown to improve mood in animal studies -- may be a form of self-medication for depressed people, she and her colleagues suggest, or chocolate may simply be a comfort food.
Health.com: America's healthiest superfoods for women
The link may run in the opposite direction, however. Like alcohol, chocolate may make depressed people feel better in the short term, but eating it regularly may have a negative effect on health and mood in the long run, the researchers say -- especially if the chocolate is in products such as candy bars that are filled with saturated fat and other unhealthy ingredients. Indeed, as Khiry suggests, overindulging in chocolate when you're down can sometimes leave you feeling even worse.
"There is some relation between chocolate and depression," says Scott Bea, a psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic, in Ohio. "Chocolate could be a fix for depression or it could work the other way, meaning that people who overly use chocolate could be prone to depression."
Susan Albers, a psychologist and colleague of Bea's at the Cleveland Clinic, says that chocolate raises levels of the brain chemical serotonin -- as do some antidepressants -- and also boosts blood-sugar levels, which can make you feel more energetic.
Health.com: 15 ways to breathe easier when eating
"Emotional chocolate eaters may be looking for an immediate change that exercise or antidepressants can bring," she says. But, she adds, a chocolate rush is often followed by a crash, and "The crash will make the depression worse."
Albers teaches chocoholics to stop and smell the chocolate -- literally.
"When we eat chocolate, we tend to think about the next piece before we finish the one we are eating," says Albers, the author of 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food. "I teach people to slow down the process by opening up the chocolate slowly, listening to it crinkle, and slowing down the whole process so they actually taste it and realize that a small amount can make them feel a lot better."
Khiry uses a similar strategy. To keep herself from eating too much chocolate, she sometimes tries to suck on each piece so it lasts longer.
The study had some important limitations, as the researchers note. It was not initially designed to investigate chocolate and mood, and the data was taken from a larger study on the effects of cholesterol-lowering statins. Furthermore, the study didn't distinguish between different types of chocolate (such as dark and milk chocolate, which contain different amounts of cocoa).
Health.com: Foods to boost your mood
And because the study simply took a snapshot of the participants at one moment in time, the results don't show how chocolate consumption and mood may change or interact over time.
Still, Bea says, the findings could serve as a red flag for people who may be drowning their sorrows in Hershey's.
"If you're depressed and eating lots of chocolate, look for more direct solutions such as psychotherapy and/or antidepressants," he says. "If you crave chocolate a lot, examine your mood state and deduce if depression is a factor in your life."
Copyright Health Magazine 2011 |
The Cincinnati Enquirer endorsed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race, breaking from a nearly century-long tradition of backing Republicans.
When considering their decision this year, the editorial board of the Enquirer said they didn’t take breaking their tradition of endorsing GOP candidates lightly.
“But this is not a traditional race, and these are not traditional times,” they wrote.
The board called Clinton and her Republican rival, The board called Clinton and her Republican rival, Donald Trump , “the most unpopular pair of presidential candidates in American history.”
“Trump, despite all of his bluster about wanting to ‘make America great again,’ has exploited and expanded our internal divisions,” they wrote. “Clinton’s arrogance and unwillingness to admit wrongdoing have made her a divisive and distrusted figure as well.”
The board called Trump “a clear and present danger to our country,” citing his lack of foreign policy experience and exclusionary remarks about women and minorities as some of their “fears” about his candidacy. |
The Conservative government says it is overturning an RCMP decision to doff their muskrat hats in favour of more animal-friendly tuques.
A Canadian muskrat winter hat with ear and forehead flaps, as shown on a website opposed to the use of fur. The RCMP had confirmed plans to begin phasing out its version of the fur hats. (thefurbearers.com) Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq told the House of Commons that the public safety minister is directing the Mounties to reverse the move.
The RCMP recently wrote to an animal-rights group to say it had found a tuque that works well in very cold weather and would therefore begin buying them for officers.
The Association for the Protection of Fur Bearing Animals says muskrats are caught in body-gripping traps, which can leave them exposed to the elements, dehydration, starvation and predators before they die.
The association says a single fur hat like that traditionally worn by the RCMP requires at least three muskrat pelts.
Aglukkaq, who hails from Nunavut, is a staunch supporter of fur trappers.
The RCMP referred questions Tuesday to Public Safety Canada.
Interference?
Association spokesman Michael Howie heard the news with "a combination of shock and disgust."
"The RCMP made a decision based on facts, scientific testing and the collective attitudes of their members and the public," Howie said. "The government of Canada is clearly trying to pander to a dwindling industry and disregarding the rest of the country's views."
In the Commons, Conservative MP Robert Sopuck said the "egregious anti-fur decision by the RCMP" had threatened to devastate thousands of livelihoods.
"The fur trade is vital to the economy of many remote rural communities — communities who often have few other economic options."
Howie said the majority of Canada's fur cultivation actually takes place on factory farms where hundreds of thousands of mink and fox are kept in tiny cages and slaughtered for their skin.
The association has launched an online petition demanding the government honour the RCMP's original decision.
"Interfering with what the public clearly believes in is what is disrespectful here," Howie said. "And right now, we are disgusted with our government." |
Press Release
AMD EPYC™ Datacenter Processor Launches with Record-Setting Performance, Optimized Platforms, and Global Server Ecosystem Support
Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Mellanox, Samsung Electronics, Supermicro, VMware, Xilinx, and many others form strong global ecosystem for EPYC™ processors
AMD Launches EPYC for the Datacenter
AUSTIN, Texas, June 20, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — AMD (NASDAQ:AMD), and a global ecosystem of server partners, today marked a new era in the datacenter with the launch of AMD EPYC™ 7000 series high-performance datacenter processors. AMD was joined by multiple customers and partners at the global launch event in presenting a wide array of systems, performance demonstrations, and customer testimonials. The innovative, record-setting AMD EPYC design, with up to 32 high-performance “Zen” cores and an unparalleled feature set, delivers greater performance than the competition across a full range of integer, floating point, memory bandwidth, and I/O benchmarks and workloads.
“With our EPYC family of processors, AMD is delivering industry-leading performance on critical enterprise, cloud, and machine intelligence workloads,” said Lisa Su, president and CEO, AMD. “EPYC processors offer uncompromising performance for single-socket systems while scaling dual-socket server performance to new heights, outperforming the competition at every price point. We are proud to bring choice and innovation back to the datacenter with the strong support of our global ecosystem partners.”
The world’s largest server manufacturers introduced products based on AMD EPYC 7000-series processors at today’s launch, including HPE, Dell, Asus, Gigabyte, Inventec, Lenovo, Sugon, Supermicro, Tyan, and Wistron. Primary hypervisor and server operating system providers Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware showcased optimized support for EPYC, while key server hardware ecosystem partners Mellanox, Samsung Electronics, and Xilinx were also featured in EPYC-optimized platforms.
Leading Server OEM Platforms
“The EPYC processor represents a paradigm shift in computing and will usher in a new era for the IT ecosystem,” said Antonio Neri, EVP and general manager Enterprise Group, HPE. “Starting with the Cloudline CL3150 and expanding into other product lines later this year, the arrival of EPYC in HPE systems will be welcomed by customers who are eager to deploy the performance and innovation EPYC delivers.”
“As an industry leader, we are committed to driving IT transformation for our customers,” said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, president, server solutions division at Dell EMC, “Our next generation of PowerEdge servers are the bedrock of the modern data center that are designed to maximize business scalability and intelligent automation with integrated security. The combination of PowerEdge and the AMD EPYC performance and security capabilities will create unique compute solutions for our customers to accelerate workloads and protect their business.”
Cloud Datacenter and Enterprise Customers
Datacenter and cloud service providers also welcomed EPYC to the market today. Members of the “Super 7” datacenter services providers, including Baidu and Microsoft Azure, as well as 1&1, Bloomberg, Dropbox and LexisNexis, all voiced their support at launch.
“As the world’s largest Chinese language search engine and leading AI-Tech company, Baidu prides itself on simplifying a complex world through technology,” said By Dr. Zhang Ya Qin, president of Baidu. “The AMD EPYC processor powered one-socket server can significantly increase our datacenter computing efficiency, reduce TCO and lower energy consumption. We will start deploying with the launch of AMD EPYC and I look forward to our cooperation leading to scaled EPYC adoption this year, and ongoing innovations.”
“We’ve worked to make Microsoft Azure a powerful enterprise grade cloud platform, that helps guide the success of our customers, no matter their size or geography,” said Girish Bablani, corporate vice president, Azure Compute, Microsoft Corp. “To power Azure, we require the most cutting-edge infrastructure and the latest advances in silicon which is why we intend to be the first global cloud provider to deliver AMD EPYC, and its combination of high performance and value, to customers.
Record-Setting EPYC Performance
The excitement around EPYC is driven by multiple record-setting server benchmarks achieved by EPYC-powered one-socket and two-socket systems.
AMD EPYC processors set several performance records, including:
• Two-Socket Server
AMD EPYC 7601-based system scored 2360 on SPECint®_rate2006, higher than any other two-socket system score1
• One-Socket Server
AMD EPYC™ 7601-based system scored 1200 on SPECint®_rate2006, higher than any other mainstream one-socket x86-based system score 2
AMD EPYC 7601-based system scored 943 on SPECfp®_rate2006, higher than any other one-socket system score3
All EPYC processors combine innovative security features, enterprise class reliability, and support a full feature-set. An AMD EPYC™ 7601 CPU-based one-socket system shifts expectations for single socket server performance, helping lower total-cost-of-ownership (TCO), providing up to 20% CapEx savings compared to the Intel Xeon E5-2660 v4-based two-socket system4. At every targeted price point for two-socket processors, EPYC outperforms the competition, with up to 70% more performance in the eight hundred dollar price band and up to 47% more performance at the high-end of the market of four thousand dollars or more5.
EPYC Product Overview
A highly scalable System on Chip (SoC) design ranging from 8-core to 32-core, supporting two high-performance threads per core
Industry-leading memory bandwidth across the line-up, with 8 channels of memory on every EPYC device. In a two-socket server, support for up to 32 DIMMS of DDR4 on 16 memory channels, delivering up to 4 terabytes of total memory capacity
Unprecedented support for integrated, high-speed I/O with 128 lanes of PCIe® 3 on every product
A highly-optimized cache structure for high-performance, energy efficient compute
AMD Infinity Fabric coherent interconnect linking EPYC CPUs in a two-socket system
Dedicated security hardware
EPYC Product Lineup
Model Core / Thread Base Freq. Max Boost TDP EPYC™ 7601 32 / 64 2.2 GHz 3.2 GHz 180W EPYC™ 7551P 32 / 64 2.0 GHz 3.0 GHz 180W EPYC™ 7501 32 / 64 2.0 GHz 3.0 GHz 155/170W EPYC™ 7451 24 / 48 2.3 GHz 3.2 GHz 180W EPYC™ 7401P 24 / 48 2.0 GHz 3.0 GHz 155/170W EPYC™ 7351P 16 / 32 2.4 GHz 2.9 GHz 155/170W EPYC™ 7301 16 / 32 2.2 GHz 2.7 GHz 155/170W EPYC™ 7281 16 / 32 2.1 GHz 2.7 GHz 155/170W EPYC™ 7251 8 / 16 2.1 GHz 2.9 GHz 120W
Press Release |
Buddenbrooks may be the precociously brilliant debut, Death in Venice the small-but-perfectly-formed novella, but for me, Mann's real masterpiece is his sprawling snowbound epic of 1924, The Magic Mountain. Set in a tuberculosis sanatorium during the years immediately prior to the Great War, this book is many things: a modernist classic, a traditional bildungsroman, a comedy of manners, an allegory of pre-war bourgeois Europe, and – perhaps most importantly this time of year – the ideal book to keep you company on the long winter nights, when whichever flu bug is doing the rounds has gained the upper hand and forced you into a sneezing retreat to your sickbed.
For The Magic Mountain is a work of sick-lit par excellence: a novel that convincingly portrays illness as a state of mind as well as of body (though Mann does not shy away from the more visceral aspects of the latter). This is a novel mystifyingly overlooked by Virginia Woolf in her 1926 essay On Being Ill, in which she bemoans literature's failure to make illness one of its "prime themes" alongside "love and battle and jealousy." Well, here illness is decidedly centre-stage, and the plot – what there is of it – almost incidental: Hans Castorp, a naive young engineer, travels to the International Sanatorium Berghof high up in the Swiss Alps to visit his ailing cousin, Joachim Ziemssen. What was intended as a stay of a few weeks stretches into months, and then years, as Hans himself is diagnosed tubercular and dutifully takes his place among the cast of coughing consumptives. There is a chilling ambiguity as to just how much of Hans's illness is genuine and how much the result of "going native". Indeed, Hans positively revels in his status as one of the "horizontal":
Hans Castorp stayed out on his balcony, looking down on the bewitched valley until late into the night… His splendid lounge chair with its three cushions and neck roll had been pulled up close to the wooden railing, topped along its full length by a little pillow of snow; on the white table at his side stood a lighted electric lamp, a pile of books, and a glass of creamy milk, the "evening milk" that was served to all the residents of the Berghof in their rooms each night and into which Hans Castorp would pour a shot of cognac to make it more palatable.
Ensconced in his lounge chair, miles away from the cut and thrust of life on the "flat lands", Hans finds himself questioning long-held notions of honour and mortality. Up here, the snow is "eternal", and time itself becomes slippery and can no longer be trusted to behave as one would expect. This is indeed another world: of never-ending soup and ritualised – almost fetishised – thermometer readings; of rest cures and lectures on love-as-a-disease; of petty rivalries and giddy flirtations (after all, these are individuals "feverish, with accelerated metabolism"); where death is the elephant in every room and only ever happens "behind the scenes". This gives the novel a lovely feeling of the sublime and the uncanny. Indeed, at times it almost slips into the realms of the supernatural. An x-ray machine, a visit to the cinema and a gramophone player are all treated with suspicious wonder; a central chapter, entitled "Snow", concerns its 50-odd pages with Hans's near-fatal expedition into the snowy wasteland surrounding the sanatorium, an expedition that culminates in a horrific hallucination which could have come straight out of the pages of HP Lovecraft. There is even a séance scene. (And I assume we're all in agreement here that any self-respecting Winter Read should have at least one séance scene?) All the while, unbeknownst to the inhabitants of the clinic, Europe inches towards a war that will destroy this rarefied way of life for ever.
If this all sounds a little grim, it is worth reiterating that The Magic Mountain is essentially a comic novel – albeit a comic novel dealing with the darkest of subjects. The entire work is suffused with a sly and gentle humour, making it an absolute delight to read. And, if you want to make the experience more delightful still, be sure to invest in the superior John E Woods translation, published – in hardback only, unfortunately – by Everyman's Library. What it loses in the beautiful cover artwork of the paperback it gains in lucid prose-style and readability. A book I return to every couple of years, The Magic Mountain is simply one of the greatest novels ever written. And an essential purchase for every sickbed this winter… |
While the Sioux nation has been in the spotlight almost daily for its opposition to construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, it has much more quietly been pursuing renewable energy development on the Standing Rock Reservation and other tribal lands across North and South Dakota.
Seven Sioux tribes in the Dakotas are developing what would be an enormous collection of wind farms on six reservations scattered across what is generally rated as one of the windiest areas in the country.
“The ultimate vision is to develop as much as 2 gigawatts, and potentially more,” said Caroline Herron, a consultant who’s been hired by the tribes to act as a project manager. Each of the reservations “can support a couple hundred megawatts, if not more. We’re recognizing that we’ll need to phase this in. We will probably start with a couple sites with a couple hundred megawatts each.”
The tribes four years ago formed the Oceti Sakowin Power Authority, the entity that is pursuing the wind projects. The group formed a corporation, received $400,000 in grants from a couple of private foundations and has done some preliminary planning work.
Lyle Jack, who represents the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the authority’s board, said the authority hopes to have the first turbines spinning within three years. The authority intends to issue municipal or power bonds to finance the purchase and installation of turbines.
The current challenge, however, is to identify $10 million in collateral so the authority can tap into a $10 million loan guarantee approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Those funds would pay for cultural and environmental surveys aimed at assessing any harm the project might cause to bird populations, archaeological sites and other sensitive natural resources in the area.
If the authority cannot gather up $10 million in collateral in the form of, say, cash and grazing rights, Jack said it will look outside the tribes. That would mean the tribes would lose some control of the project, a specter that Jack said has hamstrung their efforts in the past.
For years, according to Jack, the South Dakota tribes “have been trying to do clean-energy projects, but we all run into the same problems, such as investors wanting to come in and own the project, and to just lease the land from the tribes. The tribes want to control their own energy resources.
“We do need the jobs and revenue that this project would create, and it also coincides with our culture in taking care of the earth and climate. To us, the wind is sacred. Also, it’s giving us a chance to do our part in reducing the carbon footprint, and to help slow down climate change.”
The wind resource in South Dakota generally is ranked as one of the top five among the 50 states, and Herron said preliminary assessments indicate that all six sites “have great wind resources.” Depending on the turbines they use, she said, the capacity factor could be “well over 50 or 60 percent. They’re really great capacity factors.”
More-detailed wind studies are needed before Herron and the tribes can approach potential investors.
The Oceti Sakowin Power Authority also will need to develop additional transmission to move the power from remote rural areas to populated regions with a hankering for more power.
“It’s the biggest issue in that whole area,” Herron said. The tribes know they’ll have to make significant investments in more transmission, and have included the cost of it in their financial projections, Jack said.
Herron pointed out that other wind farms — and transmission upgrades — have been developed near reservations in Nebraska, the Dakotas and Iowa.
“The nut’s been cracked before,” she said.
The tribes also have to find buyers for their power. Jack said they’ve spoken with interested potential customers, including utilities and corporations. He said he is prevented by a legal agreement from disclosing any details.
As wind measurements yield specifics about just how good the breezes are, Herron said, she and the power authority “will be able to take that to the next level of discussion with a potential power purchaser.”
Although many details remain cloudy, she and Jack are confident that the pieces will come together.
“I think (the tribes) have gotten through the most difficult challenges already, in deciding to work together and putting together a strong relationship,” Herron said. “They’ve got great resources. The rest of it is technical challenges that any project would have. It’s nothing that can’t be worked through.” |
Image caption Viola Beach were killed in a car crash as they travelled back from a festival in Sweden
Indie band Viola Beach have scored a number one album, six months after they were killed in a car crash.
The self-titled debut was compiled by the band's families, using live sessions and studio recordings, many of which were originally bound for an EP.
It outsold the number two album, ELO's All Over The World, The Very Best Of, by about 6,000 copies, said the Official Chart Company.
"I'm in shock," said Finn Reeves, whose brother River was the band's guitarist.
"I think they'd be absolutely thrilled. I can see the smiles on their faces.
"They made this happen. They did the hard work."
Viola Beach consisted of singer Kris Leonard, guitarist River, bassist Tomas Lowe and drummer Jack Dakin.
All four members of the Warrington band and their manager Craig Tarry died when their car plunged into a canal in Sweden in February.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption "They are with us today" - relatives of Viola Beach react to news their album is number one in the album chart
The families of the band said: "The tragic circumstance that met Viola Beach and their manager Craig that fateful night in Sweden will not now define their lives.
"What will now define their lives and what they will be remembered for, forever, is the music they were so passionate about making together.
"For that, we will be eternally humbled and ever thankful to every single person who, by buying this glorious album, has invested in their lasting musical legacy."
Viola Beach had been championed by BBC Introducing, who invited them to play the Reading and Leeds festivals last year.
The young band's first single Swings & Waterslides reached number 11 in the wake of the tragedy, while Coldplay paid tribute by performing their song Boys That Sing at Glastonbury, hinting at what the future might have held.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Viola Beach play Swings & Waterslides in session for BBC Introducing
'Legacy lives on'
"They were just so talented and they had so much going for them," said Loren Dakin, elder sister of drummer Jack.
"If they would have come home from this, it would have just snowballed from there. They would have made it."
She said listening to the album took her back to the pubs and clubs where she watched Viola Beach play as they started to gain a foothold in the music industry.
"It's very sad - but it's also beautiful," she said. "I can hear my brother drumming, I can hear Chris singing. It's like their legacy lives on.
"Sometimes I am quite destructive with the music, because I'll listen to it when I'm sad and it'll make me feel worse.
"But a lot of times I'll listen to it with friends or when I'm in an upbeat mood and it's beautiful. It's great music and they wanted everyone to hear it."
Top five albums 1) Viola Beach Viola Beach 2) ELO All Over The World - The Very Best Of 3) Christine & The Queens Chaleur Humaine 3) Drake Views 4) Adele 25
Top five singles 1) Major Lazer feat Justin Bieber and MØ Cold Water 2) Calum Scott Dancing On My Own 3) Jona Blue feat JP Cooper Perfect Strangers 4) Chainsmokers feat Daya Don't Let Me Down 5) Drake feat Wizkid and Kyla One Dance
Elsewhere in the charts, Miami dance producer DJ Khaled's scores his first top 40 album with Major Key while BBC Sound of 2016 finalist Nao makes her chart debut at 17 with the summery funk of For All We Know.
Major Lazer, Justin Bieber and Danish singer MØ retain the number one spot in the singles chart with their dance track Cold Water, while MØ's own track Final Song becomes her biggest solo hit to date, climbing two places to number 15.
She is not to be confused with British girl band M.O, whose summer anthem Who Do You Think Of? climbs seven places to number 18, giving them their first top 20 hit.
US star Halsey - who rose to fame by parodying Taylor Swift on YouTube - scores her first Top 40 single as a featured artist on The Chainsmokers' Closer, while US band Fifth Harmony are a new entry at 36 with All In My Head (Flex).
Follow us on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, on Instagram at bbcnewsents, or email [email protected]. |
The Monsanto product – the world’s most widely used herbicide – contains glyphosate, which may also be carcinogenic for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma
Roundup, the world’s most widely used weedkiller, “probably” causes cancer, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) – WHO’s cancer agency – said that glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide made by agriculture company Monsanto, was “classified as probably carcinogenic to humans”.
It also said there was “limited evidence” that glyphosate was carcinogenic in humans for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Monsanto, the world’s largest seed company, said scientific data did not support the conclusions and called on WHO to hold an urgent meeting to explain the findings. “We don’t know how IARC could reach a conclusion that is such a dramatic departure from the conclusion reached by all regulatory agencies around the globe,” said Philip Miller, Monsanto’s vice-president of global regulatory affairs.
Concerns about glyphosate on food have been widely debated in the US recently, and contributed to the passage in Vermont last year of the country’s first mandatory labelling law for genetically modified food.
The US government considers the herbicide to be safe. In 2013, Monsanto requested and received approval from the US Environmental Protection Agency for increased tolerance levels for glyphosate.
It is mainly used on crops such as corn and soybeans, which are genetically modified to survive it.
The weedkiller has been detected in food, water and in the air after it has been sprayed, according to the report from WHO. However, glyphosate use is generally low in and near homes where the general public would face the greatest risk of exposure, the report said.
The evidence for WHO’s conclusion was from studies of exposure, mostly agricultural, in the US, Canada, and Sweden that were published since 2001. |
Though her Harry Potter costar Daniel Radcliffe has bared all in London and New York stage productions of Equus, Hermione Granger is content to remain the clean-cut belle of Hogwarts.
“I have no plans to do anything for the sake of it, or to shock people,” the actress, 18, tells the U.K.’s Mail on Sunday‘s Live magazine.
“I might be willing to take my clothes off for a Bernardo Bertolucci film, if it was a part that really made sense as part of my character. But I wouldn’t do it just to make a point, to move on from Hermione.”
Exposing her attitude about the demands of being a young star, Watson says, “I find the whole concept of being ‘sexy’ embarrassing and confusing. If I do a photo-shoot people desperately want to change me – dye my hair blonder, pluck my eyebrows, give me a fringe [bangs].”
As for wearing revealing clothes for fashion shoots, “Personally, I don’t actually think it s even that sexy. What’s sexy about saying, ‘I m here with my boobs out and a short skirt have a look at everything I’ve got’?
“My idea of sexy is that less is more. The less you reveal the more people can wonder.” |
Italian bloggers are up in arms after ministers secretly resurrected their attempts to introduce a new law dubbed the “blog killer” by critics.
The proposed legislation would force online publications, whether large or small, to amend information on their sites within 48 hours of a complaint — or face fines of €12,000 ($15,700).
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The “ammazza blog” amendment was first mooted a few years ago by the government of Silvio Berlusconi, but ended up being crowded out by opponents who said it would be used to punish small publications, bloggers or even social networks.
A brief attempt to turn the proposals into law last year hit the same roadblock, yet this week it was discovered that the clause had been quietly reintroduced into a draft bill on wiretapping and gag laws.
Here’s Il Fatto Quotidiano:
The law provides that each site owner is required to rectify any content on the basis of a simple request from anyone who considers themselves wronged. There is no chance to reply: anyone who does not rectify what they have published within 48 hours will pay up to €12,0000 fine. An example could be this: a website could publish a story about somebody who had been arrested and was being held in jail, but if the individual’s lawyer wrote to say it was not true, the website would be forced to publish the correction or face the penalty.
Because the law does not seem to discriminate between complaints that have a basis in reality and those that are factually incorrect — or give publishers room to verify the truth, they are concerned that it could effectively gag bloggers, newspapers and magazines from ever publishing anything potentially controversial.
Bloggers worry that if they take a few days off they may end up being slapped with egregious fines, or could end up having to deal with constant queries from troublemakers intended to tie them up for fear of suddenly being hit with a penalty.
Unlike some arguments between bloggers and public officials, however, this is not some minor policy squabble — and has been picked up by the famous politician Antonio Di Pietro, who made his name as part of the anti-corruption investigation known as Mani pulite (“clean hands”) in the 1990s.
According to La Repubblica, Di Pietro came out all guns blazing. |
BOSTON — If you’re able-bodied and can hit a jump shot, you had better keep your phone on. The Boston Celtics might need to give you a call to ask you to play soon.
Another one has possibly bitten the dust for the Celtics, as coach Brad Stevens told reporters at practice Friday that Gerald Wallace has been playing with bone spurs in his ankle and also has a torn meniscus in his knee. The ankle has been a season-long issue, but the knee could require season-ending surgery, according to Mark Murphy of the Boston Herald.
Celtics president of basketball operations Danny Ainge later confirmed Wallace is “done for the year.”
Wallace joins a growing list of injured Celtics players, with Jared Sullinger and Avery Bradley already out. Sullinger is expected to play Saturday against the Indiana Pacers after suffering a concussion last Friday in Los Angeles, while Bradley is progressing well but won’t be re-evaluated until next week. Vitor Faverani also needs a second opinion on his tweaked knee.
The injuries contributed to the Celtics’ decision to sign D-Leaguer Chris Babb from the Maine Red Claws to a 10-day contract on Friday. If Sullinger is not available Saturday, the Celtics’ bench will consist of Chris Johnson, Phil Pressey, Joel Anthony and Babb. |
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) reacts to Native American protest song on Nov. 18, 2014 [youtube]
The Federal Reserve has been under fire of late — accused of coddling the Wall Street bankers it’s tasked with regulating.
In September, Jake Bernstein broke the story of Carmen Segarra’s revelations about the inner workings of the New York Fed for ProPublica and the public radio show, “This American Life.” Segarra had worked for the Fed as a special examiner to investigate Goldman Sachs, one of the most controversial of Wall Street’s “too-big-to-fail” financial institutions. She was fired after only seven months on the job — and lost a lawsuit in which she claimed that her dismissal was in retaliation for refusing to back down from a finding that Goldman didn’t have an adequate policy in place to prevent conflicts of interest.
But while her suit was unsuccessful, it revealed that Segarra had secretly recorded 46 hours of conversations with her supervisors and fellow inspectors. And the audio revealed a culture of deference to the banks the Fed was supposed to be supervising, and a clear pattern of “regulatory capture” — a type of corruption where those who are tasked with protecting the public interest instead work to advance private commercial interests.
On Friday, New York Fed President William Dudley appeared before the Senate Banking Committee, and was, as the Wall Street Journal put it, “lambasted” by a number of senators for his responses to questions about the Fed’s independence. Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), told Dudley: “Good fences make good neighbors. There is the perception that are no fences between the [New York] Fed and the banks it regulates.”
As the Huffington Post noted, Dudley also conceded for the first time that the NY Fed views big Wall Street firms as “too-big-to-jail,” a charge long denied by officials.
But it was his statement that the Fed’s primary function as banking supervisors isn’t to act “like a cop on the beat” that really raised eyebrows. Dudley continued: “It’s more like a fire warden; make sure that the institution is well run so that, you know, it’s not going to catch on fire and burn down. And managed in a way that if the institution is stressed that it doesn’t collapse and threaten the rest of the financial system.”
As Rob Blackwell wrote for The American Banker, “Dudley reached for a metaphor with probably more meaning than he intended, and one with potentially disturbing implications.”
The job of a cop on the beat is pretty straightforward. They are there to keep the peace, look for wrongdoing, and punish offenders when necessary. But the role of a fire marshal is very different. A fire marshal’s job is to protect a building and its inhabitants — and save them at all costs, even from the consequences of their own errors. If a man lights his house on fire, the marshal’s job isn’t to punish him or even make sure it doesn’t happen again. The fire marshal’s role is instead to deal with the fire, rescue everyone, and put it out before it can spread. That sounds noble, and in real life it is. But when discussing bank regulation, it raises the uncomfortable specter of bailouts and other supervisory intervention taken not to prevent problems, but instead to contain them.
Last Thursday, after another critical hearing on Capitol Hill, the Fed’s Inspector General’s office announced that it was undertaking a a sweeping review of the agency’s supervisory capacity. As Gretchen Morgenson wrote for The New York Times, the move “looks an awful lot like damage control.”
A big part of the damage came during an exchange between Sen. Elizabeth Warren and William Dudley. Watch the video: |
Sixteen years after first allowing gays and lesbians to become priests and nine years after electing its first gay bishop, the Episcopal Church on Tuesday became the largest Christian denomination in the U.S. to offer religious blessings to same-sex couples.
The monumental decision, approved by a thick margin at the church's triennial General Convention in Indianapolis, means that priests in the 1.9 million-member church can officiate blessings to same-sex couples who are in long-term relationships beginning in December.
The church's House of Deputies voted 171 to 41, with nine people saying they were divided, to support a same-sex blessings liturgy that will be used during a three-year trial before the church meets again and decides if it should be permanent. The deputies' vote was done in two parts, with lay members approving the blessings by 78 percent and clergy members approving by 76 percent.
The vote followed Monday's decision by the church's House of Bishops supporting the measure by a 111 to 41, with three abstentions. Both groups have to approve new legislation.
Some Episcopal bishops currently allow same-sex blessings in their dioceses, but many have said they will not allow them unless the church has an official liturgy -- the words exchanged between a couple and a priest during the ceremony.
The new liturgy will not be mandatory. Bishops who do not approve of same-sex relationships will be allowed to bar its use in their dioceses. Priests who choose to not perform same-sex ceremonies will not face discipline.
The liturgy does not represent a religious marriage -- the church defines marriage as being between a man and a woman -- though some clergy in states that allow civil marriage officiate secular marriages in their churches.
During debate on Tuesday, many members of the church spoke in favor of same-sex blessings, while fewer spoke against them.
"I believe we are doing the loving thing, we are doing what Jesus would call on us to do," said the Rt. Rev. Michael Curry, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina, in an interview. "We are finding a way to to support and care for people who have shown lifelong care and love for each other," added Curry, who voted for the legislation and has been officiating same-sex marriages in his own diocese since 2004.
"This singular motion ... will result in the Episcopal Church of the United States marching not simply out of step with but completely out of line with the faith," said the Rev. David Thurlow of South Carolina, a deputy who planned to vote against the proposal.
Tuesday's vote followed the church's decision on Monday to allow the ordination of transgender people. That vote to change to the church's "nondiscrimination canons" to include "gender identity and expression" overwhelmingly passed the church House of Bishops and House of Deputies. It makes it illegal to bar from the priesthood people who were born into one gender and live as another or who do not identify themselves as male or female. It added to church rules against discrimination based on race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, marital status, sexual orientation, disability and age.
The Episcopal Church is the U.S.-based wing of the Anglican Communion, an 85 million-member global denomination. In addition to its U.S.-based members, it has 173,000 members in other countries and territories, including the British Virgin Islands, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti, Honduras, Taiwan and Venezuela.
Liberal trends in the church regarding the ordination of gay priests and bishops have increasingly strained its relations with its more conservative counterparts in the United Kingdom and Africa. The election in 2003 of its first gay bishop, the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, caused several dioceses to defect. The same day the Episcopal Church voted to allow transgender priests, the church's English counterpart, the Church of England, delayed until the fall a controversial vote on appointing women bishops.
The Episcopalians follow the 1.2 million-member United Church of Christ, which voted to approve same-sex marriage ceremonies in 2005. The Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations and the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) also allow same-sex marriage ceremonies. In addition, Reform and Reconstructionist Jewish denominations allow same-sex blessings. In 2009, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America let churches recognize same-sex relationships, but it did not endorse an official church policy or liturgy for blessings.
At its biennial national meeting in Pittsburgh last week, the Presbyterian Church (USA) narrowly rejected a measure that would have changed its definition of marriage from being a union between a man and a woman to one between "two people." In April at its General Conference in Tampa, the United Methodist Church also upheld its teaching on homosexuality, which does not recognize same-sex marriages or unions. |
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Coming off the success of his directorial debut The Cabin in the Woods, which he also co-wrote with Joss Whedon, filmmaker Drew Goddard lined up a couple of exciting and massive filmmaking opportunities that unfortunately fell through. First he signed on to create, direct, and serve as showrunner on Marvel’s first Netflix series Daredevil. But after penning the first two scripts and working to conceive the series, Goddard got an opportunity he couldn’t pass up: writing and directing a Sinister Six movie as part of Sony’s Spider-Man universe. So he left his showrunner role on Daredevil to develop and write Sinister Six, but unfortunately after The Amazing Spider-Man 2’s release, Sony opted to scrap its interconnected universe plans and team up on a new reboot with Marvel Studios as a partner, effectively cancelling Goddard’s Sinister Six.
It hasn’t been all bad for Goddard—he was nominated for an Oscar for penning 2015’s blockbuster The Martian, he still serves as an executive producer on Daredevil, and he helmed the pilot of one of this year’s best new shows The Good Place—but it was a bummer to see his directorial projects fall apart. Luckily, Goddard is now lining up a new project to direct, and it’s a 100% original.
Per THR, Goddard just sold a secretive spec script titled Bad Times at the El Royale to 20th Century Fox which he will produce and direct. Details are being kept firmly under wraps, but it’s described as a contained thriller with either sci-fi or horror elements—which doesn’t sound dissimilar from Cabin in the Woods.
Indeed, Goddard kept this thing so close to the vest that when he was shopping the script to studios, it was only sent to top studio execs and they had to read it on an iPad that they’d then have to hand back to a courier, bypassing the normal reading process.
This is great news, not only that Goddard is getting back behind the camera, but that it’s an original project. We recently broke the news that Goddard is also working on the script for Deadpool 2, so the guy is certainly in demand. But Cabin in the Woods showed a confidence of vision as a filmmaker, and I can’t wait to see what surprises Bad Times at the El Royale has in store. |
Migrants take shelter from the sun before disembarking an Italian coast guard ship at Augusta.
Criminal gangs are abusing Italy's Mare Nostrum migrants rescue mission, Gil Arias-Fernandez, executive director of EU border agency Frontex has admitted.
Speaking at meeting of the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee, he said that while he had nothing but praise for the Italian operation, it was a fact that traffickers were finding it easier to do their business knowing that irregular migrants were picked up by Italian rescue boats when they left the Libyan coast.
“Since Mare Nostrum started, the number of detections of irregular immigrants increased drastically,” Mr Arias-Fernandez told MEPs.
“Criminals, of course, know about Mare Nostrum and so they are sending more people on less seaworthy vessels, supplying them with less fuel and food. Their operation has become cheaper,” he said. The number of voyages had increased too, he noted.
The result, he added, was that migrants faced higher risks if the Italian authorities did not make it in time to save them.
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A surprising report in Mexico’s Medio Tempo has claimed that the USA vs Mexico friendly scheduled for Wednesday may not proceed as planned due to the poor condition of temporary grass installed in the Alamodome.
The temporary sod is laid flat over concrete, and Mexico was unable to train today because the field was in bad condition. The grounds crew then heeded Mexico’s warnings and worked to improve the condition of the field.
The report says that Mexico instead practiced at the Trinity University field today, and the general manager of the Mexican Soccer Federation Hector Gonzalez Inarritu has floated the idea of refusing to play should Alamodome conditions not improve. It says they will assess the field conditions again today or tomorrow.
The game was scheduled in San Antonio to utilize the large 60,000-seat capacity of the Alamodome, despite sacrificing both home field advantage and logistics in the process. A pro-Mexican crowd has already sold out the match just 150 miles north of the USA-Mexico border, and now issues with the playing surface have arisen.
#SodUpdate: The pitch has been transported to San Antonio and installation is underway at the #Alamodome! pic.twitter.com/ok8yL6RtLu — U.S. Soccer (@ussoccer) April 11, 2015
The scene for Miguel Herrera's makeshift press conference at Trinity University in San Antonio #USAvMEX pic.twitter.com/oVoWoEYQmr — John Strong (@StrongMLS) April 14, 2015
It’s unclear what would happen officially should Mexico refuse to play, with a forfeit and a flat out cancellation of the match both in play. The United States is scheduled to train at 5pm tonight on the surface. US Soccer has responded accordingly:
Regarding the USA-Mexico field conditions & reports, U.S. Soccer is confident the field will be ready or Wednesday’s #USMNT friendly. — Ives Galarcep (@SoccerByIves) April 14, 2015
(1/2) More Buethe:"The field installation was not completed when the Mexico National Team representative saw it on Monday." #usmnt #USAvMEX — Jeff Carlisle (@JeffreyCarlisle) April 14, 2015
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The man heard in a profanity-laden video berating Toronto police officers no longer works for the City of Toronto. "As you know, we do not address personnel matters, however, we can confirm that the individual in question is no longer an employee with the City of Toronto," city spokeswoman Wynna Brown wrote in an email to the Star.
The worker, who was never named, was employed by the solid waste management services division. He said he parked in a spot reserved for disabled motorists for about 45 seconds while running into a convenience store to buy a lottery ticket. The worker, who recorded the subsequent altercation with his cellphone, emerged from the store and suggested an officer used his vehicle to block him from getting into his car because he “thought I was just a regular n-----.” “You know this guy’s asked me for my driver’s licence and insurance over a f------ parking space,” the worker tells the cops who arrive on the scene, in the clip posted on a video-sharing website in August.
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The incident apparently occurred in a strip plaza near Lawrence Ave. E. and the Don Valley Parkway. The former city worker repeatedly referred to the officer, who is apparently black, as an “Uncle Tom" - a derogatory term for “a black person who is eager to win the approval of white people and willing to co-operate with them,” according to Merriam-Webster. |
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The University of California system said on Friday it will drop its roughly $30 million worth of investments in private prison companies following demands from a black student group.
The decision comes amid a wave of student protests against racism at college campuses across the country as well as the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement against the U.S. criminal justice system, which disproportionately impacts black people.
The UC system’s chief investment officer, Jagdeep Singh Bachher, made the decision after meeting with students of the Afrikan Black Coalition, university spokeswoman Dianne Klein said.
Klein said the UC system has a policy against “blanket divestment,” but made the decision after further review.
“This made sense given our conclusion that, based on risk over the next several years, these holdings were not a good investment for a long-term investor such as UC,” Klein said.
Klein said the amount invested was less than $30 million, a tiny fraction of the UC system’s $100 billion investment portfolio. Klein said she did not know exactly which private prison companies the system held shares in or exactly how much money was invested.
The coalition, a California-wide student group, said the UC system had $25 million invested in Corrections Corporation of America and The Geo Group.
Corrections Corporation spokesman Jonathan Burns said: “Frankly, we’re delighted to have a greater share of investors who are thoughtful about our business, can tell the difference between rhetoric and reality, and agree that the free market is a great creator of innovation and economic opportunity.”
The Geo Group could not be immediately reached for comment.
The student union also called on the UC system to divest some $425 million of investments in Wells Fargo & Co, which it said is a large investor in private prison firms and has been accused in courts across the country of practicing predatory lending against minorities.
Klein said the UC system has no plans to drop its Wells Fargo investments.
In July, Wells Fargo won a dismissal of lawsuits in Chicago and Los Angeles that alleged it violated the federal Fair Housing Act. The California city of Oakland filed its own lawsuit against the company in September. |
Part of a series highlighting significant stories from the 2012 election
Dan Cox,
2012 candidate for
U.S. Senate in Montana
With the balance of power in the Senate at stake, the 2012 Republican and Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate in Montana spent an average of $41.61 per vote — one of the highest of any federal race in the country.
Libertarian Dan Cox found himself in the crossfire of the hotly contested campaign, where his Democratic and Republican opponents spent $18.8 million combined, according to OpenSecrets.org, in a state where just 486,066 votes were cast for U.S. Senate.
Republicans implored Dan Cox to withdraw from the race for fear his influence would cost their candidate, Republican Congressman Denny Rehberg, to lose to incumbent Democrat John Tester. In the end, Cox won 31,892 votes, or 6.6 percent, almost twice the 3.7 percent margin by which Democrat Tester prevailed over Rehberg, 236,123 (48.6 percent) votes to 218,051 (44.9 percent).
Cox seized the moment when he appeared in two debates and was covered by national media, including Mother Jones, the Washington Examiner, Politico, the Associated Press, Talking Points Memo, CQ Roll Call, the Wall Street Journal, and the Christian Science Monitor. He offered a bold, Libertarian agenda while exposing the Big Government track records of both of his opponents.
“I think people are starting to wake up to the fact that there’s really not that much difference at all between the Republicans and the Democrats,” Cox said.
On his Republican opponent, he said “he voted for every police-state big-brother bill he could get his hands on,” and added that Rehberg “voted to raise the debt ceiling 10 times.”
He had little confidence that the GOP was going to completely repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, when the Republicans began talking about “repeal and replace.”
High on Dan Cox’s once-in-office priority list was ending the Federal Reserve Banking System and repealing the National Defense Authorization Act. He let voters know that the Federal Reserve lent $16 trillion to foreign corporations and banks during and after the financial crisis of 2008.
He also showed voters how the Federal Reserve’s printing of money hurts everybody, pointing out that inflation is a hidden tax.
Dan Cox also ran on ending the Transportation Security Administration, protecting private property rights, and legalizing marijuana. He charged the federal government with overstepping its boundaries by cracking down on medical marijuana dispensaries, where they are legal in Montana, and sought to protect residents against Washington overreach.
“I think he’s one of the best candidates we’ve had in Montana,” said Dave Merrick, Ravalli County Libertarian Party chairman. “He’s well-grounded in libertarianism. He’s a good speaker.”
“He’s gotten more [votes] for our national race in Montana, more percentage of the votes, than anyone in a national race who has ever run here,” he continued.
Behind the scenes helping the campaign were Montana activists like Merrick, who put out ads for Cox and circulated his campaign literature. He also made calls to get Cox into the debates, and succeeded in getting him included in two, which, Merrick says, he won. In 2008, Cox successfully opposed the Ravalli County Growth Policy, a local zoning scheme that has been repealed, thanks to Cox’s signature-gathering efforts. He says that “there’s no countywide zoning.”
Cox also took interest in illuminating the federal government’s policy of importing foreign wildlife and releasing it on federal land, destroying native wildlife. He says the federal government “dumped a bunch of wolves” it had imported from Canada onto federal land, which interfered with elk hunting and “ravaged herds.”
Looking to the future, Cox says, “It’s possible I would run again. Of course, it really depends who the candidates are.” |
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