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The fact that Browns safety Jabrill Peppers failed a drug test at the Scouting Combine doesn’t justify rampant speculation regarding whether he takes drugs and/or which ones he may be taking. ESPN Cleveland personality Sabrina Parr learned that lesson earlier this week, by losing her position with the station.
Via Joey Morona of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the local ESPN Radio affiliate fired Sabrina Parr after she offered this prediction about Peppers on the air: “He’s not going to make it because he’s on the Lean and the Molly.”
The “Lean” is a concoction of cough syrup and soda, also known as “Purple Drank,” among other names. Molly is Ecstasy. Both as illegal, and both are banned by the NFL’s substance-abuse policy.
A debate erupted after the allegation was made, with hosts Tony Rizzo and Aaron Goldhammer, with Parr eventually claiming that left tackle Joe Thomas is “on the Lean, too.” (She later claimed she was joking about Thomas.)
The dismissal of Parr came just hours after the comments were made. ESPN Cleveland is an official partner of the Browns.
Peppers provided a diluted sample at the Scouting Combine, which counts as a positive test. Post-draft comments from Browns executive V.P. of football operations Sashi Brown suggest that the team thinks it was something other than a fluke occurrence.
Even if it was, Peppers should at a minimum be very concerned about understanding exactly how much water he can drink before generating a dilute sample and, in turn, a positive test. Especially since he’ll be subject to enhanced testing while in Stage One of the NFL’s drug-testing program. |
No one’s lovin’ it.
Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images
Remember when McDonald’s rolled out “Pay With Lovin’,” a two-week promotion that asked customers to do tricks for their food in lieu of, well, paying for it? As cute as the company’s Super Bowl commercial may have made that idea look, it seems that most American customers didn’t feel the same way. McDonald’s U.S. comparable sales fell 4 percent in February.
To put it plainly: 4 percent is a lot. Over the past two years, McDonald’s has only seen its U.S. sales drop 4 percent or more in one other month—November 2014. Aside for “ongoing aggressive competitive activity,” the company also isn’t offering much in the way of excuses. Instead, McDonald’s seems to have put its tail between its legs. “Consumer needs and preferences have changed, and McDonald’s current performance reflects the urgent need to evolve with today’s consumers, reset strategic priorities and restore business momentum,” the company said in its release. “The goal going forward is to be a true destination of choice around the world and reassert McDonald’s as a modern, progressive burger company.”
Data from McDonald’s. Chart by Alison Griswold.
What McDonald’s stopped just short of saying is that it desperately needs to become more like the “modern, progressive” chains that are decimating its sales and market share. Chipotle. Five Guys. Shake Shack. Everything fast-casual and “better burger.” It’s no secret that Americans have fallen out of lovin’ with fast-food, and McDonald’s is acutely aware of this. What it doesn’t seem to know is how to fix it. Failing to find a solution cost Don Thompson the chief executive job earlier this year; as of March 1 the onus is on his successor, Steve Easterbrook. At this point, his best hope might be that sales don’t have much further to fall.
*Correction, March 11, 2015: The original headline of this post misstated that McDonald’s had admitted it needs to become more like Five Guys. In fact, McDonald’s did not specifically name a competitor it needed to become more similar to. |
Too much poo and wee is being left behind by climbers on Mount Everest.
The issue is causing pollution and could spread disease, says the boss of Nepal's mountaineering association.
Ang Tshering wants Nepal's government to get visitors to dispose of their waste properly.
He says faeces and urine have been "piling up" for years around the four camps. "Climbers usually dig holes in the snow for their toilet use and leave the human waste there."
More than 700 climbers and guides spend almost two months on the mountain slopes each season, which began this week and ends in May.
"It is a health hazard and the issue needs to be addressed," says Dawa Steven Sherpa, who has been working on clean-up expeditions since 2008.
Some climbers do carry disposable travel toilet bags to use in the higher camps, he explains.
At base camp there are toilet tents, which have drums into which human waste goes. These can be properly disposed of after they are carried to a lower area.
The camps between the base and the summit do have tents and other supplies, but no toilets.
The government in Nepal has yet to come up with a solution to the problem of human waste disposal - but officials will be monitoring the rubbish on the mountain, says the head of the government's mountaineering department Puspa Raj Katuwa
New rules mean each climber must bring 8kg (18lb) of rubbish when they return to base camp.
That is the amount experts believe a climber discards along the route.
Teams also make a $4,000 (£2,600) deposit, which they lose if they don't stick to the rules.
Last year's season was cancelled after 16 local guides were killed in an avalanche in April.
In total, hundreds of people have died trying to scale Mount Everest, which was first conquered by New Zealand climber Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa guide, Tenzing Norgay in 1953.
Follow @BBCNewsbeat on Twitter, BBCNewsbeat on Instagram and Radio1Newsbeat on YouTube |
Photo
They are the dreams of dead men: a hat comb stove pipe screw and a flower stand, quietly archived in the United States Patent and Trademark Office for the last century.
Until now.
Martin Galese, a 31-year-old lawyer in New York, is resurrecting bits and pieces of bygone eras, thing by thing.
Not unlike the fictional scientists of “Jurassic Park,” Mr. Galese scours the patent office’s archives for the “design DNA” of antique inventions, then reinterprets them as design files for today’s 3-D printers. He has posted more than a dozen of these forgotten inventions on his blog as well as the 3-D printing design library, Thingiverse, for anyone to make today.
“If you look at the figures in older patents, the 19th century patents are really beautiful. They’re really works of art,” said Mr. Galese who finds these early engravings much more beguiling than modern software schematics he has worked with as a patent lawyer.
One favorite is an 1875 pot scraper, with elegant lines and a humble utility that was trumpeted in the words of its inventor, who declared:
“To all whom it may concern: Be it known that I, URIAS CRAMER, of New Philadelphia, in the county of Tuscarawas and State of Ohio, have invented certain new and useful Improvements in Pot-Scrapers.”
The scraper’s patent application breathlessly described how it could scour both curved and straight-sided pots of nearly any radius, and was illustrated with several carefully hand-cut images, which Mr. Galese reproduced as a 3-D model:
But why go to all the trouble of reproducing the past in painstaking detail? Why rebuild every curve and vector wrought by Urias Cramer in cast iron in the 1870s?
“You’re holding the 19th century by way of something that was produced in the 21st century,” said Mr. Galese, who finds in these objects a tangible link to the past. He’s also made a chopstick holder from the 1960s and a portable chess set from the 1940s.
Today, he said, the patent system has a bad rap. Many people see it as a fount of endless intellectual property wars between tech firms, or fuel for thuggish, “patent trolls,” ready to exploit the system’s protections for cash.
After working as an attorney in patent litigation cases, Mr. Galese said he wishes more people saw the patent archives as a rich repository, flush with freely available designs. He sometimes refers to the patent office’s archives as the “original Thingiverse,” comparing it to the rapidly growing online library of design files shared by 3-D printing hobbyists today.
Others who have seen his 3-D printing files frequently ask why he keeps posting “patented” objects online, he said, not understanding that many former patents are now in the public domain.
“People don’t think people appreciate that aspect of the patent system,” he said.
Most patents issued today last 20 years, but in the past patent protections could be shorter, sometimes lasting 17 years, sometimes less. Out of the more than 8 million patents registered in the United States, only about 2 million are still in force, according to Dennis Crouch, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Law who conducted an analysis on the subject last year.
That leaves nearly 6 million patents in the public domain, free for anyone to reuse, remix or re-purpose.
While Mr. Galese has only produced a handful of these as 3-D designs, he is still looking in the patent office archives for simple, charming objects with some kind of link to the past, like the bookmark that not only holds your place, but holds a pen.
Still, he’s never sure how close he gets to an exact reproduction, and worries about the unconscious influence of our modern world, awash in design.
“There is so much more design in our world, so many more objects,” he said, chuckling at the comparison to the movie, “Jurassic Park,” in his work.
“There’s always this question: did they bring back what was actually a dinosaur or something they thought was a dinosaur?” |
“A Great science fiction detective story”
– Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine
Days to Centenary: 170
Believe it or not there are still places on the Earth where there are no internet connections — such places certainly exist in the southern hemisphere, where I live — and over the holidays I was in just such a place, whichI hope explains the absence of new posts on any of my blogs for a little while.
Now that I’m back: Happy Alan Turing Year!
As I counted down to midnight on December 31, 2011 surrounded by family and friends, my thoughts were mostly with the people around me (and others who couldn’t be there), which is as it should be. But I was certainly aware, as well, that the Turing year was about to begin… was about to begin… and then suddenly had begun.
For many people this will be a culminating moment. I imagine it must be such a moment for Andrew Hodges, who many years ago painstakingly pieced together a myriad of fragments from the life of a man who was too much forgotten and pieced them together into a biography that helped revive him in our collective memory.
It was Hodges’ book that first exposed me to Turing in the 1980s. I recently bought my fourth — or is it fifth? — copy of Alan Turing: The Enigma, because I can’t resist giving the book away when I meet someone whom I think might enjoy it or benefit from it. Then, after a time of not having it on my shelf, I’m suddenly afflicted with the need to read it again and have to go out and buy another copy and each time I return to it I learn something new. For that iterative, cumulative experience, thank you Dr. Hodges, and Happy Alan Turing Year.
And along with him, a very big thank you and Happy Alan Turing Year to the many good people (in part represented here) — most of whom will never have the profile that Dr. Hodges does — who have worked so hard to ensure that the Alan Turing Year happened at all, and who continue to work to ensure that the myriad of events that make up the celebration all over the world actually take place. You guys are awesome.
And on the topic of people who make the Alan Turing Year happen, having acknowledged all the official folks, let’s not forget the Turing Elves, those unofficial individuals who — through works of art and DIY technical projects and a myriad of other endeavors that are as disparate and entertaining as the Elves themselves — help make every year Alan Turing Year.
And just as it’s a culminating moment for Dr. Hodges, for the official ATY folks, and for the Elves, I can only imagine that it must also be such a moment for Turing’s surviving family members, who only learned many years after the event of Turing’s important role in the war, who finally saw him receive the apology he deserved from the government that persecuted him, and who may now at long last see him pardoned (see this post), which is the most complete vindication that the law can extend to him at this late date. This is the year the family Turing (whether they bear the name or not) get to finally enjoy the honour that should have been his and theirs a long, long time ago.
It will also be a culminating moment for the members of an LGBT community that is by now so multi-generational, international, and diverse that it can hardly be called one community at all. It is a constellation of communities that has, since the beginning of the gay liberation movement in the late 1960s, evolved to have a strength and a public profile that once would have been unthinkable.
Even now it remains a reality for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, the transgendered, and the queer, that each person’s personhood — their character, their intrinsic nature, their contribution to the world, their strengths and flaws, their very self — is too often overshadowed by the simple fact of their sexual orientation. It’s maddening to be reduced in that way and this recognition of Turing helps to minimize that kind of reduction. We’re not where we need to be yet, but when a man of Turing’s stature has gone as long as he has with as little recognition as he’s had almost exclusively because of his sexual orientation, international recognition of the kind that the Alan Turing Year provides is certainly a move in the right direction.
And this should also be a culminating moment for any number of others who are ignored or dehumanized or belittled on account of factors that ought to have no bearing on one’s view of them or on their ability to participate fully in social and professional life, whether that factor is their race, their gender, their religion, a physical or psychological idiosyncrasy or affliction, or anything else which might impair us in our ability to see them as whole and invididual people while it does nothing at all to diminish them. The diminishment of any one of us diminishes us all and the long overdue recognition of Turing enriches us all.
Which means that — while we must never allow ourselves to be distracted from Turing himself, his work, and the honours that he’s earned — this is nonetheless an Alan Turing Year for everyone.
So, Happy Alan Turing Year to you.
[Note: The image in this post was borrowed from here.]
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Bitcoin Press Release: The blockchain application platform Lisk now has its digital currency LSK listed on various exchanges and financial services like ShapeShift, Yuanbao, or CoinPayments. Adoption is steadily growing through payment processors and online merchants.
June 30, 2016 Aachen, Germany – Lisk, the open source blockchain application platform, is proud to announce that the digital currency LSK is evolving at a tremendous speed. A large part of this evolution is mass adoption by many services, including conversion services and exchanges.
One of the services now accepting LSK, ShapeShift.io, allows the exchange of one digital currency into another, without the need to create an account or fill an open order. Other providers offering a similar service for the LSK currency include Changer.com and Changelly.com.
In terms of regular exchanges, Lisk has seen steadily increasing adoption throughout the past few weeks. Recently, CEO Max Kordek visited China and met with many Chinese exchanges. This face to face relationship drove these exchange owners to believe in the currency and adopted Lisk for trade on their service. These services included Yuanbao.com and Jubi.com, two of the biggest altcoin exchanges in China. Additionally, BitBays.com, and Touzibi.com also listed the currency.
The Polish exchange BitBay.net has added many different currency pairs for LSK. These pairs included LSK/USD, LSK/BTC and LSK/EUR. The new exchange RAWX.io will launch soon and Lisk sits at the top of the poll to determine which coins will be added.
Looking further back many different exchanges are already supporting the LSK token. These exchanges include Poloniex.com, Bittrex.com, YoBit.net, BitMEX.com, Livecoin.net, OpenLedger.io, Cryptomic.com, Bloombit.com, and ChameleonBit.trade. On the leading edge of this group is Poloniex, one the largest exchanges in the world, which added a LSK/ETH. This pairing is unprecedented on the exchange as previous pairs were pegged to BTC and USDT.
Lastly, Lisk can now be used in online transactions. This is due to the payment processor and gateway CoinPayments.net adding support for the currency. The service provides digital currency integration for nearly all popular web shopping carts used today. This allows Lisk to be used with a myriad of online shops, all of which are ready to accept LSK.
Please use all exchanges, websites, services, tools, and clients being linked to in this press release at your own risk! Please do your own due diligence.
About Lisk
Lisk is a blockchain application platform that offers JavaScript development tools to deploy sidechains and build decentralized applications on top of them. It connects various different decentralized technologies to enable developers to build useful, powerful applications for the real world. Lisk was started earlier this year by Max Kordek and Oliver Beddows.
Learn more about Lisk at – https://lisk.io
Get started with Lisk at – https://lisk.io/get_started
Lisk Documentation is available at – https://lisk.io/documentation?i=lisk-docs/README
Media contact
Name: Max Kordek
Email: [email protected]
City and Country Location: Aachen, Germany
Lisk is the source of this content. Virtual currency is not legal tender, is not backed by the government, and accounts and value balances are not subject to FDIC and other consumer protections. This press release is for informational purposes only.
About Bitcoin PR Buzz:
Bitcoin PR Buzz has been proudly serving the PR and marketing needs of Bitcoin and digital currency tech start-ups for over 2 years. Get your own professional Bitcoin and digital currency Press Release. Click here for more information. |
That was a mighty win in Lille the other night for our boys in green and I wonder did anything strike you about the players' celebrations after?
That was a mighty win in Lille the other night for our boys in green and I wonder did anything strike you about the players' celebrations after?
Like how, four days before a monumental game against France, management allowed them have a few beers. And here's the thing. Nobody took umbrage. Nobody was phoning Joe Duffy or grilling Martin O'Neill at a press conference about what in the name of the Almighty they were doing supping drink so close to the biggest game of their lives.
And Hallelujah for that.
Trust me, they'll be more than fine by the time Paul Pogba and company stand before them in Lyon tomorrow and anyone who thinks otherwise has probably learnt everything they know about sport from a library book.
Diarmuid Connolly sees his penalty is saved by Laois goal keeper Graham Brody. Photo: Sportsfile
But just imagine the same thing happening with a GAA team. Imagine Jonny Cooper or Diarmuid Connolly being photographed supping bottles in Coppers last Wednesday with the Meath game just four days away? There'd be consternation. Not alone would they not be playing tomorrow, chances are they'd be gone off the Dublin panel for a whole summer.
Now I'm not for a second recommending lads going on the beer in the week of a championship game, but I do believe there's a red light flashing for the GAA that they'd be wise not to ignore. And that light is drawing attention to the number of young players, particularly in the weaker counties, now opting against committing to inter-county.
In Kerry, I always felt that the social side was vital to us being successful, vital to a sense of camaraderie. It was a release valve that, ultimately, made us more united. We always worked damn hard, but we played harder than anybody else too, though few enough people probably knew it.
In Jack O'Connor's first stint, we went for one training weekend in Cork, staying in Hayfield Manor. The restaurant wasn't quite big enough to take our full party for dinner, so there was a kind of partition separating some of us from the rest. Next thing, Jack pipes up, 'Lads, ye can have a glass of wine with the dinner!'
And we're looking at one another, thinking that there's surely a hidden camera somewhere. That he's maybe trying to set us up here. We'd presumed it would be a strictly-no-alcohol weekend but now, weren't we sitting on the far side of the partition to Jack, with an invitation to drink.
We identified the youngest, most innocent waiter and - basically - got him to open the wine taps. Had the poor chap so flat to the mats ferrying bottles to the table, he almost didn't have time to bring out food. And you know that thing about it only taking one spark to start an inferno? I'd say we were in a pub in Patrick or Washington Street before Jack had even got up from the table.
Lord Jesus, we paid for it too. Jack ran us into the ground the next day, deciding there and then that he couldn't trust us to turn sideways. It was the beginning and the end of the Kerry wine list!
Jack made things a lot more disciplined in Kerry, introducing us to Pat Flanagan, a strength and conditioning wizard who was well ahead of his time.
And, after a while, he started having us back in training the Monday after a championship game, purely to keep us on the straight and narrow. But the game was still enjoyable. I honestly wonder if it is today.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to depict the county man's life today as life in a prison camp. I know there's great banter in most dressing-rooms, successful or not. But everything now is analysis, core-work, strength and conditioning, personal programmes, monitoring your diet. The game eats into every aspect of a player's life, taking up more and more of his time.
And, in my opinion, we're treading very dangerously here.
In the last ten years, we've seen bigger changes in the game than we've seen in the previous hundred. The younger generation are willingly pushing the boundaries out further and further.
The balance has been lost in my opinion and God forbid you buck the trend. Put it this way, I've had an insight into three generations of Kerry football and there's no doubt in my mind that the most enjoyable one was Páidí's. National League? They'd be wheeled out at venues around the country like some exotic creatures being presented for a photo opportunity.
If it was any distance out of Kerry (and most places are) they'd head up the night before, sink a few pints, then do their thing on the Sunday. Now, the same bottom line applied. On the field, you were expected to perform.
Kerry manager Paidi Ó Sé has a word with nephew Tomas Ó Sé, centre, and full-back Seamus Moynihan during the 2002 All-Ireland semi-final.
When Páidí took over as manager in 1997, we trained awful hard, but it was only three nights a week. No weights programme, no personal programmes, no stretching sessions, no core work. Your total workload was carried out in those three sessions, maybe Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Páidí was a good reader of things, knew when to give lads rope and when not to. His attitude was - basically - train hard, play hard.
Pressure on time was probably the reason I walked away from county in the end. When I started out, September to February was basically down time. And that time was vital to me. I'm not sure the modern player knows fully how to switch off. The most physical thing I'd do in that period of down time would be a game of five-a-side.
Otherwise, I'd eat loosely, drink loosely, put on the few pounds. But I'd come back mad for road even though those first two months back training would be torture. Now if a fella goes for a pint over Christmas, he'll most likely be in the gym the following day. Probably won't even eat the turkey. It's gone too far.
It strikes me that the game lacks coaches with sufficient confidence to make that call. To say to fellas, 'Lads, leave your hair down over Christmas'. You have this epidemic of guilt running through the GAA. Remember, most fellas have pressure of work too, so something has to suffer. Work or training.
When that happens, you're not right mentally. How could you be? My own view is that a lot of young players are left half-depressed by the unnatural demands being placed on them now. And the art of talking is going out of things. You see fellas on their way to games now with the big earphones on, shutting themselves away from the outside world. The concept of a bonding weekend is to take a group away for military exercises rather than just sitting down and getting to know one another. Everybody's in a terrible rush.
And my worry is that this is only going to get worse. We're certainly not seeing all the best footballers in the country out on the field today because the game is burning a lot of young lads away, especially in the weaker counties. It means the gap is getting bigger and bigger. Everyone's trying to set the same standards when it's probably just not feasible.
Dublin manager Jim Gavin Photo: Sportsfile
Like I don't doubt the likes of Jim Gavin and Eamonn Fitzmaurice make sure their players get enough down time to keep the experience enjoyable. My worry is for the 20 counties trying in vain to get up to that level. There's simply got to be a two-tier championship in my opinion.
I think it's still possible to allow players have some kind of social life without falling foul of the modern ethos. But it takes a confident manager to facilitate that. Not one who apes what's going on elsewhere. I heard a story last week that one inter-county team is doing two weights-sessions a day and a ten-kilometre run every second day.
That's madness. You wouldn't be able to lift feathers after that.
I also sense strength and conditioning coaches becoming more and more influential, despite many of them having no GAA background at all. It's in their nature to drive players as hard as they're allowed. So our balance is completely wrong here, every coach just driving his own agenda, be that club, Sigerson or county.
Listen, I like the professional side of the game. I just fear a lot of current county players will look back on their careers in ten years time and be going 'What the f**k was that about?'
When I came in, there were some great characters in the Kerry dressing-room, the Eamon Breens, the Liam Flahertys, my own brother Darragh. There was so much fun, the sweat would be coming out of me in buckets just from laughing so much on the way to a game.
But by the time I finished with Kerry, I had kids, I was traveling from Cork, we had core sessions, personalised weights sessions, three or four field sessions. Everything took longer. Training, meetings, video analysis, study of the opposition. I might leave home at 3.30pm and get back at 11.30pm. The same enjoyment wasn't there.
Now I still loved it, nobody was putting a gun to my head. To be quite honest, I even kind of regret that I didn't go back for one more year. But I just sensed my time getting more and more squeezed.
I read recently that as many as 50 footballers in Galway got J1 passes this year and I'm sure they did so imagining Galway had no chance of beating Mayo last weekend.
In my view there's no more than seven football counties right now who don't have to worry about this problem.
And that's something the GAA is going to have to get its head around sooner rather than later. There's a talent drain that needs to be fixed and the way to do that is through loosening the chains, not tightening them.
By the way, best of luck to the boys in green tomorrow.
Irish Independent |
Pakistan has sharply criticised the United States for a missile attack on Wednesday in which six people were reported killed near the Afghan border.
"Drone attacks have become a core irritant in the counter-terror campaign," the foreign office said.
It was the first such raid in a month and came after Pakistan's spy chief met his US counterpart to discuss a deep rift over CIA activities in Pakistan.
There was huge anger after a drone raid killed dozens of civilians on 17 March.
That attack in North Waziristan drew rare condemnation from Pakistan's powerful military chief.
Although several militants were reported killed, the vast majority of the dead were civilians attending a tribal meeting.
'Counter-productive'
Pakistani officials are quoted saying a number of militants were killed in Wednesday's attack in the Angoor Adda area of South Waziristan, a militant stronghold.
The media are barred from Pakistan's tribal areas and it is impossible to verify the claims independently.
But the timing of the attack prompted the Pakistani foreign office to protest to the US ambassador.
"We have repeatedly said that such attacks are counter-productive and only contribute to strengthen the hands of the terrorists," it said in a statement.
"Pakistan has taken up the matter with the US at all levels."
Reports this week said Pakistan was demanding a cut in the number of CIA personnel in Pakistan.
Image caption Anti-US feeling across Pakistan has escalated in recent months
US-Pakistani relations are still recovering after CIA contractor Raymond Davis shot dead two men in Lahore earlier this year.
Mr Davis was held on murder charges for weeks and only freed after relatives of the men he shot dead pardoned him in court. He maintained the men had been trying to rob him.
The case stoked anti-American feeling across Pakistan and led to angry demonstrations - particularly when it emerged that he worked for the CIA.
Drone attacks are hugely unpopular with the Pakistani public. Correspondents say they have the tacit approval of the authorities, but Pakistani leaders deny secretly supporting the strikes.
Many militants, some of them senior, have been killed in the raids. Hundreds of civilians have also died.
The US does not routinely confirm it is conducting drone operations in Pakistan, but analysts say only American forces have the capacity to deploy such aircraft in the region. |
President Trump has floated the possibility of replacing Attorney General Jeff Sessions Jefferson (Jeff) Beauregard SessionsTrump says he hasn't spoken to Barr about Mueller report Ex-Trump aide: Can’t imagine Mueller not giving House a ‘roadmap’ to impeachment Rosenstein: My time at DOJ is 'coming to an end' MORE with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R), Axios reported Monday.
Trump broached the idea in internal discussions about bringing his staunch ally into the folds of his administration, sources within the West Wing told the news outlet.
Before an interview last week with The New York Times, Trump had already expressed anger and frustration at Sessions for recusing himself from the Justice Department's investigation into Russian meddling in the presidential election, Axios reports.
Trump, during the interview, opined that Sessions's decision to recuse himself was "unfair" to him and that he would've likely picked another person to lead the Justice Department if he had known Sessions would recuse himself.
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Axios reports that Trump regularly considers personnel switch-ups, but doesn’t always act. Pondering about bringing in Giuliani may fall under this umbrella.
The report, however, comes after Trump tapped Anthony Scaramucci to serve as the White House communications director on Friday, leading Sean Spicer to resign as White House press secretary. |
(left, Mossad cutout conveniently leaves his calling card)
With France taking measures decisively sympathetic to Islam,
why would Muslim zealots suddenly choose THIS MOMENT to
murder a dozen French citizens, an act that would
certainly turn French public opinion against Muslims and in
favor of Israel?
(Latest- Even BBC admits attack may have been fake)
---------- Jewish Insider Reveals How Mossad Staged It
" Wake up, my fellow Christians. You are under insidious attack by the Illuminati: a secret oligarchy of Jews and Freemasons. Don't be deceived by the media which they own."
"IT IS FROM US THAT THE ALL-ENGULFING TERROR PROCEEDS. WE HAVE IN OUR SERVICE PERSONS OF ALL OPINIONS, OF ALL DOCTRINES,... MONARCHISTS, DEMAGOGUES, SOCIALISTS, COMMUNISTS, AND UTOPIAN DREAMERS OF EVERY KIND. We have harnessed them all to the task: EACH ONE OF THEM ON HIS OWN ACCOUNT IS BORING AWAY AT THE LAST REMNANTS OF AUTHORITY, IS STRIVING TO OVERTHROW ALL ESTABLISHED FORM OF ORDER. By these acts all States are in torture; they exhort to tranquility, are ready to sacrifice everything for peace: BUT WE WILL NOT GIVE THEM PEACE UNTIL THEY OPENLY ACKNOWLEDGE OUR INTERNATIONAL SUPER-GOVERNMENT, AND WITH SUBMISSIVENESS." Protocol 9. Vs. 4. (Circa 1897.)
by James Perloff
(henrymakow.com)
It seems like they're spinning out PSYOPS these days faster than the writers of plots for a daily soap opera. Ottawa and Sydney are already old news.
The three latest headlines have probably been: the Charlie Hebdo shootings in France, the downed AirAsia plane, and "North Korea hacks Sony."
While no conclusive explanations have yet been reached, these three seemingly distinct events all have something in common: running afoul of Israel.
On December 2nd, the France Parliament passed a resolution asking that France recognize a Palestinian state. And just a week ago, Israel informed France that it was "deeply disappointed" with France's vote on a UN resolution that would have required Israeli forces to withdraw to their pre-1967 borders by 2017.
(Left. Teaching everyone to identify as Jews)
With France taking measures decisively sympathetic to Islam, why would Muslim zealots suddenly choose THIS MOMENT to murder a dozen French citizens, an act that would turn French public opinion against Muslims and in favor of Israel? We are told the motive for the atrocity was publication of cartoons satirizing Islam and Muhammad. What Muslim would consider cartoons more important than Palestinian rights, which Muslims have spent decades earnestly striving and bleeding for?
Clearly, the beneficiary of the Charlie Hebdo incident is neither France nor Islam, but Israel.
9-11
This was equally true of 9/11. Though allegedly carried out by Middle Eastern Muslims, they did not benefit - the U.S. has been making war on them ever since, and the Middle East has descended into chaos. Americans did not benefit - they have suffered the casualties and enormous costs of multiple wars, to say nothing of a growing police state at home. 9/11's SOLE BENEFICIARY is Israel - her enemies neutralized one by one, courtesy America.
We will not repeat here the widely discussed Israeli connections to 9/11. However, let's at least quote Francesco Cossiga, former President and Prime Minister of Italy: "All of the democratic areas of America and of Europe . . . now know full well that the disastrous attack [9/11] was planned and executed by the American CIA and Mossad with the help of the Zionist world, to falsely incriminate Arabic countries and to persuade the Western Powers to intervene in Iraq and Afghanistan."
The Charlie Hebdo shootings show some of the same "MO" as 9/11. A key 9/11 clue was alleged hijacker Satam al-Saqami's visa, found intact and unburned near the World Trade Center. Supposedly it somehow survived the explosion unscathed and made it to the ground. Then, of course, there were the Koran and flight training manual found in a car at Boston's Logan Airport. And the terrorists who visited a Daytona Beach strip club the night before the attacks, and bragged that America was about to see "bloodshed," conveniently leaving behind a Koran, a business card and other forms of ID.
Likewise, in the recent Paris shootings, police have identified the alleged perpetrators by means of an ID card which one of them CONVENIENTLY left in the getaway car.
Analysts have pointed out that the attack was carried out with military precision and skill. If you watch the footage of the getaway (shot by Amchai Stein, deputy editor of Israel's IBA Channel 1, who "just happened" to be on the scene), the perps wore hoods over their faces: they clearly did not want their identities known. Why, then, after all this precision, did they carelessly leave identification in the car? Could it be that the masked shooters were NOT the same men whom the ID card has sent the police chasing after? (Perhaps the Mossad believes all French detectives are Inspector Clouseaus, but more likely they rely on compliant Freemasons within Law Enforcement who will obey their Masonic oaths of absolute obedience and secrecy in exchange for promotions and other material rewards.)
A detailed, ongoing debunking of the Charlie Hebdo shootings may be found at: http://www.jimstonefreelance.com/.
AIR ASIA CRASH
Next, AirAsia. In a single year, 2014, Malaysia lost three airliners: MH370, MH17, and AirAsia 8501. All three were lost under very controversial circumstances.
Malaysia is also one of just four countries in the Far East that doesn't recognize Israel. More significantly, in late 2013, the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission, chaired by Mahathir Mohamad (Malaysia's former prime minister), declared Israel guilty of war crimes and atrocities.
The other three Far Eastern countries that don't recognize Israel? Well, there's Indonesia, and Brunei (a small country on the island of Borneo, which is otherwise divided between Malaysia and Indonesia). 155 of Air Asia 8501's passengers were Indonesians.
Are France and Malaysia the victims of sophisticated Israeli vengeance? If such an idea seems farfetched, is it no more absurd than the government/MSM claim that MH370 simply "disappeared." If such brutality by Israel seems unthinkable, remember its slaughter of Gaza's civilians only last summer.
NORTH KOREA
And the fourth country of the Far East that doesn't recognize Israel? It's North Korea, who is now being punished with economic sanctions after its crackerjack team of computer geeks ran circles around the hayseeds in charge of Sony's security. And why shouldn't we believe the claims of government and mainstream media about that? After all, if Muslims will commit mass murder over a cartoon, wouldn't North Koreans hack us over a movie?
Wake up, my fellow Christians. You are under insidious attack by the Illuminati: a secret oligarchy of Jews and Freemasons. Don't be deceived by the media which they own. The political Israel of today is not the Israel of the Bible. It is a Luciferian counterfeit, engineered by the same Rothschild bankster cabal that has financed communism and world government. Ultimately, they want their beast to rule his totalitarian world from a throne in Jerusalem, pretending to be God (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4).
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https://41.media.tumblr.com/9ae523c9a04d7a99f8de3aa75f0272fc/tumblr_o0wm4sa14c1qk32lpo1_1280.png > > "The Freljord will bow to me, else it shall shatter beneath my heel.” > > The noble and benevolent Queen Ashe once guided the people of the Freljord with a firm yet gentle hand. The course of history was forever changed, however, when her once warm and passionate heart was corrupted by the icy touch of the Frozen Watchers. Now her armies sweep across the tundra like the blizzard wind, seeking to swell the forces of her Iceborn horde that all of Runeterra might someday feel the Watchers’ wrath. Hey everyone! Took some time yesterday to throw together a quick Blackfrost Ashe concept! Inspired by a dream I had the other night where I was playing Support Liss to a Blackfrost Ashe in an all Freljord team while Ice seeped out of our Nexus and slowly froze the entire map! This one came together pretty quickly so I didn't come up with many design variations but I'd like to revisit it and polish it up a bit sometime soon. Let me know what you guys think! EDIT: Tattered the cape up because some of you guys said it was too reminiscent of Talon! I was trying to create a thematic tie with the fabric trailing behind Blackfrost Anivia but I can definitely see why it reminded you guys of Talon. https://41.media.tumblr.com/1f8246aaebf08d1a4cd3124a9fe17536/tumblr_inline_o0xqxgD3gg1qiaw9q_540.png If you'd like to see more of my work you can [follow me on twitter!](http://www.twitter.com/TomRandby) I post a lot of concepts and progress images there!
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Will of Fire, Heart of Stone
Chapter One
Edited 3/14/09
A/N: I just finished a story with a wishy washy Sandaime who gets redeemed at the end. Writing the epilogue to that story made me want to work on this one again. This is a stronger, more resolute Sandaime Hokage, but his world won't be an easy one. As you shall see.
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A week after the demonic disaster named Kyuubi almost leveled Konoha, notices went out to the ANBU. Several senior ninja now had new, internal duties.
For some reason, the three Hyuuga ANBU began spying on the Uchiha. Two Uchiha spied on the Hyuuga. The Inuzuka ANBU members were tasked with the Ino-Shika-Cho clans. The Nara clan spied on the Inuzuka. Hatake Kakashi was pulled from his grief over the death of his sensei to start surveillance on the civilian council members.
No one knew why they were tasked away from reconstruction or intensified border patrol. Internal spying was usually a matter for ROOT, wasn't it, or the Counter-Espionage group.
A few people tried to get the Hokage or even Jiraiya to explain what was going on. Orders were orders; the Hokage sat resolute and said nothing.
Indeed, most of the ANBU didn't question their orders. The Hyuua were naturally suspicious of the Uchiha; the Uchiha loathed the Hyuuga.
A few ANBU were now getting paid by the Hokage to do what their clans would normally have them do in their off hours.
Reports flowed in to the Hokage. The information he wanted to know was so strange. Were the Uchiha talking with people outside of their compound more often? Did the Yamanaka clan ninjas talk with a lot of civilians?
It was a full week later that notices went out to the clan heads and the elder counselors. There was a meeting at nine…that night…less than two hours distant.
The newly reinstated Hokage wasn't known for being dramatic, so the counselors and clan heads showed up expecting either great or terrible news. Two weeks after the Kyuubi disaster, they were expecting more dire news.
They were proven correct when an unspeakably angry Sarutobi Hiruzen stormed into the room. Normally a genial sort, an angry Hokage had the council nervous. The news was going to be terrible…had Iwa resumed the war?
It wasn't every day that the most powerful ninja in the Fire Country seemed like a raging volcano. Disquieting thoughts bubbled up in the minds of everyone present.
"Sit," he said at barely a whisper, still everyone fell into their seats.
A rather dour-looking Toad Sannin, Jiraiya, followed the Hokage into the room. Then, ominously, the doors were shut and sealed from the outside. This was a rare sort of security precaution. All the evidence pointed to war.
"How many of you in this room like living in a Hidden Village?" the Hokage asked.
The assembled elders and clan heads of the village were surprised at the question. A lot of shrugging and confusion followed. This wasn't the way Sarutobi usually spoke. He was direct and to the point.
"Raise your hands if you like living in Konoha." The barked command shocked the listeners.
Everyone raised a hand. This was embarrassing to them, like being back in the Ninja Academy.
"Raise your hand," the angry Hokage said, "if you love that we're nestled into a vast forest. A forest our Shodai Hokage endowed to us…his greatest and most incredible work, something that could never be replicated, not with all the Earth and Water users in Fire Country."
The counselors and clan heads did nothing. That just made the Hokage angrier.
"If you like living in a forest, raise your hand."
Again, all the hands went up.
"And who here had donated their time to helping those injured in the disaster? To making life a bit better for your neighbor, for the man who sells you daikon, or the woman who bakes your bread. All of you, right?"
Some hands went up without a thought. The more snobbish clan leaders reluctantly raised theirs, as if they had difficulties remembering ever helping anyone.
"I can assume everyone here wants their children, their heirs, to grow up among the leaves, right?"
This was an easy one. All the hands rose up as one.
"Yes. Many of you have just had children. Some are the new clan heirs. Some will, unfortunately, have to replace clan heirs who died during those horrible events when the hospital was damaged and part of a village wall caved in."
That sad history had been discussed among the clans. Why did Sarutobi bring up such a painful subject now? The Yamanaka's had lost a son, the designated heir. The Aburame had lost two children and their clan head, extinguishing that branch of the family. The Uchiha had lost almost ten percent of their ninja, including the third in line to be clan head behind Fugaku's own two sons.
"Yes, it's a fine thing to live in a village like this one. A fine thing. Three Hokages to date have died to keep this place alive; I checked the rolls and another eighteen hundred jounin-ranked ninja have died in our decades of skirmishes, intrigues, and wars. A beautiful forest we have grown from blood, sweat, and ground bone. A beautiful place to raise children…."
The clan heads, in particular, had no idea if Sarutobi had lost his mind. The words coming out of his mouth, this anger, what had happened? If it wasn't war, what was it?
Sarutobi stopped for a moment, looked at Jiraiya, and took a deep breath. "Fine. Everyone in here is loyal to the Leaf. So you attest. Now tell me if you'd all like to have Stone ninjas attack us in a week…. Anyone?"
The elders looked confused. What the Hokage said wasn't a declaration of war, was it?
"No one wants that, Hokage-sama," said the acting head of the Aburame clan. (With the previous head's death, the internal politics of selecting a new permanent head would take time.)
"No one says they want that," Jiraiya said, his tone even angrier than the Hokage's. "But that's what you clout-headed fools almost caused."
"What," the Uchiha Clan head shouted. A number of other people jumped to their feet to defend their patriotism.
"Sit," the Hokage said, barely constraining his rage. "All of you return to your seats. We have much to discuss."
Sarutobi was usually so mild mannered that it was odd to see him stand and begin pacing the way a caged tiger might…and the council knew that this aged man was more deadly than any tiger.
"Because of the devastation from the Kyuubi's attack, we are at our weakest right now," the Third Hokage said, his weariness only exceeded with the vigor of his anger.
"You all know this. It's vital we keep this truth secret. Right? We must repair ourselves as fast as possible giving our enemies as small an opportunity as possible…to learn of our distress."
The assembled elders all agreed. Who knew what Stone or Cloud might do if they had accurate information as to what had happened. Even their ally Hidden Sand might get some fool-headed ideas given the chance. The main wall hadn't been completely repaired yet and Konoha's surviving ninja forces were mostly injured or despondent in grief at the present moment.
Battle-hardened ninja knew what it was like to fight in battle. But to fight the unstoppable, the juggernaut of a bijuu…that was something else entirely.
Some of the ninja on the battlefield might never be right in the head again.
"Secrecy. We all know the importance. It's common sense. It's been discussed in this very chamber two times since the attack. So how is it that one or more traitors sit on this council, traitors who would draw the Stone army to us?"
That prompted more outcry, of course. The look on the Hokage's face was enough to put down this eruption of self-preservation.
"You, all of you in this room save the Aburame and two of the minor clans now present, were told eight days ago of this village's most recent S-class secret. I even formed a special law to protect this information…to keep Konoha and also the young sacrifice safe."
Danzo, along with Homura, finally understood what this was about. The Head of ROOT began trying to figure out how he was going to survive this. Sarutobi would assign a slap on the wrist, right? Perhaps a loss of political power or a forced retirement. But a retired ninja can maintain unofficial power for a very long time. Danzo's mind churned through his options.
"Less than a week later, what do I find? Defiance; passing of the secret through the clans; even civilians discussing military secrets on the street corner. For a normal secret, I would be angry but dismiss it as a bit of venting, dangerous but potentially necessary. But not for this secret. Now you shall know why I am so angry, so furious: a team of chuunin out patrolling seven days ago discovered something that chilled my blood."
The angry face of Sarutobi became fixed.
"A spy, a spy from Stone, rushing back to Earth Country as quickly as he could."
Cold horror bloomed in the minds of not a few clan heads present. The greater part of the room now saw where this story was going…and they were too weak to keep Sarutobi and Jiraiya from doing what they had now resolved had to do.
"This spy was taken down easily – by surprise – and sent to interrogation. Do you want to know what this spy had learned just from walking our streets? He knew the classified details of what had happened to Kyuubi, even the name of the jinchuuriki; he knew the specifics of the sealing array used; he knew even how long the seal had to be in place – nine years – before we could be absolutely sure that Kyuubi would die when his jailor died. He knew details I released to this council only one day before the spy heard them. These details I only released to this Council under great duress…and under my special law. Why then did a spy learn them so quickly…a spy so green he was taken down by chuunin eating their dinner while out on patrol!"
The Uchiha head had grown paler and paler. "I protest…."
"Sit down, you blowhard. You and your ilk have almost brought a war upon us at the time we're least able to cope with one. To think I thought this Council was worth the frustration; that the idea of participation and semi-representative democracy was valuable; that it would keep us from becoming monstrous and corrupt; that we were different from Stone and Cloud and Hidden Mist because our clans and our villagers could be involved in governance….
"I was a fool. I considered some of you as adversaries or as annoyances. But I was wrong. As a body this council is worthless except to bring down ruin upon us. You can't keep your mouths shut! So many treasonous things have begun in the minds of people who had the privilege of sitting in this room. I should strike these betrayers down as I speak…."
The Uchiha shut up midway through that vitriol. He was a formidable ninja, but 'The Professor' could knock him to pieces in minutes, having developed now-forbidden techniques that negated the Sharingan's predictive and copying abilities.
"You all expected me not to notice you were violating military intelligence protocol; that you were spreading vital, classified information so freely that a green spy from Stone, here on a simple training mission, could learn our most critical secrets within hours of entering our village. I am not a doddering fool; I have not forgotten my job in the all-too-brief time that the Yondaime took the leadership of Konoha. I am the Fire Shadow; I have the will of fire, but today I must also harden my heart and perform a most painful duty.
"For one week I have had my ANBU spying on all of you. I preyed on old hatreds and no one questioned why I was spying on my own people so soon after a disaster. I have a good deal of evidence, enough to pass judgment.
"For breaking the special Kyuubi law, this Council, per my powers as Hokage in a time of disaster or war, is dissolved. All of you will submit to 'informal' questioning as to what you know of this security leak. Those of you responsible will spend time with the ANBU interrogators. Those who maliciously broke the law will receive the full sentence, death; those who are merely stupid or gossips will be removed as ninjas. None of the guilty will ever hold positions of prominence in this village again…."
At this the Head of the Uchiha Clan attacked. It was either he assassinate the Hokage now…or die a traitor later.
The Hokage had expected it.
The Hyuuga ANBU had provided evidence that suggested nearly every Uchiha knew of the jinchuuriki – and it was clear that news was passing to civilians from several Uchiha. Perhaps they expected for village mobs to deal with the jinchurriki, not caring that the seal needed time to bind the Kyuubi's soul to the young boy's. Not caring that it was entirely likely that this act of vengeance would give Kyuubi back all his power.
The Uchiha would destroy anything…even a baby…that had the potential to become more powerful than even their greatest prodigies. It was the Uchiha way. Konoha had always gone along, turning a blind eye, in the past. (Well, save for when the Shodaime and Uchiha Madara got into a battle over their tactics and goals….)
The Hokage batted away the Fire attack as he leveled a massive Killer Intent at the only Uchiha in the room.
This attack was one the Professor had used very rarely…but it worked. The amount of fear generated within the hate-filled Uchiha's mind caused a blood vessel to burst. The man fell over, incapacitated and slowly dying.
"Anyone else care to challenge me?" The Hokage looked over the cowering morons with disgust. "I may be old, but I can kill the strongest of you just by glaring at you."
The quivering mass of the dying Uchiha Clan leader on the floor gave testament to that.
"All of you will be taken for questioning by several people I trust implicitly. The traitors will feel the talents of the ANBU torture squad. You will reveal the name of every person you informed of this secret…and why. This is not a gossipy shougi parlor…this is a military village. Secrets, even one you hate, can kill us if known to a wide audience."
Jiraiya, usually a goofball, looked as severely angered as the Hokage. He finally spoke up. "My greatest student gave his life to save this pissant village…and all of your pettiness nearly took that and threw it away. I counseled against sharing any information with you…I had a more hard-nosed understanding of what many of you were. Sensei decided to trust in your military instincts, your self-preservation instincts. He has already admitted his folly.
"Stone could have mobilized and been here within a week…and they would have known exactly which child to secure. They'd have killed the poor tyke, because they are truly heartless bastards, and Kyuubi's chakra would have been free to reform a demonic body. All of us would have died. We've let you spoiled princesses poke your noses into things for too long. I'm going to start my interrogation with the Hyuuga."
The Hokage just nodded. "As of now, I am sole leader of the village. All of the special dispensations for clans are void…as several clans have brought us to war and should feel the pain of what they did…and I will appoint special advisors to deal with trade, reconstruction, relations with the Daimyo, and other matters. We're done."
The Hokage and Jiraiya left through what had been a sealed door.
The other door to the room opened…and a variety of ANBU who did not come from clans poured into the room and overwhelmed the mostly elderly council members. Some of these people had once been fighters, but they couldn't easily stand up to men thirty or forty years younger. Some hadn't even trained regularly in a decade or longer, so used to sitting in the Council chambers and meddling in things not within their purview.
The civilian counselors, who had not been invited to this meeting, were dragged from their homes by masked ANBU. The kinder ANBU used pressure points to knock them unconscious. A few of the ones who'd experienced Council politics before were a bit more…aggressive. The Hokage had approved all of this in advance; after all, he did understand the power of a bit of theatre for the general populace.
Inside and outside the council chamber, the guiltiest struggled the hardest. They had caused the Hokage to invoke the penalty clauses of his law; they had caused the power of the clans to be somewhat broken. It was possible that none of the clans would be trusted for a long time to come after all the revelations came out.
None of the ANBU seemed at all concerned when they broke arms or had to stab a person to keep him from escaping.
The bloody scene inside the room would keep it from being used as a meeting space for a long time. The Hokage did not have it remodeled for nearly a decade, as he considered it an honest, vicious blot – one that should be remembered – on the Village Hidden in the Leaves.
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The ANBU began the interrogation of Danzo a few minutes after three o'clock in the morning.
The man had been a rival for years…but Sarutobi had enjoyed the sparring for a good long while. He had never thought his…perhaps-friend was so deep in corruption.
The more of these interrogations Sarutobi listened to, the more out of touch he felt.
All of this…all this vile, beastly plotting inside his village walls! Minato had asked Sarutobi two months ago what he should do about Danzo; the young Hokage had been considering forcing the aged ROOT commander on a suicide mission just to be rid of him. Sarutobi had counseled against it…a foolish effort.
Sarutobi steeled himself and stood behind the one-way mirror. It was nearing four o'clock in the morning, but Sarutobi subsisted on anger right now.
"Now, Danzo," the interrogator said, one of the few interrogation specialists who weren't compromised in some way by ROOT's blackmail or coercion schemes. "Tell me the names of those you informed about the Kyuubi aftermath."
"You're going to kill me anyway. I have confessed my crimes; fallen on my sword for a once-great, now wasting away village. That is enough, I think."
The interrogator, one of the few remaining who was trained during the Nidaime's reign as Hokage, leaned forward. "You know my reputation, Danzo. Do you really want to see my…technique with your own eye?"
Sarutobi stifled a laugh at the little joke. Mocking Danzo for his infirmities was wrong… Huh? Sarutobi hadn't stayed up for this many continuous hours in a good many years. The hours were wearing on him.
"You wouldn't…. That bastard Sarutobi signed a warrant, didn't he? It's bad enough you're going to kill me…but torture?"
"The kind I practice…well, it doesn't leave much in the way of a mark."
"Do your worst…."
Sarutobi closed his eyes and rubbed them. Danzo's holding out like this said that he knew something important. He was being stubborn to demonstrate something, to win a concession…or maybe to be a bastard until the bitter end.
Yakogi would find the information. The number of failures the man had could be counted on two hands – all due to his subjects' hearts giving out under stress. Less than ten died from the more than one thousand who had 'chatted' with this legend.
Sarutobi watched as the barrel of water was carted into the room.
"Is there nothing I can do to prevent this?" the interrogator asked his subject.
"Die," Danzo spat.
"Not today. Not because of you. You should feel lucky I am your lowly interrogator. Had you been before the Shodai Hokage himself, you would feel living wood piercing under your finger and toenails, growing millimeter by millimeter until you begged for death. My technique…is less refined. Well…we shall begin."
The old interrogator formed some handseals and a thin column of water erupted from the tank.
The first bit form up a collar around Danzo's neck. He was immobilized.
The next bit splashed against the man's lips and teeth, prying them open and continuing down his throat.
The water hung there, holding Danzo and suffocating him.
As Danzo's eyes lit up in horror at feeling a technique that should never have been invented, Yakogi performed another set of handseals…and the water from his throat, esophagus, lungs, and stomach began to draw back…slowly. By the time the water was gone, Danzo was nearly passed out.
It was a pain, Sarutobi knew from watching Yakogi work, the inevitable black outs this technique caused. But Yakogi was always cautious to begin and quick to stop once a subject had broken.
"The names, Danzo. Tell me the names."
"The Leaf is rotten," Danzo's damaged vocal cords rumbled. "The branches are rotting. When the fire comes, the Leaf will burn."
Yakogi made more handseals and the process repeated itself.
Sarutobi left the room and let Yakogi ply his trade. He had other conversations to observe.
The Uchiha elders had been taken as a group a few hours ago. Jiraiya had one of them now.
"You can't do that to us. You can't…."
That was a female voice. Fugaku's wife, Mikoto. Sarutobi stepped into the viewing area and fully closed the door.
"You are mistaken," Jiraiya said. "The clan laws have been repealed by a wartime decree; the village council has been disbanded, too. Now…you will tell me how you were told the true details of the Kyuubi attack."
"I have rights. I demand to speak with my husband."
Sarutobi was surprised that she didn't already know. Jiraiya must be saving that information for a reason….
"Right now, you are suspected of treason. I don't think the Hokage cares much about your rights."
"Fugaku would never permit this…."
Sarutobi recognized that the woman had entered a kind of fugue state. Her brain just wasn't processing the questions Jiraiya asked anymore.
"Your husband is dead."
That got a reaction. It wasn't a scream or tears or even shock. The only thing Sarutobi noticed was her lip beginning to quiver. She was a trained kunoichi, after all, and could mask her emotions.
"How?"
"He attempted to assassinate the Hokage with a fire jutsu. The Hokage…well, he proved why he was Hokage then. Your husband died a minute or two later."
"We are broken, then?"
"All the Uchiha elders are in cells like this one. None of you will ever leave, not until we understand the full extent of this treason…."
"All this, the destruction of our clan, for one simple little baby! He should be dead…."
"I care not for a discussion of policy with a traitor like yourself. I care only for information. Now…speak."
"The Hokage wouldn't kill the child…so the Uchiha Elders, all of us, we decided to…plant the seed of an idea. A bit of overheard gossip here…and eventually some civilian makes an attempt and gives everyone else the idea. That 'child' should be dead."
"Names…now."
Sarutobi had heard enough of this. All the Uchiha Elders, six ninja in number now that Fugaku was dead, all conspiring. They would have to be killed.
Minato thought he was ending the chaos and destruction…saving the village. But the method of salvation he chose was now ripping the Hidden Leaf to shreds, exposing the rot that was far more widespread than Sarutobi had feared to imagine.
Sarutobi walked out and picked up a clipboard. The preliminary results were in. Of the twenty-one council members and minor clan advisors, fourteen had broken the law. Of the civilian council members who were informed of the Kyuubi details, all of them had broken the law.
Sarutobi had long debated with himself whether there more danger sharing military information with civilians who did not…and could not…understand the importance of discretion or in allowing only ninja to get restricted information. The answer was still unclear.
He flipped a few pages on the clipboard. Many of the other councilors knew that the law had been violated and did nothing. They would receive lighter sentences, but they were not innocent.
Right now, the ANBU had warrants to apprehend more than forty civilians.
The days of the Uchiha-led Konoha Police Force were over. Civilians would need to get used to being handled by the ANBU. That reminded Sarutobi to have the Police Force records audited and examined…hopefully there would be no irregularities.
It was just another blow.
How much of the village would revolt? Would it lead to a civil war…over something like this…over a baby who kept the raging chakra of a demon held back? Were trained ninja so blind – leaving aside civilians – so given to their passions?
Sarutobi set down the clipboard. He knew that Ebisu, the former head of Ninja Force Internal Affairs, an oft hated figure for his role in policing…well the police and the ninja and anyone else who worked for the Hokage. He was an honest sort, but his days as a line ninja were over. He'd be 'accidentally' killed by teammates while on a mission.
Sarutobi mulled this over as he settled in to listen to another interrogation.
Perhaps Ebisu should go into training the young. It would be nothing at all to make him a Special Jounin…a pity for a talented ninja. It was hard to get someone to take a role in Internal Affairs, but necessary. Ebisu had done a great service then…as he was doing now.
Yamanaka Inoichi was likely innocent, but Ebisu would find out for sure. Sarutobi wanted to make damned sure that his lead interrogation specialist was trustworthy. The ANBU would spend weeks on these detailed interviews if Sarutobi could only trust Yakogi. (He had been retired and living outside the Hidden Leaf during the Kyuubi disaster. Sarutobi had only recalled him a day ago…and was positive the man hadn't been caught up with Danzo or anyone else.)
He settled in to watch Ebisu and Inoichi spar. He had hours to go and his bones were weary.
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Three weeks after Kyuubi's defeat, the Sandaime Hokage felt every one of his sixty-five years of life. He walked out onto the balcony overlooking a wide avenue. It was packed with people: villagers and shinobi.
He didn't have to fake the dire look on his face.
"Today, people of Konoha, I must relate a tale of treason to you."
The gathered individuals standing outside the Hokage Tower were understandably nervous. The Hokage hadn't called for a general gathering like this one since Iwa had declared war on the Leaf.
Treason had to be at least as bad as a bunch of Earth Country scum.
"A military secret was revealed to the Village Council about two weeks ago…and they were informed that the information was subject to our highest secrecy ranking. Within the week, the majority of them were freely discussing the secret within their clans. All of the civilian members also violated the military secrecy law.
"This was supremely dangerous, as a young spy from another Hidden Village had just infiltrated our village as part of a training mission. He learned the complete details of our military secret within hours…and it was only luck that a group on patrol caught him before he crossed the border. Our council's loose lips with one of our most important military secrets nearly brought us to war…and at a time we could least expect to deal with it. Instead of repairing the walls and tending to the wounded today, we would have been fighting an enemy force looking to crush us at our weakest point.
"Each person who was told this military secret was questioned…and those who broke the secrecy laws were interrogated to the fullest extent. Twenty-three civilians have been convicted of treason, as have forty-one shinobi. Those convicted of the most minor offenses are currently serving time in our special military prison; those convicted of major offenses will be executed today…."
That brought a gasp from the crowd. Military executions were almost always done in secret, after secret trials, the village at large never permitted to know of what had happened.
Moments later, thirty one people, including seven of the Uchiha Clan, were dragged from an unmarked door on the side of the Hokage Tower. Their guards brought them in front of the city wills near just to the left of where the Hokage was speaking.
"As Hokage, I must protect the people of the village from threats foreign and domestic. These traitors have revealed secrets that only through luck did not end in a bloody war. May you wail for all eternity in the guts of the Shinigami."
A masked man to the side of the condemned let loose a Fire Dragon which seemed to gobble up each person. It was a powerful spectacle with an unmistable message: military secrets will cost you your lives should you ever betray them.
The Hokage continued with his speech. "The Uchiha Clan compound and several other properties belonging to clans and civilians have been confiscated. These Uchiha lands were originally gifts to lure that clan here…and they have been taken back for cowardly, treasonous conduct. Shortly, we will turn those spaces into affordable housing for those adversely affected by the attack. Likewise, we will be moving our orphanage into new quarters there, seeing that we have a massive increase in the numbers of children without living parents…"
"What will happen to the remaining Uchiha?" Predictably it was a civilian shouting out the question. Why the people loved the cold hearted Uchiha Sarutobi couldn't understand.
"Some will choose to resign as shinobi of the Leaf and leave the village…and will be bound with a new protective seal to prevent them from ever attacking Konoha. Some have already gone nukenin…they will be hunted down and killed after I finish teaching my anti-Sharingan tactics to our Hunter Ninjas. Those who remain loyal to Konoha will remain welcome to live with us. However, they will no longer have the right to control our police force nor a right to sit on a council should it ever be reformed. Traitors, among them all the Uchiha Elders, should never prosper from their acts."
The Hokage's speech continued…and the village's opinion of the man changed. While he had cultivated a laid back reputation, he now demonstrated why he was the strongest ninja in the village, even at his advanced age.
Those few who had escaped detection even after learning about the Kyuubi being sealed into a child knew they had to keep the knowledge secret. The Hokage was willing to follow through on his law.
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"This is intolerable, Lord Hokage," Hyuuga Hiashi said. He had become clan head only two years earlier after his father retired and joined the Hyuuga Elders. "None of my clan has been convicted of anything. None of us were responsible for letting the secret escape."
"You personnaly followed the letter of the law, Hiashi. But you broke its spirit. Some in your clan, like the two executed Elders, openly flouted my decree after they got the information from the Uchiha or others. Remind me, Hiashi, of how much you knew about the whispering of the other clans…and what you did to stop it."
Hiashi remained stone faced.
"Correct. It is a shinobi's task to maintain secrets, his own, his village's. Your clan failed in that respect. You heard the whispers, your clan associates heard them…and most had enough sense to not pass them along. Why did you not come to me, tell me…my few remaining ANBU have been severely taxed with their reduced numbers, severely wounded comrades, and greatly increased duties. The clans needed to step up…and didn't. This is conduct I should reward? Encourage?"
"Aside from those disgraced old men, who have paid the ultimate price, my clan did nothing wrong." The young Jonin kept trying to argue but a single opinion. It wasn't a strong case to make and Hiashi was still a relatively poor negotiator.
"It is not commission I blame you for, but omission. You did not act to stop this. You are as guilty as any of the fools burnt to cinders for almost bringing us to war. This argument will not wash."
Hiashi, as collected as ever, nodded. "Then I must inform you, Lord Hokage, that the Hyuuga will be asserting the right of severing from the Hidden Leaf."
"You will follow the traitorous Uchiha? The confused Akimichi? The decimated Kentoru? It is solely within your discretion. I will not even attempt to oppose or delay you. But answer me a question: what do you hope to gain?"
Hiashi had not moved during this exchange, but now he looked a bit…irresolute. "We must maintain a position within a village where we are respected. That is no longer the case here, Lord Hokage. We will seek a powerful new alliance."
Sarutobi just nodded his head, not terribly surprised at the continuing Hyuuga arrogance. Their remaining Elder Council was filled with fools who had not held a kunai in decades…and they dictated policy to the clan head. Hiashi seemed to at least recognize the futility of what he was forced to do today.
After all, where would they go? Hidden Mist, the place where the Bloodline Wars were in full swing? Hidden Cloud, which had several times before attempted to capture, not kill, Byakugan users out on missions? Hidden Stone, which had only been deterred from a continuing war after Minato savaged their last, largest armed attempt at invasion?
Hidden Sand? Hidden Grass? Hanzou's Hidden Rain? Maybe petition a Daimyo to form a new Hidden Village…
No, none of these would kowtow to the Hyuuga. Hiashi likely already knew this…but his 'honor' – as defined by the Hyuuga Elders – would demand prominence and privilege.
"I wish you the best of luck then, Hiashi. Be careful."
"The Hyuuga need no luck."
Sarutobi frowned after Hiashi left his office. This would not end well.
But he could not…would not return to coddling of the clans, letting them trample through the village as if no one else mattered.
The Great Unravelling was in full swing. That would be his terrible legacy. But at least the Hidden Leaf might have the opportunity to grow stronger from his difficulty.
"Good bye, Hyuuga Hiashi. May the Kami guide you safely…and may you hide from the hungry eyes of the Shinigami."
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Sarutobi Hiruzen, the famed Ninja Professor, could barely keep a civil tongue in his head.
The remaining teachers in the Academy – comprising those not killed by the Kyuubi and not withdrawn from Hidden Leaf by departing clans and minor families – had the…gall to present these records.
It was a disgrace.
The ANBU would have another task to sort out very soon. Retired school teachers would soon be visiting Inoichi. Sarutobi thought he himself might be due for a torture session, as well, for not spotting this mess sooner.
"Let me see if I understand this. The Academy had an 'unofficial' policy of handling disciplinary matters differently depending upon who the student's sponsor was?"
An abashed chuunin named Seiko Noda nodded, unable to form up words. He had never expected to be interrogated by the Hokage of all people concerning the Academy and its running.
"So, if I were to sponsor a student who was disruptive, causing havoc with the other students' learning…how would it be handled?"
"Delicately."
"And if a similar student spent his time painting classrooms green or planting traps for the teachers, but came from a civilian family?"
"Expulsion."
"The Jounin I entrusted to oversee the Academy was a fool then. Best for him that he's now dead. We will rebuild the walls of the building soon enough…but we will not reimplement all the old policies. Do you all understand me?"
He got back a chorus of discouraged "Hai, Hokage-sama."
The Hokage turned to question an ANBU who had been tasked with examining odd caches of paperwork found in the homes of the traitor council members.
"And these papers you wished to discuss? What relevance do they have with schooling?"
"I believe," the masked ANBU cautiously began, "that council members would from time to time pay a visit to certain chuunin at the Academy."
"To what end?"
"To make suggestions, especially on team formation."
"That is my job…."
The ANBU nodded, pausing to think his way through a mine field. "Correct. But the Lord Hokage listens to advice, if I'm not mistaken. Especially the teacher-generated commentary on each student's progress and assessment of strengths and weaknesses."
The Hokage nodded. He turned to look back at Seiko Noda. "Is it true? Was pressure applied?"
The chuunin nodded.
"Were the comments always accurate? Complete and accurate?"
The chuunin shook his head and let out a long-held breath.
"Were favors or money exchanged for these…considerations?"
The terrified chuunin nodded again.
The Hokage looked at the other teachers. That none of them would meet his eyes was proof enough.
"ANBU, what was the end result of these contacts, aside from team placement?"
"I haven't finished reviewing the documents, but the pile I have reviewed suggest a…troubling pattern."
"Yes?"
"If Lord Hokage would care to review team composition for the last decade, I am sure he would find that clan team members often find themselves on teams with other clan members…."
"Yes, I agree with that."
"And that the teams formed by civilian or orphan children rarely passed their jounin-sensei's personal examinations…."
"You've got to be kidding me…."
It was so obvious now…now that someone else had unraveled this mess. The Hokage felt like a fool, but he spent so little time on the Academy. Not with wars looming and jounin to oversee and manage in A- and S-ranked missions.
He had felt comfortable delegating most of the Academy issues to people he thought trustworthy…which now seemed misplaced.
"So…the clans look better if their children always 'perform' better than other student ninja, get on better teams, pass out of the Academy earlier. This is ridiculous. Half the Hokages have come from no clan…and the other two came from the same one and were ridiculously talented in their own right, not from long maintained bloodlines. Namikaze Minato, our greatest Hokage, was completely untaught until he reached the Academy…and then he grew like a weed. I confess to having excellent 'tutors' early in life. But…this kind of sabotage. Making the clans look powerful by literally making everyone else fail and look weak. Am I hearing this right?"
The masked ANBU just nodded.
"This sounds like treason to me. Subversion of the village's military strength for favors and money. Have them all taken to Interrogation. Let's get the whole picture."
The masked ANBU nodded…and a few chuunin, fearing this conclusion, tried to escape. One found out it was not possible to shunshin from this room – Sarutobi knew more about sealing than anyone else in Konoha save for his student Jiraiya – and the others found out that an ANBU could subdue several weak chuunin at the same time.
Sarutobi watched with his anger finally ebbing away.
Had he been sleeping all these long years? Not paying attention? Not questioning what he was told? All of these findings made his village seem like something else, something foreign and revolting.
Had his conception of the Hidden Leaf always been a lie? Or had he let corruption eat away at it?
Sarutobi pondered. Hatake, strong clan and exceptional warriors. But that new jounin Maito Gai was easily Kakashi's equal…and was an orphan.
For every powerful clan jounin Sarutobi could think of, there were two or three non-clan ones who were as good or better.
Almost all the remaining ANBU were non-clan. Uzumaki Kushina had come from a clan in Whirlpool Country. She had been the last clan ANBU Captain.
Sarutobi would need to dig deeper. Had the early compromises necessary to fuse Senju and Uchiha – which made Konoha attractive to other clans – rotted the village this way? Could it have been possible for things to have gone differently, for Sarutobi to have managed things differently.
These last weeks had severely disarranged nearly everything he thought he knew.
He hoped there were few more surprises in store…for him or the village.
In a fit of anger his hand snaked out and plucked up one of the many folders discussed in this room in the past few days.
The Hyuuga.
He flipped it open and began reviewing the report.
Graduated one or two genin every year from the Academy. Had 17 active chuunin at the time of their leaving – and 62 'retired' chuunin. Only 7 jounin – four of whom were 'retired.'
More of this 'clan first' garbage, Sarutobi realized. These retirements at chuunin level – it permitted the ninja to be trained at the village's expense and then to be used for the clan's benefit. Many of these 'retired' chuunin had trained hard and long enough to take and pass a jounin examination…but instead they remained behind the clan walls.
The other shinobi had to pick up the slack: the non-clan shinobi.
"There cannot be villages within villages…if the goal is to have a wholly united village. I cannot and will not permit this to happen," he vowed.
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"I said no," Jiraiya reiterated.
"Why not?"
"I have my reasons."
"That's not good enough."
"You know, I never was good enough for you, Sensei. Wonder why I'm the only one of your students who still talks to you."
Sarutobi sighed. "And, again, the past intrudes upon the present. Why, in my dotage, does everyone see fit to remind me of my more youthful failings? It would have been better to correct me back then…"
"Correct the Professor? Surely you jest. He knew everything. Just ask him; he'd tell you."
"Very funny."
"I'm not smiling."
Jiraiya was being…difficult. This was a conversation the Sandaime Hokage had long been bracing himself to have…and now Jiraiya had been in the village to help with the final reconstruction of the village walls.
Sure the masonry had been up for some time. But it had taken three weeks to reinscribe all the sealing arrays and then activate them. Jiraiya hadn't been happy to be stuck in-village for three weeks, but he'd done it.
The man claimed he was born for a life of wandering, women, and worship. The Hokage agreed with the first two, but wasn't sure what Jiraiya meant by the last. His student was a most profane, if amusing, person.
"If you are not willing to become Godaime Hokage, Jiraiya, I must ask you to state your reasons. If it is simple resentment towards me, I am afraid that won't cut it."
"No. No, it's more than that."
The Hokage nodded, waiting.
"I do not trust myself."
"I trust you…."
"No, stop doing that. Just listen to me, would you?"
The Hokage just nodded. This was obviously important to his student.
"I do not trust myself. I thought myself at the pinnacle of my craft a few years ago. I had just trained a ninja to exceed my own remarkable feats. I had a name. I had money. I had a woman in every village and two in every city. I felt happy. But, it wasn't to be. It was all a lie.
"My teammate, I distrusted him but I did not see him for what he was, what he was doing. My student, I taught him to be great, but I taught him too well. His knowledge of sealing came to exceed my own. So when I tried to take his place, to offer my life to the Shinigami to save Konoha, I found I could not. I did not have the skill to create and understand and control the arrays. People seem to think it was a simple matter to call down the Death God and get him to do what you want…but, after he was called, his actions were all guided and controlled by the seal. Every bit of it. A man made seal instructing and leading a God…it is as momentous an accomplishment as I make it sound.
"Minato created the arrays out of whole cloth in less than four days. Arrays to guide the Death God; arrays to restrain the Kyuubi once inside of the boy; arrays to leech off the Kyuubi's power to make a true powerhouse of a child; arrays to tie the Kyuubi's lifeforce to that of the host. It has taken me eight months since then – every day since his death – just to begin to unravel it. He was a genius. I gave him knowledge and power as a ninja, he exceeded me by age twenty, he eclipsed me by age twenty four, the self-sacrificing bastard.
"I was ready to knock him unconscious and do this myself, but I felt like a toddler attending a physics convention when I tried. I now know that what he did just isn't theoretically possible. No other jinchuuriki was created this way. All of them required a quirk of the Shodai's genetics to even capture them.
"It wasn't possible…as I said…and Minato did it anyway. It would be like me calling down Kami, giving her a corporeal body, having my way with her to her ever increasing pleasure, and then letting her take my soul in payment. It is the stuff of dreamers and poets and mystics.
"I trained and lost the most valuable person this village has ever known. I permitted the most horrible person this village has created to betray us for years…and then leave without a scratch because of your order to 'let him go.' I suspected my teammate a lot longer than you did. For a decade or more, I watched him and told you to watch him.
"I feel that I am both not strong enough to have my warnings believed and not strong enough to step in and take the fatal swing of a katana should my village ever demand it. I cannot be Hokage. Not now. Not ever."
Sarutobi Hiruzen looked for a place to begin unraveling this mess inside his student's mind. But, he realized that Jiraiya wouldn't listen. He had convinced himself to feel unending guilt…and nothing would shake that loose.
"I will honor your statement, my student. But I will ask again in one year's time…."
"You may, but I don't see how my answer will be any different."
"I have failed you then, my student. I should have struck Orochimaru down myself. That is my failing, not yours. I trained him; I knew he was powerful and a bit twisted; I allowed him to grow unrestrained, like a cancer. It fell to me to end him…but my heart was too soft. This is my shortcoming, not yours."
Jiraiya nodded, but said nothing.
Sarutobi was stuck. He had the same feelings of guilt – for not seeing the rot in his village for so long – but he couldn't just call himself 'unfit to be Hokage' and leave.
He had held the office on and off for all of his adult life.
There was, by definition, no one more fit to be Hokage than Sarutobi.
He wanted to smoke, but just sat there, trying to think his way through this problem. The trouble was there was no easy or simple solution.
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Three Years Later
The fire was everywhere. His family was expelling fireball after fireball, not caring that they hit the tents or the fragile wooden buildings.
The boy looked for his younger brother…and bit back a sob when he saw the boy crushed under a fallen log. He wasn't moving at all and the fires were almost on top of him.
Sasuke had only been three. He did not deserve this. None of the Uchiha did.
Little Itachi scrambled away from the fighting. He had activated his Sharingan almost two years ago, on his seventh birthday. He was now nearly nine and skilled, but…he had never seen a fight before.
He was utterly terrified and slunk into the shadows.
Soon the ninjas stopped and someone began to douse the flames.
A pale man rode on a snake into the area where his adoptive parents' dead bodies lay. Itachi knew they were actually his aunt and uncle…but they had encouraged him to call them 'mother' and 'father.'
The pale man jumped down from his snake and pulled out a surgical knife.
The moment he saw his mother's severed eyeball in that man's hand, Itachi clamped down a groan.
His brain felt like it was filled with stabbing kunai. And his eyes, he'd never felt so much pain.
It would be days later when Itachi, all alone, realized that his Sharingan had changed. It was what the old scrolls had called Mangekyo.
He had salvaged very little from the fires, but he had managed to bury his disfigured mother and father…and what the fires spared of his little brother.
He vowed vengeance that day.
He vowed he would be stronger than that pale man. He vowed he would step on that man's neck and carve his eyeballs out of his living head.
He was Uchiha. Nothing would stop him.
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Two Years Later (5 Years After the Great Unraveling)
It felt like she was flying. Yes, definitely flying. She opened her eyes, realized she wasn't dreaming, and began to struggle against whatever was keeping her arms and legs bound.
The flying stopped. The darkness around her head disappeared.
"You're awake."
Hyuuga Hinata blinked. "Yes. Where is my mother?"
"She couldn't take of you anymore. I have adopted you."
That didn't make sense to her. Her father was really strong. "Where's my father?"
"He was hurt with your mother. If they get better then you can go live with them again."
"Okay."
"Well, I'm going to put this hood back on you so you can sleep. It'll be getting light out soon."
Hinata didn't like the dark, but she didn't argue. "Thank you."
She was back in the dark, and flying again, and the story she had been told made no sense. Where were her mother and father? They were ninja. They were powerful.
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Sarutobi tried to clear his mind from all the awful news he'd gotten. Jiraiya had reported in that the entire Hyuuga had been slaughtered in Wave Country, where they'd been petitioning to form a hidden village.
The Wave Daimyo had apparently decided that his country's future lay not in ninja, but in shipping. He'd made a deal instead with the Gato Corporation. Sarutobi knew that man had a…less than shining reputation.
But the Hyuuga were slaughtered to a child. The eyes removed, the bodies charred beyond recognition.
Just like the Uchiha two years earlier in their makeshift private village in Lightning Country. All dead, all the known Sharingan possessors with their eyes cut out. Jiraiya was sure that that was Orochimaru's work
The Hyuuga…not even Jiraiya could guess at. There was too little evidence left behind. Orochimaru had left shed snake skin, like he didn't even care who knew.
He turned and began to walk through a park. Nature was good for restoring mental balance. This was a civilian park, rather than a military training ground, so it was filled with children.
He hadn't expected it, but he saw a bright shock of yellow hair near the swings.
Uzumaki Naruto.
Just another orphan tucked in among so many others.
Leading a happy life, as far as Sarutobi could tell. And he was watching. Every active duty chuunin now did a regular shift at the orphanage every few weeks. The children had competent watchers, in addition to the full time civilians, and got to be exposed to ninja every day.
It was an unorthodox recruitment method, as many little boys and a few girls declared they would become ninja, but it wasn't primarily done for that reason. The Hokage wanted Naruto – and the other children – kept safe.
The village was smaller now.
After the Great Unravelling nearly fifteen thousand civilians had left, almost a quarter of the village population. In the elapsed time, around five thousand new civilians had moved in.
It was a different place.
For the clans who'd remained in the Leaf, life was more integrated. The Aburame had mostly stayed as had the Yamanaka. All of them had integrated more into the overall Hidden Village. The few remaining Akimichi – those who had broken with the rest of their clan – didn't even bother living next to each other. (Instead, they had a favorite restaurant in town that served as a communal meeting hall.)
The Nara, predictably, found it too troublesome to leave, but had largely taken over the top positions in the ANBU division that dealt with civilian matters. Their clan techniques were quite effective in detaining any errant civilians…and without the cost of much effort.
The Inuzuka loyalty had kept them in Hidden Leaf, too. They filled many of the top spots among the Hunter-nin. Indeed, they had prospered by joining in with the community. Three Inuzuka had made small fortunes opening up public veterninary practices. The people of Konoha and Fire Country – not least the Fire Lord's wife – loved their animals.
However, for every 'clan ninja' working in Konoha, there were five or six non-clan ninja now. The head of ANBU, the top three in charge of the hospital, the jounin in charge of the academy…all non-clan.
Since they'd reformed some of the older practices of the Academy – namely 'graduating' 30 or so genin a year only to immediately fail 21 of them out of the shinobi lifestyle, claiming they were too old to rejoin the Academy – they had a lot more ninjas to go around. The Hidden Leaf finally had the strength, in pure numbers if not talent, it had before the Kyuubi's attack.
Sarutobi, over loud protest and several forced retirements, had declared that no jounin-sensei would be permitted to test and fail out a team. Instead, they would all witness a common skills test held for all potential genin. (The terrible practice of favoring clan members hadn't quite faded yet, but team compositions had shifted. There were no more 3-clan-member teams and 3-nobody teams. That much the Hokage could ensure.)
The Hokage felt embarrassed at all those years of wasted shinobi. Potential genin who'd been forced into a civilian life or to enroll in the samurai training program in Fire City. That was a lot of wastage ended…so many potentially excellent shinobi tossed out after all those years of training.
Sarutobi sat on a park bench and enjoyed the sun's warmth on his face. His head was covered with his special hat, but his eyes were fixed on the boy. He really looked like the Yondaime had when he was a boy. Over the years that boy grew and grew, like an out of control weed. Naruto was still a bit on the short side, but he made friends easily, it seemed, and enjoyed running, climbing trees, and causing chaos.
This anonymity had served Naruto well. The villagers as a whole did not pay attention to the orphanage…and none of the spies who penetrated Konoha (Sarutobi didn't kid himself to think that infiltration didn't happen once a month or more often, even if they had tightened up security) would ever think to look in the new orphanage for the village's most precious military secret, the boy who saved them all every day from the Kyuubi.
Naruto would start taking classes at the orphanage school in a few days…and would start at the Ninja Academy in two years.
The orphanage school was much improved in the last five years. The visiting chuunin often helped manage field trips outside the village walls to look at trees and plants or try to walk local wildlife. Naruto would have a chance to learn reading and writing. Math and bits of history and pride in the Fire Country. He'd be ready to attend the Academy on time.
The only thing that Sarutobi still wondered about was when Naruto should be told about his tenant. A part said just as soon as he started learning about chakra. If the Yondaime's seal worked as intended, and Jiraiya swore it would, the boy would have access to a massive store of chakra. Possibly, if he were trained correctly, an unlimited supply.
Another part cautioned him to hold off on telling the boy for a while. Until he made genin at least.
Sarutobi had already decided he would visit the boy personally – not just walk by or look at him in the park – when he began the Academy. He had had a good life so far it seemed. Sarutobi could give him a few more years of comfort. Given that Sarutobi had begun taking a more active role in the Academy the last few years, no one would think it odd for Sarutobi to visit with a few young students from time to time.
The boy wasn't yet a hero to the village – as the only people who knew of the boy's sacrifice weren't telling – but he would be someday.
Jiraiya had already stated he would be willing to train the boy in the future. Sarutobi was sure he would take to teaching the boy as well. Kami knew that the boy could become stronger then even the best jounin-sensei could handle.
Yes, that was settled. Sarutobi would take on a new student; one last student. And teach him all that he could, leadership along with the skills of a ninja. Strong in body, mind, and soul.
The new generation had the Will of Fire, Sarutobi would ensure it. One could only hope they wouldn't have to have a Heart of Stone. But…if it came to it, Uzumaki Naruto would be trained in that as well.
After all, Orochimaru was still out there with a few dozen sets of Uchiha eyes…and someone had killed and mutilated more than a hundred Hyuuga bodies. The world would be heating up in a few years, wouldn't it?
Uzumaki Naruto would need everything Jiraiya, Sarutobi, and anyone else could teach him. Everything. |
Serbian Parliament. Photo: Beta
Serbia’s parliament is holding a session on Saturday in which the only item on the agenda is changes to the Law on Ministries. According to the proposed changes, two new ministries will be formed – for environmental protection and European integration.
Their establishment was agreed after negotiations between the ruling coalition’s main partners, the Serbian Progressive Party and the Socialist Party, with the Socialists expected to take both new posts.
Environmental protection will now be separated from the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Agriculture and Environmental Protection.
The government’s Office for European Integrations will be closed and its duties taken over by a new Ministry of European Integration.
Other changes include the Ministry of Mining and Energy taking over some duties from the Ministry of Economy, while the Economy Ministry will take over regulating concessions and public-private partnerships from the Ministry of Trade, Tourism and Telecommunications.
Voting for the changes of the Law on Ministries is the first step towards the election of Brnabic as Prime Minister. Next week, parliament will start debating the new PM’s expose.
The deadline for electing a new government is Friday, June 30. Brnabic, who is supported by most of the ruling coalition, needs 126 of the 250 votes in parliament to be confirmed.
President Aleksandar Vucic on Monday said he had persuaded ruling party MPs to back his choice of Brnabic – despite clear discontent over the appointment of a non-party figure who is also a lesbian.
The President went on to have negotiations with his coalition partners, but although some of them remained defiant, Vucic’s Progressive Party said it had gathered enough support for Brnabic. |
Image copyright London Fire Brigade Image caption Birds had often been seen flying into a hole in the roof
A bird carrying a lit cigarette to its nest has been blamed for starting a fire in a building in south London.
London Fire Brigade investigators believe a bird took the smouldering butt to its nest on the roof of the building in Landor Road, Stockwell.
Matt Cullen, who examined the scene after the fire on Wednesday night, said he was "baffled" at first.
"The smoking gun was found when we discovered a partially burnt birds nest," he said.
The blaze damaged about a fifth of the building's roof and nine people were evacuated.
'Crazy' fire
Mr Cullen said: "When we got up into the roof, we were baffled as there were no obvious ignition sources.
"No-one had been up to there for a long time and there were no electrics that could have sparked a blaze.
"Neighbours told us they often saw birds flying in and out of a hole in the roof.
"We believe that one of the birds picked up a cigarette butt that was still smouldering and dropped it into the nest, causing it to catch fire and set the roof alight."
Richard Scroggs, who runs The Old Post Office Bakery in Landor Road, remarked: "It's crazy isn't it?
"Smokers. What can you say? I'm glad I gave up." |
The charge: That Palin broke state ethics rules by holding national television interviews about her run for vice president from the governor's office.
The complaint comes as Palin's personal life, her prospects as a future presidential candidate and everything she says and does continues to draw headlines.
Zane Henning, a North Slope worker from Wasilla, said he filed the complaint with the attorney general. He says Palin is promoting her future political career on state property, pointing in particular to the governor's Nov. 10 interview with Fox News Channel host Greta Van Susteren.
"The governor is using her official position and office in an attempt to repair her damaged political image on the national scene," Henning wrote.
The Palin camp, besieged by interview requests, said the governor was no longer a candidate at the time of interviews, but otherwise had little to say about the complaint.
"The consideration of complaints under the executive branch ethics act is a confidential process, by law," wrote Palin spokesman Bill McAllister. |
A BARBIE girl’s gotta do what a Barbie girl’s gotta do.
Tara Monroe has been cruising around a Texas town in a child’s Barbie Jeep ever since refusing to downgrade from four wheels to two after cops suspended her driver’s licence. And it’s surprisingly awesome.
Confused locals have been uploading hilarious snaps and videos to social media, captured when they spot the straight-faced, RayBan-wearing 20-year-old riding around in the bright pink, battery-powered kiddie car.
YOU GUYS THIS GIRL DROVE A PINK BARBIE JEEP TO SCHOOL pic.twitter.com/7vQPnd01ZP — Whatever, (@DallasRelates) September 2, 2015
Monroe, a Texas State University industrial engineering student, was automatically stripped of her licence in a DUI arrest when she refused a police breathalyser test after partying at a hip-hop gig in March, My San Antonio reports.
Her father took her vehicle and left her with a bike to get around. But that’s just not how his daughter rolls.
“Riding a bike around campus sucks. Like really sucks,” Monroe said.
So the young renegade browsed Craigslist and found the perfect and legal solution for the bargain price of AU$71: the Barbie Jeep.
“When we drove up to buy it ... (they) asked where the little one was to test drive it to which I replied, ‘I am the little one,’” she said.
Before long, Monroe was the newest — and possibly oldest — recruit of the Barbie girl way of life, and named her new vehicle ‘Charlene’ after the little girl who owned it before her.
Scooting at 8km/h, Monroe sits snug with her 160cm-tall frame and leaves onlookers in baffled fits of laughter wherever she rolls.
But Monroe said she wasn’t expecting the web to blow up over her plastic ride, saying friends “weren’t even surprised because I do stuff like this all the time.”
“This is the best way I could have gotten my 15 minutes of fame,” she said. “Basically, it was the best decision I’ve made in college, yet…”
“I’m just happy everyone thinks this is so hilarious.”
Twitter: @sopphie |
Rhino poacher killed in Kruger shoot-out
Johannesburg - A suspected rhino poacher was killed in a shoot-out at the Crocodile Bridge Ranger section of the Kruger National Park on Thursday, SA National Parks (SANParks) said.
An investigation by SANParks rangers, police and the military into the killing of a rhino cow and her calf earlier in the day led to three men, said spokesperson Reynold Thakhuli in a statement.
"A shoot-out ensued, which led to one suspect being fatally wounded and the other two [being] arrested."
Four fresh rhino horns, a hunting rifle and an axe were recovered from the men.
The total number of rhinos poached in the Kruger National Park since January this year now stands at 130.
Another SANParks spokesperson, Paul Daphne, appealed to the public to report suspected poaching.
"It is unfortunate that we could not save the rhino cow and calf in time, but we are convinced that with the increased measures we have in place, the poachers are feeling the pressure..." he said.
Thakhuli said the two alleged poachers would appear in court soon. |
By Jeff Jenkins in News | August 30, 2017 at 11:46AM
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Police have a charged a Harrison County man with battery following a much-watched road rage incident Monday afternoon in Morgantown.
File Police say William Sothen, 63, of Salem is charged with battery.
William Sothen, 63, of Salem, was the man on the motorcycle who got off the bike and took the woman who gotten out of the car beside him to the pavement.
Harrison County Sheriff Robert Matheny confirmed Sothen is a retired Harrison County deputy.
“I’ve seen the video, and it’s disturbing to me,” Matheny told the AJR News Network in Clarksburg. “If that is [Bill] Sothen in the video, those actions do not reflect the standards of the Harrison County Sheriff’s Department.”
Sothen retired shortly after Matheny took the oath-of-office in January, the Sheriff said.
The road rage began several minutes before outside of Morgantown, according to Morgantown Police Chief Ed Preston.
“It was a mutual following, pulling up beside each other, yelling at each other,” Preston said. “It was a mutual ongoing road rage incident. It lasted several miles. It started on the interstate (I-68) and ended inside the city.”
READ: CRIMINAL COMPLAINT
The video taken at the scene lasted for approximately four minutes. The woman who took it was a guest on WAJR Radio’s Morgantown AM Wednesday. She said the woman got out of her car at the Van Voorhis Road intersection and then Sothen got off his bike.
“At first they were just talking. It was a heated confrontation from the beginning,” she said. “They were just talking and then they got physical. Honestly, it was scary.”
The altercation finally ended with an off-duty WVU police officer got out of his car and broke it up, Preston said.
The woman, a 21-year-old resident of Harrison County, won’t be charged, Preston said, adding both Sothen and the woman could have avoided the situation.
“Neither one of these parties should have been involved in the altercation to begin with. Either one of them could have walked away before it became physical. I would say they’re both wrong for that aspect of it,” Preston said.
The woman who shot the video said it was never the intention for it to go viral.
“It actually saddens me because the person who leaked the video, I’ve asked them to take it down, the girl in the video has asked them to take it down and he won’t. The girl in the video doesn’t want all of this attention from it because it is a serious matter,” she said.
The witness, who is 19, said she is glad she decided to hit the record button on her phone.
“I know people around my age–we literally video everything–so I did not think it was going to turn into what it did but I’m happy I captured it all on video so it can be used and police can figure out what happened,” she said. |
1 Decide what kind of spouse you want. Would a spouse, husband or wife, who is happy to be a homemaker suit you? Do you want a sweet and caring spouse who is family-oriented, or are you looking for someone who is work-oriented? Do you want a spouse with similar interests or do you think opposites attract?
2 Remember to read the bio data two or three times before meeting your potential partner. The bio data should spark some ideas of what you can ask your possible life partner about. For example you can ask, "What do you like about your hobby?" Or, you can say, "Oh, you like cooking and traveling - so do I!".
Try searching for him/her on Facebook, or on Twitter. It will give you some details about his/her life and likes.
3 Respect his/her parents. This could depend on local traditions. For example, in Hindu families, it may be customary to touch the feet of the girl's parents. But keep in mind that respect is not about certain traditions, it is a mindset.
4 Remember that it is okay for you or the other person to be nervous. calm down and smile . Make the other person feel comfortable.
5 Ask a few simple questions. For example, you can ask the meaning of his/her name as an ice breaker.
6 Ask him/her if he/she really wants to do an arranged marriage or prefers a love marriage. Both men and women go through pressure from family to meet potential partners. Make the other person feel comfortable so that they can open up and share their preferences, if they so desire.
7 Share your life and career goals with the other person and ask them the same. You can discuss about how each of you plans to maintain work and life balance, in the case where both want to work. In case any partner reveals a preference to stay at home, you can discuss about how both can build such a relationship.
8 Ask whether the other prefers a nuclear family or a joint family. Since most Indian women are expected by tradition to move to their spouse's home, it would be ideal to share what each of you prefers - nuclear or joint.
9 Discuss religious faith if it matters in the marriage.
10 Talk about each others hobbies. What habits are a turn on and what are a turn off. For example, many people may say that smoking is a big turn off for them.
11 Keep in mind that both men and women should try to understand how each of them adapt to changing scenarios in marriage. Both partners should discuss what they expect from a spouse with regard to responsibilities towards families. At the same time, both men and women should discuss if they have any specific preferences regarding family planning.
12 Keep in mind that in many cases, men and their families are quite conservative regarding the kind of clothes women can wear. Men should take care to respect a woman's preference regarding dressing - she may be willing to sacrifice her preferences for clothing to suit your and your family's preferences; or she may not be ready to give up what she likes to wear. As in the case of any disagreeing opinions, try to find out if a middle ground can be reached.
13 Discuss how much each of you earns. Reply if it is fixed salary or profit percentage. Explain if you are not salaried. Your work could be earning you profits. A concern regarding a business family is that it is driven for profits and if it makes losses then it will pledge all its assets to make sure that family name doesn't get spoiled and salary is paid to employees first. But in all of this, do remember that your relationship with the spouse is not a business deal. Also both should be comfortable in talking about finances to each other.
14 Avoid asking a potential partner about his/her past relationships. Neither should one feel obliged to speak about the past. It should come out of each person's ease or comfort in talking about it. Do not force answers out of the other person.
15 Be clear if you expect your partner to do a few duties. For example, if you have grandparents who are old and parents had been operated twice for health issues and you wanted your partner's support to take care of them, do mention it. This applies to both men and women, as both want to do the best for their parents.
16 Don't make it a monologue. The meeting should be a conversation.
17 Don't agree to marriage after the first meeting. Make sure that you have at least two or three good meetings before delivering the final decision.
18 Know that a lot of men and women may not reveal certain things about themselves in the first meeting itself. They may take time to open up, maybe only after the second or third meeting.
19 Speak to your own family about respecting your marriage partner once the marriage is finalized. |
Overview
According to Wikipedia, WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL, which runs on a web hosting service. Features include a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by more than 18.9% of the top 10 million websites as of August 2013. WordPress is the most popular blogging system in use on the Web, at more than 60 million websites.
Are web hackers really targeting WordPress plugins?
Which WordPress plugins are the most sought after by hackers?
What types of vulnerabilities are the most coveted by hackers?
Approximately 43,000 attacks specifically targeted WordPress plugins during a single week
A total of 66 different WordPress plugins were targeted, out of which 8 received the lions share of attacks (see chart below)
The "TimThumb" plugin: http://www.binarymoon.co.uk/projects/timthumb/ received a whopping 73% of all attacks
Many PHP applications are infested with RFI vulnerabilities - see the chart below, which portrays the amount of 'RFI' vulnerability disclosures in PHP applications, that were made public
Massive scanning of vulnerable WordPress plugins is an easy task to perform. The internet offers many "off the shelf" PHP RFI scanning tools, which hackers can download and run
The benefit from exploiting RFI, for the hacker is tremendous - in most cases it means full control of the web server's infrastructure
When looking closely at the vulnerabilities that were being targeted, we noticed the following distribution by year of vulnerability publication (according to CVE and OSVDB): Hacker's fondness of remote file inclusion vulnerabilities can be explained by the high "return on investment" involved -When looking closely at the vulnerabilities that were being targeted, we noticed the following distribution by year of vulnerability publication (according to CVE and OSVDB):
The chart above raises an interesting insight on the WordPress plugins vulnerability mitigation habits of application owners. Given that hackers do not waste time on irrelevant exploits and vulnerabilities, this clearly indicates that many applications are still left unpatched, even years after the publication of the vulnerability.
Lets spend a moment dissecting the information we gleaned on the 'Timthumb' attacks that we spotted during the sample week
270 unique attackers were responsible for the attacks during the sample week
70% of the attacks originated from only 6 attackers in France
The rest of the attacks mostly originated from Italy, US, Germany, Canada and Brazil (in that order) A total of 318 different web applications were targeted during the sample week
Out of the 318 web applications that were being targeted:
39% belong to '.com' domains
23% belong to US military domains ('.mil' TLD)
6% belong to US government domains ('.gov' TLD)
1% belong to non-profit organization domains ('.org' TLD)
1% belong to educational domains ('.edu' TLD)
All other targets were country code second-level domains (e.g. .co.uk, .co.jp, etc.) The URLs used inside the RFI payload point almost entirely to hostnames that resemble legitimate known sites such as: Picasa, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube (in this order), for example, http://www.picasa.some.site or http://flickr.com.some.site
Deeper analysis of the majority of remote PHP code that is used by hackers revealed that it was written by Indonesian hackers, who breached and took over legitimate web servers across the web
The remote PHP code, which is included, was always encoded multiple times using Base64, ROT13, and Gzip compressed. This is probably done for the purpose of WAF, Anti-Virus and Anti-Malware evasion
The purpose of the remote PHP included code is to install two main types of malware:
A remote command execution PHP web page, which enables the hackers to remotely control the web server's machine, and grants them access to all files on the system
A highly evolved botnet software with many capabilities such as remote command and control through IRC, automatic propagation to other web servers using similar vulnerabilities, MySQL data dumping capabilities and so forth
Summary
As suspected, it is beyond any doubt that WordPress plugin exploitation is one of the main tools in the malicious web hackers' arsenal. Specifically, the 'Timthumb' remote file inclusion vulnerability, which was originally published back in August 2011, is still the most sought after by hackers.
We have also concluded that the root cause for the majority of WordPress plugin vulnerabilities that are being targeted by web hackers is remote file inclusion - this is probably due to the high ROI involved with these vulnerabilities. Moreover, it seems that hackers are still actively looking for vulnerabilities, which are 2-5 years old. This may indicate that application owners are very slow in deploying fixes and do not tend to upgrade WordPress plugins to the latest, more secure versions.
Based on the malicious PHP code that was 'remotely included' in the attacks, it seems that while the majority of attacks appeared to originate from European countries, the people behind these attacks were actually Indonesian hackers. In addition, the remote code was always encoded multiple times to evade pattern-based protections such as WAF, Anti-Virus or Anti-Malware, and was placed on remote machines with domain names that resemble popular legitimate sites
Last but not least - all of the attacks mentioned in this article were thwarted by Akamai's KONA security solutions.
This blog post was written by Ory Segal, Principal Product Architect and Or Katz, Principal Security Researcher As suspected, it is beyond any doubt that WordPress plugin exploitation is one of the main tools in the malicious web hackers' arsenal. Specifically, the 'Timthumb' remote file inclusion vulnerability, which was originally published back in August 2011, is still the most sought after by hackers.We have also concluded that the root cause for the majority of WordPress plugin vulnerabilities that are being targeted by web hackers is remote file inclusion - this is probably due to the high ROI involved with these vulnerabilities. Moreover, it seems that hackers are still actively looking for vulnerabilities, which are 2-5 years old. This may indicate that application owners are very slow in deploying fixes and do not tend to upgrade WordPress plugins to the latest, more secure versions.Based on the malicious PHP code that was 'remotely included' in the attacks, it seems that while the majority of attacks appeared to originate from European countries, the people behind these attacks were actually Indonesian hackers. In addition, the remote code was always encoded multiple times to evade pattern-based protections such as WAF, Anti-Virus or Anti-Malware, and was placed on remote machines with domain names that resemble popular legitimate sitesLast but not least - all of the attacks mentioned in this article were thwarted by Akamai's KONA security solutions.
The chart above raises an interesting insight on the WordPress plugins vulnerability mitigation habits of application owners. Given that hackers do not waste time on irrelevant exploits and vulnerabilities, this clearly indicates that many applications are still left unpatched, even years after the publication of the vulnerability.Lets spend a moment dissecting the information we gleaned on the 'Timthumb' attacks that we spotted during the sample week
In recent years, the security posture of WordPress plugins was a topic of much interest, mostly due to the abundance of security vulnerabilities that were found and published. A quick search of the CVE database for the terms 'WordPress' and 'plugin', returns 64 different vulnerability disclosures in 2013 alone - obviously a high number by any standard.In June 2013, Checkmarx, a source code analysis vendor released a very thorough and interesting whitepaper on the topic of WordPress Plugins Security, listing the most vulnerable plugins.While reading Checkmarx's whitepaper, and going through the long list of vulnerable WordPress plugins, we felt that a few critical questions were still left unanswered. The questions were:In order to answer the questions above, we decided to mine Akamai's security big data platform ('Cloud Security Intelligence') for WordPress plugin attack patterns. Akamai's 'Cloud Security Intelligence' is a massive scale distributed data platform, which stores billions of security events from thousands of web applications all across the globe. The platform enables Akamai's threat research team to distill quality insights on attack trends taking place on the Internet.When looking at attacks against WordPress plugins across Akamai's customer base during a one-week period, we discovered the following: When looking at the type of vulnerabilities that hackers were trying to exploit, we saw a clear preference for Remote File Inclusion vulnerabilities, which accounted for 96% of all vulnerability types. |
Can mandatory helmet laws save motorcyclists lives? That’s the question that inspired this article, but, looking at the available data, no correlation appears to exist. Crazy, right? Let’s look deeper at the data and see what fatality rates can tell us about motorcycle safety.
Motorcyle Fatalities by Riding Population
This map compares fatalities per riding population, by state. In the red states, motorcyclists run a .00075 percent chance of being killed in an on-road crash or higher. Yellow states are .0005 percent and above. Green states are .00025 percent and up. The three blue states are .00021 or below.
The most dangerous state for motorcyclists is Hawaii that saw 37 deaths during the first nine months of 2012 (the latest date range for which we have data) and has 30,000 road-legal motorcycles registered. The safest state, New Jersey, reported only 65 motorcyclist fatalities on its roads during the first nine months of 2012, despite having over 330,000 registered motorcycles.
States with Mandatory Helmet Laws
This map shows the 20 states with mandatory helmet laws for all riders. Most other states require helmets only for teenage motorcyclists, while three states have no helmet requirement of any kind — Illinois, Iowa and New Hampshire. This map does not distinguish between those states and the 27 remaining, simply because the number of under-18-year old motorcyclists is statistically irrelevant.
While the most dangerous state does not require helmets for adult riders and the safest state does, very little statistical correlation between helmet laws and fatality rates can otherwise be determined.
Percentage of Fatalities Not Wearing Helmets
Now this map shows the percentage of motorcyclist fatalities where the rider was not wearing a helmet. Red states report that helmets were not worn in 75 percent of fatal crashes. Yellow states are 50 percent and up. Green states are 11 percent and up. In blue states, that number is less than 10 percent.
Perhaps most interesting is that this map doesn’t strongly correlate either with helmet laws or overall motorcyclist fatality rates. The state in which an unhelmeted motorcyclist fatality is most likely to occur is New Mexico, which has no helmet law. In Vermont, where all motorcycle fatalities did involve a helmet, there is a helmet law. Most helmet law states fall into the lower third of states where fatal crashes were likely to involve helmet use.
In fact, this data could be said to indicate that helmet use more strongly correlates with fatal crashes than not wearing a helmet does. Take Vermont for instance, which has both a helmet law and reports 100 percent of fatal motorcycle crashes involved the use of one. Doesn’t make them sound terribly safe, does it?
Read More On Page 2 >>>
Percentage of Fatalities with 0.08% or Higher BAC
This map shows what, according to the 1981 Hurt Report, is the single most common cause of motorcycle crashes — riding one while under the influence of alcohol. In this case, .08 percent BAC or greater. In red states, 34 percent or more of fatal crashes were reported to involve intoxication. In yellow states that percentage is 20 percent or greater. Green states are between 13 and 17 percent and the one blue state, ever-safe Vermont, reports only 1 percent of fatal crashes involved intoxication.
Again, there’s little correlation between intoxicated fatalities and overall fatality rates. If anything, there’s a small correlation between states where fatal crashes are more likely to occur without a helmet and states where fatal crashes are more likely to involve alcohol, but it’s hardly one-to-one.
So what does this teach us about motorcycle safety?
Well, the lack of correlation between fatality rates and either helmet laws or even the percentage of fatal crashes involving helmets is often used by anti-helmet law advocates, seemingly to prove their point.
“Mandatory helmet laws do nothing to prevent crashes,” states the American Motorcyclist Association. “Regardless of the protective equipment worn, any motorcyclist involved in a crash is at considerable risk. Mandatory helmet laws do nothing to prevent crashes that injure or kill motorcyclists.”
The Alliance Of Bikers Aimed Toward Education (ABATE) states it, “believes that accident prevention and avoidance are more important to significantly reducing injuries and fatalities than any mandatory equipment laws. Mandatory helmet laws do nothing to prevent accidents.”
The trouble appears to be that we’re all operating on incomplete data. “They only tell you the percentage of riders killed without a helmet on,” explains RideApart COO and resident statistics nerd Nolan Zandi. “They do not tell you the percentage of riders in general who don't wear a helmet. For example, In Alabama, 15 percent of motorcycle deaths involve no helmet. However, how many riders in general don't wear helmets? If only, one percent of riders don't wear helmets and 15 percent of deaths are from that one percent who don't wear helmets, then we can say that unhelmeted riders have a disproportionately high share of motorcycle deaths. Alternatively, if 15 percent of riders in general don't wear helmets, than we can say that in Alabama, wearing a helmet doesn't seem to affect the odds of dying in a wreck. Unless, of course, there is another factor, like helmeted riders ride more dangerously and aggressively because they feel protected by their helmet, these kinds of things are what make statistics so hard. Unfortunately, this dataset doesn't include that information, making it difficult to get insight onto the effects of wearing a helmet.”
What data we do have is changes in fatality rates immediately following the repeal of mandatory helmet laws. Assuming other variables in a given state with a recently repealed helmet law remain relatively unchanged, this is the best possible indication as to the effectiveness of helmets in preventing death. For example, Michigan reported an 18 percent increase in annual motorcyclist fatalities last year, when it repealed its mandatory helmet law. The Southern Medical Journal reported that motorcycle fatality rates in Texas increased by 25 percent, per miles-travelled in the seven years following the 1997 repeal of its helmet law. In Florida, the motorcycle fatality rate increased by 21 percent following its repeal of the helmet law in 2000. All three examples include increases in fatalities large enough to rule out statistical anomaly and occur immediately following a helmet law repeal, raising the chances that other variables played little or no role.
Of course, we’re missing other, major pieces of the motorcycle safety puzzle. “What are the fatality rates controlled by different helmet types?” Asks Nolan. “How do fatalities compare among people wearing sweet, $500 full-faces compared to Harley skid lids? What about other motorcycle gear? How do fatalities for ATGATT riders compare to the "Sun’s out, guns out” crowd?
And then there’s motorcyclist behavior and attitudes. No study has ever been attempted to compare the accident rates of riders who pursue advanced training and practice safe riding compared to those who buy Hayabusas for first bikes. If you separate the skilled from the unskilled, what do fatality rates look like then?
Don’t underestimate the importance of answering these questions. One last statistic underlines the importance of gaining a greater understanding of motorcycle safety and using that knowledge to effect change. “One trend is clear from this data,” says Nolan. “And, it’s the most disturbing. Over the last 10 years, motorcyclist injuries and fatalities, controlled for number of vehicles and miles ridden, have significantly increased while the same numbers for car drivers has decreased.” Riding a motorcycle is getting more dangerous, and we need to do something about it.
Want to check out our data and see what conclusions you can draw? Here’s a spreadsheet detailing fatalities, registrations, rates, helmet use (in fatal accidents) and intoxication (in fatal accidents). I used this free map generator to make the maps. And below are our sources for this material. Help us get to the bottom of this.
Sources:
GHSA.org
Statista.com
CDC.gov
NHTSA.gov
WikiMedia.org |
Tiffany Weimer, left, and Tori Huster returned to scene of fire Monday. (Steven Goff / The Washington Post)
Around 9 p.m. Thursday, Tori Huster went downstairs to watch “Scandal.” Tiffany Weimer was in her upstairs bedroom, watching old episodes of “30 Rock” on her laptop and breaking in a new pair of soccer shoes.
In four days, they would report to Washington Spirit training camp at Maryland SoccerPlex ahead of the National Women’s Soccer League season. For a second year, Huster and Weimer were to live with the Eckerstrom family, which has hosted a half-dozen players since 2013.
On an otherwise ordinary night in Boyds, a bedroom community in Montgomery County, smoke detectors wailed on Aspen Dale Court. Huster saw the smoke. Weimer heard what she thought were doors slamming. It was, in fact, two explosions in the garage.
The players and three members of the host family, including the starting goalkeeper for Penn State’s NCAA championship team last season, scrambled for safety. Huster corralled the family’s dog and Foster, her 5-year-old Chesapeake Bay retriever. Weimer raced out in cleats.
The massive fire caused a section of the second floor to collapse onto the garage, burying a Porsche. It also scorched four cars parked in the driveway; two are unrecognizable. The heat peeled the paint off a neighbor’s house.
A firefighter suffered non-life threatening injuries. The cause is under investigation. Kurt Eckerstrom, a tech consultant who has lived with his family at the home since 2003, estimated reconstruction will take nine to 12 months.
“If the timing had been any different,” Huster said, “we could’ve lost a life. We were very lucky.”
The first day of training camp is a time to reconnect with teammates, meet newcomers and stretch stubborn muscles. For the Spirit, it was a time to begin workouts but also to console veteran players who, for the time being, will live in a hotel and attempt to rebuild personal lives.
The start of practice, Huster said, “helps take your mind off it.”
The other players were just beginning to learn details.
“We had no idea how serious it was,” Joanna Lohman said. “We were shocked.”
Said Coach Jim Gabarra: “Tiff and Tori were pretty shaken up.”
After practice Monday morning, Weimer, 32, and Huster, 26, grabbed a quick lunch at the SoccerPlex pavilion before returning to the burned-out house, which sits on a cul-de-sac beyond the northern edge of the sprawling recreational complex.
Insurance representatives and a TV crew were waiting. Kurt Eckerstrom was there in tall plastic boots, sifting through the wreckage. He and his wife, Pam, raised three daughters: Emma, who competed in track and field at Colgate; Dana, a freshman defender at the University of Mary Washington; and Britt, who anchored Penn State’s national glory last fall.
The family has followed the ups and downs of women’s pro soccer for more than a decade and, when the Spirit put out the search three years ago for volunteers to put up players on modest salaries, the Eckerstroms did not hesitate.
“They are the best of the best people,” Weimer said. “If they had to move into a trailer, we would come with them.”
Said Kurt Eckerstrom: “I would happily claim Tori and Tiff as my own daughters.”
Britt Eckerstrom, a Northwest High School graduate, was the first goalkeeper selected in the NWSL draft in January, taken by the Western New York Flash in the third round. She had planned to drive north last Wednesday for the start of practice, but housing arrangements were incomplete. So she decided to remain in Boyds for a few extra days.
Almost all of her belongings were packed inside a Volkswagen GTI parked close to the garage. It was charred to the frame. She ended up flying to Buffalo on Saturday.
Although the fire did not spread to the bedrooms occupied by the Spirit players, a fallen ceiling and water damage ruined most of their belongings.
A day later, Huster was able to recover jewelry. Weimer, an aspiring writer who penned an online guest column for The Washington Post during the 2015 Women’s World Cup, dug out seven journals chronicling her life since college. Both hope to recover photos stored on their laptops. Their cars were destroyed.
Over the weekend, the team took them to Dick’s Sporting Goods for new clothes and shoes. SoccerPlex staff raised money for gift cards.
Anthony DiCicco, son of former U.S. women’s national team coach Tony DiCicco, launched a GoFundMe campaign. By late Monday afternoon, donations had surpassed $28,000.
Asked about the generosity of the local and national soccer community, Huster failed to hold back tears. “I get chills,” the Cincinnati native said.
“I didn’t even think people liked me that much,” said Weimer, who is from Connecticut.
She added: “You don’t realize how much you can help somebody until you need to be helped. It takes special people to act.” |
Translated by Lisa Carter
Eliezer was one of the first people I met in Cuba. It was 2002, and a Princeton professor by the name of Peter Johnston—the epitome of a WASP: very white, tall, thin,
serious, with blue eyes that stared intently ahead, expressionless—had invited me to accompany a group of students to the island. Peter had been traveling to Havana for years and knew many of its writers. He took me to Antón Arrufat’s house; to Reina María Rodríguez’s rooftop; to visit a young novelist who had just won a prize for his novel El paseante cándido. “That Peter knows everyone. Word has it he’s CIA,” a friend would later confess.
“You’ve got to meet Eliezer—he’s the best bookseller in Havana,” Peter Johnston said one day.
We took a taxi to El Vedado, got out in front of the Coppelia ice cream parlor, and walked until we reached an entrance on L Street bordered by four simple pillars. We knocked, and a voice from inside shouted: “It’s open!”
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Upon entering, we found ourselves in someone’s living room: there were lace curtains, dusty and lit up by a neon sign; porcelain figurines—angels and shepherds; and, in the middle of the room, an older couple sitting in rocking chairs, watching one of those big old cabinet television sets. They must have been about sixty. She was in a bathrobe; he was wearing shorts and a muscle shirt that rose up to show his hairy belly.
“Eliezer?” Peter asked, getting straight to the point as always, wasting no time on useless pleasantries.
We must have come to the wrong place, I thought. Weren’t we coming to see a bookseller? This was an old couple’s home, and it smelled musty.
The man paid no attention to us and remained fixed on the TV, but his wife replied without looking at us: “In the back, down there, see,” pointing to a door at the far end of the room. The image onscreen was blurry, in black and white, of a news anchor.
We crossed the living room, passing between the old couple and the television, came to the door, and walked into a bedroom. There, sitting on a chair, surrounded by piles of books stacked on the floor—some of the heaps reached as high as the ceiling—was Eliezer, a very handsome young man, about thirty years old, with thin, dark eyes and classic Arab features. Must be of Lebanese descent, like so many Cubans, I thought. His gaze was intense, his smile mischievous.
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“Peter,” Eliezer said, as if he had been expecting us. “I got a first edition of Paradiso for you.”
“We already have it,” Peter replied drily.
“I also got a real gem for you,” Eliezer went on as he rummaged through one of the piles. “Wait until you see this.”
He pulled out a book seemingly at random and passed it to Peter. I was amazed the tower of books hadn’t come down with it. “Look at this gem. You won’t find another copy in Cuba, or anywhere else in the world most likely. It’s the album from Saddam Hussein’s visit to Havana in 1979. Wait until you see this picture. Look: Saddam with Fidel and Raúl. Can you imagine? Take it . . .”
Eliezer was asthmatic and would run out of breath halfway through a sentence: he paused to inhale, and the constant interruptions lent a breathy, mysterious quality to the conversation: “Look at this . . . eeegh . . . Can you imagine . . . eeegh . . . that dictator . . . eeegh . . . here in Havana?”
“How much?” Peter asked.
“For you . . . fifty dollars. I’m giving it away.”
“Fine,” Peter said. “And have you got any material on churches? I’m interested in documents about Protestant churches in Cuba—pamphlets, fliers—for the Ephemera Collection at Princeton.”
“Not right now, but I’ll get some for you. What I do have is this. Look: Los siete contra Tebas, the banned book by Antón Arrufat. An autographed copy.”
“We already have it,” Peter said.
“This is the essay that won the Casa de las Américas Prize this year. It sold out, but if you see here—”
“I’m only interested in Protestant church pamphlets.”
I listened to the conversation and the haggling while contemplating, in amazement, the piles of books all around me. There wasn’t a single bookshelf or a single cabinet in the entire room, just towers of novels, books of poetry and essays. How many? A thousand? Two thousand? A lot, in any event. And Eliezer seemed to know the inventory of these insane depths by heart: he could find a book and pull it out of a stack in a matter of seconds.
“I’ll come back tomorrow for those Protestant pamphlets,” Peter said.
“Come whenever you like . . . eeegh . . . You know I’m always here.”
We walked back through the living room, the old couple still in exactly the same place, their eyes still glued to the TV. “Revolution is construction,” a voice announced over images of workers pouring concrete.
*
Out in the street, as we walked back to the Hotel Habana Libre, Peter told me about Eliezer. He had been studying history at the University of Havana, but his studies were interrupted during the Special Period, when there was also no power at the university and no food in the student cafeterias. It was during those desperate times, when everyone had to invent some way to survive, that he began to sell books, first on a sidewalk in the El Vedado district and then in the Plaza de Armas. He did so well that, within a few months, he was able to rent a room from the old couple to receive customers somewhere a little more discreet, because at the time it was illegal to run a business.
A clandestine bookstore! I recalled how Eliezer had kept his voice low and would glance at the door as he showed us his treasures. I also remembered how, upon arriving at the airport, the customs agents had checked every one of my books and written docs on my baggage tag: they were looking for book smugglers, the way customs agents in other countries pursue drug smugglers. Books instead of drugs: one of the many peculiarities of this island, a paradise for bibliophiles.
*
The next day at the breakfast buffet, a hotel employee handed me a note from Peter. As was his custom, he had written it on Princeton letterhead:
“I forgot to tell you that, for legal reasons, it is ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN to ride in three-wheeled vehicles. They are extremely DANGEROUS and university insurance does not cover accidents that occur while in them.”
Three-wheeled vehicles? It took me a minute to understand that Peter was referring to cocotaxis, those yellow motorcycles with a Pac-Man-shaped cab, which were the most entertaining, efficient way to get around Havana: they race along the Malecón, transporting fair-haired tourists, long hair blowing in the breeze. Oh, Peter! I thought.
I left the hotel, flagged down a cocotaxi, and asked the driver to take me through the streets of Centro Habana. He was a strapping twenty-five-year-old, with muscular brown arms, sculpted in the gym of life. Like so many Cubans, he radiated sexual energy. He told me that he drove a cocotaxi three days a week and a regular taxi the other three days.
“Which do you like better? The cocotaxi or the regular?” “I prefer the regular taxi.”
“Why is that?”
“With a regular taxi, if a tourist gets in, I can take him wherever he wants to go, anywhere.”
“Anywhere?”
“I’m here to make the tourist happy. You get me?”
As he spoke, I stared at the black curls escaping from his helmet and the shapely biceps that flexed every time he turned the handlebars to change direction.
“And if I were to tell you to take me to Camagüey?” I asked. “To Camagüey? Well, that’s far . . . really far. We’d have to come to an agreement. Here, take my phone number.”
I noted his number—William was his name—as he sped us along the Paseo del Prado. In two minutes we were in front of Trocadero No. 162, one of those mythical addresses in the history of literature, like Boulevard Haussmann No. 102, or the corner of Río Guadalquivir and Reforma in Mexico City.
Trocadero: I had always imagined the street in an elegant section of Havana, like its Parisian namesake, which has a view of the Seine and is flanked by the mansions where so many of Proust’s friends lived. But the Cuban Trocadero was a dusty street in Centro Habana, full of crumbling buildings, with mountains of garbage on the sidewalk and shirtless kids sitting in doorways. It looked more like Africa than Paris.
José Lezama Lima’s home was now a small museum: three rooms that housed the writer’s furniture, paintings, photographs, and part of his library, locked away in sealed bookcases.
“May I consult the books? I’m actually writing about Lezama and Proust,” I said to an employee in a government uniform.
“Well, you can’t exactly consult them, no. You can, however, see them through the glass. The bookcases are sealed and can’t be opened.”
“Do you know if Lezama had Proust’s novel in his library?”
“Well, what we’ve got here are Lezama’s novels and the books he read, but not all of them. Some of them are at the National Library.”
So poor, this Lezama Museum! Especially in comparison to museums like the Louvre and the Metropolitan, those transnational storehouses of first-world culture, with their luxury buildings, with armies of employees and million-dollar budgets. And yet this little and lonely museum—with its three employees in khaki uniforms and cats prowling the courtyard—seemed somehow more authentic. You could feel Lezama’s spirit here.
The employees watched with curiosity as I studied the titles sealed away in the bookcases. No Proust. When I was done, the girl who sold tickets—in the same khaki uniform—asked:
“Where are you from?”
*
After leaving the Lezama Museum, I spent hours wandering through Centro Habana, dodging piles of rubble, motorcycles, and taxis. “Oyeee, oyeee” could be heard everywhere, and—as always happens whenever I walk through this neighborhood—I felt immeasurably happy to be surrounded by blacks and mulatas, old women sitting on stoops, and jineteros hustling boys, girls, cigars, pirated music, and almost everything else.
I walked back to the hotel, all along the Malecón, passing by Maceo Park and the Hotel Nacional de Cuba. By the time I got to La Rampa, I had decided to pay another visit to Eliezer and went through the ritual I had learned from Peter: I knocked on the door, said hello to the old couple, walked through the living room, past the television, until I reached the door at the end. Eliezer walked up to me with a bright white smile and held out a hand as he said: “Look what I’ve got for you. First edition of Virgilio Piñera’s short stories, published in Buenos Aires. It’s the only copy anywhere in Havana. And not only that: look at this dedication. ‘To my friend Gombrowicz, with admiration from your Cuban disciple. Buenos Aires, May 1954.’ It’s dangerous for me to have a treasure like this here: someone might steal it. You take it.”
The price—two hundred dollars—was more than I had left for the rest of my trip, but Eliezer didn’t give up. He opened two folding chairs that were propped in a corner; we sat down, and he continued to propose treasures.
“Look here,” he said. “It’s a book of poetry by a lost Origenista. Have you read María Zambrano? You can’t get anything of hers in Cuba, but I’ve got a novel that came out in Mexico. And look at this: the speech Carpentier gave at the Pioneers’ first youth congress in ’63. Can you imagine? Not even the Fundación Alejo Carpentier has a copy. A friend brought it to me, an old guy who knew Carpentier, went to the event with him, and kept one of the handouts. The great Neo-Baroque novelist speaking to a bunch of twelve-year-olds. Do you think they understood a word he said?”
Eliezer’s little room was a library of Babel that seemed to contain the entire canon of Cuban literature. You only had to mention an author from the island—Julián del Casal, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Lydia Cabrera—and, as if by magic, he would pull out a copy that also had a whole story around it: a first edition, signed by the author, a bookplate from a famous collection, a banned work, an avant-garde journal published in a far-off province . . . Among the thousands of tomes, there were a few treasures: books by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Reinaldo Arenas, Severo Sarduy, and other exiled writers.
“I don’t show this to anyone,” he would say as he surreptitiously pulled a book out from under a chair or behind a curtain. “Look at this treasure: Pájaros de la playa, Sarduy’s posthumous novel about his illness. Did you know he died of AIDS? A friend brought me this from Spain. I don’t know how he got it through customs. If they’d caught him, they’d have arrested him. Can you imagine? It’s the story of an island full of terminal patients, young men aged by disease . . . the bomb. This book, it’s a criticism of the UMAP camps and what the government did to gay men in the eighties: lock them up. If they ever find me with this, they’ll lock me up, too.”
Apart from being Babelic, Eliezer’s bookstore was also mono-thematic: every single book about Cuba was there, but nothing else. There wasn’t a single foreign author, unless it was a Hemingway or a Humboldt who had written about the island. Carlos Fuentes? From the look on Eliezer’s face, I suspected he had never even heard of him. Borges? “No, never had a book by Borges here . . .” Vargas Llosa? “A year ago someone brought me a copy of Conversación en la catedral, but, being a banned book, it didn’t last long. I sold it for a mint. Have you ever seen Fresa y chocolate? In the sixties, we Cubans could recite the first page of Conversación by heart: it was a form of protest.”
We were chatting like this when I heard a door close behind me. Eliezer stood up.
“Well, look at that. I didn’t think I’d ever see you here again,” he said to the visitor.
As I turned to see who had come in, I came face-to-face with a six-foot-five blond, with a gymnast’s body and a pair of impres- sive biceps, who looked like he had just stepped off the page of Vogue Italia or International Male. Bronzed skin, long hair, blue eyes, and muscles everywhere. Was he Swedish? Norwegian? Danish? A Nordic athlete? A Scandinavian bodybuilder?
Apart from being Babelic, Eliezer’s bookstore was also mono-thematic: every single book about Cuba was there, but nothing else.
“You speak Spanish?” I asked.
“Sí,” the Viking replied. “Michael,” he said, offering his hand. “And where are you from, Michael?”
“I’m from Granma.”
Granma?
In the region of Oriente, over five hundred miles away, is the beach where Fidel Castro disembarked before heading into the Sierra Maestra mountain range: he arrived on board a yacht called Granma, which he had bought from an American in Mexico, and after the Revolution, the province was named after it, as were the official newspaper and many other things in Cuba. The American had chosen that name in honor of his grandma. And so the yacht—which is on display at the Museum of the Revolution— the newspaper, the province, and even this Viking continue, to this day, to honor that little old lady who, unbeknownst to her, became the grandmother of the Cuban Revolution. How many great things had been given to this island by that anonymous grandma? “From Granma? But you look Swedish. Is your family Scandinavian?” I asked, expecting a story about Communist parents who had come to Cuba to support the Revolution.
“Huh? Swedish? No. I’m from Granma. My family is from Granma.”
Maykel—I later learned that’s how his name was spelled—had a hick accent and when he spoke he filled the room with fresh country air.
“From Granma, but I moved here for work.” “What do you do?”
“I’m a baker,” Maykel said.
Maykel was wearing a tight sleeveless white T-shirt that delineated every muscle in his back. The very spectacle of that body—freckled shoulders, triceps, long arms—made me dizzy.
Eliezer had observed our interaction in silence, his smile dripping with irony. How did he know Maykel? This baker did not look like a bookworm.
“Tell me about Granma,” I said. “What’s life like there?”
“Well . . . I live in the country there. It’s not like here in Havana. It’s different.”
Maykel told me that he had left Granma because of a girlfriend; she was so jealous that one day she found him talking with the neighbor and went crazy. She went into the kitchen for a knife and threatened him, screamed that she would kill them both, but then, no, she would kill herself, and Maykel had to tackle her to get the knife and stop her from slitting her wrists. She made such a scene that the police came and nearly arrested all three of them. The girlfriend was a lost cause, so he decided to move to Havana.
“I didn’t do anything wrong. I was chatting with the neighbor. But my girlfriend doesn’t understand. Muchacho, the problem is that there in Granma, everyone stares at me. It’s not my fault; it’s just the way it is. I go out, and people stare, and the girl loses it. That’s why I came to Havana.”
“And people here don’t stare at you?” I asked.
“Well, yeah. They stare here, too. But at least no one’s monitoring my every move.”
“What do you mean, people stare?” I insisted.
“Just that. If we were to go out now, you’d see: people stare at me.”
“Let’s go see what that’s like. A guajiro peasant from Granma walking around El Vedado, and people staring at him,” Eliezer said with the same enthusiasm as when he talked about books. “A baker from Granma strutting down La Rampa. We have to see that.” Maykel smiled in amusement at Eliezer’s words.
The three of us left the room—the old couple was still glued to their TV—and headed out into the street. Night was falling and the sky had clouded over with birds heading to roost in the trees of El Vedado. Just before we reached La Rampa, as we walked past the Cine Yara, Maykel said: “Walk behind me so you can see how people stare.”
Eliezer and I let Maykel walk a few steps ahead. He moved as if he were a runway model, strutting through the crowds: cute couples on their way to the movies, office workers waiting for the bus, students on their way to Coppelia for ice cream. Maykel wiggled hips and shoulders, but—despite his handsome, muscular physique—there was something awkward about the way he moved. He was much sexier when he stood still and said nothing. When he walked, he looked like a robot, a bad actor bumbling across the stage. Maykel paraded to the corner, then stopped and turned around.
“Did you see how people stared?” he asked with pride.
But in fact—poor Maykel!—no one had even looked at him. The streets were teeming with sexy, athletic, seductive bodies; amid all that beauty, Maykel had passed unnoticed.
*
The following day—my last before returning to New York—I went back to visit Eliezer.
“I got you another book by Severo Sarduy,” he said upon seeing me. “Look: erotic sonnets that hide pornographic scenes. Do you know how it begins? ‘Omítemela más.’ Can you imagine? Omission becomes a synonym of penetration. Take it . . . you’d be doing me a favor. Can you imagine if the police found this here?”
“And Maykel?” I asked.
“The baker from Granma is probably out jineteando, chasing after foreigners,” he said with his impish smile. “That’s what the entire province lives off: jineterismo, hustling.”
I told him it was my last night in Havana and said, “Let me take you out for dinner. Peter recommended a family-run paladar nearby.”
Eliezer grew serious and replied, “I don’t go to restaurants with foreigners.”
“What, do you think I’m going to rape you? We’re going to dinner, not to a brothel.”
“I’ve never been to a restaurant. On principle.”
“Principle? I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I’m inviting you because I like you, I like talking to you. We’d continue the conversation over a glass of wine and a plate of croquetas. The paladar’s nearby, up on a rooftop filled with shaded plants. We’ll sit outside, and you can tell me more about Maykel and your books.”
“I never eat at night,” Eliezer said, his expression unchanged. “And I’m not going to a restaurant.”
There was no way to convince him.
I gave him a hug and said good-bye. That night, as I ate alone at the Hotel Habana Libre restaurant—an enormous room with a socialist vibe, full of pasty tourists and waiters dressed in black bow ties—I thought of Eliezer a few blocks away, eating all alone in his little book-filled room, as the old couple sat, still glued to their television.
__________________________________
Excerpted from the essay “Sodom’s Bookstore,” from CUBA ON THE VERGE: 12 Writers on Continuity and Change in Havana and Across the Country, edited by Leila Guerriero. Copyright © 2017. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. |
The actual number of jobs outsourced offshore will continue to creep up, but especially in the United States, the new wave of outsourcing and relocating jobs is happening at home.
Leading the reverse trend are the kinds of jobs that are considered core to the business, requiring higher skills and training than what is typically available offshore. Some high-level jobs that were originally sent offshore brought poor results—those jobs are coming back first.
A decade ago, when consultants such as Boston Consulting Group insisted that not outsourcing offshore was tantamount to missing out on a major strategic benefit, many kinds of jobs were moved offshore. As the American economy tightened, offshoring became a rush, to generate what was thought to be immediate cost-benefits.
But now, many companies are reversing earlier offshore outsourcing decisions, for skilled jobs as well as regular manufacturing work. U.S. businesses are recognizing that cheap, exploited foreign labor is only a short-term expedient. The recent lead-based paints and tainted-milk scares in China, and similar problems in other countries, brought this recognition: If other countries had to comply with the same environmental laws and safety regulations, the costs would substantially increase.
Meantime, Chinese labor costs are rising about 15 percent to 20 percent a year. That makes producing goods in China not nearly as cheap as it used to be. For many manufacturers, that narrowing is enough to tip the balance back to U.S. plants. This led them to question whether some work could be outsourced closer to home where inflation is low and the economic climate is more predictable. There are domestic outsourcing alternatives that are both financially sound and good for American workers.
And BCG too is reversing earlier advice: When currency fluctuations and rising wages in emerging markets are factored in, the United States is becoming a lot more attractive. Beyond just high-tech jobs, many American businesses are bringing jobs home again. Here are some examples:
1. NCR has hired about 500 workers to build ATM machines and self-service checkout systems at a Columbus, GA. plant, and it plans to add another 370 jobs by 2014, building products that were formerly produced at plants in China, Hungary and Brazil.
2. Greater quality was the major factor cited by Carbonite for moving back jobs to the United States. Its call center in India was having turnover of 100 percent or more each year, compared with just single-digits in the Boston call-center. The U.S. base provides much better service and customer satisfaction.
3. GE has reopened a Louisville plant that had been closed for decades, based on the fact that it’s no longer as expensive to hire U.S. workers.
The industrial automation business has examples of the reverse trend—offshore companies with local offices and skilled staff offering services to American customers. India-based control systems integrators are offering software development, systems integration and local service support at hourly-rates that most U.S.-based SIs cannot compete with. Some successful systems integrators and service companies that have plenty of work in the hopper are considering outsourcing to these “local” services to reduce costs, supplement their own staff and improve competitiveness. As this trend develops, the emergence of some multi-national hybrid businesses is inevitable.
As the cost gaps narrow in the coming years, this “re-shoring” trend is likely to grow. In American job markets where hiring has been stalled, offshoring repatriation is an encouraging sign.
Jim Pinto is an industry analyst and commentator, writer, technology futurist and angel investor. You can e-mail him at: [email protected]. Or review his prognostications and predictions on his Web site: www.JimPinto.com. |
Universal Studios Japan is formally opening its new Attack on Titan attraction on Friday. “ Attack on Titan The Real” is part of the Universal Cool Japan event (along with Evangelion , Resident Evil and Monster Hunter ) which will run between January 23 and May 10. Musician and well-known Evangelion fan HYDE was among the celebrities who attended Thursday’s opening ceremony. The Mainichi Shinbun paper’s MaiDiGi filmed the opening:
The “ Attack on Titan The Real” collaboration recreates the world of Hajime Isayama ‘s Attack on Titan manga and anime. The attraction features a full-size, 15-meter (about 49-foot) Eren Titan — the first of its kind in the world, according to the theme park — as well as a 14-meter (46-foot) female Titan. Visitor can witness the Titans locked in fierce combat from the perspective of SurveyCorps members.
The attraction also lets you experience the traumatic scene with Eren’s mother in the first episode. For its reenactment of the operation to capture the female Titan, the attraction uses Clone-oid, “the world’s most advanced technique to recreate humans.”
Universal Studios Japan is serving “Survey Corps’ expeditionary rations” with bacon, a potato, black tea-flavored bread, and soup (for leaders) or just a potato, bread, and soup (general issue for regular soldiers). Also available are company black tea and colossal Titan mousse, complete with a blade.
Universal Studios is selling Survey Corps cloaks, 3D Maneuver Gear bracelets, and cellar key pendants and more.
Comic Natalie posted more photographs from the Attack on Titan , Evangelion , Resident Evil and Monster Hunter attractions. Niconico streamed the opening ceremony, and the Minna no Evangelion Fan site sampled some of the live footage from Evangelion 4D attraction. Kotaku attended the press preview and sampled the dishes.
Source: Comic Natalie
Featured image: Twitter @ichigohime727
More from Anime News Network |
Long before the exodus from Syria to Europe reached its current peak, an untold number of mostly young male asylum-seekers embarked on the journey as a kind of advance party. One of them was Hussein Ahmad.
Even before that, the route into Europe had already been well used by many, including Iraqis fleeing the carnage of their own civil war. Then, with few welcoming places left in the Mideast, Syrians started to take the route to find European refuge, hoping their families could later follow.
Back then, before the entire world got a glimpse, it was an even longer and riskier journey.
Still, Ahmad was desperate. Home was Raqqa, the seat of power for ISIS. The group had imprisoned him twice for not being observant enough.
The third time they came to his house, he fled out the back door, and the next day was using a way out that would later be successfully used by his wife, Amal, and his two small children — and tens of thousands of other Syrians — to get to Germany.
Last Friday, after a year and a half apart, the family tearfully reunited on Platform 25 of Munich's central train station.
"I'm very, very happy my family reached me, thank God," he said, beaming. "I thank the German government."
A handful of other men stood watching. With no sight of their own loved ones they walked away, clearly disappointed. At least two of them said they too had arrived months ago, using the same route.
Chance of a lifetime
Fathers, sons and husbands who made the journey many months ago are waiting in places like Germany and Sweden for families to follow. It's yet another major pull for many Syrians now making their way to, and across, Europe.
Encouraged by news of the happy reunions and warm welcome in Germany in the past week, many more have left Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon and beyond, to make the same journey. In my calls to colleagues in Baghdad and Beirut, there are suggestions the flow is about to surge.
For those who have yearned for a better life in Europe, this is the chance of a lifetime.
But the window for a happy conclusion to the story for those now en route may be closing.
The Ahmads are lucky. Their reunion predated word that Germany was starting to strain under the influx it had invited, and they just missed by days the decision to temporarily impose controls at the border with Austria and to send 2,100 riot police to secure it.
Their reunion also comes before tough new Hungarian laws come into effect this week, aimed at stemming the stream of asylum seekers walking across its border, and likely scuttling the plans of thousands trying to get to Germany.
What happens to the refugees currently making their way across Europe when the flow is interrupted, as it inevitably will be, is unclear.
Thousands could soon be stranded
Today, EU member states will be discussing a proposal to more evenly spread the already arrived refugees among them. The idea for a mandatory refugee quota, presented at the European Parliament last week, suggests members resettle 160,000 between them.
Besides the criticism that the number falls far short of what's necessary, working against this proposal will also be the significant differences of opinion among EU members.
Most governments in Europe's East, as well as the U.K., balk at the idea of anyone telling them how many refugees to take in, if any at all. So do many of those countries' citizens, some of whom have erupted in protest to make their anti-refugee views known.
All this means, at some point soon, there will be many more refugees languishing in Europe than apparently anyone is willing or able to cope with.
The first major foreseeable bottleneck will be Hungary's inhospitable border with Serbia. Thousands could become stuck there as winter approaches — kept out by Hungary's new laws, a new fence, and also, if its parliament approves, the deployment of the Hungarian army.
With rail services also more or less shut down now from Budapest to Munich, new routes will surely be sought out, which will affect more countries, and could be more dangerous. Smugglers who were sidelined when Germany and Austria threw open their borders could thrive again.
That carries its own dangers, as we saw with the suffocation of more than 70 refugees in the back of a truck discovered in Austria.
Thousands will likely find themselves stranded in or near countries that do not want them.
Who will then care for the refugees several borders short of their destination and their loved ones?
Read more about the refugee crisis: |
Oklahoma City Thunder guard Russell Westbrook (0) shoots in front of Indiana Pacers forward Solomon Hill (44) during the first quarter of an NBA basketball game in Oklahoma City, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2015. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki) (Photo: Sue Ogrocki, AP)
OKLAHOMA CITY – Even when expecting an offensive flurry and the torrent of noise cascading down from the cheap seats inside Chesapeake Energy Arena, the anticipation isn't enough to actually endure the blows.
In the quiet time before Tuesday night's game, the Indiana Pacers had prepared for everything that makes the Oklahoma City Thunder one of the most feared home teams in the NBA.
But then, Russell Westbrook shrieked and scored. The Thunder splashed 3s. The sold-out arena went unhinged and the Pacers, for the first time in more than a month, digested a blowout defeat, 105-92.
BOX SCORE: Thunder 105, Pacers 92
Indiana never held the lead and by the fourth quarter had fallen into a 23-point deficit even before coach Frank Vogel emptied the bench of his DNP crew to finish the game.
"I don't remember the last time," C.J. Miles said, referring to the team being on the wrong end of a big loss. Miles would have had to think all the way back to the Jan. 21 game in Atlanta to recall that bad memory.
Through February, the Pacers had won seven of eight games and pulled within half a game of the last spot of the playoffs. However, the trip to Oklahoma City stalled this run as the Pacers (23-34) couldn't withstand a devastating 24-5 run that stretched from the third quarter to the opening minutes of the fourth.
This wave all started after Miles knocked down a 3-pointer that pulled the Pacers to within 65-64 with 4:32 remaining in the third quarter. Then, Westbrook responded by either scoring or facilitating the Thunder through the rough patch and solidifying his triple-double (20 points, 11 rebounds, 10 assists) with more than 2 minutes still left in the third.
"We did mention some of the guys could get red hot," Ian Mahinmi said. "We did mention the Russell Westbrook pick-and-roll game, and some of the stuff we could control, we didn't go a great job."
The depth of the Thunder, now 9-1 through February, has carried the team through a season of injuries. Both teams have felt their share of pain, but while Indiana's have subsided – every injured player but Paul George has returned to the lineup – Oklahoma City remains in recovery mode. Kevin Durant, the reigning MVP, missed his third straight game and recently needed surgery to reduce pain in his surgically repaired right foot. Then, before Durant even arrived in the arena on Tuesday night, wearing a walking boot, the team announced that newly acquired Steve Novak had undergone an appendectomy. Thunder players have now missed 152 total games this year.
"A lot of punches thrown at us this year," Oklahoma City coach Scott Brooks said. "But we're still standing."
The Thunder stand because Westbrook's sheer energy and will command them to. In the first quarter, after he attacked the rim, Westbrook had already entered gonzo mode, flexing and yelling at the crowd as he strutted back to his sideline.
"He's the motor of that team and just what he means to that team speaks for itself," said George Hill, who had to spend time tracking Westbrook. "I think he's one of the top players in this league, for sure."
By the fourth quarter, Westbrook turned into the craziest cheerleader in the house. Since no Thunder starter played a single minute in the final frame – their work for the night was over after opening an 80-69 lead at the end of the third – Westbrook could celebrate the round of 3-pointers the Thunder bench drilled in three consecutive possessions. From that knockout punch, the Thunder led by 20 points and the Pacers would soon turn their attention to Friday night.
"We have to play better to beat a really good team in their building," Vogel said. "Even without KD, they're a really good team. We didn't play well enough and we have to regroup and go after Cleveland."
Call Star reporter Candace Buckner at (317) 444-6121. Follow her on Twitter: @CandaceDBuckner. |
ST. LOUIS, Mo. — A former lesbian turned Christian is coming out about her conversion from living as a homosexual, and is testifying about the power of God to change a life.
Jackie Hill Perry, 25, is a spoken word poet, and is expecting her first child, a girl, next month along with her husband, poet Preston Perry.
“I think we’ve made God very little if we believe that He cannot change people,” Perry declared on Wade-O Radio last year. “If He can make a moon, stars and a galaxy that we have yet to fully comprehend, how can He not simply change my desires?”
Perry has become increasingly outspoken about her testimony, as she was once in romantic relationships with other women. The poet says that she was sexually abused at age five, and as a result, developed gender confusion throughout her youth, not knowing if she wanted to identify as a man or a woman. However, she hid her urges as her family attended a church that had biblical beliefs about morality.
In her late teen years, Perry began experimenting with homosexuality, and became sexually active with a girl. She continued in this lifestyle, moving on to a second girlfriend, who encouraged her to dress more masculine. Perry also frequenting “gay” clubs and attending homosexual pride events.
But in 2008, at age 19, she became convicted about her behavior, and she knew that she was heading down the wrong path. Perry said that God spoke to her one day as she lay in bed, the day after she had engaged in sexual activity with her girlfriend.
“The girl who you’re with will be the death of you,” she recalled Him saying. “At that time, my eyes were opened to that it wasn’t just homosexuality that would be the death of me. It was my complete and entire lifestyle. It’s not just, ‘You’re gay. You’re [also] lustful, you’re prideful, you’re a thief, you’re rebellious, you’re a masturbator and you’re a porn addict.’ I saw all of these things that deserved Hell and I really believed and saw that God would be just in sending me there.”
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“The Scriptures came alive to me,” Perry told the Christian Examiner. “They said for the wages of sin is death, and I perceived it as real. But [Scripture] also said those who repent and believe will inherit eternal life. And I thought, ‘Ok God, I trust you. I believe You.'”
She knew she had to walk away from her girlfriend and stop giving into whatever her flesh wanted. Perry then sat down and penned a poem called “My Life as a Stud.”
“Instead of me dying to myself, I was willing to die for myself,” she wrote. “There was no fairy whispering in my ear/Only me and the devil telling me what I wanted to hear.”
“The more my will to sin would grow, I could see it in my face …. I could see Him stretched out on the wood…/Being the disgrace for the sin I was committing in His face,” Perry continued. “Seeing Him take on the wrath of the Father on the wood in my place/I still spat in His face.”
Perry has performed the song at numerous outlets nationwide, and has sometimes faced resistance for her stance. Her video performance of the poem, first performed live in 2010, now has over 400,00 views.
“No, my friend, you were not born gay,” she declares. “You were born into sin and shaped in iniquity/When Eve ate that fruit, we were cursed to do anything/ We were open for murder, we were destined to lose/We were given free will/You chose to choose/You chose to defy God’s rules ’cause inside of you, you wanted to be like Him and make them.”
Perry has since gone on to sign with Humble Beast Records, where she released her debut album “The Art of Joy” this month, which is also available for free online. Earlier this year, she married fellow poet Preston Perry. But she said that marriage isn’t the panacea—Christ is.
“That’s so not true,” Perry said. “What’s true is that when you’ve been united with Christ by faith, when you know Him and have been made righteous in His sight, that is your goal. Working from that, it’s going to be to live a life that is pleasing to Him whether through marriage or singleness.”
Warning: Explicit Content |
Behind the Scenes at Colt: Making the Nation's Favorite Rifle
Iain Harrison -
In a few minutes, these will be M16 lowers
This past week saw a gaggle of gunwriters traipse through the hallowed halls of Colt's plant in Hartford, Conn. I managed to sneak in at the end of the line and thought you guys might like to take a look at what goes into making the nation's favorite rifle.
There's been big changes over the past few years in the rifle division for Colt. Nowadays they're not just supplying one customer with one product (Uncle Sam, the M4), they're supplying many different customers with up to 40 different rifles in the lineup. This wasn't an internal business decision, it was kind of forced, as the company lost out on the Army M4 contract when it was awarded to the Freedom Group earlier this year. In many ways, the loss was a good thing for Colt and it's line of rifles for the civilian market--their line now boast products the market actually wants. Ain't capitalism grand?
Since 2009, Colt has dropped some serious money into modernizing the plant, with new machinery and processes. It was intriguing to see machine tools made in the 1930's still hard at work, standing next to a state-of-the-art CNC machines. One thing that was truly impressive though, was the attention to quality that went into each gun. Yes, they're far from being custom one-offs, but the gauges, comparators and controls that are in place mean that you can pull a rifle out of the rack and it will perform identically to any other in the line.
Each carbine, whether it's made for the military or civilian market is made to exactly the same standards. We got to see some of the critical dimensions that make up a Military Specification, then compare them at random to parts that were coming off the machines. Suffice to say, the Colt parts exceeded the specification by a wide margin. Having built a fair number of ARs, I always figured that parts were parts, no matter where they came from. I might have to change that opinion.
Take a look inside the plant with me, I'm sure you'll see a few things that'll trip your trigger.
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Toronto Coun. Michael Thompson says he and other passengers subdued and restrained a belligerent man on a flight home from Jamaica earlier this week to calm what they felt had become "a dangerous situation."
Thompson and his mother were on their way back to Toronto from the Caribbean on Monday after a Mother's Day trip together when, about an hour into their Air Canada flight, a man became "rather loud and boisterous" in a conversation with flight attendants, the councillor said.
Air crew members were trying to calm the man, but "he was not very pleasant in his language," Thompson said.
After the man began wielding a coffee pot as if to strike people and then threatened to "take down the plane," Thompson and other passengers asked the flight crew if it was time to do something about the passenger.
When they got the all-clear from the captain, Thompson said he, flight attendants and a few other passengers restrained the man with plastic ties and belted him into a seat until the pilot made an emergency landing at the airport in Orlando.
"At the end of the day it really came down to what we the individuals who were involved and obviously the flight crew felt was a dangerous situation," Thompson told CBC Toronto on Wednesday.
He and other passengers began to fear for their own safety, he said.
"And so part of it was self-preservation."
Man removed from flight by FBI
The man, identified as Brandon Michael Courneyea, was removed from the plane by the FBI on a charge of assault or intimidation of a flight crew member and interfering with their job duties. The allegations against the man have not been proven in court.
A spokesperson for Global Affairs Canada would not speak to the details of Courneyea's case, but confirmed that consular officials are in contact with U.S. authorities about a Canadian citizen that had been detained.
His wife, Amanda Courneyea, told The Canadian Press that her husband had gone on a solo vacation without her and their five children to fulfill a life-long dream. But she had booked him on an earlier flight home because he told her that local residents had threatened his life.
"That is not my husband at all," she told CP in a telephone interview. "There's a lot more to what brought that on, because my husband is the kindest, most loving man you'll ever meet. And anybody that knows him will tell you the same thing."
'We did the right thing'
According to Thompson, the man moved to a seat near him after the flight attendants' first attempts to calm him down. The man sat behind another man and started calling him names and "using colourful language."
Thompson volunteered to sit with the man and try to keep him calm as flight attendants began their beverage service. After a time, the man said he had to stretch his legs, but then began ordering Thompson to get away from him.
Thompson said he wouldn't leave. That's when the man grabbed a silver coffee container in one hand and then said he was "going to take this plane down."
"I was just trying to talk to him in a very calm voice, but he didn't respond to that and kept saying he was going to take the plane down and he was going to open the door," Thompson said. "And I said, 'no you're not.'"
By this point some passengers were crying, he said. That's when Thompson approached the head of the flight crew and asked about the procedure for subduing a passenger.
When the flight attendant said the captain gave the okay, she got some plastic ties and Thompson and a handful of fellow passengers got the man into a seat and restrained him.
No punches were thrown, but "it took some time," Thompson said.
Asked if he would do the same thing again, Thompson said he hopes he never has to.
"It was surreal then, and to a large extent just thinking back about it now, I think all of us … we did the right thing," Thompson said. "I certainly felt my safety was in jeopardy, I felt the safety of the plane was actually in jeopardy." |
Though its winds had weakened as it moved north, Hurricane Matthew delivered record-breaking rainfall to parts of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. In many coastal areas, the storm dumped well over 12 inches (30 centimeters) of water.
On October 9, 2016, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image of floodwaters laden with sediment pouring out from several rivers in North Carolina and South Carolina. Colored dissolved organic matter may have contributed to the dark color of the river water as it spilled into the Atlantic Ocean.
The rain combined with intense storm surges left many communities swamped and reeling. At least 10 people died in North Carolina; several of them were swept away in cars while attempting to drive. Authorities have rescued thousands of other people from homes and cars. More than 1,500 people were stranded in Lumberton, North Carolina, according to news reports.
NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz and Adam Voiland, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response. Caption by Adam Voiland. |
Sarah Palin and her family were reportedly involved in a mass brawl at a snowmobile party which had to be broken up by police.
Alaska's gossip blogs lit up with accounts of the Saturday night fight, claiming that the former governor's son and daughter both threw punches while Mrs Palin herself shouted: "Don't you know who I am?" as the scene descended into chaos.
Police confirmed that "some of the Palin family members" were at the party, where a "physical altercation [was] taking place between multiple subjects". A spokesman added: "Alcohol was believed to have been a factor in the incident."
According to Amanda Coyne , an Alaskan political blogger, the incident took place at a party celebrating the Iron Dog snowmobile race, a contest won several times by Mrs Palin's husband Todd.
Mrs Palin's 25-year-old son Track apparently emerged from a Stretch Hummer limousine and got caught up in a fight, soon joined by his younger sister, Bristol. The blogger suggested that the other participant in the fight was a man who had previously dated another sister, Willow Palin.
Track Palin stumbles out of a stretch Hummer, and immediately spots an ex-boyfriend of Willow’s. Track isn’t happy with this guy, the story goes. There’s words, and more. The owner of the house gets involved, and he probably wished he hadn’t. At this point, he’s up against nearly the whole Palin tribe: Palin women screaming. Palin men thumping their chests. Word is that Bristol has a particularly strong right hook, which she employed repeatedly, and it’s something to hear when Sarah screams, “Don’t you know who I am!” And it was particularly wonderful when someone in the crowd screamed back, “This isn’t some damned Hillbilly reality show!”
Sarah Palin [centre] surrounded by her family members. Back row: son Track and husband Todd, second row: daughter Willow [left] and Bristol [right] and daughter Piper [front]
Anchorage Police would not confirm whether the former governor was at the scene, saying that "no arrests were made" and the incident was being looked by detectives and prosecutors.
It wasn't the only drama to befall the Palins in recent days. On Sunday, the day after the fight, a man was arrested for allegedly stalking Bristol Palin.
Miss Palin, now 23, first came to international attention during the 2008 election when it emerged she was pregnant at 17. She was twice engaged to the baby's father, Levi Johnston, but the pair split up without marrying.
Mr Johnston later wrote a book titled "Deer in Headlights: My Life in Sarah Palin's Crosshairs".
Police said that Miss Palin returned to her home on Sunday to find Peter PW Ferrero, a 25-year-old man from Florida waiting in her driveway. He had allegedly bombarded her with hundreds of Facebook message has been charged with felony.
Ferrero claimed he had climbed up to a third-floor balcony at the house and tried to open a door there, according to a police report.
Sarah Palin’s office did not respond to requests for comment. |
Animation studio TMS Entertainment began streaming the fifth short in Dededen , its new original anime with Seibu Railways, on Sunday. The anime celebrates both the 50th anniversary of TMS Entertainment and the 100th anniversary of Seibu Railways. TMS Entertainment happens to be located near the Araiyakushimae Station on the Seibu Shinjuku Line.
The studio streamed the first episode in March, the second episode in June, the third episode in August, and the fourth episode in October.
The anime follows the daily life of the main lead Amoru Tokorozawa and the railway. TMS plans to make five episodes, each 75 seconds long. The anime is running on the trains' onboard SmileVision screens, as well as on the Smile StationVision screens around major stations from February 23 to December 31.
Hiro Kaburaki is directing the anime with Norihiro Naganuma, his assistant director on Kimi ni Todoke - From Me to You, My Little Monster, and Hozuki's Coolheadedness. Kayoko Ishikawa (Aikatsu design works) designed the characters, and S.E.N.S. (Kimi ni Todoke - From Me to You, xxxHOLiC, Ore Monogatari!!) scored the music. |
For some, the irony is almost too much to bear. While Congress is eager to fund a $2 billion expedition to search for oceans beneath Europa, some 95% of Earth's oceans are unexplored. Given the role of oceans in regulating climate, and their untapped potential for food and health, is it time to rethink our priorities?
This debate has been going on for half a century. Even John Steinbeck wrote an impassioned plea in 1966 to create a NASA for the oceans:
While the lifeless rubbled surface of the inconstant moon becomes increasingly littered with the burnt-out bones of vehicles, the bathyscaphe has visited the deep and unknown places of the earth only a few times. There is never much argument about appropriations for space shots, but a recent request for money to explore, map, and evaluate the hidden places of our mother earth brought howls of protest from Congressional leaders and the inevitable question—is it really necessary? We must explore our world and then we must farm it and harvest its plant life…..And we must mine the minerals, refine the chemicals to our use. Surely the rewards are beyond anything we can now conceive, and will be increasingly needed in an over-populated and depleting world. There is something for everyone in the sea—incredible beauty for the artist, the excitement and danger of exploration for the brave and restless, an open door for the ingenuity and inventiveness of the clever, a new world for the bored, food for the hungry, and incalculable material wealth for the acquisitive—and all of these in addition to the pure clean wonder of increasing knowledge.
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Steinbeck's arguments are still heard among oceanographers and self-described "ocean nerds" today. "As a scientist, I want to explore the great wonders our ocean has to offer," writes Conservation International's Greg Stone. "As a conservationist, I need to explore the vital human-ocean connection: how the ocean can provide for people and how our impacts affect the health of our oceans."
Likewise, Michael Conathan at the Center for American Progress argues:
In a time of shrinking budgets and increased scrutiny on the return for our investments, we should be taking a long, hard look at how we are prioritizing our exploration dollars. If the goal of government spending is to spur growth in the private sector, entrepreneurs are far more likely to find inspiration down in the depths of the ocean than up in the heavens. The ocean already provides us with about half the oxygen we breathe, our single largest source of protein, a wealth of mineral resources....
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But even in a time of shrinking budgets, the priorities remain unchanged: NASA's exploration budget dominates the ocean exploration budget of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) by roughly 150-to-1.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
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We are awed by the beauty and diversity of marine life, including exotic creatures that look more alien than anything we've seen in science fiction. We recognize the impact that environmental degradation of the oceans has on tourism and fishing industries. We express outrage over whale hunting. And with every passing week, we hear more dire news about the ocean's longterm health: massive "dead zones," accumulating plastic debris, the growing threats to coral reefs.
So, why does ocean exploration hold less appeal than the exploration of space?Conathan argues that part of this incongruity comes from access:
No matter where we live, we can go outside on a clear night, look up into the sky, and wonder about what's out there. We're presented with a spectacular vista of stars, planets, meteorites, and even the occasional comet or aurora. We have all been wishing on stars since we were children. Only the lucky few can gaze out at the ocean from their doorstep, and even those who do cannot see all that lies beneath the waves.
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And those exotic, deep-sea creatures? They often don't survive the trip to the surface. Decompression is usually fatal. Our ability to understand these animals remains limited, and we remain disconnected from deep ocean life.
And then, there's the harsh reality described by Ryan Carlyle, a subsea hydraulics engineer — ocean exploration can be excruciatingly boring:
The vast majority of the seafloor once you get >50 miles offshore is barren, featureless mud. On face, this is pretty similar to the empty expanses of outer space, but in space you can see all the way through the nothing, letting you identify targets for probes or telescopes. The goals of space exploration are visible from the Earth, so we can dream and imagine reaching into the heavens. But in the deep oceans, visibility is less than 100 feet and travel speed is measured in single-digit knots….Sure, there are beautiful and interesting features like geothermal vents and coral reefs. But throughout most of the ocean these are few and far between. We stare up at the stars and dream of reaching them, but few people look off the side of a boat and wish they could go down there.
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Or, put another way, here is a typical view from an undersea probe:
And, here's a view from a rover on Mars:
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Let's face it. When we see images from other planets, even the most mundane terrain captivates us, because we getting close-up glimpses of worlds where humanity has yet to visit. What's always been true about exploration remains true today: Nothing intrigues us like the blank spots on a map.
The Case Against Space
One of the most ardent proponents of shifting our exploration priorities is Amitai Etzioni, the director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University. In his 1964 book The Moondoggle, he said there was less to be gained in deep space than in near space — the sphere in which communication, navigations, weather, and reconnaissance satellites orbit — and argued for more investment in studying our own planet instead of the Moon.
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Fifty years later, his views haven't changed; if anything he feels vindicated. In the most recent issue of the journal, Issues In Science and Technology, he updates his 1964 argument, saying that we need to choose the "fruitful frontier" over the "final frontier."
The entire article is worth reading in full, but here are some highlights of his case for bringing our exploration budget down to Earth:
Climate
NASA does make helpful contributions to climate science by way of its monitoring programs…. However, there seem to be no viable solutions to climate change that involve space. By contrast, it is already clear that the oceans offer a plethora of viable solutions to the Earth's most pressing troubles. For example, scientists have already demonstrated that the oceans serve as a "carbon sink." The oceans have absorbed almost one-third of anthropogenic CO2 emitted since the advent of the industrial revolution and have the potential to continue absorbing a large share of the CO2 released into the atmosphere. Researchers are exploring a variety of chemical, biological, and physical geoengineering projects to increase the ocean's capacity to absorb carbon. Additional federal funds should be allotted to determine the feasibility and safety of these projects and then to develop and implement any that are found acceptable.
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Food
Although aquaculture is rapidly expanding—more than 60% from 2000 to 2008—and represented more than 40% of global fisheries production in 2006, a number of challenges require attention if aquaculture is to significantly improve worldwide supplies of food. First, scientists have yet to understand the impact of climate change on aquaculture and fishing. Ocean acidification is likely to damage entire ecosystems, and rising temperatures cause marine organisms to migrate away from their original territory or die off entirely. It is important to study the ways that these processes will likely play out and how their effects might be mitigated. On the issue of food, NASA is atypically mum. It does not claim it will feed the world with whatever it finds or plans to grow on Mars, Jupiter, or any other place light years away. The oceans are likely to be of great help.
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Health
While NASA has claimed that its space exploration "benefit[ted] pharmaceutical drug development"….Ocean research, as modest as it is, has already yielded several medical "spinoffs." The discovery of one species of Japanese black sponge, which produces a substance that successfully blocks division of tumorous cells, led researchers to develop a late-stage breast cancer drug. An expedition near the Bahamas led to the discovery of a bacterium that produces substances that are in the process of being synthesized as antibiotics and anticancer compounds. In addition to the aforementioned cancer fighting compounds, chemicals that combat neuropathic pain, treat asthma and inflammation, and reduce skin irritation have been isolated from marine organisms….[Yet] up to two-thirds of all marine life remains unidentified.
To Boldly Go
Furthermore, for years scientists have been fascinated by noises originating at the bottom of the ocean, known creatively as "the Bloop" and "Julia," among others. And the world's largest known "waterfall" can be found entirely underwater between Greenland and Iceland, where cold, dense Arctic water from the Greenland Sea drops more than 11,500 feet before reaching the seafloor of the Denmark Strait. Much remains poorly understood about these phenomena, their relevance to the surrounding ecosystem, and the ways in which climate change will affect their continued existence. In short, there is much that humans have yet to understand about the depths of the oceans, further research into which could yield important insights about Earth's geological history and the evolution of humans and society. Addressing these questions surpasses the importance of another Mars rover or a space observatory designed to answer highly specific questions of importance mainly to a few dedicated astrophysicists, planetary scientists, and select colleagues.
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Etzioni argues that NASA's projects, especially those dedicated to exploring deep space and to manned missions, can readily be cut, with billions moved from distant planets to nearby oceans. Echoing that letter written by John Steinbeck nearly 50 years ago, Etzioni concludes, "The United States needs an agency that can spearhead a major drive to explore the oceans—an agency that has yet to be envisioned and created." |
Atlas Obscura on Slate is a blog about the world’s hidden wonders. Like us on Facebook and Tumblr, or follow us on Twitter.
Stretching over an arm of Lake Triftsee (itself a product of the Trift glacier), hidden among the high Swiss Alps, the Trift Bridge is a thin modern suspension bridge that looks like it could blow over with one stray wind, but is in fact quite safe.
Originally built in 2004, the bridge was replaced in 2009. The first bridge was constructed to allow workers from the Trift hydroelectric plant to access a power plant that was built below the glacier to collect and use the run off. A few short years after the original bridge was built, the second, sturdier model was hung across the wide ravine and the site was opened to the public.
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Currently the bridge spans a vertigo-inducing 560-foot gap in the mountains, suspended over 300 feet from the valley floor. Unlike some of its more primitive inspirations, the Trift bridge is made of thick steel cables over which wooden planks have been bolted. Despite the modern construction it still looks like a death trap.
While the bridge itself is an impressive site to visit, the journey there is harrowing in and of itself. You'll need to take a cable car, which also rises high above the ground. |
The Black Knight is the lead jouster at Quahog's Ye Olde Renaissance Faire. He is romantically linked to Maid Madeline, who also works at the Fair. He also drives a Yellow Hyundai. He was voiced by Will Ferrell.
This Knight appears in "Mr. Saturday Knight". In it Peter Griffin, recently and suddenly unemployed, decides to fulfill his childhood dream of becoming a knight. He gets a job as a jouster at the Ye Olde Renaissance Fair. When the Black Knight catches Peter and his wench in a seemingly-provocative situation, he tells Peter he never wants to see him there ever again, causing Peter to quit his job as a jouster. Later, when he saw Peter watching the jousting competition he insulted him by calling him a fizzle, which provoked Peter to joust against him. While charging at each other, Tom Tucker announced that the owner of the Yellow Hyundai had their car being towed, causing The Black Knight to lose focus long enough for Peter to knock him off his horse. It turns out Mort Goldman did it out of revenge.
Years earlier, while apparently experiencing an acid trip as a teenager, Peter found himself at the top of a fake castle at the Renaissance Fair. After proclaiming that he could fly, Peter jumped off the castle, thankfully being rescued by the Black Knight. From that night, Peter aspired to be a knight. Peter tried to tell him about that day, but the Black Knight was too busy shaving.
Although different in character design, Peter builds a moat in "Death Has a Shadow" to keep the Black Knight at bay. |
RECENT YEARS HAVE seen the last nails knocked into the coffin of Romanian football. It seems that Gheorghe Hagi’s famous words that Romanian football was a ticking time bomb, waiting to implode on itself, have come true.
Let’s go back in time a bit, more precisely to 1998. The Romanian national football team was still one of the top sides in the world at that time, boasting talents the like of Hagi, Popescu, Ilie and Petrescu. The team had qualified for the 1998 World Cup in France by the time the Tricolorii had one last warm-up match before the finals, against Paraguay in Bucharest.
The game took place at Steaua Bucharest’s ground, the Ghencea Stadium, on 3 June. Romania lost, with high-tension following the game as local fans admonished many of the players after some decisive errors. Gheorghe Hagi, Romania’s finest talent, broke down after the game at the press conference, unable to carry the burden of the national team any longer. He famously said:
“For ten years we’ve hidden [through our performances] the dire conditions we have here in Romania. We have nothing, no football. Where are the performances produced by the clubs in Romania? We deserve for you to make us statues for what we [the national team] have done considering the conditions in Romania. The results are singing with us. Romanian [club] football is gone. Gone. Zero. In two or three years, zero.”
Eighteen years after Hagi’s infamous words, the nation is finally realising how accurate he was. Since then, Romania’s national team have not qualified for another World Cup, with the wait showing no signs of ending. This season, no Romanian football club reached the group stages of any European competition, and the only thing that keeps the in any kind of existence is the TV rights deal.
So how did Romanian football end up here? What has changed since the days when Ilie Dumitrescu scored twice against Argentina in 1994, since the Balkan nation beat England at two consecutive tournaments, in 1998 and 2000, and since Steaua and Rapid Bucharest played against each other in the quarter-final of the UEFA Cup in 2006? It’s a question many Romanian fans are asking of themselves.
The issues can broadly be split into three main categories: corrupt club owners, financial irregularities, and a lack of long-term planning.
[divider]Corrupt owners[/divider]
The titles of books written by present and former football club owners in Romania during time behind bars is both the most ironic and tragic list: The Competition, An Investor’s Guide to Football, Management of Football Clubs, Structures and Organizations, Sportsman’s Personality – A Prerequisite for Success in Sport, and Football For Future Professionals.
From the prisons of Jilava and Poarta Albă have come of the most condescending titles in Romanian football literature; advice by men that flouted the rules, broke down the Romanian game, and ended up behind bars.
“Gheorghe Hagi is the only one that invests white money in Romanian football.” These blunt words recently came from Ioan Becali, a former football agent who is now behind bars after being found guilty of tax evasion. His theory suggests that the domestic game is rife with corruption and mismanagement, something he contributed to himself.
At the beginning of the 2000s, the biggest Romanian clubs reached deep into the pockets of notoriously unpopular figures at the time – they were in dire financial straits in most cases – individuals who were very rich but whose interests didn’t include the well-being of the national game.
Skeptical fans at the time suggested that these individuals were looking to benefit from increased popularity by donating money in the short-term and failing to looking consider what Romanian football really needed to grow and prosper again.
Some of these individuals simply wanted fame, and to benefit from their club’s stature in the country to grow their other businesses. Some of them simply wanted to make profit; but none of them wanted to own a successful and healthy football club, one that could grow both financially and pick up silverware.
The case in-point is of Unirea Urziceni. The small club, founded in 1954, won the league in 2009 for the first time and went straight into the Champions League, where they enjoyed a number of impressive, dogged performances. After the money for participation in the competition – largely TV rights revenue – arrived, the team’s owner, Dumitru Bucşaru, withdrew financial support as he had made a sharp profit.
Unirea were, as a result, forced to sell most of their top players to cover debts, leading to relegation at the end of the next season. The following summer saw Bucşaru fail to file for a licence for the club to play in Liga I; he decided against any league participation at all for the fallen giants. Unirea Urziceni were subsequently dissolved and, in the space of three years, the club went from a proud 55-year history and European participation to folding and a mass exodus of talent from the domestic league.
A similar story befell Oțelul Galați, who won the league in 2011. They subsequently played in the Champions League but were relegated after the club’s owner took all of the revenue from UEFA and left with his pockets lined.
Read | Gheorghe Hagi: the master of fantasy
Despite many of these club owners spending time behind bars as a result of their blatant corruption, many serve short sentences and are then free to continue their businesses. Some have even attempted to return to Romanian football.
The issue of corruption is rife in Romanian’s top-flight, a league well-known for the number of matches that were fixed in the 1990s and early 2000s. The corruption that occurred in the domestic was not a wholly surprising story to the fans, but most were shocked at how well it was hidden in plain sight.
The people who led the top-flight formed a type of Cosa Nostra, called Cooperativa. What’s even more bizarre is that nicknames, such as ‘Corleone’, for Dumitru Dragomir, former president of the Professional League of Football, ‘The Lord’, for Jean Padureanu, owner of FC Gloria Bistrița, and ‘The Godfather’, for Mircea Sandu, President of the Romanian Football Federation, were out in plain sight but were never investigated. If ever there was a need to delve deep into the financial and sport irregularities, this was surely it.
Meanwhile, during this period, clubs endured some of the darkest days for Romanian teams in the European competition. With the national league being considered by many as one of the weakest in Europe, owners took the decision to deny their teams participation at all, failing to renew licences and driving fans away.
In 2003, one of the aforementioned owners at the time, Dumitru Sechelariu, admitted on a TV show that he was strongly involved in fixed matches and also that there was an association of a couple of club owners who did the same, proposing them to stop this practice. Though this was a turning point in the eradication of match fixing, the damage was already done.
While some owners are football people with a genuine will to improve the domestic game, sadly many have closed academies, withdrawn financial support, sold off the best talent on the cheap to the first bidder, and instigated an era of corruption and financial irregularity. How can a league function and grow – and more importantly recover – if those in power are the most corrupt?
[divider]Financial mismanagement[/divider]
The most pertinent financial analysis in football is undertaken by Deloitte. They split the revenues of a club in three main categories: matchday, broadcasting rights, and commercial sources. If you were to apply these criteria to Romanian football in the 1990s and 2000s, you’d find some of the most poorly managed clubs in Europe.
The TV broadcasting plan was worth pittance, the merchandise available for sale was minimal to non-existent, and the stadiums were often empty. With such an unhealthy business model, how did clubs survive during these barren years? The answer is simple: owners treated their clubs like a toy. Each time their team needed money, they pumped funds in the club’s accounts. When they stopped doing this, however, or could no longer afford to, large cracks appeared.
This is how historic clubs with large fan bases, such as Rapid Bucharest, were relegated. It is how a club such as FC Vaslui disappeared a few years after playing in the Champions League. It’s also how a club like CFR Cluj, who beat Manchester United at Old Trafford in 2012, can now be suspended by the Romanian Football Federation for not being able to pay its debts after owner Pászkány Árpád left. It’s how clubs such as Dinamo Bucharest, Universitatea Cluj and Oțelul Galați became insolvent. It was the only thing they could do to survive.
For Romanian football fans, it’s harrowing to have witnessed the fall from grace from the 1980s and mid-1990s to now. With decrepit, empty stadiums and a lack of talent on show, it’s almost impossible to attract younger fans as the best talent continues to leave the country at the earliest opportunity. The problems are compounded further by club’s having to use the money generated from player sales to simply survive. Signing players for significant sums is almost unheard of in Romania now.
In the summer of 2015, with the exception of Steaua Bucharest, only one other club could afford to pay to sign a player. The rest of the clubs signed only free agents.
Some comfort came in 2014 with a new broadcasting deal that was introduced based on revenue, allowing clubs to guarantee their survival provided they manage their finances carefully.
With the exception of heavyweights Steaua – whose annual budget is around €15 million – the other teams depend on the money from TV rights, which cover up to 70 percent of their total budget. League officials and representatives of the clubs estimate that the presence of the TV deal is so important that if the money ceased, only five teams would be able to survive.
Read | How Gigi Becali failed Steaua Bucharest
The plot thickens with the knowledge that most of the teams that could survive are funded by local politicians and town halls, and used as an electoral tool.
It’s hard to see how clubs can survive without a real shake-up of the current governance system and owners whose interest is in the long-term state of the Romanian game. Football is today a game directed by money; where you put that money is all-important.
[divider]A lack of long-term thinking[/divider]
It’s easy to turn on the TV, to zap through the sports channels, or to check Romanian football newspapers and websites to realise that the domestic game is drowning at the moment.
The greatest challenge for Romanian football is to paint a brighter future. With owners using clubs for short-term gains, the long-term picture is almost impossible to paint. What will the state of Romanian football look like in 20 years? Pessimists will say very much the same; optimists will point to a change on the horizon.
Disregarding a few development centres belonging to the Football Federation, Romania does not have even host an academy league anymore. So many talented children that reach 18 are lost in the mire of Romanian football, being forced to seek a contract abroad or to hang up their boots for good.
As only a few managers rely and trust young players in Romania – with a culture of needing results immediately ensuring that few youngsters are given a chance – most of the kids have no other option than to leave. Others, more fortunate youngsters, are recruited by the big teams, but become second choice options to foreigners often of questionable value and skill.
Sadly, the people who should have helped our clubs progress are in jail for stealing money instead of serving the game. Steaua Bucharest, the most important club in Romania, closed its academy because owner Gigi Becali could not see the value in long-term planning, preferring to sign players who were ready to play immediately. Smaller clubs from the top-flight also prefer to sign out-of-contract foreign players instead of promoting young, local lads.
The positive comes from the fact that a couple of independent academies have opened up in Romania in recent years, but they’re simply scratching the surface of the talent that exists across the country. The hard truth is that Romanian players’ best chances are at clubs in Western Europe, who are more likely to pursue with young players.
This is why hundreds of under-16 Romanian players are taken on trial at clubs in England, Spain and Italy each year, with agents descending on the country in the hope of finding the jewels that the domestic game continues to ignore. The great risk with this for the national team is that these players will end up moving abroad, knowing all about the troubles of their native Romania, and playing for their adopted nations instead. The small crumbs of comfort that Romania can still produce good players will be lost as their best talents fail to return.
Gheorghe Hagi’s words cross my mind once again. Perhaps us football fans in Romania believed that the current problems were simply cyclic, that we once had Nicolae Dobrin and Ilie Balaci, spent some time in the wilderness, before the great teams of Hagi and Popescu came along and restored pride. The problem is, the issues run far deeper today than they ever had before.
Watch a Liga 1 match and you’ll realise that Romanian football has few, if any, standout players. Romania, a country that used to be a beacon of football in the region, no longer produces top players. Even more tragically, the memories of Steaua in 1986 seem like a fairytale, a dream we all conceived to hide the blemishes of the game today.
It’s probably too simplistic to say that Romania is suffering today because of the likes of Mircea Sandu, Dumitru Dragomir, the Becali family and others. The reality is, however, that the issues are all linked, from long-term planning to financial mismanagement and the dissolution of academies. Change will only come when measures are implemented to attempt to change the Romanian game in 20 years, not two.
After the transition from the romantic era of football in the 1970s and ‘80s to the modern era, the gap between Romanian football and the rest has become almost impossible to bridge. Romania is being left behind like an old wagon in an abandoned train station. As Gheorghe Hagi said: “Romanian [club] football is gone. Gone. Zero.”
Let’s hope he was wrong after all.
By Avram Alexandru. Follow @alexxx_avr |
When Tina Fey wrote Mean Girls, she drew more inspiration from her own past to craft Queen Bee Regina George than you might have guessed. But now Fey realizes that it's never grool to be cruel
Fey told Net-a-Porter's magazine The Edit that she was mean in high school as the way of dealing with her own insecurity.
"I was [the Mean Girl], I admit it openly. That was a disease that had to be conquered," Fey said. "It’s another coping mechanism – it’s a bad coping mechanism – but when you feel less than (in high school, everyone feels less than everyone else for different reasons), in your mind it’s a way of leveling the playing field. Though of course it’s not."
Fey says she still feels tense around teenage mean girls — some things never change.
But she managed to move past that and ended up with some killer female friendships. While she and Amy Poehler were filming Sisters over the summer, they reunited their old SNL crew and had pool parties with Rachel Dratch, Maya Rudolph and all their kids. Watch out for new comedy dynasties.
Fey reminisced about meeting Poehler, and yes, everyone has always loved her, "I remember counseling so many guys who were just immediately in love with her. It was a phase that every Chicago improviser had to go through – ‘I’m secretly in love with Amy.’"
Fey also offers the secret to immortality: “Steer clear of the internet and you’ll live forever." |
#166 hala-madrid-guti
31.Jul.2010 | 21:11 este tio es un suplente de puyol y pique, y a exo bien por irse
#168 rycopan25
31.Jul.2010 | 22:05 llego al barça sin hacer ruido y ha jugado 5 años a todo tren, grandisimo defensa con muy pocos errores y un poderio defensivo de mucho nivel! ojala te vaya bien haya donde vayas, gracias por todo marquez!!! GRANDE CULE !!
#169 art5116
31.Jul.2010 | 23:00 El moderador parece que le escuece que diga que a Gago en el partido del Bernabeu contra el Barça debió haber sido expulsado varias veces y se fue de rositas. Y le escuece que le recuerde que quizás el árbitro no lo hizo por culpa de la campaña mediática, y nunca mejor dicho, porque mediatizó a los árbitros contra el Barça de manera escandalosa toda la segunda mitad del campeonato, y aun así se ganó la liga con 3 puntos de ventaja. ¿Quizás el moderador se siente parte de esa campaña de desestabilización contra el Barça y que presionó y condicionó tanto a los trencillas como para no expulsar a un jugador como Gago que hizo más méritos que los leñeros holandeses de la final del mundial?
#171 jugarfe
01.Ago.2010 | 08:59 desde el # 1 al 169 como se ve el plumero ahora resulta que marquez es beckenbauer
#172 nomquesaptothom
01.Ago.2010 | 11:06 #171 desde el # 1 al 169 como se ve el plumero ahora resulta que marquez es beckenbauer Marquez ha tenido un rendimiento y comportamiento exquisito en estos 7 años que ha pasado en el Barça, se ha ganado el apoyo y respeto de toda la afición culé. La celebracion de la liga ya olía a despedida. Suerte en el futuro y Barcelona siempre sera tu casa!!
#176 m.kaulitz
01.Ago.2010 | 17:21 Grande Marquez, creo que ha llegado a un acuerdo con el NY Red Bull donde esta Henry. Suerte Forza Xerez
#177 flecher
01.Ago.2010 | 20:15 deseo q marquez le vaya de maravilla,se ha comportado comoun autentico profesional y ha sido correcto siempreen todo ,hasta en su despedida ,un caballero ,gracias por defender la camiseta del mejor equipo de la historia
#178 alsansa
01.Ago.2010 | 21:52 Si, ha sido buen jugador, no era Beckenbauer, pero dió algo de nivel a la defensa y al centro del campo azulgrana. La cuestión ahora es... ¿cuánto le cuesta este "despido" al Barcelona? Recordemos que él estaba dispuesto a seguir, pero Guardiola ha dicho que no sigue, supongo que por dos años se llevará una buena pasta. #169 El moderador parece que le escuece que diga que a Gago en el partido del Bernabeu contra el Barça debió haber sido expulsado varias veces y se fue de rositas. Y le escuece que le recuerde que quizás el árbitro no lo hizo por culpa de la campaña mediática, y nunca mejor dicho, porque mediatizó a los árbitros contra el Barça de manera escandalosa toda la segunda mitad del campeonato, y aun así se ganó la liga con 3 puntos de ventaja. ¿Quizás el moderador se siente parte de esa campaña de desestabilización contra el Barça y que presionó y condicionó tanto a los trencillas como para no expulsar a un jugador como Gago que hizo más méritos que los leñeros holandeses de la final del mundial? ¿Qué narices pinta aquí Gago, me lo explicas?
#179 onekenobi
02.Ago.2010 | 09:32 #178 Si, ha sido buen jugador, no era Beckenbauer, pero dió algo de nivel a la defensa y al centro del campo azulgrana. La cuestión ahora es... ¿cuánto le cuesta este "despido" al Barcelona? Recordemos que él estaba dispuesto a seguir, pero Guardiola ha dicho que no sigue, supongo que por dos años se llevará una buena pasta. # 169 ¿Qué narices pinta aquí Gago, me lo explicas? No cobran traspaso y rescinden el contrato de mutuo acuerdo. O sea que al Barça no le cuesta nada, pero tampoco saca beneficio. |
‘Few could sustain the glance of his eye, at once fiery and penetrating’
Savaged by critics for its supposed profanity and obscenity, and bought in large numbers by readers eager to see whether it lived up to its lurid reputation, The Monk became a succès de scandale when it was published in 1796 – not least because its author was a member of parliament and only twenty years old. It recounts the diabolical decline of Ambrosio, a Capuchin superior, who succumbs first to temptations offered by a young girl who has entered his monastery disguised as a boy, and continues his descent with increasingly depraved acts of sorcery, murder, incest and torture. Combining sensationalism with acute psychological insight, this masterpiece of Gothic fiction is a powerful exploration of how violent and erotic impulses can break through the barriers of social and moral restraint.
This edition is based on the first edition of 1796, which appeared before Lewis’s revisions to avoid charges of blasphemy. In his introduction, Christopher MacLachlan discusses the novel’s place within the Gothic genre, and its themes of sexual desire and the abuse of power. |
UK Foreign Secretary: Georgia is a successful model in the region Friday, April 1, 2016 1:19:00 PM
On the 30th of March, 2016, the British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond arrived on an official visit to Georgia. According to the Georgian Foreign Ministry, at the beginning of the visit, the Head of the British Foreign Office honored the memory of those who died for the territorial integrity of the country. Then he held meetings with the Prime Minister, the Speaker of Parliament and the Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs of Georgia, as reported by Ekho Kavkaza.
"We attach special importance to your visit in Georgia and regard it as strong support for our country," the Georgian Prime Minister, Giorgi Kvirikashvili, said after the meeting. He expressed confidence that this visit will give new impetus to the cooperation and further expansion of the relations between the two countries. Special attention was paid to the necessity of further development of the economic cooperation and the importance of British investments in Georgia.
Philip Hammond, for his part, noted that the UK considers Georgia as a significant international partner and regarded as an example of a successful country in the region. He confirmed that his country would continue to support the sovereignty, the European and the Euro-Atlantic integration of Georgia. Hammond stressed that Georgia is an independent state and must have the ability of sovereign choice, without the influence of outside forces.
Together with the Georgian Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister of Great Britain visited Rustavi and inspected the construction project of expanding the South Caucasus gas pipeline, which provides gas ti the company British Petroleum. Philip Hammond also spoke at the Forum of Young Politicians of the South Caucasus, organized by the Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy, according to the portal Georgia Online.
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MasterCard has published its roadmap for getting Americans to use chip-and-PIN cards in stores, following Visa's lead in proposing to replace swipe cards by April 2013.
Over the next year, Americans will have to get used to entering a PIN when using a credit card, rather than scrawling a name (any name) as they do today. That's because MasterCard has joined Visa in pushing an April 2013 date on the implementation of chip-and-PIN terminals in US retailers.
Shops will be encouraged to install chip-and-PIN kit with a combination of carrot and stick. MasterCard promises "true financial benefits for merchants as they implement EMV-compatible terminals", while NFC World reminds us that Visa is already threatening that "liability for counterfeit fraud may shift to the merchant's acquirer" if EMV isn't supported.
EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard & Visa, and is the standard to which chip cards conform. When presented to a reader, the EMV chip takes part in a cryptographic exchange which makes the cards prohibitively expensive to forge. EMV chips – contact or contactless – are infinitely more secure than the basic RFID payment systems which got Forbes magazine into such a tizzy last week.
But while the cards are much harder to forge, the PINs are harder to keep secret as they're used in every shop visited.
The worst combination results from cash-point machines (ATMs) which haven't been upgraded to use the EMV chip, so are still dependent on the easily-copied magnetic stripe. Once such a machine has been located (just fry your own chip and then try to use different ATMs until you hit one that works), the fraudster can install a skimmer in any store, collecting the magnetic-stripe data, and then watch the customers entering their PINs.
The solution is to upgrade all the cash points, but that takes time and money. Despite those issues, the introduction of chip-and-PIN has reduced fraud in Europe massively. The vast majority of fraud is now conducted over the internet through retailers who are prepared to deliver to somewhere other than the card-holder's address.
So American retailers have 13 months to upgrade their terminals, and as just about every new EMV terminal now supports contactless (NFC) payments as well, it means every retailer will be able to start accepting Google Wallet payments too, just in time for the iPhone 5... ® |
Russia’s ambassador to South Korea said Moscow would take action if Seoul deploys THAAD. File Photo by Pat Benic/UPI | License Photo
Feb. 3 (UPI) -- Russia's ambassador to South Korea warned Moscow would take measures if Seoul chooses to go ahead and deploy the U.S. missile defense system THAAD, according to a South Korean newspaper.
The joint U.S.-South Korea decision to deploy THAAD was reached in July 2016.
Russia has not been as vocal as China in its opposition to the missile defense system, which Beijing claims is being used for monitoring purposes.
But on Friday, Ambassador Alexander Timonin told South Korean reporters if the system is placed in position, Russia has no choice but to take steps to ensure its security, Maeil Business reported.
"A THAAD deployment may have a dangerous impact on the situation on the peninsula...We regard it as part of the U.S. global missile defense program, which is stationed along the Russian borders and therefore poses a threat to our security," Timonin said.
China is suspected of boycotting South Korean companies and banning performances of K-Pop artists in response to the decision.
The statement from the top diplomat in Seoul came on the same day U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis agreed with South Korean leaders that THAAD deployment is to take place as planned.
According to local newspaper Munhwa Ilbo, Mattis said North Korea provocations have made it necessary to deploy missile defense.
Mattis also said the United States would work with allies for peace, stability and freedom in the Asia-Pacific.
In Beijing, during a regular press briefing on Friday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said China's position on THAAD has not changed.
"The U.S.-South Korea pursuit of THAAD deployment can undermine China's national strategy and prosperity, and also undermines regional strategic balance," the spokesman said, according to Yonhap. "It does not help solve the problems on the Korean peninsula."
Lu also described THAAD deployment as the "wrong path."
China has taken 43 retaliatory measures against South Korea entities since the decision was reached, according to Seoul's Korea Institute for National Unification.
A total of 23 of those cases were culture-related, 15 involved South Korean businesses and five targeted Seoul's diplomatic corps, politicians and military. |
They were known as the “book women.” They would saddle up, usually at dawn, to pick their way along snowy hillsides and through muddy creeks with a simple goal: to deliver reading material to Kentucky’s isolated mountain communities.
The Pack Horse Library initiative was part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), created to help lift America out of the Great Depression, during which, by 1933, unemployment had risen to 40 percent in Appalachia. Roving horseback libraries weren’t entirely new to Kentucky, but this initiative was an opportunity to boost both employment and literacy at the same time.
A pack horse librarian at an isolated mountain house, carrying books in saddle bags and hickory baskets, year unknown. University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center.
The WPA paid the salaries of the book carriers—almost all the employees were women, making the initiative unusual among WPA programs—but very little else. Counties had to have their own base libraries from which the mounted librarians would travel. Local schools helped cover those costs, and the reading materials—books, magazines, and newspapers—were all donated. In December 1940, a notice in the Mountain Eagle newspaper noted that the Letcher County library “needs donations of books and magazines regardless of how old or worn they may be.”
Old magazines and newspapers were cut and pasted into scrapbooks with particular themes—recipes, for example, or crafts. One such scrapbook, which still is held today at the FDR Presidential Library & Museum in Hyde Park, New York, contains recipes pasted into a notebook with the following introduction: “Cook books are popular. Anything to do with canning or preserving is welcomed.” Books were repaired in the libraries and, as historian Donald C. Boyd notes, old Christmas cards were circulated to use as bookmarks and prevent damage from dog-eared pages.
Pack horse librarians start down Greasy Creek to remote homes, date unknown. University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center.
The book women rode 100 to 120 miles a week, on their own horses or mules, along designated routes, regardless of the weather. If the destination was too remote even for horses, they dismounted and went on foot. In most cases, they were recruited locally—according to Boyd, “a familiar face to otherwise distrustful mountain folk.”
By the end of 1938, there were 274 librarians riding out across 29 counties. In total, the program employed nearly 1,000 riding librarians. Funding ended in 1943, the same year the WPA was dissolved as unemployment plummeted during wartime. It wasn’t until the following decade that mobile book services in the area resumed, in the form of the bookmobile, which had been steadily increasing in popularity across the country.
Pack horse librarians cross a log bridge to reach home used as a distribution center for a mountain community, year unknown. University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center.
In addition to providing reading materials, the book women served as touchstones for these communities. They tried to fill book requests, sometimes stopped to read to those who couldn’t, and helped nurture local pride. As one recipient said, “Them books you brought us has saved our lives.” In the same year as the call for books, the Mountain Eagle exalted the Letcher County library: “The library belong to our community and to our county, and is here to serve us … It is our duty to visit the library and to help in every way that we can, that we may keep it as an active factor in our community.”
Atlas Obscura has a selection of images of the Kentucky pack horse librarians.
Children greet the “book woman,” 1940. Kentucky Libraries and Archives
“Sometimes the short way across is the hard way for the horse and rider but schedules have to be maintained if readers are not to be disappointed. Then, too, after highways are left, there is little choice of roads,” c. 1940. Kentucky Libraries and Archives
Book delivery to a remote home, 1940. Kentucky Libraries and Archives
A man reading to two small children, c. 1940. Kentucky Library and Archives
The library in Stanton, Kentucky, 1941. University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center.
Packing saddle bags with books, date unknown. University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center.
A trunk full of donated magazines, c. 1940. Kentucky Libraries and Archives
Making a scrapbook, c. 1940. Kentucky Libraries and Archives |
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Hello Everyone,
Take a look at this beautiful oil painting of Chelsea and Lupa. Chelsea is a Saluki (on the right as you look at the painting) and Lupa is an Italian Greyhound.
The beautiful dog portrait of a Saluki and an Italian Greyhound was hand-painted by us onto canvas at Dog Artists’ studio. It was based on a photograph that the owners had emailed to us. If you would like a quote to commission a portrait of your dogs onto canvas please email: [email protected] and to view our price guide please follow the link – Dog Portrait Price Guide. We do deliver world-wide too!
The photo the dog oil portrait was based on
Dog Artists’ Resulting Oil Painting……..
Hope you all like the painting.
If you have a question, please feel free to comment below or email us at [email protected]
Bye for now x
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Signing on as the first advertiser on "Serial" has turned out nicely for MailChimp. The podcast, which investigates the 1999 murder of a Baltimore high school student, quickly became a hit. But as its only launch partner, MailChimp's payment was calculated using an audience estimate that turned out to be a fraction of the more than 31 million downloads "Serial" has registered so far. The exposure took MailChimp's ad viral, turning "Mail-Kimp" -- the way a kid pronounces MailChimp's name in the ad -- into a social media sensation. The ad even has its own remix.
"Serial" is now being flooded with advertiser calls, and the podcast is self sustaining, a significant accomplishment for what was simply an experiment a few months ago.
Ad Age caught up with "This American Life" director of operations Seth Lind, who manages sponsorships ("Serial" is a "This American Life" spinoff), to chat about the business of "Serial" and how that MailChimp ad came to be. The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Ad Age: The MailChimp ad is a cult hit. It even gets parodied in "Serial" parodies. What's so endearing about it?
Seth Lind: In the public radio world, that kind of montage has a name, it's called a vox. People say, "Oh, let's do a vox" where you have people answering the same question, and you do a montage of their answers. So, it certainly sounds different than most single voiced podcast ads. The ad is really based around that one person not knowing how to pronounce "Chimp," and then, for whatever reason, people glommed onto it and it became a meme. That's not something you can do on purpose.
Ad Age: MailChimp got a pretty good deal given the amount of publicity the spot has generated.
Mr. Lind: Yeah, I suppose it's the type of publicity you try to hire a bunch of publicists to get and never get. They owe a big thank you to a random tourist with English as a second language who didn't know how to pronounce Chimp.
Ad Age: Wait, they grabbed people off the street to voice the ad?
Mr. Lind: Yes. It's pretty common in public radio to go out and interview people on a subject. But yeah, ["Serial" producer] Dana Chivvis just said "Do you want to voice an ad for a new podcast?" She went went out and recorded those in a day, probably like an hour.
Ad Age: So the edit team is the one that produced the ad?
Mr. Lind: Yes.
Ad Age: Are you concerned there are lines that might be blurred between edit and advertising?
Mr. Lind: We have a strict firewall between advertising and editorial in terms of content. Occasionally, a sponsor will reach out and say, 'We have a product that's this or a campaign that's this. Do you have any stories coming up about the topic?' And we're just like, 'That's never going to happen.' We're never going to associate an ad with a particular piece of content. You're sponsoring the show and you're sponsoring whatever happens to be in the show that week. ... I think it's just a point of pride to be good producers. We're producing audio that's entertaining and that ad is no different. I don't think it should be surprising that a "This American Life" or a "Serial" producer can produce an audio ad that is high quality or as good or better than something that an agency would make -- because it's actually our only job to make compelling audio.
Ad Age: Radio doesn't seem to have the same problem as print with sponsored content. Hosts, for instance, read ads all the time.
Mr. Lind: Yes, certainly in commercial radio. Sometimes, they're saying: 'You know what I love...' and you're like, 'I don't think you love that, I think you're reading a piece of paper in front of you.' But, obviously we don't do endorsements and things like that. But yes, I do think the host read spots are effective.
Ad Age: Did Chicago Public Radio make a ton of money when "Serial"'s popularity surged?
Mr. Lind: When we were conceiving of the show we went out to sponsors, and we tried to recruit them to purchase launch packages and Mailchimp did. But then once the show was popular and was getting written about, more sponsors added on. So, in that way, the visibility of it and the success of it brought in more sponsors at the tail end of the season and brought in a lot of inquiries about sponsoring in the future.
Ad Age: What percentage of the budget does advertising make up? Is "Serial" primarily reliant on ad dollars?
Mr. Lind: For the first season it was really the only revenue. Because the call for donations we did was to fund a second season. So, 100% would be the answer there. And then I would say, for the second season it's about half.
Ad Age: Podcasting is a digital format, are you able to pass along listener data to your advertisers as you would with a digital display ad?
Mr. Lind: No. We just tell them the download numbers. It's just the pure numbers. The episodes have been downloaded 31 million times, and that's across all 11 episodes. So it's just a lot of people.
Ad Age: What was the original estimation of the audience?
Mr. Lind: It's top secret. ... It was in the hundreds of thousands.
Ad Age: Last question -- did Adnan do it?
Mr. Lind: I have to admit that I do not know. |
Image caption Simon Jay has been starring in Trumpageddon
In Edinburgh, this is the final hectic weekend of the annual Festival Fringe.
There have been 3,400 shows - some of which have delighted critics and some which definitely did not.
In comedy, a rich theme has been the state of America and of the US presidency.
But is satirising President Trump the definition of pointlessness?
At the start of last year, comedian Simon Jay needed to decide on the show he'd work on for the 2016 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
"This was 20 months ago so Donald Trump wasn't even Republican nominee - but I sensed comedy in him so I decided to take a punt and go for a Trump show," he says.
"But I think even last August the Edinburgh audience was mainly seeing Trump as a bit of a no-hoper. A year later I'm back with a show about a president."
It's probably safe to say few of the comedians satirising President Trump at Edinburgh this year have been fans of his style or his politics.
But they accept that the first months of his presidency have provided huge amounts of material.
In Trumpageddon, a deeply orange Jay invites his audience to a rally. The president deals peremptorily with questions then - as Jay admits - "tends to get a bit handsy" with women in the audience.
Image copyright AFP Image caption President Trump has been a popular subject of satire since his election
"Standing on stage, I can see some people get really frightened by him. I've watched lots of his rallies online and they're big showman experiences.
"They're loud and silly and bizarre and in some ways it's like a stand-up experience already. In the 1970s, Trump could have been the American Bernard Manning."
Jay says the impersonation aspect is important but it's only part of the show. "I use my real hair and a lot of make-up. There are some obvious things like wearing a blue suit and the strange o-shapes he makes with his fingers.
"When the audience submit questions they can be silly and crude - but Americans in particular also ask intelligent questions about energy policy or big business.
"So I need to know enough about Trump to give informed answers, alongside all the jokes. The audience knows I'm the puppeteer but they want to hear from the real Donald Trump too."
The other person in Edinburgh who's playing President Trump for an entire show is Cambridge student Jack Bolton.
Trump'd is a comedy musical set in a future America where Arnold Schwarzenegger has become Vice-President.
"I think President Trump is the joke that never goes stale," Bolton says. "Our story isn't dealing directly with events of 2017 but every week there are developments keeping him in the news: people want to hear about him. So he's box-office."
Image caption Jack Bolton outside a covfefe stall (Trump invented the word in a mis-typed tweet earlier this year)
Adam Woolf is one of the show's writers. "We're not trying to change people's view of him," he says.
"In the States people have already formed their opinions of him and that's probably largely true in Edinburgh too. Basically we're just making fun of him, we're not going to bring him down."
Jack Bolton spends part of each day in costume distributing flyers for the show to tourists on Edinburgh's Royal Mile.
"I do sometimes encounter very pro-Trump Republicans and, to be fair, most take my impersonation in their stride," Bolton says. "I think even his supporters recognise he has flaws in his personality."
"I admit I enjoyed seeing Simon Jay as Trump in our rival show in Edinburgh. It's very different because we have songs and dances but I think Trump lends himself to improv too. He's a rich source of comedy."
Unlike Jay, Jack Bolton wears a blond wig in the role. He says Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live has been a big influence on his portrayal.
Woolf says, as a writer, it's the psychological traits he tried to capture.
"Trump always has to portray himself as a winner and repeatedly points out that he's a winner - so you build that into the script," Woolf explains.
"He is capable of totally dismissing the facts of any criticism made of him, which even now surprises me."
Image caption Matt Forde also impersonates Boris Johnson in his Edinburgh show
Already well-known from appearances on mainstream TV, Matt Forde's show in Edinburgh is called A Show Hastily Rewritten in Light of Recent Events - Again.
It's not all about Trump but, he says: "It's an hour of stand-up about the mad chaos which has descended on the world - so there's a lot of him."
"I find Trump in some ways a despicable individual but you have to admit he's exceptionally entertaining.
"So you can have fun with the voice and physically what he does with his shoulders and his mouth. But there's a twin-track because you're trying to expose his politics too."
"Another impersonation who's been a winner for me is Boris Johnson and there's a certain parallel between them. They both have constructed personas which are designed to distract.
"Both men have inherently comedic linguistic tics and bits of body language which are in part deliberate. But they're very powerful individuals - you have to extract the comedy they offer but also keep them under scrutiny."
Forde adds: "For someone like me in Edinburgh there's a sweet spot where you say something that makes the audience laugh about a politician but it's also a point well-made with some truth behind it."
Image caption Geoff Norcott styles himself as "the UK's only declared Conservative comedian"
At 40, Geoff Norcott is creating a niche for himself as Britain's best-known right-wing comic. He acknowledges the label is a simplification, "but it creates a very useful dynamic with the audience".
His show at Edinburgh is called Right Leaning But Well Meaning. So will Geoff be the stand-up who stands up for Trump?
"Politics in Britain and in America are very different. I'm seen here as a Tory but in America I think I could be on one wing of the Democrats," he says.
"If I do start building more Trump into my act, probably it will be talking about the media's demonization of people who voted for him.
"I don't think I would do material expressly defending Donald Trump but it annoys me when voters are seen as having had malevolence in their heart. Poor Americans in particular look at Trump and genuinely see something that appeals to them.
Norcott continues: "I'm a satirist and satire has to be directed above all at people who wield power and influence - which can be different from being in political power. It would be interesting to find comedy that's explicitly pro-Trump and I imagine in America you will find it. There are blue-collar comics there who will have very different opinions from most people performing at Edinburgh.
"There's comedy in the high-minded elitism of those who are so quick to criticise Trump-voters. As a performer, I have to watch Trump carefully because he's the US president and has huge power.
"But I also keep an eye on the cultural overlords who don't approve of him and are continually telling me to think the same things. Satire isn't all one way."
Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email [email protected]. |
MUMBAI (Reuters) - Sahara, a sprawling conglomerate that ranges from media to property and Formula One racing, has agreed to pay the full $1.6 billion to release its jailed boss on bail, a lawyer for the company said on Friday.
The Sahara group chairman Subrata Roy (C) is escorted by police to a court in Lucknow February 28, 2014. REUTERS/Stringer/Files
Subrata Roy has been held in jail for more than a year after Sahara failed to comply with a court order to refund billions of dollars it had raised in outlawed bonds.
Sahara, once one of India’s most high-profile firms, has in the past made several failed attempts to raise the bail money using its prized overseas hotels that include the Plaza in New York and Grosvenor House in London.
The Supreme Court in March allowed Sahara three more months to raise cash for the bail money. It has warned it could ask a receiver to auction Sahara’s assets if the group fails to raise bail.
The court will hear Sahara’s new bail proposal on Thursday, the Sahara lawyer told Reuters. “All the formalities for the bail bond would be completed before Thursday,” he said, declining to be named.
A Sahara spokesman did not return calls seeking details. Gautam Awasthi, another lawyer for Sahara, said in a statement on behalf of the company that the Supreme Court would hear the case on Thursday.
The $1.6 billion is what Sahara is required to pay initially to get its chief released on bail. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the Supreme Court have estimated Sahara’s total liabilities due to the outlawed bonds at as much as $7 billion.
Sahara says it has paid 95 percent of the dues to the bondholders, but the regulator disputes that.
Roy, the company’s founder, styles himself “managing worker” and guardian of the world’s largest family. Several employees have said operations across the group have been hit over the past year without him.
In its last attempt, Sahara was close to finalising a deal with U.S.-based Mirach Capital Group to raise money by taking a loan against its overseas hotels, but talks collapsed. |
You haven't seen Carrie Guzman on the television shows hosted by archconservatives Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck. Her name hasn't appeared on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal. And she hasn't shown up in any surreptitiously videotaped sting operations conducted by youthful right-wing zealots.
In fact, Guzman represents a face of the group ACORN that has been largely absent from the media in general since various factions of the right wing set out to discredit and cripple the anti-poverty organization.
At least she used to be a part of Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. As head of the Lansing office, she worked out of a small office in that city for four years, putting in long hours while making just $30,000 a year. Given that Guzman holds a Ph.D. in community development, the pay is exceptionally meager. But she loved the job nonetheless, seeing it as a way to continue providing a public service after retiring from Michigan State University, where she previously served as director of the undergraduate social work program.
But late last year, after the federal government illegally cut off funding to the nonprofit and threatened to do the same to any other entity either affiliated or even associated with the group, ACORN in Michigan shut down all operations.
One year before the ax fell, Michigan ACORN had offices in Detroit, Lansing, Saginaw, Flint and Grand Rapids. At its peak, it had more than 20 full-time staff and represented more than 10,000 member families around the state.
In 2008, according to organization officials, it helped more than 1,000 families get their taxes filed, saved some 75 families from foreclosure, and assisted more than 150,000 people in filling out voter registration applications.
ACORN was also a key member in the coalition that successfully pushed for an increase in the state minimum wage in 2006, and its work in speaking up about the foreclosure crisis helped to pass the Home Foreclosure Prevention Act in the spring of 2009.
Despite those successes, the group was already facing difficult times as fallout from the financial meltdown caused foundations and philanthropists to scale back support, Guzman says. That same meltdown, especially here in Michigan, where unemployment is rampant, also put a debilitating squeeze on the working-class and poor and people of color whose monthly dues form the backbone of ACORN's support structure.
For two months early in 2009, Guzman went without a paycheck, but she kept plugging away, helping people get their income tax returns properly filed and continuing to lead organizing efforts.
By September, when a pair of young conservative activists released secretly recorded videotapes purportedly showing ACORN employees in a handful of cities giving helpful advice to them as they posed as a pimp and prostitute looking for assistance on things like opening a brothel or illegally funneling money into a fictitious political campaign, all hell broke loose.
The furor caused by the videos led Congress to pass legislation cutting off funds to ACORN in a matter of weeks. Even more devastating than the shutoff of federal money — which never formed a large part of ACORN's support — was language in the legislation that also opened up the possibility that any group affiliated or even allied with ACORN could also lose federal funding. That legislation, along with the torrent of negative publicity generated by the video sting, had additional repercussions: Foundation supporters and corporate partners — such as banks that helped fund foreclosure prevention programs — started separating themselves from the organization.
"That was the last straw," says Guzman, who lives in Lansing. "We just couldn't keep going after that."
That and the threatening phone calls that caused her to fear for the safety of her staff.
Michigan isn't the only place where ACORN has suffered. Kevin Whelan, ACORN's deputy national director, says that most state operations have either closed entirely or undergone drastic cuts. Of the nearly 400 people employed by the organization nationally just a year ago, fewer than half remain on the payroll, he says.
As bad as all that is, the recent decision by California ACORN to break away from the national group to create a new nonprofit organization could portend even more trouble ahead. As the Los Angeles Times reported when the split occurred in January, the separation from its "embattled parent organization" is a "move that observers say might foreshadow other defections that would seriously undermine one of the nation's largest and most politically powerful community organizations."
There is no doubt that conservative efforts to weaken ACORN, beginning at least as far back as 2004, when the group's voter registration efforts sent a chill through the Bush White House, have crippled the organization.
Along with an assault masterminded from the White House by Karl Rove was a second prong of attack from corporate interests that tried to keep their fingerprints off hatchet jobs by using an industry-funded "astroturf" group.
An early effort in that campaign, according to the group SourceWatch, "involved the appearance of a website called RottenAcorn.com, created by the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), a front group created by Washington, D.C.-based astroturf specialist Richard Berman and his lobbying firm Berman & Company." The RottenAcorn.com website says ACORN is "really a multimillion-dollar, multi-national conglomerate," and "its political agenda is driven by a relative handful of political thugs for hire." In an Oct. 29, 2008, article, the investigative journalism group ProPublica revealed that both a full-age ad in The New York Times attacking ACORN and the RottenAcorn.com website are "funded by Rick Berman's Employment Policies Institute, which has among its clients the American Beverage Institute, a trade group for bars and restaurants." As if battling the Republican Party and well-funded corporate hit squads weren't enough, ACORN has been brought low, at least in part, because the mainstream press failed to do its job.
And then, heaping insult upon injury, ACORN was abandoned by many of the Democratic politicians that benefited from the group's efforts, including a one-time community organizer named Barack Obama.
The question being raised now is whether it will be able to continue to exist at all.
But not all of ACORN's problems can be laid at the feet of others.
SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS
The seeds of current-day ACORN were planted in 1970, when the National Welfare Rights Organization sent a talented organizer named Wade Rathke to Little Rock, Ark.
As noted on ACORN's website, Rathke's first campaign was aimed at helping welfare recipients attain their basic needs, such as clothing and furniture. This drive began the effort to create and sustain a movement that would grow to become the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now — the original ACORN."
The fledgling group's ambitious goal was to "unite welfare recipients with needy working people around issues of free school lunches, unemployment issues, Vietnam veterans' rights and emergency room care. The broad range of issues did not stop there, as the organization grew throughout Arkansas. ACORN organized farmers to take on environmental issues concerning sulfur emissions."
It became a multi-state organization in 1975, launching branches in Texas and South Dakota, keeping the original acronym but changing its name to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Eventually it spread to more than 40 states and gained hundreds of thousands of members.
Lansing organizer Guzman says she first learned about the group the way most people did back in the 1980s.
"Someone came and knocked on my door and asked me to become involved," she recalls. The issue then was an effort to keep a neighborhood school from being closed.
The effort caught her interest, and she became a dues-paying member, contributing $10 a month to help support the cause. From the outset, Guzman says, the group was controversial, fostering a culture of confrontation.
"ACORN has always been edgy, and has always pushed the envelope," says Guzman. Rather than seeking in-your-face confrontations, she considers herself more of a "bridge builder" with a low-key temperament. But says she understands the reason for the organization's aggressive philosophy.
"ACORN has never been afraid to directly confront people with rallies and demonstrations, or going to the homes of corporate executives to stage protests. Things like that. But a lot of times, that kind of edginess is necessary to draw attention to an issue."
With the bulk of its members existing on the margins of society, she explains, it was important to prove to them that they had the power to make change happen. People who never had access to the corridors of power learned that there is power in numbers, power in knowledge. Over time, ACORN grew to become what Peter Dreier and John Atlas, in a piece penned for the Huffington Post blog site, described as "the nation's most successful community organizing group ... making headlines by mobilizing low-income Americans to fight for social justice, challenging powerful banks, corporations and government officials around such issues as [increased] wages for the working poor, predatory lending and foreclosures, welfare reform, public education, affordable housing and voting rights."
Dreier teaches politics and directs the Urban & Environmental Policy program at Occidental College in California. Atlas, founder and president of the New Jersey-based National Housing Institute, has written a soon-to-be published book about the history of ACORN.
Both men have regularly risen to the defense of the organization as it sustained a series of attacks in recent years. But even admirers of the group were taken aback in July 2008, when it was disclosed that ACORN founder Wade Rathke's brother, Dale, had embezzled nearly $1 million from the organization eight years earlier. Although an agreement to recoup the money was signed and payments were made, police were never notified and most of ACORN's board was never informed of the crime. Both brothers remained with the organization until whistle-blowers disclosed the scandal.
"We thought it best at the time to protect the organization, as well as to get the funds back into the organization, to deal with it in-house," Maude Hurd, then president of ACORN, told The New York Times. "It was a judgment call at the time, and, looking back, people can agree or disagree with it, but we did what we thought was right."
Over the years, ACORN had made powerful enemies, and they pounced on what Dreier and Atlas described as a "tragic example of poor judgment." The group's detractors, not surprisingly, went for the jugular.
The Employment Policies Institute issued this statement: "It comes as no surprise that ACORN founder and chief organizer Wade Rathke hid his brother's embezzlement of nearly $1 million from the 'charitable' organization's employees, board of directors and donors. This is just one more page in ACORN's corrupt history, which already includes election fraud investigations in at least a dozen states, hypocritical and oppressive employment practices and a political agenda driven by a handful of anti-corporate activists."
While the right wing gleefully slobbered over the whiff of blood, the group's supporters responded like they were gut-punched.
"Staff," says Guzman, "felt very angry and betrayed."
PIMPED OUT
During the summer of 2009, twentysomething conservative activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles visited at least eight ACORN offices in five different cities. Giles pretended to be a prostitute. O'Keefe either posed as a pimp or claimed to be Giles' protector. Various illegal schemes were proposed. According to news reports, two ACORN staffers were fired for their seeming willingness to assist the two activists in their feigned plans to break the law.
After the videotaped sting in September, ACORN commissioned former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger to conduct an inquiry into both the incident and the effectiveness of reforms instituted following disclosure of the embezzlement.
One of the things Harshbarger concluded in a report released in December 2009, was that the "serious management challenges" facing the organization are the "fault of ACORN's founder and a cadre of leaders who, in their drive for growth, failed to commit the organization to the basic, appropriate standards of governance and accountability. As a result, ACORN not only fell short of living its principles but also left itself vulnerable to public embarrassment.
"The hidden camera controversy is an apt example. While some of the advice and counsel given by ACORN employees and volunteers was clearly inappropriate and unprofessional, we did not find a pattern of intentional, illegal conduct by ACORN staff; in fact, there is no evidence that action, illegal or otherwise, was taken by any ACORN employee on behalf of the videographers. Instead, the videos represent the byproduct of ACORN's longstanding management weaknesses, including lack of training, lack of procedures, and lack of on-site supervision."
The way Guzman sees it, when the group greatly expanded its efforts to register voters in the 2000s, resources that had previously gone into training went into growth. Also, the culture of the group could be a sword that cut two ways.
"Community organizers by nature are not administrators," she observes. "They are movers and shakers." As a result, even though she says the "protocols" put in place by the national organization were generally very good, the middle management support needed to carry them out wasn't always there, and training wasn't always adequate.
On the other hand, the video sting revealed more than shortcomings on the part of ACORN. According to Dreier, coverage of the incident both created a controversy far out of proportion to its actual news value while failing to reveal the true context of what really happened.
While Fox News broadcast the videos "on a virtual round-the clock basis," Dreier wrote in a piece penned two weeks ago, and the right-wing blogosphere served as an echo chamber that amplified and spread the allegations, mainstream media acted more like "stenographers" than reporters, failing to reveal crucial facts about the so-called "sting."
While the heavily edited tapes make it appear as if conservative activist James O'Keefe dressed as a ridiculously flamboyant pimp when taping ACORN employees, he in reality presented himself as merely a friend to pretend hooker Giles (who in some cases claimed to be seeking help setting up a brothel). It was only outside that he donned the laughably outrageous costume that included a faux fur coat and oversized shades. In an act of bold-faced deception, he then spliced the footage "to make it appear" that he'd actually worn the costume in meetings with ACORN staff.
Most of the mainstream media continued to miss that salient fact in recounting the video escapade while reporting on the arrest of O'Keefe and three other men last week, when they were charged with plotting to tamper with the phones at the New Orleans office of Democratic Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu.
Missing the real story is part of a pattern when it comes to mainstream coverage of ACORN, Dreier says.
Last September, Dreier and University of Northern Iowa journalism professor Christopher Martin released a report titled "Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, and What the News Got Wrong."
The study looks at mainstream media coverage of ACORN during 2007 and 2008, in advance of the presidential election. According to the study, groundwork for the attack started being laid as early as July 2006, when EPI released a report titled "Rotten ACORN: America's Bad Seed." The report made reference to ACORN's "questionable activities" and referenced investigations into allegations of "election fraud" by the group but, Dreier and Martin's study notes, failed to produce any evidence of convictions against ACORN.
And while it's true ACORN workers in a number of states were accused of placing false names on voter registration cards, there hasn't been one recorded instance of any attempts by anyone linked to ACORN actually trying to cast a fraudulent ballot. That fact is confirmed by both the Harshbarger report and a report compiled by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
The distinction is an important one. As Wayne State University law professor and election expert Jocelyn Benson points out, fraudulent voter registration cards can be a time-consuming drain on the resources of the officials charged with verifying them. Falsifying those cards is a serious crime, she says, and those doing it should be prosecuted.
But workers falsifying cards as a way to help pad pay checks is a far different matter from actually trying to change the outcome of an election. That is something the Republican Party was accused of doing by investigative reporter Greg Palast and others following the 2000 presidential election, when Florida election officials allowed the names of thousands of voters — many of them African-American — to be wrongly removed from the rolls.
The way voting list have been purged in Michigan has also been an issue.
As Dreier and Martin pointed out in their analysis, "85.1 percent of the stories about ACORN's alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to note that ACORN was acting to stop incidents of registration problems by its (mostly temporary) employees when it became aware of these problems."
In fact, as Guzman points out, there is an obligation to turn over all filled-out cards, whether or not fraud is suspected. Guzman says it was ACORN's practice to flag cards with potential problems and then notify the clerks that there was concern about them.
The problem from the GOP's perspective is that the poor, young and minority people ACORN largely attempts to register tend to vote Democratic. Concentrating on crucial swing states, ACORN was able to register some hundreds of thousands of new voters during the 2006 and 2008 election cycles.
That was another story the mainstream media missed almost completely. Dreier reports: "98.5 percent of the stories about ACORN's alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to provide deeper context, especially efforts by Republican Party officials to use allegations of 'voter fraud' to dampen voting by low-income and minority Americans, including the firing of U.S. attorneys who refused to cooperating with the politicization of voter fraud accusations — firings that ultimately led to the resignation of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales."
In October 2008, according to published reports, the Department of Justice's Inspector General found that U.S. Attorney David Iglesias had been improperly fired because he had refused to pursue prosecutions against the ACORN and a prominent New Mexico Democrat before the 2006 mid-term elections.
In Aug. 2009, as Dreier and Martin also point out, the House Judiciary Committee "released over 5,000 pages of White House and Republican National Committee e-mails, along with transcripts of closed-door testimony by Karl Rove, former Bush senior advisor and deputy chief of staff, and Harriet Miers, former White House counsel. The documents revealed that Rove played a central role in the firing of David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, for failing to help Republican election prospects by prosecuting alleged instances of voter fraud by ACORN."
Nearly every major news organization reported on the release of the documents, the professors report. "... but none of them — including the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal — mentioned that Rove was specifically focused on attacking ACORN for its voter registration efforts in New Mexico and other states, even though ACORN is mentioned frequently as a Republican target in investigative documents."
As Guzman says of the national voter registration effort: "There was never any criminal or malicious intent. Our focus was always on how we can give people a voice."
The attempts to demonize ACORN reached a crescendo in October 2008, when Republican candidate John McCain, in a televised debate with Obama (whom the right was attempting to closely link with ACORN) claimed, "We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama's relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."
It all begins to take on a sort of Alice in Wonderland quality. Having the White House direct a campaign of intimidation and prosecution against a group dedicated to helping poor people isn't worth mentioning. But the fact that some misguided temporary workers write down the names of cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse on registration cards raises dire concerns that democracy itself is being threatened.
That same sort of trip through the looking glass can also be found in the response of Congress to the (thoroughly suspect) video escapade perpetrated by O'Keefe and Giles who — it's worth noting — likely violated the laws in at least two states when they made their hidden-camera recordings.
A CONSTITUTIONAL QUESTION
Within weeks of the pimp and prostitute video exploding on the scene, the so-called Defund Acorn Act of 2009 passed through Congress — with only 75 House Democrats and 7 Senate Democrats opposing it — and on Oct. 1 President Obama signed it into law. It was done despite warnings from the Congressional Research Service that in all likelihood the law would be judged unconstitutional if challenged.
The CRS indicated that language in the bill — specifically the portion that reads "None of the funds made available by this joint resolution or any prior Act may be provided to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) or any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, or allied organizations" — violated a clause in the U.S. Constitution that prohibits what is known as a bill of attainder. In laymen's terms, that means the government can't single out an individual or group for punishment without a trial.
ACORN, turning to the Center for Constitutional Rights for legal help, went to court in an attempt to have the law overturned. Two Detroit attorneys, Julie Hurwitz and Bill Goodman, played a key role in drafting the lawsuit. In early December, Nina Gershon, a federal judge in Brooklyn, N.Y., ruled in favor of ACORN, saying the legislation indeed violated the group's constitutional rights.
But, according to Hurwitz, despite the judge's ruling, federal funding to the group remains shut off, and the Obama Justice Department is fighting to keep it that way on two fronts. On the one hand, it is arguing that Gershon's ruling no longer applies because the language from the original bill has been inserted into a subsequent piece of legislation that Obama signed. At the same time, it is seeking to have Gershon reconsider her ruling.
"Right now, everything is on hold," says Hurwitz. "And every day that passes is one more nail in the coffin in terms of ACORN's ability to function as an organization."
Lawyers for the group are attempting to expedite the judicial process, but they're fighting a Justice Department that is "doing everything it can to slow things down."
The effect, says John Atlas, who has written the soon-to-be published book about ACORN, is a "disaster for poor people."
"This is clearly a cautionary tale about what the right-wing echo chamber is capable of doing to any progressive group in America that begins to threaten the power structure."
But it's not just the Fox talkers and the bloggers who amplify their rants. It is the GOP and the corporate right as well. It's also a mainstream press that fails to do its job.
And then there are the Democrats who count on the votes of poor people and people of color to get elected, as well as ACORN's supposed allies on the left.
"Both Democrats and the progressive community were largely silent during all this," says Atlas. "They just ran for the hills."
Dreier says the left is already suffering as a result. With ACORN effectively neutered for at least the time being, a crucial ally isn't able to effectively help rally the communities it serves to turn up the volume in support or the administration's attempts to reform health care and banking laws.
"There's real consequences of this that extend far beyond ACORN," Dreier says.
As for Carrie Guzman, she says there've been three or four people who have tracked her down and showed up at her house in recent days looking for the tax preparation help that ACORN is no longer around to provide.
Also lost is a planned effort to use ACORN to help with the census; the thinking was that people who live in hard-to-count neighborhoods would know where to look and be more likely to have otherwise reluctant doors open up to them.
She's the first to acknowledge that ACORN — like any large organization — had its share of problems. But the benefit gained from helping give marginalized communities a voice and sense of real power far outweighed any shortcomings.
"Now," she says, "the ACORN brand has certainly been damaged. How irreparably, I don't know. But it's certainly been damaged. And it's left a huge void. Right now, I don't see anyone else stepping up to take the lead."
In some ways, she says, it all seems so crazy. All these attacks on a group that has helping poor people and the disenfranchised as its goal. What, she asks, is there to be so afraid of? But she knows the answer to her own question.
"We did make political change. We did make economic change. And some people just didn't want to see that. I think that is the real reason we ran into so much trouble."
Curt Guyette isnews editor. Contact him at 313-202-804 or [email protected] |
Percy Harvin makes plays. That alone does not make him especially unique or remarkable to the NFL though. What sets Harvin apart is he consistently makes plays. He doesn't exactly make playmaking look easy. Such feats of effortlessness are mostly reserved for freaks of nature like Calvin Johnson. Harvin has top tier athleticism but nothing otherworldly. Percy Harvin makes playmaking look... organic - like he was put on this planet to do so.
One might point to his competitiveness and physicality as the root of this feeling. Yet fellow Seahawk and undersized playmaker, Golden Tate, is similarly touted for his competitiveness and physicality and I get a dramatically different feeling from watching him play. To use fire as a metaphor, Tate's competitive fire burns bright. There are times when he gets going and just seems completely unstoppable. But the fire is erratic. There are other times when you could run your hand through the fire and not get burned.
Harvin's competitive fire burns more like an ember. It's steady, it's extremely hot, but it's not bright. If you put your hand on an ember, you're going to get burned, every single time. This is a rare quality for a wide receiver. Even for the best WRs, explosive plays are few and far between. It's really no wonder why great receivers are synonymous for being divas. Big play receivers marvel at their own playmaking ability right alongside the rest of us. Harvin has a certain, "another day at the office," demeanor about him that you don't often find from a dynamic playmaker.
One could look to a guy like Larry Fitzgerald as another big play receiver with a blue collar demeanor. Yet Harvin's competitiveness is palpable, where Fitzgerald competes with seemingly zero emotion. I would describe Fitz as a technician who has mastered his craft. This demeanor is not uncommon for a receiver and comes woefully short of defining Harvin's play style.
I've struggled with putting words to Percy Harvin's effect on the field since the very day that we traded for him. My epiphanous moment finally came through a completely unrelated medium...
A couple weekends ago I powered up the DVD player to watch an episode of HBO's award winning miniseries Band of Brothers, which chronicles the incredible story of Easy Company in World War II. Easy had just helped the Allies halt the German's desperate bid to march on Paris in the Battle of the Bulge, and were now ready to go on the offensive. The first step was to seize the strategically significant town of Foy.
Easy needed to quickly cross an open field before German artillery could zero in on their position. Unfortunately, under the incompetent leadership of Lieutenant Dyke, the attack stalled at the precise moment when it was imperative to be pressing forward. The former commanding officer of Easy Company, Captain Winters, was overseeing the assault and briefly considered taking over command himself. However the recently promoted captain was called back due to his now elevated rank. So instead he called upon, well, I'll let you see for yourself...
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Percy Harvin is the Lieutenant Ronald Speirs of the NFL.
Football is incredibly simple for Lieutenant Percy Harvin. There's nothing brilliant about what he does on the field. He simply does it more fearlessly and efficiently than anyone else. More than Harvin's tremendous talent, I think this is why Adrian Peterson, the "Player's Champ," said what he said when the Vikings sent Harvin to Seattle.
The best all around player I ever seen or you'll ever see! Goes to Seattle! I feel like I just got kicked in the stomach. Several times!!! — Adrian Peterson (@AdrianPeterson) March 11, 2013
Lieutenant Harvin exposes momentum for the illusion that it is. Every offense in the league suffers moments when they can't move the football. Maybe it's the feeling of a surging opposing offense, maybe it's stewing over a stupid turnover, maybe it's consecutive three-and-outs. Whatever it is, prior results seem to build on each other and affect future results. Momentum. There is zero logic behind this phenomena but it's still a credible theory because humans are not ruled by logic.
The quarterback position has arguably the greatest influence over a playing field in all of team sports. They're the field general who executes the attack. Thus, the league's elite quarterbacks have an ability to override the illusion of momentum and keep their team in the game. I believe that Percy Harvin is one of the few "troopers" in the NFL who similarly possesses this ability. He has the Ronald Speirs Effect on the field.
Lieutenant Percy Harvin changes the game on an emotional level which seems impossible for his position. Part of that is his talent, part of it is how many ways you can put the football in his hands. But mostly it's the ember of competitiveness he plays with and the relentless assault he brings against the defense. |
JACKSON -- Four lesbian couples are asking a federal judge to immediately stop Mississippi from enforcing a law that bans same-sex couples from adopting or taking children into foster care.
The request for a preliminary injunction was filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Jackson. The document said an injunction would only affect the four couples who are plaintiffs.
The couples and two gay-rights groups, the Campaign for Southern Equality and the Family Equality Council, filed suit Aug. 12 to challenge Mississippi's 2000 law that set the adoption ban.
It was not immediately clear how soon U.S. District Judge Daniel P. Jordan will consider the request filed Friday. A preliminary injunction would stop the state from enforcing a law while it is challenged in court. A judge can grant injunction if it appears that the people who filed a lawsuit would face irreparable harm by letting the law remain in place, and if they appear likely to win the suit based on their legal arguments.
The couples point out that Republican Gov. Phil Bryant said in his 2014 State of the State address that he wanted all children to be born into a "mature, two-parent family." They say allowing same-sex couples to adopt would help fulfill that goal.
Bryant, who is seeking re-election this year, has said many times that he opposes adoption by same-sex couples.
Mississippi is the last state to ban adoptions by same-sex couples. Lawmakers in Florida and Michigan reversed bans earlier this year, while courts in Louisiana and Nebraska struck down rules or laws in those states.
The court document filed Friday in Mississippi says plaintiffs Donna Phillips and Jan Smith, of Brandon, were married in 2013. The marriage took place out of state because Mississippi had banned same-sex marriage until a U.S. Supreme Court in late June wiped away such prohibitions nationwide.
Phillips and Smith have an 8-year-old daughter, but only Phillips is legally recognized as a parent of the girl, who is identified in Friday's court filing only by her initials, H.M.S.P. The document says Smith wants the same legal recognition through adoption.
"As Jan and Donna found out, the Mississippi Adoption Ban makes something as ordinarily simple as registering their child for public school an arduous process," the document says. "Because Jan is the legal owner of their home but is not recognized as H.M.S.P's legal parent, every year she is required to complete an agreement 'renting' her home to Donna and H.M.S.P. to prove that H.M.S.P. lives in the school district."
Plaintiffs also say the adoption ban interferes with the ability of both parents in a couple to fully participate in making education decisions and emergency medical decisions for their children.
Former Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, a Democrat, has said in recent years that he regrets signing the law that's now being challenged. |
Introducing the Blockchain Token Securities Law Framework
Reuben Bramanathan Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 12, 2016
We’re excited to announce the release of the Blockchain Token Securities Law Framework. We’ve also created a Framework Tool as a guide for developers and users of blockchain tokens.
As the development of blockchain tokens (also known as App Coins) continues to enable new decentralized business models, new legal issues come into focus. For developers, legal and regulatory uncertainty can be one of the main barriers to building new blockchain protocols and applications.
The Framework is a starting point for developers and companies entering the space. It can be used to analyze the likelihood that a particular blockchain token (e.g. any given App Coin) would be subject to US federal securities law. It also establishes a set of best practices for token crowdsales.
The Framework has been prepared in collaboration with Coin Center, Union Square Ventures and Consensys. It is open source and free to use. |
WASHINGTON – The Department of Veterans Affairs fails to report 90 percent of poor-performing doctors to national and state databases intended to alert other hospitals of misconduct, according to findings released Monday by the Government Accountability Office.
The government watchdog found VA officials were slow to investigate when concerns were raised about the performance of certain doctors. Further, in eight out of nine cases, the VA failed to report doctors who didn’t meet health care standards.
“Until [the Veterans Health Administration] strengthens its oversight of these processes, veterans may be at increased risk of receiving unsafe care through the VA health care system,” the GAO concluded.
The findings were based on reviews of 148 instances of complaints against VA medical providers at five hospitals from 2013 to 2017. The concerns ranged from unsafe or inconsistent practices to doctors incorrectly recording patient visits.
The VA failed to document about half of those cases, the GAO found. For 16 doctors, the VA waited multiple months or years to initiate reviews of complaints.
During that time, nine doctors were disciplined by the VA for possible professional incompetence or misconduct, or they resigned to avoid disciplinary action. But the VA didn’t report any of them to state licensing boards, and only one was reported to the National Practitioner Data Bank. Those databases are designed to inform other health care facilities about doctors’ past performance.
In one instance, a doctor who resigned from the VA while under investigation was not reported, and later hired to another, non-VA hospital in the same city. Two years later, that hospital disciplined the doctor for the same conduct that prompted the VA investigation, the GAO reported.
The GAO is recommending the VA improve oversight of how concerns raised about doctors are reviewed and documented. In response to the watchdog report, VA Deputy Chief of Staff Gina Farrisee wrote the agency agreed with the recommendations and would comply with them by October 2018.
“Without documentation and timely reviews of providers’ clinical care, [VA] officials may lack information needed to reasonably ensure that providers are competent to provide safe, high quality care to veterans,” the GAO report reads.
The U.S. Office of Special Counsel has recently received complaints from whistleblowers that seem to back up the GAO findings of VA leadership failing to address concerns about doctors, inspectors wrote.
A subcommittee of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs is planning to meet Wednesday morning to discuss the report publicly.
Read the full report here.
[email protected]
Twitter: @nikkiwentling |
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We’ve seen transforming robots before, and I’m not talking about anything related to Hasbro.
Researchers from MIT are among many engineers and tinkerers trying to design robots that perform different functions by changing their shape or appearance.
Japan-based Brave Robotics has designed a 1/12-scale RC car that can transform into a humanoid robot. It can shuffle around, grab footage with its Wi-Fi camera, and even fire little missiles from its arms.
But the intriguing part about the Transform Robot is its scope. Not only has Brave Robotics hobbyist Kenji Ishida put 10 years into building robots in disguise — he began in 2002 with a simple pair of legs and the Transform Robot is version 7.1 — he wants to build a full-scale transforming, drivable car with artificial intelligence by 2030.
Transformers fan gone wild? Perhaps.
Even though building a real Autobot seems highly unlikely due to the enormous power requirements, not to mention the sheer cost and AI hurdles, Ishida is an undaunted dreamer.
He showed off his RC transformer last weekend at Maker Faire Tokyo, which also witnessed the appearance of 13-foot mecha marvel Kuratas, inspired by a different sci-fi franchise.
The Transform Robot is partly made of 3D-printed components and runs on lithium-polymer batteries.
The car even has room for two seats in case your action figures want to hop a ride. Check it out in the vid below.
Ishida will make only 10 Transform Robots, custom painted and already programmed, each for $24,000. Yes, that’s the 1/12-scale version.
Well, how else is he supposed to fund Autobot development?
Check out more information here. |
Hi, there!
Nico Saraintaris here (you can watch me playing this and other decks on my twitch channel).
Description
Silence ramp is a fun deck to play I've created last season. You can climb ladder really fast. It's great against hunters and zoo (early board control and huge taunts), priests (lots of 4-attack minions), control warrior and other combo-based druid decks (you can set up lethal way earlier). Paladin can be hard because of Equality combo and mage is fine (you can play around secrets, so no Kezan Mystic needed).
Mulligan
Aggresive mulligan is key here. Go for Ironbeak Owl + Ancient Watcher combo, 3-mana cost minions and Innervate. Against warrior and hunter, Acidic Swamp Ooze is great (no need for Harrison Jones, you have the card draw you need. Besides, acidic mana cost is cheap and represents another body for the combo hiding behind those taunts). Against handlock, you should keep silence, Big Game Hunter and The Black Knight.
Have fun and tell us what you think!
Videos |
As Debt Limit Deadline Nears, Concern Ticks Up But Skepticism Persists
Despite Image Problems, GOP Holds Ground on Key Issues
Survey Report
With just two days to go before an Oct. 17 deadline to raise the nation’s debt limit, 51% of the public views a rise in the nation’s debt limit as “absolutely essential” in order to avoid an economic crisis, while 36% think the country can go past the deadline without major problems.
Public concern over breaching the debt limit deadline has risen only slightly from a week ago, when 47% said a rise in the debt limit was essential and 39% said it was not.
Those who see no dire economic consequences resulting from going past Thursday’s deadline are not only skeptical about the timing – most say there is no need to raise the debt limit at all. Nearly a quarter of all Americans (23%) – including 37% of Republicans and 52% of Tea Party Republicans – believe the debt limit does not need to be raised at all.
The new national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted Oct. 9-13 among 1,504 adults, finds that 52% believe political leaders will resolve the debt limit issue before the deadline, while 44% think they will not. Democrats are more optimistic than Republicans that a solution will be found (58% vs. 47%).
Despite deep frustration with national conditions, the public’s views of Washington political leaders have shown only modest changes since before the government shutdown began. Approval ratings for President Obama (43% approve), Democratic congressional leaders (31%) and GOP leaders (20%) all are at or near all-time lows, yet are not substantially more negative than they were in early September, a month before the shutdown started.
Republicans continue to get more blame than the Obama administration for Washington’s fiscal policy stalemate, but the balance of opinion has not changed in the past week. In the new survey, 46% say Republicans are more to blame for the deadlock in Washington over the government shutdown and debt limit; 37% say the Obama administration is more to blame. A week ago, when the question asked just about responsibility for the government shutdown, the public said Republicans were more to blame, by 38% to 30%.
Over this period, the percentage of Americans who say they are very concerned about the economic impact of the government shutdown has risen, from 48% to 57%.
As the government shutdown drags on and the debt limit deadline approaches, 81% say they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States, while just 14% are satisfied. The percentage saying they are satisfied with the state of the nation has fallen 13 points since July and is now at its lowest level since the financial crisis in late 2008.
The grim public mood is reflected in the record share of voters who want most members of Congress defeated in next year’s midterm elections. Nearly three-quarters (74%) of registered voters would like to see most members of Congress defeated; during the 2010 and 2006 election cycles, which both culminated in shifts in control of the House, no more than 57% in each of these two cycles wanted most members of Congress not to be reelected.
Moreover, the share saying they do not want their own representative reelected – 38% – is as high as it has been in two decades. At this stage in the 2010 and 2006 midterms, fewer wanted to see their own member of Congress defeated (29% in November 2009, 25% in September 2005).
An early read of voter preferences for the 2014 midterm shows that the Democrats have a six-point edge: 49% of registered voters say they would vote for or lean toward voting for the Democratic candidate in their district, while 43% support or lean toward the Republican candidate.
In November 2009, a year before the Republicans won a House majority, Democrats held a five-point edge (47% to 42%). In September 2005, 14 months before the Democrats won a House majority for the first time in more than a decade, Democrats held a 12- point lead (52% to 40%).
The Democratic Party continues to be viewed more favorably than the Republican Party: 47% of adults have a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party while 38% view the GOP favorably. As in the past, the public by wide margins views the GOP as more extreme in its positions than the Democratic Party (55% to 34%) and less willing to work with its political opponents (32% say the Republican Party, 50% the Democrats).
However, as many say the Republican Party (42%) as the Democratic Party (39%) can better manage the federal government. And by 44% to 37%, slightly more say the GOP is better able to handle the nation’s economy.
Debt Ceiling Deadline Debated
Americans are divided deeply along partisan and ideological lines in opinions about the necessity to raise the debt limit. Two-thirds (67%) of Democrats say that raising the debt limit by Oct. 17 is absolutely essential to avoid an economic crisis. This includes 71% of liberal Democrats and 66% of conservative and moderate Democrats.
By contrast, Republican views tilt in the opposite direction, with about half (52%) saying the country can go past this deadline without major economic problems. This includes a 56% majority of conservative Republicans, while moderate and liberal Republicans are divided. Opinions among both Republicans and Democrats have shown little change over the past week.
A sizable share of conservative Republicans say it is not just a matter of when the debt limit should be increased, but whether it should be raised at all. Overall, 43% of conservative Republicans believe the U.S. can not only go past the deadline, but also say that raising the debt ceiling is not needed at all. Roughly half (52%) of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who agree with the Tea Party say it is not necessary, now or ever, to raise the debt ceiling.
Will Debt Limit Issue Be Resolved Before Deadline?
Overall, 52% think Obama and Republicans will resolve the debt limit issue before the deadline, while 44% do not think they will reach an agreement in time.
College graduates and those in households with higher family incomes are optimistic about an agreement; about six-in-ten expect a resolution before the deadline. Fewer of those with lower family incomes and less education express optimism about a resolution.
Young people under the age of 30 are not confident Obama and Republicans will reach an agreement before the debt limit deadline: 60% do not expect an agreement before the deadline, just 36% do. Half or more in older age groups expect a resolution.
By a 58%-36% margin, most Democrats think the debt limit issue will be resolved before the deadline. Republicans are divided: 47% think the issue will be resolved in time, 49% think it will not be resolved. Moderate and liberal Republicans are much more skeptical than conservative Republicans about the prospects of a debt limit agreement before the deadline (61% and 43%, respectively, say it will not be resolved).
More Worry about Shutdown’s Economic Impact
A 57% majority of Americans say they are now very concerned about the government shutdown’s effect on the U.S. economy, up from 48% a week ago. The increase in concern crosses most demographic and political groups, though it is particularly notable among middle-income Americans. Last week, just 43% of people in households earning between $30,000 and $75,000 annually said they were very concerned about the shutdown’s economic impact. That has risen 15 points to 58% today. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of those earning less than $30,000 are very concerned about the shutdown’s impact, compared with 50% of those earning $70,000 or more.
Concern about the shutdown’s effects has risen across party lines, though there remains a substantial partisan divide. Fully 72% of Democrats say they are very concerned about the economic impact of the shutdown, up from 59% last week. Among Republicans, 50% are very concerned today, up from 39% a week ago.
As was the case last week, Tea Party Republicans are the least concerned segment of the public: just 30% of Republicans and Republican leaners who agree with the Tea Party say they are very concerned about the shutdown’s effect on the economy, 33% say they are somewhat concerned, and 37% say they are not too or not at all concerned.
Leadership Job Approval Little Changed
Since the start of the government shutdown, there has been little change in overall job approval ratings for political leaders in Washington, largely because public frustrations preceded these events. Barack Obama’s job rating is, on balance, negative – 43% approve while 51% disapprove. This marks the first time in Obama’s presidency that the share offering a negative job rating has edged above the 50% mark. But the balance of opinion is not substantially different from his job rating a month ago (44% approved, 49% disapproved) or in the wake of the 2011 debt ceiling debate (43%, 49% in August 2011).
Just 20% approve of how Republican leaders in Congress are handling their jobs, while a record-high 72% disapprove. Yet, the change from a month ago, when 24% approved and 68% disapproved is modest, and current ratings are not far from where they have been for much of the past year.
In Obama’s case, only Republicans rate his job performance lower today than a month ago. In fact, just 6% of Republicans approve of Obama’s job performance, the lowest rating from Republicans for his presidency (the previous low was 9% in August 2011). Just 38% of independents approve of the president’s job, while 55% disapprove. This is among the lowest ratings independents have given Obama over the course of his presidency, but is largely unchanged from a month ago.
With just a 20% approval rating, Republican leaders in Congress trail not only the president but also their Democratic counterparts (31% approve). This difference is driven mainly by the relatively high levels of criticism from Republicans themselves. Just 42% of Republicans approve of how GOP leaders in Congress are doing their jobs. By comparison, among Democrats, 60% approve of Democratic congressional leaders, and 79% approve of the president’s job performance.
Views of the Parties: Traits and Issues
While Republicans take more blame for the shutdown than Democrats, there is little sign that the GOP has hurt its position relative to Democrats on a range of traits and issues.
Overall, 42% view the Republican Party as better able to manage the federal government, while about as many (39%) say the Democratic Party is better described this way. In December 2012, the Democratic Party held a 45%-36% advantage over the GOP as the party seen as better able to manage the government.
The Democratic Party continues to be seen as more willing to work with the opposing party than Republicans (50%-32%), and far more say the GOP is more extreme in its positions than the Democratic Party (55%-34%). However, on both of these measures, the Republican Party’s standing is not significantly different than it was in December of 2012.
There is a divide within the GOP when it comes to which party is more extreme in its positions. Overall, 61% of Republicans say the Democratic Party is more extreme in its positions, 30% say the GOP is more extreme. However, among moderate and liberal Republicans, 54% call their own party more extreme in its positions, just 39% say the Democratic Party takes more extreme positions. By contrast, conservative Republicans view the Democratic Party as more extreme by a 72%-19% margin.
When it comes to the key issue of dealing with the economy, slightly more say the Republican Party (44%) than the Democratic Party (37%) could do the better job. Independents favor the GOP on the economy by a 46%-30% margin.
The public is divided over which party can better handle immigration: 40% say the Republican Party could do the better job dealing with immigration, 39% say the Democratic Party.
Early Look at 2014 Midterm
More than a year ahead of the 2014 midterm congressional elections, Democrats hold a slim edge over Republicans. Overall, 49% of registered voters say that if the elections for Congress were being held today, they would vote for the Democratic Party’s candidate in their district, 43% say they would vote for the Republican candidate. Four years ago, in November of 2009, there was roughly the same balance of opinion a year ahead of the 2010 congressional elections (47% said they planned to vote for the Democratic candidate, 42% the Republican candidate).
On the 2014 generic ballot, the parties run well among their traditional bases of support. There is higher support for Democratic candidates among blacks, women and younger Americans.
Republicans run relatively well among white voters, older voters and those with family incomes of $75,000 a year or more.
At this early stage, independent voters are evenly divided: 43% say that if the elections for Congress were being held today, they would vote for the Republican candidate in their district, 43% say they would vote for the Democratic candidate.
Large Majority Wants Most Congressional Incumbents Out
Americans express clear frustration with congressional incumbents. A record-high 74% of registered voters now say that most members of Congress should not be reelected in 2014 (just 18% say they should). By comparison, at similar points in both the 2010 and 2006 midterm cycles only about half of registered voters wanted to see most representatives replaced.
Historically, voters have been more positive about reelecting their own members of Congress than members as a whole, and that remains the case today. Even so, just 48% of voters say their own member of Congress should be reelected, while 38% say he or she should be replaced. That is as negative a balance on this question as at any point in the last two decades.
A year ahead of the 2010 midterm – an election in which 58 incumbents went on to lose reelection bids, the most in more than a half-century – 29% wanted their own representative to be defeated; 38% say that today.
Democratic voters are slightly more likely than Republicans to say that their own representative should be reelected: 47% of Republican voters and 54% of Democratic voters favor their own representative’s reelection, as do 43% of independent voters.
By contrast, in 2009, when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress as well as the presidency, fully 64% of Democratic voters wanted to see their member of Congress reelected, compared with 50% of Republican voters. In 2006, when Republicans held the Senate, the House and the White House, 70% of GOP voters wanted to see their member remain in office, while just 53% of Democrats did.
Party Favorability Largely Unchanged Over the Past Year
In the midst of the shutdown and ongoing partisan battle over the budget and debt limit, views of the political parties are notable more for their stability than for any substantial change. In fact, overall public ratings of the political parties have moved very little over the course of the year.
Currently, just 38% of Americans have a favorable view of the Republican Party while 58% have an unfavorable opinion. The percentage rating the GOP unfavorably is unchanged from July (58%) and remains among the highest on record. Favorable ratings of the GOP are up slightly from a low of 33% in July, and are roughly on par with previous surveys back to 2011.
The Democratic Party continues to receive better ratings than the GOP, with about as many offering a favorable (47%) as an unfavorable (48%) opinion. Democratic Party favorability had also fallen to a low of 41% in July, and has returned to a roughly even divide that is consistent with polling over the past few years.
Overall views of the parties have also been relatively level across party lines. A good part of the Democratic Party’s overall favorability edge over the GOP is because it consistently receives more positive ratings from its own political base. Currently 86% of Democrats offer a favorable assessment of the Democratic Party, compared with 77% of Republicans – a gap that has been relatively consistent over the past year.
But Democrats have also re-opened a favorability advantage among independents, 41% of whom now offer a favorable assessment of the Democratic Party, compared with 33% who view the GOP favorably. Polling over the summer found independents offering equally low favorability ratings to both political parties.
Boehner, McConnell, Reid, Pelosi All Viewed Unfavorably
Amid deadlock in Washington, public views of both parties’ congressional leaders are more negative than positive, while views of the president are now divided.
Currently, 27% of the public holds a favorable opinion of John Boehner. While that is unchanged from January, the portion with an unfavorable view of the House speaker has increased ten points to 50% since the beginning of the year (the share offering no opinion has declined proportionately). The increase in negative views comes from Democrats (a 17-point increase) and independents (a 10-point increase); Republican views are unchanged: 46% of Republicans offer a favorable assessment of the Speaker, while 30% offer an unfavorable assessment, almost identical to the GOP ratings of Boehner in January.
A similar pattern holds for Boehner’s Senate counterpart; as Mitch McConnell has become more visible, his negatives have increased more than his positives. Overall, more now view McConnell unfavorably than favorably by a 37% to 23% margin. In January, that margin was 28% unfavorable, 21% favorable. The change in unfavorable views stems largely from growing negative feelings among Democrats (unfavorable rating up 11 points) and independents (up 13 points). Yet McConnell does not even rank well within his own political party. As many Republicans view McConnell unfavorably (30%) as favorably (31%). At the start of the year, GOP views of McConnell were similarly split (25% favorable, 25% unfavorable.)
For Harry Reid, the story is somewhat different: he is far more well known today than in January, with more viewing him both favorably (27% up from 21% in January) and unfavorably (39% up from 34%). Not surprisingly, Republican views have grown increasingly negative: 58% now view Reid unfavorably up from 48%. But Democratic views of Reid have improved even more steeply. In January, the Senate Majority Leader received a paltry 29% favorable, 20% unfavorable rating from his own party. Today, 47% of Democrats view Reid favorably while just 18% view him unfavorably.
Though Nancy Pelosi has played a less public role in the current budget debates, her overall visibility remains far higher than the other congressional leaders, and views of her are even more steeply polarized. Republicans view Pelosi unfavorably by a 75% to 13% margin, while Democrats view her favorably by a 61% to 22% margin.
While Barack Obama continues to be viewed more favorably than either party’s congressional leaders, he receives the lowest favorability rating of his presidency today: 47% favorable, 50% unfavorable. The decline in Obama’s favorability since January – down from 59% – parallels the decline in his job approval over this period from 52% to 43%. Independents’ favorable ratings of Obama have declined from 55% favorable in January to only 42% today; 54% of independents currently have an unfavorable view of the president.
Broad Public Dissatisfaction
Today, just 14% of Americans say they are generally satisfied with the way things are going in the country today, while about eight-in-ten (81%) say they are dissatisfied. This assessment rivals some of the most negative in Pew Research Center surveys dating back to 1990.
The last time evaluations of the state of the nation were this negative was during the 2011 debt-ceiling showdown; in July 2011, before a last-minute agreement to raise the debt limit, just 17% were satisfied, while 79% were dissatisfied. The only time in recent history when public satisfaction has dipped below current levels was in October 2008, during the depths of the financial crisis, when only 11% said they were satisfied with the state of the nation.
While dissatisfaction is widespread across nearly all partisan and demographic groups, Democrats are somewhat more likely than Republicans and independents to have a positive view of national conditions: Just 8% of Republicans and 10% of independents are satisfied, compared with 23% of Democrats.
Economic Views Turn More Negative
After showing some signs of improvement in the summer, ratings of the national economy have once again turned more negative. Nearly half of Americans (48%) currently rate economic conditions as poor, up from 32% in September and a recent low of 29% in June. And just 13% now say the economy is in excellent or good condition, down from 19% last month and 23% in June.
While current economic ratings have worsened from a month ago, there is little change in the public’s economic outlook. Americans are about as likely to say conditions a year from now will be worse (28%) as to say they will be better (25%), with another 44% saying conditions will be the same. This outlook is little changed from September, but more negative than in June, when more thought conditions would improve than worsen by a 33% to 19% margin.
In general, the public is less optimistic about the future of the economy than it had been throughout much of the recession and post-recession period, when Americans were consistently more likely to say economic conditions would improve than to say they would worsen. As recently as September 2012, 43% felt the economy was on track to improve over the coming year, while just 8% thought it would worsen. |
Library Hotel by Library Hotel Collection [1] is a 60-room boutique hotel in New York City, located at 299 Madison Avenue (at 41st Street), near the New York Public Library, Bryant Park, and Grand Central Terminal. The hotel was designed by architect Stephen B. Jacobs.
Library Hotel by Library Hotel Collection boasts a unique organizing principle: each of its ten guest floors has a theme, designated after a major category of the Dewey Decimal Classification (the 5th floor, for example, is the 500s, the Sciences), with each room as a subcategory or genre, such as Mathematics (Room 500.001) or Botany (Room 500.004). (Dewey categories 000, 100, and 200 are placed on the 10th, 11th, and 12th floors, respectively.) Other room themes include Erotic Literature (Room 800.001), Poetry (Room 800.003), and Music (Room 700.005). All rooms have a small complement of 50-100 books and decorations that accompany the theme, with 6,000 books overall throughout the hotel.
Because of this classification scheme, the hotel owners were sued in 2003 by the OCLC (owners of the Dewey Decimal Classification system). OCLC reached an agreement with the hotel enabling the hotel to continue using the Dewey system.[2]
Hotel Denouement from Lemony Snicket's The Penultimate Peril was modeled after the Library Hotel.[citation needed]
The Library Hotel is owned and operated by Henry Kallan whose Library Hotel Collection includes Manhattan's Casablanca Hotel, Hotel Giraffe and Hotel Elysee. A spin off of the Library Hotel's "book lovers' paradise" concept is the Library Hotel Collection's Aria Hotel concept designed for music lovers. Aria Hotel Prague opened in 2003 and Aria Hotel Budapest opened in 2015 and was named the #1 ranked hotel in the world for guest satisfaction in the 2017 TripAdvisor Traveler's Choice Awards.[3]
Room menu [ edit ]
Third Floor: Social Sciences
300.006 Law
300.005 Money
300.004 World Culture
300.003 Economics
300.002 Political Science
300.001 Communication
Fourth Floor: Language
400.006 Ancient Language
400.005 Middle Eastern Language
400.004 Asian Language
400.003 Germanic Language
400.002 Romance Language
400.001 Slavic Language
Fifth Floor: Math and Science
500.006 Astronomy
500.005 Dinosaurs
500.004 Botany
500.003 Zoology
500.002 Geology
500.001 Mathematics
Sixth Floor: Technology
600.006 Health & Beauty
600.005 Computers
600.004 Medicine
600.003 Management
600.002 Manufacturing
600.001 Advertising
Seventh Floor: The Arts
700.006 Fashion Design
700.005 Music
700.004 Photography
700.003 Performing Arts
700.002 Paintings
700.001 Architecture
Eighth Floor: Literature
800.006 Mystery
800.005 Fairy Tales
800.004 Dramatic Literature
800.003 Poetry
800.002 Classic Fiction
800.001 Erotic Literature
Ninth Floor: History
900.006 Biography
900.005 Geography & Travel
900.004 Asian History
900.003 Oceanography
900.002 Ancient History
900.001 20th Century History
Tenth Floor: General Knowledge
1000.006 New Media
1000.005 Journalism
1000.004 Museums
1000.003 Encyclopedic Works
1000.002 Almanacs
1000.001 Libraries
Eleventh Floor: Philosophy
1100.006 Love
1100.005 Paranormal
1100.004 Psychology
1100.003 Philosophy
1100.002 Ethics
1100.001 Logic
Twelfth Floor: Religion
1200.006 Mythology
1200.005 Native American Religion
1200.004 Germanic Religion
1200.003 New Age
1200.002 African Religion
1200.001 Eastern Religion
References [ edit ]
[4]
Coordinates: |
If I believed the Earth was slowly turning into cheddar cheese, I could invoke this theory to explain a lot of things. Why is the rat population in our major cities growing so quickly? Earth cheesification is providing more rat food. Why have there been so many earthquakes lately? The cheesification of the tectonic plates has made them less resistant to sudden shifts. Why are glaciers melting? The freezing point of cheddar cheese is lower than that of water; as the Earth at the poles undergoes cheesification, the unfrozen cheese is causing a slight warming of the ice sheets from below, resulting in unusual levels of melting.
Then we would be at liberty to publish headlines such as this : “Research suggests warmer summers could be causing colder winters.” This conjecture, brought to you via the magical theory of global climate change, is reported as though it is the most plausible explanation of the peculiar fact that Canadian winters do not appear to be getting any warmer.
If, however, we could devise a theory that might literally be able to repel absolutely any possible counter-evidence, then we would have accomplished something truly diabolical: an unfalsifiable theory. If we could indeed devise such a theory, then we could run wild explaining anything and everything, and absorb absolutely any eventuality, without ever needing to question our faith in the underlying hypothesis.
I could go on like this for a long time, I suppose. At some point, however, you would confront me with some natural fact that I could not logically account for by means of my cheese theory. In other words, even the greatest faith in this underlying assumption could never withstand all possible evidence.
Question you aren’t supposed to ask: Why is the non-warming of recent winters a peculiar fact in need of an explanation? After all, did anyone in the past harbor any presumption that winters ought to be getting warmer? Why should they? The difference, of course, is that in the age of global warming, everyone is supposed to know, beyond any doubt, that the Earth is indeed getting significantly warmer. Thus, every time someone casually observes that the weather is pretty chilly, or that there has been a lot of snow, all hearers in the room look at their hands awkwardly, smirk bemusedly, or display some other symptom of that feeling familiar to anyone who has had to face doubts about a deeply held religious belief: “But this just can’t be true, because if it is, then my world is about to crumble.”
The world of anthropogenic global climate change crumbled a long time ago
The world of anthropogenic global climate change crumbled a long time ago. That, in fact, is why we have a theory called “anthropogenic global climate change” in the first place. Thirty-five years ago, it was called global cooling. When the temperature records made minced meat of that “theory,” it was put on ice for a few years, as it were. Finally, on the principle that if you can’t beat Mother Nature, you must join her, the wizards who brought us global cooling conveniently revised their models to prove beyond any doubt that the newly discovered global warming trend was a man-made phenomenon. Then, around 1998, the temperature records began to flat-line. Carbon dioxide, the Enemy, was reaching ever-higher levels in the atmosphere; and yet it was no longer having the desired – er, I mean “anticipated” – effect of warming the planet as it should (oops, I mean “as the models predicted”).
For several years, the global crusaders against carbon dioxide mocked, ridiculed, and/or ignored anyone who dared to ask why, if rising CO2 levels cause global warming, temperatures were not rising at accelerating rates, as CO2 levels continued to rise exponentially. Oh, but temperatures are indeed rising, the faithful said. In fact, each year, they produced annual temperature record analyses, garnered through the official scientific records center, the UN, showing that that year had been the warmest ever recorded. Then, a little later, some fine print would appear somewhere explaining how the report had slightly overestimated the warming for the year in question.
Hedging their bets, the global warmers began offering arguments to account for the stalled warming trend, even while they continued to deny that the trend had stalled – a method equivalent to saying, “I didn’t kill my wife, but if I did, it was in self-defense.” Their main argument was a condescending appeal to the big picture that the skeptics were allegedly too narrow-minded to see: Global temperature change, they said, is a process that develops over a very long period of time. Therefore, they harrumphed, claiming that a broader trend has ceased because temperatures have not changed for a few years shows an unscientific short-sightedness.
Of course, if one were to accept this bet-hedging argument, one could turn it back on the global warmers: Eighty years can hardly be called a “big picture,” in planetary terms. The Earth is believed to be more than four billion years old. If five years without warming is too short a period to call a trend, then why is eighty years of net warming a long enough period to call a trend? From the point of view of four billion years, eighty looks an awful lot like five, does it not? (To be precise, as a percentage of four billion, 5 is 0.000000125%, while 80 is 0.000002%.) So how sure can we be that the period during which this unnatural warming is alleged to have happened is a long enough period to indicate a “long-term trend”? Will they be forced back to frightening us about global cooling again in twenty years?
Perhaps dimly recognizing this little problem, the global warming advocates – um, I mean “researchers” – finally hit upon the perfect modification of their theory, namely to say that it doesn’t matter what happens to the temperature; the cause, in any case, is man. Thus, along about the middle of this century’s first decade, we suddenly had John Kerry and Hillary Clinton exiting a Senate hearing and taking to the microphones to discuss “global climate change.” No one officially announced this name change, of course. It just sort of happened. And with it came the lovely new premise that what our CO2 emissions are causing is neither warming nor cooling, per se, but rather “change.” “What kind of change?” you ask. Invalid question. Just “change.” Change from what? From some previous year’s “climate”? From some objective standard of what would have happened “naturally,” had we icky humans not spewed the by-product of so much life-sustaining productivity into Gaia’s aura? It makes little difference; no need to fuss about what exactly the “changers” are claiming is changing, since the particular changes that might occur from here on out are of no consequence to the theory. Any change will do – including no change at all, which can also be interpreted as a change, if you tilt your head a bit to one side.
The unanimous, settled scientists and their masters, the unanimous, settled proponents of global governance, have continued to act as though they still want you to accept that temperatures are rising every year, ice caps are shrinking, polar bears are drowning, and so on. “Global climate change” is, for most practical purposes, still “global warming.” This is necessary, since global regulation requires global panic, and it would be much more difficult to stir panic over the idea – which is, officially, the theory of the moment – that “temperatures, and their effects, may or may not change in one way or another over any given period of time.”
Global warming is indispensable as a political tool, even if it can only be preserved through a fuzzy bait-and-switch operation with global climate change
Global warming is indispensable as a political tool, even if it can only be preserved through a fuzzy bait-and-switch operation with global climate change. Nevertheless, the name change provided good backside protection. “Global climate change” takes a perfectly good bit of crackpot neo-religiosity and elevates it to the level of unfalsifiable pseudo-theory – unfalsifiable, as in nothing you could possibly present to the nutters by way of facts can ever be evidence to the contrary. Why not? Because there is no contrary.
If cooling, warming, and stasis are all evidence of anthropogenic global climate change, then science has finally followed the rest of the modern world into that realm of inescapable self-incrimination dubbed the Kafkaesque. We are guilty of global climate change. There is no proof. There is not even anyone to talk to by way of defending ourselves. Having been inexplicably accused, we will simply be sent on a dreamlike quest through a never-ending maze of inhuman obfuscation until, gradually, we come to accept that the accusation against us must be true, or else it would not have been made. At this point, we must desire our own demise, as the only “just” resolution, given the undefined crimes of which we have convicted ourselves.
At last, as the fight to defend global warming reached fever pitch over some e-mails seeming to discuss evidence-alteration – remember, this defense of warming took place years after the official line was that it didn’t matter whether the temperature was rising or not – one of the main players in the scandal, and one of the most prominent and respected defenders of the cause-without-any-definable-effect, stepped forward to concede that there has been no warming since 1995. When asked whether he thought natural causes could account for the warming from 1975-1998, and if so, to what extent, he answered, “This area is slightly outside my area of expertise. When considering changes over this period we need to consider all possible factors (so human and natural influences as well as natural internal variability of the climate system).”
So let’s get this straight: Dr. Phil Jones, one of the world’s foremost authorities on global climate change, says that the question of the possibility and degree of natural climate influences is outside of his area of expertise. Translation: I don’t do climate change; I do man-made climate change. His expertise is in trying to show the existence of an influence on climate that no one prior to 1970 thought was possible, and he thinks that looking at other influences which everyone has always known were real is outside of his area. In other words, looking at known facts of nature would get in the way of his career-advancing conjectures, so, as a matter of professional policy, he doesn’t look at them.
Notice that when Jones lists “all possible factors” of warming from 1975-1998, he lists “human influences” first, as though this were the obvious first place to look for an explanation of a variation in global temperatures over a 23-year period – as though no 23-year period has ever shown a variation in temperatures before. His default assumption is the furthest one from common sense, namely that humans did it.
Likewise, in our latest contribution to unfalsifiability, in which cold winters have been interpreted as a symptom of global warming – in spite of the fact that until recently, the party line was to deny that winters are still cold at all – the research project undertaken to reach this conclusion is described this way: “Cohen and his co-authors began by asking themselves why winter temperatures in the northern hemisphere aren’t going up as quickly as in the spring, summer and fall.” Once again, the default assumption is anthropogenic global warming. The task the researchers set for themselves was to explain away falsifying evidence. For example, why were they not trying to explain how the cold winters might be causing warmer summers? Because the paradigm they are working in demands that all apparent exceptions to global warming be explained away. Thirty-five years ago, they would indeed have been making the opposite argument, in order to salvage global cooling.
Recently, a former Korean student of mine made a typical unquestioning reference to global warming. Constitutionally averse to letting smart people say stupid things, I briefly offered some of the usual arguments against anthropogenic climate change. My student answered, diplomatically, that the issue seemed to be a “mystery,” but that as she was unable to verify my facts in her first language, and as so many intelligent people were working on this issue at the UN, she was obliged to stick to her position. In other words, she was assuming, as we are all meant to do, that the burden of proof is on the “denier.”
I asked her this question: If I went to the police and told them you were a murderer, should they arrest you? Why not? Because we put the burden of proof on the accuser, which is to say, on the person proposing something that falls outside of normal assumptions. Why do we do the opposite with man-made global climate change? |
Hello there. In this article, we’ll take a look at seven articles that cover the process of data visualization for the web. The original idea was to make it helpful for as many people as possible. That’s why I tried to concentrate on different topics such as HTMl5 Canvas, CSS, SVG, JavaScript Libraries, and Gantt Charts.
1. HTML5 Canvas Tutorial: An Introduction
Our first one is not actually about charts or something like that. In fact, there are only three practical examples in this article: Drawing Lines, Drawing Rectangle, and Drawing Text. But what’s more important is that author gives you a possibility to learn how HTML5 Canvas works. And after that you can use this technology the way you want.
So, what’s so important about HTML5 Canvas? First of all, you can use it to create almost any type of project, from Data Representation to Gaming. Talking about the technology itself, it has tons of great features. It’s interactive and can respond to your actions. Every canvas object can be animated. It’s a web standard, so there’s no reason to worry about the browsers compatibility. Check the article if you ant to get the whole picture about the canvas’ strong sides.
Talking about the article, since it’s an introduction to the technology, I assume that it was written mostly for the beginners. Basic knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript is everything you need to know to get the idea.
Link to the article
2. Making Charts with CSS
Something more practical this time. This article will help you build Bar Charts, Sparklines, and Pie Charts with plain CSS. What’s good about this article is that it describes the possible pros and cons of such an approach. It’s well written, and every step is described pretty well. But since this time there’s some Sass code, it’s probably not the best choice for the rookies.
Link to the article
3. Creating Your Own Online Gantt Application with dhtmlxGantt
Those two was pretty easy, huh? Well, here’s something new. This article will teach you how to build your own online Gantt Chart app using dhtmlxGantt. What’s so unusual about it? Well, unlike the previous two, this article describes the full process of application building. There are back-end and front-end parts that cover the following main phases: database creation, database handling, chart initialization and adding some extra features (e.g. exporting, important tasks highlighting, etc.).
If you want to try it by yourself, there are some preparation that should be done before you get started. You should have a local web server with PHP and MySQL running to build this chart.
Link to the article
4. Visualize Data Beautifully with Chart.js Library
Building a chart from the scratch may be not as easy as you’d like. But have no fear. There’s always a possibility to use a JavaScript library for that task. Chart.js is an open-source library that uses HTML5 canvas for rendering. It’s intuitive and easy to learn so that you won’t face any trouble.
This article describes how you can create different types of charts such as Line Chart, Bar Chart, Radar Chart, Polar Area Chart, Pie Chart and Doughnut Chart. And, moreover, they’re animated! Check this demo page if you don’t trust me.
Link to the article
5. Building a Multi-Line Chart Using D3.js
D3.js is the JavaScript library that was designed for data processing and visualization. It consists of little utilities that allow you handle the data and create DOM elements.
This article has two parts and covers the fundamental principles of chart building. From the first part, you’ll learn how to build the axes, create a single line and a multi-line chart. The second part will teach you how to make our graph scale dynamically, add the legend to your chart, and handle the events. Great beginning guide.
Link to the article: Part 1, Part 2
6. Designing Flexible, Maintainable Pie Charts with CSS and SVG
Guess, it’s the most detailed article I’ve seen in awhile. It will guide you through the process of pie chart creation covering the tiniest details.
You’ll learn how to use CSS animation, what issues you can face during the working process, and, what’s more important, what benefits you can get choosing SVG over the pure CSS.
Link to the article
7. 11 Best jQuery Charting Libraries
It’s not a secret that jQuery is a standard nowadays. There are dozens of famous JavaScript frameworks that were built on its basis. jQuery is the must. No doubt about it.
That’s why I chose this article. Every charting library has its own strong and weak sides. There are big and advanced libraries that allow you build some exotic charts like Cytoscape.js, for example. On the other hand there’s Easy Pie Chart that does one job – renders pie charts, but it makes it good.
Link to the article |
NY Daily News reports that the Department of Justice has announced that the NYC Board of Elections broke federal law when it improperly purged nearly 120,000 Democratic Brooklyn voters from the rolls ahead of last April’s presidential primary. This latest report adds to widespread allegations that the Democratic Party rigged the primary in favor of Hillary Clinton.
New York City Board of elections was reported to have admitted it broke Federal law last year, after “the number of active registered Democrats dropped there by 63,558 voters between November 2015 and April 2016. That translates into a 7 percent drop in registered Democrats in the borough.”
WNYC reported: “States are not allowed to kick voters off the roles solely because they’ve failed to vote — but may remove them only if there’s reliable information indicating they have moved away, they don’t respond to a notice sent to their home, and they don’t vote through the second federal general election after that notice.”
However, according to the latest reports, “BOE didn’t follow those rules in its purge — and in fact removed thousands of voters who had voted since 2008, along with others who had not but were entitled to remain registered, according to the federal brief.”
Although none of the news reports have explicitly stated that this purge was in favor of the Clinton campaign, the news corroborates allegations that the primary was rigged in favor of the ultimately unsuccessful Democratic nominee.
That Democratic voters were improperly purged from the voting rolls corroborates numerous claims that the DNC actively orchestrated to rig the 2016 Democratic Primary in favor of Hillary Clinton.
Accusations of corruption leveled at the DNC were largely validated by Wikileaks’ release of the DNC emails, as well as defense counsel statements in the DNC Fraud lawsuit to the effect that the DNC favoring one candidate over another was not illegal.
The Daily Mail recently reported that a Bernie Sanders campaign organizer and long-time Democrat has also filed a new lawsuit, accusing the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton of fraud and seeking access to their servers: “a move that his lawyer believes will solve the murder of DNC staff member Seth Rich.”
Disobedient Media previously reported on the unfolding DNC Fraud Lawsuit, and although the lawsuit against the DNC supporters was dismissed, attorneys for the plaintiffs in the case filed an appeal last month.
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Windows 10: Free Upgrades, Spartan Browser & Holographics
Microsoft said its developers consulted 1.7 million Windows Insiders, who delivered 800,000 pieces of feedback on more than 200 topics regarding the new OS.
Windows 10: 7 Predictions Of What's Next (Click image for larger view and slideshow.)
Microsoft executives discussed how a slew of new Windows 10 features will operate across PCs, tablets, laptops and smartphones … and casually announced its foray into holographic technology -- during an event at the company's Redmond, Wash., headquarters on Jan. 21.
It's clear that Microsoft understands its Windows 8 OS was not well received, and it's working to bring a more seamless, personalized computing experience to enterprises and homes. To do this, developers consulted 1.7 million Windows Insiders, who delivered 800,000 pieces of feedback on more than 200 topics regarding the new OS, according to the company.
Terry Myerson, executive vice president of Microsoft's operating systems group, kicked off the day's presentations with the news of free upgrades. For the first year that Windows 10 is available, Microsoft will provide a free upgrade to the OS for all devices running Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows Phone 8.1, said Myerson. Windows 10 will be available as a service, and Microsoft will keep it current for the supported lifetime of the device it's running on.
Windows 10 offers Windows 7 fans a more familiar experience than Windows 8 did. In addition to a new notifications bar, users will be happy to see the return of the Start menu, which is available in the traditionally small view, or in full-screen view.
[10 Real Reasons Microsoft Skipped Windows 9]
The new Continuum interface will provide a single platform across all devices and is designed to allow users to seamlessly transition from tablet to PC mode by attaching the keyboard and mouse.
Additionally, Windows 10 PCs will live-sync with Windows 10 mobile devices. The universal app platform offers the "mobility of experience" for users; all apps will perform similarly no matter which Windows device is being used.
Cortana played a major role at the Jan. 21 event. Microsoft's spoken-voice competitor to Apple's Siri will join the Windows 10 desktop with new features that enhance PC functionality. Cortana can search within a device's hard drive for specific documents, send emails, play or pause music automatically, and display notifications or photos.
The mobile version of Windows 10 features customized background images, grouped app lists, and additional features to the Action Center. Users can sync notifications for desktops and PCs, adjust the keyboard size to type with one hand, or speak to type. As predicted, the Windows 10 mobile OS will feature mobile-enhanced versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook. The universal touch-first apps will also be available across devices.
Microsoft also confirmed the development of a new browser, code-named Project Spartan, which will be available for PCs and mobile devices. Features include an enhanced note-taking mode in which users can write on webpages then save and share them, a reading list that becomes part of the core browsing experience on all devices, and Cortana.
Gamers will be happy to know that Microsoft is also taking steps to make games more personal and social. The new Xbox app for Windows 10 will let gamers stream and play games on PCs, as well as save and share video clips from game-play.
Microsoft saved two big surprises for the end of its event. The first, Microsoft Surface Hub, is an 84-inch display that lends itself to meetings and brainstorming sessions. The multi-functional touch screen is designed to allow users to connect with remote team members, move and mark screen content, and share meeting notes with participants.
[Office 365 is getting an upgrade: Microsoft Buys Equivio]
The second, and arguably most exciting of the day's announcements, is "Windows Holographic," a project intended to deliver holographic computing through Windows 10.
Using the see-through high-definition Microsoft HoloLens headgear, users can interact with holograms surrounding them. The gear contains advanced sensors to capture environmental details, high-end CPU and GPU, and HPU (holographic processing unit). The holographic chip understands the wearer's movements and voice, and displays holograms in midair or on physical objects.
"We invented the most advanced holographic computer the world has ever seen," said Alex Kipman, technical fellow in Microsoft's operating systems group and head of Windows Holographic. Users can interact with the Windows 10 HoloStudio app to create 3D objects by means of voice and motion.
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Kelly Sheridan is the Staff Editor at Dark Reading, where she focuses on cybersecurity news and analysis. She is a business technology journalist who previously reported for InformationWeek, where she covered Microsoft, and Insurance & Technology, where she covered financial ... View Full Bio
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In a paper published in the physics journal, Classical and Quantum Gravity, Dr. Diego Rubiera-Garcia from the University of Lisbon in Portugal, and his team, posited that a physical object, such as a person or spacecraft, could survive the gravitational forces of wormhole travel. To make the theory and math work, they do have to play fast and loose with Einstein, but that’s not a big deal apparently.
According to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the innermost centre of a black hole holds a singularity; a point where gravitational forces are so strong that space and time end. If any object made it to a black hole’s event horizon, and eventually its singularity, it would be stretched into infinity; simply put, an infinitely thin piece of infinitely long spaghetti. However, since no evidence exists to support the existence of singularities, physicists have been taking some liberties with the theory.
Earlier this year, the theory of the ‘naked singularity’ was published, which suggests the universe has 5 dimensions instead of 4. New theories in quantum physics also call into question many theoretical aspects of Einstein’s work, especially those concerning black holes. While we rely heavily on the current ‘rules’ of the physical universe, Einstein’s work is not set in stone; the universe could be much spookier and weird. Knowing this, physicists have begun to develop new theories which fill in a few theoretical gaps and loopholes; one is Rubiera-Garcia’s hypothesis that if a singularity isn’t necessarily the centre of a given black hole, it could be a finite-sized wormhole.
He and his team began by figuring out what would happen to objects if they survived the event horizon and made it to the wormhole. Using geodesic lines, which are the paths in space-time that free-falling objects follow, they created a model. Using a given object, they plotted the chemical and physical interactions that keep an object together as it travels through space and time. Rubiera-Garcia states,
Each particle of the observer [object] follows a geodesic line determined by the gravitational field…Each geodesic feels a slightly different gravitational force, but the interactions among the constituents of the body could nonetheless sustain the body.
In other words, if there is no singularity but rather a finite wormhole, objects would still experience extreme gravitational forces from the black hole, but ‘stay together’ in a sense. The team explains,
…different parts of the body will still establish physical or chemical interactions and, consequently, cause and effect still apply all the way across the throat of the wormhole…
The objects that enter the black hole will only be stretched and crushed to the size of the wormhole. If that object entered the wormhole, and hypothetically came out the other side, it would still be intact. It would be really weird looking, but not destroyed, which, in theoretical physics, isn’t too bad. It’s better than entering a singularity and meeting the end of space and time anyway.
This is obviously all theoretical, and since we have yet to actually ‘see’ a black hole, it will remain that way. That being said, it at least allows for physicists to begin redeeming the idea of the black hole, which has carried with it a stigma of being a frightening obliterator of all things that exist. Wormholes are cute, singularities are not.
For more information on wormholes, and whether they could possibly exist, check out the video below. |
Story highlights A hearing officer would determine if a complaint has merit, requiring schools to stop teaching any controversial material
But critics fear anyone with an ideological agenda will be able to challenge what is being taught
(CNN) A new Florida law would let anyone in the state challenge, and possibly change, what kids are learning in school.
Any Florida resident can raise concerns about teaching material they find unfit for public school classrooms, according to legislation that went into effect Saturday. The bill was introduced in February by Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Naples, and was signed into law last week after passing with bipartisan support.
An "unbiased hearing officer," not employed by the school district, would determine if a complaint has merit, requiring schools to take any controversial books or material out of the classroom.
Previously, only parents could file complaints, which were then heard by a school board.
Supporters of the law have disputed material presenting global warming and evolution as "reality." Others found certain reading material to be "pornographic." And for some, US and world history textbooks seem biased and anti-American.
Read More |
For an overview of spacesuits in the Fallout series , see Space suit.
The REPCONN space suit is a piece of clothing in Fallout: New Vegas.
Contents show]
Characteristics Edit
These suits are used for traveling in the inhospitable vacuum of space. It is classified as a light armor and can be repaired with radiation suits. It also has a high radiation resistance.
Location Edit
This armor is found in the REPCONN test site during the quest Come Fly With Me. It is found down in the REPCONN basement, overlooking the inaccessible irradiated rocket hangar, where you go to give the fuel and thrust control modules to the Bright Brotherhood. The space suit and helmet will be on a shelf to the left when you enter the door. Unlike the suit, the helmet does not provide additional radiation resistance.
The only other space suits are worn by Bright followers, who will be found in the irradiated hangar. By killing them, extra space suits can be procured.
Notes Edit
Behind the scenes Edit
The space suit was inspired by this particular photograph, according to Josh Sawyer's Facebook account.[1]
Bugs Edit
PC Playstation 3 Xbox 360 [verified]
PC Playstation 3 Xbox 360 player.equipitem 00025b83 . Since this is just an appearance malfunction, you do not need it at all. Equipping other armors will display that armor's corresponding left glove instead. [verified]
. Since this is just an appearance malfunction, you do not need it at all. Equipping other armors will display that armor's corresponding left glove instead. Xbox 360 [verified]
PC Playstation 3 Xbox 360 [verified]
PC Playstation 3 [verified]
Gallery Edit
The image used to model the spacesuit
Add an image to this gallery |
State Auditor Jim Zeigler is sticking by his endorsement of Roy Moore in the special election for the U.S. Senate and dismissed the relevance of a Washington Post story about Moore's alleged pursuit of teenage girls when he was in his early 30s.
"First, Roy Moore denies the report," Zeigler said. "Secondly, it happened 37 years ago. Third, in each of the alleged incidents, the Washington Post says there was no sexual intercourse and he did not attempt sexual intercourse.
"So even if you believe the Washington Post story, he stopped. But he denies the Washington Post report," Zeigler continued.
Religious leaders slam Zeigler for comparing Moore scandal to Joseph and Mary "Take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus," Zeigler said. "There's just nothing immoral or illegal here. Maybe just a little bit unusual."
"The Washington Post has had paid investigators in Alabama for the last month trying to dig up dirt on Roy Moore," Zeigler said. "The best they could come up with was something that happened 37 years ago that he denies."
Zeigler also questioned the credibility of the main accuser in the story.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Zeigler mentioned encounters between men and much younger women in the Bible.
"Zechariah was extremely old to marry Elizabeth and they became the parents of John the Baptist," Zeigler said. "Also take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus."
"There's just nothing immoral or illegal here. Maybe just a little bit unusual."
Edited at 4:53 p.m. to correct spelling of Zechariah. |
Gov. John Kasich (R-Ohio) said on Tuesday that he supports the Cleveland Cavaliers signing retired NBA guard Allen Iverson.
“That’s been a rumor,” the presidential candidate said when asked by TMZ about the former professional basketball player.
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“I’d love to have Iverson back in Cleveland,” he said. "Are they talking about it?
“Wow, A.I.,” the 2016 GOP presidential candidate added. "I’m for it.”
Kasich also praised LeBron James, the Cavaliers’ current hoop star.
“He’s right up there,” he said when asked if the NBA forward is a “savior” of Ohio.
TMZ said on Tuesday that rumors have repeatedly circulated that Iverson is interested in playing for the Cavaliers next season.
Iverson initially retired from the NBA in October 2013 following 14 seasons in the professional basketball league.
He was selected as an NBA All-Star 11 times and won its MVP award during the 2001 season.
Iverson, now 40, most notably played for the Philadelphia 76ers but also had stints as a Denver Nugget, a Detroit Piston and a Memphis Grizzly.
Kasich’s endorsement comes as he struggles for his own success in the GOP’s crowded 2016 field.
The Ohio governor presently ranks seventh out of 15 Republican White House hopefuls across multiple national polls.
Kasich currently receives 3.2 percent voter support, according to the latest RealClearPolitics average of samplings. |
Johann Reichhart ( – ) was a state-appointed judicial executioner in Bavaria, Germany from 1924–1946. During the Nazi Germany era, he executed numerous people who were sentenced to death for resisting National Socialism.[2]
Life and career [ edit ]
Johann Reichhart was born in Wichenbach near Wörth an der Donau into a family of Bavarian knackers and executioners, including his uncle Franz Xaver Reichhart and brother Michael, that went back eight generations to the mid-eighteenth century. His father (d. 1902) had a small farm on a remote land in Wichenbach near Tiefenthal (Wörth an der Donau) and took on extra work as a master knacker. Reichhart attended the Volks-school and vocational school in Wörth an der Donau, both of which he completed successfully. He then completed an apprenticeship as butcher, and served as a soldier in the First World War.[2]
Beginnings as an executioner in the Weimar Republic [ edit ]
In April 1924, Reichhart took over the office of state judicial executioner in the Free State of Bavaria from his uncle Franz Xaver Reichhart (1851-1934), who retired at age 70. For each execution, Reichhart was paid 150 Goldmark plus ten marks for daily expenses, and given a 3rd-class railway ticket. For executions in the Palatinate (Pfalz), he was dispatched by express train.[2]
Executions decreased during 1924–1928, and Reichhart executed only 23 people (only one in 1928), and he had difficulty making a living for his family. He negotiated the right to take on other work domestically and abroad, and was released from the requirement of local residence. His business ventures failed, however; he gave up his wagon transport business in 1925, and in 1926 his inn at Mariahilfplatz. He sold Catholic treatises in Upper Bavaria as a traveling salesman. In 1928, he attempted but failed to resolve his contract with the Bavarian Ministry of Justice. He moved his residence to The Hague and became a successful independent greengrocer.
In the spring of 1931 and in July 1932, Reichhart travelled to Munich to carry out death sentences at Stadelheim Prison. In July 1932, several Dutch newspapers described his "other activities" and revealed his identity, which was normally kept incognito. As a result, Reichhart's business dwindled, and in the spring of 1933 he returned to Munich, where he considered ending his work as executioner.[2]
National Socialism [ edit ]
On 22 June 1933, following the seizure of power by the National Socialists, Reichhart signed a new contract with the Bavarian Ministry of Justice. He now received a fixed, significantly higher annual salary, paid monthly. On 18 July 1933, following a request from the Ministry of Justice for Saxony, Reichhart was also authorized to execute in the state of Saxony and received a flat fee for "each occurrence". The guillotine (Fallschwertmaschine) and assistants were provided to him by the Free State of Saxony at the execution sites in Dresden and Weimar. In January 1934, the Bavarian judiciary raised his annual income to 3,720 Reichsmark, and he no longer needed to worry about his financial security.[2]
From 1 September 1933, Reichhart joined the National Socialist Motor Corps (NSKK), the National Socialist War Victim's Care (NSKOV), the National Socialist People's Welfare (NSV) and the German Labour Front (DAF). In April 1937 he joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP).
The Reich Ministry of Justice (Reichsjustizministerium), by decree of 25 August 1937, reassigned its areas of responsibility and named three executioners. Ernst Reindelr [de] was responsible for the central execution sites in Berlin, Wroclaw and Königsberg; Friedrich Hehr [de] was responsible for executions in Butzbach, Hamburg, Hanover and Cologne; and Reichhart was named for executions in Munich, Dresden, Stuttgart and Weimar. On 19 February 1939, after the annexation of Austria, the Reich Minister of Justice ordered a change of territories: Reichhart gave Weimar to Friedrich Hehr, and added Vienna and Frankfurt to his territories (Frankfurt replacing Butzbach). Reichhart temporarily suffered from depression.[2]
During his service, Reichhart worked to accelerate the execution process and make it "less stressful" for convicted people. Beginning around 1939, he had the tipping board (bascule) on the guillotine replaced by a fixed bench. The condemned was held by his assistants, without restraint devices, until the hatchet blade was dropped. Reichhart abolished the black blindfold; instead, one of his assistants held the convict's eyes closed. These measures shortened the duration of the actual execution to 3–4 seconds (time specified by Johann Reichhart).[2]
Reichhart also carried out executions in Cologne, Frankfurt-Preungesheim, Berlin-Plötzensee, Brandenburg-Görden and Breslau, where central execution sites had also been constructed. From 1938 to 1944 he was also executioner for central execution sites in Vienna and Graz. From 1924 on, during the Weimar Republic and the period of National Socialism, he executed 2,951 people (250 of them women) via guillotine, and 59 by hanging. He also executed Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl (d. 22 February 1943), the most famous members of the resistance group White Rose (see also Hans and Sophie Scholl). Reichhart later said that he had never seen anyone die as bravely as Sophie Scholl.[2]
After the 20 July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944, the number of executions rose sharply. In December 1944, in the administrative divisions of central execution centres, Reichhart was designated as the executioner of the "execution centre for the execution district VIII", which included Munich-Stadelheim (Stadelheim Prison), Remand Prison Stuttgart and Penitentiary Bruchsal.[2]
Executioner for the US Military Government [ edit ]
Following VE Day, Reichhart, a member of the Nazi Party, was arrested by members of the United States Army and spent one week in Stadelheim Prison for the purposes of denazification. He was not tried for carrying out his official duties as judicial executioner. He was subsequently employed by the U.S. Office of Military Government, until the end of May 1946, to help execute 156 Nazi war criminals on the gallows at Landsberg am Lech. The technique required for this must have been known to him since 1942 at the latest, when he submitted a design proposal for British-style gallows with trapdoor (Long drop), which was rejected by the Reich Ministry of Justice (hanging, was by the Reichs-Law of 29 March 1933 introduced as an additional form of execution). With hanging executions during the Third Reich era, Reichhart had to work with the Austro-Hungarian short drop pole method of strangulation hanging (Würgegalgen [de]: strangulation gallows).[2]
In August 1945, Reichhart was denounced by the Munich city administration. He lived comfortably in a villa and had several cars. Formally, he was still a judicial executioner of the Free State of Bavaria without acting in this capacity.[2]
At the end of May 1946, Reichhart learned that he had executed two innocent people due to mistaken identity.[4] He subsequently retired as an executioner and served only as a consultant. He assisted American master sergeant John C. Woods in managing the gallows, and was commissioned by the United States Military Government to supervise the construction of the gallows in Nuremberg. On 16 October 1946, Woods hanged the war criminals convicted in the Nuremberg trials, assisted by Joseph Malta.[2]
Post-executioner life [ edit ]
In May 1947, Reichhart was imprisoned again. After a denazification trial process in Munich in December 1948, he was "incriminated" and sentenced to two years in a labour camp and confiscation of half of his assets. Following an appeal, the sentence was reduced to one and a half years and confiscation of 30% of his property. Since the prison sentence was settled, Reichhart was subsequently dismissed. Reichhart's activity made him a lonely person. His marriage failed. His son, Hans, dispirited by his father's occupation and the denazification trial, committed suicide in 1950.[2]
Impoverished and despised by many, Reichhart lived on a small military pension from the First World War. In 1963, during a series of murders of taxi drivers, when public demands increased for the reintroduction of capital punishment, Reichhart spoke out against the death penalty.[7]
Reichhart was temporarily confined in Algasing [de] psychiatric hospital.[2] He died on 26 April 1972, at a hospital in Dorfen, at the age of 78.
Miscellaneous [ edit ]
In early 2014, it was determined that a guillotine found at the Bavarian National Museum was probably the one which Reichhart had used to execute the Scholls.[citation needed]
References [ edit ]
Notes
Bibliography |
'Flying Doughnuts': Airbus Files Patent For A New Kind Of Plane
Enlarge this image toggle caption Espacenet Espacenet
Airbus has filed a patent for a new plane that looks decidedly more Star Trek Enterprise than airplane.
The Financial Times dubbed it "flying doughnuts."
According to the patent application, the craft would address a long-standing problem for plane designers — pressurized cabins, which stress planes on the front and back ends and require heavy, reinforced frames.
The patent says the new design would distribute that pressure in a way that would be more "economic and efficient."
Airbus says the design also has an additional benefit: Seating passengers in a circle, doughnut-style, allows for more fliers than the old-fashioned paper-towel-holder-with-two-wings.
"An approximately cylindrical geometry limits possibilities for increasing the passenger carrying capacity of the aircraft," the patent says.
Airbus spokesman Justin Dubon, though, told NPR that the design is not currently in production — and may never be. Dubon says the company files more than 600 patents every year.
"Some of these become the seed for other ideas with practical use," he says.
Still, Dubon says, "There are some very clever people here that have fantastic ideas. And who knows? Maybe one day they will come to light."
In the meantime, Airbus may want to start redesigning the drink carts to handle curves. |
A simple parking ticket can lead to a hold on your vehicle registration and threats to intercept California tax refunds. The $73 citations, which can spiral, if unpaid, to $175 or more, are the bane of many Angelenos' existence. They brought nearly $150 million to municipal coffers last year and are acknowledged to be a necessary stream of revenue for City Hall's budget. In essence, they're just another way to tax people without saying so.
This week a state lawmaker proposed mandatory parking-ticket payment plans for cities including Los Angeles. And yesterday, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation announced its own limited payment program.
The bill, by Assemblyman Tom Lackey of Palmdale, would "require local governments to create a monthly payment plan by which low-income drivers will be able to realistically pay their parking fines," according to a fact sheet from the Republican's office. |
UPDATE: Amazon issued a statement Friday night saying, "When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers' devices, and refunded customers. We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances." However, the company did not touch on whether it would monitor more closely what books get uploaded as part of its self-serve system for publishers to avoid such circumstances altogether.
The press loves a juicy story, and Amazon served one up on a silver platter this morning by automatically deleting certain copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from customers' Kindles. But many facts were left out of this media frenzy, namely that the ebooks were essentially pirated copies sold for 99-cents by a company that had no rights to the material.
Amazon was able to remove the titles because the Kindle is configured to automatically sync up with the user's Bookshelf via the electronic book reader's WhisperNet wireless service. When the company removed the unauthorized books from customers' accounts, they also disappeared from the Kindle. Amazon then delivered a cryptic e-mail about what happened:
"We recently discovered a problem with a Kindle book that you have purchased. We have processed a refund to the payment method used to acquire this book. The next time the wireless is activated on your device, the problematic item will be removed. If you are not in a wireless coverage area, please connect your device to a computer using your USB cable and delete the file from the documents folder."
Naturally, the media went wild.
Amazon deleting books remotely? And the book in question being 1984, the dystopian classic where deep surveillance and censorship is the norm? It could only get more ironic if it was Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451.
David Pogue at The New York Times hopped on the story early, claiming that "the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition," and stated that Amazon "electronically deleted all books by this author." Pogue asserted that "Amazon...caved" on the matter.
The normally-reliable Harry McCracken at Technologizer wrote, "The books' publisher decided that it wasn't so hot on the idea of electronic rights after all."
TechCrunch went so far as to compare Amazon's action to burning books, writing that the retailer deleted "perfectly legal versions" of 1984 and Animal Farm. "Big Brother is in your Kindle. Watching," TechCrunch's MG Siegler wrote.
According to the NYT's Pogue, "it's like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we've been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table."
Oh, give me a break. Whatever happened to a little fact checking? I guess we don't bother with that when a juicy story can be used to drum up comments and pageviews.
I hate to be a party pooper ("Kindles" is now a top trend on Twitter with comments on this nearly every second), but let's get some facts straight before we compare Amazon to Big Brother:
The two books in question were published for the Kindle by a company called Mobile Reference, which offers public domain books for around $1. Mobile Reference did not have the right to sell Orwell's novels because 1984 and Animal Farm are still under copyright protection in the United States. They were not legitimate or "perfectly legal" copies of the books, but rather illicit copies that should not have been sold in the first place.
Contrary to what the New York Times reported, the publisher did not change its mind, nor did Amazon cave to pressure. Rather, Amazon was notified that copyrighted material was being sold on the Amazon store without permission and it removed said material.
In addition, the NYT's claim that Amazon deleted all works by this author is incorrect. In fact, there are still multiple copies of 1984 still for sale on the Kindle -- just not for 99-cents from a company that had no rights to do so. Other ebooks published by Mobile Reference that do fall under public domain are also still for sale.
This is not the first time such an event has happened. Amazon has had to perform widespread recalls from the Kindle at least two other times in the past, and the company sent out the exact same notification. Ayn Rand's books were put up on the Kindle Store without consent from the Ayn Rand Institute and had to be pulled down, while unauthorized copies of Stephenie Meyer's popular Twilight series had to be removed as well. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was reportedly offered for sale for a few hours on Monday, even though electronic versions of the books have not been authorized.
Of course, those titles don't invoke the delicious irony of Amazon lurking inside your Kindle and deleting 1984.
That's not to say that Amazon's actions were completely justifiable. The two ebooks may have been illegal copies, but they were purchased by the customer. In the real world, if you purchase stolen goods, you don't get to keep those goods, but you're also properly informed of the situation. This is where Amazon messed up.
Instead of being honest about what happened -- that it sold unauthorized ebooks and has done so in the past -- Amazon only told customers that there was "a problem." While removing such titles from a customer's Bookshelf and in turn deleting them from the Kindle may be standard policy, a lack of communication about what actually happened has led to a media firestorm that will surely last through the weekend. Amazon also could have offered customers a legitimate replacement copy of 1984 or Animal Farm and footed the difference, because in the end, this was Amazon's mistake.
Perhaps most importantly, this case and the others before it highlight a major problem with Amazon's Kindle Store. The retailer shouldn't have been selling copyrighted material in the first place, and it needs to take a serious look at its acceptance policies to prevent such occurrences in the future. By comparison, Apple has stringent reviews of all applications submitted to its iPhone App Store.
So is Amazon going to come take legitimate books off your nightstand because a publisher changed its mind, or even burn down your library as TechCrunch implies? No. But hopefully it will put policies into place on the Kindle Store so it won't need to recall unauthorized ebooks in the future. |
The U.S. Army general picked to lead U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan warns the security situation there is deteriorating despite a valiant effort by Afghan forces.
Lieutenant-General John "Mick" Nicholson told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday that terror groups like Islamic State and al-Qaida continue to see Afghanistan as an attractive sanctuary. He warned the U.S. may need to take a more aggressive approach.
"We still see attempts by terrorist organizations to get into Afghanistan," Nicholson said. "Do we have the right level of CT [counterterrorism] capability to deal with that?"
Of particular concern to U.S. military and intelligence officials is the spread of the Islamic State group, which has sought to establish a sanctuary in Nangarhar province, and a resurgent al-Qaida in Kandahar province.
The Taliban have also re-emerged as a threat, briefly seizing the northern city of Kunduz last year while also taking key districts in Helmand province. There are concerns, too, that the Taliban have hopes of retaking their spiritual home in Kandahar.
Nicholson assured lawmakers he would not let the U.S. sit idly by.
"We need to prevent Kandahar from falling into the hands of the Taliban," Nicholson said, adding he would "absolutely" recommend using U.S. military force to prevent the Taliban from retaking the provincial capital.
If approved by lawmakers, Nicholson would take over as the commander for U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan from Gen. John Campbell, who is expected to retire.
‘Crisis situation’
The U.S. currently has about 9,800 troops in Afghanistan for counterterrorism activities and to train and advise Afghan security forces. But that number is expected to drop to about 5,500 by the end of the year, worrying lawmakers.
"I believe we are in a crisis situation," said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, a constant critic of the Obama administration's Afghanistan policy. "It makes no strategic or military sense to continue the withdrawal of American forces."
Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte also expressed alarm at the way the administration has telegraphed troop levels in Afghanistan to U.S. enemies.
"This has been a constant kabuki dance," Ayotte said. "We cannot afford to take on risks that allow obviously safe havens, again, for al-Qaida and ISIS engagement."
Nicholson said that, if confirmed, he would review U.S. troop levels during his first 90 days in command and make an appropriate recommendation, warning he saw the need for a long-term commitment.
Realistic expectations needed
But he also said the U.S. needed to have a realistic expectation of what can be achieved.
"This is Afghanistan. There will always be some level of violence in Afghanistan," Nicholson said.
"We're not trying to create a Western-style society here," he added. "We are looking at an adequate level of security to prevent the re-emergence of transnational terrorist threats."
Nicholson is currently the commander of NATO's Allied Land Command, based at Izmir, Turkey. He has served several tours of duty in Afghanistan and also commanded the 82nd Airborne Division and a company in the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment.
Lawmakers praised Nicholson for his experience.
Nicholson's nomination could go before the full Senate for vote as early as next week. |
The Hunt for Engineers: Expensify and the surprisingly difficult challenge of finding the right people
As many of our regular readers have probably noticed, we’ve been mentioning here and there for quite some time that we are in the market for new employees. And as we’ve said before, we’re taking a drastically slower route toward hiring than many startups do. But we’re being extra picky about who we hire, because we’re trying to preserve two things that are very important to us:
the integrity of our product, and
the corporate culture we’ve very carefully crafted
In other words, not just any Computer Science major will do. In fact, we don’t even care if you have a college degree. We don’t care if you’re a U.S. citizen.
What we do care about?
a great work ethic, almost to the point that some of your friends might call you masochistic. We work long, hard hours doing what we love, and if you’re the kind of person who wants to clock out at 5:00 or spend half the day surfing LOLCats, this isn’t the place for you.
a great character: fair, honest, with a decent sense of humor, and absolutely zero drama. Please, we get enough drama from watching Dexter.
talented and fast at picking new things up: you should be technologically multilingual, with the kind of intellectual flexibility that would make Neo’s bullet-avoiding backbend in The Matrix look like your grandma doing the limbo on a geriatric cruise. This doesn’t just apply to programming, though we demand a high level of talent and capability in that arena, for sure: what else are you good at? Can you speak in front of a group? Explain multiple step processes to your luddite relatives? Make a mean seven-layer dip? In essence, what else are you bringing to the table?
ambition: you’ve got to have it. We don’t want Expensify to be your final resting place; that’s just not how this industry works. We want people who are mobile, constantly looking for a next great project, working on side projects of their own, and with big plans for the future. And we want to help you get there, too.
Generally, we’ve found that our best applicants also have the following in common:
programming experience from way before their college years
a zest for adventure – everyone on staff is a world traveler, and have what one of our engineers referred to as a “willingness to get into trouble”
curriculum vitae that extend far beyond the classroom and the office: your most impressive work was probably done for the fun of it, anywhere from a junior high school bedroom to an exotic beach somewhere (our preferred location)
The point we’re trying to make is: the expectations are high, but the rewards are higher, and if you think you’ve got what it takes, we’d love to hear from you. We’ll sponsor a visa, buy your lunches, and propel your career to the next level – if you’re the right fit. |
The fifth assessment report from the IPCC looks at everything from oceans and sea ice to carbon budgets and geoengineering
Global change
The global climate has already changed in many ways that are unprecedented in the past hundreds or thousands of years, the world's scientists and governments concluded in the new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These changes have affected every region of the globe, on land and at sea. Continued carbon emissions will drive further heatwaves, sea level rise, melting ice and extreme weather. The changes will last for centuries and limiting the effects would require "substantial and sustained" cuts in carbon dioxide, the scientists report.
Temperatures
Scientists are now at least 66% certain that the last three decades are the warmest in 1400 years, with global temperature having risen by 0.9C in the last century. However, more than 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases is being stored in the oceans.
By mid-century, scientists predict a further rise of 1.4-2.6C if carbon emissions continue to rise as they are today. If emissions were halted almost immediately and significant carbon was extracted from the atmosphere, the rise by mid-century would be 0.4-1.6C.
The scientists predict the average temperature between 2080 and 2100 will be 2.6-4.8C higher than today if emissions are unchecked. They are 90% certain that heatwaves will be more frequent and longer.
In the oceans, the strongest surface warming is expected in tropical and sub-tropical regions, up to 2C by 2100 and posing a grave threat to coral reefs which sustain much sealife. Scientists conclude that a collapse of the Gulf Stream that warms western Europe, as dramatised in the film The Day After Tomorrow, is very unlikely this century but cannot be ruled out afterwards.
Oceans
Global sea level has already risen by 20cm in the last century and scientists are now 90% certain that the rate of the rise will increase. The tide line is rising as warming glaciers and ice sheets pour hundreds of billions of tonnes of water into the oceans each year, but an equally big factor is the warming – and therefore expansion – of the seawater itself.
The new projections for the average sea level in the period 2080-2100 are greater than in the 2007 report, ranging from 45-82cm higher than now if nothing is done to curb emissions to 26-55cm if carbon emissions are halted and reversed. In the former case, sea level could have risen by a 98cm by the end of the century, seriously threatening cities from Shanghai to New York and meaning hurricanes and cyclones inflict far worse damage when they hit shorelines.
Sea level projections have been controversial because exactly how fast glaciers and ice sheets will slip into the sea is not well known. A collapse in ice sheets is therefore not included in the estimates and could add tens of centimetres more to the rise. Because the big Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are slow to melt, scientists predict melting and sea level rise will continue for centuries. If a temperature rise of between 1C and 4C is sustained, the vast Greenland ice sheet will completely melt adding 7m to sea level, scientists predict, but over the course of a millennium.
The acidity of the ocean is also increasing, due the large amounts of carbon dioxide it is absorbing, and this will continue. This will harm shell-forming sealife but scientists are still determining to what extent.
Ice
The impact of warming is crystal clear in the faster rates of melting in virtually all the world's glaciers and the huge ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. The ice sheets have been shedding at least five times more water in the 2000s than in the 1990s, the scientists report. Northern hemisphere snow cover has fallen by 11% a decade since 1967 and the temperature of the seasonally frozen ground, or permafrost, has increased by 2-3C in Russia and Alaska.
Arctic sea ice has been melting by 9-14% a decade since 1979, while sea ice around Antarctica has been increasing by 1-2%, probably due to current changes.
Scientists are 90% sure that Arctic sea ice, snow cover and glaciers will continue to shrink. The scientists say a "nearly ice-free" Arctic ocean in September is at least 66% likely before 2050. By 2100 between 35% and 85% of the remaining world glacier volume will have vanished if emissions are not cut. Permafrost is also 99% likely to shrink further.
Extremes
It is 90% certain that the number of warm days and nights has increased globally and heatwaves have become more frequent, lasting longer in Europe, Asia and Australia. Droughts have also become more frequent and intense in the Mediterranean and west African regions.
The number of heavy rainfall events over land has increased in more regions than it has decreased. It is virtually certain that the frequency and intensity of the strongest tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic has increased since the 1970s.
The scientists concluded it is 99% certain that the frequency of warm days and warm nights increases in the next decades, while that of cold days and cold nights to decrease. The frequency and intensity of extreme downpours is very likely to increase in many populous regions.
Pause
The last decade has been the warmest on record but although CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have continued to accelerate, surface air temperatures have only marginally increased in the past 15 years, leading some to suggest global warming has stopped. The IPCC scientists reject this, reporting that while the warming trend is robust over decades, there is "substantial" variability within decades. They conclude: "Trends based on short records ... do not in general reflect long-term climate trends."
They add that the heat being trapped by global warming in 2011 was 43% more than the estimate for 2005 in their last report and that over 90% of all the heat added enters the oceans.
Carbon budget
Scientists calculate that nearly half of all the carbon dioxide that can be safely emitted without raising temperatures above a dangerous 2C has already been emitted. This, says the IPCC, means governments must act quickly to have a reasonable change of avoiding 2C. It is also very likely that more than 20% of emitted CO2 will remain in the atmosphere longer than 1,000 years after man-made missions have stopped. According to the IPCC, a large fraction of climate change is thus "irreversible on a human time-scale", except if man-made CO2 emissions are sucked out of the atmosphere over a long period.
Geoengineering
The scientists report that "geoengineering" the climate by reducing the amount of sunlight being absorbed by earth or by extracting and storing carbon dioxide and other climate-changing emissions is theoretically possible. But, the IPCC warns, there is insufficient knowledge to assess how effective such methods, such as pumping sunscreen chemical into the stratosphere, would be and warns of "side effects and long-term consequences on a global scale."
Abrupt change
It is "very likely" that the so-called Gulf Stream, which ferries warm water to western Europe, will weaken over the 21st century. But it is "very unlikely" to collapse or undergo a major transition this century. Further warming will lead to significant methane emissions from permafrost over the next century, equivalent to 50 to 250 billion tonnes of CO2. But the IPCC scientists do not assess the possibility of catastrophic releases this century.
Uncertainties
In terms of data, information is still limited in some locations and especially from before 1950s. There is also limited data from oceans below 700m.
Theoretical uncertainties are how pollution affects cloud formation and the planet's overall climate "sensitivity", ie how much it responds to extra CO2 in the atmosphere. The new report slightly reduces the minimum climate sensitivity but at the report's launch event, co-chair Thomas Stocker said that change, if realised would slow the impacts of climate change by just a few years.
There is uncertainty about the contribution of human activity to changes in tropical cyclones and droughts.
Other explanations of warming
The scientists state: "It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century." The report rules out any significant contribution from changing solar cycles, volcanoes and cosmic rays. |
Just as François Hollande's cash-strapped government pulls the plug on a score of expensive French state arts projects launched by his rightwing predecessor, one exorbitant aluminium structure has bucked the trend.
Paris's futuristic new classical concert venue, the Philharmonie de Paris – a vast metal construction which promises to transform the northern Paris skyline – is on track to become one of the world's most expensive concert halls despite attempts by some politicians to block it because of its spiralling price tag.
State auditors have also expressed gripes, but the government has decided the building work is so far advanced that nothing can halt the cultural juggernaut. It is likely to open its doors, two years late, in 2015, after delays, suspension, rows and rocketing budgets – and after having more than doubled in cost to a staggering €387m (£316m).
The 2,400-seat concert hall will sit in the Parc de la Villette, on the north-east edge of Paris, near the city's peripheral ring road and the grey dual carriageways that lead to the rundown suburbs.
Its creators argue that it will not only end Paris's long-running shame about its lack of purpose-built classical music venues to match Berlin or London, but it will revolutionise attendances by attracting, young, "non-elitist" classical concert audiences.
The extravagant metal-encased building, likened to a stack of giant paving stones reflecting the city, is the latest Paris creation by the French "starchitect" Jean Nouvel, whose previous designs include the Institut du Monde Arabe and the controversial Quai Branly ethnographic museum.
He has described the Philharmonie as "the most prestigious project" of his career. The planned metal-clad roof is likened to a hill which visitors can climb. The 52m (170ft)-high aluminium slab at the top, which will have the concert listings projected on it, will be visible from the ring road so people sitting in traffic on the famously drab, grey motorway can see what's on.
But French state auditors have warned of the "exorbitant inflation in costs" of the project that is publicly funded by the state and the city of Paris. Another senate report complained of a "worrying drift" in the budget, asking whether the project really had to be so "grand" and did Paris really need it?
The green party in Paris angrily abstained from a vote to grant more city cash, warning of a "bottomless pit" for the public purse in a time of financial crisis. Paris city hall defended the project as "more than just a concert hall", calling it a daring and necessary bid to renew classical music audiences.
While several other cultural projects are to be shelved, including Nicolas Sarkozy's controversial pet project for a new national history museum, the Socialist Hollande might now end up having to borrow Sarkozy's own cultural catchphrase uttered in defence of the criticised exorbitant state funding of the Philharmonie: "Who can argue that in this time of crisis we don't need music?"
• This article was amended on 10 January 2013 because the original said Philharmonie de Paris is on track to become the world's most expensive concert hall. This has been corrected to say one of the world's most expensive concert halls. |
Secretary of State Tillerson speaks to employees on his first day. (Photo: State Department/Flickr)
It’s not the role of American diplomats to join the resistance against Trump.
This week David A. Rank, the charge d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Beijing, did the right thing. Finding himself unable to carry out his duties in support of the policies of the elected government of the nation he serves, Rank resigned. On the other side of the world, another career Foreign Service officer did the opposite. Lewis A. Lukens, the charge d’affaires in London and currently the acting ambassador, tweeted his support of London mayor Sadiq Khan in the midst of the president’s cross-Atlantic Twitter spat with the mayor.
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Unfortunately, many Americans will draw the wrong conclusions from the actions of these two men. Even those who disagree with his decision should respect Rank’s willingness to give up his job on a point of principle. Lukens may also get cheers, but he deserves none. Going out of his way to support Khan when Trump was exchanging barbs with him was more than a mistake. No matter what you think of Trump, when a U.S. diplomat inserts himself into such a dispute it’s a violation of the trust that the nation places in its representatives to loyally represent its government.
But the dilemma facing the State Department today may not be so much the actions of two men who have paraded their political disagreements with the president in public. The real problem may be those in the Foreign Service who are staying at their posts and off Twitter but may also be carrying out their duties with a lack of enthusiasm or with willful disobedience that will undermine Washington’s ability to act.
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That liberals predominate among federal employees is not exactly a secret. That career Internal Revenue Service staff — acting either on their own or responding to clear signals from the Obama administration — chose to discriminate against conservative groups applying for non-profit status is a matter of record. But if many pockets of the federal bureaucracy tilt left, that is also true of the department tasked with carrying out the orders of the executive with respect to foreign affairs. In January, 1,000 State Department staffers signed a cable protesting Trump’s original travel-ban order. But, unfortunately, the problems in the Foreign Service go beyond such flamboyant, and clearly inappropriate, gestures. As the New York Times reported this week, tension between the White House and senior levels of the diplomatic corps is rising. If true, this is troubling because if senior personnel — people who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations and who should be setting an example of apolitical behavior — are ready to step outside their lane and demonstrate their opposition to the government of the day, that raises the possibility that the president can no longer count on the loyalty of the Foreign Service.
It also feeds the sense on the part of some administration supporters that the flood of illegal leaks of classified information designed to embarrass Trump from government employees to the press is more than Washington business as usual. Monday’s indictment of an intelligence contractor who is alleged to have distributed National Security Agency documents to journalists is just the tip of the iceberg. What is happening now may be a symptom of an open revolt in which government officials join the “resistance” against Trump in a manner that resembles a coup in a banana republic more than the workings of American democracy.
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Talk of a “deep state” seeking to thwart Trump sometimes tells us more about the grievances and complexes of alienated conservatives making this charge — especially those who fall under the rubric of the alt-right — than anything else. But when diplomats start acting like free agents rather than like the voice of those who were elected to set foreign policy, the notion of a conflict between career civil servants and those chosen to run the government stops being a paranoid fantasy.
It is true that in terms of his behavior and his views Trump is not a typical president. There is nothing irrational, let alone dishonorable or illegal, about opposition to any number of his positions, including his stance toward NATO, trade, the Middle East, and even immigration. But setting policy is still the purview of the president, not the civil service.
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As for Lukens, those who claim that in a normal administration praise for a mayor of a city in an allied country beset with terrorism would be the default reaction of U.S. diplomats are missing the point. Lukens is no novice. He was undoubtedly aware of the president’s statements about Khan. Trump’s tweets may be another example of the president’s astoundingly poor judgment. But it is not the job of the acting U.S. ambassador to Britain to correct or show up his boss. If Lukens and any other career Foreign Service officers feel they can’t serve Trump, then they should emulate Rank and resign. If not, they should keep their mouths and social-media accounts shut.
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Perhaps many on the left as well as those who work inside the government feel that Trump is the exception that proves the rule and that they are morally justified when they seek to sabotage his administration. Perhaps others believe they should act to save a wayward leader from self-sabotage or from the consequences of his own folly. But whether or not they are right about Trump, he has the right to expect the Foreign Service to serve him as loyally as it did his predecessors. A nation whose government employees feel empowered to act against the government of the day ceases to be a democratic republic and starts down the road to tyranny and chaos.
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Let’s admit that part of the current situation in the Foreign Service is the result of many important posts remaining unfilled more than four months into Trump’s administration. That’s helped create a vacuum in the carrying out of U.S. foreign policy that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is struggling to deal with. Some of this problem is due to congressional Democrats’ slow-walking all presidential appointments and jamming up the confirmation process. But the lion’s share of the blame belongs to a White House that appears to be unable to get its act together and vet all of the appointments that need to be made amid the chaos and infighting that currently reigns in the West Wing.
Foreign Service officers may have enjoyed their jobs more when they were carrying out President Obama’s will, but Trump’s mandate is no less legal.
But the inability of the administration to put men and women willing to follow Trump’s orders in place is no excuse for the Foreign Service to go rogue. They may have enjoyed their jobs more when they were carrying out President Obama’s will, but Trump’s mandate is no less legal. More to the point, following his orders is not optional.
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As with the leaking of classified material, opinions about State Department sabotage of the White House tend to depend on where you stand on the political spectrum. Anyone who leaked information to expose Obama’s push to appease Iran or otherwise obstruct his plans would have faced no mercy from that administration and its supporters while being cheered by many on the right. But now that the shoe is on the other foot, State Department and NSA workers who play that game with Trump are being lauded as patriots by the Left while being decried as traitors by the Right.
But the principle ought to be the same no matter the policies or the president. It’s up to the voters to decide who runs the government and whether elected leaders should be replaced, not the bureaucrats or the diplomats who serve them. Government employees that work to undermine the president should be fired, and if their misbehavior involves violating security laws, prosecution is fully justified. Trump notwithstanding, mutiny in the State Department cannot be tolerated, let alone cheered for partisan reasons.
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READ MORE:
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National Review’s Dennis Prager Responds to Anti-Trump Critics
Donald Trump & Jeff Sessions’s Newfound Resentment |
Twitter and Facebook know that hordes of soccer fans will head online to talk about the World Cup this week, and both social networks want to be home to the conversation. They're each rolling out hubs and features dedicated to the World Cup, giving fans easy ways to follow along and show that they're watching.
Hashflags, trending hubs, and match scores
Twitter is even starting right with its sign-up form, giving people who make new accounts the ability to choose their team's flag as their profile image. But the highlight of Twitter's World Cup features is its dedicated timelines, which pull together tweets from major sources on the games.
You'll soon be able to access one major timeline just by looking for #worldcup, and from there, find links to all of the teams' accounts and scoreboards for each game. There are custom timelines for each individual match too, if you want to follow along even more closely. Finally, Twitter's bringing back what it calls Hashflags: when you hashtag a three-letter country code, such as #FRA or #GER, the country's flag will appear as an image right beside it.
Twitter's Vine video-sharing service also has a World Cup hub of its own — much like the Twitter hub, the Vine hub is focusing on videos created on location at the games and content from "key sources" in Brazil throughout the next month. While Vine's focus on video makes this a natural destination, we imagine a lot of World Cup fans will want to see more than six-second clips.
Facebook is taking a fairly similar approach. It's put together a hub called Trending World Cup, which also includes scores and news from the matches and a feed of posts from teams and players. Your own friends' posts will show up in the hub too, which will be accessible straight from Facebook's Trending area on the News Feed. Once the games start, people will be able to post what they're watching too by using the smiley icon that's used for sharing what you're doing.
In addition to the hub, Facebook has also put together an interactive map showing where fans of some of the World Cup's top players come from. The map is fairly simple and seems to be tapping into whoever follows these players' pages on Facebook, but the map lets you break down where those people are coming from by country and by city. Even if you might have guessed which countries like which players the most, it can still be interesting to explore.
Not to be left out, Google is also offering its own resources for keeping up with the World Cup. In addition to the stadium street view features Google announced last week, the company is also launching a special World Cup Google Trends page that will collect the "players, teams, and moments that are capturing the world's attention." Google Now and Google Search have also been tweaked to give quick access to World Cup results for those that want them, as well.
Update, June 11th, 2:45PM ET: This post has been updated to include information on Vine and Google's World Cup hubs. |
“We asked partners to pinpoint the factors underlying the pay differences,” said Jeffrey A. Lowe, who heads Major, Lindsey’s law firm business, “and the No. 1 factor was origination,” or who receives credit for bringing a legal matter to the firm.
Rainmaking, or attracting legal work from clients, has always been a top factor in lawyer earning power, and is continuing to grow. The average origination amount, according to the survey, was almost $2.5 million, and that amount was up 25 percent from two years ago. Typically, lawyers’ annual compensation is tied to the amount of business they bring.
“We found that, predominantly, a partner’s compensation is tied to bringing in business to the law firm,” Mr. Lowe said.
Women partners, the report found, brought in an average of $1.7 million worth of business compared with the $2.6 million average of their male counterparts. Because there are more male partners, the average skews higher than if there were equal gender representation. Two years ago, women brought in $1.2 million worth of business, and male counterparts chalked up $2.2 million.
The lag in pay for female partners in either attracting business or getting credit for it could stem from several factors. One is that the “old boys network” still has an outsize influence because of connections made in law school or earlier that affect who is hired to handle their corporate legal matters. |
Populux, a venue in Detroit, has closed its doors for the immediate future, according to The Detroit News. The owners have launched an investigation into who posted a pair of racist messages to its Twitter account today. According to a spokesperson for Majestic Theatre, the complex where the venue resides, Populux will be closed “at least a week” while the investigation takes place. The owners have filed complaints with the F.B.I. and the local internet crimes task force in an attempt to identify the perpetrator.
After the tweets went live, the venue faced immediate backlash from locals and artists, including Vic Mensa, who said he was canceling a scheduled performance at the venue due to the tweets. Other musicians followed suit. The messages were then deleted, and followed by an apology in which Populux claimed it had been hacked. The venue's Twitter and Facebook accounts have been taken down in the aftermath. RiFF RAFF was also scheduled to perform at Populux later this month. |
The Road to Area 51
.. Built in Burbank, the OXCART needed cumbersome transport to Area 51, with road signs removed, road banks leveled and trees axed. After decades of denying the facility's existance, five former insiders speak out
by Annie Jacobson for the LA Times
April 2009 Area 51. It's the most famous military institution in the world that doesn't officially exist. If it did, it would be found about 100 miles outside Las Vegas in Nevada's high desert, tucked between an Air Force base and an abandoned nuclear testing ground. Then again, maybe not-- the U.S. government refuses to say. You can't drive anywhere close to it, and until recently, the airspace overhead was restricted--all the way to outer space. Any mention of Area 51 gets redacted from official documents, even those that have been declassified for decades. It has become the holy grail for conspiracy theorists, with UFOlogists positing that the Pentagon reverse engineers flying saucers and keeps extraterrestrial beings stored in freezers. Urban legend has it that Area 51 is connected by underground tunnels and trains to other secret facilities around the country. In 2001, Katie Couric told Today Show audiences that 7 percent of Americans doubt the moon landing happened--that it was staged in the Nevada desert. Millions of X-Files fans believe the truth may be "out there," but more likely it's concealed inside Area 51's Strangelove-esque hangars--buildings that, though confirmed by Google Earth, the government refuses to acknowledge. The problem is the myths of Area 51 are hard to dispute if no one can speak on the record about what actually happened there. Well, now, for the first time, someone is ready to talk--in fact, five men are, and their stories rival the most outrageous of rumors. Colonel Hugh "Slip" Slater, 87, was commander of the Area 51 base in the 1960s. Edward Lovick, 90, featured in "What Plane?" in LA's March issue, spent three decades radar testing some of the world's most famous aircraft (including the U-2, the A-12 OXCART and the F-117). Kenneth Collins, 80, a CIA experimental test pilot, was given the silver star. Thornton "T.D." Barnes, 72, was an Area 51 special-projects engineer. And Harry Martin, 77, was one of the men in charge of the base's half-million-gallon monthly supply of spy-plane fuels. Here are a few of their best stories--for the record: On May 24, 1963, Collins flew out of Area 51's restricted airspace in a top-secret spy plane code-named OXCART, built by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. He was flying over Utah when the aircraft pitched, flipped and headed toward a crash. He ejected into a field of weeds. Almost 46 years later, in late fall of 2008, sitting in a coffee shop in the San Fernando Valley, Collins remembers that day with the kind of clarity the threat of a national security breach evokes: "Three guys came driving toward me in a pickup. I saw they had the aircraft canopy in the back. They offered to take me to my plane." Until that moment, no civilian without a top-secret security clearance had ever laid eyes on the airplane Collins was flying. "I told them not to go near the aircraft. I said it had a nuclear weapon on-board." The story fit right into the Cold War backdrop of the day, as many atomic tests took place in Nevada. Spooked, the men drove Collins to the local highway patrol. The CIA disguised the accident as involving a generic Air Force plane, the F-105, which is how the event is still listed in official records. As for the guys who picked him up, they were tracked down and told to sign national security nondisclosures. As part of Collins' own debriefing, the CIA asked the decorated pilot to take truth serum. "They wanted to see if there was anything I'd for-gotten about the events leading up to the crash." The Sodium Pento-thal experience went without a hitch--except for the reaction of his wife, Jane. "Late Sunday, three CIA agents brought me home. One drove my car; the other two carried me inside and laid me down on the couch. I was loopy from the drugs. They handed Jane the car keys and left without saying a word." The only conclusion she could draw was that her husband had gone out and gotten drunk. "Boy, was she mad," says Collins with a chuckle. "We couldn't have told you any of this a year ago," Slater says. "Now we can't tell it to you fast enough." At the time of Collins' accident, CIA pilots had been flying spy planes in and out of Area 51 for eight years, with the express mission of providing the intelligence to prevent nuclear war. Aerial reconnaissance was a major part of the CIA's preemptive efforts, while the rest of America built bomb shelters and hoped for the best. "It wasn't always called Area 51," says Lovick, the physicist who developed stealth technology. His boss, legendary aircraft designer Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson, called the place Paradise Ranch to entice men to leave their families and "rough it" out in the Nevada desert in the name of science and the fight against the evil empire. "Test pilot Tony LeVier found the place by flying over it," says Lovick. "It was a lake bed called Groom Lake, selected for testing because it was flat and far from anything. It was kept secret because the CIA tested U-2s there." When Frances Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk, Russia, in 1960, the U-2 program lost its cover. But the CIA already had Lovick and some 200 scientists, engineers and pilots working at Area 51 on the A-12 OXCART, which would outfox Soviet radar using height, stealth and speed. Col. Slater was in the outfit of six pilots who flew OXCART missions during the Vietnam War. Over a Cuban meat and cheese sandwich at the Bahama Breeze restaurant off the Las Vegas Strip, he says, "I was recruited for the Area after working with the CIA's classified Black Cat Squadron, which flew U-2 missions over denied territory in Mainland China. After that, I was told, 'You should come out to Nevada and work on something interesting we're doing out there.' " Even though Slater considers himself a fighter pilot at heart--he flew 84 missions in World War II--the opportunity to work at Area 51 was impossible to pass up. "When I learned about this Mach-3 aircraft called OXCART, it was completely intriguing to me--this idea of flying three times the speed of sound! No one knew a thing about the program. I asked my wife, Barbara, if she wanted to move to Las Vegas, and she said yes. And I said, 'You won't see me but on the weekends,' and she said, 'That's fine!' " At this recollection, Slater laughs heartily. Barbara, dining with us, laughs as well. The two, married for 63 years, are rarely apart today. "We couldn't have told you any of this a year ago," Slater says. "Now we can't tell it to you fast enough." That is because in 2007, the CIA began declassifying the 50-year-old OXCART program. Today, there's a scramble for eyewitnesses to fill in the information gaps. Only a few of the original players are left. Two more of them join me and the Slaters for lunch: Barnes, formerly an Area 51 special-projects engineer, with his wife, Doris; and Martin, one of those overseeing the OXCART's specially mixed jet fuel (regular fuel explodes at extreme height, temperature and speed), with his wife, Mary. Because the men were sworn to secrecy for so many decades, their wives still get a kick out of hearing the secret tales. Barnes was married at 17 (Doris was 16). To support his wife, he became an electronics wizard, buying broken television sets, fixing them up and reselling them for five times the original price. He went from living in bitter poverty on a Texas Panhandle ranch with no electricity to buying his new bride a dream home before he was old enough to vote. As a soldier in the Korean War, Barnes demonstrated an uncanny aptitude for radar and Nike missile systems, which made him a prime target for recruitment by the CIA--which indeed happened when he was 22. By 30, he was handling nuclear secrets. "The agency located each guy at the top of a certain field and put us together for the programs at Area 51," says Barnes. As a security precaution, he couldn't reveal his birth name--he went by the moniker Thunder. Coworkers traveled in separate cars, helicopters and airplanes. Barnes and his group kept to themselves, even in the mess hall. "Our special-projects group was the most classified team since the Manhattan Project," he says. Harry Martin's specialty was fuel. Handpicked by the CIA from the Air Force, he underwent rigorous psychological and physical tests to see if he was up for the job. When he passed, the CIA moved his family to Nevada. Because OXCART had to refuel frequently, the CIA kept supplies at secret facilities around the globe. Martin often traveled to these bases for quality-control checks. He tells of preparing for a top-secret mission from Area 51 to Thule, Greenland. "My wife took one look at me in these arctic boots and this big hooded coat, and she knew not to ask where I was going." So, what of those urban legends--the UFOs studied in secret, the underground tunnels connecting clandestine facilities? For decades, the men at Area 51 thought they'd take their secrets to the grave. At the height of the Cold War, they cultivated anonymity while pursuing some of the country's most covert projects. Conspiracy theories were left to popular imagination. But in talking with Collins, Lovick, Slater, Barnes and Martin, it is clear that much of the folklore was spun from threads of fact. .. As for the myths of reverse engineering of flying saucers, Barnes offers some insight: "We did reverse engineer a lot of foreign technology, including the Soviet MiG fighter jet out at the Area"--even though the MiG wasn't shaped like a flying saucer. As for the underground-tunnel talk, that, too, was born of truth. Barnes worked on a nuclear-rocket program called Project NERVA, inside underground chambers at Jackass Flats, in Area 51's backyard. "Three test-cell facilities were connected by railroad, but everything else was underground," he says. And the quintessential Area 51 conspiracy--that the Pentagon keeps captured alien spacecraft there, which they fly around in restricted airspace? Turns out that one's pretty easy to debunk. The shape of OXCART was unprece-dented, with its wide, disk-like fuselage designed to carry vast quantities of fuel. Commercial pilots cruising over Nevada at dusk would look up and see the bottom of OXCART whiz by at 2,000-plus mph. The aircraft's tita-nium body, moving as fast as a bullet, would reflect the sun's rays in a way that could make anyone think, UFO. In all, 2,850 OXCART test flights were flown out of Area 51 while Slater was in charge. "That's a lot of UFO sightings!" Slater adds. Commercial pilots would report them to the FAA, and "when they'd land in California, they'd be met by FBI agents who'd make them sign nondisclosure forms." But not everyone kept quiet, hence the birth of Area 51's UFO lore. The sightings incited uproar in Nevada and the surrounding areas and forced the Air Force to open Project BLUE BOOK to log each claim. Since only a few Air Force officials were cleared for OXCART (even though it was a joint CIA/USAF project), many UFO sightings raised internal military alarms. Some generals believed the Russians might be sending stealth craft over American skies to incite paranoia and create widespread panic of alien invasion. Today, BLUE BOOK findings are housed in 37 cubic feet of case files at the National Archives--74,000 pages of reports. A keyword search brings up no mention of the top-secret OXCART or Area 51. Project BLUE BOOK was shut down in 1969--more than a year after OXCART was retired. But what continues at America's most clandestine military facility could take another 40 years to disclose. ANNIE JACOBSEN is an investigative reporter who sat for more than 500 interviews after she broke the story on terrorists probing commercial airliners. When she isn't digging into intelligence issues for the likes of the National Review, she's snapping together Legos with her two boys. SOURCE: Annie Jacobson for the LA Times |
CTV British Columbia
Simon Fraser University is being condemned by its own faculty members for renting space to a controversial anti-vaccine conference they describe as a dangerous source of misinformation.
The Vaccine Resistance Movement’s 2013 summit, billed as a “transparent discussion” among doctors and researchers, is being held Tuesday night at SFU’s Harbour Centre campus in downtown Vancouver. The motto: “The only shot you need is the truth.”
But SFU’s dean of health services, John O’Neil, warned the event merely propagates misguided and anti-scientific views on vaccination while downplaying the proven life-saving benefits.
He told CTV News he fears the university has lent legitimacy to the cause by accepting organizers’ money.
“They could have rented anywhere in the city, but they chose SFU Harbour Centre because it gives them credibility in the public eye,” O’Neil said.
SFU’s Faculty of Health Sciences has issued a statement disavowing itself from Tuesday’s event and apologizing for what it describes as an inappropriate use of university facilities.
Members of the Vaccine Resistance Movement question the safety of vaccines, suggesting they are the cause of autism and numerous other disabilities – a claim health care professionals have contested for years.
“It’s a one-sided perspective on risks that have been shown scientifically time and again simply do not exist,” O’Neil said. “There is no connection between vaccines and autism.”
The VRM also argues the pressure to vaccinate comes from a “vaccine lobby” and “big government,” according to its website.
Health professionals say vaccines are an essential tool to stop the spread of easily-preventable diseases such as influenza, pertussis and meningitis, which can be fatal to children.
But doctors worry widespread misinformation on the Internet has left many parents uneasy about vaccinations – parents like Chanelle MacIntyre, a mother-of-two who is attending the Vaccine Resistance Movement’s summit in hopes of learning as much as she can to protect her children.
“I’m just in this decision-making process right now. You feel you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” MacIntyre told CTV News.
SFU president Andrew Petter defended the decision to rent space for the event Tuesday, and denied that the transaction implies any association between the university and the anti-vaccination crowd.
He also stated his personal view that the movement is “contrary to public health.”
“Its views are wrong and they should be disregarded, but I think the best way to expose them is to challenge those views, not the university,” Petter said.
With a report from CTV British Columbia’s Shannon Paterson |
Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History (W.W. Norton, 2016).
Alexander the Great had Bucephalus, from whose back he could survey his phalanxes. Frederick the Great typically sought out the vantage point of a tall hill. A forward commander in World War I had a sandbagged trench bunker, a periscope, and a hand-cranked telephone. And the Cold War had its iconic blue room.
You’ve seen its rendition in films like Dr. Strangelove and War Games: a cavernous space, giant glass-mounted world maps and cobalt-tinted screens animated by data glowing amid the gloom. Look a little closer though at the actual historical antecedent to the movie sets: the hulking AN/FSQ-7 terminal that was the cornerstone of the SAGE air-defense system, with its distinctive circular display. Next to the holster for the space-age light-gun that was used like a modern day mouse was a cigarette lighter and an ashtray, both built right into the console. They are quaintly amusing design details — and markers of a moment captured in a very different milieu by Mad Men — but they also represent a telling concession to the need for artificial stimulation (nicotine) coursing through the biological circuitry of the human operator who was expected to sit and service the terminal for hours on end.
SAGE’s blue room, with its high-tech systems for communication and control of the atomic battlespace, is a quintessential artifact of cybernetics, the loose, messy social philosophy and engineering paradigm that King’s College War Studies professor Thomas Rid presents in his ambitious new book. The cigarette lighter and the ashtray are the irreducible material signature of cybernetics; mute reminders that we have met the machines and they are us.
Nicotine addiction, in fact, can be understood precisely in terms of cybernetic precepts such as feedback and homeostasis: as the body’s natural chemical balance changes due to substance dependency, psychopharmacological routines kick in to trigger the demand for the drug to return it to a state of normality. This is much the same way that the thermostat in your home regulates the temperature. Crucially, the more one smokes, the greater the cravings (positive feedback in the parlance of cybernetics), and thus ever increasing levels of what cybernetics would term negative feedback are required to bring the body back into temporary balance, or homeostasis.
Cybernetic concepts have become so well absorbed that they seem like laws of nature or biological givens, yet, as Rid is concerned to show, cybernetics has a tangled and curious history. It was the byproduct of a shifting set of intellectual alliances and bedfellows, not to mention ferocious scientific debates. It was also a subject of immense popular interest, with monographs like Norbert Wiener’s foundational Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1949) becoming improbable bestsellers. Indeed, by the late 1960s, cybernetics had undergone a kind of cultural transfusion, not only the stuff of military command, control, communications and intelligence, but also woven into the lines of Richard Brautigan’s hippie poetry (“machines of loving grace”) and assimilated by architects of the social revolution like Buckminster Fuller and Stewart Brand. “Cybernetics promised to guide stray missiles to targets and lost minds to exaltation,” as Rid puts it pithily.
Cybernetics wasn’t just a universal theory of machines, then; it became — sometimes over the protestations of its founders — a universal theory of, well, everything. If mechanical systems could be understood in terms of feedback and equilibrium, why not the human brain? And if the brain was a closed, computable system, then so too was the rest of nature, culture, society; all of life, in fact. In its relentless insistence that nothing under the sun was beyond the scope of systems engineering, cybernetics found itself in direct contention with the other great 20th century philosophy of mind, psychoanalysis. But where Jung and Freud saw the mind as a vast unknown, its secrets sometimes seeping through in dreams or mythopoeic archetypes, cybernetics saw only inputs, outputs, and circuits, all subject to command — and control.
The key actor in Rise of Machines, at least in its early chapters, is Norbert Wiener, the MIT professor and mathematician who coined the term cybernetics and was responsible for its promulgation (after the Greek κυβερνήτης, or “steersman”). Rid treats his protagonist with sometimes inexplicable disdain, even outright contempt: he is not just an “MIT professor” (itself repeated often enough to become an epithet), he is also (variously) “a proud professor,” “a hapless professor,” “publicity hungry,” “diffuse and incomprehensible,” and “eccentric.” Wiener himself, it must be said, looked the part: short and pudgy with a round face, white hair and beard, and thick black-rimmed glasses. But Rid misses no opportunity to portray him as impractical, alarmist, and out of his depth. One early anecdote has Wiener and his junior colleague Julian Bigelow fumbling around Fort Monroe, looking to further their research, until the authorities arrive to escort them off.
For all of this, however, we never really get a flesh and blood portrait of Wiener, and the man remains something of a cipher throughout. Was he a nutty professor or a visionary and humanitarian? An innovator or a failed academic? Portrayed more sympathetically is Ross Ashby, the British psychiatrist responsible for introducing the public to the world’s “first thinking machine” (it was a black box designed and engineered to do exactly nothing, that is to maintain a perpetual state of homeostasis). Alice Mary Hilton, meanwhile, a rare female voice from the period who wrote rhapsodically of “cyberculture” in the early 1960s — “In an era of cyberculture, all the plows pull themselves and the fried chickens fly right onto the plates” — is depicted by Rid gluttonously explaining her ideas to The New Yorker around mouthfuls of “a handmade ham sandwich.”
Others who come and go — John von Neumann, Gregory Bateson, Stewart Brand, Timothy Leary, Jaron Lanier, even Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre, to name just a few (the ensemble cast is almost all male, with the exception of Hilton and a brief cameo from Donna Haraway) — fair little better, generally drawn as either over-eager science brats or California dreamers. Along the way we visit hippie communes in Big Sur, dial-in to the online discussion boards of the WELL, eavesdrop on cypherpunk enclaves, and don virtual reality headgear. Eventually Rid takes us back inside the green machine — the military, specifically the U.S. Department of Defense, aligning the precepts of the AirLand Battle that was supposed to defeat Warsaw Pact tank armies in the 1980s and the post-Desert Storm revolution of military affairs with cybernetic arts of war. But the real battlefield is inner space — which is to say, cyberspace. The climax of the book is its discussion of the complex of public fears around an Electronic Pearl Harbor (the language is Hamre’s), a phrase whose staying power Rid sees as evidence of the machines at their apogee. And with this ascent comes one final, remarkable story.
Rid’s account of the hack (or if you prefer, cyberattack) dubbed Moonlight Maze is the single most extensively researched episode in the book. He takes us much deeper than Fred Kaplan in his corresponding account of the same events in Dark Territory (2016). Moonlight Maze goes down in history as the first known instance of state-on-state cyberwar, netting the black hats a cache of sensitive documents estimated as high as the Washington Monument. The anonymous agents who responded to the massive network intrusion apparently originating inside Russia in 1998 are some of the few figures Rid seems to treat with genuine sympathy and admiration. It’s a brilliant set-piece, and without too much in the way of spoilers let me say that Rid appears to suggest that the whole scheme is undone by a loose-lipped Russian General — though these are not loose lips of the sink ships variety. The machines are finally compromised by the foibles of human flesh.
• • •
Rise of the Machines is a sweeping intellectual history, engagingly written and brought to life by numerous details and anecdotes. Cybernetics and its progression of offshoots — cybernation, cyberculture, cyborgs, cyberspace, cyberpunk, cypherpunk, and finally cyberwar — are all disentangled and demystified in its pages. Rid is an able explainer of gnarly technical concepts, and a reader can reasonably expect to come away with a working understanding of, say, variable time fuses, in what is compellingly described as the first robotic war as British air defenses — aided by truck-mounted SCR-584 radar-directed fire control — used their smart munitions to shoot down Nazi Germany’s pilotless V-1 attack rockets.
Perhaps the book’s greatest success is in the way in which it injects this techno-history deep into the fabric of normality that structures contemporary life: It’s not just Predator drones that are the inheritors of the robots’ confrontation high above the English Channel, it’s also the pilot at the controls of our Airbus A380, one component among many in the feedback and control loops keeping the aircraft aloft; or ourselves, smart phone in hand, unselfconsciously tapping back into the invisible networks that surround us as we deplane. Your avatar is as much a cybernetic shell as the cockpit is for the crew, both airspace and cyberspace equally conducive to transcending the limits of earthly habitus.
Rid is especially good on the interface between weird science and popular culture, giving us everything from Arthur C. Clarke quoting Wiener in the pages of Playboy to a spread in Life magazine with a pinup model luxuriating in the mechanical arms of General Electric’s 80-ton “Electric Beetle,” a device manufactured at the same upstate New York factory that (as it happens) Kurt Vonnegut visited to write his breakthrough first novel, Player Piano (1952), set in a dystopian mechanized society extrapolated from then-current trends in workplace automation. This is not art imitating life so much as strange loops of attraction and repulsion, running from Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (the 1920 Czech play that bequeathed us the word robot) to, of course, The Terminator, the blockbuster franchise whose third installment gives the book its title. (Rid deliciously quotes Manfred Clynes, the researcher who created the term cyborg: “Schwarzenegger playing this,” Clynes said unironically, “dehumanized the concept completely.”)
The story of cyberspace — by which one might mean anything from the Internet to the singularity of science fiction authors like Vernor Vinge — is too-often fashioned as the triumph of the hideous progeny of the military-industrial complex. (Everyone knows that the Internet was invented to help the U.S. government survive a nuclear war, right?) Rid reminds us that these origin stories (and mythologies) are complex, and while he gives the military origins of cybernetics its due, he is equally at home in the arts, literature, and trends in pop culture. This is another of the book’s virtues, and what commends it to an audience who may be overly familiar with only one side of the story.
And yet, for all of his range and richness, Rid overstates the novelty of his analysis. He begins by painting himself as a dupe of the commonplace that the prefix cyber was invented by novelist William Gibson in Neuromancer (1984). Unable to accept that a sci-fi “fantasy” about a “drug addict” was responsible for the word’s omnipresence today, Rid (in his own words) “. . . started digging. Rise of the Machines was what I found.” But of course the story of cybernetics — and our collective fascination with intelligent machines more generally — is not some buried colossus awaiting just the right shovel. Wiener and cybernetics, as well as mechanical fire control, MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, Sperry, SAGE, the Macy Conferences, self-reproducing automata, The Whole Earth Catalog, Brautigan’s “Machines of Loving Grace,” osmotic pumps in rats, virtual communities, and techno-feminist science fiction have all been treated extensively in prior work by authorities as diverse as Paul N. Edwards, Manuel DeLanda, Anne Balsamo, N. Katherine Hayles, David A. Mindell, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi to name just a few, and especially Fred Turner, whose itinerary in From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006) Rid follows closely in key sections of the book.
Rid, however, takes a longer view of the subject than just about any of them, determined to present cybernetics not just as technological or intellectual or social history, but as a kind of master narrative — a mythos — for the 20th century and beyond. The book is ultimately about closing the loop. Rise of the Machines, in other words, reads military, cultural, and technological history cybernetically. The game is given away in the closing pages, where Rid overtly invokes the language of cybernetics to capture the anxieties and ambitions that coexisted uneasily at the human-machine interface: “The machines were always a positive and negative force at the same time, utopian and dystopian at once, although most of the time optimism dominated” [emphasis mine]. This dualism — or again, feedback loop — is the basic structuring device of the narrative. Rid turns to it over and over again, as when, to take just one example, he notes that the same model of mainframe computer powered both Stewart Brand’s legendary online community the WELL and Minuteman missile consoles, the only difference being that the former was housed in a handcrafted wooden cabinet.
Cybernetics, from Wiener’s initial attempts at flight prediction to our fantasies of virtual reality, is marked more often by its failures than its successes, Rid suggests. (When the future finally arrived it looked more like LOLcats and tweets than William Gibson’s “fluid neon origami trick.”) But if the real danger is not the machines taking over but the myth of the machines taking over, one might ask whether the book finally succeeds in escaping the logics of the very histories it seeks so thoroughly to explore. Rise of the Machines builds its narrative through eight main chapters that are organized thematically — Automation, Organisms, Culture, Space, and so on. The last of these is given over to War, and one can’t help but sense some prophecy in that sequencing. Or perhaps it’s still only a secular teleology. Can humans — and machines — change our interconnected fates? We better hope so.
Matthew Kirschenbaum is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author most recently of Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (Harvard University Press, 2016) and is co-editor of Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming (MIT Press, 2016). A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, Kirschenbaum has previously written on computer forensics, new media, and digital humanities. |
Clowns brawled with animal rights protesters under a circus big top in San Bernardino on the night of Friday Apr. 17, 2015 (Published Monday, April 20, 2015)
Clowns brawled with animal rights protesters under a circus big top in San Bernardino Friday night.
Hundreds of spectators watched the fight break out when workers allegedly tried to stop the activists from forcing their way inside after the Ramos Bros. Circus show began.
Two protestors were arrested following the melee, while two circus employees were injured when the fight broke out at 8:08 p.m., according to a San Bernardino Police Department spokesman.
Ringmaster Oliver Ramos claimed his lip was split after he was hit on the face with his megaphone in trying to keep protestors outside.
"All of a sudden when I turned around one of them jumped on top of my uncle - he's over 68-years-old - and they started beating on him and I reacted," Ramos said. "When I pulled them off they hit me with a megaphone in the face and all these ladies started scratching me on the face."
However protester Nicholas Shaw-McMinn claimed they were protesting non-violently, and that protesters were the ones attacked by the circus workers.
"Employees locked us on the property and wouldn't let us leave. They assaulted... multiple protestors, some with weapons," Shaw-McMinn said.
He also claimed one of the workers placed him in a choke hold during the clash.
The activists, who said they are members of the Direct Action Everywhere group, provided video which showed them protesting outside the big top before the melee.
The Ramos Bros. Circus website boasts that the show features "animals from all over the world," showing images of lamas, camels and horses.
Ramos said he does not mind activists protesting on the street but wants them to stay off the property where the circus is performing. He also believes something has to be done to prevent further clashes occurring
"These people are just crazy fanatics… it has to stop. These people are getting out of hand," Ramos said.
However it seems they will not be staying away, as more than 100 protesters are expected to show up for more demonstrations taking place Saturday.
The "Protest Ramos Bros. Circus" Facebook page says: "Traveling animal acts perpetuate animal cruelty, inhumane care, public safety hazards and distorted images of wildlife.
"As compassionate animal lovers we must stop animal entertainment and extend our love to all animals. Animals are not our (sic) to use, they are not our property; they are beings that desire the same freedoms as us."
It also claims circus animals are trained using methods such as whipping, hitting, poking, and shocking with electrical prods. |
The iPod has been retired from Apple’s homepage, in a move that could mean the much-loved music device is set to be retired.
The device has sat at the top of the company’s site for over 13 years, and going through various iterations like the iPods Classic, Shuffle and Touch. But it has been taken down from that top banner, and hidden in a special “music” part of the site, after the company's big Worldwide Developers Conference event.
All of the well-known models apart from the Classic are still available, but Apple makes it difficult to find them from its home page. The Classic was retired late last year amid upset from fans, with Apple blaming difficulty finding the parts after years of declining sales. The rush to get hold of one led to people buying them online at vastly-inflated prices.
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The iPod was once Apple’s flagship product — and has been credited with the resurgence of the company — but the only way to find it from the homepage is to go to the Music tab and scroll down. The main function of the Music tab is to show off the newly-released Apple Music, and users have to almost to the very bottom of the page to find it.
From there, users can click onto the devoted iPod site, which advertises the still-available iPods Touch, Nano and Shuffle. The Apple TV — set to be updated at the recent WWDC event, but pulled after it was found not to be ready — can be found on the same page.
Apple tends to retire each version of the iPod quietly, letting it lag behind in updates and devoting less marketing time to it until it disappears without ceremony. That was the same fate that met the iPod Classic, last year, and so it’s possible that the iPods are being gradually removed.
That could partly be because after the launch of the streaming service Apple Music, Apple’s focus is now on sending music over the internet rather than storing it on the iPod personal media players. Only the iPod Touch can connect to the internet at all, and it must do that using wifi so can’t do it away from known home and business networks.
Earlier this year, rumours swirled about the death of the iPod Shuffle, after stock ran low in stores. But it is still available to buy on Apple's website, for now. |
In 2013, Kshama Sawant became the first socialist elected to a major city council in decades. Among her accomplishments in office, she helped make a $15 an hour minimum wage in Seattle a reality in 2015, catalyzing it into a mainstream idea in American politics.
Since Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Presidential Campaign, Democratic Socialism has surged in popular as an antidote to far right and corporate establishment politics. While the Democratic Party experienced recent electoral wins this November in Virginia, New Jersey and across the country, included in that blue wave were 21 Democratic Socialists of America members or endorsed candidates.
“Within the Democratic Party, people are not just passively saying, ‘Well, anybody but Trump.’ People are clearly rejecting corporate politics as well as Trump himself and right wing politics,” said Seattle City Council Member Kshama Sawant in an interview. “There’s a real battle within the Democratic Party going on between corporate politics, Wall Street dominated politics of Pelosi and Schumer, and the millions in the grassroots, people who supported Bernie Sanders and were really energized by his message of a political revolution against the billionaire class. Just because Bernie is not running himself, or because it’s not the presidential election year doesn’t mean that the ideas that he energized have gone away.”
That energy is most evident among young people. Sanders won more voters under 30 across all demographics than Clinton and Trump combined during the primaries. A Harvard-Harris poll conducted in October 2017 found that 69 percent of Democrats ages 18 to 34 favored moving the party further left. The failures of neoliberalism and the Democratic Party establishment’s ties to wealthy donors over the working class are pushing voters to favor progressive solutions that challenge these power structures.
“Now that the DSA and Our Revolution have got their candidates elected, I think the question is, what kind of policy program will these elected officials at different levels put forward? What kind of work will they do?” she said. “The reason I am fighting and I have fulfilled every promise that I made on the campaign trail is because I’m part of an organization, Socialist Alternative, that is tied to social movements, tied to the working class and holds me accountable. What are the structures similar to Socialist Alternative? What are the structures that can be used to hold these other candidates who have won, accountable?”
Rather than simply pushing the Democratic Party further left, many young voters are turning to socialism as a solution to the problems rampant in today’s hyper-capitalist society. The Democratic Socialists of America reached over 30,000 members in October 2017, and recent election victories of members and endorsed candidates are reflective of this surge in popularity.
“I think that will be one of the key questions in the next several years, not just next year but for the rest of their first term,” she said of trying to push the Democrats leftward. “The vast majority of people who voted for Trump are working class people who wanted to register a protest against corporate politics. What it shows, really more than anything else, is the absence of a real alternative to corporate politics. If Bernie Sanders had been the candidate who was running against Trump, he would have presented a real left wing alternative, a real progressive, humane, and sane alternative to what people are looking for. Instead, Trump, because he’s a con man, he got to pose as somebody who would as he said, ‘Remember the forgotten men and women,’ but obviously not.”
She cites the Republican tax reform package as “the antithesis of anything good for the working class,” likening it to a wish-list for the wealthy. And yet, she says, because Hillary Clinton didn’t offer an alternative to corporate politics, working people voted for him. “What Trump took advantage of was the complete vacuum that exists on the left. He ran as an alternative, as an outsider to Hillary Clinton,” she said. “The reason he succeeded was because there’s such a deep hatred of corporate politics.”
And yet, the Democratic Party’s answer seems to be more of the same. And, according to Sewant, this dynamic isn’t confined to national politics. “You see the same power structures being replicated,” she said. “In Seattle, we didn’t win a $15 minimum because the Seattle city council is all Democrat. No, we won it despite the fact that all the politicians here are Democrats, because most of them are corporate Democrats and they did not support $15 an hour, but we won it despite them because we built a strong social movement,” she said.
Sawant says that building social movements on the left will invigorate the Democratic Party—and not the other way around.
“As a socialist, I feel more optimistic today than I would have in years past because people are moving more to left and not to the right. People are questioning the status quo, people are angry at corporate politics. There’s a small current of real right wing ideology and that’s horrific. We should not pretend it doesn’t exist, but that does not describe the vast majority of people who voted for Trump,” said Sawant. |
Senator receives support from Bob Katter but hearings to test Bob Day’s eligibility won’t occur until new year
Rodney Culleton’s eligibility to sit in the Senate will be heard by the high court in December but hearings to test Bob Day’s eligibility and the method to replace him will not occur until the new year.
At a directions hearing at the high court in Canberra on Monday, Culleton received support from two unlikely quarters: with a show of support outside the court from Bob Katter, and the prospect that the attorney general, George Brandis, will appoint counsel to defend Culleton’s eligibility or offer legal aid for him to get his own lawyer.
Katter revealed a third party had asked Culleton to join the Katter Australia party, which both had rejected, but Katter left the door open to take him on board if One Nation “ratted” on him.
Rod Culleton says he won't attend high court hearing on his Senate eligibility Read more
Culleton’s case turns on whether a conviction for larceny, since annulled, rendered him ineligible because the conviction stood at the time of his election to the Senate.
Culleton, who represented himself, used the hearing before chief justice Robert French to criticise Brandis, accusing the attorney general of “grabbing a sow’s ear to make a silk purse” by referring his eligibility to the court despite defects in the original case brought against him by Bruce Bell.
The One Nation senator asked for the case to be put off “well into next year” in order for him to get counsel or put his own case together.
“I need to rehydrate my piggy bank financially,” he said. “This case will take substantial time – I don’t have the artillery of the attorney general.”
Culleton said he wanted time to prepare “so that I’m not swatted because I can’t get prepared”.
French acknowledged the public interest in clarifying whether the subsequent annulment of a conviction meant a parliamentarian was eligible for election. The chief justice ordered the attorney general to file written submissions by 25 November.
If Culleton had not appointed legal representation by then, the commonwealth should appoint an independent barrister to run arguments for Culleton’s eligibility as an amicus curiae, allowing Culleton to continue to represent himself separately.
Culleton criticised that approach, likening it to “sleeping with the enemy” to have the attorney general to appoint a lawyer to argue against the commonwealth. But he expressed concern at picking his own lawyer, explaining the difficulty would be “trying to find a senior counsel that loves One Nation”.
Counsel for the attorney general revealed Culleton had recently made a request for legal aid and French advised him to quickly resolve whether it could and would be given.
French ordered the case go before the full court in the December sitting, which could be as early as 7 or 8 December. He said the case could be dealt with quickly as it concerned the narrow constitutional point of the effect of the annulment and whether it operated retrospectively.
Hanson brushes off complaints her staffer threw phone at Rod Culleton aide Read more
Culleton disputed the orders, telling the court they were not procedurally fair, imposed a “massive workload” on him, foreshadowing an appeal to the full court of the high court.
Culleton disputed the circumstances of his conviction for larceny, telling the court the truck key he had allegedly stolen in a dispute with a repossession agent had been “lost in a hug” and he had only been convicted in absentia because he was unable to attend court.
Culleton said he “didn’t want to be convicted of a crime” and told reporters he intended to ask for a jury trial but he was corrected by French, who said he was not being accused of a crime.
Appearing outside the court, Katter claimed the case set a bad precedent, as misplacing a key was not a crime and Culleton had not been declared bankrupt or insolvent, the other basis of Bell’s challenge.
Katter accused the One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson, of failing to support Culleton by agreeing to the referral of his eligibility to the high court. Katter also criticised her for not supporting his proposal for a bank royal commission and backing two government bills he called an “attack on trade unionism”, which Culleton opposes.
Katter said he wished Hanson would show support for Culleton but he was “certain Hanson would come back to the fold”.
“I’m not, like everybody else, abandoning Culleton,” Katter said. “No, I’m going to stand right beside him with as much aggression as I can possibly show.”
Katter revealed a third party, without his knowledge, had approached Culleton to ask him to jump ship to the Katter Australia party but was rejected.
“I said at the time we don’t take rats ... and I know Culleton and he ain’t a rat, so he won’t come anyway,” Katter said. “[Culleton] is not a rat, his party has ratted on him, it would appear, and I said that at the time ... If it turns out that he hasn’t ratted but he’s been ratted on, that’s a horse of a different colour.”
Asked about his future in One Nation, Culleton said: “Well I had a shave this morning and you don’t see any whiskers – I’m not a rat, I wouldn’t want to be a rat and don’t ever refer that I would be a rat.
Pauline Hanson agrees Rod Culleton's eligibility case should go to high court Read more
“I’m One Nation at the moment ... I’ll serve my term with One Nation.
“If I was to go it wouldn’t be my choice, I’ll leave it to others.”
French stood over Bell’s challenge against Culleton until after the court dealt with the Senate referral on Culleton’s eligibility.
In the Day matter, French ordered parties to agree on a set of facts by 22 December or a single justice would hold a hearing on factual disputes. The matter will return to the court of disputed returns in 2017.
A spokesman for Hanson told Guardian Australia that Katter should “stay out of it”.
He said One Nation had supported the referral because “accountability is everything our party stands on” but Hanson and the party were “extraordinarily supportive” of Culleton.
He refuted Katter’s contention the party had not supported calls for a bank royal commission and said that was party policy even before Culleton’s candidacy. |
For reasons that are not immediately clear to me, it seems that a lot of developers who attended Microsoft's recent PDC event were surprised to hear that the company now sees HTML5 as the way forward for developing rich Internet applications—and not, as they had been expecting, Silverlight. Their surprise surprises me, because past statements by the company had already made this repositioning obvious, though perhaps not explicit.
When Silverlight was introduced in 2007, it was positioned as a kind of alternative to Adobe Flash. Though Silverlight and Flash have their differences—Silverlight's approach is a bit more programmer-oriented, Flash's a little more designer/artist-oriented—they were broadly aimed at the same market: complex, interactive content, delivered through the Web browser.
As such, a naive observer might have expected Silverlight to be more prominent at PDC. During the keynote presentation, however, it received nary a mention. Mary-Jo Foley talked to Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft's Server and Tools division, and was told that Microsoft's strategy has shifted. HTML5 is now the solution for these same rich Web applications.
After the ZDNet story was published, both Bob Muglia and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wrote to "clarify" Microsoft's position. Fundamentally, though, it was as reported: Silverlight is still important, but no longer the premier option for Web development. The focus has shifted.
Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth. It's understandable in a sense—if you're a design agency or developer who's made your living from building Silverlight applications, the last thing you want to hear is that the company backing Silverlight is ditching it in favor of something else—but surprising nonetheless: it's been clear from Microsoft's recent actions that HTML5 is the priority, and over the past few months, the company has as good as said so already.
This should be news to nobody
The development of Internet Explorer 9 should have been a wake-up call to Silverlight developers. Throughout Internet Explorer 9's development, Microsoft has been shouting about HTML5 and Web standards. Really, it's been hard to miss. The company has made huge strides towards making Internet Explorer 9 a high-performance, standards-compliant, HTML5 machine. The current emphasis on HTML5 should not come as a surprise to anyone.
The development of Internet Explorer 9 should have been a wake-up call to Silverlight developers.
And it's not just the Internet Explorer team making a big noise about HTML5. Even the Silverlight team, in a blog post dating back to September, acknowledged Microsoft's commitment to HTML5. The post does two things. First, it positions Silverlight not as a replacement for HTML5, but as an adjunct to HTML5. There are certain things that HTML5 can't do—for example, stream DRM-protected video—that Silverlight can. HTML5 may be the main way of delivering Web applications, but this doesn't mean that there aren't niches where Silverlight (or, for that matter, Flash) is appropriate.
Second, the post draws attention to non-Web uses of Silverlight. Silverlight can be used to develop applications that exist outside the Web browser in two areas. One, Silverlight can be used for desktop applications. They still use the Silverlight runtime, but are launched and run as if standalone. The Seesmic Desktop social networking client is a good example. It's built using Silverlight, but it looks and feels like a regular program (albeit one with a slightly quirky interface).
Two, and this is the one that is strategically most important to Microsoft, Silverlight is the primary development tool for Windows Phone 7. It's not the only tool—games will generally use the XNA Framework instead—but most non-game applications will use Silverlight.
If Silverlight developers didn't see the change in strategies coming, then it's not because Microsoft was making some big secret of it, and it certainly shouldn't surprise anyone. Frankly, Bob Muglia was not even announcing a new strategy: he was describing the strategy already taken, the one already elucidated by the Silverlight team, and already plain at least since the release of the first Internet Explorer 9 platform preview.
The Apple issue
The big reason for this change in strategy is that HTML5 will, one day, be cross-platform in a way that Silverlight probably won't ever be. Part of this is Microsoft's own fault—the company produced first-party Silverlight versions for Windows and Mac OS X but left Linux support to Novell's Moonlight, and did little to encourage .NET development on iOS or Android—but a big part of the problem is iOS. Apple refuses to allow browser plugins, and is reluctant even to allow standalone applications developed using alternative frameworks. If Microsoft wants to embrace iOS devices, HTML5 is the only real option.
Adobe faces a similar issue with Flash—it too isn't welcome on iOS—but Adobe has nonetheless attempted to bridge the gap. The latest set of Flash tools can produce standalone programs that Apple will, begrudgingly, accept into the store. Adobe has also worked to produce a Flash plugin for Android and Linux, and is expected to produce one for Windows Phone 7 too.
So what does this new focus for Silverlight—standalone applications, phone applications, and filling the gaps in Web applications—mean for the framework and its developers?
Silverlight's new direction
It certainly doesn't mean that Silverlight is no longer important. If anything, the opposite is true. Silverlight is more important now than it has ever been. Just not in a way that was originally envisaged.
The truth is, Silverlight as a Flash-killer never quite made sense. The runtime, just as with the Flash runtime, is given out for free anyway, and though Microsoft may sell a few extra copies of Visual Studio or Expression Blend to Silverlight developers, it was never going to be a huge money-maker. And it was never likely to displace Flash; Silverlight's more programmer-y approach may well have appealed to developers of Web applications, but it also meant it was unlikely to ever appeal to creators of Flash animations. So the loss of this market to HTML5 probably isn't catastrophic: Silverlight was never likely to win here.
Silverlight's new importance stems not from Web applications, but Windows Phone 7. If Microsoft doesn't make a success of Windows Phone 7 then the company's chances of making any money from the smartphone market are negligible. Smartphones are, potentially, an enormous growth market, important not just in their own right, but as a component of a broader market of highly portable, touch-driven devices. A rich selection of high-quality third-party applications is a key part of this, and these applications will generally use Silverlight. For as long as Windows Phone 7 is a going concern, Silverlight will remain a top priority.
This might seem small comfort to existing Web-oriented Silverlight developers, as phone development is a very different beast than Web development. In some ways, it's a much narrower market: most developers are writing internal applications for use by the employers, and these employers are much less likely to want phone applications than they are Web applications. But in other ways, it should be rather broader: a new market of end-user, "shrinkwrap" software has opened up that didn't exist before. |
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden (center) speaks to a crowd of agency officials and dignitaries during a State of NASA speech to unveil the 2016 budget proposal at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA's Orion spacecraft (rear center), SpaceX's Dragon capsule (right) and Boeing's CST-100 spacecraft serve as a backdrop.
The White House budget proposal for NASA in 2016 calls for a $500 million boost over the 2015 enacted budget and would keep NASA on its path to Mars, NASA chief Charles Bolden says.
The $18.5 billion budget request, presented by Bolden today (Feb. 2), includes funding for developing a mission to Jupiter's moon Europa, and the agency's asteroid redirect mission (ARM). Officials think ARM could help pave the way for crewed missions to the Red Planet by the 2030s.
"NASA is firmly on a journey to Mars," Bolden said. "Make no mistake, this journey will help guide and define our generation." [Red Planet or Bust: 5 Manned Mars Mission Ideas]
The new fiscal year 2016 budget, if enacted as it stands now, doesn't come without sacrifice. If the budget request proceeds as is, NASA could end the long-running Opportunity rover's mission on Mars next year. Officials with the space agency cited Opportunity's "signs of age, including recent problems with its flash memory," as cause for ending its operations in the budget proposal.
Officials still aren't sure that the program will end, however. NASA Chief Financial Officer David Radzanowski said that officials will re-evaluate the planned ending of the mission during the next year to see if it makes sense to keep the rover online going forward. Like the new budget request, NASA officials also expected Opportunity's mission to end in fiscal year 2015, but they found the money to keep it going, Radzanowski added. Opportunity has been roaming the surface of the Red Planet for more than 10 years.
The NASA budget request would also end operations for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO for short), but, like Opportunity, officials are looking for additional funding to keep the mission going through fiscal year 2016, Radzanowski said. It was also unfunded in the initial 2015 budget before more money was secured. LRO has been orbiting the moon since 2009, helping scientists learn more about lunar water and map the lunar surface.
NASA's Orion spacecraft program — designed to bring humans to deep-space destinations like Mars — and Space Launch System mega-rocket are funded under the budget request. Orion is expected to receive about $1.1 billion for 2016, with the SLS receiving about $1.35 billion. Both programs are funded at lower levels than the budget enacted in 2015.
On the whole, Bolden sees NASA's future as bright.
"That the idea we’re adrift is an empty hook trying to catch yesterday's fish," Bolden said. "I couldn't be more excited about our future. We're making steady progress and continuing to reach for new heights."
The new budget request also includes funds for the continuation of the Commercial Crew Program, designed to help private companies create space systems that can ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The program is getting a boost this year, with about a $1.2 billion budget, up from the $805 million allotted in 2015. The private spaceflight companies Boeing and SpaceX are tasked with delivering astronauts to the station under the program by 2017.
Under the proposed budget, NASA should be given a little less than $5.3 billion for science missions, including $620 million to continue the development of the James Webb Space Telescope, expected to launch as the Hubble Space Telescope's successor in 2018.
The science budget amount also includes $1.36 billion for planetary science, with funds earmarked for developing the agency's plan to launch a mission to Europa, according to a budget fact sheet.
The request also asks NASA to develop the next in the series of Landsat satellites, Earth-gazing missions that monitor the planet's climate and observe the planet's deforestation among other objectives.
"I can unequivocally say that the state of NASA is strong," Bolden said.
Learn more about the NASA budget directly through the space agency: http://www.nasa.gov/news/budget/index.html#.VM_sC2TF_hr
Follow Miriam Kramer @mirikramer. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com. |
Description: Hitler doesn't like the new meta after the Heroes of Skyrim drop
Heroes of Skyrim has been released
and we are hoping to build some decks.
We particularly thought you would be
interested in a couple of cards specifically:
Echo of Akatosh and Praetorian Commander
Just another failed attempt to make token decks relevant, I assume
Not exactly...
Not tokens...
Tokens aren't effected at all
Summoning them gives your whole deck keywords or stat bonuses
If you quit Hearthstone because of RNG, leave the room now.
Of all the insanity!
That much raw value for 6 mana is insane!
Do they think people enjoy facing 2-mana 7/5s?
We might as well all just dust our Odahviings now-
he'll do nothing at all to a board full of giant monsters!
I'll have to use hard removal on two drops
because they'll be too huge to ignore!
But sir, playing a 3/3 on turn 6 is a huge tempo loss!
Their next turn could be a 6/4 drain!
Just win before turn 6 and you'll be fine...
I'm not interested in a game that locks me into aggro!
We had a diverse meta!
So many different viable builds,
endless possibilities and the excitement
of trying to outguess your opponent each game!
Now it's just the haves vs the have nots
and what they "have" is an 8/7 with charge, drain, and ward for 3 mana!
You can't play around this,
there's no counter to it except getting there first!
I was so excited for this set to drop,
I saved up my gold and soul gems-
now only two cards even matter.
My sorcerer,
my beautiful midrange archer that I put so much work into...
They're just trash now, soul trap fodder.
What good is Unstoppable Rage
when opp's lanes are full of cheap giant monsters
and they still have mana left over to javelin?
Don't worry, Gerda, you can still play arena.
Deck building is no fun any more.
I feel like Ulfric when he was lost in Alduin's Mist.
It's all over.
I'm selling my account.
All our dreams of attracting Hearthstone veterans and passing up Shadowverse
have been wiped out by two little cards.
Let's see what's on Steam sale. |
News in Science
Human sigh acts as a reset button
Scientists studying breathing patterns think they have found the reason we sigh: To reset breathing patterns that are getting out of whack and keep our respiratory system flexible.
The study entailed rigging up eight men and 34 women with sensor-equipped shirts that record their breathing, heart rates and blood carbon dioxide levels over 20 minutes of quiet sitting.
What the researchers at the University of Leuven in Belgium were looking for were specific changes over one-minute periods encompassing sighs that could confirm or contradict the "re-setter hypothesis" for the function of sighing. And they think they found it.
"Our results show that the respiratory dynamics are different before and after a sigh," writes Elke Vlemincx and her co-authors in the latest issue of the journal Biological Psychology. "We hypothesise that a sigh acts as a general re-setter of the respiratory system."
The re-setter hypothesis is based on the idea that breathing is an inherently dynamic and rather chaotic system, with all sorts of internal and external factors changing how much oxygen we need and keeping our lungs healthy and ready for action.
This sort of system requires a balance of meaningful signals and random noise to operate correctly.
Occasional noise in a physiological system, like the respiratory system, is essential because it enables the body to learn how to respond flexibly to the unexpected, says Vlemincx.
"A sigh can be considered a noise factor because it has a respiratory volume out of range," she says.
Loosening up
In this experiment, a sigh was defined as at least two times as large as the mean breath volume.
"A breath is defined by a specific volume (depth), the amount of air we breathe in and out, and a specific timing, the time it takes to breathe in and out," says Vlemincx. "Both these characteristics vary: from one moment to the next we breathe slower, faster, shallower, deeper."
Vlemincx says that when breathing is in one state for too long, the lungs deteriorate. They become more stiff and less efficient in gas exchange.
So in times of stress, when breathing is less variable, a sigh can reset the respiratory system and loosen the lung's air sacs, or alveoli, which may be accompanied by a sensation of relief, says Vlemincx.
Knowing this, it would seem logical then to add some sighs to the breathing regimes of people on mechanical, ventilators. As it turns out, it has been tried.
"If you put in a few sigh breaths, people feel better," says Frank Wilhelm a clinical psychologist at the Universit�t Basel in Switzerland.
Wilhelm has studied the role of breathing in psychological disorders extensively.
Over doing it
On the other hand, too much sighing can add too much noise to the system and can also throw the system out of whack. This appears to be what happens to people experiencing panic attacks, says Wilhelm.
"Panic victims don't recover from sighing," says Wilhelm.
In fact, people experiencing panic attacks have been long observed to involve a great deal of sighing, and show all the symptoms of hyperventilation: dizziness, numbness in the extremities, etc., he says.
For that reason a training program involving biofeedback was developed to help panic disorder victims get control of their sighing. It works, says Wilhelm, and further confirms the re-setter hypothesis for sighs.
"It's like a miracle cure, when you think about it," he says. |
In an apparent bid to stoke further controversy, the Tea Party leader who last week referred to Allah as a “Monkey God” has apologized — but to Hindus, not Muslims. And in an earlier blog post, now removed, he refers to Islam as a “7th Century Death Cult coughed up by a psychotic pedophile.”
Mark Williams, the conservative radio talker and chair of the Tea Party Express yesterday posted an “apology” for the “Monkey God” post he wrote last week:
A few days ago I wrote an article critical of a monument to the 911 hijackers to be built at Ground Zero and scheduled to open on 9/11/11. I can only assume the date is only to emphasize the perverted message of the monument. The only thing sicker is that Americans will not only allow it but that they will defend it. In the course of the article I described the “god” worshiped by terrorists as “a monkey god”. I was wrong and that was offensive. I owe an apology to millions of Hindus who worship Lord Hanuman, an actual Monkey God. Moreover, Hanuman is worshiped as a symbol of perseverance, strength and devotion. He is known as a destroyer of evil and to inspire and liberate. Those are hardly the traits of whatever the Hell (literally) it is that terrorists worship and worthy of my respect and admiration not ridicule. So, again, to my Hindu friends I offer my sincerest apologies for my horrible lapse and my insensitivity. It was unintentional, inexplicably ignorant and I am ashamed at my offense toward you.
We’ve also found some earlier examples of Williams expressing his feelings about Islam — and they make the Monkey God line look tame.
Last year, in a post that has since been removed, he responded to news of a failed terror attack in New York by writing:
[R]epeat after me: Islam is a 7th Century Death Cult coughed up by a psychotic pedophile and embraced by defective, tail sprouting, tree swinging, semi-human, bipedal primates with no claim to be treated like human beings or even desirable mammals for that matter.
And later that year, in a post titled “Savage Islam,” he wrote:
Muhammad instructs all Muslims to use whatever it takes to murder innocents and die in the process, the more violent the better. Even better than that, use the tools of civilized Man against civilized Man. No matter how tame an adherent to Islam may appear, they are still Muslim and just waiting for allah to provide them with an opportunity.
None of this seems to concern the Republican operatives who founded and run Tea Party Express, for which Williams continues to serve as a frequent spokesman. In response to the “Monkey God” comment, they told TPMmuckraker that it had nothing to do with them because it was written on Williams’s personal blog. We’ll let you know if they feel differently about the “death cult” line. |
It’s official: OS X is now macOS, and it’s being tagged as ‘Sierra.’
With continuity, Apple is adding auto-unlock. Instead of having to type a password, you can use an iPhone or Apple Watch to authenticate a Mac.
There is also a universal clipboard feture. Text copied on your iPhone can now be pasted on a Mac.
Apple is also optimizing storage on Macs by offloading older files to iCloud when you’re running out of space on your computer. If you have files you know you won’t need, like redundant email stuff, Apple will also manage that by destroying your junk. Apple says it saw a 5x improvement in available space.
Apple Pay is also coming to the Mac via the Web. When you shop online, a ‘pay with Apple Pay’ button lets you authenticate a purchase on your iPhone using Touch ID.
Your messy tabs are also getting cleared up with support for third party apps, and developers don’t need to do a thing. It’ll happen automatically.
If you like watching video on the Web, and videos go picture-in-picture so you can keep working across apps.
Siri!
And as expected, Siri is coming to the desktop. It’s the same experience you’ll find on your phone, more or less. She’s housed in the Dock as well as the Menu Bar.
Of course, she’ll have some insight into your Mac, and it’s mostly the same as you’ll find in Spotlight search. So, if you ask Siri to open up a file, she can; it just saves you the step of looking things up in Spotlight.
Interestingly, you can pin your recent Siri searches to the notifications bar.
Siri can also search the Web — just like on the iPhone. The neat trick there is that you can drag things like pictures into a document or a app like Notes. You can also message people with voice.
Developers can access macOS Sierra today, and the public beta is launching this Summer.
Read next: Apple announces iOS 10, and it's jam-packed with features |
As the world has turned to the Internet to have conversations, cities are trying to catch up.
To that end, Surrey decided to leapfrog ahead Wednesday with a new online forum that will be the first of its kind in Western Canada, part of growing efforts by civic governments to talk to their citizens.
Mayor Dianne Watts announced the city is kicking off a partnership with interactive market researcher Vision Critical aimed at getting thousands of Surrey residents and business owners to become part of a group ready to weigh in on everything from off-leash dog parks to new condo developments.
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"We want to make sure the community has another avenue for input and discussion on relevant topics and ideas that are important today," said Ms. Watts, who announced the project during her annual state of the city address. The one-year pilot will cost $50,000.
Later, she added that the issue of how to get public input is particularly crucial for Surrey because it is such a young community, where a lot of people are too busy with families to spend hours at public meetings.
But mayors of both young and old cities are pondering the online world these days.
"These are popping up around the world," said Susanna Haas Lyons, a Vancouver public-engagement specialist. "It's helping to meet the needs of people who don't have a lot of time but do want to participate."
Although Ms. Watts said in her speech that the initiative, which will be called City Speaks: Your Surrey, Your Say, is the first in Canada, Ms. Lyons said the region of Halton in Ontario has tried something similar.
A spokeswoman for Vision Critical said this kind of public dialogue is in a pioneering stage.
"This is about trying to get new people into the conversation," said Shachi Kurl, whose company has tried this with one other city, in Australia.
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Cities have found themselves struggling to talk to the public in recent years, as citizen groups start Facebook campaigns or create their own websites to oppose city initiatives.
Although cities have a much stronger tradition of public consultation than provincial and federal governments, they've relied on public meetings and open houses.
That has evolved into an exercise for various groups in seeing who can get the most supporters out to those meetings, send the most e-mails to the mayor and council or "vote" the most often in online polls.
Experts say an online forum that allows people to participate in a lengthy conversation on their own time, in their own homes, can help mitigate that.
The "long-term, continuing nature of consultation means it's harder for NIMBYs or other motivated interest groups to 'stack' an online consultation," said Ms. Kurl. "It's more than a matter of showing up to a meeting."
She noted that polls show only 31 per cent of people say they're willing to show up to a council meeting to voice their opinion on an issue, but 59 per cent said they'd participate in an online consultation.
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Surrey recently went through a tumultuous debate over a casino. Part of the argument that erupted was whether the number of people at the meetings or the number of names on an "online petition" were really representative of the whole community.
Other cities have used online technology to survey residents about specific issues but have not developed a pool of people who can be surveyed about many things over time, as Surrey is attempting.
Ms. Lyons said that, while an online forum like Surrey's can be a powerful tool for both residents and city staff and politicians, it has its limitations.
"You need to sign up and give information to a government entity. You will have some people with a higher degree of comfort with that and lower privacy thresholds and others that don't have that. There can be some demographic splitting there." |
An indictment accusing an FBI agent of lying to hide that he fired two shots at Robert "LaVoy" Finicum and missed caps an 18-month investigation that began with Oregon sheriff's detectives who followed "where the evidence led," their commander said Wednesday.
Deschutes County Sheriff Shane Nelson credited his investigators for their tenaciousness and said he was "disappointed and angry'' that the FBI agent's alleged deceit and actions "damage the integrity of the entire law enforcement profession.''
The sheriff also revealed that FBI leaders, told of his department's findings more than a year ago, didn't put the agent or four of his colleagues on leave. They were all members of a Hostage Rescue Team assigned to help arrest the leaders of the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
The indictment of W. Joseph Astarita, 40, of New York casts a shadow on the highly trained team.
"The Hostage Rescue Team is among the most elite units in the bureau and the idea that someone could be engaged in a firearm discharge in such a high-profile case and then allegedly withhold information is an extraordinary and serious charge," said Brian Levin, a former New York Police officer who has worked closely with the FBI and now is director of California State University's Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. "It's extraordinarily disappointing."
The indictment also will almost certainly fuel Finicum supporters and others fighting government control of public land.
"I'm encouraged. I'm thrilled that the grand jury came back with this finding,'' said Finicum's widow, Jeannette Finicum. Her husband was an Arizona rancher who served as the occupation's primary spokesman, known for the distinctive cowboy hat and earmuffs he wore during the winter siege.
She said Astarita's early shots may have contributed to the firing of the fatal gunshots moments later by two state police troopers who killed her husband on Jan. 26, 2016. She has given notice to the FBI that she intends to file a civil lawsuit claiming excessive force in her husband's death.
Astarita, wearing a dark gray pinstriped suit, white shirt and red-and-blue striped tie, showed no emotion as he sat beside his lawyer in a packed federal courtroom with extra security posted throughout the Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse.
Defense lawyer Alison Clark entered not guilty pleas on Astarita's behalf to the five-count indictment unsealed Wednesday. It charges Astarita with three counts of making false statements and two counts of obstruction of justice.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Janice M. Stewart set a trial date for Aug. 29. Assistant U.S. Attorney Pamala Holsinger estimated a trial would last one week. Astarita made no statements during the two-minute hearing.
The indictment says Astarita "falsely stated he had not fired his weapon during the attempted arrest of Robert LaVoy Finicum, when he knew then and there that he had fired his weapon.''
Between Jan. 26, 2016 and Feb. 6, 2016, Astarita is accused of concealing from Oregon investigators that he fired his weapon and lying to three supervisory FBI agents about his shots, which avoided a required call to the FBI's Shooting Incident Response Team to investigate.
"Defendant acted with the intent to hinder, delay and prevent the communication of information from the Oregon State Police to the Federal Bureau of Investigation relating to the possible commission of a federal offense,'' the indictment says.
Astarita will remain out of custody pending trial. Federal prosecutors referred repeatedly to Astarita as an FBI special agent. According to FBI headquarters, Astarita remains employed in an administrative capacity.
LaVoy Finicum shooting: FBI agent faces 5-count indictment W. Joseph Astarita, who was a member of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team, is accused of failing to alert the FBI's Shooting Incident Response team to investigate his officer-involved shooting, lying to two supervisor FBI agents and concealing to investigators that he had fired his weapon on Jan. 26, 2016, the indictment says.
Astarita is accused of firing twice at Finicum as Finicum emerged from his white Dodge truck after swerving into a snowbank to avoid a roadblock on U.S. 395 in Harney County. Finicum had just sped away from state police and FBI agents who stopped occupation leaders traveling in a two-car convoy earlier on the highway. He nearly struck another FBI agent when he crashed at the roadblock, police said.
Astarita's bullets didn't hit Finicum, 54. The sheriff's investigators concluded that Astarita fired twice at the truck, hitting it in the roof and missing on the second shot.
Seconds later, state troopers shot Finicum three times after he stepped away from his pickup and reached for his inner jacket pocket, where police said he had a loaded 9mm handgun. Bullets struck him in the back and one pierced his heart, an autopsy found.
Oregon's U.S. Attorney Billy J. Williams was adamant that the FBI agent's indictment hasn't tainted the state troopers' decision to shoot Finicum.
"Special Agent Astarita's alleged actions that led to this investigation and indictment do not, in any way, call into question the findings" of Deschutes County investigators into the Oregon State Police officers' use of deadly force, Williams said. "OSP's actions were justified and necessary in protecting officer safety.''
Prosecution of FBI agents is rare The indictment of FBI agent W. Joseph Astarita stands out because it's unusual for any of the bureau's nearly 13,000 special agents to be charged with crimes.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, working with the Deschutes County Major Incident Team, investigated the FBI team's actions.
Sheriff Nelson criticized the FBI for failing to place Astarita and the other Hostage Rescue Team agents on paid leave when he and investigators traveled to FBI headquarters over a year ago. They briefed the FBI's then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, now acting director, about their findings and the FBI's potential criminal liability in February 2016, the sheriff said. Nelson said he was told within the last month that the agents weren't put on leave.
"Today's indictment will ensure that the defendant and hopefully any other HRT members will be held accountable through the justice process,'' Nelson said.
He applauded the U.S. Attorney's Office for its attention to the case. "They took their time and got it right," he said.
The FBI and state police moved in on Ammon Bundy and other key occupation figures as they were driving from the refuge to a community meeting about 100 miles away in John Day.
None of the Hostage Rescue Team members admitted to discharging their guns during the confrontation, Nelson said last year in announcing the investigation's results. A state trooper later described to investigators seeing two rifle casings in the area where the FBI agents were posted. But detectives who arrived later at the scene to investigate didn't find the casings, police reports indicated.
Waco and Ruby Ridge: Past FBI armed siege fiascos The indictment of an FBI agent in the roadblock confrontation where Oregon standoff spokesman Robert "LaVoy" Finicum died follows high-profile FBI fiascos involving its handling of armed sieges.
The indictment follows two federal trials against refuge occupiers accused of conspiring to impede U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management employees from doing their work through intimidation, threat or force during the takeover. The occupation began Jan. 2, 2016, and lasted 41 days.
Its leaders said they were there to support two Harney County ranchers ordered back to prison to serve out terms for setting fire to public land. They also protested federal management of the refuge and wanted to turn it over to local control.
Ammon Bundy, his older brother Ryan Bundy and five other defendants were acquitted of conspiracy and weapon charges last fall. Two other defendants were found guilty of conspiracy after a trial this year. Others were found guilty of misdemeanor charges, including trespass. Eleven other refuge occupiers pleaded guilty to the federal conspiracy charge.
The indictment drew praise from Brian Claypool, the Finicum family's lawyer, who said he believes that the agent didn't admit to the shooting because at the time Finicum "was not posing a risk of serious harm'' and the shots escalated the situation.
"This is about upholding public trust and preserving the integrity of any investigation involving a death at the hands of law enforcement,'' he said.
It's unclear if any of the other members of the Hostage Rescue Team will face sanction. While Oregon's U.S. attorney wouldn't comment, the Deschutes County sheriff said his office is working with the inspector general on a continuing investigation. He referred to his investigators' focus on "subsequent concerning actions'' of some other members of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team after Astarita's gunshots.
Travis Hampton, Oregon State Police superintendent, said he was discouraged by the FBI agent's alleged actions, but they don't represent the FBI or the hundreds of others who were involved in the arrests of the occupation leaders.
When the investigation was announced last year, criminal justice experts said they were stunned that an FBI agent might lie about firing his gun. That the bullets missed their apparent target drew even more disbelief.
The FBI's deadly force policy is the same as Oregon's. Agents can use deadly force if they believe they or someone else are at risk of death or serious injury. They're also trained to consider a moving vehicle as a potential "deadly weapon" and to stop it by incapacitating the driver.
Danny Coulson, who led the FBI office in Oregon from 1988 to 1991, called the federal charges "devastating."
A conviction for making false statements could bring up to five years in prison; a conviction for obstruction of justice could bring up to a 20-year sentence.
The FBI likely will do its own administrative inquiry, said Coulson, the first commander of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team and an FBI deputy director during the bloody 1992 shootout in Ruby Ridge, Idaho. He now runs a security consulting business in Texas.
"It's a very serious thing. Let's let the criminal justice system play out," he said. "Nobody's above the law."
-- Maxine Bernstein
[email protected]
503-221-8212
@maxoregonian |
Update: 16:24 ET: After the FBI dismissed their 2013 and 2014 interviews with Orlando shooter Omar Mateen as "inconclusive," the Bureau interviewed him again later about his contacts with Moner Mohammad Abusalha, the first US citizen to carry out a suicide bombing in Syria, the AFP has reported. "We determined the contact was minimal and did not constitute a substantive relationship or a threat at that time," FBI Special Agent Ronald Hopper told reporters. In retrospect, it appears to have been more more than just minimal.
* * *
Update 15:50 ET: Accoding to an FBI official, Omar Mateen was acting alone, adding during a press briefing that the investigators are not looking for any second suspect.
. @FBI we do NOT have a second suspect that we are looking for. pic.twitter.com/p6O4TGFfuw — Orlando Police (@OrlandoPolice) June 12, 2016
* * *
Update: 15:34 ET: During a press briefing, an FBI official confirmed that Mateen called 911 and “stated his allegiance to Islamic State.” He added that the FBI first became aware of Mateen in 2013, when he made derogatory and inflammatory comments to his co-workers, alleging possible terrorist ties, an FBI official told journalists during the briefing. The FBI interviewed him twice in 2013 but was unable to verify the substance of his comments. Mateen was then once again questioned by the FBI in 2014 about his possible connections to a known US terrorist suicide bomber, the official said, adding that the questioning revealed that their contacts were minimal and Mateen had not been considered a threat.
* * *
Update 15:30 ET: According to the Orlando Police and federal officials, Mateen legally bought two guns last week, federal officials said. The suspect "purchased a handgun and a long rifle within the last few days," Trevor Velinor, assistant special agent in charge at the ATF Tampa Field Division, told reporters at a briefing.
* * *
Update 13:32 ET: Omar Mateen, who several years ago changed his name from just Omar Mir Seddique and added the Mateen part to his official name, is now said to have pledged allegiance to ISIS. As the Post reports, Omar Mateen had committed himself to ISIS before carrying out the bloodiest mass murder in US history at a gay nightclub in Orlando on Sunday, federal officials said. ateen “made a pledge of allegiance to ISIS,” California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told CNN.
And in an even more surprising update, NBC reports that moments before the shootings, Omar Mateen called 911 to pledge allegiance to ISIS.
Orlando gunman called 911 moments before shooting and pledged allegiance to leader of ISIS, sources tell NBC News https://t.co/0XkMoA2xo2 — NBC News (@NBCNews) June 12, 2016
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Update 13:15 ET: According to WaPo, the ex-wife of the 29-year-old shooting suspect said he was violent and mentally unstable and beat her repeatedly while they were married. The ex-wife said she met Omar Mateen online about eight years ago and decided to move to Florida and marry him. At first, the marriage was normal, she said, but then he became abusive.
“He was not a stable person,” said the ex-wife, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she feared for her safety in the wake of the mass shooting. “He beat me. He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn’t finished or something like that.”
* * *
Update 12:55 ET: A picture of the suspected attacker - who was earlier identified as Omar Mateen - has now been published by CBS news.
More pictures:
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Update 12:35 ET: Cited by CNN, Congressman Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said that Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen "made a pledge of allegiance” to Islamic State and was “heard praying in a foreign language.” Earlier, Senator Bill Nelson also talked about the alleged links between Mateen and Islamic terrorists.
"I asked the FBI if there was any connection to Islamic radicalism. There appears to be. But they are naturally cautious and waiting throughout to see if if this is [in fact true]," Nelson said at a news conference on Sunday.
My full statement on the #Orlando shooting this morning: pic.twitter.com/viERHIljen — Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) June 12, 2016
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Update 12:25 ET: Mir Seddique, the Afghan immigrant father of the suspected shooter, says it is intolerance of homosexuality, and not affiliations with radical Islam, that likely provoked the attack. "This has nothing to do with religion," he told NBC, stating that he was “in shock like the whole country.” He went on to relate a “recent incident” that demonstrated his son’s attitudes. "We were in Downtown Miami, Bayside, people were playing music. And he saw two men kissing each other in front of his wife and kid and he got very angry. They were kissing each other and touching each other and he said, 'Look at that. In front of my son they are doing that.' And then we were in the men's bathroom and men were kissing each other."
* * *
Update 12:23 ET: The shooting "appears to be connected to Islamic radicalism" according to Florida Senator Ben Nelson
#Orlando shooting "appears to be connected to Islamic radicalism" - Florida Sen Bill Nelsonhttps://t.co/rVSzoSakq0 https://t.co/jdFI52iT8E — BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) June 12, 2016
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Update: 12:10 ET: Take this with a grain of salt (source is CNN), but according to Breaking911, an FBI source reported to CNN that the shooter was known as suspected ISIS sympathizer
BREAKING: FBI Source Reported To CNN That Shooter Was Known As Suspected ISIS Sympathizer - https://t.co/uzG33o5JaH pic.twitter.com/wVyFszpRlQ — Breaking911 (@Breaking911) June 12, 2016
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Update: 12:07 ET: CBS reports that Omar Mateen was on law enforcement radar in last five years,
JUST IN: Omar Mateen was on law enforcement radar in last five years, @jeffpeguescbs reports https://t.co/yjXjCLx2Hm pic.twitter.com/Wm5aamNN4v — CBS News (@CBSNews) June 12, 2016
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Update 11:24 ET: ABC reports that Mateen's parents were born in Afghanistan, and he was "on the radar" of U.S. officials for some time, but was not the target of a specific investigation, law enforcement officials told ABC News.
* * *
Update 11:15 ET: According to the gunman's father, the shooting had nothing to do with religion, and adds that his son got enraged after seeing men kissing recently.
Father of suspect in Orlando massacre tells NBC News his son was enraged after seeing two men kissing recently https://t.co/RrFwArkZqt — NBC News (@NBCNews) June 12, 2016
The suspected gunman in today's gruesome Orlando nightclub shooting which killed at least 50 and injured 53, has been identified by relatives and law enforcement officials as Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old from Fort Pierce, Florida, CBS reports. According to social media, he is a US citizen, born in 1986, from Port Saint Lucie, FL. and both his parents are from Afghanistan. He was a registered democrat with a security officer and firearms license. Florida Congressman Alan Grayson adds that he believes the attack is "more likely than not" ideologically motivated.
NBC's Pete Williams reports that terrorist was on a "watch list" over associations w "suspicious" people several years ago.
The Orlando Mayor said Mateen was armed with a hangdun as well as an AR-15 assault rifle.
CBS added that the FBI is currently checking if he was linked to extremists.
According to BBC, Mateen was not on any terrorism watch list, although as CBS also adds Islamic terrorism is being investigated as one of the possible motives behind the mass shooting.
CNN adds that the suspected Orlando gunman was trained in use of weapons.
Suspect in #Orlando, Omar Mateen is U.S. citizen from Port Saint Lucie, FL. His parents are from Afghanistan. He was born 1986. — Ahmed Shihab-Eldin (@ASE) June 12, 2016
JUST IN: Orlando nightclub shooter ID'd as Omar S. Mateen, law enforcement sources tell @CBSNews https://t.co/zcv0mxzLiR — CBSN (@CBSNLive) June 12, 2016
Some more details on the alleged shooter as disclosed on Find the Data, disclose that he was a registered Democrat in the 18th Congressional District.
A search of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services database reveals that Mateen had security officer and firearms licenses: |
For five years since joining the club, all the France international goalkeeper has heard about is potential, and many believe it is now time for Mauricio Pochettino’s side to start delivering. Ultimately, they could not do that in the FA Cup semi-final on Saturday, losing 4-2 to Chelsea at Wembley. But the manner of the way they outplayed their opponents, only to suffer from a couple of clinical sucker-punches, at least shows Lloris that his team-mates are able to step up to the plate on the big occasion.
GETTY Hugo Lloris believes Tottenham can take heart from their performance against Chelsea
GETTY Lloris said Tottenham are on the right track to winning silverware
“Chelsea, they are used to winning trophies,” he said. “It’s a winning team. And maybe they have more experience than us. But we try to make a good balance. “It’s my fifth season for Tottenham. And I can see the team is enjoying to fight and to compete against the best teams. “On Saturday, we all took the responsibility together. You can win, you can lose, but the most important thing is to do it with your identity.
Twitter explodes as Chelsea beat Tottenham in FA Cup semi-final Sat, April 22, 2017 Express Sport brings you all the best tweets as Chelsea beat Tottenham in the FA Cup semi-final Play slideshow 1 of 8 |
The anniversary of women's suffrage is bringing all sorts of enlightened opinions out of the woodwork. Including the US Chamber Of Commerce blogger whose solution to the pay gap is to tell women to "choose the right partner at home."
On the lobbying group's official blog, Brad Peck approvingly cites another writer, Don Boudreaux, who wrote, "Not only does achievement of such 'equality' require the state to treat people unequally, obsession with income equality also reflects a Scrooge-like fetish for money." Peck was so taken with the "fetish for money" phrase that he named his post after it. Boudreaux also wondered, "Why do so many 'Progressives' excuse – or even positively approve of – envy of other persons' monetary assets?" In other words, why are you so jealous of people getting paid more to do the same work?
He compares women's situation in the workplace to two men, one of whom chooses to go to work a lot and the other one of whom likes to spend all his time in the gym. Peck uses the example to suggest that businesses shouldn't be penalized just because women insist on popping out babies.
This would be the same US Chamber of Commerce whose resistance to climate change legislation was too extreme for several power companies, among others, and whose pro-business agenda has also extended to opposing health care reform and unionization.
Given all this, it will not shock you that they also opposed what would become the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which it said represented a potential wind-fall against employers by employees trying to dredge up stale pay claims." Via Firedoglake, we learn that they have a sterling record on women's rights:
* 1977: US Chamber opposes amendment to Civil Rights Act that would ban discrimination against pregnant women.
* 1978: US Chamber says pregnancy is a "voluntary" condition in its opposition to Pregnancy Discrimination Act.
* 1987: Family Medical Leave Act "sets a dangerous precedent," according to the US Chamber.
* 1998: US Chamber opposes Equal Pay Act because "work experience does tend to create greater wage gaps."
* 2007: US Chamber opposes Lilly Ledbetter's court case for equal pay because "tear-stained testimony" prejudices against a defendant. Opposed the bill in Congress to right the wrongs against Ledbetter in 2008 and 2009 as well.
* 2007: Chamber official pledges "all out war" against Family Medical Leave Act, and in 2010 made it a "priority" to fight in Congress.
* Monday: US Chamber again cites pregnancy as a "voluntary choice."
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There are plenty of inconvenient facts about what causes the pay gap that have nothing to do with lazy ladies and their childbearing, but nevermind. This is how Peck dispenses with them:
It is true that culturally speaking women are more likely to have to make the tough choices about work-life balance. But as we all seek to fit our values into a dynamic 24/7 economy, let's not overlook the obvious, immediate, power-of-the-individual solution: choosing the right place to work and choosing the right partner at home.
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I make an individual choice to tell Peck he's an idiot.
Equality, Suffrage, And A Fetish For Money [Chamber Post]
US Chamber: Equal Pay "a Fetish for Money," Women Should "Choose the Right Partner at Home" [Firedoglake]
Earlier: The New York Times Gets The Wage Gap Wrong
Does The Wage Gap Really Exist?
How Do We End The Wage Gap?
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So Who Hacked Clinton? The Truth Could Be More Shocking Than You Expected
The U.S. Intelligence Community, led by the three most political actors in recent history, claims to have irrefutable “proof” that the Russian government was behind the hacking of Democratic Party computers and those affiliated with the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. However, Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and National Security Agency director Admiral Mike Rogers provided not one iota of evidence that it was Russian state players who hacked into the computers of the Democrats or the personal email accounts of Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta and other staffers.
Podesta has a long track record of interest in extraterrestrial visitations of our planet and unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and the files the U.S. government possesses on these subjects. Consequently, Podesta, who has served as White House chief of staff for Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, has drawn the interest of the most dedicated contingent among the computer hacker community: those who hope to discover the “mother lode” of secret files allegedly held by the U.S. government on alien visitations and UFOs.
Podesta, along with his brother, Washington DC super-lobbyist Tony Podesta, are at the center of the power structure of the United States. So, when a well-connected individual like John Podesta claims an interest in government files on aliens and UFOs, the UFO hacker community takes a keen note. Podesta is at the center of his own UFO “podesteria.” A “podesteria” in medieval Italy was an administrative division of Italian city-states lime Venice and Genoa.
Today, there is a “podesteria” in cyberspace that includes computer hackers and UFO investigators having varying degrees of expertise in discovering where the U.S. government is hiding its most critical secrets. It was this “podesteria” of hackers that penetrated the weak security of Podesta’s Google mail account and discovered, in addition to some intriguing email on the subject of extraterrestrials between Apollo 14 moon astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell and Podesta, other emails dealing with the 2016 election campaign.
The bottom line with the hacking of Podesta’s email and that of others in his email chain, which included Mrs. Clinton’s top advisers Huma Abedin and Jennifer Palmieri, is that Russia had nothing to do with it. The U.S. intelligence community, hungry to go back to the era of the Cold War and bloated U.S. intelligence budgets, is inventing Russian involvement in a desperate move to divert attention away from the corruption of the Clinton family and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Podesta is a magnet for the successors to WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange's old 1980s and 1990s “Cypherpunk” colleagues - young hackers who will do just about anything to expose what they see as a massive cover-up of the ET presence on Earth. The largest hacking of military computers in recent times was carried out by a young Scottish hacker named Gary McKinnon. Using the handle "Solo," McKinnon was charged with breaking into 97 U.S. military and NASA systems between February 2001 and March 2002. McKinnon said he was searching for files on the suppression of free energy systems (what astronaut Mitchell wanted to discuss with Podesta) and UFOs. Russia was not involved in the case with McKinnon then and it certainly is not involved in the issue regarding the hackers of Clinton’s campaign today.
The United States tried to have McKinnon extradited to the United States but in 2012, British Home Secretary Theresa May, now the prime minister, surprisingly vacated the extradition order. British criminal charges against McKinnon were suddenly dropped. Among those who supported McKinnon in resisting extradition to the United States were Boris Johnson, the present Foreign Secretary, and David Cameron, the former prime minister.
Earlier this year, Hillary Clinton attracted her own share of hacker attention when she told the Conway Daily Sun in New Hampshire that as president she would "get to the bottom" of the UFO cover-up. That served as another magnet for the global hacker community.
And Bill Clinton has done his best to draw the interest of UFO hacker groups. In a 2005 speech in Hong Kong, Bill Clinton told the audience, "I did attempt to find out if there were any secret government documents that reveal things, and if there were, they were concealed from me, too. I wouldn’t be the first president that underlings have lied to or that career bureaucrats have waited out. But there may be some career person sitting around somewhere hiding these dark secrets, even from elected presidents. But, if so, they successfully eluded me, and I’m almost embarrassed to tell you I did try to find out.”
Asked by the New Hampshire newspaper what her husband meant, Mrs. Clinton replied, "I think we may have been [visited already]. We don’t know for sure.” In 2014, Bill Clinton told television host Jimmy Kimmel: "If we were visited [by aliens] someday, I wouldn’t be surprised. I just hope that it’s not like [the movie] “Independence Day,” that it’s a conflict.”
The CIA, NSA, and DNI know fully well that the UFO hacker community is very adept at ferreting out the private emails of those who they believe possess knowledge about their favorite subject. John Podesta also knows this. In 1998, when Podesta served as President Clinton’s chief of staff, 72 of 215Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requeststo NSAwere for UFOfiles. In addition, 15 percent of all FOIA requests to the CIA in 1998 were for UFO-related documents. After he left the White House, Podesta actually championed the cause of UFO researchers who wanted full disclosure of government UFO files pursuant to the FOIA!
What part of the UFO research community gets through legal channels, often with disappointing results as a result of heavily-redacted declassified pages, another part achieves through computer hacking. In September of this year, two North Carolina men who were part of a hacker group called “Crackas With Attitude”were indicted for hacking into the Verizon personal email accounts of CIA director Brennan and DNI director Clapper. Three other members of the hacker group lived in Britain. A text message sent by one of the indicted North Carolina men reads: “I've been looking for evidence of aliens since Gary.” The reference was to Gary McKinnon, the British UFO hacker. While looking for references to aliens in Brennan’s emails, one of the hackers claimed he stumbled upon information that showed the CIA had engaged in torture: “I f***ing own this loser [meaning Brennan], I have just released emails of them admitting to torture.”
This is a prime example of how UFO hackers, while looking for information on their favorite subject, stumbled across extraneous information that was, nevertheless, of interest. And this is exactly how the hackers who penetrated Podesta’s and the other Democrats’ email stumbled across other email of interest, in this case email of interest to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and the Donald Trump campaign. Again, there is not one scrap of evidence of Russian government involvement.
The corporate media is trying to lay blame for the hacking of Podesta's and other Clinton campaign officials' email on Russian President Vladimir Putin. That is because the Democrats do not want to be embarrassed by admitting that the real culprits are hackers who want to know more about Podesta's knowledge of the "little gray aliens." It is the fault of Podesta and Mr. and Mrs. Clinton that they have attracted, with their talk about aliens, every computer hacker and script kiddie on the planet hungry for any morsel held in government and private computers about ET.
Just when most people believed the 2016 presidential election could not become any stranger, it has taken a nose dive into the “Twilight Zone.” As far as this writer’s knowledge of hackers, it was my job to monitor hacker operations throughout the 1980s and 1990s for the NSA, Department of State, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and U.S. Navy. It was clear then, as it is evident today, that computer hacking blamed on nefarious “state-supported” hackers was almost always the result of a teenager connected to a modem from his or her parents’ basement. |
RT breaking the latest Podesta emails before WikiLeaks sparked accusations of collusion with the whistleblowing organization. Actually, no conspiracies were involved – just good journalism.
Having discovered over 1,800 emails date-stamped October 13 on the WikiLeaks site, RT sprung into action.
Wikileaks followed shortly after by tweeting that #PodestaEmails6 were now available.
Despite the documents being public when discovered by RT, accusations soon began that it was proof that Russia and WikiLeaks are somehow working together. Christopher Miller, a journalist for the US government-backed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, set the wheels of suspicion in motion.
Earlier today, @RT_com tweeted & pubbed a story on fresh @wikileaks Podesta emails dump before WL posted them to the site & tweeted a link. pic.twitter.com/nHb0GIq4Am — Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) October 13, 2016
Hillary Clinton’s Press Secretary Brian Fallon then followed suit, tweeting that the work by RT journalists was part of a conspiracy “in service of Trump”.
More evidence of Russian collusion with @Wikileaks in service of Trumphttps://t.co/P2nXQIMKBS — Brian Fallon (@brianefallon) October 13, 2016
WikiLeaks even stepped in to clarify that the emails were available, just not tweeted, and that RT had not acquired them in any other way.
@ChristopherJM@RT_com No they didn't. The release was visible to anyone looking at https://t.co/wzxeh7hZLU well before our first tweet. — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 13, 2016
Brian Fallon was contacted by an RT journalist. We offered to explain to him how the team broke the news. He has not responded.
READ MORE: ‘Clintons won't forget what their friends have done’: WikiLeaks release #PodestaEmails6 |
Greek police searched the offices of the Golden Dawn party on Wednesday after an anti-racism rapper was stabbed to death by a man who sympathized with the far-right group.
The killing touched a nerve in Greece, where an economic crisis has worsened social tensions, and rallies in several cities to mark the death turned violent.
A 45-year-old man was arrested and admitted to the killing, police said. Greece's citizen protection minister said the suspect was a Golden Dawn sympathizer.
Pavlos Fissas, 35, who went by the stage name Killah P, was stabbed twice in the heart and chest on Tuesday night in a brawl after a soccer match shown in a cafe in Keratsini, a working-class suburb of Athens.
(Read more: Euro zone's 'north-south divide' to widen further)
Police said the offices of a political party were searched for evidence linking it to the attack, but stopped short of naming Golden Dawn. They later arrested a Golden Dawn official for a weapons offence after finding a police-style night-stick in the party's offices in Piraeus.
More than 5,000 people rallied in Athens on the spot where Fissas was stabbed. Police fired teargas at protesters who hurled stones and petrol bombs at a police station and set garbage containers on fire, Reuters witnesses said.
"The government of (Prime Minister Antonis) Samaras is the instigator by allowing murderous Golden Dawners to roam around unpunished and armed with knives," said KEERFA, the United Movement Against Racism and the Fascist Threat.
"It's time to punish the neo-Nazi murderers of Golden Dawn and to throw the Samaras government - a miserable gang of bankers, the troika (of international lenders) and neo-Nazis - into the trash."
The leader of the right-wing Independent Greeks party, Panos Kamenos, who visited the scene of the crime to pay his respects was attacked and lightly injured by a group of protesters.
Clashes between police and demonstrators were reported in two other Greek cities, Patras and Thessaloniki.
Criminal
The killing of Fissas has revived calls to ban Golden Dawn, Greece's third most popular party according to recent opinion polls, which denies constant accusations of involvement in a wave of attacks on immigrants and leftists.
With an emblem resembling a swastika, the party rose from obscurity to enter parliament last year. Its leaders have denied the Holocaust and defended Greece's 1967-1974 military junta.
Golden Dawn is a "criminal organization" that should be declared illegal, the co-ruling Socialist PASOK party said.
The far-right party has condemned the killing and denied accusations by "wretched sycophants" of any involvement.
"(The accusers) are miserable and wretched not only because of their brazen lies and slander but because they are exploiting a tragic event for politicking, to win votes and to divide Greek society," Golden Dawn said in a statement.
The government plans to sharpen the law defining what a criminal organization is, said Citizen Protection Minister Nikos Dendias.
"The abominable murder in Keratsini by an attacker sympathizing with Golden Dawn, according to his own statement, illustrates, in the clearest way, the intentions of neo-Nazism," Dendias said. |
With the Seattle Seahawks season over, Seattle can turn their attention towards the 2017 season. The Seahawks offensive line was abysmal, and every Seattle fan and their mother are praying that the unit improves next season. The Seahawks line did not look as bad in the playoffs, albeit a small sample size, as it did in the regular season, however. The group created some huge holes for Thomas Rawls at times. The pass protection, however, has never surpassed underwhelming. It is time to find a core player for the Seahawks to build off of up front through the draft, and here are some of their top options.
1. OT Cam Robinson, Alabama
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Regarded by most as the top offensive line prospect in the country, Robinson would be a dream selection if Seattle could get their hands on him. Astonishingly quick for his build, Robinson owns all the talents of a potential day one starter in the National Football League. Standing six-foot-six, 310 pounds, the three-year Alabama starter controls the point of attack and shows outstanding technique in pass-protection, two of the major factors the Seahawks offensive line is missing. Multiple mock drafts have him actually falling back to Seattle at the 26thpick, but as we get closer to the draft his stock seems to still be on the rise.
2. OG Dan Feeney, Indiana
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A four-year starter at Indiana, Feeney’s experience is certainly no concern. Measuring six-foot-four, 305 pounds, the guard brings excellent quickness for his build and a physicality coaches at the N.F.L. level want to see. Effective against pass rush, but he will have to adjust to N.F.L. quarterbacks hanging onto the ball longer. Feeney is certainly a viable replacement for Mark Glowinski. If Feeney was selected Germain Ifedi would probably see reps at left guard, allowing Feeney to fill in the right guard position. Unfortunately, he does have an injury background that includes a history of concussions, so a thorough medical examination is likely necessary.
3. OG/OT Forrest Lamp, Western Kentucky
Lamp could be the potential perfect fit for what Seattle wants to do up front. Often regarded as one of the top guard prospects in the draft, Lamp has spent his last two college seasons at tackle. With Tom Cable’s history of plug-and-play offensive lineman, he may be exactly what Cable is looking for. At six-foot-four, 300 pounds, Lamp is built like a wall and brings one of the best pass protection techniques in the country. A combination of aggressiveness and ability to stay lower than the defender has been the focal point of the young blockers excellence. Certainly a mid-first-rounder or later, Lamp could end up in the Emerald City.
4. OT Ryan Ramczyk, Wisconsin
Ramczyk is thought of by some draft experts as their top lineman in the 2017 Draft, but experience remains his biggest negative. From a Division III player at UW-Stevens Point, to All-American offensive tackle at Wisconsin, Ramczyk has a long way to go still to be N.F.L. ready. Ramczyk redshirted in 2015 after transferring, and 2016 was his only Division I experience. However, this seems to be his only weakness. Showing exceptional balance, agility and power at the point of attack, it looks like he has been playing a high level much longer than a single season. Great technique in pass protection shows his knack for the art of blocking is surely there, and it will likely require the N.F.L. preseason to truly gauge how effective Ramczyk will be early on in his career. It is worth noting, though, he underwent hip surgery just three days after Wisconsin’s 24-16 victory over Western Michigan in the Cotton Bowl. It remains to be seen how this will affect him in the long-run
5. OG Dorian Johnson, Pittsburgh
Another prospect that could move around the line if needed, Johnson played left tackle, right guard and left guard while at Pitt. To put it simply, this guy is a near must-have if your Seattle’s coaching staff. Standing six-foot-five inches and weighing 315 pounds, he is one of the most N.F.L.-ready offensive lineman to enter the draft in a long while. Little-to-none of that weight is excess, as Johnson is relatively lean and downright ripped. Throw exceptional technique and patience and Johnson may be the perfect blocker. He has shown great ability as a pulling guard, which is another huge need for the Seahawks up front. Johnson has potential as a day one starter and Seattle has a golden opportunity to select him later than they probably should be able to.
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6. OT/OG Zach Banner, USC
Any player that can move about the offensive line is immediately much more attractive to a Seattle franchise looking for any help they can get. Banner is a six-foot-eight, 360-pound giant of a human. Obviously, with all that weight, he must clog up holes instead of make them right? Wrong. Banner shows elite movement for his size and a coachable technique. Another great point-of-attack blocker, his biggest negative is he has been known to make mental mistakes and can often lose his balance in pass protection. This, of course, has hindered his productivity at times. However, as stated before, his ability to possibly move inside makes him an intriguing option, especially to Seattle’s needs.
7. OT Dion Dawkins, Temple
A player who will have a lot of work to do prior to his first season in the N.F.L., Dawkins could be very good with the correct coaching. This comes as result of him being able to slack off on technique due to his refrigerator-like frame. At six-foot-five, 320 pounds, he is among the heaviest blockers in this year’s draft. He consistently won at the point of attack and exceptional power is among his greatest strengths. Not quite a day one starter, he is lower on this list than he is on most peoples, as Seattle is in desperate need of a foundation. However, Dawkins might have one of the biggest upsides among lineman in the draft.
8. OT Garrett Bolles, Utah
Arm length may be the deciding factor in keeping Bolles from being drafted but he has enough other positives to allow him to be intriguing. Coming from a rough-around-the-edges background, the 24-year old still has plenty of potential at the professional level. Another power player, Bolles maintains balance and agility that keeps him effective on the outside as a tackle. Often lackadaisical on the basics, though, some coaching will be needed to fix some bad habits. Not necessarily a day one starter, but Bolles has a definite shot at developing into a legit top player.
9. OG Nico Siragusa, San Diego State
Earning two all-Mountain West first team selections and a third-team AP All-American selection at SDSU, Siragusa certainly could play either guard position at the pro-level. This would be a perk especially for Seattle as they would probably enjoy leaving Germain Ifedi where he is and just replace Glowinski. At six-foot-five and 300 pounds, he is another typical mammoth-like blocker who has elite power. Luckily, power prospects are exactly what the Seahawks need, and this draft is filled with them. Great at blocking for the run, Siragusa was among the SDSU front that opened holes for one of the NCAA’s most prolific rushers, Donnel Pumphrey.
10. OT Adam Bisnowaty, Pittsburgh
A conventional offensive tackle, Bisnowaty possesses all the necessary attributes to be successful in the N.F.L. Being much more agile and quick than he looks, he also owns very long arms and a great body structure. Able to contain pass rushers and defeat run-stuffing defenders, Bisnowaty has almost everything you want in a rookie, with some remaining coachables. His balance is one obvious issue, but that can be improved and made a non-issue with the correct training. He does have an injury background, so his medical evaluation as we near the draft must be watched very closely.
The post Top 10 Offensive Lineman Seattle Seahawks Could Draft appeared first on Cover32. |
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