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Chad Dawson claims that he's processed and easily gotten past last September's devastating loss to Andre Ward at 168 pounds, but the way he talks about the fight makes you wonder if that's really the case, as he prepares for Saturday's HBO main event at 175 against Adonis Stevenson.
Dawson (31-2, 17 KO) was stopped in the tenth round, going down in the third, fourth, and 10th frames before telling referee Steve Smoger that he'd had enough. The "quitting" loss was criticized somewhat at the time, but others couldn't really blame Dawson, as he'd simply been outclassed and beaten up by a healthier, stronger Ward. The weight drain to get down to 168 seemed pretty obvious.
But here's what Dawson said this week about that fight:
"My honest opinion is it was definitely a set up by HBO and other people too. It was set up for me to come in at 168. I would be vulnerable and they could expose it and he would look good at the same time. That's just my opinion on the whole situation. We could've done it at a catch weight where we both would've been comfortable but they wanted it at 168. They wanted me to come to Oakland. And I know HBO has high hopes for Andre Ward. I know they have high hopes for him and they want to make him this big champion but that's water under the bridge for me."
I don't even want to say he's wrong or crazy, because what the hell do I know? It's true that nobody forced Chad Dawson to go to 168 pounds. He could have passed on the idea and taken a lesser fight, but the money was right for this one. I'm sure most at HBO did expect Ward to win, and those who know boxing largely did believe that dropping down a weight class for the first time in several years ran a very high risk of hurting Dawson physically, and that appeared to be the case.
But I don't know if you can call it a "set-up," really. It was a money offer and Dawson took it. In some ways, it sounds like he didn't really think that the weight would be a big deal. He acknowledges now that it was. And again, a whole lot of pundits and fans and even fellow fighters thought it was too much of a risk.
The way I look at it, Dawson miscalculated the impact the weight loss would have on him, and the best you can hope for now is that it didn't mentally affect him too terribly moving forward. If it has, Adonis Stevenson is definitely a live dog on Saturday. |
“It’s obvious to anyone who picks up a newspaper or turns on the news that the nation is in the midst of a crisis,” FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe said at a July 13 press conference at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he joined Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the heads of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in announcing the charges. “Opioid abuse destroys lives and it devastates families. This week, we arrested once-trusted doctors, pharmacists, and other medical professionals who were corrupted by greed. These people inflicted a special kind of damage.”
Additionally, HHS began suspending 295 providers—including doctors, nurses, and pharmacists—so they can no longer participate in federal health programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and TRICARE, a health insurance program for veterans and the military.
The takedown targeted schemes that billed the federal programs for medically unnecessary prescription drugs. It also focused on medical professionals who unlawfully distributed opioids and other prescription narcotics, thereby contributing to the opioid epidemic. |
REUTERS/Brendan McDermid Next semester, 200 lucky Princeton students will have the opportunity to take The Great Recession: Causes, Consequences, and Remedies with professor Paul Krugman.
The reading list is stacked (and we can't believe that only 178 students are currently signed up to take a class with a Nobel Prize winner, according to Princeton's office of the registrar).
"The course will begin by reviewing the causes of the recession that began in December 2007. It will concentrate on consumer behavior, financial markets, unemployment, and the housing sector," according to the course description. "The role of public policies in contributing to the economic crisis and in ending the crisis will be explored. The state of the recovery will be assessed and monitored."
Regular Krugman readers will recognize many of the texts from his bloggings at the New York Times, but it's cool to see them laid out all syllabus style.
You can follow along at home all semester. Things get a little more free-form by April, but the midterm is on March 12, kids (via David Dayen): |
Updated Stats
Video Views Per Day: 1,422,483
Current Number of Subscribers: 4,634,338
Current Number of Views: 818,214,380
Estimated Earnings Per Day: $1830
Youtube is number three most visited website on the internet. Containing millions of active users, Youtube gets around 4 Billion unique visits daily and that's not it. Youtube started a program called "youtube partnership" in 2007. With that program anyone can earn revenue for making original content and sharing it on youtube. So from the year 2007 up till now youtube has approved hundreds and thousands of youtube channels for revenue generation.
Fact: Youtube in October 2012 announced that its top 1000 partners are making more than $23,000 per month, on average, just by advertising google ads on their videos. This doesn't include the product promotions that youtube partners can do to make extra few bucks .
The best part of youtube is that you don't have to make a million dollar movie to start. All it takes is just a camera, a laptop(or desktop, whatever you prefer), an internet connection and a good idea(which won't cost you any money). There are thousands of examples on youtube of people who are making a living out of youtube and all they did was they started to follow their passion and now they are dealing in some good money.
Youtube is open for you all the time, but I would recommend that a good age to find the audience of your kind would be 13-21 years. Most of the Youtube partners who are making handsome money on youtube are above 21, but they started when they were in there teens like, Shane Dawson, Ray William Johnson, Phillip de Franco, Pewdiepie and many more...
So its time for you to either sit back, relax and watch videos other people have made, or jump in as a youtube partner and make money, or even living out of youtube. |
Alumni Legacy Scholarship
The school we all know today as Eastern Michigan University has had many names over its history, and so have the students who’ve attended. Normalites, Hurons, and Eagles have gathered over the years to share in the traditions and rich history of EMU. Traditions not only pass through each graduating class, but strengthened through numerous generations – continuing a family legacy. Do you have relatives who have graduated from EMU? If so, you are in luck, in 1970, a scholarship was established to honor the children and grandchildren of EMU alumni.
This scholarship helps many students who are currently enrolled at EMU, and those who have already come and gone through the campus know what a great experience EMU can be. The school is always looking for almuni to keep the traditional alive by donating to the Alumni legacy scholarship fund.
Eligible recipients can be awarded $1,250 per academic year and the reward is renewable based upon class level, degree program, and successful completion of other eligibility requirements. Awards are renewable for up to four consecutive years. That’s a cool 5k!
Application Guidelines
So your granddad loves to tell stories of his time here and now you’re interested in the money up for grabs. What do you need to know?
Be accepted as a Freshman, Sophmore or transfer student Submit a fully completed application. Provide official transcripts reflecting at least a 3.2 grade point average. Entering freshman, please provide official high school transcripts that include ACT/SAT scores and a cumulative grade point average. If you have already been admitted to EMU, your transcripts will be pulled through the Admissions Office. Entering sophomores and transfer students should provide official college transcripts. A written letter of recommendation. (not from a family member, they’ve already helped enough with this particular scholarship) An essay (500 words or less), describing what it means to you to be an EMU Legacy. Resume outlining work, school, extracurricular activities, and volunteer experience.
Additionally, all applicants must be sponsored by a parent or grandparent who is an Eastern Michigan University alum. Demonstration of financial need is not a requirement for this scholarship. The Office for Alumni Relations must receive all applications, complete and ready for review, by the posted deadline of May 1, 2015 at 5 p.m.
View Alumni Scholarship Scoring Rubric
Renewal Criteria
So if you’ve earned it, how do you keep it?
In order to remain eligible for the Alumni Association Legacy Scholarship, all recipients must:
Earn and maintain a 3.2 grade point average Participate in at least 3 service hours at alumni events and other activities sponsored by the Office for Alumni Relations per semester Enroll as a full-time students for every semester (fall and winter) this scholarship is received. That 12 credit hours.
After you apply, winners are announced in July 2015. That’s right around the corner, so get to it! The deadline is May 1st. Follow this link to the application. Good luck! |
Downwell is a roguelike vertically scrolling shooter platform video game developed by Ojiro "Moppin" Fumoto and published by Devolver Digital. The game was released for iOS and Microsoft Windows in October 2015, for Android in January 2016, and for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita in May 2016. A port for the Nintendo Switch was released in January 2019 and was ported by British studio Red Phantom Games, which also developed the PlayStation ports.[1]
Plot [ edit ]
Downwell centers around a "curious man" named Welltaro, who is at the local park one night when he decides to explore the depths of the well nearby. Knowing that monsters are waiting for him inside, he straps on his gunboots and starts his trip downwards, killing his enemies to proceed and collect treasure.[2]
Gameplay [ edit ]
Downwell 's protagonist shooting a stomping-resistant snail enemy with the "burst" ammo upgrade. protagonist shooting a stomping-resistant snail enemy with the "burst" ammo upgrade.
Downwell's art style and underground level design have been compared to Spelunky and Cave Story.[3] The game features three basic controls, the movement to left and right, and the ability to jump while on a solid surface. When mid-air, the player may press and hold the jump button down to fire from their gunboots.[4] Downwell is completely presented in a palette consisting of three colors, which default to black background and white outlines, with red as a highlight for gems, enemies and other important items. The precise colors are interchangeable through unlockable in-game palettes.[5]
The well is procedurally generated,[3] and the player is often confronted with a large number of different types of enemies, most of which can either be shot with the gunboots or stomped by jumping on them, others, however, are resistant to being stomped and can thus only be killed with bullets. While normal enemies only feature a red glare alongside the white outlines, these particular enemies are completely highlighted in red, with a more filled sprite body.[4] The gunboots are automatically reloaded when the player hits a surface, regardless of whether or not it is solid.[2] During the descent, players will find "timevoids", which, upon entering, stop everything outside them, as well as the music. These timevoids may lead to caves, which provide the player with a large amount of gems, or with an alternate weapon, which influences speed, delay, ammo usage, ammo count and the shoot pattern of the gunboots, as well as providing either health or a max ammo upgrade.[6] In other cases, the timevoids lead to a shop, where he is welcomed by a Jizō, who is taking the place of a shopkeeper, offering the player three different items in exchange for gems.[7]
The well is built up from multiple stages, each of them having three levels and featuring different sets of environmental designs and enemies.[8] At the end of each level, the player is given the choice between three player upgrades, which persist throughout the play session and support the player, additionally to ammo upgrades or shop purchases.[9] Additionally, alternating with color palettes unlocks, the player unlocks different movement styles, which influence his position and movement animation while on solid ground, as well as some of the well's procedural attributes, like frequency and type of timevoids.[5]
Development [ edit ]
Downwell's development began around March 2014. At that time, Fumoto had graduated in opera singing at the Tokyo University of the Arts, but felt like that was not the way he wanted to go in life.[10] So, at the end of February 2014, Fumoto canceled his studies and went on to make multiple "game-a-week" projects, after he read about that idea in Rami Ismail's article on Gamasutra.[11] Downwell was Fumoto's thirteenth project, in which he instantly saw a high potential and decided to continue its development.[7] Much of the game was influenced with Fumoto's obsession with Spelunky, and the initial idea for the game came from him wondering what a mobile phone game with similar gameplay would be like.[12] In early development the gameplay was that of a standard platform game, however once Fumoto came up with the Gunshoe mechanic he rebuilt the game around it.[13] During early development, the game was titled Fall or Well, however, during an indie meet-up in Tokyo, Japan, Fumoto figured that he needed an actual name for his game, and therefore came up with Downwell, and stuck with it.[14] While the game was not very popular at the time, Fumoto started posting animated GIF images of Downwell's gameplay in early development stages on his Japanese Twitter account, which came to the attention of Cara Ellison from The Guardian, as the game was largely different from Japan's usual indie gaming market.[15] On the same day of the article being published, indie publisher Devolver Digital hooked up with Fumoto through a comment on one of his GIF images, which showed the player shooting monsters and crates together with the "drone" upgrade, which repeats the actions the player takes.[16] This comment and the following dialog then led to Devolver Digital becoming Downwell's publisher.[17] With constant support from Devolver Digital and Fumoto's continuous posting of GIF images led to the opening of the game's official website and the announcement for the late 2015 release on iOS and Microsoft Windows.[18]
Due to Devolver Digital's international influence, the game went to different gaming conventions, one of which was the Independent Games Festival 2015, which was held from 2 March 2015 to 6 March 2015, at which Downwell got to the finalists of the "Student Showcase Award".[19] Another important convention was Japan's largest indie games festival, BitSummit 2015, which was held from 11 July 2015 to 12 July 2015, and at which Downwell was nominated for the Vermillion Gate Award by the Grand Jury and scored second behind La-Mulana 2.[20] The game was finally announced for a release on 15 October 2015 and was released for iOS and Microsoft Windows, while Moppin continued working on the Android version. On 12 November 2015, Downwell was nominated for "Best Mobile/Handheld Game" for The Game Awards 2015, which took place on 3 December 2015.[21] On 11 December 2015, publisher Devolver Digital teased Downwell for future release on PlayStation Vita by sharing a picture showing the game running on a PlayStation Vita device with tate mode enabled.[22] On 26 January 2016, it was announced that Downwell would be released the following day, respectively, 27 January 2016. On 9 February 2016, an official video by Sony Computer Entertainment revealed that the game would be released for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita sometime in 2016.[23]
Fumoto announced in January 2018 that had started working for Nintendo, saying "I'll do my best".[24] It is believed that his success with Downwell was a large factor in his hiring.[25] Fumoto previously stated that "[i]t was super fun developing games as indie" and that he "[could not] wait to see what it's like to develop games as part of a bigger team."[26] In September 2018, during that month's Nintendo Direct show, it was announced that Red Phantom Games was developing a port of Downwell for the Nintendo Switch.[1]
Reception [ edit ]
Upon release, Downwell received critical acclaim. On Metacritic, the game currently holds a score of 81/100 for Microsoft Windows,[27] 91/100 for iOS,[28] 80/100 for PlayStation 4,[29] and 85/100 for PlayStation Vita.[30] Steven Hansen from Destructoid praised the game's design concept and giving it a perfect 10/10 by saying that "[t]hese are the kind of things you learn as you delve deeper and deeper into Downwell's four worlds (three levels each) and they are presented intelligently."[31] Another positive review was written by Nadia Oxford from Gamezebo, who gave the game a 5 out of 5 stars ranking and praising Downwell's overall play-style and design, stating that "Downwell is easily one of the best action games to hit mobile this year. It’s intense, it’s unique, and every game you play goes towards unlocking something new."[32] Peter Bathge from German PC gaming magazine PC Games, however, gave the game a 70% score, criticizing that "[the game] feels somehow weird on the PC. This does not only come from the not always perfect, fixed and predefined controls, but the whole game principle is obviously cut to the mobile market needs."[33]
Awards [ edit ] |
Exclusive interview with Alex Youden, an ambitious young engineer from the UK who’s launched the NFire 1 modular 3D printer on Kickstarter.
Alex tinkering with the NFire 1
Though he’s only 19 years old, Alex Youden has already a remarkable track record in product design. Two years ago, he won the Intermediate Engineering and Technology category of the Young Engineer of Britain awards, developing a new way to practise a golfing technique.
Since then, he’s had one simple but ambitious vision; every home should have a 3D printer. He invested his prize money to start NFire Labs, and today he launches the NFire 1 on Kickstarter, a modular 3D printer that promises to be affordable and high-quality. ALL3DP spoke to Alex about the features of the NFire 1 and his plans for the campaign.
Q: This is an Elevator pitch for the NFire 1. Tell us what it is and why it’s exciting in 30 seconds or less. GO!
The NFire 1 is the worlds first truly modular 3D Printer which can change and adapt to your own personal journey through 3D printing. If you purchase a small 3D printer and then want to print larger objects, currently you would have to buy a new 3D printer. Not any more. If you purchase the standard sized NFire 1 3D printer, all you have to do is upgrade the axis and you can instantly double your build volume! Simply swap out the specific components and you are good to go. Printing in dual colours with the NFire 1 is as easy as printing with a single colour with a simple upgrade! We have focused on making upgrade-ability as easy as possible.
Q: We can see it’s a Delta printer. What advantages does this offer over a conventionally designed FDM printer?
NFire 1 Modular 3D Printer
The NFire 1 is a delta configured 3D printer, which means it overcomes some of the common issues that a standard cartesian FDM 3D printer has. It has increased printing speed due to its low mass print head. The footprint is vastly reduced compared to the print volume. We also think the delta design and the NFire 1 looks a lot nicer than the alternative cartesian 3D printers.
Q: The asking price is, frankly, astonishing. How on earth can you offer a 3D printer so cheap to backers without sacrificing quality?
Right from the start we wanted the NFire 1 to be local. Most of the printer has been sourced from within a 2 mile radius of our location. Why get something shipped half way around the world when it’s on your doorstep? The NFire 1 is therefore completely designed and manufactured here in the UK! A fact which not many other 3D printers can boast. Bulk pricing is another factor in offering the NFire 1 at such a great price. This is one of the reasons we turned to Kickstarter and crowd funding.
Q: And when you say “truly modular”, that’s a big promise! How does this work, exactly?
We started from scratch. With years of experience with building, modifying 3D printers we knew what works and what doesn’t. We combined all of the best ideas and the result of this was the NFire 1. With starting from the ground up we were able to create the necessary design changes to make all the parts interchangeable. This is something we are incredibly proud of, especially when the sky is the limit with the amount of upgrades and add-ons you can get for it.
Q: The theoretical build volume of 3,375cm^3 or 6,750cm^3 is also impressive. Is it easy to implement? What are the possible applications?
Sample prints from the NFire 1
We all know bigger is better, right? The possible applications of such a large volume is limited by only your imagination! You are able to print some of the most intricate and detailed prints which are huge compared to others. Peoples minds are blown when these 3D printed objects go from simple key-chains to something which can be held with two hands!
Q: The E3D extruder has a lot of fans in the 3D printing community. What makes this component so special, and why did you choose it for the NFire 1?
The E3D V6 Lite is a metal hotend which prints to an extremely high standard when tested, no other hotend came close to its performance. With the whole ethos of having high quality the e3D V6 Lite was an obvious choice. With it also being produced in the UK, it tied in with our whole local concept.
Q: For the Kickstarter campaign, do you have any stretch goals lined up, in the event you meet your initial targets?
We could tell you, but then we’d have to kill you! They will be released during the Kickstarter campaign.
Q: Tell us a bit more about yourself. What inspires you?
Two years ago I built my very first 3D Printer (A Reprap i2 for anyone out there interested). The first time I saw that hotend move about, buzzing and wiring, with this thin strip of molten plastic flowing out the end… It put a spark in my head. From that moment onwards 3D printing has been this simply mind-blowing concept of having a physical object created out of thin air to me! It’s this wonder and this amazement which I want to give to as many people in this world as possible. The NFire 1 provides a platform to do this. With it being made with high quality components and the fact it is so affordable it opens the door of many people! I firmly believe that in the near future every home will have a 3D printer.
Q: What advice would you give other folks using crowd-funding platforms for the first time? (Answering as a Start-Up)
Take your time, what ever you do don’t rush into it. The last thing you want to happen is to release something which is untidy and unfinished. Not only will it be hard to fund, but if it does, you are going to have one hell of a time sorting all the issues out with backers pressurising you for their pledge! The NFire 1 launch has been pushed back a few weeks just to make sure everything is in place and ready to go.
The C4DI has been incredibly helpful in regards to the progress of NFire Labs. I have never experienced anything like it before, and it really is a place which you have to go to to realise its full potential and what it can offer. For growing start-ups and indeed growing established businesses the C4DI in Hull is the place to go to! I don’t think NFire Labs would be half the company it is now with out the support from them.
Q: Finally, what’s the single most useful thing you’ve ever 3D printed?
It may not be the most useful, but it certainly is the most powerful. I 3D printed a traffic cone on the NFire 1 and it has turned into a firm favourite around the office. People are lost by its seamless appearance and it’s the same expression which I first had when I saw 3D printing. This amazement and you can see people trying to work out how it was made. It’s this feeling which needs to be had by anyone and everyone! |
China to build new parliament for Zimbabwe – free of charge
China’s Zhang Ming was quoted as saying the new building was a donation to Zimbabwe.
JOHANNESBURG - A Chinese envoy has handed over construction plans for a new parliament building to President Robert Mugabe.
State radio is reporting that China plans to build the new parliament just outside Harare at no cost to Zimbabwe.
The state ZBC is reporting that a special envoy of Chinese president Xi Jinping handed over the construction plans to President Mugabe yesterday.
The new parliament building is planned for Mount Hampden, 18km west of the capital.
Apparently the current building is too small for Zimbabwe's large houses of assembly.
The envoy, Zhang Ming, was quoted as saying the new building was a donation to Zimbabwe.
Mugabe considers the Chinese government a key ally; he's called China Zimbabwe's all-weather friend.
But earlier this month, Mugabe criticised some Chinese businessmen based in Zimbabwe for failing to bank their money inside the country. |
I might have to change the name of this blog to Firetail BBQ!
It seems I am barbecuing more than I am brewing these days.
But never fear, I whipped up a batch of Bra Beer today (more on that in a few weeks when it is ready to drink)
I did however venture back into the world of low and slow cooking on the Weber Q.
Today's challenge was Bacon Wrapped Baby Back Ribs (try saying that 5 times quickly!)
That's right, wrap your pork ribs in bacon! Baby back ribs are pretty lean, the bacon will render and keep everything nice and moist.
Ingredients:
A couple racks of Baby Back pork ribs (I got mine from Super Butcher)
Your favourite BBQ rub.
Bacon
Method:
Rubbed and ready.
The night before your cook
Remove the membrane from the back of the ribs.
Cover in your favourite BBQ rub.
Wrap in foil and place in the fridge.
On the day of the cook
Take your bacon and create a loose weave over the top of the ribs, mine is very loose as I only had a little bit of bacon left (Oh No!!)
Ohhhh Yeah.
3 hours before serving clean and prep the Weber
Set up your smoke box or pouch with whatever wood you like (I used Mesquite and Hickory)
Place a double layer of foil on the grill, top that with a trivet
Place a foil pan full of water next to the trivet
Get the BBQ to 120ºC (250ºF)
Arrange you ribs on the trivet and walk away for 1.5 hours.
Here they are looking lovely after 1.5 hours, here I baste liberally in BBQ sauce.
I was planning on making my own, but ran out of time and used Master Foods BBQ Rib sauce, which is fantastic.
And after 3 hours low and slow, here is the final result.
Bones were picked clean, mouths were wiped, requests for more were spoken!
Another excellent technique for low and slow cooking on the Weber Q.
Cheers |
In his first public comments since the Los Angeles Lakers announced that he had suffered a torn right rotator cuff, Kobe Bryant went peak Kobe Bryant with his Twitter response:
This is what happens when I pass too much! #ShoulderShock thank u all for ur thoughts and prayers #team @DrinkBODYARMOR @Lakers #oneluv — Kobe Bryant (@kobebryant) January 23, 2015
That is brilliant. And perfect Kobe – a self-aware joke, an endorsement, hashtags and thanks.
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More telling? No dour notes, no blacked-out Twitter avatar (as he did during his 2013 rehab from an Achilles tear), no complaints about the struggle being real, nothing for us to chomp down on in wondering if Kobe was game to retire after a third consecutive season was ended by a major injury.
Bryant was never going to retire, regardless of the $25 million he would be walking away from in the process, but it wouldn’t be atypical for him to spend the next few months fuming and lamenting his recent streak of bad luck. It would have been just fine for Bryant to be frustrated before the cloud cleared and the summer brought new hope, but we’re not getting any of that from this tweet. Perhaps we’re reading too much into a stupid Twitter message, but it’s still good to see.
Kobe Bryant, healthy and on the basketball court again, would be great to see. We’re enjoying 2014-15, but this is one benefit of 2015-16 that can’t get here soon enough.
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Story continues
Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! |
Abstract Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi are mutualistic symbionts living in the roots of 80% of land plant species, and developing extensive, below-ground extraradical hyphae fundamental for the uptake of soil nutrients and their transfer to host plants. Since AM fungi have a wide host range, they are able to colonize and interconnect contiguous plants by means of hyphae extending from one root system to another. Such hyphae may fuse due to the widespread occurrence of anastomoses, whose formation depends on a highly regulated mechanism of self recognition. Here, we examine evidences of self recognition and non-self incompatibility in hyphal networks formed by AM fungi and discuss recent results showing that the root systems of plants belonging to different species, genera and families may be connected by means of anastomosis formation between extraradical mycorrhizal networks, which can create indefinitely large numbers of belowground fungal linkages within plant communities. Key Words: arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis, extraradical mycelium, anastomosis, plant interconnectedness, self recognition, non-self incompatibility, mycorrhizal networks
Introduction Most terrestrial plant species establish mutualistic symbioses with arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi, which develop extensive, belowground extraradical hyphae fundamental for the uptake of nutrients from soil and their transfer to the host plant.1,2 Since AM fungi have a wide host range, they are able to colonize and interconnect plants of different species, genera and families, by means of hyphae extending from one root system to another. Such mycorrhizal networks, first visualized and quantified in vivo by means of two-dimensional experimental systems, spread from colonized roots into the surrounding environment at growth rates ranging from 738 to 1067 mm per day, depending on the host plant, and reach hyphal extent of 10–40 mm per mm of root length.3 Moreover, AM extraradical networks may be interconnected by means of the widespread occurrence of anastomoses, whose formation depends on a highly regulated mechanism of self recognition between compatible hyphae. Successful anastomoses occur between hyphae belonging to the same individual and to different individuals of the same isolate, during the presymbiotic growth of AM fungi.4 By contrast, hyphae of individuals belonging to different genera and species, and even to geographic isolates of the same species, are unable to fuse, and show rejection responses, either before or after contact, revealing AM hyphal ability to discriminate against non-self.5 Extraradical mycorrhizal networks maintain the capacity of self-recognition, evidenced by the high frequency of anastomosis between hyphae originating from the same and different root systems colonized by a single AM fungal isolate.6 Here, we discuss recent advances in the study of self recognition and non-self incompatibility in hyphal networks formed by AM fungal germlings during the presymbiotic stage of their life cycle. We review evidences for the characterization of true anastomoses—i.e., complete fusions of hyphal walls, cytoplasmic flow and migration of nuclei through hyphal bridges—and for the detection of incompatibility responses—i.e., protoplasm retraction from hyphal tips and septum formation in approaching hyphae, even before physical contact—as revealed by time-lapse, video-enhanced and epifluorescence microscopy. Finally, we discuss recent results showing that the root systems of plants belonging to different species, genera and families may become linked by means of anastomosis formation between mycorrhizal networks, which can create indefinitely large numbers of fungal linkages connecting together many plants in a community.
Evidence for the Existence of Anastomosis in Presymbiotic Mycelial Networks of AM Fungi Although anastomoses have been extensively studied in vegetative hyphae of Ascomycota and Basidiomycota,7,8 they are believed to be lacking or rare in other fungal phyla.9,10 A few works reported sporadic observations of their occurrence in AM fungi, without giving any quantitative data on the frequency of hyphal fusions in the different isolates or on the cytological events involved.11–14 The first extensive study on anastomosis in AM fungi reported data on fusions of hyphae belonging to the same isolate in different species of the genus Glomus, by using a combination of time-lapse and video-enhanced light microscopy, image analysis, and epifluorescence microscopy.4 Protoplasmic continuity, the characteristic feature of successful hyphal fusions, was evidenced by the complete disappearance of hyphal walls and visualized by histochemical localization of formazan salts in hyphal fusions, after SDH (succinate dehydrogenase activity) staining ( ). Time-course experiments showed that hyphal tips were able to fuse with hyphae growing nearby in about 35 min, and that a bidirectional flow of particles (vacuoles, mitochondria, nuclei, and fat droplets) moved at the speed of 1.8 ± 0.06 µm/s through hyphal bridges formed during anastomosis.4,15 Open in a separate window The established protoplasmic flow was further demonstrated by the detection of nuclei in hyphal bridges, evidenced by DAPI (diamidinophenylindole) staining. Nuclear migration occurred between hyphae belonging to the same germling and to different germlings of the same AM fungal isolate, in three different Glomus species, G. caledonium, G. intraradices, G. mosseae.4 The ability of self compatible hyphae to fuse and exchange nuclei is of critical importance for the maintenance of genetic continuity within AM fungi, which are considered clonal organisms.16 Since they produce multinucleate spores, containing 1,000 to 5,000 nuclei each,17 and have been shown to be multigenomic,18,19 nuclear exchange during anastomosis within the same germling and between different germlings of the same isolate could represent a means for the maintenance of isolate genetic diversity, in the absence of sexual recombination.4,20,21 The frequency of anastomosis formation between contacting hyphae originating from the same germling or from different germlings of the same isolate ranged from 34% to 90%, in G. caledonium and G. intraradices, respectively.4 Similar results were found in other studies carried out on geographic isolates of G. mosseae originating from Europe (France and United Kingdom), USA (Arizona and Indiana) and Middle East (Syria), where anastomosis frequency ranged from 60% in the UK isolate IMA1 to 85% in the Arizona isolate AZ225C.5 Such values were obtained on total hyphal contacts ranging from 91 to 242, which are relatively high numbers, given the inability of AM fungi to grow extensively in the absence of a host plant.22–24 In the experimental data, mycelial length of each germling varied with the different isolates, from 34.5 ± 3.5 mm in the French isolate BEG69 to 119.5 ± 14.4 mm in the UK isolate IMA1. It is interesting to note that anastomosis densities detected in AM fungi, unable to grow saprophytically, ranged from 0.62 ± 0.06 to 1.3 ± 0.23 per cm of hyphal length, values comparable with those reported for the saprophytic fungi Rhizoctonia solani and Gibberella fujikuroi.25–27 Interactions between hyphae belonging to the same germling of AM fungal species of the genera Gigaspora and Scutellospora did never lead to anastomosis formation. In fact, no fusions were found over 220 hyphal contacts in G. rosea and over 460 hyphal contacts in S. castanea.4 These data were confirmed by other works, carried out in in vitro monoxenic cultures on mycelium spreading from Ri T-DNA transformed carrot roots, where no anastomoses were detected among main hyphae (runner hyphae) of Scutellospora reticulata, while only 1% of fusions was found in branching absorbing structures.28 Interestingly, the most important mechanism allowing fungal mycelium to become interconnected was represented by wound healing between broken hyphae, previously described by Gerdemann.29 Further studies, aimed at comparing the different anastomosis ability of two phylogenetically distant AM fungal families, Glomeraceae and Gigasporaceae, confirmed their fundamental diversity in mycelial developmental structure.30
Evidence for Non-Self Incompatibility in Presymbiotic Mycelial Networks of AMF When hyphae originating from different species or genera of AM fungi come into contact, no anastomoses are formed.4,13 Different intergeneric and interspecific hyphal pairings yielded zero fusions over large numbers of contacts, ranging from 90 in the pairing G. mosseae-G. caledonium to 140 in G. mosseae-G. rosea and 232 in G. caledonium-G. rosea. Interestingly, hyphal interactions lead to different responses, ranging from no interference—i.e., hyphal intermingling—to the formation of hyphal swellings which become empty and septate after the failure of anastomosis formation. These findings, suggesting that AM fungi can recognize self entities and discriminate self from non-self, opened the way to tests of vegetative compatibility, already used for the identification of genetically different isolates of pathogenic, saprophytic and ectomycorrhizal fungi.8,31–35 Such tests, carried out on geographically different isolates of G. mosseae, showed that hyphal interactions between different isolates do never produce anastomosis, suggesting their genetic isolation. Accordingly, hyphae intermingled without any response in 49–68% of contacts, while developed incompatibility reactions in 32–51% of hyphal contacts, in the different pairings. Incompatibility responses were consistent with those detected in hyphae belonging to different genera and species after physical contact, and were characterized by hyphal swellings, vacuolization, localized wall thickenings, protoplasm withdrawal, retraction septa formation and hyphal lysis ( ),5 and comparable to postfusion incompatibility events reported in other fungi.7,8,36–39 The strong genetic barriers to hyphal fusions exhibited by G. mosseae isolates of different geographic origins could have the function of hindering heterokaryon formation between genetically different mycelia, thus permitting the maintenance of the fittest gene combinations. Moreover, such barriers may prevent the exchange of cytoplasm and the spread of harmful genetic elements.8,40 The major evidence for the existence of a highly regulated system of self recognition and non-self discrimination in AM fungi was represented by the detection of precontact tropism and the formation of hyphal swellings and consecutive retraction septa prior to any physical contact between neighboring hyphae.5 The occurrence of hyphal tropism, previously studied also in other fungal species, Phanerochaete velutina and Stereum spp.,7,36 suggests that specific recognition signals, released by interacting hyphae, are involved in interhyphal attraction and in the regulation of hyphal fusion.32,41 Nevertheless, the nature of the specific compounds acting as signals for self recognition and non-self discrimination in AM fungi remains to be unravelled.
Visualization of Intact Mycelial Networks Spreading from Roots Colonized by AMF The most important AM fungal structure for plant nutrition is represented by the extraradical mycelium spreading from mycorrhizal roots into the surrounding soil, which is able to uptake mineral nutrients—N, P, S, Ca, K, Fe, Cu, Zn—and to transfer them to root cells.1,42–44 Mycorrhizal mycelium has been investigated in different experimental studies, based on either destructive extraction from soil or root observation chambers or in vitro systems, which yielded only qualitative data on its structure and growth.45–48 The first visualization of intact AM mycelium extending from mycorrhizal roots into the extraradical environment was obtained by means of a bidimensional model system which utilized two cellulose esters membranes “sandwiched” around the roots of individuals plantlets ( ). After only seven days' growth, a fine network of extramatrical hyphae growing on the membranes was visible to the naked eye, and its length extended from 5169 to 7471 mm (hyphal length), in Thymus vulgaris and Allium porrum, respectively ( ).3 In order to understand the fundamental role played by extraradical mycelium in nutrient uptake and translocation, it is interesting to calculate hyphal length per total root length, which reaches 40.2 mm mm−1 in A. porrum, and the mean growth rate, which ranges from 738 to 1067 mm per day, depending on the host plant. Such data are comparable with the higher values of hyphal densities previously detected by using destructive extraction from soil, which were much variable, ranging from 1.6 to 1420 mm of hyphal length per mm of root.49–52 Open in a separate window Open in a separate window The experimental system deviced to visualize the mycorrhizal mycelium also evidenced that the mechanism allowing the formation of the network was self recognition and hyphal anastomosis. Since AM fungal hyphae showed many branches (8.6–9.7 cm−1) the number of anastomoses per cm of hypha was very high (4.6–5.1), as well as their frequency, 75–78% of hyphal contact ( ). The frequency of anastomosis was higher in extraradical mycelium (symbiotic) than in presymbiotic mycelium of AM fungi or than in self-anastomosing isolates of Rhizoctonia solani.4,5,25 Table 1 Plant Species/Fungal Species Hyphal Density (mm mm−2) No. of Anastomoses Per Hyphal Length (cm) Anastomosis Frequency (%) Ref. Allium porrum/Glomus mosseae 2.7 4.6 75.0 3 Allium porrum/Glomus mosseae 3.5 3.8 59.3 6 Daucus carota/Gigaspora margarita* - 0.0075 9.8 30 Daucus carota/Gigaspora rosea* - 0.012 4.2 30 Daucus carota/Glomus hoi* - 0.057 100 30 Daucus carota/Glomus intraradices* - 0.076 100 30 Daucus carota/Glomus mosseae 3.9 2.5 45.5 6 Daucus carota/Glomus proliferum* - 0.066 100 30 Daucus carota/Scutellospora reticulata* - 0.0079 5.2 30 Gossypium hirsutum/Glomus mosseae 6.8 6.2 53.1 6 Lactuca sativa/Glomus mosseae 2.9 3.0 63.8 6 Petroselinum crispum/Glomus caledonium 3.8 1.5 18.6 § Petroselinum crispum/Glomus intraradices 2.3 5.5 56.9 § Petroselinum crispum/Glomus mosseae 3.5 4.7 62.3 § Prunus cerasifera/Glomus mosseae 2.4 5.1 64.0 3 Solanum melongena/Glomus mosseae 4.1 2.1 47.0 6 Thymus vulgaris/Glomus mosseae 2.1 5.1 78.0 3 Open in a separate window It is important to stress that the viability of the mycorrhizal network was 100% and that all the anastomoses showed protoplasmic continuity and nuclear occurrence in hyphal bridges, confirming the occurrence of nuclear exchange also during fusions between extraradical (symbiotic) hyphae.
Visualization of Belowground Interconnections between Plants of Different Species, Genera and Families AM fungi have been reported to be active in mediating nutrient transfer among plants,53–58 mainly through the extensive mycelial networks, which, due to the lack of host specificity, may link the roots of contiguous plant species.57,59,60 Recent studies showed a novel mechanism by which plants may become interconnected, that is hyphal fusions between extraradical hyphae originating from different individual plant root systems of different species, genera and families.6 The bi-dimensional experimental system utilized allowed the visualization and quantification of fusions between mycorrhizal networks spreading from Allium porrum (leek) root systems—after inoculation with the AM symbiont Glomus mosseae—and those originating from Daucus carota (carrot), Gossypium hirsutum (cotton), Lactuca sativa (lettuce), Solanum melongena (eggplant). The use of plants belonging to different species allowed the detection of a host plant effect on the development of extraradical mycelium, since hyphal density in cotton was 6.8 mm mm−2, a value statistically different from those of all the other plant species, which ranged from 2.9 to 4.1 mm mm−2 in lettuce and eggplant, respectively ( ). Cotton was also the species which showed the highest interconnectedeness in the mycorrhizal network: the number of anastomoses per mm of hyphal length was 0.62 compared to values ranging from 0.21 to 0.38 of the other species. The frequency of anastomoses between mycorrhizal networks originating from the different plant species was very high, ranging from 44% in the pairing leek-eggplant to 49% in the pairing leek-cotton, even though lower than that between networks spreading from the same species, leek (62%). The occurrence of true anastomoses was verified by means of SDH and DAPI stainings: formazan salt depositions and nuclei were detected in the middle of hyphal bridges connecting different mycorrhizal networks, whereas no hyphal incompatibility reactions were found in interactions between hyphae connecting different mycorrhizal networks. The high rate of anastomosis formation between extraradical hyphae spreading from the root systems of different plants suggests that plant interconnectedness may be greater than previously thought. Accordingly, due to the wide host range of AM fungi, mycorrhizal mycelium could give rise to an indefinitely large network of hyphae interconnecting contiguous plants, representing a major factor in the distribution of resources in plant communities.56,57,61,62 The bi-dimensional experimental system deviced for visualizing the structure of the mycorrhizal network could be further implemented, to detect and quantify nutrient and carbon transfer in the “soil food web”.63–66
Acknowledgements This work was supported by funds from the University of Pisa (Italy) and by C.N.R. (National Research Council, Italy).
Footnotes Previously published online as a Plant Signaling & Behavior E-publication: http://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/psb/abstract.php?id=2227 |
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Operation "Dragoon"
“We went down there with 22 men and there were only five of us left at the end. We used to drink ourselves silly every day, out of sheer joy that we were still alive.”
Unteroffizier Walter Lang (1./JGr. 200), 23 August 1944
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P-47D-25, P-47D-28, P-51D-5 Spitifre Mk.Vb, Beaufighter Mk.VIc Germany: 20% discount on purchase and 25% discount on repair costs for: Ju-88A-4, Me.410-A1, Bf.109G-6, Fw.190F-8 Germany gets 30% discount on the XP conversion.
The 2nd Invasion of Europe
Most remember the D-Day Landings at Normandy. However, few can recall that the original plans called for 2 smain landing in France .Originally planned as Operation Anvil and Overlord. Dragoon was to coincide with the landings at Normandy codenamed “Overlord”. The Attack however was delayed due to slowed than expected progress in the Italian theater of Operations as well as lack of usable landing craft in the sector.
On August 15th, 1944 an invasion force of 887 ships, 2,000 aircraft, 173,000 men, and 18,000 vehicles. Set out from ports in Corsica on a path to landing ports in the French Riviera. The Allies chose the Var Coast east of Toulon. Where the German and Vichy French defenders were reinforced, but surprised at the assault nonetheless.
Landings Took place with aim at
Alpha (Cavalaire-sur-Mer)
Delta (Saint-Tropez)
Camel (Saint-Raphaël)
Prior to the Invasion of Southern France. The German Air Forces in days leading up to the attack had received some much needed re-enforcements to defending units in southern airfields. Germany's Fleigerdivision 2 with it's HQ in Montfin as well as General Blaskowitz's Army Group G were stationed as Static units in the surrounding countryside. Only the 11th Panzer division remained at that time as a full fledged fighting force due to supply issues in the entire Army group prior to the Invasion.
The landings on August 15th were aided by ship and air bombardment. As fighting at Camel beach proved to be the most difficult. Especially Camel-red (near Saint-Raphael) where air support from British Hellcats were paramount but nonetheless the landings had to be shifted to other parts of the beach. Repeated airstrikes from German torpedo and bomber planes. Backed by fighter escorts and Heavy fighters rained down upon the ships day and night. This drastic contrast unlike the Normandy invasion. Paints a quite harrowing picture of the ground scene. As the Army fell and retreated, the air war became more and more a desperate race for the German pilots to buy them more time. The German Army group in fact it was noted by General Eisenhower after the fact that had they had know the true status on the ground they would had pushed sooner, faster, with more people than in Normandy.
Subsequently though the landings in the south allowed the allies use of the Mediterranean ports in the Riviera. Also opening a spear head that would eventually liberate most of southern France almost effectively dissolving the Vichy government in one fail swoop.
23 Jun 1944 Churchill, with misgivings, gave in to pressure from the Americans and sanctioned operation Anvil (the proposed US-French invasion of the south of France). 2 Jul 1944 General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson (Supreme Commander, Mediterranean) received orders from London, England, United Kingdom to organize the invasion of Provence, France. The name of this operation was changed by British Prime Minister Churchill to "Dragoon". 20 Jul 1944 French troops began withdrawing from Italy in preparation for the invasion of southern France. 21 Jul 1944 The French Expeditionary Corps and the US VI Corps began to be withdrawn from the front lines in Italy to prepare for the invasion of Southern France. 15 Aug 1944 Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France, began. On the same day, Saint-Tropez, Var, France was captured by the 15th Infantry Regiment of 3rd US Infantry Division. 21 Aug 1944 French First Army enveloped Toulon, France. 23 Aug 1944 US troops from the north and French troops from the south met near Bordeaux, France. 24 Aug 1944 Allied forces liberated Cannes in southern France. 26 Aug 1944 French troops captured Tarascon and Avignon, France. 27 Aug 1944 The last German troops in Toulon, France surrendered. 28 Aug 1944 The German garrison in Marseilles, France surrendered to French forces. 29 Aug 1944 French troops captured Montélimar in southern France. 3 Sep 1944 US and French troops reached Lyon, France.
All the pictures are taken from the author's personal archive.
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About the Author:
Clay «FryingTiger» Remy, a Historical Consultant, Alpha tester, and Global Moderator for War Thunder. With over 10 years Military Service in the US Marine Corps active and reserves. Technical/Historical researcher and owner of a company that provides training and licensing of equipment for use in films, documentaries, museums, and other displays. I have been involved in a variety of digital projects stemming from video games stemming from flight Sims like War birds, WWIIOL, to Ship and FPS products on a variety of platforms. I also provide Historic data and quality assurance for films and museums for military related projects. |
We have a lot of poorly-designed tax policy in this country, and transportation policy is no exception. Under IRS Code Section 132(f), the federal government outlines its "qualified transportation fringe" benefit, which, as of 2014, allows for tax deductions of up to $245/month for parking, $130/month for transit, and $20/month for bicycling. For transit, the commuter benefit can cut the costs of a monthly pass by 15 percent or more, which amounts to hundreds of dollars per year for most regular transit users. That kind of cost reduction could have a significant impact on ridership, but, unfortunately, whether you get that discount or not is up to your boss, not you, and most small businesses (and even many large ones) simply don't offer it.
Broadening the reach of this program would be hugely beneficial to cities and their residents, saving money for the people who need it most and boosting transit use in the process. I started thinking about how we could accomplish this a while back, and wrote about some of those ideas on my blog over a year ago. If you want a little more detail about how the commuter benefit works in practice, I recommend you check out that previous post.
Recently though, as I continued to think about how we might get this benefit into the hands of more people, particularly employees of smaller businesses (which are much less likely to offer these types of fringe benefits — see here, page 9) I started to wonder: if we really want more people to use transit, and we think it's a worthwhile goal to subsidize people's commutes, why go through all the trouble of tax deductions and employer control? Why not make things simple and just subsidize transit passes directly?
Photo from Next Stop STL.
Currently, if employees want to have their transit passes (or parking) subsidized they're basically reliant on their bosses to care enough about the program to offer it. The benefit does reduce the tax burden on the business as well as the worker, but the bulk of the benefit goes to employees and it's possible that the costs of time and paperwork exceed the benefits for many small employers. It's an unnecessarily complex process that almost seems designed to reduce commuter benefit claims. If the government wants to subsidize commutes it should be prepared to subsidize everyone's commutes, not just those fortunate enough to work for large employers, like Microsoft or GE, that have the resources to offer them.
Instead of going to all this trouble we could move to a system where transit pass prices were directly subsidized by the federal government: organizations like the MTA and King County Metro could set their fare prices, then automatically reduce them by a set amount — say 20 percent. Then, at the end of every year, they could determine the cost of the subsidy and submit a bill to the government. In other words, almost exactly what we already do, without all the pointless intermediate steps.
Direct subsidies would have a number of benefits over the current system:
Everyone would be served by the subsidy regardless of employer, income, or the extent of their knowledge of tax policy. VTPI executive director (and Planetizen blogger) Todd Litman has compiled research indicating that a fare increase of 10% can decrease ridership by 2% to 10%. Insofar as more people would be eligible for discounted passes, transit ridership would be likely to increase. Employers would save time, no longer needing to bother with burdensome and unnecessary tax documentation. Because all transit users would benefit, federal government spending on transit would increase while local jurisdictions saved money (which is already the outcome of commuter tax benefits, just on a smaller scale). Although total federal transit subsidies would increase, per-person costs would decrease because of the reduced time spent on individual tax filings and simplified/consolidated service delivery. More people would buy monthly transit passes, which speeds transit loading and encourages greater reliance on transit: the money's already spent, so the more you use it the more value you get from it. Perhaps most importantly, this would be a far more equitable way to allocate resources. Under the current tax structure, higher-paid workers receive a greater discount because their tax deduction falls under a higher tax bracket. An employee earning $35,000 a year receives a 15% discount, while someone earning ten times that amount receives a 33% discount. It's wrong, and it should change.
This would also put more power in the hands of employees. If we wanted to retain the payroll tax deduction for employers (and I'm not really sure why we would, since they wouldn't play a role any longer), it would be up to the employer to reach out to the employee to confirm their participation in the program, not the other way around. If we eliminated the payroll tax deduction for employers, as we probably should under this new system, those savings could help pay for its increased employee-subsidy costs.
To those who would argue that the commuter benefit is for getting to and from work, not for all transit trips, my first question would be: Why? Is travel to work the only one of any value, economic or otherwise? I would definitely argue against that notion. Also, since the tax deduction is usually tied to the purchase of a monthly transit pass, not one-off fares, we're already failing to differentiate between work and non-work trips. When I worked for the University of Washington I received a heavily discounted transit pass, and I used it for visiting friends and going to the store as often as I used it for my commute, and I think that's okay. It's especially important that we get people out of their cars during peak commute hours, but it's valuable at all times of day, for all purposes.
What do readers think? Any benefits I missed, or unforeseen consequences you think I may have overlooked? |
“I think we’re in impeachment territory.”
Those were not the words of a left-wing political blogger with high hopes, nor a hyperactive Twitter maven spouting conspiracy theories. They came from David Gergen, the typically moderate, mild-mannered CNN analyst and former aide to four presidents, both Republican and Democrat.
Gergen appeared on CNN Tuesday night to discuss the controversies that have overwhelmed the Trump administration in the past week.
At the top of the list were reports that President Trump had asked then-FBI Director James B. Comey to drop an investigation into Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser. The revelation has fueled claims that Trump might have obstructed justice, which in the past has been treated as an impeachable offense.
If true, it could mean devastating consequences for the president, said Gergen, who served under Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, both of whom faced the impeachment process.
“I was in the Nixon administration, as you know, and I thought after watching the Clinton impeachment I’d never see another one,” Gergen told host Anderson Cooper. “But I think we’re in impeachment territory now for the first time.”
Cooper asked: “Really?”
“I think that obstruction of justice was the number one charge against Nixon that brought him down,” Gergen responded. “Obstruction of justice was the number one charge against Bill Clinton, which led to his indictment in the House.”
In controversy after controversy, Republican lawmakers have defended President Trump's actions. But with his disclosure of highly classified information to Russian diplomats, they've floundered to explain the decision. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
The New York Times first, then The Washington Post and other outlets have reported that Trump had asked Comey in a February meeting not to pursue the Flynn probe and instead go after journalists in leak cases. Comey shared his notes from the conversation with aides, who in turn described the notes to reporters. Legal analysts told The Washington Post Tuesday that a criminal obstruction-of-justice case is possible but would likely require more evidence.
The news came within a week of Trump’s dismissal of Comey and a day after reports that Trump had shared classified information with Russia.
The White House denied the version of the conversation described by Comey’s aides, telling The Post “the president has never asked Mr. Comey or anyone else to end an investigation.” Trump has separately defended his firing of Comey and his sharing of information with Russian officials.
On CNN, Gergen said that “from a lay point of view” it appeared Trump was trying to impede the FBI’s investigation.
“He was using his power to do that, and when James Comey didn’t go along with him, when he wasn’t his boy, he fired him, which I think is also relevant to the question of what he was trying to do,” Gergen said. “So from my point of view this is of enormous consequence for his presidency.”
“I think if you look at the three bombshells we’ve had,” Gergen added, “what we see is a presidency that’s starting to come apart.”
Gergen wasn’t the only moderate voice to suggest Tuesday that a plausible case for Trump’s removal was emerging.
Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist for the New York Times and longtime critic of Trump, wrote that while Trump may not be guilty of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” necessary for impeachment, he had shown himself incapable of governing the country. A more appropriate solution, Douthat argued, was to remove Trump under the 25th Amendment, which allows the president’s cabinet to deem him “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
“It is not squishy New York Times conservatives who regard the president as a child, an intellectual void, a hopeless case, a threat to national security,” Douthat wrote. “It is people who are self-selected loyalists, who supported him in the campaign, who daily go to work for him.”
The 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967 in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, sets out both a plan of succession for the presidency and a complicated and daunting means of removing a president deemed incapacitated.
The relevant Section 4 reads as follows:
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President. Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.
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There is another house price bubble under way in the Dublin area. Notwithstanding the efforts by the Central Bank to keep mortgage credit under control, some extraordinary prices have been quoted recently for the small parcels of land that become available.
There is another house price bubble under way in the Dublin area. Notwithstanding the efforts by the Central Bank to keep mortgage credit under control, some extraordinary prices have been quoted recently for the small parcels of land that become available.
A site with planning permission is for sale on Vernon Avenue in Clontarf, on the north side of the capital. This is a nice area, close to the sea and only about four kilometres from the city centre.
The site is small, just under an acre, which equates to half a soccer pitch or about seven tennis courts. The permission is for 17 three-bedroom houses, so it will be a bit of a pinch. The guide price quoted for the site is €3.85m, which works out at an average €226,471 in site cost per unit. Given construction costs on smaller sites in the city and the various levies and taxes, if building goes ahead, these homes will need to sell for prices in the €500,000 bracket.
There is a three-bedroom semi-detached house available on the property websites currently, also on Vernon Avenue, which runs to 1,313 square feet. It is priced at €640,000, which should help explain the €4m per acre expected for the 17-house site.
The Phoenix Park contains 1,752 acres and is worth over €7bn on the per-acre Clontarf valuation. The Government alone must own enough Dublin land, on this basis, to wipe out the national debt.
This is not a proposal to carpet the Phoenix Park in three-bedroom houses, it is an illustration of the dysfunctional market that has already re-emerged in the city just a few years after the biggest housing bust in the country's history. There are working farms inside the M50, which is about 8km from the city centre through most of its length.
That is to say there is vacant land, not zoned residential, in the inner suburbs of Dublin, while demand pressure is sufficient to push the price for ready-to-go sites to €4m per acre. Huge rolling prairies of land can be found north and west of the ring road, further out, but some of it no more than 10km or 12km from the centre, which the planners have designated for agriculture (or 'amenity', whatever that means).
Meanwhile, would-be first-time buyers working in Dublin are eyeing properties in the midlands, 70km and 80km from the city, which are available at prices they can afford, but from which they must contemplate a daily commute of up to two hours through the vacant countryside.
On Joe Duffy's radio programme on Friday one young woman explained that she owned a five-bedroom house in Mullingar which she loved, but that the daily commute was a grind. Mullingar is 80km from central Dublin. She reckoned she could sell the Co Westmeath property for about €200,000, which is probably just over the cost of construction. But it is not enough to buy a site in Clontarf.
Commuters from the midlands who travel into central Dublin along the M3 motorway pass to the left a district called Pelletstown,, well inside the M50 and convenient to the Phoenix Park and many other amenities. There has been some residential construction around the area in recent years, mainly apartments.
The suburban railway line to Maynooth, upgraded at considerable expense in recent times, runs through the area which, like Clontarf, is just 4km from the centre. There are large tracts of undeveloped land around Pelletstown, inside the M50, including some currently devoted to agriculture, a curious obsession for urban planners. Prices in Pelletstown and adjoining districts are below Clontarf levels - it's a nice area too, but not close to the sea. Prices in the €300,000 bracket are nonetheless beyond reach of Dubliners on average incomes, or of the owners of fine five-bedroom properties in distant Mullingar.
There is a scheme for 318 new homes in Pelletstown headed for appeal to An Bord Pleanala. The area has been zoned residential since 1999, but existing residents object that the new development will add pressure to inadequate school provision in the area. They also complain that a promised railway station (on an existing line already built and paid for) has not been provided.
The merits of their objections are for An Bord Pleanala to adjudicate, but it is lamentable that this squabble continues. The residents may well have a case: public authorities, including the Department of Education and transport providers, can be a part of the problem too.
There are local disputes about numerous other residential sites in the Dublin area which actually enjoy residential zoning but where necessary services have not been provided. It is vacuous to point to the availability-on-paper of zoned land if it is impossible as a practical matter to proceed with development. But the deeper problem is the absolute prohibition by the planners of residential development in the outer suburbs of the city. There is enough land between Mullingar and Dublin to build a mega-city. Indeed there is enough land along the outer side of the M50 to meet current and future demands, some of it already close to decent transport links.
Two researchers at the London School of Economics, Christian Hilber and Wouter Vermeulen, have just released a paper in The Economic Journal looking at the development of house prices in the United Kingdom in recent decades and the role played by planning restrictions.
They conclude that planning restrictions have had a critical cumulative impact and that the areas of the UK with the most unaffordable house prices are the ones with the greatest regulatory interventions. The UK system of planning and zoning, and the system of housing finance, have been copied in this country and the resulting dysfunctionality of the housing market is not a coincidence. Housing costs are not a huge issue in Britain outside London and the southeast. Sounds familiar - there is no great issue in Ireland either, outside Dublin and a few other urban centres.
There are two bad answers to the Dublin affordability crisis. The first is to relax the mortgage lending rules, placing both banks and borrowers in the path of temptation. It is not prudent for banks to lend people very large multiples of income for house purchase, nor is it prudent to head back towards 100pc loan-to-value ratios. Remember how well that worked out?
The market valuations in Dublin are anyway distorted upwards by the artificial restrictions on supply. Housing is not a reliable form of collateral for long-term secured lending if there is a risk of sensible valuations, and hence negative equity, once a sane housing policy is instituted. Even if banks were permitted by the granite-faced supervisors to loosen mortgage finance, would it be wise for them to do so, or for the borrowers to avail of their imprudence?
The second bad answer would be to permit a renewed bout of pay inflation driven by the inability of Dublin-area employees to aspire to home ownership at current prices.
The last credit bubble saw government concessions to escalating pay demands, notably in the public service. Why not offer cheaper homes, instead of higher pay and higher debts?
Sunday Independent |
James Martin/CNET
Looks like Amazon got its happy holidays after all.
The company on Thursday reported a profit of $214 million, or 45 cents a share, on revenue of $29.33 billion, exceeding some analysts' estimates of 17 cents a share on $29.68 billion in revenue.
The results show that Amazon learned from the mistakes it made last year when its delivery partners FedEx and UPS ended up with a backlog of packages that caused some shipments to arrive at customers' doorsteps after Christmas. This year, the world's largest online retailer revised its delivery plans and even extended its Christmas delivery cutoff date, getting packages to customers on time, said Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor, which provides analytics and other services to online retailers.
For the current quarter, the company said it expects sales to rise to between $20.9 billion and $22.9 billion, growing 6 percent to 16 percent compared with the first quarter last year. It also forecast that operating income would range from a loss of $450 million to a profit of $50 million. Amazon last year reported $146 million in operating income.
Last quarter's profit comes after two consecutive quarters of losses, and investors are buying into the results. Shares surged more than 13 percent in after-hours trading. The stock closed at $311.78, up $7.87, or more than 2 percent.
"They did a really good job of extending the holidays and not repeating the debacle of last year," Wingo said.
Like other retailers, Amazon sees a spike in activity during the season, with big shopping days like Black Friday and, in more recent years, Cyber Monday, driving orders.
The holidays also tend to bump up the company's Prime membership, as people take advantage of the program's free, two-day shipping for last-minute shopping. The company in March hiked the price of Prime membership to $99, up from $79.
"When we raised the price of Prime membership last year, we were confident that customers would continue to find it the best bargain in the history of shopping," Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement. "The data is in and customers agree -- on a base of tens of millions, worldwide paid membership grew 53 percent last year -- 50 percent in the U.S. and even a bit faster outside the U.S.
Amazon did not release specific numbers for Prime. Wingo estimated that Prime membership has grown to roughly 40 million.
Prime is a key component of Amazon's strategy. A subscription service that gives members access to e-books, videos and music in addition to two-day shipping, it keeps customer -- and their dollars -- inside Amazon's vast ecosystem. One study of 2014's fourth quarter found that Prime customers spend hundreds more on Amazon than non-Prime shoppers.
"When a customer becomes a Prime member, they do step up their purchases very considerably," Chief Financial Officer Tom Szkutak said during a call with journalists following the report. He would not say how much more Prime members spend or whether they're watching more streaming videos than other consumers. Amazon has heavily invested in its Prime Instant Video service, which Szkutak said is driving more consumers to Prime.
The real star of Amazon's earnings continues to be its cloud-computing arm, Amazon Web Services. The company said that 1 million people use the service now and that it will start breaking out the service's financials this year, an indication of AWS' growth. Amazon has expanded the service considerably since it launched in 2006. It is a major provider of data storage and computing for several consumer brands, including video-streaming service Netflix, and even government entities like the CIA and NASA.
In the past, AWS sales were included in a miscellaneous category for North America sales called "Other," which saw $1.67 billion in sales in the last quarter.
Updated, 2:58 p.m. PT: Added more details from earnings call.
Updated, 3:17 p.m. PT: Updated stock price. |
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' MORE has raised more than $6 million in the 24 hours since polls closed Tuesday night in New Hampshire, the Sanders campaign confirmed late Wednesday.
The campaign beat its $6 million fundraising goal and is now urging supporters to donate another $1 million by midnight.
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“I’ll be honest — right now, the math looks difficult to raise another $1 million today,” campaign manager Jeff Weaver said in an email sent to supporters, according to The Washington Post. “But I think it’s important for us to try, and not just because there are 14 primaries and caucuses over the next three months.”
Sanders crushed rival Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE in the Granite State. Afterward, he used his victory speech to urge supporters to donate to his campaign.
About 18 hours after the polls closed, Sanders had raised more than $5.2 million, with an average campaign contribution of just $34.
The Vermont senator has been outraising his rival Hillary Clinton of late. In January, he raised $20 million, besting Clinton's $15 million.
Updated at 10:08 p.m. |
Matthew Stafford tied an NFL record with his seventh fourth-quarter comeback win of the season after the Lions' 16-13 Thanksgiving victory over the Vikings. The overlooked reason, however, for the success of the Cardiac Cats in the final frame has been the reliability of kicker Matt Prater.
Detroit's kicker was 2 for 2 on game-tying or game-winning field-goal attempts in the fourth quarter or overtime Thursday, extending his career perfect mark in that metric to 25 of 25.
"I don't think you can ever think anything is automatic, but he's as good as they come in these situations," Lions coach Jim Caldwell said after the game.
Prater made a 48-yard boot to tie the contest at 13 with 1:45 left. Vikings quarterback Sam Bradford gifted Prater another opportunity to prove his clutch kicking, throwing an interception to Darius Slay to put the Lions in range for another miraculous come-from-behind win.
After a Stafford kneel, Prater drilled a kick from 40 yards out through the uprights to give the Lions sole possession of first place in the NFC North.
"I still have a lot of confidence where I don't doubt myself," Prater said. "Basically, I have the same mind set as I would with an extra point in the first quarter. I don't go out and ever expect that I won't make the kick."
In a season highlighted by the constant struggles of kickers, the Lions have to be relieved that they don't have to fret with their special teams unit with the game on the line.
"Can't say enough about Prater," Stafford said. "The guy, he's as clutch as they get. Really that unit has done a heck of a job for us all season long. I know they'll continue to do a great job for us." |
Researchers have uncovered a major security vulnerability they are calling Heartbleed. It is said to have huge implications for the entire Internet.
Here is an overview of the bug and how it works:
Yan Zhu of the Electronic Frontier Foundation explained how the bug operates in more detail in her article Why the Web Needs Perfect Forward Secrecy More Than Ever:
EFF has long advocated for websites to support HTTPS instead of plain HTTP to encrypt and authenticate data transmitted on the Internet. However, we learned yesterday of a catastrophic bug, nicknamed “Heartbleed,” that has critically threatened the security of some HTTPS sites since 2011. By some estimates, Heartbleed affects 2 out of 3 web servers on the Internet. Heartbleed isn’t a bug in the design of HTTPS itself but rather the result of a simple programming error in a widely-used piece of software called OpenSSL. It allows an attacker who connects to an HTTPS server running a vulnerable version of OpenSSL to access up to 64KB of private memory space. Doing the attack once can easily cause the server to leak cookies, emails, and passwords. Doing the attack repeatedly in a clever way can potentially leak entire encryption keys, such as the private SSL keys used to protect HTTPS traffic. If an attacker has access to a website’s private SSL key, they can run a fake version of the website and/or steal any information that users send, including passwords, private messages, and credit card numbers. Neither users nor website owners can detect this attack as it happens.
In case you didn’t catch it, this bug has been around since 2011.
CNET.com provided tips on how to protect yourself from the bug:
Do not log into accounts from afflicted sites until you’re sure the company has patched the problem. If the company hasn’t been forthcoming — confirming a fix or keeping you up to date with progress — reach out to its customer service teams for information, said John Miller, security research manager for TrustWave, a security and compliance firm. Once you’ve got confirmation of a security patch, change passwords of sensitive accounts like banks and email first. Even if you’ve implemented two-factor authentication — which, in addition to a password asks for another piece of identifying information, like a code that’s been texted to you — changing that password is recommended. Don’t be shy about reaching out to small businesses that have your data to make sure they are secure. While the high-profile companies like Yahoo and Imgur certainly know about the problem, small businesses might not even be aware of it, said TrustWave’s Miller. Be proactive about making sure your information is safe. Keep a close eye on financial statements for the next few days. Because attackers can access a server’s memory for credit card information, it wouldn’t hurt to be on the lookout for unfamiliar charges on your bank statements.
CNET also said that a site called LastPass can be used to check websites to see for their Heartbleed patch status.
It has been reported that the NSA used Heartbleed for intelligence for years.
According to Bloomberg.com, the NSA kept the bug secret in order to exploit its capabilities:
Putting the Heartbleed bug in its arsenal, the NSA was able to obtain passwords and other basic data that are the building blocks of the sophisticated hacking operations at the core of its mission, but at a cost. Millions of ordinary users were left vulnerable to attack from other nations’ intelligence arms and criminal hackers. “It flies in the face of the agency’s comments that defense comes first,” said Jason Healey, director of the cyber statecraft initiative at the Atlantic Council and a former Air Force cyber officer. “They are going to be completely shredded by the computer security community for this.” The NSA and other elite intelligence agencies devote millions of dollars to hunt for common software flaws that are critical to stealing data from secure computers. Open-source protocols like OpenSSL, where the flaw was found, are primary targets. While many Internet companies rely on the free code, its integrity depends on a small number of underfunded researchers who devote their energies to the projects. In contrast, the NSA has more than 1,000 experts devoted to ferreting out such flaws using sophisticated analysis techniques, many of them classified. The agency found the Heartbleed glitch shortly after its introduction, according to one of the people familiar with the matter, and it became a basic part of the agency’s toolkit for stealing account passwords and other common tasks.
A statement by Michael Sutton, vice president of security research at Zscaler, a San Jose, California-based security firm, sums up the seriousness of the bug and its potential impacts:
“We’ve never seen any quite like this. Not only is a huge portion of the Internet impacted, but the damage that can be done, and with relative ease, is immense.”
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Contributed by Lily Dane of The Daily Sheeple.
Lily Dane is a staff writer for The Daily Sheeple. Her goal is to help people to “Wake the Flock Up!” |
The Chinese government is complaining about Trump’s aggressive stance on North Korea, but its implementation of U.S.-drafted sanctions Monday suggests it is in fact going along with the U.S. effort.
The Trump administration secured a major victory this month when China declined to use its veto at the U.N. Security Council and voted for strict sanctions against North Korea’s exports—after it had voiced opposition to using sanctions. The sanctions will slash a third of North Korea’s $3 billion exports.
Before the vote, China had indicated they would not support sanctions. U.N. Ambassador Liu Jieyi said that China did not support an “economic blockade,” and scolded the U.S. for being one of two parties that “refuse to move towards what is required by Security Council resolutions.” Days later, China voted for the U.S.-drafted resolution.
But in an apparent toughening of their stance, President Xi Jinping warned Trump over the weekend to exercise “restraint” over his language in relation to North Korea.
“At present, relevant parties should exercise restraint and avoid words and actions that would escalate tensions on the Korean Peninsula,” Xi said, according to the statement provided by China’s government.
However, despite the warning and amid concerns that China would approve the North Korea resolution but not actually follow through with it, China’s Commerce Ministry on Monday announced that China would ban imports of coal, iron, iron ore, lead ore, lead and seafood from North Korea—fulfilling China’s implementation of one of the key pillars of the U.N. resolution.
Even with that, the Chinese seemed reluctant, with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi telling Xinhua state news agency, “Given China’s traditional economic links with the DPRK, it is China that will mainly pay the price for the implementation of (the sanctions).”
Meanwhile, the state-controlled Global Times published a furious op-ed criticizing Trump on both North Korea and his reported decision to push for an investigation of China’s trade practices. The op-ed urged China to “turn its passivity around”:
The US frequently sends warships to patrol the South China Sea, and now it’s ramping up trade pressure on China. China should turn its passivity around. China will not act as an aggressive provocateur, but we should make Washington realize that China is not the one to be messed around with.
However, there was no sign of such a turning around from Beijing as it enforced the sanctions well within the 30-day limit set by the U.S.-drafted resolution.
Trump has taken an unusually hard line on China and had been outspoken in his disappointment that China had not worked with the U.S. to clamp down on North Korea.
The communist country’s recent backing down on North Korea may have something to do with Trump’s connecting of trade with the crisis in North Korea.
The Global Times blasted Trump for doing exactly that, calling the linking of the two “illogical.”
Adam Shaw is a Breitbart News politics reporter based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY |
A new paper on the Vox Web site by the European economists Rafael Lalive, Simon Luechinger and Armin Schmutzler on the effects of increased rail service makes clever use of natural experiments created by changes in German ownership and regulation. The results aren’t that surprising — more frequent rail service sharply reduces pollution and other costs associated with driving — but it’s good to have this kind of solid work to back our intuitions.
And can I say that this is a subject that really deserves a lot more attention? Mea culpa: I haven’t written much for a while on these issues, focusing mainly on the economic crisis, which is on the front burner for the moment. But we know, as surely as we know anything in economics, that there are huge market failures here — that every time an individual chooses to drive during rush hour, he or she is imposing huge costs on other drivers, on people who breathe, and more.
Ideally, the answer is to get the incentives right and to charge large fees for driving in congested areas. Short of that, there are huge second-best payoffs to mass transit; if we did the accounting properly, taking all the benefits into account, Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor service (which makes money even without taking this into account) would be seen as a huge social boon, and projects like a proposed rail tunnel under the
Hudson River between New York and New Jersey would be total no-brainers.
And the thing is that these are externalities that everyone can see. You can deny global warming (and may you be punished in the afterlife for doing so — this kind of denial for petty personal or political reasons is an almost inconceivable sin), but can anyone deny that more drivers means more traffic congestion?
Well, maybe I’m understating the power of denial. But still, this is a totally obvious case for government intervention that’s staring us all in the face every time we hit the road.
Running the Government Like a Business or a Family
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to knock down the bad analogy between governments and individuals, and the line that the government should act like an individual family or business, and cut back on spending when times are tough.
The key point is interdependence: your spending is my income, my spending is your income, and if we all try to slash spending at the same time, the result is a depression. Somebody needs to step up and spend when others won’t — and the government can and should be that somebody.
That said, the funny thing is that real individuals and businesses don’t behave the way the balanced-budget scolds claim. Businesses often borrow and spend when borrowing is cheap or they see high payoffs to investing; so do families. So the reporter Josh Israel at the commentary website Think Progress, in a recent post titled “14 GOP Congressmen Who Think Government Shouldn’t Borrow Have Big Debts Of Their Own,” is doing good by pointing out how many of those deficit-fearing Congresscritters turn out to have quite large personal debts. |
Trump Saw A Disturbing Video, Then He Shut Down The CIA’s Covert Syria Program from ZeroHedge
While we’ve carefully documented the dynamics in play behind Trump’s decision to end the CIA’s covert Syria program, as well as the corresponding fury this immediately unleashed among the usual hawkish DC policy wonks, new information on what specifically impacted the president’s thinking has emerged.
Thomas Joscelyn, a Middle East analyst for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, explains in the August edition of The Weekly Standard:
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump was shown a disturbing video of Syrian rebels beheading a child near the city of Aleppo. It had caused a minor stir in the press as the fighters belonged to the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement, a group that had been supported by the CIA as part of its rebel aid program. The footage is haunting. Five bearded men smirk as they surround a boy in the back of a pickup truck. One of them holds the boy’s head with a tight grip on his hair while another mockingly slaps his face. Then, one of them uses a knife to saw the child’s head off and holds it up in the air like a trophy. It is a scene reminiscent of the Islamic State’s snuff videos, except this wasn’t the work of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s men. The murderers were supposed to be the good guys: our allies.
Trump pressed his most senior intelligence advisers, asking the basic question of how the CIA could have a relationship with a group that beheads a child and then uploads the video to the internet. He wasn’t satisfied with any of the responses:
Trump wanted to know why the United States had backed Zenki if its members are extremists. The issue was discussed at length with senior intelligence officials, and no good answers were forthcoming, according to people familiar with the conversations. After learning more worrisome details about the CIA’s ghost war in Syria—including that U.S.-backed rebels had often fought alongside extremists, among them al Qaeda’s arm in the country—the president decided to end the program altogether.
Screenshot of the horrific video of a CIA-backed Syrian group beheading a boy named Abdullah Issa.
At the time the beheading video surfaced (July 2016), many in the American public naturally wanted answers, but the story never really picked up much momentum in the media. As Joscelyn describes, it caused nothing more than “a minor stir in the press.” The State Department seemed merely satisfied that the group responsible, Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki, claimed to have arrested the men that committed the gruesome crime, though nothing more was known. Absurdly, a US government spokesperson expressed hope that the child-beheading group would “comply with obligations under the law of armed conflict.”
The only press agencies that publicly and consistently challenged the State Department at the time were RT News and the Associated Press, yet even these attempts didn’t get picked up beyond the confines of the State Department’s daily briefing. When the AP’s Matt Lee initially questioned spokesman Mark Toner as to whether Zenki would continue to receive any level of US assistance, Toner casually replied “it would give us pause” – which left Lee taken aback.
Meanwhile, it wasn’t just the US government which had aided Zenki, but as fighting in Aleppo raged it became a favored group among both the mainstream media and prominent think tank pundits. One of the UK’s major broadcasters (Channel 4) even went so far as to attempt to delete and hide its prior online content which sought to normalize the beheaders as “moderate” and heroic once news of the video got out.
Controversial, but @AbuJamajem is largely right: – “In #Syria, U.S. Can Keep Its Hands Clean or Get Things Done”https://t.co/vYzwH0mWXB — Charles Lister (@Charles_Lister) August 22, 2016
Among think tankers, Zenki’s most prominent public supporter, frequently presenting the terror group as actually representative of Syria’s “secular” and supposedly democracy-promoting armed opposition (even after the beheading video emerged), was Charles Lister. Lister was finally confronted not by mainstream media, but by AlterNet’s Max Blumenthal at a DC event held by the (largely Gulf funded) Atlantic Council.
Only by the time of this January 2017 public forum, and after being persistently questioned, did Lister awkwardly back off his previous enthusiastic promotion of Zenki:
We can imagine that Trump saw other things beyond the shocking Zenki beheading video which made him fully realize the utter criminality of the CIA program (Thomas Joscelyn further emphasizes that Trump came to understand the full scope of CIA cooperation with al-Qaeda in Syria).
The only question that remains is who in the CIA or Obama-era State Department should be prosecuted first?
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Online gaming may boost school scores but social media is wasted time, study suggests
Posted
In what could be music to the ears of many parents, teenagers who regularly play online games are more likely to get better school scores, an Australian study suggests.
Key points: RMIT research suggests gaming helps boost results in maths, science and reading
Online gaming helps develop analytical and problem-solving skills, researchers say
Scrolling through Facebook, Instagram or chat sites was shown to hinder academic success
Research released from RMIT University has found gaming helps boost results in maths, science and reading.
But researchers said scrolling through Facebook, Instagram or chat sites had the reverse effect, by hindering academic success in high school.
Associate Professor Alberto Posso from RMIT's School of Economics, Finance and Marketing said online gaming appeared to be a more useful way to spend time online for teenagers, compared with social media.
"Kids that are spending more time on online gaming — for example in a maths test — they're likely to score 17 points above the average, which is about 4 per cent above the average [test score]," he said.
Associate Professor Posso used data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) to analyse the online habits of 12,000 Australian 15 year olds, which he then compared to their academic results.
He said the PISA data revealed that online gaming helped young people develop analytical and problem-solving skills.
"Sometimes [players] have to understand some of the principals of chemistry even, so they really have to understand science," he said.
"Some psychologists have argued that massive online player games can be beneficial to cognitive development."
'You're not really going to solve problems using Facebook'
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study found spending hours on social media was mostly wasted time for teenagers, in terms of academic performance.
Australian teenagers who used Facebook or chat sites every day scored 20 points worse in maths than students who never used social media, the research said.
"You're not really going to solve problems using Facebook," Professor Posso said.
"What's interesting, from an economic perspective, there's a very high opportunity cost of time, where we're spending a lot of time doing something that may not necessarily be associated with performance in school.
"When you play online games you're solving puzzles to move to the next level and that involves using some of the general knowledge and skills in maths, reading and science that you've been taught during the day."
The research has been published in the International Journal of Communication.
Topics: schools, education, games, social-media, australia, melbourne-3000 |
c/o Lauren Billington
It’s been three weeks since bleary-eyed Floridians woke up to news that a gunman had killed several people at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas. As the hours rolled on, and the internet did what it does, videos bounced off social networks like Snapchat and Twitter and onto mainstream news channels, warning viewers about the graphic images they were about to see. A click transported you to the moment shots began to ring out from a 32nd-story balcony hundreds of yard from the stage.
Details unfolded, and we learned that the shooter — a 64-year-old, millionaire retired real estate investor named Stephen Paddock — stocked a massive arsenal of guns in the Mandalay Bay Hotel room from which he would fire upon the 22,000 people gathered to see country star Jason Aldean. What initially sounded like fireworks were actually bullets, fired from guns outfitted with bump-stocks (which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire more like automatic ones). As victims in the massive crowd were treated for wounds suffered on festival grounds, images of fallen festival attendees, lost Stetsons and crying cowboys made their way to the eyes of a watching world. Eventually, we learned that 59 people died in the terrorist attack media outlets have dubbed “the worst mass shooting in modern American history.”
Aldean — who was just in Tampa for a boozy summertime performance at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre — took to Instagram to say that the events he witnessed were “beyond horrific.” He sent thoughts and prayers to everyone involved, along with just about everybody else with a Facebook account. Nonprofit pro-gun lobby The National Rifle Association mostly remained silent, though, and pols reminded us that it just wasn’t the right time to talk about gun control.
Still, at the center of it all was the truly horrific reminder of the reality that even concerts — where the world goes to be moved by the simple sound of a song — were never truly sacred spaces safe from the twisted fantasies of some asshole with a gun.
“I don’t know what to make of it, really. Like most people, I am in shock and a little bit of denial,” yacht-rock singer Michael McDonald told CL in an interview days after the shooting. McDonald, 65, is scheduled to play the Clearwater Jazz Holiday on October 21, and noted that he hunted and collected guns in his younger days. “I was fascinated by guns, but for some reason this NRA lobby prohibits us from even bringing up the subject of why we’re making it easier for mentally impaired people to buy firearms.”
Against Me! guitarist James Bowman — who brings his punk band to play two nights of Big Pre-Fest in Ybor City at the end of this month — shelters his 5-year-old son from the news and said events like Vegas do stick in the back of his mind.
“You don’t necessarily try to forget about it, but it’s such a hard thing that does hit close to home because of the business we’re in. We all know what happened, and it’s the furthest thing you want to happen on any day,” Bowman, 37, said. “It doesn’t come up in everyday conversation because it is so scary.”
But Bowman’s tour rolls on, and so did Bay area concertgoers.
Two days after the attack, 15,000 Jack Johnson fans piled into the amphitheatre on the Florida State Fairgrounds. Kelsey and Joe Mitchals, both 27, sat on the lawn and brought their 2-year-old son Rylan and his 8-week-old brother Jackson. There was a little apprehension, but overall the vibe of the show by Johnson — a laid-back pro surfer turned songwriter — was what their family needed. At a Sunday concert by rising R&B star SZA, a sold-out Orpheum crowd was triumphant in the way it sang back every word. Down the street at Crowbar’s Ol’ Dirty Sundays, it was business as usual with a packed concert crowd from a show by electro producer Com Truise mixing in with the B-boys and girls gathered for the late-night hip-hop party.
And at Friday’s Band of Horses show at Jannus Live, a most enduring symbol of a collective scene’s unbreakable spirit manifested itself in 8-year-old Legend Billington, who attended the concert with his mom Lauren. She admitted to being nervous about the plethora of dark windows that sit above and around the famed courtyard venue, but made a conscious decision to watch the show from the outer edge of the crowd.
“We paid attention to the exits, and I made sure Legend knew all his emergency numbers and his address,” Lauren, 43, told CL, adding that discussing a tragedy like Vegas is a fine line for a kid his age. “I have not had to explain it to him — instead we talk about good, critical thinking in the case of an emergency.”
But why would she bring an 8-year-old to a rock show?
“For one, he loves the band,” she said, adding that every memory she has is related to a song, lyric band or venue. Billington won’t let anyone take that away from her or her family, and wants her kids to experience as much of the world as possible without being ruled by fear. “There are many risks we take daily. I’m more anxious about taking them to national monuments, Disney World, and sports events than I am about bringing them to smaller local concerts.
“I tell my sons all the time that ‘we only get each day once,’” she added before inadvertently explaining Bay area music fans’ resilience in the face of horror:
“They are encouraged to be positive risk-takers and to do the things that they love with the people they love.”
Taking risks for the love of live music. That’s the simple answer for why we go to concerts, and it’s the simple reason why we’ll never let anything take those experiences away from us |
Mr Bush has never laid out his plans in this way before
In a major policy speech, Mr Bush refused to set an "artificial deadline" to withdraw US troops, saying it was "not a plan for victory".
It comes after the release of the first Iraq strategy document, which rejects widespread calls for a timetable.
Mr Bush has come under growing pressure from Democrats on Iraq. Polls give him the lowest approval of his presidency.
They also suggest that six out of 10 Americans think the war in Iraq is not worth the cost.
As such, this was a speech from a president in deep trouble, says the BBC's Justin Webb in Washington.
Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said Mr Bush's speech was "recycled... tired rhetoric", and that the president had "once again missed an opportunity to lay out a real strategy for success in Iraq that will bring our troops safely home".
'Some setbacks'
Speaking at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, Mr Bush said there would be violence in Iraq "for many years" and that US troops would only be able to withdraw as local forces gained competence.
"These decisions about troop levels will be driven by the conditions on the ground in Iraq and the good judgement of our commanders, not by artificial timetables set by politicians in Washington," he said.
HAVE YOUR SAY America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins so long as I am your commander-in-chief
President George W Bush
Excerpts: Strategy for Victory Send us your comments
Mr Bush said victory would come "when the terrorists and Saddamists can no longer threaten Iraq's democracy, when the Iraqi security forces can provide for the safety of their own citizens, and when Iraq is not a safe-haven for terrorists to plot new attacks on our nation".
This was a partial redefinition of what victory might be, and potentially highly significant, our correspondent says.
Mr Bush also openly acknowledged that there had been "some setbacks in standing up a capable Iraqi security force, and their performance is still uneven in some areas".
But Iraqi forces were regaining control of the country and training programmes had been improved, he said.
Withdrawing US troops before they had accomplished their mission would send the wrong message to the insurgents, Mr Bush added.
"America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins so long as I am your commander-in-chief," he said.
Shift
The new National Strategy for Victory, released hours before Mr Bush's address, defines who the US sees as the enemy in Iraq, listing three groups in declining order of size:
"Rejectionists" - primarily Sunni Arabs who fared well under Saddam but have lost influence and authority. The US says their resistance will fade if a new democratic government protects minority rights
"Saddamists" who were active members of the former regime. The US expects their power to wane to the point where Iraqi security forces can defeat them
"Terrorists" associated with al-Qaeda who want to establish a totalitarian Islamic empire, and who must be killed or captured through counter-terror operations.
Our mission in Iraq is to win the war - our troops will return home when that mission is complete
Full strategy document (392KB) Most computers will open PDF documents automatically, but you may need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader. Download the reader here
"No war has ever been won on a timetable - and neither will this one," the document adds.
There are currently more than 150,000 US troops in the country. The White House has said it expects conditions will permit a reduction in US troop numbers next year, after Iraqi parliamentary elections in mid-December.
The US is spending about $6bn a month to keep its forces in Iraq. About 2,100 Americans have been killed since the March 2003 invasion. |
DAVID FARRAR: Providing strategic advice to a group planning a campaign to get rid of MMP.
A group of National and Act Party activists is preparing to launch a campaign against MMP.
Details of the campaign, to be launched soon in the lead-up to the referendum on MMP on election day in November, have been leaked to the Sunday Star-Times.
Among the campaign's key players is Simon Lusk, who played a major role in Don Brash's leadership coup against Act leader Rodney Hide.
Jordan Williams, the young Wellington lawyer who accompanied Brash on the day he deposed Hide, is being considered for the role of frontman of the campaign.
David Farrar, National's pollster and a well-known right-wing blogger and columnist, is providing strategic advice. Also involved is right-wing blogger Cameron Slater, known as Whale Oil. |
Whether or not abortion remains a crime in Queensland will likely be decided by who is elected to government on November 25. The procedure is currently only lawful to "prevent serious danger to the woman's physical or mental health".
Pro-Choice Queensland/Supplied
Pro Choice QLD/Facebook
"We need to know how many candidates at the state election are willing to come forward and say what their planned response to the recommendations from the [Queensland Law Reform Commission] will be," she told BuzzFeed News. Melinda decided to provide medical terminations to her patients in 2015 when she read about the "horrible deaths and complications" that came from backyard abortions in Queensland during the early 20th century. "The law hasn't changed since 1899 and I was quite outraged and realised that I could choose to provide this to women in need," she said. "Technically any GP in Queensland can provide this service if they want to, but I think the murky legal area is inhibiting a lot of GPs that might be interested in making it part of their policy of reproductive health. "At the moment it is a bit of a postcode lottery as to whether women can get access to a termination."
Melinda said she did not want to be named because she worked within the shadows of the law. "I could be charged and face up to 14 years in jail and my patients could face seven years, but I have a bit of a defence under case law and my patients don't." Essential research polling showed in February 76% of Queenslanders believed the state's abortion laws should be changed.
Essential Research / Via d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net
Most voters polled were less likely to vote for candidates who wanted to keep treating abortion as a crime. More than 100 candidates have signed a pro-choice candidate pledge from independent lobby group Fair Agenda, which is backed by The Human Rights Law Centre, Women’s Legal Service Queensland, White Ribbon and the Queensland Council of Unions. "One in four women have a termination in their lifetime so this is absolutely an issue for voters and it should be an issue that candidates are willing to stand up on, regardless of their political affiliation," Pro-Choice Queensland convenor and former state Liberal senator Sue Boyce said of the pledge.
Dan Peled / AAP
The candidates committed, if elected, to "vote to remove abortion from the criminal code, and support laws to ensure all Queenslanders can safely and legally access full reproductive healthcare, without being harassed or intimidated.” Labor member for Murrumba and candidate for the newly-formed electorate of Bancroft, Chris Whiting, has taken the pledge because he believes "the law is clearly outdated and it needs to be reformed". "Whatever people's moral position is, we cannot criminalise the thousands of Queenslanders who undergo this process every year," Whiting told BuzzFeed News.
"It is abundantly clear that there are decades worth of case law that circumnavigate what are 19th century statutes."
Chris Whiting/Facebook
Whiting is running against LNP candidate Kara Thomas who is also the director of research, policy and advocacy at anti-abortion lobby group Cherish Life Queensland.
Supplied
The organisation was responsible for a raft of misleading radio, newspaper and Facebook advertisements in the lead up to the scheduled vote on Pyne's abortion law reform bills earlier this year. Thomas gave evidence for Cherish Life in an inquiry into Pyne's second bill last year, during which she argued the section (s225) of Queensland's criminal code which criminalises women should remain in the law. She argued against abortion in all scenarios, including following a rape. "Even in cases of rape and incest, does the child pay the death penalty for the actions of the perpetrator, and is a second act on the woman going to make it better?" Thomas asked the inquiry.
Thomas declined an interview with BuzzFeed News.
The candidate also argued against safe-access zones — a key part of Pyne's legislation — which would make it illegal for any person seeking to "intimidate, or impede the access of a person entering or leaving" an abortion provider (within 50 metres of the clinic). "There are a number of stories of women who have changed their mind because of sidewalk counsellors," Thomas said. "I am not supportive of violence outside of clinics, but I do not think that it is right to impose a restriction around a building based on a belief that the unborn are not human." Thomas joined the most vocal opponent to Pyne's bills, Cleveland MP Mark Robinson, in an interview by anti-abortion rights blogger Dave Pellowe, whose other videos include "There's no clear definition of what hate speech is", "Good news, there is no rape culture" and "Are homosexuals born that way?"
Dave Pellowe/YouTube Kara Thomas and Mark Robinson.
"Abortion ... is the intentional killing of an innocent human being," she said.
"If the unborn are human, which science says they are, then it is morally wrong according to our laws to unjustly kill a human being." She referred to abortion as "state-sanctioned coercion" and spruiked the anti-abortion documentary Hush, which showed a purported link between abortion and an increased chance of developing breast cancer. This purported link has been widely and repeatedly rejected by Australia's medical organisations including the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, the Australian Cancer Council, the Breast Cancer Network of Australia, and the Australian Medical Association, as well as American organisations the National Breast and Ovarian Cancer Centre, the National Cancer Institute, and the American Cancer Society. Whiting said his opponent should be "clear with her constituents about where she is employed and what her stance is".
Pro-Choice QLD/Facebook |
Chances are you have heard of Roman ‘Amok’ Papsuev. He’s an incredibly talented game industry artist, who has been working hard on a series of incredible images of the Russian folk heroes, recreated in his signature videogame style. This project is called “Tales of Old Rus‘”.
His drawings conquered a lot of media websites and became a huge hit on 9GAG. We couldn’t pass this opportunity and managed to talk with Roman about his career, his collaborations with George R. R. Martin, the search for great authentic references and the whole philosophy of the “Old Rus‘” project.
Could you please introduce yourself and talk a bit about your work?
Well, I’ve been working as an illustrator for quite some time, since the beginning of this century you may say (chuckles). I was making illustrations for books of famous local fantasy authors: Vera Kamsha, Nick Perumov, Dmitry Kazakov.
Then, just as a hobby, I began painting portraits of A Song of Ice and Fire characters. Later George R. R. Martin took a notice of me and recommended me as an artist for Fantasy Flight Games (FFG). So I got a job working on a card game based on A Song of Ice and Fire series.
It was great getting a direct email from Martin himself and getting his feedback. With his help I was able to fix some of the portraits. All in all there were around 120 of them. Now you can find most in various Game of Thrones related wikis and resources.
Eventually Martin and FFG asked me to contribute to the “The Art of Song of Ice and Fire” artbook. The writer was kind enough to give me some exclusive descriptions of the Targaryens and I was happy to create their portraits. Good times.
Anyway, I was quite busy, making illustrations for books and fantasy novels. In 2008 I got the “Best Artist” award at Eurocon. Later I got an interesting proposal from local Russian company Astrum-Online. This is how I got into game industry.
The thing is that being a freelancer I had a chance to work on various tasks and was lucky enough to collaborate with “13Roentgen” studio, headed by Leonid Sirotin (a well-known Russian game producer, mostly specializing in mobile and social games). He was the one to bring me into game industry, and I’m still incredibly grateful to him. It was interesting working in a completely new field. Right now I’m the Lead Artist in ITT Territory Studio, which is a part of Mail.ru Group.
I’ve been able to contribute to a various projects, including such browser games as «Juggernaut», «ThreeKingdoms», «Legend: Legacy of the Dragons». Also I did a lot of art for «Territory-2»: concept art, promo art, you name it. This project was closed, but all the content did not go to waste.
Our team switched to mobile games and we’ve managed to use some of the Territory-2 concepts in «Evolution: Battle for Utopia». This game was very successful and even got a custom page in AppStore.
I also used to be a writer back in the day and managed to publish 4 novels and a couple of short stories. Thankfully I knew when to stop, because I finally realized I wasn’t good at it. During those days I was studying a lot of mythology, medieval history and other historical sources. So you might say I have a long interest in folk tales and couldn’t resist the temptation to work with our local folklore.
How did you come up with this idea of folk heroes reimagining?
Being a CG-artist I sometimes get back to the roots and have fun drawing with a pencil. I spent a lot of time working on a sketchbook “MonstaPanopticum”. It was a collection of various monsters, sort of my imagination practice, just a personal project. The sketchbook was done but I still had a lot of ideas. I thought about Russian folk tales and mythology. There’s a ton of very cool characters there and not a lot of video games exploring this amazing setting.
My initial idea was to develop the theme and try to look at it at an unusual angle. Then I figured I could try drawing Russian classical characters in a hardcore fantasy-style game setting.
It all started as a mind exercise, but slowly grew into something much bigger. I’ve started researching folk tales, read some related books and the whole project became much more interesting. I got an opportunity to make videogame interpretations of the Russian tales. I tried to be not constricted by stereotypes or so called classical vision. You can study the descriptions of some of the images and figure out how much time I’ve spent researching the details.
I do not just make up these characters. Everything is in the Russian mythology. I just try to interpret them in my own way, finding some common features, keeping the images in one general style. If it works, we’ll get the feeling of one giant living and breathing fantasy world, populated by these creatures.
I got to be honest – I don’t believe that these characters need any particular reimagining. It’s a huge layer of Russian culture and I truly believe you should read these stories to kids: these tales are full of magic, positive characters, happy endings. Then, when your children grow up, they may have a look at my paintings, read the descriptions and learn a lot of new stuff. Because original Russian folk tales are far more complex and brutal than you think. As well as all mythology, as a matter of fact.
My images do not destroy the classical visions of these characters. Russia actually has a huge visual heritage and my project is not trying to substitute it. It’s just the way of looking at well-known heroes a bit differently. Yes, I do break stereotypes but I do not mean to change the way we perceive our historical or mythological heritage. I feel that it’s time for us to try and integrate our folk tales in the contemporary life. This is a chance to remind young people in Russia and all around the world about our cultural inheritance, to help them gain a better understanding of the classical characters of Russian folk culture.
I believe that since we live in 21st century it’s useful to get rid of some of the stereotypes and patterns we have. Try to imagine our classical Russian bogatyrs standing next to Khorne from Warhammer universe. Just visually try to figure out which character looks stronger? Who would win the imaginary fight? See what I mean?
To be fair there was a number of great games which tried to take some of Slavic folk heritage into the world of interactive entertainment. Let’s take Allods Online for example (I didn’t play it). I heard Witcher 3 is also awesome (I didn’t play it either). In my works I tried to put the characters in a harsher, grittier visual reality, giving them my own personal artistic interpretation.
Can you shed some light on how does your creative process works? Where do you get all those incredible ideas for details of your character?
It was easy to draw the first images. I’ve been creating them almost on the spot, based on the childhood impressions I had. By the way some of these drawings will go through a small modification later, because they really stand out from the general style of the project which is now based on more mature tales and character descriptions I’ve found in different sources.
I use a whole bunch of various ways to research the characters for my drawings: Wikipedia, some Mythology encyclopedias, dictionaries, scientific articles and so on. I try to work only with authentic original folk texts. Believe me, it’s much harder than just letting your fantasy go wild.
I usually start with reading the original folk tale about the character, then I go to Wiki and start digging: scientific sources, books, websites. After gathering all the information I begin drawing.
Details are obviously very important. Having worked in the game industry and knowing its requirements I always try to add as much visual information about the character as possible. It’s the basis for character design. Obviously these guys and girls don’t carry around all that stuff, but these details, these little things help me to tell their story. You can deliver maximum amount of information with minimal effort: just one picture can tell you a lot. All this fantasy equipment, runes, weapons have nothing to do with reality, so people, who don’t play games, can’t figure out why there’s so much gigantic armor plates. I try to explain it all and I even compiled a FAQ for those who are interested in these images. Tastes differ, so there’s bound to be some misunderstandings. I always say – please just try not to take it all too seriously. These are just the artist’s fantasies on the subject.
I guess you get this question a lot, but I can’t help myself: what were the main inspirations for developing the style of the characters?
Since I’ve been working in game industry, I’m pretty good at understanding all the visual patterns in character design, but I haven’t really played any Warhammer, Allods Online, DOTA 2, The Elder Scrolls, Dark Souls and even World of Warcraft. But I do know how these games look. A lot of people just glance at my images and start naming games I haven’t even heard of. Sometimes they mention movies: “Oh, this dude looks like a Transformer.” Most of them are sorely wrong.
If you need to simplify, you might say I’ve used the style of Warhammer, which is very dark, epic, unrealistic and visually shocking. Sometimes I add more cartoonish characters like spirits of the forest or domovoy (Russian house spirit), just to vary the world I’m drawing.
As an artist, I think every image must tell some kind of story.
A lot of my inspiration comes from my experience. I’ve seen a lot of artbooks, watched tons of movies and learned visual styles of different games. All this baggage is the foundation of my works. I don’t have any visual references next to me when I’m working, just dictionaries, encyclopedias and original texts of Russian folklore. Every visual aspect of the character comes directly from my head.
I’ve got two notebooks. One is my personal Sketchbook of Ideas. This is where I develop my characters, work on the images. I share some of these WIP stages in my Instagram (amokrus).
When the character is ready I finally draw it in my “Tales of Old Rus’’” Sketchbook, scan it, throw in a bit of Photoshop and publish it in Internet.
How will this project develop in the future? Do you plan to make a videogame out of it?
Actually, I haven’t really thought about the project’s commercial potential. For now I just want to draw. There are a lot of opportunities to turn this project into a product and I have a lot of offers. There’s definitely going to be an artbook, that I can say for sure. Maybe a board game. There might be a video game (I don’t really care about the genre). Time will tell.
You know, the funny part is that this project is unique because it has sparked an incredible interest for Russian folklore all around the world. I did nothing to promote this series of images. I just drew to my heart’s content. Actually my collaboration with George Martin began the same way. I never really struggled to get into the spotlight. I don’t do any PR stuff, I don’t really care for it.
We’ll see how this project will go. I’m definitely going to continue my work. It’s just so much fun!
***
We thank Roman for his time and encourage you to check out his official Facebook page and Instagram. |
MEETING THE MINISTER
"One of the asymmetries of history," wrote Henry Kissinger of Singapore’s patriarch Lee Kuan Yew, "is the lack of correspondence between the abilities of some leaders and the power of their countries." Kissinger’s one time boss, Richard Nixon, was even more flattering. He speculated that, had Lee lived in another time and another place, he might have "attained the world stature of a Churchill, a Disraeli, or a Gladstone." This tag line of a big man on a small stage has been attached to Lee since the 1970s. Today, however, his stage does not look quite so small. Singapore’s per capita GNP is now higher than that of its erstwhile colonizer, Great Britain. It has the world’s busiest port, is the third-largest oil refiner and a major center of global manufacturing and service industries. And this move from poverty to plenty has taken place within one generation. In 1965 Singapore ranked economically with Chile, Argentina and Mexico; today its per capita GNP is four or five times theirs.
Lee managed this miraculous transformation in Singapore’s economy while maintaining tight political control over the country; Singapore’s government can best be described as a "soft" authoritarian regime, and at times it has not been so soft. He was prime minister of Singapore from its independence in 1959 (it became part of a federation with Malaysia in 1963 but was expelled in 1965) until 1990, when he allowed his deputy to succeed him. He is now "Senior Minister" and still commands enormous influence and power in the country. Since his retirement, Lee has embarked on another career of sorts as a world-class pundit, speaking his mind with impolitic frankness. And what is often on his mind is American-style democracy and its perils. He travels often to East Asian capitals from Beijing to Hanoi to Manila dispensing advice on how to achieve economic growth while retaining political stability and control. It is a formula that the governing elites of these countries |
Former Attorney General Eric Holder has said he is eager to become more involved in resisting President Donald Trump and is also considering a presidential run in 2020.
“Up to now, I have been more behind-the-scenes,” Holder told Yahoo News in an interview. “But that’s about to change. I have a certain status as the former attorney general. A certain familiarity as the first African-American attorney general. There’s a justified perception that I’m close to President Obama. So I want to use whatever skills I have, whatever notoriety I have, to be effective in opposing things that are, at the end of the day, just bad for the country.”
Holder, who served as Barack Obama’s Attorney General from 2009 to 2015 before being replaced by Loretta Lynch, also said that he had planned to take a back seat role in politics, but Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 election inspired him to re-engage in frontline politics.
“I thought, frankly, along with everybody else, that after the election, with Hillary Clinton as president, I could walk off the field,” he continued. “So when she didn’t win, I thought, ‘We’ll have to see how this plays out.’ But it became clear relatively soon — and certainly sooner than I expected — that I had to get back on the field and be in effective opposition.”
Since Trump took office, Holder has been involved in legal attempts to torpedo Donald Trump’s immigration agenda. In January, he was hired by Democratic leaders to represent the state of California to maintain its status as a sanctuary city.
On Monday, Holder spoke at a public meeting at the Ronald Reagan State Building in Los Angeles, alongside California Senate leader Kevin de Leon, to promote legislation known as the California Values Act, which prevents local police from enforcing immigration law.
During the meeting, Holder claimed that the “federal government does not have the ability to force states to do things that are inherently federal in nature,” and that attempts to withhold federal funds for failing to comply with immigration law are unconstitutional.
“Now is the time to be more visible,” Holder added. “Now is the time to be heard.”
Other Democrats mooted as potential 2020 presidential candidates include Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and former Vice President Joe Biden.
You can follow Ben Kew on Facebook, on Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at [email protected] |
John Mayer briefly spoke on Frank Ocean’s new music during a recent Instagram live stream. After amusedly touching on what reggae would sound like in space, he responded to a fan question in the comments: “Favorite Frank Ocean song? ‘Sweet Life,’” he said. “And then he played me this song the other day... I won’t say the title, that's his business, but... He’s doing stuff right now that’s... talk about space reggae, future reggae, that’s Frank Ocean.” Check out a video of the stream below; Mayer speaks on Ocean around the 8:20 mark. Mayer previously played guitar on Channel Orange, while Ocean sang on Mayer’s 2013 album Paradise Valley.
Producer Calvin Harris recently announced that his new collaboration with Ocean and Migos, “Slide,” will be released tonight, marking the first piece of new music from Ocean since the release of Blonde. |
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David Busst has offered Manchester United and England left-back Luke Shaw hope of a return to action before the end of the season.
Former Coventry defender Busst suffered a horrific leg break against United at Old Trafford in 1996 after colliding with Denis Irwin and Brian McClair and retired from the game a few months later.
Busst needed 26 operations and contracted the MRSA virus but he is confident Shaw, 20, who sustained a double fracture of his right leg in Tuesday night's 2-1 defeat at PSV Eindhoven, will make a full recovery.
He told The Sun: "It wasn't the actual fractures that stopped me from playing, it was the infections.
"But so long as it's a clean break and there is no infection, there shouldn't be a major issue for Luke."
Manchester United announced on Wednesday that Shaw will remain in Eindhoven for the 'early stages of his recovery' after undergoing surgery in the Netherlands on Tuesday night. |
Pat Robertson (The 700 Club/screen grab)
Pat Robertson on Monday declared that Donald Trump was the “clear winner” of Sunday night’s presidential debate, and the televangelist asserted that the GOP candidate’s admission that he groped women was simply “macho” talk.
“Trump was the winner,” Robertson opined on his 700 Club television program. “Basically, the pundits were writing him off.”
The TV preacher argued that Trump was like the mythical Phoenix because he had performed well at the debate just days after the leak of a video tape, in which the Republican nominee bragged that he could grab women “by the pussy” without their permission because he was a star.
“A guy does something 11 years ago, it was a conversation in Hollywood where he’s trying to look like he’s macho,” Robertson said. “And 11 years after that they surface it from The Washington Post or whatever, bring it out within 30 days or so of the election and this is supposed to be the death blow and everybody writes him off, ‘Okay, he’s dead, now you’ve got to get out of the way and let Mike Pence run the campaign.'”
“The Donald says no,” he continued. “He’s like the Phoenix. They think he’s dead, he’s come back. And he came back strong. So, he won that debate.”
A scientific poll conducted by CNN following Sunday night’s debate found that 57 percent of people said that Hillary Clinton won, while 34 percent thought Trump came out ahead.
Watch the video below from The 700 Club, broadcast Oct. 10, 2016. |
Mitch McConnell in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. Yuri Gripas/AFP/Getty Images
It became conventional wisdom over the course of the election cycle that Donald Trump was a Frankenstein monster that the Republican Party created through the politics of racial resentment and anti-Obama demonization. This line of reasoning often implied that the Republican establishment was about to receive its comeuppance via a humiliating landslide electoral loss.
Well, that didn’t happen. And, as you can see above, chief Senate obstructionist Mitch McConnell—he of the infamous quote about Obama’s defeat being “the single most important thing [Republicans] want to achieve“—is looking mighty smug Wednesday. He has some reason to feel good: He’ll soon get to push through a vote for a conservative Supreme Court justice and to throw the Affordable Care Act in a garbage can.
But Trump’s victory speech early Wednesday morning underlined a major McConnell-related irony. A huge part of the opposition plan executed by McConnell, Paul Ryan, and the rest of the Republican Congress involved choking off the parts of President Obama’s agenda that would have helped the working class—the consideration of a public option for health insurance, the expansion of Medicaid, the passage of a stimulus package appropriate to the size of the 2008 recession, and generally the funding of redistributive government spending through higher taxes on top earners. These kinds of potential measures, and even the more limited measures that did pass, were demonized as the socialist agenda of an un-American president. And so even as America’s economy recovered in many ways, its inequalities of wealth and income persisted.
The white victims of this process, as we now know, were not happy, and their feeling of economic stagnation was—in addition to the War on Christmas, the suspicion that Barack Obama is African ISIS, and the general feeling that Hillary Clinton is an uppity bitch—one of the things that flipped just enough states to Trump’s side to give him the Electoral College.
Look what President-elect Trump described as the first priority of his administration in his victory speech:
We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals. We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.
That’s a mega-stimulus New Deal–style proposal no matter which party’s mouth it comes out of. At the same time, we are all aware that Donald Trump’s policy on free trade is that he is very against it. The “trade” section of Trump’s website is a list of vows to withdraw from agreements and institute tariffs. It’s an aggressive mercantilist promise to use the power of the government to protect American industries that are not competitive internationally, particularly those that are not competitive with China and Mexico.
So your Republican president’s agenda is to balance the protection of noncompetitive domestic businesses with a huge increase in public spending (and let’s not even mention the massive public-works project known as the wall with Mexico). It’s not really socialism—Trump’s government is going to take on the cost of propping up big manufacturers without being rewarded via an ownership stake therein—but it’s just as “socialist” as, to take one example, subsidizing the purchase of private health insurance. And it’s unquestionably Big Government.
I’m not an economic historian, but I happen to have recently read Tony Judt’s history of 20th-century Europe, Postwar, and Trump’s vision of the American economy sounds a lot like the mixed British economic system that was repudiated by the rise of Margaret Thatcher. (Try to picture a 1970s British car and you get a sense of the pitfalls of overprotection of industry.) Across the pond, of course, Thatcher’s rise was paralleled by the ascendance of a free-market, free-trade-extolling American politician named Ronald Reagan who shared her contempt for the encroachments of the welfare state. Among the politicians elected to Congress in the 1984 Reagan landslide was a young(er) Mitch McConnell, and among the Republicans Reagan inspired was a teenage Paul Ryan, whose brother once told the New York Times that Ryan’s political views were formed by discussing Reagan during family dinners. Now Ryan and McConnell are the architects of a strategy that has ended in the election of someone whose idea of economic policy is the creation of “millions” of government jobs and withdrawal from the Reagan treaty that became NAFTA. (And who, to boot, wants to forge a military and diplomatic alliance with the KGB officer who runs Russia.)
History repeats itself as farce, I’ve heard.
With apologies to Hamilton Nolan
See more Slate coverage of the election. |
The "S" word came up Saturday afternoon following the 6A title game.
The "S" word I'm talking about is sportsmanship. It's something we seldom salute in what is a winner take all society. It doesn't make the highlights, and it isn't printed on the front page. But perhaps it should be.
Pine Bluff head coach Bobby Bolding talked about the good sportsmanship displayed by his Zebras and the Greenwood Bulldogs during Pine Bluff's hard fought 28-21 win. The communities of Greenwood and Pine Bluff are as different as night and day, but on this day all I could see were two well-coached teams giving it their all to win a State Title. The great thing about sports is that it can bring kids together from entirely different backgrounds, and the hope is that they will leave the playing field with a new respect for each other. I hope that happened Saturday.
On Friday night, I witnessed a lack of good sportsmanship from Pulaski Academy coach Kevin Kelley.
The 5A Title game was the most compelling matchup of Championship weekend: the feel good story of the 2015 season, the McClellan Lions, facing the Mighty Bruins of Pulaski Academy. It was a rematch of a mid-season meeting where PA scored an early knockout. The final in that one was 41-30, but 24 of McClellan's 30 points came against PA's reserves. The Bruins led 35-0 at the half, and 41 to 6 early in third quarter.
Friday night's Championship Game was different.
McClellan came in with a great plan, and thanks to some friendly bounces and huge plays, they led Pulaski Academy 30 to 29 at halftime. This game wouldn't be decided until late in the 4th quarter.
It was the Pulaski Academy defense that came up with the play of the game. Trailing by only five, midway through the fourth quarter, McClellan faced a 4th and two at midfield. The PA defense swarmed the "Lion King" Pierre Strong to end McClellan's final threat.
The Bruins would add a touchdown to go up 13 at 43-30. That should have been the final score, but it wasn't. What happened next made me cringe.
With 12 seconds to go, after using two timeouts on the drive, PA threw for another touchdown to make it 50-30.
No one likes a bad winner.
It was the final seconds of PA's second straight state title win, and Coach Kelley should have been thinking about the celebration. You'll often hear coaches and former players call the victory formation a team uses when the quarterback kneels down to run out the clock the "greatest formation in football." Apparently, it's gone the way of the punt at PA.
Instead of running out the clock and soaking in a second straight title, Coach Kelley decided to use the last seconds to get payback; to punish McClellan. He later went to Facebook to explain why he went for the final Touchdown.
I'm not interested in his reasons. Coach Kelley was wrong. And if he needed to justify his decision after the fact on Facebook, he likely knows he was wrong, too. Instead of talking about the tremendous effort by the kids on either sideline or the heroics that turned the game by the overlooked defensive unit instead of PA's offensive juggernaut, we're talking about running up the score.
That unnecessary late touchdown has created nothing but bad blood. There's no middle ground on this one; it's PA against the world.
The relationship between public and private schools in this state is shaky at best, and stuff like this doesn't help the private schools.
Coach Kelley is a great coach who preaches "we, not me" to his players. If he were thinking that way late Friday night, he could have saved everyone a lot of grief. |
Writer Hired For Ron Howard And Brian Grazer's 1984 By Eric Eisenberg Random Article Blend
1984 was first published in 1949 and tells the story of a dystopian future where a man named Winston Smith rebels against the evil, ever-watching Big Brother. The book has gotten adapted multiple times, most notably in 1956 (Michael Anderson directing, Edmond O'Brien starring) and 1984 (Michael Radford directing, John Hurt starring).
Deadline confirms that Fairey will serve as an executive producer on the project along with Grazer and Howard. No production start or release date is mentioned for the film. Back in March a strange story surfaced online. It was reported that Brian Grazer and Ron Howard would be making a new adaptation of George Orwell's brilliant novel 1984 inspired by renowned street artist Shepard Fairey. At the time the project was in the earliest stages of development and had yet to find a writer or director. The production staff is still working on the latter, but now they've wrangled the former. Deadline reports that Noah Oppenheim has been hired to create the newest adaptation of 1984. Oppenheim, who was previously known as a television producer on shows like Hardball With Chris Matthews, Today and The Buried Life, he has made the switch over to screenwriting and already has a number of other high-profile projects on his plate. As previously reported the scribe is working on the WarGames remake, the redo of Daniel Espinosa's Snabba Cash, and The Secret Life of Houdini (the Harry Houdini movie that Gary Ross will direct).1984 was first published in 1949 and tells the story of a dystopian future where a man named Winston Smith rebels against the evil, ever-watching Big Brother. The book has gotten adapted multiple times, most notably in 1956 (Michael Anderson directing, Edmond O'Brien starring) and 1984 (Michael Radford directing, John Hurt starring).Deadline confirms that Fairey will serve as an executive producer on the project along with Grazer and Howard. No production start or release date is mentioned for the film. Blended From Around The Web Facebook
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Sofia addresses the flack she’s received for Gloria.
Ever since she began portraying Gloria Pritchett on Modern Family, Sofia Vergara has received tons of flack for portraying a stereotype on TV. But Vergara has no problem with that and even says that it’s because of her that Latinas with strong accents can be on TV.
Speaking with Hola! USA, she said,
“Gloria’s character is inspired by my mom and my aunt. They are both Latin women who grew up in Colombia, like me. They love color, prints, and shoes.”
She added,
“It upsets me when Latinos complain about Gloria. I am grateful for the opportunity because the gringos have let me in with this strong accent I have. Eight years ago nobody had an accent like this on television.”
Vergara has been nominated four times for a Golden Globe for the role so clearly somebody likes what she’s doing!
Since starting on Modern Family, Sofia has landed an endorsement deal with CoverGirl, started her own K-Mart line, and her own underwear line.
Modern Family airs on ABC Wednesdays at 9 PM.
Photo: Tinseltown / Shutterstock.com |
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At a White House event, President Trump declared himself no longer a civilian as he seems to believe that being president also makes him a member of the military.
Video:
According to the official White House transcript, as provided to PoliticusUSA, Trump said, “We’ve had a lot of victories, but we haven’t had a victory on healthcare. We’re disappointed. I am very disappointed because, again, even as a civilian, for seven years I’ve been hearing about healthcare, and I’ve been hearing about repeal and replace. And Obamacare is a total disaster. Some states had over a 200 percent increase — a 200 percent increase — in their premiums, and their deductibles are through the roof. It’s an absolute disaster.”
Donald Trump is still a civilian. Being president does make him a member of the military. The role of commander in chief is a title, not an official military position. Trump is still very much a civilian, and subject to civilian laws. Trump is slipping fast, and it is time for the American people to take notice of the fact that they are being governed by someone who might not be all there.
If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human: |
More than 60 dogs seized in Studio City, and none were yet up for adoption. Marin Austin reports for the NBC4 News at 7 on Saturday, May 7, 2016. (Published Saturday, May 7, 2016)
The owner of a pet adoption center in Studio city is facing neglect charges after more than 60 dogs were seized from her home Friday night, officials said.
Animal Control officers took the dogs of a variety of breeds and sizes from the home of Rachel Kennedy, owner of Lucky Puppy Rescue & Retail at 11734 Ventura Boulevard, according to Brenda Barnette, general manager of Los Angeles Animal Services.
Officers said they took 65 dogs, many of them with medical conditions, for humane reasons. Los Angeles County code allows only three dogs per residence, officials said.
"Every single one of them are my babies," said Kennedy, who claims she took the dogs home to live with her because many of them are too sick and cannot be legally adopted by the public.
In a Facebook post, the pet adoption center said all of the dogs that were taken were "elderly, blind, deaf, cancer, and mommies left to die at the shelter with their babies."
Kennedy claims she spends about $200,000 a year to rescue and care for sick dogs who would otherwise be euthanized by the city. "There's something wrong in this system," said Kennedy. "Us as rescuers, we do this from the heart and they took my heart away."
Kennedy faces charges of illegal kennel and animal neglect, according to Barnette. Each dog was being examined and a health record was being created.
While Kennedy says she has a permit for most of the dogs to live at Lucky Puppy Rescue & Retails, she knew she was breaking the law when she took them home. She said will visit the animals who are now at the Los Angeles City East Valley Animal Shelter.
Barnette said the seized dogs are in custody and unavailable for adoption, foster or transfer to a private adoption or rescue group.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the dogs were seized at Lucky Puppy Rescue & Retail. The dogs were taken from Rachel Kennedy's home in Studio City. The article has been updated. |
This article is over 2 years old
Results of annual report card based on data collected before bleaching killed a fifth of the reef’s coral, suggesting next year’s results will be even worse
Great Barrier Reef scores D for health for fifth year in a row
The Great Barrier Reef has been given a D on a report card for its overall health by the federal and Queensland governments for the fifth year in a row.
The results of the annual report card were based on data collected before this year’s climate change-induced bleaching event that killed about a fifth of the reef’s coral, suggesting next year’s results will be even worse.
The report card measures the progress towards water pollution targets, as well as the overall health of the Great Barrier Reef’s ecosystems, including coral and seagrass.
The Great Barrier Reef: a catastrophe laid bare Read more
Combining all the measurements, the reef was rated D or “poor”.
Many of the individual assessments of progress towards water-quality targets showed very slow progress.
The government has a target to reduce inorganic nitrogen flowing into the Great Barrier Reef – mostly from sugar-cane fertilisation – by 50%. The report card rated progress towards that target with an E or “very poor”, finding it had only been reduced by 18.1%.
Progress towards improving sugar-cane farming and grazing practices in Great Barrier Reef catchments was rated “poor”, as was progress towards sediment and pesticide targets.
Some improvement was seen in coral cover in “inshore reefs” – those closest to the coastline – with their score moving from a D to a C.
But the coral cover in the most northerly sections – Cape York and the Wet Tropics – were given a score of D.
Those northern sections, particularly Cape York, were the hardest hit by the 2016 bleaching event, which occurred after the data used for this report card was collected.
Initial estimates show that 22% of the coral along the whole Great Barrier Reef was killed in the event, with 85% of that mortality occurring in the northern tip, north of Lizard Island.
The results follow a Water Science Taskforce report from the Queensland government in August finding $8.2bn was needed to meet water-quality targets the government has committed to, in order to avoid having the reef included on the world heritage in-danger list.
The new report card said “hundreds of millions” were being spent on projects to reduce pollution.
The government will need to report to the UN’s world-heritage committee in December on implementation of its plan to meet those targets, including on whether the plan has been adequately funded.
Imogen Zethoven from the Australian Marine Conservation Society described the report as “startling”.
Great Barrier Reef: Unesco pushes for tree-clearing controls Read more
“Coral bleaching, crown-of-thorn outbreaks and the ongoing poor condition of inshore reefs – these are the visible signs of a reef in crisis and the need for urgent action on water quality,” she said.
“The reef can’t survive and thrive without clean water. We must see accelerated action by the Queensland government to move ahead with legislative caps on water quality, supported by the federal government,” Zethoven said.
Sean Hoobin form WWF Australia said the results were “not a good look” ahead of the government’s reporting to the UN.
“The continuing poor scores are further evidence that the current programs and spending on reef pollution fall far short of what’s required. At this rate Australia simply won’t meet the targets committed to in Reef 2050,” he said.
Hoobin pointed out that almost $13bn is being spent to save the Murray-Darling basin.
“The reef is the jewel in the crown of Australia’s tourism industry and deserves a rescue package similar to the Murray-Darling basin,” Hoobin said. |
The U.S. Air Force unveiled on Friday the first image of its new long-range B-21 bomber developed by Northrop Grumman Corp.
U.S. Air Force Secretary Deborah James revealed the drawing of the aircraft at the Air Force Association’s annual Air Warfare Symposium, Reuters reported.
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The B-21 will be designed to launch from the U.S. and strike any target around the world and will eventually replace the Air Force B-52 bombers, according to CNN.
Northrop won an estimated $80 billion contract in October to build 100 new bombers, and Boeing Co. said on Friday it would forgo further protests to the contract.
The Air Force has said it will release more information about the warplane in March. The aircraft still faces hurdles in Congress, where questions have been raised about funding the program.
Write to Katie Reilly at [email protected]. |
University of Florida athletic director Jeremy Foley will contact Philadelphia Eagles coach Chip Kelly this week to gauge his interest in coaching the Gators, CBS Philly's Marc Farzetta reports.
Florida is seeking to replace Will Muschamp, who was dismissed on Nov. 16 after going 28-21 in four seasons. He was allowed to finish the regular season but will not coach the team in a bowl game.
"Foley does not plan to officially interview Kelly yet, but will simply gauge Kelly’s interest and make his first pitch," a source told Farzetta.
• Nebraska fires head coach Bo Pelini
Kelly is currently in his second season in the NFL after serving as the head coach at Oregon from 2009 to 2012. Kelly had a 46-7 record with the Ducks and qualified for a BCS bowl in each of his four seasons.
The Eagles are currently in first place in the NFC East at 9-3. In Kelly's first year with the team, Philadelphia won the NFC East but lost in the first round of the NFL postseason.
Yahoo's Pat Forde reported Sunday that Colorado State's Jim McElwain is a "leading candidate" to take over the Gators. Florida was also reported to be interested in Ole Miss head coach Hugh Freeze, but Florida denied that report.
- Dan Gartland |
Lust, Lies And Empire: The Fishy Tale Behind Eating Fish On Friday
Enlarge this image toggle caption Adam Cole/NPR Adam Cole/NPR
It sounds like the plot of a Dan Brown thriller: A powerful medieval pope makes a secret pact to prop up the fishing industry that ultimately alters global economics. The result: Millions of Catholics around the world end up eating fish on Fridays as part of a religious observance.
This "realpolitik" explanation of why Catholics eat fish on Friday has circulated for so long, many people grew up believing it as fact. Some, myself included, even learned it in Catholic school. It's a humdinger of a tale — the kind conspiracy theorists can really sink their teeth into. But is it true?
"Many people have searched the Vatican archives on this, but they have found nothing," says Brian Fagan, a professor emeritus of archaeology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, whose book, Fish On Friday, explores the impact of this practice on Western culture.
The real economic story behind fish on Fridays turns out to be much better.
Let's start with a quick lesson in theology: According to Christian teaching, Jesus died on a Friday, and his death redeemed a sinful world. People have written of fasting on Friday to commemorate this sacrifice as early as the first century.
Technically, it's the flesh of warmblooded animals that's off limits — an animal "that, in a sense, sacrificed its life for us, if you will," explains Michael Foley, an associate professor at Baylor University and author of Why Do Catholics Eat Fish On Friday?
Fish are coldblooded, so they're considered fair game. "If you were inclined to eat a reptile on Friday," Foley tells The Salt, "you could do that, too."
Alas, Christendom never really developed a hankering for snake. But fish — well, they'd been associated with sacred holidays even in pre-Christian times. And as the number of meatless days piled up on the medieval Christian calendar — not just Fridays but Wednesdays and Saturdays, Advent and Lent, and other holy days — the hunger for fish grew. Indeed, fish fasting days became central to the growth of the global fishing industry. But not because of a pope and his secret pact.
At first, says Fagan, Christians' religious appetite was largely met with herring, a fish that was plentiful but dry and tasteless when smoked or salted. And preservation was a must in medieval times: There was no good way for fresh fish to reach the devout masses. Eventually, cod became all the rage — it tasted better when cured and it lasted longer, too.
The Vikings were ace at preserving cod — they "used dried and salted cod as a form of beef jerky on their ocean passages," Fagan says. And the route the Vikings took at the end of the first millennium — Greenland, Iceland, Newfoundland — matches up with the natural range of the Atlantic cod.
It's possible that others may have followed the cod trail to Canada before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Clues suggest that English fishermen from Bristol may have made the voyage by around 1480 but kept mum on the location lest the competition rush in. By some accounts, both Columbus and John Cabot had heard of these adventures when they set off on their own epic journeys west.
"Why do people go over the horizon?" Fagan says. "In the case of the North Atlantic after the Norse ... they went looking for cod" to satiate the demands of the faithful.
So that's the empire part of our saga. Funny enough, while the pope story is a fish tale, an official leader of a church did make fish fasting the law for purely practical reasons. For that story — and the lust our headline promised — we turn to a monarch known for his carnal cravings: Henry VIII.
By the time Henry ascended the throne in 1509, fish dominated the menu for a good part of the year. As one 15th century English schoolboy lamented in his notebook: "Though wyll not beleve how werey I am off fysshe, and how moch I desir to that flesch were cum in ageyn."
But after Henry became smitten with Anne Boleyn, English fish-eating took a nosedive.
You see, Henry was desperate with desire for Anne — but Anne wanted a wedding ring. The problem was, Henry already had a wife, Catherine of Aragon, and the pope refused to annul that decades' long marriage. So Henry broke off from the Roman Catholic Church, declared himself the head of the Church of England and divorced Catherine so he could marry Anne.
Suddenly, eating fish became political. Fish was seen as a " 'popish flesh' that lost favour as fast as Anglicism took root," as Kate Colquhoun recounts in her book Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking.
Fishermen were hurting. So much so that when Henry's young son, Edward VI, took over in 1547, fast days were reinstated by law — "for worldly and civil policy, to spare flesh, and use fish, for the benefit of the commonwealth, where many be fishers, and use the trade of living."
In fact, fish fasting remained surprisingly influential in global economics well into the 20th century.
As one economic analysis noted, U.S. fish prices plummeted soon after Pope Paul VI loosened fasting rules in the 1960s. The Friday meat ban, by the way, still applies to the 40 days of the Lenten fast.
A few years before the Vatican relaxed the rules, Lou Groen, an enterprising McDonald's franchise owner in a largely Catholic part of Cincinnati, found himself struggling to sell burgers on Fridays. His solution? The Filet-O-Fish.
While not exactly the miracle of loaves and fishes, Groen's little battered sandwich has fed millions around the world. |
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Dec. 26, 2017, 8:28 PM GMT / Updated Dec. 27, 2017, 5:10 PM GMT By Ali Vitali
Lady Luck's moment in Virginia's political spotlight will have to wait.
The Virginia State Board of Elections will postpone its Wednesday random-drawing tiebreaker, granting a request from Democrat Shelly Simonds less than 24-hours before the unusual political event.
"We’ve been informed that the SBE is postponing their meeting," a board of elections spokeswoman told NBC News Tuesday, adding that more details will be passed along "as soon as we get them."
Republican David Yancey and Democrat Shelly Simonds attend a "take your legislator to school day" on Nov. 28 at Heritage High School in Newport News, Virginia. Julia Rendleman / The Washington Post via Getty Images
The Board of Elections was set to meet Wednesday morning in Richmond to determine the winner of the hotly-contested House of Delegates race between Simonds and Republican incumbent David Yancey by randomly drawing the winner's name, most likely out of a bowl.
Simonds' lawyers, Jonathan Berkon and Ezra Reese, told reporters in a conference call Tuesday that "there isn't any hurry" and a delay would allow for further review of the tie determination in the contest, 11,608 to 11,608.
Simonds' camp has filed motions asking a court to declare her the winner and suspend a judges' panel declaration of a tie last week, arguing that they should not have reviewed the discarded ballot that allowed the race to become tied up. The judges ruled that the previously tossed ballot should have been counted for Yancey, a decision that erased Simonds' one-point victory and equalized the result.
Matt Abell, Lead SBE Election Administration Analyst, holds the crystal bowl from which the political party slips were drawn at the June 26th board meeting. Virginia Dept. of Elections
That ballot in question had both candidates' bubbles filled in but Simonds' bubble had a slash mark through it and the judges interpreted that as meaning the voter didn't want to vote for the Democrat.
Simonds had earlier been declared the apparent winner in the race for the 94th District seat, a victory that would have flipped the red seat blue and created a 50-50 tie in the Virginia House.
If the drawing does ever take place, under one of the possible lottery scenarios, the state Board of Election would put each candidate's name in an old film canister, place the canisters into a glass bowl, shake it up, and then pick the canister with the winner's name inside. It remained unclear who would have the honor of selecting the winner.
The drawing would have been live-streamed on Facebook starting around 10 a.m., ET.
Should Simonds end up eventually taking the seat, it would mark the first time in two decades that Virginia's House was evenly divided and could lead to an unusual power-sharing arrangement in the legislature.
The 94th district isn't only Virginia district with its election results hanging in the balance.
Democrats are currently challenging the results out of Fredericksburg after about 100 residents in a split precinct were given the wrong ballot on Election Day in a House of Delegates contest. That case is set to go to court early next year and could further impact the balance of power in the legislature. |
Students from GHumble High School discussing sexual abuse assembly -- (KHOU screen grab)
Officials at a Texas high school pulled the plug midway through a girls-only assembly on sexual abuse when the speaker snapped at several girls who weren’t paying attention and said she wouldn’t feel bad if they were raped, reports KHOU.
A guest speaker was brought in from a local domestic violence and sexual assault charity to speak to 9th and 10th grade girls at Humble High School about healthy relationships and domestic violence. However, when some girls in the back on the room began chatting, the talk on self-esteem and protecting oneself took an ugly turn when the counselor snapped at them.
“She said when she moves the cover from over your face and they start swabbing and combing the hair — she was explaining the rape kit — she said she would not feel bad for us. She said she would tell us, ‘Oh I told you this was going to happen to you,'” explained sophomore Chantranise Lane.
According to multiple girls in the room, teens became upset with some of them crying, including a few who are rape victims.
The school district confirmed that part of the talk had to do with what girls wear and what they post on social media, but the teens said they should be speaking with the boys and telling them not to rape.
“They shouldn’t be telling students that just because you’re posed a certain way, you’re going to get assaulted. That shouldn’t happen. You need to teach the boys not to do that,” said Zaria Rogan,
“If somebody comes at me and I tell them ‘No, you stop what you’re doing,’ that is a no. So if boys are not being taught this and they’re being taught that if we portray ourselves like this then they can do what they want to us, then that’s never going to change.” added Emily Nelson
“I feel like they were degrading us making us bad for being a female,” Lane explained. “They’re making us feel bad for loving ourselves or trying to accept ourselves.”
According to the school, the assembly was abruptly stopped and another planned for later was canceled before issuing a statement saying they never wanted the girls to feel uncomfortable about themselves.
The group that supplied the speaker said that they never had an issue before and weren’t sure what happened, but were looking into it.
Watch the video from KHOU below: |
HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. (CBSNewYork) — Summertime heat doesn’t only attract people to barbecues and the beach, it attracts pesky, party crashing flies as well.
One in particular — the green-fly — is out in force this year.
As CBS2’s Andrea Grymes reported, one Long Island town is using an innovative approach to trap the seasonal pest in its breeding grounds.
Normally, the last thing Hempstead Town Supervisor Anthony Santino would like a handful of is green head flies, or more commonly green flies.
The voracious summertime biters are no threat to anyone because they’re dead, after having been trapped inside a rather innocuous looking wooden box.
“Once they enter the trap they are unable to escape, and then they dehydrate,” Santino (R) said.
Hempstead Town has set up dozens of the green-fly boxes in their breeding grounds in the swampy areas of the Lido preserve.
The flies can enter the boxes from below, but are then trapped by the covering mesh screen.
Every summer, the female green-flies lay millions of eggs in the marsh, but to do so they need to feast on humans.
“They literally need a blood meal to produce more offspring,” Santino said.
Rob Humphreys knows it all too well since he likes to run through the preserve daily.
“You don’t know you’re getting bitten until you feel the pain. You look down, and there’s a nice little hole, blood coming out, and it swells up and it itches like crazy. I hate it,” he said.
The green flies will head anywhere they can find a human host, whether at the beach or poolside.
“In July and August, there’s no wind, and on a hot day and they’re all over the place,” Joseph Chiodi said.
Town managers said there is minimal cost to taxpayers since the wooden fly boxes can be built in-house a cost of $100 each.
Local gardener Kathryn Heneghan said she loves that there are no pesticides involved.
“I prefer that over any chemical treatment because I worry about my kids,” she said.
Town leaders said with sixty fly boxes, they can capture up to 150,000 green flies a day who will never get the chance to bug you.
It’s an approach that may be tried elsewhere, because green flies swarm coastal areas from New Jersey to New England. |
With nine weeks left until the general election, most signs point to a victory for Hillary Clinton. In head-to-head national polling she has been ahead of Donald Trump for much of the past year, and in most recent surveys she has retained the lead. At the state level, too, Clinton holds the advantage: over the summer she moved ahead of Trump in many key battleground states, greatly complicating his path to accumulate two hundred and seventy votes in the Electoral College.
Of course, polls aren’t infallible—we relearned that lesson in the recent Brexit referendum. But in the past eight U.S. elections, the candidate who was leading on Labor Day went on to become President. At the online bookmakers, where real money is wagered, Clinton remains the strong favorite. On Tuesday the polls-based forecasting model maintained by the Times Upshot team estimated the probability of her winning at eighty-four per cent. FiveThirtyEight’s “polls-only” model put the probability of a Clinton victory at 68.5 per cent.
Why, then, is there so much anxiety among Clinton supporters? One reason is a new CNN poll, released on Monday, which generated headlines saying Trump had taken the lead. Among respondents the pollsters deemed “likely voters” that was true: the poll showed Trump at forty-four per cent, and Clinton at forty-two per cent. But among the broader pool of registered voters, Clinton was still ahead, forty-four per cent to forty-one per cent.
Essentially, the pollsters screened out some of Clinton’s supporters because they didn’t adjudge them likely to turn out on November 8th. There’s nothing unusual or untoward in that. As elections approach, many polling organizations switch their focus from registered voters to likely voters. But all such screens are somewhat arbitrary, because each polling organization has its own criteria for screening out unlikely voters.
When inspecting the trend in a given poll, it is also better to compare like with like. In this case, we can still look at registered voters: among those voters, Clinton’s lead in the CNN poll has shrunk from eight points a month ago to three points now. That finding is in line with other recent polls. On August 10th the Real Clear Politics poll average, which combines the results of numerous surveys, showed Clinton leading Trump 47.8 per cent to 39.9 per cent, a gap of almost eight percentage points. By Tuesday morning the gap had narrowed to 3.3 percentage points. (Clinton: 46.2 per cent; Trump: 42.9 per cent.)
Just as there are many ways to decide who is a likely voter, numerous methods can be used to construct poll averages. The key decisions are which polls to include and how to weigh them. The Huffington Post’s poll average, which is somewhat different than the Real Clear Politics average, indicates that Clinton is still leading by more than five percentage points—48.1 per cent to 42.5 per cent. But it, too, indicates that the race has narrowed over the past month.
Why has it narrowed? Part of the explanation may be that Clinton’s recent slippage reflects a predictable correction to the polling gains she enjoyed after a successful Democratic Convention and Trump’s self-defeating attacks on the Khan family. As memories of Conventions fade, the bounce that candidates get from them often subsides, partially or wholly.
In this case, it could be argued that the polls have largely reverted to where they were before the Conventions. On July 11th, a week before the gavel came down in Cleveland, the R.C.P. poll average showed Clinton leading Trump by 4.5 percentage points—not far from where the gap is today. Looking at the numbers this way, the key fact about modern American politics is that the country is divided pretty evenly, with this year being no exception. We should always have expected a close race.
A more pointed explanation for the recent polling trends acknowledges the possible effect of the recent barrage of negative press about the Clinton Foundation and Clinton’s private e-mail server. In an ABC News/Washington Post poll, which was carried out on August 24th through 28th, fifty-six per cent of respondents said they had an unfavorable opinion of Clinton. That was a jump of six points compared with a poll taken at the start of August. The Post’s Aaron Blake noted that Clinton’s favorable/unfavorable numbers were the worst she “has had in her quarter-century of national public life.”
Monday’s CNN poll confirmed that Clinton has a serious image problem. Asked to choose the most honest and trustworthy candidate, just thirty-five per cent of respondents picked her, and fifty per cent chose her opponent. Given Trump’s long record of bankrupting companies, stiffing suppliers, exaggerating his net worth, and running a sham university that charged high fees to low-income people, this was a remarkable (and depressing) finding.
But it needs putting in perspective. To come out on top in November, Clinton doesn’t need to transform herself into a beloved leader. She just needs to defeat Trump, who, by most measures, is even more unpopular than she is. Here again, the poll averages provide more reliable information than individual surveys. According to the Huffington Post’s poll average, Trump’s net favorability rating—that is, his favorable rating minus his unfavorable rating—is minus nineteen. Clinton’s figure is minus 14.6.
Ultimately, of course, the race will come down not to polls but to the Electoral College and the outcome of voting in the battleground states. For these purposes, I’ll put eleven states in the battleground category: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. According to the Real Clear Politics polling database, Trump is narrowly ahead in only two of these states: Iowa and Missouri. Clinton is up by five points or more in six: Colorado, Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. In the three remaining states—Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina—Clinton holds narrow leads.
Mimicking the national trends, polls published last week showed the race tightening in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. But Clinton was still ahead of Trump in these surveys, and her unfavorability ratings were better than his. In Pennsylvania, for instance, which is shaping up as a must-win state for the Republicans, a poll from Franklin & Marshall College showed Clinton leading Trump by seven percentage points: forty-seven per cent to forty per cent. Clinton’s net favorability rating was minus sixteen, which is pretty bad. But Trump’s net favorability rating was minus twenty-one.
It should be noted that numbers like these have seldom, if ever, been seen before in a U.S. Presidential election. To many Americans, the election has come down to a choice between the unpalatable and the unthinkable. But in this strange and dystopian contest, Clinton retains a distinct advantage. In the weeks ahead, which will see three Presidential debates and, almost certainly, more surprises, we will find out if she can maintain it all the way to the finish line. |
WASHINGTON, DC — A view of Nationals Park from the Hampton Inn’s Top of the Yards rooftop bar on April 1, 2016, while the Nationals were playing the Minnesota Twins. (Photo by Fritz Hahn/The Washington Post)
Rain is inevitable on Thursday as the latest in a conveyor of cold fronts charges through the region. But I am cautiously optimistic the Nationals will be able play their home opener.
[Should the MLB schedule early-season games to avoid wintry weather?]
The bulk of the rain should fall through early afternoon Thursday
Models are in a good agreement that a slug of rain, possibly heavy for a time, will come through during the morning to early afternoon hours.
Simulated radar high resolution NAM model 11 a.m. Thursday. (WeatherBell.com)
Models *currently* don’t show much rain mid-afternoon into the evening
After the morning-early afternoon rain passes, models are in a good agreement that any additional rainfall is light and inconsequential. The European and GFS models simulate less than 0.1 inches of rain between 2 and 8 p.m. Thursday.
European model
Rainfall forecast from European model 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday. (StormVistaWxModels.com)
GFS model
Rainfall forecast from GFS model 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday. (StormVistaWxModels.com)
In other words, from mid-afternoon Thursday into the early evening, any rain showers should be widely scattered, short-lived, and probably won’t amount to much. Skies may even brighten.
Could the timing of the rain shift between now and Thursday? Yes. Could showers be heavier and last longer than these models suggest? Sure.
I wouldn’t say the game is in the clear at this point.
What will temperatures and wind be like?
The culprit for the rain is a strong cold front coming into the area, but temperatures probably won’t fall markedly until overnight Thursday, some time after the game.
Temperatures during the game should starting off around 60 degrees and gradually fall back into the mid-50s by the late innings. If the sun manages to come out at all Thursday afternoon, it could be slightly warmer than this.
European model forecast temperature at 5 p.m. Thursday. (StormVistaWxModels.com)
Winds will be steady out of the west, at around 10-20 mph, but nothing too extreme the way it looks now.
This forecast is low confidence, so keep an eye on our blog for updates over the next two days. |
“E-cigarettes can cause cancer”; “Vaping ‘no better’ than smoking”: headlines last week challenged the idea that electronic cigarettes are safer than conventional cigarettes, after findings emerged that their vapour damaged and killed human cells.
Jessica Wang-Rodriguez, a head and neck cancer specialist at the University of California at San Diego, and her team found that cells lining human organs sustained up to twice the DNA damage seen in unexposed cells. They were also five to 10 times more likely to wither and die than unexposed cells even if the vapour contained no nicotine, the addictive ingredient in conventional and most electronic cigarettes.
“Without the nicotine, the damage is slightly less, but still statistically significant compared with control cells,” says Wang-Rodriguez, who led the research.
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Although the study garnered headlines around the world, researchers contacted by New Scientist have criticised it for its inability to properly compare the damage caused by smoke from conventional and electronic cigarettes.
Relative harm
“The relative harm compared to real smoking is the critical point here, since the majority of vapers use e-cigarettes to cut down or quit smoking,” says Marcus Munafò of the University of Bristol, UK. “That direct comparison is largely missing.”
To assess what vaping does to human tissue, the researchers exposed cells to vapour from two brands of e-cigarettes every three days for between one to 8 weeks. However, with cigarette smoke they were only able to expose the cells for 24 hours before all the cells died.
Because the cells were able to survive for far longer when exposed to vapour rather than smoke, the main outcome of the study is the opposite of what the media has reported: that cigarette smoke is far more toxic than e-cigarette aerosol, says Konstantinos Farsalinos of the University of Patras in Greece.
“The comparisons were based on unequal treatments, without equivalent exposures for equivalent periods of time,” says John Britton, a toxicologist at the University of Nottingham, UK. Even if the time periods had been equal, the results would not necessarily have reflected real-life hazards, he says. The dose of vapour the cells received was equivalent to that from vaping for hours on end, a much higher dose than someone would typically get.
More realistic would have been to compare samples of cells taken from the airways of people who use either e-cigarettes or real cigarettes, says Britton.
Toxins from flavourings?
One puzzle the results raise is why cells appeared to be damaged even by nicotine-free vapour. One possibility is that other toxins are created when flavourings are exposed to heat.
“E-cigarette vapour is known to contain a range of toxins which include impurities in the e-cigarette liquids and toxins generated when solutions are heated to generate vapour,” says Britton. “Some are carcinogenic, so it’s likely some long-term users of e-cigarettes will experience adverse effects on their health, and the authors are correct to point out that these products should not be considered risk-free,” he says. But if smokers can’t give up completely, e-cigarettes are safer than smoking, he says.
“Those of us reviewing the evidence are saying that when compared with tobacco smoking, e-cigarettes are a safer option, and I don’t think this new research detracts from that advice,” says Linda Bauld of the University of Stirling, UK.
Wang-Rodriguez, however, urges vapers to be cautious. “They shouldn’t assume it’s a safe alternative to smoking,” she says. “We don’t really know all the harmful effects of vaping at this point, so I’d encourage users of both e-cigarettes and regular cigarettes to understand the consequences and stop using.”
Journal reference: Oral Oncology, DOI: 10.1016/j.oraloncology.2015.10.018
(Image credit: Sefa Karacan/Anadolu Agency/Getty) |
'Lion King' director Rob Minkoff is producing the animated feature inspired by Brooks' comedy classic 'Blazing Saddles.'
Michael Cera, Samuel L. Jackson and Michelle Yeoh have joined the voice cast of Blazing Samurai, an animated feature inspired by Mel Brooks' comedy classic Blazing Saddles.
Rob Minkoff, director of The Lion King and Stuart Little, will produce the animated comedy together with Yair Landau and Susan Purcell. Landau's Mass Animation shingle is producing with Huayi Brothers Media Corporation, Flying Tigers Entertainment and GFM Films, which is handling international sales at AFM.
George Takei, Gabriel Iglesias, Djimon Hounsou, Aasif Mandvi, Sandra Tsing Loh and former Spice Girl Mel B. are also among the voice cast.
Open Road Films has picked up U.S. rights to Blazing Samurai and plans a domestic bow on August 4, 2017. Sony Pictures International Releasing has picked up several territories and Huayi Brothers is distributing the film in Greater China. GFM Films is selling worldwide rights to buyers at AFM.
Cera will play Hank, a dog who dreams of becoming a great warrior and saving the town of Kakamucho from becoming the litter box of a nefarious feline warlord. Jackson will voice Jimbo, a once-great cat samurai who has been hitting the catnip too hard for too long. He takes Hank under his wing and teaches him the way of the samurai. Brooks will voice Shogun, a misguided but benevolent leader.
Helmers Mark Koetsier (Kung Fu Panda) and Chris Bailey (Alvin and the Chipmunks) will direct from a screenplay by Ed Stone and Nate Hopper.
“There is no business like Shogun business,” quipped Brooks. The comedy legend will attend AFM Nov. 4 to showcase footage from Blazing Samurai to buyers, along with Minkoff and Landau.
“Throughout the recording sessions from Mel Brooks to Mel B, this cast has not only met the humor, but raised the level of comedy and heart in this unique homage to Blazing Saddles,” said Landau. “Ed and Nate delivered a first-rate script in Blazing Samurai, a story about cats and dogs getting along that will appeal to everyone whether they’ve seen the original comedy classic or not.”
Brooks is executive producing Blazing Samurai along with Reginald Hudlin and Pietro Ventani. |
It has been a major recruiting weekend for Oklahoma with the 2016 class, but the Sooners have added one more piece to their 2015 puzzle.
Junior college wide receiver Jarvis Baxter confirmed Friday night he is going to be a walk-on at OU with hopes of earning a scholarship either during the season or next semester.
Baxter, who is 5-foot-11, was ranked No. 43 in the Scout juco 100 last season and had signed with South Florida. He was released from his letter of intent with USF two weeks ago when it became clear he was not going to qualify academically.
Baxter, however, will make OU’s requirements and said he is going to report to Norman on Tuesday with everybody else.
Baxter said USF only allows someone to use nine credit hours in the summer to meet the required GPA. Baxter took more than nine hours but those extra hours couldn’t count for USF but do count for OU. OU allows for more than nine hours in the summer, which is what Baxter needed to reach the required GPA.
Baxter was a star at Trinity Valley where he played against fellow OU juco transfer Dede Westbrook. That’s where it all started. Once Baxter talked with Westbrook, Baxter called offensive coordinator Lincoln Riley about joining OU.
“I talked with him, and he said they have a walk-on spot at wide receiver open,” Baxter said. “I talked to my family about it and decided this would be the best thing for me to do.
“I’m going to have a chance to earn it during the season. Pretty sure I’ll end up with that scholarship because nobody is going to work harder than me.”
Baxter visited OU initially for the 2011 OU-Texas A&M game. He remembers it well and said OU has been his dream school ever since.
“I got an autograph from Corey Nelson,” Baxter said. “I talked with Jamell Fleming. I wanted to get his gloves, but he said he couldn’t do that.”
In the last week Baxter has started to receive full scholarship offers from other schools, but in the end, decided OU was the place to be.
“Because of the institution,” Baxter said. “The kind of school OU is. It’s a great community, and I can get a great education.”
Baxter said he is a 3-for-2 kid with three years to play two seasons’ worth of eligibility. |
Almost 400 people have died in clashes between security forces and Rohingya Muslims in Burma, the country's military commander has said.
The numbers, posted on the military's official Facebook page, are a sharp increase on the previously reported toll of just over 100. The statement said all but 29 of the 399 dead were insurgents, whom it described as terrorists.
The statement said there had been 90 armed clashes including an initial 30 attacks by insurgents on 25 August, making the combat more extensive than previously announced.
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Advocates for the Rohingya, an oppressed Muslim minority in overwhelmingly Buddhist Burma, say hundreds of Rohingya civilians have been killed by security forces.
According to the UN, some 38,000 have fled into neighbouring Bangladesh.
It comes after Chris Lewa, director of the Arakan Project pressure group, told ABC: "So far reports—I think quite credible—mention about 130 people including women and children killed.
"That happened on Sunday when suddenly security forces cordoned [off] the whole area, together with Rakhine villagers. It seems like this has been a major massacre in Rathedaung."
The latest violence follows an attack by Rohingya insurgents on police posts in the remote region, prompting a huge military crackdown.
The insurgent group that claimed responsibility for last week's attacks, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, said it acted to protect Rohingya communities.
Shape Created with Sketch. Rohingya mothers face persecution Show all 10 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Rohingya mothers face persecution 1/10 Ramida Begum holds her 10-day-old daughter in their shelter in Kutupalang, an unregistered refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. 'The military caught my husband and burnt our house down a week before I left Myanmar. Since then I don't know whether my husband is dead or alive' Reuters 2/10 Minara Begum sits inside the shelter, cradling her one-month-old son Ayub. Minara fled to Bangladesh from Nasha Phuru village in Myanmar with her husband and mother-in-law. 'My child doesn't get enough breast milk as I don't eat enough nutritious food. I have to buy milk powder from local market though it's not very good for my son' Reuters 3/10 Amina, pictured with her 16-day-old daughter Sumaiyin, is in a refugee camp Balukhali that neighbours Ramida and Minara's. 'One and a half months ago the military came to our village and kept firing their guns. I ran away with my neighbours to save our lives. You see us alive here only because the God was so kind. They caught my uncle and my younger brother and we don't know whether they are dead or alive' Reuters 4/10 Fatema sits beside her one-day-old daughter Aasma in Kutupalang. Fatema fled to Bangladesh from Jambuinna village in Myanmar two months ago after her house was burnt down by the military. She crossed Naf River by boat during the night. 'Our situation is better than many other refugees as my husband Mohammad Alom works here as a day labourer. Many of the new refugees have no work here, so they have to rely on relief' Reuters 5/10 Jamalida cradles her two-month-old daughter Shahida. Jamalida came to Bangladesh with her husband from Nasha Phuru village in Myanmar Reuters 6/10 Rehana Begum lays her one-day-old daughter in front of her inside their tarpaulin shelter. Rehana fled her village of Jambuinna in Myanmar three months ago. 'We were in our home and suddenly the military came to our village and started shooting. When we heard the sound of gun shots we immediately went to our relatives. We walked for four hours without any food and water to reach the border at 1 a.m. We paid 25,000 Myanmar kyat (£14) to a broker to cross.' Intercepted by Bangladesh border guards, Rehana's family narrowly escaped being sent home. 'They wanted to send us back, but then we heard gunshots from the Myanmar side and the guards released us, saying, "Stay in Bangladesh and save your lives"' Reuters 7/10 Noor Begum sits next to her one-day-old daughter Sumaiya as she stares into the camera. Noor came to the camp one-and-a-half months ago from Nagpura village with her husband Jahangir Reuters 8/10 Rajuma Begum observes her one-month-old son Raihan. 'I fled to Bangladesh because of fear, because I needed to save my children. I was pregnant and suffering from fever while crossing the border. I also have an 11-month-old boy, so it was very difficult to reach the border from our village Wabek in Myanmar. I had to rest frequently. After six hours of horrible walking we finally reached the border at 2am and crossed after paying a broker' Reuters 9/10 Eighteen-year-old Asmot Ara rests her newly born daughter on her lap. Asmot said she came to the camp one month ago with neighbours from Nagpura village. In Myanmar her father-in-law was killed and their home burnt down by the Myanmar military Reuters 10/10 As Marijaan holds her 25-day-old daughter Noor Habi, her son peers over her shoulder. Marijaan fled to Bangladesh from Khyeri Prang village in Myanmar one month ago after her house was burnt down by the Myanmar military. 'I reached the border at night and crossed by the boat. I paid the boatman to cross the Naf River' Reuters 1/10 Ramida Begum holds her 10-day-old daughter in their shelter in Kutupalang, an unregistered refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. 'The military caught my husband and burnt our house down a week before I left Myanmar. Since then I don't know whether my husband is dead or alive' Reuters 2/10 Minara Begum sits inside the shelter, cradling her one-month-old son Ayub. Minara fled to Bangladesh from Nasha Phuru village in Myanmar with her husband and mother-in-law. 'My child doesn't get enough breast milk as I don't eat enough nutritious food. I have to buy milk powder from local market though it's not very good for my son' Reuters 3/10 Amina, pictured with her 16-day-old daughter Sumaiyin, is in a refugee camp Balukhali that neighbours Ramida and Minara's. 'One and a half months ago the military came to our village and kept firing their guns. I ran away with my neighbours to save our lives. You see us alive here only because the God was so kind. They caught my uncle and my younger brother and we don't know whether they are dead or alive' Reuters 4/10 Fatema sits beside her one-day-old daughter Aasma in Kutupalang. Fatema fled to Bangladesh from Jambuinna village in Myanmar two months ago after her house was burnt down by the military. She crossed Naf River by boat during the night. 'Our situation is better than many other refugees as my husband Mohammad Alom works here as a day labourer. Many of the new refugees have no work here, so they have to rely on relief' Reuters 5/10 Jamalida cradles her two-month-old daughter Shahida. Jamalida came to Bangladesh with her husband from Nasha Phuru village in Myanmar Reuters 6/10 Rehana Begum lays her one-day-old daughter in front of her inside their tarpaulin shelter. Rehana fled her village of Jambuinna in Myanmar three months ago. 'We were in our home and suddenly the military came to our village and started shooting. When we heard the sound of gun shots we immediately went to our relatives. We walked for four hours without any food and water to reach the border at 1 a.m. We paid 25,000 Myanmar kyat (£14) to a broker to cross.' Intercepted by Bangladesh border guards, Rehana's family narrowly escaped being sent home. 'They wanted to send us back, but then we heard gunshots from the Myanmar side and the guards released us, saying, "Stay in Bangladesh and save your lives"' Reuters 7/10 Noor Begum sits next to her one-day-old daughter Sumaiya as she stares into the camera. Noor came to the camp one-and-a-half months ago from Nagpura village with her husband Jahangir Reuters 8/10 Rajuma Begum observes her one-month-old son Raihan. 'I fled to Bangladesh because of fear, because I needed to save my children. I was pregnant and suffering from fever while crossing the border. I also have an 11-month-old boy, so it was very difficult to reach the border from our village Wabek in Myanmar. I had to rest frequently. After six hours of horrible walking we finally reached the border at 2am and crossed after paying a broker' Reuters 9/10 Eighteen-year-old Asmot Ara rests her newly born daughter on her lap. Asmot said she came to the camp one month ago with neighbours from Nagpura village. In Myanmar her father-in-law was killed and their home burnt down by the Myanmar military Reuters 10/10 As Marijaan holds her 25-day-old daughter Noor Habi, her son peers over her shoulder. Marijaan fled to Bangladesh from Khyeri Prang village in Myanmar one month ago after her house was burnt down by the Myanmar military. 'I reached the border at night and crossed by the boat. I paid the boatman to cross the Naf River' Reuters
Burma's leader, Aung San Suu Kyi has said the "terrorist" attacks were "a calculated attempt to undermine the efforts of those seeking to build peace and harmony in Rakhine state".
The Burmese government has repeatedly denied claims the Rohingya are facing genocide. It previously brushed away evidence of human rights violations as fake news and "propaganda".
Bangladeshi border guards have tried to keep out the fleeing Rohingya, but thousands could be seen on Friday making their way across muddy rice fields.
Young people helped carry the elderly, some on makeshift stretchers, and children carried newborns.
Some, carrying bundles of clothes, cooking utensils and small solar panels, said they had walked at least three days to get to the border.
Sham Shu Hoque, 34, crossed the border with 17 family members. He said he left his village of Ngan Chaung on 25 August after it was attacked by Burmese security forces who shot at the villagers. He said troops also used rocket-propelled grenades, and helicopters fired some sort of incendiary device.
Five people were killed in front of his house, he said. His family survived the attack but was told by the soldiers to leave. They took a week to reach Bangladesh, hiding in villages along the way, he said.
Most of Burma's estimated 1 million Rohingya live in northern Rakhine state. They face severe persecution, with the government refusing to recognize them as a legitimate native ethnic minority, leaving them without citizenship and basic rights.
Additional reporting by agencies
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Ahead of England's World Cup qualifier against Poland, former Juventus player and Polish legend Zbigniew Boniek decided it was the perfect time to show he can still take shots better than Andy Carroll can.
From the Telegraph:
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"My [eight-year-old] grandson Mateo moves better on the pitch than Andy Carroll," said Boniek. "Mateo is very good at golf and tennis. He has better co-ordination."
Well, OK then. Either Boniek is trying to get Liverpool to buy his grandson for £35 million or he really doesn't think very much of Andy Carroll. Maybe this is just his roundabout way of suggesting that Carroll take up golf and tennis?
Whatever the case may be, Boniek has an impressive mustache and Andy Carroll has no mustache at all. Advantage: Boniek. |
The orientation of a diagram on the page of a textbook may seem inconsequential, but it can have a significant impact on a reader's ability to comprehend the information as presented, according to a team of researchers at UC Santa Barbara, Vanderbilt University, and Western Carolina University. Their findings appear in a recent issue of the journal Bioscience.
Focusing on variously formatted cladograms –– also known as phylogenetic trees –– the researchers found that two diagrams may contain the same information, but they aren't necessarily equivalent in terms of how the information is interpreted. "In Western culture, we read from left to right, so we naturally come to a diagram with that behavior," said Andrew T. Stull, a researcher in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at UCSB and an author of the paper. "The important point in this research, however, is that how efficiently a student comprehends the information presented in the phylogenetic tree depends on how the tree is angled."
As it turns out, when a diagonal tree extends from tips on the left to the root on the right, and the trunk angles downward to the right-hand side, the information is more easily accessible. "The way we interrogate the tree is first culturally based –– left to right –– and the strong diagonal line tends to make us flow one way or another," said Stull. "But that combined effect influences the accuracy, or how we're able to use the tree effectively."
However, most textbooks depict the diagonal cladogram in the upward orientation, Stull noted. "Many artists draw the diagram in an inefficient and potentially confusing way," he said. "Artists have a tendency to draw it at the upward angle, not realizing they'd communicate the information better if they angled it downward."
The researchers used a phylogenetic tree for their research because it is very important for a process called tree thinking. "It's the idea that from an evolutionary perspective, there is a distinctive relationship between taxa," said Stull. "It's not just that things line up together on a tree, but you can infer certain biological, physiological, and pharmaceutical commonalities that might be relevant. There are a lot of things you can do in knowing how all of life is organized, and each organism's relation to everything else."
Drawing them in tree form, Stull continued, should help teach students the relationships between organisms, and to anticipate the valuable information those relationships can provide.
The researchers used eye-tracking technology to carry out their research. They showed test subjects one tree, and then another, and asked them to determine whether or not they were the same. "In order to answer the question, they had to interpret the two images," Stull explained. "Then we took all the eye positions. What we found is that when people studied the tree with the upward diagonal trunk, they were less accurate than when the tree followed the downward diagonal."
Why the directional angle makes a difference may have to do with how organisms represented by the individual branches relate to their closest common ancestor and to those with a more distant common ancestor. "With upward angled trunks, it may be because they [students] are thinking of it from the root up," Stull said. "But it's more efficient to think of it from the branches down. So, from an artistic perspective, it makes more sense to build it that way. With that orientation, the user doesn't have to deconstruct it in order to access the information."
Stull's co-authors include Laura R. Novick, associate professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University; and Kefyn M. Catley, a professor of evolutionary biology at Western Carolina University.
[RETURN TO TOP]
† Top image: Although images in textbooks generally represent phylogenetic trees with trunks angling up and to the right, research shows that students have better comprehension when the trunks angle down to the right.
BioScience |
“Now the repute of thy might endures for a space; straightaway again shall age, or edge of the sword, part thee from thy strength, or the embrace of fire, or the surge of the flood, or the grip of the blade, or the flight of the spear, or hateful old age, or the gleam of eyes shall pass away and be darkened; on a sudden it shall come to pass that death shall vanquish thee, noble warrior.” (Beowulf, xxvi)
“Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12)
Why tell a life story? Why recount a person’s deeds? There are times, of course, when we tell the stories of infamous deeds, and these we recount to inspire a warning. But most often we tell stories to inspire greatness. Epic deeds paint grand pictures for our emulation, and the goal of these mighty deeds, planted in our hearts and minds through the stories we absorb, is to bear fruit in our lives. Soak in anemic, empty stories and the fruit in your life will be anemic and empty; saturate yourself in stories with rich and nutritious stuff—even stories which you don’t fully understand—and the fruit in your life will be rich and nutritious. Such a story is Beowulf—no mere epic of swords, golden rings, and monsters, but a powerful, richly nutritious tale for the mythic soul of man, written to inspire us to be better men ourselves.
But there is a twist. Where we might expect a story about how to be better men to focus on life, Beowulf is a story about death; it is a tale not of living well, but of dying well. And this makes good sense, because in the ethical economy of Beowulf’s world how you live is closely—nay, intimately—intertwined with how you die. The measure of the man is determined by how well he faces death. Here the ethics of the ancient world are at odds with our modern one, because death is a subject we are particularly at pains to ignore. Thus, when we turn and apply the examining light of ancient literature to our own lives, the results are both stark and uncomfortable.
Beowulf’s tale is both short and simple. An evil creature, Grendel, is terrorizing the subjects of King Hrothgar. Beowulf arrives to challenge the beast in a mighty contest. He waits at night for the fell creature to arrive, then slaughters it and wins fame for himself and his king. But the deed is not yet done—soon thereafter the mother of Grendel comes to wreak more evil, but Beowulf chases her down, takes her life and sets the people free from terror, earning gold and fame in the process. This, however, is not where Beowulf’s story ends. Years later Beowulf has become a mighty king in his own right, when a dragon, awoken by the greed of men, begins to terrorize his people. Alone, and knowing he will die, Beowulf pursues and eventually kills the dragon, losing his life in the process.
How does the ethic of dying well run throughout this story? There are three currencies in the world of Beowulf: gold, fame, and your life. Mighty (that is, noble and good) men perform mighty deeds (they wager their lives) in order to earn gold and fame. We are tempted to think that accumulation is the goal of these wagers—long life, much gold, and great fame. But Beowulf’s poet wants us to know the grave danger embedded in each of these: namely, to think that these currencies are ends in themselves, to forget that death comes to all. For what does a man take with him when he dies? Does his fame go with him to the grave? Does he carry his gold with him? No. And so the man who fails to use these currencies rightly is an unjust man. The man who forgets the approach of death, and lives in cowardice merely to preserve his property, is in the ethic of Beowulf doomed.
“Now the repute of thy might endures for a space,” admonishes King Hrothgar, because “on a sudden it shall come to pass that death shall vanquish thee, noble warrior.” Death sits at the door—do not trust in your wealth or fame! He may as well have quoted Moses: “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Under this ethic, when death is foremost in our minds, our relationship to the material subjects of our lives is revealed: what you do with your gold, and what you do with your reputation, and what you do with your life, become paramount concerns. These things cannot be kept: they must therefore be used. Noble men spend their gold, their fame, and their lives wisely. Cowardly men do not.
From within this, the story of the Beowulf’s contest with the dragon becomes the high point of this struggle. The dragon is an image of greed—it hoards its gold and does not share it. And in this terrible image we ought to see ourselves; we are tempted, even now, to keep and hoard our gold; to be deceived by the allure of wealth into thinking that the more we have, the better off we will be; that the measure of a man is in the accumulation of his possessions. Beowulf preaches the opposite ethic. It is not in possessing, but in giving, that a man is revealed. And hence the dragon must be destroyed.
Beowulf knows that taking this task will not earn him earthly fame—a contrast to his struggle with Grendel. There he stood to win gold and fame through that mighty deed. With the dragon, however, there will be neither wealth nor fame. There is only the deed. And here the character of Beowulf is proved once for all: is he a mercenary, we ask, out only for gain? By no means! “Then for the first time,” the poet observes, “he had to show his strength without Fate allotting him fame in battle” (Beowulf, xxxv). An action undertaken without the promise of earthly reward—an action, that is, of self-sacrifice—is thus the most noble of all.
Beowulf takes eleven companions with him to fight the dragon, and here the parallels to the Passion of Christ should not be overlooked: Jesus, of course, had twelve disciples, but one (Judas) abandoned the ranks before his passion. Ten of Beowulf’s companions abandon him in cowardice; one, Wiglaf, remains to fight at his master’s side. Ten of Jesus’ remaining disciples also abandoned him—but John alone remained. Thus, as Jesus goes on to fight the dragon of human sin alone, so Christlike Beowulf advances on the dragon of greed alone—a final, brave act to display the grand selflessness of true manhood.
Consequently, faithful Wiglaf becomes our stand-in. He is our way to enter into the story of Beowulf. He models for us how we are to respond to the tales of mighty, selfless deeds—that is, with mighty, selfless deeds of our own. Will we be the loyal servants, or the cowardly earls? The poet has no qualms identifying which he thinks is the right path, and Wiglaf declares that:
God knows that, as for me, I had much rather the flame should embrace my body with my gold-giver. It does not seem fitting to me, that we should bear shields back to our dwelling, if we cannot first fell the foe, guard the life of the prince of the Weders. I know well that, from his former deeds, he deserves not to suffer affliction alone among the warriors of the Geats, to fall in fight; sword and helmet, corslet and shirt of mail shall be shared by us both. (Beowulf, xxxvi)
But of those who ran, he only says this: “Death is better for all earls than a shameful life” (Beowulf, xxxix).
How you spend your wealth, how you spend your fame, and how you spend your very life are, according to the ethics of Beowulf, the factors that determine the ultimate value of your life. It is the knowledge of death that determines your choices and actions in the present. Keep your death in mind, and you will make right choices about the currencies you possess. This is a critical voice we continually need to hear—especially in an era which praises what Beowulf’s poet would surely see as the cowardly determination to preserve life, rather than the righteous goal to spend your life-currency justly. To Beowulf, a good death is better than a long life in cowardice. This is a reminder we desperately need, for in this nothing has changed: as with Beowulf, death comes to us all. It is an engagement none of us can avoid. And when death arrives your wealth, your reputation, and (of course) your life cannot go with you. What you have not spent will be accounted to you as waste. Therefore learn to spend your life, your wealth, and your reputation rightly, in the now. Make a study of selflessness and right living. Learn from the ancients how to be a man. Read Beowulf. |
Pulling a rabbit out of a hat, or tricks of a similar ilk, may have dazzled generations of children.
But the future of live magic could be under threat, thanks to the rise of the YouTube magician.
The rising popularity of online videos is leading to a loss of key skills which could damage the very existence of live magic in years to come, a leading Magic Circle member has warned.
Jamie Raven, who belongs to the prestigious inner magic circle, said amateur magicians are increasingly learning their trade behind the camera, perfecting one trick on film to post for "likes".
But while YouTube and social media may spark an interest in magic, he warned essential skills such as interacting with real people to control or misdirect their attention are being lost.
If the current obsession for online profile continues, he said, in generations to come "there will be no magic shows, there will be no live interaction". |
Simon Rex and Ashley Tisdale star in the latest and worst addition to the “Scary Movie” franchise. (Photo by Quantrell D.Colbert)
“Scary Movie 5” must be some kind of psychological experiment. Perhaps the filmmakers sat in a lab, rubbing their temples while wondering aloud how awful they could make a movie and still score at the box office.
It’s the only reasonable explanation for this lazy, boring, vile and tragically unfunny attempt at a horror-film spoof that is sure to kill brain cells and may signal the impending apocalypse. It’s the kind of movie that leaves audience members partially lobotomized, exiting the theater and muttering absently to themselves, “How on earth did this movie get made?”
The answer: cheaply. Each of the increasingly terrible “Scary Movie” installments has enjoyed an impressive return on investment, so it’s only logical that producers want to keep making them, quite literally, ad nauseam. The cost-cutting is evident, between the not-so-special effects and the amateur editing errors, including a casual relationship between dialogue and moving mouths.
Thirteen years after the first “Scary Movie,” this new chapter follows the same general template, with one exception: This incarnation kicks off with Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan, playing themselves, preparing to make a sex tape.
From there, the story skips to couple Dan (Simon Rex) and Jody (Ashley Tisdale), who inherit a trio of youngsters after the demise of the kids’ dad (Sheen). What follows shouldn’t be confused with a plot; it’s more a series of snippets in which the characters borrow familiar story lines from other movies, including “Mama,” “Inception,” “Black Swan” and “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.”
But “Scary Movie” doesn’t really put any kind of twist on these familiar plots, so much as present them in some brainless context. But stupid doesn’t necessarily equate to funny, and that goes for Heather Locklear, dressed as a pregnant ballerina whose water breaks all over a male dancer’s face as he lifts her above his head.
The movie is so appalling that even a film fan who guffawed her way through “The Aristocrats” would feel nothing but a deep emptiness as the end credits begin to roll, wondering if one solid joke was too much to ask from a movie that bills itself as comedy.
But no, there’s nothing worthy of even a small smirk. Instead, the movie serves up violence against man, woman, child, doll and ape, not to mention sexual situations involving a German shepherd, a hairy, overweight nanny, Santa Claus, an automatic swimming pool cleaner, a pony and a microwave. A knock-knock joke told by a 6-year-old would be funnier than this endless stream of flatulence jokes, feces-infused food items and gratuitous vomiting.
For some reason, watching this movie kept conjuring up the voice of Smokey Bear intoning “Only YOU can prevent forest fires.” It must be a sign from beyond that we — the film-going public — have the power to end this. As long as people keep watching these inept films, the “Scary Movie” franchise will thrive and reproduce. And that is a truly terrifying prospect.
No stars
PG-13. At area theaters. Contains crude language, brief nudity, sexual situations, allusions to drug use and gory, if obviously fake, violence. 85 minutes. |
New Delhi (CNN) — Air India, a debt-burdened, state-run carrier, is trying to shed some extra flab.
The airline has asked 125 of its flight attendants to lose a few pounds or get ready for an airport job.
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"It is an opportunity for them to bring themselves back to the (required) fitness level. If they cannot because of any medical reasons, they will be offered ground duties," Air India spokesman G.P. Rao told CNN Tuesday.
The decision follows fitness guidelines laid out by India's civil aviation regulator.
Last year, the regulator mandated a body mass index (BMI) of 18-25 for male cabin crew members and 18-22 for female cabin crew members. Men with a BMI of 25-29.99, and women with a BMI of 22-27, were classified as overweight.
'Safety issue'
Some say the index, which is determined by a person's height-to-weight ratio, is not always an accurate indicator of someone's health and body fat percentage.
But the airline insists the move to manage its employees' physique is not about appearances.
"It's a safety issue," Rao said. "The crew has to be fit to be able to carry out their inflight duties, including emergencies."
Rao, however, didn't say how much time the shortlisted 125-odd crew would have to slim down.
He added this is not the first time Air India has advised its flight attendants to stay "fit."
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"This is an ongoing process. We have been doing this exercise for quite some time," he said.
Air India currently employs more than 3,000 cabin crew members. According to a Times of India report , a "large number" of the employees refused to undergo medical examinations for their BMI as ordered by the company back in 2013. Instead, they asked the airline to first pay for gym memberships before conducting any lab tests, the report said. |
The NHL won’t play in an outdoor game in California this year. But you can still get your AHL hockey fix on the West Coast.
The league announced it will play an outdoor game at Raley Field (a baseball stadium) in West Sacramento, Calif. The contest will include the Bakersfield Condors and the Stockton Heat. The Condors are the Edmonton Oilers’ newly affiliated AHL team. The Heat are with the Flames. The game will take place on Dec. 18.
In case you were wondering, the average high in Sacramento in December is 54 degrees. The average low is 38 degrees. Perfect weather for hockey, eh?
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The event will just be one part of the “Biggest Show on Snow” which is a six-week “holiday extravaganza” at Raley Field.
This will be the eighth outdoor game in AHL history according to the release. The last one was at Comerica Park in Detroit on Dec. 30, 2013 as part of the Winter Classic.
Also, there will apparently be something called a “Monster Ice Slide” which sounds amazing. This reminds me of the brown snow slide at the Columbus All-Star Game, which we here at Puck Daddy may or may not have tested.
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Josh Cooper is an editor for Puck Daddy on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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Introduction
Specifications
Lian Li DK-02X CASE TYPE: Mid-Tower MATERIAL: Aluminum & Tempered Glas WEIGHT: 45kg SLOTS: System 1: 2
System 2: 8 DRIVE BAYS: 1x External Slim ODD x1 or Internal 2.5" HDD x1"
System 1: 8x Internal 2.5/3.5"
System 2: 9x Internal 2.5/3.5" MOTHERBOARD
FORM FACTORS: System 1: Mini-ITX
System 2: Micro-ATX, ATX. XL-ATX, E-ATX, HPTX DIMENSIONS (WxHxD): 1250 x 805/835 x 600 mm
Keyboard tray: 1150 x 50 x 240 mm FRONT DOOR/COVER: N/A FRONT FANS: 120mm x 4 REAR FANS: 120mm x 2 (pre-installed) TOP FANS: N/A BOTTOM FANS: N/A SIDE FANS: 120mm Fan x 3 on each side (included) I/O for each System: 3x USB 3.0
1x Headphone
1x Microphone FAN/LED Controller: N/A Compatibility System 1: CPU Cooler: 175mm
GPU: 300mm
PSU: 160mm Compatibility System 1: CPU Cooler: 175mm
GPU: 400mm
PSU: 400mm
I would like to thank Lian-Li for supplying the review sample.Lian Li is known for making some very elaborate aluminum cases, and the company has also offered actual work desks made of the material in the past. But those were large, not very fashionable, and geared toward those who wanted something fancy in their office. The DK range of enclosures come in different sizes and offers a cleaner, simpler look that works in an office, or as a reception desk in a more public surrounding. While we have reviewed fairly traditional Lian Li enclosures in the past, the DK-02X represents an extreme departure into what could be done while still offering some viable functionality.The "X" in the "DK-02X", like all of Lian Li's cases signifies that the chassis is anodized black inside and out. As of now the DK-02X and the DK-02 are the same case. This might change if Lian Li comes out with a silver version (which would be named DK-02A), but there are no plans for this at this time. |
"Food stamps" arrive in Britain next month, when tens of thousands of vulnerable people will be issued with food vouchers in lieu of money to tide them over short-term financial crises.
Rather than, as now, offering a cash loan, most councils will from April offer new applicants who qualify for emergency assistance a one-off voucher redeemable for goods such as food and nappies.
Many of the 150 local authorities in England running welfare schemes have confirmed that they will issue the vouchers in the form of payment cards, which will be blocked or monitored to prevent the holder using them for alcohol, cigarettes or gambling.
Several plan to issue charity food parcels to people applying for crisis help, and are preparing to give cash grants to food banks to enable them to take on full-time staff and increase opening hours.
Each authority has drawn up eligibility rules, setting out who will qualify for crisis help and the conditions under which it will be given. One plans to make emergency help conditional on good behaviour.
The shift to in-kind and voluntary assistance follows the decision last year to abolish the government-run social fund and to replace it with more than 150 welfare assistance schemes, operated by English local authorities and the Welsh and Scottish governments.
The social fund – known as the "backstop" of the welfare system – typically offered small loans of about £50, repayable against future benefits, to help vulnerable individuals who faced short-term crises as a result of having cash stolen or benefits delayed.
A separate set of cash grants, typically worth about £1,000, was made to people with a disability, ex-prisoners and victims of domestic violence, to enable them to buy or replace items that would help them live independently, such as beds, clothing and kitchen utensils.
Although social fund spending represents a relatively tiny chunk of the social security bill, there is concern that the new arrangements will for the first time build into mainstream welfare provision the distribution of food voluntarily donated by the public, schools and businesses.
Lady Lister, a Labour peer and poverty expert, said the shift from cash loans to in-kind help would leave the most vulnerable people "high and dry".
"The social fund was a safety net under the safety net," Lister said. "I do not call putting money into food banks a safety net."
Some fear the use of in-kind vouchers will repeat the shortcomings of cashless payment cards, issued to asylum seekers. Critics said these cards left users unable to buy essential non-food items, and made them more likely to turn to risky or criminal ways of obtaining cash.
One welfare charity worker said: "There's a lot of naivety. The social fund is big, and meets a whole range of needs. There's going to be an awful lot of people that will need to tap into its successor."
But councils say huge reductions, in some cases cuts of up to a third, in the amount allocated to support people in hardship have left them with no option but to offer vouchers, refer applicants to food banks and secondhand furniture projects, and to drastically tighten eligibility. The government spent £230m on the social fund in 2009-10 but has allocated £178m to local authorities for 2013-14.
Inquiries by the Guardian found that:
• Conservative-run Hampshire council plans to invest a big chunk of its welfare fund allocation in charities and food banks. Over time, it hopes to stop offering food vouchers as part of a shift towards "reducing the entitlement culture".
• Labour-run Manchester city council will offer successful applicants low-interest loans of up to £200 a year, with a credit union, rather than food vouchers. It says in future years grants for furniture and cooking utensils will be offered on condition that recipients sign up to "expected behaviours and actions".
• Bristol city council's crisis fund restricts emergency payments to food, heating, nappies and toiletries. It says the cards "should not be used for cigarettes, alcohol or entertainment", and if misuse occurs it will seek repayment.
• Labour-controlled Darlington council plans to invest £58,000 in a church food bank, including £30,000 to enable the charity to take on a full-time worker.
From April, thousands of applicants who now have access to crisis help will be turned down under the schemes. Many councils plan to refer the expected rising numbers of unsuccessful applicants to soup kitchens and other charities.
Alison Garnham, chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group, said: "Local authorities have been given a difficult task, to deliver support on a reduced budget at a time of rising need.
"But we are seriously concerned that some authorities will not be providing any access to cash to families to meet their essential needs, and may be offering support in a way that serves to stigmatise those who need it."
Others have warned that people who are turned down for crisis help will turn to crime, begging or loan sharks. Almost all authorities are bracing themselves for an expected rise in demand for crisis support from April, when the bulk of the benefit reforms, aimed at saving £18bn, are introduced. Among these is the so-called bedroom tax.
There is also nervousness that any glitches in universal credit, from October, will see an increase in poorer households seeking help from welfare schemes.
The government, and some charities, have argued that the existing system of crisis loans was abused by people – often young men – who did not use the loans for genuine emergencies. They argue the new system will discourage dependency, more efficiently directing scarce resources at the people who most need them.
The Guardian also found that:
• The cost of administering each of the 150-plus new welfare assistance schemes is typically equivalent to around 20% of the value of the entire local fund. Several authorities, including the Welsh government, have outsourced the running of the voucher schemes to private contractors.
• Local authorities are worried that the new patchwork of welfare assistance systems will lead to a postcode lottery, with vulnerable people moving to apply for crisis help in more "generous" boroughs.
• There are concerns that some welfare systems will not be ready by 1 April. The Furniture Re-use Network said a survey showed two-thirds of its members believed the new system would not be in place in time. There are concerns that, despite huge growth in the numbers of food banks in the past two years, many parts of the country will have little charity food assistance capacity. |
As the Braves prepare to enter the Division Series, I want to return to two controversial incidents at the end of their regular season, when they embroiled themselves in two separate incidents when a batter admired his home run for far too long. First it was Jose Fernandez, the inspiring and amazing Rookie of the Year candidate, hitting his first home run in the majors; then it was Carlos Gomez, taking revenge for what he perceived to have been an intentional hit by pitch three months earlier. In both cases, Brian McCann got rather peeved. (He also got memed.)
So, here’s what happened, as explained by Jason Turbow on his Baseball Codes blog. (I quote him every time I write about unwritten rules, because he breaks everything down from the perspective of unwritten rules violations.)
September 11:
Bottom of the sixth: Fernandez blasts a nearly 400-foot drive off Braves left-hander Mike Minor for his first career homer, flips his bat away and—ostensibly in response to Gattis—stands to admire it. This is not an innocent would-be slugger in awe of his own unexpected power; the move is intended to disrespect the Braves, who take it precisely that way.
As Fernandez crossed the plate, Brian McCann got in his face and yelled at him.
September 25:
Carlos Gomez, the game’s second batter, homered against Paul Maholm Wednesday, then lingered in the batter’s box. Once he began to trot, his churn rate increased with every step; he shouted with increasing fervor at first baseman Freddie Freeman and Maholm even before reaching third.
Watching this, McCann decided to unload a few of his own notions on Gomez, and made sure that his message could not be ignored. The catcher planted himself about 15 feet up the third base line, completely blocking Gomez’s path to the plate. The runner would not pass without first getting an earful.
As it turned out, he would not pass at all. McCann shouted him down without ceding the baseline, players from both teams stormed the field, Reed Johnson landed a punch to Gomez’s noggin, and the ensuing scrum carried everybody to the backstop. Gomez was ejected shortly thereafter, and left the field without ever touching the plate.
I’m always interested in unwritten rules and the seemingly irrational ways that baseball players enforce them. In this case, Brian McCann and the Braves took a fairly uncontroversial one: you’re not supposed to spend too long admiring your own home runs — “pimping” them — because that is disrespectful to the other team. But the Braves’ angry reactions caused them to lose both moral arguments in the court of public opinion.
Jonah Keri called the Fernandez brouhaha “just another case of baseball players taking themselves and their ridiculous unwritten rules way too seriously,” and the Gomez incident led to multiple articles where a yelling Brian McCann was photoshopped into other historical events, as Mike Bates writes, “to tell them to tone it down and cut the fun short.” Emma Span pithily summed up the Braves in a playoff flowchart: “The slightest perceived slight will be met with a benches-clearing brawl.”
That said, both of the players accosted by McCann apologized. Fernandez said, “I feel like I don’t deserve to be here, because this isn’t high school. This is a professional game. I made a mistake. I’m going to learn from it… I embarrassed a lot of people. It’s just not right for the game. For sure I can promise 120 percent that that will never ever happen again. I won’t show anybody up like that.”
And Gomez tweeted this:
The way I carried myself on the field is unacceptable, I should have done better to control myself and set a good example. — Carlos Gomez (@C_Gomez27) September 26, 2013
So there appears to be a disconnect: there is a popular viewpoint that the Braves and McCann are in the wrong, while Fernandez and Gomez appear to believe that they were in the wrong. The easy answer could be because they were all in the wrong and that two wrongs don’t make a right. But it is curious to note that Gomez got suspended for his actions, while McCann only got fined. Here is what is likelier: while people outside of baseball think all of these unwritten rules are ridiculous, people in baseball agreed with the Braves.
In baseball, what Fernandez and Gomez did was unambiguously wrong. You don’t show up the other team, ever, for any reason. Meanwhile, while McCann’s actions may have been over the top, his intentions were laudable: he was sticking up for his teammates, which in baseball is unambiguously good. Standing in the baseline may have caused a bench-clearing scene, but Brian McCann didn’t do it for the fans, he did it to stand up for Maholm. Defending your buddy’s honor may be old-fashioned and dumb, but that’s what baseball players are.
As Michael Wex once wrote, referring to the Yiddish practice of referring to one’s wife as “tsiherste,” meaning “Do you hear me?”: |
OTTAWA – Canada should support the United States in whatever action it decides to take in Syria, former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin says.
In an interview with Global News, Martin said Canada should be working the phones to convince other allies to support the United States “and the actions they will take.”
“The American president [Barack Obama] drew a red line and said if chemical weapons were used, that he and others would act. That red line has been crossed,” said Martin.
Martin, who in 2005 helped implement the “responsibility to protect” doctrine for UN member states to protect citizens whose governments aren’t guarding them from atrocities, says it clearly applies in today’s Syria situation.
“The purpose of responsibility to protect is to say that other countries have a responsibility to act when a country oppresses its own people, and there can be fewer, greater acts of oppression, than when you use a weapon of mass destruction against your people,” he said.
Western governments believe the Syrian regime launched a chemical attack against its own people, reportedly killing 355 and injuring 3,600 – a claim Syria’s UN ambassador denies.
On Wednesday, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird met with George Sabra, president of the opposition group Syrian National Council.
Following the meeting in Montreal, Baird said Canada does not have the weapons to contribute to the types of strikes being referred to in news reports – such as by armed drones and cruise missiles.
But he said Canada is discussing with allies about how to deal with the Assad regime and will continue to co-operate with them.
Baird added the government has pledged $42.8 million in humanitarian assistance to go towards emergency food assistance, shelter and sanitation.
Liberal leader Justin Trudeau said Wednesday Parliament should be recalled to discuss what role Canada should play in Syria, but he has previously expressed reservations about military intervention.
NDP leader Tom Mulcair also said Parliament should be reconvened, and he called it a “tragedy” that Canada does not have a seat on the Security Council.
“It’s a tragedy that Canada’s voice won’t be heard because we were never able to get a seat at the UN,” he said.
The Conservatives have said it is “premature” to discuss recalling Parliament at this time.
Martin said while it’s preferable to get the blessing of the UN Security Council, it’s clear that Russia will not endorse action in Syria.
He said the actions made during the Kosovo War in 1999, in which the security council refused to act but NATO intervened, “were exactly the right ones.”
“It’s preferable to obviously get the endorsement by the UN Security Council. It’s been very clear by the actions of the Russians that we’re not going to get it in this particular case, and I think the precedent that NATO and Kosovo (set) a number of years ago is the one that we should follow,” he said.
Martin said the real justification for responsibility to protect is endorsement by the allies. He said the U.K. and France have shown support, but the Germans are not as clear.
“In other words if the United States were to act, because they’re the ones who’ve got the capacity, the missiles to act, and they’ve got the vessels close by, then what the United States will require is the support of their allies,” he said.
“Canada has got to play a role in bringing the allies on side.”
– with files from the Canadian Press |
DETROIT -- The Detroit Red Wings have recalled forward Cory Emmerton from the Grand Rapids Griffins. He will make his NHL debut today against the Chicago Blackhawks at Joe Louis Arena (2 p.m., FSD).
Center Valtteri Filppula is out with the flu.
Emmerton, 22, was Detroit's first choice (41st overall) in the 2006 entry draft. He ranks among Griffins leaders with 17 assists (third) and 23 points (tied for fifth) in 33 games, despite missing 12 games due to injury in December.
Filppula should be ready for the next game, Wednesday at home against New Jersey. For now, he's added to a long list of idled Red Wings: Mike Modano (lacerated wrist), Pavel Datsyuk (broken hand), Danny Cleary (broken ankle), Brad Stuart (broken jaw), Chris Osgood (hernia surgery) and Tomas Holmstrom (broken hand). |
Duck feathers covered a major road in Cambridgeshire, bringing traffic to a standstill, after a fire in a lorry.
A ruptured diesel tank caused the fire in the lorry, which was carrying the duck feathers on the A14 near Hemingford Grey.
The westbound carriageway of the road was shut after being covered in the white feathers and a rolling roadblock was in place eastbound.
Diversions are in place but motorists are advised to avoid the area.
Eddie Theaker, from Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service, said: "This was a potentially dangerous incident as the lorry's diesel tank had ruptured and the fire was extensive.
"Although the fire is out, the westbound carriageway has a lot of debris still on it caused by the feathers and all agencies are working hard to ensure that it is cleared as soon as possible." |
Saudi Arabia has accused the Syrian government of waging "genocide" against rebels and criticised Iran and Hezbollah for backing and arming the regime.
Speaking at a news conference with US Secretary of State John Kerry in Jeddah, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal Saud has said Syria is facing a "double-edged attack".
"(It) is facing a massive flow of weapons to aid and abet that invasion and that genocide. This must end." he said.
Prince Saud also attacked Iranian involvement in the war-torn country and described Tehran's backing foreign militias as "the most dangerous development".
He also repeated Saudi Arabia's call for the rebels to be armed.
Saudi Arabia, a Sunni state which views Shia Iran as its arch-rival, has increased aid to Syrian rebels in recent months, supplying anti-aircraft missiles among other weapons.
At a meeting in the Qataris capital, Doha, on Saturday, ministers from 11 nations in the "Friends of Syria" group agreed "to provide urgently all the necessary material and equipment to the opposition on the ground".
Syrian regime called its neighbours to stop arming rebels battling to overthrow Bashar al-Assad and said a decision by Western and Arab countries on Saturday to arm those rebels would prolong the crisis and deepen the bloodshed.
More than 93,000 people have been killed in Syria since peaceful protests erupted in March 2011. Assad's violent response helped provoke what is now a civil war that has driven nearly 1.7 million refugees into neighbouring countries. |
Kevin Gates was found guilty to battery in Polk County, Florida, on Wednesday (Oct. 26) after he was seen kicking a female fan during a concert in the city of Lakeland last year.
The judge sentenced Gates to 180 days in Polk County jail, with credit for any time served, and fines and court costs, WFLA reports. He was convicted by a jury of six women after one day of testimony.
Miranda Dixon, 18, admitted to having tugged on Gates' pants during the concert at Rumor's Nite Club on Aug. 28, 2015. She said during the trail, "I was trying to get his attention for my friend."
Dixon's friend Teremal Redding testified as well, saying she had asked Dixon to grab Gates to get his attention "because he is a famous rapper." She said that the entire front row had been grabbing at Gates and that the first time Dixon grabbed him, he kept performing, but the second time he got violent, kicking her with force.
Gates' defense attorney Jose Baez cross-examined Redding about Dixon's injuries, pointing out that Redding had stayed for the rest of the show after her friend left following the incident.
In a previous hearing, Gates admitted to kicking a fan during the show and used the Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law in attempt to have the charges dropped.
"I kicked them, I wanted them off me," he said during the previous hearing.
Rumor's Nightclub head of security Joe Hailey testified during the trial that Gates' security team had not made any special requests for additional security or any barricade between the stage and the crowd for the concert. He said there were about 20 security guards working that night and that there was room for Gates to back up on stage if he did not want to be touched. |
Thanks to its adorable chubby cheeks and silly dashing gait, a wild European hamster has stolen the show at the 2015 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards or CWPA. The humorous photo titled "Rush Hour" nabbed top honors in the inaugural competition.
Distinguished for its lighthearted focus on the giggle-inducing, serendipitous side of wildlife photography, the photo contest aims to highlight technically excellent images that showcase "the funny side of the majestic creatures we love to photograph and protect."
CWPA founder Paul Joynson-Hicks was inspired to establish the contest through his own experience as a wildlife photographer. As he explains on the competition's website, "I often enter wildlife photography competitions (so far with very little success!), but I love seeing the funny pictures. Strangely enough, they are harder to come by than you might think."
Julian Rad, the Austrian photographer responsible for the winning hamster image, was awarded with an impressive array of prizes, including a trophy, a Nikon D750 camera and a seven-day guided photo safari trip to Tanzania. Meanwhile, the photographers responsible for the silver and bronze award-winning images (below) were awarded some enviable Nikon camera equipment. |
The ACLU has intervened in the case of a lesbian high school student in Alabama whose principal has forbid her from attending prom with her girlfriend:
"Cynthia Stewart, a 17-year-old junior at Tharptown High School in
northern Alabama, is a member of her school’s prom planning committee,
had personally raised over $200 for the prom, and created the theme her
classmates had chosen for the dance. She is also an out lesbian. When Cynthia approached her principal to ask if she could bring her
girlfriend with her to the prom, he said no. He also made Cynthia
remove a sticker she was wearing that said, 'I am a lesbian,' telling
her, “'You don't have that much freedom of speech at school.' Cynthia’s
aunt and guardian, Kathy Baker, then appealed the principal’s decision
to the school board. But the board let the decision to bar Cynthia
from bringing her girlfriend to the prom stand."
The school has apparently threatened to cancel the prom for everyone should Stewart bring her girlfriend.
UPDATE: School reconsidering request! |
A few days ago I wrote about the issue of women in ministry. While I don’t think I have ever hidden my views on the topic (I married a female colleague, after all), I also have never written about it on the various blogs I have maintained over the last few years. And maybe recently, I didn’t see it as my place to comment on women in ministry. I am still not sure… I don’t see it as my place to comment on anyone’s “right” or “place” to be a pastor. If anything, I think it is my place to talk about my experience of being a Lutheran pastor or a millennial pastor or a Canadian pastor. It is also to my place to talk about being a male pastor.
So let’s talk about that.
Being a male pastor is kind of like Louis C.K.’s description of “Being White”. (Warning: The video contains offensive language).
Like Louis C.K. says, male pastors aren’t better. But being a male pastor is clearly better.
Like all the advantages of being white and male in North America, there are advantages when it comes to being an ordained pastor. Here are some of the obvious ones:
No one ever defines my ministry by my gender. No one says, “wow a male pastor or a man in ministry, good for you.” I always get to be just a pastor. I don’t have to constantly live with a qualifier in front of “pastor”, and I am not forced to bear someone’s inappropriate shock that I am my gender and I am a pastor. People expect me to be direct and tell them what I think. They want me to lead them somewhere. I am rarely challenged or expected to defend or make a case for my ideas. I don’t have to apologize for having strong opinions or constantly defend my ideas. People think twice about fighting with me. I always have a leg up in conflict, bullies find it harder to push my buttons because I have fewer to push. I am never automatically second class because of my gender, so conflict is on equal terms or tipped in my favour. I don’t have to suffer being called “boy” or “son” as way of dismissing my point of view, and I am not accused of being divisive if I disagree with something or anything. People are used to pastors of my gender. There are no congregations that are unsure of male candidates for ministry, no parishioners who think it is alright to say something like, “I will never be buried by a man.” I don’t have to endure questions about whether I will take paternity leave, or what will happen when I have kids. People almost never assume that I have a particular gift for ministry before they know me. They don’t automatically think that my gender is suited to particular areas of ministry like preaching or administration. No one assumes that I am not good at pastoral care or being nurturing. People don’t say that I have the gift of speaking with a voice that men can relate to. I don’t have to worry about my safety. I don’t think twice about being alone in the church or if I am safe on my own. If a man asks to meet with me one on one, I don’t have to question my physical safety or his motives. Men don’t try to share the peace with me by hugging me (or grabbing my ass). No one assumes that I am the church secretary or the pastor’s spouse. I am never told, “You don’t look like a pastor or you are took young to be a pastor” even thought I am built like a football player and at times have had long hair and a beard like a hell’s angel. And I have a tattoo. And I am 30 (two decades younger than the average age of pastors in our denomination). Churches are built for men. Pulpits, altars, pastor chairs, vestments are all designed my size and body type in mind. I don’t look ridiculous because the standard garb of my profession is made for my gender, and I don’t look like a cross dresser in a clergy shirt. All the pronouns are for my gender. God is a he. Jesus is a he. Pastors are almost always referred to as he or him or his. I don’t have to correct people because they never use the wrong pronoun to refer to me. Being male is the norm in the church. I didn’t have to take classes in seminary about men’s issues, there is no post-modern male theology, male pastors where never brought in to speak about being male pastors as if it was special or odd or a novelty. I could join the Old Boys Club if I wanted to. Leadership in the church is still overwhelmingly male, and there are no glass ceilings for male pastors in the church. No one pretends it is, “all in good fun” to make sexist jokes about my gender, and none of my colleagues treats me like I am second class because of my gender. I don’t have to walk on egg shells in ecumenical situations. I don’t have to justify my position and call to my conservative colleagues, because they all have male pastors in their denominations. I am not an oddity or the token male at ministerial events.
All the advantages of being a male pastor are only advantages because women suffer the opposite. So many of my colleagues have to contend with these annoyances, insults, and frustrations each day because they are the reality of life in the church. This fact makes me very angry. I pray for the day when these will not be male-pastor advantages, but the reality for all pastors, regardless of gender.
*** Special thanks to my wife, Courtenay, for helping me write this post, since she knows much more about the struggles women in ministry face than I do. You can follow her on twitter @ReedmanParker ***
Read a Christmas Post here:
I am at War with Christmas
See some more posts:
Putting My Jesus Feminism to the Test
10 More Reasons Why Male Pastors are Better,
So what do you think? Are these true? Are there more advantages to being a male pastor? Share in the comments.
Follow me on Twitter: @ParkerErik
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Intake of fish oil reduces the risk of CHD and CHD deaths. Marine n-3 fatty acids (FA) are susceptible to oxidation, but to our knowledge, the health effects of intake of oxidised fish oil have not previously been investigated in human subjects. The aim of the present study was to investigate markers of oxidative stress, lipid peroxidation and inflammation, and the level of plasma n-3 FA after intake of oxidised fish oil. In a double-blinded randomised controlled study, healthy subjects (aged 18-50 years, n 54) were assigned into one of three groups receiving capsules containing either 8 g/d of fish oil (1.6 g/d EPA+DHA; n 17), 8 g/d of oxidised fish oil (1.6 g/d EPA+DHA; n 18) or 8 g/d of high-oleic sunflower oil (n 19). Fasting blood and morning spot urine samples were collected at weeks 0, 3 and 7. No significant changes between the different groups were observed with regard to urinary 8-iso-PGF2α; plasma levels of 4-hydroxy-2-hexenal, 4-hydroxy-2-nonenal and α-tocopherol; serum high sensitive C-reactive protein; or activity of antioxidant enzymes in erythrocytes. A significant increase in plasma level of EPA+DHA was observed in both fish oil groups, but no significant difference was observed between the fish oil groups. No changes in a variety of in vivo markers of oxidative stress, lipid peroxidation or inflammation were observed after daily intake of oxidised fish oil for 3 or 7 weeks, indicating that intake of oxidised fish oil may not have unfavourable short-term effects in healthy human subjects.
TRIAL REGISTRATION:
ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01034423. |
[PSA] Removed Games Cards Becoming "Not Marketable"
Community items for "banned" games are now unmarketable (self.Steam)
submitted 22 hours ago by Tasty_Salamanders
About 2 days ago community items (trading cards, emoticons, backgrounds) for games removed from Steam by Valve, for things such as fake reviews, were made unmarketable. All listed items on the market were cancelled and returned to the inventories to their owners, the market pages for the items still exist but they are now useless.
The items still remain tradable.
Games removed by the devs themselves are uneffected. i.e. Football Manager 2013 items are still marketable while something like Lemurzin items are not.
[steam-tracker.com]
Looks like Valve is finally cracking down on the profit loophole for some games. Games that have been removed from Steam are now seeing their cards, emoticons, boosters, and backgrounds labeled as "Not Marketable".According to official postings on r/Steam , only games removed from the store due to violations will be affected.The following games's items have been confirmed to be delisted from the Steam Community Market. While not marketable, items associated with these games remain tradable. |
Matt Finn is your reigning OHL Defenseman of the month.
With Finn, the points never quite tell the whole story, but for the sake of a ‘once upon a time,’ the captain of the Storm has registered 18 points in 18 games to start the year, putting him fourth in OHL scoring among defensemen. Add to this the news that Finn has been named to Team Canada in the upcoming Subway Super Series, and that he’s led Guelph to the best record in the OHL to start the season, and it’s been a great start for the 19-year old defenseman.
Finn continues to play in all situations with the Storm and at the OHL level he excels at everything. His skating is strong, his shot is heavy, and he makes smart plays with and without the puck. The only real weakness in his game, if there is one, is that he doesn’t play a particularly physical game. Finn is a legitimate candidate for this year’s World Junior team and he looks like he’ll be more than ready to make an impact with the Marlies this time next year.
Connor Brown is still leading the OHL scoring race and Verhaeghe, despite a somewhat less productive two weeks (though he did have a hattrick…), remains in 7th.
2013 first round pick Frederik Gauthier picked up 3 points in 2 games this weekend and is now registering a point per game after a slow statistical start to the season. I haven’t seen him play yet this year so I’ll defer to a good twitter-follow Tobias Drundridge: “my only complaint is that he doesn’t seem to have any confidence in his shot. Always dishing. Other than that I like what I see.”
Have a good Remembrance Day, everyone.
Maple Leafs Prospect Statistics - 2013-14 Season
Last Update: Tuesday, May 27. |
CHICAGO, Ill. (Friday, Dec. 13, 2013) – The Chicago Fire Soccer Club announced Friday that the club has acquired defender/midfielder Lovel Palmer from 2013 MLS Cup finalists Real Salt Lake in exchange for allocation money. Per MLS and team policy, terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“We’re pleased to welcome Lovel to the Fire,” said Fire Head Coach and Director of Soccer Frank Yallop. “He is a versatile, experienced player who will be instrumental in building a deep squad to compete in 2014.”
Palmer joins the Fire after one season with Real Salt Lake. Selected in Stage 2 of the MLS Re-Entry Draft on Dec. 14, 2012, Palmer made 17 appearances and tallied one assist in regular season play, and made three post-season appearances as RSL reached the 2013 MLS Cup.
The Mandeville, Jamaica product began his professional career with Jamaican First Division side Harbour View FC in 1999, appearing in 143 matches. Palmer joined MLS in March 2010 when he was signed by the Houston Dynamo. In one-and-a-half seasons with the Dynamo, Palmer scored three goals and tallied one assist across 45 appearances. On July 21, 2011, Palmer was traded to the Portland Timbers where he would appear 34 times and tally one assist.
A Jamaican youth international, Palmer made his senior national team debut in 2005 and has since earned 24 caps. |
Britain's current account deficit has ballooned to its highest ever level, official statistics showed yesterday, raising fresh concerns about the sustainability of the UK’s recovery.
The balance of payments gap shot up to £27bn in the three months to September, equal to 6 per cent of GDP. The current account deficit for the third quarter of 2013 was also revised up to 6 per cent. Both figures represent the biggest quarterly deficits registered since modern records began in 1955.
The previous record was set in the third quarter of 1988, during the Lawson boom, when the current account deficit, according to the latest figures, hit 5.1 per cent of GDP. Revisions to the GDP level since the Office for National Statistics’ previous balance of payments report revealed that the current account deficit in the 2013 calendar year was the highest annual deficit on record, at 4.5 per cent of GDP, beating the 4.4 per cent seen in 1989.
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Analysts warned that the deficit made the UK vulnerable to a sudden reversal of global capital flows. “If the UK falls out of favour with international investors for any reason, the economy might be forced to rebalance the hard way, with a combination of currency depreciation to make exports more competitive and lower domestic demand to suck in fewer imports,” said Simon Ward of HSBC.
The main cause of the balance of payments deterioration was slippage in the income account to minus £12.6bn, with a decline in the revenue earned by British firms on their overseas investments and an increase in the UK profits of overseas firms. The trade deficit for goods and services actually narrowed slightly over the quarter to £9bn.
In a further concerning sign, the ONS doubled its estimate for the fall in business investment in the third quarter from a 0.7 per cent to a 1.4 per cent decline. The annual rate of growth collapsed from 10.7 per cent to 5.2 per cent.
The ONS also confirmed that net trade and business investment dragged down growth in the three months, with almost all of the 0.7 per cent GDP growth coming from household consumption. The household savings rate in the quarter declined to 7 per cent, indicating people are financing their additional spending by saving less of their disposable income.
The ONS also made some sizeable downward revisions to GDP growth over the past year, taking the annual rate of growth in the third quarter from 3 per cent to 2.6 per cent. Those revisions will make it hard for the economy to grow in line with the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast this month for 3 per cent growth in 2014. The economy would need to grow by 2.2 per cent in the final quarter alone to hit that target. “The latest set of national accounts leave the UK’s economic recovery looking more fragile than it seemed before,” said Samuel Tombs of Capital Economics.
In the US, by contrast, growth in the third quarter was revised up to its strongest rate in 11 years. GDP rose 5 per cent on an annualised basis, up from the 3.9 per cent previously estimated. That news sent the benchmark Dow Jones index up above 18,000 for the first time ever, while the dollar also strengthened. “After four years of rocky recovery, the US economy is now hitting its stride and growth should remain good next year, with lower gasoline prices a big plus for consumers,” said Gus Faucher of PNC Financial Services.
Signs emerged yesterday of a further slowdown in the UK housing market. The British Bankers’ Association reported that mortgage approvals last month were down 20 per cent on November 2013, from 45,594 to 36,717.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
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The Pirate Bay dropped the dime on an anti-piracy agency it claims illegally copied system files to create a "fraudulent parody site."
The Pirate Bay, as you may already know, is the world's largest file sharing site, and as its name suggest it has a certain propensity toward, shall we say, content that is not necessarily respectful of the copyright laws of the land. But while it doesn't have much respect for copyright, it has even less respect for those who disrespect copyright in the name of copyright. The Pirate Bay alleges that Finland's Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Center unlawfully used some of its materials to create a parody site - piraattilahti.fi, complete with a sinking galleon - and so it called the police.
"While The Pirate Bay may have a positive view on copying, it will not stand by and watch copyright enforcing organizations disrespect copyright," The Pirate Bay said in a press release. "It's funny that we have to teach the copyright lobby the meaning of the law. The fact that they wrote it doesn't mean that they are above it."
The Pirate Bay claimed the CPIAC "is not new to balancing on the edge of what's right and wrong," noting that the group instigated a police raid in 2012 against a nine-year-old girl who had downloaded music from the internet, which resulted in the confiscation of her Winnie the Pooh laptop.
"CIAPC is like an ugly high school bully without friends," the statement said. "It's time to take a stand. Cyber bullying is a serious matter to us all."
The Pirate Bay also pledged that any financial award it wins as a result of this case will go toward replacing the girl's laptop.
Source: The Pirate Bay |
Kotaku East East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.
A few weeks back, I received an email from a reader who was blind in one eye and wanted to know how the Oculus Rift would work for him. I thought it was an interesting question but honestly didn't know the answer, so I put it to the back of my mind. Then this last weekend I went in for Lasik surgery. It didn't go well.
Simply put, the surgery was a failure and while the doctor is hopeful that I will make a full recovery in the coming months, I have been effectively blind in my right eye for the past few days. So in an attempt to turn something horrible into something useful to others, I decided to see what Oculus Rift is like for those with only one functioning eye.
I started simple with a little tech demo called GirlMirrorLook. Basically, you are a girl in a small villa surrounded by beautiful scenery. There is also a mirror.
Now, in recent weeks, I had spent more than a little time with the Rift, but I was still surprised when I put the Rift on in my one-eyed state; everything still looked like it was in 3D. I still felt like I could reach out and touch the objects I was seeing—they just seemed a little flatter somehow. The objects didn’t quite pop out of the frame like they had before. After all, how could they? Stereoscopic 3D is impossible with just one eye.
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However, due to the screen completely enveloping my peripheral vision, I was still visually immersed in the game. And since when I moved my head the camera moved identically in my Rift-vision, my brain seemed happy to interpret it as what I was really seeing—regardless of whether objects had the 3D “pop” or not.
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I tried out another few tech demos—a room full of Hatsune Miku knock-offs, a Rift version of Tetris—and they seemed to be a comparably immersive experience to what I had had when playing the Rift with both eyes.
So it wasn't until I tried playing Proton Pulse Rift, the first real game I ever played on the Rift, that the lack of Stereoscopic 3D became an issue. Proton Pulse is an Arkanoid/Breakout-style game where you look down a long vector graphics corridor and block a bouncing ball with a semi-transparent paddle controlled by your head movements. Without the Stereoscopic 3D, it was much harder to judge how far the ball was from me at any given time. Like in the real world, I had lost my depth perception.
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Lastly, I decided to try out something a bit more flashy and fast-paced in the form of Half Life 2: Episode 2. I only played through the first ten minutes or so, but there was one major issue I noticed when compared to my several hour stint last week with Half Life 2: Episode 1: the motion blur is much, much worse. Perhaps it is just that having two eyes lets you filter out the blur better, but every time I made a big, quick head or camera movement, my vision became little more than a mass of color. Despite this, however, the game was still quite playable.
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In the end, I was really surprised at how well the Oculus Rift worked with only one eye. The immersion factor was still strong—I still felt like I was in the game and not in my living room. The motion blur and lack of depth perception were downsides to be sure, but everything was still perfectly playable.
And on one level, at least, playing one-eyed was definitely superior. I never felt even the least bit queasy.
Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.
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This Is Kotaku East As more and more publications are dialing down their Japan coverage, Kotaku had this crazy idea:… Read more Read |
Cognitive liberty is the concept that an individual has absolute sovereignty over their state of consciousness as long as it does not infringe on the rights of another. This includes the use of meditation, prayer, and psychoactive drugs, as well as the right to not be force-fed any psychoactive drug against one’s will.
Currently, cognitive liberty is not a very much respected philosophy in American politics. Most psychoactive drugs like cannabis, psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, and mescaline are considered illegal to possess and consume. Similarly, we see young children all throughout the nation being force-fed certain psychoactive drugs (the “good kinds”) in name of “normal thinking” and “normal behavior.”
As a libertarian, I feel cognitive liberty is a necessary component to any free society. I have written numerous times about my disdain for the War On Drugs and specifically the failure that is marijuana prohibition.
I am also against our tendency as a society to administer psychoactive drugs so carelessly and with so little respect for the free choice of young people and the mentally ill. It is an awful thing to offer a drug to any person without appropriately informing them on what the drug is supposed to do or how it might make them feel. We should also explain to children very clearly that they have a choice whether or not to continue taking the drug if they don’t like its effects. It often happens where a child’s personal interest is put secondary or even overlooked completely.
Let it be known that I do think there are cases where someone needs to be given a drug against their will (maybe if they are unconscious or completely delusional and incoherent). But these situations are limited, and I think it is safe to say that society and government has overstepped its boundaries on more than a couple fronts when it comes to this issue.
Who really has the authority to tell a conscious and thinking being what they can and cannot put into their body or how they should experience reality? I don’t consider it justified for any free society to draw such arbitrary distinctions between what is “good” or “bad” for an individual if that individual is exercising their own rational free choice. People have different values and interests in life – this is the same dimension of diversity that characterizes all of nature and what has made evolution possible.
The act of consuming drugs is a victimless crime, and it does not justify people getting locked up in prison or having a criminal record that inhibits them from ever getting a good job or building a bright future. Drugs have been present in every society known to man and it is time we respect their place in the structure of our humanity. It is one thing to advise others against the use of certain drugs, and it is another to try to banish their existence or ignore it entirely.
I am perfectly comfortable acknowledging the fact that some drugs have negative consequences while still promoting the freedom for others to use these same drugs. For one thing, negative consequences are a part of all decisions we make – it does not mean we sacrifice our freedom to make those decisions. To borrow from something I wrote in a recent article about government spending,
“Just because half of American marriages end in a divorce doesn’t mean we want the government to make decisions on who we should marry. Life is filled with mistakes; it is how we learn, and it is a part of freedom.”
If you really want to help those who are dependent on drugs – or if you really want to make a long lasting change in any individual’s behavior – then you need to appeal to that person’s reason. You can not rule a rationally thinking person by force. And yes, even a drug addict has his or her own mode of rational thought in accordance with their own values and interests.
When people value something strong enough, they find a way to go against government restrictions in order to satisfy that want. This is why prohibition always leads to a black market for goods that society finds valuable.
When will people recognize that others value these drugs? When will we learn to tolerate these differences? If we really want to make a positive change than we need to re-think freedom and re-think the way we influence others if we want to continue living in a free society. If we don’t accept the notion of cognitive liberty, if we sacrifice those fundamental principles of self-ownership and freedom of thought, then in what ways are we really free anymore?
To learn more please visit The Center For Cognitive Liberty & Ethics, which includes notable members like visionary artist Alex Grey, libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, and psychedelic researcher Ralph Metzner (who used to work with Timothy Leary). |
Three people from Blount County are facing felony reckless endangerment charges after deputies say they forced a minor to inject methamphetamine.
Deputies say 29-year-old Samuel Thomas Hill, 32-year-old Michael Eugene Hill and 18-year-old Felicia Faith Hannah lured a 17-year-old girl in the bedroom of Samuel Hill’s home at Butterfly Gap Loop Road on Tuesday, held her down by her arms and injected her with methamphetamine.
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Investigators say the girl was injected with meth against her will. She later had bruising on her arms and tested positive for methamphetamine at a hospital.
Samuel and Michael Hill are being held on a $25,000 bond and have a court date on April 8th. A bond has not been set for Hannah at this time.
The incident is still under investigation. |
Christopher Garza said he knows he shouldn't have been driving his muscle car at 158 mph early Friday on the Indiana Toll Road near Gary — he just wanted to help his buddy clear his mind by showing him how fast his new ride could go.
When the 30-year-old from Chicago passed an Indiana State Trooper squad car, he decided to slow down and own up, he said.
"Obviously, what I did was very dumb," Garza said Friday afternoon.
The trooper was parked in his squad car at mile marker 13, three miles east of the Cline Avenue exit, when at 1:31 a.m. he saw a black 2016 Dodge Challenger Hellcat traveling "at a high rate of speed," the release states.
The trooper clocked the Challenger at 158 mph in a "well-posted 70 mph zone," and clocked the car a second time at 151 mph, according to police. The car "rapidly decreased its speed" when it passed the police car, according to the release, and the trooper pulled Garza over.
Garza told police he knew he was doing 160 mph and wanted to show his friend "what his 707-horsepower engine could do" and "thought the Indiana Toll Road would be the safest place to do this since it was empty," the release states.
"It was not my intention for us to get busted," Garza said.
Garza's friend, an injured service member, had recently returned home, he said. Because the two like to work on cars and trucks together, he decided to take him for a ride in the Hellcat to distract him from his troubles, he said.
"Really, I was just kind of getting my buddy's mind off of reality for a little bit," Garza said.
They've taken cars to tracks before, where Garza said he has gotten the Hellcat "up to 184," 16 shy of the speedometer's 200 mph max.
Indiana State Police An Indiana State Police trooper took a picture of the speed clock before arresting Chicagoan Christopher Garza for reckless driving. An Indiana State Police trooper took a picture of the speed clock before arresting Chicagoan Christopher Garza for reckless driving. (Indiana State Police)
"As Ricky Bobby once said, I just want to go fast," Garza joked, referencing the protagonist in the comedy "Talladega Nights."
But he also said, "I'm pro-law enforcement. I'm pro-military. And I'm pro-not breaking the law."
"The moral of the story is I know the risk I take every time I decide to speed," Garza said. "This was the lesser of the consequences to suffer going such a high speed. I'm kind of fortunate that I learned my lesson through jail."
When asked whether state troopers have witnessed drivers traveling at higher speeds, state police spokeswoman Sgt. Ann Wojas said in an email that "it's right up there." While police "do see over 100 mph," it's "not usually in the 150s," Wojas said.
Lake County sheriff's Deputy Chief Dan Murchek said his officers have encountered speeders driving over 100 mph, although not recently. The speed that Garza was driving at was "an extremely excessive speed," and he noted "it's dangerous to do that" for public safety and the officers involved.
Garza was arrested and taken to Lake County Jail, where he was bailed out Friday, and the Hellcat was towed. Going forward, Garza knows he'll have to appear in court.
Still, Garza said his buddy "had a great time last night and that's all that matters to (him)."
"I'll deal with the consequences," Garza said.
[email protected]
Twitter @ruthyjacobs |
Introduction of Ramses II
Ramses II was the third ruler in the 19th Dynasty (also known as the New Kingdom Period) and was born in 1303 BC. This pharaoh is many times referred to as Ramses the Great. Some alternative spellings for this Ancient Egyptian pharaoh are Rameses and Ramesses. Ramses II is also believed to be the pharaoh mentioned in the biblical story of Moses which gives him additional importance in history.
Ramses II’s Family
His father, Seti I, appointed Ramses II Prince Regent at the age of fourteen. After the death of his father, Ramses II then became pharaoh and ruled Egypt for many decades. Ramses II took the throne in his very late teens or early twenties. It is believed that Ramses II ruled from 1279 BC to 1213 BC for a total of 66 years. Ramses II had many wives and fathered about 100 children during his lifetime; although, the actual number is not known. At the time of his death, Ramses II was over 90 years of age and due to his longevity outlived many of his offspring, wives, and family members. Living this long was almost unheard of for people of that time. During his lifetime, Ramses II celebrated an unprecedented 14 Sed Festivals. These Sed Festivals were held after 30 years of a pharaoh’s reign and then every three years thereafter. The Sed Festivals were meant to celebrate the continued success of a pharaoh and also to rejuvenate a king’s strength.
Ramses II’s father was Seti I and his mother was Queen Tuya. Ramses II’s chief wife and consort was Nefertari although he had many other wives as well. Two other known wives are Isetnofret and Maathorneferure. It is believed that 12 sons died during Ramses II’s lifetime. Upon Ramses II’s death, he was succeeded by his thirteenth son Merenptah (aka Merneptah). Merneptah was thought to be between 55 or 60 years old when he actually took over the throne. Merneptah went on to rule for about ten years.
Ramses II’s Mummy
Due to the great discovery of Ramses II’s mummified body, Egyptologists and scientists have since been able to piece together some great information about this pharaoh. For example, upon analysis of Ramses II’s remains, the pharaoh is thought to have had red hair. Because this was not a prominent characteristic in Ancient Egypt, it most probably helped set him apart from other citizens of that time. In addition to standing out from the general population, persons with red hair were also seen as followers of the God Seth. Regarding other characteristics, Ramses II’s mummy further revealed that he had a hook nose with a strong jaw line and was about 5 feet 7 inches tall. It was also revealed that he was ridden with arthritis.
In addition to finding Ramses II’s mummy and learning more about this pharaoh’s attributes, information regarding the movement of his corpse was revealed through a linen cloth found wrapped around the mummified body. The linen cloth contained hieroglyphic pictures and provided details of how this move was accomplished in order to protect the pharaoh’s body from looters. The recordings revealed that Ramses II had been originally buried in the tomb KV7 (Valley of the Kings), but then the body was rewrapped and transferred to a holding area; the tomb of Queen Inhapy. It appears that within 72 hours, the body was again moved. This time it was moved to the tomb of the High Priest Pinudjem II. Today, Ramses II’s mummy can be found at Cairo’s Egyptian Museum.
More study of this great pharaoh reveals that toward the end of Ramses II’s reign, he developed serious health problems; although, these can be mostly attributed to old age. It appears that Ramses II walked with a hunched back due to his arthritis, had a hardening of the arteries, and had severe dental problems (abscessed tooth issues caused by bacterial infections).
Before Ramses II came to power, two thousand years of Pharaohs had come to rule before him, and the pyramids had been standing for at least a thousand years. By the time Ramses II died, he had accomplished many things. He was known as warrior, great king, family man, and venerated as a god. He had acquired several wives, many offspring, and had made the country wealthy by collecting riches and supplies from other empires. Due to his love of architecture, he had also created many memorials throughout Egypt. Some of the memorials completed were especially created for his first queen, Nefertari. Upon his death,
at least nine pharaohs are known to have taken the name Ramses; however, none came close to leaving the legacy that Ramses II had left for Egypt and the world except for one – Ramses III. As history continues to reveal more about this great pharaoh, his success most likely came as a result of being the master of propaganda and politics. |
Says Warren Buffett has publicly said his secretary "should not be paying a higher tax rate" than him.
During the second presidential debate, Hillary Clinton argued against tax rules that allow the ultra-rich to pay lower rates than the middle class. She said she would change them as president, a move that has become known as the "Buffett rule."
"Warren Buffett is the one who's gone out and said somebody like him should not be paying a lower tax rate than his secretary," Clinton said.
Warren Buffett is the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Forbes estimates him to be worth $64.3 billion and one of the richest men in the world. He is also a Hillary Clinton supporter and has sparred with Donald Trump over Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns.
Urging major tax changes, Buffett has repeatedly said he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary and other employees.
In 2007, Buffett told NBC Nightly News that he pays a smaller tax rate than multiple employees in his office.
In 2011, Buffett wrote an op-ed in the New York Times called "Stop Coddling the Super-Rich." In the article, Buffett said that his taxes amounted to "only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office."
In 2013, he told CNBC that while his tax rate rose 8 to 9 points more that year, "The differential between me and the rest of the office, not just my secretary but the rest of the office, was greater than that. It'll be closer, but I'll probably be the lowest-paying taxpayer in the office."
A quick phone call to Buffett’s office confirmed this fact-check. Buffett’s assistant Debbie Bosanek -- the secretary Buffett mentions -- confirmed her boss pays a lower tax rate than she does.
So, how can this be?
Buffett’s op-ed says his tax rate is lower than his employees’ because money made off investments is taxed at a lower rate than wage income
"If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot," Buffett said.
Personal income is taxed based on how much a person makes each year. In 2016, the brackets range from 10 percent for those making $9,275 or less, to a top marginal rate of 39.6 percent for those making $415,051 or more. Meanwhile, the tax rate on long-term capital gains -- the profits from investments -- is 15 percent. However, if the taxpayer's taxable income is greater than $415,051, their long term capital gains are taxed at 20 percent.
Here are the current rates for a single taxpayer.
Taxable Income Tax Rate $0 to $9,275 10% $9,276 to $37,650 $927.50 plus 15% of the amount over $9,275 $37,651 to $91,150 $5,183.75 plus 25% of the amount over $37,650 $91,151 to $190,150 $18,558.75 plus 28% of the amount over $91,150 $190,151 to $413,350 $46,278.75 plus 33% of the amount over $190,150 $413,351 to $415,050 $119,934.75 plus 35% of the amount over $413,350 $415,051 or more $120,529.75 plus 39.6% of the amount over $415,050
On Oct. 10, 2016, Buffett released details about his personal tax data in a statement titled, "Some Tax Facts for Donald Trump." He says he paid $1.85 million in federal taxes in 2015, and his adjusted gross income was $11.6 million. That means he paid 15.9 percent in effective federal income tax.
Lawrence Zelenak, a Duke University law professor, said in an email most taxpayers with incomes in the low six figures have a higher rate than 16 percent.
"That's true even if you consider only federal income tax. Add in payroll tax and Buffet's rate becomes even lower compared with his secretary," he said.
Payroll taxes are separate from income taxes, and are deducted by your employer before you get your paycheck. These taxes pay for Medicare and Social Security. The employee tax rate for Social Security is typically 6.2 percent of your gross income, up to $113,700, and 1.45 percent on all income for Medicare.
These two rates are not progressive or applied to all income, so as income increases, they make up a smaller percentage of the total income.
Since Buffett makes the majority of his money from investments, his wage income -- and therefore his payroll taxes -- are low. But those who work for a living, especially those who make higher than average salaries, get taxed at higher rates. We don’t know what salary Buffett’s secretary earns, but it’s likely much higher than the median pay for secretaries. (Remember that Buffett is one of the richest men in the world.)
A study from the nonpartisan The Tax Policy Center says that people making between $100,000 and $200,000 pay an average 19.6 percent in taxes, including payroll and income taxes.
Our ruling
Clinton said Buffett claimed to pay a smaller tax rate than his secretary. Buffett’s secretary confirmed she pays a higher rate than her boss. Buffett said he pays about 16 percent in income taxes, while any employee making between $100,000 and $200,000 typically pays about 20 percent in taxes. We rate this claim True. |
The driver who left a woman trapped inside a burning, crashed car on the Gowanus Expressway wasn’t heartless — he was a hero, the man’s brother told The Post.
“He did not just run away from the scene. He lost his phone in the car [and was] unable to call the ambulance,” Waheed Ahmad, 21, said about his brother Saeed Ahmad, 23.
Ahmad crashed a 2007 Infiniti G35 sedan into a concrete barrier Friday morning and hailed a cab while his friend Harleen Grewal, 25, sat burning inside the passenger’s seat, police said.
“He tried to get her out. That’s how his hands and his legs and his neck got burned. He couldn’t get her out. The fire got too crazy. It just burned so quick,” said Ahmad’s distraught brother.
Saeed Ahmad “was in pain” and since “the ambulance wasn’t coming” he asked the taxi to take him to Maimonides Hospital in Borough Park, his brother said.
Police tracked Ahmad down to the hospital where he was charged with criminally negligent homicide, leaving the scene of an accident, aggravated unlicensed operation of a vehicle and speeding.
His family was told by cops that they couldn’t visit or speak to Ahmad until after his arraignment, the family told The Post at their Brooklyn home.
The hospital contacted Ahmad’s friend listed as his emergency contact who spoke to him before police arrived, the family said.
“Everything is chaos right now. We are shocked. It’s horrifying for the girl and her family,” said Waheed.
He added, “He’s emotionally distraught. Every time they ask him about what happened, he’s crying and screaming. His friend burned alive.”
Ahmad is being treated for burns to his extremities at the Staten Island University Hospital. |
Global Payments, a third-party payments processor at the center of a Visa and MasterCard security breach, reiterated Monday morning that while customer data may be at risk, the data breach has been "contained to the best of our ability."
Overall, 1.5 million accounts may have been affected.
Global Payments CEO Paul Garcia said that the "diligent work" may take some time, but it will complete the ongoing investigation and identify any changes that need to be implemented.
Garcia said the company will get its record of compliance back with Visa and MasterCard "as soon as possible." Executives were upbeat about Global Payments' ability to regain its record of compliance with credit card associations.
The company also said it wasn't aware of any fraudulent transactions taking place.
Separately, Global Payments reported third quarter earnings of $57.9 million, or 73 cents a share, on revenue of $533.5 million, up 17 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings in the third quarter were 83 cents a share. Wall Street was looking for earnings of 84 cents a share.
Global Payments projected 2012 revenue to be $2.15 billion to $2.2 billion. The company expects non-GAAP earnings of $3.50 a share to $3.58 a share. GAAP earnings were $3.10 a share to $3.18 a share.
Charges related to the breach weren't disclosed because the investigation is ongoing.
Approximately three weeks ago, the breach was discovered. Within hours, law enforcement had been contacted. Garcia described how the company "jumped on this instantly" and said that only a "handful of servers" were affected.
Here's what happened and when:
On Friday, it was first reported that Global Payments suffered a security breach, where as many 50,000 cardholders may have had their information exposed.
Global Payments processes card payments between merchants and banks, sitting in the "middle-ground" directing where payment data should go.
Brian Krebs, who first reported the breach, initially warned that 10 million cards may be compromised. On Sunday, Global Payments revised down Krebs' figure as it confirmed as many as 1.5 million Visa and MasterCard accounts may have been compromised by the security breach.
While card numbers may have been downloaded from its systems, no other personal data -- such as names, addresses, or Social Security numbers -- were accessed.
Both Visa and MasterCard confirmed there was no breach to its own systems.
Visa and MasterCard both sent out non-public alerts to banks to warn of the breach, which was thought to have occurred between January 21 and February 25, as Global Payments informed law enforcement and brought in an independent data security organization to inspect any damage.
Visa, as a result of the breach, removed Global Payments from its list of approved service providers, but invited it to reapply once it submits evidence to show its security is "in compliance with Visa's standards."
MasterCard said it had not followed Visa's move, but was awaiting the result of an independent forensic investigation before it made any decision.
The Associated Press reported that a technical problem affected the Visa network for 45 minutes on Sunday evening, which resulted in users unable to use their credit and debit cards. Visa confirmed this was not as a result of the recent security breach.
While the reputation of Visa and MasterCard stands in jeopardy, Global Payments lies in ruins. But Jefferies analyst Jason Kupferberg said that the processor can weather the storm.
The processor has $300 million to $400 million in unrestricted cash, which could pay for the damage left by the breach, compared to figures by the 2009 Heartland data breach, in which 130 million accounts ran compromised. Analysts weighed in almost immediately after the breach with their opinions.
This story originally posted as "Global Payments: Data breach is contained" on ZDNet. |
Texans' attitudes shifting along with U.S. on legalizing pot
Gov. Rick Perry’s objections to a law designed to halt prison rape appear to be about his aversion to federal involvement. Gov. Rick Perry’s objections to a law designed to halt prison rape appear to be about his aversion to federal involvement. Photo: Justin Hayworth, FRE Photo: Justin Hayworth, FRE Image 1 of / 25 Caption Close Texans' attitudes shifting along with U.S. on legalizing pot 1 / 25 Back to Gallery
SAN ANTONIO — Whether it's for economic, medical or personal liberty reasons, more and more Texans are taking the position that marijuana should be legal.
About half of Texans — 49 percent — support legalizing small amounts of marijuana for recreational use, and 77 percent support legalizing medical marijuana, according to a University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll released this week. Nationally, 58 percent of Americans say pot should be legalized, according to an October Gallup poll.
“Texas, like the rest of the country, is coming to the realization that we can no longer afford to imprison thousands of our citizens for consuming a substance much less harmful than alcohol and much less addictive than cigarettes,” said Gerry Goldstein, a nationally renowned defense attorney based in San Antonio who has represented drug cartel kingpins and journalist Hunter S. Thompson, among others.
About 73,611 adults in Texas were arrested last year for marijuana possession, according to Department of Public Safety data, accounting for 59 percent of all drug possession arrests in the state.
Goldstein said the state spends more than $50,000 a year to house each prisoner.
“We could be sending these folks to Harvard,” he said.
Mike Helle, president of the San Antonio Police Officers Association, said his organization has “so many different pressing issues right now that legalizing marijuana is not a priority,” but that if police did not have to worry about Class B misdemeanors for pot possession, “you could free up thousands, if not millions, of dollars in manpower alone.”
“You want to talk about freeing up resources,” Helle said. “But as police officers, we enforce the laws, not create them.”
In Texas, an offender with less than 2 ounces of marijuana can be sentenced to up to 180 days in jail and a fine of up to $2,000. An offender with more than 5 pounds faces up to two years in jail.
Ana Yañez-Correa, executive director of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, a policy research group advocating for criminal justice reform, said she isn't surprised at the poll results.
“People in general understand arresting someone for the use of marijuana is more likely to waste taxpayer dollars and law enforcement's time than to deter use,” Yañez-Correa said. “That's why you see libertarians, members of the tea party and Democrats all saying the same thing on this issue.”
At an international conference last month, Gov. Rick Perry touted Texas drug courts and forms of decriminalization, or lessening of criminal penalties, for marijuana use, calling it an economic issue.
Perry made clear he does not support legalization, but said he supports individual states' rights to legalize the drug and predicted Texas would not do so anytime soon.
The governor's comments added fuel to an already burning issue across the country and state. Washington and Colorado became the first states to legalize marijuana for recreational use for adults last year, and more than 20 states have legalized pot for medicinal purposes.
State Sen. Wendy Davis, a Fort Worth Democrat running to replace Perry as governor, has said she supports medical marijuana. Attorney General Greg Abbott, the likely Republican candidate for governor, has said he opposes decriminalization or legalization and that Texas' current laws — outlawing any use of marijuana — should be better enforced.
“Legalizing drugs would encourage drug use, which affects every sector of society, straining our economy, our health care and criminal justice systems, and endangering the lives of future generations,” a spokesman for Abbott said last month.
The Texas poll, which surveyed 1,200 registered voters, found only 23 percent of respondents said marijuana should remain illegal in all cases in the state. About 49 percent said marijuana should be legal for any use, including recreational, either in small quantities (32 percent) or any amount (17 percent).
“How can we as a society deny people who need marijuana for medical treatment?” Yañez-Correa said.
Marijuana is prescribed for a wide range of medical issues in states that allow medicinal use.
For example, it is prescribed to glaucoma patients, people undergoing chemotherapy for cancer to boost their appetite, insomnia, pain relief, seizures and muscle spasms.
The University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll methodology has been criticized by other polling outfits and some media outlets because it is an Internet opt-in survey.
In 2011, the American Association for Public Opinion labeled the methodology as unreliable because it is not completely random.
The poll was conducted Feb. 7-17 and the margin of error is 2.83 percentage points.
“Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have died from an overdose of aspirin,” Goldstein said. “Find me a physician who has ever admitted a patient for an overdose of marijuana.”
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Twitter: @KoltenParker |
The House vote on the GOP’s ObamaCare repeal bill is down to the wire, with dozens of Republicans waffling as “undecideds.” What’s the holdup? Ninety-six percent of people who have to buy their own insurance stand to benefit from this bill, which will likely drive down premiums by double digits.
The remaining 4 percent — those with pre-existing conditions — will be protected by a federal fund to subsidize their insurance costs. They won’t get priced out of the market, because the fund will pay the lion’s share of their premiums.
But some Republicans are running scared. Although the bill solves two problems — lowering premiums and protecting people with pre-existing conditions — these fence-sitters are worried about something else: getting re-elected.
As a member of the New York delegation put it, the issue is “optics.” They’re cowed by the media’s false reports that the GOP is abandoning people with pre-existing conditions.
In fact, no one wants to do that. There is a consensus that people with pre-existing conditions should be able to get insurance. The issue is who pays the hefty price tag.
ObamaCare forced healthy buyers in the individual market to foot the entire bill. That’s why their premiums have doubled since the law went into effect.
The new House bill sets up a fairer way: a $130 billion pot of federal money to pay for people with pre-existing conditions. The entire nation chips in, not just people stuck in the individual market.
see also ObamaCare replacement bill is on the verge of dying WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders frantically trying to convince moderate...
Under ObamaCare, the healthy and the chronically ill paid the same premiums. It’s called community pricing. Healthy people would never reach their sky-high deductibles.
Instead the premiums extorted from them would be used to cover huge medical bills for the chronically ill, who consume 10 times as much medical care.
In fact, Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini reports that less than 5 percent of ObamaCare enrollees consume over half of the health care. Most healthy people saw that being charged the same as these sick people was fundamentally unfair and refused to sign up.
ObamaCare’s community pricing was the single biggest reason premiums have doubled since 2013, according to actuarial consultants at Milliman.
The GOP bill offers a solution. States can choose to get a waiver from ObamaCare’s community-pricing rule, so that insurers can sell to healthy people at a far lower cost. States that get the waiver should see double-digit premium decreases for the healthy almost immediately.
Naysayers claim the federal fund to subsidize people with pre-existing conditions won’t be adequate. Nonsense.
How many people will need help? Not as many as Democrats claim.
Before ObamaCare, 250,000 people a year with pre-existing conditions were denied coverage for health reasons by major insurers. Most of them got help through state high-risk programs, but these no longer exist.
In 2010, the ACA established a temporary program for people not being helped by the state high-risk programs. About 115,000 enrolled there.
Adding the two figures together, count on 365,000 people to need help paying for their premiums because of their medical histories. To be safe, call it 400,000.
Based on the $32,000 per person the ACA’s temporary program spent insuring people with pre-existing conditions, the federal fund will need $12.8 billion a year. So the $13 billion a year the GOP bill provides is likely adequate.
New York ruined its individual insurance market two decades ago by imposing community pricing, which drove out healthy buyers. Don’t count on the state Legislature here to wise up, get a waiver and offer low prices to most buyers.
But several states — Alaska, Minnesota, Idaho and Oklahoma among them — have already acted, without waiting for Congress. They used state funds to help cover the sickest people, and relieve pressure on healthy premium payers. Alaska averted a 40 percent premium hike that way last year.
Let’s see, the funding is adequate, and the approach works. Spineless politicians whining about “optics” should look in the mirror. What they’re really missing is backbone.
Betsy McCaughey is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and author of “Beating Obamacare.” |
FORMER Shetland–based computer hacktivist Jake Davis was freed from a young offender institution on Tuesday, however the 20 year old has been ordered to restrict his use of the internet.
Davis was sentenced to two years in the Feltham Young Offenders Institute last month for hacking into a wide range of websites, including Sony and the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) as part of the LulzSec online collective.
However 21 months spent on an electronic tag were taken into account and he was released after serving just 37 days.
The court has said he is once again allowed to use the internet, but he must not contact anyone connected to the Anonymous hacktivist collective of which he was a part.
He is also banned from creating any encrypted files, securely wiping any data or deleting his internet history.
Davis was the confident and cocky public voice of the Anonymous splinter group LulzSec that enjoyed making fun of organisations such as The Sun and the right wing Westboro Baptist Church.
He was arrested in Lerwick two years ago when police swooped on his Hoofields chalet where he had recently moved from Yell, the island where he grew up with his mother.
The final message posted by his online alter ego Topiary was: “You cannot arrest an idea.”
At the weekend Davis returned to Twitter, where one of many humourous tweets said: “You can arrest an idea, you can imprison an idea, you can warp an idea, you can break an idea, but you still can’t lick your own elbow.”
He is now based in the London borough of Islington where he is working on a number of projects with contemporary art group Artangel.
He is also talking about co-writing a film about the internet, he describes as “a drama/sattire” (sic).
Aside from that, he tweets: “654 days on curfew and 37 days in Feltham. Up next: another 365 days on license (parole) and 1825 days of intense monitoring. Free though!”
He also wants to publish a “nerdy prison diary online once it’s been vetted by twenty million lawyers…”
Just before he was sentenced, Davis gave this exclusive interview to the BBC. |
Senate Democrats emboldened by the GOP’s failure to repeal and replace ObamaCare are increasingly coming out against President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, narrowing Neil Gorsuch’s path to confirmation.
Sen. Bill Nelson Clarence (Bill) William Nelson2020 party politics in Puerto Rico There is no winning without Latinos as part of your coalition Dem 2020 candidates court Puerto Rico as long nomination contest looms MORE (D-Fla.) on Monday announced he would vote against ending debate on Gorsuch’s nomination.
Nelson, one of several Democrats to announce their opposition on Monday, was a significant blow to Gorsuch because he represents a state won by President Trump and faces reelection in 2018.
He’s also one of three Democrats remaining in the Senate who voted to end debate on Justice Samuel Alito’s nomination in 2006.
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“I will vote no on the motion to invoke cloture and, if that succeeds, I will vote no on his confirmation,” Nelson said Monday.
Gorsuch’s prospects for ending a filibuster got a boost later on Monday when Sen. Joe Manchin Joseph (Joe) ManchinTrump claims Democrats ‘don’t mind executing babies after birth’ after blocked abortion bill Democrats block abortion bill in Senate The Hill's Morning Report - A pivotal week for Trump MORE (D-W.Va.) told a reporter for NBC that he would vote to end debate on the nomination. Manchin said he had not yet decided whether he will back Gorsuch’s nomination.
Still, Nelson’s decision suggests Democrats are seeing better political prospects in opposing Trump and Gorsuch than in backing him and risking the ire of the left.
In a similar sign, Sen. Patrick Leahy Patrick Joseph LeahySenate plots to avoid fall shutdown brawl Booker wins 2020 endorsement of every New Jersey Democrat in Congress The Hill's Morning Report - Can Bernie recapture 2016 magic? MORE (D-Vt.), a former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, appeared to walk back comments that hinted he might oppose a filibuster against Gorsuch.
After telling a Vermont news outlet that he was “not inclined to filibuster,” Leahy tweeted that Gorsuch would be filibustered unless he “provides REAL answers to written Qs & senators have ample time for review & debate.”
Democrats are under enormous pressure from liberal groups to oppose Gorsuch after Republicans last year blocked Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
Republicans need to find eight Democrats to vote to end debate to break a filibuster against Gorsuch.
Doing so would prevent them from having to use the nuclear option — voting to change the Senate’s rules to prohibit a filibuster against the Supreme Court nominee.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellHouse to push back at Trump on border Democrats block abortion bill in Senate Overnight Energy: Climate protesters storm McConnell’s office | Center-right group says Green New Deal could cost trillion | Dire warnings from new climate studies MORE (R-Ky.) has signaled his willingness to take this step if Democrats block Gorsuch, who emerged relatively unscathed from last week’s confirmation hearings and is seen by Republicans as well-qualified for the court.
A path remains for the GOP to get to 60.
All 52 Republican senators will back ending debate on Gorsuch.
And a number of Democrats have not said how they will vote.
They include senators who are up for reelections in states won by Trump.
And while Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE in Florida was close, he dominated the Democrat in North Dakota, Indiana, Montana and Missouri as well as West Virginia.
Those states are home to five of 2018’s most vulnerable Democratic incumbents: Sens. Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp Mary (Heidi) Kathryn HeitkampOvernight Energy: Trump taps ex-oil lobbyist Bernhardt to lead Interior | Bernhardt slams Obama officials for agency's ethics issues | Head of major green group steps down Trump picks ex-oil lobbyist David Bernhardt for Interior secretary On The Money: Shutdown Day 27 | Trump fires back at Pelosi by canceling her foreign travel | Dems blast 'petty' move | Trump also cancels delegation to Davos | House votes to disapprove of Trump lifting Russia sanction MORE (N.D.), Claire McCaskill Claire Conner McCaskillPoll: 33% of Kentucky voters approve of McConnell McCaskill: Lindsey Graham 'has lost his mind' Trey Gowdy joins Fox News as a contributor MORE (Mo.), Jon Tester Jonathan (Jon) TesterOvernight Energy: Trump ends talks with California on car emissions | Dems face tough vote on Green New Deal | Climate PAC backing Inslee in possible 2020 run Dems face tough vote on Green New Deal How the border deal came together MORE (Mont.) and Joe Donnelly Joseph (Joe) Simon DonnellyOvernight Energy: Trump taps ex-oil lobbyist Bernhardt to lead Interior | Bernhardt slams Obama officials for agency's ethics issues | Head of major green group steps down Trump picks ex-oil lobbyist David Bernhardt for Interior secretary EPA's Wheeler faces grilling over rule rollbacks MORE (Ind.). Four of the five have kept a tight lip on whether they’ll back Gorsuch.
The two other Democrats who backed Alito are Sen. Tom Carper Thomas (Tom) Richard CarperDems slam EPA plan for fighting drinking water contaminants EPA to announce PFAS chemical regulation plans by end of year Overnight Energy: Zinke joins Trump-tied lobbying firm | Senators highlight threat from invasive species | Top Republican calls for Green New Deal vote in House MORE (Del.), who says he will oppose Gorsuch, and Maria Cantwell Maria Elaine CantwellThis week: Congress, Trump set for showdown on emergency declaration Senate reignites blue slip war over Trump court picks Senate votes to extend key funding mechanism for parks MORE (Wash.). Cantwell’s spokesman told the Seattle Times that she’s undecided and will meet with Gorsuch this week.
Republicans pounced on Nelson’s decision, pledging that the Supreme Court will be fodder for the 2018 Senate battle.
“Senator Bill Nelson proved to Floridians today that he no longer shares their values and instead is more politically aligned with the liberal elite of Washington,” said Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
But Nelson is not the only Democrat up for reelection in 2018 who opposes Gorsuch.
Sens. Sherrod Brown Sherrod Campbell BrownWorse than nothing's been done since the massive Equifax hack Dems face internal battle over budget On The Money: Dems set Tuesday vote on Trump's emergency declaration | Most Republicans expected to back Trump | Senate plots to avoid fall shutdown drama | Powell heading before Congress MORE (Ohio), Bob Casey Robert (Bob) Patrick CaseyTrump claims Democrats ‘don’t mind executing babies after birth’ after blocked abortion bill Democrats block abortion bill in Senate GOP wants to pit Ocasio-Cortez against Democrats in the Senate MORE Jr. (Pa.) and Tammy Baldwin Tammy Suzanne BaldwinKlobuchar, O'Rourke visit Wisconsin as 2020 race heats up Dems offer smaller step toward ‘Medicare for all' Overnight Health Care — Sponsored by America's 340B Hospitals — Powerful House committee turns to drug pricing | Utah governor defies voters on Medicaid expansion | Dems want answers on controversial new opioid MORE (Wis.) have also all come out against Trump’s nominee, a signal they believe they are better off siding with their party’s base.
Another Democratic vote to watch is Sen. Michael Bennet Michael Farrand BennetDemocratic donors stuck in shopping phase of primary Overnight Health Care — Sponsored by America's 340B Hospitals — CDC blames e-cigs for rise in youth tobacco use | FDA cracks down on dietary supplements | More drug pricing hearings on tap The Hill's Morning Report - Presented by the American Academy of HIV Medicine - Next 24 hours critical for stalled funding talks MORE, who represents Gorsuch’s home state of Colorado. He’s facing sustained pressure to back Gorsuch, whom he helped introduce at the committee last week.
If Republicans flip Bennet and the five most vulnerable red-state 2018 Senate Democrats, they’d just need two more to confirm Gorsuch.
Other targets include Leahy and Sens. Jeanne Shaheen Cynthia (Jeanne) Jeanne ShaheenCongress must step up to protect Medicare home health care Dems slam EPA plan for fighting drinking water contaminants Bipartisan Senators reintroduce legislation to slap new sanctions on Russia MORE (D-N.H.) and Angus King Angus Stanley KingHillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid Addressing repair backlog at national parks can give Congress a big win MORE (I-Maine).
King, who is up for reelection, hasn’t announced a decision on Gorsuch’s nomination and immediately distanced himself from a filibuster.
Shaheen isn’t up for reelection but is from a politically purple state. A spokeswoman told The Hill on Monday that she is undecided and is “currently reviewing hearing transcripts.”
Gorsuch’s nomination is expected to come to the Senate floor next week, after Democrats on the Judiciary Committee delayed an initial vote on his nomination until Monday. Under the committee’s rules, any one senator can request that a nomination be held over the first time it appears on the agenda.
Republicans want to clear Gorsuch’s nomination before they leave for two weeks and have warned they could delay the Easter recess to confirm him.
And McConnell again threatened to go nuclear on Monday.
“This much is clear: If our Democratic colleagues choose to hold up this nominee, then they’re acknowledging that they’ll go to any length to block any Supreme Court nominee of a Republican president,” he said. |
Following news of Demonoid's takedown, the hacktivist group Anonymous attacked the Ukrainian government on Tuesday with its usual technique: a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
The collective targeted and took down the National Television and Radio Broadcasting Council of Ukraine (nrada.gov.ua), the Ukrainian Agency for Copyright and Related Rights (uacrr.kiev.ua), and the Ukrainian Anti-Piracy Association (apo.kiev.ua).
All the sites appear to be fully operational again at the time of writing.
The initiative, dubbed OpDemonoid, was explained by an Anonymous-released video -- seen above -- which announced the plan on Tuesday.
In a previous statement to the public, Anonymous reminded the Ukrainian government that they had faced its wrath before. Here's an excerpt:
Haven't you, Ukraine, learned anything from the Anonymous Collective? You were attacked once, and yet feel the need to keep censoring us, your people, and every day hard working citizens? Ukrainian government, You should have expected us.
Last month, a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack brought Demonoid to its knees. Last week, the server was turned off completely and the site led to a dead end . Then it came back to life, and started redirecting to random sites full of advertisements . Eventually this stopped and both demonoid.me and demonoid.ph crumbled again.
Then we learned that the situation was much worse. Demonoid was busted by Ukrainian authorities who had a talk with ColoCall, the largest datacenter in Ukraine. Mexico initiated a criminal investigation into Demonoid's owners .
Anonymous is apparently interested in punishing Ukraine right now; it's not yet clear if Mexico will be next.
See also: |
Today, HM is proud to premiere Emery’s newest single, “The Less You Say,” as part of the band’s inventive plan to release their entire new album, You Were Never Alone, via podcast. All in all, there are 12 tracks on the band’s upcoming full-length album, due out May 19 from the label they own, BC Music. Emery band members Matt Carter and Toby Morrell are in the midst of a new podcast launch called Break It Down (iTunes), dedicated to the stories behind the songs, with the first 12 episodes the premieres of every track on the band’s sixth studio release.
Carter and Morrell both agree on one thing: This is the best song on the album. Carter spoke with HM about their favorite track.
You might not believe me, but I am so thankful to have people enjoying this podcast. I was nervous about trying something this different and am overwhelmed by the response. What’s more, this song is actually my favorite on the entire album. Toby says it is his as well. It feels like an old school me song and something we would have tried to write in 2000. It has the perfect blend of Toby’s and Devin’s vocals, and it has some guitar parts that just plain tickle me to listen to and play. I hope you enjoy it at least partly as much as I do.
As the members of Emery wrote, recorded and toured, some of them remained committed to their call-it-like-it-is Bad Christian podcast (and accompanying brand), which had skyrocketed out of the gate after its launch in 2013. They were able to begin BC Music with the infrastructure they created with Bad Christian, also dipping their toes into publishing and remaining committed to a cutting edge approach to the music industry. |
Bats and moths have been engaged in acoustic warfare for more than 60 million y. Yet almost half of moth species lack bat-detecting ears and still face intense bat predation. We hypothesized that the long tails of one group of seemingly defenseless moths, saturniids, are an anti-bat strategy designed to divert bat attacks. Using high-speed infrared videography, we show that the spinning hindwing tails of luna moths lure echolocating bat attacks to these nonessential appendages in over half of bat–moth interactions. Further we show that long hindwing tails have independently evolved multiple times in saturniid moths. This finding expands our knowledge of antipredator deflection strategies, the limitations of bat sonar, and the extent of a long-standing evolutionary arms race.
Abstract
Adaptations to divert the attacks of visually guided predators have evolved repeatedly in animals. Using high-speed infrared videography, we show that luna moths (Actias luna) generate an acoustic diversion with spinning hindwing tails to deflect echolocating bat attacks away from their body and toward these nonessential appendages. We pit luna moths against big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) and demonstrate a survival advantage of ∼47% for moths with tails versus those that had their tails removed. The benefit of hindwing tails is equivalent to the advantage conferred to moths by bat-detecting ears. Moth tails lured bat attacks to these wing regions during 55% of interactions between bats and intact luna moths. We analyzed flight kinematics of moths with and without hindwing tails and suggest that tails have a minimal role in flight performance. Using a robust phylogeny, we find that long spatulate tails have independently evolved four times in saturniid moths, further supporting the selective advantage of this anti-bat strategy. Diversionary tactics are perhaps more common than appreciated in predator–prey interactions. Our finding suggests that focusing on the sensory ecologies of key predators will reveal such countermeasures in prey. |
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Tension between the international community and Iran is mounting. With the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) ready to issue a report on Tehran’s attempts of developing nuclear weapons, with recent claims that scientists from Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea have all played an important role in helping Iran come close to full nuclear capacity, and perhaps most crucially, with Israel warning of the possibility of launching a pre-emptive attack, every move now made in the international arena is crucial. While the US and UK weigh up their military options, we must ask: should the UK really get involved?
The IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear developments is scheduled to be released to the 15 members of the UN Security Council on Wednesday. However, as details of the report begin to emerge from leaked information in today’s Washington Post, the gravity of the situation is becoming clearer. Namely, the details demonstrate Iran is at a particularly advanced stages of designing a nuclear explosive.
The Telegraph’s Alex Spillius describes this well in his recent article on the IAEA report. He emphasizes that Iran is currently designing a nuclear explosive device small enough to fit in a warhead that involves an R265 generator. The R265 generator has been described in the Washington Post as ‘a hemispherical aluminum shell with an intricate array of high explosives that detonate with split-second precision. These charges compress a small sphere of enriched uranium or plutonium to trigger a nuclear chain reaction.’ Additionally, although tests have not yet been carried out, the IAEA states’ satellite images have confirmed a site in the Qom region that is supposedly being used to house a completed a steel container.
Iran’s build up of nuclear technology has been aided by foreign assistance. Vyacheslav Danilenko, a former Soviet atomic scientist, has recently been named as having played a key role in Iran’s nuclear development. Not only is he said to have given lectures, but he has also contributed substantial technical information to Iran’s nuclear developers. However, nuclear scientists from Pakistan and North Korea are also said to have supplied formulas and assistance as well.
Most importantly, the way that the international community now plays its cards is absolutely fundamental. Although particular countries such as France and China have condemned Iran’s so called ‘obsession’ with nuclear development, anger at perceived USA hypocrisy only seems to be spurring Iran on even more. In fact, Saeed Jalili, Iran’s nuclear negotiator, has claimed that the USA is waging terrorism against the country.
However, tensions with Israel are also starting to mount. Shimon Peres, the Israeli President, has warned of the possibility of a pre-emptive attack. If this materialises, it seems highly unlikely that the US and its allies would not interfere. Therefore, the role of the UK in this matter is substantially more important than the media is portraying it to be. Namely, if the US seeks UK support in targeting Iran’s nuclear sites, enormous decisions will have to be made.
The UK is not really sitting in the sidelines. It has already stated it is upping its contingency plan to join any potential offensives. Although the UK might be giving the USA a reassuring pat on the shoulder, if crunch time really comes and the UK becomes heavily involved, then we will all have to step back and reassess.
It has to be said that despite concern of these recent developments, it is pertinent that other issues are addressed; focus cannot be lost. The UK needs to handle its current involvement in Libya and continue playing an active role in bringing solutions to the table regarding the EU crisis. Furthermore, it needs to ensure domestic happiness before it pursues what could potentially become an extremely regrettable war. To reiterate, The UK should not start any more unnecessary and preventable wars but should focus on its agenda that is already full of issues far from easy to tackle.
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Gay journalist Chadwick Moore – who recently came out as a conservative – spoke at Portland State University in a speech that drew protests and prompted Moore to boldly engage demonstrators who heckled him.
The speech, “The Joys of Being an Infidel: Challenging Orthodoxy and Standing Up for Free Speech in America,” drew roughly 60 students and community members, including about a dozen student protesters.
They held signs declaring “No sympathy for alt-right trash” and “Destroy your local fascist,” and at times disrupted the speech with verbal outbursts. Moore responded in sometimes feisty rebuttals as the two sides clashed.
Moore entered the national spotlight after coming out as a conservative in an op-ed in the New York Post in February that detailed the intense backlash and hatred he received from his once beloved and supportive gay community for writing a feature on Milo Yiannopoulos for Out magazine.
“If you dare to question liberal stances or make an effort toward understanding why conservatives think the way they do, you are a traitor,” Moore wrote in his coming out piece. “It can seem like liberals are actually against free speech if it fails to conform with the way they think. And I don’t want to be a part of that club anymore.”
Now, as an emerging defender of free speech, he finds himself a target.
‘The Joys of Being an Infidel’
In opening his Portland State speech on April 28, he alluded to its title with an Islamic greeting: “As-Salaam-Alaikum,” he said. “That’s how they say it in France.”
The event was organized by Freethinkers of PSU, a nonpartisan classical liberal and humanist student group.
Blake Horner, one of the leaders in Freethinkers of PSU, said that some protest was expected given that dozens of flyers promoting the event had been vandalized or torn down during the preceding week.
“It seems that many people at PSU were motivated to halt public knowledge of this event,” Horner said. “We were also confronted by someone who was determined to intimidate us.”
On the day of the speech, messages plastered on the group’s display case called Moore a “fascist defender.”
Moore reserved strong criticism for PSU’s Queer Resource Center at the beginning of his speech. He pointed out what he perceived as the center’s political bias for refusing Freethinkers’ request to place a flyer in its space while socialist promotional material is displayed on its windows.
“Here I am, a public gay person who was working for the two largest gay magazines in the world as their top investigative journalist, and they can’t put that up there because they don’t like my politics,” Moore said. “Maybe the Queer Resource Center should rebrand itself as something less misleading.”
Moore suggested the center call itself the “Ministry of Propaganda” or the “I’m with Her Memorial Museum and Gift Shop,” referring to Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential bid. The audience burst out in laughter.
.@Chadwick_Moore christens the PSU Queer Resource Center the “I’m With Her Memorial Museum & Gift Shop.” Full video: https://t.co/vqhlAw0GBn pic.twitter.com/0medDT34P7 — Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) May 7, 2017
Moore later read from a “power and privilege” training document he received from a PSU student. He criticized the training material, which defined white people, heterosexuals and English-speaking people, among other groups, as “agents of oppression” due to their privilege.
After addressing the training material’s arguments point-by-point with counter facts and statistics, Moore ripped up the document.
“Anyone who gets this in a future class, this is what you have to do to it,” he said. “Sign up for a new class.”
‘We can punch you too’
Protesters began to heckle and disrupt Moore further in his speech as he continued to ridicule social justice activism and the political far-left.
“Can you not wait until the Q&A and be polite?” Moore responded as the interruptions continued. “Why don’t you shut up and have respect for your fellow students?”
Later, an audience member called out the rude behavior of some protesters. “Stop being homophobic, let the gay man talk!” he shouted. “You’re stifling gay speech.”
Moore carried on with his lecture but about midway through another student yelled at him from the middle of the room.
“I am black, I am disabled, I’m a woman,” she shouted. After a back-and-forth, Moore invited her to speak during the Q&A. The student stormed out of the room and pounded on the window with her fists.
“Girl, there’s still time, we can punch you too,” a student shouted to Moore after he mocked the disrupters’ low energy. “Sorry, not a threat,” she said after the audience gasped. Some students in the audience recognized her as a candidate for student government.
1 in 5 gay Americans are conservative
Moore closed his speech by reading part of a letter he received by a gay man who thanked him for “coming out” in his New York Post op-ed.
“This touched me so much and I cried a little because I was thinking about how much the gay community has meant to me my entire life,” Moore said.
Citing a Gallup survey that estimates 1 in 5 gay Americans are conservative, Moore shifted his ire to queer resource centers across the country.
“If you decide to shun a huge percentage of your community simply because they might not agree with your political views … you’re denying people a chance to true happiness of living authentically,” he said.
During the Q&A, audience members used the opportunity to express support, criticism or gratitude for Moore’s partisan views.
“I was one of those people who wrote you a message when you came out,” said a young woman in the audience. “I want to personally thank you for being as loud as you are because you’re speaking up for people like me.”
Later on, one of the protesters who earlier held a “Black Lives Matter” sign asked Moore about his views on racial matters.
“You talk about how you feel like you don’t have free speech in some places,” she said. “Are you also fighting then for the free speech of black gay Americans?”
Puzzled by the question, Moore asked her to clarify.
“Knowing people who side with the right-side … they tend to be racist,” she said.
Moore stated that he supports free speech full stop.
“Why would I not want black people to have a voice?” he asked. “I want everyone to have a voice. More speech is more speech.”
Freethinkers
After answering questions for about 40 minutes, Moore thanked the audience and some of the protesters for voicing their dissent in a respectful manner.
Several attendees expressed their gratitude to event organizers for hosting the event.
“I was impressed by Chadwick standing up to these bullies and speaking his mind,” said Mykle Curton, a self-identified leftist who graduated from PSU in 2013. “Just because I disagree with him on politics doesn’t mean I can’t like and support him. I agree with him about his rejection of identity politics. They argue that you can lump people into groups and generalize their experiences and beliefs.”
Marko Balogh, a student leader of the Freethinkers, expressed concern that the event was too politically polarizing and didn’t further the mission of the organization.
“While I think free speech—including the freedom to offend—is an absolutely vital component of an intellectually healthy society, I don’t think the excessively combative demeanor of the speaker was helpful,” he said. “If we are going to reduce political polarization and make our society better for everyone, we have to approach politics from a charitable and well-meaning mindset.”
Balogh said he hopes future events organized by Freethinkers would encourage conversations in which “all sides of the issues are considered wholeheartedly.”
Editor’s note: Andy Ngo was involved in organizing this event.
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PHOTO CREDITS: Main, Twitter screenshot; Top, Collin Berend; Bottom, Andy Ngo |
The Matt Damon film also had the biggest debut weekend for the month of October.
The Martian earned a massive $12.1 million in South Korea over the weekend, reaping almost half of the box-office revenue in the country over the period.
The fact that Friday was a national holiday helped boost figures, which marked the biggest opening of all time for Fox in the country.
The Matt Damon film, distributed by 20th Century Fox Korea, grabbed 48.3 percent of the three-day weekend market share, according to the Korean Film Council. This is also the biggest opening score for the month of October in the Asian country, whose population watches more films per year on average, more than four, than any other country in the world.
Hollywood films set in outer space have generally done well. The Martian also broke opening-day records previously held by Avatar and Interstellar, drawing a total of over 1.53 million admissions. Local industry observers in the country of a population of 50 million primarily measure a film's performance by theater attendance.
The successful debut of The Martian pushed The Intern down to No. 2. The Anne Hathaway-Robert De Niro comedy accounted for 15.3 percent of the box-office market share this weekend. Handled by Warner Bros. Korea, the film has so far earned a cumulative $15.8 million.
Local film The Advocate: A Missing Body debuted in third place as it reaped 13.8 percent of box-office revenue. The CJ Entertainment title has grossed about $4 million overall. Starring A Hard Day actor Lee Sun-kyun in the lead role, the crime actioner is about an ace advocate who is about to win a missing-body homicide case. Things take an unexpected turn, however, when his defendant, the primary suspect, suddenly confesses to the murder, and the lawyer suddenly finds himself having to defend his pride and stand up for justice.
Following the successful debuts of The Martian and The Advocate, homegrown period drama The Throne dropped two spots to finish in fourth place this weekend. The costume drama, which is Korea's entry for the foreign-language Oscar race, took 7.2 percent of sales that added to its gross total of over $4.1 million. The film set in the Joseon Kingdom (1392-1910) crossed 6 million admissions, making it the eighth best film of the year. Showbox/Mediaplex distributes the film, which was chosen as the opener for the Hawaii International Film Festival that kicks off on Nov. 12.
The Accidental Detective, a second CJ Entertainment title in the top ranks, finished at No. 5. This was two spots down from the previous week as the film accounted for 6.3 percent of the box-office total. The crime comedy's cumulative box-office revenue comes down to a little less than $17 million. |
It pays to have friends in high places.
Al Sharpton gave himself a 71 percent raise last year after his National Action Network group drew a record $6.9 million in donations — as the controversial cleric’s association with Mayor de Blasio and President Obama lent him a newfound air of legitimacy.
De Blasio’s election gave Sharpton a seat at City Hall, as the mayor treated him as an adviser and presented him at a press event next to Police Commissioner Bill Bratton after the death of Eric Garner.
Also in 2014, Obama addressed NAN’s annual convention, bringing along five of his Cabinet members.
The Harlem-based nonprofit collected $2 million more in 2014 than the year before, according to the latest financial records available.
Sharpton’s pay increased from $241,545 in 2013 to $412,644, including a bonus of $64,400, tax filings obtained by The Post show.
In April, four months after his pal de Blasio took office, some 5,000 people attended NAN’s 2014 conference headlined by Obama and attended by the mayor, Gov. Cuomo and then-US Attorney General Eric Holder. It was NAN’s biggest fund-raiser of the year.
In October, a few months after Sharpton’s summer of police protests, he pulled in a reported $1 million at his 60th-birthday bash. Pols and dignitaries rushed from the annual Al Smith Dinner hosted by Timothy Cardinal Dolan that same night to the NAN fund-raiser at the Four Seasons restaurant.
NAN does not need to disclose its donors, but a program distributed at his birthday parties had full-page ads from companies that gave money. AT&T, real-estate developer Forest City Ratner, Walmart, McDonald’s, Verizon and GE Asset Management were all included.
Although Sony’s then-co-chairwoman, Amy Pascal, met with Sharpton in 2014 after a hacker revealed racially insensitive e-mails, the reverend told The Post that Sony did not give NAN money.
The windfall allowed the organization to finish 2014 in the black. Yet NAN, and Sharpton, continued their deadbeat ways.
NAN didn’t pony up its last installment on the $780,145 it owed the IRS for unpaid payroll taxes until this Oct. 22, the organization’s financial statements show. The nonprofit had racked up unpaid payroll taxes since at least 2003, according to public records.
Sharpton, meanwhile, still has outstanding tax liens of $3.4 million, including money he owes personally to both New York state and the IRS, and taxes owed by his businesses, according to public records. He paid off one federal lien, for $931,398, in April.
Sharpton has maintained that he owes much less money than records reflect and that he has been chipping away at the bills through payment plans.
He also insists he didn’t really get a raise last year.
“I’m glad that NAN has resolved all of our past tax debts three years earlier than our agreement with the IRS and paid part of the compensation owed to me for several years I did not receive a salary,” Sharpton said in a statement.
Tax records show NAN paid him $4,860 in 2006 and nothing in 2007 and 2008.
But a spokesman for the organization offered a different explanation, saying the salary hike was repayment of loans Sharpton previously made to NAN.
Former IRS official Marcus Owens, an expert on nonprofit law, said the explanation seemed odd.
“To structure the payoff of a loan through a salary transfer doesn’t seem really plausible because no one would want to pay income tax on their own money coming back to them,” Owens said. “It seems like that characterization was developed after the fact for some other purpose.” |
I decided to add my name to a petition by, as of this writing, 81 MIT faculty, calling on MIT to divest its endowment from fossil fuel companies. (My co-signatories include Noam Chomsky, so I guess there’s something we agree about!) There’s also a wider petition signed by nearly 3500 MIT students, faculty, and staff, mirroring similar petitions all over the world.
When the organizers asked me for a brief statement about why I signed, I sent them the following:
Signing this petition wasn’t an obvious choice for me, since I’m sensitive to the charge that divestment petitions are just meaningless sanctimony, a way for activists to feel morally pure without either making serious sacrifices or engaging the real complexities of an issue. In the end, though, that kind of meta-level judgment can’t absolve us of the need to consider each petition on its merits: if we think of a previous crisis for civilization (say, in the late 1930s), then it seems obvious that even symbolic divestment gestures were better than nothing. What made up my mind was reading the arguments pro and con, and seeing that the organizers of this petition had a clear-eyed understanding of what they were trying to accomplish and why: they know that divestment can’t directly drive down oil companies’ stock prices, but it can powerfully signal to the world a scientific consensus that, if global catastrophe is to be averted, most of the known fossil-fuel reserves need to be left in the ground, and that current valuations of oil, gas, and coal companies fail to reflect that reality.
For some recent prognoses of the climate situation, see (for example) this or this from Vox. My own sense is that the threat has been systematically understated even by environmentalists, because of the human impulse to shoehorn all news into a hopeful narrative (“but there’s still time! if we just buy locally-grown produce, everything can be OK!”). Logically, there’s an obvious tension between the statements:
(a) there was already an urgent need to act decades ago, and
(b) having failed to act then, we can still feasibly avert a disaster now.
And indeed, (b) appears false to me. We’re probably well into the era where, regardless of what we do or don’t do, some of us will live to see a climate dramatically different from the one in which human civilization developed for the past 10,000 years, at least as different as the last Ice Ages were.
And yet that fact still doesn’t relieve us of moral responsibility. We can buy more time to prepare, hoping for technological advances in the interim; we can try to bend the curve of CO 2 concentration away from the worst futures and toward the merely terrible ones. Alas, even those steps will require political will that’s unprecedented outside of major wars. For the capitalist free market (which I’m a big fan of) to work its magic, actual costs first need to get reflected in prices—which probably means massively taxing fossil fuels, to the point where it’s generally cheaper to leave them in the ground and switch to alternatives. (Lest anyone call me a doctrinaire treehugger, I also support way less regulation of the nuclear industry, to drive down the cost of building the hundreds of new nuclear plants that we’ll probably need.)
These realities have a counterintuitive practical implication that I wish both sides understood better. Namely, if you share my desperation and terror about this crisis, the urgent desire to do something, then limiting your personal carbon footprint should be very far from your main concern. Like, it’s great if you can bike to work, and you should keep it up (fresh air and exercise and all). But I’d say the anti-environmentalists are right that such voluntary steps are luxuries of the privileged, and will accordingly never add up to a hill of beans. Let me go further: even to conceptualize this problem in terms of personal virtue and blame seems to me like a tragic mistake, one on which the environmentalists and their opponents colluded. Given the choice, I’d much rather that the readers of this blog flew to all the faraway conferences they wanted, drove gas-guzzling minivans, ate steaks every night, and had ten kids, but then also took some steps that made serious political action to leave most remaining fossil fuels in the ground even ε more likely, ε closer to the middle of our Overton window. I signed the MIT divestment petition because it seemed to me like such a step, admittedly with an emphasis on the ε. |
We've been hearing a lot about Volantis lately, but what about the other supposed Nexus device - Shamu? Since we originally broke the story back in July (with the Information affirming Shamu's existence soon after) things have been relatively quiet, with only a benchmark test here or there popping up with alleged specs that seemed to point to a smaller device.
Today, however, 9to5Google has divulged specs and details about the device in which the outlet seems fairly confident. 9to5 says it can corroborate the 5.9" screen size, and notes that "the device we've learned about" actually carries the following specs, some of which clash with earlier reports:
5.92" QHD display (498PPI)
3200mAh battery
13MP camera and 2MP front shooter
Snapdragon 805 processor
3GB RAM
Worth noting is that 9to5's information aligns almost perfectly with information we received earlier this year, but they also sound very close to a device we've seen under the name Quark, which may in fact be the basis for Shamu.
We can also fill in some of the gaps in 9to5's information. For instance, Shamu (as we noted in our original coverage) is expected to carry a fingerprint sensor on its back, replacing Moto's signature dimple/logo décor. Additionally, 9to5 notes that Shamu doesn't appear to be running a 64 bit version of Android, and indeed the information we saw earlier this year indicated that the device would launch on a 32 bit version of Android L (while Volantis will carry a 64 bit version). Our information at the time also suggested that Shamu would have wireless charging capabilities (and compatibility with Moto's new Turbo Charger), but as with any pre-release information, we can't be totally certain just yet.
9to5 also notes that the form factor has only been slightly modified from the Moto X as far as they can tell - the volume rocker and power button are said to be positioned more toward the center of the device to allow for easier access.
Finally, 9to5 doesn't rule out the possibility of multiple Nexus phones. While we can't corroborate the existence of a smaller Nexus phone, there has certainly been evidence floating around to suggest a 5.2" device. Shamu, according to 9to5's information is still aiming for a November release, with an announcement at some point in October. Hit the link below for the full story, and 9to5's own mockup of the device.
Source: 9to5Google |
“Thinking about Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer.” Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty Images.
James Comey has quietly been on Twitter since 2014, but since that time, the former FBI director had only tweeted once—and it was only after Gizmodo blew up his spot. Then last week, as though suddenly possessed, he started tweeting, posting five times in six days, a fairly rapid rate for someone whose previous output was a single Will Ferrell joke. Still using the name Reinhold Niebuhr, for the theologian he wrote his college thesis on (and still not bothering to change the default profile picture), Comey decided to allow us a peek into his post-FBI, country-spanning, decidedly Under the Tuscan Sun–like journey of self-reflection, which has taken him from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to Iowa. Yes, Iowa—the very place you go to kick the tires of a presidential run. (Comey’s wife is from Iowa, but c’mon, we all have “relatives from Iowa.”) Whether Comey is trying to lay that particular groundwork or simply feels inspired to connect with regular Americans (who can one day buy his book, which is conveniently forthcoming) is anybody’s guess. For now, all we have to go on is the tweets themselves. Let’s review them, with the forensic attentiveness Comey would no doubt demand, one by one.
We begin at the beginning, back in March, with Comey’s response to the Gizmodo investigation by Ashley Feinberg:
It’s a macro of Will Ferrell in Anchorman, and it feels a lot like Dad trying to pretend he’s in the know with what the cool kids are doing—the outdated movie reference (Daad), the way he capitalized the F in Fbijobs.gov (Daaad), the laissez-faire “I don’t even care that you found my secret Twitter” attitude (Daaaaaaaaaaaad). Not cool, Dad. Grade: D
Beautiful fall day at West Point. Lone kayaker on the Hudson. pic.twitter.com/gcJ730VD7p — James Comey (@Comey) October 18, 2017
Reinie Niebs was quiet until this past Wednesday, when he was so moved by nature and the view at West Point that he decided to fire up the ol’ Twitter and to post what is essentially an out-of-place Instagram. It’s still the work of an old who doesn’t understand the platform or how most people use it, but instead of repeating the embarrassing try-hardery of the Anchorman tweet, it’s endearing. He loves his country and his country’s historic military academy, he loves rivers, and he finds beauty in images of men striking out on their own. Which, reminder, he does too from time to time. Lordy! Grade: B
Little Round Top, Gettysburg. Good place to think about leadership and values. pic.twitter.com/o1cKBXrLCl — James Comey (@Comey) October 19, 2017
This photo is of a bunch of rocks, but not a very aesthetically pleasing pile of rocks. Comey still gets points for being at Gettysburg, the Mecca of late-middle-age patriots. He loses points for “Good place to think about leadership and values,” which is a bit too transparent. You’re not supposed to tell people you’re thinking about leadership and values, Jim, you’re supposed to imply it with your constant self-seriousness. Anyway, what, pray tell, would all that thinking about leadership and values yield? “Ah! Here I am at Gettysburg. Now I will reflect on leadership as well as values. Both … are good?” Grade: C
Good to be back in Iowa. pic.twitter.com/TGJHOhQ9KF — James Comey (@Comey) October 21, 2017
First of all, this is just a nice picture: nice sky, nice sunset. There’s a “Where’s Waldo?” aspect of it, because you have to find the former FBI director hiding among the corn, and that’s always satisfying. (But then you imagine Comey asking his wife to go take a picture of him hidden in the corn, and it’s back to being weird.) The text itself is an understated gem: Yes, it is good to be back in Iowa. Iowa is real America. By the transitive property, James Comey is real America? It seems like Comey wouldn’t be mad if that was your takeaway. Exactly. Grade: A-
Watching migrating white pelicans in Iowa thinking about Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer. pic.twitter.com/TCAU4gs0Jw — James Comey (@Comey) October 22, 2017
Why is this guy so obsessed with Niebuhr! Confidential to James Comey: Most of us still have no idea who that is. And, please, show don’t tell: A picture of birds in a V formation, subtly reminding us that Comey believes in following procedure and the chain of command, is much better than stating, piously, that you’re thinking about a prayer that happens to be your favorite theologian’s claim to fame. Grade: B-
Goodbye Iowa. On the road home. Gotta get back to writing. Will try to tweet in useful ways. pic.twitter.com/DCbu3Yvqt3 — James Comey (@Comey) October 23, 2017
Another one presumably taken by Comey’s long-suffering wife: “Hon, could you get one of me in the street here?” That he wanted a shot of him looking plaintively into the Iowa distance is understandable, though it’s somewhat undercut by his giantlike stature. Still, he’s learned: He doesn’t tell us that he’s thinking about leadership and values, but clearly that’s what he wants people to read into this photo, even if one gets lost trying to envision the scale like the tweet is a math problem on the SAT: “If he’s 6 foot 8, then how wide is the road??” Hiding in plain sight amid the strange composition, Comey finally mentions what he’s really been up to with this slow-form tweetstorm: “Gotta get back to writing.” I think you forgot the #ad hashtag there, buddy. Then (note the hapless two spaces between sentences), “Will try to tweet in useful ways.” What could he possibly mean by “useful” here? Can we expect a tweetstorm with instructions on how to dismantle the government? Trenchant commentary on the Russia investigation? So far, his tweets are the opposite of useful. But in their entertaining bizarreness, they offer a small insight into the mind of a guy who wants to say more than he’s been able to, and, we hope, one day soon will get a chance to. Instant follow. Grade: B+ |
A horrifying new dashcam video shows at least one white member of the Aiken, S.C. Police Department search inside a black man’s rectum for the apparent crime of being a passenger in a car with paper tags, which, it bears noting, is not a crime in the state of South Carolina. Driving a car with paper tags isn’t illegal either, as long as they aren’t expired.
The Washington Post reports the car belonged to a woman named Lakeya Hicks, who had the paper tags because she had recently purchased the vehicle. Hicks’ tags weren’t expired, and a check on her license came up clean. But the cops didn’t let her go.
Instead, Officer Chris Medlin asked the passenger, Elijah Pontoon, for identification. Pontoon, who has a criminal record, was ordered out of the car and handcuffed. In the video, Medlin explains his legal rationale: “Because of your history, I’ve got a dog coming in here. Gonna walk a dog around the car.” Also: “You gonna pay for this one, boy.”
The k9 arrives but find no contraband. The cops search the car but find no contraband. This evidence does not lead them to conclude there was no contraband. This evidence apparently leads them to decide to search Pontoon’s asshole.
Audio from the video suggests all they find was a hemorrhoid. At the same time, according to a federal lawsuit filed on their behalf, a female officer was searching Hicks, exposing the woman’s breasts to the other three male officers and anyone else who happened to be on the road.
Again, no contraband was found.
Later, a dejected Medlin can be heard on the radio speaking to a superior after the fruitless search.
“We search the car. There ain’t nothing in the car... And on a search of him, up in his crotch by the butt, I felt something hard. I lifted his pants and pulled the back of his underwear down and I didn’t see anything but I didn’t get all the way up in there to get no vertical up shot. I just pulled his underwear back, but I didn’t see nothing. But it felt, he said it was a hemorrhoid. It ain’t no... it was a rock. It was a rock of crack. It’s gotta be a rock. He’s got it up in his butt.”
Medlin sadly concludes, “But there ain’t no way to justify. He said, ‘I got nothing here. That’s a long time ago. I ain’t doing nothing.’ He said it’s a hemorrhoid. I got nothing else to go on. Nothing. Yeah we’re gonna have to cut him loose here.”
Who needs probable cause to perform an invasive search? Apparently not Medlin. |
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Celtic are sending highly rated teenager Kris Ajer on loan to Kilmarnock for the rest of the season.
The Norwegian midfielder signed a four-year deal with the Hoops last February after impressing on trial.
Ajer, 18, has yet to start for Celtic under Brendan Rodgers but has always been considered a player for the future.
(Image: Ken McKay)
Now he will be given to Killie gaffer Lee Clark for the next four months as his education in the Scottish game moves up a gear.
Rodgers said: “Kris will go to Kilmarnock. There were a couple of options but it’s good for him to play there.
“He has settled in here so he can go and play there for the rest of the season where we can keep a close eye on him and take him back.”
(Image: SNS Group)
Kris Commons has returned after an emergency loan at Hibs, who are keen to keep him at least until the end of the season.
And Kieran Tierney could make his comeback from injury against Albion Rovers in the Cup on Sunday, although new signing Kouassi Eboue won’t play.
He added: “Kieran’s back. I wouldn’t be reluctant to play him, even on the astro.
“Kouassi won’t feature. His visa has just been completed and he’ll be back but not by then.” |
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