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Ryan Davis has fond memories of Kyle Field.
Not only did Auburn upset then-No. 19 Texas A&M, 26-10, two years ago during Davis' only prior trip to the Aggies' palatial stadium, but it's also where he got his first college touch.
Then just a freshman, Davis was deployed on a trick play against Texas A&M, running a gadget play -- Woody -- that has been in coach Gus Malzahn's arsenal since his days as a high school coach. Davis, crouched behind the line of scrimmage as quarterback Jeremy Johnson took the snap and handed the ball off to him. Davis took off around left end for a 28-yard gain.
"My freshman year I do remember from the Woody play," Davis said. "That was my first collegiate touch, so that was a memory for me."
RELATED: Auburn challenges receivers to step up in November
Davis, who had just one other touch that season, figures to see plenty more this weekend when No. 14 Auburn (6-2, 4-1 SEC) travels to College Station to take on Texas A&M (5-3, 3-2) at 11 a.m. Saturday on ESPN. The 5-foot-9, 175-pound junior has emerged as a favorite target of quarterback Jarrett Stidham and one of the most reliable receivers in the country this season.
"I tell you, Ryan has really worked extremely hard," Malzahn said. "He's one of those guys that really wants the ball."
Davis leads in receptions (41), receiving yards (381) and touchdowns (three) this season as he has enjoyed a breakout junior campaign. While Davis hasn't been used much as a downfield threat, with most of his receptions coming on short routes, screens and swing passes, he has shown the ability to create big plays out of those passes.
He has become a safety valve of sorts for Stidham in the passing game, garnering nearly a quarter of all the team's targets this season (24.7 percent) while averaging 5.1 receptions per game. There's a reason for that sheer volume, of course, as Davis has proven himself to be a surehanded receiver who won't misplay balls or make mistakes.
Davis' 41 catches have come on 49 targets, giving him a catch rate of 85.7 percent, which is the best among Auburn's receivers with at least 10 targets this season. It's a mark that also ranks first among all SEC receivers with at least 10 targets, according to Football Study Hall's advanced statistical profiles.
Making Davis' catch rate even more impressive this season is the limited number of drops the receiver has had through eight games. According to CFB Film Room, entering the bye week Davis had the lowest drop rate -- 2.5 percent -- among all receivers in the SEC with at least 20 receptions this season.
"He attacks the ball," Malzahn said. "He's playing with a lot of confidence right now, and you can see that grow throughout this year. He's one of the more veteran guys we have in our receiving corps. A guy that's played a lot of ball. Just playing with a lot of confidence right now. I know our quarterback has a lot of confidence in him, too."
Tom Green is an Auburn beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @Tomas_Verde. |
I have always been a sucker for post-apocalyptic stories, and Just a Pilgrim by Garth Ennis fits that bill. It was originally released as a five-issue miniseries by Black Bull in 2001, but you can get the complete trade paperback now. Ennis, of Preacher and Punisher fame, combines a bunch of off-kilter ideas and character traits in this story, which makes the comic interesting, but strangely enough, also keeps it from being anything other than an amusing oddity.
The story takes place after a solar event called “the burn” scorches the Earth, destroys all plant life, and evaporates all the water. Apparently, the radiation also created some monsters. The setting is a quirky mix of an Eastwood spaghetti western and The Road Warrior. Pilgrim is Eastwood, kinda.
We are never given his name, other than Pilgrim. He’s an anti-hero that the reader can never quite be sure about, especially at the end. In typical Ennis fashion, Pilgrim is a religious fundamentalist with a wicked past and a penchant for grotesque violence, while quoting scripture. He assists a group of people traveling through the wasteland of the Atlantic seabed trying to find a rumored outpost where people can live in relative safety. On the way, a band of barbarians, with a leader who is the stereotypical pirate, becomes determined to kill, rape, and pillage the group. A young boy with the travelling group, Billy Shepherd, documents the trip in his diary. It’s high adventure on the dried up seas.
Some of the details just feel like they were meant to be shocking for the sake of being shocking. Pilgrim’s character is interesting. Is he a hero? An anti-hero? A villain? But the religious twist just feels like Ennis is taking unfair jabs at people of faith. Overall, it’s a quick, easy read with post-apocalyptic flair and adventure, but there’s not much weight to it. |
One more comment on the post by Mike Treder that I addressed last time. Recall he wrote
Techno-rapturists among our reading audience might be quick to respond with glib answers about miraculous nanotechnology solutions that are just around the corner …
To understand Foresight’s actual point of view on this issue (which is actually a lot closer to that of CRN, which Mike co-founded, than is implied in the quote), it is necessary to understand what the power of a mature nanotechnology is really like. I fear that this often gets lost in the detailed discussions of the proto-nanotech that we see today in the labs.
Here’s one simple way to say it: the accidental impact on climate of current technology is at least three orders of magnitude smaller than the intentional impact of a mature nanotechnology. If you are Really Worried about a roughly one watt per square meter influence on the Earth, I urge you to consider the Weather Machine which could interdict and/or redirect the full roughly one kilowatt /m^2 that’s available. Or, to judge by the diurnal warming and cooling rates, change the global surface temperature by 10C per day.
Now frankly, this worries me a lot more than natural climate change. My worry goes as follows: people are so worried about climate that they actually build a Weather Machine. Their models of how climate work are not as good as they think they are; let’s say that they are in roughly the same state of actual to perceived knowledge that the Federal Reserve was in macroeconomics in 1929 (or 2008, for that matter). They turn it on and there’s, well, a depression. Or multiple governments build them and have wars. Nuclear weapons are trivial by comparison.
Let me demonstrate. In the original Weather Machine post I claimed that a Weather Machine Mark II could “shoot down the moons of Mars.” I took a guess at the energy available, resolving power, etc and figured I was well on the safe side.
Just for fun I did the math and impressed myself a little bit. At closest approach, with an active spot of 10,000 km diameter (remember the WM is a cloud of balloons in the stratosphere with optical-wavelength antennas that are synchronized to be a coherent optical phased array), using violet light for the beam, you could focus a petawatt beam on a 2.7mm spot on Phobos. A petawatt is about a quarter megaton per second. 2.7mm is about a tenth of an inch. I.e. you could blow Phobos up, write your name on it at about Sharpie handwriting size, or ablate the surface in a controlled way, creating reaction jets, and sending it scooting around in curlicues like a bumper car. |
Minutes before the bullets started flying Tuesday night, Judith Heslop got an upset stomach and went to her bedroom to lie down.
Walking those 20 feet may have saved her life. Soon after she left the front room of her apartment, a barrage of gunfire tore through the 3700 block of Ulloa Street, killing three people and wounding two others. Five bullets crashed through Heslop’s front window.
“Last night was a night when the Almighty God took me up from here to spare me from these terrorists,” said Heslop, 51. “I don’t know what else to say they are.”
The latest mass shooting came less than a month after another fusillade injured five and killed one in Central City.
Tuesday's bloodletting left New Orleans’ homicide total for the year at 131 — exactly where it stood at the same point in 2015.
Several witnesses said a large group of people had gathered Tuesday night in front of a row of white shotgun doubles on Ulloa Street, which intersects with Tulane Avenue at one end of the 3700 block.
Police said the gunfire began about 9:25 p.m. One person died at the scene, according to police, and two more died at a hospital.
Two other victims, both male, were taken to a hospital in a private vehicle and remained there Wednesday, police said.
It was the city's first triple homicide of the year. The Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office identified those killed as Darome Hilton, a 34-year-old man; Glenquel Emerson, a 20-year-old woman; and Bobbie Basquine, a 22-year-old man.
Just as in the immediate aftermath of the recent Central City shooting, police said nothing publicly Wednesday about who the shooters were or what their motives might have been.
Detectives have privately concluded that the Central City shooting was an act of gang violence, but police have not commented on whether they believe gangs were involved in the latest burst of violence.
One of the victims died on Heslop’s porch. She sat inside for hours as his blood pooled outside and detectives with flashlights searched the street for shell casings.
Several groups of people gathered anxiously at the scene Tuesday night, waiting for news about whether their loved ones were injured or killed.
At one point a scuffle broke out nearby at Tulane and South Cortez Street. NOPD officers and State Police troopers intervened to break it up.
One resident of the block ended up stuck around the corner in her car, waiting for the all-clear before she could return home to her daughter, who had rushed back into the house when the gunfire began, counting about 13 shots.
“She was hysterical,” said the woman, who declined to give her name.
Heslop said big groups have been spending late nights drinking outside on Ulloa Street for months now, and that she’s complained to her landlord about it. Other neighbors said the same thing.
On June 29, police said, a man got out of an SUV with an AK-47 and shot a 25-year-old man in the 4100 block of Ulloa Street, on the other side of South Carrollton Avenue.
“I’ve lived here for three years, and this is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” Heslop said.
“After this shooting, I don’t know if I want to stay here,” said another neighbor, 66-year-old Catherine Myles. “I want out.” |
banjomik,
Thank you for the very awesome and extremely thoughtful monochrome silhouette of my photo 'Childhood Innocence' that I posted on r/itookapicture . I like you believe that it is complete bullshit that my photo received absolutely no karma because as you said in your kindly worded letter 'the composition, title, and subject matter were quite good'. The fact that you did not have nor could not find Patriots naval blue is of no consequence as this is the best piece of artwork I have to hang in my new apartment. Which brings me to why I have taken so long to put this picture up. I deeply regret you having to wait and wonder just how I received this photo as I know I would after waiting patiently for a few days. Well between moving to a new apartment and hour away and still having day to day business to conduct in my old stomping grounds as well as the slight motor vehicle accident that followed shortly after I apologize that you had to wait like this. I wish I had a photo of the beautiful photo on the wall, but unfortunately since getting engaged it seems only fair to ask my 'better half' where she would like it placed also. Once again banjomik thank you I very much so love the photo. Please continue to stalk my account as one day I will upload a photo of where this picture finally did end up on the wall. So to 'the most influential artist of his generation' thank you I look forward to seeing more of your art, hopefully on my walls!!
~fourtwizzy
P.S. How do those metal hangers you included work? I don't want to 'hulk smash' your artwork! |
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Tens of thousands marched over the weekend in demonstrations in the Valencian Country and the Balearic Islands to demand an end to discrimination against Catalan speakers ahead of key elections that could bring major political changes in both territories.
In Majorcan capital city Palma, some 20 civil society organizations and trade unions called upon institutions to protect and help foster the own language and culture of the islands as they marked the Language Day on Saturday 25th. The groups argue the current Balearic government, led by the Spanish conservative Popular Party (PP) has undermined the rights of Catalan speakers by marginalising the language in school, public administration and the media, which includes disabling the reception of Catalan-speaking TV channels from Catalonia.
According to Balearic newspaper Ara Balears, some 8,000 people gathered in Palma's downtown, and a further 12,000 demonstrated in a pro-Catalan language education march. In the islands of Minorca, Eivissa and Formentera, other gatherings for Catalan language and culture were also held.
Meanwhile on the same day, Cultural Action of the Valencian Country (ACPV) group got thousands of people to demonstrate through the streets of Valencia demanding an end to "corruption and negligence" by Valencian institutions. Protesters also called for change in linguistic and cultural policies, and demanded renewed action for Valencian -the popular name Catalan language receives in the Valencian Country.
Since 1995, the Valencian autonomous government has been in the hands of PP. As they have done in the Balearic Islands, Spanish conservatives have increasingly marginalized Catalan in public life. The Valencian government blocked Catalan TV reception in the Valencian Country in 2011, and it closed down the Catalan-language Valencian TV in 2013 arguing financial reasons. Meanwhile, the Valencian government has not met demands from tens of thousands to grant Catalan-medium education to pupils.
Opinion polls say PP could be ousted from government in both territories
The Balearic Islands and the Valencian Country are now in a defining moment since both territories are set to renew their autonomous parliaments on May 24th. If PP and potential government partner Citizens' Party (C's, Spanish centre-right nationalism) do not secure a combined absolute majority neither in Valencia nor in the Balearic Islands, then a pro-Catalan language leftist majority could emerge and bring change.
In the 60-member Balearic Parliament, recent polls say PP would still be the largest party, even if it would get 22 to 26 seats, down from current 35. C's is predicted to win 3 to 5, which could prove insufficient to keep the PP in government. Centre-left PSOE could get 13 to 17 seats, which could combine with Majorcan pro-sovereignty coalition MÉS (4 to 6), left-of-centre Spanish Podemos (7 to 10) and other minor parties to form a new multi-party government, more inclined to further the rights of Catalan speakers and to strengthen the role of language in public life.
In the 99-member Valencian Corts, a similar scenario is predicted by surveys. Weighed down by corruption, PP could lose half of its current seats according to a recent El País poll: 28 MPs, down from 55 it got in 2011. Not even a deal with C's (17 seats) could give them a majority. A leftist four-party alternative government could then be created if PSOE (23 seats), Podemos (17), Valencian sovereignist Compromís (9) and Spanish federalist United Left (5) strike a deal.
(Image: demonstrators in Valencia on Saturday 25th / photo by ACPV.) |
The Islamic State has issued a vicious and detailed call to "lone wolf" followers to stab, shoot, poison and run over Australians at iconic attractions including Bondi Beach and the MCG.
The latest exhortation from the terrorist group follows the death in Syria of convicted Australian terrorist Ezzit Raad, who was jailed in connection with the 2005 plot to blow up the MCG and features as the latest jihadist poster boy in a new magazine.
In its first edition of Rumiyah published overnight, the terrorist group calls for lone wolf attacks in Australia in a manner of detail not seen before in the group's publications.
"Light the ground beneath them aflame and scorch them with terror," it states, painting the attacks as the way to avenge the death of Raad. |
Like many other reviewers who have expressed enthusiastic praise for this book, I, too, have found the book to be a goldmine of detailed, comprehensive information about the 1996 killing of JonBenet Ramsey in Boulder, CO. Again and again, in issue after issue, the book follows a consistent methodology of collecting evidence, asking questions about the evidence, and gathering more evidence to resolve the questions. I found this basic but penetrating methodology to be truly impressive, particularly when combined with Mr. Kolar's thorough knowledge of the facts of the case from his own direct involvement as the lead investigator for the Boulder District Attorney's Office under DA Mary Lacy in 2005 and 2006.
The book describes various "outside intruder" theories of who killed JonBenet, including an elaborate multi-intruder scenario in Chapter 2 that seems to integrate the most commonly cited evidence very effectively (though not all the known evidence). The book describes and dissects the lone-pedophile theory promoted by Lou Smit and others. And the book explains the many problems with the repeated, adamant claims of an "outside intruder" by the Ramseys. The book's evidence seems to show rather conclusively that the Ramseys have allegedly engaged in a vigorous effort to direct the attention of investigators away from any family member, even though statistically (according to Kolar) fewer than 6% of child murders are committed by strangers, especially when the murdered child is found in the child's own home.
What I also found very striking in the facts described in this book is the depth and intensity of the seemingly never-ending conflicts between the Boulder DA's office (in support of an "outside intruder" theory) and the Boulder Police Department (in support of a "family member" theory, with John and/or Patsy Ramsey as the main suspects). The DA and the police never seem to have come together seriously in a joint search for the truth. We now know, for example (since 2013*), contrary to the impression given by DA Alex Hunter, that the grand jury in the case did issue a final report with two specific criminal charges recommended against both John and Patsy Ramsey -- not for murder, but (paraphrasing) for allowing their daughter to be placed in danger resulting in the child's death, and for assisting a murderer. Danger from whom? What murderer? Maybe one parent assisting the other? Those points surely must have been explained in the full grand jury report, but most of the report remains sealed at present (as far as I know). The grand jury's report wasn't publicly known to exist at the time Kolar's book was published in 2012, although I suspect Mr. Kolar himself probably knew, since page 218 of his book mentions that he had full access to the grand jury files during his relatively short term as lead investigator under DA Mary Lacey. (Mr. Kolar's website, ventuspublishing.com, has announced that a forthcoming new edition of the book will include discussion of the grand jury recommendations and also the latest DNA test results.)
Based on meticulous examination of the evidence, the book systematically rules out any outside intruder theory and also clears John and Patsy as possible killers of JonBenet. This leaves only one other family member to consider. Given the vicious nature of the strangulation, along with the blow to the head and a possible sexual assault, it may seem completely self-evident that there is no way such violence could have been perpetrated by a 9-year-old boy, JonBenet's older brother, Burke. But Kolar disagrees with this presumption, based on startling evidence presented in Chapter 33. The evidence strongly reinforces the suspicion about Burke, but the book also emphasizes that more evidence gathering is needed to confirm the suspicion -- evidence such as family medical records, particularly any records pertaining to psychiatric treatments that Burke reportedly received as a child. This kind of evidence wouldn't necessarily be made public; it could be limited to official investigators (possibly in a new grand jury setting) seeking to identify JonBenet's killer and the killer's motivation.
Chapters 35 and 37 examine the "touch DNA" evidence that allegedly showed involvement by an intruder. Those chapters identify the weaknesses in that DNA evidence, including the fact that there was non-family-member DNA from a total of six different unknown persons, all of whom would have to be considered suspects if touch DNA evidence can be relied upon (just as any discovery of fingerprints warrants further evidence gathering as to their origin and circumstances). Hence, the book hypothesizes the multiple intruder scenario presented in Chapter 2 -- but with all intruder theories thoroughly disproved by the other physical evidence described in other chapters, such as the lack of any forced entry and lack of clear evidence of entry or exit through the one unsecured window in the basement, along with the apparently fake ransom note, additional voices heard on Patsy's 911 call (after audio enhancement), compelling evidence against Lou Smit's stun gun theory, and so on.
Chapter 36 summarizes a "Theory of Prosecution" which Mr. Kolar expressed to the newest Boulder DA in 2011, although the full details of the theory evidently are too sensitive and probably horrendous in their implications to disclose publicly at present. Chapter 36 ends with a hint to readers that "the foundation for this theory is interspersed throughout this manuscript and I will have to leave it to your imagination at the moment."
Chapter 37 (p. 428) mentions that under Colorado law, children under the age of 10 are not considered to be capable of forming criminal intent and thus cannot be prosecuted for crimes, not even murder. Furthermore, page 428 also mentions that there is a statute of limitations in Colorado on charges such as accessory after the fact, that might have been applicable to John and Patsy Ramsey, but whose time limit is now long expired. In addition, Patsy Ramsey is no longer living, having died in 2006 from cancer. Thus, with no possibility of criminal charges against any of the "family member" suspects, what would be the point of forming a new grand jury -- and, for that matter, the point of publishing Mr. Kolar's book? The long Epilog following Chapter 38 explains Mr. Kolar's reasons in great detail. Chapter 37 also explains the reasons more succinctly as follows: "In our pursuit of truth and justice, not only for this little girl, but for all the other innocent people wrongly accused by her family, isn't it our responsibility as criminal investigators and prosecutors to go in search of it?"
* References regarding the grand jury report:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/25/justice/jonbenet-ramsey-documents/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2013/10/us/jonbenet-ramsey-documents/?hpt=hp_t1 |
LIMA (Reuters) - Peru President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski told Russian media that Pacific-rim countries can forge a new trade deal that includes China to replace the U.S.-led TPP that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to scrap.
Peru's President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski waits to address the United Nations General Assembly in the Manhattan borough of New York, U.S. September 20, 2016. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
Kuczynski, speaking to Russia Today in an videotaped interview posted on the state-funded broadcaster’s website Friday, said Russia should also be part of any new bid to hammer out a tariff-slashing agreement for the Asia-Pacific region.
U.S. President Barack Obama had framed the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership, which excludes China and Russia, as a way for Washington to set trade rules for the fast-growing Pacific-rim region before Beijing does, part of his “pivot to Asia.”
Written so it cannot be implemented without the United States, the TPP appeared dead this week following Trump’s surprise victory and promises from Republican congressional leaders to defer to him on trade policy.
“It can be replaced with a similar deal, but without the United States,” Kuczynski, a fervent free-trade supporter said in the Russia Today interview. “I think it’d be best to have an Asia-Pacific deal that includes China, and includes Russia as well...it’d have to be a new negotiation.”
The comments came ahead of the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit that Peru will host next week in the first event to bring together heads-of state from China, Russia, the United States and Japan following Trump’s unexpected election.
China, leading talks on a deal seen as an alternative to the TPP - the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) - said this week that the Pacific-rim area needs a free trade deal as soon as possible and that it would seek support for one during the summit in Lima.
Kuczynski, a 78-year-old former Wall Street banker who lived in the United States so long he once held citizenship, reiterated his criticism of Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and vowed to oppose it in the United Nations.
“The Berlin Wall lasted 40 years...why do we want another wall?” Kuczynski said, adding that Trump could trigger a “terrible crisis” in Mexico if he discourages trade between the two countries. “In Latin America we must show solidarity.”
Trump has said a new border wall would stem the flow of undocumented migrants and drugs from Mexico. He has called the TPP a “death blow” for manufacturing jobs and made his opposition to it a cornerstone of his campaign. |
WASHINGTON -- The Republican Party's new point man on food stamps, Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas), insists that he doesn't want to cut nutrition assistance benefits. Instead, Conaway is leading a multiyear review of the program, just to make sure it's the best it can be.
But it might not be up to Conaway. Republicans could push food stamp cuts this year through a parliamentary process known as "reconciliation."
The GOP has discussed using reconciliation as a way to repeal Obamacare or to do tax reform. Now, some Democrats and food stamp advocates are warning that the Republican-controlled Congress could use the obscure budget maneuver to reduce food stamp assistance.
Here's how it could happen: When Congress passes a budget resolution, as it is expected to do this spring, it sets spending levels for various federal agencies. Through what are known as reconciliation instructions, budget committee leaders can then instruct the committees overseeing those agencies to meet specified spending limits. So, in theory, the House and Senate budget committees could tell their respective agriculture committees to reduce spending by a certain percentage, and the committees would have to do it.
A coalition of nearly 400 food banks, labor groups and farm industry advocacy groups recently set a letter to top lawmakers on budget committees expressing concern that U.S. Department of Agriculture initiatives -- including crop insurance and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps -- could get whacked through reconciliation.
In 2014, Congress overhauled federal nutrition assistance and agribusiness subsidies in a piece of legislation called a "farm bill" that was supposed to set agricultural policy for five years. The bill reduced overall federal spending on agriculture and nutrition programs by about 3 percent.
"These difficult cuts were made across the farm safety net, conservation programs, and nutrition programs," says the Feb. 23 letter from a range of groups, including the AARP, the American Farm Bureau Federation and the Bay Area Food Bank.
"The policy changes and reforms associated with these cuts are only now being fully implemented by the United States Department of Agriculture," the letter continues. "As such, no additional cuts to these programs should be considered, at least until these policies have time to take place and be thoroughly evaluated."
For Republicans, the advantage of the reconciliation process is that it could get through the Senate with a simple majority, meaning Democrats would be unable to filibuster. But it is extremely unlikely that a budget bill dismantling Obamacare would be able to avoid the president's veto, so cuts to food stamps are entirely theoretical at this point.
Still, the possibility of a reconciliation bill is on the radar. Last month, Conaway, who recently became chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, and the committee's top Democrat asked in a joint letter to House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.), that programs reauthorized in the farm bill be left alone. The request suggested that the agriculture committee is worried that the budget committee might mandate further cuts through a reconciliation directive.
A spokesman for Price told The Huffington Post only that Republicans are working on their budget bill.
"You can see a scenario where SNAP gets the disproportionate amount of cuts in any kind of reconciliation," Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), the agriculture committee's most vocal defender of food stamps, said in an interview. "There are members in the majority here who do not like the program, do not understand the program, and are trying to find ways to get rid of it."
Bob Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal D.C. think tank that opposes food stamp cuts, told HuffPost this week he thought the budget committees would be a likelier source of near-term policy changes than Conaway's review of nutrition assistance.
"I think there's a good chance that the Republican budget resolution that's adopted in April will have reconciliation instructions to the agriculture committee with the assumption that there's cuts in SNAP," Greenstein said. |
EDMONTON - The team captain peeled off her basketball kicks, slid her long-suffering feet into a soothing tub of ice and shared her wisdom about the stages of the journey the national women’s basketball team is navigating.
No one on the Pan Am Games gold medal-winning team is better situated for that task than Kim Gaucher, as Team Canada fine-tunes for the 10-team FIBA Americas Women’s Championship that runs from Aug. 9-16 at the Saville Centre, where a berth in the 2016 Summer Olympics is on offer to the champion.
“Kim has experienced it all,” head coach Lisa Thomaidis said at Tuesday’s Team Canada practice. “From a 16-year-old (in 2001) going to a World (Championship) qualifier, to an Olympian in London to a fifth-place finish at (2014) World’s, she’s been through everything.”
That includes low points, too, such as being on teams that failed to qualify for the 2004 and 2008 Summer Games. Gaucher, a continuous member of the national team since 2001, knows as well as any of her teammates, and better than most, how precious this opportunity is.
“The experience (and) leadership she brings ... is invaluable,” Thomaidis said. “We as coaches can relay some of that information, but when it comes from a teammate, it just means so much more.
“She’s been the cornerstone of this program for so long. To get to this point, we as a staff are so happy for her.”
Like the rest of her teammates, Gaucher has never experienced the thrill of playing an Olympic qualifying tournament at home, something that far outstrips the excitement of winning a gold medal at the Pan American Games.
“That didn’t actually feel hard,” Gaucher said, about the team collectively managing its emotions and not letting the Pan Am euphoria to get out of hand. “We kind of know what’s on the line here. We’ve been preparing for this and we were ready for it.
“They asked us after the tournament if we wanted to cut the nets down and we said, ‘No. We’re not done yet.’ This (Pan Am) isn’t what we’re playing for — it was a LOT of fun. We wanted to win gold, we wanted Canada to see what we can do. We wanted to send a message, in a way, to the other teams, as well.
“Like, ‘Hey, we’re good, we’re ready to play this summer. But this (FIBA Americas) is big. This tournament is what we want to win gold at.”
If they’re going to cut down a net, it will be on Aug. 16 after the FIBA Americas tournament final. So, after winning Pan Am gold, there were relatively brief celebrations, then some much-needed down time.
For the veteran guard from Mission, B.C., that meant a four-day visit to Ontario cottage country with her Toronto-based sister and other family members, followed by some down time in Connecticut, where her husband is from.
“I didn’t have any media or that kind of stuff, I was away from any distraction,” Gaucher said. “I was able to just wake up in the morning, work out, take a nap, work out. It was perfect.”
The team is back at its home base in Edmonton and back on task now. |
All photos and video by Robert King
They went to the airport when the massacres began.
Residents of Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, knew that French soldiers were stationed at Bangui M’Poko International Airport. And so when the latest round of fighting in the city began last week, they fled to the airport, hoping the soldiers would offer them protection. We landed at M’Poko five days later.
The latest round of sectarian fighting that has led CAR, one of the poorest countries in the world, to the brink of collapse began last March when Michel Djotodia and his loose rebel alliance (known as the Séléka) stormed Bangui and ousted President François Bozizé. Djotodia appointed himself president and tried to integrate the Séléka into the armed forces, but it didn’t work. Even Djotodia admitted that he didn’t have control over most of the rebels, many of whom are said to be mercenaries from neighboring Chad and Sudan.
Bands of mostly Muslim former Séléka rebels are now terrorizing the majority Christian country, raping and murdering civilians as they roam. Civilians have formed their own “anti-balaka” militias — balaka means machete or sword — to fight back. Meanwhile, many of those who aren’t fighting have sought refuge in the only places they consider safe: houses of worship. And the Muslim civilian minority face continuing reprisals—both looting and killing—by the anti-balaka forces after nine months of Séléka rule.
It’s important to note that many people with firsthand knowledge of the war have told us that the religious aspect of the conflict — Muslims vs. Christians— is overblown. They say this is not an ideological war, but rather a war of identity that goes back generations. Regardless of the root causes, the United Nations and other prominent NGOs speculate that the situation could become far worse.
“A Logistical Nightmare”
In fact, the situation may already be far worse outside the capital, far from the relative protection of the French military and the medical help provided by NGOs. But the country is so large and the population so spread out, the true extent of the violence is unknown. Many villages lie deserted, their residents having fled to the bush to escape. Malaria and malnutrition have followed them.
“It’s a logistical nightmare,” said Romain Gaduchon, who organized a recent European Community Humanitarian Office ECHO Flight into the country to deliver aid. He described the CAR as the least accessible country in Africa, owing to its lack of infrastructure and seaports, and its dense jungle.
In addition to delivering aid, the ECHO flight also delivered otherwise stranded journalists — including us. Halfway through the flight, we received a briefing from one of the ECHO employees: The area around the airport was not secure. The night before, two French troops had been killed. In response, Christians had looted Muslim neighborhoods and killed civilians.
As we landed, we could see makeshift shanty towns and IDP (internally displaced persons) camps surrounding the perimeter of the airport. French soldiers were everywhere. Refugees held signs denouncing Djotodia as they chanted, “Thank you President Hollande. Thank you French army.”
French journalists at the airport told us that sentiment toward the media had seemingly changed overnight. That day, while in Muslim neighborhoods, the journalists received glares, and some civilians made throat-slitting gestures at them.
When we ventured out the following day, however, we were received warmly. We traveled to the Monastery of Bliss, which, like many places of worship in the city, had become an informal IDP camp. Father Yeelen Waongo told us there were 15,000 people staying in his compound. He blamed the fighting solely on politics, saying that religious fervor is being manipulated by people using it to gain power.
Emmanuel Teka, a law student seeking refuge in the monastery, blamed the problems on the current president. “The French troops need to get the weapons away from the Séléka and the anti-balaka,” he said. And what of revenge? “It’s not good, but people here want to do it.”
Teka said it was up to the president to foster peace. Elsewhere in the camp, women and children sang songs calling for his removal.
“We've Always Had Peace”
Bangui is still very much a city on the edge, though the situation appears to have stabilized somewhat today. Shops are still closed, but people are walking the streets and going about their normal lives, which is a big change from the previous week. We saw few Séléka forces. Some young men on the street called out “Peace, peace!”
That said, at a French checkpoint in the dangerous PK 12 neighborhood, things were still tense. When we arrived, a young man lay on a makeshift stretcher, bleeding profusely from his leg. His friends told us he had been hacked with a machete by ex-Séléka rebels. They screamed for revenge.
Dr. Andre Gombako then approached the men, informing them that his brother had been killed by the Séléka a few nights ago. He stressed the need for forgiveness, and admonished everyone to remain nonviolent despite the attack. “I have no anger in my heart,” he said. “We’ve always had peace in this country between the Christians and Muslims.”
Gombako said the country needs two things to recover from the violence: A general disarmament, and the expulsion of the foreign fighters who came in with Djotodia from Chad and Sudan.
Later at the checkpoint, a single pickup truck full of heavily armed Multinational Force of Central Africa (FOMAC) peacekeeping soldiers pulled up. Murmurs went through the crowd, and some angry words were exchanged. Residents told us that some of the Chadians who had entered the country with the Séléka forces had blended into the FOMAC ranks, and they worried they would soon attack.
Past a roadblock, in a Muslim neighborhood, we found residents who dismissed claims that the Séléka were from Chad and Sudan. They said the French troops targeted Muslims indiscriminately, but didn’t disarm any of the anti-balaka forces, which left Muslims vulnerable to reprisal attacks. “The French troops aren’t going after the Christian community, only the Muslims,” one person told us. “We need the United Nations.”
Opinions of the Séléka were mixed amongst Muslim civilians. But once again, people stressed that everything had been fine between Muslims and Christians before the Séléka showed up. “We don’t know why we are having this problem,” one man said.
Muslims tended to blame the violence on the anti-balaka, and said that the portrayal of them as a defensive force formed by villagers was misleading. The anti-balaka were, they said, loyalists of Bozizé who were being manipulated by political forces. “The Christians lost the power, but they don’t want to accept defeat,” a man named Ali told us.
All over the city, fingers are pointed in many different directions: The anti-balaka started it. The anti-balaka rose up against the Séléka, who started it. Longstanding religious tensions have boiled over. Religious tensions are brand new. The Chadians are to blame. Or the Darfuris. Or the French.
In other words, no one has any real explanation for why longtime neighbors began killing each other, or why more than 100,000 people in Bangui no longer feel safe in their homes. |
Just days after the U.S. Department of Justice announced the results of an investigation into the Albuquerque Police Department, three members of the Police Oversight Commission are quitting.Anna's full report | VIDEO | 3 Police Oversight Commission members quitIn their resignation letters to Mayor Richard Berry, Richard Shine, Jennifer Barela and Jonathan Siegel said they’re resigning because the civilian commission has no teeth.“The city attorney’s office addressed the POC on April 10, 2014, and stated that we have no power to decide against the APD Chief or against the independent review officer’s findings regarding citizens’ complaints,” reads Siegel’s letter. “I cannot continue to pretend or deceive the members of our community into believing that our city has any real civilian oversight.” The city responded Tuesday.“An effective Police Oversight Commission has the ability to play a very important role, as mentioned by the Department of Justice, and these are critical components for community oversight," said the city's Chief Administrative Officer Rob Perry. "I thank the POC members for their service. We are hopeful that the City Council which created this board and nominates its members, will work in consultation with the DOJ in continued efforts to reform and implement needed changes.”
Just days after the U.S. Department of Justice announced the results of an investigation into the Albuquerque Police Department, three members of the Police Oversight Commission are quitting.
Anna's full report | VIDEO | 3 Police Oversight Commission members quit
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In their resignation letters to Mayor Richard Berry, Richard Shine, Jennifer Barela and Jonathan Siegel said they’re resigning because the civilian commission has no teeth.
“The city attorney’s office addressed the POC on April 10, 2014, and stated that we have no power to decide against the APD Chief or against the independent review officer’s findings regarding citizens’ complaints,” reads Siegel’s letter. “I cannot continue to pretend or deceive the members of our community into believing that our city has any real civilian oversight.”
The city responded Tuesday.
“An effective Police Oversight Commission has the ability to play a very important role, as mentioned by the Department of Justice, and these are critical components for community oversight," said the city's Chief Administrative Officer Rob Perry. "I thank the POC members for their service. We are hopeful that the City Council which created this board and nominates its members, will work in consultation with the DOJ in continued efforts to reform and implement needed changes.”
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Researchers have re-examined data captured by the Voyager 2 spacecraft back in 1986, and think they've found evidence of two never-before-seen moons hidden in the rings of Uranus.
Uranus, the third largest planet in our Solar System, already has 27 moons that we know of - but these two new ones appear to orbit the planet more closely than any of its other natural satellites, and are causing wavy patterns in its closest rings.
Although Saturn is the most famous ringed planet orbiting our Sun, it's not the only one, with the three other gas giants - Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune - all having their own ring systems.
But we haven't had much opportunity to study Uranus, seeing as it's almost 20 times further from the Sun than Earth is, and much of the information we have on it came from Voyager 2's flyby 30 years ago.
Now a duo of planetary scientists from the University of Idaho have re-examined this data to show that there's something strange going on in two of Uranus' 13 rings, called Alpha and Beta.
These rings display a previously unnoticed wavy pattern, suggesting that they're being pulled at by two tiny moons.
"These patterns may be wakes from small moonlets orbiting exterior to these rings," the researchers write in their paper on the pre-print site arXiv.org.
So why didn't Voyager 2 see these moons as it zipped past?
The researchers suggest these moons are so tiny, and also so dark, that they would have blended into the background for the spacecraft. Being "dark" means they barely reflect any light, as is the case with most of the moons in the area, and also Uranus's dark rings.
But the two Idaho researchers, Rob Chancia and Matthew Hedman, have crunched the numbers, and suggest that the pattern they detected in the Alpha and Beta rings are similar to those caused by the pull of some of Uranus's other moons, such as Cordelia and Ophelia.
They predict that, if these two new moons exist, they would only measure between 4 and 14 km (2 to 9 miles) across.
For now, this discovery is far from confirmed, and the researchers are still in the process of publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. But you can read their full report on arXiv.org now, and the team is getting ready to inspect Uranus with the Hubble Space Telescope in order to get more information.
Mark Showalter from the SETI Institute in California, who has previously discovered moons around Uranus, but wasn't involved in the study, told Ken Croswell over at New Scientist that the existence of the two new moons is "certainly a very plausible possibility".
He also said that Hubble is the "best bet" for finding these new Uranian satellites, but if that fails, maybe it would be time for Uranus to get its own orbiter mission - which we're totally on board with.
It's been a good year for our Solar System, with a new dwarf planet discovered last week, and another one back in May, as well as a moon hiding at the back of our Solar System earlier this year.
The better we get at peering out into space, the more crowded our neck of the galaxy gets, and we love it. The more curiosities to understand, the better. |
Friday morning through early afternoon, anti-Trump and anarchist rioters calling themselves #DisruptJ20 took to the streets of Washington D.C. to protest Trump’s inauguration. Their protest took several forms, from blocking entrances and freeways, to violence in the forms of vandalism, destruction and throwing concrete at police officers. While many in the media expressed dismay at the violence, some still justified the violence as a legitimate form of protest, including one Washington Post reporter.
As rioters downtown were hurling chunks of concrete at police officers, the White House condemned anti-police violence in a new post on its website. Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery expressed outrage on Twitter, claiming it didn’t “acknowledge” “legitimate dissent:” Note no acknowledgement of any legitimate dissent. Those protesting are "rioter," "looter," or "violent disrupter," according to Trump — Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) January 20, 2017 Even claiming that this policy would inspire “Zimmerman-like vigilantes.” given the context, hard to read this as anything but a call for more George Zimmerman-like vigilantes pic.twitter.com/XaWPO5y9k5 — Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) January 20, 2017 But the worst tweet came in response to Democratic Congresswoman Claire McCaskill, after she condemned the violent riots. Lowery responded that the riots were very much American, even comparing them to the Boston Tea Party: Nothing is more unAmerican than protesters who are not peaceful. Disgusting. — Claire McCaskill (@clairecmc) January 20, 2017 The participants in the Boston Tea Party would likely beg to differ https://t.co/DsxII9elS9 — Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) January 20, 2017 <<< Please support MRC's NewsBusters team with a tax-deductible contribution today. >>> DONATE |
Let me start by saying that the products featured in this post were provided to me free of charge courtesy of Crispy Green. This post may have affiliate links but this in no way will influence the review to follow and all opinions are my own.
Crispy Green: Crispy Fruit Review and Giveaway- Tangerine, Apple and Mango
I never really gave any consideration to freeze-dried fruit other than my outdoor camping friends have praised it for years. After all these years, I can honestly say that I understand why it is so popular – it is really good!
Let’s back up to a conversation that I was having with Jason a couple weeks ago about dehydrated fruit and meat, It was mentioned that a favorite snack of his was beef sticks, cheese and dried fruit. I thought at the time that he was a step below in the evolution of his taste buds but have found that really I was the one low on the taste evolution scale.
Crispy Green was kind enough to send us 3 packages of their Crispy Fruit in Tangerine, Apple and Mango. The varieties that they offer are wide-ranging and include Asian pear, banana, cantaloupe and pineapple as well as tangerine, apple and mango. The fruit is kosher certified, peanut tree nut free, gluten-free, dairy free and vegan – the reason for this is that all that is included is 100% pure fruit dehydrated.
As I opened the packages I was unsure what to expect and I was please too see that the fruit was recognizable as the shape that I am accustom to. The Tangerine looked like it had all the moisture taken out, and as I tasted it I noticed how the natural sweetness came through. The Mango’s were sliced in bite size pieces and had a hint of sweet. By far my favorite was the Apples, they were the perfect crispness with a hint of sweet.
While I had not given much consideration to dried fruit in the past, I am much more open to not only trying future fruits but I am even considering purchasing a dehydration system of my own to dehydrate my own fruits. I think I have come a long way in my evolutionary journey of tastes and look ahead to other culinary snacks.
I encourage you to visit CrispyGreen.com and on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or to purchase on Amazon.
GIVEAWAY: Crispy Green is offering a 16 pack of Crispy Fruit to my readers! (1) lucky winner will be selected at random to win this 16 pack assortment of fruit and Each box contains 8 bags of Crispy Apples, 4 bars Crispy Asian Pears, and 4 bags of Crispy Tangerines. I will be randomly choosing 1 person on August 26 (8/26/2015) to receive this fun & easy summer treat! Open to residents in the US only. To enter complete the entries below! Winner will be notified by me by email and prize will be fulfilled by Crispy Green! Remember you have 48 hours to claim prize, or I will choose another winner. GOOD LUCK!!!
Win a case of Crispy Fruit from Crispy Green
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Rep. Jeb Hensarling has endorsed Republican presidential candidate and fellow Texan Ted Cruz Rafael (Ted) Edward CruzTrump unleashing digital juggernaut ahead of 2020 Inviting Kim Jong Un to Washington Trump endorses Cornyn for reelection as O'Rourke mulls challenge MORE in an effort to derail controversial businessman Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE, the GOP front-runner.
“I believe that now is the time for Republicans and conservatives to unite behind the candidate who can not only win in November, but who will govern according to the principles we advocate and share,” Hensarling said in a statement Thursday.
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“We are down to two candidates who can secure the Republican nomination — Donald Trump and Ted Cruz,” Hensarling said, dismissing the chances of Ohio Gov. John Kasich. “Based on Donald Trump’s track record, I have serious questions about his commitment to the conservative cause.”
Hensarling, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was in the spotlight last year for leading the push to block reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, which Cruz, the junior senator from Texas, also opposed.
He is the ninth Texas lawmaker to throw their support behind Cruz, who is pushing to coalesce support from those on the right in an effort to derail Trump. |
October 15, 2015Emily Davis, 928-638-7609Kirby-Lynn Shedlowski, 928-638-7958
Grand Canyon, Ariz.–Grand Canyon National Park is in the process of replacing a portion of the Transcanyon Pipeline (TCP) at Phantom Ranch. As part of the construction process, the TCP will be turned off to allow crews to connect the new portions of the pipeline to the existing pipeline.
The TCP shutdown will begin on Sunday, October 18 and is anticipated to last through the end of the week. For safety purposes, crews must also turn off the power to Phantom Ranch on Monday, October 19.
Phantom Ranch will begin water conservation measures Sunday, October 18 that will last the duration of the project, but drinking water will continue to be available. Drinking water will be unavailable at Bright Angel and Cottonwood campgrounds, Roaring Springs, and Manzanita Rest Area (formerly Pumphouse Residence) during the shutdown. Day hikers and backpackers should be prepared to carry all drinking water or be able to treat creek water for drinking.
The TCP shutdown will not affect 1 1/2-Mile Resthouse, 3-Mile Resthouse, and Indian Garden on the Bright Angel Trail or Supai Tunnel on the North Kaibab Trail.
Grand Canyon National Park has a large and complex water utility system that provides water to close to 5 million annual visitors in addition to about 2,500 residents that live within the park. Visitors and residents on the South and North rims will still have access to water during the planned TCP shutdown via a water storage system. However, during the shutdown visitors and residents are encouraged to practice basic water conservation measures.
Water conservation can be as simple as turning off the water while you brush your teeth or shave, taking shorter showers, not watering lawns or washing cars, and filling the sink with water while washing dishes.
Because of the complexity of the TCP replacement project, at least one more multi-day TCP shutdown is anticipated this year. At this time, there is no date set for that shutdown.
-NPS- |
A controversy that began with the audit of two family planning clinics serving low-income clients has escalated, as 32 Republican state lawmakers are calling for an audit of all such Medicaid providers, including the largest, Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin.
The legislators are asking the Joint Legislative Audit Committee to conduct “a comprehensive, independent audit of Wisconsin’s Medicaid family planning providers,” with “a thorough investigation of their billing practices.”
Nicole Safar, Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin’s policy director, on Wednesday said the group would fight any claims. But if forced to pay, the financial damage would be “devastating.”
“Any sort of audit of family planning providers is only going to show widespread compliance. There is no wrongdoing, there is no fraud,” Safar said. “Anyone can shine a light on us.”
A Nov. 1 report by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism revealed that state auditors claimed that Family Planning Health Services Inc. and NEWCAP Inc. had overbilled Medicaid by a total of $3.5 million, largely for birth control drugs and devices. Those audits are being conducted by the state Department of Health Services’ Office of the Inspector General.
The clinics, in their August responses to the state, said the state itself had set their billing practices. They raised questions about whether the state OIG had unfairly targeted them for audits — a claim the auditors deny.
Beth Hartung, president of the Wisconsin Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, told the Center in November, “My hunch is that if any one of us were audited it would come out the same way. We’re all operating the same way.”
“It would mean, quite frankly, that we would all close,” she said.
Safar also acknowledged then that her organization bills the same way. Planned Parenthood is a nationwide nonprofit reproductive health care organization with 22 Wisconsin locations.
Her statement struck Rep. André Jacque, R-De Pere, when he first read the Center’s report, as an unusual admission of guilt, he said Wednesday.
In a Jan. 22 letter to the audit committee, he wrote, “It is peculiar and deeply troubling that any large recipient of taxpayer dollars would pre-emptively divulge that they are guilty of massively defrauding the government and actively in violation with their billing practices, with no plans to change or reimburse taxpayers.”
He also wrote that “several other states report similar findings with Planned Parenthood and other Medicaid family planning providers,” and said $115 million nationwide had been documented in overpayments. The letter did not provide details.
Jacque, who has a 100 percent rating from Wisconsin Right to Life, said his stance on abortion and family planning issues was immaterial.
“Irrespective of the issue of my position on the abortion issue … this is an important taxpayer issue,” he said Wednesday. “The fact that this is basically a dispute between state auditors and providers, I think that’s something that should organically draw the attention of legislators and the government in general.”
Of the 32 lawmakers who signed, about half have perfect ratings from Wisconsin Right to Life, while the other half just started their jobs.
The audit committee is led by Republicans and composed of lawmakers from both parties. It advises the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau and can direct it to conduct audits.
Primary source documents
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Newly elected Rep. Scott Allen, R-Waukesha, said he could not recall whether he had read the audit findings or response from the clinics, but he agreed to sign Jacque’s letter because the questions he posed seemed reasonable.
Asked whether his pro-life stance influenced his decision to sign the letter, Allen said, “I really couldn’t say. It seems to me that when there’s questions raised, more information is needed, and an audit is an appropriate step.”
Diane Welsh, the lawyer who is representing the two family planning clinics, said the legislative auditors should review the current OIG audits to see whether they were conducted properly before deciding to expand the audit to other providers.
“When the standards that were put in that audit are reviewed by an independent body, they’ll see that the wrong standards have been applied, and they will demonstrate that the Medicaid program has not been overpaying for the services the clinics are providing,” she said. “Wisconsin Medicaid has not been overpaying millions of dollars to family planning clinics.”
Wausau-based FPHS serves about 6,000 people a year in nine counties and declined to comment.
Oconto-based NEWCAP Inc.’s Community Health Services division last year served about 3,500 people in six counties.
Neither organization provides abortions. Both operate in areas officially designated to have shortages of health care professionals.
NEWCAP CEO Robert Koller said his organization “believes that not only are the legislators misguided in making this request, but (the letter) continues to demonstrate nothing less than a concerted effort to limit health care to the most vulnerable population of the state.”
The Department of Health Services said the lawmakers’ actions would not affect the current audits, which are in progress. The clinics challenged the audits in August and have not received a formal response from the OIG.
Since 2012, five Planned Parenthood clinics shut down after the Legislature cut funding to the organization.
Last weekend, Republican Gov. Scott Walker hailed this move and anti-abortion legislation among his key achievements on an Iowa stage with other Republican presidential hopefuls.
The audit claims concern the clinics’ use of Medicaid’s 340B drug pricing program, in which pharmaceutical companies are required to provide discounted drugs to safety net providers.
For family planning providers, the federal government reimburses 90 percent of the cost of drugs, while the state pays 10 percent. That breakdown means the state stands to recoup relatively little, but state auditor Alan White has said his job is to protect federal as well as state taxpayers. |
A day after accepting a top White House job, President Trump's new communications director announced Saturday that he's deleting old tweets that were critical of his new boss, saying his own views have evolved and that what he said in the past shouldn't be a distraction.
Full transparency: I'm deleting old tweets. Past views evolved & shouldn't be a distraction. I serve @POTUS agenda & that's all that matters — Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) July 22, 2017
"Full transparency: I'm deleting old tweets. Past views evolved & shouldn't be a distraction. I serve @POTUS agenda & that's all that matters," Anthony Scaramucci, the latest White House hire, tweeted on Saturday.
He followed up that notice to followers by saying, "The politics of 'gotcha' are over. I have a thick skin and we're moving on to @POTUS agenda serving the American people."
Mr. Trump announced Friday that he'd hired Wall Street financier Scaramucci to help the White House sharpen its public message.
Outgoing White House press secretary Sean Spicer announced his resignation after Mr. Trump selected Scaramucci to be his new communications director, a decision that factored into Spicer's decision to leave, CBS News confirmed. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has served as the deputy press secretary, will be the new press secretary.
In a statement following his appointment, Mr. Trump said, "Anthony is a person I have great respect for, and he will be an important addition to this Administration. He has been a great supporter and will now help implement key aspects of our agenda while leading the communications team."
He added, "We have accomplished so much, and we are being given credit for so little. The good news is the people get it, even if the media doesn't."
Social media users quickly did a deep dive and recirculated past tweets by Scaramucci that were at odds with Mr. Trump's views, including one that praised Hillary Clinton's competence. Mr. Trump defeated Clinton for president last year and continues to criticize her, including in several tweets Saturday.
Other repurposed Scaramucci tweets expressed support for stronger gun laws, which he tweeted about in August 2012. In May 2016, he expressed displeasure with individuals who believe climate change is a hoax. Mr. Trump has at times referred to global warming as a hoax.
Weirdly these are being deleted! But the Internet is forever, Anthony Scaramucci. pic.twitter.com/wYTeULnxMW — Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) July 21, 2017
Twitter users also scrolled back deep into Scaramucci's timeline to raise questions about a 2012 tweet in which he seemed to misattribute a quote to author Mark Twain.
"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like its heaven on earth. Mark Twain," Scaramucci tweeted. Scaramucci did not delete that tweet.
Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like its heaven on earth. MarkTwain — Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) June 15, 2012
Scaramucci served Mr. Trump as a campaign fundraiser and adviser during the transition. He is currently serving as the senior vice president and chief strategy office at the Export-Import Bank, and will officially begin his new role Aug. 15.
He made his first appearance before reporters in the White House briefing room on Friday and quickly apologized to Mr. Trump for referring to him as a "hack politician" during an August 2015 appearance on Fox Business Network.
Asked whether Mr. Trump was aware of the comment, Scaramucci joked that the president mentions it every 15 seconds.
He called it one of his "biggest mistakes" before looking into the cameras and saying: "Mr. President, if you're listening, I personally apologize for the 50th time for saying that." |
Mazda's web of spider problems is growing.
In one of the stranger recalls in recent memory, Mazda is again recalling some of its cars to fix a problem with spiders getting inside and wreaking havoc.
The latest recall involves 42,000 Mazda6 midsize sedans from the 2010-12 model years, and equipped with the 2.5-liter, four-cylinder engine.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said the spiders can weave a web inside a vent hose connected to the fuel tank. This blockage can cause excessive negative pressure inside the gas tank itself.
"Negative pressure could cause the fuel tank to crack, resulting in a fuel leak, increasing the risk of a fire," NHTSA said in a statement.
There have been no fires, accidents or injuries as a result of this issue, Mazda said.
Mazda dealers will notify owners of the affected cars and will reprogram the cars' ECU to compensate for the potential effect of the spiders. Dealers will also clean and inspect the vent hose.
The problem is similar to one discovered in 2011 when Mazda had to recall 65,000 of its 6 sedans from the 2009-10 model years. The culprit was found to be the yellow sac spider, a mildly venomous species (their bite is similar to a mosquito bite). At the time, Mazda surmised that the spiders were attracted to the hydrocarbons in the cars.
That recall installed covers on the vent in the fuel tanks to keep the little guys out. Subsequently, Mazda decided to take the additional step of reprogramming the cars' computers, leading to this latest recall. |
Steve Evans believes Leeds United will reach agreements to extend the contracts of Lewis Cook, Charlie Taylor and Alex Mowatt before the start of next season – on the strength of the squad he plans to put together this summer.
Evans, who revealed on Friday that he expects to sign a deal to stay on as head coach for the 2016-17 campaign once Leeds are safe from relegation, said talks were ongoing with the agents of Cook, Taylor and Mowatt with all three academy products running close to the end of their existing contracts.
The trio are tied down until June 2017, leaving United under pressure to negotiate improved terms and avoid a repeat of the situation which saw Sam Byram – another player produced by Leeds’ academy at Thorp Arch – leave for West Ham United in a £3.7m deal last month.
Byram quit Leeds after months of speculation about his future, caused by Leeds’ failure to agree a new deal with him and an initial offer from owner Massimo Cellino which asked the right-back to take a wage cut. He was sold with only six months left on his contract.
Byram’s exit was the latest in a line of unwelcome departures from Elland Road, before and since Cellino’s takeover in April 2104, but Evans insisted he was not fearful of losing Cook, Taylor or Mowatt – and claimed Byram’s decision to move on had been influenced by Leeds’ inability to challenge for promotion from the Championship.
Uwe Rosler, the head coach who led Leeds into this season, was sacked in October after only 12 games in charge, making way for Evans to replace him. United have not held a place in the league’s top six at any stage since the campaign began.
“I think Sam last summer – and I’m only guessing – didn’t think there was a squad here that would challenge for the Premier League,” Evans said. “That’s probably what he was looking at.
“He had a desire to play in the Premier League. If I was the father of the Cooks, the Taylors, the Mowatts then you want them to play in the Premier League, don’t you?
“But I’d also want them to play there for Leeds United – so I’d have a look and see if they’ve really got a squad which is challenging.
“Do I think Sam would have left if Uwe Rosler was coach and Leeds United were sitting in the top six? He’d still be a Leeds United player. It’s great to see him do well at West Ham but I think he’d still have been at Elland Road.”
Cook, the 19-year-old prospect who has been capped by England at youth level and claimed his first league goal with a spectacular strike in Tuesday’s 1-1 draw with Fulham, signed a new deal as recently as last May.
Leeds handed him a two-year contract as his previous deal prepared to enter its last 12 months. Taylor received a three-year deal in 2014 while Mowatt – the club’s reigning player of the year – was tied down to 2017 during the 2013-14 term.
Evans said: “I don’t know if the status would be advanced but I certainly know the president and Paul Bell (United’s executive director) have been speaking to representatives of those guys. That will go where it goes.
“There’s no pressure from me, the club decide what’s right and what’s not right, but I think we won’t be going into next season with them only have one season left on their deals.”
United are in the bottom half of the Championship but far removed from the relegation zone and Evans said he had been told by Cellino that he would be confirmed as head coach for next season as soon as Leeds were unequivocally safe.
Leeds travel to Brighton tonight, the first of 14 remaining league fixtures, looking to improve a run of one win in 10 matches.
Cook’s long-range shot on Tuesday lit up a tense meeting with Fulham and Evans admitted the young midfielder – targeted by Premier League club Bournemouth in January – would send his value soaring and attract increased interest with a run of goals.
“If he keeps playing as he is then of course we’ll get tested (by bids),” Evans said. “But there was a massive test with Cook in January. It wasn’t just Bournemouth. There were four or five more clubs who expressed a real interest, to the point where I thought the offers would have been acceptable. The president’s view was that he’ll get better.
“I think everyone accepts that if Lewis adds goals to his game, he probably becomes unbuyable for (some) clubs in the Premier League.” |
Posted 6 years ago on Aug. 10, 2012, 4:16 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt
Earlier this week, members of Occupy Wall Street revved up the Illuminator - our bat signal - and beamed a special message onto Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan: Trump is bulldozing the 99% and we stand with the victims of his senseless disregard for environment and cultural heritage.
The guerrilla screening of Anthony Baxter's dramatic documentary 'You've Been Trumped' tells the David-and-Goliath story of a village of fishermen and farmers invaded by Trump to build "the world's greatest gulf course" for elite foreign jet-setters on pristine coastland of immense environmental and scientific value. Initially rebuked by the local municipality, Trump lures in the Scottish government with promises of thousands of jobs. After years of lies, political corruption, journalist suppression, and harassment of local people, Trump has finally constructed just a fraction of his intended plan with mostly-foreign contractors and few permanent jobs.
Solidarity means to stand with oppressed people everywhere because their struggle is our struggle, and there are few clearer cases than this one of the 1% bulldozing the rights, land, and dignity of the 99% for pure profit. Donald Trump does not represent us, and Occupy Wall Street stands with the brave people of Aberdeen and the Menie Estate - and their allies everywhere - fighting for sustainable development and the rights of hard-working people to their own land and communities. |
Le Snoot offers art without the "snooty side" of art, as founder Logan McDonald described it. The play on words and Le Snoot's iconic portly swine mascot define the antithesis of what McDonald did not want to see in his art gallery.
Le Snoot was founded in 2012, and the latest exhibit is called "A Tribute to Adult Swim."
"I was seeing there were more students who wanted to host shows that are outside of fine art," McDonald said. "The average cost of hosting a gallery show - including space rental, framing and other additional expenses - really adds up. It's not a thing everyone can afford. This created the idea of a non-conventional gallery where we use our in-house printing services to display digital works."
Featuring services such as high-quality printing, Le Snoot also offers free gallery space to artists.
The team consists of Logan McDonald, founder and creative director, Sasha Loseva, Le Snoot's accountant, and Kori Gibson, Le Snoot's client consultant.
"Although we have our titles and individual business strengths, our working together is what really makes Le Snoot," McDonald said.
As fans of different Adult Swim programming, the trio decided to introduce a new location with the tribute gallery.
The Adult Swim exhibition will open Oct. 17 at Le Snoot's new location at 11 W. Duffy St.
Gibson's connection to Adult Swim brought insight about the idea for the show.
"I've spent a lot of time watching Adult Swim. From its premiere in 2001, I can honestly admit it's really shaped my humor through to adulthood," Gibson said. "Adult Swim has always been there- bringing my friends and me together where we could sit back and talk about our favorite episodes. I've formed strong bonds with strangers from using references and quotes that other fans can pick up on.
"I used to think of Adult Swim as having only a cult following, but with each new show, I feel as if the fan base is growing stronger. Le Snoot (at the past location) had tribute shows before, such as our past "Adventure Time" tribute show. Logan and Sasha are also longtime fans of Adult Swim, and are excited by the concept."
A Tribute to Adult Swim will showcase works from local and non-local artists paying tribute to their favorite Adult Swim characters and programs.
Le Snoot staffers have their favorites, as well: McDonald's top show is "Superjail!" with favorite character Jeff Goldblum. Gibson's favorites are "Tom Goes to the Mayor" and Dr. Orpheus from "The Venture Bros." Lovesva loves "Squidbillies" with Early Culyer.
Expect to see unique creations featuring all the artists' favorite characters and shows at Le Snoot's Tribute to Adult Swim.
"Some of our best entrants will come in the day of the show," McDonald said. |
In this photo taken Jan. 5, 2012, U.S. director David Fincher smiles during a photo call for the movie "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"in Berlin, Germany. The Walt Disney Studios will film a new version of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" in Australia after the country agreed to pay it 21.6 million Australia dollars ($22.6 million) to film the movie there. The inducement announced Tuesday, April 2, 2013, is the biggest ever paid by an Australian government to bring in a Hollywood production. Fincher will direct the Jules Verne science fiction classic, said Disney Asia-Pacific spokeswoman Alannah Hall-Smith. (AP Photo/Gero Breloer)
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Australia is paying its biggest Hollywood inducement ever to bring "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" Down Under.
The Walt Disney Studios will film a new version of the science fiction classic in Australia, which will pay the studio 21.6 million Australia dollars ($22.6 million) to film there, the government said Tuesday.
David Fincher of "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" and "The Social Network" will direct, said Disney Asia-Pacific spokeswoman Alannah Hall-Smith.
"No casting decisions have been made," she said, so the filming schedule and locations haven't been set.
The Australian newspaper reported the movie was offered to Brad Pitt, who starred in Fincher's "Fight Club," and to Channing Tatum, though nothing has been set.
The story centers on Capt. Nemo and the undersea adventures encountered on his submarine the Nautilus. Jules Verne's book was made into an Academy Award-winning movie in 1954 with Kirk Douglas starring as sailor Ned Land and James Mason as Nemo.
The announcement comes after "The Wolverine," starring Australian actor Hugh Jackman, recently wrapped filming in Sydney. The government paid Fox Studios AU$12.8 million to film in Australia.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the "The Wolverine" created more than 1,750 jobs, contracted more than 1,027 Australian companies and generated AU$80 million in investment.
She expects "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" will create more than 2,000 jobs.
A strong Australian dollar buoyed by a mining boom has made Australia less attractive to Hollywood as a filmmaking location in recent years.
The payment comes in the form of a grant based on a percentage of the film's expected expenditures in Australia. The standard location offset has been 16.5 percent, though the film industry is lobbying for it to be raised to 30 percent.
The government announced last month the creation of a new AU$20 million fund to complement the location offset. It also said it would consider increasing the offset above 16.5 percent if the Australian dollar remained high.
It wasn't known how much the payment would offset the film's budget. It is a major inducement compared to those typically offered in America, where states often give tax breaks to movie and TV productions to film within their borders. This has caused a loss of production in Hollywood, called "runaway production," because California is not as generous with tax breaks as some other states.
"The securing of this film is a huge coup for the Australian film industry and for the near 1,000 local businesses that will be providing goods and services for the film," Gillard said in a statement.
"The Wolverine" in 3D opens in July in the United States, Australia and other countries. |
Cassie Sainsbury: Adelaide woman arrested for drug trafficking in Colombia was framed, family says
Updated
The mother of an Adelaide woman who has been arrested and detained in Colombia for drug trafficking maintains her daughter is innocent and has hit out at those who she says have framed her.
Cassandra Sainsbury, 22, was arrested after being found in possession of 5.8 kilograms of cocaine as she waited at El Dorado International Airport in Bogota to fly back to Australia, her sister Khala said.
Ms Sainsbury was arrested on April 12 after an X-ray machine detected the cocaine hidden in her luggage.
Her family have described her as "naive", and said she could be facing up to 25 years in prison.
Her mother told KIIS FM her daughter was given a package that she believed contained headphones, and she put it into her luggage without questioning it.
"The day of her departure he came up to her hotel gave her a package that was wrapped in black plastic and she took it and put it in her luggage," she said.
"And this is where the naive bit comes in, she didn't even rip it open to make sure there were headphones in there."
She said they had engaged a local lawyer.
"If she pleads guilty the minimum is six years," Ms Evans said.
An Adelaide lawyer who has previously represented Australians charged with drug offences overseas said Ms Sainsbury may not get a trial for three or four years if she did not plead guilty.
Human rights lawyer Stephen Kenny said the defence costs in such a situation could be up to $30,000.
"I've had a brief discussion with a lawyer in Colombia," he said.
"Probably if it's a guilty plea the matter could be dealt with in about six months, but if it went to trial if she pleaded not guilty it could be up to three years before the matter is finalised."
'She is just so scared', mother says
Earlier this morning, Ms Evans told the Today show she could not believe someone could do this to her daughter.
"Cassie is just, 'I didn't do it mum, you have got to get me out' and crying hysterically," she said.
"She is just so scared that she is caught up on the other side of the world for something she didn't do with no support over there, no nothing.
"The anger inside of me that someone could do this to an innocent girl for their own gain and to destroy several lives, not only Cassie's but her family's as well ... I don't know how a person could do that."
Khala Sainsbury said her sister, who has worked as a personal trainer in Adelaide, was in Colombia on a working holiday.
An online campaign, which has raised more than $2,000, has been set up by the family to help raise money to pay for legal costs.
"Cassie would never do anything like what she has been accused of," Khala wrote online.
"Anyone that knows her, would say she is a kind, loving, happy kind of girl. She would help anyone out in need."
Trial to take place in two months' time
Drug laws in Colombia Penalties for possession, use, or trafficking of illegal drugs are severe, and convicted offenders can expect long prison sentences under harsh conditions.
Serious offenders must remain in the country to serve a lengthy parole period, during which they are given no housing and may lack permission to work — as they are neither a citizen nor a resident.
Family members must often support the offender, sometimes for more than a year, until the parole period expires.
Drug crimes account for the third most common reason for imprisonment in Colombia.
Between 42 and 48 per cent of the country's female prison population are behind bars having been accused of drug offences. Source: Transnational Institute study of Drugs and Democracy
Ms Sainsbury was denied bail and would face trial in two months, the family said.
Khala said Ms Sainsbury was being held in Colombia's largest women's prison.
"Our hearts break, because we know she is innocent," she said.
According to her sister, Ms Sainsbury was planning her wedding "to the love of her life" and that was now on hold.
The family also said Ms Sainsbury was a volunteer of the Country Fire Service (CFS).
But a CFS spokesperson said she had not volunteered with the service for three years.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) confirmed it was providing assistance to an Australian woman arrested in Colombia, but would not provide further details.
Topics: drug-offences, crime, law-crime-and-justice, adelaide-5000, sa, colombia
First posted |
There are few things more unsettling than waking up one the morning and realizing that you've somehow lost an entire day. That's the exact feeling you get when you begin watching college basketball on a Monday evening and finish watching college basketball in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, all without a wink of sleep between the two bookends.
For the third straight year, I stayed awake for more than 30 hours in order to watch games that were sometimes entertaining, sometimes tolerable and sometimes unwatchable. It was awesome, and it was really, really stupid.
Here's a rundown of all the bests and worsts from year three of the marathon experiment:
Best Game: Kansas/Duke
A quick look at the list of final scores (and national rankings) makes this choice a puzzling one on the surface, but anyone who actually sat through all 40 minutes of Duke/Kansas knows how high the level of play was. The game had a superior flow to it, and it was more competitive than Kentucky/Michigan State for the first 35 minutes. Then the officials kind of took the shine off it late by awarding Kansas 13 free-throws in their last seven possessions. Basically, it was superior to the game before it for 35 out of a possible 40 minutes, but couldn't match the opener's final act. I still think that's enough to warrant the top spot.
Worst Game: Saint Mary's/Akron
I'm always disappointed at just how scarce the attendance is at this game every year, mainly because Saint Mary's home games are so entertaining to watch during the regular season. You could hear the students getting rowdy throughout the game, but the camera was set up in a way so that you couldn't see them, which gave you a visual of about 15 people who didn't appear to be wearing the home team's colors and looked like they'd rather be anywhere else. It's not exactly a shot of a caffeine at a time when you need it the most. Also, this was the least competitive game of the marathon.
Best Revelation: Tyler Haws is Mickey Parke's identical twin
For real though.
This led to a 2gether theme which made continuous appearances for the first six hours or so of the marathon.
Hardest Game To Stay Awake For: La Salle/Quinnipiac
I'm not going to lie to you, I don't really remember any of this game. In the two years previous, the 3-7 a.m. stretch was by far the hardest for me. Then the sun would come up and I'd go about my normal morning routine and my brain would become convinced that this was just like any other day. That did not happen this year.
My guess is that the successfully-achieved nap I took the night before -- something I couldn't manage in 2011 or 2012 -- had something to do with this. All I know is that I was fine through the wee hours of the night and then dead when the sun came up...and then dead again in the late afternoon during the start of Baylor/South Carolina. The flip side was that I felt way more awake when I finished than I had the previous two years. I don't know why any of this happened or what it means. I probably need to stop doing this.
Best Announcing Performance: Bob Valvano
This is the first year that the revered Kanoa Leahey from Hawaii hasn't received honor. E kala mai iaʻu, my man.
I'm giving the nod to Bob (heh) because he called the Saint Mary's/Akron game at 3 a.m. local time, and then somehow flew to Louisville to call the U of L/Hofstra game a mere 14 hours later. That's a pretty unreal day, which means something coming from me.
Best Fans: The Wichita Rockstar Grannys
This category is obviously just an excuse to bring them up and honor them with the full amount of praise they deserve.
You young ladies truly are...rockstars.
Stay golden.
Best Home Atmosphere: Florida Gulf Coast
This award probably belongs to Wichita State, but since we just honored the grannys, I felt like we should go in another direction. It's like when the big award winner actually deserves all the smaller awards too, but you have to give them to other celebrities to make sure that they'll come. It's exactly like that.
Anyway, the Dunk City fans were terrific. I had no idea that they would embrace the event the way that they did, but kudos.
Worst Home Atmosphere: Stanford
This isn't what you want to see...
Announced attendance was 5,994; looked/sounded like at least half of those fans were backing BYU. Cougar supporters represented at Stanford! — Greg Wrubell (@gregwrubell) November 12, 2013
At the Stanford game - there may be more BYU fans than Stanford fans — Ro Davies (@Ro_Davies) November 12, 2013
I know it's a Monday night for Stanford basketball fans, but this is a big game, and BYU's strong turnout is making them look bad. — Michael Lemaire (@Mike_Lemaire) November 12, 2013
.@byubasketball one of the Stanford ushers told me he hoped BYU won because "your fans are just the nicest people I've ever met." — Jae Clarke (@jaeclarke) November 12, 2013
The Oregon win was almost a week ago. Move on.
Best Team Performance: BYU
Outside of Duke/Kansas, this was the one game I would have been completely wrong about had I made predictions. I came in thinking the Cougars didn't have the size or athletes to hang with a team featuring Chasson Randle and Dwight Powell, and I left (figuratively) believing that they'll be right there with Gonzaga and Saint Mary's competing for the WCC crown. Matt Carlino and Tyler Haws can play with any guards in the country.
Worst Team Performance: Akron
The Zips did not look like a team expected to win their division, which could have had something to do with the travel and tip time. If you're going to wear a Z on your chest, you have to bring more than that...even if it is 4 in the morning.
West Virginia gets an honorable mention here for losing to a bad Virginia Tech team that it had down by 15 points for most of the first half. The Hokies were coming off of a season-opening loss to USC Upstate.
Best Individual Performance: Chase Fieler, Florida Gulf Coast
Plenty of options here, but Fieler made up the highest percentage of his team's points and almost single-handedly turned a game that FGCU trailed by 12 early into an Eagle blowout.
Best Ending: Kentucky/Michigan State
Another category with multiple options worthy of the distinction, but Branden Dawson's tip-in with 4.4 seconds to go to ice the game may have been the single biggest moment of the marathon. Obviously, No. 1 vs. No. 2 coming down to the closing seconds earns some bonus points.
Worst Ending: Baylor/South Carolina
While this may have been the most dramatic ending of the day, a lengthy referee huddle followed by an announcement that the game was over provided the most unfulfilling marathon finish. You would have loved to have seen the Gamecocks have a shot to send the game into overtime with zero seconds on the clock, especially since it was a game you kind of felt like they deserved.
Best Highlight: Jabari Parker's one-handed alley-oop finish
It's impressive enough on its own...
But it gets even cooler when you examine the eerie similarities between it and Grant Hill's dunk for the same team, against the same opponent.
Biggest Disappointment: Jarrell Martin's injury
The highly-touted LSU freshman tweaked his ankle just one minute into his first college game and never returned. The Tigers still played UMass down to the wire in one of the marathon's more entertaining games.
Full Game Rankings:
1) No. 5 Kansas 94, No. 4 Duke 83
2) No. 2 Michigan State 78, No. 1 Kentucky 74
3) BYU 112, Stanford 103
4) No. 23 Baylor 66, South Carolina 64
5) Massachusetts 92, LSU 90
6) Virginia Tech 87, West Virginia 82
7) Cincinnati 68, NC State 57
8) New Mexico State 95, Hawaii 88
9) La Salle 73, Quinnipiac 67
10) No. 16 Wichita State 66, Western Kentucky 49
11) Florida Gulf Coast 65, Hartford 51
12) Saint Mary's 85, Akron 63
All Tip-Off Marathon Team
Chase Fieler, Florida Gulf Coast: Scored a career-high 30 points as Dunk City overcame a slow start to take care of business against Hartford.
Julius Randle, Kentucky: The freshman star dominated the middle against Michigan State, scoring 27 points to go with 13 rebounds.
Jabari Parker, Duke: Introduced himself to the sports world with a dazzling 27-point performance that was highlighted by a one-handed alley-oop cram.
Tyler Haws, BYU: Poured in a marathon-high 31 points as the Cougars dropped 112 on Stanford in what might have been the most impressive performance of the 24 hours.
Chazz Williams, UMass: The marathon darling notched 24 points and dished out eight assists as the Minutemen held off LSU, 92-90
Food And Drink Consumed
1 Mountain Dew Kickstarter
1 Rockstar energy drink
2 Cups of coffee
3 Cheese sticks
1 Weird asian fried rice thing
3 No-bake cookies
2 Pieces of caramel coffee cake
9 Bagel bites
8 Pretzel sticks with dip
5 Handfuls of sweet tart minis
2 Gummy vitamins
It will take my body no less than two weeks to fully recover from this exercise. For the third straight year, this feels like it was a massive mistake.
More from SB Nation College Basketball
• What to watch in college basketball's 24-hour marathon
• Wiggins, Randle and Parker impressive in debuts
• Why the 2013-14 college hoops season will be one of the best ever
• AP names preseason All-Americans | SB Nation's All-Americans
• Andre Dawkins has a story (and he'd rather not talk about it) |
Dale McGowan‘s daughter came home last month and was gushing about one of her teachers:
“We started evolution in science today.” A tickle of dread went down my spine… “And?” “And it’s awesome. He’s teaching all about it, just like you would. He explained what theory really means, and said that the evidence is incredibly strong for evolution, and when kids started saying, ‘But the Bible says blah blah blah,’ he just put his hand up and said, ‘You can talk about that with your minister. In this class we are learning about science, about what we know.”
We’re so used to criticizing bad science teachers that it’s easy to forget how to react when you hear about one who teaches it correctly!
After taking all this in, Dale offers excellent advice (emphasis his):
… we’ve got to get just as good and consistent at complimenting the good as we are at complaining about the bad. It’s not just a question of good manners. If we really care about quality in the classroom, it’s a practical imperative.
Coming from a teacher’s perspective, I can tell you the whole mood of our office changes when one of us gets a positive email. (And CCs the boss on it.) It doesn’t happen often — because, again, parent are generally more used to tearing apart bad teachers instead of praising the good ones — but when it does, the teachers are on a cloud the rest of the day.
It makes you want to rush back into the classroom and do an even better job with the kids. |
Days after returning from West Africa, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Thomas Frieden opened a press conference with a sobering admonition about the effort to contain the Ebola epidemic to West Africa: “The window is closing.”
In an impassioned call to action, he urged American doctors, nurses, and health care professionals to join Africa in its fight. “This isn’t just the countries’ problem,” he said. “It’s a global problem.” With vivid detail, Frieden painted a gruesome picture of overcrowded isolation centers in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, where health care workers are struggling to keep up with “basic care.” He mentioned deficiencies not only in the number of doctors, nurses, and health managers available, but the protective gear needed to keep them safe. Without an immediate change in the current landscape, he said, the worst is yet to come. “The level of outbreak is beyond anything we’ve seen—or even imagined,” Frieden said.
At one particular 35-bed facility, Frieden described the chilling sight of more than three-dozen Ebola patients without beds, left with no other place to fight their infections but the floor. The health care workers, too, face “distressing” conditions. “Roasting hot” personal protective gear including robes, masks, boots, and goggles, make simply drawing an IV a near impossible task. “It is very difficult to move…sweats pours into goggles, [the health workers] see the enormous need but the great risk, too,” he said.
But even more alarming than the disturbing images, was the lack of outside support. “The most upsetting thing I saw was what I didn’t see,” he said. “No data from countries where it’s spreading, no rapid response teams, no trucks, a lack of efficient management,” he said. “I could not possibly overstate the need for an urgent response.”
Outside of the isolation centers, the burial process poses its own unique challenges. With the bodies of Ebola victims even more contagious after death, those who handle them are put at great risk of infection. In his travels, Frieden recalled meeting with young men of a burial team working well past 10 p.m. in full protective gear to bury Ebola casualties. After close to 15-hours of grueling work wrapping the bodies, sanitizing them with bleach, and lowering them six feet into the ground, many return home to families who have ostracized them for fear they carry the infection, forcing them to sleep outside on the ground.
Not burying these bodies properly, Frieden says, poses even more of a threat to the community. When he asked how an Ebola intelligence officer was in the elevator one day in West Africa, he was saddened to watch her respond instantly: “Terrible.” Just days before, the officer told him, 19 bodies of Ebola victims were left lying outside with few men to bury them. The next day, over 35 new cases had developed.
In another harrowing scene, Frieden described meeting with a 22-year-old girl who had been infected with Ebola in Liberia. Fatima, as he called her, had been caring for a young family member suffering with diarrhea and vomiting, when she herself contracted the disease. Even more traumatizing than her own battle with the infection, from which she eventually recovered, was watching her older brother lose his battle. “When I asked her what was the hardest thing…she broke into tears and said she was next to her brother when he died,” said Frieden. “She was horrified by the symptoms he was having—and terrified that she was next. That’s the reality the people in this regions are dealing with every single day.”
In urging Americans and other global health workers to get involved, he stressed that if proper precautions are taken, the work is not dangerous. The CDC director used his own recent experience in West Africa as proof that medical professionals can remain safe. “Swaddled in protective gear” he was “sprayed down with bleach every step of the way” to ensure he was safe. “Turning this around will require lots of effort and highly specialized people. Doctors, nurses, health administers, emergency managers. People who can stay for three months or more,” Frieden said. “The longer you are there the more effective you can be.”
Frieden also called on companies in the private sector to step up their response, saying that that the U.S. Embassy has reached out to corporations who have facilities in the area. Firestone, whose West African rubber factory is the largest in the world, built its own isolation center for the 73 contacts in their company. Eleven ended up contracting the disease, all of which were treated at Firestone’s own facility. “I think it’s in their interest sooner rather than later to get involved,” he said of companies in the area.
When reporters probed Frieden about potential vaccines, he managed expectations of finding a viable treatment option in enough time. “Vaccines have begun clinical trials, but we don’t have large quantities, and even if they’re safe, we have to figure out if they are effective.” The supply of one treatment known as ZMapp, Frieden confirmed, has been completely exhausted. Making more is “extremely difficult,” and not a viable solution time-wise. “We can hope a vaccine works out, but we can’t count on it,” he said.
Despite the chilling report from his West Africa trip, Frieden “remains confident” the there’s still time to contain the epidemic. “I saw many signs of hope,” he said, praising health care workers working around the clock to contain the disease. “I held a 2-year-old kid who is a survivor. Her parents have died but she’s being raised by family…she’s a symbol of hope,” he said. “The survivors are living proof that you can beat this.”
Frieden ended his talk with a final plea to the international community. “There is nothing mysterious about we need to do,” he said. “The only real question is if we’ll do it fast enough.”
If we don’t, there is no telling how far it will go. “For every day that this continues to spread in West Africa, the likelihood of someone getting infected and transmitting it elsewhere increases,” he said. “As long as Ebola is spreading anywhere, all of us need to be concerned.” |
WARNING: This story contains details that may be disturbing to some readers.
The RCMP is looking into several gruesome discoveries of animal carcasses left mutilated by the side of the road near Brandon, Man.
At least six animals have been found dumped in a rural municipality outside Brandon. At least two had their ears cut off.
Hobby farm owner Heather Eagle Bears says she found a dead miniature horse by the road leading up to her house. A few days later, she discovered a mutilated goat at the side of the road. The animal had been tied up and dumped.
"It was quite disturbing," Eagle Bears told CTV Winnipeg on Wednesday. "It was pretty close to home and they didn’t get there by themselves, obviously."
None of the animals belonged to Eagle Bears, but she says they seem like they might have been somebody's pets.
She added that responsible farmers have a "method" for dealing with dead animals, and this isn't it.
"I've never seen anything like this before," Const. Tyler Schryvers, of Brandon RCMP, told CTV Winnipeg.
Police say four more dead animals were reported on Tuesday. Three coyotes and a raccoon were found in a ditch near where the pony was discovered.
RCMP are investigating the deaths, but many questions remain.
"I saw the carcasses and I couldn't tell you if the animals were alive, how they were treated before they were dispatched or what the cause of death was," Schryvers said.
Investigators say they're hoping to identify the individual responsible. |
January 9, 2011 — Mario Gleichmann
Welcome back to another episode of Functional Scala!
First of all, a happy new year to all of you – this year will bring a bunch of new episodes about ‘Functional Scala’ to you, so i hope we’ll grasp a better and better understanding over time on how Scala enables us to write functional code. Again, we’ve only scratched the surface so far – there are far more basic functional concepts (like curried functions, algebraic datatypes, pattern matching, …) to come, before we dig down into some more advanced topis like catamorphisms (sounds cool, eh? But trust me, the idea behind is really simple – you even saw already some examples of it using folds) or type classes and some of their instances (i.e. Functors, Applicatives and even – drum roll – those ubiquitous mentioned ‘warm fuzzy things’ , ehm i mean Monads).
For this episode, we’ll get back into the act really slowly by repeating some stuff of past episodes. We’ll focus on a rather technical aspect of how Scala treats methods when it comes to mix those into the functional game. Let’s repeat some of the core chracteristics for functions: we’ve said that functions are first class values, coming with its own type:
val isEven : Int => Boolean = ( x :Int ) => x % 2 == 0 ... val evenNums = filter( isEven, List( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ) )
C’mon – this is boring. We already knew that. Yeah, i know! But the one thing i want to re-emphasize is the fact, that every concrete function always boils down to a value of a certain function type (in this case Int => Boolean). And since a function is a value, it can be assigned to a name (in this case isEven) and passed to another function just as all other ordinary values like Lists or integer values (in this case function isEven is passed to function filter, which qualifies filter to be a so called Higher Order Function).
Now – in contrast – take a look at the following method, which looks quite similar to our function isEven:
object SomeFilters { ... def isPositive( x :Int ) : Boolean = x > 0 }
You may say that method isPositive looks pretty like a normal function: there’s an argument value of type Int which goes in and another value of type Boolean which is returned by the method (similarly, the last expression within the methods body is also the return value of the method). So far for the similarities! But what may be the type of that method? Uhm, while a method is always a member of a certain type (a singleton object in our case), a method itself doesn’t feature its own type at all! Of course you can say that a method features a certain signature (in this case ( Int ) Boolean ) which almost looks like a function type (like Int => Boolean), but you may remember that this is only syntactic sugar for a Function Trait, e.g. Function1[Int,Boolean]. So in Scala, a function is always a value, represented as an object during runtime which implements a certain Function Trait (while a method isn’t represented as an object in its own right at runtime. It’s rather a member of an object).
So a method can’t be seen as an autonomous value like a function – but it virtually looks like a Function, if we compare its signature with the type of a function, right? So the enthralling question is, what happens if we try to pass the above mentioned method isPositive to a higher order function, which expects a function of a similar type:
val filter = ( predicate :Int => Boolean, xs :List[Int] ) => { for( x <- xs; if predicate( x ) ) yield x } ... val positiveNums = filter( SomeFilters.isPositive, List( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ) )
What have we done? We just called a higher order function filter, which expects a function of type Int => Boolean and instead of passing a function, we just referred to a method isPositive whose signature ( Int ) Boolean looks quite similar!
Now guess what’s going to happen if we try to compile and run that piece of code. The compiler will … not complain! Further on, that piece of code will run smoothly and produce an appropriate, compatible result as if we had passed a function instead of a method. But how can that be? We’ve just elaborated lenghty on the fact, that a method is not a function, yet filter clearly expects a function as its first argument! Something really magical must go on behind the scenes … (please act now and imagine some strange melody as in the Thrillers of Edgar Wallace) .
Well, what’s going to happen behind the scene isn’t that magic at all. In fact it’s so easy that you could do it easily all by yourself. Since we already got all ingredients which we are going to need, let’s think a moment how we could achieve to use that method isPositive for doing all the heavy work (in deciding which integer value may be a positive one). Since all problems in computer science can be solved by addding another level of indirection, what about writing a wrapper function, which in turn delegates to our method?
val wrapperFunc : Int => Boolean = ( x :Int ) => SomeFilters.isPositive( x ) ... val positiveNums = filter( wrapperFunc, List( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ) )
See, this one will work as we explicitly wrap that function around … and isn’t that difficult! Of course, we also could leave that syntactic sugar behind and define the wrapper function by directly implementing the appropriate Function Trait:
val wrapperFunc : Int => Boolean = new Function1[Int,Boolean]{ def apply( x :Int ) = SomeFilters.isPositive( x ) }
Coming from an object oriented background, you now may got a better feeling, since it simply looks like calling the method of an object from inside the method of another object (and in fact, it is!). And this one should be pretty business as usual for all of us. Well, this trick we’ve done (if you’re a fan of design patterns, we could call it the Bridge pattern for bridging some incompatible interfaces) for coercing a method into something where a function is expected, is so easy that even the compiler can detect and do it. In fact, this automatic coercion got an own name – it’s called Eta expansion. As you’ve seen, you could do it by yourself, but since it’s just some boilerplate code, the compiler will take that boring work away from you.
Of course, the context in which eta expansion takes place has to be unambitious, so the compiler can confidently coerce a method into a function. Let’s take a look at a admittedly somehow contrived example …
def sum = 1 + 2 ... def sum( x :Int, y :Int ) : Int = x + y ... val sumAsFunction = sum
What we have here is an overloaded method sum. The first one takes no argument and calculates the sum of two fixed integer values, whenever the method gets called. The second one takes two integer values and returns the sum of both. Now take a closer look at sumAsFunction. Since we didn’t annotate any type, type inference kicks in. The compiler tries to resolve the whole expression and infers the type by the resolved value. Unfortunately the compiler ignores our wish to refer to the second method and coerce it into a Function, since this dull compiler simply ignores our name (…AsFunction) where we clearly stated our intention. Instead the compiler asumes by default that it’s simply a call to the first method (while there is no assisting information), hence sumAsFunction refers to a value of 3 which is of type Int.
Ok – so far so good. But what if we really want to coerce the second method into a function? Well, in this case we have to pitch in for the compiler. There we have two options. The first one is to give an explicit type annotation, so the compiler knows that coercion have to take place:
... val sumAsFunction : ( Int, Int ) => Int = sum
Ahhh, now we force the compiler to do eta expansion, since the simple call of the first method would result in a value of type Int which is clearly in conflict with the stated type for sumAsFunction! So there’s only one chance for the compiler to get out of trouble – that is to coerce the second one into the intended function type.
Since we’ve already introduced the magical underscore as a jack-of-all-trades while discovering some shortcuts within function definition, he’s again on board if we want to initiate eta expansion more explicitly. So the second option to force the compiler to coerce the second method into a function is to explicitly refering to the methods so called method value, simply by quoting some underscore behind the method name (instead of the methods arguments). Since the method is overloaded, we have to give the compiler some more hints, so the compiler can be absolutely sure we like to refer to the second method. That’s done by quoting an underscore for each unapplied argument (accompanied by the arguments type) :
... val sumAsFunction = sum ( _ :Int, _ :Int )
Again, since we explicitly refer to the method value (you can think of getting a reference to the method itself, instead of the result value of a method), eta expansion kicks in and leaves a function of type ( Int, Int ) => Int, which the compiler derives from the method signature. Hence sumAsFunction is of our intended function type – hooray!
Summary
In this episode, we discovered on how to mix methods into the functional game. We’ve seen two options for mostly automatically coercing methods into functions. The first one is to refer to a method by simply stating the methods name without its argument list (which would be a simple method call) wherever a function is expected. In this case the compiler will implicitly performing eta expansion. A more explicit form is represented by the second option, where we apply the underscore after the methods name (instead of the methods argument list). In this case we explicitly refer to the so called method value.
Either way, you have to be prepared for some pitfalls. Since methods belong to objects, and objects typically offer some state which may be refered or manipulated by the objects methods, you may coerce methods into impure functions!
Either way, with eta expansion you now have another cool word within your glossary, with which you can impress your team mates … Fun aside – with eta expansion absorbed into your mental model, you now are able to expand the space of possible function candidates at your hands. As we will see in a further episode, methods are the only way to come close to what is called polymorphic functions (together with eta expansion).
Either way, it’s an easy way to use methods and functions interchangeably whenever functions are needed (and may be one of the main factors why so many people confuse functions with methods, e.g. refering to methods as functions). |
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World Health Organisation had just announced ‘milestone’ of no new infections in neighbouring Sierra Leone when latest fatalities came to light
Two Ebola deaths and three suspected cases in Guinea 'flare-up'
Two people from the same family have died from Ebola in Guinea, the government has said, in the first re-emergence of the virus in the country since an outbreak was declared over in December 2015.
Ebola vaccine trial in Sierra Leone battles against fear and logistics | Kate Holt Read more
Test samples from the two patients “revealed the presence of the Ebola haemorrhagic fever virus”, the government said in a statement, while officials feared further suspected cases. “For now we have two confirmed cases and three suspected cases.”
All five were from the town of Korokpara in the southern region of Nzerekore.
“The health authorities have taken the appropriate measures to contain the spread of the disease,” the statement said.
The announcement came on the same day that the World Health Organisation said the latest flare-up of Ebola in neighbouring Sierra Leone had officially ended.
The UN health agency confirmed Guinea’s new cases. “Two people have tested positive for Ebola in N’zerekore Prefecture, Guinea,” said the WHO.
A source close to the local anti-Ebola co-ordination team told AFP that the two deceased patients were a married couple who had both shown symptoms of vomiting and diarrhoea.
“That attracted the attention of local people who alerted the health services in Nzerekore,” he said on condition of anonymity.
The worst Ebola outbreak on record has claimed more than 11,300 lives since it first began in Guinea in December 2013.
Nearly all of the deaths occurred in the three hardest-hit west African countries of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.
While the WHO hailed the fact that Sierra Leone had seen no new cases for 42 days – or two Ebola incubation cycles – as “a milestone” earlier on Thursday, it also warned that a recurrence of the tropical disease remained a possibility.
“WHO continues to stress that Sierra Leone, as well as Liberia and Guinea, are still at risk of Ebola flare-ups, largely due to virus persistence in some survivors, and must remain on high alert and ready to respond.”
The WHO declared Guinea Ebola-free on 29 December, followed by Liberia on 14 January. |
Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant lead double lives. In one, they’re part of the sketch-comedy troupe The State and the creators of Reno 911!, the hit series that ran for six seasons on Comedy Central. In the other, they’re the screenwriting duo behind self-described “schlocky” movies like Night At The Museum, The Pacifier, Taxi, Balls Of Fury, Let’s Go To Prison, and perhaps the most infamous, Herbie: Fully Loaded. (The average A.V. Club grade for one of their films is C-.) Critical drubbing aside, Lennon and Garant have found considerable success—$1,467,015,501 to put a number on it, as they do in the introduction to their new book, Writing Movies For Fun And Profit: How We Made A Billion Dollars At the Box Office And You Can, Too! (All proceeds from it benefit the USO.) Considering the title and the cover image of a tuxedoed Lennon and Garant being tended by two scantily clad women, readers could be forgiven for thinking the book is jokey, but Writing Movies is an almost ruthlessly practical guide for working inside Hollywood. Many books cover the process of crafting a screenplay—for comparison, The A.V. Club picked up Syd Field’s Screenplay at a garage sale in Hollywood, appropriately enough—but Lennon and Garant’s may be the first to take a macro look at screenwriting. It covers everything from the strict formatting rules of screenplays to how to handle getting fired to taking notes. Just before the book’s release, The A.V. Club spoke with Lennon and Garant about getting into screenwriting, their awareness of their image, and the joy of being Hollywood’s court composers.
The A.V. Club: Most people will know you from Reno 911! and The State, but how did you make the transition into movie work?
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Tom Lennon: There’s a logic to it, but it was very accidental. The logical way it happened is that without us knowing about it—you know how in Karate Kid, all the stuff he’s doing, the wax-on and all that stuff that was teaching him how to do karate? For us, The State was teaching you how to work in a studio system. It was accidentally teaching us. It was the “wax-on” version.
Robert Ben Garant: We pitched every day at 3 o’clock to 10 guys who were rooting against you, who you were in direct competition with to get your sketches on the air.
TL: So you had to be generating tons and tons and tons of material every single day. You had to be working on a sharp deadline.
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RBG: You had to be willing, when they said they don’t want it, to throw it away and start over with something brand new. There were guys in The State who would take one script and rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it and fight for it for a whole season, and after a couple of seasons, you realized that doesn’t work. You have to just be willing to throw something away, no matter how good it is, and write a better joke. And that’s what it is working here: You have to be passionate, and yet throw yourself away. You have to work your ass off all the time, and you realize, as a writer, you can’t win the argument about whether your work is good.
TL: It’s way, way faster to write something else than to argue about it for a long time. Like at The State, Ken Marino sometimes throwing chairs across the room, which did happen on occasion.
AVC: How long did it take you to get a good handle on how this business works?
TL: I think we’re still in that process. But eight films in, we know a lot of the pitfalls. That’s why we wanted to write the book. By the way, I looked up Syd Field, who has, like, two credits. Mnemosyne and Men In Crisis, 1964. Three episodes of a TV series in 1964. When you combine all the credits of all the other screenplay-book writers, you get, like, one or one-and-a-half credits.
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AVC: Yeah, a lot of these books seem to be written by non-writers. Field was an executive. In his book, he talks about looking at thousands of scripts.
TL: You can learn way more in one day of working for the studio. It’s just a different thing.
RBG: We came in as weird, New York, jaded sketch guys, and we’ve had successes and failures, and after doing it for a decade, you learn that there’s only about 70 people in this town, and you run into them over and over and over again. Be nice to them.
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TL: Yeah, be really super-wonderful to be around, on top of writing really, really fast.
RBG: When we first started to write our first movie, You Are Going To Prison, we wanted it to be crazy and unique, brand new, our voice, not like anything that’d ever been before. It took us about a year to write our first script.
TL: And then we were like, “Oh, fuck it. You know what? The guy’s gotta win at the end.”
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RBG: The guy’s gotta win at the end.
TL: Eventually we were like, “Oh wait a second! The reason this keeps not working is because we kept breaking all the rules.” I’m not arguing that the movie ever did work, because, God bless [director] Bob [Odenkirk], but the end was kinda weird.
RBG: You go into prison on page 10, and you get to turn the tide on Icepick by tricking him on page 45.
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TL: So as much as we thought we were coming in and being like The Sex Pistols and like punk-rock dudes—
RBG: But their songs are still chorus, verse, chorus.
TL: Yeah, absolutely! Same with The Clash.
RBG: The Clash were like verse-verse-verse-chorus, and they were catchy. So no matter what you’re doing, no matter how unique your voice is, you have to learn that a studio movie has an exact formula that you stick to. You need to learn that, unless your lead character is written in a way that one of the 20 movie stars want to play him, your movie will not get made. You can write for yourself at home all day. This book is for writing movies that actually will sell in Hollywood.
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TL: But beyond that, it won’t get made. Some screenwriting teachers have sold some screenplays. That’s part of step one. There’s still 95 percent of the process after the fact.
AVC: The book is practical almost to a fault because you acknowledge great rule-busting work, but you pretty sternly advise keeping to the rules. At what point do you think a person can start moving beyond that stuff?
TL: The structure rules? Never, if you’re gonna write studio movies. The structure rules are always true.
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RBG: That said, James Cameron, you know, Titanic is super long. Avatar’s got its own weird shape to it. But that motherfucker started with Terminator, and on page five, a Terminator comes to earth to kill somebody. On page 10, the good guy tries to save Sarah Connor. That movie is a machine, and it’s totally structured, and it’s totally marketable. And it’s got a cool robot with the sex scene.
TL: Our general rule is look at the structure of Die Hard, and if you’re not doing that, you’re probably wrong. You don’t have to have Hans Gruber in it, but… Night At The Museum, basically we just pitched it like, “Oh, it basically has an identical structure to Die Hard.”
RBG: With magic instead of terrorists.
TL: Yeah, exactly, and a T-Rex instead of Alan Rickman. Although, a giant Alan Rickman would have also been cool.
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AVC: The cover of the book—
TL: There’s a lot of cleavage, considering it’s a screenwriting book. That is a lot of boobs. Let’s face it, man.
AVC: Yeah, it is a lot of boobs, and people who are aware of your comic sensibilities might expect this to be a lot jokier than it is.
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TL: Yeah, that was really the agenda, which is say all the stuff that isn’t in any other screenwriting book. Because honestly, no one really knows about it, I don’t think.
RBG: Nobody that’s written a book knows it.
TL: Anyone who was writing a real book about writing for the studios would have chapters about how to get fired. And how to get rehired. How to do rewrites.
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RBG: And, like, formatting.
TL: A lot of formatting in screenplay books is wrong.
RBG: It’s wrong, yeah. Like, you come here out of film school and you know nothing. The assumption that, because you can craft through the script, you’re gonna work out here is crazy. Yeah, you need that, but that’s about 10 percent of it. And so we were trying to help people not be as bewildered. We learned this stuff while working here, and it’s easy stuff to know. Just nobody’s put it in a book yet.
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[pagebreak]
AVC: That Syd Field book spent much more time on building characters and it’s much more about—
TL: Those books focus on the stuff that you can’t teach someone.
RBG: You can’t teach somebody how to be a good writer.
TL: We can teach you the hours that you’re supposed to write—which is every waking moment for the most part.
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RBG: We can teach you the structure that your script has to be in if it’s going to be sold to a studio. But coming up with good characters? You can’t teach that. I would argue that if Syd Field could do it, why didn’t he? [Laughs.] It’s silly. You can teach people to paint, and you can teach people shading and form. You can’t teach someone to be a good painter. You can only teach them the rules.
AVC: The chapter that sticks out is the one about parking lots, which says that where studios allow you to park reveals what they think of you. It was a funny look into unsaid politics.
TL: There’s a lot to know that no one knows, and by the way, not a lot of it is good. We could give you the good news and the bad news. The fact is, if you’re going to work in the studio system, you absolutely will get fired off of everything you’re doing. But also, our book, I think, is pretty upbeat and optimistic. We’re not bitter studio hacks. We’re happy studio hacks.
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RBG: Yeah, we love it.
TL: I’ve been comparing us a little bit to the court composer Salieri.
RBG: Who was happy as a clam until Mozart showed up.
TL: Until there was a Mozart for him to be compared with, he was having a great time, I think! It’s good to be the court composer. I mean, until Mozart’s around to make him go insane.
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AVC: In this kind of business, people tend to discourage anybody else from trying to break in, but this book is encouraging.
TL: Well, thanks. I think there’s a couple things about it, because it’s something that so many people want to try their hand at, and it’s almost impossible to succeed. To get one movie made, I would argue, is almost impossible. So we have certainly tried to demystify as much as we can from the process.
RBG: You get treated like shit as a writer in Hollywood—you’re lower than the doormat. The writer’s the first guy to get fired. So a lot of writers have this chip on their shoulder that manifests itself in trying to mystify the process and talking about how “I sit at my typewriter every day and read.” I think it’s to make themselves feel better, and as a result, like it spooks the shit out of young writers. It’s not magic, and it’s not therapy. It’s a job.
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TL: You should be cracking out about 10 pages a day.
RBG: You can’t learn about it sitting around thinking about it, and you don’t learn about it bitching on comment boards about how Hollywood sucks. Like, look at it, “Okay, that movie sucked and yet those writers keep getting hired over and over and over. Why?” Like there must be a reason! There must be a reason A) why they get hired over and over and B) why do their movies turn out sucky? People need to think about it, check their snobbery at the door, and look at it as a job. In our spare time, Tom is doing this movie that he has creative control over that’s a low-budget comedy, and I just wrote a horror movie that, knock on wood, seems to be pretty close. We did it for fun.
TL: You notice that the “fun” is crossed out on the book. We made a real point of crossing that out.
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AVC: So many times in the book, you drive home the point that the movie is no longer yours once it’s sold. It’s the studio’s. But you have the chapter on Herbie: Fully Loaded where it sounds like you weren’t taking your own advice.
TL: That was a real hot mess for us. We were still figuring out the system. We could have stayed on that movie if we had not been such dicks. [Laughs.] We just simply would not give on a couple things. Which, by the way, you’re the writer—fucking give on those things!
RBG: If we had stayed through to the end, it probably would have been a much better film than the one that it turned out to be.
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TL: We certainly had not learned a lot yet, including how to make people’s bad ideas work. What we did on that one was we just drew a line in the sand and were like, “We’re not gonna make this fucking car smile. A car can’t smile. That’s impossible. It’s made out of metal.”
RBG: We were so aware that the president of the studio loved our first draft.
TL: Loved our draft.
RBG: The person sitting between us and her—
TL: Was fucking us up.
RBG: And it made us so upset that we weren’t thinking rationally and trying to go through the proper channels to make that movie as good as it could be. Even today, I think that movie was gonna suck even if we hadn’t been around, but it would have been better.
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TL: The other way to think about that would be, “It’s pretty bad, but I’ve seen way worse movies.” I feel like I’ve written way worse movies. It’s not even, like, funny bad. It’s not like The Room. It’s just like, “Eh.” It’s like averagely bad. [Laughs.]
AVC: You talk about Herbie: Fully Loaded and some of the other stuff you’ve done, and there’s a funny line in here where you say, “If you’re looking to write Oscar movies, you picked up the wrong book. We wrote the movie where the monkey slaps Ben Stiller.”
TL: Well, one of our big lessons about if you want to do this job—and again, people are gonna be like, “Well, this is only if you want to write giant, schlocky, huge, tent-pole studio movies.” Yes. We’re the first people to say that that’s what it’s for. Yes. This is not to write Atom Egoyan. This is not to write My Life As A Dog. We’re very aware of our image, and I think the first rule that I give if you’re going to screenwriter in Hollywood is suppress your ego. This is kind of a sausage factory. By which I don’t mean this is a sausage party, it’s a sausage factory. We’re making a sausage party. It’s a little bit of both, I guess.
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RBG: But as a writer, it’s funny. People randomly choose somebody who they hate to attack and blame them for the movie being bad, whether it’s the director they hate or writer they hate. Every failure and success in Hollywood is a group effort. It’s a committee. It’s a bunch of people, and good movies and bad movies are the faults, sometimes, of the producer or the executive or the writer or the director.
TL: It’s almost impossible to make a good one. I would argue it’s almost impossible to make a bad movie! It’s almost impossible to make either one.
RBG: Yeah, that’s true. But we look back, and the stuff that I do and that we do together that I’m super proud of is equally hated as the stuff I do that I can’t stand. The stuff that we write that totally gets fucked up and turns out to be a horrible movie is hated. And Reno [911!]: Miami, I think is fucking great.
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TL: The weirdest thing is I look at my Tomatometer of movies that we’ve done, and Herbie: Fully Loaded is only, like, a couple marginally off from the Reno 911! movie, which I still, to this day, think is one of the best things we’ve ever done.
RBG: I stand by it. People hate it. It’s like, “Ah, fuck it.” You make things as good as you can possibly make them. We never jump into anything unless we think it’s gonna be fucking great. And after 10 years you realize sometimes that works out—if it does, it’s a miracle. If it even gets made, it’s a miracle. So we’re here just plugging away. It’s a job. We’re not in a basement in Paris painting. We’re in Hollywood writing movies, contracting for the studios.
TL: Or sometimes we’re writing those movies from a very nice hotel in Paris. The other good thing about writing is you can do it from anywhere. And if you do it successfully, you can do it from any nice place.
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AVC: But one of the things you tell people in the book is that you have to be based in L.A.
TL: Well, to get started, you really, really, really do. Honestly, Ben and I were both guys who lived in the Village in New York. Never thought we would leave, ever. I thought I’d die in Greenwich Village. Kind of like in Edgar Allan Poe. You know how he kind of wandered off one day, and they found him in the gutter? I’m not saying that won’t still happen. That’s still quite likely, because I get to New York a lot. [Laughs.] But we had no intention to ever leave New York. But the fact is, again, if you’re going to play the absolute busiest level—I’m not saying best—busiest level of screenwriting, you absolutely, positively have to be there, hands down, no question.
AVC: You mentioned staying busy and checking your ego—it seems like a certain part of what you’re doing is just a job.
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RBG: I think when you’re saying “just a job.” That’s not accurate.
TL: It’s just an amazing job.
RBG: People have this disconnect. Because people know our faces because of The State and Reno, we’re screenwriters and people know who we are. It’s funny to me because stoners and people who love The State then say, “Yeah, but The Pacifier sucked.” And I just say, “The Pacifier is for children or for their parents. Why did you go fucking see it?” When people attacked our family movies, “Night At The Museum sucked!” “Yeah, well, about a billion dollars’ worth of people disagree with you.” And I, believe it or not, agree with the people who like Night At The Museum. It’s a good family movie. The reason we pitched Herbie: Fully Loaded wasn’t for the paycheck. We looked at the crappy billboard for I think it was The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, and we said, “Why don’t people do decent family movies?” As a kid, I loved Herbie, I loved Mary Poppins. Why isn’t anyone who’s funny or smart writing movies for families? And so that’s, oddly enough, how we started the thing that became disaster that was called Herbie: Fully Loaded.
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TL: You gotta understand, at this point Lindsay [Lohan] had just gotten boobs. It was a different world, man. Everything was still ahead of us. |
About This Game Juliette Waters wakes up in an empty apartment from the seventies, buried underground by a landslide. With the help of her ghost recording equipment she manages to escape and make contact with Walter, the owner of a local boat business. She learns that her boyfriend Jonathan is looking for her, and she decides to look for him too. She borrows Walter’s boat to travel the flooded landscapes of Saginaw Park, and heads for the coordinates written down on a post-it note stuck to the ship’s computer.
Sylvio 2 is an atmospheric, first-person horror game completely without chasing enemies or cheap jump scares. The unique gameplay mechanic of the video and sound analyzing tool lets you find hidden messages and clues on how to interact with your surrounding and progress through the game.
The game consists of nine levels and a flooded main area with twenty islands, free to explore. Estimated gameplay time is 6 hours.
Sylvio 2 is a sequel to critically acclaimed Sylvio, nominated for Best Original Game on the 2015 TIGA Awards and listed as one of the best horror games by PC Gamer. It is created and developed by Niklas Swanberg, owner of horror game studio Stroboskop. Juliette Waters is once again portraid by Swedish actress Maia Hansson Bergqvist. |
Donald Trump in Jackson, Mississippi on Saturday. Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
On Monday morning, several injuries were reported after an explosive device went off in New York City’s Port Authority bus terminal; the device was apparently strapped to a 27-year-old man who is now in custody. The incident is being considered an attempted terror attack, and the president responded swiftly by … uh …
Another false story, this time in the Failing @nytimes, that I watch 4-8 hours of television a day - Wrong! Also, I seldom, if ever, watch CNN or MSNBC, both of which I consider Fake News. I never watch Don Lemon, who I once called the “dumbest man on television!” Bad Reporting. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 11, 2017
Indeed, it appears that POTUS is ignoring today’s national security news because he is fuming about a weekend New York Times story that reported that his primary occupation as president is reading and responding to the little headlines that scroll along the bottom of cable news programs.
As the National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar pointed out, Trump may have had the Times story on the brain because he was … watching cable news:
Sounds like he was watching MSNBC, which was discussing the NYT story right before this Tweet... https://t.co/TUw5xScajB — Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) December 11, 2017
Of course, whining about Don Lemon is preferable to the president’s usual methods of responding to terror attacks, namely spreading urban legends and gloating about the validation of his complaints about Muslims. |
The home secretary, Amber Rudd, did not look at evidence held by South Yorkshire police on its operation at Orgreave during the 1984 miners strike and the subsequent collapsed prosecutions against 95 men before she turned down an inquiry into the events, the Guardian has learned.
The Home Office has refused to say what documents Rudd and its officials considered, but South Yorkshire police said they had not sent the materials they held to the home secretary.
Campaigners said they felt let down and that Rudd had made a superficial decision “without bothering to look at the evidence”.
The South Yorkshire police archive on Orgreave is understood to include all its papers on the operation itself, in which officers are accused of having planned the use of violence against 8,000 miners who gathered to picket the coking plant near Rotherham.
Documents also relate to the criminal charges subsequently brought against 95 miners, which collapsed in June 1985 after allegations that police officers had lied in court and fabricated evidence. Papers documenting 39 miners’ subsequent civil claims for assault, false arrest and malicious prosecution, which the force settled, paying £425,000 in damages, are also held.
Other material includes witness statements, lists of arrest records, documents on the “mutual aid” given by other police forces, as well as photographs and film of the day. None of it was seen by the Home Office during 15 months in which first Theresa May, then Rudd, said they were considering an inquiry.
The Home Office also did not approach the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) for the evidence it gathered and examined to produce its June 2015 report on Orgreave, the police watchdog’s deputy chair, Sarah Green, is understood to have told campaigners.
The Home Office declined to say what evidence May, Rudd or her officials had considered before reaching the decision not to launch an inquiry. A spokesperson said only that Rudd had reviewed “a range of relevant documentation”.
Joe Rollin, chair of the Orgreave Truth and Justice campaign (OTJC), said: “We were led up the garden path for more than a year, given signals that some form of inquiry would be held, but this now shows the Home Office let us down without even bothering to look at the evidence. People in our former mining communities felt crushed by the decision last Monday, and angry with themselves for ever believing the government would listen.”
May first said in June last year that she would “consider any request to set up a public inquiry”, after the IPCC reported evidence of excessive force by police at Orgreave, and subsequent perjury by some officers, perverting of the course of justice and a cover-up.
South Yorkshire police told the Guardian, in answer to a question about whether the force had given its files to the Home Office: “All of the materials in possession of South Yorkshire police have been previously made available to the IPCC in their raw form. We have not shared these files with any other body.”
In July last year May, then home secretary, met OTJC representatives and was told that mistrust of the police has passed down to miners’ grandchildren. Families whose relatives were among the 96 people unlawfully killed due to South Yorkshire police failings at Hillsborough five years later also told May and Rudd that they wanted an inquiry. The Hillsborough families believe that the disaster and its subsequent alleged cover-up might have been avoided had the force’s culture been reformed after the malpractice exposed by the Orgreave events.
However, last week Rudd announced she would not hold an inquiry in any form. She said this was principally because nobody had died at Orgreave, there had been no miscarriage of justice, policing had improved since 1984, and the link with Hillsborough could not be made with any certainty.
Labour’s Andy Burnham, who has campaigned for an inquiry into Orgreave, said the former mining communities in South Yorkshire had “again been told by the government that they do not matter”.
He said: “This news confirms my suspicion that the home secretary did not do a thorough job in looking at all the evidence, and for that reason her decision is inadequate and unsound.”
Following Rudd’s refusal, a cross-party group of MPs led by the chair of the home affairs select committee, Yvette Cooper, and including the Conservative MP Edward Leigh, wrote asking her to support the committee holding its own inquiry into Orgreave.
As the committee’s membership has a six-to-five Conservative majority, support from the government is seen as essential to securing a decision by members to pursue an inquiry. Cooper has also asked Rudd what evidence the Home Office relied on before refusing an inquiry into Orgreave. The Home Office is due to respond on Friday. |
His comments put him at odds with the society’s official response to the dispute. In a statement earlier this month, the organization attributed the exclusion of Mr. Wong to a judgment error “at the staff level.” It also said that the organization has hosted events “with speakers representing all sides of major Asia-related issues.”
Mr. Wong was a leader of the Umbrella Movement, which began in 2014 and took its name from the umbrellas that protesters used to defend themselves from police pepper spray during weeks of widespread demonstrations where they demanded a more direct say in the election of the Hong Kong’s chief executive, its top political office.
Mr. Wong contributed to “Hong Kong 20/20: Reflections on a Borrowed Place,” a compilation of writings marking the 20th anniversary of Britain’s 1997 handover of the territory to China. The Asia Society had invited him to speak at a gathering to commemorate the publication of the book.
Once it became clear that Mr. Wong was not welcome, allegations of censorship arose, and fingers pointed at Mr. Chan, a real estate developer and philanthropist who has been outspoken in his support of Leung Chun-ying, the former chief executive of Hong Kong and the focus of the 2014 democracy protests.
“At Asia Society, we just don’t cover certain things. Can I have the liberty to do that?” the co-chairman said at the lunch on Thursday, which had the theme “Hong Kong, 20 Years Later: Promises Made, Promise Kept, Promises to be Fulfilled.” |
A tagged union
Sometime you have some data that can be of type A or B. Very common use cases include decoding various file format or network protocols, communicate with memory mapped devices, some processing that can return an A or a B depending on its result, and many more.
To resolve that issue, it is common to use a union. A union is a aggregate where all members share the same memory. It is very handy, but use it wrongly and you end up badly messing up your memory. I’ll demonstrate in this article how to make this safe in D.
The first step toward this goal is to create a tagged union: a union associated with a tag that indicates which element of the union is currently valid.
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struct TaggedUnion {
union {
A a ;
B b ;
}
enum Tag {
A , B
}
Tag tag ;
}
Now we have a nice struct that contains either an A or a B, and a tag that indicate which one it is. But this is still unsafe, use it wrong and you’ll wreck your memory. We need to make it safe.
Some encapsulation
The next obvious step is to build the struct in the proper state right away. Let’s put some constructors in place, let’s make all the data private, and provide access to these via controlled, typed, ways. We need to provide a method that checks the tag and calls the right user code with the correct type. Thankfully, D allow to do that – without performance penalty – using template alias parameters.
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struct TaggedUnion {
private :
union {
A a ;
B b ;
}
enum Tag {
A , B
}
Tag tag ;
public :
this ( A a ) {
tag = Tag. A ;
this . a = a ;
}
this ( B b ) {
tag = Tag. B ;
this . b = b ;
}
auto ref apply ( alias fun ) ( ) {
final switch ( tag ) with ( Tag ) {
case A :
return fun ( a ) ;
case B :
return fun ( b ) ;
}
}
}
At this point you probably wonder how you can use this. This is dead simple, you simply call the function apply with the code you want to run as a template parameter. Your code will be instantiated with all the possible types.
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TaggedUnion t = ...;
void process ( T ) ( T data ) {
alias Type = typeof ( data ) ;
static if ( is ( Type == A ) ) {
// Code that handle the case where it is an A.
} else static if ( is ( Type == B ) ) {
// Code that handle the case where it is an B.
} else {
static assert ( 0 , "You must handle type " ~ Type. stringof ) ;
}
}
t. apply ! process ( ) ;
Be careful, as type inference can get in your way here. If case A and B don’t return the same type, you may want to specify it explicitly. Another pain point is that a function that does not return is assumed by dmd to be of return type void (when it can be anything). If you want to throw in some cases, you’ll also need to be explicit. You also can’t use a local function for reasons that seem unclear to me – most likely a dmd bug (2.062).
A generic solution
Now we can repeat this pattern all over the place, but at some point a more generic solution becomes worthwhile. D is quite powerful at this game, so let’s leverage this. We will use some string mixins to construct the exact same union as we did before, but dynamically with several types. Nothing new here, we simply ask the compiler to write the code for us.
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template TaggedUnion ( Types ... ) {
private auto getUnionContent ( ) {
string s ;
foreach ( T ; Types ) {
s ~= fullyQualifiedName ! T ~ " member_" ~ T. mangleof ~ ";" ;
}
return s ;
}
private auto getTag ( ) {
string s ;
foreach ( T ; Types ) {
s ~= T. mangleof ~ "," ;
}
return "enum Tag {" ~ s ~ "}" ;
}
private auto getSwitchContent ( ) {
string s ;
foreach ( T ; Types ) {
s ~= "case Tag." ~ T. mangleof ;
s ~= ": return fun(member_" ~ T. mangleof ~ ");" ;
}
return s ;
}
struct TaggedUnion {
private :
union {
mixin ( getUnionContent ( ) ) ;
}
mixin ( getTag ( ) ) ;
Tag tag ;
public :
this ( T ) ( T t ) if ( is ( typeof ( mixin ( "Tag." ~ T. mangleof ) ) ) ) {
mixin ( "tag = Tag." ~ T. mangleof ~ ";" ) ;
mixin ( "member_" ~ T. mangleof ~ " = t;" ) ;
}
auto ref apply ( alias fun ) ( ) {
final switch ( tag ) {
mixin ( getSwitchContent ( ) ) ;
}
}
}
}
D allows for very expressive type construction, and that is awesome! This small example is simple and shows perfectly how to do it. Unlike many abstractions in programming, this one doesn’t cost anything at runtime as it uses compile time feature of D. This is probably one of the biggest advantages of D : allowing you to build nice abstraction completely at compile time and have the optimizer remove the excess for you.
PS: Once again, a big thank to John Colvin for his help in correcting the article. |
A suspected chemical attack on a rebel-held town in Syria has triggered the first direct US military action against the country’s government forces as the US launched a missile strike against a Syrian air base earlier today. Following the attack on 4 April, there were reports of residents dying in their houses, with victims and injured survivors showing symptoms that match poisoning by nerve agents. However, there is no evidence yet to identify which one.
Symptoms included pupils shrunk to the size of pin pricks, foaming at the mouth, breathlessness and convulsions. ‘The best guess is a nerve agent, probably an organophosphate,’ says Dino Pisaniello of the School of Public Health in the University of Adelaide, Australia. ‘The characteristic response of pin point pupils is a key clinical observation here. Sarin is suspected but there are many organophosphates that would exert the same effect in sufficient quantity.’
All nerve agents (see below) work in the same way, latching onto cholinesterase enzymes in blood plasma, red blood cells and at certain nerve endings in tissues. The enzyme can no longer hydrolyze the neurotransmitter acetylcholine involved in muscle contraction, which accumulates, leading to violent muscle spasms and death if the muscles involved in breathing can’t function. The bond between the nerve agent and the enzyme is permanent unless antidotes are administered.
Finding the culprit
It is important to identify which agent was used to predict the number of people who might be affected and to establish culpability, says Dan Kaszeta, a London-based consultant and former US Army Chemical Corps officer. ‘Knowing the type of nerve agent helps us chase the supply chain and understand the full narrative behind the attack. It is essential for any war crimes tribunal to have this evidence collected by a neutral organisation like The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW),’ he says.
‘It looks like people downwind of the attack were affected which means that it was a volatile agent like sarin and not VX,’ speculates Alastair Hay, an emeritus environmental toxicology professor at the University of Leeds, UK.
The OPCW has 22 labs licensed to examine chemical weapon samples and can identify a nerve agent from biomedical or environmental samples. There are tests to measure degradation products of nerve agents in urine taken from victims, or the levels of cholinesterase in blood.
Environmental samples, such as soil and concrete, can also provide evidence but the clock is ticking as the site remains in a war zone. Hay says timely access to the site is important, but evidence can be retrieved years after an attack in some cases.
‘It looks like people downwind of the attack were affected which means that it was a volatile agent like sarin and not VX’ Alistair Hay, University of Leeds
At the moment, there is also still a question mark over where the weapons came from and who is responsible for the attack. In theory, competent chemist could make these nerve agents, says Hay. ‘However, the difficulty is having a virtually airtight facility so there is no risk of exposure. Nerve agents are so toxic that a very small exposure can kill, so containment of the reaction sequence is critical.’
Kaszeta points out that nerve agents need to be produced in a batch process at scale, requiring ‘some heavy chemical engineering’. He continues: ‘There are 5-7 steps required to make sarin, for example, some of which are extremely difficult, and one requires hydrogen fluoride at high temperature and pressure. It is an expensive undertaking.’
That’s one reason why most commentators agree that the Syrian government is most likely to be responsible; the rebel forces don’t have the money, infrastructure or expertise, says Kaszeta. What’s more, the OPCW established that the Syrian government killed hundreds of people using sarin in an attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in 2013. |
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Today is a good day for fans of American supercars. California-based Bulleta Motors unveiled its latest supercar creation: the RF22. Although it’s based upon the Lotus Evora, it doesn’t look much like the little British Porsche fighter that underpins it.
Samir Sadikhov, the man responsible for the Aston Martin DBC and the Cadillac C-Ville, penned the sleek yet menacing body. Underneath the bodywork, Bulleta has managed to squeeze a 3.5-liter V6 with a Bulleta-designed supercharger, which is good for 505 horsepower and 410 pound-feet of torque and a 0-60 time of 3.6 seconds. Not exactly F-22 power, but pretty quick just the same.
Mounted mid-car, the engine sends power to the rear wheels through either a six-speed manual or an optional six-speed automatic with sport paddle shifters behind the steering wheel.
Stopping power comes from carbon ceramic disks which are surrounded by standard 19-inch carbon fiber wheels or optional 20-inch forged aluminums.
Intriguingly, Bulleta Motors will allow customers to spec the car with a composite body or with a carbon fiber body. Then, on the interior, buyers can choose either a two or a 2+2 seating arrangement, which makes it ideal for any supercar or super GT enthusiast with or without kids.
If that weren’t enough kit for you, World Car Fans reports that each RF22 buyer will also receive a “custom made, individually numbered, Swiss mechanical chronograph time piece, matching the serial number of its companion car.” I guess that’s so when your RF22 is in the shop, as it inevitably will be as a limited production supercar from a relatively unknown carmaker, you can still feel connected to your very expensive American-built lump of carbon fiber. |
This post will have a lot of UPG. Take it for what you will.
Hiraeth, a Welsh word with no exact English definition. There are a few variations of the meaning scattered on the internet. But there are two definitions that really make sense to me. The first one is from Wikipedia, “It is a mix of longing, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness, or an earnest desire for the Wales of the past[1],” and the second from a Welshwoman studying abroad, “A longing to be where your spirit lives[2].”
Ever since discovering this word and the multiple layers behind it, it has stuck with me. But it is not until today that I truly understood the word. To be able to feel what the word means, not just to know the definition. It was a very surreal and fundamental moment for me.
I spent the afternoon with my Great-Uncle Ian at a small garden shop and tea room. It’s called The Secret Garden and it is truly a fitting name. A 400 year old building Just off of the A4042 you can easily blink and drive past it. We perused the grounds and looking at flora that he knew of far better than I. But even though I don’t know the specifics of each flower, I could still appreciate the place.
After a while we do what any self-respecting Brit does when possible, we drink some tea. Their tearoom overlooks the stereotypical Welsh countryside. A field of sheep with accompanying donkeys, and striking green hills. The best part of the entire view was that in the distance nestled in the valleys was my childhood hometown and Folly Tower, a local landmark that was originally built around 1765 or so.
We sat there until closing time and talked about life and nature, with him sharing his countless tales of past experiences I will never forget. But towards the end of the conversation right before we had to leave, I experienced hiraeth for the first time in a moment similar to the Eureka Effect.
The cold wind nipped at my face, laughter was tangible in the air, and Sól ignited the sky in an amber blaze before He ended His journey. At this moment I saw Cymru in all of its primal beauty. I saw my home. Not just the place I currently reside, but the place where my spirit lives. I saw the Green, Green Grass of Home. The fields and valleys that have sustained my People and ancestors for centuries. I saw the pride of Y Ddraig Goch that all Welshmen and Welshwoman share. But even then, there was something deeper still.
My spirit dwells not only with the people and lands of Wales, and all of Britain, but with the Gods and wihta of this island as well. While I was once content with refusing religion or believing in some form of Other, there was always something missing. A subtle void that always kept me pondering the possibilities. This island has worshipped many gods and goddesses; from Brigid to Vesta to Þunor, they are all a part of my past and they all influence my future.
I would at a time attempt to limit myself to only one Way. Though I have come to find that the Old Ways are not as simple as a solitary road leading from one place to the next. The Ways are more akin to a complex system of roads that may combine in places, diverge in others, or even run parallel within view of each other. And yet, all of these various roads have the possibility to find themselves at the same destination: To reach the Other, in whatever variety it may be in.
Where I used to be worried about only taking a specific road, to never diverge for the fear of finding myself lost. Now I have no such trepidation. I am content with weaving through the various roads, albeit with healthy caution. For to travel many is to have a far more complete and authentic view of the world; and in this instance, a more authentic view of the Old Ways my spirit has chosen to reside with.
Hiraeth is now a constant low ache in my heart. An addiction not dissimilar to that of an addict. For I experienced if only for a moment, the world that my ancestors lived. Where there was nothing but your inner-yard, the land to support you, and the Gods to watch over it all. A simpler time but perhaps a more fulfilling one. To have some semblance of that again is something to crave. The closest place I experience anything close to it when I’m with the Other. When life becomes an ephemerally simple matter of honouring the Other. Something that has happened since the beginning of time and will continue to do until the very end.
But I allow myself to divert on tangents. It is a habit that leads to attempting many conversations at once which often becomes a veritable mess of things. So I will return to the story at hand. Once the moment had passed and Sól escaped behind the mountains, we had to leave. But now the Garden was possessed by a new feeling entirely. The air was heavier and our movement sluggish. We sauntered around the premises once more but all the while followed by a white Labrador. He has lived in the Gardens for years, dutifully guarding the place. I believe he protected the place in more ways than one. For my family has said multiple times that they believe dogs live in two places at once. I see no reason to disagree with that opinion. There were many statues of gnomes scattered around. Whether this means that hobs lived around or not I do not know for sure, but the dog made sure to sniff each and every statue. I took that as a sign, for all we can do when it comes to Others is look for signs and omens.
With the experiences in both the tearoom and leaving the Gardens, I left that day with a certainty that I was home in every sense of the word. I am in the land of my ancestors once more, and following gods that once had power in the people’s hearts. And this, in all of its simplicity, is enough for me.
Most of these pictures were taken from The Secret Garden website. I did intend for this post to have a more direct intent when first writing it, as I had every intention of finishing it when I got back from the Gardens. However, life happens and it has been almost a month since the visit so the post has lost some of its intended meaning through the delay of my writing. But I had far too much written down already to just abandon the writing and seeing a draft every time I opened WordPress was slowly destroying my sanity.
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Michael 'Mike' Stephenson, MBE, commonly known as Stevo, (born 27 January 1947) is an English rugby league commentator and former player.
Mike Stephenson was born in Dewsbury, West Riding of Yorkshire, England.
Stevo, the nickname that he is known by in rugby league and on TV, played at club level for Dewsbury, and Australian side Penrith, and also played for Yorkshire and Great Britain, with whom he won the 1972 Rugby League World Cup. Stephenson played in the hooker position for most of his playing career.
Stephenson was responsible for the setting-up of the Rugby League Heritage Centre at the George Hotel in Huddersfield.
He was awarded an MBE (Member of the Most Excellent order of the British Empire), for his services to rugby league and sports broadcasting in the New Year Honours List 2017.[3]
Playing career [ edit ]
Stephenson began his professional playing career at his hometown club Dewsbury in 1966, after being signed from local amateur club Shaw Cross RLFC. He went on to make his Great Britain début in Castleford in 1971 against the touring New Zealand side. His greatest moment in international rugby league was being a member of Great Britain's victorious 1972 World Cup-winning side; Stevo scored a try against Australia in the World Cup Final.
Stephenson won caps for Great Britain while at Dewsbury in 1971 against New Zealand, in 1972 against France, and in the 1972 World Cup against France, New Zealand and Australia.[1]
Stephenson's time in the Dewsbury first team coincided with an upturn in the club's fortunes on the pitch. He played in Dewsbury's 9–36 defeat by Leeds in the 1972–73 Yorkshire Cup Final and scored 2 tries in Dewsbury's 22-13 victory over Leeds in the 1972-73 Championship Final. He left Dewsbury after their championship winning season in 1973 to join Australian Rugby League outfit Penrith. He played 69 games for the Panthers between 1974 and 1978, scoring 21 tries. Stevo was also player-coach of the side for a brief, unsuccessful spell. He ended his playing career in 1978 and settled in Sydney.
Broadcasting career [ edit ]
Stevo began his broadcasting career in Australia with brief spells at radio and television stations in Sydney. He first appeared on British airwaves in 1988, when he was invited to co-commentate on the rugby league Ashes series in Australia for BBC Radio 2 with Eddie Hemmings.
In 1990, Stevo joined the new British satellite television broadcaster BSB as a match summariser for its Rugby League coverage. At BSB, he joined up again with Hemmings, who had also been signed up by the broadcaster. The pairing were kept together when BSB and Sky Television merged to form BSkyB in 1991; the combined satellite TV network inherited BSB's rugby league TV contract.
Stephenson announced at the start of the 2016 season that he would be retiring from commentating at the end of the season after 26 years. His last game on the microphone was the 2016 Super League Grand Final.
Honours [ edit ]
Club [ edit ]
International [ edit ]
Individual [ edit ]
Harry Sunderland Trophy: 1973
References [ edit ]
Stevo: Looking Back, by Mike Stephenson ISBN 978-1-904091-23-3 |
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Political correctness is a class mechanism used to justify the marginalization of a “deserving poor”. Two recent developments, one an event and one a trend, make this clear: the 2016 presidential election, in which Americans (a correspondent has suggested I specify: white Americans) without college degrees voted to an unprecedented extent as a bloc or “class”; and the furor around campus “free speech”, which has developed somewhat in response to real instances of academic and artistic censorship, but just as much in response to the imposition of intricate, inconsistent rules of etiquette which are impossible to deduce from first principles and almost as difficult to relate to the real and urgent material deprivations which still cause so much suffering in the world. Leftists should view political correctness very skeptically, not only for strategic, tactical, or epistemic reasons, but for moral reasons as well. I’ll draw on the philosophical literature about epistemic injustice to explain what I mean.
To its proponents, political correctness is a way of avoiding transgressions ranging from minor faux pas to serious “symbolic violence”. Increasingly activist analytic philosophers have classified many of these transgressions as forms of epistemic injustice, or harms against individuals in their epistemic capacities (as questioners, reasoners, knowers, etc.). In a 2007 book of the same name, Miranda Fricker claims that these transgressions are significant both ethically and epistemically: that hewing to epistemic justice also best serves epistemic rationality – that it’s the best way to find the truth. In turn, many opponents of political correctness suggest either that it is ethically insignificant (that the relevant transgressions cause only minimal harm) or that it is epistemically pernicious (that it makes finding the truth harder, or impossible). Here instead I want to argue that political correctness is ethically pernicious: that it itself leads to the sorts of transgressions that philosophers of epistemic injustice take seriously.
As a disclaimer, the fact that I’m mostly discussing Democratic, liberal, progressive, or leftist political correctness should not be taken to mean that I think Republicans, conservatives, reactionaries, and rightists are not guilty of insisting on political correctness on some occasions. In fact, I think of political correctness as an unfortunate tendency exhibited by almost every group of human beings. Nevertheless, provisionally, I want to say that there’s a reason to worry particularly about the currently dominant liberal political correctness more than similar conservative behavior, and the reason is precisely that the latter does not seem to rise to the level of injustice in the same way the former does. But as I indicated, this is just a provisional view.
The central, canonical form of epistemic injustice is testimonial injustice, the harm that accrues when prejudice or bias causes one person to disbelieve another person’s testimony. This can be seen as a kind of flip-side of standpoint epistemology, which urges that marginalized people be seen as relative “experts” on the conditions of their marginalization (people of color as experts on race, women as experts on gender, and so forth). It is easy to imagine the sorts of scenarios that inspired this concept: scenarios in which some woman is disbelieved because “women are hysterical”, for instance, or in which a member of some ethnic group is disbelieved because of a stereotype about lying.
Testimonial injustice has been a central feature of mainstream Democratic politics for years. This is the What’s the Matter with Kansas? school of thought: poor white voters just don’t know their own interests, can’t distinguish what’s good for them from what’s bad. In 2008, Barack Obama provoked gasps by saying out loud what many liberals (and centrist Republicans) believed: that voters in poor rural towns whose factories had closed “get bitter” and “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them . . . as a way to explain their frustrations.” The expression of values which for some other group would simply be believed, if not always respected, here requires a diagnosis. In 2016, Hillary Clinton made it clear that the testimony of a quarter of the electorate, the “deplorable” half of Trump voters, was unreliable and unimportant due to the group’s biases. Nathan Ballantyne makes clear in “Debunking Biased Thinkers (Including Ourselves)” that the attribution of bias is as vulnerable to bias as any other discursive move. Even Bernie Sanders said at one point during the primaries that white people could not know what it feels like to be poor. Surely, a charitable listener thinks, he must not have meant to include, for instance, the white folks of McDowell County, West Virginia, and of similar places, many of whom were so excited by his candidacy.
Academic discourse being in many ways a rabid form of Democratic politics, it should come as no surprise that academia is rife with testimonial injustice as well. I will restrict myself to mentioning one instance, the notion of white fragility. White fragility is taken to be a phenomenon in which white people fall apart during discussions of race: they refuse to engage, become excessively defensive, fall back on (purportedly) discredited tropes like “colorblindness”, and so on. In any such discussion, statements by white people that fall into this pattern can be diagnosed “fragile” and thus discredited. What’s important to me here is not whether the theory of white fragility is true or false (an empirical question), but who, in particular, will exhibit this trait. First, older people are more likely to exhibit white fragility, since they hail from a time in which aspiring to “colorblindness” was still considered liberal or progressive. Second, neurodiverse people, like those with social anxiety or autism-spectrum disorders, are more likely to exhibit white fragility, due to the emotional difficulty and inherent awkwardness of such conversations and the seeming requirement that one suspend one’s own judgment and substitute another person’s. Third, the worse-educated are more likely to exhibit white fragility, as rebutting ideas like colorblindness actually takes extended and not always persuasive argumentation.
Testimonial injustice is a regrettable but hardly avoidable feature of human tribalism. What really troubles me is the hermeneutical injustice of political correctness. (Like “epistemic” and “testimonial” injustices, this is Fricker’s term.) Hermeneutical injustices are harms caused by the unequal distribution of shared epistemic resources, especially lexical and other linguistic resources, for making sense of our experiences. I want to point out two kinds of hermeneutical injustice: the hamster-wheel of redefinition and new vocabulary, and the insistence on intersectional complexity.
If a perfectly progressive person went into a coma two decades ago – even one, probably – they would wake up a reactionary. This is the case even if they were early supporters of gay marriage, transgender rights, reparations, criminal justice reform, or anything else. They would wake up a reactionary because the terminology used to express these positions is changing constantly, and in the modern scheme of political correctness one’s affiliations are determined as much by terminology as by party affiliation or platform. Someone who’d been at the forefront of trans acceptance would wake up reactionary for not knowing terms like “cisgender” or “genderfluid”. Someone passionate about the justice of reparations would wake up, express that passion, and find themselves viewed suspiciously for not knowing that “people of color” is in vogue. I myself have been castigated for mentioning the thesis that “race isn’t real” – I learned this growing up liberal as a mantra about biological race, but in some circles it’s now, apparently, viewed as an attempt to minimize the social importance of race.
Who’s harmed by this? The same three groups I mentioned before, for similar reasons – plus the people who simply lack the verbal-cognitive ability to adapt to constantly changing rules, and the people who don’t have time to learn. (Ironically, the book Charles Murray was actually invited to Middlebury to discuss, Coming Apart, proposes a thesis along very similar lines: that the rise of a “cognitive elite”, to his mind more or less genuinely meritocratic, on America’s coasts and in America’s colleges is harming those who don’t meet the standard.) The elderly more and more lose track of the new terms, and the young more and more pretend not to understand the old ones. Think, for example, of the slew of articles about college students refusing to spend Thanksgiving with their families, or of the Harvard placemats that literally scripted Thanksgiving conversations about social justice. And those with autism-spectrum disorders are far more likely to prefer clear, precise denotations, and to miss out on the connotations and signaling apparatuses on which political correctness places greater importance. As for the less-educated – well, academic terms and definitions are learned in academia! If, as I often heard my college peers say, one cannot be “a good person” without reading Frantz Fanon, or Gayatri Spivak, or Said, Butler, Crenshaw, Coates, or whomever, then what progressives normally see as a sign of disprivilege – the lack of a college education – must morph into a sign of low moral character.
Intersectional complexity has similar effects. By intersectional complexity I mean not the implications for social science of the original 1980s-era theory of intersectionality, but the less sophisticated and more popular notion that more or less all political issues and social justice struggles are interconnected. Hillary Clinton (or, no doubt, a staffer) actually tweeted an incomprehensible diagram in this vein during the 2016 primary season; another prominent example is the perplexing contention from an organizer of the Women’s Strike that the central issue it concerned was solidarity with Palestine. My favorite example of this lay sense of intersectionality is a piece of artwork a college friend of mine drew during Occupy Wall Street. No doubt intended to be inclusive in some sense, the unfortunate effect of insisting on such intersections is to make it impossible for people who have experience with or views on only one or a few issues to participate equally in conversations about them. But of course the only people with the time or wherewithal to learn about every such issue are activists and academics working in relevant fields.
It’s crucial to understand why Donald Trump’s political ascendancy, such as it was, is relevant. First, political correctness was a constant concern both of the campaigns themselves and of the discussion surrounding them, and understanding it as a form of epistemic injustice can help us to understand how it played such a huge role. In one model, attitudes toward political correctness were more helpful in predicting which survey-takers voted for which candidate than any other measure except party affiliation – and in the survey it used, over half of Trump voters gave the highest available score for their opposition to political correctness (Clinton voters were, on average, neutral toward it, with almost half expressing opposition). Second, the 2016 election was the first to see “class” appear as an educational category: what really united “lower-class” Trump voters was not wealth or income but the lack of a college degree. We should view the fervent and unified bloc of such voters as a statement, of whatever coherence or wisdom, about epistemic injustice.
Why do leftists, progressives, and liberals, the progenitors of ideas like epistemic injustice, seem unaware of, or unabashed about, their own systems of exclusion? Some people, like Peter Boghossian and John McWhorter, have theorized that social justice is an essentially religious movement, perhaps even with distinctly Judeo-Christian elements. Others, like Adolph Reed Jr., view it as an ideology that serves the interests of a professional-managerial class. Luckily, these analyses are not at all mutually exclusive. In fact, the great sociologist Max Weber already linked the two in his 1905 masterwork The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
The Protestant Reformation, Weber writes, was deeply unsettling to many people, because the Catholic Church’s conditional assurances of salvation had been replaced with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Paradoxically, the notion that one could never do anything to save one’s soul led people to compensate by working very hard – the sort of productivity necessary for early capitalism.
The same sort of paradox lies at the heart of much social justice rhetoric and practice: it is said to be impossible for white people to be non-racist or for males to be non-sexist, for instance, but rather than spurring some or another white and/or male aficionado to spend their time on things that aren’t impossible, this leads to endless spiraling examinations of the ways in which they are problematic. Within social justice, “work” takes on new meaning: it is not at all rare to hear a social justice advocate say, e.g., “I’ve been doing a lot of work on that issue,” by which they mean that they have attempted, internally, to confront and correct their own biases. Political correctness is the only means available for signaling that one is undergoing or has undergone such a process. But because a final salvation by works is impossible, there must always be another level of epistemic labor for the penitent to perform, another kind of privilege to check, another kind of behavior to apologize for.
Whatever one thinks of Weber’s Protestant ethic, the restriction of salvation-signaling hard work to the realm of the linguistic, academic, theoretical, etc. and the personal, internal, etc. should not be the sort of development leftists like. The timing of it, too, should strike us as suspicious. Right when American manufacturing, for instance, seems the most vulnerable to global trade pressures and the nascent possibility of automation, a new generation of woke college graduates – and professors – appears to tell us that real work, the kind that confers virtue and dignity, can never be done with one’s hands. Should it surprise anyone that centrist liberals think rural voters deserve to lose their health coverage, or that centrist conservatives think rural communities deserve to die, or that political philosophers think they shouldn’t even be able to vote? A leftist should know: it wouldn’t be a very good Spirit of Capitalism if it were to promote useless work or to forgive joblessness. But a leftist should also try to do better.
I’m sympathetic to Miranda Fricker’s sense that epistemic justice also serves epistemic rationality. One question my analysis raises, then, is: what sorts of knowledge or understanding might be precluded by the epistemic injustice of political correctness? The clearest example is illustrated by Lee Jussim’s work on stereotype accuracy. Jussim has tried to demonstrate that lay stereotypes about groups – the sorts of stereotypes all that social justice “work” is meant to shake off – are not just highly reliable, but often more reliable than the theories of academic social science. In other words, the prototypical ignorant citizen, who hasn’t labored toward the non-salvation of identity-capitalist wokeness, may make better predictions in many settings than the progressives and elites who scorn them – even if they’re experts.
Another example is the 2016 election, whose dynamics in both the primary and general election completely escaped the vast majority of coastal commentators. It’s no coincidence that Dilbert author Scott Adams got things right: no great intellect, Adams simply and intuitively grasped a comparison – also elucidated by Joan C. Williams – between the corporate-speak gobbledygook of his pointy-haired boss and the media’s clear preference for the political correctness of the message-less, confusing Clinton campaign, which seems in retrospect less a push to be elected President than a push to be promoted to President. Almost anybody outside the bubble could have told you clearly what Clinton’s faults were, but the bubble itself fawned over punditry denying that those faults existed.
Educated people, including educated liberals and progressives and especially educated leftists, must consider both the ethical side and the epistemic side of political correctness. The good news is that they can do so by returning with a renewed (or newly real) dedication to the sorts of principles they’ve always claimed to champion: inclusiveness and good listening, openness and free expression, empathy and care for the marginalized, thoughtfulness and respect for the truth. The bad news is that in doing so they may need to lose their religion, and its trappings of complex social theory, baroque conversational rules, and unstated hierarchies of authentic oppression. The journalist Chris Arnade has talked about the “front row” and “back row” of America. Professional progressives in politics, the media, and the academy must confront honestly the conflict between their class interest in remaining at the front and their deeply-held conviction that there shouldn’t be a back row at all. |
But the solution offered by these devices also illuminates a problem they’ve helped to create. In thinking about the limits of exoskeletons, it’s perhaps most important to think about why many people seem more interested in hoisting someone out of their wheelchair than they are in making spaces accessible to that chair.
* * *
Powered exoskeletons did not start as assistive devices. The first patent for a powered exoskeleton, filed by a Russian inventor named Nicholas Yagn, was approved on January 28, 1890. Yagn’s “apparatus for facilitating walking” involved long springs attached to each leg, designed to give soldiers in the Russian Army an advantage when running. There is no documented evidence that Yagn’s device was ever actually built or operated.
In the 1960s, inventors began to create elaborate powered exoskeletons, a rise fueled once again by the military. In 1965, with funding from the U.S. military, General Electric started developing something called the Hardiman, whose name was a mashup of “Human Augmentation Research and Development Investigation” and “MANipulator.” The machine was huge—once built, it would weigh 1,500 pounds, and was meant to amplify the strength and endurance of human arms and legs. “Man and machine can be combined into an intimate, symbiotic unit that will perform essentially as one wedded system,” the G.E. engineer Ralph S. Mosher wrote in a report on the Hardiman.
But the Hardiman never quite lived up to the hopes and dreams of its creators. In 1970, engineers finished building the leg and girdle systems, but they weren’t able to walk or stand up without support, and the project was abandoned the following year.
At the same time that G.E. engineers were working on the Hardiman, scientists in Belgrade were also experimenting with powered exoskeletons, this time for use on patients with various forms of paralysis. In 1970, the researcher Miomir Vukabratovic designed what he called a “partial active exoskeleton.” Unlike the Hardiman, this exoskeleton was far lighter (just 26 pounds) and was successfully built and tested on humans in over 100 clinical trials. But Vulabrotavic’s exoskeleton had no power source integrated into the device, and the limitations of the motor and battery technology of the time made the exoskeleton unusable.
It wasn’t until around 2000 that powered exoskeletons really passed from dream into working reality. That was the year that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded a project called the Berkeley Lower-Extremity Skeleton, or BLEEX. The BLEEX system, developed by engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, only includes legs, and the wearer has to carry the power supply and computer for the device in a large backpack. The premise of this system isn’t to help disabled people towalk again, but rather to make carrying large loads over long distances less exhausting. “While wearing the exoskeleton, the wearer can carry significant loads over considerable distances without reducing his/her agility, thus significantly increasing his/her physical effectiveness,” the researchers write.
Since then, a whole battery of exoskeletons for different purposes have been developed specifically with disability in mind. In addition to ReWalk, there’s the eLEGS system, HAL, and MindWalker, to name a few. In 2009, a group at MIT built an elastic exoskeleton based in large part on Yagn’s springy drawings. |
A 10-year-old Sacramento County girl is safe at home after a terrifying ordeal in the Sierra.The girl fell into an ice cave over the weekend, near Castle Peak, not far from the Boreal Mountain Resort. And as luck would have it, Bay Area first responders happened to be training there.Samantha White, 10, was looking down a hole over a snow-covered creek when she slipped. I a photo, you can see her hand print where she grasped the snow before she fell 10 feet. Her father tried to help.Samantha's dad William White said, "I stuck out the snow pole for her to grab and she wasn't strong enough to hold on to it."Samantha said, "I didn't hurt myself. It was just scary and the water was freezing."There were 14 members of the Marin County Sheriff's Search and Rescue Team who just happened to be training in the same area near Boreal.Robert Rye from the Marin County Sheriff's Search and Rescue team , or Marin SAR, said, "She was crying, scared. She couldn't hear very well because the snow pack was probably six or eight feet thick."In less than 15 minutes, the team improvised a system of ropes and plucked the Sacramento County girl straight out of the hole. Two of the search and rescue workers, pictured with Samantha and her hiking friend, are teen volunteers.Malcom Schoenlein, a youth member of Marin SAR, said, "We got her wet shoes and socks and wet jacket off, and replaced it with gear that we pulled together from our personal packs."Lauren Knott, a youth member of Marin SAR, said, "I remember putting my hat on her head when we pulled her out of the hole because she was shivering and then I said, 'You look good in my hat.' Then she smiled and I was so happy."Samantha said, "I was happy I was up and my feet were freezing."Samantha would have become hypothermic or worse, but the search and rescue team was there in the right place at the right time. |
Help! How do I know?
How do you tell a scientist from a non-scientist? Where does science end, and propaganda, politics, and opinion begin? You only need to know one thing: …
… Straight away, this sorts the wheat from the weeds. We don’t learn about the natural world by calling people names or hiding data. We don’t learn by chucking out measurements in favor of opinions. We don’t learn by suppressing discussions, or setting up fake rules about which bits of paper count or which people have a licence to speak. A transparent, competitive system where all views are welcome is the fastest way to advance humanity. The Royal Society is the oldest scientific association in the world. Its motto is essentially, Take No One’s Word For It. In other words, assume nothing; look at the data. When results come in that don’t fit the theory, a scientist chucks out his theory. A non-scientist has “faith”, he “believes” or assumes his theory is right, and tries to make the measurements fit. When measurements disagree, he ignores the awkward news, and “corrects”, or statistically alters, the data–always in the direction that keeps his theory alive.
Page 13
TURN THE PAGES (Links in red will become active as pages are published). You are on the page in the Red Square.
This is page 15 of The Skeptics Handbook II. A 20 page PDF
NOTES: This page was created as part of the booklet Global Bullies Want Your Money (The Skeptics Handbook, vol. II). It was inspired by requests from people who were obviously frustrated. They wanted a formula, a checklist, or a table: a way to know which side was right. The people who normally like to trust authority are the ones most likely to run into a brick wall in this debate. They trust the scientific method, but also trust the institutions, the processes, and the politics that have risen up to supposedly carry this method from it’s pure form into it’s practical output. And the two sides are at loggerheads.
I trust the scientific method, but not the human institutions (they are subject to ambition, personality, money, and conflicts of interest).
In the end, the only real way to decide is to look at the evidence. But, if you have to figure out who to trust, if that’s your chosen short-cut, then at least this is a more systematic approach than trying to weigh up the resumes on each side.
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It’s well documented that the INSTEON I/O Linc can be used to control a garage door and monitor whether the door is open. It can even be accessed from a mobile device, making this a highly convenient home automation tool for less than $100. What was far less clear (to me, at least) was exactly how to connect the I/O Linc to the garage door opener. So, what follows is equal parts tutorial and lessons learned. The details will almost certainly vary, so be sure to consult the user manuals for your equipment.
Equipment List
SmartLinc 2412n controller
I/O Linc
20-28 gauge wire
Garage door opener
Magnetic sensor (optional)
Soldering iron, wire nut, or some other means of joining wires (optional)
Wiring the Garage Door Opener
A garage door opener (GDO) typically has several terminals on its rear panel:
Some GDOs will have three terminals; others have four. For three-terminal openers, there are two “hot” terminals (one for devices that control the door, one for safety sensors) and a shared “common” terminal that’s normally in the center. A four-terminal GDO will normally have two terminals for controlling devices and two for sensors. The specific function of these terminals can vary from one GDO to the next, so be sure to track down the manual for your unit. (I hope you have better luck than I did.)
On my GDO—a Craftsman from circa 1997 with part number 41A5021-3B on the rear panel—there are three terminals:
To connect my GDO to the I/O Linc, I used a length of old (read: ugly) speaker wire that I had lying around. (I recommend using bell wire or one pair of wires from an RJ-45 cable as they will be a better fit for the I/O Linc terminals.) One wire connects to the Remote/Opener Terminal (#1). The second wire connects to the common terminal (#2) in the center. The button on the wall will also be wired to these terminals.
Next, we’ll connect the other end of the new wires to the I/O Linc. The instruction sheet that ships with the I/O Linc is helpful and full of dense information, but it left me scratching my head. There is one very important wrinkle that must be dealt with before we can wire the I/O Linc to the GDO. The I/O Linc ships with its relay in latch mode, which means that when you press the button on the wall, the I/O Linc will close the relay and keep it closed. Most GDOs assume that the relay will close for a brief period (say, two seconds) and then open again. We need to configure the I/O Linc to respect this assumption.
Configuring the relay mode
Press and hold the “Set” button (on the side of the I/O Linc) until it beeps. Release the button. The I/O Linc is now in linking mode. Press and hold the “Set” button (on the side of the I/O Linc) until it beeps. Release the button. The I/O Linc is now in unlinking mode. Press and hold the “Set” button (on the side of the I/O Linc) until it beeps. Release the button. The I/O Linc is now in output relay programming mode. The unit automatically rotates to the next mode; if you were starting with a stock I/O Linc in “Latch” mode, it is now in “Momentary A” mode. This means that an “On” command will operate the door, and an “Off” command will be ignored. (If you prefer that “Off”—or even both commands—will trigger the door, then feel free to explore the “Momentary B” and “Momentary C” modes.)
I/O Linc Wiring
We’re ready to connect the GDO to the I/O Linc. The other ends of our wires need to be connected to the Normally Open (N/O) and Common (COM) terminals on the I/O Linc:
The other two wires in the photo are for a magnetic garage door sensor. More on that in a moment.
When the I/O Linc receives a signal from its controller (a SmartLinc 2412n in my case), its relay closes, and the normally open circuit is closed for a brief moment. This is the very same event that occurs when you press the button on the wall. The GDO responds by opening, closing, or halting the garage door.
Monitoring the door state
If you want to monitor whether the door is open or closed, then you’ll need a magnetic door sensor. These are inexpensive (< $5) and easy to install. Once the sensor is mounted, connect one wire to the I/O Linc’s “Sense” (S) terminal and the other to “Ground” (GND). When the door is closed, the green Sense light on the I/O Linc will be illuminated. When the door opens, the light will go out.
N.B.: If you plan to use the INSTEON mobile app, be advised that the “Status” for the I/O Linc is the status of the relay, not the door. When you open or close the door, the status will briefly change from Off to On and then back. If you want to monitor the open/closed state of the door, you will need a more sophisticated app. For Android devices, MobiLinc is a good option.
Closing thoughts
Controlling and monitoring your garage door opener with INSTEON devices is not complicated, but pulling together the relevant instructions can be frustrating. Makers of garage door openers generally don’t explain how to do one-off installations, and the dense instruction manuals for the other components can be offputting. Hopefully I’ve found a comfortable middle ground with this tutorial. If you follow these steps and find that the steps are incorrect or that your equipment differs from what I’ve described, please leave a comment below. Good luck, be safe, and have fun. |
Forget $2 gas. Gas is getting close to the $1 mark in some parts of the country.
There are at least eight states where some stations are now selling gas for less than $1.25 a gallon, according to GasBuddy.com. The cheapest gas at the moment is at a 7-Eleven in Oklahoma City, which is selling a gallon of regular for $1.11. In fact, more than a dozen other stations in that city have gas for $1.14 or less. Extremely cheap gas can also be found in Texas, Missouri, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois Michigan and Kansas.
Nationwide, the average price of a gallon of regular is down to $1.74, the cheapest it's been since early January 2009.
A huge supply of gas is flooding the market, which is driving down wholesale gas prices. A gallon of regular gas was going for just 69 cents on the wholesale market in Oklahoma on Monday morning, according to Tom Kloza, chief analyst for the Oil Price Information Service. Most other regions have wholesale prices below $1.
Related: U.S. running out of space to store oil
Gas probably won't go below $1 a gallon, Kloza said, but cheap gas has become fairly common.
"About one station in four nationwide is at $1.50 a gallon or less," he said.
Cheap gas is also the result plunging oil prices; a barrel of crude fell below the $30 mark again on Monday. There's a glut of oil on the market due to strong U.S. production, the end of Iranian sanctions and the refusal of some OPEC members like Saudi Arabia to cut back production to support prices.
Related: How much does gas cost in your state?
But gas this cheap may not last much longer, even if oil prices continue to tumble Kloza said. The reason: Since refineries can't make much money in this kind of market, some will probably take this opportunity to shut down and perform maintenance, he explained
And the reduced supply of gas will mean higher prices.
Still, Kloza expects gas to stay relatively cheap by historical standards, with the national average for 2016 likely to come in between $2.25 to $2.50 a gallon. |
Hey guys! Quick update for what I’ve been up to lately. It’s been a long while (and even longer since I’ve been on Tumblr o.o) and I hope you guys are looking forward to some more content :)
Top 10 OSTs of 2014! HOLY CRAP GUYS I MADE A VIDEO! Today I reviewed my top 10 favorite OSTs of 2014. This was such an amazing year in video game music, it was hard to pick even 10 to spotlight! I hope you guys enjoy the video and I look forward to hearing what you think about it :)
heymrbass: New stream for Extra Life! And remember, donate: http://www.heymrbass.com/charity
TheChicagoClubhouse Extra Life: 24 Hour Videogame Marathon for Charity! Help Us Reach Our Stretch Goal of $250! Still streaming here guys! Come tune in and support a great cause in Extra Life!
heymrbass: Posting the new stream link!
Extra Life Charity Stream! Hey guys, long time no see! :) Just wanted to let you all know that I’m doing some charity livestreaming with my friends for Extra Life today. It’s a 24-hour marathon stream and it’s a pretty awesome cause, so come stop by and watch us play some games! You can also tune into my friend’s stream over at heymrbass, he’s a pretty cool guy and I’ll stop by there later today to visit and play some games as well. Hope you’re all doing well and come visit!
Analysis: Mario Kart Stadium Hey guys, back on the horse with an analysis of Mario Kart 8’s Mario Kart Stadium! :) Also, fun fact: the blog turned one year old today, so hooray for that! I’ll celebrate with a quick vlog later this week that will discuss the vlog’s bright future :D
So you guys can expect a new video either tonight or (more likely) tomorrow evening. Surprise. Backstreet’s back, y'all. (Ok, I promise never to say that again)
Analysis: Metalman’s Stage, Mega Man 2 Hey guys, new blog is up! Finally getting back into more retro music with a quick glimpse at the Mega Man 2 OST :) |
Corey Kluber of the Cleveland Indians was named the American League's top pitcher, winning his first Cy Young Award.
Kluber captured 17 first-place votes and 169 points, narrowly edging out Felix Hernandez of the Mariners who earned the other 13 first-place votes and 159 points. White Sox LHP Chris Sale finished third with 78 points.
Editor's Picks Schoenfield: Kluber edges Felix to win AL Cy You couldn't go wrong with Corey Kluber or Felix Hernandez as the AL Cy Young winner. The race was that close, David Schoenfield writes.
"I think I'm definitely surprised," Kluber said.
Kluber enjoyed a breakthrough 2014 season, his second full year as a starter, going 18-9 with a 2.44 ERA and 269 strikeouts in 235 2/3 innings. The right-hander led the league in wins, finished second in strikeouts, third in innings pitched and was third in ERA.
The 28-year-old Kluber was dominant down the stretch this season with the Indians (85-77), who fell just short of a postseason berth despite posting a winning record for the second straight year. He posted a 1.73 ERA after the All-Star break and won his last five starts, recording 54 strikeouts and a 1.12 ERA over that stretch.
Kluber became the fourth Indians pitcher to win the award, joining Cliff Lee (2008), CC Sabathia (2007) and Gaylord Perry.
Tight Race Many expected Felix Hernandez to win his second Cy Young Award, but Corey Kluber held his own against King Felix. Here is a look at both pitchers: Category Hernandez Kluber IP 236 235 2/3 Strikeouts 248 269 HR allowed 16 14 ERA 2.14 2.44 --ESPN Stats & Information
When asked how he would celebrate the award, Kluber revealed plans far from flashy.
"Probably go home and give my daughters a bath," he said.
Hernandez said the tough loss will motivate him even more.
"I don't know what to say. That was tough,'' Hernandez said. "A little disappointed. Just give me more motivation to work harder and harder and be better next year."
Hernandez went 15-6 with an AL-leading 2.14 ERA and 248 strikeouts in 236 innings. He set a major league record when he pitched 16 straight games of seven or more innings and allowing two earned runs or less. It was a brilliant stretch from May to early August that put Hernandez in the lead for his second Cy Young award.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report. |
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump received a huge cheer from America's sheriffs this week, especially when he told them "my support for you will never ever waiver."
Trump called into a National Sheriffs' Association annual conference in Minnesota where he promised to stand behind law enforcement no matter what and pledged to push for the death penalty for anybody who kills a police officer.
"Hello everybody, great to be with you," he said to cheers via Skype late Monday.
He noted that sometimes police get in trouble, but he said it's "unfair" for the media to focus on those incidents while not giving cops credit for keeping people safe.
"You don't get recognized properly the way you should be recognized. You do a phenomenal job. You keep us all safe," said the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
He added that in meetings with voters around the country, there is support for law enforcement.
"We have great admiration and respect for you and I just want to thank you for doing an incredible job. Believe me, the country is behind you," said Trump in a video posted on Facebook.
"The country, the people, which are the people that count, they are behind us, they are behind you, they are behind me," he added.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at [email protected] |
To hear Reps. Fred Upton and Ed Whitfield talk about their new energy bill, you'd think it will prevent gas prices from increasing before your next fill-up.
Upton, the Michigan Republican who chairs the influential Energy and Commerce Committee, and Ed Whitfield, the Kentucky Republican who heads the Energy and Power subcommittee, recently argued in a letter to fellow lawmakers that one way to stop rising gas prices would be to pass the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011 (H.R. 910).
The bill grows out of longstanding frustration by industry groups and lawmakers who believe that Environmental Protection Agency regulations unnecessarily burden many companies.
The measure -- which Whitfield’s subcommittee approved on March 10, 2011, and which now heads to the full committee -- would prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases for the purpose of addressing climate change.
Here’s a portion of what Upton and Whitfield wrote to their colleagues in the March 8, 2011, letter, which is headlined, "Concerned About High Gas Prices? Cosponsor H.R. 910 and Make a Difference Today!"
"Whether through greenhouse gas regulation, permit delays, or permanent moratoriums, the White House takes every opportunity to decrease access to safe and secure sources of oil and natural gas," the lawmakers wrote. "Gasoline prices have climbed dramatically over the past three months. American consumers deal with this hardship every day, and as this poll indicates, the majority of respondents do not see the pain subsiding anytime soon. Americans also understand the realities of supply and demand as it relates to oil prices. Unfortunately the White House does not. ...
"H.R. 910, the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011, is the first in this legislative series to stop rising gas prices by halting EPA’s Clean Air Act greenhouse gas regulations. As one small refiner testifying before the Committee on Energy and Commerce put it: ‘EPA’s proposed [greenhouse gas] regulations for both refinery expansions and existing facilities will likely have a devastating effect on … all of our nation’s fuels producers…. If small refiners are forced out of business, competition will suffer and American motorists, truckers and farmers will be increasingly reliant on foreign refiners to supply our nation’s gasoline and diesel fuel.’
"We … have taken the first steps in attempting to restrain this regulatory overreach that will restrict oil supplies and cause gasoline prices to rise."
But can the bill really stop gas prices from going up, as the letter says?
We’ll look at two key questions. Could the proposed EPA regulations on oil refineries actually increase prices at the pump? And when would the impact of the regulations be felt?
As to the first question, experts had different opinions.
The oil industry argues that regulations imposing new costs on refiners could force U.S. refineries to charge more. (The proposed regulations are supposed to shield smaller operations from regulatory impacts, but experts said that a significant proportion of U.S. refineries would indeed be affected.)
"It’s Economics 101," said John Felmy, chief economist at the American Petroleum Institute. "The refinery business is a very low-margin business. They have no margin for error and face tough competition internationally."
Others argue the refining industry could adapt to new regulations.
"Looking at past public claims when the Clean Air Act was passed would show that U.S. refining capacity still managed to increase over time, despite the high expense refiners had to put out to comply with the Clean Air act," said Amy Myers Jaffe, a fellow in energy studies at Rice University.
"So one might imagine, depending on the details on how carbon regulation would be implemented, U.S. industry could likely similarly adjust," Jaffe said. "It depends on the specifics of how a policy is implemented. There are no doubt some small refineries in the United States that might be really inefficient, so maybe some of them would close if they had to increase their costs substantially, but tiny, uncompetitive, regional refineries are not the main thing that makes the US refining and marketing industry ‘competitive.’"
Indeed, while a shift to overseas refiners could have negative consequences for the nation -- it could weaken the United States’ industrial base, threaten U.S. jobs and pose problems for national security -- it’s not a foregone conclusion that prices at the pump would rise. If U.S. refiners become less competitive and more oil is instead imported from overseas refiners, it will be because the cost of refining overseas becomes more competitive. That’s the essence of a free market.
And even if the cost of refining did go up, the cost of gasoline is volatile and affected by many factors such as global demand and supply disruptions. So there's no certainty that a bump in refining costs would necessarily translate into higher prices at the pump.
As for the second question -- when any impact might be felt -- the rules wouldn't take affect for months or years.
The EPA won't even propose the first-ever greenhouse-gas standards for refineries until December 2011 and doesn't plan to issue final standards until November 2012. Those standards would govern emissions for new and significantly overhauled refineries. Rules for existing refineries are expected to be unveiled in July 2011.
Based on the past history of EPA regulations, the new rules aren't likely to take effect until a few years after that, experts said.
So, if the bill were to pass, it would prevent EPA regulations that would otherwise take effect in 2013, 2014 or 2015. That’s a long way away.
Another factor: the regulations targeted by the House bill are new ones. So if the House bill passes, it would essentially protect the status quo -- not take any explicit action to stop price hikes.
So where does this leave us?
While Upton and Whitfield's letter is carefully worded, it frames the argument for the bill in the context of today’s trend of rising gasoline prices. Yet the impact of the bill -- if there is an one -- would be years away. And there's no proof that the law would actually stop gas prices from rising. The added regulations now being planned may hamper U.S. refiners, but the international free market could just as easily end up keeping refining costs low. And it’s hardly assured that any changes in refining costs -- up or down -- will influence gasoline prices, which are subject to a wide array of influenes. We find their claim False. |
Following a dramatic appearance by Hillary Clinton on the packed floor of the Democratic Convention, Barack Obama, the Hawaiian-born son of a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya, was finally and officially named the party's presidential candidate last night.
Mrs Clinton swept on to the convention floor just as her home state, New York, was being called upon to cast its vote during a raucous roll-call of the delegates of all states. In a striking gesture of unity after all the months of bitterness, Mrs Clinton took the microphone to formally ask that the vote be suspended and that the convention approve the Obama nomination by acclamation.
"With eyes firmly fixed on the future, in the spirit of unity... let's declare together in one voice, right here right now, that Barack Obama is our candidate and he will be our president," she said, reading from a script.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
"I move Senator Barack Obama of Illinois be selected by the convention by acclamation as the nominee of the Democratic Party" she added, lifting the roof of the convention hall. Her request was instantly accepted by Nancy Pelosi, the convention's presiding officer.
Mrs Pelosi then announced that Barack Obama had accepted the nomination.
The stage is now set for Denver's vast outdoor arena where tonight, on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, Mr Obama will deliver an address upon which hangs the outcome of November's American presidential election, and the hopes of the first black man with a real shot at the White House.
Eight years ago, such a scenario would have been laughable. Obama was broke and without political friends of any consequence. He had to gatecrash the 2000 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles after arriving on a cheap flight at the last minute. A rental car company rejected his maxed-out American Express card and he watched Al Gore accept the party's nomination on television screens at the perimeter of the convention centre.
Tonight will seem a millennium away. This time, it will be Gore in the audience lending support to the candidate on whose slender shoulders the Democrats' hopes lie. The psychodramas surrounding Hillary Clinton have also been dealt with following the rapturous reception for her barnstorming speech to the convention on Tuesday.
Senator Obama's acceptance of the nomination before 70,000 people is set to be an extraordinary political event. The task at hand is to energise the party and reconnect Obama's "colourblind" vision for the country with those Republicans who were briefly enthralled by his electrifying promise to unify America's angry and divided politics.
Back in 2000, at the age of 39 and with his career crashing around him, his hopes seemed to have flamed out after he had been trounced while trying to unseat a well-liked black Congressman. He recalls being terrified that for all his dreams he was about to disappear from public life – just as his talented Kenyan father had done before him.
Last night, he arrived in Denver on a private Boeing 757 with his name emblazoned on the side. It was yet another giant step in the remarkable journey from ambitious local politician to global political superstar, who may from January be President of the world's troubled superpower.
Tonight, millions of Americans – and millions more around the world – will hang on his every word. But John McCain, whose campaign is ratcheting up the attacks on Obama's inexperience with every hour, will be watching too. Even Obama's decision to choose the experienced political warhorse Joe Biden as his running mate has not given him the hoped-for "bounce" in the polls.
Yet, during the past eight years, it is Obama's extraordinary ability to rise to the occasion that has marked him out from the crowd. Campaigning this week in four battleground states – Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri and Montana – he has worked late into the night with a pen and yellow pad, crafting in longhand what is expected to be the speech of his lifetime.
Mr Obama has given hundreds of stump speeches over the past two years, some of them inspiring, many of them repetitious. But it is an address delivered in 2002 to a group of war protesters in which he flatly stated his opposition to the invasion of Iraq that he considers his best.
Just a year after 11 September 2001, with Mr Bush riding high and polls supporting an invasion – and just as he was preparing to run for the US Senate – he committed what many thought to be political suicide.
"I don't oppose all wars," he said. "What I am opposed to is... a war based not on reason, but on passion, not on principle but on politics." That seemingly foolhardy, if prescient, statement made him the only top-tier presidential candidate flatly to oppose the war before it was launched. Until 2004, he languished in the backwaters of Chicago, an obscure state senator – the lowest form of pond life in national politics. Then he was noticed by John Kerry, the Democratic candidate of that election year. Wooden and uninspiring, Kerry was on the lookout for a talented black politician. After seeing Obama skilfully work a room of white voters, he soon invited him to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston.
It was just 17 minutes long but the speech captured America's attention. The speech, which Obama insisted on writing himself, was hailed as a classic by the political world and earned him comparisons to John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
It has become part of the myth of Obama's effortless rise as a political phenomenon. But behind the legend lies a cunning, an extraordinary ambition and an unrivalled attention to detail that he learnt going door to door as a community organiser in Chicago's South Side.
That trademark micro-management was in evidence again yesterday as his campaign succeeded in short cutting the roll-call of states – thereby avoiding the embarrassment of the biggest states declaring for Hillary Clinton. The Obama camp ensured that long before most Americans switched on their TVs last night – Barack Obama was already the Democratic nominee to become the 44th US president.
King's dream and the road to Denver
1870: Hiram Revels, a Republican from Mississippi, is the first African American elected to the US Senate.
1954: Thurgood Marshall, a lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), successfully argues for the end of school segregation before the US Supreme Court. In 1967, he becomes the first African American to serve on the court.
1955: Rosa Parks, a seamstress and civil rights activist in Alabama, refuses to give up her seat on a bus to a white person. Her act propels the Civil Rights movement forward.
1963: Martin Luther King, pictured, leads the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that brings 250,000 to the capital on 28 August – 45 years ago. The event culminates with his "I Have a Dream" speech from the Lincoln Memorial. (King is assassinated in April 1968.)
1968: Shirley Chisholm becomes the first African-American woman elected to the US Congress. In 1972, she runs for the Democratic presidential nomination.
1984: The Rev Jesse Jackson makes the first viable bid by an African American for his party's presidential nomination. He wins more than three million votes in the primaries, but eventually comes third.
2001: Colin Powell, a four-star general, is chosen by George Bush as Secretary of State, the first time an African American has served in that position. He was also the first black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest military rank in the US, in 1999.
For rolling comment on the US election visit: independent.co.uk/campaign08
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Vladimir Lenin
Comrade Workers, Forward To The Last, Decisive Fight!
Written: First part or August 1918
First Published: 17 January, 1925 in Rabochaya Moahva No. 14; Published according to the Manuscript
Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 28, 1965, pages 53-57
Translated (and edited): Jim Riordan
Transcription/HTML Markup: David Walters
Online Version: V.I.Lenin Internet Archive, 2002
The Soviet Republic is surrounded by enemies. But it will defeat its enemies at home and abroad. A rising spirit which will ensure victory is already perceptible among the working people. We already see how frequent the sparks and explosions of the revolutionary conflagration in Western Europe have become, inspiring us with the assurance that the triumph of the world workers’ revolution is not far off.
The external foe of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic at present is British, French, American and Japanese imperialism. This foe is attacking Russia, is plundering our territory, has seized Archangel and (if the French newspapers are to be believed) has advanced from Vladivostok to Nikolsk Ussuriisky. This foe has bribed the generals and officers of the Czechoslovak Corps. This enemy is attacking peaceful Russia with the ferocity and voracity of the Germans in February, the only difference being that the British and Japanese are out to seize and plunder Russian territory and to overthrow the Soviet government so as to “restore the front”, i.e., to draw Russia again into the imperialist (or more simply, the predatory) war between Britain and Germany.
The British and Japanese capitalists want to restore the power of the landowners and capitalists in Russia in order to share with them the booty captured in the war; they want to shackle the Russian workers and peasants to British and French capital, to squeeze out of them interest on the billions advanced in loans, and to extinguish the fire of socialist revolution which has broken out in our country and which is threatening to spread across the world.
The British and Japanese imperialist savages are not strong enough to occupy and subjugate Russia. Even neighbouring Germany is not strong enough for that, as was shown by her “experience” in the Ukraine. The British and Japanese counted on taking us unawares. They failed. The Petrograd workers, followed by the Moscow workers, and after Moscow the workers of the entire central industrial region, are rising more untidily, with growing persistence and courage and in ever larger numbers. That is a sure sign we shall win.
In launching their attack on peaceful Russia the British and Japanese capitalist robbers are also counting on alliance with the internal enemy of the Soviet government. We all know who that internal enemy is. It is the capitalists, the landowners, the kulaks, and their offspring, who hate the government of the workers and working peasants-the peasants who do not suck the blood of their fellow-villagers.
A wave of kulak revolts is sweeping across Russia. The kulak hates the Soviet government like poison and is prepared to strangle and massacre hundreds of thousands of workers. We know very well that if the kulaks were to gain the upper hand they would ruthlessly slaughter hundreds of thousands of workers, in alliance with the landowners and capitalists, restore back-breaking conditions for the workers, abolish the eight-hour day and hand back the mills and factories to the capitalists.
That was the case in all earlier European revolutions when, as a result of the weakness of the workers, the kulaks succeeded in turning back from a republic to a monarchy, from a working people’s government to the despotism of the exploiters, the rich and the parasites. This happened before our very eyes in Latvia, Finland, the Ukraine and Georgia. Everywhere the avaricious, bloated and bestial kulaks joined hands with the landowners and capitalists against the workers and against the poor generally. Everywhere the kulaks wreaked their vengeance on the working class with incredible ferocity. Everywhere they joined hands with the foreign capitalists against the workers of their own country. That is the way the Cadets, the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks have been acting: we have only to remember their exploits in “Czechoslovakia”.[22] That is the way the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, in their crass stupidity and spinelessness, acted too when they revolted in Moscow, thus assisting the whiteguards in Yaroslavi and the Czechs and the Whites in Kazan. No wonder these Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were praised by Kerensky and his friends, the French imperialists.
There is no doubt about it. The kulaks are rabid foes of the Soviet government. Either the kulaks massacre vast numbers of workers, or the workers ruthlessly suppress the revolts of the predatory kulak minority of the people against the working people’s government. There can be no middle course. Peace is out of the question: even if they have quarrelled, the kulak can easily come to terms with the landowner, the tsar and the priest, but with the working class never.
That is why we call the fight against the kulaks the last, decisive fight. That does not mean there may not be many more kulak revolts, or that there may not be many more attacks on the Soviet government by foreign capitalism. The words, the last fight, imply that the last and most numerous of the exploiting classes has revolted against us in our country.
The kulaks are the most brutal, callous and savage exploiters, who in the history of other countries have time and again restored the power of the landowners, tsars, priests and capitalists. The kulaks are more numerous than the landowners and capitalists. Nevertheless, they are a minority.
Let us take it that there are about fifteen million peasant families in Russia, taking Russia as she was before the robbers deprived her of the Ukraine and other territories. Of these fifteen million, probably ten million are poor peasants who live by selling their labour power, or who are in bondage to the rich, or who lack grain surpluses and have been most impoverished by the burdens of war. About three million must be regarded as middle peasants, while barely two million consist of kulaks, rich peasants, grain profiteers. These bloodsuckers have grown rich on the want suffered by the people in the war; they have raked in thousands and hundreds of thousands of rubles by pushing up the price of grain and other products. These spiders have grown fat at the expense of the peasants ruined by the war, at the expense of the starving workers. These leeches have sucked the blood of the working people and grown richer as the workers in the cities and factories starved. These vampires have been gathering the landed estates into their hands; they continue to enslave the poor peasants.
Ruthless war on the kulaks! Death to them! Hatred and contempt for the parties which defend them-the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, and today's Left Socialist-Revolutionaries! The workers must crush the revolts of the kulaks with an iron hand, the kulaks who are forming an alliance with the foreign capitalists against the working people of their own country.
The kulaks take advantage of the ignorance, the disunity and isolation of the poor peasants. They incite them against the workers. Sometimes they bribe them while permitting them to "make a bit", a hundred rubles or so, by profiteering in grain (at the same time robbing the poor peasants of many thousands of rubles). The kulaks try to win the support of the middle peasants, and they sometimes succeed.
But there is no reason why the working class should quarrel with the middle peasant. The workers cannot come to terms with the kulak, but they may seek, and are seeking, an agreement with the middle peasant. The workers' government, the Bolshevik government, has proved that in deed.
We proved it by passing the law on the "socialisation of land" and strictly carrying it into effect. That law contains numerous concessions to the interests and views of the middle peasant.
We proved it (the other day) by trebling grain prices"; for we fully realise that the earnings of the middle peasant are often disproportionate to present-day prices for manufactured goods and must be raised.
Every class-conscious worker will explain this to the middle peasant and will patiently, persistently, and repeatedly point out to him that socialism is infinitely more beneficial for him than a government of the tsars, landowners and capitalists.
The workers' government has never wronged and never will wrong the middle peasant. But the government of the tsars, landowners, capitalists and kulaks not only always wronged the middle peasant, but stifled, plundered, and ruined him outright. And this is true of all countries without exception, Russia included.
The class-conscious worker’s programme is the closest alliance and complete unity with the poor peasants; concessions to and agreement with the middle peasants; ruthless suppression of the kulaks, those bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers, who batten on famine. That is the policy of the working class.
Endnotes |
Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended his ending of a President Obama-created temporary amnesty program for illegal aliens, saying it “cannot be defended” under the Rule of Law.
In a speech to the Federalist Society, Sessions — a pioneer of the immigration in the national interest movement — blasted the Obama administration’s creation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that has given temporary amnesty to nearly 800,000 illegal aliens.
“Similarly, no Cabinet Secretary has the power, through guidance, letters or otherwise, to wipe entire sections of immigration law,” Sessions said. “But that’s what the previous administration did with its Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, policy.”
“Under DACA—without the consent of Congress—individuals here illegally who met certain criteria were granted not only lawful presence but work authorization, and the right to participate in Social Security, which unlawful immigrants are not entitled to have,” Sessions continued. “So no matter what one thinks about the immigration issues and policy, it cannot be defended in my opinion lawfully.”
“Once again, the Department advised and the administration put an end to it—and it is being ended now.”
In September, Sessions announced on behalf of President Trump’s administration that the DACA program would officially end in March 2018 and applications for illegal aliens to sign up for the program would end in October 2017.
Most recently, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Acting Secretary Elaine Duke directed that the United States Immigration and Citizenship Services (USCIS) agency reopen the DACA program to allow more than 100 illegal aliens to gain temporary amnesty status before the program is ended. Applicants who can show “individualized proof” of mail delivery problems can reapply for extensions.
Meanwhile, Trump’s nominee to lead DHS, Kirstjen Nielsen, has confirmed that she will proactively work with members of Congress to help push an amnesty for DACA illegal aliens, despite the potential 9.9 million to 19 million chain migration that could follow such a decision and the negative impact it would have on America’s working and middle classes. |
Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has developed India’s answer to Google Earth which is named as Bhuvan. It means “Earth” in Sanskrit language. Bhuvan is a project fully developed by Indians in ISRO where they have used the Indian satellites to get images.
How To Use Bhuvan
First of all you need to register yourself on Bhuvan registration page. To use Bhuvan, you need to install a plugin provided on that website only. That plug-in is of size around 11MB which will not take much time to install. Once the installation will be done, go to the Start – Programs and click on “Bhuvan”. It will open the Bhuvan webpage from where you can click on the “Enter” button available on the website.
Welcome to Bhuvan!
Why Bhuvan? Google Earth is already there.
This is a natural question which will arise in your mind but checkout some of the advantages which are there in Bhuvan and not available in Google Earth. Comparison detail mentioned below is an extract from timesofindia page,
Google Earth Bhuvan Zoom levels up to 200 meter Zoom levels up to 10 meter Single layer information Multi-layer information Images upgraded every 4 year Images upgraded every year No alternate viewing options Options of viewing on different dates Uses international satellites Uses Indian satellites
Bhuvan will help Indian government and people to trace different locations, agricultural needs and many more.
Since the bandwidth and Internet Speed is a big issue in India, that’s why Bhuvan team has developed it in such a way that it can be browsed on low speed internet connection as well. Here we have attached some of the screenshots from Bhuvan thru which you can feel the resolution and functionality of Bhuvan.
Screenshots from Bhuvan
Taj Mahal on Bhuvan
New Delhi on Bhuvan
India on Bhuvan
Current Limitations:
I was facing problem while exploring Bhuvan on Firefox and other browsers. Now shifted to Internet Explorer and found that it is working properly. Make Internet Explorer a default browser on your PC and browse Bhuvan over there. Since Bhuvan is still in development phase (Beta) so the image quality is not at its best, we hope that it will provide good quality images in near future. |
A 10,000-square feet open space plot at Nariman Point, where the BJP’s state headquarters stand, could be de-reserved by the civic body, which has proposed the land be allowed for commercial use.
In April 2013, the BMC had served the BJP a notice for unauthorised construction on the plot. If the de-reservation goes through, the structure may get regularised, while the city will lose out on another green space.
The BMC’s move comes even though resident groups have filed a petition in the Bombay high court (HC) asking for the open space to be reclaimed for public use by evicting the offices of political parties such as the BJP and the Janata Dal (Secular).
In June 2013, HT had reported that residents found the BJP had made illegal alterations and additions to their office. The PWD, which owns the land, said it will open the rest of the garden up for residents.
But in the draft development plan the BMC released on Monday, it sought to de-reserve the space — Jawaharlal Nehru garden. When the civic body had served the party with a show-cause notice in 2013 over the construction, the BJP proposed that the civic body regularises it.
The garden has been marked as a recreational ground ever since the city’s first development plan in 1967 . In the 1980s, the PWD allotted it on a temporary basis to the two parties. Later, some of the area was also allotted to the Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation (MTDC). In the new DP, the BMC said it plans to lower open spaces standards in the city, because of paucity of land.
“While the report claims there are few open spaces in the city, it [civic body] is trying to subvert even the existing open spaces by de-reserving them. This is extremely condemnable,” said Pankaj Joshi, executive director of the Urban Design Research Institute.
Locals are shocked at the de-reservation. “This is a devious way adopted by the ruling party to ensure their illegalities are legalised. This is very shocking,” said Nayana Kathpalia, an open spaces crusader and a trustee with NAGAR.
BMC chief Sitaram Kunte said he would comment on the matter later.City may lose Nariman Point garden to BJP headquarters.
First Published: Feb 20, 2015 01:18 IST |
Drama as taxi smashes into a cafe in Gorleston High Street
Taxi crashes into Flour & Bean cafe and bakery in Gorleston High Street. Picture from @born1878 on Twitter. Archant
A taxi has crashed into a cafe in Gorleston High Street.
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A taxi has crashed into a cafe in Gorleston High Street.
Emergency services and building surveyors were called at 9.20am today after a car smashed into the front of the Flour and Bean cafe and bakery. The car did not go into the cafe, but one woman in her 40s was treated by an ambulance crew.
A spokesman for the East of England Ambulance Service said her injuries were not believed to be serious but she will probably be taken to hospital.
A spokesman for Norfolk police, who received a call from a neighbouring shop seconds after the crash, said a building control officer from Great Yarmouth Borough Council went to the scene to assess the damage.
She said: “The road remains open and the owner of the taxi is arranging for the vehicle to be removed.”
Norfolk Fire and Rescue Service crews have also been at the scene.
Picture taken by @born1878 and posted on Twitter. |
SUMMER DAY CAMPS 2018
This summer we will be hosting two camps for middle school-aged students interested in board games (May 30 – June 1) and board game design (June 11–15).
Spielbound Board Game Essentials Day Camp
date_range May, 30, 2018 – June 1, 2018
May, 30, 2018 – June 1, 2018 alarm 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM (CDT)
9:00 AM to 3:00 PM (CDT) place Spielbound Board Game Cafe
Spielbound Board Game Cafe payment $95.15 via EventBrite
$95.15 via EventBrite email greg [at] spielbound.org
From May 30th to June 1st, Spielbound will be hosting a three-day board game camp for middle school students. Board games can be an instrumental tool to grow and encourage skills in spatial reasoning, math, critical thinking, group work and cooperation. Throughout the days, students will have an opportunity to learn games from multiple genres with the help of Spielbound staff and volunteers. The games selected for the camp will give students a comprehensive understanding of the skills and fun to be gained through collaboration and play. The final day will end with a session where parents and Spielbound volunteers will learn games from the student in the camp. Lunch will be provided each day, send any dietary restrictions or accessibility requests to greg [at] spielbound.org and we will work to accomodate them in advance.
Board Game Design Day Camp
date_range June 11, 2018 – June 15, 2018
June 11, 2018 – June 15, 2018 alarm 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM (CDT)
9:00 AM to 3:00 PM (CDT) place Spielbound Board Game Cafe
Spielbound Board Game Cafe payment $167.24 via EventBrite
$167.24 via EventBrite email greg [at] spielbound.org
From June 11th to June 15th, Spielbound will be hosting a five-day board game design camp for middle school students. Board games can be an instrumental tool to grow and encourage skills in spatial reasoning, math, critical thinking, group work and cooperation. Throughout this camp, students will have an opportunity to learn games from multiple genres with the help of Spielbound staff and volunteers, to identify the structures of board game design, and to then design a working prototype of their own original board game. They will get to work with members of Spielbound's Spielmason board game design group, who have printed and published multiple games. The games selected for the camp will give students a comprehensive understanding of the skills and fun to be gained through collaboration and play, and the design process will help them gain skills in graphic design, creative writing, and collaboration.
The camp will end on Friday the 15th with a demo session where students will teach their games to family, friends, and Spielbound volunteers from 3pm-5pm.
Lunch will be provided each day, send any dietary restrictions, accessibility needs, or questions of any kind to greg [at] spielbound.org and we will work to accomodate them in advance and get you the answers we need. |
Getty Images
Packers coach Mike McCarthy kicked off the offseason by saying that running back Eddie Lacy can’t play at the same weight in 2016 that he played at in 2015, so there’s no doubt that the Packers asked Lacy to drop some pounds this offseason.
McCarthy disputes just how much fat they wanted Lacy to trim, however. There have been reports that the team wanted Lacy to lose 30 pounds, but McCarthy said that wasn’t the case while speaking from the Scouting Combine in Indianapolis on Thursday.
“The numbers that have been out there about his weight are inaccurate,” McCarthy said, via ESPN.com. “The Green Bay Packers have never, ever asked him to lose 30 pounds. That’s totally out of the realm of what we’re talking about. That’s the facts there. He’ll learn from this.”
McCarthy also confirmed that Lacy has spoken with Tony Horton, who created the P90X workout program, about a workout plan for the offseason to get to whatever weight it is that the Packers have prescribed for the back. McCarthy said he’s confident that Lacy will reach that goal and that the Packers will “see definitely a different guy in April, and more importantly in July.” |
Ryan Roy, a former Pizzeria Uno cook who was fired for attending a white nationalist rally (Screen cap).
Another day, another Charlottesville white nationalist who finds himself out of work.
The Burlington Free Press reports that Ryan Roy, who had worked as a cook at a South Burlington Pizzeria Uno, was fired from his job after activists identified him as an attendee at last week’s white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“Ryan Roy has been terminated,” Skip Weldon, chief marketing officer for Pizzeria Uno, told the publication. “We are committed to the fair treatment of all people and the safety of our guests and employees at our restaurants.”
In an interview with the Free Press, Roy decried the liberal activists who got him fired from his job and alleged they weren’t tolerant of his belief that white Americans should have their own country that is separate from all racial minorities.
“I think it kind of just proves my point, proves a lot of what I think, not that I needed further proof,” Roy said. “I think it’s group think.”
Roy freely admitted to attending the rally, which he said was designed to advocate turning the United States back into a “white” country.
“Obviously I would advocate for racial separation and racial nationalism or repatriation or even a return to — our country was a white country up until the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act,” he said. |
shadow
Angela Merkel, incontrando Matteo Renzi domani, si chiederà quanto il potere abbia cambiato l’uomo politico che lei ebbe la lungimiranza di invitare tre anni or sono a Berlino, quando egli aveva perso le primarie del Pd ed era solo il sindaco di una relativamente piccola città italiana. L’impressione deve essere stata favorevole perché in seguito, al primo Consiglio europeo cui Renzi partecipò, lo presentò come «il mio amico Matteo». Forse in quel momento, volgendo lo sguardo intorno al tavolo e osservando la modestia politica dei partecipanti, Angela Merkel coltivò la speranza che quel giovane italiano ne potesse assumere la guida e aiutarla nel faticoso compito di rendere più solide le istituzioni europee.
Da quel giorno si sono alternate conferme e delusioni. Conferme per la capacità di portare in porto riforme che da anni venivano millantate, senza che nessun governo riuscisse a farle. Delusioni perché Renzi non è riuscito — forse non ha neppure provato? — a consolidare la sua posizione nel Consiglio europeo e a diventare un punto di riferimento. Come molti suoi predecessori non è andato al di là di qualche battaglia in difesa di legittimi interessi nazionali. Battaglie condotte male per di più, senza capire, ad esempio, che per essere influenti a Bruxelles sui dossier per noi più importanti sarebbe stato meglio chiedere i posti di commissario europeo alla Concorrenza o di direttore del dipartimento che si occupa di Aiuti di Stato.
Invece il posto di Alto rappresentante per gli Affari esteri che abbiamo ottenuto è di grande prestigio ma, come si è visto, del tutto inutile per quei dossier. Angela Merkel è l’unico vero statista in Europa, il solo capace di non abbandonare un progetto in cui crede anche se ciò significa, come si è visto durante la crisi dei rifugiati, sfidare l’opinione pubblica del proprio Paese. L’unico, nella tradizione di Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Schmidt e Helmut Kohl, che si chieda come contribuire alla Storia del suo Paese e quale futuro si debba costruire. Se Helmut Kohl sarà ricordato per l’unificazione della Germania, Angela Merkel vuole essere ricordata come il cancelliere che ha salvato l’Unione Europea. Ma ha bisogno di alleati, e oggi in Europa ne ha pochi.
A Est Polonia e Ungheria hanno imboccato una strada che li sta allontanando dai principi di democrazia che sottostanno al progetto europeo. La Gran Bretagna si prepara a un voto in cui potrebbe decidere di abbandonare l’Unione. Portogallo e Spagna hanno perduto l’equilibrio politico e non riescono a formare governi stabili. La Francia, alleato storico, è incapace di riformarsi e quindi indebolita. In questo quadro deprimente l’Italia può essere l’alleato indipendente e leale di Angela Merkel. Un’occasione unica di poter contribuire alla costruzione dell’Europa in cui vivremo guardando al di là del proprio orticello.
Per giocare questo ruolo il presidente del Consiglio deve convincersi che senza Europa nessun Paese può farcela da solo (basti guardare alla vicenda greca). Incominciando con il discutere in modo intelligente le proposte contenute nel Rapporto dei cinque presidenti sul completamento dell’Unione monetaria e proporre che l’argomento sia posto all’ordine del giorno del Consiglio europeo del 18 febbraio. |
In Thailand, and increasingly in places like Indonesia and China, braces are becoming a huge teenage fashion statement. Which is pretty strange considering in the West, braces are ruthlessly stigmatized and pretty much a metaphor for adolescent awkwardness.
In the countries mentioned above, however, braces are considered a sign of wealth, status, and style. The reasoning is fairly straightforward—genuine orthodontic braces are very expensive. In Bangkok, for example, a set of tinsel-teeth will cost you roughly $1200, a substantial sum for a country with a GDP of $345 billion (the US had a GDP of $15.06 trillion in 2011). So all the kids want to wear these things, because anything worn by the young and rich is obviously super cute.
Earn the Star.
This positive perception of braces is no doubt partly due to their popularity among young celebrities like Thai pop singer Earn the Star and Indonesian heartthrob Andika Kangen. Several Indonesian and Thai websites also appear to be littered with pictures of Gwen Stefani in her braces in the late 90s, which she recently confessed were a "fashion choice."
After clicking on countless fashion braces blogs and bearing witness to the sheer variety of colors and shapes available, I started to channel my 10-year-old self flipping out about all the cute, colorful jewelry at Claire's Accessories in Glendale Mall, circa 1997. I could even vaguely recall being jealous of the kids in my school who had braces, or crutches, and especially the ones with colorful casts for their broken arms, which everyone would draw on. Why didn't I get to walk around all day with poorly drawn penises on my arm?
But like any other popular commodity that is both really expensive and "really cute," supply inevitably rises to meet demand. The market is now flooded with numerous knockoffs and fakes. In Indonesia, fashion braces—which are called kawat gigi untuk gaya or behel—will run you a mere $100.
And the best part about fashion braces is you don’t even need to see a medical professional. It is not uncommon for Indonesian beauty salons to slap braces on people's faces. If even that seems like too much of a hassle, DIY kits can be purchased from open-air stalls at local markets and through many online retailers. On this site, you can choose between "flowers," "kitty," "power O," and "Mickey"—as in the mouse. Another online retailer has made a video montage advertising the vast array of possibilities fashion braces have to offer the trendsetting Thai tween.
Even legit braces have health risks, such as tooth decay and decalcification, gingivitis, mouth sores, soft tissue inflammation, and root resorption, but apparently the health risks of fashion braces are even more severe.
While a nice set of faux pink Hello Kitty braces might be super cute, they can, according to the press, also be super deadly. So far, fake braces have been linked to the deaths of two Thai teens. A pair of shoddy braces was blamed for the death of a 17-year-old in the northeast city of Khon Kaen from a thyroid infection, which rapidly progressed to fatal heart failure. Then, in Chonburi, police tied the death of a 14-year-old girl to braces purchased at an illegal open-air stall.
The response of the Thai government was to ban the importation, production, and sale of fashion braces completely. Selling fake braces is now punishable by up to six months in prison and carries a hefty fine of 50,000 baht—roughly $1300. For importers and producers of fake braces, the punishment is anywhere up to a year in prison. Thailand's Consumer Protection Board has said some of the wires in the fake braces seized in raids have contained lead.
Unsurprisingly, these measures seem to have only pushed things further underground, creating a sort of fake braces black market in which DIY kits continue to be sold both online and discreetly at certain flea markets. Fake braces have also come to be associated with a scrappy motorbike subculture known as dek wehn wehn. (Dek is Thai for "kids," and wehn wehn is an onomatopoeia for the sound of a motorbike revving up.)
In Indonesia, where fashion braces remain legal, the trend is no longer limited to tweens—adults are purchasing them too. Some travelers have noted that in certain hotels in Indonesia, it is difficult to locate a member of the staff who doesn't have a potentially lead-lined grin.
For more weird fashion, visit VICE Style. |
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Tributes have poured in following the sudden death of a 16-year-old soccer player.
Izzy Dezu collapsed while playing for the Shelbourne FC youth academy during a game against St Kevin's Boys at the AUL Complex on Clonshaugh Road, north Dublin.
The talented footballer's club led the way with tributes on Wednesday.
In a statement, Shelbourne FC said: "We are heartbroken to have to confirm the news that our Academy U16 player, Izzy Dezu, collapsed and died during a match at the AUL Complex last night.
"The thoughts of everyone at Shelbourne FC are with his family, friends, teammates and coaches who have been devastated by his tragic loss.
"May he rest in peace."
Izzy's friends took to social media on Wednesday to share heartfelt messages.
One pal said: "It's killing me having to write this, but today I lost someone very special, but not only special to me but special to a lot of people that knew him.
"Izzy Dezu was one of the best and he left a huge gap in my life today.
"We used to absolutely kill eachother everyday of the week but still no matter what, [we] always had eachother's backs and had the best laughs when we where together.
"No matter what I'll never ever forget you and neither will any of the boys.
"You of all people this happens to "the big friendly giant" not once have I ever seen you harm someone or be nasty.
"You had a heart of gold man and everyone loved you for that."
St Kevin's Boys also issued a statement passing on their condolences to the club and said that it's "very sad for the whole game of football" when something this tragic happens.
They said: "We at St Kevin’s Boys FC would like to pass on our condolences to the family, friends and everybody at Shelbourne FC after their young academy player Izzy Dezu collapsed and died in a game last night.
"It's very sad for the whole game of football when something as tragic as this happens in a football match. We would like to thank all the people who rushed over and gave the best medical attention until the medics arrived.
"People from Shelbourne, SKB, Shamrock Rovers and Bohemian Football Club were there to help, football clubs coming together to help a young man. R.I.P."
Collinstown FC also passed on their condolences.
They said in a statement: "Collinstown FC would like to pass on our condolences to the family, friends and everybody at Shelbourne FC after their young U16 academy player Izzy Dezu collapsed and died in a game DDSL game last night." |
October 2017 (version 1.18)
Update 1.18.1: The update addresses these issues.
Downloads: Windows | Mac | Linux 64-bit: .tar.gz .deb .rpm | Linux 32-bit: .tar.gz .deb .rpm
Welcome to the October 2017 release of Visual Studio Code. There are a number of significant updates in this release and we completed several popular outstanding feature requests. We hope you like it and the highlights include:
If you'd like to read these release notes online, go to Updates on code.visualstudio.com.
You can also check out this 1.18 release highlights video from Cloud Developer Advocate Brian Clark.
The release notes are arranged in the following sections related to VS Code focus areas. Here are some further updates:
Workbench - Blue product logo, panels overflow support, file move confirmation.
- Blue product logo, panels overflow support, file move confirmation. Integrated Terminal - Better Windows support, show faint text, unset environment keys.
- Better Windows support, show faint text, unset environment keys. Source Control - Inline pending change view, File Explorer indicators.
- Inline pending change view, File Explorer indicators. Languages - TypeScript 2.6.1, localized JS/TS messages, IntelliSense inside strings and comments.
- TypeScript 2.6.1, localized JS/TS messages, IntelliSense inside strings and comments. Debugging - Debug configuration in the Status Bar, Debug view focus commands, console coloring.
- Debug configuration in the Status Bar, Debug view focus commands, console coloring. Extension Authoring - ConfigurationChangeEvent, async Input Box validation, folder open/closed icons.
Insiders: Want to see new features as soon as possible? You can download the nightly Insiders build and try the latest updates as soon as they are available.
Workbench
Support for Multi Root Workspaces
Support for multi-root workspaces is now enabled by default in the Stable release. This was our #1 feature request - it's been a while coming but it's here now.
Please refer to our documentation for a full explanation of all of the multiple folder features: improvements to settings, our SCM experience, Tasks, Debugging and more.
NOTE: Extension authors should refer to our wiki that explains the new extension APIs to make your extension fully leverage multi-root workspaces.
Git status in File Explorer
To satisfy another very popular feature request, we added support to the File Explorer to show modified, added, conflicting, and ignored files in a different color and with a badge.
The Git file decorations can be customized in many ways. You can hide the decorations entirely with the git.decorations.enabled setting and configure to only show colors explorer.decorations.colors or badges explorer.decorations.badges . There are new colors for theme authors which are prefixed with gitDecoration .
There is also a proposed API to allow extension authors to add color decorations to arbitrary resources. We haven't finalized on anything yet but are eager to learn how you would use decorations.
Vertical panels
Per popular user request, we now support a vertical panel layout. Using the actions Move to Right and Move to Bottom in the panel title bar, panels can switch between being displayed on the bottom or the right side.
Panel title bar improvements
We have improved the panel title bar such that it is now possible to rearrange and hide panels as well as added overflow support. Overflow with the Additional Views dropdown is particularly useful when the panels are docked vertically and have limited horizontal space.
Blue logo for Stable
The VS Code logo for Stable releases is now blue again. You can read all about our icon journey in this blog post.
Note: Depending on your platform, you may still see the earlier logo due to operating system caching of the application icon.
Confirmations in File Explorer
We now present a confirmation dialog when moving files or folders in the File Explorer via drag and drop. This should prevent accidentally performing a move when not desired. If you don't want to see the confirmation dialog, you can configure explorer.confirmDragAndDrop to false .
We also added a new setting, explorer.confirmDelete , to optionally hide our existing delete confirmation dialog.
Note: We will always show a confirmation dialog when deleting a file or folder will bypass your platform's trash bin.
Quick Open applies .gitignore exclusions
Quick Open (⌘P (Windows, Linux Ctrl+P)) applies the exclusions from .gitignore files when enabled with the "search.useIgnoreFiles" setting.
Editor
Ctrl+D / Cmd+D improvements
Due to popular demand, the Add Selection to Next Find Match (⌘D (Windows, Linux Ctrl+D)) action has been modified to behave differently when you start adding multiple cursors with no selected text. In this case, the action will temporarily ignore the Find widget search options and will always search for whole words and case sensitive matches.
Navigate to next / previous symbolic highlight
Thanks to PR #35740 from Krzysztof Cieślak, it is now possible to navigate between highlighted symbols using F7 or Shift+F7 in languages where there is a semantic highlight provider. When you have a symbol selected, you can now quickly move to other instances of that symbol in your file.
Integrated Terminal
Faint text support
The terminal now supports the escape sequence for faint text:
Unset environment keys
You can already set custom environment variables for Integrated Terminal sessions but now you can also clear existing variables by assigning them to null in the terminal.integrated.env.<platform> settings:
"terminal.integrated.env.linux" : { " HOME ": null }
Improved Windows support
Windows support in the Integrated Terminal has been improved:
Deeply nested processes are now properly cleaned up after exiting the terminal session. This happened most frequently with servers launched from Node.js.
On Windows, the terminal received lines already wrapped so we don't know which lines are wrapped and which are separated by new lines. We now guess where lines are wrapped by checking the last character of the previous line and flag them as such. This fixes a problem with tasks where problem matchers would break on Windows and is also one of the prerequisites to get multiline links working on Windows.
Languages
TypeScript 2.6.1
VS Code 1.18 ships with TypeScript 2.6.1. This update provides VS Code with several exciting tooling improvements and also fixes a few bugs. You can read more about TypeScript 2.6 here.
Auto Import for JavaScript and TypeScript
Speed up your coding with auto imports for JavaScript and TypeScript. The suggestion list now includes all exported symbols in the current project. Just start typing:
If you choose one of the suggestion from another file or module, VS Code will automatically add an import for it. In this example, VS Code adds an import for Hercules to the top of the file:
Auto imports requires TypeScript 2.6+. You can disable auto imports by setting "typescript.autoImportSuggestions.enabled": false .
Localizable error messages and Quick Fix descriptions for JavaScript and TypeScript
JavaScript and TypeScript error messages and Quick Fix descriptions are now displayed in your current display language:
The "typescript.locale" setting lets you configure which language is used separately from your editor's display language. To revert to VS Code's 1.17 English only error messages, set "typescript.locale": "en" .
Extract local refactoring for JavaScript and TypeScript
VS Code 1.18 adds several new JavaScript and TypeScript refactorings in addition to the extract method refactoring added in VS Code 1.16. The extract constant refactoring creates a new local variable for the currently selected expression:
When working with classes, you can also extract a value to a new property.
Install @types Quick Fix for TypeScript
TypeScript now offers a Quick Fix to npm install missing @types definitions for a given module:
This Quick Fix will install the @types definition locally and add it to the devDependencies in your package.json .
Additional typescript.tsc.autoDetect settings
VS Code automatically generates both build and build+watch tasks for all tsconfig.json files in your workspace. In VS Code 1.18, the typescript.tsc.autoDetect setting now lets you control which kinds of tasks are generated:
"typescript.tsc.autoDetect" : "build" // only generate build tasks "typescript.tsc.autoDetect" : "watch" // only generate build+watch tasks "typescript.tsc.autoDetect" : "on" // Generate both (default) "typescript.tsc.autoDetect" : "off" // Don't generate tsconfig build tasks
Quick suggestions are disabled inside of strings and comments by default. In some cases, such as in JavaScript template strings, a string or comment may contain blocks of code where quick suggestions should be enabled. Grammars can now hint that VS Code should re-enable quick suggestions by adding a meta.embedded scope on tokens inside of a string or comment:
JSON
JSON now supports JSON Schema Draft 06. The most notable additions are the const , contains and propertyNames properties. Read here for a more detailed overview of changes from draft 04.
Source Control
Inline change review
You can now review source code changes right within the standard editor. This feature depends on whether it is supported by the source code provider but it is already enabled for Git repositories out of the box.
With this new UI, you can not only review your code changes but also navigate, stage or revert them inline.
Git: Conflict marker detection
When staging a file which is flagged as having conflicts due to a merge or rebase, VS Code will check for the standard merge markers (for example <<<<<<< ) and alert you if you forget to delete them when you are about to stage the file.
Git: Improved integration
Recently, there was a patch to Git which enables tools like VS Code to use git status without interfering with other concurrent Git commands. VS Code is now prepared for that upcoming Git change by using the right environment context ( GIT_OPTIONAL_LOCKS ) when spawning Git.
Extensions
Recommended extensions badge
Recommended extensions now display a badge to easily distinguish them from other extensions in a list. Hover on the badge or click the list item to learn why the extension was recommended to you.
Single view combining workspace and general recommendations
The two views for workspace recommended extensions and general recommended extensions are now combined into a single view with the two kinds of recommendations showing up in a split view. Use the command Extensions: Show Recommended Extensions to see this view.
There is also a handy Install All Workspace Recommendations command on the WORKSPACE RECOMMENDATIONS title bar to install all the extensions that are recommended by other users of your workspace.
You can edit workspace recommendations via the Configure Recommended Extensions (Workspace Folder) command in the same title bar.
Debugging
Debug in Status Bar
VS Code now shows the active debug launch configuration in the Status Bar. By clicking on the debug status, a user can change the active launch configuration and then start debugging without the need to open the Debug view.
Focus actions
We have introduced new actions to easily move keyboard focus to the various Debug sections. This should make it easier for keyboard centric users to navigate while debugging.
These actions are:
Focus Variables: workbench.debug.action.focusVariablesView
Focus Watch: workbench.debug.action.focusWatchView
Focus CallStack: workbench.debug.action.focusCallStackView
Focus Breakpoints: workbench.debug.action.focusBreakpointsView
Start without debugging shortcut
The default keyboard shortcut on macOS for Debug: Start Without Debugging changed to Ctrl+F5 to avoid a collision with an existing macOS keyboard shortcut.
Coloring of Debug Console evaluation results based on type
Debug console expressions are now colored based on the type property returned from the debug extension. This is currently supported by the Node.js debug extension.
A first glimpse of support for Node.js debugging in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) was already available in the previous milestone (but only for older versions of Node.js that still support the "legacy" protocol). In this milestone, another pull request by Bartosz Sosnowski (@bzoz) was integrated that adds support for the "inspector" protocol that is used by more recent versions of Node.js. With this update, it is now possible to run Node.js v8 in WSL.
Tasks
Schema improvements
The schema for the tasks.json file version 2.0.0 was updated. The taskName property is deprecated in favor of the label property to make it more consistent with contributed tasks. In addition, there is now a snippet for new tasks. By default, it creates a task of type shell to execute commands in the Integrated Terminal.
workspaceFolder replaces workspaceRoot
Last release, we deprecated the ${workspaceRoot} variable in favor of ${workspaceFolder} to make this consistent with multi-root workspace support. For the same reason, we are deprecating ${workspaceRootFolderName} . Please use ${workspaceFolderBasename} instead. This deprecation applies to debug launch configurations as well.
Performance improvements
Faster editor decorations
Decorations are a fundamental editor concept on which numerous features are built; for example: find matches highlights, diff annotations, word highlights, selection highlights, breakpoints, folding markers, and inline colors. Moreover, numerous extensions make use of decorations to customize the rendering of VS Code's editor. Below is a screenshot with various editor decorations highlighted:
PR #36410 reimplements editor decorations as a delta-encoded Interval Tree (an augmented Red-Black tree). Besides reducing the time spent in all operations related to decorations (creating, updating, deleting or querying), the change also brings in some impressive memory usage savings. As an immediate result of these optimizations, we have increased the in-file on type find limit from 1,000 matches to 20,000 matches.
Windows start-up
We are always on the lookout for ways to improve VS Code start-up time. During the last month, we made a variety of improvements that significantly decreased the time of the initial (cold) launch of VS Code.
Extension Authoring
Configuration: Listen to specific changes
Now Configuration change event provides a ConfigurationChangeEvent object that has a method affectsConfiguration to check about configuration changes. You can also check if a configuration has changed for a resource.
export interface ConfigurationChangeEvent { affectsConfiguration(section: string , resource?: Uri): boolean ; }
Async Input Box validation
The showInputBox function now supports asynchronous validation. Call showInputBox like so:
vscode.window.showInputBox({ async validateInput(value) { return await someLongRunningOperation(value); } });
Folder icons in File Icon Themes
File Icon themes can now disable the default folder icon (the rotating triangle) in tree views and use the folder icons to indicate the expansion state:
To do so, File Icon themes must specify "hidesExplorerArrows":true in the File Icon theme definition file. Thanks to Ari for the PR.
New Context: resourceExtname
There is a new context key to control keybindings and menu items. Its name is resourceExtname and its value will be the extension of the file in question.
New workspace.name property
A new workspace.name property was added that provides (readonly) access to the name of the workspace. The name will be undefined if no workspace is opened.
SCM: New menu: scm/change/title
Along with the new SCM inline change review, a new contributable menu context is now available: scm/change/title . It allows you to contribute commands to the header of an inline change review view.
Terminal: Setting environment
You can now set the environment of terminal instances launched via the extension API:
window .createTerminal({ name: 'My session' , shell: 'zsh' , env: { JAVA_HOME: '<path>' } });
Command debug.logToDebugConsole is deprecated
With the introduction of a proper vscode.debug.console.append(...) API in the October release, it is no longer necessary to use the debug.logToDebugConsole command to append text to the debug console. Due to that we are deprecating the debug.logToDebugConsole command and plan to drop support for it in the future. If it is difficult for you to move off this feature, please speak up by commenting here.
Note: Currently this API is proposed, so in order to use it you must opt into it by adding a "enableProposedApi": true to package.json and you'll have to copy the vscode.proposed.d.ts into your extension project. Also be aware that you cannot publish an extension to the Marketplace that uses the enableProposedApi attribute.
Command vscode.startDebug has been removed
As announced in the previous release, we have finally removed support for the vscode.startDebug command.
Command vscode.workbench.customDebugRequest has been removed
As announced in the previous release, we have finally removed support for the vscode.workbench.customDebugRequest command.
Debug contributions in package.json
Activation event onDebug:type has been removed
As announced in the previous release, we have finally removed support for the onDebug:type activation event.
Using debuggers.startSessionCommand in package.json has been removed
As announced in the previous release, we have finally removed support for the startSessionCommand command.
Using command with debuggers.initialConfigurations in package.json is deprecated
As announced in the previous release, we have finally removed support for the initialConfigurations command.
Updated documentation and mock-debug example
With this release, most of the command based debug API has been replaced by the proper API available through vscode.d.ts . Consequently, we have updated both the documentation for debug extensions and the underlying mock-debug example for the new APIs.
New commands
Key Command Command id Open quick file picker with the second entry selected by default workbench.action.quickOpenPreviousEditor Open a folder as workspace in a new window workbench.action.openFolderAsWorkspaceInNewWindow Remove a root folder from the workspace workbench.action.removeRootFolder Focus Problems workbench.action.problems.focus Focus Variables workbench.debug.action.focusVariablesView Focus Watch workbench.debug.action.focusWatchView Focus CallStack workbench.debug.action.focusCallStackView Focus Breakpoints workbench.debug.action.focusBreakpointsView
Notable Changes
22523: Touch support in editor tabs (scrolling, open, context menu)
35527: macOS High Sierra: parts of the UI not rendering
36122: Windows: window on secondary monitor does not restore at exact position
36695: Workspace doesn't restores itself on re-opening Code in Ubuntu 17.10 GNOME
Thank You
Last but certainly not least, a big Thank You! to the following folks that helped to make VS Code even better:
Contributions to language-server-protocol :
Contributions to vscode-languageserver-node :
Contributions to vscode-node-debug2 :
Contributes to vscode-chrome-debug :
Contributes to vscode-chrome-debug-core :
@digeff: Fix site.js appearing in the call stack instead of site.ts PR #246
Contributes to vscode-extension-samples :
Contributes to vscode-recipes :
Contributes to vscode-extension-vscode :
Contributions to localization :
This is the seventh month since we opened community localization in Transifex. We now have nearly 500 members in the Transifex VS Code project team. We appreciate your contributions, either by providing new translations, voting on translations, or suggesting process improvements.
Here is a snapshot of top contributors for this release. For details about the project including the contributor name list, visit the project site at https://aka.ms/vscodeloc. |
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Ohioans who buy their own health insurance should see an average out-of-pocket savings on premiums of 21 percent because of taxpayer subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, according to a new study by the Rand Corp., a widely respected think tank.
Without the health care law, Ohioans who bought individual policies would pay $3,973, on average, in premiums in 2016, the study shows. But the subsidies, or tax credits, will bring the individuals’ costs down to $3,131.
These people will buy their insurance through a computerized marketplace, or “exchange,” where insurers will compete for business.
The study, done for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, covered ten states that together were considered representative of the nation. A number of its findings are likely to please supporters of the health care law, known widely as Obamacare.
But the study also somewhat supports a claim by Ohio Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor, an Obamacare critic who leads the state Department of Insurance. Taylor said in early August that the Affordable Care Act will drive up premiums by an average of 41 percent . She based this on rates that insurers submitted to the state for policies to be sold on the exchange in 2014.
This was for the same kind of policies studied by Rand: those bought by individuals who don’t have employer-provided coverage and who in 2014 will buy their policies on the exchange.
Taylor’s figure did not account for buyer subsidies, nor for the wide variety of policies that are now available, some with deductibles of $10,000 and even $25,000, that will no longer be sold. Obamacare will require a change in coverage for many, with more exams and medical conditions covered, and will eliminate some of the high-deductible, bare-bones policies now sold and used in Taylor’s comparison.
Figures from the Rand study suggest that on price hikes, Taylor was correct in theory -- if excluding these key factors -- but that her numbers were off.
Without factoring in subsidy offsets and the policies that people are likely to buy, premiums for individual policies in Ohio will average $5,312 in 2016, according to figures from Rand. That’s 34 percent higher than the average for individual premiums without Obamacare, Rand’s figures show.
But that, too, is a high estimate that does not factor what kind of coverage people will actually buy on the exchange (there’s a choice of four levels of coverage -- bronze, silver, gold and platinum), the actuarial value of that coverage and how age and tobacco use will play into premiums and choices. Insurers have had to weigh this for their rate-setting calculations.
Christine Eibner, a senior Rand economist and lead author of the study, told us in a telephone interview this afternoon that she considers this is a realistic way of comparing premiums. It compares premiums for coverage people will get on the exchange with coverage they have or would have had without Obamacare.
Based on that calculation, the average premium for individual policies in Ohio would rise by $900, or 22.65 percent. That's nearly half of Taylor’s unweighted calculation.
The price hike would be offset for many Ohioans by the taxpayer subsidy.
Either way, here’s how costs would break down on average in 2016 under the Rand analysis: The policy buyer would pay $3,131 in annual premiums. Another $2,181 would come from a tax credit, paid for by the act’s taxes, fees and offsets.
Tax credit eligibility will be determined by income, phasing out after 400 percent of the poverty level. Some 67 percent of exchange enrollees in Ohio will be eligible, Rand found. By 2016, 9.9 percent of Ohio’s non-elderly population will be enrolled, the study estimated.
This is likely to boost business for insurers, Rand data suggest. Fifteen percent of non-elderly Ohioans are now uninsured, and that will go down to 6.2 percent by 2016, the study estimated.
Nearly 63 percent of those expected to enroll in Ohio would not have had insurance without the Affordable Care Act, Rand said. |
(image The Dallas Voice)
This should come as a shock to absolutely nobody: oil giant ExxonMobil's shareholders have once again voted down a proposal that would have provided employment discrimination protections to the company's LGBT employees.
The Dallas Voice reports on the outcome of ExxonMobil's yearly shareholders meeting in downtown Dallas:
Shareholders voted to reject a resolution, 81 percent to 19 percent, from the New York state comptroller calling for the company’s Board of Directors to add sexual orientation and gender identity/expression to the oil giant’s EEO policy. The 19 percent support for the resolution reportedly was the lowest ever. George Wong addressed the shareholders on behalf of the New York State Common Retirement Fund. He presented the business argument that the company should recruit from and retain the widest possible talent pool. Failure to do that leads to less efficient business operations. Most Fortune 500 companies do have inclusive nondiscrimination policies including most other major oil companies, he said. During general comments, no one else supported the nondiscrimination proposal.
ExxonMobil has the lowest score ever received by a company in the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index, meriting a -25 rating for rescinding LGBT discrimination protections and cancelling domestic partner health benefits when Exxon acquired Mobil in 1999. Other oil companies, such as Chevron, BP, Shell and Spectra, have received scores of 85 or higher.
Last week, Freedom to Work, an LGBT rights organization that focuses on employment issues, filed a complaint with the Illinois Department of Human Rights alleging that the company engages in discriminatory hiring practices. In its piece on the complaint, the Huffington Post explained the suit's basic argument: |
Should Ron Paul win the Iowa Caucuses, the media narrative is the Republican Party establishment will go scorched earth on the quirky libertarian Texas Congressman, just as they did Pat Buchanan back in the day.
But unlike that successful kamikaze mission of yesteryear, this one won’t work. In fact, if the Republican Party establishment chooses to go down that road they might just propel Paul to the nomination.
That’s because Ron Paul isn’t Pat Buchanan, and the environment this go-around is dramatically different than it was back then for two reasons.
First of all, Paul’s campaign apparatus is dramatically superior to anything Buchanan ever had. His Iowa Caucus campaign is a well-oiled machine, and the envy of the entire process. They’re running the best commercials. They’re the best organized. They’re the most loyal. And look beyond Iowa, too. Paul wins straw polls all over the country, including CPAC and even at the 2011 Values Voters Summit. I know several of these people who are the masterminds of Paul’s organization, and these folks don’t put their phasers on stun when it comes to their opponents and know what they’re doing. They’re not kooks, they’re sharp cookies and losing is not an option in their strategy. They have no problem burning down the entire system, because they distrust it anyway.
Buchanan still needed the system. He still needed jobs on cable news networks or help publishing/selling his books and columns. Paul isn’t running to reform the system. He’s running to reboot it. Buchanan has never had an organization this good. In fact, no insurgent candidate in modern American political history has had an organization this professional and well-funded.
Second, voter angst and anger towards Washington and Republicrats in general is at an all-time high. In 2004 the voters gave George W. Bush and the Republicans control of Washington. In 2006 they made Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House. In 2008 they made Barack Obama President of the United States. In 2010 they fired over 700 Democrats running for re-election around the country. Meanwhile, marriage continues to remain undefeated at the ballot box whenever pro-homosexual activists attempt to challenge it, but at the same time the American people seem content with normalizing homosexual behavior in popular culture.
That’s a schizophrenic swing of energy and emotion in less than one decade. In just six years the American people voted for a quasi-socialist welfare state they didn’t want to have to pay for, and a return to Judeo-Christian moral values they themselves don’t want to be accountable to.
That tells me the American people are looking for someone – literally anyone – to show some leadership on the issues. Voters aren’t satisfied after trying both parties’ milquetoast ruling class, and are looking to drain the swamp.
Enter Ron Paul.
Paul has already been heavily vetted. He’s a national figure, who has run for president several times and has been running for the last five years. His quirks are known. His positions are known. Believing the American people will not vote for someone who wants to return us to 1789, is like believing the American people will never vote for someone who wants us to look like West Germany circa 1978 when they just did.
We are a confused people. We know what we’re supposed to be and supposed to look like, and yet we have no idea for how to get there. We lack the spiritual and moral foundation to rebuild the wall, if you will. Minus a Nehemiah showing the way, a civilization will either choose one of two paths—self-indulgence and ultimately self-destruction, or hit the control-alt-delete button in order to start over again.
The liberals represent the former, and Paul and his libertarian brigade represent the latter.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Make no mistake—voters are desperate. Therefore, trying to give Paul the Buchanan treatment will actually entrench Paul’s support all the more, because voters don’t trust the source of the attacks. It’s impossible to underestimate how little regard the American people have for political parties, and the Republicrat ruling class and its crony capitalism. They will see Buchanan-type attacks against Paul as the system trying to defend its indefensible self, and rally to him all the more. Folks are much angrier and desperate then they were during Buchanan’s presidential runs. Thus, the crankier and crazier Paul sounds the more they’ll love him. He’ll be getting attacked by all the people they can’t stand and don’t trust.
The peasants want to storm the Bastille, and in many respects the philosophy Paul is espousing of individualized liberty for the sake of self is right out of the French Revolution—so it fits the mood of the country perfectly.
This brings us to how to defeat Paul.
Paul is a man with powerful ideas, some very good and some very bad. If human history has taught us one thing it’s that bad powerful ideas can only be defeated by good powerful ideas.
Instead of trying to cram milquetoast flip-floppers down voters’ throats, the Republican Party needs to champion candidates who have good powerful ideas about how to return to the roots of the American Revolution—which begins with the premise individuals have liberty and rights from God alone, and the role of government is to protect those God-given rights and then get out of the way to allow liberty to flourish.
The more Rudy McRomneys the Republican Party serves up, the more popular someone like Paul will become. Frustrated voters will use Paul as a blunt instrument, or maybe even a sharp object, to attack a failed system with.
The Republicrats deserve Ron Paul. The ruling class created the Ron Paul phenomenon by its own actions. And the more they persist in being tone-deaf to voters’ angst, the more likely they are to suffer at his hands.
And as much as I disagree with Paul, I’d choose him over the Republicrat ruling class any day of the week, and twice on Sunday. |
Update I had made an error in coding for the HADCRUT/C&W example - see below. The agreement with C&W is now much improved.
I have fixed the which.min error here too; it made little difference).
level Numcells Simple average Nested average 1 1 32 0.3292 0.3292 2 2 122 0.3311 0.3311 3 3 272 0.3275 0.3317 4 4 482 0.3256 0.3314 5 5 1082 0.3206 0.3317 6 6 1922 0.3167 0.332 7 7 3632 0.311 0.3313 8 8 7682 0.3096 0.3315
HADCRUT and Cowtan/Way
UpdateI had made an error in coding for the HADCRUT/C&W example - see code. I had used which.min instead of which.max. This almost worked, because it placed locations in the cells on the opposite side of the globe, consistently. However, the result is now much more consistent with C&W. With refining, the integrals now approach from below, and also converge much more tightly.
The nested integration makes even more difference than C&W, mainly in the time from 1995 to early 2000's. Otherwise, a A
Trend 1997-2012 Trend 1980-2012 HAD 4 0.462 1.57 Hier1 0.902 1.615 Hier2 0.929 1.635 Hier3 0.967 1.625 Hier4 0.956 1.624 C&W krig 0.97 1.689
which would agree very well with the nested results
Update: Kevin Cowtan has explained the difference in a comment below.
Method and Code
monthave=array(NA,c(12,33,8)) #array for monthly averages datapointer=gridpointer=cellarea=list(); g=0; for(i in 1:8){ # making pointer lists for each grid level g0=g; # previous g g=as.matrix(hexmin[[i]]$cells); ng=nrow(g); cellarea[[i]]=g[,4] if(i>1){ # pointers to coarser grid i-1 gp=rep(0,ng) for(j in 1:ng)gp[j]=which.max(g0[,1:3]%*%g[j,1:3]) gridpointer[[i]]=gp } y=inv; ny=nrow(y); dp=rep(0,ny) # y is list of HAD grid centres in 3D cartesian for(j in 1:ny) dp[j]=which.max(g[,1:3]%*%y[j,]) datapointer[[i]]=dp # datapointers into grid i }
Update: Note the use of which.max here, which is the key instruction locating points in cells. I had originally used which.min, which actually almost worked, because it places ponts on the opposite side of the globe, and symmetry nearly makes that OK. But not quite. Although the idea is to minimise the distance, that is implemented as maximising the scalar product.
for(I in 1:33)for(J in 1:12){ # looping over months in data from 1980 if(J==1)print(Sys.time()) ave=rep(NA,8) # initialising #tab=data.frame(level=ave,Numcells=ave,average=ave) g=0 for(K in 1:8){ # over resolution levels ave0=ave integrand=c(had[,,J,I+130]) # Set integrand to HAD 4 for the month area=cellarea[[K]]; cellsum=cellnum=rep(0,length(area)) # initialising dp=datapointer[[K]] for(i in 1:n){ # loop over "stations" ii=integrand[i] if(is.na(ii))next # no data in cell j=dp[i] cellsum[j]=cellsum[j]+ii cellnum[j]=cellnum[j]+1 } j=which(cellnum==0) # cells without data gp=gridpointer[[K]] if(K>1)for(i in j){cellnum[i]=1;cellsum[i]=ave0[gp[i]]} ave=cellsum/cellnum # cell averages Ave=sum(ave*area)/sum(area) # global average (area-weighted) if(is.na(Ave))stop("A cell inherits no data") monthave[J,I,K] = round(Ave,4) # weighted average } }# end I,J
Data
In my previous post , I introduced the idea of hierarchical, or nested gridding. In earlier posts, eg here and here , I had described using platonic solids as a basis for grids on the sphere that were reasonably uniform, and free of the pole singularities of latitude/longitude. I gave data files for icosahedral hexagon meshes of various degrees of resolution, usually proceeding by a factor of two in cell number or length scale. And in that previous post, I emphasised the simplicity of a scheme for working out which cell a point belonged by finding the nearest centre point. I foreshadowed the idea of embedding each such grid in a coarser parent, with grid averaging proceeding downward, and using the progressive information to supply estimates for empty cells.The following graph from HADCRUT illustrates the problem. It shows July 2017 temperature anomalies on a 5°x5° grid, with colors for cells that have data, and white otherwise. They average the area colored, and omit the rest from the average. As I often argue, as a global estimate, this effectively replaces the rest by the average value. HADCRUT is aware of this, because they actually average by hemispheres, which means the infilling is done with the hemisphere average rather than global. As they point out, this has an important benefit in earlier years when the majority of missing cells were in the SH, which was also behaving differently, so the hemisphere average is more eappropriate than global. On the right, I show the same figure, but this time with my crude coloring in (with Paint) of that hemisphere average. You can assess how appropriate the infill is:A much-discussed paper by Cowtan and Way 2013 noted that this process led to bias in that the areas thus infilled tended not to have the behaviour of the average, but were warming faster, and this was underestimated particularly since 2000 because of the Arctic. They described a number of remedies, and I'll concentrate on the use of kriging. This is a fairly elaborate geostatistical interpolation method. When applied, HADCRUT data-based trends increased to be more in line with other indices which did some degree of interpolation.I think the right way to look at this is getting infilling right. HADCRUT was on the right track in using hemisphere averages, but it should be much more local. Every missing cell should be assigned the best estimate based on local data. This is in the spirit of spatial averaging. The cells are chosen as regions of proximity to a finite number of measurement points, and are assigned an average from those points because of the proximity. Proximity does not end at an artificial cell boundary.In the previous post, I set up a grid averaging based on an inventory of about 11000 stations (including GHCN and ERSST) but integrated not temperature but a simple function sin(latitude)^2, which should give 1/3. I used averaging omitting empty cells, and showed that at coarse resolution the correct value was closely approximated, but this degraded with refinement, because of the accession of empty cells. I'll now complete that table using nested integration with hexagonal grid. At each successive level, if a cell is empty, it is assigned the average value of the smallest cell from a previous integration that includes it. (The simple average shows that there is an optimum; a grid fine enough to resolve the (small) variation, but coarse enough to have data in most cells. The function is smooth, so there is little penalty for too coarse, but a larger one for too fine, since the areas of empty cells coincides with the function peak at the poles. The merit of the nested average is that it removes this downside. Further refinement may not help very much, but it does no harm, because a near local value is always used.The actual coding for nested averaging is quite simple, and I'll give a more complete example below.Cowtan and Way thankfully released a very complete data set with their paper, so I'll redo their calculation (with kriging) with nested gridding and compare results. They used HADCRUT 4.1.1.0, data ending at end 2012. Here is a plot of results from 1980, with nested integration of the HADCRUT gridded data at centres (but on a hex grid). I'm showing every even step as hier1-4, with hier4 being the highest resolution at 7682 cells. All anomalies relative to 1961-90..The HADCRUT 4 published monthly average (V4.1.1.0) is given in red, and the Cowtan and Way Version 1 kriging in black.s with C&W, it adheres closely to HADCRUT in earlier years, when presumably there isn't much bias associated with the missing data. C&W focussed on the effect on OLS trends, particularly since 1/1997. Here is a table, in °C/Century:Convergence is very good to the C&W trend I calculate. In their paper, for 1997-2012 C&W give a trend of 1.08 °C/Cen (table III). C&W used ARMA(1,1) rather than OLS, but the discrepancy seems too large for that.This is the code for the integration of the monthly sequence. I'll omit the reading of the initial files and the graphics, and assume that we start with the HADCRUT 4.1.1.0 gridded 1980-2012 data reorganised into an array had[72,36,12,33] (lon,lat,month,year). The hexmin[[]] lists are as described and posted previously. The 4 columns of $cells are the cell centres and areas (on sphere). The first section is just making pointer lists from the anomaly data into the grids, and from each grid into its parent. If you were doing this regularly, you would store the pointers and just re-use as needed, since it only has location data. The result is the gridpointer and datapointer lists. The code takes a few seconds.The main data loop just loops over months, counting and adding the data in each cell (using datapointer); forming a cell average. It then inherits from the parent grid values (for empty cells) from the parent average vector using gridpointer to find the match, so at each ave is complete. There is an assumption that the coarsest level has no empty cells. It is then combined with area weighting (cellarea, from hexmin) for the monthly average. Then on to the next month. The result is the array monthave[month, year, level] of global averages.Moyhuhexmin has the hex cell data and was given in the earlier post. I have put a new zipped ascii version here |
You talkin' about me? Well I'm the only one watching this. Oh yeah? Okay.
Donald Trump never ceases to check the TV ratings. So, read 'em and weep, Donnie.
Compared to President Barack Obama's first address in 2009, Trump's early ratings are down by 17 percent.
The audience that did tune in was heavily Republican, but the approval ratings were also down.
While the 57% who said they had a very positive reaction to Trump's speech outpaces the marks received by his predecessor for any of his recent State of the Union addresses, they fell below the reviews either Barack Obama or George W. Bush received for either of their initial addresses to Congress. In 2009, 68% had a very positive reaction to Obama, while 66% gave Bush very positive reviews in 2001.
So Trump’s audience was off by 17 percent and the approval rating from that shrunken audience was down by 11 percent. What have people said about things like this in the very, very recent past?
x Wow, the ratings are in and Arnold Schwarzenegger got "swamped" (or destroyed) by comparison to the ratings machine, DJT. So much for.... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2017
Time for a little editing.
Wow. the ratings are in and Donald Trump got “swamped” (or ass-kicked) by comparison to the ratings machine, Barack Obama. So much for being a reality TV star.
Though you know what’s going to show up in Trump’s Twitter instead: “Fake News! Everyone watched and it was the biggest audience ever. Everyone loved it. They told me so!” |
Update 3 p.m. October 6, 2017: Principal Bertie Simmons was told in a meeting with her supervisor Jorge Arredondo this afternoon that she is suspended for another week and that the investigation into her performance is being expanded. *See below for more details.
Dr. Bertie Simmons, the longtime and much-acclaimed principal of Furr High School in the Houston Independent School District, has been sent home – apparently in large part as a result of a disagreement she had with higher-ups over the use of school uniforms.
Karen Taylor, a friend of the 83-year-old Simmons, said the former Principal of the Year had told the district that gang activity seemed to be increasing at the school – evidenced by the increasing display of gang colors by students – and that she wanted to stop or at least slow it down by requiring uniforms. “She was saying that Lamar and other schools use uniforms and she really needs them.”
Continue Reading
Instead she was told by her superiors that HISD does not want to expand the use of uniforms and her request was denied, Taylor said.
Also included in the letter sent to Simmons by the district was a reference to Simmons allegedly threatening a student with a bat, as reportedly observed by a teacher. For years, Simmons has referred to getting a bat in some form as a joke. Again, Simmons is 83 years old and, well, remarkably short.
“It’s always been a joke since she’s been at Furr that when she walks up to a student and someone says something to her that’s joking, she says, ‘Oh, don’t make me get my bat.’”
Asked for a statement, the HISD press office responded with this:
"The Principal at Furr High School in the Houston Independent School District has been temporarily relieved of duties due to a personnel matter. We cannot provide specific details out of respect for the privacy of the individuals involved. Administrators from Central Office are working closely with the school community and the campus leadership team to ensure there is no disruption to student learning."
Taylor said she believes there is jealousy at work in the attack on Simmons, who has been frequently highlighted in local and national media for her ability to turn around Furr High School. There is a famous true story about her negotiating a deal with warring gangsters at her school that if they behaved for the rest of the school year, she’d take them to New York City to prove 9/11 happened. And she did just that, including having the group take in a Broadway show.
More recently she headed up a yearlong effort by the school that successfully secured a $10 million grant in a national contest from Lauren Powell Jobs, widow of Steve Jobs, for Furr. Taylor said HISD officials had told Simmons the money should be spread around the district, which she didn’t want to do. And when she contacted the organizers of The Super School Project, she was told that unless the entire grant amount went to Furr, Taylor said, there wouldn’t be any money forthcoming.
Simmons's attorney, Scott Newar, sent a letter to Carranza today in which he denied the allegations made by
Dr. Jorge Arredondo, HISD’s East Area Superintendent, in a memo to Simmons. According to Arredondo's memo: " Dr. Simmons “failed to adhere to the district’s decision to relax student dress code for the first semester and…verbally threatened students with a baseball bat.”
Here's the letter Simmons's attorney sent to Carranza:
Taylor also said that most teachers at Furr are very upset about what’s happened to Simmons and wanted to show their support, but were warned by the administration that there should be no such demonstrations.
We attempted to contact Simmons directly but she was not immediately available, on the advice of her attorney.
Updated, 4:30 p.m.: Bertie Simmons says she doesn't understand why the district has done this. "I don't know why, what I've done or haven't done."
"All I can say is I love these students, and clearly the district doesn't love me. I've just been in shock because last Friday when they ushered me off campus and gave me that letter, I was just shocked." Simmons said she had a hearing with a hearing officer on Tuesday and thought it went well. "I'm energized by this. When I see something is wrong I get energized," she said. "I'm ready to go now. I'm ready to fight I'm ready to do whatever to make things right. Because this is obviously wrong."
Updated 3 p.m. October 6, 2017: Scott Newar, the attorney Bertie Simmons has engaged in this matter, said today that they are weighing their response to the latest move by the district. "They are continuing their investigation of Bertie. Now the investigation has expanded from these bogus allegations of a threat with a baseball bat and a violation of the relaxed uniform policy to investigating her for unstated issues involving her administration of Furr High School.
"They have an internal auditor out at the school district continuing a sort of witch hunt against her and this is going to go on for the next week at least," Newar said.
Her friend Karen Taylor also sent this letter to Superintendent Carranza: |
Barcelona centre-back Gerard Pique could miss up to 12 matches for the club after a foul tirade of abuse against an assistant referee.
With Barcelona 1-0 up in the second leg of the Spanish Super Cup, the 28-year-old was sent off, ending the chance of a famous come-back - they had been down 4-0 to Athletic Bilbao after the first leg.
The Spanish international lost his head after the assistant failed to flag an offside call in the 55th minute.
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"I s*** on your w**** of a mother", he angrily told the linesman before he was dragged away by team-mates.
Abusing an official will land Pique with a minimum of a four game suspension, meaning he would miss the fixtures against Athletic Bilbao, Levante, Malaga and a massive trip to Atletico Madrid in early September.
The Spanish football association (LFP) could suspend him for up to 12 matches for the offence.
Pique was also involved in an incident (above) with an offical a week earlier, after he was elbowed by Sevilla striker Ciro Immobile in the Super Cup.
In English, Pique said "f***'s sake, mate, six refs and nobody sees it?"
Keep up to date with all the latest news with expert comment and analysis from our award-winning writers |
Well, it looks like you love having trailers in Plex! Thanks so much for all the kind words and great feedback. We’re thrilled to bring you some most excellent enhancements, less than two weeks after our original launch of the feature. Let’s dive in and explore the new stuff! First of all, we’ve massively improved our algorithm for picking appropriate and related trailers when using Cinema Trailers. We now take content rating into account for both library and “new and upcoming” trailers, so your kids won’t be subjected to an R-rated trailer before The Little Mermaid, for example. You also have complete control over where your Cinema Mode trailers come from—you can even pick multiple sources!
Many of you also requested better localization, and we’re happy to report that “new and upcoming” trailers are now also chosen based on your library language whenever possible.
Next up, by popular request, you can now automatically get “red band” (restricted audiences) trailers for your R- and NC-17-rated movies when available. You can find this preference in the agent settings, and you’ll need to force refresh your library to get those trailers.
You can also enable Cinema Trailers on a per-library basis in the library settings. Because hey, if you’re like us, you may not want Cinema Trailers before your collection of cat videos.
Last, but not least, we’ve added another requested feature, the ability to specify a custom “pre-roll” video to follow Cinema Trailers. You can use it to roll your favorite THX video (try not to blow out your speakers, please), a short PSA telling your family to stop texting during the movie, or that one clip of your dog catching a frisbee in his teeth. The video has to be in a Plex library, and using it is as easy as copying and pasting the URL into the pre-roll setting (an advanced setting on the Extras page).
The new release is available right now for Plex Pass members from our downloads page, and full release notes are available here. Barkley is still proud to be sporting his Plex collar, which of course includes a bottle opener. Best. Invention. Ever. |
Acme Widgets Inc. has been in business for over 10 years and they have exchanged emails with thousands of customers and suppliers. The email messages are archived neatly in Gmail but most of the email addresses aren’t stored in Google Contacts. The company is now shifting office and they need to inform everyone via email of the office move.
The big task ahead is to extract all these email addresses from the Gmail mailbox and download them in a format, like CSV, that can be easily imported into the Google address book or a mailing list service like MailChimp.
Introducing Email Address Extractor, a Google add-on that sifts through all email messages in your Gmail account, extracts the email addresses and saves them in a Google Spreadsheet. It works for both Gmail and Google Apps accounts.
The Extractor can mine email addresses from a particular Gmail folder (label) or the entire mailbox. You can choose to extract emails of the sender, the recipient(s) and those in the CC list. The add-on can also parse the email‘s subject and message body for email addresses. This is useful for extracting addresses from generic senders, like PayPal emails or contact forms, where the email addresses are contained in the message body.
How to Extract Email Addresses in Gmail
You may follow the step-by-step guide or watch the video tutorial on YouTube (download) to get started:
Install the Gmail Extractor add-on and grant the necessary permissions. The add-on needs access to your Gmail and also to Google Drive for saving the email list inside a Google Spreadsheet. Go to the addons menu inside the Google Spreadsheet, choose Email Address Extract and click Start to launch the extractor addon. Specify the search criteria and all emails that match the rule will be parsed by the extractor. You may use any of the Gmail Search operators to filter messages. Next select the fields (to, from, cc, bcc) that should be parsed for extracting emails (screenshot). The add-on can also pull names of the sender and recipients if they are available inside the message header.
Click the “Start” button and the extractor will start pulling emails into the spreadsheet. The entire process may take some time depending up on the size of your Gmail mailbox.
Gmail Extractor FAQ
The Google sheet should remain open and the computer should be online during the extraction. If the connection is lost, or if the extraction process is interrupted for some reason, you can simply click the “Resume” button and the extractor will pick from where it left off earlier.
If you go back to Gmail, you’ll find a new label called Extracted. This keeps tracks of the emails that have been processed and can safely delete this label after all the email address have been parsed and extracted.
The Google Spreadsheet created by Email Extractor add-on has two sheets – All Emails & Unique Emails. The first sheet includes every single email found in your Gmail account while the second sheet is a cleaned up list sans any duplicate emails. This is the sheet you should use for building your address book.
The free version of the add-on is fully featured but it would only extract addresses from up to 500 email threads (a thread contains multiple email messages). The premium version (link) imposes no such restriction and it entitles you to 90 days of complimentary support.
Internally, it is a Google Script that uses the magic of Regular Expressions to pull email addresses from Gmail. The extracted email addresses are saved in a Google spreadsheet that can be used as input for sending personalized email messages through Gmail Mail Merge.
Also see: Schedule Emails in Gmail for Sending Later |
US Border Patrol agents along certain sectors of the US-Mexico border are sharing rifles after malfunctions and quality concerns on their Colt brand M4s lead to many being pulled.
As a result, agents in sectors like Tucson, Arizona, are passing the same set of M4 carbines from one set of hands to another from shift to shift.
According to News 4 Tucson, the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector union president Art del Cueto said: “The problem is they are now using pool guns so what happens instead of having their individual ones they have sighted in they’re having to use a pool weapon…[and they] don’t know who used it [prior or how it is sighted in].”
Jeff Prather is a former DEA agent “who now runs the Warrior School in Tucson.” He said the rifle shortage exacerbates the difficulties of a situation where the cartel were already better armed than Border agents. He said: “Cartels have always been better equipped, the paramilitary forces, the corrupt Mexican soldiers and federales at times.”
Prather also expressed concern that the removal of the rifles might be “politically motivated.”
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins Reach him directly at [email protected]. |
Dennis Leary firefighters show to tackle 9/11 conspiracy theories Ron Brynaert
Published: Thursday December 4, 2008
Print This Email This Dennis Leary, famous for his biting, sarcastic comedy and his religious chain smoking, revealed to a fan at a Los Angeles book signing that his critically acclaimed FX show "Rescue Me" about NYC firefighters will tackle 9/11 conspiracy theories in the coming season.
"When asked by a hesitant fan as to whether or not the actor thought there should be a reinvestigation into the events leading up to and surrounding the 9/11 tragedy, Leary's eyes lit up as he revealed that conspiracy and reinvestigation into 9/11 are, in fact, major plot lines in the first 10 episodes of Rescue Me season 5, set to premiere in April 2009 for a 22-episode run on FX," Erin Broadley reported for LA Weekly.
Broadley continues, "But when another fan pushed it too far and asked Leary's personal opinion about the conspiracy surrounding Building 7's collapse, the actor and author was quick with his response. 'You guys don't want to get into that with me,' Leary said, suddenly serious as he explained that he 'knew several of the guys who had been there working to hold that building up.' Leary then paused, politely changed the subject and returned to meeting fans."
Writing for conspiracy site Prison Planet, Paul Joseph Watson complains, "The L.A. Weekly failed to report what happened at the end of the conversation. After the question about Building 7, security thugs stepped in, blocked the camera and proceeded to kick the protagonists out of the bookstore. There was no hostility or impoliteness on the part of the 9/11 truthers, but apparently Learys security thinks it necessary to physically eject anyone who expresses an opinion different to his."
"Break out the tin-foil hats," Don Kaplan mocked in Wednesday's New York Post.
Prison Planet notes that one of Leary's co-stars, Daniel Sunjata, "has been a vocal advocate for the 9/11 truth movement in questioning 9/11 and he likely had a massive influence on the decision of the script writers to dramatize the issue." Sunjata even wore a shirt to an awards ceremony in April of 2007 brandishing the message, "9/11 was an inside job."
"The prevalence of 9/11 truth in a plethora of different mediums is exactly what is required to spread the truth and wake up people who would not necessarily come into contact with this information through the usual channels," Watson writes for Prison Planet. "We applaud the staff of Rescue Me for having the fortitude to tackle this vital issue."
A video of the encounter, taken from the website Framing the World, can be seen below: |
Thanks for all of your help, after following a myriad of advice, I still have no idea which one worked, as none worked right away but after one last attempt of restarting before taking it in to a professional to look at, it just started working. Either way, it works again, I can finish the translation. I will have the chapter out today, and I plan to put out an extra chapter sometime soon as an apology for being so late (I am now on winter break and don’t have anymore classes til next month).
Starting next semester I will be a senior, and my classes will be more intensive, potentially reducing my time available to translate, so for the first month of the semester, I won’t post any dates for translations to be out, and if things turn out to be too hard (I hope they won’t) I may not be able to translate at all (in all reality, it’s likely that worst case would be 1 chapter per month).
On the note of my slow pace, if any translator is interested in taking over MCM, please let me know, I only request one sample of your translations (hopefully for the next chapter or so) so that I can confirm your translation is good enough, as I don’t want to hand it off to someone who has no idea of what they’re doing. So, unless someone comes forward wanting to translate, I will keep working on it, but with my senior year coming up, I may not have much time, so I hope everyone will be able to put up with it.
TL;DR
Keyboard now works
On Winter Break
Plan to put out chapter today and extra chapter soon
Starting Senior year next semester, may be very busy and translation may slow
Anyone who wants to pick up MCM, please let me know and bring a sample of your work
Again, thanks for your help and consideration,
Falinmer
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Last week, the new president of the Oregon Right to Life board of directors, Harmony Daws, was fired from her position as operations manager of a thriving Portland-area cleaning business. Two weeks prior, she had told her left-leaning boss that she had accepted the position as president. Ostensibly, she was fired for pro-life beliefs, as well as other political beliefs.
After that conversation, her boss came to her again and told her to never mention her pro-life work. Harmony agreed, mentioning that it had only come up in their conversation as friends, having worked together for four years. Her employer was cold and distant for the following week and a half. Then last Friday, she fired Harmony for “discrimination” and for Harmony’s beliefs that she saw online, apparently including her blog and the ORTL website.
Employees who worked under Harmony varied in beliefs and lifestyles, including a Satanist, a Wiccan, a lesbian, and atheists too. Upon hearing of her firing, several of them told her they had never felt discriminated against in any way. They said she “loved everyone.” It was because of Harmony’s work running the daily operations of the company that her boss went from struggling to make payroll for three employees to a team of 14 employees with projected 2016 sales of over $500,000.
It is clear that Harmony was the one discriminated against, not the discriminator. Harmony said, “What my employer did was illegal. Firing someone based on their religious or political beliefs is a civil rights violation. I’m a libertarian and I support my former employer’s right to hire and fire as she chooses. However, she could have asked for a resignation over our difference of beliefs. To have been mistreated as I was by being fired, after my exemplary record as an employee, was unconscionable. Regardless, had I known then what the price to accept the presidency would be, I would still have accepted the position. Fifty-eight million children have lost their lives since 1973. Losing a job in my stand for their right to life was a small price to pay.”
Editor’s Note: Harmony’s story was written about on The Blaze. Read it here.
Read Harmony’s bio here. |
The latest threat report from Kaspersky suggests hard drives may have been spying on us for more than a decade. Infiltrating storage devices is just one component of the Equation Group, a "threat actor that surpasses anything known in terms of complexity and sophistication of techniques." The depressing news is outlined in this blog post by the security company.
According to the firm, the Equation Group comprises at least six trojans dating back to 2001. Systems have been infiltrated in over 30 countries, Kaspersky says, and some elements of the group likely remain undiscovered. "Solid links" also tie the Equation Group to Stuxnet and Flame trojans.
The Equation Group's capabilities reportedly include reprogramming the firmware of hard drives from every major brand. Once infected, drives can create hidden partitions, store data for future retrieval, prevent data from being deleted, and alter data that's being accessed. At least one of the trojans can potentially snoop passwords associated with full-disk encryption, as well. And, as if that weren't bad enough, it's basically impossible to determine whether a drive has been affected.
One of the trojans is designed to compromise machines that aren't connected to the Internet. It hides on USB flash drives, has the same hidden partition mojo, and can report back to the mothership when network conditions allow.
Although there's no mention of similar trojans for SSDs, anyone targeting mechanical storage probably isn't ignoring the solid-state alternatives. The entity behind the Equation Group appears to have sufficient resources and expertise to get into whatever it wants. More details are available in this SecureList post and this Q&A document (PDF). |
The Hero fans are getting EVEN ANGRIER it would seem, as someone’s taken the extraordinary step of making an Android app version of a petition to get HTC to bring a new version of Android to the many HTC Hero phones around the world still stuck on Android 1.5.
Apparently, you “sign” the app petition by downloading it and leaving a comment beneath the app’s Android Market listing. Here’s the description:
“Are you tired of HTC promising us time and time again our much needed Eclair update? Even when we get updated we still wont be at the latest version! Sign this petition and hopefully we will get the message to HTC to stop giving out false release dates! “Sign by downloading and then leaving a comment on the market!”
And here’s us, adding our signature:
We’re with you, Hero owners. Although we are very, very close to going MAD and purchasing a Nexus One. When that happens we’ll stop caring about your plight.
Here’s a QR code for the petition app, if you want to STICK IT to poor old HTC: |
NEW YORK – D.C. United entered Yankee Stadium enjoying their best form of the season, riding a six-game unbeaten streak that pushed them above the playoff line in the Eastern Conference.
But coach Ben Olsen knew there was bound to be some pain. And it came late in the second half of a 3-2 loss to New York City FC Thursday night.
“That one hurts. But there are games in the season that hurt,” Olsen said. “I’ve never gone through a season in my career as a coach or a player that you don’t have games like this. They hurt for a day or two and then you move on.”
A tidy 1-0 road win turned on a defensive gaffe when David Villa picked off a poor back pass from Luke Mishu. The NYCFC captain clinically finished with his league-leading 17th goal of the season, giving the home club, and its fans, some life.
“It’s one of those things that we need to get rid of before playoffs come around,” said Lamar Neagle, who headed in a stoppage-time equalizer. “If we plan on getting in the playoffs, it’s something that’s going to get us through is going 90 minutes. We need as many points as we can get especially against East Coast teams and it’s a really unfortunate loss for us.”
However, the blame wasn’t placed on Mishu, rather on the inability to add a second goal to put away NYCFC.
“Against quality players it is never easy and you have to take your chances,” Olsen said. “The lesson is the one we continue to learn which is when you have a change to go 2-0, you go 2-0. You punish them. Because there are plenty of times we could punish this team and it couldn’t be done.”
For much of the match, the story was about D.C. United’s collective -- and Jalen Robinson’s individual -- defending to stifle NYCFC’s vaunted attack.
“I thought he was good overall. I think he is going to be a good center back,” Olsen said. “For guys like Luke and Jalen, it is vital for his development. He is going against one of the best forwards in the world…for 90 plus minutes. That is a great experience for him. I thought for the most part, he had a good game. “
So while it’s a painful lesson and a long trip back to Washington D.C., the focus shifts to a critically important game against the New York Red Bulls on Sept. 11.
“I don’t think against New York Red Bulls concentration will be an issue,” Olsen said. “We have some days off. We can get away and regroup and be ready for another great team, the Red Bulls.” |
Equifax’s former chief executive Richard Smith repeatedly deflected questions from a Senate panel Wednesday about a $7 million IRS contract the company recently received to help prevent fraud and whether the company could profit from the hack that exposed sensitive data of 145 million people.
“Can you explain to the American people, not just as consumers who have been exposed and breached here, but as taxpayers, why in the world should you get a no-bid contract right now?” asked Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.). Smith responded that he didn’t know the specifics of the contract but that he thought it was for work the company was already doing and that the contract was just being renewed.
“You realize to many Americans right now that it looks like we’re giving Lindsay Lohan the keys to the mini bar,” said Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.). Smith stared at Kennedy for a few seconds then said he understood the appearance.
Under the $7.25 million contract, Equifax is to verify taxpayer identities and help prevent fraud for the Internal Revenue Service.
Smith endured the barrage of tough questions as he faced the second of four congressional committees he is set to visit this week as lawmakers probe the company’s massive data breach and its bungled response. After 12 years at the helm of the company, Smith stepped down as CEO last week, and is the only company representative slated to appear before lawmakers. Behind him sat former senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) who occasionally stood up to whisper in Smith’s ear. Farther back, but within camera shot, was an apparent critic mocking Smith in a black top hat, white mustache and a monocle that resembled a character in the Monopoly board game.
The hard-charging former CEO helped transform Equifax from simply a credit-rating company to a massive data manager that employs artificial intelligence and machine learning to help companies determine whom to lend money to. Smith was heralded on Wall Street for his aggressive expansion of the company, including starting to collect employment data, such as consumers’ salaries. But that business model came under repeated attack Wednesday by the Senate Banking Committee.
Equifax could actually profit from the breach, warned Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). The company, for example, is providing consumers free fraud alerts for one year, she said. But if victims want to extend that coverage after a year, they will have to pay Equifax.
Warren quoted a speech Smith had given touting that fraud was a huge opportunity for the company. “This breach has created more business opportunities” for Equifax, she said. Equifax “did a terrible job of protecting our data because they didn’t have a reason to protect our data.”
In an interview outside the hearing room, Warren called for a host of reforms to the credit reporting industry as well as new rules on data security. Consumers should own their own data and control who has access to it, she said.
“This is a whole industry right now where the incentives are in the wrong place,” she said. “The incentives are to collect as much data about people as possible and then pump it out for sale.”
Smith repeatedly apologized for the breach, acknowledging the company struggled to respond quickly to consumers’ concerns. Equifax’s call centers initially had only 500 employees and grew to 3,000 in two weeks, he said. “I apologize to this committee and all Americans for this breach,” Smith said. “I am in no way skirting the issue of this horrific breach, and it was a horrific breach.”
Separately Smith repeatedly defended three Equifax senior executives who sold nearly $2 million in stock after the company learned of the breach but before it was disclosed publicly. The executives did not know about the breach when they sold their stock and the sales were approved by the company’s general counsel, he said. “These are three men I have known for a long time. These are honorable men who followed the protocol,” Smith said.
That defense was met with skepticism by several lawmakers. The company wants the public to believe the executives were “the three luckiest investors” who managed to sell their stock before the company’s stock price fell by more than 30 percent, said Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.). “I find that hard to believe,” Scott said. There may have been no intention to commit insider trading, said Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), but “this really stinks. I mean it really smells really bad. And I guess smelling bad isn’t a crime.”
In testimony this week, Smith revealed that Equifax missed an opportunity to prevent the breach. In early March, the Department of Homeland Security alerted Equifax about a critical vulnerability in its software. The company sent out an internal email requesting that the problem be fixed, but that was not done, Smith told lawmakers. By May, hackers found the software vulnerability and used it to gain information to millions of consumers’ sensitive information. It was not until late July that the company detected the breach.
The company then struggled to respond to the backlash. For several days, the company’s Twitter account directed consumers in search of help to a fake site pretending to be Equifax. It initially required consumers to agree not to join a class-action lawsuit to get some form of help before dropping that demand.
“In the rollout of our remediation program, mistakes were made, for which again, I am deeply apologetic,” Smith said. “I regret the frustration that many Americans felt when our websites and call centers were overwhelmed in the early weeks. It’s no excuse, but it certainly did not help that two of our larger call centers were shut down for days by Hurricane Irma.”
Hamza Shaban contributed to this report.
Read more:
Before the breach, Equifax sought to limit exposure to lawsuits
Equifax suffered another breach in March
Equifax asks consumers for personal info, even after massive data breach |
Rose Hathaway is a dhampir, half-vampire and half-human, who is training to be a guardian at St Vladimir's Academy along with many others like her. There are good and bad vampires in their world: Moroi, who co-exist peacefully among the humans and only take blood from donors, and also possess the ability to control one of the four elements - water, earth, fire or air; and Strigoi, blood-sucking, evil vampires who drink to kill. Rose and other dhampir guardians are trained to protect Moroi and kill Strigoi throughout their education. Along with her best friend, Princess Vasilisa Dragomir, a Moroi and the last of her line, with whom she has a nigh unbreakable bond, Rose must run away from St Vladimir's, in order to protect Lissa from those who wish to harm the princess and use her for their own means. Written by jessieyf1 |
British passports have been ranked the fourth most powerful passports in the world.
This is according to research conducted by transport search comparison site GoEuro, which has ranked different passports based on cost, the number of hours work needed to acquire one, how long the document is valid for, and how many countries it provides visa-free entry to.
Taking these factors into consideration, a British passport is one of the most useful passports in the world, allowing its holder to visit 174 countries visa-free at a cost of just £73. By comparison, the US passport allows entry to the same number of countries but costs £16 more.
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Swedish passports were deemed the most valuable with access to 174 countries for just £28, while Afghanistan came in last place, giving its passport holders access to only 28 countries at a cost of £69.
Afghan passport holders must also work 183 hours before they can obtain the document, compared to the one hour of work required in Sweden. British passport holders need to have 11 hours of work under their belts before they can apply.
Turkish passports are the most expensive in the world at £166, while UAE passports are the cheapest, costing a measly £9.
Shape Created with Sketch. The 10 most powerful passports in the world Show all 10 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. The 10 most powerful passports in the world 1/10 1. Sweden Access to 174 countries for £28. Holger.Ellgaard via Wikimedia Commons 2/10 2. Finland Access to 174 countries for £37. Janne Hellsten via Wikimedia Commons 3/10 3. Germany Access to 174 countries for £45. NoRud via Wikimedia Commons 4/10 4. United Kingdom Access to 174 countries for £73. 5/10 5. USA Access to 174 countries for £89. Getty Images 6/10 6. Denmark Access to 173 countries for £65. 7/10 7. Canada Access to 173 countries for £88. Ottawa - ON - "Oberster Gerichtshof von Kanada" by Taxiarchos228 at the German language Wikipedia 8/10 8. Spain Access to 172 countries for £20. 9/10 9. Belgium Access to 172 countries for £50. "Brussel Parlementsgebouw". Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons 10/10 10. Netherlands Access to 172 countries for £52. "Den Haag Binnenhof" by Markus Bernet via Wikimedia Commons 1/10 1. Sweden Access to 174 countries for £28. Holger.Ellgaard via Wikimedia Commons 2/10 2. Finland Access to 174 countries for £37. Janne Hellsten via Wikimedia Commons 3/10 3. Germany Access to 174 countries for £45. NoRud via Wikimedia Commons 4/10 4. United Kingdom Access to 174 countries for £73. 5/10 5. USA Access to 174 countries for £89. Getty Images 6/10 6. Denmark Access to 173 countries for £65. 7/10 7. Canada Access to 173 countries for £88. Ottawa - ON - "Oberster Gerichtshof von Kanada" by Taxiarchos228 at the German language Wikipedia 8/10 8. Spain Access to 172 countries for £20. 9/10 9. Belgium Access to 172 countries for £50. "Brussel Parlementsgebouw". Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons 10/10 10. Netherlands Access to 172 countries for £52. "Den Haag Binnenhof" by Markus Bernet via Wikimedia Commons
Click here to view the latest travel offers, with Independent Holidays. |
The Nets CEO Brett Yormark wants to offer Kentucky coach John Calipari a job as head coach and president, Yahoo’s Adrian Wojnarowski reports.
The Nets fired head coach Lionel Hollins on Sunday and reassigned general manager Billy King to a different role within the organization.
Calipari, 56, has been a rumored NBA target for several years, most recently with the Kings. He has repeatedly said he is not interested in making the jump to the pros again.
• MAHONEY: Nets begin to address biggest issues with Hollins firing
Calipari’s only head coaching job in the NBA came with the Nets from 1996–99. Yormark “has remained an immense ally” of Calipari’s since his departure, Wojnarowski reports, and “has remained a proponent of making a lucrative offer to bring Calipari back to the Nets in a dual president and coaching role.”
Open Floor Podcast: Ex-Nets assistant GM Bobby Marks on his tenure
Calipari has coached at Kentucky since 2009, where he has built rosters stocked with NBA talent and led the Wildcats to four Final Four appearances.
- Dan Gartland |
IDEAS Sam Kass is a former White House chef.
I recently returned home from Paris, where I participated in a number of events around the climate-change conference that used food to tell the story of climate change and highlight potential solutions. The city had the crazed but celebratory feeling of a wedding, with plenty of planning boiling down to a final, frantic push to cross the finish line. But just as marriage is only the beginning of a new kind of life, it turns out the finish line is actually the starting line—and the real work begins now.
Unfortunately, there’s no time for a honeymoon. Each nation has to figure out how it is going to fulfill its commitments, most of which focus heavily on energy—a natural choice because it’s the top contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.
But a quick look at the relationship between food and climate makes clear that we are largely overlooking the sector that holds the greatest potential to solve the problem of climate change.
There are three big reasons our plates are so important. The first is that smart food policy can have the biggest return on investment. The production of food emits 25% to 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions—it’s the second leading source. And unlike the energy sector, where rates have begun to decline, emissions in agriculture are projected to increase by 30% by 2050. The mitigation potential here is huge.
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When thinking about an issue as big as agriculture, it can be daunting to decide where to start. There are two clear paths we should take: reduce the amount of food that goes to waste, and reduce the emissions from food with climate-smart agriculture.
Let’s start with food waste. Globally, we waste a third of the food we produce (in the U.S., we waste 40%). That means that nearly a third of the land we farm grows food that ends up in a dumpster instead of someone’s stomach. This waste accounts for 8% of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. If waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter.
We will need specific policies and innovations to increase efficiency and help people manage their food more efficiently. Congresswoman Chellie Pingree of Maine recently proposed a smart and pragmatic bill that would go a long way towards achieving many of these goals in the U.S.
Beyond eliminating waste, expanding climate-smart agricultural practices is the way forward. Climate-smart agriculture is defined as practices that sustainably increase productivity and system resilience, while reducing and sequestering greenhouse gas emissions. We should do what it takes to help farmers incorporate these cost- and climate-saving measures. The World Bank has already committed to align all of its loans and investments towards outcomes of climate smart agriculture. The United States should do the same.
The second untapped power of the plate is that food happens to be a language everyone speaks. Using food, leaders can make the issue of climate change real, and bring urgency to a problem that has seemed, for some, quite distant. The concept of gases which none can see, a few degrees which doesn’t sounds catastrophic, glacial melts thousands of miles away have not resonated with the general public. People feel an appropriate sense of alarm when they learn that things like chocolate and coffee, wine and champagne, peanuts, shellfish and crustaceans may all be out of reach for our grandchildren because of climate change. After making a meal with these very same products for leaders last week in Paris, I can say for certain it struck a chord.
The third reason food should be our focus is because it allows everyone an opportunity to be part of the solution. Farmers don’t grow food in a vacuum; they grow food for people to eat. We will not have climate-smart agriculture if we do not have climate-smart consumption. We—as eaters—can help push farmers to transition what and how they grow.
While policy is of the utmost importance, laws won’t solve this existential problem on their own. A dramatic cultural shift is needed if we are to fully reach our goals, and the dinner table is the place start. Consumers will need to make changes to their diets. For example, livestock alone produces 18% of greenhouse gas emissions. I’m a lover of steak, but we must eat less meat, and the meat we do consume should be part of a system that sequesters carbon. Because food is one of the deepest expressions of our culture, it holds tremendous power to move our values forward.
The environmental movement needs to prioritize food far beyond what it has to-date, and do it in a way which embraces the farmer as vital partner. The food world has the opportunity to establish itself on the most important platform of our times, and in doing so become a true political force.
Until the food we eat is grown, harvested and consumed with a healthier planet in mind, we will not reach the goals outlined in Paris. Just like marriage, success must be built on commitment over the long term, continual investment and work as well as a sense of optimism.
Contact us at [email protected]. |
Nick Diaz has not lost a welterweight fight in nearly six years. | Photo: Sherdog.com
Cocky Upstart
UFC 47 “It’s On”
April 2, 2004 -- Las Vegas
Shoe Tossing Good Time
“The Ultimate Fighter 2” Finale
Nov. 5, 2005 -- Las Vegas
Hospital Brawl
UFC 57 “Liddell vs. Couture 3”
Feb. 4, 2006 -- Las Vegas
Jeff Sherwood
Diaz and Riggs battled it out.
Gogoplata for Naught
Pride 33 “Second Coming”
Feb. 24, 2007 -- Las Vegas
Familial Conflict
EliteXC “Return of the King”
June 14, 2008 -- Honolulu
Continue Reading »
Few figures in MMA are as intriguing as the favorite son of Stockton, Calif., Nick Diaz . Inside the Octagon, his fighting style is as crowd-pleasing as they come. Armed with exceptional heart and courage, he pushes forward and tries to finish from the moment a fight starts until the moment it ends. It has led to some wild and unpredictable wars.Outside the Octagon, Diaz has been no stranger to controversy. He has gotten into trouble with promoters, athletic commissions and other fighters, and the sense that he could do anything at any time only enhances his appeal. As his longtime trainer, Cesar Gracie , put it succinctly: “You can’t out-crazy Nick Diaz .”As Diaz fights Carlos Condit for the interim welterweight title at UFC 143 this Saturday at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas, he finds himself on the cusp of superstardom. UFC “Primetime” has shined a spotlight on his unique career and personality, introducing him to a new base of fans. A fight with Georges St. Pierre , should Diaz get past Condit, would take him to an even higher level.If Diaz does become one of the UFC ’s top stars, it will be a wild ride. Like former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson, Diaz is simultaneously uniquely suited for fame and uniquely unsuited for dealing with the trappings of it. This is an entertaining but dangerous combination. Already, it has produced no shortage of wild events. These are 10 crazy moments from Diaz’s MMA career.When Diaz, at the age of 20, entered the Octagon for the second time, he was known as a jiu-jitsu specialist. His fight against Robbie Lawler was thought to be a classic striker-versus-grappler matchup, so it came as a shock to many when Diaz stood and traded toe-to-toe with the slugger. The result of their battle would come as even more of a surprise.With pinpoint punches, Diaz got the better of early exchanges with Lawler. Then, he began to taunt. Lifting his hands up in the air and daring Lawler to punch him, Diaz showed no fear and gave no hint of backing off. It seemed like a suicidal strategy against one of the most powerful punchers in the weight class, but when Diaz landed a looping right hand to the jaw, Lawler collapsed face first to the canvas, and the fight was called.Diaz had delivered one of the most memorable UFC performances of the year. A “jiu-jitsu fighter” had stood, taunted and knocked out one of the welterweight division’s most feared strikers. Everything about the contest was startling, and Diaz had demonstrated the approach to fighting that would eventually make him a champion and star.When the UFC showcased and made into stars a number of young fighters on “The Ultimate Fighter” reality series, some prominent veterans expressed resentment at perceived preferential treatment. Few expressed their aggravation as loudly as Diaz did in the lead-up to his fight with Diego Sanchez . Diaz and Sanchez waged a war of words and even exchanged adversarial emails prior to the bout at “The Ultimate Fighter 2” Finale.The tumult did not end when fight night arrived. The match between Sanchez and Diaz took place at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, a small venue in Las Vegas in which fighters wind up in close proximity. This led to Diaz famously hurling a shoe at Sanchez backstage as they were waiting to come out for their fight. Unfortunately for him, the gesture would not secure Diaz the win. Diaz landed more total strikes than Sanchez, but “The Dream” connected with more significant strikes and received a unanimous decision with 30-27 scores.When Diaz fought Joe Riggs at UFC 57, it was just another competition, and it fit a pattern of Diaz fights at the time. He outstruck Riggs by nearly a 2-to-1 margin and was more active working for submissions on the ground, but Riggs won the judges’ decision on the basis of takedowns. The fight did not stand out on a night when Randy Couture and Chuck Liddell completed their classic trilogy.What happened after the fight ended was a completely different story. Diaz and Riggs were sent to the same hospital. Big mistake. Diaz began jawing with Riggs inside the hospital, even as Riggs was being fed fluids through an IV in his arm.Words quickly escalated, and Diaz threw the first punch. A wild brawl broke out in the hospital room, as the two adversaries had to be separated by police officers. The fight was untelevised, but hospital attendants and nurses got free front row seats.Diaz later explained why he fought with Riggs in the hospital to MMA Weekly Radio.“I ain’t no bitch,” he said. “You know what I mean? That’s why I said I’ll fight him all night. I’d fight him right now. If he were here, I’d fight him right now.”Pride 33 was dubbed “Second Coming” for obvious reasons, as it was the sophomore American show for Japan’s Pride Fighting Championships promotion. However, it could just as easily have been a description of Diaz’s performance at the event. Diaz burst on the scene in the Ultimate Fighting Championship with his wins over Jeremy Jackson and Lawler but went on to drop a series of decisions. When Pride signed him to fight its lightweight champion, Takanori Gomi , at Pride 33, Diaz was viewed as just another opponent. He had dropped three of his past six fights and entered the ring as a heavy betting underdog.If Gomi did not take Diaz seriously as an opponent, it was an enormous mistake. The fight turned into a brawl quickly, with Diaz taunting and throwing up his hands even more wildly than he did against Lawler. As the two fighters traded power punches, the crowd exploded with enthusiasm. Gomi connected with much harder blows but Diaz answered with volume punches, and the Japanese star eventually wilted under the pressure.In the second round, an exhausted Gomi finally took the fight to the ground. Diaz immediately locked in the exotic gogoplata submission and coaxed the tapout. It was the crowning victory of Diaz’s career, full of drama and capped by a spectacular finish -- until his drug test results were in. Diaz tested positive for a high amount of marijuana, and the Nevada State Athletic Commission later elected to switch the result of the bout to a no contest. The decision was widely criticized, with many arguing that marijuana simply was not a performance-enhancing drug. Still, the failed drug test only added to the intrigue surrounding one of the most talked about fights of 2007.One Diaz brother is difficult enough to handle. Dealing with two is an even trickier proposition. After K.J. Noons defeated Yves Edwards to retain his EliteXC lightweight title in his birthplace of Hawaii, Diaz was brought into the cage as the next challenger for Noons’ championship. Noons had with him his father, a former professional kickboxer. Diaz had with him his younger brother, “The Ultimate Fighter” Season 5 winner Nate Diaz . With former professional wrestler Bill Goldberg conducting the post-fight interview, a tag team brawl broke out: the Diaz brother duo against the father and son Noons tandem.Tag teams are not particularly well suited for legitimate competition, but it made for an entertaining spectacle in Hawaii. After Noons’ father charged the Diaz brothers, Nick and Nate were escorted from the cage. They left receiving a negative reaction from the Hawaiian crowd. They proceeded to give the Noonses the finger and then flashed their middle fingers at the crowd for good measure.UFC color commentator Mike Goldberg would not have labeled the display classy, but it was prototypical Diaz. |
The wait is finally over.
Thirteen days after the Patriots acquired him via trade and three days after he was allowed to join the team after serving the one remaining game on his suspension, cornerback Aqib Talib made his first appearance in a Patriots uniform Wednesday. Wearing No. 31, he practiced with the Patriots as they prepped for Sunday's game against the Colts.
Coach Bill Belichick was asked before practice about his initial impressions of his new cornerback.
"We’re just trying to catch him up," Belichick said in his most extensive comments about the cornerback to date. "He’s been in here every day. Three days in a row he’s been in here early, working hard, trying to get caught up. We’ll see how it goes."
We'll see, indeed.
Alas, Talib was not expected to speak to reporters for the first time until Thursday, so we'll have to wait until then for his initial impressions.
Until then, use your imagination and try to come up with a clever caption for the photo above. I know we're not giving you much to work with, but you should be happy just to get a glimpse of No. 31 in uniform. Leave your captions in the comments section. |
Plus: The highest attendance for a third-tier game; Border conflict (2); and England v Hong Kong. Send your questions and answers to [email protected] and follow us on Twitter
"As it's April Fools' Day on Friday, can you remember any of the 'best' japes in football history?" asks Eric Benson.
Football-related April fools gags? Seeing it would be too cheap to point out that David N'Gog was born on 1 April 1989, and mean to boot, here's a random selection of All Fools Quips Modest (you'll understand later) gleaned from the pages of this very august journal.
We begin with a couple of classics from 1991. When Notts County visited Bristol City, the Magpies manager Neil Warnock handed the referee a teamsheet containing the England line-up from the previous week's international against the Republic of Ireland. That County line-up in full (including two Nottingham Forest players): Seaman, Dixon, Adams, Pearce, Walker, Wright, Robson, Platt, Beardsley, Lineker, Barnes.
Meanwhile the Sheffield United midfielder John Gannon took a phone call from the club office. "Could you get to the ground by 9am on Monday morning in your matchday suit for a new team photo?" asked a voice down the line. Gannon duly arrived, tarted up to the nines. Bramall Lane was, needless to say, deserted.
In 1985, Michel Platini, Werder Bremen and a West German television station ganged together in order to mock up a story of the Juventus midfielder's transfer to the German club. It would be the lead item on the news. "I have achieved all that is possible with Juventus," said Platini, who was preparing at the time for a European Cup semi-final against Bordeaux. "The time has come for a fresh challenge." Werder's players were shown toasting the transfer with champagne. "The news was received with astonishment, doubly so when it spread to Italy," reported Patrick Barclay in the Guardian soccer diary. "But then even April Fools' Day is conducted with Teutonic efficiency in the land of the Bundesjoke."
In 1996, Tomas Brolin was forced to apologise to his manager at Leeds, Howard Wilkinson – "as well as the chairman and managing director in person," added Sgt Wilko – after telling Swedish television that he was to leave Elland Road for a loan deal with Norrköping. It was supposed to be a gag, and one causing an outbreak of high amusement no doubt, but news agencies picked up the story and wired it around the world, much to Brolin's chagrin.
Life has since imitated art, but in 1997 an announcement was made in the Sun newspaper that Gary Lineker was ready to purchase Leicester City, with the intention of turning the stadium into a crisps museum and renaming the club Lineker Crisps FC. "Stunned Gary tried to deny the takeover when the Sun confronted him," reported the paper, "but he finally admitted: 'It's in the bag'."
In 1988, the Russian newspaper Isvestia reported that Diego Maradona was going to sign for Spartak Moscow. It turned out to be their April fool joke. A made-up transfer! Tee hee, Isvestia! And to think newspapers in England were publishing this sort of nonsense for real on the other 364 days of the year.
Ten years later, millions of Portugal fans were tricked into thinking their team had been granted a reprieve in the World Cup, having failed to qualify for France 98. A Lisbon broadcaster announced that Iran had decided not to bother taking up their place "for security reasons", and that Fifa had chosen Portugal as their replacement. The station even went to the lengths of recording spoof quotes in English from "Fifa officials" confirming the story. The spoilt British, meantime, thought they had it bad with Alan Green.
Just before a match at Goodison Park in 2000, Watford police informed their Merseyside counterparts that Elton John was planning on landing his helicopter on the pitch. He wasn't, though. Not exactly sure what the police were trying to gain by doing this.
And to conclude in slightly unhinged fashion, here's some vaguely football-related April fools tomfoolery from the first world war. It's from the 17 April 1915 edition of this paper, written in the free jazz style, and headlined "The Quip Modest":
"There are some jests that have more wisdom in them than much solemnity can boast, and that which 'Eye-witness' describes in his latest dispatch was one of them. On 1 April a British airman dropped upon the quarters of some German troops in Lille what appeared to be a large bomb, and stayed long enough above the scene of his exploit to make sure that the startled enemy, when they were sufficiently reassured to approach what was, as a matter of fact, merely a football, had read and appreciated the message attached to the bomb – 'April fool! Gott strafe England!' The German temper being what they are only too ready to prove it, this must have been a very subtle and successful form of attack; for having made a national duty of a hatred as heavy as the potato bread which feeds it, it is highly annoying to be laughed at for your pains and to see what should have been the blood-curdling slogan of that hatred tossed back to you as an All Fools' Day greeting. The wisdom of the jest lies in the fact that it embodies what is so very much the best way of acknowledging this gloomy, elaborately drilled Teutonic fury, if it has to be acknowledged at all. This Quip Modest is vastly more effective than any retorts in kind, if only because the Germans have so abundantly proved themselves incapable of it. Whereas the Germans, if they hold any communication at all with us, can only give us the Lie Direct and invent fresh and fearful stages of dispute we, in the intervals of carrying on the war very vigorously, can yet get back now and then to Quips Modest or even Retorts Courteous. This, apparently, the Germans cannot do, and the failure is not a symptom of strength."
So now you know. Any more for any more? Send them to the usual address.
TEAMS GO DOWN, GATES GO UP
"The English record attendance for a third-tier match was the 'Boxing Day massacre' between Sheffield United and Wednesday on 26 December 1979," wrote Alex Hannick last week. "But is this the largest attendance for a third-tier derby/game that has taken place globally?"
"The 49,309 people that watched the 'Boxing Day massacre' by no means constitutes the all-time attendance record for a third-tier game," notes Tim Dockery. "Fortuna Düsseldorf have a somewhat storied past after winning two German Cups, losing the 1979 European Cup Winners' Cup final to Barcelona in extra-time and spending over 20 years in the Bundesliga. Having been relegated in 1997, they have bounced around the lower leagues, going as low as the fourth division from 2002 to 2004.
"During the 2008-09 season, Fortuna competed in the 3rd Liga where they set their own average attendance record at over 28,000 per game. That season ended with them securing promotion into the 2 Bundesliga with a win over Werder Bremen II in front of 50,095 people. However that's still not the record.
"Having won Serie A twice with Diego Maradona, Napoli went into slow decline and were declared bankrupt and forced to fold in 2004. To ensure that Napoli would still have a team, the film producer Aurelio De Laurentiis founded Napoli Soccer, who were immediately placed in Serie C. On 7 February 2005 their game against Reggiana was played in front of 62,058 spectators. Not only was this an all-time attendance record for Serie C, it was higher than the record attendance that season of all but 10 clubs in Europe."
But wait. Liam Corte has more. "One instance that came to mind was a recent, rather tragic occasion. In Serie C in Brazil in 2007, over 60,000 turned up to see Bahia win promotion against Vila Nova. Part of the stadium collapsed, causing the deaths of several fans."
BORDER CONFLICT (2)
Last week we went over international teams playing each other in stadiums located close to the two nations' border. There are more leads, though ...
"I'd like to point out a few potential candidates," writes Jostein Nygard. "San Marino's Stadio Olimpico di Serravalle is by my reckoning about 800m from Italy, the aptly named Stade de la Frontièr in Luxembourg's Esch-sur-Alzette is about 400m from France, while Liechtenstein's current international stadium, the Rheinpark Stadion in Vaduz, is less than 100m from the border of Switzerland. But so far, none of these footballing giants have played their neighbours at these stadiums. In Liechtenstein's second match in an official tournament, a Euro 96 qualifier on 7 September 1994, they played Austria at the Sportpark Eschen-Mauren, their first international venue, which is about 2.2km from Austria, so that's a no-go as well. Also back in 1935, Poland travelled to Breslau to play a friendly against Germany. These days Breslau is best known as Wroclaw, and is now a part of Poland.
"Looking at Africa, it's worth pointing out Lesotho's national stadium in Maseru, the venue of a 2002 World Cup qualifier against South Africa. By my reckoning, it's roughly 1,650m to the South African border. Finding accurate information of international matches in Africa isn't easy. So far my best bet for a winner would be China, who played away at Macau in a World Cup qualifier on 20 February 1984. The current national stadium, Estádio Campo Desportivo, is perhaps 700m from the middle of the river that separates the former colony from China. The stadium wasn't finished before 1995 though, so I don't know exactly where the match took place."
KNOWLEDGE ARCHIVE
"Can you help settle what is fast becoming an argument full of bickering and insults between me and my mate?" asked Dave Edes in 2003. "Did journeyman striker Paul Rideout ever turn out for a Hong Kong Select XI when they played England a few years back?"
No, afraid not Dave. As the England online website noted, only Mike Duxbury and David Watson turned out when England beat a Hong Kong Golden Select XI 1-0 on 26 May 1996. "Although Duxbury was 36 and Watson 34, they effectively stifled England's attack, plunging the England team's prospects into doubt as they flew home for the start of the European Championship tournament," it sagely wrote. Meanwhile Steve Cliff, who was at the match, said: "The game was rubbish, my ticket cost the equivalent of £50 and the outstanding moment was Steve McManaman being shrieked at like a Beatle when taking a corner – by male Cantonese teenagers."
For thousands more questions and answers, take a trip through the Knowledge archive.
CAN YOU HELP?
"My team, Charlton Athletic, are currently on a run of 73 games without a goalless draw," writes Jon Laysell. "Is this a record?"
"Last week, the prime minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin, visited Belgrade," begins Vedrana Nikolic. "After meetings with our officials he showed up at a football game between two youth teams: Belgrade's Red Star and St Petersburg's Zenit. Many of my colleagues claimed it was the first time in history that one foreign high official visited any football game which wasn't the finale of some big competition. I am pretty sure they are wrong, but I hope that you could help me prove it to them."
"I remember when I was a young boy, 1 April fell on a Saturday, so the Football League decided to create a 'hilarious' jape by sending referees and linesmen with thematically linked names to the same game," recalls Robin Tucker. "All I can remember is that one match had Mr Bishop and Mr Church (and presumably Mitre as the ball sponsor) while another had three officials all called Smith. Judging by the date it would have to be 1989. I can't find any record of it."
Send your questions and answers to [email protected]. |
Discrimination and Worker Evaluation
NBER Working Paper No. 21612
Issued in October 2015
NBER Program(s):Labor Studies
We develop a model of self-sustaining discrimination in wages, coupled with higher unemployment and shorter employment duration among blacks. While white workers are hired and retained indefinitely without monitoring, black workers are monitored and fired if a negative signal is received. The fired workers, who return to the pool of job-seekers, lower the average productivity of black job-seekers, perpetuating the cycle of lower wages and discriminatory monitoring. Under suitable parameter values the model has two steady states, one corresponding to each population group. Discrimination can persist even if the productivity of blacks exceeds that of whites.
Acknowledgments
Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX
Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w21612
Users who downloaded this paper also downloaded* these: |
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump shakes hands with supporters at a campaign rally Friday in Dimondale, Mich. (Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)
Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump by a wide margin in July, funding a costly television blitz and deploying hundreds of staffers across the country — traditional campaign investments that her Republican presidential rival has largely forgone.
The Democratic White House contender spent nearly $49 million last month through her campaign committee and a joint fundraising committee that raises money for Hillary for America, according to new finance reports filed Saturday night. Almost $26 million of her monthly expenses went to produce and air a blizzard of television and online commercials — part of what has been a $120 million ad bombardment by her campaign. Clinton’s operation also spent nearly $5 million to pay 705 staffers in July and $2 million on travel.
Trump, meanwhile, had his biggest spending month yet, doubling the amounts he spent in May and June. But the $18.4 million his campaign shelled out in July was still a fraction of Clinton’s arsenal. Nearly half of the money, $8.4 million, went to one company: Giles-Parscale, a web-design firm whose president, Brad Parscale, serves as the Trump campaign’s digital director.
The San Antonio-based company, which got its foothold designing websites for the Trump Organization in 2011, has emerged as one of his campaign’s biggest vendors, taking in $12.5 million so far. In the last few months, Giles-Parscale’s portfolio has grown as it has spearheaded Trump’s belated but aggressive online fundraising effort.
Other large sums spent by the Trump campaign in July went to travel ($3.2 million) and merchandise ($1.8 million). The campaign doled out $773,000 to reimburse various Trump-owned companies for expenses. In all, nearly $7.7 million has been paid out to Trump companies or Trump family members to cover campaign expenditures, filings show.
While Trump’s payroll remained a fraction of Clinton’s last month, he continued to pay one former staffer: ousted campaign manager Corey Lewandowski received his regular $20,000 monthly fee on July 6 – two weeks after he was jettisoned and had been hired by CNN as a political commentator. Trump has continued to call on Lewandowski for advice since his departure, a dynamic that contributed to friction with campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who resigned last week.
Altogether, since the beginning of the 2016 campaign, Trump’s campaign has spent $89.5 million on his bid, while Clinton’s operation has invested almost $319 million.
The sharp imbalance is driven in part by the real estate tycoon’s belief that he does not need to pay for the usual campaign tools, relying instead on his social media reach and coverage of his raucous rallies. His campaign just launched its first general election TV ad last week, saying it planned to spend $4.8 million on a 10-day ad buy in Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida.
[Clinton’s allied super PAC laps pro-Trump groups in the money race]
The billionaire also trails his Democratic rival when it comes to raising money. July was his best month yet: the Trump campaign and two joint fundraising committees it has with the RNC together pulled in $82 million, officials announced earlier this month. That came close to the $90 million that Clinton raised in conjunction with the Democratic party in July.
However, Trump does not appear to be harvesting as much cash from those joint fundraising efforts as Clinton does. His campaign said that that it raised $64 million with the RNC through online donations and direct mail in July, ostensibly mostly small contributions that would be directed to his committee, rather than the party. But Trump’s campaign reported just $36 million in receipts last month. That included $14.5 million transferred from the joint fundraising committees and a $2 million donation from Trump himself, who has now given a total of $52 million to finance his White House bid.
It is unclear why more money was not transferred from the joint fundraising committees, which are not scheduled to file their next finance reports until Oct. 15. The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for clarification.
Meanwhile, Clinton raised $62.3 million for her campaign in July, including more than $30 million raised through two joint fundraising committees.
After accepting their parties’ nominations at their July conventions, the two candidates headed into the final three-month stretch of the campaign in starkly different financial positions.
Clinton’s campaign had more than $58 million in the bank, while Priorities USA Action, the main super PAC flanking her bid, boasted nearly $39 million on hand.
Trump’s committee had more than $38 million in reserves, while two of his biggest super PACs reported less than $4 million between them as August began.
The Democratic National Committee also had a blockbuster month, thanks to big-dollar donations that Clinton has helped raise for the party. The DNC pulled in $32 million, compared to the Republican National Committee’s $24 million’s July haul. But the RNC’s strong fundraising lead gave it a larger cash edge heading into August, with $34.5 million in the bank and $7.7 million in debt compared to the DNC’s $10.1 million cash on hand and $4.5 million in debt. |
Wild Frontiers, an adventure operator, has nine group tours scheduled for 2014, five of which are sold out to their maximum capacity of 12, and contrasts with two group tours in 2013, neither of which ran full. The company has seen tailor-made bookings rise from four last year to 26 so far in 2014, with many more in the pipeline.
Tailor-madeadventures.com, which creates itineraries for Iran, has seen an 80 per cent increase in enquiries since the beginning of the year and said that the vast majority of interested customers have gone on to book. The company sent 24 customers to the country in 2013, and so far has had bookings for 50 people this year.
Jim O’Brien, the company's head of development, said: "Thirty-five years ago, Iran dropped off the tourist map, becoming the preserve of a few hardcore independent travellers and those in organised groups. Since the election of Hassan Rouhani as president last August, however, and a thawing in political relations with the west, it seems that Iran is returning to travellers' bucket lists with a bang."
Numerous tour operators have compared Iran’s future to that of Burma, which has been a top-selling destination since the election of Aung San Suu Kyi in 2012 and the subsequent change in stance on tourism in the country.
Although his company has been running trips to Iran for 10 years, Jonny Bealby, founder and managing director of Wild Frontiers, told Telegraph Travel that in the last six months or so there has been a significant increase in demand for the destination, which he puts down to "the election of a more moderate leader, and last year’s nuclear agreement”.
The expectation that the British government will ease its travel advice to Iran will lead to a further increase in bookings, according to tour operators.
“Once this [advice against travel] has been lifted, we predict a further, even-greater increase in demand, one similar to when Aung Sang Suu Kyi changed her stance on travel to Burma a few years ago," Jonny Bealby added.
The Foreign Office still currently advises against all but essential travel to most of Iran, and against all travel to within 62 miles (100km) of the entire Iran/Afghanistan border and within six miles (10km) of the entire Iran/Iraq border. However, there is the feeling among tour operators and country experts that these restrictions are more to do with diplomatic relations than actual risk to travellers. Tour operators running trips to Iran currently do so against Foreign Office advice.
In January, Telegraph Travel predicted that Iran would be one of the world's top destinations in 2014, citing "epic scenery, an extraordinary history and culture and a warm welcome".
Martin Randall Travel, a specialist cultural tour operator, is planning two tours to Iran for 2015 in June and October, concentrating on the major buildings and archaeological sites in Tehran and Shiraz, the former capital of Persia. The tour will allow three days in Isfahan, to visit all the major monuments. The company last ran a tour to Iran in September 2010 and the three scheduled for 2011 all had to be cancelled.
Liz Brown, the company’s marketing manager, explained that if the Foreign Office advice remains unchanged, their 2015 tour will not run, but that they will be accepting bookings as they are expecting the advice to change later this year. This caveat will be explained in the brochure, Ms Brown added.
Travel to Iran is not without its difficulties. Female travellers must wear a headscarf at all times, alcohol is prohibited, and driving standards are notoriously poor. The current Foreign Office advice means that obtaining valid travel insurance is difficult, although operators such as Wild Frontiers offer their own policies.
In addition, British tourists currently wishing to travel to Iran must obtain their visas from the country’s embassy in Dublin, since the Iranian embassy in London has been closed since 2011. The Foreign Office currently says that the Iranian Consulate in London may be able to offer limited advice on getting a visa, a process that it warns can be “long and unpredictable”.
But Mr O’Brien of Tailor-madeadventures.com added that “while it's not ideal for travellers to have to obtain their visas outside of the UK, judging by our bookings, this is proving to be only a minor hurdle to single-minded travellers wanting to experience Iran for the first time."
Although political relations with the west have made travel to Iran difficult for the past few decades, the country holds some of the world’s most spectacular ancient ruins and religious sites, including the Unesco World Heritage site of Persepolis, which dates from 515 BC, and the expansive Imam Square in Isfahan.
Read more
Twenty destinations for 2014: in pictures
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Hi everyone!
First of all, many apologies for the last month update skip.
A few crucial things have happened in the last couple of months and some very important decisions have been made as well as we'll try and explain.
1. Additional Funding Acquired
This has been lurking over the dev team for almost a year now and with the scope of the game having expanded quite a bit since the end of Kickstarter both in terms of scale and depth, we knew we had to find additional resources to finance the project at some point.
That point has come and after months of discussions, negotiations, term agreements, paperwork and so on, we've finally secured additional funding (amount we can't disclose right now) which basically means we can finally just make what we'd like to make without having to worry about whether a certain feature is "worthwhile" or limited by pipeline issues. We believe everything is worthwhile since we know some of you will enjoy it and appreciate it.
So money issues are completely gone for the time being and our mind and soul is replenished with creativity once again.
2. UE4 Pipeline Hurdles
On the dev side, there have been a few fundamental issues mostly related to creating and polishing the quality of all character movements in UE4.
We've been looking into these issues (such as use of root motion and mirroring animations) for some time and the great guys at Epic have also been very supportive in trying to resolve this with us. Although we can simply do away with this like many other games but with our minimalistic concept, fluent, seamless motion details are crucial and we needed to perfect this at whatever the cost.
Fortunately we were able to find a solution by creating our own new set of pipelines in the asset preparation process so hopefully things will be smooth sailing for a while.
3. New Recruits!
With additional funds secured and pipeline sorted out, we've managed to take on board additional team members to really start grinding.
We've taken on 6 additional talents - 2 modelers, 1 animator, 1 support artist and 2 UE4 programmers. That brings our team to a total of 12 now and we'll be keeping it that way until our main build.
We have received many applications from abroad but in the end, the distance and time barrier was hard to overcome and until we are in a position to open up office in the U.S. or perhaps somewhere in Europe, at the moment, we don't think remote working and communications will cut the cake. Although we'd like to bring talent over here, we're just not that well off yet :)
All our new members will start their 1st day during next month so we really anticipating to pick up greater momentum and energy as well as added creativity.
4. New Project Milestones
We are aware that many backers are rightly curious as to the release date and so I guess it's our duty to share with you at least our new set of milestones.
As many of you have assumed and inquired already, the original expected release date which we noted at the start of our KS campaign was um.... now :) To explain simply, like many other who have come before us, we just had to put something up based on very rough "gut" estimates on the basic game features we had in mind.
With design depth and scope being continuously evolved, new, better ideas emerging, asset management issues arising, pipeline changes being made and so forth, we are now very much more confident in announcing a more realistic schedule.
Key milestones are as follows:
Feb 2017 - Main build (all core key features)
Mar 2017 - GDC
Jun 2017 - E3
End 2017 - Full Build (World build)
2018 - Early access, QA, localization, release
Early access timings will need to be announced based on the level of standard achieved during the full build and in reality, release dates will need to be decided with publishers and platforms.
We're still hoping for a concurrent platform release but according to many advice from professional experience, that's going to be tough with differing QA processes and interests. At the very least, we are targeting PC (Steam, GOG etc.) + a console or minimal release time gaps among the other platforms.
This is also the actual general milestone we have obliged by and bound to our new investment company so schedule management is "also" a top priority - second to product quality of course :)
We know many have optimistically hoped for a much sooner release and we apologize for having to announce this now but we've just managed to sort everything out over the past couple of months and we are content that at least finally we are announcing something we're confident with.
A quick note also that in future updates, please understand that we are somewhat limited in our freedom in disclosing some key designs and/or visuals (not that we've shown off plenty anyway...) but we'll do our best to sneak in a few shots here and there and share some more ideas "with the purpose of receiving constructive feedback and response from the community" :)
We can only ask for your continued moral support and belief, so in due course, we can kick some serious butt!
Finally, we'd like to ask all readers to please hold off your sound/music score/translation/localization/collaboration/marketing inquiries until towards the end of the year since we cannot get around to give these issues serious thought it deserves.
Thanks once again and back to work. |
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: For the first time, 25-year-old U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning has admitted to being the source behind the largest leak of state secrets in U.S. history. More than a thousand days after he was arrested, Manning testified Thursday before a military court. He said he leaked the classified documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks in order to show the American public the “true costs of war.”
Reading for over an hour from a 35-page statement, Manning said, quote, “I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information … this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general.” He added, quote, “I believed that these cables would not damage the United States. However, I believed these cables would be embarrassing.” He said he took the information to WikiLeaks only after he was rebuffed by The Washington Post and The New York Times.
At the pretrial hearing at Fort Meade military base in Maryland, Manning pleaded guilty to reduced charges on 10 counts, which carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. But even if the judge accepts the plea, prosecutors can still pursue a court-martial on the remaining 12 charges. The most serious of those is aiding the enemy and carries a possible life sentence.
Over the course of the hearing, Bradley Manning took responsibility for leaking the so-called “Collateral Murder” video of an Apache helicopter attack in Iraq; some U.S. diplomatic cables, including one of the early WikiLeaks publications, the Reykjavik cable; portions of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs; some of the files on detainees in Guantánamo; and two intelligence memos.
For more, we’re joined by Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, lawyer for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. He has just returned from attending that pretrial hearing last night for Bradley Manning.
Michael Ratner, welcome back to Democracy Now! Well, this is explosive. Bradley Manning stands in court and accepts responsibility for releasing the documents, says he is guilty of doing that.
MICHAEL RATNER: It was one of the more moving days I’ve ever spent in a courtroom. You’ve heard from Bradley Manning once before, which was when he testified about the torture that happened to him. I was crying through that. This was amazing. I mean, he actually didn’t stand; he sat at the defense table. And he read his 35-page statement, which, sadly, we do not have a copy of, even though there’s nothing classified about that statement. And hopefully we’ll get it, because that is something that should be taught in every school in America.
He went through each of the releases that he took responsibility for, that you mentioned on the air, and he told us why he did it. And in each case, you saw a 22-year-old, a 23-year-old, a person of incredible conscience, saying, “What I’m seeing the United States do is utterly wrong. It’s immoral. The way they’re killing people in Iraq, targeting people for death, rather than working with the population, this is wrong.” And in each of these—each of these statements tells you about how he was doing it politically.
AMY GOODMAN: Remind us of how he did this. He was actually serving in Iraq as a soldier.
MICHAEL RATNER: Yes, he was a soldier. He was in—and he goes through that in his statement. He’s an intelligence analyst. And one of the things he worked with, what were called “significant activities reports,” which are the daily logs of what’s happening in Iraq and, attached to it, of course, in Afghanistan. And as he read those, I think he became appalled by what he saw: the killings, the targeted assassinations, the fact that people didn’t want the United States there, the fact that we weren’t really helping the country or helping individuals. And he said he wanted to lift the fog of war from it. And he got in touch with various organizations, including WikiLeaks. And that, he talks about. He talks about that. And—
AMY GOODMAN: Explain. He actually said he didn’t go to WikiLeaks first.
MICHAEL RATNER: No, that’s correct. He first—he had these documents on a disk that he eventually took out of—took out of the special secure room. He actually came to the United States with it. That’s the Iraq war logs and the Afghan war logs. And he tried to get it to The New York Times and The Washington Post. He calls up The Washington Post, has a five-minute discussion with somebody there.
AMY GOODMAN: Does he know who?
MICHAEL RATNER: He doesn’t recall who, or at least didn’t say it. He doesn’t take it—he said they don’t take him seriously, and then he feels he can’t get that. He calls the public editor at The New York Times and leaves a message on the answering machine of the public editor and doesn’t get a call back. He’s then thinking about: “How am I going to get this critical information out? Because I think what the U.S. is doing should be debated in the United States. We’re killing people without cause, essentially.”
And then, he has already known about WikiLeaks, because he was aware of WikiLeaks in part because of their release of the text messages or the SMSes from the World Trade Center phones that were there on 9/11. So he’s aware of WikiLeaks. He’s in some communication, by chat or otherwise, with WikiLeaks. And they point him to a site where he can upload, upload the documents.
One interesting point on that is what he mentions about WikiLeaks. Some papers have reported that he said he believes he was in communication with Julian Assange. He actually says it could have been Julian Assange, it could have been someone he calls “Daniel Schmitt,” which is probably Daniel Domscheit-Berg from Germany. And he says—and it also says it could have been someone high up in WikiLeaks. He really doesn’t know. And he says, “Whatever I did in this case, I did because I wanted to do it. I was not pressured to do it. I made the decision to do it.” So he tries these other media, and ultimately he sees that WikiLeaks has a way of uploading documents that’s anonymous, that he doesn’t know who’s on the other end, and they don’t know who’s on his end.
AMY GOODMAN: He also said he was motivated by the Reuters FOIAs, right? Freedom of the Information Act requests to get the—what came to be known as the “Collateral Murder” video.
MICHAEL RATNER: I mean, when we can get the transcript and put out the quotes of what he said, on that “Collateral Murder” video, which he saw the Reuters journalists killed, then he saw them attack the van that was trying to rescue people, in which children were injured, and he said, “What I heard them say in that helicopter as they were shooting was incredible bloodlust.” “Bloodlust,” that’s what he said.
AMY GOODMAN: During that pretrial hearing on Wednesday, let’s talk about this, Michael. Bradley Manning spoke about the “Collateral Murder” video of an Apache helicopter attack in Iraq and admitted for the first time being the source of the leaked tape. Manning said, quote, “The most alarming aspect of the video to me was the seemingly delightful bloodlust the aerial weapons team happened to have.” He added, the soldiers’ actions, quote, “seemed similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass,” describing the video as “war porn,” saying the crew’s “lack of concern for human life” and “concern for injured children at the scene” greatly bothered him. So, this is the video—it was shot July 12th, 2007—that Manning referenced. It shows U.S. forces killing 12 people, including two Reuters employees. Now, this video is taken by the U.S. military Apache helicopter. It is the camera that’s mounted within the helicopter. You hear the soldiers in the helicopter joking, cursing. And it is showing a target on the men who are walking in an area of Baghdad known as New Baghdad below. Among them, an up-and-coming Reuters videographer named Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver, Saeed Chmagh.
U.S. SOLDIER 1: I have individuals with weapons.
U.S. SOLDIER 2: You’re clear.
U.S. SOLDIER 1: Alright, firing.
U.S. SOLDIER 3: Let me know when you’ve got them.
U.S. SOLDIER 2: Let’s shoot. Light ’em all up.
U.S. SOLDIER 1: Come on, fire!
U.S. SOLDIER 2: Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’.
U.S. SOLDIER 4: Hotel, Bushmaster two-six, Bushmaster two-six, we need to move, time now!
U.S. SOLDIER 2: Alright, we just engaged all eight individuals.
AMY GOODMAN: Reuters driver Saeed Chmagh survived that initial attack. He’s seen trying to crawl away as the helicopter flies overhead. U.S. forces open fire again when they see a van pulling up. The van comes to evacuate the wounded, like Saeed Chmagh.
U.S. SOLDIER 2: The bodies.
U.S. SOLDIER 1: Where’s that van at?
U.S. SOLDIER 2: Right down there by the bodies.
U.S. SOLDIER 1: OK, yeah.
U.S. SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse. We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly picking up bodies and weapons.
U.S. SOLDIER 1: Let me engage. Can I shoot?
U.S. SOLDIER 2: Roger. Break. Crazy Horse one-eight, request permission to engage.
U.S. SOLDIER 3: Picking up the wounded?
U.S. SOLDIER 1: Yeah, we’re trying to get permission to engage. Come on, let us shoot!
U.S. SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse one-eight.
U.S. SOLDIER 1: They’re taking him.
U.S. SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse one-eight.
U.S. SOLDIER 4: This is Bushmaster seven, go ahead.
U.S. SOLDIER 2: Roger. We have a black SUV—or Bongo truck picking up the bodies. Request permission to engage.
U.S. SOLDIER 4: Bushmaster seven, roger. This is Bushmaster seven, roger. Engage.
U.S. SOLDIER 2: One-eight, engage. Clear.
U.S. SOLDIER 1: Come on!
U.S. SOLDIER 2: Clear. Clear.
U.S. SOLDIER 1: We’re engaging.
U.S. SOLDIER 2: Coming around. Clear.
U.S. SOLDIER 1: Roger. Trying to—
U.S. SOLDIER 2: Clear.
U.S. SOLDIER 1: I hear ’em—I lost ’em in the dust.
U.S. SOLDIER 3: I got ’em.
U.S. SOLDIER 2: Should have a van in the middle of the road with about 12 to 15 bodies.
U.S. SOLDIER 1: Oh yeah, look at that. Right through the windshield! Ha ha!
AMY GOODMAN: That is the video that WikiLeaks, when releasing it, dubbed “Collateral Murder,” of the July 12, 2007, attack. In that van, by the way, were two children who were critically wounded. Saeed Chmagh was killed. That is the video that we played first when it was released and also interviewed Julian Assange at the time here in the United States, interestingly. Michael Ratner with us, who is Julian Assange’s attorney. So this video Bradley Manning got in downloading, because it’s a U.S. military video, that Reuters, which had asked repeatedly for it, never got until WikiLeaks released it, to know the last seconds of their employees’ lives.
MICHAEL RATNER: Not only did Reuters never get it, Amy, CENTCOM, which is I guess the central part of the Army, basically said, “We don’t think we have the video.” And yet, everybody that was in the room with Bradley Manning, everybody knew about the video. It was one of many, many videos. He says in this video—and he said it in court—he said, “What was amazing is, when they—after they hurt these children in the van,” he said, “they showed no remorse for the children. And when they saw someone crawling on the ground, they said, 'I hope he picks up a gun,' essentially, 'because we can kill him then.'” So, these people—this was really here a 22- or 23-year-old man watching this. Most people would have said, “Well, I’ll just get through the Army, and that’ll be it.” He didn’t, and he’s a hero for that, because what he did is he acted on his moral conscience, and he exposed what the—the war crimes the U.S. was doing.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what does this mean right now? Bradley Manning has pleaded guilty to uploading the largest trove of state secrets in U.S. history to WikiLeaks, which then released them. What does he face exactly?
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, he faces a possible 20 years in prison. But the problem here, military is different than our regular courts in the U.S., which is to say that the plea does not have to be accepted by the government or by the judge—
AMY GOODMAN: So why would he have agreed to plead guilty?
MICHAEL RATNER: —or by the prosecutor, really. He did what’s called a “naked plea.” His hope, I think, is that when the government sees this and also the support he’ll get for acknowledging what he did and also the reasons and the moral reasons why he did it and the political reasons he did it, that the government won’t go on and try and prove aiding the enemy and the more serious espionage charges. What he really pleaded to was doing actions that were prejudicial to the good order and discipline of the military, by giving documents to someone not authorized or a group not authorized to get them. So he faces 20 years. I think he did it because he was otherwise facing, and he still could be facing, life imprisonment, if not the death penalty. So they’re trying to figure out—
AMY GOODMAN: Because? Life imprisonment for?
MICHAEL RATNER: For espionage, as well as the death penalty.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, what about this charge, aiding the enemy?
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, that’s the—
AMY GOODMAN: What is the case for it?
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, that’s the craziest. I mean, that’s just saying, because he gave documents to WikiLeaks and they were published by WikiLeaks — and they were published by The New York Times, I should say, and The Guardian and Der Spiegel — that al-Qaeda read those documents, and therefore WikiLeaks was essentially the transmittal means he used to get documents to al-Qaeda. So that the enemy there is al-Qaeda; some would say the enemy is even WikiLeaks, according to the U.S. government. But that’s the claim. It seems like a completely spurious, ridiculous claim. You can go after The New York Times for that every time it publishes and someone from a, quote, “terrorist” group reads those documents. So it’s a nonsensical claim.
But he was facing life. And he made this statement that—you know, I just want to say that whatever people’s images were of Bradley Manning from the newspapers, which have reported on this, you know, disturbed human being, this disturbed individual, this man gave a political statement that should be read, I think, by every American and should certainly be taught in every one of our schools on what the moral obligations are of people in the military to stop, really, a killing machine of the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: And what does this mean for Julian Assange? You’re his attorney. You were just recently there once again in London in the Ecuadorean embassy, where he is holed up and granted political asylum by Ecuador but can’t leave the embassy or Britain, the British authorities, will arrest him. The significance of this, Julian Assange, who believes the grand jury empaneled here could indict him for espionage and is afraid of being extradited here?
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, there are two things that came out. One is, I would say that Bradley Manning’s testimony put WikiLeaks and Julian Assange in the same place that The New York Times would be or The Guardian, which is to say he gave documents or uploaded them to a website that is the equivalent of—you know, with The New York Times getting information about warrantless wiretapping from someone in the U.S. National Security Agency. So I think, in that sense, it tells us that the U.S. should get off his back, that Julian Assange should be getting the support of The New York Times and The Guardian and Der Spiegel, which used all of these—which used all of these documents. So I think it’s actually, in that sense, helpful to Julian Assange.
On the other hand, there were two people who were identified to me as members—as lawyers on the grand jury that’s sitting in—that’s sitting in Virginia. Two of the prosecuting attorneys were there in the court.
AMY GOODMAN: Yesterday, at the pretrial hearing of Bradley Manning.
MICHAEL RATNER: Yes, yes, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: So they’re there, and you’re there, Assange’s attorney.
MICHAEL RATNER: They’re there, and I’m there. I didn’t have a chance to meet them, because they don’t come out and mix with the rest of us. They’re on the government’s side with—surrounded by camouflaged people. But they were there. And so, that tells us that that grand jury is still active and going on, and that they are still after Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. When I say “they,” the U.S. government. But for some reason, they’re thinking they can distinguish that from The New York Times and The Guardian. I don’t think they can. And I think it’s—you know, to me, it’s outrageous that The New York Times and The Guardian have not supported one of the people they worked with in revealing these documents.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Michael Ratner, I want to thank you for being with us, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, lawyer for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, returned last night from attending the pretrial hearing for Bradley Manning, who has been in detention now for more than 1,000 days.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. Stay with us. |
About
What is "BLEAK"?
BLEAK is a Massive Fantasy Platformer for PC, Mac and Linux, that we've been developing for the past year. In it we have revived the lost art of storytelling to connect the gamer to a dangerous and vicious new world.
In short we're totally committed to creating the single player, lore-loaded, character-driven, challenging platformer that we've been aching to play and we hope you've all been waiting for!
So How "BLEAK" are we Talking?
Great question! To answer it we'll need to take a look at the game's setting and lore.
Imagine a world where immediately upon birth your dominant arm is amputated and replaced with a pickax. As soon as you can walk, you're sent into the darkest, coldest mines to extract a precious golden metal known as "Core". You have no choice. The omnipresent "Cultivators of Good" will punish acts of defiance with denial of food. Your family gets their rations by working in factories and building new augmentations for future workers. Unlike you, their limbs have been swapped with wrenches and hammers.
To the north flows an ocean of acid and past that lies the distant island you know only as "Suffer". This is where you're told the disobedient are forever punished. To the east looms a river of green and orange sludge and imposing cliffs just beyond. And even farther menaces the seemingly endless wall called "Never". Its name developed in response to the fate of any who attempted to scale it. They were "never" seen or heard from again. Or at least... that's what you've been told.
You are a Sourcer of The Pinnacle and if you're not dead, or your mouth isn't sewn shut for questioning your life... you are without doubt one of the lucky ones. Oh and if you ever see what looks like a moving tree or two small, round, glowing circles off in the distance, we regret to inform you that escape is impossible. You are as good as dead.
Bleak enough for you? This world is mean, dark, and cruel. Its massive scope and landscape require your brave exploration despite the necessity for constant vigilance as new monsters and mysteries lurk around every corner.
Pictured above are some of the races found only in this game. These aren't elves or dwarves. We've spent over a year crafting original concepts with wild characteristics. You can meet and interact with these exotic and sometimes brutally dangerous beings on your journey!
Each race in the world of Pinnacle has been fleshed out to such an extent that even their languages are based on unique alphabet glyphs. These will appear throughout the game on signage and in tomes (if you're lucky enough to find one). The depth and authenticity created by this detail is mesmerizing.
The journeying portion of our game will take place as a richly detailed action platformer. You'll play as Sky, Bug and Bleak and face off against a myriad of lethal and unusual enemies. It's important to note that the above footage is an Alpha build of the game, and is only meant to illustrate some platforming mechanics and the overall aesthetic.
Whenever you enter a town or city, the camera will reposition, transforming your perspective from an action platformer into that of a top-down adventure game. This will allow you to truly get up close and personal with the many inhabitants of Pinnacle. Talk to them, explore their shops and homes! Have fun!
You may have noticed the circular border around our gameplay screenshot. That's because you're seeing the world through the lens of an old Sourcer scavenger robot called "Glitch" (pictured above). By justifying the existence of the camera we can add a new level of immersion and connect the player that much more to this dangerous world.
What do you believe? Pictured above is a diagram detailing the various belief systems that occur throughout Pinnacle. They apply to different races and play a large part in determining how certain NPC's will interact with the player on their adventure. Just like the languages, these are far from random, but rather are based upon faithfulness to lore and legends of the characters and races.
• 3 Playable Characters Each With Their Own Special Abilities
• 7 Original Races
• 15 Explorable Territories
• 70+ Levels (Including Secret Levels)
• Levels with Branching Endings
• A Huge Story Spanning Thousands of Years
• 8 Fully Incorporated 26 Character Alphabets
• 9 Integrated Belief Systems
• 50+ Interactive NPC's
• Mount and Airship Travel
• Pet Companions
• Top-Down City Exploration
We are a Boston-based independent game studio. We have assembled a team of seven artists who have been working tirelessly for over a year now on our first project in development, BLEAK. We are all diehard gamers dedicated to the revitalization of the tradition of incorporating creativity, originality, and story-telling into video games. We're thrilled to watch as BLEAK becomes everything we knew it could and would be, but we have reached the point where we truly need your help, and that is where this kickstarter campaign comes in. Let's make this thing together and bring back all the depth and imagination that this valued art form, the video game, has to offer!
In order to make a platformer this massive and this conceptually experimental, we have to bring it straight to our fellow gamers. Publishers typically want nothing to do with innovation because they are set on the proven sell. But we truly believe that other gamers like ourselves would relish the opportunity to play a game that's edgy, creative, and utterly original and yet at the same time a bit of a throwback to the the late 90s Glory Age Of Gaming when stories, lore, and characters mattered. Kickstarter seems like the perfect vehicle through which to accomplish our goal.
The money we receive will go directly to funding the marketing, expenses, and talent challenges that we now face in order to see this project through to its completion. It's a huge commitment, and we're totally up to it! If you show us through your support that this game means as much to you as it does to us, we are prepared to create for you a game of epic proportions!
In other words, we have the team, we have the talent, and with your help we will have the resources to bring to you and to all BLEAK, the massive fantasy platformer that we've all been yearning for.
We will make this game as large as you show us you want it to be. Anything we make over our goal will fund additional content, be it additional levels, animations or even whole chapter expansions!
1.5 GB RAM
2.2 GHz Processor
512 Mb Video RAM
Adobe Flash Player
4 GB Hard Drive Memory |
The gunman who killed 58 people and injured over 500 at a Las Vegas concert last month had lost a significant amount of money in the past two years. Police think that might be a "determining factor" in the worst mass shooting in modern US history.
Stephen Paddock was a high-stakes gambler and real estate investor who had lost a “significant amount of wealth” since September 2015, which led to “bouts of depression,” Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said in an interview with news station KLAS-TV.
“This individual was status-driven, based on how he liked to be recognized in the casino environment and how he liked to be recognized by his friends and family,” Lombardo said. “So, obviously, that was starting to decline in the short period of time, and that may have had a determining effect on why he did what he did.”
Las Vegas shooter was on a losing streak in the two years before the massacre, leaving him depressed, sheriff says. https://t.co/8hYtJEIH3z — AP West Region (@APWestRegion) November 3, 2017
Lombardo said investigators haven’t uncovered exactly what led Paddock to unleash a barrage of gunfire into a crowd of concertgoers from his high-rise hotel suite.
“We are doing an autopsy on his brain, the coroner is in the process of having that completed. Which takes some time,” Lombardo said. “We don’t know if he had a mental defeat which caused him to change.”
“I hope we find something in his brain,” he added.
Investigators still consider Paddock’s girlfriend Mary Lou Danley a person of interest, who is still being actively interviewed. Lombardo said that, while investigators thought her account was accurate, they questioned her about Paddock’s purchase of 40-50 guns in a short period of time.
“It is hard for me to believe,” said Lombardo. “You would think Ms. Danley would have some information associated with that.”
Read more
There had to be a trigger point to cause Paddock to start purchasing large amounts of weapons in a short period of time, but “we have yet to determine what it is,” the sheriff said.
“Obviously he took a long time to think this out, process, obtained the weaponry, the logistics, thought out the plan, so it may be a longer term issue that made him snap,” said Lombardo. “We may not find out.”
One of the laptops found in Paddock’s hotel suite was missing a hard drive, and searches of his internet history turned up nothing unusual. Investigator found no evidence that Paddock had help in carrying out the attack.
Lombardo dismissed speculation that he acting like a sniper or had knowledge of weapons, describing him as “a psychotic individual in possession of a firearm shooting into a crowd.”
“It wasn’t difficult to do what he did,” the sheriff said. “I don’t want to say he was a genius. It was diabolical.”
As for Paddock taking his own life, Lombardo said “I believe the suspect believed the wolf was at the door.”
Several news organizations have sued for 911 calls, police video and search warrants related to the shooting. |
The James Bond Gun Barrel Sequence
Summary The Gun Barrel Sequence is the scene that typically opens any James Bond film, game, or other video media. It features James Bond walking along a white backdrop, shown through the view of the barrel of a henchman's gun. Realizing he is about to be killed, Bond quickly whips around and shoots the assassin first. The scene has been shot with many different actors including Bob Simmons, Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig.
Introduction
#1:Bob Simmons #1:Bob Simmons
In 1962, the astonishing United Artists studio logo music blasted out to movie audiences around the globe. It was followed by what would come to be the most famous movie introduction ever. James Bond, played by Bob Simmons, walked along a white backdrop, shown from a view through the inside of the barrel of a henchman's gun. Aware that he was being watched, Bond quickly turned and shot the assassin. Blood dripped down the screen, the gun barrel trailing off and opening to reveal the main titles.
Since then, the tradition has continued, with a current total of 7 actors having played Bond in the sequence. The sequence has remained relatively the same, with some small differences along the years. However, the entire scene was given a redesign for Casino Royale in 2006.
Dr No: The start
The gun barrel sequence was created by Maurice Binder, who went on to design 14 of the James Bond title sequences. The effect was as realistic as it seems, as Maurice created it by filming through a real gun barrel with a pin-hole camera. A fact unknown to many is that Sean Connery was not actually playing James Bond in the scene. It was in fact stuntman Bob Simmons, wearing a suit and hat, his right arm out-stretched with a pistol and his left arm concealed at his side. The scene with Bob Simmons was used 3 times, in Dr. No, From Russia with Love and Goldfinger.
Dr. No Title Sequence Dr. No Title Sequence
As the blood dripped away, the gun barrel swayed from side to side, went to the right of the screen and turned white, fading into a dotty title sequence, as shown on the left.
Since the gun barrel sequence is the first sequence in the film, Bob Simmons could arguably be the first official James Bond. Although two actors had previously played him (see Who Played James Bond: A Complete History), Bob Simmons was the first person to portray James Bond in the official Eon Productions Series.
The gun barrel sequence in Dr. No is also noted for its unique opening sound effects, different from all those to follow, as well as being the scene to originally showcase the world renowned James Bond theme tune! Although Monty Norman is credited for writing the tune, some people believe that John Barry was responsible for at least part of it. Its just one man's word against another's, but regardless of who composed it, the theme tune is an absolute classic that is recognizable worldwide and superbly suited for the introduction to James Bond. It even made our list of Top 10 Bond Theme Songs.
Thunderball: Connery Takes Over
During pre-production of Thunderball, the decision was made to use CinemaScope Anamorphic film, which allowed for a 16:9 aspect ratio to be filmed on a 4:3 piece of film. The change in aspect ratio meant that the original gun barrel sequence needed to be reshot, otherwise it would appear horizontally stretched in the theatres.
#2: Sean Connery #2: Sean Connery
They choose to reshoot the scene with Sean Connery playing Bond. It is unclear why this decision was made, because Bob Simmons was still the Stunt Arranger on Thunderball, and was therefore available for shooting. Perhaps Connery was meant to be in the original, but was unavailable, forcing them to substitute.
It is clear that Sean Connery was trying to imitate Bob in the reshoot, but the shots aren't quite identical. Connery wears the same clothes, but when he turns to shoot the assassin, his extends out his left arm, instead of hiding it at his side. His stance is also a little different. Note the visible difference in aspect ratio between the two images above.
This version of the sequence was actually shot in colour, as opposed to the original black and white version. However, it was rendered in black and white when it was used again in You Only Live Twice, and later, Diamonds Are Forever.
On Her Majesty's Secret Service: Lazenby
#3: George Lazenby #3: George Lazenby
When Connery quit the role of James Bond after You Only Live Twice, the scene had to be reshot again for new actor George Lazenby. The producers didn't want Lazenby to just imitate Connery throughout On Her Majesty's Secret Service, so they changed a few things up, including the gun barrel sequence.
For the first time since Dr. No, the white dot stops halfway to reveal the "Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli present" credit line. Then Lazenby walks across the screen and turns, falling onto his knees, before shooting the assassin. It was also the only sequence where the blood erased the image of Bond as it came down, instead of the usual translucent effect.
Another interesting aspect of this sequence is that it reveals that Lazenby was in fact walking on a treadmill. The gun barrel stops at the center of the screen, but Bond keeps moving for half a second, before turning to shoot.
OHMSS was the only film where the blood erased Bond from the screen. OHMSS was the only film where the blood erased Bond from the screen.
Live and Let Die: Roger Moore Goes Fourth
With Live and Let Die, the filming returned to the original 1.85:1 aspect ratio of the early films, and the sequence was reshot with Roger Moore. For his entry, Roger walked across the screen and turned, his legs apart and his left hand on his right arm, steadying his shot. It was the first time James Bond hadn't worn a hat in the sequence.
#4: Roger Moore (in a Tux) #4: Roger Moore (in a Tux)
This scene was used again in The Man with the Golden Gun. However, starting with The Spy Who Loved Me, the series changed back to the anamorphic film format, and Roger had to shoot the scene again. They were careful to make the reshoot as close to the original as possible, but they did change Rogers casual suit to a tuxedo, another first for the series.
It went on to be used in The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy and A View to a Kill, at which point Roger Moore retired from the role of James Bond, painting the way for Timothy Dalton.
The Living Daylights: Dalton Takes the Torch
When Timothy Dalton came aboard for The Living Daylights, he actually filmed the sequence twice. The first one was scrapped, because it was thought that Tim jumped too far when he spun around to shoot. It wasn't lost though, as it was used in an early British teaser trailer.
#5: Timothy Dalton #5: Timothy Dalton
The second sequence is the one used in The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill. Tim shoots in a similar fashion to Bob Simmons and Sean Connery, with his right arm extended out to shoot, and his left arm by his side. He leans to the right a little though, and his stance is unique too.
Goldeneye: Brosnan and the Age of CGI
Goldeneye marked the first large deviation from the traditional gun barrel sequence. Maurice Binder, who had done all of the sequences up to this point, passed away in 1991, and was replaced by Daniel Kleinman. Daniel changed the long standing tradition of using a real gun, instead choosing to use CGI to generate the scene.
To his credit though, he kept the style extremely similar to Maurice Binder's work, a respectable choice in my opinion. The change to CGI produced a sharper, sleeker image, that suited the newer films. Daniel darkened the colour of the blood, but kept everything else the same.
Like Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan also filmed two versions of the sequence, one being used for the trailer, another reshot for the actual film. The teaser trailer for Tomorrow Never Dies shows the alternate version. In both versions, Pierce shoots with his right arm, but unlike all Tim, Sean and Bob, he remains bolt upright as he turns.
#6: Pierce Brosnan (3rd version) #6: Pierce Brosnan (3rd version)
In 2001, while Die Another Day was in production, Director Lee Tamahori requested that a special addition be made, to celebrate the 20th film in the series. The gun barrel sequence was modified to include a CGI bullet shooting into the screen, as shown in the image on the left.
Casino Royale: Enter Daniel Craig
As part of the reboot of the series with Casino Royale, the producers decided to change a few things, including the 20 movie tradition of the gun barrel sequence. It's always a little controversial to do something like this, but with Casino Royale, I think it was the right choice.
To explain why, I'll first have to set the scene. Casino Royale was the first James Bond novel, and the producers decided to make the film a sort of prequel to the rest of the series. It began with a very stylish black and white scene where Bond kills the two people required for him to get his 00-status.
He kills the first man in a bathroom, and then heads to the office of a corrupt MI6 agent to get his second kill. It then skips back to the bathroom scene, where Bond bends down to pick up his gun. As he's doing this, the man he just killed turns out to be still alive, and points his own gun at Bond. Bond turns around and shoots just in time, shown from the view through the assassins gun, and it then goes into the titles.
The sequence was the first to be shown in Black and White since Diamond's Are Forever back in 1971. There are many differences in the gun barrel itself. For a start, they scrapped Maurice Binder's design, instead making a barrel with 28 grooves instead of 8. It was also a different style and colour, and the first ever sequence not shot against a white background.
#7: Daniel Craig #7: Daniel Craig
It was also the first time that some variation of the James Bond Theme hadn't been used. Instead, it went straight into the title song. They changed the tradition, but given the circumstances, I think it was an excellent choice, and extremely well done.
Quantum Of Solace: The End of a Tradition
Now this is the one I really don't understand. For Quantum Of Solace they brought back a sequence closer to the originals than Casino Royale had been. The white dots moving across the screen had returned, the gun barrel was almost back to normal, the scene was again filmed against a white backdrop, and the James Bond Theme Song was back.
Sounds great right? Well no, because for some unknown reason, they choose to ruin a long running tradition by placing the sequence at the end of the film, right before the credits. I believe it was a terrible decision, because a Bond movie should, by definition, open with the gun barrel sequence. Sure, Casino Royale had a little scene first, but the main film itself did open with a gun barrel.
Daniel Craig Daniel Craig
Complaints aside, let's discuss the scene in question. It was created by the design company MK12, who replaced Daniel Kleinman as the Title Sequence Designer. Daniel Craig walks in quite a hurry across a white backdrop and turns to shoot, standing in a similar fashion to Timothy Dalton. The camera then zooms out, and the red silhouette of Bond makes the Q in the Quantum of Solace logo. |
Internet giant says renewable energy is increasingly lowest cost option and it will not rule out investing in nuclear power
Google’s data centres and the offices for its 60,000 staff will be powered entirely by renewable energy from next year, in what the company has called a “landmark moment”.
The internet giant is already the world’s biggest corporate buyer of renewable electricity, last year buying 44% of its power from wind and solar farms. Now it will be 100%, and an executive said it would not rule out investing in nuclear power in the future, too.
Google uses AI to cut data centre energy use by 15% Read more
“We are convinced this is good for business, this is not about greenwashing. This is about locking in prices for us in the long term. Increasingly, renewable energy is the lowest cost option,” said Marc Oman, EU energy lead at Google. “Our founders are convinced climate change is a real, immediate threat, so we have to do our part.”
Technology companies have come under increasing scrutiny over the carbon footprint of their operations, which have grown so fast they now account for about 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, rivalling the aviation industry.
Oman said it had taken Google five years to reach the 100% target, set in 2012, because of the complexity involved with negotiating power purchase agreements. “It’s complicated, it’s not for everyone: smaller companies will struggle with the documents. We are buying power in a lot of different jurisdictions, so you can’t just copy and paste agreements.”
The company’s biggest demand for energy is its data centres and it admits their overall thirst for power is growing, despite experiments to improve their efficiency through AI.
In 2015, Google bought 5.7 terawatt hours (TWh) of renewable electricity, a little less than the 7.6TWh generated by all of the UK’s solar panels that year. The majority of the power comes from windfarms in the US.
Portugal runs for four days straight on renewable energy alone Read more
Oman said that while the falling price of solar and wind meant they had been the cheapest technologies to get to 100% by 2017, Google was now looking to sign 10-year agreements for low-carbon power that was not intermittent, such as hydro, biomass and nuclear.
“We want to do contracts with forms of renewable power that are more baseload-like, so low-impact hydro; it could be biomass if the fuel source is sustainable, it could be nuclear, God forbid, we’re not averse. We’re looking at all forms of low-carbon generation.”
But he said new nuclear power was “controversial”, the safety implications were much more “dramatic” than with renewables, and the price was “much more difficult [to ascertain]” than when funding solar panels and wind turbines.
“We don’t want to rule out signing a nuclear contract if it meets our goals of low price, safety, additionality and in a sufficiently close grid, we don’t want to rule that out, but today we can’t positively say there are nuclear projects out there that meet this criteria,” he said.
The company’s 100% renewable energy does not mean Google is getting all its energy directly from wind and solar power, but that on an annual basis the amount it purchases from renewable sources matches the electricity its operations consume.
Jodie Van Horn, a campaigner at the Sierra Club, an environmental group, said: “By transitioning global operations to run entirely on renewable energy, Google is charting a course for other corporations, institutions, cities and communities to take bold action that will create jobs, save money, and protect families from dangerous fossil fuel pollution.” |
The ASUS Eee Pad Transformer is quickly becoming the darling of the Android tablet world. With all the specs (dual-core, Android 3.0, keyboard dock - the list goes on) and a price tag at $400, this may just be the one Honeycomb tablet to rule them all. Alas, when a great product and a great price meet, there is great demand - and when there is great demand and a less-than-great supply level, there is a high level of dejected customers leaving their electronics retailers with empty hands.
The low shipment volumes of the Transformer have been news for the last couple of days, with as low as 10,000 units being moved per month. There has been a fair bit of speculation as to why ASUS isn't pumping out more of these tablets to capitalize on the popularity and hype that lead to Best Buy selling out their stocks in short order.
There are now two primary theories as to why production is so low, the first of which involves component shortages. CrunchGear (via a German netbook website in contact with individuals close to ASUS) is reporting that a shortage of components, no word on which one(s), is the reason that the Taiwanese producer is unable to hit the 300,000/month target they had originally set. This shortage may be the result of another, rather significant, tablet maker. Suppliers for tablet manufacturers are stating that Apple is buying up a large share of tablet components for their iPad 2.
The second theory is one that centers around ongoing testing. Thinq got in contact with John Swatton, marketing manager at ASUS, to ask him about the supply shortages. When commenting on the situation, he claimed that production has not slowed at all, but rather testing is to blame for some initial delays.
Various sources are saying that production has slowed, this is untrue. Production has been increasing steadily since the first shipments left the factory, and we will continue to see increasing quantities delivered to UK retailers... We have implemented a number of additional testing procedures for the Eee Pad Transformer to ensure an unrivalled user-experience. This has resulted in delays to a number of shipments"
So there you have it, from the horses mouth. The rumor is that component shortages are to blame, but the official word is that it is merely testing and the shipments will be hitting full stride shortly. I am choosing to believe the official word at this point, as it would be too painful to see this beautiful device banished to the land of Unicorns or Bionics because of a shortage of parts.
via CrunchGear, Thinq, Electronista |
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