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Upcoming 90s style RPG on PS Vita adds another version to its party
Grab the nearest household item-turned-weapon and set sail for a fictional island in New Zealand in a new 2D action adventure inspired by the legend of Maui and the Giant Fish. In Reverie, you play as Tai, a young boy on summer holiday exploring the dangerous Toromi Island, in an effort to calm angry spirits threatening the safety of the land’s inhabitants.
Now, some of you may already know Reverie is coming first to the PlayStation Vita worldwide in Q1 2018, but we are very happy to announce that it will also be coming to PlayStation 4 soon after, as a physical release and digitally on PlayStation Store.
The physical PS4 and PS Vita editions of Reverie will be released in small quantities after the digital launches because of the time it takes to produce the physical goodies we’re including: a manual, map, physical soundtrack CD and the game cartridge/disc (obviously).
As a little extra to celebrate this announcement, we’ve decided to show off a new area of Reverie! Since we are closing in on Halloween, how about an exclusive look at the spookiest place on Toromi Island… Butler’s Cay! (The name sounds familiar, no?)
The notable landmarks of Butler’s Cay are the cemetery and the church. We’ve tried to be accurate in our design of these sights as they’re based off early New Zealand architecture and history, such as the Christ Church in Russell. There are many other secrets to find on Butler’s Cay as well, but we don’t want to reveal too much!
For more information about the game, or us, you reach us easiest on Twitter, or via our email address [email protected]. Thank you for your time! |
Along with similar declines in the PC industry, tablet sales fall for five quarters with only budget models showing growth
Sales of tablet computers fell by more than 6m over the past year as the market contracted 14.7%, according to a report.
At a time when consumers are questioning whether they really need both a computer and a tablet or either along with a smartphone, the only part of the market to grow was the sub-$200 offerings.
Tablet sales were down from 50.5m to 43.0m year-on-year worldwide in the third quarter, according to IDC, after four straight quarters of double-digit declines. Even premium tablets such as the iPad suffered big declines, with Apple’s sales down 6.2% to 9.3m iPads in Q3 year-on-year. Apple’s marketshare grew though as competitors shrank further, with second-place Samsung down 19.3% and fourth-placed Lenovo down 10.8%.
Amazon, however, continued its rampant growth with its Fire tablets, of which all but one cost £100 or less, up 319.9% in Q3 year-on-year. Amazon is now the third-biggest tablet manufacturer after Apple and Samsung after its 5,421.7% increase in Q1 and 1,208.9% increase in Q2, going from tens of thousands of sales to 7m total tablet sales in three quarters.
Chinese smartphone and electronics manufacturer Huawei also bucked the tumbling trend with a 23.4% increase in year-on-year sales in Q3, after a sales up 116.6% in 2015 and up 82.2% and 71% in the first and second quarters of 2016 respectively.
However, the race to the low end has created quite a few devices that are simply not worth buying. Jitesh Ubrani, senior IDC research analyst, said: “Unfortunately, many low-cost detachables also deliver a low-cost experience.
“The race to the bottom is something we have already experienced with slates and it may prove detrimental to the market in the long run as detachables could easily be seen as disposable devices rather than potential PC replacements.”
Some manufacturers including Amazon have benefited from the ability to cut the right corners and make low-cost machines that aren’t terrible and fill a growing niche for basic media consumption. But cheap and terrible tablets, like the frustrating budget smartphone experiences before 2013, have put people off tablets.
Consumers simply aren’t as interested in tablets as in smartphones, they have instead become the new PC in the drawer that never gets replaced. At the same time 2-in-1 devices - PCs that double in some capacity as tablets with touchscreens - have begun to cannibalise both traditional PC sales and classic mobile operating system tablet sales.
If the decline in high-end tablet sales continues, it’s clear that where people used to buy a high-end tablet for the home, they’re instead turning to the smartphone, the computer or budget models that are just good enough. |
Wildflowers at Henderson Canyon Road at Anza-Borrego State Park. This area is a well-known spot to see flowers during the famous Desert Bloom season.
This year’s “banner bloom” at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park was one for the books and if you captured pretty pictures of Mother Nature at work, now is your chance to share them.
Winter Rains Bring Historic Desert Bloom
Following the most February rain in more than a decade, the desert bloom is attracting thousands of visitors. (Published Friday, March 17, 2017)
The Anza-Borrego Foundation, in partnership with Borrego Art Institute and Kesling’s Kitchen, recently launched the 2018 Anza-Borrego Desert Photo Contest to find incredible photos of views, blooms, and memories taken by visitors to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park (ABDSP).
2017 Super Bloom at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park
The theme of the contest focuses on the unique and natural beauty of the park. Submissions will be accepted in across six categories: plants of ABDSP; desert bighorn sheep of ABDSP; animals (not sheep) of ABDSP; landscapes of ABDSP; people enjoying ABDSP; black & white photos of ABDSP.
All photos must be taken within the boundaries of the park; the deadline for digital submissions is 12 p.m. on Dec. 1. Contestants can submit up to 10 photographs for the contest, across different categories.
According to the competition rules, judges will conduct an initial review of the submissions and choose approximately 200 photos to move onto the next round. Those photographers will then have to submit a printed version of their work, along with a $5 entry fee.
Judges will conduct a final review of the prints in early 2018. On Feb. 3, 2018, judges will make their critiques, choose the winners and award first, second and third-place ribbons and a grand prize to the “Best in Show.”
All winners will receive a one-year gift membership to Anza-Borrego Foundation; the winning photos and honorable mentions will be displayed at Borrego Art Institute from Feb. 3 through Feb. 28, 2018.
Signs Point to Banner Bloom at Anza-Borrego Desert
NBC 7's Jodi Kodesh and Monica Garske discuss the annual "Desert Bloom," set to happen soon at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. With the right amount of rain and milder temperatures and wind, Kodesh says the perfect formula is there to produce a banner bloom. (Published Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017)
There will also be a voting period open to the public for the “People’s Choice” winners in each category, from Dec. 20 through Jan. 26, 2018. The work of those winners will be featured in the Anza-Borrego Foundation’s social media.
NBC 7 saw many breathtaking photographs of ABDSP earlier this year -- around late February to mid-March -- during the park's famous "Desert Bloom" season.
This year, thanks to a perfect a trifecta of healthy rainfall and mild temperature and winds, the desert saw a vibrant "Super Bloom" that brought forth colorful fields of yellow, white and pink wildflowers.
Just before the season began, NBC 7 spoke with Ernie Cowan, president of the Anza-Borrego Foundation (ABF), about the blooming process and he said it was "all coming together."
Desert Blooms of Season's Past
Cowan said the western edges of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park – the Badlands – is a well-known wildflower zone, as well as Henderson Canyon Road, and Di Giorgio Road.
For big horn sheep sightings, he recommended the mild, 3-mile walk or hike along Borrego Palm Canyon.
Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the largest state park in California, is located about 90 miles east of downtown San Diego. The park makes up one-fifth of San Diego County, while the rest lies in Imperial and Riverside counties, spanning Borrego Springs and Shelter Valley. |
I started writing in a journal when I was in grade 3. One of my teachers took my parents aside on parent-teacher night and suggested that they get me a notebook so I could write my ideas down. I think this came about because I wasn’t paying attention in math class, but it in hindsight it was likely one of the events that lead me to writing.
I journaled daily for years — until my mid-twenties, in fact. I have boxes full of journals of all shapes and sizes stored in a basement somewhere. There are the pink, sparkly ones of high school days, filled with “I love so-and-so’s,” and lots of stickers, the angsty tirades of my early 20s, the day-to-day scribbles of my early 30s. I reduced my journaling to a few times a week as I grew older, and recently, I stopped.
I broke my life-long journaling habit because it was interfering with my writing.
For months I had been getting up at the crack of dawn to scribble my thoughts and feelings into a notebook. By the time I finished, the day’s writing time was nearly over. But there was more than that to the end of my journaling: it wasn’t a positive force in my life anymore.
Journaling can become an excuse not to write other, harder things, like fiction. (Fiction might not be harder for everyone to write, but it sure is for me.) I was spending more time writing about myself, and less time writing for others.
Before I quit journaling altogether, I wrote myself a list of the pros and cons of the art of journaling.
Pros of Journaling:
It helps you get to know yourself It gives you an outlet to vent your feelings in a place where no one can get hurt (unless your brothers steal your journal, break the lock and read it — speaking from experience :) It creates a record of your life that can perhaps be shared with others
Cons of Journaling:
When you have limited time, it takes time away from writing You can fall into a pit of self-reflection and over-analyzing When all is said and done, most of our journals won’t be found on more than one person’s bookshelf, which of course isn’t the main reason most of us journal, but, if you want to write for others…see number one above.
For me, journaling in a traditional sense had run it’s course. I can’t say that I’ll never start it up again, but for now, I’ve set it aside. I still take a few moments each week to write down a few things I’m grateful for in a notebook beside my bed, but otherwise, I’m focusing on fiction.
How about you? Do you write in a journal? Has it ever interfered with your writing? |
What might this mean for the Volt sales later this year?
Aside from the fact that it’s a nice perk, is it fair to incetivize consumers this way? (Obviously California and many plug-in car fans think so, but just asking …)
Thanks to Mark Z for the link …
As of March 12, fewer than 3,620 green HOV stickers allowing solo-driver access for plug-in cars were left in California out of an initial 40,000 allotment.
The green stickers – as opposed to white stickers – are a perk for purchase of transitional zero emission vehicles (TZEV) such as the Chevy Volt.
This means if solo access to the High Occupancy Vehicle lane in California was an incentive to buy an eligible plug-in car in the number-one plug-in cars state, this is on the verge of drying up.
The white stickers for all-electric vehicles like the Nissan Leaf, Tesla Model S, and others are unlimited through Jan. 1, 2019.
A person named “Tom” from the BMW i3 Facebook Group noticed this dwindling green sticker supply on the California Air Resources Board’s Web site, and tipped off InsideEVs.
The site reports in the past four months more than 12,000 people have applied to the state for the green stickers and 8,000 stickers have been applied for since Jan. 1, 2014.
Source: Calif. ARB.
If you were thinking of getting a Volt in California and applying, better act quick.
Whether this will adversely affect Volt sales after the supply is gone does remain to be seen, but it would be reasonable to surmise it could.
Meanwhile EV buyers will still have access to their white stickers, so will we see any tip in the balance between the perennial Volt vs. Leaf mock sales race later this year?
InsideEVs
Doh!
As a trivial pursuit extra bit of news, what do you think of this? …
Funny? Or not funny? That is the question of a tweet a third-party social marketing firm hired by Nissan did on behalf of the Leaf and at Tesla’s expense.
As you no doubt have seen, Tesla was unceremoniously booted from New Jersey after its motor vehicle commission decided to enforce laws already on the books rendering it ineligible for a dealer franchise license.
The tweet, which has subsequently been taken down, was explained away by Nissan as something the Japanese automaker never explicitly was asked about and thus did not directly approve.
“It’s okay #NewJersey, you can still #GoElectric with the #NissanLEAF #EV,” said the tweet as reported by autobloggreen.
Nissan’s Rob Robinson, senior specialist of social communications told ABG in benign terms, “We thought it was a discussion we didn’t need to be weighing in on,” he said, referring to the Tesla versus New Jersey tiff.
Others have said they do think it was funny and it even livened up Nissan’s Twitter account.
Our comment? No comment. But we thought if you’ve not seen this already, you might be interested to see.
autobloggreen |
If you need to catch up on the story, please read this and this.
In the past week, readers of this site have really come through for Pastor Norman Hayes after he was beaten up by a “Militant Atheist” (who would arguably be better described as a thug with a criminal past).
You all pitched in thousands of dollars to Hayes’ recovery fund, which is currently over $5,000. His son Andy wrote this note to supporters last night:
There have been many responses from the Friendly Atheist post, my dad just wanted to say thanks and that it means a lot. This isn’t about theology, it’s about humanity and how we treat each other.
That’s humbling and amazing. Thank you all for showing everyone that we won’t stand for this sort of violence done in association with our beliefs. |
ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Italian police said they have busted a crime ring exporting fake extra virgin olive oil to the United States, highlighting the mafia’s infiltration of Italy’s famed agriculture and food business.
Twelve people with links to the ‘Ndrangheta, the organized crime group based in the southern Calabria region, were arrested on Tuesday on a series of charges including mafia association and fraud, police said in a statement.
The gang shipped cheap olive pomace oil to the U.S. where it was re-labeled as the more expensive “extra virgin” variety, prized for its rich taste and health benefits, and distributed as such to retail stores in New Jersey, they said.
Italian crime syndicates earned an estimated 16 billion euros ($16.85 billion) in 2015 through illegal activities in the agriculture sector, up from 15 billions in 2014, according to Italy’s agricultural association, Coldiretti.
Besides counterfeiting products, gangs make money seizing control of farmland and firms, fixing prices, controlling distribution and through labor exploitation, studies say.
In 2015, crime groups forced more than 100,000 Italians and migrants to work long hours for little pay in fields across the country, according to a report by Italian General Confederation of Labor union (CGIL).
Police said they found no evidence of labor exploitation linked to the fake olive oil scheme, which saw at least ten tonnes of low quality oil, in some cases past sell-by date, sent to the United States.
Pomace oil is extracted from olive pulp left-over from the production of higher quality oils using chemical solvents.
It costs about a tenth of the Italian made extra virgin variety, which sells at about 10 euro a liter, according to David Granieri, the head of Italian olive growers’ association UNAPROL.
Granieri said counterfeit food products posed health risks, as they might contain allergens not indicated on the label, and damaged the reputation of Italian delicacies.
Honest producers, who rely on a perception of luxury to sell at higher prices aboard, also suffered from cheap fake products at a time of low oil production, he added.
“They (the crime groups) are drugging the system,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.
Police said they had been in touch with U.S. authorities on the case.
Italy has long struggled against counterfeiting of its prized culinary goods, and police estimate the domestic market for fake foodstuffs is worth around 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) a year.
($1 = 0.9494 euros) |
The trial of a Malian jihadist, charged with war crimes for orchestrating the 2012 destruction of nine Timbuktu mausoleums and a section of a famous mosque, opened Monday at the International Criminal Court.
Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi appears at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, on August 22, 2016.
Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi asked for forgiveness as he pleaded guilty to the 2012 attacks on the fabled city of Timbuktum in Mali, Africa, and urged Muslims not to follow such "evil" ways at his unprecedented war crimes trial.
"Your honor, regrettably I have to say that what I heard so far is accurate and reflects the events. I plead guilty," he said as his trial opened, admitting a sole war crimes charge of cultural destruction.
Armed with videos, graphics and 360-degree landscapes, war crimes prosecutors showed images of the destruction of the centuries-old sites in the west African city.
Aged about 40, Mahdi is the first person ever to confess his crimes at the ICC, is also the first Islamic extremist to appear before the tribunal and the first charged with crimes arising out of the conflict in Mali.
The razing of the ancient shrines by jihadists triggered global outcry, and archaeologists hope the trial will send a stern warning that such plundering of our common heritage will not go unpunished.
Mahdi is accused of "intentionally directing attacks" against nine of Timbuktu's famous mausoleums as well as the Sidi Yahia mosque between June 30 and July 11, 2012.
Founded between the fifth and the 12th centuries by Tuareg tribes, Timbuktu's very name evokes centuries of history and has been dubbed "the city of 333 saints" for the number of Muslim sages buried there.
Here are five things you need to know about Mali's holy sights:
Who built the mausoleums?
The mausoleums of Muslim saints located in Timbuktu's cemeteries and mosques date back to the ancient caravan city's golden age in the 15th and 16th centuries as an economic, intellectual and spiritual centre. Some date back as far as the 14th century.
The construction of the original tombs of Muslim saints was undertaken by anonymous groups of family members or disciples of the saints, according to experts.
The earthen mausoleums around them were erected after the tombs were desecrated by those who believed they could gain power from being close to the remains.
In the centuries that followed, their maintenance and upkeep was taken on by descendants, local residents and patrons of the sites.
Thirteen of the city's most revered sites became UNESCO-protected in 1988.
Why are they revered?
Known as the "City of 333 saints," or the "Pearl of the Desert," Muslims from across the world visited the tombs of saints as holy places where those in difficulty could ask for divine intervention.
The city's inhabitants have long believed the tombs protect them from danger and they appeal to the saints for help.
Throughout the years, residents have asked the saints to intervene in anything from securing a woman's hand in marriage to making the rains come.
UNESCO describes them as "pilgrimage sites for Malians and neighbouring west African countries."
Why were they destroyed?
Islamist fighters desecrated the centuries-old shrines using pickaxes and chisels after seizing the city in 2012.
The jihadists considered the shrines, as well as priceless ancient manuscripts from Timbuktu's golden age, to be idolatrous.
On trial next week for his alleged role in spearheading the destruction is Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, a member of Ansar Dine, a mainly Tuareg group which at the time held sway over Mali's desert north.
Ansar Dine allied with Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and a third group to occupy the city, until being routed in a French-led intervention in January 2013.
Court prosecutors say the jihadists' first attempted to dissuade Timbuktu's residents from their long-held practice of worshipping the shrines, but after failing set upon their wholesale destruction.
The Islamists also implemented a version of Islamic law which forced women to wear veils and set whipping and stoning as punishment for transgressions.
Why is the ICC case important?
The case is the first to be brought by the world's only permanent war crimes court over the extremist violence that rocked Mali in 2012 and 2013.
It is also the first time that a jihadist has appeared before the court in The Hague and the first ICC case investigating the destruction of religious buildings and historical monuments.
The defendant has made clear he will plead guilty — another first for the court — to a single charge of jointly ordering or carrying out the destruction.
What happened to the mausoleums?
The reconstruction of the shrines began in March 2014, relying heavily on traditional methods and employing local masons.
To make sure the rebuilt shrines matched the old ones as closely as possible, work was checked against old photos and local elders were consulted throughout the process — an important step in a city where culture has traditionally been passed on by word of mouth.
Several countries and organisations financed the reconstruction, including UNESCO.
Work finished on the site in July 2015, and a ceremony marking the completion was held on February 4, 2016.
Five head of cattle were ritually sacrificed just after dawn, ahead of a reading of the entire Muslim holy book, the Koran, and the handing of the keys to the families in charge of their care. |
Campaign signs concerning a municipal vote over fingerprint requirements for ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Lyft are seen along a roadway in Austin, Texas, May 6, 2016. Reuters/Jon Herskovitz Ride-hailing giants have said for years that their services will start to kill car ownership by giving urban dwellers a cheaper and more efficient way of getting around.
A recent study from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, Texas A&M Transportation Institute, and Columbia University supports that notion.
Uber and Lyft left Austin, Texas in May 2016 after servicing the city since 2014. The ridehailing giants called it quits after voters upheld strict regulations on the companies, like issuing fingerprint-based background checks.
Uber and Lyft returned in May after lawmakers passed a bill overriding the strict regulations.
The departure offered a unique window of opportunity for researchers to investigate how people changed their habits after growing accustomed to ride-hailing services.
The study surveyed 1,200 Austin locals and asked what trips they typically took using an Uber or Lyft. It then asked how they were making those same trips now that the ride-hailing services weren't available.
The study found that 41% switched back to their own cars to fill the void left by Uber and Lyft. Among the people who turned back to their own vehicles, 9% bought an additional car strictly for the purpose of getting around without the ride-hailing giants.
From there, 42% of people surveyed switched to another ride-hailing company in the area. A flurry of community-based services and smaller apps entered Austin in the wake of Uber and Lyft's departure, such as Arcade City Austin.
Only 3% of participants surveyed said they turned to public transit.
The takeaway isn't so much that Uber and Lyft reduce the need to own a car, but rather they limit how often people use a car they already own, Robert Hampshire, lead author of the study, said in an interview.
"A large faction of these people already had a car and just weren't using it as much," he said. "Then when Uber and Lyft left, they began to use it more often."
Still, it's noteworthy that roughly 100 people felt the need to buy a car without the presence of a major ride-hailing service. Additionally, people who switched to their personal vehicle were 23 times more likely to report making more trips than those who switched to a community-based service like Arcade City Austin.
"What I thought stood out the most was for those who did switch to their personal vehicle, they drove considerably more often," Hampshire said.
Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images
Having to weigh the cost of each individual ride may encourage people to take fewer trips, Hampshire said. Most people don't think about how much they drive after purchasing a vehicle outright.
That could be good news for major cities, which are grappling with worsening congestion. If people feel compelled to only take a Lyft or Uber when it's absolutely necessary, that reduces the number of cars on the road. In a small number of cases, the services' presence could compel someone to forego purchasing a car altogether.
Hampshire said he was surprised by how few people opted to take public transportation.
"In Austin, their public transit system is not as built out as other cities. It may not be seen as a viable option," he said.
Automakers are preparing for the death of car ownership in cities. General Motors launched in 2016 its car-sharing service called Maven. Maven is primarily used by millennials who may be reluctant to own a car in expensive cities like New York and San Francisco.
Although the study bodes well for traffic relief, it's worth taking it with a grain of salt.
Ditching a personal car in favor of ride-hailing apps can help alleviate traffic if done on a wide enough scale. But unless more people start to rely on carpool services like Lyft Line or UberPOOL, ride-hailing still contributes to more single-occupancy cars on the road.
Hampshire said of the people surveyed who used Uber and Lyft as their primary method for getting around, only 12% elected to use the companies' carpool options.
The study's results may also vary in cities that have better access to public transportation.
Either way, the study shows ride-hailing can make it easier to ditch personal cars in large cities. |
Introducing Rip Clips - Pant Length Management
Rip Clips are the world's first pant length alterations system that doesn't involve needle and thread. Held together with strong rare-earth (neodymium) magnets that keep your pant cuffs in place so you never worry about stepping on them.
Rip Clips work to achieve three goals. First, they protect your pants from being stepped on and ruined. Second, they save you time and energy, compared to standard alteration methods. Lastly, they save you money by being half the cost of an original hem from department stores. If you never get your pants hemmed because it is too much hassle, or if you are tired of paying high alteration fees for an original hem, Rip Clips are for you.
Through many different prototypes and months of testing, Nick and Chris have created a product that solves the problem of pants not always being the perfect length.
Designed to be invisible while wearing, Rip Clips work for all pants that have a standard cuff hem.
The Magic is in The Magnet
All these goals are accomplished with Rip Clips. It all works because of high quality Martensitic stainless steel plates that attach to your shoes and your pant cuffs which are attracted to one another through a neodymium magnet. These little magnets are amazing! They are rated to hold more than 13 pounds of pull force; more than enough to keep your pants off the ground. In fact these little wonders can hold more than 5,000 times their weight!!
Unlike hemming one pair of pants, you can use the same Rip Clips for multiple pairs of pants. Made from the highest quality materials and manufacturing processes, Rip Clips will be protecting your pants for years to come.
The idea for Rip Clips stems from Chris' youth. As a boy he was living in a house without a lot of money. Chris never liked ripped and mangled pant cuffs but he wasn't able to get his pants hemmed. Searching for a solution, Chris would roll up and duct tape the inside of his jeans, stick a nail through the jeans into the sole of his shoe, or stuff the ends of them into his shoes.
One day while looking at a magnetic name tag , Nick and Chris knew that magnets would be a part of the solution they were looking for. After finding out the strength of rare earth neodymium magnets, they knew how. Nick and Chris have a passion for creating this project because it fixes a problem too many people experience, in a new innovative way.
Rip Clips comes in 3 high quality finishes: Pitch Black, Pure White, and exclusive Kick Starter Green. These colors pair perfectly with most shoe sole colors.
Ready when you need them
Specifications:
Magnets:
Shape: Square 3/8"
Weight: .0381 oz.
Magnetized : Permanent, Axially
Material: NdFeB Neodymium (Rare-earth)
Grade: N52 (The strongest on the market)
Coating: Ni-Cu-Ni
Pull Strength: Approx. 13.22 lbs Plates:
Plates:
Each set of Rip Clips consists of 4 stainless steel plates; 2 shoe plates (one for the left shoe and one for the right) and 2 pant plates (left leg and right leg).
Pant Plates: 1/2" tall x 1" wide. These plates are made from high quality Martensitic stainless steel type 430. These plates are designed to slip in-between the stitching of the hem of your jeans and clamp together to hold in place. There are several dimples on the pant plate that hold onto the fabric of your pants, ensuring they wont slip out of place when you wash/dry your pants.
Shoe Plates: The shoe plates are 3/8" tall x 1" wide and are made from the same type 430 stainless steel as the pant plate. They are backed with 3M double sided tape that aligns to your shoe with a simple peel and stick. Two small screws to securely attach to the back of shoes and mount flush with the countersink holes. The super strong neodymium magnet is permanently bonded to the center of the shoe plate.
Where do the Pledge funds go?
100% of the money raised will go towards the first production run of Rip Clips. These funds will allow us to meet the tooling and minimum order quantities set by our different manufacturers.
Manufacturing Process
Rip Clips are proud to be completely designed and manufactured right here in the USA.
Stainless Steel Plates - The stainless steel pant and shoe plates are cut from large, high quality Martensitic stainless steel sheets (type 430). The plates will be made by CPC Fabrication; a sheet metal manufacturing shop right here in Southern California. A high powered laser cutting machine cuts the sheet metal to our exact specifications, then is bent and rounded to pair up with the backs of modern shoes.
Magnets - The magnets are made from neodymium NdFeB otherwise known as “rare earth”. Though this element is not as rare as it sounds, China has created a near monopoly on the global deposits. Meaning the best quality and most cost-effective magnets come from China. Presently this is where we are sourcing the magnets.
Assembly - All Rip Clips products will be assembled and packaged by us in Southern California, USA. This will allow us to keep a close eye on quality to provide you with the best product possible.
International Backers
Please allow for greater shipping times if your destination is outside of North America.
Rewards
The Bat Cave: High quality wood box that displays your Rip Clips compatible shoes. The Bat Cave has a steel plate mounted on the top of the inside, and the magnets on the shoe plates mounted on your shoes have more than enough power to suspend your shoes in mid air.
Rip Clips All Rights Reserved (patent pending) |
Malt refers to any germinated grain, usually barley, used in brewing and distilling. Andrew Martahus’ choice of career may seem like a sharp left turn from his undergraduate education in chemical engineering, yet the opposite is true. In this modern food processing facility in the heart of MidTown, he will soon oversee the step-by-step process of making malt from grain.
Different types of beer use different varieties and combinations of grains, Martahus explained. For example, IPAs use almost 100% barley, while wheat beers consist of about 50% barley and 50% wheat. Porters usually use a light barley as the base, but small amounts of darker malt are added to create their darker character. Haus Malts does not yet have a drum roaster for roasting malts used in darker beers, but that’s part of the second phase plans. “We can handle most beers,” explained Martahus, adding that although Haus Malts’ pricing will be higher than corporate purveyors like Cargill, the product will be high-quality and can be custom-blended to a brewer’s specifications. Haus Malts uses a type of two-row barley called Newdale that is grown by Maine Potato Growers, Inc., in Presque Isle, Maine. It is sent by truck to Hirzel Farms in Luckey, Ohio, where the seeds are cleaned so that uniform barley kernels can be shipped to Haus Malts. The company, whose warehouse is now stocked with raw material, will soon turn its wheat, spelt, rye and barley into specific combinations of malt, called “grain bills,” that will be sold to craft brewers. Martahus compares the malting process to coffee roasting, although it’s obviously significantly more complex than that. Throughout the carefully monitored seven-day process, the grain is steeped in a temperature-controlled germination room, baked in a low-temperature kiln and then filtered through a rootlet remover called a deculmer before it’s placed in 50 pound bags. “We start the full-fledged germination process,” said the chemistry major. “During the first four days, it’s growing. The kernel has a matrix of protein and starch, and it starts producing enzymes that start to sugar. We stop before it fully sprouts through the end of the kernel. We’ve used some but not all of the starch. Then the brewer converts the starch and sugar using natural enzymes in the kernel. That makes sugar, and yeast eats the sugar to make alcohol.” Haus Malts plans to focus initially on the Cleveland area, testing its malt combinations on breweries like Great Lakes, Platform and Market Garden, which have expressed interest in the product. Martahus said that he’s already received inquiries from breweries in Columbus, Toledo and Cincinnati, among other places. The company will focus on the Great Lakes region. To gear up for opening the facility, both father and son attended a two-week intensive program at the Canadian Malting Barley Technical Centre in Winnipeg, Canada. Traveling clear across North America was pretty much the only way to learn the craft from experts at the so-called “malt academy” of Canada. “It was the only place to learn how to malt that was not through the big corporations that control the market,” said Andrew Martahus. “It’s sort of a black box. There’s not much information out there.” He recently had a chance to brew a spelt grain beer with Andy Tveekrem, the head brewer behind Market Garden and Nano Brew. “We took the Pearl Street Wheat and replaced the wheat with spelt,” said Martahus. “We called it the Rust Belt Spelt. It sold out in one week.” To contact me, send an email to [email protected] You also can follow me on Twitter @leechilcote. |
Last Friday, in New York, I discovered a strip club near the site of the planned Islamic centre, described by its opponents as "the mosque at Ground Zero". As pole dancers gyrated with all the sizzling eroticism of a weary Wal-Mart checkout assistant at the end of a long shift, I asked the burly front-of-house man – Scott, from Brooklyn – whether they had faced any protests about this profanation of hallowed ground. Had any Fox News commentators, for example, been beating an angry path to their door? Well, he replied, one or two passers-by had raised objections since the controversy erupted about the Islamic centre. "People are entitled to their opinions," said Scott, but the "New York Dolls" Gentlemen's Club had been here for 30 years and the folks working in it had to make a living.
Now a strip club at the memorial site of the worst terrorist atrocity on American soil would truly be a profanation. Though obviously not comparable to a strip club, planting a large new mosque directly on that site would nonetheless show an acute lack of sensitivity. Nine years on, the place where the twin towers stood is still a building site, but in a nearby exhibition you can see the plans for a commemorative ensemble of pools, trees and a museum, as well as a soaring new "freedom tower". As at the sites of Auschwitz, Katyn, Hiroshima or Ypres, so in the footprint of the World Trade Center, historical tact and commemorative mission should override all other considerations.
But here's the point: the strip club on Murray Street is not "at Ground Zero" any more than the site of the planned Islamic centre, a former Burlington coat factory in Park Place, is "at Ground Zero". They are, respectively, three and two blocks away. Neither would be visible from the World Trade Center memorial site, which may in some important if secular sense be considered hallowed ground. In New York, two blocks is a country mile. By the time you get to Park Place, there is no doubt that you are already somewhere else, amid the city's habitual huggermugger craziness, with the Amish Market on the corner selling Amish BBQ chicken, Amish fettucine and Amish sushi – all of them as authentically Amish as I am Chinese.
Then the critics of the proposed centre in Park Place – sorry, "Ground Zero Mega Mosque" – go on about dubious sources of funding and suspect statements by its principal protagonist, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. And so, they say, it should be built further away. The leap of illogic is as big as any leap of faith. Were the centre to have terrorist sources of finance, or radical, bloodthirsty Islamist leadership, it should be stopped anyway, whether it is two blocks away from Ground Zero or 200.
In the event, these claims too turn out to be twisted, or absurdly thin. The anti-Islam blogger Pamela Geller, for example, has a characteristic rant on her website, arguing that Rauf was associated with a Malaysian peace group which funded the Gaza aid flotilla. Her headline: "Ground Zero Imam Rauf's 'Charity' Funded Genocide Mission". The Daily Show's Jon Stewart did a fine riff on this kind of guilt by association, pointing out that the second-largest shareholder in Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which owns Fox News, is Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal – who is associated with the Carlyle Group, which has done business with the Bin Laden family, "one of whose sons – obviously I'm not going to say which one – may be anti-American".
In a clumsy, provocative comment during a television discussion soon after 9/11, Rauf said that US policies had been "an accessory to the crime that happened" and that Osama bin Laden was "made in the USA". That was wrong, and offensive. But it has to be put against the rest of his words and deeds, which have been devoted to promoting a gentle Sufi version of Islam compatible with a free society. I'm not a huge fan of his kind of interfaith waffle, but if the Muslim world were comprised entirely of Raufs, we would not have the problems we face today – and there would have been no 9/11 attacks. That is why the state department has been funding him to travel round the Middle East explaining American Islam.
There is therefore no reasonable objection to this Islamic centre, with its mission to promote peace, love, interfaith dialogue and swimming, being built in Park Place. Yet in the runup to the US mid-term elections on 2 November, senior politicians, pundits and even supposed opponents of religious discrimination are either condemning it or ducking out with weasel words. Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House of Representatives, denounced the scheme, saying: "Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington." Fox star Bill O'Reilly says it should not be built because "Muslims killed us on 9/11". Sarah Palin famously tweeted "Peaceful Muslims, please refudiate" (sic). Facing a tough re-election race even Harry Reid, the Democrat majority leader in the Senate, distanced himself from President Obama's cautious endorsement of Muslims' constitutional right to build the centre.
Most grotesquely, Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League insists it should be moved. Talking of the relatives of 9/11 victims who oppose it (though some other relatives support it), Foxman says "their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorise as irrational or bigoted". An organisation established to combat bigotry thus comes out in defence of ... bigotry. And the upshot of all this is that, in a Pew poll this August, 51% of Americans asked said they opposed the building of the centre near the World Trade Center site.
There is now no good way forward. If it goes ahead, it will be a constant bone of contention. If it is moved, more Muslims will believe radical Islamists when they say: "You see, we told you so – America is Islamophobic." Either way, America is doing something extremely stupid. As if it did not have enough problems of its own, it is conspiring to give itself a problem which, up to now, it has not had – or at least, has had much less than most European countries.
Yes, there have been a few home-grown American jihadists, but there is a lot of evidence that American Muslims are generally better integrated, and more supportive of the state in which they live than most of their European counterparts. There are several reasons for this, but one of the biggest is the First Amendment tradition of free speech and freedom of religion, which is now at issue in those blocks just up the road from, but not at, Ground Zero.
That great tradition, which Scott, the doorman at "New York Dolls", seems to have understood better than Foxman, Gingrich or Reid, says: this is America, where Geller can rant, strippers can grind, Christians, Jews and Muslims can pray – and Stewart can make fun of them all. This is America, where no one has the right not to be offended. For God's sake, America, don't catch our European disease. |
This week, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) published a catalog of 227 official star names. The list was published in order to standardize names and to cut down on confusion when referencing constellations, since each one has had various monikers in Greek, Roman, Chinese, Arabic and many other languages throughout history.
Although the IAU has attempted to provide a brief history of the cataloguing of the stars on their website as an accompaniement to the new catalog, the association begins with the western astronomers of the European Renaissance; crediting Johann Bayer's Uranometria atlas of 1603 as the first such popular catalog. This in fact omits the pivotal contributions of a number of medieval scholars to the information science of cataloguing the stars.
The earliest known cataloguer (as opposed to just mapping) of the stars in the West is Hipparchos of Nikaia (c.190-126 BCE). He is credited as the inventor of trigonometry, but also began to measure the night sky using instruments like the dioptra (Gr.διόπτρα, a surveying instrument for the stars) and perhaps the armillary astrolabe. He compiled and indexed many previous astral readings of the night sky. He was one of a number of Hellenistic astronomers following the period of expansion and subjugation under Alexander the Great who were fascinated by the act of enumerating and cataloguing the stars. The most famous of these astronomers, Ptolemy, wrote the Almagest. This work established the need for astronomical tables which then allowed for the calculation of the positions of the planets, eclipses and the setting of the calendar.
One explanation for this Hellenistic era celestial obsession is offered by ancient Greek historian Graham Shipley, who notes, "The desire to catalogue and name the heavens may be seen as part of a larger ideological project...coloured by a desire to identify and symbolically appropriate the peoples and lands with which they came into contact." In other words, the very act of cataloguing was an argument of dominance. It could serve as a gesture of imperialism to have informational command over the heavens.
The cataloguing work of Hellenistic astronomers had a great impact on the medieval Muslim world. As Marika Sardar, a curator of Islamic Art now at the San Diego Museum of Art, noted, "Between the eighth and tenth centuries, Baghdad was a major center of study under the Abbasid caliphs al-Mansur (r. 754–75) and al-Ma’mun (r. 813–33)...At this time, scientists translated studies in Sanskrit, Pahlavi, and Greek into Arabic, and, for the first time, recorded Arab Bedouin traditions." Claudius Ptolemy's works were translated and studied by these scientists as well. Notably, such observatories included both Muslim academics and Jewish ones, such as the 9th century Sahl (Abu 'Uthman) ibn Bishr.
The intellectual debt we owe to medieval Muslim astronomers is great. A few years ago, an exceptional book was published by cartographical historian Elly Dekker. Called Illustrating the Phaenomena: Celestial Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, she notes the astronomical tables revised and codified within the Baghdad astronomical observatories active from the 9th to the early 10th century. The pivotal Al-Zij al-Mumtahan (the validated astronomical table) was then assembled by the astronomer Al-Battānī (Lat. Albategnius). He notably lists 533 stars and determined the length of the solar year. Turns out that he was only a couple of minutes off the mark. The Bodleian Libraries’ have now digitized a 12th-century copy of a work by notable Muslim astronomer ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣūfī’. It is called Book of Fixed Stars and was a popular illustrated treatise written in Arabic (via Digital Bodleian and Fihrist).
Astronomers and cartographers writing in Arabic are an oft-overlooked group, but so are the female medieval cosmographers. The best known of the Middle Ages is likely Hildegard of Bingen, a German abbess at a Benedictine monastery, who worked throughout the 12th century. She wrote works on cosmology which she then attributed to divine inspiration (what a modest nun!). Her drawings of the seasons and of the animals blowing the winds onto the earth's surface (e.g. a lobster) are a reminder that mapping--whether accurate or not--is still an act of understanding. Similarly, there were elite women like Sophia Brahe, a Danish astronomer of the 16th and early 17th century who lived in the shadow of her more famous brother, Tycho. Sophia was a voracious reader of German and Latin who contributed to the early modern scientific revolution.
Heading into the early modern era, interest in mapping of the heavens indeed took off. The printing press made maps of the stars more accessible and widely circulated than ever, and new technologies like the telescope, invented around 1608, continued to fuel the celestial craze. One of the most famed of the celestial cartographers was Jesuit mathematician named Ignace Gaston Pardies, whose star atlas was published a year after his death: one in 1674 and another edition in 1693 and 1700.
The multi-cultural history of cataloguing and mapping the stars says a lot about every civilization's interest in understanding the celestial sphere on their own terms and in their own language. Information science and the intentional act of organizing places we cannot visit then provide us with a means of control--even if we have none. The IAU's new standardized list of star names then enshrines part of the rich history of astronomy through language, but we should also remember the myriad men and women who wished to catalog the heavens with their own terms. |
Or – “Comic-Book Time: Explained.”
The Marvel Universe as we know it (barring a few retcons and absorptions of existing properties such as Captain America) can be seen to have begun with the first issue of the Fantastic Four. For the first few years, it seemed that the stories were happening in ‘real time,’ but slowly, time in the Marvel Universe began to change, to stretch and flow and even reverse itself a time or two. Many a comics fan has remarked at one time or another how difficult it is to resolve the sheer number of happenings with the in-universe explanations of how long the characters have been around.
Three things you probably DIDN’T know about Marvel Time:
The Marvel Universe DID begin in 1961.
Everything you know IS NOT wrong.
And it’s all the intentional and deliberate work of one single, terrifyingly powerful and dizzyingly twisted mind...
Time Is An Illusion
Before we get too far into our exercise, I want to lay out the ground rules under which I am working:
1. We accept that Fantastic Four #1 actually takes place when it was published, in 1961.
2. We accept that all ‘topical references’ (i.e. Captain America fighting Nixon, then working alongside Carter in ‘The Avengers’, then saving Reagan from the Serpent Society, et al) actually happened as shown, in their appropriate time-frames.
3. We accept that it is currently the year 2011 in Marvel Comics continuity.
Luckily for us, we have a handy touchstone of time’s passage throughout the early years of the Marvel Universe, one Peter Parker, bitten by a radioactive spider during his sophomore year of high school. That story saw print in August 1962, and Peter graduated high school in Amazing Spider-Man #28 in the fall of 1965. Thus, Peter’s last three years of high school take place over the space of three years for us as well. Reed Richards and Susan Storm get married in the summer of 1965, and two years later, in the fall of 1967, we discover that Sue is expecting. Since Amazing Spider-Man Annual #4 guest-stars the Human Torch, and since the Official Marvel Index of The Amazing Spider-Man puts that issue BEFORE Amazing Spider-Man #53 (which came out the same month as Fantastic Four Annual #5, where we find out about the pregnancy) we can see that time is passing at roughly the same rate for Spider-Man and for the FF. (Stay with me, I’m just showing my work, here.)
In the fall of 1968, Susan Richards goes into labor. (Our first hint of what’s to come is that fact that Sue’s pregnancy takes place over the course of nearly twelve months instead of the customary 37 to 42 weeks of gestation, the first time that the Fantastic Four’s stories don’t conform to ‘real time.’)
Most children are only a few minutes old when officially named. Reed and Sue’s baby, born in November 1968, is not named for nearly THIRTEEN MONTHS, our time, receiving the sobriquet “Franklin Benjamin Richards” in January 1970.
The Mind Games Start Early
Two things about this are significant to someone with a keen eye (and a mind for conspiracy theories): One, the thirteen months of stories we have been presented cannot actually cover thirteen months of time for the characters, as not even absent-minded professor Reed Richards would wait a year to pick a name for his firstborn. Two, the child is named for his grandfather, later revealed to be a time-traveler who looks out for him, and (Sorry, I mixed up my grandpa stories!) his ‘Uncle Ben,’ the most physically imposing member of the Fantastic Four. In short, it’s almost as if his parents were influenced into naming him so that a powerful fellow would be particularly interested in his welfare.
Very early in his life, Franklin is shown to have unusual abilities (he is able to see his mother while invisible, and awakens The Thing at one point using latent psychic powers.) After interactions with Annihilus and later Ultron, Franklin’s powers became a running theme, scaling up and down as well as turning on and off with relative regularity. No less an authority than Professor X quantified him as one of the most powerful mutants alive. By the time of Fantastic Four #134 (May 1973) a five-year-old Franklin looks to be the size of a (rather creepy) three-year-old.
Okay, I may be underestimating the boy’s size. But by the time of Fantastic Four #170 (May 1976) Franklin looks like… a rather creepy (and strangely brunette) three-year-old.
And by the time of Fantastic Four #224 (November 1980), the now 12-year-old Franklin looks and acts approximately seven or so.
And is it just me, or does it look like he just made Mommy’s pants disappear? Now, at this point, much of my speculation is based on what you expect a child of a given age to look or act like, but how can we explain it when, nearly a year later, Franklin seems to be five again?
That particular interaction with Annihilus is interesting, as well, as it leads to Franklin once again manifesting his super-powers (openly.) The answer is as simple as it is frightening:
Franklin Richards is whatever age he wants to be.
And he not only makes himself that age, he makes it so that he’s ALWAYS been that age, and no one ever remembers anything different BECAUSE HE CHANGES THE FUNDAMENTAL NATURE OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE. In a very real way, Franklin Richards IS ‘Marvel Time.’ And the entirety of his universe ages more slowly because Franklin doesn’t want to grow up and he certainly doesn’t want things to change too much while he enjoys his extended childhood.
Where It Gets All Icky And Freudian
By the early 80’s Franklin is firmly established as being somewhere between 6 and 9 years old, when the first echoes of a change start to occur in his universe. Seeing as how he was born in 1968, Franklin is starting to reach what should be the age of puberty, where he should start liking girls and growing up. By no coincidence, the Marvel Universe of this era is witness to the events that the X-Men would come to know as ‘Days of Future Past.’
For those of you that don’t know, ‘DoFP’ is an alternate reality where all the mutants are nearly wiped out, and Franklin is the most powerful creature left in the world, and he has a girlfriend and you can’t call her and check it or nothin’, because she’s from the future. In short, it’s the quintessential adolescent power fantasy of heroism and sexual potency. During this same timeframe, Susan Richards becomes pregnant again, and Reed is forced to try and save his child from cosmically irratiated body chemistry. This time it fails and the Richards’ second child is believed to have died. (We later learn that “Future Franklin” arrived and mystically moved his sister’s spirit somewhere else. Write that down. It’s important later…) Altering his age yet again, Franklin becomes an official superhero for the first time as Tattletale, auxiliary member of Power Pack.
Franklin’s age from this point on (1987, the year of his what should be his 19th birthday) seems a bit older, hovering in the 8 to 11 year-old range, and his first foray into superherodom seems to convince him that this vague pre-pubescent realm is a good thing. Franklin also allows the Marvel Universe to grow up a bit, transitioning into the dark and gritty 90’s era. But, of course, his idea of “grown up” is all about beard stubble and phallic weapons and leather jackets and adolescent angst. Now, remember that bit where Franklin came back in time to save his sister’s mind? Why would that be significant?
Because, if we accept our hypothesis that the Marvel Universe is under his control, that means we have to accept the unpleasant fact that Franklin caused his baby sister’s seeming demise. His motive: Not wanting to share Mommy’s attention with ANYONE. To add an exclamation point to these emotional issues, Franklin’s time-travelling grampa arrives and ages him in a dimension outside of time or something (ironically, he ends up close to his actual age of 25 or so) allowing Frank to become the superhero Oedipus Psi-Lord.
Notice the Invisible Woman’s costume here, or more to the point, the relative lack thereof… An associate of mine once remarked that Susan Richards is the mother figure of the Marvel Universe, and the problem with this peek-a-boo stripperific suit is simple: “Who wants to see the mother of the Marvel Universe half-naked?” Answer: A kid with some serious maternal bonding issues after years of nannies and butlers and witch-caretakers, that’s whom. To add to the whole (you should excuse the expression) complex, Reed Richards is lost, presumed dead at this point, leaving Mommy single and coincidentally dressed like a whore from Krypton. “Who said anything about talking,” indeed.
Franklin remains a grown-up superhero for a few years, eventually missing his dad enough to resurrect him. When he tires of the responsibilities of adulthood, Franklin lets things go back to normal, de-aging himself again. In the late 90’s, in a fit of pique, he wishes his family and all their friends to the cornfield dead, but still manages to protect them by creating an alternate world where they’re safe and sound (albeit poorly drawn.) Around the time of what should be his 30th birthday, he realizes that he was unfair to his lost sister, and brings little Valeria back, finally ready to share his parents’ love and attention. Franklin never quite completely overcomes his Quentin Tarentino-esque love of the terse, stubbly tough guy but at the same time rediscovers his childhood love of the brightly-clad superheroes like Spider-Man.
Eternal Sunshine In A Perfect Museum Of Colorful Toys
At present, Franklin Richards is chronologically 43 years old, and may not even himself fully realize that he is controlling the entire universe. He has finally learned to socialize, taking a place in the Future Foundation, recognized as one of the greatest potential minds of the future, and surrounding himself with peers who are likewise prodigious, including his sister Valeria. He has periodically re-injected himself as center of attention, as seen recently when Galactus himself arrived to assess Franklin as a threat. He has given up many of the childish pursuits of his youth, and has accepted that things don’t always have to have happy endings. He has realized that he likes Spider-Man young and single, that he likes the Avengers nearly as much as the Fantastic Four, but that Daddy is (and will always be) the smartest man in the world, and Mommy the strongest woman. Uncle Ben is his special favorite (see Fear Itself #5 if you don’t believe me) while he holds a quiet resentment of popular Uncle Johnny. (Sometimes he even wishes Uncle Johnny were dead, but he knows he won’t stay mad forever.) Like many kids, he likes the idea of having more than one of the same toy in different colors, and wonders how the Hulk would look in red, or how Wolverine would look as a girl. His adult mind likes to ponder huge world-shattering stakes, but his child mind doesn’t really like to (and, indeed, isn’t equipped to) think about long-term consequences. And, of course, Franklin likes being 12 and half years old more than anything.
Time is never going back to normal, if he has his way, and none of the denizens of the Marvel Universe, not even super-smart Daddy, will never know any different. Like little Anthony Fremont, he quietly enjoys that everyone in the world is just a puppet dancing on his stage, and he’ll cut their strings, change their clothes and repaint them however he sees fit, whenever the mood strikes. And that’s a good thing, Franklin. A real… real good thing…
(Of course, there’s a completely DIFFERENT subtle and disturbing reason why no one in the DC Universe ever ages, but that, as they say, is another ((Classified)) story.) |
BRITISH PRIME MINISTER Theresa May has raised the country’s terror threat level from severe to critical.
Critical is the highest level possible in the UK and means that an attack is “expected imminently”.
The threat level is decided by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC). The last time it reached critical was in 2007, having been severe since 2014.
Prime Minister Theresa May said that the decision had been made following investigations today.
“It has now been concluded that the threat levels should be increased for the time being.
“This means that [the JTAC's] assessment is not only that an attack is highly likely, but that another attack is imminent
“It is a possibility we cannot ignore that there is a wider group of individuals linked to this attack.”
May added that military personnel will be deployed to Britain’s streets to support armed police officers under Operation Tempora.
Armed personnel will be visible at big events such as concerts and sporting events, she said.
Attack
Source: PA Wire/PA Images
The move comes as 22 people were confirmed dead after last night’s suicide bomb attack on an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.
Manchester police identified the suspect behind the attack as 22-year-old Salman Abedi.
Police staged an armed raid on a Manchester address believed to be where Abedi lived, carrying out a controlled explosion to gain entry after arresting a 23-year-old man earlier Tuesday in connection with the attack.
“A single terrorist detonated his improvised explosive device near one of the exits of the venue, deliberately choosing the time and place to cause maximum carnage and to kill and injure indiscriminately,” May said after an emergency ministerial meeting.
The attack was the deadliest in Britain since July 7, 2005 when four suicide bombers inspired by Al-Qaeda attacked London’s transport system during rush hour, killing 52 people and wounding 700 more.
The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the attack. |
PM Narendra Modi with Russian President Vladimir Putin in New Delhi.
The US is unhappy over India doing "business as usual" with Russia, but it will have no effect on US President Barack Obama's upcoming visit to India which remains an "important partner.""No. India remains an important partner," US State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki told reporters on Friday when asked whether deals reached during Russian President Vladimir Putin's just concluded visit to India would change Obama's plans.Obama has been invited by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to be the chief guest at India's Republic Day parade on January 26. He will be the first US President to get that honour and the first one to visit India twice while in office."Obviously, our economic relationship is a big part of what we continue to work on," Psaki said while repeating its caution to "allies and partners" that it was not time for doing business with Russians following its intervention in Ukraine.The US, she said, had seen reports about India and Russia signing agreements in oil exploration, infrastructure, defence and nuclear energy including construction of 12 Russian-built nuclear units in India over the next two decades."We continue to monitor it, but we haven't looked at all the specifics of the contracts, for obvious reasons," Psaki said. But "We continue to urge all countries not to conduct business as usual with Russia."Noting that "there are already sanctions in place" imposed on Russia by the US and its Western allies, Psaki said it was not calling for sanctions on other countries."In general, though, given the situation, it shouldn't be business as usual," she said.Asked if the US had spoken to Indians before Putin's trip that it's not the right time to do business with Russia, Psaki said: "Well, we've been engaged in that discussion.""I'd remind you India doesn't support the actions of Russia and the actions - their intervention into Ukraine," she said. "They've been pretty outspoken about that as well."On the presence of Sergey Aksyonov, Prime Minister of Crimea, the former Ukrainian territory annexed by Russia, in Putin's delegation to India, which too has upset Washington, Psaki said: "I don't have anything new to offer on that."Asked if the US had confirmed if he was there or not, she said: "There have been a range of reports." But "I don't have any US government confirmation. We're obviously not in on the trip with them." Asked again if there's any change in Obama's trip to India, the spokesperson said emphatically: "No. No, no." |
The Solar Cube: A Solar and Wind Powered Water Source for Remote Areas
September 22nd, 2008 by Ariel Schwartz
Carbon nanotubes may be the water filter wave of the future, but Spectra Watermakers’ Solar Cube works pretty well in the meantime.
The Cube (AKA the Spectra Solar Brackish Water System) is a portable solar and wind powered desalination unit that can produce 950 to 1500 gallons of fresh water each day. Attached photovoltaic cells generate up to 1240 watts, while the wind generator can produce up to 1000 watts.
The Cube generates more power than is necessary for water production, so excess energy can be used for other things—such as the operation of emergency equipment.
And the Solar Cube has already been tested in tough environments. Recently, it was deployed for testing by the Chilean military and civilian services, where it was used in identical conditions to those found in Iraq. During the past year, the Cube was also introduced to remote areas of South America and Asia. Prototypes were used in Pakistan after the major 1995 earthquake in the country.
The Cube has performed well—the system has a recovery rate of 30% and produces high quality water that contains less than 170 mg/L of seawater.
While the Solar Cube probably won’t be used in major metropolitan areas anytime soon, it is ideal for disaster sites and locations that have limited access to fresh water. Personally, I’d like to keep one in storage in case of emergency. I just need to come up with $38,000 to cover the asking price.
Posts Related to Solar Power: |
Jon Gruden claims the reason Jimmy Graham isn't getting the ball enough is the fact that Russell Wilson doesn't have the time in the pocket to find him down the field. (0:40)
CINCINNATI -- If Russell Wilson has his way, the trip to his native Queen City this weekend will be one part business, one part feasting.
"The Nasty 'Nati," the Seattle Seahawks quarterback said Wednesday, laughing as he opened his conference call with Cincinnati Bengals reporters. "I haven't had a chance to go lately, but I'm excited to hopefully get some White Castles and Skyline Chili."
Fast food chains White Castle and Skyline Chili are two of the region's more iconic after-hours eating establishments. People born in and around Cincinnati, like Wilson, swear by both. Next to Pete Rose's record-setting 4,192nd career hit, Skyline's three-way and four-way are the most important numbers to those who call Southwest Ohio and Northern Kentucky home.
Hey, @DangeRussWilson, stop in and we'll treat you like royalty. We don't speak for the @Bengals D-line, though. http://t.co/RprxdEeD3M — White Castle (@WhiteCastle) October 8, 2015
Born in Cincinnati's Christ Hospital, Wilson spent very little time in the area before his family moved to Virginia. When he steps foot inside Paul Brown Stadium on Sunday, he will be playing in Cincinnati for the first time in his life. Although he did play the Cincinnati Bearcats once in college, that was a home game for the North Carolina State Wolfpack that Wilson quarterbacked for three years before his only year at Wisconsin.
Wilson said he knew there would be some nostalgia when the Seattle Seahawks landed in the region this weekend.
"We would go back up there every year a few times a year, so ... I used to love watching the Cincinnati Reds," Wilson said. "My dad always used to talk about the Bengals even though he was a huge Chargers fan. Anthony Munoz and guys like that. There's a bunch of memories watching them play. Growing up I used to love their jerseys.
"Like I said, I have very fond memories."
The last time the Bengals and Seahawks met was in 2011, one year before Wilson was drafted by Seattle. |
Pope Adrian II ( Latin : Adrianus PP. II , Italian : Adriano II ; 792 – 14 December 872) was Pope from 14 December 867 to his death in 872. He was a member of a noble Roman family who became pope at an advanced age, despite his objections. [2]
He maintained, but with less energy, the policies of his predecessor Nicholas I. Lothar II, king of Lotharingia, who died in 869, left Adrian to mediate between the Frankish kings with a view to assuring the Holy Roman Emperor Louis II the inheritance of Lothar II, Louis's brother. Adrian sought to maintain good relations with Louis, since the latter's campaigns in southern Italy had the potential to free the papacy from the threat posed by the Muslims.[4]
Photius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, shortly after the council in which he had pronounced sentence of deposition against Pope Nicholas I, was driven from the patriarchate by a new emperor, Basil the Macedonian, who favoured his rival Ignatius. An Ecumenical Council (Considered the 8th Ecumenical Council by the Catholic Church) was convoked as the Fourth Council of Constantinople to decide this matter. At this council Adrian was represented by legates who presided at the condemnation of Photius as a heretic, but did not succeed in coming to an understanding with Ignatius on the subject of jurisdiction over the Bulgarian church.
Like his predecessor Nicholas I, Adrian was forced to submit in temporal affairs to the interference of the emperor Louis II, who placed him under the surveillance of Arsenius, bishop of Orte, his confidential adviser, and Arsenius' nephew Anastasius, the librarian.
Adrian had in his youth married a woman named Stephania, by whom he had a daughter, and both were still living at his election, following which they lived with him in the Lateran Palace. In 868, they were carried off and murdered by Arsenius' son Eleutherius, who had forcibly married the daughter.[5]
Adrian died in 872 after exactly five years as pope. |
Every Christmas, Nanette Castillo, 49, decorates her tiny home in Holy Cross in Novaliches, Quezon City with lights and lanterns to feel the holiday spirit. She buys inexpensive gifts for her two children and several grandchildren, and cooks a variety of dishes for her family to feast on during noche buena.
But for this year, there are no lights and lanterns to light up Castillo’s home.
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Aldrin – the eldest and only son of Castillo – was shot dead close to midnight last October 2 along the busy Herbosa Street in Tondo, Manila. He was about to cross the road to buy brandy to drink with his friends when seven masked men on motorcycles cut him off, and shot him, hitting his left cheek twice, and neck once.
Aldrin fell down on his face as his blood dripped down the pavement. And as if the three bullets lodged in his head were not enough, one of the masked men walked towards him, turned him over, and shot him twice in the chest. The suspects then immediately fled the scene, as if nothing happened.
Two months have passed but Castillo remained furious and indignant over the fate of her son as if it only happened yesterday. So many questions linger in her mind – “What had he done wrong? Who killed him? Why did they kill him?”
But answers to all these questions seem impossible to find, as Castillo also struggle to find possible reasons to celebrate Christmas.
“Wala akong Pasko ngayon, kahit yung anak kong babae,” Castillo said in an interview with INQUIRER.net on December 20
(I have no Christmas this year, even my daughter.)
“Kaso lang nga, may apo ako. Bata ‘yun e, para sa kanila ‘yung Pasko. Hindi ko naman pipigilang magsaya ‘yung mga bata,” Castillo also said, shaking her head as she held a laminated photo of Aldrin.
(But I have grandkids. They’re children—Christmas is for them. I will not prevent them from celebrating.)
“Pero ‘yung sa ‘min? Wala kaming Pasko, kahit ‘yung mother ko. Kasi kahit na matagal na o bago pa lang [na nangyari], hindi katanggap-tanggap ‘yung pagkamatay ng anak ko,” she added.
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(But for us? We have no Christmas, even my mother. Time may pass, but I could never accept my son’s death.)
Questions with no answers
Aldrin was a drug user before, Castillo admitted, but he had already kicked the habit long before he was killed.
Castillo also said his son was not in the drug watchlist in Tondo or in Novaliches, as he had a clean record and had no enemies, who could have the motive to murder him.
“Di naman siya salot sa lipunan katulad ng sinasabi ng gobyerno na to. Wala naman siyang pinerwisyong iba. Bakit nila binaril? Gusto ko magkaroon ng sagot ang tanong ko at kung sinu-sino yang mga h******** na yan,” she said.
(He was not one of the ills of the society like what this government says. He did not wrong anyone. Why did they gun him down? I want answers to my questions and I want to know who killed my son.)
Aldrin had kept himself busy working as a welder. Days before he died, he was asked by his sister to come over to her Tondo house to install an air conditioner, Castillo said.
He was supposed to go home to Novaliches and leave Tondo earlier but he got the flu so he stayed longer, Castillo narrated. And because the neighborhood used to be their home for decades, she was sure he was safe and did not think of anything unusual.
But then the unthinkable happened. Castillo, out of despair, then blamed her daughter for her son’s death. If he was not there in Tondo, she thought, he would still be alive.
“Pati yung anak kong babae sinisi ko, ‘Kasi bakit mo pinapunta kasi kuya mo? Dapat hindi nabaril ‘yan.’ Nagkaroon pa kami ng gap sa family,” Castillo lamented.
(I even blamed my daughter, telling her ‘He could not have had been killed if you did not ask him to come over.’ It created gap in our family.)
Strength to pursue justice
Castillo smiled as she sat down the long bench across the table in a cafe in Quezon City where the interview was held. She said she wanted to go to Tutuban night market in Divisoria, Manila to buy cheap stuff for Christmas. Normita, a mother who also lost her 25-year-old son to the government’s anti-illegal drug campaign, told her that it would be hard to shop because of the sheer number of people in the market.
Castillo laughed and told her: “Kinaya ko nga nung namatay ang anak ko, ano ba naman ‘yung pagpunta sa Tutuban.”
(I got through my son’s death, what is that compared to shopping in Tutuban.)
Today, Castillo keeps herself busy by volunteering for Rise Up for Life and for Rights, a Church-based non-profit group supporting and organizing the victims of extrajudicial killings (EJK) and their families. She helps in conducting house-to-house visits and talking to the families, scheduling meetings, and doing other things she can do for the organization.
She got in touch with the group during the “Start the Healing” rally in Edsa on November 5 in search for answers over what happened to her son.
“Nu’ng sumali ako sa Rise Up, nabuksan ang isip ko. Dati simpleng nanay lang ako. Ang sa akin, bahala kayo diyan, basta safe ang anak ko… hanggang sa nangyari sa akin ‘to,” Castillo told INQUIRER.net.
(Joining Rise Up opened my mind. Before, I was just a simple mother who does not care about everyone else as long as my children are safe. Until this happened to me.)
“Pasalamat kami may natakbuhan kami na ganito, dahil kung hindi, ‘di namin alam gagawin namin, pare-pareho kaming walang alam sa batas eh,” she added.
(We’re thankful there’s an organization like this where we can run to. Because if not, we do not know what to do because all of us have no knowledge about the law.)
Her new life as an advocate against the killings greatly helped her in coping with the loss, helping her process the trauma and the pain by meeting other families who share the same experience as her.
“Walang ibang higit na makakaintindi sa amin kundi kami ‘ring mga nawalan,” she said.
(No one could ever understand us more but us who also those who have lost.)
Castillo still waits for the day that she and her daughter patch things up. And on Christmas Day, she will light a candle at her son’s tomb at the Manila North Cemetery to pray not just for her peace of mind, but also for justice to prevail over the death of her son, Aldrin, and of thousands of others who have fallen victims to the government’s deadly crackdown against illegal drugs. /kga
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Bulgarian investigative journalists Atanas Tchobanov and Assen Yordanov created one of the only websites in the world to successfully replicate WikiLeaks' model of anonymously leaked bombshell documents. Now their project may face a similar fate to WikiLeaks': Crippling attacks by the financial institutions of the country they've embarrassed.
Earlier this month, Tchobanov and Yordanov's news outlet Bivol.bg, which publishes documents from their WikiLeaks-like leak site BalkanLeaks, received a letter from Bulgaria's central bank threatening to fine the news organization for publishing "false information and circumstances" that undermine the "reputation and credibility" of four Bulgarian banks that filed the complaint with the government--a violation could carry as much 150,000 Bulgarian lev ($100,000) in penalties.
The offending information, according to the banks, is a U.S. State Department cable obtained by WikiLeaks and published by the two Bulgarian journalists, which details the alleged money laundering and corrupt practices of the Bulgarian finance industry. The leaked 2006 memo details U.S. Ambassador John Beyrle's claims that eight "bad apple" banks in the country were participating in money laundering, often for the mob, as well as making bogus loans to connected companies that were never repaid.
"Banking and financial authorities are aware of the most notorious banks and claim to be working hard to draft legislation and regulations to bring practices in line with Western norms...However, a number of domestic banks apparently manage to escape strict scrutiny," Beyrle's report reads, before launching into a detailed description of each bank's alleged mafia ties and criminal practices.
Included among those eight are Bulgaria's First Investment Bank, Corporate Commercial Bank, Investbank, and Central Cooperative Bank, all of whom are participating in the complaint against Bivol. Bivol says it gave the banks a chance to respond before their publication of the cable, but none of the four now filing the complaint had any comment.
The $100,000 potential penalty for publishing that cable, according to Bivol and BalkanLeaks founder Atanas Tchobanov, would be far greater than the total assets of his tiny media outlet. "It’s an enormous sum," says Tchobanov. "It will ruin us."
Tchobanov argues that the banks' move to penalize him and his partner Yordanov represents political punishment for exposing evidence of the banks' corruption. "If there's any criminal case, the authorities should investigate criminal money laundering. Now instead we’re under investigation for publishing that cable," says Tchobanov. "Clearly it’s related to this nexus of corruption, organized crime and banks who cover those activities."
Bivol and BalkanLeaks, after all, have made powerful enemies in Bulgaria. Using the same anonymity tools as WikiLeaks, the group has obtained leaked documents exposing judicial bribery, former members of the Soviet-tied secret police, and blackmailing between Bulgarian prosecutors. After obtaining and publishing a State Department cable on Bulgarian organized crime the group received from rogue WikiLeaks ex-associate Israel Shamir last summer, Bivol partnered with Assange's group to release the rest of WikiLeaks' Bulgaria-related cables. One of those cables accused Bulgarian prime minister Boyko Borisov of close mafia ties, a claim he vigorously dismissed in a Bulgarian TV interview as "yellow journalism."
(For the full story of Bivol, BalkanLeaks and WikiLeaks, check out my book, This Machine Kills Secrets, or read the series of excerpts related to BalkanLeaks at Slate.)
I've reached out to all four banks who filed the complaint against the Bulgarian journalists, but only heard back from First Investment Bank, which responded that it had pursued the complaint "with the sole purpose to protect our repute by discontinuation of the practice of communication of false information concerning our institutions and acting on the advice of an outside legal counsel" and referred me to the relevant section of Bulgaria's banking regulations.
Reporters Without Borders plans to release a statement Wednesday expressing the group's support for Bivol. In a phone interview with Olivier Basille, the executive director of the group, he told me that if the banks actually sought to correct false information published by Bivol, they would have used traditional defamation law rather than the central bank's strong arm tactics, and notes that Bivol has merely published allegations from an official source. "It’s the duty for the media to investigate the way a society and the financial system functions," he says. "When there are sources of information that raise questions in the public interest, it’s their duty to publish it."
The Bulgarians aren't the first to face a backlash over the leaked State Department cables, of course. WikiLeaks itself faced a financial blockade coordinated by Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Bank of America and Western Union that deprived it of the majority of its donation sources for more than a year. Lately the group has become so strapped for cash that it's created a donation-based paywall around its content, a move that has angered some of its most steadfast supporters.
Tchobanov and Yordanov say they plan to fight any charges from Bulgaria's central bank and are raising money for a legal defense through a donations page on their site. Tchobanov tells me that the media outlet currently has total savings of less than $2,000.
But he believes that calling more attention to the banks' alleged corruption will do more to keep his investigative news site afloat than going silent. Tchobanov still hopes to turn law enforcement's spotlight from his site's publication to the banks themselves. "We're not going to hide, but to expose this and speak loudly," Tchobanov says. "We’re in a situation of publish or perish."
—
Follow me on Twitter, and check out my new book, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks and Hacktivists Aim To Free The World’s Information. |
you are not paying for the devlopment of this game.
insted they are using the money made from this to create an MMO that will be pay to play based on the gameplay from this.
basicly you are testing and ironing out bugs so the MMO will be launched near perfect with little or no cost to the devlopers, those that have pointed this out on the companys forums have been deleted.
as far as this "game" goes, it remains to be known what will happen at the launch of the MMO (btw you get 1 free chr for buying this, thats right, only 1!) but my guess is this will be pulled.
this is not a direct flame at the compnany involved, but i wish i had known this before buying.
guess i should have reserched it first.
you are not paying for the devlopment of this game. insted they are using the money made from this to create an MMO that will be pay to play based on the gameplay from this. basicly you are testing and ironing out bugs so the MMO will be launched near perfect with little or no cost to the devlopers, those that have pointed this out on the companys forums have been deleted. as far as this "game" goes, it remains to be known what will happen at the launch of the MMO (btw you get 1 free chr for buying this, thats right, only 1!) but my guess is this will be pulled. this is not a direct flame at the compnany involved, but i wish i had known this before buying. guess i should have reserched it first. Check this box if you received this product for free (?) Do you recommend this game? Yes No Cancel Save Changes |
Nov 21, 2016: Washington Wizards forward Markieff Morris (5) shoot in between Phoenix Suns center Alex Len (21) and guard Eric Bledsoe (2) during the first quarter at Verizon Center. (Photo: Tommy Gilligan/USA TODAY Sports)
WASHINGTON – With some distance from an acrimonious final few months in Phoenix, Markieff Morris misses the place.
Morris’ 4 1/2-season stay in Phoenix was a positive progression for four seasons until his twin, Marcus, was traded to Detroit and he asked for a trade. After his play and behavior took a downward turn, Morris was traded in February to Washington but could not help the Wizards make the playoffs.
In his first NBA season elsewhere, Morris remains Washington’s starting power forward and has produced a slight statistical bump amid the Wizards' struggles.
“It’s kind of like the same,” Morris said of the Suns’ and Wizards’ experiences. “Both teams, it’s a freelance of basketball. We just play for the most part. You find your spots. John (Wall) does a great job of getting me the ball here. In Phoenix, I had Bled (Eric Bledsoe) doing a great job. It’s like the same brand of basketball.”
Morris visited with friend and former teammate P.J. Tucker on Sunday’s off-day but did say his motivation might be greater when he returns to Phoenix again in March than it was for Monday’s game.
RELATED: Bledsoe links Suns, NBA youngest starting 5s ever
“I had a wonderful time there,” Morris said of Phoenix. “It was a great experience. That’s a place that I might go back and live. It’s a great city. You have your ups and downs anywhere but my five years there were some of the best times in my life.”
Does Marcus feel the same way?
“No, no, no, he’s all the way done,” Morris said. “I was there longer so it’s kind of more set in my heart. He’s completely done in Phoenix.”
Morris enjoyed playing for Jeff Hornacek and had strong performances in his short time under Suns coach Earl Watson to help Suns General Manager Ryan McDonough make a deal with the Wizards. The Suns took on two players, Kris Humphries and DeJuan Blair, whom they eventually waived, and the Wizards’ No. 13 pick in the June draft, which they used to package with their No. 28 pick and the rights to Bogdan Bogdanovic to get rookie Marquese Chriss at No. 8.
“For me, it wasn’t difficult to reach him,” Watson said. “What we try to do here is take away the non-sensitive side of it and turn it into a family environment with positivity and encouragement but at the same time have direct conversations, accountability and transparency. It’s a difficult mix to manage.”
Washington Wizards forward Markieff Morris (5) battles for the ball against Eric Bledsoe on Monday. (Photo: Nick Wass/AP)
Brooks helps Watson
For Watson at the helm of a young team, he draws from how Wizards first-year coach Scott Brooks handled his Oklahoma City team when Kevin Durant was a second-year player and Russell Westbrook was a rookie thrown to the fire. He recalled how Brooks never lost his cool through the young players’ mistakes because he was building something for the long run.
“What really changed us is as the season progressed, those young guys began to earn ownership of the team,” Watson said. “I expect the same evolution here for our group because it’s very similar.”
MORE: Rookie Tyler Ulis stays sharp for rare chance
Night at the museum
Suns players and staffers took a private Sunday night tour of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
“It speaks volumes that every shade has a DNA of the fabric,” Watson said. “It’s not just ownership of one race. We all share a significant piece of the fabric of that flag. The national anthem situation is kind of old but it’s the reason why I stand. I really feel like my family has a big part of building this country.
“It was moving. It was touching. It was eye-opening, even for those who are very familiar with the history, but at the same time, it was uplifting.”
DOWNLOAD: The free azcentral sports Suns XTRA app
Free throws
* Suns small forward T.J. Warren remained away from the team due to illness Monday. He has been away from the team since leaving Friday’s game in Indiana in the first quarter and going to a hospital for treatment.
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* Suns forward Jared Dudley, booed lightly in his return to Washington, on last season’s Wizards and this season’s Suns: “You want to play fast but you got to play smart as a team. That’s what we’re trying to teach here. We’re trying to play fast. Just because you play fast doesn’t mean everybody has the freedom to do what they want. That’s when you’ve got to have self-discipline. That’s what we (Washington) lacked last year.”
* Watson on center Alan Williams recording double-doubles off the bench in Thursday’s and Friday’s games: “It just shows the energy and passion he has on the bench is not fake. He plays with the same thing.”
Reach Paul Coro at [email protected] or (602) 444-2470. Follow him at www.twitter.com/paulcoro. |
The AMD Radeon™ R9 295X2 graphics card is the world's fastest, period.1 A mammoth eight gigabytes of memory and more than 11.5 teraflops of computing power help this card do what it was built to do: be the undisputed graphics champion.
Two AMD Radeon™ R9 series GPUs (Hawaii XT)
When you're holding all the cards, it only makes sense to double down. We took two of our most advanced, Mantle technology-enabled GPUs and put them together in one cohesive unit. Don't bet against it.
Factory-fitted liquid cooling system
In an industry first, the AMD Radeon™ R9 295X2 graphics card reference design ships with an advanced closed-loop liquid cooling system developed jointly with Asetek. Enjoy cool temperatures, quiet operation and consistently high performance, right out of the box.
All metal construction
Built from striking powder coated aluminum, this GPU is beautiful to behold. It's built to our highest standards, and it sends a message that's loud and clear: this is serious hardware.
Mantle technology
There's optimization, and then there's Mantle technology. Games enabled with Mantle speak the language of Graphics Core Next to unlock revolutionary performance and image quality.
AMD TrueAudio technology
Technology that puts the magic of surround sound into every headset and helps give sound engineers the freedom to innovate in ways they've never had before. This is what the future of PC gaming sounds like.
Ultra resolution powerhouse
For some gamers, having enough isn't the point. For them, overkill is merely a starting point. That means extreme resolutions, multiple monitors and sliders to the max. Run ultra settings in 4K with impunity. Or get two million pixels more than 4K by combining five HD screens in an AMD Eyefinity technology setup.4 Either way, the AMD Radeon R9 295X2 barely breaks a sweat.
Features |
The law subjects more financial companies to federal oversight and regulates many derivatives contracts while creating a consumer protection regulator and a panel to detect risks to the financial system.
A number of the details have been left for regulators to work out, inevitably setting off complicated tangles down the road that could last for years.
But “because of this law, the American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street’s mistakes,” Mr. Obama said before signing the legislation. “There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts. Period.”
He was surrounded by a group of mostly Democratic lawmakers and advocates of the overhaul legislation, including the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California , and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada , as well as Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts , chairmen of crucial committees involved in developing the legislation.
Photo
The White House orchestrated a major signing ceremony at the Ronald Reagan Building across from the Commerce Department to trumpet the new law.
Mr. Obama took pains to try to show how the complex legislation, with its dense pages on derivatives practices, will protect ordinary Americans.
“If you’ve ever applied for a credit card, a student loan or a mortgage , you know the feeling of signing your name to pages of barely understandable fine print,” Mr. Obama said. “But what often happens as a result is that many Americans are caught by hidden fees and penalties, or saddled with loans they can’t afford.”
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He said the law would crack down on abusive practices in the mortgage industry, simplifying contracts and ending hidden fees and penalties, “so folks know what they’re signing.”
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The law expands federal banking and securities regulation from its focus on banks and public markets, subjecting a wider range of financial companies to government oversight.
It also imposes regulation for the first time on opaque markets like the enormous trade in credit derivatives.
It creates a council of federal regulators, led by the Treasury secretary, to coordinate the detection of risks to the financial system, and it provides new powers to constrain and even dismantle troubled companies.
And it creates a powerful regulator, to be appointed by the president and housed in the Federal Reserve, to protect consumers of financial products.
The first visible result may come in about two years, the deadline for the consumer regulator to create a simplified disclosure form for mortgage loans. |
History of Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg (from the Webster TIMES Centennial Anniversary Issue, 1859-1959) The Name From the days when the big lake with the longest name in the United States was a central gathering place for the Nipmuc Indians and their friends, the great pond - divided by narrow channels into three larger bodies of water - has been famed throughout the area.
The Indians had several different names for the great body of water, as can be learned from early maps and old historical records. However, all of these were similar in part and had almost the same translation, according to Indian language. Among early names were Chabanaguncamogue, Chaubanagogum, and Chaubunagungamaug, the latter now incorporated in the long name. All historians - and Indians of this and other territories - have agreed that Chaubunagungamaugg means "Fishing Place at the Boundary". One of the tribes on the other side of the lake was the Monuhchogoks, which was corrupted to the name Manchaug. A map of 1795, showing the town of Dudley, indicated the Lake name as "Chargoggaggoggmanchoggagogg". In 1831, both Dudley and Oxford, which adjoined the lake, filed maps listing the name of the pond as Chargoggagoggmanchoggagogg, but a survey of the lake done in 1830 lists the name as Chaubunagungamaugg, the ancient name. Authorities have indicated that the development of the name to the present long form stems from the time Samuel Slater began his mills near the lake, which was nearer the Manchaug village. Hence the Indian designation Chargoggagoggmanchauggagogg meaning "Englishmen at Manchaug," came into use. Later they added their original Indian descriptive name, and the entire designation becomes "Englishmen at Manchaug at the Fishing Place at the Boundary" -- or Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. Despite this official knowledge, the lake - now descending too often to the designation of Webster Lake - is known the world over by the humorous translation "You Fish on Your Side, I Fish on My Side, Nobody Fish in the Middle". As far as is known, the great publicity attained by this translation and the length of the name, stems from a story once written by Larry Daly, editor of the Webster TIMES, and widely picked up by other papers and magazines. In his humorous article about the Lake and the Nipmucs, and the disagreement over the translation, he submitted his own translation - which is now more freely accepted than the authentic meaning. In the days of the Indians, the lake was a noted fishing place. The tribes gathered there for their pow-wows. The coming of the white man changed that kind of gathering, but throughout the years, the lake with the long name has continued to attract thousands of people to its shores each summer.
Some Statistics The area of the Lake is 1,442 acres, which comprise three spring-fed lakes joined by narrow channels, North Pond, Middle Pond and South Pond. There are 17 miles of shore line. The length of the Lake is 3.25 miles, and at its widest point in Middle Pond, the distance is 1.125 miles. The shore line of North Pond is 5.78 miles, of Middle Pond, 7.06 miles, and South Pond is 4.17 miles.
A depth chart for Webster Lake from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife can be seen at: http://www.mass.gov/dfwele/dfw/dfw_pond/dfwwebst.pdf Memorial Beach The idea of taking the lake beach as a memorial to World War II veterans was promulgated by Webster TIMES Editor Laurence Daly, through the pages of the newspaper.
Residents were eager to pay tribute to the boys in service, and several ideas were suggested, including a half-million dollar civic center in the middle of town. However, scores of servicemen corresponded from time to time with the popular editor. Mr. Daly soon noticed how frequently these men, stationed in all parts of the world, mentioned that they dreamed of the day when they could once again view our lake and enjoy a swim at Second Island. Because the Slaters had so generously made this beach accessible to the townspeople, few remembered that it was not town-owned and might someday be lost to the public. Therefore, Mr. Daly began a campaign through the TIMES to enlist interest in buying Second Island as a War Memorial. Mrs. Slater was reluctant to sell, but the idea gained in favor and soon there was talk not only of taking Second Island by eminent domain, but also of creating a fine Athletic Field at the park on Ray Street which the Slaters had given to the town years before. Articles were inserted in the Town Warrant of 1946 and it was voted to take Second Island by eminent domain. The courts set a price of $20,000 which was paid to H. Nelson Slater for the beach and the great acreage surrounding it. The people further appropriated money, about $65,000, to construct a locker house with concession stand, to build a road, plant trees, and landscape the area. The beach was enlarged and improved though the efforts of Alex Starzec and the Parks Department, which supervises Second Island Memorial Beach. Today, there are two walking tracks, one which incorporates the old French River Bridge, boat launch, basketball court, playground, concession stand and ample parking. Early Boat Races Racing on the Lake attracted noted oarsmen from all parts of New England. A race course was established near Killdeer Point, which came to be known as Sea Scout Point and was most often the starting point for sailboat races which were held on the weekends. Racing was in six and eight-oared sculls, with sailing coming into vogue later. Sportsmen came from Boston and Providence for these events, but transportation to the "point" was usually by boat from Beacon Park, or Eliot's Shore, as it was then called, where there was a Yacht Club headquarters. Union Point was a favorite spot for observation, as well as for picnics and water sports. Most of the development of the lake occurred after the advent of the railroad made it possible for visitors and townspeople to reach various points along the lake. The train to East Thompson stopped at the depot downtown and also at the depot in the East Village, and disembarked passengers all along the lake shore -- Beacon Park, Union Point, Point Pleasant, Bay View (from there it was a good walk into Point Breeze), and also at Bates Grove. The greatest resort period in the Lake's history probably occurred from 1895 to 1930 when a fleet of boats was in operation each summer to take thousands of passengers to the cool spots where picnics, clambakes, bowling, dancing, swimming and canoeing flourished. The Hills, father Edgar S. and son, Ralph B., operated two of the most prominent resorts -- Point Breeze and Beacon Park and also operated the only fleet of boats ever to be successfully maintained on the Lake. Edgar S. Hill was connected with many activities in town, including the TIMES, the Music Hall, the State and Liberty Theatres, lake resorts, and the Street Railway or trolley cars. A small clubhouse was in existence at Bay View and another at Point Breeze. There was also a picnic grove and resort at Bates Grove. Edgar Hill purchased Point Breeze in 1897. Actually, Hill swapped his interest in the Music Hall for the Lake resort. About the same time, he took over Beacon Park and purchased a fleet of lake "steamers". At Point Breeze, Mr. Hill added on the huge dance hall, which later owner Henry Gawle used as the dining room for the resort which featured clambakes and catered to outings. Mr. Hill also built a great stairway, about 20 feet wide, leading down the steep embankment to a wharf and landing shed, where the steamers pulled in with thousands of visitors each summer. Beacon Park Eliot's Shore, or Beacon Park as it was later named, was purchased from the Ancient Order of Hibernians, who had taken it over from Father Quan of St. Louis parish. Already popular in the area as a picnic and swimming spot, Mr. Hill built a big pavilion, a dance hall, a steamer house, a boat shed and two canoe houses. In addition, a wharf was constructed at the shore, and later one of the few open-air theatres in this section was built at Beacon Park. The pavilion's top floor was on street level at the park entrance, but stood three-stories tall on the shore side. The third floor held a small dining room and a large "casino" where soft drinks, ice cream, popcorn and souvenirs were sold. (At no time was liquor ever sold at these lake resorts in the old days.) The second floor contained the apartment in which Ralph Hill and his wife lived and on the ground floor were dressing rooms for the actors and actresses, as well as supply rooms. On each of the three stories was a wide verandah overlooking the lake. This spacious building was converted into a lovely private dwelling when Alfred E. Kleindienst purchased Beacon Park in 1937. The Hills built a dance hall and also a waiting station, after the trolley tracks were run up to Beacon Park. The original fleet of boats consisted of the City of Webster (100 passengers); Empire (75 passengers); Leslie (35 passengers); Point Breeze (35 passengers) and the Vixen (18 passengers). Regular stops on the Lake were made at Point Pleasant, where Henry and Ma Bugbee rented cottages; at Bay View, where Monsey Camp was later located; Point Breeze, Long Island, Goat Island, and Wawela Park. Industries from Worcester and Providence chartered trains to come here for their annual outings and hired the steamers for the day. At that time there was nothing at either Union Point or Killdeer. In fact the latter was actually an island, accessible from the Gore Road only through a swamp, and later by a small footpath and then a buggy path which was made by filling in. Eventually the whole swamp was filled in and Killdeer became one of the most populated places on the lake. When persons living at one of the islands or at Wawela wanted the boat to stop by for a passenger, a red flag was placed on the landing in the daytime or a red lantern at night. Because of the numerous families living at Long Island and Wawela, there were many night passengers, especially for the shows at the Beacon Park theatre. Acts from the regular vaudeville circuits were hired throughout the summer, the show changing each week. Trolley Run About 1899, the trolley line was run from the Main Street up Lake Street and over a bridge to Beacon Park. This opened up a new world for townspeople, and make the lake accessible for family outings. Each Sunday for many years, special attractions were booked for the park where visitors could watch free of charge the great feats of that era. There were balloon ascensions, high-wire acts, and other types of aerial and diving stunts. A baseball field was laid out and Webster's well-known semi-pro teams played there weekly, drawing large crowds of spectators.
In 1920, Ralph Hill purchased Beacon Park from his father and continued to expand the attractions until the Depression and the advent of the family automobile changed the picture of the lake. The younger Mr. Hill, who previously had been connected with the Webster TIMES as a bookkeeper, and who also conducted bowling alleys on Main Street, became affiliated with his father at the State and Liberty Theatres after he sold Beacon Park. When Ralph Hill took over Beacon Park, he engaged some of the outstanding carnival attractions and also operated a ferriswheel, merry-go-round and other amusements on a concession basis. He relates that until the trolleys stopped running to Beacon Park, all the extensive lighting for the grounds came from a special hitch-up with the trolley wires. The Hills sold Point Breeze to Michael Commons, who in turn sold to Michael Lilla, who operated the resort for many years until it was taken over by the Gawle family. Killdeer About 1920, William G. Haggerty opened up a section at Killdeer, known as Sandy Shore -- a beautiful curving beach. He erected bath houses and concession stands for dispensing food. Only means of access was via the steamers from Beacon Park, and for several years, the popular Sunday excursion was a visit to Beacon Park and a steamer ride to Sandy Shore for the excellent swimming. About the mid-1920's, Killdeer Island was bought from the Slaters by K.D. Purdy of Schenectady, N.Y., and Frank E. Wilber of Webster, representing the Killdeer Development Co. George Hall was also connected with the development. They installed a road by "filling" a portion of the swampland and constructed many bungalows. Their purchase included Sandy Shore, and this semi-public beach when it became "lots for sale". Ralph Hill then leased Second Island for four years, and moved the Sandy Shore bathhouse to this section of the lake. He tried to buy the beach and land from Mr. Slater but was unable to do so. A few years later, Mr. Slater offered to lease the Second Island area to the Town of Webster at a nominal fee of $1 per year, and this offer continued for about 10 years. Beacon Park Sold About 1934, Mr. Hill decided to give up operation of Beacon Park, and offered to sell the entire site, with all the buildings and facilities to the Town of Webster at a cost of $35,000. The article was turned down at the annual Town Meeting, and it seemed as if Webster had lost forever its opportunity to own shore front at the lake which could be used free of charge by the townspeople. In 1937, Alfred Kleindienst bought it and converted it into a private estate.
In the mid-sixties, Leo Didonato purchased the property and sold it to a group of investors who constructed 98 condominium units called Beacon Park. In the meantime, development had been going on all along the shores. Union Point became a popular spot for summer homes, as did Point Pleasant, which eventually passed from the ownership of the Bugbees into private hands. A few homes were built at "The Narrows", the channel scarcely wide enough for the big steamers to pass through, and which connects the north and middle ponds of the lake. Here was a favorite swimming place for youngsters because it was an easy swim across the narrow channel to Killdeer, and then a tramp through the woods brought the braves ones to Sandy Shore, at no transportation cost. Birch Island, almost connected to the Narrows by swampland, was eventually filled in and built up. Here, too, a pavilion was erected for the accommodation of patrons and the beach was semi-private. At the turn of the century, several summer homes were built around the "circle" at Point Breeze and later several year-round houses were added. Off Point Breeze Road juts and arm of land, known as Loveland. Bay View had only three our four summer cottages nestled in the pines near Monsey Camp, the former Bay View House which was popular with young people of another era. It served as a popular girls' camp, open every summer under the direction of Miss Lillian Monsey and Miss Helen Hanley. Cottages and additional bunkhouses were added to the facilities, which included instruction in swimming, boating and water skiing. Colonial Park At the southernmost end of the lake, along the Connecticut border, lies Colonial Park. In the early 1920's, George Hall built the Lake Hotel, which was later operated by William Haggerty as Indian Inn, a name it retained while operated by Edward Blanchart and others. In the late 50's, the spacious resort hotel was the main building of Lutherwood, a camp operated by the Lutherans of the area. It brought many young people to the lake in the summer, where they had swimming and boating at their private beach, in addition to instruction and a program of crafts and sports. A small store (called "The Dug Out") was operated by the Fritzche family who owned the beach rights and maintained it as a swimming spot for the public. Treasure Island A section of waterfront comprised of about 35-40 acres located between Birch Island and Union Point was sold by Justin Herideen to ACO Development Corp. (John Androlewicz, Milton Carter, and Henry Osowski) who developed the property into a 64-room motel and conference center called Treasure Island in 1965. The property included a 50-boat marina. The motel was destroyed by fire in 1972. The balance of the property which included the restaurant and swimming pool was salvaged and sold to Hometech Corp. in 1973 who operated the restaurant and sports facility and planned to build a 50-unit condominium complex. The restaurant and sports center burned in 1974 and the plans were abandoned. The property was eventually sold to Noel Development Corp. in 1989 and construction of 78 condo units began. In Feb. 1991, a joint venture was entered into with Bay Finance Co. with a commercial loan that allowed the complex to be completed. Presently, there are 78-units and a marina which is managed by the Treasure Island Condominium Trust. |
Image by quimby | Some Rights Reserved
I recently began taking a Harvard computer science course. As pretentious as that sounds, it’s not as bad as it seems. I am taking Harvard CS50 on-line, for free, in an attempt to push my knowledge and expand my understanding of this thing I love so much, programming.
The course uses Linux and C as two of the primary learning tools/environments. While I am semi-capable using Linux, and the syntax of C is vary familiar, the mechanics of C compilation, linking, and makefiles are all new.
If you are an experienced C developer, or if you have worked extensively with Make before, there is likely nothing new for you here. However, if you wanted to let me know if and when I am passing bad information, please do! This article will (hopefully) be helpful to those who are just getting started compiling C programs, and/or using the GNU Make utility.
In the post, we discuss some things that are specific to the context of the course exercises. However, the concepts discussed, and the examples introduced are general enough that the post should be useful beyond the course specifics.
The course makes available an “appliance” (basically, a pre-configured VM which includes all the required software and files), which I believe can be downloaded by anyone taking even the free on-line course. However, since I already know how to set up/configure a Linux box (but can always use extra practice), I figured my learning would be augmented by doing things the hard way, and doing everything the course requires manually.
For better or for worse, this has forced me to learn about Make and makefiles (this is for the better, I just opened the sentence that way to sound good).
Make File Examples on Github
In this post we will put together a handful of example Make files. You can also find them as source at my Github repo:
Compiling and Linking – The Simple
This is by no means a deeply considered resource on compiling and linking source code. However, in order to understand how make works, we need to understand compiling and linking at some level.
Let’s consider the canonical “Hello World!” program, written in the C programming language. Say we have the following source file, suitably named hello.c:
Basic Hello World Implementation in C:
#include <stdio.h> int main(void) { printf("Hello, World!
"); }
In the above, the first line instructs the compiler to include the C Standard IO library, by making reference to the stdio.h header file. This is followed by our application code, which impressively prints the string “Hello World!” to the terminal window.
In order to run the above, we need to compile first. Since the Harvard course is using the Clang compiler, the most basic compilation command we can enter from the terminal might be:
Basic Compile Command for Hello World:
$ clang hello.c -o hello
When we enter the above command in our terminal window, we are essentially telling the Clang compiler to compile the source file hello.c, and the -o flag tells it to name the output binary file hello.
This works well enough for a simple task like compiling Hello World. Files from the C Standard Library are linked automatically, and the only compiler flag we are using is -o to name the output file (if we didn’t do this, the output file would be named a.out, the default output file name).
Compiling and Linking – A Little More Complex
When I say “Complex” in the header above, it’s all relative. We will expand on our simple Hello World example by adding an external library, and using some additional important compiler flags.
The Harvard CS50 course staff created a cs50 library for use by students in the course. The library includes some functions to ease folks into working with C. Among other things, the staff have added a number of functions designed to retreive terminal input from the user. For example, the cs50 library defines a GetString() function which will accept user input as text from the terminal window.
In addition to the GetString() function, the cs50 library also defines a string data type (which is NOT a native C data type!).
We can add the cs50 library to our machine by following the instructions from the cs50 site. During the process, the library will be compiled, and the output placed in the /usr/local/lib/ directory, and the all-important header files will be added to our usr/local/include/ directory.
NOTE: You don’t need to focus on using this course-specific library specifically here – this is simply an example of adding an external include to the compilation process.
Once added, the various functions and types defined therein will be available to us.
We might modify our simple Hello World! example as follows by referencing the cs50 library, and making use of the GetString() function and the new string type:
Modified Hello World Example:
// Add include for cs50 library: #include <cs50.h> #include <stdio.h> int main(void) { printf("What is your name?"); // Get text input from user: string name = GetString(); // Use user input in output striing: printf("Hello, %s
", name); }
Now, if we try to use the same terminal command to compile this version, we will see some issues:
Run Original Compile Command:
$ clang hello.c -o hello
Terminal Output from Command:
/tmp/hello-E2TvwD.o: In function `main': hello.c:(.text+0x22): undefined reference to `GetString' clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)
From the terminal output, we can see that the compiler cannot find the GetString() method, and that there was an issue with the linker.
Turns out, we can add some additional arguments to our clang command to tell Clang what files to link:
$ clang hello.c -o hello -lcs50
By adding the -l flag followed by the name of the library we need to include, we have told Clang to link to the cs50 library.
Handling Errors and Warnings
Of course, the examples of using the Clang compiler and arguments above still represent a very basic case. Generally, we might want to direct the compiler to add compiler warnings, and/or to include debugging information in the output files. a simple way to do this from the terminal, using our example above, would be as follows:
Adding Additional Compiler Flags to clang Terminal Command:
clang hello.c -g -Wall -o hello -lcs50
Here, we have user the -g flag, which tells the compiler to include debugging information in the output files, and the -Wall flag. -Wall turns on most of the various compiler warnings in Clang (warnings do not prevent compilation and output, but warn of potential issues).
A quick skimming of the Clang docs will show that there is potential for a great many compiler flags and other arguments.
As we can see, though, our terminal input to compile even the still-simple hello application is becoming cumbersome. Now imagine a much larger application, with multiple source files, referencing multiple external libraries.
What is Make?
Since source code can be contained in multiple files, and also make reference to additional files and libraries, we need a way to tell the compiler which files to compile, which order to compile them, and how a link to external files and libraries upon which our source code depends. With the additional of various compiler options and such required to get our application running, combined with the frequency with which we are likely to use the compile/run cycle during development, it is easy to see how entering the compile commands manually could rapidly become cumbersome.
Enter the Make utility.
GNU Make was originally created by Richard M. Stallman (“RMS”) and Roland McGrath. From the GNU Manual:
“The make utility automatically determines which pieces of a large program need to be recompiled, and issues commands to recompile them.”
When we write source code in C, C++, or other compiled languages, creating the source is only the first step. The human-readable source code must be compiled into binary files in order that the machine can run the application.
Essentially, the Make utility utilizes structured information contained in a makefile in order to properly compile and link a program. A Make file is named either Makefile or makefile, and is placed in the source directory for your project.
An Example Makefile for Hello World
Our final example using the clang command in the terminal contained a number of compiler flags, and referenced one external library. The command was still doable manually, but using make, we can make like much easier.
In a simple form, a make file can be set up to essentially execute the terminal command from above. The basic structure looks like this:
Basic Makefile Structure:
# Compile an executable named yourProgram from yourProgram.c all: yourProgram.c <TAB>gcc -g -Wall -o yourProgram yourProgram.c
In a makefile, lines preceded with a hash symbol are comments, and will be ignored by the utility. In the structure above, it is critical that the <TAB> on the third line is actually a tab character. Using Make, all actual commands must be preceded by a tab.
For example, we might create a Makefile for our hello program like this:
Makefile for the Hello Program:
# compile the hello program with compiler warnings, # debug info, and include the cs50 library all: hello.c clang -g -Wall -o hello hello.c -lcs50
This Make file, named (suitably) makefile and saved in the directory where our hello.c source file lives, will perform precisely the same as the final terminal command we examined. In order to compile our hello.c program using the makefile above, we need only type the following into our terminal:
Compiling Hello Using Make:
$ make
Of course, we need to be in the directory in which the make file and the hello.c source file are located.
A More General Template for Make Files
Of course, compiling our Hello World application still represents a pretty simplistic view of the compilation process. We might want to avail ourselves of the Make utilities strengths, and cook up a more general template we can use to create make files.
The Make utility allows us to structure a makefile in such a way as to separate the compilation targets (the source to be compiled) from the commands, and the compiler flags/arguments (called rules in a make file). We can even use what amount to variables to hold these values.
For example, we might refine our current makefile as follows:
General Purpose Makefile Template:
# the compiler to use CC = clang # compiler flags: # -g adds debugging information to the executable file # -Wall turns on most, but not all, compiler warnings CFLAGS = -g -Wall #files to link: LFLAGS = -lcs50 # the name to use for both the target source file, and the output file: TARGET = hello all: $(TARGET) $(TARGET): $(TARGET).c $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o $(TARGET) $(TARGET).c $(LFLAGS)
As we can see in the above, we can make assignments to each of the capitalized variables, which are then used in forming the command (notice that once again, the actual command is preceded by a tab in the highlighted line). While this Make File is still set up for our Hello World application, we could easily change the assignment to the TARGET variable, as well as add or remove compiler flags and/or linked files for a different application.
Again, we can tell make to compile our hello application by simply typing:
Compile Hello.c Using the modified Makefile:
$ make
A Note on Tabs Vs. Spaces in Your Editor
If you, like me, follow the One True Coding Convention which states:
“Thou shalt use spaces, not tabs, for indentation”
Then you will have a problem with creating your make file. If you have your editor set to convert tabs to spaces, Make will not recognize the all-important Tab character in front of the command, because, well, it’s not there.
Fortunately, there is a work-around. If you do not have tabs in your source file, you can instead separate the compile target from the command using a semi-colon. With this fix in place, our Make file might look like this:
Makefile with no Tab Characters:
# Compile an executable named yourProgram from yourProgram.c all: yourProgram.c <TAB>gcc -g -Wall -o yourProgram yourProgram.c # compile the hello program with spaces instead of Tabs # the compiler to use CC = clang # compiler flags: # -g adds debugging information to the executable file # -Wall turns on most, but not all, compiler warnings CFLAGS = -g -Wall #files to link: LFLAGS = -lcs50 # require that an argument be provided at the command line for the target name: TARGET = hello all: $(TARGET) $(TARGET): $(TARGET).c ; $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o $(TARGET) $(TARGET).c $(LFLAGS)
In the above, we have inserted a semi-colon between the definition of dependencies definition of the target and the command statement structure (see highlighted line).
Passing the Compilation Target Name to Make as a Command Line Argument
Most of the time, when developing an application you will most likely need a application-specific Makefile for the application. At least, any substantive application which includes more than one source file, and/or external references.
However, for simple futzing about, or in my case, tossing together a variety of one-off example tidbits which comprise the bulk of the problem sets for the Harvard cs50 course, it may be handy to be able to pass the name of the compile target in as a command line argument. The bulk of the Harvard examples include the cs50 library created by the program staff (at least, in the earlier exercises), but otherwise would mostly require the same sets of arguments.
For example, say we had another code file, goodby.c in the same directory.
We could simply pass the target name like so:
Passing the Compilation Target Name as a Command Line Argument:
make TARGET=goodbye.c
As we can see, we assign the target name to the TARGET variable when we invoke Make. In this case, if we fail to pass a target name, by simply typing make as we have done previously, Make will compile the program hard-coded into the Makefile – in this case, hello. Despite our intention, the wrong file will be compiled.
We can make one more modification to our Makefile if we want to require that a target be specified as a command line argument:
Require a Command Line Argument for the Compile Target Name:
# compile the hello program with spaces instead of Tabs # the compiler to use CC = clang # compiler flags: # -g adds debugging information to the executable file # -Wall turns on most, but not all, compiler warnings CFLAGS = -g -Wall #files to link: LFLAGS = -lcs50 # require that an argument be provided at the command line for the target name: TARGET = $(target) all: $(TARGET) $(TARGET): $(TARGET).c ; $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o $(TARGET) $(TARGET).c $(LFLAGS)
With that change, we can now run make on a simple, single-file program like so:
Invoke Make with Required Target Name:
$ make target=hello
Of course, now things will go a little haywire if we forget to include the target name, or if we forget to explicitly make the assignment when invoking Make from the command line.
Only the Beginning
This is one of those posts that is mainly for my own reference. As I become more fluent with C, compilation, and Make, I expect my usage may change. For now, however, the above represents what I have figured out while trying to work with the examples in the on-line Harvard course.
If you see me doing anything idiotic in the above, or have suggestions, I am all ears! Please do comment below, or reach out at the email described in my “About the Author” blurb at the top of this page.
Additional Resources and Items of Interest
John on GoogleCodeProject |
According to officials the man appeared to be under the influence of alcohol
Victim was 'grabbed by the neck and dragged round tiger enclosure'
Man killed by white tiger after jumping into enclosure at New Delhi Zoo
A man has been killed by an endangered tiger after allegedly jumping into its moat at an Indian zoo.
The man, named locally as Maqsood, is said to have been under the influence of alcohol when he climbed into the white tiger enclosure at New Delhi Zoo on Tuesday.
Witnesses say the 22-year-old entered the enclosure despite several attempts by zoo security to keep him from the tigers.
Scroll down for video
Attack: A screenshot from Indian television show the white tiger standing over the man after he jumped into its enclosure at the New Delhi Zoo
Fierce foe: According to officials the man appeared to be under the influence of alcohol and jumped over the fence despite zoo security's attempts to stop him
Indian police and zoo personnel retrieve the shoes the man, who was 'dragged around the enclosure' by the white tiger Another witness said the tiger kept ‘roaming around’ the enclosure, holding the victim by the neck. Zoo officials said the man had appeared to have been ‘under the influence of alcohol’ and that security had tried to keep him away from the tiger enclosure. ‘Despite repeated warnings that he shouldn't get too close to the outdoor enclosure, the man eventually climbed over a knee-high fence and small hedges, then jumped down 18 feet into a protective moat,‘ National Zoological Park spokesman Riyaz Ahmed Khan said. Authorities eventually frightened the tiger into a small cage inside the enclosure.
The man, whose body remained in the outdoor enclosure two hours after the attack, was dead by the time help reached him, Khan said.
Gruesome: According to witnesses, the man's body was left in the enclosure for several hours before police were able to remove it Tragedy: Zoo workers and security staff carry Maqsood's body past the tiger cage at the zoo in New Delhi The man, whose body remained in the outdoor enclosure two hours after the attack, was dead by the time help reached him
The zoo remained open Tuesday afternoon, though authorities eventually roped off the tiger enclosure.
White tigers are found in southern and eastern Asia, particularly India, and owe their appearance to a recessive gene. They are regarded as an endangered species.
India is home to 1,706 Royal Bengal tigers and fewer than 100 white tigers, according to the last census in 2011. All the white tigers are in captivity. |
A dangerous new strain of dog flu is spreading concern across the West. A dog in Montana recently tested positive for the highly contagious virus, and the Washington state health department is warning pet owners after possible exposure at a Seattle-area kennel.
In Chicago, the dog flu spread so quickly last year that some shelters were forced to close their doors to prevent further contamination, reports CBS News correspondent Adriana Diaz.
At Paws Chicago, they've treated around 300 sick dogs at their hospital and helped find them temporary homes while they recover. Vets understand the difficulty of containing this highly contagious virus.
Ashley Leise walks dogs in the Seattle area. She's paying extra close attention to her four-legged friends after warnings about the new strain of dog flu.
"They can get sick just like us, and I know how much I hate being sick," Leise said.
King County public health officials say up to 90 dogs staying at a kennel outside of Seattle may have been exposed to the virus. Two have tested positive for flu, but further tests are needed to confirm it's the new strain.
"None of the dogs have immunity to fight it off, so you see large numbers of dogs getting ill when the virus starts to circulate," said Beth Lipton, vet for Public Health Seattle and King County. "When dogs are going to day care or dog parks or boarding overnight in kennel facilities, it can spread very rapidly."
Cases first showed up last March in Chicago and spread quickly. Around 2,000 dogs in 24 states have been infected. A vaccine was made available in November.
Vets say the disease is rarely fatal, but owners should see a vet right away if their dog shows symptoms.
"So if your dog doesn't eat well, misses a meal, if you see coughing, if you see lethargy, just being tired, moping around, it could be a sign of a fever," vet Rob McMonigle said. "If you see that, give your local vet a call and schedule an appointment because they'll need to get on some special medications for it."
The Seattle and King County health department says their Facebook post outlining the symptoms has been viewed 189,000 times since Tuesday. Local vets are now stocking up on the vaccine.
And while the virus is no laughing matter, a viral video features a Chicago pup named Herbert who's putting on a brave face while recovering from the flu.
"Dogs are household members and often times they're like kids in the family," Lipton said. "People want to take care of their pets and do the right thing and keep them safe."
Humans can't contract the virus, but they could spread it to healthy dogs after close contact with an infected dog. |
Getty Images Taco and bean burrito
The fast food chain, Taco Bell, has been accused of false advertising when it refers to “seasoned beef” in its meaty Mexican fare.
The Alabaman law firm Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles filed a lawsuit on Friday on behalf of Amanda Obney, a Californian customer of Taco Bell. Ms Obney doesn’t want cash damages but demands that Taco Bell be more honest in its advertising practices.
(More on TIME.com: See the top 10 Worst Fast-Food Meals)
In a study conducted by the law firm, it was found that Taco Bell’s “meat mixture”, which it dubs “seasoned beef” contained less than 35 % beef. If these figures are correct, the product would fail to meet minimum requirements, set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to be labeled as “beef”. The other 65% of the “meat” is made up of water, soy lecithin, maltodextrin, silicon dioxide, anti-dusting agent and modified corn starch (amongst other ingredients more suited to a test tube than a taco).
Although Taco Bell displays these added ingredients on its website, there is no mention of just how much actual meat is contained in the product.
(More on TIME.com: Fiddy and the Tacos – Top 10 Ridiculous Celebrity Lawsuits)
Rob Poetsch, a spokesman for Taco Bell, said the company denies that its advertising is misleading: “Taco Bell prides itself on serving high quality Mexican inspired food with great value. We’re happy that the millions of customers we serve every week agree.”
The verdict of the case — or the ruling from the court of public opinion — has yet to be announced.
(More on TIME.com: Watch the video of Calorie Displays Might Not Change Your Order) |
The Narendra Modi government finds itself clueless on how to tackle the present economic slowdown and growing unemployment in traditional as well as IT sectors. Certain exercises were conducted in the finance ministry after Yashwant Sinha gave the matter a political spin. However, there are sharp differences even on the efficacy of traditional remedies like increased public investment, rate cuts and a special boost to employment-intensive sectors.
So far, there is clarity on one point: there will not be any fiscal stimulus. Barring this, the government and its advisors seem to be at a loss to find any workable measures to bring the economy back to health. Nitin Gadkari has put forth an ambitious Rs 6.9 lakh crore worth new highway corridors plan. But highly-mechanised highway construction has very little job-creation prospects.
The Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, set up on September 25, was not able to prescribe any specific steps to tide over the crisis. After its first formal meeting on October 11, the council only identified ten priority areas like fiscal and monetary policy and economic governance. It carefully avoided suggesting any actionable measures. After the meeting, its chairman Bibek Debroy did not reveal much about the deliberations. But the council did consider the need for out-of-the-box solutions after the government is left with very few traditional options.
For about three years, finance minister Arun Jaitely has been going round liberalising the economy as per the classical reform texts, removing hurdles in production and scrapping foreign direct investment (FDI) caps. In May this year, he valiantly abolished even the Foreign Investment Promotion Board. The Planning Commission, which was seen as the sole reason for stifling growth, was scrapped three months after Modi took charge.
The railways, it was presumed, was languishing because of the separate rail budget. So it was abolished. At the end of this three-year-long scrapping spree, the prime minister insisted that India must focus on the ease of doing business. What worries the government is why the economy suffered such severe setbacks even after their liberalisation push.
During the Manmohan Singh era, the reform writers had ready scapegoats. Every fall in production was attributed to obstructions by the supporting Left or 10 Janpath’s ‘remote control’. Meddling by Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council was another standard explanation. Even business and trade associations were harsh on the UPA governments when India saw double-digit inflation and a steep fall in the rate of industrial production around June 2008.
But in those days, all this was attributed to a ‘weak’ prime minister’s inability to take up reform measures. Atal Bihari Vajpayee had an adversarial RSS and its outfits like the Swadeshi Jagran Manch and Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh. He had to factor in Nagpur’s periodic warnings. The Modi government is not hamstrung by a remote control or such obstructions from within.
At the party level, two ‘practical’ suggestions have come from BJP’s business friends, especially from centres like Surat. They have suggested soft-pedalling of the ongoing tax raids and Enforcement Directorate notices on lakhs of firms, shell or genuine. This, they have told the BJP chief, had demoralised the business community. The second suggestion is to order an across-board rate cut in the Goods and Services Tax (GST) for the first two years to provide breathing space for traders, and to help them switch over to the white economy.
Unfortunately, both these demands will harm the Modi government’s ‘can-do’ image. The widely-publicised black money raids were part of Modi’s personality build up as a strong leader out to wipe out black money, an election promise he had made a cornerstone of the BJP campaign. There have been frequent cuts in GST rates under pressures from the government’s friends. An across-board reduction will considerably dilute the very purpose of the GST, which was bandied about as a major tax reform for foreign investors.
For this government, the appointment of an advisory council itself is a significant comedown. Gone are the days when the prime minister was lampooning the ‘Harvard wallas’, claiming he had the ‘pulse of the people’. After the economic slowdown became an issue of public debate, there has been a letup in the announcement of new schemes. One of Modi’s first acts was to scrap the former PM’s group of ministers – about 70 of them – and pass on their powers to the PMO. After the demonetisation disaster, the much derided group of ministers is back. Jaitely presides over the cabinet panel on exchange traded fund with Piyush Goyal and Dharmendra Pradhan as members.
But the most striking aspect of the present economic muddle is the eerie silence on the part of business writers and industry associations. Compare this with the sharp criticism of the economic policies during the Vajpayee and Singh governments. Where have all the acerbic analysts and reform warriors of yesteryears gone? Have they lost their voice? Or do they feel they don’t have anything more to suggest other than labour act changes and retail in FDI?
P. Raman is a senior journalist. |
The blast happened during early morning prayers at the Madina mosque in the Unguwar Shuwa area of Mubi, some 200 kilometres (125 miles) by road from the Adamawa state capital Yola.
It was the biggest attack in Adamawa since December 2016, when two female suicide bombers killed 45 people at a crowded market in the town of Madagali.
Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari, who announced nearly two years ago that Boko Haram was "technically defeated", described the blast as "very cruel and dastardly".
AP
Security analysts said it again underlined the threat posed by the Islamic State group affiliate, despite an overall decline in deaths from attacks by the group last year.Military and civilian militia sources in the northeast said the attack was likely to have been in response to recent increased ground and air operations against Boko Haram.Adamawa state police spokesman Othman Abubakar told AFP that "at least 50" people were killed in the Mubi attack, which saw the bomber detonate his explosives among worshippers."The bomber was about 17 years old," he added later.Asked who was responsible, Abubakar said: "We all know the trend. We don't suspect anyone specifically but we know those behind such kind of attacks."
Roof blown off
The attack bore all the hallmarks of Boko Haram, the Islamist militants whose insurgency has left at least 20,000 people dead and more than 2.6 million others homeless since 2009.
Abubakar Sule, who lives near the mosque, said he was present during the rescue operation and that 40 people died on the spot while several others were taken to hospital with severe and life-threatening injuries.
"The roof was blown off. People near the mosque said the prayer was mid-way when the bomber, who was obviously in the congregation, detonated his explosives.
"This is obviously the work of Boko Haram."
Yan St-Pierre, a counter-terrorism specialist at the Modern Security Consulting Group in Berlin, said the bombing was part of a pattern of increasingly lethal strikes in the last four weeks.
The latest Global Terrorism Index, published last week, said that deaths attributed to Boko Haram in 2016 fell by 80 percent.
But St-Pierre said despite this "Boko Haram remains an extremely potent and dangerous organisation" which was far from being "on the back foot", as the military and government has claimed.
A civilian militia source embedded with the military told AFP the attack was likely to have been to "shore up morale" after a series of recent losses in the remote region.
On November 19, Boko Haram bases in the Njimiya, Parisa and Gulumba areas near the Sambisa Forest of Borno state were hit by air strikes, leading to "heavy losses", he claimed.
This could also explain two videos put out on social media by Boko Haram in the last week, purporting to show its fighters in combat and dead Nigerian soldiers, he added.
A military source in the Borno state capital, Maiduguri, said there had been more aerial offensives in the Marte, Kukawa, Monguno and Abadam areas of northern Borno.
"They are feeling the heat. They have lost a staggering number of fighters, so they are now fighting back in their usual dastardly way, attacking civilians," he said.
'Operational presence'
Boko Haram briefly overran Mubi in late 2014 as its fighters rampaged across northeastern Nigeria, seizing towns and villages in its quest to establish a hardline Islamic state.
The town's name was changed temporarily to Madinatul Islam, or "City of Islam" in Arabic, during the brief Boko Haram occupation.
But it has been peaceful since the military and the civilian militia ousted them from the town, which is a commercial hub and home to the Adamawa State University.
In recent months, Boko Haram activity has been concentrated around Madagali, in the far north of Adamawa near the border with Borno.
There have been repeated raids and suicide bombings, blamed on Boko Haram remnants pushed out of their camps in the Sambisa Forest.
Boko Haram fighters are also said to be hiding in the Mandara mountains, which forms the border of Adamawa and Nigeria with neighbouring Cameroon, where there has also been more attacks.
Ryan Cummings, from security analysts Signal Risk, said the attack suggests Boko Haram "has an active operational presence in Adamawa" and retained the capacity to hit hard.
"It appears that despite open calls for Boko Haram to desist in such acts of mass violence against Muslim civilian interests, that these have not been heeded," he added. |
Image copyright EPA Image caption The head had been on display at the Guimet Museum in Paris
A French museum has returned the head of a 7th Century Hindu statue to Cambodia 130 years after it was taken.
The statue, a representation of the Hindu gods Vishnu and Shiva, had its head taken in French colonial times.
It was returned by the Guimet Museum in Paris at Cambodia's request and reattached to the body on Thursday.
A Cambodian culture ministry spokesman said joining the head to the statue felt "like we are reconnecting the soul of our national heritage".
Image copyright Reuters Image caption France may yet be allowed to display the Harihara statue in future
Image copyright Reuters Image caption The statue is "symbolic of prosperity", one official said
Image copyright EPA Image caption The reunification was carried out with a lavish ceremony in Phnom Penh
"According to our Khmer culture, the reunion is symbolic of prosperity," Deputy Prime Minister Sok An said at a ceremony in Cambodia's National Museum.
The complete statue had stood in the Phnom Da temple in southern Takeo province before its head was shipped to France in 1886.
Cambodia has not ruled out allowing France to display the complete statue, known as Harihara, in the future.
Over the past few years, Cambodia has sought to return artefacts taken by other countries without permission. In the past three years, several statues were sent back to Cambodia by US museums and a private collector in Norway. |
[Peter] deserves an award for doing more with less. He’s built a handheld device based on an AVR controller that has features normally associated with much more powerful devices. Here’s what it doesn’t do: no phone calls, no text messages, no accelerometer, and best of all no app approval needed. What it does do is leverage inexpensive, readily available components combined with common homebrew development techniques to create a touch sensitive handheld.
The demo video embedded after the break details the device playing video, rendering 3D objects, and displaying pictures and ebooks with touch scrolling. All of this is running at 60 fps for a smooth picture. The whole thing is no larger than the 320×240 LCD that he salvaged from a broken MP3 player. An Atmel AVR ATmega644 microcontroller ties together the display, a resistive touch screen, and a microSD card for storage. The chip also controls the backlight, a Lithium Polymer battery, and uses USB for PC connectivity, charging, and even a mouse or keyboard interface. He etched the PCB himself for surface mount components and managed to do it with just four jumpers needed on the underside.
This is a big leap forward from the last AVR based touch sensitive device we saw. All of the functionality seen in the demo is run using 4k of memory and 32k of programming space. Because [Peter’s] powering this at 3.3v the system clock is limited to 12MHz but he’s managed to make it work. We asked him to post code and schematics and he didn’t hold back. Head over to the microtouch project page to download the code, Eagle CAD files, and PCB artwork. All of the demo files are there just waiting for you to build on his hard work. When you’ve got something running, don’t forget to share it with us! |
The servants knew. The Confederate White House in Richmond, Virginia, was not a happy home. The coachman had heard Varina Davis, the first lady of the South, wondering aloud if the rebellion her husband led had any prayer of success. It was, he heard her say, “about played out.” Less than a year into the war, she had all but given up hope. And the president himself, Jefferson Davis, gaunt and sere, was under tremendous strain, disheartened and querulous, complaining constantly about the lack of popular support for him and his policies.
What the servants at the dinner table heard could be even more interesting: insights into policy, strategy and very private lives. They could glimpse up close the troubled emotions of Varina, who was much younger than her husband. She was in her mid-30s, he was in his mid-50s, and her energy, even her sultry beauty, were resented by many in that small society. She had a dark complexion and generous features that led at least one of her critics to describe her publically as “tawny” and suggest she looked like a mulatto.
Varina’s closest friend and ally in the cabinet was Judah P. Benjamin, the cosmopolitan Jewish secretary of war and then secretary of state. He was a frequent visitor to the Davis residence. He shaped Confederate strategy around the globe. And over port after dinner, what intimacies might have been revealed about this man, whose Louisiana Creole wife lived in self-imposed exile in Paris, and whose constant companion in Richmond was her beautiful younger brother?
As in any of the big households of yesteryear (one thinks of Downton Abbey, to take a popular example), what the servants knew about the masters was a great deal more than the masters knew about them. And in the Davis household the servants were black slaves, treated as shadows and often as something less than sentient beings. The Davises knew little of their lives, their hopes, their aspirations, and they certainly did not realize that two of them would spy for the Union.
History is almost equally oblivious. When it comes to secret agents, or servants, or slaves, all learned to tell the smooth lie that let them survive, and few kept records that endure. When it comes to the question of the spies who worked in the Confederate White House, where solid documentary evidence has failed, legend often has stepped in to fill the gaps and, to some considerable extent, to cloud the picture.
The one slave-spy we know the most about is William A. Jackson, the handsome coachman who appears to have been hired out by his owner at one point to work as a waiter in a Richmond hotel before being rented to the Davis family to drive them around the city.
In early May 1862, soon after New Orleans had fallen to the Union and as the Federal army under Gen. George McClellan was inching its way up the peninsula from Yorktown toward Richmond, the slave William Jackson crossed the lines into the Federal camp and began telling his story to the officers, who debriefed him at length, then to a handful of reporters. Over the next several weeks, tales about his revelations were printed and reprinted in papers all over the country.
Thus, one could read in the The Liberator, an abolitionist paper out of Boston, an article picked up from Horace Greeley’s Tribune in New York that was a paean to the escaped slaves making their way to Union encampments. Typically they were called “contrabands,” not yet entitled to their freedom (the Emancipation Proclamation was not announced until later that year, and did not go into effect until 1863).
“The fact cannot be questioned that the most important information we receive of the enemy’s movements reaches us through the contrabands,” the author of the Tribune article proclaimed.
When Jackson made his appearance in the Union camp, we are told, generals, colonels and majors flocked around him and the commander, Gen. Irvin McDowell, telegraphed the War Department with some of Jackson’s revelations.
If he brought useful tactical intelligence, however, it didn’t make it into the Northern newspapers, which focused on the gossip he passed along.
Jackson described Jefferson Davis as “pale and haggard,” sleeping little, eating nothing, constantly irritable and complaining about his generals: ‘He plans advances, but they execute masterly retreats,’” Jackson is quoted saying.
Varina Davis, meanwhile, had become a terror to her servants. “Mr. Davis treated me well,” said Jackson, “but Mrs. Davis is the d–––l,” the word devil considered too fraught for the paper’s readers.
Jackson seems to have spent quite a bit of time driving Varina around, and listening closely to her depressed views of the “played out” Confederacy. In part, no doubt, Jackson was telling the Union officers and press what they wanted to hear, raising their morale by talking about the declining mood in Rebel Richmond. He said not only slaves but whites were looking forward to the arrival of the Union troops. The Davises kept their bags packed and ready to go, he said, and even Mrs. Davis couldn’t pass off Confederate money.
Harper’s Weekly magazine published an engraved portrait of Jackson with his flowing signature beneath it, and a brief article filled with the kind of amazed admiration and inbuilt condescension that was common throughout the Northern press when it lionized escaped slaves: Jackson was “an extremely intelligent man, reads and writes (as his signature shows), and converses in a manner which shows that he has been used to good society.”
The Tribune’s backhanded praise, picked up by The Liberator, had been even worse. “The old plea, that a mulatto may have a soul and be intelligent on account of the white blood in his veins, while a pure negro is nothing but an overgrown monkey minus the caudal appendage, will not hold true in this instance. Jackson is as black as a Congo negro, and much more intelligent than a good many white folks.”
By the end of the summer of ’62, as McClellan’s peninsular campaign faltered and the war seemed to be stretching on endlessly, Jackson, the contrabands, and what came to be called their “black dispatches” started to catch the blame for military and political failings. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which billed itself as the evening paper with the highest circulation in the United States, started writing about “that arrant humbug, ‘Jeff Davis’ coachman,” who supposedly had assured the North that Union sympathizers would rise up in Richmond.
After that, Jackson faded from the scene, and it was not until after the war that stories began to circulate about another, and potentially much more effective spy in the Confederate White House.
Her name in popular history is Mary Elizabeth Bowser, but she used many different names, in fact. She was part of an extensive Union spy network run by Elizabeth Van Lew, a Richmond society woman who once owned Mary, had her educated in the North, and freed her in secret only to enlist her in the spy ring that included, it seems, Mary’s assignment as a slave-servant in the Confederate White House. Mary was of mixed blood, and she may well have been tied by that blood to Van Lew’s family, but if she worked for the Davises, as she and others claimed, she did so under a false name and false pretenses. Varina, asked about her years later, said she’d never heard of her.
The most careful and authoritative research on Bowser is to be found in Southern Lady, Yankee Spy, by Elizabeth R. Varon, a professor at the University of Virginia. As she notes, the spinsterly Van Lew never hid her Union sympathies entirely, but built a reputation for eccentricity as “Crazy Bet” that, along with her social status, afforded her considerable protection in Civil War Richmond.
As every intelligence service knows, when a woman is not taken seriously by the men around her she can work wonders as a secret agent, and that certainly was the case with Van Lew. She hid fugitive soldiers who escaped from Confederate prisons, she plotted with Union sympathizers and met clandestinely with couriers and spies from the Federal army.
By 1864, when Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was closing in on the Confederate capital in long, drawn out, bloody sieges, Van Lew’s network of white and black “detectives,” as spies liked to call themselves in those days, provided important, concrete military intelligence to Grant’s army. Of that there is no doubt. Grant recognized Van Lew’s valor publicly after the war, and in 1869, when he was president, had her appointed as Richmond’s postmaster (a somewhat ironic post for a former spymaster).
But what role did Mary play in Van Lew’s network?
It is safe to say (with ambiguity appropriate to espionage) a very special one.
In 1846, 15 years before the Civil War began, Van Lew had arranged the baptism of “Mary Jane, a colored child” in St. John’s church, which normally was reserved for white parishioners. It also appears from the chronologies provided by Van Lew’s biographers that Mary was not an infant at the time of the baptism. Probably she was 4 or 5 years old.
When that same little girl had barely reached her teens, Van Lew sent her to Princeton, New Jersey, “to receive an education, in order to prepare here to go to Liberia to serve as a missionary.”
Mary was only 14 when she sailed for Monrovia to teach the Gospel among slaves who had been liberated in the United States only to be sent “back to Africa” to a place among a people they never knew. Although desperately unhappy, Mary stayed for almost four years before Van Lew brought her back to Richmond. “I do love the poor creature,” Van Lew wrote to a friend in the American Colonization Society. “She was born a slave in our family—& that has made me always feel an awful responsibility.”
Interesting choice of words: “Born a slave in our family.” Later in life, Mary would talk about having “the advantage over the most of my race both in blood and intelligence,” and would tell Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others, that her mother was white but her father was “a Cuban-Spaniard and negro.” The rigorous and cautious Varon concludes it was much more likely that Mary’s father “was a white man, perhaps a member of the Van Lew family or their Lynchburg cousins, the Richardses.”
One might note that Mary was conceived and probably born before the death of Van Lew’s much-loved father in 1843.
The only physical description we have of Mary was after the war: “a Juno, done in somber marble … her features regular and expressive, her eyes exceedingly bright and sharp, her form and movements the perfection of grace.” (None of the photographs that purport to be her have been confirmed, according to Varon.)
Could such a woman, when she was about 20 years old, have found a place in the Davis household in Richmond? Not if she came directly from Van Lew, who was certainly no favorite of Varina Davis. Nor if she came under the name of Mary Richards, who had been arrested and jailed for not being a slave when she came back from Liberia in 1859, before the Van Lews claimed her again as part of the family’s chattel just to protect her. But under yet another alias? Very possibly.
In 1905, as a very old woman, Varina Davis felt called upon to deny that she had ever had in her employ “an educated negro ‘given or hired’ by Miss Van Lew as a spy,” and added, “My maid was an ignorant girl born and brought up on our plantation.”
But nobody had claimed Mary was Varina Davis’s maid. The executor of Van Lew’s estate had written in a biographical sketch and subsequent correspondence that Mary’s name was Mary Elizabeth Bowser (Mary Richards had married a Mr. Wilson Bowser in 1861). Then that name and general details of Mary’s life wound up in a Harper’s Monthly article in 1911:
“She was installed as waitress in the White House of the Confederacy. What she was able to learn, how long she remained behind Jefferson Davis’s dining chair, and what became of the girl ere the war ended are questions to which Time has effaced the answers.”
In fact, Varon and Lois Leveen, whose novel The Secrets of Mary Bowser tries to fill some of the gaps with fiction, did manage to find a bit more fact.
In September 1865, a woman calling herself Richmonia Richards gave a talk in New York City’s Abyssinian Baptist Church which the Anglo African, a newspaper there, described as “very sarcastic” and “quite humorous.” Among her anecdotes were stories of intrigue in the Confederate Senate as well as the Confederate White House. But the real substance of the intrigues is not there.
By 1867, Mary, with missionary zeal, was teaching freed slaves and their children in St. Mary’s, Georgia, on the Florida border, when Harriet Beecher Stowe, her brother the Rev. Charles Beecher, and the Rev. Crammond Kennedy of the Freedmen’s Bureau paid a visit. They were enthralled, especially by stories she told of her work as “a member of a secret organization in Richmond … a detective of Gen’l Grant.” The Rev. Kennedy thought “she could write a romance from her experience in that employment.”
Would that she had, or, if she did, that it could be found.
In fact, the last we know of Mary J.R. Richards Bowser Garvin (there was another husband after the war) aka Mary Jones aka Richmonia Richards and also known as names unknown is from her letters in 1867 to the superintendent of education for the Georgia Freedmen’s Bureau explaining why she could no longer carry on with so few resources trying to meet such enormous needs in ever more hostile and dangerous territory. The white Southerners, the old elites, meant to make it impossible to educate the former slaves and their children.
“I wish there was some law here, or some protection,” she wrote. “I know the southerners pretty well … having been in the service so long as a detective that I still find myself scrutinizing them closely. There is … that sinister expression about the eye, and the quiet but bitterly expressed feeling that I know portends evil … with a little whiskey in them, they dare do anything … Do not think I am frightened and laugh at my letter. Anyone that has spent 4 months in Richmond prison does not be so easily frightened."
What happened to Mary after that? The facts of her life fell prey to prejudice, the sinister turmoil in the Reconstruction South, and the traditions of spies who take their greatest secrets to grave. Almost 150 years later, truly, time has effaced the answers. |
I took a flyer on a Chromebook, and am so glad I did. After hours of research on which one to get, I passed on HP's Chromebook 11 because of the anemic ARM processor and went with the Acer C720 4GB. Most of my laptop time is spent online so this made perfect sense for me. I was already using gmail and drive, as are my kids' schools, so that made the choice even easier. Set up all 4 of our Google accounts on it and now each person can log in to their own Google account. Sets up in only a few minutes right out of the box. Enter your wifi info and Google account and away you go. Also have Crouton loaded, which means I can easily switch between Chrome OS and Linux with a few keystrokes. The screen is above average, plenty bright but certainly not as good as an IPS panel. Viewing angles are fine for me, as I usually am not sharing my screen and if I do I use Chromecast to do it on the big screen TV. Keyboard is also above average, though not as nice as my work Lenovo T430 machine. It took me about 15 mins to get used to the trackpad, but after that i actually love it. 2 finger scroll, nice response, I've come to want it on all my laptops. Speed is phenomenal. Boots from power off in less than 10 seconds. Boots from sleep in 2 seconds. Haswell Celeron Processor, 4G of RAM and SSD drive all contribute to that. No lags in video and no slowness complaints whatsoever. Battery life is as advertised. With 50% screen brightness and normal web surfing I got 9.5 and 10 hours for my first two charges. There is a fan, but it's so quiet i only hear it if i put the vent up to my ear. Runs quiet, runs cool, and runs fast. Charges pretty quick also, though I did not time it. I don't care for the way the SD card sticks out of the side when inserted. I would have liked it to be flush with the case, and use it as a permanent storage space, but not a big deal. Speakers are above average, I never did use laptop speakers much, opting instead to connect it to my home theater or using my phone with earbuds. But the sound quality is very nice on here. Overall I am very happy with Chromebook idea in general, and I am completely confident I bought the best one currently on the market. Best thing about it? It doesn't run Windows and it doesn't run OS X!
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400-Watt Wall Panel Convection Heater is rated 4.0 out of 5 by 153 .
Rated 5 out of 5 by Yooper from Econo-Heat Wall Board Heater Econo-Heat 400 Watt Convection Flat Panel Space Heater with Programmable Thermostat This unit will "Convection" heat your room. You have to leave it on in order for the air to circulate in the room! Immediate heat is not and has never been the intended purpose for this product! I live in Upper Michigan where winters are very cold. These heaters work great! You need to follow the instructions in order for proper operation. Garage applications will not work well. An interior room of a home will work perfect. "TIP" Mount heater to interior wall, not a wall where outside temperatures are on the other side! This unit WILL draw cold air from the floor and heat it causing a natural rotation of air in the room! You will not be disappointed! They do work! especially if you have a "cold" room and are looking to supplement your existing heat source! Keep Warm! Summer will be back soon!
Rated 5 out of 5 by Skip from This product has been a life saver with the bitter cold weather we have had this year. I purchased three wall panel heaters hoping that they would help cut down the chill in three rooms that are extremely cold in my 100 year old house. Two of the rooms are bedrooms that are exposed on three sides to the outside, the other room is an all glass sunporch which also has exposure on three sides of the room. The difference in the temperature of the rooms now makes them livable and very comfortable. I also love the fact that the wall panels can be painted so that they blend in nicely with the room. I highly recommend this product to anyone who needs the extra warmth in a room and does not like the dryness that a space heater causes to the room and to the skin. The difference in the bedrooms has been unbelievable. The rooms are nice and toasty warm without being too hot or dry. Just right for a good nights sleep. I am thrilled with the difference in the sunroom. It is comfortable enough even with the bitter cold weather that we have experience this year to sit out in the sunroom and watch TV comfortably.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Alreeug from FABULOUS! We have had 3 econo-heaters warming up our house for over a year now. Just as they say, they heat up a small to medium sized room by about 10 degrees. They don't produce any dust and don't make any noise! We bought a small home a year and a half ago and the only source of heat is ceiling heat in the living room . We could have spent $5,000 to put in a mini ductless heating system but instead we thought we'd try out the econo-heaters first and save up for the ductless. We have been so happy with the efficiency and heat that we decided not to bother with the heat pump! We even had our first problem today, one of the heaters won't turn on. I called Econo-Heat and they said send me your receipt and address and we will get you a new one shipped in the next day or two. Great company, they really stand by their warranty! Definitely a great option for a small home!!!
Rated 4 out of 5 by Sandia from does the job! We purchased three heaters in July and I waited to post a report to make sure they worked as planned. We had two heaters installed as supplement heat in a north side bathroom in NM at high altitude. They performed as planned and heated easily two to three degrees above the central heat to keep the bathroom cozy in the early morning and at night in December. So we are satisfied. The third unit was installed in a spare bedroom on the North side. It also heated the room two to three degrees above the central heating system which is a radiant floor heating system in our house After a month of use one of the bathroom units developed a hair line crack that does not appear to interfere with the function and is barely visible. It may shorten the lifetime of the unit but for now no problem. The installation was done by a professional as we are not handy. He had no problem and did the work fast. The units look nice and are out of the way replacing space heaters.
Rated 4 out of 5 by pdb1 from Simple, good looking solution After reading through all the reviews, I decided to purchase three of these for areas of the house that were not well heated. In particular, a couple bathrooms that had no heat. In terms of performance, they do about what I expected of convective type heaters - plug them in and leave them on. These heaters work well for a smaller room, like a bathroom. One of them developed a crack and stopped working. I contacted the company by phone and left a message. the product manager phoned me back the same day. I explained what happened and emailed him some photos. He thought it must have been damaged in shipping and then the heating/cooling cycles made the crack larger which eventually breached the heating element. He immediately sent a warranty replacement. Great customer service.
Rated 5 out of 5 by chica from worked for us! Needed extra heat in a chilly alcove during the extra cold winter months we've begun experiencing. Looked at oil-filled radiators, which are very efficient, but wanted something with a low profile that could be wall-mounted not far from an outlet (comes with 6 ft of cord). At 400 WATTS it is the equivalent of four 100W incandescent light bulbs, but produces far more heat. (Read the safety instructions such as should not be under furniture, near drapes, etc., but is safe for pets and children.) It was easy and fairly quick to mount (only needed to cut down one of the four plastic insulated spacer mounts because our older plaster wall was not perfectly even). We did experience the "new" chemical smell, but with continuous use the smell was gone within 48 hours. Added bonus is that you can paint this to match the wall. Simple and aesthetically pleasing, it does not draw attention to itself. This is by far the best we could find until something better comes along. And the price (before the electric bill) is superb compared to more expensive oil-filled wall mounted radiators that take up more space. Very pleased with this simple and inexpensive solution to our short-term needs.
Rated 4 out of 5 by kj1nyc from Gets the job done I needed a heat source for a small bathroom with 3 outside walls. The temperature in the bathroom easily dipped into the teens in the winter time since it had no heat source. I bought this because it is efficient and it is low profile. So far, so good. It warms the room to a manageable temp but not anywhere near even 65 degrees b/c of the outside 3 walls. It also doesn't warm up the tile floor because of the nature of the heat. It does get very hot so be careful around it with pets or kids. Some people complain that it cracks but I haven't encountered that yet. Installed and painted in 20 minutes..needed a second person to hold it in place while I screwed it in. |
The British economy continued to contract for a third consecutive quarter, for which the weather is to blame, along with a slumping construction industry and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The British economy slumped for the third consecutive quarter, adding to the economic concern throughout Europe, with some economists calling this the most prolonged double-dip recession in the United Kingdom since the 1950s.
Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the economy, contracted 0.7% in the months of April, May and June, according to the United Kingdom's Office for National Statistics. The decline was broader than the 0.2% drop economists had forecast.
Investec economist Victoria Clarke said this is a "very prolonged and severe economic downturn" that is "driven by a global financial downturn" beginning in 2008. The London-based economist said this is the longest double-dip recession since the British started tracking their GDP in 1955.
On an year-over-year basis, GDP fell 0.8%.
"This morning's GDP is little short of a disaster for the UK economy and a humiliating blow to [finance minister] George Osborne," said Richard Driver, analyst for Caxton FX. "The government will surely have to adjust its austerity stance now and a clearer growth strategy must be put in place to get Britain back on track."
"We've said the situation would get worse before it gets better," said Jeremy Cook, chief economist at the foreign exchange company World First. "Anything worse than this and we are risking depression."
A stagnant construction sector, and less dramatic slumps in manufacturing production and the services sector also did their part to drag down GDP, according to the report. Construction activity dropped by 5.2% in the second quarter.
The holiday from the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and wet weather might have contributed to the slowdown, said James Knightley, senior economist at ING Commercial Banking London.
"The wettest April-June period on record and the dullest June (in terms of hours of sunshine) since 1909 likely deterred shoppers," said Knightley, adding that the GDP report is "merely a very early estimate based on only 44% of the complete information required to provide the 'final' GDP number."
Things could look up, according to Driver, who forecast a "mild recovery in the second half of the year, particularly in light of the Olympics." But he added that the "risks of further contraction are increasing all the time."
London is hosting the Summer Olympics, which begins on Friday.
Harry Duff of the Office for National Statistics said the second-quarter GDP figures will be updated, if necessary, in about one month. |
FAIR LAWN — Two restaurants will open their first Bergen County locations at a development under construction on Route 208.
Habit Burger, a California burger chain, will open its first New Jersey location at the Fair Lawn Promenade, and Noodles & Company, a Colorado fast-casual chain will open its first Bergen County restaurant, Scott Loventhal, director of development of Garden Homes, said.
Garden Homes is the developer of the mixed-use project. The Promenade will include 65,000 square feet of retail and office space in three buildings and 150 residential units in two other buildings.
TKL Research, a clinical research organization based in Rochelle Park, will be the first tenant to open in March, Loventhal said. TKL plans to open a new 25,000 square-foot clinic along Route 208.
Aside from Habit Burger, Noodles and TKL, tenants will include Anthony's Coal Fired Pizza, Qdoba, Starbucks, Verizon Wireless, Massage Envy, European Wax and Cups Frozen Yogurt, as well as dentist's office and three other office tenants, Loventhal said.
"It's a nice mix of service and restaurants and office, which we think will be a complement to the residential," he said.
Loventhal hopes to have the first residents move into the luxury apartments in April. Rents start at $1,900 a month for a one-bedroom apartment, plus utilities.
The project should be fully occupied by the end of 2014, he said.
Residents and visitors can access the Promenade from Route 208 northbound and Pollitt Drive. The project is about a 15-minute walk from the Radburn NJ Transit train station.
Construction started in 2012 and should be complete by the end of 2014, Loventhal said. The site was formerly home to an Eastman Kodak processing facility.
"We had a really nice collaborative effort with the officials in Fair Lawn to create a great ratable for the town," Loventhal said. |
THE WORK ETHIC WE INHERITED GROWING UP HAS FALLEN PREY TO THE ‘WELFARE’ SYSTEM
The Cato Institute released an updated 2013 study (original study in 1955) showing that welfare benefits pay more than a minimum wage job in 33 states and the District of Columbia. Even worse, welfare pays more than $15 per hour in 13 states. According to the study, welfare benefits have increased faster than minimum wage. It’s now more profitable to sit at home than it is to earn an honest day’s pay.
Hawaii is the biggest offender, where welfare recipients earn $29.13 per hour, or a $60,590 yearly salary, all for doing nothing.
Here is the list of the states where the pre-tax equivalent “salary” that welfare recipients receive is higher than having a job:
1. Hawaii: $60,590
2. District of Columbia: $50,820
3. Massachusetts: $50,540
4. Connecticut: $44,370
5. New York: $43,700
6. New Jersey: $43,450
7. Rhode Island: $43,330
8. Vermont: $42,350
9. New Hampshire: $39,750
10. Maryland: $38,160
11. California: $37,160
12. Oregon: $34,300
13. Wyoming: $32,620
14. Nevada: $29,820
15. Minnesota: $29,350
16. Delaware: $29,220
17. Washington: $28,840
18. North Dakota: $28,830
19. Pennsylvania: $28,670
20. New Mexico: $27,900
21. Montana: $26,930
22. South Dakota: $26,610
23. Kansas: $26,490
24. Michigan: $26,430
25. Alaska: $26,400
26. Ohio: $26,200
27. North Carolina: $25,760
28. West Virginia: $24,900
29. Alabama: $23,310
30. Indiana: $22,900
31. Missouri: $22,800
32. Oklahoma: $22,480
33. Louisiana: $22,250
34. South Carolina: $21,910
As a point of reference the average Middle Class annual income today is $50,000, down from $54,000 at the beginning of the Great Recession. Hawaii, DC, and Massachusetts pay more in welfare than the average working folks earn there. Is it any wonder that they stay home rather than look for a job. Time for a drastic change. America is virtually bankrupt.
Are we Nuts or what? How do we un-do this type of stupidity on the part of Americans? |
Only India's richest man could afford to offer free 4G services to millions of users — and Mukesh Ambani just did that.
The Chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries announced on Thursday that his phone company, Reliance Jio, will extend its current three-month offer of free 4G LTE services for another quarter.
This means new and the existing 52 million Jio customers will get free 4G connectivity until March 31, 2017.
The free services include unlimited free voice calls, 1GB of 4G LTE data every day, access to public Wi-Fi hotspots spread across the country as well as video-on-demand services.
Reliance Industries' Chairman and MD, Mukesh Ambani announcing the new Jio "Happy New Year Offer" Image: screengrab/jio digital
Ambani also said Jio had surpassed 50 million subscribers in less than three months since the service launched, and the company continues to sign up over 600,000 new users on an average every day.
Ambani claims that his users use 25 times more data than an average Indian broadband user, making Jio the country's largest broadband internet service provider.
Jio's launch in September this year was not welcomed by existing carriers, especially when Ambani announced his network won't charge users for voice calls, which accounted for as much as 70 percent revenues for some carriers.
Reliance Industries has already invested upwards of $20 billion in buying spectrum, setting up the network and making things operational. It is yet to see any revenues coming in. |
Remove the door knockers. Pull down the shutters. Pretend no one’s home. Your adult children are coming back — for good.
One-in-nine baby boomer parents said their adult children returned home within the last year, according to a new report from financial services firm Fidelity Investments and Stanford Center on Longevity, which surveyed 9,000 employees.The adult children save money on rent and household goods, but their parents are the ones who appear to be suffering: 68% said they were more stressed, 53% said they were less happy and another 53% said they had less leisure time after the return of their “boomerang kids.” More than three-quarters (76%) said they took on higher expenses, too.
Even people who are now in their 40s and 50s are considering mom and dad an option. Older millennials are 2.7 times more likely to live in their parents’ home than people under 55 years old than in 1999, while Generation-Xers, who are now in their mid-30s to early 50s, were 2.2 times as likely to live with their parents, according to separate data released last week by real estate site Trulia. “No parent is going to want to say no to a child who needs help, but certainly being realistic about the financial situation is important,” said Katie Taylor, vice president of thought leadership at Fidelity.
See: The real reason college grads move home with their parents may surprise you
More American adults are living with their parents and grandparents than ever before — 19% of the U.S. population (or nearly 61 million people) lived in a multigenerational household, up from 17% (42 million) in 2009 and 12% (27.5 million) in 1980, according to the Pew Research Center, nonprofit think tank based in Washington, D.C.
But not all millennials are as “lazy” or “entitled,” as they are often accused of being. About one in four 25- to 34-year-olds who live at home and are not working or going to school do so because of a health-related reason or because they are acting as caregivers to their family members. And more than a third of Americans, including millennials, expect to financially help their parents within the next few years, another survey found. Some are even making efforts to help their parents save for retirement.
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A Big Tip of the Tuque to the Crew at Mount Van Hoevenberg
At the risk of repeating myself, it has been a winter of extreme weather in the Adirondacks. In a not so ironic twist, the Southern Jet Stream took my advice and went home, but his slightly less annoying cousin, the Polar Vortex is back in town. By this point however, after enduring a few freeze - thaw cycles, most Adirondackers will agree, both of these extreme weather visitors have become very annoying.
Is anyone else getting tired of seeing screen shots like this one posted on Facebook? I am.
After the warm rain washed away all the snow and ice, (ski base) the big freeze descended on Lake Placid and the Adirondacks. We received six inches of snow since the temperatures dropped, but that is not enough to put back country skiing back in business. The sub-zero temperatures and wind chills are the story this week, so skiing at Whiteface Mountain takes a strong constitution.
In what can only be described as a heroic effort, the trail crew at Mt. Van Hoevenberg spread and groomed a few kilometers of man made snow. This provides a nice, although flat, loop course with two tracks set and a firm skate lane for those of us who must get outside.
The only thing to do in a situation like this is make the best of it. Seeking downhills, I conducted a short assessment of the steeper trails covered in only natural snow. Frozen cheeks on the downhills weren’t worth the poor conditions, but a couple of loops around the perfectly track-set course was surprisingly fun despite the minus-five-degree temperature.
Poor snow conditions aside, late afternoon skiing at Mt. Van Hoevenberg is a treat on a clear, cold day. The setting sun on Cascade Mountain creates an Alpenglühen to complement the inevitable post-ski glow. |
If you're still hesitating if RoR is the best choice for you, here are top 10 famous websites built with Ruby on Rails. Feel inspired!
If you’re still hesitating if RoR is the best choice for you, here are top 10 famous websites built with Ruby on Rails. Feel inspired!
1 - Twitter (in its early days)
We’re putting Twitter on our list as it was originally built with Ruby on Rails in 2006. With the growth of its popularity, after five years, founders have switched from RoR to Java server.
I guess there’s no need to introduce ;-)
3 - Yellow pages
Famous book with business directories and telephones stepped into the virtual world, known as the Internet Yellow Pages or IYP. Ruby on Rails based website, the biggest one that IT&T runs.
4 - Hulu
Add-supported online video service, a favorite site of almost every Family Guy fan. Founded in 2007, offers a wide selection of TV shows, etc. Sort of free TV on your computer.
5 - Slideshare
E-learning platform that allows you to upload and share presentations. Created in 2006, it took only one year to hit 3 million unique visitors. Impressing one.
6 - Github
Our favorite. Social network platform for developers. Essential tool for every code lover. The most popular code hosting service in the world with over 9 million users and 21.1 million repositories. (in 2015)
7 - Shopify
E-commerce shop that allows users to build an online store. Necessity is the mother of invention - it was created in 2004 by Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake as the already existing e-commerce sites were unsatisfying.
8 - Groupon
Well known to every bargain hunter. The website which main idea is to offer coupons for deals to its local or international subscribers. Launched in 2008 in US, quickly spread and gained popularity, all over the world.
9 - Urban Dictionary
Crowdsourced online dictionary of slang, founded in 1999 and powered by Ruby on Rails. The must-visit website for contemporary human-being ever called ‘nerd’.
10 - AirBnb
A web service for everyone who want to rent a holiday accommodation. Founded in 2008, it connects hosts and travellers all over the world.
Impressed? So how about staying behind such tech success by yourself?
Join our series of free tutorials and learn how to make your own SaaS application in a full-stack, easy-to-approach Rails framework.
Rails Rocks!
Photo by: gratisography.com |
Begin in farm country, late last summer, no particular day. Carmi, Illinois—a town on the Little Wabash River, down in the southern tip of the state, twenty-five miles from Kentucky, population about fifty-five hundred. A group of twelve farmers—burly white men with ruddy complexions and very short hair—sitting around a rectangle of pushed-together tables in a nondescript room, talking with their junior senator, Barack Obama. It was long before Obama decided to run for President, and he wasn’t in a rush. He sat at one end of the tables, leaning back in his chair, his knee propped against the table edge. He wore a tie but had removed his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. A young farmer complained about the Jones Act, a 1920 law that he felt was partly responsible for a detrimental consolidation in the barge market. Another farmer had a question about ethanol. “My question first arose in my mind during the State of the Union address,” the farmer said. “President Bush said I’m all for biofuels, and then he started talking about switchgrass. And I’m, like, now wait a minute, we’ve got a system where we can make ethanol out of corn. I guess cellulosic ethanol”—which can be made from switchgrass—“is more efficient. But we don’t know how to do it, and we don’t know if farmers are ever going to grow switchgrass, and we don’t know if we would even want to grow switchgrass, so why so much emphasis on cellulosic ethanol?” “Well, I’m not a scientist,” Obama said, in a leisurely way, “so I gotta be careful when I start getting into this stuff that I don’t wade too deep and then can’t get back to shore. Right now cellulosic ethanol is potentially eight times more energy-efficient than corn-based ethanol, because you eliminate the middle step of converting it into sugar before you convert it into ethanol. That’s my understanding. I know you’re attached to corn, but if somebody came to you and said, you know what, if you take half your fields and grow switchgrass you’ll make the same amount of money or more, then—” “Not really,” the farmer interjected. “Because I had a guy come to me before wheat harvest and said do you wanna sell your straw and I said no. I said, ‘Don’t even talk to me, I don’t wanna sell my straw.’ ” “Now that’s interesting,” Obama said. “Why wouldn’t you want to sell your straw?” “Organic matter!” the farmer said, triumphantly. “Well, but if it’s economical to you, if it’s a good business decision, you’ll be interested.” “If you paid me enough,” the farmer conceded. “If you were paid enough. Now, you know the economics of it better than I do. So we’ve got to sit down with farmers who are growing the crops and figure out what would make sense. Because, look, I’m not a farmer, and what you just described, I want to keep my straw because it’s important, uh—” “I thought I was the only person who had this idea,” the farmer broke in, “and then in FarmWeek the guest editorial he said wait a minute, he said what we’re talking about is against everything we’ve preached for the last twenty or thirty years, where we return organic matter to the soil.” “Exactly,” Obama said in a soothing tone. “And all of a sudden we’re talking about denuding the ground—” “Which we shouldn’t do. And so,” he said, returning to the topic, “the way to think about this is not to impose ideas on farmers that aren’t gonna work, by people who don’t farm. But we have to create more efficient ethanol if we want to see a significant growth in the market. The fact of the matter is that Brazilian ethanol is substantially cheaper than U.S. ethanol. Now, George Bush wanted to go ahead and let that come in, and myself and Durbin”—Richard Durbin, Illinois’s senior senator—“said no, we would continue to support the existing tariff so that we can have the development of a homegrown ethanol market. I want to make sure that whatever is being done is utilizing the fact that we’ve got some of the richest soil on earth and the best farmers on earth. But the flip side is that farmers need to be engaged and not just put out a hand and say I’m not interested because I’m used to growing corn and beans.” There are three things that Democratic political candidates tend to do when talking with constituents: they display an impressive grasp of the minutiae of their constituents’ problems, particularly money problems; they rouse indignation by explaining how those problems are caused by powerful groups getting rich on the backs of ordinary people; and they present well-worked-out policy proposals that, if passed, would solve the problems and put the powerful groups in their place. Obama seldom does any of these things. He tends to underplay his knowledge, acting less informed than he is. He rarely accuses, preferring to talk about problems in the passive voice, as things that are amiss with us rather than as wrongs that have been perpetrated by them. And the solutions he offers generally sound small and local rather than deep-reaching and systemic. Take a recent forum in Las Vegas on health care. Here are Hillary Clinton and Obama speaking about the same subject, preventive care. “We have to change the way we finance health care, and that’s going to mean taking money away from people who make out really well right now, so this is going to be a big political battle,” Clinton said. “The insurance companies make money by employing a lot of people to try to avoid insuring you and then, if you’re insured, to try to avoid paying for the health care you received.” She stood at the front of the stage, declining an invitation to sit down next to the moderator. She spoke energetically but composedly, conveying the impression that she had spent a great deal of time preparing for the event because it was extremely important to her. “A lot of insurance companies will not pay for someone who’s pre-diabetic or been diagnosed with diabetes to go to a nutritionist to find out how better to feed themselves, or to go to a podiatrist to have their feet checked,” she said. “The insurance companies will tell you this: they don’t want to pay for preventive health care because that’s like lost money because they’re not sure that the patient will still be with them. But if they’re confronted with the doctor saying we’re going to have to amputate the foot they’re stuck with it. That is upside down and backwards!” Now here is Obama. “We’ve got to put more money in prevention,” he said. “It makes no sense for children to be going to the emergency room for treatable ailments like asthma. Twenty per cent of our patients who have chronic illnesses account for eighty per cent of the costs, so it’s absolutely critical that we invest in managing those with chronic illnesses like diabetes. If we hire a case manager to work with them to insure that they’re taking the proper treatments, then potentially we’re not going to have to spend thirty thousand dollars on a leg amputation.” A young man asked about health care for minorities. “Obesity and diabetes in minority communities are more severe,” Obama said, “so I think we need targeted programs, particularly to children in those communities, to make sure that they’ve got sound nutrition, that they have access to fruits and vegetables and not just Popeyes, and that they have decent spaces to play in instead of being cooped up in the house all day.” In the past couple of months, Obama has hosted health-care forums of his own—in New Hampshire, in Iowa. In these forums, he is tranquil and relaxed, as though on a power-conserve setting. He paces slowly, he revolves, he tilts his head. He comments in a neutral, detached way. He doesn’t express sympathy for sickness, or scorn for bureaucracy, or outrage at unfairness. He says that the system is broken and needs to be fixed, but conveys no particular urgency. This mode of his is often called professorial, and Obama himself likens these forums to the constitutional-law classes that he taught at the University of Chicago. But “professorial” implies that he seems cerebral or didactic, and he doesn’t. Despite the criticism he has received for being all inspiration and no policy, Obama has so far stuck to what appears to be an instinct that white papers belong on Web sites, not in speeches. It is surprising, given the recent electoral record of Democratic policy wonks, that he is not given more credit for the astuteness of this approach, but it’s true that it’s not just strategy—it’s who he is. “He doesn’t have the handicap that a lot of smart people have, which is that they come across as ‘You’re not smart enough to talk to me,’ ” George Haywood, a private investor and a friend of Obama’s, says. “Adlai Stevenson, another Illinois guy, had that—he came across as an egghead and it was off-putting to people. Barack is the opposite.” Probably one of the reasons for this is that Obama seems not to attach much value to cleverness as such. Even in law school, perhaps the place more than any other where sheer cleverness is prized and love of argument for its own sake is fundamental to the culture, he was not much interested in academic jousting. No, Obama’s detachment, his calm, in such small venues, is less professorial than medical—like that of a doctor who, by listening to a patient’s story without emotional reaction, reassures the patient that the symptoms are familiar to him. It is also doctorly in the sense that Obama thinks about the body politic as a whole thing. If you are presenting a problem as something that they have perpetrated on us, then whipping up outrage is natural enough; but if you take unity seriously, as Obama does, then outrage does not make sense, any more than it would make sense for a doctor to express outrage that a patient’s kidney is causing pain in his back. There is also, of course, a racial aspect to this. “If you’re a black male, you don’t have to try hard to impress people with your aggression,” Haywood says. “There was a period when black politicians started to be successful, and it was understood that if you wanted to be mainstream you’d better have gray hair. Doug Wilder was an example. David Dinkins. Mayor Bradley in L.A. To be popular with the broader white electorate, you’d better look safe, you’d better not look angry. Now, I don’t think Barack made a conscious decision to come across this way, but it is a happy accident. Some people may have seen his speech at the Democratic Convention, or heard that he rocked the house, and they may be disappointed, but the mainstream is not ready for a fire-breathing black man.” (It seems likely that, consciously or not, Obama has learned from these examples, and knows that the election of a President Obama wouldn’t mean a revolution in race relations, any more than women prime ministers were a sign of flourishing feminism in South Asia. Bigotry has always made exceptions.) Obama’s calm is also a matter of temperament. The first thing almost everybody who knows Obama says about him is how extremely comfortable he is with himself. “He was almost freakishly self-possessed and centered,” Christopher Edley, Jr., one of Obama’s professors at Harvard Law School, who is now a dean at Berkeley, says. There is something freakish about Obama’s self-possession—it’s conspicuous, it draws attention to itself, like the unnatural stillness of someone able to lower his blood pressure at will. He doesn’t strive for an Everyman quality: he is relaxed but never chummy, gracious rather than familiar. His surface is so smooth, his movements so easy and fluid, his voice so consistent and well-pitched that he can seem like an actor playing a politician, too implausibly effortless to be doing it for real. Obama has become known for his open-necked shirts—he may do to the tie what John Kennedy did to the hat—but he never looks casual. “Gore and Bush both have this jokey quality, and I’ve never seen that in Obama,” Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist who has spent time with all three politicians, says. “It’s not like he’s a sobersides, but Bush can be goofy, Gore can be goofy; Obama is not goofy.” What’s strange about this is that the serene man his friends describe could not be more different from the person Obama himself describes in his memoir, “Dreams from My Father.” In that book, the young Obama is confused and angry, struggling to figure out who he is, often high, wary of both white condescension and black rage, never trusting himself, always suspicious that his beliefs are just disguised egotism, his emotions just symptoms of his peculiar racial lot. Of course, the book is about his emergence from this state of mind—it’s a traditional tale of self-finding which ends, traditionally, with a wedding, in which his confusions are resolved—but the contrast between the Obama of the book and the Obama visible to the world is nonetheless so extreme as to be striking. “He was grounded, comfortable in his own skin, knew who he was, where he came from, why he believed things,” Kenneth Mack, a friend of Obama’s from Harvard and now a professor there, says. “When I read the book, I was surprised—the confusion and the anger that he described, maybe they were there below the surface, but they were not manifest at all.” Asked about this, Obama says, “You know, what puzzles me is why people are puzzled by that. That angry character lasts from the time I was fifteen to the time I was twenty-one or so. I guess my explanation is I was an adolescent male with a lot of hormones and an admittedly complicated upbringing. But that wasn’t my natural temperament. And the book doesn’t describe my entire life. I could have written an entirely different book, about the joys of basketball and what it’s like to bodysurf as the sun’s going down on a sandy beach.” Why didn’t he write a book about the joys of basketball? Why focus on an aspect of himself that seems so politically unpalatable? When Obama was in law school, just before he wrote “Dreams,” he talked about wanting to be mayor of Chicago, and since people tend for some reason to tolerate—indeed, to delight in—considerably more eccentricity and dubious conduct in mayors than they do in other elected officials, it may be that he wrote the book with that ambition in mind. He probably realized that revealing his druggy past was the best way to defuse the issue in the future. But Obama is a master storyteller, and it’s likely that he also knows that the typical story of the political candidate—doing very well in school, followed by doing very well in a profession, meanwhile relishing a good life (victory, revenge, nice house, basketball, whatever)—is not moving or inspiring stuff. When he was working as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama spoke to a number of black ministers, trying to persuade them to ally themselves with his organization, and in the course of these conversations he discovered that most had something in common. “One minister talked about a former gambling addiction,” he writes. “Another told me about his years as a successful executive and a secret drunk. They all mentioned periods of religious doubt . . . the striking bottom and shattering of pride; and then finally the resurrection of self, a self alloyed to something larger. That was the source of their confidence, they insisted: their personal fall, their subsequent redemption. It was what gave them the authority to preach the Good News.” Cassandra Butts, a friend of Obama’s from law school, remembers, “Barack used to say that one of his favorite sayings of the civil-rights movement was ‘If you cannot bear the cross, you can’t wear the crown.’ ”
Obama rose to prominence at the 2004 Democratic Convention, describing his life as a celebration of the American dream: a “skinny kid with a funny name,” the product of an improbably idealistic union between an African man and a girl from Kansas, he rose out of obscurity to attend Harvard Law School and would go on—it was by then clear—to become the third black U.S. senator since Reconstruction. But in another sense his life runs directly counter to the American dream, rejecting the American dreams of his parents and grandparents, in search of something older. Obama’s maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham, grew up a small-time delinquent in El Dorado, Kansas. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with himself, but he knew that he wanted to get out of Kansas—out of his parents’ house, away from the airless parochialism of the small-town Midwest, where, as his grandson imagined it, “fear and lack of imagination choke your dreams so that you already know on the day that you’re born just where you’ll die and who it is that’ll bury you.” After a few false starts and eloping with a restless girl, he did what men of his type iconically do: he moved west. He moved to California, then to Seattle, and then, finally, to the last frontier, as far west as he could go without ending up east again, to Hawaii. From a starting point eight thousand miles farther east, in Kenya, Obama’s other grandfather, Hussein Onyango, moved in the same direction for similar reasons. Discontented and ambitious, he left his father’s village, curious about the new white people settling in a nearby town. He took to wearing European clothing and adopted European notions about hygiene and property with a convert’s fervor. During the Second World War, he travelled to Europe as a cook for the British Army. The children of these two men, Obama’s parents, one generation removed from their native places, were freer than their fathers. Obama’s mother, Ann, married first a man from Kenya and then, when that man left, a man from Indonesia, and when the second marriage fell apart, she briefly returned home to Hawaii to start a master’s in anthropology, and then left again for Indonesia, to spend several years doing field work. She gave her son, then thirteen, the choice whether to come with her or stay behind at his school in Hawaii, and he chose to stay. Obama’s father was expelled from school, and his father cut him off, but he managed to obtain a scholarship to attend college in America. He left his pregnant wife and his son to study econometrics at the University of Hawaii. There he met Ann Dunham, married her, and had another child, Barack. He left his second family to return to Kenya to work for the government, where he married another American woman and had two more children with her. After a few years, this third family disintegrated, and, because he was unwilling to accept the unfairness of Kenya’s persistent tribalism, so did his government position. Angry and penniless, he started to drink. “What strikes me most when I think about the story of my family,” Obama writes, “is a running strain of innocence, an innocence that seems unimaginable, even by the measures of childhood.” Innocence is not, for him, a good quality, or even a redeeming excuse: it is not the opposite of guilt but the opposite of wisdom. In Obama’s description of his maternal grandfather, for instance, there is love but also contempt. “His was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price,” Obama writes. “Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men prone, in the end, to disappointment.” Stanley Dunham’s restlessness didn’t get him anywhere but far away. He ended up an incompetent, unhappy insurance salesman, his life not very different from the one he might have lived if he’d stayed in Kansas, except that, having travelled all that distance to end up there, he was all the more dissatisfied with it. His daughter saw his dissatisfaction but learned the wrong lesson: the trouble wasn’t that he had wandered in a meaningless fashion, wandering for wandering’s sake, expecting that a new place meant a new life; the trouble was that he hadn’t wandered far enough. She would go farther. “It was this desire of his to obliterate the past, this confidence in the possibility of making the world from whole cloth,” Obama writes, “that proved to be his most lasting patrimony.” Obama’s mother is, in his portrayal, an American innocent out of Henry James: a young girl who ventures into the world believing that things are as they seem to be; that a person’s story begins when she is born and her relations with other people begin when she meets them; that you can leave your home without fear of injury or loneliness because people everywhere are more or less alike. She had no idea what she was getting into when she left Hawaii—no idea that only months before she arrived Indonesia had suffered a failed but brutal coup and the killing of several hundred thousand people. Eventually, somebody told her what had happened, but the knowledge didn’t change her. “In a land where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship,” Obama writes, “she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.” She had a faith, inherited from her father and resistant to experience, “that rational, thoughtful people could shape their own destiny.” She should have counted herself lucky for emerging from the experience with only a second divorce and two bewildered children. “Things could have turned out worse,” her son wrote. “Much worse.” Innocence, freedom, individualism, mobility—the belief that you can leave a constricting or violent history behind and remake yourself in a new form of your choosing—all are part of the American dream of moving west, first from the old country to America, then from the crowded cities of the East Coast to the open central plains and on to the Pacific. But this dream, to Obama, seems credulous and shallow, a destructive craving for weightlessness. When Obama, as a young man, went to Kenya for the first time and learned how his father’s life had turned out—how he had destroyed his career by imagining that old tribalisms were just pettiness, with the arrogant idea that he could rise above the past and change his society by sheer force of belief—Obama’s aunt told him that his father had never understood that, as she put it, “if everyone is family, no one is family.” Obama found this striking enough so that he repeated it later on, in italics: If everyone is family, no one is family. Universalism is a delusion. Freedom is really just abandonment. You might start by throwing off religion, then your parents, your town, your people and your way of life, and when, later on, you end up leaving your wife or husband and your child, too, it seems only a natural progression. So when it came time for Obama to leave home he reversed what his mother and father and grandparents had done: he turned around and moved east. First back to the mainland, spending two years of college in California, then farther, to New York. He ended up in Chicago, back in the Midwest, from which his mother’s parents had fled, embracing everything they had escaped—the constriction of tradition, the weight of history, the provincial smallness of community, settling for your whole life in one place with one group of people. He embraced even the dirt, the violence, and the narrowness that came with that place, because they were part of its memory. He thought about the great black migration to Chicago from the South, nearly a century before, and the traditions the migrants had made there. “I made a chain between my life and the faces I saw, borrowing other people’s memories,” he wrote. He wanted to be bound. Of course, in a sense, by choosing to leave his family and move to a place to which he had no connection, he was doing exactly what his parents had done, but, unlike them, he decided to believe that his choosing self had been shaped by fate and family. There was, at least, something organic, something inescapable about that. “I can see that my choices were never truly mine alone,” he wrote, “and that is how it should be, that to assert otherwise is to chase after a sorry sort of freedom.” Choosing was the best that he could do. In time, the roots would grow. He married Michelle Robinson, a woman who already owned the memories and the roots, who was by birth the person he was trying to become: the child of an intact, religious black family from the South Side. He took a job organizing a South Side community that was disintegrating but that he hoped, through work and inspiration, to revive. Later, rejecting the agnosticism of his parents and his own skeptical instincts, he became a Christian and joined a church. “I came to realize,” he wrote in his second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” that “without an unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith, I would be consigned at some level to always remain apart, free in the way that my mother was free, but also alone in the same ways that she was ultimately alone.” By the time he arrived at law school, when he was twenty-seven, he had become the man he had imagined. All his life, people had considered him black because he looked black, however confused he might be inside, and now he was no longer confused. His conversion was complete. “If you had met him, you would never get that he was biracial,” Kenneth Mack says. “You would never get that he grew up in Hawaii. When I met him, he just seemed like a black guy from Chicago. He seemed like a Midwestern black man.”
The victory of freedom over history is not just, of course, an American story about individuals but also a story that America tells about itself. Obama rejects this story even in one of its most persuasive incarnations, the civil-rights movement. He calls the “spirit that would grip the nation for that fleeting period between Kennedy’s election and the passage of the Voting Rights Act: the seeming triumph of universalism over parochialism and narrow-mindedness” a “useful fiction, one that haunts me . . . evoking as it does some lost Eden.” When it seems that history has been defeated, that is only an illusion produced by charisma and rhetoric. It is, then, not surprising that when it was proposed that America should invade Iraq with the goal of establishing democracy there, Obama knew that it would be a terrible mistake. This was American innocence at its most destructive, freedom at its most deceptive, universalism at its most naïve. “There was a dangerous innocence to thinking that we would be greeted as liberators, or that with a little bit of economic assistance and democratic training you’d have a Jeffersonian democracy blooming in the desert,” he says now. “There is a running thread in American history of idealism that can express itself powerfully and appropriately, as it did after World War II with the creation of the United Nations and the Marshall Plan, when we recognized that our security and prosperity depend on the security and prosperity of others. But the same idealism can express itself in a sense that we can remake the world any way we want by flipping a switch, because we’re technologically superior or we’re wealthier or we’re morally superior. And when our idealism spills into that kind of naïveté and an unwillingness to acknowledge history and the weight of other cultures, then we get ourselves into trouble, as we did in Vietnam.” In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative. There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean. He distrusts abstractions, generalizations, extrapolations, projections. It’s not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good. Take health care, for example. “If you’re starting from scratch,” he says, “then a single-payer system”—a government-managed system like Canada’s, which disconnects health insurance from employment—“would probably make sense. But we’ve got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition, as well as adjusting the culture to a different system, would be difficult to pull off. So we may need a system that’s not so disruptive that people feel like suddenly what they’ve known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside.” Obama’s voting record is one of the most liberal in the Senate, but he has always appealed to Republicans, perhaps because he speaks about liberal goals in conservative language. When he talks about poverty, he tends not to talk about gorging plutocrats and unjust tax breaks; he says that we are our brother’s keeper, that caring for the poor is one of our traditions. Asked whether he has changed his mind about anything in the past twenty years, he says, “I’m probably more humble now about the speed with which government programs can solve every problem. For example, I think the impact of parents and communities is at least as significant as the amount of money that’s put into education.” Obama encourages his crossover appeal. He doesn’t often criticize the Bush Administration directly; in New Hampshire recently, he told his audience, “I’m a Democrat. I’m considered a progressive Democrat. But if a Republican or a Conservative or a libertarian or a free-marketer has a better idea, I am happy to steal ideas from anybody and in that sense I’m agnostic.” “The number of conservatives who’ve called me—roommates of mine, relatives who are Republicans—who’ve said, ‘He’s the one Democrat I could support, not because he agrees with me, because he doesn’t, but because I at least think he’ll take my point of view into account,’ ” Michael Froman, a law-school friend who worked in the Clinton Administration and is now involved in Obama’s campaign, says. “That’s a big thing, mainstream Americans feeling like Northeast liberals look down on them.” After Obama’s Convention speech, Republican bloggers rushed to claim him, under headings such as “Right Speech, Wrong Convention” and “Barack Obama: A Republican Soul Trapped Inside a Democrat’s Body.” The Convention speech was uncharacteristically Reaganesque for Obama, being almost uniformly sunny about America, which he called a “magical place”; these days, he tends to be more sombre. Even so, Republicans continue to find him congenial, especially those who opposed the war on much the same conservative grounds that he did. Some of Bush’s top fund-raisers are contributing to Obama’s campaign. In his election to the U.S. Senate, Obama won forty per cent of the Republican vote; now there is a group called Republicans for Obama, founded by John Martin, a law student and Navy reservist shortly to be posted to Afghanistan, which has chapters in six states. (On its Web site, the group highlights aspects of Obama’s biography that aren’t usually emphasized, referring to his mother’s second husband as an “Indonesian oil manager,” and mentioning the year after college that Obama spent working at Business International Corporation.) Of course, not all Republicans like Obama—John Martin receives a steady stream of rude e-mails. “Hi John, Just wanted to let you know that there aren’t Republicans for Obama Hussein Barack,” one woman wrote. “Please remove me from your mailing list and get over your white guilt.” “Some Republicans you scum are!” a man from Hobe Sound, Florida, wrote. “This is someone who has a 100% left wing voting record in the Senate, including rejection of Roberts and Alito and wants to repeal our tax cuts. Screw him! And screw you too!” In the most widely quoted part of his Convention speech, Obama said, “The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States.” Seasoned observers of Washington tend to dismiss such talk of national unity and bipartisan coöperation as meaningless political boilerplate. Even Obama’s allies worry that it sounds a little flaccid. “So much of what he’s said he’ll do when he’s President is about being conciliatory and bipartisan and really listening,” a friend says. “All this process-oriented stuff that’s not exactly Churchillian rhetoric.” But, coming from Obama, the talk about unity isn’t boilerplate—he actually means it, and it’s substantive, which is to say that it has consequences that make people angry. Obama is always disappointing people who feel that he gives too much respect or yields too much ground to the other side, rather than fighting aggressively for his principles. “In law school, we had a seminar together and Charles Fried, who is very conservative, was one of our speakers,” Cassandra Butts says. “The issue of the Second Amendment came up and Fried is pretty much a Second Amendment absolutist. One of our classmates was in favor of gun control—he’d come from an urban environment where guns were a big issue. And, while Barack agreed with our classmate, he was much more willing to hear Fried out—he was very moved by the fact that Fried grew up in the Soviet bloc, where they didn’t have those freedoms. After the class, our classmate was still challenging Fried and Barack was just not as passionate and I didn’t understand that.” Recently, Obama said that if Bush decided to veto a military spending bill on the ground that it included a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, he, Obama, would support removing the timetable in order to pass the bill. Liberal bloggers were irate at this capitulation, but the writer Samantha Power, who has worked for Obama on foreign policy, says, “Standing on one side of the room with his arms folded is just not his M.O.” This is, again, partly a matter of temperament. “By nature, I’m not somebody who gets real worked up about things,” Obama writes in his second book. “When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously.” He tends to think of his opponents as deluded and ridiculous, rather than as demons. “I’ve never been a conspiracy theorist,” he says. “I’ve never believed there are a bunch of people out there who are pulling all the strings and pressing all the buttons. And the reason is that the older I get, the more time I spend meeting people in government or in the corporate arena, the more human everybody becomes. What I do believe is that those with money, those with influence, those with control over how resources are allocated in our society, are very protective of their interests, and they can rationalize infinitely the reasons why they should have more money and power than anyone else, why that’s somehow good for the society as a whole.” Obama’s drive to compromise goes beyond the call of political expediency—it’s instinctive, almost a tic. “Barack has an incredible ability to synthesize seemingly contradictory realities and make them coherent,” Cassandra Butts says. “It comes from going from a home where white people are nurturing you, and then you go out into the world and you’re seen as a black person. He had to figure out whether he was going to accept this contradiction and be just one of those things, or find a way to realize that these pieces make up the whole.” In the state senate, this skill served him well—he was unusually dexterous with opponents, and passed bills that at first were judged too liberal to have a chance, such as one that mandated the videotaping of police interviews with suspects arrested for capital crimes. “In our seminar, whether we were arguing about labor or religion or politics, he would sit back like a resource person and then he would say, I hear Jane saying such and such, and Tom seems to disagree on that, but then Tom and Jane both agree on this,” Robert Putnam says. (For a couple of years, Obama participated in a seminar about rebuilding community, inspired by Putnam’s article “Bowling Alone.”) “I don’t mean he makes all conflicts go away—that would be crazy. But his natural instinct is not dividing the baby in half—it’s looking for areas of convergence. This is part of who he is really deep down, and it’s an amazing skill. It’s not always the right skill: the truth doesn’t always lie somewhere in the middle. But I think at this moment America is in a situation where we agree much more than we think we do. I know this from polling data—we feel divided in racial terms, religious terms, class terms, all kinds of terms, but we exaggerate how much we disagree with each other. And that’s why I think he’s right for this time.” Even when he was very young, Obama was scornful of, as he puts it, “people who preferred the dream to the reality, impotence to compromise.” Sometimes, of course, there is no possibility of convergence—a question must be answered yes or no. In such a case, Obama may stand up for what he believes in, or he may not. “If there’s a deep moral conviction that gay marriage is wrong, if a majority of Americans believe on principle that marriage is an institution for men and women, I’m not at all sure he shares that view, but he’s not an in-your-face type,” Cass Sunstein, a colleague of Obama’s at the University of Chicago, says. “To go in the face of people with religious convictions—that’s something he’d be very reluctant to do.” This is not, Sunstein believes, due only to pragmatism; it also stems from a sense that there is something worthy of respect in a strong and widespread moral feeling, even if it’s wrong. “Rawls talks about civic toleration as a modus vivendi, a way that we can live together, and some liberals think that way,” Sunstein says. “But I think with Obama it’s more like Learned Hand when he said, ‘The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.’ Obama takes that really seriously. I think the reason that conservatives are O.K. with him is both that he might agree with them on some issues and that even if he comes down on a different side, he knows he might be wrong. I can’t think of an American politician who has thought in that way, ever.” Obama is, in fact, committed to respecting the opinions or cultures of others even when religious beliefs aren’t involved. “There are universal values that I will fight for,” he says. “I think there may have been a time and a place in which genital mutilation was culturally appropriate, but those times are over. I’m not somebody who believes that our foreign policy has to be driven by moral relativism. What I do believe is that we have to apply judgment and a sense of proportion to how change happens in any society—to promote our ideals and our values with some sense of humility.” “Lincoln is a hero of his,” Sunstein says—Obama announced his candidacy in front of the Old State Capitol in Springfield in order to draw a connection between himself and that other skinny politician from Illinois—“and in the legal culture Lincoln is famous for believing that there are some principles that you can’t compromise in terms of speaking, but, in terms of what you do, there are pragmatic reasons and sometimes reasons of principle not to act on them. Alexander Bickel, in ‘The Least Dangerous Branch,’ made this aspect of Lincoln famous, and I don’t know if Obama has this directly from Bickel, but if he doesn’t he has it from law school.” Lincoln, Bickel wrote, “held ‘that free government was, in principle, incompatible with chattel slavery.’ . . . Yet he was no abolitionist.” Should freed slaves become the equals of white men? “The feelings of ‘the great mass of white people’ would not admit of this,” Bickel described Lincoln as thinking, “and hence here also principle would have to yield to necessity.” Lincoln wrote, “Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question, if indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded.” Obama has staked his candidacy on union—on bringing together two halves of America that are profoundly divided, and by associating himself with Lincoln—and he knows what both of those things mean. He calls America’s founding a “grand compromise”: compromise, for him, is not an eroding of principle for the sake of getting something done but a principle in itself—the certainty of uncertainty, the fundament of union. “I would save the Union,” Lincoln wrote, in a letter to Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” “I like to believe that for Lincoln it was never a matter of abandoning conviction for the sake of expediency,” Obama writes. “Rather . . . that we must talk and reach for common understandings, precisely because all of us are imperfect and can never act with the certainty that God is on our side.”
Obama sat leaning back in a chair in his office in Washington. He gave the impression that he would be perfectly comfortable sitting in that chair, without moving, all day. As he spoke, he waved his hand in a vague, regal gesture, like somebody absent-mindedly swatting away a fly. He talked about the aftermath of the Iraq war, how he believes that it is crucial to avoid a Vietnam-syndrome-style retreat into isolation. “There are no countries now with no security implications,” he said. “If you have ungoverned spaces, they become havens for terrorists and breeding grounds for pandemics and generate refugees that can destabilize areas that are of great interest to us. Security and humanitarian concerns are all part of one project, which is to create a world in which people see enough opportunity that they end up sharing our interest in maintaining order. . . . I would take some of the troops that we redeploy out of Iraq and use them to bolster NATO forces in Afghanistan. I think we still have the opportunity to succeed there.” Obama has become known for his skepticism about the Iraq war, but he is not a dove, nor is he averse to thinking in international terms. Two of the issues to which he has devoted the most attention since he arrived in the U.S. Senate, avian flu and nuclear nonproliferation, are grand global problems, which, while relatively uncontroversial, are nonetheless risky choices for signature issues, since, in both cases, success is invisible, and failure could mean disaster of world-changing proportions. Still, it seems that this global mode of thinking is comparatively new for him. When the first President Bush invaded Iraq, Obama was in his late twenties and thinking seriously about a career in politics, but friends from that time don’t recall his opinion of the war. “I don’t want to make claims as if I had been in a position to articulate a clear position on it,” he says. “I remember believing that Saddam’s invasion justified international action, and had I been forced to articulate a policy I’d like to think that I would have supported it once the international coalition was put together. You know, I was busy in law school at the time, or studying for the bar.” Obama had just returned to his office for an hour or so after voting on the floor of the Senate. He had spent the morning shuttling between the Senate and his office, being briefed on his schedule, chewing gum as he walked. It took him about ten minutes to make the trip each time, a delay sufficiently irritating that Obama’s assistant expended considerable effort to avoid it. That day, she had tried to book the Senate’s President’s Room for a meeting, but Hillary Clinton’s assistant had got there ahead of her. In the office reception area, crowds of people milled about, many of them unscheduled; the office had become something of a tourist attraction. Marian Wright Edelman had marshalled a group of faith leaders, parents, and sample sick children to speak with Obama for a minute or two about children’s health. About twenty rotund, middle-aged firefighters arrived and, too many to fit in the office, stood in the hallway, blocking the door. A couple of reporters from the Chicago Tribune—two of several people the paper has assigned to cover the Obama beat full time—waited on the sofa for a delayed interview. (The day had begun with a candidates’ forum sponsored by a builders’ union at which Obama was scheduled to speak after Senator Joseph Biden, and, as a consequence, a winking press aide told the reporters—we all know what happens when you speak after Joe Biden—Obama was going to be late to everything for the rest of the day.) A white father from Winnetka had brought his two sons, the elder of whom, about nine years old, begged to wait as long as it took to spot Obama for even a second. (After an hour, a receptionist suggested that they come back the following morning.) Two teen-age girls—one, from Lake Elmo, Minnesota, carrying a soda, another, wearing pink tights and carrying a frozen yogurt—stopped by, hoping for a photograph with the Senator. A receptionist gave them a black-and-white portrait from a pile she kept at her desk, and the girls squealed in delight. The girl with the soda snapped a few photographs of the reception area and the empty conference room next to it and signed the guest book. “Where are you? No picture?” she wrote, next to more conventional comments (“Good luck Your Sweet,” “My hero!,” “Thank you, you rock!”). The moment Obama’s Senate schedule ends for the week, he flies somewhere to campaign over the weekend, usually Iowa. “What an unbelievable crowd, I am so grateful to all of you for taking the time out on a Sunday afternoon to be here today.” Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, mid-February. “Let me thank first of all the person who just introduced me, Tom Miller, who is just an outstanding attorney general.” Small town after small town, street after street of one- and two-story houses with lawns, then the commercial strip, the same everywhere, McDonald’s, Burger King, Holiday Inn, Super 8, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Super Target, and then the smaller regional stores with names that rhyme—Rib Crib, Hobby Lobby, Taco Tico, Prime N’ Wine. “I am Barack Obama and I’m running for President.” Algona High School, Algona, Iowa. Early April. “A state senate seat in the area where I lived opened up and some people I knew in the community got involved and asked me if I’d be interested,” Obama said. “I did what every black man does when confronted with a major decision like that: I prayed on it, and I asked my wife.” (Laughter.) “And after consulting those two higher powers I did what every first-time candidate does, which is to talk to anyone who will listen to you. I’d go to PTA meetings, I’d go to the barbershop, I’d go to softball games, and everywhere I went I’d get the same two questions. First question: Where’d you get that funny name, Barack Obama? Although people would mispronounce it. They would call me Alabama, they called me Yo’ Mama.” (Laughter.) “But the second question was what led me to run for President. People would ask me, ‘You seem like a nice guy, you have a fancy law degree, you make a lot of money, you’ve got a beautiful, churchgoing family, why would you want to go into something dirty and nasty like politics?’ ” “He’s always wanted to be President,” Valerie Jarrett, who has been a family friend for years, ever since she hired Michelle Obama to work in Mayor Daley’s office, says. (Michelle Obama is now an executive at the University of Chicago Hospitals.) “He didn’t always admit it, but oh, absolutely. The first time he said it to me, he said, ‘I just think I have some special qualities and wouldn’t it be a shame to waste them.’ I think it was during the early part of his U.S. senatorial campaign. He said, ‘You know, I just think I have something.’ ” “Some people who knew of my activism in the community asked me would I be interested in running for that office,” Obama said in Ames. “And so I did what every wise man does when confronted with such a decision: I prayed on it, and I asked my wife.” (Laughter.) It remains to be seen how well Obama adapts himself to campaigning. It doesn’t come altogether naturally to him. Late last year, when he was thinking about whether to run, friends asked him if he was ready for a fight, if the thought got his adrenaline going, and he would say, “Yes—but I don’t know if I want the hassle.” That’s not something you imagine somebody embarking on a Presidential campaign saying—not wanting the hassle. “But that’s why he’s so likable,” a friend says. “That’s the quality people are seeing in him, they’re seeing how campaigning could be a grind.” “Bill Clinton was far more into the tactics of politics,” David Axelrod, Obama’s chief campaign adviser, says. “He was a voracious consumer of polls. Of course, he was so indefatigable that he could do that and still read four books a week and be President of the United States. You wouldn’t hire Barack to run your campaign. You might hire Bill Clinton to run your campaign.” This is not the only difference between Obama and Clinton. To compare them is to see that a political natural, as both of them are called, can mean very different things. “Bill Clinton has preternatural ability as a listener,” Robert Putnam says. “Everybody always walks away from him thinking, For the first time in my life someone has actually listened to me—that man Bill Clinton is the first person in the world to really understand me. It’s almost magical—even Newt Gingrich said something like, Every time I meet him I feel like I have to go rinse my mind out for an hour. Barack is not that good.” Putnam’s is a common reaction; it seems to be a response to Clinton’s passionate political drive, his hunger, the need he is said to have to make everybody love him. Some of this quality, in a more restrained, sublimated form, is present, too, in Hillary Clinton—in her intense desire to win people over, in her exhaustive preparation, in her willingness to give everything she is capable of for every single vote. This is not Obama’s style at all. He doesn’t seem hungry. He seems to like people but not to need them. When most politicians speak to a crowd, they give the impression that that is what they live for; Obama at town-hall meetings appears engaged but not fervently so, as if there were several other things that he would be equally happy doing that day. He still has the speechmaking power that he displayed at the 2004 Convention, but for the most part he keeps it in reserve. Even at large rallies these days he doesn’t try to overwhelm—his eyes don’t flame, his hands remain unclenched and below his shoulders, he doesn’t go for a sudden conversion experience. (Sometimes his wife, Michelle, appears onstage with him, and this further dilutes the evangelical tone: the way Obama depicts Michelle in his books and speeches makes her sound like a sitcom wife, rolling her eyes at his excesses, affectionately taking him down a peg if he becomes pompous, humorously scolding him for not picking up his socks, and so her down-to-earth, TV presence undercuts his movie uplift.) Obama is, obviously, running for President: it’s not that he isn’t hungry for converts but that his way of courting them is subtle. When his speechwriter, Jon Favreau, who in 2004 wrote speeches for John Kerry, was interviewed for the job, Obama asked him what his theory of speechwriting was. “I didn’t have a grand theory in my pocket,” Favreau says, “but I told him, When I saw you at the Convention what really struck me was that you told a story from the beginning to the end of that speech—a story about your life, about how it fit in with the larger American story—and it built to a point where people wanted to applaud, rather than using forced applause lines. Democrats just haven’t done that. And Barack said, That’s exactly what I try to do.” That is Obama’s theory of speeches, and it seems, also, to be his theory of campaigning: don’t try to score huge points at every moment, don’t kill yourself for every vote—a campaign is a long, slow story, and you don’t want to exhaust your audience or yourself. “One weekend I was with him they were making a big deal about his school in Indonesia being a madrassa,” Valerie Jarrett says. “I said, ‘How could they have even run with this story? It’s so completely inaccurate!’ He said, ‘You know, we’ve contacted the school and the principal’s gonna explain what kind of a school it is and we’re gonna refute it all. You need to just calm down. This is gonna be fun! Valerie, you’re not a guy but let me explain it to you in sport terms. It’s like we’re in a basketball game, and I’m gonna fumble the ball, and someone’s gonna steal the ball, and I’m gonna miss a free throw, but we’re gonna win the game. You can’t get yourself worked up over every little thing that somebody says about me or you’re gonna go crazy.’ ” When Christopher Edley first met Obama, in law school, he decided that he would go far, because of his centeredness. Then when, later, he read Obama’s first book and saw how Obama had suspected and vivisected himself for so many years, he decided that he would go far because of that. “The capacity for self-reflection is in my experience invaluable for a candidate or a President,” he says. (Edley worked in the Carter and Clinton Administrations and for Dukakis’s campaign.) “It’s difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t been involved how tough a Presidential campaign is. When you spend day after day flying around the country in an aluminum tube at forty thousand feet, it’s the easiest thing in the world to lose yourself. And when every misstep becomes a thirty-six-hour media disaster there’s every reason to second-guess your instincts, so being sensitive to your strengths and weaknesses and having the courage to come to terms with them is helpful when you’re facing a crisis. I’ve seen candidates who, like a deer frozen in headlights, can’t find their way forward and have to be led around by staff. I’ve also seen candidates who, faced with adversity, turn into the stubbornest of mules and can’t adapt or adjust. Most candidates walk into the room asking everybody ‘How’m I doing? How’m I doing?,’ with no ability to look at themselves in the mirror. So the ability that Barack shows in the book to be brutally self-reflective—this is deep stuff.” “When he’s exhausted on day forty of the campaign fund-raising drive, in the grind of it, can he keep it up?” a friend says. “I think sometimes he feels phony to himself. He’s going to struggle with being the candidate, being a regular guy who has become a persona named Barack Obama. The persona is going to get larger and larger, and more and more distant from him and the way he used to live his life. We have a real live human being running for President here. He doesn’t have much experience in this kind of campaigning, and this is both his strength and his vulnerability.” |
Just as it’s about to celebrate four months of activity, the GT Sport Closed Beta Test will reportedly come to an end July 16.
The news comes from various beta players, with the first sign of a public announcement belonging to Twitter user fu_ko1221111.
The beta just received an update last week, introducing damage and consumables into the mix. These features were part of the newest public build, which was present at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. Pit stops appeared to have taken on a bigger role in the game, with players getting the option to repair various parts of their cars while in the garage. With the game’s esports focus, this should add an extra layer of strategy to races.
The GT Sport Closed Beta originally kicked off back in March. A month later, Polyphony Digital added European countries to the program, as well as South America. At the end of May, version 1.06 expanded into Asia and Oceania. While neither PD nor Sony have shared player figures, estimates peg the beta count somewhere in the four digit range.
If you have access to the beta, you’ll want to get some final seat time in before July 16. This may not be the end, however: during our interview with Kazunori Yamauchi at E3 2017, he dropped a hint that a second, more feature-rich beta could arrive. Yamauchi put a pin in August — so it may not be a long wait at all. Gamescom takes place at the tail end of next month, too…
Even if a second beta doesn’t appear, GT Sport is still scheduled to release in Fall 2017. The beta had a few dozen cars available across three classes: the final game will include 177 vehicles, adding rally cars and the ongoing Vision GT program to the mix. GT Sport will feature 19 locations with 27 track variations across them.
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According to an annex to the Minsk Protocol obtained by a newspaper, the area where the airport is located should have been transferred to Donetsk militia.
KIEV, January 25 (Sputnik) — The Donetsk airport, which has been under fire from Ukrainian forces, is located on the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic’s (DPR) side of the demarcation line outlined in the Minsk agreements, the Ukrainian Mirror Weekly newspaper reports.
According to an annex to the Minsk Protocol obtained by the newspaper, entitled “line of contact between the parties with reference to locality”, the area where the airport is located should have been transferred to Donetsk militia.
The fact that the airport has to be given to Donetsk militia “is supported by numbers – coordinates set forth in the annex to the [Minsk] Memorandum. Perhaps this is why this document has remained unpublished until now,” the newspaper’s international politics observer wrote.
According to the newspaper’s Kiev sources, the Minsk agreements envisioned that the airport would be transferred to DPR, however, this did not happen as the militia failed to transfer a number of locations to Kiev-led forces, the source said.
A ceasefire agreement and a memorandum outlining the ceasefire’s implementation were signed in September 2014 during meetings of the trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, which comprises representatives from Ukraine, Russia and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Both sides have subsequently reported numerous ceasefire violations.
The Donetsk airport has long been a hotspot for fighting between Ukrainian forces and local independence supporters. Fighting intensified last week, with Kiev officially acknowledging that a major security operation was being carried out at the airport. The renewed shelling has destroyed nearby homes and infrastructure. |
Celerina Santos is still waiting for her husband to come home.
It's been two years since he and nine other men set off from their small village on the southwest coast of Mexico, hunting for a cheap used van for their ecotourism project.
The community spent all they had on a group of cabins, restaurants and boats they had built on the shore of the Pacific, hoping to attract tourists and provide work for the impoverished village.
The van would be the final part of the jigsaw, bringing visitors to the community.
The ten men made the long journey north to Matamoros, a city long famous for cheap vehicles, and more recently known for barbaric drug violence and kidnappings. Celerina's husband Nemorio phoned to tell her they had arrived safely.
When she called the following day, the line was dead. The men never came back.
'Authorities have never helped us'
The village they left behind lies by the side of a long dirt track which eventually widens out to a solitary, white-sanded beach.
Small, rudimentary houses are scattered between thick vegetation; the only sound that interrupts the silence is the crashing of the waves.
Here money is scarce. The village had invested heavily in the tourism project. But when their husbands went missing, the wives took what little they had left and set off searching for their men.
"The truth is that in these two years we've been alone. The authorities have never helped us, neither economically or in the search for our husbands" - Celerina Santos, wife of missing man
They talked to officials in government offices, searched prisons and visited morgues across the country.
They've sold off belongings to finance the search, including six of the boats they bought for the ecotourism project, and have bounced from state to state, following dead-end clues and red herrings handed to them by the same state investigators meant to help them.
After two years of constant journeys, and little to show for it, Celerina feels abandoned by the authorities.
"The truth is that in these two years we've been alone. The authorities have never helped us, neither economically or in the search for our husbands," she said.
'Bodies mounting up'
Twenty-four thousand people have been reported missing, according to Mexico’s Human Rights Commission, many trapped in the battle between organised crime groups and the government.
Relatives echo Celerina’s story, saying that when they turn to the authorities, they find them unwilling or unable to help.
Al Jazeera tried to get basic details on the case of the missing men from Zapotengo, but our repeated calls and emails to the Tamaulipas and Oaxaca state attorneys offices, as well as the federal attorneys office, went unanswered.
Whilst outgoing president Felipe Calderon’s administration has tried to tackle the problem of organised crime by pouring money into the Federal Police and its armed forces, the task of helping the victims of the violence has not figured high on the list of priorities.
Mexico's top human rights official says that almost 16,000 bodies are still to be identified, but after six years of bodies mounting up, the federal government has only just opened its first dedicated forensic centre, which can hold a maximum of 150 bodies.
Although it has now been operational for nearly a month, it has yet to receive a single corpse; it has no powers to order Mexico's 32 states to send it their unidentified bodies, and none of them have yet offered.
'Human rights have been ignored'
Lack of co-operation between state and federal authorities has frequently been blamed for the failure to find those lost among the violence in the country.
To try to close the gap, Calderon last year pledged to create a national database for missing persons that investigators from all states could use to track the disappeared - but so far it has failed to materialize.
Federal officials told Al Jazeera they still don't know when it will be finished.
Amnesty International spokesman Daniel Zapico says Mexico's inability to address the issue shows a general lack of political will.
"For us it is very clear. We need to put human rights in the agenda as one of the main issues in this situation," he said.
"Human rights have been ignored by this government and also at the local and state level."
New administration
It remains to be seen if this will change with incoming president Enrique Peña Nieto.
The list of more than 200 pledges from his new administration does not mention the victims of the violence, and he has given little indication of what steps he will take to improve their situation.
The list of necessities is a long one.
"Human rights have been ignored by this government and also at the local and state level" - Daniel Zapico, Amnesty International
The majority of Mexico's states don't have the technology to do DNA testing and crime scenes are regularly tainted by untrained investigators.
Many relatives of those disappeared think twice before going to local police forces, often fearing local officials may be in the pay of those who murdered their loved ones.
Peña Nieto has talked of reforming and retraining police, just as his predecessor did. But rooting out corruption among badly paid and frequently uneducated local police has proved to be easier said than done.
All of which leaves Celerina without hope that the authorities will be able to find her husband. And she says that without help she can do no more.
"We can’t go on. We are worn out, we've abandoned our children searching for their fathers, spent the money we don't have," she said.
"Although we feel they are still alive, that one day we’ll see them again ... some day."
It is a hope that alternatively sustains and tortures the thousands of Mexicans who still do not know the fate of their loved ones. |
Jan Markell dedicated her radio program last weekend to replaying a talk that California pastor Jack Hibbs gave to a conference she hosted in Minneapolis last fall.
In the talk, Hibbs warned evangelical Christians against seeking interfaith understanding with Muslims, saying, “Islam is today is being embraced by so-called evangelical churches announcing that we worship the same god and they’re our brothers. Listen: That is not only false, it is a demonic doctrine being propagated by heretics.”
He went on to explain that Satan is using Islam as a “vehicle” in the Last Days before the return of Christ, and that Allah is simply the ancient “moon god” Baal, which is why Islam is represented by a crescent moon.
“Now look, you may hold that view today simply because maybe you’re not a heretic, but you might be ignorant that this is a war against an ancient doctrine, an ancient god with a little ‘g,’ and ancient system that used to go around by the name of Baal,” he said. “It is the moon god of the ancient Babylonian empire. Babylon had 360 gods. The chief god was the moon god. Don’t you think it’s interesting that all around the world, mosques have a moon symbol, a crescent on top of their buildings?” |
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — The owner of a popular independent Bay Area bookstore is suing the California attorney general, claiming that a new state law regulating the sale of autographed books violates his civil rights.
For over four decades, Book Passage has been holding author readings and selling autographed books.
From its locations in the San Francisco Ferry Building, Sausalito and Corte Madera, Book Passage hosts over 700 book-signing events annually.
Under the new law, booksellers must provide a certificate of authenticity for all autographed books. This must include information about the person who signed the book, the identity of witnesses to the book signing, and the identity of the person from whom the bookseller obtained the book, as well as insurance information. The bookseller must then keep these records for seven years or potentially face fines.
The law expands existing regulations to address the issue of counterfeit sports memorabilia, but also applies to books and other collectibles.
Co-owner Bill Petrocelli says the new law violates his constitutional rights. The Oakland native received a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley prior to becoming an author and bookseller.
He actually worked at the California Attorney General’s Office after graduation.
On Thursday, Petrocelli’s lawyer filed a civil rights complaint against Attorney General Xavier Becerra claiming that the autograph law infringes on his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
The complaint alleges Book Passage and Petrocelli “are threatened with onerous compliance obligations and potentially ruinous fines if they continue to sell autographed books” as they have for the past four decades.
Petrocelli maintains that not only does the law violate the First Amendment by burdening bookstores’ ability to disseminate books, but that it also violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The complaint alleges that the law “imposes its onerous burdens on booksellers while irrationally and arbitrarily exempting pawn shops and certain online retailers.”
The California Attorney General’s Office told CBS San Francisco that they are reviewing the complaint.
UPDATE: On Oct. 12, 2017, Governor Jerry Brown approved the passage of AB 228, excluding works of fine art, furniture, decorative objects and signed books from the definition of an autographed collectible.
By Hannah Albarazi – Follow her on Twitter: @hannahalbarazi. |
Talk of machine guns & surveillance spooks hotel guests
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
The Bilderberg Group has launched an unprecedented security crackdown on the eve of tomorrow’s secretive confab of global power brokers, with guests at the Westfields Marriott Washington Dulles hotel being intimidated by talk of machine guns and high-tech surveillance.
Video streaming by Ustream
Police tell Alex Jones and crew to leave the hotel.
Surveying the scene at the hotel today, radio host Alex Jones described a chaotic picture, with Bilderberg security, including a particularly vocal Swedish woman, stomping around the building announcing that “machine gun nests” were being set up in anticipation of a deluge of protesters arriving over the next few days.
Given the fact that a record number of demonstrators are expected to attend, Bilderberg has been more stringent than ever before in its efforts to get people out of the way, telling customers who had made room reservations for two days before the start of the conference that their bookings would not be honored.
Undercover Fairfax police, secret service, hotel security, as well as diplomatic service personnel are all now rushing to finalize preparations for the arrival of Bilderberg members tomorrow morning.
According to London Guardian journalist Charlie Skelton, conference organizers were also using iPhones to film guests who had arrived for brunch. Regular guests as well as journalists are also having background checks run against their names.
Alex Jones also heard discussions between members of Bilderberg security about how sophisticated surveillance equipment using satellites was being used to tap phones of prominent activists and media personalities set to cover the event.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
{openx:74}
Although well over a thousand people have signaled their intention to attend the protest, Bilderberg only expects around 500 to be in place at any one time.
Alex Jones himself was contacted yesterday by Bryan Stolz, Director of Hotel Operations at Marriott International, who told Jones that his room booking was cancelled and that he and his crew would be banned from entering the premises of the hotel.
People who are already staying at the hotel have had letters delivered to their rooms ordering them to leave the premises before noon on Thursday.
We are also expecting to receive details of Bilderberg’s 2012 agenda within the next few hours. One topic of discussion already confirmed to be up for debate will be ecological issues and Agenda 21 – part of Bilderberg’s efforts to usher in a post-industrial revolution.
*********************
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News. |
Booking.com
A Gray Jay in Algonquin Provincial Park
Bob and I spent three days skiing and hiking on various trails in Algonquin Provincial Park, in Ontario, trying to make the most of the last weeks of winter here in Ontario. We love to go looking for birds and animals, but in this case, on the Opeongo Road, the Gray Jay came looking for us.
The drive in from Highway 60 took us past a frozen marsh bisected by a good-sized stream. A day earlier, the inky black waters were flowing freely, but a severely cold overnight temperature had solidified the water to a glassy, windswept surface.
Someone had provided an offering of bird food at the edge of the small parking lot, but a fresh snowfall had rendered the seeds difficult to find. Nevertheless, Black-capped Chickadees as well as Red-breasted Nuthatches were repeatedly returning to the modest scattering of seeds, while a Gray Jay sat obscurely on a branch above all the activity.
Bob and I promptly removed some peanuts and sunflower seeds from our knapsack, to try to entice the Gray Jay to eat out of our hand. Gray Jays are also referred to as Grey Jays, Canada Jays and Whiskey Jacks.
Gray Jays typically have fluffy plumage, a short bill, and a long tail. Being a very frigid and windy morning, the Gray Jay was puffed up against the cold to try to maintain its body heat.
As you see in Bob’s short video, the Gray Jay did not mind the cold windy weather.
As we observed the Gray Jay, it took on the task of preening its feathers. I was able to observe a red band around one leg when a ray of sunshine peeked through the clouds.
Gray Jays typically live in coniferous and mixed wood forests where there are Black, White or Engelmann Spruce trees, or Jack or Lodgepole Pine trees. These particular types of trees enable Gray Jays to store food up in under the pliable scales of bark where it will remain dry and well-concealed. Cold temperatures are also a requirement for the preservation of their perishable food.
A curious Red Squirrel scoured the ground looking for scraps before sampling one of Bob’s peanuts in the shell.
In the meantime, a second Gray Jay appeared and swooped in for some of the black oil sunflower seeds laying on the ground. We were able to distinguish it from the other bird because this one had a yellow band on its leg.
A friend of our family, Dan Strickland, has been studying Gray Jays in Canada since 1967. From 1979 to 2000, Dan was Chief Park Naturalist in Algonquin Provincial Park, and has a long list of other wildlife that he has studied over the years.
During those years, Dan has done major research on Gray Jays, work that still continues. Today, Dan is considered the world’s leading expert on Gray Jays, and according to “The Science Behind Algonquin’s Animals“, his and Algonquin Provincial Park’s research into Gray Jays “is now considered one of the world’s longest-running investigations of a population of color-banded birds”.
As Bob patiently waited for one of the Gray Jays to feed from his hand, a Red-breasted Nuthatch (Sitta canadensis) perched briefly on one of his fingers and quickly selected several small pieces of broken nuts.
Gray Jays are notoriously friendly and curious, and often will follow hikers along a trail, begging for treats along the way.
Eventually Bob succeeded in enticing one of the Gray Jays to take food from his uplifted palm, but I was not quick enough to snap a photo. The other Gray Jay, however, was content to remain on its perch. Perhaps it had already eaten well earlier that morning.
As Bob and I drove back towards Highway 60, we scanned the frozen marsh and stream for any evidence of the Pine Marten and the otters that live there. They both eluded us that day.
In our next blog posting, we hike on the Beaver Pond Trail in Algonquin Provincial Park, in search of wild Otters.
Meanwhile, the cold wind continued to whip up the snow, and winter seemed far from over.
You May Also Enjoy:
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Cow Moose and Calf winter in Algonquin Provincial Park
Eastern Screech Owl: A Master of Disguise In Burlington, Ontario
Among the Winged Magic at El Rosario Monarch Butterfly Reserve in Mexico
Our South African Journey to Kruger National Park
Visiting Machu Picchu, Our Long Time Dream
Exploring The Cliff Dwellings At Mesa Verde National Park
Drombeg Stone Circle, Our Visit To The Druid’s Altar
Black Bear Mom And Cubs Eat Blueberries In Algonquin Park
Gray Treefrogs at Lower Reesor Pond in Toronto
Scarlet Tanagers at Ashbridge’s Bay Park In Toronto
Frame To Frame – Bob and Jean
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"I am the only one who knows who the finalists are!” Donald Trump tweeted Tuesday night. | AP Photo Trump shoots down reports that his transition is in disarray
Donald Trump pushed back against the notion that his week-old presidential transition team has devolved into a “knife fight,” writing on Twitter that he is overseeing a “very organized process.”
That process, which involves making thousands of political appointments before Trump takes office next January, has reportedly been fraught thus far with power struggles between influential members of the Manhattan billionaire’s team. And while he has made just two appointments so far, Reince Priebus as his chief of staff and Steve Bannon as his chief strategist, rumors continue to swirl about the avalanche of names reportedly under consideration for cabinet posts.
Story Continued Below
“Very organized process taking place as I decide on Cabinet and many other positions. I am the only one who knows who the finalists are!” Trump wrote on Twitter Tuesday night.
But one insider told POLITICO that the transition is "an absolute knife fight," with multiple people jockeying for positions.
Trump continued his defense into Wednesday morning, tweeting "Australia, New Zealand, and more. I am always available to them. @nytimes is just upset that they looked like fools in their coverage of me" — a shot at the New York Times' story published Tuesday that reported U.S. allies had no contacts with Trump and were "blindly dialing in to Trump Tower to try to reach the soon-to-be-leader of the free world."
Trump also tweeted Wednesday morning that he isn't trying to get his children "top level" security clearances, saying it was "a typically false news story," It wasn't clear if he also included his son-in-law Jared Kushner along his children. Kushner has been a close adviser to Trump and is believed to be under consideration for a White House position.
Trump spokesman Jason Miller said on CNN Wednesday that the president-elect tweeted because he's trying to set the record straight and he's "not going to be confined by the media norms."
He added that there's a clear structure in place for the transition team and that internally the staff is calm. He also blamed some of the "palace intrigue" on people who are bitter for not being tapped for certain positions. He also said that he and Kushner were laughing this morning when they read some of the news reports about the infighting within Trump's transition team.
"This whole description of the knife fight, or this internal fighting. Nothing could be further from the truth," he said.
Two names floated for perhaps the highest profile cabinet post, that of secretary of state, have already drawn heavy scrutiny. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is believed to be a front-runner for the job, but he has little foreign policy experience and has done paid consulting work for foreign governments that would create a conflict of interest if he was appointed to the job.
Former United Nations ambassador John Bolton has also been rumored to be under consideration, prompting Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to promise to “do whatever it takes to stop someone like John Bolton being secretary of state.”
Trump also broke with presidential protocol Tuesday night when he left behind the pool of reporters covering him to go have dinner at a Manhattan steakhouse. His campaign press secretary Hope Hicks said she was not aware that the president-elect had left Trump Tower and that she would not do anything to “leave the press in the dark” even though the Manhattan billionaire has evaded pool coverage in the past and did not allow reporters to travel on his plane with him during the campaign, something past candidates have done. |
Research by the US Fish and Wildlife Service has found that laundered profits from the illegal drug trade contribute to deforestation along smuggling routes in Central America.
Steven Sesnie, an ecologist and the lead author of the research, says the drug economy is threatening some of the most remote, biodiverse forests in Central America — and the people who have lived there for thousands of years.
Drug profits are used, in many cases, to purchase land deep in the forest for cattle ranching. The beef can then be sold legally and the proceeds made to look like the result of a legitimate commercial enterprise. This has led to the destruction of about 1 million acres of Central American forest over the last decade, a process Sesnie calls “narco-deforestation.”
Related: Drug traffickers are wiping out the jaguar in Central America
Sesnie’s research covered all of Central America, but focused more intently on a few countries where researchers spotted higher rates of deforestation and larger patches of cleared forest. These areas, especially Honduras and Guatemala, corresponded with areas of high-volume cocaine trafficking. Sesnie’s team arrived at the 1 million acre figure by combining a newly released data set on global forest change with information from a counternarcotics database, which quantifies how much cocaine per year is being transported to certain countries and the volume of drugs seized, lost or delivered.
Most cocaine production occurs in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia, but 86 percent of the cocaine that arrives in the US is currently transported through Central America, which generates huge profits for local traffickers.
“That leaves a lot of money in these places, and this money is often invested in other illegal activities or illegal land markets,” Sesnie explains. “Eventually, [this] allows that money to be legitimized or transferred into the legal economy. That's the nexus of where the deforestation occurs. It's an agricultural driver, but underneath it is an effort to launder these illegal profits.”
The deforestation is occurring mainly in remote areas along the Caribbean coast of Central America, Sesnie says.
“These are really the last large expanses of lowland, highly diverse tropical forests that are also inhabited by indigenous groups who are primarily the stewards of these areas,” he explains. “They are fishermen, hunters and small-share farmers who have lived in these spaces for many thousands of years. Oftentimes, they engage in land clearing, but that has been traditionally a shifting cultivation, in which small areas are cleared and then left to rest. In tropical forest settings, things can recover quite quickly.”
Sesnie says the relationship between the indigenous communities and the traffickers is "interesting and not always a bad one.” Often, the traffickers provide sources of employment that weren't previously available and some have even been known to provide health benefits, he explains.
Money from illegal trafficking also gets invested in other ways, Sesnie says: ecotourism, hotels, African palm plantations, other forms of agriculture — even shade-grown coffee. But, while the traffickers “may be fulfilling an economic development role, that can also bring a great deal of violence,” he adds.
“Murder rates in these areas have risen sharply. [Drug trafficking] can bring a lot of social and health problems with it,” he says. “As these drugs flow through these remote areas, they're also consumed. So, it's really a double-edged sword. More often than not, there can be a great deal of harm and violence that also occur in these very remote spaces.”
This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI’s Living on Earth with Steve Curwood. |
An Australian backpacker was left shocked after she was told she could not rent a flat in Edinburgh because people from her country are 'drunks and racists'.
Laura Gratton, 24, saw the £400-a-month room advertised online and inquired about the possibility of living there having recently moved to Scotland for the first time.
But the landlord turn down her request straight away - saying that 'it is well known that Australians are racist' and she would therefore not be a good housemate.
And after Miss Gratton - who is working in a restaurant in Edinburgh - pointed out that she is friends with people from all around the world, the man again insisted that 'Australia is the most racist nation'.
Rejected: Backpacker Laura Gratton was told she couldn't rent a flat in Edinburgh because she is Australian
Advert: The traveller saw this notice posted on spareroom.co.uk and responded to it
The backpacker, originally from Melbourne, moved to Scotland after visiting Edinburgh for a weekend and falling in love with the historic city instantly.
She has been travelling around different countries for years, and was previously working in London after securing a two-year UK visa.
Miss Gratton saw the flat advertised on spareroom.co.uk, offering a room in a shared house in the centre of Edinburgh, and sent a message to the landlord to express his interest.
The man replied: 'Hi Laura, it is well known in Europe that Australians are racist. In fact around the world your people are famous for this.
'Just as France is famous for wine and cheese. Australia is famous for its drunks and racists. I'm sorry I need to reject this request.'
Response: The landlord sent Miss Gratton these two messages telling her Australians are 'drunks and racists'
Travels: The keen backpacker is travelling the word including a stop in London
Globetrotter: She has also snapped keepsake photographs and landmarks around the world, and is pictured her in Paris
Outraged at the response, Miss Gratton wrote to him saying: 'You obviously are quite racist putting such labels and speculations on a whole race without knowing the individual.
'The majority of my closest friends are from across the globe so would hate to think I'm racist. So thank you for rejecting this email, I don't think we would get along at all. And I suggest you actually visit Australia and realise how multicultural we are.'
But the landlord then sent her a link to a news report about racism in Australia, adding: 'Hi, I'm not judging a whole race. I don't want to take the risk. It is fact Australia is the most racist nation, your people are so open about it as well.
'This is what you Australians are known for in Europe. I think we would still get along by the way. Anyway, good luck.'
Miss Gratton said afterwards: 'When I first received the response I thought it was just a joke but then I realised that he was being serious.
Adventurous: Miss Gratton with an Italian friend posing for a picture together in Stockholm
'I was angry and frustrated that someone could think like this and say it to me just because of where I was from.
'Australia is a multi-cultural and very accepting country. There are race issues like any other country - but the actions of a few shouldn't be used to judge anyone from that country.
'This was my first encounter of such strong negative and offensive stereotyping on my travels. I have heard the odd joke about drinking to do with Australians or Irish people but it has only ever been jokes among friends, never anything intended to hurt like this.'
No joke: Ms Gratton said she could not believe the response at first but was offended when it turned out to be real
A spokesman for spareroom.co.uk added: 'If we'd spotted anything like this in someone's ad we'd have removed it instantly.
'Dismissing a whole nation as racist is, frankly, ridiculous. There are clear laws about discrimination when it comes to renting rooms but it's not just about what is and isn't legal - it's about treating people as you'd want them to treat you.' |
Targeted Expression of OptoA 2A R and MAPK Signaling by OptoA 2A R Activation in the Striatopallidal Neurons
Two weeks after the injection of AAV5-EF1α-DIO-mCherry-optoA 2A R and its control vector into the striatum of the adora2a-Cre mice (Figure 1a), we verified the selective expression of optoA 2A R in the striatopallidal neurons. Quantitative analysis of double immunofluorescence staining result indicated that 88% of mCherry (optoA 2A R-mCherry)-positive cells were colocalized with encephalin (a marker for the striatopallidal neurons), whereas only 17% mCherry-positive cells were colocalized with substance-P (a marker for the striatonigral neurons) in the striatum (Figure 1b). Representative double-immunofluorescence staining images illustrated the colocalization of optoA 2A R-mCherry with enkephalin but not substance-P (Figure 1c). Furthermore, the red (mCherry) fluorescence was specifically expressed in the terminals of the striatopallidal neurons in the globus pallidus, but was absent in the terminals of striatonigral neurons in the substantia nigra pars reticularta where substance P are highly expressed (Figure 1d). These results confirmed the selective expression of optoA 2A R in the striatopallidal neurons. Moreover, optoA 2A R stimulation in the striatum for 5 min induced p-MAPK in the mCherry-positive cells underneath the optic fiber (Figure 1e) in a similar pattern as the A 2A R agonist CGS21680. Quantified analysis showed that light-induced p-MAPK activation was detected in 57% mCherry-optoA 2A R-positive cells (n=1218 from 4 mice). Thus, optoA 2A R and CGS21680 produced indistinguishable p-MAPK signaling in the striatum.
Figure 1 Targeted expression and phospho-MAPK (p-MAPK) signaling of optoA 2A R in striatopallidal neurons. (a) Schematic illustration of the optoA 2A R chimera construction by replacing the intracellular loops 1, 2, and 3 and C terminal of the bovine rhodopsin with that of the adenosine A 2A receptor (A 2A R) to achieve control of A 2A R signaling by 473 nm light (left panel). Representative fluorescent image shows the expression of mCherry-optoA 2A R in the striatum after injection of AAV5-DIO-mCherry-optoA 2A R to adora2a-cre mice for 2 weeks (right panel). (b) The quantitative data shows that 88% mCherry-positive cells (n=114, from four mice) were colocalized with enkephalin (ENK), whereas only 17% mCherry-positive cells (n=106, from four mice) were colocalized with substance P (SP). (c) Double immunostaining with the mCherry and the specific antibodies (ENK or SP) showed that optoA 2A Rs were specifically expressed in ENK-positive striatopallidal neurons (white arrows, upper panels) but not SP-positive striatonigral neurons (yellow arrows, lower panels). (d) Following injection of AAV-DIO-mCherry-optoA 2A R virus in the dorsomedial striatum (DMS) of adora2a-cre mice, the mCherry fluorescence of striatopallidal projection terminals was specifically expressed in the global pallidum (GP) but not in the substantia nigra pars reticulate (SNr). The green fluorescence of striatonigral projection terminals containing endogenous SP was specifically expressed in the SNr. (e) The expression of p-MAPK was induced by optoA 2A R stimulation (white arrows, left panels) or CGS21680 injection (white arrows, right panels). Quantified analysis showed that light-induced p-MAPK activation was detected in 57% mCherry-optoA 2A R-positive cells (n=1218 from four mice). Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
Optogenetic Activation of Striatopallidal A 2A R Signaling in the DMS, Precisely at (but not Randomly in Relation to) the Time of the Reward, Suppressed Goal-Directed Behavior
To determine the effect of optoA 2A R signaling in the DMS and DLS on goal-directed and habitual actions using a satiety-based instrumental learning paradigm, we first performed an devaluation time-course study to select specific RI training schedule that were most likely sensitive to bidirectional manipulation of the A 2A R activity in the DMS and DLS. Devaluation test revealed that after the CFRRI30RI60 training, mice showed a clear goal-directed behavior on the 3rd day, developed habitual behavior on the 4th day, and became a stable habitual behavior on the 5th day after RI60 training (Supplementary Figure 1). Since the mice on the 4th day of RI60 schedule were at the transition period from goal-directed to habitual behavior and were most sensitive to bidirectional manipulation of A 2A Rs in the DMS and DLS, we used the RI60 training for 4 days for the rest of the experiments.
We verified that the locations of the optical fiber implantation sites and expression of optoA 2A R were restricted to the DMS by immunofluorescence (Figure 2a). At the RI sessions, we used the ‘time-locked’ method to deliver optoA 2A R stimulation (for 2 s per reward) precisely at the time of reward delivery (Figure 2b). Mice with ‘light off’ serviced as controls. All mice gradually increased their lever pressing rates to obtain reward and reached the lever pressing plateau at the second day of RI training. There was no main effect of optoA 2A R stimulation (F 1,14 =0.371, p>0.05) nor optoA 2A R stimulation × RI training course interaction effect (F 5,70 =0.098, p>0.05) by repeated-measures ANOVA. Thus, optogenetic activation of the striatopallidal A 2A R signaling in the DMS did neither impair lever pressing performance nor affect acquisition of instrumental learning (Figure 2c).
Figure 2 ‘Time-locked’ but not random optogenetic activation of striatopallidal adenosine A 2A receptor (A 2A R) signaling in the dorsomedial striatum (DMS) suppresses goal-directed behavior. (a) Left panel: Schematic illustration of the locations of the fiber tips for each animal in the ‘light-off’ group (the red triangles) and ‘time-locked’ activation group (the blue circles). Right panel: Typical coronal section of mCherry-optoA 2A R expression in the DMS of adora2a-cre(+) mice. The white arrow indicates the optical fiber tip. (b) Schematic illustration of timing of lever pressing, sucrose reward delivery, and optical stimulation. Light stimulation (the blue flash) was delivered to the DMS during a 2-s period in ‘time-locked’ manner with (the flashes between the two red dotted vertical lines) or in ‘random’ manner with (the flashes in the random interval periods) reward delivery (the liquid drops). (c) Two groups of mice expressing optoA 2A R in the DMS were subjected to either ‘time-locked’ light stimulation or ‘light off’ (n=8 per group) during the random interval (RI) training session (as indicated by the blue bar). The two groups performed indistinguishably in the acquisition phase of instrumental learning by repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA)—RI period × optoA 2A R stimulation interaction effect: F 5,70 =0.098, p>0.05; optoA 2A R stimulation main effect: F 1,14 =0.371, p>0.05. (d) Following the RI training sessions, a 2-day devaluation test without any experimental (optoA 2A R activation) manipulation was conducted as described in the Materials and Methods section. Mice without optoA 2A R activation during the RI training sessions significantly reduced their lever presses in devalued condition compared with valued condition (normalized devaluation: t 1,7 =6.861, ***p<0.001, preplanned t-test). By contrast, mice with optoA 2A R ‘time-locked’ stimulation showed no significant devaluation effect (normalized devaluation: t 1,7 =0.709, p>0.05, preplanned t-test). However, there was no normalized devaluation × optoA 2A R interaction effect by repeated-measures ANOVA analysis (F 1,14 =0.429, P=0.523). (e) We further performed instrumental behavioral analyses of a separate set of four experimental groups: mice expressing mCherry with ‘time-locked’ light stimulation (n=7), mice expressing optoA 2A R with ‘light off’ (n=9), mice expressing optoA 2A R with ‘time-locked’ light stimulation (n=8), and mice expressing optoA 2A R with random light stimulation (n=8). Consistent with the result in (c) repeated-measures ANOVA analysis indicated that there was neither between-subject effect (F 3,28 =1.481, p=0.241) nor RI training sessions × manipulation groups interaction effect (F 15,140 =1.284, p=0.220) in the acquisition phase. (f) Repeated-measures ANOVA analyses of the devaluation test revealed that there was significant effect of optogenetic manipulation × (normalized) devaluation interaction effect: F 3,28 =3.258, p=0.036. Similarly, the simple main-effect analyses of the devaluation test in four groups indicated that only mice with optoA 2A R expression in the DMS and time-locked light stimulation performed habitually, whereas other groups displayed goal-directed behavior (simple effect analyses: F 1,8 =7.141, *p<0.05 for ‘light off’ and F 1,7 =6.074, *p<0.05 for ‘random’ stimulation groups, and F 1,6 =16.050, **p<0.01 for mCherry group). Data are presented as the mean±SEM. The color reproduction of this figure is available on the Neuropsychopharmacology journal online. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
The devaluation test (Figure 2d) revealed that there was no normalized devaluation × optoA 2A R interaction effect (F 1,14 =0.429, p=0.523) by repeated-measures ANOVA. However, preplanned t-test showed that the optoA 2A R mice with ‘light off’ displayed a goal-directed behavior with sensitivity to devalued reward (t 1,7 =6.861, ***p<0.001, n=8). The goal-directed behavior in the ‘light-off’ group probably reflects unstable (transient) nature of instrumental behavior for the 4-day RI60 training schedule and might be partially attributed to the relatively low level of lever pressing in this group (and the total rewards received) when the optical fiber implanted in the DMS compared with other experimental groups. Importantly the optoA 2A R with ‘time-locked’ stimulation during the RI sessions failed to show sensitivity to outcome devaluation (preplanned t-test, t 1,7 =0.709, p>0.05, n=8), indicating that their responding was habitual.
To better define the temporal importance of optoA 2A R signaling precisely at the time of reward and to exclude the nonspecific effect caused by light, we have performed behavioral analyses with separate set of four experimental groups: mice expressing mCherry with ‘time-locked’ light stimulation (n=7), mice expressing optoA 2A R with ‘light off’ (n=9), mice expressing optoA 2A R with ‘time-locked’ light stimulation (n=8), and mice expressing optoA 2A R with ‘random’ (n=8) light stimulation. The light stimulation scheme was illustrated in Figure 2b. Consistent with the result in Figure 2c, there was neither between-subject effect (F 3,28 =1.481, p=0.241) nor RI training sessions × manipulation groups interaction effect (F 15,140 =1.284, p=0.220) in the acquisition phase by repeated-measures ANOVA (Figure 2e). However, analyses of the devaluation test (Figure 2f) revealed that there was a significant effect of optogenetic manipulation × (normalized) devaluation interaction effect (repeated-measures ANOVA, F 3,28 =3.258, p=0.036). The simple main-effect analyses of the devaluation test, respectively, in each group confirmed that only mice with optoA 2A R expression in the DMS and time-locked light stimulation performed habitually (F 1,8 =7.141, *p<0.05 for light off and F 1,7 =6.074, *p<0.05 for random stimulation groups, F 1,6 =16.050, **p<0.01 for mCherry group). Taken together, statistical analyses of both sets of the experiments (Figure 2d by the preplanned t-test and Figure 2f by the repeated-measures ANOVA) support that optogenetic activation of striatopallidal A 2A R signaling in the DMS modulated the mode of instrumental behaviors by acting precisely at the time of the reward.
Optogenetic Activation of Striatopallidal A 2A R Signaling in the DLS had Relatively Limited Effects on Habitual Formation
Next, we examined the effect of optoA 2A R signaling in the DLS on instrumental behaviors. Similarly, we confirmed the optical fiber implantation sites and expression of optoA 2A R to be restricted to DLS by immunofluorescence (Figure 3a). Following the RI training sessions, optoA 2A R mice with ‘light off’ (n=10) or with ‘time-locked’ stimulation (n=13) gradually increased lever presses. There was no main effect of optoA 2A R stimulation (F 1,21 =0.156, p>0.05) and no interaction effect of training session × optoA 2A R stimulation in the RI sessions (F 5,105 =0.916, p>0.05) by repeated-measures ANOVA (Figure 3b). After the 4th day of RI60 training, repeated-measures ANOVA analyses of the devaluation test revealed that there was no optogenetic manipulations × normalized devaluation interaction effect (F 1,21 =0.022, p=0.884). However, the preplanned t-test showed that optoA 2A R mice with ‘time-locked’ stimulation tended to perform goal-directed behavior (normalized devaluation test, t 1,12 =3.725, **p<0.01 (Figure 3c); devaluation test, t 1,12 =2.030, p>0.05 (Supplementary Figure 2c)). Conversely, optoA 2A R mice with ‘light off’ displayed habitual behavior (normalized devaluation test, t 1,9 =1.270, p>0.05 (Figure 3c); devaluation test, t 1,9 =1.868, p>0.05 (Supplementary Figure 2c)). Thus, optogenetic activation of striatopallidal A 2A R signaling in the DLS tended to promote goal-directed behavior, but its effect was relatively limited.
Figure 3 Optogenetic activation of striatopallidal adenosine A 2A receptor (A 2A R) signaling in the dorsolateral striatum (DLS) exerts relatively limited and possibly opposite control over habitual action compared with the optoA 2A R in the dorsomedial striatum (DMS). (a) Left: Schematic illustration of the sites of optical fibers implantation. Right: A representative image of mCherry-optoA 2A R expression and fiber implantation. (b) Mice were under continuous reinforcement (CRF) training followed by RI30 and then RI60 training with or without optoA 2A R stimulation as described in the Materials and Methods section. The performances of optoA 2A R mice with ‘time-locked’ stimulation (n=13) or with ‘light off’ (n=10) during the acquisition phase were indistinguishable (repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA), random interval (RI) training course × optogenetic stimulation interaction: F 5,105 =0.916, p>0.05; optoA 2A R stimulation main effect: F 1,21 =0.156, p>0.05). (c) OptoA 2A R mice with ‘time-locked’ stimulation or ‘light off’ during the RI training sessions were subjected to devaluation test as described in the Materials and Methods section. Repeated-measures ANOVA analyses revealed that there was no normalized devaluation × optogenetic stimulation interaction effect (F 1,21 =0.022, p=0.884). However, preplanned t-test analysis revealed that optoA 2A R mice receiving ‘time-locked’ stimulation tended to perform goal-directed behavior (only for the normalized devaluation test: t 1,12 =3.725, **p<0.01; but not for devaluation test: t 1,12 =2.030, p>0.05; Supplementary Figure 2c). Whereas optoA 2A R mice with ‘light off’ displayed habitual behavior (normalized devaluation test: t 1,9 =1.270, p>0.05; devaluation test: t 1,9 =1.868, p>0.05; Supplementary Figure 2c). Data are presented as the mean±SEM. The color reproduction of this figure is available on the Neuropsychopharmacology journal online. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
Knockdown of A 2A Rs in the DMS Enhanced Goal-Directed Behavior, Whereas Knockdown of the A 2A Rs in the DLS had a Limited Effect on Habitual Behavior
We further evaluated the effects of focal knockdown of the A 2A Rs in the DMS and DLS on instrumental learning. Figures 4a and 5a provided representative outline of the AAV transfection and A 2A R focal knockdown areas of the DMS and DLS. Fluorescent images showed that A 2A Rs expression (the red fluorescence) was reduced selectively in the Cre-expressing regions (indicated by green fluorescence). Quantitative analysis of the A 2A R immunoreactivity (Figures 4b and 5b) confirmed selective knockdown of A 2A Rs in the DMS (by 91%) and DLS (by 94%) after transfection with AAV-Cre-zsGreen only in A 2A Rflox/flox mice but not in WT mice (A 2A R+/+).
Figure 4 Focal knockdown of adenosine A 2A receptors (A 2A Rs) in the dorsomedial striatum (DMS) enhances goal-directed behavior. (a) Left: Schematic illustration of the maximal (black) and minimal (gray) A 2A R knockdown areas in the DMS. Right: Representative immunofluorescent photomicrographs show focal knockdown expression of A 2A Rs in the DMS after injection of AAV-Cre-zsGreen into the A 2A R(flox/flox) (right panels) and A 2A R(+/+) mice (left panels). Intensity of A 2A Rs (red) were significantly deceased in the overlapping area with zsGreen expression (the yellow circle) in A 2A R(flox/flox) mice but not in A 2A R(+/+) mice. (b) Quantitative analysis showed that A 2A R expression were markedly reduced in the virus-transfected regions of A 2A R(flox/flox) mice compared with A 2A R(+/+) mice. (c) Two–three weeks after bilateral injection of AAV-Cre-zsGreen into the DMS, A 2A R(flox/flox) mice and A 2A R(+/+) mice (n=8 per group) were under CRF-RI30-RI60 training paradigm as described in the Materials and Methods section. Both groups similarly increased their lever pressing rate during the acquisition phases (repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed no random interval (RI) period × genotype interaction effect: F 5,65 =0.859, p>0.05; and no genotype main effect: F 1,13 <0.001, p>0.05). (d) Mice with DMS A 2A R knockdown significantly reduced their lever pressing in the devalued condition compared with that of the valued condition, but the A 2A R(+/+) mice responded insensitively to the selective satiety devaluation treatment (normalized devaluation × genotype interaction effect: F 1,13 =9.161, p=0.01; simple effect analysis: F 1,6 =35.683, **p<0.01 for A 2A R focal knockdown mice by repeated-measures ANOVA). Data are presented as the mean±SEM. CRF, continuous reinforcement. The color reproduction of this figure is available on the Neuropsychopharmacology journal online. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
Figure 5 Focal knockdown of the adenosine A 2A receptors (A 2A Rs) in the dorsolateral striatum (DLS) exerts relatively limited effects on habitual behaviors. (a) Representative image shows that A 2A Rs were knocked down selectively in the area with the AAV-Cre-zsGreen expression in the DLS of A 2A R(flox/flox) mice but not in A 2A R(+/+) mice. The yellow circle depicted the boundary of the AAV-Cre-zsGreen expression and A 2A R knockdown area. (b) Quantitative analysis shows that A 2A R expression was markedly reduced in the AAV-Cre-zsGreen transfected regions of A 2A R(flox/flox) mice compared with A 2A R(+/+) mice. (c) Focal A 2A R knockdown in the DLS (n=7) did not affect lever pressing during the acquisition phase compared with their A 2A R(+/+) controls (n=6) (repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed no random interval (RI) period × genotype interaction effect: F 5,55 =1.234, p>0.05; and no genotype main effect: F 1,11 =0.534, p>0.05). (d) There was no genotype × devaluation interaction effect (F 1,11 =1.993, p=0.186, repeated-measures ANOVA) for the normalized devaluation test. Both groups similarly showed insensitivity to outcome devaluation (DLS A 2A R knockdown mice: normalized devaluation; t 1,6 =0.646, p>0.05; wild-type (WT) mice: normalized devaluation; t 1,5 =2.017, p>0.05). Data are presented as the mean±SEM. CRF, continuous reinforcement. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide |
Image copyright Netflix Image caption Big budget: The Crown dramatises the events and intrigues of Elizabeth II's early reign
Netflix recently launched the second series of The Crown, its lavishly shot (and priced) period drama about the British Royal Family.
Reports have claimed the show's first series cost a record $130m (£97.4m) - though its creator Peter Morgan thinks that's nearer the total for both.
Either way, it's a lot: Between $6.5m and $13m per hour-long instalment.
Could dramatising Queen Elizabeth II's reign have cost more than the actual Queen costs the UK?
Let's look at that - and some other things that are pricier on screen than in real life...
The Queen versus The Crown
The Queen is about to get more expensive, after MPs voted to increase the Sovereign Grant paid to her by the British Treasury.
She'll receive £82.2m in 2018-19, equivalent to around £2.71 per British taxpayer.
The Sovereign Grant is worked out as a percentage of profits from the Crown Estate portfolio, an extensive property empire which posted a £328.8m profit in 2016-17.
As royal visits, ceremonies and security are not covered by the Grant, the actual yearly cost of the monarchy is about £300m, Britain's Telegraph newspaper reports. Anti-monarchy pressure groups argue that the figure is higher.
With that in mind, it seems Her Majesty and family are still costlier than their glamorous TV imitators.
Verdict: The Crown is expected to run for six series. If their cost remains stable, that's either $780m (£584m) if you believe the rumours, or (on Morgan's figures), $390m (£292m). So if the monarchy does indeed cost £300m a year, that would fund three series of the Crown at worst. And, at best, all six.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption From 2017: What does the Queen cost us?
US government alien hunters versus The X-Files
Earlier this month, it emerged that the Pentagon had spent more than $20m from 2007-2012 on a secret programme to investigate Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs).
The news was greeted with incredulity. Wouldn't it have been cheaper to call Mulder and Scully?
That depends how fast they work.
The much-loved 90s TV series where FBI agents probe the paranormal, The X Files cost $1.5m per episode for the first five series, according to IMDB. Adjusted for inflation to 2007, when the Pentagon operation started, that's $2.1m.
Verdict: The Department of Defense could have borrowed the intrepid agents for roughly nine-and-a-half episodes. Good value? Maybe. Number of aliens encountered by Fox Mulder and Dana Scully: several. Number the US government owns up to: none so far...
Image copyright Fox/Getty Images Image caption Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully: Better with aliens than the Pentagon
The RMS Titanic versus the film Titanic
Back in 1997, it was a rite of passage to sob through the epic disaster romance Titanic to the ubiquitous strains of Celine Dion.
Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet captured hearts as the doomed lovers Jack and Rose, but 11 Oscars came at a price: $200m.
So which cost more, the movie or the unlucky vessel?
Construction of the real-life Titanic began in 1909, and it was built and furnished for an estimated $7.5m. That's equivalent to about $127m when the film came out.
Verdict: The blockbuster takes it. Seemingly, it costs more to tell the story of an ill-starred luxury liner than it did to build it in the first place.
Image copyright United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo Image caption Kate and Leo's Titanic cost more than the original ship
ER versus a real US emergency room
US healthcare is notoriously expensive; and the same was true of medical drama ER, which helped George Clooney shoot to stardom.
In 1998, US TV network NBC offered its makers Warner Bros an unprecedented $13m per episode for the antics of Doctors Greene, Corday, Weaver et al.
How does that compare to the cost of running a real ER?
The John H Stroger Jr Hospital, in Cook County, Illinois, was the model for fictional Cook County General Hospital, and kindly gave the BBC a breakdown.
Its emergency department takes about $41m a year to run, including staff and supplies.
Verdict: That $13m equates to $19m an episode in today's dollars. On that maths, you could run the real-life ER for five-and-a-half months for the cost of just one TV instalment.
Image copyright NBC/Getty Images Image caption TV gold: The cast of ER pictured in 1997
Update 26 December 2017: This report has been updated to explain the calculation of the Sovereign Grant and clarify its cost to taxpayers. |
Efforts undertaken to arm the United States to fight as part of World War II are almost beyond criticism in American politics. It may be surprising to many of us then that the policies and efforts employed over 70 years ago still affect our industry today and are in many ways at the heart of the current malaise that is plaguing our domestic aerospace industry.
Following World War I, the military was anxious to demobilize its forces rapidly as it had done after every war in the past. By 1920, many Americans clearly sought a return to quieter times and more traditional values. Politicians were also weary and carried their constituents’ sentiments to the House floor. The result was two decades of meager investment in military readiness and technology. During this period, the U.S. military relied upon advances in the commercial industry at large and adopted advances in aviation and electronics to meet its mission requirements as little military-funded technology development was to be had.
On the eve of U.S. involvement in World War II, with war already raging in Europe, the U.S. military began rearming and supplying its allies in Europe to win against a technologically superior German army and air force. The priority for military funding in the early 1940s was building enough armaments to meet the challenge from Nazi Germany. As the war progressed, new military thinking emerged to develop technology as a response to German war technologies and their effectiveness on the battlefield. While sheer numbers of tanks, soldiers, planes and logistics eventually won the war in Europe, the development of the atomic bomb, radar, the jet engine, ballistic missiles and supersonic aircraft are legacies of World War II technology developments that would shape the next 65 years of government spending.
It’s hard to imagine today the sheer magnitude of the industrial efforts to manufacture armaments to meet our needs in the World War II theater. Automobile factories ceased manufacturing passenger cars in order to free up capacity to manufacture tanks, aircraft and weaponry on behalf of the federal government. Every industrial capacity that could be used by the U.S. government for war materiel production was employed. The government, for all intents and purposes, commandeered U.S. industry to win the war in Europe and Asia. Given the Great Depression that preceded this era, nobody complained about having jobs and income to feed their families while the nation was at war. U.S. government debt rose, as a fraction of gross domestic product, to historic levels to fund this expanded production to levels comparable to what we see today.
After the war ended, the industrial capacity was converted back to civilian production. However, the scientific treasure recovered from Nazi Germany coupled with the evolving geopolitical threat from the Soviet Union fueled military-funded technology development. This had the effect of leaving a portion of the industrial conversion permanently in place. Companies such as Hughes and General Electric maintained a large postwar research-and-development (R&D) base to develop new weapons systems to remain one step ahead of the Soviets. In this sense, the industrial policy of the World War II U.S. military never really ended but evolved to fit the Cold War. NASA sprang into existence to contest the Soviets’ dominance in the exploration of space.
This unprecedented level of funding continued unabated through three more decades. Its final crescendo was the Reagan military buildup of the 1980s, when missile defense was developed and the nation rearmed in a manner reminiscent of World War II.
In 1991, the Soviet Union finally collapsed and this really ended the raison d’etre for the World War II industrial model that was again employed during the Reagan era. Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi army became the eventual and unfortunate recipient of a generation of weapons designed to destroy the Soviet army, adding an exclamation point to this period of history.
For the two decades following the demise of the Soviet Union, government funding struggled to find justification without the clear and present danger of an enemy such as the Soviets. The nation found that enemy on Sept. 11, 2001, and a new round of spending ensued. However, the United States had already piled up an enormous debt by this point in history and the two simultaneous Middle East wars ran up trillions of dollars in additional debt that the nation could ill afford. The prosecution of the Iraq and Afghan wars continued and new technology funding flowed unabated until 2008, when a burgeoning private debt crisis that eerily mirrored the government debt crisis exploded and plunged the nation into an economic crisis not seen since the Great Depression. Many of us in the industry sensed that something fundamental was about to change when this crisis broke, but few of us appreciated the profound change that it was bringing.
The economic crisis that has plagued the nation for five years now has finally broken the U.S. World War II industrial model of government-commercial collaboration. The U.S. government is experiencing unprecedented budget deficits and can ill afford to continue spending vast amounts of money it does not have on new technology development. The dreaded term “sequestration” and the budget austerity that it implies are a force here to stay for at least a decade.
Natural sociological and economic forces are forcing NASA and the defense technology complex to return to the model they had prior to World War II in which government-funded R&D was indeed sparse. As before World War II, the U.S. government will be forced to rely upon inventors and technology developed in the private sector and adopted to the military and government needs.
Without casting judgment on the policies of the past, World War II and the extended Cold War that followed turned the natural economic order and U.S. industrial model upside-down where entire industries were converted into arms of the U.S. military and the U.S. government itself. While this was necessary to win the war, the reverse transformation, or demobilization, was never really achieved. During the Cold War, our post-World War II global economic dominance was due in part to the fact that we had destroyed most of the world’s industrial capacity and we could dominate industrial economic spheres for the next 50 years. The Cold War was underwritten by this economic dominance and allowed the World War II industrial model to remain intact. The economic collapse of 2008 was inevitable when overspending in the United States and the world’s reindustrialization caught up. The permanent loss in tax revenue from the market housing bubble collapse is putting pressure on spending, and the debt servicing is multiplying this pressure. The U.S. government has no way out other than cutting spending.
So, what should we expect in the next 10 years? I, for one, am optimistic and believe in the spirit and power of capitalism and its ability to efficiently deploy capital, innovate and produce value. Our aerospace industry will change and adapt to this new reality and the U.S. government will find new ways to harness the more efficient capital deployment of the private sector.
Witness a superb example: Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX). SpaceX has spent less than $1 billion in capital since its founding in 2001 and has launched five successful Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle-class vehicles (Falcon 9), five Falcon 1 vehicles and four Dragon crew capsules, and built three launch pads. A part of this capital came from the U.S. government (about $600 million), but it was implemented by the private sector and its deployment was without a doubt a pure venture capital approach.
Without entering into all of the arguments about crew safety and standards, it’s hard to argue that this is not a more efficient deployment of capital than that of the Constellation program. Constellation spent several multiples of this number, well over $12 billion, on its launch vehicle and crew vehicle system and only succeeded in launching one suborbital rocket.
The SpaceX experience is in many ways a model for how I see the next decade unfolding. “New space,” as some call it, represents the hopes, ingenuity and capital of investors to do what formerly was considered the sole domain of the government. Companies such as Moon Express, Skybox Imaging and Iridium Communications are all shining examples of what can be done. For me the future is bright and will be led by those willing to take the risks and put skin in the game like the “new space” companies are. In the meantime, the government R&D community is taking it on the chin and the World War II industrial relationship is going into the garbage bin of history.
Jim Cantrell is president and chief executive of Strategic Space Development, an aerospace and technology consulting firm based in Tucson, Ariz. |
* Venezuela seizes big oil project from U.S. company
* Sends troops to take boatyards in oil heartland
* Opens door to takeovers of major oil contractors (Recasts, adds Williams response, details on Wood Group contract, protesters wounded)
By Daniela Garcia
CIUDAD OJEDA, Venezuela, May 8 (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez sent troops to seize oil service companies on Friday, tightening his grip on the oil industry as low crude prices pinch the OPEC nation’s finances.
Chavez is a socialist and former soldier who has already nationalized large chunks of the OPEC nation’s economy, including most of the energy sector and telecommunications companies.
Williams Companies (WMB.N) said the government seized two natural gas facilities in eastern Venezuela after building up millions of dollars in debts for services, adding it could demand payment through international arbitration.
Military vehicles rolled through the streets of Ciudad Ojeda, on the shores of oil heartland Lake Maracaibo, where the government seized hundreds of boats and shipyards after Chavez signed a law to nationalize a group of oil service companies.
“We have started to nationalize all these activities connected to oil exploitation,” Chavez said from a confiscated boat sailing across the lake. “This is a revolutionary offensive.”
Williams said the government took over the El Furrial and PIGAP II gas compression facilities, which are crucial for boosting the production of fields that produce Venezuela’s most valuable crude.
Flush with cash amid an oil boom, the president in 2007 nationalized oil projects worth billions of dollars, leading oil giants Exxon Mobil (XOM.N) and ConocoPhillips (COP.N) to quit the nation and sue for compensation.
Crude revenues have fallen in recent months and Chavez is now moving against smaller service companies the government has struggled to pay. The new law gives the government the option to pay compensation in bonds rather than cash.
NEW TAKEOVERS
The move could lead to further declines in oil production by risking slowdowns in key services following years of underinvestment by state-owned oil company PDVSA, which bankrolls the social programs that keep Chavez popular after a decade in office.
The law makes it easier for the government to later seize assets owned by service giants such as Halliburton (HAL.N) and Schlumberger (SLB.N) as PDVSA builds up billions of dollars in debts with contractors.
It appears to be targeted at specific service companies that have been hampered by severe cash flow problems due to lack of payment by PDVSA, which as of last year owed at least $8 billion to contractors and providers.
Chavez told hundreds of oil workers dressed in the red shirts that identify his supporters that the takeovers included a water injection project part-owned by British company John Wood Group (WG.L).
Six people demonstrating near Maracaibo, across the lake from Chavez’s rally, suffered gunshot wounds when an unidentified gunmen fired on them, the investigative police in Maracaibo said.
Wood Group (WG.L) said on Friday it was in a strong position to extract compensation for the loss of its 49.5 percent interest in a 16-year, $800 million contract in Lake Maracaibo.
According to Williams’ filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, it has three gas compressor facilities in Venezuela with a net book value of $324 million.
Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez said the facilities help PDVSA pump 500,000 barrels of crude per day from Venezuela’s best quality fields in the eastern state of Monagas.
Other oil service companies in Venezuela include Baker Hughes BHI.N and BJ Services (BJS.N).
(For a factbox on Chavez nationalizations, please click on [ID:nN08526556]) |
Sixty animals 'butchered' in two months since crackdown was suspended after inquiry uncovered murder, rape and extortion
Elephant deaths in Tanzania have risen dramatically since the government abandoned a shoot-to-kill policy against poachers, officials admit.
Lazaro Nyalandu, the deputy minister of natural resources and tourism, said 60 elephants were "butchered" in November and December, compared with two in October.
Soldiers, police, game rangers and forestry officers had been involved in a month-long crackdown on poachers, codenamed Operation Terminate, in October. But the operation was suspended after an inquiry by MPs uncovered a litany of arbitrary murder, rape, torture and extortion of innocent people.
Mizengo Pinda, the prime minister, told Reuters: "The anti-poaching operation had good intentions, but the reported murders, rapes and brutality are totally unacceptable."
The inquiry's findings – including the killing of 13 civilians and arrest of more than 1,000 people – led to the sacking of the tourism minister Khamis Kagasheki, who had called for perpetrators of the illicit ivory trade to be executed "on the spot",as well as the defence minister Shamsi Vuai Nahodha, the home affairs minister Emmanuel Nchimbi and the livestock development minister David Mathayo.
Nyalandu said that, with the operation on hold, the government would appeal to foreign donors to help Tanzania's wildlife department and ranger service. "Those to be approached include the European Union and Asian countries," he was quoted as saying in media reports. "Asian countries are reportedly the main consumers of elephant tusks and byproducts."
There is huge demand for elephant tusks in many Asian countries, where they are used to make ornaments. In August 2011, Tanzanian authorities seized more than 1,000 elephant tusks hidden in sacks of dried fish at Zanzibar port and destined for Malaysia.
Recent research by the International Union for Conservation of Nature found that 22,000 elephants were killed in 2012 and Africa will lose one-fifth of its elephants in the next decade if the poaching crisis is not arrested. There were around 10m African elephants at the start of the 20th century, but that number has fallen to 500,000 owing to poaching and habitat loss.
The international trade in ivory was banned in 1989 but it has been dubbed the "white gold of jihad" by activists who say it is funding armed rebel groups including al-Shabaab, the militia behind the siege of the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, that left at least 67 people dead.
With 70,000-80,000 elephants in 2009, Tanzania is believed to be home to nearly a sixth of all African elephants. A recent census at one of the country's biggest wildlife parks, Selous Game Reserve, showed elephant populations had plummeted to just 13,000 from 55,000 previously.
Last year a Tanzanian MP said poaching was out of control with an average of 30 elephants killed for their ivory every day. Media reports have alleged that some MPs and other officials are involved in and benefiting from the lucrative ivory trade. |
WASHINGTON, D.C. – As winter storm Jonas barrels into the East Coast, a small group of soldiers will remain guarding the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery, despite the weather.
Since April 1948, soldiers from the Army’s 3rd Infantry Regiment’s ‘The Old Guard’ have guarded the Tomb 24 hours a day, 365 days a year regardless of the weather.
According to ABC News, even this severe storm will not stop them.
“These guys will be out in the snow, no matter what,” said Major Russell Fox, a spokesman for the Army’s Old Guard. “They love what they’re doing and they’re dedicated.”
A ‘relief’ is usually 6 soldiers serving a 24-hour shift guarding the Tombs. They change shifts each morning at 6 a.m.
Arlington National Cemetery closed at noon Friday due to the storm, but there are planned reliefs for both Saturday and Sunday. The soldiers are familiar to tourists as they wear their dress blue uniforms and march around the remains of an unknown soldier from World War I, World War II and the Korean War.
They march in front of the tombs for 21 paces, then face north to stand at attention for 21 seconds before marching 21 paces in the other direction.
When the cemetery is closed, the soldiers may change out of their dress blue uniforms into camouflage uniforms. At night and in poor weather they are allowed to go inside a small enclosure, known as ‘the box.’ They are allowed to stay in the enclosure for 2 hour intervals. |
http://i.imgur.com/uTg4RHL.jpg *TL;DR: From **~5 AM - Noon PDT** on **8/25**, the NA game servers will be moving to a new, centralized location in **Chicago, Illinois**. This move, along with other components of the [NA Server Roadmap](http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/help-support/WH8doH76-na-servers-and-the-future), should improve connection quality for the vast majority of NA players. West Coast players will see an uptick in raw ping numbers, but should also see that uptick mitigated by connection improvements in the form of better overall stability and reduced packet loss. We’ll follow up the server move with a **weekend stress test** (complete with **Party IP**) from **August 28 - 30**. More details below.* Last week, we [gave you guys a date](http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/help-support/U0M1AVfO-na-server-roadmap-update-na-server-move-on-825), and now the time is upon us! From **~5 AM - Noon PDT** on **8/25**, the NA game servers will be moving to their new home in **Chicago, Illinois**. # What to expect Around 5 AM PDT on the 25th, we’ll disable ranked play and kick off a phased, zero-downtime transfer of server activity, with an escalating percentage of game starts steadily re-allocated to Chicago over the course of the move. Keep in mind your game starts may hop back and forth between Chicago and Portland if you’re playing during this period. By the end of the migration, all games will be supported out of Chicago, with Portland reverting to a disaster-recovery backup while we continue to gather data and make any required adjustments. **Tentatively**, we’re shooting to complete the transfer by 12 PM (noon) PDT. http://i.imgur.com/PS8Hyxs.jpg # Things to look out for Considering our extensive preparation and the lack of downtime, the most likely outcome is that you won’t notice any disruption on your end, but we’re also preparing for any and all contingencies. Worst case, we encounter significant issues and temporarily roll back to the current Portland servers so you encounter minimal downtime or disrupted play as we fix any major problems. Look for up-to-date info in the in-client ticker and [Service Status](http://status.leagueoflegends.com/) page! Given the complexity of NA’s internet architecture and ISP landscape, we know we’ll have to troubleshoot various local routing issues that crop up following the server move; we’re already preparing to make sure your connections take the most efficient possible paths on our dedicated network to the new servers. Most connections will be already well-aligned by the time Chicago is live, but there will likely be at least some that aren’t getting to Chicago as quickly as they could be. And we could use your help! Tomorrow,** look for our Chicago Connection Clinic Megathread** in which you guys will actually be able to help us troubleshoot any emergent network pathing problems by testing your connection to Chicago and sending us traceroute info from your machines. # ISP Peering: Cox, AT&T, Verizon On a related note, **ISP peering** will of course play a major role in making sure your connections are getting to Chicago as quickly as possible. One of our key Roadmap efforts over the past year has been signing and maintaining agreements with ISPs across the US and Canada - check out our latest peering list [here](https://support.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/204246204-NA-Server-Roadmap#h3). A note on some of the more high-profile names missing from that list: we’re currently installing our connections with **Cox**, **AT&T**, and **Verizon**, and expect to have peering fully up and running with all three within a few weeks. If you’re with one of these ISPs, your connection post-Chicago move may not be on the most efficiently routed path until that work completes. We’ll keep you updated as these ISPs come online. #Transfers As we’ve mentioned, starting tomorrow, we'll also offer free transfers to players located in the US, US territories, and Canada who are currently playing on other servers - look for a transfer email from us and a free transfer option in the store on your account! Lingering questions about transferring your account? Check out our [Account Transfer FAQ](https://support.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/201751924-Account-Transfer-FAQ). #Stress Test Weekend After the move itself has been successfully completed, we want to roll right into a **stress test weekend** from **August 28 - 30** to observe how well the new game servers handle peak traffic. To help make sure we really put the new Chicago infrastructure through its paces, we’re enabling **Party IP** over the weekend - check out the details below in case you need a refresher. **Number of players in party --> Bonus IP awarded** * 2 --> 100% bonus * 3 --> 150% bonus * 4 --> 200% bonus * 5 --> 300% bonus You earn rewards win or lose, but only if you’re in a party with at least one other player. Make sure to log in, help us test, and earn extra IP from **August 28th, 00:00 PDT** through **August 30th, 23:59 PDT!** ----- We’ll be back tomorrow with up-to-date info on the progress and outcome of the move, ~~but in the meantime we’re also happy to address any immediate questions you may have in the comments below!~~ thanks everyone for your questions! We'll be live tomorrow with additional information during the transition. Going to archive this thread now that the Chicago servers are fully online! Details and discussion should be [directed over to this updated post](http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/help-support/2uTrAyy8-na-server-roadmap-update-chicago-server-move-complete). Thanks!
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Pharrell Williams and his BBC Miami partners are back in full control at Billionaire Boys Club and ICECREAM, after buying out Iconix Brands Group Inc’s 50% stake in the labels. Not that everything’s suddenly all rosy – the company has until June to complete a refinancing job on $300 million worth of debt, and is currently being investigated by the Securities and Exchange commission.
According to Pharrell’s spokesperson, his producer and BBC Miami wanted to get Iconix’s meddling paws out of the two brands (not their exact words, obviously) so they could have full control over their expansion, growth and licensing opportunities. It’s unclear how BBC and ICECREAM got into such dire financial straits, but what could the suited moneymen at Iconix possibly know about streetwear?
Check out the diamond-and-dollars encrusted Stan Smith, probably BBC’s most noteworthy collab of recent times.
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The popular replacement browser Skyfire has been updated to version 3.0 for Android, which adds additional social networking support. Skyfire has enhanced Facebook Connect to allow the user to easily stream videos shared from friends, and to make it easier to share content with your friends.
Skyfire 3.0 also adds Facebook’s Social Graph and Like Button to every page you visit, making it even easier to share content. If you would like to download Skyfire, you can do so from our app database.
Continue after the break for the full presser.
Skyfire 3.0 Browser for Android Mobile Phones layers the Facebook Social Graph over the entire mobile browsing experience
Mountain View, Calif. – November 23, 2010 – Today Skyfire, maker of the award-winning browser for mobile devices, announces the launch of Skyfire 3.0 with Facebook Connect for Android 2.0 and higher devices. With this new version of the popular Android application, the company ushers in an entirely new way to experience the mobile Internet, geared to the needs of the social networking generation.
The world’s smartest mobile browser is now the world’s most social browser. Skyfire brings the true power of Facebook to your Android device with easy streaming of videos shared from friends, quick news feed access, an easy way to see the most popular ‘liked’ articles on any site, and more.
Skyfire for Android is one of the most popular third-party apps on the platform with almost two million users. Earlier versions of Skyfire launched the SkyBarTM, a cloud-powered toolbar that allows users to watch video, view related content, and easily share content with friends. With Skyfire 3.0, the browser takes social integration to the next level, by integrating Facebook directly into the SkyBar.
Skyfire 3.0 with Facebook Connect seamlessly integrates Facebook’s Social Graph and Like Button onto every page of the Internet. With a single click, users can quickly check their Facebook Page, “Like” or share any Internet content, see the most “liked” content on any site recommended by their friends (or the general Facebook community), and seamlessly view videos and other Facebook links posted by friends.
New Features in Skyfire 3.0 with Facebook Connect Include:
· Popular Content – You just finished reading a story on one of your favorite web sites and want to quickly decide what to read next. Click on the Popular button on the SkybarTM and instantly see what content on the site is most popular within the 500+ million user Facebook community. Recommendations from friends are prioritized and show up at the top of the list.
· FireplaceTM Feed Reader – A simple but addictive tool that provides a filtered list of your Facebook feed that only includes links to browsable web pages, images, and videos posted by your Facebook friends.
· Facebook Portal Integration – With a single touch you have access to your Facebook feed, profile and fast-growing location service Places.
· Facebook Like Button – Skyfire 3.0 puts the Facebook Like Button on EVERY PAGE of the Internet. No scrolling around searching for the button on the page, simply click on the SkybarTM Like Button to easily “like” or “unlike” the page you are viewing or to share the page with your friends via Facebook, Twitter, or email.
· Skyfire OneTouch SearchTM – Users enter a single search term and can choose to search Google, Facebook, VideoSurf, Digg, Twitter, or Amazon with a single touch and without having to navigate to separate sites.
“Skyfire 3.0 with Facebook Connect makes mobile browsing social,” said Jeff Glueck, CEO of Skyfire. “This is just the latest innovation made possible by Skyfire’s Rocket PlatformTM and illustrates why Skyfire, as the first browser ever powered by a cloud service, is a must-have for smartphone users.”
Skyfire 3.0 with Facebook Connect for Android is now available for free for a limited time only in the Android Market.
Note: Facebook and the Like Button are registered trademarks owned by Facebook Inc in the United States and/or other countries. Skyfire 3.0 with Facebook Connect is not affiliated with Facebook ™ but is authorized by Facebook to use the Facebook Connect trademark. Adobe and Flash are registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.
About Skyfire:
Skyfire is dedicated to using cloud computing to improve multimedia experiences on mobile phones, and has created the first “Compression as a Service” (CAAS) offering for wireless carriers and device makers. Skyfire’s technology has been visible to consumers through the Skyfire browser app, which has enabled Skyfire to refine its technology with millions of users. The app was named the #2 App of All-Time for Android by TechCrunch, and was the top pick in a PC World September 2010 comparison of all Android browsers. Skyfire won the Best Mobile Application-People’s Voice at the 2009 Webby Awards and was named a Top App of 2009 by the New York Times’ Gadgetwise. Skyfire’s iPhone browser, launched in November 2010, quickly reached the top selling app rank on the Apple App StoreSM, as the first way for iOS users to access videos designed for the Adobe Flash PlayerTM. Skyfire is based in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. For more information, visit www.skyfire.com, or follow Skyfire on Twitter at twitter.com/skyfire. |
In the wake of the sexual harassment allegations against Justin Caldbeck, he has since released a public apology, wherein he promised to seek professional counseling for his behavior after stepping down from his position at Binary Capital.
Netizens were quick to collectively eye roll at the statement:
Sorry you did it or sorry you got called out, bro? It’s sexual assault- as in criminal, not ‘indefinite leave’ situation — Ian Bray (@IanABray) June 24, 2017
an asian fetish or did you think those women would be less likely to say something? — ShawnNorth (@shawnpuwo) June 24, 2017
Created a list for people like you pic.twitter.com/bSVN4c2W6Q — Space Cowboy (@haxforce) June 24, 2017
Especially fellow techie, Brendan Mulligan:
Hey @caldbeckj, go find a bucket of acid to dip your face in, you fucking horrible piece of shit. https://t.co/Dc7mbANkXM — Brenden Mulligan (@mulligan) June 23, 2017
Mulligan was so upset that he took to Medium.com to write his thoughts on the matter. There, he dissected Caldbeck’s apology piece by piece to point out any flaws and issues he found with the statement.
As the post continues to gain traction, it draws readers to comment their own thoughts and feelings on his writings. This includes one of the women responsible for bringing Caldbeck’s inappropriate behavior to light, Niniane Wang, who wrote a response to Mulligan’s article:
“I’m one of the 3 women who went on the record to expose Justin’s sexual harassment. I laughed out loud reading your post. It’s so well-written!
I’ve been trying to expose Justin for 7 years. He kept threatening reporters, and it was incredibly difficult to get this article out. He fought tooth and nail. Then he writes this apology (that was surely drafted by a crisis PR firm), and suddenly I’m seeing people say “We’re all human and make mistakes” and “I’m glad he’s learning” and “What a heartfelt apology”.
My fear is that if people actually believe that, what if the leave of absence doesn’t become permanent? Are people going to let him come back in 6 months when he’s “reflected” and learned his lesson?
I do not believe that someone can harass women for 10 years, tell the people who exposed him to go fuck themselves, and then 24 hours later, thank them for bringing him self-awareness.“
Wang also took to Twitter to point out another issue with Caldbeck’s apology:
To all who like Justin Caldbeck’s apology: It starts with “Attributable to Justin Caldbeck”. It was written by PR firm. Did he even read it? — niniane (@niniane) June 24, 2017
It remains to be seen what will happen to Justin Caldbeck in the future. |
After making its presence felt in the U.S. with its affordable, unlocked handsets, Florida based mobile phone company BLU is entering the Indian market. BLU has started off its Indian adventure with the launch of two new Windows Phone handsets in the country, a press release issued by the company earlier today said. The two models the company unveiled today are the BLU Win JR LTE and BLU Win HD LTE. Both these handsets will be sold through Amazon.in, as well as through Microsoft retail points across India, the release stated. BLU has also set up a new office in the northern Indian city of Gurgaon for its nationwide operations. These phones were however already available on various stores in India since the past few months.
“We are extremely excited about building our brand in India. We believe that the Indian consumer is very savvy and knows what he wants. We are committed to developing aspirational products in a price range that will make them attainable” said Samuel Ohev-Zion, CEO of BLU Products. “BLU aims to be a major player in the Indian mobile market,” he added.
Let us delve in to the technical specifications of the phones now, shall we? We will start off with the BLU Win JR LTE
BLU Win JR LTE
The BLU Win JR is an affordable Windows phone powered device that has been priced at Rs.5,999. It is powered by the 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 chipset that runs at 1.2 Ghz. A compact device aimed ay entry level users, the BLU Win JR features a 4.5-inch FWVGA (845 X 480) display. It has 8GB of internal memory and 1GB of RAM. The phone also supports memory expansion using microSD cards of up to 64GB. Like other phones in its price range, the BLU Win JR LTE is also a dual SIM handset that supports 4G LTE networks. The phone supports plenty of connectivity options, including Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and boasts a 2000 mAh battery. TheBLU Win JR runs Windows Phone 8.1 out-of-the-box but will be upgraded to Windows 10 soon, the company confirmed. BLU has also chosen to tread the path chosen Nokia and Microsoft and offers the the phone in plenty of color options. TheBLU Win JR gets a 5 megapixel main camera with LED flash and a VGA front camera for selfies and video calling. The phone is currently available for purchase from Amazon.in for the aforementioned price of Rs.5,999 which puts it in direct competition with several affordable Windows Phone devices from Microsoft themselves.
Next up, we talk about the…
BLU Win HD LTE
The BLU Win HD LTE, as you might have guessed by now, is the more premium of the two handsets announced today by BLU. This phone however is powered by the same Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset as the BLU Win JR but has a better display and a more premium design. The BLU Win HD gets what the company says a “metal finishing, state of the art soft touch feel, and precision cross-hatched patterns on the side keys”. It also boasts of a 2.5mm thin bezel. Other changes include the fact that the display size has been increased to 5-inches on this device. The camera also sees an upgrade with the BLU Win HD getting an 8 megapixel main camera and a 2 megapixel front camera for all the selfie addicts out there. The BLU Win HD LTE gets 8GB of internal storage – upgradeable to 64GB using microSD cards. like its more affordable sibling, the BLU Win HD also manages with just 1GB of RAM, which could be enough considering the fact that the phone runs the resource friendly Windows Phone 8.1 out-of-the-box. That said, BLU has confirmed that the BLU Win HD, too, would be receiving an official upgrade to Windows 10. The BLU Win HD has been priced at Rs.7,999 and is available on Amazon.in.
BLU has also added that, starting in November, they also plan to roll out an array of Android powered phones in the country. It would be interesting to see if they would launch the BLU Pure XL in India which is nothing but a re-branded Gionee Elife E8 that we talked about a few days ago.
[Images Via BLU] |
LAST STORM OF 2018 WE SWEAR NO HUBRIS HERE 2018-03-20 How deep is the snow on Jill's bucket? The snow on Jill's bucket is 2.57 inches deep. CELEBRATING 8 GLORIOUS YEARS OF INACCURATE TECHNOLOGY This page will refresh automatically every three minutes. DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE! DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE in its horrific SOLID FORM! FALLING! FROM! THE! SKY! Only DASA (the Delaware Aeronautics and Snow Administration) has the technology to measure this phenomenon accurately...
You can't view this movie. Bummer.
Snowfall by Hour
Hour Inches Total [Earlier] 0.91 0.91 9pm 1.66 2.57 10pm 3.17 5.74 11pm 0.00 5.74 12am 0.00 5.74 1am 0.00 5.74 2am 0.00 5.74 3am -0.15 5.59 4am 0.00 5.59 5am -0.15 5.44 6am 0.00 5.44 7am 0.00 5.44 8am 0.00 5.44 9am 0.00 5.44 10am -0.30 5.14 11am -0.45 4.69 12pm -1.21 3.48 1pm -0.91 2.57 2pm -1.36 1.21 3pm 15.87 17.08 4pm -12.09 4.99 5pm 0.15 5.14 6pm 0.15 5.29 7pm -3.78 1.51 8pm -0.15 1.36
Colophon
@boutell of P'unk Avenue coded this. Have a peek at the source code (no, I don't usually write PHP anymore). HTML5 video is generated with ffmpeg. (IE users: use IE9 or better.)
Jill's equipment: "EVERYTHING I NEED IN THE UNIVERSE is a Logitech C270 cheapo webcam, a new sexy piece of software called Willing Webcam v.5.53, and this cheapie refurbed lappy I bought of off Woot.com for $299. And this paddle game."
The snowflake in the graph is a photomicrograph of an actual snowflake taken by Wilson Bentley circa 1902.
Earlier Experiments of Note |
Ten years ago today, in the name of protecting national security and guarding against terrorism, President George W. Bush signed into law some of the most sweeping changes to search and surveillance law in modern American history. Unfortunately known as the USA PATRIOT Act, many of its provisions incorporate decidedly unpatriotic principles barred by the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution. Provisions of the PATRIOT Act have been used to target innocent Americans and are widely used in investigations that have nothing to do with national security.
Much of the PATRIOT Act was a wish list of changes to surveillance law that Congress had previously rejected because of civil liberties concerns. When reintroduced as the PATRIOT Act after September 11th, those changes -- and others -- passed with only limited congressional debate.
Just what sort of powers does the PATRIOT Act grant law enforcement when it comes to surveillance and sidestepping due process? Here are three provisions of the PATRIOT Act that were sold to the American public as necessary anti-terrorism measures, but are now used in ways that infringe on ordinary citizens’ rights:
1. SECTION 215 – “ANY TANGIBLE THING”
Under this provision, the FBI can obtain secret court orders for business records and other “tangible things” so long as the FBI says that the records are sought "for an authorized investigation . . . to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities." The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court must issue the order if the FBI so certifies, even when there are no facts to back it up. These “things” can include basically anything—driver’s license records, hotel records, car-rental records, apartment-leasing records, credit card records, books, documents, Internet history, and more. Adding insult to injury, Section 215 orders come with a "gag " prohibiting the recipient from telling anyone, ever, that they received one.
As the New York Times reported, the government may now be using Section 215 orders to obtain “private information about people who have no link to a terrorism or espionage case.” The Justice Department has refused to disclose how they are interpreting the provision, but we do have some indication of how they are using Section 215. While not going into detail, Senator Mark Udall indicated the FBI believes it to allows them “unfettered” access to innocent Americans’ private data, like “a cellphone company’s phone records” in bulk form. The government’s use of these secret orders is sharply increasing -- from 21 orders in 2009 to 96 orders in 2010, an increase of over 400% -- and according to a brand new report from the Washington Post, 80% of those requests are for Internet records.
Today, EFF sued the Justice Department to turn over records related to the government’s secret interpretation and use of Section 215, regarding which Senator Ron Wyden, like Senator Udall, has offered ominous warnings: "When the American people find out about how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act,” said Wyden on the Senate floor in May, “they are going to be stunned and they are going to be angry.”
2. NATIONAL SECURITY LETTERS
Among the most used -- and outright frightening -- provisions in the PATRIOT Act are those that enhanced so-called National Security Letters (NSLs). The FBI can issue NSLs itself, without a court order, and demand a variety of records, from phone records to bank account information to Internet activity. As with 215 orders, recipients are gagged from revealing the orders to anyone.
While NSLs existed prior to 2001, they were infrequently used. The PATRIOT Act lowered the standard making it easier for the FBI to use NSLs to obtain the records of innocent people with no direct link to terrorists or spies, and their use skyrocketed. According to the ACLU’s report on PATRIOT Act abuses, there were 8,500 NSLs issued in 2000 but approximately 192,000 issued between 2003-2006. All of these NSL’s led to one terror conviction, and in that case, the NSL wasn’t even needed.
Not surprisingly, EFF FOIA requests have found abuse of their NSL authority: “mistakes” that led to getting information on the wrong people, ISPs handing over extra or wrong information, and dozens of “exigent letters” that “circumvented the law and violated FBI guidelines and policies.” EFF has successfully challenged the NSL gag orders in multiple cases as unconstitutional under the First Amendment, but the overall scheme still survives to this day.
3. SNEAK AND PEEK WARRANTS
Section 213 of the PATRIOT Act normalized “sneak-and-peek” warrants. These allow law enforcement to raid a suspect’s house without notifying the recipient of the seizure for months. These orders usually don't authorize the government to actually seize any property — but that won't stop them from poking around your computers. Again, sneak-and-peek warrants could be used for any investigation, even if the crime was only a misdemeanor.
From 2006-2009, sneak-and-peek warrants were used a total of 1,755 times. Only fifteen of those cases—a microscopic 0.8%—involved terrorism. The rest were used in cases involving drugs or fraud.
These uses and abuses of the PATRIOT Act against ordinary Americans are only the tip of the iceberg. EFF has repeatedly documented how federal law enforcement agencies have abused our nation’s broken secrecy system to hide specific instances of illegal and unconstitutional conduct related to the PATRIOT Act. EFF’s Freedom of Information Act requests have painted a picture of “an [FBI] engaged in excessive illegal intelligence gathering.”
After ten years, it’s crystal clear that the “emergency” measure sold as a necessary step in the fight against terrorism is being used routinely to violate the privacy of regular people in non-terrorism cases, threatening the Constitutional rights of every one of us. And after ten years, EFF is even more dedicated to fighting against PATRIOT overreach, both in Congress and the courts. Help us in that fight by becoming an EFF member, so that we can work together in making the next ten years better for civil liberties than the last. |
You’d think investors would be happy. Twitter just released its first quarterly earnings report as a public company, with revenue and earnings coming in significantly ahead of analyst estimates.
And yet, as of 6:02pm Eastern time, Twitter’s stock had fallen 18 percent in after-hours trading. What happened? Well, the company also said that it now has 241 million monthly actively users — up 30 percent year-over-year, as the release says, but only up about 4 percent from last quarter. In other words, it looks like user growth continues to slow.
In addition, Timeline Views, which are another indication of user engagement, actually fell 7 percent to 148 billion.
The concerns make sense, but at the same time, the discussion feels like a big reversal. As others have pointed out, a couple of years ago, the big concern around consumer social networks (well, mainly Facebook and Twitter) was whether they could actually make money from their rapidly growing user bases. By the time Twitter’s S-1 was revealed to the public last fall, there were questions about whether it had a growth problem, and now it seems those concerns are having a real effect on stock price.
(Note: I’ll be updating this post until about 6pm Eastern just to make sure the numbers are still accurate, but they don’t appear to be changing hugely.)
Update: CEO Dick Costolo offered some thoughts on user growth during the earnings conference call. |
Obsidian lead designer Nathaniel Chapman has stated in an interview with Eurogamer that the developers are currently working on a patch to improve the PC version of Dungeon Siege 3‘s keyboard and mouse controls. I’ve yet to play the PC version of DS3, but I was witness to Alec’s agitated bellowing about the PC controls (among other things), so I’m going to go ahead an assume that this is a good thing.
Chapman had this to say about the PC controls:
Actually this is one thing I would have liked to have spent more time on… Basically, I think as long as PC gamers have a good way to control the combat they will enjoy it. One review – I can’t remember which – said if you play with a game pad the combat is great, so right now we’re working on improving the PC controls through an update. I think if there are PC gamers who are having a negative reaction it’s less about what the combat is, it’s more how the combat controls.
Chapman was also, however, willing to talk about smaller changes that he would have made if he could.
I think our loot system has a lot of strengths but one of the weaknesses is that it’s not very clearly communicated what each of the stats does… I think having a more fleshed-out tutorial system for the stats and what they do and how they function would be a nice thing. Having more unique armour variants too. It’s always good sequel or DLC material.
And talk about bugs a little bit. This was his response to whether gamers have the right to expect bug-free games at launch.
So, I think there are two things. One is the rose-coloured glasses effect. I think older games were just as buggy [as newer ones], but we’re more tuned-in at looking for the bugs. I personally remember old PC games and even old Nintendo games that had tons of bugs. I think the big difference is that the core technology of games has gotten more complex and it’s very difficult to get out all the little bugs. Usually in an old 2D Nintendo game a bug is no more than a few lines of code to fix, whereas in a 3D game it could be something in the animation system stomping memory in the renderer. There are so many more layers that it’s very hard to catch all the bugs. On the flipside, I think more what gamers should expect when they go out and buy a game is that they get an experience that’s worth their money. But it’s very hard to say what that is.
You can read the full interview, “Reinventing Dungeon Siege”, here. You’ll be leaving RPS, of course. Don’t forget your coat! It’s cold out there. |
CLOSE IndyStar IU Insider Zach Osterman discusses the Hoosiers' choice of Archie Miller as the program's new men's basketball coach. Matthew Glenesk / IndyStar
New IU coach Archie Miller reached out to Georgia guard Al Durham less than 24 hours on the job. (Photo: Marvin Gentry-USA TODAY Sports)
On the job less than 24 hours, new IU basketball coach Archie Miller is already reaching out to 2017 signees in an effort to keep Tom Crean's last recruiting class intact.
Al Durham Sr., father of IU recruit Al Durham, said Miller reached out Saturday.
"Al is a priority," Durham Sr. said. "(Miller) definitely wants him. He thinks he fits into his system well."
Following Crean's dismissal, Durham asked IU for a release from his national letter of intent. Pennsylvania forward Clifton Moore, another member of the 2017 class, also asked for his release last week.
Durham Sr. said Miller plans to visit the family "as quickly as he can talk to us face-to-face, which is good."
• DOYEL: Fred Glass knocks it out of the park with Archie Miller hire
• INSIDER: Archie Miller 'a great hire, great for the state'
As of Sunday, that visit has not been officially scheduled.
Durham, a three-star combo guard from Wilburn (Ga.) Berkmar, committed to the Hoosiers in October of 2015 — the first member of IU's 2017 class. And he may wind up in Bloomington still.
"I'm glad he reached out immediately," Durham Sr. said. "Al likes Indiana, loves Indiana. He was coming for Tom Crean, but it's Indiana. Just have to do what's best for the kid and make sure he's in the right situation."
A third member of IU's recruiting class, Justin Smith out of Lincolnshire (Ill.), is not believed to have requested out of his letter of intent.
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Miller will be introduced as IU's new head coach at a 3 p.m., Monday news conference.
• MORE:'No doubt' Archie Miller will make in-state recruiting a priority
• MORE: 5 things to know about Archie Miller |
LOS ANGELES -- Doc Rivers said he and the players on the Los Angeles Clippers agreed with NBA commissioner Adam Silver's decision to ban team owner Donald Sterling for life in response to racist comments the league says Sterling made in a recorded conversation.
"I thought Adam Silver today was fantastic. He made a decision that really was the right one that had to be made," Rivers said Tuesday before the Clippers played the Golden State Warriors in Game 5 of their first-round series. "I don't think this is something we rejoice in or anything like that. I told the players about the decision and I think they were just happy there was a resolution and it's over or at least the start of it. I was just really proud of them and I've been proud of the players in the NBA overall, I've been proud of the ownership throughout the league and I think we're all in a better place because of this."
Rivers said the team was practicing when Silver made his decision and he informed the team of the ruling during their film session on Tuesday.
"I kind of said it and told them what Adam had said and honestly there was nothing in the room at that time when I said it," Rivers said. "There was complete silence. I said what I thought I needed to tell them and then we went right back to film."
There had been some discussion about Rivers' future with the team but after Silver's ruling, which includes forcing Sterling to sell the team upon the approval of three-fourths of the league owners, Rivers said he may not have much of a decision to make.
"I haven't thought about it," Rivers said. "I hadn't thought about leaving or staying. This should not be about me or what I'm doing or what I'm going to do. I love coaching. I've enjoyed these guys. I don't have an answer because I've given it zero thought. Obviously Adam's decision, if there was going to be one, makes mine easier."
Rivers viewed Silver's decision as the first step of the healing process for the Clippers after TMZ first published audio tapes of Sterling making racist comments to his girlfriend, V. Stiviano, Friday night.
"We can move forward," Rivers said. "We have to. You always have to move forward. You learn over and over that when something like this happens with the burden or racism, it always falls on the person that has been offended to respond and I've always thought that that's interesting. I felt the pressure on my players. Everyone was waiting for them to give a response. I kept thinking that they didn't do anything yet they have to respond, so Adam responded and I thought that was the sigh of relief that we needed.
"Is it over? No, it's not over, but it's the start of the healing process that we need and the start of our organization to try to get through this. I know we have a game, but I do think this has been more important and I think our players have done the best they can possibly do in this situation."
"Is it over? No, it's not over, but it's the start of the healing process that we need," Clippers coach Doc Rivers said of Donald Sterling's lifetime ban. Stephen Dunn/Getty Images
Rivers acknowledged that Clippers players considered boycotting the game if Sterling was given a slap on the wrist by the league. It was one of the reasons he canceled practice on Monday to allow his players to regroup and relax with their families after Sunday's blowout loss.
"They were waiting for a decision and that clearly could have happened," Rivers said. "That was one of the reasons I didn't have practice yesterday in a clear practice situation. When you get blown out like we got blown out you probably should have a practice. I just didn't think it would make any sense to do it. I thought they needed to go home and be with their families and breathe a little bit. Knowing that Adam was going to have a press conference today, I just felt like we knew there was going to be some kind of resolution. I was almost happy his announcement was during our practice. During the announcement, none of the players were watching it, they were practicing and preparing for a game. Afterwards is when they found out. I think that all turned out good."
When Rivers was asked how he felt still working for Sterling, Rivers said, "I don't know if I am. That's the point of this. That's why Adam did what he did."
Rivers was then asked if he could work for Sterling if he kept the team and he said, "I don't think he will."
"I think Adam has made that clear, unless there's something different than a lifetime ban," Rivers said. "A lifetime ban is a lifetime ban so I think that's already been decided and yes, I do think that's the right decision. The next step is where do we go. If you think about it, I'm coaching a team and I actually don't know who to call if I need something, so the quicker that this is done, the better for everyone. Having said that, it's going to take time and we all have to be patient."
The Clippers continued to wear black socks on Tuesday but did not do anything else as they did Sunday, when they wore their warmups inside out. Most fans wore black and a new intro video stressing "We Are One" was played before the game. Rev. Jesse Jackson was on the court pregame. He greeted Clippers captains Chris Paul, Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan and also chatted with Rivers. He watched the game courtside next to Paul's brother, CJ.
"I do believe this will be a safe haven for us and our crowd will be amazing tonight. I think that will help them," Rivers said. "The fourteen guys that we dress, they did nothing wrong and they need support and I think that will happen."
"I told them how much I admired them and how they handled this and just to let them know this was some closure but there's still work to do. I thought they set a very good example around the league on how they conducted themselves." |
In the midst of a still struggling and fragile global economy, Germany has announced that it will shut down seven nuclear plants by the end of the year--which means that Germans will be left to run their factories, heat their homes, and power their economy with 10% less electrical generating capacity. Nine more plants will be shut down over the next decade and tens of billions of dollars in investment will be lost.
The grounds for this move, and similar proposals in Switzerland, Italy, and other countries, is safety. As the Swiss energy minister put it, “Fukushima showed that the risk of nuclear power is too high.”
In fact, Fukushima showed just the opposite. How’s that? Well for starters, ask yourself what the death toll was at Fukushima. 100? 200? 10? Not true. Try zero.
To think rationally about nuclear safety, you must identify the whole context. As the late, great energy thinker Petr Beckmann argued three decades ago in his contrarian classic "The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear," every means of generating power has dangers and risks, but nuclear power “is far safer than any other form of large-scale energy conversion yet invented.”
To date, there have been devised only five practical means of producing large-scale, affordable, reliable energy: coal, natural gas, oil, hydroelectric, and nuclear. (Although widely-hyped and frequently subsidized, solar and wind power -- which generate energy from highly diffuse and intermittent sources -- have failed for forty years to deliver.) Whether you’re concerned about a dangerous accident or harmful emissions, a nuclear power plant is the safest way to generate power.
The key to nuclear power’s safety, Beckmann explains, is that it uses a radioactive energy source--such as uranium. In addition to having the advantage of storing millions of times more energy per unit of volume than coal, gas, or water, the radioactive material used in power plants literally cannot explode. Ridiculing the scare tactics that a nuclear power plant poses the same dangers as a nuclear bomb, Beckmann observes: “An explosive nuclear chain reaction is no more feasible in the type of uranium used as power plant fuel than it is in chewing gum or pickled cucumbers.”
The one danger of running a nuclear plant is a large release of radiation. This is extremely unlikely, because nuclear plants contain numerous shielding and containment mechanisms (universal in the civilized world but callously foregone by the Soviets in their Chernobyl plant).
But in the most adverse circumstances, as Fukushima illustrated, the cooling system designed to moderate the uranium’s heat can fail, the backups can fail, the radioactive material can overheat to the point that the plant cannot handle the pressure, and a radiation release is necessary.
Yet, even then, it is extremely unlikely that the radiation levels will be high enough to cause radiation sickness or cancer--and radiation in modest quantities is a normal, perfectly healthy feature of life (your blood is radioactive, as is the sun). And even the worst nuclear accident gives neighbors a luxury that broken dams and exploding refineries do not: time.
While many, many things went wrong at Fukushima, as might be expected in an unprecedented natural disaster, what is more remarkable is that thanks to the fundamental integrity of the nuclear vessel and the containment building, none of the power plant’s neighbors have died, nor have any apparently been exposed to harmful levels of radiation. (The Japanese government has announced that eight of 2,400 workers have been exposed to higher-than-allowed amounts of radiation, but these amounts are often hundreds of times less than is necessary to do actual damage.)
Now imagine if a 9.0 earthquake and 40 foot tsunami had hit a hydroelectric dam; thousands of people could have died in the ensuing flood.
Or what if they had hit a natural gas plant or oil refinery or coal plant? These structures could have suffered explosions, such as the type we saw on BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico, or just collapsed and spewed debris and pollution throughout the area.
The Fukushima nuclear plants, with their incredible resilience, almost certainly saved many, many lives.
Nuclear power also saves lives that would otherwise be lost to pollution. A nuclear power plant has effectively zero harmful emissions. (It generates a small amount of waste, which France, among other countries, has demonstrated can be both re-used economically and stored safely.) By contrast, fossil fuel plants generate various forms of particulate matter that strongly correlate with higher cancer rates. We should not “‘knock coal,’” Beckmann stressed, as fossil fuel plants are vital for human survival for decades to come, but we should recognize that new nuclear power plants are far safer than the status quo.
The perversity of using nuclear power’s demonstrated safety as a black mark against it is not new. Beckmann’s book came out in 1976--three years before the Three Mile Island “disaster,” which nuclear critics capitalized on, even though it was, as Beckmann later wrote, “history’s only major disaster with a toll of zero dead, zero injured, and zero diseased.”
Still, environmentalists shut down nuclear plants, oblivious to the accidents they could have prevented.
In just the three years leading up to Three Mile Island, Beckmann observed, “dam disasters have killed thousands of people (at least 2,000 in India in August 1979); many hundreds have died in explosions and fires of gas, oil, butane, gasoline, and other fuels . . . ”
As a consequence of the anti-nuclear hysteria in Beckmann’s time, the U.S. government made it either impossible or economically prohibitive to build new plants, in the name of “safety.” Fukushima has affirmed that nuclear is the safest form of power in existence. Any government that fails to recognize this is endangering its citizens’ health.
Alex Epstein is a fellow at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, specializing in energy issues. The Ayn Rand Center is a division of the Ayn Rand Institute and promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.” |
Silas Young made a splash in Ring of Honor as "The Last Real Man," but the past year has seen him explode, with victories over Jay Lethal, Bobby Fish, KUSHIDA, Jushin Thunder Liger, Mark Briscoe, and others. Young had a storied rivalry with Dalton Castle before challenging for three separate championships in ROH, as well. This Friday at Ring of Honor's Best in the World PPV, Young will face former ROH Champion Jay Lethal. Fightful.com will have full coverage of the show, but ahead of it, I spoke to Young for a "Manly or Not Manly" segment, as well as a full interview, which releases tomorrow.
***
Manicures and Pedicures
"Definitely not manly. Those are something women do. Any guy who gets a pedicure or manicure should be embarrassed to admit that he does it."
So Silas young has never had a manicure?
"Absolutely not"
Partying the night before a match.
"Manly. Very manly. The Beer City Bruiser and myself definitely like to have some beverages and get into a little bit of trouble, whether it's the night before or the night of the show. It doesn't matter. We're partying every night."
Checking your own Wikipedia page.
"WHAT'S WIKIPEDIA?! Yeah, I know what Wikipedia it. Checking your own wikipedia page, tweeting about other guys, talking about how great you are. Not manly. Very pathetic and disgusting."
Man buns
"If you got long hair and gotta keep it up, that's one thing. If you have some short little thing here in the back and you pull it back to look like a man or look cool. You don't look like a man. You look like a CHUMP."
Skinny jeans.
"Not manly. Enough said. Give your girlfriend her pants back."
The NBA offseason.
"It must be nice to get paid a lot of money to do a couple games here and there and have a few months off, but in professional wrestling we don't have an offseason. If we get a little hurt or we roll our ankle during our match, we keep going because the show must go on. Not like these NBA athletes who stub their toe and have the next six weeks off."
Cologne.
"Colonge is alright, unless you're one of these people that doesn't shower and just uses it to cover up the stink of you. Go take a shower, you pathetic piece of crap."
Fightful.com will have full live coverage and discussion of Ring of Honor Best in the World, which you can purchase at ROHWrestling.com, and the FITE App. |
Grateful Dead's Bob Weir Teams Up with National Members for New Solo LP
Published Aug 04, 2016
Columbia/Legacy Recordings. Scroll through the record's tracklisting to find Weir's "Campfire Tour" dates below.
San Rafael, CA -
10/
Oakland, CA -
10/
Los Angeles, CA -
10/
Upper Darby, PA -
10/
Brooklyn, NY
-
Kings Theatre
10/
Brooklyn, NY -
10/
Port Chester, NY -
10/
Nashville, TN -
Grateful Dead co-founder Bob Weir struck out solo with the release of Ace in 1972. Now, the rock vet is set to release a new collection next month through Columbia Legacy Recordings titled Blue Mountain.Marking Weir's first album of entirely original material in 30 years, Blue Mountain is described as "a deeply personal collection of music inspired by the ranch stories and fireside songs of Bob's youth." Produced by Josh Kaufman, the record sees Weir collaborate with Josh Ritter, as well as Aaron Dessner, Bryce Dessner and Scott Devendorf of the National.Weir will also be taking the record on the road this fall on a short run of dates through the United States. Pre-sale tickets for the "Campfire Tour" go on sale August 9 at 10 a.m. local time before being open to the general public on August 12; both are available through Weir's site here Blue Mountain will arrive September 30 throughBlue Mountain:1. Only A River2. Cottonwood Lullaby3. Gonesville4. Lay My Lily Down5. Gallop On The Run6. Whatever Happened To Rose7. What The Ghost Towns Know8. Darkest Hour9. Ki-Yi Bossie10. Storm Country11. Blue Mountain12. One More River To CrossTour dates:10/7Marin County Civic CenterFox Theater10The Wiltern12Tower Theatre1415Kings Theatre16The Capitol Theatre19Ryman Auditorium |
Police seized several weapons and arrested 14 protesters in Portland on Sunday as a day of demonstrations descended into chaos.
The arrests were made throughout the course of the day at a "variety of locations” during multiple protests in the city’s downtown area, according to the Portland Police Department.
The protests came just days after two Portland men were stabbed to death while trying to fend off a man who shouted anti-Muslim insults at two young girls on a light-rail train.
Several Arrested During Protest in Downtown Portland on Sunday Afternoon (Photo) https://t.co/z43dW5cakT pic.twitter.com/RTzhcE12Qb — Portland Police (@PortlandPolice) June 5, 2017
At least three demonstrations occurred across the city on Sunday, including a controversial pro-Donald Trump free speech rally at near city hall, which spurred counter protests. The demonstrations drew thousands of participants, according to ABC affiliate KATU.
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler had fought to have the federal permit for the Trump Free Speech Rally revoked, saying it could “exacerbate an already difficult situation” and threaten public safety.
At one point, authorities fired pepper balls and flash-bang grenades to clear crowds after protesters threw “a significant amount of projectiles” at police, the department said. Police also seized multiple weapons and other items, including hammers, bricks and chains.
Another collection of weapons seized today. pic.twitter.com/tdMmMSM2Wp — Portland Police (@PortlandPolice) June 5, 2017
“We have to understand that it’s legitimate that Portland’s shaken up right now," rally organizer Joey Gibson told a crowd at Terry Schrunk Plaza, located across from the Portland City Hall. "They did everything they can to keep us out of here because they thought that we’re going to come in here and just ruin the city ... and spread out hate speech. … We’ve got to prove them wrong," he said, according to KATU.
Police said protests at the plaza were mostly peaceful, but a separate protest at Chapman Square “required significant attention from law enforcement.”
The 14 suspects, who ranged from 19- to 64-years-old, are scheduled to appear in court on Friday. |
Breaking
Apple on Thursday addressed mounting criticism over the revelation that it slows down iPhones with aging batteries to prevent performance issues. In addition to apologizing, the company has also lowered the price of out-of-warranty battery replacements to $29, and will issue a software update in early 2018 to let users find out more information about the health of their device's battery.
"Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that."
December 28, 2017
A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance
We've been hearing feedback from our customers about the way we handle performance for iPhones with older batteries and how we have communicated that process. We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down. We apologize. There's been a lot of misunderstanding about this issue, so we would like to clarify and let you know about some changes we're making.
First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades. Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that.
How batteries age
All rechargeable batteries are consumable components that become less effective as they chemically age and their ability to hold a charge diminishes. Time and the number of times a battery has been charged are not the only factors in this chemical aging process.
Device use also affects the performance of a battery over its lifespan. For example, leaving or charging a battery in a hot environment can cause a battery to age faster. These are characteristics of battery chemistry, common to lithium-ion batteries across the industry.
A chemically aged battery also becomes less capable of delivering peak energy loads, especially in a low state of charge, which may result in a device unexpectedly shutting itself down in some situations.
To help customers learn more about iPhone's rechargeable battery and the factors affecting its performance, we've posted a new support article, iPhone Battery and Performance.
It should go without saying that we think sudden, unexpected shutdowns are unacceptable. We don't want any of our users to lose a call, miss taking a picture or have any other part of their iPhone experience interrupted if we can avoid it.
Preventing unexpected shutdowns
About a year ago in iOS 10.2.1, we delivered a software update that improves power management during peak workloads to avoid unexpected shutdowns on iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, and iPhone SE. With the update, iOS dynamically manages the maximum performance of some system components when needed to prevent a shutdown. While these changes may go unnoticed, in some cases users may experience longer launch times for apps and other reductions in performance.
Customer response to iOS 10.2.1 was positive, as it successfully reduced the occurrence of unexpected shutdowns. We recently extended the same support for iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus in iOS 11.2.
Of course, when a chemically aged battery is replaced with a new one, iPhone performance returns to normal when operated in standard conditions.
Recent user feedback
Over the course of this fall, we began to receive feedback from some users who were seeing slower performance in certain situations. Based on our experience, we initially thought this was due to a combination of two factors: a normal, temporary performance impact when upgrading the operating system as iPhone installs new software and updates apps, and minor bugs in the initial release which have since been fixed.
We now believe that another contributor to these user experiences is the continued chemical aging of the batteries in older iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s devices, many of which are still running on their original batteries.
Addressing customer concerns
We've always wanted our customers to be able to use their iPhones as long as possible. We're proud that Apple products are known for their durability, and for holding their value longer than our competitors' devices.
To address our customers' concerns, to recognize their loyalty and to regain the trust of anyone who may have doubted Apple's intentions, we've decided to take the following steps:
Apple is reducing the price of an out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacement by $50 — from $79 to $29 — for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced, starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018. Details will be provided soon on apple.com.
Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone's battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.
As always, our team is working on ways to make the user experience even better, including improving how we manage performance and avoid unexpected shutdowns as batteries age.
At Apple, our customers' trust means everything to us. We will never stop working to earn and maintain it. We are able to do the work we love only because of your faith and support — and we will never forget that or take it for granted.
The new $29 iPhone battery replacement is a reduction of $50 from the previous cost of $79. It will be available for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced, starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018.The company will also issue an iOS software update with "new features," coming in early 2018. This will let users see if the condition of their phone's battery is affecting performance."We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down. We apologize," the company wrote in an open letter published to its website. "There's been a lot of misunderstanding about this issue, so we would like to clarify and let you know about some changes we're making."It went on to clarify that it has never, and would never, do anything to intentionally shorten the lifespan of any Apple product. The company also denied degrading user experience to encourage upgrades."Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that," they said.The letter goes on to explain how batteries age and degrade in performance over time, and what the software changes do to address these problems. It states that recent customer feedback over the controversy compelled it to make changes, including the upcoming software update and reduction in battery replacement price.Aging batteries have reduced capacities, and can cause random shutdowns of devices when they are subjected to spikes in power usage. Apple has addressed this by reducing peak performance of processors in older phones, which can make them run slower, but also keeps them operational for a longer period of time.Despite the fact that throttling keeps devices operational for longer, Apple's own admission has helped fuel a popular conspiracy theory that the company intentionally slows down older iPhones to encourage customers to buy a new device. Tests have shown that older devices outfitted with a new battery, available for $29 starting in late January, will see their performance return to normal levels.However, Apple's admission and continued belief in the conspiracy theory have helped to spur a number of lawsuits from around the world . Some critics have contended that even if the throttling is in the best interest of users and their devices, Apple should still have been more transparent about the fact that software updates could result in slower phones.Seeing an opportunity from Apple's public relations crisis, some competitors this week issued statements to say that they do not throttle the processing power of older devices.Apple, too, clearly saw the damage that was being done with the story continuing to make the rounds in the news and on social media. It remains to be seen whether Thursday's response and the upcoming changes will put the controversy to bed.Apple's full letter to customers is included below: |
Updated 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama plans this week to name CIA Director Leon Panetta to replace Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Gen. David Petraeus, now running the war in Afghanistan, would take the CIA chief's job in a major shuffle of the nation's top national security leadership, administration and other sources said Wednesday.
Sources confirmed the news of Panetta being chosen to replace Gates to CBS News national security correspondent David Martin. Petraeus' expected nomination for the CIA post comes according to an Associated Press source.
A senior defense official told CBS News that Gates recommended Panetta to Mr. Obama six months ago because of his budget experience, management experience, and intelligence experience - the Pentagon controls 80 percent of the overall intelligence budget. Gates will leave his post on June 30. Petraeus probably won't leave Afghanistan until September.
All sources spoke on condition of anonymity because the changes are not final.
The changes would probably take effect this summer. Gates has already said he will leave this year, and the White House wants to schedule Senate confirmation hearings in the coming months.
The officials say Mr. Obama is expected to also announce that Lt. Gen. John Allen would replace Petraeus as Afghanistan commander, and that diplomat Ryan Crocker will be the next U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan.
A senior official says Gen. Allen will take up his position in Afghanistan - assuming senate confirmation - at the beginning of September. In the interim, the official says, Allen will become special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and spend next the few months preparing for his presumed assignment in Afghanistan.
Diplomat Crocker seen as top pick for Afghan post
The changes are expected to be announced Thursday at the White House. A former U.S. official said all four candidates would stand together with Mr. Obama for the announcement. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday morning that the president will be making a personnel announcement on Thursday.
Panetta and Petraeus are both clearly qualified for the new jobs and should be easily confirmed by the Senate, according to Martin. The latter's "presence at the CIA will be good news for the troops in Afghanistan since he will know -- better than any other CIA director could -- exactly what intelligence they need in the field," says Martin.
Martin: Panetta and Petraeus should sail through Senate
Allen, now the deputy commander of U.S. Central Command in Florida, is due in Washington on Wednesday, and sources in Afghanistan said Petraeus was also headed to Washington.
The Associated Press first reported Tuesday that seasoned diplomat Crocker is the top candidate for the Afghanistan ambassadorial post as part of a far-reaching revamping of the nation's top leadership in the conflict there, now in its 10th year. The Washington Post first reported that the additional changes would be announced as a package deal.
Officials said Tuesday the White House was weighing several factors, including Crocker's role in the larger cast change in Afghanistan policy this summer and fall. Those personnel changes are unrelated to the progress of the prolonged war but come just as Mr. Obama needs to demonstrate enough success to follow through with his pledge to begin withdrawing U.S. forces in July.
U.S. military and civilian defense leaders call 2011 the make-or-break year for turning around the war and laying the path for a gradual U.S. exit by 2015. The main obstacles are the uncertain leadership and weak government of Karzai, the open question of whether the Taliban can be integrated into Afghan political life and the continued safe harbor Pakistan provides for militants attacking U.S. and NATO forces over the border in Afghanistan.
A U.S. official who confirmed Panetta's move to the Pentagon said the White House chose him because of his long experience in Washington, including working with budgets at the intelligence agency, as well as his extensive experience in the field during his time as CIA director. The official said Panetta had traveled more than 200,000 miles, to more than 40 CIA stations and bases and more than 30 countries, including Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Petraeus, who took over as Afghanistan war commander in June, has been expected to leave that post before the end of this year. His name had been floated for weeks as a possible replacement for Panetta if Mr. Obama tapped Panetta to replace Gates as Pentagon chief. Current and former administration officials noted that Petraeus would bring a customer's eye to the job as one of the key people to use and understand CIA and military intelligence during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Petraeus claims that military advances, especially in the traditional Taliban stronghold areas of southern Afghanistan, have blunted the Taliban-led insurgency and given the edge to the U.S. and its NATO partners. A planned transition to Afghan security control begins this year, and the U.S. wants to start withdrawing some of its approximately 100,000 forces in July.
Sending Crocker to Afghanistan would briefly reunite him with Petraeus, re-creating the diplomatic and military "dream team" credited with rescuing the flagging American mission in Iraq. Crocker would replace Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, a former Army general whose two-year tenure has been marred by cool relationships with major players in the Afghanistan war, including the White House, U.S. military leaders and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, administration and other sources said.
The nearly wholesale changes at the top of Mr. Obama's Afghanistan military and diplomatic lineup will leave fewer military and civilian leaders who have Obama's ear and who also have Afghanistan experience. Allen, the choice to become Afghanistan war commander, has never served there.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will leave his post in September after four years dominated by the ebb of the war in Iraq and the escalation of the one in Afghanistan. The top candidate to replace Mullen is Marine Gen. James Cartwright, who also has never served in Afghanistan.
Crocker, now at Texas A&M University, didn't respond to emails from the AP seeking comment. His assistant, Mary Hein, said he has been traveling for the school over the past week and was not available for interviews. |
CLOSE Details about the Webber Building collapse. Rebecca Burylo
Buy Photo A portion of the Webber building has collapsed in downtown Montgomery. (Photo: Lloyd Gallman/Advertiser)Buy Photo
Developers plan to press on with the restoration of the historic Webber Building in downtown Montgomery despite a partial building collapse Thursday that has left surrounding streets blocked indefinitely.
"Certainly, this is a setback, but I'm of the belief that it is not insurmountable," said David Payne Sr., owner of the building and president of Design Build South LLC., which is handling the restoration.
No one was injured when the northeast corner of the building collapsed early Thursday afternoon, although workers said they just barely escaped in time.
Structural engineers were at the scene of the more than 150-year-old building at Perry and Monroe streets Thursday, Payne said. They will make a recommendation at some point about how feasible the restoration is, he added.
The cause of the collapse was not immediately clear, although workers were installing windows at the basement level and some workers on the scene said that the chain reaction of the collapse might have started there.
The following streets will be closed indefinitely: Perry Street from Dexter Avenue to Madison Avenue and Monroe Street from Perry to First Alabama Plaza.
Tim Brown said he and several others were working on the second floor on the other side of the building from the collapse when he saw a cloud of smoke and heard someone shouting, "get out of the building."
He said he and the other workers escaped from the building just in time and that the section that collapsed "fell in while we (were) running out."
"It was a spooky situation, I can tell you that," Brown said.
Montgomery Fire and Rescue received the call of the collapse at 1:17 p.m. and nine units were dispatched to the scene, according to District Fire Chief Ronnie Bozeman.
About 15 workers were inside at the time, including four in the basement, according to workers at the scene.
Payne said the building superintendent, Brian Brakenhoff, saw a crack in the wall and heard or saw a brick pop out, and that he acted quickly to get everyone out of the building.
"It is a miracle today that no one was injured," Payne said. "When I first heard the news, I was sure that someone was killed."
The two buildings west of the Webber have also been evacuated until a construction engineer can deem their structural safety.
The air quality was checked by Hazmat and is clear of any hazardous gases.
Residents are urged to keep their distance and keep outside of the collapse zone, which is deemed to be one and half the size of the structure.
Payne said, however, that so much work had already been done on the building that it appears to be salvageable.
"We were well into the construction, repair and restoration of the building, so it looks like now we just have an exterior wall to repair," he said.
Payne said the building is too much of a gem and has too much history for him to abandon the project.
The Webber Building was the home of the Montgomery Theater starting in 1860, according to the Landmarks Foundation. It's where actor John Wilkes Booth once performed and where the notes for the song "Dixie" were first written down.
After the theater closed in 1907, it became Webber's Department Store until that closed in the late 1990s. The building sat deteriorating under a collapsing roof until the Montgomery Riverfront Development Foundation purchased the building for $325,000 in 2001.
Payne signed an agreement to purchase the building from the Montgomery Riverfront Development Foundation about four years ago.
The renovation of the building includes plans for retail space on the first floor, office space on the second floor and apartments on the third floor.
The Landmarks Foundation offered some words of encouragement for Payne in a statement Thursday.
"Landmarks has suffered similar setbacks during renovation efforts in the past. Knox Hall, an 1848 building on Perry Street, was damaged by fire in the 1980s. Local historian Mary Ann Neeley commented, 'Landmarks was not daunted by the setback, and now Knox Hall is standing tall and glorious today,' " the statement reads.
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Third most popular Sina Weibo microblog post of the past 24 hours…
From Sina Weibo:
@微博搞笑排行榜: A restaurant in Chengdu hired foreign male model to be a server!! Business has exploded!!!!
Comments from Sina Weibo:
山涧小院子：
Tisk tisk, seeing so many people in the comments criticizing these girls for worshiping the foreign and fawning over foreigners, really, that’s enough now! If if were a group of Heavenly Kingdom [Chinese] handsome guys, we’d be just as excited, okay?
曾静薇_：
Pshaw! What’s worth commenting about the selling sex? I just want to say: Where in Chengdu?
官网美瞳喵：
An offense to public morality! Every time I see this kind of news, my first reaction is: tell me the address!
lovewonwon：
Look at the pile of men who can’t get any eating sour grapes, as if they wouldn’t go if it were women dressed scantily as servers, hehe.
维生素Dddd：
Look at the female customers smiling and laughing so much they can’t even keep heir legs together…
喵难揍：
What can men do these days other than grumbling/complaining?! If you looked as handsome as them, there’d also be a pile of girls unable to keep their legs together for you! Unable to eat grapes so saying the grapes are sour! You’re not handsome, so you complain about women liking handsome guys; you don’t have money so you complain about beautiful girls living off rich men; you don’t have a lot of academic achievement so you complain about others having high scores but low ability! Which is to say you spend all day YY about beautiful women throwing themselves into your arms. If you have nothing better to do, then just rub one out [masturbate].
逗比-南波吐：
I see the one being carried is my girlfriend. What should I do? Should I break up with her?
扒蒜老妹儿-：
There are guys saying this group of girls worship the foreign and fawn over foreigners. Are you guys stupid or what? When you see a wave of beautiful women, do you first think of their nationality? Fuck, of course you’ll be looking at their bodies. If you had an eight-pack of abs, a face like Daniel Wu, you could be from Tieling Xiweizi Village and no one would care. Fuck, foreign worship can be dragged into even this.
我不是大龄女青年：
Fuck! What’s the address?! Get out of my way!
此号无人使用20140120： |
This Risk Drinking Game is a great solution for anyone who wants to spice up this classic game. And well, since you’ll be playing for the next 6 hours you may as well make a party out of it. It follows all the original rules of risk except with some added drinking rules to help keep it interesting. There’s nothing wrong with a little drunken diplomacy.
Requirements:
The Game Of Risk, and drinks of choice.
Set up:
Set up Risk as you normally would.
Summary:
Players play a game or risk where they must drink whenever they lose an army and eliminated players must down their whole drink.
Risk Drinking Rules:
While most of the rules remain the same as regular risk the stakes are raised in that players must drink for making mistakes. Once the game is set up there there will be a few drinking games added in.
Whenever a player loses a unit he must take a sip of his drink.
Whenever a player claims units for having a whole continent under their control he gets to give out drinks equal to units gained this way.
Once eliminated a player must finish the rest of their drink.
Optional rule; Drunken advantage
This optional rule gives players an advantage in exchange for taking drinks. At any point in the game any player can reroll 1 die if they take 3 sips of their drink. Sure it sounds like a lot now but by the end of the game dumb ideas start to sound like good ones.
We highly recommend using the optional drunken advantage rule. It really adds a layer to the game where the most confident players gain a quick lead only to have to bow out before the end of the game because they went too hard too early.
Overall this Risk drinking game is quite a bit of drinking even without the optional rule. It’s not surprising to see players bow out way before the game is finished. So please remember to Drink Responsibly. |
After a video emerged appearing to show Hillary Clinton struggling to stand upright before stumbling into a car at a 9/11 memorial ceremony in New York City Sunday, the presidential candidate was forced to go public with the pneumonia diagnosis she received two days before.
But the near-fainting spell was in fact due to dehydration, exacerbated by her condition. Her husband Bill Clinton said Monday that it wasn’t the first time. “Rarely, but on more than one occasion, over the last many, many years, the same sort of thing’s happened to her where she just got severely dehydrated,” he said.
Politico reports, citing unnamed sources, that Clinton is chronically dehydrated, and that her reluctance to regularly drink water has become a “source of tension” between the candidate and her staff. “She won’t drink water, and you try telling Hillary Clinton she has to drink water,” a source in close contact with the Democratic candidate said. Politico described a hectic rehydration mission which included lots of bottles of water as well as Gatorade.
In 2013, CBS reported that some 75% of Americans may be functioning in a chronic state of dehydration, many mistaking the symptoms for other illnesses. Whether she’s among them or not, the Democratic nominee might be better off taking a big gulp next time a staff member approaches with a glass of water. Here’s everything you need to know about dehydration:
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Why do we get dehydrated?
Dehydration occurs when your body loses more fluid than you take in, upsetting its balance of salts and sugar, which affects the way it functions. Water makes up between 60-70% of average adult— and it’s important to keep levels stable. Water is essential for life and our body uses it in many different ways, from lubricating joints and regulating our temperature to enabling waste removal via sweating, bowel movements and urination.
If not treated immediately, chronic – or ongoing – dehydration can lead to serious medical complications; it can affect your kidney function, increase the risk of kidney stones and lead to muscle damage and constipation. This level of dehydration requires hospital treatment where a sufferer will be attached to a drip to restore fluids. Of patients treated for kidney stones, 50% are likely to have a recurrence within ten years.
How do we get dehydrated?
Usually, by not drinking enough fluid – usually water – to replace what you lose. Factors that can contribute to dehydration include the climate, physical exercise (particularly in the heat) and diet. Chronic diarrhoea, vomiting, frequent urination and profuse sweating, for example from a fever, can also lead you to become dehydrated.
How can you tell you’re dehydrated?
Early warning signs include tiredness, a dry mouth, having dark coloured, strong-smelling urine, feeling thirsty and lightheaded and needing to urinate less than usual. If you begin to suffer from extreme thirst, lethargy, sunken eyes, no tears when you cry, little or no urination, a rapid heartbeat and breathing, and dizziness when you stand that lasts for more than a few seconds, you should get medical treatment straight away as these are signs of chronic dehydration.
As hydration regulates the body’s process of temperature control, being too hot or too cold can also be a sign of dehydration.
Who is most at risk?
Everyone is prone to dehydration, but some are at higher risk than others. Infants and children are particularly prone to becoming dehydrated as their bodies are made up of 65-75% water.
Elderly people are also at risk, as you lose your sense of thirst dramatically as you age, meaning older people often forget to drink enough water. Clinton, who is 68, could fall into this category. According to recent research by the BBC, one in five older people living in care homes does not drink enough fluid and those with dementia were six times more likely to be dehydrated.
People living with medical conditions, including diabetes, cystic fibrosis and kidney disease, as well as alcoholics, are also more prone to dehydration.
What’s the best way to avoid it?
Drink plenty of water! The Institute of Medicine recommends that women from the age of 19 to 70 drink 2.7 liters – or 11 cups – of beverages per day, and men of the same age are recommended to have 3.7 liters. This includes standard tap water as well as tea, coffee and juice – more or less all drinks which contain water. The U.S.’ Centers for Disease Control advises citizens to choose water instead of sugar-sweetened beverages, recommending teachers to educate students about the danger of consuming too much caffeine, including energy drinks.
Write to Kate Samuelson at [email protected]. |
The UFC made its sixth stop in Australia with UFC Fight Night 55, which took place Friday at Sydney’s Allphones Arena. The event, which streamed on UFC Fight Pass, saw a record number of finishes as every fight on the card ended in a stoppage.
In the main event, middleweight contender Luke Rockhold (13-2 MMA, 3-1 UFC) continued to make his case for a title shot when he submitted “The Ultimate Fighter 3” winner Michael Bisping (25-7 MMA, 15-7 UFC) in the second round.
The co-main event saw Al Iaquinta (10-3-1 MMA, 5-2 UFC) knock out “TUF 9” winner Ross Pearson (16-8 MMA, 8-5 UFC) while Robert Whittaker (13-4 MMA, 4-2 UFC) and Soa Palelei (22-4 MMA, 4-2 UFC) picked up wins to round out the four-fight main card.
After every event, fans wonder whom the winners will be matched up with next. And with another night of UFC action in the rearview mirror, it’s time to look forward, put on a pair of Joe Silva’s and Sean Shelby’s shoes, and play UFC matchmaker.
* * * *
Soa Palelei
Should fight: Winner of Todd Duffee vs. Anthony Hamilton at UFC 181
Why they should fight: After an uninspiring effort in his previous outing, Palelei rebounded with a ground-and-pound finish of injury replacement Walt Harris for his 12th victory in his past 13 fights.
“The Hulk” had his grappling game exposed by Jared Rosholt earlier this year when he lost a one-sided decision to the talented wrestler. Unless the 36-year-old can somehow shore up that hole in his game, he’s not going to break into the next tier of the heavyweight division.
That said, Palelei is always capable of pulling off a knockout. And if he can put together a winning streak against other middling fighters in his weight class, such as the winner of Duffee (8-2 MMA, 2-1 UFC) and Hamilton (13-3 MMA, 1-1 UFC), who meet at UFC 181 on Dec. 6, he could earn another chance to face a top heavyweight.
Robert Whittaker
Should fight: Winner of Nate Marquardt vs. Brad Tavares at UFC 182
Why they should fight: Whittaker’s decision to move up to middleweight was clearly the right one. In his divisional debut, the “TUF: Smashes” winner became the first to knock out Clint Hester when he finished the fight with a second-round flurry.
The Australian rebounded from recent back-to-back losses, and after numerous tough cuts to welterweight, he said a change was needed. Not often will fighters at the UFC level move up in weight, but Whittaker looked better than ever after doing so.
Hester is hardly a small middleweight, and Whittaker didn’t appear physically outmatched prior to his knockout victory. He was quick, slick and confident, which is going to cause problems for some members of the 185-pound weight class.
While Hester had a nice winning streak before he crossed paths with Whittaker, he’s yet to defeat any competition that will prove he can be a long-lasting member of the UFC roster. If Whittaker wants to continue to rise through the ranks, he needs to defeat a bigger name.
Two well-known middleweights in Marquardt (33-13-2 MMA, 11-6 UFC) and Tavares (12-3 MMA, 7-3 UFC) are set to square off at UFC 182 on Jan. 3, and a potential victory over the winner would add a lot of credibility to Whittaker’s resume.
Al Iaquinta
Should fight: Gleison Tibau
Why they should fight: Since he first appeared on “TUF 15,” Iaquinta has shown the type of talent that could result in a special career.
He’s had setbacks and glimpses of brilliance since then, but against Pearson, the 27-year-old showed the full extent of his abilities when he stopped his British counterpart by second-round knockout.
Iaquinta saw mostly indifference when he told MMAjunkie he had a striking advantage over “The Real Deal.” He backed up those words with a counter-striking clinic that concluded with the referee pulling him off his opponent.
Pearson was a step up in competition from anyone Iaquinta had previously fought, but the New Yorker was clearly ready for it. Now it’s only natural to continue to climb the ranks.
Tibau (30-10 MMA, 15-8 UFC) would be a formidable test for Iaquinta. He’s fought a lightweight record 22 times under the UFC banner and has a history of separating the pretenders from the contenders.
Iaquinta has everything going for him right now, though. He’s young, comes from a tremendous gym at Team Serra-Longo, has unshakable self-belief and is on a roll with wins in five of his past six fights. If he can keep that momentum rolling through Tibau, he could garner a spot in top 15 of the division.
Luke Rockhold
Should fight: Ronaldo Souza
Why they should fight: Despite a setback against Vitor Belfort in his UFC debut, Rockhold has fought back to prominence and is on the verge of becoming the top contender in the middleweight division after earning his third consecutive UFC victory.
Another fighter who’s made waves in the 185-pound weight class is Souza (20-3 MMA, 3-0 UFC). “Jacare” is undefeated since coming over from the now-defunct Strikeforce organization and appears to be on a collision course with Rockhold.
Even though Rockhold already holds a September 2011 win over Souza, both fighters have evolved tremendously since then and have proven to be two of the top talents in the UFC middleweight division.
The first meeting decided who would be Strikeforce champion. Should the rematch go down roughly three years later, it’s likely that the outcome would determine the No. 1 contender to the UFC 184 title bout between Chris Weidman and Belfort.
For complete coverage of UFC Fight Night 55, check out the UFC Events section of the site. |
This feature first appeared in this month's edition of ProCycling magazine. Related Articles Report Card: Movistar Team
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During the final segment of Bradley Wiggins faultless build-up for the 2012 Tour de France - at the Criterium du Dauphiné - Team Sky only once came up against a rider who not only refused to turn over and be beaten, but who also succeeded.
On the race’s most mountainous stage Nairo Quintana (Movistar) charged away on the Col de Joux Plane, the single hardest climb of that year’s Dauphiné. Yet for all Team Sky laid down a relentless pace behind designed to wipe out any rival attacks - which, barring a late downhill move by Cadel Evans, largely managed to do - Quintana reached the finish ahead of both the Australian and the Sky-led main pack.
Up until that point, Sky had won almost everything they wanted to in the Dauphiné, which they completed with the overall victory and three riders in the top four. But if Quintana constituted a minor fly in the ointment for Sky last June given he was so far behind overall, in the Vuelta al País Vasco this April, his stage victory ahead of Sergio Henao and Richie Porte had a far more devastating effect on the British. Against almost all expectations, he won outright.
Quintana’s team-mates in Movistar feel that the 23-year-old Colombian has a huge margin of progression. Juan Jose Cobo, the only rider to beat Sky’s combined ‘A’ team of Wiggins+Froome in a three-week stage race, back in the 2011 Vuelta points out that “Last year Nairo was with Alejandro [Valverde] right up until the last climbs in his debut Grand Tour “- with one particular high point being when Quintana took sixth on the race’s toughest ascent, the Cuitu Negru, after working for his team leader. “That means he’s got it in him to win in major Tours.”
This year, Quintana is being groomed for the Tour de France, a race where one top name in Sky’s management admitted to ProCycling that he considered the Colombian so dangerous “we won’t be giving him any room for manouvre at all.”
They could be right to do that, given Quintana is not just a gifted climber. As Cobo points out, “in his first month with us [2012] he was already capable of winning a stage race, the Vuelta a Murcia. What surprised us wasn’t so much that he could take the mountainous stage” - as he did, taking the lead with it - “but that he was so unstressed about the time trial that followed. We knew that he was a climber all right, but not that he could do so well in the time trialling.” Sky, too, were to find this out at the Vuelta al País Vasco, where Porte and Henao looked set to win outright until Quintana claimed the final victory thanks to winning the last, technically very difficult, race against the clock.
Growing up in Colombia
If Quintana’s all round abilities are what make him so dangerous as a three week stage race contender, his first eye-catching result in Europe came in the Subida a Urkiola in 2009, a sadly defunct summit finish race that acted as a revenge match for the Clasica San Sebastian, held 24 hours earlier. On Urkiola, probably the steepest climb of the Basque Country, and riding for a tiny South American squad, Boyaca es Para Vivirla (Boyaca is a place to go and see), aged 19, Quintana placed seventh.
“It was the biggest race the team got to do that year,” Quintana recalls, “I was pretty young and I’d only just turned pro. that summer. To be honest, I never imagined it, but that was where I started taking my first steps. That result opened me a lot of doors.”
It is one of the best-known cycling cliches that riders who have come from a very poor background tend to be hungrier for success in cycling. In Quintana’s case, given that he began working almost as soon as he could walk, helping his father - who is disabled - work as a wholesale fruit merchant in rural Colombia shifting cartloads of vegetables, the cliche happens to be true. But he doesn’t see his upbringing as having been excessively hard.
“Yes, we did work from a very young age. One of my earliest memories is sitting in a bus surrounded by other farm workers and sacks of fruit and vegetables. But it wasn’t all bad, it’s like anything, once you start doing it, you get used to it. We had some good times”
On two wheels as well as four, there were other experiences there in his hometown of Combita, northeast of Bogota, that helped forge his endurance level as a pro. For example there was how he had to ride down one mountain and up another mountain pass, a mere 16 kilometres long, every time he went to school - an education which, like so many young Colombians, he combined with his ‘day-job’ of working to help the family, making for very long hours for a teenager.
“Combita itself is at around 1,700 metres above sea level, but my parents house was a lot further up the mountain, at 3,000 metres. So to go to school, in another town called Arcabuco, I had to go up that climb, which was around eight percent average gradient and 16 kilometres long, every day. And then it was 16 kilometres downhill again. I did that every day for three years, from 15 to 18. And when I was 17, too, that was what got me interested in riding a bike anyway.”
There was no tradition, he says, in his family, of racing or riding. “It had never occured to me.” But given the climb he had to tackle on his ‘school run’ was so hard, groups of normal amateur riders would use it, and one day he decided to tag along with some riders on a training run to see how well he could match against them.
“They started accelerating and accelerating and they couldn’t drop me,” he recalls with just a hint of pride in his quietly spoken voice. “So I got home, I told my dad, and he was very pleased. He bought me a racing bike and then we went on to village races.”
He went straight from junior to a Continental level with the Boyaca squad, who snapped him up after he took third in the Colombian version of the Tour de L’Avenir, in 2008. That meant Quintana has been used to punching above his weight from a very young age, given he never raced as an amateur, but was already familiar with U-23 events. “As a junior there weren’t many races at my level. I would get fourth or fifth in uphill time trials, once second but I was racing against guys three or four years older than me.”
His next move, into Colombia es Pasión in 2010, came when Boyaca lost sponsorship deal and stopped racing in Europe. “Colomba es Pasión already wanted to sign me in 2009, but Boyaca was my local team. When Boyaca dropped down a category to amateur, though, I could sign with Colombia es Pasión.”
The Tour de L'Avenir
In 2011, having won the Tour de L’Avenir of the European variety the previous year - another important landmark - Quintana then won the mountains prize in the Volta a Catalunya.
“That showed me I was doing ok, without making huge progress. “It also saved his career. Quintana crashed out badly of the Vuelta a Colombia, badly injuring his wrists during a pile-up in the race - “and it still hurts” - and was two months off without racing. But Movistar had had their eye on Quintana since the Tour de L’Avenir - and even more so after Catalunya, and “doing a really good time trial in Castille y Leon on a bike that wasn’t my measure and didn’t even belong to me.” So in 2012, despite having had half the 2011 season off, he signed with the Spanish. The Colombian who started out by riding up 16 kilometre climbs just so he could get an education was finally en route.
“I was in good shape from the first month with Movistar, winning from the Vuelta a Murcia onwards, where I beat some big names like Samuel Sanchez and Roberto Gesink,” he recalls. Quintana has, since then, been the first top Colombian to excel in time trials since Victor Hugo Peña and Santiago Botero, who won the World Championships Time Trial and a Tour de France time trial back in the early noughties. “I did well in Murcia, but I’d already represented Colombia at the World’s in timetrials at U-23 level,” he said, “maybe I’m not a top name, but if you look at the climbers, I’m always up there in the time trials as well.”
Murcia was one breakthrough, but the biggest was without doubt managing to beat Team Sky in the Joux Plane in the Criterium du Dauphine. They were, as Quintana recollects, “way superior to everybody else at the time and they were scarily fast in every stage before that. All we could do was sit on their wheels.”
“But I felt good on the Joux Plane day, I attacked to see what I could get, but the most I could do was 20 or 30 seconds. They were always close behind, Sky were so strong. But nobody else dared attack.”
Confidence for the Tour de France
“Winning there gave me a big dose of confidence, I felt much more sure of myself on the French mountains now,” he says, “straight away after the Dauphine I went onto the Route du Sud and won the most important mountain stage there, too, with big differences between the main favourites.” - of over a minute, in fact, between himself and his vastly more experienced closest pursuer, Herbert Dupont (Ag2R), and with nearly four minutes between himself and the equally veteran third placed Anthony Charteau (Europcar).
Ironically enough, one reason why he managed to stay away on the descent off the Joux Plane into Morzine - one of the most difficult in the Alps - was because he had been given the wrong bike. (This error also blows a hole in Sky’s theories of marginal gains being paramount to success, quite apart from losing the British team the stage, but that’s another story.)
“The team’s biomechanic messed up and he gave me a bike that was too large, he insisted that was the right one,” Quintana recalls. “But because the frame was a little bit longer, that bike gave me a little bit more confidence on the descents, as happened that day.”
“It was only this year, after a lot of nagging, that I got the team to give me a bike that was one smaller, the right, size.” He now descends “normally, it’s ok,”, without the same degree of confidence, he says “but I’ve got a lot better on the climbs with a new bike. I can ride it harder, and you can feel the bike responds quicker when I move ” He laughs at the idea that Movistar should give him a different bike for the descents, but perhaps it is worth considering.
Even with the wrong bike, he was a huge factor in Movistar team-mate Alejandro Valverde’s success in the Vuelta, where Valverde took second overall and could have won the race outright had he not miscalculated when Contador attacked at Fuente Dé.
“I came to the Vuelta directly from Colombia, where the temperature was nearly twenty degrees cooler - 10 degrees in the middle of the day or so. So when I got to Pamplona on the first day with 37 degrees, my body couldn’t really handle it.”
“But thank goodness, when the second week of mountain climbing started, my body had got used to the hotter weather and I was ready to go. It was a very tough Vuelta indeed.”
Goals at the Tour de France
Looking ahead to the Tour, his initial objective will be to “help Alejandro again, he’s at a very good level” - and with the mountainous route that the Vuelta has this year and given Valverde is now 33, it is almost now or never for the Spaniard.
“But if there are any opportunities for me, I’ll take them.”
Quintana, together with Sergio Henao and Rigoberto Uran (Sky) as well as Carlos Alberto Betancur (AG2R) is supposed to be at the head of a new generation of Colombian riders. But although too young to recall the Colombian greats in the Tour in the 1980s - although his gravelly voice, weatherbeaten skin and almost un-nervingly serious way of talking make him seem much older than in his twenties - Quintana nonetheless has clear memories of some of the more recent generation of Colombian riders and say that “in fact, we’ve always been around. This isn’t a ‘return’ to thirty years ago for us. We’ve always been there.”
He names Maurizio Ardila - “one of [Denis] Menchov’s greatest domestiques” - Santiago Botero and Maurizio Soler - “who did great things in the Tour de France mountain stages and was always really consistent” - as the top names from his country in recent years. “And then there was time triallist Victor Hugo Peña, aka El Tiburon [The Shark], who was Colombia’s first Tour de France leader in 2003, and who was the senior figure in Quintana’s two years in the Colombia es Pasión [Colombia is Passion] team, in 2010 and 2011.
He agrees with Betancur, though, that the arrival of the biological passport has enabled “not just one or two, but a large number” of Colombian riders to break through to the surface, and the benefits of living at altitude to become more noticeable again.
“I think that in my case, for example, I live at 1,800 metres above sea level, we were born and we grew up there, and I believe that makes a difference. But to be honest I haven’t thought about how different we are or not: here in Europe there are lots of good riders.”
Quintana has already proved he is more than a match for riders of the level of Richie Porte (Sky), even when he was in top form after winning Paris-Nice. How much higher can he go? Valverde, for one, says that Quintana has “an enormous future, even if he’s very young” and insists “that he can have a role as a team leader when I’m not there, as he showed in the Volta a Catalunya.”
For the Tour, Valverde’s idea is that Quintana will be making his debut “and learning about it little by little.” Could he outshine the Movistar leader? This July we will find out. But Quintana has already proved he has stepped up a huge level this spring. And with no pressure on him as a team leader, he could go even further than anyone has expected - particularly with the right bike. |
MANILA - Senator Vicente "Tito" Sotto III on Thursday blamed online "trolls" for supposedly exaggerating his controversial remark about single parents.
"Mga trolls lang nagpapalaki nyan. Hayaan mo na sila," he said in a text message to ABS-CBN News.
Sotto drew criticism on Wednesday after using the colloquial Tagalog phrase "na-ano lang" to describe Social Welfare Secretary Judy Taguiwalo's status as a solo parent.
"In the street language, when you have children and you are single, ang tawag doon ay 'na-ano lang,'" he told Taguiwalo.
In an interview with reporters, Sotto wondered why his comments drew heavy criticism, adding that two of his daughters were also single parents.
"I have two daughters who are separated, who are single and have children. So I don't think there should be any big fuss about it," he added.
Sotto apologized to everyone who took offense with his "joke", saying some people simply did not understand it.
"Perhaps...these are just people who are not my fans so to speak (laughs). Baka mga talagang pakontra lang sa akin yan, kahit anong makita sa akin pangontra na."
"That's why ang premise ko, in the street language. 'Yun ang biruan sa kalsada eh. Kung minasama nila, eh di I'm sorry, I apologize. They didn't understand the joke," he said.
"Madali naman 'yun kung hindi natin mamasamain. Pero kung minasama nila, humihingi ako ng paumanhin," Sotto added.
In his text message to ABS-CBN News, he also noted that the "na-ano lang" is merely a popular catch phrase.
"People have been using that statement everywhere to give a comic description if (the) husband is not present," he said.
Several netizens, one of Taguiwalo's children and the Gabriela women's party-list earlier scored Sotto for sexism and misogyny.
-- With a report from Sherrie Ann Torres, ABS-CBN News |
Huawei's new flagship smartphone for 2016 is here, and its big claim to fame is a pair of Leica-certified cameras. The 5.2-inch Huawei P9 has a traditional 12-megapixel camera, but right next to it is another, monochrome 12-megapixel module. Working together, the two sensors can improve contrast in photos by 50 percent and triple the light information taken in by the phone. This is because the monochrome sensor doesn't have the RGB light filtering that its color sibling requires, and so is able to soak up more photons. I spent some time with the P9 ahead of its announcement in London today, and what I saw leaves me encouraged. This phone is slim, well built, performs well, and the dual-camera system isn't trying to push any unnecessary gimmicks.
The design feels cohesive, elegant, and yes, premium
The P9 falls right in line with this year's high standard for flagship Android phones. It has an aluminum unibody case, a 3,000mAh battery, a USB-C port, and an octa-core Kirin 955 processor of Huawei's own making. The fit and finish on this device are immediately impressive, and the phone's design feels cohesive, elegant, and yes, even premium. In spite of the two camera modules and sizable battery, the Huawei P9 is only 6.95mm thick (without any extra camera bumps). In Europe, the P9 will have space for a microSD card, which in China and other Asian markets will be swapped for a second SIM slot. There are a couple of other specification splits between Europe and China: the rose gold P9 won't be available in Europe and neither will the 64GB version of the handset. All P9s come with 3GB of RAM, but European models will have to limit themselves to 32GB of built-in storage.
A 5.5-inch Huawei P9 Plus is also being announced today, coming with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage by standard, with China also getting a bumped-up 128GB variant. The Plus model expands the battery to 3,400mAh and switches the display technology to Super AMOLED from the regular P9's IPS, although both share a 1080p resolution. The Plus also adds an IR blaster and a pressure-sensitive screen, which the company is calling Press Touch technology (Huawei used similar tech in limited edition versions of last year's Mate S). The P9 Plus will be available in May, in both Europe and Asia, while the smaller P9 will be on sale on both continents by the end of this month. Huawei refuses to either confirm or deny any launch plans for the P9 in the United States, though the company is already on the record as having said that it plans to launch a flagship smartphone in the US this year.
I tried my best to understand the exact details of Leica and Huawei's partnership on the camera system of the P9. Huawei's announcement says only that the two cameras have "Leica certification." When asked what that actually meant, the Chinese company said that it was developed through "a co-engineering process." When asked what that meant, the company said that they worked together. Given Leica's willingness to cynically rebrand (and then overprice) Panasonic cameras, I have to be dubious about the value of this partnership until either company discloses some substantive benefits from it. Either that, or the camera will have to just prove itself better than all the rest. It does promise to deliver the best black and white photos with its dedicated monochrome sensor, and it has laser autofocus, though neither camera module comes with optical image stabilization. I'll withhold judgment until I can put it through its paces properly, but for now, check out the photos of the P9 below. It really is quite lovely, dubious branding or not.
The Huawei P9 is priced at £449 in the UK with 32GB of storage and 3GB of RAM, while the Huawei P9 Plus will cost £549 with 64GB of storage and 4GB of RAM from mid-May. |
Turkey should accelerate its steps in biotechnology The annual BIO International Convention was held in San Francisco last week. In this, the world’s biggest biotechnology event, Turkey has been represented by an increasing number of people every year, but significant steps should now be taken in terms of quality.
The Turkish delegation’s participation in the convention was organized by the independent think tank, the Economic Policy and Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV). This year’s Turkish delegation at the convention was dominated by public administrators.
It was indeed an important step that members of the Health Industries Steering Council (SEYK) were able to explain their work to investors at the convention. In fact, the formation of the SEYK toward the end of last year and its holding of intense meetings were important steps by themselves. However, biotechnology competition globally has increased so much, and developing countries have their eyes set so firmly on it, that Turkey needs to accelerate its steps. It needs to make concrete moves as soon as possible with a clever strategy.
MSD Health Policies Director Deniz Öncel said they had reached a good phase but several more concrete steps are now needed. “But beyond the prioritized technology transfer projects, it is more important to have a framework on how Turkey can become more competitive in biotechnology, R&D, production, investment, management and technology transfer,” Öncel said.
The private sector must be included in the business and should participate in SEYK meetings, Öncel also said, adding that the private sector’s practical experience should be taken into account while forming a vision and policy. This would enable Turkey to reach its goals faster in a race that it has been relatively late in joining.
Best practices
Öncel also said Turkey needs a boost in the biotechnology field. It needs more ideas and more entrepreneurs. As the number of ideas and companies increases, the value of innovation will be better understood as these companies would be receiving investments. With companies being bought by multinational companies and by going public, Turkey will attract more international investors, she added.
“If we want to be among the important players in this sector, where there is cutthroat competition, then we do not have the luxury to stop,” Öncel said.
She also expressed hope that by the time of next year’s BIO international conference, several advanced innovations would be presented including an international-standard patent law, projects supported by major funds, successful technology transfer contracts, startups with investors, and incentives designed with the participation of the private sector in SEYK meetings.
Öncel said they were supportive as a company, and hoped that startups at the convention for the first time this year would succeed in making fruitful contacts and attracting investments. |
This story appeared in the radically leftist New York Times, of all places.
It says:
A small number of very premature babies are surviving earlier outside the womb than doctors once thought possible, a new study has documented, raising questions about how aggressively they should be treated and posing implications for the debate about abortion. […]The study, one of the largest and most systematic examinations of care for very premature infants, found that hospitals with sophisticated neonatal units varied widely in their approach to 22-week-olds, ranging from a few that offer no active medical treatment to a handful that assertively treat most cases with measures like ventilation, intubation and surfactant to improve the functioning of babies’ lungs. […]The study, involving nearly 5,000 babies born between 22 and 27 weeks gestation, found that 22-week-old babies did not survive without medical intervention. In the 78 cases where active treatment was given, 18 survived, and by the time they were young toddlers, seven of those did not have moderate or severe impairments. Six had serious problems such as blindness, deafness or severe cerebral palsy. Of the 755 born at 23 weeks, treatment was given to 542. About a third of those survived, and about half of the survivors had no significant problems.
You can double-check the details of the study.
Meanwhile, in Congress, the Republicans are getting ready to reintroduce a bill that bans abortions after 20 weeks.
Excerpt:
Republicans in the House of Representatives will hold a vote on or around the anniversary of the murder conviction of late-term abortionist Kermit Gosnell on a marquee bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy because unborn children feel intense pain in abortions. This is the second time Republicans have planned a vote on the major pro-life bill — and this vote is expected to take place next week, possibly Wednesday, the anniversary of Gosnell’s conviction. […]As pro-life sources have informed LifeNews, other new provisions of the bill that strengthen in include a born-alive infant protection requirement that requires a second doctor be present and prepared to provide care to the child if he or she is born alive and that the child must receive the same level of care as would any other premature infant. The baby must then be transported and admitted to a hospital. The woman is also empowered with a right to sue if the law is not followed, and is provided with an informed consent form that notifies her of the age of her baby and the requirements under the law. Abortionists are explicitly required to follow state mandatory reporting laws and state parental involvement laws. Finally, abortionists are required to report any late abortions done under the exceptions to the Center for Disease Control and such data will be compiled into an annual public report to ensure accountability.
This bill doesn’t go all the way to banning all abortions – far from it. But pro-life groups are pleased, because they want to save some lives even if they can’t save all:
Top pro-life advocates are strongly supporting the final version of the bill up for a vote next week, according to the Weekly Standard. Two major pro-life groups have already signed off on the revised bill. “We will have even stronger support than we did in the last Congress,” said Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, a leading pro-life advocate in the House. “It will be good to have a truly unified pro-life conference.” National Right to Life Committee president Carol Tobias worked closely with Republican leadership staff members and met Thursday with McCarthy. “I felt very comfortable working with leadership staff,” said Tobias. “We were working as allies.” “We are thankful to our pro-life allies on the Hill, including House GOP leadership and the Congressional Pro-Life Women’s Caucus, who have tirelessly worked to bring this bill to a vote,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List. “This process has yielded a strong bill which we expect to pass next week with enthusiastic bipartisan support.” Sponsoring Congressman Trent Franks of Arizona says the bill has the potential to save thousands of babies from abortion.
That bill is, of course, opposed by Democrats.
UPDATE: Here’s a news story about a woman who killed a 20-week-old baby who was born alive and left to die. |
The three-week-long Islamic State siege of the Syrian town of Kobani is rapidly intensifying. On Monday, fighters were said to have raised the black ISIS flag over at least one building in the eastern part of the city as vicious street-to-street battles unfolded. Reporting from southern Turkey, journalist Harald Doornbas noted that a second flag had gone up just southeast of the city.
The good news is the Syrian Kurds have (so far) kept ISIS from breaching the center of the city. The bad news is everything else. Kobani, also known as Ayn al-Arab, is just six miles from the Turkish border, over which more than 100,000 civilians fled when the Islamic State attack began in late September.
The advance of the Islamic State fighters into a strategically important Syrian city is a development that U.S.-led airstrikes were supposed to preclude. But as many are suggesting, the coalition efforts to stem the Islamic State onslaught have been ineffective. This is, at least in part, because ISIS has changed its tactics.
"In Syria and Iraq, they took down many of their trademark black flags, and camouflaged armed pickup trucks," The Wall Street Journal wrote of ISIS. "They also took cover among civilians." The group is also said to have decentralized some of its command structure, adjusted its movements to nighttime, and eschewed the frequent use of cellphone and radio communications. |
BEFORE THE ADVENT of opinion polls, by-elections were the most reliable means of gauging the mood of the electorate.
For decades before the 1916 Rising, Irish nationalists represented by the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) sought Irish home rule – a subordinate parliament and government in Dublin.
But the emergence of Sinn Féin, which championed an independent Irish republic, transformed the political landscape. In 1917 Sinn Féin won four by-elections on the bounce in North Roscommon, South Longford, East Clare and South Kilkenny.
No victory was more emphatic than East Clare and no winning candidate more central to the future history of Ireland.
A political novice
The victor was a political novice with little experience of public speaking outside the classroom. The senior surviving Volunteer from 1916, he was largely unknown before the East Clare by-election.
But after it he was catapulted to national prominence, became president of Sinn Féin and represented East Clare for the next four decades. That soldier turned politician was Éamon de Valera.
The East Clare by-election on July 10 was precipitated by the death on the Western Front of the sitting MP: Major Willie Redmond, brother of the leader of the IPP.
Patrick Lynch KC, a barrister, contested the seat for the IPP under the banner: “Clare for a Clareman – Lynch is the Man”. His supporters, who were strongest in Ennis, contended that an Irish republic was a political fantasy. For several reasons, few expected anything other than a Sinn Féin victory.
One of the most rebellious counties in Ireland
First, Clare was one of the most rebellious counties in Ireland and during the by-election the county inspector of the Royal Irish Constabulary had to obtain a draft of 150 soldiers. Eight months after the by-election Clare became the first county to be placed under military rule since the 1916 Rising.
Second, no election had been contested in East Clare since 1895 and the IPP’s constituency machine was decrepit and almost bankrupt. By contrast, the Sinn Féin campaign was highly organised and backboned by the revamped Irish Volunteers who were unafraid to defy the authorities and acted as a private police force.
De Valera, who had only been released from prison on 16 June, campaigned in his Volunteer uniform and told the electors that, “every vote you give now is as good as the crack of a rifle in proclaiming your desire for freedom”.
Third, buoyed up by its earlier electoral successes Sinn Féin attracted not just the support of the young but that of the Clare Champion (the county newspaper) and, more significantly, the endorsement of Bishop Michael Fogarty of Killaloe and the majority of younger clergy. The Catholic card was played astutely and reassuringly by de Valera.
Although everyone expected a victory for de Valera, no one expected so stunning a winning margin. When the result of the election was announced on July 11 de Valera had secured 5,010 votes to Lynch’s 2,035.
A game changer
The rural vote had turned against the IPP. The Freeman’s Journal, the newspaper of the IPP, lamented that, “East Clare has declared for revolution by an overwhelming majority”. Lynch was not the man after all.
The East Clare by-election was a milestone for Sinn Féin because it secured a striking popular mandate which helped the organisation to continue its rapid growth ahead of the 1918 general election.
For de Valera his victory was a pivotal episode in his progression from militant to political republican. More than any other factor, the scale of his success propelled him to the presidency of Sinn Féin in October 1917 and launched his long political career. For a man who in the early months of 1917 wished to have no truck with politics this was quite a turn of events.
Dr Daithí Ó Corráin lectures in the School of History & Geography, Dublin City University. His research interests include the aftermath of the 1916 Rising, the Irish Revolution, the Irish and National Volunteers and twentieth-century ecclesiastical history. He is co-editor of a landmark 30-volume series on the local experience of the Irish Revolution published by Four Courts Press.
The 100th anniversary of the election of Éamon de Valera will be commemorated by Fianna Fáil Leader, Micheál Martin, the Clare Fianna Fáil organisation, and his family, today Sunday 23 July in Ennis. The will take place at the Glór Theatre at 12pm. Following the activities in the theatre, a full dress-parade, led by a brass band, will march, led by Micheál Martin and former Clare TD, Síle de Valera, from the Glór Theatre to the O’Connell Monument – the site of some of Éamon de Valera’s most famous speeches. |
Gorakhpur's main state-run hospital withheld every bit of information from parents of infants who died due to shortage of oxygen earlier this month, an India Today investigation has found.
There was a total lack of transparency, no accountability and miscommunication at the city's BRD Medical College and Hospital where 34 infants died one after another on the intervening night of August 10-11, the investigation has discovered.
Overall, a total of 64 babies, many of them encephalitis patients, died at the hospital in Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's hometown from August 7 to the noon of August 11.
Most deaths - 34 - were reported in a matter of hours between August 10 and 11. "It's a heinous crime if deaths happen because of oxygen shortage," Adityanath had remarked in the aftermath of the tragedy. "It will be a service to humanity, if we present the right facts."
India Today's undercover investigation has unearthed shocking facts.
The probe found how parents were kept in the dark as the infants died at the BRD hospital on the killer night.
NURSES GAVE PARENTS MANUAL AIR BAGS TO PUMP OXYGEN
The parents had little clue about the imminent disaster when nurses unhooked the ventilators and handed manual air bags to the parents to pump oxygen into their children.
India Today's investigative team reached out to Balwant Gupta, the man in-charge of oxygen supplies at BRD on the fateful night on August 10 and 11.
Gupta said, "We had 52 oxygen cylinders. When piped air supplies dropped at 7.30 pm, some other staff replaced them with back-up cylinders. "When I took over (the shift), the entire stock was exhausted by 11.30 pm."
Gupta informed all the staff on duty that the hospital would run out of all oxygen cylinders in a couple of hours. They were told to prepare self-inflating bags for emergency.
But no one shared information about the crisis with the parents. "I don't know what would have happened, if I had disclosed this to the patients (attendants/parents)," he admitted.
Anxious parents, Gupta said, pumped air from the hand-operated device for the next two hours till a new lot of oxygen cylinders arrived.
"The vehicle carrying the oxygen cylinders was running late. It came in at 1.22 am (August 11) and the supply of oxygen resumed at 1.30 am," he recounted.
'INADEQUATE OXYGEN SUPPLY CAUSED DEATHS'
When our reported asked what caused the deaths, Gupta replied, "Inadequate oxygen supply. What else? Supplies should have been adequate. They weren't and that's why patients suffered."
A government inquiry has indicted the then BRD principal Rajeev Mishra, chief anaesthetist Satish Kumar and chief pharmacist Gajanan Jaiswal for the crisis.
Liquid-oxygen vendor Pushpa Sales has also been held responsible for disrupting deliveries over payment issues since August 4.
Top hospital doctors not only sat over oxygen shortage for almost a week, they didn't even respond to SOS calls for hours when the situation demanded, the investigation found.
"The Superintendent-in-Chief called back only in the morning, asking what happened. He said he would come in at 9 am and would hold a meeting with the people concerned," Gupta disclosed.
When our reporter asked Gupta when did he call the superintendent-in-chief, he said, "I called him in the night itself. The call went unanswered. He called back at 7 am."
According to V.K. Chaurasia, spokesman of the BRD Medical College and Hospital, duty staff hustled parents away from the wards when children began to die that night.
"All the parents were moved out so that they didn't come to know their children had died," he confessed. "Parents were moved out. When Dr Kafeel (Khan) arrived, some other doctors were called in to discuss the next course of action. Only then did they start releasing the bodies of (the dead) babies."
But that's not all.
VARIOUS PROTOCOLS ALSO VIOLATED
India Today's investigation found out gross violation of various protocols - from tendering to the procurement of oxygen supplies.
Documents accessed by India Today show the hospital outsourced cylinders from a plant as far as 350 km away - from Imperial Gases Limited in Allahabad.
What is worse, the investigation found that the company could instead have delivered industrial oxygen to the Gorakhpur hospital.
"The deal was signed by the principal himself. He instructed me to carry out his orders. I did inform him (about industrial supplies). But he ignored," insisted Gajanan, the hospital's head pharmacist, who is now under investigation.
Dr A.K. Srivastava, the then chief medical superintendent, directed India Today's team to the exact location of the unit that supplied oxygen cylinders to BRD.
"It (Imperial Gases) has a depot in Faizabad, from where it was delivering supplies to many hospitals", he said.
At Faizabad, the plant's manager confirmed that the unit only produced factory oxygen and not medical.
"See, we cannot produce medical oxygen here. We are not licensed to produce medical oxygen. It involves a lot of formalities", said S.K. Verma, Manager of Imperial Gases' factory in Faizabad. "We keep no stock of it either. We only store industrial (oxygen) for supplies," he added.
ALSO READ |
Gorakhpur deaths: Adityanth govt orders FIR against BRD Hospital employees
Gorakhpur tragedy: Inquiry report blames oxygen supplying firm, 2 doctors
Gorakhpur tragedy effect: Delhi hospitals asked to ensure proper supply of medicines, equipment
WATCH VIDEO: Operation Gorakhpur: Truth behind deaths of infants in BRD hospital |
He and another researcher, Mohammad Siahpush, a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, developed an index to measure social and economic conditions in every county, using census data on education, income, poverty, housing and other factors. Counties were then classified into 10 groups of equal population size.
In 1980-82, Dr. Singh said, people in the most affluent group could expect to live 2.8 years longer than people in the most deprived group (75.8 versus 73 years). By 1998-2000, the difference in life expectancy had increased to 4.5 years (79.2 versus 74.7 years), and it continues to grow, he said.
After 20 years, the lowest socioeconomic group lagged further behind the most affluent, Dr. Singh said, noting that “life expectancy was higher for the most affluent in 1980 than for the most deprived group in 2000.”
“If you look at the extremes in 2000,” Dr. Singh said, “men in the most deprived counties had 10 years’ shorter life expectancy than women in the most affluent counties (71.5 years versus 81.3 years).” The difference between poor black men and affluent white women was more than 14 years (66.9 years vs. 81.1 years).
The Democratic candidates for president, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, have championed legislation to reduce such disparities, as have some Republicans, like Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi.
Peter R. Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, said: “We have heard a lot about growing income inequality. There has been much less attention paid to growing inequality in life expectancy, which is really quite dramatic.”
Life expectancy is the average number of years of life remaining for people who have attained a given age.
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While researchers do not agree on an explanation for the widening gap, they have suggested many reasons, including these:
¶Doctors can detect and treat many forms of cancer and heart disease because of advances in medical science and technology. People who are affluent and better educated are more likely to take advantage of these discoveries.
¶Smoking has declined more rapidly among people with greater education and income.
¶Lower-income people are more likely to live in unsafe neighborhoods, to engage in risky or unhealthy behavior and to eat unhealthy food.
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¶Lower-income people are less likely to have health insurance, so they are less likely to receive checkups, screenings, diagnostic tests, prescription drugs and other types of care.
Even among people who have insurance, many studies have documented racial disparities.
In a recent report, the Department of Veterans Affairs found that black patients “tend to receive less aggressive medical care than whites” at its hospitals and clinics, in part because doctors provide them with less information and see them as “less appropriate candidates” for some types of surgery.
Some health economists contend that the disparities between rich and poor inevitably widen as doctors make gains in treating the major causes of death.
Nancy Krieger, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, rejected that idea. Professor Krieger investigated changes in the rate of premature mortality (dying before the age of 65) and infant death from 1960 to 2002. She found that inequities shrank from 1966 to 1980, but then widened.
“The recent trend of growing disparities in health status is not inevitable,” she said. “From 1966 to 1980, socioeconomic disparities declined in tandem with a decline in mortality rates.”
The creation of Medicaid and Medicare, community health centers, the “war on poverty” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 all probably contributed to the earlier narrowing of health disparities, Professor Krieger said.
Robert E. Moffit, director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said one reason for the growing disparities might be “a very significant gap in health literacy” — what people know about diet, exercise and healthy lifestyles. Middle-class and upper-income people have greater access to the huge amounts of health information on the Internet, Mr. Moffit said.
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Thomas P. Miller, a health economist at the American Enterprise Institute, agreed.
“People with more education tend to have a longer time horizon,” Mr. Miller said. “They are more likely to look at the long-term consequences of their health behavior. They are more assertive in seeking out treatments and more likely to adhere to treatment advice from physicians.”
A recent study by Ellen R. Meara, a health economist at Harvard Medical School, found that in the 1980s and 1990s, “virtually all gains in life expectancy occurred among highly educated groups.”
Trends in smoking explain a large part of the widening gap, she said in an article this month in the journal Health Affairs.
Under federal law, officials must publish an annual report tracking health disparities. In the fifth annual report, issued this month, the Bush administration said, “Over all, disparities in quality and access for minority groups and poor populations have not been reduced” since the first report, in 2003.
The rate of new AIDS cases is still 10 times as high among blacks as among whites, it said, and the proportion of black children hospitalized for asthma is almost four times the rate for white children.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last month that heart attack survivors with higher levels of education and income were much more likely to receive cardiac rehabilitation care, which lowers the risk of future heart problems. Likewise, it said, the odds of receiving tests for colon cancer increase with a person’s education and income. |
Preface
I’m a big fan of Prometheus and Grafana. As a former SRE at Google I’ve learned to appreciate good monitoring, and this combination has been a winner for me over the past year. I’m using them for monitoring my personal servers (both black-box and white-box monitoring), for the Euskal Encounter external and internal event infra, for work I do professionally for clients, and more. Prometheus makes it very easy to write custom exporters to monitor your own data, and there’s a good chance you’ll find an exporter that already works for you out of the box. For example, we use sql_exporter to make a pretty dashboard of attendee metrics for the Encounter events.
Event dashboard for Euskal Encounter (fake staging data)
Since it’s so easy to throw node_exporter onto any random machine and have a Prometheus instance scrape it for basic system-level metrics (CPU, memory, network, disk, filesystem usage, etc), I figured, why not also monitor my laptop? I have a Clevo “gaming” laptop that serves as my primary workstation, mostly pretending to be a desktop at home but also traveling with me to big events like the Chaos Communication Congress. Since I already have a VPN between it and one of my servers where I run Prometheus, I can just emerge prometheus-node_exporter , bring up the service, and point my Prometheus instance at it. This automatically configures alerts for it, which means my phone will make a loud noise whenever I open way too many Chrome tabs and run out of my 32GB of RAM. Perfect.
Trouble on the horizon
Barely an hour after setting this up, though, my phone did get a page: my newly-added target was inaccessible. Alas, I could SSH into the laptop fine, so it was definitely up, but node_exporter had crashed.
fatal error: unexpected signal during runtime execution [signal SIGSEGV: segmentation violation code=0x1 addr=0xc41ffc7fff pc=0x41439e] goroutine 2395 [running]: runtime.throw(0xae6fb8, 0x2a) /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/panic.go:605 +0x95 fp=0xc4203e8be8 sp=0xc4203e8bc8 pc=0x42c815 runtime.sigpanic() /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/signal_unix.go:351 +0x2b8 fp=0xc4203e8c38 sp=0xc4203e8be8 pc=0x443318 runtime.heapBitsSetType(0xc4204b6fc0, 0x30, 0x30, 0xc420304058) /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/mbitmap.go:1224 +0x26e fp=0xc4203e8c90 sp=0xc4203e8c38 pc=0x41439e runtime.mallocgc(0x30, 0xc420304058, 0x1, 0x1) /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/malloc.go:741 +0x546 fp=0xc4203e8d38 sp=0xc4203e8c90 pc=0x411876 runtime.newobject(0xa717e0, 0xc42032f430) /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/malloc.go:840 +0x38 fp=0xc4203e8d68 sp=0xc4203e8d38 pc=0x411d68 github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/vendor/github.com/prometheus/client_golang/prometheus.NewConstMetric(0xc42018e460, 0x2, 0x3ff0000000000000, 0xc42032f430, 0x1, 0x1, 0x10, 0x9f9dc0, 0x8a0601, 0xc42032f430) /var/tmp/portage/net-analyzer/prometheus-node_exporter-0.15.0/work/prometheus-node_exporter-0.15.0/src/github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/vendor/github.com/prometheus/client_golang/prometheus/value.go:165 +0xd0 fp=0xc4203e8dd0 sp=0xc4203e8d68 pc=0x77a980
node_exporter , like many Prometheus components, is written in Go. Go is a relatively safe language: while it allows you to shoot yourself in the foot if you so wish, and it doesn’t have nearly as strong safety guarantees as, say, Rust does, it is still not too easy to accidentally cause a segfault in Go. More so, node_exporter is a relatively simple Go app with mostly pure-Go dependencies. Therefore, this was an interesting crash to get. Especially since the crash was inside mallocgc , which should never crash under normal circumstances.
Things got more interesting after I restarted it a few times:
2017/11/07 06:32:49 http: panic serving 172.20.0.1:38504: runtime error: growslice: cap out of range goroutine 41 [running]: net/http.(*conn).serve.func1(0xc4201cdd60) /usr/lib64/go/src/net/http/server.go:1697 +0xd0 panic(0xa24f20, 0xb41190) /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/panic.go:491 +0x283 fmt.(*buffer).WriteString(...) /usr/lib64/go/src/fmt/print.go:82 fmt.(*fmt).padString(0xc42053a040, 0xc4204e6800, 0xc4204e6850) /usr/lib64/go/src/fmt/format.go:110 +0x110 fmt.(*fmt).fmt_s(0xc42053a040, 0xc4204e6800, 0xc4204e6850) /usr/lib64/go/src/fmt/format.go:328 +0x61 fmt.(*pp).fmtString(0xc42053a000, 0xc4204e6800, 0xc4204e6850, 0xc400000073) /usr/lib64/go/src/fmt/print.go:433 +0x197 fmt.(*pp).printArg(0xc42053a000, 0x9f4700, 0xc42041c290, 0x73) /usr/lib64/go/src/fmt/print.go:664 +0x7b5 fmt.(*pp).doPrintf(0xc42053a000, 0xae7c2d, 0x2c, 0xc420475670, 0x2, 0x2) /usr/lib64/go/src/fmt/print.go:996 +0x15a fmt.Sprintf(0xae7c2d, 0x2c, 0xc420475670, 0x2, 0x2, 0x10, 0x9f4700) /usr/lib64/go/src/fmt/print.go:196 +0x66 fmt.Errorf(0xae7c2d, 0x2c, 0xc420475670, 0x2, 0x2, 0xc420410301, 0xc420410300) /usr/lib64/go/src/fmt/print.go:205 +0x5a
Well that’s interesting. A crash in Sprintf this time. What?
runtime: pointer 0xc4203e2fb0 to unallocated span idx=0x1f1 span.base()=0xc4203dc000 span.limit=0xc4203e6000 span.state=3 runtime: found in object at *(0xc420382a80+0x80) object=0xc420382a80 k=0x62101c1 s.base()=0xc420382000 s.limit=0xc420383f80 s.spanclass=42 s.elemsize=384 s.state=_MSpanInUse <snip> fatal error: found bad pointer in Go heap (incorrect use of unsafe or cgo?) runtime stack: runtime.throw(0xaee4fe, 0x3e) /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/panic.go:605 +0x95 fp=0x7f0f19ffab90 sp=0x7f0f19ffab70 pc=0x42c815 runtime.heapBitsForObject(0xc4203e2fb0, 0xc420382a80, 0x80, 0xc41ffd8a33, 0xc400000000, 0x7f0f400ac560, 0xc420031260, 0x11) /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/mbitmap.go:425 +0x489 fp=0x7f0f19ffabe8 sp=0x7f0f19ffab90 pc=0x4137c9 runtime.scanobject(0xc420382a80, 0xc420031260) /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/mgcmark.go:1187 +0x25d fp=0x7f0f19ffac90 sp=0x7f0f19ffabe8 pc=0x41ebed runtime.gcDrain(0xc420031260, 0x5) /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/mgcmark.go:943 +0x1ea fp=0x7f0f19fface0 sp=0x7f0f19ffac90 pc=0x41e42a runtime.gcBgMarkWorker.func2() /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/mgc.go:1773 +0x80 fp=0x7f0f19ffad20 sp=0x7f0f19fface0 pc=0x4580b0 runtime.systemstack(0xc420436ab8) /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/asm_amd64.s:344 +0x79 fp=0x7f0f19ffad28 sp=0x7f0f19ffad20 pc=0x45a469 runtime.mstart() /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/proc.go:1125 fp=0x7f0f19ffad30 sp=0x7f0f19ffad28 pc=0x430fe0
And now the garbage collector stumbled upon a problem. Yet a different crash.
At this point, there are two natural conclusions: either I have a severe hardware issue, or there is a wild memory corruption bug in the binary. I initially considered the former unlikely, as this machine has a very heavily mixed workload and no signs of instability that can be traced back to hardware (I have my fair share of crashing software, but it’s never random). Since Go binaries like node_exporter are statically linked and do not depend on any other libraries, I can download the official release binary and try that, which would eliminate most of the rest of my system as a variable. Yet, when I did so, I still got a crash.
unexpected fault address 0x0 fatal error: fault [signal SIGSEGV: segmentation violation code=0x80 addr=0x0 pc=0x76b998] goroutine 13 [running]: runtime.throw(0xabfb11, 0x5) /usr/local/go/src/runtime/panic.go:605 +0x95 fp=0xc420060c40 sp=0xc420060c20 pc=0x42c725 runtime.sigpanic() /usr/local/go/src/runtime/signal_unix.go:374 +0x227 fp=0xc420060c90 sp=0xc420060c40 pc=0x443197 github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/vendor/github.com/prometheus/client_model/go.(*LabelPair).GetName(...) /go/src/github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/vendor/github.com/prometheus/client_model/go/metrics.pb.go:85 github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/vendor/github.com/prometheus/client_golang/prometheus.(*Desc).String(0xc4203ae010, 0xaea9d0, 0xc42045c000) /go/src/github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/vendor/github.com/prometheus/client_golang/prometheus/desc.go:179 +0xc8 fp=0xc420060dc8 sp=0xc420060c90 pc=0x76b998
Yet another completely different crash. At this point there was a decent chance that there was truly an upstream problem with node_exporter or one of its dependencies, so I filed an issue on GitHub. Perhaps the developers had seen this before? It’s worth bringing this kind of issue to their attention and seeing if they have any ideas.
A not-so-brief bare metal detour
Unsurprisingly, upstream’s first guess was that it was a hardware issue. This isn’t unreasonable: after all, I’m only hitting the problem on one specific machine. All my other machines are happily running node_exporter . While I had no other evidence of hardware-linked instability on this host, I also had no other explanation as to what was so particular about this machine that would make node_exporter crash. A Memtest86+ run never hurt anyone, so I gave it a go.
And then this happened:
This is what I get for using consumer hardware
Whoops! Bad RAM. Well, to be more specific, one bit of bad RAM. After letting the test run for a full pass, all I got was that single bad bit, plus a few false positives in test 7 (which moves blocks around and so can amplify a single error).
Further testing showed that Memtest86+ test #5 in SMP mode would quickly detect the error, but usually not on the first pass. The error was always the same bit at the same address. This suggests that the problem is a weak or leaky RAM cell. In particular, one which gets worse with temperature. This is quite logical: a higher temperature increases leakage in the RAM cells and thus makes it more likely that a somewhat marginal cell will actually cause a bit flip.
To put this into perspective, this is one bad bit out of 274,877,906,944. That’s actually a very good error rate! Hard disks and Flash memory have much higher error rates - it’s just that those devices have bad blocks marked at the factory that are transparently swapped out without the user knowing, and can transparently mark newly discovered weak blocks as bad and relocate them to a spare area. RAM has no such luxury, so a bad bit sticks forever.
Alas, this is vanishingly unlikely to be the cause of my node_exporter woes. That app uses very little RAM, and so the chances of it hitting the bad bit (repeatedly, at that) are extremely low. This kind of problem would be largely unnoticeable, perhaps causing a pixel error in some graphics, a single letter to flip in some text, an instruction to be corrupted that probably won’t ever be run, and perhaps the rare segfault when something actually important does land on the bad bit. Nonetheless, it does cause long-term reliability issues, and this is why servers and other devices intended to be reliable must use ECC RAM, which can correct this kind of error.
I don’t have the luxury of ECC RAM on this laptop. What I do have, though, is the ability to mark the bad block of RAM as bad and tell the OS not to use it. There is a little-known feature of GRUB 2 which allows you to do just that, by changing the memory map that is passed to the booted kernel. It’s not worth buying new RAM just for a single bad bit (especially since DDR3 is already obsolete, and there’s a good chance new RAM would have weak cells anyway), so this is a good option.
However, there’s one more thing I can do. Since the problem gets worse with temperature, what happens if I heat up the RAM?
🔥🔥🔥memtest86+🔥🔥🔥 A cozy 100°C
Using a heat gun set at a fairly low temperature (130°C) I warmed up two modules at a time (the other two modules are under the rear cover, as my laptop has four SODIMM slots total). Playing around with module order, I found three additional weak bits only detectable at elevated temperature, and they were spread around three of my RAM sticks.
I also found that the location of the errors stayed roughly consistent even as I swapped modules around: the top bits of the address remained the same. This is because the RAM is interleaved: data is spread over all four sticks, instead of each stick being assigned a contiguous quarter of the available address space. This is convenient, because I can just mask a region of RAM large enough to cover all possible addresses for each error bit, and not have to worry that I might swap sticks in the future and mess up the masking. I found that masking a contiguous 128KiB area should cover all possible permutations of addresses for each given bad bit, but, for good measure, I rounded up to 1MiB. This gave me three 1MiB aligned blocks to mask out (one of them covers two of the bad bits, for a total of four bad bits I wanted masked):
0x36a700000 – 0x36a7fffff
– 0x460e00000 – 0x460efffff
– 0x4ea000000 – 0x4ea0fffff
This can be specified using the address/mask syntax required by GRUB as follows, in /etc/default/grub :
GRUB_BADRAM="0x36a700000,0xfffffffffff00000,0x460e00000,0xfffffffffff00000,0x4ea000000,0xfffffffffff00000"
One quick grub-mkconfig later, I am down 3MiB of RAM and four dodgy bits with it. It’s not ECC RAM, but this should increase the effective reliability of my consumer-grade RAM, since now I know the rest of the memory is fine up to at least 100°C.
Needless to say, node_exporter still crashed, but we knew this wasn’t the real problem, didn’t we.
Digging deeper
The annoying thing about this kind of bug is that it clearly is caused by some kind of memory corruption that breaks code that runs later. This makes it very hard to debug, because we can’t predict what will be corrupted (it varies), and we can’t catch the bad code in the act of doing so.
First I tried some basic bisecting of available node_exporter releases and enabling/disabling different collectors, but that went nowhere. I also tried running an instance under strace . This seemed to stop the crashes, which strongly points to a race-condition kind of problem. strace will usually wind up serializing execution of apps to some extent, by intercepting all system calls run by all threads. I would later find that the strace instance crashed too, but it took much longer to do so. Since this seemed to be related to concurrency, I tried setting GOMAXPROCS=1 , which tells Go to only use a single OS-level thread to run Go code. This also stopped the crashes, again pointing strongly to a concurrency issue.
By now I had gathered quite a considerable number of crash logs, and I was starting to notice some patterns. While there was a lot of variation in the parts that were crashing and how, ultimately the error messages could be categorized into different types and the same kind of error showed up more than once. So I started Googling these errors, and this is how I stumbled upon Go issue #20427. This was an issue in seemingly an unrelated part of Go, but one that had caused similar segfaults and random issues. The issue was closed with no diagnosis after it couldn’t be reproduced with Go 1.9. Nobody knew what the root cause was, just that it had stopped happening.
So I grabbed this sample code from the issue, which claimed to reproduce the problem, and ran it on my machine. Lo and behold, it crashed within seconds. Bingo. This is a lot better than waiting hours for node_exporter to crash.
That doesn’t get me any closer to debugging the issue from the Go side, but it gives me a much faster way to test for it. So let’s try another angle.
Bisecting machines
I know the problem happens on my laptop, but doesn’t happen on any other of my machines. I tried the reproducer on every other machine I have easy access to, and couldn’t get it to crash on any of them. This tells me there’s something special about my laptop. Since Go statically links binaries, the rest of userspace doesn’t matter. This leaves two relevant parts: the hardware, and the kernel.
I don’t have any easy way to test with various hardware other than the machines I own, but I can play with kernels. So let’s try that. First order of business: will it crash in a VM?
To test for this, I built a minimal initramfs that will allow me to very quickly launch the reproducer in a QEMU VM without having to actually install a distro or boot a full Linux system. My initramfs was built with Linux’s scripts/gen_initramfs_list.sh and contained the following files:
dir /dev 755 0 0 nod /dev/console 0600 0 0 c 5 1 nod /dev/null 0666 0 0 c 1 3 dir /bin 755 0 0 file /bin/busybox busybox 755 0 0 slink /bin/sh busybox 755 0 0 slink /bin/true busybox 755 0 0 file /init init.sh 755 0 0 file /reproducer reproducer 755 0 0
/init is the entry point of a Linux initramfs, and in my case was a simple shellscript to start the test and measure time:
#!/bin/sh export PATH=/bin start=$(busybox date +%s) echo "Starting test now..." /reproducer ret=$? end=$(busybox date +%s) echo "Test exited with status $ret after $((end-start)) seconds"
/bin/busybox is a statically linked version of BusyBox, often used in minimal systems like this to provide all basic Linux shell utilities (including a shell itself).
The initramfs can be built like this (from a Linux kernel source tree), where list.txt is the file list above:
scripts/gen_initramfs_list.sh -o initramfs.gz list.txt
And QEMU can boot the kernel and initramfs directly:
qemu-system-x86_64 -kernel /boot/vmlinuz-4.13.9-gentoo -initrd initramfs.gz -append 'console=ttyS0' -smp 8 -nographic -serial mon:stdio -cpu host -enable-kvm
This resulted in no output at all to the console… and then I realized I hadn’t even compiled 8250 serial port support into my laptop’s kernel. D’oh. I mean, it doesn’t have a physical serial port, right? Anyway, a quick detour to rebuild the kernel with serial support (and crossing my fingers that didn’t change anything important), I tried again and it successfully booted and ran the reproducer.
Did it crash? Yup. Good, this means the problem is reproducible on a VM on the same machine. I tried the same QEMU command on my home server, with its own kernel, and… nothing. Then I copied the kernel from my laptop and booted that and… it crashed. The kernel is what matters. It’s not a hardware issue.
Juggling kernels
At this point, I knew I was going to be compiling lots of kernels to try to narrow this down. So I decided to move to the most powerful machine I had lying around: a somewhat old 12-core, 24-thread Xeon (now defunct, sadly). I copied the known-bad kernel source to that machine, built it, and tested it.
It didn’t crash.
What?
Some head-scratching later, I made sure the original bad kernel binary crashed (it did). Are we back to hardware? Does it matter which machine I build the kernel on? So I tried building the kernel on my home server, and that one promptly triggered the crash. Building the same kernel on two machines yields crashes, a third machine doesn’t. What’s the difference?
Well, these are all Gentoo boxes, and all Gentoo Hardened at that. But my laptop and my home server are both ~amd64 (unstable), while my Xeon server is amd64 (stable). That means GCC is different. My laptop and home server were both on gcc (Gentoo Hardened 6.4.0 p1.0) 6.4.0 , while my Xeon was on gcc (Gentoo Hardened 5.4.0-r3 p1.3, pie-0.6.5) 5.4.0 .
But my home server’s kernel, which was nearly the same version as my laptop (though not exactly), built with the same GCC, did not reproduce the crashes. So now we have to conclude that both the compiler used to build the kernel and the kernel itself (or its config?) matter.
To narrow things down further, I compiled the exact kernel tree from my laptop on my home server (linux-4.13.9-gentoo), and confirmed that it indeed crashed. Then I copied over the .config from my home server and compiled that, and found that it didn’t. This means we’re looking at a kernel config difference and a compiler difference:
linux-4.13.9-gentoo + gcc 5.4.0-r3 p1.3 + laptop .config - no crash
linux-4.13.9-gentoo + gcc 6.4.0 p1.0 + laptop .config - crash
linux-4.13.9-gentoo + gcc 6.4.0 p1.0 + server .config - no crash
Two .config s, one good, and one bad. Time to diff them. Of course, the two configs were vastly different (since I tend to tailor my kernel config to only include the drivers I need on any particular machine), so I had to repeatedly rebuild the kernel while narrowing down the differences.
I decided to start with the “known bad” .config and start removing things. Since the reproducer takes a variable amount of time to crash, it’s easier to test for “still crashes” (just wait for it to crash) than for “doesn’t crash” (how long do I have to wait to convince myself that it doesn’t?). Over the course of 22 kernel builds, I managed to simplify the config so much that the kernel had no networking support, no filesystems, no block device core, and didn’t even support PCI (still works fine on a VM though!). My kernel builds now took less than 60 seconds and the kernel was about 1/4th the size of my regular one.
Then I moved on to the “known good” .config and removed all the unnecessary junk while making sure it still didn’t crash the reproducer (which was trickier and slower than the previous test). I had a few false branches, where I changed something that made the reproducer start crashing (but I didn’t know what), yet I misidentified them as “no crash”, so when I got a crash I had to walk back up the previous kernels I’d built and make sure I knew exactly where the crash was introduced. I ended up doing 7 kernel builds.
Eventually, I narrowed it down to a small handful of different .config options. A few of them stood out, in particular CONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING . After carefully testing them I concluded that, indeed, that option was the culprit. Turning it off produced kernels that crash the reproducer testcase, while turning it on produced kernels that didn’t. This option, when turned on, allows GCC to better determine which inline functions really must be inlined, instead of forcing it to inline them unconditionally. This also explains the GCC connection: inlining behavior is likely to change between GCC versions.
/* * Force always-inline if the user requests it so via the .config, * or if gcc is too old. * GCC does not warn about unused static inline functions for * -Wunused-function. This turns out to avoid the need for complex #ifdef * directives. Suppress the warning in clang as well by using "unused" * function attribute, which is redundant but not harmful for gcc. */ #if !defined(CONFIG_ARCH_SUPPORTS_OPTIMIZED_INLINING) || \ !defined(CONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING) || (__GNUC__ < 4) #define inline inline __attribute__((always_inline,unused)) notrace #define __inline__ __inline__ __attribute__((always_inline,unused)) notrace #define __inline __inline __attribute__((always_inline,unused)) notrace #else /* A lot of inline functions can cause havoc with function tracing */ #define inline inline __attribute__((unused)) notrace #define __inline__ __inline__ __attribute__((unused)) notrace #define __inline __inline __attribute__((unused)) notrace #endif
So what next? We know that CONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING makes the difference, but that potentially changes the behavior of every single inline function across the whole kernel. How to pinpoint the problem?
I had an idea.
Hash-based differential compilation
The basic premise is to compile part of the kernel with the option turned on, and part of the kernel with the option turned off. By testing the resulting kernel and checking whether the problem appears or not, we can deduce which subset of the kernel compilation units contains the problem code.
Instead of trying to enumerate all object files and doing some kind of binary search, I decided to go with a hash-based approach. I wrote this wrapper script for GCC:
#!/bin/bash args=("$@") doit= while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do case "$1" in -c) doit=1 ;; -o) shift objfile="$1" ;; esac shift done extra= if [ ! -z "$doit" ]; then sha="$(echo -n "$objfile" | sha1sum - | cut -d" " -f1)" echo "${sha:0:8} $objfile" >> objs.txt if [ $((0x${sha:0:8} & (0x80000000 >> $BIT))) = 0 ]; then echo "[n]" "$objfile" 1>&2 else extra=-DCONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING echo "[y]" "$objfile" 1>&2 fi fi exec gcc $extra "${args[@]}"
This hashes the object file name with SHA-1, then checks a given bit of the hash out of the first 32 bits (identified by the $BIT environment variable). If the bit is 0, it builds without CONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING . If it is 1, it builds with CONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING . I found that the kernel had around 685 object files at this point (my minimization effort had paid off), which requires about 10 bits for a unique identification. This hash-based approach also has one neat property: I can choose to only worry about crashing outcomes (where the bit is 0), since it is much harder to prove that a given kernel build does not crash (as the crashes are probabilistic and can take quite a while sometimes).
I built 32 kernels, one for each bit of the SHA-1 prefix, which only took 29 minutes. Then I started testing them, and every time I got a crash, I narrowed down a regular expression of possible SHA-1 hashes to only those with zero bits at those specific positions. At 8 crashes (and thus zero bits), I was down to 4 object files, and a couple were looking promising. Once I hit the 10th crash, there was a single match.
$ grep '^[0246][012389ab][0189][014589cd][028a][012389ab][014589cd]' objs_0.txt 6b9cab4f arch/x86/entry/vdso/vclock_gettime.o
vDSO code. Of course.
vDSO shenanigans
The kernel’s vDSO is not actually kernel code. vDSO is a small shared library that the kernel places in the address space of every process, and which allows apps to perform certain special system calls without ever leaving user mode. This increases performance significantly, while still allowing the kernel to change the implementation details of those system calls as needed.
In other words, vDSO is GCC-compiled code, built with the kernel, that ends up being linked with every userspace app. It’s userspace code. This explains why the kernel and its compiler mattered: it wasn’t about the kernel itself, but about a shared library provided by the kernel! And Go uses the vDSO for performance. Go also happens to have a (rather insane, in my opinion) policy of reinventing its own standard library, so it does not use any of the standard Linux glibc code to call vDSO, but rather rolls its own calls (and syscalls too).
So what does flipping CONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING do to the vDSO? Let’s look at the assembly.
With CONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING=n :
arch/x86/entry/vdso/vclock_gettime.o.no_inline_opt: file format elf64-x86-64 Disassembly of section .text: 0000000000000000 <vread_tsc>: 0: 55 push %rbp 1: 48 89 e5 mov %rsp,%rbp 4: 90 nop 5: 90 nop 6: 90 nop 7: 0f 31 rdtsc 9: 48 c1 e2 20 shl $0x20,%rdx d: 48 09 d0 or %rdx,%rax 10: 48 8b 15 00 00 00 00 mov 0x0(%rip),%rdx # 17 <vread_tsc+0x17> 17: 48 39 c2 cmp %rax,%rdx 1a: 77 02 ja 1e <vread_tsc+0x1e> 1c: 5d pop %rbp 1d: c3 retq 1e: 48 89 d0 mov %rdx,%rax 21: 5d pop %rbp 22: c3 retq 23: 0f 1f 00 nopl (%rax) 26: 66 2e 0f 1f 84 00 00 nopw %cs:0x0(%rax,%rax,1) 2d: 00 00 00 0000000000000030 <__vdso_clock_gettime>: 30: 55 push %rbp 31: 48 89 e5 mov %rsp,%rbp 34: 48 81 ec 20 10 00 00 sub $0x1020,%rsp 3b: 48 83 0c 24 00 orq $0x0,(%rsp) 40: 48 81 c4 20 10 00 00 add $0x1020,%rsp 47: 4c 8d 0d 00 00 00 00 lea 0x0(%rip),%r9 # 4e <__vdso_clock_gettime+0x1e> 4e: 83 ff 01 cmp $0x1,%edi 51: 74 66 je b9 <__vdso_clock_gettime+0x89> 53: 0f 8e dc 00 00 00 jle 135 <__vdso_clock_gettime+0x105> 59: 83 ff 05 cmp $0x5,%edi 5c: 74 34 je 92 <__vdso_clock_gettime+0x62> 5e: 83 ff 06 cmp $0x6,%edi 61: 0f 85 c2 00 00 00 jne 129 <__vdso_clock_gettime+0xf9> [...]
With CONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING=y :
arch/x86/entry/vdso/vclock_gettime.o.inline_opt: file format elf64-x86-64 Disassembly of section .text: 0000000000000000 <__vdso_clock_gettime>: 0: 55 push %rbp 1: 4c 8d 0d 00 00 00 00 lea 0x0(%rip),%r9 # 8 <__vdso_clock_gettime+0x8> 8: 83 ff 01 cmp $0x1,%edi b: 48 89 e5 mov %rsp,%rbp e: 74 66 je 76 <__vdso_clock_gettime+0x76> 10: 0f 8e dc 00 00 00 jle f2 <__vdso_clock_gettime+0xf2> 16: 83 ff 05 cmp $0x5,%edi 19: 74 34 je 4f <__vdso_clock_gettime+0x4f> 1b: 83 ff 06 cmp $0x6,%edi 1e: 0f 85 c2 00 00 00 jne e6 <__vdso_clock_gettime+0xe6> [...]
Interestingly, CONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING=y , which is supposed to allow GCC to inline less, actually resulted in it inlining more: vread_tsc is inlined in that version, while not in the CONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING=n version. But vread_tsc isn’t marked inline at all, so GCC is perfectly within its right to behave like this, as counterintuitive as it may be.
But who cares if a function is inlined? Where’s the actual problem? Well, looking closer at the non-inline version…
30: 55 push %rbp 31: 48 89 e5 mov %rsp,%rbp 34: 48 81 ec 20 10 00 00 sub $0x1020,%rsp 3b: 48 83 0c 24 00 orq $0x0,(%rsp) 40: 48 81 c4 20 10 00 00 add $0x1020,%rsp
Why is GCC allocating over 4KiB of stack? That’s not a stack allocation, that’s a stack probe, or more specifically, the result of the -fstack-check GCC feature.
Gentoo Linux enables -fstack-check by default on its hardened profile. This is a mitigation for the Stack Clash vulnerability. While -fstack-check is an old GCC feature and not intended for this, it turns out it effectively mitigates the issue (I’m told proper Stack Clash protection will be in GCC 8). As a side-effect, it causes some fairly silly behavior, where every non-leaf function (that is, a function that makes function calls) ends up probing the stack 4 KiB ahead of the stack pointer. In other words, code compiled with -fstack-check potentially needs at least 4 KiB of stack space, unless it is a leaf function (or a function where every call was inlined).
Go loves small stacks.
TEXT runtime·walltime(SB),NOSPLIT,$16 // Be careful. We're calling a function with gcc calling convention here. // We're guaranteed 128 bytes on entry, and we've taken 16, and the // call uses another 8. // That leaves 104 for the gettime code to use. Hope that's enough!
Turns out 104 bytes aren’t enough for everybody. Certainly not for my kernel.
It’s worth pointing out that the vDSO specification makes no mention of maximum stack usage guarantees, so this is squarely Go’s fault for making invalid assumptions.
Conclusion
This perfectly explains the symptoms. The stack probe is an orq , which is a logical OR with 0. This is a no-op, but effectively probes the target address (if it is unmapped, it will segfault). But we weren’t seeing segfaults in vDSO code, so how was this breaking Go? Well, OR with 0 isn’t really a no-op. Since orq is not an atomic instruction, what really happens is the CPU reads the memory address and then writes it back. This creates a race condition. If other threads are running in parallel on other CPUs, orq might effectively wind up undoing a memory write that occurs simultaneously. Since the write was out of the stack bounds, it was likely intruding on other threads’ stacks or random data, and, when the stars line up, undoing a memory write. This is also why GOMAXPROCS=1 works around the issue, since that prevents two threads from effectively running Go code at the same time. |
The 53-year-old McMaster was one of those who spent the past decade or so re-orienting the Army away from traditional war-fighting. But he is widely considered one of the service’s top strategic thinkers and his supporters insist he is the best person to figure out how to respond. “He learns and he thinks about what could be and what should be,” says Sullivan, the retired Army chief of staff.
McMaster’s pioneering tactics in confronting the Iraq insurgency after the 2003 invasion were rewarded with a key role under General David Petraeus in rewriting the Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency operations. It was not an easy undertaking. The U.S. military had not focused on counterinsurgency operations in the decades since the war in Vietnam. As a colonel and brigade commander in 2005 in Iraq’s western Al Anbar province, McMaster helped pioneer a strategy that came to be known as “clear, hold, build”—in which swarms of U.S. forces backed by airstrikes secured a city or town and built up the local security forces until they were deemed ready to maintain security while local government institutions could mature.
But getting the Army as an institution to focus on training and buying the necessary equipment to fight bands of terrorists and guerrillas hidden in population centers—instead of big tank formations like the Iraqi Republican Guard it clobbered in the 1991 Persian Gulf War—proved extremely challenging.
The steady erosion of public support for the conflict—and growing angst in Congress about the seeming lack of an end game—didn’t help.
What is taking place in Ukraine, however, is seen as a game-changer. McMaster and the study team he has put together believe their work could have huge impact on what the Army buys, how it trains and how its units are structured for years to come—maybe even as much as the Yom Kippur War did.
***
The Army has a long history of trying to learn from wars it didn’t fight—and fold the battlefield lessons into its own arsenal.
A decade before the carnage of the American Civil War, George McClellan, who later became the commander of the Union Army, was an official observer of the European armies engaged in the Crimean War, which Russia lost to an alliance of France, Britain, the Ottoman Empire and Sardinia. That conflict is widely considered the first modern war, in which mass-produced rifles, explosive shells, mines and armored landing craft were first used. John Pershing, who commanded allied forces in World War I had also previously observed the Russo-Japanese War.
But the current thinking of McMaster and his top aides on what the Ukraine war might mean for the U.S. is eerily parallel to the experience of the early 1970s. That is when the U.S. military had been distracted by another guerrilla war, in Vietnam, while Russia’s military grew bolder and more sophisticated, posing a new threat to NATO, the Western military alliance.
It’s not the actual 1973 war that the Army believes parallels the modern-day conflict in Ukraine but rather the Army’s approach afterward in digesting its lessons—and folding them into its own war plans. The study of that earlier war “serves as a useful model for analyzing the conflict in Ukraine,” says Colonel Kelly Ivanoff, a field artillery officer and top aide to McMaster, who adds that the detailed undertaking to study the 1973 war was to “profoundly influence the development of the U.S. Army for the next 15 years.”
The Russia New Generation Warfare study will “examine the Ukraine theater for implications to Army future force development, with emphasis on how Russian forces and their proxies employed disruptive technologies,” he added.
The effort, which is just getting underway, is focused on 20 separate “warfighting challenges”—including maintaining communications in the face of cyberattacks; developing a greater degree of battlefield intelligence; redesigning Army combat formations and tactics; and identifying new air defenses, weapons and ways to employ helicopters.
Indeed, where the Yom Kippur War analogy reaches its limits, say close observers, is the way in which Russia has also employed other, nonmilitary power—first during the Russian military annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014 and then in its ongoing proxy war in eastern Ukraine.
“They looked at what we were doing in the early ’90s and some of what we were saying we wanted to do and went one better,” said Sullivan, who served as Army chief of staff from 1991 to 1995 and now runs the Association of the U.S. Army, an advocacy group. “They started adding the special operating forces, which included diplomats, people who were subverting [the Ukrainian government] from the inside. It’s a hybrid.”
Now, he said, the Army is trying to apply “what we learned about the way they are using their little green men—people who are subverting the governments.”
That is not to say that the Russian Army and its proxies are 10 feet tall. The Ukrainian Army is credited with deterring an all-out Russian invasion. And the briefing that has been shared at the highest levels of the Army and with a number of foreign allies points out that the Russian military shrank dramatically in size between 1985 and 2015. And its biggest weakness is widely considered its conscript army, which has limited training and suffers from poor morale.
General Starry, who led the Yom Kippur War after-action review, concluded that the quality of the soldiers ultimately can carry the day—not numbers. “It is strikingly evident,” he wrote later, “that battles are yet won by the courage of Soldiers, the character of leaders, and the combat experience of well-trained units.”
But combined with Moscow’s efforts to upgrade its nuclear forces, what has been on display in eastern Ukraine and more recently in its military foray into Syria is expected, at least by the generals, to change the U.S. Army for a long time to come. |
Journalist Infiltrates ANTIFA, Undercover Video Exposes Everything
“You’re going to take the knife—and we’ve got 2 AK’s coming,” said one Antifa member. “The idea is plain clothes and hard tactics. I don’t think they’ll know what hit them, because they’re not prepared for what we’re planning.”
Many Americans have grown increasingly concerned over the virtual media blackout on Antifa’s domestic terrorist activities. Only through the alt-media has the mainstream been forced to cover them, and even then, it’s only a lip service—but in this ground-breaking new video, the word “Antifa” may now be set to become a common household name.
Steven Crowder was the last that many would expect to infiltrate the rogue “anti-fascist” organization. The quirky comedian is known for his controversial political commentary, on the podcast which he hosts, “Louder With Crowder,” so when he recently released this undercover video of Antifa, many were surprised.
“Why did it take two late night hosts—Comedians—to find this out?” Crowder asked a media official, after showing him indisputable evidence of Antifa’s wrong-doings. “You know I wish you the best of luck,” the man says—and then just like that, he walks away.
This video documents nearly everything, as Crowder went undercover in a massive two week operation, infiltrating a local Antifa cell. He exposes their tactics, how they coordinate, their communication methods, and most importantly, how the media is completely turning a blind eye to what they’re doing.
“Protests, violence, riots, calling everyone a Nazi—this is the M.O. of Antifa. We’ve all seen it, but the media, politicians, and academia all defend, deflect, or completely deny,” he says. “What we saw were some brave people risking their lives!” said one CNN interviewee, in reference to the far-left riots. “The Antifa movement is interested in preserving the fabric of America!” said another.
“Why is that?” asks Crowder, wondering why the media seems to be completely united in their crusade against the alt-right. “How deep does their organization go? What’s their end game?” he asks. For several months, he meticulously infiltrated Antifa, which according to him has begun upping their vetting process.
“In order to get in with the Antifa crowd, we had to infiltrate their private groups. After news broke that they were officially classified as a domestic terrorist organization, they pulled everything in much closer to the chest. They started vetting people, becoming paranoid about spies, demanded we meet with them in person, installing their cryptic messaging app onto our phone,” Crowder says.
It’s important that we understand Antifa’s tactics, but we must first understand that they’re in a PR battle. What they claim on the media, and what they actually do in person, are two completely different things. On the surface, the organization claims that they’re fighting fascism, supporting our freedoms, and trying to eradicate hate in this country…but the undercover videos tell a different story.
“Did you bring your gun?” a woman asked at an Antifa meeting. “I have…a regular rifle and an assault weapon, and a sawed-off style shot gun,” the man responded. The leader replied by saying that she had a handgun, and “two AK’s coming.”
It turns out that police have been tracking this “pan-sexual, transgender queer” for a while, and were grateful for the footage—but the media on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with it.
“You just saw correctly—even being shown the footage in the presence of police officers to confirm authenticity, they walked away,” he said in reference to Matt McDonald of Fox 13 News. Another media host, Dan Harris from ABC’s Nightline, turned down the footage.
“We were delivering a story to local and national news on a silver platter, which included infiltration, violence, and exposing the roots of a national domestic terrorist organization—and NO ONE even wanted to even give it a GLIMPSE? Not one person? It didn’t even get mentioned!” Crowder says.
He ends the video with some sobering remarks, pointing out that the left has been normalizing violence against conservatives for too long. “If they call Ben Shapiro or me a Nazi, what does that make you? If they justify violence against someone with an iPhone camera, what can they do to you?” |
Lee Berthiaume, The Canadian Press
OTTAWA -- Personal and political divisions over ballistic missile defence were on clear display Tuesday, as a group of parliamentarians gathered on Parliament Hill to discuss the threat posed by North Korea.
Members of the House of Commons' defence committee agreed during a rare summer meeting to a series of emergency briefings in the coming weeks on the government's plan should North Korea attack.
The meeting came as the U.S. Treasury Department upped the ante on North Korea by sanctioning several Chinese and Russian entities for supporting the rogue state's nuclear and missile programs.
There was no immediate word of Canada following with its own sanctions.
Instead, much of the discussion in the hallways before and after the committee meeting centred on whether Canada should join the U.S. continental missile-defence shield, after famously opting out of the system in 2005.
The Trudeau government has sidestepped questions about Canada's intentions, saying only that ballistic missiles are one threat being discussed as Canada and the U.S. look to upgrade North America's defences.
But one Liberal MP said Tuesday that Canada should reconsider its decision not to join the U.S. missile shield, even as the Conservatives danced around the issue and the NDP reaffirmed its historic opposition.
Liberal MP Mark Gerretsen said a lot has changed since then-prime minister Paul Martin decided Canada would not join ballistic missile defence in 2005.
"Personally, I think that we do need to start to look at what Canada's role will be in that," he told reporters after the committee meeting.
"We should be having an ongoing discussion about what our role should be in that. And I think 10 years plus after the fact is a timely opportunity to have that discussion again."
'Cheaper to develop new weapons'
Gerretsen would not comment on the government's official position, or whether his view was shared by many other members of his party.
But fellow Liberal MP Stephen Fuhr, chairman of the defence committee, noted that Canada has limited resources when it comes to defence -- a reference to the fact the U.S. has spent about $100 billion on its missile shield.
Fuhr also played down the threat posed by North Korea, citing military officials and defence experts who told the committee last year that there was no direct threat to Canada from another country.
"Even if we wind back the media in the last 30 days, I don't think Canada was ever mentioned in the rhetoric that was flying back and forth between North Korea and the United States," he said.
Meanwhile, Conservative MPs refused to say Tuesday where their party sits now.
The Liberals were in office when Canada declined to join the defence system in 2005, but Stephen Harper made no move to reverse course during the Tories' 10 years in power.
That was despite Conservatives having pressed for Canada to join while they were in opposition to Martin's government.
Conservative defence critic James Bezan suggested his party would take a position once the defence committee is briefed on North Korea, even as he referenced the fiery debate from 12 years ago.
"You've got to remember the history behind that discussion, the wounds that were created because of the decision by Paul Martin back in 2005. And things didn't change until this summer," Bezan added.
"So from this point forward, everyone is looking at how we can best work with the United States. How we can work through NORAD in dealing with this new threat."
The only party with a clear position appeared to be the New Democrats, with NDP foreign affairs critic Helene Laverdiere calling on the Liberals to reaffirm their opposition to ballistic missile defence.
"It's cheaper to develop new weapons than to develop that kind of defensive system," she said.
"And that kind of defensive system only leads countries like North Korea but also countries like China and Russia, who may feel concerned, to upgrade their systems and it leads to escalation."
Laverdiere called for Canada to take more of a leadership role in finding a diplomatic solution and to support efforts at the UN for full nuclear disarmament around the world. |
Critics of President Donald Trump’s decision to bar transgender Americans from serving in the U.S. armed forces are citing a 2016 RAND Corporation study that, they claim, refutes “the idea that transgender soldiers are somehow expensive, or that they undermine the morale and cohesion of the military over all,” as the New Yorker put it.
The question of cost relates to gender transition treatment, which some transgenders want the military to provide for them.
The RAND study says that the cost of gender transition treatment for transgender service members would be “relatively low” — that is, relative to total military expenditure on health care. But a closer look at the numbers in the study reveals that the health care costs of transgenders who choose to undergo gender transition treatment in the military would be some 14 times higher than the average health care costs of service members in general.
The study estimates that between 29 and 129 transgender service members in the active component of the military would choose to utilize “transition-related health care” annually. The mid-range estimate is 79 individuals per year. Given that the total active component population of the military in 2014 was 1,326,273, that means about 0.006% of service members could use gender transition-related health services. The RAND study estimates that the annual cost of such services would be as low as $2.4 million and as high as $8.4 million, based on different assumptions about the relative prevalence of transgenderism within the military and between men and women. That represents “a 0.04- to 0.13-percent increase in active-component health care expenditures,” RAND concludes. The mid-range estimate for that increase would be 0.085 percent. Therefore 0.006% of service members would be responsible for a 0.085% increase in costs — i.e. a transitioning service member’s medical bills would be 14 times the average.
There are large categories of people who are excluded from military service because of medical conditions — e.g. asthma — that are cheaper and easier to treat than transgender-related health issues (both physical and mental).
As for the question of morale and cohesion, the RAND study is explicit about some of the issues that the military would encounter — such as the need to screen for additional mental health issues, and the problem of recovery from gender-transition surgery. RAND notes that it may not be possible to deploy transgender service members: “Other countries [with transgender service members] have found that, in some cases, it may be necessary to restrict deployment of transitioning individuals to austere environments where their health care needs cannot be met.”
The RAND study noted that other countries had not experienced problems with unit cohesion and transgender service members. “However,” it noted, “we do not have direct survey evidence or other data to directly assess the impact on the U.S. military.” In Australia, Canada, Israel and the United Kingdom, the effects were minimal, but these militaries “had fairly low numbers of openly serving transgender personnel.”
Given significant doubts, it was entirely appropriate for the U.S. military to make its own recommendations, which the president has followed.
Critics of the president’s new policy have compared the transgender ban to the racial segregation of the military. In fact the comparison is useful. Racial segregation was a policy of social engineering championed by so-called “progressive” Democrats like President Woodrow Wilson. It made our military less effective. Today’s push for transgender soldiers is another, largely Democratic, effort to use the military to achieve social outcomes unrelated to the primary purpose of the military, i.e. defending the country and defeating its enemies.
The White House Press Corps questioned Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders about how Trump’s new policy squared with his promise during the campaign to “fight” for LGBT Americans. In fact, the new policy fulfills that promise because it is based on what the military says it must do to defend the country. No one has the “right” to serve in the military, but the military has the obligation to protect the country and the freedom of all within it. |
If you work ridiculous hours and have no time to actually have a life then you are doing it all wrong!
Time is more important than money! There I’ve said it.
The whole idea is that you work to live and not live to work but somewhere down the line a lot of us get this concept all mixed up. It’s like one of those catch 22 situations where you initially take a job to enable you to earn more money and thus lead a better life, but it becomes a never ending pursuit of more money and a promise that one day you will cut back the hours. So you end up basing your life around work and the whole plan has flipped 180!
It’s not right is it? Okay you may need the money to support a family or you may work in a profession that requires long hours with little time off, but there are always ways to increase your earnings without compromising your life. The first step is to actually realise that a change needs to be made.
So I am going to show you 5 reasons why time is more important than money.
1. We only have a limited time on this planet so make it count
There are various theories that with the advances in science and medicine many of us will live past the age of 200, and possibly a lot longer than that. Age reversal, stem cell technology and the curing of various diseases are just some of the ways this will be possible, but so far all of this is still in the development stage.
We can’t expect to solely rely on the idea that we will always be here. Most of us see death as a taboo subject and we naively believe that we will be around forever, but we should be living our lives as if there is a time limit.
That timer is counting down and we have no idea when it reaches zero, so why are we wasting most of our time doing the things we don’t want?
2. When you look back on your life, you never wish for a bigger bank balance
Think of your life like a book that is being written and will be published when your time is up. I’m fairly sure that you can’t fill up a book with your bank balance so what else is there?
Each chapter of this book should be focused on a different aspect of your life and to enable this to happen, your life should be as varied and eventful as possible. Spending countless hours every week for years on end working yourself into the ground will not make a very good book, not unless you are making a difference with your job and/or money.
When people look back on their lives they never wish they could have spent more time in the office so take note of this now and do something about it.
3. There is no point having money if you have no time to spend it
There are many people out there who just love to hoard money away in the hope that one day they will eventually have enough to retire. These hoarders actually have a scarcity mind-set and are afraid of losing their hard earned cash. The truth is, no amount of money will ever be enough for them and they see their increasing bank balance as a barometer of their success.
It would be unfair to call these people ‘tight’ as a refusal to spend money can also be attributed to a lack of hobbies or social life. It’s certainly easier to spend 70 hours a week in the office if you feel like you have nothing fun to do outside of work.
The solution to this is quite obvious. The more we have going on in our private lives, the less time we will allow work to take from us.
4. Those who have time want money, and those who have money want time
You know the funny thing is that most people want what they can’t have and this is usually true across both ends of the time/money spectrum. Those who are unemployed or have low incomes will strive for more hours or a better paid job while those who are on six figure salaries often moan that they have no time to spend with their friends and family.
Neither of these is desirable and both will ultimately cause unhappiness in your life so the trick is to find a happy medium which leads me to my next point.
5. A healthier balance leads to a healthier life
It’s almost like a cruel paradox. You can have all this free time but no actual money to do anything worthwhile or you can have all this money but no free time to do the things you want. The trick is to find a balance and earn enough money without sacrificing all of your free time.
Easier said than done I admit but if you find yourself out of sync with your work and amount of free time then you should try to find ways of addressing this imbalance in your life.
Remember we only work x hours a week because that is the amount that society arbitrarily places upon us all. This amount isn’t set in stone and it is up to us to decide what we do with our lives.
If you are in a position where you have little choice but to work a lot of overtime or you don’t have the resources to free up a lot of your life, just take the opportunity to have some ‘you’ time. Keep your weekends free or have one or two evenings a week where you have the chance to do whatever you want.
Take that class, have that night out, practice that hobby, have a weekend away, spend time with your friends/family/partner. Whatever it is that you daydream about at work, make some time during the week to focus on that and I promise you that you will be far happier and less stressed.
So let me know, is time more important than money or is it the other way around? |
In the distant horizon, a giant wave is building. There are some who recognized the swell and raised the alarm. There are others who deny the possibility of such a wave. Most remain blissfully unaware. The wave is building and when it reaches our shores, it will hit with the force of a tsunami.
The wave is propelled by government spending and crested with unfunded pension obligations. The Pew Center on the States wrote in The Trillion Dollar Gap (February 2010), “A $1 trillion gap exists between the $3.35 trillion in pension, health care and other retirement benefits states have promised their current and retired workers as of fiscal year 2008 and the $2.35 trillion they have on hand to pay for them.”
Like any tsunami, the wave began long ago and very far out to sea. Thirty years ago the vast majority of union workers were in the private sector. Public employees in unions reached parity with private sector members by 2009. This was aided in part by campaign contributions from the unions to elect Democratic Party candidates and generous pay packages and retirement plans passed by those same politicians in return.
By 2010, the general public received a series of shocks. The first shock was the jobless recovery of the Great Recession that cost 8 million jobs. Most of the job losses occurred in the private sector yet the majority of the $800 billion Stimulus Bill went to “save and create” public sector employment. The second shock was learning that civil servants earned twice that of private workers. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Federal workers received average pay and benefits of $123,049 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation. The third shock was revelation of incredible retirement plans doled out by politicians since 1999. In 2002, California passed SB 183 that allowed police and safety workers to retire after 30 years on the job with 3% of salary for each year of service, or 90% of their last year’s pay. During the Great Recession, fireman began retiring with $150,000 pensions at age 52 despite a life expectancy approaching 80. In Orange County CA, lifeguards, deemed safety workers, retired with $147,000 annual pensions. The Orange County sheriff, recently convicted of witness tampering, will receive $215,000 annually while in jail. Bob Citron, the Treasurer of Orange County who pushed the county into bankruptcy in the 1990s, receives a pension of $150,000 per year. A tsunami of anger and resentment is building.
As the wave approaches, economists issue thick reports with ominous names like “The Gathering Storm” (Reason Foundation) advising us that the pension obligations we have created are unsustainable. They report cities and states cannot economically allow workers to retire at 52 when they have a life expectancy of 26 years of retirement. They simply cannot pay for these pensions with existing revenue. Services will go down and taxes will go up to pay for these generous pension obligations. Orange County’s CEO, Thomas G. Mauk, predicted that pension requirements in 2014 will take 84% of the county’s law enforcement payroll. It is already 50% today. To exacerbate the problem, The Great Recession forced most states into budget deficits as their revenues decline. For FY2010, every state except Montana and North Dakota has projected a budget deficit. (RedState 3/21/2010).
California once again leads the nation with a $26 billion budget deficit plus an unfunded pension obligation of $500 billion. Its current financial structure is clearly unsustainable. It has an operational structure that in ungovernable with often duplicative agencies, some collecting less in tax revenue than the agencies spend on collection. Wikipedia lists 500 existing public agencies for the State of California. California can no longer afford such a luxury. It must deconstruct these bloated inefficient government agencies, and rid itself of their chairman, staff, offices, cars, pensions and the overhead that such excess represents. A $26 billion dollar deficit is not something that can be corrected with a wage freeze or job furloughs. Bold leadership can lead California to deconstruct its 500 agencies down to 100 functional organizations. California is a classic example of what must change in the coming Great Deconstruction.
One Orange County city has already taken bold steps to correct its $10 million deficit. It may be a model for other cities and states across the country. Internally, it has decided it will not replace any city worker that dies, retires, moves or quits. The city will simply out source the employment to an outside service company and eliminate healthcare requirements and unsustainable pensions. Building inspectors will be out sourced as will city plan checkers, librarians and meter maids. Only essential services like top executives and cops will remain on the city payroll. The city staff will eventually decrease from 220 to approximately 35 personnel. This is the essence of deconstruction.
At the state and local level, the Great Deconstruction has already begun albeit delayed by an infusion of federal stimulus dollars and grants in 2009 and 2010. The federal government must deconstruct as well. It must happen, if only because the revenue is no longer there to sustain all of these often well-intentioned programs. The federal government will not be immune from fiscal reality.
In this sense, the election in November will be a referendum on the very sustainability of our system of government. One party will continue to borrow and spend in order to maintain the 500 agencies in California and the abundance of federal programs. They have not said how long they will be able to borrow money to sustain their system. The other party will try to simply turn off the spigot - now. Either way, one day the money will run out and the inevitable deconstruction will occur.
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The Great Deconstruction is a series written exclusively for New Geography. Future articles will address the impact of The Great Deconstruction at the national, state, county and local levels.
Robert J. Cristiano PhD is the Real Estate Professional in Residence at Chapman University in Orange County, CA and Director of Special Projects at the Hoag Center for Real Estate & Finance. He has been a successful real estate developer in Newport Beach California for twenty-nine years.
Other works in The Great Deconstruction series for New Geography
An Awakening: The Beginning of the Great Deconstruction – June 12, 2010
The Great Deconstruction :An American History Post 2010 – June 1, 2010
The Great Deconstruction – First in a New Series - April 11, 2010
Deconstruction: The Fate of America? – March 2010 |
They call them "boomerangs." They're primarily 20- or 30-somethings who grew up in Traverse City, then ran away to seek their fortunes elsewhere as soon as they could. After all, unless they owned or worked in a hospitality business, there was just no place for them in a resort town.
Now, those boomerangs are coming back.
Many of these marketing, Web design or information technology people missed northern Michigan — and, because the technology allows it, they can live wherever they want.
These entrepreneurs are finding each other now in Traverse City. Go to a coffee shop in downtown called Brew, and scores are hunched over laptops, designing websites, coding, running social media, even composing music for clients nationwide. They also connect through social media "tweetups" or "geek breakfasts" or in new "co-working" spaces, where they network, socialize and barter their services.
Erin Monigold, 29, is among them. She launched Social Vision Marketing in Traverse City in 2010 after having been laid off from a larger marketing firm.
"It was really when social media was starting to take off a lot," Monigold said, "and it seemed like a lot of small businesses in the area really needed some help to try to do it right, needed help to try to get the word out about their business."
Monigold also saw the potential to use social media to create more of a sense of community among the hundreds of scattered freelancers and small-business owners in Traverse City. She launched the Traverse City Tweetup, which attracts hundreds of freelancers in the area to monthly meetings, and the Traverse City Geek Breakfast, where tech professionals gather monthly to exchange ideas and services.
Part of it, Monigold said, is generational — a need for younger people to define their own careers, because nothing seems as certain as it was for their parents, many of whom worked for the same company for 30 years or more.
Michael Kent grew up in Traverse City, then left for a job in the service industry in Chicago and Ann Arbor. He quickly grew tired of it and returned to Traverse City with his wife, Brooke Allen, to follow their real passion.
They launched Allen-Kent Photography, which also designs websites.
"I've been excited about the fact that maybe there isn't a huge tech community here like downstate or Grand Rapids or Chicago, but I see one coming, and we can be part of that," Kent said. "We have this little nexus through the tech community where, maybe it's not like Silicon Valley, but we've got all these tiny little tech firms that are just our friends."
Kristin Fehrman, director of marketing at Ozmott LLC, which develops apps for iPhones and Android phones, ran as fast as she could to Silicon Valley after leaving Traverse City. She returned this year because she wanted to take charge of her own career and do it from a place she loves.
It is a trend that appears to be specific to Traverse City, said Rob Fowler president and CEO of the Small Business Association of Michigan.
"I think, more and more, people choose the lifestyle and either start a business or become that free agent where they may have three or four different clients," Fowler said. "They can do it from anywhere in the world, and they choose to do it from Traverse City."
These people also do not want to become part of the hospitality industry that defines Traverse City. They come here specifically to fill niches for growing second-stage companies.
"I think what we're seeing is that's really creating a demand for a CFO for a day, a CIO for the day," Fowler said. "Not a week, but one day a week, until we need them two days a week and until we grow into it."
And, Fowler said, they're coming en masse to Traverse City, although his group does not yet have any survey figures for it.
Apart from the lifestyle of the region, another reason it's happening in this particular place is Michigan native Michael Moore, the documentary filmmaker who has helped make Traverse City hip through his work fixing up downtown and launching film and comedy festivals.
"Regardless of what you think of his politics, Michael Moore made a really good statement about this area. He said this area is going to die if people do not start taking the younger generation into account," said Kevin Reeves, a musical composer who went away to Nashville for a time, then came back to Traverse City, where he grew up, in 2009. Reeves said he came back to a very different city from the one he left just a few years before.
Chad Rickman, who does Web development for Traverse City-based Hagerty Insurance as well as freelance work, credited Moore with helping create the cultural climate needed to get younger entrepreneurs to come back.
It's that kind of energy that Bradley Matson, 28, hopes to tap into as he opens his CoWharf Coworking space, which had its grand opening last week in downtown Traverse City.
"We don't see Traverse City becoming the next Silicon Valley. That's unrealistic," said Matson, who invested about $20,000 into the co-working space. "But we do see Traverse City as being a hub for an event, like Austin South by Southwest," a reference to the annual film and technology event in Texas.
"That's feasible here for summers when people come here anyway," he said. "Get the geeks a little more color. Why not?"
Matson is helping plan a "Startup Weekend" next year just before the Traverse City Film Festival at the end of July.
Matson is a "boomerang" himself, having moved to Arizona for a while to pursue a career, then coming back to Traverse City with his wife, Kirsten, to open CoWharf while still telecommuting to his old job.
They needed about 12 people to get the co-working space off the ground. They have 30 signed up so far, primarily graphic designers, programmers, photographers and writers.
Tres Brooke, 41, an emergency management consultant who telecommutes to his East Lansing-based company, Cema, is giving CoWharf a try. It's better, he said, than working in isolation at his home.
"We communicate with each other more than ever now; we're accessible from anywhere, anytime; and yet we're all starting to work at home and work in isolation increasingly," Brooke said. "And I'm starting to go a little stir crazy.
"I crave interacting with other people and sharing ideas. I'm a very expressive and intuitive person, so I have to be around other people. Otherwise, I'll just kind of go nuts after a while." |
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