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1. It's one night only
Local nonprofit arts organization Flux Projects is gearing up for its fourth annual experimental public art party on Sat., Oct. 5, from 7 p.m. to midnight. Featuring 20 projects spread throughout the Castleberry Hill Arts District, Flux Night is created for a single night before being completely erased, like a Tibetan sand mandala of public art.
2. Admission is free.
As always, Flux Night is free-99 and open to people of all ages. The only cost is your time and an open mind.
3. There Will Be Interactivity.
Experimentation is part of Flux Night's mission. Artistic expression quarantined to canvas and gilded frames is so 16th century. For a contemporary society that has created itself out of pixels, reblogs, intangible streams, clouds, and simulated interaction, it seems only appropriate that many projects reflect our new reality. Former Atlantan Pablo Gnecco and his interactive project "Array" will capture and project audience portraits to create non-linear stories. Toronto-based Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky's "Late Night Convenience" will be a pop-up convenience store giving away free grocery lanterns for patrons to take with them into the night, taking experimental weirdness with them.
4. Helena Reckitt is curating.
London-born Helena Reckitt is an international curatorial pop star with deep ties to Atlanta's art scene. The Oxford graduate spent seven years teaching and curating at the Atlanta College of Art, Emory University, and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. She has written for numerous outlets about contemporary performance, feminist and queer art. Her curatorial theme, 'Free Association,' aims to emphasize the project's exceptional street-level community interactions in a car-centric city that doesn't always provide it.
5. Get to know Castleberry Hill
Castleberry Hill is a neighborhood that is always in, well, flux. Formerly the red light district of Atlanta, the neighborhood grew as a supporting community to the rapidly expanding railway industry comprising many warehouses and commercial retail and trade businesses. The real estate boom transformed that brick and mortar character into luxury lofts, some of which were left hanging after the bust in 2008. With the economy on the rise, the neighborhood is reinventing itself again.
6. It's easy to get to.
Take MARTA to the Dome/GWCC/Philips Arena/CNN Center station or bring your bike and have it valeted at The Granite Room at 211 Peters St. If you're driving, parking will be available at the Brown Lot of the Georgia World Congress Center located at Magnum Street and Georgia Dome Drive as well as surface lots around Centennial Olympic Park. Both are within walking distance and ATL-Cruzers will be providing free shuttle service from the Brown Lot and from the corner of Centennial Olympic Park Drive and Marietta Street.
7. There's stuff for everyone.
Music and dance play will play an important role in this year's events. Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre's "The Sound of Falling" features two dancers trapped in a box, divided by a wall, as they reenact the memories preceding their isolation in a decaying high-rise. Benita Carr, Bill Orisich with Evan Levy, Lance Haugen and others' present "Horse Drawn Piano" a musical parade of sorts that will makes its way through the darkened streets. Metal and rocks will be positioned on the piano's strings, transforming the vibrations of the historic road into part of the music.
8. Download the app.
Flux Night 2013 has its own app for iPhone users to help navigate through the projects, find things to eat, beer to drink, restrooms, EMS, if needed, and other landmarks. Downloading the free app is the best way to keep track of all the projects and the best strategy for seeing what you want to see without getting completely lost. It will also come in handy when trying to meet up with friends.
9. Prepare for anything.
Flux is roughly translated into "lots of walk." Wear comfortable shoes because there are a lot of buildings to walk through, circles to stand in, and queues to, well, queue in. No need to abuse your feet for style — it will be pretty dark anyway. If worn-in Reeboks aren't on the agenda, let Dr. Scholl's love you. Bring a jacket, too. As you know, Atlanta weather can be fickle.
10. Arrive early to eat.
Art isn't fun when you're cranky. Come to the event as early as 6 p.m. to grab a bite from Good Food Truck, Doggy Dogg, Streatery, Nectar, King of Pops, and more because enjoying art requires snacks. |
Carter Page speaks with reporters Thursday after testifying before the House intelligence committee. J. Scott Applewhite/AP
President Donald Trump's erstwhile campaign adviser Carter Page told the House intelligence committee that he informed senior campaign officials about a much-scrutinized trip he made to Russia in July 2016.
He also confirmed that he had other interactions with multiple representatives of the Russian government, including a "private conversation" with the country's deputy prime minster.
The roughly eight hours of testimony, held behind closed doors Nov. 2, came as part of the House intelligence committee's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and potential collusion between members of the Trump team and representatives of the Russian government.
Page testified that he had told at least four officials about his July trip: then-campaign chairman Corey Lewandowski, spokeswoman Hope Hicks and advisers J.D. Gordon and Tera Dahl.
Lewandowski, he testified, greenlighted the trip, telling him, "if you'd like to go on your own, not affiliated with the campaign, you know, that's fine," Page said.
Page testified that he also told Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then a Republican senator for Alabama and outspoken supporter of the Trump campaign, about his upcoming trip. Page said he made the remarks "briefly" and "in passing" after a dinner with several other campaign officials.
"I mentioned it briefly to Senator Sessions as I was walking out the door, that I'm, you know – I'm – because I remember it was actually right – I forget the exact date, but it was the Thursday night before I flew to Moscow to give my speech. So I mentioned to him in passing, so – as we were walking out the door."
Page shared with the committee emails that he'd sent to campaign officials. One appears to seek their input on remarks he would be giving during his visit.
"Please let me know if you have any reservations or thoughts on how you'd prefer me to focus these remarks," Page wrote.
Another email, sent after his trip, offers to provide a summary of the "incredible insights" from meetings he'd had with members of the Russian government.
"I'll send you guys a readout soon regarding some incredible insights and outreach I received from a few Russian legislators and senior members of the presidential administration here," Page wrote.
Among the officials he met with was Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich. Page testified that the two had a "private conversation" following his remarks. Page also testified that he met with "a couple of legislators," as well as "some senior government officials."
The release of the transcript is unusual and apparently came at the request of Page himself. The former adviser appeared before the committee without a lawyer, and his testimony, spread across 243 pages, was often contradictory, at times stoking confusion and consternation among the committee members who were questioning him.
His testimony, though, offers yet more evidence that senior Trump campaign officials were at least aware of, and perhaps encouraged, interactions between campaign members and representatives of the Kremlin.
Last week, the Justice Department special counsel that's also investigating Russian election meddling unsealed a guilty plea in which another Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos, testified that he had informed and even been encouraged by senior Trump campaign officials to meet with Russian representatives promising incriminating information on Hillary Clinton.
Trump has maintained that there was no collusion between his campaign and the Kremlin. |
Some alleged that police shut down last Friday’s guerrilla marketing campaign, but police say event organizers never emerged.
Last Friday night, several Richmonders reported that police shut down the three scheduled audiovisual projections that were part of Kanye West’s global guerrilla marketing campaign promoting his new album (see below). However, police spokesperson James Mercante said that no officer directly prevented any projection from occurring.
At least one senior police officer present at each of the three scheduled locations said he saw neither organizers nor audiovisual equipment at any time. However, there appears to have been at least one projection that took place in Shockoe Bottom sometime Friday evening.
Here’s Mercante’s full statement to RVANews about the police presence last Friday night:
The Department became aware of the potential for several large groups to gather in different locations of the city for an event. As would be the case for any planned large gathering, officers monitored the areas to ensure the safety of residents and the free flow of traffic. There were no injuries or arrests.
However, police in Houston and Baltimore did shut down similar events.
— ∮∮∮ —
Several Richmonders on the scene of the first Projection are reporting that police have shut down the event because organizers did not secure the proper permits. More as it develops.
@rvanews Confirmed. Not happening in #RVA Organizers did not secure the necessary permits — Todd B. Waldo (@tbw) June 15, 2013
— ∮∮∮ —
Kanye West will offer a sneak peak of his new album Yeezus across the world tonight through a guerrilla marketing campaign called Projections, a series of audio-visual installations that project his face on structural facades with accompanying audio from his new album. Three of tonight’s installations will be here in Richmond:
Museum of the Confederacy • 9:30 – 10:00 PM
W. Broad Street & Harrison Street • 10:30 – 11:30 PM
N. Robinson Street & Floyd Avenue • 11:30 PM – 12:00 AM
Here’s video of West’s previous projection for the song “New Slaves” at Wrigley Field last month:
Vickie Yates of the Museum of the Confederacy said she heard about the museum being used as a Projections backdrop shortly after 3:00 PM today when someone phoned her after hearing about it on Twitter. Yates said no one representing Kanye West of Def Jam Records has contacted the museum about the event.
“I would be doubtful if [the other locations] have been told either,” she said. After all, that’s the purpose of guerrilla marketing. “You kind of just go out and do it.”
While indifferent to the Museum’s inclusion in the audio-visual installation, she said her only concern was that if large crowds gather outside the museum, it might block access to the nearby VCU Medical Center. “I haven’t talked with anyone at the City of Richmond” about that, she said. |
The Democratic Socialists of America has grown astronomically over the last year — we now stand at over 24,000 members!
Chapters are popping up all over the country engaging in vital day-to-day struggles, as well as the important work of political education.
Our international links, however, are far weaker than they were in past eras of the organization. In the 1980s, DSA fostered ties with socialist currents in Europe and played a major role in Central American solidarity campaigns.
Today's international context demands such engagement once again. The success of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party in the United Kingdom, as well as Podemos and Jean-Luc Mélenchon's France Insoumise have been inspiring our efforts in the United States.
Now we have a chance to share some of our struggles and gain valuable wisdom from a delegation including members of Jeremy Corbyn's staff, Momentum, France Insoumise, and Podemos, among others.
We already have accommodations for our international guests, but given the immense costs already associated with the convention, we need your help to cover airfare and other costs.
As small as we still are, DSA is poised to be at the forefront of struggles in the US for years to come. Exchanging ideas and forging ties with international guests at our biggest convention ever would be a tremendous boon. |
This month, more than 165 organizations and 2000 concerned people from across America sent a letter to Sens. Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' MORE (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren Elizabeth Ann WarrenSanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' House to push back at Trump on border GOP Sen. Tillis to vote for resolution blocking Trump's emergency declaration MORE (D-Mass.) asking for justice. Not justice for any one individual – justice for the country and the environment. As key members of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Sanders and Warren have the ear of the Government Accountability Office and the power to successfully call for an investigation into what has become a rogue federal agency: the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).
Does “rogue” sound harsh? Well, FERC’s actions are harsher. The agency is supposed to regulate pipeline companies, but recent history shows it is behaving more like an advocate acting on their behalf, helping to grease the wheels for the pipeline companies regardless of the value of their projects or the harms they inflict on communities and the environment. Of all of the agencies in the entire federal government, FERC has the highest approval rate for the projects submitted to it for approval: 100 percent. That’s right, since 1986 FERC has green-lighted every single proposal the pipeline industry sent its way and up to its Commissioners. That’s not a regulatory agency, that’s a rubber stamp.
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FERC’s approval rate should not come as a surprise. Unlike any other federal agency, FERC is funded entirely by the industries it regulates — that’s right, FERC gets its entire budget from the industry it is supposed to oversee. No other independent federal agency has a similar funding structure.
How does it work? Basically, FERC issues charges on the industry it regulates calculated to cover all of its costs, including an agency budget that has grown 50 percent, from $200 million to $300 million, in just a 10-year period from 2004 to 2014. This means that the more pipelines, gas delivery, and LNG facilities FERC approves the more fees it is able to collect to support its fast ballooning budget.
This industry-financing mechanism not only encourages a biased approval process for proposed projects, but it also provides FERC with a significant degree of insulation from Congress and the legislative branch of government that no other independent federal agency enjoys.
It gets worse. FERC has never in its history issued a civil penalty for violations related to construction activity for any pipeline project. And yet we know for a fact that violations of FERC-issued pipeline construction approvals border on routine. For example, the Tennessee Gas Pipe Line Company’s 300 Line Upgrade Project was found to have major failures ranging from improperly installed erosion controls that impacted resources to disturbances resulting from stormwater discharges. Who recorded these failures? FERC. And what were the penalties the company incurred from FERC? None. FERC didn’t even issue a stop-work order to make sure the company fixed the problems it was causing before allowing it to continue with its damaging construction.
Once a pipeline project receives FERC approval, the problems are compounded. The pipeline company receives the power of ‘eminent domain,’ the right to take private property for its own use. In addition, pipeline projects are exempted from the state and local environmental and community protection laws that apply to every other industry.
What this means is that projects like Kinder Morgan’s Northeast Energy Direct (NED) pipeline can force homeowners, families and businesses in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and beyond to relinquish part of their property to allow for the construction and operation of this 400-plus-mile pipeline. Despite opposition and concerns voiced by so many, including Sens. Sanders, Kelly Ayotte Kelly Ann AyotteBottom Line US, allies must stand in united opposition to Iran’s bad behavior American military superiority will fade without bold national action MORE (R-N.H.), Jeanne Shaheen Cynthia (Jeanne) Jeanne ShaheenCongress must step up to protect Medicare home health care Dems slam EPA plan for fighting drinking water contaminants Bipartisan Senators reintroduce legislation to slap new sanctions on Russia MORE (D-N.H.) and Reps. Ann McLane Kuster (D-N.H.) and Frank Guinta (R-N.H.), the project proceeds towards approval. Despite Kinder Morgan submitting an application to FERC that it admitted was missing critical information, FERC marked the application as “complete” because use the company promised to provide the information eventually.
Among the problems with the NED pipeline, as with so many others like it, is that FERC fails to force the company to address the need for the gas the pipeline will carry – the agency simply requires the company to consider different paths to cut for its project, rather than answering the threshold question of whether the project is necessary. In fact, the findings of the Massachusetts Attorney General that no new natural gas pipelines are needed to supply the Commonwealth is apparently being ignored in the NED FERC review process. Similarly, expert analysis documents that the gas to be carried through the PennEast Pipeline from the shale fields of Pennsylvania to (the company claims) communities in New Jersey is not needed in Pennsylvania, where there is a gas glut, and would create a 53 percent surplus in New Jersey. FERC officials don’t seem to care.
What can be done about all of this? Well, fortunately there is an agency in the government that can reveal the depth of this toxic mess and help us identify solutions: the Government Accountability Office (GAO). As the investigative arm of Congress charged with auditing the federal government, the GAO can examine the way FERC is working—or rather, the way it is not working. An objective GAO review is clearly needed because neither Congress nor the president has the authority necessary to hold FERC accountable for their abuses of the public trust. A thorough and objective review is clearly warranted, and can only be brought to bear by the GAO, which can initiate a dialogue with FERC and bring about the reforms the agency so desperately needs. That’s why more than 165 organizations, from environmental nonprofits to religious groups, have stood up and asked for a review. The future and well-being of our communities and environment depends on it.
Van Rossum is the Delaware Riverkeeper and leads the Delaware Riverkeeper Network (DRN). |
Corey Perry, Team Canada: "My roommate was [Jarome] Iginla. And then there was [Brent] Seabrook, [Marc-Andre] Fleury, [Mike] Richards, [Dany] Heatley, [Patrick] Marleau and [Martin] Brodeur, I think. It was interesting because everybody kind of gathered in ours. We had the one TV and the couches and everybody always gathered in there. It was kind of a cool setup."
Jamie Langenbrunner, Team USA: "We had three in ours: myself, Jack Johnson and Bobby Ryan. Being the older guy, I had my own room and those two shared a room.
"You know what? It was very much the same. Obviously, we knew the magnitude of that game. But when you're playing in the Olympics, every game there are nerves. Go back to the quarterfinals, where it's do-or-die, as well. Maybe it was a little more, but we'd been preparing for it the whole two weeks.
"I think, going into the Olympics, it was a very young team. Chris Drury and Brian Rafalski and I were the only Olympians. I think we did a lot of talking early on, just about being who we are and being our team. ... We'd put ourselves in this situation. We were the only team that hadn't lost a game and we played pretty well in every game.
"Going into the gold-medal game, they told us we could have moved into another [bigger] locker room. We said, 'Nah, we'll just stay in our usual locker room.' Keep with our same routine."
Brooks Orpik, Team USA: "I think being the gold-medal game, too, I think it gave you a lot less time to think about it and get nervous about it. You kind of just got up and the game was on you before you knew it. I think that was good for everybody.
"I don't think I was very nervous at all. I think the early start time had a lot to do with that."
Roberto Luongo, Team Canada: "You're nervous. It was a huge moment in my career, in my life. The good news was that it was a 12 o'clock game. You didn't have time to sit on it. You got up, you ate and you went to the rink. That was a good thing, you didn't have to sit on it all day and build up more nerves and that kind of stuff."
Joe Pavelski, Team USA: "We had the luxury of playing at noon every day in that tournament leading up to the gold-medal game, which was pretty nice. We had that same schedule every day, you didn't have to travel for pregame skates, you just stayed in your routine, wake up and walk over to get food and then walk over to the rink."
Scott Niedermayer, Team Canada: "Yeah, it's different. There's no doubt. The trick is to try not to let it be. And that's a hard thing to do. Pretty exciting getting up that day. Even the night before, you know, lying in bed knowing what's going to happen tomorrow, the opportunity and the stage and all that stuff. I had that same feeling going into a seventh game of a series or a Stanley Cup final.
"The trick is to try and stay focused and just do what you need to do to have success, what you'd done up to that point. Easier said than done.
"I think as a team and how we'd progressed and how we stuck together, I think we felt pretty good. I mean, we still felt the pressure and excitement and all that. I know I didn't feel any anxiety. A bad anxiety. No questions. I mean, I didn't really have a question in my head. Are we going to win this? I certainly believed we were going to win it. I think going into a game with that attitude is probably the right way to do; not always easy to do, considering what has happened and who we were playing. They had obviously beat us before."
Brenden Morrow, Team Canada: "They beat us 5-2 previously. I knew that the pressure was on us at that point in the tournament. Well, from the onset of it. Just hosting it, then losing that game against a U.S. team, they were young, energetic, didn't have the pressure on them."
Patrick Kane, Team USA: "For some reason, I slept pretty good that night. I felt good about that.
"It's weird. You go to the Olympics, and everyone goes to the cafeteria to eat. You're in there eating with your team and then a couple tables over the Canadians are eating, too. And then you see each other walking back and forth from the bus. It's just kind of a weird aura before the game even starts or even at the rink."
Ryan Callahan, Team USA: "Just a lot of excitement leading up to the game; it was different than a playoff game. You're excited for a playoff game, but you can feel the energy in the city, the energy of the guys on the team and what we were about to go out and play for. It's hard to describe that feeling you have."
Bill McCreary, referee: "We sat down in the morning for breakfast, the four officials that were working the game, Jean Morin and [Stefan Fonselius, from Finland] and Danny O'Halloran. I went for a walk. You want to get out in the fresh air and feel good about yourself. Because it's an afternoon game, your routine changes a little bit. I remember the ambience in the city, everyone was just embracing it. It was a great spectacle.
Ron Wilson knew it was going to be a tight game. But little did he know it was going to be that tight. George Bridges/Getty Images
"We got there close to two hours before the game. All the guys just wanted to get there and sort of put aside all of that emotional side of the stuff we were witnessing. We knew it was time to get to work."
Doug Armstrong, management, Team Canada: "I walked to the game by myself, just nervous energy I guess, knowing it wasn't in your control how it was going to end."
Joe Pavelski: "The one thing I really remember from that morning was all the red in the entrance to the rink that day. Going through those lines outside, you remember the massive lines of people waiting out there, all in red."
Ryan Miller, Team USA: "I felt at ease. It was a good tournament. I was thinking about putting a big game together to give the guys a chance to win. Throughout that whole tournament, we put an emphasis on everyone being selected to do a part, we had a game plan and everyone had to deliver their job. And every player had throughout the tournament. I just tried to keep my mind in that kind of space and just give guys a chance that day.
"Everyone was pretty calm, as I remember it. The guys were appropriately loose, at a good level. Guys that need to joke around were joking around, guys who like to focus were focused, it felt like a normal game. That's how it felt like to me, at least. And to me, those are good signs."
Ryan Whitney, Team USA: "It was me and Ryan Malone, we had a thing in Pittsburgh. We would mess around and make fun of things we didn't do well. I would tell him to skate fast and he would tell me to be physical. We would get the boys laughing.
Ryan Getzlaf said it was business as usual before one of the biggest games of his life. Alex Livesey/Getty Images
"We got to the rink around 9:30 or 10. I think I ate around 8:30 with Bugsy Malone and Brooks Orpik and a couple other guys. There was so much nervous energy. Everything went by so quick. You felt like you were getting ready for the game from the moment you woke up."
Paul Stastny, Team USA: "As the game got closer, butterflies started. You get nervous before every game. That's just part of the business. It's tough to beat the same team twice in a short tournament. The pressure was on them, but after we beat them, we had expectations that we were going to win. ... Guys were focused. We had Whitney, he was doing a good job in the locker room of keeping everyone calm. He kept it light in there. He did a good job of pumping everyone's tires and getting everyone loose. ... It's one of those games where you don't need speeches."
Rick Nash, Team Canada: "I've always said that once you get to the rink, time doesn't really matter to me. Once you take your suit off and get into your clothes to go onto the ice, half hour before warm-up, hour and a half, you start stretching -- whatever it may be -- once you get to the rink, there's never been any time for me. I've always been very set on game day."
Ed Olczyk, color commentator, NBC: "I had the feeling that we were on the verge of something real special, considering how the tournament went. Just kind of everything leading up to it. It did have the feeling of one of those unique days -- expect the unexpected, people were going to see the best of the best."
Gary Bettman, NHL commissioner: "I remember the excitement in the city walking the streets was palpable. It was like nothing else in the world besides the gold-medal game existed.
"The streets were mobbed and the restaurants were mobbed and the bars were mobbed. I remember we went for lunch around lunchtime and they told us, you have to be out in 45 minutes because we've sold the table for the entire afternoon."
Patrick Sharp, Team Canada, 2014: "I went back to my hometown in Thunder Bay [Ontario] and watched all the games. I followed the tournament pretty closely. I just remember thinking how big a stage it was, and maybe it was because I was back in Canada, I'm not sure, but I felt I was nervous myself just watching the games. I was thinking, 'This is as big a stage for hockey as it can get.'"
Duncan Keith, Team Canada: "I was walking to the bus to head to the game. I was walking by myself and I remember thinking how nervous I was and anxious and excited. I just remember feeling, I'd never been that nervous before a game in my entire life."
Jamie Langenbrunner, No. 15, says it was a surreal feeling as the players took the ice. Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
PREGAME, WARM-UP, NATIONAL ANTHEMS AND EARLY IN THE GAME
Hearing the frenzied crowd, feeling the tension while getting dressed in their respective locker rooms, reinforced to the players what was riding on this game. A record average of 27.6 million Americans and 16.6 million Canadians -- half of the country's population, in the case of the latter -- were tuning in to watch.
Patrick Kane: "To be honest with you, I don't think we knew how crazy it was going to be when we got there."
Paul Stastny: "In the locker room, you could feel the atmosphere; you could hear it. It was like, 'Let's just get this game started.' It was so much excitement."
Zach Parise: "It's a different feeling. There was just such a different vibe around the locker room. And even just amongst each other, just knowing what was at stake."
Ryan Callahan: "It was [loud]. Like I said, that goes to the energy you feel, not only in the building, but the whole city leading up to it and the day before. Being in Vancouver, such a hockey city; it was a cool place. We knew we were up against a tough opponent. ... We were going into a tough game, knew it would be close."
Team Canada, according to Ken Hitchcock, had great team cohesion during their run to the gold medal. Brian Bahr/Getty Images
Paul Stastny: "It really hits you when you're out there for warm-ups. It couldn't be any louder for warm-ups. Everybody was so excited for it. Honestly, it reminded me of when you see the commercials of the U.S. national soccer team playing in Mexico or something. ... That warm-up was louder than any NHL arena in playoff time. You can't even describe how loud it was. After that, you realize the magnitude."
Jonathan Toews: "For us, it was all or nothing. I think it is anytime for Canada at the Olympics. But to be at home with our home fans, with the efforts of all the different Canadian athletes were putting out to win golds, win medals for our country, that's the one we expected to win. Anything less than that is disappointing. You're constantly reminded of that when you're in that atmosphere."
Wayne Gretzky, special adviser, Team Canada: "First of all, I remember feeling that going into the gold-medal game, the two best teams in the tournament were going to meet. That was in the back of my mind. I also remember that day before the game just how nervous I was eight years earlier [as Team Canada general manager in Salt Lake City], when we played in the gold-medal game. I just remember all the excitement and nerves and what everyone was going through. But really, quite honestly, that day in Vancouver, I had a great sense of belief and relief going into the game that Canada was going to win the gold medal."
Mike Babcock, head coach, Team Canada: "Just remember the opportunity at hand: being Canadian and having an opportunity to win Olympic gold at home. To share that with your family, to share that with Vancouver, to share that with Canada, those were my thoughts.
"I just remember it was a dream of mine one day there would be a party in every little house and farmhouse and little community and town across Canada if we were able to get it done.
"I thought we were calm and composed. We went through the structure of how we were going to play and have success. We were very businesslike. We had very good leadership in our room in [Chris] Pronger and Niedermayer, some guys that had been around a long time. And I thought that really helped us."
Ken Hitchcock, assistant coach, Team Canada: "I've never been in a competition where I felt more prepared. I felt like the team was more prepared, more relaxed and more ready to play than any team in that game. I really felt comfortable where the team was at; I really felt comfortable where the prep was at. ... I felt like there was no question in my mind we were going to win the hockey game. I wasn't nervous; I wasn't, 'Oh, my God, what's going to happen?' I would be in a different frame of mind now, if the result had changed. I just felt like, from the time I got up to the time I went to the rink, to the time we prepared, to the time we were ready to play, we were going to win the hockey game because No. 1, we were playing so well. No. 2, we were pretty healthy. No. 3, I felt like we played great against the Americans in the first game and lost. So, I didn't have any doubt we were going to win. ... Most of the speeches we made were, 'Hey, we're doing this really well, let's just keep going. This is what's really going well -- keep going.' There were very few adjustments we made, we thought, 'Man, we're really on top of our game here.'"
After losing to the U.S. earlier in the tournament, Rick Nash said Team Canada had plenty of time to figure out what went wrong. Alex Livesey/Getty Images
Rick Nash: "We played our system the whole way through and we lost in the round-robin to the U.S., so we had a lot of time to work out our kinks and we knew what they were going to do, so it was just follow the system, play hard and play for your country."
Jamie Langenbrunner: "I'd be lying if I didn't say the legs didn't feel a bit different. I remember the first game of the tournament, your eyes start wandering. This is really happening; we're really here. Gold-medal game, it was some of the same. You had a little bit of that in the warmup, but it goes away as soon as you're warming up. Maybe the first couple of shots, your hands don't feel the same.
"If I remember correctly, I remember the talk about how proud we should be about being at this point and that we'd earned everything we'd gotten and those types of things.
"We knew where we were. We knew there'd be 100 people cheering for us and the rest cheering for them. We knew what kind of atmosphere it was going to be."
Ken Hitchcock: "Mike did most of the talking. The points were really simple. We really built on the way we played in the second half. We thought we played great in Game 1, the second half. We felt really, really good. We just felt like, 'Man, we're playing really well. Let's just keep going.' Our team was really close, really tight together. There was great chemistry, great cohesion. Just, it felt like a bunch of guys you didn't ever want to let go of the rope. That was the way it felt. You didn't ever want to go home. You didn't want it to break up. You just felt like you were going to win forever."
Roberto Luongo: "It was really intense. Obviously, when countries compete against each other, there's a bit more emotion involved than a regular game."
Ryan Whitney: "Jamie Langenbrunner was real good. Guys just looked up to him and Chris Drury. They were guys who had been there and have done everything you can do in hockey. They would say what we have to do. I was there cracking jokes and laughing a little bit, keeping it a little loose. I remember [coach] Ron Wilson was great at not putting pressure on the guys, reminding them this was an amazing opportunity and a day none of us would ever forget. There wasn't much hockey talk before. There was really no more X's and O's you could go over.
"I tell everyone, because I'm not afraid to remind my buddies I played in the Olympics, I tell them the two things I'll never forget there was how silent it was when we beat them in the round-robin. Remember when [Ryan] Kesler scored the best empty-netter of all time? It was dead silent there.
"The other thing was before that [gold-medal] game. It was bonkers."
David Backes: "That locker room was very businesslike. Not a lot of voices in there. I might have been one of the louder voices. Just, 'Hey, you know what? We've been doing it all tournament, we don't have to change much. We beat this team already, let's go out there and do it.' We knew the stage, the viewership, what it meant for us."
Zach Parise: "You couldn't see them, but they were loud. I do remember that. Because we did 20-minute warmups, and I think in the NHL we did 16 minutes. And Canada wanted to keep it more like an NHL game. So we had the ice to ourselves for a little bit and then they came on and the buzz in the building was awesome. The atmosphere in the building was incredible.
"You still had the butterflies through the game. It was one of those rare games that you, just for the first little bit, you don't want to make a mistake. I guess it's like playing a Game 7. I think as you kind of get your feet under you, you're a little bit more comfortable and you just play and your instincts take over."
Brooks Orpik: "I remember it because every other game besides that one we had a ton of support at all the games, but in that one it was pretty red in the crowd there. I think it was in the upper deck they stuck all the Americans. I say all, there weren't many.
"I think it kind of worked in our favor, too. I didn't envy the Canadians' position at all. I mean, everyone's like, 'Oh, yeah, it was a home game,' but they were expected to win, there was so much pressure on them to win. We had such a young group, too, with no Olympic experience, and I think that took a lot of pressure off us."
Ryan Miller: "I took in a bit of it. I like to be aware of my surroundings. I didn't want to have too much tunnel vision going on. My job is to be aware of what's going on around me. So I took in a little bit of it. I just tried to make it into another hockey game."
Ryan Getzlaf, Team Canada: "Part of being able to play at that elite level is going out there and embracing the moment and not getting too wound up. I think that you have to consciously think about calming down and playing the game the right way.
"I remember sitting down after the first shift, getting back to the bench and just sitting down and kind of taking a deep breath and saying, 'We got that one out of the way' kind of thing, and we can go on with the game."
Jamie Langenbrunner: "That first shift was tough. You were a little caught up."
Duncan Keith: "After the first couple shifts, as a team we were prepared, we were focused. As much as we were nervous, there was still that something inside of us that said to ourselves, we weren't going to be denied on our home soil, we were going to find a way, no matter what. As nervous as we were, it turned into that attitude that we weren't going to be denied."
Corey Perry's goal gave Team Canada a lot of confidence midway through the second period. George Bridges/Getty Images
CANADA TAKES A 2-0 LEAD
After tense, back-and-forth action, at 12:50 of the first period, Jonathan Toews scored to give Team Canada the early lead and further stoke the fired-up crowd. Then, at 7:13 of the second period, Corey Perry fired one past Ryan Miller to make it 2-0 and it looked as though the Canadians were in charge.
Corey Perry: "It was huge. It definitely helps that it went in, but I think we were halfway through the game. There was still another half a game to play. Anything can happen.
"To score the second goal, it was special. It was a great play. I just had to make the quick shot on Miller because it was a cross-ice pass and it just found a way to get in."
Ryan Getzlaf: "At that point, you're just playing. We're playing every minute, every shift because they're doing the same thing. So it's not something that we're going to be able to relax at any moment when you're in a game like that. So, I don't ever remember feeling safe, no."
David Backes knew that even though the U.S. was in a hole, they had faced, and overcome, adversity before. Jamie Squire/Getty Images
Sidney Crosby: "I think we were really comfortable. We were getting really good chances. Miller was making some good saves. We felt we had control of the game."
Ryan Miller: "I was definitely disappointed to get down. But at the same time was thinking about trying to keep everything in striking distance. Two goals isn't insurmountable ... just wanted to settle things down."
Mike Babcock: "Get the third goal. Just get the third one."
Jamie Langenbrunner: "Through the whole tournament, there was always this feeling that this was going to happen for us, that this was our time. Down 2-0, whatever it was, we never thought about [losing].
"Even against Finland, when we were up 5-0, you still don't feel comfortable. You never allowed yourself to feel comfortable.
"To me, it's one of those tournaments you have to be pumped up at every moment until that final buzzer because the teams you're playing are that good.
"I just remember thinking, 'Now we're going to have to find a way to get three on them.' It never occurred to me that it meant we were done."
Zach Parise: "It's always easy to say when a team has a great comeback that, 'Oh, we never felt we were out of it.' But, of course, it was frustrating. It was frustrating because they were doing a good job against us. We never really changed the way we played. We just kept doing what had worked for us. Eventually, we kind of chipped away and started to break them down a little bit.
"I think it's human nature in hockey, especially in a big game, I really thought that they started to be really passive. All of a sudden we were able to skate the puck in, we were able to skate the puck through the neutral zone, things we'd had trouble doing earlier in the game. All of a sudden they were backing off. I remember us saying to each other on the bench that they're backing off a little, just keep going. It's like in football, when a team goes to a prevent defense and the other team just seems to be able to move the ball down the field. That's kind of how we felt on the bench.
"You keep looking up at the clock and it's one of those things when you're down, the clock seems like it's flying and when you're winning, it seems like it's going too slow."
Ryan Whitney: "I can honestly say it was insane, how good a team Canada had, that at 2-0, just how little panic there was on our bench. That was the Perry goal. I figured that, and understandably so because I messed up on that Perry goal, I wouldn't be out there again. ... Bobby Ryan wasn't playing that much, either, we were on the bench joking around and keeping guys loose. I remember going out. I would go out on TV timeouts and do a couple tight turns in front of the bench and say, 'I'm ready, boys.'
"Guys weren't panicking. It was [experience from] beating them once. There were a couple factors. We beat them once, we had at that time the best goalie in history in that two weeks playing for us. They're not going to score again, you're thinking. We had such willpower and chemistry on that team. That was a really close team, for a two-week tournament it was pretty crazy how well guys got along and how much guys cared."
Duncan Keith: "We had a lot of respect for them. The game's not over; we still had lots of time left to play. We were happy we were up 2-0 but there was never any let-up or taking a breath because we were up."
Patrick Kane: "I think at that point you're down 2-0, so you have to press a little bit and try and score. But I remember being in the second period, we had some chances. It seemed like every time we had chances, especially when it was 2-0, shifts kind of kept building, and our team kept getting better and better. ... I think going to the third, we felt pretty confident that we could probably get one more and come back."
With 24 seconds left in the third period, Zach Parise scored one of the biggest goals in U.S. history. Saeed Khan/Getty Images
TEAM USA TIES IT
Refusing to back down, the upstart Americans rallied 5:31 after Perry's goal on a deflection by Ryan Kesler to make it 2-1. And then, in storybook fashion, with Ryan Miller on the bench in favor of the extra attacker and the Americans doing everything they could to score, Zach Parise tied the game with just 24.4 seconds left in the third period.
Zach Parise: "There must have been about five minutes left [in regulation], and we'd dump it in and they'd dump it out. I think, finally, Luongo misplayed a long shot and we were able to keep the puck in the zone."
Ron Wilson, head coach, Team USA: "We had used our timeout, I don't know what it was, with a little bit more than a minute to go in the game. I had it in my mind I had to get Joe Pavelski on the ice at some point because Joe is one of those junkyard dogs, he makes things happen. He doesn't look pretty doing it. It's really hard to sell other people around you that he's a really good hockey player when they don't see him every night. The first timeout, when we pulled the goalie, Millsy's on the bench, I didn't put Pav on the ice."
David Backes: "I don't know if I touched the ice a lot in that third period. It was just Ryan Callahan and Tim Thomas at the end of the bench. Great seats for the end of that game. Trying to do whatever we could. Calling out plays to guys. Letting them know what was open. Opening doors. Things like that. You're thinking, minute left, hopefully we can find something."
Duncan Keith: "I was on the bench. I remember looking at the clock, there was about 52 seconds left. There was a whistle. I remember looking out, thinking, 'Geez, if we can only get through this last 52 seconds here, we'll have a gold medal.'"
Ryan Getzlaf: "I was on the ice and I'd taken two faceoffs in a row in our zone at the end of the game. The first one, we got out of the zone and the second one, it stayed in."
Ron Wilson: "There were about 35 seconds left and [Babcock] wanted to have Pronger and Niedermayer on the ice the whole last two minutes. So Mike called the timeout and it gave me the opportunity to pull one of the guys off and put Pav on. We drew up a play, and then who does the puck end up going to below the goal line but Joe Pavelski? And Joe makes the play out to Patrick Kane ... "
Patrick Kane: "I remember, I think, Dustin Brown took a shot, Luongo kind of had a chance to cover it, but it kind of went out of his glove and went back around. The play kind of ended up in front of the net, and I kind of spun and shot it. I knew it had a chance when I saw Parise sitting there and the puck laying there and he poked it through."
Sidney Crosby perhaps said it best when the U.S. tied up the game: "Pretty gross." Harry How/Getty Images
Ryan Getzlaf: "I remember the play. Them having the puck behind the net; it was along the goal line. I was contemplating whether to challenge the guy behind the net or staying home and I think I chose to stay, and somehow he got the puck past me and hit Zach going to the net there. He made a good play."
Zach Parise: "I just do remember watching the puck hit off Jamie's skate and that really threw Luongo off and you find yourself in front of the net with the puck right on your stick. I remember the sound of the puck hitting the back pad in the goal.
"You're so excited. It was new life. All of a sudden, we had new life. Just to be in that situation, to get ourselves in that situation, was unbelievable."
Patrick Kane: "Ah, it was a good feeling. At that point, you're feeling pretty amazed you tied it up. And then you're thinking just get it to overtime, and you'll probably have a good chance to win it because we did have all the momentum."
Jonathan Toews: "I can't describe a worse feeling, a more sinking feeling than giving up that 2-1 lead with whatever was left on the clock; it wasn't much. I don't think we ever felt comfortable with a 2-0, 2-1 lead at any point. You just feel like you want to run the clock down."
Ryan Callahan: "I was on the bench. ... I remember me and Bobby Ryan jumping up and down together. I think my helmet almost ended up at center ice, we were cheering so much. It's just an incredible feeling when you see that puck go in and you know that maybe you're just one goal away from winning the gold."
Sidney Crosby: "Pretty gross. Pretty gross. Pretty quiet. The best thing that happened is that they scored with that amount of time left. If they would have scored with like five minutes left, who knows? You don't know. You don't know because they have momentum then and they're kind of going after it. The fact that it was so late, we were able to basically get right in the room after and just turn the page and regroup."
Ryan Miller: "Honestly, the guys were standing up and I was sitting down. I tried not to react either way. I always feel like when I'm in that situation, my job isn't going to change whether we score or not. I try to keep it pretty even. I'm not going to lie, I was pretty happy he scored. But I tried to keep myself composed and ready."
Mike Babcock: "I thought our team played good down the stretch. We had three 6-on-5 faceoffs in our own zone and Getzlaf won every one, if I'm not mistaken. When it's 6-on-5, the puck always goes in backdoor, and sure enough it was there backdoor for them. But I remember looking up at the scoreboard and saying, 'Good, there's only 27 seconds left' or whatever there was. Because you were going to have time to go back to the dressing room and regroup. If the game keeps going there, you may not have regrouped."
Ryan Getzlaf: "At that point, it was a huge letdown knowing that we had it in our grasp and we had that game and let it slip away. Obviously, now it's kind of irrelevant in the long term, but it still means the same to me that I was on the ice and wasn't able to close it out the way we wanted to.
"I play that over and over in my mind on how they scored and what we could have done differently. It's kind of a weird thing considering that we won, but I do try and figure out all the time what we could have done differently to prevent that."
Ryan Whitney: "When Zach scored, that was the one time in my life, I remember legit blacking out. Jumping up and down, screaming and hugging guys. I went to hug [John] Tortorella, he was going crazy. When [Parise] scored, I'll never forget it. I remember saying, we're winning now. I was wrong.
"When he banged it in, I was at the end of the bench, I just started screaming, jumping around. Not a clue what you're doing. It was total blackout."
Ron Wilson: "Because it was just the tying goal, we [were really] celebrating on the bench. Because you're that close to your dreams: winning a gold medal, and on top of it winning it in Canada. So our guys had gone nuts. And had I had any common sense at all, I would have said, 'Calm down, the game's not over.' Or, 'Let's go out and win it before we get to overtime. We've still got 25 seconds, they're going to be so disappointed, we might be able to jump on them.'"
David Backes: "He buries that puck and you're like, 'This was meant to be.' We have all the momentum now, whether it's the end of the period of overtime, let's stay at it. It was meant to be."
Brenden Morrow: "I just remember when they scored late in the third, the timing was probably great for us because they were really pouring it on the last five minutes or so. We needed that breather to adjust and refresh. Had they started overtime right away, our mindset might not have been in the same place. You get in, you relax, you start to talk it out. It was good to have that little break for us."
Roberto Luongo: "It was very deflating. We were lucky that we were able to go to the locker room after that and regather our thoughts and come out for OT. If we had to go straight into OT without taking a break, I don't know if we would have been in the same mindset. It was a good thing we were able to go back in the locker room and just reset our mindset and get ready for OT."
Jamie Langenbrunner: "I remember thinking if we had scored a minute earlier, we would have won this game in regulation.
"We kind of had that feeling that if we just pushed and pushed them, we were going to get a break. That was the feeling I remember having is, 'We have them, we have them.'
"I was excited when it did happen. I don't know if I saw it go in. I was trying to screen the goalie. I just remember Zach's arms going up and chasing him into the corner."
Zach Parise's game-tying goal brought back some pretty sweet memories for Mike Eruzione. Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
Scott Niedermayer: "I think we felt we were playing well and if we sort of kept up with those things, that there was somebody in that room that was going to find a way to do it. It was a pretty good pit in my stomach, I mean I was on the ice, probably chased out of position to try and get the puck and [Parise] was left alone. But a pit in your stomach for a little while. But again we kept together and didn't let that stop anything that we believed."
Rick Nash: "Yeah, it was a sick feeling in your stomach. You're 26, 27 seconds or whatever it was away from a gold medal, and they tie it up. But I can say I've never been with a more confident group in the dressing room in between periods. We felt that we played great during the game, played well and there were so many captains in there, so many leaders, that just the wave of confidence coming through that room, like we knew we were going to get the gold medal."
Corey Perry: "Your emotions go up and come screaming to a halt and come down. I think we went into the intermission, nothing had to be said. There were so many great leaders in that room that just knew what was at stake. We had the feeling that if we went out and played the way we wanted to play, we were going to win."
Bill McCreary: "What a momentum shift you could feel in the game. As an official seeing it as you do on the ice, the U.S. were starting to take over the game. When [Parise] scores, you could just feel it, just see it and feel it going to the U.S. side."
Paul Stastny: "I was on the bench. I don't even know how much time we had left. It looked like there was 20 guys on the ice. Once that went in, the building got so quiet. The bench was so loud, so excited. We all thought we had it in the bag. You score that late, you have all the momentum."
Mike Eruzione, Team USA, 1980: "One of the local television stations showed up to film. It was really fun watching the kids watch the game. When Zach scored, these kids flipped. And I thought, 'Wow, that must have been what it was like when we played, people watching us.' It was very cool to watch that."
Gary Bettman: "It was like the crowd was almost mesmerized when the U.S. tied up the game."
It was no easy task, but Mike Babcock found a way to make his team believe before OT began. Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
IN THE LOCKER ROOMS BEFORE OVERTIME
The teams skated to their respective dressing rooms to prepare for sudden-death overtime, which was to be in the NHL format of 4-on-4. As the ice was resurfaced, the players and coaches tried, in some cases desperately, to maintain their focus.
Sidney Crosby: "Obviously, the first minute it's just kind of like, guys are just taking it in. But right away it was just like everyone just kind of snapped out of it. It was pretty energetic. Five, seven minutes before we went back out, it just felt like, 'OK, we're definitely in the right mindset here.' I think the fact that you had guys like Niedermayer and Pronger, I remember Scott Niedermayer just saying little things. It was just like, 'We've got to regroup here and we know what we've got to do, let's make sure we get back after it.'
"I remember Mike Babcock had a really good speech. He said, 'You know as bad as it seems right now, we just made this even better, possibly, so somebody's got a real opportunity here to make it really special.' I kind of remember looking around, everyone just seemed to have a good mindset going into overtime. It really showed."
Ryan Miller: "The guys were obviously enthusiastic, but the guys were also trying to get their focus back. It wasn't a celebration by any means. We were excited to get the opportunity. Maybe Whitney and, I can't remember, but someone else mentioned, 'Who's going to be the next Eruzione?' Or something to that effect. The boys got the message."
Patrick Kane: "I remember I was sitting next to Erik Johnson. We were kind of looking at each other, saying, 'We have a chance to win gold here.' It was pretty crazy. Everyone was excited. I think maybe to the point where we were too excited because it almost felt after all that happened and we came back from 2-0, tied it up in the late stages like that, it was almost a guarantee we were going to win it."
Jonathan Toews: "It was such a weird feeling in your throat and your stomach; that everything just dropped. Trying to forget about that and trying to forget about what you could have had if you would have killed off the last minute or whatever, it's hard, but you got to forget about it and move on."
Brooks Orpik & Co. had all the momentum in the world heading into the locker room before OT. Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
Brooks Orpik: "I think the whole game we were pretty confident. Obviously, when you get to the last couple of minutes, when you're still down a goal against a team like that, I think you're definitely nervous that it's not going to go your way. I think when Zach scored that goal to tie it up and then going into overtime the way that we tied it up late there, I remember the mood in the dressing room; I don't think anybody thought we were going to lose after the way that ended in regulation.
"So, I thought the attitude, the confidence in the room, was really good going into overtime."
Brenden Morrow: "You're pissed off, initially. The first couple minutes, you're upset with how things went, what could have been. But then you look at the opportunity. If somebody had told us, 'You've got an overtime to win a gold medal at the beginning of the tournament,' who wouldn't have taken that? After you have that initial five minutes or so to reflect, we were thinking the same thing the Americans were. We were confident."
Mike Babcock: "It was great because the room calmed down right away. [Coaches] could tell because we were close enough to hear it. As a coaching staff we went through our structure, 4-on-4 and who was going to play. I went through it then with the players, our structure and how we were going to play. That took about a minute. Then I said to them, 'There's too much talent on the ice, this game is going to be over fast. One of you is going to be a hero for the rest of your life. Let's put our foot on the gas and let's go get 'em.'"
Ron Wilson: "We go to overtime -- we as a coaching staff. We didn't even know what we were facing. We started asking around: 'What are we doing?' We hadn't really investigated what happens. Then we're told, 'You've got a 20-minute overtime.' We're like, '20-minute overtime?' 'Yeah, they switch ends,' which you don't do in the NHL. 'You go in, they're doing the ice, you get a 20-minute overtime, sudden death, but you're playing 4-on-4.' So I was like, 'That doesn't really work to our advantage because Canada is very deep.' I knew if we get to a shootout, I thought we're going to win. We've got the three best shootout guys and you can use them over and over again, so we had Patrick Kane, we had Joe Pavelski and we had Zach Parise.
"We hadn't even been in any 4-on-4 situations in the whole tournament. Canada had already played Switzerland in an overtime, so they had at least an inkling of what to do. We had to take a couple of minutes ourselves to regroup as coaches, and then we had to go in and tell them how we wanted to play 4-on-4. We hadn't even practiced it."
Ken Hitchcock: "One shot and we win a gold medal. One shot and we're going to live together forever. Keep playing the same way we're playing. Don't change a thing. That's exactly what everyone said."
Jamie Langenbrunner: "We were trying to confirm what the overtime rules were because the gold-medal game was different than the other games.
"It was a lot of talk about this is our time. Talk about how tight they would be right now and how we've got an opportunity to jump on them."
Scott Niedermayer: "I don't think I've ever given a speech of any kind, [but said something to the effect]: 'Just keep doing what we're doing. We'll get rewarded. Just believe and I feel it's in here.' Just those things. And I think everybody did believe, or maybe not everybody, but the majority of the group. Enough that that was the team's attitude and somehow it did work out."
Ryan Getzlaf: "You know what? It was a weird feeling because we still didn't have any sense of panic in our locker room whatsoever. When you're playing at that level and you look around that locker room, there's really no reason for anybody to have panic with the experience and stuff that we had in that room. I remember going in, calming down a little bit, getting the emotions back in check and getting ready to play again."
Drew Doughty probably wasn't the only player feeling the jitters before sudden-death overtime. Jamie Squire/Getty Images
Zach Parise: "I was still on a high from scoring the goal. But at the same time, you have that feeling you want to go get that next one, too. That kind of game, it doesn't matter if you don't get the next one.
"We're trying to quickly learn a few things, how we're going to play 4-on-4. With all the skill level Canada had, that 4-on-4 kind of played to their advantage. And at the start, you kind of get back those feelings you had in the first period: You really need one shift to get into it."
Drew Doughty, Team Canada: "It's insane. You don't want to be the guy who's going to mess up. At the same time, you so badly want to be the guy who wins the game for your country. A crazy feeling. I'm not going to lie. It's probably the most nervous I ever was, in overtime of the gold-medal game. I've had other times during our Stanley Cup run where I could have been nervous, but I definitely think when I was on the ice, the most nervous time was that overtime period, knowing it was in Canada and we were supposed to win the gold medal."
Bill McCreary: "We figured it would be a really fast OT. At that stage, you just hope for what we call a clean goal. Not a goal where a guy is hooked off the puck or a trip of any type of foul that creates a turnover that leads to the goal. That certainly didn't happen.
"It ends on a good note when there isn't something that leads up to the goal that people could question later on."
Ryan Whitney: "Saying, 'We've got them -- they're all tightened up.' We kept saying, 'Let's make this whole country cry,' or something stupid like that. There were some funny things said."
David Backes: "I think we've got all the momentum. I think even after the break, we're in the room, going, 'Someone's got to be the hero. It just takes one shot.'"
Wayne Gretzky: "I don't think I really got nervous at all for them until the Americans tied it up late in the game. And when that happened, you know anything can happen in overtime."
Sidney Crosby says he never really looked at the net when he scored the golden goal. Cris Bouroncle/Getty Images
OVERTIME
The two teams, edgy with anticipation and adrenaline amid the deafening roar, skated onto the ice for the opening faceoff of sudden-death overtime. Soon, a hero would be made. The tense, early moments were alive with dramatic plays, including a golden opportunity by Team USA's Joe Pavelski.
Sidney Crosby: "You could tell right from the start of overtime we were skating, we weren't sitting back. I think that's the attitude you want in overtime."
Jamie Langenbrunner: "I felt we carried the play early on. We had some opportunities."
Ron Wilson: "Pavelski intercepted a Niedermayer pass and fired one that Luongo had no idea where the puck was, and the puck stuck right here, between his mask and his shoulder. He caught it like that. Only Pav does stuff like this: He anticipated where Niedermayer was passing the puck and suckered him and stuck his stick there and took a quick shot. We thought it was going in, then you're like, 'How did he stop that because [Luongo] hasn't been sharp all night?'"
Joe Pavelski: "I think about it a little bit once in a while, that's for sure. You always hope you get a chance in overtime and that you're ready for it. I was ready, I got the chance, but it didn't go in. I remember going back to the bench and Timmy Thomas just being like, 'That was close.'"
Ron Wilson: "And then a couple of minutes, about two minutes later, Phil Kessel hit the crossbar that nobody really realized because the puck hit the crossbar and went up into the netting. We saw it from the bench and we were like, 'Are you kidding me?'
"Phil hadn't done much in the Olympics, but he got one of those shots off like a really quick, really unbelievable release that only he can do and so he's literally one inch from himself scoring the golden goal."
Brenden Morrow says he couldn't imagine facing the Canadian fans if they had not come back with a gold medal. Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)
Mike Babcock: "We turned the puck over early -- Niedermayer to Pavelski and he went high on Luongo. After that, we dominated. We had the puck for the rest of the time, I thought."
Sidney Crosby: "I don't remember Pavelski's chance. I just remember that last shift. They had a rush, it ended up coming back, I think Niedermayer passed it to me."
Scott Niedmermayer: "I don't know who I was trying to pass it to. I double-clutched on it, like I saw somebody, and then I saw their guy and I kind of did it halfway and then [Crosby] got it."
Zach Parise: "I was on the ice, and I remember Sid coming through and trying to split the D and the puck kind of rimmed around and hit the ref's foot, and I think that kind of threw Rafalski off a little bit and Sid read that."
Ron Wilson: "I still see the puck coming around the boards. I didn't see what happens because it's in this corner [near the team benches]. We had our two most reliable defensemen, Rafalski was out there and Ryan Suter. They were our go-to pair."
Sidney Crosby: "I tried to go through the D -- it kind of got broken up and just kind of a scramble in the corner."
Jamie Langenbrunner: "Unfortunately, I was on the ice up by my point. The puck came around the boards, however, that bounce came off there. I was covering the point, not sure who it was."
Drew Doughty: "I was on the ice. I was coming down the right point, coming in back door. If Sid shot it off the back pad, I'd try to get the rebound."
Scott Niedermayer: "I remember getting it behind the net again, regrouping, gave it to Sid. I guess at that point I remember, you know, this guy's going for it right now. You just get that feeling like he's going to be real aggressive with this puck and he's going on the attack, and he did that and I think he kind of lost it. Then it's into the corner. Four-on-4 -- I loved it because stuff happens and it doesn't take much to get an opening. The puck was in the corner rattling around, and I felt I was open at that point, so I was already making a few strides towards the net to be the hero."
Zach Parise: "Sid sent it to Iginla. I was playing high in the slot covering the point, so I was kind of helpless. I was too far away to try and disrupt Sid."
Ron Wilson: "The puck went around the wall and I see Brian Rafalski going. I said, 'OK, we're safe here because he's got it.' The next thing I know, Sid's in on a breakaway."
Mike Babcock: "When Sid got the puck, we were in a pretty good situation there."
Sidney Crosby: "I knew I had a good look. I think it was Rafalski was with me along the boards, and I knew that the other D was with Iggy in the corner. So as soon as I got off the boards, I knew that there was nobody in front. I just had to beat Rafalski off the boards, the way it kind of worked out I ended up on the net side and he ended up, I think, on the other side of me. ... I knew I was in a good position to get some momentum to go to the net and there wasn't anyone there. So, I think the big thing there is, do you shoot or do you take it?"
Ryan Miller: "There's a lot of times where he turns and shoots; there's other times where he knows he's got room and comes to the net. I thought this would be one of those times where he comes to the net."
Sidney Crosby: "I just thought, 'I've got to shoot it.' Because if I take it to the net and for some reason I either have the forward come down and hit the puck or if the goalie cuts the angle and I don't get a good shot off, then I'm going to be kicking myself for not. When you're in that spot in overtime, you've got to take the shot. It wasn't a hard, hard shot, but I got it away pretty quick. I don't think I even looked at the net. I knew where [Miller] was, but where I got the pass, I think I was right by the dot and I kind of knew the net was there and just tried to get it away quick."
Wayne Gretzky, who knows a thing or two about goals, says the gold medal was gravy on a great Olympic Games. Sandra Behne/Bongarts/Getty Images
Ryan Miller: "I wasn't going to give him a chance to use that great backhand he's got."
Ron Wilson: "I don't know what Ryan was thinking, starting to go with a poke-check on the puck and he's still 20 feet away. I didn't ever even want to ask Ryan, 'What were you thinking? If you go down in your butterfly, you've smothered it.'"
Sidney Crosby: "The goalie goes down and basically, just the light coming on. I don't know if it's stuck in his pads or ... Right at that split second, it's not like you see it the whole way going in the corner. You lose sight of it, then the light came on and you see everyone."
Ryan Miller: "Mistake on my part. It sucks."
Scott Niedermayer: "I think he was a little surprised, he shot it pretty quick. It wasn't a real, real good scoring chance. ... To be honest, I don't even think I saw him shoot it, and I just saw it hit the pad in the back of the net. It wasn't even that hard or top corner or anything. Just kind of 'thud,' right in the back."
Ron Wilson: "I asked Brian, I was like, what happened in the corner where we couldn't see? And he says, 'Well, I was going to the puck and I looked up, like, Where's Iginla? Where's Crosby? Where are they? So I watched the puck almost 'til it got to the back of the net. I know where it's going, so I'm going to the hash mark. So I look this way, look that way and there's no puck there.' The puck had hit Billy McCreary's feet. And [Rafalski] said, 'It's in the net.' And I'm going, 'It hit Billy McCreary's feet.' Billy didn't even know because we came back, I had him about a week later. I said, 'Billy, if they shoot the puck around the wall on a dump-in, try and jump in the air. I know it's getting harder, you're getting a little older.' He could be caustic and then between the first and second he came over and he said, 'I had no idea you were busting my [chops]. Someone told me in between periods that the puck hit my feet in the gold-medal game.'
"The puck never even got to Brian, and it was in our net. In a sneeze, it was in our net. And we had the two better scoring chances, too."
Bill McCreary: "I think at the end, the feeling is you want to be satisfied with your own work. You watch the medals being handed out and it's a good feeling to realize you were not part of anyone losing or not part of anyone winning. It was a great experience."
Drew Doughty: "I saw it [go in] right away. Me and Niedermayer were both down pretty low actually, and we were the only two defensemen on the ice. We tried to be the first guys to get to Sid."
Jamie Langenbrunner: "Unfortunately, I had a pretty good angle of watching it go in."
Mike Babcock: "I don't know how everybody else thinks, but in my heart and in my mind, I always believed we were going to get it done. That's just the way I operate."
Zach Parise: "It's just, you're devastated right away. Because that just shattered everything. You're going from being on such a high, having a chance to win the game and all of a sudden you watch it go in and just, like, that it's over. Everything we did, the whole two weeks, it's over.
"That's what it was -- disbelief that it just ended just like that. What seemed to be like a nothing play turned out to be it's over, the Olympics are over."
Needless to say, Patrice Bergeron was overwhelmed by emotions after Sidney Crosby scored the winning goal. Jamie Squire/Getty Images
Jarome Iginla, Team Canada: "I felt like a little kid, throwing your gloves in the air. It was a one-goal-takes-all and it went the right way, in my opinion. It was very special and it was one of those memories that will be with me for a long time. There was a lot on the line, as far as one goal and it could've gone either way. That was the old saying, 'The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.' Fortunately, it went the right way -- and it was a pretty cool feeling."
Roberto Luongo: "Joy. Relief. I just remember putting my arms in the air and just gliding all the way down. I wasn't even skating fast, I was just looking at the heavens and thanking God the whole way that we were able to pull that off."
Corey Perry: "I was sitting at the end of the bench. I think I was sitting right beside Morrow. We hadn't played at all. We were sitting there and watching the whole thing unfold and as soon as it went in, I jumped over the boards."
Brenden Morrow: "Exhilaration. It was almost more relief than anything. Scared to show your face anywhere in Canada had we not won that. It was a huge relief. I remember the bench pouring, everyone jumping. And then all the flag skating and all that mayhem happened and you just spend the night celebrating."
Ryan Callahan: "You're still going home with a silver medal, but it's devastating. You're that close to completing your goal and ultimately winning a gold medal. To have that taken away from you that quick, it's hard to take."
Phil Kessel, Team USA: "That's just how it happens, right? You get some chances, if one goes in, you're done."
Ryan Getzlaf: "I was on the bench. I didn't actually see it. I was talking to one of the coaches at the time. ... It wasn't a 2-on-1 down the ice or anything like that, where you could get prepared for it. Just kind of, bang. It happened and away we went.
"When it did go in it was just kind of a shock and then everything's a blur. You don't really think about things from that point. Just jump over the boards quick and get to the pile."
Ryan Whitney: "Everyone probably thought we were going to win. I know I did. Unfortunately, that's what happens. That was no one's fault. It was a quick play, get it to Sid and that was that. That's how quickly things can turn and change. I would have bet anything we were going to win." |
Opponents of Proposition 8, California’s anti-gay marriage bill, demonstrate outside of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Feb. 7, 2012, in San Francisco Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.
It’s going to be one blockbuster of a history-making year at the Supreme Court.
The justices announced Friday that they will hear two cases about gay marriage. The first, United States v. Windsor, is the small step. The second, Hollingsworth v. Perry, is potentially giant. With the choice between staging a nice little one-act play about states that recognize gay marriage and a full-dress, five-act opera about whether states can constitutionally ban it, the court chose the big production. This is it: The civil rights issue of our generation, in the hands of nine justices. As a reporter, I couldn’t be more excited. As a supporter of gay marriage who is also a nervous Nellie, I’m kind of terrified.
Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer met in 1963. They lived together and registered as domestic partners 1993. In 2007, Spyer got multiple sclerosis. She and Windsor got married in Canada that year, and Spyer died in 2009. New York, where they live, recognized their marriage, but because Congress defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman in the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, Windsor had no spousal rights, according to federal law, when her wife died. She had to pay $363,053 in estate taxes—which she wouldn’t have had to pay if she’d been married to a man.
This is the sympathetic story the gay rights movement teed up for the Supreme Court and in particular for Justice Kennedy, who loves two things: states’ rights and gay rights. (I am stealing that line, along with plenty else, from New York University law professor Kenji Yoshino.) Windsor is about gay marriage, of course, but it’s also about whether states should retain their role as the primary source of law for marriage, divorce, and other domestic relations. I love this case because it looks like a winner. Windsor won before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The Justice Department argued that the Supreme Court should take this case.
Perry is a whole different ball game. This is the case brought by the odd-couple hotshots David Boies and Ted Olson. They argued that it was unconstitutional for voters in California to ban gay marriage by passing the referendum Proposition 8 after the state supreme court legalized it. Olson and Boies asked the big civil rights question of our time: Does the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protections bar states from discriminating against gay couples by preventing them from marrying? They argued that there was no important societal interest served by this form of discrimination. And they won after an amazing 12-day trial in which the lawyer defending Prop 8, when asked how allowing gay marriage would harm opposite-sex couples (the societal interest supposedly at stake) famously said, “Your honor, my answer is: I don’t know. I don’t know.”
When Olson and Boies’ victory was appealed, Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld the win—but went to great lengths to limit its scope. He called Prop 8 “unique” because it took away a right to marriage that had already been exercised by thousands of California couples. That meant the 9th Circuit ruling for gay marriage only applied in California, not states like Idaho and Alaska and Arizona, which are also covered by the 9th Circuit. This was the nice, safe step. But Prop 8 supporters, in their petition to the high court, made the case bigger. They wrote, “The 9th Circuit’s sweeping dismissal of the important societal interests served the traditional definition of marriage is tantamount to a judicial death sentence for traditional marriage laws throughout this Circuit.”
Now what? Does the Supreme Court agree—do five of the justices see this in terms of doom rather than progress? Or could they possibly side with Olson and Boies all the way and declare gay marriage legal in every single state? That would mean changing the laws of 41 states that have not yet taken that step. At a panel discussion I did with Yoshino and Jeffrey Toobin on Thursday night at New York University, Yoshino argued that the court will find some middle ground, some way to allow gay marriage in California without forcing it on the parts of the country that aren’t ready. He also pointed out that other state marriage bans, in Hawaii and Nevada, are also bubbling up through the courts, which could make the justices feel that delaying the big question (my own nervous Nellie preference) isn’t really an option.
It takes four votes to decide to hear a case—the step announced today—and five votes, of course, to decide the outcome. So we truly don’t know what today’s news means, which justices want to go for broke and which don’t, or where this will take the country. Earlier this week, Tom Goldstein of Scotusblog wrote of the gay marriage petitions granted today, “These are the most significant cases these nine Justices have ever considered, and probably that they will ever decide.”
So I’m more than a little anxious—that’s my nature. And there’s so much at stake, because when the Supreme Court gets the big stuff wrong, it can take a long time to undo the damage. But I can’t wait to watch this megaproduction. I can’t think of a more exciting show. |
Filtering: You take the negative details and magnify them, while filtering out all positive aspects of a situation. A single detail may be picked out, and the whole event becomes colored by this detail. When you pull negative things out of context, isolated from all the good experiences around you, you make them larger and more awful than they really are. Polarized Thinking: The hallmark of this distortion is an insistence on dichotomous choices. Things are black or white, good or bad. You tend to perceive everything at the extremes, with very little room for a middle ground. The greatest danger in polarized thinking is its impact on how you judge yourself. For example-You have to be perfect or you're a failure. Overgeneralization: You come to a general conclusion based on a single incident or piece of evidence. If something bad happens once, you expect it to happen over and over again. 'Always' and 'never' are cues that this style of thinking is being utilized. This distortion can lead to a restricted life, as you avoid future failures based on the single incident or event. Mind Reading: Without their saying so, you know what people are feeling and why they act the way they do. In particular, you are able to divine how people are feeling toward you. Mind reading depends on a process called projection. You imagine that people feel the same way you do and react to things the same way you do. Therefore, you don't watch or listen carefully enough to notice that they are actually different. Mind readers jump to conclusions that are true for them, without checking whether they are true for the other person. Catastrophizing: You expect disaster. You notice or hear about a problem and start "what if's." What if that happens to me? What if tragedy strikes? There are no limits to a really fertile catastrophic imagination. An underlying catalyst for this style of thinking is that you do not trust in yourself and your capacity to adapt to change. Personalization: This is the tendency to relate everything around you to yourself. For example, thinking that everything people do or say is some kind of reaction to you. You also compare yourself to others, trying to determine who's smarter, better looking, etc. The underlying assumption is that your worth is in question. You are therefore continually forced to test your value as a person by measuring yourself against others. If you come out better, you get a moment's relief. If you come up short, you feel diminished. The basic thinking error is that you interpret each experience, each conversation, each look as a clue to your worth and value. Control Fallacies: There are two ways you can distort your sense of power and control. If you feel externally controlled, you see yourself as helpless, a victim of fate. The fallacy of internal control has you responsible for the pain and happiness of everyone around you. Feeling externally controlled keeps you stuck. You don't believe you can really affect the basic shape of your life, let alone make any difference in the world. The truth of the matter is that we are constantly making decisions, and that every decision affects our lives. On the other hand, the fallacy of internal control leaves you exhausted as you attempt to fill the needs of everyone around you, and feel responsible in doing so (and guilty when you cannot). Fallacy of Fairness: You feel resentful because you think you know what's fair, but other people won't agree with you. Fairness is so conveniently defined, so temptingly self-serving, that each person gets locked into his or her own point of view. It is tempting to make assumptions about how things would change if people were only fair or really valued you. But the other person hardly ever sees it that way, and you end up causing yourself a lot of pain and an ever-growing resentment. Blaming: You hold other people responsible for your pain, or take the other tack and blame yourself for every problem. Blaming often involves making someone else responsible for choices and decisions that are actually our own responsibility. In blame systems, you deny your right (and responsibility) to assert your needs, say no, or go elsewhere for what you want. Shoulds: You have a list of ironclad rules about how you and other people should act. People who break the rules anger you, and you feel guilty if you violate the rules. The rules are right and indisputable and, as a result, you are often in the position of judging and finding fault (in yourself and in others). Cue words indicating the presence of this distortion are should, ought, and must. Emotional Reasoning: You believe that what you feel must be true-automatically. If you feel stupid or boring, then you must be stupid and boring. If you feel guilty, then you must have done something wrong. The problem with emotional reasoning is that our emotions interact and correlate with our thinking process. Therefore, if you have distorted thoughts and beliefs, your emotions will reflect these distortions. Fallacy of Change: You expect that other people will change to suit you if you just pressure or cajole them enough. You need to change people because your hopes for happiness seem to depend entirely on them. The truth is the only person you can really control or have much hope of changing is yourself. The underlying assumption of this thinking style is that your happiness depends on the actions of others. Your happiness actually depends on the thousands of large and small choices you make in your life. Global Labeling: You generalize one or two qualities (in yourself or others) into a negative global judgment. Global labeling ignores all contrary evidence, creating a view of the world that can be stereotyped and one-dimensional. Labeling yourself can have a negative and insidious impact upon your self-esteem; while labeling others can lead to snap-judgments, relationship problems, and prejudice. Being Right: You feel continually on trial to prove that your opinions and actions are correct. Being wrong is unthinkable and you will go to any length to demonstrate your rightness. Having to be 'right' often makes you hard of hearing. You aren't interested in the possible veracity of a differing opinion, only in defending your own. Being right becomes more important than an honest and caring relationship. Heaven's Reward Fallacy: You expect all your sacrifice and self-denial to pay off, as if there were someone keeping score. You fell bitter when the reward doesn't come as expected. The problem is that while you are always doing the 'right thing,' if your heart really isn't in it, you are physically and emotionally depleting yourself.
*From Thoughts & Feelings by McKay, Davis, & Fanning. New Harbinger, 1981. These styles of thinking (or cognitive distortions) were gleaned from the work of several authors, including Albert Ellis, Aaron Beck, and David Burns, among others. |
The Baltimore Ravens are about two weeks from starting training camp, and they have no idea on how long running back Ray Rice will be unavailable to begin the season.
The NFL needs to make a decision soon because the league shouldn't punish the Ravens along with Rice, who is expected to receive a multi-game suspension for allegedly striking his fiancée unconscious in February. The Ravens' workload at running back will be based on the length of Rice's absence.
If Rice is going to miss a major chunk of the season, the Ravens would give Bernard Pierce, Justin Forsett and Lorenzo Taliaferro more snaps this summer, especially later in the preseason. If Rice is only going to be suspended for a couple of games, the Ravens' rotation at running back may not change significantly.
Why is the NFL taking so long to announce its decision? Rice's legal situation was wrapped up on May 20, when he was accepted into a pretrial intervention program to avoid trial on aggravated assault charges. That was 48 days ago.
Rice met with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell on June 16. That was three weeks ago.
While it's difficult to predict how Goodell will wield his discretionary power, a suspension of two to four games for Rice would follow the league's recent track record with first-time offenders. Let's not forget that Rice has a chance to reduce any suspension through appeal. So, it's unknown when the final resolution will come.
It's surprising that the NFL has prolonged this matter. Everyone involved -- the league, the Ravens and Rice himself -- should want to put this behind them as quickly as possible. |
Samsung is often at the fore when it comes to new advancements in television technology, but its latest set marks an odd change of pace for the firm.
The Serif TV was inspired by the typing font of the same name, with its edges taking on the shape of a capitalised letter I, as you can see in the image below.
Samsung
Designed by Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, the Serif has a thick chassis with jutting edges that make it look like something from the 1950s.
Despite its retro design, the set comes with modern technology on board, including WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity and smart features.
It will launch in three models, with a 40-inch UHD version spearheading the range, joined on the market by a 30-inch Full-HD edition and a 24-inch model.
"Serif TV's shapes and colors break away from the usual theme of masculine, cutting-edge technology and extra-large dimensions," said Samsung on its website.
The Serif TVs are launching in the UK, Sweden, Denmark and France on November 2, with prices running up to £1,199 for the flagship model. |
It’s hard to believe that just a year ago, there were no size options in the iPhone line. Small was best in the Apple world. In fact, Steve Jobs chose the original iPhone's design so it could easily be operated with one hand.
Apple, however, is making a habit of defying expectations, doing things Jobs said the company would never do. The introduction last year of an iPhone phablet, the iPhone 6 Plus, was, as I see it, the start of those expectation-defying impulses. And consumers embraced it.
A year later, the iPhone 6 Plus has proven its worth and popularity. Sure, Apple never tells us how many of each type of iPhone it sells, but the signs are all around us: There appear to be almost as many 5.5-inch iPhones in the wild as there are 4.7-inch models. What’s more, Apple has put the larger iPhone on the same upgrade path as the smaller model, which brings us to the iPhone 6S Plus, a thoroughly recognizable smartphone that is something of a performance beast. |
And after having said, “I don’t have anything to say about Cee Lo Green’s revision of ‘Imagine’ that my friend Rebecca didn’t already say,” I’m finding that I have something else to say.
This whole incident is a perfect example of what’s wrong with ecumenicalism.
This notion that “all religion’s true”? This notion that everyone finds their own path to God — even atheists, in our own way? This notion that people can hold religious beliefs that are not only different but totally contradictory — Jesus both is and is not the son of God, dead people both go to Heaven and are reincarnated, homosexuality is both loved and despised by God, there are many gods and there is only one God and God is a sort of three-for-one deal, Catholicism is the one true faith and Mormonism is the one true faith and Islam is the one true faith and no one faith is the one true faith — and that, somehow, all of these contradictory beliefs can be true?
It’s not just laughably absurd. It’s not just logically impossible. It shows a callous unconcern about whether the things you believe are true.
This attitude isn’t just something Cee Lo Green came up with on his own. It’s ridiculously prevalent among the ecumenical/ interfaith crowd. There’s a very common idea that all religions are true in some sense, and/ or that all believers are finding their own path to God in their own way.
Except that different religions aren’t just subtly different, or stylistically different, or different in trivial matters, or orthogonally different and concerning themselves with different arenas of existence. Their differences are, in many cases, central to the very foundation of the beliefs. Especially when you look at the number of religions that have, as a central defining tenet, the idea that their religion is the one true religion, and that believers in all other religions are damned to perdition. And when it comes to the ecumenical, “all religions are sort of true in their own way” sort of belief, these differences reveal a deep crack in the very foundation of the faith.
So when ecumenical believers blithely ignore or gloss over these differences, they’re basically saying that they don’t care very much whether the things they believe are true. They’re saying that sure, there are differences, but it’s divisive and unpleasant to look at those differences too closely — and let’s forget about trying to actually resolve them and figure out who’s wrong and who’s right, that’s a total clusterfuck. They’re saying that, when you put reality on one side of the scale, and put conflict avoidance on the other, conflict avoidance wins hands down. (And in my experience, when you press them on these questions, they tend to get either very vague or very defensive and pissy.)
Now, I genuinely do understand the desire to work for mutual understanding and respect of people who are different from you. And I think this ecumenicalism comes, in large part, from an admirable place: a revulsion at the horrors caused by religious wars and hatreds and bigotries, and a passionate desire to end them. I get that revulsion, and that desire. I even share it.
But there is a huge difference between saying “Everyone has a right to believe something different from what I do” — and saying “All beliefs are equally true.” There is a huge difference between saying, “People who believe different things from me can be good people” — and saying, “People who believe radically different things from me are right, and I’m somehow magically also right.” There is a huge difference between saying, “We should respect and embrace diversity of cultures and identities” — and saying, “We should ignore serious differences in truth claims about how the world really works.” There is a huge difference between saying, “Arguing about religion is divisive and unpleasant, so let’s temporarily set aside our differences so we can focus on our common ground” — or for that matter, saying, “Let’s discuss and debate our disagreements without being uncivil or ugly” — and saying, “Arguing about religion is divisive and unpleasant, so let’s never do it, and let’s convince ourselves that we’re all somehow magically right in our own way. And let’s not think too hard about whether that statement even makes a lick of sense.”
And while I think this desire to ignore religious differences comes partly from a desire to avoid religious wars and hatreds and bigotries, I also think it comes, at least sometimes, from an aversion to conflict that verges on the neurotic. And I definitely think it comes from an intense unwillingness to think very carefully about one’s own beliefs. Ecumenicalism is like a gentlemen’s agreement: you don’t ask hard questions about my religion, and I won’t ask hard questions about yours. You don’t point out contradictions or falsehoods or absurdities in my beliefs, or ask whether they have any good evidence to support them, and I’ll do the same for you. We’ll all hold hands and sing “Kumbaya,” and we’ll utter vague deepities about the beautiful mystery of it all… and we’ll stick our fingers in our ears and ignore the atheists outside the campfire circle, the ones who are yelling, “None of you has any good reason to think that any of this is true!”
Yeah. Good luck with that.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Religion relies on social consent to perpetuate itself. Ecumenical religion is a perfect example of that. And more and more atheists are denying that consent. Simply by coming out as atheist, simply by saying “No, we don’t believe in God or the supernatural,” we are denying that consent. And we’re going to make it harder and harder to ignore those hard questions. If you have any good answers to those questions, we’re more than happy to hear them. But if we ask the question, “How do you reconcile the differences between your religion and other religions, and how do you decide which belief is true?” — and the only answer you have is “Kumbaya” — we’re not going to take you very seriously.
Related post:
Against Ecumenicalism: Why Atheists Don’t Have to Show “Respect” for Religion |
Brutus, the shop dog at Engage Armaments poses with the Armatix iP1, a .22 caliber smart gun that has a safety interlock along with Andy Raymond (Photo by Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
After word spread that his Rockville store would sell the nation’s first smart gun — infuriating gun rights activists who fear more regulation — Andy Raymond’s phone and e-mail inbox went absolutely berserk.
“The phone was ringing off the hook,” he said Friday morning in an interview.
That’s because gun rights advocates think the guns will be mandated. Electronic chips in the Armatix iP1 can communicate with a watch that can be bought separately. Then the gun cannot be fired without the watch.
Somebody told one of Raymond’s workers that the store, Engage Armament, wouldn’t be selling the gun because there wouldn’t be a store — it will burn down. At another point, Raymond picked up the phone and said, “Hi, this is Andy. How can I help you?”
The caller said, “You’re the guys selling the smart gun?” Raymond tried to reason with him. But the caller said, “You’re gonna get what’s coming to you (expletive).”
Raymond took that as a death threat.
Even the store’s dog Brutus did not escape the vitriol.
Raymond was clearly shaken, and late Thursday night, he released a video saying he wouldn’t sell the gun and apologized for messing up. He also wrote a message on his Facebook page: “You call me and email me and threaten my life? You come at me, my girlfriend, or my god damned DOG I will put one in your dome. I promise you.”
And then he decided to sleep at the store. He stayed til 3 a.m., then went home, and then came back at 6 a.m. to stand guard.
“I thought what I was doing right,” he said. “I didn’t want my shop burned down. I didn’t think people would do that.”
He continued: “I can’t have my shop burned down. I don’t think somebody is gonna come shoot me, but somebody could burn down my shop while I’m not here.”
Raymond can’t believe the night he endured.
“I’m really sorry I got involved in all of this,” he said. |
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO The portable flow meter can give experts valuable information about the way dolphins and Beluga whales breathe, which researchers say could one day help humans.
SHARE CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Andreas Fahlman, an assistant professor of biology at Texas A & M University-Corpus Christi, (right) places a portable flow meter over a dolphin’s blowhole. As the dolphin breathes through the flow meter, scientists can measure information to let them help dolphins and beluga whales in the wild. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Andreas Fahlman, an assistant professor of biology at Texas A & M University-Corpus Christi, checks information about the breathing of a Beluga whale on his computer.
By Dayna Worchel of the Caller-Times
The way in which a dolphin or a whale breathes while swimming in the ocean might one day help a premature baby become more healthy.
It may also help scientists determine why large numbers of these animals beach themselves, even when they are healthy.
"Dolphins are like the canary in the coal mine. They are the most affected by toxins and they don't have as much resistance to airborne particulates as humans," said Andreas Fahlman, assistant professor of marine biology at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.
Fahlman recently traveled to Hawaii along with Micah Brodsky, a consultant and wildlife veterinarian, to study the way dolphins breathe with a team of collaborators at Dolphin Quest Oahu. He learned that bottlenose dolphins have compressible lungs, which collapse to protect them while they dive.
To do the research, his team placed a special, portable flow meter, designed by Brodsky, over a dolphin's blow hole and measured the airway pressures and airflows as the animals breathed normally for a short time. Cooperation was voluntary by the dolphins. The trainers at Dolphin Quest were able to help Fahlman and his team place the flow meters on the animals' heads because of the level of trust between the trainers and the dolphins, Fahlman said.
The implications of the study are useful in determining the physical health of the dolphins and for the health of ecosystems, he said. Information learned can also be used to determine the reason why dolphins and whales beach themselves.
"That's the million dollar question," Fahlman said.
Often, a diseased dolphin or whale will go to a beach and other animals in the pod will follow along and do the same, even if they are not sick. But if the diseased animal is removed, the pod will continue to swim normally, Fahlman said. A full article was published on Fahlman's discovery in the July 8 edition of "The Journal of Experimental Biology."
There's also possible applications for humans such as reducing trauma in the emergency room and helping people to keep their lungs open when they come in with breathing problems. Because dolphins have a specialized type of surfactant, a liquid which helps the lungs expand, information gathered from studying the animals could help premature babies breathe easier, Fahlman said.
The published study established that the methods used to gain the breathing knowledge are valid, he said. Fahlman was scheduled to leave for the Dolphin Quest location in Bermuda this month to continue the dolphin breathing studies. That knowledge will build on what they learned in Hawaii, he said.
"We are taking information from animals under human care and seeing how we can help dolphins in the wild," he said.
Christian Dietert, an intern at Dolphin Quest in Bermuda, will be helping Fahlman this year as they gather more research on dolphin breathing. Dietert, who graduated from the university last year, is enthusiastic about the work he will do, assisting in gathering information from wild dolphins off the coast of Bermuda to compare it with dolphins under human care at Dolphin Quest.
"The more we know about these amazing animals and how they interact with their environment, as well as the challenges they face, the better we can protect them in the wild," Dietert said. |
The human fingerprint in global warming
Posted on 29 March 2010 by John Cook
In science, there's only one thing better than empirical measurements made in the real world - and that is multiple independent measurements all pointing to the same result. There are many lines of empirical evidence that all detect the human fingerprint in global warming:
The human fingerprint in atmospheric carbon dioxide
That rising carbon dioxide is caused by human CO2 emissions should be obvious when comparing CO2 levels to CO2 emissions:
Figure 1: CO2 levels (Green Line - Law Dome, East Antarctica and Blue line - Mauna Loa, Hawaii ) and Cumulative CO2 emissions in gigatonnes of CO2 (Red Line - CDIAC ).
Confirmation that rising carbon dioxide levels are due to human activity comes from analysing the types of carbon found in the air. The carbon atom has several different isotopes (eg - different number of neutrons). Carbon 12 has 6 neutrons, carbon 13 has 7 neutrons. Plants have a lower C13/C12 ratio than in the atmosphere. If rising atmospheric CO2 comes fossil fuels, the C13/C12 should be falling. Indeed this is what is occuring ( Ghosh 2003 ) and the trend correlates with the trend in global emissions.
Figure 2: Annual global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning and cement manufacture in GtC yr?1 (black), annual averages of the 13C/12C ratio measured in atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa from 1981 to 2002 (red). ). The isotope data are expressed as d13C(CO2) ‰ (per mil) deviation from a calibration standard. Note that this scale is inverted to improve clarity. (IPCC AR4).
Further confirmation comes by measuring oxygen levels in the atmosphere. When fossil fuels are burned, the carbon in the fossil fuels are joined to oxygen, creating carbon dioxide. As CO 2 increases in the atmosphere, oxygen decreases. Observations show oxygen levels are falling at a rate consistent with the burning of fossil fuels.
Figure 3: CO2 concentrations from Mauna Loa, Hawaii (black) and and Baring Head, New Zealand (blue). In bottom right corner is atmospheric oxygen (O2) measurements from Alert, Canada (pink) and Cape Grim, Australia (cyan) (IPCC AR4 2.3.1 adapted from Manning 2006).
The human fingerprint in the increased greenhouse effect
Satellites measure infrared radiation as it escapes out to space. A comparison between satellite data from 1970 to 1996 found that less energy is escaping to space at the wavelengths that greenhouse gases absorb energy ( Harries 2001 ). Thus the paper found "direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth's greenhouse effect". This result has been confirmed by more recent data from several different satellites ( Griggs 2004 , Chen 2007 ).
Figure 4: Change in spectrum from 1970 to 1996 due to trace gases. 'Brightness temperature' indicates the equivalent blackbody temperature ( Harries 2001 ).
That less heat is escaping out to space is confirmed by surface measurements that find more infrared radiation returning to earth. Several studies have found this is due to an increased greenhouse effect ( Philipona 2004 , Wang 2009 ). An analysis of high resolution spectral data allows scientists to quantitatively attribute the increase in downward radiation to each of several greenhouse gases ( Evans 2006 ). The results lead the authors to conclude that "this experimental data should effectively end the argument by skeptics that no experimental evidence exists for the connection between greenhouse gas increases in the atmosphere and global warming."
Figure 5: Spectrum of the greenhouse radiation measured at the surface. Greenhouse effect from water vapor is filtered out, showing the contributions of other greenhouse gases ( Evans 2006 ).
The human fingerprint in temperature trends
Another human fingerprint can be found by looking at temperature trends in the different layers of the atmosphere. Climate models predict that more carbon dioxide should cause warming in the troposphere but cooling in the stratosphere. This is because the increased "blanketing" effect in the troposphere holds in more heat, allowing less to reach the stratosphere. This is in contrast to the expected effect if global warming was caused by the sun which would cause warming both in the troposphere and stratosphere. What we observe from both satellites and weather balloons is a cooling stratosphere and warming troposphere, consistent with carbon dioxide warming:
Figure 6: (A) Change in lower stratospheric temperature, observed by satellites (UAH, RSS) and weather balloons (HadAT2 and RATPAC), relative to period 1979 to 1997, smoothed with seven month running mean. Major volcanic eruptions indicated by dashed blue lines (Karl 2006).
If an increased greenhouse effect was causing warming, we would expect nights to warm faster than days. This is because the greenhouse effect operates day and night. Conversely, if global warming was caused by the sun, we would expect the warming trend to be greatest in daytime temperatures. What we observe is a decrease in cold nights greater than the decrease in cold days, and an increase in warm nights greater than the increase in warm days (Alexander 2006). This is consistent with greenhouse warming.
Figure 7: Observed trends (days per decade) for 1951 to 2003 in the number of extreme cold and warm days and nights per year. Cold is defined as the bottom 10%. Warm is defined as the top 10%. Orange lines show decadal trend (IPCC AR4 FAQ 3.3 adapted from Alexander 2006). |
Valve released new footage from Portal 2 yesterday.
The clip (embedded below) features the debut of actor Stephen Merchant as Wheatley — a quirky A.I. that aids the player in their return to the Aperture Science complex. Wheatley was unveiled at E3 this June and was temporarily voiced by Valve animator Richard Lord.
If the video is any indication Portal 2 appears to stray much further from the Aperture Science test labs than the original game. Much of the video above takes place in Aperture Science’s automated weapons factory, where we see death-dealing bots like the familiar Aperture Science Sentry Gun.
A good part of the factory footage involves construction of a deadly new Boxed Turret (imagine the Companion Cube packing heat).
Portal 2 comes out February 9, 2011 for the Playstation 3, Xbox 360, PC and Mac. The follow up to the 2007 original, in addition to continuing the story of GLaDOS, will also come with a suite of co-op levels.
Image courtesy Valve
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What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?
If you’ve spent any time living in Western civilization — or if you’ve watched The Dark Knight — you’ve probably come across some version of that question. For some reason, the intelligentsia has latched onto this query as a kind of parlor game, a way to prove one’s bona fides as a Deep Thinker. (Guys, you’ll never believe this, but Neil deGrasse Tyson has some thoughts on the subject. Here’s an entertaining solution to the problem.)
Never mind that it is, to be frank, a bullshit question. As Isaac Asimov wrote a generation ago:
For those who remain convinced that this paradox has a solution, however, there’s finally good news: The question will be resolved this year. The answer lies in the fate of the 2016 Chicago Cubs.
The immovable object here is the year 1908, when Teddy Roosevelt was president, the Model T first rolled off the assembly line, and the Cubs last won a world championship. The last Cubs title predates modern skyscrapers, toasters, home air conditioning, sliced bread, and Arizona. The weight of 1908 has proved not only immovable, but unapproachable since 1945, the last time the Cubs even played in the World Series. The last Cubs pennant predates the United Nations, Israel, India, and integration. Decades of Cubs fans have been born, lived full lifespans, and died without ever witnessing their team win a championship.
A Cubs world championship would not be the most unlikely outcome in sports — thanks to Leicester City, it would not even mark the conclusion of the longest championship drought this year — but it’s not an exaggeration to say that it would be the most anticipated championship in sports history. Nothing can come close. The Cubs’ streak is now 22 years — nearly an entire generation — longer than the Red Sox’s 86-year drought.
The Cubs have been unlucky — they were famously five outs away from the World Series in 2003, and were up two games to none in a best-of-five NLCS in 1984 — but mostly they just haven’t been very good. The last time they had the best record in the major leagues was 1945, so even if baseball played by EPL rules and awarded the crown to the team with the best regular-season record, the Cubs’ title-less streak would be at 71 years and counting.
For any team to go a century without a title is improbable. For that team to be the marquee baseball franchise in what was the second-largest city in America until the 1980s (when Los Angeles passed Chicago in population), with all the revenue advantages that accompany its geography in a sport with no salary cap, is almost unfathomable.
Unfathomable though it may be, it is also undeniable: The Cubs have pissed away a sizable competitive advantage for 108 years, which is why their pursuit of a championship is the greatest ongoing adventure in American sports.
It wasn’t always this way. The Cubs were, in fact, one of the game’s premier franchises during the game’s first 40 years as a professional sport. The Chicago White Stockings, as they were then known, were champions of the National League in its inaugural year of 1876, the first of their six NL titles in the league’s first 11 seasons. After a 19-year stretch of fielding competitive teams without a first-place finish from 1887 to 1905, the Cubs (who adopted their current name in 1903) broke through in 1906 with the greatest regular-season record of all time. Featuring a 6–4–3 trio immortalized in poetry and remembered today as Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance, the Cubs went 116–36. They lost to the White Sox in the World Series in six games, in one of the greatest upsets in World Series history, but rebounded to win back-to-back titles in 1907 and 1908.
From 1906 to 1910, the Cubs won four NL pennants, two World Series, and averaged a record of 106–47. Their .693 winning percentage over a five-year span looks like a misprint; in the last 60 years, just three teams have posted a winning percentage that high over a single season: the 2001 Mariners (.716), the 1998 Yankees (.704), and the 1995 Indians (.694), who played only 144 games following the 1994 strike.
Make that four teams, because at least for the moment, the 2016 Chicago Cubs are on the list.
If Theo Epstein were a man of Westeros, he’d be known as "Cursebreaker" by now. Promoted to Red Sox GM after the 2002 season, he guided Boston to its first world championship in 86 years just two seasons later — when Epstein was only 30 years old. To prove it wasn’t a fluke, the Sox won another title three years later. He and the Red Sox parted ways after the 2011 season, and he quickly seized upon the opportunity to take on the only challenge in sports greater than bringing a title to Fenway Park — bringing one to Wrigley Field.
Epstein (as team president) and his longtime Boston consigliere Jed Hoyer (whom he hired as Chicago’s GM) inherited a vastly greater challenge in Chicago than they had in Boston. The Red Sox were coming off a 93–69 season when Epstein took over, their third 90-win season in five years. The Cubs, by contrast, had gone 71–91 in 2011, with an old roster and a mediocre farm system. They would not turn into a winner overnight.
So Epstein and Hoyer didn’t try to make them one. They sensibly decided the team had to get worse before it got better, and in 2012 the Cubs lost 101 games, their worst season since 1966, which, given the Cubs’ reputation as lovable losers, was saying something. In 2013 they improved all the way to 66–96; their 197 losses over the two-year span were the most in the franchise’s 140-year history.
But unlike so many bad Cubs teams of generations past, this time their losing was done with a purpose. This time the future really did look brighter, and not just in retrospect. Taking their lumps for two years gave the Cubs top draft picks, which they used to select Kris Bryant (no. 2 overall in 2013) and Kyle Schwarber (no. 4 overall in 2014). It gave them the no. 2 pick in the 2012 Rule 5 Draft, which they used to select Hector Rondon. And it gave them the wherewithal to trade veterans for young players, like Sean Marshall for Travis Wood, and Ryan Dempster for Kyle Hendricks, and (of course) Scott Feldman for Jake Arrieta. They picked up Luis Valbuena (whom they traded three years later for Dexter Fowler) and Trevor Cahill on waivers.
The Cubs’ hitter-centric approach to building a roster led to shrewd deals like trading Andrew Cashner for Anthony Rizzo, and perpetually injured reliever Arodys Vizcaíno for Tommy La Stella, while spending millions of dollars on Jorge Soler as a near-major-league-ready Cuban defector. And when the front office felt the team was close enough to contention to open the vault, it signed Jon Lester (and Joe Maddon!) as free agents and took on Miguel Montero’s contract after the 2014 season, and then wrote more big checks to Jason Heyward, Ben Zobrist, and John Lackey this past winter.
And, of course, they took advantage of a spectacular bit of desperation on the part of Billy Beane by making one of the defining moves of their administration, trading 1.5 seasons of Jeff Samardzija for an über-prospect by the name of Addison Russell. (In an entertaining bit of chutzpah, the Cubs included Jason Hammel in the trade — and then re-signed Hammel as a free agent five months later.)
The Cubs’ transaction list under Epstein and Hoyer reads like a work of fiction, a wish-fulfillment list composed in hindsight. The worst mistakes they’ve made in four years are not protecting Justin Bour in the Rule 5 Draft after the 2013 season, trading Welington Castillo last summer for a minimal return (though Castillo would be traded again weeks later before emerging with the Diamondbacks), and throwing a ton of money at Edwin Jackson in free agency, a mistake they wrote off last summer when they released him.
But those are the worst mistakes, and if Epstein and Hoyer could undo all of them, all they’d have is a first baseman with nowhere to play, a catcher with a little more thump, and some cash. Meanwhile, their successes have built a juggernaut basically from scratch: Not one player on the 2016 Cubs was on the major league roster when Epstein and Hoyer were hired.
But even to those who believed in the Cubs’ plan, the pace of their improvement has been breathtaking. In 2014 the Cubs went 73–89. Their farm system was the toast of baseball, and they started bringing their hefty financial resources to bear that offseason, but even heading into 2015, most (but not all) pundits figured it was premature to expect the Cubs to contend.
Instead, the Cubs delivered one of their best regular seasons in more than a century, recovering from a 52–47 start to earn a wild-card berth. Though they’d finished third in the NL Central, they vanquished their divisional rivals in Pittsburgh and St. Louis before getting swept by the Mets in the NLCS.
A season before the Cubs were supposed to be ready for prime time, they went 97–65. The last time they won more than 97 games in a season was … 1945. The rebuilding process had yielded fruit a year early, and its harvest was the most bountiful Wrigleyville had seen in generations.
And it was only the beginning. Two months into the season, this year’s Cubs are the most irresistible force that baseball has seen in recent — and maybe not-so-recent — history.
It’s hard to talk about the 2016 Cubs without descending into what can only be called baseball stat porn. The numbers that surround this team range from the astonishing to the unbelievable. Here is the simplest way to sum up how good this team is with facts that should be mutually exclusive:
1. The 2016 Chicago Cubs are on pace to challenge the all-time record for victories in a season.
2. They are underachieving.
At 39–16, the Cubs are on pace to win 115 games. The major league record of 116 wins, set by the 1906 Cubs, was approached by the 1998 Yankees (114) and then tied by the 2001 Mariners, but has never been exceeded.
The key words there, of course, are "on pace." It’s much easier to win 71 percent of your games over a third of a season than over a full one. In modern baseball history (i.e., since 1901), 16 teams have started a season 41–14 or better. The Cubs’ record at this point in the season is rare — just five teams in the divisional era have had a better start through 55 games — but not unprecedented.
What is unprecedented is just how they’re managing it. The Cubs aren’t winning five out of every seven games by claiming all the close ones. They are, in fact, quite pedestrian in those affairs: After Sunday’s 3–2 loss to the Diamondbacks, they are just 7–7 in one-run games.
Rather, the Cubs are winning by utterly obliterating their opponents. Consider this: The Cubs have lost four games all season by three runs or more. On April 15 they lost to the Rockies 6–1; on April 23 they lost to Cincinnati 13–5 (their only loss all season by more than five runs!); on May 11 they lost the first game of a doubleheader to the Padres 7–4; and last Tuesday they lost to the Dodgers 5–0. That’s the entire list.
By comparison, they’ve won 27 games by three runs or more. That 27–4 mark in such contests is staggering and would easily eclipse the modern major league record if it held:
That list is basically a who’s who of the greatest teams before integration. The 1902 Pirates famously went the entire season without losing three games in a row. We’ve already discussed the 1906 Cubs. The 1927 Yankees are a cliché for total domination whose usage transcends sports. And the 1939 Yankees are a popular pick among the cognoscenti as the greatest team of all time.
Lucky teams can win the close games — the 2003 Detroit Tigers, who set the AL record with 119 losses, went 19–18 in one-run games — but as that list shows, the hallmark of great teams is beating others to a pulp.
And a third of the way through the season, the Cubs are lapping the field in that metric, beating their opponents with such abandon that they’ve basically turned their closer’s job into the baseball equivalent of the Maytag repairman. Despite leading the known universe in wins, Chicago ranks 26th in the major leagues in saves, with 11. It’s hard to earn a save when a team is always leading by five runs in the ninth.
A more holistic method for measuring a team’s dominance is to look at its ratio of runs scored to runs allowed. (Run differential — runs scored minus runs allowed — is a simpler method, but doesn’t account for the difference between high-scoring and low-scoring eras.)
And by that measurement, the Cubs are again off the charts. They’ve scored 297 runs and allowed 156, giving them a ratio that would be the best in modern major league history:
Using baseball’s Pythagorean theorem, which estimates what a team’s win-loss record should be based on its runs scored and allowed, the Cubs should be 42–13. They’re on pace to win 115 games — and they’ve been a little bit unlucky.
Even more impressive is that the Cubs are doing this in the modern era. No other team on the above lists played after World War II, and for good reason: The game had considerably less parity before things like integration, the draft, and revenue-sharing made it a little harder for the best teams to dominate the worst. The Cubs are the only post–World War II team in the top 15 in terms of run ratio. Here’s the same list since 1946:
That’s not a gap; that’s a Secretariat-with-a-jetpack-size chasm. Yes, we’re only a third of the way through the season, but even if we compare the 2016 Cubs to other squads at the 55-game mark, they’re still ahead of every team in more than a century:
What the Cubs have done in the last two months is without precedent in the memory of anyone alive today.
While it would be logical to assume the Cubs won’t continue to play this well all year, there are no red flags screaming "regression!" in their lineup. Fowler (.303/.421/.515) and Zobrist (.326/.438/.500) are unlikely to maintain their batting lines, but Heyward probably won’t slug .299 all season, either. Rizzo is hitting exactly as well as he did in 2014–15, and Bryant (who has cut his strikeout rate by a third from his rookie season) and Russell are good bets to continue the steady improvement they’ve shown as sophomores.
In part because of the season-ending injury to left fielder Schwarber — one of the three best hitters on the team as a rookie in 2015 — the Cubs’ lineup isn’t, at least on the surface, all that impressive. It’s middle-of-the-pack in terms of power (sixth in the NL in homers), speed (eighth in steals), and batting average (seventh). But it leads the NL in runs per game because it’s the epitome of what Epstein and Hoyer want their offense to be: The Cubs grind out at-bats and make pitchers throw strikes. In this regard, they are not just the best in the NL and better than the 2000s Red Sox teams that Epstein and Hoyer built: They might be the best team of all time.
The Cubs have drawn 250 walks in 55 games, an average of 4.55 walks per game. The average NL team has drawn just 3.23 walks per game, meaning the Cubs are on pace to draw 213 more walks than a league-average team. That would be, easily, a National League record:
The Cubs preach plate discipline, and they preach it, and they preach it some more. They target it in the free agents they sign (Zobrist is like the Pied Piper of plate discipline, and Fowler and Heyward have always had that club in their bag), and they encourage it in their young players (Russell and Soler have both taken a step forward in their walk rate this year). The Cubs take their walks so they can get on base (they’re second in the NL in OBP) so they can score runs.
But the pitching staff is the linchpin to their greatness. The Cubs have used only five starting pitchers all season, and all five starters have an ERA under 3. In fact, of the 11 pitchers who have thrown at least 10 innings for Chicago this year, Justin Grimm (3.48) is the only one with an ERA over 3. The team ERA as a whole is 2.57, which is, well, nuts. The Cubs are on pace to allow 459 runs; the only team of the live-ball era to allow fewer runs per game is the 1972 Orioles.
Strangely, the Cubs are on a historic run-prevention pace even though their pitchers aren’t particularly distinguished in the three outcomes over which they have the most control. The Cubs have allowed the second-fewest home runs in the NL, but they are just fourth in the NL in strikeouts and sixth in walks allowed. But their ERA is half a run better than every other team in baseball because of their .248 batting average on balls in play, another one of those stats that looks like a misprint. League average in this regard is usually a tick under .300; anything under .270 requires a great defense, tremendous luck, or both.
The Cubs don’t have a reputation as a great defensive team, but this is one area where their bleeding-edge analytics may give them a hidden edge. With teams using defensive shifts 10 times more often than they did just five years ago, we know now that properly positioning defenders can make a bad defense look good and a good defense look great. Fowler’s defensive metrics in center field, for instance, have improved significantly this year largely because he is playing deeper.
This seems to be the fulcrum on which the Cubs’ ability to keep winning at a historic pace rests. If their team BABIP has been the beneficiary of good luck and starts to regress to the mean, they may cool off to the point of finishing the season as just an ordinary great team (by which we mean they’ll still probably win more than 100 games, the first Cubs team to do that since 1910). But if they can continue to turn balls in play into outs three-quarters of the time, then their run prevention may not be a fluke, and they may in fact make a serious challenge for 116 wins.
Also working in the Cubs’ favor is that the National League has as little parity as any league has had in at least a decade. Six NL teams entered the season neither expecting nor trying to win in 2016. While the Phillies rode a hot stretch in one-run games to a 24–17 start, they’re under .500 now, as are the similarly frisky-but-not-really-trying Brewers. The Braves are 16–40. The Padres are 23–35 and have already sold off James Shields. The Reds are 21–36 and have one of the worst bullpens ever assembled. The Cubs don’t really need the help: They have a 17–6 record against teams above .500, which would, yes, be a modern major league record. Still, the opportunity to beat up on the bottom-feeders of the league bodes well for their chances to make statistical history all season long.
So the good news for Cubs fans is that their team is probably going to wind up as one of the best regular-season teams ever. The bad news is that none of that really matters once the postseason starts.
Historically, there has been a correlation between starting the season this well and finishing the season with a ring; of the 16 teams that have started 41–14 or better, 15 at least won the pennant. The problem is that almost all of those teams played before the divisional era, in which finishing the regular season with the best record in the league meant a spot in the World Series. Only three of those teams had to play an additional round of playoffs, and one of them — the 2001 Seattle Mariners — lost in the ALCS. The Mariners have still never appeared in a World Series, but at least they trace their history back to just 1977. If the Cubs win 117 games but fail to reach the World Series, let alone win it, their regular-season record will be of little solace.
We can do a little back-of-the-envelope math to determine the probability that the Cubs will win their best-of-five NLDS and best-of-seven NLCS to advance to the World Series. If we assume the Cubs’ true talent level is that of a 110-win team, that the wild-card team they’ll face in the first round is a 92-win team, and that the division winner they’d face in the second round is a 97-win team, then using what Bill James called the Log5 method along with simple binomial theory, we can calculate their odds of winning each series as follows:
Odds of winning the NLDS: 71.1 percent
Odds of winning the NLCS: 68.3 percent
Odds of winning both rounds: 48.6 percent
Factor in home-field advantage and the Cubs basically have a 50–50 shot of reaching the World Series for the first time in 71 years. (Their odds of winning the World Series cannot be calculated without knowing whether the asteroid smashing into the earth will collide before or after Chicago wins the title.)
A coin flip may not sound like a resounding endorsement to fans giddy with excitement over the greatest Cubs team of their lifetimes, but in the 10-playoff-team era, it’s remarkable for any club to have a 50–50 shot at the pennant on June 7.
But the best news of all for Cubs fans is that there’s no reason why Chicago won’t continue to dominate in years to come. This is a team built for the long haul. Five members of the starting lineup are 26 or younger, and the average age of the offense is 27.9; of the 12 teams since World War II that won at least two-thirds of their games, none had an offense this young.
For all the premature talk about whether Arrieta will leave the team as a free agent after next season, he’s the only key member of the roster who is eligible for free agency before the end of 2018. The Cubs still have room to grow their payroll, and they still have talent left in the farm system, including 19-year-old shortstop Gleyber Torres and 24-year-old catcher Willson Contreras, who’s hitting .335/.428/.585 in Triple-A and could be the starter next season.
Oh, and if the chatter about MLB shrinking the strike zone (by raising the bottom of the zone from the hollow beneath the kneecap to the top of the knees) is true, that figures to benefit the teams that use the strike zone as a weapon — and none do so more effectively than the Cubs.
Anything could happen when the irresistible force meets the immovable object this October — cats and dogs living together, the sun going supernova, a Donald Trump presidency — but Cubs fans should take solace knowing this isn’t the last crack they’ll get at the ultimate prize. Maybe the better question to ask is this: What happens when one irresistible force after another meets an immovable object? Eventually that object has to yield, doesn’t it? Eventually the Cubs have to claim a title?
Or maybe it’ll cause hell to freeze over — which, as every Cubs fan knows, is the same thing.
All statistics are current through Sunday’s games. These figures, and possibly the meaning of life, are courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com. |
A developer wants to put up a 55-unit apartment building on Phinney Ridge that comes with zero on-site parking, but now the project is on hold over transit concerns. (Photo: KOMO News)
SEATTLE - A developer wants to put up a 55-unit apartment building on Phinney Ridge that comes with zero on-site parking, but now the project is on hold over transit concerns.
City planners had approved the project under the "urban village" criteria, which requires a bus to go by every 15 minutes. That's when neighbors fought back by showing how the bus schedule doesn't match actual service.
Developers often rely on frequent bus service to save them from having to build parking lots with their housing projects.
Irene Wall and her fellow neighbors with the group Livable Phinney argued that the No. 5 bus doesn’t run frequently enough. Now it’s possible that her battle with the builder could reshape Seattle’s long-term growth plans.
“What we've discovered is the city can make mistakes and they do need to be challenged sometimes,” Wall said.
The mistake, Wall said, is how often buses drive by. The developer used bus schedules to say transit was frequent enough that no on-site parking was needed. Members of Livable Phinney checked that against Metro's actual performance data. They found that bus service failed to meet that every 15 minutes rule nearly 40 percent of the time.
Under an appeal, a hearing examiner halted the project in its tracks.
“What we really want is for this case to establish a precedent for determining how much additional parking is needed," Wall said.
Seattle is granting these parking exemptions for projects along transit lines. This ruling could now be a game changer for neighbors living in areas designated as urban villages.
“This is for everybody's benefit to get this right," Wall said.
Calls and emails to the developer and the company’s attorneys have yet to be returned.
More detailed information on the fight against the project at 6726 Greenwood Ave. N can be found at livablephinney.org. |
Step inside Bjork’s brain. The real and the surreal slide in and out of each other, nature commingling with imagination, black volcanic rock and raving neon jellyfish, as the avant-techno savant’s music and video works surround you. "Bjork Digital," the exhibition of her virtual-reality creations that opens May 19 as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Reykjavic Festival, immerses the visitor in 360 degrees of Bjorkian sights and sounds. In the video for the song “Stonemilker,” from her 2015 album Vulnicura, VR thrusts you onto the Icelandic beach where the country’s prodigal daughter wrote the song.
Step inside Bjork’s mouth. A tunnel of crimson and fuchsia lit by white flashes of teeth glistens, at once enveloping and intimate, as machines click and whistle and that inimitable accent — Rs rolling like rocks, vowels long and open — attempts to articulate its “Mouth Mantra.”
Step inside Bjork’s heart. In the “Black Lake” room, walk onto the precipice of despair and feel Bjork’s fists as they pound against her chest, the pain of heartbreak made thunderous by the sphere of speakers.
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Related Stories This Eight-Minute VR Journey Through Evolution on Earth Is Something Totally New
From her days as a child pop prodigy, to her years fronting the Sugarcubes, to her decades as a solo artist collaborating with a who’s who of musical, film, art and fashion pioneers — including Michel Gondry, Tricky, Spike Jonze, Thom Yorke, Zeena Parkins and Alexander McQueen — Bjork has been one of our most forward-thinking pop artists. In 2011, she created apps for her science homage Biophilia. For Vulnicura, an album that plunges deep into the heart of darkness in its exposition of her breakup with the visual and performance artist Matthew Barney, Bjork became one of the very first musicians to experiment with virtual reality.
At "Digital," you can experience on high-quality VR equipment the videos she created with Andrew Thomas Huang and other directors. There is also the “Black Lake” installation made for a retrospective of her work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, along with her two-dimensional music videos. Bjork’s debuting old-school musical technology as well. The book 34 Scores features musical fonts created by pianist and collaborator Jónas Sen, design house M/M (Paris) and the engraving company Notengrafik Berlin.
The big event is May 30, when Bjork makes her debut at the Walt Disney Hall with 32 string players conducted by Bjarni Frímann Bjarnason; the show sold out in minutes. You can also catch her in July at the FYF Festival. Bjork with the Phil or Bjork with Missy Elliott: that’s the expansive range of Ms. Gudmundsdottir.
In a phone interview, Bjork praised the emotive and metaphysical capacities of VR, Icelandic choirs and the ties that bind her and Beyonce.
EXPAND A still from "Bjork Digital" Andrew Thomas Huang
LA Weekly: How did it come about that there is a traveling exhibition of your videos?
Bjork: It was something that grew gradually. When we did the first video, me and Andy Huang were experimenting with a camera. We were commissioned by MOMA to do a video to a song called “Black Lake.” We were going to do a dome. That developed into two big screens and the speakers were in a circle. We were having this conversation about circular, surround things; we both find it really exciting when new technology comes along, and the rule book hasn’t been written and you can make it up as it goes. The whole “Black Lake” thing took up two years, we did so many scripts, there were so many board meetings. Emotionally that song is so difficult, it’s the toughest song I’ve ever written, so filming it went hand in hand. I was barefoot in lava, it was a cold day — it was really hilarious.
We literally finished that and he was in Iceland and he said, "By the way, I borrowed this [360-degree] camera someone just made. Shall we try it?" The next day we went to the beach where the song was written and filmed it in one take, that was “Stonemilker.” Emotionally that was the opposite to “Black Lake,” it was very happy and free. It was like this effortless spontaneous sibling.
So we got an offer, from Australia, to have a room with 40 VRs, a warehouse — nothing on the walls, just VRs — and people come watch our VR videos. So we made a couple more with different people, and we just decided to try this and experiment, and people loved it; it was a huge hit. We didn’t know if it was going to allow people to be emotional, but we were watching people holding hands, and crying.
The last video we did, called “Family,” that’s one of the ones I’m proudest of. You could really act on what affected the viewers the most. I think it’s quite metaphysical in a way. “Family” is about showing a wound in your chest and then you heal and do these somersaults and you walk away. That’s one of the strengths of VR; it has that power where a 2D video on MTV didn’t have. It seems like it’s you. It feels like it’s your body and it’s inside you.
I know you’re releasing the score book in L.A.; will there be anything else new in "Digital"?
There’s not going to be a new addition in L.A. because I’m working on a new album, and I feel the Vulnicura cycle is complete now. We’re going to have the best VR headsets and sounds possible. Plus, it’s probably going to be one of the last times we exhibit the “Black Lake” room. We have a room with all my videos, the old ones, but the quality has been put in the best position. I feel in a way, after working with so many directors, like I’m their little curator babysitter. A lot of people are watching it on YouTube, where the quality is terrible and the sound is terrible. Partly in defense of all these directors, you can watch this with the best sound possible.
So, you’re working with the newest of technologies with VR and the oldest of technologies with written musical scores.
In the beginning of Biophilia, I thought, so how do I feel about musicology? Let me map it out and make a music score how I would have liked to be taught when I was a kid. How do we notate these things? With Biophilia and Vulnicura we had these animated scores with Stephen Malinowski, which are scores for people who are trying to learn notation, to try to dissolve this gap between people who are educated in music and those who are not. You have digital notation, which is basically MIDI, and you have classical notation, and you have CDs and you have MP3 files and you have streaming. I want to put everything on the table and then go, OK, let’s not moan that the music industry is going to hell and we’re all going to die. Let’s see what we’ve got on the table. This scorebook is part of that. Then I would like to sell online the MIDI files of the scores from these songs so people could plug it into the synthesizers at home and do karaoke and jump up and down. I would like people to take their harp to the bonfire and play the scores and sing along. In a way it’s me trying to figure out all the different ways and combinations of sharing music today.
It was really fun, when we were making Biophilia, we were at this house on the beach, and we bought this really cheap pipe organ with no keyboards but that you could run MIDI through. We were hacking online and getting MIDI scores of songs, everything from Destiny’s Child to Led Zeppelin to Snoop Doggy Dogg. We would get a bottle of rum and play those MIDI files and plug it into that cheap eBay organ and do it like karaoke. We were crying laughing. People really like, especially when they’ve had a couple of drinks, to sing along. In Iceland I don’t know how may hundreds of choirs there are; everyone’s in a choir and people like to sing. They want to sing old Icelandic choir songs, they want to get drunk by the bonfire in the summer and sing.
It’s funny that you were listening to Destiny’s Child, because it seems to me that emotionally and thematically, Vulnicura paved the way for Beyonce’s Lemonade.
I definitely noticed the similarities. I decided to put Vulnicura in chronological order, which hadn’t been done on a pop album before, I think, not that consciously. I wonder if that inspired her. I think it’s important women credit women. I think Lemonade is an incredible album. I don’t think for a second musically it was inspired by what I do. She’s obviously in her own universe. I’ve said this before, I’m obsessed with Beyonce, she’s one of my favorite artists. Also, it’s different times. I really noticed it when Beyonce’s album came out, and around the same time, Donald Trump was trying to grill Hillary Clinton for Bill Clinton’s affairs, which is obviously ridiculous. I think it’s a generational thing. I think 10 or 20 years ago, that would have been the woman’s fault. I think it’s a big improvement that Beyonce has been a big part of. Now, if the guys fuck up, they fuck up. It’s not the women’s fault. We’re not swallowing that anymore. Guys just have to take the blame for what they do and be responsible for their shit, and we’ll be responsible for our shit. But we can’t be responsible for our shit and their shit, that’s not going to happen anymore.
"Bjork Digital," Magic Box at the Reef, 1933 S. Broadway, downtown; opens Fri., May 19, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. (runs through June 4 with ticketed entry every 15 minutes); $35. laphil.com/tickets/bjork-digital-overview. |
Whether you buy ESO items or you sell them for that sweet Elder Scrolls Online gold, motifs are one of the things that keeps the economy spinning.
Here is a quick guide to how to obtain the rare motifs, be sure to collect them all!
ESO MOTIF GUIDE
1 . E vent motif - SalhrimFrostcaller
Welcome in first eso motif guide. ESO Motif Book is available in Crown Store during the New Life Festival event. The raw material for the costume is unobtainable and has to be crafted with Mimic Stones.
2. lnstance Motif - Mazzatun
The final boss in Ruins of Mazzatun (Tree-Minder Ka-Nesh) drops the motif chapters. The drop rate depends on difficulty level with normal mode having a very low chance and veteran hard mode always dropping a chapter. The material (Leviathan Scrimshaw) required drops from bosses of Mazzatun and by deconstructing the gear that dropped in the instance.
3. Instance Motif - Silken Ring
Chapters of the motif is dropped by the final boss of Cradle of Shadows (Velidreth). The drop rate depends on difficulty level with normal mode having a very low chance and veteran hard mode always dropping a chapter.The material (Distilled Slowsilver) required drops from bosses of Cradle of Shadows and by deconstructing the gear that dropped in the instance.
4. Event Motif - Grim Harlequin
Entire motif book is available for purchase in Crown Store during the Witches Festival. Style material, Grinstone, is obtainable only by deconstructing Grim Harlequin styled drops, or replaced by mimic stones.
5. Event Motif - Hallowjack
Amber Marble, drops from Plunder Skulls as well. Chapters of this motif can be obtained from Plunder Skulls that are looted from delve bosses, world bosses, dungeon and trial bosses during the Witches Festival but only under the effect of Witch mothers Brew. The motif material,drops from Plunder Skulls as well.
6. Instance Motif - Celestial
Chapters of this motif are a guaranteed reward from weekly trial quests in Aetherian Archive, Sanctum Ophidia and Hel Ra Citadel. The full book has extremely low chance of dropping from the reward bags. Each trial rewards different parts:
AA: Helmet, Shoulder, Boot, Staves, Axe
HRC: Chest, Belt, Shield, Mace
SO: Glove, Leg, Bow, Dagger, Sword
The style material can be obtained from bosses within those raids.
7. DLC Motif - Order of The Hour
Chapters of the Motif are available via daily quest in Golden Coast (Dark Brotherhood DLC) that makes you kill boss of Kvatch Arena. Boss himself has a low chance of dropping the motif. Raw material – Grains of Pearl Sand can be found in resource nodes scattered all around Gold Coast.
8. DLC Motif guide - Minotaur
Chapters of the Motif are available via daily quest in Golden Coast (Dark Brotherhood DLC) that makes you kill the minotaur boss – Limenauruus. Boss himself has a low chance of dropping the motif. Oxblood Fungus Spores (raw materials) can drop from normal Minotaurs found in the Gold Coast.
9. Guilds Motif - Draugr
Chapters and style material is obtainable via daily quests for Fighters Guild, Mages Guild and Undaunted.
10. Master Writ Voucher - Ebony
Chapters and style material (Night Pumice) are available for purchase at RolisHlaalu (Mastercraft Mediator) for Master Writ Vouchers.
ESO items. Stay tuned for more eso motif guides! This is the first part of our eso motig guide dedicated to those elusive. Stay tuned for more eso motif guides! |
Chris Fox, CTV News Toronto
City council has voted 42-1 in favour of moving forward with the planning and design work for both the downtown relief subway line and an extension of the Yonge subway into York Region.
The vote came after a last-ditch effort from Coun. Josh Matlow to halt planning work on the five-stop Yonge subway extension and instead focus the city’s efforts on getting the relief line built.
During the lengthy debate, Matlow argued that it would be “irrational” to push forward a subway extension that would bring additional riders onto the Yonge subway when the line is expected to exceed capacity by 2031.
Mayor Tory, however, said that it is a simple “political reality” that the province will expect the subway extension to be undertaken concurrently with the $6.8 billion relief line.
Tory also said that the city is better off working with politicians in York Region to get both projects funded and built than working against them.
“When was the last time you heard them being supportive of a transit project in downtown Toronto?” he asked.
Planning will take design work to 15 to 30 per cent threshold
As part of its vote, city council also endorsed the Carlaw Avenue alignment for the relief subway line.
Staff endorsed that route over another route along Pape Avenue largely due to the the higher density along the Carlaw corridor south of Gerrard Street.
The planning work, which will take place over the next two years, will include some tunnel design and station configuration work as well as geotechnical work.
Once complete, the work will take the planning for both projects to the 15 to 30 per cent threshold required to develop a more precise cost estimate and schedule.
In addressing his colleagues on council, Tory called the impending vote a “bold step” that would finally get work started on the long-discussed relief subway line.
That said, some councillors did express concerns about advancing work on the Yonge subway extension while a large number of questions regarding that project remain unanswered.
Coun. Janet Davis said that she is concerned that the city will be on the hook for millions of dollars in operating costs for a subway extension that will mostly serve residents outside of Toronto.
She said the situation is not unlike the York Spadina subway extension, which is expected to cost the city $30 million annually once it opens in December.
“We are subsidizing the cost of all the York region riders that go on the Spadina line and if we don’t get a better deal on this line than we will be doing the same thing,” she said.
Planning for Yonge subway extension further ahead
Earlier on Wednesday, Deputy City Manager John Livey explained that planning for the Yonge subway extension is about five per cent completed and is actually further ahead than the planning for the relief line, which is at zero per cent.
That discrepancy prompted some councilors to wonder why the city is proceeding with the work on the Yonge subway extension at all.
TTC officials have repeatedly warned that parts of the Yonge subway line will be overcapacity by 2031, making any extension of the line a risky proposition.
“Why is it that the subway extension is further ahead than the relief line? Why do we keep advancing other projects when the number one priority for Toronto is the relief line?” Coun. Kristyn Wong-Tam said.
“Why are we investing our resources in a subway system beyond city boundaries? Even if the province pays for it it ties up TTC talent and resources,” Coun. James Pasternak added.
Tory had threatened to stop work on extension
Mayor Tory had previously said that he would consider halting the work on the Yonge subway extension until the province agrees to fund the relief subway line but last week he backed away from that threat, telling reporters that he would work alongside the mayors of Richmond Hill and Markham to make sure both the subway extension and the relief line get funded and built.
On Wednesday, the mayor was questioned about the reasons for his about-face and responded that he felt it was ultimately the best path to securing funding for the relief line, which he said remains his priority.
It should be noted that the $90 million cost of the next phase of planning on the Yonge subway extension is being jointly paid for by the province and York Region. The work itself, however, is being largely undertaken by TTC staff.
It also remains unclear who would cover the operating costs for the subway extension.
Questioned about those costs on Wednesday, TTC CEO Andy Byford conceded that it remains unclear how much it would cost to operate the three proposed stops outside of Toronto city limits as well as who would be footing the bill.
Nonetheless, Tory told council that he believes a united approach that would see both projects funded “concurrently” is still the best approach.
“I thought that it was better arrangement rather than being in conflict with all these mayors to have them supporting the relief line,” Tory said Wednesday.
Tory told council that the relief line must be in operation before any additional stations are opened on the Yonge line and promised that continuing work on the extension won’t change that.
“My concern of course principally is the relief line. I want that funded pronto. We now have some allies that are supporting us and I think that is very important,” he said.
Byford said that the relief line will take approximately eight years to build once shovels are in the ground, meaning that the time is of the essence for the completion of planning and design work on the new preferred alignment along Carlaw Avenue.
Tax rebate may be scrapped
After Tory’s key items are dealt with, council will debate dozens of other items, including the future of a tax rebate on vacate commercial properties that some have blamed for storefronts sitting unoccupied.
The motion that will be before council would authorize staff to ask the Province of Ontario to phase out the rebate over the next few years.
Under the plan, the rebate would be reduced from 30 per cent to 15 per cent for a period from July 1 of this year to June 30, 2018. The rebate would then be eliminated completely as of Canada Day, 2018.
According to a staff report, the city hands out about $23 million in tax rebates to the owners of vacant commercial and industrial buildings each year. |
A low, sullen warehouse building, 299 Meserole Street sits in a straggle of industrial units not far across the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn. This afternoon, the cool, dark space within is in the process of being transformed with palm trees, portable toilets and a makeshift bar. Mirrorballs spin out over the empty room as three men scatter handfuls of multicoloured paper – tiny flickers of pink and blue and silver cellophane – on to the concrete floor. When they are finished, they scrunch up red plastic drinking cups and throw them on to the ground too. The effect is of a party recently ended, of a room still ringing with merriment, laughter and dancing.
Up on a small stage, Arcade Fire are soundchecking, running through their potential set for the night to come: a selection of new songs – Reflektor, Supersymmetry, It's Never Over – as well as a couple of steady favourites: Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out), Sprawl II, Wake Up. The preparations here today are part of the band's album launch extravaganza, two semi-secret shows for 3,000 people, that will be replicated in Los Angeles and Miami, with attendees requested to dress up in their finery, and for which tickets have been swapping hands for up to a rumoured $5,000 (£3,100).
It was 2004 when Arcade Fire emerged out of Montreal with their extraordinary, mysterious debut album, Funeral. A six-piece band comprising of Win Butler, Will Butler, Régine Chassagne, Tim Kingsbury, Jeremy Gara and Richard Reed Parry, as well as a moveable feast of other players, over the past nine years and two more albums – Neon Bible (2006) and The Suburbs (2010) – they have built a reputation for both the intrigue and intelligence of their songwriting, as well as for live shows that can seem ecstatic, desperate and electric all at once.
Reading on mobile? Watch Reflektor by Arcade Fire
Across those nine years, much has changed about the band: members flitting in and out, the focus of their songwriting shifting to accommodate other talents — Butler's brother Will, multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry, and bassist Tim Kingsbury among them – and with each album a musical turn that has at times unsettled their devoted following.
On Monday they will release Reflektor, a double album that has already startled many who have heard it, with its sheen and its unabashed splendour: there are shades of Studio 54, of disco and glam rock, as well as Talking Heads, Blondie and ska. There is the obvious influence of David Bowie, who guests on one of the new songs, and of LCD Soundsystem, whose James Murphy produced the record, along with the band's long-time collaborator Markus Dravs. And beneath it all, lyrics that speak darkly of a relationship in disarray, of disappointment and disillusionment and sudden flares of hope; of falling apart and coming back together, of two lives that can never quite unravel. "And now you're older, Butler sings on one track, "you will discover, it's never over."
"When Régine and I met, I was 19 years old," says Win Butler, lying back in what he refers to as a "therapy pose", with his long legs draped over the arm of the sofa. "We spent so much of our life working on records, working on music, and it was the idea of putting all of this life on to a little piece of plastic." Now 33, Butler has seen not only his own life alter, but the music he makes physically change, from the records, tapes and CDs of his teenage years to the world of iTunes and MP3s. "If [The Beatles'] Revolver is about the LP, and Reflektor is about the end of the CD era," he says, "it was feeling: 'If we were making the last CD, how would we make it?' Because the medium of something kind of always impacts on it a little bit. And it was also kind of a way of understanding the times, and life, and how I feel about myself, men, women, relationships, you know … all the different things."
Many hearing the album for the first time have been preoccupied by its musical volte-face, and have drawn comparisons with U2's 1991 album Achtung Baby, noted on its release for its defiantly experimental sound. Yet Butler dismisses the comparison. "With Achtung Baby, they have these characters that have been created of themselves and they were making an effigy about culture," he explains. "And I don't think that is what we're really trying to do. I think what we're driving at is a little bit different. I think [Reflektor] was more about allowing ourselves to be transformed, musically, allowing ourselves to be changed, trying to connect in a new axis."
Régine Chassagne. Photograph: Douglas Mason/Getty Images
It began with rhythms, with the influence of Haiti – the country Chassagne's parents had fled during the dictatorship of Papa Doc. These rhythms had been tangible even from Funeral, but in recent times, particularly since the devastating earthquake of 2010, the band had begun to explore the country's musical heritage, performing there at festivals and playing with Haitian musicians. In the summer of 2011, Chassagne, the Butler brothers and some of the drummers from the Haitian band RAM spent two weeks in New Orleans working specifically on rhythm. "We just recorded beats," says Chassagne, in her slow, sing-song voice. "We were interested in doing hybrid beats that could translate stuff that I know from my family background in Haiti. I was always interested to try to find rhythms that mean something, to communicate emotion through rhythm and music. Because rhythm is almost like a vocabulary."
The rest of the band could not replicate Chassagne's more primal relationship with Haitian rhythms, but their response was nonetheless instinctive. "To understand or to feel them is immediate," Win Butler says. "It's like putting you finger in an electric socket." It also offered rich new ground for musical exploration. "They are very different from the rhythms I grew up with," says Kingsbury. "You see the historical sweep from Africa, but African-American music from North America is also very different. The emphasis is very different. So it does put you in a different headspace and it does make you engage with the music in a different way."
Will Butler recalls the particular delight of working with the RAM drummers and overcoming their mutual linguistic hurdles. "My French is not very good," he says sheepishly, "and my Creole is even worse than my French, but it was actually very good for my musicianship to be in a room with people I couldn't really communicate with except through music. Most of us are pretty heady most of the time, we love talking about music, everyone's an ethnomusicologist at some time, so it was very good to only have hand gestures, to play what you meant. It was very valuable."
Wrapped around what Chassagne refers to as "voodoo rhythms" were other influences too. Reed Parry mentions Fela Kuti and James Brown before describing the finished record as in no way resembling James Brown and "not sounding anything like Fela Kuti". Will Butler explains how some of the sounds that in many ways fired the album didn't even make it to the final cut. "On The Suburbs we said that Depeche Mode and Neil Young were approximate poles of the album, and this album too has poles," he says. "One of those poles was the Haitian rhythms. Synth string drones is another. But we also recorded a ton of punk rock stuff that isn't on the album, that is just abrasive like nobody's business, so that is actually a core of the album too." There are remnants of it still, he points out, on tracks such as Normal Person and Joan of Arc. "Just a bit in some of the edginess of it, it's still there."
Win Butler. Photograph: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images
But for the most part, the roughness is counterbalanced by sheen. "I think in order to realise some of the songs fully, we realised we had to really polish them," Will explains. "That rough form was really powerful, but the back of your eyeballs were dry after you'd listened to it. And it was actually really fun to go down that road, to get out the really sharp-skinned sandpaper and make everything shine again."
The tension between the scuffed, crackling side of the record and glistening keys is one of the many dualities on Reflektor. It is there also in the mirroring of the album title, of course, something also alluded to in the track Supersymmetry, and as on previous albums, some tracks appear to sit in pairs, and there are retakes of earlier songs – in this case Here Comes the Night Time. "I think every album we write about what's happening to us at that time," Chassagne says. "And sometimes there's a lot [to say], and there's like a second wave … the same idea, and so then you get this," she holds one palm up, "and that," she raises the other. It is often, Will adds, a case of "just attacking the same concept over and over".
The duality of the album's title track is broken, oddly enough, by the presence of David Bowie. "He just needed the work," Kingsbury says soberly. "It's really sad actually." In truth, Bowie was roped in while visiting the Electric Lady studio where the band were working in New York. "The song is better for having a third voice in it," says Will. "So it's not just these two voices talking to each other, so it's not just Islands in the Stream, there's a third voice at the end, an outside perspective."
Working with Murphy had been a hope for Arcade Fire since as far back as Neon Bible, but it was only for this album that their schedules aligned. Will recalls with amusement that, in the early years of their careers, they danced around one another with some scepticism. "I always imagined he and LCD would be kind of insufferable," he says. "And he actually said the same about us – that people were talking so much about Arcade Fire before he had heard or seen us that he was like: 'Oh goddamnit … why are these stupid bands doing stuff with xylophone?' And then he saw us and thought: 'Wait, that's Arcade Fire?' And I did the same: 'Wait, that's the guy that I thought would be this hipster douchebag that I wanted to punch in the face and the balls at the same time? Great!'"
For Chassagne, Murphy's role was to help realise the great dance record she believed the album could be. "I really wanted to get the right feel to the songs and be able to dance, really dance to them," she says, suddenly lit up. She talks passionately about dancing in Haiti: "When Win and I were staying in this place that had windows but no real doors and some drummers started playing, and more drummers came and more drummers came, and they were playing these roots, voodoo rhythms, and we just danced til 5am, and when we were too hot, we just ran and jumped in the ocean."
And she remembers with a sudden tenderness the sight of her mother dancing: "I always have this memory of my Mom dancing in the kitchen all the time," she says and starts to laugh. "We had a really bad radio – so bad you had to put your finger in it to change the music, so you were always at risk of being electrocuted every time you went to change the channel. And the songs would come on in the kitchen and my Mom would just dance, and she was always sad. I suppose it's the experience a lot of people have as immigrants. She loved to dance so much and was so sad because she always thought people didn't dance enough. She was a Haitian woman. She was round. So I don't exactly dance like that, but not completely different either."
She is not, she insists, the band's greatest dancer. "I think Will," she says. "Ritchie as well. Everybody! Everybody can dance!" But the problem with going out dancing these days, says Will, is that it's hard to find a place that plays the music that makes you want to dance. Chassagne agrees: "I don't get it, because dance music, sometimes it's so dumb! Why does it have to be that dumb? The thing is I find either it's danceable and really stupid, or it's brave and artful and thoughtful, but you can't dance to it. But I want to have both!"
The aim of the evening ahead, with its dress-up code, short, hour-long set of new songs, and a DJ set from Murphy, is that it might just lure people into dancing. They have even invented an alter ego band named The Reflektors, in which they perform wearing giant papier-mache heads of themselves, to add to the levity, and perhaps also to relieve the weight of what it means to be one of the world's biggest bands.
The party, in all its bright fun and silliness, is in some way an extension of the record. "It's hard not to get people out of their comfort zones and just alienate them," says Will. "I think a lot of art and a lot of the stuff we make, we get people out of their comfort zones by being extremely confrontational. And it's great that art's really confrontational, but there's something to be said about lifting people out of the day-to-day, that makes them excited about dancing instead of just feeling horrible about the government. But it's also valuable to feel horrible about the government." He laughs. "You want people dancing and being like 'The government sucks.'" He shoulder dances as he sings a little ditty: "The government sucks."
Shortly after 9pm, I am sitting in a white limousine at the back of the venue, wearing a papier-mache head of Chassagne. Win has implored the driver to find the worst kind of bass-heavy chart dance music he can on the limo's radio, to wind down the windows and turn it up loud. It is to this soundtrack that we all make the short journey round to the front of the building, to where the crowd has assembled and a red carpet has been rolled out.
We climb out to shouts, whistles and cheering, and the rush of it is faintly terrifying – through the head's giant nose holes, I can see little, breathe less, and wonder quite what my feet are doing. Win takes my hand and leads me along the queue, posing for photographs with fans as we go. Ahead of me, he is just a blur of sequinned jacket that I follow into the venue to where the rest of the band, in their wild suits and giant heads, have occupied the dancefloor. As I watch them dancing, I see how it liberates them, how charged they seem by rhythm and music and anonymity, and how thrilling it is to watch them caught in this sudden flare of hope.
• This article was amended on 6 November 2013 to correct a description of Arcade Fire. The original called the band "a loose circle of musicians orbiting husband and wife duo Win Butler and Régine Chassagne". In fact they are a six-piece band, as well as a moveable feast of other players. |
Play 02:45 Play 02:45 Agarkar: Surprised with Vijay as replacement
A finger injury has sidelined India opener Rohit Sharma from the rest of the England series. M Vijay, who flew back home after the Tests, has been called up as his replacement.
"Rohit Sharma has sustained a fracture on the middle finger of his right hand, and has been ruled out of the ongoing ODI and T20 International Series against England, as a result," a BCCI press release said. "The All-India Senior Selection Committee has picked Murali Vijay as his replacement."
The specialist batsmen already with the limited-overs squad in England who could replace Rohit in the XI for the third ODI on Saturday are Ambati Rayudu and the 19-year-old Sanju Samson. India could consider using Ajinkya Rahane as an opener, and slotting either Rayudu or Samson in the middle order.
Rohit was promoted to the top order in January 2013, and has had some success in the role, averaging 46.34, contributing to India's Champions Trophy success last year and becoming the third batsman to make an ODI double century.
While Rohit has struggled to nail down a permanent place in the Test side, his replacement Vijay has managed to do so, but has struggled to establish himself in the limited-overs outfit. Vijay was picked for a tri-series in the Caribbean in July 2013, ending a two-and-a-half-year absence from the ODI side, but he didn't do enough to warrant a longer run.
Rohit's previous visit to England in 2011 was also cut short when he was struck by a Stuart Broad bouncer and injured his right index finger.
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd. |
The Gardiner Expressway had to come down. A decade ago in Toronto, that was the consensus. Urban designers, the new Waterfront Toronto agency and Mayor Mel Lastman all agreed: It was a necessary step to rebuild the city's decrepit port lands, and worth its price tag of more than $1-billion.
Two and a half years ago, John Tory spoke about tearing down the Gardiner as "something that's going to make this a much greater city."
So what's changed? Today, the east end of the Gardiner is collapsing. It needs a multiyear rebuild. And Mayor John Tory is ready to lead city council to spend hundreds of millions of dollars – not to take it down, but to put it back up.
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In post-Rob-Ford Toronto, his position has an obvious political payoff. But if Mr. Tory wants to go that route, he will have to own the consequences. Rebuilding the Gardiner will leave a blight on the waterfront, an area that's becoming the symbolic heart of the city. And it will cost us, in every sense.
Since last month, the mayor has advocated – with arguments that are almost all misleading – for the so-called "hybrid." This is essentially a rebuild of the Gardiner East. He's implied it would facilitate more development than tearing the highway down; this is false. He also couched the traffic argument in grand rhetoric about "great urban design." Building under a highway, he implied, would be the sophisticated, big-city move. New York has done it! Amsterdam!
Yes: You can put things under an expressway. You can also put lipstick on a pig.
Using the space underneath expressways is the kind of underdog move now beloved by young architects; it came up in an ideas competition in Calgary that I covered last month.
On Toronto's waterfront, Underpass Park – which sits under a set of highway off-ramps – got a nod from the mayor this week. Its design is brilliant, under the circumstances. But the nicest part is actually in the sun, between two ramps and not under them. What would make the park even better? Remove the roads.
There is a broad expert consensus that urban elevated expressways are bad news: They're noisy; they are polluting; they are obstacles to a varied, lively streetscape. Ask yourself: Given the choice, do you want to live next to an elevated Gardiner – or not? Would you rather go to a park that's under a highway – or one that isn't?
Mr. Tory is determined to spin shadow into sunshine: to claim the high ground of "city-building" as he does the opposite.
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"It is simply unthinkable that we are talking about, in essence, building a new elevated expressway," says Michael Kirkland, a local architect and urban designer who worked for years with Waterfront Toronto.
Jennifer Keesmaat, the city's chief planner, is clear. At a conference last month, where landscape architects hailed the Toronto waterfront as a global example of good planning, she told me: "The best option to realize our waterfront, and to fulfill our vision of building complete communities, would be to create a beautiful, grand boulevard."
The details have yet to be designed. However, when the landscape architects Field Operations – famous for the High Line, a former elevated railway in Manhattan that is now a hugely popular park – looked at the problem in 2010, their imaginings looked very attractive.
We can, Ms. Keesmaat says, make the new stretch of Lake Shore Boulevard a beautiful place.
And can we improve upon an elevated expressway? "Sure," she said, "but it's mitigation." In other words, you can make the best of a bad situation.
Is that what we, as Torontonians, want? Is that compromise worth paying many millions for? The "hybrid" plan would be much more expensive than the tear-down alternative; the city's figures put the difference at nearly $500-million, and that doesn't account for the loss of value in the planned Keating Channel neighbourhood, which could reach $200-million in the next two decades.
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The "hybrid" places a highway and off-ramps, rather than a boulevard, through the centre of this new district; it scrambles the plan of the neighbourhood and eats up acres of development land. That would involve huge costs to compensate the development consortium 3C for some of its property; the number could be north of $50-million. Meanwhile, city consultants estimate the lost value of the city's own land at $137-million.
What's most troubling is that the proposed benefit to car traffic is small – affecting 3 per cent of commuters into downtown – and may not even exist. There is lots of empirical evidence that eliminating expressways leads people to change their behaviour. Traffic disappears. This is precisely what happened on the eastern end of the Gardiner when it was torn down in 1998. Mr. Kirkland, Ms. Keesmaat and others have raised the examples of cities such as New York, where, as The Globe's Oliver Moore reported this week, the demolition of the West Side Highway caused zero gridlock. I was there in April to review the new Whitney Museum, a polished $422-million building that sits on the edge of the former highway. It is lovely, and expensive, real estate.
The mayor has found one distinguished design professional to advocate his point of view: John van Nostrand, a planner who has been arguing to mitigate the Gardiner for more than a decade, and not winning the argument. He delivered a belligerent performance at City Hall last week ("They didn't do a very good job," he said of Ms. Keesmaat's predecessors), providing political cover for the mayor. And yet, in 2004, he took part in a design study for Waterfront Toronto that favoured a tear-down. Mr. Kirkland, who was also part of the group, said this of Mr. van Nostrand: "He failed to move the conversation."
Today, the entire design establishment of Toronto is on the other side – favouring the tear-down and "boulevard" option. The list includes Waterfront Toronto, Ms. Keesmaat, the city's urban design director Harold Madi, two former chief planners, including Paul Bedford, the current and two former deans of the University of Toronto's Daniels Faculty of Architecture and Design, the urbanist and economist Richard Florida, the Toronto Society of Architects and the Council for Canadian Urbanism.
If Mayor Tory wants to ignore them and chase a political imperative, so be it. But the decision shouldn't be hidden with the promise of city-building. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. |
At least two Palestinians were wounded by gunmen disguised as fellow protesters in a group of men throwing stones at Israeli security forces in Ramallah on Wednesday. After participating in the stone throwing, several gunmen suddenly drew their weapons and fired point blank at the Palestinians.
The plainclothes gunmen were immediately joined by over a dozen uniformed Israeli soldiers, who can be seen on video beating, kicking and pointing assault weaponry at the Palestinians before dragging them toward Humvee-style vehicles.
While the Israeli military reports that two Palestinians were injured in the gunfight, Agence France-Presse, which has posted video, counts three men among the injured.
The incident can also be seen in video posted by the Shehab News Agency:
Reuters reporter Luke Baker tweeted that the gunmen were undercover Israeli police officers who had been inciting the Palestinians to throw rocks at the soldiers before firing at the stone-throwers themselves.
Footage in Ramallah shows undercover #Israeli police throwing stones at Israeli forces and inciting #Palestinian youth to do the same — Luke Baker (@LukeReuters) October 7, 2015
@zpyarom I've been watching them operating. The undercover units ran back to Israeli troops and drew their weapons to fight back — Luke Baker (@LukeReuters) October 7, 2015
The Israeli military has not yet commented on whether the plainclothes gunmen are formally affiliated with its security forces, but the video footage appears to show them working in close cooperation with the uniformed soldiers.
In addition to those wounded by the gunmen, 18 Palestinians sustained injuries from rubber-coated steel bullets during Wednesday's clash in Ramallah, the Palestinian news agency Ma’an reported.
The clash occurred near Beit El, an Israeli settlement adjacent to Ramallah. An Israel Defense Forces spokesman told The Times of Israel that 350 Palestinians threw stones, Molotov cocktails and fireworks at Israeli soldiers. "In response, the IDF fired at the main agitators," the spokesman said.
Last month, Israel’s Security Cabinet unanimously voted to lower the bar for the use of live fire against stone-throwers. The new rules allow Israeli police officers to fire their weapons if they believe any individual's life is in danger, not just their own. |
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The GOP is trying to oust Donald Trump from the Presidential campaign trail. Numerous GOP officials and corporate media reports have indicated that Donald Trump may drop out of the race. Curiously, the news comes just weeks after Trump walked away from the Republican National Convention with the nomination. No other candidate came close in total number of delegates in the state primaries and the proposed roll call from dissenting delegates failed to bring results. The attempted ousting of Trump reflects both the fracturing of the Republican Party and the rupture of the two-party corporate duopoly generally in this election cycle.
This isn't the first time establishment Republicans have attempted to push Trump out of the race. When Trump began picking up momentum earlier in 2016, many well-known Republicans refused to endorse him. Republican Mitt Romney made a video appearance at the Democratic Party National Convention to warn of the dangers of a Trump presidency. The Business Round Table, a collection of corporate executives, also warned New York Times readers of Trump's possible Presidential victory. Even the Koch Brothers are sabotaging Republican Party supporters of Trump by pulling their funding from his supporters in Washington.
The reason for the ruling class's fear of Trump is clearly articulated from the source. Trump is unpredictable and his message uncontrolled. There are times when Trump speaks to working class anxiety by repudiating trade deals and calling to re-regulate the financial sector. There are others when Trump is easily baited into traps set by the Democratic Party. In recent weeks, the Democratic Party has attempted to frame Trump as an unpatriotic traitor. Trump has reaffirmed his support of Russian President Vladimir Putin and refused to take back remarks regarding the heroism of a Muslim American soldier who died in combat in Iraq.
While power struggle between the Democratic Party and Republican Party is nothing new, Trump's impact on the two-party corporate duopoly should not be understated. Trump has destroyed the GOP's infrastructure. His rhetoric has inspired emboldened racist elements of the working class as well as legitimate class grievances among the Republican Party base. Trump has occupied a vacuum that its corporate-backers have refused to fill. No longer can the Republican Party operate as it did in the past without losing ground to the increasingly conservative Democratic Party.
For nearly five decades, the Republican Party has positioned itself the party of white supremacy. The Democratic Party has been able to place unions, Black voters, and white liberals under its tent over this period. However, the neo-liberal crisis of capitalism has changed this dynamic dramatically. The gap between Democratic Party rhetoric and policy has widened since the early 1980s. This has forced Republicans to move further to the right in the midst of Democratic Party-led wars, austerity measures, and assaults on civil liberties.
Donald Trump represents an existential threat to the very existence of the GOP. In her speech at the Democratic National Convention, Hillary Clinton herself admitted that she would be a President for “Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.” She was thus very forthright in extending an invitation to refugee Republicans into her “big tent” campaign. Clinton’s neo-liberal, imperialist agenda is attractive to a Republican Party establishment that has effectively lost its base to Trump. Trump’s erratic behavior only further endangers his ability to defeat Clinton’s strategy and bring victory to what is left of the Republican Party.
A series of interviews on “Democracy Now!” have clarified the depths to which the Clinton campaign seeks to use fear of Donald Trump as its catalyst for victory. In two separate debates, Green Party supporters Kshama Sawant and Chris Hedges confronted Clinton operatives Rebecca Traiser and Robert Reich. Traitser and Reich refused to address concrete policy and instead promoted a Clinton Presidency on the basis of the dangers of Donald Trump. The debates confirmed that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party have become virtuously indefensible. Such a realization has forced the two-party corporate duopoly into a crisis situation, especially on the Republican Party side. Either the Republican Party establishment gets behind Trump or it joins forces with the increasingly conservative Democratic Party machinery led by Clinton to defeat the “fascist” casino capitalist.
The fact the Republican Party has not distanced itself from rumors of Trump’s departure indicates that there is a significant portion of GOP leaders who would prefer a Hillary Clinton Presidency. Hillary Clinton is, after all, the chosen politician to serve the capitalist oligarchy. Clinton has received tens of millions of dollars in donations from hedge funds and various other Wall Street donors. This places Trump at a glaring disadvantage. Yet this disadvantage has been mitigated by the open rebellion both Democratic and Republican Party bases are waging against the establishment.
The conditions that created the revolt of young voters in the Democratic Party and the entire base of the Republican Party are not going away. Trump may step down, or he may continue on in his campaign. Whatever the case, the legitimacy of the two-party duopoly will remain tenuous at best. Millions of people are sick and tired of war, austerity, poverty, and a system that represents no one but the elite. A mass break with the two-party system is on the horizon and Trump’s campaign has played a significant role in speeding up the process. So the conversation about Trump should not be confined to his personality or his reactionary character. It should center on the root causes of his rise to the GOP nomination and what that means for the future of US political landscape. |
How do you western males losers feel and what will you losers do when in a locker room you see a guy who have more bigger penis than your penis who told you that he like the same girl you like, are you western males losers feel inferior, defeated, etc awful and are you western males losers going to give up the girl you love to the other penis? It seems to be that way because you western males losers are the only males in this world who put high value and take pride on their penis size, proven by you western males losers the only males who keep boasting about your penis size while saying other penis are smaller than your penis including keep saying us Asian guys have small penis.
Anyway, to any of you who want to know the reasons why those western males losers keep boasting about their penis size including keep saying us Asian guys have small penis is because :
1. Those western males losers are very jealous of us Asian guys because the best girls in the world which are known as our Asian girls are belong to us Asian guys, those western males losers retardedly believe that by keep saying us Asian guys have small penis will make our Asian girls no longer love us Asian guys and then prefer those western males losers.
2. Because those western males losers are naturally racist, so far no other males in this world who keep boasting about their penis size while saying other penis are smaller, including with african males who have the biggest penis size but those african males don't go on boasting about their penis size. What pathetic about this fact is those western males losers keep quiet about african penis who are more bigger than their western penis, no wonder that westerners are racist the most against african. |
youve been watching to much alien trilogy bro space exploration has been dead since the 70s and wasting money on taking picnic trips to space then back without accomplishing anything except "herp derp we orbit nao" fucking probes have accomplished more than manned space flight has all together so fuck it, but the second russia or china says "all your moon are belong to us now" amerika will get all chuck norris and go back but not accomplish anything other than land, plant a flag then leave, they didnt even know the moon had water elements till they crashed some big ass probe into it last year wtf was they doing when we landed back in the 70's other than playing golf and lol watch me hop around tl:dr nasa and america is a fucking joke
Genre Dramatic Reading |
Every month, I lead a group for a walk across Hampstead Heath while we talk about a book. Emily’s Walking Book Club works on the premise that it is easiest to talk to someone when you fall in step with one another, side-by-side. I’m convinced that the movement of our limbs aids the movement of our thoughts, and the fresh air and beautiful views help too.
Somewhere between 10 and 40 of us gather to walk and talk. I wonder what our collective noun would be – a series of walking book clubbers? An edition, a print run? Crucially, we can all talk at once, as the group fragments into twos, threes and fours to allow myriad conversations. We periodically regroup to recap, read aloud and launch into a new topic. This means that no single reader can dominate and, if there’s a clash of personalities, it’s easy to avoid one another.
Reading is a necessarily anti-social activity: the words on the page are taken in only if the wider world, with its many distractions, is zoned out. Perhaps it is surprising, then, that books can inspire socialising. Sometimes a book is so good that it demands to be talked about, ideally with someone else who’s read it.
So, in theory, book clubs should be a joy. Unfortunately, the reality sometimes disappoints. People complain that book clubs with friends tend to dissolve into un-book-related gossip by the end of the first bottle of wine, whereas book clubs with strangers can be intimidating.
For those of you who feel frustrated with your regular book club, but still like bookish conversation, don’t give up; either start up your own walking book club, or join a book club with a difference. There are lots of unusual ones out there – here’s three to get you started …
The Knitting Book Club
”Knitting does amazing things to your mind,” says Gerald Allt, who hosts a monthly knitting book club at his I Knit shop in London’s Waterloo. “It definitely helps to distil your thoughts on what you’ve read.” On the first Tuesday of the month, the click-clack of knitting needles accompanies impassioned literary discussion as people work on their woollens while unravelling complicated strands of plot. Novices be warned, the group is for experienced knitters only, as teaching would interfere too much with talk about the book. “No one feels nervous, even if they come on their own,” says Gerald, “because everyone knows that, at the very least, they can talk about their knitting.” Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee on 1 December, Free, iknit.org.uk
The Art Book Club
The Ikon Gallery in Birmingham holds book clubs alongside its exhibitions. A guest speaker leads the discussion about how a particular book is relevant to the artist’s work. The idea is that the book throws new light on the art, and the art gives an unusual way in to the book. Readers gather inside the gallery, amongst the art, to talk about the book’s relationship with the work around them. “Everyone feels inspired,” says Rebecca Small from Ikon. “It stimulates all the senses.” Heart of Darkness and Fiona Banner on January 12, £4. https://ikon-gallery.org/event/book-club-heart-of-darkness/
The Cinema Book Club
When the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle screen an adaptation of a book, they offer a free book club event, for which an academic introduces the film and hosts a discussion afterwards. Most unusually, at this book club you don’t have to have read the book first – it is as much an opportunity to ask the academic to elaborate on their area of expertise as it is to share your own views. Organiser Amy-Claire Scott says, “People enjoy listening to someone speak passionately and enthusiastically about the film and the subject. The most common thing you hear people saying afterwards is, “I’m going to read that now.” The Muppet Christmas Carol, 13 December, free with cinema ticket, tynesidecinema.co.uk |
Todd Frazier is congratulated on his two-run home run by Brandon Phillips during the sixth inning. (Photo: AP Photo/Darren Hauck)
MILWAUKEE — Somewhere, just maybe, across the globe, members of the 1982 Reds were popping cans of Bürger beer to celebrate the knowledge that their place in franchise history as the only Reds team to lose 100 games was safe.
With a 9-7 victory over the Brewers at Miller Park on Saturday, the 2015 version of the Reds won its 63rd game of the season, eliminating this year’s team from the infamy of losing 100 games for the second time since the first professional baseball team called Cincinnati home in 1869.
The victory also gave the Reds a game-and-a-half lead over the Brewers, a team that failed to reach its 63rd victory over the 162-game schedule for the eighth straight game, while the Reds have now won one more game in September (nine) than they did in all of August.
BOX SCORE: Reds 9, Brewers 7
Three times in Saturday’s game, the Reds came from behind to take the lead, finally scoring three in the eighth to get to J.J. Hoover and Aroldis Chapman to hold the lead.
“I’ve just been very, very pleased with the way our guys have been playing, especially since we rolled over August and got into September,” Reds manager Bryan Price said. “Most of the teams we’re playing are teams that are in the playoff hunt and they’re pushing and pushing and our guys are pushing back. I’m very proud of that. Down 2-0, down 6-3, down 7-6, and being able to find our way back into the game — and in that eighth inning, so much of it was putting the ball in play.”
Brandon Phillips hit a two-run single in the eighth to break the tie after the Brewers elected to intentionally walk Joey Votto to load the bases.
After a leadoff single by Eugenio Suarez and a two-out single by Jason Bourgeois, Skip Schumaker came up with runners on the corners and blooped a 1-2 offering into short left field.
Brewers third baseman Elian Herrera and left fielder Shane Peterson both tried to slide for the ball, but it landed between them and the two hit each other’s knees, scoring Suarez easily from third to tie the game at 7.
Brewers third baseman Elian Herrera (left) and left fielder Shane Peterson collide while trying to catch an RBI single by Skip Schumaker during the eighth inning. (Photo: AP Photo/Darren Hauck)
While Peterson, who had just entered the game for the injured Khris Davis, eventually got up and walked off the field under his own power, Herrera did not. After a delay of approximately 12 minutes, Herrera was taken off the field on a cart.
Hoover struck out three and allowed a hit in an inning of work, while Chapman came into the game in the ninth for his 32nd save of the season.
Reds starter Josh Smith gave up four runs on six hits in just four innings on the mound. In his fourth career start, the 28-year-old right-hander allowed a run in three of his four innings, including two in the first.
Smith returned to the Reds’ rotation after being called up when rosters expanded following the end of the Triple-A season, and when spots opened up by the innings limitations of Michael Lorenzen and Raisel Iglesias.
Smith, who has pitched twice since his call-up from Louisville, struggled with his command once again, failing to throw a first-pitch strike to any of the six batters he faced in the first.
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“For me, it’s huge. I’m not (throwing) 100 like (Aroldis Chapman) or mid-90s like these other guys, so strike one is more important for me than these other guys,” Smith said. “It’s something I’m working to get better at and something I continue to work at and try to do better next time out.”
Smith retired two of the first three batters he faced in the first, but then walked Davis on five pitches before giving up a two-run double to Domingo Santana to fall into a 2-0 hole early.
The Reds took the lead in the third when Smith led off with a drive that bounced off the wall in center field and caromed along the warning track in right as he ran around the bases for a stand-up triple.
The next batter, Jason Bourgeois, hit a grounder to second to score Smith easily. Schumaker then singled and Votto followed with his 28th home run of the season, giving the Reds a 3-2 lead.
That lead wouldn’t last long, as Brewers second baseman Scooter Gennett doubled to lead off the third and then scored on Davis’ single.
Logan Schafer then led off the fourth with his first home run of the season. Smith gave up a one-out single to Brewers starter Taylor Jungmann, but Smith got Gennett to ground into a double play to end the inning.
Frazier’s two-run home run in the fifth brought the Reds within a run at 7-6. It was Frazier’s 35th home run of the season, making him just the second player in team history to hit at least 35 home runs and 40 doubles in the same season. Frank Robinson hit 39 homers and 51 doubles in 1952.
“It’s unbelievable, it really is — 41 doubles, 35 home runs. That’s a good year, I don’t care what you're batting, honestly,” said Frazier, who is now hitting .259 on the season after going 1-for-5. “You think about all the stuff that coulda, shoulda, woulda, a bunch of times where you could have gotten another double or robbed of a home run, it all adds up. I’m just very excited. It’s a great feat and I’ll have it forever.”
Jay Bruce singled after Frazier’s homer, ending Jungmann’s night. Jungmann, also a rookie, was one of the bright spots of the Brewers’ season, but he has struggled in September, going 1-1 with a 6.32 ERA in his first three starts of the season’s final month before allowing six runs (five earned) to the Reds in his five innings on Saturday. He’s now 1-1 with a 6.97 ERA in September after going 8-5 with a 2.48 ERA in his first 15 starts.
After Jungmann was pulled in favor of Jeremy Jeffress, Suarez reached on an error by Brewers shortstop Jean Segura, Tucker Barnhart sacrificed the runners over and pinch-hitter Brayan Pena grounded out, scoring Bruce to tie the game at 6.
Manny Parra entered in the seventh inning and retired the first two batters he faced before Adam Lind lined a ball off Parra’s back for a single. Davis then singled to center, ending Parra’s night. Burke Badenhop gave up a ground-ball single to right on his first pitch, giving the Brewers a 7-6 lead.
"It was very nice. We’re resilient, we’re still fighting,” Frazier said. “Every stat counts and every W counts, as well.” |
The 240 people who live in very basic lodgings on the southern tip of a sunny Caribbean island may wish to reconsider the less-than-rosy opinion they have of their surroundings.
No less an authority than Miss Universe has visited Guantánamo Bay and pronounced the infamous US detention centre a "relaxing, calm, beautiful place".
According to a blog posting that will strike fear into the hearts of diplomats in Caracas and Washington, the beauty queen - who is also known as Dayana Mendoza from Venezuela - visited the facility last week with her friend, Miss USA, Crystle Stewart.
"It was a loooot of fun!" Mendoza wrote on the Miss Universe blog. She also recounted how she and Stewart met US military personnel and toured the camp, with its barbed wire fences, minefields and watchtowers. As well as a bar on the base, the pair also discovered an "unbelievable" beach in the bay.
"We also met the military dogs, and they did a very nice demonstration of their skills. All the guys from the army were amazing with us."
But the "deployment" - organised to entertain US troops and "boost morale" - also had its educational aspects.
"We visited the detainees' camps and we saw the jails, where they shower, how the[y] recreate themselves with movies, classes of art, books. It was very interesting," wrote Mendoza. "I didn't want to leave, it was such a relaxing place, so calm and beautiful."
Her experiences are a far cry from those of former detainees, who have alleged that torture, including "waterboarding", was practised at Guantánamo Bay.
Britain announced last week it would investigate whether its secret services were complicit in the torture of a UK resident released from the camp last month.
Barack Obama has set a one-year deadline for shutting the prison. |
Homeless man's death in encounter with cops brings protests
FULLERTON, Calif. Kelly Thomas was an often-seen fixture in this Southern California college town, a schizophrenic drifter described by his parents as easygoing and non-violent.
His death after being taken into custody by six police officers at a public transit station last month is the object of federal and local investigations, sparking weekly protests outside the police station and drawing concern from mental health experts who want better training for cops in dealing with the mentally ill.
"Dad, Dad," were among Thomas' final words, a haunting, desperate cry captured on video by a cellphone as police subdued the 37-year-old just after darkness fell at the city's central bus and train depot July 5.
The video has been viewed more than 695,000 times on You Tube. A hospital-bed photograph Ron Thomas took as his son lay in a coma shows a face grotesquely swollen and bloody, eyes blackened.
"They just beat the hell out of him," says Cathy Thomas, Kelly's mother, who counts six applications of a Taser-like weapon on her son in the video.
Thomas died five days later after being taken off life support.
Six Fullerton police officers have been placed on paid leave pending an investigation by the county district attorney, and the family has filed a legal claim against the city. A spokeswoman for the FBI's Los Angeles office, Ari Dekofsky, says agents are investigating "whether Kelly Thomas' civil rights have been violated."
Allegations of police brutality are hardly new, nor is videotaped evidence of it. Riots tore South Central Los Angeles in 1992 after four police officers were acquitted in the videotaped beating of motorist Rodney King.
That racially charged scene was a far cry from the one here, 25 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. This conservative, majority-white, Republican-leaning city of 135,000 is home to a 35,000-student campus of the California State University system.
Police Chief Michael Sellers has called Thomas' death "a tragedy for our community" but offered no description or sequence of events that evening. With two of the city's five council members calling for his resignation, Sellers last week took a medical leave.
Sgt. Andrew Goodrich, a police spokesman, said the department has nothing to say until District Attorney Tony Rackauckas makes a report.
The six officers have not been officially identified. An attorney for the officers, Michael Schwartz, did not return a call for comment.
Rackauckas said last week he has seen no evidence the officers intentionally tried to kill Thomas and that his investigators have not determined if the officers used excessive force.
An autopsy was inconclusive and awaits the results of toxicology tests, said Rackauckas' chief of staff, Susan Kang Schroeder.
Investigators have another video of the confrontation that has not been made public but has been viewed by the officers involved. It was captured by a surveillance camera controlled by Fullerton police. Schroeder said investigators are not making it public to avoid tainting witnesses' memories, should charges be filed.
Investigators have interviewed more than 80 witnesses, she said.
Still another video was taken by a security camera inside a county bus that pulled into the station as the confrontation unfolded. With audio, it shows boarding passengers describing to the driver what they saw, with several saying police beat, hogtied and shocked Thomas.
Ron Thomas, Kelly's father, a former investigator for the Orange County sheriff's department, wants murder charges filed. He said doctors showed him MRI scans revealing Kelly Thomas suffered two severe types of brain injury, one a lack of oxygen because his heart stopped, and the other blunt-force trauma.
"How can it be inconclusive when his face was so bashed in?" Thomas said.
Mayor Richard Jones, 78, a retired Air Force doctor and plastic surgeon, says he needs to know the cause of death.
"I will say these are gruesome injuries, but I've seen worse in people who survived," Jones said. "I don't know why he died."
Thomas' deadly encounter with police came after he was approached at the transit center by officers who were responding to a report of car break-ins.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness, an advocacy group, called on the city to provide better training in dealing with the mentally ill.
"There's not a family that I've ever spoken with that doesn't have similar fears — fears that their mentally ill family member is going to be confronted by police and misunderstood," says Steve Pitman, head of the group's local chapter.
There are protests every weekend at the police station, and city leaders' silence has sparked recall petitions.
"It's devastating for Fullerton," Councilwoman Sharon Quirk-Silva said. "This does not characterize Fullerton."
Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to For more information about reprints & permissions , visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to [email protected] . Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com |
As mentioned by Yasin, Github offers an endpoint where privileged users can recover bypass codes. These recovery codes were accessible for download as plaintext and had the content-type as text/plain , something like:
XXXXX-XXXXX
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
nosniff
valueOf
1048576!
Disclosure timeline
Acknowledgement
For more Javascript trickery follow me on Twitter.
What immediately caught my attention was that the format of the code forms (with some exceptions) a valid JavaScript file with lines in the format of, ten hex digits separated by a hyphen.This remember an old blog post of mine where I could possibly exfiltrate information from properties file formatted in a peculiar way. And another great blog post: Plain text considered harmful: A cross-domain exploit. So I thought I could do something similar here. It did not take long until I found the right approach.also in this case Github sets theto prevent browsers from interpreting this content as valid JavaScript or other file types. But while Firefox now added support forthe browser compatibility is still spotty (I am looking at you Safari!!).But without waiting any further HERE is the live POC. The nut of the trick is to define afunction for the corresponding variable:We are talking about enumerating/brute-forcing 5 hex digit variables that requires a considerable effort, but is far from be unfeasible. A rough calculation tells us that we need to define about 16^5 variables that are aboutnot all the codes are valid Javascript variable (e.g. the one starting with a number are not). For a random hexadecimal digit that's six out of sixteen, thus a 37.5% chance.Reported the issue via Hackerone.Github triaged the issue.Bounty awardedI would like to thank the Github security team, you guys rock, really!!Well that's all folks. |
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Late last year, a delegation of 45 Amish community members from the United States and Switzerland paid an unusual visit to Jerusalem to present to Israeli government and rabbinic leaders a declaration of repentance for the movement’s historic disregard for the Jewish people and its silence during the Holocaust.
Led by community elder Bishop Ben Girod, the group shed the traditional Amish rejection of modern transportation in order to make the visit and offer the statement of contrition and of support for modern Israel.
‘Christian Edition’: In your own narrative, what is the history of the Amish movement? How did it spring up and what were its main beliefs?
What is the history of the Amish movement’s interaction with the Jewish people of Europe and then America? Were your predecessors’ attitudes and theology philo- Semitic or adverse?
Some of the small Protestant movements which emigrated from Europe to America, such as the Pilgrims, identified with the Jewish people as a fellow persecuted minority and adopted the ancient Israelite concept of a covenant community. Was this the case with the Amish as well?
Did the Amish study their Bibles in Hebrew in that era, as did the Pilgrims?
Why did your branch of the Amish movement issue a declaration of repentance on your recent visit to Israel? When and why did your reconciliation efforts with the Jews start?
How important is this change in position to your particular following, and how is it being received in the wider Amish movement?
How pervasive is this awakening to biblical Zionism within the broader Anabaptist movement?
Does your support for Israel include recognition of the enduring nature of the land-promise to Abraham and his descendants?
Do you support Israel’s right to self-defense? If so, how does that reconcile with the traditional pacifism of the Amish movement?
Some in the Mennonite movement have veered away into very liberal positions and social activism, including pro-Palestinian advocacy and even dialoguing with figures like Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. What is your view on these trends?
Many mainline Protestant denominations are now divided along liberal and conservative, Evangelical wings, with the former usually being more pro-Palestinian and the latter more pro-Israel. Are the same dynamics at work in the Anabaptist movement?
How do you see the future of the Amish movement evolving?
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Handwritten in calligraphy on a special parchment, the declaration is considered by Girod the most important document issued by his Church in some 300 years.The Amish came out of a pietistic Protestant movement know as the Anabaptists (re-baptizers), which arose in central Europe during the Reformation and also included the Mennonites and Hutterites. These religious communities were persecuted by the larger established churches for their faith and their application of the Believer’s Baptism, rather than reliance on infant baptism.Many of their number emigrated to America in the 19th and 20th centuries due to its greater respect for religious liberties. Today there are an estimated 250,000 Amish in several rural communities scattered across the US, with some “New Order” Amish more amenable to modern technology while preserving the movement’s separated communal lifestyle and high moral standards.Born in Indiana in 1944, Girod grew up in a conservative Amish congregation near Bowling Green, Missouri. In 1981, he had a dramatic encounter with God which radically changed his life. He received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and began challenging his fellow Amish to open up to the mainstream Evangelical move of God in our day, including the growing phenomenon of Christian support for Israel.Girod has written of this experience in his book Baptized by Fire: The Gethsemane Way. But his message met resistance from more traditional elements within the Church. Today, he is an elder of an Amish community near Bonners Ferry, Idaho, where he also heads the ministry “Anabaptist Connections,” working to heal and reconcile historic wounds and divisions shaped from past traumas in the Amish and Mennonite movements.The declaration submitted by Girod and his fellow travelers asked forgiveness for the movement’s historic acceptance of Replacement theology and “for our collective sin of pride and selfishness by ignoring the plight of the Jewish people and the nation of Israel.”The document also states that the Amish will now “bless” and speak out strongly in support of Israel and the Jewish people.The Christian Edition recently asked Girod to further expand on his efforts to bring about a historic change in the Anabaptist movement’s approach to Israel.Girod: The Amish movement, beginning with Jacob Amman, had its emphasis on an outward mode of worship, a serious deviation from the original waters from which our early Anabaptist forefathers drank. Because we have lost the fire of evangelism, we have become the quiet in the land today. Even though we are internationally esteemed for our beautiful craftsmanship, we have become spiritually ineffective.To my knowledge, there has historically been no Amish-Jewish interactions. The Amish have, rooted in their belief system, a deep-seated anti-Jewish attitude which may not always be verbally expressed, but it will be found if one searches it out.No, not at all.No, the Amish never studied the Hebrew language.This has been a personal matter with me, after having encountered the Lord in 1981. I eventually discovered our serious error [regarding] our anti-Jewish attitudes, after which I carried for many years this burden, not knowing nor understanding why I was given this burden, especially after seeing I could not find any Amish nor Mennonites who would share my views.When I finally took this leap of faith, in January of 2010, to assemble a group of Anabaptists to go to Israel on a repentance mission, I was showered with Divine favor in not only having others prepare the connections for us in Israel and Jerusalem, but God opened my eyes to numerous individuals among both Amish and Mennonites who carried the same vision, some of whom had also carried this same burden.It is so important that without it the Amish nation will be at risk for God’s judgment on them. There is an awareness being spread abroad of our wrong Jewish attitudes; the scene is changing, albeit slowly.It has enough influence to inflame the outspoken anti-Jewish proponents, which only serves to give [this awakening] more fuel where many are taking a closer look at it.The two cannot be separated.The original Anabaptist position was nonresistance, not pacifism – a big difference when defined correctly. Yes, I support Israel’s right to defend itself.This is extremely disturbing, for it also reveals just how far we have fallen from God’s perspective of the whole issue concerning the promise coming through Abraham for our day.To deny the Jews is in essence denying the promise – something they [liberal Mennonites] have been blinded to, resulting in their arrogant support for the terrorists.Shockingly, yes!This question would require a book to fully answer it. Suffice it to say, however, that the future of the Amish, inclusive with the Mennonites, looks more promising than at any time in recent generations. An awareness of our fallen state blankets the whole Anabaptist nation these days, causing many to review our past and how it is affecting our actions today. This will now also include our Jewish connections.
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Bikes and trains are a great mix. A train can get you out into the coutryside for some downhill runs, or let you cycle at a destination too far to get to by bike in a day, saving a car trip. Our own velvet-voiced editor Dylan Tweney throws his taxi-yellow, easy to carry fixed-gear on the commuter train from time to time, and I would travel along with my non-biking friends in Berlin on the bike-friendly U-bahn.
But while San Francisco and Berlin both allow bikes (although I hear the new muni cars have less bike spaces than the old ones), neither is as impressive as the the Stuttgart to Degerloch Zahnradbahn in Germany. The open bike-car has taken bike-commuters along this short two kilometer (one and a quarter mile) stretch since 1983. Two kilometers? Are these people lazy?
Our German speaking readers will have noticed what is going on here: Zahnradbahn is a cog-driven railway, and this train climbs 200 meters (almost 2,200 yards) from station to station, a climb that is guaranteed to get you to work soaked with sweat. We can’t help thinking that the ride home must be a lot of fun, though.
Here in Barcelona, you can take your bikes on trains but unless you get lucky, you won’t find a goods-carriage to put them in (although the city’s trams do have parking inside). Do any of you readers from around the world have bike-friendly public transport where you live? Tell us about it in the comments.
Official page [City of Stuttgart via Cyclelicious] |
David Zalubowski/Associated Press
Former Milwaukee Bucks center Larry Sanders has been out of the NBA for less than a year, but he is already giving consideration to a potential return.
According to Shams Charania of The Vertical, the 27-year-old big man revealed Tuesday that a comeback could be in the cards once he gets his off-court life fully in order:
Once my art, music and passions off the court feel stable, I will look into coming back. I still love basketball. I want stability around me, and part of my mindset to leave was not to put all my eggs in one basket. I feel highly valuable on any team. There aren't a lot of people who can bring my game to a team. I still play basketball all the time, staying in shape. I will need to make sure the situation is right for me.
The Bucks bought out the remainder of Sanders' $33 million contract last season shortly after his second suspension for violating the NBA's anti-drug policy.
Sanders willingly walked away from the game of basketball, and he explained his decision in a video for The Players' Tribune:
Milwaukee selected Sanders with the No. 15 overall pick in the 2010 NBA draft out of VCU, and he seemed to be developing into one of the league's top defensive bigs.
His breakout season came in 2012-13 when he averaged 9.8 points, 9.5 rebounds and 2.8 blocks in just over 27 minutes per contest.
He appeared in just 50 games over the next two seasons, however, and his production dropped off to the tune of 7.3 points, 6.1 rebounds and 1.4 blocks per game in 27 appearances in 2014-15.
Sanders is a physical specimen at 6'11" and 235 pounds, and he will undoubtedly appeal to many teams as a big off the bench based on the potential he once flashed.
Per Steve Kyler of Basketball Insiders, Sanders is also aware that he must prove his commitment if he does ultimately catch on elsewhere:
Organizations may be skeptical based on how his time with the Bucks ended, but signing him could come with high rewards.
Sanders was trending toward Defensive Player of the Year consideration, and if he can come anywhere close to that form in his second NBA stint, he'll be well worth the risk.
Follow @MikeChiari on Twitter. |
The news cycles don't take breaks on the weekends anymore. Hollywood keeps reeling from the aftermath of the still worsening Harvey Weinstein scandal, and another accusation was leveled in a new direction on Sunday night.
The Wrap reported that “Star Trek: Discovery” actor Anthony Rapp on Sunday claimed that Kevin Spacey 'tried to seduce' him decades ago when he was a 14-year-old actor appearing on Broadway."
In an interview with BuzzFeed, Rapp said that a then-26-year-old Spacey invited him to a party in 1986 and "placed him on his bed, climbed on top of him and made a sexual advance" before Rapp was able to “squirm” away.
On Sunday night, Spacey said on his Twitter account, “I honestly do not remember the encounter … but if I did behave as he describes, I owe him the sincerest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior.”
Spacey decided to respond by coming out as gay, something that has been rumored for years.
The Twitter responses to this were generally harsh, and mostly not fit to share here. The gist is that he's closely guarded his sexuality for decades but decided to come out now to provide some sympathy cover. |
BEIJING (Reuters) - China’s foreign ministry on Monday urged the United States and North Korea to sit down with each other face-to-face and resolve their problems, as tension continues to climb on the Korean peninsula after North Korea’s latest rocket test.
While China was angered by the launch, it has also expressed concern at plans by Washington and Seoul to deploy an advanced U.S. missile defense system, saying it would impact upon China’s own security.
“The focus of the nuclear issue on the peninsula is between the United States and North Korea,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei told a daily news briefing.
“We urge the United States and North Korea to sit down and have communications and negotiations, to explore ways to resolve each other’s reasonable concerns and finally reach the goal we all want reached.”
North Korea launched a long-range rocket on Feb. 7 carrying what it called a satellite, drawing renewed international condemnation just weeks after it carried out a nuclear bomb test.
It said the launch was for peaceful purposes, but Seoul and Washington have said it violated United Nations Security Council resolutions because it used ballistic missile technology.
North Korea’s nuclear bomb test last month was also banned by a U.N. resolution.
China, while frustrated by North Korea and having signed up for numerous previous rounds of United Nations sanctions on its isolated neighbor, has said it does not believe sanctions are the way to resolve the problem and has urged a return to talks.
Numerous efforts to restart multilateral talks have failed since negotiations collapsed following the last round in 2008.
Chinese popular opinion has become increasingly fed up with North Korea, a country once a close diplomatic ally.
In an editorial on Monday, the official English-language China Daily called for new U.N. sanctions to “truly bite”.
“The threat of a nuclear-armed DPRK is more real than ever,” it said, using the North’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Hong repeated that North Korea would have to “pay a price” for its behavior.
Tension persists on the Korean peninsula.
Last Wednesday, South Korea suspended operations at the Kaesong industrial zone just inside North Korea, as punishment for the rocket launch and nuclear test.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (C) reacts as he watches a long range rocket launch in North Korea, in this photo released by Kyodo February 7, 2016. REUTERS/Kyodo
The North on Thursday called the action “a declaration of war” and expelled the South’s workers. Kaesong, which had operated for more than a decade, was the last venue for regular interaction between the divided Koreas.
Asked about the zone’s shutdown, Chinese spokesman Hong said the peninsula was in a “complex and sensitive” phase.
“We hope all sides can take steps to ameliorate the tense situation,” he said. |
slides: See the List: 25 Chain Supermarkets in RI with the Most Health Violations
Do you know how clean your supermarket is?
GoLocalProv reviewed hundreds of inspections conducted by the Rhode Island Department of Health over the past three years to come up with a list of the state's chain supermarkets with the most violations. SEE SLIDES BELOW
Who's Inspecting?
"We have 17 food inspectors at present and we will soon be interviewing to fill two vacancies. There are some inspectors who specialize in milk, shellfish and food processing inspections," said Joseph Wendelken with the Rhode Island Department of Health. "Most of the inspectors inspect retail food establishments (restaurants, markets, schools, caterers, etc.)."
Major Violations vs Minor
"The first 27 items on the inspection form would be considered major or critical violations," said Wendelken.
GoLocal ranked retailers for total number of violations found during inspections over the three years, and also included as a sub-category which of those constituted major violations.
Related Slideshow: 25 RI Supermarkets with the Highest Number of Health Violations - 2016
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New movements in style involve technology, animals and modernism
By Caroline Brown
Illustration by Eleanor Qu
What are the trends in fashion, art, and architecture? What is trending in social media? Our world has become obsessed with the term “trendy.” Trends are a forecast of progress and of what will come to cultural fruition in the near future.
During the seminaries at Eco-Fashion Week in late October, the marketing director from Worth Global Style Network (WGSN), Carly Stojsic, presented WGSN’s three macro-trends for autumn/winter 2014: “hack-tivate”, 21st Century Romance, and anthropomorphism. WGSN is a world-renowned trend forecasting company that was established in 1998. Its philosophy is to provide businesses with inspiration, change, and a forward-thinking mentality.Their clients are businesses from all types of sectors — including Apple, H&M and Nickelodeon — because WGSN provides trends that encompass society as a whole.
The hack-tivate macro-trend is derived from the necessary precedence of reclaiming products back to their organic state, and then repurposing and repairing them using technology. It is a socio-movement with positive emotions of energy, fun and enthusiasm. The movement focuses on the skeleton of a product. It exposes its insides, then creatively rebuilds it to have multi-functions using Google sourcing or apps. The attitude behind this movement is that if we can’t access or open what we own, then it does not belong to us.
Upcycling, reimagining, and sustainability are other important characteristics. The movement obtained a lot of momentum with the Fab Lab phenomenon, which originated at MIT with the name “Center of Bits and Atoms.” The Fab Lab has spread across the world to places like Norway, India and South Africa. A Fab Lab is a digital fabrication workshop with invention and social fabrication imbedded into its mission. They take apart technology to its core, and rebuild it for a more functional use.
[pullquote]The movement focuses on the skeleton of a product. It exposes its insides, then creatively rebuilds it to have multi-functions using Google sourcing or apps. The attitude behind this movement is that if we can’t access or open what we own, then it does not belong to us.[/pullquote]
The second trend that Stojsic spoke about was 21st Century Romance. This trend comes from the literary term “magic realism” and the cultural term meta-modernism. The former aspect plays with the concept of adding a touch of magic to everyday products, while the latter oscillates between contradictions. The difference between 21st Century Romance and the previous Romantic Period is the evolution of technology and how it has become deeply integrated into our lives. This techno-romantic period plays on this antithesis of nature versus technology to create a strong emotional reaction. A great example of this macro-trend is Erdem’s spring/summer 2013 collection. With the help of technology, he uses textile techniques like lucid layers of transparency organza or floral embroidery with a 3D effect to elevate his clothes into another dimension that creates a hypercraft.
The third macro-trend is anthropomorphism, products that take on human emotions and personalities, or animal characteristics. This trend focuses on a cross-fertilization of creature and comfort with an emphasis on touch. The revitalization of fur (e.g. fur iPhone cases) gives evidence to our need to humanize our products, but this trend evolves past that. It stresses a hybrid of technology, humans, and animals to signify honest and fun emotions. Mixing and matching high and low fashion will evolve into dressing to convey one singular emotion. The resurgence of animated graphic clothes, reflective of pop art mania, is an example of using an eclectic wardrobe to express a modern theme.
The trends presented at this seminar all had a unifying message: technology is not something that separates us, but something that has become a part of us. Whether it is through magic, contradictions, personification, or repurposing from an original organic state, one thing is clear: technology is no longer an accessory, but an extension of humanity. |
Golf is a completely unique sport. When we decided to write this book, we quickly realized that golf is virtually the only sport where the lowest score wins. It was this line of thinking that began to move us away from the conventional methods of improvement and allowed us to focus on what really counts: finding the most efficient way possible to shoot your lowest score.
Golf is also unique in just how many of its players — from Tiger Woods to the guy who can’t break 100 on his best days — are actively trying just about everything they can to improve. Yet, we feel that the tools available to them are limited. Though there are vast amounts of instructional videos, articles, and books, none have focused directly on lowering scores.
Until now. |
— The Miami Heat's LeBron James, the 2012-13 Kia NBA Most Valuable Player and winner of four of the previous five MVP awards, highlights the 2012-13 All-NBA First Team. James was the only player to receive all 119 First Team votes.
Joining James on the First Team are Kevin Durant of the Oklahoma City Thunder, Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs, Chris Paul of the Los Angeles Clippers, and Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers. For Bryant, his 11th First Team nod ties him with Hall of Famer Karl Malone for the most such selections. Bryant had been tied at 10 with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Elgin Baylor, Bob Cousy, Michael Jordan, Bob Pettit and Jerry West.
Pacing the Heat to a league-best and franchise-record 66-16 mark, James was the only player in the NBA to lead his team in scoring (26.8 ppg), rebounding (8.0 rpg) and assists (7.3 apg). He shot a career high from the field (.565) and from three-point range (.406). Additionally, James led the NBA in score differential (+9.5) and player impact estimate (22.1 percent), according to NBA.com/Stats, in the process becoming the youngest player in NBA history to post eight different 2,000-point seasons, and the youngest player to reach the 20,000-point plateau.
Bryant, an All-NBA First Team selection for the eighth straight season, scored 2,133 points, averaging 27.3 points. This season, he moved past Wilt Chamberlain for fourth on the NBA's all-time scoring list. Additionally, Bryant eclipsed the 2,000-point mark in a single season for the eighth time in his 17-year NBA career, in the process becoming just the fourth player in NBA history to score 2,000 points in a season at age 34 or older, joining Alex English, Jordan and Malone, each of whom did so twice.
Duncan earns his 10th First Team selection and first since 2006-07. In his 16th NBA campaign, Duncan averaged 17.8 points, 9.9 rebounds, 2.7 assists and 2.65 blocks, ranking third overall in the latter. He shot .502 from the floor and a career-best .817 from the free throw line.
In earning his fourth All-NBA First Team selection, Durant averaged 28.1 points while shooting .510 from the field, .416 from distance and .905 from the free throw line. With those percentages, Durant became just the second player in NBA history (Larry Bird; 1986-87) to average 28-plus points while going .500/.400/.900 during the year. Additionally, Durant's field goal and free throw percentages represented career bests.
Paul, an All-NBA First Team selection for the third time, had a league-best 4.26 assist-to-turnover ratio; he had 13 games in which he dished at least 11 assists while committing no more than one turnover. The 2013 All-Star Game MVP, Paul averaged 16.9 points, ranked second in assists with 9.7 apg and paced the league in steals with 2.41 spg.
The All-NBA Second Team consists of guards Tony Parker of the Spurs and Russell Westbrook of the Thunder, forwards Carmelo Anthony of the New York Knicks and Blake Griffin of the Clippers, and center Marc Gasol of the Memphis Grizzlies.
The All-NBA Third Team includes the Houston Rockets' James Harden and the Heat's Dwyane Wade at guard, the Indiana Pacers' Paul George and the Golden State Warriors' David Lee at forward, and the Lakers' Dwight Howard at center.
The All-NBA Teams were chosen by a panel of 119 sportswriters and broadcasters throughout the United States and Canada. The media voted for All-NBA First, Second and Third Teams by position with points awarded on a 5-3-1 basis. Below are the results of the voting for the 2012-13 All-NBA Teams, with First Team votes in parentheses. The balloting was tabulated by the independent accounting firm of Ernst & Young LLP.
Position All-NBA Team Points 2012-13 ALL NBA FIRST TEAM Forward LeBron James, Miami (119) 595 Forward Kevin Durant, Oklahoma City (102) 555 Center Tim Duncan, San Antonio (45) 392 Guard Kobe Bryant, L.A. Lakers (91) 521 Guard Chris Paul, L.A. Clippers (97) 537 2012-13 ALL-NBA SECOND TEAM Forward Carmelo Anthony, New York (24) 397 Forward Blake Griffin, L.A. Clippers 132 Center Marc Gasol, Memphis (38) 295 Guard Tony Parker, San Antonio (16) 273 Guard Russell Westbrook, Oklahoma City (20) 306 2012-13 ALL-NBA THIRD TEAM Forward David Lee, Golden State 79 Forward Paul George, Indiana 73 Center Dwight Howard, L.A. Lakers (17) 203 Guard Dwyane Wade, Miami (3) 145 Guard James Harden, Houston (5) 253
Other players receiving votes, with point totals: Brook Lopez, Brooklyn, 132 (7 First Team votes); Stephen Curry, Golden State, 72; LaMarcus Aldridge, Portland, 62; Chris Bosh, Miami, 59 (4); Joakim Noah, Chicago, 56 (3); Zach Randolph, Memphis, 45; Al Horford, Atlanta, 31 (2); Paul Pierce, Boston, 24; Al Jefferson, Utah, 20 (1); Tyson Chandler, New York, 19 (1); Roy Hibbert, Indiana, 9; Luol Deng, Chicago, 8; Kevin Garnett, Boston, 8; Ty Lawson, Denver, 8; Josh Smith, Atlanta, 7; Deron Williams, Brooklyn, 6; Pau Gasol, LA Lakers, 4; Serge Ibaka, Oklahoma City, 4; Omer Asik, Houston, 3; Kenneth Faried, Denver, 3; Raymond Felton, New York, 3; Kyrie Irving, Cleveland, 3; Carlos Boozer, Chicago, 2; Mike Conley, Memphis, 2; David West, Indiana, 2; Rudy Gay, Toronto, 1; J.J. Hickson, Portland, 1; Andre Iguodala, Denver, 1; Dirk Nowitzki, Dallas, 1; Nikola Pekovic, Minnesota, 1; Rajon Rondo, Boston, 1; Nikola Vucevic, Orlando, 1. |
Dual OC GeForce GTX 1070 Graphics Card is rated 5.0 out of 5 by 9 .
Rated 5 out of 5 by Anonymous from Would buy this everytime Amazing card, I've been using it since November and using it to power two monitors at 144hz and 60hz and they've been running perfectly with all ultra settings in Overwatch. It could also run Doom respectably on Epic settings. Love it. Recommend it.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Anonymous from Very good card. Lower Power Upgrade Awesome I have an older Alenware Aurora R4 and was thinking about upgrading due to the gtx 590 holding me back. I considered some 980Ti & other options, but went with the new gtx 1070 due to its better benchmarks & half power consumption. Runs much quieter & I'm playing Fallout 4 on max settings after pairing it with a gsync enabled monitor. The pci express 2.0 mobo doesn't appear to be holding me back at all. Much better decision to go with the upgraded gtx 1070 gpu and new monitor vs a $2k rebuild!!!
Rated 5 out of 5 by William from Awesome and reliable card I bought this card for a bit cheaper than what it is now when reviewing it, but it definitely is the best bang for the buck card. Plays all the games I need to with great FPS while at the same time not overheating and being obnoxiously loud. Many 1070s suffer from having an annoying coil whine but this ASUS version doesn't seem to have that problem. It even looks very aesthetically pleasing in your case with a nice sleek white design.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Irwan from Great card!! I'm doing 4K gaming, and this video card can easily handle full 4K resolution @ 60Hz. I also did SteamVR performance test, and it says my machine now is very high performance for VR. So far this card is very stable and I don't have any problem with fan noise.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Britler from great card, cheap in price high in quality. got this for my new build, was perfect for matching my colors, one thing to keep in mind, it has no backplate, so you see the green card on the top, but i dont mind!
Rated 5 out of 5 by Anonymous from Best graphics card out there( for the price) Runs every game 1440 p ultra 80 fps+ awesome and runs super cool
Rated 5 out of 5 by Anonymous from Great performance the $$$ Would def recommend this product with out a doubt |
Emily Lakdawalla • August 10, 2016
Yutu is NOT dead (probably)
Despite what you may have read on other websites last week, China's Yutu lunar rover is probably still functional on the surface of the Moon. Yutu's still-functional status was confirmed by an official of the Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (SASTIND) to Andrew Jones, a space journalist in Finland. Jones wrote to me in an email this morning:
A call to the media centre of the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (SASTIND) reveals that Yutu "did not die but is in hibernation". It just stopped detecting work on July 28. Being 'dead', they say, means losing touch with the ground and all its signals gone, but "Yutu still has signals". "According to procedures, Yutu will wake up this month, but whether it can continue to work will be determined by the conditions then. Maybe it will give us a surprise."
If I understand this correctly, Yutu's current hibernation (inactivity during lunar night) is therefore no different than any of the previous 32 lunar nights that it has survived. To be clear, just surviving is not scientifically useful; Yutu has been incapable of any motion since 2014, and none of its science instruments work anymore. But it's not dead yet, according to Chinese space officials! It could still wake up in the lunar morning and communicate with the ground again, as it has done 33 times before.
What happened -- how did the premature news of Yutu's death spread through English-language media? The stories circulated last week, while I was on vacation. When I returned to work yesterday, I sat down to write a short blog post on the demise of Yutu. But when I read the Google-translated Chinese-language sources (like this one on China Spaceflight), I couldn't find the date of last contact with Yutu, a detail I really wanted in my story. That seemed odd to me, because if there's one detail that typically survives machine translations, it's calendar dates. The best English-language media source on Yutu's death, this article on Spaceflight Now, said that the death date was July 28, the very beginning of the lunar night -- but how could mission controllers have confirmed Yutu's death after sunset, at a time when the rover would ordinarily have been incommunicative due to hibernation anyway? The source of that information seems to have been a post on Weibo, China's Twitter. Confused, I quit writing and sent an email to Andrew, who regularly reports on Chinese space news, asking him if he'd noticed the last-communication date in any Chinese-language websites. He began to dig and came up empty. Thus his call to the SASTIND media center this morning -- and the confirmation that Yutu is not known to be dead, just hibernating as usual, as is the lander.
Andrew wrote an article for the gbtimes correcting the spread of the misinformation about Yutu: "So it turns out China's Yutu Moon rover could still be alive." Check it out, and don't be surprised if Yutu wakes up again next week!
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Emily Lakdawalla Senior Editor and Planetary Evangelist for The Planetary Society
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MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough continued to rip President Trump on Friday’s show, saying that Russians are lucky that POTUS is “stupid enough” to pick up their fake news.
“We’re obsessed on how the Russians have hacked, how the Russians have tried to impact this, how the Russians have tried to impact the White House,” Scarborough said. “We’re really just playing into their hands.”
Former FBI Agent Clint Watts — who testified Thursday during the Senate Intel Committee’s hearing on Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election — joined the MSNBC morning show to discuss the situation.
Also Read: Trump Defends Michael Flynn, Blames Media and Democrats for 'Witch Hunt'
“Most of this for the Russians is just dumb luck, that they have stumbled upon a presidential candidate… that was stupid enough to pick up their fake news,” Scarborough said.
Watts replied: “It is exactly the point of Russian active measures. It’s to sow confusion inside your enemy so they’re fighting within themselves, so that you can maneuver on them. They have done that so well that we’re doing it for them still.”
Scarborough said the operation Russia allegedly launched against America isn’t “complex.” Watts agreed, saying it’s similar to what Russian officials impose on their own populace.
Check out the video above. |
Ishwar Dayal, a marginal farmer of Bhartana in Etawah of Uttar Pradesh, was in for a shock when he was handed over by district officials a certificate saying his outstanding farm loan amounting to 19 paise has been waived.
He says he couldn’t believe that such a measly amount has been waived. Equally stumped were dozens of other farmers handed out similar certificates at a programme held in the district headquarters of Etawah on Monday. Rama Nand got Rs 1.79 that he owed to the bank waived, while the certificate that Munni Lal Bholi got stated that his outstanding loan of Rs 2 had been waived.
Hundreds of farmers – big and small – have similarly been left bewildered as the Uttar Pradesh government headed by chief minister Yogi Adityanath follows up on its poll promise of waving farm loans up to Rs 1 lakh to ease agriculture distress in the state’s rural hinterland.
Promised even by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during an election rally in Kannauj district in February, some 86 lakh farmers across the state are expected to benefit under the scheme.
But as district after district holds such programmes to hand out loan waiver certificates to the beneficiaries, there have been shockers and genuine relief in equal measure. On Sunday, some farmers at Hamirpur had loans waived from Rs 10 to Rs 215. The next day, it was the turn of many farmers in Etawah to be taken aback.
At a programme on Monday, some 7,000 farmers were handed over certificates notifying the amount of their loans waived. According to official data, some 50 farmers got less than Rs 100 of their outstanding loans waived while the benefit for 200 of them was less than Rs 1,000 each.
“I was shocked to see the certificate of waiver of Rs 10.37 given to me in Hamirpur. I fall in the category of small and marginal farmer... I was expecting that the government would clear Rs 1 lakh against my outstanding of Rs 1.55 lakh on Kisan credit card,” said Munni Lal of Maudaha.
Reports of farmers expressing dismay poured in also from areas such as Jalaun, Kannauj, Mahoba and Farrukhabad.
Opposition parties have seized upon the opportunity to term the loan waiver exercise a fiasco. “It is laughable,” alleged Juhie Singh of the Samajwadi Party. Other opposition leaders insinuated that measly amounts were being waived just to inflate the number of beneficiaries and make the government look good.
State agricultural minister Surya Pratap Sahi, however, insisted the government was only living up to its promise. “Where is the surprise if the government has distributed the certificate to a farmer waiving Rs 100 or even less if that is the amount the farmer actually owed to the bank?” he asked. “After all, we cannot make his dues bigger or smaller”.
“There are also farmers who have had Rs 90,000 and more of their loans waived,” Sahi told HT.
Rajesh Gupta, the additional director of agriculture, also found nothing amiss in the meagre amounts being waived. “There are many farmers who paid their dues to banks in 2016-17, but some amount, which in many cases has been found to be less than Re 1, remained unpaid due to various reasons, including some mistake in interest calculation. Now we have waived only that amount and issued certificates accordingly,” he explained.
First Published: Sep 13, 2017 07:25 IST |
MUMBAI: The BJP on Monday said that it was confident about relegating Shiv Sena to the sidelines in the BMC.“The next mayor of Mumbai would be from the BJP,” Manoj Kotak, BJP group leader in the BMC, said.The Shiv Sena in the BMC house is already under immense pressure, fearing loss of its hold over the cash-rich corporation if the BJP withdraws support in a tit-for-tat move following the Shiv Sena decision not to be a part of the BJP government led by Devendra Fadnavis in the state.The option before the Shiv Sena then would be to get in to a partnership with the MNS to reach the halfway mark in the house of 226.“There would be pressure on us if the Shiv Sena sticks to its stand to not support the BJP in the state assembly,” a senior Shiv Sena corporator said. “The MNS can be an option but it would be difficult to handle it and the pressure would remain till the next corporation election.”A rift between the Shiv Sena and the BJP is likely to affect the regular business of the civic body.Although there is no provision in the law to dissolve the BMC, the state can interfere in its proceedings.“According to the MMC Act, 1888, Section 520 B and C, the state government can interrupt the BMC business if it finds any financial mismanagement or misuse of public funds which hamper public works,” a senior official from the municipal secretary department said. “The state can dissolve it by taking the advantage of the same clause.”Kotak said he planned to soon meet the chief minister without the mayor to submit a memorandum on the city and its development projects.Kotak said the BJP mayor would have executive power. “We will implement mayor-in-council system in the BMC,” Kotak said. |
Image caption Mikaeel Ibrahim (centre) was met at Manchester Prison by Mizanur Rahman (left) and Abdul Muhid (right)
The head of the prison and probation service says there is a small but "significant risk" of Muslim prisoners becoming radicalised. Panorama spoke to one convict who was met by Islamic extremists when he was released from prison.
Michael Coe went into prison as a gangster and left as Mikaeel Ibrahim, a convert to Islam.
In 2006 he had been jailed for eight years after threatening police officers with a shotgun while on parole for a knifepoint carjacking.
Ibrahim converted to Islam later that year after meeting al-Qaeda terrorist Dhiren Barot, who was jailed for life for plotting to detonate limousines packed with gas canisters.
Barot gave him the invitation to Islam, the Dawah. "Within that week the Dawah that he gave me, it hit me where no-one else's Dawah hit me," Ibrahim said.
But what attracted this 33-year-old east Londoner to Islam?
"Even though I wasn't Muslim, I always hung around with Muslims and after a little time it rubs off on you... in the end I decided this is the way forward and my life has been much better since," he explained.
'Love of brotherhood'
BBC Panorama met him in December 2013 when he was released from Manchester Prison into the arms of two convicted extremists - Abdul Muhid and Mizanur Rahman.
"Obviously the love of the brotherhood is large, they come to get me, they come to bring me back 300-odd miles and I love them for the sake of Allah," Ibrahim explained.
Image caption Ibrahim appeared to be acting as a minder for Anjem Choudary at a protest
Muhid and Rahman were jailed following the 2006 Danish embassy protests in London against a cartoonist accused of belittling the Prophet Mohammad.
Waiting outside the prison, Rahman told us he was not worried about what the authorities might think about the fact they had come to meet Ibrahim.
"The police are on the witch-hunts so they will have an attitude of: 'What are they up to?' Forget about the fact that he needs to get from Manchester to London somehow," he said.
Panorama: Find out more Image copyright bbc From Jail to Jihad? BBC One, Monday 12 May at 20:30 BST Then available in the UK on the BBC iPlayer
Inmates who are identified as a potential threat because of their extreme views are usually met by the police or probation service when they are released on licence, but this did not apply to Ibrahim as he had completed his entire sentence.
Four days after leaving prison Ibrahim took part in a protest at Brick Lane in east London against the sale of alcohol, organised by the men who met him from prison.
They follow radical preacher Anjem Choudary - a one-time key player of the radical group al-Muhajiroun, until it was banned under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.
Ibrahim has never been on a government de-radicalisation programme in or outside prison and does not think he needs to.
"I follow the rules of Islam to a 'T'. What the other people who have ulterior motives deem as extreme is their business. For me, I'm not an extremist," he said.
'Powerless'
Panorama also spoke to Jordan Horner, who has taken the Islamic name Jamaal Uddin. He was jailed in December 2013 for trying to bring Sharia Law to the streets of east London. He said that he had been instrumental in converting other prisoners inside.
Image caption Jordan Horner, known as Jamaal Uddin, has been given a landmark antisocial behaviour order
"The prison officers witnessed people become Muslim and in front of them I was giving them what we call Shahada, an invitation and acceptance of Islam.
"They was becoming Muslim in front of the prison officers - and they [the officers] felt sort of powerless. They said I was trying to divide Muslims from non-Muslims, trying to get them to follow an extreme version of Islam."
After his release in February 2014, he became the first person to be placed on a five-year, landmark antisocial behaviour order, intended to stop him promoting extreme versions of Islam.
Over the last 10 years, the number of Muslims in prisons in England and Wales has doubled to nearly 12,000, Ministry of Justice figures show. The vast majority are moderate. However, there are around 100 Islamist terrorists in prison.
The Prison Service claims that the radicalisation of Muslim inmates is rare. But when it happens it can be serious.
'Protect the public'
Michael Spurr, chief executive of the National Offender Management Service, said: "What concerns me most is that there is a significant risk, given the fact that we manage some very dangerous people. And our job is to minimise that risk becoming a reality - so minimise the risk that somebody in prison becomes radicalised and commits a terrorist offence.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Michael Spurr told BBC Panorama that his job was to minimise the risk of prisoners becoming radicalised
"Our job is to protect the public. That's what we do every day and what worries me is whenever we fail to do that, in a whole range of different potential scenarios people could be hurt."
So what are the authorities doing? One tactic is to transfer inmates in order to stop them spreading their views and establishing a hierarchy.
There are de-radicalisation programmes but they are voluntary. The Prison Service also appoints specially-vetted imams into prisons.
Whitemoor high-security prison in Cambridgeshire has the highest proportion of Muslim inmates, more than 40%.
Governor Damian Evans believes it would be wrong to view them through the lens of extremism.
"It is very important that we recognise that the vast majority of practice of Islam within prison is fundamentally a good thing. Islam can very often provide good opportunities for personal change and development," he told the BBC.
The prison houses about 10 convicted terrorists and three times as many with extremist views, but Mr Evans says his staff are trained to gather intelligence and form good relationships with prisoners.
"When that happens we tend to pick up on what might be going on. We are generally good at identifying risk and acting on it," he said.
Panorama: From Jail to Jihad? BBC One, Monday 12 May April at 20:30 BST and then available in the UK on the BBC iPlayer. |
By Keith Idec
Most boxing fans want to see Terence Crawford move up to welterweight to fight Errol Spence Jr. or Keith Thurman.
It is more likely, of course, for Spence and Thurman to fight each other first. Thurman (28-0, 22 KOs, 1 NC), the WBA/WBC welterweight champion from Clearwater, Florida, is recovering from elbow surgery and won’t return to the ring until sometime early in 2018.
Spence (22-0, 19 KOs), the IBF welterweight champion, figures to fight at least once before a bout between him and Thurman could be made for some time next year. If they agree to fight each other, Crawford would favor Thurman over the powerful southpaw from DeSoto, Texas.
Crawford admitted that it’s tough to pick a winner, but told fans during a recent reddit.com question-and-answer session he would pick Thurman to win.
“That’s a tough one,” Crawford said. “I’m leaning a little more with Thurman than I am with Errol, being that I seen him show more in numerous fights. In the fight with Kell Brook, I think Keith Thurman would have won that same fight as Errol Spence. If Errol would have fought the same fight against Thurman, I think Thurman would have won that fight.”
The 29-year-old Crawford (31-0, 22 KOs), the WBC/WBO super lightweight champion, will return to the ring Saturday night. The Omaha, Nebraska, native will face undefeated IBF/WBA champion Julius Indongo (22-0, 11 KOs) in a 12-round, 140-pound title unification fight at Pinnacle Bank Arena in Lincoln, Nebraska.
ESPN will televise the Crawford-Indongo fight, which will crown the first fully unified champion in boxing since former middleweight champion Jermain Taylor owned the IBF, WBA, WBC and WBO 160-pound titles in 2005. Crawford is an 11-1 favorite to beat Namibia’s Indongo, a 34-year-old southpaw who in his past two fights has knocked off former IBF/IBO champion Eduard Troyanovsky (26-1, 23 KOs) and ex-WBA champ Ricky Burns (41-6-1, 14 KOs) in their respective home countries of Russia and Scotland.
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing. |
Danny Griffiths On What It Felt Like Falling 20-Stories At Shipstern Bluff
360fly | Wave Of The Week
Video by Dave Otto - See full clip here
On Thursday 16 June, Danny Griffiths suited up in the near freezing conditions and headed out on skis and boats to Shipstern Bluff. It's one of the world's most mutinous slab surfing locations. Mostly, you'll watch people drop in and stumble on one or more of the many liquid steps that draw up on themselves to form smaller-big-waves. They form just a couple of feet above a rock slab and boulders, and below more water than you could ever imagine gravity allowing to rise above sea level. It's hard to make it out the channel but when you do and look back, it's all worth it - they say.
We spoke to Griffiths today about that day, that fall and getting straight back out there.
Coastalwatch: That wave Danny, it was a crazy wipeout and looked nearly unsurfable at all, why did you guys decide to go out?
Danny Griffiths: We had a big east coast swell the week before last and we were keeping our eye on the southern swell that was moving around. We usually don’t get very big swell periods – nothing this high at 18-19 seconds. What we did know was that it would be really steppie, drawing a lot of water off the reef, more than usual when we surf out there. You could tell it was going to be big because there were waves coming up the boat ramp, it’s a good sign for the size before you get right out to the Bluff.
SEE ALSO: What Was The One Thing Kobi Abberton Said That Made Red Bull Cape Fear Go Ahead?
We arrived out there with a group of skis and boats in the freezing cold and watched the first set descend out of the darkness but it was hard to gauge the real size of the wave faces it without anyone on them. Mikey Brennan, my tow-partner and I just got out there, no hesitation. Right off the bat, Mikey dropped into one of the biggest waves I’ve seen out there in ten years and held on until the spit out. It was a huge wave and full of energy.
The low tide was 11am so we got as many rides in as we could before it dropped right out, and waited around for about an hour before we could get back into it. With each hour that the tide fills in, the more surfable it gets.
DG: Then I took that fall.
CW: One of the heaviest falls, up there with the best!
DG: It doesn’t help that your hands and feet get so cold and numb out there to the point where you just can’t feel them. My back bootie had a hole in it too, so my toes were stiff. The cold affects you every time, you’ve just got to jump up on the board and do a few loops to get the feeling back in your toes.
There were five or six steps and it was crazy beast. I knew it was big. It was a big black wall.
We had borrowed a ski and it was a bit slower than we were used to. I tried to generate as much speed as I could to get to the bottom. The wave drew up twice as fast as what they usually do and I tried to jumped down the biggest step. I bogged, on that step. I didn’t see it until it was a meter in front of me. So in the moment, I just tried to bust through the back to get a breath before I went over because I knew I was going over.
The funny thing is, everyone keeps asking, why didn’t you do this and that? I just laugh. It happens so fast. You use a split second to decide.
(VIDEO ABOVE: Right back into it, this was the keeper!)
CW: It’s pretty easy to comment from the warmth of your couch or office and you’re watching it in slow-mo.
DG: You see the steps drawing up closer and closer – the wave your jumping down onto isn’t flat either. You have the opportunity to jump the entrance step and you usually have enough time to line up the next one and work out where you’re going to hit it and land. The problem on Thursday was the steps were popping up everywhere drawing more waves in front of you. It was the gnarliest I’ve seen Shippies.
CW: The motion of going over the falls at that size, what was it like?
DG: As soon as I started pulling away from the step it was time to get out of there. I thought I could get that breath and then go over the falls. There was no way I was going to get through the back of that wave.
I started doing a really slow back cartwheel. I curled up in a safety ball and then just fell out of, what felt like a 20 story building. I couldn’t hold that safety ball, my arms and legs went everywhere. There was so much power and energy in that wave. I think I remember kelp brushing past me and my board hit me a couple of times but I couldn’t tell whether it was my board or the boulders.
SEE ALSO: Lizzie Stokely Gets Barrelled At Shipstern Bluff
I could hear the thunder of the wave all around me and my ears started ringing. I came up after I inflated the vest. My wetty was unzipped and my vest was unbuckled, nearly completely undressed.
CW: Then, just like that you were back out there. Not even a scratch?
DG: Ha, yeah. I had a ten-minute rest in the boat. I wasn’t rattled and scared but my body was aching. I couldn’t leave on that note, I just wanted to get a good one. I did end up making a wave after that, as people kept going down and out. Everyone that surfed got wiped out, it’s just so addictive.
CW: So how did it rate all up from your experience?
DG: In 10 years surfing shippies, I’d say that first one Mikey got was one of the biggest I’ve ever seen since surfing out there. It was definitely in the top 10!
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In the early 1990s, Android head honcho Andy Rubin worked as a low-level Apple engineer. And that, according Apple's latest ITC filing, is grounds enough for them to potentially block Android in the US.
It sounds far-fetched; the bulk of Android's foundational work was completed in the mid-to-late 90s, when Rubin was at General Magic and Danger (the company Google eventually bought, primarily for the operating system). But while extreme, the reasoning may not be as crazy as it sounds, according to FOSS Patents:
Apple now asserts—in a filing with the ITC, which means Apple has a legal obligation to make truthful representations of fact—that Rubin's superiors at Apple were the inventors of that realtime API patent and he worked for them at the very time they made that invention. He worked as a low-level engineer while the inventors were senior people. It's possible that he then contributed to the implementation of the claimed invention.
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The implications of this—other than that Apple is being even more aggressive than previously imagined in its suits against HTC and other Android OEMs—are that if Apple were to sue Google directly over this particular patent, the could conceivably get an injunction. Against the entire platform. As well as lots, and lots, and lots, of money.
That's another case somewhere further down the line, if it happens at all. For now, just know that Apple's bringing in the heavy legal artillery—and they might just have a point. [FOSS Patents] |
A mother and her two teenage daughters were shot to death after five masked men broke into their house in the small town of Chilas in Gilgit, Pakistan in what was reported to be an honor killing.
The girls, ages 15 and 16, were reportedly targeted on June 24, 2013 killing over a mobile video of them enjoying rain in their garden, which had been circulating locally and was taken as an affront to the family's honor.
Authorities allege that the killer was the girls’ stepbrother Khutore who was enraged at watching this video and enlisted the help of four of his friends to restore, in his view, his family's honor. The friends have since been captured and confessed to their crimes, but Khutore is still at large.
According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan‘s annual report, honor killings remain “the most consistent and abhorrent form of violence against women in Pakistan.” In 2012, 913 women were killed in the name of their family's honor, including 99 children, the report says.
Shafiqul Hassan Siddiqui dissected the reasons behind honor killing in Pakistan on Dunya blogs:
It is an outcome of vengeance. 95% focused on women. One of the family members (mostly a man), with the consent of other family members, kills and sentences the woman on few basis. For the whole family this becomes a moment of pride when they sacrifice their own blood because due to her they earned dishonor. There are many reasons that are considered as the main and basic causes behind the honor killing.
Reacting to the recent killing, New York Times Pakistan Bureau Chief Declan Walsh (@declanwalsh) tweeted:
@declanwalsh: utter madness – two girls and mother killed in northern Pakistan over video showing them enjoying the rain. http://beta.dawn.com/news/1020576
Lubna Khan (@Lubnagigyani), a blogger on gender issues, commented on the killings:
@Lubnagigyani: CRIME of the heinous kind. Honourable humans do not KILL under any circumstances-egoistic machoism being the last
Political blogger Zeesh (@zeesh2) took issue with the term “honor killings”:
@zeesh2: honor killing is a misnomer – misdirected emotions- if they really have honor they need to kill themselves not others
Gedrosia (@gedrosian), a Twitter user from Balochistan province, added that leaked mobile videos have had dire consequences for female students in conservative areas too:
@gedrosian: there are a number of cases in Balochistan too where college/school photos were leaked. and girls were taken out of colleges
Writing a few days before this most recent killing, The Future summed up the solution to ending honor killings: |
Amid Monday's excitement, it was discovered that the blue-and-green ocean wave wallpaper image Apple released to promote its upcoming OS X Mavericks for Mac is fitted precisely for a 27-inch Retina Thunderbolt Display, or even a 27-inch Retina iMac.
The new Mac Pro will drive three 4K-resolution displays. Apple does not currently offer a screen of that caliber resolution.
The 5,120-by-2,880-pixel image hosted on Apple's website is sized at exactly twice the width and height of the 2,560 by 1,440 pixels found in today's 27-inch iMac and 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt display. The Retina-caliber wallpaper was first noted on Twitter by Web designer Marvin Scharle.Apple first hinted at Retina display support for its MacBook Pro lineup in 2011, when a developer preview of OS X Lion included a high-resolution wallpaper at 3,200 by 2,000 pixels. But Apple didn't release its first Retina display MacBook Pro until mid-2012, over a year later It's possible that Apple could bring a Retina-caliber resolution to its standalone Thunderbolt Display later this year, alongside the debut of a new Mac Pro. When the company offered a sneak peek at its new cylindrical Mac Pro on Monday, it boasted that the high-end machine will be powerful enough to drive three 4K-resolution displays but Apple does not currently offer any screens with a 4K resolution.The 4K Ultra high definition television standard has a resolution of 3,840 by 2,160 pixels, giving it an aspect ratio of 16 to 9. The Digital Cinema Initiatives 4K resolution is slightly wider, at 4,096 by 2,160 pixels.Anticipation of a next-generation Thunderbolt Display has swirled since Apple redesigned its iMac lineup with a thinner profile in late 2012. The company's standalone big-screen displays have traditionally employed the same technology as its big-screen iMac, but such an update has not yet come to its Thunderbolt Display.Speculation about a 27-inch Retina display from Apple also comes as new rumors published this week by hit-or-miss publication DigiTimes claim that Apple is planning to release a new iMac in the second half of calendar 2013. Citing Taiwan-based industry supply chain sources, the report said that Apple is looking for alternatives to LG Display, as that company had low yields for iMac panels when the all-in-one desktop was redesigned in late 2012.That report made no mention of a possible Retina display for new iMacs, but those machines could also be a potential candidate for a high-resolution upgrade, based on the double-pixel wallpaper found in Apple's first OS X Mavericks beta. |
Welcome back to Halflight ZONE!!
In recent months the project was silent but not gone, we did not update but we where busy working on the game . An apology if I do not update as often , I will try to keep you informed on relevant things we just did not want with info and no screenshots. 3 months ago we were ready to show progress but then Unity 5 was released and we decided to upgrade and update our objects , textures and code , assets, etc. it take us time to rebuild everything we had but the end result was worth it.
There is no demo of what we been working on, we want to release a well made and polished demo in 4 to 5 months so you can experience our vision of the game ( but we will keep you updated on ther stuff) .We are proud of what we are building and the new direction on the gameplay and game mechanic.
Updates.
So, we have done many thinks visually. For starter we changed from B&W to color, the game at first was going to be a 50s tv show simulator but then it will not appeal to many so we will add this as a filter that you can turn on/off.
As you can see the environment is going looking good in Unity 5, every building can be visited. This is a screenshot of the commercial area. Every building will have interiors and its own set of puzzles.
Every texture in the world will have that "hand painted look" as you can see in the image, there still some filters to make it look more like a living art.
I think thats all i have to share with you today. We dont want to spoil the gameplay or anything until the demo but be sure to stay tune to our site we will release better updates and more screen images of what we are doing.
Also welcome Ekincan Tas as our lead programmer. We are a small team of two people but we are making our progress. Stay tune! |
ROME (Reuters) - Italy anxiously awaits the reaction of financial markets Monday to the appointment of former European Commissioner Mario Monti to head a technocratic government, hoping it will end a disastrous week for the euro zone’s third largest economy.
In a frenetic weekend of political activity, Italy’s parliament approved a package of economic reforms agreed with European leaders, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi resigned and President Giorgio Napolitano appointed Monti, a respected international figure as head of a new government.
The whole hurried process, much faster than is normal, was designed to calm markets which last week pushed Italy’s borrowing costs to the levels that forced Portugal, Greece and Ireland to seek bailouts.
The first test will come Monday when the Treasury offers up to 3 billion euros worth of 5-year BTP bonds in an auction that will show how far fragile confidence in Italy’s battered public finances has been restored.
Because the euro zone cannot afford the much bigger bailout that would be needed to save its third largest economy, the crisis threatened a European financial meltdown.
Napolitano said after nominating Monti that there must be an extraordinary effort to address the crisis and Italy could not wait for elections to solve political paralysis. He said Italy must recover the trust of investors and European institutions.
Monti said he would work urgently to form a government and to pull Italy out of the crisis. The new government is thought likely to be a tight cabinet of around 12 technocrats and to be appointed within days.
“I intend to fulfil this task with a great sense of responsibility in the service of our country. In a moment of particular difficulty for Italy, in a turbulent situation for Europe and the world, the country needs to meet the challenge,” Monti said after his nomination.
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Italy’s borrowing costs soared to way above a “red line” of 7 percent last week but markets calmed once it became clear that Berlusconi would go and Monti take his place.
Newly appointed Prime Minister Mario Monti arrives to speak to reporters following a talk with Italian President Giorgio Napolitano at the Quirinale palace in Rome November 13, 2011. Italy's head of state begins talks on Sunday to appoint an emergency government to succeed outgoing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and handle a crisis that has brought the euro zone's third largest economy to the brink of financial disaster. REUTERS/Quirinale Presidential Office/Handout
Berlusconi went on television Sunday and said he had resigned out of a sense of responsibility and to protect Italy from speculators. He expressed sadness that thousands of protesters yelling insults including “clown” had jeered him when he went to Napolitano’s palace to hand in his resignation.
Monti’s government will try to push through reforms agreed by Berlusconi with euro zone leaders to cut Italy’s massive debt and revive a chronically stagnant economy. But he could face opposition from right and left to some of the more unpopular measures on pensions and the labor market.
There are clear signs that he will face problems, with Angelino Alfano, secretary of Berlusconi’s PDL party, saying there was “huge opposition” among its members despite promising its support to the new prime minister.
The devolutionist Northern League, Berlusconi’s partner in the center-right coalition, also said Monti would face an uphill battle in getting parliamentary support for the reforms from a disparate group of parties supporting the technocratic government.
Italy’s political turmoil was very much centred around the flamboyant and scandal-plagued figure of Berlusconi and thousands of demonstrators partied in the streets of Rome on Saturday after he resigned.
The normally ebullient media magnate cut a forlorn figure as he stared from his car, looking pale and drawn, when he left Napolitano’s palace.
Slideshow (11 Images)
Top European Union officials and German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed signs of an end to the weeks of uncertainty, with Merkel saying the approval of a reform package in parliament Saturday was “heartening.”
“I hope that confidence in Italy is restored, which is crucial for a return to calm throughout the euro zone,” she said ahead of a party conference in Leipzig.
Berlusconi, one of Italy’s richest men, had dominated the country since bursting onto the political scene in 1994.
The next election is not due until 2013 but there are widespread predictions Monti will not last until then, making way for polls once he passes the reforms promised to Europe. |
NASA is looking to capitalize on the growing smartwatch trend, and it needs your help to do so. The space agency is hosting a contest with Freelancer.com, challenging participants to design the best smartwatch app that could be used by astronauts on the International Space Station. The best app designer will receive $1,500.
Overall, NASA wants an app that will help keep the astronauts a little more organized — as well as one that will keep them safe. The app needs a timer and a way to easily display the crew's calendars and agendas for each day; it also needs to send them warnings or alerts in case they are in danger, perhaps if they need to find shelter from orbital debris. Additionally the app should let astronauts know when the ISS is in a position to communicate with ground control.
NASA is turning more to crowdsourcing methods to help come up with innovative designs
Those interested in designing the app should make it compatible with the Samsung Gear 2 (sorry Apple Watch) and present their ideas as pictures "highlighting the unique design’s navigation, interaction, layout, look, feel, etc." There are less than four weeks remaining in the contest, and only six people have joined so far, so the competition is still thin. But with 16 million users registered at Freelancer.com, that pool probably will grow.
NASA is turning more to crowdsourcing methods to help come up with innovative designs and engineering ideas for its space missions. In May NASA announced its "Journey to Mars Challenge," which asked the general public to come up with ways to keep Martian astronauts safe while needing limited resupplies from Earth. The space agency also teamed up with Freelancer.com in July, asking for new tool designs to be used by Robonaut 2 — the humanoid robot on the ISS. |
President Trump and first lady Melania Trump arrive for the Red Cross Ball at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. (Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)
President Trump might have plans to make his Palm Beach resort Mar-a-Lago his “winter White House.” But on Saturday night, the ballroom of the private club looked more like a royal court.
“Vienna to Versailles” was the theme of the black-tie Red Cross Ball that the president and first lady Melania Trump attended — he in a tuxedo, she in a slinky fuchsia gown — greeted by sign-carrying protesters proclaiming themselves to be “Nasty Women” with plans to “Resist.”
Things were far friendlier in the ballroom, with the president’s pals and others who just played nice for the evening Palm Beach-style, meandering from the poolside cocktails to the dance floor. Bewigged servers and entertainers wore gowns and get-ups that looked like castoffs from Marie Antoinette and Co.’s closets, per social media evidence and a spy or two in the room (the annual fundraiser, a highlight of the town’s social calendar, was oddly closed to the media this year).
Crystal candelabras, opulent palm tree centerpieces and gold-toned place settings contributed to the welcome-to-my-chateau vibe.
The Trumps took it all in from the head table, where the president sat with his wife on one side and commerce secretary nominee (and Palm Beach denizen) Wilbur Ross on the other. In remarks before taking a spin on the dance floor, Trump praised both the Red Cross and ball co-chair J.J. Cafaro, a mall developer convicted in 2002 of bribing former congressman Jim Traficant and in 2010 for not disclosing donations to his daughter’s failed congressional campaign.
According to one attendee, Trump stayed for hours and seemed to be reveling in the glow of acceptance of a Palm Beach crowd that had once viewed the nouveau riche developer with skepticism. Standing at a dais festooned with the presidential seal, with a glittering gold curtain behind him, Trump looked proud of the trappings of the presidency as he surveyed a room fit for a king (the Donald J. Trump ballroom, after all, was constructed to look like Versailles Hall of Mirrors).
And true to form, he saved his highest praise for, well, himself. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the room looking more beautiful — perhaps at our wedding — right, Melania?” he said. “We’re very proud of Mar-a-Lago and all the money we’ve raised in this room and in this wonderful house.”
Mr Sunshine Eddy Shipek Red Cross Ball Mar A lago Palm Beach Winter White House President Donald Trump A post shared by Eddy Shipek (@eddyshipek) on Feb 4, 2017 at 6:25pm PST
Mr Sunshine Eddy Shipek with Veronica at the Red Cross Ball Mar A lago Palm Beach Winter White House President Donald Trump 561-693-8636 A post shared by Eddy Shipek (@eddyshipek) on Feb 4, 2017 at 7:29pm PST |
Like Central America and the Caribbean has been since the league’s inception, MLS is eyeing a new pool of talent in West Africa that can certainly be a lucrative spot for finding young talent.
In what might be called as the dawn of MLS 4.0, the league has quickly transitioned from signing big name international stars on the backside of their careers to now scouring for young, rising talent across the globe. In particular, the growing trend in MLS seems to be finding talent in nation’s such as Ghana and Cameroon and now more recently in Nigeria. Nations that all have a strong track record of producing talent at the international level.
Now with the league growing in terms of having a true reserves system in place with the USL, teenage talent from Africa can come and develop into first-team talent, all while playing in a competitive league that can be a springboard for a move to Europe. The recent success of Anatole Abang, on loan in Romania from the New York Red Bulls as well as Montreal Impact defender Ambrose Oyongo’s recent signing in France proves that the method is working.
And their success is now leading to more African talent filtering over.
A source tells Metro that Ibrahim Usman is in talks of joining the Seattle Sounders and likely their USL team. A couple weeks ago, the Red Bulls lined up a deal for 18-year old attacker Jerome Philip, a player who is on the radar of his nation’s U-20 national team.
Another source tells Metro that another Nigerian teenager, Muhammed Saleh, will join reigning MLS Cup champions Toronto FC and will start his career with the club in the USL.
It is a formula that has worked well in other places.
Throughout clubs in the English Premier League, France’s Ligue 1 and Germany Bundesliga, top-end talent from West Africa has successfully integrated into top clubs for two decades. Now it appears that MLS is at a point where it can truly latch on to this trend.
When the league started in 1996, players from Jamaica and countries such as El Salvador and Guatemala came to MLS and immediately strengthened the league. In recent years, Honduras and Costa Rica – the Ticos might have as many as 10 players in MLS on their World Cup roster this summer – have all had heavy representation in MLS.
If similar gains can be found in West Africa, then the league can truly develop a reputation for developing and selling talent abroad. |
While rumors of the iPhone 6s having a smaller battery than its predecessor emerged about a month ago, Apple today made no mention of the new device’s exact power capacity.
However, a 3D Touch promotional video released by the company seems to confirm that the 6s will indeed have a smaller battery than the iPhone 6. Specifically, GSMArena discovered that the video shows a shot of the battery marked “1715 mAh”, which is less than the iPhone 6’s 1810 mAh battery.
The extra space gained from reducing the device’s battery is most likely being used to fit new, larger components like the Taptic Engine and Force Touch-enabled display.
It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean the device will provide fewer hours of usage. In fact, Apple’s specs on the 6s show that the device will have the exact same talk, Internet browsing, and video playback time as its predecessor. This is most likely due to increased power efficiency in the new phone.
Although we’ll have to wait for a teardown of the new phone to confirm the lower capacity, this video is a good indicator that the 6s will have a smaller 1715 mAh battery. |
USS Reasoner (FF-1063) was a Knox-class frigate of the United States Navy, named in honor of 1st Lt. Frank S. Reasoner, awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously in the Vietnam War.
Construction [ edit ]
Reasoner was laid down 6 January 1969, by Lockheed Shipbuilding and Construction Company, Seattle, Washington, and launched 1 August 1970, cosponsored by Mrs. James C. Curry and Mrs. Robert Svinger. Reasoner was commissioned 31 July 1971, Cmdr. Francisco Velazquez-Suarez, USN, commanding. Her hull number, originally DE-1063, was changed in 1975.
Design and description [ edit ]
The Knox-class design was derived from the Brooke-class frigate, modified to extend range and without a long-range missile system. The ships had an overall length of 438 feet (133.5 m), a beam of 47 feet (14.3 m) and a draft of 25 feet (7.6 m). They displaced 4,066 long tons (4,131 t) at full load. Their crew consisted of 13 officers and 211 enlisted men.[1]
The warships were equipped with one Westinghouse geared steam turbine that drove the single propeller shaft. The turbine was designed to produce 35,000 shaft horsepower (26,000 kW), using steam provided by two C-E boilers, to reach the designed speed of 27 knots (50 km/h; 31 mph). The Knox class had a range of 4,500 nautical miles (8,300 km; 5,200 mi) at a speed of 20 knots (37 km/h; 23 mph).[2]
The Knox-class ships were armed with a 5"/54 caliber Mark 42 gun forward and a single 3"/50 caliber gun aft. They mounted an eight-round ASROC launcher between the 5-inch (127 mm) gun and the bridge. Close-range anti-submarine defense was provided by two twin 12.75-inch (324 mm) Mk 32 torpedo tubes. The ships were equipped with a torpedo-carrying DASH drone helicopter; its telescoping hangar and landing pad were positioned amidships aft of the mack. Beginning in the 1970s, the DASH was replaced by a SH-2 Seasprite LAMPS I helicopter and the hangar and landing deck were accordingly enlarged. Most ships also had the 3-inch (76 mm) gun replaced by an eight-cell BPDMS missile launcher in the early 1970s.[3]
Service history [ edit ]
Reasoner first deployed with HSL 31 "Lamps" SH2D in 1973 to Southeast Asia and took part in Operation End Sweep (the removal of mines in Haiphong Harbor). Reasoner was decommissioned on 28 August 1993, and subsequently leased to Turkey, where the ship was recommissioned as Kocatepe. On 22 February 2002, she was finally purchased by Turkey. On 4 May 2005, the ship was used as a target and sunk in the Mediterranean Sea.[4]
In popular culture [ edit ]
Awards and decorations [ edit ]
Joint Meritorious Unit Award
Navy Unit Commendation
Navy Meritorious Unit Commendation
Navy "E" Ribbon (2)
Navy Expeditionary Medal
National Defense Service Medal w/service star
Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal w/bronze star
Southwest Asia Service Medal w/bronze star
Humanitarian Service Medal w/bronze star
Navy Sea Service Deployment Ribbon
Kuwait Liberation Medal (Kuwait)
[5]
Notes [ edit ] |
Paradigm Change in Mexico: Independent Candidates
Andrés de la Peña Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 16, 2017
Independent candidates, “El Bronco”, María de Jesús, and Álvarez Icasa (last 3), picture by alternativo.mx
In the year 2000, Mexico went through what was widely called, by the new government and the population alike, a “democratic transition.” Mexico had evolved from an autocratic government into a single party system. Years later, Mexico developed a dominant party system where true opposition was possible, even though it had no chance of winning an election. In the year 2000, president Vicente Fox, from the “Partido de Acción Nacional,” won an election and kicked the antique “Partido Revolucionario Institucional” from government.
The PRI appeared under a different name and in a different era of Mexican history, but it had managed to survive in a “soft” authoritarian fashion for 75 years and 14 presidencies. Members from the PRI have been responsible for some of the most malicious acts of corruption and violence that have taken place in Mexico, including student massacres in 1968 and 2014. The paradigm change of an extant opposition government shook Mexico and forever changed Mexican politics. Multiple effects can be attributed to the death of the of the single-party regime: added transparency and a reinforced freedom of information policy, “free-for-all” corruption instead of the previous vertical structure, massive shifts in administration, and the liberalization of journalism, among other positive and negative consequences.
One of the effects of the “democratic transition” was a constant change in electoral dynamics. First, political alliances were formally introduced, and from the presidential elections of 2012 onwards, Mexican parties started making coalitions for votes. This should have been a straightforward move towards democracy, but in practice it was very far away from that. So far, there have only been two notable alliances worthy of national attention: PRI-PVEM-PANAL, and the most recent one (2017), PAN-MC-PRD.
While this alliance system seemed like a great opportunity at first, the only two alliances born from it have been extremely controversial. The first alliance has been widely regarded as an attempt by the PRI to maintain a sliver of control over Mexico after the democratic transition kicked them out of government. The PRI-PV-PANAL alliance groups two small “opposition” parties that worked to split opposition vote during the 2012 presidential election, leading, in part to the PRI victory. On the other hand, the PAN-MC-PRD alliance includes parties that have been traditionally opposed in their most basic values ─like political liberalism versus political interventionism─ and are also seen as trying to expand their political control through an alliance.
This is how a theoretically democratic idea is twisted under the toxic political environment in Mexico. The alliance system has produced little democratic progress, as the only notable alliances are very clearly motivated by internal party dynamics instead of an actual ideological push or an attempt at wider representation of interests. This time around, the new flavor being introduced in the presidential campaign is that of independent candidacies, a controversial topic and a very, very good idea on paper. Independent candidates were introduced in 2015 and produced two notable candidates: Pedro Kumamoto and Jaime “El Bronco” Rodríguez Calderón.
Pedro Kumamoto, independent candidate, picture by radio UdeG (Guadalajara University Radio)
Pedro Kumamoto is a higher-class student from the state of Jalisco running an independent political Civil Society Association called “Wikipolitica”. He ran for the post of local deputy in Jalisco’s congress and gathered widespread support from people frustrated with a seemingly static government. His platform ─ Wikipolítica is not a party ─ introduced two major changes in Jalisco’s law: the “3 de 3” law, which forces public workers to issue a property, fiscal, and personal interests (friends, people they have business links with, etc.) statement, and the “sin voto no hay dinero” law, a groundbreaking change in campaign financing that looks to replace the old public financing system (where any party with a minimum amount of voters gets a set amount of funds from the government) with a new system, where parties get funding in proportion to the amount of voters they attract.
Jaime “El Bronco” Rodríguez, independent candidate an governor of Nuevo León, picture by El Universal
Jaime Rodríguez, “El Bronco”, is an ex-PRI politician who ran for governor of Nuevo León, one of the most economically-important states in Mexico and host to the city of Monterrey. Widely known for his “rural” manners and his upfront speech, “El Bronco” has gained a huge following as well as a very hefty group of detractors during his mandate. Rodríguez’s controversies include multiple prison mutinies in his state resulting in inmate and police officer deaths as well as infuriatingly sexist and backwards comments in public press hearings. Ultimately, his government has had a 33% approval rating, only 5 points below the national average. Many would say he is a positive change, and many others would contend he is the same thing.
Pedro Kumamoto and Jaime Rodríguez represented the face of independent candidates up until now. One of them was a career politician while the other one was barely old enough to legally hold a seat in congress, a diverse range to be sure. Today, however, the 2018 presidential elections are looking much more complex with the introduction of the PAN-MC-PRD alliance, the continuity of the PRI-PV-PANAL alliance, the strengthening of radical and populist anti-establishment candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador with his party, MORENA, and the introduction of 40 independent candidates.
These 40 presidential candidates include journalists, career politicians and indigenous assembly representatives. The period for announcing intentions to run for president ended on October, and independent candidates have until February to make their candidacy official by gathering 850,000 signatures and a support of at least 1% across a minimum of 17 states.
Relative to other countries, this makes it very tough for a new independent to even run for office in Mexico. But even with a bar so high, multiple notable independents have already stepped up to the plate.
There are various notable candidates: Jaime “El Bronco” Rodríguez; Pedro Ferriz de Con, a renowned opposition journalist; Margarita Zavala, leader of one of the 3 feuding factions within the PAN (she left after it was made clear that Ricardo Anaya, the president of the party, would be the one to run for presidency instead of her); Armando Ríos Píter, PRD ex-militant, independent senator and political critic; María “Marichuy” de Jesús, extremely notable indigenous representative and member of a nation-wide network of indigenous populations looking to get involved in institutional politics as well as socialist socio-economic ventures.
Carlos Mimenza, independent candidate and real estate vendor, picture by Quintana Roo Hoy.
One notable candidate is Carlos Mimenza: a controversial entrepreneur and real estate mogul in southern Mexico. He is known for initiating an anti-corruption campaign and denouncing ex-governor Roberto Borje ─whom he has close ties to─ for corruption. After Borje left, Mimenza supported the candidacy of Joaquín González. Some years later, when González was denounced for corruption as well, Mimenza claimed to be opposed to his government and “disappointed” after González “fooled him into supporting his candidacy.”
I had the chance to attend a conference by Mimenza on a university campus, where he brought what, in eyes of the public, was a faux assistant to ask him a loaded question at the end of the conference to pose him as a hero. The assistant in question, a middle-aged man who didn’t appear to be a part of the student body or the faculty, stood up when the questions were over and Mimenza was leaving the stage to shout a question: he asked if he was not “afraid he would be killed due to his brave efforts to battle corruption.” Mimenza answered with what appeared to be a manufactured response “I am not going to stand by while Mexico is bled out.” Speaking to event organizers and assistants after the fact, none recognized the man.
Emilio Álvarez Icasa, independent candidate an member of Ahora, picture by El Español
One notable candidate is Carlos Mimenza: a controversial entrepreneur and real estate mogul in southern Mexico. He is known for initiating an anti-corruption campaign and denouncing ex-governor Roberto Borje ─whom he has close ties to─ for corruption. After Borje left, Mimenza supported the candidacy of Joaquín González. Some years later, when González was denounced for corruption as well, Mimenza claimed to be opposed to his government and “disappointed” after González “fooled him into supporting his candidacy.”
I had the chance to attend a conference by Mimenza on a university campus, where he brought what, in eyes of the public, was a faux assistant to ask him a loaded question at the end of the conference to pose him as a hero. The assistant in question, a middle-aged man who didn’t appear to be a part of the student body or the faculty, stood up when the questions were over and Mimenza was leaving the stage to shout a question: he asked if he was not “afraid he would be killed due to his brave efforts to battle corruption.” Mimenza answered with what appeared to be a manufactured response “I am not going to stand by while Mexico is bled out.” Speaking to event organizers and assistants after the fact, none recognized the man. |
Chicago’s Sprout Social is a company that we have covered a host of times on The Next Web, usually in relation to its roots in the Midwest, but not always. We’ve been bullish on its product, social media management, and its niche, enterprise management of conversation and brand, since we first heard of it.
Today the company has released the second full version of its product. While the first generation of Sprout Social, through its various updates was capable, it lacked enough that it didn’t quite feel ‘full.’ The company seems to have thought along the same lines, and has put much effort into solving the issue, by expanding its feature set, and working on mobile applications.
The second generation product includes support for teams and agencies to manage a variety of accounts, while maintaining a single workflow to prevent confusion. I suspect that this was a feature driven by request, given that it was sorely missing in the earlier editions of Sprout.
During my testing of Sprout Social since its initial release, I found the ability to customize the experience based upon who was logged in to be missing. Not every person managing a brand needs to see all the information, and thus focus could be an issue for a brand that dealt with a high flow of total updates. Sprout has tackled that by creating what it calls “personalized dashboards” for various sorts of users to lower confusion.
To summarily glance at what else is new, Sprout Social has introduced assignment queues, a white label option, a native iPhone application, and group reporting.
The features of this upgrade to Sprout Social seem to fulfill the same role that the Mango update to Windows Phone platform acted out quite recently. By that we mean that Sprout Social now feels built to complete what one could call its initial objectives. It’s taken years, investment, and a massive staffing increase, but Sprout has now met its starting potential.
That is not to say that we don’t take exception with some of Sprout’s product choices. Honestly, in the current world, to release an iOS application and ignore Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone 7 is to miss the point [The company did inform TNW that its Android application was hit with delays, but is forthcoming]. While white label support has the potential to expand the company’s revenue, we wonder if Sprout is not fundamentally undercharging for its product. In its press release the company announced “more flexible pricing and plans,” something that we are usually quite the fan of. But with plans starting at low rates, from which is deducted the white label commission, you start to contemplate if the company is not leaving more money than is wise on the table. Long live fat value and undercharging, but there is a line that once crossed only leads to slack bottom lines.
On the whole, Sprout Social has put out a strong update. Yes, things in the new set of features could be tweaked, but for a company on the move, and likely eyeing its runway, it has done well. We’ll continue to keep an eye on the company in the future.
Read next: The online sharing habits of men vs. women [Infographic] |
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Liverpool prospect Rhian Brewster trained with the first team at Melwood today as he ended another successful week in his development.
The 17-year-old prospect was the star man for Liverpool U23s on Monday as they came from behind for a 3-1 away win at Leicester.
Brewster grabbed the equaliser before claiming two assists for Matty Virtue and Harry Wilson as Mick Garrity's men consolidated their third place in the Premier League 2 table.
Brewster only made his first start for the U18s earlier this year but has made rapid progress.
The departure of Brooks Lennon on loan back to America has freed up a regular role with the U23s and the youngster is steadily making an impact at the higher level.
He has continued to impress for England all season as well while he was able to fire in a hat-trick at Melwood in a behind closed doors first-team friendly with Accrington Stanley. |
Washington is planning to table another bill for a regime change in Damascus at United Nations. Its contents are not much different than what were vetoed by both Russia and China recently. One cannot blame Barack Obama administration to keep trying to bring aboard a united UN Security Council vote to exploit it for a regime change as it did in Libya with the help of two veto-powers, France and Britain. Washington is not in the position to bypass UNSC as it did in 2003 and invaded Iraq.
Pro-USrael former prime minister of Lebanon, Sa’ad Hariri, spilled the beans in an interview with a British reporter last month that Washington wants to establish a coalition government in Damascus – consisting of Muslim Brotherhood and anti-Bashar Ba’athist leaders. The new regime will not only establish diplomatic relation with the Zionist entity but also distance itself from Hizbullah, Hamas and Iran. Thus making it easier for USrael to attack the Islamic Republic.
To begin with, the US, Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia has introduced the religious ‘sectarian card’ in Syria which has been home to one of the most tolerant religious society in the Arab world – pitting Sunni majority against Shia, Christian and secularist/Socialist Ba’athist minorities. Washington and Qatar is arming the anti-government rebels as they did in Libya.
However, Syria is not an easy toast like Libya, Afghanistan or Iraq. But the Jewish Lobby believes that a pro-Israel regime in Damascus is the only way to get rid of Iranian menace. Zionist Jew Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a propaganda arm of Israel Lobby (AIPAC) said recently:
“Syria is the soft underbelly of Iran, Tehran’s most important ally, conduit for arms and cash to terrorists. A unique confluence of American moral purpose and America’s strategic interest argue for intervention in Syria. It’s time to start arming the Free Syrian Army (rebels)”.
One wonder why the US should turn against one of its Arab ally which helped US by sending its forces in Lebanon to protect both the US-Israel interests in late 1980s?
In addition to Russian support – Bashar al-Assad regime is supported by Iran, Iraq, Hizbullah and Hamas. Syria itself has 270,000-men strong army and airforce equipped with tanks, missiles and fighter-planes. All together, could make Israeli Jewish lives hell.
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#BlackLivesMatter Protest Leader Gets 8 Years in Prison for Torching QuikTrip
In late December 2014 St. Louis County prosecutor’s office filed charges against 19 year-old Ferguson protester Joshua Williams for setting fire to a QuikTrip in Berkeley, Missouri.
Arsonist Joshua Williams was wearing a red sweatshirt when he was filmed setting fire to the Berkeley QuikTrip.
Here is Williams torching the QuikTrip in his red sweatshirt.
Williams was a popular figure at the ferguson protests.
Joshua Williams (left center) and Nicholas Austin Jackson shout at St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson (left) as he tries to give a presentation during the second meeting of the Ferguson Commission in St. Louis on Monday, Dec. 8, 2014. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
In fact, MSNBC ran an entire exposé on the frequent Ferguson peaceful protester Joshua Williams.
As GotNews reported, Joshua Williams spoke at Al Sharpton’s rally in Washington DC in December.
Sharpton flew him to Washington for the rally… in his red sweatshirt.
Joshua Williams from Ferguson was one of the top speakers at the rally.
Joshua’s speech was posted on CSPAN.
Black Lives Matter protest leader Joshua Williams was sentenced to 13 years total in prison for torching and burglarizing the Berkeley, Missouri QuikTrip.
KMOV.com
KMOV reported:
A young man was sentenced to 13 years in prison in connection to the 2014 destruction of a QuikTrip in Berkeley.
Joshua Williams, 19, was sentenced to eight years for arson and five years for burglary in the case, according to authorities.
Police say Williams ignited the fire at the convenience drug store during protests after the death of 18-year-old Antonio Martin. The 18-year-old was shot and killed by a Berkeley police officer. |
Listen To The Full Episode:
Why are women catty to each other? What makes us be ugly to the very women we call friends? Why do we try to pull each other down at work? Why do we think we are fashion critics and hair experts? What makes us give a mean aside to our friend at the coffee shop about a woman passing by in an outfit we think is horrible? Who are we to judge? But more importantly, why are we passing judgment and being catty?
Toinette and Angela dig deep during this show to uncover why women hold other women back with insults, jealousy and cattiness. With every insult or cruel remark, we damage the equality movement. Our words can change the life of the person who receives them. With one casual, catty comment we could change the course of a person’s life without even knowing it. Your words could deepen wounds that have already been settled in for years, which in turn, could make someone give up on a dream or a passion, because she decided she wasn’t good enough…because of your catty words.
Learn from Angela and Toni about how we as women should be bringing each other up, to reach the stars. There is room for all of us to shine so bright. We will never be able to be the women we were meant to be without the support of other women.
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Defending the conglomerate's stock after recent declines, Macquarie Securities analyst Tim Nollen also cites such catalysts as the new football season and next year's launch of Shanghai Disneyland.
Macquarie Securities analyst Tim Nollen on Monday published a bullish report on Walt Disney and its stock, citing such catalysts as the new football season, the new Star Wars film and next year's launch of the Shanghai Disneyland theme park.
"We continue to view Disney as one of the very best overall franchises in media," he said in the report entitled "Defending Disney: Catalysts in Store," wherein he also reiterated his "outperform" rating on the stock. "After a 16 percent fall in the shares in the past four weeks [versus the S&P 500 down 5 percent], we think investors now have an interesting entry point to a stock with three major near-term catalysts."
The first catalyst is the return of football season, which he argued "could help restore some confidence in ESPN." The second is Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which Nollen said "could provide an immediate catalyst this week with the Sept. 4 global consumer product launch, leading into the film release Dec. 18." He estimated that new consumer products tied to the film franchise could bring in revenue of $5 billion in the first year.
The third catalyst he cited is the Shanghai park opening in spring 2016. Nollen updated his revenue expectations for Star Wars and Shanghai, leading him to raise his earnings per share estimates.
Discussing the new Star Wars movie in more detail, Nollen said it "could generate $5 billion in consumer merchandise sales in its first year of release, assuming it does better than Cars 2’s $3 billion." After the revenue for retail and merchandise partners, he estimated that "this would easily net Disney about $500 million in licensing and retail revenue."
Disney will be unveiling Star Wars: The Force Awakens consumer products over an 18-hour period via a YouTube special, "announcing and un-boxing a new product roughly once every hour from a total of 15 different global locations, featuring online talent from its Maker Studios" starting Wednesday evening, Nollen detailed. Sales will officially start at midnight at select Disney stores, as well as certain stores operated by other major retailers.
"It’s not clear how to model this as we can’t name a similar such event," the analyst said. "But looking at another successful Disney franchise, Cars 2 sold more than $2.8 billion worth of merchandise in its first year alone in 2011, and the original Cars movie sold approximately $10 billion worth of merchandise in its first five years of release. Taking into account the strength of the Star Wars franchise, which has altogether sold over $20 billion worth of licensed goods in its lifetime, we estimate that Star Wars: The Force Awakens could perhaps bring in merchandise sales of $5 billion in the first year."
His assumptions predict a higher than usual licensing fee for toys and products, however. "Disney does not disclose its licensed revenue share per product and/or brand. However, in fiscal year 2014, Disney earned $2.54 billion in licensing and publishing revenue, as compared to the $45.2 billion total retail sales of Disney’s licensed products," representing a licensing fee of approximately 6 percent, the analyst wrote. "Given the Star Wars brand, we estimate that Disney may be able to earn a higher licensing fee, perhaps closer to 10 percent."
But he lauded the conglomerate for its planned reveal of the Star Wars merchandise. "In true Disney fashion, the company is making this a media event with an 18-hour unveiling of products on YouTube," Nollen wrote. "We also estimate the movie itself should gross about $2 billion at the global box office, netting nearly $1.2 billion in revenue for the company." This would put the film at No. 3 in the all-time box-office ranking behind Avatar and Titanic.
Discussing fall football returns, Nollen highlighted: "The college football season starts in full force this coming weekend, and NFL Monday Night Football begins Sept. 14. The start of football season last year led to a 2 percent increase in live-same day ratings for ESPN in September."
The analyst explained: "We are perhaps less bearish than some on cord-cutting, based on work we have done on offsets to the traditional bundle from skinny bundles and potential direct-to-consumer OTT offerings. We certainly don’t think ESPN will look to go direct-to-consumer anytime soon, but it could, and would probably be one of the very few basic cable networks to succeed in doing so."
Nollen, in his report, also estimated that the Shanghai park could add $300 million in revenue in fiscal year 2016 and break even within two years, "whereafter it contributes a small but rising percentage to earnings per share." And, as the analyst suggested, "Shanghai could also open doors to establish a TV licensing or network deal with [Chinese state broadcaster] CCTV." |
Samsung launched a trio of wearable devices at the Mobile World Congress earlier this week: Two smartwatches called the Gear 2 and the Gear 2 Neo and a fitness tracker called the Gear Fit. The Tizen-based devices come with more functionality and a new design. While Samsung touted a lot of hardware details, it failed to mention when these devices would be hitting store shelves. Not to worry though, as we have on good authority that the Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo and Gear Fit will be available from week 14 of 2014. That indicates a likely global rollout that begins on or after March 31, 2014.
While our insider source was able to give us the availability date, there was no mention of the price these devices will carry. It has been rumored that Samsung was looking to price the Gear 2 at a lower price point to the original Galaxy Gear, but there isn’t any official confirmation of the same. According to the timeline provided to us, the three devices will be unveiled a week before the Galaxy S5 becomes available globally.
Hardware wise, there isn’t as much of a difference from the Galaxy Gear to the Gear 2. The screen size, resolution, size of RAM and internal memory are all the same. There is a faster 1 GHz CPU on the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo, but otherwise hardware isn’t a differentiator. The Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo differ in the fact that the Gear 2 comes with a 2 MP camera that is embedded onto the watch face. The Gear Fit on the other hand is a fitness tracker that comes with a curved AMOLED screen and a bevy of sensors that include real-time heart monitor that tracks your vital information on the go. All three wearable devices garnered quite a lot of attention, with the Gear Fit winning the “Best Mobile Device” accolade by the GSMA yesterday. What are your thoughts on the new line of wearables? Are you interested in getting any of the devices? Let us know below. |
Over the weekend, Nike released a new ad starring Cleveland Cavaliers forward LeBron James, women’s tennis great Serena Williams and a star-studded list of others promoting equality in life and sports.
Joining James and Williams in the ad that aired during Sunday’s Grammy’s are Golden State Warriors forward Kevin Durant, pro women’s soccer player Megan Rapinoe, New York Giants wide receiver Victor Cruz, Olympian hurdler Dalilah Muhammad, Olympic gymnast Gabby Douglas, actor Michael B. Jordan and singer Alicia Keys.
Jordan narrated the commercial, saying, “Is this the land history promised? Here, within these lines. On this concrete court. This patch of turf. Here, you’re defined by your actions — not your looks or beliefs. Equality should have no boundaries. The bonds we find here should run past these lines. Opportunity should not discriminate. The ball should bounce the same for everyone. Worth should outshine color. If we can be equals here …”
“We can be equals everywhere,” LeBron finished.
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent |
Within the lifetimes of most children alive today, bioenhancement is likely to become a basic feature of human society. Personalised pharmaceuticals will enable us to modify our bodies and minds in powerful and precise ways, with far fewer side-effects than modern drugs. New brain-machine interfaces will improve our memory and cognition, extend our senses, and confer direct control over an array of semi-intelligent gadgets. Genetic and epigenetic modification will allow us to change our physical appearance and capabilities, as well as to tweak some of the more intangible aspects of our being such as emotion, creativity or sociability.
Do you find these ideas disquieting? One of the more insidious effects of such self-editing is that it will blur the boundary between persons and things. The reason is simple: bioenhancements are products. They require machines, chemicals, tools and techniques that develop over time. They become obsolete after a number of years. They are likely to be available for purchase on the open market. Some will be better than others, and more expensive than others. Some – like cars or jewellery or your house – will confer a greater or lesser degree of prestige.
But if we’re not careful, we ignore the fact that these ‘products’ are altering key aspects of a human being’s selfhood. Without realising it, we drift into an instrumental mode of thought, which would reduce a person to the sum total of her modified or unmodified traits. We could lose sight of the individual’s intrinsic value and dignity, and start comparing people as if they were used vehicles in a car lot.
The problem of dehumanisation isn’t new, as the bleak history of war, colonialism and slavery attests. But as a result of the intensification of consumer capitalism in recent decades, the need to compare, to perform, to continually ratchet up our achievements, are pressures that continue to define everyday life for many people in the developed world. Advertising, entertainment and social media encourage us to strive to be thinner, better, smarter, cooler – in other words, to be constantly dissatisfied with who we are and what we have.
If human bioenhancement becomes widespread in the coming decades, there’s every reason to expect that these insidious tendencies will intensify. The temptation to speak casually about ‘getting an upgrade’ or ‘choosing a better model’ for oneself will be strong. Instead of saying: ‘Sara got a new brain implant but she’s disappointed with its performance,’ people will say: ‘Sara’s upgrade was pretty good, but did you notice how Alice still ran circles around her?’
Anyone who speaks in this manner has crossed an invisible but critically important line. They are treating human beings as if they are commodities that can be assessed, measured and exchanged. In this view, humanity becomes a kind of ‘platform’ – akin to a piece of software or an operating system, whose performance can be boosted, built upon and manipulated at will. Personality traits become ‘features’; hard-earned skills and talents become ‘assets’; deep-seated personal struggles and failings become ‘liabilities’. Confronting this tendency toward the commodification of persons, and counteracting it with effective cultural strategies for ‘re-humanisation’, will pose one of the most important moral challenges of our time.
So, what can you do? First, you should adopt and promote personal philosophies that defend human dignity. You ought to reject any mode of thinking that reduces a person to a mere collection of traits or accomplishments. Remind yourself that you are not the same as your performance profile, and that your worth does not lie in your particular capabilities, but rather in the ineffable totality of your personhood. Resist the lure of trying to ‘measure up’: even though people can quantify your strength, performance or intelligence, what makes up your worth as a person can’t be tallied on a scoreboard.
Secondly, subject your existing enhancements to ongoing critical assessment. The more imbricated in your day-to-day existence the devices become, the more difficult it will be to imagine life in a different mode. Our growing awareness of the attentional and emotional costs of constantly being on our smartphones, for example, doesn’t seem to translate into using them any less. Once complex material and chemical bioenhancements become internal to and part of the body, trying to examine the costs and benefits of ‘opting out’ – particularly if everyone else is ‘upgrading’ – will be trickier than ever. What is needed, in short, is a fairly radical act of imagination: envisioning a reality in which some of the most basic gadgets and habits of our everyday lives have been temporarily removed. It might take the form of a half-serious, half-playful exploration, through which you palpate the edges of your habitual self.
Finally, select enhancements for yourself with an eye to flourishing, rather than to competition or success. In choosing a particular modification, your first question might be: ‘What does this allow me to do that I couldn’t do before?’ But a different question would serve you better: ‘How might this new capability actually contribute to my overall quality of life?’ Some might deride you as a Luddite or a backward-looking Romantic. But the aim is a reasonable one: to zoom in on what truly matters in living a good life, rather than a simply enhanced existence, and to assess the pros and cons of each modification from this perspective. Questions you might wish to ask yourself include: What are the activities that I find most reliably fulfilling? What kinds of friendships do I want to have, and how do I want to spend my time with those people? What sorts of work do I find most meaningful? How much space do I leave for solitude and silence in my life?
As humans, we are not simply organic beings who deploy external material tools to meet our needs. Those tools and technologies become part of who we are, and so we need to be careful about what we use and how we use it. The blurring of person and product is already a widespread and, in some ways, unavoidable feature of society. But the advent of bioenhancement takes the phenomenon to another level. If we are going to push back against it, we must start asking tough questions of ourselves today, and put into practice the sorts of choices and innovations that will keep us most vibrantly and creatively human. That might turn out to be where the real enhancement lies. |
One of the biggest unspoken rules in combat sports is that you don't touch the ref. That rule was broken in a pretty massive way this past weekend during German promotion Aggrelin's 19th event (via MiddleEasy).
During the main event, Nihad Nasufovic caught Wilhelm Ott in a rear naked choke that had Ott tapping. But instead of stopping the fight, the ref simply watched as Ott tapped and didn't step in to stop things.
In the end it was Nasufovic who released the hold. And then things got crazy. Ott, obviously pissed over the non-stoppage, gave the referee a huge shove and then a big overhand right.
To his credit, the ref simply covered up and didn't fight back as the cage filled with members of both team. Somehow the entire scene didn't devolve into a brawl, because as you know sometimes these things happen in MMA. |
Scott Quigg tells Saqib Uddin he wants to win a world title before his longed for rematch with Frampton
Scott Quigg tells Saqib Uddin he wants to win a world title before his longed for rematch with Frampton
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SCOTT QUIGG is hoping to secure a rematch with domestic rival Carl Frampton – and is confident that he will become world champion before the all British battle.
The Bury boxer is in a position to face the winner out of Abner Mares and Leo Santa Cruz for the WBA featherweight title next year and Quigg believes he can win that belt before locking horns with his Belfast rival.
Quigg is eager for a shot at revenge over the only man to have beaten him, in their super-bantamweight world title unification clash in Manchester clash last year, which Frampton won by spilt decision.
“I’m always going to want the rematch with Frampton, I would always love that fight again but at the end of the day I want to go and become world champion, so when I become world champion that fight will happen,” he said.
“From the first fight, my tactics were wrong on the night and I should have put the pressure on early. As soon as I put the pressure on the fight would have been mine, but it was too little too late.”
Both men now compete at featherweight, with Frampton leaving friend and trainer Shane McGuigan and relocating to Manchester earlier this year to train with Jamie Moore. He returned to the ring in Belfast a couple of weeks ago, defeating Horacio Garcia on points.
Quigg was ringside overlooking Frampton and he believes it wasn’t Frampton’s “best performance by far” due to the change of team and 10 months out of boxing.
“He fought a fringe world class fighter, Garcia was very predictable but what he did bring was a very energetic work rate and a world class chin. But I think Frampton made very hard work of it,” Quigg said.
“If he stuck to his boxing he could have had an easier night but if you consider that he’s had a 10-month layoff and a completely new change of team he got the job done and he now moves on.”
In a BoxNation podcast promoter Frank Warren said he would open the doors for Quigg to join his stable and compete with his fellow featherweights Josh Warrington, Carl Frampton and Lee Selby.
Quigg’s response was that he feels satisfied with Eddie Hearn’s role as a promoter as he has set him up for a chance to become two-time world champion next year.
“I’m happy where I am, Matchroom do the job for me, I have just put myself in line for the winner of Abner Mares and Santa Cruz for the world title, it is what it is and I’m happy where I am,” he said. |
German wage moderation and the EZ Crisis
Peter Bofinger
The EZ ‘consensus narrative’ argues the Crisis should not be thought of as a government debt crisis in its origin. Instead it regards large intra-EZ capital flows that emerged in the decade before the Crisis as the real culprit. This column argues that while the narrative is correct, it is also incomplete. With its focus on the deficit countries, it neglects the role of Germany, by far the largest member state, and its contribution to the imbalances in the years preceding the Crisis. A narrative that does not account for the effects of the German wage moderation is incomplete.
In “Rebooting the Eurozone” (published on Vox on 20 November 2015) a consensus narrative on the causes of the Eurozone (EZ) Crisis is provided. The authors argue that the Crisis should not be thought of as a government debt crisis in its origin. Instead they regard large intra-EZ capital flows that emerged in the decade before the crisis as the real culprit. While this narrative is correct, it is incomplete. With its focus on the deficit countries, it neglects the role of Germany, by far the largest member state, and its contribution to the imbalances in the years preceding the Crisis.
In 1999, when the Eurozone started, Germany was confronted with an unemployment rate that was too high by German standards, although it was still below the EZ average. The solution to the unemployment problem was typical of Germany’s corporatist system. Already in 1995 Klaus Zwickel, boss of the powerful labour union IG Metall, made the proposal of a Bündnis für Arbeit (pact for work). He explicitly declared his willingness to accept a stagnation of real wages, i.e. nominal wage increases that compensate for inflation only, if the employers were willing to create new jobs (Wolf 2000). This led to the Bündnis für Arbeit, Ausbildung und Wettbewerbsfähigkeit (pact for work, education and competitiveness), which was established by Gerhard Schröder in 1998. On 20 January 2000, trade unions and employers associations explicitly declared that productivity increases should not be used for increases in real wages but for agreements that increase employment. In essence, ‘wage moderation’ is an explicit attempt to devalue the real exchange rate internally.
‘Wage moderation’ is not necessarily an expression of weaker bargaining power of trade unions. They were convinced that this would help to create more jobs. They also explicitly accepted firm-level deviations from collective agreements, when a firm experienced economic difficulties. The government contributed to wage moderation by reducing social security contributions in exchange for higher indirect taxes and by shifting a part of the employers’ contribution rate for health insurance to the employees.
Wage moderation and the inflation rate of the EZ
The effects of wage moderation are mirrored in the development of unit labour costs. From 1999 to 2008, unit labour costs in the German economy remained more or less constant. In the manufacturing sector, which is characterised by a high degree of unionisation, unit labour costs declined by almost 9%.
For the ideal functioning of the EZ, unit labour costs of each member state should increase in line with the inflation target of the ECB. This would lead to national inflation rates close to the ECB target rate. Compared to this benchmark rate, which for the EZ is assumed to be 1.9%, wages in the German economy were almost 20% too low in 2008 (Figure 1). In the same period, unit labour costs in the rests of the EZ developed above this target rate, especially in Spain, Ireland and Greece.
Figure 1. Unit labour costs per employee (1999=100)
Source: AMECO, Destatis, own calculations
Wage moderation and EZ imbalances
‘Wage moderation’ contributed to the EZ imbalances through several channels.
First, the German HICP inflation was for many years below the ECB’s target rate and also below the HICP inflation of the rest of the EZ.
A study by the ECB showed for the five largest Eurozone countries that a positive (negative) GDP deflator differential was reflected in relatively higher (lower) unit labour costs, profits and indirect taxes (ECB 2003). At the EZ level, the low German inflation rate compensated for the above target inflation rates, especially in Spain, Ireland and Greece.
As the HICP for the whole EZ was more or less in line with the target, the ECB held its policy rate constant from June 2003 until December 2005 at the then very low rate of 2%. With a single nominal interest rate, the real inflation rate in EZ countries with high inflation was low, while it was relatively high in Germany. Thus, inflation differentials can be amplified through the demand side (Angeloni and Ehrmann 2004).
Figure 2. HICP inflation rate
Source: Eurostat, own calculations
Wage moderation and stagnation of domestic demand in Germany
A second transmission channel was the very weak real domestic demand in Germany, which strongly decelerated due to the wage moderation.
In the period 1995 to 2000 the average annual growth rate was 1.7%, in the period 2000 to 2005 it declined to -0.1%. In the rest of the EZ the growth rate of domestic demand was 3.2% in the first period and 2.0% in the second (Figure 3). For the rest of the EZ the weak domestic demand in Germany implied a strong deceleration of their export revenues for goods and services to Germany. The average annual nominal growth rate of their export revenues from Germany was 8.2% in the period 1995 to 2000 and 3.1% in the period 2000 to 2005. If Wyplosz (2013) argues that domestic demand lies at the root of the divergent paths of the EZ member countries, this view is compatible with a narrative that regards wage moderation as an important part of the imbalances within the EZ.
Figure 3. Domestic demand (at 2010 prices)
Source: AMECO, own calculations
Wage moderation and the current account
This leads to a third transmission channel.
While wage moderation had an immediate effect on German domestic demand, it improved its price competitiveness and its exports over time (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Germany: Real exchange rate vis-à-vis EZ and current account balance vis-à-vis EZ
Source: Sachverständigenrat (2014)
The improvement of the current account in the years 2000 to 2007 is due to the weak German import demand and to increasing exports to the rest of the EZ. This was different before 1999 when Germany’s imports from and its exports to the rest of the EZ were growing in parallel (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Bilateral current account between Germany and the rest of the EZ (in euros, Billions)
Source: Deutsche Bundesbank
The impact of the improvement in competitiveness on the German current account was estimated with a VAR analysis in the report of the Sachverständigenrat (2014). It shows that price competitiveness has a significant effect on the current account balance. It explains a swing in the current account from a deficit of 3.0% in 1997 to a surplus of 1.5% in 2007 (Figure 6).
Figure 6. Contribution of price competitiveness to the German current account balance (in %)
Source: Sachverständigenrat (2014)
A very strong impact of German wage moderation on current imbalances within the EZ is found in a paper by LeMoigne and Ragot (2015). Using a quantitative model of international trade, they find that the German wage moderation is responsible for roughly half of the divergence in terms of trade balance, and explain an increase of more than 2% of the French unemployment rate.
A study by Kollmann et al. (2015) comes to the result that strong external demand and German competitiveness gains (wage moderation and technological improvements) are important sources of the German external surplus. According to this paper, positive shocks to the German saving rate have been especially important since the mid-2000s. However, as that the saving rate of private households remained more or less constant, it is difficult to explain the increase of the current account with the aging of the German society or with pension reforms. In addition, household saving was much higher in the 1990s when the current account even showed a small deficit (Figure 7).
Figure 7. Household saving rate and current account
Source: Destatis
The real saving shock happened in the sector of non-financial corporations. In the period 1991 to 2000 the average saving rate of non-financial corporations was close to zero, in the period 2001 to 2010 it was 2% (Figure 8). This was caused by growing profits especially in the years from 1999 to 2007. As wage moderation has contributed to higher profits, it can be regarded as a determinant of the saving shock in the corporate sector.
Summary
An EZ Crisis narrative that does not that does not account for the effects of the German wage moderation is incomplete. Germany is by far the largest EZ economy and it is a very open economy with strong trade links to all other EZ member states. It would be difficult to explain why such a strong internal devaluation, which is regarded as a key determinant of Germany’s success story in the 2000s (Dustmann et al. 2014), did not have significant repercussions for the rest of the EZ.
Wage moderation led to decline in unit labour costs and to a German HICP inflation rate below the ECB’s target value. As this compensated for above target inflation in the rest of the EZ, the ECB was not able to increase its policy rate although there were signs of overheating in the deficit countries. Wage moderation caused stagnation in German domestic demand, which had a negative impact on the German demand for goods and services from the rest of EZ. Wage moderation improved the price competitiveness of Germany gradually which led to a deterioration of the bilateral current account of the rest of the EZ. Finally, wage moderation caused higher profits in the corporate sector, which led to a higher saving rate of this sector. Household saving in Germany has been more or less constant since 1999.
References
Angeloni, I. and M. Ehrmann (2004), “Euro area inflation differential”, ECB Working Paper No. 388.
Dustmann C. et al. (2014), “From sick man of Europe to economic superstar: Germany’s resurgent economy”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 28(1), pp. 167-188.
European Central Bank (2003), “Inflation Differentials in the Eurozone, Potential Causes and Policy Implications”, September.
Kollmann et al. (2015), “What drives the German current account? And how does it affect other EU Member States? ” Economic Policy, 2015, Vol. 30, pp.47-93.
Le Moigne, M. and X. Ragot (2015), “France et Allemagne : Une histoire du désajustement européen”, Working Paper, OFCE, June.
Sachverständigenrat (2014), “Mehr Vertrauen in Marktprozesse”, Jahresgutachten 2014/15.
Wolf, M. (2000), “Von der ›Konzertierten Aktion‹ zum ›Bündnis für Arbeit‹”, UTOPIE kreativ, Heft 117, pp. 669-68, July.
Wyplosz, C. (2013), “Eurozone Crisis: It’s About Demand, not Competitiveness”, The Graduate Institute, Geneva, and CEPR, January |
Doctors were making mistakes in up to 15 per cent of cases because they were too quick to judge patients’ symptoms, they said, while others were reluctant to ask more senior colleagues for help.
While in most cases the misdiagnosis did not result in the patient suffering serious harm, a sizeable number of the millions of NHS patients were likely to suffer significant health problems as a result, according to figures. It was said that the number of misdiagnoses was “just the tip of the iceberg”, with many people still reluctant to report mistakes by their doctors.
There was a call for better reporting methods to ensure that each misdiagnosis was recorded and monitored properly.
Prof Graham Neale, of the Imperial Centre for Patient Safety and Service Quality at Imperial College London, who is carrying out research into cases of misdiagnosis in the NHS, said it was a problem that was not being adequately dealt with.
“There is absolutely no doubt that this is being under-reported,” he said. “But more importantly they are not being adequately analysed.
“Trainee doctors are too quick to judgment, that is one of the problems that we face.”
He added, however, that in many cases, the medical errors were rectified within 48 hours.
The experts drew on research published in the American Journal of Medicine that estimated that up to 15 per cent of all medical cases in developed countries were misdiagnosed.
Earlier this year, the Healthcare Commission found that missed or wrong diagnoses were a major cause of complaints to the NHS. Of more than 9,000 complaints analysed, almost one in 10 related to a delay in diagnosis or the wrong diagnosis being made. Separate research also suggested that one in 10 patients in hospital was harmed because of the care they received.
Peter Walsh, the chief executive of Action Against Medical Accidents, a campaign group, said his charity received 4,000 calls a year from people who thought that their condition had been misdiagnosed.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “There is no mandatory reporting of missed diagnoses so the true scale cannot be known.
“There are very few reports to the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) and we would like to see it become a legal requirement for all missed diagnoses to be reported.”
Dr Robert Hendry, head of medical services at the Medical Protection Society, said misdiagnosis was a factor in two thirds of complaints against GPs. “It’s a very significant problem for the NHS,” he said.
The NPSA runs a database that records medical errors, patient incidents, mistakes in medical notes and near-misses on a voluntary basis.
Between April 2008 and March 2009 there were 39,500 reports of incidents involving clinical assessment. Those included missed or wrong diagnosis but also related to scans that could have been misinterpreted or where the wrong body part was scanned or tests where patients’ samples could have been mixed up.
Dr Kevin Cleary, the medical director of the NPSA, said there were a number of reasons that a diagnosis could be missed or be inaccurate, including a lack of training, test results that were misinterpreted, poor communication and diseases that had similar symptoms.
“Missed diagnosis is one of the most complex issues in medical reporting,” he said. “There are some illnesses, like flu for example, where the symptoms for a number of conditions are very similar, especially early on, so it is not always possible to make a diagnosis immediately.”
A spokesman for the Department of Health said more than one million “patient safety incidents” were reported every year, the vast majority of which caused patients no harm.
“We are examining a move to obliging the NHS as a whole to report to the National reporting and learning system run by National Patient Safety Agency,” the spokesman said.
“The NHS already collects data on safety incidents including misdiagnoses through the National Patient Safety Agency's reporting system and uses this data to learn from incidents." |
Kuala Lumpur: The missing Malaysia Airlines plane flew for one hour and 10 minutes after Malaysian aviation authorities saw it vanish from radar over the South China Sea and travelled hundreds of kilometres off course, according to a senior Malaysian air force official quoted by CNN.
According to the official, who had asked not to be named, the plane flew in the opposite direction from its scheduled flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with its communications equipment turned off and was last seen over a tiny island called Pulau Perak in the Strait of Malacca.
Why the pilot would be travelling in the wrong direction deepens the mystery about the fate of the plane but raises the possibility of a hijacking or technical fault that caused the pilots to not know what direction they were flying. |
Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved KXAN Photo
Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved KXAN Photo
AUSTIN (KXAN) -- A man accused of robbery apparently got a case of the munchies and demanded a taco truck operator make him food -- threatening him with brass knuckles -- before then going on a beer run, according to Austin police.
An Austin Police Department officer responded to 9400 North Interstate 35 on May 17. According to a police affidavit, the taco truck operator was changing the propane tank on his truck when he noticed Madaleno Medina, 27, trying to get money out of people in the parking lot. Medina then allegedly walked over to him with green brass knuckles on his left hand and balled his hands into fists and demanded money.
The worker was able to get away, retreating to his taco truck for safety. He told police Medina then placed an order for tacos and, when the worker refused to make him any, left the area. The worker told police all cash from the tip jar was gone after Medina left the area to a nearby Chevron, which he allegedly left with a case of beer.
Shortly after, the responding officer was called to another robbery two blocks away where the suspect was also said to have used green brass knuckles. Three people, including Medina, were detained and questioned, and police say he admitted to being at the taco truck earlier in the day.
Surveillance video from a Shell gas station near the taco truck showed Medina near the worker and walking from the taco truck with something in his hand -- something police say they believe was cash from the tip jar. Additionally, police say surveillance video from a Chevron confirmed Medina had, indeed, "committed a beer run."
Medina is charged with aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon and is being held on a combined bond of $43,000 for both robberies.
A booking photo of Madaleno Medina has been requested from APD. |
Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania are trying to quickly push through a measure to would allow people from outside a voting district to watch over voters.
The bill would take effect in time for this year’s presidential election in a state where Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed he will be the victim of voter fraud. He has provided no evidence to back that accusation.
Raging Chicken Press, a progressive website focused on Pennsylvania politics, reported that the bill was being swiftly pushed through the state’s GOP-controlled House of Representatives. The bill would “allow Trump supporters from around the state to ‘watch’ over the polls in minority communities throughout the state,” the website noted.
On Wednesday, the bill was sent to the state’s appropriations committee to determine how much it would cost to implement.
Pennsylvania Democrats warned that the measure could lead to voter intimidation.
Simply put: #GOP fighting to allow outside agitators to intimidate your local poll workers and make it harder for YOU to vote — PA House Democrats (@PaHouseDems) September 21, 2016
Poll watchers can intimidate voters by raising constant challenges at polling places, ProPublica reported.
“There’s actually a risk that, in a more disorganized way, people are going to be showing up to the polls, they won’t know the law, and they’ll be engaging in discriminatory challenges,” Adam Gitlin, counsel for the Democracy Program of New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice, told ProPublica. “That can create the potential for a lot of disruption, longer lines because each voter takes longer to vote and potentially discouraging and intimidating voters from coming to the polls.”
Trump and his supporters have repeatedly made allegations of voter fraud and called for volunteers to “Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!”
“The only way we can lose, in my opinion, I really mean this, Pennsylvania, is if cheating goes on,” Trump claimed last month, despite being consistently behind in the polls there.
Advancement Project, a civil rights organization, has published a guide explaining what poll watchers are allowed to do ― and what they’re not allowed to do ― in Pennsylvania, which is available here.
“If you are challenged on Election Day, do NOT leave without voting. At the very least, vote a provisional ballot.”
On Wednesday, the bill was sent to the state’s appropriations committee to determine how much it will cost the state to implement. |
WASHINGTON -- An Army medic from Michigan who risked his life multiple times to rescue Vietnam War comrades is the first person to be awarded the Medal of Honor by President Trump.
Mr. Trump presented America's highest military honor to James McCloughan on Monday afternoon at a White House ceremony, calling him "a brave guy."
"For over two centuries our brave men and women in uniform have overcome tyranny, fascism, communism and every threat to our freedom. Every single threat, they have overcome," Mr. Trump said. "And we've overcome these threats because of titans like Jim, whose spirit could never be concurred. That's what this award is, and Jim's life represents so well: America's unbreakable spirit."
McCloughan was a 23-year-old private first class who had been drafted into the Army when, in 1969, he found himself in the middle of the raging, days long Battle of Hui Yon Hill. McCloughan voluntarily entered the "kill zone" to rescue injured comrades, even as he was pelted with shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade.
"The worst 48 hours of my life, and I'm getting an award for it," McCloughan told CBS News' David Martin in an interview.
President Trump presents the Medal of Honor to former Army Specialist James McCloughan of South Haven, Michigan, during an East Room ceremony at the White House on Mon., July 31, 2017, in Washington, D.C. McCloughan is awarded with the medal for his heroic acts as a combat medic during the Vietnam War. Getty
In its announcement last month, the White House said McCloughan "voluntarily risked his life on nine separate occasions to rescue wounded and disoriented comrades. He suffered wounds from shrapnel and small arms fire on three separate occasions, but refused medical evacuation to stay with his unit, and continued to brave enemy fire to rescue, treat, and defend wounded Americans."
Now 71 and living in South Haven, Michigan, McCloughan told The Associated Press in an interview last month that the battle was "the worst two days of my life."
McCloughan described the shrapnel as "a real bad sting" and recalled, "I was tending to two guys and dragging them at the same time into a trench line." He said he looked down to see himself covered with blood, a wound so bad that it prompted a captain to suggest that he leave the battlefield to seek treatment.
"He knew me enough to know that I wasn't going," McCloughan said.
The combat medic stuck around until the battle ended, coming to the aid of his men and fighting the enemy, even knocking out an enemy RPG position with a grenade at one point. In all, the Pentagon credits McCloughan with saving the lives of 10 members of his company.
The Medal of Honor is given to Armed Forces members who distinguish themselves by going above and beyond the call of duty in battle.
"We honor you, we salute you, and with God as your witness, we thank you for what you did for all of us," Mr. Trump said to McCloughan.
McCloughan left the Army in 1970 and spent decades teaching psychology and sociology and coaching football, baseball and wrestling at South Haven High School. He retired in 2008.
In 2016, Defense Secretary Ash Carter recommended McCloughan for the Medal of Honor. But since the medal must be awarded within five years of the recipient's actions, Congress needed to pass a bill waiving the time limit. Then-President Obama signed the measure in late 2016, but he didn't get the opportunity to recognize McCloughan with the medal before his term ended this year.
"President Donald Trump will be putting that on me for the first time in his experience of doing such a thing," McCloughan said. "That's pretty special." |
Archaeologists are avid users of social media, as well as online crowd-based funding and content-sourcing tools—deploying them to save sites, sustain the historic environment and protect history, often in the face of government disinterest, ‘austerity’ and short-sighted cultural policy.
It seems, however, that these social media applications do potentially more harm than good – by allowing archaeology and the future of collective cultural heritage to be swept away by naïve initiatives without strategic oversight. The archaeological record and the archaeological profession are at stake, local communities face unequal access to their own heritage and archaeologists themselves become all too often a subject of abuse and exploitation.
An article published today in Open Archaeology focuses on the current state of the social web in the development of archaeological practice, and reflects on various conscientious activities aimed both at challenging current online interactions, as well as at positioning archaeologists as more informed innovators of the web.
Sara Perry and Nicole Beale, both from The University of York, surveyed the field in search of active social web initiatives in archaeology, studying their development and evaluation and assessing their impacts on other people, on cultural heritage itself and on the world at large. They found out that archaeologists have been drawing on social media and crowdsourcing/crowdfunding tools since their appearance on the web, and also that despite this long history of involvement, there is little evidence that they are aware of their (often dangerous) impacts.
It seems that these social web applications have not only put archaeologists themselves in danger, exposing them to severe online harassment and abuse, but that they are also draw local communities into exploitative labour practices, and seemingly enable a devolution of responsibility for, and weakened oversight of, the archaeological record. In so doing, the use of the web appears to be relieving the government and the cultural custodians of their duties to protect and conserve the historic environment for the future.
The authors argue that archaeology could adopt a more obvious social justice stance, using web-based media to advocate for cultural change and to bring attention to the short-sighted politics which are threatening our collective cultural heritage.
De Gruyter |
This is the dessert version of the popular comfort food, Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich. The creamy peanut butter blends well with the sweetness of the jam. Chopped peanuts adds crunch and gives a hint of saltiness that cuts on the sweetness. Here is an easy dessert recipe for Peanut Butter and Jelly Bars.
Ingredients:
2 sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 extra-large eggs, at room temperature
2 cups (18 ounces) creamy peanut butter
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 1/2 cups (18 ounces) raspberry jam or other fruit jam of your choice
2/3 cups salted peanuts, coarsely chopped
Procedures:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 9 by 13 by 2-inch cake pan and line it with parchment paper. Grease again and dust the pan with flour.
Using an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar on medium speed until light yellow (about 2 minutes). Turn mixer speed to low and add the vanilla, eggs, and peanut butter. Mix until all ingredients are well-combined.
Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt and slowly add to the peanut butter mixture mixing on low speed. Mix just until combined.
Take 2/3 of the dough and spread into the bottom of the greased cake pan using an offset spatula. Spread the jam evenly over the dough.
Get the remaining dough and drop as small globs over the jam. Don't worry if all the jam isn't covered; it will spread while baking. Evenly distribute the chopped peanuts on top and bake for 45 minutes, until golden brown.
Take out of the oven and completely cool before cutting into squares.
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The Russian Grand Prix was always likely to be one of those races where, with the new 2017 combination of high drag cars and low degradation tyres, overtaking would be extremely difficult and strategy games equally so.
In fact it was only the fourth race in F1 history to feature no overtaking moves after the opening lap skirmishes.
The key question is whether Ferrari could have manoeuvred Sebastian Vettel into a position to win the race, after losing the lead at the start to Bottas, if they had been more aggressive by bringing Vettel in from second place when Bottas was dealing with lapped traffic?
Last year’s race was dictated by collisions on the opening lap, which effectively took three front running cars out of points scoring positions and this year’s race was dictated by the start and by a Safety Car after yet another first lap collision.
Pre-event considerations
There are some basic factors about the 5.8 kilometre Sochi circuit, which dictate race strategy; the track surface gives low tyre degradation, fuel consumption is high, so there is some management to be done and overtaking is extremely difficult.
Although Pirelli brought the softest tyres in its range, the forecasts were all saying that this would be a one-stop race.
The soft tyre was a complete waste of time so once again the most durable tyre option of the three available was barely used in the race, further narrowing the strategy options.
The supersoft and ultrasoft had almost identical levels of degradation, at 0.03secs per lap, which is very low. Yet the ultrasoft was 0.5s a lap faster, so there was a strong case for spending as much of the race as possible on that faster tyre, especially as there was no trade off on degradation.
Track position is king at Sochi, as at all tracks where overtaking is difficult.
As the degradation is so low, there is not the performance step by taking a new tyre, so the undercut tactic was not useful here.
The strategy for front-runners was to run the ultrasoft tyres as far as they would go to build a good gap to the slower traffic and then pit for supersofts, taking care to come out into a nice gap and avoid losing time with slower cars.
At the back of the field there looked to be another option, which was to start on the supersoft tyres and then switch to ultrasofts later in the race. As most midfield cars would be in a high-speed train anyway, some drivers would not necessarily be able to exploit the extra half a second of performance from the ultrasoft.
Also the pace gap between the tyres gets larger as the car gets lighter on fuel – provided you have clear track - so being on ultrasoft in the final stint would give a good performance advantage.
And, contrary to popular belief, there is no penalty off the line starting on the supersoft rather than the ultrasoft tyre in terms of initial grip; they are both good.
Sauber saw this and tried it with both cars, as did McLaren with Vandoorne. Part of the thinking was that there is a strong chance of a Lap 1 Safety Car, due to start collisions, which allows you to pit for free and then run the entire race on Ultrasoft tyres.
This tactic bought Sauber 14 seconds of race time, compared to a normal strategy. Sadly their car isn’t fast enough for that to have meant much in terms of positions.
But if some other midfield teams had tried it, perhaps on their lower placed car in a split strategy, then it could have brought some nice gains. For example, Toro Rosso had Kvyat in 12th and Sainz 14th.
If Carlos Sainz had started on supersofts and then pitted under the Safety Car, he would have rejoined right behind Stroll. If he gained at least the 14 seconds Sauber managed over the two stints on ultrasofts, then that could have put him ahead of Massa in 9th place after the Brazilian was forced to make a late pit stop for a puncture.
Did Ferrari miss an opportunity to win by not pitting Vettel sooner?
Ferrari pole positions are rare these days and as for front row lock outs, you have to go back 10 years. So they are not to be squandered! With both cars on the front row in Sochi, the conditions were ideal for a Ferrari 1-2 result, provided that the start went well.
However Bottas took the lead into Turn 2 and then pulled away using impressive pace on the ultrasoft tyres, which he had shown in Friday practice.
A number of commentators and fans asked the question whether Vettel could still have won the race, if he had pitted on Lap 25 or 26, just as the leader Valtteri Bottas began to catch slower traffic.
The answer is no, it would not have materially changed the result in itself. Basic modeling with reasonable assumptions on getting through traffic show he would have been around 1.5s behind Bottas after the Finn stopped.
However it would have applied much more pressure to the Mercedes mechanics at their pit stop - a team that has had some pit stop problems this season - and in the final stint on Bottas, a driver who’s inexperienced in leading races. Mercedes haven’t been flawless under pressure, so it was possibly worth a try, especially as by staying out Vettel encountered two sets of slower traffic anyway and then a further two sets after his stop!
So he gained nothing by staying out.
The key consideration here, however, is where he would have dropped back out had he made that early stop. The answer is that he’d have come out behind Magnussen and Sainz, who had both pitted and were basically a lap down. Ferrari didn’t pit him because if this; they held off, looking for gaps and aware that by staying out there was no concern on the tyres performance going off.
Bottas did make a mistake later, locking up a front wheel, but it didn’t affect his race outcome and with no pressure Mercedes were flawless on their stop; it was the fastest stop of the day, in fact and 0.8s faster than Vettel’s.
Hulkenberg loses out to Force India duo
There’s a good battle in the lower reaches of the Top Ten this year between the Renault of Nico Hulkenberg and the Force India drivers Sergio Perez and Esteban Ocon.
The pressure is on for Hulkenberg as he’s the only Renault driver scoring points, with Jolyon Palmer having an uncompetitive start to the season.
In Sochi Hulkenberg did another superb job in qualifying, to put the Renault eighth, ahead of them. But he lost out to both on the opening lap and could not recover, despite a strategy gambit.
Once the positions were lost, Hulkenberg stayed out until Lap 40 on the ultrasoft tyres, taking advantage of that 0.03secs per lap degradation.
He came out on supersofts, which were 14 laps fresher than the Force India, but as they took advantage of the low degradation, there was no way to even try to pass them.
The UBS Race Strategy Report is written by James Allen with input and data from several of the leading teams’ strategists and from Pirelli.
RACE HISTORY AND TYRE USAGE CHARTS -Courtesy of Williams Martini Racing - Click To Enlarge
Showing the gaps between the cars as the race progresses and also the relative pace of the cars. Time gaps on vertical axis, Lap number on horizontal axis.
This is what a race trace with no overtaking looks like, the first such race since Valencia 2009! And to a single soft tyre used from the range of three compounds brought to Sochi.
Look at the difference in pace between the Mercedes (light blue) and Ferrari (red) cars compared to everyone else. Then look at the gaps back from the Red Bull, which is in a race of its own.
The fear is that if the new lighter Mercedes also has aerodynamic and engine upgrades it could be a big step faster. Ferrari must match that upgrade in Spain, otherwise the gaps between the top three could look very large on the race trace from Barcelona! |
WASHINGTON, April 2 (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel will take a voluntary pay cut as a show of solidarity with Pentagon employees who will have to take unpaid time off over the coming months, a Defense Department spokesman said on Tuesday.
Hagel will give back the equivalent of 14 days' pay to the government, Pentagon spokesman George Little said. That would come to about $10,750, based on Hagel's salary of $199,700.
"My understanding is that there is a legal way to actually write a check, if you will, back to the U.S. Treasury," Little told reporters.
Most of the Pentagon's 800,000 civilian employees will have to take 14 days of unpaid leave as it implements more than $40 billion in spending cuts before the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30 as part of a blunt budget-cutting effort known as "the sequester" that will affect a broad range of government operations. |
PORTAGE, MI - There's a win-win situation when the Portage District Library sets the table for its Food for Fines program Oct. 10-16, organizers say.
The Portage District Library at 300 Library Lane.
Those who bring donations of food to the library not only provide needed Thanksgiving meals to the Portage Community Center's Food Basket program, they also have library fines waived.
The library will waive $1 in overdue fines for each item donated during the Monday-Sunday program. If you choose to donate ramen noodles, it takes five individual packages to receive a waiver of $1 in overdue fines.
"I love the Food for Fines program because it makes Portage a stronger community -- library users make a difference by helping to provide a Thanksgiving meal to those in need," said Christy Klien, Portage library director.
A special donation site will be located in the atrium of the library to the left of the entrance, near the DVD collection. Donations will not be taken at the checkout desk or any other public service desk either before or after the collection dates. Look for signs as you enter the library to direct you to the donation site.
The library accepts any type of non-expired canned or packaged items, but is especially looking for food for a holiday meal such as green beans, corn, peas, mixed vegetables, yams, sweet potatoes, pears, peaches, fruit cocktail, cranberry sauce, French-fried onions, stuffing, instant potatoes, cream of celery/mushroom soup, poultry/vegetable broth, turkey gravy mix, biscuit mix, cake mix with frosting and brownie/muffin mix.
For more information, go to http://portagelibrary.info/food/ or www.portagecommunitycenter.org/ holiday-programs.
Tom Haroldson covers Portage, Vicksburg and Schoolcraft for MLive/Kalamazoo Gazette. Contact him at [email protected]. |
Many of you are likely familiar with Tim Sledd as he was one of our first guests on the GiReviews Podcast.
Tim owns and operates Small Axe Jiu Jitsu, Andre Galvao’s first-ever affiliate academy (which Tim spoke in length about here).
As you can tell, Tim and I are prone to some foolishness but Tim takes his Jiu Jitsu very very seriously and not only is he a good friend of GiReviews, but a fantastic instructor.
I’m a big advocate of the idea that just because you can do something well, doesn’t mean that you can teach others to do it. I would much rather learn a technique and learn from a good instructor versus a world champion. Having an instructor that is a world champion and a truly good teacher is much more rare than you think.
With that said, I’ve always been impressed by Tim’s ability to be remain humble despite being a very good instructor and learning techniques from the best BJJ practitioners in the world.
His ability to learn these techniques and then explain them to others is excellent and when I found out he was creating a new DVD on the Leg Drag Position, I was ecstatic.
Leg Drag Workshop DVD by Tim Sledd
The DVD is comprised of 3 parts: Indiana University (IU) Workshop, Ground Zero Workshop, and Bonus Material.
Chapters and Content
IU Workshop Intro to Positions Concepts Cross side to Leg Drag Closed Guard Pass Half Guard Butterfly Guard Pass Slip Knee to Mount Passing Spider Guard Closing
Ground Zero Workshop Basic Leg Drag Position Mendes Position Reverse Position Attack From Side Control Back Take Closed Guard Pass Half Guard Pass Butterfly Guard Pass Slip Knee to Mount Sider Guard Pass Questions Drills Closing
Bonus Material Basic Takedown Mount to Leg Drag Leg Drag from Rear Mount De la Riva Sweep De la Riva Sweep 2 De la Riva Sweep 3 Outro
*It’s of special note here that while some techniques are included in both workshops, the instruction is varied to address the needs of the attendees at those workshops and it’s definitely worth watching Tim explain and teach them both times.
Bonus Material
Yes, I know I’m supposed to talk about this last, but it’s my favorite part. In this section, Tim shows how to achieve the leg drag position from mount, rear mount, 3 different De la Riva (DLR) sweeps, and from the basic BJJ clinch takedown (my favorite).
My favorite part of BJJ is the combining and stringing together moves/positions. I believe it’s what sets each belt level apart from the belt below it and you can truly assess Tim’s skill level with how he applies the more ‘modern’ leg drag with some classic BJJ sweeps and positions.
IU Workshop
I really like that Tim refers to these as workshops. As a teacher, I know when I go to a seminar, it’s going to be somebody talking ‘at’ me the entire time and often times BJJ seminars are no different. But I also know that if I’m going to a workshop, that I am going to be doing work and getting better as a teacher.
When you attend one of Tim’s workshops, expect to put in a lot of reps but also expect to walk out with mental and muscle memory that will allow you to use the techniques you learned in the future.
I really enjoy the ‘Concepts’ section of this workshop that gives a LOT of Why’s and How’s to the position, as well as a lot of things you ordinarily wouldn’t notice just from watching like where Tim has his weight and how the leg drag would work against opponents of different builds.
My favorite technique in this section is the ‘Durinho Pass.’ Tim showed it to me one time and I’ve been using it for roughly a year to pass half guard with a lot of success. I don’t always go to the leg drag from it, but it’s very rare that I don’t get a pass when I do it correctly.
At the end of the workshop, Tim discusses that once you’re familiar with the leg drag, you’ll see it everywhere. He goes over a number of different places you’ll see it from such as the berimbolo. Being a horrible berimbolo player myself, I love the option to come up into the leg drag! I also really like that Tim gives out a lesson plan during his workshops to help attendees retain what they learned that day.
Ground Zero Workshop
In this workshop, Tim really stresses the Leg Drag as a position, and not a pass. I believe this is similar to how people like Nino Schembri view the omoplata as a position and not a submission.
I’d get out a pen/pencil and paper or be typing on your computer while watching this. The number of details is insane and they all make a huge different between being able to do it versus white belts and versus advanced belts.
My favorite part of this workshop is not only the Leg Drag instruction, but also the questions and drills sections at the end. Tim shows a lot of awesome drills to increase your leg drag skills outside of longer techniques.
Fun note that only teachers will pick up on, but Tim always snaps his fingers when he is speaking about his hands. This is to help you have an auditory que on where to look and also so he doesn’t have to keep differentiating between saying left/right. This is an awesome veteran BJJ teacher tool that I first picked up from watching Roy Dean, and I’ve seen Tim do it in person, so it’s really cool to see Tim do it in his workshops.
Overall Impression
I really like that Tim sticks to some more solid pressure-passing style Leg Drags versus the more common ‘ankle grab’ leg drag. He does so because even when you have ankle control, you still have to get past the shins, and hips to pass, which is incredibly difficult against a seasoned guard player.
The amount of information on this DVD is fantastic – not too much to overwhelm and be worthless, but not too little either The instructional is phenomenal – Tim is an excellent teacher and provides every key detail The techniques are well chosen – Most of these are techniques I haven’t seen elsewhere, on YouTube or otherwise
Overall, I think this DVD would be a great value at $75+ and it’s an absolute STEAL at $35. Click here to check it out! |
The Supreme Court on Monday said Costco could be liable for copyright infringement for selling foreign-made watches without the manufacturer's authorization.
The high court – ruling 4-4, with Justice Elena Kagan recused – was interpreting the so-called "first-sale" doctrine (.pdf) of U.S. copyright law. Until Monday's ruling, the doctrine was thought to allow the purchaser of a copyrighted work to re-sell the work without the copyright holder's permission. That's why we have used bookstores, record stores, GameStop (.pdf) and even eBay. (.pdf)
However, because there was no majority decision, Monday's ruling solely affirms a lower court's decision against Costco and does not adopt a nationwide precedent.
"It's as if the court never took the case in the first place. We have to wait for another case like this to come along," said Thomas Goldstein, the SCOTUSblog founder who has argued nearly two dozen cases before the high court.
The case before the justices was brought by Costco, which was selling the Omega Seamaster watch for about $1,300, well below the $2,000 recommended U.S. price.
Omega, of Switzerland, sued Costco for copyright infringement, because Costco was obtaining the watches from unauthorized European dealers that sold them far cheaper than U.S.-based Omega distributors. Omega copyrighted the watch design in the United States by imprinting the company's emblem on the underside of the timepiece.
The justices upheld a lower court decision saying the first-sale doctrine did not apply to goods produced overseas.
Costco, in its appeal of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' ruling, told the Supreme Court that the decision effectively urges U.S.-based manufacturers to flee the United States (.pdf) to acquire complete control over distribution of their goods in the American market.
Under the ruling, if hardware manufacturers adopt Omega's distribution and legal tactics, it might be copyright infringement to re-sell your used computers, mobile phones and tablet computers produced in China.
The Obama administration, with Kagan as solicitor general, had taken Omega's side, writing that the "Copyright Act does not apply outside the United States." (.pdf) If it did, the administration told the justices in a friend-of-the-court filing, that would be an "extraterritorial application of U.S. regulatory statutes."
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It is a calculated shift to the left, forsaking the wider appeal that comes with the rhetorical consensus on private wealth creation, in favour of the Laborist appeal of more public spending and an openly redistributive agenda. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten on the campaign at a solar wholesale distributor in Brisbane. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Remember Kevin Rudd's 2007 claim to be a "fiscal conservative" backed up by his dramatic campaign taunt to John Howard that "this sort of reckless spending must stop"? Not this time. Transparently, Labor's pledge to put fairness before fiscal repair is an attempt to re-leverage the public odium of Tony Abbott's disastrously harsh 2014 budget and where possible, tie Turnbull to it - and its plethora of broken promises - as firmly as possible.
But it comes with a heavy price because it necessitates trenchant opposition to the new Liberal tax-cut agenda as much as it does to the old Abbott model of punitive welfare cuts. Moreover, it exposes Shorten Labor to the charge, now being increasingly made, that Labor has become unreservedly hostile to private capital. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten addresses Labor supporters during the campaign. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Warming to this theme, Turnbull called Shorten "the most anti-business agenda of any Labor leader in a generation" on Wednesday. Even Wayne Swan declared the contest over company tax cuts and more spending amounted to "a class war in Australia". Electorally, in the wake of the Rudd-Gillard years, Shorten's approach prioritises the reconnection of the ALP with its disillusioned base over attracting the extra middle-ground voters needed to win an election. And that in turn explains why insiders in both camps report Labor is doing better in its heartland - i.e. safe seats it already holds - than it is in the marginals where swinging voters will decide the election. Mr Shorten poses for selfies with Labor supporters. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
The result could be a repeat of 1998 - a sizeable swing to Labor for only a modest return of new seats. Yet for Shorten personally, that would bring an upwelling of affection from the Labor faithful, casting him as a defeated leader who had fought the good fight for "Labor" values - very useful if your challenger is the darling of the rank-and-file, the Left's Anthony Albanese. All of this suggests Shorten may well be already thinking about his own survival as leader beyond the horizon. Don't expect him to use the term or even to accept the logic, but the inescapable conclusion is that he has a two-election strategy having concluded months ago that gaining the 19 Coalition seats needed to win on July 2 is unachievable. Inevitably, he will deny this as he must. But such thinking would only be prudent. Shorten is no fool, and knew full-well when seeking the leadership after the 2013 rout that it was potentially a poisoned chalice. No Labor leader has lasted a full term, let alone two, since Kim Beazley in the late 1990s - and that goes for two elected prime ministers as well. Back then, Shorten would have assumed victory was a long-shot even against Abbott, but the advent of the more appealing Turnbull has made this one-term approach extremely difficult and the two-stage approach all the more realistic. |
Specialized have quietly been revamping their line of mountain bike tires over the last year or so, modifying existing tread patterns with a little extra siping here, new knob profiles there, and more 2.6" options.
The Hillbilly is no exception, and the wet conditions specialist has been reworked to offer even more traction when the trails are muddy and soft. It now looks more like an aggressive version of Specialized's Butcher as opposed to a traditional mud spike, with tall, square knobs that have been spaced out to help keep the tire from getting clogged with mud.
Specialized Hillbilly Details
• Intended conditions: soft to intermediate terrain
• Gripton rubber compound
• Tubeless ready
• Sizes: 27.5 x 2.6", 29 x 2.6", 29 x 2.3" (tested)
• Weight: 980 grams
• Price: $60 USD
• www.specialized.com
• Intended conditions: soft to intermediate terrain• Gripton rubber compound• Tubeless ready• Sizes: 27.5 x 2.6", 29 x 2.6", 29 x 2.3" (tested)• Weight: 980 grams• Price: $60 USD
Tall side knobs help the Hillbilly dig deep into the ground. Tall side knobs help the Hillbilly dig deep into the ground. There's more siping than the prior version, which helps deliver even more traction. There's more siping than the prior version, which helps deliver even more traction.
Performance
Pinkbike's Take
The new Hillbilly is a highly recommended option for riders who frequently find themselves riding in wet, muddy conditions. It's more versatile than a full-on mud spike, checks in at a reasonable weight, and perhaps best of all, has a very reasonable price – that's a tough combination to beat. — Mike Kazimer
In addition to the new tread pattern, the Hillbilly uses Specialized's proprietary Gripton rubber compound, which is claimed to offer vibration damping properties that help keep the tire sticking to the ground in rougher sections of trail. It's the 29 x 2.3” Grid casing version that's tested here, but there are also 27.5 x 2.6” and 29 x 2.6” options available, all priced at $60 USD.The Hillbilly was officially released only a few month ago, but I was able to get my hands on some early production samples late last winter, which means I've been able to subject them to plenty of muddy miles.The installation and tubeless setup was hassle-free, and once installed on a rim with a 30mm internal width the Hillbilly measured a true-to-size 2.3” from side knob to side knob. As far as pressures go, I typically run 21 psi in the front, but I ended up going a couple pounds higher with these tires to get the sidewall support that I was looking for. The reinforced Grid casing is Specialized's answer to riders looking for more puncture resistance, although it's not quite as burly as what Maxxis offers with their DoubleDown casing – riders in extremely rocky areas may find themselves seeking even more protection. That being said, I didn't suffer any punctures over the course of the test period, although the trails I was on tended to have more roots than rocks, which aren't as likely to slice a sidewall.Enough about casings and pressures – how does the Hillbilly handle the slop? Extremely well, with loads of traction available, even on harder surfaces – areas where this style of tire typically struggles. Compared to the Maxxis Shorty, the Hillbilly felt less likely to suddenly slide out when faced with the slimy roots and wet rocks that are common here in the Pacific Northwest, and it soon became my go-to front tire when trail conditions took a turn for the worse.The Hillbilly isn't an all-rounder (and it's not billed as one) and on dry, hardpacked trails the taller knobs do have a tendency to squirm, especially during hard cornering. But when those trails turn to mud, the same knobs will dig right in with the tenacity of a rabid dog going after a buried bone, churning at the soil and providing massive amounts of grip. There were times when I found myself laughing out loud after exiting a turn – it's positively silly just how well this tire will lock-in and hold onto softer ground.Even with such an aggressive tread pattern the Hillbilly's rolling resistance is reasonable. It's certainly not a ultra-fast rolling summer tire, but it never felt overly-sluggish either. I am curious about what running the 2.6” version in the front and rear would be like – I have a feeling that's a recipe for a really good time. As far as durability goes, tires last a lot longer when they're used in the mud rather than on rocky, hardpacked terrain, and this Hillbilly is still going strong, with enough tread left for another round of winter riding. |
While everyone else was sitting around talking about whether or not it was possible, OTTO and Budweiser just went ahead and did it. On Tuesday, Otto and Anheuser-Busch announced that they teamed up to deliver 51,744 cans of beer using autonomous driving technologies.
The low-key announcement was a far cry from the huge event put on by Daimler Trucks North America over a year ago when the Freightliner “Inspiration” truck rolled across the Hoover Dam with a massive press presence, orchestral fanfare, and even a huge video projected onto the dam itself.
Still, despite its humble appearance, the Otto delivery marks a huge milestone in transportation history – the first time a load has been delivered in an autonomous truck. Budweiser even commemorated the delivery by printing a small image of an Otto truck with the words “first delivery by self-driving truck” printed on each can of Bud delivered.
The ride started in Fort Collins, CO, traveled through downtown Denver, and ended up in Colorado Springs. The truck wasn’t driving autonomously the whole way, only on the highways, but when self-driving mode was engaged, the “driver” retreated back into the sleeper berth, leaving no one in either the driver or passenger seats.
Walter Martin, a trucker with almost a decade of experience driving big rigs, was in charge of the vehicle. According to a Wired reporter who went for a ride after the delivery was completed, Martin seemed perfectly at ease with hitting the “engage” button to turn on the self-driving system once they were on the highway, getting out of the driver’s seat, and settling into the sleeper berth.
Otto was recently purchased by Uber for an estimated $680 million. The company has a different approach to autonomous driving than its competitors. Where truck manufacturers require a whole new truck to be purchased, Otto plans to sell kits that can be added to existing trucks in order to achieve self-driving capabilities.
Indeed, the kit that allowed the Budweiser delivery is valued at around $30,000. It isn’t designed for use off of highways, so Otto imagines a future where drivers will be local workers, taking over for the truck in the last few miles after hopping in at a designated depot. They would deliver the load, then drive the truck back out to a terminal and send it on its way before hopping in a new truck.
Until the infrastructure for that exists however, Otto sees their technology as offering safety improvements over human-driven vehicles on highways. They also talk up the convenience of having self-driving technology that can let drivers do paperwork, take a break, or even catch up on sleep, all while the truck is rolling.
“Teaming with Otto to deploy self-driving technology on the roads of Colorado is a monumental step forward in advancing safety solutions that will help Colorado move towards zero deaths on our roads,” said a statement from Colorado Department of Transportation Executive Director Shailen Bhatt according to Fleetowner. “Colorado will continue to focus on working with Otto and others on how to safely deploy this technology on our roads.”
According to Wired, not all of the kinks have been ironed out just yet – Martin still needed to buckle the driver seatbelt – even when he’s not in the seat – to keep the system from binging at him the whole journey.
Source: gobytrucknews, truckinginfo, fleetowner, wired, fortune, overdrive, truckersreport, truckersreport
Image Source: anheuserbusch |
In case you hadn’t noticed, or perhaps you forgot, Pope Francis will be arriving in the Washington DC tomorrow, his first Apostolic Journey to the United States. Here are 10 things to bear in mind ahead of his arrival.
10. That he’s addressing Congress in Spanish doesn’t mean he favors illegal immigration or NAFTA.
9. Pope Francis won’t be endorsing your presidential candidate.
8. Pope Francis won’t be ex-communicating the Supreme Court, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, etc., etc.
7. Pope Francis won’t be appearing on any of the late night talk shows.
6. That he’s meeting President Obama doesn’t make him a Marxist.
5. That he’s speaking to the UN doesn’t make him a New World Order globalist.
4. That he’s attending a multi-religious service at Ground Zero doesn’t mean he believes in syncretism or is jonesing for a One World Religion.
3. That he’s meeting with Catholic Charities doesn’t mean he supports contraception or abortion.
2. None of the major networks or cable news programs covering Pope Francis’ have a clue on how the Catholic Church works.
1. Catholic doctrine will be described as “policy”. |
Image: iStock
Google has released Motion Stills for Android, a take on its iOS app for turning iPhone Live Photos into smooth GIFs for sharing on the web.
Google says Android fans have wanted an app for sharing smooth GIFs ever since it launched Motion Stills for iOS a year ago.
Rather than convert a clip into a Motion Still, Android users would take the shot from within the app itself, which processes it for sharing as a looping GIF or a video. Like Live Photos, the clip is three seconds long, though there's no still image in the file.
Google has also added a Hyperlapse-like feature called Fast Forward, which condenses up to a one minute video down to a shorter clip. The playback speed can also be adjusted between 1x to 8x after recording.
Motion Stills is available on Google Play for devices running Android 5.1 and up, meaning it supports about 66 percent of all Android devices in use today.
Google notes the app features an on-device trimming algorithm that prevents pocket shots and camera shakes. It's also redesigned the iOS video processing pipeline for video stabilization on Android, which uses the device's GPU during playback.
"For this release, we redesigned our existing iOS video processing pipeline to use a streaming approach that processes each frame of a video as it is being recorded. By computing intermediate motion metadata, we are able to immediately stabilize the recording while still performing loop optimization over the full sequence. All this leads to instant results after recording -- no waiting required to share your new GIF," Google said.
The Android version of Motion Stills arrives ahead iOS 11, which introduces Live Photo editing features that partly overlap with Motion Stills for iOS, such as a loop effect. It will also add long exposure effect, a bounce effect, and the ability to trim the video. |
FOX has been a suspension specialist for 40 years, and have won a huge range of motorsport events from the Paris-Dakar to the Indy 500. As a supplier to Ridetech, they've dominated Pro Touring recently. It's fair to say they know their way around shocks. They also understand the importance of proper suspension travel. Since they've also supplied shocks for the Ford Raptor, they also know how to build to an OE level of quality and durability. So, as you can imagine, we were pretty excited to work with them.
To develop these coilovers, we took measurements of the suspension's full range. FOX then designed a shock setup that would work throughout the whole range. After an initial fitting and test, they brought their race trailer out to our local track and we spent two full days with a two FOX engineers, three Miatas and two drivers to fine-tune the valving. We baselined against our current offerings, and used cars ranging from a typical FM II Miata to the 500 hp Targa Miata. This is the end result - a Miata suspension built from the ground up for us.
Our goal was for a high performance suspension that wouldn't punish on the street. We placed an emphasis on stability in corners, turn-in and body control combined with a very high level of grip. The adjustment was designed to primarily adjust the low speed rebound damping, which is mostly affected by body movements. You can adjust from a street setup to a hyper-aware track setup quickly and easily.
There are a lot of little details on these parts that aren't immediately obvious. The springs sit on a high density plastic ring that acts as a bearing, allowing the spring to rotate on the perch without the expense of a Torrington bearing. The internal washers are disc ground for high accuracy, giving more consistent behavior of the shock. Even the body of the shock is given Kashima coat, which is a superior form of hard anodizing to protect the shock under the worst conditions. The lower bearings have a Teflon liner so there's no need to grease them. Even the shocks are light - 40% lighter than a typical aftermarket unit. They are a monotube design.
The shocks have 5" of shaft travel. That's pretty spectacular, and it's part of the reason they can deliver searing track performance without punishing you day-to-day. When we put an experienced Miata driver and track instructor behind the wheel, he couldn't believe how comfortable they were on the street and how hard he could hit the berms. They just work.
Due to the long travel and maximum compression available, you can run just about any ride height with this setup. If you want to run low, the shocks will allow the suspension to compress as far as possible. If you want to run high, that long shaft travel will mean you still have droop available. You may have to use a longer spring for particularly high heights, such as a Baja application.
The standard spring set is 550 lb/in front and 375 lb/in rear. This is suitable for street use and track use, and it's what we use on the V8 cars we build for customers. On the V8 track car, we used 750/500, and the standard valving can deal with up to 900 lb front springs.
The springs will go loose at full droop. To avoid this, we do offer a helper spring kit for an extra $250. They won't make a difference to how the car drives, but they will keep the springs seated when the suspension is fully extended. It's mostly for ease of maintenance.
There may be some interference between the bottom of the shock and V8Roadster lower control arms. Some grinding will be required in this case.
The kit includes four shocks, bumpstops, front and rear springs and new front and rear mounts. No parts are reused. These shocks are built in the USA and can be rebuilt. 1-Year Limited Warranty for the original customer against defects in materials and/or workmanship. |
BELLEVUE, Wash. -- A neighboring church in Bellevue has given a local Muslim community a place to gather and pray after the community's mosque, the Islamic Center of the Eastside, was destroyed by arson.
Last Saturday crews battled a massive fire that ripped through the Islamic Center of the Eastside. Police arrested a 37-year-old at the scene after they found him lying on the ground near the fire. He was charged with second-degree arson this week.
The Muslim community who gathered at the mosque suddenly had no place to pray. They scrambled and got access to a backroom in the Highland Community Center, but that was only temporary. Luckily, this week their neighbors stepped up.
The Bellevue Stake of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has sat next door to the Islamic Center for decades. The church saw this as an opportunity to lend a hand.
This week the church offered its neighbors a large open room (a converted classroom) free of charge for families to gather and pray for as long as they need.
“It’s really very simple,” Church Director of Public Affairs Gordon Wilson said. “It’s just neighbors helping neighbors. Jesus said, ‘Love your neighbor.’ They’re right next door. How can it be more obvious than that?”
The church even left a welcome sign at the front door, along with two large boards covered in messages of hope from members of their congregation.
“It was a surprise, and it was very heartwarming,” Islamic Center board member Shams Pirbhai said. “That means a lot to me and to our whole congregation.”
The Islamic Center community plans to lease a larger space in the next few months, but now they don’t have to rush.
Pirbhai says their community has been blown away by the outpouring of support from families and groups around Bellevue. And this gesture holds a special place.
“They are really good neighbors and really helping us out,” Pirbhai said. “And we appreciate that.” |
Old Gods Expansion Could Have Included Titans, Deck Spotlight: C'Thun N'Zoth Control Priest, The Angry Chicken #152
May 26th Hotfix Notes, Medivh Skills & Talents Recap
Legion Beta - Build 21796
Quantum Warriors <WQW> managed to clear GR 120 on the European server, with non-seasonal characters. Chewingnom shared some details on how they did it - the differences between their 4 man party and other, as well as the healing support Crusader spec that was used.
The 4 man setup used by them was an Energy Twister Wizard along with 3 support characters. Read below for all the details.
Hello, this is Chewingnom from the clan <WQW> Quantum Warriors on EU.
I'm writing this post because I wanted to share our GR120 4P clear on EU NS (EU #1) (Just done tonight!) with you. You will think that we are just some high paragon guys fishing for a good rift... but I share this clear with you because this is not the case. We actually replaced the Support Monk by a whole new build that I'm thinking about since 2.4.1 PTR (And even back in 2.4) : The Heal Crusader.
You will say "Nothing new, a lot of people have theorycrafted Support Crusader builds since 2.4". Indeed, since 2.4, there is alot of Support Crusader builds here and there, but none of these builds had the potential to be part of the metagame, mostly because the monks spot is the only viable spot to be replaced by the. Thus, I came up with a Crusader build able to replace the Monk and capable of GR120+.
After alot of brainstorming I finally found a build that was actually worth to try a few weeks ago. So we made a few tries and cleared GR115 pretty easily (You can see it here). After some more tests in GR119/120 and some builds adjustements with my mates LouLou, Hustle and S0RRY, we felt it was clearly viable and we decided to just do it. Our sweet mate S0RRY who was playing Monk switched to Crusader and he actually learned the gameplay really fast !
Setup Used :
ET Wizard : LouLou
Support Barb : Chewingnom
Support WD : Hustle
Support Crusader : S0RRY
Clear/Leaderboards screenshots :
Clear Screenshot
Leaderboards
Some hints :
The Consecration + Inviolable Faith healing has alot of potential so you can compensate some of the toughness loss quite easily (Blur Passive + Ghost Trance BBV).
The Sweep Attack packing is insane for Pain Enhancer and Area Damage in high density maps, especially with a static DPS like Twister Wizard.
The Critical Law is a great DPS buff along with Resolved Judgment. Though, the problem with Judgment is that the Crit Buff doesnt work on CC-immune mobs, so the uptime is not that good sadly.
The potential :
We think it can compete with Support Monk in high end pushing (Likely 122+). I can see Support Crusader and Support Monk being equally viable in the 4 players metagame, Support Monk is in my opinion the safe way with no surprise while Support Crusader is the risky way with opportunities to really shine, more potential. Risky, indeed. Toughness is not a real issue in most cases but some bad elites combos can be hard to survive with a Crusader. Monk is still more consistent for toughness.
Why can it be worth it to play Crusader? Alongside the Critical Law, the main advantage for the Heal Crusader is Gathering Sweep. The more density you have, the more the Crusader will buff your DPS by sweeping mobs. More mobs into PE and ET range, more ET breakpoints, more AD, AD more efficient...
Still, it is very hard to quantify the DPS gain from the Sweep Attack, but playing Crusader is allways a ~5% DPS buff even without Sweep Attack and with Judgment poor uptime taken into account. But, the DPS potential due to Sweep Attack can theoretically be so insane in « dream maps » that it can justify to drop the Monk if you are at your DPS ceiling. In the end, my opinion is that you will have to decide what's best for your group and what you prefer to play.
Note that I'm only talking about the 4 players metagame here. The toughness buffs from Monk are likely mandatory in 2 players and 3 players (With the current Twister build at least, but the concept of Tal Rasha 6P is mostly locking the Wizard build anyway). But maybe we just didn't think enough about it!
The build :
Hero Details
DiabloFans Build
How it works :
I gave up the Roland 6P (250% Attack Speed Bonus) that I tried back in 2.4 to get the Roland 2P (Cooldowns Reset with Sweep Attack) along with the Akkhan 4P (50% RCR while in Akarat and 50% CDR on Akarat) instead.
One of the keys of the build is to use the Akkhan's Addendum in the Cube Weapon Slot which gives you Prophet Rune (150% Armor & Cheat Death Proc) and Embodiment of Power Rune (+5 Wrath Regen) of Akarat Champion and allows you to take Rally Rune.
The Rally Rune is basically resetting all your cooldowns when you use it. One of the other keys to the build is Akarat's Awakening that will reset your cooldowns everytime you block, as with both Justice Lantern and Hold Your Ground Passive, you can be block-capped. Thus, all of this will allow you to put down alot of Consecration very fast and will also allow you to handle your cooldowns and Zodiac ring procs easily, giving you enough freedom to focus on sweeping mobs.
The gameplay is quite obvious and simple : You have to stack Consecration on the floor to get healing, while Sweeping mobs wisely (No mindless spam) into the Twister range. Always use Consecration and Law just before using Rally Akarat (which will reset them) in order to enhance your Consecration Stacking and Zodiac Ring Procs.
You have to use Judgment wisely too, because it roots enemies, you have to figure out the best way to use it : Only on the mobs already stacked with Gathering Sweep into Twister Range, right before an Arcane CoE... Condemn is still very useful to pack density and sometimes keeping it together but Shield Glare may likely be a viable option to get 20% damage buff.
It seems to me that the build is pretty strong in its current state and may likely be the best group setup while fishing for a dream map in high endgame. The coordination of the group and the teamplay is likely way more difficult to master than with a Monk though.
Remember that the metagame is never settled in stone and copy/paste builds from Rank 1 guys doesn't mean you are playing the best setup (Or the only viable setup). There are so many build-possibilities, so many group synergies that maybe nobody thought about yet, that you can't just say "If Rank 1 is playing this, it is the best build/setup, no matter what". No.
Thus I wanted to thank my mates LouLou, Hustle and S0RRY who are very smart/good players and always want to try out new builds and group setups. Thanks guys, keep up the good work
<WQW> Chewingnom
PS : A video of the GR120 clear will be uploaded soon ! |
Inmates in the film The House I Live In. (Photo courtesy of Derek Hallquist)There are two documentary films on limited release right now that, by rights, should be mandatory viewing for every human being in the United States old enough to comprehend them.
David France’s How to Survive a Plague and Eugene Jarecki’s The House I Live In are both movies that address fundamentally important issues left out of both the official historical narrative and our contemporary political discourse. It is either ironic or bitterly appropriate that the two films were first released in the period immediately before the US presidential election, a time when the political conversations being played out in the national media are usually at their lowest level.
A Nation of Drug Warriors
Not that they get much coverage at the best of times, but you can add mass incarceration and the war on drugs (the interconnected subjects of The House I Live In) to the US drone strikes program, climate change and any other urgent, hugely important issue that was either left out of the presidential debates and campaigns or had its worst aspects actively celebrated.
This is hardly surprising: Jarecki makes it very, very clear that support for the drug war – not just perpetuating it, but constantly ratcheting it up and thus imprisoning ever more socially and economically disadvantaged Americans – is horribly bipartisan. Some of the politicians we see in archive footage, sternly denouncing drugs and espousing harsh policies that have devastated communities, are still leading lights of the Democratic party, like Joe Biden, and both Hillary and Bill Clinton. And their support for these policies seems to give few progressives pause.
Also See: The People Vs. the War on Drugs: Filmmaker Tackles the “Predatory Monster”
This is partly because, as The House I Live In shows, we have allowed the stereotypes and narrative of drug war propaganda to permeate and become embedded within our world view. Reefer Madness scare stories and opium den caricatures from historical archives seem laughable to us now, so clearly fact-free in their scaremongering that their naked racism hardly seems sinister. But as Jarecki illustrates, with each new drug come the same scare stories, and the more recent they are, the more plausible they seem: from the super-strength granted by crack and PCP to the face-eating user of “bath salts.”
Moreover, each new drug scare is associated with, and becomes justification for, policies that disproportionately impact a specific racial group politically useful to repress: from Chinese Americans on the West Coast in the 19th century (opium) to African-American communities in the 1980s (crack). Jarecki does not discount the seriousness of the effects of drug addiction; rather, his film shows how the specter of drugs’ effects on society has been deployed in racist, discriminatory and politically manipulative ways.
For an example of this mythology’s deleterious impact on our political discourse, we need look no further than the second televised presidential debate. Asked about his record on immigration, Barack Obama reassured viewers that the undocumented immigrants his administration has focused on deporting have been “gangbangers.” In the first place, this is simply a lie – one unsurprisingly missed by many progressives who rushed to fact-check only Mitt Romney’s half of the debate, but not by Adam Serwer at Mother Jones or Julianne Hing at Colorlines, who reported that “the vast majority of undocumented immigrants who have been deported during Obama’s tenure do not have violent criminal records.”
But moving away from policy facts and on to the level preferred by most pundits when discussing the presidential debates, that of “narrative” and “framing” – what was Obama aiming to achieve with the “gangbangers” line? Progressives who would be appalled by overt racism are still susceptible to the coded language that says that the demonized racial group of the day does contain a terrifying subgroup from whom we must be protected. Drug users and distributors are still a reliable “enemy within” from whom politicians seeking office promise to protect the American people just as fiercely as they will protect them from “terrorists.”
Obama’s rhetoric thus achieves the same thing Richard Nixon achieved when he launched the modern war on drugs: It wins votes by scaring the public and painting himself as their guardian. Somewhat ironically, however, while in public Nixon pioneered the tough rhetoric still used today, his administration devoted two-thirds of its antidrug budget to treatment programs – almost the exact reverse of Barack Obama, whose rhetoric has promised much but whose National Drug Control Budget for fiscal year 2013 devotes just over 40 percent of a requested $25.6 billion to treatment and prevention.
Jarecki’s film is clear-eyed when it comes to the realities of drug addiction: The film takes as its starting point the drug-related death of the son of his family’s former housekeeper, Nanny Jeter. But in tracing the causes and impacts of drug abuse in the United States, Jarecki came to understand the war on drugs as a destructive force of mass proportions and turned his lens on that system’s destructive effects – including its failure to address the problem of drug addiction itself. As no less an authority than addiction treatment specialist Dr Gabor Maté attests, the attendant punitive criminal justice policies and aggressive policing have worsened some of addiction’s key causes and contributing factors: poverty, alienation, despair. It is Maté who offers one of the most bitter condemnations of the war on drugs when he wonders aloud whether it is actually a failure:
“I’m beginning to think maybe it’s a success. What if it’s a success by keeping police forces busy? What if it’s a success by keeping private jails thriving? What if it’s a success keeping a legal establishment justified in its self-generated activity? Maybe it’s a success on different terms than the publicly stated ones.”
The House I Live In is bold enough to challenge the orthodox image of drug dealers as well as drug users. As David Simon (former newspaper beat reporter, author and creator of “The Wire”) notes in the film, most dealers are employees or middle management for the sole employer in the equivalent of a company town, whose choice of profession in their local economy is entirely pragmatic and logical, in fact barely a choice at all. If many of their bosses are amoral monsters who don’t care about the harm the business does to the local community or to their employees, well, welcome to America: That describes most bosses in the legitimate economy, not just the underground one. Aren’t we always being told that “job creators” like this are to be lauded?
Our entertainment culture is equally infected by this mythology, and progressives should not assume themselves to be immune. The television show “Breaking Bad” is acclaimed by the liberal intelligentsia (arguably justifiable in aesthetic terms), but it is also part of a shift toward portrayal of methamphetamine users and dealers as the current “public enemy number one” in American life. As Simon observes, the drug war began as and continues to be a set of racist policies but has now extended to targeting a swathe of the United States’ increasingly economically marginalized white poor, too. (Thus the class-based nature of all institutional racism is eventually illuminated.)
Once we understand the war on drugs as essentially another front in an ongoing class war waged from the top down, its place can be seen within a wider matrix of American policies that perpetuate inequality and devastate the poor while squeezing any profit from them that can be made.
A Case Study in Fighting Back
So what opportunities exist for resistance or even reform? Some inspiration and hope are offered by How To Survive A Plague, which illustrates, among other things, how economic inequality intersected with other forms of oppression to exacerbate the AIDS crisis and continues to do so. While the two films are concerned with different issues, what those issues have in common is that the populations most affected by both have essentially been abandoned by our political class.
It would be overly simplistic to say that one film focuses on a problem, while the other shows how to start implementing a solution. The House I Live In does point briefly to the efforts that are being made by prison and legal reform groups – efforts that bore fruit to a small extent with the passage of Proposition 36 in California and the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington. Likewise, How to Survive a Plague ends by making it very clear the extent to which AIDS continues to be a crisis and a battle that needs to be fought.
So both films inspire, if not directly demand, action – it’s just that one offers something very rare in documentary filmmaking: a practical example of what form that action might take to achieve some measure of success. How to Survive a Plague isn’t quite a complete how-to for direct-action activism, but it’s a damn good start – call it Direct Action 101. The film chronicles ACT UP and its Treatment and Data Committee (later the Treatment Action Group) from 1987 to 1996 and beyond – from their rabble-rousing beginnings to a degree of acceptance within the scientific, political and medical communities; through their lowest times of in-fighting, schisms and despair; to their most inspiring actions and crucial, hard-won victories.
You will already have heard a lot of talk, post-election, about how now is the time to hold Obama’s feet to the fire, to “make him do it” (never mind that this idea originates in a myth), to pressure elected officials into making progressive decisions. But what both of these films show is that, for the best activists and most urgent causes, that work never stops. It doesn’t let up during election season so that activists can get behind their candidate and defend him or her from criticism.
On the contrary, in How To Survive A Plague we see that ACT UP bird-dogged both candidates for president, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, to push one of them into making some kind of commitment to which they could be held, whichever of them won the 1992 election. By confronting Clinton at a New York City fundraiser, ACT UP member Bob Rafsky prompted not just the famous “I feel your pain” response, but something more substantive: Two days later, Clinton met with members of ACT UP and other activists to discuss his AIDS policies and agreed to make a major AIDS policy speech, to have people with HIV speak to the Democratic Convention and to sign on to United for AIDS Action’s five point plan. Flashforward 20 years, and those few activists brave and smart enough to confront candidates during election season find themselves blocked by barricades and dragged away by militarized police (not that ACT UP protesters didn’t have to contend with plenty of police brutality themselves, as shown by scenes in the film that have a visceral power).
Contrary to the sometimes condescending, sometimes downright abusive rhetoric lobbed at activists who don’t prioritize getting out the vote at election time, recognizing the power of radical direct action is not some kind of impractical idealism. It often involves, for example, identifying the legislator or other public figure who has the power to create a change within the existing system and bird-dogging that person until they are forced to make even a lip-service promise to which they can then be held.
Making pragmatic alliances with imperfect politicians may be a valid activist strategy, but a good test for whether those who urge this are operating in good faith is to gauge their reaction once it’s suggested that this should apply to politicians on both side of the aisle. Just as The House I Live In shows that the drug war is far from an issue that divides America’s two big parties, How To Survive A Plague upends partisan expectations in footage showing activist Peter Staley’s appearance on “Crossfire.” While Pat Buchanan makes the usual conservative implications about the immorality of homosexual acts, he also sympathizes with ACT UP’s efforts to accelerate FDA approval processes, while Tom Braden, on “the left,” chides Staley piously for his uncouth, overly demanding activism and, in a move all-too-familiar among American progressives, reflexively defends the government agency.
Both films manage to be consistently surprising even if you consider yourself someone reasonably well-informed about issues that are kept out of mainstream media and mainstream political discussion. By using only archive interviews with certain HIV-positive activists – often men who spoke on camera about their belief that the disease would kill them in a matter of years – until close to the film’s end, How to Survive a Plague even manages to create a sort of horrible but compelling and emotionally rewarding suspense as to who did indeed survive to this day.
For those who did survive, any compassionate viewer is filled with a sense of relief and admiration, sharing in their disbelief that they made it. For those who died, any compassionate viewer is filled with not only grief but rage on their behalf, a rage stirred by the conviction that these people were killed not just by AIDS, but by the negligence, political cowardice, bigotry, complacency and greed of politicians, religious leaders, medical professionals and pharmaceutical company executives.
The same rage will inevitably fill to bursting any compassionate human heart on witnessing The House I Live In. The film’s closing contention is a comparison so provocative and counter-intuitive that many progressive viewers may recoil (as it appears Jarecki initially did himself).
It is important, however, that we do not turn away. There are times when anger can be the only appropriate reaction – and the catalyst that spurs us to action. |
Jason Collins' coming-out party was a historic and controversial story, feel-good for some, an abomination for others and an "uncomfortable conversation" on "Outside the Lines" that still resonates in ESPN conference rooms and in the ombudsman's mailbag.
More than one ESPN manager told me it was "a learning experience" and then couldn't come up with what had been learned. How about this: The tricky trifecta of religion, race and sexuality exposed not only the fault-lines in "OTL's" preparation but the inconsistent performance of ESPN journalism in general. The old story won't die because it brings up too many unresolved questions that we will be addressing in my scheduled 18 months as ESPN's fifth ombudsman.
• What are the boundaries of sports talk, and on which shows?
• What is the distinction between a reporter and a commentator? The lines seem to blur sometimes.
• How can ESPN balance the varying sensibilities of its audience? There are people who want the network to provide a safe haven from the real world. But Barry Blyn, vice president of consumer insights, tells me that he is finding in his research a "hunger for more challenging news." These people want information, they want to understand their world, including the world of their games.
• ESPN's resources are substantial, and as it continues to hire more experienced journalists, will it match their ambitions with a company will to give them reporting and commentating room?
• If it does, there will be another, more complex balancing act. What happens when ESPN's "partners" -- the teams, conferences, leagues whose games it airs and analyzes -- are made uncomfortable by tough reporting?
Let's start this journey back in April with the face of a seven-foot journeyman hoops bouncer, Jason Collins, smiling out of a Sports Illustrated cover online. It took most of sportsworld by surprise. The opening lines of his confessional essay, "I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay," stirred the pro basketball, African-American and LGBT communities. It would stir Christians, as well.
ESPN seemed somewhat slower than the Internet to get excited by the announcement. A snide case had been made that it was, after all, a rival's scoop, that Tim Tebow was still adrift and that the NFL draft was looming. In any case, it was perfunctorily covered on early "SportsCenter" editions and briefly examined by ESPN NBA reporter Chris Broussard. He predicted, correctly, that the NBA and most players would publicly support Collins, who was a free agent. Whether Collins would sign another NBA contract, Broussard said, depended less on his sexual orientation than on whether any team needed an aging enforcer who averaged about nine minutes a game.
Some of those who had long hoped for a male active professional team athlete to come out were vaguely disappointed; as attractive and intelligent as Collins was, he was not a star and, as a free agent, was technically not even active. Also, there had been expectations of bigger names; ESPN's enterprise unit was one of a number trying to track down a months-old rumor that four NFL players were poised to come out together.
OTL was the first ESPN show to cover the story in any depth in its 3 p.m. airing. It had to shift gears from a planned Lakers dissection. LZ Granderson, an openly gay, black ESPN columnist, magazine writer and frequent TV commentator, came on by phone and celebrated a brave new locker room. He talked about the importance of Collins describing himself as black, thus eroding a stereotype of the African-American community as homophobic. He discussed the symbolism of Collins wearing No. 98 to memorialize the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student. Granderson also imagined all the young gay players who could now believe there would be a place for them on high school, college, even pro teams.
In his turns, Broussard, who had been on hand for the scheduled Lakers show, was just as thoughtful, declaring the climate right for acceptance, acknowledging the overwhelming support (Kobe Bryant, Tony Parker and Jason Kidd, not to mention Michelle Obama, had quickly weighed in with positive tweets). But tiny red flags popped up in Broussard's remarks. He wondered how much of the support reflected true feelings and how much "political correctness." There would be players, he said, who might be uncomfortable showering with and even just being around gays, but who didn't want to say so and risk being marked as bigots.
Granderson began to frame the story: He invoked his 10-year friendship with Broussard, back to their being colleagues at ESPN The Magazine and teammates in rec league basketball. He said he saw their relationship as an example of how people with very different points of view could have respectful and intelligent disagreements while remaining friends. Implicit was that this could be a model for NBA players.
Broussard broke in to "second" Granderson's remarks. He added "I am a Christian" and agreed with the idea that people can tolerate differing points of view.
The OTL host, Steve Weissman, asked Granderson whether there was a difference between tolerance and acceptance. Granderson said that there was, and he noted for the record that he was a Christian, too. He said that just as he and Broussard had had "this uncomfortable conversation" about gays and straights, as had the military before the end of "don't ask, don't tell," now it was the turn of the NBA.
'WALKING IN OPEN REBELLION TO GOD'
In a host decision, Weissman asked Broussard to comment on Collins declaring himself a Christian in his SI essay. Several ESPN executives, in casual, off-the-record conversations, attributed that decision to inexperience. Broussard told me later that he "was stunned when Weissman asked me a direct question," but said he felt he "needed to let the viewer know where I'm at for context and clarity."
Broussard said, "If you're openly living in unrepentant sin, whatever it may be, not just homosexuality [but] adultery, fornication, premarital sex between heterosexuals … I believe that's walking in open rebellion to God and to Jesus Christ." He added. "I would not characterize that person as a Christian because I don't think the Bible would characterize them as a Christian."
At this point, as Weissman said to me later, the control room told him to let Granderson wrap up the segment.
Granderson's voice became passionate. He said that "faith, just like love and marriage, is personal." He talked about the unfairness of using the Bible to deprive others of equal rights. No one could define his Christianity. He declared that "Jesus Christ is my personal Lord and Savior."
As both Granderson and Broussard would later say, they were sorry that the focus of the show had shifted from Collins' coming out to their personal beliefs. Yet both seemed to feel that an airing of those beliefs was intrinsic to understanding the scope of the story.
And in the context of the times, it was a big story. A few months earlier, ESPN had helped expose Mike Rice, the Rutgers men's basketball coach whose physical and emotional abuse of players included gay slurs. The use of homophobia to tyrannize and control straight athletes is an old-school tactic that can work only in a climate of fear and inequality. Rice was eventually fired.
A few months after Collins' coming out, when you might think we had all been sensitized, Indiana Pacers center Roy Hibbert, at a playoff news conference, described himself as "no homo" to distance himself from the praise he had just given another man. My email called the phrase no big deal, a jokey-jock throwaway. But I think it reflected an uneasiness about sexuality even among large celebrity athletes we might assume should be more confident of their manhood.
Personally, I was most surprised by revelations, in excellent Magazine and OTL pieces by espnW reporter Kate Fagan, about Brittney Griner, the hot new WNBA star. She said she had been forced to stay in the closet during her years at Baylor. Her coach, Kim Mulkey, was apparently afraid that any hint of lesbianism on her team would affect recruiting. I had naively thought we were past the dark days of the 1990s when coach Rene Portland of Penn State promised the parents of prospects that no "predatory" lesbians would darken her locker room. (Is this still a pervasive recruiting tactic? I hope ESPN's enterprise commandos are on it.)
In such a climate, I wondered why ESPN did not do more to advance the Collins story or at least connect more dots to other sports stories, perhaps even link to the gay struggle for equal rights and its push-back and to the spike in assaults on gay men. (The next day's OTL devoted half the show to a "Good Morning America" sit-down with Collins and a phoner with John Amaechi, an ex-NBA player who had come out after his retirement.)
On the day of Collins' coming-out announcement, OTL had at least four hours to put together a produced news package, to gather more talking heads, to be smart in its analysis. Just what does this story mean, if anything, to sports, to gays, to the perception of manhood in America? For a traditional broadcast or cable news operation, four hours is enough time to crash such a report, with lunch included.
When ESPN does respond well to a breaking story, it leans on its superstars. The superb work of Bob Ley and Jeremy Schaap after the Boston Marathon bombings is a good example.
So, too, the first-rate follow-ups to the Collins story by Bill Simmons and Rick Reilly. Simmons had two excellent podcasts, one a discerning discussion about the ramifications of Collins' announcement with Grantland writer Wesley Morris and one with Collins himself. Reilly came up with vintage columns, one in which he interviewed Collins' former fiancée, among other friends, and another with fresh material on flamboyant Dodgers outfielder, Glenn Burke, who was forced by baseball to stay in the closet, which eventually drove him out after a short, promising career.
More context would have made the OTL show far better. It was thin on the meaning of Collins' coming out and overly focused on two men discussing the differences in their Christian outlooks. And even the schisms in jock Christianity could have been made more pertinent. NASCAR drivers, who have incorporated religious services into their prerace rituals, are privately contemptuous of the "stick-and-ball" athletes who pray to "trinket Gods" to bring them luck.
Covering baseball in the last century, you would find clubhouses divided between so-called God-Squadders and Juicers. The born-again Christians, who attended pregame chapel, prayed that their teammates would find the path out of the barroom and show up sober for batting practice. The party boys expressed disdain for the "softness" of the observant, who, they claimed, didn't really need to win because religion forgives losers.
SAFE HAVENS AND SHOWERS
ESPN on-air coverage is driven by live games and studio analysis, and a Jock Culture hero-goat-scoreboard mentality prevails. By default, fault was found by some ESPN executives with Granderson, Broussard and Weissman, all of whom are otherwise generally well-regarded in Bristol. It was Granderson, it was said, who, knowing Broussard's religious views, led him into his remarks. It was Broussard who stepped out of his assigned role and went too far. It was Weissman who lost control of the show. The criticisms were casual and off-the-record; they seemed like a way to get past the show.
At the time, the company quickly issued a noncommittal statement: "We regret that a respectful discussion of personal viewpoints became a distraction from today's news. ESPN is fully committed to diversity and welcomes Jason Collins' announcement."
Two weeks later, ESPN President John Skipper told reporters, "I think we did great other than we made one mistake: The mistake was not being more careful with Chris Broussard, and there is a collective responsibility there." Answering a question from Richard Deitsch of Sports Illustrated, Skipper said: "We don't quarrel with his right to have any personal point of view, although we do assert as a company that we have a tolerant point of view, we are a diverse company, and that does not represent what our company thinks."
The attitude, as I read it, was that these were small, regrettable, forgettable mistakes. No major fouls. In fact, considering ESPN's "Embrace Debate" mantra, it could have been far messier. In other words, we can move on. This was a one-off.
You think? Or was it another example of that Jock Culture sensibility of not dwelling on an error, fine for the playing of games but not for the journalistic issues that affect our understanding and appreciation of those games. The ESPN audience was not so ready to move on. There were hundreds of emails to the ombudsman. They tended to fall into four categories.
1.About 30 percent of the respondents not only supported Broussard's religious views but applauded the emergence of faith as an antidote to the "pro-gay" agenda of the media. Jim Wesson of LaFollette, Tenn. was expressing the opinion of many viewers when he wrote: "If Chris Broussard had expressed a pro-homosexual point of view you would not have criticized him for expressing his personal feelings rather than simply being a basketball analyst. It's very troubling that ESPN is tolerant of everyone except Christians."
2.Another 30 percent supported Broussard on First Amendment grounds. He had a right to speak his mind. Many of these also complained that the religious beliefs he espoused do not get a proper airing in the media.
3.About 20 percent said they thought Broussard was way out of line and had spoken inappropriately. Some thought he should be disciplined or fired. The case of former ESPN commentator Rob Parker was brought up as a precedent. Parker, who is black, had wondered on "First Take" whether Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III was an authentic black or a "cornball brother" who was "not down with the cause." This was based on Griffin's lifestyle, hairstyle and white fiancée. Parker was suspended, and his ESPN contract was not renewed.
4.Another 20 percent thought any mention of homosexuality had no place on a sports network watched by families and children. They invoked the safe haven attitude about controversial matters that often includes complaints about commercials for male sexual enhancement drugs. Kerri Wittwer of Melissa, Texas, spoke for that point of view: "Very disappointed to walk into our family area to my elementary age sons watching ESPN and the coverage being a lengthy interview on being gay in the NFL. My sons love sports and ESPN. Just as I don't think that Sports coverage needs to include ball players and their romantic relationships with women, the same goes for a man's relationship with other men. Seems we have strayed from SPORTS coverage to relationship and political coverage."
By the time I started as ombudsman and got to talk to the principals in mid-June, the story had dropped off the table. No one at ESPN was particularly motivated to talk about it. But the audience, which I represent, was still interested, and so was I.
Granderson told me that "the conversation went too far - not too far for where it needs to go but too far for that news story. It was not necessarily a conversation for ESPN, which is not necessarily the place to examine theological differences."
Could he have done something differently? "I could have opted to put my ego aside and remember the purpose I was there for," he said. "I'm not backing away, but I'm disappointed to put Chris in a place to be defending his Christian views and values."
He had his parting shot: "What's heartbreaking is using God to spread hate."
COLLINS SEEMED OK WITH IT
A decade ago, Broussard and I were colleagues at The New York Times, where he was known for having given up seminary to pursue a career in sportswriting. He was forthright when we talked earlier this month.
"The media in general, not just ESPN, is lopsided in its coverage," he said. "It's a cheerleader for the lifestyle and same-sex marriage and puts those who disagree in an unfavorable light. You can see it in the eye rolling and body language of so-called objective journalists. Born-again people are made out to be bigots and intolerant even though there are Neanderthals present on both sides."
Broussard said he went on the show as "an objective journalist," but, because it was OTL, he was ready to let the host lead him. As it turned out, Granderson led.
"I was satisfied," Broussard said. "I would do it again. It was what I believed. It was not out of hate, not in a judgmental way. It was conventional Christian doctrine.
"I got a lot of support from players afterward, especially from Christians, who loved it. Others told me I had the courage to speak out. They said 'You got big balls, brother, you the man.'"
Broussard called Collins the next night and they talked for about 10 minutes. "I wanted him to know I wasn't trying to use his announcement for my own views. He seemed OK with it."
As was, Broussard thought, the company: "ESPN did not make me feel they were against me."
The third man in the ring, Weissman, who is being used more often as a host of OTL, knew nothing about Broussard's religious views, he told me. Nor did his producers. Should they have? In 2007, in response to Amaechi's coming out (his memoir, "Man in the Middle," was published by ESPN), Broussard wrote a column on the topic for ESPN.com.
In the piece, he maintained that although he believed that homosexuality, like any sex outside a male-female marriage, was a sin, he also believed that gay and straight players could be teammates. "If I can accept working side-by-side with a homosexual," he wrote, "then he/she can accept working side-by-side with someone who believes homosexuality is wrong."
He also wrote: "Granted, I don't shower with LZ after games like NBA teammates do, and I'll admit that if I had to, it might be a little uncomfortable at first.
The column was 6 years old, and was news to the immediate supervisors of the April OTL show, some of whom had been at ESPN when the column appeared. In fairness, Broussard was a magazine feature writer at the time, not lead NBA reporter for ESPN TV.
And would it have made a difference had they known? The big turning point in the conversation was when Weissman asked Broussard to comment on Collins' calling himself a Christian. Given that Broussard and Granderson had already described themselves as Christians, the host was tying up loose ends by asking a follow-up question. It was textbook journalism.
"At the end of the day," Weissman said, "I thought we had a respectful, intelligent and honest conversation."
I'm not so sure about that. The program was lumpy and unframed. A commentator and a reporter were put into a position of point-counterpoint. They went too far and yet not far enough. Granderson's concept of the "uncomfortable conversation" should be an aspect of ESPN's purported mission of injecting more journalism into its coverage. But it needs to be offered in a context that explains why you need to know about drugs, sexual abuse, money for college athletes, cheating, the topics that some in the audience will consider crucial, others alienating, still others just plain buzz killers. Maybe more of an effort has to be made to place these stories beyond a 13-minute, 46- second slot on OTL.
Nevertheless, that old coming-out story is constantly being renewed by the people it inspired. Two months later, in June, I noticed a new display being mounted in the ESPN employee cafeteria in Bristol. It was called OUT/field and was sponsored by the company's LGBT group. A series of panels honored gay athletes, including Martina Navratilova, Billy Bean and the man who sometimes got lost in this story, Jason Collins. |
The Mercedes driver came out on top after a race-long battle with Vettel, which included a flashpoint when they made slight contact at Turn 1 after Vettel emerged from the pits on the inside of Hamilton.
Hamilton made use of an alternative strategy to Vettel – aided by making a pitstop just before a virtual safety car period came to an end – to get back on terms with the Ferrari, which had surged into the lead at the start.
“Seb was so fast ahead, it was such a push to try to keep close to him and not let him pull away,” said Hamilton after the race.
“It was just the rawest fight I can remember having for some time, which I loved. This is what the sport needs to be every single race and this is why I race, what got me into racing.
“To have those close battles with him, a four-time champion, is awesome.
“In the end we came out so close together which was very, very close into Turn 1, I gave you [Vettel] space otherwise we would have touched. It was close, it was cool.
“In the heat of the moment it’s difficult to know from the outside, I felt like I ran out of road but was alongside.
“But it was how racing should be – I love it, I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
The final stint of the race hinged on whether Hamilton could make his soft tyres last long enough to prevent Vettel – on the harder medium compound – from fighting back late in the race.
“The team did a great job with the strategy,” said Hamilton, who repeatedly questioned the decisions from the pit wall when he was left out for a later first stop than Vettel, while being reassured that things would come back to him later on if he could keep his pace up.
“This is one of the hardest races, to keep up with him, he drove fantastically well so it’s such a privilege to race against him.
“The last stint, 25 laps, when they told me they [the tyres] had to do that I didn’t think… I thought at the end of the stint he would come back but we managed it.
“These guys [Ferrari] have done a phenomenal job, the pace they have, it is close between us.”
Additional reporting by Jonathan Noble |
A proposed Silk Road high-speed railway. [Li Yi/China Daily]
China's railway authority has proposed a Silk Road high-speed railway connecting the country's northwest region to West Asia via Central Asia, a plan it said would overcome the cross-border connectivity problem of different rail standards.
He Huawu, chief engineer of China Railway Corp, put forward the proposal at a Thursday forum on the One Belt, One Road Initiative hosted by China Civil Engineering Society.
His proposed route was from China's Urumqi and Yining to Almaty in Kazakhstan, then to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, Tashkent and Samarkand in Uzbekistan, Ashgabat in Turkmenistan and finally blending into West Asia's network through Teheran, Iran.
The northeast-southwest line would be complementary to the existing railway network in central Asian nations, which mostly run southeast to northwest toward Moscow, He said. What's more important, it could get rid of the incompatibility between this region's wide-gauge track systems and China's standard-gauge system.
For years, the 1.52-meter track standard adopted in Central Asia has been a headache for logistics managers because it is not based on the 1.435 meter standard track adopted in China and most other parts of the world. Changing gauges at the border takes days for cargo and significantly cuts railway transport's competitiveness against shipping by sea.
It is unlikely now to persuade those countries to change their existing railways, He said, but the high-speed rail he envisions along the new route would connect seamlessly to China's network and other regions. That's because the worldwide standard for fast rail is the 1.435 meter variety, so a new line could be built based on it.
"The Khorgos station bordering Kazakhstan last year handled less than 17 million metric tons of cargo running at full capacity, but beyond the station, the east-west annual cargo transportation capacity is 100 million tons," He said.
The bottleneck undermined the idea of a large-capacity corridor.
"Increased container traffic and sea container traffic moved by land instead could justify the cost of building the line," he said.
According to He, container trains and passenger trains could run on the same route. The only difference would be speed. A passenger train could run at 250 to 300 kilometers per hour, while a container train could run at 120 km/h.
Other experts cautioned that an Asian railway link has been under discussion for a long time and has not materialized mainly because of various geopolitical concerns of the countries alone the route. |
BEIJING (Reuters) - China’s violence-prone far western region of Xinjiang has begun a campaign to promote ethnic unity with a call for respect of the cultures of the minorities who call the region home, while vowing another crackdown on terrorism and separatism.
A pedestrian reacts as a security officer holds out a detector on a street in Urumqi, Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region, November 17, 2013. REUTERS/Rooney Chen
Hundreds of people have been killed in unrest in Xinjiang in the past few years. The government blames the violence on Islamist militants who want to establish an independent state called East Turkestan for minority Uighurs, a mostly Muslim people who speak a Turkic language and hail from Xinjiang.
Rights groups and exiles say one of the major problems in Xinjiang is government controls on Uighur culture and Islam, and point out that few Han Chinese who live and work in Xinjiang make any effort to learn Uighur or make Uighur friends.
Zhang Chunxian, Xinjiang’s Communist Party boss, launched “the year of ethnic unity progress” at a meeting in the region’s capital, Urumqi.
“We must respect differences, and take a respectful attitude towards dealing with problems of (different) customs, to create an atmosphere in society of respect for the culture and customs of different peoples,” Zhang said, in comments carried in Thursday’s official Xinjiang Daily.
This can start from the smallest things in daily life, and people should be “guided” to live, work and study together so they can learn respect and tolerance, added Zhang, who is a member of the Han majority.
While saying there was progress in combating extremism and getting the various ethnic groups to get along with each other, he admitted that there had been a rise in ethnic disputes and terrorism remained a problem in some parts of Xinjiang.
Companies that operate in Xinjiang need to be pushed into employing more minorities, and their culture and languages need encouragement and protection, Zhang said.
Bilingual education also needs improving, he added, referring to a policy that has long proved controversial in Xinjiang as many Uighurs fear their mother tongue is being pushed aside in favor of Mandarin.
Han Chinese are generally not taught Uighur or about Islam at school in Xinjiang.
Zhang, who has repeatedly called for the different peoples in Xinjiang to get along better with each other, vowed a “resolute crackdown” on terrorism and separatism, though said people involved in this were a small minority.
Uighurs have traditionally followed a moderate form of Islam but many have begun adopting practices more common in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, such as full-face veils for women, as China has stepped up a security crackdown in recent years. |
This story appears in the March 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine.
A cold drizzle falls as we shiver in the streets, waiting for the Viking lord and his band of raiders to appear. It’s a raw January night in the old Shetland town of Lerwick, but there’s euphoria in the air.
Beside me, a man with two young children laughs as he spots a red smoky haze rising behind the town hall. “Looks like they torched the whole building,” he shouts, to grins all around. Fire, after all, is why we are here. It’s Up Helly Aa, the great incendiary celebration of the Viking past in Shetland. Like everyone else, I’ve come to see a Viking ship burn.
As the lord’s squad and dozens of others pour into the street, fire seethes from hundreds of torches. A roar of delight goes up from the crowd as it catches sight of the sleek longship the raiders tow. The Vikings first landed on these rocky shores north of the Scottish mainland some 1,200 years ago, crushing the local resistance and taking the land. For nearly seven centuries Norwegian lords ruled Shetland, until they finally pawned the islands to a Scottish king. Today the old Norse dialect—Norn—is all but forgotten in Shetland, but the islanders remain intensely proud of their Viking past. Each year they prepare obsessively for Up Helly Aa, assembling, plank by plank, a replica of a Viking ship.
View Images Bristling with spears and swords, Viking and Slav reenactors face off in a mock battle during a festival in Wolin, Poland. What began as small raiding parties early in the Viking age grew into armies that conquered large swaths of Europe. Photograph by David Guttenfelder
Now, as the crowd belts out old songs of sea kings and dragon ships, the torchbearers tow the vessel into a walled field. As the lord gives the signal, a hail of torches sets the ship ablaze. Fire races up the mast, and embers fly into the night sky. On the sidewalk, children stomp their feet and dance, nearly delirious with excitement.
Later that evening, as revelers kick up their heels at parties, I marvel at the power the Vikings still hold over our imaginations. Dead and gone for centuries, these medieval seafarers and warriors live on in the invented worlds of filmmakers, novelists, and comic book artists. Today most of us can reel off details of these imagined Vikings—how they fought and feasted, where they lived, how they died. But how much do we really know about the Vikings? Who were they, how did they see the world, and what were their lives truly like?
Now, with advanced technology—from satellite imagery to DNA studies and isotope analysis—archaeologists and other scientists are coming up with many surprising new answers. In Estonia, scientists are poring over two buried ships filled with slain warriors, shedding new light on the violent origins of the Vikings. In Sweden, researchers are studying the remains of a female Viking commander, illuminating the role of women in warfare. And in Russia, archaeologists and historians are tracing the routes of Viking slave traders, revealing the importance of slavery to the Viking economy. For archaeologists the doors are starting to swing open on a world that was far more complex and compelling than once thought. “These are heady times in Viking research,” says Jimmy Moncrieff, a historian at the Shetland Amenity Trust in Lerwick.
View Images Warfare wasn’t the exclusive domain of Viking men. This sword was buried with a female leader. Photograph by GABRIEL HILDEBRAND
SWEDISH HISTORY MUSEUM/CC BY (SWORD, IN TWO PIECES)
Taken together, the new studies reveal a fresh picture of the ambitions and cultural impact of these daring seafarers. From the shores of their Scandinavian homeland, between the Baltic and North Seas, Viking fortune seekers took to the world stage in the mid-eighth century, exploring much of Europe over the next 300 years and traveling farther than earlier researchers ever suspected. With sleek sailing ships and expert knowledge of rivers and seas, they journeyed to what are now 37 or more countries, from Afghanistan to Canada, according to archaeologist Neil Price of Uppsala University in Sweden. En route they chanced upon more than 50 cultures and traded avidly for luxuries. They donned Eurasian caftans, dressed in silk from China, and pocketed heaps of Islamic silver coins. They built thriving cities at York and Kiev, colonized large swaths of Great Britain, Iceland, and France, and established outposts in Greenland and North America. No other European seafarers of the day ventured so fearlessly and so far from their homeland. “It’s only the people from Scandinavia who do this,” says Price. “Just the Vikings.”
360° VIDEO: VIKING AND SLAV REENACTORS FACE OFF IN AN EPIC BATTLE Charge into the fray of an epic Viking battle with over 600 hardcore reenactors armed with swords and axes. More than a mere blood sport, the climax of the Wolin Viking Festival in Poland is a mecca for “experimental archaeology."
But exploration and trade weren’t the only roads to wealth. Viking raiders prowled the coasts of Britain and Europe, striking with sudden, shocking brutality. In northern France they sailed up and down the Seine and other rivers, attacking at leisure and filling their ships with plunder. Spreading terror far and wide, they extorted nearly 14 percent of the entire economy of western Europe’s Carolingian Empire in exchange for empty promises of peace. Across the channel in England, sporadic raids expanded into total warfare, as a Viking army invaded and conquered three Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, leaving bodies to rot in the fields.
The Viking age, says Price, “is not for the squeamish.” But how, ask researchers today, did all this mayhem begin? How and why did medieval farmers in Scandinavia become the scourge of the European continent?
In the nearly three centuries before the raids on foreign shores began around A.D. 750, Scandinavia was wracked by turmoil, Price says. More than three dozen petty kingdoms arose during this period, throwing up chains of hill forts and vying for power and territory. In the midst of these troubled times, catastrophe struck. A vast cloud of dust, likely blasted into the atmosphere by a combination of cataclysms—comets or meteorites smashing into Earth, as well as the eruption of at least one large volcano—darkened the sun beginning in A.D. 536, lowering summer temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere for the next 14 years. The extended cold and darkness brought death and ruin to Scandinavia, lying as it did along the northern edge of medieval agriculture. In Sweden’s Uppland region, for example, nearly 75 percent of villages were abandoned, as residents succumbed to starvation and fighting.
View Images Historical interpreters bring a reconstructed longhouse to life at the Ribe Viking Center in Denmark. Meals were cooked over an open fire on a hearth, and Viking fare included salted herring, barley porridge, and boiled sheep heads. Photograph by David Guttenfelder
So dire was this disaster that it seems to have given birth to one of the darkest of all world myths—the Nordic legend of Ragnarök, the end of creation and the final battle, in which all gods, all supernatural beings, and all humans and other living creatures die. Ragnarök was said to begin with Fimbulwinter, a deadly time when the sun turns black and the weather turns bitter and treacherous—events that eerily parallel the dust veil that began in 536, Price says.
When summer at last returned to the north and populations rebounded, Scandinavian society assumed a new, more truculent form. Leaders surrounded themselves with heavily armed war bands and began seizing and defending abandoned territory. In this real-life Game of Thrones, a militarized society arose in which men and women alike celebrated the virtues of warfare—fearlessness, aggression, cunning, strength under fire. On the Swedish island of Gotland, where archaeologists have found many intact graves from this period, “almost every second man seems to be buried with weapons,” notes John Ljungkvist, an archaeologist at Uppsala University.
As this weaponized society was gradually taking shape, a new technology began revolutionizing Scandinavian seafaring in the seventh century—the sail. Skilled carpenters began constructing sleek, wind-powered vessels capable of carrying bands of armed fighters farther and faster than ever before. Aboard these ships, northern lords and their restless followers could voyage across the Baltic and North Seas, exploring new lands, sacking towns and villages, and enslaving inhabitants. And men with few marriage prospects at home could take female captives as wives by persuasion or force.
All of this—centuries of kingly ambition, a seeming abundance of wifeless young warriors, and a new type of ship—created a perfect storm. The stage was set for the Vikings to pour out of the north, setting much of Europe on fire with their brand of violence.
View Images Sleek wooden vessels like the Gokstad ship were key to the success of Viking traders and raiders. Unearthed in 1880 from a burial, the ninth-century ship was powered by sail and 32 oarsmen. Photograph by ROBERT CLARK
PHOTOGRAPHED AT VIKING SHIP MUSEUM, MUSEUM OF CULTURAL HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF OSLO
Around 750 a band of early Viking warriors dragged two ships onto a sandy headland on the island of Saaremaa, just off the coast of Estonia. Far from their homes in the forests near Uppsala, Sweden, the men were the bloodied survivors of a costly raid. Inside their ships lay the tangled corpses of more than 40 Viking men, including one who may have been a king. All were in their youth or prime of life—tall, muscular, strapping men—and many had seen savage fighting. Some had been stabbed or hacked to death, others decapitated. One man died after a sword took off the top of his head.
On the sandy headland the survivors began the gruesome task of reassembling severed body parts and arranging most of the dead men in the hull of the largest ship. Then they covered the bodies with cloth and raised a low, makeshift burial mound by placing their wood and iron war shields over their slain comrades.
View Images Reenactors in Poland don armor in preparation for close combat. The Vikings lived up to their violent reputation: From an early age Scandinavian boys were trained for battle and socially conditioned for bloodshed. Photograph by David Guttenfelder
In 2008 a work crew laying an electrical cable discovered human bones and bits of a corroded sword, and local authorities called in archaeologists. Today, sitting in his office at Uppsala University, Price marvels at the discovery. “This is the first time that archaeologists have ever been able to excavate what is clearly a Viking raid,” he says. More remarkable: The warriors laid to rest at Salme, Estonia, died nearly 50 years before Scandinavian raiders descended on the English monastery of Lindisfarne in 793, long thought to have been the first Viking attack.
Today the ship burials at Salme are creating a stir among Viking specialists. “What I find amazing is all the swords,” Price says. Most researchers had long assumed that early Viking raiding parties consisted of a few elite warriors armed with swords and other costly war gear, as well as a few dozen poor farm boys furnished with cheap spears or longbows. But that’s clearly not the case at Salme. The burials there contained more swords than men, confirming that at least some early expeditions consisted of many warriors of high status.
View Images The ruins of a Viking longhouse in the Shetland Islands recall a proud past. After defeating the local Pictish people, Viking raiders took Shetland’s finest lands for their own. They brought Norse laws with them and ruled for nearly 700 years, until a Scottish king claimed the archipelago. Photograph by Robert Clark
On a January morning in a quiet industrial park south of Edinburgh, Scotland, researchers lead the way through locked doors to a small conservation lab. For more than a year, scientists here have been unpacking the riches that one Viking leader amassed from raiding and ransacking in foreign lands. Buried some 1,100 years ago in southwest Scotland, the Galloway hoard is a collection of strange and beautiful things, from a solid-gold ingot to pieces of silk samite cloth from the Byzantine or Islamic world to an enameled Christian cross. Olwyn Owen, an independent archaeologist who specializes in the Viking age, says she’s never seen anything quite like it. “It’s an incredible find,” she says, “just incredible.”
Today a conservator has laid out some of the rarities from the hoard. On the table there’s a slender gold pin shaped like a bird. It resembles an aestel, a small pointer that bishops and other members of the clergy once used to read sacred texts. Nearby is a gold filigree pendant, possibly designed to hold a small relic of a saint. And, at the end of the table, Owen gazes at nine silver brooches, some bearing swirling tendrils and mythical creatures, others strange humanlike faces. All but one, says Owen, were designed for Anglo-Saxon wearers. “In other words,” she concludes, “some Anglo-Saxon monastery or settlement had a very bad day.”
The Viking leader who carried off these treasures had a weakness for beautiful things. Rather than melting down all the plunder into bullion, this Viking lord set aside several pieces for his personal collection of exotic, foreign art. The Vikings, says archaeologist Steve Ashby with the University of York, had a taste for finer things from foreign cultures, and some elites took pleasure in owning and using these status symbols. “The top men, they were dandies,” says Ashby. “It’s a society in which conspicuous consumption is important.”
A FEARSOME FLEET Watch Vikings build ships and raid lands in this sweeping tale of Viking history handcrafted entirely from paper. Then learn the intimate secrets of Viking shipbuilding in this expansive graphic.
More Johnny Depp than Vin Diesel, Viking leaders painted their eyes, pulled on flashy colored clothing, and donned heavy jewelry—neck rings, dress pins, armbands, and finger rings. But this dress for excess had a serious purpose: Each object told a story of foreign adventure, of recklessness and courage rewarded. Fitted out in the spoils of war, a Viking was a living recruitment poster for the raiding life, beckoning young men to take an oath of loyalty in return for a share of booty. “Viking leaders couldn’t be bashful about what they achieved, if they wanted to maintain a power base,” Ashby says.
At the start of the Viking age, these raiders targeted mainly coastal or island monasteries—armed, it seems, with advance intelligence. Scandinavian traders were already plying the coasts of Britain and Europe, and they quickly discovered that the markets typically were held next to monasteries. Strolling past stalls and sizing up the goods, some would have spotted the silver chalices and gold altar furniture adorning monastic chapels. “I don’t think it requires mental leaping to think there’s someone who finally says, ‘Guys, why don’t we just nick the stuff?’ ” says Price.
Early raiding parties planned their attacks for the summer months, and they often set out with just a few ships and perhaps a hundred fighters. Bristling with iron weaponry, the raiders struck rapidly and went about the carnage swiftly, setting sail before locals could mount a defense. In France, in the ninth century alone, Viking raiders stormed more than 120 settlements, massacring monks and local inhabitants, stripping churches of their treasures, and enslaving the survivors. “If you lived in northwest France in the late ninth century,” Price says, “you must have thought your world was ending.”
As rivers of precious metals flowed back to Scandinavia, young men flocked to the great halls of Viking leaders, eager to swear their loyalty. What began as small raiding forays of two or three ships gradually evolved into fleets of 30 vessels, then many more. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a contemporary annal, hundreds of Viking ships arrived along the east coast of England in 865, carrying a ravenous host that the Chronicle writers called micel here, the great army. Pushing inland along England’s rivers and roads, these invaders began smashing Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and seizing large swaths of land to colonize.
Just outside the modern city of Lincoln, archaeologist Julian D. Richards from the University of York is studying one of the winter camps of the great army. The encampment, known as Torksey today, was large enough to accommodate 3,000 to 4,000 people, but discoveries there indicate that the great army was more than a fighting force. Metalsmiths melted down plunder, and merchants conducted trade. Children raced through the muddy fields, and women went about their work—which may have included leading men in battle in some parts of the Viking world.
One famous early Irish text records how a woman known as Inghen Ruaidh—or Red Girl, after the color of her hair—led a fleet of Viking ships to Ireland in the 10th century. Bioarchaeologist Anna Kjellström of Stockholm University recently reanalyzed the skeletal remains of a Viking fighter found in the old trading center of Birka, in Sweden. Mourners had furnished the grave with an arsenal of deadly weapons, and for decades archaeologists assumed that the elite fighter was male. But while studying the warrior’s pelvic bones and mandible, Kjellström discovered that the man was in fact a woman.
This nameless Viking woman seems to have commanded the respect of many Viking warriors. “On her lap she had gaming pieces,” says archaeologist Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson of Uppsala University. “This suggests that she was the one planning the tactics and that she was a leader.”
View Images Camping under canvas as Viking armies once did, participants at the Slav and Viking Festival in Poland tend to be sticklers for authenticity. Many adorn their bodies with tattoos, and some adopt a Viking diet, slaughtering and roasting game. Photograph by David Guttenfelder
View Images Along the Dziwna River in Poland, bystanders watch a replica Viking ship navigate the currents on a summer afternoon. Photograph by David Guttenfelder
The fleets that carried death and destruction to western Europe also transported slaves and commodities to markets scattered from Turkey to western Russia, and possibly Iran. Medieval Arab and Byzantine officials described convoys of armed Viking slavers and merchants known as the Rus who regularly voyaged along river routes to the Black and Caspian Seas. “I have never seen more perfect physiques than theirs,” observed Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, a 10th-century Arab soldier and diplomat from Baghdad. “Every one of them carries an ax, a sword, and a dagger.”
To shed light on this southern trade, archaeologists are now excavating sites along the routes to the Byzantine and Muslim worlds. On a late June morning some 230 miles southwest of Moscow, Veronika Murasheva, an archaeologist at the State Historical Museum in Moscow, walks the bank of the Dnieper River where a small medieval city once stood. Founded by Viking explorers more than 1,100 years ago, Gnezdovo lay along two major trade routes—the Dnieper, which flows into the Black Sea, and a skein of streams that sweeps into the Volga River, whose waters empty into the Caspian Sea. Gnezdovo clearly profited from this geography, flourishing and eventually sprawling over an area the size of 30 city blocks.
Today Gnezdovo is mantled in forest and grassland, but over the past century and a half, Russian archaeologists have uncovered hill forts, hoards, caches, workshops, a harbor, and nearly 1,200 burial mounds that have produced rich artifacts. Gnezdovo, they discovered, was home to a wealthy Viking elite who collected tribute from the local Slavic population and who likely managed aspects of the southern commerce. Each year, after the spring thaw, Viking traders set off from Gnezdovo in ships laden with luxury goods—furs, honey, beeswax, chunks of amber, walrus ivory—and cargoes of human slaves. Many, says Murasheva, were bound for the Black Sea and Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire and a city of more than 800,000 people at the time. In the heat and dust Viking traders wandered the markets, striking deals for their cargo and buying prized commodities: amphorae filled with wine and olive oil, fine glassware, colorful glazed plates, swatches of silk and other rare textiles.
View Images Concealed in iron helmets, chain mail, and leather cuirasses, Viking reenactors make a formidable impression, revealing how these ancient raiders stirred such terror in their victims. Photographs by David Guttenfelder
Other Viking traders ventured farther east from Gnezdovo, following streams that wended across western Russia into the Volga. In bazaars along the river and around the Caspian Sea, Muslim buyers paid handsomely for foreign slaves, since the Quran forbade believers from owning freeborn Muslims. The eastern buyers settled their bills with heaps of silver coins known as dirhams, a key source of wealth in the Viking world.
By searching archaeological reports and databases, Marek Jankowiak, a medieval historian at Oxford University, has found records of more than a thousand hoards of dirhams that Viking traders and others buried across Europe. Based on an initial analysis, Jankowiak estimates that Viking slavers could have sold tens of thousands of eastern European, mostly Slavic, captives into bondage in the 10th century alone, earning millions of silver dirhams—an immense fortune at the time. In the Viking world, where lords regularly rewarded their fighting men with gifts of silver, the road south was the road to power.
View Images At a Viking-style wedding ceremony held at a festival in Poland, a celebrant plays a replica of an ancient Scandinavian horn. Photograph by DAVID GUTTENFELDER
In the firelit halls of the Norse lords, storytellers also described early voyages to the west. Gazing around at those assembled, they told the tale of a trader, Bjarni Herjólfsson, who lost his way in thick fog while sailing from Iceland to Greenland. When the mist finally lifted, Herjólfsson and his men spied a new land that bore little resemblance to Greenland. It was blanketed in forest, but Herjólfsson had little interest in exploring it, so he angled his ship out to sea. The lost Viking had reached the New World by accident—the first European, it seems, to lay eyes on its shores. It was the beginning of Viking voyages to North America.
Today few feats of Viking seafarers are so cloaked in mystery and controversy as their exploration of the New World. According to the Norse sagas, Viking mariners sailed westward from Greenland in four major expeditions, searching for timber and other resources. Scouting along the northeast coast of Canada as early as 985, they wintered in small base camps, cut timber, picked wild grapes in a place they called Vinland, gave birth, and traded and fought with the indigenous people.
In 1960 a famous Norwegian explorer, Helge Ingstad, went looking for these Viking camps. Along Newfoundland’s northern tip, at a place known as L’Anse aux Meadows, a local landowner led him to several hills whose contours resembled longhouses. Nearby lay a peat bog that contained bog iron, a source of iron ore prized by Vikings. Excavations revealed three large Viking halls, some huts, a furnace for processing bog iron, and butternuts from a type of tree that grows hundreds of miles farther south. Taken together, the discoveries and saga clues strongly suggested that Viking explorers not only had landed in Newfoundland but also had ventured farther south into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
View Images Standing proud in mail and helmet, archaeologist and Viking reenactor Andrew Nicholson has conducted experiments with Viking weapons. In combat, he says, the battle axes could reach speeds of 110 miles an hour at the point of impact. Photograph by Robert Clark
View Images Some Viking warriors valued the treasures they stole for their beauty—and as coveted status symbols. These Anglo-Saxon brooches (top) and this gold, bird-shaped pin (above) were discovered in a hoard buried by a wealthy Viking in Scotland. Photographs by ROBERT CLARK
WITH PERMISSION OF HISTORIC ENVIRONMENT SCOTLAND
More recently a Canadian archaeologist turned up traces of Viking traders in the Canadian Arctic. Patricia Sutherland, an adjunct professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, was searching through old collections at the Canadian Museum of History near Ottawa when she discovered pieces of Viking yarn. Spun by skilled weavers, the yarn came from sites inhabited by the Dorset, a Paleo-Eskimo people who lived in the Arctic until the 15th century. “I thought it just can’t be,” Sutherland says, so she expanded her museum search and discovered a trove of Viking artifacts, from whetstones for sharpening metal knives to tally sticks for tracking trade transactions.
The most intriguing find was a small stone vessel that looked like a crucible for melting metal. Sutherland and a small team recently took a closer look using a scanning electron microscope. Along the inner surface they detected traces of bronze, as well as tiny glass spheres that form when minerals are melted at high temperatures—tantalizing evidence of Viking-style metalworking. Sutherland thinks that Viking seafarers from Greenland voyaged to the Canadian Arctic to trade with indigenous hunters, exchanging metal knives and hones for thick arctic-fox furs and walrus ivory—luxury goods for European markets.
Tracking down other Viking expeditions mentioned in the sagas, however, remains a big challenge. To locate potential sites, archaeologists must comb thousands of miles of remote coastline. So three years ago archaeologist Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama at Birmingham decided to try a new approach.
View Images Still standing a thousand years after it was raised, the rune stone at Anundshög in Sweden commemorates the love of a Viking father for his son, Heden. The young man’s fate is unknown, but like many young Vikings of his time, he may have immigrated to a Viking colony in eastern or western Europe. Photograph by ROBERT CLARK
Parcak, a National Geographic fellow, specializes in using imagery from orbiting satellites to detect potential archaeological sites. In a test run in Iceland, she and her colleagues detected what appeared to be turf walls. When archaeologist Douglas Bolender of the University of Massachusetts Boston went to investigate the area, he discovered buried remnants of turf buildings and a turf wall only six inches tall—exactly where Parcak suggested. “This is astounding,” he marvels, “the tiny remains of a buried turf wall identified from 770 kilometers in space.”
Buoyed by this success, Parcak and her team began poring over satellite imagery of Atlantic Canada. In southwestern Newfoundland they spotted clusters of what looked like turf walls on a promontory known as Point Rosee. Overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Point Rosee lies along a sea route to lands of butternut trees and wild grapes. And like L’Anse aux Meadows, it adjoins a large peat bog where Viking seafarers could have collected iron ore.
During a small excavation in 2015, Parcak and her colleagues found what looked like a turf wall, as well as a large hollow where someone seemed to have collected bog ore for roasting—the first step in producing iron. But a larger excavation last summer cast serious doubt on those interpretations, suggesting that the turf wall and accumulation of bog ore were the results of natural processes. Today Parcak is waiting for additional test results to clarify the picture.
Parcak thinks, however, that she and her team are developing a scientifically rigorous way to seek Viking sites in North America. Her colleague Karen Milek, an archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen, agrees. “Looking for the Norse here is like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Milek says. Satellite imagery is one of the best ways to go, she adds, “and Sarah is defining that best approach.”
On a blustery winter day, I catch a cab to Shetland’s Sumburgh Airport. It’s the morning after Up Helly Aa, and few Shetlanders are awake after the long night of revelry. The swords and helmets are put away, and the children are sleeping, dreaming of sea kings. The wooden longship, the pride of the lord, is now ashes in the field. |
By The Numbers will highlight the Red Wings on-ice accomplishments in the 2015-16 season. Each week during the off-season, By The Numbers will profile a different player on the team, focusing on their statistical highs. This week we focus on forward Luke Glendening.
Luke Glendening congratulates goalie Petr Mrazek following the Red Wings' 5-3 win over the Colorado Avalanche in a Stadium Series game at Coors Field in February. (Photo by Getty Images)
Luke Glendening is a player that is somewhat hard to judge just by the numbers as he is not known for his scoring. Instead, Glendening is known for face-offs, penalty killing and his challenging offseason workouts at Barwis Methods.
Green Bay Packers tackle T.J. Lang, a Michigan native and Red Wings fan, has worked out with Glendening at Barwis Methods in Plymouth, Mich.
"Luke’s a guy whose scrappy, man," Lang said. "He’s strong in the weight room, he’ll surprise you, so he’s probably one of the more athletic guys that I’ve seen. His work ethic, I mean, he’s just a gym rat, he’s always in the gym. It doesn’t matter what time it is he’s always there, so he’s a guy that you see his success translate over the ice and it’s no surprise when you see the guy work out. So he’s probably got some of the more athletic bones in his body that I’ve seen with at least working out with the guys."
6 | On February 27, Glendening played in the Stadium Series outdoor game at Coors Field in Denver, Colo. It marked Glendening's sixth outdoor game. Glendening played in three outdoor games with the Michigan Wolverines at Michigan Stadium, at Camp Randall Stadium in Madison, Wis. and at Progressive Field in Cleveland. He also played at Comerica Park with the Grand Rapids Griffins and then in the Winter Classic at Michigan Stadium.
54.6 | Glendening won 54.6 percent of his face-offs this season, which led the Wings. He was the 13th-ranked player among those with 1,000 or more face-offs. Glendening was tied for 29th with 614 total face-offs won.
200 | Glendening reached a milestone on Feb. 29, Leap Day, at Dallas, playing in his 200th career NHL game. He finished the season with 219 regular-season games played.
1 | Glendening has missed just one game in the last two seasons. He did not play on Dec. 28 at Minnesota due to illness. In the 2013-14 season, Glendening played 56 games with the Wings and 18 with the Grand Rapids Griffins.
21 | Glendening had a career high 21 points in 81 games this season. He had eight goals and 13 assists. His first point of the season came on an assist Oct. 31 at Ottawa and his final point of the regular season came on an assist April 2 at Toronto.
71 | Led all Red Wings' forwards in blocked shots, including a season-high five during a 3-2 win over Buffalo (March 28). Over the past two seasons, Glendening has 144 blocks in 163 regular-season games, which leads all team forwards.
DetroitRedWings.com managing editor Bill Roose contributed to this report. |
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